The Whore's Child (17 page)

COST

“That Howard Christie up there?” his father wanted to know the next day. Their Sunday afternoon was already off to an unusual start, his father having arrived in Uncle Bert’s car instead of the two of them walking over there to pick it up.

Mr. Christie had finished scraping the front and was painting now. When Lin acknowledged that this was precisely who was on the ladder, his father nodded thoughtfully. “Figures,” he said. “He always was a bird dog.”

“What’s a bird dog?” Lin asked, but his father had already gotten out of the car. He now stood on the brown terrace, hands on his hips, sighting up the ladder, standing there until Mr. Christie noticed him.

“Hello, Thomas,” he called down, friendly, like he always was. “You and Linwood off to the lake?”

That morning after Mass, Lin had mentioned that he hoped this was where his father might take him that afternoon.

“Didn’t know housepainters worked weekends, Howard,” his father said.

Mr. Christie chuckled. “Well, it’s kind of a short season, Thomas. You get a stretch of good weather, you need to take advantage.”

“Well, if that’s your story, you should stick to it,” Lin’s father said. “You wouldn’t be charging my wife any time and a half or anything, would you?”

“No, nothing like that, Thomas.” Mr. Christie was still smiling for some reason. “In fact, she’s getting my discount parish rate.”

Now it was Lin’s father’s turn to chuckle. “I might want to see the bill, just to make sure.”

Mr. Christie turned back to painting now. “I keep an open book. Anybody that wants to can have a look.”

“Well, I might want to.”

“You and Linwood enjoy your afternoon.”

His father looked like he might have liked to continue this conversation, but apparently he couldn’t think of a way, so he got back into Uncle Bert’s car. The key dangled from the ignition, but he made no move to turn it. “Your mother inside?”

Lin said she was. His father nodded, staring darkly at the front door. His prediction—that Lin’s mother would kiss his ass before he ever entered that house again—was weighing on him heavily, Lin could tell. He could probably predict—as could Lin himself—what his mother would say if he’d walked in right then: “Did somebody kiss your ass, Thomas? Because I have to tell you, it wasn’t me.” When his father finally decided it wasn’t worth it, he looked over at Lin, really taking him in for the first time. “What happened to you? Join the marines?”

“Haircut,” Lin explained.

“No kidding,” his father said. “He call you Linwood all the time?”

Lin admitted he did.

“If you don’t like it, tell him.”

Lin said he didn’t mind. His name, he knew, had always been a bone of contention between his parents. He’d been named after Grandpa Foster, whose own father had also been named Linwood. “I’m just grateful he wasn’t named Jitbag,” Lin had once overheard his father remark. Lin was glad, too. Though he had no idea what a “jitbag” might be, he didn’t care for the sound of it.

They immediately headed in the wrong direction for the lake, and Lin had just concluded they were in for another long afternoon at his grandmother’s when they passed the street they would have turned on if her house had been their destination. In fact they kept on going right out of town, finally pulling into a used-car lot out by the new highway. In its center was a tiny shack that looked like an outhouse, and a man wearing a plaid sport coat—who’d been leaning back on the hind legs of a chair and reading a magazine by the light of the open door— got to his feet and came out to greet them. “Slick Tommy,” he said wearily, as if the very sight had exhausted him. Quite a few of his father’s acquaintances referred to him as “Slick,” which made Lin wonder if maybe this was the reason he didn’t want to move to Connecticut, where nobody would know his nickname.

“How about this one?” his father wondered, indicating a bright green Bonneville.

“Just took it in trade.”

“And?”

The man shrugged. “I wouldn’t, if it was me.”

“I’m not you.”

“Ain’t that the truth.”

“What do you need to get?”

“Twenty-four hundred.”

His father made a face. “I meant the other price. The one you give your preferred customers.”

“You know who my preferred customers are, Tommy?” the man said. “They’re the ones who buy cars from me. Not the ones who come in every week and tell me I’m a thief and never buy so much as a hubcap.”

His father looked around the empty lot. “You want me to wait here while you tend to all your other customers?”

They took the Bonneville for a ride out on the highway, his father pushing the accelerator all the way to the floor and letting up only when the speedometer hit 85, the engine rumbling and throaty, clearly disappointed when it started slowing. Then they drove over to Uncle Bert and Aunt Melly’s, parking the Bonneville out front. To Lin’s surprise, when his father tooted Uncle Bert himself came out onto the porch (causing Lin to suspect yet another ghost scene), followed by Aunt Melly and all three of their kids, the smallest one toddling right over to Lin and throwing up her arms.

“She likes you,” Aunt Melly translated. “She wants you to pick her up.”

Lin regarded the child’s full diaper, her runny nose and crusty chin. When he finally picked her up, the child stared deep into his eyes, gumming and twirling her pacifier provocatively.

“I don’t know, Tommy,” Uncle Bert said in his whine when his father started the Bonneville up, its engine rumbling and straining like an animal on a leash, drawing the neighbors out onto their sagging porches.

“It’s got pretty good pep,” his father said.

Uncle Bert shook his head as if he’d once had a car just like this one and had to shoot it. “Probably gets about eight miles to the gallon. Pop the hood a minute.”

The next-oldest cousin now wrapped his arms tightly around Lin’s thigh and buried his shaved skull in Lin’s groin, which, for reasons entirely mysterious to Lin, gave him an erection.

“That’s some haircut you got,” his aunt said. From previous visits Lin knew that she wasn’t about to rescue him from the affection of his cousins.

“Smells hot,” Uncle Bert said when Lin’s father finally located the latch and lifted the hood. “What are they asking?”

“Twenty-four,” Lin’s father said.

“I don’t know,” Uncle Bert said again, still staring at the engine as if expecting it to reach a decision.

“It’s not nice to touch people there, Bertie,” Aunt Melly said languidly when she noticed that her son, curious about the hard shape in Lin’s pants, was trying to determine its exact size with his thumb and forefinger. Now the oldest girl came over too. Only a couple of years younger than Lin, she stared at him with the same vacant expression her father was using on the Bonneville’s engine.

“
Jesus,
Melly,” Uncle Bert whined, finally noticing Lin’s predicament. “Can’t you take them inside?”

“They get tired of being inside,” Aunt Melly said. “Besides, all that TV isn’t good for them.”

“Why don’t you let Brian sell you a car?” Uncle Bert wondered. “He’d make you a good deal.”

“Because then I’d owe him.”

“So what? He’s your brother. He made me a heck of a deal on the Buick.”

“Right,” his father said. “As he points out every time you run into him.”

The vacant-eyed girl now jumped on Lin’s back, wrapped her spindly legs around his waist and covered his eyes from behind with two damp hands.

“The trouble with you Harts is you’re all stubborn as mules,” Aunt Melly observed as she headed back inside. “Bert, sweetie, what’d Mommy just tell you?”

“If you’d go to work for him, he’d probably give you a company car,” Uncle Bert pointed out.

“He’ll kiss my ass before I’ll ever work a day for him,” Lin heard his father predict. With the child’s hands clamped tight over his eyes, he couldn’t see a thing.

“Well, I don’t know if I’d buy this,” Uncle Bert said. “Not at that price.”

“Oh, they’ll come down some.”

“Still.”

Lin could sense that his father had turned toward him now. “Okay,” he called over, “put those kids down. It’s time to go.”

The salesman in the plaid coat was bouncing from one foot to the other when they pulled back into the lot. “I was just about to call the cops,” he announced when they got out.

“The car I left here was worth a lot more than this gas-guzzler.” Lin’s father pointed at Uncle Bert’s Buick, sitting right where they left it.

“That’s true,” the salesman conceded. “Except it’s not yours. It’s your brother’s.”

The two men stood looking at the Bonneville. Lin’s shirtsleeve still had a smelly wet spot where he’d balanced the toddler.

“So, what do you think?”

“Runs hot, too,” Lin’s father said.

The man nodded. “That Chrysler you drove last week was twice the car.”

“Should be, at twice the price.”

“Well, the better something is, the more it costs. You’ve probably noticed that yourself, Slick.”

“So what do you really need?”

“On which?”

“This one.”

“The one that guzzles gas and runs hot?”

“Right.”

“I suppose I could let it go for two grand.”

“How about if I was somebody else? Like one of your golfing buddies?”

“If
you
were somebody
else
?” the man sighed. “What a wonderful world this would be.”

AFFECTION

Mr. Christie wanted to make a catcher out of Hugo Wentz, until the boy’s father went ballistic at the suggestion. Mr. Wentz drove the Caddy right up behind the backstop, got out and read Mr. Christie the riot act over the fence, as Hugo sat in the front seat with the grim expression of someone who, if allowed to redesign the world to his own specifications, would retain very little of the present one. Only when his father, having told Mr. Christie how it was going to be, got back in the car did Hugo get out, toss his glove over the fence and begin his long solitary trek to the distant gate and then back again, as his father fishtailed through the stone pillars.

Lin watched the whole thing from second base, wondering first why Mr. Christie allowed the other man to speak to him that way, and then why he didn’t seem to hold it against Hugo when he finally arrived back at the diamond and promptly sat on his glove where he’d tossed it in the grass.

“Come on out here, son,” Mr. Christie called, then added, when the boy stood up and started walking, “and bring your glove with you. We’re going to try you at a new position.”

That Mr. Christie treated Hugo Wentz so kindly was puzzling to Lin, who couldn’t think of a single reason why he should. Bestowing affection on a boy that fat, sullen and sarcastic called into question the value of affection in general and devalued the affection afforded boys who’d earned it. Lin understood that Mr. Christie was quick to smile, to encourage and forgive, but there had to be a limit, didn’t there?

Which was why, when Mr. Christie welcomed Hugo to the pitcher’s mound—of all places—and put a hand on the boy’s shoulder while pointing out home plate to him, Lin found himself disliking not just Hugo but also Mr. Christie, and he made a mental note right then to refuse his offer of a ride home. Since he’d started painting their house on weekends, Mr. Christie had taken to giving him a lift after practice, laying Lin’s bike carefully in the bed of his pickup on top of the canvas duffel bag that contained the bats and balls. A couple of times they’d even stopped at the DQ for soft ice cream. Mr. Christie had a way of asking questions so that Lin didn’t mind answering, and of nodding at all his answers as if they were the very ones he himself would have offered. Never did Lin feel more at the center of things than in Mr. Christie’s presence, which was why, last week at the DQ, a terrible wish had occurred to him before he could prevent it, a wish he’d regretted immediately and which frightened him so badly that, needing to be alone, he’d gone to bed early that night, even though his mother kept coming in to check on him, convinced he was coming down with something. What scared him was that a careless wish, especially from
him,
might possess some untold power.

At least that wish was something he didn’t have to worry about now, not after seeing Mr. Christie’s hand on Hugo Wentz’s shoulder. Having finished his instructions to the inattentive boy, Mr. Christie now trotted in from the mound and donned a catcher’s mask, telling another boy to grab a bat.

Lin found it even easier to dislike his coach and sometime friend in the stupid catcher’s mask, the man who just last week he’d wished was his own father.

“Look alive out there, Linwood,” he called out jovially, though Lin was aware of having done nothing to merit this warning. When Hugo Wentz’s first pitch sailed halfway up the backstop, provoking laughter throughout the infield, Lin joined in, not really caring if Mr. Christie might be disappointed in him.

PERSONALITY

One Saturday in early August, Lin and his mother took the bus to New York and then a train out into the Connecticut countryside, where her parents lived in a house with a swimming pool. Before they left, she’d gotten into an argument with his father because the trip meant he’d miss his afternoon with Lin. They were taking the trip, his mother explained, so they wouldn’t have to listen to Mr. Christie banging his ladder against the house all weekend, peering into whatever windows he was painting around. It was like living in a fishbowl, she said, though Lin had never seen Mr. Christie look anywhere but at the brush massaging paint into the dry wood. The job was taking too long, she also claimed, because Mr. Christie was doing it by himself. He said his regular partner was still sick, but she’d seen the man on the street and he looked perfectly fine.

Unlike Lin’s other grandmother, Grandma Foster didn’t pester him constantly about why he didn’t come to visit her more often. She seemed to understand that there were things a ten-year-old boy couldn’t be held responsible for. Unlike Grandma Hart’s house, Grandma Foster’s was big and airy, and with the windows thrown open, breezes ruffled the curtains even on the warmest days. That two women the same age could be so different was baffling to Lin, who liked to think that age and experience would naturally lead to similarity. How did human beings turn out so different? The older people got, it seemed to Lin, the less they agreed on. According to his mother, the reason was personality, which, to his way of thinking, didn’t so much explain the problem as just give a name to something that still didn’t make any sense.

He spent most of Saturday afternoon in the pool doing cannonballs off the diving board while the adults talked inside. He quit only when the sun slanted behind the roof of the house and the breeze turned cool. When he complained of hunger, his mother reminded him that Grandma and Grandpa Foster ate late, like civilized people. They liked to have cocktails first. His grandfather must have overheard part of this conversation, though, because a few minutes later he appeared on the deck with a big platter of steaks, and the new gas grill puffed to life; to ease the wait, Lin was given a stick of pepperoni to gnaw on, but only after he’d washed his hands and face.

That night, as always, he slept in the downstairs den, on a sofa that folded out into a bed. The room had its own television, which he was permitted to watch as long as he wanted, but his hours in the pool had wearied him and before long he was asleep. He woke up once—someone had come in to turn the TV off—at the sound of voices from the foot of the stairs. “It’s not about the money,” he heard his grandfather say. And then, “What you saw in him in the first place is what I’ll never understand.”

When they returned home late the next afternoon, his father was waiting for them at the bus stop in Uncle Bert’s car. Lin’s mother had been preoccupied during the entire journey, and when she saw the Buick, she looked like this was the last straw. “What’re you
doing
here, Tom?” she said when he picked up her bag.

“What,” he said, dropping the suitcase on the curb as if he’d suddenly lost his grip on the handle, “you’d rather take a cab? If you do, just say so, because there’s one right across the street.”

“I thought we’d agreed you weren’t going to meet us.”

“Really?” he said, tossing the bag into the open trunk and then slamming it shut. “You thought we agreed about something?”

Lin sat in the backseat, his mother up front with his father. “How’s Linwood the Third?” his father said. “Still convinced he’s better than everybody?”

“Don’t start,” his mother warned him.

“Daddy’s little girl,” his father chuckled.

To Lin’s surprise, his mother didn’t say a word. In fact, she didn’t speak again until they pulled up to the curb behind Mr. Christie’s pickup. “Good Lord,” she said under her breath. “He’s still here.”

“Well,” his father replied, “that’s love for you.”

This remark made no sense at all to Lin, who wasn’t sure he’d heard it right.

“You want me to get rid of him?” his father offered.

“No. I just want him to be finished.”

“Well, I’m going to take my son out for a plate of spaghetti, if you have no objections,” he said. “You’re welcome to come too, if you like.”

“What I’d like,” she replied, getting out of the car, “is to go upstairs, climb into bed, fall asleep and wake up far away.” Lin knew exactly what she intended to do when they were gone. She would put Jo Stafford on the record player and let “The Wayward Wind” play over and over.

“Things don’t have to be like this, Evelyn,” his father called, watching until the door grunted shut behind her. Then he swiveled around to look at Lin. “You want to come up front?”

Lin shrugged. Nobody, he’d noticed, ever asked him about anything that had any consequence.

“Fine,” his father said. “Stay there, then.”

Actually, Lin realized, that wasn’t quite true. Mr. Christie not only asked his opinion but also listened carefully to it. Why then, when at that precise moment the man came around the corner of the house, balancing the big wooden ladder expertly on his shoulder, his hand half raised in a good-natured wave, did Lin pretend not to see him?