“All you have,” I said. “Our son has become a celebrity.”
“Really? What kind?”
“There’s only one kind.”
“You mean like Dick Clark or like that?”
“Or Chessman or Dillinger.”[69]
“You’re joking.”
“He’ll be on television.”
“What station? What time?”
“I don’t know—yet.”
“I’ll watch for it. What’s his name?”
“The same as mine. Ethan Allen Hawley—called Allen.”
“Well it’s been an honor to have you and Mrs. Allen with us.”
“Mrs. Hawley.”
“Of course. I hope you’ll come again. Lots of celebrities have stayed here. They come for—the quiet.”
Mary sat straight and proud on the golden road toward home in the slow and glittering snake of the traffic.
“I got a whole box of sparklers. Over a hundred.”
“Now that’s more like you, dear. I wonder if the Bakers are back yet.”
Chapter nineteen
My son conducted himself well. He was relaxed and kind to us. He took no revenge, ordered no executions. His honors and our compliments he accepted as his due, without vanity and also without overdone humility. He advanced to his chair in the living room and switched on his radio before the hundred sparklers had fizzed out to black sticks. It was obvious that he forgave us our trespasses. I never saw a boy accept greatness with more grace.
It was truly a night of wonders. If Allen’s easy ascent into heaven was surprising, how much more so was Ellen’s reaction. Some years of close and enforced observation told me Miss Ellen would be tattered and storm-blown with envy, would in fact look out for some means of minimizing his greatness. She fooled me. She became her brother’s celebrator. It was Ellen who told how they were sitting in an elegant apartment on Sixty-seventh Street, after an evening of magic, casually watching the C.B.S. late news on television, when the word of Allen’s triumph was announced. It was Ellen who recounted what they said and how they looked and how you could have knocked them over with a feather. Allen sat remote and calm during Ellen’s telling of how he would appear with the four other honorables, how he would read his essay while millions looked and listened, and Mary clucked happily in the pauses. I glanced at Margie Young-Hunt. She was indrawn as she was during card-reading. And a dark quiet crept into the room.
“No escaping it,” I said. “This calls for ice-cold root beer all around.”
“Ellen will get it. Where is Ellen? She drifts in and out like smoke.”
Margie Young-Hunt stood up nervously. “This is a family party. I’ve got to go.”
“But Margie, you’re part of it. Where did Ellen go?”
“Mary, don’t make me admit I’m a trifle on the pooped side.”
“You have had it, dear. I keep forgetting. We had such a rest, you’ll never know—and thanks to you.”
“I loved it. I wouldn’t have missed it.”
She wanted to be away, and quickly. She took our thanks and Allen’s thanks and fled.
Mary said quietly, “We didn’t tell about the store.”
“Let it ride. It would be robbing His Pink Eminence. It’s his right. Where did Ellen go?”
“She went to bed,” said Mary. “That’s thoughtful, darling, and you’re right. Allen, it’s been a big day. Time you went to bed.”
“I think I’ll sit here a while,” Allen said kindly.
“But you need rest.”
“I’m resting.”
Mary looked to me for help.
“These are the times that try men’s souls. I can dust him, or we can let him have his victory even over us.”
“He’s just a little boy, really. He needs his rest.”
“He needs several things, but rest isn’t one of them.”
“Everyone knows children need their rest.”
“The things everyone knows are most likely to be wrong. Did you ever know a child to die of overwork? No—only adults. Children are too smart for that. They rest when they need rest.”
“But it’s after midnight.”
“So it is, darling, and he will sleep until noon tomorrow. You and I will be up at six.”
“You mean you’ll go to bed and leave him sitting there?”
“He needs his revenge on us for having borne him.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. What revenge?”
“I want to make a treaty with you because you’re growing angry.”
“So I am. You’re being stupid.”
“If within half an hour after we go to bed he does not creep to his nest, I will pay you forty-seven million, eight hundred and twenty-six dollars and eighty cents.”
Well, I lost, and I must pay her. It was thirty-five minutes after we said good night that the stair creaked under our celebrity.
“I hate you when you’re right,” my Mary said. She had prepared herself to spend the night listening.
“I wasn’t right, dear. I lost by five minutes. It’s just that I remember.”
She went to sleep then. She didn’t hear Ellen creep down the stairs, but I did. I was watching my red dots moving in the dark. And I did not follow, for I heard the faint click of the brass key in the lock of the cabinet and I knew my daughter was charging her battery.
My red spots were active. They dashed about and ran away when I centered on them. Old Cap’n was avoiding me. He hadn’t come clear since—well, since Easter. It’s not like Aunt Harriet—“up in heben she be”[70]—but I do know that when I am not friends with myself old Cap’n doesn’t come clear. That’s a kind of test of my personal relations with myself.
This night I forced him. I lay straight and rigid, far over on my side of the bed. I tightened every muscle of my body, particularly my neck and jaw, and doubled my fists on my belly and I forced him, bleak little eyes, white spiky mustache, and the forward-curving shoulders that proved he had once been a powerful man of his body and had used it. I even made him put on the blue cap with the short shiny visor and the gold H contrived of two anchors, the cap he hardly ever wore. The old boy was reluctant, but I made him come and I set him on the crumbling sea wall of Old Harbor near the Place. I sat him firmly on a heap of ballast stone and fixed his cupped hands on the head of the narwhal cane. That cane could have knocked over an elephant.
“I need something to hate. Being sorry and understanding—that’s pap. I’m looking for a real hate to take the heat off.”
Memory’s a spawner. Start with one clear detailed print, and it springs into action and it can go forward or back like a film, once it starts.
Old Cap’n moved. He pointed with his cane. “Line the third rock beyond the breakwater with the tip of Porty Point at high water, then out that line half a cable-length she lies, what’s left of her.”
“How far is half a cable-length, sir?”
“How far? Why, half a hundred fathom, of course. She was anchored to swing and the tide flowing. Two bad-luck years. Half the oil casks empty. I was ashore when she caught fire, about midnight. When the oil fired she lit the town like midday and flames running on the oil slick as far as Osprey Point. Couldn’t beach her for fear of burning the docks. She burned to the water in an hour. Her keel and false keel are down there now—and sound. Shelter Island virgin oak they were, and her knees too.”
“How’d it start?”
“I never thought it started. I was ashore.”
“Who’d want to burn her?”
“Why, her owners.”
“You owned her.”
“I was half-owner. I couldn’t burn a ship. I’d like to see those timbers—like to see what shape they’re in.”
“You can go now, Cap’n, sir.”
69
Dick Clark… Chessman… Dillinger: Clark (1929- ) hosted
70
Aunt Harriet—“up in heben she be”: “Rockin’ Chair” (1929), written by Hoagy Carmichael and performed with Louis Armstrong: “My dear old aunt Harriet, in Heaven she be.”