The Uninnocent (20 page)

Me, I was sick of the place by the time we finished, but Franklin and his Iris walked around it in the morning, afternoon, and then again before sunset, admiring its every angle. Whereas they couldn't have been more pleased with the outcome, I felt horrified and ashamed. We'd somehow robbed the house of its history and personality by making it look so different. It didn't dawn on me until after we'd folded the drop cloths, cleaned the brushes with turpentine, and put everything back in the cellar that what we had done was paint my parents and grandfather out of the picture. I realized too late that I preferred it the way it was before, comfortably the worse for wear, a pleasant dirty white instead of this cat-piss hue.

Even more, what came out of the experience for me had nothing to do with the project itself but with a growing curiosity about and deepening distaste for the project manager. The same way you can look an animal in the eye and know if it's sick or healthy, I studied Franklin over the course of those days together and began to form a strong opinion as to his character. I didn't let on as I observed him. I did as I was told, faking as respectful an obedience as I could.

When he said, “Climb up the ladder and see if you can't get a little more trim gloss on that eave,” I climbed up the ladder and brushed more trim gloss on the eave. When he said, “Lunch break, Wyatt,” I came down from wherever I was on the side of the house and sat in the violet shade with him and ate a ham sandwich, listening to him pontificate about how smelly the canals are in Venice in the summer, and how warm the mink hats they wear in St. Petersburg as the snow drifts down over Palace Square, and how in Varanasi, also known as Benares, one of the oldest cities in the world, says he, Indian seekers—“would-be freemen,” he called them—bathe themselves in the chocolate-brown waters of the Ganges to find their way toward heaven, or some such. He was consumed by his stories and his own voice, while I watched a troop of black ants at my feet carry tiny morsels of ham and rye away toward some unknown underground destination.

As I listened and watched, my eyes narrowing to gain better focus, I began to believe, with the certainty of one who knows firsthand that death follows life, that there was something deeply disturbed about Franklin. Something unnatural, off. Was he just delusional, a suave but big fat outrageous liar? Just a user and a taker? Or was he on the lam, untrustworthy, hiding here in Gro-ver's Mill from someone or something? Was he dangerous? Was he possibly
evil
?

“Did you wash yourself in the Ganges, too, then?” I asked, just to see what he would say, not caring really whether he did or didn't.

“I'm not a Hindu,” he answered. “No point.”

“So what'd you learn, seeing those poor saps dunk themselves in muddy water?”

Franklin sighed, looked away. “That human beings may be the lowest class of species in the universe. But let's change the subject. Your grandmother—”

“Iris, you mean?”

“—wouldn't appreciate me telling you such negative things, Wyatt. Besides, you're young. The world's mostly ahead for you. You'll have your own experiences and form your own conclusions about everything when you grow up.”

“I don't need to get one day older to form my own conclusions,” I said, hoping to provoke some telling response.

“No, really?” turning his slitted eyes on me.

I don't know why I felt the strongest urge to hit him in the face with one of my already clenched fists, but knew I'd be overpowered in a flash, so I said with as bitter and worldly a tone as I could muster, “Look, Frank—I mean, Franklin. I already know the world stinks. I don't need to go to Venice or any of your other fancy-ass places to figure that out. I'm not stupid any more than you're a Hindu.”

Franklin thought about that, or pretended to, for a moment. Then said, mock-cheerful, “Lunch break's over, Einstein. Time to get back to painting.”

Life pressed on over the next months. Franklin arranged for the three of us to go to Radio City Music Hall to see a show featuring the Rockettes, and while my grandmother was thrilled, I couldn't help but feel guilty about our grand adventure—he bought dinner at a ritzy restaurant, my first encounter with creamed herring—knowing it was something my mom would have given anything, but anything to do.

Being by now a total outcast, a shunned goat, at school, and not caring what others said about me, I started spending afternoons up at the cemetery, hanging out near my parents' side-by-side graves, before heading down to do my daily walk around Grover's Mill Pond. The role of mama's boy, or daddy's, was one at this point I relished rather than rejected, wishing the bullies could fairly taunt me with such labels again. What would I give if I could still fish the pond with my father, or row out to the middle for another picnic with my boozy mother. Answer is anything. But I didn't have anything to give, nothing anyway that would bring them back. And so I found myself hanging around as much at the cemetery as at the drowning pond, the ash-carpeted pond, because in both places I noticed my heart calmed and my chance at happiness improved. Or, not
happiness
—less miserableness.

The keeper of the graveyard, a pasty middle-aged fellow with gimlet teeth, unwashed hair, and a kindly, sad look in his eye, asked me one Tuesday, when there was no funeral to oversee or vandals to chase away, what I was doing there so often.

“Why you asking?” I asked him back. “Am I breaking a rule or something?”

“No,” he said, shoving his hands into trouser pockets, shy, I thought, about talking to the living as opposed to the dead. “Just seems like a young fella like you ought to be having fun with your friends somewhere instead of haunting an old boneyard like this.”

I shrugged.

Then he asked an unexpected question. “Well, seeing as you're here so much, how'd you like to pick up a little extra walk-around money?”

So it was I was hired to mow the lawn, sweep leaves and other leavings off the oblong marble markers, pick up trash—I couldn't believe all the junk, candy wrappers, discarded funeral programs, even a used condom—left behind by sloppy mourners and cemetery-goers. Ralph paid me in cash, and other than giving me my assignment for the day, didn't pull a Franklin on me by expecting me to listen to dumb speeches or answer a bunch of questions, so we got along pretty well. He had a daughter about my age named Mollie, who came with him to work sometimes, and because she seemed to share my outcast ways, we sat against one of the mausoleums and chatted during breaks or after work. Like me, Mollie had lost her mother. Not to death, but because she ran off with another man.

“She might as well be dead and drowned as your mom,” Mollie said, shaking her head as she looked at me with unblinking, lovely brown eyes, dark as wet bark. “Don't hate me for saying so, but I sorta wish she
had
drowned. Least that way I could feel sorry for her.”

“Yeah. I know,” I said.

Because I didn't have any costly hobbies, and didn't care about going to the movies or buying burgers and malted milks—I would have treated Mollie, but she had no more interest than I did in these things—the money started adding up. I kept it hidden in the lining of a seersucker jacket I rarely wore, which was safely hung in the far back of my closet. My grandmother occasionally asked me what I'd been up to all day, and was perfectly satisfied with the hodgepodge of white lies I concocted for her benefit. As often as not, I even told her the partial truth—“I helped mow somebody's lawn,” to which she said, “Good way to get some exercise,” and the matter dropped. While I was pretty sure Franklin knew I was lying half the time, he let it ride. So long as I kept
our
lawn mowed.

It was right about then when Franklin announced his intention of painting and wallpapering the interior of the house, a project my grandmother embraced wholeheartedly, that I began to develop a project of my own. It began small, like a baby worm inside an apple. But as the days rolled by, it slowly formed itself at the core of my raw existence. Here I'd been earning money for no reason, but now I needed money if I was going to run away and start a new life somewhere else. I didn't know any other place besides Grover's Mill, but my home wasn't home anymore, it was being leached away from me. Now at least I had a plan, a reason to get out of bed in the morning. And if I wavered, a particularly disturbing encounter with Franklin solidified my goal.

This occurred when we were nearly finished stripping off the old wallpaper in the dining room, a stately leaf-and-floral pattern with Greek vases that I used to get lost in staring at when I was a kid, which was to be replaced by a more up-to-date geometric design. To me it was just more of the same business of erasing the past, but I had no will to get all hot under the collar over it. The two of them had gone into New York to pick the new paper in a showroom there, so it was a moot point.

Helping Franklin with this work during the mornings before heading off to my chores in the cemetery, where I could hang around with Mollie, left me little time for my loitering by the pond, and school was just a fading memory. I'd basically dropped out, without anybody making much of a fuss about it. I assured my grandmother I would finish high school later, after taking time off to regroup. Meantime, working both jobs—and let me say here, if I might, that I was a hard worker, despite any attitude issues I had regarding Franklin—left me a worn-out rag at the end of the day. It was everything I could do to get some supper into my belly, do the dishes, and slip past Iris and Franklin as they listened to some variety program on the radio, to head upstairs and to bed. A fast masturbation into one of my socks, and I was quickly in dreamland.

One night, I'd gone down the hall to take a pee. After I lay down again, for whatever reason, I was having a hard time getting back to sleep. I tossed and turned, punched my pillow, adjusted my blanket, then finally had just started to drift off when I heard someone turn the knob on my door and softly glide into my room. Far too startled, not to mention frightened, to speak or scream or even move, I lay there listening, and waited. Some long minutes passed, my heart up in my throat, and I did hear shuffling, very soft, across the rug, and the delicate, awful sound of breathing. I could swear I heard the intruder reach down and lift something up from the floor and—I can't say for sure because my ears were so full of the shush of my pounding heart—inhale. The next sound was not as indistinct. A floorboard creaked, only somewhat muffled by the braided rug. The silence that followed was, as the cliché goes, deafening—and it went on for such an excruciatingly long stretch of time that I began to wonder if I hadn't dreamed the intrusion. I continued my vigil with a corpselike stillness, and after a time I heard the faintest thud—not a thud, more like a
poof
of air—followed by another unnatural silence, and then the expertly turned handle again, though oddly no footfalls from my bedside back to the door. Mortified, I didn't move a muscle, barely breathed, hoping against hope that there would be no further activity. As the room began to lighten, the sun not yet risen outside but the sky pinkening the sheers in my window, I recovered my wits and began trying to sort out what in the world I'd experienced.

Franklin, who considered himself a bit of a chef, was making Irish oatmeal and Belgian waffles in the kitchen that morning, whistling, as I walked in and poured myself a glass of milk.

“Where's my grandmother?” I asked.

“When I came down, she wasn't up yet so I checked in on her and she's a tad under the weather this morning. Would you mind taking that up to her?” pointing at a tray set out with a soft-boiled egg, toast spread with marmalade, orange juice. The unnecessary touch of flowers in a cream pitcher nauseated me, I must confess.

“Breakfast in bed,” I said, and proceeded to do as he told me.

Not that I suspected for a moment my grandmother had been the person who visited my bedroom during the night, but seeing her in bed, white as if she'd been soaked in bleach, feeble from flu, confirmed it hadn't been her. I placed the tray on her side table, asked if there was anything else I could do.

“No, Wyatt. I just need to sleep, is all. I'll try to eat some of that later.”

Back downstairs in the kitchen, I certainly wasn't going to give Franklin the pleasure of hearing me ask if he happened to notice any burglars in the house last night. Best, I knew, just to leave him thinking I was dumb as a brick. One thing that continued to bother me as the day wore on was how my intruder, surely Franklin, had managed to exit the room without having made a single hint of sound. He'd deftly stolen into the room. Stood over me silent as death for a long time. But then it was as if he'd simply floated to the door when he made his escape. How did he do that? I took to leaning one of my schoolbooks—which I secretly read on evenings when I had enough energy—against the inside of my bedroom door before going to bed. This way, I figured I'd know if he had snuck in again in the middle of the night. I kept my father's wooden leg beside me under my blanket too, with which I planned to bash in his skull if the chance arose. But every morning I saw that the book was still there, so I gathered he had lost interest or decided it wasn't worth the risk.

As work in the rooms continued, the wariness and hostility I felt toward Franklin only grew, despite his apparent decision not to trespass further on my privacy when I was sleeping. Grandmother's health improved, in no small measure because of Franklin's doting, but rather than making me glad this only irked me. One could reasonably argue I had no right to feel competitive with him, but any natural instinct—granted, piddling—I had about being a good grandson was crowded off the stage by Franklin. He was like a land-going octopus with tentacles wrapped around nearly every part of my life. When she was sick, confined to her room, my grandmother had instructed me to do whatever Franklin said, that until she was up and out of bed, he was head of the house. The only problem was, this edict remained in effect even now that she was back to her old cold self. I found myself living with a strange new father now, one with whom I didn't share a drop of blood in my veins and toward whom never a kind thought ran through my mind. Had my real father been alive to see what was happening here, or so I fantasized, he'd have beaten Franklin to within an inch of his life and then dragged him—one leg powering the way—down to the pond to finish the job. Sweet dream, but just a dream.