Only Love Can Break Your Heart (18 page)

“I know you know about the money, Richard,” Old Giff said. “Is this because of that?”

I didn’t answer. Old Giff sighed.

“I think it is, son,” he said. “I think you got a damned-fool idea in your head, and now it’s come to this.”

He held his arms out in the air for a moment—a gesture to the magnitude of my predicament.

“How well do you know Mrs. Carswell, son?”

“Not at all, sir,” I said.

“She’s a very kind and decent young woman who is trying to move forward with her life in the wake of a painful divorce,” Old Giff said. “Did you know that, son?”

I shook my head.

“Would you like to know something else about Mrs. Carswell, Richard?”

I didn’t, but I knew he was going to tell me anyway.

“Her father is a very close friend of mine. Mr. Wells Basten,” Old Giff said. “Do you know Mr. Wells Basten, son?”

“No, sir.”

“You should. He’s the chairman of our board of trustees.”

My eyes widened. Wells Basten, I thought, as in the Basten Tennis Center and the Basten Alumni House.

“Mr. Basten and his family have long been important supporters of this institution,” he said. “In addition to substantial sums to our annual fund and dedicated gifts to development projects, he likes to provide up-to-date reference books to our library’s collection. Can you see where this is going, Richard?”

“Yes, sir,” I said.

“I have to hand it to you, boy. You’ve got a knack for self-destruction.”

I had to agree with him.

“If it was anything else,” Old Giff muttered, “or anyone else . . .”

His voice trailed off into a long sigh.

For a moment we sat together in silence. Miserable as I was, I felt a welling up of sympathy for Dr. Giffen. Even after what I’d done to him, he still wanted to spare me. But I’d left him with only one course of action.

“It’s all right, Dr. Giffen,” I said. “I deserve it.”

He walked back around his desk and slumped into his chair.

“What do you think this is going to do to your mother, boy?”

At last the tears came.

“Please, Dr. Giffen,” I said, my voice quivering with desperation. “You don’t have to talk to her. Just kick me out already.”

Old Giff removed his glasses again and set them on the desk in front of him. He rubbed his eyes and let out another long sigh. He must have been thinking what I needed was therapy, or a good ass kicking, or maybe just an arm around my shoulder from someone like him. But it didn’t matter. I had insulted the headmaster and traumatized the daughter of the chairman of the board of trustees. My fate was sealed before I walked through the door.

A light flashed on Old Giff’s phone. He lifted the receiver to his ear.

“Yes?” he said. “All right. Thank you, Marilyn.”

He gently set the receiver back in its cradle.

“Your mother’s here,” Old Giff said.

I could never have prepared for the depth of self-loathing I felt as I watched my mother wilt while Dr. Giffen explained to her why I was being dismissed. It would be utterly foolish, then or now, to suppose that there was any glimmer of relief beneath the shock and the distress. Nevertheless, I held on to the conviction that I had spared her a small part of her burden. Besides, she wouldn’t worry about it for long, I thought; we had bigger problems.

“Well then,” Dr. Giffen said.

And so it ended for me at Macon Prep. I followed my mother out of Old Giff’s office and down the stairs of Leggett Hall for the last time as a student. As we drove in silence under the gates and on toward our uncertain future, I was overcome by an odd sense of euphoria. At last, I felt at least partially purged. And for a while anyway, I was free. I wouldn’t have to start at Randolph High until January.

13

MY MOTHER TOOK MY
expulsion from Macon rather well, all things considered. She was finding herself suited to the role of martyr. The Bible study women again rallied around her, as they had since the Old Man’s stroke. My return to the public school system was the subject of many prayers.

Christmas came and went. My mother made the best of it, doing her usual bit with the decorations: garlands of pine needles wrapping the banisters, tied off with red velvet bows; white Christmas lights in the boxwoods and the dogwood trees lining the driveway; a tasteful tree and an heirloom crèche set on the mantel.

With the Old Man no longer able to work, my mother had to find some kind of employment. She ended up taking a job behind a desk at the furniture company that belonged to Miss Anita Holt’s family. Something was better than nothing. The accountant, Mosby Watts, put my mother in touch with a private car dealer, and within a week the Mercedes was gone, the sum of its sale already spent on bills. I was surprised at how sorry I was to see it go.

The Old Man had a regular aide during the daytime—a young black man named William. William wore hospital whites and a pair of Air Jordans. They spent a lot of time watching sports on TV. When dementia made the Old Man forget himself and start referring to him as “boy” or “the nigger,” William just ignored him, as if they were an old married couple who had lived with each other’s careless words for too long to be bothered by them.

William started inviting me out onto the back porch to keep him company during his smoke breaks. He was full of questions about what it was like to grow up rich.

“I’m sorry he says those things to you,” I said.

We were out on the side porch. William smoked one of his Kools, huddling against the cold in his suede jacket.

“Dag, man,” he said. “Cold out here. Where your rock at?”

“My rock?”

“Your ball, homes.”

He pointed at the basketball hoop on the gable of the garage.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Just thought we might shoot a little to stay warm.”

“I’m not sure we still have one.”

We stamped around a bit, hands stuffed in pockets, William’s cigarette dangling from his mouth.

“He’s not a racist, you know,” I said. “He’s just old.”

William lifted his cigarette and pointed the smoking end of it out toward Twin Oaks.

“Who lives up there?” he asked.

“The Culvers,” I said.

“Ah. ‘That son of a bitch Brad Culver,’ ” William said, imitating the Old Man’s angry-codger voice.

“That’s the one,” I said.

I told William about Twin Oaks and Frank Cherry and Paul’s run-in with Culver. William absorbed it all thoughtfully, sucking his cheeks in when he puffed on his Kool.

“It’s a nice house,” he said.

“Yeah,” I said.

It was an abnormally cold winter. The house was always drafty, with its high ceilings and stone and wood floors. To save money, my mother kept the thermostat below sixty. Every morning, I built great, heaping, roaring fires to quiet the Old Man’s shivering under his blanket in the armchair in front of the daytime reruns.

One morning, before William arrived, I left the Old Man and, bundled up in gloves, a stocking cap, and a flannel-lined parka, went out into the frosty cold to restock the woodpile next to the fireplace. Grabbing the garden cart from where I had left it a few days before, I trudged out to the big stack of split logs behind a small hedge in the side yard. Off in the distance, I could see the smoke rising from the Culvers’ chimneys. Since they had returned, Brad Culver hadn’t even bothered to call.

Culver was not the only one of Dad’s former business associates or so-called friends who had made little to no effort to comfort him in his decline. I understood this neglect better as I grew older. These men were all over sixty; many of them, like the Old Man, on into their seventies. They had all lived through at least one of three wars, smoked heavily in their younger days, drank hard liquor, and ate plenty of red meat. They exercised little beyond a weekly round of golf and maybe a few minutes a week standing in one of those old belly-fat vibrating machines. None of them wanted to be confronted with what they might themselves soon be facing.

Brad Culver was no different, yet his neglect struck me as unforgivable. As I loaded the garden cart with wood, I visualized Culver in a much warmer room in front of a cheerier fire. I imagined myself clubbing him over the head or whacking him at the knees or, as Paul had instructed me so long ago, right in the balls and then in the nose. I indulged this brutal daydream until I was heaving, the sweat running across my stomach beneath the parka, my breath firing out in white bursts of steam.

I pulled the cart behind me back up to the house, quieting my breath as I went, feeling the sweat go cool beneath my coat. As I reached the side door and opened it, I heard the muffled sound of the Old Man calling to me, his voice high pitched and desperate.

I found him in the bathroom, standing with his back to me, his slippered feet spread awkwardly on the white tile floor. One white-knuckled hand gripped his aluminum walker, while the other splayed out flat against the wall. His pants fly was open, and his flaccid member dangled out, dribbling urine down his leg. Without thinking, I stepped under his outstretched arm so that he could lean on me, grabbed his flank with my right hand to hold him up, pinched his pecker with my left, and aimed it at the toilet bowl.

There I stood in silence, my Dad hanging on to me, his face clenched in a grimace of effort. I felt the rush of steaming piss pulsing beneath my fingertips, listened to his stream splashing in the water beneath us. This is where you got your start, boy, I thought.

WILLIAM STARTED BRINGING
a basketball with him so he could shoot hoops while the Old Man slept. I stood under the goal and tried to catch the rebounds as William tossed the ball up between puffs on his cigarette.

William was as inscrutable as the Sphinx. He liked to talk, but not about anything personal—just sports and cars, mostly. I wanted to know everything about him: what it was like to take care of people like the Old Man, how he’d happened to end up in the job in the first place, how long he expected to be doing it, what his dreams were, what it was like to be black. I never asked him these things. In fact, though I began to think of him as my best friend, I knew next to nothing about him.

The first Friday in January was my mother’s turn to host the Bible study. The Old Man had dozed off. William and I were outside playing our little game of shoot, catch, and pass as the cars began to roll in.

William had arrived that day wearing the new pair of Air Jordan 2 basketball shoes he’d received from his mother for Christmas.

“Do your shoes make you fly?” I said, passing back a rebound.

“I can fly over you.”

“Prove it.”

“When I’m done with my cig.”

He set his stance in his new white shoes and rocked forward onto his toes, releasing a smooth, arcing jump shot that bounced off the board and clanged through the rim.

“You didn’t call bank,” I said.

William ignored me, catching the ball with one hand and dribbling between his legs, spinning around and popping up a fallaway jumper that rasped through the stiff, frozen net. He flicked his cigarette butt into the grass and popped up another jumper.

“Did you know people are being shot over those shoes?” I asked.

“People get shot over a lot less than a pair of Jordans,” William said.

“That’s true, I guess.”

William stopped and tucked the ball under his arm, gazing back toward the house. Behind me stood a woman in a maroon down overcoat and white Tretorns, smiling at me.

“Hello, Rocky,” she said.

It was Leigh Bowman, back from the funny farm.

Her hair was much shorter and looked dirty. She wore no makeup. Her eyes were wide and glassy. She looked like someone who had just woken up from a case of the flu and walked outside to check the mailbox before going back to bed.

A wave of guilt overtook me. Since she had been gone, we had all been so consumed with our own problems that I had scarcely thought about what had become of Leigh or what I had done to her. I felt like running away. Instead I stuffed my hands in my pockets and trudged over to her. William followed behind, the basketball tucked under his arm as he lit another cigarette.

“Who’s your friend?” she asked.

“This is William,” I said. “He takes care of my dad.”

“Could I trouble you for a cigarette, William?” Leigh asked.

William removed another cigarette from the pack of Kools in his coat pocket and handed it to Leigh. She leaned forward as he cupped the lighter to her face and back to his own.

“Mmm, menthol,” she said. “Perfect on a cold day.”

“I didn’t know you were home,” I said.

“For a few weeks now,” she said. “I’m sorry I haven’t been by. Daddy’s been very protective.”

I could sense no irony in her words or in her tranquilized gaze.

“Leigh, are you all right?”

It was Miss Anita, peering out from the side door.

“I’m fine, Miss Anita,” Leigh said, furtively hiding the cigarette behind her back. “Just saying hello to Richard here.”

“Come inside, dear,” Miss Anita said. “It’s cold.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Leigh called back. “In a minute.”

“Hello, Richard,” Miss Anita said.

“Hi, Miss Anita,” I said.

She disappeared back into the house.

“Miss Anita has been my angel,” Leigh said. “She’s been like a mother to me since I got saved.”

“Saved?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s wonderful, isn’t it? I finally understand what it means to know the Lord. It’s truly incredible, especially after what I’ve been through. You know what they were saying about me, don’t you?”

“No,” I lied.

She took a drag from the cigarette.

“That I was
possessed
,” she said.
“
By the
devil
!”

She laughed—a barking sound, like a seal. Little wisps of smoke trickled from her nostrils.

“Leigh,” Miss Anita called again from the house.

“I better run,” she said. “It’s so good to see you.”

She opened her arms. Slower than I should have, I returned her embrace. She felt thin and fragile beneath the down overcoat, as if she had the hollow bones of a bird.

“Bye, now,” she said. “God bless!”

She ran back to the house, her arms stiff beside her, legs trudging along beneath the overcoat.

“Who was that?” William asked.

“My brother’s old girlfriend,” I said.

“Judge Bowman’s girl?” William asked.

“Yes,” I said. “How did you know?”

“Your daddy got some stories to tell.”

“Oh,” I said. “What did you think of her?”

He shrugged.

“She used to be so beautiful,” I said.

“Huh,” William replied.

He took a last drag off his cigarette and extinguished it on the ground next to where Leigh had left her butt. He stooped and picked up both butts and tucked them into the pocket of his coat. I turned toward the house, to the window by the door, where I could see the Old Man peering out at us, up from his nap.