The Short History of a Prince (43 page)

MAY
1996

W
hen he was in his early thirties Walter learned more from his father about Daniel’s illness, about the botched surgery and the experimental drugs he’d been given. They stumbled into the conversation quite by accident one summer night when they were alone on the porch at Lake Margaret. Robert had been rambling on about the Cubs until the perfumed candle deep inside the frosted glass bulb guttered down to the end of the wick and went out. The windy darkness was all around them, a wild August blow slapping the water up against the seawall and tearing branches from trees. There had been a memorable night like it years before, starting with a sweltering afternoon, a gust coming from the south and another, and pretty soon the waves were slopping out of the lake, the shutters flying off their hinges. Robert laughed out loud at the thought of it, and he said to Walter, “Were you there when Daniel tipped the sea boat over, turned it turtle? The boys worked for an hour righting the hulk, and when it was back up, Daniel wanted to go out again, into the eye of the storm. Brave fool!”

“Where was I?” Walter said. How had he missed the storm, and his fearless brother wrestling with the upside-down boat? Why hadn’t
he been there? “When was that, Dad? Was it the summer Daniel was sick? Had he become weak before anyone knew he was ill?”

That was the tumble, the two of them like blind men falling into a pit, groping to find a wall, a grip. Walter hadn’t meant to ask a question that would require a long answer, a painful reply, but he’d gone and opened his mouth. The wind was unsettling, and he’d had a few drinks, and the night sky hung close, a dark hood over them, and he’d asked about his brother. It was done. Although Walter couldn’t see the details of his father’s face, he knew that Robert was alert, sitting straight in a chair meant for slouching, the tense line of his back in relief against the coarser blackness of the night. Carefully, slowly at first, Robert explained the progression of the illness. He told Walter that the exploratory surgeries they’d performed were not done in hopes of Daniel’s recovery, but were last-ditch efforts, to keep up the fight as well as study the mysteries of the cancer. The medical community was working toward a treatment of Hodgkin’s, a therapy that would in the future be improved and someday perfected. It became hit-and-miss as they went along, as Daniel steadily declined.

“Researching—using Dan,” Walter said.

“The doctors were at a loss, trying what they could,” Robert said, “but they just didn’t know very much. That was the fact of the matter. We told ourselves that Daniel might have been slaughtered in Vietnam for no cause. He might have died in a car crash—there are any number of senseless ways to lose your life.”

“Did you think of traveling to Mexico,” Walter asked, “or feeding Daniel apricot pits, or trying a seedy place on the south side of Chicago for acupuncture or shiatsu? Was that sort of thing done in those days?” Had his parents, he wondered, been willing to suspend their suburban traditions and gamble with the exotic?

Robert leaned forward and scratched his leg. For some time he kneaded his calf. Walter understood as well as he ever had that his parents had been stunned by their son’s disease, and that after all the years the disbelief and the guilt could so easily be renewed. They may have blamed themselves for a recessive quirk that had given Daniel the cancer, some glitch along one of their own wormy chromosomes.

“It must have been terrible,” Walter said. “Awful.” It was hopeless, the conversation, better to talk about baseball without even listening to each other.

“It was sly,” Robert said suddenly. “The disease. A shyster. Nothing we could do about it, but still there were mistakes that have been hard to forgive. The operation they did early on, when they sutured the wound too tight, for one.”

“Too tight?”

“Waiting for that mess to heal delayed the chemotherapy three or four weeks. It gave us something to blame for a while. The end was inevitable, we knew, but we focused on that bungle and I guess it didn’t do any harm. Righteous indignation, not a worthless feeling. It got me through the most difficult part.”

“What?” Walter said after a minute. “What part was that?”

“Telling my own son that he was going to die.”

“Dad,” Walter breathed.

“You probably won’t be surprised that a day doesn’t go by without my thinking of him, that several times a week I remember the talk we had. I told him I was sending him off on a trip, a journey I couldn’t prepare him for.” Robert shook his head and scoffed. “A journey. I said that he would leave his body behind, that he’d be the first of us to take the leap. There couldn’t help but be something of an adventure in it. That’s what I said, an adventure in it. I was drowning in sorrow and I was making out death to be an excursion to an amusement park. I have never even admitted the extent of my stupidity to your mother.”

“Dad,” Walter said again. He was shaken both by the confession and by his father’s eloquence.

“How do you explain something you don’t understand, don’t want to understand, something you’ve had little experience with? I assured him. I talked about the great mystery. I said I trusted the plan. Death, I explained, as if I knew, was the ultimate act of generosity, the one magnanimous act we’re made to do, like it or not, when our time comes. What was I to say, that I was afraid for him, scared out of my wits? I couldn’t have put into words then that I was terrified for us, as much as I was for him. I didn’t know if we’d get through it.”

“You—you did best.”

“No,” Robert said, “I’m afraid not. I spoke as if I understood more than an ordinary man, as if I had conviction. I meant to be reassuring but I muffed it by being dishonest, by being prissy. I think about what I’d want at my end and prissiness is the last thing, the worst thing! Dan tried to see through it, but who knows if he did, or could. I think he gave up the ghost when I couldn’t face him squarely and say, ‘You’re dying and part of us, a huge chunk, is going with you. I have no idea what in God’s name comes next for you or any of us.’ ”

“No one wants to hear that—”

“I’m telling you that Daniel asked me for my truth, not some student teacher horse’s-ass lecture. I sometimes think I spent all of my courage in that two-minute talk I had with him, that I spent my quota on the big lie. I don’t know that it takes more guts to make up baloney than to talk straight. Get me another Bud would you please?”

Walter felt along the hall in the dark, and when he came back to the porch his forefingers to his father’s hand as he gave the beer over was the best they could do to acknowledge the brief intimacy. They continued to drink and Robert maundered on about his own boyhood, his parents, his grandparents and the world wars. Walter half listened to the stories he had heard before. He couldn’t shake the image of his father struggling to find a suitable truth, a palatable fiction, by Daniel’s bed. If there was anything to regret, Walter thought, it was the shabby work of memory, that several good lines had become nothing more than doggerel in Robert’s mind.

In Otten, Walter hated to admit that for his students at fourteen and fifteen there was already little hope for major rehabilitation. They might shed their fat, earn a lot of money, find religion, join support groups, but their basic natures were fixed. They would grow up into a complex future with uncertain skills and beleaguered backgrounds, and all he could do for them, it seemed, was focus on the small shortcomings that were manageable. Sometimes the only help he could give was correcting their grammar, fixing the length of a sentence. He thought he could predict with one hundred percent accuracy which
members of his
South Pacific
cast would go on to become members of community theater, reliving their adolescent dreams of stardom on rickety, jerry-built stages. He had been asked to come forward on the last night of the show, and Kimmy Roth, the girl who played Nellie Forbush, had handed him one long-stemmed red rose. There had been a polite round of applause when he took his curtain call and a few whoops after he’d thanked the pit band, the stage crew and the actors.

All of the productions Walter had ever been involved with had come together at the last minute, and he had forced himself to believe that
South Pacific
too would gel in the final rehearsal. The students for the most part had worked hard and they seemed to be proud of their efforts. His seventh-hour bad girl, Sharon, had hideously overacted in her role of Bloody Mary, mugging and trying to steal everyone else’s scenes. The Otten audience had loved it and given her an ovation at her curtain call. It pleased Walter to see her and the others wearing their makeup after the performances as a badge of honor, carrying their carnations and their dirty costumes with an exaggerated, vainglorious strain, hefting a great burden.

Walter had made an appearance at the cast party the first night; he’d done his best to be jolly, playing old show tunes on the piano while the ensemble sang, locking arms and swaying. They were each of them their own selves, certainly, and yet he could not help seeing his students as types. There was something of a Mitch in the crowd, the good-looking lazy kid who played Lieutenant Cable, and a well-rounded, kind Daniel or two. There was a Walter, a sophomore named Jacob Burkhart. He hadn’t come to the party because he had a voice lesson early the next morning seventy miles away in Madison. He was the shortest person in his class and there was the problem of a tic in the lid of his left eye, but he had a respectable tenor voice. He had admitted to Walter during a costume check that he wanted to be in chorus lines in touring productions of Broadway shows. It was impressive, Walter thought, that Jacob had set his sights so reasonably on the provinces and on the back row.

At the cast party he played “Getting to Know You,” and he looked over the top of the piano wondering who in the group was going to be the Otten sacrificial lamb. He had blocked the thought,
gone to the buffet, eaten a brownie and excused himself, thanking Mrs. Roth on the way out. He had never stopped wondering why Daniel had been assigned his thankless high-profile role. From Walter’s study of Otten he had concluded that in every four-year cycle a student died, usually in traffic, in an alcohol-related death. The 1973 Oak Ridge High yearbook had been dedicated to Daniel. He’d died right before the book went to press and they were able to squeeze in the full-page picture. Susan was the special girl who had had a poem printed, a memorial of some fifty lines to accompany the photo. As Walter recalled, the piece was titled “The Precious Nature of Life,” but there had been some catchy phrases and sweet sentiments about the air in May, the smell of violets, the light in the morning, the light in the evening and the sound of mothers calling their children in for supper. It had demanded the reader to look around and take note of the bounty and the beauty. If a few of Oak Ridge’s teenagers had heeded Susan’s words, it could be said that Daniel and his sweetheart had made quite a contribution at the age of eighteen and sixteen. It was more than Walter could boast of doing in his profession, getting teenagers to snap to attention. He hoped that Daniel’s classmates, at their reunions, still talked about the McCloud boy, the swimmer, and, for just a minute, felt the old sadness.

It was in the aftermath of his
Swan Lake
performance and disgrace that Walter realized he had been not the sacrificial lamb but the scapegoat. Mr. Kenton had in effect flogged him. Walter decided after the beating that he had been punished for the carport, for his shameful relations with Mitch, his hateful feelings toward Susan, his indifference to his brother. It was forty lashes for every one of his lapses, his hostilities, his perversity. Maybe, he thought, the beating extended beyond himself too, and Mr. Kenton had given him a lick for Mitch’s cruelty and another for Susan’s falseness. Add one more for his parents’ silence, and why not a whop or two for their blanket forgiveness, when they should have mustered the strength to at least scold him. Walter had tried to see his thrashing as an impersonal attack on frailty and unkindness. It made him feel a little bit better, to think on a large scale, rather than the personal, to think that it wasn’t really one sadistic man beating the shit out of an effeminate boy.

There were two pieces of bad news that May in Otten, both delivered by Joyce over the telephone. The first came on a Friday night, just as Walter was adjusting his covers, about to go to sleep.

“I hate to be the bearer of sad tidings,” Joyce said. “It’s Francie and Roger. I’m sorry to say that they are divorcing.”

“D-divorcing?” Walter sputtered. “How come?”

“She has a young man, apparently. In Bloomington.”

“In Indiana? A young man?”

“I don’t know, honey. Younger than she is. She’s gone, at any rate. Picked up and moved.”

“You might think I’m faking,” Walter said, “but I honestly had the sense that she was out of the picture at Easter. She’d gotten so skinny—”

“I feel for Roger.”

“I feel for Francie’s fellow, and for Aunt Jeannie, of course. Has she ever been humiliated before?” Right away Walter wished he could take it back. “Oh, Mom,” he said. “This is a disaster. I don’t want to know what it means about Lake Margaret.”