The Short History of a Prince (8 page)

Walter couldn’t imagine that there was one personality in Schaumburg as peculiar as Mrs. Gamble, not one woman who would
storm out of her house with a bullwhip when the little children begged from the milkman. He was stubborn and not altogether reasonable about his dislike of his sister’s town. It was middle-aged of him, he realized, to feel irritated by a place, to be bothered by the fact that there were driveways instead of alleys, that there were no stay-at-home mothers, no tired housewives in curlers, no women who started drinking whiskey sours at three in the afternoon on their porches. Where was that leisured class, the Mrs. Gambles, who took it upon themselves to police the families, the dogs, the village employees? Mrs. Gamble could detect the tantrum of a spoiled child in a faraway house. The squall of a husband and wife. The low rumble of the garbage men, always late, coming from the west side of Oak Ridge. There was no point and certainly nothing attractive in middle-aged despair, and yet, Walter thought, someone had to have angst. It should not have been surprising that the old neighborhood would slowly vanish as the children grew up and their parents moved away and the world changed, but he was on hand to say, I am surprised! I am dismayed. I don’t like it!

There was a quietness about Lucy’s street, as if each house were stranded on its own lawn. It was hard to believe that men and women were really behind their closed paneled doors, couples thinking, cooking, making love, banging on a piece of wood with a hammer down in the basement, something, anything, for home improvement. The shades were drawn all down the street as if a president had been assassinated, as if one a day got a bullet through his head.

Walter arrived in Schaumburg on Saturday morning, just as his three-year-old niece was getting ready to go to her ballet class at the park district. Lucy had invited Walter especially for the class, because of his interest in the dance. He was standing on the blue mat that said
Welcome!
in red cursive, talking to Lucy before she appeared. “Linda’s too young,” he was saying as the door swung open. “Do the park district officials look at the feet? Would they know what they were seeing if they did? Who does she take after, you or Marc?” He waved his hands in front of his face. “It doesn’t matter—the fact is she’s too young.”

“Walt,” Lucy said, smiling at him. “I’m fine too.” She was the only person who had ever called him Walt. He had also once looked up
“Walt” in the
Oxford English Dictionary
. It meant to revolve in the mind, to consider. It meant to fall into anger or madness. His name, in any form, did not portend an easy life.

Lucy took him by the arm and led him into the entry that was as large as the New York studio apartment he had left behind. His sister’s house always had the gift-shop aroma of dried flowers and scented candles. Walter took a whiff and coughed. He wondered how a suburban girl had taken to the country craft movement, if it was pure chance, a mutation that had made his mother’s home-decorating gene run amok in Lucy. There were plaid bows around the stems of the brass candlesticks on the mantel, checked gingham curtains with tiebacks, and at every turn a fabric goose, a wooden goose, a porcelain goose, a stenciled gaggle of geese. There were pigs too, pink pigs, white pigs, stuffed pigs, china pigs. The house had come with the opulent foyer chandelier, a dazzler, all right, with several hundred prisms hanging from ever smaller steel circles that went up to the ceiling. The fixture clashed with the barnyard motif, but unfortunately it seemed to be attached to the main beam without hardware, a natural and permanent outgrowth from the ceiling. Walter’s niece was sitting on the carpet through the way into the living room, picking out bits of pink lint in the white tulle skirt in her lap. “Hello, Miss Queen Dido,” he called to her.

Linda looked up, slowly, blinking, as if she’d been asleep. She hadn’t rushed to the door, calling his name, spinning around, wriggling with excitement. “Hi, Uncle Walter,” she said dutifully.

He thought her terrifyingly well mannered, as quiet and closed as the houses in the neighborhood. To Lucy he said, “Her feet are not ready for ballet. Her bones are too malleable. I looked at them last weekend, at the lake. They’re baby feet, soft, like pudding. In Russia they don’t start children until they’re nine or ten, and only after each one has had a complete physical, only if the child is suited for the rigorous training. I’m serious, Lucy. She’s too young.”

“You? Serious?” She reached around him with slack arms, and laid her head on his shoulder.

“Take her to
The Nutcracker
when she’s eight,” he commanded, absently patting her back. He called out to Linda, “Cover your ears.” She obediently clapped her pudgy hands to either side of her head. “She’ll want to be Clara more than anything in the world,” he said
into Lucy’s silky sweet-smelling hair. “Blue satin dress, golden curls, white pantaloons, pink shoes. After the performance, tell her you can’t afford the lessons. Apologize. Keep telling her about your impoverished state, even when she weeps, begs, beseeches. Pretty soon she really will want lessons more than a puppy, more than Barbie’s dream house, more than getting her navel pierced. She’ll take up religion. She’ll pray. When her demands reach a feverish pitch you say, ‘Maybe. Maybe, Linda.’ Right before she goes over the edge you acquiesce, although grudgingly. It will be perfect timing, you see, because at that point she will be ready to submit to the torture, and find the path to the divine.” He took a deep breath. “This park district thing is all wrong.”

Lucy had moved away from Walter halfway through his prescription for her daughter’s dancing career. She’d enrolled Linda in the ballet class thinking it would please him. She laughed a little as he spoke, as she wrangled the child into her yellow-and-white tutu. “There’s no telling what goofy old Uncle Walter will say or do,” she whispered. Linda was already wearing white tights and yellow ballet slippers. The yellow headband, with pink and green flowers sticking straight up on a thick wire, wound in a white ribbon, gave her the antennaed look of an ant.

“She loves her class, don’t you, Lind,” Lucy said, jostling the whole girl to free the skirt of lint. It was not a question and Lucy didn’t wait for Linda to answer. She took Walter by the arm again and pressed gently. “Marc thinks she’s so cute in her dancing outfit. Relax, Walt, and look at how cuddly she is.”

“How what?” he called to her.

Linda followed her mother out the door, her unfortunate knock-kneed walk making the stiff tulle of the skirt bounce up and down. She buckled herself into her own car seat in the back of the New Dodge Caravan Limited Edition, which was a glittery sand color called Desert Romance. Walter wished Linda would cry and buck, get down on the floor and be a head banger. She fastened her seat belt and adjusted her antennas. When Lucy turned on the ignition, Kenny Loggins came on with the air-conditioning.

“You were born too late to enjoy this kind of thing,” Walter said. “This guy’s voice is clotted with—with goodness and self-satisfaction.
Why aren’t you listening to something you can argue with, Mahler, or Björk, or Liz Phair?”

Lucy tilted her head toward Walter and smiled without opening her mouth. He was different, that’s how she thought of him, when she described him to her friends. A different drummer who wouldn’t hurt a flea.

“Walt,” she said pleasantly, “would you please just give up on me?”

She had a knack, Lucy did, of occasionally saying something that betrayed a certain acumen. Walter had actually come to Schaumburg determined not only to nag at her but also to talk. From what he’d gathered, neither one of his parents had wanted to make a set of stories about the past. They had discouraged her questions, nipped her native curiosity in the bud. Joyce and Robert had apparently believed that Lucy could make a clean start if she wasn’t burdened by the family’s previous history, if she was not encouraged to read difficult books or take up an art form beyond making cakes from boxed mixes. Walter had occasionally wondered if Joyce hadn’t had the heart to raise another child, if she had gone through the motions hoping for a healing effect, hoping for something that never came to her. He wondered if his mother had not had the strength to rescue Lucy from her mild temperament and her ordinary aspirations. Joyce had allowed her only daughter to go to junior college and marry at nineteen.

Who could tell what had shaped Lucy or who had given her her best self? By the time she was kindergarten age the neighborhood was already lost. The swarm of children had grown too old to play war in the summer nights and so she had missed shinnying in the Kloper trench after the phantom bounty. There were moments when Walter had truly believed that if the big boys caught him they would slit his throat with their pocket knives and bleed him like a lamb at slaughter. Fear, he’d believed early on, had a metallic taste, and also smelled of dirt. Across the alley, on the safe side, Mrs. Gamble leaned against her fence, her burning cigarette providing the beacon and the scent of the home country.

Walter had asked himself a number of times why Lucy should care about the history of Maplewood Avenue. Why should she be interested in the texture of his boyhood? There was no clear reason, and
still he wished that retarded Billy Wexler had not been killed by a car, gone before Lucy had had a chance to see him stealing the trash-can lids. Year after year Billy seemed never to grow older, always a four-year-old in the same adult body. His tantrums, his shrieking, had had the same grounding effect as church bells, a noise that is both heard and unnoticed, day after day. By the time Lucy was in third grade the genius twins were doing liver transplants at competing university hospitals. She’d missed the boisterous secrets the porch mothers told about their husbands, and she’d missed the pack roaming the block barefoot from Memorial Day to Labor Day, as if they were all living on a farm. But it wasn’t exactly an elegy that Walter wanted to deliver.

He wanted to talk to Lucy not because he wished to cast a golden light on his past but because finally, in his premature middle age, he was afraid. Afraid, he guessed, of life itself. He was afraid of the boys who sat in their bedrooms in the glow of their computer screens, communing in sentence fragments with people they would never meet. When he thought of all those little zombies his stomach hurt. So many people seduced by a technology that bred impatience and greed. What was good, what had stood the test of time and had value, was being thrown out and replaced with a perpetual present that was slick and speedy and shallow. His stomach juices churned, the muscle clenched. He was well aware of the fact that others before him had been frightened by the next generation’s ignorance and bad manners in just the same way. It was certainly not abnormal to believe that the new crop was deficient, but perspective did not make the distress less keen. In his blackest moods Walter feared that the books, music, art—everything he loved—were going to be overlooked by this coming spiritless and nescient generation.

Walter would make a point of listening to Lucy as much as speaking himself. He would listen. He wanted to find out from her that he was mistaken about the next century, no cause for sleepless nights. He would admit that he had become like the old lady shaking her black umbrella at the unruly boys loitering at the bus stop; he had become dowdy and out of touch, as Wordsworth had, mumbling on his walks over the wold, depressed about the general evil of the civilization.

He hoped to find, too, that he and Lucy, even without the old neighborhood, had something in common. He was willing to probe,
to take a risk, to see if there was anything, besides duty and the assumption of love, that linked them. If there was not, then he would rest. He would let duty and familial love be enough. But how exhilarating it would be if they had reason for a bond, if there was something that in all of their years Walter had overlooked.

Even when he tried to dismiss his gloominess as something characteristically middle-aged, he could not move beyond his impression that Lucy and her husband, Marc, were lacking in substance, and that living itself would not provide them with insight. They were poorly equipped. They seemed to have missed their chance to build an inner life. They didn’t read, they didn’t discuss ideas, religion or politics, as far as he could tell. Lucy, he feared, had an interior dialogue that was as still, as silent, as a deaf girl’s.

On the way to the park district building Lucy pointed out Marc’s favorite features in the new van, which he had managed to acquire below cost from the dealership. There was a white quilted piggy with a red satin bow around its neck hanging from the rearview mirror. At a stoplight she took a deep breath and she said, “I’m so happy you’re living close to us. We’ll be able to have all the holidays together, not just Christmas. Mom said that even Mrs. Gamble is thrilled to have you back in the Midwest.”

“Thrilled?” Walter said. “I didn’t know that Mrs. Gamble was capable of registering delight. Indignation, yes. Rage, of course. Is there an emotion that invariably goes along with the act of snooping? What does one feel when one skulks? Titillation, perhaps.” He took a tissue from a red-and-white container that had been embroidered in counted cross-stitch, and wiped his nose. “Do you notice that we always speak of her? When we meet, one of us always brings up Mrs. Gamble. Is she like that problematic third party, the Holy Ghost? I never understood what the Holy Ghost was, but maybe Mrs. Gamble is as good a definition as any. Otten is three hours from Oak Ridge and that’s surely close enough to be in her force field again. That’s the alarming part about moving to Wisconsin.”

“She’s an old dear,” Lucy said.

Walter turned slowly to look at his sister. He was unable to move his mouth, to ask her to repeat herself. He felt as if he’d snorted the
words, as if they’d gone up his nostrils and were doing their bad magic.

“But think,” she persisted, unaware of his shock, “think. You’ll be able to have Thanksgiving with us, with the whole family, at Lake Margaret. And Easter, too. I don’t think I ever remember you at any of the Lake Margaret holidays.”