Life Among Giants

by Bill Roorbach

  I could also sit with Kate, pat her back, tell her things were going to be okay, even though I didn’t believe it. Just about the time I thought she was going to break down completely (she barely slept, barely ate, didn’t talk, never laughed), she straightened herself up, appeared for dinner showered and dressed and shining bright, two suitcases tightly packed, her tennis bag stuffed and ready.

  “What’d I tell you,” my father said. And the next morning he drove her the fifty miles to New Haven, where she took up residence in her college (as they called the dorms up there), took up residence, in fact, on Saturday, August 26, 1970.

  WHICH DATE I remember perfectly, because that same afternoon I took it upon myself to rescue the bereaved widow next door. This was less saintly than I was prepared to admit: like my mom, I’d been jealous of Kate’s connection with Sylphide. Here was a chance to forge my own.

  Dabney (so we had learned in the “People” section of Time magazine) had made some kind of mess of his last will and testament—apparently he’d written two versions. The newer one turned the mansion and everything in it over to Sylphide, but every penny else, including the rights to his songs—a vast fortune—went to Linsey, with specific instruction that the boy be remanded to the custody of his grandmother (so much for Kate’s theories about the matter), Dabney’s blighted mother back in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, where Dabney himself had famously worked as a coal miner into his early twenties, writing his heartsick songs at night.

  It all happened instantaneously after Dabney was dead: Linsey was flown to England under escort and in a firestorm of publicity. There were photos in the Daily News, photos in Newsweek, photos in The Saturday Evening Post, editorials (all of them arguing for the return of the beloved boy to his stepmom); there were the dancer’s ever-so-gentle public queries about the motives of her in-laws and ungentle countercharges (which sounded, in fact, a lot like Kate’s ideas, all wrong: the dancer was a piranha, a gold-digger, a careless parent, a fake). The legal system, immune to the great ballerina’s delicacy, her magical kindness and obvious honesty, oblivious of her inability in grief to dance and so make a living (my own take on the matter), froze all assets indefinitely, so that she couldn’t even sell belongings to pay for daily life.

  And after a season without funds, the High Side was visibly in trouble. Sylphide, we knew from The New York Times, had had to let go the High Side’s groundskeepers, cooks, maids, drivers, and finally the famous little butler. From my bedroom window I could see that the glorious gardens were overgrown. The vintage Bentley sagged in the driveway under a layer of old rain-patterned pollen and acorn caps. The daily deliveries of food and liquor and flowers and the streams of guests had stopped.

  After a long look at Dabney’s old album cover—a really long look, that nymph both fleeing and beckoning, that exquisite form, that open, angelic face, that dancer’s derriere—I ferried our lawn mower across the pond in Dad’s aluminum rowboat (the closest he’d gotten to his dream of a yacht). On the far bank I unloaded quickly, set to work mowing, stopping often to clear the discharge gate on the machine, my fingers turning green. I pulled my shirt off, paced the great, dewy expanse of lawn, a whole sweaty morning in hot sun. If nothing else, I was getting a workout. I pushed the mower, I daydreamed, I made my way toward the mansion, stripe by stripe of lawn, more and more intricate as I got closer. In a tremendous sugar maple growing inside their walled garden, I spotted the remains of a tree fort Kate had often mentioned, a leafy palace for the kids of the Chlorine Baron, the industrialist who’d built the High Side during the Roaring Twenties on his profits from industrial chemicals and home cleaning products, also the poison gases used by the enemy in World War I.

  The front yard was ornately planted. I made my way around the rhododendrons and azaleas, ducked under wild branches (but no matter, at my height I was always ducking), doubled and tripled back, going for every blade, taking the opportunity to examine the famous building, almost a mausoleum: leaded windows, iron shutters, massive lintel stones, an elegant but forbidding entryway, heavy oaken door looming at the top of a flight of ancient steps, the whole setup imported from Europe block by block, remnants of a feudal castle. Last pass, I killed the mower and studied the door, black iron straps and vast hinges, massive knocker held in a life-sized lion’s mouth, really enormous.

  There was a bang and creak up there, and suddenly the door swung open with a momentum of its own. Framed by the blackness behind her, the ballerina appeared, hugging herself sleepily, dense bathrobe faint green. She was smaller and much more delicate than she’d seemed onstage those few times Kate had coughed up tickets, more airy and light and ephemeral than even on the famous album cover. And certainly less beautiful, not particularly beautiful at all. I cowered, all but bowing, soaked in sweat, filthy, embarrassed.

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “I’m just mowing,” I said.

  She gave a small but grateful nod.

  “I’m Katy’s brother,” I said. “David.”

  “I thought it is Lizard, no?”

  “That’s what they call me at school.”

  “Ah,” she said seriously, even somberly. “In Norway, firfisle.”

  “Fur-feez-ul,” I repeated, best I could do, as serious as she.

  “You are taller than anyone is saying,” she said, all matter-of-fact, famous Scandinavian lilt. Her gaze lingered briefly on my belly, which in those days was hard as any marble god’s. I was used to comments about my size, used to being stared at, and used to people being a foot and more shorter than I. But even as tiny as she was, at the top of the stairs the dancer towered over me, her greatness like sunshine up there, her sorrow like clouds.

  I said, “I just wanted to help.”

  Apologetically she said, “I can’t pay.”

  “It’s okay,” I said. “Neighbors help neighbors. You know.”

  She seemed to consider that, brightened. “I am wondering if you can help me with one thing more.”

  I tried to take the wide stone steps gracefully, even if three at a time, followed her into the enormous foyer, past the grand stone staircase and through a hidden door, down a hallway into the spacious, restaurant-grade kitchen. We floated right to the stove, where a teapot waited cold.

  She handed me a box of matches, gazed up at me. She said, “I can’t make the fire to light.”

  Those startling celadon eyes, always mentioned by the press! (I’d paid attention to every word ever written.) Eyes the color of oxidized copper, or what my mom called sea-foam green, full of light and a penetrating intelligence. Pale, spare eyebrows, open and generous face, her nose tall and thin, cut like glass. Her lips thin, too, and parted in supplication, and I saw as I broke her stare that a front tooth was chipped. She was short, I kept realizing, really quite short. She had breasts under that robe and all the rest of a female body. And she had bad skin, acne-scarred and shining. Which was what I’d tell Mom when I got home. The dancer’s unassailable beauty in photographs, her imposing beauty onstage, that towering presence, they were illusory! She was really only a girl, not very much older than Katy and her friends, or me. She smelled of bed sheets more than anything, like someone who’d been ailing, smelled of what must be jasmine—always her scent, according to Kate, who found it nauseating.

  Not I.

  I lit a match, turned the knob, waited. Nothing. “The gas is off,” I said.

  “Off?” said the world’s greatest dancer.

  I looked into green light of her eyes a second too long, like rocketing past the earth’s atmosphere and into the realm of stars. Helpfully I said, “You have to have gas to make the burners work. It comes in through a pipe. Did you pay your bill?”

  She studied me, trying to understand. My heart fled to her helplessness. The dancer had no equipment for living in this world. When tears came to her eyes, tears came to my own.

  “Oh, for me,” she said cryptically, and then something urgent in Norwegian, a song of a sentence, a woman troubled about much
more than her gas bill. Abruptly she reached up to hug me, or rather, reached up to be hugged the way a child might. I leaned and put my arms about her as best I could, more than surprised, intensely aware of my naked, sweaty, grass-stained chest against her cheek as she pressed back. “Oh, Firfisle,” she said, rising up on her tiptoes, balance enough for both of us. “Firfisle-mine.”

  We breathed there in front of the ten-burner stainless-steel stovetop five minutes or so, a monumentally long embrace, the multiple fragrances of her rising to my nostrils—a little sweat, a little liniment, that smell of bed—just about the most awkward five minutes of my life. I wondered when it would be okay to let go.

  “I am hating it, to be alone,” she said finally.

  “Me too,” I said. And then I flushed with the truth of it: my former teammates, and Jinnie, and most of all, my sister, Kate, all lost.

  THE NEXT WEEK, entirely out of the ether, a message arrived from the head football coach at Princeton, “Rumbling Rick” Keshevsky himself, a crisp piece of bond paper folded into a shorter note from no less a personage than the president of the university. The letters took some deciphering, but after several readings it became clear that based on my junior-year game stats and my perfect grades they were offering me early acceptance and a full academic scholarship, plus room and board.

  It wasn’t that I’d forgotten meeting the Princeton scouts, wasn’t that I’d forgotten my Princeton dream; it was that I’d assumed I’d blown it, quitting the Staples High Wreckers. Had wanted to blow it, no doubt. But the letter made it clear they knew all about Coach Powers and my hair, my getting axed: didn’t matter—they’d had their eye on me for years. I was pleased but not jumping up and down, nothing like that, mostly I was just surprised. I really had very little sense of the honor of the thing, had always taken my physical prowess for granted, just something I’d been born with, nothing to be particularly proud of, not something to peddle in exchange for status. Long hair or no, I was one of the best high-school quarterbacks in the country, something to this day it’s hard to keep in mind. Jock or not, I was an academic star, as well, on course to be valedictorian, a kid who read philosophy on his own, a kid who translated Latin poetry (looking for the sexy bits, but still). Of course Princeton wanted me.

  My high-school-dropout father, always the salesman, put on his best pair of penny loafers and his most collegiate sweater and drove me down to South Jersey—he wouldn’t let me go on my own, wouldn’t let me not go. He steered the big highways with one hand on my knee, a squeeze every twenty miles or so, not a word between us. The two of us were shown around campus by a simpering series of assistant football coaches. I was being courted, stroked, seduced, nothing subtle about it. I wasn’t impressed—not with myself, not with the school, not with any of their blandishments.

  But my dad glowed, handed his business card to each new professor and coach and admissions dean, shook hands vigorously, talked too loudly, led with his bulky, oft-broken nose, cranked up his sparkling but damaged charm, left me in the background, where, as it happened, I was content to be.

  Rumbling Rick, though, was too imposing for that treatment. His office was a cave in the bowels of the football stadium, steel door like a prison gate; he answered Dad’s knocking only at length, filled the archway—chiseled face, chin like a truck grille. He ignored my father, took my hand in his two Princeton tiger paws, pulled me in, squeezed my biceps, unembarassedly pulled a leather-covered stepstool between us and stood on it so he could look directly into my eyes.

  “Son,” he said, “a little haircut shouldn’t come between great men. You can play in braids and ribbons as far as I’m concerned. First-string quarterback by sophomore year! Can you give me a yes today?”

  From out in the alcove my Dad said, “Yes. Yes, he can.”

  Keshevsky ignored him, could see the ambivalence in my face. Gently, he said, “Yes, no, Hochmeyer, take your time, make your own decision. But come out and practice with us today. Those boys want to see you in action.”

  The 1970 season at Princeton would start in two weeks. I was intensely aware that I was still only going to be a high-school kid. Quitting the Wreckers had made me different; nothing that had been important before had remained important after. And meeting Sylphide had turned me one notch again in the direction of this undefined thing I seemed to be straining toward, nothing to do with hair, more to do with the ambiguities I’d begun to notice in the world, a new feeling that nothing was black or white, nothing either/or, that no one could truly lose or win. I thought of the dancer’s not exactly delicate hands on me there in front of her kitchen stove. I was no gridiron brute, took no pleasure in my own powers, didn’t need to stomp anyone, didn’t want to play out my father’s dreams, or Coach Keshevsky’s, these stale old guys with their failing testosterone.

  But there was no way around it. I dressed for practice and worked out with the college fellows, shadowing the quarterback, Matt Morrissey, my once hero, a senior everyone knew was going to play for the Green Bay Packers. In a scrimmage Coach Keshevsky let me take the helm of the freshman team. The varsity drubbed us, of course, and the real first-year quarterback, left on the sidelines, was visibly pissed. I ran plays perfunctorily, completed a dozen solid passes, slowly got inspired, ran for the only freshman touchdown—an arrogant quarterback sneak against the coach’s call, purposefully knocking over my own man, the enormous freshman center (guy from Hawaii, later to do well in the bigs), using his bulk as a ramp to launch myself over the opposing line, then dancing through the secondary, breaking one tackle, two, head fakes, spins, straight-arm right, straight-arm left, lots of simple ducking, and then, all alone out there, a colossus racing seventy-nine yards with the whole varsity defense chasing me, the best tackling team in the Ivy League.

  So what?

  Rumbling Rick was stern with me after, of course—I’d gone against orders—but I just gazed at him, nothing to say, this little tyrant without his stool. I was through apologizing to coaches. As a parting gift—a little more incentive towards my decision—Keshevsky gave me an envelope with six box-seat tickets to the upcoming game at Yale—the opponent’s homecoming. “Closer to Westport for you,” he said in a way that was warm and cold all at once.

  “Hey,” said my dad.

  I was indifferent until I had the obvious thought: I could invite Katy to her own homecoming game. Of course the coach would have known where she went to school, would have known everything there was to know about me, including my plans to major in Philosophy and Culture, a new field being pioneered at Princeton, as it happened. But none of that would have occurred to me then, the extent of a coach’s manipulation.

  He said, “Okay, mister. No more bullcrap. Time to grunt or get off the pot. Can I tell the boys yes? Can I give Professor Lunkins the good news?”

  Lunkins was the chairman of the philosophy department. From him I’d had three stirring letters in a week. “I need some time to think,” I said.

  “Nothing to think about,” said my father.

  “He’ll think,” said Rumbling Rick approvingly.

  Dad drew himself up, handed over a business card, barked in imitation of the coach: “Mr. Keshevsky—Rumbling Rick, if I may—telephone me at your leisure. Have I got investments for you!”

  CRUISING UP THE Jersey Turnpike on the way home Dad and I laughed about the coach’s face at that moment—his dismay, disgust, disdain for my father all barely hidden—but I must have let on that I’d been embarrassed.

  Pop said, “I know, I know. You think it’s extortion. You think I’m using you. But, buddy, you’ve got to be fighting all the time. All the time, fighting. Because why, David?”

  I mocked him mildly: “Because ‘Opportunity Could Be Right in Front of You.’ ” Sign in his boss’s office apparently, oft quoted.

  “Exactly right. And I’ve got to be sharp these days, believe you me. Mr. Perdhomme is up my ass every second with a hot glowing poker, David. You should see the scars. I’ve got to be on my toes
! No, not good enough. I have to be on my goddamned toenails!”

  “Especially in these times,” I said unhappily, since that was going to be the next line.

  And those were bad times indeed. Kate’s tuition at Yale was an issue, I’d come to understand. We hadn’t had beef for dinner in weeks. Only a couple of months before, Dad had lost a briefcase with negotiable bonds inside, also his entire collection of illegal gold coins, also his raw diamonds, his vaunted Yangtze River pearls, all his paranoid investments, stuff he could physically touch, keep in sight, keep protected from man and market: gone.

  That briefcase!

  He’d been bringing it to the office vault for safekeeping, he said, one of his occasional paroxysms of insecurity, and managed to leave it on the train, just another in a long series of self-imposed disasters. All the humor drained from his face as he remembered it now: “My fucking pearls! How could I be so stupid?”

  I didn’t want him crying. I said what I’d said a dozen times before: “It could have happened to anyone.”

  But he did cry, first just a little, his lip quivering, and then he was sobbing. He pulled over on a patch of grass, all there was for a shoulder on the Merritt Parkway, folded himself into the steering wheel, really broken.

  “Dad?” I said.

  “Never be a loser like me, David. Please, please, please. Don’t say no to Princeton, David.”