The Whore's Child (16 page)

ENEMIES

Namely Hugo Wentz. A sixth grader, one year ahead of Lin at St. Mary’s, Hugo joined the team almost two weeks into the season. The rules were specific: no one whose application form was not handed in by the deadline would be allowed to play American Legion, but an exception was made for Hugo because his father owned Elm Photo. In fact, it was rumored Mr. Wentz had enrolled his boy himself, so he wouldn’t be such a sissy. Lin recalled a day that winter when the fifth- and sixth-grade boys had been combined for gym class to have their fitness evaluated. Many of the boys had been able to climb hand over hand up a thick rope all the way to the rafters, and Lin had made it over halfway. Hugo was the only boy who hadn’t been able to pull himself up the rope at all.

The other members of the team were already playing catch, waiting for Mr. Christie to show up with the bats and bases, when Lin heard a vehicle bumping along the rutted access road. He turned, expecting it to be Mr. Christie’s pickup, but instead it was a brand-new 1963 Cadillac with tail fins, coming toward them too fast and stirring up a cloud of dirt when it stopped. Hugo sat in the front seat, as far as possible from the man behind the wheel, who put the car in Park and stared across the seat at his son.

From where he stood against the fence, Lin had a good view of the Wentzes, who greatly resembled each other. Mr. Wentz was a florid man, all belly and jowls, who owned several small, unrelated businesses in town. Perhaps because he was always flitting back and forth between them, Mr. Wentz managed always to convey a cosmic impatience. What he seemed impatient about right that instant was that his son was just sitting in the car, looking straight ahead, almost as if he hadn’t noticed they’d stopped, or as if the arrival at their destination had to be announced, like on a train. Finally, after his father’s lips moved, Hugo got out of the car, closed the door behind him and gazed impassively at the chain-link fence. Though there was no gate, the fence was no more than waist high. Still Hugo regarded it as if it were twenty feet tall and strung at the top with barbed wire. After a moment, the window of the Cadillac rolled down and Mr. Wentz called, “Forget something, Hugo?”

Apparently his son was still grappling with the problem of the fence, and the expression on his face suggested he couldn’t handle both it and his father’s question at the same time. Either that or he’d concluded that the two things were somehow related. Was his father asking him if he’d forgotten how to fly? Only when Hugo finally turned around did he see his father was holding his mitt. Mr. Wentz, disgusted that the boy had made no move to fetch the glove, Frisbeed it at the boy, who juggled it, then dropped it. The mitt remained there on the ground while father and son stared at each other. At last, Mr. Wentz said, “What?”

“There’s a fence,” Hugo said.

His father rubbed his temples with his thumbs. “So climb it,” he said, and then roared off. Hugo watched the Cadillac until it shot between the stone pillars that marked the entrance to Carling Field, then tossed his glove over the fence. Lin assumed he was going to take his father’s advice and climb it, but he was wrong. Instead, Hugo shambled its entire length, down to the hinged gate a hundred yards away, where he let himself in and then shambled back. To Lin, these two gestures made no sense. If he wasn’t going to climb the fence, why toss the glove over it? Having watched both his going and his coming, Lin suddenly felt grateful that Hugo Wentz was on the team, if only for the purpose of comparison.

When the pathetic circuit was finally completed, Lin pretended to be deeply involved in evaluating the team’s talent, perhaps even deciding on a starting lineup, so he wouldn’t have to play catch with Hugo Wentz, who probably threw like a girl. Still, after a minute or two, he sensed the boy’s presence behind him.

“Hey, Hart. You got a ball?” Hugo wanted to know.

Lin shook his head, surprised that the other boy knew his name and had chosen to use it.

Hugo Wentz snorted unpleasantly. “Figures,” he said, turning away again.

It nearly took Lin’s breath away, that one word. Just that quickly, it seemed, he’d made an enemy.

GRANDMA HART

Shortly after moving into the apartment above the barbershop, Lin’s father had gotten into a car accident. By the time he got around to telling Lin’s mother about it, she’d already heard. “Totaled, huh?” Lin heard her say into the telephone. “Well, now you’re a foot, like me.” That not having a car made a person into “a foot” made a kind of sense to Lin, who saw no reason to suspect he hadn’t heard his mother correctly. The expression certainly made more sense than another of her favorites, which was along the same lines. Often, befuddled, she’d proclaim she didn’t know whether she was a foot or horseback anymore.

His father claimed that not having a car was no big deal. His apartment was only a few blocks from the hotel where he tended bar in a waist-length jacket and bow tie, his shiny black hair combed straight back, looking wet even when it was dry. It did mean that they had to borrow Uncle Bert’s car when they visited Grandma Hart, who lived alone now, since Lin’s grandfather died, one town away. Because his father and Uncle Bert weren’t speaking, it also meant that it was Aunt Melly who came out onto the porch to hand over the keys. “You could come in and have a cup of coffee, Thomas,” she said, cradling her belly. Lin tried to remember if he’d ever seen his aunt when she wasn’t pregnant.

“Not likely,” his father replied. “Wasn’t for somebody who’ll remain nameless, I wouldn’t be here at all.”

Lin understood that he himself was the nameless person, and also that the reason his father and his uncle weren’t speaking had something to do with the car—but also that it was not
just
the car, according to his mother, who had little use for any of the Harts, claiming that to them, fighting was as natural as breathing.

A couple of months before, Uncle Bert had phoned Lin’s mother to complain. “Listen to me carefully, Bert,” he overheard her say. “You’ve got nothing I want, and that includes your car.” When apparently Uncle Bert tried to backtrack, she continued, “If you don’t want your brother to borrow your car, tell
him,
not
me.
”

Lin could hear his uncle’s whiny voice leaking out of the receiver.

“I don’t
care
what he says, Bert. If he’s using it to take Lin places, that’s between you and him. If he owes you money, same deal. You’ve known him a lot longer than I have, and if you’re dumb enough to give him anything you want back, you’ve only yourself to blame.”

“Lin might like to come in and see his cousins,” Aunt Melly said now, though nothing could have been further from the truth. Lin’s cousins, all three of them, were nasty creatures with streaming noses and sagging diapers who wanted him either to pick them up or let them sit on his lap, which always left a smelly wet spot on his pants.

“Besides, you could say hello to your brother and patch up this silliness.”

“I’m right here, if he wants to patch anything up,” his father said. “And he knows where I live. If I can walk all the way over here, he can drive over there.”

“Have it your way, then,” Aunt Melly sighed. “I’m too worn out to try to convince either one of you. I used to be pretty before I met your stupid family.” And suddenly it seemed to Lin that she might cry.

“You still are,” his father said. “Why do you think you’re knocked up all the time? Because you’re ugly?”

This brought a small smile. “Yeah, but what about later, when he decides I’m too fat.”

“Come find me, darlin’,” his father suggested. “Looks like I’ll be free.”

“I might, just to see the look on your face when you open the door and see me standing there with four brats in tow,” Aunt Melly said, though Lin could see that she’d cheered up when she tossed his father the keys.

“I’ll have it back by supper,” he said.

At Lin’s grandmother’s, things began where they always did. “Why don’t you ever come visit your grandmother?” was what she wanted to know. Lin understood that the old woman was really asking his father, not him, but it was still weird and embarrassing to stand there in her kitchen and hear this same question first thing.

“Give it a rest, Ma,” his father said, sinking onto a kitchen chair. “We just walked in the door and already you’re at it.”

Lin didn’t like his grandmother’s house, where it was always too warm and full of food smells he didn’t recognize—because according to his mother, she was “ignorant” and insisted on cooking with onions and never opened the kitchen windows to air the house out.

“Your grandmother’s not going to live forever, you know,” she said, still fixing him with her stare. “When she’s dead, you’re going to wish you came to visit her.”

No I’m not, Lin thought.

“Tell her she’s full of it,” his father suggested, stretching his long legs out in front of him, crossing his feet at the ankles. Since Lin had not been offered a seat, he was still standing there in the middle of the bright kitchen. “Tell her if they dropped an atom bomb right in the center of town, she’d be the only survivor.”

The old woman looked her son over. “What’s that?” she finally said, pointing to a purple swelling under his right eye. Lin was glad she’d asked, because he’d been wondering about it himself.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing,” she repeated. Then, “Why don’t you go work for your brother Brian?”

“Why don’t you mind your own business?”

“He called yesterday. Said you could come to work for him whenever you want.”

“Good. It’s settled, then,” his father replied cheerfully. “When I want to, I will. Right now, I don’t want to. Right now what I’d like is a cup of coffee, if that’s not too much to ask.”

“I hope you don’t talk to
your
mother like this,” the old woman said to Lin. “Is this any way for a man to talk to his own mother?”

“Go ahead and take her side,” his father suggested. “If you don’t, she’ll be mean to you too.”

“You want a soda?” she said. That was the only good thing about Grandma Hart’s house. The refrigerator was always full of orange sodas, a brand he’d never seen anywhere else. At his other grandmother’s he got one glass of name-brand cola, after which it was fruit juice. Here he could drink all the off-brand orange soda he wanted.

Later, back home, sitting at the curb in Uncle Bert’s car, his father was pensive, as he usually was when they returned from their weekend afternoons together. “They’re not bad people, you know,” his father said, though when he said it he was staring at the house where he used to live, so Lin didn’t understand who he was talking about. And he couldn’t help wondering if Uncle Bert had called his mother again, since instead of returning the car when he’d promised, his father had driven to a tavern where he knew everybody and their dinner kept getting interrupted by people who wanted to know where Lin’s mother was and how much longer they were going to stay separated. “You’d have to ask Evelyn,” his father said. “Call her up right now, in fact. If you find out anything, let me know.”

“Who?” Lin said now, responding to his father’s remark about bad people.

“Your grandmother. Your Aunt Melly.”

Lin shrugged. It wasn’t like he’d ever thought they
were
bad people.

“Your Uncle Bert’s a pain in the ass, but he’s not a bad guy either.”

Lin nodded. Actually, he liked his uncle the best of all his father’s relatives, though his mother was right: his whiny voice was just like a girl’s.

“It wouldn’t kill you to pretend you liked them, is all I’m saying.”

Lin considered this. His impression was that he
had
been pretending this very thing.

“Just because your mother doesn’t like somebody doesn’t mean you can’t,” his father continued. “Just because she thinks she’s better than everybody doesn’t mean you have to.”

“Okay,” Lin said, suddenly on the verge of tears.

“So, is she seeing anybody?”

“Who?”

“Who.”

“Mom? No.”

“She ever say anything about me?”

“She says she doesn’t want to be married to a bartender.”

He nodded. “Well, that’s a switch. Her favorite people all used to be bartenders. That was before you, of course.”

Back inside the house, his mother called to him from the kitchen. “Is he gone?”

“No,” Lin said, peering through the blinds.

“What’s he doing?”

“Just sitting there.”

“He’ll get tired of it,” she said.

GHOSTS

Lin understood, sort of, about the past—for instance, that his mother was different before he was born. True, it was odd to think of her as somebody whose favorite people were bartenders, but to Lin, this was further evidence that his dramatic entrance into the world had changed everything. It felt, sometimes, as if the world must’ve been patiently waiting for him to get born so that
real
things could start happening—kind of like the difference between the drills at school and an actual fire. He knew that things could and did happen even if he wasn’t there, but he still had the impression that the truly important events tended to occur only when he was there to witness them. Last year, for example, when his parents argued late into the night about maybe moving to Connecticut where there were good schools and his mother could make better money teaching, Lin always woke up and listened to their voices coming up through the heat register. It was possible, he supposed, that he’d slept through other arguments, but he imagined that by their very nature (as witnessed by the fact that he’d not been there to take them in) they would not be essential to his understanding or survival. Surely life played that fair, at least. The world was there for him to learn from and learn about. Otherwise, what was the point?

True, his faith that the world was considerate of him was occasionally undermined, like when his father finally moved into the apartment above the barbershop. Lin had felt that he’d probably missed some important event or discussion that would’ve provided a bridge to the moment when his father appeared at breakfast with his suitcase to explain that he’d be going away for a while. And when he tossed the suitcase into the trunk and drove off in the car, Lin felt even more powerfully the existence of some ghost scene from which he’d been mysteriously and unfairly excluded. He knew that in his mother’s opinion the stupid Harts were holding his father back, whereas according to his father, his mother was a “daddy’s girl”—complaints he’d heard voiced through the heat register. But what had happened to bring things to this current pass? He couldn’t conjure the missing scene, no matter how hard he tried, which begged a question: What if the world
didn’t
play fair? What if it didn’t care whether he learned its lessons or not?

One Saturday morning in July, Lin’s mother decided it was time for his haircut, and they’d walked downtown, she dropping Lin off at the barbershop so she could run some errands. As he waited for his turn in the chair, Lin tried to imagine his father’s apartment on the second floor, a place he never had visited. He’d asked about it once, but his father had told him not to worry, he wouldn’t be there that long. As a result, the apartment was somehow less real than it would’ve been had he been allowed to see it; though Lin had no idea why this should be so, nevertheless it felt true. On television he’d seen movie sets—whole streets that were mere facades, doors that led into empty space—and he suspected something of this sort about his father’s apartment.

The barbershop was quiet except for the snicking of Tony’s scissors and the occasional turning of a magazine page, so Lin was able to hone in on the ceiling and listen for the sound of his father’s footfalls, some sign that reality and not illusion was up there above the shop. After his haircut, with lime-scented cologne stinging the back of his neck, Lin waited outside for his mother and studied the second floor’s unshaded windows and the dark doorway around the corner that led upstairs. Just inside, at the foot of the stair, was a broken beer bottle, which proved that his father didn’t live up there, not really. The fact that his mother never even glanced at the entryway when she returned from her errands suggested the same thing.

They walked home in silence, Lin trying to think how to ask his mother if she, too, sometimes doubted the actual existence of places and things she’d heard about but never seen. Perhaps it was because he was so deeply involved in this metaphysical query that he felt the world tilt when they turned into their street. There, high up on a wooden ladder and dressed in his painting clothes, Mr. Christie was scraping the eaves of their house, and again Lin registered a ghost scene in which worlds merged dangerously.

“Good morning, Evelyn,” Mr. Christie called down when he heard them climbing the porch steps below. “How you doing, Linwood?”

And there it was—the same expectant hesitation that occurred on Sunday mornings when Mr. Christie leaned down the pew with the offering basket, implying some other hoped-for thing.

“You’ve got a lot done already,” his mother observed, holding a hand up to shield her eyes from the sun.

“The worse the peeling, the easier the scraping,” Mr. Christie said, as if to suggest that the worse something looked, the easier it was to correct. “The back’ll go slower.”

“Where’s your partner?”

“Paul? Oh, he came down with some bug or other. Don’t worry, though. You won’t be charged for two men unless two men are here.” Then to Lin, “That’s some haircut you got there, Linwood.”

Lin could feel himself blush at being observed so closely.

“He hates going to the barber lately,” his mother said, and this made him redden even further. Next would she explain why? That he hated sitting in the chair and thinking that maybe his own father was right overhead?

“Be glad you have to go,” Mr. Christie said, confusingly until Lin remembered that under his Red Sox cap, he was bald. “You should come to one of Lin’s games, Evelyn,” he then said, and Lin could feel his mother bristle. She didn’t like people making suggestions about what she should or shouldn’t do, especially after his father moved out, an event that caused a lot of people to voice their opinions. “Lin’s our star second baseman.”

“I would, but Carling Field’s so far,” his mother said, “and I don’t have transportation.”

“Oh,” Mr. Christie said, as if anticipating this excuse. “I could swing by and pick you up. I think there’d be room for all three of us in the truck.”

“Well, it’s certainly nice of you to offer,” she said, starting inside, as Lin wondered why, if it was such a nice offer, she wouldn’t even entertain it.

Upstairs, after lunch, Lin watched Mr. Christie from behind the sheer curtains of the front window and tried to imagine the missing ghost scene. Had his mother hired Mr. Christie over the phone or had he called her to ask for the job? And why hadn’t she mentioned that the house needed painting? Outside the window, Mr. Christie’s paint-splattered boots were so close that if the screen hadn’t been there, Lin could’ve reached out to untie them. Strange, he thought, to be so close to another person when that person had no idea you were even there. From where he crouched, he could hear every swipe of the scraper as the paint flecks rained down, many of them coming to rest on the sill. Each time Mr. Christie reached out from the ladder, he made little grunting sounds, and once he said, “There. Gotcha, you little devil.” At that moment Lin realized he himself was, for Mr. Christie, a ghost presence, both there and not there. Would it be possible, Lin wondered, for someone to get so close to him without him noticing? In the barbershop, for instance, would it have been possible for his father to watch him through a small hole in the ceiling? No, he decided, it didn’t work that way. Where the world was concerned—he felt this deeply—Linwood Hart was privileged.