Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe?
Page 23
“So you’re here to arrest my aunt?” I asked, and Caroline shook her head.
“I’m done with all that,” she said.
“Why?”
“Calvin, I killed that man,” Caroline said. And I knew what she meant. After all, I had, in my way, killed the same man, and the man he’d killed, too, and I was relieved to be so far away from the place where I had done that thing to those people.
“So why are you here then?” I asked Caroline, and I felt as I had earlier, right before I’d asked Aunt Beatrice if she was my mother. It was the feeling you get when you ask a question and are afraid the answer you’re going to get is not the answer you want.
“I want you to run away with me,” Caroline said, then laughed at herself for saying, or wanting, something so ridiculous. “I mean it,” she added, and I believed that she did.
Anyway, that was the answer I wanted! I’d finally gotten the answer I’d wanted! And it turned out, as is true of most people and of most good things, that I was not worthy of it, that I was scared of it.
“But you barely know me.”
“Well, yeah,” Caroline said in a way that suggested that her barely knowing me was my most attractive quality.
“Where would we go?” I asked, not really caring where, just trying to buy myself some time. Caroline shrugged, but I sensed that she knew where and that she wasn’t going to tell me because I would find some way to object to the place even though I’d surely know not one thing about it. “To do what?” I asked, and again she just shrugged.
“I can’t,” I said. Caroline didn’t say anything to that, didn’t even bother to shrug, just fixed her eyes on me and kept them on me, just daring me to say something false. I realized then how she must have, in fact, been very good at her job, and that it must have cost her a great deal to give it up. But I persisted. I told her that my aunt was very sick and that I had to take care of her. And that my mother had come back into my life, that she was not dead after all, and that it would be wrong to leave her now that it turned out that she hadn’t left me. I suggested that Caroline stay with us instead. That we didn’t have to go anywhere. That we could make a life here in ________.
“A life here,” Caroline repeated. She’d made her voice sound as Sheboygan as possible: guileless, wide open, as though she really were considering making a life in that place. “Tell me about it,” she said. But she must have known I wouldn’t, that I didn’t need to. Because I could already see the life we’d make there. My aunt would die soon, and I would have to watch that happen, would have to bury her. And then it would be us, and my mother, in the house that resembled a church. No matter how much we’d changed, or had wanted to, we would revert to who we had always been. My mother would probably take up her John Calvin again, and I would find another obscure industry to blog for. Who knew what Caroline would do, but whatever she did, or didn’t do, my mother would probably judge her for it, just as she’d judged Dawn, and they would end up hating each other, and then they would end up hating me, and me, them. It would be like we were back in Congress. It would be like we had never left or never could leave.
“Where will we go?” I asked Caroline. And this time she told me. And I was right: I knew not one thing about the place.
234.
There was still one last thing nagging at me.
“Did you really not know about my mother’s book?” I asked.
“Oh, Calvin,” she said, placing her right hand on my left cheek, and I closed my eyes to more deeply feel her touch. “Of course I did. Everyone knows about it. It’s a very famous book.”
235.
It turned out that we’d been walking toward Caroline’s car the entire time, that she’d parked it down the road and walked back to the house so that no one would know she was there (it’s not easy for a spy to stop acting like a spy, a thief like a thief, a minister like a minister, a blogger like a blogger). We got in the car, and she drove us back to the house. When we got there, I saw Charles’s car parked out front. I assumed that my mother and Charles had returned from their errands, and I felt a strong need for closure, a need to not simply disappear, a need to say goodbye.
“You sure that’s a good idea?” Caroline asked, and I knew what she was really asking was, Are you sure you’re going to be able to do that? I didn’t answer her. I just got out of the car, walked into the house. My mother was sitting at the table with my aunt, who, when she saw me, handed me her pipe and her lighter. I lit the pipe, sucked on it, inhaled, exhaled, without coughing, and then returned the pipe to my aunt. She had a bemused look on her face, and I couldn’t help but wonder if she’d seen me talking to Caroline, if she knew I wanted to tell her something, and if she, like Caroline, doubted I’d be able to.
“Where’s Charles?” I asked.
“Gone,” my mother said. It turned out that she’d driven Charles to the airport so he could fly back to Congress to be with his father, Leland. My mother seemed melancholy; maybe she was thinking of how, for so long, the Otises had watched out for me on her behalf (my mother feared, I think, that my aunt would show up and try to corrupt me, and of course she was right to fear that) and how it marked an end of an era.
“Charles is a good man,” my mother said.
The room was still thick with smoke, and my head was still thick with it, too. I’ve heard that smoking pot relaxes you, but that wasn’t true in my case.
“Charles is an asshole,” I said. And when I said that, I could feel something take root and grow within me, and I knew that I really was going to be able to say goodbye to them after I was through saying all the other things I’d always wanted to say.
“He is a good man,” my mother insisted, and even though she was supposed to be a new person, I could hear the old rectitude in her voice, which made me even angrier.
“He beat his father over the head with a bottle of laundry detergent. But then, his father probably deserved it. He’s an asshole, too.”
“Calvin,” my mother said in warning. My aunt hadn’t said anything, pot smoke pouring out of her mouth the way the words were pouring out of mine.
“You were a terrible mother,” I said to my mother.
“Bea,” my mother said to my aunt. As though my insulting her was Aunt Beatrice’s fault. Which it might have been. But I wanted credit for it, too. My aunt may have put the words in my mouth, but I was the one who was finally saying them.
“It’s true,” I said to my mother. “My father was a better mother than you. The Sociologist would probably have been a better mother than you, too. You had sex with both of them. And Reverend John Lawrence. I don’t know how you could have had sex with that man, if you did have sex with him, but I bet, since you did, if you did, even he would have been a better mother than you.”
After that, there was silence. I didn’t know what either of them was thinking. But I was trying to think of what terrible thing to say next. There was so many of them in me, and so many of them had been waiting to be said for so long that I didn’t know which one to choose.
“Your book was boring,” I finally said, taking care not to refer to it as famous. “I’m glad you didn’t write another one. The first one was bad enough.”
“Calvin,” my aunt said, and this time it was she who seemed to be warning me about going too far.
“Oh, go ahead and die already,” I said to her. My aunt didn’t say anything to that, didn’t seem to be affected by what I’d said at all, but my mother gasped.
“You shouldn’t judge me,” I said to my mother, and my aunt laughed in pleasure at hearing those words of hers come out of my mouth. Which of course was what I wanted, what I’d always wanted. I already miss you so much, I thought, and now, years later, I still miss her, and I’ve missed her for so long now that I suppose I’ll never stop missing her. Meanwhile, my mother was staring at me, in horror or astonishment or admiration, I couldn’t tell which.
“Who are you?” she wanted to know.
“Yes, Calvin,” my au
nt said, smiling. “Who are you?”
That was a joke. She knew who I was. Because she had helped make me. And so, in her way, had my mother. But I answered anyway.
“You know who I am,” I said. “I’m Calvin Bledsoe.”
Acknowledgments
This book was inspired by Graham Greene’s 1969 novel Travels with My Aunt. Thanks to Mr. Greene, wherever he might be.
In an interview with the Paris Review, the fiction writer Joy Williams responded to the notion of fellow fiction writer Don DeLillo’s coldness by saying, “What’s wrong with that? The cold can teach us many things.” That idea ended up being so important to this book that I had one of my characters repeat it. Thanks to Ms. Williams for that.
Thanks to the editors of the Cincinnati Review and Great Jones Street for publishing sections of this book.
Thanks to Jim Longenbach and Joanna Scott for their support and friendship over many many years.
Thanks to Chuck Adams and Craig Popelars at Algonquin Books, and to my agent, Elizabeth Sheinkman.
Thanks to Bowdoin College for its financial support.
Thanks to my friends and family.
also by brock clarke
The Price of the Haircut
The Happiest People in the World
Exley
An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England
Carrying the Torch
What We Won’t Do
The Ordinary White Boy
About the Author
Brock Clarke is the author of five novels, including the bestselling An Arsonist’s Guide to Writers’ Homes in New England, as well as three collections of short stories, the most recent being The Price of the Haircut. He lives in Portland, Maine, and teaches at Bowdoin College.
Published by
ALGONQUIN BOOKS OF CHAPEL HILL
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a division of
WORKMAN PUBLISHING
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New York, New York 10014
© 2019 by Brock Clarke.
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on experience, all names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019005910
eISBN 978-1-64375-014-9