Look at me: (9 page)

Moose was released from federal prison on time served—a full year, by then—and transferred his four-year probation to Illinois. He returned to Rockford and moved back into his old bedroom, the toe-activated beer dispenser yawning empty, ghostly above his head. His father had been felled by a stroke during the crisis, and Moose wheeled him around in a chair until a second, more devastating stroke drove him into a coma. At first, Moose himself had been virtually comatose, buried under a landslide of failure and despair, the knowledge that people who once had admired him now feared and avoided him, that his mammoth legal bills and settlement had bled his wealthy family into debt. Yet even now, a restless scurrying persisted within his brain, the beams of his technological convictions probing agitatedly for some topic on which to affix, now that he was so far away from everything. And one day, as he pushed his father’s wheelchair alongside the river, this quiet, steady man Moose loved with a pain at the core of his chest, whose catcher’s mitt hands now hung at his sides, insensate as loaves of bread, Moose looked across the river and felt the past unroll suddenly from behind the present panorama of dead chrome and glass and riverfront homes as if a phony backdrop had toppled, exposing a labyrinth. “It’s all here,” he murmured wonderingly, and experienced a lifting within himself. “Everything is here.”

He leaned forward and spoke urgently into his father’s slack face, “Pop, everything is here!” and it seemed to Moose that some response or approval had waved to him from the cloudy reaches of his father’s eyes.

And the joy of that discovery had rescued Moose, had given him hope: the Industrial Revolution had happened right here in a form that was exquisitely compressed; everything he needed to know was right under his feet! He began stockpiling facts about Rockford’s history until the mention of any single year could prompt a detailed recitation of which buildings were under construction and which businesses at their zeniths, the mayor’s name, a rundown of the influential families, a recipe for a certain raisin pudding. A friend of his father’s on the board of Winnebago College was able to procure for Moose a part-time teaching position, whose small salary sustained him while he worked feverishly on a multivolumed history of his hometown whose explicit purpose was etiological: to discover
what had gone wrong
between its founding in 1834 and the present day—what, precisely, had been lost in the ineluctable transformation from industry to information.

“It’s so sad,” Charlotte had heard her father say. “What he’s trying to figure out is why he cracked up. Like a hundred and fifty years of trivia is going to answer that question.”

But to Charlotte, her uncle’s exile was more intriguing than that. At night, the house thick with sleep, she would peer out her bedroom window at the trees and sky and feel the presence of a mystery. Some possibility that included her—separate from her present life and without its limitations. A secret. Riding in the car with her father, she would look out at other cars full of people she’d never seen, any one of whom she might someday meet and love, and would feel the world holding her, making its secret plans. She was an exile, too.

The waitress arrived with a giant round tray, which she set on a stand near their table.

“Char, go get Ricky, would you, honey?” Ellen asked.

The instant Charlotte was gone, Harris spoke urgently to Moose and Priscilla, though only Priscilla returned his gaze. “You could do me a hell of a favor,” he said, “if you’d ask Charlotte why she’s switching schools.”

“She’s leaving Baxter?” Priscilla said.

“We didn’t find out until a few weeks ago. She says she’s going to East.” The idea made Harris frantic. East was public, blue-collar, a bunch of machinists’ kids! In general he marveled at his daughter’s equanimity—the Lord, in His mystery, had apportioned his son the beauty and his daughter the strength. But at times he was overcome by an urge to break Charlotte, make her see how resolutely the deck was stacked in her disfavor. As if knowing this would protect her from something worse. Harris wanted to save her.

“Have you asked her why?” Priscilla said.

Harris flung up his hands. “Have I asked!”

“She’s completely closed,” Ellen said. “She won’t talk to either one of us.” She was craving a cigarette. Lately she’d begun sneaking them at home: Kools, which made her feel like a teenager.

“Of course I’ll try,” Priscilla said, “but if she won’t talk to you …”

Ellen glanced at Moose and found him watching her, but when their eyes met, he looked away. She understood. Looking into her brother’s eyes seemed to confirm an unbearable truth that only the two of them recognized. Of all her many regrets: not getting out of Rockford and seeing the world when she was young and unencumbered; marrying too early; not taking Ricky to the doctor the moment she’d first spotted those fingery bruises on his legs—her mind spasmed late at night in a frenzy of terror and regret when she measured the chasm between the life she’d imagined for herself and the one she was living—of all those regrets, her brother’s transfiguration still felt like the most shocking, most inexplicable loss.

When Charlotte and Ricky returned to the table, the adults were becalmed in a silence that could only mean they had been discussing Ricky’s illness. Exchanging an eye roll, the children resumed their seats.

“Charlotte,” Aunt Priscilla interjected awkwardly into the stillness. “Your father mentioned you’re switching schools.”

“Yeah,” Charlotte said warily, nibbling a wing. “I decided to go to East.”

“Any special reason?”

“It’s much bigger. Lots of kids I don’t know.”

“That must take some courage,” Priscilla said.

Oh, terrific, Harris thought: go ahead and congratulate her.

“I’m already pretty out of things at Baxter,” Charlotte said.

“Really,” Priscilla said. “When did that start?”

“Last year. At the very beginning.”

Ellen listened greedily. She had given up even trying to talk seriously with Charlotte about her situation; whenever she dared to, her daughter would turn those flat, cold eyes on her as if to demand, How on earth can you possibly help me? “You were always so popular,” she blurted, unable to stop herself.

Charlotte looked at her mother—her sad, beautiful mother. How could anyone so beautiful be so sad? “It has nothing to do with popularity,” she said.

“It sounds like it has to do with a sense of belonging,” Priscilla said.

There it was, that warm—what?—sympathy. A luxuriant sleepiness overcame Charlotte. “I think so,” she said.

“What’s the difference,” Ellen asked, hurt, “between that and being popular?”

Charlotte didn’t answer. Her aunt had opened a perfumed chamber to her, a grotto of tenderness.

Harris could contain himself no longer. “I’m concerned about your education!” he cried. “I’m concerned about your getting into a decent college and having the opportunity to make something of your life!” Because looking like you do, he thought helplessly, the world isn’t going to cut you many breaks. “Does that mean anything at all to you?”

“Yes,” Charlotte said. She felt tired. How had she been dragged into a discussion about school with her father—the very thing she’d managed to avoid all summer?

“Look, Charlotte,” Harris said, more gently. “The fact is, running away from your problems isn’t going to solve them.”

“Who says I have problems?”

“Well, obviously you do, or you wouldn’t be switching schools.”

“That’s circular logic.” Moose.

He’d been silent so long that the sound of his voice jolted everyone. Harris gawked at him. “You said she can’t solve her problems by switching schools,” Moose explained. “And then you said the fact that she’s switching schools proves that she has—”

“What the hell does that have to do with the price of rice in China?” Harris broke in.

Moose went silent. As they all waited for him to resume, a slight dread overtook the table—even Harris felt it—a fear that this rarest of conversational efforts had been snuffed. “I’m sorry,” he forced himself to say. “I interrupted you.”

Moose faltered, then began again. “Maybe she doesn’t want to be like every other kid in Rockford,” he said in a clumsy rush.

“I don’t want that, either,” Harris said. “That’s exactly what I want to avoid. By giving her a decent education!”

Charlotte, a little bewildered by the tempest forming around her, said, “Dad, I’m constantly learning things.”

“I’m not talking about tropical fish!”

“Oh, but there’s where you’re wrong,” Moose said, and in an unprecedented spate of enthusiasm he rose suddenly to his feet, knocking his chair backward so that it crashed into the wall and sent a shiver through the plate glass windows. A hush befell the dining room. “I’m sorry, but I have to say this,” Moose told Priscilla, who had hastily righted his chair and was tugging his hand, urging him back down. “She can learn the things that matter by studying almost anything,” Moose said loudly, addressing Harris. “We teach our children blindness! Not to see, not to think—that’s what they learn in our schools. And the world is being robbed by it!”

Moose had commandeered the room; ungainly, unkempt, yet somehow dashing, the detritus of an old charisma still alive in him. Charlotte listened in awe as her uncle silenced her father, pinioning him to his chair. “What matters is that she think for herself,” Moose declaimed, slicing the air with his hands, “that she question authority! That’s what will make her exceptional!”

“I gather you hold yourself up as a shining example,” Harris said.

“Oh, Harris,” Ellen said bitterly.

“No,” Moose said, the very word an expiration. He dropped back into his seat. “I don’t hold myself up as anything.”

Harris was fuming. How dare Moose embarrass him—embarrass all of them in the country club dining room!

“I agree with you, Uncle Moose,” Charlotte said passionately. “I agree with everything you said.”

“You can agree with him until the cows come home,” Harris said, forcing himself to speak softly. “The question remains: What. About. Your education?”

“I can study with Uncle Moose.”

Everyone looked at Charlotte except her uncle, who was gazing into his lap. She wondered if he’d heard. “Mom has your book about glass,” she told him, “and I read the introduction, about how glass windows let in all the light in medieval times and suddenly everyone could see more clearly and it changed the way they dressed and how clean their houses were, and then they got glasses and mirrors so they could see what they looked like for the very first time, and how it—”

“Charlotte?” Harris announced, in an oddly congratulatory tone. “That’s the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my life.”

But Charlotte was watching her uncle, in whose averted face a scarlet blush was proceeding toward his neck. Slowly he lifted his head. His eyes met hers for a moment, then skidded away. “Why would you want to study with me?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She struggled to find words for the feeling she’d had, watching her uncle silence her father just now. Charlotte felt a sudden, urgent need to be closer to Moose, to have him look at her as he’d done a few minutes ago, with recognition. “There’s something I want to find out,” she said.

Moose nodded. Then he said, “All right.”

No one spoke. Even Harris found himself mute. Somehow, he knew it was too late to undo this thing—worse, that he’d brought it on himself. His eyes grazed his wife’s, expecting accusation, but he was relieved instead to find softness there. “Well, I’m glad I made my point,” he finally said, then laughed—a helpless giggle that caught in him and persisted. Everyone looked at him oddly—except Moose, who began laughing, too, a big chesty laugh that seemed to throw its arms around Harris’s like two drunks, their commingled mirth hushing the dining room a second time. Harris dabbed at his eyes. His plan had backfired—completely, unequivocally. What could you do but laugh?

Ellen smiled at her husband. It pleased her to think of Charlotte studying with her brother, as if having them in each other’s company would somehow bring them both closer to herself. Then her eyes fell on Ricky’s empty chair, and she flinched. “Where is he?”

“He went outside,” Charlotte said, and turned on Ellen her cool, unreadable eyes.

“Go get him, Char, if you don’t mind,” Harris said. “We should think about heading home.”

Charlotte grabbed a handful of chalky after-dinner mints from the crystal bowl near the door and went out. The darkness was sultry, the warm air delicious on her bare arms. She took off her glasses and let the night run together around her. “Ricky!” she called softly into the darkness. She skipped down the concrete steps to the pool, which gleamed a sharp, luminous turquoise. It was empty. “Ricky,” she called again.

She returned to the golf course, pausing to take off her sandals, which she held in one hand. The grass was fat and cool, prickly under her feet. At some distance she saw flickering shapes, and put her glasses back on. They were in a sand trap, three pairs of shoes lined up along its edge.

A hard moon poured cold blue light over the golf course. The sand in the trap was damp from the sprinklers, which must have just been turned off. Charlotte reached the edge of the trap and saw an enormous sandcastle splayed in the moonlight. Surprisingly delicate, its turrets accented with little pinecones. The girls were digging a moat.

“Wow,” she said. “The morning golfers will freak.”

Ricky lay on his back in the sand, looking up at the stars. “We’re leaving,” Charlotte told him.

He raised a hand, and she pulled him to his feet.

The clubhouse gleamed through the dark. Charlotte carried Ricky on her back, his arms around her neck like a possum. She’d given him her sandals to hold, and they bumped against her collarbone. He was even lighter than he looked. “You okay?” she said.

“Tired.”

“You’ve been running around.”

“Remember before?” Ricky said, after a pause. “How tired I was?”

“Yes,” she said. “But this isn’t like that.”

He could say or do anything he liked, but people looked at Ricky and imagined him dead. He must feel it constantly, Charlotte thought, must see it everywhere he looked.