“Where do you live?” asked Deputy Kerry as we neared the chipping, weather-beaten old Chamber of Commerce sign that read, tragicomically, Entering Horsehearts: Village of the Future. It seemed strange that Deputy Kerry was only asking me this now, where I lived. What if I’d said, “Oh, didn’t they tell you? I live in Washington, D.C.!”
“Fish Glen Road,” I said. “Three thirty-six.”
“Oh, over there,” he said cryptically, and took a left at the next light.
My parents were on the front porch when we pulled up. To my dim and watery eyes, they looked faraway, two pink and furious figurines, and I realized, slowing up in front of the house, swollen-faced and handcuffed, that I didn’t know my parents well enough to be doing this to them, inflicting such an episode upon their lives. I realized that it was harder to endure the wrath and disappointment of people who’ve been kept from you, and from whom you’ve kept yourself, than it was to endure it from the people whom you knew best. All my stern upbringing was there waiting for me on the porch, its unhappy administrators waiting to administer something final and more — or perhaps, in their failure, to resign altogether, to take their leave of sternness, of administration, of me.
My mother stood up from the porch glider on which she’d been sitting, rocking herself back and forth with one foot, the other foot tucked up under her, her arms folded across her chest, her expression stricken and tight. My father turned from where he’d been gazing out into the mountains, rethinking his forestry degree, perhaps, or humming the most tragic Brahms he knew, or once again lamenting the snowmobiles that had wrecked the local wildlife, causing deer, now inured to the sound of motors, to dash out onto the highway and be killed. Perhaps he was making a list of all the ways your children could break your heart. He was not one to let you know what he was thinking, but he let you watch him think it, let you watch him stare into the air in which he constructed his worries and ideas, his eyes transfixed, his lips folded in. Now he turned to look at me, and the sheer height of him, even at that distance, filled me with remorse.
Deputy Kerry unlocked my handcuffs by the car but still clutched my elbow, pushing me along in front of him like a little cart. It was a long march during which I understood that, for all the unusualness in their lives, all my parents had ever wanted was to be average, normal, useful, ordinary. They could not bear the full force and chaos of their own eccentricity, could not bear the full life of it, the complete course, all the stuff and ramifications. To see something out of line in their own children must have reminded them of all that they were and could not hide from. It must have reminded them of the deep and sorrowful loneliness of themselves, which they had tried so desperately not to suffer.
Deputy Kerry handed me my hat.
“Go to your room,” my mother said coldly, and I stepped obediently into the house, staring down at my own steps as I took them, like a cartoon of a shamed person.
“Whoa,” said Claude, from inside the kitchen, seeing me. He was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. “What did you do?” he asked.
“Just — shush,” I said miserably. I went into my room and flopped on my bed. I dashed the straw hat to the floor.
Claude came to the bedroom doorway. He bit into his sandwich. “Don’t worry,” he said with his mouth full. “I’ll spy for you; I’ll let you know what’s going on. I can check it all out from the front porch.”
“Great,” I said indifferently.
LaRoue came up from the cellar. “Tsk, tsk,” she said at my doorway. And then added, more consolingly, “Don’t worry.” She looked sorry for me, for the first time in her life. “Don’t worry. I heard them talking. They’ve decided not to yell.”
What they’d decided to do was to send me to church camp for the rest of the summer. They told me this after they’d thanked Deputy Kerry and shaken his hand (for a job well done?), and after they’d suddenly, briefly entertained a visit from Frank Morenton himself, who, Claude later told me, came flying up in his white convertible, leaping out to apologize to my parents for the public display at Storyland. He was also bearing my rope purse, which I had left at the Lakeside entrance. (How strange to imagine him with my purse!) “Let’s keep this whole thing with your daughter just between us. Here, this belongs to her.” He thrust the purse at my mother. “The park’s a nice family place,” he added. “I’m getting to be an old man. I’ve seen a lot. I came to this country with no money, and I worked too hard now to have my efforts be the site of scandal and commotion. I believe in America.” I was being treated with the same anxious hands as the Lost Mine crash. I was the Lost Mine crash. I was the same thing. All that is mine won’t be lost.
Saved by America.
“What country do you think he’s from?” I asked Claude.
“Indonesia,” Claude replied. “Or maybe France. How should I know?”
Later I heard that Frank Morenton had fired Isabelle for her bad judgment, only to hire her back again the next day; I also heard she still got her car and her Christmas trip to Florida and that he bought Gloria Deb a bright red moped.
“Your daughter, of course, is fired,” he said to my parents. “But as for the money, let’s just call it even-steven.” Horsehearts was the sort of place where even a person of prominence might say things like “even-steven.” It was the sort of place where if you stayed too long, you might add or subtract syllables; you might ask for “ham burgs” or “cheese burgs” or “cream de mint.” After twenty years, you could end up saying “bingo” for “yes.”
“We greatly appreciate that,” murmured my father.
“Would you care to come in for some ice tea?” asked my mother.
“No, thanks,” said Frank Morenton. “I just wanted to hurry down here and tidy up, let you know that although I could, I’m not going to prosecute. Now we can just move on, put things behind us.”
“Yes,” said my mother.
“I hope you will do as I intend to do and not mention this to people.”
After that my parents said nothing Claude could discern.
“Now I’ve got to get back,” Morenton announced, and then he was gone, fast in his beautiful car, like a shiny, shiny god.
That’s how Claude described it later. I’d stayed in my room, as told. I’d stared at my Desiderata poster. Go placidly amid the noise and the haste.…
Go placidly.
What a crock.
The camp was a Baptist one a hundred miles away in the mountains on Lake Panawauc, said my parents, standing in my bedroom not long after Frank Morenton had left. I would be sent there until the end of August. Then I’d come back and pack for fall and winter. They were sending me away to boarding school.
“A military academy?” I asked, and no one in the room, myself included, knew whether I was joking.
“The Mount Brookfield School,” said my father. I was astonished that in my fifteen-minute ride from the lake to Horsehearts they had planned my future so specifically. “The financial arrangements we may have to work out with your grandmother. It would behoove you to pay her a visit and explain yourself.”
“Yup,” I said drily, “I guess it would.” We were all standing in my pink and purple room, with the Desiderata poster and the beehive shade and the records and the makeup mirror. I started playing with the dangling string of the light switch, turning it on and off, watching the beehive shade fill up with pink, and then empty again to white, watching the pink when it threw itself across my parents’ faces like a veil of embarrassment, then vanishing again like a passing fever, or the patrolling light from a squad car.