Gentlehands (3 page)

“I hope I see you again, Mr. Trenker,” said Skye. “This has been such a super evening, and Mummy’s not going to believe a raccoon ate out of my hand. I don’t even believe it myself. I can’t wait to spring keeshond on her, too. She’ll die if she’s never heard of one, you know, it’s like telling the Pope he doesn’t know all his cardinals or something.”

“Come again,” my grandfather said, looking straight at me, “if you want to.”

“If we
want
to!” Skye exclaimed. “Does a starling
want one of your sunflower seeds!”

“Not very much,” said my grandfather. “He has trouble getting the shells open.”

“The one time I wanted to show off and say a starling or a blue jay or something besides just a plain bird, I pick the wrong bird.” Skye laughed. “I like you so much, Mr. Trenker. You’re subtle!”

“I try to be,” my grandfather said.

All the way back to Beauregard, Skye did seventy, talking nonstop about him.

“You don’t mind going fast, do you, Buddy?” she asked me.

“It doesn’t feel like we’re going too fast,” I told her, but it did, and we were, and I knew I wasn’t going to do anything to stop it.

I TRIED TO CONVINCE SKYE TO LET ME DRIVE TO
Beauregard with her that night, and hitch a ride back to my house, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She dropped me and took off like a rocket. I saw my father standing in our driveway by his Toyota, smoking a cigarette, watching me. He was in uniform because he was working nights that week.

“That was a Jensen she was driving,” I said. “Did you ever hear of a Jensen?”

“Did she ever hear of a speed limit?” he said.

“Oh,
Dad
.”

“It isn’t funny, Buddy,” he said.

I stood there and he stood there and then he said, “Where’d you go?”

I didn’t want to tell him then. He wasn’t in the greatest mood, and I didn’t want to open that whole can of worms at the end of a beautiful evening.

“We just rode around,” I said.

“Rode around at eighty miles an hour?”

“She wasn’t doing eighty.”

“She was doing close to it,” he said. He took a drag on his cigarette and twirled his car keys in his hand. “Buddy, if your social calendar isn’t too full, I’d appreciate it if you’d do something with Streaker tomorrow.”

“I work until two,” I said.

“And after two?”

“I was going clamming with Ollie.”

“Take Streaker with you,” he said. “Okay?”

“Okay,” I agreed.

“Streaker hangs around his mother too much,” my father said.

“I know that. Okay.”

He gave me one of his friendly punches and opened his car door. “I’ve never even heard of a Jensen,” he said.

“Neither had I,” I said.

“Well, anyway, did you have a good time?”

“Yeah.”

“Your mother’s asleep on the couch,” he said. “Don’t wake her up, she’s beat. We started to panel the playroom tonight.”

The playroom was actually the garage. My father had built a wooden floor there, and they were fixing it up for Streaker and me.

“See you tomorrow,” I said.

My mother was in her robe with the afghan over her. I guess after she’d finished helping him with the paneling, she’d begun work on his scrapbook, because it was open on the coffee table, with newspaper clippings and a pot of glue next to it. Every time my father’s name appeared in
The Seaville Citizen
, my mother would clip the article, underline his name, and paste it on a page. His name was in the paper almost every week. Stuff like “Sergeant William Boyle arrested G.L. Jones of Fireplace Drive at 11
A.M.
Wednesday morning for speeding and driving while intoxicated.” The whole scrapbook was filled with things like that.

I tiptoed past her, went into the bedroom, and undressed in the dark. Streaker was snoring, and I got under the covers and began reliving the whole evening in as much detail as I could make myself remember. I was glad I didn’t have to face my mother, and go into the visit to Grandpa Trenker. The next morning I beat it out of the house before anyone was up, and rode my bike to The Sweet Mouth Soda Shoppe, ready for work.

In the summer we always had a fairly good early-breakfast crowd on nice days. Everyone was eager to get to the beach. It was a warm, sunny Saturday, so even the owner, Kick Richards, was hustling around in the kitchen, flipping pancakes and throwing bread into the
toaster. Kick used to be an actor until he married a local widow about ten years older than he is. He’s in his early forties, a former drunk who claims pot changed his life. He usually comes in when it’s crowded, and when the crowd thins, rolls himself a joint and smokes out back. Any of the employees who want a favor from Kick wait until he’s had his joint; then he’s open to all requests and suggestions.

The one thing Kick hates is to have employees use the phone in his office, which is this dinky room about the size of a small bathroom. There is no pay phone, so if you want to make a call, you either have to walk around the corner to the front of the A&P, or get Kick to relent.

Around ten thirty that morning we had a slow period, and I saw Kick head for the back steps. I waited about ten minutes, then went out to confront him. Kick’s a nice-looking man, on the short side and very thin, with longish blond hair and round brown eyes. Ollie’s mother calls him “This failed actor who married poor Ginny Townsend for the little money she has left”—he doesn’t go over too big with the locals.

He was sitting on the steps listening to the news over WWRJ on a pocket transistor.

“Jesus, that was funny,” he said to me.

“What was?”

“The announcer just said the police are using a
time-tested strategy on the man in Wilmington holding those people hostage—waiting. Waiting is a strategy?” He laughed. “That’s some strategy. Waiting. All those years I wasn’t working in New York, I was really using a time-tested strategy, Buddy. I was waiting.”

“Yeah,” I said. When Kick smoked grass he always picked apart what he heard and found something funny about it.

“Kick,” I said, “if you were falling in love with somebody and couldn’t even make a fast phone call to them, how do you think you’d feel?”

He sat there thinking it over.

“You know what you’re going to be someday, Buddy?” he said.

“What?”

“A
gozlin
,” he said. “Do you know what a
gozlin
is?”

“A goose?”

“That’s a gosling,” he said. “You’re going to be a
gozlin
, rhymes with Roslyn. It’s Yiddish.”

“What’s it mean?”

“An unmoral, unethical person,” he said. “A swindler. When you’re finished calling her make sure my office door’s closed.”

Peacock answered the phone and said Miss Skye was swimming in the ocean.

“Would you care to leave a message?”

“Just tell her Buddy Boyle called,” I said, be
cause I couldn’t see telling Peacock to ask her if I could see her that night. All the way back from Montauk I’d wanted to ask her what she was doing the next night, but I’d been afraid she’d say she was busy, and that would spoil the time we’d just spent together.

I began to get into a small panic, wondering how I’d get ahold of her before evening. Somehow I had to get hold of her before I went clamming.

When I went back on the floor, Ollie was sipping a Coke at a table by the window.

“I want
all
the details,” he said. Ollie and I have been hanging around together since fourth grade. He’s this redheaded guy with freckles where most people just have pores, buck teeth he dreams of having capped someday, and a build like an Olympic weight lifter. He’s a tackle on the Seaville High football team, and last year some poor runner from Westhampton High collided with Ollie and was unconscious for ten minutes.

“All
what
details?” I said, trying to ignore the fact the woman behind him was waving her hand at me, trying to order breakfast.

“Did you make out?” Ollie gave me his chipmunk grin, and I sighed and shook my head.

I said, “I’ll be glad when you date more than three times a year, so you don’t have to live through me.”

“No kidding, Buddy, how’d you do?”

“WAIT-
TER!
” The woman behind Ollie was working herself into something.

“I can’t go into it,” I said. “Streaker’s coming with us today, okay?”

Ollie nodded and I felt Kick come up behind me and grab me by my belt. “Get your ass over to that customer!” he said. “And tell your baboon friend this isn’t the local watering hole.”

“Now I know how come you call this place Sweet Mouth,” Ollie said, and he was mad, his face was all red. He tossed a quarter on the table and shoved his chair back hard.

“Oh dearie,” Kick feigned this apologetic tone, “don’t tell me we’re losing
you
for a customer!”

I felt sorry for Ollie because I knew he was supersensitive about the way he looked and the baboon crack got to him. It always got to me when someone picked on the way Ollie looked, because I’m considered really good-looking, and I didn’t do anything to get this way. Ollie went storming out of the place, and I gave Kick a dirty look that he shot back to me in spades.

“This isn’t the local pool hall, Buddy! Tell your friend to find another hangout!”

“Oh go roll another joint,” I said under my breath, and Kick said, “I don’t know what kind of a wisecrack you just made, mister, but the next time I do
you
a favor hell will freeze over!”

It was going to be one of your beautiful days, I told myself, at the rate things were going; it was going to be one of your all-time glorious days.

Then a groupie crowd descended on the place (they’re these summer people who rent one house and sell about nineteen shares in it)—at least a dozen, with more straggling in a few minutes after that—and I was struggling with trays of eggs and pancakes and French toast until I thought my shoe leather would burn holes in Kick’s floor. Groupies tip about ten cents on a three-dollar order, too, so I seemed to be running behind in every way.

Suddenly, just as the noon whistle blew, and every town dog milling around in front of the A&P down the street started howling, I looked up and saw her.

“Do the dogs always howl along with the whistle?” she said.

“Hi!” I said.

“Hi!”

She was all in blue, right down to her sandals. I guess she specialized in wearing all one color, and she had this great perfume on, and that smile, and she just stood there and I just stood there, and the jukebox was roaring out some rock number, and the whole place was babbling around us, waiters calling out: “Two over easy, o.j. and one black.”

“I came to get you,” she said.

“I’m working,” I said.

“I’m shopping,” she said. “What time are you through working?”

“Two,” I said.

“I’m going to take you for a swim,” she said. “Would a swim make you happy, Buddy?”

“I guess it would,” I said.

“Don’t guess with me, Buddy,” she said.

“BUDDY!” I could hear Kick behind me.

“Someone’s calling you,” she said. “I’ll be parked outside at two sharp. Okay?”

“Okay,” I said.

Before I’d left the house that morning, I’d stuck a note up in Streaker’s bunk telling him to be ready at two thirty.

So much for promises, and clamming.

“What in the HELL is wrong with you?” Kick asked me.

“Nothing!” I lied.

THE POOL HOUSE AT BEAUREGARD IS BIGGER THAN
the house I live in. Skye directed me to one of the four dressing rooms; it was about the size of the bedroom I share with Streaker. There was a table and couch and chairs, a rug on the floor and paintings on the walls. On the table there was a slim silver vase with a white rose in it, and about two dozen photographs in gold and silver frames. Skye was in most of the pictures, along with her older brother, Ogden Pennington, Jr., who was traveling in Europe that summer. There were pictures taken through the years of the family—on skis, on surfboards, in horse-drawn carriages, near Christmas trees, and rolling eggs down long green lawns. There were pictures of them on ships and getting off planes, in golf carts and on horseback. On our table at home there’s just one photograph, of Streaker and me, the dollar-nineteen Woolco color kiddies’ special, in a plastic frame.

On the way to Beauregard, Skye had said not to worry about the fact I didn’t have a pair of swim trunks with me, she’d fix it. She’d made a phone call from the Jensen, on a real phone, not a CB radio, and sure enough there was a pair of navy trunks and a large navy towel laid out for me on the couch. We’d mostly listened to a tape of Barbra Streisand on the way there. I hadn’t felt much like talking; I was still feeling guilty that I’d lied to my mother, and told her I had to disappoint Streaker because Kick needed me to work the afternoon shift.

I looked really crummy in my old clothes. About the only thing I had on that wasn’t a rag was a new red sweater I’d bought the week before. I was glad to ditch my clothes and get into the trunks, sorry I hadn’t worked a bit on more of a tan because everyone around the pool was the color of bronze.

Just outside the dressing rooms there was this large room with tables and chairs, a bar and an enormous gold mirror covering a whole wall. My bare feet sank into the thick rug, and I saw Skye stretched out on a chaise, waiting for me, in a two-piece white bathing suit with a light blue monogrammed
P
on the bottom half. The light blue
P
was on everything around the pool: pillows, tablecloths, ashtrays, matchbooks and sun pads.

“Mummy’s dying to meet you!” Skye said, and
three tiny dogs yapped around near her feet as we walked out into the sun. Skye said they were Papillons, which meant butterfly in French. They weighed in at about four pounds.

There were about twenty people lounging around. In the center of the pool, on a float, I saw the man with the yellow-tinted glasses lying on his back, the false cigarette glowing as he sucked on it. Skye led me up to a chaise with a light blue-and-white parasol attached to it, and a chubby, deeply tanned, silver-haired woman under it. She was wrapped in a large white towel with the light blue P embroidered on it. She was sipping orange juice and reading a book called
The Stars’ Stars
.

She greeted the butterfly dogs first. “Janice! January! Little Ophelia. You girls settle down or mean old Peacock will have to take you in, and you’d miss everything. You wouldn’t like that one bit, would you?”

“Buddy,” Skye said. “This is my mother.”

“How do you do, Mrs. Pennington.”

“Buddy
who?
” She put on bright blue tinted sunglasses and looked up at me.

“Buddy Boyle,” Skye said.

“What sign are you, Buddy Boyle?”

“I’m a Gemini.”

“Mercurial, amusing, communicative,” she said. “Mr. De Lucca out there is a Gemini, too,
with Leo rising. That’s why he’s a journalist.”

We all automatically looked toward the float, and then Mrs. Pennington said, “He can’t hear us talking about him without his hearing aid. I’ve often lamented that I cannot close
my
ears as easily as I can my eyes.”

Skye sat down and so did I, and Skye said to me, “Mr. De Lucca is out here in Seaville on some mysterious mission. He won’t tell anyone about it, will he, Mummy?”

“I hope he doesn’t,” said Mrs. Pennington. “I like mysteries, and secrets and puzzles and games. Would you like to play backgammon with me, Buddy?”

“I don’t know how to play,” I said.

“You can tell a great deal about someone by how he plays backgammon,” said Mrs. Pennington. “Skye here gets careless after a while and fails to protect herself. That’s the way she is in life, too, I’m afraid. Aren’t you, darling?”

“Oh I take care of myself, Mummy,” Skye said.

“What
do
you play, Buddy? Do you play croquet?”

“No,” I said. “I play Yahtzee with my kid brother sometimes. I play Monopoly.”

“I don’t like Monopoly at all,” Mrs. Pennington said, “unless I get both Boardwalk and Park Place right away.”

“The green properties are pretty good,” I said.

“North Carolina Avenue and those?” she said.

“I’ve won a lot of games with those,” I said.

“
Rrrrrreally?
” she said.

There was a splash as Nick De Lucca rolled off the float and kicked his way toward the ladder.

“I hope Mr. De Lucca isn’t bored here,” she said. “They say the way to entertain artists and writers is to feed them or amuse them or shock them. Well we fed him; we’ve done what we could.”

“I’m going to introduce Buddy to everyone,” Skye said while Mr. De Lucca walked toward us, rubbing his head with a towel.

Mrs. Pennington said, “Hand him his shirt, dear, on the back of that chair. His hearing aid is in the pocket.”

De Lucca took the shirt, hooked up his hearing aid after he put the shirt on, then dried his glasses on a corner of the shirt. “Why do people have heated pools?” he said. “Hello, Skye.” Then to me, with a lilt of surprise, “Well, hello there.”

“Do you two know each other?” Mrs. Pennington said.

“We met the other night,” De Lucca said.

“Buddy’s been telling me the most interesting things about Monopoly,” Mrs. Pennington said.

“I didn’t think anyone could tell a Pennington about monopoly,” De Lucca said, and Mrs. Pennington clapped her hands and giggled.

“Oh we aren’t discussing oil, Mr. De Lucca,” she said. “I leave that to Ogden. We were discussing the game of Monopoly.” She picked up some knitting from the table beside her, placed it on her lap and began working the needles.

“Sit down, Mr. De Lucca.”

He said, “What are you making?”

She held her knitting up for us to see. “Can anyone guess?”

“Sweaters,” I said, “for Janice, January and Ophelia.”

“I’m knitting only one thing, Buddy.” I was sure I’d guessed right. It was blue and white of course.

“
A
sweater for one of the dogs,” I corrected myself.

“I suppose it looks like a sweater,” she said, “but it isn’t. Mr. De Lucca? You love mysteries.”

“I pass,” De Lucca said in a bored tone.

“Why they’re golf-club covers!” Mrs. Pennington said.

De Lucca winced and drew in on his fake cigarette.

Skye took me around and introduced me to people. They sat in little cliques of three and four, by the pool, and we finally joined some kids our age, three girls and a boy. His name was Connie as in Conrad. Anyone in my crowd called Connie would have done something about it—fast—use his middle name or go by a nick
name, but Connie Spreckles didn’t seem to mind his name at all. Skye told me later he was a San Francisco Spreckles, whatever that meant. I just said “Oh” as though it made perfect sense.

Everyone took great care to say my name at the beginning or end of anything they said to me, like “Do you really live out here all year, Buddy?” or “Buddy, is there anyplace to go besides The Surf Club?” I could tell they were all bending over backwards to include me, even though there’d be long passages of time when they’d talk about people I didn’t know, and places I’d never been to. They all referred to The Hadefield Club a lot, as though it was their second home. I’d never even been inside it. It was this real snob place down the road from Beauregard, right on the ocean, the kind of place that didn’t let many Jews in, or anyone without tons of money. Around town we called it The Hate-Filled Club.

I don’t remember whose idea it was to play “Whose Is It?” but apparently they’d all played it before and thought it was a hilarious game. One of the girls went to the pool house and brought back an assortment of clothes found in the dressing rooms. Then another girl would hold up something: a shoe, a belt, a shirt, a cap—and everybody would try to guess from the smell, the label, the look of the object, who had worn it.

I saw my new red sweater in the pile, and didn’t
think anything about it until the girl named Rachel picked it up and said, “The label says Made in Korea.” Then she rolled her eyes to the heavens and said, “Now,
really
, how tacky can you get? And it’s Orlon!”

“It’s the yard boy’s,” Connie said.

“It smells like a yard boy’s,” Rachel said, holding the armpit to her nose and making a face. I’d worn the sweater half the morning at Sweet Mouth.

“It’s mine,” Skye said.

“Oh sure it is,” one of the girls said. “Orlon’s never touched
your
sacrosanct skin, my darling!”

Skye stood up and snatched the sweater out of the girl’s hands and said, “This is a jackass way to spend our time! Who wants to race to the beach?”

Connie understood then and said something that sounded like “There’s nothing wrong with Orlon,” but he was on his feet and running after Skye, and the other girls followed. Rachel stayed behind with me.

“I don’t feel like a race to the beach,” she said.

She put the sweater on a chair and sighed. We didn’t say anything for a while, although I was trying frantically to think of something to say. She finally said, “I hate myself, you know.”

“I think I’ll take a swim,” I said.

I got up and dove into the pool.

Later, when I was dressing to go home, Skye knocked on the door and slipped inside.

“Mummy loves you,” she said, beginning to chatter fast the way she did when she was nervous. “Now we’re going to have to get out the Monopoly set and let her try the green strategy or she’ll never let us rest, honestly, Mummy can be
relentless
, and poor Daddy
hates
games, he can’t play backgammon or croquet. I mean, he plays golf but that’s about
it
!”

“I suppose you’ve got something on tonight?” I said.

“Oh and do I wish I didn’t, Buddy, because it’s the most boring thing in the world, a dance at The Hadefield and I can’t get out of it because Daddy has a table reserved and it’s this e-
nor
-mous sit-down dinner, but I’ll see you Sunday night, won’t I?”

“If you want to,” I said.

“I want to,” she said. She looked at me that way she had of looking at someone so intensely and I couldn’t hold it, and dropped my eyes before she did.

She said, “I want to remember the color of your eyes, Buddy.”

I just wasn’t used to that stuff at all, and I pretended to have to tie my shoelaces which were already tied, and she probably thought I didn’t
feel anything because she went back to chattering—something about not having time to run me home and how she hated sit-down dinners and wearing long dresses, it took her hours to put her face on, and would I mind if Mr. De Lucca gave me a ride?

“I’ll see you Sunday,” I said when De Lucca called into the pool house, “I’m leaving, Buddy!”

“Promise me?” she said.

“What do you mean?” I said. “Of course I promise you.” For some reason I had the feeling I was this close to crying or something stupid, I didn’t even know, but I walked out of the dressing room without saying anything else, or looking back, just went, depressed as hell.

De Lucca was driving this little white Fiat convertible, and I climbed in beside him, while he made the phony cigarette go red, puffing on it, not saying much as we headed down the long driveway, and then down Ocean Road to town.

I could smell the sickly sweet scent he wore and I breathed in the air on my side of the window, wondering if it was possible that I was going to puke from the stink.

“What’s your name, anyway?”

“Buddy,” I said.

“Buddy what?”

“Boyle,” I said.

He took the fake cigarette out of his mouth
and looked at me for longer than someone driving a car should gawk across at his passenger.

“Is your father a cop?”

“Yeah?”

“William Boyle?”

“Yeah. I’m Junior.”

“No kidding,” he said.

“No kidding.”

“Well,” he said.

“Well,
what?
”

He didn’t answer me and I didn’t give a damn because I was too down to care what was on De Lucca’s mind.

When I finally got home, I saw my father sitting on our front porch, where he almost never sat, in a way he almost never sat, with his legs crossed and his arms folded, and I didn’t even have to see the expression on his face to know he was waiting for me, and it wasn’t going to be pretty.