IF THE SUMMER OF ’77 was a struggle for us, we were not alone. The day after our van broke down, a twenty-five-hour blackout hit New York City. Riots spilled across dozens of neighborhoods, more than a thousand stores were looted, and firefighters responded to hundreds of blazes. Within a few days, nearly four thousand people had been arrested, jamming the city’s jails and holding cells. A month later, New Yorkers felt some relief when Son of Sam, David Berkowitz, was arrested, but the blackout and the killing spree had signaled a city in crisis, and this same sense of unease was spreading through the country.
It was the summer of the Johnstown Flood, James Earl Ray’s brief escape from prison, back-and-forth nuclear tests between the United States and the Soviet Union, and in August the death of Elvis. The economy was stagnating, inflation and gasoline prices continued to rise, and Jimmy Carter’s approval rating was slipping for the first time since he took office, thanks to trouble with his budget director, Bert Lance. A close adviser and one of several old friends from Georgia to whom Carter had given top appointments, Lance was being accused of shady banking maneuvers and abusing his influence for his own financial gain. Loyal to a fault, Carter defended Lance, and with each new headline his credibility as the president who’d promised to bring trust back to the White House, the moralist who still taught Sunday school, suffered blows from which he would never fully recover.
Back at Our House we had our own lingering concerns. At first it appeared that the van only had a dead battery, but when a mechanic checked the car he found transmission problems and a leaky head gasket. We couldn’t afford to replace the engine, so we drove the old clunker as little as possible, running most of our errands on foot or in Line’s ice cream truck. On the bright side, my mother salvaged her summer class, and the students who stuck with it seemed pleased with their work. To my relief, the discussion of Lolita did not expose Tino and Brie’s affair, perhaps because neither party was there to face the jury. Though the Our House coffee shop failed, my mother looked back on the turbulent summer with a survivor’s pride, proclaiming herself excited for fall, when the rest of the faculty would return, invigorated and with some money in their pockets. Enrollment was up, and remarkably, the coming term looked almost promising.
My father had been smitten by baseball again, and his enthusiasm had spread to the team, which went 14-6 over summer league and won its division. More important, he brought five new'recruits to the school. Added to the returnees and a handful who had joined us by word of mouth, our numbers had now reached thirty. The hippies also had a good summer: Tino and Cinnamon returned from the farm, and Linc, his jaw healed and cleanshaven, reduced his Jack & Jill hours to weekends. He said he liked selling ice cream; in fact he’d begun to mix his own flavors; and I was happy to see he’d indulged in the merchandise and was back to his jolly, potbellied self. He looked forward to taking the reins of the fall’s first course: religion.
Only two students would not be coming back: Molly, who got her treasured wish and enrolled in Amy Carter’s class at Hardy Middle School, and Stephanie, who was on hand for the first week but then mysteriously dropped out. Dawn gave no explanation other than that her friend had done a year of photography and was ready to move on to other interests. At first I was happy to see Stephanie gone—the fewer people who knew about the illicit entanglement, the better. I was upset enough on the first day of school to see that Brie had not stayed in France but was back in our circle, throwing off her same radioactivity.
Stephanie’s departure only made me think more about Cleo. She’d written me a note from Bethany Beach in June, signed Yours truly, and I’d sent her two long letters afterward. In the first I’d wished her a Happy Fourth and said I’d be spending the holiday in a pith helmet in the basement, far away from fireworks; in the second I went on about The Great Gatsby and told her what had happened to the van. But she’d taken three weeks to reply, and even then sent only a postcard, of the five-and-dime variety: Greetings from Delaware. She wrote in her big loopy cursive, using only the left-hand side, and mentioned tennis camp and the Rehoboth boardwalk and perfect waves for bodysurfing. Looks like I’ve run out of room. Sorry about your van. Sincerely yours, Cleo.
All summer I fell asleep replaying our last night together. I started or finished letters that I never sent, full of too much longing or turgid descriptions of the D.C. heat. The more I waited to hear from her, the more I wondered if she was angry with me, if she knew somehow that I hadn’t told my parents about Tino and Brie. Or maybe there was another reason for her silence. I managed to get her phone number in Bethany from Factotum Frank, and often thought about ringing her up, making an expensive long-distance call that would infuriate my father. But when I went to pick up the phone, something told me that whatever was going on with her, I didn’t want to know.
On the Monday of the second week of school, a new student showed up. We were in the middle of a guest lecture by two Mormon missionaries who had knocked on our door the previous evening while making their rounds of the neighborhood. Linc had told them Thanks, but no thanks, then got the idea that it might be fun to bring them to class. “What would you say to thirty potential converts?” he’d asked.
Now the missionaries, pert as Osmonds, were talking about the Book of Mormon in our living room. They were just getting into the story about Joseph Smith and the golden plates of the angel Moroni when the doorbell rang, and a second later in walked Bailey, his son Troy in tow.
“Don’t mean to interrupt.” Bailey looked around at the students arranged on couches and pillows on the floor, many jotting in notebooks. With these polite young men holding forth we almost had the appearance of a respectable school. “Seems you’re making progress, Pete. Mind if I have a word with you?”
I was glad he didn’t look closer at our guests and recognize their telltale white shirts and black nameplates. He already thought we were a den of Communists. What next? Champions of plural marriage?
He and Troy joined my father on the porch, and later that night, after the missionaries had left calling cards and copies of the Book of Mormon, agreeing to come back anytime, my father announced that Troy was our latest student.
“Not a good idea,” my mother said. She was dishing out salad before our manicotti dinner.
“How could I say no?”
“You’ve got to learn not to mix business with friendship. Especially when it’s not a friendship at all.”
“We’re living in Bailey’s house. His half-price house.” My father refilled his glass with Gallo Chablis. “Do I need to remind you that the lease comes up in October? Don’t you want him to renew?”
“Sometimes yes and sometimes no,” my mother said.
“Look, Troy’s only a part-timer: Tuesdays and Thursdays after school.”
“What’s he into?” Tino asked.
“Bailey didn’t say.”
“I know what he’s into,” I blurted out. What was the use of covering for Troy when his problems would surely reveal themselves? I felt I had to warn people about something. “You all have to swear yourselves to secrecy,” I said, and went on to repeat Cleo’s story about her brother’s struggles with alcohol, right down to the empty liquor cabinet and his academic slide.
“That’s not what Bailey told me,” my father broke in. “Troy’s still at Our Lady of Perpetual Help. He’s doing well but he needs a creative outlet.”
“He failed two courses last term,” I said.
“Bailey told me he gets straight A’s.”
My mother dropped the serving spoons into the salad bowl, which wobbled on the table like a spinning top. “Who are you going to believe, Pete? That S.O.B. or your own son?”
“I’m just reporting what I heard.”
“And so is Daniel. I’d be a lot more inclined to listen to that nice girl than her megalomaniacal father. No wonder his kid has a drinking problem. Stuck in that ‘spoils of Africa’ house—it’s his only way out. Can you imagine living with Bailey? My blood pressure soars at the sound of his name.”
“Well, we’re going to have to live with his son.” My father took a big swallow of wine. “He starts tomorrow.”
Molly said in a low tone, “I’m sure glad I go to Hardy.”
Tino couldn’t avoid putting in his own opinion. “Every teenager’s an alcoholic. That’s neither here nor there. You want to know the bigger issue?” He shook his grimy finger at Molly and me. “Espionage. Young Troy is his father’s chief of Gestapo. Look out, kids, he’s the young Heinrich Himmler. And you know what that means? Hide your dirty magazines and bury your dope. There’s a bonfire in the town square and it’s hungry for books.”
“Oh, please.” My mother sniffed.
“You watch,” Tino said. “Because rest assured, he’ll be watching you.”
Though I’d grown used to Tino’s self-dramatizing, I had to admit I was curious to know why Bailey would send his son to a school that he didn’t approve of.
Later that evening, while my mother was in the dining room helping Molly with her homework and my father was in the parlor watching an Orioles game, I called Cleo from the only semiprivate phone in the house, in my parents’ bedroom. This time I didn’t hesitate or think about it, just dialed her number, and was lucky that she was the one who answered, on the first ring.
“Daniel.” She sounded surprised, and I wondered if she’d been waiting for a different call.
I tried to be casual, and act as if we’d been in touch all summer and everything was normal. “So what’s up with your brother?” I asked.
She made a desultory effort to catch up, though she never apologized for taking so long to write back and not bothering to call, when she was the one who’d left, not me. And too quickly she moved on from talking about the summer to answering my question, when she should have known that I was really calling to talk to her. She reported that Troy was on probation at OLPH, and would be trying Our House part-time, for a change of pace.
“I’m just surprised your dad is letting him,” I said, going along. “Or did Sister Donovan put in a good word for us?”
“No, it was Troy’s decision. He’s been pushing hard for it ever since he got back from France.”
“That’s odd. He doesn’t strike me as the type for a democratic school.”
Cleo tapped on the phone. “Hello? Anyone on here?” She paused for a moment. “Sorry about that,” she said. “Sometimes Frank listens in. He doesn’t think I can hear him unscrewing the whatchamacallit. But I don’t care if you’re on here, Frank. It’s not like I’m saying anything the world doesn’t know. My brother needs to maintain a B average. At least he’s not drinking as much since he came back from France head over heels.”
“He’s got a girlfriend? Good.” I figured romance was a far preferable form of intoxication.
“She’s not exactly a girlfriend.”
“But they were going out this summer?”
“Sort of—” Cleo hesitated. “Their status is unclear.”
“It would be unladylike of me to share the details, but suffice it to say that something happened, and for one of them the fun ended there, while for the other it was just getting started. My brother doesn’t have much experience with girls, and this one in particular has plenty of experience. Are you listening, Frank? Because I don’t care.” Cleo sounded almost cynical. I wondered what had happened over the summer to sharpen her edge. Perhaps she’d met an older boy, someone with a motorcycle. The thought of Cleo, her arms wrapped around the leathered waist of some beach town heartbreaker, made me wish to be off the phone. It seemed years ago since we were kissing by the garden.
“Anyway,” she went on, “Troy’s obsessed with her, and he thinks he can make her fall for him, but that’s not going to happen. The school psychologist said my brother has an addictive personality. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. He’s just substituting the drink with misguided love.”
“But she’s in France. Won’t he forget about her soon enough?”
“She’s not in France. She’s right here,” Cleo said. “Why do you think Stephanie quit your school? She’s had enough of the Tino and Brie situation. But she’s too nice to say anything and screw you guys over.”
“They’re still together?” I shuddered.
“It’s not obvious?”
“We’ve only been back in school a week. They seemed to be keeping apart. I thought it was over.” Perhaps to pretend the whole thing wasn’t happening, I asked, “But what does this have to do with Troy?”
“You’re not getting it, are you? Brie’s the one who Troy’s obsessed with. They hooked up in Aix-en-Provence. She probably thought he was a rebel then got sick of him. Now she’s back with teacher.”
I didn’t like Cleo’s sarcastic tone. Her Bailey side had surfaced out of nowhere, and for the first time I grew annoyed with her. “If you knew about Brie and Troy, why didn’t you call to tell me right away? We could have used a warning, you know. This is great, just great,” I said, wondering how many love triangles one house could take.
“Don’t blame me,” Cleo snapped back. “You never told your parents, did you? Because if you had, this wouldn’t be happening. They’d have fired that old creep long ago.”
“You don’t know Tino,” I said despondently. “He’s like a leech you can’t peel off.”
“If you’d told your parents in May, they could have done something.”
“The summer came up fast and we got busy and everyone went their separate ways. I thought Brie would run off with some French guy and Tino wouldn’t leave Cinnamon again.” My words raced together. “I wanted to talk to my mom, but she was teaching the summer course and my dad was coaching baseball. I couldn’t find the time—”
Cleo softened her voice. “I’m sure you meant to. It’s not my business anyway. But you might want to try again.”
After I got off the phone I stepped into the hallway, gathering the will to talk to my parents. I wanted to say something now, but hated to think of the fallout. They couldn’t get rid of Tino without launching an inquisition, and I knew he’d put up a colossal fight. With the new term under way we couldn’t afford this kind of disruption. Why had I held my tongue so long?
I needed to think this over, so I went upstairs. Tino and Cinnamon’s door was closed. I waited and listened a moment but heard no sounds from their room. Sitting in bed distractedly I tried to decide what to do. My latest biography, on Calvin Coolidge, rested on my side table. I paged through it, casting my eyes over the life of the thirtieth president:
He kept quite a menagerie at the White House, including cats and dogs, a donkey and a goose that once starred in a Broadway play, and a raccoon named Rebecca that he walked on a leash.
Though Jefferson, Adams and Monroe all died on the Fourth of July, Coolidge was the only president born on Independence Day.
Stiff and laconic, his nickname was “Silent Cal.” He was known to go an entire party without making conversation. But he justified his economy of speech in a famous quote that he often repeated: “The things I did not say never hurt me.”
Good for you, Cal. I closed my notebook and paced my room. Silence may have been your trick, but it sure hasn’t worked for me.
With Cleo’s exhortation still ringing in my ear, I made my way downstairs, fully intending to talk to my parents. But on the second floor I saw a light from the bedroom where Quinn had set up camp. He’d brought an old mattress, a crate and a lamp, and was spending most of his nights at Our House. He said his parents didn’t mind that he was a boarding student, so long as he came home occasionally to help out with the chores. I knocked and he invited me in. He was sitting on the mattress reading. “Got a minute?” I closed the door behind me. He put down the Book of Mormon.
“I need your advice,” I began, and whispered everything I knew about Tino and Brie, from their apparent trysting place to the real reason why Stephanie had bowed out. I told him about lovesick Troy as well, and the catastrophe his arrival might bring. I felt relieved to be able to tell someone, though I realized, as I unloosed a breathless plait of words, that I still carried the burden.
Quinn blinked his starry eyelashes, and I sensed he appreciated my confiding in him.
“I’m going to settle this.” He dropped the Book of Mormon and hopped out of bed. Before I could tell him to wait, he’d breezed past me and was climbing upstairs. As I reached the top step he was already knocking on Tino’s door.
“Come in,” Cinnamon said, and Quinn let himself inside.
“Is Tino here?” he asked.
“What do you need?” Cinnamon sounded groggy, as if she’d fallen asleep with the light on. She was braless in a tank top. A book with a red symbol in its center lay open on her freckled chest.
“I’ve got something to say to him.” Quinn leaned in the doorway. “Do you know where he is?”
“Probably at Dan’s.” Cinnamon rubbed her eyes.
“Who’s Dan?”
“Dan’s Café. It’s the neighborhood dive. Tino’s friendly with the bartender.”
“And you don’t go with him?”
“It’s not my scene.” Cinnamon gave Quinn a look that seemed to ask, Why all the questions?
I stepped inside the room, nudging past Quinn, afraid he was going to tell too much. “What are you reading?” I asked.
Cinnamon held up the book: The Divine Principle by Sun Myung Moon.
“Moonies,” Quinn said. “Did you hear about the mass weddings they do over in Korea? They’re talking about doing them here, too.”
I asked Cinnamon why she was reading a book by Reverend Moon. He’d been in the news since taking his Unification Church to the United States in the early seventies. He’d met with President Nixon, addressed both houses of Congress, and his “God Bless America Festival” was one of the biggest religious rallies in the history of D.C. It would be another five years before the famous mass wedding of two thousand couples in Madison Square Garden, but already the Moonies had struck fear in many parents.
Cinnamon reported that Linc had hatched a brilliant idea: he’d invited some Moonies to Our House to debate the Mormon missionaries about marriage and religion. “It’s gonna be a trip,” she said. “That’s why I’m studying up.” She flipped through The Divine Principle. “They’re all coming tomorrow.”
“Do my mom and dad know about this?” I asked.
“Linc checked it through with them. You worry too much, Daniel. You should take up meditation.”
“I’ll think about it,” I said, and Cinnamon gave me a smile that made me weak in the knees.
We went back downstairs to Quinn’s room.
“I bet that rat’s with the girl right now,” he said.
“Cinnamon knows, doesn’t she?” I asked.
“Of course she knows. She’s just letting it ride.”
“I don’t understand it,” I said.
“Neither do I.” Quinn grabbed the Book of Mormon off his bed and gestured with it. “I’m going to wait up for him, and when he gets home I’ll give him a piece of my mind.”
I was grateful for Quinn’s support, but I told him that this was my problem.
“It’s everyone’s problem,” he said. “I like it here, and I’ll do anything to help.”
“You have to promise to let me deal with this,” I insisted. “I need to figure it out on my own. Let me talk to my mother and father first. I wanted you to know, that’s all.”
“Okay,” he said, and on my way out of his room, just to be sure, I closed the door so he wouldn’t glimpse Tino slinking back upstairs.
My parents and Molly were having a spirited talk in the dining room about Amy Carter. Molly said the First Daughter was shy and that she missed her old home in small-town Georgia. Sometimes, to get away from the First Family hullabaloo, she climbed up into the tree house her father had built her on the South Lawn. “If I’d only gone to Hardy last spring instead of staying here, I bet we would have been good friends. But she already has her group now,” Molly lamented. “A bunch of them went to slumber parties in the tree house this summer.”
“It’s not too late,” my mother said. “You can still make friends with her.”
“I told her about Chester and Chairman Mao, and she told me about Misty Malarky Ying-Yang, but it’s not like she invited me over. Maybe if we had a tree house, I could invite her over here;”
This got me excited. I had visions of a great tree house up in the maples, near Quinn’s airship. Jimmy and Rosalynn would come over and sit on the patio, talking with my family about world affairs. Imagine how many students we’d recruit if the president of the United States was a regular guest lecturer. We’d have to move to a bigger house, new and clean and insect-free. We’d be famous. My parents would get cabinet positions: co-secretaries of Health, Education and Welfare. I’d have full use of the presidential archives, clearance for every room in the White House. Jimmy was hardworking and thrifty—to save money for the country and set an example, he’d sold the presidential yacht and turned off the lights around the city’s monuments. His family was humble, just like us. It wasn’t hard to picture that we could all be friends.
“I don’t know about a tree house,” my mother said. “Your father’s carpentry skills leave much to be desired. The last thing we need is the floorboards breaking and Amy Carter crashing to the pavement.”
“I think it’s a cool idea,” I put in. “Tino’s a good carpenter. He built his own tree house on the commune. And it was sturdy enough for lots of people.” Somehow, in my fantasy about the Carters, I’d forgotten why I’d come downstairs, and instead of accusing Tino, here I was praising him.
Molly’s eyes lit up, and she clutched my mother’s sleeve. “Let’s make Tino build a tree house.”
My father rose from his chair. “It’s late. You should be going to bed, Molly.”
“But can we put a tree house in the back?”
“We’ll talk about that later. You have to get up early for school.”
Molly grabbed her homework, took my mother’s hand and led her upstairs, no doubt to further plead her case that we absolutely had to have a tree house so she could be friends with Amy Carter.
After they were gone, my father asked, “Why did you have to open your big mouth?” His face was high-colored; he’d had more than his usual two glasses of wine and I knew this was not the moment to tell him about Tino and Brie. “We can’t afford a damn tree house. And do you think we have all the time in the world?”
“It could be a school project,” I suggested.
“What do tree houses have to do with religion? This is your uncle’s harebrained course, and I plan to stay out of his way and let him screw it up.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, a misplaced apology.
The next day was bright and mild, a beautiful fall morning. We opened the downstairs windows, and the lily fragrance from the Moonies’ bouquets brightened the dusty living room. Linc had asked the Mormons to arrive at midmorning so we’d first have a chance to meet Thomas and Ketzia, representatives from the Unification Church’s enclave on Upshur Street. Thomas was thin and clean-cut in a throwback suit and skinny tie; Ketzia wore a sky-blue dress, her ginger hair tied in a bow. They were friendly and outgoing, but in the tight-wound way of flight attendants, fond of the word “wonderful,” as in “It’s so wonderful to meet all of you on this wonderfully sunny day. I just know we’re going to have a good time.” These were not the Manson family freaks that Sister Donovan had spoken of, unless they planned to kill us with kindness.
We went around the room giving our names. It worried me that Dawn was absent for the second class in a row, but this quickly left my mind when I saw that Troy wasn’t here, either. I’d woken up late with a powerful dread. I’d missed breakfast and had come downstairs just as the students had begun to arrive. Was this my reprieve? Did Troy have a change of heart and decide not to come to our school after all?
Brie introduced herself, and last came Tino, who wasted no time attacking Reverend Moon and his support of Richard Nixon. “No offense, but your boss is a nutso fascist. He was for the Vietnam War right up to the bitter end, and after Watergate he took out full-page ads asking everyone to ‘love and forgive’ Tricky Dicky.”
Linc turned to Tino. “That’s no way to talk to our guests.”
“How do you think Moon got his green card?” Tino continued. “He wrote Nixon a personal check for a hundred thousand dollars. What do you have to say to that?” He fixed the Moonies with a wicked stare.
Linc told Ketzia she didn’t have to answer.
“It’s all right,” she said politely, as if Tino had asked for nothing more than a second bag of salted peanuts. Then, in one bubbly stream of zeal, she explained that Reverend Moon was the Messiah of the Second Coming, and his wife, Hak Ja Han, was the Holy Spirit. He was the “True Father” and she the “True Mother.” Together, they were the first couple to bring children into the world without the curse of original sin. And since Communists do not believe in God, and thus deny the existence of the “True Father,” His Holiness Reverend Moon, they are agents of Satan and must be defeated. “President Nixon was a wonderful man for fighting the spread of communism. He will always be a friend of the Holy Spirit Association for the Unification of World Christianity.”
“Try saying that ten times fast,” Linc said in an effort to cut Tino off.
But Tino rode right over him: “See, kids. It’s just like I told you. Moon’s a wacko fascist.”
Thomas straightened his tie. “I bet it would be fun if we could see a show of hands. Who here likes communism?”
A couple of hands wavered, and Tino was about to tee off again when the doorbell rang.
My mother told me to answer it then turned to Linc, gritting her teeth. “You need to do something. This is getting out of control.”
I went to the door, praying that it wouldn’t be Troy, and breathed a sigh of relief when the Mormons greeted me with Pepsodent smiles.
“Are we early?” asked Brother Drexel and Brother Sidell.
“Just in time,” I said.
But as I let them in and they walked past into the front hallway, I caught a glimpse of the street below. Double-parked beside the Ben Franklin fire hydrant was the champagne Cadillac. Two figures were inside, engaged in what looked like an argument.
I shut the door and, instinctively, locked it.