New Jersey Noir

by Joyce Carol Oates

  Gallows humor, not very funny. But I didn’t have much to laugh about, anyway. The wind made a swirling snow-devil out at the far edge of the pond, where some kids were ice-skating, blissfully unaware of why a bunch of people in overcoats were huddled down at our end. We trudged along after the service, climbed in our cars, and slowly drove home.

  Life at school didn’t improve. The opposite. I should have been grateful that the punks had given up teasing me, but instead I felt ignored. What was worse, I was now pitied by many of my imbecile classmates. How I hated the sympathetic stares I got from students I hardly knew. Walking the hallway between classes became an ordeal both embarrassing and infuriating. My only recourse was to feign sickness as a way of getting out of school for stretches of time, at least until winter subsided. And when the weather warmed, I simply began ditching classes and hanging out by myself down at the pond. The school’s student counselor dropped by one evening and spoke about my absences and failing grades with my grandmother and Franklin, who was by that evening, as he was most every evening now. I eavesdropped from an adjacent room and was relieved and angered by my grandmother’s response which was, in essence, “The boy’s suffered a series of bad blows and ought to be allowed to work through his mourning as need be.” I was relieved because this meant I was, as I understood, freed from adults lording over me, telling me what to do. Angered because I knew, even then, I didn’t have the first idea how to mourn, and was essentially abandoned to my own devices from that moment on.

  At what point did I begin to suspect Franklin was trying to seduce my grandmother? I was young enough at the time—fifteen at the end of World War II—that anyone beyond their teens was an oldster to me, yet in retrospect I realize Franklin must have only been in his mid-forties. Though my grandmother was a decade or more his senior, she was still a handsome woman in her hawkish way. But no, I thought, shoving away this disgusting thought as one might a snapping rabid dog. Don’t be ridiculous. Franklin, fraud though he might be, was acting charitably toward a sonless widow and a luckless orphan stuck under the same roof, wasn’t he?

  I wasn’t overly surprised when he moved into the house that spring as a boarder. My grandmother explained she could use the extra money to help pay down the mortgage, but I knew she could have gone on just fine without, living off the healthy proceeds of the sale of the hardware store. I had grim mixed feelings about the way things were developing. On one hand, as I say, I welcomed the buffer Franklin constituted between my grandmother and me. On the other, it took my breath away, angered and confused me, how proprietary he became. Not just toward my grandmother but the whole household, myself included. His authority was established with an almost businesslike swiftness, as if he were born to the task. Impressive, too, was the ease with which he pushed back whenever I got it in my head to challenge him, even over the slightest thing.

  When I commented, testing his patience one evening during dinner, that Franklin was more a last than a first name, he laughed softly, picked a fleck of tobacco that came loose from his handrolled cigarette with his thumb and pinky finger, and said, “I’ve heard that one before. Benjamin Franklin and all.”

  “Well, why don’t you let people just call you Frank? Wouldn’t that be easier?”

  “Would you want to call our recently deceased president Frank Delano Roosevelt?”

  “Why not? It’s less of a mouthful,” I countered. “Anyway, you’re not the president.”

  He regarded me with a slow sidelong glance. “I like you, Wyatt. And respect you enough not to call you Wy. Franklin comes from the Middle English word for freeman—Frankeleyn. Frank means something else altogether. The Franks were a German tribe, named after a kind of spear they used back in the early times. When they moved from Germany to Gaul, that’s how France got its name. I hate the Germans and can’t stand Frenchmen. But I like the idea of being a freeman. So, Franklin it is,” he said, and took another drag off his cigarette.

  Increasingly, he enjoyed making smart little speeches like this while my grandmother now and then glanced over at me and nodded, as if to say, You might learn something if you keep your trap shut and listen.

  I didn’t hate him, not yet, but I couldn’t figure Franklin out, either. He seemed never to have worked a day in his life, and it was unclear to me where he came from, what his background was, if he had family, how he knew so much, and how he managed always to have enough money to pay his room and board. The first person I ever heard use the word enigma was Franklin. And though he was talking about something else, politics or religion, say, when I asked him what it meant and he answered, “Anything that’s baffling,” I knew I’d never forget that word because it perfectly defined Franklin himself.

  For instance, how could anybody dislike my grandfather’s sweet old dog, Claude? I inherited him after my grandfather passed away. For a while, Claude became my best friend in the world. I could tell that he missed his master as much as I did, but he slipped into the habit of sleeping on the rug by my bed at night and accompanying me on my walks around the pond. A mangy mutt with a messy coat of blacks and browns and what looked like a smile perennially on his face, Claude—so named because he was prone to knocking things over, digging up the yard, a real clod, in other words—was a comfort to me, a pal in those months of grieving the loss of my one remaining male relative. As much affection as I directed toward Claude, Franklin showed him a hostile impatience.

  “That dog should be kept outdoors,” he told my grandmother at breakfast one day, after Claude had an overnight accident on the front room rug.

  “It’s my fault,” I argued. “I should have taken him out for a walk before I went to bed. He couldn’t help it.”

  Franklin’s condescending smile was directed toward my grandmother, as he continued, “He’s pretty old not to be house-trained. By which I mean Claude, not Wyatt, of course. With your permission, I can build a dog house for him.”

  “I don’t know,” my grandmother hesitated. “There’s a foot of snow out there. I’m afraid he might freeze.”

  “Dogs are used to weather. He’ll be fine.”

  Seeing that my grandmother was actually weighing Franklin’s inhumane proposal, I slapped my hand on the table, making the silverware jump, and shouted, “No way is Claude going to be thrown out in the cold! He’ll die out there. Grandma, I promise it won’t happen again. He’s a good boy.”

  When, a month later, Claude disappeared, never to be found, I knew Franklin was somehow behind it. I had no proof, however, and because we three had been all but snowbound together, the weather that winter being the worst anybody could remember, I couldn’t figure when or how he would have managed to spirit Claude away without me or my grandmother noticing. At the same time, there were no telltale tracks in the snow. It was as if Claude had simply floated away, transported into the sky on flurries.

  The spring following my grandfather’s funeral, Franklin busied himself fixing rain gutters that had been damaged during a wet, heavy April blizzard, the last of that wretched season. He worked on repairing the front porch, wearing a jacket that had been my father’s and a porkpie hat I recognized as my grandpa’s. A closetshopping regular part of the family, he’d become, not that I had much say in the matter. I knew if I confronted my grandmother about the indecency of Franklin wearing these clothes, I’d get a sharp rebuke in response. Instead, resentment started to build in me like steam in a pressure cooker. I sensed he could tell, and that he got a perverse kick out of it.

  One day he found me down at the pond fishing. Clearly, he’d been looking for me, because he said, “There you are.”

  I didn’t look up from my line lying like a skinny snake on the water. “There I am,” I said.

  My grandmother had recently accused me of being more and more disconnected from those around me, and I didn’t bother to argue with her. I was even more disconnected than she knew. Had been in a couple of fights after school, on days I was forced to attend, and simply let the other guy win, if only to avo
id having to talk about it later. I figured if I’d somehow pulled off a victory, I would have to accept congratulations from kids I hated or else deal with demands for a rematch. I wanted nothing to do with any of that malarkey. Instead, I filched some cover-up powder from my mother’s cosmetics kit to camouflage my black eye and bruises, though I wondered if it was possible, actually, to filch anything from my mom now that she was dead and gone.

  “Catching anything?”

  I squinted up at him, said, “Caught a pretty good size stick an hour ago.”

  “Threw it back, I guess,” he quipped, sitting next to me.

  There was nothing to say so I left his line unanswered, just like my own line out in the water.

  “Wyatt?” he went on, his voice pleasant as punch. “Iris wants me to paint the house.”

  Iris? My grandmother, Mrs. Mecham, you mean? I said nothing.

  “And I was wondering if you’d like to help me. It’d go a lot faster with two of us working on it together. You game?”

  I shrugged, uncomfortable with him sitting so close beside me. “I don’t care.”

  “Great,” he said, standing after grabbing me by the back of the neck and amiably shaking me side to side, like we were old buddies. I wrenched away, staring at the clouds on the pond. “We start first thing in the morning.”

  It would seem that Franklin had, maybe at my grandmother’s behest, removed quite a stash of paint and primer, brushes and sandpaper, drop cloths and ladders, from the hardware store before its new owners took possession. He made me help him lug all this possibly stolen stuff from the cellar after breakfast.

  As with most everything, Franklin possessed a remarkable knowledge about how to paint a house. We scraped away the old curling and chipped surface of each course of clapboard first, then sanded, primed, and brushed on two coats of yellow oil paint—a pale jaundiced yellow that was my grandmother’s preference—with white trim. Work went along steadily and in a few weeks the job was done.

  Me, I was sick of the place by the time we finished, but Franklin and his Iris walked around it in the morning, afternoon, and then again before sunset admiring its every angle. Whereas they couldn’t have been more pleased with the outcome, I felt horrified and ashamed. We’d somehow robbed the house of its history and personality by making it look so different. It didn’t dawn on me until after we’d folded the drop cloths, cleaned the brushes with turpentine, and put everything back in the cellar, that what we had done was paint my parents and grandfather out of the picture. I realized too late that I preferred it the way it was before, comfortably the worse for wear, a pleasant dirty white instead of this cat-piss hue.

  Even more than this, what came out of the experience for me had nothing to do with the project itself, but with a growing curiosity about and deepening distaste for the project manager. The same way you can look an animal in the eye and know if it’s sick or healthy, I studied Franklin over the course of those days together and began to form a strong opinion as to his character. I didn’t let on as I observed him. I did as I was told, faking as respectful an obedience as I could.

  When he said, “Climb up the ladder and see if you can’t get a little more trim gloss on that eave,” I climbed up the ladder and brushed more trim gloss on the eave. When he said, “Lunch break, Wyatt,” I came down from wherever I was on the side of the house and sat in the violet shade with him and ate a ham sandwich, listening to him pontificate about how smelly the canals are in Venice in the summer, and how warm the mink hats they wear in St. Petersburg are as the snow drifts down over Palace Square, and how in Varanasi, also known as Benares, one of the oldest cities in the world, says he, Indian seekers—would-be freemen, he called them—bathe themselves in the chocolate brown waters of the Ganges to find their way toward heaven, or some such. He was consumed by his stories and his own voice, while I watched a troop of black ants at my feet carry tiny morsels of ham and rye away toward some unknown underground destination.

  As I listened and watched, my eyes narrowing to gain better focus, I began to believe, with the certainty of one who knows firsthand that death follows life, that there was something deeply disturbed about Franklin. Something unnatural, off. Was he just delusional, a suave but big fat outrageous liar? Just a user and a taker? Or was he on the lam, untrustworthy, hiding here in Grover’s Mill from someone or something? Was he dangerous? Was he possibly evil?

  “Did you wash yourself in the Ganges too, then?” I asked, just to see what he would say, not really caring whether he did or didn’t.

  “I’m not a Hindu,” he answered. “No point.”

  “So what’d you learn, seeing those poor sons of guns dunk themselves in muddy water?”

  Franklin sighed, looked away. “That human beings may be the lowest class of species in the universe. But let’s change the subject. Your grandmother—”

  “Iris, you mean?”

  “—wouldn’t appreciate me telling you such negative things, Wyatt. Besides, you’re young. The world’s mostly ahead for you. You’ll have your own experiences and form your own conclusions about everything when you grow up.”

  “I don’t need to get one day older to form my own conclusions,” I said, hoping to provoke some telling response.

  “No, really?” turning his slitted eyes on me.

  I don’t know why I felt the strongest urge to hit him in the face with one of my already clenched fists, but knew I’d be overpowered in a flash, so I said with as bitter and worldly a tone as I could muster, “Look, Frank—I mean, Franklin. I already know the world stinks. I don’t need to go to Venice or any of your other fancy-ass places to figure that out. I’m not stupid any more than you’re a Hindu.”

  Franklin thought about that, or pretended to, for a minute. Then said, mock cheerful, “Lunch break’s over, Einstein. Time to get back to painting.”

  Life pressed on over the next months. Franklin arranged for the three of us to go to Radio City Music Hall to see a show featuring the Rockettes, and while my grandmother was thrilled, I couldn’t help but feel guilty about our grand adventure—he bought dinner at a ritzy restaurant, my first encounter with creamed herring—knowing it was something my mom would have given anything, but anything to do.

  Being by now a total outcast, a shunned goat, at school, and not caring what others said about me, I started spending afternoons up at the cemetery, hanging out near my parents’ side-by-side graves, before heading down to do my daily walk around Grover’s Mill Pond. The role of mama’s boy, or daddy’s, was one at this point I relished rather than rejected, wishing the bullies could fairly taunt me with such labels again. What would I give if I could still fish the pond with my father, or row out to the middle for another picnic with my boozy mother. Answer is anything. But I didn’t have anything to give, nothing anyway that would bring them back. And so, I found myself hanging around as much at the cemetery as at the drowning pond, the ash-carpeted pond, because in both places I noticed my heart calmed and my chance at happiness improved. Or, not happiness—less miserableness.

  The keeper of the graveyard, a pasty middle-aged fellow with gimlet teeth, unwashed hair, and a kindly sad look in his eye, asked me one Tuesday, when there was no funeral to oversee or vandals to chase away, what I was doing there so often.

  “Why you asking?” I asked him back. “Am I breaking a rule or something?”

  “No,” he said, shoving his hands into trouser pockets, shy, I thought, about talking to the living as opposed to the dead. “Just seems like a young fella like you ought to be having fun with your friends somewhere, instead of haunting an old boneyard like this.”

  I shrugged.

  Then he asked an unexpected question: “Well, seeing as you’re here so much, how’d you like to pick up a little extra walk-around money?”

  So it was I was hired to mow the lawn, sweep leaves and other leavings off the oblong marble markers, pick up trash—I couldn’t believe all the junk, candy wrappers, discarded funeral programs, even a used con
dom—left behind by sloppy mourners and cemeterygoers. Ralph paid me in cash, and other than giving me my assignment for the day, didn’t pull a Franklin on me by expecting me to listen to dumb speeches or answer a bunch of questions, so we got along pretty well. He had a daughter about my age named Mollie, who tagged along with him to work sometimes, and because she seemed to share my outcast ways, we sat against one of the mausoleums and chatted during breaks or after work. Like me, Mollie had lost her mother. Not to death, but because she ran off with another man.

  “She might as well be dead and drowned as your mom,” Mollie said, shaking her head as she looked at me with unblinking, pretty brown eyes, dark as wet bark. “Don’t hate me for saying so, but I sorta wish she had drowned. Least that way I could feel sorry for her.”

  “Yeah. I know,” I said.

  Because I didn’t have any costly hobbies, and didn’t care about going to the movies or buying burgers and malted milks—I would have treated Mollie, but she had no more interest than I did in these things—the money started adding up. I kept it hidden in the lining of a seersucker jacket I rarely wore, which was safely hung in the far back of my closet. My grandmother occasionally asked me what I’d been up to all day, and was perfectly satisfied with the hodgepodge of white lies I concocted for her benefit. As often as not, I even told her the partial truth—“I helped mow somebody’s lawn”—to which she would respond, “Good way to get some exercise,” and the matter would drop. While I was pretty sure Franklin knew I was lying half the time, he let it ride. So long as I kept our lawn mowed.