Life Among Giants (3 page)

Mom would be allowed to visit him, but only under escort, a night or two maybe a couple of times a week, occasionally longer. And while she was away I'd attend school as always. Take the school bus. Go to the store—our neighbor Mrs. Paumgartner would be glad to drive me. Get the mail. Keep the house neat.
Th
ey trusted me
implicitly,
was the exact word. Lugubrious talk like that, talk I could barely stay with, my one thought being that I'd have any number of nights with Emily, making love with Emily all over our house, this lithe, lanky girl who knew too much: mouth and tongue, hips and thighs, breasts and hands, smoothest brown skin.

Outside, one of the guards hustled off to get the government car, which he'd parked down the hill in a gravel lot hidden among rhododendrons. Mom admired the selection of mums in the breezeway—those mums, I'll never forget them, all dried out in lines of flower pots, rare colors, apparently, splashes of blood and brains and bruises.
Th
e second guard crossed his arms, closed his eyes in the nice sun. His name was
Th
eo, suddenly comes to me,
Th
eo.
Dad and Mom stood apart, fury spent, some semblance of peace arising, some old redolence of love.

Oh, man. I'd rather not go on.

But:

A new-looking silver sedan pulled into the drive, swung around very slowly under the portico, stopped. A man in a crisp blue suit got out, blue tie dotted with hundreds of golden fleur-de-lis, cocky grin.

“Kaiser?” my Dad said clearly.

Smoothly, the man pulled a large black handgun out from under his jacket, the barrel a black hole sucking in everything. He aimed it casually, pulled the trigger, shot Dad in the face, shot him again in the chest.
Th
e bangs didn't seem loud enough to be real. I thought it was all a joke, had to be a joke, Daddy's stupid jokes, the man still grinning. Time went into suspension.
Th
e place was lit in sparkles, dust motes, forever lit.
Th
e bodyguard fumbled in his own jacket, couldn't get his weapon out. My mother made an impossibly slow hop, caught Dad as he was falling, fell with him in a blooming mound of their nice clothes.

“Nicholas,” she said, almost conversationally.
Th
en incredulous:
“Nicholas.”

And then, and then, and then, as I was making my own hop toward them, the man shot
her,
three bullets, three pops, efficient trajectory, making sure my dad was dead, that's all; Mom was just in the way.

Th
e guard still couldn't get his gun out, stepped forward anyway with a shout, and the man shot him, too, dropped him. In the moment's vast illogic, Dad and not the shooter seemed the dangerous one to me, someone who pulled bullets to himself and his loved ones with his big negative magnetism. So it was no heroic act when I finally got my body to lunge at the shooter, a big leap on longest legs even as he aimed his weapon at my face,
click-click-click,
empty magazine, or whatever it's called, at any rate no bullets. I would have had him, too, but tripped over my parents' tangled legs, landed on my mother bodily, lay on her heavily, and she on Dad, a bleeding, stinking pile.

I looked up into the coldest eyes I'd ever seen, clambered up in that tangle of legs, like breaking a tackle. Kaiser didn't like leaving me alive, that I could see, but he'd already used too much time, must have known he wasn't going to prevail in hand-to-hand combat with the likes of me. He slid easily back into his car, shut his door almost gently.
Th
e transmission clacked into gear like any transmission. I dove at the car, luckily missing: I would have hung on till my skin was peeled off, every scrap.
Th
e shooter drove away neither slow nor fast, crunch of groomed gravel.

I grabbed a pot of mums—heavy, cold, plenty awkward—held it like a football as time resumed full speed, spun, cocked my arm, calm quarterback, spun and fired that thing in a perfect spiral after the retreating car, watched it smash that wide rear window.

But the shooter just kept going.

2

Th
e perfect drinks, the perfect salads (down to perfect individual slices of radish, clearest memory, a bit of the red skin pulled into the white of the glistening core by the edge of a prep cook's knife). And the perfect sandwiches, so neatly made on white toast, perfect, perfect, and served with perfect china-lavender ramekins of house-made mayonnaise, tiny spreading knives plated in gold. It was really,
really
good food, unforgettable down to the last details, details I'd linger over for the rest of my life. So simple:
pommes frites,
those BLTs, tiny cups of lobster bisque. “Sherry,” my mother said, tasting the soup, that palate of hers. And then dessert. I've never since had chocolate cake like that, a celebration in itself where no celebration was possible.

I linger over the people, too, except for my father, whom I just can't ever quite stand to conjure. Jack, though.
Th
at confident presence, the élan with which he handled the tension—tension was just something to be expected, he seemed to say, as if conflict were a gift. And my mother, of course. I linger over her. But reluctantly, memory going cloudier, Mom in her best little smart suit, short tweed skirt, great gams, Mom in her perfect makeup, her hair in a perfect coil glistening with lacquer, secret pins. And Katy. How strong she looked in her tennis clothes! How buff she'd become, new bracelet on her wrist, her easy access to perfect rage, no transitions for her, lightning bolts igniting the barn when all around the sky is clear, those long fingers, the quick blue eyes, the skin of her face, the faint freckles, her straight teeth, the scar on her lip (a bicycle fall), the very slight but permanent impression therefore of a sneer.

It's Kate I have to start with, Kate where the story really begins, though she would disagree.

W
HEN
D
ABNEY
S
TRYKER-
S
TEWART
died (on April 7, 1970, according to Wikipedia, so six months or so before my parents' own catastrophe that October), my sister cried as if he'd been
her
husband and not the great ballerina's. Our robust girl became a wraith walking the hallways of Staples High, and it was a good thing she'd already been accepted at Yale. She locked herself in her room every afternoon, wouldn't come out on weekends, refused to go back to the High Side, not even to collect her belongings, her accusations getting wilder and wilder as the weeks went on, hysterics giving way to paranoid fantasies: the dancer was out to get her, would have her killed!

What?

Yes, Sylphide!
Th
e dancer had forced Linsey away to England, where he was in custody of his awful grandmother, who was a witch! As for poor Mom, Katy decided she was in on whatever the conspiracy was supposed to be, wouldn't eat food if Mom had touched it, wouldn't ride in the car with her. My father said it was the shock, that it would pass. My mother didn't let on what
she
thought, for fear of saying something unkind, as she put it, which was her way of being unkind.

Kate, meanwhile, was failing to pack for college. Mom entreated her. Dad still said she'd come around. Four in the morning, five, she'd ghost into my room, wake me just by the queer force of the things she couldn't tell me, these long silences as she sat on my desk tugging at her hair or inspecting the moons of her fingernails. Here and there she'd murmur answers to my queries: the dancer had stolen valuable belongings from her (never anything specific, though I pressed); the dancer had called her a slut (no particular context cited, and the idiom more like Kate's than any international ballerina's); the dancer had put weights in the handles of Kate's tennis rackets (oh, sister, no); the dancer had bugged Kate's room with microphones (I couldn't find any, of course, but searched thoroughly through two separate dawns at Kate's forceful behest).

Th
erapy, medication—those things were uncommon back then, and were certainly not things we talked about in my family. Psychiatrists were for crazy people, not for any of us.
Th
ere were normal people and then there were people with character issues. We Hochmeyers, of course, were the normal people. So Kate pined and mourned and slammed doors and made accusations in cycles of delusional intensity, thoroughly retreated as summer wore on.

I could understand her being upset. Dabney and his band had planned a very fancy world tour for the new album, including two whole months in South Korea, Hong Kong, and Japan; there had in fact been discussion of Kate's deferring matriculation at Yale for a year so she could continue to care for Linsey as he traveled with the rockers past the summer: India, Indonesia, Australia. A glamorous vision of her future had died, and not only Dabney.

I
WAS INVOLVED
in my own little drama. In early July, Coach Powers had sent out a mimeographed memo about the summer practice schedule for football, stern handwritten note at the end:
HAIRCUTS MANDATORY!

Th
at was aimed at Jimpie Johnson, who had managed to grow a huge bush of curly hair since the end of our last season, and at me. I was no hippie, and no Samson, either, and certainly not a rebel. I didn't care about my hair, and in fact my then-longtime girlfriend, Jinnie Bellwether, liked to rub her hands on a new buzz cut like nobody's business. But I didn't go to the barbershop, and I didn't go, my hair sneaking down into my eyes, over my ears, into my collar. I could take my shirt off and lean my head back and feel the ends of it on my shoulders, nice.

Dad, still alive (still alive!), sat up with me in the nights before my announcement, marched me through the consequences step by step, but I was firm: no haircut. I meant to stand by Jimpie and surely the whole team would stand by us. Dad's angle was reassuring, too, delivered with a hot grin as he sat on the edge of my bed: “What's Powerless going to do? Cut his championship quarterback? His all-state fullback?”

C
OACH CUT BOTH
of us, is what he did. He'd made a public stand, so he was stuck. After a week, best friend or no, Jimpie gave in and went back to practice with his head shaved. I hung on, could hardly say why. I hung on even when Coach Powers tapped Wes Fielding, a promising freshman, to be quarterback two weeks into summer practice. I hung on even when Jinnie Bellwether dumped me, end of August, and even when she took up with Jimp the first week of school. She was a football girl to the core, and I was off the team.

If all these years later the decision seems momentous, the breaching of some kind of fateful dam, an unleashing of the floods of destiny, it certainly didn't seem that way then. It just seemed right. I was a kid who stuck to his guns, my father liked to say, but it seems more to the point that I was a kid with a father who did not stick to his. My reasons seemed diamond sharp back then, but they were quixotic at best, deeply vague. I was a kid who loved football. Why would I quit? Maybe I just meant to please Kate, not that she gave any sign of caring, or maybe I was compelled to echo her withdrawal from all things. Anyway, without football practice to worry about, I had time to do good deeds, the stuff my mother was always on me to do but never gave me credit for, stuff that made me feel happy: dog walking at the animal shelter, clean-up after a flood at the YMCA, youth night at the old folks' home.

I could also sit with Kate, pat her back, tell her things were going to be okay, even though I didn't believe it. Just about the time I thought she was going to break down completely (she barely slept, barely ate, didn't talk, never laughed), she straightened herself up, appeared for dinner showered and dressed and shining bright, two suitcases tightly packed, her tennis bag stuffed and ready.

“What'd I tell you,” my father said. And the next morning he drove her the fifty miles to New Haven, where she took up residence in her college (as they called the dorms up there), took up residence, in fact, on Saturday, August 26, 1970.

W
HICH DATE
I
remember perfectly, because that same afternoon I took it upon myself to rescue the bereaved widow next door.
Th
is was less saintly than I was prepared to admit: like my mom, I'd been jealous of Kate's connection with Sylphide. Here was a chance to forge my own.

Dabney (so we had learned in the “People” section of
Time
magazine) had made some kind of mess of his last will and testament—apparently he'd written two versions.
Th
e newer one turned the mansion and everything in it over to Sylphide, but every penny else, including the rights to his songs—a vast fortune—went to Linsey, with specific instruction that the boy be remanded to the custody of his grandmother (so much for Kate's theories about the matter), Dabney's blighted mother back in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Dabney himself had famously worked as a coal miner into his early twenties, writing his heartsick songs at night.

It all happened instantaneously after Dabney was dead: Linsey was flown to England under escort and in a firestorm of publicity.
Th
ere were photos in the
Daily News,
photos in
Newsweek,
photos in
Th
e Saturday Evening Post,
editorials (all of them arguing for the return of the beloved boy to his stepmom); there were the dancer's ever-so-gentle public queries about the motives of her in-laws and ungentle countercharges (which sounded, in fact, a lot like Kate's ideas, all wrong: the dancer was a piranha, a gold-digger, a careless parent, a fake).
Th
e legal system, immune to the great ballerina's delicacy, her magical kindness and obvious honesty, oblivious of her inability in grief to dance and so make a living (my own take on the matter), froze all assets indefinitely, so that she couldn't even sell belongings to pay for daily life.

And after a season without funds, the High Side was visibly in trouble. Sylphide, we knew from
Th
e
New York Times,
had had to let go the High Side's groundskeepers, cooks, maids, drivers, and finally the famous little butler.
From my bedroom window I could see that th
e glorious gardens were overgrown.
T
he vintage Bentley sagged in the driveway under a layer of old rain-patterned pollen and acorn caps.
Th
e daily deliveries of food and liquor and flowers and the streams of guests had stopped.

After a long look at Dabney's old album cover—a really long look, that nymph both fleeing and beckoning, that exquisite form, that open, angelic face, that dancer's
derriere
—I ferried our lawn mower across the pond in Dad's aluminum rowboat (the closest he'd gotten to his dream of a yacht). On the far bank I unloaded quickly, set to work mowing, stopping often to clear the discharge gate on the machine, my fingers turning green. I pulled my shirt off, paced the great, dewy expanse of lawn, a whole sweaty morning in hot sun. If nothing else, I was getting a workout. I pushed the mower, I daydreamed, I made my way toward the mansion, stripe by stripe of lawn, more and more intricate as I got closer. In a tremendous sugar maple growing inside their walled garden, I spotted the remains of a tree fort Kate had often mentioned, a leafy palace for the kids of the Chlorine Baron, the industrialist who'd built the High Side during the Roaring Twenties on his profits from industrial chemicals and home cleaning products, also the poison gases used by the enemy in World War I.

Th
e front yard was ornately planted. I made my way around the rhododendrons and azaleas, ducked under wild branches (but no matter, at my height I was always ducking), doubled and tripled back, going for every blade, taking the opportunity to examine the famous building, almost a mausoleum: leaded windows, iron shutters, massive lintel stones, an elegant but forbidding entryway, heavy oaken door looming at the top of a flight of ancient steps, the whole setup imported from Europe block by block, remnants of a feudal castle. Last pass, I killed the mower and studied the door, black iron straps and vast hinges, massive knocker held in a life-sized lion's mouth, really enormous.

Th
ere was a bang and creak up there, and suddenly the door swung open with a momentum of its own. Framed by the blackness behind her, the ballerina appeared, hugging herself sleepily, dense bathrobe faint green. She was smaller and much more delicate than she'd seemed onstage those few times Kate had coughed up tickets, more airy and light and ephemeral than even on the famous album cover. And certainly less beautiful, not particularly beautiful at all. I cowered, all but bowing, soaked in sweat, filthy, embarrassed.

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“I'm just mowing,” I said.

She gave a small but grateful nod.

“I'm Katy's brother,” I said. “David.”

“I thought it is Lizard, no?”

“
Th
at's what they call me at school.”

“Ah,” she said seriously, even somberly. “In Norway,
firfisle.
”

“Fur-feez-ul,” I repeated, best I could do, as serious as she.

“You are taller than anyone is saying,” she said, all matter-of-fact, famous Scandinavian lilt. Her gaze lingered briefly on my belly, which in those days was hard as any marble god's. I was used to comments about my size, used to being stared at, and used to people being a foot and more shorter than I. But even as tiny as she was, at the top of the stairs the dancer towered over me, her greatness like sunshine up there, her sorrow like clouds.