I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.

by John Donovan

  We’re all sitting around in the living room. Fred has jumped into my lap and is fast asleep, and Uncle Jess is telling Uncle Bert about a modeling assignment he had in Ibiza two months ago. Uncle Bert says he would like to go to Ibiza, and Mother interrupts with a sort of shriek. “Bert! You in Ibiza! It’s too funny!” She laughs very loud. Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert look angry.

  “Why not Ibiza?” asks Aunt Louise.

  “Bert is not exactly an international island-hopper, darling,” Mother answers. “Can’t you see Bert in Ibiza?” she asks Uncle Jess, who looks embarrassed.

  “I’d like to know what seems so funny to you about Bert in Ibiza,” Aunt Louise says. She is boiling mad.

  “If you’d said Nantucket, that I could have understood,” Mother says. “But Ibiza! Come on, darling.”

  Aunt Louise jumps up. “I’ll go warm up the supper. We’re all starving.” She runs out to the kitchen, and I can hear a lot of dishes being rattled around.

  “Let me help, darling,” Mother calls out. There is no answer, and Mother doesn’t move, so we all sit waiting for Aunt Louise to bring in the Chinese. Mother finishes her drink. “I mean it, darling,” she calls again, getting up. “Let me help.” She goes out to the kitchen, and they have a few words with each other before Aunt Louise brings in the supper. Mother helps her. She gives Uncle Jess and me plates, and we all sit down to eat. Mother has a new drink.

  “Well, my dear,” Mother says to me. “It’s all settled. Right?” I think I know what she’s saying, but I don’t know how to answer her. “You want to come to live with your momma, don’t you?”

  I’ve only eaten a couple of mouthfuls of my supper, but I’m not as hungry as I thought.

  “New York is the greatest city in the world for kids. There is absolutely no other place like it in the world. There’s more of everything there. Got it? More of everything. Whatever you want, New York’s got it. You agree with me, don’t you, Jess?”

  Uncle Jess looks at his food. “It’s a great city, of course,” he says. “It’s nothing like Boston.”

  “What did I tell you?” Mother says. “So it’s all settled. Right?”

  I don’t know if I’m supposed to answer or not. Is she asking me or telling me? No one helps me. Everyone is looking the other way as though I were a criminal or had done something wrong.

  “Well …” I try to say something. “I don’t know, Mother. It’s like I said. I like it here. This is my home.”

  “A kid’s home is with his mother,” she says.

  “Sure. All the kids have got parents.”

  Mother looks at me very quickly when I say that, and not in a friendly way.

  “And all the kids live with their parents, right?” she says.

  “Sure.”

  “So what’s the big discussion about? You come live with me. I’ll find you a good school, and your father will put you in it. OK?”

  I look dumb, I guess.

  “We’ll have a time! There are places in New York I have wanted to see for twenty years! What a time it will be, seeing them together!” She begins to sound as though she really wants me, and I must admit that for the first time it seems remotely feasible.

  “I don’t know …” I blurt out.

  “What’s there to know? You’re coming! In a few weeks! I’ll make a few changes in the apartment, and then you’ll come! OK, sweetheart?” She sounds so enthusiastic now that I’m sure it will work out fine.

  “Well, I guess it will be OK,” I say, “if it’s OK with everyone else.” They all keep looking away. Aunt Louise sighs deeply. Hardly anyone has touched his Chinese. Fred woke up a minute ago and is going crazy trying to get within licking distance of a plate. “What about Fred?” I ask.

  “I’m sorry, dear,” Mother says. “You’ll have to give Fred away.”

  “No!” I say. Everyone looks surprised. “I wouldn’t give Fred away!”

  “But, sweetheart,” Mother says, “it’s only a little apartment. I mean, just squeezing in one more person—” She stops before she can finish her thought.

  “I don’t care if you squeeze me in or not,” I say. I’m yelling. “I don’t care what you do. Any of you. None of you matter to me anyway. None of you really loved Grandmother like Fred and me. Grandmother wouldn’t have let anyone split us up.”

  “Of course she wouldn’t, dear,” Mother says, “but that doesn’t have anything to do with bringing Fred to New York. Mother would never have wanted Fred to come some place where there wasn’t room for him.”

  “If there isn’t room for Fred, there isn’t room for me!” I say. I get up. “Excuse me,” I say. I go to my bedroom. Fred follows and jumps on my bed when I throw myself on it. He whines a little bit, the bright bastard. He knows what has happened. I guess I cry for a couple of minutes. Fred stops whining and licks away the tears rolling down my cheeks.

  six

  For the next couple of days Aunt Louise is in and out, and she and Mother are having a great time screaming at each other about everything they talk about. I’m telling you, the decibel count went up about six hundred percent on our street by the end of the weekend. The principal thing they argue about is the house and what should be done about it. Should it be sold or rented? If it’s sold, it will take so long to settle Grandmother’s estate, but if it’s rented, there will be income for me, and I’ll be able to go to college. But I’ll be able to go to college anyway, if it’s sold and the money is invested. Real brilliant arguments, you can see.

  The second thing they argue about is chairs, which belonged to their grandmothers and great-grandmothers and a variety of other ancestors—and things like handmade bedspreads, some of those funny dishes with flowers painted all over them, and a whole lot of other junk. The argument about the big clock is the funniest. That argument lasts off and on for about six days. It’s one of those clocks made two hundred years ago. It weighs a ton and a half, I guess, and there’s a lot of stuff carved all over it and a pretty good picture of a ship on it. To tell the truth, without thinking much about it, I always liked that clock. This particular argument is settled by Uncle Jess.

  “It’s the only thing I want from the house,” he says. Since there’s no topping that, Uncle Jess is awarded the clock. Of course, he doesn’t get the last word on it.

  “You’ll have to pay the shipping charges to Los Angeles,” Mother says. She’s a real gracious loser.

  They’re always arguing about me too, but I don’t get the gist of those arguments because they make elaborate efforts not to have them when I’m around. When I get tired of hearing the discussions about the house and the furniture, I figure they’re tired of them too and would like to change the topics of disagreement. So I take Fred for walks a lot during these days. He’s delighted of course. It isn’t too often that he is taken out about ten times a day. He gets out so often now that sometimes when we come in again he looks at me as though he’s apologizing for not having done his business outside. I tell him that’s OK, he doesn’t have to do his business ten times a day, three are enough. Mother keeps saying I’m nuts to talk to him in sentences, that all he understands are short, one-word commands, and that people like me who talk to animals have personality defects. She’s all heart.

  One of our walks is a long one, on Saturday. Grandmother has been buried for four days, and no one says anything much about her. In fact, it’s almost as though they forgot why they’re all together. She’s been dead for a week. Last Saturday she made me a great breakfast—pancakes from some mix a buddy of hers brought back from Vermont, with some syrup that tasted as though it had just oozed out of a maple tree. That afternoon she had this heart attack, and she died that night. I figure that since no one is going to talk about Grandmother, to me anyway, I’d better take a walk over to where she is buried just to be sure everything is all right. The cemetery is not too far
from the house, maybe two miles. It’s in a part of the town where a lot of Italian people live. Whenever I meet an Italian kid, I always figure he lives near the cemetery. That’s crazy of course, because Italian kids live everywhere. It just goes to show you what nutty ideas people get into their heads. I figure that since the cemetery is filled with gravestones and I have seen all these great pictures of Rome and Italy with stone pillars and a lot of marble, it is natural that Italians would live around cemeteries where they would feel closer to their heritage than in any other part of the town. I’m great on ethnic origins.

  I put a leash on Fred for a long walk like this one. When he’s just going out around the house or to the beach near the house, I figure that Fred doesn’t need a leash. He obeys me very well when we’re outside. But I don’t walk to the cemetery part of town too much, so it’s better that Fred knows who’s boss right from the beginning on this particular stroll. He hates the leash. But he likes to go to new places, which gives him a chance to sniff at a thousand new spots on the sidewalk, curbstones, corners of walls, fire hydrants, and trees. Old long Fred. When that doggie sniffs, all of him sniffs. He starts with his nose naturally, but in a second his chest is heaving in and out, his rear is moving, and his tail is wagging. He accepts the leash as the price of having all those marvelous new sniffs.

  We get to the cemetery in about an hour. Fred has sniffed a lot, but not so much that we couldn’t get anywhere. I find where Grandmother is buried, in the old part of the cemetery in a large grassy plot. I look at the gravestone and see that my grandfather died nineteen years before Grandmother.

  There are a lot of wilted flowers piled up. Fred goes crazy. The flowers don’t smell like flowers but have sort of a putrid smell. Fred loves them. He throws himself into the pile, runs his head and neck over the profusion of color, and generally enjoys himself, which makes all the money tied up in those flowers seem worthwhile to me.

  “Hey, Fred,” I say, “this is where Grandmother is buried.”

  Fred looks at me, but he doesn’t stop rubbing around.

  I think that maybe Grandmother would like him to do this.

  “You don’t mind, do you, Grandmother?” I hear myself asking aloud. It is quiet in the cemetery, with the exception of the noise Fred makes on the flowers.

  “They’re going to sell the house or rent it,” I can’t stop myself from saying. “Mother wants me to go to New York to live with her. I think she wants me. Do you think she wants me?”

  I don’t know what I think is going to happen, but I wait for an answer.

  “She doesn’t want Fred. I won’t go without Fred. I didn’t mind going to visit her for a weekend without Fred because Fred was with you. Now he can’t be with you any more. I thought maybe Fred and I could stay in the house alone, but no one will let me.”

  Fred has stopped rubbing around now, and he looks at me as though I’m crazy. I sit down on the flowers with him. I hold him in my arms, which is all he needs to fall asleep in two seconds.

  “What do I do now?”

  I lie back on the flowers. One bunch has a blue ribbon on it, with crummy-looking gold letters reading “Love Davy.” I pick off the letters.

  “That was a good breakfast, Grandmother,” I say. “I didn’t tell you last Saturday, but it was. You’re a very good cook. I always wanted to tell you. And Fred liked the way you cooked too. Didn’t you, Fred?”

  I guess I am the world’s number-one crybaby this week, because I start bawling again. Fred wakes up and licks my tears, and I say a lot of crazy things to Grandmother, like how I’ll never forget her, and when I’m as old as Mother and Aunt Louise I won’t be arguing all the time, and please, God, keep Grandmother warm this winter and forever.

  I finally drag myself off the flowers. I put the crummy gold letters in my pocket along with two wilted flowers. Fred and I go home.

  “You’ve been for a long walk, sweetheart, haven’t you?” Mother says when we come in. She is sitting there with Uncle Jess. They are having drinks.

  “Yes,” I answer.

  “Where did you go?” Mother asks.

  “Oh, no place.”

  “You must have gone some place!”

  “Just around.”

  “Be that way,” she says. “We’ve been thinking.” She nods to Uncle Jess. “If Fred means so very much to you, sweetheart, he should come to New York too. What would you think of that?”

  Think of it! I stand there like a twirp for a minute, and then I guess my mouth spreads from one ear to the other.

  “You mean it?” I ask.

  “Sure,” she says.

  I run over to her and give her a big kiss. I think she gets a little embarrassed, because our kisses have usually been more or less formal. But she carries it off OK.

  “You’ve got to promise to do all the work though,” she says. “I’ll just have the fun.”

  seven

  They let me make the final decision on Grandmother’s house. I decide to rent it. After my mind is made up, I’ll say this for Mother and Aunt Louise—they take to consulting me about a lot of things they hadn’t before. They ask me what I think about leaving some of the furniture in the house so it can be rented furnished, and what I think about how much we should charge, and when I will be ready to let people see it. They must have read a book on child psychology. After two weeks of whispering about me and arguing with each other, they suddenly start consulting me about things, and I’ll admit that I feel better disposed to the whole big deal. We find a tenant in another week, a guy who wants to move his wife and little kid in before Christmas, who will take the house for two years. When Fred throws himself on his back in front of the guy and the guy rubs his belly like he is supposed to, I figure he will be a good person to be a landlord to.

  Mother is very perky after the business about the house is settled, and when we sign the lease she insists we give a big party for Mr. Henderson, the tenant. For Mother, giving a big party means having a large number of drinks, so Aunt Louise pooh-poohs that right away, but Mother won’t let Mr. Henderson out of the house until he agrees to have a highball with her. Mr. Henderson has one drink. As he’s leaving he says he’s looking forward to showing his wife the house and knows she’ll love it because she likes old things.

  “If there are problems about anything, just ask me,” Mother urges. Since she plans to go back to New York in another few days, the offer isn’t as generous as it seems. Mother tells me that she’s done everything she can, don’t I think? I tell her sure she has. To forestall one of the long talks she has been having with me in the last week when there’s been no one else around, I tell her that I have a lot of homework to do. That’s not a good reason for not talking “heart-to-heart” as Mother puts it, so I sit down and Mother talks. She tells me about all the plans she had for herself when she was a young girl, how fantastically popular she was in college, how she moved right along when she went to New York, how one bad mistake has set her back so that she has really had a whole decade robbed from her by my father, how difficult it was to get back into the swing of things when you had given everything you had to your family, how now she was a happy and mature adult and was looking forward to having a wonderful life with me, and so on. I say Yes and No when she wants me to, and an hour and a half later she tells me that we’ve had a good talk, haven’t we? I tell her we have, and she tells me I stay up too late for my age. So I take Fred out for his finals and tumble into bed, knowing that in another week or so I’ll not be sleeping here again.

  Mother goes back to New York a few days later. Fred and I move in with Aunt Louise temporarily. Mother will get her apartment ready for us in a few weeks, so I can move down during Christmas vacation. I’m so busy shuffling myself around now that the time goes by fast. I tell Mother I want to bring a lot of stuff to New York, and she tells me I can bring about a quarter of it. She sends me the measur
ements of my closet and tells me that in New York everything has got to be shoved into little spaces and that every inch will be important. I can’t bring my own bed and my own chest. They are too big. She is talking with a decorator about my room, and it’s going to be lovely. I say good-bye to a lot of people, everyone in school and all the teachers. I’m planning to visit Aunt Louise in the summer, so it’s not as though I’m not going to see all these people again. I tell about thirty guys that they can visit me in New York, and I wonder what Mother will think about that. I kiss Mary Lou Gerrity good-bye. It’s not the first time I’ve kissed her, but it’s the first time we’ve opened our mouths when we kissed. Mary Lou tells me afterwards that she will be faithful to me, and I tell her that I will be faithful to her too, though I really had no intention of getting that involved. She said it first, so there was nothing else I could do.

  I take Fred to the cemetery a lot now, almost every day. Aunt Louise’s house is even closer than Grandmother’s. I begin to feel guilty on days when I don’t go to visit. When I come the next day, I always tell Grandmother that I’m sorry I wasn’t there yesterday. I tell her about everything that has happened during the day and about all the plans for New York. I ask her if that’s OK with her. I guess I cry a lot. I don’t want to leave her behind. It’s cold now, and I know it’s very cold underground, and when there isn’t anyone to come to talk with you, the cold is worse, I am sure. Can you hear me, Grandmother? Will you know when I’m not coming any more that it’s not because I don’t love you? It’s because I’m in New York. Fred always lifts his leg on the gravestone.

  eight

  I’d never visited Mother in her new apartment, which I hadn’t realized was in an old house on a street that looks like New York must have looked a hundred years ago. Now I know what they mean by blocks. Before, when Mother told me such and such a friend lived two blocks away from her and they didn’t visit each other at night unless they had escorts, I thought maybe a block was, say, ten miles. It isn’t. It can be twenty skinny houses’ worth and take only two minutes to walk. Where Mother lives, some blocks look OK to walk on, but others look as though you might want to walk around them. That’s why Mother and her buddy don’t visit, I guess.