I didn’t have to solve my dilemma. No one gave me a chance to answer. Aaron’s vocabulary comprehension challenge was considered inappropriate by the adults. While I stared at him, stuck with my wheels spinning, he was rebuked. He lost even his mother’s support; she was particularly outraged and ordered him out of the room. Aaron stormed off and I was brought a hot chocolate as either a compensation or a sedative. I drank this in silence, temporarily afraid of cultural arguments. They were more dangerous than their surface made them seem. I peeked out at Julie from time to time. She looked unhappy, but beautiful. Her long hair, black, shiny and very straight, trailed down the shape her new breasts made against her white angora sweater. I told myself she was sad because she had lost my love, in the same way that I thought Ophelia was tormented by Hamlet’s abrupt coldness.
“My lord, I have remembrances of yours that I have longed long to re-deliver.”
“No, not I. I never gave you aught.”
“My honored lord, you know right well you did; / And, with them, words of so sweet breath composed / As made the things more rich: their perfume lost, / Take these again; for to the noble mind / Rich gifts wax poor when givers prove unkind.”
I thought our situations weren’t so different than the noble Dane and the fair Ophelia. Her father was a Polonius to Bernie’s Claudius. I was in a fight to the death with the usurpers and couldn’t risk exposing my cause to her for fear she would betray me. I had to pretend hostility and, like the Prince, I felt a generic disappointment in her sex. She was weak, after all. “Frailty, thy name is woman.” And my brave mother was weak. Her weakness was manifested differently than that of Hamlet’s mother, but at the source, Ruth was just as weak and just as useless.
When the brunch ended, Julie got up and moved behind my chair. I ignored her. She tapped my shoulder. “You said you were going to teach me chess.” She spoke softly.
“Aren’t you going home?” I said in my new guise as the ungracious Hamlet.
“No, Dad and Bernie have work to do. You’re stuck with us all afternoon. Come on, teach me how to play.” She took my hand and urged me out of the chair. We went to my wing of the mansion the quick way, through the kitchen and the maid’s quarters.
Entering my room, Julie halted, put her hands on her hips, and swiveled her torso to survey it. There was a maternal attitude in this pose. I had a flash of insight: she was being my big sister, a sort of halfway mother. She didn’t love me the way my grandiose imagination wished. I hadn’t discouraged her with my new gruff tone. There was no romantic interest to discourage because she saw me as a little boy, not a tragic prince.
“This is very cute,” she said, moving toward my desk and inspecting the books and papers on it. She lifted a story I had written for English class. “You did this? It’s so long.” She flipped the pages and came to the illustration at the back. I had scrawled line sketches of my characters in black; the only other color, a trail of blood leading to the scene of a killing, was crimson.
“Oh,” Julie commented in dismay about my gruesome drawing. The corpse was female and the flow of blood trailed more from her groin than her heart, although in my story she had been accidentally stabbed through the bosom because she intervened between two men dueling over her. The assignment was to tell a story that would illustrate the theme of medieval chivalry. I had gotten an A minus, with a long comment that although my story was well-written and had something to do with chivalry, it wasn’t really to the point. And the drawing was scary rather than ennobling, my teacher had complained.
“Read it,” I said in a gloomy voice. Perhaps its violence would teach her not to play at being my mother.
“Okay,” she said and sat at the desk.
She was very beautiful. Her skin was brilliantly white and her cheeks were red with good health. She was on the swimming team at her school; the daily workouts lent her an energetic and luminous appearance. Her neck was a column framed by long black hair that was also luminous. She glowed from her new maturity, her nascent womanhood. Looking at her, entranced by her reposed and yet robust beauty, feeling that she didn’t see me as a lover — as a man who would satisfy her — but merely as a boy whom she ought to soothe and encourage, I got my first truly spontaneous erection. It is difficult for me to know, despite years of analysis, whether my feelings for Julie would have occurred anyway without my premature sexualization and my abandonment by Ruth and Francisco. But what is the point of such speculation? Those events are me, as much a part of me as my face, as much of a mask or an honest countenance as I make of them.
“It’s very sad,” Julie said, lowering the pages of my story. She frowned and her tone was stern. She appeared not moved, but disapproving.
“It’s supposed to be sad,” I said petulantly.
She softened. “You have a great imagination.” She put the story back on the desk and turned to me purposefully. “Are you happy living here?”
Was Polonius behind the arras eavesdropping? I wondered. “Oh yeah! It’s great here. Uncle Bernie’s great to me. He gives me everything I want.”
“He’s very generous. But there are no kids living here. Aaron and Helen are all grown up. I heard you didn’t want to live with Aunt Sadie, but maybe you want to live with us. We’re only fifteen minutes away. You could still see Uncle Bernie. We come here practically every other weekend. And you would be close to your Mom.”
I was mesmerized by the prospect of living in daily proximity to Julie, within hearing of her gentle voice, within range of her warm brown eyes, within reach of her angora sweaters and what gave them shape.
“You know Bill can’t be bothered by me, but he’d love to have a kid brother.” Bill, her sixteen-year-old brother, was present for only the must-attend family functions: Passover, Thanksgiving, Uncle’s birthday. He was a moody adolescent, in rebellion against his coarse businessman father. He grew his hair long, he played bass guitar in a rock band; I was told he asked to join the Freedom Rides. I don’t think I’d ever heard him speak more than a mumbled monosyllable. He didn’t seem companionable.
Not certain whether to refuse or accept, I looked toward the window. A taxi entered our driveway, heading for the front door. There was a single passenger, a woman who appeared, in the flash I got as it went by, somewhat like my mother.
“Think about it,” Julie said. “I’ll go with you to talk to Uncle Bernie about it. He won’t mind. I mean, he’ll miss you, but he’d understand that it’s better for you to be with other kids.”
The doorbell rang. The mansion was so large there were two extensions for its bell. One was at the head of my hallway, near the kitchen so that the gong sounded loud to us.
“There’s somebody here!” I said, thrilled, and ran off, to get to the door first. I saw a woman’s figure through the side panel of glass. My heart raced as I pulled on the handle.
I got it open and there was my mother, an unexpected and, for a moment, unmitigated joy. Her head was covered by a scarf (she had been shaved near the temples for the electroshock therapy), there were black half-moons under her eyes that turned them stark and vacant, and she clutched a small overnight bag to her stomach, as though protecting it from a thief. I was so happy I couldn’t speak. I ran to hug her. I pressed into the bag rather than Ruth.
“Hello, Rafe,” she said in a high singsong. She held on to the suitcase with one hand and hugged me into the luggage with the other.