The Short History of a Prince (51 page)

He cried out of anger then, at himself, at his sloth, his inability to have drummed up some sort of coalition to save Lake Margaret. He had given in to Sue Rawson and he had let teaching suck him dry. He should have sold pizzas door-to-door or slept with someone rich; he should have seen to the preservation of the property. The quilt was soaking and the batting was coming out of it in soggy clumps. Jeannie’s bargain raincoat was useless, which was why she kept it at Lake Margaret, for someone else to wear. He was wet down to his briefs, nothing left to do but go back up to the house and try to start a fire with the damp wood; nothing left to do but beat himself for his own shortcomings. What had he learned so far? He was a failure in every department. He’d always suffered like a nitwit from unrequited love. With hindsight, after he’d been dumped, the boyfriends were such amazingly obvious jerks. He’d never mastered anything, had no technique for the arts he’d pursued, hadn’t practiced the piano religiously as a child, didn’t have techniques for just plain living, hadn’t done well by the farm boys in Otten, had no source beyond the family home for his strength. “Sit yourself down,” he said, “because you could go on and on for an entire day in this vein.”

But he was sick to death of his tirade by the time he got to the kitchen. He’d call Joyce if only to hear a voice that was not coming from his own spleeny brain, and to find out once and for all if there was any word. “I give up,” he said under his breath. “I’m calling.” If there was no news he would try to think of something to fill the afternoon that did not involve self-laceration, and if there was a plan he
would try to begin to imagine the next day, and the day after that, the end of Lake Margaret creeping up on them, hour after hour.

What was both an admirable quality and a failing in his mother, he would later tell Susan, was her ability to pull off scenes that had great theatrical potential, and all without any sense of drama. His mother had probably cultivated her talent as a result of growing up with a sister like Jeannie. Joyce had never stormed out of the house or broken a dish in a temper. When he was small she had always reproached him quietly, and when Daniel died there was no apparent outrage against God or the doctors. It was what he might fault her for if he had to make a grievance about his upbringing.

In the matter of Lake Margaret she remained true to form. Walter, shivering from his chill, clutched his mug of steaming Swiss Miss with one hand, and with the other tried to dial Oak Ridge’s number on the large black rotary phone. It was an ancient skill, he thought, finding the correct number on the face of the relic, moving the circle around just so, to the exact spot, not getting the index finger stuck, letting go at the right time. Rotary dialing, the vanishing art.

“Hello, Mom,” he said, when she answered. I’m desolate, he wanted to say. I have three months of freedom and I’m already lost. What you are about to tell me will make it even worse.

“I’m glad you called,” she said. “Dad and I were going to get ahold of you tonight. We’ve been putting the final pieces of the—”

“What?” Walter said. “What?”

“I hardly know how to speak anymore, honey. These dealings are ticklish, and for weeks I’ve been going after Sue so gingerly.”

“Gingerly,” Walter repeated.

“But then when it came time to make the move—well, I don’t know. It was such a peculiar thing.”

He didn’t know what she was talking about. Could it be that his dainty mother, deep down, had the constitution and cunning of a Mafia don, going after the thing she wanted, zooming in for the kill?

“I think it was because of you that Sue Rawson agreed,” she was saying. “She is glad—yes, I’d say that she’s glad—that you will be the principal shareholder, that you’ll have more than anyone else. Perhaps it was what she’d hoped for all along. That is, if you’ll agree, if you’ll
take our offer, and really hers too, if we can put the shares in your name. Sometimes I think that it’s really what she meant from the beginning. It must have thrown her for a loop when Roger and Francie tried to take the ball. We had to play the game, you understand, beg her to come down in the price, walk on our knees. There are tax implications, of course. She and Dad are still working on the IRS part of the puzzle, and there’s the issue of maintenance, but your father seems to think it will come out more or less in our favor.”

She had spoken in English, in her usual quiet way, but she had begun the story in the middle. He was not sure that he’d understood her. “Are you there, honey?” she said.

“I’m here, at Lake Margaret,” he managed.

“Is this something that you’d like to take on, because if—”

“Mom.” His mother, a Gambino family baby who had been set out in the bulrushes, presumed dead while she drifted west on the river to Illinois.

“Please,” he said. “Hold on. I think you need to tell me this news in person. I’ve been feeling pitiful, so sorry for myself just two minutes ago and I haven’t quite switched gears. I’ve got to shift up through desperation, depression, standard unhappiness—here we go—to absence of malaise, to satisfaction, pleasure, felicity—I’ve got a way to go to euphoria, to ecstasy. Bear with me. If it’s okay I’ll drive down to Oak Ridge now. I’ll get in the car and I’ll be there in a few hours and then what I’d like to do—if you’re not in the middle of something—I’d like to sit down on the porch, or in the kitchen, and you could explain the deal, if that’s what it is, from the start to the finish. And I say this only because I’m getting older and I have a feeling that this could be one of the biggest moments of my life. I want to prolong it. I don’t want to have it happen over the telephone. If you could have some kind of music playing when I pull up, that would add to the sensation, certainly. Brahms, I think, would be fitting. The Fourth Symphony. I’ll bring a bottle of wine and an enormous half-dead Wisconsin fish flapping in the bottom of a bucket. It’s really too bad that Mrs. Gamble isn’t here to join us—but I’m getting ahead of myself. I’d like to come and hear the plan, if you don’t mind.”

He ran outside without a wrap, he slammed the door, he went down the hill. “Oh golly,” he was saying as he slid on the wet grass.

“Oh, golly, oh dear God.” Was he asleep, was he awake, was he dead? Was it a hoax, an April fool sort of prank? He should pause to kneel by the all-generous lake and give thanks. “Thank you. Thank you, Jesus.” How good the rain felt on his face, streaming into his shirt, down his hot chest. How cold and refreshing. “Thanks so much, Sue Rawson. Is it true, you tall stern imp? You ogre aunt? You angel! Please make it come true!”

If he had gotten any of his mother’s drift he might dare to hope for noisy Lake Margaret Thanksgivings and Easters. He’d dare, but he’d take the dare tentatively. Could it be that there was the chance for future boys, summer after summer, sleeping down in the boathouse, playing with matches and reading inappropriate magazines? And the hope, too, for girls long after the year 2000 giving each other back rubs at night in the large yellow bedroom, and doing their hair and getting mad at each other and making up, getting mad, making up. His parents had arranged to buy out Sue Rawson, and if he understood, they were going to give him the shares. He reached out to hold the drooping limb of the willow, their expensive-shoreline lachrymose willow. There was the possibility that in his dotage he’d sit at the head of the table and Lucy’s children would take his dinner plate away and bring him pie. He’d be the matriarch, demanding Cool Whip. It would be up to him to make the Easter lamb cake every year because he had watched Aunt Jeannie mix it up with the secret ingredient. There was no underestimating the effect of a half pound of lard. He’d be Aunt Jeannie and Sue Rawson, all in one, the two biddies in a single harmonious body, something on the order of the Platonic ideal. Uncle Walter, the man who put on elaborate puppet productions, the tough who patrolled the grounds, making sure there was decorum, no boys in the girls’ room, the cake-maker who further won the children’s hearts by inciting them to throw mashed-potato balls around the room at dinner. He’d invite little Linda up to his room to listen to Puccini, and he’d let her touch his Liberace jacket, and on summer nights, in the fluttering light of the candle on the porch, he and Lucy would take an hour to follow the thread of each other’s lives. This is how a woman must feel, he thought, when she learns she’s going to have a baby. Solemn and afraid and giddy. In the long future ahead there would be lawn care and putty work and foundation troubles,
leaky faucets and rotting floorboards, and there would be conversation and food and sound sleep, and in the family there would be marriages and deaths and the squall of infants. It was green pastures, still waters, goodness, mercy and the cup flowing over.

It took several weeks for Walter to absorb his parents’ plan. He had known as a teenager that Daniel had had complications with a surgery and that Joyce and Robert had sued the doctor. He had inferred from his father’s comments through his college years that part of the settlement had been used to pay for his education, and some of it, he’d learned later from his mother, had gone for the general upkeep at the lake, for a new roof, plastering the living room, resurfacing the old bathtub. In November, after Sue Rawson’s bombshell, Joyce had told her husband that even if they’d had the money she wouldn’t rush into the fray, that she was going to let Jeannie’s group take hold if they had the means. It was no use, she said, borrowing money and then getting into a bidding war with her own sister after they’d been friends for sixty-some years. When Francie went off to Indiana and Roger bowed out, Joyce called on Sue Rawson and began the negotiations, making an offer that was two hundred thousand dollars lower than the asking price. She and Robert had no qualms about giving Sue Rawson what was left of the settlement money, which had always seemed to them to be tainted cash. It was clear to Joyce, considering the relative ease with which Sue Rawson capitulated—indeed, the relief with which she yielded—that her older sister had never had any intention of selling her portion to Jeannie or any of Jeannie’s children.

Walter and Joyce reviewed the chain of events, starting as far back as the anniversary party in 1972, and for several days they went around and around, favoring first one theory about Sue Rawson’s motives and then another. Perhaps at the start, Joyce told Walter, Sue had not realized how much the place meant to all of them. Or maybe she’d wanted to test them, to see if they did care, to see if in fact they were worthy. Or she might have believed that she should get cash from the estate, that the money was rightfully hers; and maybe, too, she had been genuinely concerned about the upkeep and the responsibility of
ownership. Or perhaps, in the end, Joyce ventured, Sue Rawson lost her nerve.

“Lost her nerve to be the wicked queen,” Walter said.

It was the idea they came back to again and again, the failure of nerve. How thankful she must have been, Joyce said, to have such a graceful way out.

Lucy was to get part of Joyce’s shares upon her death, but Sue Rawson stipulated that Walter hold the keys to the kingdom, that he have the majority of the stock. She was a no-nonsense fairy godmother; she wrote him a terse note ordering him to call her lawyer to discuss the trust that she had established to assist him with the annual maintenance.

Both Joyce and Walter were concerned about Jeannie’s response to the McCloud ascendancy, a rise in their fortunes that was going to sorely test her sportsmanship. There was petulance in Aunt Jeannie’s new expression, a chronic pout in her lower lip, but it was the silence, so unnatural, that worried Walter. He came up with the idea of having a thirty-year-overdue housecleaning extravaganza, a weeklong party that might serve to make everyone feel included and helpful, and on the final Saturday they could rent a metal cooker and roast a pig. It was Joyce who organized what turned out to be a small party and, with time and patience, lured Jeannie to the lake for the occasion. Through June, Joyce called her big sister every morning, and once or twice a week they went to the tennis club for dinner. Joyce listened while Jeannie complained about everything but Lake Margaret, and she said soothing words when Jeannie put her head in her hands and whimpered over Francie. When Joyce invited her to help scour the lake house, to sort through the junk that had accumulated over the generations, Jeannie said she couldn’t possibly get up to Wisconsin before August. But the thought of the others rifling around in the rooms that she had always claimed disturbed her, and she later phoned Joyce and said in her lackluster voice that she guessed she’d come along if they thought she could be of any use.

In early July it was the three of them, Walter and Joyce and Jeannie, who spent a week going room by room, each of them armed with the Gamble-style aprons that Walter had purchased and equipped with cleaning supplies. They took down all the photographs from the
famous wall and dusted each frame. They went through the dishes, the sculptures, the books, the bedding, the jars of loose coins in the grandfather’s collection, the fusty issues of
Boy’s Life
dating back to 1925, the odd assortment of zoris and tennis shoes that had been piling up since the fifties, and the swimsuits and jackets and hats from the turn of the century. There were family letters that no one had looked at in decades, and scrapbooks, broken toys and board games with faded paths to the treasure. They knew they were not exactly making progress—there was very little they actually discarded, but the project, taking stock and cataloging and dusting, gave the three of them a sense of satisfaction.