Eye Contact (54 page)

Joey finished his milk. “Come on,” he urged us. “Let’s go upstairs.”

We all looked at each other and shrugged—there was no point in putting off the tour any longer. Joey was already in the doorway and ready to go exploring. Hazel said, “That’s a fine idea, Joey. If you’ll all be on your way, I can get some work done.” She turned her back to us and began mashing potatoes. The rest of us filed out of the kitchen like chastened schoolchildren, following Joey into the hall.

Suzanne leaned to tell me quietly, “Hazel is a treasure, really. You’ll grow to love her, just as we all do.”

Unconvinced, I summoned an I-hope-so smile.

Our little crowd made its way through the hallway past the dining room, living room, and den. In the entry hall, we gawked at the tree for a moment, then started up the stairs. As I did this, I noticed the back hall doorway open. Parker stepped indoors with two bags of groceries, apparently last-minute supplies for Hazel.

“Parker!” I called. “Come meet the Quatrains.”

As I herded the group back down to the Christmas tree, Parker hesitated at the back door, hefting the bags as if to say that he was needed in the kitchen. “Come on, Parker”—I laughed—“this’ll only take a moment.” And I led Suzanne a few steps down the hall to meet him.

Parker looked about for somewhere to put the groceries, placing them on the floor near the kitchen doorway; then he stepped toward us, still bundled up for the cold weather, complete with muffler and knit cap. His beard was frosty, his sunglasses fogged.

As he removed his cap and shook his wavy hair, I told Suzanne, “This is Parker Trent, whom I’ve hired as my new managing editor at the
Register
.” As he unwound the scarf from his neck, I told him, “And this is my cousin, Suzanne Quatrain, chairman of Quatro Press.”

She extended her hand. “A pleasure, Mr. Trent. Welcome to Dumont.”

He shook her hand and removed his sunglasses, telling her, “It’s an honor, Miss Quatrain. After Mark offered me the job here, I did a little research on Quatro. I discovered that Dumont’s largest industry has enjoyed a boom period under your recent leadership.” He smiled. “Congratulations.”

“Thank you,” she said, sounding a little flustered—I wasn’t sure if she was responding to Parker’s flattering words or his physical charm. “But, please,” she added, “do call me Suzanne.”

“And I, Suzanne, am simply Parker.”

She paused in thought. “So,” she said, “you’re a researcher.”

“A highly skilled one,” I answered for Parker. “He’s been responsible for some first-rate journalism, and I’m eager to put him to work here in Dumont.”

He granted, “Research has always interested me, and I guess it is, in fact, one of my strong points.”

She nodded. “After you settle into the job, perhaps we could talk. I’ve been involved in a little research project of my own lately, and I could use some advice.”

Unzipping his coat, he said, “Glad to help, if I can. What’s the focus of your project?”

“It’s of a scientific nature. Specifically, DNA.”

“Sounds interesting. Maybe we could—”

“I’m bored,” Joey interrupted. “Can we please go upstairs now?”

The rest of us laughed. Joey had been sidelined long enough, so we all headed upstairs. Parker ran back to deliver the groceries to Hazel, then joined our group, draping his heavy ski jacket over the banister at the foot of the stairs. Arriving in the upstairs corridor, we toured the rooms on either side of the hall—six bedrooms.

The two most lavish of these were originally occupied by my uncle and aunt, Edwin and Peggy Quatrain. While separate bedrooms for a married couple now strike me as a civilized notion, it was highly unusual back in the sixties when I first visited the house, and, even as a boy, I was curious as to why Mr. and Mrs. Quatrain didn’t sleep together. Now, Neil and I had claimed my uncle’s room as our own, where we did indeed sleep together. We decided to use my aunt’s beautiful room as our principal guest room, and it was occupied that weekend by Roxanne and Carl.

Of the four remaining bedrooms, three were originally for each of the Quatrain children, and the last was the guest room where I slept as a boy. (Hazel’s little suite was still in its original location, downstairs off the kitchen, except that now she lived there alone, as she had since the death of her husband, Hank the handyman.) Now these four smaller bedrooms were mostly in disarray, except for the room that had been my cousin Mark’s, which Parker Trent had spruced up as his temporary quarters until able to lease an apartment of his own.

As we passed through the hall, Suzanne paused to look inside her room. It still had the pink floral wallpaper and frilly tieback curtains she had known as a girl, and I expected her to linger in the doorway, sharing with us some fond memory of awaking there with the giddy excitement of a long-ago Christmas morning. But she said nothing. She simply stepped back from the room, and it was impossible to read any thoughts whatever from the blank expression on her face.

Joey was eager to see his old room, and he raced ahead of the crowd to open its door. We followed and watched as he wandered to the center of the room, little more than a clearing amid the piles of boxes and other miscellany that had been stored there. I expected him to react with indignation at the discovery that his childhood sanctuary was now used as a junk room, but, to the contrary, his face lit up with fascination, and I remembered that even as a boy, he defied Hazel’s best efforts to bring some order to his constant mess.

“Hey!” he said. “Look at this, Thad.” We all craned into the room as Thad joined his uncle, helping him extract something from the bottom of a box. As they worked together, I realized that Thad—who had thus far comported himself as an absolute snot—was actually capable of displaying a spark of interest in someone else’s life. It was also clear from his manner that Thad liked his uncle Joey, sympathetic to his disability.

“It’s my
typewriter
,” said Joey as they lifted it out of the carton. “I wondered where it went.” And sure enough, there was the old Smith-Corona portable that Joey had lent to me during my visit. He carried it to his bed and flumped down with it, setting it on the same plaid bedspread that had remained there for years. He blew some dust off the machine, rolled a piece of paper into its carriage, and started awkwardly but patiently pecking at the keys—his technique had improved some in the thirty-three years since I last saw him attempt this. Thad tapped his uncle on the shoulder, then placed the typewriter on a child-size desk at the bedside, as if to tell Joey that he could work more easily there. Joey smiled at his nephew, sat on the little chair, and continued to peck away. Moments later, he yanked the paper from the machine and rushed over to present it to me. It read, “Merry Christmas, everybody. Have a happy New Year, Mark,” printed half red, half black. I was surprised to see that Joey had spelled and punctuated his message correctly. While I still harbored some serious philosophical quibbles with the Catholic education that both Joey and I had been subjected to, I was forever grateful to those nuns for their unrelenting focus on grammar.

“Excellent,” I told Joey. “I didn’t realize our family was riddled with writers.” He grinned proudly and showed his brief missive to the others in the hall, who wished him a merry Christmas in return.

Continuing down the hallway, we stopped at the door to Parker’s bedroom. Joey rambled to the others, “… and this was my brother Mark’s room, but he’s dead now.”

“Yes, Joey,” his sister Suzanne told him, “we all know that.”

But Neil, Roxanne, Carl, and Parker all flashed me a quizzical glance—this was a detail of family history that I found difficult to discuss, that I had simply never mentioned. So I mumbled, “Vietnam,” a single, sufficient word of explanation that prompted the others to nod their understanding.

In that quiet moment, standing there looking through Mark Quatrain’s doorway, I wondered what he would look like if he were still alive that day, if he were there with us to celebrate my move to Dumont. Would he still wear those khaki slacks that triggered my own lifelong fetish? Would he muss my hair again? Would I feel the same erotic charge from the touch of his hand?

“Hey,” said Joey, popping up behind me. I froze, exactly as I had done on the afternoon when Joey caught me looking through this same doorway, staring at his older brother’s ass. “Hey!” he repeated, just as before. “Wanna see the upstairs?”

“What
is
upstairs?” chimed Roxanne, who had not yet wandered up there.

“I was wondering about that myself,” said Carl.

“There’s one way to find out,” Suzanne suggested, gesturing toward the front staircase, which continued up to the third floor. “Follow me,” she said. “I’ll be happy to show it to you.” Then she stopped herself, adding, “That is, of course, if Mark doesn’t mind.” She had forgotten that, while this was her childhood home, the house had a new owner.

“Of course I don’t mind,” I told her. “Do lead the way.”

And she did, escorting the eight of us up the front stairs.

But in my own mind, not far below the surface of consciousness, I was still staring into Mark Quatrain’s bedroom. Joey still asked, “Wanna see the upstairs?” He grabbed my elbow and started tugging me toward the steep back stairway.

Barely above a whisper, I asked, “Are you sure it’s all right? Your parents acted so weird about it.”

“Sure,” said Joey, “it’s not as if it’s
locked
or anything.”

Even so, there was something sneaky about the way we climbed those back stairs. As he reached to open the door, I expected to feel a rush of cold air from the unused top floor, but it was plenty warm up there.

To my surprise, the door led to a kitchen, which looked a lot like the one downstairs, but with a much higher ceiling. There was no food around, but there was a toaster and such on the counter, and you could see gold-edged dishes through the glass doors of the cupboards. Everything was neat, nothing was dusty, but you could tell that no one lived there. “C’mon,” said Joey, heading through a doorway toward the front of the house.

I followed. A hall—with a bedroom on one side, an office on the other—led to the main room and its arched window across the front wall. I stood gaping at the vast space. The ceilings were slanted, like an attic’s, only much, much higher.

The furniture and paintings and rugs all looked like they came out of Mom’s decorating magazines. At the back end of the room, chairs faced a brick fireplace that was tall enough to walk into. It had shiny brass things like big chessmen that kept the logs in place, and there was a metal rack that held a bunch of long fireplace tools. Along the side walls, there were rows and rows of built-in bookcases with cabinets beneath them. There must have been tons of books, but now and then there were gaps on the shelves, and these were filled with old things like candlesticks and framed pictures and marble statues of guys’ heads. At the front end of the room, everything faced the wide half-circle window. Through it, you could see the bare branches of the treetops and, beyond them, most of the town and, farther still, fields. Near the window, there was an unusual railing that looked like the banister of the front staircase down in the entry hall, but it didn’t go anywhere. Every few feet along the top of the railing there was a fancy piece of carved light-colored wood that looked like some kind of plant.

Joey saw me looking at these, so I asked what they were.

His eyes got wide as he told me, “King-things!”

“Huh?”

“Watch this,” he told me, walking over to one of the wooden plants—they looked sort of like pineapples, but without the leaves on top. He took hold of it, and, to my surprise, it lifted right off the railing. Attached to the bottom of the plant was a round wooden stick, maybe a couple of feet long, that slipped out of a hole drilled in the top of the banister. “They’re all this way,” Joey explained, then lifted it in the air, kind of like a drum major. “See?” he said. “It’s a king-thing.” He started marching around the room with it, waving at unseen crowds with his other hand, and you could practically see some big furry cape hanging from his neck. I have to admit, it was pretty funny, and he liked it when I laughed, but he himself couldn’t laugh—he was the king, and I guess kings have to be serious.

He kept this up for a while, but as far as I was concerned, the game was over. (It was sort of babyish, if you ask me.) So I ambled around the room looking at things, touching things, and I decided it was the most beautiful room I’d ever seen. I hoped that someday I could live in a place like this, which didn’t look anything like the house where Mom and I lived at home in Illinois.

Like the kitchen, the big room was clean and tidy, but clearly not lived in. The rooms were kept this way for a reason, I figured, but I had no idea why. It was as if someone had gone away, and these rooms—separate from the rest of the house, a home in and of themselves—were being kept presentable so that they might be rented or something. I asked Joey, “Who lived here?”

He stopped marching around and thought for a moment. Then he shrugged his shoulders. “It’s
always
been this way. Hazel comes up and cleans now and then, and Hank fixes things that need fixing. I like to come up and look around or snoop out the window or play king, but otherwise”—he slipped the king-thing back into its hole—“no one’s ever up here.”

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Michael Craft is the author of more than a dozen novels and three stage plays. He is best known as the author of the popular Mark Manning series, set in the Midwest, as well as the Claire Gray series, which takes place in Palm Springs, California. Three of Craft’s novels have been honored as national finalists for Lambda Literary Awards. His latest mystery novel,
The MacGuffin
, features a new protagonist, architect Cooper Brant.

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