“And speaking of thin Republican women, your mom asked that I try to ensure you pierce no further body parts while under my roof nor deface them with permanent illustrations. I don’t see how I could practically prevent such actions, were you to suspend what I have a hunch is your generally decent judgment, but if you consider my generosity in other areas, I’m hoping that may count for something. Sort of like Mafia protection. Think of me as your personal Don Corleone, without the hit men.”
“Like don’t you mean Tony Soprano?” This was the first evidence that Scott was actually listening. For most of Walter’s speech (which he had rehearsed silently on the bus to Newark Airport), the expression on Scott’s face was disturbingly akin to blank. It did not help that he arrived wearing a T-shirt which read, in a font you’d expect to see on a law firm’s letterhead, GRABBER, BOODIE & DEWITT. (Honestly now, if you wanted vulgar, you could execute it with far more verve than that.)
“So you’re with me?” said Walter.
Scott smiled. “All sounds cool to me, Uncle Walt. You’re the man.”
“You may call me Walter. I think that will go over better at work, don’t you?”
“Hey, it’s copa. Whatever suits. Am I supposed to like not be your nephew?”
“Of course you’re my nephew. I can be as nepotistic as I darn well please. I’m the boss,” said Walter. “As you say, I am the man.”
Scott sat down on the leather couch—could sitting and sprawling be a single action?—right next to The Bruce. T.B. had been feigning relaxation; throughout Walter’s tour, his eyes had never left Scott. Scott started petting him now, and T.B. accepted the affection with wary pleasure.
“You know,” said Walter, “if you don’t mind, I was thinking you could also walk this guy a couple of mornings, which would permit me to get to the gym before work. It much improves my mood.” He also liked the idea of Scott doing the hand-off to surly, gum-snapping Sonya. The two of them might just have something in common. Now that Scott was actually in Walter’s home—complete with grotty duffel bag, guitar case covered with holographic stickers, and a gaudy medallion that looked like something Prince Charles had worn at his Duke of Earl coronation—Walter did see him as a prototypical teenager. But after all, this was part of the adventure! Like hosting an ambassador from one of those brand-new African countries that kept cartographers on their toes.
“Unpack, have a beer, whatever,” said Walter. “And why don’t you call your mom; I put a phone in your room. I’ll take you over to the restaurant in an hour. Hugo’s got his hands on the first truly fabulous corn of the season.”
BACK IN EARLY JUNE, WALTER HAD HAD a moment’s hesitation, wishing he could take back his offer to Scott, when he discovered that Gordie had moved into a place of his own. Walter found this out from his trainer at the gym, who was the trainer of every important homosexual man between Fourteenth and Canal and the only person Walter knew who seemed to get the dish before Ben overheard it at the bar. The first few days after hearing this news, he was constantly alert for the phone, sure that Gordie would call. Walter imagined their reunion in various locations: perhaps Gordie would summon Walter to his office—now inconceivable to Walter as a place in which to do business—or perhaps they would meet somewhere public, at the restaurant or in the park by the playground, all their mutual longing inflamed by their inability to act it out there and then. The public scenario was sexier, but either would be fine, so Walter dressed each morning prepared for Gordie’s summons, choosing clothes that were silky or crisp, fine to the touch and easy to remove.
After the third or fourth day without a call, Walter told himself Gordie needed to settle in first. He imagined Gordie unpacking possessions—not many, because the one who is left is the one who gets to keep the goodies—and carefully lining up books in a new bookcase, plates in a new cupboard, shirts in a new closet. Walter tried to dream up the perfect house gift: maybe an antique Pendleton blanket, to acknowledge Gordie’s nostalgia for his western roots? No, those were passé. A bowl? Too formulaic, too passive.
One day Walter went into an ethnic-goods shop run by a fellow whose eye for beauty made up for his infuriating ennui toward customers. (With lessons from Walter, or maybe just a good dose of Paxil, the man could have had a chain of successful shops, a far more sophisticated version of Pier 1.) There, he found a shirt from India, ivory linen embroidered, almost invisibly, with elephants and monkeys. It had the same collarless neckline that Gordie seemed to favor when he didn’t have to wear a tie. Walter wrapped it himself, in orange rice paper tied with chartreuse ribbon.
This cheerful present sat on Walter’s neglected dining table for two weeks before he realized that Gordie was never going to call. The indifferent shopkeeper took the shirt back in exchange for a huge black basket that Walter placed in a corner of his spare room. Scott could use it for dirty laundry.
One of Walter’s waitresses fixed him up with a flutist. Except for mild middle-age spread, the guy was handsome—and quite enduring in the sack—but during their third week he confessed to a slight anxiety that Walter’s astrological sign was generally not a good match for his. Would Walter go to the flutist’s astrologer and let her take a look at their moons and other mitigating factors? “It’s on me, of course,” said the flutist.
“I would not,” said Walter, though he smiled as he said it. “I do not think in purple, I’m sorry.” They lasted another week, and then the flutist went on tour. At least the ending was easy. No fuss, no muss.
And then, of course, it happened. In the pharmacy, in the toothpaste section. Walter was searching for the mint-flavored dental tape he liked best when the hand touched his shoulder. He jumped, as New Yorkers will at any unexpected touch in public.
“Oh—I never meant to scare you, I’m sorry! How are you?”
Walter knew desperate phony cheer a mile away.
“Gordie,” he said smoothly. “I thought you must’ve moved to Argentina.”
“I’m just so busy now, and I’ve been spending my weekends out in Sag Harbor. But I’ve been wanting to call.”
Walter smiled at Gordie and held his gaze but said nothing. He wanted Gordie to falter.
“You heard I moved to Chelsea. I imagine everyone has.”
“Yes, I heard that.”
“I’ve been wanting—needing time alone. For a while.”
“Poor Stephen,” said Walter.
Gordie frowned. “That sounds odd, coming from you. Don’t you think?”
Walter sighed. “I guess I have to empathize with him at some point, wouldn’t you say?”
Now Gordie looked angry. “Well, I do too, in fact. You don’t even know what went on between us. And actually, we still see each other and talk. It’s not like I don’t know what a schmuck I’ve been, but I still hope we’re going to be friends. It’s hard, harder than you can guess.”
Walter put a hand on Gordie’s shoulder. “You’re right. I’m not in your life anymore, so I’m in no place to judge. We’re also in no place to talk about this. I mean, at the dental floss display?” As he gestured at the legions of little white boxes suspended in midair, he saw it, the one he wanted. He took it down.
Gordie said, “Walter, someday I’m going to call you, you know. It’s not like I think it’s over between us. But this is not my finest hour, and I…”
“I know,” said Walter. “You have to go it alone.”
Gordie stared at him, perhaps searching for any hint of sarcasm. In truth, there was none. Walter did not want to understand—he did not want Gordie to seem anything other than ignoble, yellow-bellied, glib—yet understand he did. He wanted to tell Gordie that his heart was still broken, though that would never be wise, least of all in the CVS, within reach of a placard on gum disease, complete with graphic photos.
“You know exactly where to find me,” he said, and did something unexpected to both of them. He kissed Gordie on one of his lovely clean-shaven cheeks. Just one.
Vell and graciously done, said t
he spirit of Granna when Walter left the store by himself and welcomed, for just an instant, the onslaught of midsummer air. Two days later, Scott arrived.
AT LEAST TO BEGIN WITH, Scott was elaborately thoughtful. He seemed to pad through rooms like a cat walking through broken glass; he closed doors with extreme tact; he left not a single dirty mug or sweatshirt lying around the apartment. He also took The Bruce on walks far longer than Walter did. Scott would come back with reports of the places he’d discovered: Tompkins Square Park, the concrete Picassos off LaGuardia Place, the building painted with parachuting pigs, the block where the Hell’s Angels parked. T.B. began to seem both more rested and more alert. His eczema faded.
At the restaurant, Scott was responsible for collecting and tallying receipts from Ben and for running Hugo’s errands. Though Ben and Hugo already liked their jobs, they liked them better than ever now. Walter was indeed The Man.
Late at night, Walter would sometimes wake to a muffled wailing. The first time, it alarmed him so deeply that he crept out into the dark living room carrying a glass paperweight he kept on his bedside table. The next few times, he lay awake fighting the urge to get prissy. But then he became accustomed to the sound of teenage angst in musical form, accompanied by instruments that sounded like colliding trains. He would go back to sleep thinking how proud Granna would be. Tolerance, she’d told him once, was also next to godliness. It was like a cleanliness of temper, she explained. The young Walter wanted to ask her just how tolerant she thought God was, but he kept that to himself, along with the void where his piety ought to have been.
He could not help seeking parallels between himself as Scott’s generous uncle and Granna as his own kindhearted warrior angel. There was a pretty significant difference, however. Werner and Tipi might be many deplorable things, but unlike Walter and Werner’s parents, they were not a pair of drunken, selfish losers deluded by a lethal mix of narcissism and cultural indignation (okay, perhaps a little war trauma, too). Thanks to Granna, Werner and Walter had grown up to be highly functioning, productive citizens—but if you were to ask Walter, Werner had a far easier time of it and lived his life with the sanctified nonchalance of those who will do anything to avoid dissecting their souls.
Walter and Werner’s father, August—ha! as if there’d been a grain of nobility or summery splendor in the man!—had the bad fortune to fight in Vietnam (though he did so by choice). This was followed by the more ambiguous fortune of being shot—clean through the center of his right palm, so that he did not come close to dying but did require prolonged therapy to regain the use of his dominant hand. Despite a nearly complete recovery (the hand ached in cold weather, and the palm did not flex), he returned home to his wife and children a political cynic and grade-A drinker. He was predictably unpredictable and around home too much for everyone’s comfort.
Werner, who was five years older than Walter, retained earlier, kinder memories of their father—he could even recall the bowling alley where August had kept the long runways polished, the sodapop stocked, the rental shoes lined up on their shelves like soldiers awaiting deployment—but Walter had been too young to remember those days. All he could remember now was the impossibility of knowing whether the dad he would see at the end of a schoolday would help him with his homework or complain, in an escalating rant, about the injustice of the world.
When the bowling alley closed, August Kinderman had enlisted, and his wife and two sons had moved from Boston to the small town in western Massachusetts where August’s mother lived. Granna was still vigorous, recently widowed, and happy to help with her grandsons. Walter noticed that she was a little bossy with his mother—he could remember Granna resetting the table when Rose didn’t do it quite her way and wondering aloud if the younger woman’s skirts were just a little too short—but she treated her grandsons with pure adoration. She would sing Bing Crosby songs as she washed and pressed their little shirts for school, as she baked them strudel and kugel (“Oh vould you like to sving on a star, carry moonbeemps home in a char…”). She papered her kitchen walls with their paintings and crookedly penciled compositions and let them run freely about until dark to play with other children down her nice little street of matchbox houses and beds of striped petunias.
Best of all, moving into Granna’s house meant that Walter got a separate room from Werner, even if his was the smallest. It was the only room on the third floor, with a view over chimneys and roofs toward hills that blushed brilliant red in the fall. “Greylock, tallest mountain in the state,” Granna had told him, pointing out the wide, lofty hill. It looked too tame to be a real mountain, but its superior status compelled respect. Looming to the west, it hastened sunset, lengthening the longest of winter nights. Walter would look out his window sometimes and whisper that name, the name of a magician or mythological trickster. Or a horse ridden by a knight in King Arthur’s court.
After nearly two years away, August returned. He moved Rose, Walter, and Werner to an apartment over a Woolworth just a few blocks from Granna’s house, but he had trouble finding work. Walter supposed that there simply weren’t many bowling alleys out in the country. Granna suggested that what August needed to do was finish college. In retrospect, it didn’t take brains to figure out that August’s inability to find employment had little to do with the supply of jobs and that choosing to stay in the country made it easy for him to use that fiction as an excuse.
Commitment to booze, all its rituals and the changes it wreaks on grown-ups (first the hour-to-hour changes and then, more subtly, the long-term changes), is a confounding thing for a child to observe, let alone understand. After their dad came home, Werner and Walter were often split between their parents. Many evenings, Werner went out with their mother, because he was the older one and could entertain himself during evenings of sorority-sister bridge, reading a Hardy Boys book or rearranging his stamp collection, while Walter stayed home with their dad. Father and son would sit side by side on the couch watching Hogan’s Heroes or Get Smart or Saturday Night at the Movies.
This was not an unpleasant way to pass the time, but along with those hours in front of the TV, one of Walter’s earliest serial memories was of being hustled into the car by his dad after dark and cruising from town to town in search of a bottle. It was such an important bottle, no doubt about that, and you couldn’t get it at just any store. Sometimes the right store would be closed—there would have been a mad, cursing dash in the car, way too fast—and this would lead to bouts of cursing and yet further speeding dashes from town to town. Walter did not need to be told that he wasn’t to tell his mother about these trips. Once in a while, however, she would come home while they were out on their mission—that’s what August called it—and she would be waiting and angry. Walter and Werner would go straight to their room and lie awake listening to the uproar. The two brothers never spoke about it, perhaps because it always happened in the dark before they fell asleep, and when they woke up, the tumult felt unreal or diminished by intervening dreams, dreams that for Walter were often more dramatic, more highly colored, than any of the accusations his parents made in the dark.
And then one day, very early, Granna dropped by with a cake for Werner’s birthday. It was a Saturday, and Walter was the only one up, watching cartoons. Granna walked into the living room in her shiny, snub-nosed high heels and stood between him and the TV, white gloves on hips, her head turning this way and that, like the head of an owl.
“There vuz a party?” she asked him.
Walter told her no, there’d been no party, as he saw her gaze travel from the coffee table to the floor beside the armchair to the top of a glass-front bookcase that had belonged to her hardworking, book-loving husband (a publisher of hymnals and prayer books in Germany and then, in the immigrant’s trade-off, a typesetter at a newspaper plant in Pittsfield). All these surfaces were occupied haphazardly by bottles, glasses, ashtrays, matchbooks, and pretzel shards.
“No party,” she repeated with soft-spoken furor. Walt
er had been eleven years old. He knew the subtle emotions by then as well as the obvious ones.
Within weeks, he and Werner and their mother went to live at Granna’s again while their father went away. “It’s a special kind of vacation,” their mother said brightly, but you could see she was angry: not at her husband but at Granna. At dinnertime, she and Granna worked around each other, never touching and almost never speaking. They reminded Walter of those black and white Scottie dog magnets that repelled each other when held in contradiction to their polarity.
“Where did he go?” Walter asked his brother, wondering if their father could have sneaked off to Disneyland without them. Like any normal eleven-year-old in 1967, Walter dreamed of going to Disneyland. Sixteen-year-old Werner had said, “He went to dry out. Any dope could figure that one out.”
“He went to what?” said Walter.
“Granna wants him off the booze. She says it’s why he can’t get a job or be a good father,” said Werner. “Jeez, are you a knucklehead.” Werner had reached the age when he couldn’t tell his little brother much of anything without throwing in a pinch of contempt.
When their dad returned from his “vacation,” about which he had no stories and of which he had no snapshots, they did not move back to their own house but stayed at Granna’s. August drank a lot of Coca-Cola and coffee, smoked more cigarettes, and often went to bed by ten o’clock. Another difference was that it began to seem as if the parents were in cahoots. They went out after dinner sometimes to take walks together; when August turned in early, so would Rose. Walter longed to band together with Werner, but by then Werner had thrown himself into school sports and girls. He had also worked his tail off as a lifeguard at an indoor pool to buy himself a rattletrap Impala. He would come home after one kind of practice or another to drop off half his books, shower and change clothes, contemplate his important self in the mirror, eat something right out of the fridge, and declare that he was off to the public library. (No one other than Walter seemed to wonder whether that’s where Werner really went.)