A menacing-looking bouncer stands outside. He addresses me threateningly. “You coming or going?”
I reply coolly. “I’m waiting.”
“Well, don’t wait too long. You’re blocking the entrance.”
If only he knew how long I’ve waited. He wouldn’t believe me. I wish I could tell him the strip club he now protects was once a space not for exploitation but for liberation. A home for trailblazers. The Blitz Club. Where Boy George was the coat check boy. Where everyone from Sade to Vivienne Westwood sought inspiration. Where I danced in Oliver’s arms. Allowed myself to believe love can last. Some parts of London have changed. Some hidden parts of me have too. Now my heart knows true grief. Now this once-sacred spot is a seedy dump where women are exploited for the pleasure of men with enough money to do as they please.
And men tend to destroy when they can do as they please. Myself included. I’ve destroyed more than I care to admit. How could I not? With all these years behind me?
I’ve done it all. Traveled the seven seas. Seen the Seven Wonders.Taken the polar plunge. Swum with a whale. Been to the Nile on a felucca. The only thing left for me to seek is the one thing I always wanted in the first place.
“Let’s move it along now, kid.” The bouncer shifts his muscular body closer to me. His threatening eyes are no match for mine.
I lift my veil up. My eyes appear brown at first glance. But stare at them long enough and they glow orange. Like a comforting sun. Or like a blazing fire. Depending on my mood. The bouncer recoils. “What wasthat?”
“I’ll leave when I’m ready, thank you.” I smile. Lower the veil back over my face. Take one last look at the building. Inhale the past.
A wealth of memories.
A series of lives.
I was born many times. Once when I took my first breath in 1878. Which of course I don’t remember. I don’t think it’s fair that we don’t remember being born. Surely one of the most important days in anyone’s life.
Second birth: 1895. When my father lit the fire that would change my fate. In the hotel suite I woke up in this morning.
Third birth: 1920. When I fell in love. Truly. It took me a quarter of a century of adolescence to find something deeper than the typical teen lust. Or maybe all it took was meeting the right person. Oliver.
One final birth: 1980. When Lily baptized me as her child. Made me feel the power of true unconditional love and acceptance.
I head toward the next destination when the bouncer threatens to call the police. I can’t risk arrest. I pray Oliver will be waiting for me at the lily pond. The memorial will last all day. Well into the night. There’s time still.
And there’s always hope when there’s time left.
Oliver. Boston. April. 1920.
Sometimes, most times honestly, my own ability to pretend I’m something I’m not sickens me. I don’t think of myself as a liar, and yet, I’m so skilled at it. Faking comes so naturally when I’m with Mother, Liam, my classmates, coaches and teachers. Perhaps I’m just weak. Or maybe, as my cousin Brendan says, I’m simply too concerned with pleasing others, Mother in particular. But what’s wrong with wanting others to be happy?
I suppose it’s the lying that’s wrong. When Mother asks me to pick up some cuts at the butcher and he asks, “Oliver, you have a lass yet?” I find it too easy to offer him a conspiratorial wink and say, “Still searching for her, Mr. Barrett.” It’s horrible, isn’t it? All I want is to live a life of honesty, to be as pure as a Chopin melody. Instead I’m like one of my signature wrestling moves, the one where I pull my opponent deep into a hold, almost like an embrace, before I turn him into my victim. That’s who they think I am. A destroyer. If I’m a good wrestler, it’s because the mat is where I take out my aggression at this cruel world that turns the purest of boys into the most deceitful of men.
But I must lie, mustn’t I? To be honest and pure would be to destroy my beautiful mother’s dreams. And she’s worked so hardfor us, hasn’t she? Raising two boys all by herself and taking extra shifts at work after we lost my dad in the pandemic.
“No woman should raise two men without a man,” she likes to say. In fact, she’s downstairs saying it to the mailman now.
“But if any womancando it, it’s you, Mrs. Doherty,” the mailman says in his jovial voice. That man has been delivering the mail to us for as far back as my memories go, and there hasn’t been a day where he hasn’t done it with a smile. Doesn’t he have dark days like I do? Days when he doesn’t want to leave the bed, when he longs to sink into his own gloom? Nights when he wants to ignore duty and indulge all his forbidden fantasies?
“You’re too kind,” Mother says sincerely.
“This one’s postmarked from New Haven,” the mailman says brightly. He knows, like I do, that nothing fills my mother’s heart with pride like a letter from New Haven, an update from my brother Liam at Yale. “He’s doing well, is he?”
“More than well,” my mother says with a glow in her voice. “Full scholarship to Yale. He’s made all the hard work worth it, and Oliver will too. He has his sights set on Harvard like his cousin Brendan. They have a wrestling team now, so perhaps there’s a scholarship in his future. How could they say no when they see the way he overpowers the other boys on that mat?”
“Oh, I was at the last meet. Oliver absolutely pulverized the other boy,” the mailman says gleefully, like destruction is sport, which of course it is.
“Yes, well... if it gets him a scholarship, it will all be worth it.” Somewhere inside her, my mother knows wrestling means nothing to me but the chance to get into Harvard. She’s the one who taught me piano, isn’t she? Who guided my fingers from key to key, who would play the ends of my seventh chords when my hands weren’tbig enough, patiently waited for me to master a trill. Coached me to stop parking my foot on the pedal when it could finally reach it. “It muddies the sound,” she used to say, as my father blurted out his own muddy sounds in the background. “You want your notes to be crystal clear.” She knows me. Perhaps even the piece of me I hide. Or maybe not. If she did, she would have deducedwhyI’m using wrestling to get a scholarship to Harvard.
But she has no idea what Harvard means to me, what my cousin Brendan has shown me. A whole world of men like me, men who would shatter my mother’s illusions of who her baby boy is.
“Oh my, our Liam is seeing a young woman,” Mother says. “Her name is Mary. She’s studying to be a secretary. He says she likes to bake.”
