Léon Carne pointed harshly toward his wife, and the woman made a wounded little eep sound and scuttled out of the room, and then he walked to the front door and locked the deadbolt ominously with a key and pocketed the key. But he thinks all you want to do is knock it out of him.” He might be a goddamn saint, for all I know. “I found one of the brightest, most resilient boys I’ve ever met. “What’s this crap? I hired you to find my boy.” “Did you ever think that there might be other kinds of strength than yours? Gentle and determined strength. This is my son we’re talkingĪs he’d feared, Leon was starting to bridle and turn belligerent. “It’s not that easy, Leon.” He explained that the boy had found a studio space to work and was supporting himself by selling his art. She clearly hoped the boy had permanently absented himself from his father’s control and was afraid that Jack Liffey was going to drag him back. The mother hovered across the living room, eavesdropping in trepidation. He had to talk to Leon and try to solve this exasperating problem. Yet, the boy was technically still a minor, and if he refused to tell Leon where his son was, the man would just hire somebody else to find him. Leon Krane-Carne was set in concrete by now. In the face of unremitting harassment, he’d closed his shutters against everything the boy now represented. His son was a total repudiation of whatever adjustments he had made with his private gods to save his own life. He wanted to try to get Leon to allow his son to develop in his own way, but deep in his heart he knew it was far too late in life for that. Leon Krane-Carne called and called, and he put him off because he simply did not know what to do. “I think you’re overestimating his flexibility.” Maybe he’ll see what a wonderful son he has.” He wasn’t much for garden flowers, but this one grew wild along mountain streams and he’d always loved it. Jack Liffey stared at a beautiful golden columbine over a tattered sofa, and the first line of its poem: I think I can love Dad, it’s tough, but 1 know I can’t be around him. “Father Gregg told me you can only resist power with love. To resist all that, he seemed to have drawn a lot of strength from his mother and from the example of a pacifist priest he met who had been through the civil rights movement. Not only was his father forcing a particular vision of masculinity on him, but much of that stiffness was reinforced by the macho culture that had surrounded him-the very culture that had probably drawn his father to East L.A. They went on talking for a long time and the boy gave him a vivid sense of what it must have been like to ride out his strange family life. He wondered if he could somehow establish an understanding between father and son that would be sure to get him back on the karma gravy train. Jack Liffey told him about Leon Krane’s hard time in college. Mom and I had a special bond and it protected me. They may be all right eventually, if other people love them enough, but they are very wounded people. My brothers and my sister Lula accepted everything he forced on them and built their lives around his obsessions. It was a bit spooky, Ramon’s sense of inner peace. The boy looked at Jack Liffey for validation or at least understanding. You must be strong, and strong has a very special meaning to him. “Oh, yes.” The boy shook his head sadly again. “He has a thing about weakness, doesn’t he?” Opening yourself up that way is weakness.” “You mean, in addition to everything? Maybe if 1 painted jet planes or tanks or just boxers, dad would have accepted it, though, honestly, he didn’t want me to be an artist of any kind. The boy puffed his cheeks and shook his head a little. “If the subjects were a little odder, they would call me a concept artist, but some people compare me to Sister Corita. His silk screens were already selling and he could support himself. In another year he could go to art school and in the meantime he could stay at the center. While Sister Erasmus kept a discreet distance, the boy walked him around the studio and explained how he had found exactly what he wanted to do in life, exactly where he fit comfortably in the world. Jack Liffey explained his ground rules: that he found errant children, he never did anything against anyone’s will, and right now he only wanted to talk. Liffey,” the boy advanced and held out his hand. Liffey glanced at the nearest poem, beside the stalk of a big water-spotted iris.Īlmost a haiku, he thought, and not at all the mawkish teenage twaddle he would have expected. As Sister Erasmus whispered to the boy, Jack Around the walls and leaning against furniture were similar big flowers, each with four or five lines of poetry inscribed on it in a cursive hand. Ramon was dabbing at a watercolor of a giant hibiscus on an easel.
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