He took the tape recorder from her hand and placed it on the night table beside her. The tape ran out long before they finished making love.
2
As the cab pulled up to the curb in front of his parents’ home Jamie realized for the first time how undistinguished the house was. Genteel poverty was the facade for university professors, even those who had inherited old money.
He had hitched a ride in the backseat of a T-18 jet with one of the NASA astronauts who was dashing home to the Bay area for a quick weekend. Now, as he paid the cab driver and got out onto the sidewalk, he felt almost as if he had stepped onto a movie set. Middle-class Americana. A quiet suburban street. Unpretentious little bungalows. Kids on bicycles. Lawn sprinklers cranking back and forth.
He went up the walk, nylon travel bag in one hand, feeling a little unreal. How would Norman Rockwell paint this scene? Hello, Mom, just dropped in for a few hours to tell you that I’m off to Mars.
Before he could reach the front door his mother was there waiting for him, a smile on her lips and the beginnings of tears in her eyes.
Lucille Monroe Waterman was a small woman, pert and beautiful, who had been born to the considerable wealth of an old New England family that dated itself back to the Mayflower. The first time her family had allowed her to venture west of the Hudson River was the summer she had spent on a dude ranch in the mountains of northern New Mexico. There she had met Jerome Waterman, a young Navaho fiercely intent on becoming a teacher of history. “Real history,” Jerry Waterman told her. “The actual facts about the Native Americans and what the European invaders did to them.”
They fell hopelessly, passionately in love with each other. So much so that Lucille, who had not given much thought to a career, entered the academic life too. So much so that they were married despite her parents’ obvious misgivings.
Jerry Waterman wrote his history of the Native Americans and it was eventually adopted as the definitive text by universities all across the nation. Success, marriage, the comfort of a dependable income, the insulated life of academia-all these mellowed him to the point where Lucille’s family could almost accept him as their daughter’s husband. And Jerry Waterman found that he wanted to be accepted. It was important to Lucille. It became important to him.
Lucille won her doctorate in English literature and then they had a baby: James Fox Waterman, the “Fox” being an ancient family name from Lucille’s mother’s side of the clan. Although he could not know it, Jamie was the grandson that brought about the true reconciliation of the New Englanders and their Navaho son-in-law.
Lucille clung to Jamie, there in the doorway of their Berkeley home, as if she wanted never to let him go. Then his father appeared, smiling calmly from behind his pipe.
No one would recognize Professor Jerome Waterman as the fiery young champion of Native American history. His hair was iron-gray and thinning so much that he combed it forward to cover his high forehead. His face showed what Jamie might be like in thirty years, fleshy, puffy from a sedentary life. Dark-rimmed glasses. Open-necked sports shirt with its manufacturer’s logo embroidered discreetly on the chest. There was no more fire in Jerry Waterman’s dark eyes. It had been a long time since he had been in a fight more strenuous than arguing with a dean over class size. He had won his youthful battles and over the years had become more like his former enemies than he could possibly admit to himself.
“I can only stay overnight” were the first words Jamie actually spoke to his parents.
“On the phone you said they were sending you to Mars?” His mother looked more frightened than proud.
“I think so. It looks that way.”
“When will you know for sure?” his father asked.
They walked him into the book-lined library, where the bright sunshine was blocked from the window by a tall azalea bush that threatened to undermine the house’s foundation one day.