The Short History of a Prince (18 page)

The twenty-five adults were sitting around the Ping-Pong table that had been assembled in the living room for the occasion. Aunt Jeannie had brought her festive pumpkin-and-turkey-print cloth to cover the rough green surface. The children were in the kitchen at what had always been called the cat table, almost out of earshot. The meal, as usual, had begun with a brief group conversation, about potential purchases or recent acquisitions in the dog, car and computer departments. Marc was the expert in the vehicle line, and he was sure to sit next to the husbands who would want to pick his brain. Cousin Maxi sat in the corner talking to the college girls, the two education majors, about the success of her second-grade students in a program called Reading Recovery. Roger Miller, Francie’s husband, had recently
begun to raise orchids, but he couldn’t seem to find anyone who wanted to hear about the delicate process of hand pollination. Sue Rawson was next to Robert McCloud at the far end of the table, bent to the work of eating, carving the thigh of the turkey with a serving fork and her pocket knife. Robert trusted Sue Rawson’s financial instincts, and they often sought each other out to discuss their mutual funds. Aunt Jeannie, from the head of the table, broke through several of the conversations and called down to Walter, “Your mother tells me you’re going to direct
South Pacific
at the high school. That sounds so special!”

He drained his glass. Without a trace of mockery he exclaimed, “I bet it will be! It will be very special, Aunt Jeannie.”

“What’s the best part about directing a play, I wonder?”

“The best part, the best part.” Walter covered his eyes with his napkin as if the subject warranted complete concentration. His aunt, he knew, would never stop speaking to her adult children and relations as if they were preschoolers. “Well,” he said, leaning forward so she could hear him. “I’ve already cornered a couple of boys in my freshman class and told them if they’re in the chorus I might sneak a plus into their grade. At the least I’d give them a brownie. I dared them to learn the Charleston after school one day—fourteen-year-old boys with sloppy steps and goofy grins, but they did it, and I got the sense, unspoken of course, that they were grateful to have moved in a way that didn’t involve running down a field after a ball. I’ve got my eyes peeled for talent. There’s a girl named Sharon in my seventh-hour class who’s built like a barge and has no fear. I may have to blackmail her to try out, but I’m thinking she’d make a lulu of a Bloody Mary. The school recycles the musicals every five years, because they already have the costumes and thirty copies of the play, so I’d like to try to figure out a way to make it seem new and unusual.”

Jeannie’s red lipstick was called Congo Madness, and with that color and a black lip-pencil she had learned over the years to create a big enough mouth for what she herself called her extra-large personality. Her smile was certainly still the focal point of her dazzle. “That is just so wonderful,” she was saying to Walter. “I remember the way you loved your dancing. We all kind of hoped you’d grow out of it, and you did!”

Mitch, a developer in Del Mar, two little girls, a wife. It was a predictable enough life, no reason to dwell on the shock. Walter was determined that no one rob him of the charity he meant to feel toward everyone in the room. “I loved the ballet all right,” he said, “but I stunk. I mean I was really lousy. My ankles, my knees, my feet.” He grimaced at the thought of his legs in black tights. “I could turn on a dime, though. It was the one thing I could do. The girls used to gasp in class when I got turning. And I had a noble head. I’ve realized lately: a noble head. I didn’t know it then, but I had just as much nobility as the next guy. If I could have been amputated at the neck I would have been a great dancer.”

Aunt Jeannie slapped her hand to her mouth. “Oh, sweetheart”—she tittered—“surely not. You don’t mean it.”

Before he could assure her that he was exaggerating, Sue Rawson loomed over the table demanding quiet, banging at her water glass with the serving knife. She boomed, “I have an announcement to make.” Lucy and Maxi were clearing the table, but everyone else abruptly stopped their chatter and turned to the person many of the younger ones only grudgingly accepted as the matriarch. “I’ll make this brief,” she said. “And thereafter I don’t want to hear another word about it until we have our next family meeting. In the meantime you can decide what you want to do.” Joyce covered her nose with the triangle her hands made, the weight of her head resting solely on the tips of her two index fingers at the bridge of her nose. Even Lucy stood still then. She leaned against the mantel, her arm around the largest bowl in the kitchen, full of coleslaw. No one in the family liked coleslaw, and every year Joyce shredded three cabbages and emptied two full jars of mayonnaise.

“As you know,” Sue Rawson said, “I own well over a third of the stocks in the Lake Margaret Corporation. I believe it’s time either to pass the property down to the next generation, or sell out altogether. I can’t force this upon my sisters, but I can sell my shares. I’d like my money. We elders need to be relieved of the financial burden, the taxes, the maintenance and so forth, and let you youngsters, if you’re up to it, take on the responsibility of ownership. I haven’t used the place for years except for family affairs such as this one. I’ve had enough. The house is falling into disrepair and I don’t like it. We’re
valued here at about nine hundred thousand dollars, you can figure what my shares are worth. I’ve got fifteen more than my sisters. You can call my lawyer, Mr. Giddings, when you’ve a proposal put together. This transaction will require thought, creativity, cash, and I dare say put you all to the test. Nothing wrong with that. Let’s say we come together June first. That gives you plenty of time to consider the options. All right, then? Where’s the dessert? I like to see it on the sideboard, gives a person reason to carry on. I hope there’s enough Cool Whip. Last year you girls didn’t bring enough.”

She sat down, picked up her drumstick and went back to the work of gnawing at the bone. There was only a moment of silence before Aunt Jeannie’s youngest daughter, Mary Beth, began to wail, “Lake Margaret? Lake Margaret?” Aunt Jeannie herself cried, “What are you saying, Sue?”

“You heard me,” Sue Rawson barked. “I spoke plain English. Do we need an interpreter next to me, to make my sentences into gestures? Anyone know the deaf alphabet? I want to sell. I want the money.
Je veux l’argent
, for you French speakers. We can sell the whole place if none of you want to buy me out. I’ve got more shares than the other two. My brothers left me more of their portions for their own good reasons. I own a larger chunk of this place than anyone else.”

No one dared to murmur or cough or stir. They sat, each one, staring at the pumpkin men and gobbling turkeys on the tablecloth. Most of the cousins felt as if they’d been evicted from their own homes, as if they were squatting on the sidewalk with a few belongings thrown willy-nilly in boxes. Walter could think only that from the single speech of his aunt Sue’s would begin the dissolution of over a century of one family’s life. He didn’t think, I must fight her, or She is wrong. Aunt Jeannie had carved smiles on some of the miniature pumpkins in the centerpiece and she’d found long-burning birthday-size candles to put inside them. They seemed to be winking at Walter. He said to himself, Here, then, is the awful beginning.

It was Joyce who first moved, who put her hands noiselessly to the table and stood up. She tapped her shiny silver spoon on her wineglass, an unnecessary call to attention. She was growing old, Walter thought again, but she was full of grace, a quality that had completely
bypassed her sisters. She stood before them, glancing over the table, meeting each person’s eye. Sue Rawson would know better than to deny her, the dignified baby sister who had had her share of loss. “You want your money,” she said quietly. “We all understand that.” In truth, most of them were appalled by the notion. “There is something, however, that you must realize, Sue. I’m asking you to think about our heritage, about the fact that none of us paid any money, not a cent for Lake Margaret. Our parents did not have to pay for the privilege of this property. It has been given to us, handed down, from generation to generation. There has been a trust fund to assist us with the upkeep. The idea of exchanging money for its use is foreign to us. You are asking your nieces and nephews, and your sisters, to pay for something that was free to you. Free.” She let the word settle for a minute.

“You talked to me about selling the place years ago, at another gathering, at Jeannie and Ted’s anniversary. The subject does put a damper on the party spirit, I might add. All these years I’ve been waiting for you to bring it up again, and for some reason you haven’t. I’d come to think that after the—discussion—we’d had that day, you perhaps, after all, saw my point of view.”

Walter remembered the anniversary party, that hot afternoon, his mother walking across the porch, through the dancing couples. Having a Catholic mass at Lake Margaret, Jeannie dolled up and behaving like a starlet, must have inflamed Sue Rawson and may have been the last straw. He remembered his mother and his aunt talking in a corner. He understood at last that it was Sue Rawson who had provoked Joyce, or maybe a corner of his mother’s skirt caught on the edge of the Peg-Board, it fell over, and she thought to herself, Why not? I could claim responsibility for this, like a terrorist who phones in, who is suddenly dangerous without having had to lift a finger.

“So all along,” Joyce went on, “you’ve been thinking of the house in terms of your rightful inheritance, your nest egg. That—makes sense. Except, you see, most of us probably have not thought in those terms. I may well have been the only person who realized what you’ve meant to do.” She brushed a white curl from her forehead. “We have not been brought up to speed. Forgive us, then, if we are taken aback.”

Aunt Jeannie murmured, “A-men.”

Joyce tapped her spoon slowly on the table. “I think you will have to anticipate three things in the coming months. Right or wrong, the family, many of them, will hold this against you. There is a lot of emotion about the house, and now we have a next generation that is attached to it. Second, there will be factions, no doubt, because this is going to be a complicated transaction, as well as an expensive one. I’m not aware that any of us have twenty-five or fifty or what?—two, three, four hundred thousand dollars to spare? The young people are most of them burdened by their own house payments and growing children. Last of all, you must know that we will never be whole again. That has been our great blessing, our strength, as a family. Goodness, the three of us, you, Jeannie and I, have managed to stay in our hometown, to be close to each other. How unusual! Nothing, of course, ever stays the same, but through great change we have remained together. How lucky we have been.” She wiped her mouth with her napkin. “We have real whipped cream this year, by the way, and four choices of pie. They’ve just come out of the oven and so they are not yet on display. And why the real cream, you may ask? No reason except the exhilaration of dangerous living.”

She sat down and looked straight across the table at Walter for a disarming number of seconds. Sue Rawson had moved on to her generous portion of dressing and was eating as if she were in the privacy of her own kitchen. No one glanced in her direction or spoke. In their lives together, they had not ever been speechless simultaneously, with the exception of the time right after the family pictures slammed to the floor. That silence had been prompted by something outside themselves. With the dishes cleared away they did not know what to do; they were embarrassed to be in their own company.

Walter gazed up at the wall of photographs. He settled on a picture of himself with Sue Rawson thirty years before. He was seven, missing his front teeth. She was covered in a dark Oriental wrap with dragons on the lapels, standing behind him, not touching, her arms at her side, looking far beyond the frame. It seemed to Walter in the disquiet of the living room that he didn’t belong in the photograph, that he had been like a milkweed seed that floated in front of the camera just as it clicked.

He wished that Joyce would speak again, that she’d jump up and say, Oh, by the way, I did it. I knocked the picture board over that time, at the party. I wanted everyone to blast out of their skins to see clearly into the future, to know the spoiler in our midst.

Walter didn’t know what such an admission would prompt, but it might at the least serve to revive conversation. Lucy spoke first, asking her father to pass the turkey platter. Her request did not interrupt the deeper silence. Walter hoped that over dessert his mother would tell the family a soothing prophecy: Sue Rawson might after all die before the property changed hands. Joyce could tell the group that their aunt was a difficult woman who nonetheless deserved affection; it was possible she wasn’t repelled by tenderness, let any who dared try to prove the point.

His mother was staring at the fireplace and patting a dog without realizing her hands were moving. The sorrow in her features had settled there long before, and was such a part of her eyes, the shape of her mouth, the sag of her cheeks, that it was hard to remember that the expression wasn’t just the look of her face. Not even Lucy’s birth all those years ago had brought Joyce McCloud back to her former self. Walter drank one last swallow of wine. He thought there must be a place, like a dead-letter office, where everyone’s longing went, yearning that was sent out, day after day. He thought it must collect somewhere, in a dank basement room, the mass of it rising and rising like water, and with no end in sight.

Five