The Books of Fell (3 page)

The TV was on and my five-year-old sister was asleep on the rug in front of it, her paper doll and a bag of Chips Ahoy! beside her.

“Wake up, Jazzy,” I said.

“Is it tomorrow?”

“No. It’s still tonight.”

“What are you doing home?”

“I got jilted.”

“What’s jilted?”

“Stood up. Keats went to the dance with someone else.”

Jazzy sat up and rubbed her eyes. She checked to be sure the paper doll was there. She never made a move without the paper doll. She called the doll Georgette.

“Is Mommy home?” she said.

“No, Mommy doesn’t seem to be home,” I said. That teed me off, too. Our mother was supposed to be home by eight-thirty on Saturday nights. The store where she worked on Main Street closed at eight in the summer.

I’d felt bad enough leaving Jazzy alone at seven-thirty, when I’d left to go to Adieu. Mom said she’d be all right by herself for forty-five minutes. Mrs. Fiedler was right next door.

“I bet you didn’t have any dinner,” I said.

“Georgette had fwogs’ legs,” she said, caressing the doll.

“Say frogs,” I said. “You’re old enough now to say frog, not fwog.” Then I leaned down and patted her blond curls, to make up for snapping at her. “I’ll make you an omelet,” I said.

“I don’t want an omelet. I want your beef Borgan.”

“My beef Bourguignon takes five hours to cook,” I said. “I’ll make you a cheese-and-tomato omelet.”

“With bacon,” Jazzy said.

“All right, with bacon. But it’ll take longer.”

I took off my white coat and undid my black silk tie.

“Can Georgette have your red rose, Johnny?” Jazzy asked.

“Tell her to help herself. I can’t use it.”

“Did you have a fight with Keats?”

“No, we didn’t fight. Her father doesn’t like me.”

“I like you, Johnny.”

“I know. I like you, too.”

I went into the kitchen and started getting stuff out of the refrigerator.

Jazzy came in after me in a few minutes, carrying Georgette and the two shoeboxes that contained Georgette’s wardrobe. Jazzy made all Georgette’s clothes. In one shoebox the clothes were shabby: torn dresses, sweaters with holes in them, and tattered shorts and slacks. In the other shoebox there were short dresses, long dresses, hats, and fancy high-heeled shoes. Those clothes in that shoebox were trimmed with lace, decorated with real, tiny buttons, and colored with the brightest shades in Jazzy’s crayon collection.

Jazzy’s game was to have Georgette discover that her real parents were millionaires. She would dress Georgette in her poor clothes and serve her macaroni, or shredded wheat, or a few raisins. Then Georgette’s real family would come by to claim her, and she’d be dressed in her other clothes and sit down to “fwogs”‘ legs or champagne and caviar.

When we lived in Brooklyn, my mother had a part-time job at The Gleeful Gourmet. She’d bring home some new delicacy for us to sample nearly every night: guacamole, cold lobster mousse, artichoke hearts with mushroom sauce — things we’d never tasted before. Sometimes my mother’d make salads for the place, or hors d’oeuvres or desserts, and I’d help her. That was when I discovered that I liked to cook, and that I was good at it.

My father’d retired from the force by then. He was doing private investigating. I’d fix him the food he’d take on stakeouts, surprise him with things like deviled meatballs, Chinese chicken wings, or stuffed grape leaves.

When we moved out to Seaville, after his first heart attack, we were talking seriously about opening a place like Plain and Fancy, where I’d gotten my part-time job.

What we hadn’t counted on was the high rents for stores in a resort area. The stores in Seaville cost from a thousand to two thousand a month.

Since my father’s death, all Mom talked about was getting back to Brooklyn and opening something there.

I was just flipping the omelet over when my mother’s Volkswagen pulled into the driveway, with the Born to Shop decal still fixed to the back fender. I figured she hadn’t noticed it yet.

I told her that I’d been stood up, leaving out the encounter with Pingree because I didn’t want to get her on my back about the dent in the Dodge just yet.

“Would you mind making one of those for me, too?” she asked. “I’m really beat! We had three customers come in at five minutes to eight. I said, ‘We’re closing at eight,’ and one of them said, ‘We won’t be long.’ What time is it now?”

“Quarter to ten,” I said. “That’s too long to leave Jazzy alone.”

“Mrs. Fiedler was coming over every twenty minutes, Johnny.”

“Mommy? Georgette had fwogs’, frrr-ogs’ legs for dinner!”

“That’s nice, honey. I know it’s too long to leave her, but I couldn’t walk out on a thousand-dollar sale, and I called Mrs. Fiedler to be sure she was home and could check on Jazzy. A thousand dollars in an hour and a half, and only two of them were buying! I don’t know where people get their money! Do they rob banks?”

“They put it all on credit cards,” I said. “You know how that goes, Mom.”

“Don’t start on me tonight, Johnny!” she said. “Just because your fancy girlfriend stood you up, don’t take it out on me!”

“Keats’s father doesn’t like Johnny,” Jazzy said.

“Johnny should stick with his own kind if he doesn’t want to be treated like a doormat,” Mom said.

I passed Jazzy her omelet. “What’s my own kind? Dad always said it was the wrong kind.”

“It was! But that’s over. We moved out here so you could meet just your average kind of kid. Can’t you settle for your average kind? And now I hate it out here!”

“I hate it out here, too,” Jazzy said.

“Jasmine, eat your omelet your brother was nice enough to make for you.”

“Do you want cheese and bacon and tomato in your omelet, too?” I asked my mother.

“I’d eat ants and grasshoppers and spiders in my omelet at this point!”

Jazzy began to giggle.

Mom put her arms around her. “At least someone thinks I’m funny.”

Mom did look tired, but she was still a good-looking woman, even after nine and a half hours behind the counter at Dressed to Kill. We were all blonds in our family, although my mother’s hair was veering toward orange because of something she was using to “highlight” the color. My deep-blue eyes had come from my mother. Jazzy’d gotten her pug nose.

“How did your girlfriend get Quint Blade over there so fast?” My mother asked what I’d been asking myself ever since I left Fernwood Manor. Don’t tell me Quint Blade didn’t have a date for his Senior Prom?”

“Maybe there are two jilted people with broken hearts tonight,” I said. “Me, and Quint Blade’s original date.”

“Or just maybe she never intended to go with you at all!” my mother said.

“Mom, Keats was all excited this morning when the orchid arrived. She bought me a purple silk bow tie.”

“I’d like to give her a purple fat lip!” my mother said.

“I’d like to give her a purple punch in the eye!” Jazzy said.

“Do you want your omelet firm or runny?” I asked.

“Runny,” my mother said.

“Runny out the door and give Keats a purple kick in the pants,” said Jazzy.

“Jazzy,
eat!”
my mother said. “So how did you find out that Quint Blade took Keats to the prom?” My mother sat with her elbows on the kitchen table, waiting for an answer.

I began to tell her about my run-in with Woodrow Pingree and somewhere near the end of the story, speak of the devil, the telephone rang.

“John Fell?” said Mr. Pingree. “What are you doing for dinner tomorrow night? Would you like to come here?”

Sunday morning I took Jazzy to St. Luke’s, where she went to Sunday school and I went to church.

When we got back, Mom was standing in the kitchen, holding the phone’s arm out with her left hand, muffling the receiver with her right. “It’s Herself!” Mom said. “She’s been calling you all morning.”

We had our dinner at one o’clock on Sundays. I watched Mom pull a ham out of the oven while I spoke with Keats.

“I have to tell you something, Fell.” “I already know.”

“How can you already know when you don’t know what I’m going to say?”

“You’re going to say you went to the prom with Quint Blade.”

“God, I hate this town!” Keats said. “You can’t even turn around in this town without everyone talking about it!”

“I’m going to be over your way tonight,” I said. “Why don’t we arrange a secret meeting on the beach?”

Behind me, Mom said, “Don’t let her treat you like some backdoor Johnny.”

“What did your mother just say?” Keats asked.

“She said I was a backdoor Johnny.”

“Oh, Fell! She’s mad at me, too, I suppose.”

“Why don’t we meet clandestinely?” I asked. Keats once wrote a poem that began “Clandestine skies beckon me,” which kicked off a long harangue from her English teacher, who said skies couldn’t be clandestine.

“A clandestine meeting,” she said, “under a clandestine sky. Shall we do something terribly clandestine?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I’m glad you’re not furious, Fell.” “I’m furious. I’m just holding it in.” “What do you mean you’re going to be over my way?”

“I’ve got a date.”

“You’re stabbing me right through the heart, Fell. Last night wasn’t my fault.”

“Meet me down on the beach at nine o’clock.”

Keats laughed. “That’s not a very big date if you can get away by nine.”

“Meet me down near Beauregard,” I said.

“I love you, Fell.”

“We’ll talk about it.”

When I hung up, Mom said she thought there was something fishy about that dinner invitation from Woodrow Pingree.

“I think he thinks I’ll make a good companion for his son.”

“What’s wrong with his son that he needs a companion?”

“I think he’s this loner or something.”

“So are you. That’s like the blind leading the blind,” she said. “What’s in it for you? Are you just going there so you can be within panting distance of Adieu?”

“No,” I said. “I’m just curious.”

“That killed the cat, and it killed your father, too.”

“At least he was being paid for it.”

“Paid to sit around, stand around, hang around — that was no life. Tell Jazzy she’s to set the table. How was the new minister’s sermon?”

“Jazzy?” I shouted into the living room. “Set the table! The new minister is one of those guys who makes you feel good about something you shouldn’t feel good about,” I said.

St. Luke’s had just tossed out Reverend Shorr. In his place they’d hired Jack Klinger. He was a new, dynamic, Yuppie preacher who’d given a sermon the week before in favor of opening the North Shore Nuclear Plant, the one that a lot of people claimed wasn’t safe to operate. He’d called his talk
Let Go, Let God!
He’d said faith was all about that: trusting. But I kept thinking, let go and meet God a few decades before you’d planned to.

This morning’s sermon had been billed out front on the sermon board this way: I
Talk of Dreams/Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet/Rev. J. J. Klingen, DD.

“What did he make you feel good about that you shouldn’t feel good about?” my mother asked.

“It wasn’t me he made feel good. It was all the people going to shrinks. All the people paying out a fortune to headshrinkers. Reverend Klinger said sometimes it’s worth it.”

“I’d like a headshrinker to help me figure out why we ever moved out here,” said my mother.

“Reverend Klinger said shrinks help you discover what your dreams mean, the same way Daniel, in the Bible, helped Nebuchadnezzar find out what
his
dream meant.”

“Never mind Nebuchadnezzar, why did I pick someplace to live where I can’t make more than six dollars an hour?”

“I can tell you the answer to that,” I said. “You don’t need a shrink. You just didn’t do any research on living in a resort area.”

“Don’t blame everything on me, Johnny. Your father wanted to make this move, too.”

“You talked him into it,” I said.

“Well, we’re not going to stay.”

“You keep saying that, but we never talk about how we’re going to move back to Brooklyn, without an apartment to move into.”

“Get Jazzy away from the TV and in here to set the table,” my mother said.

She wasn’t good at facing things, or making plans, until the last minute.

I was best at facing and planning clandestine meetings.

Pingree’s son answered the door. He had these little pins for eyes behind thick swirls of glass, a kid about my age and height, with light-brown hair combed forward so that he looked as if he had bangs.

Without a hello or how are you, he pointed down at the black-and-white tile floor as I stepped inside. There was an ace of hearts there.

“I can change the face of that card,” he announced.

I just looked at him. He had on a pair of faded blue jeans, a black tank top, a heavy military belt, and tan Top-Siders. My mother’d said, “Dress up when you go there for dinner. Don’t always be locked into the Teenage Look — they’re probably fancy-schmancy.” So I had on a dark suit, white shirt, and blue-and-white striped tie.

“With your permission?” he said.

“Okay.” I shrugged.

He stepped on the card, took his foot away, and there was a five of spades.

I didn’t know how he did it. The thing was, I didn’t care. I didn’t warm up to kids who said things like “with your permission?” I had as much curiosity about stunts like that as I had about Icelandic breakdancing.

He had this big, triumphant grin on his face. It reminded me somehow of Jazzy’s smile when she was being toilet trained and could make it through a whole day without dumping in her Pampers.

I managed to mumble something congratulatory before I said, “I’m John Fell.”

“Everyone calls me Ping.”

“Everyone but my family calls me Fell.”

His father appeared then. “All right, we’ll call you Fell, too.” He grabbed my hand in one of those viselike grips that’s macho enough to knock your socks off. “Come into the living room, Fell!”

He had on the same sea-colored scarf that matched his eyes, tucked into another shirt as white as his brushcut hair.

He stooped over to pick up the playing card.

“Ping? Hand over the other one, or you’ll wonder where it went someday.”

“You’re not supposed to give away the trick, Dad.”

“Oh, Fell could figure out that trick, easily.”

I couldn’t have. I watched while Ping lifted his left Top-Sider and bent over to take the ace of hearts off the bottom. So there’d been one card on top of the other. Ping’d fixed some adhesive to the bottom of his shoe, stepped on the ace of hearts, and left the five of spades there.

I hated having to be around anyone who made me feel sorry for him, or embarrassed by him. Right away I felt both ways about Woodrow Pingree, Jr.

We went into the living room and sat down. My mother would have called it “a tasteful room.” It wasn’t at all like any living room the Fells had ever occupied. In the Fells’ living rooms you took your chances when you sat down. A pair of Jazzy’s scissors or my mother’s knitting needles could jab your butt. Our living rooms whispered clutter, clutter, clutter: old dog-eared magazines lying around under chairs, tabletops weighed down with books, soda cans, loose change, empty Lorna Doone boxes, crayons. We looked like an indoor yard sale.

The Pingrees’ living room looked like something Macy’s or Bloomingdale’s had set up in its furniture department to show off its finest pieces. There wasn’t anything out of place. There wasn’t too much of anything in place. It was white and clean and modern.

“Is that gum off your shoes, Ping? Fern’ll have your head if any of it gets on the rugs.”

“It’s off, Dad.”

Ping removed his thick glasses and blew on them, then cleaned them with the bottom of his tank top.

I thought of a time way back in Brooklyn when my father’d found a pair of thick glasses smashed on the ground, beside the body of a man everyone thought had jumped out a window. My father’d said the minute he saw those glasses he’d known it wasn’t a suicide. “Do you know why, Johnny?” I didn’t. “Because,” my father’d explained, “people who wear glasses and jump out of windows take their glasses off before they jump. They either leave them behind or put them in their pockets, but they don’t ever jump with them on. So someone pushed that fellow.”

Things like that interested me a lot more than magic tricks.

But I was in for an evening of magic tricks.

After Ping put his glasses back on he sat forward in an armchair and asked me, “What’s half of twelve?”

“Six.”

“Do you want me to prove it’s seven?”

“It’s up to you.” That was as close as I could come to telling him I didn’t know any way to stop him.

Apparently, Pingree didn’t know how to stop him, either. Maybe Pingree didn’t care that his kid was like some performing bear, compulsively going through his routine come hell or high water.

Pingree had returned the ace of hearts and the five of spades to a deck of playing cards. He was shuffling the cards quietly in his large hands, leaning back against the white couch, smoking. He was watching his son get out eight oven matches, which his son arranged on a table beside his chair.

Ping formed a Roman numeral twelve (XII), using four matches to make the X and four to make the II.

“Twelve. Right?” Ping looked over at me.

“Right.”

Then Ping removed the four bottom matches, and what was left was VII.

Pingree said, “Bravo, son. Bravo.”

There was more of the same before Mrs. Pingree called us into the dining room: card tricks, rope tricks, a handkerchief that turned into a rose, coin tricks, and the final trick, before we all sat down to a rib roast.

For this trick Ping borrowed his father’s lit cigarette. There were four place cards made out of heavy paper, with nothing written on them, on the table.

“We have to see where everyone’s sitting,” said Ping.

He picked up the first card and touched the cigarette to it.

WOODROW PINGREE SR. burned itself out of the paper.

Then he made the rest of our names appear on the remaining place cards.

(Later, Mr. Pingree would let it slip that Ping had drawn out our names on the place cards with potassium nitrate. Again Ping would protest that it wasn’t fair to give away “trade secrets.”)

And so, we sat down to dinner.

Appearances are deceptive. My father used to tell me that that cliché, like so many others, was one you could rely on. What you know by looking at someone is zilch. I don’t think I’ve learned that lesson yet. I certainly hadn’t learned it by the time I went to Fernwood Manor for dinner.

There was something very different about Mrs. Pingree, other than the fact that she was a magician of sorts, too. Her talent was turning a prime cut of roast beef into leather. But it wasn’t her cooking that interested me, beyond the first hard bite into the catastrophe she served with overdone asparagus and underdone new potatoes. It wasn’t anything as simple as the fact that she could use a Julia Child cookbook.

“Skim milk masquerades as cream,” I used to sing joyfully when I acted in Gilbert and Sullivan’s
H.M.S. Pinafore
one year. It never dawned on me that cream could masquerade as skim milk just as easily.

Fern Pingree had a way of being present without being there — not so you’d notice, anyway. She behaved as though her purpose was to serve us, listen to us, and not watch us. She watched what was in front of her. She sat with lowered eyes, her very black hair held back behind her head with a piece of white net tied in a bow. She had olive skin, small hands, and a gentle, whispering voice. She seemed to be some female from another country, an Eastern one, where females did not participate equally with men.

No one tried to draw her into the conversation.

Second only to being with someone who makes you feel sorry for him or embarrassed by him, I hated being in a group with someone who was ignored. No one directed any conversation to her, or sought out her eyes, or even glanced her way.

The conversation began with some questions directed at me by Mr. Pingree. The usual. What subjects I liked in school, family stuff, how we’d come to live in Seaville … and I threw Keats’s name in a couple of times. I didn’t have the heart to mention that I loved to cook, not with what was on the plate in front of me.

Mrs. Pingree didn’t ask me anything. She seemed to be part of the conspiracy to keep her out of things. I couldn’t be sure if she preferred it that way, or just deferred to the male Pingrees.

I waited for her to say something about the dinner, the way my mother would have — ”Oh,
no,
I think I overdid the roast!” — some little acknowledgment that she knew what we were eating wasn’t wonderful…. Nothing.

Now and then I’d get a whiff of this sweet gardenia scent coming from her, almost as if to remind me she was still there. There was little else to remind me. I caught occasional glimpses of her out of the corner of my eye.

The conversation turned to a dream that Ping kept having.

Like the yearbook from The Valley Academy, which I wouldn’t have brought home, with all the bummers written across the other cadets’ faces, the conversation was one I wouldn’t have had with my father, not in front of a guest.

When Ping told the dream he put down his fork and gestured with these stubby fingers. “There are stairs going up to a tower. I don’t want to go up them.” He glanced at me. “I have a fear of heights, Fell! I have a phobia about heights!”

His father was looking down at his dinner, chewing, holding both a fork and a knife while he ate.

Ping continued. “But I must go up those stairs. Halfway up, a jack-in-the box pops out at me and hands me a card. D.D.H. are the initials on it.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Pingree asked.

“I’ll tell you! I turn the card over, and written there is
Don’t. Dare. Hope!”

Ping leaned toward his father. “You see, the tower is the one at Gardner School. I don’t want to go up in it. The jack-in-the box is telling me not to hope that I won’t have to. The dream is about my not wanting to go to Gardner, Dad!”

There was a long silence.

I can’t stand a silence like that. I’ll start to babble about anything to fill it.

What I said was, “At church this morning, the minister preached a sermon on dreams. He said shrinks are as good as Daniel was at helping Nebuchadnezzar figure out what his dream meant.”

“I know what mine means,” Ping said. “And so does Dad.”

That was when Fern Pingree finally spoke up.

“Dreams don’t have meanings!” she said flatly. She was looking up now, meeting all of our eyes as she continued. “Dreams are just mental noise. They’re neurological junk the brain is discarding. Dreams are the trash bag of the brain!”

I never expected anything like that to come out of her mouth.

“I don’t happen to believe that, Fern,” said Ping.

“It doesn’t matter what you happen to believe. Those are the facts!”

“Why does the dream come again and again, if it’s just junk the brain’s getting rid of? Why the same dream again and again?”

“Because,” said Mrs. Pingree, “recurring dreams are those that wake the dreamer and cause him to learn instead of unlearn them. A recurring dream is a kind of neurological flypaper.”

“Well, Freud would say you were wrong, Fern,” Ping said.

“Not if Freud were still alive. A lot has been learned about the brain since Freud was around.”

“You always have an answer for everything,” Ping said sullenly.

Mr. Pingree said, “And we always have a solution.” He did something I thought was peculiar then. He put down his knife and fork long enough to reach across and grip Ping’s arm. “We always have a solution,” he repeated.

Mrs. Pingree, in a white cotton jumpsuit, stood up and got the salad from across the room. “Do you like salad on that plate or a separate plate, Fell?” she asked me, and without waiting for an answer, added, “Daniel tricked Nebuchadnezzar, Fell. He wanted power over the Babylonians!”

I didn’t have an answer to that.

“I’ll take the salad on this plate,” I said.

She stood in front of an enormous oil painting on the wall. It was the most barren landscape I’d ever seen. There wasn’t anyone in the picture. It was a painting of this field of weeds on dried earth, with an abandoned barracks far off in it, weathered and worn. Above everything was this burning yellow sun that looked hot enough to make an iguana pant. At the bottom left was a parched white cow’s skull. At the bottom right, a minuscule fern where the signature of the painter would have been.

“Isn’t that one of your paintings, Mrs. Pingree?” I asked her.

“One of my early ones,” she replied. “I did it long before I started at the Institute. Since I’ve been at Brutt, I’ve only painted the ocean.”

She glanced over her shoulder at her strange landscape.

She said, “I call that one
Smiles We Left Behind Us.”

That was just spacey enough for me to grin, but Mrs. Pingree wasn’t smiling. No one was.

“I didn’t know you worked at the Institute, too,” I said. “What do you do there?”

Mr. Pingree said, “She’s my boss, Fell.”

• • •

It was Mr. Pingree who walked me down to my car after dinner.

“My son doesn’t want to go to Gardner,” he said.

I wondered why he thought I gave a damn what his son wanted, and why I’d even been asked to Fernwood Manor for dinner in the first place.

“Anyone would give his right arm to go to Gardner,” he continued. “It’s a wonderful school! But it’s in Pennsylvania, this little town filled with ragweed, hell on Ping’s asthma, and then there’s The Tower. A very tall one. New boys are made to go up in it. My son has a phobia about heights, as he mentioned.”

I was already imagining how Keats and I would make up. We wouldn’t stay down on the beach, not with me in my dark suit, and not in the cold night air that was beginning to blow off the sea.

No. I’d park my car behind Beauregard. We’d go there to make up. Keats and I had nicknamed the backseat of my Dodge “The Magnet.”

Pingree said, “If you had the chance to go away to an excellent prep school, wouldn’t you jump at it, Fell?”

“I suppose so.”

“Of course you would. But Ping has his reasons. They’re valid.”

We stood by my Dodge.

Pingree said, “Come back, won’t you, Fell?”

“Thanks,” I said.

Thanks wasn’t yes.

There was a moon rising with the wind and I thought of the way Keats sometimes touched my lips with her fingers, smiling promises.