Another Bullshit Night in Suck City Read Free

Jody’s willing to believe him, at least this night, and for many nights to follow. For the rest of the summer they’ll meet on the beach that connects the two cliffs, lean against the seawall, out of the wind, out of sight, compare the size of their feet, press their palms together. He’ll tell her more about his book, about Florida, about life on the docks. To be a poet digging ditches is very different from being a mere ditch digger . His family had thrived through the Depression, and he will also, but on his own terms. For a writer the place to be is Beacon Hill, he has friends there, he is known—he promises to take her.

beacon hill
    Jonathan makes a couple trips back north from Palm Beach over the winter, to carouse Beacon Hill, to see Jody. A trolley connects House in the Pines with Boston—Jody meets him for parties, then for weekends. She’s forbidden to stay out all night but she does anyway, sneaks back into her dorm the next afternoon, takes her punishment. By then her father has moved out, flown to Reno for six months to finalize his divorce, and her mother has stopped answering the phone. Years later she will tell me that when teachers yelled at her she simply blurred her eyes until they ceased to matter. She even shows me how, looking straight at me, narrowing her eyes slightly, heavy-lidded. She tells me this when I am having trouble at school. I try it but it never seems to work.
    That winter Ray meets Clare, a student at Radcliffe. Jonathan will always claim to have introduced the two of them, as he likes to imagine his influence far-reaching, but this is not how they remember it. Clare describes Jody as “the most beautiful woman she had ever seen.” But not too bright , she will quickly add, after all, she was just a child. We’d have these big parties, and she’d always help out, get very concerned that everyone had enough to eat. In the kitchen at one of the parties I remember she asked, “Is China a country or a continent?” Can you imagine?
    In May Jonathan leaves Palm Beach for Boston and moves into Ray’s apartment. Jody has let him know that she’s three months pregnant. Already she’s been spirited out of House in the Pines to the Florence Crittenton House, a home for unwed mothers. At this point no one knows what will happen. Anything could happen. Adoption is a possibility. Abortion, though illegal, is a possibility. There are places to go, back-alley doctors, a girl could take a bus to Providence. It’s up to Jody, of course, but there is a lot of pressure for her to make a decision, soon. Her father by now is back in Scituate with his new wife, back in the big house on First Cliff, having set his first wife, my mother’s mother, up in a new, smaller house across town. He arranges a meeting with Jonathan at Locke-Ober, a restaurant in Boston, demands to know what he intends. Don’t worry, Jonathan assures him, I’m not going down to Florida anymore. I’ll marry the poor girl . A proposition made, a deal struck, whereby Jody’s father will set Jonathan up in business, a car dealership, the details to be ironed out later.
    My mother, though, already has second thoughts about Barracuda. In a letter she never sends to my father, or perhaps the draft of a letter she does send, she writes,
    Christ, how much can a girl stand when the one she loved is always drunk—always up late with another and being tired and bitchy around her, out all the time….
    That August Ray drives Jonathan to the home for unwed mothers, and is the one witness to my parents’ shotgun wedding. My brother is born a few months later. Ray drives my mother to the hospital, Jonathan shows up just after the birth—car trouble. That winter they all live together in Ray’s apartment on the Hill. Clare remembers changing my brother’s diapers.
     
    Years later, when asked about his two marriages, first to my mother and then to his second wife, both young women from money, my father will say— I never even