Home Song (20 page)

He deferred to Claire, who pointedly refused to glance his way.

“
Steel Magnolias
,” she supplied.

The tenured staff, who had known them for years, could feel the chill as if a window had been flung open on a subzero day. For the remainder of the meeting their antennae were up, gauging the unusual tension between their principal and his wife, especially the antagonism emanating from Claire.

When the meeting ended, Tom turned his back to speak to someone else while Claire left the room behind him, taking the long way around the tables to avoid going near him.

Several minutes later, still keyed up from the staff meeting, Tom was at his post, monitoring the front hall just inside the entry doors as the school buses began arriving. Through the ceiling-to-floor glass wall he watched the students leap off the bus steps onto the sidewalk, talking and laughing as they funneled toward the building.

He saw Kent the moment he stepped from the bus. Watching him approach, Tom felt his heart start clubbing. It required no lifetime of father-son intimacy to recognize that the boy was troubled, stern-faced, speaking to no one. He walked with a portfolio riding his right thigh, shoulders back and head straight: an athlete's stride. His hair caught the morning sun, dark, gelled into a popular style that showed the coarse furrows of some stout styling tool. He wore jeans and a nylon windbreaker over a paisley shirt with an open collar. As usual, his clothing was clean and crisply ironed. His appearance spoke volumes about the quality of care provided by his mother. Among the students issuing from the bus he stood out not only for his neatness, but for his dark good looks and superior physique as well. It caught Tom like a barbed-wire fence across the gut, the swift clutch of pride tinged with awe that this impressive young man could be his son.

Anxiety gripped him, born of the complexity of their relationship, their past that needed discussing, and their future that remained a question mark. Tom's last encounter with Kent came back in vivid detail as he watched his son stalk toward the door.
You just screwed her and left
, the boy had shouted.

A student came by and said, “Hi, Mr. G.”

Tom swung around and said, “Hi, Cindy.” When he faced the door again Kent was coming through it and heading his way. Their eyes met and Kent's forward motion flagged. Tom could feel his pulse pound high in his throat, bulging veins as if he'd knotted his tie too tightly. The encounter was inevitable; Tom stood at the intersection of two halls, and Kent had to take one of them. He sped ahead as if to move past without speaking.

Tom wouldn't let him. “Good morning, Kent,” he said.

“Good morning, sir,” Kent replied obediently, without pausing.

Tom's voice stopped him. “I'd like to talk to you today if you have a few minutes.”

Kent fixed his gaze on the backs of the students flowing past him. “I have a heavy schedule, sir, and after school I have football practice.”

Tom felt embarrassment creep up his face. He, the principal, was being rebuffed by one of his own students.

“Of course. Well, someday soon then.” Stepping back, he allowed the boy to pass, sending from behind a silent message of apology and appeal.

 

Robby had gone to school early to work out in the weight room, so Chelsea rode the bus, speaking to no one, staring out the window for minutes at a time, registering nothing but sad memories of home while the seat jiggled and bounced beneath her. When the bus stopped, she filed off and headed for the building, buffeted along by a surge of students, seeking out her father even through the plate-glass wall. She swam through the wide front doorway and there he stood, same as always, at the junction of the two halls. For a moment she was reassured by his presence in the place where she was accustomed to finding him every morning.
But over the weekend everything had changed. A pall hung over every simple movement that used to make her happy. Terror lodged in her chest.

“Hi, Dad,” she said quietly, stopping before him, hugging a yellow portfolio.

“Hi, honey.” The words were familiar, but his smile was forced. She felt like a stranger in a foreign land where customs were different than those she knew. Already she hated picking her way so carefully through the tangled family tensions for which no protocol was available to guide her. She, who had always been so blithe in the exchange of conversation and affection with her parents, no longer knew how to approach them, what to say or do.

“Dad, what's . . . I mean . . .” Tears spurted into her eyes. “When are you and Mom going to make up?”

Tom put his arm around her and drew her away from traffic. He turned them to face a wall and bent his head to her.

“Chelsea, honey, I'm really sorry you have to be caught in the middle of this. I know it's asking a lot, but could you please just go on as you were? Just concentrate on school the way you always have, and enjoy it without spending your worries on us. We'll work it out, I swear we will, but I don't know when. In the meantime, if Mom doesn't act the same, please forgive her. If I don't act the same, forgive me, too.”

“But, Daddy, it's so hard. I didn't even want to come to school today.”

“I know, honey, but the danger of something like this is that it draws all the vigor out of us as a family, but I want us to be the way we were just as badly as you do.”

She put her head down, trying to keep her tears from spilling and ruining her makeup. “But we've never had
anything like this happen before. Our family was always so perfect.”

“I know, Chelsea, and we will be again. Not perfect. No family is perfect. I guess we're finding that out. But happy, like we used to be. I'll try really hard, okay?”

She nodded and her tears fell onto the yellow portfolio. They still faced the wall, Tom with his arm around her shoulders, both of them aware that curious students were passing behind them, probably gawking.

Chelsea tried to scrape her tears away unobtrusively. “Dad, can I use the mirror in your office?”

“Sure. I'll come with you.”

“No, it's okay. You don't have to.”

“Honey, I want to. You're the first one who's talked to me in two days, and it feels good.”

They went into his office and Chelsea took a sharp right, opened his cupboard door, and hid behind it where the secretaries couldn't see. She looked in the mirror and tried rubbing away her smeared mascara while Tom went on to his desk and picked up some telephone messages. After flipping through half of them, he dropped them and came to stand behind her.

She gave up trying to fix her makeup as their eyes met in the mirror. Two sadder reflections she had never seen in her life. “Dad, what should I do about Kent? I don't know what to say to him.”

He turned her around gently by the shoulders. “Be his friend. He'll need one.”

“I don't know if I can be.” She had worried herself sick about facing him again after that kiss.

“Give it time, then. He probably doesn't know how to treat you either.”

“I don't even know what I'll say to Erin. She's going to
be able to tell that something is wrong. I said I couldn't talk to her on the phone when she called yesterday.”

“Honey, I don't know either. Maybe we'd all better give it a day or two. A lot of feelings are involved here, not the least of which are Kent's. Whether or not he'll want the general population of this school to know he's my son is his call.”

They stood awhile, Tom with his hands on her arms, she staring at a design on his tie. How could lives change so drastically, so fast? they both wondered. Last week they'd been part of a happy family of four, and look at them now. She sighed and turned away, got eyeliner and mascara out of her purse, and began putting them to use while he walked back to his desk, picked up the phone messages but gave up reading them and went back to her.

“So what do you think of this whole deal?” he asked quietly.

She looked at him in the mirror with the mascara wand poised near her eyelashes. She shrugged. “I don't know.”

“Are you shocked?”

She looked down. “A little.”

“Yeah, me too.”

They stood close, wondering what to say next. Tom said, “I guess you'd be pretty bummed out if everybody found out who he is.” He deliberately chose the slang he heard so often in the halls. It seemed very appropriate today, and put them on equal footing.

With her chin on her chest she mumbled, “Yeah. . . I guess.”

Again he turned her around. “You angry at me?”

When she refused to lift her head he dipped his knees and got his face where she couldn't avoid it. “Just a little, maybe?”

“Maybe,” she admitted unwillingly.

“It's okay, Chelsea. I guess I'd be mad too if I were you.”

She closed the closet door and turned around. “Does Grandpa know yet?”

“Yes. I went out and told him yesterday afternoon.”

“What did he say?”

“Oh, you know Grandpa. He doesn't place blame on people for much of anything. He says that in time your mom will come to realize—that all of us will come to realize—that Kent will probably bring something into our lives instead of taking something away from us.”

She studied her dad's face, drawn with sleeplessness and worry. The bell rang, warning that classes would start in four minutes. She wanted to say, “But he's already taken something from us, hasn't he? He's taken our family happiness.” But speaking it aloud would make it too real and scary. Maybe if she didn't say it, it wouldn't be true.

Tom put a hand between her shoulder blades and started her toward the door. “You'd better go now, honey, so you aren't late for class.”

Suddenly she loved him very much, and some of her anger with him slipped away. She reached up and pressed her cheek to his, just because he looked so forlorn and tired. From the doorway she gave him a wistful parting smile, then went away carrying the memory of his hurt and worried face.

C
HELSEA
and Kent managed to avoid each other until classes passed between third and fourth periods. Until then he'd kept clear of his locker, where they used to meet, and she took alternative routes. But before fourth period he needed a notebook he'd forgotten and she—short of time—picked the quickest route to her social studies class, leading her past the spot where they used to rendezvous, exchange smiles, and feel their pulses quicken.

The memory stung them with embarrassment now.

Sure enough, she was barreling along behind a flock of kids when Kent came out of his locker aisle and they came face-to-face. They halted, pivoted, and veered apart as fast as humanly possible. They both blushed, and he hurried to get away in one direction while she did the same in the other.

They both felt stupid.

And embarrassed.

And guilty of something obscure.

* * *

Honors English, fifth period, was a fact of life. Mrs. Gardner, teacher, had been dreading it as much as Kent Arens, student. But the clock moved, the bell rang, and during the 12:13 shuffle he approached the door of room 232, where she stood as her class filed in.

She knew she should greet him, but couldn't.

He knew he should say something, but couldn't.

They encountered each other with the bristling stares of a cat and dog meeting in a doorway, each knowing it can hurt—or be hurt by—the other.

She saw in him the spit and image of her husband.

He saw in her the woman who'd married his mother's seducer.

Each viewpoint had its deserved antagonisms, but a profound respect for authority had been drilled into Kent from the time he could grasp it, and he nodded stiffly as he passed Mrs. Gardner.

She tipped up the corners of her lips but no smile domed her cheeks or touched her eyes. When she closed the door to begin class, he was seated along with everybody else. Avoiding eye contact with him became a concentrated study throughout that hour while she faced him and spoke of Greek plays and mythology, passed out copies of the
Odyssey
, and gave historical background about the classic. She explained why they were taking the chronological approach to literature, listed the segments of study, recommended available videos and paperback books that would bring Greek classics alive for them, and passed out a paper listing suggestions for extra-credit work for this unit.

Throughout her lecture Kent kept his frosty gaze fixed on her shoes. Peripherally, she was aware of this, and of the fact that he sat with his spine curved slightly to the right, an elbow on the desktop and a finger covering his upper lip,
scarcely moving through the entire fifty-two minutes. Once she forgot herself and looked him square in the face, startled by how much he resembled Tom. That glance touched off a peculiar sense of déjà vu, as if she were teaching the seventeen-year-old Tom Gardner, whom she'd never actually known.

The bell rang, her students began filing out, and Claire stood behind her desk, making herself appear busy, keeping her eyes downcast, giving herself and Kent a graceful means of separating without contact. But he lagged till the others had left, and stood before her desk like some sinewy Greek warrior, afraid of nothing.

“Mrs. Gardner?”

Her head shot up. A force field of negative ions seemed to dance between them, repelling them from one another.

“I'm sorry I barged into your house that way. I had no right to do that.”

Abruptly he spun, leaving only the squeak of his rubber-soled shoes and no chance for her reply as she watched his dark head and straight back disappear out the door.

In the empty room she plopped onto her chair as if he'd placed ten fingers on her chest and pushed. There she sat, an emotional tourbillion, her heart bumping around inside her body like two cats in a gunnysack. What was it she felt for that boy? More than resentment. He was Tom's son, and divorcing herself from that fact was impossible. Did she feel pity? No, not yet. It was too soon for pity, but she had to admire his forthrightness and courage. Warm shame rose to flood her face for having shunned him when she—as an adult and a teacher—should have been the one to set the example. Instead, he, a mere boy of seventeen, had done the dirty work of speaking to her first. What else had she expected?
He was, after all, Tom's boy, and it's exactly what Tom would have done.

The thought of Tom reopened her wound. She sat on at her desk, gathering her grievances about her like weapons, sharpening them against the whetstones of her own faithfulness and honesty during all the years she'd known him.

 

During the last period of the day Kent had weight training with Mr. Arturo. He was straddling a blue padded bench doing slow arm curls with a fifteen-pound dumbbell when a student aide from the main office walked in and handed Mr. Arturo a note. The teacher glanced at the name on the front, then approached Kent and extended it, folded and unread, between two fingers.

“Something from the office,” he said, and walked away.

Kent uncurled his right arm and left the dumbbell on the bench. Inside was a preprinted “Message from the Principal.” One of the student aides in the office had filled in the blanks with the time and the words
See Mr. Gardner in his office now.

Kent felt as if he'd dropped the dumbbell across his neck. He wasn't altogether sure he could swallow his own spit. On the other hand, his adrenaline was spurting so hard he figured he could have changed a tire without a jack.

No fair
, he thought.
Just because he's the authority around here doesn't mean he can force me to do something that's got nothing to do with my being a student and his being a principal. I'm not ready to face him. I don't know what to say.

He put the note in an inside pocket of his shorts, picked up his dumbbell, and continued doing arm curls. He followed them with a series of bench presses, incline presses, butterflies, and bent-arm flies, and eventually a full workout on his legs, bringing him to the end of the hour.

He went straight into the locker room for football practice and was lacing on his gear when Robby Gardner came in. Robby's locker was twelve feet from Kent's on the opposite side of a long varnished bench. He moved straight to it, opened the door with one hand and his jacket snaps with the other while between him and Kent four other boys dressed and rattled metal doors.

Tension buzzed across the twelve feet separating the half brothers.

Robby hung up his jacket.

Kent laced on his shoulder pads.

Robby pulled his shirt out of his jeans.

Kent reached for his jersey.

They both looked straight into their lockers. Their posture was exemplary. Their profiles were stern.

Okay, okay, so he's there. So what!

But each of them was burningly aware of the other. Each fought an urge to turn and search for physical similarities.

Robby's head turned first.

Then Kent's.

Their eyes locked, fascinated, against their wills, drawn by blood and a shared secret.

Half brothers. Born the same year. If our fates had been reversed, we might have lived in each other's shoes.

Rosy color climbed their necks while they searched for likenesses, linked by events that had happened to their parents in an era that seemed too long ago to make this present revelation seem valid.

It lasted only seconds.

Simultaneously they returned their attention to dressing, letting today's antipathy take its place between them again with all its painful and convoluted relationships. Relationships aside, one thing dominated their thoughts: each of
them stood to face a gossip mill if the word ever got out, and both were busy working out the full ramifications of that possibility.

They might be brothers genealogically, but on the football field they remained rivals.

By tacit agreement their animus was established during those first five minutes in the locker room: play together, but never let your gazes lock; present a unified appearance for the team, but remain aloof in principle; give the coach the impression of harmony, but never let your hands touch, not even when you're getting your hits in the huddle.

They headed outside for practice. The weather had turned gray and clouds roiled, ragged and raw with promised rain. The grass felt cold beneath their knuckles. Their mouth-guards tasted like mildew. Across the ear holes of their helmets the wind played like a flute in low register. Dirt smeared on their bare calves and never seemed to dry. By four-forty, when the drizzle started, they were anxious to hit the showers and go home to warm kitchens and supper.

Practice wasn't over yet, however. As usual, the coach broke them up into four groups and yelled, “Ten good plays!” signaling at least another half hour of work before he blew the three short blasts on his whistle that dismissed them.

They were lining up for their second play when Robby and Kent both saw him at once: their principal, their father, standing on the bleachers with his back to the wind, hands driven deeply into the pockets of a gray trench coat that whacked at his calves. His dark hair flapped against his forehead, and his trouser legs rippled, but he stood motionless, his attention riveted on the playing field like that of a felon before a magistrate. Alone he stood, the sole figure on that long stretch of aluminum, while rain darkened his shoulders.
Forlornness telegraphed itself from the set of those shoulders and the stillness of his stance. They caught him watching them and felt his regret reaching across the bleak autumn afternoon toward them both. Powerless against a force greater than any miserable, stubborn fixing of wills, the half brothers turned, meeting each other's eyes across the churned stretch of turf separating them. And for one brief moment, contrary to all that called out for divisiveness, they felt themselves unified by a stab of pity for the man who'd fathered them both.

 

Chelsea made supper that night. Her eagerness to please nearly broke Tom's heart as she presented her conciliatory offering—Spanish rice and green Jell-O with pears—then waited with hopeful eyes darting back and forth between her mother and father to see if her ploy would work.

They sat. They ate. They spoke.

But when their eyes met, his were seeking and hers unforgiving.

After supper Tom went back to school because the French Club was having its first meeting to discuss a trip to France next summer, and they had invited him to sit in. Also, adult education pottery classes were starting in the art department, and the city policemen and their wives were beginning their mixed volleyball league in the gym, so he stayed until the building was empty.

At home, Claire finished her classroom prep and prowled around like a caged cat, trying to make herself do one more load of laundry but needing a vent for her frustrations instead.

She called Ruth Bishop and Ruth said, “Come on over.”

Dean was gone again, working out at the club, and Ruth
was writing a letter to her parents. She pushed her stationery aside and poured two glasses of wine.

“All right,” she said across the kitchen table. “Let it all hang out.”

“It seems my husband has a son nobody bothered to tell me about till now.”

Claire spilled it all, crying some, cursing some, wailing out her hurt and disillusionment, drinking two glasses of wine while venting her anguish on Ruth. She told of her initial shock followed by anger, then her chagrin while facing the boy at school. But she returned to the moment that stung worst.

“I wish I'd never picked up the phone when she called back, but I just couldn't help myself. And now I've heard him talking to her and it makes it all so real. Oh, God, Ruth, do you know what it's like to hear your husband talking to a woman he's been in bed with? Especially after he's told you he didn't want to marry you? Do you know how that hurts?”

“I know,” Ruth said.

“It was as much their silences as what they said. Sometimes I could hear them breathing. Just. . .just breathing, like. . . like lovers who are dying to see each other; and then he said she could call him anytime, and she told him the same thing. For God's sake, Ruth, he's my husband! And he's saying that to her?”

“I'm sorry you have to go through this. I know exactly how you feel because I've been there myself. I told you, I've heard Dean hang up a dozen times when I walked into the room. Then he'd lie when I'd ask who he'd been talking to. Take it from me, Claire, all men are liars.”

“He claims there's nothing between them anymore, but how can I believe him?”

A look of disgust put an edge on Ruth's features. She refilled her wineglass with a poke of the bottle. “Take my word, you're a damned fool if you do.”

Her acerbic glance lifted and seemed to leave some things unsaid.

“Ruth, what is it? Do you know something about this? Has he talked to you . . . or Dean?”

Ruth considered before replying.

“Has he?” Claire persisted.

“Not because he wanted to.”

“What does that mean?”

“I saw them together last Saturday, at least I think it was her. Monica Arens?”

“Oh God. . .” Claire whispered, covering her lips. “Where?”

“In front of Ciatti's in Woodbury.”

“Are you sure?”

“I walked right up to his car window and leaned down and talked to him. At first I thought it was you with him, but then I saw her, and to tell the truth, I felt like a fool. I didn't know what to say once I realized it wasn't you.”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing. Just introduced her.”

“What did she look like?”

“Nondescript. Blondish hair parted on the side, hardly any makeup. Kind of a long nose.”

“What were they doing?”

“If you're asking did he kiss her or anything like that, the answer is no. But I have to be honest with you, Claire. What do you think a man and woman are doing when they meet in a car in the middle of a parking lot? If you ask him, I'm sure he'll deny it, but it looks to me like you're getting the shaft just like I am.”