The Short History of a Prince (17 page)

Walter assumed that Lucy knew enough not to suggest, even behind his back, that he get married. It was very likely that Aunt Jeannie asked at every gathering if he was dating. Aunt Jeannie, at seventy-two, like Sue Rawson, had not become diminished in any way. Her voice was shriller, her holiday sweaters jazzier, her fragrance had a greater range, and her exaggerated red lip line went far beyond the curves of her own fine mouth. She had hair that looked like spun copper, so airily spun it shone through to her clean white scalp. Walter didn’t want to think about how his mother responded to Aunt Jeannie’s questions. Joyce would probably say that Walter didn’t confide in her about those things, but that there’d been a girl back in high
school, Susan, the dancer. Good old Susan was so multipurpose, the kind of friend who could be used for any occasion.

Walter had never discussed his preferences with his mother because he felt it was so obviously understood between them. It was a conversation that was beneath their dignity, he sometimes thought, and at other times he could see no reason to hurt her out loud. He didn’t want to talk about it with her and he didn’t want to plan talking it over with her in the future. They appreciated each other, no need to dwell on what was neither here nor there. When he someday met the man of his dreams he would be only too glad to bring him home to Mother. They would sit around the table and talk about miniatures, the old neighborhood, what a good dog Duke had been. His father would pass through the room, deliver an endearing non sequitur, find his magazine and shuffle off to the sofa.

Walter could very well imagine the conversation that was taking place in the Lake Margaret kitchen. Those who had good instincts would be silent while the others rattled on, wondering and wondering why he hadn’t plucked some nice girl off the street. The thought of those conversations pained him, for his mother’s sake and for Lucy’s sake, too. That the rest of them had not figured him out, after all those years, that they continued to hope, made his heart tighten and his hands sweat.

It was in part his brother’s fault that Walter suffered at family functions. Walter blamed him. He couldn’t boast that he had known Daniel, as either a friend or an adversary. Still, the boy, in his various stages, in health and in sickness, haunted him. Sometimes in the dark bedroom Walter heard the sound of Daniel’s light tenor seventeen-year-old voice. It pleased him that in over twenty years he had not lost the tone and timbre of his brother’s speech. Two friends of Walter’s had died in their thirties, and yet Daniel’s death often seemed more recent. Walter couldn’t say one way or another that he had either liked or disliked Daniel, but surely he had been a commendable person, not to have mocked Walter, never to have beaten him up. There were times when Daniel had had every right to pound him, to punch him in the nose. Walter wasn’t sure why or how they had inhabited different worlds. Joyce had probably helped to engineer it, or maybe they had had nothing in common so that they had naturally, as young children,
taken separate paths. They must have made a truce early on, knowing the limitations and potentials of each other, coexisting without needlessly going over the same battles day after day. Walter liked to think that they had been smart, that they’d consciously made an economy in their relationship. It was pointless to project what Daniel would have been and done, but even so Walter often punished himself with images of his brother, the do-gooder. It was illogical and unfair—he knew it—to be irritated by the dead boy, and yet he sometimes felt a fleeting, dim anger. Daniel had left Walter alone with the burden of passing on the family name, the one act he would never be able to accomplish. It was convenient to blame Daniel for the wounds that Walter necessarily had to inflict on Joyce, at just those times, when his mother had to deal with Aunt Jeannie’s probes about Walter’s luck with girls. Lucy probably had to deflect the questions, too.

“Daniel would have married,” he muttered to the tarnished butter knife he’d picked from the tray.

Lucy was vigorously rubbing her spoon with action that involved both her hand and the wide sweep of her forearm. “Daniel who?” she said. “Would you look at this rag? Oh!—Daniel! Mom says he was smart and very sweet and that the girls all liked him, but you never know.” She held up an old undershirt that had moments before been white and had quickly become wet and black.

Walter stared at her goggle-eyed. “ ‘Daniel who?’ ” he repeated. Where was the reverence, the curiosity? How could she say, “Daniel who?”

He remembered all at once the feeling he had had as a child, asking an adult a simple question, an important question, with great interest. “Why, Daddy, is the sky blue?” His father had given him a terrible answer about electrons and ions and light refracting. He’d gone on incomprehensibly for ten minutes, when what Walter wanted was a short story. He’d wanted to know in a way that he could understand, that made sense: the sky is blue to match Calvin Klein’s spring line; blue because overhead you need a color that doesn’t threaten, that soothes; blue because sky-green, sky-orange, sky-red, doesn’t sound right when you read it on the spine of a Crayola. Walter realized that he had overwhelmed Sue Rawson by telling her honestly about his life, about his yearning for meaningful work, just as his
father had told him more about the atmosphere than he’d wanted to hear. It might pay, then, to take a different tack with Lucy. She was dipping her rag into the neck of the bottle, soaking the cloth with polish.

“This is The Story, more or less, of Daniel,” Walter began. He tucked his leg under himself and abandoned his knife on the armrest of the chair. “The Story of Daniel—or Daniella, if you must—goes something like this.” Lucy was polishing the daylights out of her spoon, and he couldn’t help advising her before he launched into the body of the tale. “You might want to think about saving some energy for the rest of the utensils, but then again you know best. Anyway, The Story of Daniel.” He cleared his throat, breathed in and out. “So there were once two sisters. They were good in different ways and pretty in different ways. One of them got sick and became more beautiful, because of the sickness. She lost weight, and her cheekbones became more pronounced, her eyes grew very large—she was exquisitely fragile—and also, she grew introspective, long-suffering, and probably religious. She became almost perfect in everyone’s opinion, as she languished, and when she died she was suddenly, in the collective memory, the smartest, kindest, wisest and most ravishing person who had ever lived. As the years passed, she became even more perfect, if that’s possible, although no one ever talked about her. Still, she was there, everywhere, always present. Her sister, who was ordinary, but good in her own way, could never forget the radiant and morally superior dead girl. She never married, even though everyone discussed her wedding in the kitchen. She always imagined her sister’s wedding, and it came to take the place of her own, this wedding in her dreams. No detail went unnoticed in the fantasy. All of the bridesmaids, for example, had large firm breasts that were useful, like Velero, when it came to holding up their fuchsia strapless dresses. She even understood that when she talked about the ghost sister she was really using her to understand herself. She realized that dead people serve as a kind of measure, that you look back to them to find yourself. She accepted that. You must know that the living sister was happy enough. She had a real job, she had lovers occasionally, sometimes people she knew and cared for, but more often she had the squalid encounters in the john you hear about, the one triumph, a truck driver, so handsome,
very little English, ten minutes of bliss in the can in a bar in the East Village—and she lived until Thanksgiving Day, when she choked on a bone right at the dinner table. It spoiled the party and no one ever forgave her, even in death. But she forgave them from heaven because she knew they were regular old human beings who worried about propriety and gravy boats and the silver being polished. And so they all lived happily ever after, especially little Linda, who grew up to be a famous ballerina despite her busybody uncle’s warning about starting her training too early.”

Lucy dropped her spoon on the tray. Walter had never seen her look astonished before. It became her. Her tongue was blue from a candy she’d been sucking on and her bottom teeth were straight and very white. He remembered that as a teenager she’d worn a metal cage around her head at night and that when he came home he always found rubber bands on the kitchen floor that had sprung off her braces. He had a fine view of her two fillings. “Waaaaaaalt.” She finally laughed down the
a
of his name.

“It’s a true story,” he said, gathering up his notebooks, tossing his head, making for the door, satisfied that at last he was having his turn to make a dramatic exit.

At dinner Walter drank a lot of wine because he’d brought several choice bottles, and also out of mortification at his own wagging tongue. He wasn’t sure why he’d told both his aunt and his sister the key facts of his life. He had been discreet for thirty-eight years and in one afternoon blown his cover. After several glasses he got into a lively discussion with Uncle Ted about sexual mores in the United States. The art of conversation had never been Uncle Ted’s strong suit. But Ted had also drunk nearly a full bottle of Merlot and so he began not only to talk but to have opinions. It turned out that he hadn’t ever gotten past blaming Betty Friedan and the entire state of California for the decline of the family and the sexual revolution.

“But, Uncle Ted, you have Jeannie,” Walter said. “Not everyone has that bulwark. You’re never going to have decline of any sort going on within ten miles of your backyard.”

Francie had just taken a drink of water and she had to spit it back in her cup. “Over Mother’s dead body,” she said, sniggering. “You’ve got that right, Walter.”

Uncle Ted was all in favor of this Newton Gingrich, he called him, as if calling the new Speaker of the House Newt was disrespectful. Walter took him seriously and tried to raise his consciousness. “Yes, but you see,” he said, gesticulating wildly, knocking the tongs from the salad bowl, “the sexual revolution was on its way long before Haight-Ashbury. For example, what changed the public’s attitude toward whores after World War Two wasn’t a change in morality at all but the availability of penicillin. Syphilis was now under control. The prevailing attitude had absolutely nothing to do with lax morals.”

“Blame it all on the feminists, Dad,” Francie muttered. “Blame it on the women who are tired of the bullshit, excuse my French.”

“Walter,” Joyce said, moving the dried flowers in the pumpkin vase so she could see him across the table. “I forgot to tell you my friend Paula—you remember, the reference librarian from way back—saw your old friend Mitch in town the other day.”

He understood his mother was trying to change the subject. He had been thinking, in relation to morality, about the time he’d caught crabs from the Sicilian longshoreman, and how that affliction had made him chaste as a nun for a while. He also was noticing that Francie had lost a fair amount of weight, and was uncharacteristically petulant. “What did you say, Mom?”

“Mitch Anderson. My friend Paula, the one who loved going to
The Nutcracker
every year—Paula saw him in town.”

Walter hadn’t heard from Mitch, hadn’t ever tried to contact Mitch, hadn’t seen him since high school graduation. He didn’t admit to thinking about Mitch. Susan had gone to her tenth reunion and the fifteenth, and found no trace of him. She had hoped to visit Mitch’s mother, but the woman had either gotten an unlisted number or moved, or had died.

“He’s a developer in Southern California, Del Mar, doing quite well for himself, it seems. Two little girls, I think she said.”

“Huh.” It was the best Walter could manage. He put a chilled pre-cut square of butter in the depression of his steaming mashed potatoes and watched it melt. I’m shellacked, he said to himself. He
tried to focus on the yellow pad becoming liquid and slowly filling the reservoir. Uncle Ted had turned to the other side and was talking past Francie, telling Lucy’s Marc about the phony organic produce that came from the West Coast and was triple the price of so-called commercially grown vegetables. Mitch, in Del Mar, two girls, a developer. Walter thought of Mitch standing before a zoning board, flicking his bleached hair. His skin was probably leathery from the California sun, with rugged-man creases around his eyes. Maybe he wore cowboy boots, a bolo tie, a big silver belt buckle, a hunky drag and slouch to his walk to suit the terrain where just beyond the pass there were mesas. He would have the power to charm the elderly women into deeding over their farms, the power to make the men on the water board reroute the rivers so that his personal property of twenty thousand square miles became arable.

“What happened to that girl, you know, the one who went off to the New York City Ballet, the one you used to bring up here?” Walter’s cousin Vicki asked.

“Miami Ballet,” Walter said with his mouth full of potato. “More Balanchine down in Florida than there is in New York.” Susan had called him the night before to tell him that she’d fallen in love with a man other than her husband, the man who looked so much like an older version of Daniel. She wanted Walter to travel with her to Chicago in January so that she could possibly commit adultery. “She’s doing great,” he said, the potatoes slogging down his throat. “Star of the company.”