by M. E. Kerr
“Here’s Electra again, A.J.,” my father said.
“A.J.? I want you to call me Electra. You don’t have to call me ‘Mother.’ ”
“Okay.”
“Everyone’s going to carry a small bunch of dandelions,” she said. “I’ve always been partial to dandelions, and your father’s promised to hunt down thousands and thousands of dandelions to pass around at the reception. They’ll be my wedding bouquet, too. Imagine dandelions in the desert!”
Then my father said, “You’ll go back the night of the fourteenth, A.J. Don’t worry about anyone finding out who you are, you won’t stay for the reception. You’ll just wing it out for the private ceremony and then back to obscurity.” He laughed.
“That suits me fine,” I said.
“Maybe you’d better ask Billie Kay to pick out the earrings for you. I don’t want you to buy something crappy.”
“Is Billie Kay coming to the wedding?”
“Why should she? It’s private. She can come to the reception. Everyone is invited to the reception,” he said. “After all, a man only gets married once . . . or twice . . . or three times.” He laughed so hard he had a short coughing fit. Then he said, “See you, A.J. Call me if you need anything.”
I hung up when I heard the dial tone. For a while I sat staring at the sweet potato plant. I was remembering what Brenda Belle had said about beautiful things changing after a while . . . and I was wondering how long the glow would last between my father and Electric Socket.
I didn’t want him to marry her, not because it probably wouldn’t last, and not because I was particularly interested in my father’s happiness. It was something else; it was the snide cracks in columns about the women he dated, and it was a cartoon a Washington paper had once printed. In the cartoon my father was at a conference table with some U.N. dignitaries. There was a balloon over his head, and inside it were all these naked females, young and big-busted: the types he dated. The balloon was supposed to represent what he was thinking while he was at the conference. He was wearing a tie pin with the initials D.O.M. (for Dirty Old Man), and the cartoon was captioned, “In the Spring an Old Man’s Fancy Lightly Turns from Thoughts of Peace.’”
I know my father laughed at things like that. “A.J.,” he always said of the press, “the day they don’t have it in for me, I don’t have it anymore.”
But things like that always bothered me. I had these long daydreams in which my mother was still alive . . . or if I felt that was asking too much, there was a stepmother, a woman with graying hair and a very poised and dignified facade . . . and we all lived together and were photographed coming out of church, or enjoying a family outing in some national park, feeding deer or roasting marshmallows over an open fire. Sometimes we ate dinner out (not in a nightclub) and other times my father carved a Thanksgiving turkey, and the table was filled with just ordinary relatives like Grandpa Blessing.
I knew my father had earned the right to behave any way he wanted, and I hadn’t even earned the right to criticize him, but I could never understand his taste in women. I asked him once why he never liked the brainy types, and his answer was, “A.J., I have a very large library available for mental stimulation.”
“He’s just a man,” Billie Kay used to say during her darkest moments with him. “I’ve got to get that through my head.”
My grandfather was still asleep after I’d dressed and made myself a breakfast I couldn’t finish. I put on my coat and began walking around Storm until it got light out.
What I was doing was what psychologists call “displacing”—concentrating hard on another problem to make the real problem less important. (I’ve seen several psychologists, mostly those employed by schools to help solve students’ problems.) I was putting most of my attention on the forthcoming Valentine dance, muttering to myself over the fact I’d miss it because I’d be on the coast. At Storm High, the Valentine dance was traditionally a masquerade ball. Everyone came as a famous lover, and they all wore masks.
The mask idea really appealed to me, because Christine Cutler really appealed to me, and I’d been wearing a variety of invisible masks ever since New Year’s Day. In one, I was Brenda Belle’s boyfriend, playing the role to the hilt, hoping to make Christine jealous. In another, I was this dark and brooding fellow who passed her in the halls without looking at her, pretending to be too deep in thought to notice her. In still another, I was her secret admirer, watching her every move, standing near her in the shadows, exchanging these looks with her. That mask was the one she seemed to respond to the most. . . . I had envisioned myself stepping forward from the shadows at the Valentine dance.
I’d intended to go as the Shropshire Lad of Housman’s poems, the one who’d been to Ludlow fair and left his necktie God knows where, and who’d heard a wise man say when he was one-and-twenty, “Give crowns and pounds and guineas, But not your heart away. . . .”
Housman was my favorite poet. I knew a lot of A Shropshire Lad from memory. My father said that Housman wasn’t deep (my father preferred poets like Milton, Pope, Spender and Auden), but I believe he just didn’t have enough heart for A. E. Housman. My father was the type who’d consider the Shropshire Lad a loser.
With all hopes of attending the dance crushed, I felt this wave of fatigue coming over me as I walked around Storm. Like I said, I was displacing, thinking only of the dance and pushing from my mind the other things: my father’s forthcoming marriage to Electric Socket, the old familiar down direction my school marks were heading in—the old familiar feeling of wanting to give up. When daylight came, I thought of going back to my grandfather’s and sleeping through the day. Instead, I wound up at school and talked myself into staying awake.
I had a tendency toward narcolepsy. I never knew the word for it until my father told me about this famous senator who suffers from it. He falls asleep very suddenly, driving a car, eating dinner in a restaurant, during meetings, and particularly on the Senate floor. To combat it, he has to take pep-up pills constantly, so that he’s often high and talkative and rowdy. There are rumors that he drinks, though he never touches a drop, and there are stories of his explosive temper and his restless inattentiveness during Senate proceedings. My father said when he’s off the pills, he tries to stay awake by reciting isms: Communism, feudalism, paganism, masochism, et cetera.
I used to sleep away all my free time when I was attending private schools, and I often slept during class. Whenever the going got rough, I got sleepy. (“What is it you can’t face?” one of the school psychologists had asked me once. “Why, being awake, I guess,” I smirked. I got four demerits for that fast answer.) After my father told me about the Senator, I tried to keep myself awake reciting ations: sedation, nation, ration, conversation, et cetera.
For a while as I sat by the school that morning, I was going at a good clip: decimation, condemnation, deflation, cancellation, complication, aspiration, combination, gyration, on and on, and all the while I spent my time at that, it completely escaped my memory that I was supposed to have a poem which would depict “poignancy” ready for English.
Before I even got to English, there was my visit with the principal of Storm High.
“Sit down, Adam,” he said, “I want to have a talk with you.”
I sat across from his desk in a large leather chair. I sometimes think heads of schools all over the United States buy the large leather chairs across from their desks from the same place. They are all alike. The reason I have found myself sitting in one of them is never very different, either.
The principal’s name was Mr. Baird. I’d met him only once before, on my first day in that school.
“What’s the matter, sir?” I said.
“You tell me, Adam. Why are you failing three subjects? You’re failing History, Math and Science.”
“I seem to block on tests,” I said. I remembered another school psychologist telling me I was afraid to be tested, afraid I’d never measure up to my father.
“Adam,
” Mr. Baird said, “I know you haven’t been with us very long, but would you say you’re happy here in Storm?”
“I don’t know, sir. I’m not unhappy, I don’t think.” It was going to happen again, I thought; it was beginning in the same old familiar way.
“Why have you been late getting to school?” he said. “I can understand oversleeping occasionally, but you have a total of nine lates with that excuse, all of them in three weeks’ time.”
“I don’t have a good reason, I guess,” I said. I remembered a story Billie Kay used to tell me about the movie star, Marilyn Monroe. Before she was famous, her name was Norma Jean Mortenson. She’d been this orphan child nobody’d ever wanted. After she became an important actress, she’d purposely take these long baths while everyone was waiting for her. She’d sit in the tub telling herself she was giving Norma Jean a treat: the whole world would have to wait for the little orphan kid nobody’d ever wanted.
I’d never purposely set out to make anyone wait for me, or been late on purpose, but I liked the story. I sat there distracting myself by thinking about it, because I had an idea what was coming. At one school they’d actually asked me to turn in my athletic sweater, because only graduates could own one.
I’d left this smelly purple-and-white sweater with holes under the arms on the headmaster’s desk, as though I were surrendering an honor once bestowed on me and then rescinded.
“Adam,” said Mr. Baird, “I wonder if it’s working out, or if it isn’t?”
“You don’t think it’s working out.”
“Do you?”
“You want me to say it isn’t, so you can say I should leave, or not return after Easter vacation. Isn’t that right?”
He sighed. “Your father’s asking a lot of you. You are who you are, Adam. You can’t change that fact by changing your last name.”
“My father didn’t ask it of me. I asked it of me.”
“You’ll have to show some improvement, Adam.”
“I will,” I said. “Don’t worry, I will.”
“There’s something else.”
“What else?” I said.
“Dr. Cutler feels you’re interested in Christine.”
“In Christine?” I pretended to be dumbfounded at the idea.
“He says you’ve called her and you’ve been by the Cutlers’.”
“Not lately,” I said.
“And you haven’t called lately without saying anything when she answered the phone?”
Twice. I’d done that exactly twice. I’d heard her say “Hello” and then I’d clammed up. Maybe I’d never intended to say anything. I don’t know. I’d dialed her number once after flunking the History test, and once one Saturday night after I had been over at Brenda Belle’s and she was rattling on about Ty Hardin. . . . I knew Christine knew that it was me. I knew Christine was as aware of me as I was of her.
“Why would I do that?” I asked.
Mr. Baird shook his head. “I don’t know why you would, either. Maybe Dr. Cutler is making something out of nothing. He has no love for Charlie and that feeling may extend to you.”
“What exactly happened between them?” I asked.
Mr. Baird said, “Whatever happened between them is something probably only they know. Feuds are like that. There are rumors and versions and the real truth is obscured. I don’t know what happened between them. Ask your grandfather what happened between them.”
“I have,” I said. “He said Dr. Cutler stole his business from him.” My grandfather had never said that outright; Marlon Fredenberg had said that. I was testing to see what I could find out.
Mr. Baird just shrugged. “Well then.” He leaned back in his chair. “Adam, the point is I can’t tell Dr. Cutler anything about your background when he asks me. I have to pretend I don’t know that much about you. . . .You can see why Dr. Cutler doesn’t encourage your interest in Christine.”
“Why does he have to know who my father is?” I said.
“He’s got a right to know something about you.”
“I see,” I said.
“Do you?”
“Yes,” I said, “I see.”
“That’s what I meant when I said this situation is asking a lot of you. It may be the reason you’re having trouble.”
“Either way,” I said, “I’d probably be having trouble.”
“What?” he said.
“I said I won’t be any more trouble.”
“I hope not,” he said.
I was late getting to English. I saw Christine sitting in the front row. She gave me this look, the same kind of look I’d been giving her and she’d been giving me for weeks now. It was one of those long looks that cries out for words which you could probably never say if you knew the right words, anyway. You certainly couldn’t say them in front of someone’s locker, or passing someone in the hall, or sitting in Corps Drugs over Cokes. She knew about the look and so did I, but every time we were close enough to talk, we didn’t look at each other and we said stupid things, like the day she said, “Stop staring at me, you’re always staring at me,” and I said, “You must be staring back to know I’m always staring at you.”
Another time I’d said, “Tell your father Billie Kay Case doesn’t think I’m an unknown quantity,” and she’d said, “A lot of people don’t believe that was really Billie Kay Case, Adam.”
We didn’t have conversations, just fragments of conversations. What we had were these long looks between us.
As I was walking back to my seat, Miss Netzer said, “Don’t bother to sit down yet, Adam. Since you’re the last to arrive, you can be the first to recite.”
“Recite?” I said.
“The poem you chose to depict poignancy,” she said. “Step up in front of the class, Adam.”
I had to do some fast thinking, since I had nothing prepared. I remembered the poem from A Shropshire Lad which I’d blocked on during that test at Choate. I knew it by heart, and I supposed it expressed poignancy as well as any other.
I put down my books on my desk and went to the front of the room.
“It’s a poem by A. E. Housman. It’s called ‘The New Mistress.’ ”
“Proceed,” she said.
I didn’t want to look in Christine’s direction. I saw Brenda Belle sitting in the second row, and I concentrated on her.
Then I began:
Oh, sick I am to see you, will you never let me be?
You may be good for something but you are not good for me.
Oh, go where you are wanted, for you are not wanted here.
And that was all . . .
And that was all; that was exactly where I had blocked during the test at Choate, and exactly the point where I began to laugh as I stood before Miss Netzer’s class.
I just laughed, first in small spurts with a few words in between and then in great gales until I was shaking and holding myself, laughing so hard it was like crying.
I think what triggered it was the expression on Brenda Belle’s face, a slow, crumbling look of sadness and disbelief, and I suddenly realized she thought I was giving her a message. But I was not really laughing because she had misunderstood and I had hurt her: I was laughing at the messes we get ourselves into, at the sheer craziness that exists, at the victims we become, all of us.
“Adam? ADAM!” I heard Miss Netzer trying to get my attention. I heard her rap the desk with her ruler. But I couldn’t stop.
“Sit down!” I heard. “Adam, sit down!”
But I was loose and convulsed, and by that time very far away from that English class and everyone in it. My mind was racing compulsively, flashing pictures at me: pictures of myself packing my bags while the other boys went on to their classes, arriving at airports where my father waited with a new game plan etched in his eyes, a new school catalog for me to look through. . . . I saw our home in Virginia, where the housekeeper would serve me nightly as I sat by myself in the large dining room at the long oak table; I saw my father getting out of a he
licopter on the White House lawn while I watched him on the boob tube miles away; I saw that Polaroid picture of my mother and my father and me with our faces missing; and I saw a wedding in the desert filled with dandelions while Electric Socket “went” “I will care for you but not crowd you,” and my father “went” “I will care for you but not crowd you—”
“Leave the room immediately, Adam!” Miss Netzer had me by my arm.
Then I was out in the hall.
“Adam Blessing, is anything wrong?”
I turned around to see who it was, and beheld a tender, smiling face, a bright clean flower-splotched dress in blue and yellow, a vision: It was Ella Early, her gray hair freed from the bun and newly curled; Ella Early, soft-toned and minus chalk dust . . . Ella Late Who Has No Fate, transformed and shining with Nothing Power.
Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.
“Better a quiet death,” my mother is fond of saying, “than a public humiliation.”
I experienced both after Adam recited that poem in English while looking straight at me. In fact, I died quietly several times, and the most painful of all my deaths was when Christine Cutler turned around in her seat and smirked at me.
After that, I carried a quotation in my wallet which I had copied from an essay by William Hazlitt: “Love turns, with a little indulgence, to indifference or disgust; hatred alone is immortal.” Under the quotation, I wrote: My attitude re: C.C.
My mother says always have on nice underwear in case you are in an accident; if I was in an accident, I wanted it on record that I hated Christine Cutler.
It was five days before I could bring myself to speak to Adam. He finally cornered me one afternoon when I was on my way to gym.
“You have to speak to me,” he said. “I’m in enough trouble without you giving me the Silent Treatment.”
“Don’t tell me your troubles!” I said. “I am a laughingstock.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It wasn’t intentional; it had nothing to do with you.”
“Tell that to Ty Hardin,” I said. “Do you know what he calls me? He calls me Sick I Am To See You.”