Mermaid: A Memoir of Resilience (32 page)

We made a film one weekend which qualified as absurd, although we had been aiming for Kafkaesque. Later, with the camera rolling, we drank shots of tequila in Ted’s attic bedroom and made our post-film “documentary” with comments from film critics and historians. I played a critic interviewed while lying on the floor with my legs up against the wall. My body formed an L, except that I’d turned one foot backward so that the toes of each leg pointed in opposite directions—a detail about which the interviewer, Ted, made no comment.

After we finished filming, Ted called out to a friend, “Play something on that fiddle, Rich.” He tended to order people around as if he were reclining on a bed of goose down, snapping his fingers. In fact, he was sitting campfire-style with Dad’s World War II pilot’s cap strapped to his chin and circa-1920 glasses on his nose. Wind rattled the eaves around us while Richard, who had studied violin at Juilliard since age eight, played a Bach piece. I watched Ted pick up the antique guitar Mom had given him for Christmas. He stroked its odd, brass body while listening attentively to “Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring.” It occurred to me that Ted had a unique kind of love for our mother, that because of Mom he took no hardship personally and had learned to embrace what is strange in this world. He knew that Mom loved him, even if she expressed her love in a contemptuous sort of way. That was enough for Ted. Why couldn’t it be enough for me? Why did I always doubt my family’s affection?

Richard finished, and we all cheered. Then Ted and Chip launched into their latest ballad, a ditty really, set to a guitar rhythm suspiciously similar to the theme song for
The Beverly Hillbil
lies
:

Well, it all started at Motel 6,

You ordered hash browns, toast, and grits,

It was there that I knew this feeling was no lie,

For ... you ... are ... the ... ap-ple dumplin’ of my eye

The next night, Tom and I got separated from the others in a cemetery after leaving the Purple Pub, where Ted had bought us all one last pitcher of beer with loose change he scrounged from the floor. Tom and I wandered in circles around headstones instead of office buildings. Our combined navigational skills portended a future of poor planning and missed opportunities, and yet this was the happiest I’d been since before Frank’s death. Outside of these weekends, I applied for credit cards, drove a company car, and toted a briefcase. Occasionally I asked myself if I was going backward by dating a college boy. What about Tom’s education? He kept leaving campus midweek to visit me in Newton, which was jeopardizing his near-perfect grade point average.

Maybe I was being too hard on myself, but my ambivalence swelled into deeper conflict as I contrasted my life with the lives of Claire and my other friends from Cincinnati. While Claire was having her second baby and moving around the country with her young family, I was going to Ultimate Frisbee matches. Ted seemed to have adjusted to the idea of Tom dating me, but I couldn’t bring myself to tell anyone else in my family. I was two years older than Tom. That would be frowned upon. As far as men were concerned, I’d managed to challenge the limits of what my family considered taboo every time. That might not have been such a problem except that I wanted so to get it right this time. My ambivalence grew.

When I couldn’t tolerate it anymore, I broke up with Tom. Two days later, he showed up on my doorstep with roses and an excellent short story that he’d stayed up writing the night before. The story was about a rugby match—his metaphor for loss and pain, I assumed. It never occurred to me that I might represent the opposition. Instead, I was humbled by the subtlety of the story’s insight. He left for school the next day and after that I couldn’t imagine myself without him. I tuned out my reservations about his age. Apparently Ted had learned to do the same, and it helped that we didn’t mention any of this to Mom.

“W
hat am I going to tell my friends?” Mom screamed over the telephone. This was in the fall of 1985. Tom and I had recently moved into a basement apartment on Capitol Hill for Tom’s first job, and Mom had just found this out through Tom’s mother. “That is a sssin,” she hissed over the phone.

We had different definitions of sin. To me, a sin occurred when someone intentionally hurt someone else. “We’re just minding our own business,” I said. “Your friends do not need to know my sleeping arrangements.”

“But they already do.”

“How?” I asked.

“Whaddaya mean? I had to tell them!”

Well, then you’re naive, I wanted to say, because I knew dozens of Catholics who slept with boyfriends and girlfriends before marriage. However, Tom’s mother—a newbie to parenting an adult child—had broken the code of silence. She’d asked him if he was living with me. None of the parents we knew actually asked that question. They just pretended that their adult children did not have premarital sex. I was proud of Tom for telling the truth. We would not lie or sneak around, because we had made the choice that was right for us.

We were not prepared for the backlash, though. After his mother called my mother, she stopped talking to Tom. Over several months, Tom’s mother’s only communication with Tom had come in a package she sent containing the
Confessions of St. Augustine
, no letter included, not even a Post-It. Tom laughed when he opened it, but I could see that he was shaken. Upon settling into our apartment in DC, he read the book. Now he was pressing for marriage.

“Not a good idea,” I said. “We have worse problems than our mothers.”

“This has nothing to do with our mothers,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “It has to do with the fact that we are not ready.” I was referring to our shared history of stubbornness and pride, which had revealed itself after we left Boston and just before we moved to Washington DC.

In between cities, we’d taken the month of August to backpack through Europe, but in the final days of a fabulous and eye-opening trip, I grew tired of lugging forty pounds on my back. I’d taken on too much, and instead of reorganizing our plans, I started griping. Then I got drunk on a train before we arrived in London, which made Tom fume. How could I be so careless? We weren’t in Disneyland. There were pickpockets in London. Had I not read Dickens? Of course not! I’d had almost no education in contrast to his, and worst of all, I was foolish. I depended on the kindness of strangers.

To which I reminded Tom that he had no education whatsoever in the school of hard knocks, from which I had a master’s degree. As I saw it, he was imperious. All the books in the world could not possibly open the eyes of someone so sheltered.

We were right in front of Westminster Abbey when Tom proved to me that he had earned an honorary doctorate from the school of hard knocks. He’d had his own gaggle of Catholic brothers to brawl with, his mouth washed out with soap, and his head pounded in football and rugby matches since he was in diapers. In front of a constable, he all but beat his chest and yodeled like Tarzan. “Would you like me to take him in?” asked the constable, and for an instant I actually hesitated, but that would have escalated our problem. Besides, it was not as if I hadn’t provoked him by getting drunk on the train. We apologized and flew out the next day. But we were not the same couple we’d been in Massachusetts by the time we took up residence in Washington DC.

In September, having committed to living together, having outraged our medieval mothers, and having transferred my job, I realized that there was no going back to Boston for me. Besides, I loved Tom. Yet, by late fall, talk of marriage still seemed premature. As I saw it, we needed to shirk this penance that our mothers wanted us to make. Until now, I had thought that Tom shared my views on Catholicism, which is to say that we would not be bullied into practicing it. We would pick and choose our own form of worship. I failed to see that the Water Street Tom had been replaced by the Capitol Hill Tom. He was going through his own changes. Hadn’t I changed after college? The problem was that Tom’s trajectory was the opposite of mine. The new Tom was finding his voice, one that embraced our parents’ Catholicism.

I’d hoped that we would find our own brand of Catholicism, one with more wiggle room on certain issues. Tom was talking about law school. “Why law school?” I said. He’d always intended to become an English professor. Next he was saying he would work full-time and go to night school five nights a week and Saturdays. Simultaneously he bemoaned the idea, saying that he should be going to Harvard Law, to which I would say, “Then you should apply to Harvard. You’ll probably get in.” But he refused. He would stay in his job and go to Georgetown at night.

The only goal that we shared unequivocally was more education. I was applying to graduate programs. I had decided in Boston that I would return to school for a doctoral degree in psychology. I’d imagined us entering graduate programs together, living on stipends and part-time jobs, and being poor for a few years. In Massachusetts, Tom supported that plan; in DC, he supported it only in theory.

Then, on a date that, based on past experiences with my family, I should have deleted from my calendar, Christmas Eve, Tom convinced me to look at engagement rings. At a jewelry counter in Cincinnati, he slipped a ring on my finger, and I said, “Maybe we should put this back. I don’t even know which finger to wear it on. This is a claw, not a hand. Let’s just wait on this.”

“We’re past that point.”

“We are only starting out.” There was so much to sort out: grad school, kids, or not ...

“Look, if you love me ...”

Would I have moved to a new city with him, at the risk of losing my family, if I hadn’t loved him? But I was beginning to see that Tom’s definition of love might be as different from mine as Mom’s definition of sin. His idea was to sacrifice what he now considered an irresponsible goal, a doctorate in English, and instead to grit his teeth through work and law school because that was a “responsible goal.” As I saw it, that decision made no sense. I didn’t need him to support me. If not for the fix I found myself in—our mothers in an uproar, my father suffering from a failed kidney transplant, and the prospect of being banished by my family and by Tom—I would have said no to marriage at this time. Instead, I silently apologized to myself and to Tom for what I was about to do. I accepted.

M
y father was grinning as he came from the living room, where Tom had just asked for my hand during the Christmas Eve party. Mom’s reluctance to show enthusiasm was nothing new as far as weddings went in our family. She’d sulked at Liz’s rehearsal dinner. Mom greeted any man who wanted to take a daughter away from her with suspicion.

The enthusiastic parent-of-the-bride role always went to Dad, which was almost comical for a man so taciturn. But he rallied the troops despite his weakened condition to make an animated announcement in the party room, putting a stop to the pinball players, the football watchers, the grandchildren on scooters, and the baby xylophoners. He clapped a hand around Tom’s shoulder and told everyone: “Quiet down because Tom’s got something to say.” A room filled with roughly thirty-five people of all ages went from its customary level of chaos to military decorum. Dad was grinning from ear to ear. I could probably count the times I’d seen him smile that way.

In an equally excited voice, Tom said, “Eileen and I are getting married!” At first there was silence. I thought, “Oh, please,” but then Ted and Kevin gave Tom congratulatory slaps on the back. Bridget knew Tom from Massachusetts, and she had liked him from the start. The “babies,” now in college, were nice to everybody. On the other hand, I’m not sure some of my siblings even congratulated the groom-to-be. Their stamp of approval would have traveled like a human wave through one of these announcements.

Tom was not used to being snubbed. In fact, he often chided me for my obsequious nature, as he called it. He hated when I stepped aside on a sidewalk or a staircase for strangers to pass, although I thought that was just common sense. Admittedly, though, I would catch myself apologizing to trees or desks after bumping into them. This came from being shoved about, usually unintentionally, but often enough that I was used to getting out of other people’s way. As a former rugby player, Tom couldn’t grasp my mentality.

We never discussed my siblings’ indifference toward his wedding announcement, but I hoped that he would write it off. I was used to it and, while it hurt me, I knew that my siblings would argue that they had a right to uphold their principles. Tom and I had brazenly moved in together and made no attempt to keep it a secret. Aside from that, my siblings were Cincinnatians through and through, which meant that they could be polite but cool with outsiders. They clumped together at social gatherings. They did not intend to be exclusive, but they had an impenetrable bond.

Outsiders bold enough to step into their circle were subject to political and religious scrutiny. Ted and I were outsiders. We knew that about ourselves. When I’d fallen in love with Tom, I’d rejoiced in the idea of a mate who could blend in with my family. He had enough of the Catholic camouflage that he would not be targeted, and yet he was a thinking man who would not dismiss his differences in order to fit in. What I failed to anticipate was that Tom would refuse to be relegated to outsider status. That went against his nature.

Three weeks after Christmas, the phone rang in our bedroom on Capitol Hill. Outside, the sun fought gray clouds; inside, it was a gloomy Sunday afternoon, a day for paperwork. Without thinking, I picked up the ringing phone.

“Have you set the date?” Mom asked.

I was holding in my hands the application to a doctoral program in clinical psychology at Howard University.

“Well?” she said, annoyed.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe two years from now?”

This was met with a walloping silence before she scolded me in a whisper—I could practically feel her lower jaw jutting out, her chin pushing through the receiver into my ear. “You are killing your father!” Then she hung up on me.

I didn’t call back.

A month later, on the eve of Valentine’s Day, Dad was giving a speech at a fundraiser for his old high school, accepting an award for George Ratterman, his teammate who had gone on to become a pro football legend. Being there on behalf of his old teammate, Dad was probably the most excited he’d been in years. Before an audience that included Michael, at least one uncle, and a number of Dad’s close friends, Dad delivered another one of his “St. Crispin’s Day speeches.” He began by explaining that the St. Xavier High School football team had once been called the Musketeers, just like the university’s team. They had changed their name during World War II, when old teammates were dying by the dozens on the battlefield. What kept hope alive in Cincinnati was George Ratterman and his blazing passes. Those who had been on the field or in the stands back in the forties would have remembered Dad as the receiver of several passes. Dad paused to describe a few of them. It was because of those passes whizzing over the heads of so many opponents, he said, that Xavier changed its team name. And what did they change it to?