American Boy (7 page)

I loved the Dunbars’ attic in part because my mother was ruthless about throwing out or giving away anything that wasn’t essential to our lives. What other families saved for future generations or emergencies, or simply because they couldn’t bear to throw it away, my mother banished as “junk.” So when I entered the Dunbar attic, I felt as if I were in a place where time meant something more than the present moment, and items were saved for reasons other than mere utility. The Dunbar attic contained the usual assortment of old clothes and outgrown toys, broken furniture and holiday decorations, but all of it seemed to me part of an effort to perpetuate and preserve a family and its traditions. To me, it was as much museum as storage area.

We listened to our favorite album—the soundtrack to
West Side Story
—over and over that evening. We’d seen the movie the previous summer, on a trip to Minneapolis with Mrs. Dunbar. (While the doctor tried to provide us with a medical education, Mrs. Dunbar tried to encourage our appreciation of culture.) It was the musical’s sadder songs that best matched our mood that New Year’s Eve. For while we tried to convince ourselves that the big party didn’t interest us—after all, we were above the immature antics of our adolescent peers—we both knew we really wanted to be at Buzz Mallen’s place.

We finished off the sausage and chips and washed them down with the beer. And we had just cracked the seal on the brandy and lit our cigars when I made the suggestion I’d had in mind all along.

“Hey,” I said, trying to sound as if the idea had just occurred to me, “why don’t you go find Louisa and see if she wants to join us?”

Johnny was sitting in an old armchair whose upholstery had torn and begun to leak stuffing, and I was in a rocker whose cane back had begun to unravel. “Louisa?” he said.

“You know—she lives in your house?”

“I thought this was going to be a stag night.”

“She has to hear us up here. And she’s sitting down there all alone on New Year’s Eve. It’s kind of rude, don’t you think? Go ahead. If she doesn’t want to, she’ll just say no.”

He puffed on his cigar and stared at me for a long moment. “Fine,” he said. “If that’s what you want.”

While Johnny was gone, I looked around for another chair. I finally found a small metal folding chair, once part of a play set the twins had only recently outgrown. I sat down to try it, and then, confident the chair would support one of us if necessary, brought it over and put it under the lamp. I was using it as a footrest when Johnny reentered the attic.

He came toward me with an expression so glum I was certain he had failed to persuade Louisa to join us.

Then Johnny said, “We’re over here,” and I looked past him to Louisa Lindahl, who was just ascending the final step.

She paused for a moment to adjust to the dim light. “Is this where the party is?”

“Over here,” Johnny said again.

As if she couldn’t be sure of the safety of the planks beneath her feet, Louisa walked slowly toward us. When she stepped into our little circle of light, she took a long moment to gaze down at the arrangement. The record player. The empty potato chip bag. The beer cans. The ashtray, with Johnny’s cigar still glowing.

“Well, this looks comfy,” she said. “But where are the party hats and the noisemakers?”

She was wearing an ill-fitting, too-tight cotton dress, and I remembered it from the days when she was scurrying back and forth behind the lunch counter at Burke’s. But now it looked as if her wardrobe had been supplemented from the closets of the Dunbars. The fraying blue cardigan she had on was so large it must have once belonged to Dr. Dunbar. It fell from her broad shoulders like drapery, hanging down to her thighs, and the sleeves were turned up multiple times. And she was wearing a pair of slippers that had been Mrs. Dunbar’s.

“This isn’t a party,” Johnny said. “This is an antiparty.”

“Sad,” she said, nodding in understanding.

“We were invited to a party,” I rushed to explain, “but we didn’t want to go.”

“Why the hell not?”

“You had to have a date,” said Johnny.

“Gotcha.” And then she flashed a smile that made her look as if she were preparing to take a bite out of something.

I had an impulse to say that we could have found dates if we wanted to, but I kept my mouth shut. That remark would only have made us seem more pathetic. Besides, upon her arrival the attic became the place I most wanted to spend New Year’s Eve.

Johnny sat down in the children’s chair, and Louisa sat where Johnny had been. She pointed to Johnny’s record player, where Larry Kert’s version of “Maria” emanated from the mesh-covered speaker. “You’re sure wearing that out. I could hear it down in my room. What are you listening to?”

“
West Side Story,
” said Johnny. “But this isn’t the movie soundtrack. It’s the original Broadway recording.”

The distinction meant nothing to her. “Don’t you ever play anything else?”

I reached down and picked up the stack of albums we’d brought to the party. “What do you want to hear? We’ve got Dave Brubeck. The Kingston Trio. The Brothers Four. Odetta.”

“You have any Ricky Nelson?”

“Nope,” Johnny answered. “Sorry.”

“Bobby Vee?”

“No Bobby Vee.”

She shrugged and pointed to the bottle at Johnny’s feet. “What are you ringing in the New Year with?” Midnight was hours away.

“Blackberry brandy. Want a drink?”

“You have any more beers?”

“Sorry.”

“Okay. What the hell.”

“You want me to get you a glass?” offered Johnny.

Louisa laughed. “Don’t bother.” She reached for the bottle, twisted the top off, and then did exactly what a teenage boy would do: she wiped the rim with the palm of her hand.

After two swallows she grimaced and handed the brandy back to Johnny. “You could put that on pancakes.” Nevertheless, after the bottle passed from Johnny to me, she accepted it when it came back to her.

For a long time no one said anything. We simply circulated the bottle and listened to Larry Kert and Carol Lawrence profess their doomed love. As Tony and Maria approached their fate, Johnny grew increasingly drunk. Louisa was visibly bored, and she didn’t even know how the story ended....

Louisa spoke up. “This must be a real fancy affair your folks went to tonight,” she said to Johnny. “I saw the red dress your mom was wearing. Jesus, was that something!”

Johnny nodded. “They go to that dance every year. It goes on all night, and then when it’s over the McDonoughs—they own the hotel—open up the restaurant and fix bacon and eggs for everybody.”

The music was over, but no one got up to put on another record.

“But she won’t wear that dress again next year, will she? It’s a new dress every year, I’m sure.”

“I don’t know. Maybe.”

“She’ll probably wear it once, and then it’ll end up over there.” Louisa pointed to a standing wardrobe filled with garment bags.

“Could be.”

“Damn fancy dress for this town,” she observed. “Is your mom from Willow Falls?”

“Detroit. She and my dad met at the University of Michigan.”

“How the hell did they end up here? A doctor—he can go anywhere.”

Louisa may not have been from Willow Falls, but it hadn’t taken her long to understand why so many people in our town worshipped Rex Dunbar. He wasn’t like the mayor, whose family had become wealthy selling Chevrolets to the residents of Willow Falls for decades. Nor was he like L. D. Smalley, who had been drawing up deeds and writing wills in town for over thirty years, or Gordon Ruland, whose family had been selling groceries in Willow Falls almost as long as the town had been there. As admired as these and other men were, they were in Willow Falls because they were from there. But Rex Dunbar and his stylish, beautiful wife—as Louisa said, they could have gone anywhere.

“After my dad got out of the service,” Johnny said, “he and my mom got in the car and took off. They were planning to drive out to the West Coast and take their time getting there. They stopped in Willow Falls for gas, and they liked the town right away. They thought it would be a good place to raise a family.”

“To each his own,” said Louisa, shrugging as if to suggest that while that might have been a reason good enough for the Dunbars, it didn’t count for much with her. She pulled a crushed pack of Chesterfields from the pocket of her cardigan. “You sports have a light?”

Before I could grab the matches, Johnny picked them up and tossed them to Louisa. I would have lit her cigarette for her.

“You probably know how we landed here,” she said. “Lester said he knew a fellow here who’d give him a job. Guess what. No fellow. No job.”

The bottle came around to me again. I took what I believed to be an impressively long swallow and felt the brandy burn its way down my throat. Heat radiated throughout my chest, but that sensation didn’t match the syrupy sweetness. I grimaced, then spoke up with false confidence. “I can’t wait to get the hell out of Willow Falls.”

“Yeah?” replied Louisa. “You have a destination in mind?”

“Not really. Chicago, maybe. The West Coast. Someplace far away, that’s for sure.”

“How about you?” she asked Johnny. “You looking to get out, too?”

“My dad thinks a small college would be a good fit for me. Someplace like Carleton—that’s in Minnesota. Or maybe Macalester, in Saint Paul.”

“That’s what he thinks. . . . What do you think?”

“Sure, either of those would be okay.”

She turned back to me. “But those aren’t far enough away for you?”

“I’m not sure I’ll wait until college to leave.”

“Really?” She looked unconvinced.

“I might take off next summer. See if I can find a job somewhere. Out west, maybe. Like on a ranch.”

“What the hell do you know about working on a ranch?” asked Louisa.

I shrugged. “I can learn.”

“And break your damn back in the process.”

“I’m not afraid of hard work.”

“I grew up on a farm in North Dakota. I couldn’t wait to get the hell out of there. Which is what my old man did. Left me and my mom holding the rope.” She shook her head disapprovingly. “And you want to sign on for that kind of life? Thanks but no thanks.”

Wounded though I was, I made an attempt to recover. “Ranch work is what I’d like to do.”

“You think there’s a difference? My mother died on the farm. Drowned in a spring flood, trying to save a cow.”

“Sorry to hear that,” said Johnny.

“Yeah. Well. We hadn’t hardly been in touch for a while. If she hadn’t owed so much on the place I might have got something out of it. Then I wouldn’t have had to follow Lester and his big ideas.”

As fascinating as I found Louisa’s history, some of which I’d heard from my mother and other sources around town, it wasn’t holding Johnny’s interest. He wanted to return to something I’d said. “You mean,” he said, his mouth and eyes all circles of astonishment, “you wouldn’t even stick around for the summer after we graduate?”

I shrugged and looked over to Louisa as if to say, what can you do with these kids?

But Louisa’s attention was drifting. She stood and walked over to one of the small attic windows. “Denver for me,” she said, peering out the cobwebbed glass. “I got a cousin there.”

“Yeah, Denver is cool,” said Johnny.

But Louisa had already lost interest in geography. She poked around the attic’s darker margins, casually inspecting the Dunbar family’s artifacts. She picked up a gilt-framed sepia photograph of a fierce-looking whitebearded man. “Relative?” she asked Johnny.

“My mom’s grandfather.”

“Mean-looking old bastard.”

“He was an Episcopalian minister. Mom said he was pretty strict. Not like her dad.”

“I still think he looks like a mean bastard.” Louisa cocked her head, as if she needed to consider him from another angle. “I lived with a minister’s family once,” she said, “while I was in high school. He was nothing but an old lecher. All short and shriveled and pockmarked. I think maybe he’d had smallpox. Anyway, he was sneaking around all the time, trying to catch me alone or undressing or something. And I was supposed to be grateful they took me in. They did it as a favor to my mom. She thought it was important for me to go to high school, and the town closest to our farm didn’t have one. A high school, I mean.” Louisa shuddered. “I should have told his wife about him spying on me. She was a fat old bitch and she hated me for some reason. But if I would’ve told on her husband I bet she’d have killed him.”

Louisa continued her tour of the attic. When she came to a sewing machine she wiped a finger through the dust that covered it. “This work?”

“I guess.”

“And it’s just sitting up here gathering dust. Must be nice.”

Louisa grabbed the handle of a baby carriage and rolled it a few feet back and forth. “Shouldn’t there be two of these?”

“There were. My mom gave one to her sister. But she wanted to keep this one. Because it was mine, she said. And because it came from a company in England.”

Louisa wheeled the carriage out of the shadows and toward us. “Mrs. Dunbar and her beautiful baby boy ... I bet the two of you made quite a sight rolling around Willow Falls.”

“I remember those days well,” said Johnny with a smile. I could tell by the way his head rolled from side to side on the chair back that he was drunk. “Didn’t have a care in the world. Just laid on my back staring up at the sky. Let someone else do the driving.”

Louisa laughed. “You remember when you were a baby? Like hell.”

“Yep, those were the good old days.”

Johnny rose unsteadily to his feet and handed me the brandy. There wasn’t much left in the bottle. He made his way slowly over toward Louisa. He looked tenderly into the carriage, as if he expected to find his infant self inside. Then he turned around and flopped backward into the carriage. It wobbled and bounced on its springs, but somehow it didn’t collapse or fall over.

Louisa braced herself and held tight to the handle. “Christ!”

I struggled out of the rocking chair. By the time I arrived at the carriage, Johnny was settling in, his legs hanging over the side.