The Son of Someone Famous (20 page)

“Excuse me,” I said. “Was that your big toe with the corn on it again?”

“I
hate
you,” she said through her teeth.

“Hatred is immortal,” I said.

“I think you know more about everything than you're admitting.”

Ty Hardin and Diane Wattley danced past us. “Hey, Mystery Man,” Ty called out. “How about some birdcalls?” He was laughing very hard.

“What is that supposed to mean?” Christine asked me.

“Rumor has it that I'm Milton Merrensky,” I said.

“I wouldn't be seen dead with Milton Merrensky!” Christine said.

Ty Hardin called out again, “How about some birdcalls, Milton?”

“This is humiliating!” Christine said.

I made a bad attempt at a whippoorwill's call.

“Stop it!” Christine said.

Then Peter Pepper tapped me on the shoulder. “One good turn deserves another,” he said. “May I have this dance with Christine?”

I headed immediately for the phone booths in the hall outside the gym. I decided to call the Storm hospital and see if I could reach Adam. If Adam was like a stranger to me since I'd overheard the conversation between my mother and my aunt, Adam's father didn't seem so unknown. I had seen him on television, and I had read about him in the
gossip columns. If I were to make a guess who would be more likely to be friends with a flashy blonde smelling of whiskey, Adam or his father, I would choose the latter. I believed Adam, if no one else in Storm would. I was looking up the number of the hospital when two husky policemen, accompanied by Mr. Baird, headed down the hall. . . and then Ella Early yanked open the door of the phone booth.

“Wait!” she called to Mr. Baird. “Wait! He's right in here. I told you it couldn't be Adam Blessing trying to sneak in—he's right here!”

She pulled me out of the phone booth. “Adam, tell Mr. Baird who you are, for heaven's sake! There's a rumor you've just broken in through the equipment room!”

Mr. Baird had stopped in his tracks. He said to the police, “Bring the boy down in the equipment room up here.” Then he turned to me. “Adam, is that you?”

“It's him,” Ella Early said. “I spoke to him earlier.”

“Then speak up, Adam!”

I sagged against the phone booth and stared at Mr. Baird through the holes in my sweater.

“You have a lot of explaining to do, Adam,” he said. “Come to my office.”

“It wasn't him involved in any of this,” Ella Early said.

“You stay out of this, Ella,” said Mr. Baird. “You don't know the half of this.”

“I know the gossip.” she said. “I'm not deaf yet. Adam,” she said, trying to help me move by gently taking my arm, “tell him you've been here all evening. They say you've been
at the hospital with some . . . some
hoyden
who swallowed pills.”

“Come to my office, Adam,” said Mr. Baird.

I was watching what was headed toward us from way down at the other end of the corridor. It was Adam. There was a policeman on either side of him. He was carrying a fur coat and a blonde wig. He had obviously tried to sneak in through the equipment room, leave the coat and wig there, and then somehow signal me to change clothes with him.

There was a crowd beginning to collect in the hall. “You have nothing to worry about,” Ella Early said to me gently, “if you just tell the truth.”

I hugged Sir Walter Raleigh's head close to my heart.

“Adam?” Ella Early persisted.

Romeo Hardin spoke up from the crowd. “That's not Adam, Miss Early, there's Adam!” He stood there grinning with satisfaction as Adam approached, with both policemen holding him firmly now, as though he were an escaped convict.

Ty walked across to me. “Milton?” he said. “
I'm
taking Christine home.
You're
taking Diane Wattley home. Get it?”

Mystery Man made one last horrendous gesture with all his strength and power. I kicked Ty Hardin hard, so hard he let out a yelp of surprise and pain.

“What feels right is right,” I said.

“You're not Milton Merrensky!” he said, dancing around on one leg. “You're a girl!”

I saw Queen Elizabeth then, her face screwed up like a small baby's face a moment before it began to wail. I tossed
Sir Walter's head into the phone booth, and I unfastened my long cloak.

Christine let loose, orchestrating the hysteria which was fast filling the school corridor.

“Blow your nose on this,” I said, dropping my cloak over her head as I passed her.

Then I joined the death procession to Mr. Baird's office.

From the Journal of A.

I spent Friday night at Mr. Baird's house, and Saturday morning we drove Electric Socket to the Burlington Airport. Later in the day I went back to my grandfather's house to pack. It was my first chance to call Christine. She answered the phone herself, and I said, “This is me. Adam. There's bad news.”

“Everyone's heard and read the news by now,” she said. “By now you're almost as well known as your father.”

“I don't mean that news,” I said. “I mean the news that I've been expelled.”

“And everyone's seen your picture with that person,” she said, ignoring what I'd just told her.

She was talking about the picture of Electric Socket leaving the hospital on my arm. Mr. Baird had ducked out of camera range. The picture was in the early edition of
The Evening Star
with the caption:

Son Keeps Famous Father's Flame Going

“I feel sorry for her,” I told Christine.

“I feel sorry for
you,
Adam.”

“Oh, I'll get into another school.”

“I don't mean that, specifically. I mean everything in general. I mean about who your father is. It really makes me appreciate my own sweet, uncomplicated father.”

“My father has to handle a lot,” I said. “He's always under a lot of pressure.” I hadn't been able to reach my father. He was out of the country on special assignment. (I wondered what important meeting they'd call him out of to give him the news, or if the reporters would spring it on him as he was rushing to his limousine.) I'd talked to Billie Kay and my grandfather in California. They'd wired money for me to join them.

“And I really appreciate my own normal homelife now,” Christine continued.

“Well, I'm glad of that. I'm glad you're not mad.”

“There's nothing for me to be mad at. I'm just sorry for you.”

“Don't be sorry for me,” I said. “I'm not that bad off.”

“I can't help being sorry for you. I could cry when I think about you, Adam.”

“Listen,” I said, “not everyone would be happy having a sweet uncomplicated father and a normal homelife. Did you ever think of that? Maybe I like being his son, did you ever think of that?”

“Then how come you didn't admit whose son you are?”

“What?”

“How come you pretended to be someone else if you're so happy being his son?”

“I didn't say I was happy being his son,” I said. “I just said not everyone would be happy having a sweet,
uncomplicated father.” I was thinking of something Electric Socket told me just before she boarded the plane to go back to Hollywood. She said, “Even though things didn't work out between your father and me, Adam, I wouldn't have missed knowing him for the world. He's not an ordinary man. Honey; he's not your average Tom, Dick or Harry. You can't expect your dad to act in an ordinary, average way.”

I told Christine, “Not everyone is an ordinary, average man.”

“I'll take
my
father any day,” she said.

“Why don't we leave our fathers out of the discussion?” I said, because I hadn't called her up to talk about or defend my father, and for some reason I could feel myself becoming really steamed when she said she pitied me because I was his son.

“That's impossible—to leave our fathers out of the discussion,” she said, “under the circumstances.”

“I don't want to go on and on about it,” I said. “Will I see you before I go?”

“I can't.”

“Your father?”

“I've promised him,” she said. “But you can write, Adam. He doesn't care if we write.”

“He's all heart,” I said.

She said, “Adam, he's a
father
—you don't understand! He's looking out for me like a father does.”

“Yes,” I said. “Well, you're his major responsibility. I mean, some people are just fathers . . . or daughters . . . or sons . . . and that's it.” I was thinking of myself, not just Dr.
Cutler. So far in my life all I'd been was someone's son, even when I was so busy pretending I wasn't his son. I seemed to have had just one role in life: son of.

Christine said, “I wouldn't want my father to be any way but the way he is.”

I suppose we could have gone on for hours comparing our fathers. I felt like asking Christine just what the hell her sweet, uncomplicated father had ever been called on to do in his life but worm people's dogs, spay their cats and prescribe remedies for constipation and diarrhea in four-legged creatures.

I mean,
my
father had been chosen to address the United Nations, sat at dinner with heads of state, and slept under the same roof with presidents, kings and foreign ministers!

But it would only have sounded like sour grapes, and I didn't feel bitter or argumentative. Instead, I felt like doing a lot of thinking about my old man, which would take a long time, because he was so much more than just my old man.

I said, “I can't think of anything else to say, Christine.”

“I understand. Write to me, Adam.”

“Okay,” I said, because you can't answer “What about?” when someone says “Write to me.” But what would I have written about to Christine? We never really even knew each other.

“Good-bye, Adam.”

She said it, so I didn't have to.

Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.

“Brenda Belle?” he said, “This is me. Adam. I spent the night at Mr. Baird's.”

“What's his house like?” I said. “Has his wife really got a wart on the tip of her nose?”

“His house is all right,” he said. “Yes, she really has a wart on the end of her nose. . . . I'm sorry you were put on probation, Brenda Belle. I've been expelled.”

“I hate him!” I said. “A lot!”

“He really feels badly,” he said. “He says he has to do it, for the sake of the school. . . and the Board of Directors.”

“For the sake of the
school
!” I shouted. “The school ought to be thankful someone like your father would let you throw spitballs at his blackboards! What is that school ever going to be known for? Nobody important ever went to that school! That school hasn't graduated anybody but a bunch of Joe Schmucks and Nancy Nowheres! That is a real lemon high school!”

Adam said, “Well anyway, I'll be heading out to the coast tonight to join my grandfather.”

“Winging it to the coast, huh?” I laughed to keep from crying.

“Yeah,” he chuckled.

“That was a neat picture of you and Electric Socket,” I said. “My mother said she took those pills for a publicity stunt, to get her name in all the papers.”

“That's not true,” Adam said. “She really fell for my father.”

“He's too restless a man to settle down with one woman, my aunt says.”

“I guess so,” Adam said.

“My aunt says a man like your father has too much on his mind to think seriously about romance.”

“He's not your ordinary, average man,” Adam said.

“I'm being punished,” I said, “for being put on probation. I wish I could see you before you go.”

Adam could probably tell from the breaks in my voice that I was on the verge of bawling. He said, “Don't feel bad, Brenda Belle. We'll write. Maybe you'll come out to the coast to visit me.”

“My aunt would like your father's autograph,” I said. It was a lie. I wanted it.

“I'll send her an autographed photograph,” Adam said.

“Tell him to write on it ‘For Brenda Belle Blossom.'”

Adam laughed. He said, “I'm not going to say good-bye.”

“You don't think
I
am?” I said.

So we both hung up without saying it.

From the Journal of A.