The Love Children Read Free Page B

grimaced.
    She made him an omelet and gave him the same salad we had, Boston lettuce, asparagus, and white beans. I liked all Mom’s dinners, except eggplant parmesan. I hated eggplant in those days, and because of that, Mom hardly ever made it.
    It got to be a custom: when he came home, they’d have one serious talk. They’d be in the kitchen. Mom would be cooking and Dad would sit on the kitchen counter over by the washing machine. He would have a drink in his hand, and he would say they had to have a talk. And she would say, “Ummm.” Then Dad would say a wife’s first duty was to her husband, in a pronouncement from on high. Mom would exclaim, “Whooa! Listen to the man! The ghost speaks!”
    She was referring to his ancestor. Dad was related way back to the poet Coventry Patmore, author of The Angel in the House , whose thesis was that wives were created to make little heavens on earth for men in the home. I’d never read it and I’m not sure Dad had either. Dad’s full name was Patmore Leighton. He used to tell me I had the right to join the Daughters of the American Revolution because his forebears had fought in the Revolution. When he said that, Mom would snarl that the DAR were a bunch of bigots too ignorant to let the great Marian Anderson sing. I didn’t know what that fight was about, exactly, but I knew enough never to join the Daughters, whoever they were. Mom came from a Lithuanian family that had settled in Rhode Island; she still had some cousins in Providence. Her name was Andrea Paulauskas Leighton. Whenever Dad started quoting his ancestor,
she would say that a woman’s first duty is to herself, that she was a free being, not a possession. I’d disappear then: I couldn’t stand those arguments. Dinner would be late that night.
    They would have one long talk, and that was it. No matter how long Dad stayed, they’d never talk again and they’d both act mad afterward, walking around barely speaking to each other until he disappeared again. As the years passed, they grew more and more hostile, more fixed in their positions. I couldn’t understand why they had stopped loving each other.
    My mother was smart and my father was talented. He painted large, energetic squares of color, two or three to a canvas, cerise and gray and yellow, or blue and that same cerise, sometimes with a squiggle or two connecting them. For many years he didn’t make any money from his artwork, and we lived on their Harvard salaries. Dad was an adjunct, and Mom just a teaching fellow, and the two combined made hardly any money. At the time I didn’t know how hard up we were for money; we had the house Daddy had inherited from his great-uncle, and Mom could turn a cheap cut of meat into a feast.
    But when I was eight or nine, Daddy was “discovered.” An important art critic wrote about him, and after that galleries called and then articles and reviews proliferated. Museums and collectors bought his work. I was proud that he was famous.
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    One thing we never talked about, Sandy and me, that was sort of a secret bond between us, was our pride in our parents. It separated us from the others in our gang. Nobody talked about their parents—that would have been tacky. But Sandy often quoted things her father had said and I quoted my mother all the time. Bishop’s father was famous too; he was a politico in Cambridge, he was deputy police commissioner or something and he knew the governor and Tip O’Neill. Bishop never quoted him though. Still, we knew he used to adore his father, who was a friendly,
laughing man full of good humor even at home. Only these days, Bishop barely spoke to him because they disagreed about the war. His parents supported it: well, two of his brothers were in the service.
    We knew little about the other kids’ parents, and most of what we did know was bad. Like we knew that there was something weird about our