by John Donovan
"I don't know..." I blurt out.
"What's there to know? You're coming! In a few weeks! I'll make a few changes in the apartment, and then you'll come! OK, sweetheart?" She sounds so enthusiastic now that I'm sure it will work out fine.
"Well, I guess it will be OK," I say, "if it's OK with everyone else." They all keep looking away. Aunt Louise sighs deeply. Hardly anyone has touched his Chinese. Fred woke up a minute ago and is going crazy trying to get within licking distance of a plate. "What about Fred?" I ask.
"I'm sorry, dear," Mother says. "You'll have to give Fred away.
"No!" I say. Everyone looks surprised. "I wouldn't give Fred away!"
"But, sweetheart," Mother says, "it's only a little apartment. I mean, just squeezing in one more person-" She stops before she can finish her thought.
"I don't care if you squeeze me in or not," I say. I'm yelling. "I don't care what you do. Any of you. None of you matter to me anyway. None of you really loved Grandmother like Fred and me. Grandmother wouldn't have let anyone split us up."
"Of course she wouldn't, dear," Mother says, "but that doesn't have anything to do with bringing Fred to New York. Mother would never have wanted Fred to come some place where there wasn't room for him."
"If there isn't room for Fred, there isn't room for me!" I say. I get up. "Excuse me," I say. I go to my bedroom. Fred follows and jumps on my bed when I throw myself on it. He whines a little bit, the bright bastard. He knows what has happened. I guess I cry for a couple of minutes. Fred stops whining and licks away the tears rolling down my cheeks.
or the next couple of days Aunt Louise is in and out, and she and Mother are having a great time screaming at each other about everything they talk about. I'm telling you, the decibel count went up about six hundred percent on our street by the end of the weekend. The principal thing they argue about is the house and what should be done about it. Should it be sold or rented? If it's sold, it will take so long to settle Grandmother's estate, but if it's rented, there will be income for me, and I'll be able to go to college. But I'll be able to go to college anyway, if it's sold and the money is invested. Real brilliant arguments, you can see.
The second thing they argue about is chairs, which belonged to their grandmothers and great-grandmothers and a variety of other ancestors-and things like handmade bedspreads, some of those funny dishes with flowers painted all over them, and a whole lot of other junk. The argument about the big clock is the funniest. That argument lasts off and on for about six days. It's one of those clocks made two hundred years ago. It weighs a ton and a half, I guess, and there's a lot of stuff carved all over it and a pretty good picture of a ship on it. To tell the truth, without thinking much about it, I always liked that clock. This particular argument is settled by Uncle Jess.
"It's the only thing I want from the house," he says. Since there's no topping that, Uncle Jess is awarded the clock. Of course, he doesn't get the last word on it.
"You'll have to pay the shipping charges to Los Angeles," Mother says. She's a real gracious loser.
They're always arguing about me too, but I don't get the gist of those arguments because they make elaborate efforts not to have them when I'm around. When I get tired of hearing the discussions about the house and the furniture, I figure they're tired of them too and would like to change the topics of disagreement. So I take Fred for walks a lot during these days. He's delighted of course. It isn't too often that he is taken out about ten times a day. He gets out so often now that sometimes when we come in again he looks at me as though he's apologizing for not having done his business outside. I tell him that's OK, he doesn't have to do his business ten times a day, three are enough. Mother keeps saying I'm nuts to talk to him in sentences, that all he understands are short, one-word commands, and that people like me who talk to animals have personality defects. She's all heart.
One of our walks is a long one, on Saturday. Grandmother has been buried for four days, and no one says anything much about her. In fact, it's almost as though they forgot why they're all together. She's been dead for a week. Last Saturday she made me a great breakfast-pancakes from some mix a buddy of hers brought back from Vermont, with some syrup that tasted as though it had just oozed out of a maple tree. That afternoon she had this heart attack, and she died that night. I figure that since no one is going to talk about Grandmother, to me anyway, I'd better take a walk over to where she is buried just to be sure everything is all right. The cemetery is not too far from the house, maybe two miles. It's in a part of the town where a lot of Italian people live. Whenever I meet an Italian kid, I always figure he lives near the cemetery. That's crazy of course, because Italian kids live everywhere. It just goes to show you what nutty ideas people get into their heads. I figure that since the cemetery is filled with gravestones and I have seen all these great pictures of Rome and Italy with stone pillars and a lot of marble, it is natural that Italians would live around cemeteries where they would feel closer to their heritage than in any other part of the town. I'm great on ethnic origins.
I put a leash on Fred for a long walk like this one. When he's just going out around the house or to the beach near the house, I figure that Fred doesn't need a leash. He obeys me very well when we're outside. But I don't walk to the cemetery part of town too much, so it's better that Fred knows who's boss right from the beginning on this particular stroll. He hates the leash. But he likes to go to new places, which gives him a chance to sniff at a thousand new spots on the sidewalk, curbstones, corners of walls, fire hydrants, and trees. Old long Fred. When that doggie sniffs, all of him sniffs. He starts with his nose naturally, but in a second his chest is heaving in and out, his rear is moving, and his tail is wagging. He accepts the leash as the price of having all those marvelous new sniffs.
We get to the cemetery in about an hour. Fred has sniffed a lot, but not so much that we couldn't get anywhere. I find where Grandmother is buried, in the old part of the cemetery in a large grassy plot. I look at the gravestone and see that my grandfather died nineteen years before Grandmother.
There are a lot of wilted flowers piled up. Fred goes crazy. The flowers don't smell like flowers but have sort of a putrid smell. Fred loves them. He throws himself into the pile, runs his head and neck over the profusion of color, and generally enjoys himself, which makes all the money tied up in those flowers seem worthwhile to me.
"Hey, Fred," I say, "this is where Grandmother is buried."
Fred looks at me, but he doesn't stop rubbing around.
I think that maybe Grandmother would like him to do this.
"You don't mind, do you, Grandmother?" I hear myself asking aloud. It is quiet in the cemetery, with the exception of the noise Fred makes on the flowers.
"They're going to sell the house or rent it," I can't stop myself from saying. "Mother wants me to go to New York to live with her. I think she wants me. Do you think she wants me?"
I don't know what I think is going to happen, but I wait for an answer.
"She doesn't want Fred. I won't go without Fred. I didn't mind going to visit her for a weekend without Fred because Fred was with you. Now he can't be with you any more. I thought maybe Fred and I could stay in the house alone, but no one will let me."
Fred has stopped rubbing around now, and he looks at me as though I'm crazy. I sit down on the flowers with him. I hold him in my arms, which is all he needs to fall asleep in two seconds.
"What do I do now?"
I lie back on the flowers. One bunch has a blue ribbon on it, with crummy-looking gold letters reading "Love Davy." I pick off the letters.
"That was a good breakfast, Grandmother," I say. "I didn't tell you last Saturday, but it was. You're a very good cook. I always wanted to tell you. And Fred liked the way you cooked too. Didn't you, Fred?"
I guess I am the world's number-one crybaby this week, because I start bawling again. Fred wakes up and licks my tears, and I say a lot of crazy things to Grandmother, like how I'll never forget he
r, and when I'm as old as Mother and Aunt Louise I won't be arguing all the time, and please, God, keep Grandmother warm this winter and forever.
I finally drag myself off the flowers. I put the crummy gold letters in my pocket along with two wilted flowers. Fred and I go home.
"You've been for a long walk, sweetheart, haven't you?" Mother says when we come in. She is sitting there with Uncle Jess. They are having drinks.
"Yes," I answer.
"Where did you go?" Mother asks.
"Oh, no place."
"You must have gone some place!"
"Just around."
"Be that way," she says. "We've been thinking." She nods to Uncle Jess. "If Fred means so very much to you, sweetheart, he should come to New York too. What would you think of that?"
Think of it! I stand there like a twirp for a minute, and then I guess my mouth spreads from one ear to the other.
"You mean it?" I ask.
"Sure," she says.
I run over to her and give her a big kiss. I think she gets a little embarrassed, because our kisses have usually been more or less formal. But she carries it off OK.
"You've got to promise to do all the work though," she says. "I'll just have the fun."
'hey let me make the final decision on Grandmother's house. I decide to rent it. After my mind is made up, I'll say this for Mother and Aunt Louise-they take to consulting me about a lot of things they hadn't before. They ask me what I think about leaving some of the furniture in the house so it can be rented furnished, and what I think about how much we should charge, and when I will be ready to let people see it. They must have read a book on child psychology. After two weeks of whispering about me and arguing with each other, they suddenly start consulting me about things, and I'll admit that I feel better disposed to the whole big deal. We find a tenant in another week, a guy who wants to move his wife and little kid in before Christmas, who will take the house for two years. When Fred throws himself on his back in front of the guy and the guy rubs his belly like he is supposed to, I figure he will be a good person to be a landlord to.
Mother is very perky after the business about the house is settled, and when we sign the lease she insists we give a big party for Mr. Henderson, the tenant. For Mother, giving a big party means having a large number of drinks, so Aunt Louise pooh-poohs that right away, but Mother won't let Mr. Henderson out of the house until he agrees to have a highball with her. Mr. Henderson has one drink. As he's leaving he says he's looking forward to showing his wife the house and knows she'll love it because she likes old things.
"If there are problems about anything, just ask me," Mother urges. Since she plans to go back to New York in another few days, the offer isn't as generous as it seems. Mother tells me that she's done everything she can, don't I think? I tell her sure she has. To forestall one of the long talks she has been having with me in the last week when there's been no one else around, I tell her that I have a lot of homework to do. That's not a good reason for not talking "heart-to-heart" as Mother puts it, so I sit down and Mother talks. She tells me about all the plans she had for herself when she was a young girl, how fantastically popular she was in college, how she moved right along when she went to New York, how one bad mistake has set her back so that she has really had a whole decade robbed from her by my father, how difficult it was to get back into the swing of things when you had given everything you had to your family, how now she was a happy and mature adult and was looking forward to having a wonderful life with me, and so on. I say Yes and No when she wants me to, and an hour and a half later she tells me that we've had a good talk, haven't we? I tell her we have, and she tells me I stay up too late for my age. So I take Fred out for his finals and tumble into bed, knowing that in another week or so I'll not be sleeping here again.
Mother goes back to New York a few days later. Fred and I move in with Aunt Louise temporarily. Mother will get her apartment ready for us in a few weeks, so I can move down during Christmas vacation. I'm so busy shuffling myself around now that the time goes by fast. I tell Mother I want to bring a lot of stuff to New York, and she tells me I can bring about a quarter of it. She sends me the measurements of my closet and tells me that in New York everything has got to be shoved into little spaces and that every inch will be important. I can't bring my own bed and my own chest. They are too big. She is talking with a decorator about my room, and it's going to be lovely. I say good-bye to a lot of people, everyone in school and all the teachers. I'm planning to visit Aunt Louise in the summer, so it's not as though I'm not going to see all these people again. I tell about thirty guys that they can visit me in New York, and I wonder what Mother will think about that. I kiss Mary Lou Gerrity good-bye. It's not the first time I've kissed her, but it's the first time we've opened our mouths when we kissed. Mary Lou tells me afterwards that she will be faithful to me, and I tell her that I will be faithful to her too, though I really had no intention of getting that involved. She said it first, so there was nothing else I could do.
I take Fred to the cemetery a lot now, almost every day. Aunt Louise's house is even closer than Grandmother's. I begin to feel guilty on days when I don't go to visit. When I come the next day, I always tell Grandmother that I'm sorry I wasn't there yesterday. I tell her about everything that has happened during the day and about all the plans for New York. I ask her if that's OK with her. I guess I cry a lot. I don't want to leave her behind. It's cold now, and I know it's very cold underground, and when there isn't anyone to come to talk with you, the cold is worse, I am sure. Can you hear me, Grandmother? Will you know when I'm not coming any more that it's not because I don't love you? It's because I'm in New York. Fred always lifts his leg on the gravestone.
'd never visited Mother in her new apartment, which I hadn't realized was in an old house on a street that looks like New York must have looked a hundred years ago. Now I know what they mean by blocks. Before, when Mother told me such and such a friend lived two blocks away from her and they didn't visit each other at night unless they had escorts, I thought maybe a block was, say, ten miles. It isn't. It can be twenty skinny houses' worth and take only two minutes to walk. Where Mother lives, some blocks look OK to walk on, but others look as though you might want to walk around them. That's why Mother and her buddy don't visit, I guess.
Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert had decided to pile me and Fred into their Chrysler and take us and our stuff to Mother's the day after Christmas. Everyone had agreed that this was the sensible thing to do. We would avoid train tickets and a lot of Railway Express charges for my stuff, and we would get Fred to New York with the least amount of noise from him. Fred loves cars, and nothing makes him happier than to take a long drive.
Mother's house is in the middle of the block. It was built in 1834 and has high ceilings. There are a couple of fireplaces in her apartment and a nutty-looking porch over the kitchen of the people who live under her on the second floor. We're all shivering with the cold when we come in, and it's the back porch Mother wants to show us first. She calls it her terrace, and I can see right away that she thinks Fred can live out there. I tell her that Fred loves heat, and if she will show me where I'll live, I'm sure Fred can squeeze in there too. She's very real-estate agent about the whole thing though, so we have to wait to see my room. We see her study, which has a desk in it with a quill pen stuck in a china inkwell. Then we see her bedroom and her bed, which is a sight, with a big floppy lace ceiling over it. We see the kitchen, which must have been a closet in former days, and the bathroom.
"It's for both of us," she says. She opens four doors and finally shows me a shelf she calls mine. "For your personals, darling," she says. "Shaving things and all that." She laughs. This makes me mad. Some of the guys at home have already had one or two shaves, but I haven't, and to tell the truth I'd like to. I haven't even had any hair to speak of under my arms yet, but I think I'm getting some. I understand that after that, it will come to my upper lip pretty fast. The thing is, L. T. Murray ha
d hair under his arms as long ago as the fifth grade. He showed it to me a lot and told me that if I would rub spit in this area, hair would come very fast. L. T. didn't know what he was talking about of course, as I discovered.
We see Mother's living room, which is great. It has some big couches and funny-looking leather chairs. She has a fire going, and Fred has already curled himself up in front of it, at home in five minutes.
"Now the piece de resistance!" Mother declares. She flings open a door off her living room, and there is my room. It's all boy, all right. She has had it paneled and has had some skinny drawers built in a skinny double-decker bed. She's got a strange collection of stuff on the walls, and she tells me they are from Childcraft. They're great of course, but they're for kids about five. She's also got a teddy bear sitting up on my pillow.
"You remember it, don't you, darling?" she says. "I've kept it always." I'm embarrassed because I don't remember it. "It was your first toy. You loved it so." She is sort of slobbering all over me. Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert look away, and I don't know what to do.
"Sure," I say. "I remember it. I wondered what happened to it."
"I knew you would!" Mother says. She looks at Aunt Louise. "It was an important influence in his earliest years. It is a security symbol. That's really why I kept it. I knew Davy would need it again." She grabs the teddy bear off the bed and gives it a big kiss. By this time Fred has seen it and is sitting up begging to play with it. Boy, could he make something of that security symbol in three minutes! I tell Fred to get down, and Mother tells all of us that she has the loveliest family in the world and everything is going to be so wonderful now that Davy and she are together and it's nice to have Fred living here too. They move back to the living room. I stay behind in my room for a minute. The mattress on my bed is OK, and it's pretty neat that Mother had another bed built on top of mine. Both of them are so narrow though, that I'm not sure I'd want to sleep in the top bunk. That will be for the people I invite, I guess. Fred is sniffing away at everything. He's having a marvelous time. I'm hoping he won't lift his leg on anything which happens to smell too delicious not to baptize. At least not tonight.
