Peaceable Kingdom

by Francine Prose

  The bar was set out on a carved oak hutch. Grady hovered nearby with a hopeful expression that eventually drew his hostess—a pretty, blond woman with sparkly girlish eyes that seemed startled to find themselves looking at you from so many spidery lines. A slight tic kept pulling one eye to the side, as if she wanted to wink at you but kept changing her mind.

  “I’m Caroline,” she said. “Did I say that before? Can I fix you a drink? Would that be all right? What would Miss Manners say?” Grady knew what she meant. Even when they themselves were feverishly drinking away the longueurs of a children’s party, the parents who hired him almost never offered him drinks. It was as if he were one of the children, or had been hired to drive them somewhere instead of just entertain them.

  Grady smiled. “Miss Manners would say bourbon, a little ice. Please. Thank you.” Caroline laughed and poured him a big glass of bourbon.

  “You really shouldn’t,” she said. “Bourbon has the most toxins.” Even as it occurred to Grady that this was her way of flirting, some note in her voice made him realize which of the TV-watching girls was hers. He was thinking of how to say this when he looked past the hutch and saw a photo of Mr. Rogers grinning at him from the wall.

  “Gee,” Grady said. “I’m finding it a little hard to drink this with Mr. Rogers watching.”

  “Oh,” said Caroline. “I don’t think Fred would object.” She spoke warningly, as people do when you are about to slander someone and they signal you: Careful. This is a friend.

  “Do you mind if I ask,” Grady said, “why you have a framed photo of Mr. Rogers on your wall?”

  “I don’t know if you know,” said Caroline, “but we have two sets of kids.” She gestured up at the ceiling and down at the floor. “The girls are from previous marriages, but Walt is our joint production. I used to watch Mr. Rogers with my first family, then I started watching him again with Walt. And there Fred Rogers was, still hanging in there. I wrote him a fan letter, and he sent me a very nice note.”

  “That’s wonderful,” Grady mumbled. Barbara used to say that Mr. Rogers was the last guy in the world she would leave Harry alone in a room with. But he couldn’t tell Caroline that. It was a year since Barbara left—a year and two months, exactly. A year before that, a car had rear-ended her at a stop sign and left her in constant intractable pain from a headache nothing could touch. They’d seen a dozen doctors and at some point half the doctors asked: What happened to the car? It was embarrassing to have to say: Only one taillight got smashed.

  Last Christmas Eve, Barbara sent Grady and Harry out for whipping cream for the eggnog. She’d been so specific—they’d driven around for ages till they found the only cream in the county that wasn’t ultra-pasteurized—and by the time they got back she had packed and left. Christmas Eve: they would always know precisely how long she’d been gone. Now she called Harry weekly and sent postcards from Berkeley, where she was in herbal therapy with a homeopath from Bombay; her handwriting was unrecognizable, sloppy and round as a child’s. In nearly every card, she advised Grady to put sunscreen on Harry, as if she had forgotten they lived in a place with seasons. The longer Grady thought about this, the harder it became to let Caroline know that his silence was not a judgment on her warm feelings for Fred Rogers. Finally Caroline said, “Let’s go find my husband. Do you need any help setting up?”

  Actually Grady didn’t; he’d designed the show that way. Still, he followed Caroline, who was, he sensed, bringing him not for help but to be checked out. She led him through a cathedral-like addition, its rough beams and glass walls suggesting an Alpine ski lodge with guests who had nothing to do but wait for the clouds to part for their personal glimpse of the Matterhorn. The afternoon light made everything look glittery and expensive—the snowy field outside, the tinsel, the candles floating in glass bowls, the gleaming metallic thread shot through the women’s sweaters.

  The man whose forearm Caroline touched was talking to a pale girl with greased, lacquer-black short hair and wine-red raccoony eye shadow. She smiled once and vanished when Caroline said, “Eliot, this is Grady. Grady’s doing Walter’s puppets.” The man who shook Grady’s hand had the serious good looks of certain anchormen who Grady was always shocked to learn were around his own age.

  “Eli,” he said, with an odd overemphasis that made it hard to tell if he was being friendly or just contradicting his wife. “Good to meet you. Can I get you another drink?” Eli’s eyes had a swimmy, unfocused gaze that couldn’t quite locate Grady’s.

  “Puppets,” said Eli, refilling Grady’s bourbon. “That’s amazing.” Often guys like Eli said that what Grady did was amazing, mostly in the one-quarter admiring, three-quarters patronizing way people told Barbara: It’s amazing women survive staying home with the kids. How many of the doctors he’d gone to with Barbara had paused, pen poised above the prescription blank, to tell him how much they wished they had talent in the arts.

  Grady said, “I’ve been doing it for five years.” He took a big gulp of bourbon. They were leaning against the hutch.

  “I know what you mean,” Eli said. “Nothing stays amazing for very long. Then other things become amazing. You know what amazes me? I don’t know half of these people’s names.” They both stared into the room. Eli said, “This is embarrassing. Forget you heard this. I sound like the middle-aged yuppie Great Gatsby.” Suddenly it struck Grady that Eli was really stewed.

  Grady put down his glass. He liked having his wits about him. Barbara’s leaving had left him feeling a need for extra vigilance about Harry. He kept telling himself that, despite everything, Harry would be all right; that morning Harry had woken him in great excitement to see on TV what looked like the Balinese equivalent of the Rose Bowl parade.

  “I’ve got my puppet stuff in the hall,” Grady said. His stage was a rectangular frame, surrounded by curtains he hung at waist level from shoulder straps and put his hands up from underneath. His puppets fit in one large suitcase.

  “Is that it?” said Eli. “Amazing.” As Grady followed Eli down the basement stairs, a stocky child flew into them with such force that Eli stumbled. “Walt, this is Grady,” Eli said. “Grady, my son, Walt. Grady’s the puppet man.”

  The boy was dark-haired and glossily pretty, but with a peculiar, passive-aggressive slump you rarely saw in a child. “Are we having a piñata?” he said.

  “No,” Grady said. “No piñatas.”

  “Good,” said Eli, “I can’t stand piñatas. I’ve never seen it go down where some kid didn’t nearly get brained.”

  “I want a piñata,” Walt said.

  “Excuse me,” Eli said. “I need to check on something upstairs.” Stunned, Grady and the birthday boy watched him leave. The child recovered first, lost interest, and drifted off. Grady hoped Eli would come back. He could, if he had to, do his show marooned with kids on a desert island. But everything went a lot smoother with at least minimal grownup support.

  An elderly woman in jeans walked briskly toward him. She had a quick, slightly batty smile and a furrowed, appealing face. “I’m Estelle,” she said. “Walt’s grandma.” Grady could have guessed. Estelle’s right eye had the same funny squint as her daughter’s.

  Estelle said, “I’m Eliot’s mom.” It touched Grady to think of Eli holding out, through at least one previous marriage, for that tic he must have seen from his cradle and imprinted on like a duck. “You think these little monsters can sit still?” Estelle asked. “I guess you can try, but I doubt it. If it isn’t remote control or computer, forget it. If they can’t punch a button and tell it what to do, they’re not interested.”

  Not Harry, Grady thought. Harry didn’t want to run the world but to be its unnoticed servant. He really had been worried that the driveway to this house would go on forever and never lead them here. Over in the corner, Harry and the kid he’d been dinosaur-punching with were playing with silver blocks, each covered with a foil-like skin of hologram bricks.

  Grady rarely started without lots of consulta
tion. When did the parents want him? Before or after the cake? He considered asking Estelle, then decided to take Eli’s departure as a sign of total permission. He unpacked the puppets from their case and hung the stage from his shoulders. “All right, kids,” he said, “I’d like to introduce you to some puppet friends who’ve come with me especially for Walt’s birthday.”

  The children hit their respective “off” buttons and trudged toward Grady’s stage. When Grady caught Estelle’s eye, she drew herself up and saluted. “Flaps up!” Estelle said.

  Some days Grady could almost convince himself that Snow White was the greatest story ever told. To meet his seven dwarfs told you all you needed to know about the varieties of human personality. The wicked queen scared even him, and when she made the audience her mirror and asked who was the fairest of them all, the children’s voices actually shook as they shouted out, “Snow White!” Today was hardly one of those days—but somehow Grady got through. He even got a little rise out of them when the dwarfs tried to figure out what kind of creature the sleeping Snow White was. “A moose,” the children cried. “A rhinoceros.” When the queen offered Snow White the poisoned apple, an older kid yelled, “Just say no.” Another kid, at another party, had said this a few weeks before.

  The children clapped when Snow White and the prince took their bows. Within seconds the place sounded again like a video arcade. Harry and his friend returned to their Mylar blocks, and Estelle came over to watch Grady pack up the puppets. “I adored it,” she said. “Of course it’s wasted on them.”

  Grady stood beside Estelle, watching the children play. It felt exactly like standing with Eli, observing the grownup party. What completed the circle was a small girl watching a mini-TV on which, Grady realized, was a closed-circuit broadcast from the adult party upstairs. “I worry about this generation,” Estelle said. “I mean it. They’re growing up so they can’t tell computers from people, except that they’re nicer to computers. I read in an article that the way things are going, in twenty years people will kill you for two dollars in your pocket. Two dollars!”

  “That’s inflation,” said Grady. “Today it’s fifty cents.”

  He couldn’t tell if Estelle’s laugh was phony or sincere. After a pause she said, “Take my grandson. Last Christmas I got him a goldfish. The kind you win at the fair and, the next day, down the toilet. The day after Christmas I’m babysitting, I go answer the phone, and when I get back, Walt’s got his fist in the bowl, grabbing at the poor fishie like Sylvester the cat. He had the most awful grin on his face, like he knew what he was doing.”

  “The bad seed,” said Grady lightheartedly, so she’d know he didn’t mean it even if he did. Officially, he was finished work, but he didn’t want to go home. He considered going upstairs, but was hesitant to leave Harry down here with Walt the goldfish-grabber. Finally he excused himself and went up past the living room—he didn’t feel strong enough yet to brave that sea of adults—straight to the second floor.

  The girls were burrowed deeper in the coat pile, still watching TV. From the doorway, Grady watched Mother Teresa insisting they rip out the carpet from a mission house she’d been given. “She should have kept the wall-to-wall,” said one of the girls. “It would have been more humiliating.”

  “Closer to the poor,” said another girl.

  The third girl said, “Last night on PM Magazine there was this guy who’d been kidnapped by aliens who told him they had a plan for permanently ending world hunger.”

  “That’s dumb,” said the first girl. “You watch PM Magazine?”

  As soon as Grady went back downstairs, Caroline approached him and said, “We should probably get started.”

  “Started?” said Grady.

  “The puppet show,” she said.

  “Ended,” Grady said. “It only takes half an hour.”

  “Where was I?” Caroline looked so crushed with disappointment that for a second Grady almost offered to repeat the whole show. The moment passed quickly, replaced by the thought that if it had been Mr. Rogers downstairs, she would have been down there watching.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I really am. It’s all too much at once. My first husband was a painter and in my first marriage we were always having parties. Afterwards we always fought.”

  “Parties are work,” Grady said.

  “It wasn’t that,” she said. “It was that we felt like each party was a window through which the guests could see our lives, and afterwards we would wonder what they saw, and try to see what they saw, until we would wind up not liking what we saw.”

  Grady’s face felt stiff; he was dimly aware of a smile sitting stupidly on his mouth. He didn’t know what to say. What if his life was dead-ending here, leaving him stuck forever, unable to either continue this conversation or move? Just then Grady felt a tug on his pants. My little savior! he thought. “How did you find me?” he said, and sank straight to his knees. It was crowded and the people standing nearest him gave him peculiar looks until they saw that he was consoling a child. Then, of course, they smiled. Harry was sobbing so hard he was choking. “Calm down,” Grady whispered. “What happened?”

  It took Harry a while to talk. “Walt hit me,” he said.

  “Where?” Grady said. “Hit you where?”

  Harry solemnly lifted his shirt. Diagonally across his right shoulder was an ugly welt. “How did he do that?” Grady said.

  “A sword,” Harry said.

  “A sword?” repeated Grady, this time for Caroline’s benefit.

  “Oh, God,” she said. “His plastic He-Man sword. He’s been whacking the shit out of everything with it, and Eliot lets him get away with it.”

  “What seems to be the problem?” asked Eli.

  Grady stood up. “The kids were fighting,” he said. He longed to tell Eli to fuck off and grab Harry and get the hell out. But Grady felt he owed it to Harry not to make too much of this—to make him seem like a regular guy who could handle some rough-and-tumble.

  “Walt hit me with a sword,” Harry said.

  “That little monster,” Eli said. “Well, he’s younger than you. You think you can forgive Walt if he says he’s sorry?” Harry nodded tearfully. “All right,” said Eli. “Let’s go talk to him.”

  “I don’t know,” Grady said. “We should really be leaving.”

  “Not before the cake,” Eli said to Harry. “Not before the ice cream and cake.” Harry seemed to agree.

  “O.K., we’ll stay for some cake,” Grady said, and the three of them trooped downstairs. The racket of the video games rose up to meet them. Grady felt suddenly tired; he couldn’t remember how many times he’d been led up and down these steps. He thought: I went to a children’s party and wound up in Dante’s hell.

  Walt was jabbing his sword at two little girls he had screaming in a corner. Eli gently disarmed him in a scene with echoes of every hostage movie Grady had ever watched. “Where’s Grandma?” Grady asked Eli.

  “Oh, Estelle?” said Eliot. “Kids, where’s Estelle?” “Oh, I don’t know,” he told Grady. “The kids probably killed and ate her. One thing about Mom: Dad was a fighter pilot, and now whenever the going gets rough, Mom just parachutes out.”

  Eli loomed over Walt. He said, “Did you hit this kid?” Only after Walt nodded did Eli kneel. “Say you’re sorry,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” Walt said. Grady knelt, too, and the four of them huddled like some sort of midget scrimmage. “All right!” shouted Eli. “Cake time!”

  In a small kitchen adjoining the playroom, refreshments were set out on a rolling cart. On the top tier was the cake, actually a cake system, a series of rectangles iced like a choo-choo train. On the lower tiers were paper plates and forks. Eli wheeled the whole thing in. “Goddamn it,” he said. “I should have lit the candles before I made my grand entrance.”

  Where was Caroline? wondered Grady. If she’d been upset about missing his show, what about missing this? And what about the teen half-sisters up on the second f
loor? Didn’t they want to be here?

  “Matches?” Eli said. Grady patted his pockets, though it was years since he’d smoked.

  “Wait. I’ve got the perfect item.” Eli took a pistol down from the wall. He aimed at the cake and pulled the trigger.

  “I haven’t seen one of those in years,” Grady said.

  Eli smiled. “Not since your fifties finished basement, right? Well, this is my finished basement.” He lit the birthday candles with the lighter-gun. “And one for good luck. Can you sing?”

  After two dispirited verses of “Happy Birthday,” Walt took four tries to blow out the candles. “Gross,” said one of the older kids. “You’re spitting on the cake.”

  The cake and ice cream were served buffet style; each child was given a plate. Harry put his plate on the floor by his Mylar blocks. One girl set hers in the outstretched arms of the remote-control robot. “Bad day for the rugs,” Grady said.

  “Those kilims are tough,” Eli said. “Camels have been pissing on them for two thousand years. Come on. I want to show you something.”

  If Grady had known that Eli meant to lead him upstairs again, he wouldn’t have gone. But once they’d set off it was hard to balk and risk revealing that Grady was scared to leave his son with Eli’s bad-seed child. Grady took a quick look-round for Harry, and, silently promising to be right back, followed Eli up two flights of stairs.