by Rocky Love with John Paglia
Genesis
In eighteen years as an obstetrician, Dr. Norman Libbon had welcomed hundreds of babies into the world, including four sons of his own. But on April 6, 1947, at ten-o-six in the morning, he had the shock of his life when from between his wife Mabel’s legs emerged a tiny pink hand. An electric reaction of surprise passed through the delivery room as Mabel’s volcanic scream erupted and the tiny one’s shoulders seemed to split her in half. Though she had given birth five times in nine years, each time the scream was just as primal, as if she were being axed down the middle as out came a baby in a gush of blood. As his wife collapsed in a final whack of pain, Dr. Libbon lifted the tiny baby by the ankles and slapped her bottom. The baby turned pink from her backside to her cheeks, and with the first cry that burped from her lips began the colic wailing of months.
Dr. Libbon cradled the goopy crying baby in his arms and bent at the knees to lower himself to bed level. Mabel breathed heavily. Her brown hair was caked with sweat on her forehead. She turned her head to see.
“We have a girl, Mabel,” he said. “Can you believe it? Four sons, and now a baby girl.”
Mabel smiled, her thirty-year-old face lined with fatigue, and she looked upon her weeping daughter. “Rochelle,” she whispered, “don’t worry, you’ll never want for anything.” She strained her neck to kiss the tiny forehead.
“Such a beauty,” said Norman of his pink wrinkled babe.
“Well, we have our little princess now. I’d say that’s enough children for one lifetime.” Mabel beamed love at newborn Rochelle.
Norman leaned into his wife. “You know,” he said in a low voice, “she came out reaching.”
“Me, me, me!” Mabel said, rocking her bawling infant on the back porch, as she watched her sons play softball in the yard. Norman’s father, Dr. Lawrence Libbon, had bought this mansion at the turn of the century, when it was already over fifty years old and Brooklyn was an urban outback. The house stood next to the Promenade like a regal eye, keeping watch on the visitors who came to stroll by the side of the river and delight in the glorious silhouette of Manhattan. Curious onlookers would stop to peer into the gigantic windows. The family life of the Libbons was obscured by lace curtains, betraying nothing more than movement and light. In front of the screened back porch was a large yard, beyond which was the cobbled walkway of the Promenade, the river, and the southern end of Manhattan. The Promenade was popular with lovers, no matter what the season; and in the urgent late-September wind, couples clung on benches, then hurried away. Surrounded by her children, Mabel watched the lovers and remembered herself and Norman, twelve years ago, frozen in a moment of her memory.
From the beginning, they had shared a spirit of devotion which was defined for Norman in science, and for Mabel in religion. Raised a Protestant, Norman had disavowed God, and because she loved him, Mabel Rosenberg chose to view his lack of belief more as an open field in which her faith could roam free. She agreed to a quiet wedding at City Hall. They both believed in the ultimate goodness of people, and they were equally serious about the importance of having a large family. But at the bottom of all that was love. What started in wind under stars — on a bench at the Promenade, watching the dark blue river curl around Manhattan — rooted itself in earth. He presented her with a good solid future. And she cared for him deeply, slowly teasing feelings from him with love. She always listened to his views even when she strongly disagreed, and he dared to hope that she might allow an atheist home.
She led him to believe this, which was deceptive of her; because the day Robert Libbon was born in 1938, Mabel announced that their children would be raised as Jews. Her one concession was that Norman need not directly participate, as long as he didn’t obfuscate her efforts. This was the couple’s most serious compromise, and to their credit, they lived with it more or less peaceably. As the family grew, and the couple became distracted from each other, Mabel carried their original love like a shutaway jewel, which she took out from time to time to remind her.
“I am an incurable romantic,” she would tell her young sons. Robert was nine, Earl was seven, Nathan was five, and Leo was two.
“When’s that little zero gonna ever stop crying?” Earl begged his mother. “When?”
“Maybe when her brothers learn to treat her like a lady, how’s that?” Mabel said with a sharp nod. She knew his complaint was not so much about the crying as about all the attention it gathered to his sister. For five years, before Leo, Earl was a middle child in constant struggle to be remembered. Now, there was another youngest baby to steal his parents away. He had liked it when it was only Robby and him, and their father would play with them on weekends. Now he never did.
“Daddy can make her stop,” Earl said, grimacing his squarish face at Rochelle.
He looked so cute in his short pants and dirty sweatshirt and Dodgers cap. His knobby knees were scraped, and his serious face was streaked with mud. Mabel smiled at her little Earl.
“Go on, sweetie, your brothers need you on the ball field.”
Earl stood there sulking, until Rochelle’s frantic crying had once again stolen their mother’s attention — then he dashed back to the game.
Finally, at the age of five months, two weeks and six days, during a storm one Sunday in late September, Rochelle Libbon stopped crying. She smiled, and blinked her eyes, and laughed. Her brothers gathered around the crib, pinched her chubby arms, tickled her under the chin, and pressed their fingertips into her dimples. Without all the noise, they learned to love her.
Teeny four-year-old Rochelle knew how to jump so her petticoats fluttered up and her brown banana curls bounced. She was a cheerleading squad of one, adamant in her adorableness, a girl with a mission. She had four handsome, popular brothers who needed to understand that of all the females in the world — women and girls, large and small, round and narrow, loud and quiet — she, Rochelle, was the most important to love. She performed for them: at the table, before bed, on the way to school, on the sidelines of their afternoon games. Robby, who as the oldest was the most important to woo, smiled, waved, even blushed, but otherwise didn’t pay much attention. Earl flatly ignored her. Leo, the youngest boy, wavered between joining the baseball team and the cheerleading squad and, never making up his mind, stood at the sidelines and watched.
It was Nathan who most felt the power of young Rochelle. By the age of nine, he was the most handsome and sensitive of the good looking Libbon boys. His thick brown hair was traced with gold which glittered in the sun when he moved. Rochelle thought his soft brown eyes were dreamy. His slender rounded nose was slightly arrogant, and he used it to make a point when he needed to. In contrast, his lips were full, naturally pouting for kisses. He knew he would be a doctor when he grew up: they all would, except Rochelle, whom their mother was training to be a doctor’s wife. Nathan’s idea was to spend his youth dreaming, before it was too late, and he wasted no time with frivolities such as sports. He stretched out on the ground with a book, alongside the baseball diamond where the other boys and their friends played, and watched his sister campaign for attention. Despite appearances, Nathan spent more time gazing up into his baby sister’s skirt than at the page. And Rochelle knew it.
“Na-than!” she giggled, and he turned a page and pretended to read. Nathan’s imaginings, which would come to mark his life, began there on the miniature baseball diamond behind the big house on Columbia Heights. His loving gaze silently taught Rochelle how to move, to kick, to call out her appreciation of the opposite sex. Without realizing it — because after all she was too young to know — she followed him like a mentor: learning, absorbing, taking his cues.
Rochelle was a boy’s girl, geared to trust and to please. Mabel, who felt she had been blessed with a daughter and should reap the benefits of a special friendship, observed Rochelle’s intense loyalty to her brothers and father, and strove to impart a female point of view.
In her campaign to align female with female in an otherwise male home, Mabel displayed a blue and white flowered apron she had sewed especially for Rochelle. There were ruffles around the edges. Ruffles. Nathan laughed, and so did seven-year-old Rochelle. Mabel forced a smile and waved the apron like a flag. “Darling, wouldn’t you like to help Mommy in the kitchen sometimes?”
Leo shyly approached the apron. “I’ll help,” he said, touching the ruffle. “Can I try it on?”
“Aprons are for girls, Doctor Leo,” said Mabel. “Your wife will have her own apron.”
Leo looked aggrieved. He stood by that apron, demurely sullen, and tried to suppress a blush that rose from his neatly ironed collar up his slender neck and blazed into his narrow face.
“Okay, Mom,” he said.
“Rochelle, darling, would you like to help Mommy make dinner tonight?”
Rochelle shrugged. She looked to Nathan, who slightly curled his bottom lip: their secret sign for no. The yes sign was quickly flared nostrils.
“I have homework, Mommy,” Rochelle said.
“Nathan will help you with your homework later. Come, spend some time with Mama in the kitchen. Learn from me before I die.”
Mabel’s most lethal bullet: “Before I die.” That meant she really wanted you to obey. It meant if you didn’t, she’d tell Doctor Norman. And he would order the sacrifice of some important pleasure, like dessert for a week, or the monthly movie.
“Yes, Mommy, okay.”
So Rochelle put on the apron, transforming her from a poetically inclined cheerleader to a stupidlooking ruffly babydoll. Robby and Earl collapsed in hysterics. Nathan shook his head, suppressing laughter. Poor Leo burned with jealousy.
This was the day Rochelle first observed the making of a True Jewish Blintz.
“Into the batter you pour everything you know,” Mabel said. “Art, literature, music. Everything. Into the batter. Mix — around, around, around — slowly, with strength, with grace, like a dancer. Pour the batter onto the griddle one ladle at a time. These are your children, and each should be perfect. Brown and flip, brown and flip, brown and flip. You are an acrobat. Here we are sunbathing, laying each perfect pancake like a towel on the sand, carefully, side by side. Now, my Rochelle, for the filling! The filling we have prepared in advance, of course. Cheese filling, only a little sweet with honey, and our personal touch of nutmeg and vanilla just to confuse the boys a little. Ah, there we go. One big spoon each pancake. And now we fold our little babies into their blankets, one corner at a time, with love. This, Rochelle Libbon, this is a True Jewish Blintz! It will be one of your most powerful tools as a woman. Learn it, and never divulge the secret. The best way to marry a doctor is first to master the blintz.”
Another tool of the trade was clothes. “You are a bird and these are your feathers,” Mabel instructed thirteen-year-old Rochelle. They studied the children’s clothing department at Saks Fifth Avenue, where Mabel taught her daughter about fabrics, styles, colors, prices. “You buy what you like, but also what suits your needs.” Mabel flung above the rack polka dotted dresses and tight slacks with back zippers, saying, “Rochelle, darling, how about this?” Her response was an inevitable, “No, Mommy, no.” Rochelle couldn’t understand all the flashy clothes her mother chose for her, since Mabel herself wore strictly conservative dresses.
One day, offended by the suggestion of completely matching accessories for a red dress that Rochelle hated anyway, she shot the question to her mother: “Why don’t you wear it if you like it so much?”
The answer was a resigned, “You’re still young. Me, I have different fish to fry. There comes a time for an older woman to turn her mind to other things.”
Other things. Rochelle had it figured out: her mother was having an affair because her father was hardly ever home. She imagined the scene: Mabel in her tailored pink suit and little pink hat with its beige net veil, whizzing up in a mirrored elevator to the penthouse love nest. Her lover was rich, of course, and the secret apartment was severe with leather and chrome. A vast window took in the Empire State Building, the tallest building in the world, lit from bottom to top. The city flickered in a mass of red and blue and green and white lights. The apartment had a large bathroom with a deep tub and a double sink. Rochelle never pictured a kitchen; a lovers’ hideaway didn’t need one. She watched her mother burst from the elevator and run down the hall. The front door sprung open. And there he was: The Rich Lover, standing in front of the picture window. He wore a light gray suit with a blue tie, his steely gray hair was slicked back, his eyes were as blue as sapphires blazing love and Mabel rushed into his arms. As the lovers spun around, Rochelle caught sight of a medical bag on a chair. Aha! Mabel’s secret lover was a doctor, too! Not that it was such a big surprise; what else could one expect from Mrs. Catch ’Em With a Blintz?
Rochelle was wrong about her mother, though — as most children are. Mabel was devoted to her family. And despite his frequent absences, Norman appreciated his wife. He watched from the distance of his demanding profession as she was contoured by the winds of their children. At times he thought her job was harder than his; and other times he felt so burdened and tired, he wished they could trade places. For all the joy he was privy to as he welcomed babies into the world, his sadness lay in not knowing any of them. Including his own children. He had delivered all of them, and while he saw them most every day, he didn’t understand what drove them, or who they were.
Robby was already in medical school at Columbia, on the brink of marriage to his high school sweetheart, Natalie. Earl was at Ohio State University on a football scholarship, acing pre-med, dating girls. He wrote long, loving letters to his father, describing his life, begging for approval without ever asking. Norman sometimes answered with short notes jotted in doctor’s scrawl on his prescription pad: “Go get ’em, son.” “Too busy to write at length, but thinking of you.” “Congratulations on all those A’s!” “Your mother hopes you’ll be with us for Passover.” Leo was in the tenth grade, excelling in art and not science, embarked upon an after-school private tutorial program to prepare him for pre-med. And Nathan was in his junior year of high school, editor of The Bohemian, his all-boys school’s newspaper into which he bootlegged a column by his sister, secretly published under the byline “Rodney Parker.”
Rochelle was determined that the last person she’d ever marry was a doctor. And she’d never just be someone’s wife. She had better things in store. Writing as Rodney Parker freed her from the antipromise of the fate professed by her mother. And furthermore, Rochelle decided, she would shed her Jewish half as soon as possible. She would take a pseudonym and do something amazing.
Nathan told her about Collette, who began her career writing erotic juvenile novels under her husband’s name, Willie. He took the money and the credit, until she came out of the closet, then everyone knew. Collette. Rochelle. Rochette. Collelle. She was convinced of the inevitability of what she believed to be her destiny: greatness. Inside her beat a rare and great heart, definitely not a Mrs. Doctor.
Rodney Parker’s “Advice for Boys” column was immediately popular. Some letters requested information about sports injuries. Rochelle got the information from Robby and Earl, and printed the answers. Other letters asked about parents, which was one of Rochelle’s specialties. “Whatever you do,” she wrote, “obey, but keep clear on what you know is right for you. Be firm in what you believe, just don’t let Mom and Dad know it!” The most popular letters were the secret ones: anonymous requests for Rodney’s advice about how to date girls. Rochelle told them: “If you know a girl likes you, ask her out to dinner at a nice restaurant, even if it costs all your savings. If you’re not sure if she likes you, write a short note; if you never hear from her, assume the worst. When you meet a girl at her house, always bring a gift. Flowers are nice, or perfume, or chocolate. Dress well and be clean. Wear cologne but only if it’s exotic. Always escort your date by taxi, never subway, even if you have to borrow money from your parents. Never ask a girl to pay.” When asked for advice about sex, Rochelle wrote: “No means no and Yes means yes. If a girl wants it, she’ll let you know. If she doesn’t, try someone else.”
The Advice for Boys column was publicly ridiculed and secretly read. Letters to Rodney collected in Nathan’s makeshift office in the library, and he brought them home to Rochelle, who read every one. She learned more about boys from the letters to Rodney than she had living in a house full of males all her life; for the first time, she got a glimpse of their inner thoughts. She didn’t realize that much of the advice she doled out came straight from Mabel, but with a twist. Rochelle wanted boys to treat girls well out of respect, not just because one of them might end up their wife. She wanted boys to learn to expect nothing of girls except what girls expected of themselves. She wanted boys to desire girls, and not be too shy to let them know. And she wanted boys to be generous, not because of a moral prerogative, but because she liked to receive gifts and assumed it was their duty to give them to her.
One day the strangest letter so far arrived, and Rochelle didn’t know how to answer it. It said “Dear Rodney, I love you. You are so sensitive and deep. Your insight knows no bounds. No one knows how to treat girls better than you. You must be a good friend and lover. I wish I knew what you looked like. Will you print your picture? L.”
Some poor girl had gone and fallen in love with Rodney! Rochelle felt guilty for the first time about the deception. What a strange feeling to be loved by a girl; it had never occurred to her that she could elicit such powerful feelings in someone of her own sex. She would have liked to have put the girl out of her misery, but didn’t know how to answer without revealing the hoax. So she took the letter to Nathan, and asked his advice.
Since Robby and Earl had gone away to school, Nathan and Leo no longer shared a room. Nathan had taken over the older boys’ room and redecorated according to his own tastes. In place of pennants and footballs and posters of star athletes, were photos of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Yeats. Rochelle called it the Male Hero Wall. He had not taken her dare to include pictures of Collette, Jane Austen, or the Brontës.
She knocked on his door.
“Enter,” he said. He was sitting at his desk in the near dark, with an open book illuminated by a small lamp. He had grown tall but still had a lanky teenage build. His hair was cut very short, and he was beginning to shave his reddish beard, which he had let grow stubbly. For added poetic effect, he carried a cigarette between his lips, but never lit it.
She came in flapping the letter. “Some girl has the hots for me.”
“Let me see that.” He grabbed it from her. “Turn on the overhead, why don’t you.”
Flooded with light, the filth of Nathan’s room really hit her. She crossed the floor, avoiding mines of garbage or dirty clothes, and tossed herself onto his bed. She stretched out long, closed her eyes, and tried to feel the blood coursing through her veins. She saw darkness inside her closed lids, black laced with red, and blue dots, and green stripes.
“Nathan?” she whispered.
“Shh,” he said, “I’m reading.” But really he was watching her.
Rochelle at the age of fifteen was blossoming, but not into the flower Mabel had tried to cultivate. Mabel wanted her only daughter to be small and compact, lithe, with good muscle tone; she wanted her daughter to have manageable hair; she wanted her daughter to be effortlessly beautiful; and she wanted her daughter to dress like a lady. Were Mabel to have her way, Daughter’s destiny would further Mother’s own; Rochelle would learn all Mabel’s lessons in a crash course, and graduate to bigger and better things. But Rochelle the adolescent was a stubborn weed, growing strong and wily into the wind, not with it. In her secret soul she cultivated madness, dreams of a life not of her parents’ stable prosperous world but of lunacy and adventure. Rochelle had even grown too tall, with loose muscles hanging on a strong frame. Her breasts were larger than was respectable (but boys appreciated them) and she liked to flaunt them in her brothers’ T-shirts, which she wore without a bra. She bought her clothes a size too small, wearing tight T-shirts over crisp jeans cuffed above the ankle. She polished her fingernails and toenails with the most vivid colors she could find: red, orange, yellow, green, black. She refused to wear face makeup, because Mabel wanted her to. And since Mabel would have liked her to tame her weedy brown hair with curlers and spray, Rochelle let it go wild.
Rebels, after all, are born before revolutions.
It was the beginning of a war, which Rochelle perpetuated in the oblivion of her innocence, and which Mabel fought with conviction. “Our children will be respectable members of society if it kills me!” she told Norman, who remembered that tiny pink hand reaching.
Stretched out on her side, Rochelle propped herself up on bent elbow and wiggled into comfort. Nathan enjoyed watching her as much as she enjoyed settling her body into his bed.
“So Nath,” she said. “What do you think? I have a girlfriend.”
Nathan swung his long legs up onto the desk. He read the letter again. “Where does it say a girl wrote it? All it says is that it’s from L, and L loves you. It’s a boys’ school, remember.”
“You think a boy wrote it?”
Nathan shrugged. “Could be. Why not? Haven’t you ever heard of a fruit?” Nathan smiled. “You’ve got a boyfriend. I’m jealous.”
“Jealous enough?”
He walked slowly to the bed, watching Rochelle — who watched back — smiling his cynical sexy James Dean smile. He stretched himself over Rochelle, body on body, a perfect fit. “I’m tempted,” he said, “really tempted.”
“You’re tempting me.”
They laughed. Nathan sat up, his back against the wall, his legs flung over hers so their bodies crossed.
“Let’s draw him out,” Nathan said.
“Who?”
“Your boyfriend, the fruit.”
L became “Lover” and Rochelle replied publicly. She had to; the author of the letter had not given a return address. So as not to embarrass L. into hiding, she wrote with the assumption s/he was a girl. “Dear Lover, We at The Bohemian are happy to know girls read the paper, too. Your letter was charming. I was personally touched. Maybe we can meet. But first, would you write a letter for the column? Rodney.”
Rodney’s letter to “Lover” caused a sensation at Nathan’s school. A girl writing in? Everyone’s sister became suspect; who else was likely to have seen the paper? Nathan wisely mimeographed extra copies of the next issue — in which Lover’s letter was expected to appear — and as soon as stacks of the issue were distributed to classrooms, they disappeared.
“Dear Rodney, Thank you for the kindness of your answer. You are very considerate — you know what I mean. I would like to meet you in person. Can we arrange a private meeting? L”
“Dear Lover, You are a gentle soul, and would make any man a good wife. Yes I will meet you. But only if you specify place and time in your next letter to The Bohemian. Signed, Rodney.”
“Dear Rodney, I am so embarrassed, but since you insist, I will comply. The following instructions are in code: ofsosobh nitntfoa efterl tupol ers ed na y. I hope you can decipher this and that your readers will be gentlemen enough not to try. L.”
Nathan and Rochelle cracked the code late at night, under his covers, with a flashlight. The intrigue was unnecessary, but it was exciting — side by side in their flannels, like lovers, but not.
“It’s so easy,” Nathan said. “One fifteen saturday on steps of boro hall.”
As she walked to Boro Hall on a sunny early afternoon late in April — in her tight cuffed jeans and red V-necked sweater, hair flying wild — Rochelle felt both excitement and guilt. L, whoever s/he may turn out to be, was a sad soul, and deep in her better heart Rochelle would have liked to have spared him or her. But she also felt thrilled at the possibility and scope of ridicule she could weave around this person.
Stately Boro Hall with its wide steps and pillars had never been visited by so many teenage boys at one time. They were everywhere: across the street, behind the pillars, pacing at the very foot of the steps at either side. Rochelle was not surprised; everyone had been expected to crack the code. Poor L. But what fun! Rochelle glanced around for Nathan, spotted him across the street in a phone booth, and proceeded up the steps.
She sat in the very center. It was one-fifteen. The boys were thrilled; they thought she was L. They thought she was the lovesick girl in search of Rodney’s true identity. She looked around for another girl, someone off to the side who would never climb the stairs now that Rochelle was sitting there. But there were only boys, tens of them, waiting. A feeling of intense pleasure filled her as she gathered all their attention.
Then, down at the foot of the steps, Leo appeared, all scrubbed and nervous and thin. He was watching her, just standing there and staring as if trying to understand what to do next. At first she thought he had come along with the other boys to see, but then she realized that Leo didn’t know the secret. He didn’t know that she was Rodney. Maybe he thought she was the girl who wrote the love letters. No — it was suddenly clear to her — he didn’t think that. If he had come to watch, he wouldn’t have been standing there as if he had been about to climb, and he wouldn’t have been holding that pink carnation. Her insides twisted as she understood that her brother Leo was L.
She needed to console him, so she waved. He paled, waved back, then dropped the flower and crossed the street. Rochelle looked at Nathan, whose expression said that he, too, was stunned but had understood.
They decided they had to help Leo. Not to change him, but to let him know it was okay. He was their brother and they wouldn’t deliberately hurt him any more than they already accidentally had. He holed up in his room all afternoon until dinner, and they waited for the meal that always began at seven, when he would have to face them.
The dining room occupied the ground floor corner room, whose tall windows, draped in lace, overlooked the Promenade. The large round table that had accommodated the family of seven for twenty years was set tonight for the remaining five: Norman, Mabel, Nathan, Leo and Rochelle. Mabel used her blue and white everyday china for family dinners, and while the table was set casually by her standards, it was opulent with gleaming oak, blue linen napkins, sterling candlesticks of various lengths, red tulips arranged in a low bowl, and platters of boiled chicken, blintzes, challah, vegetables steamed in spicy broth, new potatoes sautéed in garlic. It was Saturday dinner, the end of Sabbath, so dessert would be a bakery cake, probably chocolate. Norman had called to say he’d be half an hour late from the hospital, and as Mabel used the time to advance the after dinner process by cleaning what she could now, Nathan and Rochelle lounged on the living room couch, reading Chinese love poems. Nathan read, in a whisper:
I stand and watch The moonlight creep Through the great gate Across the court. I cannot sleep!
A stir in the night! It is you, my lord, Come to my arms at last?
Ah! ’Tis but the shadow Of dancing flowers, High on the garden wall. — And still I watch And wait!
“Beautiful,” Rochelle sighed. She lifted her face to see Leo slip like a wisp of smoke into the dining room. “We have to tell him it’s okay,” she whispered to Nathan.
“No, we can’t say anything. We just have to let him know.”
The front door creaked open and Norman walked in.
“Evening, children!” He hung his hat on the round wooden globe that punctuated the bottom of the banister where it curled to its closure. He had developed a middle-aged paunch, and his hairline had receded so far that the front half of his head was totally bald, leaving the back of his head covered with tight gray curls.
Rochelle got up to kiss him. “Hi, Pop.”
“Pop!” Norman chuckled. Despite Mabel’s warnings, in private, of the dangerous direction in which their daughter was certainly headed, Norman adored Rochelle. Without his having put any real effort into it, she had come to reflect his point of view more than his wife’s. Rochelle’s renegade spirit charged Norman with a youthful energy he himself had once felt. He secretly approved of his daughter. Not, though, his third son, and on this point he and Mabel concurred.
Nathan should conform, they thought; no one liked a lazeabout poet man.
“Where’s Leo?” Norman asked.
“At the table,” Nathan said.
“What do you say we join him?”
Leo was sitting alone at the table. He looked away when his brother and sister entered the room. Rochelle felt his humiliation, and smiled warmly at him, almost too warmly to seem sincere. Nathan lightly patted his younger brother’s shoulder, and sat by his side. They did not speak directly to him, but around him: of school, and friends, and future. Norman and Mabel noticed nothing unusual; they were too used to the tribulations of adolescence to find meaning in discomfort. As cool and easy as Nathan and Rochelle strove to be, Leo remained miserable.
Finally, Rochelle saved him. She said, “And this afternoon, it was wild. I’ve been writing love letters to Nathan’s paper and today I went to meet Rodney.”
“Love letters?” Mabel said.
And Norman: “Who is this Rodney?”
“He never appeared,” Rochelle said. “I don’t know.”
“Love letters?” Mabel repeated.
“Just for fun,” Rochelle said. “You know, to entertain the troops.”
Nathan laughed. “People loved it, Mom and Dad. I printed more copies than ever. It was like a continuing epistolary drama, with Rochelle writing letters to Rodney under a pseudonym.”
“Who is Rodney,” Norman asked.
“I can’t tell you, Dad,” Nathan said. “As a journalist I have to protect the anonymity of my source.”
“Well, I think it’s cruel,” said Mabel.
“Why, Mom?” Rochelle said. “It was fun.”
“Fun? To ridicule this poor Rodney? Fun?”
Rochelle shrugged. “I didn’t really ridicule him, Mom. I just wrote that I loved him.”
“Which is even worse!”
“It’s no big deal. Now everyone knows it was me.”
Leo’s expression melted into a smile as he realized the gift his siblings were offering. “It doesn’t really matter,” he said, “if it was only a joke.”
Late that night, Leo knocked on Nathan’s door. Rochelle was with him, sitting in a corner, blinking a flashlight on and off while Nathan sat crosslegged on the bed and moved his arms balletically in the lightdarklight of the makeshift strobe.
“Who?” said Nathan.
“It’s me.”
“Enter.”
They continued their performance for Leo, who watched from the doorway.
“Close the door, we need total darkness,” Rochelle said.
Leo shut the door. “What are you doing?”
“Pretending,” Nathan said.
“Pretending what?”
“We’re not sure,” Rochelle said, and she and Nathan cracked up laughing.
His cheeks flush with humiliation, Leo turned to leave.
“Wait.” Nathan jumped off the bed, flipped the light switch and the room popped into focus. Leo was in his blue terry bathrobe. His thin legs were covered with dark curly fuzz. “Leo, stay.”
“I just wanted to say —” Leo began.
“Never explain and never complain.” Nathan laughed, and Rochelle laughed, but Leo wasn’t ready to relax even with them; their strange twinship was impenetrable and always had been. He sat stiffly on the edge of his big brother’s bed, feeling like a reluctantly invited guest.
“Who is Rodney, anyway?” Leo finally asked.
Rochelle smiled. “Me.”
As the Rodney Parker enterprise soared to its zenith in the Libbon home, and as her children detached from her influence, cleaving instead to each other, Mabel began to think something would have to change. Rochelle and Nathan were too close — they seemed to look at each other with, well, desire — and Mabel’s fertile imagination feared the worst. Exactly what the change needed to be came to her late one Wednesday afternoon as she lifted the blades of her hand-held mixer out of a dark brown devil’s food cake batter.
Nathan had to go.
She ejected the blades, tapped them against the side of the bowl and twirled them above her hand to prevent batter from dripping onto the floor as she carried them to the sink. He was a bad influence on Rochelle. He could go away to boarding school for his senior year.
Before dinner, she summoned Norman into the kitchen, closed the door, and informed him of her decision.
“But dear,” he said, “do you really think that’s necessary?”
“I’ve thought it through and I know it’s the best decision.”
“For who? Not for Nathan.”
“For everyone.” She walked across the room, opened the refrigerator door and withdrew a bowl of salad she had prepared earlier.
Norman shook his head. “Mabel, in a year he’ll be leaving for college.”
“It needs to be done now. Before something terrible happens.”
“Terrible? How?”
She looked at him and raised her eyebrows.
“Oh, Mabel, that’s ridiculous!”
“Nothing is impossible, Norman. Your daughter was born hand-first. I bet you thought that could never happen.”
Norman paused, thinking it over. What if his wife was right? It wasn’t as if, in the history of the world, siblings never... he couldn’t even think it. If she was right, and they failed to act because of his hesitation, then he would be responsible.
“I suppose you have a school in mind?”
“San Diego Boys Academy.” She vigorously shook a bottle of salad dressing and dripped some onto the salad.
“Mabel!”
“It’s a fine school, dear.”
“It’s practically a military academy!”
“It emphasizes discipline. It is not a military academy.”
“I think you should let the idea go. Nathan won’t like it.”
“I already called the school and they’re willing to accept a late application. They think he’ll make a good candidate. It’s the perfect idea for Nathan, whether he likes it or not. And it will give me some time to help Rochelle become a little more refined before she leaves for college.”
“I don’t like it.”
“Norman, in all the years I have devoted to raising our children, have I ever done anything that wasn’t in their best interests?”
“Well, no.”
“How can you think I would ever misguide my own children?”
“Of course you wouldn’t, dear.”
“You’ll need to tell him tonight.”
“Me?”
“It’s a father’s job.”
And so, after the family had finished their dessert of chocolate cake, after they had pushed their plates to the edges of the place mats and scraped backwards in their chairs, after Mabel had risen and begun to clear the table, Norman looked at Nathan. A child’s face ripening in maleness, hormones raging beneath a surface of pimples and whiskers, Adam’s apple pronounced in the thin neck, body tall and lank from fast growth. He was drumming the table with a spoon and knife, and Rochelle was bouncing in her seat to his rhythm. Maybe Mabel was right.
Leo was the first to ask to be excused. Norman nodded. All three teenagers stood and began to leave.
“Nathan, hold on a minute.”
Nathan paused in the doorway and turned around.
“Have a seat, let’s talk.”
“About what?”
Norman gestured toward the chair. Nathan sat.
“Can I stay, too?” Rochelle asked.
“This is private.”
“Please?”
“What’s going on?” Nathan asked.
“Rochelle, please give us some privacy.”
She glared at her father and threw a quick kiss to Nathan before stomping up the stairs.
Norman observed his son — leaning back in his chair, arms crossed over his chest, eyes staring solidly ahead — and for a moment surrendered to a deep feeling of love. Nathan was his child. He couldn’t do this. Then Mabel swung through the door, leaned over the table to snatch away the butter dish, and dug a sharp glance at her faltering husband. Norman leaned forward, cleared his throat, but still couldn’t speak. Instead of returning to the kitchen with the butter dish, Mabel sat down at the table.
“Your father and I have something to say to you, Nathan.”
“Your mother and I...” Norman’s voice sounded thin. He cleared his throat again. “Your mother and I have decided that you will be going away to school in the fall.”
“What?”
“We’ve found an excellent school we think you’d do well to attend in preparation for college.”
“College? That’s like two years away!”
“Less than that,” Mabel corrected. “Norman?”
“We feel it would be a good idea if you spent your senior year —”
“I’m not going.”
“I’m afraid your mother and I have decided —”
“Forget it.”
Nathan stood. Norman stood. For the first time, Norman saw that he and his son had reached the same height.
“I don’t want to go away, Dad.”
“We often don’t want to do what’s best.”
“Why is it best?”
“We feel —”
“Whose decision is this? Yours? Or yours?” Nathan faced his mother. “You put him up to this, didn’t you?”
“Your father is the head of this household.” Mabel stood up and carried the butter dish to the kitchen.
“Dad, are you telling me this is your idea?”
Norman received the blazing eyes of his third son, the middle spoke of his progeny, a boy he dearly loved. And he lied, “Yes, it is.”
Nathan left for California in the fall of 1962. The Libbons received tuition bills along with notes from the principal, attached to Nathan’s report cards, suggesting that he could do better if he tried. By spring, they received a letter informing them that Nathan would need to attend summer school in order to graduate. Before their deposit check had even reached the school, Nathan had run away to Berkeley.
Nathan wrote only to Rochelle, describing his adventures hanging out with Beatniks reading poetry in coffee houses and staying up all night smoking wacky weed. She begged her parents to send her to California for a visit, and they refused. Rochelle and Nathan corresponded like unrequited lovers, in long tense letters. From the safe distance of three thousand miles, Nathan revealed the flip side of his love for her, the lust side of the coin. “I want to marry you,” he wrote in one letter. And she replied, “Yes.” They both knew that, if a visit had been allowed, their yearning for each other would have crossed every boundary.
Home was intolerable without Nathan. And with Leo preparing for early admittance to the University of Pennsylvania the following year, Rochelle was in despair. The thought of being left alone with her mother, who would only become more ferocious in her attempts to sculpt her, was terrifying. So she escaped into her school, joining every plausible activity: Speakers Corner, Literary Ladies, Art Circle. Anything nondomestic. At night she studied alone in her room. She did so well in her classes that, by the time she graduated, she had earned prizes and a scholarship to the college of her choice.
Norman was proud, but Mabel was worried. What kind of a wife would this girl make? “I’m gonna be a famous writer!” Rochelle proclaimed. And Mabel shrieked, “Rochelle, calm down, now!”