Fell Back
Page 15
“For whom,” I said.
“Exactly! But I’m not sure you’re sympathetic. Sometimes I think you hang on to that old romance with Delia so you don’t have to deal with reality.”
“I’m over Delia,” I said. Do you know what an oxymoron is? It’s the official name for something combining contradictory expressions. If that sounds complicated, just think of cold fire, or hot snow, or over Delia.
But I would never admit to anyone that she was still there. I’d rather agree to the idea that Little Jack didn’t kill Dib, Lenny Last did.
“Keats,” I said, “you’re right. We need to get away.”
THE MOUTH
Of course Lenny Last was not his real name.
In 1961, he was enrolled in Gardner School as Leonard Tralastski.
Until he’d won the scholarship to The Hill, his life had not amounted to a hill of beans.
I yawn and snore to think of it!
Get out the violins until we’re past the part where little Lenny’s daddy goes down flying a torpedo bomber in World War II.
On the very day the Japs surrendered, September 1, 1945, Baby Leonard was born.
Happy Birthday, Tralastski!
Just when the Japs were crying in their saki as their emperor surrendered in Tokyo Bay, Mommy’s little sweetums was at Lenox Hill Hospital bawling in his crib.
I know, I know: We don’t say Japs anymore. But when we did, back when we did, there was no sign that Leonard Tralastski would have anything but a very ordinary fate.
His long-suffering mother raised him in a tiny two-room apartment on the West Side in New York City.
He was never poor.
His long-suffering mother worked in Hosiery at Macy’s six days a week, and several nights sold tickets at a nearby Loew’s.
But in a way our boy was a poor thing: poor in spirit and in poor health. He was, for an eternity, this too-tall, too-skinny kid who suffered from severe asthma, from mild acne, and from growing up without a dad.
He had no friends, no knack for making any.
He spent most of his time talking to his own hand.
He had a white glove that he pulled over his right hand, then closed the hand to a fist. On the back of the glove he painted a face, a lipstick mouth where the thumb and forefinger met. The thing’s mouth moved when Lenny moved his thumb.
He called it Handy.
Sometimes he’d entertain his mother with Handy.
LENNY: Good morning, Handy.
HANDY: What’s good about it?
LENNY: Well, the sun’s out.
HANDY: Whose son?
LENNY: S-u-n! Not s-o-n. The s-u-n is out.
HANDY: Who let it out?
Only 1 mother would have clapped after, and cheered an encore out of him.
She was his only cheerleader, until the day he got off the train in Trenton, New Jersey, and got on the Gardner School bus, bound for Cottersville, Pennsylvania.
He was going to prep school.
He was going to be a junior.
They say in this life you have a very narrow chance of meeting the one person who is your other: your double, your doppelgänger. It is not a romantic meeting but a meeting of the minds. Some say the souls. And it is agreed that had you two never found each other, as most do not, then neither one would rise to the heights or sink to the depths such a coupling often inspires or propels.
Folie à deux.
That’s the official name for it.
Would Gilbert have written without Sullivan? Would Lewis have discovered anything without Clark?… Would Loeb have murdered without Leopold?
On that bus, on that autumn day in Bucks County, when the leaves were being torn from the trees by a bitter wind in an early snap, Lenny Tralastski met his other.
“Is this seat taken?” said he.
I am not going to introduce myself.
I will tell you the story of Lenny Last with as few asides as possible.
You’ll notice that I take some liberties, the privilege of any storyteller…. Maybe the dialogue isn’t verbatim; maybe this one wasn’t smiling, that one wasn’t frowning when I said he was.
It’ll all come out in the wash.
• • •
Aside:
Folie à deux means simultaneous insanity.
It takes two to tango … to tangle, too.
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Copyright © 1989 by M. E. Kerr
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author’s imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.
eISBN 10: 1-4405-3934-0
eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3934-3