Where The Boys Are (56 page)

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Authors: William J. Mann

BOOK: Where The Boys Are
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Then they’d gone off to die in the war.
I think I may be losing my mind.
Wally takes a breath and opens his car door.
She never reacted to the scandal he’d caused with Alexander Reefy. Never. His father had hit him, knocked him across the room—but Mom had never said a word, not even when the papers were full of it, not even when the other boys began taunting him, not even when Wally ran away from home and refused to leave the refuge of Miss Aletha’s house. Not once had Mom spoken of it, not then, nor at any time since.
She knows nothing of my life,
Wally thinks as he walks slowly up to the door.
Nothing. She may not even know about Ned’s death.
Oh, she’s probably heard about that. Ned still had cousins in Mount Pleasant, and Wally knows how people here talk. Word was sure to spread. People were keen on talking about the tragedies of others, of people they barely knew, as if they were plotlines or television scripts, turning death and disease and grief and loss into the stuff of small talk at the grocery store.
Wally and Ned had turned their backs on all that. They’d left Mount Pleasant and resettled in the city, where people still talked—people will always talk—but there were so many people that ultimately it didn’t matter what they said. Or maybe it did, only Wally had stopped caring. He and Ned had found a life of their own. They had escaped. To go back was unthinkable.
Please, Walter. Would you come home?
She opens the door and looks up at him with those round blue eyes of hers. They haven’t changed. Big and round and blue. Penciled eyebrows arch across her pale powdered forehead.
“Hello, Mom.”
“Oh, Walter, Walter, thank you for coming.”
The house smells exactly the same as he remembers it. Perfume. Powder. Soap. A lady smell. That’s why his father always hated it here, why he was never home longer than he had to be. Dad blamed Mom for making their son gay. Wally knew this for a fact, even if he had never heard his father utter those words.
“How many years it’s been, Walter.”
Does she expect an embrace? Wally doesn’t offer one.
“You look well, Mom,” he tells her.
“You, too, Walter. So handsome. The spitting image of your father.”
Wally has no response for that. He can’t even begin to process it. He strides through the living room into the den. On a card table is a half-finished jigsaw puzzle of the Taj Mahal.
He turns and looks back at his mother. “Why is Officer Garafolo calling me looking for Kyle?”
“Oh, Walter, Walter, he keeps coming by here, harassing me, asking me all sorts of questions—”
“Is that why you called me? Why you said you thought you were losing your mind?”
She touches her forehead with her fingertips. “I said that? About my mind?”
He glares at her. “What’s going on, Mother? Was Kyle in some sort of trouble?”
“Oh, he was always in trouble. You know that. He was a bad boy. He wasn’t like you, Walter. You were the good boy and he was the bad one. That’s what your poor Aunt Bernadette always said. You know that.”
“No, I don’t, Mom. I don’t remember anything about Mount Pleasant and really don’t care to.”
His eye catches the framed photograph on the wall over the telephone set. The three of them: Mom, Dad, Wally. Wally is eight. They’re all smiling. Wally wears one of those big wide striped ties from the Seventies. His father is in his Army uniform—tall, dark, gaunt.
Yes, the spitting image.
You were the good boy, Walter.
WILLIAM J. MANN is the author of two novels,
The Men From the Boys
and
The Biograph Girl
, as well as two acclaimed studies of the Hollywood film industry:
Behind the Screen: How Gays & Lesbians Shaped Hollywood
and
Wisecracker: The Life and Times of William Haines.
A widely read journalist, Mann is currently at work on a biography of John Schlesinger. He lives in Provincetown, Massachusetts. You can visit his Web site at
www.williamjmann.com
.
KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by
 
Kensington Publishing Corp.
850 Third Avenue
New York, NY 10022
 
Copyright © 2003 by William J. Mann
 
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.
 
Kensington and the K logo Reg. Pat. & TM Off.
ISBN: 978-0-7582-9189-9
 

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