by M. E. Kerr
My grandfather took a swallow from his can of beer (he’s given up spritzers and ascots, and he’s back to falling asleep nights with all his clothes on). He said, “I told them I’d attend to it.” He was munching on a piece of bacon and making a new sign: New England Clam Chowder, 40¢ A Bowl! “But I didn’t tell them when,” he snorted.
Janice was trying to avoid Billie Kay, who was trying to catch her so she could pet her and play her idea of a tickle game with the cat. Janice always made it over the garden wall before Billie Kay could grab her collar.
“They’ll catch up with us one day,” said Billie Kay.
“So will the undertaker and the gravedigger,” said my grandfather. “I have no past and no future, just today. I intend to enjoy today!”
“That reminds me of something from Christopher Fry’s The Dark Is Light Enough,” said Billie Kay. “It goes: ‘If we could make each morning with no memory Of living before we went to sleep, we might Arrive at a faultless day. . . .’ ”
“Speaking of fry,” said my grandfather, “we ought to think about adding fish fries.”
“Who’s going to buy ice cream in a place smelling of fish?” I said. I was sitting there finishing a plate of scrambled eggs and trying to read a letter from Brenda Belle.
“He’s got a point, Charlie,” Billie Kay said.
“I’m not taking the advice of anyone who isn’t even bothering to finish high school,” my grandfather answered.
It was another nudge stemming from my unwillingness to make up my mind whether or not I’d enroll in summer school out here. I’d have to, if I wanted to enter junior year in Hollywood High. We’d talked about it a lot: the idea of me working in the Boat and attending high school. My grandfather was always making cracks about living with a dummy who’d probably have to go to body-fender repair school one day to learn a trade.
I wasn’t in the mood to argue the point this morning, or go into the matter at any length. I read Brenda Belle’s letter with a mixture of curiosity and removal. I was still close enough to Storm to be interested in the gossip, but in another way I was light-years from that period in my life.
I had thought, when I first moved in with my grandfather out here, that I would worm from him the exact truth concerning my father and mother, and my mother’s accident. There are still many pieces to the puzzle which I haven’t fit into place. I know that my mother didn’t love him when she married him, that having me didn’t make her love him any more, and that she ultimately ran off and left me with him. I know that she was killed in the automobile accident on her way out of Storm . . . Did my grandfather kick her out when she showed up there? . . . Was she leaving Storm because my father was on his way to bring her back? They are unanswered questions, and the few efforts I made at posing them brought defeated sighs from my grandfather, and painful “I don’t want to talk about it” responses.
Maybe Christopher Fry is right: We should wake each morning with no memory of living before we went to sleep; maybe it is just best to get on with things—I don’t know. I do know that if the answers to my existence are rooted in my mother’s existence, then hers are rooted in my grandfather’s and his are rooted in my great-grandfather’s, on and on . . . on and on. And I would have to trace back the whole history on my father’s side . . . and when I was ancient and awaiting the undertaker and the gravedigger, I might finally have all the answers and the exact truth.
But I have my own life to live, and I want to start. I have people to meet who will have nothing to do with my father or my mother, and places to see where things will happen solely to me.
This morning I thought all this through again, and I thought a lot about my father. I see him in another, softer light . . . not because he’s become any softer (he hasn’t), but because I appreciate now why he never drops his guard, or trusts, or lets himself become too seriously involved with anyone. . . . It is possible that all the hurt has made him so good at what he does; it is equally possible that such a man is only good at what he does, and not good at all at the things most men do easily. The only thing I’m really sure about where my father is concerned is that he’s different. Special, you might say. An extraordinary man.
This afternoon when my father telephoned, I was ready for him. He was calling from Paris. He’s going to be there awhile, then on to Russia, India and China. He’s dating a chanteuse named Huguette. (“Not You-get, A.J.,” he told me when I talked with him last week. “If you pronounce her name You-get, you get nothing—ha-ha! It’s Oo-get.”)
“Have you decided whether you want to join me this summer, A.J.?”
“Yes.”
“Well for God’s sake, out with it!” he barked. “I’m not in Santa Monica.”
“I’m coming,” I said.
My father isn’t big in the world of elated responses. Maybe the announcement that I am joining him didn’t leave him particularly elated. No reason why it should. It’s enough that he asked me.
“I’ll make arrangements,” he said.
“I’ll be ready to leave June first.”
“Don’t pack a lot of stuff. We’ll travel light.”
“That suits me fine,” I said.
One day, no doubt, I will find myself enrolled in yet another school. It might even be a body-fender repair school, as my grandfather threatens—there’s just no telling. In the meantime, I am not going to sweat it.
We’ll travel light—I like that. I’m not ready for anything heavy. I want to start out slow and easy while I get used to a few things . . . like all the advantages of being the son of someone famous. That’s just a part of being me. But not the biggest part. I know that now.
Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.
Some of you would probably imagine that a happy ending to my story would be an announcement that my voice had risen several pitches and that I no longer have any fuzz on my upper lip.
As my Aunt Faith would say, that is an untruth.
But there are those among you, I know, who will perceive the fact that I am not ending on an unhappy note, when I tell you that I’ll be singing alto-bordering-on-bass in the Storm High graduation choir, and that I am now into celebrating my fuzz, wherever it appears: lip, underarms, legs. I have gone natural.
“Brenda Belle,” my mother tells me, “you should spend a little more time on your grooming, particularly if you plan to visit Adam out in California this summer.” My mother is a big hit at our local beauty parlor, where she sits under the drier holding forth on the subject of Adam and his father. She enlarges on things as she goes along, though her natural survival instinct keeps her from involving Dr. Cutler in any way. The past improves, they say . . . and her opinion of Adam is now at its highest point since she and Aunt Faith first viewed Adam as “that poor kid living down there with old Charlie.”
“Mother,” I tell her, “I’m not sure Hollywood is my style right now. I may not go out there. Tinsel Town is not a very natural place.”
“Neither is Hogg’s Swamp a very natural place for a young girl to spend her time with a boy,” my mother answers.
“With a boy like Milton Merrensky, it is,” I reply.
“What do you do down there?” she asks, and never tires of asking.
“We practice birdcalls, for one thing,” I tell her. “Do you want to hear a whippoorwill?”
“Not again, Brenda Belle! Please!”
I don’t blame her. I am awful at whippoorwills, I have discovered. But I can do a mean male chaffinch, and a dandy tooth-billed bowerbird.
“Do Christine Cutler and Peter Pepper ever go to Hogg’s Swamp?” my mother asks.
“Never!”
“Or Ty Hardin and Diane Wattley?”
“They’re too busy with lovers’ quarrels.”
“Marlon Fredenberg and Marilyn Pepper?”
“They never leave the back seat of his old Chevy.”
“Oh dear,” my mother moans softly to herself, “oh dear, oh dear,” a familiar exclamation from my mother these days, about
a lot of things, from the fact I refuse to throw out the smelly sweet potato plant I rescued from Dr. Blessing’s house (I am inventing a charcoal filter to eliminate the odor) to the fact that his house was sold to a religious commune of young people called “Christ’s Stormtroopers.”
I have learned a lot of things since Adam first appeared in Storm. Most of them I keep to myself, like the true story of Christine’s father and Adam’s mother. I see him around Storm, sometimes, and seeing him gives me a new calm. If that docile little man with a bald head and spectacles can star in a romantic drama which anyone would care to still whisper about years hence, then there is no trick to this romance business. For all I ever knew about people before all this happened, there were duels fought at dawn over Ella Early, and Rufus Kerin fathered famous princes in secret.
The thing is, you just can’t tell about people, even when you think you know everything there is to know about them.
Take Milton Merrensky, for example. He isn’t shy at all. He just doesn’t have a lot to say, because very few people discuss the things that interest him. How many people in Storm, Vermont, even care that courtship feeding is a feature of the precopulatory behavior of most finches, or that turkeys blush? How many people in the whole world can imitate the nesting call of the violet-eared waxbill? Milton Merrensky can.
I am beginning to see past The Pillars and Corps Drugs, and all the tacky and familiar facades of Storm, to other worlds within my own world, where minute creatures thrive, and plant life I had never known existed grows and changes with the season. . . . I see, too, the world beyond my world, Australia, for example, where megapodes build mounds ten feet high around their egg chambers; and the forests of Central America, where the marbled wood quails sing duets.
“Milton Merrensky!” my mother sighs. “I wouldn’t be interested in him for a boyfriend.”
“He wouldn’t be interested in you for a girlfriend, either,” I answer, though Milton has often remarked favorably on my mother’s striking resemblance to a great crested grebe, known for its violent headshaking in courtship ceremonies.
“Brenda Belle,” my mother says, “I’m not criticizing you. But I have this feeling, this very definite feeling that you are slipping away from the crowd—that you are losing interest in the things other girls in Storm care about.”
This time I think my mother’s right.
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