The Whole World Over (46 page)

"Oh people are sissies," said Walter. "Or, I should say, a lot of my dear
friends are sissies. They don't like to ruin their shoes. Or they're certain
they'll be stranded, the subways and taxis all paralyzed in apocalyptic
drifts of snow."

"I'll be there. You'll have me, at the very least."

Walter, in a moment of neighborly beatitude, had invited Bonny.
He had also invited Greenie's husband and the puppy woman, who
appeared to be friendly with both of those men. Walter had caught sight
of her more than once through the window of the bookshop, and he had
chatted with her twice when she was walking Greenie's husband's dog
(for whom T.B. had the futile hots).

By six, the tables were set, the stew was ready, and Walter had managed
to run home, shower, and change. On the way back to the restaurant,
in the chilly, windy dark, he marveled at an hour's transformation.
The cars along Bank Street had been engulfed by two tenderly undulating
dunes, sparkling like quartz, spilling over to fill the sidewalks. Falling
as fiercely as ever, the snow made a faint hissing sound as it replenished
the drifts. Overhead, the larger boughs creaked like antique doors.

Quite thoughtfully, McLeod had shoveled the sidewalk from his shop
to Walter's Place, but the rest of the way was impassable. Walter and
T.B. walked straight down the middle of the street. Though it had yet to
be plowed, tires had pressed the snow into a stippled, corrugated track,
still a clean and brilliant white. Ahead of them, the wind would knock
loose great chunks of snow from the branches above, spilling them onto
the road with explosive glee.

Four of Walter's least rugged friends had called before three, from
Hoboken, to say that they feared the PATH train would close. Now Ben
told him that seven more had canceled. Walter put away place settings,
rearranged name cards, and pushed the empty tables against a wall. He
lit candles and stoked the fires that Ben had laid.

Alan Glazier was the first to arrive, bearing a bottle of wine. (Walter
refrained from joking about the infamous coals.) Right behind him,
thank heaven, came several of Walter's old acting buddies. Two still
acted, one a relentlessly successful villain leapfrogging from one soap to
the next; the others had taken their talent to advertising and public relations.
Out of a much larger original clique, they were the only ones left
standing, not just alive but healthy. He hugged them one by one and
called Ben over with his tall glass pitcher. "Mulled cider ought to have
been the cocktail tonight," joked Walter. "Eskimo pies for dessert.
Maybe we should all go out later and have an igloo-building contest."

There was a commotion of stamping at the door. Walter let the men
hang their own coats. When he stopped to listen to the music, he realized
that Ben had put on an Ella Fitzgerald Christmas CD. "Very, very
funny!" he called across the room. "Get out the mistletoe, why don't
you!" He laid an extra mat before the door, and when he stood up, right
there, holding a large potted plant wrapped in green tissue, stood Bonny.

"A man of his word," said Walter. "What's this?" As he pulled off
the tissue paper, he thanked McLeod for shoveling the walk. "Is this
heather? I'm sorry to laugh, but
heather
?"

"I like to live up to the cultural stereotypes," said McLeod. "White
heather's for luck, my mum always told us."

"Thank you," said Walter. "Luck is something you can never have
too much of. Kind of like mashed potatoes."

"Luck is like a good dog," replied McLeod, thickening his accent so
that
good
would have rhymed with
shrewd.
"Na take it for granted
when it's by your side. Then long and loyal may it bide. . . . Again, my
mum. I think she invented that one."

"Well, amen. Bet I'd like your mum." Walter carried McLeod's plant
to the longest table and centered it there, replacing a glass globe filled
with white tulips. As he went to dispose of the tissue paper, he realized
that snow had dampened the paper and its color had bled onto his
hands and linen shirt. They were splotched with forest green.

He closed his eyes and willed himself to enjoy the evening thoroughly,
come what may. When he opened them, he saw the heather. It was
lovely. He looked around: everything, everyone looked lovely.

For the next half hour, Walter hugged and kissed, hung the women's
coats, passed a tray of cheese puffs and cherry tomatoes stuffed with
crab. He had no time for a drink, and he forgot about his ruined shirt
and the dozen friends he'd lost to the storm. The sadness he'd felt about
Gordie's absence seemed to have fallen away, as if by special dispensation.
Just after Hugo gave him a nod from the kitchen door, he went to
the window and peered out. The street, empty of people and traffic, was
dazzling. The snow continued to fall, and where it clung to the branches
of the wide sycamores, the slender gingko and pear trees, it etched a
vivid urban forest. "Oh my stars," Walter whispered. His breath clouded
the window, then vanished. He felt the urge to breathe again and draw
on the pane a transient design or, boyishly, his own initials. He turned
around and called out, "Dinner, my friends, is about to be served!" Such
glorious words. There was a smattering of applause, and people jostled
one another at the tables, eagerly seeking their place cards.

Impulsively, Walter instructed Ben to help him push the tables together
into one large clump and told everyone to sit wherever they pleased.

ONE DAY IN HIGH SCHOOL
, when the snow had fallen so mercilessly
that afternoon classes were canceled, Walter had come home to find
Granna talking to her husband. She was sitting at the kitchen table with
a cup of tea and the framed picture that Walter had never seen anywhere
other than on her bedroom dresser. Granna kept the ornate silver frame
so rigorously polished that you could catch fragments of your reflection
in its minutest leaf or blossom.

She stood and greeted Walter with pleasure, taking his wet coat and
draping it over a radiator. "Off with your coat, and I vill make hot
chocolate." She started toward the stove but then turned to pick up her
husband's picture. She kissed it quickly, smiled at Walter, and set the
photo on a bookshelf against the wall, safe from spills and careless
reachings.

"I talk to your grandfather about many things," said Granna as she
stirred the pan of milk. "It may be I say more to him since he is dead
than when he was alive."

"Was he a big talker?" Walter was the one who felt embarrassed.

"Oh no. More a big reader. But he liked to read out loud. He read me
a little bit of everysing. A little bit newspaper, a little bit history, a little
bit Bible. English and German both. I miss all the little bits." She concentrated
on stirring the milk as it heated, then filling a cup. The spoon
sounded so musical, so soothing and civilized, against her shapely
porcelain cups.

When she set the cup on its saucer in front of Walter, she said, "He
needed a listener for his reading, I think. I was a listening wife. It's a
good thing, a listening wife. Listening husband, that is good too." She
tapped Walter's hand with one finger and gave him an encouraging
smile.

He thanked her for the chocolate, wishing he knew the right thing to
say. Years later, he was ashamed that he'd never offered to read to
Granna himself. What an insensitive lout he had been! A little bit Shakespeare.
A little bit
National Geographic.
A little bit Sherlock Holmes.
Or perhaps that wasn't what she'd have liked; maybe the reading-aloud
was a part of the marital intimacy she'd had with her husband. Maybe it
had been like an ongoing courtship.

But these were thoughts Walter had much later, after Granna died.
That day in the kitchen, all he thought of was loneliness: spending a life
without finding one person he could talk to in solitary kinship again and
again, face-to-face or, if the worst should happen, at least through a picture
frame. How will I ever find that one person if I can never marry? he
thought. What if no one ever needed Walter—needed him to read
or
to listen?

THE CONVERSATION AT THE PARTY
was dense and eccentric, the talk
of friends who no longer need the ordinary everyday topics. The rich
food led them to talk about the diets of vultures, parrots, and Aztec
kings; parrots and kings led them to argue about the future of zoos
and the future of elections. In smaller groups, they rhapsodized about
Shakespeare's sonnets, laughed at Arnold Schwarzenegger's political
ambitions, marveled at how C. S. Lewis had found God, and listened to
the soap-opera villain recount in detail how the entire crew of the
Endeavor
managed to survive shipwreck in conditions that made the
weather that night look like July in Ibiza.

And then, long after Walter had forgotten they should already be
there, the door blew open and in sauntered Scott, Morticia, and another
teenage couple. A gust of wind entered with them. In the arresting chill,
as the dinner guests turned away from their meal, Walter realized that
his friends might see the newcomers as crashers, as a band of
Clockwork
Orange
hoodlums. He stood and said, "For those of you who haven't
met him already, allow me to introduce my nephew, Scott, and his . . .
entourage." The word
henchpeople
had come to mind.

"Welcome!" someone called out. "Get the hell in here and close that
door!"

"Do any of the lot of you wear watches?" whispered Walter as he
pressed the sodden group toward the coatroom.

"Uncle Walt, we had to check out Central Park in this totally awesome
blizzard. It is so unreal up there!"

"Get your overclothes off before you flood the place with all that
unreality," said Walter, though his main intention was to move them out
of sight for a moment or two. "Boots, young fellow," he said to the male
companion. "Those boots will go no farther than this. If your socks are
wet, I've probably got a spare pair in my office."

"Thanks, Grandma," said Scott with a sly smile. "Hey, cool shirt. Is
that like some kind of batik, or did your pen explode?"

Walter looked down; he'd forgotten about the tissue paper disaster.
"It's yours after tonight. But don't try that bait-and-switch on me." As
the other three peeled off their parkas and droopy sweaters, Walter
whispered to Scott, "This is really beyond rude, I have to tell you."

"Sorry, man, but don't you ever get like a kid when it snows?"

Walter sighed. "Well, you have a point. Just go into the kitchen and
ask Hugo for plates. Serve yourselves. Your table's back there." He
pointed. "Hello there, Sonya. And you would be . . . ?"

The two tagalongs, Tyrone and Lisa, had firm enough handshakes,
but one of them—or probably all four—smelled of marijuana.
Later,
Walter scolded himself. And really, what did he expect? The tykes from
Mary Poppins
?

By the time Walter sat down again, Alan Glazier was telling the others
about his son, George, how he had suddenly become quite shy in his
kindergarten. He was far ahead of his peers in his ability to read, but
perhaps this had only served to isolate him socially.

"Well, what are you doing so far away from him, if I may ask? Don't
you suppose that has something to do with it?" asked one of Walter's
actor friends.

Alan laughed nervously. "I'll be moving out there soon."

"Yes, but what kind of consolation is 'soon' to a five-year-old?"

"I'm sure a five-year-old is far more complicated than either you or I
can imagine," Walter suggested. "We, after all, are not parents. As I am
discovering in the most explicit fashion." He looked ruefully toward the
back table, where the teenagers were happily emptying a bottle of wine.
"Crimonitely!" he exclaimed, to the open amusement of his friends. He
excused himself and made a beeline for Scott.

"I can be closed for underage drinking, my dear nephew. I believe you
know this," he said. "This is not precisely my living room." He picked
up the bottle as they clutched their glasses possessively.

"Hey, it's called Walter's Place, right? So, why not? And by the way,
I'm twenty-two," said Sonya. T.B. lounged in her lap. She was scratching
his jowls, and he was drooling in ecstasy.

Ignoring Morticia, Walter took Scott to the kitchen, where Hugo
was carefully dissecting the pies. "Look, Scott. I thought that including
you and your friends in my party would be something you could
appreciate—by which I mean have a good time while minding your
manners. I'm not even going to ask who's stoned here, because I presume
you all are—"

"You won't call Dad," said Scott, sounding plaintive.

"Of course not! Or not, I should say, if you start minding your p's
and q's. This . . . this Sonya, I fear—"

"Uncle Walt, you introduced us."

Walter wanted to scream. "I don't know why I should expect to be
treated like the cool dude you once believed I was, but the alternative is
that you treat me like a big, fat, square-as-baloney parent, okay? Meaning
. . . oh for crying out loud, Scott,
meaning
that if you don't behave, I
can ship you back to your real parents. Message loud and clear?"

"Deafening." Scott had gone from fearful back to cocky. He leaned
close to Walter and said, "Baloney's round, man."

"That's all she wrote, my friend." Walter turned away decisively and
took a tray from Hugo. The chocolate and banana custards had been
marbled in such a way that the wedges of pie resembled plump triangular
bees. His chef gave him a wry smile. Hugo's family story had always
been murky to Walter, though he knew it involved a couple of grown
children and a jilted wife or two.

Walter thrust the tray at Scott. "Practice your serving technique,
Junior."

Not long after their access to booze was cut off, the teenagers left.
Walter's last glimpse of them was of Scott and Morticia framed in the
doorway, merged in a flagrant, convoluted total-body kiss.