The short history of a p.., p.17
The Short History of a Prince, page 17
The dancers were already coming through the door. Daniel said reasonably, “Let’s just wait a few minutes. Mom will know that we’d want to talk to them.”
“Sure, Dan, sure. I always assume Mom reads my mind. I figure she’s there to serve us, and besides she’s so much cheaper than a limo driver. I’m thinking about giving her a raise this Christmas, but she’d probably just spend it on booze.”
Daniel was about to ask Walter why he was so annoyed when Mr. Kenton came through. He touched his hat to the boys and passed on down the hall. It was the sort of flick of the hand a real celebrity would make to acknowledge his fans. Walter couldn’t believe it! That gesture was so phony on a person like Mr. Kenton. What a joke his Drosselmeyer had been! He’d overplayed it, he’d murdered the part. “What a fake that was,” Walter started to say.
“Hi, you.” Susan was talking to Daniel. “Hey, Walter. Look what you have on! You used to wear that old jacket when I first knew you.”
“Hey?” he said. She had never in her life said Hey, as far as he knew. Or Hi, you, for that matter. And she didn’t have the habit of talking to him as if he were a kindergartner: Look what you have on! She was wearing the purple coat that came to her ankles, a white rabbit fur hat with black flecks, and she had in her arms a dozen long-stemmed red roses. Mitch was right behind her, and the four of them fell into line walking toward the exit. Walter, Mitch, Susan, Daniel. Susan chattered at Daniel, telling him she’d gotten flowers from someone who hadn’t signed a name to the card. “I wish I knew who sent them,” she said, “so I could thank the person. They are the prettiest things. Here,” she said, filling his face with the bouquet. “Smell.” She went on to tell him how slippery the floor was when the confetti rained down on the dancing snowflakes. “I’m telling you, it’s dangerous! We’ve all fallen on it. The stuff gets up your nose, and makes you sneeze, and it finds its way down your throat. It’s so distracting I sometimes wonder if I’ve actually danced, or if I’ve just dodged the paper the whole time.”
“You d-dance,” Daniel said. “You—it was so beautiful.”
“Jesus,” Walter hissed. He did not congratulate Mitch. Without a word the two boys turned away and went out different doors, to their waiting cars.
The weekend before Christmas the McClouds had their annual party for the neighborhood. It was Daniel who asked his mother if they could have the celebration on Sunday night, rather than Saturday, so that Walter’s friends might be able to come. Walter had sneered into his toast. Where the hell are your friends? He wanted to have a blowout, finally, after all the years growing up in the placid household of 646 Maplewood Avenue. Get your own company and stop dressing like a lost Bible Belt boy.
Walter didn’t think he had ever before felt hateful toward his brother. He wondered if he was making up for lost time, hating with abandon morning, noon and night. He hated Daniel’s meek suggestions, hated the fact that on most days he looked like a softly lit oversized photograph of a big-eyed kitty cat. Walter hated how fast his own heart beat when he felt especially mean-spirited, when he was about to say something unkind. “Go get your own friends,” he said under his breath, on the way to the sink.
Mitch and Susan arrived at the party at five-thirty, after their matinee. Susan’s makeup had a gluey look and her hair was still in its tight bun. Mitch had two red marks on either side of his face where the Mouse King’s headdress had rubbed. Without taking off their coats, they tagged up the stairs behind Walter. He went slowly, carrying a large platter of cheese cubes, crackers and miniature charbroiled wieners on toothpicks that Uncle Ted had brought from the deli at the Jewel.
Sue Rawson had only moments before given Walter a crate of records that no longer interested her or were worn-out. When Susan threw her wrap down on Walter’s bedroom floor by the box she said, “Where’d you get these?”
“My usual source,” Walter said. “They just arrived.”
“Do you know what they are? Have you looked?”
“My father hauled them in here about five minutes ago. I have no idea what she’s discarding this time.”
“I know we should go mingle, but you realize that this is the perfect time to play the music game? Right now. Do not get near them, Walter. These will be so fresh, for guessing the composer and everything. Stop, don’t come any closer. Mitch, guard them so he doesn’t peek. I’ll go find Daniel and he can put the records on, so it’s really fair, so we don’t have to suspect each other of cheating.” She draped her coat and scarf over the box. She put Walter’s cast-iron doorstop on her clothes, as if those things could keep strong and dishonest boys from surveying the goods.
She ran down the stairs, and into the living room, wending her way through the adults. They were standing in groups, talking, holding their drinks and their china dessert plates. She was so happy to be at the party, to be at the McClouds’ house trying to find Daniel. She’d had a great performance and afterward a talent scout from New York City had come backstage to see her. She was going to have a chance to prove herself, to dance, perhaps, for Mr. Balanchine. She had thought that someday such a thing might happen, but not so soon, not yet.
None of the guests knew about her good fortune. They were standing in clumps in the living room chatting about their children and their holiday obligations. Aunt Jeannie was playing “O Holy Night” on the piano with the right hand and motioning with the left to Francie, to come sing. Joyce McCloud’s dollhouse was on the coffee table decorated for Christmas, with wreaths at the windows outside and tiny electric candles inside. There was a glow in the toy house and a glow in the real house too, even if Sue Rawson was chiding a neighbor child for picking the Brazil nuts out of the party mix.
Mrs. Gamble was still at home, in her apron, keeping an eye on the festivities from the safety of her living room. She had let down her curls and blotted her wart with powder, almost ready to make her appearance at the party. She could see the guests; she could see Billy Wexler, rocking back and forth in front of the platter filled with mints, reaching to take one, pulling back, repeating the trajectory, again and again. Susan, in her search, watched the grown man for a minute, and she wondered if she could make him take a candy. She knew enough about him to understand that he wasn’t predictable, that it was easy to make him cry, and that his crying could escalate into a full-scale tantrum. She pushed the kitchen door open. “They’re good, Billy,” she said over her shoulder. “They’re really good.”
Daniel was in the kitchen, at the table, sitting by himself, holding his dog. He had felt so tired it was all he could do to drag Duke up into his lap.
“Oh, Daniel,” Susan said. “There you are. I’ve been looking for you. Could you help us? Would you mind?” She knelt at his side, by the chair, and fingered Duke’s ear. “What an adorable little dog you are.”
Daniel almost reached and stroked her hair, she was that close to the dog. It would have been so easy to put his hand out and touch her head.
“We’ll go up the back stairs,” she said, as if he didn’t know the way around his own house.
In Walter’s room the three dancers shut their eyes while Daniel chose a record from Sue Rawson’s box, and then moved the needle to the first band. He put a cardboard against the turntable so they couldn’t see the record spinning. Mitch was sitting on the bed, Walter stood at the dresser with his back to the stereo, and Susan crouched at the far end of the room by the bookcase. When they played, Mitch rarely made a winning guess. He didn’t care about the game. And that night, especially, he didn’t need to prove anything in Walter’s stupid music contest. A talent scout from the Big Apple, two hours before, had just about invited him to join the New York City Ballet. He ate from the full tray of crackers and cheese and sausages, and on the easy selections he called out preposterous names, Prokofiev, when everyone knew it was Bach; Richard Strauss, when it could only have been Handel.
Susan had always taken the game seriously. She was competitive, lashing out at Walter when he won too many in a row. She’d stamp and beat the bureau; she’d accuse him of studying specifically to win, or cheating, stacking the records in an order he’d memorized. He was careful to let her win now and again, both because he couldn’t stand it when she was angry and because winning pleased her so much.
That night he gave her time to get Janet Baker, a cinch, although she didn’t know the cantata number, and she didn’t get Neville Marriner and she certainly didn’t get Decca. On the second selection he let her have Kathleen Ferrier, but she surprised him when she called, “ ‘Return, O God of Hosts’!—Samson, Handel, urn, urn Sir Adrian Boult, conductor!” On the third turn she got the record label before she’d come up with the conductor, the artist or the composer. She had never been privy to Sue Rawson’s collection, as far as Walter knew. A person had to be a genius to know the label first, or at least have read the Schwann catalog backward and forward the way he had. She was smart, but no prodigy, and she had limited knowledge when it came to composers. He couldn’t account for her new skill, unless she had been cramming in the last several weeks, unless she’d cozied up to his aunt, plotting her revenge. She was clapping her hands, jumping like a cheerleader with a scissors kick, and in an old house with suspect floor joists. The whole place was quaking.
When the fourth record came on, Walter put his foot forward, as if it were a little bit over the line, as if he could race ahead. He shut his eyes, thinking, thinking quickly, but before two notes had sounded she was shouting, “RCA!”
“Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto,” he cried. Her voice, her first answer, had rattled him, and instead of focusing on the soloist, instead of concentrating on the qualitative difference between Horowitz and Van Cliburn, he thought, Is it RCA? What pianist records with that label? He had a fleeting thought that she was somehow duping him, but wouldn’t she be quiet and smug if she was pulling the wool over his eyes, rather than so genuinely exuberant? “Horowitz!” she hollered. “New York Philharmonic!”
She started to dance her American Beauty Rose steps to Beethoven’s piano concerto, yelling in three-quarter time, “I got it! I beat you, Wa-a-a-lter!” He turned around, and saw, through the blur of Susan’s waltz step, Daniel’s thin face, his blue eyes and the blond lashes magnified behind his new glasses. Before his illness he’d been robust, a nearsighted teenage boy with good teeth and a chiseled jaw. He’d been handsome enough for ordinary purposes. Now the skin on his face had a gray cast, and it sagged under his shining eyes, puddled to his chin, as if the bones underneath had melted away. Susan was laughing, kicking up her leg, shouting, “RCA, I knew it!” The dog barked at her heels. “Oh, Duke, Dukie,” she crooned, scooping him up, trying to bury her face in his short, steely fur, “I knew it just by the sound. I love you! I knew it!”
Mitch was alert now too. He had stopped chewing. Daniel had somehow been feeding Susan the correct answers, that much suddenly came clear to Walter. No one knew the label just by the sound. Daniel was flashing the jackets at her or else there were signals: two fingers, Decca; three fingers, Georg Solti; a pinkie, CBS Masterworks; a thumb, Leontyne Price. Walter understood the setup by the way she was blabbing to Duke. She was talking to Daniel through that butt-wipe of a dog. She was telling Daniel she loved him. She loved him! She was probably going to thank Dukie for the dozen goddamn red roses. And what’s more, his brother loved her back, his just-about-dead brother, eyes all shiny with the light of dear Jesus, the crowbait was head over heels in love with the snowflake-dewdrop, Mrs. Jekyll-Mrs. Hyde, the ying-yang girl.
Daniel had never crossed the line before going to the Arie Crown Nutcracker, never entered Walter’s dancing-school life or tried to engage with what Walter considered his real self, the other self that tried to take hold outside of the house. Walter looked at his brother carefully replacing the record in the jacket. It was as if the Trojan horse had been set in his bedroom, the enemy creeping out of the trapdoor. He had not paid attention to the warning signs, although he had registered fear early on, when Daniel asked if he could go along to see Susan dance. He knocked over his own desk chair. He hated all of them, couldn’t stand the sight of their smiles, their stupid, gloating, happy grins and Mitch’s cavernous pink mouth stuffed with the masticated powder of a whole package of Saltines.
It wasn’t the force of rage that propelled him down the back stairs headfirst, bumping his eyebrows, his mouth, his nose, his ears, along each step. He ran out of the room without tying his shoes, unsure where he was going or what he meant to do, and at the top of the uncarpeted stairs with metal plates on every lip, he tripped on the shoestrings and went spiraling down. It was Mitch who followed him from the bedroom, who saw, and then screamed, in Walter’s stead; screamed, Walter later remarked, like a bunny under a lawn mower. He must have swallowed all of that cracker dust in a hurry to let out a shriek like that. Mrs. Gamble had just arrived and was standing on the rug in the kitchen, looking the place over. She did not, as was her custom, remove her coat. The McClouds suspected that underneath her good winter coat from 1936, with the fox pelt draped over her neck, she always wore her apron; the trowel, flashlight, Allen wrench and screwdrivers straining the pockets. When Walter came to a standstill by the dishwasher, she ran clanking to the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and hauled out the ice, muttering as she went about the benefits of an immediate application of Vitamin E to the wounds.
Walter lay groaning, his head in a pool of blood, and his feet up the stairs. He looked into Mitch’s eyes, and he thought that if he weren’t so dizzy he’d take both hands and smooth away the red Mouse King marks on either side of his friend’s heavenly face. Mitch, who was already jilted, and didn’t quite know it. Walter could see past the stars whirling around and around over Mrs. Gamble’s pin curls. He thought he could see beyond the walls of the house, that his vision was improved because Mrs. Gamble was in the room, her oracular powers sparking from her aura to his vulnerable, open self. He could see the future: Susan, the widow, crying down the hall at school after Daniel’s death, all the girls and boys following at a respectful distance, following the lover who had been left behind to live. Daniel was dying. Susan knew it, and that minute he did too. He had received several knocks to his skull, but very likely they would not kill him. He would live on and on after his brother was gone. Mitch seemed so far away, and it was with great effort that Walter whispered, “I’m still here. Hold it, my head. It’s yours.”
Six
JANUARY
1996
Twenty-three years after the fall down the stairs Walter still had a scar above his eyebrow. He had had to go to the emergency room and have fourteen stitches. When one of the neighbors wondered out loud, in the McClouds’ living room, if the kids upstairs had been drinking, Mrs. Gamble came to Walter’s defense. She had smelled nothing, she said, and seen no broken vessels in the whites of the eyes. In the hospital Walter was so agitated he tried to get off the gurney. He wanted to go home, to find out for himself what Susan and Daniel were up to in his bedroom, if Mitch had stayed to fight them, if there was a duel planned, the prospect of a frosty morning, the pearl handles of the pistols with their dull gleam on the tray, the bravery, the fear, the blast, the bloody swatch on the snow. He was raving, struggling with the orderly, and might as well have been drunk. The nurse finally gave him a shot to knock him out.
At Christmas break, home in Oak Ridge, away from Otten, Walter stood at the top of the back stairs just once and thought of his fall. He remembered the cutting edge of the steps, how slowly he had tumbled, how difficult it had been to grab hold of anything solid. He had been able to anticipate each hurt before it happened, crack after crack to his head. Mitch was the only person who had seen the spill. Walter was first upright and seconds later he was on the floor in the kitchen. But he too had been able to watch himself after he went over the edge, and all the way to the bottom; he could see, as if from above, the humiliating dive, every blow delineated in the near stillness of his motion. Why nature bestowed clarity and helplessness on a person at the same time remained a mystery to him.
He wondered if somewhere far off, defying the laws of science, Mitch’s two screams were still echoing, if those vibrations had traveled into space, if they moved on and on like rays in a light-year. There might be other forms of life who were receiving the noise and trying to interpret the tones. Walter had always thought that Mitch had cried out for his sake, involuntarily, because of the accident. As he stood at the scene it occurred to him that Mitch might not have been reacting to the fall, that he was instead warning Daniel, warning Susan. The high-pitched womanly screeches may have been Mitch’s way of threatening both of them, daring them to go any further.
Walter didn’t approve of the use of the present participle in the verb “obsess.” He didn’t like the way it was so casually used, as if every normal person had clinical obsessions. Still, he let himself say, “I’ve been obsessing about my brother, obsessing about Mitch.” He suspected that the year of Daniel’s death was vivid to him because he was living again in high school, faced each day with ninety freshmen and sixty sophomores. He sometimes felt that his Otten students weren’t in the current story at all, that he was using them for his own purposes, to illuminate his own past. It wasn’t that he was sloughing off, or was in a stupor, or fretting about mistakes he’d made more than two decades before. He was nowhere, he sometimes felt, floating through his own years backward and forward inside the 1937 brick building that took up a block on Otten Boulevard in Otten, Wisconsin. He wondered if he’d always been in Room 209 listening to lockers slam, seeing visions of the old life while he waited to begin preaching, while he waited for a semblance of quiet.
In January he started to go to the basketball games at the high school, not only because there was nothing else to do within a seventy-mile radius, but because he found he enjoyed the spectacle. With the exception of a few of Daniel’s swim meets, Walter had not gone to sporting events as a teenager. The heroism of the boys out on the court was a revelation to him. He soon understood—watching Otten’s Bill Pierce fly up to the basket, hover in midair, slam the ball through the hoop—why athletes were worshipped in town and in the larger world. He wanted young, handsome Bill Pierce to tear down the court, trample the opposition, score and steal and score. Walter whistled with his thumb and index finger clamped between his teeth when his team made their points, and he leaped to his feet when a player dodged his way through the defense, driving the ball, hooking it into the basket.
