The Short History of a Prince (31 page)

Joyce came in with groceries that afternoon and she thought how relaxed and happy Daniel looked on the sofa. “Another month,” she said at night, and in the morning. “Give us another month.” Later on it was, “One more week.” She told herself that she was strong enough to hold out hope, to beg for an allotment of time, to live with the uncertainty, to go on asking day after day. With their love, with Susan’s love, anything was possible. It was the girl who could get him to sit up and drink some broth; she who made him laugh, who made him extend his forecast to the spring. He planned to be well enough to take her to the prom in May, to escort her to the last dance of his senior year.

There were evenings in February when Walter walked into the kitchen to find Susan and Joyce standing side by side at the counter like best friends, chopping up chicken breasts and celery to put in the broth. The ingenue and the mother were bent to the task of keeping
the sick boy breathing, conquering his illness with cooked spinach and the salutary power of romance. Walter avoided going home, avoided stepping into a scene that should already have played itself out on daytime television. He went to the health-food store and sat for an hour at the counter like a drunk, in front of his tiger milk shake. Or he went to the library and slept in the oversized chair in the company of Oak Ridge’s crazy man and the woman with open sores on her legs. Most often he went to Mitch’s house. He could go in secret, shinny up a post onto a roof outside Mitch’s room, and open the broken window, climb in, so that Mrs. Anderson would not know just how often he was over, so she wouldn’t think he was wearing out his welcome.

From what Walter could gather, Susan had not felt obliged to tell Mitch that she was casting him aside. It had been clear, the night of the Christmas party, that she was moving on, that Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Anderson were henceforth a part of history. With the specter of death hanging over the McCloud household, Susan apparently believed that she did not have to abide by the rules of courtship and civilized behavior. Everyone would naturally understand. It was a bewildering situation, a cruel fix, Walter thought, but for him there was something about all of the relations that made a pleasing symmetry. Susan had jilted Mitch. It was too bad, an absolute shame. Susan had also deprived Walter of a mother and a brother so that the two boys could both, in a sense, call themselves orphans.

Through January Mitch sat on the el without exerting any pressure against the ride, so that on a particularly bumpy trip Walter feared Mitch would slide off the seat. The two sat facing each other, staring at the floor or out the window. Walter wondered how long it would take Mitch to understand that they were together under the same evil star. He hoped that one day on the train Mitch would glance across to him and see his own sorrow reflected in Walter’s face. They both looked beat up, they both weren’t getting enough sleep. Walter saw his image in the train window and he thought there was misery in the way his own curls seemed to have unraveled, the way they hung in the dry heat of the train as if rain had flattened them. The sight of Walter might fill Mitch with pity, something he might have felt on a few previous occasions, when he’d seen handicapped children on the street or blind people. Although Mitch was wounded, as good as missing
a vital organ, surely he would realize that Walter had also lost something, a hand, an ear, several toes, small losses as opposed to a whole beating heart, but parts missing nonetheless. Conniving Susan, the schemer, had robbed both of them, taken what was rightfully theirs.

They didn’t talk about her. At the Andersons’ house Walter sang along with the record player. There were arias in
Tosca
that described his own unhappiness, and he sat with his legs crossed and his eyes closed, belting them out with Renata Tebaldi. Mitch lay on his bed with his hands pressed against his abdomen. He was having stomachaches and chest pains, what felt like bitter digestive acids leaking into his rib cage. “Ow, ow, ow,” he moaned over the noise of the singers. Above all of that clamor Mrs. Anderson went unnoticed, calling to them from the den to turn down the stereo.

Walter understood the signal that in January seemed to beam over the land every five seconds from the McCloud house, from the snug little company that was working with such industry to restore Daniel’s health. Mitch came calling for Walter one Saturday morning and he too felt the warning. It was a bad day for Joyce—trouble feeding Daniel, trouble cleaning his wound—and when she saw Mitch standing at the door she said, “What in heaven’s name are you doing here?”

“Nothing. Just passing by, but no, I—I don’t need to see anyone.”

The message from Joyce was clear.
We don’t want you
. But there was also the fine print: the world was not going to let Walter or Mitch rant or rail in the face of Susan’s goodness. She had come into Daniel’s life, had found in her heart love for a person whose patchy skin fell off in flakes onto her hands and her lap. She might save him—so the idle boys be off. Mitch and Walter were well. They had lives ahead of them, and in that future the assurance of strong bodies. During this time they were to be quiet, they were to wait, until there were results, until the something, the thing that was not within their poor power to affect, took place. Then, in the great afterward, there would be more time than a person could spend to sort out the mess.

It seemed to Walter that as the days passed, clauses were added to the original message, sections that contained threats.
If you so much as think to smash the streetlights, to club the ducks in the park, to steal and pillage for attention, you may not live to regret it
. There was not much
choice, no alternative but to give up the girl, the mother, the brother, without a squeak. Walter considered that someone, sometime, much later, might see through to their nobility, might understand what they had sacrificed, but in his own room he did not feel much heroism. His parents might just as well have taken him into the forest under the pretext of gathering wood and left him.

Through the winter the two boys went through their usual motions. They met at school, they went to ballet class, they traveled back to Oak Ridge on the el, and then one way or another, by climbing in the window or walking through the front door, Walter usually wound up in Mitch’s room. He would have stayed the night on the floor if he could have escaped Mrs. Anderson’s watchful eye for the length of twelve hours. Between seven and ten o’clock in the evening they sat on Mitch’s brown coil rug side by side, leaning against his bed. They opened the windows, and smoked Mitch’s dope, a new hobby for both of them, and they spoke in a desultory way about food they’d like to eat and movies they’d seen. Ever since Christmas, when Walter tumbled down the stairs, they could hardly think what to talk about. It was ironic, Walter thought, that they finally had hours at a time in each other’s company and there was nothing much to say. The dance no longer seemed like a large enough subject, and the Susan topic, on the other hand, would lead them through dark twisting lanes, every one a dead end.

If the grass didn’t make Walter feel isolated or recklessly hilarious, it sometimes loosened his tongue, and after several hits gave him the freedom to speak about any trivial thing that came to mind. He lectured Mitch one night for forty-five minutes about coffee, about all the facets of production. They were smoking hash, good hash, “organic,” the dealer, a fourteen-year-old punk, had said. Walter made a note to tell Mrs. Gamble, if it ever came up in conversation, that they were not polluting themselves, that they were partaking of a chemically free product of the finest quality. After the third toke he very badly wanted a cup of coffee. He got to thinking and talking, simultaneously, about drip versus percolation and the variation in filter paper. His uncle Ted loved coffee, and had thrown what energy Aunt Jeannie spared him into becoming a connoisseur. He was one of the first
grocers in the nation to have a grinder available to his customers, so that they could take home the roasted beans freshly ground. Through the years at parties Uncle Ted had casually dispensed facts about the coffee bean in the pause between the main course and dessert. Walter heard himself taking the story back, further and further, to the place where coffee thrives, in the rich volcanic soil of the world’s largest archipelago in Indonesia. He knew things on dope that he didn’t realize he knew. “Imagine,” he said with his eyes closed, “a couple of thousand years ago, the Toradja people of Indonesia, who believed that their ancestors came from the stars.” He sang a long, repetitive aria about Capella forming, forty-six light-years away from Earth, and dripping people, like silver rain, down into Southeast Asia. Eventually he made his way back to the important differences between washed coffee and dry-processed, to the problem of tariffs, the longshoremen and the questionable romance of the beverage. He felt as if he might never shut up.

Mitch, taking another hit, looked across at Walter. “That bitch,” was all he said.

Daniel marshaled his forces and made it to school on Valentine’s Day. He was wearing a red sweater that a few months before had stretched across his chest and been put away for Walter. It hung in pleats down the front and the back. Susan, at his side, click-clacked on the tile in her black heels. She looked worldly and rich in her crimson sleeveless linen dress, her hair done up in a French twist and secured with a rhinestone clip. When Walter saw the pair coming down the hall, looking like two human-sized red-hots, he almost shouted, Fire! He guessed in that moment that he was capable of becoming a thug and that he’d enjoy the subterfuge. It would be nothing to walk to the end of the corridor and pull the alarm. He’d smash the glass by the extinguisher, too, and then he’d join a line somewhere along the way, filing calmly, courteously out of the building, an upstanding citizen. Susan was dressed as if she thought Driver’s Ed, American Lit, Geometry, Civics, Chemistry and French were going to have cocktail wagons, in
place of the teachers’ desks, and bands, playing slow jazzy tunes, the curtains drawn for that hazy late-afternoon happy-hour feel.

Mitch and Walter walked down the hall looking at the waxed floor, at the thousands of little brown and green speckles in the tiles sliding under their feet. They had met in the alley before school and smoked a joint in celebration of that little dick Cupid. They smoked out in the cold near the baseball diamond at lunch, in continued observation of the holiday. Walter fell asleep in his World History class, and the teacher, Mr. Windberg, crept up behind him and squawked in his ear. It was an amusing moment for the other students: Walter jumping in his desk, the wooden top holding him like a straitjacket against the force of his shock.

By four o’clock he and Mitch had gotten themselves to Chicago. They both ordered the hamburger platter at the Artists’ Café. They ate every scrap, down to the wilted lettuce and the orange tomato. “Do you think we’re straightened out?” Mitch said. They never asked each other personal questions. And Walter certainly had never before been a part of the royal We. He swallowed his coffee, stared at his friend, averted his eyes, tried to take another sip from his empty cup. The question implied a shared history; they might have gotten out of bed together that morning. To think—an entire night with Mitch, sharing the privacy of sleep. They might have lingered under the covers, unable to sort out their own smell in the warm pocket of the bed, Mitch’s unruly bangs falling over his closed eyes, creases in his cheeks from the pillowcase. They might have risen to the prospect of a long, difficult day, and having come near the end, there was the reasonable query:
Do you think we’re straightened out?

“I—I’m all right,” Walter said. “Are you? You okay?”

“Fine.” Mitch slapped a quarter for the tip on the table. It was a father’s gesture, and when he stood up he jingled the change in his pockets with his hands like a salesman. He could handle anything, and he walked the yellow line on the linoleum out the door to prove it.

They both did well in class that evening. Walter felt that in general he was making progress. It wasn’t only that the Rockford Ballet experience had given him confidence. Susan was gone, ding dong the witch is dead, and with her absence came an unexpected freedom. Walter hadn’t realized how much she’d constrained him until she’d
flown the coop. There was nothing tentative now in the bold strike of his battement frappé,
I love you, love you, Mitch
.

During the center work, Mr. Kenton told the twenty girls to go off to the barre and work on their trouble spots on their own. It was rare that he singled out the boys and gave them their own masculine high-jumping combinations. For fifteen minutes Walter and Mitch, starting at opposite sides of the room, leaped and turned, doing jetés, glissades, cabrioles, ballonnés. As Walter started across the floor one of his earliest fantasies about Mitch flashed before him: the two boys, without much clothing on, dancing alone in a room, the hairs on Mitch’s arms sparking gold in the sunlight, Walter moving in and out of his love’s clasp.