Tad looked forward to seeing Minus Persson, who’d been overseas for years, but he was anxious about the possibility that Minus’s sister, Inger, might be there, too, even though it was sixteen years since their strained affair. After its dissolution, he’d then found friendship with her brother, who was two years older and had lived off campus, in nonhermetic reality, away from the fumbling artificial hothouse of freshman social life. The two men had become close as Tad and Inger had drifted apart, like the Alpine man and lady who trade places on the old-fashioned cuckoo-clockish barometers. By Tad’s senior year, when Tad was fed up with his rowdy, intolerant roomie, he and Minus had even shared an apartment in a part of Waterville that was actually worse than the one Tad grew up in.
Tad had developed a crush on Minus, who was skinny but straight, and who had laughed it off with a sophistication that impressed nineteen-year-old Tad. Since Minus was a progressive like his sister—he was named after the sensitive son in one of his parents’ more pastoral movies—he even helped Tad assimilate the homosexuality Tad had hidden from himself in Waterville and from his roommate at Hale. They’d even briefly attempted to become a musical team, singing anachronistic folk oddities and acting out sophomoric sketches in basement coffeehouses that survived on open-mike nights. Long, lean Minus and pint-sized Tad made a funny contrasting visual, but their voices blended evenly when they sang their barbershop duets.
After the cab managed the intervening congestion of midtown, the choppy high seas between safe harbors, the West Village had a hushed domesticity that was similar to the Upper East Side, and there were no footprints at all in the deepening snow, Tad noticed as he emerged on Greenwich Street.
Minus and his wife and daughter had just moved back to New York, and Tad hadn’t seen the town house they’d just moved into. The building was of old brick, with a short flight of stone steps and a reliable-looking forest green front door. As he worked the satisfying old brass knocker, Tad could see a fireplace through the window, its small blaze soundless through the glass. As the door opened, the reassuring sound and smell of limited, strictly controlled burning wood leapt out ahead of its master.
There was Minus, the unseated bygone object of his worship, five years older than the last time Tad had seen him, at the memorial service for his freshman roommate, who’d accidentally overdosed. He greeted Tad as if addressing Puck, knowing it was Tad’s big role. “Are you ‘that shrewd and knavish sprite called Robin Goodfellow’?”
Tad happily responded, luxuriating in the reference, “Aha! ‘Thou speakest aright! I am that merry wanderer of the night.’ ”
Minus was bony and gregarious, with a horsey face, no conventional beauty like his younger sister, but his zest for the company of others and his energetic manner, as if he were always manning a sailboat in a bracing wind, had excited cannibal Tad in the same way Inger’s plushness also had. Minus was balding now, and resembled the kindly, frizzy folktale farmer who rescues the abandoned baby. It was a kind of relief for Tad, since it mitigated his desire to make love to or replace or usurp him. To Tad, Minus was an idealized imperfect human.
“Tad, old tot! Good to see you!” His English had a slight British sound as well as a Swedish cast, because he’d learned it in Europe. “Ruth, I’ve known Tad since we were both little tiny unicellular organisms!” He led the old tot into the small living room, and over by the fire, which itself seemed Shakespearean. “Tad, this is my wife, Ruth.”
Minus had married the daughter of the famous rotund slapstick movie comic Bobsy Baum, best remembered for his audible gulp and trademark catchphrase—like a bad child facing complications—“Ooo, what I did!” The couple had met in the mutual mixed backwash of her then newly late father’s entourage and his own living father’s at the Edinburgh Film Festival, where Bobsy was receiving a special after-the-fact lifetime achievement award. The famous rely on the fellow famous to overlook their fame, or, rather, look through it, like X-ray vision.
Ruth was unexpectedly stylish for the offspring of a baggy-pants loudmouth. She had short dark hair, the efficient “Mommy as Olympic event” cut, and wore a contrastingly demure black velvet dress with lace at the sleeves and collar. She was visibly pregnant, which reminded Tad of the Christmas cornucopia, filled to overflowing. “Nice to meet you, Tad!” She took his hand. If his height and baby face surprised her, she smoothly showed no evidence that it did. “This is like a highly distilled high school reunion, where I meet the friends from my husband’s life before me!” Tad hadn’t had the money to fly to Stockholm for their wedding. Her parents were both dead, so Minus’s family locale had won.
“Yes! And may I be the last to congratulate you?” Tad nodded in her direction. “And on your incipient new daughter, too! Minus told me on the phone! That’s great!”
“We’re shooting for Groundhog Day, so she can come out and see her shadow!” Ruth showed unusual irreverence for an expectant mother. Tad could see in her face the wryness of her Jewish father, as well as the restraint of her beauty-contestant mother, a second-tier ingenue decades younger than Bobsy who gave famously wooden performances in Bobsy vehicles with names like Destination Darling or Meet Sam Handwich. Ruth had the seasoned poise of someone who’d been a child at parties full of famous adults, all of whom had bantered with her as a novelty alternative to chatting with their exes and rivals.
“This place is beautiful!” Tad felt at home, or at least in a good place. The fire reminded him of his junior suite at Hale, the only time he’d ever had a working fireplace. It had felt like borrowed comfort to him then, the pauper in the prince’s chambers.
“Thanks! Or rather, thank Ruth! I was in England all fall, so I hadn’t seen it myself till last week!” Minus had spent the last semester at Oxford, lackadaisically auditing a seminar on the films of Gunnar Sternland, whose alter ego his own father had often portrayed. Even Oxford was surrendering to the rule of pop culture, though Sternland’s were as dire and unpop as movies got. Otherwise, Minus had spent his years sailing, playing tennis, traveling, and playing his guitar. He was one of the few whom the easy life actually relaxed. “We had to get a place in town. Ruth has to be here for—”
Ruth seemed eager to downplay whatever Minus was about to say. “It’s a long, long story,” she said, modestly but mysteriously. Tad sensed it was something bad.
Minus took Tad’s jacket. “I see you’re in your trademark jeans and white shirt! It’s as if you’re a character in a comic strip, always wearing exactly the same outfit!”
“My whole hope was that it would be noneccentric!” Tad explained.
“Ah yes, the wish to be mistaken for normal! I say, embrace your eccentricity!” Minus’s voice had deepened in recent years, and Tad could hear his actor father’s timbre in it now. “Our older daughter, already in progress, will be here in a minute. She’s five, and she is determined to help wrap the presents for her grandparents!” Minus mimed Laocoön struggling with serpents. “It’ll be just a small group, six or seven of us.”
Tad noticed that Ruth was wearing a small silver pin on her chest, a female angel holding a swaddled infant.
“I like your pin!” he said, hoping a compliment would lubricate their alliance.
“Yes, you’re the expert, I hear!” She smiled. “My mother gave it to me.”
“I think it’s Gabriel.” Tad appraised the jewelry for meaning. “Silver’s his color, too.”
“His?” Ruth paused.
“Well, officially angels are male, but there’s a tradition that in some circumstances, Gabriel might be a woman, and so protects expectant mothers.”
“An Audubon of the ether!” Minus declared.
“Have you picked a name for the baby yet?” Tad asked.
“Ruth let me pick last time, so it’s her turn.” Minus smiled. Their partnership seemed steady.
She smiled almost imperceptibly. To Tad, men were dormant volcanoes, but women were still lakes teeming with secret life. “My grandmother’s name was Esther, but I don’t know if that’s a workable little girl’s name these days.”
“Well, who knew Mabel and Maude would come back?” Tad offered as assurance.
He saw on a side table a candlelit menorah, and was reminded again that the Baums were Jewish, though it was never emphasized in the press coverage he remembered from his childhood. Beneath the menorah, confusingly, were strewn piles of green and red Christmas gifts, some opened, some not. “I see you’ve already made some headway with the presents!” he remarked. He’d learned from Bonny that hosts like guests who pay attention to the surroundings.
“They’re from people we mostly don’t even know!” Ruth laughed, fishing a crystal bud vase out of a nest of wood shaving. “Look at the engraving. Slashers 2!”
“It’s a promotional gift from the producers,” Minus explained merrily. He and Ruth enlisted Tad in laughing at the odd, impersonal corporate gifts they’d received from her still-video-vigorous dad’s distributors, lawyers, and agency. The couple was particularly entertained by a bottle of champagne that, weirdly, had been dipped in chocolate. Tad noticed that Ruth and Minus seemed to take their rarefied privilege with a sense of its absurdity.
“Oh, look at this!” To continue the comic show-and-tell, Minus led Tad to a side table. “We told Anna she could pick any holiday cake she wanted at the bakery! Look at the one she selected!” There was a buxom fashion-doll figure in a Santa hat, with a huge billowing hoop skirt made of cake and frosted to resemble ermine-trimmed red velvet. “Who is she, anyway? Santa’s mistress?”
Ruth shook her head. “We try to raise her with gender-neutral fairness, but despite the karate lessons, and the picture books about how the lioness does the actual hunting, she still gravitates to the dolls and the makeup! Now she wants to take ballet! Me, I think it’s a form of ritual bondage, all that excruciating tiptoeing! It’s like they’ve been tied up and are trying to get to the phone to call the police!” Tad was pleasantly surprised to hear her free-associate with him. She sensed her possible filibuster, and sweetly defused it. “Oh, I don’t know. I’m from circus folk.”
“Look at this!” Minus added playfully, and lifted the doll’s torso. It was an attachment to the cake, legless. “No bottom! She’s like a prop. Anna was so disappointed when she saw that! She thought there was an entire doll in there. We told her it could be her doll that’s standing up to her waist in an imaginary swimming pool, and she sort of accepted that. She’s got other gifts to look forward to, anyway. But it reminds me how those old Victorian skirts were supposed to convince you that women were too virtuous to have private parts!”
“Would you like something to drink, Tad?” Ruth asked. “We have glögg.”
Minus grinned—the old snaggletoothed grin that Tad nonetheless found attractive—and now mimed guzzling from a bottle. “As in glug glug glug!”
“It’s not as disgusting as eggnog,” Ruth offered as a deadpan recommendation. “And I’ve even got some Mogen David in case Elijah shows up!”
“Uh, white wine?” Tad responded. He remembered Dad once advising him to drink only one variety of alcohol to minimize a hangover. The wisdom of our forefathers.
Ruth left the room, and Minus gazed after her with satisfaction. From another room came Anna’s voice. “Daddy! I can’t get the Scotch tape to work!”
“Excuse me, Tad!” Minus said. “My wicked empress is calling me. Coming, gumman!”
Tad noticed on the nearby grand piano, among a Stonehenge of framed family photos, a dated but impressive picture of craggy Magnus Persson and his wife, Christine Larsen, on a windswept winter beach. Both wore fisherman’s sweaters, the kind whose thick-knit patterns are supposed to identify you even if you decompose after drowning. Minus, once so seamless and sunny, now looked pleasantly weather-beaten, like his father.
There was another photo near it, a fading color studio shot of a pretty prepubescent girl with curly hair, slightly too much of it, in the early seventies white Afro fashion. He assumed it was Ruth, and then he saw the inscription: “Ruth, you’re the purtiest gal in the zoo! Love always and then some, Dadsy.” In smaller writing was a contrite addition. “P.S. Sorry to miss your big day!”
He saw on the wall behind the piano a framed sampler that, in the dim light, seemed to read GOD BLESS OUR FAME. A closer examination revealed it to be the more conventional GOD BLESS OUR HOME.
Tad listened to the contented fire consume itself. If Magnus Persson and Christine Larsen were slightly famous to the intellectual fringe, Bobsy Baum was flat-out famous, recognized by undemanding millions around the world. Even Tad’s mom knew who Bobsy was, but she couldn’t have identified Gunnar Sternland. Bobsy’s most successful film had been the Cold War–era fantasy The Humans Race, in which the chubby little coward character he always played was accidentally part of a rocket trip to Mars. Somehow the superrace of Martians—with their distinctly Russian accents—pit themselves in a high-stakes interplanetary Olympics against Bobsy and his friend, the hero astronaut (only in a Bobsy Baum movie would a leading man play the supporting role). Through coincidence and actual climactic bravery, Bobsy wins one for earth and mankind is saved. At the fade-out, he’s embracing a greenish girl with four arms and saying into the spaceship’s radio, “Mother? There’s someone I’d like you to meet.…” Apparently, the men Martians were bad and the women Martians were nice, or compliant anyway. Tad had loved the picture as a child watching reruns, and now here he was in earth’s pretend savior’s daughter’s home.
Anna could be heard crying, and Minus was trying to calm her. “Now now, Anna. Remember little Lord Jesus, away in the manger? ‘No crying he makes’?”
Ruth came back in with a glass of wine. She handed it to Tad but called into the other room, “Honey? I thought we were going to try to minimize the little Lord Jesus!” She lowered her voice to speak confidentially to Tad, a compliment, since she barely knew him. “ ‘No crying he makes!’ Jesus as the original suffer-in-silence role model! Jesus died! Aren’t you sorry you’re healthy? You’d think Jesus was a Jewish mother. ‘I’ll just sit here in the dark, making no crying!’ ” She shrugged and picked up her own half-empty glass of seltzer. Tad hadn’t expected, from this trim and pretty woman, echoes of her gross father’s performing style. She interpreted his surprise as disagreement. “Oh my! No offense. Minus says you’re studying God, but he said you don’t believe in Him.”
“Oh, I don’t! Not at all!” He assured her fervently, which seemed to please her.
“Well, here’s to …” She grinned and lifted her seltzer, but was at a loss for a toast.
“Imaginary beings!” Tad offered. “Ourselves included!”
“Oh, that sounds like Bishop Berkeley malarkey!” Ruth commented. Malarkey was a perfect Bobsy Baum word, Tad noted. “Life is but a dream? If only!”
Minus returned, happily shaking his head. “Well! Grandma’s gift is going to be completely covered in Scotch tape! We could leave it out in the rain without a worry!” Tad turned to face him. “You must have children, Taddeus! It is the greatest! Carrying them on your shoulder, teaching them proper Scotch tape use! I know it might require negotiation, but do it!” Tad could see Minus’s thought patterns wash over his face like an innocent adult who changes his clothes with the window shades up. He was recalling Tad’s foray into his sister. “Oh! Speaking of … I mean, Tad, I have a surprise for you!”
“Inger’s coming?”
Minus stared, then laughed. “Yes, she’s staying with us for a few days! How did you guess?”
“I don’t know, I guess I anticipated it. And it is the season for it.”
“And our mother is here, too! They’re here to shop! They’re almost never in New York! You’ve never met my mother, have you?”
“Well, I did, only briefly. When I was, as it were, dating Inger, she came through Boston on a movie promotion and took her out to dinner.”
“Well well! And why not you, too?”
“I think she offered to, but … I don’t remember anymore. We were already having problems.”
“Ah, convoluted youth,” Minus reminisced. “So difficult! I’m much less complex now. And here’s our Anna!” His tiny daughter came into the room, wearing a black velvet dress that matched her mother’s, and a glittering plastic tiara. The firelight on her face reminded Tad that supposedly the cherubim were ruddy-cheeked because they reflected the glory of the God they faced.
“This is the empress I was telling you about,” Minus whispered histrionically. “She got it as a present this morning and now she won’t take it off! Anna, can you say hello to Tad?”
“Hello,” the child said cautiously.
“It’s nice to meet you, Your Majesty,” Tad smiled and took her hand lightly. “You’re the queen, is that right?”
“Yes, that’s right,” she answered matter-of-factly.
“I’ve got a nephew who’s also into ruling everything. Maybe you should get together. And where are you the queen of?” Tad asked.
Her Serene Highness had a momentary loss of serenity, but after a moment her frozen eyes reanimated. “I don’t know,” she answered, though without sounding too worried about it. “Yet.”
“Well, if you’re free to pick,” Minus postulated, “you might as well make it someplace very big!”
“Dreamland’s pretty big,” Tad suggested.
“Ah yes, Dreamland!” Minus grinned. “Where you’ve been working as a resident alien.” Even after several years apart, he seemed to read Tad like a book, and a book for junior readers at that.
“Mmmm,” acceded Tad. “Elsewhere? I’m there!”
“There’s no such place really,” advised Anna. “I’ve been to a lot of places in planes. I know.”
“They’re just playing, Anna,” Ruth said softly. “Like when you have your stuffed giraffe talk. It isn’t real talking.” Tad couldn’t tell if Ruth meant that the conversation or the speakers were unreal.
“What do you want for Christmas, Anna?” Tad asked.
“A giraffe,” she answered calmly.
“She’s currently obsessed with giraffes,” Minus explained. “My theory is that they combine the typical horse craze with the typical ballerina craze.”
“She even cut the picture of the giraffe out of the encyclopedia! I don’t know how she thought she wouldn’t get caught!” Ruth grinned and stroked Anna’s hair. Clearly the transgression had been forgiven long ago.
“Then she taped it on the wall by her bed!” Minus continued. Obviously, Anna saw Scotch tape as a means to power.
“Because I wanted to have it. In the book, it wasn’t mine,” Anna explained, a little annoyed her parents were telling a stranger about her illicit romance. Tad understood her possessiveness. Some lovers aren’t content to leave their sweethearts in the encyclopedia; they try to put them in a separate place. “The giraffe is the biggest animal there is,” Anna went on, as if to explain her infatuation.
“Well, actually …” Tad debated contradicting a child. “It is the tallest. The elephant is the biggest. Of land animals, anyway.”
“Ooh!” Ruth overacted finding these facts interesting. “Tad knows all about the animal kingdom!” She was trying to sell Tad to Anna. Her word choice reminded Tad that folklorists and even scientists choose to organize the animal world into a kingdom.
“The whale is the biggest of all animals,” Tad continued. “People tend to forget about the whale because it’s in the ocean, and the people making the lists are on land, so they think land is more important.”
This got a confused silent response from Minus and Ruth, but Anna was now involved in the debate.
“Then what’s the tallest ocean animal?” she asked.
Tad took her seriously. “Well, that’s a little trickier, because nobody’s standing up in the ocean, they’re mostly sideways. You know, swimming. So we talk about how long they are instead.”
Minus feigned astonishment. “You’ve got the very biosphere stratified!” He stooped to match his daughter’s height and began to tickle her, which she both resisted and encouraged.
Tad had mixed feelings of envy and pleasure at his good friend’s jet stream of a life, his rare peaceful disposition, his loving marriage, their firelight. Their appealing daughter made him review his chimerical desire for children, for fatherhood and family, and the weird molestation charge that muddled this mirage. He then guiltily thought of Angelo. Angelo was like his favorite lowbrow comic book, a guilty, comfortable pleasure he’d put aside, presuming a great text like one of Milton’s was due him, even though, like Dean Parish, those could be difficult to read. Genuinely fun comic books and partners should be prized.
Minus had picked up his guitar—the very one he and Tad had sung to in coffeehouses—and, as a private joke, began to strum through a Swedish carol both he and Tad had always found weirdly literal. In translation, it had seemingly moronic lyrics:
Christmas is here again, Christmas is here again,
And it’s going to last ’til Easter!
No, that can’t be true! No, no, that can’t be true—
Because, before Easter, Lent comes.
Ouch, Tad reflected. Those cold-weather types—which arguably include the Irish, if you go with the Viking rape stories—can’t let go of Lent. An umlaut of guilt hovers over their Ho Ho. Even their version of the infant Saint Nicholas supposedly refused his mother’s nipple on fast days. For Tad himself, this year, Lent had come before Christmas. Did that mean after Christmas, Easter would come?
Minus continued, as if serenading Anna. “ ‘I saw three ships come sailing in, on Christmas Day, on Christmas Day …’ ” Tad remembered Minus’s enthusiasm for old melodies, how they’d sung twee glee club throwbacks like “Glorious Apollo” or “Good Claret Is My Mistress Now,” a drinking song about a scornful puss denying her swain.
Minus hadn’t cared that he was partnered onstage with a gay man. When Tad had asked him if he minded being mistaken for gay, Minus had shrugged and said, “I can’t help what people think. If I were Jewish, and some people looked down on me for being Jewish, would that make me less of a man? You live as best you can, no matter what the ignorant think. Your Eleanor Roosevelt said something about how no one can belittle you without your cooperation.” Minus spoke English with greater exactitude than most native English speakers, and was more accepting of Tad’s gayness than Tad was himself.
“Such a lovely carol,” Ruth said dreamily. “Though what the heck the three boats have to do with anything beats me.”
Anna looked curious. “How are carols different from songs?”
Minus paused in his playing. “No one knows,” he answered with lighthearted gravity.
Tad’s mind was unaccountably seized with an image of Inger, not a memory, exactly, because he hadn’t witnessed it. It was of Inger as a teen, wearing Saint Lucia Day candles. They had caused her hair to catch fire, leading to her having her head close-cropped and then playing Saint Joan at her Geneva boarding school. It had all grown back by the time Tad met her.
Suddenly, there she was, Valkyrie Inger, stamping snow off her boots in the vestibule like Artemis back from the hunt, only instead of venison, she carried bags from assorted boutiques.
“Hello!” she called. Yo ho, tow ho! She was now as big as a nice house, and, Tad knew, had a husband and two daughters in Seattle. She put down her parcels, and took a deep breath when she saw Tad, as if she’d just lifted a lovely but breakable gift out of its nest of tissue.
“My costly one!” she beamed, going to him without removing her overcoat. They’d met in freshman French class, and always made a joke of the fact that cher meant both “darling” and “expensive.”
“Nice to see you!” He hugged her, and the melting snow on her coat made his shirtsleeves wet. Her blond hair, not so lustrous now, was short, like Ruth’s, but not severe. Tad’s anxiety about seeing her now seemed unnecessary. Perhaps her overweight humanized her, leveled the field, the way Gabe’s smoking made him seem less unreachable.
“We’re in town for only a few days, to shop.”
Her sleek, slightly accented voice brought back memories of his undergraduate torment and happiness. “Shop—that is such a northern European verb, at least the way you say it!” he mused.
She answered saucily, as if she were touching him on each syllable. “Like ship? Or slop? Slip. Sleep. Stop.” He remembered how galvanizingly healthy she’d been at eighteen, how unkempt Waterville Tad had lit into her rosy grace like an orphan with a spoon attacking mounds of strawberry shortcake.
“You’re in a playful mood,” he observed with relief.
“Well! Free, however briefly, of my beloved husband and delightful children, I feel absolutely weightless!” She smiled.
“Good!” she said intensely, as if relishing mountain air. “I love running others’ lives!” She’d been a weapons-research scientist, Tad knew from Minus, but after her first child was born, she’d felt her job was immoral and then went to medical school instead. Only all-powerful Inger could have done that. Even her plumpness was a sign of her mastery of the situation, no matter what convention called for.
Anna had run into the kitchen and started some commotion that also took Minus and Ruth out of the living room. Anna could be heard simulating the tears of the wronged, a tired child having a tantrum. “Time out!” Ruth was saying. “Time out!”
Inger and Tad were briefly alone together. “So you are now a full-bore thirty-second-degree bohemian?” she teased.
“Yeah.” Tad grinned, deciding this exquisite creature deserved his full honesty. “I, uh, turned out to be gay and everything.”
She smiled, that Scandinavian “mulling brandy in your mouth” pucker that he always found so worldly. “I’m not surprised that you’re gay,” she offered smoothly. “But I am surprised that you’re everything. I always thought that was only God’s … prerogative.”
She’d playfully mocked any possible tension here, and reflected her family’s Nordic tradition of God-fearing atheism. “I was going to say ‘terrain,’ but that didn’t seem like … enough!”
Contemplating the aplomb of this huge kittenish woman, Tad, to his own surprise, recalled a scene from another of Bobsy’s fantasy comedies, a burlesque called Jerk and the Beanstalk. In it, the giant’s wife had not been an ogress, but, rather, a fifty-foot babe in a negligee. When Bobsy as Jack declared his intention to make love to her, she had famously answered, “If you do, I just better not find out about it!” He realized with a start that the glacial movie giantess was Ruth’s mom, who later died in a car crash in the middle of her divorce proceedings.
“Are you here through New Year’s?”
“Just until the day after tomorrow. My husband’s in Aspen teaching our daughters to ski, and I thought I’d slalom down Fifth Avenue instead.”
“Inger! When’s Christine arriving?” Minus asked as he returned and gingerly removed his sister’s coat.
“She said she’d be here at seven.”
“She could have stayed here, too. We have extra rooms.” Minus seemed to be repeating a refrain he’d spoken many times. Tad mentally filed the fact about the extra rooms, though he secretly embarrassed himself, to be conniving about exploiting people he loved. “But, you know Christine,” Minus spoke his mother’s first name as if to identify one of her assorted personalities. “Peasants stay with relatives. Well-bred people stay in hotels.” He and Inger headed to the kitchen, to greet Ruth and Anna and to get Inger some glögg.
Alone, Tad remembered his breakup with Inger, in which she seemed to understand already facts he himself couldn’t face. He’d praised her long blond hair, and she’d gone out and gotten it all cut off. It was a gesture of independence or defiance, like a scene in her parents’ movies about inexplicably embattled couples, where even compliments and lovely presents were analyzed for awful ulterior motives. Tad had startled himself when he found he was far more turned on by her new boyish look, but the breakup was imminent. He couldn’t remember what he’d said last year to extricate himself from Angelo—because he’d been the villain and didn’t wish to relive it—but he remembered, after sixteen years, every word of Inger’s careful disengagement.
“It’s not happening, somehow,” she’d said the night before exam period was to begin.
“But I always reach orgasm, don’t I?” he’d answered defensively.
“Yes, you do, but it’s like your projected goal, instead of the fabulous revelation that ends the play. I don’t like being an objective. You aren’t thinking about me. Other men I’ve slept with are less intent to, as it were, prove the point. It’s like when my parents have to play love scenes in their films. They may undress, they may press their bodies against other actors, they must make it believable to the audience, but they know not to believe it in their hearts. I don’t know, you don’t believe this, somehow. You aren’t here. It’s like being with a ghost. A ghost who’s haunting the wrong house.”
The front door opened again, and Minus hurried from the kitchen to greet their next guest. There in three dimensions was Christine Larsen, in a turban, the supposedly elegant accessory matrons affect to indicate their transition from princess to maharani. Tad had met her momentarily sixteen years earlier, when she was visiting Inger, but now Inger looked like her then, and she looked as if advancing age were a spell cast on her definitive 1960s self by a rival star. Behind her trailed a cowed-looking taxi driver carrying a large cellophane-wrapped fruit basket.
“Hello! Hello!” She hugged everyone but Tad, whom she didn’t remember, but she gave him a dazzling smile. “Isn’t this place lovely?”
“We rented it sight unseen!” Minus seemed proud of his and Ruth’s intuition for real estate.
Ruth appeared and asked in courteous counterpoint, “How’s the hotel, Christine?”
“Fine, fine. I didn’t like my first room, but they moved me and sent me a fruit basket. I’m only here for a few days, and I’m not going to eat it, so here it is.” The taxi driver set it in the doorway and left, bewildered, a blameless zombie in the clothes he’d been buried in.
“How did you get the cabdriver to carry that all the way into the house?” Minus asked, marveling as he moved the huge basket to a less obstructive corner. “They don’t do that in New York.”
Christine smiled innocently. “Don’t they? I told him to and he just did.” She had an air of certainty that seemed to compel accommodation. “Where’s little Anna?”
Ruth laughed. “Didn’t you hear her? I just had her lie down for a minute. She’s tired.” She gave the word such implied significance, it reminded Tad of Mom describing Dad after a party: “He’s tired.”
“I’d love a glass of wine,” Christine announced, a touch of the hotel guest lingering in her delivery. “Beaujolais nouveau, if you have it!”
“We do!” Minus played the crisp steward.
Christine addressed Tad, since, as the one nonfamily member, he was the one to be seduced. “I always regard the arrival of the Beaujolais nouveau as the beginning of Christmastime!” Tad was attracted by her fame as much as anything.
Minus went to fetch the wine, and Christine announced, “The picture of his father! It is too bad Magnus couldn’t make it! He’s playing yet another Nazi in a movie that’s filming in Czechoslovakia.” She dropped her overcoat on the floor dramatically and sat in the living room’s largest chair. “He likes to say that World War Two was very hard on his childhood, but it’s being very good to him in his old age!” As Ruth took Christine’s coat, Tad noticed it was mink. He was bemused, but he figured, like Magnus, childhood hardship entitled her to her choice of status in age. I wear the furs I forged in life.
“Remember Tad Leary, Mother?” Inger said, with the only hint of deference Tad had ever heard in her voice. “You met him my freshman year? And then he and Minus became a musical team.”
“I always talked about him, remember?” Minus gave her some wine and added his letter of recommendation. “He’s the only full-fledged New Yorker here!”
“I remember you, of course!” Christine smiled. “From the courtyard, under that great oak! The moment I saw you, I thought to myself, This is Inger’s boyfriend? How can this be? He is a homosexual!” She added a sample of her tinkling laughter to indicate how charming this was meant to be, rather than tactless. Tad inwardly wondered which he preferred, his own mother’s silence on sexual matters or Inger’s mother’s astonishing straightforwardness.
Similarly, in college, he had been amazed at the notion of one’s own mother rolling naked before millions of people, as Christine so often had in her films. Her typical scenario had involved undressed pillow talk between lover opponents whose love and hate oscillated more quickly than a skittish stock market, and usually required suicide as a proof of commitment. Audiences had gazed at her creamy skin while she recited Sternland’s long monologues about anomie and self-loathing. Now, of course, this goddess had entered the third phase of her trinity, having moved from nymph to queen to crone. Tad had just seen her as one of the horrifyingly made-up Fates in a new American movie depicting the legend of Perseus and Medusa, only in this version Perseus had been recast as Hercules, presumably because American audiences had never heard of Perseus. Christine, once an international fantasy object, was required, courtesy of special effects, to remove her eyeball and pass it on, which had caused groans at the screening Tad attended. He decided not to mention this disputable achievement.
For her sake, he brought up a prouder moment as he sat down. “Frost and Ashes was on public television the other night. It really is an intense experience!”
Christine smiled ironically. “Frost and Ashes! Ah, yes! That title doesn’t offer many options, does it? But I was so young, and it was a challenge to play, well, lovesickness, syphilis, madness, and frostbite, all at the same time.” She made it sound like a recipe. Tad remembered seeing the picture sixteen years earlier, with Inger, when it had been revived at the Art Cinema near Hale, and how guiltily excited he’d been to be dating the genetic extension of a famous couple. Christine’s character was a novitiate in a remote island nunnery who goes slowly mad, starting with inappropriate barefootedness and building up to sleeping in puddles, crying during sex, and seeing the face of God in a polished spoon. It was the character’s own distorted reflection, of course, and in college Tad had thought that was pretty cosmic.
“It certainly proved that blondes don’t necessarily have more fun!” Tad tried to joke, but when he got a blank stare from Christine, he remembered she wouldn’t recognize an old American ad jingle.
“There’s no one like Gunnar Sternland making pictures today!” Ruth put in dutifully, rescuing Tad and currying favor with her mother-in-law. Whither thou goest with this conversation, I will go.
“Oh, Sternland. His people were all clergymen, that’s why his films are dripping with God. He wasn’t some vulgarian out of vaudeville!” Christine added her tinkling laugh again, as if it were an antiseptic that removed the sting, and Tad looked uneasily to see if Ruth was offended at this reference to her father’s world. Tad was light-headed in this upper atmosphere, where someone could be in the position of looking down on America’s most beloved comedy icon. Either from good sportsmanship or good manners, Ruth simply smiled inscrutably. Vaudeville, Tad surmised, was her father’s version of having fought in World War II, and he had been proud to have survived it.
“We can have dinner anytime—it’s all ready,” Ruth said helpfully, since dinner guests wait for instruction. Then she seemed to answer Christine’s comment. “Well, you know, my father’s father was a circus clown, and my father had a wonderful success, but he was always a little ashamed that he wasn’t a circus clown, too. I think he thought that the circus was pure, and that the movies were a kind of, I don’t know, opportunism, a compromise with technology.”
They headed to the dining room table. “It’s all relative,” Tad said, attempting to agree with both sides. “Martin Luther wasn’t impressed with Popes.”
“Appealing to my Protestant side!” Christine laughed. “I meant no criticism of comedy. And it is true that Swedes are too serious, you know. My parents were Danish, they knew how to laugh. They were—how shall I put this?—connected to the Continent, you see what I mean?” Young Tad had never imagined intramural Scandinavian prejudices until Inger mentioned her father considered Laplanders the equivalent of hillbillies.
As they seated themselves around the table, Tad remembered movie images of Christine starving or screaming, and he tried to reconcile it with this chic, complacent grandmother. “Did you ever experience the kind of anguish and despair the characters you played did?” he asked.
“Ohhhhh …” Christine gazed into her sea-dark wine as if she saw tropical fish just beneath the surface. “Anguish and despair are fine for the movies, but real life is a little more fun.”
Ruth had brought in several covered dishes of grilled fish and vegetables. “Serve yourselves, folks!” she announced. “We don’t stand on ceremony here!” Tad noticed that, despite their presumed wealth, Ruth apparently cooked and served everything herself.
“You know, in Britain,” Minus began. He often began sentences that way. For some reason, he was smitten with Britain. “On Christmas, the army officers serve the enlisted men their meal! It’s a sort of topsy-turvy day!”
“I see. Give the Powerless a Break Day.” Tad sounded as if he was translating into English, or, more exactly, American. “The hierarchies are lowered!”
When everyone was served, Ruth poured herself a tiny bit of wine. “To Magnus!” she said, toasting her absent father-in-law, and Tad marveled at her insightful social skills.
“To my darling ex!” Christine proclaimed, to turn the moment from Magnus’s to hers. She must have noticed Tad’s confusion, and she leaned toward him as if to tell a joke. “We’re divorced, but we live together,” she explained. It was a modern twist Tad had not encountered before. “We were much too young when we got divorced. It was just what everyone else was doing! I tell you, don’t divorce impetuously. Wait to make sure the hate is real!”
They ate in silence for a moment, and Tad noticed Ruth’s untypical far-off expression. He wondered if she was recalling her own parents’ more famous separation.
“How are all those lawsuits coming along?” Christine resumed, as if on cue. She was fearless, though as an actress, it wasn’t clear if that was by design or nature.
Ruth sighed. “Please! I’m giving myself the night off from thoughts about courtrooms!”
Nonetheless, as the meal progressed, she obligingly described the latest in her family’s legal problems. Ruth and Minus’s lot had seemed perfect to Tad, in this home-sampler sample, but apparently Bobsy, despite his pop-eyed childish sissy image, had been an assiduous womanizer and had fathered many children out of wedlock, that stiffly one-use word. Lawsuits from claimants of all ages (over twelve) constantly nipped at her daily life and her inheritance as his supposedly only child. Tad was reminded that the male gets away with whatever he can, and despite his daisy-clutching vulnerability in Hoboes in the Hoosegow, Bobsy had been as ravenously promiscuous as any bum given the opportunity would be. As Tad would.
“The worst part,” Ruth concluded, “is that if they are my real half sisters or half brothers, I’d like to get to know them! I don’t want to fight them in court. The problem is, a lot of them have proved to be completely phony! It’s just exhausting!”
“They want her to write a book!” Minus announced, as if he found the idea both impressive and hilarious.
“Yes.” Ruth played at grimness. “Except they want a Daddy Did Me book and I don’t want to do that. My father had his faults—ho boy, did he—but he tried hard, and my family life is not my neighbors’ business. Besides, you don’t betray your own bloodline. What if Anna wrote a book about us?”
Tad thought of his dad, who might have made a good vaudevillian himself, judging by his wild impromptu bedtime stories. Dad, who had taken him to all those Red Sox games Tad was wildly bored by, but still, Dad had once made an effort. And unlike Bobsy, there was no evidence he had ever been unfaithful to Mom, unless unconsciousness could be considered a rival.
Anna had appeared in the doorway, a crabby expression making her beautiful face funny. “I don’t want to write a book!” she said in fright, as if some unexpected preschool homework assignment had fallen out of the sky.
“That’s good, sweetie!” Ruth touched her daughter’s red hair bow, and Tad wondered if that feminine curlicue had been at Anna’s insistence. “Go say hi to Grandma.” The word grandma seemed incongruous applied to Christine, but once Anna sat in her lap, she looked the part. She began whispering loving nonsense into Anna’s ears, about how the Yule elf Tomten would soon be coming to visit her. It freed the rest of the group to converse.
“What I proposed,” Ruth resumed, “was a book about my grandparents, the Tannenbaums.” Bobsy must have shortened his name, Tad reasoned. Then he remembered in slight confusion that the name also meant “Christmas tree.” “He was the clown, and she made costumes for the circus.”
“How beautiful,” Tad answered sincerely, and it occurred to him that circuses were another virtually imaginary place that must have bizarre power hierarchies. Do the aerialists look down on the clowns, besides literally? Is the ringmaster a nobody offstage? Was there anti-Semitism in the turn-of-the-century circus world? Is there still?
“But they don’t think the grandparents will sell,” Minus explained with mixed resignation and amusement.
“You must come out to our real house in Whitehaven,” Ruth continued, flushing with pride. “I mean, the one I lived in as a child. She—my grandmother—collected buttons. I never knew her—my dad was sixty when I was born—but I found them among her things, and I had them all framed under glass like rare beetles or butterflies. These were mostly from circus costumes, so you can imagine how extravagant-looking a lot of them are!”
“I love collections!” Tad enthused. “They make subjects seem manageable.”
“The fact that I never met her makes me want to reach out and connect with her, somehow. That helped me feel I was doing that. The book would help me do that. Are your parents alive?” Ruth asked Tad.
Tad thought of Dad’s motionless nap earlier in the day, and Mom’s sitting alongside, the pharaoh’s wife obligingly following into the tomb. “Not really,” he said vaguely.
Ruth looked confused, which made Tad feel abashed. “I’m sorry,” he corrected himself. “They are alive! My mind drifted.”
“Tad’s mind drifts,” Minus explained. “He’s a … a psychonaut!” He looked pleased to land on this word, and poured himself and Tad more white wine. “And you, Hansel? How are things in your Black Forest?” He tapped his fingertips on his own temples, indicating dark inner hemispheres.
“Well, I think the new principal at Excelsior is going to do some restructuring.…” Tad thought he’d unveil his distress in stages.
“Uh-oh!” Ruth’s ready sound effects proved she was her father’s legitimate heir.
“Yes.” Tad left his half-lie unfinished to minimize the sin of it. “And I’m about to get kicked out of my sublet. The actor I’m renting from is coming back to town.” It occurred to Tad that even though he had abandoned acting, he still seemed to associate with nothing but actors. He liked their readiness to flee reality, as a career choice.
“Oh! Those traveling players!” Minus pretended to be outraged.
“Is there no sweetheart for you to move in with?” Inger asked. Tad appreciated the fact that she was so at ease on this subject. The Learys generally left it untouched.
“No, all alone.” Tad shrugged and sipped his wine. He then noted with annoyance at himself that it was his own doing, after all, and added, “But I’m not even looking!”
“That’s when it happens!” Inger pointed out. “When you aren’t looking for it!”
“Well, I think there’s some reverse reverse psychology at work here. I intentionally stop looking for it, so God sees me not looking for it, and says Oh no! I see what you’re up to!” It seemed foolish even to Tad, and they all laughed. Romance was the least of his worries. Besides, sitting there, it occurred to him that porno videos were a better substitute for actual sex than broadcast television was for the actual company of friends.
“Ahh!” Minus grinned. “So, Good Claret Is Your Mistress Now.”
“Well, yes.” Wine was certainly caressing Tad at that moment. He had recited his secret problems, but they seemed trivial in this sweet company.
“Well, add boils and we’ve got the Book of Job!” Minus said breezily. At that free-floating moment, Tad couldn’t recall any boils in Job.
Anna was dozing on her grandmother’s lap. “I’ll take her, Christine,” Ruth offered.
“No, no!” Christine protested. “It seems I was holding Inger like this only yesterday!”
“If you really were, you’d be in hospital now!” Inger joked. Tad was briefly confused by self-deprecation from such a successful woman. Her overweight was her shortness.
“She needs to go to bed,” said Ruth, standing.
“I’ll put her down,” offered Inger. “She’s my godchild.”
“Or I can,” said Christine. Maternity impressed Tad as a fraternity more unifying than paternity, or, for that matter, fraternity. The three women left the room together, with now fully demythicized Christine carrying Anna, the queen of somewhere.
“Ah! The ladies have left us!” Minus observed, and, accordingly, proffered a box of cigars. Tad declined, but Minus lit up and the two men sat alone at the table for a few minutes. They idly joked about how the courses of the standard dinner compared to the course of evolution on earth. Soup followed by salad, a fish or meat course, and then dessert and cigars was—with some bending—analagous to the primordial sea, vegetation, fishes, mammals, and, with the coming of man, artificial stuff that’s not necessary, and pollution.
They laughed at their theory’s uselessness, then sat in silence. Tad heard the dying fire pop unexpectedly in the other room. Minus stirred in his chair. “Ah, Tad! What am I to do?” he said, smiling, but with a sheepish sigh. “I am a hedonist, and alas, I can afford to be one!”
Tad then knew he loved Minus sincerely, since he wasn’t jealous of his friend’s comfort. “Hey, perhaps you could study yourself as a thesis subject! That could make hedonism a kind of work.”
Minus smiled at the idea and at the fact that he didn’t have to do any such thing. “By the way … I don’t mean to play the condescending gentleman,” he said, taking advantage of the fact that he and Tad were alone, “but that house in Whitehaven goes unoccupied and vulnerable to robbers about half the time. Ruth will be busy in court, and I’ll be busy … doing … whatever it is I do!” His aimlessness was his shortness. “Besides the main house, there’s a guest house by the pool. Perhaps you could be our housesitter.”
“It’s like, a manger?”
“Exactly. Whatever that is. You can be the Holy Child, or if that’s too much pressure—and, also, I know you hate getting mistaken for a little boy—you can be one of the shepherds, or that odd fellow from ‘Silent Night.’ You know—Round John Virgin!”
Tad was touched, but he wondered if this meant gardening chores or changing fuses. “Would I need any special skills, like with electricity or plumbing?”
“I suppose there might be caretaker’s duties involved, as well,” Minus confessed hesitantly. “Ruth knows more about it than I do.” He proceeded to decribe a sequence of technical security tasks Tad’s ears typically and resolutely denied entry. Eventually, Minus finished the portion of his speech that was foreign to Tad. “But it’s very rustic, very peaceful. You could do your schoolwork.”
Tad was uneasy at the prospect of becoming a tenant and employee of his best friend. Besides, Tad didn’t like either hard work or nature.
“Can I think about this?”
“Of course,” Minus said. “And I should consult Ruth first, of course. But there’s another position I wish to offer you, as well. It, too, would be unpaid.”
“What?”
“Will you stand as godfather to our Esther?” He sounded slightly impulsive and eager to comfort.
Tad felt simultaneous delight and distress. Nat and Les had traded the godfather accolades for their sons, and Tad thought they’d made the prudent brotherly selection. Still, he wondered now if Minus was trying to make him feel better, if this were artifical rain on a movie set, to save make-believe sharecroppers from strictly imaginary starvation. “That would be a wonderful honor!” he said, more confused than usual. “But I don’t have any money, I couldn’t put her through college or pay for her braces.”
“We don’t need your money!” Minus laughed. “She’ll be all set in any case. I mean it. You’d make a fine father figure. It just wouldn’t be actual size.”
“I’m glad you think so, but it’s like saying you’d be brave in a lifeboat. You don’t know what you’ll do until you’re in that situation.” Tad always loved playing with children, but it was a relief when they were taken away to be disciplined by others and raised at others’ expense.
“Well, parenthood isn’t a constantly sinking ship!” argued Minus. “It’s more like”—his college essay experience made him determined to find a clean parallel—“a ship where you’re recreation director, chef, stoker, and captain all at once at all times. And it’s a motorboat.”
“That doesn’t sound much easier.”
“It isn’t. But it’s better.”
“I’d love to be your daughter’s godfather,” Tad said, the breadth of Minus’s gesture dawning on him. Then he remembered with a thud his discharge from Excelsior. It pained him to ruin one of his life’s most honorable moments, but it would have been dishonorable not to. “I should tell you something, though,” he began slowly. “They just fired me from Excelsior because this one woman thought I was … touching her son. It isn’t true, though.”
“Well, it isn’t true. End of untrue story.”
Ruth returned alone and sat as best her enlarged self could on Minus’s lap.
“Anna told me to say good night to the little boy who knows all about animals!” She smiled at Tad.
“All About Animals!” Tad mused. “There’s a title for you.”
“I asked Tad to be Esther’s godfather,” Minus told Ruth cautiously.
Ruth looked mildly surprised, which Tad figured meant she was quite surprised. “Oh! Well, very good!” She finally shrugged, which Tad might have taken as a slight, except it meant she was green-lighting him. Apparently, she was adept at sailing with her husband. Again, it was incongruous to see this sleek woman volunteer shtick. It reminded Tad of Bobsy’s shrug to the camera at the fade-out of Married Alive, when he realizes at the altar it’s his delectable new bride who’s the murderess.
Tad tried to anticipate valid criticism. “I told Minus I was a bum.”
“No problem!” Ruth said. “I myself have no … well, no official sisters and brothers. Anyway, I have no intention of dying in the next twenty years.”
“And besides,” Minus added, “for insurance, we’ll get someone really good to be godmother. Remember, though,” he warned, “at the christening, you’ll have to renounce the devil and all his works.”
Christine appeared in the doorway, the older image of her own granddaughter minutes earlier. “I’m still on European time,” she said with a histrionic false yawn. “May I lie down in your spare room?”
“You’re welcome to stay the night!” said Ruth promptly.
“No, no,” Christine insisted. “I will not. I have my hotel room! I just need to lie down for one minute.”
“Of course!” Ruth showed her the way.
“I look forward to meeting you!” Christine called vaguely to Tad as she exited.
Minus shook his head, smiling. “She’s a tired girl, too!” he explained.
Tad and Minus toasted the agreement, then relished friendship’s silence. When Inger returned, she made a glögg toast, as well.
“It’s not a real job, of course,” she pointed out when she heard about Tad’s godparenthood. “It’s like being vice president for five terms.”
“I’m just happy to be in Congress,” Tad said, remembering as he spoke congress was also a funny word for coitus, and, after all, any personal interaction, even with demons. Tad felt like curling up and sleeping with this family, but he took that as a warning sign to go.
“Whoa, what a day!” he said, gently detaching himself from his chair. “I should get home.”
“Father knows best!” Minus reactivated himself and also stood.
“I’m not a father yet.”
“You’re always father to your own body! Ushering it around, caring for it, forbidding it to use heroin …” Minus wandered out of the room in self-amusement on an unannounced errand.
“It’s nice to see you,” Inger said simply.
“Same here.”
“You must come meet my husband and children, if you ever travel other than astrally.” She spoke for a while about them, lovingly, but with increasing fatigue. Tad attributed that to her day’s shopping.
Since the meeting was evidently winding up, he thought he’d better clear any old business. “Sorry if I messed you up way back when.”
“Oh, Tad.” She laughed dismissively. “You had the most thorough inferiority complex of any man I’d ever met. Of course, I was inexperienced then. I’ve met worse, believe me! Anyway, that’s why I slept with you—I thought it would help.” She had been the Peace Corps and he was a very tiny country.
“Yes, I know.” Tad hugged her. Somehow, this was delightful intimacy rather than disastrous Sternlandian truth telling.
“I’m glad I did. It helped us both grow up, didn’t it?”
Tad was typically of two minds about that, but he wanted this parting to be clear tropical sailing. “Absolutely.”
“You never hurt me, anyway. It was one more adventure. One more experiment.” She and her brother approached life with analytical but unmixed zeal, unlike self-stalemated Tad. She kissed his cheek, the strategic halfway point between lovers’ lips and thin air.
“I guess I was just thinking about myself,” he admitted.
Inger smiled again. “Well, that’s not unique. All men do that. And you forget—our historic affair lasted only three weeks.”
It was true, Tad calculated, after doing some hectic mental math. They’d met in French, gotten acquainted, and had broken up before Christmas break. In his memory, it had been Wagnerian. Freshmen live in dog years.
Hosts Ruth and Minus returned with Tad’s jacket and joined them at the front door. Inger stood back slightly, since the hosts always have the official last farewell.
“Again, I’m honored about …” Tad said, wriggling into his jacket.
“We’ll give you the details as they develop!” Minus assured him.
“Bye, Minus. Bye, Ruth!”
“It was good to meet you, after all these years!”
“It’ll all work out, you’ll see. If not at Whitehaven or here, somewhere else.”
“I guess it will!” Tad smiled, momentarily hung in the hammock of happiness. In a maudlin way, he couldn’t resist adding, “It’s just, I panic whenever I think about my own mortality and the pointlessness of the universe.”
Ruth smiled and pretended to be flicking ash off an imaginary cigar. “Well, as my dad used to say in his Doctor Sketch, ‘So, don’t do that!’ ”
“I’m in town for the foreseeable future. When the snows recede, we’ll go bicycling,” Minus pledged. “Will you be around?”
Tad grinned. “Oh, I’m nothing if not around!” Inger called after him. “This doctor says, ‘Get a hat!’ ”
He started trudging away, and Minus added, “See you anon, betimes, eftsoons!”
Tad marveled at how Oxonian Minus mastered even arcane English vocabulary, but he simultaneously remembered Nat once snorting that anyone who used the word anon to be amusing should be shot. Still, if Gabe’s smoking made him human and Angelo’s awful singing offset his saintliness, then Minus’s Anglophilia was at least a classy kind of flaw. And, unlike Simon, Minus wasn’t trying to win anything.
Snow was still falling. It had been a lovely dinner, Tad reasoned, and for once he was in full agreement with himself. Then, to his amazement, he saw Donna Silvarini, Angelo’s older sibling by less than a year—what Dad referred to as an “Irish twin”—the sister who used to dress Angelo up in her own dresses as if he were her personal dolly. She was pushing a real-life infant in a stroller covered with a transparent plastic tarpaulin to keep out the cold. At first, it reminded Tad of the shabbier houses in Waterville, where instead of fixing glass windows, they hung transparent plastic over them. Then, however, he thought of the miniature greenhouse the Silvarinis maintained behind their house, even though the low-flying planes overhead occasionally shattered the panes. In that part of Waterville, it was a beautiful edifice, a transparent halfway house full of transient flowers.
With Donna was her merchant marine boyfriend, whose name, Tad remembered hastily, was Joseph, but whom his shipmates rechristened Jo Jo, like the Dog-Faced Boy, because his red fiery hair looked a lot like an Irish setter’s. Tad always secretly wondered if heavy-browed Jo Jo was one of those males with the extra Y chromosome, who tend to be lurchingly large and disposed to crime. He had been an unsettling presence at Silvarini family parties, since he had habitually carried a pistol and his notion of funny was to answer the phone by saying, “To whom, perfuck, am I speaking?” And Donna, who had always been fiercely protective of Angelo, always admonished Tad on parting, “You treat my brother right.” That had been bizarre for Tad, the big Italian sister defending her sweet little brother’s honor.
“Donna!”
“Tad Leary? My God!” She seemed friendly, and if there was a scintilla of punitive standoffishness in her voice, Tad couldn’t decide if it was real or just his paranoid sense of having wronged her favorite doll. She wore an overcoat striped like the rainbow, and in the deep snow under the streetlamp, it seemed a wonderful oasis, although Tad knew it would be sneered at in his onetime lover Dean Parrish’s design-conscious crowd.
“Why aren’t you in Boston?” Tad asked, realizing as he spoke that he was stereotyping her as a stay-at-home peasant girl.
“We’re allowed to cross state borders now, it’s really broadening!” she answered, with the level, no-frills self-respect her family had—perennial tomato vines with deep roots. “Joe’s sister and her friend live on Jane Street. Joe’s folks are dead, so we’re having Christmas with them. His sister and her friend, I mean.” Tad wondered if the friend alluded to so carefully was a lesbian or a live-in boyfriend.
“I was just thinking about you!” he said. “I was recalling how Angelo said you and he loved your white First Communion outfits so much, you used to go trick-or-treating in them!”
“Yes,” she replied, seeming to picture it with pleasure. “Now I wear my bridal gown on Halloween.” Her swaddled toddler—gender indeterminable—wore a hooded sweatshirt with soft simulated reindeer horns. “This is little Blitzen.”
“Joe junior, actually,” Jo Jo corrected with pride. In this fey setting, he seemed mellow, like a bear who’s simply been misjudged by the other, more high-strung woodland creatures.
“Oh, you two got married! Congratulations! And you’re blessed with issue!”
“Not necessarily in that order.” She smiled. Jo Jo rolled his eyes, comically accepting his role as the reluctant boyfriend. “At least my mother didn’t live to see a bastard in the family!”
“Oh, but she’d love any grandchild,” Tad said with involuntary warmth, even though he worried it might seem dismissive of Jo Jo Junior’s specialness. “I mean—” Tad pictured Mrs. Silvarini smoking and weeping as she browsed the family album, beside herself with the depth of her family feeling.
“Yes, she would.” Donna corrected herself gently, and returned Tad’s warmth for respecting her often-ridiculed mother. Donna and Angelo had once pitched in to buy her an enormous World’s Best Mom trophy, which, typically, Tad found an eyesore at first, but then came to admire. “You’re right,” Donna continued. “Nothing living was illegitimate to her.” Tad wondered if that was an allusion to Mrs. Silvarini’s automatic acceptance of Tad and Angelo as a couple. He ventured a joke to draw the father into the circle.
“Still packing heat, Jo Jo?”
Jo Jo grinned, as if recalling bygone high jinks. “Not anymore. If anybody messes with me, I’ll just throw the baby at them.”
They all laughed.
“Yeah, he is big.” Tad knew praising a baby’s size reassured parents of its chances for survival. “How’re the High-Class brothers?”
“Terry’s fine, and—oh!—Marco is dating a girl whose last name is Sheehan. We joke that she looks like you with long hair! Family tastes, I guess.”
Tad laughed, but he really didn’t know how to respond to Donna’s observation, except that he knew he didn’t want to be likened to a girl. That’s my problem, he thought, quickly reprimanding himself, and not Donna’s. Besides, red-haired possible extra-Y-chromosomed Jo Jo was part of this equation, as well.
“And how’s your dad?” Tad had always admired Mr. Silvarini’s habitual silence, as if in solidarity with the vegetation, very unlike Tad’s own garrulous father.
“He’s still at it! It’s inhaling the oxygen from all those plants, Tad. They’re starting a huge federal building lobby next month.” She paused to check that Joe junior was secure in his stroller. “Anyway, what are you doing thinking about my old Halloween costumes at Christmastime?”
“Well, thinking about Angelo, I guess,” Tad said, trying to sound sensitive. Angelo’s name had been scrupulously avoided. “It’s just about a year since we broke up.”
Donna gave him a critical look, but her voice remained friendly. “You mean, since you left him.” Jo Jo simply looked into the street. XYY ultramen don’t do soap operas. They’re too dangerous.
Tad enacted being cowed, and hunched his shoulders. He had used last New Year’s Day as a platform for his underconsidered resolution. Donna now decided to take him off the hook. “Never mind. It’s all for the best. You know, he’s out in San Francisco now. He’s independent, it’s great for him.” Angelo had been living with his parents before he moved in with Tad, so Donna saw his living alone as an achievement for him, a hallmark of adulthood. “Anyway, we’re due for dinner!”
“Yes, me, too!” Tad answered in confusion. He wanted to ask if Angelo was listed in the phone book out there, but half of him told the other half it would be wrong.
“Hey, come see us when you’re in Waterville!” Jo Jo said. Tad marveled. A Neanderthal made into a member of society by the powers of fatherhood.
“I will!” Tad grinned as they went on their way. Whether he meant it or not, he sincerely meant to affirm his affection.
“And get a hat!” Donna called back.
Tad noticed that while standing still, falling snow had accumulated in his hair. He shook his head the way a tethered horse kills time. For that moment, the solitude of the dark street was wonderful. Unexpectedly, he felt unfamiliar, uplifting grace descend into him.