The Short History of a Prince (5 page)

After the mass, after he’d been released from his duties, Walter sat on the pier with Sue Rawson. Susan and Mitch had swum out to the raft and were wrestling, pushing each other off, struggling to get back aboard. There was that moment, as they hoisted themselves up, when they were suspended, their elbows bent, their torsos and legs pulled down by the water. After five years of ballet school Walter knew their bodies. Susan had virtually no breasts, two patty pies with penny-size nipples; each rib was clearly delineated all the way up to her clavicle, and in fifth position her legs tucked into each other as if they’d been welded together. Walter was sure that he could draw from memory the pattern of the veins on Mitch’s feet, the curves the artery took as it went up his calf, the distance, bone to bone, on his hairless chest. It was hard to say which feature was the most arresting, if it was Mitch’s height that commanded attention or the pinkness of his lips, the blush along his jaw, or the blue eyes, with the excessive lashes, and the
gently drooping lids. The first time she’d met Mitch, Sue Rawson had said, “Now that’s the sort of boy who will catch fish without a worm on his hook.”

“Does it sometimes surprise you that Mitch has stuck with the ballet this long?” Sue Rawson was speaking to Walter but she was looking out to the lake.

It had never occurred to Walter that Mitch might quit. “What?” he said. “No, no, not at all. He’s a natural. He loves the music, the way Susan and I do, and he always gets encouragement. And his mother makes him go to class, besides. She broke her foot the day she was supposed to dance for Sir Frederick Ashton, in London, so the story goes. It was the end of her future.”

“Ashton is a simpleton,” Sue Rawson said, as if all along they’d been talking about the British choreographer and not about Mitch. She pointed to the swimmers. “Do those two youngsters think they’re in love?”

“Uhh,” Walter said, involuntarily, as if he’d been punched.

“It’s all right.” She seemed about to pat him on the leg, but she must have thought better of it. Instead she reached for her binoculars and looked through, to see, up close, Mitch wrestle Susan to the prickly turf of the raft. “Don’t worry,” Sue Rawson said in her dry, knowing way. Susan let out a bloodcurdling scream as she fell backward into the lake. “They’ll get sick to death of each other soon enough.”

When they went up to the house the band was playing on the porch. Walter stood outside on the walk in his wet trunks, drinking champagne out of a paper cup, watching the guests dance to “We’ve Only Just Begun.” He saw his mother at the far end of the porch, winding her way through the couples, walking toward him. For many years to come he could not account for what happened next, shortly after she appeared, drifting in and out of his vision. It was as if the lights went out on the sunny afternoon, as if for a few seconds everyone was tripping around blind in the night, panicking, stumbling over their own shoes. There was a noise, like a sudden clap of thunder overhead, and
for an instant the sensation of darkness, the floor giving way. Walter felt the bang once in his heart, and then it echoed out of him, into the silence. The guests stood still, their hands clapped to their chests or their ringing ears. A large woman in a floral muumuu whispered, “Lord a mercy.”

The air cleared, became bright again. All at once everyone could see the disaster. The Peg-Board, with the family pictures, had fallen to the floor. What a noise it had made! Joyce, who may have been the only one not stopped by the commotion, continued her walk between the men and the women, the dancers who had burst from one another’s arms. She went out the door. She did not acknowledge Walter standing on the grass. She walked across the lawn and onto the footpath that led to the woods.

Aunt Jeannie was too horror-struck to weep or take action. She could only whimper, “How did this happen? How did it happen?” Uncle Ted, useful at last, ordered his brother and his nephews to lift up the board and set it against the porch wall. The glass of every single frame was smashed and the shards lay as they had been broken. The pictures that remained on the board were crooked, or their matting had fallen and dangled below the frames. “Go get the broom, please, Brian,” Uncle Ted said. “Charley, mops in the woodshed—watch your step, Mrs. Gardener, watch out there for the glass.” Nothing more dramatic than a broken jar of pickles, an everyday occurrence down at the Jewel; he’d seen it all, women’s water bursting, cantaloupes in smithereens in the produce aisle, freezer doors left open overnight and in the morning rivers of ice cream and orange juice flooding down to checkout. His aptitude, in truth, was not for managing money or overseeing a complex and perishable inventory, but rather for directing the stock boys to clean up and keeping the ladies from peril.

It was shortly after the mess was cleared away that Walter heard Aunt Jeannie’s piteous cry from the living room. “Where is Father Flannery? Didn’t anyone show him to his room? Didn’t anyone tell him he could stay the night?” Her older sons were dead drunk in the boathouse, and the younger daughters were in the trees down at the lake, jumping into shallow water from dangerous heights. Francie had finally gotten Roger Miller to look her in the eye and the two were
necking, tentatively, behind the woodpile. “Where is Father Flannery?” Aunt Jeannie wailed. Her hairpiece had wilted and come off and she was carrying it in both hands as if it were her bridal bouquet. The priest didn’t answer. Nobody had seen him leave hours before. He had eaten a sour grape off of the arbor up in the old tennis court, where his car was parked, looked at his watch and told himself he could be back in Indianapolis by dark.

The McClouds were quiet on the way home. Walter and his friends were sunburned and woozy. Robert had slept through the catastrophe on the porch, slept through the noise of the two frightened babies and woken only when most of the guests had gone. He felt refreshed and ready to drive. It had been a hard day for Aunt Jeannie, and he personally was glad to have gotten through it. He was looking forward to Sunday, to some tennis early in the morning, and Daniel’s swim meet in the afternoon. His wife was resting in the front seat next to him, and he did not disturb her. Joyce wasn’t asleep but she kept her eyes closed, and her face turned to the window, to the hum of the August night. She thought she might just call Mrs. Gamble’s son, Greg, when she got home. She might ask him if he would teach her this transcendental meditation business. She hadn’t told Robert yet, but she’d had an upsetting conversation with Sue Rawson in the middle of the party. She was going to need something in the coming months, an aid, her own little syllable, to calm her.

They drove up Maplewood Avenue. Most of the houses had a few lights on downstairs and, in the upstairs, the dim yellow glow that came from the children’s night-lights. Their own house was black, the windows reflecting the streetlights, as if the place had no heat, no life, no center of its own. The Gambles’ house was ablaze and the Missus herself was standing under the light on her front porch, her cigarette burning between her two fingers, her arms crossed, waiting. Waiting for them as if they were truant children. She looked as if she was too mad to shout, too mad to curse; she looked as if she was going to take her time and when she was good and ready she’d whisper, she’d practically spit each word, Where—Have—You—Been?

Two

SEPTEMBER
1995

A
t the end of the summer Walter spent several days at Lake Margaret trying to envision his future. It was an embarrassment, to be in his late thirties and straining, still, to see what came next. He hoped that no one was spying on him as he sat on the pier watching for a light to shine from somewhere out in the dark years before him. He had struggled to find his way as a teenager and as a college student. It was humbling to be in the future, in the time that should have been filled with satisfying labors and triumphs. How was it that he was sitting in the same chair, trying again to divine the path ahead? Most of the people he knew seemed to have had little difficulty long ago choosing a profession and stepping into the role, using the jargon naturally, looking the part. His cousin’s husband, Roger Miller, had decided in the third grade to be an optometrist; Susan had always been on the ballerina track; Daniel had wanted to become a marine biologist.

Through his twenties and thirties, Walter had worked at a dollhouse shop on the Upper East Side in New York City, selling furniture and house kits, and teaching his customers how to install the dinkiest marble tile, hardwood for floors, period molding and slate shingles. He understood the allure of the miniature because he had grown up helping Joyce put together and decorate her three-story town house
with a dormer. They’d wired the downstairs with electricity, so that at Christmas the impossibly small candles clipped on the three-inch tree in the parlor filled the room with what his father called a homier-than-thou yellow glow. Walter knew that for his adult customers the simple delight of reducing real life in all of its detail to fit on the coffee table was worth eyestrain and aching fingers. There was also the more complicated charm of creating a kingdom so small that a person could perfect it.
What
woman wouldn’t find it gratifying to make something incorruptible by human beings? No slob was ever going to track mud through the $4,000 Georgian brick town house with twenty-six hundred hand-laid mini bricks, or the English baby house with dentil molding, or the southern colonial, fourteen rooms, full attic, with clapboard siding and a cedar shake roof.

Walter had been sympathetic to some of his clients at the shop, ladies who, like himself, loved the spirit of a house as much as the particulars of design and structure. To his way of thinking there was nothing hokey or Oriental in the idea that a house had a life and sensibility of its own. He would never have said that a building had an aura, but the long and the short of it was that some places felt right and others did not. He indulged himself in the pleasure of communion with his customers as together they bent over veranda spindles and newel posts and finely turned balusters. For a while he thought he might fill his studio apartment at Ninety-sixth and Amsterdam with a replica of his old neighborhood in Oak Ridge. His boss would have given him the materials at cost, the construction would occupy him for years, and when he finished, decades later, the
Smithsonian
magazine could do a feature on him—he, an old man with a hobby. He supposed at the root of the project was the normal longing to fashion his own history and commemorate what was past. A friend had dragged him to the Y, to a seminar on taking charge and living in the moment, but the theories and techniques were suspect, Walter thought. The moment, after all, was a flash in the pan. Life, he knew, had meaning and was fully possessed only as it was remembered and reshaped.

It had taken Walter several years to admit to himself that he couldn’t go on indefinitely selling Lilliputian Coke bottles and microscopic toilet-roll dowels. What, then? How was he to spend his days and how was he to earn his bread and butter? Maybe through his
childhood he hadn’t focused, hadn’t crossed his legs at night on his bed, eyes closed, concentrating on Walter in a pinstriped suit, Walter shaking hands with the boss, Walter on the front page of
The New York Times
sealing a $70 million deal with a great American company.