Tina was sitting in the middle of the large, heavily quilted bed, finishing up her western civ when she heard the three times knock, the space, the two knock followed by three more. She stopped, putting down her pen on the notebook and looking to the crucifix overhead. Since she’d made no noise, then the door jiggled open and, down below, there was the opening of a door and then the shutting of it. Footsteps came up from downstairs from the hole near the foot of her bed, and then Mackenzie emerged, the yellow light of the halogen lamp by the right side of her bed shining on his golden hair.
“I just wanted to do something nice for Roy,” Tina said.
Mackenzie nodded. “Ian told me that he asked you to.”
“I didn’t mean to piss Dad off quite so bad,” Tina murmured.
“Yeah, he was a little upset,” Mackenzie nodded, and then lay in the bed beside his sister. Absently she stroked his head.
Tina looked to the nightstand on her left side. There was a Holy Bible, a Liturgy of the Hours, a pack of Luke’s Lucky Strikes and a dog eared copy of the Bhagavad Gita.
“Should I become a nun, become a Buddhist or remain a freak and have sex with Stearne and Luke?”
Mackenzie leaned on his side and screwing up his face, asked his sister, “Is there a fourth option?”
“I sure in the hell hope so,” Tina said. “And I sure in the hell know I better not come home tomorrow night.”
“Hum?”
Tina looked around the rafters of her room as if expecting someone else to pop out from them. Then she spoke.
“I have to try out for that play. You know that. Dad might as well have worn a sign on his head that said, “Disobey me.”
“Sometimes,” Mackenzie told her. “I wonder if he doesn’t expect it from you.”
“Disobedience?” The idea was laughable.
Mackenzie nodded.
Suddenly he said, “I’m gay.”
Tina ceased stroking his hair.
When she didn’t respond for a while, he repeated, “Martina, I said--”
“I know,” she nodded her head. “That was just sort of out of the blue.”
“That’s kind of where it comes from,” Mackenzie said. “I’d been meaning to tell you. I wasn’t trying to hide it. Just... Never came up.”
“Does Vaughan know?”
Mackenzie nodded.
“How does he feel?”
“He’s Vaughan.” Mackenzie shrugged. “How do you feel?”
“You’ve got it bad for Linus Roache, don’t you?” she said. “And Rich Tafel. He turns you on, doesn’t he?”
Mackenzie colored, but did not answer.
Tina leaned back into bed, fingering the cross of the rosary around her neck before she began to take it off.
“They turn me on too,” she said, frankly. “Oh, Mackenzie, you’re a really cute guy, you know that.”
“If you’re gonna tell me how many girls I could have...”
“No,” Tina looked a little shocked. “I was going to say, I don’t want you moving in on my turf.”

When the young voice on the other end of the phone said, “Hello?” Mackenzie said, “Oh, Vaughan! I’m so happy. I know it’s late, but I just had to tell you before I went to bed that I talked to Tina, and I told her everything. So she knows I’m gay and she totally accepts it. I can’t tell my parents, though, because they’d flip. But she was just like, ‘Don’t horn in on my territory.’ And it doesn’t make any difference to her at all.”
There was a space of silence. Then Madeleine said, “Well, that’s nice, Mackenzie. Why don’t you let me get my brother. You wanted to talk to him.... Right?”
Mackenzie, trying to process what had just happened, said lamely, “Right.” He wondered if Madeleine had noticed how he’d actually stopped and whispered the word “gay” so that no one would hear if anyone should happen to chance by his room.
Mackenzie told Vaughan everything he’d inadvertently told Madeleine, adding on how he had inadvertently told Madeleine. Then Mackenzie told Vaughan about Tina being grounded.
“But she’s still trying out for the play, right?”
“Of course,” Mackenzie told his friend.
When they were off the phone, Vaughan came into Madeleine’s room as she was getting her clothes out for the next day.
“So now you know,” he said. “Mackenzie wants to know how you feel about it.”
Madeleine pulled out a blouse, and debated with herself if she felt like ironing it or not. She decided against this and put it back in the closet.
“As long as he doesn’t try to be like Ashley and sleep with Rodder too, I can’t really say I give damn.”

CEDRIC WAS STRANGELY QUIET THAT evening. It was not a Kevin Foster strange quiet, or even the strange quiet that most men tend to. The quiet was strange to his children because he seemed distracted. For Cedric to be even the littlest bit distracted was something that never happened in the house on 1959 Michael Street. Madeleine knew that this meant he’d gone out ot Holy Spirit to visit Mother’s grave. Whenever he came back he left a part of himself in the past for a while. It took a day or so for all of him to catch up and return to the present. What if Rodder died? Madeleine took the thought out like a rotten tooth and played with it. It bled too much, tasted irony and felt too slick. It was too raw. She put the idea away. Death was not something she wanted to think about.
Death was a surprise, wasn’t it? It must have been a surprise when Marilyn died, but now it was just a fact of life. For as long as Madeleine could remember she’d had a dead mother and everyone in her life who had died had been, for the most part, the usual suspects. Now she looked around the table at her father, who had served up biscuit quiche, her brother, at Mackenzie and Tina. It could be any of them. One day if it wasn’t her first, it would be one of them, maybe all of them.
Usually Cedric would have picked up on her mood and asked what was wrong with her. He might have been a little sharp and embarrassed her, but he would have asked her. Tonight he did not.
He left he kitchen a mess, which was to say he expected the children to clean it up, and went to his room. The phone rang a little later and when no one answered, Madeleine, up to her elbows in dishwater, looked to Vaughan, who shrugged, put down the dry towel and, wiping his hands, crossed the old kitchen to pick up the phone near the refrigerator.
“Hello?” Oh? Ian! What’s up?”
They chatted and murmured for a while. Vaughan laughed a few times. Madeleine decided she liked this Ian.
“Yeah. Yeah. I’ll tell him. You could tell him, you know? Well, all right.”
Vaughan hung up.
“Ian Cane,” Vaughan explained, coming back to dry dishes.
“I figured,” Madeleine told her brother.

Cedric went to bed early, which made him wake early. He came to consciousness on the second phone call where Mackenzie was rattling away to Madeleine, obviously thinking he was talking to Vaughan. Cedric found himself sweating buckets in the hot bed of his closed up room.
He climbed out of bed, and opened a window. He smelled funky to himself. He stripped, and let the cool air and the moonlight dry his body, chill it a little. Too tired to change into anything else, he slipped back into the still wet covers.

He remembered waking up in wetness years before. He thought he’d been sweating then. But there was the smell of iron and of the womb. It was a moonless night and Cedric was struggling out of the confusion of half sleep a long time before he learned that the wetness was not sweat, and the time was a little past two in the morning.
He turned on the light and began trembling, but only a little. He took a breath and put the useless side of him away. He stretched out his red hands, his red arms and began to shake his wife.
“Ced,” her voice was weak.
She looked up at him. His naked body from cheeks to neck to torso, to his sex, was red with blood and then, when she understood she let out a little moan.
Cedric turned around to dial up the hospital, and then Ida. Then he went to the bathroom to wipe up. Marilyn was crying weakly in the bedroom. Cedric came in with water and a sponge and a towel and began pulling the nightgown from her. He could not afford to think right now.
“Shush,” he told his wife gently. “Don’t wake Maddy. We don’t have time for it.”
The naked husband wiped down his bloody wife. The whole bed was bloody, but her stomach was still firm with the child. Cedric slipped on a new night gown and then brought her down stairs. Somewhere in this he had changed into clothes. He slipped his trench coat over Marilyn and then set out into the autumn night. They drove to the hospital.
Somewhere in the early stages of labor, Ralph came. He looked disheveled. His reddish brown hair was uncombed and nappy. There were bags under his hazel eyes.
“Ida is with Madeleine. She came to the house right away,” Ralph said. “Maddy’s in bed, asleep. Gladys is on her way here.”
“Oh, no,” Cedric shook his head. “I don’t think I can handle Mother right now.”
But Cedric does not remember having to handle Mother or anyone at all. He remembers that not long after sunrise two things happened. They were so connected that Cedric always thought of one person as a transition into the other. The idea of the two of them together in the same time and space has always seemed untenable. The doctors came out and told Cedric that he had a wonderful, small son. A real fighter. And they told him that though his wife had also been a fighter, he could not have her.
Cedric remembers Ralph being beside him and he remembers seeing Marilyn looking tired and a little, yes, proud. She had wanted to bring the second child into the world. He remembers her hair not limp at all, but very alive, a little a mess, and her breasts, under the hospital gurney, full of milk that would not be used. He remembers asking himself what would be done with it? What happened to a woman’s body when she died?
And then there was the child, little and scowling and grey who would outlive him.
It is not Cedric who tells Madeleine that her mother is dead. She cries and cries and cries. The house in not empty for a long time. It seems as if the house will never be empty again and it never is. The night before the funeral he realizes that he will sleep alone for the rest of his life. It’s poetic to say that, maybe melodramtic. But it’s true. He is past thirty-five now. Many men, he reasons, have lost their sex lives by this age. He will be alone. He will never make love again. The thought sends him into such a tizzy, his body into such a need that he begins to take his clothes off and run his hands over his whole flesh. He makes love to himself, gently and then violently until he comes wet in his hands, a second wetness in his bed with the hastily turned mattress that still smells of blood. He cleans up and then weeps for a long time. The spell is broken. He is awake now. To the terror of living alone, sleeping alone, a dead wife, two children he does not know how to care for, these people he does not know how to throw out of his home or even if he wants to. He is awake to the knowledge that he will be raising these children alone. He cries and cries and cries until the only comfort is to masturbate again. It isn’t shameful. He doesn’t know why people act as if it is. Teenagers always did. When he was a teenager he thought it was. It’s better than a whore. There’s love here. He loves himself, knows himself, comes sweetly to himself, sleeps and sleeps.

At the funeral they sing “Amazing Grace”. It is the first time the baby comes home. His name: Vaughan William Alexander; such a large name for such a small child. But he will have to have large names and large dreams if he is going to thrive. Cedric wonders if the boy will make it as he brings the little bundle into the house.
“He looks so serious,” Madeleine says.
Cedric agrees.
That night they all sleep in the same bed. Madeleine clinging to Cedric, Cedric’s arm a cradle for the serious new arrival on Fitzgerald Street.
None of them weeps.

Ian does call the Fosters, as Vaughan advised. It is Tina who picks up the phone. They chat for a second. “Yeah. Sure. You’re welcome. Alright, here he is,” she hands her brother the phone.
“We’re doing something on Saturday?” Mackenzie says. “Sure,” he says. “Alright. Vaughan’s deciding? Well, I don’t know if it’ll be wild, but it might be weird.”
“You all don’t look like you’d be friends,” Ian tells Mackenzie baldly. “You all don’t seem anything alike.”
Mackenzie shrugs at the foot of his sister’s bed. “We grew up together. Like, literally. One big happy family.”
When Ian thinks of growing up together he thinks of kids he went to school with, or played on the same soccer team with.
“No,” Mackenzie says. “Vaughan’s mother died giving birth to him. Vaughan’s parents helped my mom and dad out when no one else would. So when we were babies my mom used to care for him too. We even slept in the same cradle and stuff. We’ve grown up in the same house.”
“Like brothers?”
“He’s more my brother than my brothers,” Mackenzie tells Ian.
When Mackenzie gets off the phone, Tina takes the receiver and hangs it up.
“He doesn’t know about the whole gay thing, does he?”
For some reason Mackenzie is suddenly a little resentful.
“God, I just met him, Tina. One thing at a time.”
He stretches and yawns. “I need to go to bed.”
“Are you upset with me?”
Mackenzie turns his un-intentionally dazzling smile on his sister, and she knows he’ll break someone’s heart.
“No, I really am tired. We can’t all be night owls.”
“Oh, well,” Martina shrugs.
Mackenzie rises, kicks out his legs, and gets ready for bed.
Downstairs, in his own bed, under the window that looks over the side yard, Mackenzie tries to convince himself that he feels the same way about Ian he feels about Vaughan. But this is ridiculous. He can’t tell Ian because Ian would be the victim of his... gayness. He hates to admit it. It makes him feel a little dirty and a little triumphant everytime he’s with Ian.
Mackenzie steadfastly refuses to masturbate to the fantasy of losing his virginity to Ian.
Would I still be a virgin if I had sex with a guy? Or does it have to be a girl?
Though it seems Vaughan had recently determined to never have sex with anyone, Mackenzie thought that only his best friend would be able to handle a question like that.

A strange set up follows in those days. 1959 Michael Street is never empty. Meghan is in the process of divorcing Harv, and she and her son are over frequently. Kevin and Aileen and the kids end up there all the time. Louise, and her little girl, and the cousins from Crawford Street are constantly bringing food over. Cedric is teaching himself to cook and as for teaching, he has told Ralph and Ida that he will never do it again.
“That part of my life is over.”
Cedric helps Kevin and Aileen find a place to live that’s not a closet sized apartment over the mechanic’s place. There is a little house down the corner. Cedric helps a couple of his cousins get into college and doesn’t mind watching after Meghan’s boy. The secret is that it’s just easier to care for others than it is to wrap yourself up in pain. Ralph comes, or Father Brumbaugh -- who isn’t senile yet-- and they give him daily communion. In the cracks of free time, Cedric finds himself writing a new play. He has no idea this is the one that will bring him to attention and make the way for his eventual role as playwright laureate of the state.
Margaret Stearne will be in this play. The Stearne children are in and out of the house, though Cedric cannot tell Margaret’s brothers apart. The ever changing scene on 1959 Michael is a comfort.
But patterns do emerge. The Foster children are there frequently, practically live in the house. Tina and Madeleine are obsessed with their little brothers and each other. Ashley is obsessed with flirting with boys and men. Cedric does not like her, even when she is a toddler and he tells Ida that she’d better “watch out for that one”. Lindsay is a colicky baby. There is something mean about her even then. Suddenly she will not take to Aileen’s breast, and Aileen has become used to nursing two babies at once. So, one day, Aileen lifts Vaughan to her chest, and beside Mackenzie he takes the place of the twin. They milk together, are weaned together, sleep together, go from house to house together, are watched by their sisters together and grow up to share secrets together. Even when Mackenzie gets real brothers, this doesn’t change anything. He scarcely notices the last two children. There is no closeness with Lindsay, but only a vague annoyance Mackenzie feels for his actual twin. He is always Vaughan’s shadow, or either Vaughan is his. Even when Mackenzie makes his transformation into a beautiful young man and Vaughan remains himself--or waits on the sidelines to wonder who his Self is, their relationship only deepens.

i v.

Mackenzie Foster is in the library of Jamnia High School during his lunch hour. He remembers Vaughan spending the majority of his free time here the year before. Mackenzie had found the most secret table he can. The library is clean smelling and fluorescent lights give a merciless light to tables populated by one or two loners avoiding lunch who also avoid smokers on the stoop. These kids are hunched together here, not so much learning or studying, as huddling against the miseries of high school life. There are new computers the school board just bought last year and then there are rows and rows of shelves.
Beyond these rows are small study corrals, set each between the long windows that look out over the little untended courtyard at the center of the school. Across that courtyard Mackenzie sees the windows of the hall that leads to the cafeteria where he should be right now. For the first time in his life he really hates high school. He hunches down at one of these corrals to read the book he just brought home yesterday, has spent the whole morning hiding in his locker face down, under all of his other books. Sitting through morning classes, his heart has thumped and his skin tingled to imagine this book burning a hole through the fragile metal of his locker.


Mackenzie’s been looking for books. He has always read. Not like Vaughan who was ridiculously ambitious, who taught himself Latin in the sixth grade and spent one summer learning old English so that he could read Beowulf. But up until now Mackenzie has randomly grabbed books from shelves and most of these have been fiction. For the first time he finds himself gravitating toward long books with names that promise solutions to questions in his mind.
At school the subjects are limited. He ends up searching through the church library and then going downtown to the large pink bricked pillared library across the street from Windmill Foods, the depressed brick building where his mother works.
He admits to himself what he is really looking for. He checks these books out, wondering if the computer will go off, start beeping and telling him he’s not old enough or the subject matter is too racy. Jamnia is not a small town. It is a town. It’s a city, but certainly no Chicago. Not even a Fort Wayne. People know people. Maybe the librarian will know his mother and father, but it’s just as like he or she will not. There’s really no reason his mother or father would come into a library anyway. But as the librarian, a man in silver bangles with an elf like face and curly greyish brown locks, scans his card, he expects him to ask, “Are you a faggot?”
Mackeznie makes it home, stuffing the books in his backpack, peddling on his bike quickly. Not riding anywhere near Vaughan’s house. The house on 1151 South Logan is the color of raspberry yogurt after it has been taken from the carton and darkened by the sun. It sits under elms, the little enclosed porch a line of seven windows, on the floor above the two large windows on either side of the raspberry colored square, one Ashley’s room, one Lindsay’s. Once upon a time he wanted one of these rooms and not his that looks over the side yard into the Mc.Alistairs’. Above that is the mansard roof, its sides coming together at one point, a slim brick chimney popping up to the left of the little dormer with its wide window from which Tina does her spying on the world.
Mackenzie rolls his bike along the side of the house, sticks it in the two story garage, and then goes through the back door up to his room. He’s tried to stuff his bookbag under his bed. When this does not work he stuffs it, under a pile of clothing-- ironically enough -- in the closet.
Today he has taken a chance and is sneaking one of them to school.


“HEY, KENZIE!”
Mackenzie almost shouts, and shuts the book close.
Ian peruses the cover.
“The Silence of Sodom?” It’s a plain white book with a little rosary on the cover.
Mackenzie grins.
“Can I see?” Ian asks, putting his hand out.
Mackenzie debates saying, “No”. The best tactic is to be nonchalant. He hands the book over.
“I missed you in lunch,” Ian is saying.
At the same time Mackenzie is touched by this -- his heart is actually palpitating for the nearness of the older boy, Mackenzie is also terrified that Ian will make of him if he realizes this, or deduces too much from the title of the book.
“The Silence of Sodom,” Ian reads, “Homosexuality in Modern Catholicism.”
Ian tilts his head, and his dark eyes give Mackenzie a look the other boy cannot explain.
“You into this stuff?” Ian says and Mackenzie cannot tell if this is approval, disgust or what. He goes on, his index finger stroking the little bit of black beard under his lower lip. “I’d expect that from Vaughan. Or Tina. I guess you’re a radical too?” he grins approvingly, “That’s cool.”
Mackenzie is instantly relieved. He wants to breathe to take a series of deep breaths. He wants to collapse onto the floor. Instead he says, “Don’t you all have radical Episcopalians?”
“We don’t need ‘em,” Ian says. “My Dad’s Catholic. I kinda wish I was too. You guys... With that tired old Vatican and shit. You got stuff to fight for. We don’t. It’s just like anything goes. You want a woman priest? Here you go. You wants some gay guys getting married -- sure. It’s different with you all. You’ve got an establishment and all, and you’ve got to fight for rights. Do you go to rallies and stuff?”
“No!” Mackenzie wants to laugh hard. He has no idea why. He is enjoying that Ian is so cool and he’s feeling guilty for watching the other boy stroke the little bit of black beard under his chin over and over again, watching him lick his red lips, smile and cock his head like a model.
“What?” Ian stops talking, Mackenzie has lost the thread of the other boy’s conversation.
You’re cute that way. All confused and everything.
“Nothing,” Mackenzie says grinning and makes himself stop thinking of Ian Cane this way. God this has always been the problem and now that they’re becoming friends the problem is up in his face. No one has really asked him what made him gay. How he knew. He’s not sure he does know except that girls don’t turn him on and thinking about Stearne does. Wondering what Rodder looks like naked makes him hard. He wonders if all boys go through this. He thinks they probably do. He and Vaughan never did a “I’ll show you mine if you show me yours,” but he’s heard of “Elephant Dance” and “Wiener in the Bun”. “Bread and Butter,” and all the sex games straight guys play with each other. So all boys must go through this. Somehow. Some way. And maybe what he feels for Ian isn’t exactly gay. Or exclusively.
Mackenzie realized that Ian is watching him, waiting to speak.
“Hum?” Mackenzie looks up and brings himself back to the present.
“I had come to say Vaughan’s with Maddy and Tina out on the porch,” Ian told him. “I wanted to know if it’s alright for me to sit here with you for awhile?”

But it was Ian all along, watching him in band, thinking about what he might be doing when he wasn’t around. It was actually the unwillingness to picture Ian naked or violate his privacy that made Mackenzie know.

But Ian is still waiting for an answer. It feels like Ian’s been standing over him for an hour, but he just got here about twenty seconds ago.
I wanted to know if it’s alright for me to sit here with you for awhile?
Mackenzie nods, trying to nod slowly and seem as if it’s all the same to him. As Ian sits beside him, Mackenzie reminds himself not to seem too cold in his desire to be cool.