Consenting Adult (31 page)

At this point the telephone rang and Tessa answered it. “Yes, she is,” she said. “Anything wrong, Marta?”

Margie was already out of her chair. Marta was a stout, good-natured old woman who was now part of the Jacobs family, hired some two months earlier when Margie began to lay the groundwork for going back to work. Marta was sixty-eight, acted years younger, and could not live on her small social security checks or find a job any longer as a factory worker. She knew nothing about bringing up children but she had the great faculty of enjoying them, of ignoring them unless there was some pressing reason not to, and of remaining equable at all times. Nate’s mother was moving into the house during the European trip, and Tessa was to take over from Mrs. Jacobs each weekend from Friday evening through Sunday. It had seemed an excellent arrangement to both grandmothers, to the children, to Margie and Nate, and most especially to Marta.

“So somebody is here always, somebody that knows more,” Marta had said, closing the matter.

Tessa relinquished the phone to Margie before she had assimilated Marta’s reply to her question. “Yes, wrong,” Marta had said, “but all right.”

“What temperature?” Margie asked almost at once. “Oh, that’s high. We’ll be right there. Just tell her we’re on our way.”

“Lynnie’s a hundred and two,” she said, turning to them from the phone. “Wouldn’t you know!”

“You’re a pretty good prophet,” Nate said, moving toward his coat. To Tessa he said, “She’s been saying one of the kids would come down with something just before we took off.”

“You won’t have to delay your trip?” Ken asked.

“Not if it’s a cold,” Margie said. “But if it’s measles or anything.” She looked at Nate. “You’ve got to go anyway.” To her parents she said, “He has appointments with some newspaper people in London.”

“Nuts,” Nate said. “I’m a liberated father. We both stay or we both go.”

“It might be nothing but
Angst,”
Tessa said. “Before, you always took them with you.”

“We’ll call you when we know.”

But the next morning, though it wasn’t measles, only an earache, they had already canceled their flight. “We’re not worriers,” Margie said. “But a hundred and two. You know how it is.”

“I do know. That first drink in the plane wouldn’t be any fun if you were up there thinking thermometers. I’m so sorry.”

“Children! Why do we all fall for them?”

Two days ticked by and then Lynnie’s temperature plummeted down to normal. That same evening Margie and Nate caught a night flight, their zest and eagerness restored. It starts on the first day of baby’s life, Tessa thought, and it grows each month, each year. Your own life is integrated with that child’s life and stays integrated year upon year. You can be the most freedom-giving mother or father, but you cannot be happy if your child is sad, you cannot feel hale and well if your child is sick, you cannot go off on vacations if your child is strapped down by fever.

And was this the dreaded “parentship”?
Angst
indeed. It had become almost imperative these days for parents to know
Angst
if they loved their children and showed that love, mistrusting it as a forbidden delight, condemning it, automatically tagging it “possessiveness.”

Modern attitudes, though, so often carried within them strains of an outmoded Puritanism or Victorianism, any of the repressive isms that held it unseemly to be forthcoming and open about love. Parental love, filial love, sexual love—there were so many delimiting restrictions about all of them. Puritan or Victorian children were not to be expansive, either, in their love for their parents; respect and decorum were what they were expected to reveal, not plain unabashed love. And in odd subliminal ways, the same thing was true of the young-old relationship in families today. There was something groovy in being offhand, even rude, to your parents.

But then, thanks be, there were the exceptions. Like Margie. Maybe daughters were always more loving … Nonsense, that was to classify Margie in the “dutiful daughter” role, the female role. It was because Margie was Margie, a warm loving human, married to a warm loving human like Nate. They reinforced each other, they interacted upon each other and upon those they loved and those who loved them.

Almost as if to bear witness, an elongated air letter came from London by the end of that same week. Margie had dashed it off in a large tumbling calligraphy, as if pride had unsteadied her hand and made her slightly incoherent. “Our very first night here, this British editor of a magazine,
Orbit,
latched on to Nate, and so he’s going to write a big takeout, an assignment for real, about homosexuals in the States, as they call us over here.” To which Nate had scrawled a sassy postscript: “So gird up yer learns, Researcher, I’m to have all the space we need. Love, N.”

A leap of pleasure told her how much she had wanted this project of Nate’s to turn someday from dream to reality, and how remote such a possibility had seemed. Even today, in 1969, if you looked up the listing “Homosexuality” in the index of
The New York Times,
you found nothing but the admonition “See Sex,” and when you turned to the proper page, you found a juxtaposition of listings about prostitutes, child molesters, homosexuals, deviants, sex offenses and the like, which in itself revealed all too much of the still-prevailing slant of society in general and the editors of the
Times
in particular. Yet it was true that there were many more listings than there had been a few years back, sign enough that the subject of homosexuality had been emerging as a matter of public interest, and particularly so when the listings included reviews of plays dealing with homosexual men or women, films portraying them, either well or foolishly, understandingly or doltishly, but portraying, not pretending they did not exist

That evening Tessa began to look over her own “research.” Ken would be telephoning her later, probably from Will and Amy’s house in Phoenix, if she had his calendar straight. It was a surprise, actually, to see how much material she had amassed since she had first made that embarrassed request for a volume of
Hansard
over at the British Information Service. By now she had two big boxes of clippings and photostats of articles she had read but could not clip; she also had a stack of medical and psychiatric journals, and several textbooks recently published. All of these she had tabbed in her own offhand way that would have made a trained researcher blush, but clear enough to her, the tabs or strips of paper sticking up from book and magazine alike, standing erect like a small forest of bookmarks.

And quite apart from all of this was one special cardboard box bearing a label as yellow as sunshine, which said simply,
CHANGE.
In this was a collection of what she privately thought of as “the Halston Richards view,” although only two of the papers and speeches were actually by Dr. Richards himself. One was a lecture given this past January to a symposium of psychiatrists; the other was a blurred carbon of the original typescript of another lecture still to be given in public by him, later to be published, the carbon sent along to her by Mark Waldo with a penciled note, “the whole A.P.A. is aware that a revolution is in the making.”

She paused over Mark’s note. Once she would not have known that the letters stood for American Psychiatric Association, once she had never heard of Halston Richards, nor dreamed that he represented one of an entire new wing, as it were, of the profession and the changing estimates of many within it toward the entire subject of the homosexual in the modern world. Apart from the two lectures by Dr. Richards, this box held other speeches, other lectures, other papers, none of them known yet to the general public, but all the most recent work of others “in the Richards’ wing,” many of them collected by her own efforts from analysts or psychiatrists to whom she had written on her own private stationery, never explaining her interest, always starting her letter by saying, “I am eager to have a copy of the lecture you gave at—”

During the next three evenings, she reread nearly everything in her collection, reliving the long process of learning she had almost unwittingly arranged for herself for so long a period, not then foreseeing the scope and intensity her own study would achieve, haphazard and intermittent as it had been, taking its vigor perhaps from its very haphazardness, a melting pot of opinions and convictions, some old and stately and authoritarian, others young and exploratory and willing to look anew.

Each time she ended for the night, usually after Ken had called, she found herself exhilarated and somehow more in command of her own ideas, as if she had been through a refresher course in a subject that only gained in import from being brought to the front of her best attention once again. She would close that special box with its yellow label, stare at the word
CHANGE
and wonder at its power to move her.

Ken knew from the start of his trip that something was a little different, but he attributed this to his own awareness, which he did not share with the people he saw, that the familiar “See you next year” was now merely an empty slogan. The sense that something was a bit different rather puzzled him, though, because it persisted despite his eminently reasonable explanation of it, until one night he admitted that it was depressing him. He felt low, and he kept on feeling low. He had no cold, no discomfort, nothing that could be called malaise or illness, and certainly he had no fever. When he called Tessa in the evening from a hotel room or from the house of some friend or colleague who had invited him to stay the night, he always said, “Everything’s fine,” but he also said, “I’m a bit tired,” not realizing how often he did say it. One night he varied this, to say, “I seem to get lots more tired in cars and planes than I used to, but I suppose by now I should expect that.”

“I don’t know,” Tessa said. “Maybe you ought to see a doctor about it.”

“I don’t think it’s anything to see doctors about. Getting old is a damn hard job, that’s the size of it.”

“It might be wise to get a check, though. Blood pressure and pulse and all. I wish you would, Ken.”

“You’re remembering the stroke, Tessa, but ten years have gone by. How many times has Mark said not to sit around worrying about another one?”

“I’m not, but if s important—to me, anyway. I sort of love you.”

He said, “And I sort of love you. Okay, I’ll ask about a doctor tomorrow and report back.”

And when he did report back, there was nothing but good news to give her. Pulse normal, blood pressure within the normal range, electrocardiogram fine. The doctor had called Mark in New York, comparing data, or readings, or whatever they called their findings, and Mark had confirmed him in his okay.

“‘Don’t push yourself on this trip’ is what they both told me,” Ken told Tessa. “I wasn’t pushing anyway. I guess you just feel your spine and legs more when you’re pushing sixty-five.”

He sounded relieved and her mood lightened correspondingly, but two days later when he called again, he inadvertently reverted to that telltale little phrase, “Fine, just a bit tired.” He was in Los Angeles, to be there for two days, and the next day he was to have dinner with Jeff. The next morning a faint apprehension began rising in her about the hours they would be together, like an uneasy yeast, but she schooled herself free of foreboding and realized that there was in her now a fatalism she could reach for when she needed it, a fatalism which said, “If it goes wrong, it goes wrong; Ken has done everything he could to accept everything as it is, and Jeff has to accept
that
about Ken.”

But on his next telephone call, Ken sounded calm, even cheerful, when he talked of seeing Jeff. “He’s fine, working harder than ever, full of talk about clinical clerkships at various hospitals, I think that’s his schedule for next year … sort of rotating through U.C.LA. Hospital and affiliated hospitals, like Wadsworth Veterans, Harbor-General and Cedars-Sinai—if I’m remembering right.”

“You certainly sound right.”

“My God, the energy they have. With all that, he’s driving a cab one night a week—medics seem to put in twenty-two hours per day and sleep two.”

“Don’t you try it on for size, now.”

“Telling about it exhausts me.”

Only after his return home did he talk more fully about his evening with Jeff. “I met a friend of his,” he said, not looking at her. “Also in medical school, a senior. Jeff was crossing the campus when I drove up and this Stuart Gerson was with him. But instead of Jeff waving him off when he spotted me, he said, ‘Come on, meet my father,’ and you could have knocked me over with a feather. You know how he’s always arranged to keep all his friends offstage.”

“Stuart who?”

“Gerson. Fine-looking young man.”

“Fine-looking how?”

“Nice-looking, intelligent face. About Jeff’s age, I’d guess, maybe a year older.” She seemed to be waiting for more, and he felt that he was careless not to have more to offer. “He’s a native westerner, and he’s never been east of Lake Tahoe.”

A silence fell. She could not bring herself to ask the question. The asking, just the asking, was a remnant of the old compulsive need to know, as if it were an innate right to know. Yet if it had been Margie on the campus of some graduate school, a Margie not yet married to Nate, a Margie saying, “Come on, meet my father,” to some young man she had been walking with, would she not have asked Ken perfectly naturally, “Do you think they’re in love?”

Aloud she said, “Do you think they room together, this Stuart and Jeff?”

“I’ve no idea. How would I?”

“It was sort of an automatic remark, skip it.”

“I wondered about that too. We only shook hands and a minute later he left, and Jeff said nothing about him. I was glad he didn’t I would have been uncomfortable.”

Ken looked away from her. His face took on the higher color that always signaled her to change the subject, but when he spoke again, there was a note in his voice she had never heard before, a note that was somehow tranquil, though it also made her think of defeat and a covering sadness.

“But on the plane coming home,” Ken went on, “I thought of this Stuart Gerson and Jeff again, and somehow I hoped they meant a lot to each other.”