The Short History of a Prince (52 page)

Walter took it upon himself to pull down the wine jugs on the porch ledge, those that had been put there through the years after a notable feast or celebration. There were places on the glass and the labels where the dust was matted, thick as scum. The bottles were arranged in a loose chronological order, and he let himself work at his task slowly, polishing, sniffing the corks, imagining the drinkers, their arguments, the puns, the songs. He remembered a few scenes from his childhood, the discussions Uncle Andy and Uncle Wally used to have about civil rights and the Vietnam War. He tried to imagine farther back, the decorous, well-bred great-aunts and great-uncles raising their voices over the United Nations and suffrage, prohibition and that old boozer F. Scott Fitzgerald. He was in the 1920s section when he came upon a California champagne out of place, bottled, he noticed, in 1994. He turned it over—he almost dropped it when he saw, above the Surgeon General’s warning, the names, Francie and Skip, and the date, September 10, 1995. He passed the thing back and forth, from hand to hand, as if it were hot. Obedient Francie had flown in the face of her mother and her ancestors and used Lake Margaret as a love nest! Which room? Or had they done it in every room, his room, Sue Rawson’s room, like Goldilocks trying out each piece of furniture for the best fit? He wondered if Francie would be happy once her defiance was spent, blissful in Bloomington with her impoverished sociologist. What to do with the bottle? If he put it out with the recycling it would be ground up and it would become part of someone else’s container, the mystery specks of cerise in the otherwise
clear glass. If Jeannie saw it she might have a breakdown, take to the heath in a blowing rage. No, it was better to put it back up on the shelf, leave it. Fifty years hence, the next time the bottles were cleaned, someone not yet born could come upon it and try to piece together all the relations. The bottle would guarantee Francie a place in history even if she never returned from the good life in Indiana.

For two days Joyce and Walter made their province the downstairs living room and they talked as they sorted the books. “You could take the old davenport for your house,” Joyce said. “It really looks as if it has had it, and I don’t think anyone else wants it—riot with the gash in it. There’s got to be someone, somewhere, for a price, who would love to work on an heirloom that has so much class and history. We could bring Grandma’s settee from home, the one that was here originally. Then we could say that we were actually at the work of restoration.”

The sofa in front of them was made of red leather and had been at Lake Margaret since 1922. “I might get a dog,” Walter said, looking up from a book about Eleanor of Aquitaine. “The dog hair probably wouldn’t cling to the leather.” Without planning, without having thought through his announcement, he said, “I’ll either get a dog or a boyfriend.” No! What was he saying? What had he said? It wasn’t even what he meant: he had no prospects, no one, nothing. He went on in a rush—“There are disadvantages to both, of course, as I’m sure Mrs. Gamble would be quick to point out.”

“Did I tell you that the two Gamble dogs died?” Joyce said. “Both of them went within three weeks of Florence.”

“What?” Walter’s heart was racing from his admission. He had come out to his mother, officially, and she hadn’t even noticed. Or else the short jokey sentence had slipped so quietly from his mouth that she hadn’t heard.

“I guess we had so much to talk about the last time you were home that I forgot to mention it. The two collies, bing, bing, dead. One of them got bitten by a squirrel, the other had to be put down because of bowel trouble.”

“Bowel trouble. That makes sense.”

“It’s so still over there. It’s unnerving.”

“They followed her,” Walter said. “I had the feeling those dogs would do something strange in her absence. Let’s hope she traveled with a good supply of Baggies and her precious trowel.”

Joyce laughed. “It is odd, isn’t it? Well, I don’t see why you have to choose. You could have a dog
and
a boyfriend. I don’t suppose Otten would be the easiest place for it,” she said, perfectly understandable in her vagueness, “and being your mother, I’m biased—but I love everything about you and I would think they’d be lining up.”

Walter blinked back the tears that had so quickly and unreasonably filled his eyes. It wouldn’t do to have an outburst, to cry on the Eleanor of Aquitaine book. Lately everything, absolutely everything, seemed sweetly precarious and poignant, and in his happiness he often wanted to bawl. As a young teenager he had been inexperienced and cynical in an affected fifteen-year-old way, and with Daniel’s death he’d become prematurely wise and nostalgic. The finished product, the grown-up, he was sorry to say, had the fiber of a sentimental old lady who must at all times have a hankie up her sleeve to dab at her runny eyes. This is what life has done to me, he said to himself.

Jeannie came into the room carrying a basket of sweaters, for the moment saving him from his own emotion. She had missed her hair appointment and strands of white showed at the temple. Her lapse made Walter feel more than usually tender toward her. “What do you think?” she said, dropping her load. “Should these be saved?”

She and her flesh and blood owned less than one third of the Lake Margaret stock, and in her impoverished state she was asking the McClouds to make decisions that were obvious, that she could easily make herself. She was rubbing it in, Walter knew, making the point whenever she could that he was the primary owner, that every detail was now his concern.

“Pitch them,” Joyce said.

“Wait.” Walter went to the basket, taking what was a gray sleeve, drawing it out from the middle of the heap. “Oh,” he said. He held the shapeless wool sweater to his chest. Joyce had knit for months the year Daniel died, and here was the result, her handiwork, the garment that would fit a giant. It was nothing more than twelve skeins of yarn and thousands of loops, but it had the power to bring back in a flash the green-tiled walls of the hospital, the sound of an ambulance trying
to cut through city traffic in the distance, the beating of a helicopter’s blade in the clouds, the breathing of the dying boy, his father staring at the ceiling, the full greasy bucket of fried chicken on the bed table.

Til take this one,” Walter said, balling up the sweater as best he could, stuffing it into a shopping bag that was half full of the books he was taking home, that he was borrowing.

“Oh, honey,” Joyce said. “You don’t want that old scrap.”

“You made it. I remember your making it.” Keep it light, he said to himself, that’s a boy. “There’s a use for it. Don’t you think so, Aunt Jeannie? No offense, Mom, but I could invade the Huns with it or strap the sleeves to my car tires in a blizzard, for traction, or protect our nation with it out in space, a shield against nuclear attack.”

Jeannie tittered in her usual way in spite of herself. “You always did have that sense of humor,” she said as she went upstairs. When she was out of range, Joyce went to Walter’s bag and retrieved the sweater. She laid it on the card table, the long arms hanging down, and she fingered the stitches. “Will you look at the mass of it,” she exclaimed. “I don’t even recall making it.”

“ ‘Memory—that strange deceiver,’ ” Walter quoted. He bent over a stack of books on the floor. “I’m starting to revise my own history, and wishing, naturally, that Daniel was around to refute and corroborate. Do you remember, for example, how Mrs. Gamble used to tear out of the house with her whip when we asked the milkman for ice? She used to crack the rawhide on the cement—she scared the daylights out of us. I used to think she was protecting the milkman from us, from our annoying presence. But I don’t know anymore. I’ve started to think that she had it in mind to protect the children, snapping that whip, keeping us away from a driver who could have run over us accidentally, or done us bodily harm in the back of his truck.”

“It’s possible,” Joyce said. “It’s very possible that she cared that much.”

“Revising my idea of Mrs. Gamble is unsettling, I have to admit. I feel as if I’ve been making paintings all my life and then I go and look at them and they don’t, after all, say what I intended. I suppose I’m free to invent her now, to make her fit my story as I’d like, to take the paint tube and go wild.”

“She was never sure, speaking of going wild with the paint, if it was Greg Gamble’s disreputable friends who ruined the carport roof. She couldn’t put her finger on it. G.G. did have some good-for-nothing sidekicks and she knew for a fact that one of them hid in her attic once for a few days. She couldn’t get a word out of the boys.”

“Whoever it was can take satisfaction in having outsmarted her, I guess,” Walter said, kneeling, inspecting the yellowed paper of a book on Western philosophy. “It was probably the only mystery in her life, the one thing she didn’t know for sure.”

“Dad and I got to laughing about it a while back. We couldn’t stop. It was vandalism, I know, nothing funny about that, but there was never a more fitting crime for the victim. The way she lavished attention on her carport, and the way she harassed the builders! But as we were saying, a boyfriend is easier than a dog, I think. When you go on vacation you wouldn’t have to pay for the kennel cost, and vet bills can be out of sight.”

“True,” Walter said, “but a dog loves you, and only because you feed it.”

“They live for such a short time, though.” “That could be positive.”

“Duke lasted for ages.”

“I guess I could have a boyfriend and a dog. Maybe it’s not being greedy to ask for the summer house, a dog and a boyfriend.”

“It is sometimes hard to know when to stop asking,” she said, “but I think your requests are within conservative limits.”

Before supper Walter went into the room his parents shared downstairs, the large bedroom with casement windows that opened onto the woody ravine. He sat on the great-grandmother’s chaise and flipped through the mildewed copy of
Stalky and Company
, the novel his father read every summer, taking up wherever he happened to open the book. Walter was too tired to read. He closed his eyes, wondering about an old pair of canvas lake shoes that in his memory, at least, had been the most comfortable pair of shoes he’d worn as a college student. The two rum and tonics he’d made for himself had been potent and he felt pleasantly loose and a little hazy. He had made the drinks strong in an effort to cheer Aunt Jeannie, or failing that, to assist Joyce through her sister’s black mood. Maybe his favorite shoes
were in his parents’ walk-in closet, the narrow windowless place that he used to think had supernatural potential, a gateway to another dimension. As a boy he had probably spent hours all told hiding in the back, waiting to be found.

He made his way past the rack with the windbreakers and pants, a few of his mother’s old housedresses. On the floor his father’s bluchers and heavy-duty boat macs were in line on one side, and on the other, the neat row of Joyce’s sandals and loafers and Keds. When Walter saw the cylinder on top of the hatboxes on the upper shelf he knew immediately what was inside the standard crematorium urn. He had known that Daniel had been cremated. Although there had never been a ceremony for the purpose, he’d always assumed that the ashes had been let go somewhere or buried in the cemetery, in the family plot, beneath the stone marker that read,
Daniel Robert McCloud, 1955–1973
. At an earlier point in his life he might have been shaken by the remains in the box but he felt, staring in the twilight murk of the closet, that he was in the presence of his parents, rather than his brother, that he had caught Joyce and Robert in their small act of deception, their weak attempt to hold on.

His mother was safe in the kitchen with Jeannie, whipping the mashed potatoes and dressing the salad. He lifted the urn down from the shelf, took it out to the desk, removed the lid. Inside he found the Baggie with the bits of bone in the gray dust. The sweater that Joyce had made in the hospital had been a painful reminder of both Daniel and his death, far more than the sprinkle Walter took on his finger and blew into the air. “This, what is not you,” he whispered, “bless our house.” The dust caught the late-afternoon sunlight and shimmered as it floated off. Daniel had again come through, in his mysterious and unpredictable way. Without the settlement from the surgery, Joyce and Robert would not have had the means to rescue the family. Must his brother have had to die to make this part of Walter’s life possible? There was no way to know, no good in dwelling on the question. It was better to give up a prayer of thanks to the long-ago boy who was providing for them, still affording safe passage. Walter smelled inside the urn—no scent, nothing left after all the years—put the lid back on, and returned it to the closet for his parents to someday care for, in their own time.

That night he sat on the pier wrapped in his lumpy quilt listening to the water. He had half a mind to stay out until dawn, to watch the steady, bright stars fade into the blue of the morning sky. He could take off his clothes and swim, and lie on the pier watching for meteors, or he could go upstairs and sleep in the deep quiet of the house. In a while he’d decide. There was no rush. He thought about how nothing at the lake would change for some time, not until the older generation died. Sue Rawson would still come to the family functions because he’d insist upon it. His cousins would try to sustain their dislike for Sue, but Walter would do what he could to be her champion. She chewed with her mouth open and didn’t care if she was disagreeable. What love she had in her she had showered upon Walter, but they would probably never speak of it. He counted on her living another twenty years and keeping her guard up well past the bitter end.

He thought that even though it was probably much too late he might take a trip to New Orleans. There had been one note from Julian in the course of Walter’s letter campaign. A postcard had come with a few lines of an Elizabeth Bishop poem, but he had found nothing revealing or pertinent in the verse. It wasn’t out of the question that he might run down to Louisiana for a short visit. There was very little, after all, to lose. Maybe his mother was right, and a person could have a house and a dog and a boyfriend. Buying a motorcycle would tip the scale, but having the three wasn’t exactly an embarrassment of riches. With or without true love there was bound to be a future even in a place as seemingly inert as the home of the Braves. Living and teaching in Otten was something like being assigned to write a villanelle, he thought. The nineteen-line poem, as he recalled, was supposed to have five tercets and a final quatrain on two rhymes, with the first and third lines of the first tercet repeating alternately as a refrain at the end of the succeeding stanzas, and joined as the final couplet of the quatrain. Those, more or less, were the rules. His New York City life had been free verse, but there was something to be said for some stringent guidelines, for boundaries, for finding a different sort of liberty within the constraints.