If Jack's in Love (34 page)

I told her I was sorry to hear it.

“I'm sorry about everything,” I said, “especially about everything that happened back then.”

“It wasn't you Jack, everyone knows that.”

She gazed at me kindly, but in her eyes lurked something awful: fear, anxiety.

“I can't help it,” I told her, “I've always felt so bad about what happened.”

She looked away and I wondered if I should stop.

My girlfriend hadn't been able to come to the party that night, and all I wanted now was to go off with Myra and talk about the ring I once gave her and the kidney-shaped pool at Anya's house and the kisses we once exchanged.

She smiled and said, “Okay bye, I just wanted to come over and congratulate you on getting into Harvard.”

“Do you ever see anyone from the old neighborhood?” I asked.

She patted my arm and went away.

After a while I saw her leaving the party with an older guy who played guitar in a band called Black Death. Later I found out she was dating him.

I left the party after that. The only reason I'd stayed was for her. I had been hoping she would leave with me.

 

 

WHEN MOM AND GLADSTEIN got married he sold the house in Jefferson Ward and bought a split-level off Baskin Road. That's where I spent the remainder of my adolescence, up to the time I won my scholarship.

A line of trees behind the house functioned as my woods. I would go there whenever I wanted to be alone.

When I was sixteen I actually made a few friends. My girlfriend was named Deborah and she lived one road over: a nice Jewish girl with a wide smile and an exotic nose. For years after we broke up she wrote me sad, introspective letters. Later she married a dentist. Before her wedding she told me I was the only one she had ever truly loved.

On the day I left for college Mom and Gladstein were busy packing the car to drive me to Boston.

I left to say good-bye to Deborah. She was crying, and I was sad. We knew it was over, even though we kept protesting that it wasn't.

She had been accepted into the same school Stan would have gone to had he not been enrolled in the state pen. In fact, it was the school Myra wound up attending.

After we said good-bye I strolled thoughtfully back to the house, wondering why I never felt things the way I should.

Pop was waiting for me. He had come to say farewell. I think it was the first I'd seen of him since Christmas, when he had come by to drop off my gift—a gilt-edged copy of
The Last of the Mohicans
, the only book, I believe, he had ever finished.

“Harvard boy, good golly. Must be your mother's genes'cause it sure ain't mine.”

“Must be,” I said.

“You gonna write?”

“Would you write back?”

I hadn't seen much of him over the years. It wasn't until Mom phoned to tell him I'd been accepted to Harvard that he got excited about me again. He had remarried and redivorced. He was working as a mechanic in a garage in Southside.

“Come on, let's walk to the woods,” he said.

Our house was on a cul-de-sac, and there was a patch of trees at the end that separated our subdivision from the next. That's what he meant by “the woods.”

Pop was wearing glasses and he was fat. He steered me away from Mom and Gladstein, who were loading up the new Lincoln with my belongings. Mom hollered at me not to take too long.

“This is quite an accomplishment for a Witcher,” Pop said. “I don't think any Witcher has ever gone so far. If your brother had gone to college he would have been the first Witcher to do so.”

“But being a Witcher, he didn't.”

“Don't be bitter,” he said. “You got your whole life ahead of you. It's gonna be a heck of a lot easier than mine was.”

“What's so bad about your life? You've always had plenty to eat, a roof over your head.”

“Man does not live by bread alone.”

We came to the cul-de-sac.

Pop was fidgeting with his fingers. He had something he wanted to say, but now that the time had come he didn't know how. He gave me a pleading look, as if he thought I might help him.

“I think they're ready to go,” I said.

We returned to the car, and the whole time he kept darting looks at me.

I thought, Who is this fat man with glasses?

We drove off and he stood watching. I gave him a glance as we drove by and then I looked away. I was hoping we'd get out of there fast, but Mr. Gladstein, or Moses as I called him now, saw a ball bouncing across the road and carefully braked the car. It was irritating, because the ball was plainly off the road and the kid it belonged to was waiting for us to pass.

“Go,” I said.

Mom spun around to give me a reproachful look and then her eyes were diverted by something behind me.

“Your father is waving. Turn and wave good-bye to him.”

But I didn't.

I wasn't going to look back ever again.

When my friends and I were twelve or thirteen, the arbiter in matters of taste, fashion and style was a kid who lived at the end of my street, named Barry. Barry had a subscription to Arnold Gingrich's
Esquire.
He wore the first alligator shirts I ever saw and he made known to us the importance of the alligator for pectoral adornment, as opposed to the horse, or the dolphin. This was in 1967, when kids all over the country were sporting love beads and Nehru jackets. I myself was well on my way to becoming a hippie until Barry set me on a (perhaps) less evolved track. Still, I thought he knew everything worth knowing. Looking back, I believe it might have been Barry, more than my parents or the Catholic school I attended, who truly educated me.

One thing I learned from him was how crucial it was to have nothing to do with the Smiths. (Let's call them the Smiths.) My neighborhood was a tidy place, a working neighborhood, southern in tone without being redneck. The people were decent. They kept nice houses and nice lawns. In those days there was no guarantee the neighborhood kids would go to college. I remember how shocked I was when a guy who sold pot to the neighborhood kids got accepted into Princeton. I never even knew him to read a book. He must have done it on the side, when no one was watching.

The Smiths lived on a marginal road that had been cut through the trees to allow access to other, nicer streets. Theirs was the only house on the road. There was no pop in the house, just a mom and several hyperactive kids. The mom was a sight to behold, bone-thin, scraggly, narrow-lipped. At another, more populist time she could have been a heroine in a Steinbeck novel. When she called her kids to supper she shrieked. She was abusive and drunken, an irrationally angry woman. No one in our neighborhood had much compassion for her, or, for that matter, for any whose tough luck placed them low on the social scale. I guess we were only a step above that horror ourselves. It's why the folks on my mother's side, who were kind of country, didn't like country music. It was too close to home.

Maybe that was the problem people had with the Smiths. People never want to be reminded of what they might have been, or might be. One of the Smiths, named David, was my age. He used to come around on his bicycle to harass us, but only because we never let him play with us. He'd shout names and we'd tell him to get lost. He never fought, he just came around and hollered obscenities. I remember his face, livid, purple, contorted by pain, rage and rejection. There was something ritualistic about his interaction with the neighborhood. We let him know he shouldn't be there. It wasn't his neighborhood.

Barry had laid down the law concerning him. Smith was
scum, white trash
. His name was never mentioned except in the most contemptuous of tones. “Get out of here, no one wants you.” “Who invited you?” Occasionally, in a weak moment, David would catch your eye and try to appeal to you, looking for reason, civility and gentleness. That was tough. Then you'd have to put him in his place. I remember one day, against all convention, he parked his bike and sat on the steps in front of Barry's house. Barry made a point of hosing the steps down afterwards.

For all I know, David might have been a nice boy. He might have had talent, decency and goodness. Since I was no kinder to him than anyone else was, I never found out. I didn't insult him to his face, but I took care to speak of him behind his back with the appropriate measure of scorn.

Now I wonder why. Being Catholic, I was out of place in that WASP neighborhood. My friends went to public schools, I to parochial. I rode a different school bus and stood on a different corner every morning waiting for it. I was overly sensitive to such differences. The dormer windows on my house faced the back yard, whereas every other house on the block had dormer windows facing the front. Our telephone exchange began with 288. Why did everyone else have 282? Did the others take note? Did they see that I was marked? And then there was my father, who was an auditor with the IRS. My friends' fathers were bricklayers and truck drivers. Their fathers taught them the basics of baseball, how to fish, how to hunt. My dad painted depressing street scenes from his impoverished New Orleans childhood and took me on long drives into the country, looking for UFOs.

I wasn't ostracized but socially I felt myself on thin ice. I liked books, and I hid what I was reading when my friends came to visit. One time my buddy Stanley told me his parents wouldn't let him hang around with me because I was a Catholic. I talked him out of that. Another friend's dad expressed his jubilation when JFK, that Vatican front man, got shot in Dallas. (Remembering himself, he later offered me an apology.) I had the deep longing of the outsider, the genuine outsider, to be an insider. The worst thing anyone could call me was “weird.” “Wetta, you're so weird.” I was told that constantly, often at moments when I was priding myself on seeming normal. What was so weird about me? It didn't matter that the words were spoken with affection. I wanted to be like everybody else.

Considering the level of brutality kids suffer when they're thought of as outsiders, I never had it all that bad. My friends accepted that I couldn't fish, couldn't fire a gun, didn't know how to fix cars. They adjusted to my limitations, seemed to like it that I was wistful and poetic. I dated girls; I got invited to parties.

A kind of tolerance exists even among those who might be considered narrow. Tolerance from working people is the real thing because there's nothing patronizing about it. The people I grew up with were polite and agreeable, which must have made it all the worse for David Smith. What does it mean when everyone is friendly and pleasant and gets vicious only when you come around? Like I say, I never had it as bad as he did. But maybe I felt things might turn if I wasn't careful. It's a good idea to be normal.

The Smiths of the world serve a cautionary purpose. There's something sacrificial about them. They perform a social function. They set a bottom, a defining limit, to what we dread and fear about ourselves, and reassure us that we haven't reached it yet.

What happened to David Smith? Did he become a criminal, a sociopath? Maybe he adjusted. Maybe he's a saint. When I run into people from the old neighborhood they usually can tell me something about the whereabouts of our contemporaries. But no one ever says a thing about David. I've thought about him many times over the years and even suffered for his memory. To tell the truth, this book was written, if anything, as a kind of homage to him. Still, I've never bothered to ask anyone what happened to him because I'm sure no one would know.

I would like to thank Amy Einhorn, Alice Tasman and Anna Jardine for their advice, encouragement and support.

Stephen Wetta grew up in the '60s and '70s, was influenced by the music and the literature of the time, drank, used drugs, got into financial trouble, and spent far too much time reading and writing. He knocked around for years at different jobs, didn't like any of them, and got sober without wanting to. Somehow he wound up with a Ph.D. and worked for ten years as an adjunct. His academic career was singularly undistinguished, and he was eventually hired full-time by a school that couldn't get rid of him, shortly before he was jailed for tax evasion.
If Jack's in Love
is his first novel.