Only Love Can Break Your Heart (3 page)

“We have the same birthday, young Richard,” she said.

“You and me?” I asked.

“That’s right,” she said. “How could this have escaped me, Paul?”

“Maybe somebody told you and you just forgot,” Paul said.

“Maybe,” she said, still chuckling. “Maybe. Well, young Richard, I won’t forget this time.”

“Thank you,” I said, assuming she meant to send me a present.

AT DINNER, THE
OLD MAN
and Anne sat at opposite ends of the dining table. Paul came downstairs for the first time since he’d returned from the hospital. He sat alone on one side of the table, positioned so he could prop his leg up on the chair next to him. My mother and I sat on the other side.

My mother was having trouble keeping her hands still. She pushed the food around on her plate with the dinner fork, but I never saw her take a bite. When she put the fork down, she would either put one arm around me or the opposite hand on the Old Man’s forearm.

Like my mother, Anne ate little to nothing. It was as if the two of them were in a hunger contest. Across the table, Paul picked at his food without much interest.

I was hungry, however. I devoured everything in front of me. The Old Man also ate eagerly. We were dutiful plate cleaners at every meal, the Old Man and I. Maybe it was because we didn’t smoke. My mother didn’t smoke either, nor did she drink much more than the occasional glass of white wine or a small snifter of sherry before bedtime if she was feeling a little wired. “Alcohol ages the skin,” she would say.

The Old Man had managed to sneak a few in, however. Who could blame him? And Anne—well, her food was cold on her plate before she started slurring her speech, but otherwise she made no effort to disguise her habit or her condition. My mother’s feeble attempts at polite conversation—inquiries about the weather in Akron, the flight, and so forth—were met with curt, dismissive replies. As Anne grew increasingly drunk, she made a point of calling my mother “child,” as in “The weather was miserable, child,” and “Who wouldn’t be exhausted after two hours packed into one of those puddle-jumping sardine cans that pass for planes these days, child.”

My mother pretended not to notice her condescension. The Old Man just kept refilling her glass. He must have hoped she would pass out soon. Or maybe he wanted Paul to see her good and drunk so he’d be reminded of what he had to look forward to if he ever decided—as Paul sometimes threatened to do when he and my mother were at odds—to leave and move in with Anne.

“So Paul tells me the historical trust has finally found someone sufficiently pedigreed to buy that old wreck of a house up the hill,” Anne said.

“That’s right,” said the Old Man.

“Sufficiently pedigreed?” my mother asked.

Anne lit a cigarette.

“Hasn’t Dick ever told you?” she said to my mother. “He tried to buy that house years ago, but those snobs at the Spencerville Historical Trust refused to sell it to him. What did they say they were going to do with it, Dick?”

“A museum,” the Old Man said.

Anne neither asked for nor was offered an ashtray. Instead, as my mother’s mouth fell open, she tipped the ashes onto her nearly untouched dinner.

“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “A museum, like the Quaker Meetinghouse, where the old gals from the DAR put on their Colonial-period costumes once a month and show groups of kindergartners how the settlers used to make candles.”

She turned to me.

“Have you been on one of those tours, young Richard?”

I nodded.

“Are they still dipping the candles?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“But this fellow Culver that they’ve sold the place to,” she said, turning back to the Old Man. “He won’t turn it into a museum, will he?”

“No,” the Old Man said. “He’s going to renovate it.”

“How long will that take?” my mother asked.

“A year or so. Maybe more, maybe less. We’ll see.”

“And why,” Anne asked, “is this Culver good enough to be allowed to own it and you weren’t?”

“He’s married to Jane Cabell,” the Old Man said.

“Ah,” Anne said. “That explains it. Well, you never could buy your way in with the FFV crowd, could you, Dick?”

Paul later explained to me that FFV stood for First Families of Virginia: the kind of people who still thought money mattered less than whether you could trace your ancestry back to the court of King Charles I.

“They just moved back from somewhere abroad,” the Old Man said. “Culver was in coal or iron, I think. Made his millions, cashed out, and got into investing. Since you can do that from pretty much anywhere, Jane made him move to Spencerville as payback for dragging her all over the world to keep house while he was off digging mines. I’m sure buying the old Cherry place was her idea.”

“And are you going to press charges?” Anne asked.

“For what?”

“For nearly killing my son.”

“
Our
son was trespassing on his property at the time,” the Old Man said.

“I didn’t know anyone had bought the place,” Paul said.

“That makes no difference,” the Old Man said. “It’s still illegal.”

“People have been going in that house for years,” Paul said. “I bet you’ve been in it before. Without permission.”

The Old Man didn’t answer him.

“I think you should press charges,” Anne insisted.

“No.”

“If you don’t, maybe I will.”

“Suit yourself,” the Old Man said. “But you’re not going to have to live next door to the man.”

“You weren’t too concerned about that when you threatened to kill him, were you?” she said.

“It was the heat of the moment,” the Old Man said. “Culver understands that. We’ve already talked it over and walked away as friends. He feels terrible about all of it.”

“I see,” Anne said.

She extinguished her cigarette in an especially rare slice of London broil.

“So, Dick,” she said. “I find it remarkable that in all of our conversations over the years since this child of yours came along, you never mentioned that he and I share the same birthday.”

The Old Man chewed his steak slowly and purposefully before swallowing.

“I’m sure I told you,” he said.

“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”

“Sure you did,” Paul said. “She just forgot.”

“No,” Anne said again. “He didn’t, Paul. Neither did you, darling.”

Anne narrowed her eyes at the Old Man, a faint smile forming on her lips.

“Your birthday is July twenty-ninth?” my mother asked, her voice meek, almost apologetic.

“You never told her either?” Anne said to the Old Man. “Oopsy me, Dick. What a pickle I’ve put you in.”

“I’m sure I must have mentioned it at some point,” the Old Man repeated, his face reddening with wrath.

“It must make the date that much easier to remember,” Anne said.

“How could I forget?” he said.

Anne turned to me and smiled.

“Do you know who else was born on July twenty-ninth, Richard?” she asked.

“No, ma’am,” I said.

“Mussolini,” she said.

“Who’s Mussolini?”

“That’s enough, Anne,” the Old Man said.

“It’s a fact,” she replied. “One he’ll hear in school one day. Won’t he look smart if he already knows Mussolini’s birthday?”

“Who’s Mussolini?” I asked again.

“A dead guy,” Paul said. “They hanged him from a bridge for killing Jews.”

“You’re confusing Mussolini with Hitler, dear,” Anne said. “Mussolini killed a few Jews, but only because Hitler made him.”

“What’s a Jew?” I asked.

“Jesus Christ,” the Old Man said.

“Maybe you should go to your room, Richard,” said my mother.

“Who’s Hitler?”

“He isn’t Jesus Christ, I promise you,” Paul said.

“Go to your room,” my mother ordered.

“But we haven’t had dessert,” I whined.

“
Go to your goddamned room!
” the Old Man bellowed, pounding his fist on the table.

I was too stunned to move or make a sound. My mother gaped at the Old Man, her lips quivering.

“Both of you,” said the Old Man.

He slumped back in his chair while Anne sneered at him.

“Come on, Rock,” Paul said. “Help me up.”

I stood and went for his crutches while Paul shifted out of his chair. He steadied himself on my shoulders and pulled himself to his feet.

“I think me and Rocky here might go listen to some music,” Paul said. “Thanks for dinner, Alice.”

I followed him out of the dining room and through the hallway to the landing and held his crutches while he hopped up the stairs. When we reached the top step, I handed him the crutches and followed him into his room.

“Shut the door, will you?” he asked.

Paul slumped onto his bed and reached across to the bedside table for his lighter and cigarettes. He lit up and took a long drag.

Downstairs, the shouting ebbed and flowed. In the quiet moments, I could sense the seething through the floor.

“Flip it over,” he said.

I turned the disc over to side B and dropped the needle. I crawled up onto the bed next to Paul and looked up at the ceiling and listened. The scotch must have worn me out; I was asleep before the end of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down
.”

I WOKE UP
SWEATING
and disoriented. I was under the covers in my own bed, still dressed in my school clothes. The Old Man must have put me there. It couldn’t have been Paul, with his leg. My mother wouldn’t have let me go to sleep without changing and brushing my teeth, regardless of the circumstances.

I slid down off the bed and crept out into the hallway to peer through the open door of Paul’s room. Anne was in there, on top of the covers in the bed beside him, muttering or murmuring or singing some dissonant lullaby. Was Paul asleep, I wondered, or just pretending?

The next morning, I noticed that the door to the guest bedroom was open. The bed was already made; the sole remaining trace of Anne was the smell of smoke and a pair of lipstick-stained cigarette butts in an ashtray on the vanity.

3

AFTER A WEEK OR
SO,
Paul was up and about. He stayed on the crutches for another month to give the tissue ample time to heal and was prohibited from strenuous athletic activity for another six months or so. This was another perverse stroke of luck for Paul, as it excused him from required participation in afternoon extracurricular activities at Macon Prep, the private school he attended. His afternoons were free for rambling around in his Nova and hanging out at the lunch counter in Pearsall’s Drugstore with Leigh and Rayner. Sometimes, Paul and Leigh would take me along to Pearsall’s for a hot dog and a milk shake. I would sit in the center of the wide backseat of Paul’s car, leaning forward, listening to the music and the laughter, watching their long hair flip in the breezes from the open windows, backlit by the sun.

I was too young to know that Leigh Bowman was already being thought of as a minor tragedy. Her mother had died of breast cancer when Leigh was eleven. Her father—the Honorable Prentiss Powell Bowman III—knew no other way to raise Leigh than to push her to the absolute limits in everything. Leigh had been bred to be a star swimmer and a tennis champion, a blue-ribbon horseback rider and a prima ballerina, a valedictorian and a consummate lady.

To her father’s dismay, in the summer before her junior year, Leigh began to be seen riding around in the passenger seat of Paul Askew’s big purple car. Before long, she’d given up almost everything for Paul. She still rode her horse, but she refused to compete. She traded tennis and dancing and competitive swimming for lounging in Paul’s bedroom, smoking cigarettes and listening to records. Only in the classroom had she maintained her old standing, probably because she had always made As with little effort.

Her father forbade Leigh to see Paul, which prompted Leigh to discover quite spontaneously that her father couldn’t
forbid
her to do anything. Something had slipped in her. Judge Bowman thought it was “the goddamned dope.”

Maybe he was right—maybe it was the goddamned dope. Or maybe it was just a typical case of the good girl falling for the bad boy who needed to be saved. Maybe, because of her mother and Annie Elizabeth, Leigh and Paul felt like they understood each other as no one else could. Maybe Leigh was looking for someone to help her down off the ceaseless treadmill her father had set her on. Or maybe Leigh and Paul were star-crossed from the beginning, and she was doomed to love him, come what may.

NOT LONG AFTER
Paul retired the crutches, our parents invited Brad and Jane Culver over for dinner. Paul was not present—off with Rayner and their friends, “up to no good.”

Jane Culver was older than my mother but still seemed much younger than both her husband and the Old Man. She bent to meet me at eye level when we were introduced.

“You did such a nice job in
Mame
,” she said. “You’re very talented.”

Not long before, I had played the role of Young Patrick, the ward of the flamboyant Auntie Mame, in a local fine arts center production, having been recruited by the director, Rex LaPage, who had seen me as Michael Darling in a summer theater production of
Peter Pan
. As the play’s one child actor, I had been afforded the delusion of considering myself a professional.

“You saw that?” I asked.

“When we heard our new neighbor had a speaking part, we had to attend,” she said, smiling and winking at my mother. “I’m so looking forward to living next door to a rising star!”

I smiled and blushed.

“Come meet Mr. Culver, son,” the Old Man said, as if I had never seen him before.

Even in his pressed slacks and camel-hair blazer, Brad Culver still struck me as a walking cadaver, with sunken eyes and bared teeth.

“Hey there, sport,” Culver said, extending his hand.

If I were Paul, I’d have let that hand hang in the air. But I was not Paul, so I shook it, doing my seven-year-old level best to hide my hatred and bewilderment. How could the Old Man court the friendship of the same man who might very well have killed his son—a man he himself had threatened to kill?

Before long, the Old Man and Culver were golfing buddies. Paul remained philosophical about it all.

“Dad would have shot Culver,” he reflected, “but he knew they needed someone to fill out his Saturday foursome after Buddy Watkins came down with the gout.”

TH
E FIRST WEEK
of June, Anne came back to Spencerville to see Paul graduate from Macon. This time, the Old Man arranged for her to stay at the Hilton out near the new shopping mall by Monacan Mountain. With her was a man named Bill.

Anne’s Bill looked as worthless and dilapidated as the suit he wore, which even a second grader could see was cheap and old. His posture was stooped and his hair greasy and in need of a trim. His teeth and fingers were stained with nicotine. I later wondered whether Anne had plucked him off a stool in some skid row dive, or even from beside an oil-drum fire underneath a woebegone Rust Belt overpass.

Anne and Bill smoked and talked throughout the ceremony. Nearby, the Old Man sat with his arms crossed, his balding pate flaming red.

Paul’s more illustrious classmates were honored with awards and prizes—Spanish and English and Science medals, scholarships and cash awards named for the school’s legendary high achievers and wealthy benefactors, the Headmaster’s Award, Best Boy.

“Paul would have had perfect attendance,” Anne muttered, “if he hadn’t been shot in the leg.”

Afterward I rode with my parents to a reception at the home of one of Paul’s classmates. Waiters wearing white jackets and black bow ties served flutes of champagne and hors d’oeuvres from silver trays. A keg was provided for the new graduates, who congregated around the pool house in the backyard grotto.

The adults were divided between the families of day and boarding students. For the most part the groups parted naturally, like boys and girls on opposite sides of the gym at a junior high sock hop. Anne and Bill mingled with the out-of-towners while my parents sequestered themselves with their friends in another room.

As soon as I could, I slipped away from my mother and weaved through the legs of tippling grown-ups and out to the backyard, where I found Paul below on the pool deck with his fellow graduates, neckties loosened, nursing red plastic cups. Together they joked and laughed, basking in temporary triumph. Around them were the girls, whose smiling faces betrayed occasional flashes of apprehension, as if they sensed already that, like high school, they were also being graduated from.

Leigh had less reason to fear than the rest. Paul was going no farther than Farmville, only forty-five minutes’ drive away, to another all-boys school, famous for the loyalty of its alumni and the epic debauchery of its annual Greek Week. The Old Man wanted him on a short leash, Paul had explained. We’d probably see more of him than we wanted. Nevertheless, Leigh hung on his arm, looking especially young and fragile in her delicate cotton sundress, clinging to Paul like a misbegotten waif.

Behind me I heard the sound of adult voices emerging from the house. I took cover in the hedges so I could spy on the scene unnoticed. Through a gap in the bushes, I saw the casual cheerfulness on Paul’s face melt into a more familiar expression.

“There’s my darling boy,” I heard Anne say.

Her voice had taken on a timbre I recognized from her short visit to our house those months before. She steadied herself on the railing and descended to the pool deck, her Bill in his cheap green suit behind her. An unlit cigarette dangled from her painted red lips.

“Do you have a light, darling?” she asked.

“Sure, Mom,” Paul said.

Paul removed his Zippo from its home in his breast pocket.

“Isn’t he a handsome boy, Bill?” Anne said between drags. “Didn’t I tell you?”

“He sure is,” Bill said.

“And what a pretty flower,” Anne said, reaching out to stroke Leigh’s long hair.

“Exquisite,” Bill said.

“She reminds me of Annie Bet,” Anne said. “Doesn’t she remind you of Annie Bet, Paul?”

“Sure, Mom,” Paul said.

I had never heard Annie Elizabeth, the sister who had died before I was born, referred to as Annie Bet.

“She’d have been so proud of you, darling,” Anne said.

Perhaps made uncomfortable by being compared to Paul’s dead sister, or perhaps by Bill’s flagrant ogling, Leigh had lowered her eyes to the ground. She was the first to see the stain spreading down the length of Anne’s panty hose and darkening the concrete beneath her feet.

“Oh,” she said. “Oh, Paul.”

“Shit,” Anne hissed.

One of the other boys noticed. A murmur rippled through the navy blazers and neckties. All eyes turned toward the foot of the stairs where Paul Askew’s drunk mother had pissed herself.

I felt an unexpected well of sympathy for the woman. It happened, I knew. Sometimes you just get a little excited. Or you forget to go. Or you dream you’re in a lake or a pool, where you can feel the peculiarly pleasant warmth in the water, and afterward you wake up in your bed startled, between soaked, clinging sheets.

“Oopsy,” Anne said. “I made a boo-boo.”

She tossed her lit cigarette into the pool.

“Aw, Mom,” Paul said.

He leaned in toward Leigh and whispered something to her. She nodded. They set their red cups on the ground and came around behind Anne, each taking hold of one of her elbows. Paul took the scotch glass from her hand and handed it to Bill without looking at him. Anne tottered up the stairs between them, muttering something I couldn’t make out. The wretched Bill followed, admiring Leigh from behind with an appreciative leer.

Paul and Leigh steered Anne off the walk and around the side of the house toward the row of cars parked along the road. Just as they reached the shadows, they stopped. Paul left his mother hanging on to Leigh and hurried back down the hill. He drew up to the hedgerow where I was hidden and knelt to peer in at me, his face almost shaking with indignation. I felt my face redden.

“Don’t tell him,” he said.

“I won’t,” I whispered.

“I mean it, Rocky.”

“I swear,” I said.

“Come out of there and go inside,” he said.

I crawled out and stood before him, covered with grime. Paul gripped my arm—firmly, but not painfully. With his free hand, he beat the dust and dirt from my elbows and knees. When he was finished, he released my arm and tousled my hair to clear away a string of cobwebs.

“There,” he said. “Now, go.”

I trudged up along the moss-flecked bricks to the house, afraid to look back or to search for Leigh and Anne and Bill in the shadowy distance.

“I mean it, Rocky,” Paul called. “Don’t tell him. Don’t tell a soul.”