The Metropolis Case_ A Novel - Matthew Gallaway [31]
“I’ll tell you who”—Hank leaned over in his seat and ripped a fart that, remarkably, was louder than a passing truck—“there’s a kiss for you—some group of queers who got together in Europe and wanted to torture us American men three hundred years later.”
Martin rolled down the window. “Then why do you even go?” he asked, alluding to Jane’s subscription to the Pittsburgh Opera and the fact that she required her husband to attend.
“The same reason you’re going to go, too,” Hank said. “Because your mother likes it, and it’s our job to keep her happy. Believe me, kiddo, if they’re happy, you’re happy. That’s lesson number one in relating to the other half of the species, Marty. You gotta keep ’em happy.”
ALTHOUGH MARTIN DIDN’T respond to his father’s comment at the time, over the course of the following year he would often think back to this advice, particularly since Hank seemed so disinclined to follow it himself. Once again, hockey was—at least superficially—the source of conflict, after Hank proposed sending Martin to boarding school beginning in tenth grade. Despite Hank’s best efforts, hockey remained a “second-class” sport in Pittsburgh—unlike in his hometown in Michigan, where hockey was a “religion”—and so he concluded that the solution was not to bring hockey to Pittsburgh, as he once hoped to do, but to send Martin to hockey. It did not occur to Hank that by doing this, he would lose the very thing that had allowed him to remain largely oblivious to his wife’s frustrations with their marriage but instead justified the idea with the noble and even sacrificial overtones of acting in his son’s best interest.
Jane didn’t buy any of it and expressed her displeasure to a degree that Martin had never before witnessed. “I can’t believe you want him to leave home to play hockey,” she cried more than once. “What about meeting his teachers? What about his first girlfriend? I want to take pictures of him with his date for the prom. I want these things to be part of my experience as a parent, as a mother—does that make sense to you?”
“Of course it does.” Hank could afford the luxury of seeming reasonable in these exchanges, knowing that Martin was firmly in his camp.
Jane was aghast. “You’ve already made up his mind.”
“Do you think he’d want to hear you say that?” It was now Hank’s turn to act hurt. “He’s a smart kid, Jane—he can think for himself.”
“Hank, how can you say that when he’s spent his entire life playing hockey, just to make you happy?”
A heavy sigh from Hank seemed to conclude the discussion. “I think you should take a look at who’s really being selfish here.”
Martin was both disturbed and—though he didn’t like to admit this—oddly exhilarated to see this unprecedented fissure, particularly when he knew that there was no longer any compromise he could make—short of dividing himself in two—to keep them both happy. He was beginning to detect the existence of some chthonic vein of truth—though whether in himself, the world, or both, he could not have said—that could be mined only away from his parents, so that he sometimes viewed their discord with satisfaction, as though they deserved the misery they inflicted on each other; but then he would feel disgusted with himself, and it would occur to him that he had already been split in two, just not in the way anyone could appreciate.
Worn down, Jane eventually agreed to visit. On a winter day in February 1975, they left a Pittsburgh still euphoric from the Steelers’ first Super Bowl win over the Vikings, and five hours later arrived at the school—Cranbrook, about twenty miles north of Detroit. Founded in 1928 by a newspaper baron and designed with an unlimited budget by the Finnish modernist Eliel Saarinen, the campus looked like a piece of Versailles that had been transported to Michigan via Fallingwater. While Hank remained oblivious to the artistic splendor—except to express admiration for the obvious cost of building and maintaining it—Martin knew from his mother