Gentlehands

by M. E. Kerr

  I remember Skye trying to wake me up and get me on my feet. I remember my protesting that I couldn’t go home; I’d had too much of the wine. I couldn’t face my father drunk, on top of everything else, and it was nearly midnight, he’d be just coming off his shift.

  Very vaguely, I remember her leaving and assuring my grandfather she could drive perfectly well by herself, she often did. Then almost as though it was part of a dream, I heard my grandfather speaking on the telephone to my mother, calling her Ingeborg, telling her that I’d come for a visit, and something had disagreed with me so I’d better stay the night.

  “Just something he ate,” I heard him say. “He’ll be fine tomorrow.”

  I felt him cover me, and put a pillow under my head.

  10

  MY GRANDFATHER WOKE ME AT QUARTER TO SIX THE next morning. I was due at Sweet Mouth in an hour and forty-five minutes. I’d slept in my clothes, including my new cashmere sweater. My grandfather lent me one of his shirts, and I took a shower while he made us bacon and eggs and squeezed fresh oranges. He was talking on the telephone to someone named Verner when I came out of the bathroom. I heard him say his grandson was visiting him. He really sounded pleased.

  We had breakfast and watched the sun come up, sitting on his screened-in patio, overlooking the ocean. He was playing an opera called Louise.

  “It’s worth getting up early to see such a beautiful sight,” he said as he watched the sunrise. He was wearing white silk pajamas and a black silk robe.

  I began gulping down the orange juice.

  “Thirsty from last night’s wine?” he said.

  Not only that, I had a headache, but I pretended that wasn’t it at all and said, “I just never have fresh orange juice. My mother buys Minute Maid.”

  “Why don’t you squeeze the oranges yourself? It tastes better, doesn’t it?”

  “I don’t think we even own an orange-juice squeezer,” I complained.

  “You can buy one for under a dollar,” he said.

  “Maybe I will.”

  He poured me another glass from the pitcher on the table and we ate in silence for a while, watching the sun ease up into the blue beginnings of an early-morning sky.

  “Beautiful!” he exclaimed. “Beauty can pierce you like a pain.”

  I was more interested in something else that was liable to pierce me, like my father’s fist.

  “Was my mother mad?”

  “I think she was shocked to know that you were here.”

  I groaned and chewed my bacon.

  “Why didn’t you tell her about coming here the last time?”

  “I just didn’t.”

  “Were you afraid to tell her, Buddy?”

  “I’ve been in the doghouse since I met Skye. This wouldn’t help.”

  “I see.” He poured himself a cup of coffee.

  “I was twenty-three when your mother was born,” he said. “Six months later, your grandmother brought her here to America. I hardly knew your grandmother. I was young. I’d gotten her into trouble. I married her.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” I said.

  “When you got a girl pregnant in those days, you married her.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “What does ‘okay’ mean?”

  “Whatever happened, happened.”

  “You don’t care why?”

  “It was a long time ago,” I said.

  “I had no feeling for your grandmother,” he continued. “I didn’t feel about her the way you feel about this young lady of yours.”

  I was shoveling the eggs and bacon in my mouth, embarrassed that he was going into it all. I was my father’s son, all right. I didn’t know how to talk about personal stuff.

  “She was just a girl who wanted to go to America where her own mother already was. I was a boy who loved my home, my homeland.”

  My grandfather watched the bird feeders for a while. There were chickadees and finches and nuthatches descending on it. There was a cardinal and his wife, and some grackles.

  “We got drunk one night,” he said, “the way you got drunk last night.”

  “I’m sorry about last night.”

  “You needn’t apologize.”

  “I never drink, really.”

  “Not even wine with meals, as you said?”

  “A glass maybe, once every six months.”

  “That’s why it took so little,” said my grandfather. “And you drank fast.”

  He filled a pipe with tobacco and watched the birds.

  “We got drunk,” he said, “and your mother was the result. It’s not a pretty story, I’m sorry to say.”

  “At least it’s clearer.”

  “Then there was the war,” he said. A whole flock of titmice swooped down on the feeders. “We didn’t even write each other, until she wrote me some four months after she’d arrived in America. She announced that she’d managed to divorce me. I believe it was a vast relief to both of us.”

  I poured myself the last of the orange juice.

  “If your mother had been a boy, I suppose I would have been quicker to trace her after the war. A daughter is always her mother’s child, and a son his father’s.”

  “I get along better with my mother,” I said.

  “Are you more like her or your father?”

  “I’m more like him.”

  “That’s what I mean,” he said.

  He lit his pipe with a gold lighter he took from the pocket of his robe. “After the war I was traveling: Europe, South America, Cuba…Cuba. I was thirty-seven when I met Carla.”

  “You were thirty-seven before you ever fell in love?”

  “I think until then I was in love only with myself.”

  I laughed, and he smiled and took a sip of his coffee.

  “Life might have been different if I’d met her earlier,” he said, “but then regrets are the natural property of gray hairs.” He looked at a gold watch he had placed in front of him on the table. “Do you have a driver’s license, Buddy?”

  “I have my junior’s.”

  “Do you want to drive my jeep in to work?”

  “You’re kidding?” I said. “By myself?”

  “I’m lazy.” He laughed. Then he looked across the table at me thoughtfully for some seconds before he said, “You’re lazy, too, Buddy. If you’re going to drink wine, you should learn how to drink it and how to pour it. If you want fresh orange juice in the morning, you should squeeze it for yourself and not blame your mother because she has only Minute Maid. You should learn about opera, and that a lady always has to be escorted home after a date…and you should always own up to where you’ve been.”

  “Look, Grandpa!” I said, pointing at some strange black-and-white birds with tufted red heads.

  “Those are pileated woodpeckers,” he said. Then he laughed again. “And Buddy,” he said, “you should never point at anything but French pastries.”

  Kick worked Sundays, so he was never in Sweet Mouth on Mondays. I watched the clock, waiting for it to be ten so I could call Skye, and shot the bull with Ollie, who nursed a Coke for about an hour and a half. Ollie said he hated summer because he was nothing in summer, but when school started he was a football hero again. I pretended I was anxious to get summer over with, too, but Ollie didn’t believe me because he sensed something big was happening to me. He said we didn’t have the same rapport anymore. I said for God’s sake, don’t you start making me feel guilty. I’d turn into a big blob of guilt by the time September rolled around if everybody didn’t just get off my back, and Ollie said my nose would be so far out of joint by then I wouldn’t be good enough for anyone, anyway. He said his mother said the Penningtons were swimming in money from all the oil wells they owned and probably choking on their caviar over the idea of their daughter dating me. He said it didn’t matter how handsome I was. According to his mother it wasn’t what you looked like in that crowd, it was who you were. I said thanks a lot for telling me his mother’s opinions—it made m
y day—and I carried off his half-empty Coke while he threatened to clobber me.

  At ten o’clock I called Skye.

  “I got home okay,” she said. “Don’t worry about it. How are you?” she said, not waiting for my answer. “Oh, Buddy, this has been a perfect day because I got the news that I’ve been accepted at Bryn Mawr for fall and my grades were never that good in the ninth place! I’m really thrilled, Buddy, because originally I wanted to be a Cliffie, go to Radcliffe, but they’d never let me in there, they’re grinds, and now it doesn’t matter!”

  “Fantastic!” I said, with my heart sinking to my shoes. One thing we’d never discussed was our age difference. We both knew we had one but we never talked about it. I knew Connie Spreckles was only a year older than I was, and I knew Skye had been eighteen for only a few months before I met her, so I counted on the fact it wasn’t that important. But I felt really creepy hearing she was going to college in the fall and I’d be heading back to Seaville High for another year…. I also felt desperate and determined to live that summer like it was the last one of my life.

  She asked me to come by when I finished work and I said it’d probably be later (after my father broke every bone in my body, I thought to myself), and I told her I’d call her.

  “I want to celebrate!” she said. “I want to do something subtle!”

  “We’ll do something beautiful,” I said. “Beauty can pierce you like a pain.”

  “What did you just say?” she said.

  “Beauty can pierce you like a pain,” I said.

  “Oh, Buddy!” she said. “What a super thing to say!”

  When I came out of Kick’s office, my mother was standing there.

  I took a break and we left Sweet Mouth and walked down to the A&P parking lot where she’d left the Toyota. I got in and she got in, and she said she couldn’t stay in town long because she’d left Streaker with my father, who wasn’t in any mood to baby-sit that morning.

  “How did you get to work?” she said.

  “Grandpa Trenker loaned me his jeep.”

  “You’re driving his jeep?”

  “I had to get here from Montauk somehow!”

  “Oh, Buddy,” she said.

  “Is there anything wrong with my seeing my own grandfather?” I said.

  “He’s your grandfather in name only,” she said. “He’s not your grandfather. What did he ever do that made him your grandfather?”

  “He had you,” I said.

  “He had me, all right, up to here,” she said, drawing her finger across her neck. “He didn’t want to know from me all through my childhood!”

  “He told me the whole story,” I said.

  “His version of the whole story,” she said.

  “It made sense,” I said.

  “Oh did it?” she said. “Did it make sense that my mother worked her fingers to the bone to raise me without one bit of support from him? My mother dropped dead of a heart attack when she was forty-nine because she never had any help from anyone bringing up a child in a strange country, Buddy!”

  “She divorced Grandpa, Mom, when you were a baby!”

  “And that let him off the hook?”

  “When you divorce somebody you divorce somebody, don’t you? Ollie’s mother’s raising him by herself.”

  “And look at Ollie!” my mother said. “He’s fat and he’s lonely and Helen Kidd has turned into a vicious gossip because she’s so miserable!”

  “Mom,” I said, “I can understand if you’re on the outs with Grandpa Trenker, but he didn’t do anything to me. He’s done only nice things for me.”

  “Well aren’t you the lucky one, Buddy!”

  “I could learn a lot from Grandpa Trenker,” I said.

  “Yes, I’m sure. You could learn to be a big snot-nose from Grandpa Trenker!” I’d never heard my mother say a word like that, and if Streaker or I had said it, we’d have gotten a swat from her we’d feel for days.

  “There’s nothing wrong with knowing about things,” I said. “I’m not going to learn about things from you and Dad.”

  “What things aren’t you going to learn about from me and Dad?”

  “Things,” I said.

  “What things?” she demanded.

  “Ways of the world,” I said. “Opera, birds, wine—I don’t know.”

  “Did you say wine?” she said.

  “Not wine,” I said. “How to pour wine.”

  “I know how to pour wine and so does your father. You take the top off the bottle and pour it! What are you even talking about, Buddy Boyle?”

  “I can’t explain it to you,” I said. “You won’t understand. But I don’t know how to act around certain people! I feel like a creep around certain people! I go to Beauregard and I feel like a creep because I don’t know how to act, or what to say, or anything!”

  “I told you that you were in over your head with that girl! It’s that girl!”

  “Mom,” I said, and I was trying to fight back tears that were coming, “I love that girl!” I’d never said anything like that to her or my father. “Am I supposed to just walk away from her because I don’t know about things she knows about and all her friends know about?”

  My mother stared at me, and her eyes softened suddenly, and she looked like she was going to bawl, too.

  “You’re too young to be in love, Buddy,” she said quietly.

  “What age do you have to be?” I said.

  “Oh, Buddy,” and the tears started rolling down her cheeks.

  “I want to know about things,” I said. I was bawling, too, right there in the A&P parking lot, trying to hide it with the back of my hand.

  My mother took some Kleenex out of her bag and passed me one.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “I was at this dinner party in Lefrak City once and I didn’t even know what fork to pick up,” she said, “and I never forgot it. I still wouldn’t know. I see what you mean, Buddy, don’t think I don’t see, but those are snob things and your father and I aren’t raising you to think those things are important.”

  “You’re not raising me to think those things are important because you don’t know about those things,” I said. “You couldn’t raise me that way if you wanted to, because you don’t know.”

  “Grandpa Trenker knows all about those things, I suppose,” my mother said. “That’s his speed all right!”

  “Mom,” I said, “he’s not a bad man. He might have been a lousy father but he’s a nice man.”

  “Your father says maybe you should just go and live with Grandpa Trenker if you’re so impressed with him.”

  “I didn’t say I was impressed with him, did I? I said I like him.”

  “You took that girl out there, didn’t you, so you could impress her with a fancy relative?”

  “Mom,” I said, “this isn’t getting us anywhere, and I have to go back to work. I left one guy handling the whole floor and it’s almost noon.”

  “Are you coming home after work?” she said.

  “What’s Dad’s mood like?”

  “It’s not good, Buddy. He says he doesn’t care if he ever sees your face again.”

  “Then maybe he won’t,” I said, and I pushed down on the door handle.

  “Come home after work,” she said. “I’ll talk to your father.”

  I blew my nose and stuck the Kleenex in my pocket. “Tell him I don’t look forward to being beat up in the backyard again,” I said.

  “Buddy, he just doesn’t know how to handle this. Neither do I.”

  “I’ll handle it myself, Mom,” I said. I’ve been lazy about handling my problems, but I’m not going to be anymore.”

  “Come home after work,” she said.

  “I’ll be there after he’s gone,” I said. I had to get my clothes, anyway.

  11

  I’D BEEN LIVING AT MY GRANDFATHER’S FOR FOUR days. For the first time in my life, I had my own room, with an ocean view. Every morning I drove the jeep to work, and afte
r work I headed over for a swim in the pool with Skye.

  On the Friday of the Fourth of July weekend, as I was on my way to Beauregard, I heard a police siren behind me. I pulled over and looked at my father through the rearview mirror, sauntering up toward the jeep with his policeman’s cap pushed back on his head, one hand in his pocket. It was our first encounter since the one in the backyard when he’d clobbered me with his fist.

  “How you doing?” he said.

  “Okay.”

  There was this little smile playing on his lips, and he couldn’t look at me while he talked to me. He watched the road ahead and lit a cigarette.

  “How do you like being on your own?”

  “I like it fine.”

  “I can see why,” he said, giving the jeep door a slap with his hand, grinning more. He took a puff on his cigarette and we didn’t say anything for a while.

  “How’s Streaker?” I said.

  “He’s a great kid,” my father said. The day I’d packed and cleared out, Streaker wouldn’t come down from a tree in our front yard. I’d stood under the tree and tried to talk to him, tried to explain I had to take care of my problems, and he had to learn to fend for himself until I got myself straightened out.

  “I don’t want your stupid catcher’s mitt,” he’d said.

  “Good!” I’d said. “I can still use it.”

  Then I’d said, “Aren’t you going to come down for a good-bye hug?”

  “I don’t hug,” he’d said. “I’m not a girl.”

  “I can see that,” I’d said. “You’re a cat that’s been treed. Well, meow, Streaker. Thanks for being so understanding.”

  “I don’t care if I never see your face again,” he’d said.

  “You’re not a cat at all,” I’d said. “You’re the family parrot, parroting everything Dad says.”