The One-in-a-Million Boy (7 page)

“Why didn't you keep up?” she asked. She sounded merely curious. He surrendered then, yielding to her age, her lively face, her general mien of urgency.

“I didn't understand the way his mind worked,” he confessed. An upwelling of sorrow befell him. Her eyes were still young. “I never figured out how to—how to be with him.”

She took this in—without judgment, it seemed to Quinn—then said, “Randall and I never quite found our feet together. He was a good boy, but we had nothing in common. So independent, ambitious, even as a child. I never felt as if he actually needed me.”

Quinn got up, pocketing the obit and leaving the money alone. “You want anything done? As long as I'm here?”

“I blew a light bulb in the parlor. I hate to get up on a chair.”

He began with the light bulb, which required a stepstool. Which also needed repair.

He returned on Saturday, the appointed day, and the Saturday after that.

As May gave over to June, Quinn arrived in the boy's place, on time and carrying tools, fulfilling what he surmised to be the full breadth of the boy's commitment.

“I've got a cake here,” she said. “You'll like it. It has a secret ingredient.”

“Who doesn't like a secret ingredient?”

“I suppose you could call me Ona.”

“You've been calling me Quinn.”

“So I have. But you're a younger gentleman. I'm an older lady. It's up to me to give permission.”

He was smiling now. “May I call you Ona?”

“Permission granted. My gutters are a mess, by the way.”

So he cleaned out her gutters, rehung a door, replaced the stair treads on the porch, watched the slow arrival of summer. Each Saturday he stayed for animal crackers or cake, an exchange of five dollars, a doggedly rendered Double Detection or 7-Up or Queen of the Air. Sometimes, she made things disappear: cards or coins or hankies with hand-tatted hems. These came to be his favorites, these sly deflections, the clever here-and-gone, simple tricks that required little more than a middling prestidigitator and an observer desperate to be amazed.

On the fifth Saturday, the boy arrived with bad news: Ona was a spring chicken.

She had three-digit rivals everywhere, from Saskatchewan to Siberia. This oversight—that he'd traced the “oldest man” and “oldest woman” titleholders but neglected to check for understudies—appeared to cause the boy a deep-churning chagrin.

He unzipped his backpack in slow motion. It always looked store-new, the shiny red of supermarket cherries. He read from yet another printout, his hard-packed expression at odds with his delicate features. “After Mrs. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias-Jordan, United States Territory of Puerto Rico,” he read, “the second-oldest person in the world is a lady, country of Romania, also age one hundred thirteen. The third-oldest person in the world is a lady, country of Japan, also age one hundred thirteen. The fourth-oldest person in the world is Mr. Fred Hale. We know him already.”

Finally he handed her the sheet. “If Mrs. Ramona Trinidad Iglesias-Jordan and the lady from the country of Romania and the lady from the country of Japan and Mr. Fred Hale die, then the oldest person in the world will be another lady, Mrs. Flossie Page, age one hundred eleven, country of USA.”

“Hmm.” Ona leafed through the shortlist—eighty-two official contenders, mostly women. Mrs. Japan and Mrs. Romania had unpronounceable names, the former free-floating with vowels, the latter fortressed by consonants. They had been listed by a research outfit committed to tracking the world's oldest citizens. All these rivals of intemperate age, the youngest of them a good eight years older than Ona, the oldest of them shy of the all-time record by nearly a decade.

Ona conjured a vision of Madame Calment snickering in her celestial rocking chair. “This print's too small,” Ona said, getting up. “I need my glasses. Come in here.”

The boy halted at the door of her parlor. She realized she'd never invited him past the kitchen. He laid the papers on her lap, then lighted on the arm of one of the matching wingbacks that had come with the house.

“Look at all these codgers,” she said. “What the heck are they putting in their oatmeal?”

“You can't get in the running until you're a supercentenarian.” The word galloped off his tongue as if he'd rehearsed it. “That means one hundred ten and plus. They think there's around four hundred in all. It's hard to track them all down.” He hopped off the chair and ran a fidgety finger down the side of the page. “See, it shows their birthday next to their name. Years plus days.”

Ona noted a woman from Oslo, another from Thailand, several from the American South, Annabelles and Elviras and Lavinias. A few men, mostly from Japan. “Who finds these people?”

“Researchers. Of gerontology.”

She narrowed her eyes at him. “Is your mother a schoolteacher?”

“My mother is a librarian.”

“You talk like a librarian.”

“I don't have any friends.”

“I don't either, really. I take tea with the ladies from church, but their health complaints can wear a body out. You're a nice boy. Why don't you have friends?”

“People don't like you unless you do sports. The card tricks didn't work out.”

“I warned you,” she said.

“One, I hate sports. Two, I hate band. Three, I hate lunch.”

“I told you not to try those tricks at school.”

“I'd rather do activities like this,” he said. “I love doing activities like this.” She wasn't quite sure what he meant. Visiting old ladies? Looking things up on his Internet? Convincing people to chase world records for something that took not one iota of talent?

“So,” Ona said, “nobody's keeping track of the hundred-to-hundred-ten crowd?”

“There's too many. Almost one-third of one million if you count the whole world. Which I do.”

“Where in blazes are they hiding?”

“I don't know,” the boy said gloomily.

“And here I thought I was two or three pneumonias away from a record. We got all hepped up over nothing.”

He shook his head sadly.

“It's all right,” she said. “We'll wait them out.”

She took out her cards to distract them both from disappointment and within a few minutes had him inside-out over a Hide the Jack that a below-average Border collie could have figured out in half a minute. He wasn't stupid—far from it—just overly agreeable.

“What happened to Viktor the beautiful blond Russian boy?” he asked.

Ona blushed. The Frenchwoman's ghastly photograph had been stuck in her head since she first saw it. Did she look like that, like a decomposing fig? Was it too much to ask this boy to mentally strip away her own cratered hollows, the baggy skin through which her bones showed like the hanger beneath the clothes? She had been lovely once. Could this twenty-first-century boy muster the drowse of imagination required to reconstruct her youthful body, her slender ankles and glossy shoulders, the oak-colored hair she'd crimped into Marcel waves with a potion of stiffened egg whites? Could he see beyond her overlaundered blouse and slacks to envision the bright poplin shirtwaist bought at McKay's Fancy Goods in June of 1916? She thought he could.

“You can't let a thing go,” Ona said. “Have you ever noticed that?”

“I have deficiencies,” he said ruefully, eyeing the cards. “What happened to Viktor the beautiful blond Russian boy?”

“Oldest story in the book,” she said. “What a goosy girl I was.”

He waited. With the unruffled patience of a cat. This did not seem like a deficiency.

“
KÅ«dikis,
” Ona said, then put her hand to her mouth.

“What's
kūdikis
?”

She regarded him carefully; maybe it was the uniform, which could have been fifty years old; maybe it was his throwback manners; or the sea gray of his irises, which suggested an age and wisdom he could not possibly possess. “‘Baby,'” she confessed. Her stomach knotted. “I never told a living soul.”

His fingers began to flutter. “You had a baby? In the circus?”

Gently, she took his hands and closed his fingers. He tucked his hands beneath him. And waited.

“I came home from the midway,” she said quietly. “In disgrace.”

He waited some more. Her head felt composed. The kitchen went quiet. The yard went quiet. The air, the light, the dust on the sills, the names and names on the list.

“Do you know where babies come from?” she asked him.

“Babies come from a sperm and an egg.”

The boy did not move.

“Well,” she went on, hardly meaning to, “this baby was born and I gave him away.”

The boy's fingers started in again. “Where's your baby now?”

“He's a doctor.”

One.

“What kind of doctor?”

“Surgeon.”

Two.

“Surgeon of what?”

“Hearts, if I recall.”

Three.

“What's his name?”

“Laurentas.”

Four.

“Laurentas what?”

“Laurentas Stokes.”

“That's the same as your tutor lady. Maud-Lucy Stokes was your tutor lady that you loved more than your mother.”

She tapped his guiltless forehead. “You don't need a tape recorder. You've got the recall of an elephant.”

“Your baby is ninety years old.” His fingers stopped moving. Maybe he was out of categories.

“Ninety?” Ona said, shocked. But of course the boy was right. She'd met Laurentas once—not counting his birth—in 1963 and had frozen him there in middle age, a hardy, nice-looking man with Viktor's coloring. For a time, they'd kept in touch—tellingly brief letters signed with their full names—and eventually their exchanges dwindled to the occasional Christmas card.

Ona got up, aware of the boy's eyes on her. She took a packet from her cupboard. “Here's the last one I have.” The postmark was five years old; the one before that, eight. “We never got the hang of correspondence.”

The boy examined the return address: Bridle Path Lane. “Does your son have a horse?”

“He's in a condo, for crumbsake,” she said. “Since about ten years ago.”
Retired at last, new condo very nice, happy new year. Yours, Laurentas Stokes.
She felt suddenly depleted. “You don't think so much of me now.”

He blinked at her. “Why?”

“I told you my secret.”

“What secret?”

She rattled the envelope.

“About your baby?”

“Yes!”

“That's a secret?”

Ona had not felt so powerless against her own fortress in decades. “Of
course
it's a secret,” she said. “My own husband never knew.” Howard, so uninspired in the boudoir that he never discovered her scar. “And I'll have you know I did not foresee spilling my secret in the winter of my life.”

But now that she had, a room opened up in her body, an empty chamber that called for filling up.

“Why did you name your baby Laurentas Stokes?”

“Maud-Lucy named him. I wanted to name him Joseph, after the husband of Mary, the unsuspecting virgin. Maud-Lucy took him back to Granyard and raised him among her own people.”

“Did you marry Viktor?” the boy asked.

“You can't pin down heedless men.” She smoothed the envelope. “After Maud-Lucy whisked Laurentas off to his beautiful life in apple country, I sorted rags in the pulp mill for two years, then my mother sent me to Portland for a secretarial course at Brooks School for Secretarial Studies, and after that I married Howard Stanhope, an old-man widower of thirty-nine.”

The boy kept his kindly gaze upon her and said nothing.

“Life with Howard was mostly a misery,” she told him. “That's a secret, too, I guess.”

“I'm good at secrets,” the boy said, studying her so intently now that she began to feel stripped after all—in a good way, stripped of decrepitude and shame.

“Enough,” she said, returning to the boy's lists. “Look at all these names. I don't believe I've ever been in the running for something. Not in all my life.”

“You can win,” he said. “All you have to do is not die.”

“That, my young fellow, might be easier said than done.”

The boy set the recorder between them. “This is Miss Ona Vitkus,” he said. “This is her life story on tape. This is Part Two.”

“Do you think you could say something other than ‘life story'? In a less portentous manner?”

What should I say?
he mouthed. Though he made his initial announcements with pomp, he otherwise maintained his habit of silence by mouthing his interjections, pointing to Mr. Linkman's questions (
What are your strongest memories of World War II? In your opinion, what was the greatest invention of the twentieth century?
), or writing new ones on the fly, impeccably spelled and divided into parts and handed over cautiously, lest the rustling be picked up on tape.

Sometimes he turned off the machine to ask a left-field question—
What did your baby look like?
—that left her flummoxed and strangely willing as he flicked the machine back on to immortalize her response. His motionless attention had the serumlike effect of loosening both her tongue and her memory. Sometimes he forgot what was secret and what wasn't. Eventually, so did she.

 

 

* * *

This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life story on tape. This is Part Two.

Do you think you could say something other than “life story”? In a less portentous manner?

. . .

I don't know. Memories. Shards. Little—little nothings that add up to—something, I guess. I hope.

. . .

All right. Fire away.

. . .

What difference does it make what he looked like? Skinny, jaundiced little thing. Bald as a boiled egg. Poor soul had a devil of a time getting born. I was a big-boned girl and he had no more heft than an August potato, but still he had to be cut out of me. Do you know about that? Cesarean?