Excerpt: Blood Reunion

BLOOD REUNION
From his divine power comes forth all this
Magical show of name and form, of you
And me, which casts the spell of pain and pleasure.
Only when we pierce through this magic veil
Do we see the One who appears as many.
The Shvetashvatara Upanishad

Chapter 1
It was the summer before my senior year of high school. July of 1961. Kennedy was still alive and well in the White House. The cost of a gallon of gas was twenty seven cents and you could buy a brand new house for less than thirteen thousand dollars. This was before the assassinations, before the riots, before humans walked on the moon. It was before Kent State and the Summer of Love, before the cities burned and before war protests and race riots sealed the manifest disillusionment of my generation
That evening Thelonius Monk was doing the best he could to drown out the argument in our kitchen. Mom and her father were hitting upper decibels of disagreement. He’d turned up like a stray terrier at the back door as I cleared the supper dishes.
Taking advantage of the interruption, I offered the old man a lukewarm greeting and fled down the hall to my room. Let Mom deal with him, I thought. Him showing up, however infrequently, was bad news. His visits always left Mom jittery and bad tempered. There were, according to her, too many things she could never forgive him for. Chiefly, I believe, the fact that Hayden Parsons had never got around to marrying my grandmother. Of course that was a forbidden topic in our house. In 1961 being illegitimate was still a terrible scandal. Frankly, the fact that Grandfather was a philandering reprobate made him all the more appealing to me since I saw myself as a bit of a rebel myself. A chip off the old block, which Mom predictably threw in my face every time I pushed her too far.
Thelonious on the stereo, I opened Kenneth Patchen’s love poems and tried not to speculate what could have prompted Hayden Parsons’ sudden impulse to visit us. Thelonious because jazz was so hip and Patchen because he was cool. It didn’t hurt that Mom considered jazz “race music”, not fit for little white girls, and that Patchen wasn’t considered poetry at all since nothing he wrote rhymed. Those attitudes highly recommended them to me.
Suddenly, as I caught mention of my name over the music. I turned the volume down, set aside the book and tiptoed into the hall. If Mom was dropping me into something nasty I didn’t want to be taken by surprise.
“. . . much less across the continent!” she was shouting. “Not on your miserable life, Dad. ”
The old man responded with something I didn’t catch.
“It’s out of the question! Go alone. Katherine won’t . . .”
“Forget I asked, Olivia. Knew it was a mistake . . .”
“Why did you then, Dad? Nobody else would go? Your drinking buddies all in jail?”
“Be fine on my own.”
Things went quiet. I thought I heard a chair scrape across the floor. I tiptoed to the kitchen door.
“Wait,” said Mom. “You know you can’t go alone.”
“I’m not a kid, Olivia. I’ll be fine. Just thought . . .”
“Thought what? That I’d let you take my daughter?”
“Guess not,” he said. “Suppose I thought it would be about time for her to get acquainted with family. She’s old enough.”
“You can’t be serious. Since when did you care about the family.”
“That was then. Maybe I’m getting sentimental in my old age.”
“You’re as sentimental as a plank. You haven’t contacted us in ages, now you are proposing to take Katherine across country to meet people we have absolutely nothing in common with except for a few freak genes. You haven’t changed one bit.”
“Maybe, but if you won’t let her go I’m going anyway . . . see some sights before I die.”
She sighed loudly. No doubt for emphasis. “How long will you be gone?”
“Three, four weeks. After the reunion I’ll drop down to Cincinnati - see your great-aunt Mary. After that maybe I’ll retrace the route your mom and I took during the Great Depression.”
“You’ve been planning for awhile then. It’s not just something you came up with this morning.”
“What I’ve been saying, Olivia. Invitation came last month.”
“And you know it’s not safe for you to go alone, what with your . . . in your situation”
“You care about that?” he said. “You thinking of coming along instead of Kitty?”
“I can’t get free even if I wanted to,” she said. “But you can’t take Katherine. She’s too young.”
“She’s seventeen, right? She’s not a kid.”
“She’s not old enough to keep you out of trouble and she’s not ready for your kind of trouble.”
“Is she likely to see it that way?”
“It doesn’t matter, I’m her mother.”
“Sooner or later she’ll have to know. You’ve known that all along.”
“She still has a year of high school. It’s too soon,” said Mom.
“You should let her decide that. For her own good, so it doesn’t come as a shock.”
“You don’t know my daughter so don’t tell me how I should raise her.”
“Fair enough but you can’t protect her forever, Olivia.”
I had heard enough of them wrangling over me like two bears over a salmon. I pushed through the kitchen door.
“That’s enough, Mom. Do you really think you know what’s best for me? You don’t know me any better than this old man does. If there is something to decide, something I should know, it’s up to me, not you.”
“Katherine, I’m thinking of your . . .”
“Oh, I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking you can run my life like you ran Dad’s. Well, guess what, he wouldn’t stand for it either or he’d still be here!”
“That’s not fair, Katherine Anne!”
“Who are you to talk about fairness, Mom. If you had your way you’d lock me in the house so I can’t see Danny Fry or any other boy. You think I’ll forget about him after a few weeks or he’s so shallow he’ll find someone else, that it? It won’t work.”
“This isn’t about that boy,” she said. “But you’re right, I don’t like you seeing him. He’s no good.”
“You don’t know him!”
“I know his type.” she said, pointedly glancing at my grandfather.
“You’re wrong, Mom.”
She was wrong in more ways than she knew but I wasn’t going to enlighten her.
“Don’t worry about it, Kitty,” said my grandfather. “I can see I better be on my way. Sorry about the dustup. Send you a postcard.”
“Wait,” I said as he reached for the door. “Tell me what you wanted me to do. What’s this trip you’re taking?”
“I don’t want to come between you and your mother.”
“Meaning you’ll cave.”
“She’s your mother.”
“She’s not my keeper,” I said. “What was it you came here to ask me?”
“It’s a moot point, Katherine. Your grandfather had no right . . .”
“There’s a family reunion in New York in a few weeks. Doesn’t happen very often. I was hoping to take you with me.”
“Why me? You came here to ask me, not Mom. Why not her?”
“You think we’d be happy traveling companions? Hell, we’d be at each other’s throats before we left Seattle.”
“But why me in particular?”
“Thought I’d like to get to know my granddaughter. Maybe you’d like to know me, who knows?” he said. “I can see it was a crazy idea.”
“Never mind that, what do you have to offer? What do I get out of this thing . . . if I decide to go.”
Mom stiffened at that, her eyes shifting between me and the old man.
“See the country, meet some people . . . no, maybe that won’t be enough. Well, why don’t you tell me what kind of a deal you’ll accept to go with me.”
“You’ll pay me?”
“I don’t want to go alone. You hang around here you’ll be getting a summer job, right?”
“You’re bribing me?” I asked. I thought I detected amusement at the corners of his deep gray eyes, eyes so much like mine.
“Okay, I’ll go with you, but not for cash. I want you to buy me new clothes for senior year. A whole new wardrobe.”
“Katherine . . .”
“It’s all right, Olivia. I understand what she’s doing. She’s winding you up.”
“I was going to say that Katherine is welcome to go if you still want her. I wash my hands of it. I’m no match for you and you know it. The two of you work it out between you.”
And it was done. Mom huffed out of the room; I was left standing in the middle of the kitchen with nothing to say, wondering what had just happened. I had only myself to blame for being painted into this particular corner.
“Friday morning at five okay with you, Kitty?”
“That’s early . . .”
“Having second thoughts?” he said. “I want to be half way to Idaho before lunch.”
The magnitude of it was beginning to sink in. I’d volunteered to accompany a man I hardly knew across an entire continent just to spite my mother. Never mind that he was my grandfather, I hadn’t exchanged a dozen words with the man my entire life until now. It occurred to me I might have gone temporarily insane.