The Best of Youth

by Michael Dahlie

  “The grandfather is all the boy has.”

  “And it’s first person.”

  “The boy tells the story.”

  Here Merrill paused and Henry became a little nervous, because it was the only time he’d ever said anything to Merrill when Merrill didn’t react with wild and happy enthusiasm. The fact was, though, that Henry was sure it was a good story. He was sure it was working. And before Merrill could say anything Henry continued: “This is really good, what I’m writing. And I’m going to see it through. If it doesn’t sit well with you and Jonathan, that’s fine, I’ll keep it for myself. But what I’m writing is really good. And I think you’re going to like it. It’s much less dismal than it sounds. It’s actually an uplifting thing, two people taking care of each other in the face of terrible hardship.”

  Again, Merrill was silent, and Henry wondered if he’d made any impression at all with these last points. But finally Merrill cracked a smile and said, “All right, Henry. If you say it’s good, I believe it. If you say it’s uplifting, I believe it. And I think you’re right that you should keep going. If it doesn’t work out, it doesn’t work out. I do worry about what Kipling will think. It’s pretty grim, even if it is in some way uplifting, but you’re on a roll and I don’t think we should interfere.”

  “Okay, good,” Henry replied, now a little tentative. “But let’s not tell Kipling about the story yet. I understand it sounds dismal, so I don’t want him to get upset. Anyway, again, if he doesn’t like it, he can fire me or I can write something else for him.”

  “Yeah, it all sounds good to me, so don’t worry,” Merrill said, nodding, and then added, with real sincerity, “you know, I can tell you love this story you’re writing, and it might sound dopey for me to say, but I really think that’s always at the heart of anything good. So really, keep going. And I’ll keep my mouth shut with Kipling. No worries on that front.”

  9

  FOR THE FOLLOWING three weeks Henry worked with great diligence. He ate sporadically, got plenty of sleep, tried to keep down his coffee intake, and only allowed himself a beer or two if work that day had been particularly good.

  It was a remarkable thing—Henry had thought this before—how quickly a person could move through a story if he worked at it steadily. And what he’d been asked for, about forty thousand words, seemed not very much at all, especially since his short stories always seemed to be at least ten thousand words. The bottom line was that at a thousand words a day, which was Henry’s typical pace once he became gripped by a story, it added up to nearly a month and two-thirds, allowing ten or so days for various distractions and days when the writing didn’t work out. At any rate, by the time he and Whitney were heading north to reclaim his parents’ possessions from Pembry Cottage, Henry had something of a draft done. “It’s not done-done,” Henry told Merrill on the phone the afternoon before leaving for upstate. “But it’s close. And it’s good. I’ve reread it a bunch of times. I should have something to give you and Kipling soon.”

  “Well, that’s really great and unexpected news,” Merrill said. “So quick! I’ll pass this news along. I’m sure Kipling will be excited.”

  And later that evening, Henry received an email from Kipling telling him this as well. “I’m astonished and excited to hear that you’ve got a draft done,” he said. “I know you want to polish it, but I’m eager to look at it as soon as possible. I can’t wait to see what kind of story is unfolding.” (This sentence seemed to be good news, since it indicated that Merrill had been true to his word and that he hadn’t told Kipling what the story line entailed.)

  Kipling continued with other matters, however. “Since you’re polishing up the draft now,” he wrote, “I thought I’d also send you a few rules of thumb that I live by and that are important for the final product.” Kipling then proceeded (in a strangely formatted list with indentations and bullet points) to offer Henry a detailed explanation of what he thought was important to remember about a work of art, “especially a work of literature,” although, in the spirit of modesty, he did preface this list with the statement, “I’m sure you know these things, but as a writer in my own right, I never think it hurts to revisit common conclusions about good writing.”

  Among the points Kipling made (and there were many) were:

  • If you use parentheses and semicolons, it’s because you haven’t thought through your work properly. Please make sure none are in the final product.

  • Please be careful with the overuse of prepositions, i.e., use “she awoke” instead of “she woke up.”

  • Take plenty of breaks to sleep and to eat. Hemingway did. So should you.

  • If you run into trouble, remember that a writer’s greatest asset is his imagination. A day of daydreaming is better than a month of research.

  This last point was actually something with which Henry deeply agreed, but its Zenlike phrasing upset him, and, following the rest of the absurd and quite exhaustive list, it dawned on Henry in a surprisingly blunt way that he really did not like Kipling very much at all. Henry’s abandonment at Kipling’s country home, Kipling’s slapdash short stories, and now this helpful-tips manifesto, were all too much, especially since it seemed to go after certain of Henry’s own tendencies, specifically in regards to his passion for parenthetical expression.

  All the same, the troubling feelings Henry experienced over Kipling’s patronizing tone and his incomprehensible aggression toward parentheses was tempered somewhat by the fact that Henry was due to leave for the Adirondacks the next morning. Henry’s anger did not dissipate but the prospect of the road trip offered some reason for a more general optimism. He and Whitney hadn’t spent very much time together recently, other than a lunch or two, and he thought that a night at Pembry Cottage, and time in the car doing things like chatting and eating junk food, might lead to quite a bit of fun—fun of the sort that he was sure he needed more of in his life.

  And by the time Henry was out in front of Whitney’s building the next day, he was even more excited. His Volvo was filled with gas—had been serviced, even, just three days earlier—and Henry had loaded the car with various snacks for the trip ahead, including a sort of specialty beef jerky purchased in Chinatown from some kind of famous Chinese maker of this kind of thing—he’d read about him several times on popular Manhattan websites.

  Whitney seemed just as excited when he made his appearance, running out of his building in an exaggeratedly happy way (after Henry phoned him from the car) carrying a small weekend bag in one hand and a handle of Jack Daniel’s, held high above his head, in the other.

  “I’m so excited!” he said as he opened the door.

  “I’m so excited too!” Henry replied.

  At any rate, it was a happy greeting, and even after Whitney settled in and they found their way to the New York Thruway, they were still just a bit giddy. This happiness continued, through Albany and Saratoga Springs and past Lake George. They talked about books and various appealing women around Williamsburg and also restaurants that had recently opened that they wanted to try. And they talked about more weighty things as well. Whitney gave a somewhat emotional description of his grandmother’s death when he was seven, and Henry, who had already spoken several times about his own parents’ deaths, once again recounted what it was like to face such tragic events.

  They also talked about simpler and more immediate matters, including the prospects for their dinner that night, Henry talking for some time about a local butcher in Lake Placid that sold game meat. “Hunting season is under way, so I’m sure we can get venison if you want,” he said with enthusiasm.

  This last comment, however, led to an unexpectedly serious conversation about meat-eating and the environmental implications of it all. Both Henry and Whitney were meat eaters, and for Henry’s part, it was hard to imagine changing his behavior too much in this regard. But after Whitney eagerly said that he’d been planning on giving up factory-farmed meat (which, incidentally, would not interfere wit
h their venison that night), Henry decided he was quite happy that he had not gotten around to surprising Whitney with his Chinatown beef jerky. He also concluded (because it was on his mind) that perhaps he ought not to suggest they stop at a roadside van he liked just off the New York Thruway that served things like hamburgers and hot dogs. Fortunately for Henry, Whitney was apparently feeling very hungry as they passed the van and insisted they stop. Thus Henry was able to eat a hot dog without feeling too guilty. Whitney ordered a gyro, which struck Henry as the pinnacle of processed meat. Still, he decided it was probably best not to make this point out loud because Whitney seemed so thrilled by what the person in the van had given him.

  And at the butcher’s, just ten miles from the camp, Henry felt better. Who could argue with the virtues of buying meat culled from the wilderness? Henry bought two pounds of some sort of venison loin that the butcher recommended, and after stopping at a grocery store for a few other provisions, they were soon passing up the long gravel drive that led to Pembry Cottage.

  The house was built on a high promontory that offered an exceptional view of Lake Placid, while keeping it somewhat discreetly nestled within the lakeside foliage. The word “cottage,” of course, was used in the Newport way, not in the Beatrix Potter way, and the house was actually a grand late-nineteenth century mansion consisting of seven bedrooms, servants’ rooms (now never used other than for kids and guest overflows), large porches and sitting rooms, and a formal dining room with a table that seated sixteen. The dining room had once had at its center a Chippendale table and matching chairs, but the trustees decided that they were in danger of being ruined (by all the children and the drastic yearly changes in upstate weather), and since the house was in need of some unexpected repairs (around 1968) the furniture was sold and replaced with a very nice table that was not, however, a precious antique.

  The house was unusual in this part of the world because, rather than an elaborate series of buildings and cabins, as was the custom with most of the great camps in the Adirondacks, it was more like a lodge, a single structure in which all the guests stayed. Henry’s ancestors had been criticized by the earlier wealthy settlers for this, but Mr. Pembry had a vision for the area that resembled something closer to Chamonix or Zermatt. In fact, Mr. Pembry was largely credited with bringing the 1932 Olympics to Lake Placid, although he was fairly old at that point.

  The house sat on a piece of property composed of about seven acres, including nearly eight hundred feet of shorefront with a magnificent boathouse, built long before zoning laws made such structures illegal. It had four slips, a long dock, and above the slips was an enormous room with a vaulted ceiling, a pool table, a fireplace, and a porch that overlooked the lake. This particular room was generally colonized by the various young people who were there at different points in the summer, and Henry certainly spent many nights playing pool and listening to music there when he was up for weekends with his parents.

  At any rate, it was exactly the sort of magnificent second home the rich patriarch of a large family might build for himself, and Henry and Whitney quickly settled in (after each opening a beer). The house was empty for the weekend—it often was this time of year, after the warmer months but before snow and ice brought the winter sports—but Henry had called ahead to the caretaker the family employed, so the heat was on and there was even firewood by the fireplace in the central living room. And starting a fire was one of the first things Henry did, after showing Whitney where to put his belongings, and before long Henry and Whitney were lying across elaborately upholstered couches from the 1920s, drinking more beer and watching the fire.

  It was always interesting, Henry thought, seeing friends from one location in a brand-new place, and, as he had expected, the conversation took a deeper turn (that afternoon by the fire, on a walk around the property, during a quick inspection of the items Henry had to bring to the dealer in Massachusetts the next day—all of which were under a white bedsheet with a Post-it note attached labeled “Henry!”—and then into the kitchen, where they prepared the venison and began to eat). They covered quite a bit of narrative ground, but the most startling of the revelations was a detailed discussion of Whitney’s father, who had, unbeknownst to Henry, spent two years in prison for some kind of white-collar fraud involving securities—hidden losses of some sort, and three bad years in a row that his father had tried to mask. His father now taught math at a community college—he’d earned a graduate degree in mathematics from MIT before being lured into the world of investment.

  “His job he has now,” Whitney said as he cut into a potato, “he really loves it. He should have been doing it all along. I guess that’s how these things go.”

  “And you were how old when they arrested him?”

  “Twelve. That was something.”

  “Yeah, I’ll bet,” Henry said, taking a sip of beer. “I can’t really imagine.” It was odd, the difference in tragedies that they’d suffered involving their parents. Henry often found it hard to talk about his parents’ deaths because everything was so inscrutable. That is, although the pain and the emotion were straightforward, his articulation of it all seemed so confused and often felt very shallow and inexact when expressed. Surely Whitney’s sufferings were something close to the intensity of what he had experienced, but there was a measure of disgrace involved, probably making the matter even more difficult to talk about.

  “We visited a lot,” Whitney finally added. “And they put him in a minimum-security prison, so he wasn’t being threatened by murderers. But trust me, it was still a prison, and my dad is a nervous type of man. It seemed like every time we went there he was holding back tears and apologizing to my brothers and me. That didn’t make it any easier. It’s better, I guess, than some idiotic front involving how other people screwed him or how his crimes were commonplace and that he’d been singled out, although that may be true. Anyway, it’s interesting, how a person goes down that road. Not to excuse him at all, but my father was a totally repressed Protestant—not a flamboyant guy who craved money, and not someone you’d expect to get involved with a scheme like this. He made a lot of mistakes in his investments, tried to cover them up, and then tried to cover things up again after another round of mistakes.”

  “Yeah,” Henry said. “I think that’s probably not uncommon.”

  “My dad is a really good guy,” Whitney said. “But what do I know? I’m not exactly impartial. And fuck, he lost people’s money and lied about it, so maybe he deserved what he got.”

  It was all a lot to think about, and although Henry said several times that he couldn’t imagine having to watch his own father suffer like that, he wasn’t sure that he was being much comfort. The fact was that he was also very drunk by the time they had worked through this discussion, and not the good kind of chatty drunk. It was the kind of drunkenness that comes from drinking all afternoon and evening and then eating nearly two pounds of a freshly slaughtered deer covered with sauce made from whipped egg yolks. After a moment of silence, following another remark from Whitney about how happy his dad was now as a math teacher, Henry confessed to the fact that he was nearly at the point of falling off his chair and that it was probably best if they went to bed.

  “If I don’t go now, I don’t think I’ll make it,” Henry said, standing. “Let’s leave the dishes. We’ll do them in the morning.”

  “I’m feeling the same,” Whitney said. With that, they found the stairs and made their way to their bedrooms.

  10

  THE NEXT MORNING, Henry couldn’t quite tell if he was still drunk, although after getting his bearings and finally managing to put on his pants, he determined that he was, unfortunately, stone sober but also very hung-over.

  He would have liked to have spent that day doing nothing—maybe a Bloody Mary to ease things some and then experiments with Pembry Cottage’s waffle iron before a long nap to bring his hangover closer to its conclusion. But they had to leave that day—they needed to get his parents’ posse
ssions to the estate dealer, which wasn’t open on Sundays—and Henry wanted to get a reasonably early start so he could spend whatever time he needed to with the dealer. After his parents died, Henry had scrupulously assembled his important family artifacts, keeping some with him, others in an expensive storage facility in Boston designed for housing such things, and also in a largish safe-deposit box in the Commonwealth Bank, the Boston bank that also handled his money. When Henry went through the items that morning at Pembry Cottage, he was happy to see that there was nothing particularly meaningful to him, other than an old canvas hat that his father wore on the few occasions he fished from a rowboat on the lake. Henry would keep that—the hat looked quite good on him, as he could hardly help but notice that morning, and this despite the delirium of his hangover. But as for the mahogany writing secretary Uncle Louis had told him about, and an unexpected box of sterling flatware, and numerous other small and forgotten items, Henry was happy to sell it all. There was a pair of pistols that Henry found slightly intriguing—Colt .38s, as Henry determined from the factory engravings. Henry did suddenly remember his father mentioning the guns once, indicating that they were heirlooms of some sort. But very quickly Henry became alarmed that they might be loaded, and after making sure that they weren’t (as best he knew how) he decided that these too would be turned over to the estate agent that day. In fact, he concluded with real resolution that he never wanted to hold a gun again.

  At any rate, it didn’t take long for Henry to gather everything up, and since there was nothing that needed to be carried by two people, he let Whitney continue to sleep and packed the Volvo himself. He wrapped what he could in old woolen blankets that were among his parents’ things—it struck Henry that he might actually keep these blankets, since they were quite nice and likely without value—and before long his task was complete.

  After that, he roused Whitney from bed. Unfortunately, Whitney was equally hung-over, and the two did what they could to clean, although, by the time they left, Henry felt guilty about the very shoddy job they’d done. But his head was now hurting very much and he had a long drive ahead of him and the guilt soon gave way to the discomfort of once again being on the road.