The Whole World Over (31 page)

Best of all, moving into Granna's house meant that Walter got a separate
room from Werner, even if his was the smallest. It was the only
room on the third floor, with a view over chimneys and roofs toward
hills that blushed brilliant red in the fall. "Greylock, tallest mountain in
the state," Granna had told him, pointing out the wide, lofty hill. It
looked too tame to be a real mountain, but its superior status compelled
respect. Looming to the west, it hastened sunset, lengthening the longest
of winter nights. Walter would look out his window sometimes and
whisper that name, the name of a magician or mythological trickster. Or
a horse ridden by a knight in King Arthur's court.

After nearly two years away, August returned. He moved Rose, Walter,
and Werner to an apartment over a Woolworth just a few blocks
from Granna's house, but he had trouble finding work. Walter supposed
that there simply weren't many bowling alleys out in the country. Granna
suggested that what August needed to do was finish college. In retrospect,
it didn't take brains to figure out that August's inability to find
employment had little to do with the supply of jobs and that choosing to
stay in the country made it easy for him to use that fiction as an excuse.

Commitment to booze, all its rituals and the changes it wreaks on
grown-ups (first the hour-to-hour changes and then, more subtly, the
long-term changes), is a confounding thing for a child to observe, let
alone understand. After their dad came home, Werner and Walter were
often split between their parents. Many evenings, Werner went out with
their mother, because he was the older one and could entertain himself
during evenings of sorority-sister bridge, reading a Hardy Boys book or
rearranging his stamp collection, while Walter stayed home with their
dad. Father and son would sit side by side on the couch watching
Hogan's Heroes
or
Get Smart
or
Saturday Night at the Movies.

This was not an unpleasant way to pass the time, but along with
those hours in front of the TV, one of Walter's earliest serial memories
was of being hustled into the car by his dad after dark and cruising from
town to town in search of a bottle. It was such an important bottle, no
doubt about that, and you couldn't get it at just any store. Sometimes
the right store would be closed—there would have been a mad, cursing
dash in the car, way too fast—and this would lead to bouts of cursing
and yet further speeding dashes from town to town. Walter did not need
to be told that he wasn't to tell his mother about these trips. Once in a
while, however, she would come home while they were out on their
mission—that's what August called it—and she would be waiting and
angry. Walter and Werner would go straight to their room and lie awake
listening to the uproar. The two brothers never spoke about it, perhaps
because it always happened in the dark before they fell asleep, and when
they woke up, the tumult felt unreal or diminished by intervening dreams,
dreams that for Walter were often more dramatic, more highly colored,
than any of the accusations his parents made in the dark.

And then one day, very early, Granna dropped by with a cake for
Werner's birthday. It was a Saturday, and Walter was the only one up,
watching cartoons. Granna walked into the living room in her shiny,
snub-nosed high heels and stood between him and the TV, white gloves
on hips, her head turning this way and that, like the head of an owl.

"There vuz a party?" she asked him.

Walter told her no, there'd been no party, as he saw her gaze travel
from the coffee table to the floor beside the armchair to the top of
a glass-front bookcase that had belonged to her hardworking, book-loving
husband (a publisher of hymnals and prayer books in Germany
and then, in the immigrant's trade-off, a typesetter at a newspaper plant
in Pittsfield). All these surfaces were occupied haphazardly by bottles,
glasses, ashtrays, matchbooks, and pretzel shards.

"No party," she repeated with soft-spoken furor. Walter had been
eleven years old. He knew the subtle emotions by then as well as the
obvious ones.

Within weeks, he and Werner and their mother went to live at
Granna's again while their father went away. "It's a special kind of vacation,"
their mother said brightly, but you could see she was angry: not at
her husband but at Granna. At dinnertime, she and Granna worked
around each other, never touching and almost never speaking. They
reminded Walter of those black and white Scottie dog magnets that
repelled each other when held in contradiction to their polarity.

"Where did he go?" Walter asked his brother, wondering if their
father could have sneaked off to Disneyland without them. Like any
normal eleven-year-old in 1967, Walter dreamed of going to Disneyland.
Sixteen-year-old Werner had said, "He went to dry out. Any dope
could figure that one out."

"He went to what?" said Walter.

"Granna wants him off the booze. She says it's why he can't get a job
or be a good father," said Werner. "Jeez, are you a knucklehead."
Werner had reached the age when he couldn't tell his little brother much
of anything without throwing in a pinch of contempt.

When their dad returned from his "vacation," about which he had no
stories and of which he had no snapshots, they did not move back to
their own house but stayed at Granna's. August drank a lot of Coca-Cola
and coffee, smoked more cigarettes, and often went to bed by ten
o'clock. Another difference was that it began to seem as if the parents
were in cahoots. They went out after dinner sometimes to take walks
together; when August turned in early, so would Rose. Walter longed to
band together with Werner, but by then Werner had thrown himself into
school sports and girls. He had also worked his tail off as a lifeguard at
an indoor pool to buy himself a rattletrap Impala. He would come home
after one kind of practice or another to drop off half his books, shower
and change clothes, contemplate his important self in the mirror, eat
something right out of the fridge, and declare that he was off to the public
library. (No one other than Walter seemed to wonder whether that's
where Werner really went.)

Granna—who'd be at the stove, preparing a stew or pot roast—
would scold Werner: Dinner was time for family. Eating while standing
was the habit of beasts. Werner would get intestinal cramps and risk
driving off the road.

Werner, who stood a foot taller than Granna by then, would bend
down and kiss her on the forehead. He'd say something like "Beasts
don't have algebra and a buttload of Norman Melville to read." Walter,
setting the table, would watch his brother saunter out the door, listen to
the Impala roar away toward freedom.

August would be in the living room, supposedly checking the paper
for new job listings. But when he came to the table, what he'd talk about
was the news, reciting story after story with derision. He'd rant about
the stupidity of the war, the stupidity of the president, the stupidity of
the first lady and her stupid obsession with flowers, the stupidity of the
gooks and how, ironically, it just might help them win. "Hey, what's
another fricasseed village or two when the Mouseketeers are beating
down your door? Man but the world is full of jerks."

Granna's sacred tolerance began to crack. One night she told her son
to show some respect and native pride: for a president who would not
give up on a difficult fight, for a first lady who knew that to love the
beauty of nature was to love God, and—more pointedly—for a country
that would continue to send good money to a man so determined never
to make a living.

"Like you've ever had to support a family," August said.

Granna stared hard at him and seemed to consider whether she ought
to reply at all, but she did. "I am doing ziss now, ziss very past year and
more."

There was a pause, like a quick inhaling, and then August laughed,
loud and short, a gunshot laugh. "Touché, Mother!" he said, raising his
glass of Coke. "The only catch being that whatever money you're using
here comes from Dad's fat pension."

Granna stood up, almost demurely, and carried her plate to the sink.
She came back to her place, sat down, and stared once again at her
son. "Perhaps you and Rose might go down the street for ice cream.
Walter vill help me clean dishes. Perhaps you vill bring him a chocolate
sundae."

Walter (who always helped with the dishes anyway) watched his
father turn to his mother and say, "Hear that, Rose? We are being
shown the door."

As he waited, without much real optimism, for his chocolate sundae
to arrive, Walter finished his homework and went to bed. He was awakened
by a car screeching into the driveway, radio blaring. Boy, is Werner
going to get it now, he thought—until he heard his parents' voices. They
were singing "Blue Moon," warbling the chorus like third-string opera
singers.

Next morning, they were not at the breakfast table. Granna said very
little as she made oatmeal for Walter and Werner. She looked as if she
had been crying, but one thing you did not ask Granna about was her
emotional state. If you did, she would say something like (if she seemed
sad) "I am bearing up, as we all must do" or (if she seemed light on her
feet) "Joys, they are butterflies; never should you try to hold them, not
even so much as touch the vings."

Seventh grade was a year of retreat for Walter: retreat to his attic
room, retreat into reading, retreat from the realization that spin-the-bottle
and gym dances left him feeling as if everyone around him had
shared a special drug when he wasn't looking. He became aware that
the reason he loved to watch
Lost in Space
had nothing to do with sci-fi,
which he generally hated, and everything to do with the actor who
played Major West.

Then came the summer that would stand out forever as a uniquely
vivid, turbulent summer in Walter's life. It was the summer he met beautiful,
nervous Joel, his first requited crush; the summer he read
In Cold
Blood
(and every night for weeks locked all the doors and windows);
the summer of Manson's rampage; the summer his father, having sold
his own car, crashed Granna's Buick into a phone pole the next town
over, killing his wife then and there, himself after nearly a month in a
coma. Along with Granna, Walter and Werner visited their father and
his machines every day he lay there in limbo, and not once did Walter
wish for the man's recovery—though, at his grandmother's side, he went
through the motions of stoic prayer. She was the one he felt bad for. He
knew she was convinced she had failed in the gravest way a person can
fail: as a parent.

August died, fittingly, at the end of August. In September, a week late,
Werner went off to start college at U. Mass. The idea was that he'd be
near enough to come back on weekends, though he might as well have
gone to UCLA. He came back at Thanksgiving, but Christmas he spent
with a girlfriend in New York City. The following year he did go to California,
transferring to UC–Santa Cruz. "Haight-Ashbury, here I come,"
he said to Walter. How he'd evolved from a would-be flower-child to a
Republican moneyman would always be a bit of a mystery to Walter. But
people, no matter how well you knew them, never ceased to surprise.

AFTER SCOTT HAD BEEN THERE
just over a week, it occurred to Walter
that he had not shared a home with another person since living with
Granna. Even in college he'd never had roommates; he'd rented the teensiest,
grungiest studios and fixed them up to a fare-thee-well. The highly
peopled occupations he'd chosen—theater first, then restaurateering—
meant that once he went home, privacy signified far more than space.

So now he experienced all sorts of odd, unexpected emotional symptoms,
exacerbated by the ambiguous nature of his affection for Scott.
Even after he learned to sleep through Scott's faintly caterwauling music,
he would sometimes awake for no discernible reason. Hearing nothing
more than the murmur and groan of the city outside, he'd wonder if the
boy was in the apartment or out at large. He would resist the urge to
go into the living room and put an ear to Scott's door. Even then, he
might not know. What he felt in these wakings was a mixture of tenderness
and agitation. Was he worried for Scott's safety? Not really. Was he
envious—or, worse, jealous!—at the notion of his nephew out with a
prospective lover, dancing and kissing, sitting with legs intertwined on a
pair of barstools? Or was he simply feeling the misplaced wishful yearning
of someone who'd been single for too long?

The Bruce, meanwhile, took Scott's presence completely for granted.
When Walter opened the bedroom door first thing in the morning, T.B.
shot across the living room and sniffed greedily at the gap beneath
Scott's door. Scott would emerge, squatting down to tussle with the dog,
greeting Walter as a sleepy afterthought.

"Hey, Walt, how they hangin'?" Scott would growl in his sexy
teenage morning voice.

Walter tried not to stare at his nephew's lovely naked chest or the
scandalously low point at which the blond hair on his abdomen disappeared
behind the drawstring of his flimsy shorts. Early on, Walter had
given up on reinstating the second syllable of his own name.

The first two weeks, Werner called nearly every night—at the restaurant,
to Walter's annoyance. Cocktail hour at Kinderman West coincided
with dinner rush at Kinderman East. Walter would call Scott away
from setting tables, sweeping the sidewalk, or answering the front
phone. The boy would have a short conversation with his parents, his
end a series of cheerfully sarcastic quips like "No, Mom, I stay out all
night at leather bars" and "Like anybody has time to read when we're
right up the block from the triple-X video store."

Every so often, Walter would be summoned to the phone after Scott
said good-bye. He'd reassure Tipi that Scott was being fantastically
helpful (code for kept out of trouble) and that he was a perfect roommate
(code for spending the night where he was supposed to spend the
night). "Rest assured that I'm exploiting your son's talents to the max,"
he might say. "I've worn him out so completely that his fancy guitar is
gathering dust."