The Short History of a Prince (6 page)

He had not visualized prosperity and fulfillment, and so he was thirty-eight years old, sitting at the end of the pier at Lake Margaret wondering where to live in the years before retirement. The wind blew across the lake, driving off the sailboats and turning the water a darker green. Already some of the leaves had yellowed, drifted to the ground and stuck in the bushes. The neighbors were burning brush and to Walter the air smelled of autumn. He watched the chipmunks darting to the holes in the cracked seawall with wads in their mouths, and he thought that if he were a small animal in Wisconsin he would know by the smell to expect great change. Smoke filled the air, spiraling into the pale blue sky. He used to think there was nothing as sad as Lake Margaret in the fall, and it seemed so again. Summer was over, school would begin, winter was upon them. All green things, the moss, the vines, the children at their desks, would soon experience a prolonged state of near death.

In the daylight Walter sat far into the old white Adirondack chair, drinking coffee, and in the night he sat there also, under the heavens, wrapped in a quilt. He had never been out of doors by himself for that long, and it seemed to him enough of an occupation, watching the water change color, watching the fishermen holding their rods hour after hour in their metal boats. A morning went by, and he had only looked, and remembered, and looked, in the honest labor of smelling the change of season and waiting for absolutely nothing. He looked across the lake to the cow pasture and he looked at the water, where he sometimes saw his ghostly boyish form swim up to the surface. His was an ordinary tragedy, he knew. He had been happy as a child and had not realized it. But happiness was spent so quickly, he thought, and identifying it, feeling it, trying to hang on to it, made him nervous. Maybe it was better to be ignorant of bliss, unselfconscious, and later have the sense to recognize its traces.

In May, Walter had applied for a job teaching English at Otten High, in Otten, Wisconsin. He had been back to school part-time in the last four years for his certification. It had been a marvel in the
spring during his inquiries to hear the secretary at the school say “Otten,” and then “Wisconsin,” as if her vowels, the broad Wisconsin
o
, were on display for a freak show. Walter could have supplied good reason for wanting the job, but he had applied primarily on a whim. It was the secretary, Mrs. Oldenberg, and her bewitching voice, and it was also the fact that Otten was an hour from Lake Margaret. The town of three thousand people had been named for a temperance leader, Samuel Otten, an easterner who had hoped to build a temperance utopia out in the wild Wisconsin territory. Well over one hundred years later there were taverns dotting the village map. Walter didn’t know if such an inception, followed by the abandonment of the ideal, was a good sign. He and Samuel Otten were perhaps cut from the same cloth, two men from the East with ridiculous expectations. Maybe it was absurd to imagine he could teach farm boys Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” but from a distance it didn’t seem impossible. They might not heckle him; it might be worth a try.

He had learned, a week before, that from the fifteen applications he’d submitted had come only two offers. It was a choice between a school in Queens and Otten High. He had grown accustomed to life in New York, and he wasn’t sure he could make the adjustment to a town with a one-screen movie theater, no bookstore, no cafe, no opera company, not one ballet troupe and no chain clothing stores. It was unlikely, too, that there would be very many of his own kind in Otten. Either pick involved the risk of death, he considered, one literal, the other spiritual. The Queens high school had metal detectors at the door, equipment that weeded out assault weapons and handguns. Box cutters, apparently, were not detectable by the scanner. A math teacher had bled to death after his throat was slit in May.

Walter sat with his feet in the water pitting one place against the other, thinking of irrelevant specifics, weighing the appeal of the mangy city rodents, slinking along the subway tracks, against the type of rat sure to be found in Otten, the sleek, well-fed beast that made its living in the grain elevators on the edge of town. He listed the famous people who had grown up on Wisconsin soil: Spencer Tracy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thornton Wilder, Harry Houdini and, of course, Liberace. Wladziu Liberace, born in the working-class town of West Allis;
Wladziu, Polish for Walter, had been called Wallie when he was a boy. Surely the Liberace connection was as good as a marker, showing him the right direction.

Mr. McCloud, from Otten, Wisconsin, Walter said to himself. He rolled up his pants and slowly let his legs slip into the lake. If it warmed up he might swim out to the raft. There were very few boats around on the weekdays, and if he got a cramp and started to drown no one would see him flailing. In the years that he had been gone from the Midwest, his father and Uncle Ted had planted cedar and maple trees along the fence line to keep the neighbors from the family’s intimate moments. Francie and Roger Miller had gotten married at the water’s edge with a string quartet in the grass on one side of them and a brass ensemble on the other. There had been two memorial services, three weddings and numerous office parties. Walter had missed a good many of the celebrations. He couldn’t help reminding himself that Daniel would not have strayed so far from home, would not have fled the way Walter had after high school. Daniel had not ever really left the 600 block of Maplewood Avenue in Oak Ridge. He was forever eighteen, forever the child who would not willingly leave his parents for adult life. It was so easy to imagine that Daniel would have become successful in a conventional way, someone who moved confidently through the halls of a venerable financial institution in the heart of the city. Daniel might well have bought a house down the street from the McClouds, calling on Joyce and Robert in the evenings, to ask their advice, to dispense his own wisdom.

It was a trap, rusty, clanking, stinking, Walter knew, to glorify the lost brother, the kind of son who would have driven up to Lake Margaret every weekend to spare his father the trip, who would have mowed the lawn, checked the locks, weather-stripped the windows, cleaned the gutters. Walter tried to imagine himself on the tractor mower, wearing a chambray work shirt, a baseball cap, canvas pants with compartmentalized pockets down the thigh that snapped shut. It didn’t require more than five or six minutes to get the picture in focus, to see all of the accoutrements clearly: Walter, revving the engine, wearing a dark blue cap, Ray-Bans, and his new mail-order fanny pack, complete with water bottle, securely fastened at his waist. After
struggling for nearly seventy-two hours to imagine a future, and coming at last to the vision—Walter McCloud dressed for lawn care—he said to himself, Maybe. Maybe I could live in Otten.

He had read in the paper that there was a trend, a tide that could be charted, people of his generation who had moved away from their birthplaces and were coming back home in middle age. Walter could be part of a legitimate trend, a pattern that as far as he could see was not harmful to his or anyone else’s health. “A trend,” he said out loud, as if the word might charm him into casting the deciding vote: Otten or Queens. Aside from the comfort of being at last a part of a movement, he thought that it was probably time to return to a place where he had imagined himself, even if the image was farfetched. He leaned back against the Adirondack chair and pictured himself mowing the slope down to the lake, the sunset in the distance, through the trees, the bats hanging by their little feet in the barn, staying put, and all the summer insects, every one of them, fluttering around the yellow porch light.

On Walter’s fourth day at Lake Margaret his old friend Susan drove up from her parents’ house in Oak Ridge with her two children. She lived near Miami now, in Coral Gables. There had been very few students at the Kenton School of Ballet who were star quality, and from her beginning there she was best girl. She’d left Illinois for Manhattan when she was seventeen, and at eighteen she became a member of the New York City Ballet. She was one of the last dancers to be hand-picked by Mr. Balanchine for the roster, before his illness. At his Russian Orthodox funeral all of the ballerinas stood in the darkness of the vaulted cathedral holding lit candles. Susan, tears streaming down her face, was in the center of the photo that ended up in
Time
magazine. A year later she shocked her friends and relations by quitting the company. She hadn’t the heart for it, she said. Didn’t like the new management. She failed to mention that she’d met a man named Gary Morgan at a party, that she’d fallen in love with a normal, non-artistic person, the owner of a bookstore in Coral Gables. She moved to Florida, decorated Gary Morgan’s house, signed on with Edward Villella to dance with the Miami Ballet and got married. “There’s more
Balanchine in Miami,” she always insisted, “than there is in New York.” When Walter visited her he was always freshly horrified by the tiny lizards that skittered like mice across the sidewalks.

In the afternoon Susan and Walter stood up to their ankles in Lake Margaret while the two boys swam. She had not aged much in the twenty years since her high school graduation. Her hair rippled from her forehead and went all the way down her back just as it had when she was seventeen. “I don’t know anyone else whose hair cascades,” Walter said. “It wimples. And rumples. I don’t think there’s any amount of money the average woman could pay to get the effect, right from the roots, of undulation.”

“You’re getting corny, Walter,” she said, pulling the mass over her shoulder and inspecting it for split ends. “Is that what happens when a person is nearly forty?”

Her nose was a little bit stubby, her one flaw, but otherwise Walter thought that, counting the hair, she was close to the ideal. She had large blue eyes, thick blond lashes, the right amount of mouth, curving lips that had a certain elasticity, and she wasn’t too thin. He had seen plenty of dancers who had starved themselves and looked like plucked chickens.

“Speaking of old age,” she said, “I’ve been meaning to tell you. I met someone recently who reminded me so much of Daniel.”

“That happens to me, sometimes,” he said, splashing water up along his arms.

“No, but this man was so much like him. And it occurred to me, afterwards, that you and I, as close as we are, have never really talked about that year Daniel was sick. We avoid it. There, I’ve said it. Well, anyway, it was startling to be with this person who had some of Daniel’s mannerisms and what seemed like the same sort of organizing principle in his brain, if that makes sense. In many ways they are nothing alike, but there was something uncannily similar about, I don’t know, maybe their chakras.”

“You’re getting wonky in your old age, darling. Are your earrings—they’re crystals, right? Are they functional? Do they tell you where to go, what to buy, who to trust?”

“It’s just fashion, Walter, and we haven’t even hit forty, so let’s stop this talk, please. I admit to thirty-three in the company, even
though everyone probably knows it’s a lie. But I’ve wondered through the years who Daniel would have become—and this man seemed like a good approximation. His face could have been a computer simulation of Daniel’s, those renderings of how a person, at seventeen, will look when he’s forty-five. Or maybe I’m making it up, and it’s only that we’re still somehow looking for him, missing him. Is that ridiculous after all these years?”

Walter squinted across the lake, at the pasture that had grazed cows since his grandfather’s era. “In books, death is what often propels the plot,” he said, “either ignites the action or finishes it. Death or marriage, one or the other. For me, death has always been right under my skin, not doing much to move me in any real direction, no plot device. It’s just there, lurking, a spot, the Daniel stain, in every cell. I can’t say that such a presence is useful, or has taught me some great lesson the way it would in a novel. The law of thermodynamics, you know, the idea that nothing is lost, that a loss in one area equals a gain in another, was actually not invented by scientists but by the people who write redemptive fiction. Stories that are praised for being a testament to the human spirit. Actually, in real life, we lose things all the time and they’re gone. Lost, period.”

That was as much as Walter had said about Daniel in years. Susan reached under the water, picked up several snail shells and turned each one, snail by snail, over in her hand. After she had examined all of them she said, “I used to think that Daniel, when he died, had really gone to India or Burma, and that I could go there and find him walking down the street—”

Just then her nine-year-old boy, Tim, stepped on a sharp stone and yelped. She sprang up on the pier and ran down the rickety wooden slats to hoist her son to safety and examine his big toe. Walter climbed the rock steps to shore and went for the Band-Aid box in the boathouse. He was grateful to the child for putting an end to the conversation. He didn’t want to speak about Daniel, or Susan’s role that year, the year they glossed over when they reviewed their history. The cut toe was bloody. The Band-Aid swam in the wound, wouldn’t stick, and in the end they bound it in a rag Walter found in the tackle box.