The Short History of a Prince (44 page)

“Your father and I are thinking hard about it. Trying to find some way to talk Sue Rawson down. I don’t know. I can’t tell if she’ll bend or not. I really cannot call this one. We have to give thought and attention to some sort of plan.”

“I will,” he said. “I will.” But it isn’t thought and attention that’s lacking, he wanted to say. If mental energy rather than cash could save the place, they’d have it handily. He hung up the phone, turned out the light and lay awake half the night. Before Francie and Roger had come forward with their offer, there had been two meetings with the cousins. None of them had money or time. They were all overcommitted with jobs and children, Scouts, school-board meetings, soccer games, conferences and sick in-laws. They wanted Lake Margaret, in theory, but they couldn’t pay, and they didn’t really feel like wasting their vacations painting the old house and ripping out the torn kitchen linoleum. It would be sold for lack of money and devotion.
Walter would stand at the gate and he’d look, and then he’d have to get in his car and drive away. Foreigners would move in and they’d knock down the walls and put in new bathrooms and hang cheap pictures and paint the upstairs pink and cover the floor with carpet and fill the porch with ugly wicker lawn sets. He would be left to make a miniature Lake Margaret. He had once had the idea of making a replica of his neighborhood in Oak Ridge, but if he was going to commit himself to construction in an inch scale he might be better off to create a tiny Lake Margaret. The project would allow him to exercise his memory and hold the house dear. This chronicle of his life would become an obsession for him, he knew. He’d become a consumer of little things, searching the country over for craftsmen who could build the parlor chairs to his exact specifications. He would get the details right if it meant going to Italy for the fabric and spending all his money in a given year on an ottoman the size of a Snickers bar. It would be humbling, to become exactly like the women he used to ridicule when he worked at the dollhouse shop in New York. Walter fell asleep thinking that Roger Miller was the only lucky one at the end of the story, the only character who was actually free.

In mid-May, Joyce called Walter and she didn’t bother to say hello or prepare him for the shock. He was sitting at his butcher-block island in the kitchen, eating city granola with figs and cranberries, apricots and dates, a gut-cleansing mix an old friend in Brooklyn Heights sent him regularly. “Florence is dead of a heart attack,” Joyce announced. “She got out of bed this morning, took a shower, put her clothes on, came downstairs, took a frying pan off the hook by her stove, and keeled over.”

Not Florence! Funny, that he always felt closer to her when he thought of her as Mrs. Gamble. How could Mrs. Gamble be dead? Joyce had outlined a logical sequence, but he didn’t want to picture her lifting up the covers, slowly swinging her veiny legs over the side of the bed, standing on the worn green paisley carpet, pulling her lacy nightgown over the quivery mass of her belly, that part which had always been concealed by the apron.

“Trishie called the ambulance, but she was already gone when they arrived.”

“Already gone,” he murmured. Mrs. Gamble had always been so reliable, lurking at the window, watching the McClouds, and he found it difficult to believe that she was truly out of this world. Now that it would never again be possible to catch a glimpse of her behind her sheer dining-room curtain, it struck Walter that he too had been a watcher, that he’d been as fascinated by Mrs. Gamble as she was by all of them. He had probably given her equal time, spying out the kitchen window into her breakfast nook.

He didn’t want to listen to his mother describe the ambulance driver and the trip to the emergency room. In his New York days he had seen enough death to know that the process, the laboring toward the end, was at once awesome and hideous and ordinary as a boot. He had thought that at the moment of the unreal calm, when the heart finally stopped, just then what people knew left them; their body of knowledge, words, music and their suddenly unhoused spirit drifted up out of them like one last breath. It may not have been rational to believe such a thing, but there was a cosmic generosity about the idea that appealed to Walter. Perhaps that rich bit of air was left behind for the living to appropriate, to tap, all of the stuff of the dead in the public domain. If he inhaled at the right time, in the right place, he would instantly possess Mrs. Gamble’s storehouse. He clapped his hand over his mouth and nose to prevent an accidental intake.

He told Joyce he was sorry, knowing as he said so that his sympathy was misplaced. Mrs. Gamble had been neither friend nor relation. The bond of neighbor was an uneasy one without exact rules and requirements beyond the village ordinance specifying grass length, the height of fences and the types of trees allowed in the parkway. “I have to admit,” Joyce said, “that I’m sorry, too. I think I’m going to miss her. It’s strange, unsettling, that a force of nature can so suddenly vanish.”

“No,” Walter said, “no, she’s not gone. Not really. Not Mrs. Gamble. She’ll pop up in a different form. You watch, that earthquake we’ve all been waiting for in San Francisco will happen tonight. The whole state of California will break off and be swept away in one stupendous tremor. If not that, at the very least her collies will go feral,
after the requisite number of years pawing at her grave and making doggy crying noises.”

“Oh, honey,” Joyce said, laughing.

How could it be true, he wanted to say. How could she be dead? “I have a student who disappeared recently,” he said, “a kid named Jim Norman. I don’t think there’s anything left of him except a bit of odorless, faintly yellow smoke. No one knows what’s happened to him. The parents seem to have checked out too. I tried to reach him, in a teacherly capacity in class, but that proved to be beyond my powers. The school officials are trying to care, but I think everyone’s relieved. I can’t say I even knew him. So there’s no sadness, the way there would be if a straight-A student got killed in a car accident, but on the other hand we’re not allowed to be jubilant like the Munchkins. It’s uncomfortable because his absence makes us reflect on our own carelessness and lack of interest. It’s different from the discomfort Mrs. Gamble’s passing prompts in us. Help me, Mother! I’m talking like an English teacher. I’d better say good-bye before I give you an assignment. Please convey my condolences to the family.” They, he thought, were the true survivors.

After Joyce hung up he called Susan, to tell her.

“Oh, my God, Walter,” she said. “I can’t believe it. That old battle-ax! I was coming out of your house once and she was right on the sidewalk, waiting for me. Do you know what she said? She said, ‘Young lady, I’ve seen you in the living room, doing what you do on the sofa, and it’s a real bosom heaver.’ She had that low, bloodless way of talking, you know? I was so startled by the term
bosom heaver
I couldn’t get at what she was saying and I also sort of knew that she was the one at fault, snooping in other people’s windows. I never did it with Mitch, you probably figured that out, by the way he didn’t let up on me, always breathing down my neck. Everyone assumed we had, but you see, my mother had put the fear in me from way back. I come by my prudishness honestly. With Daniel it was different. For one thing, he didn’t have a lot of extra strength, and so often we were just fondling each other without any expectations. I have to say that with him it was about the sweetest thing I’ve ever had in that department. About as poignant as it can get. I go all weak when I remember that I hoped I’d get pregnant! I thought it would be so romantic to
carry his child and name it Daniel Junior, or Danielle—can you believe it, Walter?”

“I would have married you out of brotherly duty.”

“Yes, and we’d have lived in those low-income apartments on the south side of Oak Ridge, and you’d have gone to work as a mechanic. It would have been so much fun! I can’t help thinking that someone was watching over me, preventing me from going too far astray.”

“Mrs. Gamble, angel. It was she who had her eye on you.”

“ ‘A bosom heaver’! What nerve that woman had. How dare she spy on us. I’m not sorry she’s dead, Walter, not a bit sorry. She spooked me. How are you, anyway?”

“I can’t match you tidbit for tidbit, nothing to reveal about my high school sexual experiences. No long-buried secret.” For the first time he was tempted to tell her about Mitch. Maybe he could tell her, in a way that wouldn’t take away from her own fine memories. He could assure her that Mitch, after all, had only used him, that Walter had been convenient and so willing. Instead he said, “I told you about my cousin Francie’s affair with a man who’s studying rural sociology in Bloomington, Indiana. That’s a lot of excitement for one family. I’m trying to figure out how to brace myself when Lake Margaret goes on the market.”

Susan clicked her tongue and sighed.

“But let’s see, I’m going to the prom tomorrow night. The theme this year at Otten, to go along with
South Pacific
, is ‘Some Enchanted Evening.’ ”

“How awful for you! That sounds dreadful. You’re a chaperone?”

“I’m responsible for pouring the punch and watching for signs of drugs and alcohol. ‘Chaperone’ is a gentle term for a bouncer. I’m supposed to be Them, instead of Us. Which means I’m not supposed to get plastered beforehand. You have no idea how these functions serve my memory. I guess I’ve already told you how my high school career is dredged up and re-dredged up daily. Sometimes I don’t feel as if I’m in the present anymore. I’m in purgatory, suspended between then and now, alongside Mrs. Gamble. For me, Florence Gamble lives.”

“I don’t know how you stand it. Maybe the dollhouse shop was right for you—”

“When my students ask me what I did before I moved to Otten, I tell them, ‘Construction.’ Do you think they imagine me strapped to a girder ninety stories high in Manhattan, tanned, muscular, wearing a hard hat, whistling down below at the girls? What would happen, do you suppose, if word got out that I had worked at a dollhouse shop?”

“It might be ugly,” she said. “You shouldn’t think about it.”

“Well, I don’t. Much. How’s Lester?”

“No word,” she said mournfully. “Not for two months approximately, or sixty-five days specifically. It feels as if the wire has been cut. It was ill-fated and continues to be ill-fated, and yet, and yet, who knows? What about Julian? Have you done as I said and called him, or written him, or gotten on a plane and sat on his doorstep?”

“I did send him my Pollini program from 1977, signed by the master himself. It was my dearest keepsake.”

“That was all the way back in February, Walter. It doesn’t count.”

“You mean there’s a statute of limitations on offerings?”

“Yes. Frequency of communication is more important than the quality.”

“I’m sure Julian is besieged by admiring students and Louisiana poets. He has no need to look back over the Mason-Dixon line, back to a one-night stand who spends his time trying to teach farm children to support the thesis sentence with three statements.”

“You are sure of no such thing. Answer this next silly question kindly, will you?”

“Okay.”

“What do you think happens to the—the love? I pitch it with all my might towards Lester. Breakfast, class, lunch, rehearsal, performance, dinner, sleep: I am radiating love for Lester. Other people may very well be hurling love my way and I don’t have any use for it. Julian may be languishing down in New Orleans, dreaming of your arrival. What happens to the feeling once we’ve released it, do you think?”

“It’s not a property that travels in any kind of measurable way, love isn’t. The supercolliders can’t track it, and on the other end the psychics rarely detect its glittery path. There’s no mass to the stuff, no density. It’s something that you have to take on faith, I’m afraid. If I were the Mother Abbess I probably wouldn’t sing ‘Climb Ev’ry
Mountain’ at this point in the movie. I’d sing a snappy aerobics tune with the refrain ‘Use the love, use the love, use the love.’ You know, turn it homeward, where you can see its effects. But then she’s a nun. What does she know?”

“No, no, of course you’re right, damn you, Walter! Damn you. In your own sweet way you’re telling me to be a grown-up. So okay, I’m trying, I’m trying almost as hard as I can. But as to love—if there is no such thing as love you would never have forgiven me.”

“I only said love was difficult to trace. Forgiven you for what?”

“For every unthinking and ridiculous thing I did that year. That time we still don’t mention very often.”

“Oh, that year. I know the one. You did return the costume I stole from the Kentons before they sent me a subpoena. I owed you for that.”

“You didn’t exactly steal it. And that was selfish on my part, too. You should have kept it and sued them, you really should have. I hope they were worried sick about legal action. I did get the dress cleaned, it’s true, at my own expense, but I got to carry it on a hanger, all clean and white and poofy when I went back for the first time in five months. Having the costume in front of me was a way to enter without having myself and my absence be the focus. I was aloof and superior when I handed it over. No, Walter, I’ve always been selfish. I’m even selfish saying I’m selfish because I expect to be forgiven for it, to be able to go right on being selfish.”