Wayne bought a couple of pepperoni sticks and a box of chocolate graham squares and thanked Mr. Caines. The boy, Steve, came out with him.
“I can find it by myself.”
Wayne wondered if there was something about him that had made Mr. Caines think he could not find Forest Road by himself from a map that had been perfectly clear. He worried that Mr. Caines had thought he looked unintelligent. But when they got to the traffic circle on King’s Bridge Road, Wayne was glad of Steve, because the road turned crazy. It went five ways: down King’s Bridge Road, Military Road, Gower Street, Ordnance Street, and Fort William Place, leading to the hotel. Forest Road was just beyond this circle to the right, but without Steve, Wayne would not have found it. Steve told him his last name was Keating, and he wasn’t in school because it was after three o’clock. He couldn’t wait to be out of school for good though, because school was torture, and furthermore it was useless. Steve Keating said these things but Wayne could tell he was a smart kid. He could tell from the way Steve gave him his final directions, and because enthusiasm bubbled out of Steve Keating though he was only going back to Caines Grocery to stock Mr. Caines’s cooler with sandwiches and apple flips.
22
Fabric and Notions
THOMASINA HAD WRITTEN Wally Michelin a different kind of postcard from Bucharest than the one she had written to Wayne. By the time she wrote Wally’s card she had been in Bucharest for months. She no longer liked the chaos, the noise and dirt, or the old concrete-block buildings, and had decided to book a train and a boat to England.
“I want to go and sit in the park in London,” she wrote. “I can stay at the Cale Street Hostel for August and half of September for practically nothing, and when I get sick of the young Australian backpackers I intend to try and get room 118 at the Cadogan Hotel on Sloane Street. It will cost nearly a hundred pounds a night but I want to spend at least one night in the room where Oscar Wilde was arrested, and then I might go to another hotel near Poet’s Corner and go visit the monuments to my old friends the Brontë sisters, and Wordsworth. I wish they had a monument to Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy. If no one is looking I might leave a small memorial to her in some old crevice or another. A petal from one of the Queen’s roses, or a violet from one of the gypsies in Trafalgar Square. Someone needs to leave something in memory of Dorothy.”
Wally Michelin had not loved Tim McPhail, the boy who had taken her to her high school prom. She had loved the French composer Gabriel Fauré, and she had loved her music studies. When she arrived in Boston to work in her aunt’s shop after graduation, her aunt had been kind. She gave Wally a room that had belonged to her grown daughter, and she had bought Wally her own record player and told her she could go down to the Berklee College of Music bookstore on Boylston Street if she wanted to buy books or records. It was at that bookstore, on the bulletin board, that Wally read about the Harley Street Voice Clinic in London.
Her aunt Doreen’s shop was a fabric and notions store on Brattle Street, and Wally liked it. She liked the precision with which she learned to cut yards of linen and jersey from big rolls, using a yardstick on the long counter. She loved it when her aunt taught her how to pull a single thread from the weave so that the line marking its absence became your guideline for cutting. That seemed like a neat, graceful trick to her. She also liked the wall on which hung a collection of mysterious tools: bobbins for Singer sewing machines, long pins, and pearl-handled awls for punching holes in paper to transfer patterns. She liked Boston itself, so sedate and shadowed. It would have been sombre, she thought, were it not for the students who spilled into its streets in late August, enlivening the red brick and sharp angles of the sun as they swarmed Harvard Square and the surrounding streets with their armloads of textbooks and their young, intense faces that held adventure and studiousness alike.
In her years of high school, Wally Michelin’s teachers and the guidance counsellor had tried to show her university calendars and had given her tests that showed she had academic aptitude in all kinds of directions. They had not done this for every student but they had done it for the ones they felt had the intelligence and the money to go places. She had resented this, and wondered why they had singled out her and a few others such as Tim McPhail when students like Wayne Blake were ignored and left to fend for themselves. One of the teachers had asked Wally to write a list of the relatives she had in Boston, as if they were part of the qualifications that gave her special academic ability. She had replied that she had no relatives in Boston, just to shut the teacher up, and it had worked that day: the teacher had walked away disappointed. What the teacher had not known, and what Wally had not told the guidance counsellor or anyone else, was that if she could not study music she was not going to study anything at all. She would work in her aunt’s shop and would learn how to tell the difference between French and American ribbon, and to discern which buttons were long lasting and valuable and which were cheap, and in her spare time she would turn on her record player or go to free student concerts and listen to the music other people made.
Wally’s mother and her aunt Doreen were sisters, but Wally thought her aunt looked happier than her mother. She had her hair done more often, and she had pedicures too. Her toenails were painted a warm pink. It was nothing for her to go out to a restaurant three times a week. Wally had heard her mother say that Doreen’s shop and her husband together made more money than Doreen knew how to spend, and now Wally wondered if it were just that Aunt Doreen was more prosperous or whether she was happier by nature. The living room had a bay window, and in the bay part was a basket lined in satin, and on the satin lay a white mother poodle and five puppies. There was a piano in the living room, and on a shelf Doreen had a collection of dolls that were not toys but were dressed in elaborate garments. Wally knew from a catalogue her aunt kept in a drawer of her china cabinet that the dolls cost more than a hundred dollars each, some up to three hundred and beyond. Their shoes alone were little works of art.
But it was not just that her aunt had a piano and purebred puppies and her shop and the dolls; her aunt Doreen was interested in things. She knew when an operatic star was coming to town or when a new Italian film was on at the repertory cinema, and she loved to get any kind of news, and to think about it and talk about it in a lively way. After the quietness of Croydon Harbour, Wally loved the bustle and activity of Boston, as well as this lively way her aunt Doreen had of making every ordinary thing in life an event. When the mail brought a postcard for Wally from Thomasina in Paris, then another from Bucharest, Doreen made an event of standing it on the table in the hall, against the vase she kept filled with carnations and white iris. There was music in the house, and there were books, and there was always a cake in a box from the Modern Pastry shop on Hanover Street.
Aunt Doreen was a person to whom you could mention things, and the day Wally saw the notice about the Harley Street Voice Clinic at the college bookshop, she told her aunt about it. The cake in that day’s box was a Swiss roll spread with jam and studded with coconut, and Wally marvelled at its sponginess as her aunt cut them each a piece to have with tea in English teacups.