had made him sound like a baby.
Sure enough: “No, they don’t,” Brad whined back at him.
“The thing is, it pays well,” Henry says to his father a few hours later. “And Mr. Beardsley says I could make a schedule work around football practice and all. So I could work Thursdays when he stays open later anyway—after practice till close—and Saturdays. And days we don’t have practice. Yeah, I’m pretty sure about that.”
Henry has not quite thought it all through, this job at Baxter’s. He pauses to check his father’s reaction and to figure a way to spackle up the holes in his speech. His father’s tie in muted diagonal stripes of pale yellow and brown is barely back in fashion after two decades off. In the dim light Henry can hardly see the frayed flecks of pulled silk.
“The away-game days, though, I know Mr. Beardsley won’t mind,” he says as much to himself as to his father. “He said so, actually. Oh yeah, I remember he said he wouldn’t mind if it was different week to week. So then it’s fine with the away games. And it pays well.”
Henry stops there as he notices his father’s spoon has stopped circulating in his coffee mug. He has made a bad choice in ending with the pay factor. He knows that now and knows his father knows. But it is too late to rectify so Henry remains quiet, watching his father’s wrist resume the trips around the perimeter of the chipped mug they had picked up on a family road trip to Vermont in the summer.
It is the great unspoken understanding in the Powell house that any discussion that points to their lack of fortune would be in bad form. In theory the Powells came from money. In theory. Their name a good, solid-sounding name sure to be connected somehow to English nobility somewhere deep in the rings of the trunk of the family tree. But in actuality Henry Powell’s parents were Brontë penniless. A small trickle of money from a family trust fund kept them above the below, but the fact of the matter was they were below the above. Still, his mother’s grandfather had had a lot of money that was to be stingily disbursed “in perpetuity” and that enabled them to continue the illusion—with manners and bearing—that they came from old money. They surrounded themselves with wealthy friends. They wore shabbily preppy clothing. But most of all, they wore their lack of great fortune proudly. And so they were accepted into society.
It was just not done in the Powell circle, the speaking of money. A previous mention had ended badly, with Edgar Powell crying a single, solitary Native-American-looking-out-at-a-now-littered-land tear. Henry had only heard about the heartbreaking spectacle from his cousin, Tommy. Henry Powell had never seen his father cry. But he suspected seeing someone perpetually on the brink of crying is worse. The way nausea makes its victims pray for vomit. To be rid of the sickness. “How come your father cried?” Tommy had asked, unaware that he would now be eternally disliked for his Holy Grail sighting. From that point forward Henry refused to allow Tom into his fort. Henry sometimes imagined it was he who had seen his father show such emotion. He even concocted a scenario that entailed him offering his father a tissue, a kind pat on the head thanks for the thoughtfulness of the gesture. All fantasies ending with Henry and his father in a loving embrace, Henry inhaling the wet-dog tweed of his father’s clothes, his father—eyes closed in reverie—inhaling his son’s smell, the smell of childhood.
“So? Can I tell him yes?” Henry asks.
The spoon resumes clinking against the rough-hewn pottery, its surface purposely uneven in that craft-fair style.
“You can tell him yes,” his father answers after a moment. Henry has no way of knowing that these would be five of only a dozen or so words ever spoken by his father about his job at Baxter’s.
“Thanks, Dad,” Henry says, already backing out of the room. He is eager to get out of his father’s dark, tiny study, to get back out into the sunshine of the day. He would not know that his father will continue stirring and stirring his coffee until it grows cold and undrinkable. Obsolete.
In the two weeks that follow, Henry and his father do not see much of each other as his summer vacation gives way to football practices twice a day. In fact, there are many days in which the only signs that other people live in the house at all are the plastic-wrapped plates of food in the refrigerator. Henry leaves the house at first light to go to morning football practice and by the time he returns his father is gone for work. The afternoon practices stretch into the twilight, the heat mercifully lifting off the grass, which finally cools in the summer air. Once home Henry, bad posture and tired limbs, hunches over a plate shoveling his cold dinner into his mouth in silence, his parents having eaten long before he returns from the playing field.
One afternoon, Henry finds his mother in the kitchen.
“Your father wants to talk to you,” she says. Henry’s mother does not watch her hands when she is cutting. Cooking-school cutting. She is gazing out the window at the house across the street.
“Why?”
“I don’t know, talk to your father about it,” she says. Henry pictures a huge invisible watch dangling in front of his mother’s eyes, hypnotizing her. Tick-tick-tick. Henry looks to see what has her so entranced and is not surprised to find it is the geranium-filled wooden-duck planter at the edge of the driveway.
“Mom,” he says.
Tick-tick-tick. His mother’s stare never wavers. She has finished cutting, but still she holds the knife in place on the cutting board.
“Mom.”
The head turns, eyes tearing away from the driveway duck at the very last minute. It is a smooth turn that suggests the hypnosis is still in effect.
“Yes?”
“Why … does Dad … want … to talk … to … me?”
But slowed speech is not enough to hold her. Tick-tick-tick. The knife resumes its tempo on the cutting board. Over and over again, an even rhythm so familiar it has become the white noise of every dialogue.
Henry makes a show of leaving the kitchen but knows his mother probably will not notice he is no longer there. Though her knife is moving, nothing is under it to slice.
As he leaves the kitchen he glances up the stairs and, in Henry’s mind, the soap opera Vaseline-on-the-lens effect kicks in.
The carpet runner, like a Slinky attached to each stair, is no longer beaten down and Henry’s mother is bounding down the stairs, toward her boys, her tennis skirt flouncing with each step. Tretorns. Socks with little pink pom-poms at each heel. Her white Lacoste shirt tucked in. A pink headband to match the socks.
“I’ll be back in an hour,” she says, whisking past them to the front hall closet and her tennis racket with its needlepoint cover. “Betsy’s here. If I hear you boys got into any trouble I’ll be telling your father. Betsy? I’ll be at the club if you need me. You can call the main number and remember to page Helen Wellington.”
Helen Wellington invited Henry’s mother to play doubles once a week as her guest at the country club twenty minutes away. But Henry’s mother never thinks of herself as a guest. She has made a point of knowing the server’s names at the grill where the foursome has iced tea and crust-less chicken salad sandwiches following their game. She pulls in to the same parking spot in front of lower court number eight each week. But the inescapable fact is that if there were ever an emergency that required her presence she would have to be brought to the club phone by Helen Wellington, her own name unrecognizable to the club operator.
“Be good,”
