The Last of the Savages (8 page)

Matson had studied with Richard Wilbur at Amherst. One day after class, when I confessed my interest in poetry, he directed me to Shakespeare’s sonnets and then to Eliot, Berryman and Lowell—scholar poets bristling with canonical learning. The fact that I was as yet largely unfamiliar with the canon didn’t discourage me in the least. I particularly liked Lowell, the renegade patrician, who conferred on the relatively familiar landscape of Boston an antique dignity. Like Matson, I preferred the clotted sonority of his earlier work to the more recent confessional free verse. When Lowell lowered the net on the prosodic tennis court, in
Life Studies
and
For the Union Dead
, Matson felt the betrayal as acutely as did folk fans when Bob Dylan went electric. Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti, Will’s poets, were naturally anathema. I followed my mentor in such matters, though I secretly loved the unbound final lines of “For the Union Dead,” with its indictment of the shabby present:

But this was recreational reading; when the first snow fell, I was desperately struggling with calculus, French and a paper on
Macbeth.
Will, sitting across the room at his own desk, was reading a subversive pamphlet called “The White Negro.”

“Listen to this,” he said. “ ‘The source of Hip is the Negro, for he has been living on the margin between totalitarianism and democracy for two centuries.’ Is that great or what?”

“What course is it for,” I asked.

“It’s for the course called Life. You should take it sometime, Patrick.”

“You’re going to flunk out if you don’t start your term papers.”

Will fixed me with a wry smirk. “If you just said that in a phony English accent you’d sound exactly like Matson.” Will and Matson could
not abide each other. Matson was sarcastic about Will’s musical and literary predilections, which he deemed crude and vernacular, and awarded him a stream of demerits for curfew and noise violations. Will found Matson pretentious and obtuse and refused to pretend otherwise.

“It’s not an English accent.”

“No? Where’d he learn to say
shedule
—at Amherst? ‘I say, old man, we’re bloody well running a bit behind
shedule
, what?’ Did his parents teach him to talk like that? He picked up the fucking accent in the duty-free shop at Heathrow.”

“He lived there, for Christ’s sake.” Even at the time, I knew this was lame.

“Bad enough he carries that fucking umbrella everywhere. What’s really bogus is he calls it a
brolly
.”

“Does not.”

“There are certain words no American should be allowed to say under pain of death. Under pain of being beaten to death with their so-called brollies. Of having their so-called brollies shoved up their—”

“Look, I just don’t want you to flunk out. Is that so uncool?”

“I’m not touching that question. But, hey, not to worry. I have a plan.” He held up a bottle of green-and-white capsules. “Diet pills,” he said, when I gazed at them blankly. “On the seventh day God rested and on the eighth day he opened the pharmacy.” He laughed. “Enough to keep me up for finals week.” Standing up, he pushed his hair out of his eyes, threw his shoulders back and smirked at me. “Excuse me sir,” he said, “may I go to the loo?”

“Fuck off.”

“Very good, sir.” He marched toward the door, then paused. “Cheerio.”

Will made good on his promise, staying up every night that week, camping out in the library till ten and then returning to the dorm, where I coached him through a half hour of calculus. After lights-out he would read all night in the wedge of light from his hooded desk lamp while I slept with a pillow over my head. His blue eyes rimmed with red, he would capsulize his reading for me the moment I woke up, declaiming
that our American history texts were riddled with propaganda. “The whole shiteree started off with the thieving of the land from its rightful owners. And guys like my father have been perverting the democratic process for years,” he said one morning as we crunched across the frozen snow to the cafeteria for breakfast, his voice hoarse with sleeplessness. “Checks and balances my ass. It’s a cash and carry system.”

“Maybe,” I suggested, “where you come from it is.”

“Don’t be an idiot. It’s just more open where I come from. Doesn’t mean it’s more prevalent. Like racism. Yankees are just more subtle about it. More hypocritical.” This was the first time I’d heard Will defensive on the subject of the South.

When my mother arrived to pick me up for Christmas vacation, wearing her old mink stole and a nervous bright red smile, Will was in the library knocking out his last paper. From my second-story window I saw the car pull up, and watched her check herself up in the visor mirror. Anticipating the teary gleam in her eyes, I ran down the stairs and met her halfway up the walk. Surprised at how happy I was to see her, I felt my own eyes glisten as I submitted to her great bosomy embrace. I hadn’t seen her in three months; although home was less than an hour away, I had not allowed myself a visit.

“Look at you.” She held me at arm’s length, as if to read some text on my forehead. “You look so handsome.”

It was snowing lightly. I invited her in, anxious about the collision of the only two worlds I’d ever known, even though the house was almost deserted—except for Matson, who poled up the back hall to the living room with his famous umbrella. He bowed from the waist, then stepped forward to take my mother’s hand. “Ah, Mrs. Keane, a very great pleasure indeed. Young Patrick is a gentleman and a scholar, and I can see where he comes by his pulchritude.”

My mother blushed with confusion and pride. “Well, I’m awfully grateful to you for taking care of him,” she said. “I hope he’s a gentleman. We tried to drum some manners into him, but I don’t honestly know where he gets his brains.”

However we feel about our parents privately, when we are sixteen they are without doubt a public liability. But when my mother looked down at her shoes and apologized to Matson for tracking a little snow into the living room, my chilly teenaged heart thawed and I had to struggle to control my emotions.

“A lovely figure of a woman,” Matson said when she went off to “powder her nose,” and at that moment I experienced a flash of double vision: my mother
was
, in fact, an excellent woman and Matson was a pompous asshole because he was so insincere in saying so. I wish I could claim this was a lasting insight.

But I was also furious at Will, who’d promised he would be there to meet my mother and say goodbye. When he failed to show after half an hour I said we should leave. I was damned if I was going to chase him up in the library.

Once in the car with my mother, her cologne mingling with the familiar vinyl-and-cigarette-smoke smell of the Impala, I felt I was already back home.

“The strike was settled on Tuesday,” she said, “but the men won’t go back till after Christmas and it’s already taken its toll on local business. Your father hasn’t sold a thing in three weeks, so try to be considerate, Pat. Luckily I bought your presents before the strike.” Though she’d mentioned the strike frequently, on the phone, I had barely registered it; my mind crowded with what I imagined to be higher concerns. Taunton was a company town, its health tied to the redbrick paper mills which every year employed a few less heads of household. Although no one in my family worked in the mills, this sense of creeping extinction lent a strange morbidity to my childhood and helped form my resolve to escape.

In the center of town, the brick and limestone Victorian storefronts with their lights and decorations had an air of gaudy desperation. The incandescent Santa atop Chilton’s, the local department store, seemed to become more ghostly and insubstantial with each passing year as more and more of his bulbs burned out, never to be replaced; he finally died a few years later when the store filed for bankruptcy.

Hearing us in the hall, my father hoisted himself up from his recliner
to greet me. He shook my hand, regarding me with what seemed to me an entirely appropriate air of suspicion, as if I had just returned from the camp of his enemies. “So,” he said, “how’s our preppie.”

“I met the headmaster,” my mother interjected. “He told me Pat’s doing super.”

“
Housemaster
,” I corrected her. “Matson’s just the housemaster.”

“Well, anyway, he certainly spoke well of you.”

At the time the distinction didn’t seem to interest my father, any more than the football game he went back to watching interested me, but the term stuck with him; he would remind me several times over the next few days who was the housemaster in
this
house. Meanwhile my grandmother had emerged from her bedroom on her cane to welcome me home, kissing me dryly on both cheeks with her papery lips. “How are you, dear, you’re getting so big. Did you run into any of the McCabes at your little school?”

I shook my head. Nana Keane had once dated a boy who went to Harvard, and she never quite got over it. She believed, not entirely incorrectly, that the network of New England prep schools and Ivy League colleges functioned as one big happy fraternity. Now that I’d been admitted, it seemed only a matter of time before I would bring back news of her long-lost beau.

“I believe Dave McCabe has three grandsons who would be just about your age. I’m sure they’re all very good-looking. Dave was so handsome, and of course he was considered the most elegant dancer in all of Boston.” She sighed. “Dave thought the world of me.” All of her fond recollections ended with some variation of this concept:
He was so fond of me … She thought the world of me.
If Dad was vaguely unhappy about my defection to prep school, Nana Keane felt that it was only my due as her grandson. After dancing with a Harvard boy, she had never quite reconciled herself to marrying a mailman. Nana Keane never tired of telling me that we came of noble Irish stock, that in Galway stood a castle where our ancestors had flourished before Cromwell’s invading beastly horde had stolen it away. I sometimes consoled myself with this notion of our ancient nobility, but I was more interested in joining the winners than in wallowing with the losers.

After a single mornings regal sleep-in I took up my traditional holiday job. For the next four days I woke early to ride shotgun in a florist’s delivery van with one-eyed, foul-mouthed Al Wijtowski, in whom the holiday spirit did not flourish. Al had been laid off at the paper plant three years before and drove as if he were competing in a demolition derby, cursing everyone and everything in his path. Between blasts of his horn he preached an amalgam of anarcho-socialism and misogyny; women and the rich were the enemy. “They got something you need and they know it,” he said as he pulled on a pint of Old Mr. Boston Peppermint Schnapps. “The rich got money, broads got pussy, and either way they got you whipped.” He urged me to profit from his wisdom. And I didn’t question it; it was just that I intended to be rich myself.

A minimum-wage Santa, I knocked on the doors of dilapidated row houses and aluminum-jacketed ranch houses where suspicious housewives in curlers half opened the door on scenes of domestic chaos, redolent of diaper pails and cooking grease, backlit by the blue light of the television set. Some thawed at the sight of the little baskets of holly and mums and glass balls, breaking into smiles and touching their hair, suddenly self-conscious. Others, mired in domestic circumstance, were immune to these festive tokens, stoically signing the receipt with one hand, holding a hip-slung baby with the other. You sometimes sensed the male animal in the background, torpid and menacing, like some toxic, bottom-dwelling ocean creature who lies motionless in the sediment for hours only to explode and seize any smaller creature unlucky enough to swim within reach. Infrequently the husband roused himself to answer the door, beer in hand, unshaven and hostile—as if you yourself were responsible for the fact that he wasn’t drawing a paycheck.

One day, out near the plant, the door of a double-wide trailer was opened by Karen Santone, who had been my true love for six delirious days before her Jehovah’s Witness parents discovered I was Catholic and banned our romance. Stunned, I stood there holding a basket of spruce and holly. She wouldn’t look at me, whether out of shame for her surroundings or of proud contempt for my Catholic soul. At that moment I felt my heart go out to her all over again as I imagined her aging and thickening before my eyes, Christmases winging past like the pages of
calendars in old movies while she remained framed in that doorway, going nowhere.

When Al dropped me off at six-thirty on Christmas Eve, I was greeted at the door by Mom’s sister Colleen, who lived two hours away in Dorchester and who inevitably burst into tears whenever she saw me, as if years had passed and we had improbably survived wars and famines to attain this happy reunion. On this occasion she wept and crushed me to her bulging equator while her son, Jimmy, hovered just behind her like a dim moon. At the age of thirteen, he still wore short pants and an Eton jacket and seemed stunted by the attention his mother had lavished on him ever since his father disappeared, shortly and not coincidentally after his arrival on earth. Aunt Colleen spoke for him, adjusted his clothes and hair and generally treated him so much like a puppet that he seemed not to have developed any volition of his own. He shook my hand with a kind of fetal languor.

After our turkey dinner came the inevitable moment when Aunt Colleen seized a lull in the proceedings to ask, “What about some music?” And when no one could think of a polite way to disavow any such desire, she nudged Jimmy right out of his chair. “Go get your accordion, darling. You know how Aunt Jean and Uncle Mike love to hear you play.”

And so I offered Nana Keane my arm and we adjourned slowly, slowly, to the living room, where once again I failed to scream in frustration that I did not belong in this upholstered oubliette where the Christmas tree blinked away and the beatified likenesses of John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII beamed down upon us from above the fireplace and little Jimmy Boyle unpacked his monstrous instrument of torture. We settled in for the long haul as Jimmy, suddenly animate, perched on the ottoman. Nearly obscured behind the dreadful device, he coaxed forth a series of preliminary sighs and moans. No matter how many times I was subjected to this instrument I could never quite get used to the sight of it—spawn of some violent coupling of reptile and pipe organ.