Gentlehands

by M. E. Kerr

  About eleven o’clock I said we’d better leave, remembering Mr. Pennington’s order that Skye was to be home by midnight. Skye got up and went into the bathroom, leaving me with my grandfather, the first time in my life I’d ever been alone with him. I couldn’t think of anything to say, and we just sat there for a moment while he took a sip of his wine and looked across at me.

  “Do you think you impressed her, Buddy?” he finally said.

  “Well, you did.” I mumbled, and his remark had made my face red.

  He didn’t say anything, so I said, “It was borrowed glory, I guess.”

  “I’m happy to lend it to you,” he said.

  “Thanks.”

  “How is your mother?”

  “She’s fine,” I said. “We’re all fine.”

  I was hoping he wasn’t going to try and make some excuse about what he did to my mother, what he didn’t do for her, or try to explain it, and I needn’t have worried. He didn’t mention her again. He sat there sipping his wine while I drank what was left of my ginger ale and wondered how anyone could stand opera—there was another one playing, some woman shrieking, then a man bellowing some sort of answer.

  “You know, Buddy,” my grandfather finally said, “you can get there on your own, once you’re pointed in the right direction.”

  “Get where?” I said, but I knew what he was talking about. He knew I knew, too, and didn’t even bother explaining where.

  “I’d be happy to point you, if that’s what you want,” he said.

  “What do you think of her?” I said.

  “She’s very beautiful,” he answered. “Very.”

  “But beauty’s only skin deep, huh?” I said. “That’s something my mother is always saying.”

  “On the contrary,” he said. “‘Spend all you have for loveliness,/Buy it, and never count the cost;/For one white singing hour of peace/ Count many a year of strife well lost./And for a breath of ecstasy/Give all you have been or could be.’”

  Somebody spouting off poetry always made me a little self-conscious, unless it was a teacher who had to for a class assignment or something. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  “One of your American poets wrote that,” said my grandfather. “Sara Teasdale.”

  “What you’re telling me is she’s worth it, even if I do have to bring her out here to impress her.”

  “What I’m telling you,” he said, “is that you’re worth it, too; that with a little polish, you won’t have to bring her out here, although she’s always welcome.”

  “I haven’t even been out of Seaville,” I said, “except to go to Disneyland once with my folks…and Block Island another time with my dad.”

  My grandfather smiled. “It isn’t where you’ve been,” he said. “An ass who goes traveling doesn’t come back a horse.”

  “She’s also older than I am,” I said. “I don’t know how much older, but she is.”

  “A woman you love is always older than you are, even when she’s younger.”

  “I don’t know what that means,” I said.

  “When you love a woman, she seems secret and mysterious,” said my grandfather, “things you associate with the full bloom instead of the bud.”

  “She’s rich, too,” I said. “The Penningtons have tons of money.”

  “Obstacles are challenges for winners, and excuses for losers,” said my grandfather.

  “I never thought of it that way,” I said.

  Skye came back from the bathroom then, and my grandfather walked us down to her car.

  “I hope I see you again, Mr. Trenker,” said Skye. “This has been such a super evening, and Mummy’s not going to believe a raccoon ate out of my hand. I don’t even believe it myself. I can’t wait to spring keeshond on her, too. She’ll die if she’s never heard of one, you know, it’s like telling the Pope he doesn’t know all his cardinals or something.”

  “Come again,” my grandfather said, looking straight at me, “if you want to.”

  “If we want to!” Skye exclaimed. “Does a starling want one of your sunflower seeds!”

  “Not very much,” said my grandfather. “He has trouble getting the shells open.”

  “The one time I wanted to show off and say a starling or a blue jay or something besides just a plain bird, I pick the wrong bird.” Skye laughed. “I like you so much, Mr. Trenker. You’re subtle!”

  “I try to be,” my grandfather said.

  All the way back to Beauregard, Skye did seventy, talking nonstop about him.

  “You don’t mind going fast, do you, Buddy?” she asked me.

  “It doesn’t feel like we’re going too fast,” I told her, but it did, and we were, and I knew I wasn’t going to do anything to stop it.

  4

  I TRIED TO CONVINCE SKYE TO LET ME DRIVE TO Beauregard with her that night, and hitch a ride back to my house, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She dropped me and took off like a rocket. I saw my father standing in our driveway by his Toyota, smoking a cigarette, watching me. He was in uniform because he was working nights that week.

  “That was a Jensen she was driving,” I said. “Did you ever hear of a Jensen?”

  “Did she ever hear of a speed limit?” he said.

  “Oh, Dad.”

  “It isn’t funny, Buddy,” he said.

  I stood there and he stood there and then he said, “Where’d you go?”

  I didn’t want to tell him then. He wasn’t in the greatest mood, and I didn’t want to open that whole can of worms at the end of a beautiful evening.

  “We just rode around,” I said.

  “Rode around at eighty miles an hour?”

  “She wasn’t doing eighty.”

  “She was doing close to it,” he said. He took a drag on his cigarette and twirled his car keys in his hand. “Buddy, if your social calendar isn’t too full, I’d appreciate it if you’d do something with Streaker tomorrow.”

  “I work until two,” I said.

  “And after two?”

  “I was going clamming with Ollie.”

  “Take Streaker with you,” he said. “Okay?”

  “Okay,” I agreed.

  “Streaker hangs around his mother too much,” my father said.

  “I know that. Okay.”

  He gave me one of his friendly punches and opened his car door. “I’ve never even heard of a Jensen,” he said.

  “Neither had I,” I said.

  “Well, anyway, did you have a good time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Your mother’s asleep on the couch,” he said. “Don’t wake her up, she’s beat. We started to panel the playroom tonight.”

  The playroom was actually the garage. My father had built a wooden floor there, and they were fixing it up for Streaker and me.

  “See you tomorrow,” I said.

  My mother was in her robe with the afghan over her. I guess after she’d finished helping him with the paneling, she’d begun work on his scrapbook, because it was open on the coffee table, with newspaper clippings and a pot of glue next to it. Every time my father’s name appeared in The Seaville Citizen, my mother would clip the article, underline his name, and paste it on a page. His name was in the paper almost every week. Stuff like “Sergeant William Boyle arrested G.L. Jones of Fireplace Drive at 11 A.M. Wednesday morning for speeding and driving while intoxicated.” The whole scrapbook was filled with things like that.

  I tiptoed past her, went into the bedroom, and undressed in the dark. Streaker was snoring, and I got under the covers and began reliving the whole evening in as much detail as I could make myself remember. I was glad I didn’t have to face my mother, and go into the visit to Grandpa Trenker. The next morning I beat it out of the house before anyone was up, and rode my bike to The Sweet Mouth Soda Shoppe, ready for work.

  In the summer we always had a fairly good early-breakfast crowd on nice days. Everyone was eager to get to the beach. It was a warm, sunny Saturday, so even the owner, Kick Richards,
was hustling around in the kitchen, flipping pancakes and throwing bread into the toaster. Kick used to be an actor until he married a local widow about ten years older than he is. He’s in his early forties, a former drunk who claims pot changed his life. He usually comes in when it’s crowded, and when the crowd thins, rolls himself a joint and smokes out back. Any of the employees who want a favor from Kick wait until he’s had his joint; then he’s open to all requests and suggestions.

  The one thing Kick hates is to have employees use the phone in his office, which is this dinky room about the size of a small bathroom. There is no pay phone, so if you want to make a call, you either have to walk around the corner to the front of the A&P, or get Kick to relent.

  Around ten thirty that morning we had a slow period, and I saw Kick head for the back steps. I waited about ten minutes, then went out to confront him. Kick’s a nice-looking man, on the short side and very thin, with longish blond hair and round brown eyes. Ollie’s mother calls him “This failed actor who married poor Ginny Townsend for the little money she has left”—he doesn’t go over too big with the locals.

  He was sitting on the steps listening to the news over WWRJ on a pocket transistor.

  “Jesus, that was funny,” he said to me.

  “What was?”

  “The announcer just said the police are using a time-tested strategy on the man in Wilmington holding those people hostage—waiting. Waiting is a strategy?” He laughed. “That’s some strategy. Waiting. All those years I wasn’t working in New York, I was really using a time-tested strategy, Buddy. I was waiting.”

  “Yeah,” I said. When Kick smoked grass he always picked apart what he heard and found something funny about it.

  “Kick,” I said, “if you were falling in love with somebody and couldn’t even make a fast phone call to them, how do you think you’d feel?”

  He sat there thinking it over.

  “You know what you’re going to be someday, Buddy?” he said.

  “What?”

  “A gozlin,” he said. “Do you know what a gozlin is?”

  “A goose?”

  “That’s a gosling,” he said. “You’re going to be a gozlin, rhymes with Roslyn. It’s Yiddish.”

  “What’s it mean?”

  “An unmoral, unethical person,” he said. “A swindler. When you’re finished calling her make sure my office door’s closed.”

  Peacock answered the phone and said Miss Skye was swimming in the ocean.

  “Would you care to leave a message?”

  “Just tell her Buddy Boyle called,” I said, because I couldn’t see telling Peacock to ask her if I could see her that night. All the way back from Montauk I’d wanted to ask her what she was doing the next night, but I’d been afraid she’d say she was busy, and that would spoil the time we’d just spent together.

  I began to get into a small panic, wondering how I’d get ahold of her before evening. Somehow I had to get hold of her before I went clamming.

  When I went back on the floor, Ollie was sipping a Coke at a table by the window.

  “I want all the details,” he said. Ollie and I have been hanging around together since fourth grade. He’s this redheaded guy with freckles where most people just have pores, buck teeth he dreams of having capped someday, and a build like an Olympic weight lifter. He’s a tackle on the Seaville High football team, and last year some poor runner from Westhampton High collided with Ollie and was unconscious for ten minutes.

  “All what details?” I said, trying to ignore the fact the woman behind him was waving her hand at me, trying to order breakfast.

  “Did you make out?” Ollie gave me his chipmunk grin, and I sighed and shook my head.

  I said, “I’ll be glad when you date more than three times a year, so you don’t have to live through me.”

  “No kidding, Buddy, how’d you do?”

  “WAIT-TER!” The woman behind Ollie was working herself into something.

  “I can’t go into it,” I said. “Streaker’s coming with us today, okay?”

  Ollie nodded and I felt Kick come up behind me and grab me by my belt. “Get your ass over to that customer!” he said. “And tell your baboon friend this isn’t the local watering hole.”

  “Now I know how come you call this place Sweet Mouth,” Ollie said, and he was mad, his face was all red. He tossed a quarter on the table and shoved his chair back hard.

  “Oh dearie,” Kick feigned this apologetic tone, “don’t tell me we’re losing you for a customer!”

  I felt sorry for Ollie because I knew he was supersensitive about the way he looked and the baboon crack got to him. It always got to me when someone picked on the way Ollie looked, because I’m considered really good-looking, and I didn’t do anything to get this way. Ollie went storming out of the place, and I gave Kick a dirty look that he shot back to me in spades.

  “This isn’t the local pool hall, Buddy! Tell your friend to find another hangout!”

  “Oh go roll another joint,” I said under my breath, and Kick said, “I don’t know what kind of a wisecrack you just made, mister, but the next time I do you a favor hell will freeze over!”

  It was going to be one of your beautiful days, I told myself, at the rate things were going; it was going to be one of your all-time glorious days.

  Then a groupie crowd descended on the place (they’re these summer people who rent one house and sell about nineteen shares in it)—at least a dozen, with more straggling in a few minutes after that—and I was struggling with trays of eggs and pancakes and French toast until I thought my shoe leather would burn holes in Kick’s floor. Groupies tip about ten cents on a three-dollar order, too, so I seemed to be running behind in every way.

  Suddenly, just as the noon whistle blew, and every town dog milling around in front of the A&P down the street started howling, I looked up and saw her.

  “Do the dogs always howl along with the whistle?” she said.

  “Hi!” I said.

  “Hi!”

  She was all in blue, right down to her sandals. I guess she specialized in wearing all one color, and she had this great perfume on, and that smile, and she just stood there and I just stood there, and the jukebox was roaring out some rock number, and the whole place was babbling around us, waiters calling out: “Two over easy, o.j. and one black.”

  “I came to get you,” she said.

  “I’m working,” I said.

  “I’m shopping,” she said. “What time are you through working?”

  “Two,” I said.

  “I’m going to take you for a swim,” she said. “Would a swim make you happy, Buddy?”

  “I guess it would,” I said.

  “Don’t guess with me, Buddy,” she said.

  “BUDDY!” I could hear Kick behind me.

  “Someone’s calling you,” she said. “I’ll be parked outside at two sharp. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I said.

  Before I’d left the house that morning, I’d stuck a note up in Streaker’s bunk telling him to be ready at two thirty.

  So much for promises, and clamming.

  “What in the HELL is wrong with you?” Kick asked me.

  “Nothing!” I lied.

  5

  THE POOL HOUSE AT BEAUREGARD IS BIGGER THAN the house I live in. Skye directed me to one of the four dressing rooms; it was about the size of the bedroom I share with Streaker. There was a table and couch and chairs, a rug on the floor and paintings on the walls. On the table there was a slim silver vase with a white rose in it, and about two dozen photographs in gold and silver frames. Skye was in most of the pictures, along with her older brother, Ogden Pennington, Jr., who was traveling in Europe that summer. There were pictures taken through the years of the family—on skis, on surfboards, in horse-drawn carriages, near Christmas trees, and rolling eggs down long green lawns. There were pictures of them on ships and getting off planes, in golf carts and on horseback. On our table at home there’s just one photograph,
of Streaker and me, the dollar-nineteen Woolco color kiddies’ special, in a plastic frame.

  On the way to Beauregard, Skye had said not to worry about the fact I didn’t have a pair of swim trunks with me, she’d fix it. She’d made a phone call from the Jensen, on a real phone, not a CB radio, and sure enough there was a pair of navy trunks and a large navy towel laid out for me on the couch. We’d mostly listened to a tape of Barbra Streisand on the way there. I hadn’t felt much like talking; I was still feeling guilty that I’d lied to my mother, and told her I had to disappoint Streaker because Kick needed me to work the afternoon shift.

  I looked really crummy in my old clothes. About the only thing I had on that wasn’t a rag was a new red sweater I’d bought the week before. I was glad to ditch my clothes and get into the trunks, sorry I hadn’t worked a bit on more of a tan because everyone around the pool was the color of bronze.

  Just outside the dressing rooms there was this large room with tables and chairs, a bar and an enormous gold mirror covering a whole wall. My bare feet sank into the thick rug, and I saw Skye stretched out on a chaise, waiting for me, in a two-piece white bathing suit with a light blue monogrammed P on the bottom half. The light blue P was on everything around the pool: pillows, tablecloths, ashtrays, matchbooks and sun pads.

  “Mummy’s dying to meet you!” Skye said, and three tiny dogs yapped around near her feet as we walked out into the sun. Skye said they were Papillons, which meant butterfly in French. They weighed in at about four pounds.

  There were about twenty people lounging around. In the center of the pool, on a float, I saw the man with the yellow-tinted glasses lying on his back, the false cigarette glowing as he sucked on it. Skye led me up to a chaise with a light blue-and-white parasol attached to it, and a chubby, deeply tanned, silver-haired woman under it. She was wrapped in a large white towel with the light blue P embroidered on it. She was sipping orange juice and reading a book called The Stars’ Stars.

  She greeted the butterfly dogs first. “Janice! January! Little Ophelia. You girls settle down or mean old Peacock will have to take you in, and you’d miss everything. You wouldn’t like that one bit, would you?”