Whole World Over

by Julia Glass

  Granna—who’d be at the stove, preparing a stew or pot roast—would scold Werner: Dinner was time for family. Eating while standing was the habit of beasts. Werner would get intestinal cramps and risk driving off the road.

  Werner, who stood a foot taller than Granna by then, would bend down and kiss her on the forehead. He’d say something like “Beasts don’t have algebra and a buttload of Norman Melville to read.” Walter, setting the table, would watch his brother saunter out the door, listen to the Impala roar away toward freedom.

  August would be in the living room, supposedly checking the paper for new job listings. But when he came to the table, what he’d talk about was the news, reciting story after story with derision. He’d rant about the stupidity of the war, the stupidity of the president, the stupidity of the first lady and her stupid obsession with flowers, the stupidity of the gooks and how, ironically, it just might help them win. “Hey, what’s another fricasseed village or two when the Mouseketeers are beating down your door? Man but the world is full of jerks.”

  Granna’s sacred tolerance began to crack. One night she told her son to show some respect and native pride: for a president who would not give up on a difficult fight, for a first lady who knew that to love the beauty of nature was to love God, and—more pointedly—for a country that would continue to send good money to a man so determined never to make a living.

  “Like you’ve ever had to support a family,” August said.

  Granna stared hard at him and seemed to consider whether she ought to reply at all, but she did. “I am doing ziss now, ziss very past year and more.”

  There was a pause, like a quick inhaling, and then August laughed, loud and short, a gunshot laugh. “Touché, Mother!” he said, raising his glass of Coke. “The only catch being that whatever money you’re using here comes from Dad’s fat pension.”

  Granna stood up, almost demurely, and carried her plate to the sink. She came back to her place, sat down, and stared once again at her son. “Perhaps you and Rose might go down the street for ice cream. Walter vill help me clean dishes. Perhaps you vill bring him a chocolate sundae.”

  Walter (who always helped with the dishes anyway) watched his father turn to his mother and say, “Hear that, Rose? We are being shown the door.”

  As he waited, without much real optimism, for his chocolate sundae to arrive, Walter finished his homework and went to bed. He was awakened by a car screeching into the driveway, radio blaring. Boy, is Werner going to get it now, he thought—until he heard his parents’ voices. They were singing “Blue Moon,” warbling the chorus like third-string opera singers.

  Next morning, they were not at the breakfast table. Granna said very little as she made oatmeal for Walter and Werner. She looked as if she had been crying, but one thing you did not ask Granna about was her emotional state. If you did, she would say something like (if she seemed sad) “I am bearing up, as we all must do” or (if she seemed light on her feet) “Joys, they are butterflies; never should you try to hold them, not even so much as touch the vings.”

  Seventh grade was a year of retreat for Walter: retreat to his attic room, retreat into reading, retreat from the realization that spin-the-bottle and gym dances left him feeling as if everyone around him had shared a special drug when he wasn’t looking. He became aware that the reason he loved to watch Lost in Space had nothing to do with sci-fi, which he generally hated, and everything to do with the actor who played Major West.

  Then came the summer that would stand out forever as a uniquely vivid, turbulent summer in Walter’s life. It was the summer he met beautiful, nervous Joel, his first requited crush; the summer he read In Cold Blood (and every night for weeks locked all the doors and windows); the summer of Manson’s rampage; the summer his father, having sold his own car, crashed Granna’s Buick into a phone pole the next town over, killing his wife then and there, himself after nearly a month in a coma. Along with Granna, Walter and Werner visited their father and his machines every day he lay there in limbo, and not once did Walter wish for the man’s recovery—though, at his grandmother’s side, he went through the motions of stoic prayer. She was the one he felt bad for. He knew she was convinced she had failed in the gravest way a person can fail: as a parent.

  August died, fittingly, at the end of August. In September, a week late, Werner went off to start college at U. Mass. The idea was that he’d be near enough to come back on weekends, though he might as well have gone to UCLA. He came back at Thanksgiving, but Christmas he spent with a girlfriend in New York City. The following year he did go to California, transferring to UC–Santa Cruz. “Haight-Ashbury, here I come,” he said to Walter. How he’d evolved from a would-be flower-child to a Republican moneyman would always be a bit of a mystery to Walter. But people, no matter how well you knew them, never ceased to surprise.

  AFTER SCOTT HAD BEEN THERE just over a week, it occurred to Walter that he had not shared a home with another person since living with Granna. Even in college he’d never had roommates; he’d rented the teensiest, grungiest studios and fixed them up to a fare-thee-well. The highly peopled occupations he’d chosen—theater first, then restaurateering—meant that once he went home, privacy signified far more than space.

  So now he experienced all sorts of odd, unexpected emotional symptoms, exacerbated by the ambiguous nature of his affection for Scott. Even after he learned to sleep through Scott’s faintly caterwauling music, he would sometimes awake for no discernible reason. Hearing nothing more than the murmur and groan of the city outside, he’d wonder if the boy was in the apartment or out at large. He would resist the urge to go into the living room and put an ear to Scott’s door. Even then, he might not know. What he felt in these wakings was a mixture of tenderness and agitation. Was he worried for Scott’s safety? Not really. Was he envious—or, worse, jealous!—at the notion of his nephew out with a prospective lover, dancing and kissing, sitting with legs intertwined on a pair of barstools? Or was he simply feeling the misplaced wishful yearning of someone who’d been single for too long?

  The Bruce, meanwhile, took Scott’s presence completely for granted. When Walter opened the bedroom door first thing in the morning, T.B. shot across the living room and sniffed greedily at the gap beneath Scott’s door. Scott would emerge, squatting down to tussle with the dog, greeting Walter as a sleepy afterthought.

  “Hey, Walt, how they hangin’?” Scott would growl in his sexy teenage morning voice.

  Walter tried not to stare at his nephew’s lovely naked chest or the scandalously low point at which the blond hair on his abdomen disappeared behind the drawstring of his flimsy shorts. Early on, Walter had given up on reinstating the second syllable of his own name.

  The first two weeks, Werner called nearly every night—at the restaurant, to Walter’s annoyance. Cocktail hour at Kinderman West coincided with dinner rush at Kinderman East. Walter would call Scott away from setting tables, sweeping the sidewalk, or answering the front phone. The boy would have a short conversation with his parents, his end a series of cheerfully sarcastic quips like “No, Mom, I stay out all night at leather bars” and “Like anybody has time to read when we’re right up the block from the triple-X video store.”

  Every so often, Walter would be summoned to the phone after Scott said good-bye. He’d reassure Tipi that Scott was being fantastically helpful (code for kept out of trouble) and that he was a perfect roommate (code for spending the night where he was supposed to spend the night). “Rest assured that I’m exploiting your son’s talents to the max,” he might say. “I’ve worn him out so completely that his fancy guitar is gathering dust.”

  As summer wore on, calls from the Coast dwindled in frequency, and rarely did Walter and Werner trade more than a brief greeting before the phone was passed to Scott. Scott was the one who had to suffer through The Weather According to Werner. Walter would overhear remarks like “Yeah, humidity’s been awesome” and “You mean the waves at Stinson?”

  It was a summ
er of work more intense than Walter had ever known; Scott’s extra hands were a blessing. Was everyone suddenly richer? That’s not what the papers said, but that was how it felt. Certainly, the boys in the ’hood seemed all at once healthier, the sickest among them passed on, the ones who’d managed to hang on this long filled with the hope and energy purveyed in a new set of potions and pills. The number of black-bordered cards in Walter’s mail diminished—as if he were living life backward.

  And then there were the new “dieters,” people who’d given up bread and pasta for steak and butter. “Fight fat with fat, it’s so intuitively homeopathic!” said a sleek guy from Walter’s gym who suddenly showed up all the time, renouncing his vegan ways. Honestly, thought Walter, people were so absurd about food. But if the fads had turned in his favor, who was he to rock the boat?

  Walter did worry a little about Scott’s social life—surely the boy needed creatures his own age to hang with—but he heard no complaints. Contrary to what Walter had told Tipi, Scott spent a lot of his free time playing guitar in his room or combing the music listings and going out to places like CBGB and The Bottom Line. It was all very post-counterculturally wholesome. Perhaps Scott genuinely liked his own company, a rare talent in someone his age. So far, the most vulgar, juvenile thing about Scott was his never-ending collection of wisecrack T-shirts. One day his chest would proclaim, JESUS HATES YOUR SUV; the next, SUCK ONTHIS. (“You know,” Walter said cheerfully when the latter message emerged, “there are people in this town who might act on that imperative.” Scott grinned and said, “Let ’em try.” But the shirt did not make a return appearance.)

  The apartment grew vaguely collegiate around the edges. Old halves of deli sandwiches dried out, forgotten, in the fridge. Scott’s sneakers seemed to migrate about the living room, spreading their subtle pungence. Here and there, magazines lay crinkled and slumped like dead birds. Walter had expected this. He spoke calmly to Scott, whose sloppiness went into periodic remission, but with business as good as it was, Walter also hired a housekeeper, a daffy actress friend of Ben’s who sometimes left rags in the tub but could be trusted not to steal Granna’s silver or Walter’s collection of cuff links.

  “Are you still writing poetry?” Walter asked Scott one afternoon as the two of them took a late lunch break.

  “Well, yeah, sure, but I’m merging it with my music.”

  “Lyrics. Of course,” said Walter.

  Scott looked at the ceiling, audibly chewing his pastrami, playing with that Duke of Earl medallion. His T-shirt du jour, innocuous for once, proclaimed I’D RATHER BE IN MANITOBA; the menacing face of a polar bear filled the O. “Not lyrics, not conventional like that,” he said. “It’s more like I’m turning the poetry into the music. Like the music’s eating the words, digesting the emotions. Know what I mean?” He redirected his gaze at Walter. Walter noticed for the first time that his nephew had sprouted one of those fungus beardlets known as soul patches. Bad decision for anyone. And when had he traded the tasteful star in his earlobe for a miniature demon’s mask with, however tiny, a protruding tongue?

  “Like John Cage? Or maybe Enya,” said Walter.

  “Who’s John Cage?” said Scott.

  To act shocked would have been dishonest. Walter himself had heard only snatches of John Cage, always on basement FM; every time, he’d changed stations. “Oh, well. Pots and pans, vacuum cleaners and subway brakes. That sort of thing,” he said. “Cacophony before anyone else was doing it.”

  Scott looked perplexed but did not ask for elaboration.

  “Personally, I do like my songs with a melody and lyrics,” said Walter. “But I am musically bourgeois.”

  Scott nodded gravely. “I’ve seen your CD collection. But never judge a man by his music. You’re cool enough to be, like, nowhere near your age. That’s what I told Sonya.”

  It took Walter a moment to make the connection. “Sonya? Sonya who takes T.B. to entertain the oldsters?” Whatever the opposite of cool was, that was surely what Sonya thought of Walter.

  “Hey, did you know Sonya plays flute? Like even classical stuff sometimes. She introduced me to Rampal, the Bach cantatas.”

  “Will wonders never cease,” said Walter.

  “She took me to the Kitchen, where we heard seven dudes play flute together. The high notes were, like…like noise from outer space. It was so fine. It’s like you become a bat or a dog.”

  “A bat or a dog?” said Walter. Good Lord.

  “You know. Like you can hear on some higher frequency. Like your ears hurt at first, but then they’re supernatural. You’re inside this awesome tunnel. It’s genius. You are the noise. Know what I mean?”

  Walter leaned forward, smiling, and put a hand on his nephew’s arm. “No, Scott, I haven’t the remotest notion what you mean. But have fun with it.” Ben was waving him over to the phone.

  “Walter’s Place. The man himself,” he answered. As he watched Scott from across the room, he saw the boy swaying from side to side in his chair, touching his medallion to his nose, his upper lip, his chin, as if in some weird benediction.

  The caller was Bonny Prince Charlie (the book dude, mused Walter in his nephew’s lingo). He wanted to know if they were still serving lunch. “For you, my dear, whenever. Come right on over,” said Walter, though anyone could have had lunch all afternoon. If you ran an eating establishment in New York, you had to be a total rube to stop serving food anytime between noon and midnight—unless you ran a restaurant in Midtown, which, in Walter’s terms, was the same as being a rube.

  He returned to Scott and picked up their plates. “Back to work, Bat Boy. Hugo is going to show you the proper way to trim asparagus.”

  “Yo. Cool. Is there like an improper way?”

  “Like yes,” said Walter. “Believe it or not.”

  THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL, Walter lived with Granna. Because of her weakening hips, she no longer slept on the second floor but made a bedroom in the small den off the living room. She still drove, shopped, cooked, and went to church. In addition to her needlework, she took up making wreaths for charity: bay leaf in the spring, dried flowers in the summer, juniper in the fall, fir and red ribbons for Christmas.

  Walter kept his room at the top of the house, so the second story became a ghost floor—not gathering dust, because Granna cleaned it once a week, but holding unaltered the beds on which Walter’s parents and brother had slept, the pictures on the patterned walls, and the books, all leather-bound, all in German, left behind by the grandfather Walter could not remember. Sometimes it seemed as if even Werner were dead too—until he phoned, as he did about once a month. But it wasn’t the possible company of ghosts that kept Walter from moving downstairs; it was the very real company of boys, beginning with Joel, whom he sneaked upstairs for sex—at first awkward and quick, with the pretense of shared homework or a new record; then purposeful and more prolonged, even half a night sometimes.

  This was the only thing Walter felt guilty about. He did not smoke dope or drop acid or even, after his father’s example, drink more than the occasional beer. Almost as compensation, as purification, he took an after-school job at the public library. Reshelving books, he began to notice plays. Toward the end of Dewey Decimal 822, Walter became acquainted with a two-foot stretch of small blue clothbound books with gilt titles on the spines. The plays of Shakespeare. They fit so nicely in the pocket of a jacket that he checked them out one by one and carried them about, whispering the speeches aloud when he was alone. For their passion to entertain, Walt Disney and William Shakespeare were Walter’s twin idols. (You could have Barbarella and Easy Rider; Fantasiaput them to shame.) He had yet to discover Billy Wilder, Peter Sellers, or Matthew Broderick in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.

  Walter’s first role on a real stage, his third year in high school, was Petruchio. He suspected that he won the part not because he had any real acting skills but because he knew the lilt and strut of Shakespeare’s words far better than any of his classmates. Bluff: that’s
what got him into acting. When he practiced his lines at home, he would pace the short length of his attic room (which, as he grew taller, provided less and less pacing room, since two of its walls slanted down to the floor), sometimes addressing Mount Greylock, out the window. The night before dress rehearsal, he paced up and down buck naked, reciting the “I am he am born to tame you” speech to Stuart, another naked boy, who lay in Walter’s bed giggling.

  Granna was downstairs, forming hoops of dried statice and watching Celebrity Squares. Walter had grown complacent about what Granna could and could not hear from far below. The next morning she was unusually quiet at breakfast. As he gathered his books to leave and catch the bus, she stopped him and turned him to face her, both hands raised to his shoulders. Like Werner, he was now far taller than Granna, but when she was stern, his pulse still quickened. She looked up into his face and said, “Let a fire burn too hot in your heart, and smoke, it vill fill up your head.” She gave him the same brief, hard gaze once reserved for his father, and then she released him, wished him a fine day, and opened the door. He was touched and astonished by her evenhandedness, her lack of revulsion. (Only years later did he realize that, perceptive as Granna had been, she must have believed his midnight guest a girl.)

  After the applause of the next three nights, he began to dream of moving to New York City, becoming an actor, and changing his name to Walter Greylock. Strangely, he never climbed the mountain he had gazed at for so many hours from his tower room and on which he’d projected so many hopes.