“Hello,” I replied.
“Hello, Anne,” my mother said.
To my knowledge, the two women had never met face-to-face before.
“What a healthy-looking boy,” she said to my mother.
The Old Man’s forced grin looked far too painful to be worthwhile.
“Paul’s upstairs,” my mother said.
Anne slipped her coat off her shoulders and handed it to my mother.
“Would you mind bringing me a drink, Dick?” Anne asked.
“What’ll you have?”
“A rusty nail, if you can manage it.”
“I think we’re out of Drambuie,” the Old Man said.
“Just a scotch on the rocks, then.”
“I’ll take you to Paul’s room,” I said. Then I remembered: Anne didn’t need me or anyone else to show her the way around our house. I stood by silently as she crept up the stairs. The Old Man hurried to take her coat from my mother’s hands and hang it in the hall closet.
“Why don’t you come help me in the kitchen, Richard,” my mother said.
She was preparing a London broil and a broccoli casserole. The Old Man came in behind me. He took a highball glass from the cabinet and opened the freezer for ice cubes.
“I could use a drink myself,” he said.
“Don’t you dare,” my mother said.
“Christ almighty,” the Old Man muttered.
I followed him out to the dining room, where he kept the liquor and wine. He opened the lock on the cabinet and removed a bottle of scotch and poured the glass full to the lip. Glancing back at the kitchen, he slurped down about half the contents. He turned toward me, his brow furrowed.
“If you tell your mother,” he said.
I nodded.
The Old Man replenished the glass.
“Here,” he said.
He handed me the drink. I wasn’t sure what he wanted me to do with it.
“Go on,” he said. “I’ve waited on that woman enough in my life.”
I walked away, holding the highball glass out in front of me as if it were the Holy Grail, brimming with the priceless blood of the Savior—so full that it was impossible not to spill.
I tiptoed around the hall to the landing of the staircase. I was still visualizing the blood of Jesus inside it—not the figurative communion wine, but the actual, syrupy stuff, dark and sticky and tasting of iron. This sacred elixir couldn’t be squandered, I reasoned. To let it spill to the ground would be a sacrilege. So I decided, in the way children do, that the one solution was to slurp off the top layer.
The whiskey was still lukewarm and almost completely undiluted. Alone at the foot of the stairs, I marveled at the heat in my throat. I felt as if my whole body and brain had been cleansed with fire.
I managed to slide the glass onto the hall table in time to muffle the cough in my elbow. When I recovered my breath, I picked up the glass. Cradling it with both hands, I teetered up the stairs and into Paul’s room.
Anne sat across from Paul in the chair next to the open window, smoking a thin white cigarette and tapping her ashes into the sill. Paul was smoking also. He stared off out the window as if he expected someone else to show up. The room felt uncomfortably quiet without Neil Young and Crazy Horse ringing off the walls.
I had never seen a picture of Anne; Paul didn’t keep one in his room. What had she looked like before? Had any of Paul’s beauty come from her? Had she ever been beautiful at all? She certainly wasn’t alluring, as I imagined a “fallen woman” should be. She had an ugly mouth, with thin, angry lips. She wore too much makeup, or maybe not enough. It looked as if it had been applied with the express purpose of appearing careless. That air of indifference was the only way, really, in which Paul resembled her at all.
“Come into my parlor, darling,” she said.
I walked toward her and handed her the drink.
“Did you taste it to make sure it isn’t poisoned?” she asked.
“No,” I stammered. “I just spilled a little.”
“I’m teasing you, child,” she said.
She held her cigarette aloft with one hand and sipped her drink with the other, taking her measure of me. I rocked back and forth from my heels to the balls of my feet, contemplating the numbness of my lips and the sudden thickness of my tongue.
“So,” she asked, “am I as monstrous as you’ve been led to believe?”
The question confused me.
“I don’t think Rocky here has an opinion, Mom,” Paul said, his eyes still fixed on the window.
“How would he?” Anne said. She sipped her drink. “You all prefer to behave as if I don’t exist.”
“He’s seven years old, Mom.”
“Almost eight,” I added.
“When’s your birthday?” Anne asked.
“July twenty-ninth,” I said.
Anne’s mouth fell open. She gaped at me for a moment before turning to address Paul.
“You never told me that,” she said with a dry chuckle. “Why didn’t you tell me that?”
“Why would I?” Paul said.
“What?” I asked.
She aimed her small, cold eyes at me as she stamped out her cigarette.
“We have the same birthday, young Richard,” she said.
“You and me?” I asked.
“That’s right,” she said. “How could this have escaped me, Paul?”
“Maybe somebody told you and you just forgot,” Paul said.
“Maybe,” she said, still chuckling. “Maybe. Well, young Richard, I won’t forget this time.”
“Thank you,” I said, assuming she meant to send me a present.
AT DINNER, THE OLD MAN and Anne sat at opposite ends of the dining table. Paul came downstairs for the first time since he’d returned from the hospital. He sat alone on one side of the table, positioned so he could prop his leg up on the chair next to him. My mother and I sat on the other side.
My mother was having trouble keeping her hands still. She pushed the food around on her plate with the dinner fork, but I never saw her take a bite. When she put the fork down, she would either put one arm around me or the opposite hand on the Old Man’s forearm.
Like my mother, Anne ate little to nothing. It was as if the two of them were in a hunger contest. Across the table, Paul picked at his food without much interest.
I was hungry, however. I devoured everything in front of me. The Old Man also ate eagerly. We were dutiful plate cleaners at every meal, the Old Man and I. Maybe it was because we didn’t smoke. My mother didn’t smoke either, nor did she drink much more than the occasional glass of white wine or a small snifter of sherry before bedtime if she was feeling a little wired. “Alcohol ages the skin,” she would say.
The Old Man had managed to sneak a few in, however. Who could blame him? And Anne—well, her food was cold on her plate before she started slurring her speech, but otherwise she made no effort to disguise her habit or her condition. My mother’s feeble attempts at polite conversation—inquiries about the weather in Akron, the flight, and so forth—were met with curt, dismissive replies. As Anne grew increasingly drunk, she made a point of calling my mother “child,” as in “The weather was miserable, child,” and “Who wouldn’t be exhausted after two hours packed into one of those puddle-jumping sardine cans that pass for planes these days, child.”
My mother pretended not to notice her condescension. The Old Man just kept refilling her glass. He must have hoped she would pass out soon. Or maybe he wanted Paul to see her good and drunk so he’d be reminded of what he had to look forward to if he ever decided—as Paul sometimes threatened to do when he and my mother were at odds—to leave and move in with Anne.
“So Paul tells me the historical trust has finally found someone sufficiently pedigreed to buy that old wreck of a house up the hill,” Anne said.
“That’s right,” said the Old Man.
“Sufficiently pedigreed?” my mother asked.
Anne lit a cigaret
te.
“Hasn’t Dick ever told you?” she said to my mother. “He tried to buy that house years ago, but those snobs at the Spencerville Historical Trust refused to sell it to him. What did they say they were going to do with it, Dick?”
“A museum,” the Old Man said.
Anne neither asked for nor was offered an ashtray. Instead, as my mother’s mouth fell open, she tipped the ashes onto her nearly untouched dinner.
“Yes, that’s right,” she said. “A museum, like the Quaker Meetinghouse, where the old gals from the DAR put on their Colonial-period costumes once a month and show groups of kindergartners how the settlers used to make candles.”
She turned to me.
“Have you been on one of those tours, young Richard?”
I nodded.
“Are they still dipping the candles?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said.
“But this fellow Culver that they’ve sold the place to,” she said, turning back to the Old Man. “He won’t turn it into a museum, will he?”
“No,” the Old Man said. “He’s going to renovate it.”
“How long will that take?” my mother asked.
“A year or so. Maybe more, maybe less. We’ll see.”
“And why,” Anne asked, “is this Culver good enough to be allowed to own it and you weren’t?”
“He’s married to Jane Cabell,” the Old Man said.
“Ah,” Anne said. “That explains it. Well, you never could buy your way in with the FFV crowd, could you, Dick?”
Paul later explained to me that FFV stood for First Families of Virginia: the kind of people who still thought money mattered less than whether you could trace your ancestry back to the court of King Charles I.
“They just moved back from somewhere abroad,” the Old Man said. “Culver was in coal or iron, I think. Made his millions, cashed out, and got into investing. Since you can do that from pretty much anywhere, Jane made him move to Spencerville as payback for dragging her all over the world to keep house while he was off digging mines. I’m sure buying the old Cherry place was her idea.”
“And are you going to press charges?” Anne asked.
“For what?”
“For nearly killing my son.”
“Our son was trespassing on his property at the time,” the Old Man said.
“I didn’t know anyone had bought the place,” Paul said.
“That makes no difference,” the Old Man said. “It’s still illegal.”
“People have been going in that house for years,” Paul said. “I bet you’ve been in it before. Without permission.”
The Old Man didn’t answer him.
“I think you should press charges,” Anne insisted.
“No.”
“If you don’t, maybe I will.”
“Suit yourself,” the Old Man said. “But you’re not going to have to live next door to the man.”
“You weren’t too concerned about that when you threatened to kill him, were you?” she said.
“It was the heat of the moment,” the Old Man said. “Culver understands that. We’ve already talked it over and walked away as friends. He feels terrible about all of it.”
“I see,” Anne said.
She extinguished her cigarette in an especially rare slice of London broil.
“So, Dick,” she said. “I find it remarkable that in all of our conversations over the years since this child of yours came along, you never mentioned that he and I share the same birthday.”
The Old Man chewed his steak slowly and purposefully before swallowing.
“I’m sure I told you,” he said.
“No,” she said. “You didn’t.”
“Sure you did,” Paul said. “She just forgot.”
“No,” Anne said again. “He didn’t, Paul. Neither did you, darling.”
Anne narrowed her eyes at the Old Man, a faint smile forming on her lips.
“Your birthday is July twenty-ninth?” my mother asked, her voice meek, almost apologetic.
“You never told her either?” Anne said to the Old Man. “Oopsy me, Dick. What a pickle I’ve put you in.”
“I’m sure I must have mentioned it at some point,” the Old Man repeated, his face reddening with wrath.
“It must make the date that much easier to remember,” Anne said.
“How could I forget?” he said.
Anne turned to me and smiled.
“Do you know who else was born on July twenty-ninth, Richard?” she asked.
“No, ma’am,” I said.
“Mussolini,” she said.
“Who’s Mussolini?”
“That’s enough, Anne,” the Old Man said.
“It’s a fact,” she replied. “One he’ll hear in school one day. Won’t he look smart if he already knows Mussolini’s birthday?”
“Who’s Mussolini?” I asked again.
“A dead guy,” Paul said. “They hanged him from a bridge for killing Jews.”
“You’re confusing Mussolini with Hitler, dear,” Anne said. “Mussolini killed a few Jews, but only because Hitler made him.”
“What’s a Jew?” I asked.
“Jesus Christ,” the Old Man said.
“Maybe you should go to your room, Richard,” said my mother.
“Who’s Hitler?”
“He isn’t Jesus Christ, I promise you,” Paul said.
“Go to your room,” my mother ordered.
“But we haven’t had dessert,” I whined.
“Go to your goddamned room!” the Old Man bellowed, pounding his fist on the table.
I was too stunned to move or make a sound. My mother gaped at the Old Man, her lips quivering.
“Both of you,” said the Old Man.
He slumped back in his chair while Anne sneered at him.
“Come on, Rock,” Paul said. “Help me up.”
I stood and went for his crutches while Paul shifted out of his chair. He steadied himself on my shoulders and pulled himself to his feet.
“I think me and Rocky here might go listen to some music,” Paul said. “Thanks for dinner, Alice.”
I followed him out of the dining room and through the hallway to the landing and held his crutches while he hopped up the stairs. When we reached the top step, I handed him the crutches and followed him into his room.
“Shut the door, will you?” he asked.
Paul slumped onto his bed and reached across to the bedside table for his lighter and cigarettes. He lit up and took a long drag.
Downstairs, the shouting ebbed and flowed. In the quiet moments, I could sense the seething through the floor.
“Flip it over,” he said.
I turned the disc over to side B and dropped the needle. I crawled up onto the bed next to Paul and looked up at the ceiling and listened. The scotch must have worn me out; I was asleep before the end of “Don’t Let It Bring You Down.”
I WOKE UP SWEATING and disoriented. I was under the covers in my own bed, still dressed in my school clothes. The Old Man must have put me there. It couldn’t have been Paul, with his leg. My mother wouldn’t have let me go to sleep without changing and brushing my teeth, regardless of the circumstances.
I slid down off the bed and crept out into the hallway to peer through the open door of Paul’s room. Anne was in there, on top of the covers in the bed beside him, muttering or murmuring or singing some dissonant lullaby. Was Paul asleep, I wondered, or just pretending?
The next morning, I noticed that the door to the guest bedroom was open. The bed was already made; the sole remaining trace of Anne was the smell of smoke and a pair of lipstick-stained cigarette butts in an ashtray on the vanity.
3
AFTER A WEEK OR SO, Paul was up and about. He stayed on the crutches for another month to give the tissue ample time to heal and was prohibited from strenuous athletic activity for another six months or so. This was another perverse stroke of luck for Paul, as it excused him from required participation in afte
rnoon extracurricular activities at Macon Prep, the private school he attended. His afternoons were free for rambling around in his Nova and hanging out at the lunch counter in Pearsall’s Drugstore with Leigh and Rayner. Sometimes, Paul and Leigh would take me along to Pearsall’s for a hot dog and a milk shake. I would sit in the center of the wide backseat of Paul’s car, leaning forward, listening to the music and the laughter, watching their long hair flip in the breezes from the open windows, backlit by the sun.
I was too young to know that Leigh Bowman was already being thought of as a minor tragedy. Her mother had died of breast cancer when Leigh was eleven. Her father—the Honorable Prentiss Powell Bowman III—knew no other way to raise Leigh than to push her to the absolute limits in everything. Leigh had been bred to be a star swimmer and a tennis champion, a blue-ribbon horseback rider and a prima ballerina, a valedictorian and a consummate lady.
To her father’s dismay, in the summer before her junior year, Leigh began to be seen riding around in the passenger seat of Paul Askew’s big purple car. Before long, she’d given up almost everything for Paul. She still rode her horse, but she refused to compete. She traded tennis and dancing and competitive swimming for lounging in Paul’s bedroom, smoking cigarettes and listening to records. Only in the classroom had she maintained her old standing, probably because she had always made As with little effort.
Her father forbade Leigh to see Paul, which prompted Leigh to discover quite spontaneously that her father couldn’t forbid her to do anything. Something had slipped in her. Judge Bowman thought it was “the goddamned dope.”
Maybe he was right—maybe it was the goddamned dope. Or maybe it was just a typical case of the good girl falling for the bad boy who needed to be saved. Maybe, because of her mother and Annie Elizabeth, Leigh and Paul felt like they understood each other as no one else could. Maybe Leigh was looking for someone to help her down off the ceaseless treadmill her father had set her on. Or maybe Leigh and Paul were star-crossed from the beginning, and she was doomed to love him, come what may.
NOT LONG AFTER Paul retired the crutches, our parents invited Brad and Jane Culver over for dinner. Paul was not present—off with Rayner and their friends, “up to no good.”
Jane Culver was older than my mother but still seemed much younger than both her husband and the Old Man. She bent to meet me at eye level when we were introduced.
Only Love Can Break Your Heart Page 3