The One-in-a-Million Boy

by Monica Wood

  . . .

  “Why, thank you, Miss Vitkus.” That’s what she said, as if my invitation was a big gift-wrapped surprise.

  . . .

  Oh, she could eat, that Louise. Plump equaled beautiful back then. You didn’t see these half-starved coat racks prancing around in their underwear. Louise had on that purple suit dress.

  . . .

  Heavens, no. I wasn’t the suit dress type. I had a closetful of shirtwaists. “What brings you out on such a cold evening, Miss Grady?” That’s what I asked her after she’d shoveled into the pie.

  . . .

  She said, “Miss Vitkus, I find myself in need of an ally.” Why she needed an ally I had no idea. The boy who’d loosened up the rumor—a scholarship boy, unfortunately, from a cannery family on River Street—he’d been expelled.

  . . .

  Because Louise confronted the little fellow right in front of the Hawkins boy and his parents, and when she finished she had Mrs. Hawkins in tears apologizing six ways from Sunday. The boys, too: both of them in tears.

  . . .

  It was over, yes, but Louise was taking no chances. Like me, she had no man to pay her bills. “How would you like to become a schoolgirl again, Miss Vitkus?” she asks me.

  . . .

  “I haven’t been a schoolgirl since I was fourteen years old, Miss Grady,” I told her. And I hastened to add, in case she thought me ill educated, that I’d had a brilliant tutor.

  . . .

  Exactly! Maud-Lucy Stokes, who schooled me like a countess.

  . . .

  She said, “Then you’ll welcome the chance to reprise your studies, Miss Vitkus,” and she invites me to take part in her Senior Literature Seminar. I would vacate my station from one o’clock to three o’clock every Monday afternoon, and apparently that was fine with Dr. Valentine. You have no idea what a radical proposition this was in 1955.

  Has anyone ever told you—?

  . . .

  Your face. Not a single judging bone in it.

  . . .

  You’re welcome. So I tell Louise, “I’d be honored to attend your seminar, Miss Grady.” And Louise says, “Call me Louise.”

  . . .

  Of course I did. Then I plundered my cupboards and found a bottle of sherry left behind by the previous tenant. I didn’t have the right sort of glasses, but we toasted.

  . . .

  “Cheers,” I imagine. I don’t exactly recall. I remember clinking the wrong sort of glasses and wishing I had the right sort of glasses, and to this day I consider that moment—clink!—as the beginning of our friendship. I’m glad it made a sound.

  . . .

  I’ll say we did! We went through half the bottle, and because I was unused to drinking, I may have mentioned Dr. Valentine more than once.

  . . .

  Oh, I adored him. He was so . . . accomplished. But Louise got an idea in her head.

  . . .

  As she was leaving my apartment she turned around and said, “How long, Ona Vitkus, have you been in love?” Her arms came around me. She smelled like violets even in that freezing night air. “He’s your secret valentine,” she said. “But Ona, dear, are you his?”

  . . .

  . . .

  Excuse me. I forgot you for a second. You have this way of disappearing. Do you know what unrequited means?

  . . .

  U-n-r-e-q-u-i—. Never mind. You won’t need that word, fine-looking boy like you.

  . . .

  You never mind about him. Poor man spent the rest of the term tippy-tapping around Louise, going so far as to let her tinker with the final modules of the seminar. That was Dr. Valentine’s word, modules. I think he made it up, though by the time the sixties got into full swing everybody was using it.

  . . .

  The idea was to corral time in a fashion that took advantage of the boys’ fickle brains. At the time it was revolutionary, but you know, Dr. Valentine wasn’t a rebel. He was just a man in the wrong job. He liked his tea and muffin in the morning. Honestly, he was just a smarter, pleasanter, better-educated, handsomer, more enchanting version of Howard.

  . . .

  Right, so Louise was getting ready for the final module of the Senior Literature Seminar, which was supposed to get the boys all hepped up over Nathaniel Hawthorne and Walt Whitman and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

  . . .

  Long-winded gasbags from the nineteenth century. But Louise slipped in some lady writers with scandalous personal lives.

  . . .

  “These boys need a fuller immersion in the bracing waters of literature,” she’d say. I thought she had a point, not that anyone asked me.

  . . .

  Oh, the boys were all for it. They found the notion of female rebellion hard to resist. And anyway, they were all half in love with Louise by then.

  . . .

  Because she listened. The way you’re doing right now. Poor Louise had to scuffle for every book on her list. She took it as her duty to turn out future husbands with whom future wives could bear to converse over coffee and crumpets without plunging a butter knife into their own breasts.

  . . .

  Because Louise herself had divorced two imperfect men. No children, which left her with an excess of motherly inclinations. The boys’ real mothers had fallen down on the job, is how Louise saw it.

  . . .

  I’m sure they did do the best they could.

  . . .

  Yes, I’m sure they did, I’m agreeing with you, but according to Louise it wasn’t nearly enough. It was her burden, by default, not only to shine up the future husbands of the world, but also to prevent them from marrying batty-lashed simpletons.

  . . .

  By forcing the boys to read things like “Désirée’s Baby”—that’s a shocking story by a lady writer named Kate Chopin. A crusader, that was Louise. Her mother was an old suffragette from Philadelphia.

  . . .

  . . .

  Sorry, I forgot you again. You know, one meets so many people, the years pass and pass, but there are certain times, certain people—

  . . .

  They take up room. So much room. I was married to Howard for twenty-eight years and yet he made only a piddling dent in my memory. A little nick. But certain others, they move in and make themselves at home and start flapping their arms in the story you make of your life. They have a wingspan.

  . . .

  I would say so, yes. I would say that you are a boy with a wingspan.

  . . .

  You’re welcome. So, Louise brought in all these books for Dr. Valentine’s approval. But she was a cagey one, that Louise. In they came, stack after stack, big sliding mountains of books. We had six chairs lined up along the wall outside Dr. Valentine’s office, and that’s where Louise deposited her books, on these straight-back chairs where boys were supposed to wait in a sweat after some absurd infraction.

  . . .

  One stack per chair. You never saw anything so comical, all those books sitting in neat towers, each one the height of a boy. You wanted to put hats on them.

  . . .

  Quite the opposite. Oho, Louise presented her books with the innocence of a candy cane. She had on this swirly red skirt and a bright white blouse with cap sleeves. Her shoes matched: red, with white piping. I haven’t thought of those shoes for years: they practically talked.

  “I’m considering these,” she says to Dr. Valentine, “and these, and these, and these. Subject to approval.”

  Now, Dr. Valentine was handsome in his way, but a trifle gawky. Loosely jointed. He leaned over one stack, plucked up a book, leaned over another—like one of those long-necked birds you see in roadside marshes stabbing at tadpoles.

  . . .

  Not as funny as it sounds.

  . . .

  Because Dr. Valentine had elegance. So, we’ve got books on six chairs and Dr. Valentine is thoroughly flummoxed. Plus, Louise freighted the deck with such obvious outrages that her actu
al choices looked maidenly by comparison.

  . . .

  Dime-store paperbacks. Some Communist screeds. An account of a seventeenth-century lady of the night. In other words, some of her real choices slipped through unread.

  . . .

  You don’t miss much, do you? It was exactly like watching a trick—a midway flimflam where you show the mark a talking magpie and pick his pocket while he’s teaching the bird to say “Cincinnati.”

  . . .

  You’re right! Everything reminds me of birds today. Watch the window. I had a junco earlier. You might get number fifteen. In another couple of weeks you’ll have your twenty and then some.

  . . .

  Thirty’s not out of the question. You might get thirty.

  . . .

  Well, it took poor Dr. Valentine two weeks to poke through all the stacks. He missed “Désirée’s Baby” and some other good ones, but he caught a book called Mrs. Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, who wasn’t even American. That one he brought home for his wife to read.

  . . .

  It’s about a lady who goes out to buy flowers for a dinner party. Which she didn’t have to do.

  . . .

  Because she had plenty of money. She could have sent someone. Or had them delivered.

  . . .

  You know, I just recalled Dr. Valentine’s wife’s name. Sadie. She also gave dinner parties.

  . . .

  I was never invited. But Louise, she went to all of them. Sadie Valentine turned out to be a thorough reader, since she found the scene in Mrs. Dalloway where one lady kisses another lady, and she had to read quite a bit of the book to get to that part.

  . . .

  No, the dinner party happens at the end. The whole story takes place in one day; Louise made a big deal over that. The lady who’s giving the party, she lives her whole wrong life, plus her other life that she might have had, in that one day.

  . . .

  Oh, no, Louise taught it anyway. I don’t think Dr. Valentine ever found out. It’s not a long book. Not my cup of tea, exactly, but Louise was a wonderful teacher. I hadn’t studied with such ardor since I was a girl.

  . . .

  It was! It was wonderful! The truth is, people are replaceable.

  . . .

  They are. If you live a long time, you discover this. It took more than thirty-five years for Maud-Lucy’s place to fill, but fill it did, with Louise, another brilliant woman willing to take on the burden of my education.

  . . .

  I’m no good at summaries. I suppose you’d have to say—if you had to, in one sentence—that the book is about being unthinkably lonely. Oops, there’s your junco. That’s fifteen.

  MARRIED

  Longest engagement. 67 years. Octavio Guillien and Adriana Martinez. Married at age 82. Country of Mexico.

  Most times married to same person. 66 and counting. Lauren and David Blair. Country of USA.

  Highest marriage rate. 35.1 per 1,000. Country of US Virgin Islands.

  Largest wedding cake. 15,032 pounds. Country of USA.

  Longest marriage. 86 years (1743–1829). Lazarus and Molly Rowe. Country of USA.

  Most couples married in one wedding ceremony. 35,000. Country of South Korea.

  Largest TV audience for a wedding. 750 million. Prince Charles and Lady Diana. Country of UK.

  Longest train on wedding dress. 2,545 feet. Country of Netherlands.

  City to hold most wedding ceremonies. Las Vegas. 280 per day. Country of USA.

  Longest kiss. 30 hours and 59 minutes and 27 seconds. Louisa Almedovar and Rich Langley. Country of USA.

  Chapter 17

  According to the second hand on Quinn’s watch, the ceremony—conducted in a beige second-floor office of the Granyard Town Hall—took six minutes and twenty-two seconds. The newlyweds headed homeward in Ted’s freshly vacuumed van. Quinn bundled Ona into the Reliant and took the wheel. For about twenty miles the two couples caravanned, then Quinn lost patience, passed Ted’s poky Windstar, and gunned the engine, Ona’s matron-of-honor bouquet discharging festive clouds of lily pollen.

  The wedding had given them much to ponder, so they didn’t talk much. The drive was pleasant, the weather cooler, and he had the boy on his mind. During his five years away, Quinn had often felt as if he were orbiting the earth as real life went on far below him, barely visible. Upon reentry into the home atmosphere, he’d experienced a sweet sense of approach, and for months he cleaved to that feeling by force of will. The inevitable crash landing came in midwinter during a father-son “bonding” experiment embedded in a brief series of guitar lessons.

  He’d taken a second day job teaching at a music store on Forest Avenue—Stanhope Music Company, the site of his future friend’s past—and found himself an awkward teacher. The store owner deemed him “intimidatingly overeager,” adding that many of the students (admittedly, the ones with no aptitude) didn’t like him.

  “This is different,” Belle had assured him. He could still remember the way her lips formed the words. “He’s your son.”

  For lesson six, Quinn once again invited the boy into the heated comfort of Belle’s roomy garage, currently cleared out for renovation. He arranged two facing chairs and neatened up a short, thoughtfully chosen stack of CDs.

  “The longest distance marched by a marching band,” said the boy, “was forty-six-point-seven miles.”

  Quinn plugged in two guitars. Belle jaunted in, left snacks, patted them both on the head, and retreated.

  The boy took a single Oreo off a plate, a single parsimonious sip of ginger ale. “They marched from the town of Assen, country of Netherlands,” he said, “to the town of Marum, country of Netherlands, on May 9, 1992.”

  Quinn presumed there was a manner in which one answered such conversational gambits; it’s just that he could never think of one. He urged the boy to notice the salvaged soundproofing, installed since the last lesson, and the neatly assembled stash of equipment he’d scored from a local studio going under.

  “It took thirteen hours and fifty minutes,” the boy said. “Sixty marchers started and fifty-two marchers finished.”

  The floor problem—fissured concrete—remained unsolved, possibly unsolvable without overspending their budget. But giddy hope was the flavor of the season in his newly tooled household, so Quinn retained the mulish expectation that he’d have a studio up and running by spring.

  “It was your mother’s idea,” he told the boy. “We’ll bump out that wall, replace the doors, and rent out rehearsal space.” He smiled zealously. “Plus recording services.”

  He said “we” to include the boy, to whom he’d already demonstrated his newly acquired setup—what boy didn’t love machines?—but so far the boy had bared not a jot of interest. “I’ll be the session player by day,” Quinn said, patting the guitar in his lap, “and keep the home fires burning at night.”

  In response to the boy’s stillness, Quinn added, “Do you know what compromise means?”

  After another moment of solemn consideration, the boy said, “I don’t think that will work.”

  What he meant was anyone’s guess, so Quinn asked him to imagine the control booth beyond the wall, the performance space in front of him, a floating mic above his head, an open appointment book crammed with names, a humming empire that the boy, who had difficulty with spatial perception, could not envision.

  “Never mind,” Quinn said. “You’ll see it for real soon enough. Did you listen to the songs I gave you?”

  “Yes.”

  “Three times, like I asked?”

  “Plus seven more times. Ten times.” The boy looked terrified.

  “This isn’t a test. Try to relax. What did you think?”

  “The songs have too many notes.”

  A terrible, unwanted thought crashed through the ceiling of Quinn’s meticulously constructed caution, and not for the first time: this child couldn’t be his. He just couldn’t.

  “They were supposed to in
spire you,” Quinn said. Physically, the boy was all Belle: all open-faced, belly-up innocence. The part that wasn’t Belle—the part that resembled a secretive, burrow-dwelling animal—reminded him of his own father, who rarely spoke except to deliver pronouncements.

  “Okay,” the boy said, seeming to absorb Quinn’s every unfatherly thought. How could he know? He did, though; Quinn felt cornered, caught, made to pay for his five-year absence. But he decided to take what was coming to him—not just now but forever.

  You boys have to be men now, his father had once said. Your mother’s dead and that’s all there is to it.

  The boy had put on his Scout uniform for the lesson, the logic of which surpassed Quinn’s powers of deduction. Quinn regarded the costume’s precise creases and attendant frippery, patches for everything except music. He placed a guitar—a Les Paul junior knockoff Belle had bought on sale—into the boy’s arms and led him through a profoundly unsuccessful scale. “Don’t think,” he said. “Feel.”

  “Feel what?” said the boy.

  Crying won’t bring her back. Now let’s get these things into the truck.

  “Maybe ten times is too many times,” the boy suggested. In his arms the guitar looked radioactive. Quinn wondered if it was possible for a human being to actually dislike music.

  “Here,” he said, arranging the boy’s fingers into a first-position G. “We’re going to try the one-four-five progression from last week, just to remind you what it sounds like. Then we’ll review the other scale I taught you—remember the blues box?”

  The boy’s mouth made a perceptible downturn.

  “Okay, then. Great. By the time you get back to school on Monday you’ll have girls lining up to carry your books.”

  “I don’t know any girls.”

  “You will if you play the blues.”

  “You said this was rock.”

  Quinn let out his breath, long and silent. “What is the foundation of rock-and-roll, the heart and core of all modern popular music?”

  “Blues,” the boy recited glumly.