The Short History of a Prince (15 page)

Walter had suffered humiliation in every stage of his life, and he had anticipated having his share of it in Otten. A person had to get out of bed in the morning; that, after his years of teacher training, was the best advice he could give himself. In those first overwhelming weeks he walked around his own backyard in the evening, raking aimlessly, thinking about his seventh-hour class, the group that was in danger of unraveling because of one mean-spirited punk, a few regular troublemakers and a future madam named Sharon. In Jim Norman there was a menace that Walter could not easily dismiss. The boy was brittle and knowing and had no mercy. With his evil glare he as good as said to Walter, I see you are a measly little faggot—you’re someone I can mess with. Walter reminded himself that if he really wanted to he could get back on the train to New York, reclaim his job at the dollhouse shop, volunteer at the soup kitchen and reopen his charge at Tower Records. The thought of his other life fortified him and made it possible for him to face another seventh period in Otten.

On the third day of freshman English Walter had told Jim Norman that as penalty for writing obscenities on the desk he could not return until he had written
Fuck You
five hundred times in neat printing. “You might come to understand,” he explained, “just how bored I feel when I see those words on the woodwork.” On the fifth day when Jim made first a lewd gesture and then a threatening remark, and the group laughed and whooped, Walter calmly divided the class in half. The right side, he said, were prisoners applying for parole, and the other side was the parole board. The students looked so taken aback that Walter wanted to point at them and say HA. He had them; he’d temporarily outfoxed them. Sharon couldn’t believe she was a prisoner, and at the same time she was trying to think what sort of crime she would like to have committed. Walter appointed Jim Norman head of the parole board and some of them cheered. It was Jim’s duty, with his staff, Walter directed, to draw up a list of rules by which
they’d judge the prisoners, not in relation to the crime but in regard to a person’s usefulness to society. The jailbirds were to write a letter explaining why they deserved to be let out, and what they’d do with their lives if they were given a chance on the outside. Many of them rose to the bait and came to life at his bidding. He had scored, even if it was a far cry from Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”

Walter remained unflappable in those first months. He had bursts of creativity, he devised inspired group activities, and yet Jim Norman usually sat with his pen between his fingers, keeping a beat with it on his desktop. Walter managed to move the class through
The Crucible
and
To Kill a Mockingbird
, as if Jim’s mutterings and his pen made no noise, as if nothing would suit Walter better than to become in all of their minds the archetypal fruitcake English teacher, alone in Otten, wearing the trademark paisley bow tie, with shiny pennies in his new loafers. He recited poetry, he sang from
South Pacific
, the musical he would direct in the spring; he had them up and putting on scenes from the play they read. His efforts caused him a pulled neck muscle and a spastic colon at the start of November. In his bed, watching the clouds, having taken the last of his Valium, he wondered if anyone would notice if he left town, if he never returned.

On most weekends Walter drove over to Lake Margaret to check the grounds. He was at last doing a son’s duty. It had been a dry autumn and the grass did not need cutting once. It was a relief not to have to fool with the tractor mower, although he still warmed to the idea of getting decked out for lawn care. There had not been many occasions so far to use his new fanny pack or his pants with the loop for the hammer. He roamed the property with the intention of inspecting the boathouse, the woodshed, the barn, the garden and the pump. He hardly had to look, he knew so well the curve of the hillside, the tilt of each stone step, the chipped bricks in the sidewalks. He got out of the car in the circular drive, closed his eyes and felt a peace settle over him.

He often brought a sandwich and a box of cereal, his books and papers. He stayed the night. He felt that, as much as anything was his,
that house belonged to him. He understood the nature of his ownership, that it was his in a way that did not include but went well beyond a deed and the transfer of money. His uncles had died, and his mother and two aunts were the shareholders in the Lake Margaret Corporation. When he stayed on Saturday nights he slept in the four-poster bed in Sue Rawson’s room. He imagined her bulk on the mattress, her sound sleep, her guttural snores. He wondered if she allowed herself the slightest rapture when she woke in her girlhood bed to the sound of lake water out the window. After two stiff whiskies one night, the thought came to him that he was exactly like the large still house itself, the house that was filled with antiques, family paintings, letters and photographs. He tried to imagine taking a lover through the house, pointing at each object and saying, This, and this, and this, is a part of me, something you must look at if you are to understand who I am, if you are to know who it is you love. And he would have to do the same for the beloved, an exhausting labor for each, visiting the sacred places, looking and trying to know.

Walter had expected to be lonely in Wisconsin, but he found that the loneliness was a different strain from the other types he had experienced. He didn’t much miss anyone, or wish to be elsewhere, or yearn to be better dressed and wittier than his neighbors. He didn’t wonder, as he had in the past, what he could do to make some kind of long- or short-term contribution. It was more than enough, trying to win the stubborn hearts of his fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds. In Otten, he was using himself in a way he never had before, and as a result of his exertion he sometimes felt a novel satisfaction. Giving Jim Norman an F on his midterm had not brought Walter happiness or the temporary delight of revenge. He was surprised to find that he wanted to go after the boy with the slit eyes and cruel mouth, to have him wake up, to voice a perception, to meet his match in literature. It was a fantasy, that Jim Norman see himself in a piece of writing. He might grow up to be someone with the glittery hardness of Gilbert Osmond, without, of course, the refinement, or he might go the other direction and become even more slovenly, his evilness pared down to stupidity, like Gatsby’s George B. Wilson. Although Jim didn’t always show up, Walter had no intention of letting him off the hook. When
he didn’t come to school Walter called him and left the assignment on his mother’s answering machine.

He sometimes thought that after a long day it would be nice to have someone waiting for him at home. He was grateful he’d been born in his own era, that his orientation hadn’t required him to take shelter, to become an anthropologist studying remote cultures in the bush, or a priest, living in a friary with the excessive camaraderie and what-have-you of the other fathers. He realized one night at the lake that what he missed at the moment was his brother’s dog. He would have liked to see Duke chewing, with his nauseating snorting noises, on some repulsive bone. When he went back to Otten, for his week of teaching, he’d recall his time at Lake Margaret, and he felt the house to have an almost human comfort, as if the wood, mortar and brick had the pliancy of a good companion.

At Thanksgiving, the smoke from the burning leaves blew in every time the kitchen door opened, to mix with Aunt Jeannie’s rose perfume, the roasting turkey, the baking bread and the fourteen acorn squashes steaming on the counter. The musty smell of the house was temporarily overpowered by the fragrance of Pilgrim fare and drugstore cosmetics. Walter had to shut the parlor door so he could concentrate on his students’ journals for an hour or two before he joined the party. He sat hunched over an illegible piece of work, and he didn’t hear Sue Rawson in the room until she rustled a magazine.

He dropped one notebook and let loose a soprano shriek that sounded something like Hi!

She was perched on the arm of the sofa, flipping through an old issue of
Military History
. “How do you find it?” she asked. Her diction had grown more patrician through the years. Everything about her had become sharper, more severe. Age had not stooped her. If anything she seemed taller, her bony nose longer. The gray of her eyes had not grown misty with cataracts but had become dark, shiny. Walter knew her well enough to understand what her question meant. Had she been a conventional aunt she would have said, “How’s your job?”

He was panicking even before he’d recovered from the jolt of her arrival. He was short of breath after that foolish yipping Hi; he was panting! How was he going to explain his life to Sue Rawson so that she’d be pleased, so that she’d show her approval with a caustic sentence or two? What should he say? She had always valued an artistic sensibility above all else, and he had known, since the early days at the ballet and the symphony, that she believed him to be the only gifted one in the pack of nieces and nephews. He didn’t want to disappoint her, but he hadn’t had time to anticipate her question and fashion a comprehensive or poetical answer. He could tell her it was difficult, as he had expected, but that was not the exceptional reply she had come to hear. There were times when living in Otten had both the tragic and comic elements he had experienced as the Prince in the Rockford Ballet’s production of
The Nutcracker
. As his panic intensified, Walter suddenly remembered that once or twice he had been rewarded when he talked openly with Sue Rawson, when he behaved as if they were intimate. In theory, he did feel intimate with her, in spite of the fact that she was steely, formidable. He had always had a sentimental affection for her when he was far away. He had a hope that before she died she would tell him a choice morsel that would open the door to her secret self. She still intimidated him, although there was also something in her that made him want to try to wrestle her to the ground. She could almost have passed for an uncle or an older brother in her blue jeans from Sears and Roebuck, a model she had purchased back in the fifties, that snapped at her big waist.

“Well,” he began slowly, setting his stack of papers on the floor, placing his foot over his comments on the first page so she wouldn’t see. “How do I find it? I’m not sure I’m doing a respectable job, but I’m engaged in it. I can’t honestly say, you know, as my dental hygienist does, that I
love
my job. And I don’t think I’m going to be a
To Sir with Love
sort of teacher. But I wanted, I guess, to be consumed by something. That was my idea in getting certified, anyway.” He leaned back in his chair to watch her, so he could try to gauge her response. “I spent my twenties indulging myself, believing that it was right and good to be happy, sexy”—he said the word lightly, quickly—“to give in to everything beautiful and sunny, to have rich friends, to make sure I got an invitation to the Hamptons on the weekends. I was Lily Bart,
minus the face, the figure and the hats. There were seasons when everyone I knew wore the same thing: blue turtlenecks, button-up blue jeans, stone-washed to an exact shade of blue, and navy blazers. There was a specific way and direction you were supposed to twirl your foot when you sat with your legs crossed just so.” Her mouth had not yet once twitched in disapproval. “My life was about survival,” he bravely continued, “grim survival, on one hand, at the dollhouse shop, and on the other hand it was about pursuing pleasure. There was love all around me, at the opera, even up in standing room, or probably especially up there, at the ballet, at every concert I went to. It was love, you could call it, in the park, on Fire Island. Everyone seemed most of the time to be dancing, singing, playing, acting love. Love! Then of course some of us began to get sick. We grew up or we died. None of us stayed the same.”

He had found himself well beyond their usual boundaries. She was immobile, and he began to talk faster, if only to quickly get to the finish. “I realized I could live a moral life, that I should, as an adult, live a life dictated by duty. If I chose I could find beauty by living in the real world; I could probably find beauty by working day after day at meaningful drudge. I often had that anxious, desolate feeling that I was wasting my time, that I was wasting an afternoon, a weekend, a whole life, by not choosing to do the right thing—the work that would simultaneously wear me out and sustain me. I was striving for the, ah, mature life. Here, I said to myself, I’ve been waylaid by the most sinful temptations, and if I don’t change now I might wander around forever wadded up with stupidity of my own making. I’d gotten distracted by laziness, by narcissism, and I’d also become clever in a despicable way, clever like a mild version of Milton’s Satan, Satan-lite, if you will. I could think rationally, but without any sort of spirituality. I was disconnected from anything moral, or from a sense of awe. Finding the straight way so naturally led me to Otten, Wisconsin, to teach sexually active, uninterested fourteen-year-olds poetry.” He raised his voice one notch below his yelping Hi. “ ‘Margaret, are you grieving, Over golden grove unleaving?’ ”