!!!!!*****WORKING DRAFT*****!!!!!
In December, Mike unexpectedly came up to Cambridge on a snowy Friday evening. I got the call from our house mother as I sat studying for Child Development, cozy in my flannel nightgown and crocheted quilt, a hand-me down from my sister.
“There’s someone here to see you, a Michael Harrison. Shall I send him up?” Mother sounded bemused, as if an orphan had arrived, lost and looking for his family. “He looks pretty cold.”
“No, I’ll come down.”
He did look a bit bedraggled, snow still melting in his hair. He wore a massive navy blue wool coat, suffering from too-many dry cleanings, then wrinkled after two decades at the bottom of a foot locker.
“Can we s-s-s-sit over there?” he asked, indicating the dormant fireplace centered in the lounge.
I glanced at Mother, asking, “OK if we …?” She waddled around her desk, leaned down and fiddled with a switch. The gas flame burst up with that familiar odor.
“It was snowing all the way from Sturbridge on the turnpike,” Mike complained. “Every time I tried to pass a truck the slush spattered and smeared the windshield. I almost got blown off the road a couple of times.”
“What are you doing here?” I asked, a little irritated. I wanted to finish the chapter tonight, and doubted that would happen once we got up to my room.
“The Coach told me I wasn’t going to swim in the meet tomorrow, against Coast Guard,” he started.
“That’s at home, or in New London?”
“Home, so I don’t have to be back until noon.” Meaning he didn’t have to leave until the next morning. I inwardly groaned, then felt a familiar thrill flowing from my hips down past my knees.
Sighing, I smiled and said, “I’ve really to finish this chapter tonight, but I am glad you’re here. Let’s get warm and talk a bit, then can we study down here?” He only had a slim volume of the Divine Comedy with him, along with one of those composition books, the one with abstract black and white splotches on the cover. “It’s Kagan. I’ve got to learn more about newborns, and the first year.”
“How’s that going? There’s a lab with that class, right?”
“Uh-huh. Three hours, every other week. We watch through a one-way mirror, then talk about what we’re seeing in small groups.” I looked over at the fire, and shifted my sister’s blanket so it covered his legs as well. I went on. “It’s just so amazing, to watch what they’re doing, mothers and their babies. He’s studying the smallest interactions, has us looking at where the moms’ eyes go and what the babies are doing, every little movement. He gives the mom a task, telling her, ‘Help your baby build something with these blocks. Don’t worry about us, you won’t even know we’re here.’ Then we’re supposed to fill in these charts, tables with lists of behaviors, trying to see which things the moms do are most successful in getting the babies to cooperate.”
“How old are they?”
“The babies? They’re 11, 12 months old, I think. It’s fascinating, watching them both.”
“What do you see? What are you learning?”
“Well, we’re supposed to be very analytical about it all, and I try and fill the charts in like he said. But all the time, I’m thinking, this is what love is, how it starts. It always starts with ‘mother-baby pair bonding.’ Trying to analyze, codify what love is, that’s de-mystifying, no?”
“Sometimes, I feel cursed,” Mike mused. I waited, wondering what he meant. “I …feel things, they come from somewhere inside my head. Instead of just letting them flow on out, I have to analyze them, make sense of what I’m feeling, turn emotion into logical thought. I can’t stop thinking, sometimes I wish I could turn it off.” I mussed his hair, getting a thin smile and nose-laugh in return. He added, “She’s having us read Freud now, Introduction To Psychoanalysis.” “She” was the professor we called “Katy Winters” after the star of a long-running series of commercials for Secret Deodorant. She and her husband had gone from Harvard grad school to teach at W, after a two year hiatus in India, where they studied micro-finance, he from the perspective of an economist, she as a psychologist interested in how impoverished women became empowered when given small loans to start a home-based business. We became fascinated with her for two other reasons. A short story appeared about them in the New Yorker, billed as fiction, with different names, but everything else from physical descriptions to their Harvard and India connections, was directly pulled from their lives. When Mike pointed this out to her, she shyly admitted a friend had used them a springboard to get his writing career launched. And, probably more important, she was pregnant, almost full term, yet still leading his Training-Group class.
“She’s still teaching, hasn’t delivered yet?”
“No…funny story. Amazing really. You know, we have the group Monday and Wednesday, three hours each afternoon. Couple of days ago, she seemed a little antsy, kept going out to the bathroom, Turns out she was going into labor. Apparently, she went to the hospital right after class, had the baby in two hours, and left the next morning. I bet she comes back to the group next week.”
“Her first baby, right? That sounds quick.”
“Well, she is tall, you know, taller than me. That’s supposed to make it easier, I think.”
“It’d be really cool, if she brought the baby to class.”
“We’ve already talked about that. She’s planning to, even told us to expect her to breast-feed.”
I tried opening my book again, pretending to read. But the thought of Katy and her new baby, along with Mike’s immediate presence, short-circuited my attention. I rubbed his sleeve, finding the fabric scratchy and thick.
“Where’d you get this? I haven’t seen it before. It looks warm.”
“It was my dad’s. He got it at the Naval Academy. He only wore it one year, when he went on his first cruise. Remember, that was also his last. He left there, always told us they let him go because his eyes turned bad, he got near-sighted or something. But I’ve always thought it was because he gets sea-sick. Real bad, can hardly fly in an airplane, one of those people who can’t sit in the back seat of a car. My sister’s the same way. Anyway, he was opening his old Navy footlocker, pulling out stuff to throw away or give away. He and G, now that they have a place to retire, I think they’re deciding what to take and leave behind. So it’s mine now. A real Navy pea-coat. Not one of those fake surplus store ones, that only comes down part-way, This one keeps you warm and dry in the North Atlantic in the winter, ought to work just fine for days like this, right?”
I nodded, tried to seem impressed.
He went on, “My father wants to get started on building their house in Snowmass. He’s going back there over the break, to find an architect and builder. He’s rented one of the condos in the village, wants us all to go and ski. Maybe do it again in spring?” One of the girls had put the Beatles’ White Album on the dorm record player. “Rocky Raccoon” was playing, Paul warbling about the “Black Hills of Dakota”. Images of foreboding mountains simmered in my head.
“Are you going to go?”
“S is, I think I will as well. I want to try skiing again, see how good I can get at it?”
“But won’t you miss swimming, not get a chance to practice?” I found myself asking. When what I really meant was, Won’t you miss me, miss our special talks? How can we remain together, apart?
“OK if we go upstairs now?” I asked. Nodding assent, he got up, shaking the coat off. A small rectangle on onion skin paper fell from a pocket. Already headed for the stairs, he didn’t notice. I picked it up. A few typed lines read:
DEBBIE, I
Debbie turns her eyes toward mine
and sinks a gaze in me that shatters
every fibre that I live by.
I do not know her, scarcely love her, yet she
owns me,
With her eyes, so blue, and hair, so
brown and golden from the sun
I am stunned by her quiet face and smile.
And so she holds me.
And then she speaks, her unformed mind
asserts itself on mine, taunts my openness;
apprehensive, where no incisive, perceptive glance
would care to go –
She lives as still a child, though
I treat her as full-grown.
Sometime in July, 1968
Back in my room, I managed to slip the re-folded onion skin back into his pea-coat, draped over my desk chair, without him knowing.