Fallow Park Today Read online

  “Sure,” he continued with his explanation, “no one’s going to come all the way up here for low-paying jobs like these. Now, in the executive positions, and the skilled professions—like the staff in the hospital—those people come from all over the place; that’s different.”

  “In addition to a salary, you receive some kind of room and board, don’t you?”

  “No!” he said with obvious surprise. Now Meredith took her turn to smile. The man could be caught off guard, and there was something appealing about him when he was. Charisma, she recognized it to be. “No one lives at the park. I mean, no one who works here, not even Dr. Makepeace. He lives in a huge house—almost a mansion—in International Falls.”

  “But all the rooms in the Administration Building?” Meredith wondered out loud.

  “Never clear to me what their intent was there. I think maybe when the park was first conceived there were plans to house some of the staff or administration, but as far as I know, those rooms only get used for temporary housing.”

  “Temporary?”

  “When a new hire comes in—someone in an administration job, someone coming here from outside the area—they’ll stay there until they find a house or apartment. And sometimes in the winter—if a storm causes a hazardous commute—some people will use them for a night or two until the roads are cleared.”

  She liked the man. He spoke easily. What a comfort after a day of guarded conversations and excessive vigilance. She did not get the sense she had to look for hidden meanings or innuendo in his words.

  After the meal, a warm, bland medley of soft food, the trio had lingered only briefly over coffee. Of this Ansel was persuaded to take. As he stirred in cream and sugar, Meredith gave the man a more thorough appraisal. It was the first time he had taken his eyes off of her and Bill. He was attractive, seemingly good natured, and utterly guileless. He was either someone she could trust or, if this reading was wrong, someone so unbelievably shrewd he was a master in his role as an innocent. He appeared quite at ease in her company and hinted at not an ounce of awe or irksome star-struck reverence. Possibly he was accustomed to the company of some of the park’s more celebrated residents, but she suspected it was more than that. He was, she decided, the type who was not unduly or senselessly taken with celebrities or other V.I.P. statuses. She even fancied he thought no more of her than anyone else in the documentary entourage. She found herself quite taken with this prospect.

  After the meal, Ansel helped them find their way back to their rooms. Once they had deposited Bill, and Meredith had decided she would forgo the goodnight check-in at Austin’s door (all the members of the team were housed on the same floor of the Administration Building), Ansel set about checking her suite’s thermostat and ascertaining she was comfortable. As he stood before her now, apparently waiting for instructions from her, she was unsure how to proceed. It would have been a somewhat awkward moment were it not for the fact that he remained, as he had at dinner, perfectly at ease.

  “Well,” she said, cautiously venturing into conversation. Surely he was not waiting for a tip, yet there was an awkward should she or should she not make the offer.

  “Well,” he said and smiled back. Again with the wide grin. As she made eye contact with him, it seemed he opened his eyes just a degree wider. She was tempted to say, “If only you were a few years older,” but refrained. She mentally corrected herself, “If only I were fifteen years younger, or if he were the sort easily impressed by famous people.” But why destroy the fantasy by testing it, she asked herself. Her vanity did allow her to entertain the possibility that he wanted to stay. But under the circumstances, it seemed likely he would decline. Such a blow would add a sour note to what had already been a stressful day. In any event, she reminded herself such a diversion was not in her tight schedule. She opted instead to draw the young man out. It might prove interesting to hear his views on his job. Everyone has a story. This Ansel Jones was such an agreeable fellow. On the strength of that alone she believed she could coax a secret or two out of him. He seemed so direct, without a score or plan. He seemed to be neither an agent for the administration nor a calculating free agent looking for an opportunity. It might well be he would respond to such an inquisition positively, or at least chalk it up as nothing more than the curiosity of one who is new to the park. She was, after all, ostensibly visiting the park to learn about it. And if harmless flirtation should help break the ice, loosening him up a little, she smiled to herself, where was the harm?

  “Would you care to visit for a while?” she asked him. “Feel free to say no if you have to; I know you have more to do than just babysit me—”

  “No, I don’t,” he corrected her. He quickly added: “Not to suggest that you need babysitting, Ma’am! I mean that I’ve been assigned to you for as long as you need me; there isn’t something else I’m supposed to be doing.”

  “Then let’s talk for a little,” she suggested. “It’s early yet, particularly for me; I’m on California time.”

  He complied and sat at one end of the couch. She took the armchair at a right angle to it so they could talk face-to-face.

  “How long have you been here at Fallow Park?” she opened.

  “Just about six years,” he answered.

  “And before that?”

  “A couple years of college. The army. I bummed around a little bit. It’s taking me awhile to find my place. I don’t seem to have a calling or, if I do, it isn’t calling loud enough for me to hear. So while I wait to find something meaningful, I’m trying to find work that at least keeps me content, and hopefully keeps my head above water.”

  “Are you content here?”

  He laughed unguardedly, but upon reflection said: “Yeah, pretty much. It’s not the worst job I’ve ever had. It’s not the best either. I guess it’s good enough. I started in the laundry, the grave-yard shift and weekends. Then I made the security badges for a couple of years—the ones you need to get in and out of the gates and into the restricted areas. I got pretty good at that, but the work was so mundane. I learned everything you can about it—from running (and fixing) the laminating machines. I even worked for a period designing the covers—it was my idea to give them carrying cases that look like passports. Finally, they found something else for me to do. I’ve been working as an attendant now for a few years. It’s a pretty good deal; there’s a lot of variety to it. You put in enough years, you qualify for the better shifts. It’s the Federal Government; you stick around long enough, the perks get better.”

  “What brought you here in the first place?”

  “It’s one of the biggest games in town. And this is my hometown. After the army I came back here and this was a logical place to look for work. Growing up in the area, half my friends’ parents worked at Fallow. There was always an understanding in school that if you stayed in the International Falls area, you’d probably end up working here at one point or another. This has become a company town, and some people on staff are second generation park employees.”

  “How many generations of your family have been here?”

  “Here in northern Minnesota? Three. My grandparents, my maternal grandparents, moved here when they got married. My mother grew up here. I guess a lot of my choices, the path I’ve taken, have been a result of the way she’s lived her life. She’s a young woman; she was only twenty-one when I was born.”

  Meredith kicked off her shoes and curled up in her armchair. Ansel promised to be a reasonably gifted storyteller. She settled in. He seemed to be doing the same. With one arm stretched out over the top of the couch and his legs sprawled open, he appeared very much at ease, as if he were in his own living room. She expected the life story of Ansel’s young mother would be a long one.

  She was right.

  Unlike her son, Clarissa Jones did not grow up with the expectation that she would stay in this frigid part of the country and spend a significant part of her life working at the park. She was in her early thirties before she, or
anyone else in the community, ever heard the name Fallow Park. For years the area was known as just “the park,” a nickname it retains to this day among locals. There had been considerable speculation, and numerous editorials, when the one hundred and eighty acres of open land were purchased by the Government. When the announcement was finally made, the banner headlines in the local press, and the coverage on a national level, underscored what a boon the development would be to the community. Hundreds of locals would be employed and many more were to be brought in to turn the undeveloped, and in the opinion of some, unusable land into a modern private compound. Clarissa’s father, by then well into his fifties, moonlighted on weekends and two evenings per week as one of the construction workers. He helped lay the foundation for three of the residence halls and later found work with the plumbing in the leisure halls and library. That was how the Jones family began its association with the institution.

  As a child and then a teenager, long before Fallow Park was even a whisper in a subcommittee, Clarissa intended to escape the upper Midwest and return only as family obligations dictated. A class trip to Washington, D.C., further convinced her she belonged in a bigger and much warmer part of the world. She excelled at school, earned a scholarship to Duke, and promptly met a “nice boy from a good family.” Her unexpected pregnancy hastened their engagement, but the young man was excited at the prospect of starting his new life with his pretty young wife and his, at that point, unborn son.

  “By then everyone knew the gender of their children,” Ansel pointed out. “The days of waiting until the delivery to be surprised were over. But you probably remember when they made all those changes. All that testing was compulsory by then. You couldn’t tell your obstetrician that you wanted to be surprised. But those tests were still in their infancy and my mother, like a lot of woman of her generation, was one of those who was surprised by the results, or more accurately, by the response to the results.”

  “You’re straight,” Meredith pointed out, anticipating the reaction his birth prompted from his mother.

  “Oh, yeah, of course,” he said. “But my mother turned out to be one of those people. She was, how did they put it?”

  “Predisposed?” She said the word coolly, not remotely concerned if it sounded to his ears as if she had said it with as much disdain on numerous occasions before.

  “Exactly. Predisposed.” Ansel said the word with a lack of enthusiasm equal to Meredith’s. “She was determined to be one of those women predisposed to having gay children. By then the testing to establish whether a child was gay was more common. But this was something new. My mother’s generation was at the forefront of this, and it was a whole new ballgame. Now there was a sense of failure on the parents.”

  “The sins of the sons visited on the fathers,” Meredith said, reprising a popular screaming headline of the era.

  “Yeah, or on the mother in this instance.”

  “She was one of the first to feel the stigma of being a flawed breeder?”

  “Stigma,” he agreed. “That’s just exactly the right word. You know all the right words.”

  Clarissa’s freshman boyfriend, Ansel explained, the nice boy from a good family, turned out to be less than a stand-up kind of guy. “He called off the wedding and said he wanted nothing to do with her—or me.”

  Meredith nodded as he recounted the familiar story. Even though it was a scenario Meredith and most people of her generation had heard before, she appreciated the fact that it was anything but old hat to Ansel, a young man who had lived the experience and carried with him the brand—the stamp seared into him—that the byproduct of such unions knew. He carried with him the sense of inadequacy assigned to his mother simply because he was the son of this woman of diminished status. The likelihood that Clarissa would have gay children—that any, possibly every, child she might bear would be ‘afflicted’—made her seem less than whole to men who did not have the same genetic factors.

  “She was viewed as ‘untouchable’,” Meredith offered.

  “Right, exactly. Men who had no such, how did you put it, ‘predisposition?’ could see no reason to be saddled with such damaged goods.”

  “So after he dumped her, she had a tough time of it?” Meredith anticipated.

  “That she did.” As he crossed an ankle over a knee, Meredith noticed that he had removed his shoes. How he had accomplished this she was unable to discern; she was positive she had never taken her eyes off him. Probably he had done it as nonchalantly as he did everything else, and it had not registered with her as an out of the ordinary or overly casual thing for a guest to do.

  “The extent to which it was considered a mark against her became more obvious to her after she found herself abandoned. My grandparents took her in, of course, and my grandmother helped raise me. But my mother—a straight woman who gave birth to a straight son—found herself cast in the role of some kind of pariah. She learned that over time, though. Like so many people of that generation, she learned gradually, one experience, one humiliation, one rejection at a time how her standing had changed. A new pecking order was ushered in, and she was learning she was at the bottom of it.”

  Ansel explained how this attractive, intelligent, and reasonably ambitious young woman found herself something of a shunned figure.

  “For my mom—for all the young men and women of her era—it came out of the blue. Just a generation before no such testing existed. And it wasn’t compulsory for them when the testing became available. My mother was at the front line of that policy change. Had she been born to the previous generation, my grandparents’, she would have missed all the harassment, the loss of status that fell to her. I suppose it’s different for young people now, since we’re born into a world where we understand this system, this caste system, but for Mom it was a shock. She had to reinterpret herself, reinterpret where, or how, she was going to fit in in the world.”

  “I know,” Meredith told him. “Many lives were dramatically changed. I lived through that period. I knew some men and women who experienced it firsthand. They, the men especially for some reason, felt the pressure to reproduce to prove something—virility, I suppose. Actors and actresses had to have healthy—read heterosexual—children, or the public would be unable to sympathize with their characters on the screen—or so went the generally accepted belief in the industry.”

  “But that’s everywhere,” Ansel said. “It seems like it’s a component of every industry, every job, certainly every social setting. They could probably add it to the employee handbook—and get away with it! And all of this represented a major shift in how gay people were perceived. Now it was no longer a question of blaming gay people for their genetic make-up; the ‘blame’ was now thrown at the feet of the people who had the capacity to create them. And as my mother learned, there was no way for such a person to hide this aspect of herself.”

  Clarissa settled into her life as a young mother, Ansel told Meredith as he continued with his story. She worked as a secretary for many years before the park opened. Eventually she took a job at the park as a cook, ultimately rising to the position of the head cook at one of the bigger cafeterias.

  “The restaurant-style meal service was gone by then,” he noted. “It was like it is now: everyone eats cafeteria-style and selects their food from a small menu. The daily choices are the same in all the cafeterias and the specials don’t change much from day to day or week to week.”

  The food preparation was unimaginative, but Ansel pointed out his mother was not trained as a chef; despite a lack of culinary training, she was more than qualified to oversee the preparation of these kinds of meals.

  “But after she got her bearings,” he continued, “after she got over her disappointment over the failure of her relationship with my father, she was finally ready to venture out again into the dating world She was a young woman—not even twenty-five—still at the threshold of her early adult life. She was a mother, and I suppose some men, especially young ones, were put of
f by that. But with my grandparents available to watch me, she was reasonably free. She should have had no problem finding a suitable partner.”

  Ansel proceeded to describe the string of failed romances his mother suffered. There was, he noted, no way for her to conceal her big secret, her “genetic shortcoming.” She attempted at first to be evasive on the topic. This approach, she justified to her parents and a dwindling circle of confidants, seemed fair and reasonable. After all, she reasoned, it was hardly proper conversation for a first date. One leads with her best foot forward on a first date, and even a second date. There is, or certainly ought to be, an understanding that everyone has their share of baggage, and private information should never be downloaded to a stranger over a casual meal. These details will come out eventually. When we try to create our first impressions, and form them about others, Clarissa reasoned, why would we awkwardly interject the least flattering, the most damning of information? And it would have become awkward; as none of her dates broached the subject, what was she supposed to do, start in with “how do you feel about the prospect of possibly having gay children?” Yet the question was there in the air between them, almost like an unwelcomed third party to each date.

  “My mother had been engaged,” Ansel reiterated. “She had a child. It should have been obvious to each prospective boyfriend that she had undergone the test. Everyone knew by then that you couldn’t have a baby without both the mother and baby undergoing testing, unless the mother had some kind of secret, back street delivery “off the books.” Whether or not she chose to share the information, clearly she was a woman of child-bearing years who knew about her propensity for having gay children.”

  Repeatedly Clarissa Jones kept her secret to herself in social settings, operating under the assumption that once a man got to know her and, hopefully, like her, the information would not be of paramount significance. Certainly, she reasoned, it would not be a deal breaker. But she found this not to be the case.