And here's the next thing on the to-do list: a Free Sample. Someone asked for a novel about a young man who, like Bill Clinton, has to try to reach some sort of peace with a dying father-figure. Since Bill Clinton has told his own story rather well, and it just may be the best thing he gave to this country, this fictional story of how the character comes to that first step toward forgiveness is a mash-up. Bits of my stepson’s story were in my mind, bits of my own, bits of an ex-boyfriend’s, bits of men's published memoirs. This summer I've been reading my way through a box of vintage magazines my father saved; his notes on the covers called attention to other articles, but the majority of those magazines contained a father-son, or rarely a father-daughter, reconciliation story.
This story is a heavy read. If it grows into a novel, it will get heavier. Its purpose is to vent some feelings the collaborator and I have lived through, not to embarrass our other relatives, but to encourage people to think and talk about reconciliation with their parents (or with their children). Mr. Spencer is a callous heel, his son's becoming another, and in the potential novel about him his family will meet parents who are even harder to love...except that, sometimes, love seems to improve them.
***
The phone was ringing. He didn’t recognize the number. He pressed the button to put the caller on hold while he transferred the call to his answering service. Instead he heard a stranger’s voice: “...James Randall Spencer, please.”
“Speaking.” If the woman was selling something he’d blast her...
“JR, my name is Caroline Murray. I’m your stepmother,” she said.
His ears rang. He heard his heart pounding at the top of his aching head.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but your father is ill,” she said. “The doctors at University Hospital are fairly sure he has cancer, but they’ve not located the cancer yet. It would mean a great deal to him if you could spend some time with him now.”
“Time,” he repeated idiotically, massaging his scalp.
“I’m sorry,” she repeated. “I know that’s a shock—well, it’s been one to me, to see him deteriorate so fast. His kidneys are involved. His blood minerals go in and out of balance; he goes in and out of touch with reality. When he does know what’s going on, JR, he always asks about you. He didn’t want me to call you or your mother, and yet he does want to see you again. More than anything, I think. We don’t know how many days he may have. The sooner you could come out, the better. He’s very ill.”
“Stepmother,” he said, trying to make sense of what he’d just heard. “My mother never told me I had a stepmother.”
“We’ve been together almost ten years,” she said. “I always hoped to meet you under better circumstances. You’re not a boxer, are you?”
“Boxer? Not since high school. I work for a telecommunications company.”
“I thought so. JR, your father always wants to watch boxing, but only lightweight boxing, because that was your sport in high school.”
“Sh—” he blurted.
“Well don’t say it to me, say it to him,” she said. “Stepson, please—I know nothing about your situation. All I know is that when my husband loses memories of everything else, he asks about you. I’m sure you know where to find the University Hospital, where Dr. Wetherby is the head of the cancer department. When your father’s not there, he’s at home...do you have our address?”
He wrote down the address, read it back to her, wrote down her and his father’s phone numbers. His headache had subsided into numbness, and not a blindness, but a sort of tunnel vision. He saw letters and numbers on a notepad. He saw more letters and numbers on his computer screen. Those numbers related to a work-related problem, which was soluble. His eyes held on to those numbers as if they were the ropes and posts of a pier. He landed on the accounting problem and tinkered with codes and numbers. Before the end of the day he was able to tell the accounting department what to shut down while he plugged in his solution. It seemed to work perfectly.
He drove himself home, thinking about his elegant solution to the accounting data problem. He was a precision driver; that was one thing he’d inherited from the old man. No chorus of horns warned him that only part of his mind was steering the car.
Stepmother.
His parents had always agreed that their marriage had been a mistake. They stayed together because they’d had a church wedding. They went to church together on Sundays, and entertained his father’s few friends from work and his mother’s dozens of new connections on Saturdays. His mother had always kept her looks; his father had always seemed sincerely proud of that. At home, his father was usually out of the country on business—it was no secret that he’d chosen a job with as much international travel as possible. When the old man did come home after work, he went straight into the den. If the woman didn’t pursue him into the den for a quarrel, the man drank himself to sleep in front of the TV.
As a child JR had always seen his beautiful, vivacious mother’s side of things. She was emotional; she said terrible things to him, as she did to his father, when she was angry, but she was extra-nice to make up for it afterward. Then he’d realized, when the news channels went into their feeding frenzy, that one of her pet politicians had been caught hosting a drug party with money his own mother had raised by cheating poor people out of their homes. Everyone thought his mother had a warm and loving heart. JR knew his mother’s heart was as cold and hard as his father’s.
So far as he could tell the old man’s heart was pure anthracite. James Martin Spencer had taught him to swim by throwing him into the pool, taught him not to be afraid of bullies by signing him up for boxing, and taught him to stay sober by lacing his first few drinks with emetic pills. JR hated bullies and, so far as he knew, JM Spencer was the meanest bully he’d ever faced.
How a man like JM Spencer had ever persuaded one woman to marry him, JR didn’t want to know, but now apparently there were three. His mother was a second wife JM used to compare, always unfavorably, to the first one, and now JR had a stepmother.
JR had promised himself he wouldn’t walk into the trap that had destroyed whatever good qualities his parents must once have had. In high school, where he’d been a skinny geek with a painfully cultivated set of boxing moves, never dating the same girl twice was no problem. In his twenties, when his mother’s eyebrows and father’s cheekbones and so on finally came together to form an adult face, he’d been tearfully called a heartbreaker, a callous heel, and a closet gay. At thirty-five he’d become comfortable enough with his flaming feminist housemate Norah Lee that their other housemates had moved out, then been replaced by the children in the front room.
They were his children, beyond all doubt. If their faces hadn’t shown it, their fierce concentration on their game would have done. He’d insisted on their video games being the kind that called for large muscle movement. As he walked in, so far as JR could tell, James Jefferson’s little dance was steering a getaway car through a Rocky Mountain pass while Tamara Louise’s was blowing the wheels off the gangsters’ cars.
He walked past them to Norah’s home office.
“Riga, dear, I can’t just write that chapter for you. If you want to put it in, you’ve got to tell me what happened.”
JR waited. Norah quietly clicked her mouse, no doubt working on a whole separate document, while the heiress sobbed on about the chapter her fans most wanted to read being too painful to write.
“Well, you don’t have to go into all the details do you? You can say you blacked out or spaced out or something and don’t remember what happened next.”
If JR had ever formed the smoking habit he could have smoked two cigarettes or more while Riga von Hake ululated into Norah’s phone. Instead he considered different ways of saying what was on his mind, finding all of them equally bad, and watched Norah multitask.
“Oh yes!”Norah clicked back, obviously, to the memoir she was ghostwriting. Riga von Hake talked more than a hundred words a minute when she got going. Norah was her ghostwriter because Norah’s fingers could keep up with her. “Mhm,” she murmured, typing, and “Oh,” and “Oh no.”
The address the stepmother had given him was in a neighborhood JR’s mother would have avoided. Maybe that was why. JR’s mother believed in using money to impress people; his father, not so much. It wasn’t a slum, exactly. JR had been in that neighborhood. The scholarship kids at his high school lived there. Little look-alike houses were all packed together on the slope of the hill below the best public elementary school in the county. Kids played in the low-traffic streets; adults grilled and gardened in the yards. Would JM Spencer have moved there because he and this Murray woman had a school-age child? Did JR now have stepsiblings the age of his own children?
He pictured the old man sitting in his armchair, more than half drunk. “What’d you do all day?”
“I fixed the part of the accounting system the accounting people keep messing up.”
“How long d’it take you?”
“About six hours.”
“Six hours? An accounting system like that? You ought to have been able to rewrite the entire system from the DOS prompt up in three hours.”
To block it out he’d liked to hang out with friends who, according to the old man, weren’t worth counting as friends. Maybe they weren’t. The crowd started to break up when one new chemical experiment of Marla’s sent several of them to the hospital. Some of them were still locked up there. Jeremy, the suspected squealer, was run down by a car that fit the description of the one Marla’s brother used to drive, and Paul, the actual squealer, became a missing person. Sitting on Paul’s bed with Paul’s family pet purring beside him, JR had helped generate a new identity for Paul: Tom Gray. About ten years ago, feeling curious, he’d found that Tom Gray was also a missing person, now.
“Breathe,” Norah was saying. “Biofeedback time. Count one deep breath below the big red one. Count two deep breaths below the big orange two...”
JR let himself visualize the numbers along with Riga von Hake. It was silly but it helped.
“So where are those friends of yours now?” the old man had rasped.
“I don’t know,” seventeen-year-old JR lied.
“Well, I do! They’re behind bars, aren’t they? Where druggies like that belong!”
It was June. Seventeen-year-old JR had a summer job to do before he went to college. He went upstairs and wrote a note telling his parents not to worry; he’d heard of an even better job and was going to college now. Hah. He’d been all set for an internship in a government office. Arriving after all the summer jobs on the mall were taken, he’d been lucky to get work as a busboy, especially as he’d started the summer living in a shelter. He used to get to sleep at night fantasizing that the big, posh house of his high school years was his again, because his parents were dead.
“Wow,” Norah was breathing into the phone. “You were so brave, Riga.”
JR had been brave. He’d joined a good club at college, had his share of dates later, got a good job. Norah was the closest thing he’d had to a friend since the night Paul became Tom Gray. Actually, considered as a friend, Norah was a good one. It was just more fun to consider her as the girl who used to multitask all around the house, naked, in summer. Sometimes when the children were out of the house she still did that.
“I did. I think I’ve got it all. So let me send it now, and find out what’s on my housemate’s mind, okay? It’s going to be,” Norah rolled her eyes at JR, “a sensational book.”
Forgetting the ways he’d planned to break the news, JR said, “I just heard that my father’s dying of cancer.”
“Are you serious?”
“Yeah,” JR said, and his ears began ringing again. “Might leave me some money if I go out to see him. I think I'll do that this weekend.”
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