by M. E. Kerr
I felt so sorry for him, the way he missed Mom, and sorry for me the way I missed her, too. I let him say things Mom would have left the room over.
Now I have to confess something even Dad didn’t know. It happened the summer before the fire. I’d worked as a waiter/bus boy for a big party Paul and Robert gave at Far and Away.
I was just fourteen. They were paying me fifteen dollars an hour to pass trays of food and keep the floors and tables clear of empty glasses and dishes. I wore a white jacket and black pants, a white shirt and a black bow tie.
I’d pop shrimp into my mouth before I passed a tray around. I tasted the baked clams, the raw oysters, and I had a hamburger and a hot dog fresh from the grill a cook tended in the back yard. There was that thin salmon, caviar, all the rich cheeses, then tiny pastries you could pick up in your hand. Or you could have big slices of chocolate cake, or key lime pie you could eat with a fork, sitting down somewhere to enjoy the string quartet playing on the terrace.
I was looking good and feeling good, just as though I was at parties like that one all the time. There were piles of throwaway cameras on trays in case anyone felt like having a photographic record of the evening. There were sterling silver key chains for souvenirs with round silver discs that said Far and Away.
Right in the middle of things I saw this wad of money held together by a gold dollar sign, on the floor of the hall closet.
I picked it up, took it into bathroom, and counted $100x10. $1000 smackeroos.
I put it in my pocket. I’d give it to Paul or Robert before the evening was over, I decided.
But it also occurred to me that no one could have seen me. And who walks around with $1000 in his pocket at a party? Somebody who’d probably never miss it.
I wasn’t a bad kid. For one thing Mom had been too sick for me to give her more to worry about. I studied, took odd jobs afternoons and summers to make spending money and buy my own clothes.
Money was always a problem. Dad and I talked about it all the time. How much we had for this, what we couldn’t have, and what there was so far in my college fund.
Dad said, “You’re going to college if I have to rob a bank.”
“Things aren’t that desperate,” I said.
“Don’t kid yourself, Gil.”
The house Paul and Robert lived in was really a cottage. It was two hundred years old and it had been “fixed” by men like Dad time and again. One year during a hurricane, the bay rose and water came into the first floor. Dad said they spent a fortune repairing it, that they could have built a new house for what it cost. But it was one of those historic places. The original owner wouldn’t sell it until he found buyers he trusted to keep it the way it was.
It only had two baths and three bedrooms. It faced the bay, no near neighbors, but beautiful gardens on both sides, mostly Robert’s handiwork. My father used to say that you could tell which one took the garbage out in that house: it was Pauline, as he liked to call Paul. Roberta, Dad said, was the one with his nose in the daffodils and his hands in the salad bowl.
“Don’t leave yet, Gil,” Robert said that first night I worked there.
I waited until the last guest was out the door. I was sitting on the terrace, looking at the moon’s reflection in the water, wishing we didn’t live in such a crappy house, dad leaving his clothes where he took them off, never washing a dish, never giving a damn how anything looked.
“You had a rough winter, didn’t you, Gil?” Robert said from behind me.
Then Paul said, “We liked your mom a lot, Gil. We’re so sorry.”
“Yeah. She liked you guys, too.” Mom had helped out at Far and Away nights they had dinner parties, but the three of them had had a kind of friendship, too. She’d given them cuttings from plants and they’d brought by lilac bushes or dwarf evergreens. Once, Paul gave her some goldfish complete with fancy bowl. Our cat ate them that very evening, but we never let Paul and Robert know.
They had sent a couple dozen white roses to the funeral home and later they wrote Dad and me saying how much they’d cared for her. Enclosed was a photograph of Mom stretched out on a chaise in their yard, with their black toy poodle in her arms.
I could feel the money clip in my pants pocket. I was thinking of all the stuff I could get with it. I’d never be able to put it in the college fund because Dad would want to know where I got it. But I could use it for special occasions, special treats.
I couldn’t believe that Robert was smiling so sweetly yet asking me “Do you want to return the gold clip you found, Gil?”
I was about to deny it but Paul said, “We were going to pay the help with that tonight. Then I saw you pick it up.”
I could feel how hot my face and ears were. I took the clip out of my pocket and handed it to Robert.
I mumbled, “I meant to give it to you, then I forgot.”
“Bull!” said Paul.
“What?” I was surprised at the sharp tone of voice.
“I said bull! You were going to walk off with it!”
“Don’t be harsh, Paul,” said Robert.
“When he stops lying and starts apologizing, I’ll stop being harsh, not before!”
I heard myself let out this big sigh and say, “Paul’s right. I was going to keep the money. I’m very sorry.”
“Apology accepted,” said Paul.
“Thanks,” I said. “I guess I’ll never be asked to work for you again.”
“Sure you will,” Robert said. “It’s over and forgotten.”
Paul drove me home.
He didn’t say anything until the car stopped. Then he said, “Want to hear my rules for a good life?”
“Okay.”
“Keep your body clean and your head clear and earn your own money.”
I gave him a guilty smile and said thanks.
They weren’t out from the city yet that afternoon I rode my bike over to open their house.
Enchanted Waters had already opened the little round pool in back. It was an unusually hot day for May, and I’d decided I’d take a swim later.
They had the kind of house that was a maid’s dream. You had to look hard for any dust. I mostly opened and cleaned windows, and I mopped the kitchen floor. The funny thing was I liked to clean. I was good at it. I was fussy about my own things, too: my clothes, my room. I liked to try and create one little perfect area in our jungle house where I could be peaceful and forget what was in the other rooms.
When I had finished my housework at Far and Away, I shed my jeans, and T-shirt and took a swim. Then I flopped down in the rope hammock and enjoyed an eyes-shut daydream of owning this place, of having a gorgeous wife and well behaved, great looking kids who were off at the beach.
“Well! Well! Well! Our little Girlie is having herself a sunbath.”
“And you’ve had a few beers, hmmm, Dad?”
“You walk around in your underwear here?”
“I went for a swim.”
“Where are Pauline and Roberta?”
“We’re right behind you, Mike.” And there they were suddenly, and there was my father red-faced but with that defended posture, hands on hips, jaw stuck out, speechless for once. Furious, again—that pointless, humongous fury smoking away inside him ever since Mom died. I wasn’t afraid of him, but I knew not to count on him anymore.
“Hello, Gil,” Paul said, and Robert asked me “Is the water warm?”
“He’s coming home with me now!” said Dad.
“Water’s fine,” I said.
“Get your clothes on, Girlie!” Dad said.
I said, “I’m coming.”
“I don’t want him swimming here!” Dad said. He was shaking his fist at them.
Paul said, “Whatever.”
“Hey, Dad,” I said, “Dad, for Pete’s sake.”
“What is whatever
supposed to mean?” Dad demanded.
“It means whatever you say, that’s fine,” Paul said.
“You bet it is!” Dad said. “He’s my son!”
“Cool it, Dad,” I said. “I’m coming.”
“He only works for you,” Dad said, “and you remember that!”
“Not to worry, Mike,” said Robert.
Then Dad said, “Wipe that smirk off of your face!” and went for Robert. And knocked Robert down.
Blood was running from a corner of Robert’s mouth.
“You get out!” Paul shouted. “Get out now!”
“C’mon, Dad,” I said. “C’mon, it’s time to go.”
Dad wasn’t all bad, believe me. The next day he felt terrible about punching Robert. He told me I should go over there and give them his apologies, and before I could do it, he said no, he’d go himself.
He called them up to be sure they’d be there, and he drove off after bragging that he was an honorable man and an honorable man always owned up to his mistakes.
“Let that be a lesson to you,” he said.
“Let it be a lesson to you,” I said. “Don’t lose your cool.”
The thing was Dad stopped off for a few beers to work up the courage an honorable man needed. When he got over there, Paul and Robert were gone.
“Hey, Gilly boy?” he shouted at me over the phone. “I’m alone here at Far and Away. I’ve got an idea!”
“What, Dad? You’ve had a few beers again, haven’t you?”
I could always tell by his voice when he’d been drinking.
“Before I got here I stopped off to do some thinking. You’re right about not losing my cool, son. We need the work.”
“And they’ve been darn nice to us, Dad.”
“You’re right,” he admitted after a short pause. “Your mother liked them … So I’m going to do them a favor over here and you could help me.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I’m going to paint that little kitchen of theirs without charge. I’ve got that can of white enamel in my truck and I just had it rotated yesterday.”
“Dad, they may have their own ideas about it.”
“Naw, no, they spoke before about painting that little room. Paint’s peeling in there. I know what I’m doing.”
“All right,” I said. “I’ll come over just so you don’t mess it up!”
No surprise: Dad was sleeping in the rope hammock when I got there. He’d only finished one wall.
“What was destroyed was priceless,” said Paul. “We saved for years and year to buy the Pollack painting. We couldn’t afford to insure it.”
“Our family photographs, our books, oh, everything,” Robert said. “Everything. And this house … This house.”
“Where is your father now?” the policeman asked me.
“He took off. The fire was raging and he just got into his pickup and went for help.”
“Why did he set the fire?”
“He didn’t,” I said. “Why don’t you listen to the truth?”
“Gil,” Paul said, “don’t protect him.”
“I set the fire!”
They still wouldn’t hear that.
Robert said, “Mike claimed he was coming here to tell us something. He sounded furious!”
“That’s just his way,” I said. “He knew he was wrong! He was going to apologize.”
“Let’s go downtown,” said the policeman. “Let’s get all the facts straight.”
All the while I painted the kitchen that afternoon, I thought of how Dad ruined things, of what a ruin he was himself since Mom had died, of how I didn’t think I could stand living any longer with damn Dad, out there snoring in the hammock!
I was mad! You bet I was mad!
But I worked on the ceiling, even while I was cursing my father. I was careful, too, neatnik that I am, I’d covered everything around me so paint wouldn’t get on it.
I put newspapers down to keep the stove and the icebox clean.
I was about to do the last wall when I went out in the yard to shake my father and tell him he had to wake up and help! It was his idea to do them this favor, not mine!
The thing was, I’d never thought about that old gas stove. We had an electric stove, and so did everyone I knew.
While I was out yelling at Dad, the pilot light on the stove must have worked through the newspapers.
“I’m not going to paint anymore until you get up!” I told Dad.
“Who said you had to paint?” He had one eye open.
“You called me for help, remember?”
“I changed my mind.” He turned over in the hammock, his back to me.
The fire must have been running along the walls just as I sat down in the beach chair and said, “Have it your way, Dad.”
I don’t know if he heard me.
But soon we both heard the whoooosh and then the roar of the fire as it hit the propane gas tanks.
I can’t stand to drive down Bay Street and see the lick of land where Far and Away used to be.
Robert and Paul are long gone from this town now, but in my mind’s eye, I still see their shocked, sad faces as we stood out on the lawn that sunny afternoon, the smell of burnt wood in the air, what was left of the house black and smoking.
Everyone, including them, still believe my father set that fire somehow, even though I figured out how it started, and later an inspector from the fire department confirmed it.
There are certain truths no one wants to hear. No one can believe truths that are hard to accept, either.
For example, who would ever believe that the real reason Far and Away burned down was that my father was trying to do a favor for Robert and Paul?
A Personal History by M. E. Kerr
My real name is Marijane Meaker.
When I first came to New York City from the University of Missouri, I wanted to be a writer. To be a writer back then, one needed to have an agent. I sent stories out to a long list of agents, but no one wanted to represent me. So, I decided to buy some expensive stationery and become my own agent. All of my clients were me with made-up names and backgrounds. “Vin Packer” was a male writer of mystery and suspense. “Edgar and Mamie Stone” were an elderly couple from Maine who wrote confession stories. (They lived far away, so editors would not invite them for lunch.) “Laura Winston” wrote short stories for magazines like Ladies’ Home Journal. “Mary James” wrote only for Scholastic. Her bestseller is Shoebag, a book about a cockroach who turns into a little boy.
My most successful writer was Vin Packer. I wrote twenty-one paperback suspense novels as Packer. When I wanted to take credit for these books, my editor told me I could not, because Vin Packer was the bestselling author—not Marijane Meaker.
I was friends with Louise Fitzhugh—author of Harriet the Spy—who lived near me in New York City. We often took time away from our writing to have lunch, and we would gripe about writing being such hard work. Louise would claim that writing suspense novels was easier than writing for children because you could rob and murder and include other “fun things.” I’d answer that children’s writing seemed much easier; describing adults from a kid’s eye, writing about school and siblings—there was endless material.
I asked Louise what children’s book she would recommend, and she said I’d probably like Paul Zindel’s The Pigman, a book for children slightly older than her audience. I did like it, a lot, and I decided my next book would be a teenage one (at the time, we didn’t use the term “YA” to describe that genre). I knew I would need yet another pseudonym for this venture, so I invented one, a take-off on my last name, Meaker: M. E. Kerr. (Louise, on the other hand, never tried to write for adults. She was a very good artist, and her internal quarrel was whether to be a writer or a painter.)
Dinky Hocker Shoots S
mack! was my first Kerr novel. The story of an overweight and sassy fifteen-year-old girl from Brooklyn, New York, Dinky was an immediate success. Between 1972 and 2009, thirty-six editions were published in five languages.
Gentlehands, a novel as successful as Dinky but without the humor, is a romance between a small-town boy and a rich, sophisticated Hamptons summer girl. The nickname of the boy’s grandfather is Gentlehands, but he is anything but gentle. An escaped Holocaust concentration camp guard, he once took pleasure in torturing the female prisoners. His American family does not know about his past until the authorities track him down. Harrowing as the story is, the New York Times called it “important and useful as an introduction to the grotesque character of the Nazi period.”
One of the hardest books for me to write was Little Little, my book about dwarfs. I kept worrying that I wouldn’t get my little heroine’s voice right. How would someone like that feel, a child so unlike others? After a while, I finally realized we had a lot in common. As a gay youngster, with no one I knew who was gay, I had no peers, no one like me to befriend—just like my teenage dwarf. She finally goes to a meeting of little people and finds friends, just as years later I finally met others like me in New York City.
I also used my experience being gay in a Kerr novel called Deliver Us from Evie. I set the story in Missouri, where I had studied journalism at the state university. I had been a tomboy, so I made my lead character, Evie, a butch lesbian. She is skillful at farm chores few females would be interested in, dresses boyishly, and has little interest in the one neighborhood boy who is attracted to her. I didn’t want to feminize her to make her more acceptable, and I worried a bit that she would be too much for the critics. Fortunately, my readers liked Evie and her younger brother, Parr, who doesn’t want to take over the family farm when he grows up. The book is now in two thousand libraries worldwide.
When I write for kids, I often draw on experiences I had when I was a teenager living in Auburn, New York—a prison city. All of us were fascinated by the large stone building in the center of town, with gun-carrying guards walking around its stone wall. Called Cayuga Prison (Auburn is in Cayuga County), it appears in several of my books. One of these books is called Your Eyes in Stars.