A Good and Happy Child (12 page)

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worsened with erroneous self-diagnosis and gratuitous prescriptions.
How Clarissa puts up with him
was one of my mother’s pet rants.

“Clarissa decided that since I already had the glasses, I could be John, which would leave her to be Paul,” he explained in his lockjawed voice. Clarissa and my mother continued to laugh. “And here are George and Ringo,” he said, indicating their daughters, Molly and Celia, also wearing black suits and trailing behind, mortified. I said hello to them. They rolled their eyes at their parents in reply. A towering figure in a gray cloak joined us, appearing with a stick-on white beard and a plastic scythe. We all fell silent, then simultaneously recognized him and began speaking at once:

“Very ominous!”

“The Grim Reaper.”

“Oh my God!”

“If my patients were here, they’d be having a field day.”

I alone was silent when I saw Tom Harris. I wished he would stay away. Whenever he was absent, I did not think of him; but when he appeared, my veins filled with anger and adrenaline. I stared at him now, willing him to vanish. The fact that all these people—my mother, these friends—were pleased by his presence only stoked my hatred more.

“I am Father Time, not the Grim Reaper,” he said. “Though with Abby’s cooking, you never know.”

“Oh, Tom,” scolded my mother.

“I think you look evil,” I said.

It was not so much my words as my tone—intense, angry, cutting—that brought the chitchat to a standstill.

“George,” warned my mother.

“That’s all right, Joan,” said Tom Harris, drawing up and speaking in a creep-show voice.
“It is Halloween.”

A chuckle passed around, and conversation resumed. I drew aside to the table, sulking. I picked at the turkey, then spotted the wine bottles—the ones Freddie had shown me, the ones chosen by my father. I approached them reverently and fingered the labels. They were
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browning with age; the cursive letters seemed to have been inked with a calligraphy pen.

H e r m i t a g e

L a C h a p p e l l e J a b o u l e t

1 9 7 1

I looked around to see if I’d been spotted—a boy handling the wine—and in the process caught sight of Tom Harris. As he stood in my mother’s happily bantering circle, he stared back at me; in a few strides he circled the table and firmly took the wine bottle from my hands and replaced it on the table.

“I think it’s time the two of us had a talk,” Tom Harris said.

“What about?”

He lowered his voice to a whisper. “About what you said in the woods that day.”

“What do you mean?” I said suspiciously.

“You said, ‘Leave us alone,’ George. But I only saw one of you. Who were you talking about? Your invisible sidekick? The little pal you keep in your pocket?”

“No. It’s none of your business, anyway.”

He turned me away from the party. In the folds of his robes, under the shadow of his enormous frame, it was like we were enclosed behind curtains. Tom Harris glared down at me.

“It’s my business when you begin asking me funny questions. Questions about things you could not know about, like your father’s secret reasons for going away. Then I find you in conversation with someone I can’t see?” He leaned down and gripped my arm.

“What’s going on, George? Is someone—or something—telling you things?”

I wrestled away. “Why don’t you stop pretending to be my father?

You think if you pay attention to me I’ll start to like you, and then my mother will like you, and then you can marry my mom or run away a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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with her. But you’re wrong. Nobody cares about you. And I can
talk
to whoever I
want.
”

“You’re messing with things you can’t handle, George.”

But I had already turned my back to him. Feeling his eyes follow me, I turned and ran into the party, grabbing on my way a full goblet of the 1971 Hermitage from the teeming sideboard.

I gulped at the wine. It tasted bitter, but I swallowed as much as I could. I was feeling the effects. I wandered through bodies and faces, and every few paces found myself bumping into someone or grabbing for furniture to stay upright. I was like a spacecraft moving in zero gravity: I couldn’t get used to my momentum. I slung down more wine. My father detested parties, particularly Preston parties. He had despised the backbiting and the small-town jealousies, the idle wives who gossiped and picked at outsiders, the ones who once dressed down my mother at the country club because she said
dammit
on the tennis court, and who exhibited
none of
the virtues of the real South, these Virginians,
he would say scornfully;
none of the conversation, the stories, the generosity of mind. Just old military
families with their sterile Civil War nostalgia; Faulkner characters too
boring to kill themselves, all golf and genealogies. Now they’re being invaded
by this California culture. People “trying to get in touch with themselves”—

which really means destroying their children’s lives with divorce.
With the rhythm and sway of bustling guests—the excitement of disguises; Chaz Beaman pawing the angel; two couples downing scotch together, Nettleman and Kilcullen, who’d lived across the street from each other and swapped spouses in a double divorce; Valerie Pranz and “some guy”; now my mother and Tom Harris—I understood my father’s words. Freddie Turnbull’s party was steeped in sex; it was not just a chance for small-town fellowship, but for small-town adultery, something my father, religious in the old way, viewed sternly. Now, in his absence, the town was dragging down my mother and besoiling her with its groping.

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Next to the entrance hall, near a crammed coatrack, I found Dean. He wore a flannel shirt and overalls with a straw hat and a piece of hay in his teeth.

“Hi,” I said.

“Where’d you get
that
?” he said, pointing at my wine.

“Freddie said I could have some,” I said.

“How come
you
get to have some?”

“He said my dad helped him pick it out.”

“Can I have a sip?”

“Okay.”

Dean took the glass and, naturally, gulped it down, so much that it splashed on his cheeks and dribbled down his chin. He grinned and wiped his chin with his sleeve. I took back the glass, now empty.

“Thanks,” I said dourly.

“How could your dad help pick the wine? He’s dead. No offense,”

he added.

“Freddie’s my godfather. They bought it a long time ago.”

“Freddie’s a faggot,” said Dean.

“No, he’s not.”

“Yeah, he is. Ask anybody. The man’s a fudgepacker.”

“He was my father’s best friend,” I said, naïvely not seeing where that would take us.

Dean did not keep me waiting. “Then your father must have been a faggot, too. Which makes sense, since you’re a fucking fruitcake.”

I pulled out my only card.

“At least I have a mother,” I said.

“I have a mom.”

“Then where is she? Not with you.”

I took the wineglass and left him there.

In the corridor a cluster of adults—among them a magician, a Gerald Ford, and a fairy—laughed loud and wetly in a cloud of scotch fumes. I turned and climbed the stairs, toward sanctuary. It was dark up there; in the corridor there were several doors. Only one light was on, a bedside lamp in Freddie’s bedroom. I crept a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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toward it. The room was yellowed and small. A pronounced crack in the paint split one wall. Laundry was strewn about the floor and unlike the luxurious furnishings below, here there was no decoration, except for a single painting of the Virgin Mary surrounded by a wide, shiny silver border, hung on a tack. A study lay beyond, a large desk at its center. I was drawn toward it. There, I knew, I would find my father’s letters.

Debris—crumpled paper, old magazines and newspapers, notepads, pamphlets, coffee cups, pens, and erasers—littered the desk. A jack-o’-lantern glowed in the window. By its light I delved into the papers. The top ones were catering bills. I dug deeper. Insurance statements. Gas bills. And then my heart jumped: a note from Tom Harris—

on personal stationery, the kind he relentlessly fired off, containing thank-yous, magazine clippings, afterthoughts; pale yellow with blue borders—handwritten, dated Wednesday, October 21.
Freddie,

In response to your note: I said nothing to George
about the letters. I’m as mystified as you are.

“What are you doing in here?” came an outraged voice, in an unmistakable stage whisper.

I could hardly tear my eyes away—in my peripheral vision I read my name:
recent developments with George.

“George!”

I turned. Of course it was Abby Gold. She stood in the bedroom—

she had spotted me from the hall—and glared at me indignantly.

“You should be ashamed of yourself! What are you doing up here?

Come away this instant!”

I put the letter down and followed her, face burning, brain clogged with adrenaline and alcohol.

“And you stink of wine! I’m getting your mother.”

She marched me downstairs and headed toward the living room in a huff to find Mom.

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“I’m going to get some water.” I spun off in the other direction. Now that I was in trouble, I should have sobered up, taken a chair, indeed drunk some water, and waited for the hell I would catch for drinking and snooping. But instead a kind of tremor began inside my skull;
the letters.
It sent off a chain of reasoning: My father, in my vision, had been correct about the letters. My father had also been right about Freddie keeping them, and lying about them.

Ergo, my father must be right about Tom Harris, and my mother. Tom Harris was my father’s murderer.

I felt a vice close on my head. I knew I was powerless to change my situation, to change what my mother and Tom Harris had done.

It’s a terrible high summer where I am, George.
In a slow, inexorable mutation, I felt long-fingered shadows squirm into the room and inhabit all the real shadows cast by the chandelier, by the Chinese lamps, by all the gold light of the party, turning those real blue shadows to varnish, to ocher, to insinuations and whispers I could almost hear.

Somebody knows, somebody wanted it!

I felt an echo of that total negation I felt deep in the well, in the hole of my dream; but here in the land of Abby Gold and roast turkey, of Rhône wine, of light, the negation could not be blackness; instead, it was ash. A film, a grit, covering everything when I thought of that coupling, of my mother and Tom Harris. What I remember best is turning, slowly, dreamily, into the dining room, and seeing the great wheel of English Huntsman cheese, and the knife lying on its side on the platter.

r r r

I cannot tell how much time passed. If there are things I remember now, it is because I understand that certain things must have happened, a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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with a certain kind of timing. But it is useless to pretend that they are actual memories. What I remember is this:

I stood in the midst of the party. I felt wild, delirious. I laughed loudly, my voice high-pitched and excited. I behaved even more drunkenly than before, now from adrenaline, not alcohol. My laughter turned heads and stopped a few conversations. It instantly drew the attention of my mother. She raced toward me.

“Where were you? What’s going on?”

I threw my head back and laughed again, a free, volatile, kiddie giggle.

My mother looked me over. Greasy black flakes of dirt and something else—rust—stained my ruff collar. My black shirt was soiled.

“You’re filthy, George! What were you doing?’

A strange sound outside brought conversation in the living room to a standstill. First, a car horn gave an unnaturally short burst. Just a blip—so short and interrupted, you almost couldn’t register it because it didn’t sound like a car horn should, which is
hoooonk.
This was a
ho
—

This unsettling sound was followed directly by another noise—

more familiar. The hollow bang of two cars slamming together. You always imagine that car crashes sound like they do in the movies, solid crunching of steel on steel. Instead, they sound more like somebody popping a blown-up paper bag. Broken glass tinkled and skittered on pavement.

These noises broke over the party in a wave. Then came silence. Before anyone else in Freddie’s drawing room could speak, they heard the sound of me hyperventilating. I began breathing in and out rapidly, desperately. A few heads turned toward me with concern, but naturally people were more worried about the car crash, which was so close—the bottom of Freddie’s drive—that it was likely to involve a guest, and therefore, a friend. Freddie was summoned, and with a few others he ventured down the drive. The living room thinned and people moved to the windows and murmured amongst themselves.

“That sounded terrible!”

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“I’ve always told Freddie he should get the city to put up a stop sign down there.”

“Does anybody know who was leaving? Was it someone from the party?”

“Hope it wasn’t Ben Worth.”

“Why?”

“He was a few sheets to the wind when I last . . .” Ben Worth entered the room. “Ben! You’re alive!” Laughter.

My mother attended to me. A few women looked on with a mixture of concern, disapproval, and shameless curiosity. Mom got me a chair, but I wouldn’t sit in it.

“Please, George.”

I still wheezed away, heave, heave, heave, heave. Abby bustled over.

“I better get him some cold water,” she said, appraising me quickly, but stopped and turned toward me, as did everyone else, when a high-pitched voice, which I can only assume and understand came from my own throat, materialized freakishly into the room.

“He did it by cutting the brake line!”