The unpleasantness between Ward and Mary festered. Crassly adopting a ploy of his father’s, Ward circled a date on the calendar and announced he would not be speaking to his wife until the appointed day. To spite him, Mary turned to her own father for consolation and advice. Fred Stark dismissed Ward’s threat. He said, “Oh, Loretta used to pull that one and she never made it beyond twenty four hours.”
Mary called Dr. Keller for a second appointment. She couldn’t tell from his voice on the phone whether he remembered her. He said he did, but she couldn’t tell for sure, and she didn’t know why that felt so important.
His office was still in Irvington, across from the enormous oak tree. His waiting room looked different. The magazine table was covered with unfamiliar publications, Ramparts and the Village Voice. Dr. Keller looked different too. Balding on top, the rest of his long hair tied back in a ponytail. Mary had seen TV images of men with long hair, but had never been in the presence of one.
Dr. Keller offered her tea and inquired after “baby Anthony.” Mary smiled cautiously and reported that he was all grown up and doing very well at boarding school. She thanked Dr. Keller for his reflections at their first session and apologized for taking so long to come back.
She continued, “When I was here however many years ago, I didn’t tell you the full story about baby Anthony. It’s eating me up inside … in a way … I don’t know how, exactly. I’m sure people come to you with all kinds of crazy tales. What would you think if I were to tell you that my husband is not Anthony’s biological father, although Anthony thinks he is?”
“Go on,” Dr. Keller said calmly.
“What would you think if I told you that his real father is a prominent State Department official, and a bigwig in the C.I.A., but my son knows nothing of this and I often struggle with a lot of guilt about whether I should tell him?”
Dr. Keller sipped his tea. He stroked his ponytail. She gulped her tea. He stroked his mustache. She gazed out the window at the oak tree. He said, “You’ve been carrying this a long time.”
“It’s hard for me to talk about,” she said. “I want to know the effect on my son of not knowing his real father.”
Keller said, “I can give you a textbook response, or I can give you mine.”
“Both, please,” Mary said.
“According to the textbook, if you don’t tell him, it could really mess him up. And, according to me, if you do tell him, it could really mess him up.”
“Thank you. How much am I paying you for this?” Mary asked.
“Frankly, if that kind of guy were my real father, I probably wouldn’t want to know about it,” Keller said, “and if you think your husband is doing a decent job with Anthony, why change it all now?”
Mary nodded cautiously, “Okay, but meanwhile, with Anthony away at school, there’s a Cold War developing at home with my husband.”
“Cold Wars are harder,” he said.
“And please don’t just tell me to get a divorce,” Mary said. “Everyone I know claim their analysts think divorce is the solution to everything.”
Dr. Keller nodded. “Yeah, that has been going around.”
“Are you married?” she asked.
“Why does it matter?”
“I don’t see any family pictures on your desk. I was wondering if you’ve been through it—a marriage, I mean.”
Dr. Keller said, “I’m homosexual.”
“What?” Mary spouted.
“I’m a homosexual. I have a partner, but, of course, we’re not legally allowed to marry,” he said, studying her reaction.
“Um … uh … I never … it’s just that … sorry … I …” she sputtered.
Dr. Keller offered, “It would be perfectly understandable if you now felt you’d come to the wrong place to talk about marital difficulties.”
“I don’t know,” Mary said, shaking her head. “I suppose that relationship, uh, relationship things …. What’s the word everyone uses now?”
“Dynamics?”
“Yes, I guess relationship dynamics are probably much the same between all human beings, a few variables perhaps between men.”
“A few variables,” Dr. Keller agreed.
“Male couples can have Cold Wars, too?” Mary asked.
Dr. Keller nodded. “Sure, in fact, many couples, heterosexual and homosexual, have adopted the Cold War practice of ‘mutually assured destruction.’ ”
Mary found herself smiling again, though she wasn’t sure why. “My husband will think this is all very odd.”
“But it’s really very sad, isn’t it?” Dr. Keller interjected.
“Yes,” Mary agreed.
“Or rather, you are really very sad.”
Mary nodded. “I am, deep down.”
“And does your husband know that?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure. He’s caught up in his own kind of sadness. We have this story we make up for each other at night. We try to tell each other things.”
Dr. Keller said, “Maybe in the next installment, your sadness could meet his.”
Mary looked forward eagerly to her next appointment, which she was determined to keep. It was all she could do not to brag at the ladies’ book club about having a homosexual analyst. When she next arrived at Dr. Keller’s office, she found a note taped to the outer door:
Break-in! This office vandalized again! Someone looking for patient records! Maybe it’s J. Edgar Hoover out to get me! Enough, I’m moving to Canada. All patients please call Dr. Gordon at AT3-3511. He will be taking over my caseload. Many apologies.
Mary banged on the door. No answer. She impulsively kicked at the door. She did not stop to wonder who might be looking for whose records. Flush with a sudden rage at Dr. Keller for leaving, Mary pulled a pen from her purse and angrily scrawled on his note, “Fuck you.” She had never actually written the word ‘fuck’ before. It felt like the right word. Everyone was saying it these days. Mary kicked the door again.
She caught herself and forced a deep breath and peered around to see if Rusalka was watching from the parking lot. Mary marched across the street to the Kile Oak and plopped down on one of the low hanging limbs. It was broad enough for her to pull her legs up and lie back, as if on a traditional analyst’s couch.
She gazed up at the maze of branches. As a child, she was a tree-climber. She’d study a tree and plot out her ascents, branch to branch. The tree-of-life symbol was hard to avoid here and it hit her full-force, particularly in the loss of her ability to plot a clear course through her adult years. Where to next? A conquistador of trees, or so she imagined. Thinking back, she realized her desire was also for the embrace of the tree, the hours nestled in the comfortable crook of trunk and limb. Is that why she’d settled on Ward? Her anger at Dr. Keller shifted to a sigh of jealousy, that in middle age he could still embark on a new ascent, just up and go.
Mary studied the limbs above her and tried to see a path to the top. Fortunately, she was wearing pants. She took off her heels and slowly began to climb in stocking feet, stopping to rest and enjoy the view at intervals. The higher she went, the more the branches swayed. So what the fuck if Mrs. Ward Wangert was apprehended clinging to the top of the Kile Oak? This was the 1960s and people were supposed to be outrageous.
Two hours later, Ward appeared on the ground far below. He circled and finally spotted her. He called up, “Mary Wangert, what are you doing?”
“What are YOU doing?” Mary rejoined.
“We were waiting dinner. You didn’t show!”
“I thought you weren’t talking to me,” Mary called.
Ward shrugged. “Okay, I am talking to you again. Now come down out of that tree.”
“Did you see the note on the office door?”
Ward said, “I always thought he sounded weird.”
Mary called, “What about me? Is that what you always felt about me?”
Ward shook his head. Mary continued, “Or you saw me as some kind of lost kitten that you had to save?”
Ward paced the circumference of the large tree. “It would appear that way. Do I have to call the fire department?” he said.
“You might. Sometimes it’s harder to go down than up.”
Ward cupped his hands to his mouth. “I think the truth is, you saved me,” he called up.
“That’s very nice of you to acknowledge,” Mary said.
Ward pleaded, “Will you come down now, please?”
“No,” Mary countered. “If you really believe what you just said, you’re going to have to join me. You have to join me up here. Dr. Keller says our sadnesses need to meet.”
“Our what need to what?” Ward said.
“I’m very serious,” Mary called.
Ward took off his jacket and tie. He tried to ignore his fear of heights and focus instead on the emerging fear of his wife leaving the marriage. It wasn’t just husbands leaving wives anymore, to go off and become swingers like Elbert. He tried to imagine his father climbing a tree to make up with Constance. It wouldn’t have happened. Ward Sr. would have shown up with a chainsaw. Ward folded his jacket and carefully laid it across the lowest branch, beside Mary’s shoes. Mary indicated the climbing route she’d taken. Ward followed her instructions and eventually reached her perch about thirty feet above the ground.
“Thank you for coming,” she said.
“I’m sorry,” he said, breathing heavily, “Please forgive me. I’m the one who was lost.”
“Here, kitty kitty,” Mary said.
“Ward and Mary sitting in a tree,” he teased.
“I’d like to kiss,” she said, “but I’m afraid we might fall.”
“So what’s all this business about sadness?” he asked.
“We’re only a couple years away from all the boys being gone,” Mary said. “What are we going to do then?”
“Is that your sadness?”
“One of them,” she stated.
“I’m supposed to answer: run away to Canada?” Ward said.
Mary shook her head. “I don’t know. We’ll still have elderly parents. The hourglass of time will be turned over soon. And by the way, why don’t you ever talk about your father’s death? In all the years since he’s been gone, I don’t think you’ve said five words about him.”
Ward gazed out across the city. A plume of dark smoke stained the horizon. He said, obliquely, “It is what it is. I don’t blame him or you or anybody. We make our choices and live with them, despite whatever the … you know … counterculture says.”
Mary said, “I hear that word a lot, but I’m not sure what it means.”
“I think it comes from all the time that young people in the Civil Rights movement spent at counters, like soda counters and lunch counters.”
Mary shook her head. “No, wrong, you old goat. That’s not it.”
Anthony came home for spring break during the first week of April. His visit coincided with the aforementioned Robert Kennedy speech. Robbie and Duncan urged their older, wiser brother, who flew home all by himself on Trans World Airlines, to convince Dad to take them to the event. They told Anthony about the loud fight overheard after the party. They didn’t really understand it, but in the way children will unconsciously push a raw spot between parents, they wanted to see what would happen. Anthony pitched the Kennedy speech to Dad as a chance to cover the presidential primary campaign for the Rokeby Record.
To appease his sons and wife, post-tree climb, Ward complied.
On the evening on April 4, 1968, they ate an early supper with Rusalka and her kids. Everyone enjoyed sampling a special treat, a shipment of Russian caviar, that Mary assumed came from the new director of the Anglo-American School in Moscow who recently graced Mary with a letter of appreciation for founding the school back in 1951.
Directions to the Kennedy rally were a bit fuzzy. Rusalka thought it was taking place at Crispus Attucks High School.
“That’s where Oscar Robertson played,” Duncan spouted, from the backseat of the car.
“Who?” Ward said.
“Dad, you don’t know anything,” Robbie said.
Eventually they found a crowd assembled in a vacant lot outside the Broadway Christian Center on 17th Street. The crowd was mostly black, with a few pockets of whites, including Father Tyler, who beckoned for the Wangerts and Rusalka to join him.
“Something’s gone wrong,” Paul Tyler whispered to Ward. They glimpsed Kennedy pacing behind a truck.
News cycles were longer in 1968. Headlines could happen in one part of the country and take many hours to spread. The story of Robert Kennedy’s improvised speech in Indianapolis on the evening of Martin Luther King’s assassination is widely known, but deserves a brief summary here. While flying to Indianapolis from a campaign stop in Fort Wayne, Kennedy and his speechwriter received news of the King shooting in Memphis. They threw out his previously prepared remarks and drafted a new speech. At the airport they were met by a swarm of police. The police chief was afraid of riots and urged the candidate to cancel his appearance. Kennedy refused to cancel, and in turn, the police chief refused to escort him to the “ghetto.” In the ensuing confusion, Kennedy and his speechwriter were separated and ended up in different cars. The speechwriter’s car (and the speech) never made it to 17th and Broadway. So Robert Kennedy, without notes, finally climbed up on the back of a flatbed truck and informed the crowd of King’s assassination. Wails and shouts and moaning filled the air. The Wangerts and Rusalka and Father Tyler feared for their safety. On a night in which one hundred and ten American cities erupted in violence, Indianapolis grieved quietly. Kennedy’s speech was credited with calming the city. It lasted four minutes and fifty-four seconds and was direct from the gut. A section of it was inscribed soon after in the granite at his own gravesite in Arlington Cemetery.
Needless to say, the speech made an impression, especially on Robbie and Duncan. They knew the event was important, because their parents did something they hadn’t done in a long time. They hoisted the boys up in their arms, like little kids, to see and hear the speaker. Robbie and Duncan couldn’t really describe the experience afterward, not like Anthony did. He won a special prize for his account in the Rokeby Record newspaper. The younger boys only vaguely comprehended who Martin Luther King was and why the killing was so tragic. At their next school bomb drill, instead of giggling and poking at Vincent and each other, Robbie and Duncan filed down to the basement hallway and hunched obediently on the floor with their arms over their heads, silent and wary, because anything could happen! Vincent and Kayla’s dad had suddenly disappeared and maybe an atomic bomb really was going to fall. A bomb might explode and kill them right now, just like Mister Kennedy had been killed in California! Who knows what would explode next? The 1960s gave them their Lucky Charms childhood, and also abruptly jinxed it.