This Boy's Life (15 page)

“Please, Dwight,” she said.

“Please, Dwight,” he mimicked.

As we went into the first curve I felt Pearl’s fingers sinking into my forearm.

“Please, Dwight,” I said.

“Please, Dwight,
” he said.

And then he took us through the turns above the river, tires wailing, headlights swinging between cliff and space, and the more we begged him the faster he went, only slowing down for a breath after the really close calls, and then laughing to show he wasn’t afraid.

W
hen I was alone in the house I went through everyone’s private things. One day I found in my mother’s bureau a letter from her brother Stephen, who lived in Paris. It was filled with descriptions of the city and the pleasures to be had there. I read it a couple of times, then copied the address from the flimsy blue envelope and put it back in the drawer.

That night I wrote my uncle a long letter in which I created a nightmare picture of our life in Chinook. It seemed true enough as I wrote it, but I got carried away. At the end of the letter I pleaded with my uncle to bring my mother and me to Paris. If he would just help us get started, I said, we’d be on our feet in no time. We would find jobs and pay him back whatever we owed. I said I didn’t know how much longer we could hold out—everything depended on him. I plastered an envelope with stamps and mailed it off.

I waited a few days for his answer, then forgot about it.

 

MY MOTHER CAUGHT me on the steps one afternoon as I was coming in from my paper route. She said she wanted me to take a walk with her. Not far from the house there was a footbridge over the river, and when we got there she stopped and asked me what in the world I had written to her brother.

I said I didn’t remember, exactly.

“It must’ve been pretty bad,” she said. When I didn’t answer, she asked, “How did you get his address?”

I told her I’d found the letter on top of her bureau. She shook her head and looked out over the water. “I was just trying to help,” I said.

“Read this,” she said, and handed me a blue envelope. Inside was another letter from Uncle Stephen. He expressed his shock and sympathy at the wretchedness of our condition, but explained that he wasn’t able to launch a rescue operation on the scale of the one I had proposed. They didn’t have room for both of us, and as far as finding jobs was concerned we had no prospects at all. We didn’t speak French, and even if we did we would never be able to get working papers. I belonged in school, anyway. The whole idea was ridiculous.

Still, he and his wife wanted to do what they could. They had talked it over and come up with a plan they wanted us to consider. This was that I should come alone to Paris and live with them and go to school with my cousins, one of whom, Kathy, was my age and would be able to help me make friends and learn the ropes. While I lived with them my mother would be free to get away from Dwight and look for work. Once she got settled, really settled—say in a year or so—I could rejoin her.

My uncle referred to a check he’d apparently enclosed, saying he was sorry he couldn’t send more. He hoped my mother would give every consideration to his plan, which seemed to him a good one. In the future he thought it would be best if she wrote him herself.

“What do you think?” my mother asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Paris.”

She said, “Just think of it. You in Paris.”

“Paris,” I said.

She nodded. “So what do you think?”

“I don’t know. What about you?”

“He has some pretty good points. It would be a great experience for you, living in Paris. And it would give me some time to see how things go here.”

I was trying to be sober and so was she, but we ended up grinning at each other.

“Just don’t say anything about the check,” my mother said.

 

DWIGHT WAS ALL for packing me off to Paris. The thought that I would soon be leaving softened him and disposed him toward reminiscence. He said that his travels during the war had given him a whole nother outlook on life. He gave me advice on how to treat Frenchmen, and counseled me to be broad-minded when confronted with their effeminate customs. I heard a lot about the French people’s appetite for frogs, and learned that this was how they came to be known as Frogs by the people of other nations. From a set of pre-World War I English encyclopedias he had bought at a yard sale, Dwight read me long passages on French history (tumultuous, despotic, distinguished by the Gallic taste for conspiracy and betrayal), French culture (full of Gallic wit and high spirits, but generally derivative, superficial, arid, and atheistic), and the French national character (endowed with a certain Gallic warmth and charm, but excitable, sensual, and, on the whole, unreliable).

Pearl burned. She could not accept that I was going to live in Paris. I added to her unhappiness by treating her with condescension. I also condescended to Arthur and my other friends, as if they had served their purpose and were already dematerializing into quaint, vaporous memories. At school I asked for and received permission to take time off from my regular studies to complete a series of “special projects” on the history, culture, and national character of France.

All my impressions of Paris came from American movies, in which everyone wore berets and striped jerseys and sat around smoking cigarettes while accordian music played in the background. It was the same instrument I heard in the background of my mother’s Piaf records. But I didn’t know that it was an accordian. I thought it was a harmonica, and that everyone in Paris knew how to play one. So I bought a harmonica, a Hohner Marine Band, and wandered around Chinook blowing on it, honking out moony approximations of “La Vie en Rose” and the theme from
Moulin
Rouge to prepare myself for my new life in Paris, France.

 

I WAS SUPPOSED to leave as soon as I finished seventh grade so I’d have the summer to study French and learn my way around before starting school in the fall. My mother had made reservations for me on planes from Seattle to New York, and New York to Paris. She was about to drive me down to Mount Vernon to apply for a passport when my uncle changed the plan.

He wrote that he and his wife had had second thoughts about the original idea. It simply didn’t make sense for us to go to the immense trouble and cost of uprooting me from my family, my community, and my school, not to mention my language, only to do it all over again a year later. It took more than a year to get to know a country as complex as France. And there was also the question of authority. They gathered that I had a history of discipline problems. How could they be sure that I would obey them when I didn’t seem to obey my own mother, especially since I knew I’d be leaving at the end of the year?

They foresaw a lot of problems, to say the least.

But they still wanted to help, and believed I would benefit greatly from the experience of foreign travel, a good school, and a well-regulated family. So they proposed that I should live with them not for just one year but for five years, until I finished high school. And to make sure that I regarded them as my own family, they offered to become my own family. They offered to adopt me. In fact they insisted on adopting me as a condition of the rest of the plan. This was, they said, the only way it could work. My mother was welcome to visit whenever she wanted, of course, but they meant the adoption to be genuine and not just a pro
forma
arrangement. Henceforth I would be their son.

They knew this gave us a lot to think about. They didn’t want to pressure us or hurry us in any way, but we should remember that they needed time to prepare for my arrival, and that summer was coming up fast.

I asked my mother why she’d told them I had discipline problems.

“Because it’s true. It wouldn’t have been fair to send you over there without telling them that.”

“Thanks a lot. I guess that’s it for Paris.”

“Not necessarily.”

“Oh, great. All I have to do is let them adopt me.”

She told me to think about it. They were being very generous, she said. They were offering to share everything they had with me—even their name.

“Their name? I’d have to change my name?”

“It’s a good name. It used to be mine.”

When I asked my mother what she wanted, she wouldn’t tell me. She said it was my decision. Though she didn’t often make use of it, she had a way of going blank, impervious to scrutiny. She gave nothing away. I couldn’t stare her down, or wheedle my way in, or flush her from cover by haughtily pretending that I already knew what she wasn’t telling me.

But Dwight had plenty to say. The prospect of losing me not only for a year but, practically speaking, for good, brought him to a frenzy of coaxing and bullying and opinion-dispensing. He said I would never forgive myself if I passed up a chance like this. So what if they wanted me to call them Mom and Dad. He’d call them Jesus and Mary if it meant a chance to live in Paris. Was I afraid to leave my mother? Okay, he’d fly her to Paris every summer, I had his guarantee on it, word of honor. So what was the problem? I’d better think fast, he told me, and I’d better come up with the right answer.

 

WHENEVER I WAS told to think about something, my mind became a desert. But this time I had no need of thought, because the answer was already there. I was my mother’s son. I could not be anyone else’s. When I was younger and having trouble learning to write, she sat me down at the kitchen table and covered my hand with hers and moved it through the alphabet for several nights running, and then through words and sentences until the motions assumed their own life, partly hers and partly mine. I could not, cannot, put pen to paper without having her with me. Nor swim, nor sing. I could imagine leaving her. I knew I would, someday. But to call someone else my mother was impossible.

I didn’t reason any of this out. It was there as instinct. I felt lesser instincts at work on me too, such as alarm at my uncle’s description of his family as “well-regulated.” I didn’t like the sound of that at all.

And even if my mother wouldn’t tell me what she wanted, or give any hints, I was sure that she wanted me to stay with her. I took her inscrutability as a concealment of this wish. Later she agreed that this was so, but maybe it wasn’t all that simple at the time. She still hoped this marriage would work, was ready to put up with almost anything to make it work. The idea of another failure was abhorrent to her. But she may also have dreamed of flight and freedom—unencumbered, solitary freedom, freedom even from me. Like anyone else, she must have wanted different things at the same time. The human heart is a dark forest.

After a week or so I announced at dinner that I had decided not to go to Paris.

“The hell you aren’t,” Dwight said. “You’re going.”

“He gets to choose,” Pearl said, on my side for once. “Doesn’t he, Rosemary?”

My mother nodded. “That was the deal.”

“The books aren’t closed on this one,” Dwight said. “Not yet they aren’t.” He looked at me. “Why do you think you aren’t going?”

“I don’t want to change my name.”

“You don’t want to change your name?”

“No sir.”

He put his fork down. His nostrils were flaring. “Why not?”

“I don’t know. I just don’t.”

“Well that’s a lot of crap, because you’ve already changed your name once. Right?”

“Yes sir.”

“Then you might as well change the other name too, make a clean sweep.”

“But it’s my last name.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake. You think anybody cares what you call yourself?”

I shrugged.

“Don’t badger him,” my mother said. “He’s already made up his mind.”

“We’re talking about Paris!” Dwight shouted.

“It was his choice,” she said.

Dwight jabbed his finger at me. “You’re going.”

“Only if he wants to,” my mother said.

“You’re going,” he repeated.

 

EXCEPT FOR ARTHUR, people didn’t say much about my not going to Paris. They’d probably thought all along that it was just one of my stories. Arthur called me Frenchy for a while, then lost interest as I seemed to lose interest, while in secret I went on thinking of cobbled streets and green roofs, and cafés where fast, smoky-voiced women sang songs about their absolute lack of remorse.

D
wight said that he had once seen Lawrence Welk in the dining car of a train. Dwight said that he’d walked right up to him and told him that he was his favorite conductor, and he probably did, for it was true that he loved the champagne music of Lawrence Welk better than any other music. Dwight had a large collection of Lawrence Welk records. When the Lawrence Welk show came on TV we were expected to watch it with him, and be quiet, and get up only during commercials. Dwight pulled his chair up close to the set. He leaned forward as the bubbles rose over the Champagne Orchestra and Lawrence Welk came onstage salaaming in every direction, crying out declarations of humility in his unctuous, brain-scalding Swedish kazoo of a voice.

Dwight’s eyes widened at the virtuosity of Big Tiny Little Junior, who played ragtime piano while looking over his shoulder at the camera. He gazed with chaste ardor at the Lovely Champagne Lady Alice Lon, who smiled the same tremulous smile through every note of every song until she got canned and replaced by the Lovely Champagne Lady Norma Zimmer. He gloated over the Lovely Little Lennon Sisters as if they were his own daughters, and laughed out loud at the cruel jokes Lawrence Welk made at the expense of his slobbering Irish tenor, Joe Feeney. Joe Feeney was the latest addition to the Champagne Ensemble and obviously felt himself on pretty shaky ground, especially after the Lovely Champagne Lady Alice Lon was sent packing and then the Ragtime Piano Virtuoso Big Tiny Little Junior got replaced by the Ragtime Piano Virtuoso Jo Ann Castle, who pummeled the keys like a butcher tenderizing meat. When Joe Feeney sang he held nothing back. He worked himself up to the point of tears, and flecks of saliva flew off his wet lips. You had the feeling that Joe Feeney was singing for his life.