The Short History of a Prince (47 page)

“It’s sort of a story,” he said, “about a dress that I managed to appropriate. It’s a horror story, in a way, but the kind of vignette certain people would think is humorous in a slapstick, yuk-it-up kind of way.” He was tired of the hand of God, of death, of cancer, of the smell of bedpans and canned soup, and it would be a blast of fresh air to talk about Mr. Kenton and ordinary human malice.

“I’m not in a laughing mood,” she said.

“No, no, I’m not either. That’s why I’d like to tell it to you now, when you’re more liable to cry. I’d prefer it if you could muster a tear or two.”

They went down in the elevator to the parking lot. When she got into the car she slumped on the wheel and she said, “This feels like the worst day of my life.”

He could see that she was going to spill over, that she was cranking up for a long, racking cry. It was hard for him to think about anything being the worst anymore because all the days were unreal. Each one was more blandly worse than the next. He was moving through his life without thinking or understanding, and he hoped she wouldn’t start sobbing because there was no telling if he could hold on or not. And if he had a choice he would prefer not to begin the Vesuvian display on the freeway, in her hatchback car.

“This might not be helpful?” he said, as if it were a question. He was speaking too loudly, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t turn it down. “Probably nothing a person says can make a difference, but it, all of this, could get a lot worse. Maybe today is nothing. It’s possible that tomorrow could be even more terrible.”

She was quiet, pursing her lips, before she said, “That’s just brilliant, Walter. So smart.” She was spitting at him with every other
t
. “What makes you think your genius statement is true? How do you know?”

“I don’t really.” He shrugged. “It’s just a hunch.”

“I’m supposed to be grateful, aren’t I, because I’m not in Vietnam and my legs aren’t amputated at the knees, and my mother isn’t an alcoholic and my father isn’t running off with his secretary. Is that it? Because if that’s what you mean you can go to hell in a handbasket. If
you think I’m going to sit here in this dress and count my blessings, then you better get out and walk.”

He could see that there wasn’t actually much steam in her anger. She was too tired to work herself into a frenzy. “Forget it,” she said, under her breath. She started the car and turned on the radio and all the way home they listened to a Dvorak symphony. He was relieved not to have to make conversation with her while she drove in the tight dress and her three-inch heels. It probably took all of her concentration just to feel the gas pedal through the shoes. He wouldn’t want to distract her, and he also had nothing to say in his defense. With her present handicap they could easily get in an accident and have to have their legs amputated at the knees, and then her mother would become a drunk, and her father might escape with the neighbor, and he and Susan would have to be brave and cheerful and study hard and deflect everyone’s pity. He felt he was correct, that everything around him—the car, the buildings, the whole food chain—could collapse. It was a little bit of a comfort—but he didn’t say so—to think that the entire world might fall to pieces, that it wasn’t only Daniel who was failing.

She drove up on the curb at 646 Maplewood Avenue. Walter wasn’t sure if it was the elm tree at her fender that stopped her or if she shut off the motor of her own volition. “Could you hand me the screwdriver from the glove compartment?” she said. He dug through Lou Ann’s grocery coupons, empty gum packets, the crumpled foil wrappers. With one motion she slit the dress from the thigh to the ankle with the Boy Scout knife he had found. “There,” she said. “Now I’ll be able to make it up your front stairs.”

He came around to the driver’s side and opened the door for her, and they walked arm in arm up the walk and into the house. Although she could move freely they went one step at a time. She rested against him like an elderly woman. When they were inside he guided her to the bench in the hall and sat her down. He went straight to the piano, reached behind it, removed the balled-up costume and came toward her, holding it to his front. He turned around, glided into the living room, turning again, as if the blue line of the rug were the runway. It would be best, he thought, if she came to the knowledge herself.

“Isn’t it?” she finally said in a whisper. “Isn’t it what Tracy, Sonja, Maureen and Alberta were going to wear for—for
Pas de Quatre?
Oh,
my God, Walter, did Mrs. Kenton make that? Does she know you have it?”

He told her the basic story, including the carport crime and omitting the fact that he had had sexual contact with Mitch. He also did not tell her that his flogging happened on the day she had yelled at him at school, when she told him she’d be happy if he died, that he was a worthless human being. He took off his shoes to show her his toes that were still partially without the nails, and she bent over his feet and she petted them, as if they were kittens.

“It’s just going to be the two of us pretty soon, Walter,” she said. “Sure, I’ll go back to dancing school. Sure, we’ll finish our sophomore year and summer will come. I’m never speaking to Mitch again, the way he laughed at you, the way he supported Mr. Kenton. Oh, Walter, pretty soon it will really only be the two of us who know anything.”

They put on Daniel’s Moody Blues album,
Nights in White Satin
. Walter opened the curtains so that Mrs. Gamble could watch them if there was nothing good on television. They stood holding each other, rocking slowly from side to side. “I’ve never gotten what this song means,” she said. “ ‘Nights in White Satin.’ Does it mean the kind of knights riding on horses in good clothes, or is the song about clouds wrapped in material?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It’s probably about fucking. And magic. Most songs are about the two of those things, trying to put them together.” He pulled her closer. “It’s a remarkable dress,” he murmured in her ear.

“I don’t think I ever want to get married to any—you know—dumb guy.” He understood her to mean a straight man, a clod who would expect satisfaction and regularity. “But I’d live with you, Walter. I’d marry you, just so we could talk after work and cook dinners and dance around the living room in our stocking feet. If you wanted to, I’d do it in ten or, say, twenty years.”

“In twenty years Mr. Kenton will be dead, darling,” Walter whispered. “Mitch will wear a Mountie’s outfit and be in forestry up in Alaska, macho as Smokey the Bear. You’ll be a principal dancer in the New York City Ballet. I’ll be someplace close, like Dorothy is in Oz, closer to Kansas than she thinks, but far away, of course, too. No one will know me there. I won’t let anyone know me.”

Eleven

JUNE
1973

D
aniel’s memorial service took place on June 7 at Lake Margaret, outside, down by the water. Joyce and Robert had not been regular churchgoers and for years they had had no affiliation with a congregation or a minister. Jeannie urged the family to hold the service at First Presbyterian for the sake of simplicity, to spare them the headaches of travel, but she also wanted to say, and finally did, that she thought it was a little tiny bit unfair to use the property on such an occasion. “No one, after all, wants our home to be associated with tragedy,” she said, making clear that she had conferred with the others, that she did not stand alone in her opinion. Sue Rawson advised an Oak Ridge ceremony for her own reasons. The Lake Margaret property had already exerted a strong hold, a mawkish grip over the McClouds, to her way of thinking. They were soppy enough about the house as it was, no point in adding extra freight.

Joyce thanked her older sisters for their advice. She asked them to remember Daniel, and how much he loved his summers at the lake. If they could picture him swimming out to the raft, his beautiful slender arms coming over his head in the butterfly stroke, if they could see him sailing the Sunfish on a windy afternoon, they would surely understand
that there was no question about Lake Margaret. To Robert she said that it was the only place she could stand to be, that the porch and the long green hill and the sound of the water were as good as any church, and furthermore the eleven acres were spacious enough and old enough to absorb every one of the family’s rituals. “Let Jeannie and Sue stay home,” she said evenly. She kicked the roasting pan that was hanging out of the cupboard and slammed the door after it.

The service was meant primarily for the relatives, but word of the date and time and location got around in Oak Ridge. On that June afternoon a number of Daniel’s classmates and the parents, and his teachers made the drive to Lake Margaret. There were over seventy cars parked up and down the road, and Aunt Jeannie herself chased to the grocery store in search of three more plain sheet cakes and the makings for punch. Joyce went into the upstairs bathroom and wept into a towel. There had been plenty of hospitality already—“Goddamn it,” she cried. “Goddamn these people.” She and Robert had put up with a steady stream of visitors through the living room since Daniel’s death on May 22, friends and acquaintances, hospital and school staff paying their respects, the able-bodied women on Maplewood Avenue bringing food. “I can’t bear it,” she said, bending over the sink to wash her face.

Walter stood on the lawn before the service, watching the swim team come along the path, walking shoulder to shoulder, as if they were one organism, as if all that was missing was the costume of the dragon or a horse that would fit over the bulk of them, twelve pairs of big feet shuffling underneath. He couldn’t think why they had appeared, when they’d already dropped by the house in Oak Ridge, standing nervously in the hall while Joyce spoke to each of them in turn. Even as they came in formation Walter could see that they couldn’t figure out what to do with their hands, that they didn’t know how to move. They seemed to think that swinging their arms backward and forward naturally was too wild a motion for the occasion. Their discomfort was so naked Walter had to turn away from them, stand with his back against the old walnut tree.

Susan came from the porch and went to him, adjusted the collar of his brown shirt. It was nice of her to attend to him like a girlfriend just when the boys showed up. “You have spaghetti sauce on your
mouth,” she whispered, and as furtively as a mother she spit on her finger and dabbed at his upper lip. “Don’t look now, but Mrs. Anderson is getting out of the car, leaving it by the kitchen door like she expects valet parking. Mitch is in the backseat—asleep. Did you know he was coming?”

Walter closed his eyes. Did animals who were smart enough to play dead under trying circumstances half believe they were a dream, a flicker of light, a spume? Maybe I could expire right here, he thought, if I pretend hard enough, if I clap clap clap because I believe in fairies and other unseen wonders.

“I realize it’s not an invitational sort of thing,” she gabbled on, “and his mom probably made him come, but you’d think he would have asked if he could—”

“It’s okay. It doesn’t matter.”

She slapped her hand over her mouth. “I’m sorry, Walter. You’re right. What difference does it make?”

She moved the waistband of her lavender-and-pale-green print skirt to the left and the right, trying to get the front seam down the exact middle. In the two weeks since Daniel’s death she had begun to regain her bloom. She had not seen him again after the prom night; she told Walter that for her it was as if he had died then, in her arms. She no longer looked battered at school, and she was back to washing her hair every day and coordinating her outfits. Walter was grateful to her for not dressing up in black for the service. Instead of a dingy bombazine tight to the neck, skirt to the floor, she was wearing a white knit shell, her
rayon skirt with the shamrocks and a purple
belt,
a thin
gold chain around her neck with no locket, no cross, no diamond. She had fixed her silvery hair in one braid down her back.

Joyce and Robert were moving through the guests like a pair of generals greeting the good soldiers. Walter could only think, How? How could they rise to the occasion so admirably? It was horrific that they had to, and in a way it was horrific that they were capable of such heroics. “Would you mind coming to get me when this thing starts,” he said to Susan. “I’m
going up to my aunt’s room, to
ah—”

He was going to say, hide, but she nudged him toward the front door. “Shoo,” she said. “I’ll knock twice. Quick, before Mitch opens his eyes.”

Thank goodness, thank God he was getting away, if only for a few minutes. Run, run like the wind, through the cool living room, shut up against the heat, and two steps, four steps, eight, sixteen, to Sue Rawson’s chamber in the back of the house. No one would look for him there. The shadows from the trees outside, the young summer leaves and the dark branches, moved in waves, back and forth across the white coverlet on her bed. Keep still, he said to himself, clutching a pillow, curling up into the swirl of the shadows. “Keep me safe,” he said to the room.