The Son of Someone Famous (16 page)

“I don't have a good reason, I guess,” I said. I remembered a story Billie Kay used to tell me about the movie star, Marilyn Monroe. Before she was famous, her name was Norma Jean Mortenson. She'd been this orphan child nobody'd ever wanted. After she became an important actress, she'd purposely take these long baths while everyone was waiting for her. She'd sit in the tub telling herself she was giving Norma Jean a treat: the whole world would have to wait for the little orphan kid nobody'd ever wanted.

I'd never purposely set out to make anyone wait for me, or been late on purpose, but I liked the story. I sat there distracting myself by thinking about it, because I had an idea what was coming. At one school they'd actually asked me to turn in my athletic sweater, because only graduates could own one.

I'd left this smelly purple-and-white sweater with holes under the arms on the headmaster's desk, as though I were surrendering an honor once bestowed on me and then rescinded.

“Adam,” said Mr. Baird, “I wonder if it's working out, or if it isn't?”

“You don't think it's working out.”

“Do you?”

“You want me to say it isn't, so you can say I should leave, or not return after Easter vacation. Isn't that right?”

He sighed. “Your father's asking a lot of you. You are who you are, Adam. You can't change that fact by changing
your last name.”

“My father didn't ask it of me. I asked it of me.”

“You'll have to show some improvement, Adam.”

“I will,” I said. “Don't worry, I will.”

“There's something else.”

“What else?” I said.

“Dr. Cutler feels you're interested in Christine.”

“In
Christine
?” I pretended to be dumbfounded at the idea.

“He says you've called her and you've been by the Cutlers'.”

“Not lately,” I said.

“And you haven't called lately without saying anything when she answered the phone?”

Twice. I'd done that exactly twice. I'd heard her say “Hello” and then I'd clammed up. Maybe I'd never intended to say anything. I don't know. I'd dialed her number once after flunking the History test, and once one Saturday night after I had been over at Brenda Belle's and she was rattling on about Ty Hardin. . . . I knew Christine knew that it was me. I knew Christine was as aware of me as I was of her.

“Why would I do that?” I asked.

Mr. Baird shook his head. “I don't know why you would, either. Maybe Dr. Cutler is making something out of nothing. He has no love for Charlie and that feeling may extend to you.”

“What exactly happened between them?” I asked.

Mr. Baird said, “Whatever happened between them is something probably only they know. Feuds are like that.
There are rumors and versions and the real truth is obscured. I don't know what happened between them. Ask your grandfather what happened between them.”

“I have,” I said. “He said Dr. Cutler stole his business from him.” My grandfather had never said that outright; Marlon Fredenberg had said that. I was testing to see what I could find out.

Mr. Baird just shrugged. “Well then.” He leaned back in his chair. “Adam, the point is I can't tell Dr. Cutler anything about your background when he asks me. I have to pretend I don't know that much about you. . . .You can see why Dr. Cutler doesn't encourage your interest in Christine.”

“Why does he have to know who my father is?” I said.

“He's got a right to know something about you.”

“I see,” I said.

“
Do
you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I see.”

“That's what I meant when I said this situation is asking a lot of you. It may be the reason you're having trouble.”

“Either way,” I said, “I'd probably be having trouble.”

“What?” he said.

“I said I won't be any more trouble.”

“I hope not,” he said.

I was late getting to English. I saw Christine sitting in the front row. She gave me this look, the same kind of look I'd been giving her and she'd been giving me for weeks now. It was one of those long looks that cries out for words which you could probably never say if you knew the right words, anyway. You certainly couldn't say them in front of
someone's locker, or passing someone in the hall, or sitting in Corps Drugs over Cokes. She knew about the look and so did I, but every time we were close enough to talk, we didn't look at each other and we said stupid things, like the day she said, “Stop staring at me, you're always staring at me,” and I said, “You must be staring back to know I'm always staring at you.”

Another time I'd said, “Tell your father Billie Kay Case doesn't think I'm an unknown quantity,” and she'd said, “A lot of people don't believe that was really Billie Kay Case, Adam.”

We didn't have conversations, just fragments of conversations. What we had were these long looks between us.

As I was walking back to my seat, Miss Netzer said, “Don't bother to sit down yet, Adam. Since you're the last to arrive, you can be the first to recite.”

“Recite?” I said.

“The poem you chose to depict poignancy,” she said. “Step up in front of the class, Adam.”

I had to do some fast thinking, since I had nothing prepared. I remembered the poem from
A Shropshire Lad
which I'd blocked on during that test at Choate. I knew it by heart, and I supposed it expressed poignancy as well as any other.

I put down my books on my desk and went to the front of the room.

“It's a poem by A. E. Housman. It's called ‘The New Mistress.' ”

“Proceed,” she said.

I didn't want to look in Christine's direction. I saw Brenda Belle sitting in the second row, and I concentrated on her.

Then I began:

       
Oh, sick I am to see you, will you never let me be?

       
You may be good for something but you are not good for me.

       
Oh, go where you are wanted, for you are not wanted here.

And that was all . . .

And that
was
all; that was exactly where I had blocked during the test at Choate, and exactly the point where I began to laugh as I stood before Miss Netzer's class.

I just laughed, first in small spurts with a few words in between and then in great gales until I was shaking and holding myself, laughing so hard it was like crying.

I think what triggered it was the expression on Brenda Belle's face, a slow, crumbling look of sadness and disbelief, and I suddenly realized she thought I was giving her a message. But I was not really laughing because she had misunderstood and I had hurt her: I was laughing at the messes we get ourselves into, at the sheer craziness that exists, at the victims we become, all of us.

“Adam? ADAM!” I heard Miss Netzer trying to get my attention. I heard her rap the desk with her ruler. But I couldn't stop.

“Sit down!” I heard. “Adam, sit down!”

But I was loose and convulsed, and by that time very far away from that English class and everyone in it. My mind was racing compulsively, flashing pictures at me: pictures of myself packing my bags while the other boys went on to their classes, arriving at airports where my father waited with a new game plan etched in his eyes, a new school catalog for me to look through. . . . I saw our home in Virginia, where the housekeeper would serve me nightly as I sat by myself in the large dining room at the long oak table; I saw my father getting out of a helicopter on the White House lawn while I watched him on the boob tube miles away; I saw that Polaroid picture of my mother and my father and me with our faces missing; and I saw a wedding in the desert filled with dandelions while Electric Socket “went” “I will care for you but not crowd you,” and my father “went” “I will care for you but not crowd you—”

“Leave the room immediately, Adam!” Miss Netzer had me by my arm.

Then I was out in the hall.

“Adam Blessing, is anything wrong?”

I turned around to see who it was, and beheld a tender, smiling face, a bright clean flower-splotched dress in blue and yellow, a vision: It was Ella Early, her gray hair freed from the bun and newly curled; Ella Early, soft-toned and minus chalk dust . . . Ella Late Who Has No Fate, transformed and shining with Nothing Power.

Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.

“Better a quiet death,” my mother is fond of saying, “than a public humiliation.”

I experienced both after Adam recited that poem in English while looking straight at me. In fact, I died quietly several times, and the most painful of all my deaths was when Christine Cutler turned around in her seat and smirked at me.

After that, I carried a quotation in my wallet which I had copied from an essay by William Hazlitt: “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.” Under the quotation, I wrote:
My attitude re: C.C.

My mother says always have on nice underwear in case you are in an accident; if I was in an accident, I wanted it on record that I hated Christine Cutler.

It was five days before I could bring myself to speak to Adam. He finally cornered me one afternoon when I was on my way to gym.

“You have to speak to me,” he said. “I'm in enough trouble without you giving me the Silent Treatment.”

“Don't tell me your troubles!” I said. “I am a laughingstock.”

“I'm sorry,” he said. “It wasn't intentional; it had nothing to do with you.”

“Tell that to Ty Hardin,” I said. “Do you know what he calls me? He calls me Sick I Am To See You.”

“Who cares about Ty Hardin?” said Adam angrily.

“I do,” I said. “We weren't sitting on our hands discussing religion on New Year's Eve.”

“Oh for Pete's sake!” Adam said. “He's got a thing for Diane Wattley, Brenda Belle!”

It was news to me.

I said, “I have to run, old buddy. I have a date with a hockey stick.”

“Wait a minute!” Adam said.

“Toodle-oo,” I called out as I rushed past him.

It was my Aunt Faith who convinced me that I should go to Adam, return the ring after all, and tell him we should just be friends.

I had told both my Aunt Faith and my mother about the initials on the ring. I had done it the night of the day of my humiliation in English, when I was still furious with Adam. When I showed them the ring, I said, “I think he's an impostor! I happen to know he was kicked out of private school, too, and that's why he's here in Storm.”

At first they asked me a lot of questions about Adam and Christine Cutler and all that had happened. Then they seemed to lose interest in the subject, and my mother got
that tight little expression around her mouth that meant she no longer wanted to discuss something.

Shortly after my conversation with Adam, one afternoon when I was home from school early (because my mustache was growing in again very faintly, and I had work to do in the privacy of my bathroom with a jar of peroxide), my aunt appeared in my room.

“You should return the ring, Brenda Belle,” she said. “After all, you yourself admitted that Nothing Power hasn't worked.”

“It's worked for Ella Early,” I said. “She's transformed.”

“Never mind Ella Early, dear. Don't you think you should talk with Adam, and give him back his ring?”

“And ask him what the initials mean, too,” I said.

“I wouldn't pry, dear.”

“I would,” I said.

“But why, Brenda Belle?”

“Because I feel like it,” I said. “Ty Hardin says what feels right is right.”

I wondered why my mother and my aunt weren't more excited about my discovery that the last initial was not a B. They were both capable of getting excited over a lot less than that. My mother often returned from the hairdresser reeling with the news that some afternoon soap-opera star was having a marital tiff, and my Aunt Faith often did her needlework in my mother's car, parked down on Main Street early Saturday evenings, so she could see who was on his way to the movies with whom.

It was snowing out as I walked down the hill to Dr.
Blessing's. I hoped it would continue for a week without stopping, set some kind of unheard-of disaster record and prevent anyone from leaving his house for days on end. . . . The Valentine dance was only five days away, and I did not have a date.

Ty Hardin's interest in Diane Wattley was a blow. Anyone but Diane Wattley, who had bowlegs and pronounced all her r's like w's. If I couldn't compete with a Diane Wattley, I was the next thing to a basket case. When Christine Cutler (hatred alone is immortal!) was my competition, I had an excuse, but now what I had was plain old me back on my hands again, complete with dreams of nooses, razor blades and Greyhound buses to New York City. . . . Even Ella Early had more hope.