Equal Affections by David Leavitt Read Free Book Online

what looked like snot. Strings of mucus stretched from the bottom of Nat’s shoe to the grass.
    â€œWhat I’ve told you tonight,” Nat said, “please don’t mention to your sister. For all I know, she’ll write a song about it.”
    â€œDon’t worry,” Danny said. “I won’t.”
    â€œGood.” Once again Nat aimed the flashlight out onto the grass. “Someday I’ll tell you the whole story,” he said again, and Danny knew that by “someday” he meant when his mother was dead. He looked across the yard at the kitchen window. Dan Rather’s tiny face was still in the television, but Louise had walked out of range.

Chapter 5
    A bout their children’s homosexuality Louise and Nat maintained an attitude of hopeful resignation. Their final words on the subject seemed to be: Well, there are worse things in the world. And there were worse things: Louise had friends whose children were heroin addicts, and gunrunners in Nicaragua, and—worst, unaccountably worst—friends whose children were dead, too many, it seemed, dead from car crashes, or drug overdoses, or strange cancers caused by drugs their mothers had innocently swallowed in their youth. She herself hadn’t taken DES, thank God, but her sister, Eleanor, had, and now Joanne, Eleanor’s daughter, was suffering the consequences: a hysterectomy at twenty-two, the difficulty of adoption, and of course the threat of cancer looming over her, as it would continue to loom over her until it was replaced by something worse or better or at least more definable, the reality of cancer, which, as Louise knew, at least carried with it a sort of reassurance of definition: You knew what you were fighting. In the long run, she recognized, she had been lucky.
    She chose to ignore the articles Eleanor sent her, clipped from Sid’s obscure psychology journals, knowing that it was only jealousy which made Eleanor pass them on: “The Recurrence of Homosexuality in Siblings: Nature or Nurture?” “Families with Multiple Homosexual Children: A Survey,” “The Sissy-Boy and Tomboy-Girl Syndrome:New Evidence Links Childhood Behavior to Homosexual Life-styles.” Always neat photocopies, with a note paper-clipped to the first page, a note prefaced by a picture of a happy cook stirring a pot and the words GOOD NEWS FROM ELEANOR FRIEDMAN’S KITCHEN. “Just thought you’d be interested in reading this—E”; “Sid thought you might want to take a look at this—E.” But Louise had long since given up trying to understand the complicated argot of the articles or following the elaborate graphs. She slipped them, unread, in a file marked “H” and tried to remember the tragedies of Eleanor’s own life: the cane and the brace, and of course the daughter who would never have children and the son she never heard from, working in a canning factory in Alaska, his mind blown apart like a stereo speaker that has been played too loud. Eleanor’s son, Markie, had killed the cat. He had put headphones on the cat and turned the volume up full, and then he had put the cat in the bathtub, and then he had put it in the microwave—all the result of a bad trip, he said later, when she and Sid got home. I must remember that, Louise always thought when the articles arrived in the mail; I must remember how Eleanor found the cat and how she had to clean the oven afterwards.
    Anyway, Louise didn’t really believe she had two homosexual children. She still didn’t fully accept April’s homosexuality. She remembered too vividly how in high school and college April had been so boy-crazy, how she had fallen passionately for one boy or another up until Joey Conway—the pinnacle of her passion. And Louise knew she meant it; she knew. She recognized from her own youth the crazed look in her daughter’s eyes, the look that meant she would do anything