The One-in-a-Million Boy (2 page)

“I get Meals on Wheels,” she said. “I have to take the food apart and recook it, but it saves me on groceries.” She held up a cookie dinosaur. “This is their idea of dessert.” She looked him over again. “Your boy told me you're famous. Are you?”

He laughed. “In my dreams.”

“What style of music do you play?”

“Anything except jazz. Jazz you have to be born with.”

“Elvis?”

“Sure.”

“Cowboy songs?”

“If you ask me nice.”

“I always liked Gene Autry. Perry Como?”

“Perry Como or Gene Autry or Led Zeppelin or a cat-food commercial. As long as they pay me.”

“I've never heard of Ed Zeppelin but I've seen my share of cat-food commercials.” She blinked a few times. “So, a jack of all trades.”

“A journeyman,” he said. “That's how you stay working.”

She considered him anew. “You must be quite talented, then.”

“I'm okay.” What had the boy told her? He felt like a bug on a pin. “I've been working steady since I was seventeen.”

To this she had nothing to say.

“As a guitar player, I mean. I've been working mainly as a guitar player.”

Again, nothing; so Quinn switched gears. “Your English is excellent.”

“Why wouldn't it be? I've lived in this country for a hundred years. I'll have you know I was a headmaster's secretary. Lester Academy. Have you heard of it?”

“No.”

“Dr. Mason Valentine? Brilliant man.”

“I went to public schools.”

She fumbled with her sweater, a relic from the forties with big glass buttons. “These boys don't stick to anything. We had ongoing business.” She glared at him.

Quinn said, “I guess I should go.”

“Suit yourself.” She drummed her fingers on the well-used cards, which looked a little smaller than regulation.

“My son says you do tricks,” he said, unable to resist.

“Not for free I don't.”

“You charge him?”

“Not him. He's a child.” She slipped the glasses on—they were too big for her face—and inspected the deck.

The boy had written:
Miss Vitkus is EXTREMELY talented. She makes cards and quarters DISAPPEAR. Then they APPEAR again!!! She smiles well.

This was exactly the way he had talked in real life.

Quinn said, “How much?”

She shuffled her cards, her mood changing. “I shall regale you,” she said, a magician's misdirection. Quinn had run into all manner of flimflammery over the years, and this old bird was a champ.

“Just the trick would be fine,” he said, glancing at her kitchen clock.

“You're in a hurry,” she said. “Everybody's in a hurry.” She was accordioning the cards now, hand to hand, less impressively than she seemed to think, but impressive enough. “I ran off with a midway show in the summer of 1914 and learned the art of prestidigitation.” Her eyes lifted, as if the word itself produced magic. “Three months later, I came back home and for the rest of my days lived the most conventional life imaginable.” Her expression was intense but ambiguous. “I do this to remind myself that I was once a girl.” Reddening, she added, “I told your boy a lot of stories. Too many, possibly.”

He'd been right to fear coming here: the boy was everywhere. Quinn had never wanted children, had been an awkward, largely absent father; and now, in the wake of the boy's death, he was left with neither the ice-smooth paralysis of shock, nor the crystalline focus of grief, but rather with a heart-swelling package of murky and miserable ironies.

Miss Vitkus fanned the cards and waited. Her teeth were long, squarish, still white enough, her bumpy fingers remarkably nimble, her nails shiny and ridgeless.

“Five bucks,” Quinn said, taking out his wallet.

“You read my mind.” She took the bill and stowed it in her sweater.

After a moment, Quinn said, “Where's the trick?”

She leaned across the table and gathered up the cards. “Five gets you inside the tent.” He saw what was in her eyes now: anger. “Five more, you get the show.”

“That's extortion.”

“I wasn't born yesterday,” she said. “Next time, bring the boy.”

 

 

* * *

This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life story on tape. This is also Part One.

Eighty-eight more minutes? On that little gizmo?

. . .

I'll take your word for it. Fire away.

. . .

Well, there was radio. That was a good one. And copy machines. Velcro. The electric mixer. Oh, and some marvelous improvements in ladies' underthings. It's hard to pick just one.

. . .

Then I'll go with the automatic washer. Definitely the automatic washer. I don't recall just when I made the changeover. One minute you're drubbing petticoats on a washboard, the next minute you've got two teenagers and a brand-new Maytag. The in-between goes kind of blinky.

. . .

That's it. That's all I have for you.

Quinn left Miss Vitkus's house five dollars poorer and deprived of magic. He took the bus all the way to Belle's neighborhood of North Deering, where he found her raking a tulip bed behind a cliché of a fence—all those smiling pickets. He'd always thought of the house as Belle's place—which it was, legally speaking—despite the five and a half nonconsecutive years he himself had lived there. The bay windows reminded him of the sitcoms of the sixties, which the boy had ardently watched, one after the other, on a TV channel lousy with proper husbands and fathers, stand-up guys who stayed home nights to anchor the home vessel.

“So?” she asked. Even her voice had thinned, its layered notes erased.

“It's out near Westbrook,” he said. “Her yard's a mess.”

“He committed till mid-July. I told Ted we'd take care of it.”

“She's got like twenty feeders, hung way too high. He had his work cut out for him.”

Belle checked the street. “You on foot?”

“I sold the Honda.” He slipped a check from his pocket and gave it to her. He'd mailed her a child-support check every Saturday since their second divorce and had yet to miss a payment.

She regarded him woodenly. “I told you, Quinn. There's no more—need.”

He wondered, not for the first time, if a person could literally die of grief. She was wearing a pink shirt so desperately wrinkled it looked as if it had been filched from a washer at a public laundry.

“Belle,” he said. “Let me.”

She didn't let him, not at first, but he stood there with the proffered check, blood sloshing in his temples, the check lifting in the weak breeze, until he made clear his intention to outlast her. She relented, took the check, said nothing, and his head calmed.

The place looked deceptively renewed. Late-May flowers popping up everywhere, windows a-twinkle, and another collection of things set out for the trash man.

“Cleaning out again?” he asked.

“Just the things I can't bear.”

What she meant remained a mystery. He took stock of the rejects: a stuffed chair, a blender, a table lamp, some flatware. Then he caught it, sitting apart from the rest: his first amplifier, two watts, a present from his thirteenth birthday.

“Isn't that my Marvel?”

They stared at it, together, as they might inspect a dead animal. It was a cheap Japanese import in a case so heavily lacquered it appeared wet even under a three-decade layer of grime.

“It's ugly,” Belle said, “and it doesn't work. Nobody wants it.”

“My mother gave me that.” Six-inch speaker, three knobs; junk, pretty much, the sole surviving relic of his adolescence. And of his mother, for that matter.

“It still works,” he said, defensive now. He'd loved that amp. It had meant something.

“How about if you remove your junk from my house once and for all? There isn't a damn thing to hold you here now.”

“Belle,” he said, wounded. “Don't.” He had missed his last two custody visits and there would be no forgiving him. Certain things, examined in the frozen light of retrospect, were simply unforgivable.

He looked around. For two weeks Belle's family had swarmed like a gang of hornets, led by Amy, Belle's sister. Also Ted Ledbetter, another matter entirely. But today the house was quiet, the driveway empty.

“Is Ted here?”

“No. And how is that your business?”

“Sorry. Where's everyone else?”

“The aunts went home. Amy's out mailing thank-you cards. I pretend to need things to get four seconds of peace.” She set the rake against a tree and stuttered out a breath that reminded him of childbirth exercises. He followed her inside, where she seemed surprised to see him.

“Can I have some water?” he asked.

She went into the kitchen and poured him a glass. The house was a tidy Cape, a suburban classic, though technically they were inside Portland's city limits. Lawns stamped into the once-bumpy landscape. Swing sets, treehouses, dog runs aplenty. Belle's parents had owned the house and passed it to Belle under condition that Quinn's name be omitted from the paperwork.

“Did she mention him? The old woman?”

He shook his head. “She cheated me out of five bucks.”

“They had charming conversations,” she said. “I'm quoting.”

“I don't know how he put up with her.” He meant to sound lighthearted but lately everything landed with the weighted thud of trying-too-hard.

“Did
you
mention him?”

He drained the glass. The animal crackers had made him thirsty. “To her?”

“Yes, to her. Who else, Quinn?”

“I didn't.” He added, “Couldn't.”

The icy surface of her anger—she was encased in it—thawed incrementally. “It's not a strike against his character that he put up with her,” she said at last. “She's absurdly old.”

“I took that into consideration.”

She laid her fingers on his arm. “It's the one thing I asked you to do. He made a commitment, and to him the word means something. I'd do it myself, but this”—she searched the air for some words—“this is the job of the father.”

Quinn said nothing. What was there to say? He'd left when the boy was three, returned when the boy was eight. Five years willingly hacked from the fragile core of fatherhood. She could call him on it now, but didn't. Boston, New York, and finally Chicago, until it came to him that he was living the same life he'd left, only lonelier. After that, a long, humiliating bus ride home. He'd made a decent living—had always made a decent living, his one source of pride—but still he dreaded facing his former bandmates and day-job shift supervisors with the predictable news that no, ha-ha, he hadn't Made It, and yeah, he was back for good.

“I didn't say I was quitting. All I said is that she's no twinkly old gal in a gingham apron.”

“Poor you,” Belle said. “What else have you got to do today?”

“A wedding at five.”

“You always have a wedding at five. Mr. In-Demand.”

This was their old struggle, and her willingness to unearth it now made him feel less alone. Belle had once compared his chronic gigging to the daily requirements of a maintenance alcoholic. To Quinn, for whom alcohol was a touchy simile, the truth was this: playing guitar was the single occasion in his slight and baffling life when he had the power to deliver exactly the thing another human being wanted.

He trailed Belle into the living room but was not asked to sit. He looked around, sensing a false note, and then it came to him: she'd put her books away. A profligate reader, she usually had four or five going at once, leaving them everywhere, spines flattened by her passion. How many nights had she spent with him recounting plots as he pleaded with her, laughing, not to give it all away? But she always did; when she loved a story she gave it to him whole. Now those same books were stacked by size into a bookcase that looked freshly washed.

“It's only a few more Saturdays,” she said now.

“Seven, actually.”

“Seven, then. It takes, what, two hours out of your busy day?”

“Yeah, but then you have to eat poisoned cookies.”

She laughed, a brief bark that startled them both. He took her hands and held them; his sympathy filled him to bursting. It was bottomless, this sympathy.

“Can I see his room again? Just for a minute?” He hoped to return the diary before she missed it. He couldn't imagine her not knowing of the diary's existence, she who had observed the boy's life as if in the belief he would need a biographer someday.

She withdrew her hands. “Not now.”

She was punishing him, this fierce and lovely woman, his truest friend. He deserved it; but he knew her well, knew she didn't have the juice to sustain her rage.

“I've got cards to write out,” she said. “Your father sent a note. And Allan called, all the way from Hong Kong.” She waited. “Allan didn't know about our divorce. Probably he didn't even know about our first one.”

He shrugged. “You know us.” His father was in Florida year-round now, his brother on the other side of the world. They rarely spoke.

It was ten o'clock. He had hours to fill. He asked, “Are you eating?”

The question seemed to confuse her. “Probably,” she said. “I guess I must be.”

“Do you need anything?”

“Quinn,” she said gently. “There's nothing you can do for me now.”

The truth of this hurt him like a soft, blue bruise. Belle walked him outside, all the way to the sidewalk, as if he had a car waiting there. “I'm somebody else now,” she said, and if there had ever been a time in his life when he knew what to do with this kind of information, that time had long passed. He locked eyes with her until she released him with a slow shake of her head.