The Whole World Over (32 page)

As summer wore on, calls from the Coast dwindled in frequency, and
rarely did Walter and Werner trade more than a brief greeting before the
phone was passed to Scott. Scott was the one who had to suffer through
The Weather According to Werner. Walter would overhear remarks
like "Yeah, humidity's been awesome" and "You mean the waves at
Stinson?"

It was a summer of work more intense than Walter had ever known;
Scott's extra hands were a blessing. Was everyone suddenly richer?
That's not what the papers said, but that was how it felt. Certainly, the
boys in the 'hood seemed all at once healthier, the sickest among them
passed on, the ones who'd managed to hang on this long filled with the
hope and energy purveyed in a new set of potions and pills. The number
of black-bordered cards in Walter's mail diminished—as if he were living
life backward.

And then there were the new "dieters," people who'd given up bread
and pasta for steak and butter. "Fight fat with fat, it's so intuitively
homeopathic!" said a sleek guy from Walter's gym who suddenly showed
up all the time, renouncing his vegan ways. Honestly, thought Walter,
people were so absurd about food. But if the fads had turned in his
favor, who was he to rock the boat?

Walter did worry a little about Scott's social life—surely the boy
needed creatures his own age to hang with—but he heard no complaints.
Contrary to what Walter had told Tipi, Scott spent a lot of his
free time playing guitar in his room or combing the music listings and
going out to places like CBGB and The Bottom Line. It was all very
post-counterculturally wholesome. Perhaps Scott genuinely liked his
own company, a rare talent in someone his age. So far, the most vulgar,
juvenile thing about Scott was his never-ending collection of wisecrack
T-shirts. One day his chest would proclaim,
JESUS HATES YOUR SUV;
the next,
SUCK ON
THIS
. ("You know," Walter said cheerfully when the
latter message emerged, "there are people in this town who might act on
that imperative." Scott grinned and said, "Let 'em try." But the shirt did
not make a return appearance.)

The apartment grew vaguely collegiate around the edges. Old halves
of deli sandwiches dried out, forgotten, in the fridge. Scott's sneakers
seemed to migrate about the living room, spreading their subtle pungence.
Here and there, magazines lay crinkled and slumped like dead
birds. Walter had expected this. He spoke calmly to Scott, whose sloppiness
went into periodic remission, but with business as good as it was,
Walter also hired a housekeeper, a daffy actress friend of Ben's who
sometimes left rags in the tub but could be trusted not to steal Granna's
silver or Walter's collection of cuff links.

"Are you still writing poetry?" Walter asked Scott one afternoon as
the two of them took a late lunch break.

"Well, yeah, sure, but I'm merging it with my music."

"Lyrics. Of course," said Walter.

Scott looked at the ceiling, audibly chewing his pastrami, playing
with that Duke of Earl medallion. His T-shirt du jour, innocuous for
once, proclaimed
I'D RATHER BE IN MANITOBA
; the menacing face of
a polar bear filled the
O.
"Not lyrics, not conventional like that," he
said. "It's more like I'm turning the poetry into the music. Like the
music's eating the words, digesting the emotions. Know what I mean?"
He redirected his gaze at Walter. Walter noticed for the first time that his
nephew had sprouted one of those fungus beardlets known as soul
patches. Bad decision for anyone. And when had he traded the tasteful
star in his earlobe for a miniature demon's mask with, however tiny, a
protruding tongue?

"Like John Cage? Or maybe Enya," said Walter.

"Who's John Cage?" said Scott.

To act shocked would have been dishonest. Walter himself had heard
only snatches of John Cage, always on basement FM; every time, he'd
changed stations. "Oh, well. Pots and pans, vacuum cleaners and subway
brakes. That sort of thing," he said. "Cacophony before anyone
else was doing it."

Scott looked perplexed but did not ask for elaboration.

"Personally, I do like my songs with a melody and lyrics," said Walter.
"But I am musically bourgeois."

Scott nodded gravely. "I've seen your CD collection. But never judge
a man by his music. You're cool enough to be, like, nowhere near your
age. That's what I told Sonya."

It took Walter a moment to make the connection. "Sonya? Sonya
who takes T.B. to entertain the oldsters?" Whatever the opposite of cool
was, that was surely what Sonya thought of Walter.

"Hey, did you know Sonya plays flute? Like even classical stuff sometimes.
She introduced me to Rampal, the Bach cantatas."

"Will wonders never cease," said Walter.

"She took me to the Kitchen, where we heard
seven dudes
play flute
together. The high notes were, like . . . like noise from outer space. It
was so fine. It's like you become a bat or a dog."

"A bat or a dog?" said Walter. Good Lord.

"You know. Like you can hear on some higher frequency. Like your
ears hurt at first, but then they're supernatural. You're inside this awesome
tunnel. It's genius. You
are
the noise. Know what I mean?"

Walter leaned forward, smiling, and put a hand on his nephew's arm.
"No, Scott, I haven't the remotest notion what you mean. But have fun
with it." Ben was waving him over to the phone.

"Walter's Place. The man himself," he answered. As he watched Scott
from across the room, he saw the boy swaying from side to side in his
chair, touching his medallion to his nose, his upper lip, his chin, as if in
some weird benediction.

The caller was Bonny Prince Charlie (
the book dude,
mused Walter
in his nephew's lingo). He wanted to know if they were still serving
lunch. "For you, my dear, whenever. Come right on over," said Walter,
though anyone could have had lunch all afternoon. If you ran an eating
establishment in New York, you had to be a total rube to stop
serving food anytime between noon and midnight—unless you ran a
restaurant in Midtown, which, in Walter's terms, was the same as being
a rube.

He returned to Scott and picked up their plates. "Back to work, Bat
Boy. Hugo is going to show you the proper way to trim asparagus."

"Yo. Cool. Is there like an improper way?"

"Like yes," said Walter. "Believe it or not."

THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL
, Walter lived with Granna. Because of her
weakening hips, she no longer slept on the second floor but made a bedroom
in the small den off the living room. She still drove, shopped,
cooked, and went to church. In addition to her needlework, she took up
making wreaths for charity: bay leaf in the spring, dried flowers in the
summer, juniper in the fall, fir and red ribbons for Christmas.

Walter kept his room at the top of the house, so the second story
became a ghost floor—not gathering dust, because Granna cleaned it
once a week, but holding unaltered the beds on which Walter's parents
and brother had slept, the pictures on the patterned walls, and the
books, all leather-bound, all in German, left behind by the grandfather
Walter could not remember. Sometimes it seemed as if even Werner were
dead too—until he phoned, as he did about once a month. But it wasn't
the possible company of ghosts that kept Walter from moving downstairs;
it was the very real company of boys, beginning with Joel, whom
he sneaked upstairs for sex—at first awkward and quick, with the pretense
of shared homework or a new record; then purposeful and more
prolonged, even half a night sometimes.

This was the only thing Walter felt guilty about. He did not smoke
dope or drop acid or even, after his father's example, drink more than
the occasional beer. Almost as compensation, as purification, he took an
after-school job at the public library. Reshelving books, he began to
notice plays. Toward the end of Dewey Decimal 822, Walter became
acquainted with a two-foot stretch of small blue clothbound books with
gilt titles on the spines. The plays of Shakespeare. They fit so nicely in
the pocket of a jacket that he checked them out one by one and carried
them about, whispering the speeches aloud when he was alone. For their
passion to entertain, Walt Disney and William Shakespeare were Walter's
twin idols. (You could have
Barbarella
and
Easy Rider; Fantasia
put them to shame.) He had yet to discover Billy Wilder, Peter Sellers, or
Matthew Broderick in
Ferris Bueller's Day Off.

Walter's first role on a real stage, his third year in high school, was
Petruchio. He suspected that he won the part not because he had any
real acting skills but because he knew the lilt and strut of Shakespeare's
words far better than any of his classmates. Bluff: that's what got him
into acting. When he practiced his lines at home, he would pace the
short length of his attic room (which, as he grew taller, provided less and
less pacing room, since two of its walls slanted down to the floor), sometimes
addressing Mount Greylock, out the window. The night before
dress rehearsal, he paced up and down buck naked, reciting the "I am he
am born to tame you" speech to Stuart, another naked boy, who lay in
Walter's bed giggling.

Granna was downstairs, forming hoops of dried statice and watching
Celebrity Squares.
Walter had grown complacent about what Granna
could and could not hear from far below. The next morning she was
unusually quiet at breakfast. As he gathered his books to leave and catch
the bus, she stopped him and turned him to face her, both hands raised
to his shoulders. Like Werner, he was now far taller than Granna, but
when she was stern, his pulse still quickened. She looked up into his face
and said, "Let a fire burn too hot in your heart, and smoke, it vill fill up
your head." She gave him the same brief, hard gaze once reserved for his
father, and then she released him, wished him a fine day, and opened the
door. He was touched and astonished by her evenhandedness, her lack
of revulsion. (Only years later did he realize that, perceptive as Granna
had been, she must have believed his midnight guest a girl.)

After the applause of the next three nights, he began to dream of
moving to New York City, becoming an actor, and changing his name to
Walter Greylock. Strangely, he never climbed the mountain he had
gazed at for so many hours from his tower room and on which he'd projected
so many hopes.

He was glad that Granna got to see him graduate from college, that
she also got to see him in an Off-Broadway production of
Ah, Wilderness!,
a play she could appreciate and understand. That was the best
role he ever had in New York. She also lived to see him start the restaurant.
She told him how pleased she was to see him serve stuffed pork
with cabbage, inspired by her own.

One autumn day she pulled into the parking lot of her beauty parlor
and had a stroke. The woman who parked next to her saw Granna
slumped over the steering wheel. On the seat beside her lay one of her
bulky purses, a pair of her stubby shiny pumps in need of new heels, a
bag of daffodil bulbs, and a Whitman's Sampler, which she always
bought when she knew that Walter would be coming to visit. Awkwardly,
a police officer gave Walter a plastic bag containing these things
when he arrived to claim Granna's body.

"Way to go, Granna," he whispered tearfully when he saw her at the
funeral home. He knew that the only thing she'd have done differently
would have been to go to the hairdresser
first,
to look her best for Karl,
the local undertaker. Walter planted the daffodil bulbs on her grave and,
before he turned the house over to a real-estate agent, stood in his room
on the third floor and had the satisfaction of seeing his old mountain for
the last time in all its October glory.

WALTER'S FAVORITE PHOTOGRAPH OF GRANNA
sat on his front hall
table with a number of other family pictures. Granna stood in her garden,
in front of a hedge of white peonies. She looked uncomfortable,
standing stiffly, arms at her side, but she had a big proud smile for Walter,
who had insisted she pose for the picture the day he graduated from
high school. He told her that if she could insist on pictures of him in his
silly cap and gown, she must submit as well. She was wearing a tweedy
ivory dress, a shade too warm for June, with the gloves she wore to
church. On her head sat a pie-shaped blue straw hat; she'd set her purse
in the grass because she couldn't figure out how to hold it while posing.

One morning Walter saw Scott examining the pictures as he devoured
a bagel. As usual, the boy could not sit still while eating. Walter thought
of Granna telling Scott's father that only beasts ate while standing, but
he kept this to himself.

"I like this one of you and Dad," said Scott, smiling.

The picture in question showed the brothers, before their parents had
died, sitting together in a bumper car at an amusement park. They had
matching crew cuts and matching plaid camp shirts. Werner was making
horns behind Walter's head with a victory sign.

"Ah, we were young, were we not?" Walter said. Then he saw Scott
pick up Granna. "Does your dad tell you stories about her?" he asked.

Scott put the picture down and wiped cream cheese from his upper
lip. He sucked briefly on his finger. "Not much."

"Really!" said Walter. "Well, she practically raised us. Me, she raised
entirely. I consider her my true mother."

Scott looked at Walter with an odd, almost embarrassed expression.

"What?" said Walter.

Scott shrugged. "Dad says she was like totally mean to your parents,
especially your father."

"Mean?" Walter gasped. "She gave him about twenty thousand
leagues of rope." He thought for a moment. "Scott, your father did tell
you our dad was a drunk, that he killed our mother along with himself
in that car wreck? I don't see how either of us could ever forgive
him for that."