“Oh, Pop.” I patted his back. “You’re no loser.” And because I knew I had to be plain, I added, “And as for Princeton, we’ll see.”
I was too big for the car (too big for a lot of things, come to think of it), sat there cramped and uncomfortable patting at his back, no further gesture I could make, just waiting him out. It had never been close to this bad, and, painful truth, for the first time he did seem like a loser to me. Finally he spoke, blubbering: “Mr. Perdhomme’s got my ass in the fire, son. He’s a bad oyster. If I come up a suicide, don’t believe it!”
“Oh, come on, Dad. Mr. Perdhomme? Suicide?” Like my mom, I wasn’t one for his histrionics.
He knew it, too, tried to be funny: “Unless it’s by martini. Then you’ll know it was real. That’s my weapon of choice, David. If I’m dead of olives, you know I was depressed.” Then coldly serious, another big sob: “Anything else, go after that little prick Perdhomme. You hear me? Make that little prick pay!”
“I’ll make him pay,” I said gently. Humor thy father. Pat, pat, pat his back.
THE NEXT DAY I called Coach Keshevsky, told him yes.
My future as a winner secure, at least in Dad’s view, I awaited the start of the Staples High school year, doing good deeds (mucking kennels at the ASPCA, litter at the cemetery, repairs at the Historical Society), my hair long enough for a baby ponytail, of which I was secretly vain. My father had no friends left, but every waiter and gas attendant, every neighbor too slow to avoid him, everyone he met, anyone who would listen, heard the news about Princeton. My mother had a different style. She seeded the story with a certain few friends, and the whole thing—my early acceptance, the unbelievable scholarship money, probable position on the varsity team as early as sophomore year, no need for a haircut—traveled in the way of such things till it reached Coach Powers’ cauliflower ear.
Among my old teammates I still had vestigial friends (Jimpie not among them), and it was Carl Little, a huge tackle, smart in science, devastating on defense, that telephoned. “Congratulations,” he said straight off. I’d taken the call on the illegal extension Dad had wired in the basement, where in my capacity as post-football saint I’d been building new window boxes for a nursing home up in Weston. “Coach says congratulations, too. And I’m supposed to kind of sweet-talk you and spit on my hands and pull on your dick and so forth, Lizard, but here it is straight: the old general needs your ass and he’s ready to make a deal. He’s got to save face. You’re making him look like a shithead. Which he is, of course. Don’t get me wrong.”
“Tell him forget it.”
“Lizard, you fucking won the war!”
“Tell Coach I’m taking ballet.”
A FEW DAYS later a fellow in a tidy suit pulled Sylphide’s freshly buffed silver Bentley into our cul-de-sac. Emerging well-buttoned and dignified, he clicked smartly up our flagstone walk, presented himself at our door, knocking formally though it was wide open. I stood there in a towel staring down at him, my hair wet and stringing around my shoulders.
He regarded me without judgment, taking in my size, and said, “Mr. Hochmeyer?”
“He’s at work.”
“Mr. Lizard Hochmeyer?”
“Oh, okay, that’s me.”
He went on to explain with further formality (and a partly conquered working-class Boston accent) that he was employed by Sylphide. Which, of course, I knew. Kate had told me all about this guy, Sylphide’s butler, Desmond: soul of discretion, heart of a lion, mind like an IBM computing machine taking up whole air-conditioned rooms, as organized as a military parade. A person who could have run a bank, yet who’d taken this subservient position. This sacrifice he’d undertaken willingly for the good of the world, said his posture. In his eye, though, was something a little misplaced, slightly furtive.
I said what my mother would have said, and in her knowing tone, too: “I thought all the staff had been let go over there.”
He smiled briefly. “Let us simply say, sir, that funding has been restored. I am the houseman. The others will be back on the job shortly, as well.”
“Ah,” I said, “Did Sylphide win her lawsuit?” I wanted gossip for Mom, whose attention could be won by such things.
The little butler—shorter even than Sylphide—smiled despite himself, his eyes darting. “I didn’t say that. I said only that funding has been restored. Madame has sent you a gift, along with a check for your services during the brief absence of the groundsmen.” He handed me a fragrant, gilt-edged envelope.
I’d thought I’d heard a lawn-mowing rig over there! Genuinely nonplussed, I said, “Oh, I don’t want pay.” I’d had plans to mow more, dreams of further impromptu visits with the dancer. I could not forget the feel of her cheek on my chest.
But the little man didn’t hear. As I towered there in my towel, he clicked back to the car and opened its trunk, wrestled with a large, flat parcel wrapped in kraft paper. This he handed up to me with a bow I took to be ironical. He looked me over one more time, said a complimentary, “You, sir, are gargantuan.”
“Two meters,” I said. “We measured me in math class last year.”
He approved of the metric system, sized me up, sized me down. Soon he’d be building me a coffin. “Your torso, it’s a keystone,” he sighed, those eyes darting. Suddenly professional again, he spun on heel, clicked to the car, and drove off stately, not more than fifteen miles per hour.
Only when he was gone did I tear open the fragrant envelope. Inside was nothing I wanted, just a large check and an invoice in my own name, neatly typed, an accurate computation of the hours I’d put in mowing and a contractor’s hourly rate, princely. I opened the parcel next and found a large photograph in a walnut frame: President Kennedy and Dabney himself, the two of them grinning as after a joke, touching one another’s shoulders. The president had signed it over to the rocker in black ink with “Great Vigor,” the famous Kennedy catchphrase that comedians had made into a joke.
I trotted up to my room with the treasure, hid it in my closet, knowing my mom would never let me keep such a gift: she’d see it as the addled gesture of a woman in mourning. I preferred to see it as a promise of friendship.
I looked at President Kennedy and Dabney a lot over the next few weeks—two dead men—trying to discern in the image or frame or scrawl of presidential handwriting a message beyond thanks from Sylphide, but nothing was forthcoming. No invitation seemed implied, and without one I couldn’t get myself to go back over to the High Side.
Meanwhile, the parties across the pond resumed, the deliveries of dresses in huge boxes and liquor and sculptures in ice, the constant inrushing of guests, the perpetual music—from the most delicate chamber quartet on the lawn to live, roaring rock ’n’ roll barely muffled inside the great walls, Dabney’s world of friends and hangers-on, all of them paying tribute to the great man at Sylphide’s expense, or at least that’s how Look magazine and I saw it, gentle Sylphide a victim of her husband’s wild life.
ALTOGETHER, I FELT like a new kid in school. I suffered no great regret when I saw the football team at practice or heard the roar of the sixth-period pep rallies on Fridays. The only thing that made me really feel the pain was sight of Jimpie, or worse, Jimp with Jinnie, the supercilious way they ignored me, her hand in the back pocket of his jeans.
In light of my stand against haircuts, I’d become a hero of the dress code. The artsy, intellectual crowd had taken an interest in me at lunchtime, and among them was Emily Bright, whom I’d known since grade school. Emily was also a tall person, very shy, known to be difficult, a hurt look behind granny glasses, long dresses, long legs hidden. She was angular, awkward, not everyone’s idea of a beauty, certainly not mine (no one but Jinnie would do for me). But she’d been voted Anti–Homecoming Queen in our junior year. The hippie types loved her, had invented a comical “anti” tradition around her.
Emily was in my math class—Honors Calculus—and sat just in front of me, an accident of Mr. Ramsey’s seating chart. Her
hair was unbelievably rich and black, fragrant, thick and long like a thoroughbred’s tail, always in a braid. She seemed short in a chair, her height all in her legs. One warm day she wore a kind of jumper that left her upper arms bare, her dark, smooth skin laid over boyish muscles. When she raised her hand to answer Mr. Ramsey’s questions, her wing muscles rose, too, the skin of her shoulder folding. I spied the tuft of tidy, private hair under her arm and caught her scent, something in the category of vanilla, with an agreeable tinge of root, like a forest plant I’d tasted once in Boy Scouts.
I tapped her shoulder sometimes to ask a manufactured question about the math, just to see her face. Her eyes were black and burned always. She’d turn unhappily, look me over, smoldering. Did I want to get her in trouble? But Mr. Ramsey was oblivious, always writing on the chalkboard with the back of his ancient pinstriped suit to the class, tap-tap-tap. She didn’t smile, didn’t like my little jokes, not even the famous Mr. Ramsey face drawn on my fist, moving mouth and all, little black eyeglasses.
Walking through my life after noticing her, I could hardly breathe. Suddenly, I could think of nothing and no one but Emily. Sylphide’s hug slipped from my mind, the vision of Sylphide on her steps faded, the Kennedy photo and the album cover ceased beating in my closet. Emily Bright, of all girls. Her mother was a South Korean national who barely spoke English when I’d met her at field days in grade school. Her father was Afro-American (everyone knew) and well educated (everyone said). He and Emily’s mother had met when he was a serviceman in the Korean War (everyone explained). The whole family traveled to Korea each October for two weeks at a time, some kind of holiday there. Our sixth-grade teacher, Mr. Bobbins, told us that Emily was the product of something called miscegenation, which he said was the mixing of races (he pronounced this rices), and wrong, against God’s law. Emily was right there in the front row, brightest kid in class. No one would accept her, said Mr. Bobbins, with exaggerated tones of compassion, not the Negroes, not the Orientals, certainly not the Caucasians, and therein lay the tragedy of her existence. “Cruel but true,” he said, then addressed her directly, pityingly: “Your parents should have thought of that.”
Even then I knew enough to be shocked, we all did.
Emily, thoroughly self-contained, all of eleven years old, took her time standing, simply gathered her books, her pencils, her wooden, foreign box of lunch, and walked out. Whoa! Later, we learned she marched all the way home.
Several of us told our moms the whole thing, and these good women told a lot of other people, including Mr. LaRue, the principal. Mr. Bobbins was censured in some obscure way. At any rate, he didn’t talk about the need to contain the Jews anymore, or about the communists inciting the Negroes. He stopped his ranting about Martin Luther King, too, and never said again that it was just as well that JFK was dead. (However, he still occasionally wondered aloud if Linsey Stryker-Stewart—not in our room that year, but next door—should have been euthanized at birth.)
The more obvious upshot of the whole incident was that Emily’s parents took her out of public school and placed her in dance conservatory, a famous program that accepted without prejudice everyone of talent. She lived in Boston all the way through junior high and into high school, only to return to us in the middle of sophomore year, having been reported for curfew violations (out all night, was the rumor) by a jealous rival in her dorm.
Even gangly as she was, she became the reigning star of “Count” Vasily Derchenko’s Westport School of Ballet, and was known to be taking class nearly daily at Lincoln Center in New York City, even occasionally dancing very small parts in very big productions. Suddenly I was the most ardent ballet fan in New England, or anti-fan, if that would get me closer. I made a point of dropping Sylphide’s name in otherwise quotidian conversations with the drama crowd, hoped my connection to the famous dancer would get back to Emily.
One of the engines of my crush, of course, was that Emily wanted nothing to do with me. Sophomore year, she’d written a series of antiestablishment opinion pieces for the school paper, in one of which she attacked me as the leader of the football team, called me “reptilian.” I’d been kind of hurt, found myself almost agreeing with her. The other guys immediately started calling me Lizard.
But I felt no anger toward her. In fact, it may have been her argument that had set me on the road to quitting the team. She’d written that the true test of physical strength came in restraint, equipoise, tenderness, compassion. Those were dancers’ words, of course, concepts my battling father didn’t know, a form of manhood coaches Powers and Keshevsky wouldn’t recognize.
In study hall a kid I barely knew, Dwight Leonard, slipped me a copy of Rolling Stone magazine. On the cover was Sylphide, looking lost and bewildered in an office somewhere, a heartbreakingly lovely fairy tricked in from the woods for a photo shoot, her exquisite, muscular legs in ever-so-slightly wrinkled tights as she sat on a desk, faded leotard the only other cloth, perfect posture, grainy contrast, which hid the bad skin of her face. Inside was the story of her first performance since her husband’s accident—not a ballet, just a single number in a recital to benefit a famous famine-relief foundation, something she’d agreed to long before. She’d leaped out onto the stage, made a few magnificent turns, and then just come to a stop, staring out at the crowd. After a few more phrases the orchestra had stopped too, and the room (Bradley Center in San Francisco, eighteen or nineteen hundred well-heeled people) just sat there in silence, long minutes. “We love you,” someone in the balcony said finally—no need to shout. According to the article. The dancer had looked up there, looked up there a long time, then simply walked offstage.
“I have to have this,” I said.
Dwight accepted the Kennedy half-dollar I carried for good luck.
I sat near Emily at lunch, opened my hard-won copy of Rolling Stone. And Emily noticed; you couldn’t miss that cover shot of Sylphide. And you certainly couldn’t miss me, pointing my toes as I read. Oh, Emily noticed and stood and picked up her dance bag and walked right past me and out the great doors to the bus loop where her mother waited to take her to the train station and the 12:41 to New York.
Emily had no need of me, no need of any of us.
IN THOSE DAYS, my mother was always off at tennis, the kitchen bulletin board papered deeply with schedules and tourney dates and lesson times, not the slightest letup since Kate had left.
One fine Saturday, Dad and I raked leaves, the first weekend he’d been home for six weeks. Apparently, things were going better at work. This, I simply intuited—it’s not like we talked about our troubles. The poor guy had been putting in seven-day weeks, twelve- and fourteen-hour days, home on the late train to sleep, out on the early train, working his lips, chewing his nails. And something odd had happened. I’d driven him to the station Friday so as to have the car—dashed fantasies of driving off to Compo Beach for a walk with Emily—and he’d left his crappy replacement briefcase in the car, a cardboard thing already coming to pieces. When I returned with it, I spotted him climbing into the wrong train, opposite direction from New York.
I leaned on my rake, smelled the brisk air, felt the fall sunshine, couldn’t help it: I thought about football. The team would be on the bus to Greenwich for a game they’d probably win—Greenwich was weak in those years. But then again, who did Staples have for a quarterback? No one but that scrawny Fielding kid, who’d gotten his chance from my abdication. If he won, he’d be a hero. Me, I was raking leaves. Dad made a show of pulling on his beloved work boots, his one connection with an identity he’d never had: paint-splashed, steel-toed, oil-proof soles, the leather worn and supple, lovingly waxed, the rawhide laces double-knotted, absurdly high heels.
“So where’d you go yesterday?” I said lightly.
“Yesterday what?”
“Yesterday morning. Without your briefcase. I came back to give it to you and you were getting on the New Haven train.”
He laughed. And then he laughed more: busted. “I
’ll let you in on a secret,” he said. “But don’t you tell your mom. I was going to see a lady.”
“Dad!”
“Not like you think, bud. I just had to do a little job for Mr. Perdhomme up in Bridgeport. Wooing a client, you know. Perdhomme knows where his bread is buttered. I practically gave the woman a massage. One of the Fricks, you bet she came around.”
And before I could formulate the next question—Dad obviously lying—he gave me a shove, retrieved his rake, shouted, “Last man to the Butt cooks dinner!” The old stakes with rakes. He ran comically and took the little west side of our modest lawn, leaving me with the big east side, reversing the advantage of my childhood, and we set to, herding leaves like a couple of overcranked toys, real competition. He pressed his advantage, wasn’t a dad who was going to let you win. He was stout on top, slim on the bottom, legs like a heron’s, forty-four years old, stamina of a goat. The Butt was a massive round boulder down at the edge of the pond, cracked down the middle from all the fires we’d had there, from leaves to marshmallows to Kate’s troop of Girl Scouts, the ones who’d named it. The physical exercise broke the gloomy mood. My father laughed and shouted taunts.
As we came around the house—scratch, scratch, scratch with the rakes—I saw three large men in black clothes striding purposefully down the High Side lawn toward the dam end of the pond. When they saw I’d noticed them they visibly hurried, splashed heedlessly through the little brook and high cattails. They were coming to see us.
I said, “Dad?”
The biggest guy broke from the others and jogged to put himself between us and the house. He stuffed his hand in the pocket of his sweatshirt, showed the grip of a black gun. My hands began to shake. Why were armed men coming from Sylphide’s? Why were armed men coming at all? A gray-haired guy, clearly in charge, stepped up calmly. My father pulled himself up to his full five ten—or maybe in his work boots it was six feet—thrust himself into the guy’s face. “State your business, Freddy.”
Life Among Giants Page 4