The Short History of a Prince (14 page)

“It would be a nice opportunity for you,” Mr. Kenton was saying.

Walter nodded. A nice opportunity. Certainly. Nice as Topeka. Nicer than the dusty town of Ogallala. Nice, the way it’s nice to be put in a sack and dropped from the top of the Prudential Building.

“I’ll give Miss Amy a call, then,” Mr. Kenton said.

Walter managed to stand up, to exit, through the waiting room, out the studio door. He thought he heard Mr. Kenton say, “Congratulations.” He made his way through the hall to the boys bathroom. While the strains of a girl singing down and down the scale came through the walls of Mrs. DeBenedetto’s Voice Studio, Walter stood over the toilet trying to vomit, or at least retch.

When he took Duke for his walk that night, he snapped on the leash and set off across the lawns. It was dark and cold, and he considered that in all probability no one would know until morning that the dog had been hanged from the middle branch of the Gambles’ mulberry tree out front. He wasn’t sure, however, if he could stand the choking sound, and as they had recently finished a unit on Poe in his American Literature class, it occurred to him that he might, if he murdered Duke, have to live with the sound of the dog’s speedy little heart coming from under the floorboards. He undid Duke’s collar, and just as the mutt began to shit, his back hunched and trembling, Walter took off, pounding down the alley. The asphalt hit hard with each step. It was the glee that Duke must feel when he escaped, the pure rush of defiance, nothing short of jubilation.

Walter made it to his own backyard. He fell to the grass, and he lay, panting, looking up into the cloudy sky. There was a pink haze to the night, all of Chicago to blame, he thought, for spoiling a thing as vast as the heavens. He could have the role of the Prince, but the rub was Rockford. It was a test of some sort. He was in a fairy tale and there was a right course of action and a wrong course of action. He could have the kingdom but the princess bride was a midget. The ugly mutt would turn out to be the clever one, the Puss in Boots type who could guide the oafish hero to the conclusion. The story was probably really about the smart-ass pup, a dog who had already proved by his escapades that every night he achieved happiness, something that the master would never have in Rockford or in any other godforsaken outpost.

Four

NOVEMBER
1995

J
oyce believed that it was she who had kept Duke alive for seventeen long years, that it was her devotion and her will not to lose him that had given him spirit and strength. Mrs. Gamble, privately, took the credit. She was sure the dog’s longevity was the result of the nutritional yeast she had encased in meatballs and slipped through the fence directly into Duke’s mouth. On the family-history wall up at Lake Margaret there was a picture of him, standing on his short black legs, looking slantwise, figuring when to run, his tongue hanging down to his knees. In his prime, he had brought in squirrels that rivaled him for size, and for all of his years no punishment could keep him from rolling in dead fish on the pebbly shore.

On into his thirties Walter continued to be surprised by his own heart. The morning Joyce called to say that Duke was dead the unpredictable pounding began in Walter’s chest before she’d finished the sentence. The dog had died standing at the fence, looking, Joyce said, as if he were waiting for Kingdom Come. Walter had had to get off the phone quickly, put his head to his knees and steady himself. It was one of the mysteries of life, he supposed, that a person could suddenly feel love for a thing he had once despised. He would miss that clear gaze, a look that seemed knowledgeable in a creature that by rights
should only have had instinct to rely on. He would miss the one last link to Daniel. Walter had always thought, in spite of himself, that the animal understood something they did not, that there had been, not exactly a channel open from Duke to Daniel, but at the least a mutual sympathy. His fancy was ridiculous, he knew; the point had been to love the dog because Daniel had felt strongly about him. Still, the possibility was gone, the wild chance that Duke would come to Walter’s feet and drop a rolled-up, spitty note from Daniel, a message with one last plain truth.

On Thanksgiving Day of the year he moved to Otten, Walter sat in front of the fire in the parlor at the lake. Thirty-two of his relatives were scattered over the house and grounds. The older women and the mothers were cooking, the college girls secured themselves in a cold lakeside bedroom to gossip about the family, and one of the cousins Walter’s age claimed the heated nursery, waiting to hear Francie tell a secret she could no longer keep. Outside, the men and teenage boys chopped wood and the children ran in a pack from leaf pile to leaf pile, and in one sweep were down the hill, striking matches and throwing them flaming into the icy waters.

Walter’s students were required to keep a journal, to write about the texts they were reading, and also about themselves, if they were so inclined. He had 130 spiral notebooks to read and comment on by Monday, as well as a stack of as many essays. He was a first-year teacher and had inflicted this misery, this bludgeoning, upon himself. In the next quarter he would try to stagger the assignments, spread the due dates among the classes. He had chosen to work, in the hours before dinner, in the drafty front room, a place where very likely no one would interrupt him. From the living room the ancestors and Duke looked down upon him from the sacred wall. The long Peg-Board had been bolted to the door frames, never again to be removed, after the disaster at Aunt Jeannie’s party, after Jeannie had paid nine hundred dollars to have all the photographs rematted and reframed. In the parlor Walter wrapped himself in a quilt and sat as close to the hearth as he could without catching fire.

His freshmen were writing about
Romeo and Juliet
in their journals. There was an occasional entry with life and spark and wit, and it was the lure of just one more good piece that kept Walter reading. He
hadn’t imagined he’d have pets, but his favorite, a student named Betsy Rutule, wrote that Juliet was much more beautiful in the mind’s eye than any person could actually look, because of Romeo’s awesome descriptions. A girl back then, she said, probably wouldn’t smell so good or maybe even have very nice teeth, what with the Dark Ages’ hygiene. She wondered how she could get a boy to think of her in the way Romeo so generously thought of Juliet. “Are any of us even made that way anymore?” she asked. She concluded by saying that when she got her braces off maybe she’d get lucky.

Walter prodded the logs, thinking of what to say to Betsy that would not smack of false cheer. She played the trumpet in the marching band, a round-faced girl with silver hoop earrings, third row, fourth from the left, in the crush of brass instruments. There was at best a remote chance that someone was going to think that her “eyes in heaven would through the airy region stream so bright that birds would sing, and think it were not night.” Walter wasn’t ruling it out, that she could move a suitor to similar sentiments. There was a studious, unnoticeable boy in his second-hour class who might have both the gift of poetry and the love of girls, but would he know enough out of the starting gate to concentrate those talents on Betsy? Walter told her that she had discovered something important about the power of language and the imagination. He wrote in the margins of her journal that the high school boys he knew generally did not speak in Shakespearean couplets to their girlfriends, but that true love usually did make people of all ages, in all times, say impetuous and poetic things, usually working in figures of speech that included starlight, moonlight, the depth of the deeper oceans, the many grains of sand the world over and the far reaches of the universe. He forgot for the moment that he had never had braces and he wrote, “I remember how difficult it was to eat popcorn and apples when I went through my orthodontia experience. I hope yours will be over soon.”

In red pen he wrote
See Me
on top of nearly half the essays. He had promised himself in his student-teaching days that he would never do what his homo English teacher, Mr. Reynolds, had done to him.
See Me
meant a fifteen-minute session alone with Reynolds, listening to him ramble on about the use of which and that, lie and lay, good and well, bring and take. Mr. Reynolds’s dandruff fell to his
shoulders like slivers of asbestos even with the gentlest movement, when he cleared his throat or leaned forward to pencil in a semicolon. And yet there Walter sat at Lake Margaret, unable to keep himself from printing the command
See Me
, the words that would make some of his pupils feel disdain, and others dread. He reasoned that some of them needed him one-on-one to piece their shapeless thoughts together, and with a little concentration to progress to the point where he could explain the transgressions of the comma splice, the passive voice, the dangling modifier. That many of the students obeyed him, and came during their study halls, surprised Walter. It was remarkable that he, Mr. McCloud, wrote
See Me
on the assignments, and a day or two later they stood by the door at eighth hour, or before first hour, and wondered if he had a minute. The girls tended to be all nervous attention; the boys looked at the floor and nodded without making eye contact. He enjoyed getting to know them without the chaos of a whole class, and there was sometimes gratification, struggling with them to bring the subject and the object into focus, to find clarity. In the quiet of the empty room, Walter meant to treat every student, no matter how blank, as if he or she were withholding a concise paragraph, as if each one had the secret desire to write complete and grammatically complex sentences. He had tried both to have stature and to be something like himself. He meant, too, to keep his inborn English-teacher didacticism to a low roar. His class, he recklessly hoped, would be like a buffet filled with gorgeous food, so tempting that the students would lose their appetites for Cheez-its and glazed doughnuts.

The fall had been a blur of faces, so many blonds, so much white skin, pimpled skin, so much denim, so many bad haircuts. Walter felt as if he could hardly keep up, hardly maintain his self, much less his stature; he felt as if he were running uphill, pulling at the shirts of his students to make them stay in one place while he remembered their names and got through the tasks in the squares of his daily lesson-plan book. At night he fell asleep on his couch with their papers on his chest and the anthologies on the floor, and in the morning he woke too early with flutterings in his stomach. He knew that he was steaming through his classes on very little besides the force of his own personality, that he was trying to win his students with bravado. He tossed in
bed, well before the sun rose, worrying that he would not have the strength or the courage to last the day.

It wasn’t that the students as a group were cynical or disrespectful or violent or stupid. There was battle to do because many of them saw no reason for an English class. They had no interest in books, no interest, it seemed, in thought. There were studious girls and indifferent girls and bad girls; there were lean boys with offensive T-shirts and baggy pants, as well as nerd boys and athlete boys. Some were huge, boys with round, pink faces, butter-baby farm boys, their bellies already spilling over their jeans. He wondered how they could do anything through their growth spurts but dream of fried chicken and mashed potatoes. They all looked as if they were sleeping while he tried to put it to them, obliquely, of course, that the shame Reverend Dims-dale experienced was probably not so far removed from the shame they felt within the confines of their own dark bedrooms. Or was shame a thing of the past now that a person could advertise his naughty deeds on television talk shows? Walter’s students weren’t sure, or didn’t want to say. He had to read a good deal of
The Scarlet Letter
out loud to get them to take it, as if the words were bitter medicine he was making them swallow, drop by distasteful drop. He strode back and forth along the blackboard wall in his room making pronouncements, declaring that from out of the last century Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing to them in Otten, Wisconsin. “Is there discrimination in any form in our town?” he asked them innocently. He did the shuffle-off-to-Buffalo to wake them up, he tried to get them to think about what held a society together, why adultery was considered a heinous crime, why Hester Prynne was heroic. He sat for long periods of silence waiting for them to develop an opinion, venture a comment. The energy it took to make them laugh, to get them to speak!

He designed his freshman course around the theme of justice, with books and plays he had expected would provoke the average fourteen-year-old. For every bleak work he planned to follow up immediately with a piece that was comic or hopeful, so that they’d get the idea that there was in life the potential for fabulousness. In the Shakespeare unit he was going to teach
Romeo and Juliet
first and then
A Winter’s Tale
, in spite of the fact that the department chair disapproved of the second play. It was all going more slowly than he’d
imagined, this tricking his students into appreciation and wonder. In his seventh-hour class he had had to jettison the program and improvise day by day. There was one diabolical boy, Jim Norman, who, with the nod of his head, was capable of starting an insurrection. Norman’s sneer, his pen tapping, the fag jokes—each part of the contempt set Walter’s bristly neck hairs on end.