Pastime

CHAPTER 8

SUSAN said, "When Pearl sleeps with you does she get under the covers?"

We were sitting at the same table in the Ritz bar. On a Wednesday with the baseball season dwindling, and the kids grimly back in school. It was raining again. The Ritz bar is a good place to spend a rainy weekday afternoon.

"Of course," I said. "Don't you?"

"I'm not sure all dogs do that," Susan said.

"We shouldn't generalize," I said.

Susan nodded. "True," she said.

I was drinking Sam Adams. Susan had a glass of Riesling which would last her the day. The bar was nearly empty. It wasn't the old Ritz bar. It had been refurbished by new owners into something that looked like an English hunting club, or the last twenty-five hotel bars you'd been in. But you could still have a table by the window, looking out at Arlington Street and the Public Gardens.

"What do you think about Paul?" I said. "It's not just that he wants to locate his mother. He wants to find out about her."

"He's thinking about getting married," Susan said.

"Yeah?"

"For a kid like Paul whose parents' marriage was a failure, whose own life has made him careful, and introspective, the idea of marriage carries with it heavy baggage."

"His mother really is missing," I said.

"His mother has always been missing."

"Mine too," I said.

Susan took a gram of Riesling and swallowed it carefully and put the glass back down. She looked out at the wet street for a moment.

"How long have we been together?" she said.

"If you date together from the time I first got your clothes off," I said,

"sixteen years."

"Aren't you the romantic fool," Susan said.

"How do you date it?" I said.

Susan thought a minute. Outside, chic Back Bay women were picking their way past the rain puddles on their high heels, bending in under the little black umbrellas they all had, most of them holding skirts down by pressing their left hand and forearm across their thighs as the wind pushed at them.

"I'd say it begins with the time you first got my clothes off."

"September," I said. "Nineteen seventy-four. After Labor Day. It's almost an anniversary now that I think of it. You had on red undies with big black polka dots and a little black bow on the side."

"Selected with great care," Susan said. "I planned that you'd get my clothes off."

Outside on Arlington Street, the taxis all had their lights on in the rain and the overcast. The yellow headlights mixed with the neon and the traffic lights to make glistening streaks on the wet pavement-red, green, and yellow mostly. Two young Boston cops strolled past, heading toward Park

Square, their slickers gleaming in the rain, the plastic covers on their hats looking oddly out of keeping.

"In all that time," Susan said, "you have spoken maybe for five minutes, total, about your past."

"My past?"

"Yes, your past."

"What is this, an old Bette Davis movie?"

"No," Susan said. "I know you as I am sure no one in the world knows you.

But I only know you since we undressed that first time in September 1974.

I don't to this day know how you got to be what you are. I don't know about other women, about family, about what you were like as a little boy, peeking out at the adult world, trying to grow up, getting scarred in the process."

"Heavens," I said.

Susan smiled. Dampened the tip of her tongue with her wine. I drank the rest of my Sam Adams. The waiter noticed and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

I nodded and he hustled over a fresh bottle on a silver tray.

"It's a rainy day," Susan said. "We have nothing to do but look at the rain and watch the people go by on whatever street that is out there."

"You've lived here since the Johnstown flood," I said. "That's Arlington

Street, runs from Beacon Street in the north to Tremont Street in the South

End."

Susan smiled the smile she always smiled when you knew she hadn't the slightest interest in what you were saying, and she knew it, and she knew you knew it.

"Of course," she said.

The only other people in the bar were two women at a table, with Bonwit's shopping bags piled on the two empty chairs; and a guy at the bar, reading

The Wall Street Journal and sipping what looked like a Gibson, up. The women were drinking white wine. Both of them smoked. Susan settled her gaze on me and waited.

"Well, we had a dog named Pearl," I said.

"I know that," Susan said. "And I know that you were born in Laramie,

Wyoming, and that your mother died while she carried you and you were born by caesarean section and your father and your two uncles, who were your mother's brothers, raised you."

"Me and Macbeth," I said.

"Not of woman born," Susan said. "But that's all I know."

"And all ye need to know," I said.

"Many people would welcome the chance to sit in a quiet bar on a rainy afternoon and talk about themselves to an attentive listener," Susan said.

"Many people pay one hundred and fifty dollars an hour to come and sit in a quiet office and talk to me about themselves."

"Do they know you used to wear polka dot panties with a bow?" I said.

"Most of them don't."

I drank some beer. I looked out the window at the wet, wind-driven cityscape. The small rain down can rain.

"My father was a carpenter," I said, "in business with his wife's two brothers. They were very young when I was born. My uncles were seventeen and eighteen. My father was twenty."

"My God," Susan said. "Children raising children."

"I suppose so," I said. "But this was the depression, remember, and people grew up early those years. Everyone worked as soon as he could, especially in a place like Laramie."

"Your father never remarried."

"No."

"And your uncles lived with you?"

"Yeah, until they got married. They both married late. I was in my teens."

"So you grew up in an all-male household."

I nodded.

"My uncles dated a lot, so did my father. There were always girlfriends around. But they didn't have anything to do with the family. The family was us.

"Three men and a boy," Susan said.

"Maybe four boys," I said.

"All unified by a connection to one woman."

"Yeah."

"Who was dead," Susan said.

I nodded.

"They were all fighters," I said. "My father used to pick up spare money boxing, around the state, at smokers, fairs, stuff like that. And my uncles did the same thing. Heavyweight, all three of them. One uncle fought for a while at light heavy until he filled out."

"And they taught you."

"Yeah. I could box as far back as I can remember."

"What were they like?" Susan said.

"They were like each other," I said. "Other than that it's hard to summarize. They were fairly wild, tough men. But one thing was clear. We were family, the four of us, and in that family I was the treasure."

"They loved you."

"They loved me without reservation," I said. "No conditions. Nothing about their love depended on my grades or my behavior. They expected me to learn how to act by observing them. And God save anyone who didn't treat me properly."

"Like what?" Susan said. I could see how she'd gotten to be such a good shrink. Her interest was luminous. She listened with her whole self. Her eyes picked up every movement of my hands, every gesture of my soul.

"I went to the store once," I said, "and on the wayback, past a saloon, a couple of drunks gave me a hard time. I was probably sort of mouthy."

"Hard to believe," Susan murmured.

"Anyway-I was maybe around ten-the bottle of milk I was carrying got broken. I went home and told my uncle Bob, who was the only one there. One of them was always home. I never had a babysitter. And he grinned and said we'd take care of it, and later that afternoon, we all went down to the place. It was called the Blind Pig Saloon, and my father and my uncles cleaned it out. It was like one of those old John Wayne movies, where bodies would come flying out through the front window. I didn't know if the culprits were even in there when we arrived. Didn't matter. By the time the cops came the place was empty except for me, and everything in there was broken."

"Where were you," Susan said, "while all this was happening?"

"Mostly behind the bar, watching, like the kid in Shane. Even had the dog with me."

We were quiet. Susan twirled the stem of her nearly full wineglass. There was the imprint of her lipstick on the rim. I thought about what it might be like going through life with everything having a faint raspberry flavor.

"Parents' day at school was an event," I said. "They'd always come. The three of them. All six feet or more. All around two hundred pounds and hard as the handle on a pickax, and they'd sit in the back row, at the little desks, with their arms folded and not say a word. But they always came."

Across Arlington Street, past the wrought-iron fence that rimmed the Public

Gardens, beyond the initial stand of big trees, I could see the weeping willows that stood around the lagoon where the swan boats drifted in pleasant weather. Through the rain the willows had a misty green blur about them, softened by the weather, almost lacy.

"When I was ten or twelve," I said, "we moved east. I think my father and my uncles thought it was a better place for a kid to grow up."

"Boston?" Susan said.

"Yeah. The Athens of America. My father read a lot. My uncles didn't, except to me. Every night one of them would read to me after dinner while the other two cleaned up."

"What did they read?"

"To me? Uncle Remus, Winnie-the-Pooh, Joseph Altscheler, John R. Tunis, stuff like that."

"And what did your father read, to himself?" Susan said.

"He had no formal education, so he had no master plan," I said. "He read whatever came along: Shakespeare, Kenneth Roberts, Faulkner, C. S.

Forester, Dos Passos, Rex Stout. Actually I think he was reading Marquand when he decided to move us to Boston. Or Oliver Wendell Holmes, or Henry

Adams, somebody like that."

"Because he thought it would be good for you?"

"Yeah. He believed all that Hub of the Universe stuff."

"So you all came."

"Oh yeah, the four of us and Pearl."

"And what about love? Was there someone before me?"

"There were a lot of women before you."

"No. I mean, did you ever love anyone before me?"

"Just once," I said.

"Was she as pretty, sexy, and smart as I am?" Susan said.

"Would you believe, prettier, sexier, and smarter."

"No," Susan said.

"How about younger?" I said.

"Younger is possible."