Used to Be: The Kid Rapscallion Story (9 page)

1994

1

The San Francisco day is cold and wet and Mrs. Sandra Flack is nervous about the boy sitting across from her in the back of her husband’s limousine. His name is Jason and he is twelve years old. The suit his foster parents had put him in is dark blue on top and black on the bottom and Sandra cannot wait to never look at it, again.

The boy’s dark hair has been combed tight against his head, and he says little. Sandra is glad her fears did not come to pass; for weeks it has seemed to her as if the Donaldsons were going to adopt Jason for themselves. Her first inclination, of course, was to think they were just doing it to extort money out of her, but that was proven false and her fears about losing Jason did not come to pass.

Rain begins to pelt the window and she believes this to be an auspicious start. Sandra was born in Pennsylvania and raised by an honest-to-goodness Quaker minister and she is not opposed to seeing the world at large as a message from God. Today’s rain makes her worry about bad things to come.

But then Jason smiles, says, “I love the rain. May I play in the rain, ma’am?” and everything is okay.

But she does not let him play in the rain.

2

“I thought we were adopting the black girl?” Francis Flack asks his wife as she joins him in the shower.

“Where were you?” she asks. “It’s Jason’s first night in this family and you couldn’t even make it home to see him.”

“Oh, darling,” Francis says, kissing Sandra’s forehead, “you know how it is at work. But,” he says, turning away from her, “what happened to the black girl?” He picks up a photo of Jason his foster parents have provided and frowns.

Sandra has been married to Francis long enough to know he’s frowning even though he’s facing away from her. There is a distinct slump of his shoulders and a lack of comment about this boy that has just entered their family that tells her he is not happy.

“What?” she asks.

“He … I’m sure it’s not intentional … but he looks like me, don’t you think?”

“It turns out I wanted a boy,” Sandra says in a form of non-response, and rolls her eyes. Her husband has always been aloof, always preferring the business over the home life, but this is a stretch, even for him. She engages the temporary thought of making him have sex with her, but he increasingly repulses her. It drives Sandra into fits of rage when her friends tell her how lucky she is to have such a fit and handsome husband, but Sandra would trade Francis’ abs for their husbands’ blubber if he showed her any interest or passion.

They are a show couple, all performance for others and with little use for each other. If he could get her pregnant …

But he can’t, of course.

Which is why Jason is here.

If it bothers Francis that Jason looks like him, well, that was the point of not adopting the black girl, wasn’t it?

3

“Hello, there … er, Champ,” Francis smiles as Jason enters the kitchen for breakfast. “We have not been formally introduced,” he says, putting his slice of buttered toast back on the island counter top and offering the young boy his hand. “You can call me Francis.”

Jason shakes his hand as he yawns. “Why wouldn’t I call you dad?”

“Well, because Francis is my name!” the older man says, chuckling to himself.

He has always found himself funnier than most other people find him.

“Now,” Francis says, turning serious, “what should I call you?”

4

He is in the house six months before “Sport” and “Champ” and “Slugger”
are replaced by “Jason.”

5

The house is large but boring.

The six-room Donaldson house had more character than this massive mansion, Jason discovers, as each room here is perfect in its staleness. Bedrooms have a bed, a dresser, a mirror, and a nightstand. Conference rooms have a long table and books on shelves. Game rooms have a pool table and a bar. Studies have high-backed chairs, a fireplace, and a small shelf of books. The dining room is large and non-welcoming. The kitchen is filled with a one-woman staff that shoos him along. Only the butler seems the least bit interesting, and he spends most of his time looking down at Jason as if he was a bug the butler wanted to squash.

There is a basement but half of the things Francis says to him are, “Stay out of the basement, Sport.”

He asks Winton, the butler, about this and he says, “Ask your mother.”

He asks Sandra (Sandra insists he call her by her actual name and not “Mother”) about this and she waves her hand at him. “It used to bother me,” she says, taking a drag off her cigarette, “but Francis and I made a deal. I stay out of the basement and he stays out of the attic.”

“I’m not sure who gets the better of that deal, ma’am,” Jason says, finding “ma’am” a more comfortable thing to say than, “Sandra.”

“Well,” Sandra says, stubbing out her cigarette in an ashtray, “if you’re a good boy, I’ll show you the attic.”

“And Francis …?”

“You’ll have better luck getting that man to play catch with you than you will getting in that basement.”

Being 12, of course, Jason makes it his point to try to get into the basement, but while evading Winton is easy enough, he is rejected at every turn by doors with locks. One day, when he has the house to himself (himself and the new kitchen woman, but Sandra has made a point to tell Jason not to think of the various kitchen women that run in and out of their lives as actual people), he pulls up a loose floorboard in a never-used coatroom. He wants to climb through the floor of the house and drop in on the basement, but even though he makes his way through the floor and down to the crawlspace, he finds his passage blocked by hard metal.

He gets the idea that the basement is just one large box, and is determined to put that theory to the test, but then Francis surprises him with something called a “PlayStation” that Francis assures him isn’t even available in America, yet, “heck, won’t even go on sale in Japan for another few months,” and Jason forgets about the basement and starts thinking about
Battle Arena Toshinden
,
Twinbee Taisen Puzzle Drama
, and
Captain Tsubasa J
.

6

He is home-schooled. He does not like it, but Mother demands it and he has no say in the matter.

Tutors from across the world are brought in. His Spanish teacher jets in from Barcelona every other week aboard one of Francis’ private jet. His math teacher won something called the No Bell Prize. His Writing teacher isn’t seen for a month because he’s on a book tour.

During that absence, Jason still has more contact with Mr. King than he does with Francis.

7

Jason starts to wander the mansion at night. During the day, Sandra smothers him with attention. Not personal attention, necessarily, but there is an endless string of tutors keeping him busy from just after breakfast to just before dinner. He has a whole stable of physical education instructors. One of them plays baseball for the As. Another plays football for the 49ers. There is a tennis instructor who made it to the finals of Wimbledon a few years earlier, a cricket instructor who lives in New Dehli, and a squash instructor that insists squash is a sport.

They fill his day with lessons and Sandra is always there, sitting off to the side, sipping on some sugary drink and reading a magazine, as he and the instructors work out before her.

At night, however, he has the run of the mansion. Francis is almost never home, Sandra never leaves her bedroom, and Winton is sometimes awake, sipping on dry martinis, but he lets Jason have free roam of the mansion.

Jason has no idea what makes a martini dry, but it made Winton laugh when he asked, and from that moment on, the old butler and the new ward get along splendidly.

“We must make certain to only speak like this to one another at night,” Winton says one evening as they sit by the fire in the secondary reading room. “During the day, you will always be Master Jason and I will always be Mister Winton.”

“But Winton is your first name,” Jason says. “What is your last name?”

“Oh, push,” Winton laughs. “I have long since forgotten that name.”

“But why must we not act as friends during the day?”

Winton pats Jason’s hands. “Because this is a house of secrets, my boy, and in a house of secrets one must always play their role in the light of day.”

8

“Sandra thinks we should do something together,” Francis says one Saturday afternoon. He is clearly tired and has a black eye that he insists happened, “At work.” Jason has lived here nearly eight months now and understands that “At work” is Francis’ answer to almost any question his mother puts to him.

“Where is mother?”

“Eh? I don’t know. Winton! Where’s Sandra this afternoon?”

“She is having tea with the Governor’s wife,” the butler says, moving in and out of the kitchen quickly, but not before giving the back of Francis’ head the evil eye.

“Boring, that,” Francis says, smiling. “Say, let’s go to the club! How does that sound, Champ?”

“Um …”

“Splendid! Winton! Get the car, will you?”

9

The club is dreadful.

Jason sits in a chair that is too big, listening to men talk about politics and business and how politics are ruining their business. Francis seems particularly interested in asking about the “naughty” things other men are doing and he hears words like “bribe” and “kickback” and “government contract” quite a bit.

It strikes him that he doesn’t even know what Francis does “at work.”

Francis leaves Jason for long periods of time and when Jason complains that this is so boring he’d rather be studying, Francis rolls his eyes and says, “Well, you can come to the sauna, I suppose. But do be quiet. These are important men.”

Jason sits in the sauna with old, withered men who don’t bother with towels.

It makes him uncomfortable, but he keeps his mouth shut.

10

“Come here and tell me about it,” Sandra says the next day when Francis is, once again, “at work.” She sends Winton away because, “Now you can tell me everything without it getting back to Francis. That man does love his secrets. Tell me about the sauna. Leave nothing out.”

Francis tells her about “bribe” and “kickback” and “government contract.”

And about the lack of towels.

“Why, that is dreadful!” Sandra exclaims, pulling the boy to her.

Jason finds her body warm.

“Let’s play a game,” she suggests. “Whenever Francis takes on one of these dreadful excursions, I want you to tell me all about it. The more details you can tell me, the better.”

“What do I get out of it?” Jason asks, already bored with the PlayStation.

“Why,” Sandra sparkles, “you get to see the attic.”

11

Jason is not a stupid kid but he does not love the constant state of instruction he lives in, and when Sandra dismisses him for the day, he cannot wait to get outside and play. The back of the mansion consists of a large lawn that eventually gives way to a cliff that serves to keep the Pacific Ocean at bay.

Perhaps because he is 12, or perhaps because he is something of a daredevil, he enjoys walking at the edge of the cliff.

It is a cloudy, but warm Thursday afternoon in November. The rocks are slick.

12

It is Francis who rescues him, though Jason had thought his adopted father was “at work.”

Later, while he lies in bed, recovering from what Francis has diagnosed as a small concussion, Jason will think it odd that Francis rescued him from the side and not from above because he swears he remembers that.

He remembers a door in the cliff wall, too, and a tunnel and a large metal room with … vehicles of some kind. Big, black vehicles, each with a red “R” on them somewhere, and there is something about the “R” he finds familiar …

Winton was there, too, waving some kind of round, gold amulet in front of his face, he’s sure of it.

He tells his mother all of this when she comes into his room but she doesn't want to hear it.

“You are lucky your father came home at just that moment!” she says, scolding him through tears. Jason finds her outburst of emotion strange because she has been a largely cold woman since his arrival. “What would I do without you?” she asks. “That damn Francis!”

Jason sits there, his brain and body aching from the fall. He is aware that he is lucky to be alive, and he says something he has never said since arriving.

“Thank you, ma’am,” he says, “for adopting me.”

Sandra smiles at that. “So like your father when he was younger.”

“My …”

“Francis was always such a handsome boy.”

“Ma’am, I …”