New York Echoes by Warren Adler Read Free Book Online Page B

glad you’re
getting around more.” They were silent for awhile as Spencer surreptitiously
inspected his son. He felt clandestine, as if he were spying. Actually he was
remembering how it had been in their early years, the joy of his son’s birth,
the homecoming, the upbringing, all the things they did together as a family,
how wonderful it was.
    Family and work. He loved both aspects
of his life then. His children were the central fact of his and Dorothy’s life,
and everything they did was to enhance their lives, contribute to their
happiness.
    Memories crowded his mind as he sat
facing his firstborn, once his and Dorothy’s fervent and loving occupation from
sunrise to sunset and certainly in their dreams. They had marveled at the
miracle of making this little boy. Surely other progenitors must have felt the
same way. Family was the cornerstone of living in those days before mobility
and ambition upset the balance. His and Dorothy’s parents had lived in Chicago all their lives and so it had been with them. He knew, of course, when displacement
had begun and, he supposed, it was partially his and Dorothy’s fault.
    Eschewing Northwestern and the University of Chicago, he and his wife encouraged their children to attend pricey Ivy
League universities, and Henry had scored Harvard and Carol Yale, which was and
still is a feather in their parent’s caps. Not wanting their children to be
burdened with debt, they had borrowed heavily for the tuitions and it had taken
them years to pay off the debts.
    They had high
expectations, quickly dashed on graduation, that their children would return to
their Midwest haven loaded with honors and make Chicago their permanent home.
He had yearned to be the paterfamilias of a growing brood, a wise guide,
steering both his children through the minefields that awaited them in
adulthood. Dorothy, too, had her own ambitions to be the mother hen grandma
whose long soft arms would embrace her blood progeny through the generations.
    They had, of course, survived their
original disappointment, learning the hard way that destiny had other things in
store. Mobility had trumped their dreams, and once out of the coop both
children had fled. Memories of family joys, concerned only the first two
decades of their children’s lives, probably less, for soon both kids had
established themselves elsewhere and condemned them forever to long distance
parenting, telephonic talk, and reports from afar.
    Of course they
remained connected via all those new devices and they all participated in a
running documentary of their children’s activities. Inquiries were made about
their own lives, mostly, they suspected, with a sense more of obligation than
overwhelming concern. The children seemed to accept the notion of their
parents’ decline, often with, what they supposed and hoped was genuine regret.
Spencer assumed that their memories of childhood, those crucial two decades,
continued to hold them in thrall as they did him.
    They had been dutiful,
even Henry, whose gaydom might have threatened the old bond, but Spencer and
Dorothy felt they had navigated that choppy river with tact and understanding.
Besides, there was little they could do about it.
    Observing his son now,
seeing the child in the man, the deeply loved firstborn, he remembered those
first years, the joys of fathering, the caresses of that smooth baby flesh, the
giggles and tickles as the little boy got between them in their bed to be loved
and fondled, those first steps, the feel of that little hand in his, the
olfactory memory of those little boy and later little girl’s smells.
    His pride of progeny
was boundless. Drawings done by both children in first grade were still
preserved forever in frames as if they were great art and continued to grace
his Chicago apartment. Nothing could ever erase the angst of old illnesses,
measles, mumps, croup, and all the other large and small ailments and
affliction that