Excerpts

AUGUST 1972 Why Walter woke up earlier than usual on August 10, Saturday, he couldn't at first explain. The collies next door were barking at the air, as always, no space for brains in the tiny knob between their pedigreed ears. It had rained in the night and the summer sun was already drawing steam from the moist ground. Walter would later say that he felt her, that it wasn't the light cutting through the misty heat or the rumpus of the Gamble dogs that made him sit up. He had gone to the window and looked out. It was like the dawn of the world down below, so green and vapory and lush with fronds, and when the lilac tree shook in her yard he admitted that his foolish heart came up his throat. He was still half asleep, and for an instant'just that long--he expected to see a reptile reeling in breakfast on its sticky tongue or a dragonfly, all veiny wings, the size of a model airplane. Thank God! It was instead Mrs. Gamble snapping at the dying wood of the tree with her red-handled loppers. Woman, what have I to do with you? Walter thought, words he'd heard somewhere, in a play or from a book. It was five-thirty in the morning, the day of his Aunt Jeannie's and, also somewhat incidentally, his Uncle Ted's anniversary party. He needed his sleep, in preparation for the event. That he was awake and watching Mrs. Gamble must mean something. He was often assigning meaning to moments, saying, Here, and here, and here is a beginning, the opening sequence of my real life. He was fifteen and he was ready for drama even if he had to construct it himself. Ideally he'd take the part of the unlikely hero, or the witty and cunning rescuer, or the artist who is at first misunderstood. And in the conflict, he guessed, he might enjoy being hurt just enough to make an appealing victim, but not so much that he'd actually suffer. How convenient it would be, too, if change was heralded, if an epoch was launched with a clarion call or unusual weather patterns, if Mrs. Gamble could get her dogs to tweet, the birds to bark when there was going to be upheaval. He remembered how Mrs. Gamble used to sit on her toilet in the downstairs bathroom in the old days when he was over playing with Trishie Gamble, how she smoked her cigarettes and read from her book of astrological charts. The book lay open on her lap, on her apron, her pants in folds around her ankles. Her short dingy hair, as usual, was coiled into pin curls and secured with bobby pins. She had apparently long since given up the habit of shutting the bathroom door in her own house, so what if Trishie and her son, Greg, the neighbors, the dogs, drifted by while she cast their horoscopes. Walter was Virgo, the virgin: "Exact," she told him, "methodical. Industrious. Chaste." She said the word with relish. "Ch-haste." He didn't know what it meant, precisely, and he couldn't tell if it was something he could look forward to being. " 'The Virgoan heart,' " she recited, " 'is not quickly melted, but when once it finds itself in love's furnace it glows with a pure white heat and takes ages to cool.' " He conceded, to himself, that he was still afraid of her, a little, it was true, afraid to look her right in the eye. Down in the yard she was wrestling with the lilac branch, having trouble making her cut. It was one of the first signals, he would tell his friend Susan months later. Mrs. Gamble, the augur, with her loppers, trying to clip away the canker. When she squinted up at his bedroom that Saturday morning he ducked. He went down on all fours and crawled to his bed. She had felt his gaze--he shivered at the thought of it. He should shut his eyes and dream about a carefree Walter McCloud, a slouch, the life of the party, a boy with a new star, a new planet, a new astrological house. The Gamble collies had already barked at the neighbor, Mr. Kloper, on his way to work, and so there was no real reason he couldn't turn over and go back to sleep. Two hours later when Walter went down to the kitchen he found his mother standing by the sink with her nose under his brother's chin, inspecting his Adam's apple. Joyce was wearing her purple-and-blue apron that went up over her shoulders and crossed in the back with an additional sash around the waist, tied in a bow. Walter had been to the ballet the night before with his aunt, and it struck him that his mother was wearing something like a costume. He wondered if a choreographer as sensitive and penetrating as Mr. George Balanchine could translate Joyce's life into dance. What would the genius ballet master do, he wondered, to get at the essence of Joyce? He sat down to his cornflakes trying to imagine what trick Mr. B. used to bring the spirit of his dancers to the fore. In a feeble beginning, he knew, he pictured Joyce rising up and skimming across the floor on the tips of her toes doing bourrées, to pour him orange juice and set out the napkins. "Does it hurt when I touch there?" Joyce was saying, pushing the pad of her thumb into what she thought was her older son's lymph node. "Sort of." Daniel had thrown his head back, to the limit, and the strain made his voice sound higher than usual. "She means, is it pressure, which is not necessarily a bad thing, or is it pain?" Walter said, turning the cereal box over to read the ingredients. He'd pulled a muscle in ballet class in July and his teacher had spoken to him in a similar vein, trying to pinpoint the hurt. "That's right," Joyce said, "pressure or pain?" "I don't know, Mom. I just feel it. It's big." Walter glanced up from the box. "You two may be under the impression that you are alone, in our own house, but in fact you're providing Mrs. Gamble with an excellent view of the examination from her kitchen window. She probably has already figured out what's on Dan's neck. I bet she's on her way over here now with a cure-all, with some organic liver." Daniel did not mutter a brotherly "Shut up," or try to move away from the sink. His head was still hanging back and he gurgled when he spoke. "Organic liver?" "I'm going to talk to the doctor, Daniel," Joyce said. "Aw, Mom, it's all right. I don't want to mess up the day." "Overnight you have a--protrusion--as big as a--" Walter stood up, to see. He had not ever been athletically inclined but he understood his mother's confusion. There was no ball in any American game that he knew of for purposes of comparisons. "How'd you get that?" he asked, gaping. "I have a sore throat," Daniel said, as if that explained the vaguely three-sided growth that was slightly smaller than a tennis ball. "I woke up with it." Over the phone the doctor prescribed aspirin and bed rest and further consultation in a day or two if the pustule hadn't drained on its own. Joyce hung up the telephone and opened the refrigerator to look at the two hundred deviled eggs she'd made the day before. The McCloud family was supposed to drive up to Wisconsin, to Lake Margaret, for Aunt Jeannie's twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. Joyce did not want to leave her son at home with such an odd malady. "Are you well enough, Daniel, to ride in the car," she said, "or are you sick enough for me, at least, to stay with you?" Walter set his spoon down on the table and turned around to look at her. They had to go. Aunt Jeannie had asked for his help, and Joyce had made the lime Jell-O in the doughnut molds, the orange Jell-O in the fish molds, the deviled eggs, a ham and a kettle of baked beans. He realized that he'd been looking forward to the day. He didn't want to miss the occasion, and he also didn't like the idea of being at the lake, at the extravaganza, without his mother. It was she, it was her presence, that kept a family party from going off center. There were no ballet classes in August, and Walter and his two dancing-school friends, Susan and Mitch, had been hired by Aunt Jeannie to serve the hors d'oeuvres and refill the champagne glasses. They had been instructed to wear black dress pants and white shirts and black bow ties. Aunt Jeannie had purchased silver plastic bowler hats for the servers and commanded her daughter Francie to sew silver-sequined vests. Walter had told his friends that Aunt Jeannie was a nut case, there wasn't any straighter arrow than her husband, and so there was bound to be some excitement. They'd load the car with grocery bag after grocery bag, sacks filled with buns, cantaloupes, cherries, peaches, whole watermelons, gallons of milk. On the way Walter planned to be in the fold-out seat in the back of the station wagon, squashed against Mitch, across from Susan, all of their legs tangled together, the wind blowing through the car so that none of the other McClouds, neither his parents, nor Daniel, if he made it, could hear the conversation. Walter had been taken from his Illinois home to Wisconsin, to Lake Margaret, through the summers ever since he was born. His great-grandfather had built the Victorian house, the barn, the pump house, the privy and the summer kitchen. The estate had passed to Joyce's father and after his death to Joyce and her two sisters and two brothers. Weekend after weekend Joyce's husband, Robert, stopped at the iron gate and Joyce and her two boys got out and walked up the wooded drive. That was the important part, to walk the last stretch, to see it all come slowly through the trees: first, in the far distance, the glint of the lake, and then the red and blue of the plaid hammock strung between the oaks, and the stone shepherd boy in the middle of the fountain, the grassy opening, the croquet hoops and colored balls, and finally the house itself, the lovely old white clapboard house, with scallops and latticework, the long windows, the lacy curtains, the swing on the front porch moving in the breeze. Walter loved that walk, the feeling that you couldn't get to Lake Margaret by car, not really. The place still had the lingering odor of carriage leather, starched sheets and kerosene lamps, and sometimes he imagined that the relatives, all of them who had come before, were still sleeping in their iron beds upstairs under the eaves. They were sleeping, the whiteness of the hot afternoon under their closed lids, the sounds in their ears of the water and the insects, the halyard idly banging against the mast in the soft hot wind. He knew the ancestors because there were photographs on a Peg-Board in the living room, pictures of the jowly great-grandmother and the great-grandfather awkwardly holding a baby. There were pictures of the great-aunts, the solemn young women with their hair piled on top of their heads, and the great-uncles with handlebar mustaches and what looked like barbershop-quartet clothes. It was so strange, Walter thought, that a house could outlive a person; strange, marvelous even, that he could walk up the drive and out of time. Walter hated the idea of staying home from the lake, missing the anniversary party, and only because Daniel had a goiter and a sore throat. It was Daniel who, point by point, convinced Joyce that they should go and leave him behind. He would be fine in a day or two, he assured her, and, in case she'd forgotten, he was no longer five but seventeen years old, capable of pouring his own ginger ale and putting himself to bed. Actually, he said, he'd welcome the chance to rest up, to get ready for two important swim team races in the coming week. The McClouds' house and the Gambles' house were the only two homes on Maplewood Avenue that were mirror images of each other, so that kitchen faced kitchen, dining room faced dining room. To set the day to rights Joyce, from the kitchen window, flagged down Mrs. Gamble at her sink. In a matter of seconds both women were out in their yards, standing at the Gambles' chain-link fence. Daniel's little dog, Duke, a terrier and beagle mix, did not seem to realize that it was futile to try to mount the Gamble collies through the diamond links, and Joyce absently reached for his choke collar, pulling him to her so that he was standing on his hind legs, his eyes bulging. "How's the carport construction coming, Florence?" Joyce asked. Mrs. Gamble reached over the fence toward Duke. "Give the boy to me." She hoisted him up, and when she had him, clasped to her bosom, she lifted up the flap of his black ear and whispered down into the inner chamber. He stopped scrabbling and went still. Joyce remembered then that at breakfast Walter had said something about Mrs. Gamble. What was it? A line about Mrs. Gamble giving an examination, Mrs. Gamble knowing more than they did. She couldn't get it back exactly. But it was true, she thought, that Florence was like the headmistress of the block, the dread matron patrolling the corridors. She should have had a career, Joyce supposed, a position that made use of her unusual talents. A postal official barking at the next customer to step up to the window, or a meter maid marking time with her long chalk on the stick. When the children pestered the milkman for ice on humid mornings, out Mrs. Gamble charged from her back door, snapping her bullwhip on the pavement. The urchin pack scattered, gone, not a sound but the burr of the Borden's motor and the echo of the whip. Why she owned such a thing was a mystery, although some said it had come down to her from her cowhand uncle. Why she felt the need to police the children and the milkman was another puzzle. Joyce had found Walter trembling in the bushes once, the ice melting in his clenched fist, water running down his arm. There was probably not enough in Florence's three-story house, Joyce thought, and the quarter-acre lot, to keep a woman with her intellect occupied, and so she had moved beyond her property line, out into the alley, to keep watch and edify. There was no doubt that she was the pioneer with improvements on Maplewood Avenue: there had been the state-of-the-art chain-link fence, and then the rubber straps with hooks that went over the top of the trash cans to prevent retarded Billy Wexler from swiping the lids. Most recently, there was to be the addition of the carport. Each house had its own matching garage facing the alley, but the Gambles were soon also going to have a driveway up their front lawn, ending in a carport. No one had driveways in Oak Ridge, Illinois, much less a carport. No one had ever dreamed of a carport. "How's the construction coming?" Joyce asked again. After the update on the project, the slackers who passed for workmen, the crack in the concrete, the broken spotlight, Joyce asked Mrs. Gamble if she could keep an eye on Daniel while the family went off to Wisconsin to celebrate Jeannie and Ted's wedding anniversary. Mrs. Gamble raised her blond eyebrow. "How long?" "It will take most of the day, but we'll try to be home before dark," Joyce said. "Daniel knows to call you if he feels--" "No. How many years? How long has it been for Ted?" "Twenty-five, Florence. They, Ted and Jeannie, have been married for twenty-five years." Before Mrs. Gamble could make a remark about her relations, Joyce reached for Duke, prattling in a motherly way--"Here you come, upsa-daisy." Mrs. Gamble grinned into the glare of the sun and murmured, "I hope the Jell-Os don"t melt on the way." She always watched over the McClouds' house when they were gone. It was not a hardship for her, no more devotion required to watch an empty house than a full one. Walter imagined her taking the key from her apron pocket, opening the back door, and roaming through their house when they were away, during a thunderstorm, under the pretext of checking the windows. He pictured her moving silently through all of their rooms, transfixed, so that her personal habits fell away and she didn't need to pluck at her shirt or clear her throat. She would not open the drawers or rummage around the attic. Through the simple darkness of the house she'd see into Robert and Joyce and Daniel and himself; she'd see their dreams laid out before her, see their unrealistic aspirations, their daffy ideals and the thin weave of their allegiances. In adulthood Walter made an effort to refrain from thinking of the scenes of his boyhood as Greek theater, and yet, in spite of his resolve, he could not keep from associating Mrs. Gamble with Daniel's sickness. She was the old lady seer, the one with the pin curls, the X's of the bobby pins spelling out an oracle. It was Mrs. Gamble, after all, who watched over Daniel on Aunt Jeannie's anniversary. In their absence she may have walked through the McClouds' house whispering, I hope the lawn chemicals haven't leached into the water, I hope the lead pipes haven't poisoned. . . . I hope the pollution from Gary. . . . I hope it isn't, I hope it hasn't. She might have left in her wake something as insubstantial, as potent, as a dark hope. As it turned out there was so much baggage on the trip to Lake Margaret that Walter's friends, Susan and Mitch, sat crushed in one fold-out seat in the back of the car, and Walter was left with the middle bench seat. Robert McCloud had arranged the two aquamarine coolers, the suitcases and the grocery bags. It wasn't for nothing, he said, that Joyce had been a Girl Scout: she was fully prepared for an ice age, a drought, a monsoon and the invasion of the termites. Walter was pinned against the door by the coolers, it was awkward to turn around, and he had to shout to be heard. The teenagers gave up talking after a few minutes on the expressway. Susan and Mitch fell asleep against each other. Nothing had gone according to plan, and Walter stared gloomily out the window. Just as well that Daniel was sick, he thought. If he'd come they'd have had to tie him to the roof rack. Joyce glanced back now and then to make sure there was nothing unseemly going on between the two lovebirds in the kiddie seat. She gave her husband a preview of the day to come, quietly, and with restraint, evoking her hysterical sister. Even marking the gestures, not imitating them full out, was funny, and Robert snorted into his shirt and twice said, "Oh, Joycie." She had enough sense not to ask Walter if he was all right. She could see that he was troubled about something, and he in his turn knew that she had taken note of his unhappiness. Her general sympathy brought him a guilty little pleasure. His thin skin and tender heart were at once a source of pride and anxiety to her. He had asked to study ballet, she had known better than to try to talk him out of it, and she had clung to the belief that his enthusiasm for the dance would shield him from the predictable taunts. It had been such a stroke of luck that his two dancing-school friends happened to live in Oak Ridge. They had been put together in the First Junior Class at the Kenton School of Ballet in Chicago when they were ten years old and together they"d advanced all the way up to the Second Intermediate Class. But through good and bad fortune Walter would always have his own temperament, and Joyce feared that he would feel the injuries of adolescence more keenly than his peers. Still, she hadn't given up on a straightforward future for him, and she wondered if it was Susan, if the leggy girl squeezing against Mitch, was the source of his present misery. Her conclusion was not exactly off the mark. Walter was thinking about the night the week before, when he and Susan and Mitch had been in the McClouds' living room, dancing and listening to records. Walter had picked out Tchaikovsky's Serenade, a piece that had been their favorite since the previous summer. George Balanchine, the greatest choreographer in the history of the dance, according to Walter, had made a plotless ballet to the music, and Walter, in a tribute to both virtuosos, had the volume up so high that the Gamble dogs, in their yard, cocked their heads this way and that, hearing noises in a frequency Tchaikovsky never intended. The dancers rushed headlong in and out of the doors, running the length of the room with their arms outstretched, doing the bits of the Balanchine choreography they had absorbed over the years. Between the three of them they had seen eight performances of Serenade. Walter and his aunt Sue Rawson had seen it four times the month before, night after night at Ravinia Park. Mitch was always the man, intermittently lifting Susan over his head and carrying her around like a barbell. It seemed to Walter that Mitch's strength was inherent, that it was a quality he had not had to work for, no need to lift weights or wrestle or play a lot of catch. It was just there, that strength, a part of him. There were a few hard, fast, unstated rules to their dancing game, principles not to be broken or bent. They were meant for Walter. It was curious, he thought, that he understood the protocol instinctively, that no one had ever had to slap his wrist or say, Repeat after me. Funny, that it was the kind of thing he knew with animal sense. He was not allowed to lift Susan, but he could offer his arm if she wanted support for an arabesque. He was not to turn her; the pirouette business was also Mitch's privilege. Susan, however, could turn Walter, with good humor on both sides. He most certainly was not to attempt, even as a joke, to lift Mitch. But he could touch Mitch if, say, they were dancing in a circle, holding hands. Then they were comrades, the three of them. When they spun there was nearly an absence of possession. Walter, in the first movement of Serenade, threw himself into the wind of the large fan on the dining-room table and struck a pose. He buffeted back and forth, in and out of the steady push of air. If only he had on one of the blue chiffon costumes that Balanchine's dancers wore, a gown that would flutter and billow after him. He was going full tilt--no one could say that he did not have enough feeling for the entire ensemble of twenty-eight girls. "Not having the blue dresses," he panted as he jetéed past Susan, "for this ballet, is probably on a par with riding a motorcycle and"--he called over his shoulder--"finding that it doesn't rev." "You're right," she said, flying at him, taking his waist in both her hands and spinning him. "Something's missing. Your shorts don't really cut it." Walter promptly ran upstairs and put on his heavily brocaded velvet suit coat, a genuine piece from Liberace's Mr. Showmanship Collection, an item he had found on a day God blessed him for fifteen dollars at a yard sale. It was his next best thing, in lieu of a layered blue chiffon gown with spaghetti straps. He couldn't help smiling Liberace's stiff jewely grin when he wore the suit coat. As he came back into the room it dawned on him that Liberace, Tchaikovsky and Balanchine were really after the same aesthetic. He threw his head back trying to dance as if Balanchine had first choreographed the ballet expressly for Liberace, and as if Tchaikovsky had written the music only with the Mr. Showmanship suit coat in mind. He was thinking, as he moved, that there was surely a place between the hootchy-kootchy, the watusi, well beyond the hokey pokey, but running neck and neck with the gavotte, the galliard, the courante, and with all due respect to the cha-cha, the fandango, the monkey and the mambo--a place where those forms would meld into something very like what he thought he was doing with his hips at that moment. "Ow! Jesus! Mitch, you dropped me!" It was Susan, on the floor, hugging her arms to her chest, glowering. Walter opened his eyes. Mitch was stooped, petting Susan's hand. But he was staring at Walter, shaking, laughing noiselessly. "What?" Mitch finally said. "What the hell were you doing, McCloud?" Mitch rarely called his friend by his last name, but when he did, the endearment sent a tingle through Walter. "Are you okay, Susan?" Walter said. "Fine. Just fine." Very little then, besides her feelings, had been hurt. She stood up, did a demi-plié, a battement tendu, to see if all the parts still worked. "Honest to God, Walter," Mitch said, "what was that thing you just--" "Would you take that stupid coat off," Susan snapped. "It makes me hot just looking at you." Mitch sat on the sofa, clamping his teeth together to keep from tittering. Walter knew he had been a success but he puckered up, wouldn't revel in it. He got busy removing the suit coat and hanging it in the closet. Susan stood in the middle of the floor untangling the earring that was caught in her hair. In an effort to bring them back together Walter said, "I'll never forget the performance Sue Rawson and I saw at Ravinia, the time we had the far-left seats and we could see backstage, and one of the dancers was sick every time she--" Susan, her earring freed, lifted her hands over her head and rose on her half-pointes, just as the fourth movement, the Elegy section, began. She was wearing white canvas pants with holes in the knees, skinny yellowed sneakers, a lavender tank top. The only light in the room came from the Gambles' half-finished carport, the beam from the dangling fixture filtering through the leaded hall windows like the refracted light of a star. Serenade was sacred to Walter and Mitch and Susan in part because they knew it was sacred to the company members at the New York City Ballet, and in part because they had seen it at a time in their lives when they were especially vulnerable to the beauty of the music and the splendor of the ideas. They believed that the ballet was about the spirit world, about evil, and love, death, the triumph of goodness. Susan, only moments before in the living room, had been shocked by Walter wearing the hideous Liberace jacket, and then appalled by Mitch, throwing her around like a sack of flour, and dropping her! Hurting her! She would show them. She would return the dignity they owed to Serenade, to Mr. Balanchine, to Tchaikovsky and to herself. Walter moved to the sofa and sat down next to Mitch, to watch her. She danced with her eyes shut, as if she had no need to see her audience or the obstacles--the piano, the rolltop desk, the coffee table, the card table with the jigsaw puzzle of the medieval fortress. There was a quality of liquid gold about her movements, Walter thought, perhaps from the strange light on her long hair, her long arms, her long exquisitely turned-out leg unfolding into an arabesque. There was such eloquence in the simple movement. He swallowed and bit his lip hard with his eyeteeth. It wouldn't do to cry and embarrass himself. He felt, watching her, that he inhabited her body, that given her set of tools, what was such an arbitrary gift after all, he would have danced just as she did. She moved as if there were no distinction between her own limbs and the music, as if her flesh and the sound coming from the phonograph had become, in the McCloud living room, part of the same wave. Walter soon forgot his bloody lip, forgot the tears spilling down his cheeks. Going to the ballet had always inspired conflicting emotions in him. He wanted, often in quick succession, to be the girl, wanted to be the girl with the boy, wanted to love the boy, wanted to be the boy, wanted again to be the girl. It was a confusion of endless change and pairing. But that night, for the length of the Elegy, he felt as if he were inside Susan's skin. He was one character, only one, moving her arms as she did, with each inevitable step she took. When the music came to the end she slid into the hall with her arms flung back. Walter realized that Daniel must have slipped in at some point, that he was sitting on the edge of the wing chair. He'd been watching Susan too. The record scraped around and around. The boys sat in the gloom listening as the needle methodically crossed the scratches. They could not have said what it was she had done to start the charm. She had used basic steps that anyone could learn. She had kicked off her shoes--they might have done the same. She had put steps together and run around, tossing her head to keep her hair from falling across her face. And yet they waited in the quiet, hardly breathing. They felt they couldn't lift a finger until she did, until she told them to. She was still out of breath when she drifted back through the wide hall arch. Like an ordinary ballerina she sank to the floor in one motion, and she spread her legs in a V, stretching over her knees, her long limp torso draped along her calves, her hair covering her feet like kelp. Walter had wanted to reach and do nothing more than clasp Mitch's hand, maybe even hold it for a time. Daniel coughed and said, "Wow." Mitch squatted and went to Susan with his legs bent, his knuckles to the floor, like a chimp, Walter thought. The boyfriend lifted her heavy hair off her shoe, and smoothed it down her back. He lay next to her, buzzing into her ear, "Suze. Suze." She extended her hand to him with all the poignancy of the dying swan recovering for one last little flap-flap. Walter leaned forward to see them better. It was not wrong, to look upon this scène d'amour, considering his emotion, his--involvement, considering that he could just as easily have been Susan, just as naturally had the right to reach for Mitch's fingers, to kiss them, and hold them to his own flushed cheek. The lovers in the fold-out seat woke up when the car came to a complete stop at the end of the drive. The McClouds had arrived at Lake Margaret at eleven, well before the party was to start. The cousins' dogs barked and ran back and forth in front of the station wagon. Robert would not have felt truly penitent if he'd run over his sister-in-law's moronic dogs, and he did not slow down much. Susan looked around herself, rubbed her blue eyes, stretched, groaned and slumped back into Mitch. Walter had not walked the usual final leg of the trip because he was bound on either side with baggage. He opened the door slowly so that none of the goods would fall out, fondly swatted at the dogs, told them, as each of the McClouds always did, and to no avail, to shut up. He smelled the freshly cut grass and the canvas sail from the great-grandfather's sea boat that was drying on the lawn. In the outside air he was sure he could detect the fragrance of the mold and must of the indoors, the cold soot of the fireplaces and the faintest hint of mothballs. He breathed deeply. The old house was in need of foundation repairs and a coat of paint, but for Jeannie's party there was enough to show off in the grounds and the enormous screen porch that looked over the lake. She had wanted her sons at least to spruce up the front entrance before the gala, but they had been busy working at the family grocery store. Walter was glad the paint was peeling. The shabbiness, he thought, made the place seem dramatic and dignified; it commanded attention, in the way a gaunt elderly woman would, the spinster who had lived through the wars. Walter loved to lie on the swing on the porch, secure from mosquitoes and gnats, and read the nineteenth-century novels his oldest aunt, Sue Rawson, prescribed. He loved the kitchen where the aunts and nieces held on with an iron grip to the Lake Margaret etiquette, as well as to their positions, based on relations, many of which went back to their birth orders and the petty squabbles of childhood. There was only one bowl that melon balls could be served in, no sympathy for the sister-in-law who didn't know better and brought out the orange platter. Aunt Jeannie was obsessive about the refrigerator, and she defrosted it compulsively, guarding the appliance as if it were a beloved feverish animal, the wet cloths like bandages dripping down the shelves. Lake Margaret held for Walter some of his finer memories of Sue Rawson. Of course his mother had given him life, and yet Sue Rawson, he sometimes grandly thought, had given him his own self, something that may have been even more difficult than birthing a baby. From the very beginning, it seemed, without either the benefit or the obstruction of love, his tall aunt had looked down her beaky nose at him and seen him clearly. She had planned what amounted to a seduction by taking him to the ballet when he was nine; she had known every little move he would make in his seat, how tears would spring into his eyes at the first sight of the ballerinas in their gauzy blue skirts. For him, she knew, the dancers' floating hair and arms and legs would seem like the notes made visible, like music itself running around on pattering feet. I want to do what they are doing. She knew the very words he'd say to himself. I want, somehow, to be them. She was equipped with the schedule for the Kenton School of Ballet when Joyce called a few days later, inquiring about dance lessons for Walter. At the lake Sue Rawson often invited him up to her room during happy hour to listen to the opera on her phonograph. The rest of the family was down on the porch with the crackers and beverages and talk of boating, but he was in her room, the late-afternoon light flickering gold on the braided rug, the white curtain fluttering in the breeze. Joan Sutherland, Rosa Ponselle, Renata Tebaldi sang of heartbreak in Italian while Sue Rawson sat in her chair following the score. There was something thrilling in the severe commands she used to make him pay attention to particular passages. When he was older, he understood that she'd been trying to show him the way into a life of meaning with the music. As a child, he knew that regular people, his younger aunts, and his uncles, yapped at the children to pick up their towels, their inner tubes and buckets, but it was plain that Sue Rawson didn't spend her energy for nothing. She was different from other women and not very much like any man Walter knew. Certainly she was leagues apart from his mother, who was small-boned and had soft dark hair that curled at her shoulders. Sue Rawson had thick ankles and large wrists, a gray pageboy haircut, and the pupils in her blue eyes seemed not to expand beyond a prick of black. Although she was his aunt, his mother's oldest sister, he never thought of her as Aunt Sue. He never called her anything to her face. At home they always referred to her as Sue Rawson. For a long time he supposed that Rawson was a suffix that any parent could add to a person's name to give it a regional distinction. As a boy he naturally did not think about her past history. In his twenties he learned that she'd inherited a considerable sum of money from a maiden Greek professor she'd had at Vassar. They had had a deep friendship, according to his mother, whatever that meant exactly, and they'd traveled to Italy and Greece together after Sue Rawson's graduation. In Wisconsin she was usually reading on the porch, writing in the margins of her book, and she sailed in the weekend races, fiercely, with a need to finish at the head. For Walter there were long wild summer days at Lake Margaret, swimming with the cousins, swimming until his lungs were heavy with water, his ears plugged, his eyes itchy and red, his nose stuffed. The noon whistle blew from a mysterious source in town, to tell them to go up to the house for lunch. During the quiet time, if the bugs weren't bothersome, he lay in the hammock on the lawn while the cicadas, in the green of the catalpa and oak trees, pierced the quiet. In the still heat of the afternoon, damp, waterlogged deep inside himself, he tiptoed to the porch to Sue Rawson, to request another book. At dinner the parents drank and argued about politics, slamming their hands on the table, shouting back and forth about the threat of communism, the danger of the beatnik, the hippie, Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, Gene McCarthy, the unfettered female, the New Math. Walter knew very little about his own turbulent times, and he thought the adults behaved like imbeciles. If they'd had a particularly rousing meal, they marked the day and the year on one of the wine bottles with an indelible pen and placed it on the ledge on the porch. The shelf ran around the wall just above the screens and was cluttered with bottles, some that went back as far as 1900. The children, jammed together at the table, all skinny arms and elbows, were noisy and crude, farting, putting peas up their noses and, once, slinging mashed potatoes, like snowballs, at one another. It took three throws for an adult to notice the commotion across the room. Uncle Wally, who died shortly after, scooped up a mashed-potato ball from the serving dish and lobbed it over to his son. It missed his target and hit Sue Rawson squarely on the back as she made her way into the kitchen. Even the youngest child knew not to laugh. Aunt Jeannie leaped up, averting a stunned silence, and in a frenzy began both scolding the perpetrators and with her napkin blotting the buttery smear on Sue Rawson's red shirt. Walter wondered years later if that single ball of potato did it, if, as Jeannie shrilled into her ear, Sue Rawson said to herself, This, none of this, is funny. "Will you look at that?" Robert McCloud said to Walter, when Aunt Jeannie finally made her entrance at her own party at two-thirty. The unsuspecting guests were standing on the porch holding their shiny silver party plates. The sun, blurred by a haze, seemed not to have moved in the yellowy clouds since noon. It was too hot to be a glorious day and the sky was the wrong color. But the women from Aunt Jeannie's tennis club, wearing girdles and stockings and slips under their flowered dresses, insisted that it was a perfect afternoon for an anniversary party. Never mind that it was impossible to make fans from the little limp napkins that said "Jean and Theodore" in silver cursive, that they weren't much good for mopping a brow either. No matter that there were horseflies down at the lake, not so much as a puff of air from any direction--and who had noticed that the hostess was two hours late? It was a glorious day. A splendid day! Robert McCloud was the only one who saw Aunt Jeannie appear at the French doors. She was standing with silver tears in her dark lashes, wearing the wedding dress she had worn exactly twenty-five years before. "The celestial body," he murmured to Walter. "The comet streaking across the sky." The guests turned to look, to see what had glimmered in the corner of their eyes. "Dad!" Walter gripped his father's arm. The gown had been stored at the furrier since the honeymoon. None of the beads were missing from the fitted bodice, the leg-o-mutton sleeves were crisp, and the mud had been cleaned off the train that buttoned up the back into a bustle. After six children and twenty-five years of marriage to the manager of the Jewel Food Store in Oak Ridge, it was clear that Aunt Jeannie still had her figure. She opened her arms. "Welcome!" she cried. "Welcome!" Someone, a plant in the audience, Walter guessed, clapped, prompting everyone else to set their plates aside, to put down the runny Jell-O and the deviled eggsthat had been leached of their color in the heat. They all applauded. Aunt Jeannie clasped her hands at her throat and nodded her head, left, right and center. "It is every last one of you," she declared, "who has made me the luckiest, the happiest, and the most satisfied woman in the village of Oak Ridge." She stepped down, bobbing and smiling, and stood for a moment before the Peg-Board where the family pictures hung. Uncle Ted had been told to get some help and carefully bring it out from the living room that morning. Walter turned to Susan, to explain. "She wants the visitors to appreciate the wonder of a family that has shared such an expensive place for so long and are still speaking to each other. She's posing in front of the photographs, taking her place in the history that might just as well end with her, now, on this very porch." Walter was unable to pour the champagne, take in the spectacle of his aunt and keep his own sweat from dripping into the clean glasses on the table. His clothes were drenched, including the lining of the silver sequined vest his cousin Francie had made. Where was she? He assumed that Jeannie had not made her children serve, that it was important they be on display as model progeny. For an instant he felt so happy that he was his mother's son, and not his aunt's child. Francie had probably been locked in the sewing room with nothing but loose hay for materials, fretting about how she was going to come up with the vests by morning. He leaned over again, to Susan. "Aunt Jeannie's taking a curtain call, not only for her entrance but for the performance that's lasted twenty-five years." Susan smacked him on the hand. "She's gorgeous," she said, "and she's not even perspiring." "Look at Uncle Ted," he went on, unhindered. "Look!" Ted was in the corner drinking whiskey and dribbling pear Jell-O down the front of his tuxedo. "You really are evil, Walter," she said, snickering into her chest. "What are you talking about? I didn't invent these human beings. I'm showing them to you, in the same way people call your attention to the tiger and the seal at the zoo. They could do the same to us, except they're too interested in themselves to" Look, look at my mother." Susan rose up on her toes to see through the crowd. "What about her?" She squinted at Walter. "What? She looks like she always does." "I know. That's the point." Joyce McCloud was leaning against a post, staring out at the lake. Sue Rawson had been talking to her, but when Mitch passed with his platter of dates wrapped in bacon, Sue Rawson abruptly excused herself and followed him across the porch. My mother, Walter thought, is entirely unto herself, serene, untroubled by the lunacy of her family. She was wearing a batik skirt, plain flat white sandals on her bare feet and a cotton blouse. Sue Rawson had been the unattractive smart girl in the family and Joyce had been the quiet, sensible one, the daughter who was at first overlooked, the child with the serviceable intellect. Aunt Jeannie had always had a gaudy suburban glamour. Even as a little boy Walter had felt there was too much of her. Too much blue on her eyelids, too much gold jewelry clattering on her wrists, too much sweetness in the rose perfume she always wore, her large hands stroking, stroking his arm, down, down the sleeve; too much sympathy, too much understanding, suffocating him with her concern. His mother's dark hair was beginning to gray at the temples and her lipstick had worn off, but he couldn't help thinking she was beautiful, and certainly the belle of the ball in the over-thirty category. "Remember, Wally," Robert McCloud said, "it's your mother's family, not mine.' He paused while Walter refilled his glass. " The kooky gene usually skips a generation." "Uh-huh," Walter said, looking at his father, at the gap between his two front teeth, his short damp hair in spikes, the heavy lids over his brown eyes opening and closing slowly. "You boys are all right, but you'll want to have your kids checked at birth. Watch for heavy breathing, undue excitement when they come into the world. An overdose of enthusiasm is a dangerous thing, as you can well see." "I probably won't have any children," Walter said, wiping the rim of his father's glass with a linen towel. "It looks to me like a pretty risky business." "I'm not raising you to care for me in my old age," Robert said, in no relation to any conversation they had ever had, "so you can put me out on the ice floe when my time comes without feeling guilty." His father had drunk four or five glasses of champagne from Walter's table alone and perhaps more from the others. At family parties he always drank in a burst at the beginning, and then slipped away to the parlor to sleep in an armchair. Sue Rawson had driven Mitch to the inner wall and was lecturing him on George Balanchine. She was telling him about the time she'd seen Diana Adams, Maria Tallchief and Tanny LeClerq dance Apollo. Walter could tell by the way Mitch was nodding and smiling that he wasn't listening to a word Sue Rawson said, that the star male of the Kenton School of Ballet had no interest in a history of dance that did not yet include him. "Father Flannery!" Aunt Jeannie screeched through the cluster of guests. "There you are." The priest had come out on the porch quietly, without letting the screen door slam behind him. She rushed to him, clutched his arm and bore right into his pink face. Walter noted that two out of the three Rawson sisters on the porch were overpowering a helpless male simultaneously. His mother was the only one minding her own business. Aunt Jeannie had been born into the Presbyterian Church, but she'd converted to Catholicism before she married. It had been Father Flannery himself who had performed the wedding ceremony at Ascension Church in Oak Ridge twenty-five years earlier. He had come up from Indiana, for the repeat performance. "It's wonderful, so wonderful you're here!" Jeannie's hairpiece was quivering, the stiff curls slipping away from the pins. "Isn't it a glorious day? Did you see the children? They're delighted you could come!" Walter doubted that his cousins would give so much as a fig for Father Flannery. His black robes looked to have given him prickly heat on his scrawny neck and possibly down below, underneath, on his spongy skin that never saw the light of day. Aunt Jeannie continued to fuss at him and he probably had no choice but to forbear. "It rained on our wedding day all those years ago!" She was so wound up she was shouting. "Do you remember? It poured just as we came from the church, and you carried my train, you, by yourself, to the car. I'll never forget that, never." Walter could see that even though he had God on his side, the pastor needed rescue. It was precisely for rescue that Aunt Jeannie had hired him. She had given the team careful instructions about circulation. He picked up his tray, made his way to the center of the room, and thrust the drinks between the bride and her priest. "Champagne, Father?" he asked. "Not until after the ceremony, my friend." He spoke reprovingly, as if it were common knowledge that saying a mass under the influence was not only dangerous but illegal. "Ted! Ted!" Aunt Jeannie cried. "Where are you? Father Flannery is here! He's here!" Her husband was already standing at the dresser that had been dragged out to the porch for the altar, standing just as he should have been, waiting for his wife to come forward. The presents, wrapped in silver paper, had been stacked at his side. Aunt Jeannie swept through the porch, the living room, the kitchen. She shrieked down the hill, trying to find her two boys and the four girls. It took half an hour to round up the six Donleavys and make them presentable. Francie, the oldest daughter, had invited an Oak Ridge boy named Roger Miller to go up to the barn with her to see the bats hanging from the rafters. She was sixteen and had not yet kissed anyone. She was a hefty girl, and her mother worried that too often she hid her sweet face behind her long straggly hair. They sat on the one bale of straw in the barn and Roger Miller explained how a bat uses radar to find its food. It was so interesting, Francie said. He had weak eyes, long pale lashes and fragile wire-rimmed glasses. She had the urge to do something protective, to hold his head to her breast, and she looked at him thinking how to do that, how to take his face in both hands and draw it to her. When Aunt Jeannie, in the search for her children, finally saw the couple heading out to the woods, she ordered five-year-old Peter to snag them. Her anger was immediately tempered by the fact that Francie was with the Miller boy, a young man who had a future in the medical profession and came from one of the wealthiest families in Oak Ridge. "Hello, my dears!" she called gaily to Francie and Roger as they came down the path. "Come, you two," she said, as if they'd always been together. "We're going to have the mass now." She breezed onto the porch, and then lowered her head, demure all of a sudden, as she made her way to the altar. There was a hush as she slowly went to Ted and took her place before Father Flannery. "A faithful friend," the priest intoned, "is a strong defense; and he that hath found such a one hath found a treasure." "Does everyone do this?" Susan whispered to Walter. "Replay their wedding?" He moved close to her so he could speak right into her ear. "No, not everyone does this after twenty-five years of marriage. It's optional. I think it's like those Civil War reenactments. You get to dress up, fire your musket, have a bonfire, run around. It's for fun, I think." "But it's sort of beautiful. It's not only reliving their day of glory, but it's--" "A way for Aunt Jeannie to prove that she's thinner than everyone else her age and has a great hairdresser?" "No! They're renewing their commitment, making a pledge for the next twenty-five years." "And they get all these great gifts on top of it. Their children bought them a stereo. My mother spent a fortune on some silver teapot--" "It's a good thing you don't have a sister, Walter. She'd be stunted with you as the big broth--" "Shhhhh. Please." It was one of the tennis ladies behind them. "Let us celebrate this union by hearing again the vows made on August 10, 1947," Father Flannery was saying. It was difficult to hear Jeannie repeating after the priest, although the porch was much smaller than Ascension Church. She was choked up, dizzy with emotion, just as she had been the first time around. Walter reached for a drink, hoping Aunt Jeannie's friends wouldn't object to a minor's having a taste. He drank through the vows, and the prayer of thanks for the day, for the family, for the continued good health of all of those present and for peace and prosperity. He was on his third glass when Father Flannery announced that he would administer communion to the married couple and to anyone else who wished to come forward. Ted's sisters had brought the loaves all the way from an Italian neighborhood in Chicago, and broken them into pieces in the kitchen. When Susan started up to the altar, Walter reached for her hand, pulled her back to him. "You can't," he said. "It's a mortal sin if you're not Catholic." She stopped and considered for a moment. "This will ensure my trip to hell?" "Yes, that's right. A mortal sin." "Good. That's good, Walter." She raised her own glass of champagne to toast him. "I've been pure, you know, up until this point. But if I do this one thing, then I'll be secure. I'll know that we'll get to the same place, that we'll always be together. I love Mitch, but I don't think he'll really last into eternity, do you know what I mean?" She kissed him on the cheek and got in line, swaying a little, closing her eyes, already bracing herself, Walter thought, for the flames catching her hair, burning her face. After the mass, after he'd been released from his duties, Walter sat on the pier with Sue Rawson. Susan and Mitch had swum out to the raft and were wrestling, pushing each other off, struggling to get back aboard. There was that moment, as they hoisted themselves up, when they were suspended, their elbows bent, their torsos and legs pulled down by the water. After five years of ballet school Walter knew their bodies. Susan had virtually no breasts, two patty pies with penny-size nipples; each rib was clearly delineated all the way up to her clavicle, and in fifth position her legs tucked into each other as if they'd been welded together. Walter was sure that he could draw from memory the pattern of the veins on Mitch's feet, the curves the artery took as it went up his calf, the distance, bone to bone, on his hairless chest. It was hard to say which feature was the most arresting, if it was Mitch's height that commanded attention or the pinkness of his lips, the blush along his jaw, or the blue eyes, with the excessive lashes, and the gently drooping lids. The first time she'd met Mitch, Sue Rawson had said, "Now that's the sort of boy who will catch fish without a worm on his hook." "Does it sometimes surprise you that Mitch has stuck with the ballet this long?" Sue Rawson was speaking to Walter but she was looking out to the lake. It had never occurred to Walter that Mitch might quit. "What?" he said. "No, no, not at all. He's a natural. He loves the music, the way Susan and I do, and he always gets encouragement. And his mother makes him go to class, besides. She broke her foot the day she was supposed to dance for Sir Frederick Ashton, in London, so the story goes. It was the end of her future." "Ashton is a simpleton," Sue Rawson said, as if all along they'd been talking about the British choreographer and not about Mitch. She pointed to the swimmers. "Do those two youngsters think they're in love?" "Uhh," Walter said, involuntarily, as if he'd been punched. "It's all right." She seemed about to pat him on the leg, but she must have thought better of it. Instead she reached for her binoculars and looked through, to see, up close, Mitch wrestle Susan to the prickly turf of the raft. "Don't worry," Sue Rawson said in her dry, knowing way. Susan let out a bloodcurdling scream as she fell backward into the lake. "They'll get sick to death of each other soon enough." When they went up to the house the band was playing on the porch. Walter stood outside on the walk in his wet trunks, drinking champagne out of a paper cup, watching the guests dance to "We've Only Just Begun." He saw his mother at the far end of the porch, winding her way through the couples, walking toward him. For many years to come he could not account for what happened next, shortly after she appeared, drifting in and out of his vision. It was as if the lights went out on the sunny afternoon, as if for a few seconds everyone was tripping around blind in the night, panicking, stumbling over their own shoes. There was a noise, like a sudden clap of thunder overhead, and for an instant the sensation of darkness, the floor giving way. Walter felt the bang once in his heart, and then it echoed out of him, into the silence. The guests stood still, their hands clapped to their chests or their ringing ears. A large woman in a floral muumuu whispered, "Lord a mercy." The air cleared, became bright again. All at once everyone could see the disaster. The Peg-Board, with the family pictures, had fallen to the floor. What a noise it had made! Joyce, who may have been the only one not stopped by the commotion, continued her walk between the men and the women, the dancers who had burst from one another's arms. She went out the door. She did not acknowledge Walter standing on the grass. She walked across the lawn and onto the footpath that led to the woods. Aunt Jeannie was too horror-struck to weep or take action. She could only whimper, "How did this happen? How did it happen?" Uncle Ted, useful at last, ordered his brother and his nephews to lift up the board and set it against the porch wall. The glass of every single frame was smashed and the shards lay as they had been broken. The pictures that remained on the board were crooked, or their matting had fallen and dangled below the frames. "Go get the broom, please, Brian," Uncle Ted said. "Charley, mops in the woodshed--watch your step, Mrs. Gardener, watch out there for the glass." Nothing more dramatic than a broken jar of pickles, an everyday occurrence down at the Jewel; he'd seen it all, women's water bursting, cantaloupes in smithereens in the produce aisle, freezer doors left open overnight and in the morning rivers of ice cream and orange juice flooding down to checkout. His aptitude, in truth, was not for managing money or overseeing a complex and perishable inventory, but rather for directing the stock boys to clean up and keeping the ladies from peril. It was shortly after the mess was cleared away that Walter heard Aunt Jeannie's piteous cry from the living room. "Where is Father Flannery? Didn't anyone show him to his room? Didn't anyone tell him he could stay the night?" Her older sons were dead drunk in the boathouse, and the younger daughters were in the trees down at the lake, jumping into shallow water from dangerous heights. Francie had finally gotten Roger Miller to look her in the eye and the two were necking, tentatively, behind the woodpile. "Where is Father Flannery?" Aunt Jeannie wailed. Her hairpiece had wilted and come off and she was carrying it in both hands as if it were her bridal bouquet. The priest didn't answer. Nobody had seen him leave hours before. He had eaten a sour grape off of the arbor up in the old tennis court, where his car was parked, looked at his watch and told himself he could be back in Indianapolis by dark. The McClouds were quiet on the way home. Walter and his friends were sunburned and woozy. Robert had slept through the catastrophe on the porch, slept through the noise of the two frightened babies and woken only when most of the guests had gone. He felt refreshed and ready to drive. It had been a hard day for Aunt Jeannie, and he personally was glad to have gotten through it. He was looking forward to Sunday, to some tennis early in the morning, and Daniel's swim meet in the afternoon. His wife was resting in the front seat next to him, and he did not disturb her. Joyce wasn't asleep but she kept her eyes closed, and her face turned to the window, to the hum of the August night. She thought she might just call Mrs. Gamble's son, Greg, when she got home. She might ask him if he would teach her this transcendental meditation business. She hadn't told Robert yet, but she'd had an upsetting conversation with Sue Rawson in the middle of the party. She was going to need something in the coming months, an aid, her own little syllable, to calm her. They drove up Maplewood Avenue. Most of the houses had a few lights on downstairs and, in the upstairs, the dim yellow glow that came from the children's night-lights. Their own house was black, the windows reflecting the streetlights, as if the place had no heat, no life, no center of its own. The Gambles' house was ablaze and the Missus herself was standing under the light on her front porch, her cigarette burning between her two fingers, her arms crossed, waiting. Waiting for them as if they were truant children. She looked as if she was too mad to shout, too mad to curse; she looked as if she was going to take her time and when she was good and ready she'd whisper, she'd practically spit each word, Where--Have--You--Been? Excerpted from The Short History of a Prince: A Novel by Jane Hamilton All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.