The Short History of a Prince (7 page)

They hobbled up the gravel path to the house to get warm and find something to eat. The boys huddled in their bathrobes on the
lawn, in the sunshine, eating Oreos. “What’s this town like, Walter, where you’ve decided to teach?” Susan said, licking the filling out of a cookie and crushing the rest into the grass. He noted, as he always did in her company, that she used his name when she spoke to him, as if she liked to say it, liked the feel of her tongue to the back of her teeth, making the
l
, anticipating the explosion of the
t
. In college, when he had had no idea what to study in order to have a profession, he looked up “Walter” in the
Oxford English Dictionary
. There was no hope, no consolation in the definition, a rendering that was so at odds with the tidy and productive Virgo Mrs. Gamble had once promised him. “Walter” meant: to roll, to be tossed on the wave; to wallow, or revel in; to move or go unsteadily, totter or stumble; to surge or roll high. He was therefore living up to his name when he was drunk or stoned, a condition he found himself in regularly during his college years, rolling high and tottering at the same time, behaving, without question, like an ass.

“Walter,” Susan said again, “what’s this town like, this Otten?”

“I don’t know much about it, but it strikes me as a barren, inhospitable place, about as cozy as Siberia, although not as far from train service. I suppose in the drabness there are probably fabulous wild-flowers and stunning native grasses. It’s a sleepy, ugly little town in the middle of nowhere, and as far as Otten High goes, although the management doesn’t come out and say, it’s basically a technical school. Twenty percent are college-bound.”

“Oh no! You’ll be casting your pearls before swine!”

“My pearls? Yes, well, there’s certainly no harder task than that, is there, but maybe there’s no better one either. Imagine those poor pigs having nothing but slop all their lives. The school retains a Latin teacher—how’s that for an idiosyncrasy? She’s about a hundred and sixty-five years old and of course cuckoo, as all Latin teachers are. Either they haven’t the heart to let her go, or some codger on the school board can recite Catullus and values the subject. And, I hate to have to break this to you, sweetie, but you cast your pearls before swine at every performance. There are people out in the audience who are falling asleep, having spent their money on a ticket so they can dress up and be seen doing something high-minded. And there are probably plenty of situations where we’re the swine and we don’t even know it.”

“Oh, all right. You win. But still, why choose Otten? Isn’t there a middle ground, a place like Oak Ridge, a suburban school with adequate funding and serious students?”

“Why choose it?” he repeated. “I could go into a hypnotic state with the aid of your earrings and tell you that it chose me. The truth is, I don’t really have a choice, not now, not this late in the season. I’m behind everyone else, having been in the miniature business half my life and looking for work in midsummer. Fire or ice, those were the options.”

“Queens or Otten,” Susan murmured.

“It’s been easier to justify Otten than you might think. I’d love to get to know my niece, Linda, for starters. For once I’ll be close enough to act like an uncle. And I’d like to spend time with Sue Rawson. It’s unlikely that she is ever going to die, but in the event that she does pass on, I will be glad to have been in her company. Plus, I’m an hour from Lake Margaret and can help Mom and Dad look after this place. I went up and visited Otten the other night and I got a little bit of an
Our Town
kind of glow. There was a man on the school baseball diamond running his toddler daughter around the bases. That seemed promising. There was a great big retarded girl riding bikes with her younger sister, and that also seemed sort of hopeful in its own way. A real estate agent named Penny took me around and showed me the rental properties, all four of them. I could have a house for six hundred dollars a month, a whole house, with shrubs and tulips in the yard, an island in the kitchen, a living room with windows that look out to woods, to nature. There are deer antlers hanging on the garage and people will think I’m a sportsman. They’ll call me Mr. McCloud. I’ll buy a compact car and a speed bike and a Weber grill. I don’t know, for some reason it doesn’t sound that terrible.”

The younger boy, Toby, shouted to the older one, “That shovel is mine, I hate you! I had it first.”

“And there won’t be racial conflict in Otten. I’ll have garden-variety discontent to cope with, such as we see here, but not gang warfare.” Walter left the children to their mother. He went to the woodshed to find the old puppet theater and the accompanying trunk. He didn’t remember ever fighting with Daniel, although they must have occasionally had words and come to blows. They had
grown up like ghosts to each other, a shadow in the hallway, a clink at the breakfast table, a breeze coming across the porch. Sue Rawson had constructed the red-and-green plywood box and sewn a crimson velvet curtain for the front and the back of the puppet theater. She had at one time done elaborate productions, in the days when she had only a handful of nieces and nephews, before she realized that they were fundamentally uncivilized. Walter dressed the French hand-carved wolf in Red Riding Hood’s cloak and an old pair of Barbie’s stiletto heels. Over the years a few stray items had made their way into the trunk, corrupting the contents.

On the lawn Walter lay behind the theater, making the wolf heroically sing, in his heels and cloak, and with a strained falsetto, “O mio babbino caro.” The performance did not mesmerize Susan’s boys, and before the aria ended Tim whacked Toby on the nose, yet another bloody scene. Susan, with no pity in her gesture or her voice, handed Toby a mass of tissues from her purse and ordered both of them into the station wagon.

“Sometimes,” she hissed at Walter, “I despise them.” She began picking up her things, talking more to herself than to him. “I love them best when they’re asleep or when I’m gone—there, that’s the horrible truth. When I dance I use that love to set me spinning. But the reality of them, God! I’m not sure I’m cut out for this, Walter.”

He watched her gather their towels, plastic shovels, buckets, trucks and wet suits, compressing what was strewn over the lawn into one beach bag. Mothers, he thought, had the ability to rake up possessions and compact them, make the whole impossible load portable. Their proficiency was probably encoded in their genes, the packing skill having been selected for first in nomadic days, carried forward into the covered-wagon era and on into the age of mass-produced toys. Despite her agitation and her comment about mothering he could tell she was a good parent. Her boys were high-spirited, but they weren’t cocky, they weren’t cruel. She’d wanted a normal life with children and that had been one of the reasons she’d left the City Ballet, given it up. He stood aside, watching, telling her about how the ten Klopers on Maplewood Avenue used to go on vacation, and because seat belts had not yet been invented, Mother Kloper used to cram five into the middle seat, four in the back, the baby up front.
They each had a paper lunch bag with the one plaything they were allowed to take along.

“One toy”—Susan snorted. “Ah, those halcyon days.”

“They were halcyon all right,” Walter said. She was getting into the car, leaning over the front seat to give Toby the evil eye. “Do you remember Aunt Jeannie’s anniversary party?” he asked. “Do you remember how my mother made the wall of pictures topple over, and the frames shattered?”

“No!” Susan held her seat belt halfway across her chest. “Not your mother! She didn’t make that happen.”

“I wouldn’t be so sure. I sometimes think she might have given it a nudge. She was the only one who wasn’t shocked by the noise or the mess. Sometimes I think of it, and I wonder.” Walter bent down and kissed his friend through the open window. She hardly noticed, immobilized by the idea of Joyce McCloud willfully committing a destructive act.

“I don’t believe it,” she said, shaking her head. “Why? Why would she have done such a thing?” She let the belt go and pulled it again, this time all the way across herself. “We never gave your mother a literary personality, did we? It’s so interesting, to think about who she was in those days. We are her age now, Walter, do you realize that?”

He put his hands to his forehead to make a visor. He studied the sky, trying to look as if he was making an effort to remember. Joyce was outside literature, he thought, not someone they could easily peg. Through high school he and Susan, and Mitch too, had had the habit of assigning one another parts from their current favorite novel. The practice gave ordinary life the weight it would never have, and also lent substance to their own personalities. It was only lately that Walter had seen the obvious: Mitch as Charlotte Stant, and himself as Maggie Verver. But in the old days Susan was always the moral or immoral beautiful and intelligent heroine: Elizabeth Bennet, Margaret Schlegel, Anna Karenina, Dorothea Brooke. Mitch in that era was naturally the romantic lead and Walter the character part. Susan was the only dancer Walter had ever known or heard of who read serious novels.

“It was ingenious of you, to marry a bookseller,” he said.

“All the uncorrected proofs I can read,” she said, smirking at him. “A brilliant career move. Oh, Walter, you’ve got me thinking about that anniversary party. Daniel was supposed to come, wasn’t he? He had been going to bring the girl on the tennis team—Eleanor O’Reilly was her name. But he got sick that morning. The very day. And the old bag, the neighbor lady of yours, Mrs. Gamble, was so angry at your parents when you got home. She took your mother by the shoulders, said she had no business leaving a kid with a tumor on his neck at home by himself.”

“There hadn’t been a diagnosis yet,” he said, “but she seemed to know already that it would kill him.”

“God, she scared me. I thought she was going to attack your mother. Or maybe it was those dogs of hers. They were all going crazy behind her fence.” She chewed on her lip and Walter noticed that she had fine lines—wrinkles—on her brow. “Anyway, now you’re leaving your old life and moving back here. I hope your students can read other things besides the gearshift panel of their John Deere tractors.” She stroked her forehead as if she knew he had seen the creases, as if she was trying to smooth them away. “I’m a lot dumber than I ever thought I’d be. I planned to be a famous ballerina, an artist, and deep down I’m just a suburban mom with a paneled station wagon, domestic problems, two bratty kids who sleep on cotton sheets patterned with trucks. But you, you are going to teach your swine to walk and talk!” She reached both hands out of the window, pulled Walter’s head in, and solemnly kissed him on the mouth.

“Ask your mother if she made the pictures smash and why,” she called as she started down the drive. “I’ll bet you a million dollars she didn’t.”

“She’ll never tell,” Walter shouted after her. “That’s what I bet. She will never tell.”

Before school began in Otten, Walter drove to Schaumburg, Illinois, to visit his baby sister, Lucy. She had been born in 1974, when a good
portion of the family’s life, in Walter’s view, was over. She had missed growing up with his brotherly instruction and he couldn’t keep himself from thinking that such an absence might explain why she was living in a place like Schaumburg. He was arrogant, he knew, but he couldn’t help it, couldn’t help wanting to improve her, to make her see what was hollow about her choices. He was, after all, thirty-eight years old, and she only twenty-one.

There was nothing good about Schaumburg, in his opinion, not the mall around which the town had recently been built, not the corporate headquarters, not the concrete sprawl of it, not even the sweet backward intentions of the planners who wanted to build a Main Street with a mock downtown. He did not like the wide new streets in Lucy’s subdivision, with culs-de-sac that were supposed to prevent undesirable people from speeding and pillaging. All of the homes in the neighborhood—a term he used loosely for Lucy’s environs—had two-story foyer windows and skylights in the master bedrooms, but they were alike in a way the Oak Ridge houses had never been. Maplewood Avenue, he knew, had once been a tract and many of the Queen Anne-style houses had identical floor plans, but all the same those structures had grace and beauty, and also character. In fact, there were certain houses that seemed to attract handicapped or troubled people and others that assured a type of normalcy. It was as if the buildings themselves determined the owners. In Schaumburg there was probably an ordinance that broadly defined and prohibited weirdos. Nothing, Walter believed, neither a range of owners nor the ravages of time, would add texture or variety or interest to the houses. And where was the alley? In Oak Ridge, Mr. and Mrs. Kloper and the ten girls had lived to the south of the McClouds, and their cousins, the other Klopers, were in the yellow house straight across the alley, all twelve of them, all boys. For years there had been jokes about the water, the air, the soil on one side of the alley versus the other, and the effects those elements had on determining gender. The alley itself was the great divide, the place where the children spent the daylight hours, but after, in the dusk of summer, they split away, each to his own turf, and went to war.