The Short History of a Prince (24 page)

Daniel had never crossed the line before going to the Arie Crown
Nutcracker
, never entered Walter’s dancing-school life or tried to engage with what Walter considered his real self, the other self that tried to take hold outside of the house. Walter looked at his brother carefully replacing the record in the jacket. It was as if the Trojan horse had been set in his bedroom, the enemy creeping out of the trapdoor. He had not paid attention to the warning signs, although he had registered fear early on, when Daniel asked if he could go along to see Susan dance. He knocked over his own desk chair. He hated all of them, couldn’t stand the sight of their smiles, their stupid, gloating, happy grins and Mitch’s cavernous pink mouth stuffed with the masticated powder of a whole package of Saltines.

It wasn’t the force of rage that propelled him down the back stairs headfirst, bumping his eyebrows, his mouth, his nose, his ears, along each step. He ran out of the room without tying his shoes, unsure where he was going or what he meant to do, and at the top of the uncarpeted stairs with metal plates on every lip, he tripped on the shoestrings and went spiraling down. It was Mitch who followed him from the bedroom, who saw, and then screamed, in Walter’s stead; screamed, Walter later remarked, like a bunny under a lawn mower. He must have swallowed all of that cracker dust in a hurry to let out a
shriek like that. Mrs. Gamble had just arrived and was standing on the rug in the kitchen, looking the place over. She did not, as was her custom, remove her coat. The McClouds suspected that underneath her good winter coat from 1936, with the fox pelt draped over her neck, she always wore her apron; the trowel, flashlight, Allen wrench and screwdrivers straining the pockets. When Walter came to a standstill by the dishwasher, she ran clanking to the freezer compartment of the refrigerator and hauled out the ice, muttering as she went about the benefits of an immediate application of Vitamin E to the wounds.

Walter lay groaning, his head in a pool of blood, and his feet up the stairs. He looked into Mitch’s eyes, and he thought that if he weren’t so dizzy he’d take both hands and smooth away the red Mouse King marks on either side of his friend’s heavenly face. Mitch, who was already jilted, and didn’t quite know it. Walter could see past the stars whirling around and around over Mrs. Gamble’s pin curls. He thought he could see beyond the walls of the house, that his vision was improved because Mrs. Gamble was in the room, her oracular powers sparking from her aura to his vulnerable, open self. He could see the future: Susan, the widow, crying down the hall at school after Daniel’s death, all the girls and boys following at a respectful distance, following the lover who had been left behind to live. Daniel was dying. Susan knew it, and that minute he did too. He had received several knocks to his skull, but very likely they would not kill him. He would live on and on after his brother was gone. Mitch seemed so far away, and it was with great effort that Walter whispered, “I’m still here. Hold it, my head. It’s yours.”

Six

JANUARY
1996

T
wenty-three years after the fall down the stairs Walter still had a scar above his eyebrow. He had had to go to the emergency room and have fourteen stitches. When one of the neighbors wondered out loud, in the McClouds’ living room, if the kids upstairs had been drinking, Mrs. Gamble came to Walter’s defense. She had smelled nothing, she said, and seen no broken vessels in the whites of the eyes. In the hospital Walter was so agitated he tried to get off the gurney. He wanted to go home, to find out for himself what Susan and Daniel were up to in his bedroom, if Mitch had stayed to fight them, if there was a duel planned, the prospect of a frosty morning, the pearl handles of the pistols with their dull gleam on the tray, the bravery, the fear, the blast, the bloody swatch on the snow. He was raving, struggling with the orderly, and might as well have been drunk. The nurse finally gave him a shot to knock him out.

At Christmas break, home in Oak Ridge, away from Otten, Walter stood at the top of the back stairs just once and thought of his fall. He remembered the cutting edge of the steps, how slowly he had tumbled, how difficult it had been to grab hold of anything solid. He had been able to anticipate each hurt before it happened, crack after crack to his head. Mitch was the only person who had seen the spill. Walter
was first upright and seconds later he was on the floor in the kitchen. But he too had been able to watch himself after he went over the edge, and all the way to the bottom; he could see, as if from above, the humiliating dive, every blow delineated in the near stillness of his motion. Why nature bestowed clarity and helplessness on a person at the same time remained a mystery to him.

He wondered if somewhere far off, defying the laws of science, Mitch’s two screams were still echoing, if those vibrations had traveled into space, if they moved on and on like rays in a light-year. There might be other forms of life who were receiving the noise and trying to interpret the tones. Walter had always thought that Mitch had cried out for his sake, involuntarily, because of the accident. As he stood at the scene it occurred to him that Mitch might not have been reacting to the fall, that he was instead warning Daniel, warning Susan. The high-pitched womanly screeches may have been Mitch’s way of threatening both of them, daring them to go any further.

Walter didn’t approve of the use of the present participle in the verb “obsess.” He didn’t like the way it was so casually used, as if every normal person had clinical obsessions. Still, he let himself say, “I’ve been obsessing about my brother, obsessing about Mitch.” He suspected that the year of Daniel’s death was vivid to him because he was living again in high school, faced each day with ninety freshmen and sixty sophomores. He sometimes felt that his Otten students weren’t in the current story at all, that he was using them for his own purposes, to illuminate his own past. It wasn’t that he was sloughing off, or was in a stupor, or fretting about mistakes he’d made more than two decades before. He was nowhere, he sometimes felt, floating through his own years backward and forward inside the 1937 brick building that took up a block on Otten Boulevard in Otten, Wisconsin. He wondered if he’d always been in Room 209 listening to lockers slam, seeing visions of the old life while he waited to begin preaching, while he waited for a semblance of quiet.

In January he started to go to the basketball games at the high school, not only because there was nothing else to do within a seventy-mile radius, but because he found he enjoyed the spectacle. With the exception of a few of Daniel’s swim meets, Walter had not gone to sporting events as a teenager. The heroism of the boys out on the court
was a revelation to him. He soon understood—watching Otten’s Bill Pierce fly up to the basket, hover in midair, slam the ball through the hoop—why athletes were worshipped in town and in the larger world. He wanted young, handsome Bill Pierce to tear down the court, trample the opposition, score and steal and score. Walter whistled with his thumb and index finger clamped between his teeth when his team made their points, and he leaped to his feet when a player dodged his way through the defense, driving the ball, hooking it into the basket.

He usually sat up in the bleachers with Betsy Rutule from fourth-hour class, after she’d done her part in the pep band. She had stood out in the first week of class because of her forthright comments. Unlike many of her peers, she had complex ideas, she had strong feelings, and she didn’t seem to be embarrassed by her zeal. Walter wasn’t sure if the others called her ass-kisser. He hoped not. He hoped they could see that she was ingenuous, that her curiosity wasn’t about grade-grubbing. If only he could enlist his beautician friend in New York to come to her aid, to help her with her thick stiff hair. It had no body and looked as if it was meant to lie flat, nothing for her to do but try to mold it around her head, tamp it down with clips and pins. At first glance, everything about her seemed out of proportion. Her nose was too short, even for her round face, her wide eyes were set too far apart, her eyebrows needed to be hedged back. Walter thought this until she opened her mouth and made a breathtaking observation. Suddenly she became a stunner. Each expressive feature, in the second glance, was a charming length and thickness, no place for a cosmetic surgeon on Betsy’s horizon. Walter was crazy about her, and he felt privileged to be in her company at the games, to listen to her pronouncements on the players, the school staff and the parents.

The coach was not beloved by his townspeople—mothers, fathers, uncles, many of whom had had him as a history teacher when they were in high school. The word on the street: Sullivan was blind to the talent and squandered what he had. Unforgivable, to waste height and strength. Both Betsy and Walter, going against the grain, were his defenders. Coach Sullivan loved the boys and the game, Walter insisted, a person could see that. It was a pressure-cooker job, sitting down, standing up, flailing around, trying to get his point across. Sullivan had to know the rules and the fine print, had to holler out the
technicalities over the noise of the unruly public. And he had to wear a suit and tie, when practically everyone else on the court was running around in shorts.

The assistant coach, Mr. Henlow, both the chairman and the one teacher in the Psychology Department, had thin blond hair, the comb tracks always running clean through it. He wore pleated pants, beige polyester shirts with nothing underneath and cheap leather shoes that were supposed to look like expensive calfskin. He lived far away, in a town called Platteville. Walter knew his type, the sort who spoke harshly to the players, who patrolled the shower room, who professed to be making men out of boys. Betsy Rutule said, “There’s something about Mr. Henlow that scares me, Mr. McCloud. It’s not because he’s always yelling, and it probably isn’t fair, I mean, it’s not based on anything I know. I can’t explain it exactly, but he kind of looks as if he’s got this whole other body, a messy, burping, fat pig of a person inside his neat, tidy one. It’s like everything is zipped up to keep the real guy from bursting out. I know I shouldn’t say that about a teacher, but whenever I see him I keep thinking I’ll blink and—pop—someone else will be standing where he was.”

Walter wanted to pound her on the back and tell her she had an automatic A+ for the rest of her high school English career. There was fortunately a spectacular play and they rose to their feet, shouting and waving their hats. Mr. Henlow was mean and cowardly, as dangerous as they came, someone never to look in the eye. There were plenty of present and future homosexuals in Otten, and sometimes Walter stared at them briefly, sometimes there was mutual recognition in the checkout line, on the street, and in the most sexually suggestive place of all, the Laundromat, with the three types of washers: the Troy, the Trojan and The Big Boy.

“Your big boy working?” He could so easily have asked the most obvious target, the man with the scant permed hair, the tight, buttoned-up jeans. He imagined all of the Otten perverts having sex outside the city limits, beyond the
Welcome to Otten
sign in schoolteacher cursive. The town men and boys were never going to be a group, a political force, a club, having their own barbecues, their own choir, their gay pride unit in the Memorial Day parade. It was curious to Walter that with television’s inclusion of gay culture into prime-time
programming, Otten still ignored the existence and the concept of homosexuality. It was more startling than he’d anticipated, to be in a place that turned its back on the facts of life. One of the checkout ladies at the grocery store said she still couldn’t believe that Rock Hudson had been
that
way. Out of the blue as she bagged his food, she told Walter that she didn’t care what anyone said, Rock loved the ladies. He realized that in his sheltered life in New York City he had forgotten about the wild interior of his country.

To be sure, Otten tolerated a poofter if a boy was homegrown, if he behaved himself, if he didn’t show his colors. The residents didn’t treasure their oddballs, but within reason they protected them. There was, out on Highway H, a goat farmer, a third-generation farm girl, and her tax-accountant lover. Walter watched them sitting in plain view side by side at the basketball games, two unmistakable lesbians: tall women, heavy in the hips, drooping breasts under their Shetland sweaters, Sorel boots, cropped hair, a fresh look about their weathered faces. Betsy Rutule referred to them, innocently, it seemed, as housemates.

Walter had never lived in a place as an adult that he could think of as his community. When he sat in the bleachers, sharing popcorn with Betsy and Cassie Klingmeyer, he wondered if he could call the town Home. It seemed a stretch. He had not expected the Welcome Wagon to come to his door with samples of products from the local merchants, but the quiet of his fellow teachers after his arrival, their lack of interest and common courtesy, surprised him. Only the Latin teacher, Mrs. Denval, invited Walter to her house during his first month. At Sunday brunch, over cheese Danishes and instant coffee, she described Napoleon’s Russian offensive, and she spoke lovingly of Talleyrand and his gimpy walk. Walter didn’t know if he had room in his life for another eccentric older woman. He guessed that without much trouble he and Mrs. Denval could fall into a mutual adoration society, but he wasn’t sure he was up to it. He felt as if she was wooing him, that she wanted him for her pet, when she recited the opening stanzas of
The Inferno
, when she stood on a footstool in her living room and with a baton conducted the Italian national anthem as it played on an old 78. She was the only intellectual in Otten as far as he could see; she was a widow, she was lonely, restless and hungry for
gossip. They were probably meant for each other, Walter thought a little wearily.