Beggar of Love Read online

  That man up front was talking about the baby Jesus. Did ladies ever get to talk up front? Did the baby Jesus have to go to church with his mother and father like her? Did he feel like he didn’t belong too? If she was God she’d want these people outside in the woods or a park, not in some fancy building a bunch of sweaty guys had hammered together. Instead of sitting and being bored, they could plant trees, or play handball or something fun, right out there in daylight where God could see them. She bet baby Jesus would like that better than this.

  Emmy told her to wake up and follow Jarvy out to the street. She could see their dark, shiny new Oldsmobile parked a little way up the street. “A ’63!” Jarvy told everybody, even if you weren’t supposed to brag. Maybe they’d go to the city today. She loved staying at Grandma and Grandpa Thorpe’s apartment in the city. That’s where they lived when she was just born, before they bought the house here on the hillside over the Hudson River in Dutchess. Sometimes they went back down to the city for days at a time. There was so much to see out the city window, especially after they put her to bed and the babysitter left her alone in the bedroom. In Dutchess, she couldn’t see anything but the patio and the hedges.

  The minister was saying something to her. He could get her in trouble with God, so she said “Yes,” and looked down at her feet. They were always wanting her to say yes. They loved to say she was bashful when she didn’t have anything to say to the grown-ups.

  “She is such a self-possessed little girl,” the minister told Emmy. Jarvy was lighting a cigarette with his gold lighter. “Like a little adult going about her business with utter self-confidence, unconcerned with the opinions of you or me.”

  “Thank you,” her mother said and added, “I think.”

  Jarvy, above her, said, “She’s a strange little one all right.”

  Emmy nodded to her and Amelia took off running—smack into the car! Then she hopped on one leg to the sidewalk and pretended a hopscotch game was chalked there. She could go fast. She bet she could hop to the corner and back to the car without stopping before they finished talking to the minister, plus twirl around on one leg at the corner. She’d see if her cousins Ruth and Raymond could beat her at this.

  Aunt Jillian lived in another old house, but hers was right on Main Street and had a gold thing on the front that Emmy said made the house part of history. Aunt Jillian had a lot of big framed pictures on the walls and this huge mirror that showed the big old houses across Main Street, like Aunt Jillian wanted the houses to be able to see how pretty they were. When she was little, Amelia would lie on the floor and rotate her body, looking at the picture-window homes, the mirrored trees, a hunting picture, the family portrait, the other scenery pictures, and the one of her grandfather. Since it was Easter, Grandmother and Grandfather were at Aunt Jillian’s too, even though they had moved part-time to the apartment in the city where they were close to his office and the things her grandmother liked to do, like the ballet and Bonwit Tellers.

  You could see the house from the sidewalk, old-fashioned, like a little castle. Sometimes people going by would stop and snap pictures. When Amelia could get away, she would go out on the deep covered front porch and watch them watching the house, or she would lie on the cedar porch swing, out of sight of the viewers, so the creaking swing would look like it had a ghost moving it.

  Mostly, she had to stay in the parlor with the family at Aunt Jillian’s. Now that she was four she had to dress like a young lady and sit on the couch, not talk to her cousins Raymond and Ruth. Everyone would be dressed up. Cousin Ruth, who was sixteen, wore nail polish and lipstick and drank long-stemmed glasses of wine. Why would she do all that before she was grown up and had to? Her father and Uncle Stephen drank highballs and talked about what they’d read in the papers, and Aunt Jillian and Emmy talked about the food they bought and clothing styles.

  Eighteen-year-old Cousin Raymond was, her mother said, portly, and he tried to join in the conversation with the older men, smoking and with a drink in his hand too. His father said he would learn to drink responsibly by doing it at home. Amelia was never going to drink and get loud. Cousin Ruth would ask what grade Amelia was in and tell her what she could look forward to as a big girl at Dutchess Academy. Then it was usually time to eat roast beef, scalloped potatoes, and green beans in sauce, which was a lot better than listening to Cousin Ruth’s dumb stories about trying to get a boyfriend.

  She’d wonder if someday she was really going to have a little Amelia or a Ruth and Raymond of her own, with some man like Uncle Stephen. She gagged on her green beans. The sauce tasted like sour milk. She wasn’t going to spend her life sitting in parlors with boring people. But what else was there? Did kids one day give in and turn into parents? She wouldn’t, that was for sure. And she wouldn’t cook scalloped potatoes or shop at Bonwit Tellers or go to the philharmonic. She would run. She would play games. Suddenly she knew what she wanted to be: a New York Yankee! When it wasn’t summer she’d teach the little kids to play games like she did now, teach them to play baseball like Mickey Mantle.

  After dinner she couldn’t climb the trees in the yard because she was still in the Sunday dress Emmy bought last week. She couldn’t race anybody because her cousins were too fancy-pants. While the grown-up laughter and the record player inside got louder and louder, she lay on the porch swing playing ghost and thought about what she would do, who she would be like, if she would live in the city or upstate in Dutchess. She had no idea.

  She bounced her pink Spaldeen down the wood porch steps and back up, down and back up again and again. She challenged herself to do it perfectly: one bounce per step, no skipped steps, hit the middle of each step. When she got all that right she had to bounce higher and use the same rules. Then harder, higher—the ball went into a prickly bush. It didn’t have any leaves, so she could see it.

  The front door opened. She was trying to get out of the bush. Her dress was still caught on so many stickers. Emmy’s face looked like she was watching horror movies on TV. She didn’t say anything to Amelia. She only turned around and slammed back into the house.

  Amelia felt like the nightmare she always had of free-falling through a hole to China, screaming “Emmy! Jarvy!” and they had no arms to catch her. But she wasn’t falling. She was stuck.

  Chapter Three

  By the time she was fifteen, everyone but her family called her Jefferson. At Dutchess Academy she was on the volleyball, field hockey, and softball teams. It was an exciting year: Billie Jean King founded the Women’s Tennis Association. She planned to be captain of them all by her junior or senior year. Her parents had been to see the counselors about ten times to try and get her out of sports and onto the junior-miss committee or some other dumb thing, but her coaches couldn’t afford to lose her. A talented athlete, they called her. She knew that already, but she had a secret weapon besides her body: she shone at team playing.

  She remembered the exact game that woke her up to team spirit—a field-hockey game against Newby Prep when she was fourteen. It was on the hottest day that fall and she hadn’t been playing well. Besides wilting from the heat, she had the first day of the curse. The darkness that sometimes weighed down on her like a storm cloud she couldn’t get rid of was out in full force that day. She wanted to go back to bed, but her coach knew she could play better so she left Jefferson out on the field for the hour remaining of the game.

  What she didn’t know then, what she was seeing now as she watched her teammates, was that when fine athletes are doing poorly, they improve during the course of a game. Despite everything, they somehow come out on top. When the coach left her in the game she was saying, “I believe in you, Jeff.” So she scored twice and they won. She would never mention having the curse, but the other players knew she’d been feeling punk and piled up around her, hugging her and smacking her on the back to give her an extra-special hero’s boost. She felt heroic that day because she’d triumphed over the weather and her body and the tent of darkness—the team had n
eeded her. There were the individual players and there was the coach and there was her, but this whole other being, separate from any of them, called the team, was what got her through a tough day over and over.

  Now when they wanted her to run miles on her own and try out for the Olympics, she had no interest. She preferred strategy and bringing a team member from nowhere to score. She could understand wanting to be best in the world at something and maybe she could do it, but it couldn’t beat the rising-sun-daybreak high at the end of a winning game when the team hugged and yelled and sang all the way home on the bus.

  It didn’t hurt that Angela Tabor—a townie who attended every game—was one of the women cheering her on.

  Jefferson at fifteen, in the year the Twin Towers were born, was sandy-haired and smiled in a crooked way that deepened the dimple to the left of her mouth. She was tall and solid, loose-limbed, and loved to dance. Dumb dances like the Pogo and the Freak were popular, but she could do the Hustle like a pro, as long as she led. Later, she would love disco, that freeform movement that allowed her to toss Angela around like dandelion fluff. She also did the Bump and Grind, which Angela taught her one night when Dutchess Academy had a town-and-gown mixer. By the time the music stopped she knew the way her heart beat at the sight of Angela was something she should only experience for a boy, but it was such a thrill she didn’t care. It was like winning a game, like her team being in sync, like she had found exactly where she belonged and who she was.

  After their kiss it would not be the Bear Mountain Spring Beer Fest that Jefferson remembered, it would not be the end of a winter of longing; it would not be the kids tossing balls, the couples holding hands, or the daffodils laughing in the breeze. It would not be her first beer, poured into a huge paper cup by an overworked server in a vest that looked more like a corset with straps and a blouse with big puffy short sleeves. It would be none of those things. It would be the beer-bitter kiss Angela gave her right there on Main Street, in Dutchess, New York, the kiss that, like spring, changed everything.

  Lesbian lives may not always be pretty lives, but they abound in pretty moments. To Jefferson that dizzying first kiss felt like the two of them were the center of a whirlpool. Their neighbors, classmates, the shopkeepers they’d known since they were toddlers, their teachers, families were swirling around them, and all of their small Hudson River community was swirling around Flower Park; and all of New York State, the whole Atlantic Seaboard swirled around Dutchess, the whole of the country, all the world swirling in elation around and around the village of Dutchess while Jefferson kissed Angela with the passion of the moment and the passion of a hundred moments when they’d held back.

  Her dark days were over. Her wondering, puzzled days of bursting with feelings that had no name and no outlet were history. It was the end of all torment. There could be no more holding back. This was her first woman’s kiss, and her first kiss. The thought of kissing a boy made her burp.

  Angela was a different story. Young men seemed to like her angular eyebrows and long, narrow eyes—light toast brown was how Jefferson thought of Angela’s eyes. The boys did not seem to mind that her nose curved like the near beak on her grandmother’s face in an old photograph Angela had shown her, or that her lips looked as if someone had etched them, so precise and deep were their lines. They did not mind the dusky brown hair that should have been black like her mother’s or red like her father’s, and that had natural waves so tight it looked ruffled. Boys had kissed Angela, and Jefferson was to have kissing lessons all spring and summer long from the girl who had practiced on them.

  Much later she wondered if her half of the cup of beer had enhanced that magnificent kiss. From that moment she became greedy for both women and whatever liquor a sixteen-year-old girl could easily come by. Had her life since been one long yearning to recreate that moment?

  It had been noon. Someone at the pristine white Congregational church set its bells ringing. Then the Episcopalians, never to be outdone, swung theirs in the old stone bell tower while the Catholics played their taped bells across town. The air-raid siren switched on for its weekly test, its mournful wail transformed in Jefferson’s ears to a nasal bellow of glee. The boats on the river bleated and tooted, loosed from their winter moorings this first warm day of the year. The ferry across the Hudson was loudest of all, as if the captain knew there was a first kiss to celebrate. The owners of Mercurys and Buicks, British sports cars and ugly French Citroens beeped greetings at one another and rolled down their windows.

  The grown-ups called to one another and lifted toddlers from strollers. Older children, excited by the festival, shrieked and shrilled and squealed with excitement until the old cannon in the little park at the end of Cannon Street boomed once to celebrate the day. The town caretaker had been keeping it ready for their kiss, whispered Angela, even as Jefferson wondered why no one had noticed or objected to two girls kissing.

  It could not have been a more momentous kiss. When she opened her eyes she saw bright streamers lifting in the breeze and colorful beer pennants waving, or perhaps that was before she opened her eyes. For sure, when she opened her eyes, there was Angela, holding both of her hands, her best friend since Angela had moved to town six months earlier. Angela’s parents had taken over Hiram’s Soda Fountain in Dutchess.

  Poor Angela had obviously been bored after living in the city where adventure awaited her on every corner, jingling the change in its pockets. Angela was a lush girl at fifteen, five months younger than Jefferson, a gorgeous eligible girl whose family was making sure their daughter would have every frill imaginable at a glorious wedding.

  Angela Tabor didn’t seem interested in her eligibility. She told Jefferson that boys were boring pigs. Jefferson had seen her slap one who’d grabbed for her at school. Perhaps for the daughter of immigrants in a town that seemed well content to be separated from the melting pot of New York City by a forty-five-minute northbound train ride, it was her sense of herself as a stranger that inclined her to Jefferson, who also felt she fit nowhere. Pledging allegiance to the American flag, she’d confided to Jefferson, turned her insides to grateful, inspired mush, and she said she had learned, on assembly days, to brazenly bear her teachers’ sympathetic looks when they noticed her stealthily wipe tears from her eyes after singing “America, the Beautiful.” Jefferson found her slight accent electrifying.

  Was this why Angela first spoke to Jefferson—could she tell that Jefferson was different too? Had Angela noticed that Jefferson never giggled about boys, never thrust out a newly swelled chest to provoke them? Jefferson herself slouched, as if to emphasize that whatever treasures lay beneath her blouse were not being cultivated for male adolescent riffraff. Then again, it may have been Jefferson’s name itself, so very American.

  Angela had already erased most traces of her first languages, Greek and a smattering of her father’s native Czech. She wanted to be really American, so no one could tell she’d been conceived in no country but on a freighter—conceived by a father fed up with a homeland that didn’t like Jews and a mother whose family had always survived by smuggling off the coast of Greece. Why not smuggle people? The family had never before lost a daughter to one of their refugees.

  Maybe a Jefferson, her eyes seemed to plead, maybe a Jefferson from the big house that looked down on the river, whose aunt owned that classic beauty right in town, set back from Main Street, with an iron gate out front and a sign that said it was built in 1889, maybe a Jefferson could give her what she had not inherited in her blood: the American arrogance and matter-of-factness about having—having freedom, having possessions, having education.

  After the kiss, Jefferson withdrew her hands from Angela’s, but continued to hold her. She wanted Angela, half a foot shorter than her, to feel cherished. With the festival at high pitch around them and her heart pressed to Angela, she believed with her whole pleased and uproariously beating heart that the world—her team—was celebrating the first spring of forever with her Angela.
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br />   Chapter Four

  Once, when Jefferson’s father was shaving in his bathroom, he let her stand on the toilet seat next to the sink and lather shaving cream on her little-girl cheeks. He kept the razor to himself so she lost interest and watched him until he used a washcloth to clean the foamy stuff off her face. He used his index finger inside the washcloth lightly, as if it was his shaver slicing through the cream. It tickled. She laughed so much he couldn’t finish and gave her the cloth to get the last bits. It was fun, but after that he always kept the bathroom door shut when he shaved, and she couldn’t reach his shaving cream up in the medicine cabinet. Now and then, though, for the rest of her life, she would rub her jaw as if feeling for whiskers, like her father did.

  Sometimes, both in Dutchess and in the city, she sat on the floor next to Emmy’s vanity while Emmy, on an upholstered stool, put on makeup. There was a small rug in the Dutchess house, with a raised flower pattern, green on green, with little yellow and light blue specks. She would settle on it and sometimes trace the outlines of the flowers, sometimes run her hand up and down the smooth round pieces of the vanity’s legs while she watched her mother.

  The best part was the little things Emmy used. The eyebrow pencil was red and had a sharpener, and Emmy left red and tan peels on the low-down part where everything was laid out. The vanity had little wooden beads along the front and four deep drawers Jefferson wasn’t allowed to open. Emmy used a shiny thing to curl her eyelashes up and then a tiny brush that made them dark. She scraped the brush on a pad in a red holder as little as a matchbook. There was powder too, in a round marshmallow-colored box. The pink powder puff sent up smoke signals as Emmy patted it into the white stuff.