But he preferred to read, anyway. He was a very good student (he took ribbing about that too) and had hoped this would please his father, who didn't seem to notice. The only time Lloyd's father seemed to notice his son's grades was the time he got a B in geography; the strop was an incentive to improve.
Bookworm though he was, Lloyd did have his athletic side. He loved to swim and as the family had a summer home at Ashtabula, he got plenty of practice. And he loved the out of doors, loved to hike, loved nature-he was an Eagle Scout with merit badges to spare. Father said nothing about that accomplishment, one way or the other.
The only hint Father ever gave that he took some pride in Lloyd was the casual comment he would make, to family and friends, that his boy would "one day be a finer surgeon than I." This comment, which his father began to state as a fact as early as Lloyd's junior-high years, meant the world to the boy.
Appropriately, science was his favorite subject. He had begun to experiment on animals, on his own, while in grade school. He had found a cat in the street that had apparently been struck by a car; the cat was half-dead, so surgical experimentation couldn't do any harm. He had set up a little lab, a little workshop, in the garage, which was a freestanding building away from the large main house. Here he dissected living animals for the pure science of it. For the educational value.
He'd been fascinated by Kingsbury Run since he was a kid; he would see the lovely desolation of it out the window of the Rapid Transit train, which he and Mother occasionally took from Shaker Heights into the city, for a day of shopping together. An an older boy, in the Scouts, he would sometimes take the train and get off at Seventy-ninth or Fifty-fifth Street and explore the Run by himself, catch animals and experiment on them, right out there in nature.
The younger of the two sisters once caught him carving up a small dog and told their mother, and he explained that he was experimenting scientifically and she understood, though she asked him not to operate on living things again. Henceforth, out of deference to his mother, he would kill the animals first-though it limited the range of his experimentation, and the sense of power he so enjoyed.
Unlike Father, his mother had never struck him a physical blow, though she had hurt him once, in another way. She had walked in on him, when he was masturbating in his room, and had reacted with shock, with horror, and then tears. She later told him she had never been so disappointed in anyone in her life.
She had been pregnant at the time, and even now Lloyd could see her, standing in the doorway, a fat silhouette, choking with horror.
She died trying to have that fourth child. While his father had not been the attending physician, Lloyd was filled with anger toward Father. Not because his father had caused the pregnancy, no; but because medicine, surgery, had failed her. This exhalted profession to which his father gave so much time and energy, to which his father expected him to give his own life, had not been able to save the one person on the face of the earth worth saving.
He'd been thirteen when she died, and his father-whom he never saw cry over his mother's death, what a cold, cold bastard he was! — had responded to the change in the household by sending Lloyd off to military school. His oldest sister was married, and the other sister was off at college, so Lloyd-out at last from under the spell of his "sensitive" mother (that was how Father would often describe his late wife, giving the word a distasteful ring) — would finally be made a man.
And the academy was where Lloyd had been made a man, all right. He had learned that the feelings of tenderness he'd had for other males, feelings he'd tried to repress until now, were welcomed by other horny young men whose sexual awakenings were taking place in an all-male world. And while he was haunted by vague memories of his father having contempt for "queers," Lloyd enjoyed, in his first year, being the favorite of an older cadet, a loving son to a loving father, so to speak. And upon that older cadet's graduation, Lloyd became loving father to several young sons.
Did Father sense something in his manner? Home for the summer, Lloyd felt his father's eyes on him, suspicious eyes that seemed to strip him naked. His military bearing, his crisp politeness, somehow did not fool Father. Father seemed to know-though of course nothing was said-that the rifles and bayonets Lloyd had been drilling with were not always made of steel.
So on his sixteenth birthday, Father gave him one of two very special gifts that Lloyd would receive in an upbringing characterized by little fatherly attention. In the dead of one memorable night, his father took him to a brothel in the Flats, where a heavily made-up whore of perhaps twenty-two literal years and a hundred figurative wound up bringing him off with her mouth, because he couldn't do it otherwise. When Lloyd returned to his father-who was waiting in a chauffeured Lincoln out front-the old man had said, "Well?"
Lloyd, stiffly military, had said, "Thank you, Father. It was a perfect birthday."
And, as the boy climbed in, his father had bestowed a rare smile on his son and an even rarer pat on the shoulder.
For reasons Lloyd never knew, his father had pulled him out of the academy and put him back into public school for the senior year of high school. And the summer before his senior year, on his birthday, his father gave him the other memorable gift.
In the chauffeured Lincoln once more, they had driven in the dead of night, not to the Flats this time, but to Western Reserve University, where his father taught anatomy. In a vast, white, but dimly-lit classroom littered with lab benches, his father walked him to a wall of refrigerated drawers and pulled one out. Father flipped back the sheet and revealed the gray corpse of a man of perhaps forty.
"For you," he told his son.
"For… me?" Lloyd began to smile; his eyes began to tear. "My own… my very own ca… daver?"
"Your own." And again Father bestowed a smile and a hand on the shoulder. "This will be our secret."
Father had even given him a set of shining stainless-steel surgical tools in a leather pouch.
And throughout the school year ahead, at least one night a week, his father would take him to Western, and while Father prepared lesson plans and corrected papers, Lloyd practiced on his cadaver. To have power over the living, Father told him, one must first learn the secrets of the dead.
It was the most time that father and son ever spent together.
Lloyd never forgot those two gifts, those two thoughtful, personal gifts his father had given him: the live female body and the dead male one.
Even now, that rare tenderness on his father's part brought tears to Lloyd's eyes. It made him feel all the more ashamed that he had let Father down.
He hadn't at first. He'd gotten in at Harvard, no problem; between his grades and Fathers connections, it had been a snap. But he hadn't exactly been an honor student-the drinking, the carousing with his fraternity brothers had taken a toll; he also had several affairs, with boys and girls, and was confused about who he was, exactly.
Sex with girls was something he could manage-like a duty; it required affection and care and time. Sex with a guy was animal, basic, in a hurry. He didn't think it was sissified conduct-he felt more a man with a man. Like the Greeks. He was a fraternity brother, wasn't he?
Anyway, his grades were good enough to get him into med school, and that was when disaster struck. He found himself drinking more and more, and his hands began to shake-it was from the drinking obviously, but how could he tell his instructors that? How could he explain to them that the lack of dexterity was temporary?
And how could he explain to his father that this temporary lack of dexterity, and this alone, had caused him to flunk out?
For several months his father said nothing to him. Literally nothing. Any communication between the two men in the large dark house was done through hand gestures or the servants. Finally Lloyd threw himself on his knees before Father, in his study, and begged forgiveness.