The One-in-a-Million Boy (20 page)

Her eyes filled. “I'm sorry to have inconvenienced you, Quinn.”

“I just—Christ, Ona, it's just a stupid record book full of people who will literally stand on their heads for immortality.”

“Eyeball poppers and chain-saw jugglers,” she said. “Yes, I am well aware. But I wanted this. I didn't realize it at first, but now I do.” Before she stopped speaking to him, she added, “You have your music to outlive you. You wouldn't understand.”

By the time he absorbed Ona's spectacular misperception of Quinn Porter as the possessor of a musical legacy, she was beyond reach, peaked and mute and seemingly flattened by unmet expectation.

Belle, for her part, returned looking reborn. “I saw a chat,” she said. “You really missed something.” To Ona, she said, “You have a beautiful son.” Then she ordered Quinn into the back seat and put the car in gear.

 

FAMILY

1. Biggest family reunion. 2,369 members of the Busse family. Country of USA.
   

2. Most children born to one woman. 69. Mrs. Feodor Vassilya. Country of Russia.
   

3. Hairiest family. Victor and Gabriel Ramos Gomez. 98 percent of bodies covered in hair. Country of Mexico.
   

4. Most albino siblings. 3. Unoarumhi family. Country of UK.
   

5. Most statistically dominant father-son duo in Major League Baseball. Bobby and Barry Bonds. Country of USA.
   

6. Most populous country. China. 1 billion plus. Country of China.
   

7. Biggest blood donation. 3,403 donors in 12 hours. Country of Colombia.
   

8. Largest turkey farm. 10 million turkeys. The Matthews family. Country of Great Britain.
   

9. Largest gathering of clowns. 850. Country of UK.
   

10. Longest human chain. 370 miles and 2 million people. Country of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
    

Ona hoped they took her shameful emanations as the after-odors of the day room. Oh, that awful place, filled with old crocks who'd quit their lives with no more fight than a grasshopper gave a house cat. She'd stood in that day room for ten mortifying minutes, hollering like a fishwife into the tattered eardrums of her firstborn, all the while stewing in damp underpants and the dreadful knowledge that she wasn't the only one. For all her trouble, she'd gotten exactly nowhere.

“There it is,” she said, spotting a sign: Apple Country Motor Court and Café.

“It's only five o'clock,” Belle said. “We could do some sightseeing. Larry says there's some beautiful country here and we just happened to land in the ruined part.”

“No,” Ona pleaded. “I'm—ill.”

Belle eased into the parking lot and Ona got out. “I need my bag right now,” she said. “This
minute.
”

Belle looked at her queerly and gave Quinn the keys. He opened the trunk, his free hand cupping her shoulder. She'd made it to the nursing-home restroom on time—a public-face restroom with gleaming tile and a dish of little pink soaps—but in her rush to lock the stall she'd snagged her blouse and her bladder leaked before she could fully sit down and here she was now, one hand fisted over the ripped-out button, her drawers pasted to her nether parts, staring into a dead-empty trunk. Her bag was gone: the beehive overnight case with which she'd left Howard in 1948.

“Oh,” Ona gasped. “Oh, no.”

Quinn said, “Damn. I must've left it in the house.”

After that things went flooey: she lost some time, though not her feet, apparently, for when she came to, she found herself safely upright, her companions accepting keys from a skeletal boy—raised on apples, apparently—behind the motel's reception desk.

Belle steered her to a ground-floor room. Quinn had the room next door. It appeared the ladies were going to share. Had she agreed to this?

Belle sat on a bed as Ona made for the bathroom. She peeled off her slacks, damp in spots but not soaked, but her drawers were beyond redemption. Her shirttail (far too long; it had belonged to tall, long-waisted Louise) was dank and wrinkled where she'd shoved it down into her slacks. She stood there on the cold tile, entirely undone, feeling like a witless old bat in a ripped blouse and nothing else, surrounded by mirrors. Her wonderful trip had now been ruined twice over.

She sat on the toilet and bawled. It was Frankie she'd wanted to see: Frankie at eighty, looking old or looking young, stroke or no stroke. The second she'd laid eyes on Laurentas—Larry!—a picture of her darling, unreachable Frankie had exploded in her head, his countenance as merry and candid as ever.

“Are you okay in there?” The door creaked open and Belle peered through the crack. She looked almost healthy—the visit with Laurentas had restored her color—though Ona distrusted her boomeranging moods. She seemed harmless enough as she slipped into the bathroom, her face as open as a magnolia leaf. Out of options, Ona decided to submit.

“I've wet my drawers,” she whispered. “Not clean through, you understand. But I don't fancy putting these clothes back on.” She wiped her eyes. “My bag is gone and I've nothing else to wear.”

Belle plucked a towel from the rack and offered it sympathetically. “The same thing happened to me once, when I was pregnant,” she said. “I was with Quinn at a gig and had to ask the bartender for a towel.” She filled the sink and drubbed Ona's slacks and drawers with bar soap. “Is your shirt all right?” she asked, twisting the bathtub faucets with no more effort than it took to snap a finger.

Ona let go of the rip. “Don't look at me, please.”

Belle helped Ona off with her blouse—“This is our little secret,” she assured her—and into the tub, which received Ona's disgraced and flapping carcass with a slosh of disapproval.

Time passed, some of it lost. When Ona got out of the tub—she insisted on doing this herself despite Belle's offers from the other side of the door—she found her things dripping on a towel rack and on the closed lid of the toilet some dry, youthful clothes that she, apparently, was expected to put on.

“What are these?”

“It's all I've got,” Belle called in. “Your stuff won't be dry for a while.”

“I should have worn polyester,” Ona muttered, inspecting a folded pair of blue jeans, a sleeveless red blouse, an A-cup brassiere, and a pair of silk underpants with a pattern of butterflies freckling the seat. Everything freshly laundered and pressed—the overprotective work of the dark-haired sister.

She examined the underpants as if excavating her lost womanhood. It had been over fifty years since she last bled. She stepped into them and hiked them up, half expecting a genie to appear with an offer to restore her menses. The butterfly-patterned silk hung on her like another deflated muscle. How had this happened? She gazed down at the baggy casings that passed for breasts, the vertical pleats of her thighs, and yanked the panties off her body so hard she tore the band.

A butterfly had been Ona's first gift from a boy. Fourteen years old, waltzing home from a dance at the Mechanics Institute, comparing dance cards with the girls from Wald Street. Just then Mervin Fickett, a bucktoothed boy from the School Street livery, caught up with her in front of the Thibodeau block to thrust the iridescent treasure into her palm. Pinned to a stiff square of velvet, the murdered thing shone with reflected moonlight. Where Mervin had acquired such a jewel he would not tell, but he wanted her to have it because, he informed her, slurping the words through his crisscrossed teeth, the wings matched her eyes exactly.

The lovely creature left her woozy with desire—for what, she did not know. On this first summer night of 1914—the summer of no Maud-Lucy—silly, sweet Mervin Fickett laid the first innocent stone in a path that would track the rest of Ona's life. As Maud-Lucy nursed her auntie back in Vermont, Ona turned up at the midway, stunned once again by desire; in ten months' time she'd be home again, sick with regret and unthinkable pain, giving birth to a boy destined for Maud-Lucy's arms.

Viktor stole the butterfly and sold it for a nickel. She wished now that she'd hidden it, secreted it away for all these decades; she'd like to have given it to the boy. Perhaps it had been meant for him all along, for the spilling-over joy with which he'd have received it. And named it. And counted it. And kept it. No one she had ever known would have loved it more.

“Nothing fits,” she called through the door. “I'll just have to wait.”

Silence. “Do you want to borrow a nightgown?”

Time stretched and contracted; a flowery garment floated down over her head; she felt her arms being worked through silken straps. “You must have been a good mother,” she remembered saying, before waking up in overstarched sheets, a Styrofoam cup of tea at her bedside. Belle was at the door, speaking to Quinn, who hovered just outside. Someone else, too: in the fog of waking Ona thought she recognized the sturdy corporeal architecture of the scoutmaster.

“I don't want trouble,” someone was saying. Ona sat up, her normal clarity returning. She pulled the sheets over the slithery folds of Belle's nightgown. Yes, indeed: Mr. Ted Ledbetter, in the flesh.

“What's going on?” Ona said. “Why are all these men in our room?”

“Stop it,” Belle said, and slammed the door. Outside, the men's voices rose and fell, fighting over a woman who wore butterflies on her backside. Ona fell back against the pillows, which had been fluffed—by Belle, presumably—into a virtual meringue. “For crumbsake,” she said, “are they planning a duel?”

“Amy told Ted where we were staying,” Belle said. “Otherwise, he'd still be driving around Granyard looking for your car.” She sat heavily on Ona's bed and stared at her little pink phone. “He would have searched forever. For me.” Her hair hung in defeated hanks from her translucent skull, and she had on the clothes she'd been sweating in all day—all week, more likely. Ona felt a brief, blade-thin twinge of maternal alarm, a pang she hadn't experienced in well over half a century.

“So,” Belle said. “You thought he had your birth certificate. That's all it was?”

Ona didn't know what to do with fragile people; she'd spent so much of her life around bullies. “Laurentas did beautifully without me for nine decades,” she said, “and to think otherwise is to shoehorn me into the wrong story.”

“Larry has six children,” Belle said. “Four daughters, two sons.”

“I recall that,” Ona said.

“You have a great-great-great-grandchild.” She paused. “Why weren't you thrilled to see him? Why weren't you upside down with joy?”

“You didn't know Maud-Lucy,” Ona said. “A man with such a mother doesn't go looking for another one.”

“I'm not talking about Maud-Lucy.”

“Well, I am.” All those letters, full of fib and blandishment. Not a word about the fire. And not one flittering peep about keeping Laurentas's origins a secret.

She jimmied herself up in the bed, pulling the covers with her. “It won't surprise you to know that I was a distracted mother, even an unwilling one. I was touchy and cross and too young and impatient much of the time. My boys were such a handful, I didn't have a single girlfriend, I'd married a man far too old for me and hated being his wife. Howard had delusions that weighed too much for our family.”

“That part sounds like Quinn.”

“Quinn is an optimist. Howard was crazy. For that I blame President Wilson. But my point: Mother of the Year I wasn't.” When the telegram arrived about Frankie, her first thought was:
I deserve this.
“I wasn't like you,” she said. “Your boy was lucky.” She added, “If it makes you feel any better, I did love the sons I raised.”

For a time, neither of them spoke. The room smelled of their own bodies and ancient applications of carpet cleaner.

“I don't honestly believe he's gone,” Belle said. “I keep hoping he's here someplace, that he's only hiding from me.” Slowly, reverently, in surrender and exhaustion, she pressed her unlined forehead to Ona's age-pebbled chest.

Without a single thought otherwise, Ona petted this weak and suffering soul the way she'd once petted Frankie. Before the army made a man of him—a dead man, it turned out, but Howard thought the boys needed beefing up.

“During the Battle of Saipan,” Ona murmured, “my Frankie's job was to pull other boys from the tides. Boys who churned up and then fell apart in his hands. The very same shipmates he liked so well. His job was to remove their dog tags, weight down their remains in loops of chain, and return them to the seas.”

“My God,” Belle whispered.

“Twenty years old and his paid employment for the United States Navy was to wrap other mothers' sons in chains. How did my son manage a job like that? How does any son?”

She leaned back against the pillow and Belle leaned with her, her head heavy now against Ona's chest. Ona understood, after all these years, that as much as she'd loved Frankie, she'd have loved a daughter more.

“Howard suffered something awful after Frankie was killed,” she said. “I remember he bought a toy jeep from Binny Morris at the Forest Avenue five-and-dime. Might have been one of your father's jeeps, now that I think of it, a pot-metal replica of the type of jeep Frankie had joy-ridden to his death. A morbid, infantile purchase, I always thought. He kept it on the mantel even though the sight of it gave me the woozies. That's when I decided to go back to secretarial school on the sly, just in case.”

Belle's breathing had steadied. Perhaps she was asleep.

“You know,” Ona said, “I've always had the strangest feeling. As if I was there with Frankie. Not when he died. When he did his job, returning some poor child to the deep. I can almost see it happening, like a vision or a daydream, as if I'm standing right there next to my son as he performs this unpardonable task.” She ran her hand gently over Belle's thin back, the tiny knobs of her spine.