It got worse. Sharon and Mike came and sat in the family room with them and talked of tomorrow’s abortion. Mike especially acted on the premise that no one had ever loved as he had.
I remember that, Ace thought. Hell, I still feel that way.
They talked of Mike’s upcoming Air Force enlistment and Sharon’s last year of school. Of the year they’d be apart.
“You don’t know what it’s like,” Mike said. “To face this kind of separation.”
Ace and Joan looked at each other without expression. Jesus Christ, Ace thought, this is incredible. I may kill them both. But both of them knew that Mike and Sharon’s story threaded into their own was a great plus. It was another something to think about.
“I did miss Joan when I was in Korea,” Ace said, “but it’s probably not the same.”
Chapter 10
Saturday, April 19
The bicentennial Patriot’s Day. Concord and Lexington and Jerry Ford coming to call and a mass of tourists. It was the kind of event Joan never went to. It was the kind of event that Ace went to with the boys and she stayed home. Eight days ago she was not planning on this one either. But the fear was growing that they were not talking merely about her breast, that perhaps they were talking about her life. Is it possible, she thought, is it possible that my days are numbered... The quaint phrase, out of a nineteenth-century melodrama, seemed so inappropriate to the reality she faced. And yet it was the phrase that had popped into her head.
It’s something I should do. The family together, the nation’s birthday. There was a vague sense of heritage and tradition as a stay against impending dissolution that propelled her. It would make a good memory. It will also reassure the kids. How sick can Mamma be if she goes to the parade with us? They didn’t seem worried, but they would be at some point and this would help.
The big events were in Concord, but Ace said it would be too crowded and they went instead to Boston for the parade and festivities at City Hall Plaza. Had Joan been well he might have made a stab at Concord and Lexington, but he couldn’t say that and merely insisted that it would be too crowded.
The crowds were not a problem in Boston. They parked near the Old State House and walked up across City Hall Plaza and over Beacon Hill to Boylston Street. It was a good day in April. Sunny and filled with a sense of festival. Street vendors sold balloons, and hot dogs, and frozen yogurt on a stick, and macrobiotic rice and lentils, and Granny Smith apples, and toy colonial sabers, and three-cornered hats. It was not yet nine o’clock and the city was pleasant and uncluttered, the way it is early on a nonworking day.
Joan had on her new raincoat, light poplin, and stylishly cut. She walked, like Napoleon, she thought, with her hand inside her coat, feeling the lump unconsciously over and over, always hoping futilely and below the ordinary level of her consciousness that if she felt it enough it would go away.
Ace loved the city. When he was working at home he would often invent an excuse to go in and drive around. He needed contact with it, and was always persuaded that if he lost contact with it his creativity would dwindle. Is that hokey? That’s the kind of crap they say at suburban poetry clubs. Erich Segal would probably say that. Or Rod McKuen. Arf! But he felt it, and he felt it now.
He knew why she was here. She hadn’t said and neither had he, but he knew. And it pleased him. He always wanted her to come along when he went places and he always wanted to go places. She did not enjoy going to places and she didn’t enjoy traveling. Sort of extreme provocation, he thought, but you take what you can get.
He considered whether he ought to be guilty about being glad she’d come, even though what caused her to come was dreadful. He decided he ought not to feel guilty. We letter take what we can out of whatever comes our way. And we better feel what we can feel and not fuck it up with worrying about whether what we feel is right.
He was more at home with randomness than she was. He planned what he could: trips, building projects, that sort of thing. He outlined the novels carefully. But he knew the world to be essentially haphazard and he tried hard to take it as it came. And he knew that he was imperfect and would fail often and that, too, he would have to live with.
So he felt glad about her being along and paid attention to the parade. It came in a flourish of pennants and batons and braid and Ancient and Honorable Artillery companies. There were militia companies from around the Commonwealth, and drum and bugle corps in bright sateen costumes, led by plump-legged majorettes in white boots. There was a good deal of humor at the expense of the plump-legged majorettes.
“Look at this one,” Dave said, as a particularly sturdy set of cheerleaders led a high school band past them.
“Look at the one in the middle.” Dan shrieked with laughter.
“I think the band motto may be Bow Wow,” Ace said.
“Sexist bastards,” Joan said.
“It’s Phil Spitalny and his all-hound orchestra,” Ace said.
After the parade had passed they walked up Boylston Street and ate lunch in Ken’s restaurant. Their table was on a second-floor balcony that looked out over the plaza in Copley Square. The fountain was working and the rush of its waters patterned the plaza and modified Boylston Street. Things quickened about it.
It’s like being glazed over, Ace thought. It’s like having a thick layer of polyurethane varnish which seals you off from the elements. The fountain and the plaza are beautiful and the lunch is good and the family’s together and my wife has a cancer growing. And we go along on two simultaneous levels and feel both things and they don’t seem to connect The two levels. They just seem to coexist laminated, separated by an invisible shield. Emotional Gardol.
Walking back to the car after lunch, across the Common, they saw fragments of the parade now over, groups of bandsmen and majorettes, and sections of bugle corps and muster companies wandering at easy random back toward buses and cars that would take them home. Church bells rang periodically around the city. Family groups were frequent. The sun shone. The temperature was mild. In City Hall Plaza in front of the magnificent Stonehenge of the new City Hall there were thousands sitting on steps and standing on the bricked piazza waiting for Arthur Fiedler to conduct the Pops, and for a horde of pigeons to be released, and for the first of many speeches. The vendors were among them. Joan and Ace and the boys waited and watched for a while, but no pigeons appeared and Arthur Fiedler wasn’t leading the Pops and Ace could see the tightness in Joan’s face. Over some objections from the boys, they finally left in midafternoon and drove home.
She was alone in the house that Saturday afternoon. Her husband and her sons were out together. She knew the absence was contrived. Ace felt she needed to be alone. The strain was greater in front of the boys, not looking worried, not seeming down, not being snappish. Now there was less strain. But the panic moved in, as if to replace the strain. Nature hates a vacuum. She was busy, very busy: her notes, her tapes, her cleaning. And always the panic, seeming always to be intensifying, thrust back, pushed down yet growing, growing.