The information did go to Anthony’s head, although not quite in the way Mary feared. As Trip noted in his journal, “Anthony’s discovery stimulated that peculiar, lower brain stem part of the American psyche hell-bent on being Self Made, which in evolutionary terms is a slightly younger mutation of Born Again.”
After a long funk, Anthony embraced certain aspects of the revelation that I Am Not Who I Thought I Was. It provided him with emotional license to engage in uncharacteristic practices such as: 1) thoroughly reviewing his wardrobe; 2) going on a shopping spree with his first credit card; 3) flaunting his orientation at an anti-nuke rally on the Washington Mall with Trip; and 4) impulsively convincing his lover that the solution to housing in D.C. was to buy an old Hinckley Sou’wester and rent a slip at a marina near the farthest subway stop.
Further nosing around in the stacks of the Library of Congress yielded several more photos that confirmed the remarkable likeness. Anthony posed as a researcher with a half-finished dissertation on the diplomatic station in Moscow in the ’50s. The archeological flavor of the search whetted Anthony’s appetite for careful sifting through crumbling reams of data. To most people, a day in a library carrel surrounded by piles of seemingly unrelated, outdated material would not be fun. To Anthony, it was an elixir. He began musing on dates, the exact dates of his mother’s time in Moscow, the wedding in Indianapolis, the fabled winter on Great Tusk. He acquired a copy of his birth certificate and managed to secure the 1952 registration records from the maternity ward at Blue Hill hospital.
Trip tried to keep him grounded. “You’re becoming like one of those nuts who thinks he’s the long lost offspring of Czar Nicholas II.”
“But I am,” Anthony insisted, pulling at his beard.
“It could be just a coincidence,” Trip said. “Do you really think your mother would lie to you? Of course, I know parents fudge the facts with their kids all the time. For years my folks gave me completely conflicting accounts on what led up to their divorce. But you’ve always described your mom with a halo around her head.”
Anthony winced, “What if she’s denying it to save the marriage? What if Ward doesn’t know anything about it? I don’t want them to split up. Ward isn’t a bad husband, although when I think back, he acted a little different with me than with Rob and Duncan.”
“Different how?”
“He treated me easier. His attitude sometimes felt like a kind of wariness. And these checks he’s sending me now, a thousand a month. It’s like he’s trying to buy my silence.”
“You’re saying he did know that he wasn’t your biological dad?”
“Maybe unconsciously,” Anthony shrugged.
Trip said, “Ah, yes, unconsciously … my father’s favorite fallback explanation for everything that required an apology. He actually had cards printed up: ‘Mr. Bedford Forrest Ames regrets his unconscious behavior on the evening of ….’ Fill in the date.”
As usual, Trip was able to coax a smile from Anthony. They were sitting in the restaurant at the National Gallery. One of several grand, home-away-from-home public spaces they frequented. The sailboat quarters at the marina were tight. They slept in the V-berth up front and took turns dressing, hunkered over in the low cabin. The boat was cozy enough to return to after twelve hours snooping around the capital of the Free World, but not exactly a place to settle. And that was fine for now, as they fancied themselves modern-day flâneurs. Patrolling the broad avenues, imagining who was lurking in the passing limousines, discussing where their investigative powers should be focused. And discovering where to find a good salad. The chef at the National Gallery restaurant made an excellent Cobb salad. Trip was an aficionado. “Nothing that can’t be solved by a good salad,” he claimed.
“Face the facts,” Trip said. “Your supposed bigwig daddy over there in the State Department is not likely to admit anything either. What are you expecting, for him to welcome you as his heir? No way. And frankly, as far as newsworthiness, what do we really have here? A high government official may have fathered a child out of wedlock a long time ago. Not exactly headline material. It wouldn’t even make the back page.”
Like Mary, Trip was also worried that Anthony’s nosiness could inadvertently cause dangerous reactions. Just yesterday, a speeding car took a corner too tightly and almost ran them over. Probably a coincidence.
Anthony sighed and nodded. “At least it helps me look below the surface. Dig for the story underneath. I still think there’s some kind of destiny at work. I mean, for this to come out just before we move to Washington. For his office to be just a few blocks away!”
“Okay, so let’s use it as motivation,” Trip agreed, “to find a story we can run with. Your anti-nuke cause is losing steam. The atomic age is so passé. The bomb is a rusty dinosaur. Nobody cares about atoms anymore. It’s all about quarks now.”
“Did we ever hear anything back from the Blade on our pitch about the Plowshares Eight?” Anthony asked.
Trip shrugged. “They’ve already got somebody on it. Maybe if we got less focused on nukes, you could get less obsessed with your parentage. We should probably be thinking smaller, more local.”
“And we should probably be thinking about part-time jobs.”
“Let’s go look at some paintings,” Trip said. A common diversion when feeling overwhelmed by the harsher realities. They disappeared into the dim galleries, in search of their respective favorites. For Trip, that was Benjamin West’s mysterious picture of Colonel Guy Johnson with a shadowy half-naked Mohawk at his shoulder, whispering, pointing the way to the handsome colonel’s true preference. And for Anthony, it was Thomas Eakins’ rowers, The Biglin Brothers Racing. Anthony made Trip promise that when they had enough money and space, they would purchase a reproduction of this painting.
“It’s us,” Anthony explained, “two guys in the same boat, a narrow, tippy boat, rowing upstream against the tide.”
“Two soul mates,” Trip said, “with blue handkerchiefs tied on their heads.”
The blue handkerchiefs tied on their heads became a signature wardrobe feature for Anthony and Trip on the Ivy party circuit. Anthony came out as a dancer too. It was part of the statement. But only with clumsy Trip. They would dance goofy, bouncing shimmies together. It was part of the tacit understanding that they were often the token ‘gay couple’ that added spice to a party. At first the hosts were other Yalies. There was Lucian, who landed a job at the Kennedy Center and a basement apartment in Georgetown. He lived with someone who monitored something about water rights at Interior. There was Missy, who worked for UNESCO and shared a townhouse on Monroe Street with Ashley, who slaved in a back office at an investment bank.
Gradually, the circle widened. Everett handled constituent calls for his congressman and rented a house with Doug, the Labor Department statistician, across the river in Alexandria. Cynthia dropped out of Randolph-Macon to attend the Culinary Institute. She worked under the dessert chef at a big banquet hotel, and the parties in her Woodley Park studio meant cakes galore.
As pot gave way to cocaine as the ’80s drug of choice, people talked differently at parties. Less inward musings and more outward ranting. Parties became marathons of vociferousness. This was helpful for Trip and Anthony, two rookie journalists, judiciously sipping wine from paper cups, listening for scoops. They pursued a lead overheard on Everett’s back porch about an eminent domain dispute near Union Station and sold their first piece to the DC Gazette. The potentially big story was overheard repeatedly very late or in the dawn hours during a party’s last whispered gasps, with Anthony and Trip feigning sleep in a corner.
They’d become known affectionately as the ‘Blue Bandana Nomads’ for their habit of crashing on their host’s floor, rather than making the long trek back to the boat. And in exchange, waking early with no ill effects from substances, they tiptoed around other comatose bodies and did a cleanup. Gathering bottles and trash. Stacking dishes. Mopping up spills. Emptying ashtrays. Before they stepped out into a fresh urban morning to compare notes on the night’s eavesdropping. More and more they both overheard mention of a deadly pneumonia that seemed to be affecting gay men.