The Short History of a Prince (36 page)

She gave the classic sequence: three raps at the McClouds’ front door. He was at the hall window even though she was out of sight, one floor below. He held the pair of smelly black tights. She knocked again, one, two, three. He stretched the thin cotton, in and out, in and out, as if he were conditioning a balloon before blowing it up. Perhaps no one would answer, and she’d go away. From her window she had seen them lumbering like hungry animals through the cage of the house and so she knew they were home. She knocked once more, and that time Joyce came running from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dish towel.

“Florence!” she cried, opening the door. “Whatever—what is it?”

Mrs. Gamble’s presence in the McClouds’ entry was highly irregular. She did not set foot in the house, except for the Christmas party, when she and Mr. Gamble came in the back, ate a cracker, had one cocktail and then retreated to their own breakfast nook. A visit at the front door was an invasion, an assault upon the privacy and the sanctity of the McCloud home. Behind their front door, behind the white curtain that covered the glass, they were supposed to be safe from the neighborhood in which they lived.

Walter tiptoed to his room. He wished his mother had the bulk of Ma Kettle, including the .22 at her side, that Joyce could man the fort, protect the family from the stickup. In a pile on his floor he found a cleaner pair of dirty tights and a T-shirt, still damp from last night’s sweat. He very carefully folded his ballet clothes and put them in his bag. He zipped it shut. Using hospital corners, he remade his bed, and after he’d smoothed his blanket so that it no longer had a single
crease, as he would be expected to do at boot camp, he crossed the hall to the bathroom, to see if the mural on the carport had disappeared after three days. It could have worn off or been replaced by something even more modern, Art History bandits creating a Rothko effect, with horizontal bands and blurred edges. He flushed the toilet and turned the taps on at the sink, and while all that water was circling and streaming he climbed on the ledge of the bathtub for a look at the masterpiece.

Their work had remained the same. Nothing had happened to alter the splatters that were staring back at him this time like huge unblinking eyes. It looked fine. It looked good. Mrs. Gamble had had the carport built so that she could keep watch over her Chevy, so it would be close to her, right outside her kitchen, her living-room and her dining-room windows. Why wouldn’t she want her roof to be so handsomely decorated? He hopped off the tub, put his bag over his shoulder, turned off the faucet and opened the door forcefully on purpose so it banged against the shower stall. He passed Daniels room, where his brother was making revolting coughing noises, and went down the back stairs.

“I’m going to class, Ma,” he shouted from the kitchen. He had never, in his life, called Joyce
Ma
but he might as well start sounding like an ordinary, cruel teenager. “Ma,” he called louder, “I’m going downtown.” At the point of departure in the past, before Daniel’s illness, Joyce used to ask him if he had el fare, if he’d eaten a healthy breakfast. She’d wish him a safe trip. “I’m leaving,” he yelled.

Joyce was in the living room, with
her
, doing something, talking, he supposed, although he couldn’t hear them. Were they sitting, upright and stiff, or standing side by side or kneeling together at the coffee table? He couldn’t think how they would speak to each other, what they’d do with their hands and their arms, without a fence to lean on, without a fence marking the boundary. He crossed the foyer to the coat hooks. “Always been independent and reliable,” he heard his mother saying. She was either referring to his old self or to Daniel, the model citizen. He took his jacket off the peg and darted around, as if he had only then sensed a presence in the living room.

“Oh, hi, Mrs. Gamble,” he said, facing them and at the same time adjusting the buckle on his duffel bag, fine-tuning it, getting it the
right length, so that it couldn’t possibly rub his shoulder bone, should the padding of his coat instantaneously wear thin.

I’ve always disliked you, Florence, he said to himself. What child on the block didn’t mock her in the theoretical safety of his own room? She was a laughingstock, clearing her throat in long syllables, plucking at her shirt right above her breastbone as if the action released the phlegm. That motion and the noise of her sinus-drainage problem were her signature. You are the butt of the neighborhood jokes, he wanted to say. The butt. Thank you for giving us countless hours of amusement.

It was one thing to mutter about her under his breath, and another altogether to look up at her, to see her at the ready. Oh God, he thought. Help me, Father. Her exaggerated stance in front of the McCloud fireplace, her bent elbows, her splayed fingers had meaning to Walter:
Boy
, she was saying,
I’m not going home empty-handed
.

He stooped—steady now, steady now, he whispered—unzipped his bag to make sure, once more, that his ballet slippers were inside. He fished around as best he could, the trembling going all the way up his arms. Imagine her on the pot, he instructed himself. Better yet, imagine the dog shit, the volume of it, that she scoops up in the alley, day after day, year after year. It had to be a dog-do mountain equivalent to Mount McKinley, or higher, a Mount Everest coil of turds. The idea of her willingly taking on that kind of indignity emboldened him. He stood up, and bravely, without much fear at all, he walked into the living room. Mount Everest, he thought. She was squinting at him and he looked back, wide-eyed, trying to see beyond her, to the horizon, to the steaming pile of soft stink rising to the altitude of twenty-nine thousand feet.

“Good-bye, Mom,” he said, going to Joyce. He kissed her cheek. He couldn’t recall the last time he had touched her. She had a lilacky scent on her skin, from the bubble baths she habitually took in the evenings when she got home from the hospital. It was her one luxury, the way she spent her time instead of tending the house. It didn’t seem like a canned fragrance. She was the only person he knew who could smell of lilacs in February. It was the delicate freshness of one lilac flower and not the overpowering sweetness of a row of trees blooming in a line. “Oh,” he said, drawing away, unsure how long he’d been
standing close to his mother, hovering at her ear. It might have been three seconds, or ten minutes, or half an hour. He glanced at Mrs. Gamble’s beige Hush Puppies and the two inches of nylon stocking that showed above her shoes and below her pants. “So long, Mrs. Gamble,” he said. He thought of doing something insolent, blowing her a kiss, mugging, asking her about the permafrost damage to her carport concrete—something to get a rise out of Mitch in a future telling. “I can’t believe it’s only six more months to the block party,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s amazing how fast the time goes.” Chin up, back straight. He secured the button at the neck of his jacket. “I’ll see you again,” he said, in case either one of them had any doubt.

He went out the door with a spring in his step. It had been so easy to look her in the eye. He had stared at her without blinking, without faltering, and as he looked he had thought, I didn’t do anything. Give him a few more hours and he’d have forgotten he’d done it; he’d be free of it. Mitch could probably put the incident out of his mind without much of a struggle, and there they’d be, the pair of them, innocent as lambs.

Mitch had missed Thursday and Friday at school, and was still sick on Saturday. Walter had tried to call him a few times but Mrs. Anderson always answered, and he felt obliged, under the circumstances, to hang up. He didn’t want Mitch to be incriminated by association. Before ballet class that Saturday Mrs. Kenton came to Walter as he was warming up at the barre, trying to stretch. She called her pupils “dear” on the rare occasions she spoke to them about personal matters. “Is Mitch getting better, dear?” she asked.

For a minute her concern seemed so genuine that Walter forgot the sense of her question. He wished she were asking after him. Her hand was on her bosom and she was effortlessly standing in fifth position. “Fine,” he murmured, “fine.”

She smiled as if she understood his confusion. “And how’s your brother? This must be a very difficult time for you.”

“He’s a fighter,” Walter said, repeating his parents’ standard reply.

She frowned and patted his leg that was on the barre. “That’s good. Well! We’re a small group today, aren’t we?”

Mitch was out, Susan had been away for over a month, and one of the minor-league pets, Miranda, had had foot surgery. She meant,
Walter thought, that aside from her paycheck it was hardly worth her while to come to work. Walter guessed that by inquiring after Daniel she was actually trying to determine when Susan would return.
Is your brother dead yet
, she wanted to ask,
so we can have our star pupil back on the roster?

Mrs. Kenton paid attention to him all through class, correcting his arms, kneeling on the floor and guiding his foot in the half-circle of a rond de jambe, lifting his arabesque a little higher, turning it out a degree or two more than his hip allowed. He couldn’t really enjoy her notice because he knew it was no more sincere than the compliments of a fair-weather friend. She’d disregard him once Mitch was on the mend. Maybe he didn’t care. And anyhow he couldn’t work up much interest in the usual exercises when there was a drama sure to be going on back home. As he was doing his grand battements Mrs. Gamble might still be in the living room, haggling over the punishment with Joyce. She’d insist on chopping off Walter’s whole hand, and Joyce, always protecting her cubs, would skillfully negotiate for two fingers. His mother would work to save his thumb and the index finger for that prehensile advantage, using the pinkie as a bargaining chip. If only he’d pulled the stunt in the summer when all the windows were open, so the entire neighborhood could have been privy to the battle taking place between Joyce and Mrs. Gamble. A child with entrepreneurial talents could have charged admission, and it might have been spectacle enough that every year a group of punks would perform a reenactment under a big top.

Walter left the studio quickly after class and hurried down Michigan Avenue to get to the el stop. Once he reached Oak Ridge he took his time, prolonging the suspense. He went north on Maplewood for a good mile, west on Division, through downtown, east on Winthrop, back to his own block. Finally, at two o’clock, he went in the side door, listening, as he crept up the stairs, for his neighbor’s voice. He expected to find Mrs. Gamble in the living room, talking to his mother, as if no time had passed in the Oak Ridge realm while he’d been away for several hours. He could hear Joyce running the water at the sink in the kitchen and his father making disparaging remarks about Henry Kissinger. He could smell Susan. The hall stank of every imaginable flower condensed into a few dark drops. It was nervy of
her, to presume that she could barge right in and overpower not only his mother’s fragile scent but the fragrance of the house itself. Daniel asked if he could have some more milk, and by the clanking of bracelets Walter could hear that Susan was pouring. So it was lunchtime, still, at two o’clock in the afternoon. Ever since Daniel had gotten sick the house had a perpetual frowsy holiday feel, late meals, dishes stacked in the sink, newspapers all over the place. Maybe if they straightened up, vacuumed, threw a load in the wash, got back to work, they’d be cured of what ailed them.

He was thinking that Mrs. Gamble was probably no longer in the living room hunting the quarry when Susan called, “Is someone there? Is that you, Walter?”

She had sensed him although he’d been standing on the landing without moving, without making a noise. She knew the box of the house better than his mother did, since she’d been sneaking around nights, looking to get laid. His mother had given up listening for danger, why bother when Susan was on the prowl?

“Hello, hello?” she sang out.

He came from the shadows into the white light of the kitchen. She was at the counter smiling at him, as if nothing as large as his brother had come between them. “Hi!” she chirped. “I thought I heard you.”

“Oh,” he said. “Hi.” He wanted to say, I
swelled
you.

“You’re just in time,” his mother said.

Just in time. One more minute and there would have been nothing left for no-name McCloud. A crust of bread, the scum from the oatmeal pot.

“Pull up a chair,” his father said.

At least he still had his place at the table, although of course they had neglected to put out a spoon and a bowl and a glass. Beyond Susan’s perfume he could detect the smell of chicken soup. He supposed he should be thankful that they hadn’t moved him in order to make room for the new child, that they hadn’t set him up on the floor beside Duke’s kibble dish. From his mother there were no questions, not so much as How are you? How was class?

“Walter,” Robert said.

He couldn’t remember the last time his father had spoken to him before he commanded him to pull up a chair. With the exception of
Christmas Day, he couldn’t recall when his father had last been home. “Dad,” he answered.

“Do you know anything about the roof of Mrs. Gamble’s carport?”

So formal. Not Mrs. Gamble’s roof, but the roof of Mrs. Gamble, as if he’d translated the sentence from a Romance language. Walter loved how the carport was always the province of Mrs. Gamble. He would have liked to discuss the subject at length. Mr. Gamble, for instance, had nothing to do with the building projects over at that house, or the customarily male domain of the garage. Did Robert McCloud have an opinion about the Gambles’ reversal of roles? Did he think that Mrs. Gamble had burned her underwire brassiere, removing the hardware from it with her apron pliers before she torched the thing? And along those lines, he also so appreciated that his father, who was never around anymore, was supposedly the one to administer discipline and justice. He spoke as if Ward Cleaver were flashing the cue cards at the sink for his benefit. Neither Daniel nor Walter had ever misbehaved in an extreme way, and his parents had had to turn to television to learn what to say and how to act.