The Short History of a Prince (16 page)

Sue Rawson sat staring at him, her little finger hooked over her upper lip and her thumb under her chin. After a brief silence she said, “I see.”

Walter nodded. He poked the grate with the iron, already regretting his every word. She had not changed her position on the sofa. He had probably been a disappointment to her since the Rockford Ballet, when she had such high hopes that he would dance. She had short gray hair, cropped bangs, still, in her seventies, a boyish look. He suspected that with one of her muscly arms she could lift him in the air, turn him horizontal, hold him over her head. He would think about her heft, her thick waist composed of almost eight decades of bread and butter, and her undeniably butch coiffure, rather than reproach himself for babbling about the moral life. He would try to forget that he had in effect come out to her, that he had violated her code by speaking of that part of themselves.

She continued to stare, and Walter, bending to re-tie his double-knotted new brown utility boot, blurted, “I’m glad to be here. Especially glad to be close to Lake Margaret. I don’t really have a home anymore, and this place means as much to me as—”

Aunt Jeannie’s cackle sounded from all the way down the long hall. “Really,” Sue Rawson said.

She was going to do her best to remain inscrutable until she took herself away to the next world. She’d go quietly and efficiently, like a cat. Walter kicked the log in the fireplace and it fell apart, the embers scattering onto the hearth. It was too late in the conversation, no chance for redemption, and he guessed he might as well go for broke: he would remind her of their bond. “Do you remember,” he said, “how you used to play Tebaldi’s
Madame Butterfly
for me in your room, here, upstairs? God, I loved Renata Tebaldi! You used to stand at the window, as if you were waiting for Pinkerton. ‘Che dirà! Che dira?’ ” He sang outside his solid baritone range, squeaking and wringing his hands in front of his chest. “ ‘Chiamerà Butterfly dalla lontana.’ I’d feel like bawling and you’d let me have a sip of your gin.”

“I did no such thing. I despise
Butterfly.”
She was snarling. “The most mawkish drivel he ever wrote. I don’t know why he composed such a sickly—depraved”—she drew out the
a
, hammered both
d’s—
“depraved opera. What was he thinking!”

It was one of Sue Rawson’s hallmarks, Walter remembered, that when a piece of art offended her she spoke as if the writer, the painter,
the composer, had made the work principally to irritate her. There was that old thrill in the air. “Who cared what she was singing?” Walter said meekly. “You were listening to Tebaldi, to her voice.”

Sue Rawson rolled up the military magazine and raised it, as if she were about to paddle Walter in lieu of Puccini.

Walter would not have been rude to his aunt under any circumstances, but he would have liked to shake her, to make her remember those afternoons of slow time and heavy sunlight just as he did, to admit that she had enjoyed his company. “No, really,” he said, trying both not to quail and to laugh as the magazine came slamming down on the back of his chair. She would scoff if he said,
I loved those days
, or,
I treasured those afternoons
. She’d make him feel like an old biddy who pressed corsages in the dictionary. “That was where I discovered the great singers,” he said. “You introduced me to some of the most important people in my life.”

She whacked the arm of the sofa. “Mawkish drivel,” she said under her breath as she stalked from the room.

Just as Walter was beginning to decipher Peter Labatte’s handwriting, his mother turned the doorknob and stuck her head around the corner. Peter was a short, freckled boy who found the feuding families in
Romeo and Juliet
an excellent springboard for discussing the baseball strike. His writing was so small and so smeared that at first Walter thought that the word “baseball” was the name of Romeo’s friend, Benvolio. He had finally gotten on the right track with the mention of George Steinbrenner. “Can I interrupt?” Joyce asked.

Each time Walter saw his mother he had to adjust to the fact that she was in her middle sixties. She had had shingles in the summer, and she did not yet look well. She had lost weight; she walked as if something in her center had seized up, and her hair, her shoulder-length, wavy hair, had gone completely white. She looked older than Sue Rawson, who was ten years her senior.

“Dad’s out there chopping wood with a tool called a Monster Mall,” she said. “I don’t guess you think I should try to stop him.”

“He’s probably hoping it will tire him out and he’ll have a legitimate excuse to sleep through dinner.”

“He’s been a good sport through the years, putting up with all of us. I don’t know that I would have been as chipper about going to spend every summer weekend with his sisters.”

“I remember when I realized, when I had the horrifying realization, that you and Dad hadn’t always lived together, that when you were little you weren’t even living in the same state. That scared me, made me for the first time, you know, think about the hostile and indifferent universe.”

Joyce lowered herself to the sofa carefully, as if it hurt to bend, and when she was finally sitting she smiled at Walter’s remark. “Speaking of hostile and indifferent, are there prospects for real friends in Otten? Can you tell? Are those other teachers warming up?”

Walter had met a man in a box seat at Orchestra Hall in Chicago the week before. He had gone anticipating only the pleasure of hearing Maurizio Pollini give a recital of Beethoven sonatas. But in the box there had been a man named Julian Wright, sitting apart from the four others. Julian had struck up a conversation. They were talking before Walter had taken his coat off, before he was properly in his seat. They might have left at the intermission if the performer had been anyone less compelling than Pollini. Looking into each other’s eyes, they had balanced the joys of a hand job against the forthcoming storm of the three sonatas of Opus 2 and the Opus 7 in E flat. There was time for both sex and Pollini, they silently concluded, just as the lights went down.

To his mother Walter said, “I’ve been too busy to really look around. I feel as if I’ve had a successful week if I’ve gotten through half of my lesson plans, and if I make it to the grocery store.”

“Mrs. Gamble wanted to be remembered to you. She keeps asking me when you’re coming home. I haven’t told her you’ve come twice so far. How she’s missed seeing you, I don’t know. She rests now in the day. She naps. I’ve reminded her that you have a very challenging year going on, that you’ve had no preparation time and that you have papers to grade.”

“Remind her also that she never liked me.” He laid Peter Labatte’s masterpiece aside. “I tracked mud in her living room once and she
made me vacuum. Every crumb. Every dust mote. Tell her she is never far from my mind, and that I’ll sleep on her couch when I come to Oak Ridge next, provided she can remove all the dog hairs. Those hairs, as I recall, had the penetrating quality of volcanic ash. We can do tarot cards right before bedtime so that she’ll have her usual satisfaction of freaking me out. Explain to her, will you please, that I’d have to have an exorcism done to expel her from my soul.”

“Oh, Walter,” his mother said, laughing and rubbing her eyes. “She is unusual, I’ll grant you that, but she’s harmless, after all.”

“Harmless? She never cast spells on you from the toilet. I have sometimes thought that if demons ever did come from the underworld into our realm they’d do it during a purification ritual, right into Mrs. Gamble’s house, up, up into the john, through the water and out past her rear end, free! She forced me to take an overdose of niacin once. I broke out in hives everywhere, went itching and scratching for days.”

“Ah well, she still is a health nut—”

“Who smokes,” Walter put in. “A true health
nut
, yes indeed.”

Joyce smiled at him. “There was never a truer saying than ‘Good fences make good neighbors.’ It’s pretty quiet now on dear old Maplewood Avenue. We’re all getting old. The Gambles are the only children who never left home. Trishie’s having a show at the library, in January, I don’t think I told you.”

“It makes sense that Trishie has become a photographer, that she’s inherited her mother’s skill for observation.”

“She invited me up to her attic—her atelier, she calls it—for a preview. There are an awful lot of dog photographs, I guess that’s not surprising. They’re black-and-white and look artful.”

“Arty, I think is the word, Mom. Aren’t there any stark shots of that narrow downstairs bathroom, the ashtray on top of the toilet tank, the stack of books—”

“She took the nice one of Duke, the one I sent you, with his paws folded over each other, sleeping on the back porch. I like that one a lot.”

“It did capture his sweet side,” Walter said.

“And Greg Gamble, imagine, he’s forty-five, he has his mail-order business at the house still, and Florence says he cleared fifteen thousand dollars last year on the incense alone.”

“Enough money to rent a little place of his own, you’d think.”

“There was a time, believe it or not, when I seriously thought I might ask him to teach me to meditate. He goes to some group and has learned to levitate.” She tightened her lips and shook her head in small quick motions, as if she was shuddering. “Far be it from me,” she said, “to pass judgment.”

Walter coughed. “Oh, come on, Mom. You’re allowed to pass judgment. You’ve always passed judgment—granted, it was in your own quiet way. It was magnificent, for example, the way you made the pictures fall down that summer, at Aunt Jeannie’s anniversary party. You can’t tell me that that wasn’t judgment in its purest form.”

She scratched her nose severely. “Well,” she said slowly. He realized that they had the same inflection, the same rhythm when they said the word “well,” that they used it to stall for time. His mother was outwardly dutiful and good, but she too had a secret life. It was as if she occasionally brought out a plain wooden box, held it before him, and opened and snapped it shut, just enough time for a glimpse of the black stone, one sniff of the exotic scent. He waited. Her knobby hands, he noticed with a pang, were red and chapped from scrubbing carrots and apples in the unheated cookhouse. She raised herself up. “I don’t know,” she said. “There are plenty of mysteries, aren’t there? Some are best left unsolved, the reasons for them best covered. I think the craze to unburden ourselves of our feelings, all of them, is a mistake, that our deepest urges aren’t always those we can be proud of, aren’t the ones to share. Here’s another example: I’ve always wondered who ruined Mrs. Gamble’s lovely new carport roof. There’s a puzzler for you. We woke up one winter morning when you were, what, fifteen or sixteen? And that roof was covered with the primary colors, as if someone had hovered above and dropped balloons loaded with paint. Yes, I believe there were bits of balloon in the spatters of paint.”

Walter stared at her, his mouth open, his hand to his breast. After all this time, she was still curious about the prank he’d played on Mrs. Gamble, that year he was fifteen. He and Mitch, on Valentine’s Day, had in fact creamed the carport roof with paint-filled balloons.

“Hmmm?” she was saying.

Maybe he would tell her, sometime, about that night that changed his life, maybe, when there was the leisure for a long story. “Mother.” He drew the word out, resting in the
r
. “You know I love Mrs. Gamble.”

She bent to his ear and said so softly, “But not, my dear, as much as I love my sisters.”

Lucy was the third to make an entrance, not two minutes after Joyce managed, even with her infirmity, to prance out of the room. She brought with her a tray piled high with silverware, the polish and old rags. “Here, Walt,” she said, handing him a spoon and a rag that had already been dipped in the chocolaty polish. “We’re having an argument in the kitchen, about who should get married next so we can have a family wedding. Sally is five years older than me and she claims she’s still too young. All of Aunt Jeannie’s kids are married, and so are Uncle Wally’s. Phil is supposed to be getting a divorce, but hasn’t everyone been saying that for years now? There are a few distant cousins somewhere who haven’t done it, but would they invite everyone? Aren’t these spoons disgusting? They’re black! Marc went off to chop wood with Dad, even though the dust aggravates his sinuses. Linda doesn’t need me now that she’s so big. But I said to myself, I’m not doing this job on my own. Make sure you get the part with the initials, the engraving, clean too.”