Homesick (38 page)

In September the Games ended, leaving behind a legacy. Daniel got the idea he would turn himself into a distance runner. He had never been much good at sports but distance running appeared to him mostly a matter of training and will. All that was necessary was to harden his body until it was capable of stubbornly doing its duty. Maybe he couldn’t run fast but he might learn to run hard and long, harder and longer than the talented ones who hit and caught balls effortlessly. Best of all, he could learn to do this in secret, on his own. He took a grim, sweet delight pushing his body until it hurt and thinking of spring and track season and the surprise he would have in store for them all then. It was like a story in a boys’ book, he imagined the end of the race and Biff or Todd, somebody with that kind of name, somebody who hadn’t thought him much at all, coming up to congratulate him, saying “I didn’t think you had it in you. But say, Danny, you’re all right!”

Daniel had no real idea how to train. He simply laid out a course and, each time he ran it, tried to run it faster than the last time. Afraid of being seen and laughed at, he waited until dusk to train and took an added precaution. He ran in blue jeans rather than shorts, so if anyone noticed him he would not be a runner – only a boy happening to run.

Alec became his timer. Each night when twilight fell his grandfather packed his captain’s chair out onto the front lawn and settled himself into it with his wristwatch nestled in his palm. Daniel had asked him if it was necessary to make himself so conspicuous but the old man said, Yes, it was. If Daniel wanted an accurate timing the timer had to be exactly flush with the finish line which was the north corner of the house. He needn’t think he was going to wait on him standing, not with his legs. Consider his age.

They estimated the route to be approximately three miles. The highway which led west out of Connaught made the first side of the loop and if Daniel encountered a car approaching there, he slowed to a walk as soon as the headlights picked him up. When the car passed, he resumed running. At first he hadn’t bothered to
slacken his pace when he met a vehicle but this had caused people to stop their cars and ask, Did he need assistance, had there been an accident? Answering such inquiries had been embarrassing so now he went along at a jerky, impatient walk until the coast was clear again.

A mile outside of town a grid road crossed the highway and Daniel turned left onto it. His passage down this deserted stretch of road launched a flock of mallards from a slough and flung them in relief against the sky, stroking their way across the cool, impassive disc of the risen moon. Ahead he could see the railway crossing sign standing stark before a pale horizon floating above darker, settled earth. Daniel always returned home on the railway embankment. Cinders made for a difficult footing. Panting, he slipped and lurched, torturing ankles and shins, but on the embankment there was no traffic to contend with and at this point in his run he knew that if he was forced to walk he would never be able to pick up the pace again. So he slogged on resolutely to the beads of glowing lights which spelled Connaught, and when he reached the first streetlight swerved abruptly down from the embankment, plunged recklessly down the slope in a rattle of cinders, and sped across the brightly illuminated street into the shielding darkness of the alley running behind the main street.

It was full dark at present, the shade had come down upon the window. His breath sawed rustily in his chest, his sneakers slapped noisily in the narrow passage. He ran unheeding past where the yellow brick wall carved with his uncle’s name stood obscured in darkness.

Bursting out of the throat of the alley into his grandfather’s street he knew he had only two more blocks to go. Nothing must be held back, kept in reserve now. His mouth hung slack and loose, rhythmically gasping with each jolt of his legs.

The old man waits for his grandson in the chair. He holds a flashlight on the face of the wristwatch. While waiting he thinks about the black man and the endless race. He remembers best when the black man ran entirely alone. It grew dark and soldiers lit his way, holding flaming torches in upraised hands, high above their heads. The black man went deaf past the cheering crowds, sightless past the Roman ruins, the ancient broken walls, the carved gravestones, the headless, armless statues. The torches flickered and smoked, the flames nodded and bent in his draught as he went past, blind or indifferent to the women in dark, shapeless clothes who knelt and crossed themselves to ward off suffering as it crossed their path.

19

W
hat’s the point? Vera sometimes asks herself when she feels most discouraged and neglected. Why not just stop in bed, pull the covers over my head, and let the damn kid have his wish and roll into hell on a handcart. Because without me watching him he’ll betray all that is finest in him, all that he inherited of Stanley’s nature. Let him slap me in the face if he cares to, but not his father. Not Stanley.

You tell yourself it’s just a stage he’s in and not really personal. After twelve or thirteen years of living something happens in a kid’s head – all of a sudden there’s not another soul in the universe to consider but himself. Might be I was the same, although I can’t remember it was so long ago.

What would he miss first, me or dinner? Didn’t Stutz look the other day when I said, “If I was lying dead on the floor between him and the
TV
I swear he’d vault over the corpse to switch it on and never turn a hair.” “Now Vera,” said Stutz.

That goddamn television. It’s all I heard about all blessed summer.
TV
,
TV
,
TV
. Always with the complaining how he was so hard done by to have to go without. Again the only soul in the universe. Quite the performance seeing as he wasn’t missing much of
it sitting over at the old fellow’s every afternoon, staring at the screen. I’m proud of myself that I never so much as dropped a hint I knew – which wasn’t an easy thing to do with him giving himself away every time he opened his mouth. Right under my nose arguing with Stutz as to which was the better program, Tennessee Ernie’s or “Peter Gunn.” Wasn’t I sorely tempted to put him the question: “How is it you’re the big expert on Peter Gunn when we don’t own a television to watch it on?” But I didn’t.

And I didn’t buy the television to compete with anybody either. That wasn’t it at all. In any case, trying to keep him away from that old bugger is like trying to keep a wasp out of jam. Try too hard and you’re liable to get stung.

A sensible person would have given the television money to Stutz against the loan, but you think, What the hell have I been able to give the kid in the last ten years? Food and clothes and me, which strictly speaking doesn’t add up to entertainment. And figuring we practically live in The Bluebird, where else would I put it except here? Naturally, Daniel would prefer to have it at home. Now why’s that? Because if he claims to be watching television at home, how am I to know if he is or not, with him there and me here? He and the old charmer could be sitting thick as thieves and me without a clue, an inkling. Not on your life, Mother Brown.

What I’d like to say to Daniel is this: Don’t go making the mistake of thinking you’re something special to him. Everybody’s had their turn at that – me, Earl – and what did it ever come to? He’s old and there’s nobody else for him but you because the rest of us ran away to save whatever we could before he’d used us all up. I wouldn’t wish that feeling on my worst enemy, let alone you. So don’t flatter yourself when you’re no more than a convenience.

The trouble with truth is it’s cruel. That’s why nobody can bring themselves to tell it and I can’t neither. He’s never heard the word convenience out of my mouth.

And then he has the gall to tell me I never bought the television for him anyway. No, I bought it for myself and for the customers.
“We wouldn’t have got a
TV
,” he says, “if Kennedy wasn’t running for president. And the reason you set it up in The Bluebird was so you could see him every night on the six o’clock news. And now those dumb Portuguese couldn’t live without watching ‘The Roy Rogers Show’ five nights a week while they wait for their supper. If you moved it out now, they’d riot.”

The resentment in his voice when he said that, where’d it come from? Patience is supposed to be the cure for what ails them, so I was patient. Didn’t I explain how, this being an election year in the U.S., a person could learn a lot about world affairs watching the news and hearing the candidates discuss the issues? Kind of a practical education. “You’re getting to an age where you ought to be paying attention to these sorts of things. They’re talking about your future,” I told him.

All he said was, “I like Nixon.”

I gave up and went to scrub potatoes in the kitchen then. Retreat so’s you live to fight another day. It’s hard to blame the kid when Stutz is as bad, an encouragement to him really. He hasn’t got a good word to say about the Senator either. Of course, Stutz being the sort of religious he is, the Senator’s being Catholic is no incentive. Tolerance was always a watchword with Stanley, and I tried to show Stutz that he had a prejudice but he couldn’t bring himself to agree. Never mind that after the first debate he as much as said that if you elect the Senator you’re mailing America parcel post to the Pope. “Change all the menus, it’s fish on Fridays for everybody,” he says. Considers it the height of wit to call the Pope “Big John” and the Senator “Little John.” It gets on your nerves after a while, a person with one joke.

The problem is that the Senator’s got too much class for the likes of Connaught to appreciate. I said as much to Stutz. “Yes,” he shoots back. “Class spelled
M-O-N-E-Y
.” You know exactly what kind of individual you’re dealing with when they confuse the two. Stanley always knew the difference. Say with Roosevelt, who wasn’t exactly a rag-picker. I looked Stutz straight in the eye and
said, “Don’t talk to me about class. Class around Connaught is when a man doesn’t wear brown shoes with a blue suit.”

How’s Stutz expect to win an argument with me when he doesn’t have the facts? Me, I’ve got them cold. “Look,” I told him, “Senator Kennedy’s been to Harvard and Princeton, the best colleges in America – ask anybody, it’s public knowledge they are – and one in England besides, the name of which I don’t recall offhand. He’s a war hero and he reads 1,200 words a minute – about a thousand more than you do in a year. He’s visited thirty-seven countries and wrote a book that won the Pulitzer Prize. And look, just look at that wife of his. They say she speaks five languages and buys her clothes in Paris. It isn’t any ordinary dope that attracts a wife such as that. Like attracts like.”

When I was Daniel’s age I was going to speak French. Now there’s nothing left but
Je ne sais quoi. Quelle heure est-il?
Not enough for a conversation with Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy. Not enough for a conversation with a dark, sophisticated man on the deck of an ocean liner.

She’s a beauty, that Jackie Kennedy. Even pregnant she’s beautiful, which is a feat. It’s how you can judge if a woman is
really
beautiful, if she can hold onto her beauty six months gone. Then the good bones and breeding shine through. Me, I was never happier in my life than I was six months pregnant, my feet disappearing underneath me, ankles like an elephant’s. But beautiful I wasn’t. Now I’m sorry I wouldn’t let Stanley take my picture. “Next time, next baby,” I said. “I’ll improve with practice.”

What gets to me is nobody around here is smart enough to recognize what’s truly beautiful. In particular the men. Big tits is their idea of beautiful. Ask a man in this dismal hole to name a beautiful woman and nine times out of ten you’ll get Marilyn Monroe. A person shudders to think that their kid will grow up no different. Not that I expect Daniel to marry a Jackie Kennedy. I’m not that far gone. Just so’s it isn’t some doll who wears too much make-up, tight skirts, and owns a pair of pointy boobs that look like they’re
trying to drill their way out of a pink angora sweater. All I ask is for her to be good enough for him and not so good that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. Amen.

Still, the rumour is that Papa Joe Kennedy isn’t cut from the finest glass himself. You have to hand it to the old Paddy sonofabitch, he saw to it that his boys were an improvement on him. Which is all I aim for. I take heart when I see what can be done when you put your mind to it. Love conquers all. Not one of those Kennedy boys can’t pass for the finest Irish crystal – Waterford, no less.

Which must make it kind of disheartening for a father when he sees those brainless women carrying on over his boy, misjudging the Senator for a movie star instead of a future president. Old Joe didn’t raise him to be Errol Flynn, did he? The reporters have a name for them – jumpers. The double-jumpers are the ones holding the babies. They ought to have their heads examined, bouncing up and down on tiptoes, jiggling, squealing. It’s enough to give us all a bad name. Worst of all, men like to see it. A certain kind of smile will pass over Stutz’s face when he sees them hopping all over the
TV
. Deep down, he has it figured for sex, even in my case. Let him suppose what he supposes. Nobody imagines a person like me can believe in the higher, finer things. My friend Pooch certainly didn’t. That time I made the mistake of letting down my guard and talking of Stanley, what did she say? “Rub your eyes, Vera. Nothing could ever have been like you say, that good. How long were you married? Less than two years, right? Trust Pooch, who knows whereof she speaks, two years is as long as the warranty lasts and then something is sure to break. Money troubles, he starts running around, something. Seems to me that what you’ve been admiring all these years isn’t a husband but a character out of a book. Either way, he’s dead or never was. A ghost.”