by M. E. Kerr
There was only one Nels.
• • •
I’ll tell you someone who impressed our boy. Algernon Charles Swinburne. (Never heard of him, right?)
This twisted poet of yore (a lush, yes; none of them are ever happy) inspired Nels to underline so many passages!
One afternoon Lenny took a good look at what it was that captured his pal’s attention.
I wished we were dead together today,
Lost sight of, hidden away out of sight,
Clasped and clothed in the cloven clay,
Out of the world’s way, out of the light.
Oh, yes … and how about this one?
At the door of life, by the gate of breath,
There are worse things waiting for men than death.
Sick, sick sick … and he was all Lenny’s.
chapter 5
My five-year-old sister answered the phone and told the operator she’d accept the charges. I thought the operator’d tell her to ask an adult if it was all right, but the operator didn’t pay the phone bills.
“Mommy’s across the hall with Mr. Lopez,” Jazzy said.
“You don’t sound happy about it.”
“You know what he’s doing to her?”
I held my breath. “What?”
“He’s taking up the hems on all her skirts!”
I had to laugh or I’d cry. “Well, that’s good isn’t it? What are boyfriends for, anyway?”
“They’re not for that!”
“How do you know?”
“Because boys don’t sew!”
“But honey, Mr. Lopez is a tailor.”
“I know what he is! I hate it!”
“Oh, come on. Boys sew, girls sew — who’s to say who’s supposed to sew and who isn’t?”
“Daddy wouldn’t sew. He wouldn’t never sew!” “He would never sew.”
“That’s what I just said, Johnny. When are you coming home?”
“Soon, sweetheart. Go get Mommy.”
“Tell her Daddy wouldn’t want her going to the movies with Mr. Lopez, Johnny!”
“Jazzy, I know it’s hard to get used to, but Mommy has a right to go out. Daddy’s in heaven.”
“Daddy’s not. He’s rolling over in his grave.”
“What?”
“That’s what Aunt Clara said. She said Daddy’s probably rolling over in his grave.”
Jazzy let the phone drop on the table with a clunk, and I stood waiting, in the phone booth just outside The Tower. It was another hot July morning, and in Bucks County it always felt hotter than anyplace else.
It was ten o’clock on a Saturday. Keats was picking me up in another hour. She liked to sleep in and she liked to take her time dressing.
At least I was back in my clothes — had on a pair of my favorite khakis and an old Depeche Mode T-shirt Jazzy’d picked out for me for Christmas one year. My Sperry topsiders, with my left toe coming through the hole.
When Mom took the phone, she asked me what was so urgent.
“I’m going out to The Hamptons.”
“Couldn’t you have told Jazzy that?”
“I thought you might want to know the reason.”
“I know the reason,” Mom said. “You’re with her and she leads you around like a dog on a leash.”
“Mom, Keats and I are just friends now.”
Mom made some deprecating noises. She’d never forgive Keats for the time she stood me up on the night of her Senior Prom. Forget the fact it was long gone where I was concerned.
“Well, I guess I’ll see you when I get back,” I said. I was expecting her to ask me some questions: What was the reason? How long would I be away? What about my job? (I figured she could call Le Rêve and tell them I was sick; I’d be back Monday night.)
“Next time don’t make me stop everything for something Jazzy could have told me.”
“Why, because your seamstress is waiting with a beating heart?”
“He’s a tailor, Johnny, and his beating heart is my business, not yours.”
“At least Dad did man’s work.” I couldn’t believe I was saying those things.
“Mr. Lopez does man’s work, too — and he doesn’t call up his mother to get her to call the place he works and say he’s sick…. That’s what you really want, isn’t it?”
“No, that’s not what I really want!” My voice croaked in midsentence, so that I even sounded like a liar. “I didn’t even think about that. I had something important to tell you, but you’d rather get back across the hall and have your skirts pinned up!”
There was a pause.
My heart was pounding.
“Oh, Johnny,” my mother finally said softly. “What’s the matter with us? Oh, honey, I’m sorry.” “I’m sorry, too, Mom.”
“Let’s start all over, hmmm? Where are you calling from?”
I told her, and I told her all about where I was going and why. But it wasn’t an easy conversation. Once you’ve spit out a lot of venom at each other, it’s hard to just get past it.
“Lenny Last, sure,” Mom said. “I saw him on The Tonight Show, I think. Lenny Last and Plumsie … I remember Plumsie called him Tra La, and Lenny got so mad!”
“Why Tra La?”
“How do I know? At first I thought he was singing. You know: Tra la la la. But no. He was calling Lenny that.”
“See, Mom, all those years of staying up late waiting for Dad have paid off. You know everything about show business.”
I suppose I should have left Dad out of it. I didn’t know what was right anymore.
Mom skipped by it and said, “I thought you didn’t like this Horner kid. Why go out of your way to see him then?”
“I don’t like him. I like his folks. I want to face up to him…. I don’t even know what I’ll say. But I want to put him behind me.”
“And you have to go to The Hamptons to do that?” Mom asked. “I hope you’re not just running, Johnny. You’ve got your job now, and it’s a good job. They like you there.”
“I’m not running,” I lied.
I said, “It’s better than sitting on a park bench all day, isn’t it?”
For a long time I’d done that. I’d gone to the Esplanade in Brooklyn Heights and stared across the river at the New York skyline and out at the Statue of Liberty. I’d thought about jumping in and swimming out until I wouldn’t have the breath to make it back.
“Johnny, I love you,” Mom said.
“I love you, too,” I said. “Will you call Le Rêve for me and tell them I have a very bad case of flu, that I won’t be in tonight or tomorrow?”
• • •
When I got off the phone, I walked into The Tower. Deem Library was there. The infamous Sevens alumnus David Deem had donated it to the Sevens clubhouse. Before he’d died a mysterious death last spring, he’d fooled everyone. He was your all-around good citizen, owner of a sporting goods store, dutiful father to one daughter and one dachshund. All of Cottersville and Gardner were shocked when he was indicted for dealing drugs.
While he was out on bail, he was shot in his car one afternoon at twilight, seven times through the heart. There was a dead rat in his mouth, said to be the signature of The Sevens Revenge, the deadly punishment Little Jack’s father’d mentioned. It was rumored to be meted out by a Sevens on a member who had disgraced Sevens.
Twilight was a special time for Sevens. No one really knew why that was, but there were many rituals at twilight and songs with “twilight” in the verse.
I’d known Deem and trusted him. All of that was part of my breakdown, too, and I wasn’t eager to hang around in there. What I wanted was to glance at something I knew would be in the library.
It didn’t take me long to find his name in the directory, along with the years he’d attended Gardner.
Then from the collection I pulled out the light-blue leather-bound volume with The Hill Book, 1963 stamped across it in white.
I opened to the P’s and there he was: some male version of the old child
star Shirley Temple: all curls and dimples, and a big grin.
NELSON PERCY PLUMMER III
New York, New York
Neb … Nelly
The Severn Club, ‘62, ‘63. Debating, ‘62, ‘63.
Ambition: To continue as is.
Remembered for: His ego and his alter ego, Tra La.
Slogan: Here’s to Swinburne et moi!
Future Occupation: Leader
I flipped a few pages to find Tralastski, who was a serious young man with dark frames on his eyeglasses and his dark hair parted down the middle, lending him an old-fashioned, somewhat scholarly appearance.
LEONARD JOSEPH TRALASTSKI
New York, New York
Lenny … Tra La
The Sevens Club, ‘62, ‘63. Drama Club, ‘62, ‘63. Tennis, ‘63.
Gardner Follies, ‘63.
Ambition: To be an actor.
Remembered for: Being buddies with Plummer.
Slogan: We three: My echo, my shadow, and Laura.
Future Occupation: Show Biz.
THE MOUTH
Not knowing one tiny thing about Sanskrit, I can’t promise you that love means trembling elbows, so you may feel let down by me. Or question my reliability.
Nels made Lenny feel the same way sometimes.
For example:
One summer day when Lenny was little, his mother took him to Central Park, to escape the heat.
There was a lake in the park. His mother rowed one of the boats out to the middle of it.
“Just think, Leonard,” said she, “we wouldn’t be here right now if it wasn’t for an awful murder.”
That was her way of starting the same lesson over again, which she would teach Lenny as long as she drew breath: that if he thought for one minute the rich were happy, listen!
Then she told him of two young men: one filthy rich named Loeb, the other Leopold. Of how they snatched this small boy and murdered him. (It left Lenny terrified of being kidnapped.)
“Why wouldn’t we be here if it wasn’t for them?” Lenny asked her.
“Because the Loeb family didn’t want everyone to remember them for that awful crime a relative committed, so they gave this boathouse to the community.”
It was one of the stories Lenny told Nels Plummer, to give him an example of what his mother was like.
Nels used it when he wrote his New Boy’s Composition, something required of all entering students.
The theme was “History in Our Daily Lives.”
One morning, Sister and I took a boat out on the little lake in Central Park.
“Just think, Nels,” said Sister, “we wouldn’t be here if there hadn’t been a certain violent crime some years ago.”
As Nels was reading this to Lenny, Lenny stopped him.
“Very funny!” said Lenny.
“It’s not supposed to be funny.”
“I ought to know that, since it’s my story.”
“Your story?”
“I told you my mother took me to the park and told me that! Come on, Nels!”
“Did you, Lenny? I don’t remember that.”
“Well, where do you think it came from? Your sister never took you there and said that.”
Nels thought about it. “She could have. We lived right across the street.”
“But she didn’t, Nels!”
“Sometimes I get us all mixed up, Lenny. I don’t know where you stop and I begin and vice versa.” “I think you mean it.”
“I do! I swear I don’t remember you telling me that. Don’t be mad at Nelly, okay?”
“Do you have to call yourself that?” Lenny asked him.
“My father was called that and his father was, too. It’s a proud old name in our family.”
“It sounds faggy.”
“Not to us…. But Celeste always said that Captain Stir-Crazy thought it was faggy, too.”
Stir-Crazy was Nels’s nickname for the Captain of the Seastar. Captain Ian Stirman. Nels didn’t like him. Nels didn’t like anyone his sister admired.
Jealousy, they say in Hong Kong, comes into the eye as a little yellow freckle.
Nels said, “Stir-Crazy claims that Nelly is what Englishmen call the old ones. Nellies. Why should I care what the English do? Why should he? … Unless he’s a fag himself.”
Lenny wanted to get back to the subject. “Are you going to hand in that essay?”
“I don’t have another, Lenny, and it’s awfully good. Do you mind?”
“Be my guest, I guess.”
“Well, you weren’t making use of the incident, were you, in yours?”
Lenny’d written a very dull essay about a trip to the Statue of Liberty. The only people in it were “the French” and “the Americans.”
• • •
From time to time, Lenny’d catch Nels doing more things like that. He’d made Lenny teach him chess because it was Lenny’s favorite game. In no time he played it as though he had for years. Eventually he could beat Lenny, though Lenny knew at times he let Lenny win.
He took on all of Lenny’s enthusiasms, forgetting (so he claimed) that they were Lenny’s. He’d never even heard of Lenny’s favorite poet, Leonard Cohen, never read science-fiction writers like Harlan Ellison, Richard Matheson, or Alfred Bester. He glommed onto them and began finding things in them Lenny hadn’t found … and of course sometimes he’d recommend something to Lenny that Lenny had told him about.
Sometimes, after one of their bull sessions in Lenny’s suite, when they sneaked in a bottle of chianti, Nels would cry, “Toodle-oo to boo-hoo-hoo,” which was something Celeste said sometimes in her act, and he’d cross the hall singing Annette’s old song to him when he was little: “Seeing Nelly Home.”
It was her sign-off, and Celeste would add remarks like “Who wants him home?” or “Get yourself home next time, jerk!”
Celeste always called Nels “Big Guy.”
Nels had a nickname for Lenny, too, but Lenny loathed being called it. Tra La. From Tralastski.
“What’s this thing you have against nicknames?” Nels asked him. (Even the expression What’s this thing you have … was Lenny’s.)
“I just don’t like Tra La,” Lenny insisted.
The only other nickname Lenny had ever had he had hated more. It was Wheezy … because of his asthma.
Since he had arrived on The Hill, he had not had a single asthma attack.
He attributed that to the clean country air of Cottersville, although there was a tire factory just outside town. Nels claimed it was Nels; Nels said no one ever gave a damn about you before, that’s all.
“Tra La and Nelly,” said Lenny. “That sounds awful!”
“Agreed,” said Nels. “It would sound much better if it were Nelly and Tra La.”
A lot of things Nels thought were funny Lenny didn’t, at least not right away.
Sometimes not ever.
Tra La not ever.
chapter 6
How can someone disappear into thin air?” Keats said.
“Someone murders him, or kidnaps him … or he decides to begin a new identity.”
“He could have amnesia, too,” Keats said.
“Maybe we could look the case up on microfilm when we get to East Hampton?”
“No, don’t, Fell! Who cares? We’re on vacation!”
I didn’t feel like heading indoors to stare at microfilm, anyway, that morning. It was the perfect summer day: blue skies and sun above, the green hills rolling by as we left Pennsylvania, top down. Keats was driving.
“I called home and Mummy says she’s almost positive Daddy’d want you to spend the week with us.”
“Not a week, Keats. A night, two. That’s all.”
“Fell, you need more time away!”
“What did your mother mean she’s ‘almost positive’?”
“It means he’s not there to ask, but it’ll be fine.”
“I’ve got a job, remember?”
“You’d make better tips in Seavill
e, or in Bridgehampton.”
“Wanna bet? I do very well at Le Rêve.”
“Good! Because you owe me dinner out somewhere wonderful!” Keats said. “Somewhere they serve enormous lobsters. You whetted my appetite when you promised me that yesterday.”
“We’ll go to Gosman’s in Montauk,” I said.
“Let’s go early, too, so we can see the sunset and get a table down by the water.”
“What if something interesting’s going on at the convention tonight?”
“They have to eat dinner, too. We can go there after dinner.”
We were making our plans.
Every time I caught myself doing anything fun and familiar, I marked it, telling myself I was back and okay. But I was suspicious of the idea at the same time. If I really was back and okay, how come I was so conscious of it?
Then I’d dip down again for a few seconds. I’d have this picture of myself opening the car door and becoming a big red splatter on the highway.
Keats shoved in an old tape of Tracy Chapman singing her songs of social conscienc.
I mumbled something about wondering if a Mercedes Benz convertible was the ideal place to listen to lyrics about homeless people and police brutality.
“Don’t ruin e erything, Fell,” she said.
“Remember that old Billy Joel song — ’We Didn’t Start the Fire’?”
“We don’t have to fan the flame, though,” I said, but she turned up the volume.
Why couldn’t I just let her be happy?
• • •
It was late afternoon by the time we hit Seaville. No matter that Brooklyn was my real home, I’d always feel as though I was coming home when I made that right turn at the traffic light and saw the long pond by the road and the graveyard up on the slope. Then the rows of Dutch elm trees and Main Street, with its old white houses and green lawns.
“When I lived here, Kingdom By The Sea was a real dump,” I said.
“When you lived here, only the bar was open anymore. But they’ve remodeled it. Now it’s very gothic and spooky. And tacky.”
“Mom used to call it The Eyesore, and Jazzy made that into The Ice Store.”
There wasn’t a lot of traffic as we followed Route 27. It was a perfect beach day. It was the kind of day shopkeepers took chairs out to the sidewalk and sat there reading.
