Grist Mill Road

by Christopher J. Yates

  The plan was trickle-down, political empire-building that began with paterfamilias Joe as the capstone of the political pyramid. Next down would come his two fine sons, Sean and Patrick. And after that, his sons would bear grandsons who would also be nudged along the same glittering path. Breed and repeat, breed and repeat, a plan for the ages.

  I was five years old when I was presented with my first suit, bought for neither a wedding nor a funeral, but on the occasion of the seventieth birthday of Mrs. Effilinda Scott, a nonrelative but a party grandee and something of a local kingmaker. And wow, you should have seen us, Sean and Patrick in matching blue gabardine. Cute as hell!

  Along with the suit came a series of important lessons from my father. Soon my cocktail-sausage fingers had learned how to tie my tie and tuck my shirt and part my hair. Dad showed me how to roll up my shirtsleeves, reminding me as he did, We want to look like we’re doers, not bankers or playboys. When we take off our jackets, we roll up our sleeves and get on with things, right?

  Dad also gave lessons in glad-handing, oration and debate. Plus guidance on how to treat friends and spot enemies. At weekends we handed out buttons, waved pennants and allowed ladies even older than Effilinda to maul us with their grabby hands. I lost count of the endless hours we spent playing with kids we didn’t really want to play with at various fund-raisers, rallies and potlucks.

  Whenever we stood on a platform or walked through town together, it was in a formation that had been drilled into us—Mom on Dad’s right, my brother first on his left and then me. When I complained one time about being on the outside, it was explained that it was all about height order, a family triangle with Dad at the apex, and if I ate my greens and grew taller than my brother, I would take his place.

  I think I was the only kid at Roseborn Elementary who actually liked the taste of broccoli.

  The execution of the plan should have been perfectly straightforward, a timeworn march into power. Sean and I would both go to good colleges and then on to law school. Next we might work in the Justice Department or on a congressional subcommittee, or clerk for the right judge, or become assistant district attorneys.

  I knew my chosen path in life long before I understood what it is an assistant district attorney actually does. At a young age, all I understood about my father’s work was that he kept the world safe from bad guys—I thought my dad was a superhero. And if this was my father’s dream for me then I wanted it too, I wanted it like hell.

  Only now the plan had gotten horribly bent out of shape, meaning that, 250 miles northeast of the seat he had earned by dint of his hard work and the power of his smile, my father had to start working all over again. Except this time around, the scheme would require one minor constitutional amendment.

  It remains one of my more vivid childhood memories, the moment I learned of my de-selection from The Kennedy Plan. I was sitting on the living room floor playing Pac-Man when I looked up and saw my brother in his suit for the first time in months. And then I noticed my father, also splendidly besuited, the two of them edging toward the front door. No explanation was needed—I’d been struck from the ballot paper for good, there being some question concerning my suitability for office. But in all fairness to my father, as he stepped out of the house, he did offer me a look of intense consolation, the sort of look you might give a toddler with a hearing aid, or a seven-year-old with only two weeks to live.

  Mom let me stay up later than usual that night to watch Dynasty. We lay in the recliner together, her filling me in on the internecine squabbles of the various characters. What I remember most about that show, for reasons that will become obvious, was the scene in which two attractive women, one blond, one brunette (Alexis Colby and Krystle Carrington), had a catfight in a lily pond. I stared wide-eyed at the TV as these vengeful beauties flailed at each other in the shallow waters of the pond, their expensive and low-cut gowns clinging to their numerous curves, the two of them splashing and whaling and sprawling. Yes, that was the moment, snuggled up against Mom’s left hip, that my body decided to present me with the very first erotic stirrings of my life. I couldn’t have been more horrified had a cat dropped a headless bird in my lap.

  I knew pretty much what it was, this stirring down below. For some time I’d heard boys my age talking of similar seismic activity. Jonny the Spin’s first erection had leaped unexpectedly from the flap of his pajamas almost two years earlier—in front of his grandmother, as he told it. So the shock I was experiencing wasn’t fear of the unknown. No, it was the mortifying thought that my mom might notice my interest piquing. Which meant that, while trying not to move a muscle, trying not even to breathe, at the same time I desperately wanted to leap out of the armchair and run up to my room.

  Thankfully, if she did notice, my mom didn’t say anything. The fight ended with stern words for both women delivered by a handsome gray-haired man (Blake Carrington). And as the show wound down, eventually so did my first ever erection.

  That night in bed, and with some success, I tried mentally to re-create the frisson I’d experienced during the lily pond scene, going over it again and again in my head. Blond, brunette. Brunette, blond. And it was a tough choice but before too long I’d come down firmly on the side of the brunette, an allegiance I suppose I’ve retained to this day.

  * * *

  DON’T ALL BOYS ASSUME THAT they’re clever? At least until some point in their lives? And although I wasn’t exactly top of the class, my grades at school were decent. I thought maybe I might be an intellectual late bloomer, just as I had been a late bloomer when it came to matters of puberty and height—the broccoli thing having never quite worked out. Plus, I’ve always been good at math. Numbers feel right to me. If I can quantify something, I feel I have a better chance of understanding it.

  But at fifteen years of age, two years after our move to Portland, I realized I wasn’t clever at all. No, worse than this, I was in fact stupid. This became rapidly and dazzlingly clear because, smarty-pants me, I had continued to believe all this time, as I had done my whole life, that my parents were blissfully and ceaselessly happy together.

  And they were not.

  When, one Sunday afternoon after church, they told me and my brother they were divorcing, the news totally scrambled my head. How could two people so clearly in love, my parents, be splitting up? I had never glimpsed so much as the shadow of a sign, not even for one second, that there was anything but an undying love between them.

  Later that day, speaking to my brother about this bolt from the blue, he laughed disbelievingly at me. Are you a dumbass or what? he said. They argue all the time, Patch, right in front of us. Especially since we mooh … And then in a rare display of sensitivity Sean put me in a headlock and gave me a noogie instead of finishing the sentence.

  It took about one microsecond of reflection to realize what my brother had said was patently true. My God, how could I have failed to notice? The information was all there being fed into me like data, only what came out the other end wasn’t just the wrong conclusion, it was a table lamp. A swordfish.

  When the day came for my father to move out, I’d been dreading the farewell scene for some time. It wasn’t that I couldn’t stomach the thought of him not living with us anymore. I could, the idea even held some appeal. It was the thought of the final exchange that made me feel queasy—the handshake, the hair ruffle, the words of wisdom from a man who was running away from us. Now you look after your mother, boys.

  It went as badly as I’d feared. Then it got worse, because when he wound down the window of his car to wave one last goodbye, my father looked me square in the eyes. He didn’t actually say anything but I could hear the words in my head as clearly as if he’d spoken them out loud. This is all your fault, Paddyboy.

  And then, following an almost respectful period of solo divorcéhood, my father went and found himself a better family—or that’s how I viewed events at the time—a shrewd move, it must be said, because in 1986 my father, by then marri
ed to a petite blonde, a tragic widow named Carla, with two sweet blond daughters, Marcy and Steph, was elected to the Maine House of Representatives, 120th district. His wife bore him a son, Joe Junior. I baked him pound cake.

  The cake was supposed to be a peace offering on my part, an apology for bringing shame on our family and a congratulations to my dad for his new, more successful life—although I’m sure to my father the act of baking was nothing more than further confirmation that I had never been cut out for a role in The Kennedy Plan. Anyway, I would never have cooked the thing had I known at the time what my brother told me in a bar many years later, that my father had in fact first met Carla all the way back in 1976—at the Democratic National Convention in New York City, at which time Carla’s husband was very much alive. Apparently, shortly after the party nominated Jimmy Carter for president, my father and Carla made their way to a midtown hotel, where I imagine they discussed Ford v. Carter at great length.

  For the next six years Dad and Carla continued their affair at various political functions across the Northeast—a meeting of minds, my father told Sean, my mom never having been the world’s most enthusiastic party foot soldier—until, with his seat in New York seemingly lost, wouldn’t you know it, we upped sticks and moved to a house less than a mile from the home of my father’s mistress.

  But for almost seventeen years I would continue to believe that the reason for our move, and my parents’ subsequent divorce, was all because of something I’d done—or hadn’t done, I suppose you could say.

  * * *

  MOM WAS ADAMANT THAT SHE didn’t want her boys moving school again, so we stayed put in our neat house, a family home fit for a modest politician on the rise. Wanting to avoid the black mark of a messy divorce, mainly for the sake of my father’s political ambitions, my parents agreed financial arrangements between them without resorting to a court. But either Mom was too sheepish to ask for much, or Dad was too skilled a negotiator to offer a comfortable monthly sum, which meant that, struggling to pay the mortgage and bills on a house slightly larger than we needed, my now-single mother had to find work. And so, having nothing recent or of note on her résumé other than homemaker, she took various cleaning jobs in private homes and dental practices, car dealerships and real estate offices. And when she wasn’t cleaning, even if she was at home around dinnertime, she was always too tired to prepare food, so instead of home-cooked meals, we ate sterile TV dinners from segmented foil trays. One day my brother, his Salisbury steak only half-eaten, dropped his tray to the floor and said, Mom, this crap tastes like death.

  Grateful for my brother’s bluntness, I was about to toss my tray as well when I saw that Mom had started to cry.

  I cooked my first ever meal the next day from a recipe I found on the side of a pasta box. Our mom still gave us an allowance, even though she never had anything to spend on herself, and so I had enough money to buy vegetables, canned tomatoes and ricotta. We already had some ground beef in the freezer and although I couldn’t afford Parmesan and mozzarella, I knew there was some waxy orange cheddar in the fridge, so I used that instead.

  I think that lasagna turned out pretty well. My brother said it wasn’t bad and when my mom finished her last forkful, she cried for the second night running.

  Gradually I became quite the home economist. Mom would tell me how much money we had to spend on food each week and I would budget. I bought secondhand cookbooks and learned how to make mac and cheese, sloppy joes with ground turkey, and spaghetti and meatballs. I found a meat grinder that cost almost nothing at a yard sale. Grinding my own beef cut down on the cost of making lasagna, meat loaf, homemade hamburgers and chili. When we had almost nothing to spend I cooked up a large pot of red lentil soup, which my brother called stupid hippie food, but he still finished his bowl every time, and if we had a little extra cash come Friday, I roasted a chicken on the weekend, making stock from the carcass and using up the leftover meat during the following week. I could turn one chicken into three meals for three, which made me realize what good value that bird had been, and we started eating roast chicken every Sunday, our new family triangle experiencing something like happiness as we shared our weekends at that dinner table. I learned how to bake bread, each loaf costing me only a few cents to make, and then figured out that adding milk to my dough kept the bread softer for longer and started using it to make toast for breakfast and sandwiches to take to school. My brother refused to give up his morning cereal and that was a big dent in my budget—until he left for college, that is, although whenever he came home I had to make sure we had his damn Cheerios in the pantry—but mostly I’d say that my brother supported me. He could have called me a little fag for liking to cook (his favorite term of abuse back then) but he never did.

  I loved every second I spent in that kitchen—almost three years, from the age of fifteen until shortly after my eighteenth birthday when I left for college as well.

  When you cook you can silence your mind for a while. You never feel sad or down when the heat starts to rise in front of a busy stove. I suppose that somehow I had stumbled upon exactly what I needed, the ability to unplug from life for a while—and not only the small world outside but also the larger world spinning twice as fast in my head.

  Another thing I loved was the sense of transformation. I would line up my ingredients on the kitchen counter and draw a picture in my head of what these different elements were about to become. Sure, maybe I’d never get all the way to that picture, but I always got somewhere, the journey ended with a reward every time.

  But what I liked most of all about cooking was simple. I had learned to make people happy. I’d discovered that food does not have to be only sustenance, food can be love.

  * * *

  WHICH IS ALL PERFECTLY WONDERFUL—I’m sure everyone needs to escape from the world sometimes and perhaps I’d found the best way to buy myself a few hours’ silence each day, which was something I desperately needed because, every moment since it had happened, the story of that hot yellow day had been playing on loop in my mind, reeling away at the back of my skull like a home movie being projected in Technicolor over and over.

  Baked orange bicycles, bright rocks and blue skies, black rat snake, Red Ryder BB gun …

  Even when I wasn’t consciously thinking about it, I was aware of the story whirling away, mindful of the background noise of my shame, the sound like the buzz of a neighbor’s television set coming through the walls. When I did think about it, watching the events unfold behind my eyes, reliving that day again, the story would stick to the very same script every time—but only up to a point, because then, as the story neared its factual climax, it would take on a fictional twist. Yes, whenever I told the tale to myself, the ending would be different, a new sting in the tail each time. Patch running at Matthew and crushing his skull with a rock, Patch leaping in front of the forty-ninth bullet, Patch finding a splintered branch and driving it deep into Matthew’s chest, Patch fetching the slingshot from under the tarp and firing a perfect shot into Matthew’s left eye …

  And I told it again. And I told it again.

  Look, Dr. Rosenstock, I know what you would say if you read this, that when my imagination conjured up these changes to the end of the tale, I was coming to terms with what had happened. That by turning myself into the hero of the piece, I was finding a way to forgive myself.

  Only, that wouldn’t be true, Doctor, not even close. Because I’m certain beyond a doubt that this and only this is the message I was sending myself—

  That there must have been a thousand and one different ways I could have saved her that day. But what did I do? I did nothing.

  And I tell it again. And I tell it again.

  So that now even the act of making food, an act of love, is something that has begun to catch and darken at the edges. Every day in the kitchen, every day with my thoughts—how would it feel? The crushing and cracking of things. The searing heat of a pan. The feel of the blade as it slices through flesh.
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  Because now it seems to me I have the chance to write my own ending. Now I can truly become the hero of the piece. Only this time around, I can make it the truth.

  NEW YORK, 2008

  Patrick ascends toward the world’s number one restaurant on an escalator, its scrolling steps heavy with tourists, inside the marbled shopping mall of the Time Warner Center.

  The tourists wear bright rucksacks, windbreakers and sneakers. Patrick has on a lightweight charcoal suit but no tie, because an hour earlier, when he received confirmation of the lunch, he went through his closet examining the necks of his shirts and discovered all of them frayed where recently he de-collared each one of them with kitchen shears. He picked out a blue-and-white Bengal stripe and tidied the loose threads with nail scissors.

  Breathing slowly through his nose, he tries to untangle his thoughts and worries he will mistime his dismount from the escalator. When he sees the restaurant door across the narrow space of the fourth-floor gallery, he worries that he doesn’t know under which name the reservation is held. And then he worries that these minor worries are only a distraction from what he should be worrying about most of all. That this meeting is probably a sham, not a life-changing event at all. That in all likelihood TribecaM is someone in PR who wants Red Moose Barn to promote spray cheese.

  As he nears the restaurant, the mall is transformed into an avenue of orchids and bay trees and when he enters through the heavy antique door (shipped over from Jean-Jacques Rougerie’s village of Crain, he has read), he is greeted by a man in a black suit standing at a slender lectern.

  Mr. McConnell, welcome to Le Crainois. Mr.… uh … your dining companion is seated already. Is there anything you’d like me to take for you?

  Patrick pats his pockets. No, thank you, he says, looking at his greeter’s black silk tie, feeling the absence around his own neck.

  Another man appears. Good afternoon, Mr. McConnell. My name is Frédéric, I’m the maître d’ at Le Crainois. Would you like me to show you straight to your table?