TEN

I picture a Sunday evening in winter, with snow piling up silently in the darkness outside the windows. The room is dark and hushed, too. Flames are chuckling in the fireplace and the console radio’s dial glows expectantly. I’m sprawled on the carpet gazing far into the fire; my parents are sitting together on the couch behind me. Armchairs shaped like hibernating bears cast furry shadows onto the floor. We’re all waiting for seven o’clock, when from sunny California Jack Benny and his family will troop out of the radio into our living room.

As soon as they arrive, my mother sits back with a relaxed smile on her face. The show’s theme music is my father’s cue to loosen the knit tie he wears every night for dinner; his jaw-line loosens, too, and he waits for Jack’s first line. I’m already grinning.

All Jack’s friends seem to live at his house, like a family. They like to tease each other, but tempers never flare. Mary, Jack’s wife, laughs off her husband’s stinginess; when she says “Oh, Jack!” I picture her eyes rolling at him, and him beaming back in response. Dennis Day—who I assume is their grown son—annoys Jack with goofy kid-like remarks, but even so, Jack always tells him how beautifully he sings in his sweet Irish tenor. Other family members drop in. Don Wilson, a huge uncle, interrupts the banter to tell us about Lucky Strike cigarettes, which (like Don himself, Jack always says) are round and firm and fully packed. Phil Harris, a kind of black-sheep cousin who my mother says is “cheap,” though she laughs loudest at his wisecracks, comes by to tell crazy stories about how drunk his band-members got last night. And finally, Mr. Kitzel, the grandfather, reports his doings to Jack in a nasal voice which reminds me of the German accent my own grandfather put on to make me laugh.

I hear my father laughing and turn to stare up at him from the floor; he glances down. We exchange grins. It’s the only time we ever intentionally look each other in the eye. My mother’s head rests against the cushion near my father’s shoulder. She looks as if she’s having a pleasant dream, but her eyes are open, watching us both.

In the flickery glow of the fireplace, I see my parents’ faces grow round and mischievous. They begin to banter with each other. My mother chides my father, her eyes rolling tolerantly. My father, beaming, shrugs and raises his hand at his side, palm up. My grandfather laughs through his nose.

I play the piano with the band, and Robert sings “Danny Boy” in his lilting tenor voice. The crackling logs echo my parents’ clapping; the applause piles up in the soft darkness around us, never melting away.

Over the next year, Robert sent me postcards from Idaho, Montana, Wyoming. I liked to picture him riding in boxcars across the plains and mountains of the West. Then the following fall, when I’d turned thirteen, Robert sent me a pictureless card from Alabama.

Dear Jerry—

Back in the Air Force stockade. Dad’s lawyers have fixed

things so I can try again. But keep that address I gave you,

just in case. Love—Robert

I paced around the attic kicking the wall, my bed, my desk. My father must have intercepted one of Robert’s postcards in the mailbox again. My room, the house, the yard, the town—they all seemed like a series of stockades, walls within walls.

My parents tried to avoid talking about Robert. When his name did come up, they turned away from each other as if a meeting of their glances might produce sparks that could set off an explosion. The house’s combustible atmosphere also seemed to be endangered by notes flying up from the piano. I practiced obsessively until my mother screamed into the living room that it was time to do my homework, and my father yelled downstairs that I could at least play something a little more harmonious.

My parents were again determined to create “a harmonious family life.” This meant keeping busy and staying away from each other as much as possible. My father changed into his work clothes as soon as he arrived home from the office and attacked the yard with lawn tractor, rake, sickle, and axe. My mother sometimes walked partway across the lawn to shout at him: please, please don’t cut down any more trees! And he shouted back: they’re blocking the view! Then my mother came inside again and made herself a drink, but now she filled her glass only with plain soda water.

She filled her days with PTA and library board meetings. She headed a fund-raising drive for the Historical Society. Gray cigarette smoke puffed out her nostrils as she talked on the phone, jabbing her pencil in the air to give society members point by point instructions. She had to use her “nice” voice constantly—notes of self-deprecating laughter and carefully modulated light tones—to keep from sounding “pushy.”

At school, my piano teacher found me a brochure for a music school in Colorado; it must have been the one Robert had told me about. But when I showed my parents the brochure, they refused to look at it.

“It’s all very well, playing the piano for fun,” my mother said.

“But you can’t make a career out of it,” my father said.

Agreement: harmony: a conspiracy against me. I ground my teeth, smiled, nodded. And slipped silently away: the manta ray. I forged my father’s signature on the music school’s application form. When my advisor gave me applications to New England prep schools where Robert had been incarcerated, I threw them out.

I wrote to Robert:

I feel like some kind of secret monster in human disguise in this school. But the more I pretend to like the place, the more the parents pretend to like me and each other, and we keep it up—because if we didn’t, the house would explode, we would all kill each other like at the end of Hamlet, all the characters lying around the stage with bloody swords sticking up from their stomachs, except here it would be tennis rackets or maybe yard tools.

Things are real confused around here, maybe it’s because Mother’s stopped drinking again, even after five o’clock. I think it makes her lonely.

She starts talking about something that she’s been thinking about as if I’ve been listening to her thoughts all along, I leave the room while she’s talking and when I come back an hour later, she starts right up again as if I’d never left. How there’s never any parking places near the library, the way the gas station man never cleans her windshield without leaving a smudge, how the doctor can never find anything for her headaches, stuff It’s always boring and I feel bad because it’s a very big deal to her that I listen to her, but pretty soon I think of some excuse to leave, and then I feel worse but I still don’t go back to listen.

School is shit, except Music. The teacher took us to New York to the Metropolitan Opera. Mother went crazy to hear that—all the time she’d lived in New York, she never got to go there, for some reason, she wouldn’t say what. Anyways, I thought it was going to be a lot of screeching but I liked it. The way the lights came on, all the red velvet boxes glowing like a sunrise in a canyon. It was called La Traviata, and it was the same story as a book I read by Alexandre Dumas Fils called La Dame aux Camellias, so I understood what all the singing was about. The end was sad but I loved it. They play operas on the radios on Saturday afternoons, I listen to them now. I still like jazz better, but you can’t find it on the radio. Doesn’t anybody play it anymore?

There is one song on the radio, Heartbreak Hotel, have you heard it, by this singer called Elvis Presley, it has boogie woogie in it you’d like. Without you or Miss Gilly here, a big fancy heartbroke hotel is what the house is these days. Elvis Presley is great, though, his voice sounds like he is melting girls’ clothes off them with it, and he has long hair and sideburns like I am going to grow when I get the hell out of here. I’ll have a sickle (motorcycle) like Marlon Brando in The Wild Ones, did you see that movie, it is really cool.

You remember old Mr. Touhy? You must have had him for math, the little tubby guy with the no-rim glasses and blue suit, he was at the school for thirty-seven years, he said. Anyways, he left. Here’s why—he told us he’d heard from this old girlfriend he used to have in high school in Minnesota, he wanted to marry her back then but her mother didn’t like him, so they neither of them married anybody else and they wrote each other letters all these years and she stayed home and took care of her parents. Finally they died and she wrote Mr. Touhy, hey come on back, we can get married now. So he did, he just quit in the middle of the week, and took off for Minnesota. All the kids think the whole thing is weird, since he is sixty-four years old, but to me it is really great. I picture him riding a big sickle along this highway in the moonlight with this nice little old lady on the back and they’re both wearing those Marlon Brando caps and leather jackets, vrroom vrooooom they go, so long Mr. Touhy, good luck.

I wonder if I’ll ever find out why you had to leave. Are you ever coming back?

Love—Jerry

When television first came to Ridge Haven, the first to buy sets were the Italian families in town. Vince’s family had one, though I rarely saw him anymore—he was at the public junior high school. Riding in the car past his house at night, I gazed at the flickering windows hoping to catch glimpses of the programs I’d heard about the year before at PS 8. Gradually the invention spread to the outlying houses and estates, but my parents still refused to buy a set. A TV aerial sticking up from the roof like a metal clothes tree would ruin the appearance of the house.

Then one evening, I went with my parents to visit a couple whose maid had a television. We all squeezed into a tiny room in the back of the mansion—the maid, my parents, their friends, and me—to watch a quiz show starring Groucho Marx. My father’s ordinarily stony face broke into a wide grin. What made him chuckle most was the way Groucho tormented the announcer whose job it was to pitch DeSoto cars between contestants. My father had it in for salesmen.

He ordered us a television, but it was installed in our basement; even the best console models wouldn’t go with the antique furniture in the living room. Several evenings a week, my parents and I sat on an old sofa in the dark, watching Groucho and other resurrected film stars and vaudevillians. The screen’s flicker reminded me of the Sunday night fires we’d sat around with Jack Benny’s family.

I liked the televised Dodger baseball games. On September afternoons I retreated to the basement to watch the familiar figures in baggy uniforms play ball. I mentally discussed the plays with Robert as if he were sitting beside me in the dark. How’d you like Robinson’s steal? Do you think Erskine’s going to win twenty this year?

Once my mother came downstairs to watch. “Who are you talking to?” she asked in the dark.

I jumped. “No one.” I’d been smoking a cigarette, but she didn’t say anything about it. Rules seemed different in the basement.

She sat down slowly on the other end of the couch. “I talk to him sometimes, too,” she said.

“What do you say to him?”

“I promise him things will be different if he comes back.”

“Do you really think so?”

The crowd booed a player who bobbled an easy fly ball.

“Isn’t that terribly bad sportsmanship?” my mother asked.

“It’s okay to get mad and yell in Brooklyn,” I said.

“I see.” A match flared in the darkness. She sat back, drawing on a cigarette. “Can I share your ashtray?” she asked.

“Okay.” I pushed it toward her along the cushion.

She dropped her match in its direction, missing the edge in the dark. I picked it up.

“Robert used to tell me about baseball sometimes, but I couldn’t follow all the rules,” she said. “He must have thought I wasn’t interested.”

The next batter grounded out and jogged, head down, off the field.

“Why did he stop running?” she asked. “I don’t understand why he gave up like that.” She shook her head. “What happened, Jerrett?”

I had no answer for her.

A day before Halloween, some PTA ladies appeared at the weekly chapel service at school. Among them, dressed in a gray suit and pillbox hat, was my mother. When everyone was settled, she stood up and walked hesitantly to the podium. All the Ridge Haven schools were participating in a “Trick or Treat For UNICEF drive,” she explained; she hoped we would all “pitch in” to collect money for underprivileged children around the world. The teachers led the applause. I glanced around nervously. The boys were grinning at one another.

“I guess this means you’re going to chicken out on the raid,” one of them whispered to me as we filed out of chapel. “You wouldn’t want to upset Mommy.”

“Fuck you,” I snarled.

All week they’d been planning Halloween pranks, but I hadn’t committed myself to going along. Now I decided not only to join them but to organize a neighborhood raid myself. My parents had been urging me to “cultivate” the school leaders; when four of them showed up for the raid, there was no question that I’d succeeded.

One boy was class president; his father, who rode the club car with my father, was the CEO of a Wall Street brokerage house. Another school leader, whose father was on the church vestry with my father, had the highest grades in school and owned a real German Luger with which he’d once shot his neighbor’s cats. Another boy was the track team captain; his mother was being treated at a famous drug rehabilitation clinic in California. The fourth boy had lost his virginity in a whorehouse in Caracas, Venezuela, where his father had been a top oil company executive before moving to Ridge Haven and committing suicide a year ago.

“Hey, Langley, where we going?” the track captain called out to me as I walked along the roadside. They all looked at me.

I thought: This is dumb—I don’t even like these guys. But the cool night air was making me unbearably restless. My pockets bulged with firecrackers. Overhead, a crazed moon cut a swath though the silver clouds as it careened across the sky. The clouds turned to incandescent fish skimming the ocean’s surface. I was the manta ray again, swimming toward them through the night: huge, shadowy, deadly.

“This way!” I yelled, with a new authority in my voice, and streaked off down the dark open road.

Roaming the quiet neighborhood, we shoved porch furniture into pools, slashed tires, toppled cement statues, blew up mailboxes with cherry bombs. The smell of gunpowder flared in my nostrils, goading me on. The dark picture window of an empty house got in my way. I heaved a construction brick through it. The loud rain of glass made me break out in a laughing jag. I couldn’t believe I was doing something like this, but there was no question of stopping now. Inside the house, I attacked armchairs and floor pillows with my jackknife. A snowstorm of stuffing swirled around me. The other boys had to hold me back from the other rooms.

I broke free and raced out onto the driveway, my mind deliriously empty. I was galloping now, not slithering or slyly darting; I pawed the gravel and snorted with laughter. As I staggered across a lawn, a patio wall rose up before me out of the darkness. The boys were lobbing little bottles of model airplane paint at it. I grabbed one on the run. My arm cocked back, snapped forward. It felt like the most spontaneous, most natural movement I’d ever made: a perfect strike flying out of the darkness and exploding against the flood-lit white wall. A huge purple flower burst into life; jagged petals throbbed on the brilliant stucco.

Then I was galloping full tilt up the moonlit road. I was still gasping and laughing when a police car pulled up beside me.

The police booked us all. Shining flashlights into my eyes, they thought I must be drunk, and made me breathe into a machine at the station. Two boys sobbed as they gave their addresses. Still trembling too hard with excitement to be scared, I confessed to splattering the wall—the police said they’d seen us running from it—but I denied doing any other damage they’d had complaints about.

The policemen were uneasy and polite with us. They let us get cups of water from the water cooler and wash up in the bathroom. While they phoned our parents, I waited on a bench beside a steel door. Through its scratched window, I saw a row of empty jail cells; a radio was playing country music somewhere inside. I wished the police would lock me up in there: it would be better than facing my father.

But when he did finally arrive to take me home, something strange happened: I felt a glow against my face—the after-flash of the glorious tropical flower. It formed a buffer zone between me and everyone outside it. I couldn’t feel scared.

In the kitchen, he and my mother stared at me from the other side of my aura. They seemed to be “the parents” in some family drama in which I was a participant but also a spectator standing very far from the stage. The kid I saw on stage looked uncomfortable, yet as a spectator, I often had to turn my face away for fear I might suddenly choke with crazy laughter. The sounds the parents made were variations of the same voice, one low and scratchy with rage, one high and teetering on the brink of hysteria. They’d never been further away.

How could you A good home Every conceivable advantage Everything we’ve worked for all our lives Bring disgrace to your family Like some kind of hood How could you How Why How Why?

I couldn’t think of any answers to the questions, and so said nothing. Wiping her eyes, the play’s mother went out to the pantry. I heard ice clink in a glass. The father looked strange in his gray suit so late at night. He must have put it on to remind the police of his position in the town.

He slammed his fist down on the counter. “Have you any idea what this can do to us if people find out what you’ve done?”

I shrugged. Who was “us”? All this man could do to me was shout.

“Plus, there was hundreds of dollars worth of damage!”

“I’ll pay for it,” I said. “I can work it off.”

“You damn well will! There’s a lot of trees that need cutting—”

“What?” The mother stood in the pantry door, a glass in her hand. “What did you say about cutting down trees?”

The father frowned. “This is between Jerrett and me. About him paying for his vandalism.”

The mother drained her glass fast. She took a wobbly step backward. “Please—no more trees!” she moaned.

Leaning sideways, she bumped slowly against the wall. The glass slipped from her hand. It clunked onto the linoleum. I smelled gin. She sank to her knees.

I reached out for her. “Mother!”

Too late. She flopped soundlessly to the floor.

The father—my own father—lifted her in his arms. I ran after him up the stairs. He tried to shoo me away with insistent shakes of his head. In my mother’s room, I managed to get the tangled sheets smoothed out before he lay her face-down on the bed.

“You see what you’ve done!” He glared at me, catching his breath.

“You didn’t have to just dump her!” I yelled, wiping my eyes.

He stopped in his tracks. Returning to the bed, he tucked a pillow beneath her cheek. “It’s not the first time—” He wiped his forehead, backing away. “She’ll be okay, Jerrett, let her sleep it off.”

I thought: at least try to remove her shoes. I rarely touched my mother at all; now I had to wrap my fingers around her swollen ankles to tug at the shoes. Her skin felt clammy. The air in the bedroom was musty with the smell of insomnia. From the doorway, a strip of light shone along the carpet to her bedside table. There, casting a little shadow, was an open medicine bottle. She must have taken some sleeping pills just before the police had called, and with the medicine in her system, the sudden gulps of gin had knocked her out.

She looked like a murder victim sprawled across the cover of one of her library mystery novels. Hearing my father’s voice on the phone from the hall downstairs, I felt like an accomplice. I sat very still on the side of the bed and listened for the sound of her breathing.

My mother was befuddled but alive the next morning. My father did all the talking at breakfast. Arrangements had been made with the families of the other vandals, the police, the town newspaper. The charges were to be dropped, no story would appear in the paper, and the five parents would pay the cost of resurfacing the stucco wall. I was to say absolutely nothing at school about anything that had happened.

The other four boys had the same instructions from their parents. We crept through the day, glancing silently at each other in the corridors. The secrecy made me sick. Once I had to rush into a bathroom to throw up. Red-rimmed, haunted, ratlike eyes stared back at me in the mirror. I tried to picture the splash of flowering light, but here at school it had turned to a hazy penumbra that hung around me like a leaden cloak as I went through the motions of attending classes. No one else saw it—teachers and students spoke to me as if I were still the same person I’d been the day before.

In chapel at the end of the day, Tina from the music room—I’d been trying to get a movie date with her for months, without luck—played some incongruously cheerful Dvorak folk dances. Then the headmaster walked slowly in wearing ecclesiastical robes and a grim pink face. He gripped the sides of the pulpit with both hands and addressed the school. Beams of sunlight slanted down from windows like God’s gaze and glowed in his white ear-hairs.

“I am very, very proud,” he said, “of the students who have collected so much money for UNICEF.” Then he paused, his brows lowering. “There are five boys here, however—five boys who brought disgrace to their school.…”

A hush fell over the assembly. The headmaster spoke in a slow sonorous voice: “These five were arrested for doing wanton, vicious damage on Halloween night.” I stared into space, my teeth clenched. He told the school about the police’s surprise that boys from such good families had behaved like delinquents. He described the ruined wall and the shame that these thoughtless boys had caused both their parents and the school. Then he slowly read out the boys’ names. Mine was last. “Jerrett Langley,” he intoned. He let the silence hang.

As he glared at the vandals, their heads dropped one by one like scorched daisies. But when he got to me, something inside me stiffened. I’d been through this before—I’d been initiated into this school. I knew what it was like to be buried in shame. And I knew that no one could ever make me feel that bad again.

I lifted my head and glared back at the headmaster.

The dewlaps beneath his eyes quivered with rage. All around me, kids were turning in their chairs to stare at me. I bent the corners of my lips up and held a smile. The headmaster’s gaze dropped from my face.

“Dismissed,” he said finally, and walked away from the pulpit.

My feet moved strangely along the gravel path outside as if they were treading several inches above it. I took big gulps of fresh air. I just wanted to collect my books and get the hell out of this place.

But Tina was walking beside me. I slowed down.

“You must really feel awful,” she said in a hushed voice.

I stopped. She paused with me. I scraped the ground with my toe. “Actually, I’ve felt a whole lot worse,” I said. I seemed to have slipped out of my leaden cloak, and felt lightheaded without it.

“Weren’t you scared, when the cops picked you up?” she whispered.

I shrugged, and turned toward her. Her eyes seemed brighter than I’d ever seen them. She brushed a strand of hair from her forehead, her gaze staying on my face.

“Did they put you in jail, Jerry?” she asked.

I noticed that a small crowd had gathered. Some young kids were pushing each other to get better views of me. Several girls in my class were leaning forward, waiting to hear me speak.

“Not actually in the cells,” I said. “But I could see them right down this dark corridor. The prisoners were all clanking their tin cups against the bars.…” I grinned at Tina, and let the silence hang.

The next Saturday night, I took her to the movies. She let me slip my hand into her sweater even before the newsreel was finished.