The Short History of a Prince (38 page)

He saw the fantasy life so clearly that he was bereft when he returned to his breakfast cereal without her. He felt a little the way a cripple must, who has imagined walking only to find himself still strapped in the wheelchair. It would have been better not to have gone dreaming in the first place, better to drive off into the workaday world of Otten without the sense of farfetched possibility.

When he got to school Walter found a carton on the floor outside his locked door. He thought, A bottle bomb—someone is trying to kill me. He bent over it and saw the return address of a mail-order garden outfit. Nancy Sherwin was the only person who had ever given him flowers, and she had done it compulsively, before every performance of the Rockford
Nutcracker
. He opened his door and carried the box to his desk. He had never received a Valentine from anyone other than his mother, and Susan, and Lucy, when she was small, and recently little Linda. But he was a teacher, he remembered, and it wasn’t out of the question that a brownnoser would think of him. Betsy Rutule might do such a thing out of real affection, or maybe the cast of
South Pacific
wanted to show their appreciation for the way Walter was whipping them into shape.

He very much liked the early morning before many people were in the building. It was like a conception of an artwork, complete in the
mind’s eye, before words or paint strokes violate the integrity of the idea. He was an excellent teacher in the silence of his classroom, before the bell rang, the floodgates opened and the students arrived. He had done what he could for Jim Norman, coaxing, giving him responsibility, ordering him to the principal. He more or less believed in the Dominican idea that you treat each person as if he were Christ. It was fine in the abstract. However, at some point if Jesus himself didn’t respond, there was nothing to do but kick him out on his flat ass. Norman had skipped town before he’d been expelled for setting a fire in the hall, and no one on the staff was sorry to see him go. “Good riddance,” Mrs. Denval had said.

Walter slit open the cardboard box and burrowed down through the biodegradable packing material. Although flowers in general had never moved him deeply, the dreamy pink Angelique tulips he brought up, in a green wooden crate, took his breath away. Not only were they pretty, but they seemed sent from another sort of existence—a clean life of calm and simplicity purchased so easily with a credit card. He couldn’t help putting his face into them. They didn’t have a sweet smell, but the damp earth in the box brought to mind the coming thaw and the twitter of robins.

“Who?” he said, tearing away the small white envelope taped to the side of the box. They were expensive flowers that had come the day before to the school office from an overpriced company in San Francisco. He yanked the stiff white card out of the envelope, saying, even as he read, “Who?”

“From your admirer.”

Walter sat down. “From your admirer,” he read again. No one in Otten could have conceived of the flowers—no one in Otten spent more than a few dollars for a flat of petunias for their window boxes. Betsy would bring him a handmade card or a chocolate, and Mrs. Denval might give him a sticky doughnut from the bakery but she would not charge up her account for a man who would never have lusted after her in her prime. “From your admirer.” Julian, Walter thought. Julian Wright in New Orleans. Julian, sitting on a stool in his boxer shorts, legs crossed, flipping through the catalog, trying to think what Walter would like. Had Julian, in his bed at night, been pressing his hands to his lips, thinking of Walter? “Julian,” he whispered. “Is it you?”

The flowers suddenly looked bright, fluorescent, their petals vibrating. “Good God,” Walter said out loud. He could not possibly teach through the day with the flowers sitting on his desk or even hidden in his closet. How was he to concentrate, to think of anything but Julian’s mouth, the circle of it lush as a plum? How was he to enjoy the flowers if they turned out not to have been sent by Julian? Julian in a suit, Julian in nothing at all, Julian wrapped in a towel. He had to get the tulips out of the classroom—it wouldn’t do to have his pupils see him in a tizzy. He grabbed an index card and scrawled in red ink, “To Mrs. Denval. Happy Valentine’s Day.” Should he say Love, Walter? From your colleague, Walter? He didn’t care—out! Out! He signed his name, plunged his face into the flowers one last time before he carried them over to Room 247 and set them by her door.

What a relief to have the box gone, away, where it could not exert its pressure! He could do nothing but totter around his room as if he were half in the bag. When he passed his desk the fifth time he picked up his notes for
Great Expectations
. He stopped at the highlighted phrases “Inverted Cinderella tale—two major social messages—Jaggers—his trade is the perversion of justice.” He tried to reread his outline, but he was too agitated to make sense of the important points. Julian might still be sleeping, dreaming poetically of fields wearing scarlet gowns and carriages bringing death. Mitch, in California, two hours behind the Midwest, was certainly in bed, trying to dream developer dreams, boy dreams with bulldozers and dirt piles, sump crocks, all the while his innocent wife sleeping beside him.

Walter stared at the blackboard, letting himself drift back to his early-morning reverie; if genuflection and prayer were part of his tradition, he might go to Saint Catherine’s in Otten after school and light a votive candle for therapeutic purposes. The February 14 candle wouldn’t be for Daniel, not for Susan, Lester, Mitch, the wife, the two little girls. Not for Julian, with or without the Angelique tulips. Not for the present blessings and not for the gift of memory. His ritual was silly perhaps, and was not something he could explain to anyone, with the possible exception, in theory, of Susan. She would understand, but he would never tell her about his season with Mitch. It was the single omission, the secret he kept from her, and he’d guarded it faithfully
because he did not want to taint her own remembrances of her high school flame.

At Saint Catherine’s, if he were of that bent, he would light what looked like ordinary plumber’s candles for the one perfect love moment. He had had it once, before he knew it was a moment, before he knew that nothing of its sort is protracted or protected from the revising powers of memory. It had taken quite a bit of work through the years to isolate the moment, to try to maintain it in its pristine form. He had hoped that in adulthood there might be endless time, time that was of a similar texture and weight, spun from the same thread as the love moment. He had not ever found it in its purity again. His had been that Valentine’s night of 1973, lying on the cold ground, doing nothing more intricate than breathing, at last, the chill air, and finding under the bushes a tenderness that he long afterward associated with the word “grace.”

The first bell rang, and even as it sounded the students? voices came up the stairwell and into the hall. “Thank you, Julian, or whoever you are,” Walter said. He put his hands to his face, steadying himself, and then he went to the door and opened it to the here and now, to the noise and chaos and mess of this, his life.

Before Easter dinner at Lake Margaret it occurred to Walter that he could tell Lucy about the Valentine’s Day when he was fifteen, about the Pollock roof, about how vigilantes had not come after him, even though he’d virtually begged for any little rebuke. He was still squatting by the fire in the living room when he realized that it was Lucy who could receive the story. She had so looked forward to his moving to the Midwest, and she was already sick of his one-liners. He should go find her and make amends for his bad joke about the virgins, and see if he couldn’t talk to her. If he told her about that long-ago winter, about their parents, about Daniel, Susan, Mitch, would she look disapproving, he wondered, or would her clear brow furrow in sympathy? She was proving to be unpredictable, but it wasn’t outside the realm of possibility that she’d be grateful for the light the story shed
not only on him but on Joyce and Robert and, consequently, on herself. He suddenly very much wanted to be alone with her, to have some guarantee of peace so he could begin to know her and be known.

To know her and be known, not in a sugarcoated adopted-child-meets-birth-mother way, and not in the rush of an infatuation. He put on his jacket and went out, down the hill to the lake. She was probably indoors, but it felt right to first roam the property both in search of her and to gather some courage. He had wanted to talk to her in the same vein on other occasions, but he was frightened this time around. There was danger in an attempt to come close to her, and there was danger in letting her see a more truthful version of Walter McCloud. He wanted to go a distance. He wanted to try. If he failed he might not be able to reach her again, he might lose her, nothing left between them but polite inquiries and the expectation of birthday gifts for Linda. It was worth venturing, he knew it was, worth a dare.

The lake out of season was like a friend who has changed, who has dyed her hair or gotten a face-lift, become a widow and begun to live. Walter stood on the seawall, his hands shoved deep into his pockets, and he looked over the cold, rough waves. The summer water was never the color of the late-winter frothy blue. It was a wild lake for a time, no boats, no skiers, no swimmers or fishermen. It seemed to him to have an intelligence; it seemed to know that for a few months out of the year, without boats and without the sleep that ice brought, it was on its own, alive, free, and for itself. He would tell his sister the Valentine’s Day story, and surely it would be a way of talking about everyone in the family. It was Daniel’s illness, Daniel himself, who had provided refuge for Walter, protection from Mrs. Gamble. She had not come after him, although he was the only possible culprit. Dear old 646 Maplewood Avenue had been a safe house, and Walter as good as in a witness-protection program, without having to leave his birthplace, without having to acquire a limp or get a nose job. He had grown up that year into the lonesome world without realizing that his defenseless brother, the new McCloud family weakling, was his best champion. He would eventually get to some sort of conclusion, and he’d tell Lucy that Daniel died leaving them at first with a terrible grief, and then there came a hope, “the thing with feathers that
perches in the soul.” Hope for her. He’d fashion it as a happy story over all, one that ended with Lucy Rawson McCloud.

He found her with her cousins in the nursery looking through two garbage bags filled with girl clothes, five-year-old Christina’s hand-me-downs from the lawyer mother, Kitty. The women were holding up the French and Swedish cottons one by one and determining what would suit which child, and also what would be fair in terms of distribution. Walter would not dream of diverting her from the spoils before the meal and so he went on into the parlor to prepare his unit on poetry for his American Literature class. His goal for the three weeks was to convert four people who had perfect contempt for verse. If he could bring four out of his sixty sophomores to Marianne Moore’s idea of poetry as a place for the genuine, he would have amply done his duty.

When the dinner was ready the family again sat around the Ping-Pong table in the living room, with the two picnic tables as auxiliaries, as they had done at Thanksgiving. Aunt Jeannie had insisted on scattering jelly beans on the chairs, the dressers, the mantel and the sideboard for mood and decor, and just as the young mothers predicted, the children were full and irritable well before the meal. Sue Rawson glared at the two who spilled their milk at the cat table, and she yapped at spoiled Christina in her pink sweatshirt with the appliquéd Easter Bunny front and back. It was not an auspicious start to the feast.

The redeemer of Lake Margaret, Francie, ate quietly at the far end of the table while her husband of fifteen years lay upstairs with a stomach upset. The many Republicans and the few Democrats in the room did not discuss the new Congress, or the president and his wife, or the atrocities taking place at home and abroad. After a good deal of talk the group continued to agree that Michael Jordan had been right to return to basketball. Walter watched his relatives huddling in their jackets, eating the roast and pineapple salad. It was remarkable, he thought, that the collection of people around the table had very little in common but their phantom forefathers, years of shared summers in one place and their pleasure in Michael Jordan. They were not at a loss for words. After they’d exhausted basketball they talked among themselves about their software, their hardware, their vacations, their
cars, their old houses, their new houses, their bikini waxes and their children’s ear surgeries. Up and down the table they chattered. It seemed to Walter that Francie, chin to her chest, picking at her green beans, could not possibly be the agent of change. There was something ominous in her posture, in her slump. She was not a person who was preening for the role of the matriarch. She looked up, caught Walter’s eye, quickly lowered her lids, bowed her head. That was peculiar, he thought. She was sitting between Marc and her cousin Celeste, but it was as if she were alone, in hiding under her bangs. She’d lost about forty pounds, and for the first time in her life, at thirty-nine, she was attractive. There was a delicacy to her features, now that her face had lost its plumpness, and she had that other certain something Walter recognized—it was a quality he’d noticed in women who were entering their middle years—a slow burn, a sizzle, the last-minute sultriness before the end. Francie had lost weight, he guessed, not because she had finally found the magic diet but because she was having a crisis of some sort. It came to him then: they were all going to lose Lake Margaret. He had seen it in her eyes. Francie and Roger Miller were not going to be able to pull together and buy the property out from under Sue Rawson. Francie, eating at the table, was not really present. She had ditched them, left them in the lurch.