Parents’ Day wearing a miniskirt and go-go boots.
Shannon was tall and thin and had straight brown hair that fell halfway down her back. Unlike my other friends, Shannon didn’t do drugs or drink. She was an actress—in the years to come I would see her in A View from the Bridge; and You Can’t Take It with You; and The Mousetrap. There was something of Katharine Hepburn about her, although she was less imperious; at the heart of all her talent was a mixture of kindness and fire.
One night Shannon and I were back at my house. Penny lay on the bed, taking in the situation. I told Shannon about the world that now appeared to have passed, the world in which I was the loner within a family whose life revolved around horses, about the way I resented always being left behind but how I also treasured my solitude. She didn’t say anything in reply at first, but then she said that she understood what it was like to be an outsider in your own family.
We got in the Omega, and just before I started up the engine, I leaned over and kissed her on the lips.
I have forgotten a lot of things, but I haven’t forgotten that. She raised one hand and touched my cheek. It was nice.
All these years later, it still puts me in mind of that poem by Leigh Hunt (slightly altered for the occasion):
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Shannon kiss’d me.
Then she explained that she liked me, but she didn’t like me like that.
I drove her home. When I got back to the house, it was quiet. The stairs creaked beneath my feet as I ascended. I sat down on the bed and put my face in my hands. Penny looked up at me, then lowered her sad, dotted face into my lap.
What did I tell you? said the dog. I told you not to get your hopes up.
* * *
My father had bought four tickets to the farewell performance of Arthur Rubinstein at the Academy of Music, with Eugene Ormandy conducting. There wasn’t a lot that brought us all together anymore, but classical music came close. For his part, Rubinstein was back where he started, having made his professional debut in 1906 with the Philadelphia Orchestra at Carnegie Hall. Now into his eighties, Rubinstein was taking his leave. We would never see his like again.
But that day I told my parents I didn’t want to go. Even my sister thought this was weird. “What are you going to do, just stay in this big house by yourself all night?”
Yes, in fact. That was pretty much the idea.
In spite of the fact that I had at last gained Cyndy as a friend, some things in me ran pretty deep. Wanting to be alone was one of them.
The other was the thing I could not discuss, even with her. I could not admit it even to myself, and to this day I cannot explain it to you, I suspect, in any way that would give you satisfaction. All I know is that the gentle voice that had whispered to me as a child, You are not you, had not grown softer. As adolescence advanced, and the world of men and women divided before me, it could not have been clearer to me that I was on the wrong shore of that ocean.
That conflict was, of course, the thing that helped to fire up my imagination, that made me such a furious generator of blarney. It made me tremendously entertaining, in my sad-faced, goofball fashion.
But it also made it impossible to reach another soul, or to be reached. How is it possible to be in love, to be at your most naked and vulnerable with another person, if all the while you know that you are lying to her?
I knew what the price would be if I ever spoke this truth aloud. I would lose my family; I would never be loved; I would be beaten. Killed, quite possibly, depending.
And so I kept my silence, in the manner I had been taught.
It was only on nights like this, when I was at last alone in the giant haunted house, that I could come out.
My father tried to hide his hurt, but he did not succeed. The piano was the thing that, even now, still bound us. After all, the Cable-Nelson upon which I played