The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  . . .

  Linkman. Tell Mr. Linkman that Miss Ona Vitkus spent the Jazz Age washing diapers and reading The Modern Priscilla.

  . . .

  It’s a magazine about keeping house. But I’ll tell you one thing about the Great Depression. Two things, since you like lists.

  One: Some people skated by just fine.

  Two: You think you discovered recycling? We reused butcher paper.

  . . .

  First you soap off the juices.

  . . .

  From meat. Beef and pork and such. Then you smear vinegar over the whole works. Then you dry it up and use it again. We kept it in the store to wrap guitar strings.

  . . .

  Let’s find one I can answer. Here’s one: Influential People. Ask that.

  . . .

  Maud-Lucy comes to mind, naturally. In my girlhood. Otherwise, Louise. Louise was a ticket. Sometimes I see her, clear as a full moon.

  . . .

  Not literally. I don’t literally see her, for crumbsake. But she’s there, in my mind’s eye.

  . . .

  Is that so? How long was he gone?

  . . .

  Five years is a long time when you’re a young fellow. Not so much when you’re my age. At my age five years is an eye blink. What happened when he came back?

  . . .

  My goodness. And how long did the second one last?

  . . .

  Do you like your mother’s new fellow? This somewhat secret fellow who might be your father someday?

  . . .

  You certainly did mention it, however briefly. You’re not the only one with a good memory.

  . . .

  He sounds like a very nice man.

  . . .

  Of course you love your father. I might point out, however, that it’s no crime to love the other fellow, too, if he’s a good man who’s kind to you.

  . . .

  You’re welcome. Now, where—?

  . . .

  Oh, Louise was something else: that queenly bearing, those snappy eyes—oh, my, just a stunner. Unfortunately, it brought out the mouse in me. I’d left Howard to become a professional secretary, so wouldn’t you think I’d be twanging with confidence? But certain women, they command things and you obey.

  . . .

  Thank you. But I wasn’t that type at all. I required filling out, and when you’re the type that requires filling out, you go looking for stuffing, and there she was.

  . . .

  Except for me, and the Franco ladies who ran the kitchen, I was the sole female at Lester Academy when Louise blustered in like the last leaves of autumn. So, we were comrades of sorts, Louise and I. Lester was our desert island and I was starving and Louise had all the food.

  . . .

  They were good boys, I would say. Nothing like these boys today. Present company excepted.

  . . .

  You’re welcome. They came from Boston, mainly. Tuition was no trifle, but what secretly kept Lester afloat was a fearsome woman named Mrs. Emmaline Simpson. She was the great-granddaughter of the founder. Mrs. Simpson grew up in Lester, where women aspired to nothing, but somehow Mrs. Simpson managed a Bachelor of Arts degree from Swarthmore College.

  . . .

  Oh, it’s quite the fancy-pants place, in Pennsylvania, I believe. Every June she visited us, with her high white hair and mother-of-pearl combs and an eighty-pound dress you could convincingly hang on a curtain rod.

  . . .

  Her purpose was always the same: she wanted more lady authors in the English classes.

  . . .

  Something along the lines of Mistress Bradstreet. She’d make her so-called suggestion, leave the men to so-called decide, and then, at five sharp, return to school to deposit her annual check. On her way out she always gave me a box of sweets from Italy.

  . . .

  A lady poet from Colonial America. She wrote quite a bit about her wonderful husband.

  . . .

  That’s all right, I’d never heard of her, either.

  . . .

  Well, Mrs. Simpson died. The trustees thought the old trickster might’ve left her money to a pack of homeless cats. But she did them one better, oh, she did. Her bequest was gargantuan—millions and millions!—but here’s the hitch: the English department at Lester Academy for Boys would thereafter include a qualified woman.

  . . .

  Oh, I agree. Homeless cats would have been equally deserving. But can you imagine the hand wringing at the trustees’ meeting? On they went about the Lester tradition.

  . . .

  On the contrary, it was kind of amusing. One man after another, gum-flapping about tradition, tradition, tradition. If they could eat tradition, they would have. They combed their hair with it. What a day that was. A woman on the faculty? Unthinkable. I took notes, which was my job, and some of the words I declined to take down were the type for which no shorthand yet existed.

  . . .

  Of course they did. Money talks, always does. Fall of 1954: enter Louise, a one-woman weather system.

  . . .

  Hmm. Smart. That’s the first thing. Independent. But you really—you had to know her to see how she was. The war changed certain women. Note that down under World War II.

  . . .

  That’s all right, I can wait.

  . . .

  Some women, correct. On the outside, I must have looked like one of them, one of those changed women. I’d lost poor Frankie; I’d left Howard; I’d moved away from home and taken up another life. But otherwise I was the same bridled girl I’d always been, if you don’t count my one bolt out of the barn at the age of fourteen, the consequences of which I have already committed to this little gizmo—under duress, I might add.

  . . .

  Don’t apologize. You’re a good boy. I am merely noting the ratio of your willingness to my willingness. But what I meant was that the war changed Louise, too—she lost her two baby brothers in a single day—but you got the feeling it made her more of what she already was.

  . . .

  Alive. Blazing. She was forty-two years old and looked thirty. I was fifty-four and looked sixty.

  . . .

  Oh, she worked out fine at first. They had a kerfuffle over Shakespeare, of all things. Mr. Shakespeare could be a naughty old teaser, and Dr. Valentine took umbrage at Louise’s interpretations. So, a skirmish during year one, nothing fatal. Year two, also quiet, by Louise’s standards. She taught mostly what she was asked to teach, didn’t complain much. But by year three, she found her feet and started improvising.

  . . .

  We were well into the school year, I remember—the trees were spitting leaves. Here comes Louise, in this gabardine suit dress tight across the seat and so purple you’d swear it had a pulse. Until now she’s been standoffish—“hello” is about all I’ve heard from her direct—so I’ve got her pegged as a stuck-up.

  “Shall I tell Dr. Valentine you’re here?” I ask her. Very politely, of course. It’s my job.

  “If you dare,” she says to me.

  . . .

  Oh, she was. Very funny. Then she laughs that steamship laugh of hers and plunks her hind end right down on my desk, on a stack of unsent letters.

  . . .

  Dr. Valentine suffered from chronic regret so I saved correspondence for double-checking at the end of the day. I didn’t care to ask her to move her backside, but I wasn’t leaving her unsupervised with those letters, either. So I sat there. A hostage.

  . . .

  Doing like you’re doing. Looking. Getting the lay of the land.

  . . .

  Here’s what: Louise thinks she’s in trouble over George Eliot—that’s a lady writer from the eighteen hundreds. She’s been working George Eliot’s shadowy love life into her lectures. A mother called, then a father called.

  . . .

  But that’s not why she’s being summoned, and I don’t know how to tell her, since she’s gibbering on abo
ut George Eliot being a glutton for punishment when it came to men. I felt a like a glutton for punishment myself at the time, for reasons I shall not go into here. “But oh,” Louise says to me, “it made her writing so much more lush.” She made the word lush sound like biting into Satan’s apple.

  . . .

  Lush.

  . . .

  More or less. I’m a poor mimic. “Does Dr. Valentine suppose that great writers draw inspiration from dust?” Louise asks me. “From air?”

  . . .

  I’m sure I had no idea whence great writers drew their inspiration; I was trying to fiddle out whether to warn her that Dr. Valentine had summoned Louise Grady on another account entirely.

  . . .

  Well, there was a rumor afoot.

  . . .

  About Louise and the Hawkins boy.

  . . .

  A boy in the Senior Seminar. Quite a hale, strapping fellow who shaved twice a day. A freckle-faced eighth-grader got the story going and now, bammo, it was everywhere. Poor Louise, nattering on about George Eliot, when in truth she was being hauled in as a corrupter of morals. A femme fatale.

  . . .

  A schemer. A female schemer.

  . . .

  Somebody who connives to make people feel a certain way even when they don’t exactly want to. There’s no corresponding word for a man but there should be.

  . . .

  Scheming to, well, to make that boy fall in love with her.

  . . .

  I had no idea whether or not it was true, but I was worried.

  . . .

  Because she was the only woman I ever saw all day. I didn’t want the only other woman on the premises to get fired.

  . . .

  I said, “Perhaps if you tamed your lectures you would cease to be such an attraction.”

  . . .

  No, no. This was after we got to be friends. Louise liked being an attraction. She was an attraction.

  . . .

  Oh, but you will be. You just wait. Girls are going to line up at your door.

  . . .

  Yes, they will. You have the sort of handsome that girls don’t notice until later.

  . . .

  Eighteen or so. Twenty-one.

  . . .

  It’s not that long. You’ll see.

  . . .

  Right, so there sits Louise on my unsent letters, expecting a bracing duel with Dr. Valentine. “Such sheltered little sticks, these boys,” she says to me. “Exactly like their fathers. Have you noticed, Miss Vitkus?”

  This, I should note for the record, was the first full sentence she ever directed specifically to me. And she keeps running her lip, even though by this time Dr. Valentine’s door is open and there he is, not ten feet away, a portrait of electrified alarm, standing beside Mr. and Mrs. Hawkins, whose fire-breathing rage I can feel in the tingling roots of my hair.

  . . .

  Oh, my goodness, yes, I nearly died. But Louise has a sixth sense for an audience, so she removes her bottom from my desk—without so much as nudging a single letter—stands up, and before turning fully around says quietly to me, though everyone within earshot can make out her words, “If there’s one thing the male animal cannot abide, Miss Vitkus, it’s a female with secrets.”

  . . .

  Wow is right. To this day, I don’t know whether she was referring to George Eliot’s secrets, or her own, or mine. In any case, I was burning—oh, I was aflame—because after she said that, Dr. Valentine stopping looking at Louise.

  . . .

  At me. He was looking at me.

  . . .

  Indeed I was. I was a female with a secret.

  Chapter 16

  He woke late, in a funk of self-reproach, trapped in bleachy motel sheets. After banging on Ona’s door for ten frazzling minutes, he summoned the motel manager—same beaky kid from the night before—who unlocked the door on the mortifying sight of Ona emerging from the bathroom in a knee-length nightgown. Quinn yelped like a stepped-on cat.

  “What are you doing in here?” Ona wailed. “Get out!”

  Quinn clapped his hands over his eyes as the manager fled. “I knocked fifty million times, Ona,” he said, turning his back. “I thought . . .” He faced the open doorway, the daylight beyond, the temptation of Ona’s gassed-up car. He was done with good deeds. Ted’s theatrical “rescue” had pretty much exhausted his appetite for goodness.

  “Get out,” she repeated. “I don’t plan to expire for another eighteen years.”

  An hour later, over a wretched breakfast in the attached grease trap where they’d eaten once already, Quinn remained mute with embarrassment, sipping morosely at a cup of watery coffee as Ona polished off a three-stack of blueberry pancakes. Apples, it seemed, were not yet in season.

  Ona took up the slack. “Wouldn’t you expect a successful surgeon raised in the lap of loving kindness to come up with a happier ending than wheeling himself around a nursing home with a pair of binoculars?”

  “People don’t write their own endings,” he said.

  “Well, I’m planning to write mine.” Despite the nightgown incident she was oddly perky, owing to Belle’s impulsive offer of help, which she’d mentioned four times already.

  “We could swing by to see your son again on the way out of town,” he offered. “Not to put too fine a point on it, Ona, but this could be your last chance.”

  “Don’t you worry,” she said. “Laurentas has a good ten years left in him.” She twinkled from across the table.

  He said, softly enough that she might not catch it, “I was a rotten father.”

  Ona nodded, noncommittal. “There are worse things.”

  “Like what?” He really wanted to know.

  “Being an adequate mother.” She took a swig from her coffee mug. “Rotten fathers are a dime a dozen, who even notices? Whatever kind you were—and I’m sure you weren’t as bad as you think—you probably did the best you could, and nobody expects much more out of a man.”

  “Belle did.”

  “I’ll tell you, Quinn,” she said gravely. Her use of his name startled him. “If you acted more like a grieving father, your lady might want you back.”

  In her face he saw fondness, so he surrendered: “What does a grieving father act like?”

  She said nothing for a time. Then: “Like that Ledbetter fellow.”

  Stung, Quinn made no answer as a party of seven clattered in, high school kids in team jerseys, hooting like owls. They took the curving window station and spread out as if they owned the booth, the town, their own souls, all the joy and folly in the world.

  “And I wish you’d stop calling her my ‘lady,’” Quinn said, “when she obviously isn’t.”

  “You asked me a question. I gave you an answer.”

  He thought about getting up and leaving her there. Let her figure out how to drag her Ledbetter-loving bones the two hundred thirty miles back to Portland, since the sainted scoutmaster hadn’t shown up after all.

  He waved away any further discussion, and they finished eating in silence. Ona plucked a napkin from her lap and dabbed at her chin. “I wonder if there’s a record for most delicious pancakes.”

  Quinn observed her for a moment. “I can’t figure out how he hooked you on this records kick.” He drained his coffee. “You got reeled all the way in.”

  “One,” she said, “it’s not a kick. Two, he reeled me in with enthusiasm.”

  He kept forgetting essential facts about his own son: the boy had been an enthusiast, this was true. His laughter erupted out of nowhere, startling as a dog in the night; he had his delights well sheathed and brandished them at unexpected moments. Here and gone, here and gone. Unlike Belle, unlike Amy, unlike anyone with a soft spot for the boy, Quinn found this card trick of an inner life unsettling, even disorienting. A memory of the boy’s recitations attacked him unannounced: the wiry voice; the lists; the counting; the motionless face and twitchy fingers. He’d been uneasy around the b
oy, troubled by the world in which he dwelled.

  “Look here,” Ona said. “Look who’s here.”

  Ted and Belle: Ted hugging a lurid geyser of maroon and orange lilies, Belle in a fetching white sundress he’d never seen. The straps, trimmed in red, looked edible. Her hair shone. Touché, Ledbetter, he thought bitterly. Well done.

  “I need a favor,” Belle said. “Don’t say no.” Before Quinn could duck for cover, she lobbed the grenade: “Ted and I are getting married in half an hour and we need witnesses.”

  The high school kids applauded; Belle gave a them a startled glance, then smiled. Ted grinned like a sunflower as Quinn’s head filled with bees.

  “A wedding?” Ona said. Her color bloomed. He could see how someone might take her for, say, ninety-five, in exactly the right light.

  “We got the license this morning,” Ted told her, “but we need witnesses to make us legal.”

  Belle said, “The town clerks weren’t very friendly.”

  “That’s just Vermont,” Ted said. “They don’t say much.”

  “Anyway, we wanted to have people we know.” Belle turned to Ona. “I figured you’d still be here. Quinn hasn’t gotten up before ten since high school.”

  “This isn’t as sudden as you think,” Ted said to Quinn. “We’ve been talking about it”—here he looked lovingly at Belle—“for a while.”

  Belle lifted her foot, from which dangled a white sandal decorated with gold rivets. “I picked these up at a Walmart. We’ve been up since six.” She looked—not happy, no; but less doomed.

  “I’ve got a gig tonight,” Quinn said, head still buzzing. “We have to leave, like, ten minutes ago.” He’d been smacked in the forehead with a baseball once and this felt worse.

  “It’s those religious boys,” Ona reminded everyone. “They won’t mind if he’s a little late.”

  “It won’t take five minutes,” Belle said. “I don’t expect cartwheels, Quinn, but if you care for me, then this is how you show it.”

  She gave him a look, spectral and large-eyed, that embraced the length and breadth of their history. This was all he had left of her.