The Perfect Son

by Barbara Claypole White

  pretty sure he is can I come over

  You mean can Mom and I come get you because you’re too scared to ask your dad for a lift?

  yup

  He sent her a sticker of an animated smiley face. His favorite one. The one that bounced up and down and looked psychotic. Made him smile. Nothing else made him smile right now. Except for Sammie. And Max. Harry picked up his phone, sent Max a text.

  hey maxi-pad dad hates me

  Mom hates me. Parent swap?

  Harry cracked up. Went back to his Facebook page.

  please? He added a row of hearts. i can give you the full update on life with attila the dad & we can be homework buddies

  Your dad isn’t that bad, Harry. He’s just being a dad.

  your dad isn’t a jerk

  My dad’s terminally ill, Harry.

  sorry that was thoughtless

  He couldn’t get anything right today.

  Don’t worry about it.

  so can I come over

  This time he picked the robot sticker with lots of hearts.

  Let me ask Mom.

  Harry flopped back onto his pillows. Never thought that simple phrase, that one short sentence, “Let me ask Mom,” could be so loaded, so precious. He would give anything in the world to be able to ask his mom.

  Felix splashed cold water onto his face, pulled back, and stared into the powder room mirror; Pater’s face stared back. As he aged, he looked more and more like the monster from his own childhood. And now the transformation was complete. For a moment back there, he had seen nothing but anger—a hot, seething mass that could destroy anything in its path. Felix slugged his second glass of Macallan, then carefully placed the tumbler down next to the sink. He flipped over his right hand and examined his broken lifeline, which disappeared as it snaked around his wrist. Tom had always joked, “Either you’ll end up living two lives, or you’re going to develop a split personality and become a serial killer.”

  His whole arm began to shake. For a moment, he’d wanted to hurt Harry. God help him, he had wanted to hit his own son.

  Genetics will out.

  A tornado of noise whooshed down the hall and stopped outside the powder room door. Harry knocked quietly. A timid knock, a scared knock, one that said, I don’t want to wake the monster.

  “Dad? Dad, are you in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m going to do my homework at Sammie’s.” Harry paused and then words rushed out. “I need to calm down and regroup and might be better for both of us if I go out for a while.”

  Felix put his hand on the doorknob. As he turned it slowly, the doorbell chimed. “Wait. It’s a weeknight. You are not going out on a weeknight.”

  Harry grabbed his backpack. “We study well together. She helps me focus. Sammie’s mom is here. She wants to say hi.”

  Felix glanced back at the mirror. Did he have a choice? He swallowed hard and walked into the hall.

  Sammie bounced through the door and threw her arms around Harry’s neck. Her mother followed, and Felix blanked on her name. Something beginning with . . . ? Gray and lifeless with pouches of loose skin under her eyes, she looked almost as wasted as Ella.

  “Hi, Harry,” Sammie’s mother said. “Do you mind if we stop and pick up a pizza on the way home?”

  “That sounds great, Mrs. Owen. You’ll be okay, Dad? For dinner?”

  Felix nodded. He’d planned to cook for them tonight, make a cottage pie using the recipe Mother had dictated over the phone. Maybe he’d skip food and have a liquid dinner.

  “Felix, good to see you again. How’s Ella?”

  “She’s fine, thank you.” Felix kneaded his shoulder. The muscles, tight with tension, crunched under his fingertips. “How’s your husband?”

  “He’s doing well, thank you for asking. The tumors aren’t getting any bigger. Always a good sign,” she said. “Would you like Harry home by a certain time?”

  Felix almost said, Keep him. “Since it’s a school night, nine thirty. We have a ten o’clock curfew.”

  “We do?” Harry was gripping Sammie’s right hand with both of his hands.

  “We do,” Felix said. There had to be consequences for calling your father a Nazi. “And if you break it, you’re grounded for the rest of your life.”

  Harry blushed.

  Felix turned to Sammie’s mother. “Would you mind if I talk to Harry in private?”

  Sammie glanced at Harry, her bottom lip caught in her teeth.

  “Of course,” Sammie’s mother said. “We’ll wait in the car.”

  They disappeared into the night, but not before a blast of frigid air entered the house.

  “You didn’t think I’d ground you?” Felix asked Harry. “I would like to remind you that you are still a child. For another year. And that I am the parent.”

  “Dad—when have I ever disobeyed you? I may have focus issues, I may be untidy, but I’ve always followed your rules. If you say home by nine thirty, I’ll be home by nine thirty. You don’t have to threaten me.” Head down, Harry hoisted his bag over his shoulder. “Can I go now?”

  “Yes.”

  Had Ella ever grounded Harry? In fact, had Ella ever so much as raised her voice at him? The front door closed quietly, and Felix glanced at the space where the jug had been, the one that he’d swept up and dumped in the kitchen bin.

  An empty house breathed differently. It wasn’t the silence; it was the nothingness. The heavy, painful solitude that hung in every corner. In the black forest beyond the sliding doors, eyes popped through the trees. The nighttime creatures were out.

  An owl hooted, speaking the language of darkness, of despair. Of loneliness.

  When they were first married, Ella had planned to get a dog and walk it in Duke Forest every day. But once Harry was born and brought chaos into the house, Felix said no, and the subject had never come up again. Should they get a dog? Not a puppy, but maybe a rescue dog. No, that would come with unknown problems. A dog with a pedigree, then, with kennel-club papers. A perfectly behaved, perfectly trained, perfectly housebroken dog. Would that make Ella happy? Would it make Harry happy? Would a dog give Felix the one thing that continued to elude him: a real family life?

  Down the hall, Harry’s door was flung open. As always, the lights blazed. Once his son left home and had to pay his own electric bill, maybe he’d realize what it meant to be wasteful.

  Felix stormed toward the teen cave. Harry’s laptop was open, and the clean laundry Felix had folded that morning—he’d done a full load at 6:00 a.m.—lay scattered over the floor. Drawing a deep breath, Felix entered the room and forced himself to ignore the empty lemonade bottle, the crushed soda can, and the half-eaten bar of chocolate. He stepped over the debris of shoes.

  “What’s this unnatural obsession you have with putting away shoes?” Harry had said.

  It’s called order, Harry. You’ll never understand.

  He refolded the T-shirts, repiled them on the bed, and picked up the open laptop to shut it down. As he clicked on the track pad, the screen opened to Harry’s Facebook page with a message to Sammie: see you in a few. Followed by a crazy number of kisses.

  His son needed a lesson on restraint.

  Restraint had never been an issue for teenage Felix. Girls put out for him all the time, but he could never take it to the next level. Sex was not the problem. Love, however, confounded him. He couldn’t make girls happy; they couldn’t make him happy. He tried to be a good boyfriend, but after a while he couldn’t see past their flaws, and then his attention would turn to the next pretty girl. The theme continued into his twenties, but everything had changed the day Ella collapsed on the Tube.

  Still holding the laptop, Felix sat down on the bed. Harry’s skull and crossbones alarm clock ticked its ridiculously loud tick and Felix scrolled through the messages. He would never understand why he had decided to pry. Maybe there was no decision. Maybe all he wanted was to understand Harry better, but once he’d read the phrase attila
the dad, there was no turning back. He had to read all of them. Every last message between Harry and Sammie, between Harry and Max, between Harry and Ella. (As if Harry and his mother needed yet another line of communication.) He read the messages that called him a control freak, that linked the words hate and Dad, and—the worst ones of all—the messages without smiley faces, the ones that shouted loud and clear, My dad terrifies me. It was official: he had failed to be more than someone who instilled fear.

  The phone rang, but Felix didn’t pick up. He didn’t even move. Down the hall, Eudora’s voice played to the empty living room.

  “Felix, honey, I know you’re home. I can see your lights on, and I heard Harry leave. Pick up the phone.” A long pause. “Felix Fitzwilliam. You have two choices. You pick up the phone right now, or I’m coming over. And since I’m in my nightgown, I know you don’t want that vision of wrinkled beauty on your doorstep.” A longer pause. “Lord, son, are you going to make me count? One, two . . .”

  Felix ran into his bedroom and snatched the phone off the cradle. “Harry hates me.”

  “Why, of course he does. He’s a teenage boy, and you’re his daddy.”

  “We had a fight, and he said—” What the hell was he doing sharing family secrets with a neighbor? “I’m not sure there’s a way forward for the two of us.”

  “Now, that’s not true, son. It might take a bit o’ doing, is all.” Eudora paused. “Noon tomorrow, meet me at Duke Gardens for some of that . . . what’s it called? My mind just fizzled worse than a . . . Brainstorming! That’s the word I was searching for. Brainstorming.”

  “Eudora, I’ll be in the office until school pickup. We have a deadline on this hundred-million-dollar deal, and I need to work every second Harry’s in school. I don’t have time to wander around Duke Gardens.”

  “Have you ever visited?”

  “No.” Felix tried to edit exasperation from his voice.

  “Well then, it’s all settled.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You and I need to talk, and tomorrow’s one of my volunteer mornings. Did I mention I’m an ambassador for the Blomquist Garden? Such a joy to work with native plants.”

  “Yes, I believe you have mentioned this several times, Eudora. Unfortunately, I don’t—”

  “Meet me under the pergola at noon.”

  Would he have to be rude to a pensioner? “I can’t. I’m in danger of losing my job. The well-paid job that funds this family.”

  “Honey, that job sure is pointless if you lose your family anyway.” She paused. “Bye-bye!”

  TWENTY-THREE

  Felix drove through the matching stone balustrades that marked the entrance to Duke Gardens and slammed on the brakes with no thought to other drivers. Straight ahead, beyond majestic evergreens and plants with elongated leaves related—surely—to palms, the gothic spire of Duke Chapel rose like a monument to his past, to the one place that had always represented home: Oxford. Many times he’d glimpsed Duke Chapel from the Durham Freeway, and yet he’d never seen it from this angle. What a glorious surprise.

  Ducking down for a better view, Felix inched toward the car park. He was in the middle of Durham, North Carolina, but he could have been looking at Magdalen College.

  Elation vanished the moment he stepped from the car and discovered the out-of-order notice taped over the parking meter. Brilliant. He had timed his arrival perfectly—perfectly. Now he would have to take a diversion inside the Doris Duke Center to purchase a parking receipt. He would not only be a hated father; he would be a late hated father.

  Parking receipt purchased, despite the painful negotiation with an elderly volunteer who appeared incapable of understanding his English accent, Felix consulted his map and strode toward the Historic Gardens. The path was covered in sand. Sand would stick to his shoes, track into his car, and necessitate another cleaning. He hated sand.

  With a quiet harrumph, he tugged up the collar of his cashmere coat—now in its thirtieth year—and adjusted his scarf. If only he had his cashmere-lined leather gloves, too. There was a definite nip in the air, a bite of winter. Maybe even snow in those heavy clouds, which would mean school delays and closings. One snowflake, and the entire Triangle shut down. Really, it was preposterous.

  Workers in beanies milled round, quietly purposeful; a young man drove past in a golf cart loaded with gardening implements and hoses; two young women silently shoveled compost out of the back of a small truck. Several dog walkers passed him and smiled. No one seemed in a hurry.

  According to the map, he had entered the Mary Duke Biddle Rose Garden. If he wasn’t pressed for time, he might pause to admire the calm order of the artfully placed decorative urns and the well-spaced, well-labeled plants. Felix inhaled deeply, and the irritation over the parking dissipated into the icy air. Plant labels, what a marvelous idea. He would ask Ella to start labeling their plants.

  Felix turned left onto a straight path lined with flower borders and trees. Most of the plants were dormant, but some pushed up through the soil: spiky black grass no more than an inch high and a low-growing plant with vivid, scallop-edged leaves. How unexpected to find color on such a raw, sullen day. He peered down at the labels: “Black Mondo Grass” and “Heuchera.”

  He pulled out his phone and typed a note: Ask Ella about heucheras.

  Through the trees to his left, an orange Bobcat whirred away as it dug up the ground, as it destroyed to rebuild. Intriguing that this garden, which had been established for decades, was still a work in progress.

  Turning right, he spotted Eudora sitting on a metal bench under a huge pergola made of thin strips of iron and a gnarled old vine.

  “My, my, don’t you look dashing, all dolled up for the world of high finance.” She pushed off from the bench seat, then wobbled and sank back down. Felix rushed to help.

  “Are you unwell?” He had kept an older woman waiting in the cold. What inexcusable behavior.

  Eudora waved him off. “At my age, things rust up if I’ve been on my rump for too long.”

  Felix hung back, fighting the urge to tuck his arm under hers and haul her to her feet. “Apologies for being tardy. The parking meters were out.”

  “Pfff. Late is a fact of life. I had hoped you were taking time to dawdle and enjoy this remarkable local treasure.”

  “That too,” Felix said, surprised to admit to the dawdling. Dawdling didn’t fit his worldview. Of course, he no longer had a worldview, at least not one he understood. His job was in jeopardy, his wife was critically ill, his son hated him, and he was meeting a seventy-five-year-old spinster for parenting lessons under a pergola.

  “I hadn’t appreciated before how much Duke Chapel looks like Maudlin College.”

  “I’m not familiar with that—Maudlin, you said?”

  “Spelled M-a-g-d-a-l-e-n.”

  “Ah, Magdalen College pronounced the Oxford way.”

  “Indeed.” Felix tipped back his head to glance up at the gray sky through the giant metal web covered in a latticework of sticks. Frozen precipitation was definitely heading their way. Should he check the school website and see if they were announcing an early dismissal?

  “Asian wisteria,” Eudora said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “You’re looking at Asian wisteria. Not up to much in the winter, but wait until the wedding season.” She gave a low whistle.

  “They have weddings here?”

  “Lord, yes.”

  In front of them, terraced gardens flowed down to a large pond. “Is that a heron?” he said.

  “Blue heron. It comes to dine on the koi. Magnificent fish.”

  Felix nodded. He knew nothing about fish unless it was being served to him on a platter.

  “The original garden was built in 1934 at the instigation of one Dr. Hanes, an iris buff. He persuaded Sarah P. Duke to invest in a garden, and they planted an array of iris bulbs. But the land was prone to flooding, and everything rotted. Sarah died, and he convinced her daughter, Mary
Duke Biddle, to construct a new garden in honor of her mother, but on higher ground.” Eudora flashed her eyes at him. “I admire that kind of persistence, when combined with an ability to learn from one’s mistakes. Don’t you?”

  Felix nodded. Was there some didactic meaning buried in her docent spiel?

  “Mary hired Ellen Biddle Shipman, a pioneer in American landscape design, to create the Terrace Gardens in the Italianate style. The garden you see today was built by women.”

  “Impressive,” Felix said.

  “And this”—Eudora swept her arm to the right—“represents the globe with its lines of longitude and latitude. Quite fascinating when you consider the dedication of the garden was in 1939.”

  “On the eve of World War Two,” Felix said. “And this year marks its seventy-fifth anniversary.”

  “Precisely, hon. And the pergola is the original structure.”

  The structure above them had endured over seven decades and any number of weddings. He’d never thought about history in terms of gardens before, despite listening to busloads of National Trust retirees twitter over Saint John’s garden, designed by the famous English landscape architect Capability Brown. Continuity, longevity, places that had established a timeline: these were important. Felix had little interest in the contemporary.

  “But we’re starting in the wrong place,” Eudora said. “As everyone does. To experience the true joy of the Historic Gardens, we need to be on the other side of the pond, by the original entrance. Come.”

  Eudora started walking, and Felix followed.

  “We’re stepping on Tennessee stone, although”—she pointed to a low, circular wall surrounding a small pond and a statue of Cupid holding a large shell—“that’s Duke stone. Bless my soul, would you look at that?” Her voice turned girlish. “The tulips are coming up. I love tulips.”

  “So did my brother, Tom.”

  “He was a gardener?”

  “A landscape architect. Much sought after by the rich and famous.” The pride in Tom’s success never abated.

  “You miss him, don’t you?”

  Felix stroked his designer cashmere scarf, his last present from Tom. Tom had been an extravagant gift giver. I miss him every day, every week, every month, every year. The void created by Tom’s death was a rip through the universe, an open wound that would never heal. “He died of AIDS. Hard to forget such a slow, painful death.”