Consenting Adult (34 page)

Maybe there were more Nates and Margies in the world, out there waiting to be recognized. Waiting for him to find them, to approach them. If it were the other way around, if it were they who tried to approach him, it was only fair to admit he would automatically put them down as more of the “look how broad-minded I am” bunch. So it was he who would have to take the initiative, he who would have to search. Never had that thought crossed his mind either.

But there was something else, something even bigger. He had to find it. It was a night for seeing things in a new focus, but it eluded him. Suddenly he knew. What he really had to search for was not more Nates and Margies, but more gay people like the ones down there tonight, gays who would fight back, gays who knew in their own guts that nobody could do it for them, that they would have to do it for themselves.

Do what? He didn’t know exactly. But he did know that whatever it was, he and all the others like him, all the men and all the women like him, the gay people, the gay world, they would finally have to fight it out for themselves. It was theirs to do and only they could do it. They and he with them.

Far down on the street below him in the sleeping city, the peculiar yelping sound of an ambulance siren rose and fell, increasing in urgency as it drew nearer, then diminishing as it sped off. He squeezed his eyes shut as if he could close out sound as well as sight, but in his mind the towering white walls of a modern hospital seemed to rear up, its windows glistening row on row in the early sunlight.

An anguish overwhelmed him. I forgot, he thought, I forgot. There would be no internship, no residency, nothing. Out of the past a familiar blackness seemed to rush at him. The high elation of the night collapsed. He went quietly to his room, stripped, and fell into the dark sleep of despair.

The morning mail still brought Tessa notes of condolence and this Saturday’s was no exception. She paused over the modern-looking “butcher paper” envelope with its unfamiliar handwriting, and then saw the name and address printed vertically along one end of the brownish vellum. It was from Sue Wister.

Dear Mrs. Lynn,

I just got back from a vacation in Rome and my mother told me the terrible news about Mr. Lynn. It’s been a long time, of course, since I last saw you, and I can’t find the right way to tell you how awful it is, but please accept this brief note as an expression of my deepest sympathy to you and your family.

Sincerely,

Sue

Tessa set it beside her on the breakfast table, uncertain yet how it made her feel. She glanced toward Jeff’s room; there still was no sound of him. He had probably stayed up until all hours last night with Nate and Margie, would sleep until the last moment and then have a mad scramble to pack and catch his plane. But one never needed to worry about the logistics of his comings and goings; he never missed trains, buses or planes, and always remembered to set his own alarm clock.

Today when he left, she would, for the first time since Ken’s death, know the actuality of being entirely alone, not as somebody waiting for a husband’s return from an appointment or a trip, but alone, as a widow is alone. She had thought about it a good deal in the past fortnight, had thought of the millions of other women who were widows and alone, felt herself ready for what the actuality might prove to be and yet also faintly aware that one could never rely on that sense of being ready. Days ago, Ken’s clothes had been packed and sent off to a charity; she had wanted, rather insistently, to get that task behind her, had needed to strip away physical reminders, unimportant in themselves but possessed of a power to evoke sudden memory and pain.

She looked at Sue’s letter and read it once more. It was a little self-conscious, but it touched her. She and Ken had kept on seeing the Wisters from time to time, but only now did she realize that Sue never happened to be there for dinner, the way she used to be. She could not have married in the two or three years since the last time they had met; the conventional Wisters would have sent out proper wedding announcements. Perhaps she was no longer living with them, despite the address on the envelope; perhaps she was living with some man without being married, as was increasingly the fashion these days, not only for movie stars, hippies and other overachievers or underachievers, but equally for the nice girl next door. She hoped so. She would like Sue to be happy.

The telephone rang; it was Nate. Was Jeff up? Not yet. Should she have him call back when he was?

“Please. We went on a sort of pub crawl last night and I—well, get him to call me, will you? I’m at the paper.”

“He’ll be up soon. His plane is at three.”

“Get him to fit in a fast call. Thanks.”

A plane at three. And then there wouldn’t be another plane for a whole year. Not even then, for the morning after the Class of 1970 received their degrees next June, Jeff would be reporting in at some hospital in L.A. as a brand-new intern.

When he appeared it was nearly one. She gave him the message and he made for the telephone while she went out to the kitchen for the percolator and fresh toast. When she came out he was standing by the table, eying Sue’s letter.

“She just heard about Dad,” Tessa said. “Read it, if you want.”

He picked it up, read it and put it down. His depression deepened. His call to Nate had added to it. Nate had worked on the story until nearly six, using no names of course, but making it clear that he had been right there at the Stonewall and seen it for himself. The paper was cutting it to the bone, as he had expected, but the
Orbit
piece would be even more clearly an eyewitness account, and when Tessa came to read it, she would probably guess that they had gone down there together. Nate couldn’t decide whether Jeff would like him to conceal that part of it from her. He had asked Margie what she thought, and Margie hadn’t been very helpful.

“I don’t feel very helpful either,” Jeff answered. “I just got up and haven’t talked about anything yet.”

“I did tell Tessa we’d gone on a sort of pub crawl. I guess I want her to know you were in on it.”

“But it all seems different today, kind of a one-shot deal.”

“That means you’d rather have me shut up.”

“Could you just forget it, about me being there?”

“Sure thing. I probably should have figured it this way anyhow.”

He had managed a wisecrack as they hung up, but that hadn’t fooled Nate any. Now he stared at Sue’s letter to his mother, and that didn’t fool him either. He had heard that she was living with somebody named Tim Yates, but the address was still the same pale brick house in the Seventies.

Sue was one of the people he should have thought of when he was thinking of all the Nates and Margies out there. He never thought of Sue any more except in passing, had never even wondered before whether that night of catastrophe for him had been a night of catastrophe for her as well.

Maybe one of the symptoms of maturity was that when you looked back to whatever you had done in your teens or early twenties, you could see that it was cowardly or a hang-up or just plain insecure. A few years from now, when he was past thirty and in practice, would he look back and decide that everything he was doing now was cowardly or a hang-up or insecure? Would he remember his elation of last night and be embarrassed that for a while he had promoted it to mean something more than the euphoria of a street fight? It was a bleak thought. He glanced at his watch.

“I know you have to pack,” his mother said. “It was good to have you here, Jeff. It helped a lot.
You
helped a lot.”

“If anything can help.” He looked uncomfortable. “Will it be all right now?”

“I’ll keep busy. Scott Prentice just finished his new book, and there’ll be a good deal of hard work on that I can’t think what it would be like if I was just ‘empty’ every day.”

“Rotten. And it’s good about Margie working again.”

“She’s still on Ted Brannick’s mind.”

“Will he offer it to her again?”

“In a year or so, I should think. By then, she might feel she’s proved herself enough in an outside job, and take it. It would be good to have a Lynn over there again. They’re not changing the name of the firm, so it’s like a vacuum wanting to be filled.”

“She’d be Jacobs, not Lynn.”

“She said she’d be hyphenated. Margie Lynn-Jacobs.”

“You’d be rival publishers if she went.”

“Dad and I were too.”

“That seemed to work.”

“Most of the time.” She looked pensive, thinking of the schism between herself and Ken about the firms they worked for, about their quarrels over “standards” and aims, about their decision not to quarrel, not to have at each other year after year. She gazed at Jeff, wanting to say that, but it would be trite. Banality did not inhere in the concept that you could love another human being despite deep differences in point of view, in criteria for life or work—yet to phrase the concept was to demean it.

“I’d better get my stuff together,” Jeff said, gulping down the rest of his coffee.

“I’ll take you to the airport. The car’s downstairs. You drive, of course.”

He had a prevision of them in the car, stuck in traffic, Saturday-afternoon summer traffic, both trying to make conversation, getting tense and finally having one of those damn unexpected outbursts they had managed to steer clear of these past two weeks. Right now he couldn’t chance it, not in the middle of this nose dive from last night’s high.

Thanks about the car,” he said. “But if it’s okay—it’s funny, but suddenly I feel so damn low about things, I guess I’d better make it out there on my own.” He looked at her, knowing she thought he meant his father’s death, willing to have her think it. For a moment they remained wordless. Then he turned away and left her sitting there.

I
T WAS NOTHING BUT
a prescription blank with the usual Rx, but it might have been an illuminated scroll for the sweep of delight it sent through her. The familiar handwriting below the printed heading was not for a drug, not for dosage, not for medicine at all. It said, “How does this grab you? Love, J.” And centered across the top, amid a cluster of telephone numbers and office hours and the street address of a medical group, was a line she had never before seen.

Jeffery S. Lynn,
M.D.

It had looked very different on his diploma. There his full name was spelled out, Jeffery Sachs Lynn, proper to a formal document which he would frame and hang in his own office someday. It had been spelled out too on the small certificate, the one she had watched him receive in that special June ceremony held outdoors on a hill under the trees of the campus, together with the hundred or so young men and the two dozen young women, his classmates, who also that day were taking the Hippocratic Oath by which they would all live out their lives. To her that small rolled document, tied with its narrow ribbon, meant more than the diploma that would be bestowed a week later to all the many thousands of 1970 graduates of all the schools of the university, a ceremony Jeff had blithely said he wouldn’t bother to attend, and which of course she wouldn’t attend either.

But this prescription blank which she had never visualized before was somehow different in essence from either of the two formal documents. It was so familiar, so homely, so similar to hundreds of others she had seen throughout her life, and yet it was unique, because the name at the top was not Mark Waldo, M.D., not James Dudley, M.D., not David Isaacs, M.D., but Jeffery S· Lynn, M.D.

He was already interning at the hospital he had most hoped to be appointed to, but beyond that he was also “moonlighting,” as several other young doctors were doing, by being on call during off evenings and on weekends at the offices of medical groups in Los Angeles or Beverly Hills or Santa Monica. This small sheet in her hand bore the address of one such group, but to her it was a tangible evidence of his entry into actual practice, a symbol of his ability, of his fitness to order the needed antibiotic or antidote or analgesic, the drops or capsules or powders of healing.

Jeff the patient now Jeff the healer, Jeff the troubled now Dr. Lynn to whom the troubled would turn, from whom they would take strength. There’s an inversion for you, she thought, and her heart shook.

She had flown out the night before the ceremony, and to her astonishment had found Will and Amy as well as Jeff waiting for her at the airport. Will and Amy had not told her in advance that they were going out too. They never once put into words their true reason for being there, that that June was the first anniversary, almost to the day, of Ken’s death and that they thought it would be painful for her to be there alone. Her mind had drifted, almost lazily, to that terrible time when she had gone without Ken to another graduation day of Jeff’s, but there was an unreality in the memory, a disbelief that it could have been so impossible then for Ken to face his own son,

Nine years ago that had been, only nine, and yet a century of change seemed to have flowed by since then. You could no longer think of it merely as change, not for the past year certainly, not since the Stonewall Riots of the June before. Now the word that came to you was not “change” but “revolution,” now there was a whole new language to say what the revolution encompassed, what it was about. Gay Liberation, Gay Civil Rights, Gay Activists. The Gay Movement.

Recently Nate had told her that the Stonewall Riots were being called “the Boston Tea Party of the Gay Movement.” He liked the label, he said, and thought it would stand the test of time and repetition. She liked it too, felt again the surge of participation she had first felt when she had discovered that Nate had actually been there himself, seeking a new ending or perhaps a new lead for one of his
Orbit
pieces, which he was then working on. Stonewall Riots, he had said. Plural. For there had been three of them, on three successive nights, a Friday, a Saturday, a Sunday.

About Nate’s participation she had known nothing until he let her read his rewritten piece, a week or ten days after it had happened. She had already seen and clipped out for her file a couple of short reports of it, coming on them deep in the interior recesses of the
Times,
but even though one of them told of four policemen being hurt and two hundred young men arrested in the raid, it was so brief and colorless an account that she had not even remembered the name of the place.