“Just like you,” the mailman says. “Every good boy falls in love with a woman just like his mother.” I cringe when I hear that. If I do fall in love, and I’m not sure I ever will, then it certainly won’t be with a man like my father, who drank too much, raged too loud, and lived impulsively. If anything, I want the opposite of him. A boy with clarity of vision. A boy without even a hint of cruelty in him.
Mother tells the mailman she’s going to pack him some of her famous oatmeal cookies. “The secret’s in the nuts,” Mother says.
“Thanks, Mrs. Doherty. I’ll see you tomorrow.” Mother closes the door when the mailman leaves. I hear her deflate with a sigh. I know she pretends, too. Her happiness is a costume she wears for others. Underneath it is her quiet grief. It’s been two years since we lost Father. My brother left us for Connecticut in September. Maybe I’m a born faker like she is. There could be some gene we don’t know about. The imitation gene. If there is, my father didn’t have it. He couldn’t fake a thing. Not his hatred for me, certainly.Sometimes, he would catch me singing a Bessie Smith song as I played its melodies on the piano, and he would slap me across the face with the back of his heavy hand for simply warbling a feminine tune. Imagine what he might have done if he knew that last week, I let Brendan and his friends put rouge on my cheeks.
“Oliver, are you awake?” my mother bellows from downstairs. “Would you like some eggs?”
It was thrilling, looking at myself in the mirror and seeing this rouged stranger. This soft boy who looks the way I feel. Not a pulverizer of men but a lover of them. I do imagine it sometimes, what he would do. Father, I mean. In my worst moments, I’m happy he’s gone. If not happy, relieved. I feel sick admitting this, but I want a life of honesty, at the very least with myself. That’s not too much to ask, is it?
“I’m not hungry,” I yell. “I’m studying.”
I hear her down in the living room. She lifts the fallboard of the piano and plays a few scales. Mother always likes to warm up her fingers with the scales that transport her. That sound like they come from some other place. Diminished scales. I can’t help but push myself out of bed when I hear the eastern sounds. It’s like she’s calling to me to take a seat next to her, on that bench where we’re always at our most connected.
“You remember how to play this scale?” she asks.
“Of course,” I say. “The Phrygian. It sounds major, but it’s minor. A deceptive scale.” Like me.
I place my hands on the ivory. I like to play with my eyes closed. To know that I can create music from pure instinct. I play her a Phrygian scale. It’s just a C major, of course, but you start on an E, which changes everything. Where you start the story, and where you end it, changes its whole meaning.
“It takes you somewhere, doesn’t it? To some deserted Greek island perhaps, where everybody plays music and takes in the sun all day.”
I can’t help but smile, even as I correct her. “If memory serves, Phrygia was inland, and was in what would now be the Ottoman Empire.”
“Those are the facts,” Mother says. “This, my son, is a fantasy. Play me something. I want to be transported.”
I open my eyes and begin to play one of her favorites, Mozart’s “Rondo alla Turca,” the “Turkish March.” I offer her a smile as my fingers travel across the keys. She seems to relax into the music as she unties the straps of the apron she’s wearing around her widening body. Ever since Father died, she eats what she craves, wears what feels comfortable, and seems much happier for it too. Father would chastise her if she ate too much or begged for a night off cooking. Never mind that they both worked all day. She had to cook all night as he kicked up his feet and drank. Those were his rules. Sometimes I wonder who she might have been had she never been a wife who had to sew other people’s clothes to make ends meet and cook three men’s meals every night. I finish the piece with a flourish, then play some improvised notes as I tell her, “I’m going out tonight, so you don’t need to make me dinner.”
“Where are you going?” she asks, unworried. She trusts me. She shouldn’t.
“Brendan invited me to Harvard to study with him.” A half-lie. I am going to Brendan’s, but not to study. It’s his friend Cyril’s birthday, and they’ve planned a gathering in Brendan and Jack’s room. “Studying with Brendan will really prepare me for Harvard. I’ll understand exactly what they’re assigning.” I’m laying it on too thick now, so I stop.
“How kind of him. Please thank him on my behalf.” She knows Brendan, but not as well as I’ve come to know him. Father tended to keep his own family at a distance, and Brendan is my cousin on his side. Mother runs a hand through my waves of brown hair. “You need a haircut. I could do it before you go.”
“I like it long.”
“It gets in your eyes.”
“Well then, all I need to do is blow.” I blow and my hair flies up. I can tell how silly I look. She laughs, and I laugh too, but mostly because I’m imagining Brendan’s roommate, Jack Whitman, turning what I just said into some sharply delivered adage—all I need to do is blow—in his inimitably capricious way.
A wave of pain seems to stab me in the gut. I close my eyes. She must sense my change of mood because she asks, “What is it? Do you miss your father?”
“No, it’s not that.” I wish I could conceal the ache in my voice. Perhaps I’m not as good a liar as I think myself to be.
“Grief takes time, and it lingers under the surface,” she says. “Reveals itself in unexpected moments. Is it because he used to cut your hair? Amateur barber, your father.”
“Very amateur,” I crack. I’m grateful for our laughter. It allows us to move on from her questioning. If there’s one person I hate lying to, it’s her. My beloved mother, who deserves an honest son.
The boys are already singing a slurred rendition of “Happy Birthday” to Cyril Wilcox when I enter Brendan and Jack’s dorm room. Prohibition has been the law of the land for a few months now, but those rules don’t apply at Harvard. The boys who come from money, the ones with fathers who can make problems disappearwith a phone call to some politician or dean, can always take what they want, even if it’s illegal, and in this room, no one wants anything legal.
“There he is!” Brendan exclaims when he sees me standing sheepishly at the door, holding a glass jar filled with Mother’s famous oatmeal cookies. “And he’s got cookies.”
“Turn around, young man,” Jack demands with a finger pointed at me. I turn awkwardly, unsure of why until Jack exclaims, “Yes indeed, he does have cookies.” Jack raises one of his sharp eyebrows. Everything about Jack—his wit, his slender fingers, his imposing nose and devilish smile—feels sharp, like he was quickly sketched by an artist who forgot to blend and soften the lines. Sometimes, he calls himself “The Jackal,” a nickname he wishes would stick, and an animal he bears a strange resemblance to. His joke is received with applause. I know it’s meant in good fun, and I don’t mind these boys admiring me even if I don’t like any of them. Well, not that way at least. I like them very much in other ways. Their freedom, humor, and irreverence is intoxicating.
When I’ve thought of an appropriately witty response to Jack’s comment on my backside, I turn to the group and smile. “Well now, I’ve just arrived and already I’m thebuttof the joke.” I’m learning to talk like them, to wrestle with words.
“Look at my baby cousin, giving as well as he receives,” Brendan says as he puts a chunky arm around me. Brendan has the typical Doherty build. Thick all over, with hulking arms and legs, and a layer of baby fat on the cheeks that will likely never go away. But unlike us, he’s also unnervingly tall, which gives his torso the feel of an old tree, and makes his thick limbs look like branches reaching out into the world. He takes the jar of cookies and holds it up. “Who wants the best cookies in Boston?” Brendan doesn’t wait foran answer. “Birthday boy first.” He tosses a cookie to Cyril, who catches it. Then moves on to the rest of the boys. One of them has rouge on his cheeks just like I once did. The room is littered with little hints of their hidden life. Women’s makeup and jazz records. Pomade and a bouquet of green carnations.
When the cookie throwing is done, I ask Brendan, “Did I come too late? You’ve already sung happy birthday.”
