The Short History of a Prince (48 page)

Maybe he didn’t have very high expectations anymore for his friends, his family, the walls of a house, but he couldn’t help feeling grateful half the day lately for shelter, for a few people here and there, and only because they sometimes had the ability, for a minute or two, to dull the nagging ache in the hollow of his chest. You never knew when someone was going to appear out of the blue and not make things worse. That was the astonishing thing he’d learned so far in his short life, the fact that had come through to him the night with Susan in the hospital, that sometimes a moment, or even a few hours, weren’t as bad as they could have been. It was possible, too, that even death was like some great call to the dying, a lovely beckoning that the rest of them left behind couldn’t hear or know. Maybe the saddest detail in the last year was the fact that Daniel had once been a skilled chess player and as his disease progressed he couldn’t think through the moves anymore. He had cried when Joyce made the awful suggestion that he try checkers instead.

Walter went to the window and looked down through the heart-shaped leaves of the catalpa tree to the guests below, shaking hands, talking quietly. For one ridiculous instant he missed Mrs. Gamble, but of course she was back in Oak Ridge, watching over the McClouds’ house. How out of whack he must be, to want to see her pin curls, her deadly green-eyed glare, her little gray teeth. How funny, wasn’t it funny, like so many other funny things, that Mrs. Gamble was as familiar and dear as an old pair of slippers, a book that has been read a hundred times. Maybe he should be thankful for the fatigue that had reduced all his feelings to sentiment. He guessed he could take baby steps from melancholy to gratitude, or he could lie back down on Sue Rawson’s soft mattress with the trough in the middle, and finally let
loose for the enormity of his brother’s death. He could take his pick, the way the urchin pack in the alley used to, both feet in the circle to be counted, to decide who was It for kick the can.
My mother and your mother were hanging out the clothes. My mother punched your mother right in the nose. What color was the blood?
How fragile any sort of peace was, he thought then, in a family, in a neighborhood. He should go downstairs, probably, embrace, shake hands, fight back tears as was expected, receive the benediction and carry on as Daniel surely would want him to.

In Oak Ridge Robert had told Walter, in passing from the bathroom to the bedroom, that they might easily go under in grief, but if they had willpower and resolve they might lick it, they might find something to hold on to, a power within themselves to keep standing. His brief speech was like the hopeless appeal a coach might give his losing team, the last pep talk, but Walter had understood his father and had done his best to see what good remained. Susan had helped him more than she realized. They were together once more, companions through the march. Walter was thankful that she hadn’t walked through the halls crying in the final days, and after. She had kept her sorrows nearly private, acknowledging her distress only to Walter, and then with nothing more than a look or the brush of her fingers over his arm. They had managed not to see Mitch at school, or perhaps Mitch had gotten in the habit of taking any long way around them in the hall.

Daniel had died in the early morning, and already that same evening Walter could see that Susan was prepared for the old life to seal over. It seemed to him that she, out of all of them, was following the proper and sensible course. He did not hold her fortitude against her. She had said, “I think I can both hold him here”—she tapped her heart—“and”—she flung her hands up to the heavens—“let him go, at the same time. It’s hard, takes effort, concentration, like psychically patting your head and your stomach simultaneously and forever, but it’s possible. I think it’s possible.”

That night they were sitting on the McClouds’ porch swing, and she cried a little into Walter’s shoulder. They were too tired to wail. It had rained all afternoon and into the evening, the heavens grieving too, they thought. They sat, wiping at their eyes, and Susan blew her nose for so long they couldn’t help laughing. How dumb it was, she
said, that they couldn’t have an emotional moment without her sinuses draining. The night air, steamy and thick, was closing around them, and although they didn’t mention it, both of them believed the moisture and the heat were part of Daniel’s loving presence. They walked over to Susan’s house, bumping gently against each other, stumbling through the puddles without noticing, without speaking. At the gate they clasped hands, held on. Walter had hated her only weeks before. Don’t let go, he wanted to say. If there was anything to look forward to, it was seeing her again, in the morning. Suppose he went home and took off his clothes and got into bed and closed his eyes and, while he slept, suppose the earth spun and the sun rose and he opened his eyes and found clean underwear, washed his face, went down to the kitchen. It might be worth going through those motions if he could spend an hour with her, if she’d come over and sit with him, or sing in his ear, or show him a pretty little nothing, or take him for a walk. He might stay on the sidewalk all through the night, waiting for her, hanging close with his head over the fence like a girl’s loyal horse. “Good-bye, Walter,” she said, kissing him on the lips. “Goodbye, dear friend.”

She disappeared into her foyer. He followed her movement through the house as it went dark downstairs and light upstairs; room by room, into the bathroom she went, her parents’ room and her own room. He waited at the gate while she read a chapter of a Hermann Hesse novel, while she drew up her covers and plumped her pillows, set her alarm clock, leaned over and snapped off her Tensor bedside light. She would sleep, he was sure of it. After breakfast she’d wake up and call him, and it might not be so bad, the day, the endless hours stretching before them. They’d talk about Daniel for a while, Daniel, who had paved the way. It was Daniel, Walter knew, who had given Susan back to him.

“And what do you have, Dan?” He had asked out loud into the haze of the night. “What priceless gift is left for you?”

Better not to ask, better not to think of the limited prospects. He had died alone, in his sleep, while Joyce went to the bathroom and Robert stepped into the hall to take a break from the rasping noise of their son’s breathing. It was intolerable to sit through, hour after hour, and no one had been able to say how long it might go on. When they
came home from the hospital to tell Walter that the long wait was over, he felt let down, disappointed in the final scene for his mother’s sake. Joyce poached eight eggs out of habit for the old family of four, toasted a package of English muffins, made coffee and orange juice, sectioned the grapefruits. The three of them sat at the table. Everything was in place: napkins, teaspoons, cream and sugar in the wedding china. Robert sat moving his muffin around his plate with his knife as if it were a hockey puck. The food was like a prop, a useful something to handle to give a feel of reality and depth to their own characters and their conversation. They all knew they weren’t really going to eat. Joyce stirred her coffee and Robert began making a list on his napkin of people they should call, looking up occasionally and saying, “Who else, Joycie?
Who
else?”

Walter wondered if it was a perk for a nurse to be able to whisper into dying people’s ears, to have your words float on into the next world. His parents didn’t hear, or maybe he hadn’t spoken. It was the beginning of the weeks to come, the time when he felt nothing. He didn’t know anymore how to think a thought from start to finish. He couldn’t feel his bum heart ticking. And there didn’t seem to be any point to eating or swallowing or blinking or sleeping. Big deal, living and breathing. Maybe it wasn’t so bad, to have gone out in the middle of a dream.

On one of those gray mornings in the kitchen, after the end, Joyce stood at the table and asked him right out what he thought happened in the hereafter, and if he had religious inclinations. “Is there anything for you to fall back on?” she said. “I don’t know if we’ve given you boys a foundation.”

“A foundation.” Walter didn’t want to offend her, or make a blunder if she’d suddenly come upon Jesus, if it was he who was going to get her through the next few decades, but he knew she’d catch him if he recited some fakey inspirational line. “I don’t know, Mom,” he said. “God isn’t the architect and he’s not exactly the main character either, but I think he’s something, urn, literary. He’s the setting, maybe. That’s it. God is all of Mrs. Gamble’s backyard, and as for Jesus, I’ve always thought he was in the wrong line of work. I mean, he might have been happier and developed a sense of humor if he’d kept at his carpentry and gone into inspirational speaking, just on
weekends, part-time, charged money and made cassettes for people to listen to in their cars. The whole Christianity thing got out of hand when maybe it was only meant to be a fad from a warm climate. Still, if you want to enough, I guess you could probably become a believer and it might make a person feel better for a while. I don’t know much of anything, as you can tell. I feel kind of—” He couldn’t say, didn’t have the knack to describe what it was like to feel nothing.

There was concern, he guessed it was, in her wrinkled brow, and the strange crooked smile, the tremble in her lower lip. Her cockeyed mouth was making him jittery. “I did figure out one small piece,” he blazed on, looking down at her faded pink tennis shoes. “I think that Daniel was working, laboring, to get there, wherever there is, and that we watched him make his passage. That’s what the pastor at the hospital kept calling it. ‘His passage.’ ” Joyce’s shoes had rips in the rubber around the toe as if someone had carelessly tried to make scallops, and the laces were frayed, so that if they came unstrung it would be difficult, if not impossible, to rethread them. The shoes were pitiful, and for the first time in a week Walter felt as if he might sometime in the future be able to cry. “And anyway,” he went on, “it doesn’t matter that you weren’t right with him because he had already crossed over. That’s what I think. For all intents and purposes he went the night Susan showed up in that sensational dress. She chose it, incidentally, only because she knew he’d see it, if he opened his eyes. He wasn’t going to understand some elegant understated million-dollar little black number and so she pulled together that wild hairdo and the tacky choker and the dress. The dress! She found it at Goodwill. They wanted to pay
her
to take it off their hands—”

The sound of his mother’s “heh,” the syllable of laughter, startled him and he stopped talking. She moved to the sink and he went back to his cereal. That conversation, as it turned out, was not the first of many but was instead the only one they would have for years about Daniel. Before the final illness Walter had not had much interest in his brother, but in the last months he wanted to know everything that had gone on in Daniel’s head, what he thought about when he woke up, what it had been like when Susan loved him ardently, what he would have hoped to become, what he looked at underwater, in the pool, when he swam for two hours without stopping. He wanted to know
what understanding Daniel had had, what he thought of his death, if he had had faith, and what Joyce and Robert had said to him in their efforts to give him assurance. At breakfast that morning his mother turned away and began removing the stems of the strawberries a neighbor had brought. Walter was afraid to say more, afraid to begin the long search, asking, asking. He said to himself that soon, tomorrow or the next day, he would start to name all the things he didn’t know about his brother, to see if in identifying the questions Daniel would somehow come closer.

In Walter’s memory the service at Lake Margaret was always set against a backdrop that was nearly blank. There were the shapes of the guests, their flat gray faces. There were stray sentences floating by in the airless, white hours. The local minister from the Methodist church came out of the house and stood surveying his congregation, the strangers of many denominations from Illinois. Walter would not forget how the beefy man in his vestments raised his arms, and without words the whole group walked after him down the hill to the lake-front, to the grassy plot, the bit of land that year after year irked Sue Rawson. It was those two hundred feet that made the difference on the Lake Margaret tax bill, two hundred feet of prime lake frontage. Walter couldn’t help thinking of her annual outrage. She had investigated conservation easements and zoning changes, but there seemed no way around the fact that the Lake Margaret Corporation owned the longest stretch of undeveloped frontage on the lake. It had irritated her for decades that she, and her siblings, paid the hefty bill for the homeowners across the water, for their pleasure, their view.

Sue Rawson went down the slope and stood at the end of the property, as if she were marking it for the mourners, so they would understand the dimensions of the holding. At dawn Uncle Ted had walked around blasting Raid into the thickets, but it was the sun and the breeze that were keeping the mosquitoes at bay. Susan and Walter had to cut through the guests to get to their places next to Robert and Joyce. Walter smelled the traces of the repellent and the freshly mown grass, the honeysuckle and the lilies of the valley. I should learn the
trees and the shrubs and the vines and the plants, he said to himself. He loved the Lake Margaret flowers and he didn’t know what any of them were called. There were plenty of books inside the house that he could use to identify the Wisconsin flora. Pretty soon, he figured, he might wake up, back into ordinary life, and then how he’d look alive, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, boning up on the kingdoms and the phyla and the genera and the species. In a while he’d know exactly what was missing if there was the smallest loss: a violet swiped by a child, a trampled gentian, an iris with the blossom lopped off.