The Love Children (11 page)

Dolores's father didn't want her to go to college. He wanted her to stay home and get a job to help out and take care of the house because her mother was kind of broken down and didn't do much housework. But Dolores rebelled and said she'd run away if he didn't let her go to college, and so finally he said he'd pay tuition, but nothing else. So she had to go locally. UMass in Boston was the cheapest place because it was a state school; and it was pretty good too. She cried at the thought of going to college on the T, but her grades had fallen so precipitously in the past two years that she was lucky to get in there. She used to be one of the smart kids. As it turned out, she didn't go to college for very long. But that's another story.

Sandy's father drove her to Smith, Bryn Mawr, and Vassar, and she loved them all, but she finally decided on Smith, where Rhoda had gone. Bishop visited Wesleyan, Amherst, and Yale; I knew all along he'd choose Yale. And Steve got into Harvard.

He had been hanging around outside Barnes one day when I came out. I thought maybe he missed me after all. When I saw
him at the side door we always used, my heart jumped a little. He must have still loved me a little or he wouldn't have been there. And I was embarrassed too. I felt I'd let him down . . .

I had to work that afternoon, but I invited him for dinner and he said he would come. It turned out we were having pasta that night. Mom would never have planned pasta if she'd known Steve was coming, and she apologized as I set the table. “It's what I have,” she said, “What can I do?”

“He'll like it, Mom,” I said. She simmered tomatoes with garlic and added fresh basil leaves at the end; her sauce always tasted fresh. And we had veal chops with it and a wonderful salad with avocado and red onion. Steve ate with gusto, saying the spaghetti was delicious, nothing like his grandmother's. Then he wiped his mouth with his napkin and put down his fork and said, “Mrs. Leighton, I got into Harvard.”

“That's great, Steve!” she cried.

“Yeah,” he said. “I got in because I'm black.”

“What do you mean?”

“I get C's. I got in because I'm black.” He said this as though he was throwing it at her.

She was almost angry. “Don't knock it, Steve,” she said. “You may not think it's fair, but it's an attempt to make up for hundreds of years of a different kind of unfairness. You should have more respect for yourself and for Harvard: you're very bright, and somebody at Harvard saw that. Lots of the kids that get in, kids whose fathers went to Harvard and boys from rich families, like the Kennedys, don't have great grades either.”

“And Kennedy cheated.”

“Maybe.”

“You really think that?”

“What, that he cheated?”

“No. That someone there thought I was smart?”

“Of course!” she nearly exploded. “You think every black kid who applies gets in?”

Steve thought about that for a while. “I guess not.”

“You're letting the arguments of resentful white people determine your values. Don't let them define you. Make the most of your chance!” she urged.

Steve nodded. I wasn't sure he understood her argument. I wasn't sure I did. But there was something in Steve, something hard and stubborn that wouldn't let him feel good about himself. I tried to build him up all the time; when we first met, I was sure that I could improve his confidence. But I knew better now.

Mom and I had gone on the college tour in June after my junior year. We visited Vassar and Mount Holyoke and UMass at Amherst, but the place I loved was Andrews, a small college in northern Vermont known for its arts programs and liberal dorm regulations. The campus was small and pretty, dotted with birch, pine, maple, and oak trees, and the dorms were coed! They were really ahead of the times. The girls were as free as the boys, allowed to come and go as they chose, and they had a great faculty—artists, composers, and writers. I thought I wanted to write; I imagined becoming a poet. I wrote poetry on and off, especially when I was high. You could write a novel or a long poem for your senior thesis. No other college allowed that in those days.

When we got home, I had a long talk with Philo about college. He wanted me to go to Barnard or Smith or Wellesley or Harvard, even though it was local, someplace, he said, “seriously intellectual.” I was flattered that he thought of me that way, but that wasn't the way I thought of myself. I said I didn't think I was that smart. He insisted I was. “How many kids your age know Emily Dickinson the way you do? Or have ever heard of Marvell?”

“Umm,” I mumbled. It was one thing to like poetry, another
to be a physicist. He was thinking of me as if I could be a physicist, and I couldn't. I knew that. But I liked that he thought I was so smart. I said I'd think about it, but of course I didn't.

Sandy planned to be pre-med, and Bishop to study political science. He wanted to go into politics, or maybe teach it. We had meandering conversations about what we wanted to be. We were all pretty happy, thinking about going away, and we strode through the Cambridge streets laughing aloud. Knowing that we would soon be separated gave an edge to our feelings. We said we'd never forget each other, no matter what. Once we were in college, we'd visit each other for long weekends, sleeping on the floor of each others' dorm rooms, and call or write each other regularly.

“We can write a chain letter,” Bishop suggested. “I'll start it. I'll send it to Sandy, who will add on and send it to Jess, who will add on and send it to me. Then I'll add on and send it to Jess, who will add on and send it to Sandy. What do you think?”

“Terrific!”

“When it gets too long, we'll put the old pages in a binder and save the entire thing. For years!”

“We'll be famous! Like Virginia Woolf and T. S. Eliot!” Sandy was breathless at the thought.

It didn't seem inconceivable to me. If there was any justice in the world, they would grow up to do great things and get famous. Sandy would become a doctor and cure some terrible disease and win the Nobel Prize; Bishop would become president of the United States, or at least governor of Massachusetts or mayor of Boston for sure. He was already president of our senior class. And I would be a poet and wear a long straight gown and a big hat, and be invited to read from the stage like Marianne Moore, who came to Barnes one time. Wouldn't it be great to have our own little world like Virginia and Leonard Woolf and all their friends,
people like—my God!—T. S. Eliot and E. M. Forster! That's what I longed for: a life in which I'd know sophisticated people who understood life and literature and art and were smart and nice and everybody loved each other.

 

Philo had become an installation at our house. It was cool the way he wove himself into our lives. On weekends when we didn't go anywhere, Mom worked in her study, and he sat in the living room reading, or worked at the dining-room table, note cards and books spread out, until dinner time. They could work for hours at a time, not seeing each other or talking, yet taking pleasure in knowing the other was there. That's the kind of man I wanted to marry, someone who could be with me in silent pleasure.

At dinnertime, Mom would come downstairs to start cooking, and Philo would pack up his notes and go into the kitchen, offering to help. If I was home, I went to the kitchen too. I liked to be part of it, the three of us peeling and chopping vegetables together, setting the table, stirring the sauce. We'd put the news on television, or music on the radio, or a record on the stereo. Philo loved Mozart and Dvorák and Mom loved Bach and Richard Strauss and Mahler, and they'd take turns in what they listened to. Philo said Mom's music made him want to lie down. She said Philo didn't love music, he just loved to dance, and he did tend to hop around when his music was on. Their arguments were dotted with laughter.

Sometimes we went to the movies together, and once, when Philo was flush, he took Mom and me out to dinner. I was often included in whatever they did. Philo taught me to play chess, not that I really learned. But he tried. And he gave me books to read. There was the Marvell, and one by Richard Fariña. It was called
Been Down So Long It Looks Like up to Me
. I loved that book, and I fell in love with its author. Philo said he was killed in an accident
soon after he published that book. Sandy met Philo one night when she was at our house for dinner, and she thought he was cute. Steve liked him too.

 

One Saturday when Philo arrived, I was so happy to see him, I hugged him. He hugged me back and we talked a little bit. I sat there with him—Mom had gone to the market—and I asked him about some lines in a Marvell poem. Philo transformed himself into a kindly teacher and sat there with me patiently explaining words and syntax and talking about Marvell's philosophy. I gazed at his beautiful face, and suddenly realized I was in love with Philo. He was talking about Milton's
Areopagitica
, against censorship, which he said was really great. He pulled a book from his briefcase and began reading it aloud. It was amazing. What metaphors! I was struck by “five Imprimaturs are seen together dialoguewise in the Piazza of one Title page, complementing and ducking each to other with shav'n reverences, whether the Author, who stands by in perplexity at the foot of his Epistle, shall to the Presse or to the spunge.” He read the famous one “I cannot praise a fugitive and cloistered Vertue”—at least it was famous when I was a girl; I bet nobody knows it now. I asked if I could borrow the book. He said he needed it for a class the next day, but he'd bring me a copy if I wanted to read it through.

Philo and Mom were going to a party that night given by somebody in the English department at Moseley. I went out too, with Steve and his friends Lonny and Beck, to a party in Roxbury. It was wild, lots of dope, and I think there was even heroin, great music on the stereo, and people dancing. I danced a few times, not that I'm good at it, or even decent. I'm uptight, repressed, Sandy would call it, but I can't help it. Still, it was fun. I loved the people there, they were so full of life, and didn't act fake.

All of us were kind of hungover the next day, Mom and Philo from wine, me from all the smoke, excitement, and weed, and
we lay around the house like sick dogs. In the afternoon Mom insisted we had to go for a walk, so we drove to the coast and walked on the beach at Manchester. We weren't really allowed to walk there: the people who live in those towns reserved the beaches for themselves. Manchester was a rich town, like most of the coastal towns, and the townspeople didn't want outsiders coming in. But Mom said no one has the right to own the beach, that it should be for all the people, and we used to sneak in. The problem was parking, but Mom would drop us off with all our gear, and then she'd drive down to the supermarket and park in their lot and walk back up. We'd never been caught except the time I brought Steve. One look at him and they knew we didn't live there; they threw us out. But this day, we were all white and the only ones on the beach. It was winter, and we walked in the wind; I felt the wind was cleansing me. We held on to each other so the wind didn't blow us over, and we talked and laughed and watched the gulls and the ridges in the purple sand and listened to it sing in the wind.

The following weekend, Philo brought me another lavender book, much bigger than the Marvell, this one with Milton's prose. It included
Areopagitica
, which I read all the way through. Philo explained censorship to me: I knew what the word meant, of course, but I didn't really understand why it was important. Philo said that rulers always tried to increase their power as much as they could, by taking power away from anybody else that had it, like nobles or the clergy. The common people, of course, had no power at all. To succeed, rulers had to keep people from knowing what they were doing; if they could keep people ignorant, they would never protest, but only bow their heads. They had people say or write the story the way they wanted it known. When people got tired of lies and told the rulers they wanted a voice in their own lives, like in Milton's time, and in the American Revolution, the rulers refused and they had to rebel. The “shav'n
reverences” in Milton's essay were priests in the Catholic Church, which censored writing in Europe so no one would question the church. Milton was telling his fellow revolutionaries not to build a society like the Catholic Church, which went on banning books and plays and even movies right into the twentieth century. What really shocked me was that the year after Milton wrote the
Areopagitica
, he became the head censor of England. You think when a person writes something as magnificent as
Areopagitica
that there would never be censorship again. But Philo told me there was censorship even here, now, in our country!

Mom had once said that love was mean, but Philo never was. I don't think he ever made Mom cry. She made
him
cry, but not by being mean. I found out about this one hot night that summer. It was stifling and we had both left our bedroom doors open, as well as the door to the screened porch downstairs. Fans in Mom's room and mine were whirring but still I could hear Mom and Philo talking in bed. I was reading Trollope, a treasure from a trove I had found in the attic. I loved the little old books you could hold in one hand and the onionskin pages that smelled of the library, of glue and paper, that crinkled when you turned them and felt sacred. Mom's voice was a murmur and Philo would every once in a while mumble a question. Then at one point, her voice rose a little and got thick and I could hear her sob, and I perked up, trying to hear what she was saying. I thought Philo was making Mom cry. But then she cried out, “You marry so young and live together so long, you get trained. You are educated—it's like postgraduate work—in adapting to your partner. And if you're married to someone who has no control over his rage, you train yourself not to react to rage, not to feel, not to respond, to stay calm and in control at all times. And that ruins you; it kills your soul! You get numb! When I met you, my feelings were dead. I couldn't feel anything. I didn't know if I'd ever be able to feel again! And I'm not sure I do!”