The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  In dropped another jewel, an uncut sentence: Dievas davė dantis, Dievas duos duonos. God gave us teeth, God will give us bread.

  She must once have known her mother tongue, to recall these things with such urgency. Ona had no use for irony, but she nonetheless found it cruel that her parents fled in part because the Russians tried to take their ancestral voice. She wondered if their language bided somewhere secret in her body, not the chips and bits that had recently dropped from nowhere but a fully formed fluency that might yet erupt at a moment of willing surrender.

  In her life so far, such a moment had not presented itself.

  Quinn arrived exactly on time. “Rise and shine,” he called, the screen door banging behind him.

  “I rose four hours ago,” she said. “The shining I shall leave to younger persons.”

  “Ona, you look shiny as a new tuning peg. Look at that hair.”

  “I could go to war with this hair,” she said. “It cost me forty dollars.”

  His cheeks were all pinked up. Travel agreed with him, and she might have known: people like Quinn, always running from themselves, loved the road. He took her things and escorted her to the car. He’d made such a fuss about its vintage, its “legs,” owing, she felt privately bigheaded to hear, to her habit of starting it up twice a week for grocery shopping. Quinn helped her into the passenger side, cupping her elbow with his long fingers, provoking in her a paradox of helplessness and vigor.

  She smoothed her slacks across her thighs as Quinn jaunted to the other side and took the wheel. She expected a leadfoot type who’d make the drive in record time (she wondered what the record actually was), but he proceeded with stupendous caution, bypassing the most obvious highway entrance and making a sudden turn into a neighborhood of well-kept houses.

  “Where the heck are we going?” Ona asked.

  “On a rescue mission,” Quinn said. “Damsel in distress.” He pulled up to a white Cape two blocks off Washington Avenue. With a jolt of dismay, Ona realized where they were.

  “We’re taking an unbuttoned mother on a road trip?”

  “She asked to come,” Quinn said. “You have no idea what a relief it is to grant her a wish.”

  Belle came out of the house, carrying a stuffed satchel. Another woman bounded after her.

  “Uh-oh,” Quinn muttered.

  Unlike Belle, the second woman was dark-haired and sturdily built. From a distance she bore the same untouched, untouchable quality Ona remembered in the girls from Henneford Academy, Lester’s sister school, but closer up the façade melted off. She was grieving: taut and haunted.

  “May I please speak to you, please?” the brunette asked Quinn.

  As Quinn got out of the car, Belle slipped into the driver’s seat.

  “Belle—”

  “I’m taking the wheel,” she said to him. “You’re a terrible driver.” The skin beneath her eyes was purpled with fatigue; it had been nearly three months by Ona’s count, too long to last without measurable sleep, though she herself had done the same after Frankie.

  Quinn studied her for a moment as the brunette glowered at the lot of them. “All right,” he said to Belle, then turned to the brunette, who began to berate him in a stage whisper.

  Belle tossed her bag into the back seat, where it merged almost conjugally with Quinn’s duffel. Ona patted her stiff, see-through hair. “May I ask?”

  “I told Quinn he couldn’t do this alone.”

  Ona bristled. “I don’t require a nurse.”

  “I wasn’t planning to nurse you,” Belle said. “I was planning to get the hell out of town.” Her eyes brimmed. “You don’t know how badly I want to jump out of my skin.”

  But Ona did know. After Frankie, it would have been a balm of the first order to simply get into a car and go. She tried to swallow her consternation. She did not want to be one of those old people who detest change—Louise had warned her against this very thing. But she couldn’t help reeling with disappointment. Last night she’d worked her balky faucets to fill the tub high and spritzed the water with almond oil. This morning she’d dabbed perfume behind her ears. She hadn’t counted on being the third wheel. Already too hot in her long-sleeved blouse, she felt like a collapsed pudding, a leftover that someone had forgotten on the seat.

  Belle flipped open the glove box. “No map?”

  “I have a map,” Ona said. “I’m not so feeble-minded as to embark on a road trip without a map.”

  “We’ll make do.” Belle tinkered with the rearview mirror; Ona caught a whiff of body odor. Just outside, Quinn and the brunette were engaged in what might generously be called a discussion.

  “That’s my sister, if you wondered.”

  “I didn’t,” Ona said.

  Ona stared ahead, ashamed of herself. Who was she to begrudge the poor woman some breathing room?

  “Quinn told me about your son,” Belle said. “I hope you don’t mind.”

  “I suppose it doesn’t matter whether I do or I don’t.” To her surprise, though, she didn’t mind. Her secret had been released into the air, harmless as a butterfly. She couldn’t quite remember why she’d kept it so hard pressed to her chest. For ninety years.

  “Being with you,” Belle said, “helps me believe that my son is still in the world somewhere.” She blinked hard. “Thank you for that.”

  “You’re welcome,” Ona said. But for Ona, it was the opposite. She’d tucked the boy safely offstage, in a species of Limbo. He was less than real but more, much more, than a memory: a voice speaking from the wings, an impression of living stillness. But with the tormented mother lurching into the floodlights it was impossible to forget he was dead.

  Now Quinn was back. “Amy called your father,” he said, getting into the back seat. “The great man’s on his way.”

  The sister scurried to Belle’s window, holding a tiny pink phone. “Sweetie, can you at least wait for Dad?”

  “Tell him it’s a little late to be playing Dear Old Daddy,” Belle said. “Isn’t there a company somewhere that needs plundering?”

  “Call me when you get there,” the sister said. “Can you please do that, please?” She folded the phone into Belle’s hand, then kissed the tops of her sister’s fingers. “Don’t let him talk her into anything,” she instructed Ona, to whom she had not been introduced.

  Belle sighed loudly. “Tell Dad we’re taking a mother to see her son. A very nice mother, his own grandson’s community project.”

  Ona began, “Excuse me—”

  “You’re booked at the Apple Country Motor Court,” Amy said to Quinn. “When you don’t book ahead you end up sleeping in the car.”

  “That was fifteen years ago, Amy,” Quinn said.

  “Ted’s furious about this, for the record.”

  “Then where is he?”

  “With his children,” Amy said. “Spending time with his children.” She leaned far into the window. “This is on you,” she added, pointing at Quinn. Then she gave Belle’s hair a motherly swipe and turned back to the house.

  “That was hardly necessary,” Ona said.

  “Actually,” Quinn said from the back, “it was.”

  Belle snapped on her seat belt. “Amy has always been a bear.”

  Ona said, “That’s one word for it.”

  “Be glad she didn’t insist on driving us herself.”

  “Oh, I am. Your sister strikes me as the type of driver who raises the rates for everybody else.”

  “Good one, Ona,” Quinn said, and Ona felt ridiculously pleased.

  Belle started the car—the getaway car now, it seemed—and fiddled with the controls. “Where’s the AC?”

  “It’s a car,” Ona said, “not a berth on the Queen Mary.” She was still chafing from being referred to as a community project.

  Belle fanned her delicate clavicle with the collar of her blouse. “I myself am an excellent driver, Miss Vitkus. I’ll get you there, safe and sound.”

  “Not if your father gets here
first,” Quinn said. “Step on it.”

  At last they pulled away, at a prudent and acceptable speed, and within minutes they were on the highway. As their distance from home increased, the travelers established a serviceable rapport. They talked awhile about the upcoming elections, and the war, and the Red Sox, before drifting into silence. Half asleep and peering down the years, Ona found her mother standing near a window, her hair tied back by a frayed length of ribbon. Branches scratched against a lintel. A white dog sighed. Where was this? Was it possible to remember a land she had left at the age of four? Was anything truly retrievable after a hundred years?

  An hour later, as they crossed the New Hampshire border, Belle picked up a dropped stitch: “My father’s a hard man,” she said to Ona, “but he built himself up from nothing. He had goals. You have to admire that. Of course, he sacrificed his family.” She shot Quinn a layered look through the rearview. “Some daughters are more forgiving than we are. Dad got stuck with unforgiving types.”

  “You’re not the unforgiving type,” Quinn said. Ona strained to hear him. “Amy, maybe. Not you.”

  They were speaking in code, Ona knew; perhaps this was the only way they could speak. She lapsed into silence, until it occurred to her that it was her very presence that made their communication, however painful, possible at all. She’d met the woman only once, but wasn’t it likely that this version—this snappish code talker—was closer to the real Belle than the timorous little creature who’d haunted her house last week? Is this why Quinn seemed so content back there, so unworried?

  “What’s your father’s trade?” Ona asked.

  “Toys,” Quinn said, “but don’t let that fool you.” He dangled his arms over the seat the way Randall and Frankie used to do in Howard’s Model A.

  “He started with a toy plane,” Belle said, with some pride. “It came in this cute little airplane hangar.”

  “It made him a millionaire within seven months,” Quinn said, “and after that he paid someone to trace the Cosgrove family tree all the way back to a crowd of minor dukes, and that’s how Belle and Amy grew up thinking they were royalty.”

  Ona realized they were playing out an old script. Louise called this sort of thing “pair bonding,” the equivalent of birds passing a berry beak to beak.

  “It wasn’t seven months,” Belle said.

  “That’s how he tells it.”

  “It was seven years,” Belle said. “Quinn’s an exaggerator.”

  “Cosgrove?” Ona asked.

  Belle nodded.

  “Cosgrove Toys? That’s your father?”

  “In name only. He visited us from New York a few times a year.” Belle passed a truck driven by an old man who looked terrified. “Once he spent three solid years in Taiwan while we stayed home. It’s a miracle they’re still together. He came back up here for good after he retired.”

  “I think they call it jail,” Quinn said. “The great man did some short time for tax fraud.”

  “Tax evasion. It was almost legal.”

  Ona said, “I remember that toy airplane. The Future Flyer.”

  “That’s right!” Belle said, brightening. “The Future Flyer.”

  “The boys at Lester used to smuggle them in,” she said. “Lester Academy. Perhaps you’ve heard of it. I was a professional secretary to the headmaster.”

  Belle gave her a quick glance, then returned her eyes to the road. “I figured you must have worked.”

  Ona twittered inwardly to have been recognized as the employable type. “It’s a condo development now,” she said, “all those handsome buildings disfigured by the most repulsive grillwork. People ought to go to jail for that.”

  Belle smiled. Ona remembered this part, the effort of presenting an altered self to the world, the strain involved in a simple conversation.

  “You live alone?” Belle asked.

  “I had a friend, but she died.”

  “Pets?”

  “Two cats, but they died, too.”

  “I can’t hear you back here,” Quinn said. He jutted forward again, emitting a whiff of hair product, the starched-doily scent that recalled Maud-Lucy’s parlor.

  “I was telling your lady about my cats,” Ona said. Ginger, a marmalade tabby, had died first. When Kit’s turn came, Ona did not replace her, unwilling to let a helpless cat outlive its mistress.

  That was back when her hair was still growing. She could have gone through another cat and a half by now.

  As the miles clipped along, Quinn gave up trying to hear them and nodded off in the back. Ona or Belle made occasional observations—hawk on a signpost, Harley going too fast—and watched the road together. “You know,” Ona said, “I might just have one of those little planes in the house somewhere. If I find it, I’ll be pleased to give it to you.” But she hadn’t run across one in her mad and fruitless search for her birth certificate.

  Belle smiled for real then. “You’re exactly the way he described you,” she said, to which Ona made no response but to blush so hard that her eyelids heated up. Quinn was snoring lightly now, and she realized that she wasn’t the third wheel after all; he was.

  In Keene they stopped at a diner, where Ona offered to treat everyone to lunch with money from her long-dormant travel fund.

  “No, no,” Belle said.

  “Let her,” Quinn said. “She’s not helpless.” He rapped a knuckle on Ona’s wrist—it actually made a sound, bone on bone. He was presenting her, she saw this now, as his prize, like a cat dragging a blood-sticky sparrow to the mistress of the manor. Normally these things infuriated her, but because he had no other prize to give—and because he knew she knew this—she felt useful, almost jubilant. She was having a bang-up time. Whether or not the visit with Laurentas turned out the way she hoped, the trip would be worth the trouble.

  As she opened the menu, Ona felt momentarily unborn, as if her long life had been a warm-up for the real show, on which the curtain was about to rise. She ordered a grilled cheese and a strawberry shortcake, expecting to eat it all.

  * * *

  This is Miss Ona Vitkus. This is her life memories and shards on tape. This is Part Five.

  . . .

  As a matter of fact, I did see him again. Maud-Lucy made him promise. A deathbed promise, hard to refuse.

  . . .

  November of 1963. Same day the president was shot.

  . . .

  Not Lincoln. For crumbsake! Kennedy. Riding along bareheaded in Dallas and boom, the end of America. The news wasn’t two hours old when Laurentas turned up at my door.

  . . .

  I don’t recall exactly. “Hello,” would be my guess. He might have called me Mother. Frankie used to call me that as a joke. “Yes, Mother, right away, Mother”—meaning he intended to do the opposite of what I asked.

  . . .

  I’d say it was—awkward, as you might imagine after so long. He was forty-nine years old. I asked him to sit. He took a chair at my kitchen table and cried for about five minutes.

  . . .

  It was. Oh, just dreadful.

  . . .

  To be honest, I never knew whether he was upset about the president, or about seeing me.

  . . .

  Well, now, that’s true. She was his mother, after all, and she died hard. He’d been through a lot. There was a divorce in the works, too. His second wife, as I recall.

  . . .

  Yes, I suppose it was. Very hard. But sometimes divorce is a good thing.

  . . .

  No? Never?

  . . .

  All right. Divorce is never a good thing. But sometimes it has to be done. Certainly in my case. Howard was turning into a lunatic.

  . . .

  Let’s agree that “sometimes” is the correct answer. But not everything has a correct answer. You’re going to have to learn that someday. Can we—?

  . . .

  Yes, so, I left the TV on low all evening. People kept coming on to say what Jackie was doing.
<
br />   . . .

  That was the president’s wife. She had blood on her suit. People couldn’t get over that. I asked Laurentas about his upbringing among the apples and uncles and piano music, but eventually he ran out of things to say and turned to the screen. I made dinner, and then I sent Laurentas down the street for a bakery pie in honor of Maud-Lucy, who loved her sweets. He went, too, like a real son, buttoning his coat on his way out the door.

  . . .

  Pardon?

  . . .

  Oh. Yes. It was. It was awful to hear about Maud-Lucy. She’d been invisible to me for decades, but the news—well, it rang all these chimes. Bing bong bang, all these hurt places clanging to life. My good Lord, what a dreadful day that was.

  . . .

  Indeed he did. He asked about Viktor straight off. Why else do you think he came? He had Viktor’s eyes, you know, with these peppery flecks in the irises. I couldn’t find myself in there at all.

  . . .

  Well, Maud-Lucy had told him the story already, on her deathbed. All I could think to offer in the way of extras was that his father, at least as a boy of eighteen, had been a marvelous tattoo man. He was gentle, I told Laurentas, which was true if you came to him for a tattoo. His specialty was roses. Very meticulous and accurate.

  . . .

  Little furls, a thorn or two, discreetly placed.

  . . .

  That’s none of your business, I’m afraid.

  . . .

  No, no, it’s all right. You’re a child. You don’t know what’s proper to ask a lady and what’s not. And if you must know, I do have a tattoo, and it’s in a place I can’t show you.

  . . .

  Don’t apologize. To be honest, I’m rather pleased you asked. And that you weren’t surprised by the answer.

  . . .

  Because a lot of people think I’m a piece of statuary with no past, that’s why. And here you are in my kitchen, reminding me that I’m me. Now, where—?

  . . .

  Right. I asked Laurentas, “Are you a doctor?” Maud-Lucy promised me he’d become a doctor. “I’m a surgeon,” he said. “Your natural grandfather was a surgeon,” I told him, “except in America, where he was an acid cooker. And your natural father was good with a needle. Excellent hands.”