The Tall Boy

by Jess Gregg

  There seemed no way to ground my self-imposed lightning, for we were never alone together. Her husband was always there, or Sharlie, or the nurse. Not until my last night in Los Angeles did I find a chance. By way of therapy, her doctor had put her in charge of one of the other patients, a confused old party in a wheelchair. “Walk with me while I give him his exercise,” she told me. “We can talk while I push him along the corridor here.”

  We strolled in silence while I tried to steady my voice. The first word I blurted must have revealed my torment, however, because she cut in at once. “It’s not your fault, Buddy,” she said. “It’s not anyone’s fault. The depression I’ve been fighting these past years—there’s a physical cause for it, the doctors tell me. A chemical imbalance in my system—that’s what has been to blame. But there’s a medication for it now, and—Well, anyway, I’m going to be all right.”

  Whether I believed what she said—whether I even understood it—I cannot say now, for the old man in the wheelchair twisted around just then, and peered up at her. “Which nurse are you?” he demanded, querulously. “Beth or Elsie?”

  “I sure am, honeychile,” she said, shooting me a droll glance.

  For that moment, anyway, we could not stop laughing.

  20

  DEAN B.

  “It happen in the wink of an eye,” my father’s housekeeper told me. “Right there settin’ in church.” She pressed the folded handkerchief against her face, blotting the tears that kept coming. “When I tells folks about it, they think I just makin’ the whole thing up.”

  My sisters and I came back to the little college town at once, two of us from far away. The big Southern-style house he had so resolutely kept open and hospitable since my mother’s death seemed empty and echoing now; but only for the first few minutes were our voices hushed. However somber the occasion, the three of us were glad to be under one roof again—we had remained close despite the distance our lives had put between us. Yet some element of sibling rivalry must have remained, for on the third day, when the lawyer arrived and we sat down to lunch, I had a premonition that my father had left his estate to the girls.

  My hunch had a lot to back it up: both sisters had fulfilled their obligations to him lovingly and with great dedication. Sharlie had been born with his keen sense of business, and was always available to discuss his ideas, while Noo, warm-hearted and shining-eyed, had kept my mother’s tradition of comfort for him. My own contribution had not been in the same league. I could sometimes make him laugh, and he was touched when I dedicated my first novel to him; but largely, I had not lived up to his expectation. I had never shared his intense interest in the surge of the Dow, or the five-yard gain in inter-collegiate football. Worse, I had never gotten married or had any children, and the family name he loved was ending with me. He had asked no questions, but all the same, an important one had waited there between us. Some old puritan ethic kept telling me I hadn’t earned a whole lot of consideration now.

  Alberta brought in the covered dish of green-bean salad, and served the lawyer as she would have my father, generously heaping his plate. “This was his favorite lunch,” she told him. “This, with a glass of Orvieto white wine. And some apple pie. ‘Alberta,’ he say, ‘just serve it to me in a pail.’”

  The lawyer smiled and nodded deferentially to the head of the table. The chair there was not occupied, though it might as well have been, so persistently felt was the old man’s courteous manner with its lurking waggishness. Above the dining room door was the sign he had had one of his grandsons paint, and to which he wordlessly pointed when criticized for his enjoyment of the table. To Hell with Diet, it said. Yet for a man of his age and intake, he had stayed surprisingly trim. In the caricatures he sometimes drew, he presented himself as a stick with a mustache. The actuality was more pleasing: he was handsome in an unremarkable way, with eyes blending green and tan, and hair that, for most of his life, not only remained brown, but remained. While in these last years, his skin seemed to have belonged to someone slightly larger, he still resembled the man I first remember.

  A passport picture of my mother, father, and Noo.

  Even though I have enviable recall, my early memories of him are few, and most of these colored by my resistance. In his reasonable way, he was a very insistent man. Every morning, he would brush my hair straight back, buttering it down with something called Sta-comb, determined to make it lie flat like his did; but a few minutes later, the entire sticky mass would slowly rise up, and then flop back over my brow. The same kind of involuntary stubbornness defeated him in other ways. His efforts to teach me to play ball came to nothing. He strained to communicate his passion for automobiles, but apparently I was always thinking of something else. Movies, probably. My nurse, May-May, had discovered the best way to get a little peace was to take Sharlie and me to the films, and I responded to them as if my eyes had opened on the real world at last. My father, who did not share this fascination, told me long after that, on a drive to Santa Monica when I was five, I gave him a run-down of John Barrymore in Beau Brummell that went on for two hours, detailing every plot twist, describing every costume, surviving every effort to change the subject.

  He and I kept missing each other’s message till I was almost ten. Christmas was only a few days off, and out of a full heart, I had decided to make my mother’s gift myself. Finding some wooden coat hangers in her closet, and an unopened can of jade green house paint in the garage, I set to work. It shouldn’t have been difficult, but the brush kept leaving loose hairs that I couldn’t always tweeze off with my fingers. I finally solved the problem by tossing the brush away and dipping each coat hanger directly into the paint can, first one end, then the other, counting on the two tides of green to ooze together in the middle. I had planned to give twelve of these to my mother, but by the time I had finished eight, most of the paint seemed to be on the garage floor and myself. I don’t know how it had managed to soak into my shirt and shoes, but since I had sneaked a pee in the bushes, there was tell-tale green on my fly, with maybe a more disconcerting condition behind it. I tried cleaning my hands with the garden hose, but water didn’t help, and neither did soap. Beginning to suspect I was in trouble, but hoping to pass it off as a joke, I romped indoors. Ida, our cook, did not return my grin when she saw those sticky jade tracks on her kitchen floor. Her own heavy footfall sounded through the house as she went to summon my father. “Oh, God,” he groaned, when he saw the garage. “Like a massacre! Only green!”

  I knew from past experience what his displeasure could mean. He had spanked me for no worse cause than kicking Sharlie in the stomach, so he would probably cut my head off for this. To my surprise, however, he tried an approach that was radically different. Talking reasonably, he located a tin of turpentine, and cleaned me up. Shoes, shirt, and corduroys were hidden in a trash can, and the wide puddles of paint swept thin with a broom until they all blended together. We would have, he said, the first jade green garage floor in Los Angeles.

  He did not tell my mother. At dinner, that night, she noticed a faint hovering of turpentine, but he claimed not to smell anything, and gave me a wink. The secret we shared did not immediately revolutionize our relationship—I continued to resist when he tried to teach me fractions, and he still pressed for the last word in any argument. All the same, it was the beginning of trust between us. Conversations began happening, and I found he often had good solutions when I went to him with a problem. Perhaps this could have developed into the kind of rapport that binds father and son forever, but in my fifteenth year, I plunged as if programmed into a life too secret to share with him.

  “—the letters he’d dictate to his own kids always sounded like business correspondence,” Sharlie was telling the lawyer. She got laughing, and Noo filled in: “—even ending them, ‘I remain, yours sincerely—’”

  She started laughing too, and Sharlie picked it up again. “Signed them with his first name and middle initial. Dean B. And that’s what we came to ca
ll him, once we were old enough to think ‘Daddy’ sounded babyish—”

  My sisters kept topping each other with memories of him, and even Alberta paused by the swinging door to share a story. It was she who had given him the will to live after my mother’s passing; had babied him, bolstered him, sometimes even bossed him. Plump, brown, richly maternal, she seemed to number him among her children, and the open affection between them had discouraged the ladies who had hoped to find in him a brief, but profitable, alternative to widowhood. The resultant gossip had been astonishing to both of them. “But he just say, ‘Alberta, considerin’ my years, it’s a damn fine compliment!’”

  I sat silent during these reminiscences, only beginning to realize I had been so involved in keeping Dean B. from knowing about me, I hadn’t really gotten around to knowing him.

  And yet he leapt to life, suddenly and with a pang, whenever I came across something that had been peculiarly his. Just before lunch, I had glanced into his office, and my mind automatically filled him in at his old roll-top desk. Heedless of his retirement, he had worked there every day in deep concentration, his glasses swinging open-bowed from the cord around his neck, his shirt pocket spotted with dots of ink from his ballpoint pen, his index finger encircled by a rubber band to remind him of some task. “Such as what?” I asked.

  “Maybe to pray for a shred of intelligence in the White House,” he replied. He might have been kidding. I could not always tell.

  It was in his study, surrounded by charts, graphs, and stacked issues of the Wall Street Journal, that he was most at home. “Won’t you step into the office?” he would say, an invitation offered so frequently that his grandsons could steal a laugh by mimicking it. Sooner or later each day, almost everyone in the family pulled a chair up to his desk to confer with him. Neighbors too, or students from the nearby campus. Even workmen on the premises. They were likely to call him by his first name, believing Dean to be his position at the college. The man who delivered the bottled water once told me about stopping by for payment due, “—and the old dean gets me to set down for a cup of coffee with him. Before I know it, I’m tellin’ him about my trouble with the supervisor, and he’s givin’ me advice on how I can handle it. I try it too, and it works fine.” He wagged his head, and winked at me. “No offense, y’know, but your dad was a real character!”

  Others thought so too, though not always in a kindly way. His views, while benignly offered, were too frequently controversial. Inflation, for instance. No one else seemed to see it as a coming threat in the mid-Thirties, when he began teaching a business seminar at Rollins College. Even his colleagues thought his warning absurd. His prophecies of the black revolution and women’s liberation appeared to be equally far-out, and at least once a semester, some student was likely to quit his class, calling him a damn Red. Almost as alarming to many was his adherence to Christian Science, which had, to his satisfaction, healed him of the incipient blindness that had forced him to leave Yale. Butting against the accepted limitations occupied him even in the family: he enrolled Sharlie in a course of investment at USC when she was only thirteen, taught us to type at the same time we were learning to write, and astounded us with the facts of life while most of the children we knew were still of the stork persuasion.

  His revelation that sexual intercourse had a practical purpose came as a surprise to me. When I had inadvertently stumbled upon it at the age of five, I thought this interesting game was something I had personally invented, and somehow I liked it better without his explanation. More often now, I began evading his elucidation; for instance, when I was twelve and leafing through the family album. The tintype of a brooding young man caught my eye, and to my astonishment, my own name was written underneath. There had been a string of Jesse Greggs in our family over the past two hundred years, earnest deacons and merchants; but this namesake was different. He had thick black hair and a mustache like the actor who shot Lincoln. Something in his eyes searched through me, sending a sensation spangling up my spine, and I didn’t want to ruin it with a reason.

  As I grew up, I kept going back to the album to sneak another look at him, but only when I was fourteen, did I ask about him. “Don’t know too much,” my father said. “I believe he left home and was never heard of again.”

  “Why’d he leave home?”

  “Probably afraid he would disgrace the family,” he replied. “He was homosexual, I seem to have heard. Poor son of a bitch!”

  My father’s use of profanity was always startling. Sharlie said he only cussed so other men wouldn’t think he was a prude. I don’t believe he actually was a bluenose, although he was clearly in favor of the old morality. He had stayed a virgin until he married, for instance, and vainly recommended that I do the same. It was probably in the army that he had learned to camouflage his high moral standard with low jargon. “What do you mean, why?” he would demand, when I challenged his reasons for following the narrow path. “It’s as plain as the nuts on a dog!”

  None the less, I grew up feeling the weight of his values. I knew I wasn’t going to live up to them, and wanted to avoid disappointing him when he found out. The dread of some occurrence that might expose me to him and my mother created a constant tension, a continuing need to lie. The temptation to follow the earlier Jesse and leave home grew stronger, and at last, I too fled.

  Unlike my forerunner, however, I didn’t disappear. I was a discreet and good son by mail, and on holidays, my parents visited me, or I came to see them. Once, after the family hadmoved away from California, we had an opportunity to return there and spend August together. One of my television plays had caught the eye of a film director, and coincidentally, an aunt who wanted to travel, offered my parents her sprawling adobe house on the edge of the arroyo in Brentwood. The set-up seemed perfect for a reunion.

  The other Jess Gregg

  It should have worked. The skies were clear, the avocado trees were heavy with fruit, and on Sundays I let my father think he was teaching me how to play golf. I was careful, and kept my private life out of sight; discouraged phone calls from new friends, and although I occasionally brought one of them home late at night, I never took them into the house. A driveway lined with fir trees was ideal for my purpose, and the front seat of a car is a tradition in West Coast coupling. August was nearly over when I met a good-looking kid named Rick at an after-the-bar party, and around four in the morning, we drove into my dark driveway and parked. How long we had been there I don’t know, but suddenly both of us were aware of the glimmer of a flashlight coming down the driveway toward us. Half-naked, Rick ducked to the floor of the car, and I thrust my head out the window. “Who’s that?”

  The quiet voice could have belonged to no one else. “Dean B.”

  “Well, don’t come any nearer,” I warned sharply.

  He faltered, but kept coming, and I lost my cool entirely. “Will you for Christ’s sake go away!” I cried.

  This time he stopped. Then, without a word, he turned and went back into the house.

  I drove Rick back to where he lived, and when I returned home, no one was stirring. It was getting to be daylight. Too uneasy to sleep now, I showered, changed clothes, and drove into Hollywood, dawdling over my coffee at a counter until it was time to report to my director. My mind was not on our story that day, and when I returned home after lunch, it was with the feeling that this time the showdown was inevitable. Dean B. was not around, but my mother was sitting on the terrace, and she spoke reproachfully. “There was no point in being so rude to your dad last night,” she said.

  “Well, why was he checking up on me?” I demanded hotly.

  “But he wasn’t,” she defended. “He heard you drive up very late, and when you didn’t come in the house, he finally began to worry you were ill—” I gave her an impatient look. “Well, it does happen,” she said. “People drink too much at parties, and get sick. Even pass out.”

  I said, as if pushed too far, “I had a girl out there!”

  She
went silent, but I could tell she believed me—my excuse probably resembled all those explanations she gave herself: a son so crazy about girls, he simply couldn’t decide to settle down and marry. “Well,” she said abruptly, “just leave this to me, I’ll see what I can do.”

  She was an engaging woman, with dark sympathetic eyes and prematurely white hair. No one ever tried very hard to resist her, my father least of all. She had patched up and smoothed over our tensions before, and she did so now. There were no further references to the driveway incident, and by September, when I headed back to New York, Dean B. and I appeared to be quite relaxed with each other. All the same, I don’t think the breach ever really healed. Even when we joked, after that, some unspecified cross-purpose seemed to be right under the surface. My mother doubled her efforts to keep it from ever bursting back into view; but the time came when she was no longer there.

  Maybe I thought a renewed understanding could still happen, because I continued going home every year at Christmas, and kept in touch with bright, carefully misrepresentative letters. On Thanksgiving, I telephoned as usual, but only Alberta was home. It would be a lively day for him, she told me—he was hosting a dinner for twelve at noon, and at five o’clock, going to the christening of a new great-granddaughter. In the meantime, he was at church, Thanksgiving being his favorite service. In his denomination, the last twenty minutes are given over to the members for brief expressions of gratitude, and Dean B., the last to get up, spoke eloquently about what life had given him. “Thank you, God,” he concluded, and sat down. Only when he failed to rise for the final hymn a few moments later did anyone realize he was gone.