PART TWO
HOUGHTON
AND SONS
FOUR
AN ISLAND OF JOY
When Fenn Houghton was closer to sixty than he was to fifty, he took off his sandals and walked over the hot sand of Hartigan Beach. The sand slipped under his feet and squeezed through his toes until he reached the wet, hard packed shore. This was a pebble beach, and under his feet the tiny rocks were purple, blue and pink. He sat on the sand, right before the wetness, and rolled up his trousers.
“Like J. Alfred Prufrock.”
He let the water wash over his feet.
Fenn reached into the water and gathered sand and pebbles in his hands.
Closing his eyes and whispering, he drained the water from his hands until all that was left was wet pebbles. These he put in a pocket of his cargo pants.
“Dad! Dad!” he heard.
Arms airplaned out like when he was a child, blue jeans rolled up his white legs, Dylan Mesda ran in a polo shirt, sailing toward him, and then crashing at his side, gathering his knees to his chest the same way his father sat.
“Were you ready to leave?” Fenn asked his son.
Dylan shrugged.
“I could stay here all day.”
Fenn yawned.
“I don’t know if I could stay here all day now. But fifty years ago I could. And I did.”
“I don’t believe you did anything fifty years ago,” Dylan Mesda said. “I can’t believe you were around fifty years ago.”
“I knew there was a reason I kept you around.”
Dylan threw an arm around his father, and pointing down the horizon he said, “Tomorrow, we’re going to go there. We’re going to the Sears Tower.”
“Willys Tower now.”
“I’m just going to ignore that. And we’re going to go up and down the Magnificent Mile and look at all the greedy, confused and spaced out people. And then we’re going up State Parkway to see Casey and Chay.
“Or we can just do the north.”
Fenn looked north now, the beach curved in and he could see brick apartment buildings going out to the shore. The north was Evanston, Wilmette, Winnetka, Lake Forest, towns sizable but quiet, mansions with lake front property. Once it had been home.
“Right now I’m feeling like the North.”
Dylan placed his head on his father’s shoulder.
“I am twenty-two today.”
“Yes, you are.”
Fenn looked at his son, and Dylan sat up.
“Do you know who was twenty-two once?”
“You?” Dylan raised an eyebrow.
“Well, I guess anyone who’s twenty-three,” said Fenn. “But the first time I ever went out with your father I told him, I am going to Chicago. Come with me. We took the South Shore and we sat on this beach. And we were both the age you are now.”
Dylan smiled about this, and then said, “Maybe I’ll have those stories to tell one day.”
“You have plenty of stories to tell, son.”
“Most of them are not stories I want to tell my children.” Dylan added, “Or my father for that matter.”
“Come now, Hamlet,” Fenn said, “The Prince of the North paints himself a little too black, I think.” Fenn raised an arm. “Help me up. I’m old.”
Dylan bounced up, reached down and pulled up his father.
“You are not old,” Dylan said.
“And you are not the person that you feel so bad about,” Fenn said. “I see that look come over your face sometimes. It isn’t right. The past is the past, and who you are is my boy.”
“Fair enough,” Dylan said.
They walked on the edge of the water, watching the afternoon turn to evening. Dylan’s hands were out like someone walking a beam, and Fenn’s were at his side when suddenly the older man gave a shout and fell into the water.
“Dad!”
Fenn bobbed back up, laughing.
“It’s a sand bar.”
Dylan reached for his father, and Fenn reached up. But to pull him in. Dylan fell into the water, spluttering.
“See!” Fenn said. “You’ve been baptized. The past is the past. Every day is a new day. Scratch. New!”
“I thought you all would never get in,” Elias said when Dylan and Fenn reached the apartment.
“We were on the beach longer than we thought we would be,” Dylan said. “What smells so good?”
“It’s lasagna—” Elias started, and then he came out of the kitchen exclaiming: “What the hell happened to the both of you?”
“Baptism,” Fenn said. “I call shower cause I’m the oldest. Where did I put my bag?” He looked around the living room.
“I put it in the guest room,” Elias told him and Fenn nodded, heading down the hall.
The living room was large, especially for an apartment in Rogers Park tenanted by college students. Much of Merilee Anderson’s and Crystal Kirk’s furniture had made its way to their grandson’s apartment. An old rocking chair that once sat on a porch in East Carmel was there, as was an old, shallow coffee table with a round vase that once sat in Claire and Julian’s house. A white painted grille over a heat register ran under a series of windows overlooking Magnolia, and Elias had cultivated house plants all along that row, twisted together, setting their little vines to run toward the floor.
As he heard his father turn on the shower, Dylan said, “We think we’re going up to see Brendan and Sheridan tomorrow. Maybe Casey and Chay the next day.”
“Or you could just sit here and read,” Elias offered.
“Dad’s not going to want to just sit in this apartment and read,” Dylan differed as he took off his clothes and stood in his briefs.
“Given the choice between spending the day with Chay or spending the day with Brendan and that baby, I think I’d stay in the house.”
“You’re just saying that because you see them all the time.”
“Dinner’s going to be ready in about ten minutes. At least wash your hands even if you don’t plan to put on clothes.”
“Oh!” Dylan looked down at himself shocked.
“You really didn’t know you were nine tenths naked?”
“I don’t think about it with you.”
Dylan disappeared through the kitchen, sticking his finger in the pot.
“You make the best spaghetti sauce!”
“That’s all because of Claire.”
“You sure you don’t want to come with us tomorrow?” Dylan shouted from their bedroom.
“To see Sheridan and Bren play with that baby and make stupid noises at it?”
Dylan came out now in basketball shorts and a tee shirt.
“Stop being so mean, Elias. They never thought they’d have a kid, and now they do.”
“I can just imagine Brendan sitting that boy down in about fifteen years, looking all serious, the way he does—”
“Brendan’s not serious looking—”
“He totally is. Don’t get me wrong. He’s hot as fuck and I’d do him if he asked me—and if you let me,” Elias added at the look on Dylan’s face, “but he reminds me of Ed Sullivan in all those reruns I used to watch with Grand.
“Anyway, stop interrupting me. I can just see him sitting his Mexican son down and saying, ‘I have to tell you something. Me and Officer Sheridan aren’t you’re natural parents. You’re adopted.”
The way he imitated Brendan, the earnestness with which he did it, made Dylan cover his face and laugh. The shower water stopped and Elias passed his laughing boyfriend to wrap on the door and say¸ “Sir Fenn, dinner is in less than ten minutes.
“Dylan, be good to me and put out the plates,” Elias said.
Dylan nodded. Heading to the kitchen.
“Oh, and we went by the ISKCON temple today. We picked up this good incense. It’s like a pack that will last forever, and only seven bucks.”
“Is that what we’re burning now?” Elias gestured to a corner of the living room where an incense burner sending up a tendril of smoke burned on a table before a small bronze Krishna.
“Yup,” Dylan said. “There were two different types and one was burning in the shop. Dad kept asking the shop girl which type she was using, but—”
“She hasn’t really conned onto English,” Fenn explained.
Elias stuck out his bottom lip, looking across the table, and then he smiled.
“What, love?” Dylan said.
“You put out a plate for Lance.”
Dylan blinked, shook his head and laughed.
“I guess I’m ready for him to come home.”
“How soon till he does?” Fenn said.
“Break is eight days off,” Elias said.
Dylan smiled at him.
“Yes,” said Elias. “I miss him too.”
One night, about nine months after the boys had decided on their relationship, they came to Fenn for advice.
“Should we tell Paul and Kirk?”
Fenn resisted the urge to be sarcastic and simply told Dylan: “I don’t think you can,” Fenn said. “Not just yet.
“And not Tom either,” Fenn added to Dylan. “He’d never get it.”
“But you do?” Dylan said.
“If I could have kept your father and Todd, don’t you think I would have?” Fenn said. “Or Dan for that matter? But the men I loved did not love each other, so that wasn’t an option.”
As usual, Dylan had come with a surprise only to be met with a greater surprise by his father.
“I thought… I thought you just stopped loving Dad,” Dylan said. “After what he did.”
“I never stopped loving anyone,” Fenn said. “I just had to learn to love in a different way.”
He was very quiet for a moment, and then he brushed it aside and said, “Enough of that. Back to you.”
Dylan spent two years at Loretto College, waiting for Elias to turn eighteen. When dinner was over, Elias made to pick up dishes, but Dylan touched his hand and did it himself. As he took Fenn’s plate and moved into the kitchen, Elias followed him.
“I was going to get the kitchen.”
“You’re my boyfriend, not my slave. Go sit down,” Dylan told him, turning the water on.
“Keep Dad company.”
“I thought you’d want to.”
“We see each other all the time,” Dylan said as he pulled the dishwashing liquid from under the sink. “Go sit down, now.” He kissed Elias on the cheek.
From the dining room, Elias said, “No matter what, if I cook he always cleans. And then even if he cooks, sometimes he sends me out so he can clean. It’s the one time I definitely feel like the younger one. There’s no getting past his will.”
“There never was,” Fenn said.
“Not even for his father?”
“The trick to being his father is understanding there’s no getting past Dylan’s will. Not when he’s serious.
“When he was five, he took it into his head to wear this particular suit for Easter. I don’t really even remember the suit. Tom didn’t want him to. He came downstairs. At my house, with his arms folded over his chest. I mean, he was so little and I’d never really seen him determined. I told him Tom didn’t like that suit, and Dylan just stomped his foot and shouted: ‘Noooo!’”
“Well, what did you do?”
Fenn looked back to the kitchen, where his grown son was quietly washing dishes and stacking them in the wooden rack on the counter.
“I shrugged my shoulders and said alright.”
“Maybe I’ll do that when I have kids,” Elias said. “That must have driven him crazy.”
“He didn’t know what to do with himself,” Fenn said. “He was growing up. He wanted a fight. He wanted to stand up for something. Unless it was something important, I generally let him have his way. And I honestly have to say, most things weren’t that important.”
“My parents have never had that philosophy,” Elias said.
“Well,” Fenn shrugged. “Your parents are different.”
Elias admired how that phrase could have meant so many things the way Fenn said it.
“I’m almost done,” Dylan shouted from the kitchen.
“We can see you right here,” Elias told him.
Dylan turned to Elias and cracked him a smile. It reminded Fenn of Todd’s sexy little sideways smiles. He needed to go call him.
“Do you ever miss Dylan’s hair?” Elias said.
“You mean when it was like Tom’s?” Fenn said. “No. I already had one Tom. He shaved it off at thirteen and Tom was distraught—as usual—but I liked it. He did it to be like Todd,” Fenn added with a perverse smile, “and Todd liked that too. Now Elias, you must excuse me because I just realized I have to call my significant other.”
Fenn took his phone out of his pocket and added, “Frankly, just seeing the way you two look at each other reminds me of someone who looks at me that way. I’m actually going to go to the spare bedroom.” Fenn stood up. “We might have to say some nasty things to each other.”
Elias’s eyes flew wide open.
“What?” said Fenn.
“I just hope,” Elias began, and then recovered, “I just hope that me and Dylan are like that in thirty years.”
“Yes,” Fenn said. “I hope me and Todd are too.”
