A Summer of Kings (12 page)

"I was just seeing if I could tell if he really hated us. He was so friendly and well-mannered at the table, I couldn't tell, could you? I just want him to like us, Pip. I want him to want to stay."

Pip ran his fingers through his bangs, so they stood straight up, and said, "I don't know why. He could be violent. He could just snap again and kill the whole lot of you. How am I going to feel if I keep the you-know-what a secret and something happens to you?"

"But it won't. I know it," I said.

Frustrated, Pip rolled his head around on his neck. "You just said you couldn't even tell how he feels about all of you. He's probably a master at disguising his true feelings. You don't really know what he's liable to do. He could be a real cold-blooded killer, for all you know. He really could, Esther."

I shook my head. "What he told us about that march, Pip, I can't get that out of my mind. He seems so ashamed of himself. Don't you feel sorry for him?"

"I don't know," Pip said. "Maybe he was so ashamed and angry, he went and killed that fireman."

I swatted Pip's shoulder. "Pip, you've got a one-track mind. All you can think about is that he might have killed somebody."

"You'd better think about it, too, Esther, and you'd better not forget it. No telling what kind of dangerous this guy is." Pip jumped off the porch and turned around. "Oh, I left you something, up in your room."

"Pip, you shouldn't have. What is it?"

Pip must have seen something in my face, because he said, "Don't get all guilty feeling about it," which is how I was feeling. "It's just some cream rinse my mother bought for you. She said all the professionals use it, which you would know if you ever got your hair cut at a real salon instead of with me at the barber's."

"They're willing to cut it dry, so it doesn't hurt so much when they comb it. I like the barber's, and Mother doesn't mind my going there as long as they don't make me look like a boy. But thanks for the cream rinse. I hope it works. Thanks, Pip."

Pip just waved and headed off toward his house.

After Pip left, I didn't get to spend any time with King-Roy because I had to go with my sister and brother to the country club for their swimming lessons and a day at the pool.

That's the way it was all weekend long. I took care of my brother and sister and only saw King-Roy at mealtimes, when he wouldn't even look at me, but I was glad to see that at least he hadn't left yet. He hadn't gone to Harlem yet. I still couldn't get what he told us in the pavilion out of my mind. I wanted to do something for him. I wanted to make everything all right, make it so that it was okay that he ran away and left his brother and sister behind. I just wanted to make it right somehow, but I couldn't figure out how.

Sunday night my mother called me to her bedroom to talk to me. Having a talk in my parents' bedroom was never good news, so I took my time dragging myself in to meet with my mother.

"Esther, I called you in thirty minutes ago," my mother said when I finally showed up in her doorway. My parents had the neatest room. It was huge, of course, and it had a secret room hidden behind a wall of books, and a king-sized bed with big fat cherubs—ones you could almost pull out and hold in your hands—carved in mahogany, with fat twisting pillars for bedposts; and they had a pump organ in there that my father played sometimes. It had belonged to my father's mother, and we children weren't allowed to touch it. I looked all these things over as I stood in the doorway, waiting for my mother to get through her lecture on being on time and get down to the real reason she called me.

"Esther, are you listening to me?"

I turned from the organ and looked at my mother. "Not really, Mother, but I know what you were saying and it's not that I can't be on time, it's just, I didn't want to be. I know you're going to tell me something I don't want to hear."

"I want you to look after Stewart and Sophia this week," my mother said.

"See," I said. "Why? Why do I have to watch them all the time? Beatrice has nothing better to do than sleep half the day away; why don't you ask her to look after them?"

"Beatrice has no patience with them, and I need you to take them to the city on Wednesday for another audition."

"Me? Why can't you take them? I hate going on auditions, you know I do, Mother. All I do all day is sit around and watch bratty kids who can't act."

Mother's eyes filled with tears. "Madeline is sick again. I want to go stay with her this week."

Madeline was Mother's other best friend—her best New York friend—and Madeline had cancer.

I rushed to my mother's side and put my arm around her. "I'm sorry, Mother. I'll watch them for you, and I'll take them into the city and everything. I'm sorry about Madeline. Tell her I hope she feels better."

Mother pulled away from me. "Feels better? She's dying of cancer. She's never going to feel better, only worse."

"Well," I said, "I hope she feels better, anyway. I can hope it, can't I?"

So that's the way it was. All week I stayed busy with Sophia and Stewart and I hardly saw King-Roy and I didn't work on my play and Pip and I ran in the mornings, where most of the time we fought about King-Roy, and I wheeled Sophia around in a wheelbarrow and took her and Stewart to the gatehouse to help Auntie Pie with the animals, only they were no help at all. They squealed and hopped up and down when I brought any of the animals out for them to see. I took them swimming, and to Jack's to eat sandwiches and nickel pickles, and we went bike riding, to the movies, to the audition, to a matinee in the city, and to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Stewart stared at the Degas paintings and wouldn't leave the room where they were kept, and Sophia stared at the nude-male statues. By week's end I was exhausted and Sunday night came and I had another meeting with Mother and she said she needed me to watch Sophia and Stewart another week. I wanted to complain, but Mother looked a lot more tired than I felt, so I kept my mouth shut and hoped twice as hard that Madeline would get to feeling better soon.

The only good thing about the second week, or so I thought at the time, was that on Friday, when I had to take Sophia and Stewart to yet another audition in the city, King-Roy said he wanted to come with us. He said he had earned himself a day off, and I knew that he had.

While I had been taking care of my brother and sister, King-Roy had painted the laundry room white, fixed the 1947 Ford Super Deluxe station wagon, so it ran forward again, and chauffeured Auntie Pie around in it. He had caddied for my father when he played golf at the country club, listened to Beatrice practice her lines and fixed her hair dryer, so the plastic cap that went on her head was attached to the air hose the way it was supposed to be, followed Monsieur Vichy around with a pad and pencil in his hand and wrote down any great ideas Monsieur Vichy had—which meant writing down anything Monsieur Vichy said out loud—and taught Daisy, our housekeeper, how to make "real" banana pudding.

The only time King-Roy and I had had a chance to really talk again was late one afternoon.

King-Roy was working on the car and I stood watching him, hoping he'd notice how pretty my hair looked. Pip's cream rinse really worked. I twirled a section of my hair in my hand the way I saw my friend Laura do once when she was flirting with Jamie Solo, a junior in high school. King-Roy didn't even look up. When I said hi and asked him what he was doing, he said, "I don't want to talk to you right now, Esther."

"Why not?" I asked.

He glanced at me from under the hood of the car and said, "I shouldn't have told you what I did. I shouldn't have told you any of it."

I said, "I think about it all the time, what you said. I wish I could make you feel better."

"Well, you can't, so go away now." King-Roy unscrewed something under the hood.

"Won't you teach me to tap, at least?" I asked.

"No, and that's another thing I shouldn't have told you about. I talked too much," King-Roy said.

I shrugged. "That happens a lot around here. People are always telling me things they later wished they hadn't. They tell me things because I don't matter. Pip tells me things because I do. Which are you, King-Roy? Why did you tell me what you did?"

King-Roy straightened up, pulled a rag out of his back pocket, and wiped his hands. "You matter, Esther. I told you because, I guess, well, it just came out. You—you're easy to talk to." King-Roy pushed his glasses up on his nose and said, "I guess it's because you're so open and you don't try to be something you're not."

I let go of my hair and shook my head. "Oh, yes I do. That first day we met, I tried to be Katharine Hepburn."

King-Roy chuckled. "Well, see, you're honest and you make mistakes and you make me feel okay."

"I do? That's almost the nicest thing anybody's ever said to me." I leaned forward and gave King-Roy a big hug, and King-Roy quickly pushed me off of him.

"Hey, you can't be doing that," he said, looking left and right. "You want to get me in trouble?" He picked up some kind of wrench tool and pointed with it and said, "You go on, now. Go on and leave me to work."

"You smell like motor oil and soap," I said.

"I said, go on," King-Roy said, hiding his head under the hood.

By the time Friday and the train ride into the city came around, I was really excited about our trip, until I saw King-Roy come down with a filled grocery sack rolled up under his arm.

"What you got in there?" I asked him.

King-Roy grabbed the bag and held it with two hands as if he thought I was going to take it from him and said, "Never you mind."

I looked at him, but he wouldn't meet my eyes. He started walking away from me, toward the kitchen, and I trotted after him.

"Why 'never you mind'? What's in there?"

"I'm not telling, and you just leave me alone about it, Esther."

I stopped and said, "Aren't you coming with us to the audition today?"

King-Roy turned around. "I told you I was going into the city with you, but I'm gon' spend the day with Ax, in Harlem."

I eyed the bag again. "Are you staying, King-Roy? Are those all your clothes in there?"

King-Roy turned back around and walked on toward the kitchen, and he didn't say another word.

Later that morning on the train, King-Roy and I sat side by side, with his grocery bag held under his arm on the side away from me, and listened to the train going over the tracks. We stared out the window at the rain and the towns flashing past and said nothing to each other. We couldn't; Sophia and Stewart were doing all the talking. They had flipped the back of their seat over, so that it faced us, then sat down across from us. The two of them had decided King-Roy needed an inch-by-inch description of every town we rode through, so they gave it to him.

"We're coming to Tarrytown now," Stewart said. "It's named after the settlers who would go into the pubs and tarry awhile."

Sophia, not wanting to be outdone, said, "The Old Dutch Church is near here, too, you know, the one Washington Irving mentions in
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.
"

"And there's a beautiful example of Gothic Revival here, the Lyndhurst mansion," Stewart said, jumping back in.

I had tuned their noise out for as long as I could stand it, but finally I said, "Would you two be quiet? King-Roy can't see anything, sitting in the train, so how's he supposed to get excited about a fine example of Gothic Revival architecture if he can't even see it? You two are just showing off, anyway." I looked at King-Roy to see how he was taking everything.

Sophia swung her leg out and kicked my shin. "We're not showing off," she said. "We're just curious, so we believe others would be curious, too. Not everyone's as uncurious and stupid as you are, Esther." She opened the Jane Austen book on her lap with great dramatic flair as a way of reminding me of her great brilliance, compared to my stupidity.

I was about to say something but King-Roy beat me to it. He wrinkled his nose at Sophia and said, "Girl, being ugly is stupid, and that was ugly. If I were your mother, I'd wash your mouth out with soap for disrespecting your sister like that."

Stewart raised his brows and said, "It's not disrespectful if it's true. Esther is the stupid one in the family and that's a fact. Just ask my parents."

"I don't need to ask them anything. I can judge my own self who's stupid in your family," King-Roy said, looking Stewart up and down like he was seeing stupid all over the place.

I had to bite down on my lips to keep from laughing, but then Sophia burst into tears and stood up and pointed at King-Roy and said, "If I blow my audition, it's going to be your fault. I have lost my focus." She turned to me with her mouth turned down and tears falling from her eyes. She spread her hands out, palms up, and said, "Esther, I've lost my focus!" She looked at me as though she expected me to get down on the floor of the train and look for it like it was a lost bracelet.

I stood up and wrapped my arms around Sophia and pulled her down with me and into my lap. "It's all right, Soph. You'll get your focus back. You'll see. It's all right."

"The heck it is," I heard King-Roy mutter before he stood up and stepped out into the aisle to pace with his grocery sack.

Other people in our car kept giving King-Roy suspicious glances as he passed, so when he reached the end of the car, he turned around and came back and sat down again, crossing his legs.

The four of us stayed quiet all the rest of the way into the city.

Once we got to Grand Central Station, King-Roy went off to find a phone booth, to call Ax, while we waited for him by the big clock. I watched the back of him retreating, his baggy brown pants flapping when he walked, and I wanted to run after him. I felt suddenly that I'd never see him again, but I couldn't run after him because I had to run after Stewart instead.

As soon as King-Roy was out of sight, Stewart said, "I'm not going with you to the audition."

"What? You have to. You're auditioning for the part of Bobby," I said.

Stewart shook his head. "Mother wants me to audition, but I want to take a ballet class over at the school, and if I hurry, I can get in on the ten o'clock class. I've got my ballet slippers and tights in here." He patted the satchel he had hanging from his shoulder, the one I thought held all our lunches.