3

IT HAD TO HAPPEN sooner or later. There I was in the middle of the fray, that irresistible place where I always thought I wanted to be until I got there. I had been my father’s confidant, his hand-selected vice president, but more and more I would begin to feel like his co-conspirator.

My mother and Molly came down the staircase just as my father rounded the living room corner. Bailey was placing the flagpole bracket on the right-hand column of the porch. Cleo introduced herself and handed my mother the flag.

“Happy Fourth!” Bailey said over his shoulder. “We thought we’d help you get into the spirit.”

Glowering, my mother passed the flag to my father. Bailey asked about tools, and my father sent me into the house to check the utility drawer. We didn’t have a drill or anything beyond a hammer, one or two screwdrivers and a monkey wrench. When I returned to the porch with a Phillips-head and a small paper bag full of nails and screws, Bailey was giving my family a speech on flag etiquette: “It should be raised and lowered slowly and ceremoniously. Take every precaution that it does not become soiled. Never fly the flag upside down except as a distress signal. On Memorial Day fly it at half-staff from sunrise until noon and full staff from noon until sunset, and when a national figure dies and the government flags are flying at half-staff, comply with due haste and the utmost respect.”

Out of the corner of my eye I saw that Cleo had her hands tented over her mouth, hiding her expression. I wanted to know what she thought of her father, his voice broadcasting over the whole neighborhood. The stoic widower next door, Mr. Unthank, stood up from his gardening and leered at us from the frame of his tidy yard, and Jackie Clarke, the divorcee in the row house down the street, folded her magazine and went inside. My father nodded attentively, as if by moving his head up and down he could hasten the afternoon along.

When Bailey took a breath, my mother jumped in. “I’d rather not fly a flag at all.”

“Come on, Val,” my father said. “It’s the bicentennial.”

“What if I don’t like what the flag stands for?” my mother asked, and my father winced.

“It’s not a political symbol.” Bailey’s scalp shifted forward. “It represents everything that makes America great. Honor, courage and sacrifice, our national heritage of good deeds and accomplishments.”

My mother opened her mouth to speak but I interrupted. “You didn’t have a problem with Molly and me painting my room.”

“They painted his room red, white and blue,” my father boasted to Bailey.

“That’s the spirit.” Bailey clapped my shoulder with his meaty paw.

“The flag is not political? Ha!” My mother laughed to herself.

My father asked me for the screwdriver and screws. I tried not to look at him as I traded the tools for the flag, but his eyes flashed for a moment. Bailey stepped aside as my father took over securing the bracket on the porch column.

“It’s high time we went over the rental agreement,” my mother began. My father explained that he’d already worked that out, but her voice rose over his: “I want to see a lease.”

“Trust me,” my father said, but when he put his hand on her arm, she shrugged him away.

Bailey seemed to be enjoying the volley. He wore blue jeans so stiff they seemed never worn and a red safari shirt with the collar turned up. His thick chest hairs swirled at his neck like a black gurge.

“You promised we’d have some furniture.” My mother turned to Bailey. “Did you tell Pete this place would be furnished?”

“I don’t furnish my properties. Too much of a hassle.”

“We can talk about this later,” my father broke in.

“You always say that,” my mother hissed. “We’re talking about it now.”

I glanced at Cleo, who raised her eyebrows as if to say Parents! then nodded in the direction of the front door. Taking her cue, I gathered Molly and invited Cleo into the house. We sat in the rickety chairs at the dining room table, and I apologized for the drop-cloths and paint-spattered newspapers that had dried and stuck to the floor, though I knew I should have said sorry for the state of my parents’ relationship. Even now, as I cast about for something to say, my mother was probably discovering that my father had been lying to her about the deal he’d cut with Bailey. I wanted to distract Cleo, so like a fool I opened my mouth and let whatever words happened to be there tumble out.

Only two subjects had come to mind: the Indiana Pacers and presidential history. Hoping to sound smart, I launched into the bicentennial, explaining that today also marked the 150th anniversary of the coincidental deaths of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson, the best writer among the founders, had drafted the original Declaration of Independence, and Adams, the most eloquent speaker, had defended it brilliantly before the Continental Congress. But in the election of 1796 Adams defeated Jefferson by three electoral votes, and in the rematch in 1800 Jefferson won, causing long-term enmity between the two men.

As I was speaking I had the parenthetical thought that the story of these Founding Fathers resembled the rivalry between Cleo’s father and my own. But not wanting to stir the waters I was quick to note that Jefferson began writing Adams late in life about the future of the nation, and though Adams would always tell his friends that he would outlive Jefferson, their rift, for the most part, healed.

Molly had been growing impatient, and finally interrupted. “Would you like a snack?” she asked Cleo.

“I’m fine,” Cleo said.

“You should go to the kitchen and get something for our guest,” Molly suggested to me.

“Why don’t you go yourself,” I snapped back. Then it dawned on me that Molly was only being a decent hostess, like a proper girl sleuth, and also wanted to make sure that Cleo didn’t see the roaches stalking our kitchen cabinets.

“Fine.” Molly disappeared for a minute, and Cleo encouraged me to continue. She crossed her arms under her breasts, small plums snug in her tank top. I worried that she’d think I was rude to my sister, or worse, a know-it-all, droning on about dead men in wigs and knee breeches. Still, I couldn’t leave the story unfinished. “On July 4,1826, the fiftieth anniversary of the signing, John Adams died; his last words were ‘Jefferson still lives.’” I paused a moment to let this sink in. “But here’s the amazing thing: two hours earlier, Jefferson had expired!” I looked down at my Adidas high-tops, white with royal-blue stripes. “His last words...‘Is today the Fourth?”’

I couldn’t tell if Cleo was listening, but I asked if she wanted to hear the clincher, and she said, “Sure.”

“After Adams died, the messenger sent to deliver the news to Monticello actually crossed paths with Jefferson’s messenger, who was headed on horseback to Adams’s house, also bearing sad news.”

“I never heard that story before,” Cleo said, with less intonation than I’d hoped.

“Well—” I shrugged. “History is full of surprises.”

Molly returned with an ice tray filled with homemade popsicles stuck with toothpicks.

“We have two flavors.” She set the tray on the dining room table. “Orange juice and apple sauce.”

Except for those two years at Lake Bluff when we had the run of the school kitchen, my mother never allowed us to have real snacks. We ate Roman Meal bread with ketchup and cheese instead of frozen pizza, cinnamon toast or, if we were lucky, graham crackers in lieu of cookies. For dessert we had Dannon yogurt, which we froze in the cup, or popsicles made out of Minute Maid concentrate—the kind where you have to mix the orange glop with water and stir it into a juice that’s always too weak or too strong and tastes like the slotted metal spoon you used to stir it. When we’d tired of having only one flavor, my mother suggested we try freezing applesauce. I could see from the effort in Cleo’s lopsided smile that her pantry at home must have been stocked with Fritos, Chips Ahoy, Marshmallow Fluff and soda, her freezer a storehouse of Stouffer’s pizza, Breyer’s Neapolitan and Klondike bars.

She plucked an orange juice pop from the tray. “My dad can be a pain,” she said out of nowhere. “He likes to boss people around. I told him he should call first before coming over, but that’s not his way.” She held her toothpick like a tiny umbrella. “I hope you don’t think we’re rude.”

“Of course not,” I said. “If anything, my mom was the rude one. I think she’ll be better once we’ve settled in. She always gets cranky when we move.”

Cleo asked about the move, and I said it wasn’t bad; we were used to it. We’d lived in six cities, and I hoped this would be our last.

“I’ve never been anywhere.” She licked the corner of her popsicle where the orange juice was dripping. “Some family trips, that’s about it.”

She wanted to know exactly where we had lived, so Molly and I went over the list.

“Bloomington. That’s a pretty name.” Cleo combed her feathery hair out of her face. “I bet it’s full of flowers.”

“I was three years old when we left there,” I said, surprised that she would find anything to recommend a city in Indiana.

“Our grandparents live in Wausau, Wisconsin,” Molly piped up.

“Wisconsin. That’s where our fathers met,” Cleo said. “I know your dad was a big baseball star. I’ve heard stories about him since I was a kid.”

I admired my father for never talking about his baseball career. His reticence only made the myth grow. When people urged him along, he said, No sense living in the past. My grandfather—the baseball coach—had saved all of his clips, and anytime we visited Wausau I’d dig into boxes of yellowed newspaper articles about my father’s game-winning hits and towering home runs, his barehanded pickups and bullet throws across the diamond. I remembered one article in particular, written the year of my father’s career-ending concussion, after a neurosurgeon in Duluth said he should never play again. It was by the baseball columnist of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The headline read, “What Might Have Been.”

But I wasn’t going to bring this up with Cleo. She had probably heard enough from Bailey. “Your dad was a good player, too,” I offered.

“All I know is he hates to lose.” Cleo chewed what was left of her popsicle, now nothing more than a pale block of ice. “So, should we check on the adults?” she asked.

With a sense of dread I followed her and Molly to the door, but when we stepped outside all was quiet. My father had screwed in the bracket and was angling the flag into it. Bailey stood on the top step with his hands in his back pockets and his belly out.

“How’s this?” my father asked.

“A little higher,” Bailey said.

Molly scanned the porch. “Where’s Mom?”

Our father adjusted the bracket and slid in the flag. “Your mother took a drive down Livid Lane.” He mopped his brow with the back of his hand.

“When did she leave?” I asked.

“About five minutes ago. We had a misunderstanding about the terms of the lease.”

Often in the middle of a fight my mother would round up Molly or me or both of us and go for a drive to let off steam. She rarely went alone, so this time she must have been especially infuriated.

Livid Lane was one of many street names my father had made up. He’d imagined a whole map of my mother’s escape routes, including Angry Avenue, Stormy Street, Bitter Boulevard, and Hoppin’ Mad Highway. He had been taking my mother’s disappearances less and less seriously, sometimes encouraging Molly and me to play along and treat the situation as a joke.

For a while I thought nothing of it, but looking back I realize that the map of my mother’s escape routes would turn out to be real, not imaginary, and part of me must have known, even back then, that we were laughing only to avoid the threat that none of us wished to face.

I had a pretty good sense of where my mother might be—somewhere near the Potomac River—because every time I went along on one of her drives she found a park bench looking out over the nearest body of water. In Cincinnati she went to the East End riverfront, in Indianapolis to the Canal Walk downtown. Lake Michigan was less than a quarter mile from Lake Bluff Academy, so it was just a short drive to Sunrise Park, where she could gaze at the expanse of water that on a bright day seemed Caribbean blue and in winter could cool her most jagged nerves.

It used to be that she’d take off for only a short while, but lately her time away dragged on. I recalled the trip to our grandparents’ house a couple months ago, after my father first announced his plans to start the school. As usual, my mother drove Molly and me to Sunrise Park. But that time, on a surprisingly warm April day, she wasn’t satisfied looking out from the bluff to the wavering boundary of sand and shore. So we piled back into the car and drove to another body of water, Lake Wausau, two hundred and sixty miles to the north, where as a teenager she used to go to bonfires with friends. On some level I must have recognized that my mother was no longer kidding around, because from that moment on I’d been keeping a close watch, determined to stop the fissures in our family from growing any wider.

After my father had finished installing the flagpole, Bailey said he and Cleo had better be on their way. “I’ve got my own old lady to worry about. Good luck with yours.” He winked. “We’ve got a party at the club tonight. I’d invite you, but it’s members only. Maybe Ann and I will have you over to the house one of these days.”

“We’d like that,” my father said.

I told Cleo that it was nice to meet her. She held out her hands, an invitation to catch a pass, and I threw her the red, white and blue ball. As she walked down to the sidewalk she bounced it once on each step then swung around and threw me a perfect chest pass.

“We should play sometime,” she said.

“Sure.”

“What playground do you go to?” she asked.

“Pierce Park,” I said, and since I couldn’t help myself, added, “I believe it’s named for Franklin Pierce, our ineffectual fourteenth president.” I left it at that, though I could have said that his campaign slogan was “We Polked you in 1844, we shall Pierce you in 1852,” or that he was a terrible drunk who, while in office, was arrested for running over an old woman with his horse and carriage. “Maybe I’ll see you there,” I said, playing it cool.

But as Cleo waved and the Cadillac drove away, the mini-flag on its antenna rippling, I realized that I wanted nothing more than to shoot baskets with the daughter of our treacherous landlord.

 

I wouldn’t always enjoy the Fourth of July, and before long I’d have good reason to hate anything that pops, including cap guns, M-80s, balloons, champagne bottles, snaps—and especially fireworks. But the papers were promising a spectacular display that evening, and I hoped to be on the Mall downtown to watch it with my own eyes. By midafternoon, however, my mother still hadn’t returned from Livid Lane, and we all started to worry.

I remember my father calling a cab and our inching through bicentennial traffic, looking up at the kites—red, white and blue jewels in the sky above the Washington Monument. We’d never seen so many people in one place before, tens of thousands bordering the Reflecting Pool, sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, wandering the kiosks and bandstands, or just basking in the bright sunshine. We passed a parade of Uncle Sams walking on stilts along Constitution Avenue and the Freedom Train on its final stop in front of the Smithsonian. In the distance I thought I saw the masts of the tall ships moored along the Potomac, and in the Tidal Basin, the boat—cannon angled skyward—that would launch the national fireworks over the city.

Convinced that our mother would be somewhere by the river, we had the cabbie drop us off at the Southwest Waterfront. We wandered along the wharf to where some rundown houseboats were docked, and found a salty septuagenarian couple in deck chairs reading raised-letter pulp. Their wrinkles bunched together at the eyes in the same fan pattern, as if they’d been gazing at each other since the Great Depression, and I wondered if my own parents would stay together that long. I sensed they were at the beginning of the one true test of their marriage, without a guidebook, a thousand miles from home, and I wanted to believe that if they survived this trial they could make it through anything.

We described my mother and asked the couple if they had seen her. The wife lowered her book—Nurse Harriet Goes to Holland— and shook her head no. We continued down the docks, amidst the broken bottles, clamshells and fish parts, the air redolent of offal, stale beer and gasoline. Molly stopped at a bench with a hole in the middle slat, sat down on the edge and refused to go farther. “This is dumb,” she said. “Why can’t we be like other families, having friends over for a barbecue?” My father reached for Molly’s hand, and after a moment, during which her eyes never left the ground, she allowed him to pull her up from the bench.

We arrived home late in the afternoon to find my mother on the front steps, reading over a lease. While Molly and I had been sharing popsicles with Cleo, our mother had demanded that Bailey draw up a formal agreement, so he grabbed a blank lease from his car and wrote in his terms: three and a half months for free, then, beginning October 1, a one-year renewable term thereafter, at four hundred dollars per month. I’m glad I wasn’t there when my mother and Bailey simultaneously discovered that my father had been lying.

“I want to talk to both of you.” She gestured at Molly and me. Our father threw up his hands and went inside the house.

“Have a seat,” my mother said. I slumped with my back against the porch column and Molly sat on the step below me. She picked up a twig and drew invisible pictures on the flaking wood steps.

“How long have you known that we weren’t getting this house for free?” my mother asked me.

I was wearing my headband, which felt like a vise. I pulled it off and my hair fell into my eyes. “This house?”

“Yes, this house. Tell me the truth, Daniel.”

My mother had an uncanny ability to see right through to my motives. At the time I wondered if she had ESP, because I couldn’t keep a secret from her without it flashing over my face like an electric news ticker. She knew me far better than I’d realized. We had both spent years protecting my father, and now that she was giving thought to bowing out, I had to work twice as hard to compensate.

I admitted that I’d known about the deal with Bailey since before we’d left Lake Bluff, but said Molly had nothing to do with this. “When the students sign up, we’ll have plenty of money to pay the rent. We’re getting a good discount.”

“That’s not the point. Your father lied to me, and so did you.” She stood over Molly and me, the fading sun in her eyes. Her pupils contracted into tiny ellipses.

Molly broke her stick as she was drawing and asked, “What are we going to do?” She dropped her shoulders and looked up, like a street urchin from Oliver Twist, the movie we’d seen at the American Film Institute.

“I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do. We’re not going to go to the fireworks tonight.”

I started to protest but my mother interrupted. “You’ll have other Fourths of July,” she said.

“But not in 1976!” I threw down my headband.

“You know better than to lie to me, Daniel.”

“I didn’t lie.”

Strands of hair blew across my mother’s face. “Yes, you did.” She tucked her hair behind her ears. “Secrets and lies are two sides of the same coin. Only, one is hidden and the other is face up.”

My mother leaned down and kissed the top of my sister’s head. “It’s not your fault, Molly. Your father and brother did this.” She headed toward the front door then stopped and turned around. “And another thing you both should know: as soon as I walk in the house I’m going to pick up the phone and call your Uncle Linc and invite him to come live with us. Either Linc moves to Washington or I’m not going to sign this lease. Forget the school. I’ll throw our stuff in the van tomorrow morning and take you kids to Wisconsin. And if your father doesn’t like it, well, he can stay here all alone with his dreams and his secrets and lies and his so-called generous friends.” My mother reached into her purse and tried to shake some orange Tic Tacs into her hand, but the candies had glommed together in the heat. She tossed the box back into her purse and marched inside.

That night, Molly yelled at me for denying her the world’s greatest Fourth of July. I knew she didn’t care about the bicentennial; she just hated to be left out, expunged from the guest list of the nationwide party. She also knew that by throwing a tantrum loud enough for our mother and father to hear, she might win an unseen voucher for some future reward.

After Molly had harrumphed offstage, I listened at the top of the stairs to our parents arguing in their bedroom. They used to shut the door, but over the years they’d grown careless and now no longer bothered. My mother had already spoken to Line, and it sounded as if he didn’t need much convincing. He would head to D.C. as soon as he could hitch a ride or sneak onto a bus or whatever you did to get clear across the country without a dime to your name. My father called Linc a quitter, and I knew exactly what my mother would say even before she responded: You’re one to talk.

I didn’t understand then why my father couldn’t keep a job, but if you looked back over the course of his life, you’d see where his trouble began. His own father couldn’t step out of the role of brewery foreman, drinking too much at home and parenting by the proverb Spare the rod, spoil the child. It didn’t matter that the La Crosse Tribune called my father the town’s next big leaguer or that he was the first in his family to go to college, on a full ride. My mother knew this and on some level must have grasped why my father’s first instinct, at even mild criticism, was to flee. Throughout our wayfaring, my mother endured his failures and sacrificed her own prospects, determined to be the one person who would support him through and through.

But the tables were turning; I could hear it with my own ears:

Linc will ruin the school, my father predicted.

Welcome him with open arms or I’m leaving, my mother shot back.

Spare me your threats.

These are my terms, she said, and repeated this phrase until the sun fell, and in its place the Fourth of July fireworks shot into the sky.

In my red, white and blue room, I tried to forget my parents’ quarrel. I took the tasseled flag off the wall and hung it outside my window. I turned off the lights and kneeled down so I could see through the scrim of trees. To the south and east the aerial shells screamed high over the Washington Monument, exploding in wide streamers to the ground. I clapped with each new flash and pop, each bloom and flourish of fireworks, and told myself that I didn’t need to be among the masses on the Mall for the bicentennial spectacle because here I was up in the tower, watching a thousand stars rain over my own little kingdom.