Mission Flats (6 page)

‘Dick, he’d have listened because he had to listen, same as I am.’

‘Well,’ Diane retorted, ‘your mother wouldn’t have listened.’ She exhaled cigarette smoke. ‘Why would she listen to some lawyer? She never listened to anyone else.’

There was a pregnant moment while the four of them waited to see how I would react to that. There was some risk in mentioning my mother. In the ten weeks since she’d died, I had wrapped myself up in righteous Yankee stoicism. Never mind that my grief carried something extra, a tinge of guilt and shame – more than the usual dose. But to my own surprise, Diane’s comment did not trigger any of the old sadness. We were thinking the same thing: If the Game-Show Host had ever tried to put off Annie Truman with the high-handedness he’d shown me . . .

‘She’d have kicked his ass,’ I said.

Here is my mother: Around 1977 or so, on a raw morning in early spring. The weather was damp. In our kitchen that morning, you could sense the dankness outside, the smells of rain and mud. Mum was at the table, reading a hardcover book. She was already dressed, her hair gathered at the back of her neck exposing the empty dimple-holes in her pierced ears. I was at the table too. And before me, my preferred breakfast of the moment, Apple Jacks and a glass of milk. The glass was a concession from my mother, who’d recently given up trying to force me to drink the unpotable milk in the bowl, with its filmy emulsion of cereal scum. There was still a lingering self-consciousness between us over this tiff. I had the strongest urge to drink the soiled milk for her, but I couldn’t quite do it. (Those amoeboid globules of Apple Jacks oil . . .)

‘What are you reading?’

‘A book.’

‘What book?’

‘A grown-up book.’

‘What’s it called?’

She showed me the cover.

‘Do you like that book?’

‘Yes, Ben.’

‘Why do you like it?’

‘Because I’m learning.’

‘About what?’

‘It’s a history book. I’m learning about the past.’

‘Why?’

‘Why what?’

‘Why would you want to learn
that
?’

‘To be better.’

‘Better than what?’

She looked at me. Blue-gray eyes, laugh lines. ‘Just a better person.’

Dad pulled up in his truck. The overnight shift was supposed to go from midnight to eight, but Dad always seemed to get home earlier. I heard him hawk his throat before coming inside. He sat down at the table with little mute greetings for Mum and me.

Look!
I shot a glance at Mum:
Does he know?
There was a white patch in Dad’s bushy brown hair! Right at the top of his forehead! It was white powder, like baby powder, I guessed.
Mum, do you see it?

‘Dad, there’s—’

‘Ben.’ My mother gave me a stern look to shut me up.

Dad said, ‘What is it, Ben?’

‘Um, nothing.’

Mum’s face had gone a little white too. Her lips compressed into a line.

Dad offered around a box of doughnuts from the Hunny Dip doughnut shop in town. On the box was a cartoon of a brown honey pot brimming with thick, golden ooze. A doughnut floated in midair above the jar, dripping with the stuff. Dad said, ‘Here. From Hunny Dip’s, like you like.’

‘No, thank you.’

‘Go on, Anne. It won’t kill you.’

‘No, Claude.’ You could tell from Mum’s voice she was angry about him bringing home those doughnuts.

I helped myself to a chocolate glazed, which pleased him. He cupped my jaw in his thick-fingered paw and shook it. His fingers had a weird, tangy chlorine smell. There was, I noticed, more white powder on his shirt cuff.

‘Attsaboy It’s just a doughnut, for Christ’s sake.’

‘Don’t touch him, Claude.’

‘Don’t touch him? Why not?’

Her blue eyes were squinched half-shut, as if she wanted to deny her husband the pleasure of looking into them. ‘Ben, take your doughnut and go in the other room.’

‘But I’m not done yet—’

‘Ben.’

‘What about my cereal?’

Dad said, meekly, ‘You better go, Ben.’

My mother was a small woman, maybe five-two and thin. But somehow she was able to dominate her husband. He seemed to enjoy submitting to her too. It was a game, a little joke of his:
Of all the people to boss around big Claude Truman, this little spitfire . . .

When I was safely out of the room – and eavesdropping from the TV room next door – I heard her say, ‘– my house.’

‘What?’

‘I said, get out of my house now.’

‘Annie, what the hell’s wrong with you?’

‘Claude, there’s powdered sugar in your hair. This is a little town, Claude. Did you have to rub my face in it?’

‘Rub your face—’

‘Claude, don’t. Don’t talk to me like I’m stupid, like I’m the only one who doesn’t know. I am not stupid, Claude.’

I did not really understand what was going on that morning, but I knew – I think I always knew – their relationship was a precarious one. Dad’s temper, his rabbity sexual habits, his ego, and Mum’s own strong personality all made for a volatile marriage. Not a bad marriage, but an inconstant one. Sometimes they acted like lovers; they disappeared upstairs on Sunday afternoons for naps or kissed on the lips or laughed over obscure incidents in their secret history. Other times, the strain between them was obvious, like the creaking of a rope under a heavy load. As a kid I assumed this was what true love looked like – that love was inherently unstable above a certain temperature.

I pushed the door open a crack to spy and was immediately seen.

Dad spotted me – wide-eyed, the doughnut glutinizing in my fingers – and something, some small breath of shame, went out of him. To my astonishment, he surrendered to Mum immediately, asking only, ‘How long till I can come back?’

‘Until I’m ready’

‘Annie, come on. Just tell me how long.’

‘A week. Then we’ll see.’

‘Anne, where am I supposed to go? I’m exhausted.’

‘Go to the station. Go wherever you want, I don’t care. Except the doughnut shop.’

Later that morning, after Dad had gone, Mum took me into town to return the box of doughnuts. Dad’s friend Liz Lofgren was behind the counter that morning, and Mum waited until the store was empty to inform Liz that she’d better have nothing more to do with Chief Truman if she knew what was good for her. Liz pretended not to understand for a minute, but when Mum said, ‘You don’t want to be on my wrong side,’ Liz seemed to agree.

Anne Wilmot Truman was raised in Boston, and the imprint of that city stayed with her. It was in her voice, in the mangled
r
s and odd archaic colloquialisms (she always called soda
tonic;
the dry cleaner, the
cleanser;
milk shakes,
frappes).
But the deepest impression was left by her father, a striver named Joe Wilmot.

Joe had clawed his way up from a Dorchester tenement. In the 1930s and ’40s he built a small chain of grocery stores in Boston, a respectable success if not a spectacular one. It was enough to propel him out to the suburbs, anyway. But even after he’d made it, Joe could never quite shake the sense that his new neighbors – all those WASPy Juniors and The Thirds with their tennis games and rumpled clothes – possessed something he did not, something more than money. It was an attitude more than anything else, a sort of at-homeness among the big green lawns and tree-shaded streets. For lack of a better word Joe called it ‘class,’ and he knew it would always be out of his reach. Of course, this is the frustration of arrivistes everywhere. They cannot acquire ‘class’ because they cannot envision themselves having it. It is a failure of the imagination. They are anti-Gatsbys.

So Joe did what would-be Gatsbys have so often done: He tried to inculcate the elusive stuff in his only daughter. After all, this was Boston in the age of that real-life Gatsby, Joe Kennedy. And what had Old Man Kennedy learned if not that class is granted only to the second generation? So Joe Wilmot sent Annie to a private school, and when he deemed the education there inadequate, he made up the difference by paying her directly for educating herself: nickels and dimes for good posture, for reading Yeats or Joyce, for teaching herself a Mozart
lied
on the piano. The payola did not stop when she got older either. Right through the Winsor School and Radcliffe – between ballet recitals and voice lessons and a semester in Paris – Annie could always earn a buck or a fin by reciting a speech from Shakespeare or some other feat of cultivation. It was a game father and daughter played on the road to refinement.

Then the unthinkable happened. Its name was Claude Truman.

He was a thick-wristed policeman – a policeman! – from some godawful backwater in Maine. They were wildly mismatched. What Mum saw in him, nobody could understand. My guess is it was precisely his muscular rudeness that made Claude Truman appealing. He was cocksure and strong, a bull moose in springtime. He was different. Not dumb, far from it. But at the same time this was a man who thought John Cheever was a hockey player and Ionesco a corporation. It must have been a relief to Annie not to have to work so hard. Who knows? Maybe there was even an exotic appeal to Versailles, Maine. Of course, she’d never seen it, but the
idea
of Acadia County must have been romantic –
the forest primeval
and all that – especially to a young woman who had been literated to a fare-thee-well, educated beyond all reason. Her father forbade Annie to see Claude Truman, but she defied him, and the couple married three months after they met. He was thirty-seven, she was twenty-nine.

The price was high. Mum and her father had a ferocious argument, and the rift between them never healed. She called him every now and then; after she hung up the phone, she usually went to her bedroom to cry. When he died, Joe left his daughter enough to pay for my education and a little extra for herself, but not the lode she might have received if she’d stuck to the plan.

Mum did continue one Wilmot family tradition. When I was a kid, she’d pay me for various demonstrations of self-improvement. A dollar for learning the ‘we happy few’ speech from
Henry V,
and another buck for reciting it before dinner. Fifty cents for reading a novel (if it was not ‘crap’), a dollar for reading a biography. Five dollars for sitting with her through all of
I, Claudius
on PBS.

The day Mum kicked Dad out for getting doughnut powder in his hair, she cleared aside the kitchen furniture and asked me if I wanted to dance for a one-time payment of one dollar. She put on a Frank Sinatra record in the TV room and left the door open so we could hear it, then she instructed me on the proper placement of the man’s hands and the proper execution of the box step.

I laid my left hand on her hip and held my right hand up so she could rest hers in my palm.

‘Now what?’

‘Step with your outside foot.’

‘Which one?’

‘Any one, Ben. I’ll follow you.’

‘Why?’

‘That’s how it works. The man leads. Just keep stepping with your outside foot. Make the box.’

We danced for a while, to ‘Summer Wind,’ then ‘Luck Be a Lady’

She asked, ‘Do you want to talk about what happened this morning?’

‘No.’

‘Do you have anything you want to ask me?’

I was preoccupied with the complexities of the box step –
look up at your partner, never down at your feet; stand straight, as if there were a string coming out the top of your head pulling you up, up
– and all the while I was con-cen-tra-ting-on-the-beat. So I said no, it was okay.

She clinched my head a little too tight to her tummy and said, ‘My Ben,’ which meant she was sad but didn’t want me to know it.

‘You can’t bet that. It’s your badge.’

‘Of course I can. It’s worth something, isn’t it? It’s gold.’

‘It’s not gold. Besides, what am I gonna do with it? Melt it down?’

‘No, you could wear it, Diane. It’s jewelry’

‘Ben, I’m not going to walk around wearing your damn badge.’

‘Why not? You can be the new chief.’

She rolled her eyes, unamused. ‘Come on, bet money or fold. That’s how it works. U.S. currency’

Bobby Burke added, ‘Legal tender for all debts public and private.’

The pot was somewhere just south of fifty bucks, which is about as high as it gets in this game. I was sitting on three queens, with just Diane to beat. It was no time to drop out. I appealed to Dick: ‘Is this badge worth fifteen bucks or not? Tell her, Dick. These things cost twenty-five, thirty bucks. I can show you the catalog.’

‘That’s if you buy it new,’ he demurred.

‘Dick, it’s not a Buick. It doesn’t matter how many miles are on it.’

‘It’s up to Diane. If she wants to take it, she can take it.’

‘Jesus, Dick, you have no backbone. You’re like a . . . a squid. What, are you afraid of Diane?’

‘Yup.’

‘Diane—’

‘No.’

‘Diane, just listen.’

‘No.’

‘Look, if you take it, you can wear it around town and make me look like an idiot. Now, how’s that?’

She shook her head no. ‘Throw in your pants. I’ll take those.’

‘I’m not betting my pants.’

‘Must not be a very good hand.’

‘It’s got nothing to do with that.’

‘Then throw ’em in.’

‘Diane, I’m not betting my pants.’

‘What else do you have?’

‘That’s it. It’s all I got.’

She picked up the badge and turned it over in her palm, frowning. I expected her to bite it to see if it was counterfeit. ‘I’ll take it. Maybe I’ll make an earring out of it or something. I’ll wear it around town so everyone will know what a loser you are.’ She tossed it in the pot.

‘Ben,’ Dick asked, ‘does this make Diane the new chief?’

‘She hasn’t won yet, Dick.’