Gentlehands

by M. E. Kerr

  “There’s a fair at the church every year.”

  “Maybe it would take our minds off this.”

  “It’s a kids’ fair.”

  “I know it’s a kids’ fair,” she said. “I live out here, too, Buddy.”

  “In the summer you live out here,” I said.

  “I’ve been coming out here every summer for fourteen years,” she said.

  “That’s not living out here,” I said.

  “It’s not not living out here, either.”

  “Okay,” I said, “you live out here.”

  I had an idea then. Maybe I got it because I had the feeling things between us were coming to an end, anyway, and why not speed it to its doomed finish? I’d like to say I’d suddenly made the decision to stop wallowing in my misery and start thinking of someone else, like Streaker, but in my right mind I’d never have suggested that Skye come home with me, unannounced, to pick up my brother and take him to St. Luke’s Summer Fair. I didn’t even know if Streaker was there, or if my father would be sleeping.

  “I never even knew you had a kid brother!” Skye said. “It sounds like a neat idea!”

  It wasn’t a neat idea at all. My mother never liked anyone to see the house until she’d pushed the Hoover around for hours beforehand and taken Endust to all the furniture.

  I gave her the directions and we headed up Fireplace Road.

  On the way there, I turned on the radio so we didn’t have to talk. There were two speakers in the back of the Jensen, and I turned up the sound so we were flooded with this steady barrage of top tens the local radio station played.

  I remembered the day my uncle Ted died, my father told my mother he kept hearing Uncle Ted’s voice in his mind, hearing his laugh, hearing him sing, hearing him tell Irish jokes. That afternoon in the rain, I kept hearing my grandfather. There was no way I could put him out of my mind.

  I’d hear him tell me the names of the wildflowers he’d picked were adder’s-tongues, moth mulleins and saxifrages, and then he’d be telling me never to be a weak person. I’d see him leaning back in his chair, saying his life might have been different if he’d met Carla earlier, then explaining to Skye that birds weren’t really free, that they were prisoners of their own territory. Everything came rushing back: the night he tried to teach me how to pour wine, and the night he freed Graham from the steel trap. The meals he cooked for me, and the advice he gave me about clothes. I could see him making coffee mornings in his black silk robe, and outside by the steps to the ocean, gardening in his old corduroy pants. Then almost as though he was beside me in the Jensen, I could hear him telling me that once I knew something was wrong, I was responsible—“whether you see it or hear about it, and most particularly when you’re a part of it.”

  I kept remembering the article, too, trying to tie together the old man who was outraged that animals would suffer because women wanted to wear fur coats…and the young man who played the aria from Tosca to torment the Jewish women and girls homesick for Italy, sicking his attack dogs on them for punishment…. Gentlehands, and I could picture his large hands with their long fingers, and watch him reach out and stop a tear rolling down my cheek, the last time we saw each other.

  “Here’s your street, Buddy,” Skye shouted above the music. “What number is your house?”

  “It’s the little yellow one at the end.”

  She turned down the music. “I don’t want to pull in with that awful music blaring away. Will your mother be there? I think I’m a little nervous, Buddy.”

  Not as nervous as my mother will be, I thought.

  “Is this a good idea, to just surprise her? Mummy hates surprises. She wants everything immaculate and perfect when she meets new people.”

  “Our mommies are different,” I said, but I knew it was probably the only way they were alike.

  There was some part of me that even looked forward to the idea of this big disaster number, with my mother trying to control her temper and kick Streaker’s toys under things, and pick up my father’s old copies of Gun and Badge from the floor, and dirty coffee cups from the living-room table, forcing herself to smile at Skye all the while…and maybe my father just getting up from a nap in his undershirt, speechless, lighting up a cigar to give himself something to do with his mouth and his hands.

  The Toyota was gone. That meant my father was, too.

  “Wait a minute, Buddy!” Skye said, as I pushed down on the door handle. “Let me comb my hair.”

  “You look fine,” I said. “Nobody else will be all in blue.”

  “Why do you say something mean like that? I always dress in one color, it’s my trademark,” Skye said. “What are you trying to do, Buddy?”

  I suddenly didn’t know. I sat there with the door of the Jensen halfway open, the rain coming in on my trouser leg, trying to think what I was trying to do, or keep myself from doing.

  “My grandfather is Gentlehands,” I said. “I think I know where he is, and where Werner Renner is, too.”

  Skye just looked at me. She was holding her comb. There was a long strand of her soft black hair caught in it. I found one once on my jacket, at my grandfather’s, after she’d left. I’d wrapped it in a piece of Kleenex and tucked it in my pocket, to keep.

  “What did you just say, Buddy?”

  “I think I know where they are.”

  Then I saw my mother running from our house toward us. Her hair was done up in rollers. She had my father’s old yellow slicker on over a pair of jeans, and she had on bedroom slippers.

  “Oh, Buddy! Thank God!” Her face was all scrunched up as though she was going to cry.

  I started to say, “This is Skye, Mom,” and she cut me off with a wave of her hand. “There isn’t time. I have to get up to Underwood Drive now, Buddy!”

  “Get in, Mrs. Boyle,” Skye said. “I’ll take you there.”

  My mother was already in the backseat.

  “It’s Streaker,” she said. “He ran away as soon as your father left for work. He’s up on Underwood Drive.”

  “Calm down, Mom,” I said. “It’s only a block from here.”

  “Calm down?” she said. “He’s throwing rocks through all of Mrs. Schneider’s windows, Buddy! He’s wrecking her place!”

  My mother’s mascara was running while she sobbed.

  “Why would he want to hurt old Mrs. Schneider?” she asked.

  19

  EVERY AUGUST AT BEAUREGARD, THEY THROW A Future Party. Guests are supposed to come dressed as they see themselves years and years away.

  All the uniformed waiters wore long white beards, and the maids had on white wigs. Even Peacock pinned angel’s wings on himself.

  Mr. and Mrs. Pennington appeared in matching gold suits as citizens of the moon, and the three butterfly dogs were dressed in sequined coats as moonbeams. Og, from neighboring Mars, was in a silver suit.

  For a while I watched Connie Spreckles play badminton with Skye. Connie was in a white doctor’s coat, with a stethoscope around his neck. Skye had stuffed her white pantsuit to look pregnant. Rachel was there as the first female president, in a red-white-and-blue Aunt Sam suit. Her brother had come as the first male nun.

  I was standing on the sidelines, sipping a fresh lemonade. I’d cut out a question mark from heavy cardboard, which I wore like a sandwich board. Even before he sidled up to me, I could smell De Lucca’s sickly sweet cologne. He was puffing on the fake cigarette, wearing a blond wig.

  “How do you like my transplant, Buddy?”

  “I never thought of you as a blond.”

  “Blonds have more fun.”

  “I never thought of you that way, either.”

  Then he said, “They got Renner. You probably know that.”

  “I read that he’s coming to trial.”

  “He was the big fish, anyway,” De Lucca said.

  We stood there for a moment watching a waterball game going on in the pool. De Lucca didn’t say anything about the fact the Immigration Service still
hadn’t found my grandfather. I think he knew I didn’t want to talk about it. He gave my arm a squeeze before he moved on.

  “Your tip about that stamp shop in New York helped pull him in, Buddy. Thanks.”

  Then Skye came running up to me, and we hugged as well as we could with those pillows she had tied around her waist between us.

  “I hope it’s mine,” I said.

  “No child of mine is going to have a question mark for a father,” she laughed. She took a sip of my lemonade, then slipped out of her sandals.

  “Race me, Buddy,” she said, and she ran up toward the dunes while I half ran, half walked behind her. She waited for me, and we went over them together, and walked down to the edge of the surf, hand in hand. It was one of those very bright, very hot August afternoons, with almost no breeze from the sea. There were sunbathers everywhere, and a lot of people swimming in the ocean. We walked along silently for a while.

  “I’m glad you came,” she finally said.

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “Oh I know.”

  “I have been. We’ve got a new owner at Sweet Mouth.”

  “Do you like him?” She didn’t wait for my answer. “I wish you’d brought your suit. We could swim.”

  “I can’t stay.”

  “Not long enough for some supper?” she said. “Cook’s made Madrilene Ring with Shad Roe she makes only once a year and it’s to die! She does it only for this party.”

  “Once a year the firemen play the policemen,” I said, “and it’s tonight. We have a big picnic after.”

  “Does your father play?”

  “He pitches.”

  “How’s Streaker?”

  “Busy,” I said. “My mother invents all these things for him to do to earn money to pay for Mrs. Schneider’s windows.”

  “She didn’t like me, did she?”

  “She worried that you didn’t like her because she looked so tacky that day.”

  “I thought you’d call me.”

  “I thought I would, too.”

  Skye stopped walking then and dropped my hand. She moved closer to me and touched my face with her fingers. She tried to get me to look back at her while she watched my eyes. When I couldn’t, she kissed my mouth, and I could almost feel the old trembling and pull. I heard her sigh softly.

  Then suddenly she pushed me backwards, and I stumbled into the water in my shoes, while she laughed and ran down the hard sand by the surf. I threw off my cardboard question mark and went after her, catching her finally up near the dunes. We wrestled around in the hot sand until we were both perspiring and out of breath. Then we just lay back on the sand, staring up at the few puffs of clouds, laughing and panting at the same time.

  We finally walked back to the party. I carried her pillows for her.

  “I’ll be leaving in a week,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “Will you come and say good-bye before I go?”

  “Maybe.”

  “You won’t,” she said. “I know you won’t.”

  “We’ll see.”

  “And I won’t write, either, ever,” she said, “but I’ll want to sometimes.”

  I handed her the pillows when we reached the back of the pool house. They were the blue-and-white Beauregard ones with the monogrammed P’s.

  “I’ll leave them here for Peacock. Do you think he’ll be surprised to find my baby back here on the lawn?”

  “Nothing surprises Peacock,” I said.

  She didn’t walk me to the jeep.

  I hadn’t driven the jeep since the morning I read the letter from my grandfather in Sweet Mouth. It had stayed in the parking lot with the keys under the front seat. I’d finally told my father I wanted to return it to Montauk, even though there was no one there. He said that he and Mom and Streaker would pick me up in the Toyota on the way to the game and picnic at six that night. They’d be waiting for me way down at the end of the driveway, where the chain was strung across it.

  I got to the house around five thirty. The Alfa Romeo was there. I figured the day my grandfather took off, he’d probably taken a taxi to the Montauk airport, and chartered one of the small planes to take him wherever he was going.

  The house was locked. I let myself in with the key on the ring with the car keys.

  Somehow, someone else had gotten in ahead of me. There were things strewn everywhere, as though someone had been on a frantic search for something: drawers were pulled out, their contents emptied onto the oriental rug in the living room. Books had been pulled out of the bookcases, tapes, even cups and dishes and silverware had been taken from the shelves in the kitchen and tossed to the floor. Pictures on the wall had been tipped sideways or taken down. Draperies had been yanked off the windows.

  I sat down in my grandfather’s chair for a moment and looked around at the mess. My mind must have looked that way inside my head, I thought, with everything I once knew about my grandfather knocked down, tramped across and smashed…. I’d been there so often when music was playing that it took me a moment before the soft sound of a woman singing reached my ears and registered. Then I heard a closet door shut behind me in the bedroom.

  “Who’s here?” I asked. I stood up, listening for an answer.

  When there wasn’t any, I said, “Is it you?”

  It was his car in the driveway, of course. He and I had the only keys. It was he who always put on music.

  I wondered if he had arrived just ahead of me, found the house that way, and locked the door after him.

  I began walking toward the bedroom, and the music played louder, not just because I was getting closer.

  “Is it you?” I shouted again.

  The door of the bedroom was half open. I stood there, looking in. I could see more debris on the rug: clothes flung about, a chair knocked over, bureau drawers hanging open, and the music turned up even more.

  A punch of fear hit my stomach as I thought of the possibility he’d gone mad and done all of it himself, and then I felt him just inside the bedroom, just behind the door, waiting for me.

  I spoke through the crack in the door, wanting to say, “Grandfather, it’s me,” but that wasn’t what I said.

  I said, “Gentlehands?”

  The door moved. The crack disappeared.

  I felt trapped, and to end the awful suspense, I kicked the door wide open with my foot.

  A radio fell from the bureau to the floor. I saw Graham leap across to the window, and out through a broken pane.

  I never did lure Graham down from the tree outside my grandfather’s house. He only watched me with suspicious eyes while I called to him, and backed up higher into the branches of the spruce.

  He had done too much to the inside of the house for me to undo, and I didn’t try to keep him out by blocking the open window. I walked through the rooms of the house one last time, stepping over the broken and fallen things.

  I knew that it was almost six, and that soon my father and mother and Streaker would be waiting for me down at the end of the driveway.

  I had a final look at the view from those windows, at the deep green ocean waters with the whitecaps flecked through them, and the gulls sweeping down with the late-afternoon sun making their wings look pink and silver. The bird feeders had been removed from the railing, but there were still some nuthatches and sparrows hopping around hopefully, and a lone belted kingfisher high in the branches of a fir, watching them.

  When I turned around to go, I saw the navy blue cashmere sweater Skye had given me, in a heap on the rug, with the twisted tapes of Madame Butterfly, La Traviata, Tosca and Louise wound around it. I thought of picking up the sweater to take with me, but I didn’t. I just wanted to leave everything about that summer behind me.

  THE END

  About the Author

  M. E. Kerr is the winner of the Margaret A. Edwards Award for her lifetime achievement in writing books for young adults. In announcing the award the ALA Young Adult Library Services Associated cited M. E.
Kerr for being “one of the pioneers in realistic fiction for teenagers. Her courage to be different and to address touchy current issues without compromising, but with a touch of leavening humor, has earned her a place in young adult literature and in the hearts of teenagers.”

  M. E. Kerr was born in Auburn, New York, attended the University of Missouri, and now lives in East Hampton, New York.

  You can visit M. E. Kerr’s website at www.mekerr.com

  Visit www.AuthorTracker.com for exclusive information on your favorite HarperCollins author.

  Copyright

  We gratefully acknowledge permission to use lines from “If ” from The Definitive Edition of Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, copyright 1910 by Rudyard Kipling. Reprinted by permission of Doubleday and Company, Inc., and of the National Trust and the Macmillan Company of London and Basingstoke.

  Lines from “Barter” reprinted with permission of Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., from Collected Poems of Sara Teasdale. Copyright 1917 by Macmillan Publishing Co., Inc., renewed 1945 by Mamie T. Wheless.

  GENTLEHANDS. Copyright © 1978 by M. E. Kerr. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  Adobe Digital Edition March 2009 ISBN 978-0-06-190962-7

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