Chances Are . . .

by Richard Russo

  “Sit,” she repeated, and this time he was glad to obey, because his knees had jellied. He watched as she poured a slug of amber liquid into her coffee. Taking a seat across from him, she set the bottle on the table, as if to suggest she wasn’t done with it. He half expected her to offer him some. Instead she just sat there staring at him until, for some reason, he felt guilty and looked down at his cereal, which was getting soggy.

  The gist of it was this. There were several facts about their lives of which he was ignorant, starting with the mine. Sure, he’d known that it was slipping, and that over the last several years the price of copper had tanked. Each year there were more layoffs, and the workers had again threatened to unionize, as if that would ever happen in Arizona. Eventually the mine would close, and the lives of all these men would be shaken. None of this was news. No, the news was that their lives might be shaken. Indeed, they already had been. Many of the extras—things they had that many of their neighbors didn’t, the in-ground pool, the groundskeeper, membership in the country club, a new car every other year—were thanks to her, she explained, to the money she’d brought to the marriage.

  “But I thought—” he began.

  “I know you did,” she told him. “You’ll just have to learn to think differently. Starting now.”

  The night before, his father had attempted, as usual, to lay down the law. He refused to pay for any son of his to get educated in a part of the country he scorned for its snobbery and elitism; he’d come back a damn Democrat or, worse, as one of those long-haired Vietnam protesters who were on the TV every night. A private, liberal arts education back East would cost them five times what a “perfectly good” education could be had for right here in Arizona. To which his mother had replied that he was wrong—imagine her actually telling him any such thing!—because it would cost ten times more. She’d telephoned the admissions office at Minerva College and knew whereof she spoke. Not that cost was any concern of his, since she meant to pay for it. Furthermore, she continued—imagine, continuing!—she hoped their son would protest against a war that was stupid and immoral and, finally, that if Lincoln voted Democratic he wouldn’t be the only one in their tiny family to do so. So there.

  Though Lincoln loved his mother, he was reluctant to accept these new economic claims as factual, mostly because they cast his father in such an unfavorable light. If she, not he, was responsible for the “extras” they’d so long enjoyed, why had his father allowed him to believe that W. A. Moser alone was the source of their relative comfort? Nor did this new maternal narrative align with what he’d been told since he was a child—that, yes, once upon a time his mother’s family had been wealthy, but that her parents’ death had exposed an economic house of cards: bad investments, covered up by improvident loans, dwindling assets leveraged again and again. That even once the money ran out, they’d continued living the high life, summering on the Cape, taking expensive midwinter vacations in the Caribbean, bundling off to Europe whenever the mood was upon them. Partygoers and heavy drinkers, they had probably been drinking the night of the accident. They were…yes, don’t deny it…like the Kennedys. To his father’s way of thinking it was a morality tale about foolish, decadent people who hailed from an arrogant, snobby corner of the country, people who didn’t know the meaning of hard work and had finally got their long-overdue comeuppance. He’d stopped short of claiming he’d rescued Lincoln’s mother from a dissolute life, but the inference was there for the taking. Was his mother now insisting this familiar narrative, so long unchallenged, was a lie?

  Not entirely, she conceded, but neither was it the whole truth. Yes, her parents had been improvident and, when the financial dust settled, the family fortune had been all but wiped out, but a small house in Chilmark, on the island of Martha’s Vineyard, had somehow been saved from creditors and placed in a trust for her until she turned twenty-one. Why had Lincoln never heard about the place? Because when his father learned of its existence shortly after they were married, he’d wanted to sell it—out of spite, according to his mother, to further cut her off from her past and thereby keep her tethered more securely to himself. For the first time in their marriage, she’d refused to meet his demand, and her intransigence in the matter had surprised and perturbed W. A. Moser so profoundly that he’d refused, again out of spite, to ever visit the damn place. His obstinacy was why, year after year, the house had been rented during the summer season, the rates going up each year as the island became increasingly fashionable; and this money was placed in an interest-earning account they dipped into from time to time for all those extras. She now meant to use what remained on Lincoln’s education.

  Ah, the Chilmark house. When she was a girl, she told him, her eyes moist at the memory, there was no place in the world she’d loved more. They arrived on the island on Memorial Day and didn’t return to Wellesley until Labor Day, she and her mother in residence all week, her father joining them on weekends, when there would be parties—Yes, Lincoln, there was drinking and laughter and fun—people crowding onto the tiny deck that from a distant hill overlooked the Atlantic. Her parents’ friends always made a great fuss over her, and she didn’t mind that there were few other children around because for three long months she had her mother’s full attention. All summer long they went barefoot, their lives full of salt air and clean-smelling sheets and gulls circling overhead. The floors got sandy and nobody minded. Not once all summer did they go to church, and no one suggested that this was a sin, because it wasn’t. Summer was what it was.

  She hoped Lincoln would one day come to feel the same way about the Chilmark house, and to that end she’d already made the necessary arrangements for him, not his father, to inherit it. She just wanted him to promise that he wouldn’t sell the property except out of some grave necessity, and promise, too, that if he did have to sell it, he wouldn’t share the proceeds with his father, who would hand over the money to his church. It was one thing, she said, for her to give up her sole true faith, but she had no intention of allowing Dub-Yay to permanently endow a bunch of damn snake handlers, not with her money.

  It took his mother most of the morning and several whiskey-laced coffees to impart all this new information to her slack-jawed son, who listened with a sinking heart, his entire reality having been violently altered. When her voice finally fell, she rose to her feet, wobbled, said “Whoa!” and grabbed the table for support before ferrying his cereal bowl and her coffee mug over to the drainboard and announcing that she thought she’d take a nap. She was still napping when his father returned from the mine that evening, and when Dub-Yay roused her to inquire about dinner, she told him to cook it himself. Lincoln had rehidden the whiskey bottle in the cupboard, but his father seemed to intuit what had transpired in his absence. Returning to the kitchen, he regarded his son, sighed deeply and said, “Mexican?” There were only four restaurants in Dunbar, three of them Mexican. At their favorite they ate chile rellenos in profound silence that was interrupted only once, when his father said, “Your mother is a fine woman,” as if he wanted that entered into the official record.

  Gradually things returned to normal, or what had been normal for the Mosers. Lincoln’s mother, having momentarily located her voice, went back to being quiet and submissive, for which Lincoln was grateful. He had friends who lived in houses ruled by discord. When all was said and done, he supposed he had every reason to feel fortunate. For one thing, he’d just come into property. For another, though it would be a financial strain on his parents, he’d apparently be heading off to an elite East Coast liberal arts college next year, something nobody from Dunbar had ever done before. He would think of it as an adventure. But listening to his mother explain the facts of their existence had shaken him profoundly. The solid earth beneath his feet had turned to sand, and his parents, the two most familiar people in his life, into strangers. In time he would regain his footing, but he would never again entirely trust it.

  * * *<
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  —

  TEDDY NOVAK, also an only child, grew up in the Midwest, the son of two harried high-school English teachers. He knew his parents loved him because they told him so whenever he asked, but sometimes he got the impression that their lives had already been chock-full of kids before he came along, and suddenly here he was, quite possibly the kid that would break their spirits. They were forever grading papers and preparing lessons, and when he interrupted these pursuits, their expressions conveyed unspoken questions like Why do you always ask me and not your father? and Isn’t it your mother’s turn? I did the last one.

  As a boy Teddy had been small, fine boned and unathletic. He liked the idea of sports, but when he tried to play baseball or football or even dodgeball he invariably limped home bruised and battered, his fingers bent at odd angles. He came by this naturally. His father was tall but skeletal, all elbows and knees and thin skin. His Adam’s apple looked like it had been borrowed from another, much-larger man, and his clothes never seemed to fit. When his shirtsleeves were the right length, there was enough room in the collar for a second neck; if the collar was snug, his cuffs ended midway between elbow and wrist. His waist was twenty-eight inches, his inseam thirty-four, so pants had to be ordered special. In the middle of his forehead there grew a luxuriant tuft of coarse hair that was surrounded by a wide moat of pale, mottled skin. No surprise, his students called him Ichabod, though no one could say for certain whether the nickname derived from his appearance or from his special fondness for “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” the first text students encountered in The American Character, his signature senior lit course. What Teddy’s father liked best about the story was that his students could be depended on to miss its point, which he would then clarify for them. They enjoyed the supernatural element of the Headless Horseman, and when he turned out not to be supernatural at all, they were disappointed. Still, they found the story’s ending—in which the all-American Brom Bones triumphed and the pretentious schoolteacher Ichabod Crane was made a fool of and run out of town—deeply satisfying. It took some heavy lifting to convince them that the story was actually an indictment of American anti-intellectualism, which Washington Irving had recognized as central to the American character. By arriving at precisely the wrong conclusion about the story’s purpose and meaning, they had unwittingly made themselves the butt of the joke, or so Teddy’s father maintained. Particularly hard to convince were the school’s athletes, who naturally identified with Brom Bones, who was strong and good-looking, cocky and cunning and dim-witted, and he ended up with the prettiest girl in town, just as they themselves did with the cheerleaders. Where was the satire in that? To them, the story was about natural selection. Even if it had been satirical, Teddy’s father—ridiculous-looking man that he was—was the wrong messenger. He deserved, the jocks believed, a fate not unlike Ichabod Crane’s.

  Teddy’s mother was also tall and loose limbed and bony, and when she and her husband stood together, they were often mistaken for brother and sister, sometimes for twins. Her most pronounced feature was an exaggerated sternum that she was forever tapping, as if heartburn were her constant, chronic companion. Witnessing this, people often leaned away from her, lest whatever she was attempting to tamp down suddenly erupt. Worse than any of this, for Teddy, was that his parents appeared to see each other much as the world did, though Teddy’s very existence hinted that there must’ve been a time when this was not true. All too aware they were physically ungifted, they seemed to take whatever solace they could from their superior sensibilities, their ability to articulate with wonderful disdain their various strong opinions, alas the exact talent that had doomed poor Ichabod Crane.

  From an early age Teddy sensed how different he was from other kids and accepted his lonely lot in life without complaint. “They don’t like you because you’re smart,” his parents explained, though he hadn’t told them that he was disliked, only that he felt odd, as if some kind of instructional handbook on boyhood had been distributed to all the other boys. Because he so often ended up getting hurt when he tried to act like one of them, he mostly stayed safely at home and read books, which pleased his parents, who were disinclined to chase after him or even to wonder where he might be. “He loves to read,” they always remarked to other parents, who marveled at Teddy’s straight A’s. Did he love to read? Teddy wasn’t sure. His parents were proud not to own a television, so in the absence of companions, what else was there to do? Sure, he preferred reading to spraining his ankles and breaking his fingers, but that hardly made reading a passion. His mother and father looked forward to the day when they could retire from teaching and grading papers and do nothing except read, whereas Teddy kept hoping that some new activity would present itself that would be enjoyable without resulting in injury. Until then, sure, he’d read.

  His freshman year of high school, a strange thing happened: an unexpected growth spurt by which he shot up several inches and put on thirty pounds. Overnight, he was half a head taller, with far-broader shoulders, than his father. Even more astonishing, he discovered himself to be a fluid, graceful basketball player. By junior year he could dunk the ball—the only boy on the team who could—and he had a fadeaway jumper that at his height was virtually impossible to block. He made the varsity squad and was the leading scorer until word got around that he didn’t like to mix it up. When shoved, Teddy would back off, and a well-placed elbow to the ribs discouraged him from entering the paint, where, as a forward, he was told he belonged. All of this made his coach so livid he even derided as cowardly Teddy’s fadeaway jumper, which the team depended on for anywhere from twelve to fifteen points a game. “You have to bang with them,” he’d yell when Teddy hung around at the top of the key, waiting patiently for his shot. “Be a man, you damn sissy.” When Teddy still showed little inclination to bang, the coach tasked one of Teddy’s teammates to play him aggressively in practice in the hopes of toughening him up. Nelson was a head shorter but built like a tank, and he derived great satisfaction from sending Teddy sprawling when he knifed through the lane on designed plays. When Teddy complained that Nelson was fouling him, the coach snapped, “Foul him back!” Of course Teddy refused.

  Indeed, Nelson so enjoyed his hardball duties that he also took to putting a shoulder into Teddy’s ribs in the corridors between classes, knocking him into the lockers and scattering his books. “Brom Bones!” his father said, recognizing life from literature, when Teddy described what was going on. The remedy, as his old man saw it, was obvious: quit the team and thereby reject the stereotype of the American male as a brainless jock. Teddy didn’t see it like that. He loved basketball and wanted to play it as the noncontact sport he felt it truly was. He wanted to receive the ball at the top of the key, give any defender a shoulder fake, spin and take his fadeaway jumper. The sound the ball made when it went through the net without touching the rim was as perfect as anything he’d experienced in his young life.

  His varsity career ended predictably, though had Teddy predicted it, he probably would’ve taken his father’s advice and just quit. One afternoon in practice, when he went up for a rebound, Nelson undercut him, sending Teddy crashing to the floor on his tailbone. The result was a hairline fracture of a vertebra that according to doctors could’ve been much more serious. Even so, it sidelined him for the rest of the season. Among the dozens of books he plowed through during his convalescence that spring and summer was Thomas Merton’s The Seven Storey Mountain, which for some reason gave him the same feeling as swishing his jumper. When he finished the book, he asked his parents, neither of whom was religious, if he could attend church. Their characteristic response was that they had no objection unless he expected them to go with him. Sunday morning was when they read the New York Times.

  Because Merton was a Trappist monk, Teddy tried the Catholic church first, but the priest there was what his father would’ve instantly identified as an anti-intellectual, a moron, really, as far removed from
the monastic ideal as you could imagine, so next Teddy tried the Unitarian church a block farther away. There the minister was a Princeton-educated woman. In many respects she reminded Teddy of his parents, except that she seemed genuinely interested in him. She was pretty and not at all bony, so of course he fell in love with her. Still under Merton’s spell, he tried to keep that love pure, but most nights he fell asleep imagining what she might look like under her robe and stole, something he doubted Merton would’ve done. He was both heartbroken and relieved when she was transferred to another parish.

  Senior year he was cleared to return to basketball, but he didn’t turn out, which compelled the coach to mutter sissy under his breath every time they passed in the hall. Either that or pussy, Teddy couldn’t be sure which. To his surprise, he discovered that he didn’t much care what Coach thought of him, though he must’ve cared a little, because that summer, just before Teddy headed off to Minerva, the coach, attempting to free a stick that had become wedged between the blade and the frame of his lawnmower without first turning the motor off, managed to slice off the top joint of what he always referred to as his pussy finger. Teddy, when he heard about it, couldn’t help smiling, though he felt guilty, too. He’d written his college entrance essay on Merton and doubted the monk would’ve taken pleasure in the suffering of another human being any more than he would’ve spent long nights, as Teddy recently had, imagining what a pretty Unitarian minister looked like under her vestments. On the other hand, Merton never met the minister in question and had apparently been a bit of a rake before his conversion. Also, Teddy thought, there was no reason to suppose that God lacked a sense of humor. He didn’t meddle in the affairs of men, Teddy had been told, or cause them to behave in a certain way, but so far as Teddy was concerned, Coach losing the tip of his pussy finger like that had to have tickled Him.