A Good and Happy Child (9 page)

restaurant odors. Her breath was tobacco-y. She began stroking my head, somewhat clumsily.

“I got the job. Isn’t that exciting?”

“Mm.”

She paused. “Tom Harris said you got upset tonight.”

I was silent.

“Was everything okay?”

“Yeah.”

She sat in silence next to me, waiting for more. “Why did you put the chair in front of the door?” she asked firmly.

“I don’t know. I guess I was upset,” I said, seizing on her word.

“Can you tell me why?”

I thought for a moment.

“When Dad went away,” I said, “did Tom Harris want him to go?”

My mother turned aside, as if this question caused her pain.

“Sweetie, Tom Harris opposed your father’s going for the same reasons we all did. It was dangerous down there.” She peered at me in the dark. “Is that what this is about?”

“Did Tom Harris tell Daddy that? Or did he just
tell
you he told Daddy?”

“He told your father directly,” she replied. “George, what’s this about?”

“Are you
sure
he said that to Daddy?”

“George!” she said, exasperated. “What is all this?”

But I closed my eyes to make her think I had fallen asleep. She waited for a time. Waited for me to stir and say something to ease her anxiety, something concrete and solvable that she could actually address with her ample combined powers of intelligence and love. But I didn’t. Eventually she rose from the bed and crept out quietly. I heard the sink running, the aspirin bottle pop open, the pills rattling. Then
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I drifted off for real, and, as I did, I recalled an image: a man with a thick mustache lounging on our sofa at Christmastime, bearing eau-de-vie and sweet dessert wines, telling outlandish stories, with fingers that fiddled and twitched with continual impatience. My godfather, I murmured to myself: Freddie Turnbull.

n o t e b o o k 5

Hole

He was high up on the property, a little toy figure bending and bowing, seemingly dancing in an odd halting step—a kind of Electric Slide—all by himself. He was raking, actually. But the rake was invisible in his hands against the house, the yard, and the trees, all colored in the ash-brown hues of autumn.

Rosetta was the name of Freddie Turnbull’s house. It was situated just south of town, on a hillock overlooking a quiet patch of Main Street past two hulking Presbyterian churches and an old hotel named for P. G. T. Beauregard, now a halfway house for local lunatics who on mild days could be seen lolling on rockers under the columned porch.

Rosetta was a broad-shouldered, brown brick house, with ivy crawling on every side, that wore, as it were, a Victorian lace cap in the form of a whitewashed, latticed widow’s walk flanked by two chimneys. Its yard ran a hundred feet down to Main Street, and its interior was the pride of its owner: a shadowy place slathered in oriental carpets and antiques. Every year the house would be opened up for parties, and Freddie—Uncle Freddie, my godfather—would escort his friends around to show new acquisitions or restorations. Uncle Freddie had inherited a fortune from his parents, as well as Rosetta, so compared
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with his scholarly peers—he was a professor of art history at Early—he lived like a baron.

When he saw me coming toward him, the dance ceased. He leaned on the rake and watched me.

In summers Freddie would be seen in the same place, gardening. This is how I remembered him best: in great bloomer shorts, his bald head covered with a panama hat, trowel in hand, sweat pouring down onto his glasses. In summer he went bare-chested, and you saw he had the round belly and flat pectoral muscles of an aging wrestler, with tufts of hair growing from his shoulders. Now he was neatly packaged in pressed khakis and a flannel shirt.

“George! Well, what a surprise! What brings you to the pastures of the humble shepherds and shepherdesses?”

This was the way Freddie talked, in aggressive and mocking allusion.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Nothing! You’ve come a long way for nothing. Shall I put you to work?” he said, gesturing to the wide yard littered with leaves. We stood near his terrace, a platform of mossy brick, furnished with black iron chairs and table. Evidently my face fell at the idea of raking, and he laughed. “I’m
teasing
you, ass! Boys prefer eating to working, isn’t that right? Come, let’s see if there’s any gruel I can heat up for you. That’s what we eat out here in the country. Or maybe you would like some lard?”

With that, we went inside.

What we had was a far cry from gruel. Uncle Freddie whipped together a wood platter laden with slices of blue cheese, pâté, cornichons, and cracked wheat crackers.

“Just the simple food of shepherds and shepherdesses,” he continued, as he bustled around the kitchen. I tucked in hungrily. “How nice it is to get a visit from my godson.”

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63

“How is school?” I asked him.

“School?” he puffed. “My school? Back to the beginning, every year: classical architecture for undergraduates. The Parthenon,
agora,
Greek city planning. And grading papers. Grading
papers,
” he repeated with scorn. “There is no human achievement so great, that a freshman cannot reduce it to drivel.”

I smiled. We sat in the shadows in his kitchen, around a little table.

“And
your
school?” he asked.

“I hate school.”

“Of course you do,” he said. “The school system has been ruined. Full of blacks and little inbred creatures from the county.”

My eyes widened.

“Well, isn’t it?” he said.

“I guess so.”

“Of course it is,” he said. “The civil rights movement destroyed education in this country. They had to
chaaange
the curriculum so that the little blacks would be able to get As, and they ruined it for everybody. The intelligent students fled for private schools, and the teachers they brought in were more ignorant
blacks.
And now it’s just a godawful mess.”

Freddie sat despondently, as if his own speech reminded him of all the hopeless truths of modern times. My father told me that Freddie’s family had once owned an Alabama cotton plantation but had sold it decades ago,
after the boll weevil,
and the property had been converted to a lodge for game hunters. It should have occurred to me that my godfather was one of the breed of curmudgeonly university homosexuals—

bombastic, witty, overeducated—who fancy themselves the Socrates of their institution: the brilliant one, the one with taste, the True Protector of student virtue, saving young men from the mediocrity of
coaches
and
social scientists,
and God help them,
the impoverished, middle-class scrub
that passes for Society in a town like Preston
(all phrases I’d heard him use at one time or another). Uncle Freddie’s aristocratic nostalgia constituted, in a way, his Platonic forms: the departed generation of great
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talkers; the ladies who wore hats and gloves to church; the gentlemen who held their liquor and never cursed or spoke about money. I swallowed a cornichon and remembered why I had come.
They’ll
never tell you where they are,
my father had said.
You’ll have to find them.

“I want to see my father’s old letters,” I said bluntly. It was a childish opening to negotiations, but I didn’t know any better way. “I want to know why he went away.”

To my astonishment, Uncle Freddie glanced quickly at me, then stared down at his hands. A guilty gesture.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

Through the kitchen window I saw that the October sun was fading quickly and streaking the lawn with orange. In the unlit house, shadows fell everywhere around us. Uncle Freddie sat back in his chair, his face gone slack. Emotions swept his features like one of those timeelapse shots of weather streaking across a sky. He rose. He picked up the now-empty platter and put it in the sink. He stood there, a silhouette, staring out the window.

“What prompted this line of inquiry, George?”

“I thought you had letters from just before he went away,” I said.

“Hm,” he grunted, evasively. “Why those letters?”

“I want to know about him. Why he left.”

“I don’t have them!” he shouted, turning on me.

His hands twitched violently. I had seen Uncle Freddie puffed up and bellowing in hot debates, but he had never yelled at me. I recoiled. My father had been right. Uncle Freddie wasn’t going to tell me. Uncle Freddie could not be trusted.

“Maybe your mother has them,” he sulked.

“She doesn’t. I asked,” I lied.

The house, by now, had descended into gloom. We literally sat in the dark. Finally he broke the silence.

“Come here,” he said after a moment. “I want to show you something.”

After unlocking a door with a skeleton key, he led me down creaking stairs to his cellar. Then he flipped a switch, revealing ceiling-high a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

65

racks of wine, all gathering dust, some with chalk marks on them for turning, the floor scattered with cardboard boxes bearing images of châteaux, grapes, vines. More rooms spun out from this one; armies of glass bottles glinting in the dark.

“Have I never shown you the wine?” he asked. It was not
my col-
lection,
or
my cellar,
just
the wine.

“There must be a hundred bottles,” I exclaimed.

“Altogether? Over two thousand,” he said proudly. “There’s more in the next room. Go ahead, take one.”

I pulled a bottle from the wine rack gently, with two hands, afraid of dropping it. Freddie smiled. “Read it.”

“Hermitage,” I mispronounced.

“
Hermitage,
” he corrected, savoring the name. “A tiny domaine on the slopes of the Rhoˆne, where the vines grow on such steep gradients, machines are useless and everything is picked by hand. Dirty fingers and paring knives. And the date?”

“1971.”

“The year you were born,” he said.

I looked at the bottle in my hand. It was covered with dust. I ran my finger along the top, wiping the bottle clear to reveal a glimpse of blood-red wine.

“We drank the first bottle of this with a lump of Parmesan cheese—your father, Tom Harris, and I.” I flinched at Tom Harris’s name. “Your father was happy then. Just as happy as he could be, that you were in the world.”

I blushed, and looked at my shoes.

“Now this wine is ready to drink. Five cases, my friend. It’s going to be my party wine at Halloween. You may have a glass—one only—

if you think you’re ready.”

“I’m ready,” I said.

“Wine matures faster than boys,” he said drily. “Listen, George. You will learn about your father as you go—as you get older. He was a complicated man. You understand? No need for the private eye act.”

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I nodded.

“Festina lente.
You know what that means?”

“Hurry slowly.”

“
Bene.
” He smiled. r r r

I was so deeply asleep I wonder if this one came purely from my dreams. Direct and potent, but so brief it was hard to analyze. My Friend did not appear in my room to wake me. He did not take me on a journey through the nighttime ether. Instead, I dreamed of darkness. This might seem like an oxymoron, since sleep takes place in the dark, and since unconsciousness is itself a kind of void, or darkness. Dreaming, therefore, should be an illumination of that darkness . . .

If so, it explains why this was the worst dream of my life. In it, I am only awareness. I can perceive, but I cannot act. It’s like I am sitting at the bottom of a well. When I try to speak, the effort dies before it begins. All I am is a stream of thought, a trickle of consciousness, a drip in the well. Constant, but weak, and hopeless. Into the well enters another presence. It is my Friend. This surprises me, even in a dream. How could he follow me to this place? I am so deep, so remote, that his voice—soundless, though; better to describe it as his mind—is a shock. But it brings no relief. If before the well was a horrible, but neutral, place, my Friend’s voice brings with it the element of pain. It speaks in long, gloating phrases that throb in my frail consciousness like a migraine. Finally the voice dies away into silence. Now I cannot stand the quiet.

I ask him if this is a prison.

It is an end.

Does that mean I am here forever?

Yes.

Terror ripples through me. I begin to wake up emotionally, as it were—even though moments ago such a thing seemed impossible. a g o o d a n d h a p p y c h i l d

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I can’t be here forever! I haven’t done anything yet!

You are here because this is where the holes go.
At this point my Friend and I speak at cross-purposes; he seems to think of “holes” as people, I think of them as places.
Is this like a basement?
I ask.

It is a state.

A state where?
I am thinking of the South, or North.
A state of finishedment.

This odd word sets off a chain of thinking: finishedment; if I am finished, done with, over, then my Friend no longer wants me. I begin to wrestle with the dream. I begin to try and clamber out of it, like swimming to the surface when you’re underwater. His voice comes to me. It follows me, so that I hear it as I gain the surface, achieve consciousness.

YOU ARE A HOLE. YOU ARE A HOLE.

Then I am sitting in bed awake, alive, breathing heavily, soaked and slimy with sweat, those words reverberating in my head. I could not go back to sleep, dogged by the hollow cruelty of that final voice. Its tone beyond mocking: hostile; an attack in itself. It was the voice of a Dean, or a Byrd, but a thousand times nastier: the voice of real hate.
But
how could my Friend hate me?
I tossed and turned, becoming entwined with the bedsheets. A plaintive, whiny voice welled up inside me.
If he
hates me, too, who do I have left?