Red Clover (2 page)

He turned the doorknob and entered Nelson’s room. He had peeked in a few times before when his brother’s door was open, but because he’d had no business being in that section of the hallway, he hadn’t stopped to take much of it in.

Entering the room, he shut the door behind him. Nelson’s room was much bigger than his own. The furniture was bigger, and there was more of it. There was a bathroom and walk-in closet too. Lee inhaled deeply. Even the smell of the room was different, but he couldn’t put his finger on why.

Sitting down in Nelson’s rolling desk chair, he felt lost. He opened the middle drawer and shuffled through the pens, paper clips, loose change. There was a ticket stub for
West Side Story
at Lincoln Center, which Nelson had recently attended with his brother and mother in New York, and a sappy Valentine’s Day card from his girlfriend.

A Swiss Army knife caught his attention. He picked it up and pulled out one of the blades.

I wonder how old he was when he got this.

It looked old, and thinking Nelson wouldn’t miss it, he slipped the knife into his pocket.

Lee sifted through the rest of the desk drawers and not finding anything of interest, proceeded to Nelson’s dresser, where he found the same things he had in his own drawers—pretty much whatever the maid had put in there. He was beginning to think this was a waste of time, since Nelson had probably taken all the good stuff with him to college. While Lee didn’t know exactly what he was looking for, he figured any token of his brother’s past activities would give him a better understanding of him—a better understanding of how
he
should be.

He wandered into the closet, which was half the size of Lee’s entire bedroom, where he found another dresser way in the back. He went through each of the drawers—old textbooks, a chess game, a transistor radio.

Then he hit the jackpot.

Magazines. A trove of them. With pictures of nearly naked ladies on the covers. He took one out of the drawer, and with barely enough light coming in from the small window behind the dresser, flipped through the pages to the centerfold. He stared at it for a long moment, not breathing in a single molecule of air. He had no idea ladies looked like that underneath their clothes. Sitting down on the floor, he flipped through the other pages. When he saw the two naked women together, really close together, he quickly closed the magazine and put it on the floor, face down.

Wanting to take full advantage of the scant light coming through the window, Lee had to move two gym bags, several tennis rackets, and a suitcase in order to crawl into the tight space behind the dresser. He pulled everything back in place, sat under the window, and opened the magazine to page one.

* * *

Lee woke up to the sound of sirens. After he got his bearings, he stood up and looked out the window into the darkness of the side yard. Standing on his tiptoes and craning his neck, he could see through the window to the street. Police cars with their lights blazing were everywhere!

Anxious to see what all the commotion was about, he quickly dug his way out of his hiding place and raced for the door. But when he heard an unfamiliar man’s voice coming from the hallway, he stopped short of opening it.

“I know you said you looked up here, Mrs. Winekoop,” the man yelled, “but a second sweep won’t hurt. Kids have an uncanny way of fitting into the darndest places.”

Lee’s chest tightened, and suddenly his skin felt like it was on fire. When his stomach started lurching, he knew an anxiety attack was about to erupt. Frozen in place, he stood in the middle of Nelson’s room, shaking, until someone opened the door.

Lee didn’t know who was more surprised—he or the policeman. He was big and tall, the biggest man Lee had ever seen, and he didn’t look very friendly.

“What the...” He turned around and shouted, “I found him. He’s in here.”

Within seconds, his mother appeared in the doorway. “Oh, my. Where on earth have you been?”

“I don’t feel so good,” Lee said in a weak voice.

His mother walked over to him and took his hand. “Let’s get you lying down.” She looked at the policeman. “Will you please excuse me? I’ll just be a minute.”

Lee’s mother led him to his bedroom, turned down the comforter on his bed, and told him to crawl in—shoes, clothes, and all. “Just lie here quietly while I take care of...things.”

He lay there, afraid to move, for what seemed like a long time, until both his mother and father came into his room.

His father’s voice was low but his tone harsh. “Where on earth were you—”

“Please, Henry, let me handle this.”

“Just keep in mind, Abigale, that a few minutes ago, we had five police cars in front of our house and the makings of a search party getting ready to—”

“I know. I was there.” She sat on the edge of the bed and looked down at Lee. “Sweetheart, we couldn’t find you anywhere. Where were you all this time?”

“What time is it?”

“It’s almost eight o’clock. Where have you been? Were you in Nelson’s room the whole time?”

Lee nodded.

Lee’s father disappeared.

“We looked in there. Even under the bed, in the closet. Didn’t you hear us?”

Lee shook his head. “I don’t feel very good. I think I’m having an anxiety attack.”

“Maybe you should rest then. I’ll get—”

“This is what the little ingrate was up to,” his father shrieked. He waved the magazine in the air. “Looking at smut! Eight goddamn years old, and he’s looking at naked women! What the hell got into you, you sorry excuse for a—”

“Henry! Stop it. I said I’ll handle this. It’s—”

“It’s my house! And the way this should be handled is with a good whooping. Sneaky little bas...”

Before his father could finish his sentence, his mother stood up, right in his face. “I said I will handle this, and I will. And it won’t be by corporal punishment. Now, leave us alone, so I can talk privately with my son.”

His father threw the magazine down and darted out the door.

“Where did you get the magazine, Lee?”

He didn’t want to tattle on Nelson. “I just found it.”

“You have to tell me the truth. You didn’t just find it. Where did you get it?”

He didn’t respond.

“From another boy?”

Lee remained silent.

“You’re making this harder than it has to be.” She paused. “If you don’t tell me, I’m sure your father will get to the bottom of it. Now tell me where you got it.”

“In Nelson’s room.”

“Don’t lie to me. He would never have such a thing in his room.”

“Okay. Don’t believe me. I don’t care. It wasn’t what I was looking for in the first place. I just ran across it in a drawer. It was just there, so I looked at it. I think I must have fallen asleep ‘cause when I woke up, I saw all the police cars out front.”

“But we searched that room.”

“There’s a space in the closet, behind the brown dresser, by the window. I was back there.”

“Good heavens. Do you have any idea how we worried when we couldn’t find you?”

“No.”

“We didn’t know if you had run off, were kidnapped, or what.”

“I’m sorry.”

His mother heaved a sigh and turned toward the door. “Someone will be in to check on you a little later. Try to get some rest.”

“Mother?”

“What is it?”

“Who’s turn was it to watch me today?”

“Apparently there was a scheduling misunderstanding with Kate.”

“Is she here now?”

“Kate is no longer with us. Your father took care of that.”

Lee waited for the maid to check in on him before climbing out of bed and tiptoeing down the stairs to the second-floor landing. He positioned himself behind the tall potted plant where he knew he could hear what was going on in the front foyer without being seen. His parents’ voices were low but audible.

“...and I’ll say it again,” his father was saying. “There’s something wrong with that boy, and the sooner you take care of it, the better off we’ll all be.”

“And
I’ve
said it before, and
I’ll
say it again,” his mother responded. “It’s not that easy. He hasn’t been seeing Dr. Jerry for that long, and I think he’s making headway. I just wish you'd be more—”

“The boy doesn’t need some fancy shrink to see what’s wrong with him. Send him off to Hampshire like I suggested a year ago. They specialize in kids like him. It’s not that far from the New York apartment. You could stay there and be near him.”

“First of all, it’s more than two hundred miles from our apartment, and secondly, I am not sending him off to some boarding school. That’s not the answer.”

“Well, he doesn’t fit in here, and if you’d like me to go into the reasons why, just let me know. And this last incident is just—”

“This may come as a shock to you, but that
Playboy
magazine came out of Nelson’s room.”

“I suppose he told you that. And, of course, you believed him.”

“I believe him.”

“Don’t be so naive. He’s lying, and that makes the whole situation worse. Now we can’t trust him. Look, you’re ultimately responsible for half of Evanston’s police force on our doorstep looking for that kid. It’s a good thing they don’t charge for their services. Would you like me to calculate just how much that would cost?”

“You’re all about money.”

“You bet I am. And you can also bet our two sons will take after me.”

Lee heard footsteps and got ready to flee.

“Do what you want. I don’t care,” his father said.

A door slammed.

Lee huddled behind the planter, ready to run to his room if he heard his mother coming up the stairs. Instead, he heard her crying.

He couldn’t bear to hear her sobs and wanted to run to her and tell her everything would be all right. He forced back his own tears. He needed to be strong.

On the way back to his bedroom, Lee went to Nelson’s room and slipped the Swiss Army knife into his brother’s desk drawer. Back in his own bed, he replayed his parents’ conversation in his head.

So many of the things his father had said disturbed him, but none had hurt as deeply as, “Do what you want. I don’t care.”

2 | Best in Class

Eventually, the drama resulting from the
Playboy
magazine incident waned, and things in the Winekoop residence returned to normal. Lee steered clear of his father, which wasn’t hard to do, and refrained from asking his mother any more discomposed questions about his existence. Instead, he kept them safely bottled up inside and hoped when he got older he would understand why he was so different from his brothers, why his father seemed to hate him so...and what those naked girls in the magazine were doing.

In spite of what his mother kept telling him, by the time he turned ten, Lee had eavesdropped on his parents enough times to know his father really did expect him to be like his brothers, and if he could be more like them, maybe his father would like him better. But he hardly knew his brothers. Bennett was a junior in high school, and Nelson was in his first year at Harvard. Bennett was okay...sometimes. But Lee still didn’t feel that comfortable talking to him. Nelson was so much older, he seemed more like an uncle than a brother, a distant uncle at that.

Due to their age differences, they had no common interests and usually came together only at the dinner table. Lee remembered that when he was younger, Bennett had played with him a few times but never for very long, usually getting pulled away to do something else. After Bennett left, Lee would go on playing as though he was still there, pretending Bennett liked him and wanted to be his older brother. Even at ten, Lee knew that wasn’t right.

Visits with Dr. Jerry often focused on Lee’s “self-esteem,” but Lee didn’t understand how he could possibly feel good about himself when he was such a disappointment to his parents. In Lee’s mind, there was his family...and then there was him. He felt like he didn’t have anyone, except for his mother, who would stick up for him when he needed it. And he almost always needed it when his father got involved, like on Lee’s first day of school.

“The boy is not normal,” Lee had overheard his father tell his mother on that day.

“That’s not true, Henry. All his tests come back in the normal range,” she responded.

“So much for the tests.”

Lee understood that his brothers were at the top of the so-called normal range. If they were any indication of normal, Lee conceded he was likely close to the bottom of the range. Had he tested high enough in their entrance exam, Lee would be attending the same elite private grammar school as his brothers. Instead, his mother had enrolled him in a less prestigious private school, and his first day had been disastrous. The other students had teased him, and his teacher had called him Leonard all day.

“I’ve made arrangements to have him home-schooled by tutors,” his mother had told his father that evening.

“Just because he had a bad first day doesn’t mean you yank him out of school. What a waste of your money.”

For reasons unknown to Lee, it was clear that any money spent on him came from his mother.

“Nelson and Bennett loved going to school at his age,” his father had said.

“Don’t you understand, Henry? It doesn’t matter what happened to them. He’s so traumatized about this, nothing we say about Nelson and Bennett will make any difference.”

“You deal with it then. He’s all yours.”

Now, at ten, Lee had been exposed to fourteen tutors, some of whom had lasted just one semester. Unlike his brothers, he struggled to get passing grades. Unlike his brothers, he struggled with everything.

“I’m not sure what to do,” Lee heard his mother say to his father one night when they thought he was asleep. “I consulted with Dr. Ballou last week when I was in New York.”

“Who?”

“You remember him, the one we met at the Silversteins last month, the one who was on
Phil Donahue
.”

“Yes, I do remember him. Everything he said was just vague enough to hold some truth. How much is this one going to cost you?”