5.  "HONEST LULLABY"

The outstanding feeling was utter aloneness-not a self-pitying aloneness, but an acute awareness that today, on parents' weekend, at the St. Mark's varsity football game, I was ridiculously out of place.

David and I had flown back, separately of course, to Gabe's prep school in a tiny town outside of Boston. We were on good enough'= terms that at my request David had for the most part taken over Gabe's upbringing. Gabe needed a firm male hand upon his twelve-year- old, pre-adolescent shoulder, and perhaps occasionally upon his rump, someone who related to grades and sports. Most of all, Gabe needed a family, and David and his wife, Lacey, could provide that. There was a new baby sister on the way. I had begun, again, to attempt to let go of my son.

I had thought that just being at the game, in the rain, adding my body to the tiny group of parents cheering from the bleachers, was the right thing to do. Someday Gabe will tell me if it was an embarrassment to have his mother standing under her enormous green and white borrowed St. Mark's umbrella trying to shout "Go Blue!" at the right time. Or if it was an embarrassment to have his father, three feet away from me, under his borrowed red and white umbrella, groaning at fumbled passes, mumbling plays to the coach, bellowing "STICK 'EM, GABE!" at predictable intervals, and bustling down to the end zone as St. Mark's struggled to break through the line of a team superior in strength, height, and skill.

I had raced around the campus with Gabe's girlfriend, Lisa, a sweet, elegantly dressed blond upperclassman with milk-white skin and thin ankles, to find an umbrella for David. The most important item on the day's agenda, I thought as an ex-wife, was David's attendance at the game, and the weather was simply dismal.

In the middle of the second quarter I slogged over to the field, wearing my red cowboy boots, two-toned from the wet grass, a neutral corduroy skirt, a white guaranteed-to-wrinkle collar peeping out above a pullover, and an oversize blue jean jacket, hoping I looked an appropriate mixture of a preppy and outdoorsy mother. The umbrella was big enough to protect five people. When I arrived at the game site, 51. Mark's had scored one touchdown, but within the last few minutes they had begun to be trounced by the visiting team. The crowd was sparse, with only the most devoted or dogged parents and friends actually out on the bleachers. The others, in their low heels and Burberrys, stood fifty yards from the end zone on the dry library veranda. David was up in the bleachers holding a crumpled blue plastic clothing bag over his head and shouting "GO DEE!" I decided to be patient and it would be revealed to me who "Dee" was. It never was.

"David! Where's your umbrella? Lisa was bringing it to you."

"Oh," he said, his eyes never leaving the pack of muddy bodies thudding and crunching ferociously into each other on the sopping field. Only in retrospect do I realize that he would have preferred I weren't there. I was angry at Lisa, who suddenly wasn't good enough for my son, and tried to share my gigantic umbrella with David. The bleachers were soaking, so everyone had to stand. David is six foot three and made no effort to shrink down and share the umbrella, and holding it must have seemed too cozy, because he never offered.

Out on the field the boys looked like warring earthworms flushed out by the rain, wearing blue and red nose cones.

"Which one's Gabe?" I ventured.

"Number eighty-five. GO BLUE! CMON, HIT 'EM LOW, HIT 'EM LOW!"

I scanned the sidelines. Number eighty-five was distinguishable by his very white pants and lightly smudged jersey. There was a nice muddy splotch on his graceful-looking rump.

"Does that muddy rear end mean Gabe has played a little?" I asked David.

"No, huh-uh. That's just from warm-ups."

"Oh," I said, and thought, Dear God, let Gabe play just a little. Let him knock the wind out of somebody bigger than him and let him get covered in mud. David was groaning so I assumed that St. Mark's was not performing well. I decided to concentrate and figure out what was happening on the field.

There was an important play going on because everybody on the sidelines was getting louder, and David was beside himself with frustration and excitement, shouting out plays, punching the air with one fist and holding his crumpled blue clothing bag steady with the other. Lisa arrived with the red and white umbrella. David was pleased and dropped the tarp on the soaking bleachers. If I stood nearer than three feet the points of our borrowed 51. Mark's umbrellas bumped into each other. I thought that David was using his a little bit like a barbecue fork; I moved away.

Gabe's roommate, Stefan, arrived, bareheaded and dressed in a fashion statement of wrinkled black tie-dyed pants, shirt, and neck scarf. In deference to parents' weekend, he had no snake or cross hanging from his left earlobe, and had shaved off his goatee. He and Lisa and I stood under the green and white umbrella. He found Gabe in the lineup.

"Too clean. His pants are too white," he said.

"Shush. He hasn't played yet."

"I know. Maybe he could throw himself in the mud and roll around while we wait."

I loved Stefan for feeling the way I did about football. He, too, could love Gabe and be his friend and still think football was barbaric.

"There he goes," said Stefan, and I saw Gabe run onto the field. How can I explain the feelings of this pacifist mother? I love my son more than anything or anyone else ort earth. I have no interest in football, and yet was so proud of him that I could have burst. He'd never been aggressive, and now, at fifteen, six feet tall, sweet, bright, languid, hopelessly good-looking, he might decide never to lift a finger again because everything came to him so easily: friends, opportunities, girls by the score, compliments, admiration. Now, for the first time, he was going to war against his own passivity. Football made him move fast, lunge at people, possibly hurt someone, and certainly hurt himself. Gabe had just tackled a guy bigger than himself, and when the big guy wrestled him to his feet and threw Gabe off, Gabe kept ahold of his jersey, clutching it in exasperation, as I would have clutched my sister's blouse during a fight, and he almost brought the boy back down. I wondered if that was fair play or not. I wondered if Gabe would ever get mad enough to really clobber someone on the field. Or off. I remembered a Steig cartoon of a Brooklyn mom hanging out the window witnessing her little boy in a fist fight with a bully. She's shouting, "Get 'em, Johnnie, smash 'em, give him one in the nose!" I understood her now.

Storm was wandering over to our little group. She, like Stefan, was a member of the "artistic community" of St. Mark's. Her feet were plunged into huge, damp men's loafers, and her hands were plunged into the pockets of an oversize, very hip, ugly coat. Her blondish hair was mostly on one side of her head, and all around . the ear on the other side the skin was gooseflesh where it had been shaved. She had a black rubber spider hanging from one ear and a pearly bauble from the other. Storm wore her problems, on her punked-out sleeve, and many hurts on her big pretty face. She was the daughter of the coach.

"Where's Gabe?" she asked, stepping up to us.

"He's actually been playing," I said, and we all looked out at the warring earthworms and listened to the crunching of helmet and shoulderpad.

"00000, ick, yuck! This is a horrible game! I mean, I don't see the point of it, and all that horrible banging and bone breaking. God, I don't see why anyone bothers!" She saw David look over and said, "Oooops."

Gabe was out again, this time looking a lot muddier and more banged-up, thank God. The sky was no lighter, but the rain was turning to mist and the benches were drying. Gabe turned around, looking over our heads at the sky. I saw his handsome blue eyes, serious under his broad brows, in a studied frown which said, Fuckin' weather, boy, has it screwed up our game. But what it said to me was, I wonder what my dad thinks of my game, and just as I was about to busy myself talking to Stefan, lest Gabe look down at the bleachers, I saw him catch his dad's eye, and in that instant the ferocious look of agitation and concern was transformed into a resplendent smile. I have just sat at the typewriter for ten minutes trying to think of how to describe all that I saw in that smile which was returned in a mirror image by David. Pride, pleasure, the love that boys find impossible to profess to their fathers.

I had only a three-quarter view of David's face, but I knew his smile, as broad and shameless and proud as his son's. This is it, Gabe, it said. Life is about survival, and you are learning how to survive. It's got nothing much to do with football, but you are doing a fine, fine job today, and you're gonna be all right. And Gabe's said, Look, Dad, I got my uniform muddy, and isn't it all a little foolish, but I am having fun and I know you love me and everything's really quite grand, isn't it, in spite of the rain? When they could no longer contain their glee, the smiles expanded to the bursting point, and at the same exact second they chuckled their identical silent chuckles.

St. Mark's lost miserably, but none of us cared. His dad was first out on the field, camera in hand. He buried Gabe in a hug, and the two of them stood there, shifting from one foot to the other in the mud, going over plays, I imagined. Gabe took off his helmet and posed with his dad and Lisa and then with me and his dad, and when we were through his dad got two more, just of Gabe, close up, wearing the ridiculous giant-size shoulderpads which raised his jersey up so high that it looked as if his head might disappear down the neckhole. Stick 'em, Gabe. You're all right.

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