Chapter 1 #2
Red grabbed the receiver at the very same instant that Abby flung herself across him to grab it herself. He had it first, but there was a little tussle and somehow she was the one who ended up with it. She sat up straight and said, “Denny?”
Then she said, “Oh. Jeannie.”
Red lay flat again.
“No, no, we’re not in bed yet,” she said. There was a pause. “Certainly. What’s wrong with yours?” Another pause. “It’s no trouble at all. I’ll see you at eight tomorrow. Bye.”
She held the receiver toward Red, and he took it from her and reached over to replace it in its cradle.
“She wants to borrow my car,” she told him. She sank back onto her side of the bed.
Then she said, in a thin, lonesome-sounding voice, “I guess star sixty-nine won’t work now, will it.”
“No,” Red said, “I guess not.”
“Oh, Red. Oh, what are we going to do? We’ll never, ever hear from him again! He’s not going to give us another chance!”
“Now, hon,” he told her. “We’ll hear from him. I promise.” And he reached for her and drew her close, settling her head on his shoulder.
They lay like that for some time, until gradually Abby stopped fidgeting and her breaths grew slow and even.
Red, though, went on staring up into the dark.
At one point, he mouthed some words to himself in an experimental way.
“ ‘… need to tell you something,’ ” he mouthed, not even quite whispering it.
Then, “ ‘… like to tell you something.’ ” Then, “ ‘Dad, I’d like to …’ ‘Dad, I need to …’ ” He tossed his head impatiently on his pillow.
He started over. “ ‘… tell you something: I’m gay.’ ‘… tell you something: I think I’m gay.
’ ‘I’m gay.’ ‘I think I’m gay.’ ‘I think I may be gay.’ ‘I’m gay. ’ ”
But eventually he grew silent, and at last he fell asleep too.
Well, of course they did hear from him again.
The Whitshanks weren’t a melodramatic family.
Not even Denny was the type to disappear off the face of the earth, or sever all contact, or stop speaking—or not permanently, at least. It was true that he skipped the beach trip that summer, but he might have skipped it anyhow; he had to make his pocket money for the following school year.
(He was attending St. Eskil College, in Pronghorn, Minnesota.) And he did telephone in September.
He needed money for textbooks, he said. Unfortunately, Red was the only one home at the time, so it wasn’t a very revealing conversation.
“What did you talk about?” Abby demanded, and Red said, “I told him his textbooks had to come out of his earnings.”
“I mean, did you talk about that last phone call? Did you apologize? Did you explain? Did you ask him any questions?”
“We didn’t really get into it.”
“Red!” Abby said. “This is classic! This is such a classic reaction: a young person announces he’s gay and his family just carries on like before, pretending they didn’t hear.”
“Well, fine,” Red said. “Call him back. Get in touch with his dorm.”
Abby looked uncertain. “What reason should I give him for calling?” she asked.
“Say you want to grill him.”
“I’ll just wait till he phones again,” she decided.
But when he phoned again—which he did a month or so later, when Abby was there to answer—it was to talk about his plane reservations for Christmas vacation.
He wanted to change his arrival date, because first he was going to Hibbing to visit his girlfriend.
His girlfriend! “What could I say?” Abby asked Red later. “I had to say, ‘Okay, fine.’ ”
“What could you say,” Red agreed.
He didn’t refer to the subject again, but Abby herself sort of simmered and percolated all those weeks before Christmas.
You could tell she was just itching to get things out in the open.
The rest of the family edged around her warily.
They knew nothing about the gay announcement—Red and Abby had concurred on that much, not to tell them without Denny’s say-so—but they could sense that something was up.
It was Abby’s plan (though not Red’s) to sit Denny down and have a nice heart-to-heart as soon as he got home.
But on the morning of the day that his plane was due in, they had a letter from St. Eskil reminding them of the terms of their contract: the Whitshanks would be responsible for the next semester’s tuition even though Denny had withdrawn.
“ ‘Withdrawn,’ ” Abby repeated. She was the one who had opened the letter, although both of them were reading it.
The slow, considering way she spoke brought out all the word’s ramifications.
Denny had withdrawn; he was withdrawn; he had withdrawn from the family years ago.
What other middle-class American teenager lived the way he did—flitting around the country like a vagrant, completely out of his parents’ control, getting in touch just sporadically and neglecting whenever possible to give them any means of getting in touch with him?
How had things come to such a pass? They certainly hadn’t allowed the other children to behave this way.
Red and Abby looked at each other for a long, despairing moment.
Understandably, therefore, the subject that dominated Christmas that year was Denny’s leaving school.
(He had decided school was a waste of money, was all he had to say, since he didn’t have the least idea what he wanted to do in life.
Maybe in a year or two, he said.) His gayness, or his non-gayness, just seemed to get lost in the shuffle.
“I can almost see now why some families pretend they weren’t told,” Abby said after the holidays.
“Mm-hmm,” Red said, poker-faced.
Of Red and Abby’s four children, Denny had always been the best-looking.
(A pity more of those looks hadn’t gone to the girls.) He had the Whitshank straight black hair and narrow, piercing blue eyes and chiseled features, but his skin was one shade tanner than the paper-white skin of the others, and he seemed better put together, not such a bag of knobs and bones.
Yet there was something about his face—some unevenness, some irregularity or asymmetry—that kept him from being truly handsome.
People who remarked on his looks did so belatedly, in a tone of surprise, as if they were congratulating themselves on their powers of discernment.
In birth order, he came third. Amanda was nine when he was born, and Jeannie was five.
Was it hard on a boy to have older sisters?
Intimidating? Demeaning? Those two could be awfully sure of themselves—especially Amanda, who had a bossy streak.
But he shrugged Amanda off, more or less, and with tomboyish little Jeannie he was mildly affectionate.
So, no warning bells there. Stem, though!
Stem had come along when Denny was four.
Now, that could have been a factor. Stem was just naturally good.
You see such children, sometimes. He was obedient and sweet-tempered and kind; he didn’t even have to try.
Which was not to say that Denny was bad.
He was far more generous, for instance, than the other three put together.
(He traded his new bike for a kitten when Jeannie’s beloved cat died.) And he didn’t bully other children, or throw tantrums. But he was so close-mouthed.
He had these spells of unexplained obstinacy, where his face would grow set and pinched and no one could get through to him.
It seemed to be a kind of inward tantrum; it seemed his anger turned in upon itself and hardened him or froze him.
Red threw up his hands when that happened and stomped off, but Abby couldn’t let him be.
She just had to jostle him out of it. She wanted her loved ones happy!
One time in the grocery store, when Denny was in a funk for some reason, “Good Vibrations” started playing over the loudspeaker.
It was Abby’s theme song, the one she always said she wanted for her funeral procession, and she began dancing to it.
She dipped and sashayed and dum-da-da-dummed around Denny as if he were a maypole, but he just stalked on down the soup aisle with his eyes fixed straight ahead and his fists jammed into his jacket pockets.
Made her look like a fool, she told Red when she got home.
(She was trying to laugh it off.) He never even glanced at her!
She might have been some crazy lady! And this was when he was nine or ten, nowhere near that age yet when boys find their mothers embarrassing.
But he had found Abby embarrassing from earliest childhood, evidently.
He acted as if he’d been assigned the wrong mother, she said, and she just didn’t measure up.
Now she was being silly, Red told her.
And Abby said yes, yes, she knew that. She hadn’t meant it the way it sounded.
Teachers phoned Abby repeatedly: “Could you come in for a talk about Denny? As soon as possible, please.” The issue was inattention, or laziness, or carelessness; never a lack of ability.
In fact, at the end of third grade he was put ahead a year, on the theory that he might just need a bigger challenge.
But that was probably a mistake. It made him even more of an outsider.
The few friends he had were questionable friends—boys who didn’t go to his school, boys who made the rest of the family uneasy on the rare occasions they showed themselves, mumbling and shifting their feet and looking elsewhere.