The Short History of a Prince (39 page)

Walter’s salty pork all of a sudden tasted bland, the mash of the late-winter potatoes had no sweetness. He wanted to stand up and yell at them: Look, look at Mrs. Roger Miller! Does that hangdog pose, the stringy hair, the shifty eyes inspire confidence? Are you, or are you not going to come through, Francie? If the answer is no, understand that we will never sit around this table together again. You, every one of you here, need to ask yourselves what this is worth.

They would turn to each other, embarrassed again, again feeling cornered, while the question circled the room: What is it worth? What is it worth?

We die, Walter wanted to shout, and this place goes on. It is always here like a still small voice. If they could only think for a minute, think about standing in the living room one last afternoon, and finally the time would come. Someone would have to shut the door, leave it closed. One by one they’d go out the front gate, never to return, past the granite pillars that had “Rawson” spelled out in the stone.

Uncle Andrew’s oldest, Nathan, was talking about his software company, telling his corner that he was doing work on the bleeding edge. “The bleeding edge?” Walter called across the table.

“That’s right,” Nathan said. “The cutting edge, forget it, that’s history. I’ve got a technology so new, so virtual, it isn’t perfected—hell, it isn’t even invented. The bleeding edge, that’s what we’re on. People run down the hall at the office, no walking in our place, and I’ve got guys who sleep there.”

“The bleeding edge,” Walter repeated. It sounded distasteful, not something he wanted to think about during a meal. It sounded like the kind of edge he was probably on, living and working in Otten. He pushed back his chair, left his dinner and went upstairs to Sue Rawson’s room. She hadn’t stayed for the night at Lake Margaret in over a decade, but the room was hers. It would be her room when a stranger took it over. He stared out the window, wondering what he could do to galvanize his cousins. They seemed not to be the sort who believed they could make a difference, either singly or cooperatively. He began to pace the bedroom—stupid to pace, he thought, stupid to be so useless. They were going to lose the property and no one downstairs realized, and he was upstairs agitated, squandering his energy because he did not know what to do.

“Walt,” Lucy said at the door. “There you are.” She was smiling at him, ruefully, he thought, as if she wasn’t mad at him anymore, as if she was sorry about her disapproval earlier in the day.

Easy, easy, he told himself. Don’t blurt, don’t blather. There were so many things he wanted to tell her. Maybe she knew why Lake Margaret was important, but it wouldn’t hurt for her to hear it again. Lake Margaret was a piece of the story too, and she’d understand, he was sure she would, that if it went, another part of Daniel was gone. The old house was the steady center in all of their lives, the common heart. If he could keep her long enough he’d try to make a beginning; he’d sit her down in Sue Rawson’s wing chair, get her a blanket and he’d start the story with the morning Daniel woke up with the lump.

“This is one of my favorite rooms,” he said. “Sue Rawson used to invite me up here and we’d listen to music. Before you were born.”

“Sometimes you talk as if you did all of your living before I was born,” she said slowly, dreamily.

He stopped walking in circles and leaned against the old four-poster bed. He realized that she was often surprising him, that she was far smarter than he usually gave her credit for. “Have you done your living yet?” he asked.

“What do you mean, Walt?” And she laughed—“I’m in the middle of it.”

He nodded and felt along the deep brown wood of the bedstead.

She was still at the door. She was nervous too, he could see, holding a yellow washcloth, pulling at a loose thread, unraveling it. “You know that sort of like fairy-tale thing you told me at Thanksgiving, about the beautiful sick sister and the living sister?”

“The life of Daniel,” Walter murmured.

“I’ve been thinking about it, and I guess it has made me worry about you, because the sister in your story was—a little reckless, you know—her behavior with different men? If you haven’t noticed I get cranky when I’m worried. And I’ve been wanting to say all these months—I know this might sound really queer—I mean dumb. But I’ve been wanting to say that if you were ever sick, if you get sick, you know? If you couldn’t take care of yourself and didn’t have anyone? If that happened, you could come live with Marc and I.”

He caught his breath, inhaling as he spoke. “Marc and me.”

“Okay, okay, Marc and me. Whatever. Maybe it’s really weird to say that—but I’ve been wanting to for a long time. I wanted you to know that I’m not—ashamed or anything, of your lifestyle. I can’t help thinking of you up there in Otten. You hardly have any furniture. When I’m old and sick I’ll call out for Marc. What about you, Walt?” She came toward him and stopped just short of the bed. “Who will you call for?”

Nine

APRIL
1973

W
hen it warmed up that spring, Greg Gamble tore off all the shingles on the carport and put on a new roof. Mrs. Gamble stood below, in her yard, smoking and watching him. If a shingle missed the trash heap she stepped outside the gate and threw it into the Dumpster herself. She’d open an upstairs window and lean out shouting, “G.G., you’re going crooked!” It seemed to Walter that by ripping off the painty shingles Greg Gamble was erasing the bad deed. They might all forget it had ever happened. They might stop knowing who had done it. Mrs. Gamble’s new goodness, born from overlooking their mischief, would be arrested in its relative infancy, and Walter could again dislike her for every one of the old reasons.

Daniel was in the hospital for three and a half weeks that month. Years later a boy in his condition would have been sent home to die, but it was not yet routine for cancer patients to spend their last days in their own bedrooms. Joyce and Robert took turns staying with Daniel through the night, sitting up in a chair next to the bed. Robert’s factory was on the west side of Chicago, and he usually went to the hospital, to join his wife, as soon as he could get away. He and Joyce ate dinner from the vending machines. They were together
when the doctor came for his rounds, and then one of them went home to Walter and to sleep.

In the evening, after ballet class, Walter and Mitch let themselves into the dark house. Finally they had a place to go that was out of the gutter, out of reach of the police. It didn’t escape Walter’s notice that Joyce never bothered to leave the light on for her stray son. She often told him that either she or Robert would be back when he returned from class but it was never true; they could not seem to pull themselves away from the hospital. “I’m home,” he shouted to no one as he opened the door. “Come to Papa, puppy,” he yelled into the kitchen. The dog came slinking out of the shadows, no wag to his tail, no warm tongue to the hand that fed him.

Walter couldn’t stand thinking back to his younger days, when he prayed for drama in his life. His wish for tragedy had pretty much been granted, but it had not come out as he’d imagined. He was reduced, rather than ennobled, by his present situation. He couldn’t keep himself from sweet talk with the dog that had always hated him, and when his parents were home he sat at the piano torturously banging away at a Beethoven sonata, so obvious, he knew, so childish in his appeal. He could do nothing but storm through the allegro, the allegretto, the adagio, ignoring the markings, playing each movement louder and faster than the last.

Mrs. Gamble often left a morsel at the door, an apple tart in a ramekin or a loaf of seven-grain bread, a bunch of asparagus all the way from California. Walter didn’t like her food, on general principles. He brought the day’s catch to the counter and uncovered it, exposing it to the air, to rot. Sometimes Joyce made his supper in the morning and left it wrapped in plastic in the refrigerator. Or she put a ten-dollar bill under the vase on the kitchen table, with instructions to order a pizza. She always signed off with an X and an O, as if that would do, in her absence. Walter usually gave Mitch the money so that they could pay their local dealer. He was afraid that with a fifty-dollar debt the little hoodlum would hire a hit man to knock off one of them. He was fairly confident that any self-respecting criminal, faced with a choice, would take the challenge of Mitch, no fun doing in such easy prey as Walter. Still, a person couldn’t be certain, and he was always relieved to see the pizza money, to snatch it from under the
vase and hand it over to the president of the corporation, the man of the house. They could survive on milk and cereal if it meant they’d live to see the break of day.

As if he wouldn’t notice the dog, Joyce always left Walter a note, reminding him to take Duke for a walk. “Sure,” he said to her handwriting, opening the front door, letting the bunwad out to run anywhere he pleased, to scrabble into garbage cans and gorge himself silly. If Joyce left a meal the boys opened the refrigerator and stood eating the baked potato, the pork chop, the green beans, the cookies, right from the plate on the rack. Mitch could eat a potato in one swallow, and Walter was quick to grab what he most wanted and tear it down the approximate middle. They drank the milk from the carton, passing it back and forth. When they’d finished, or when they’d grown cold, standing in the breeze of the refrigerator, they shut the door and went to the bread box. They ate what was left of the loaf. They ran their wet fingers along the bottom of the stainless-steel box to get the last crumbs. This, Walter thought, this easy domesticity, is what it will feel like when I’m an adult, when I have an apartment, when I have a real life.

They fixed themselves bowls of Kix. They added miniature marshmallows to the top, along with raisins, peanuts, bananas and chocolate sauce—anything they could find—and when all of that was gone they put their heads down into their bowls and sucked up the milk. Walter made popcorn, and once they poured melted unsweetened chocolate over the kernels. The bitterness surprised them, and so they added sugar and, for balance, a dash of salt. Duke ate the mess from the trash later that night and early the next morning he puked outside Walter’s bedroom door. It was nothing less than a personal vendetta, Walter knew. The dog, although stupid in most ways, had a talent for vengeance.

The boys didn’t clean up after themselves in the kitchen. The house was a wilderness, and putting away their plates would not have made a dent in the ruin. There were ants in the garbage, in the cupboards, in the drain, which was clogged with pieces of meat and cereal and carrot shavings. The can opener had a trimming of black scum on the blade; the floor was sticky with swill and muddy paw prints; the tap was busted, and there was a rusty stain where the water ran in
the sink. Joyce brought groceries home and didn’t put them away. The trash didn’t get taken out. The mail wasn’t opened and had piled up on the table. After they’d eaten, Mitch and Walter turned out the lights on the mess and went upstairs to Walter’s room.

Every night, after Mitch left him, Walter imagined how with each next time they would begin a new sequence. He realized that becoming a lover might actually be something like learning a language, progressing from lesson to lesson, building on the previous skills until a person was speaking fluently and maybe even lyrically. Before he’d had any experience, he’d believed that sex, having sex, would be like riding a bike. You’d find your balance, wobble a little, figure out the steering and take off. After that first time you’d always know how. That’s what he’d thought, but he’d been wrong. There was sport involved, it turned out, and probably artistry, and if you were a dullard you might go on for a long time without improving, without getting past the introductory lesson in simple conversation. Mitch seemed only to want to quickly finish the business in the dark. Their trysts inside had right away become habitual and perfunctory: eat in the light of the kitchen, go upstairs and fuck, more or less, in the grainy blackness of Walter’s room. There had been a time or two, on a Sunday afternoon, in Mitch’s unheated attic, when they had lain under a dusty coverlet on an old stained mattress, and Walter had ventured to follow the line of his friend’s clavicle with his fingers, the outline he already knew so well without the benefit of touch. Mitch kept his eyes shut, as if he didn’t want to see his admirer. He might let me kiss his throat, Walter said to himself. If I am careful, if I act with intention and speed, I might peel back the sheet and look. But Mitch rolled over before Walter made his move.

Night after night at his own house Walter wanted to back up and begin again. He wanted to take off Mitch’s clothes, button by button; he wanted to light a candle so he could see the white skin, the blue eyes, the tangle of hair, and even his own proficient hands. It had been one thing in the alley, to make haste in the cold, but in the empty house they had the opportunity to take their leisure in a bed with cotton sheets, or they might have had a shower or a bath, or tried out the kitchen table like an adventurous married couple. It was not too difficult
to look each other in the eye when they were passing the milk carton back and forth in the kitchen, easing their hunger and mocking Mrs. Gamble, but somewhere during the trip up the back stairs Mitch’s footfall grew heavy, as if by the time he got to the upper hall he was carrying a load, burdened by shame.