Childish Loves (33 page)

‘What can Bill Bradley do?'

My father gave me a look. ‘What do you think a man like Bill Bradley can do? Bill Bradley can do whatever he wants to do. All these Washington types have connections in publishing. It doesn't hurt he won a championship with the Knicks.'

‘I once got stopped in the street in New York. A homeless guy told me I looked like him.'

‘I met him once myself. Sometimes Tom invites me to these shindigs and your mother makes me go. A very pleasant man; large hands. I told him, do you want to know an interesting fact. My son broke all your scoring records at Oxford.'

‘That's just not true. What did he say?'

‘I didn't know I had any scoring records at Oxford. As I said, a very pleasant man. But I don't know him well enough to ask a favor. Tom says he does.'

‘I don't need favors,' I said. At the age of thirty-five, married, with a daughter and three published books to my name, I thought I had outgrown this sort of conversation with my father. This was the conversation I spent my twenties having. ‘This isn't what I feel like talking about,' I said.

‘What do you feel like talking about?'

But we had come to the end of the block, and I could easily put him off a little longer, as we walked together up the bend in the road to our front yard.

*

I had promised Kelly to knock on her parents' door, and after lunch, with the house to myself and nothing to do until three o'clock, I wondered if I should get it over with. Instead I wandered from room to room with the lights off, looking out windows, sitting in all the chairs. Remembering what it was like-to be at home. Kelly had said she would tell her parents to come to my talk. I could meet them there, though I didn't much like the thought of introducing them to mine and explaining the connection. This is what I told myself as I put on jacket and tie and walked out: Get it over with; but I didn't get farther than her front yard. I looked at her house, the house Kelly grew up in. Pretty Georgian façade, red bricks and white pillars. Green lawn sloping into the street, with the heads of sprinklers poking out of the grass. The kind of house, I vaguely remembered thinking as a kid, in which a real American family would live. But time on my hands always makes me late, and in the end I had to hurry, sweating into my undershirt, to make my appointment at the Ransom Center.

Ms Niemetz met me at the museum lobby then took me to the student canteen. She was hardly more than a student herself and wore her pale hair short; her glasses had bright red rims. This was her first year out – she had just finished a PhD on Middleton Murry. Originally she came from Jamaica Plain, but she liked Austin and had recently bought her first pair of cowboy boots. Still, the Boston connection is part of what attracted her to Sullivan; her brother had friends who went to Beaumont Hill. The novels themselves she could take or leave. Historical fiction left her cold; her interests were more political. But she had a passion for obscurity – ‘for its own sake,' she said, ‘like art.' Over the plastic cafeteria table, between salt-cellars and napkin-dispensers, I showed her my copies of Peter's letters. These she loved, especially his letters to famous writers. Already whatever was private about them had disappeared. They were objects, and she handled them (even the Xeroxes) as if they were frail as lace.

She told me it was a good time to be selling manuscripts. Their budgets were set at the beginning of the academic year, and whatever they didn't spend, they lost. Around February the sense of urgency began to set in. Even without consulting her boss, she felt comfortable offering two thousand dollars – just for the manuscripts. She was interested in the books, too, but buying books wasn't her department. Besides with books there were other market considerations; the process was more complex. I told her that a friend of mine at the Houghton in Harvard was also interested in the manuscripts. Well, she would talk to her boss. Maybe they could go as high as five.

Then she looked at me and said, ‘Of course, part of what they're worth depends on you. You're writing a biography of him, aren't you?'

‘Not really a biography,' I said. ‘I don't know that it will help his reputation.'

After coffee, she led me back across campus to the museum and up several stairs to a conference room. Then left me alone for a few minutes to prepare my talk. Blinds covered the windows; there were too many lights on. The air conditioning seemed to be running, too. Folding chairs had been arranged in rows in front of a lectern, but the rest of the furniture, a seminar table and several upholstered chairs, was expensively made. They looked like they belonged in the dining hall of a newly built stately home. I had a headache; I sat down on one of the chairs and waited. Eventually people started to wander in. I counted them from the lectern: about a dozen. All but three I could account for – my parents and their colleagues, my sister and her friends. Ms Niemetz had made two stacks of Peter's novels on the table. Not a single one was bought and none of the three unknowns was related to Kelly. Two were an Asian couple who came late and left early. The third was a man in his thirties who took notes and had trouble gathering all his loose-leaf papers, his water bottle, his paperbacks and notebooks together, in his various bags, after the talk was over.

I had chosen several passages from the new book: the bit about Mike Lowenthal and his Society, the opening few pages of ‘Fair Seed-Time.' It surprised me how uncomfortable I felt. Mostly the questions had to do with Peter's Byron, but on the ride home, my mother, who was sitting in the front seat, said without turning, ‘I liked what you wrote, but it's odd, I never like you as much as a character in one of your books as I do in life. You seem to me nicer in life. You seem to me happier.'

My sister said, ‘That's an awful thing to say. I can't believe you said that. What a terrible thing to say.' She was sitting next to me in the back seat, as we used to. The only one of us to settle in Austin, she had kept up something of the old childish intensity of her relations with my mother.

‘It's not an awful thing to say. I don't even think it's a
critical
thing to say. I like the books very much. Whether I like the narrator as much doesn't matter one way or another. When I said it was odd, that's really what I meant. I meant that I find it curious.'

‘You find it curious that you dislike your son.'

‘That's not what I meant or what I said.' My mother was very upset by this point. I could see her in the rear-view mirror. Her round face, with its top of silver hair, looked flushed with suppressed feeling. ‘Ben, tell me
du bist nicht beleidigt
,' she said, switching halfway into German, as she often did. It is the language of her childhood and ours, and she uses it to express the old deep sympathy. Tell me you are not offended.

‘Leave me out of this,' I said. ‘This is between you two.'

*

My father planned on taking us out for dinner, to celebrate he said, but I wanted to go home first to change out of my jacket and tie. I never feel at ease in formal clothes; I never feel like myself. The bedroom I moved into when I was seven years old is outside the main house, under the stretch of roofing where the garden tools used to be kept. My parents decided to incorporate it after my mother found out, at the age of forty-four, that she was having twins. This meant that for most of my childhood I went to bed two locked doors away from the rest of my family. What I looked out on each night was the darkened garden and the short concrete stairway to the back entrance. After changing into jeans and T-shirt, I walked along the side of the house to the front yard. My flight was early in the morning and we probably wouldn't get back from the restaurant till after ten o'clock. Too late to knock on the door of an old retired couple. If I wanted to look up Kelly's parents I had to go now.

It's less than a hundred yards from my front door to hers, but by the time I reached the Manzes' house my heart was beating as fast as it would have if I were back in high school and going to visit a girl. Though the truth is, when I
was
in high, school, I never had the courage to do anything more than eavesdrop on her conversations at the school bus stop. I stood under the pillared portico and rang the bell and wished I had kept on my jacket and tie. The doorbell made a deep artificial bell sound; it echoed through the house. After a minute I heard steps and then I saw, through the clouded glass panes running either side of the doorway, a hesitant beige figure in beige skirts approaching under a bright hall light. Refractions in the glass made her slip suddenly from one pane to the next. But when the door opened a man stood in the doorway, with his shirt unbuttoned and his shirt tails hanging out of his trousers. He had a tie in his hand.

‘Hi,' I said. ‘My name is – I used to live down the road from you. Probably you don't remember me. My name is Ben Markovits. I'm a friend of Kelly's. From Boston; I didn't know her well in high school. I told her I was coming to Austin and she said I should look you up.'

‘I'd invite you in for a drink,' he said, ‘but as you can see, we're just on our way out.' He was small-featured and well-groomed, with a short brown beard, though his hair was thinning on top and the hand in which he held the tie was veined and liver-spotted. The way he rested on the edge of the door also suggested a little the weakness of age. Behind him the hallway led in beige tiles to a well-lit kitchen – by the looks of it, recently installed. An expensive, comfortable, not particularly attractive house.

‘That's kind of you, but I'm on my way out to dinner myself. But I gave her my word. I said I would knock on your door and now I have.'

‘What a shame. She should have warned us.' For a moment he looked at me, shrewdly enough. His face had none of the cheerful softness and vagueness of Kelly's face, which must have come from her mother. His accent was gently southern. ‘Is there anything she wanted you to tell me? I spoke to her on the telephone yesterday.'

‘She wanted you to hear from someone who had seen her that she's doing fine.'

‘I'm glad,' he said.

And that was that. I walked back down the hill, under the light of the street lamps, full of some strong feeling that was partly embarrassment and partly something worse. My father was watching television, half-asleep, when I came in the back door; but I woke him, and the four of us climbed into the car and drove to dinner. We went to a place we had been going to since I was a kid, one of the first true Mexican restaurants in Austin, and were seated in a corner of the grand old-fashioned dining hall, which was more like a courtyard than a room, with tiled floors and potted trees and tables lit by lanterns. At dinner my mother wanted to return to her argument with my sister. She felt guilty; she wanted to make herself understood. She wanted to understand herself, she said.

‘I don't know what it is. I have been trying to work it out. And then I thought of course I don't like to hear that you're miserable. That's only natural. But you're not, are you? Do you remember when you were thirteen or fourteen, you wrote those terrible poems. I only remember their titles, the blood and the pounding, the city of sorrow. From reading too much Edgar Allan Poe. For a while I used to worry about you, but then I thought, it's only dressing up. And that's all this is. Dressing up in ordinary clothes. You don't look unhappy to me.'

‘How do you know how unhappy he is,' my sister said.

I never sleep well before a flight and I made the mistake after dinner of going to bed too early. Then I woke up at one o'clock, wide awake, with the light of the back porch in my eyes. I could see from the window-blinds that my father was still watching television. A flickering private glow. Or at least that the TV was on while he slept on the couch. Around two or three I drifted off, very shallowly, and woke again at six in the middle of a dream, perfectly aware of what it was I had been dreaming. I had been dreaming about Kelly – a knock at my door. She had come to my office again, but without her daughter. I invited her in, and she sat down in the office armchair and took off her shirt. Her bra looked white and uncomfortable against her white skin. What are you doing, what do you want, I said angrily and woke up. Probably I was angry about the embarrassment of meeting her father, and when my heart stopped racing, I felt relieved to have done nothing wrong, even in my dreams. But not only relieved – it seemed a little strange to me, as I made my sleepless way to the airport (my father drove me) and waited in all the places you wait in an airport, that even in my dreams I had undressed her and turned her away.

*

When I got back to Boston I called up an old college roommate of mine whose father works at the
Globe
. I wanted to find Mike Scanlon, the reporter who covered the story of Peter's dismissal from Beaumont Hill. Maybe he could give me some clue about how to get in touch with Lee Feldman. The
Globe
was just then going through a difficult time. There were cuts and strikes; Scanlon,. it turned out, was one of the people who had taken early retirement. The first address they gave me for him was an apartment on Mass Ave, somewhere in Back Bay. But the woman who answered his phone had never heard of Mike Scanlon. She had moved in a few months ago and didn't know anything about the previous tenant except that he left his grey sports socks behind one of the radiators. I called my friend's father, who asked around the newsroom and came back with an address in Winthrop where, someone said, Scanlon grew up and used to spend his summers.

There was no phone number for this place, so I got in the car one Saturday afternoon and drove out to find him. It's a half-hour drive from Cambridge to Winthrop and it took me two hours. Two hours untangling the knots of Boston's highways. Winthrop itself is on a spit of land on the far side of Logan airport. It has beaches out to the Sound and beaches towards the harbor where you can watch the planes fly in so low and loud it's hard to suppress an instinct to duck. In parts the land isn't much wider than a mile, and the ugly 50s clapboard houses built on the one road running through it have views to either side of water – of ocean out the front, and bay out back, with its piers and private boats. There's a little hill to the north where the houses pile up more colorfully, and to the south an old cemetery and a new industrial complex. Scanlon had one of the houses between shore and shore. Most of these are summer places, boarded up in winter against storms. Their front porches are stacked with chairs and boating equipment. Scanlon's house had a car in front and dirty boots on the steps.