When he got back on his bike, the air was cooling down. Along Gooseneck Road, a few families had set out tables where, on an honor system, you could buy garden vegetables and zinnias in mayonnaise jars. To the left, beyond Round Hill, the sea was choppy, a sunlit, ever-changing plane of gray and green.
Charlie felt something like happiness as he rode, something like luck. He’d sent the letter; tonight he’d talk to his grandmother. He’d done, as Jane had said, what he could do. Ashaunt, after his blasted vision of it, looked unusually lovely and like itself, the honeysuckle blooming yellow-white along the road. From his moving bike, he reached to grab some blossoms and sucked the juice.
When he got back to the Red House, his wall was gone.
July 21, 1970
Dear Kate and Callum,
Thank you for the letter. Arbroath sounds lovely! We will go to Ashaunt Point for August as always. Thank you for the housing estate clippings even though I did not ask for them! Agnes thought it comical that you sent them and says to tell you she needs a garden with full sun. It is fun to dream but the truth is we are settled here and not well versed in caring for a place, much less owning it. I am hoping you will come to America for a visit if you could manage getting about. I can buy the plane tickets and would take you to a Broadway show and the Statue of Liberty, both are sights to see. Also New York is much friendlier than they say. If you come across any of the old letters I sent you I’d be glad to see them. Maybe you could lend them to me or have them photocopied? I know I did not write often enough, which I now regret. I really would like to have those letters. I hope this one finds you in good cheer and good health. I am in both.
Your Loving Sister,
Beatrice Emily Grubb
A
GE QUOD AGIS
:
Do Your Best by Doing Your Best
, or
Force through Force
, or
Excellence Because of Excellence
, or
Success through Striving
, or
Attend to Your Business
, or
Do and Be Your Best
. In Charlie’s four years at St. Mark’s School, no one, not even the Latin instructor, provided a precise translation of the school motto, which seemed, in its impenetrability, designed to foster a dual sense of privilege and panic in the student body. The boys at St. Mark’s were Forbeses, Rockefellers, Pulitzers, Fairchilds, Roosevelts, and Cabots, plus one black boy—a prince, apparently—from Ethiopia. The school’s graduates went on to become senators and congressmen, lawyers and businessmen, and the occasional (insane) poet like Robert Lowell. When the St. Mark’s alumni spawned, they sent back their sons. What of the sons? A few died in car crashes or OD’d or died or cracked up at war, but most
Did Their Best by Doing Their Best
or at least
Attended to Their Business
. They worked hard in the classroom and even harder on the playing fields and would turn into versions—often paler, less effectual (inbreeding? regression toward the mean?)—of their fathers.
Charlie’s mother (his father had gone to the village school in St. Aubin and knew nothing of this world) chose the school because her brother and father had gone there, and because she thought a rigorous education might turn Charlie into a Serious Person and draw out his Potential and allow him to Contribute, which was what Brearley had supposedly done for her. His two brothers were sent to lesser boarding schools when the time came; his sister attended a private day school from home. Charlie hated St. Mark’s more than any place he’d ever been. He hated the dark Tudor building under whose one broad roof you ate and studied, slept, worshipped, went to class. He hated the daily sessions in the chapel, and the classes, dull and tiny, lectures aimed at nobody. He hated the teachers—Masters—who were either wholly of the place, in love with the sound of their English or fake-English accents, or mysteriously, miserably trapped there, spinsters, oddballs and would-be writers, unhappiness turned to contempt for the students, who sucked the blood out of their days. He hated the steady climb toward the Ivy League, not even a climb, really—a sweep of bodies; it was hard
not
to get in if you came from St. Mark’s. He watched the dull and diligent get in, he watched the more or less dumb.
Charles is clearly a bright young man but is deeply lacking in motivation. . . . Charles wrote a highly sarcastic essay off-topic. . . . Charles pulled himself together at the end of the term and performed admirably on his chemistry exam, but his lack of effort during the long course is of continued concern to the faculty here in terms of both his intellectual and character development. . . . Charles’ test scores show him to be exceedingly bright, but his work does not measure up to his potential.
Still, as bidden, he wore his suit and tie. He did his lessons, sort of. He shoveled food into his mouth in the dining hall, where his uncle’s name was engraved in a list of dead war heroes on the wall. He neither taunted the weak boys nor got taunted himself; to be a good target you had to radiate a desire to belong. He read a lot of books not on the syllabi and ran cross-country instead of playing soccer and football, and sometimes he left the course and plunged into the woods. He found a small pond to swim in, a rocky outcrop with a cave underneath, where he smoked cigarettes and, later, pot in a small clay pipe. Any thoughts of the future were ones of avoidance. He would not go to Harvard or Yale. He would not go to college at all, though he had no better plan and wasn’t paying much attention (no TV at St. Mark’s, no radio in your room until fourth form) to what had become a full-scale war.
Years later, he would remember reading in the paper that Martin Luther King had been shot and being shocked at how little it seemed to mean to the St. Mark’s community. Bobby Kennedy was shot on the last day of fifth form; this cast a general pall over the day. He would remember when W. H. Auden, formerly a St. Mark’s teacher, came to give a reading, the great poet’s nicotine-stained fingers, his warm, gruff voice. Watching from afar, Charlie had known that Mr. Auden would be interesting to talk to (and might even listen), were he not sealed off by the sodden formality that was St. Mark’s.
O plunge your hands in water,
Plunge them in up to the wrist;
Stare, stare in the basin
And wonder what you’ve missed.
During Charlie’s time at boarding school, he was threatened with expulsion for sitting on the altar inside the chapel (someone took a photo, which ended up in the yearbook), and threatened again for “setting a fire” (a campfire it was, ringed with stones, inside a pit they’d dug on the outskirts of the grounds) with Sean, one of the few friends he’d made, a sardonic scholarship boy from Worcester who was as much at odds with the place as Charlie, though he made sure to get top grades. Once Charlie brought up transferring to his mother (to where, he had no idea), and she told him he had two choices: stay at St. Mark’s, or move home where we can keep an eye on you.
As for when it had begun—their tug-of-war, his endless, exhausting swimming against her current—he could pinpoint the moment. He had just turned ten, at the end of fourth grade. It was prize day at his school; the annual awards were being given out. Charlie was sitting on the risers with his class, wearing a suit jacket, his hair cropped close (in the class photo, he was the only boy with belt and tie askew). Beside him was Jeffrey Deacon, the second-smartest student in fourth grade. Every year since kindergarten, Charlie had gotten the grade’s award for highest scholarship. This year Jeffrey had worked tirelessly, bringing in extra long division problems and a battery he’d made from lemons and wire, memorizing extra stanzas of a Longfellow poem, sucking up to the teachers, all in an effort to win the fourth-grade prize.
Charlie had looked at his mother as she sat in the first row and seen that her hands were twisted together, her eyes shut as if in prayer. Beside him, Jeffrey sat ramrod straight. Charlie’s name, when it was announced by the headmaster, sounded like someone else’s—
Charles Porter Benoit
. He stood and wove his way to the podium, where he accepted his prize—a book and plaque—then watched as his mother rose, visibly pregnant, to stand and clap, alone among all the seated parents, her face alight not with joy or even pride, but with almost abject relief. Then his father joined her, awkwardly (was it his wife’s odd whim to stand or a custom of the country?), and Gaga, and soon the whole audience rose—because they had to, because she had. Jeffrey’s parents clapped and stood. Everybody did. Only his grandfather stayed seated in his wheelchair, flapping his large hand on his shrunken knee.
Done, Charlie decided at that moment, shutting his eyes against the noise. Done. He had, at ten, neither the language nor the distance to call his mother’s investment in him obliterating, nor could he articulate the sadness buried under it (he loved her, he had loved her so, child at her side, her firstborn son. They had discovered a bog, once, near the boat dock; they’d sunk deep in mud, found an Indian bridge, made bullfrog sounds in their throats). He wanted to hand the prize off to Jeffrey Deacon, who was frozen in his seat. He wanted to block out the voice of the headmaster, who’d told his mother before the ceremony that Charlie was bound to earn a PhD in nuclear physics by the time he was twenty-four. The fifth-grade highest scholarship prize was given out; then the sixth, seventh, eighth. Each time, everyone had to stand and clap, having stood and clapped for him. It was too hot out. Grandmothers pleated their programs into fans. Babies cried. Will, having won nothing as was expected of him, sat happily with his third-grade classmates, beating a drumbeat on the back of a folding chair.
Smaller and smaller, Charlie grew after that; it was how he pictured it later, his body and brain pressed to one side, sidestepping, until some moment—well into his twenties, closer to his thirties—when he felt his mother’s gaze diminish, her hopes slacken—and began, cautiously, to venture forth again. Was he a weak son, too subject to her will? Was she a bad mother? She could have been much worse. Did she love him? Of course. Too much, he thought. She did not pressure his brothers, not like that, and though she pressured Caroline, it was in a different way—to be her soulmate, to write poetry and pour her thoughts out, except that midway through, his mother would grow distracted or turn on his sister, rageful or diminishing, or—worse—just walk away.
It was during the summer following fourth grade that he tried to build firecrackers from the gunpowder he emptied out of twelve-gauge shotgun blanks he found tucked in the back of a cupboard in his mother’s brother Charlie’s room in the Big House—for fun, and because he was bored. He meant no harm; he wanted something to play with (Rusty had firecrackers, he had none). In the field behind the house, he emptied the gunpowder from a few blanks and wrapped it in paper, then twisted the end to make a fuse. He lit it and sprang back to witness the small explosion. With the sweet, acrid smell in his nostrils, he made another bigger one, and when it didn’t light, tore a hole and touched the match directly to the gunpowder. Then
boom
! A blinding heat upon his face.
The burns were scary—on his face, his neck, one hand, his eyelashes gone—but his mother’s fury frightened him more, made him grow still as she stood above him with her hugely pregnant belly after he and his father came home from the emergency room. How could you be so irresponsible? Selfish! Stupid! And to his father: I just knew he’d blow himself up, and now he did!
Charlie sat on the edge of the couch in the Red House, knees pressed together, silent tears running over the bandages and into his mouth. His father pulled him up roughly by the shoulder. In the doorway, his brother and sister stood fascinated.
“Sit down,
chérie
,” his father told his mother. “You need to take care of yourself.” He turned to Charlie, his face white with rage, though in the hospital he had been quite kind. “She will go into premature labor, and it will be all your fault! Go to your room. You are hopeless!
Va t’en!
”
His mother was sobbing by then, loosely, loudly, bent over her belly. For all her moods, Charlie couldn’t remember ever having seen her cry, and the sight shocked him into a glassy calm. In his room, he stood before the bureau mirror and examined his face, covered with bandages. His eyes without their lashes looked bulbous and amphibious. He wadded up torn Kleenex and stuffed it in his ears, and when that didn’t block the sound of his mother’s sobs, got into bed. His face hurt too much to touch the sheet, so he hunched knees to chest, supporting his forehead with one hand. Crouched there, he pictured the baby inside his mother, shaking as she shook, and for the first time, he began to have a sense of the substantial power of his own actions. Please, he prayed to a god whose existence already seemed improbable to him, please let the baby be okay. And if he himself had died from the gunpowder? Indulgently, he let himself imagine it. They’d have mourned him; they’d have had to, even his mother. A good boy. Highest scholarship in grade five years running. Shame he blew himself up.
THEN TO NEW JERSEY. WILL
and Caroline got to stay on Ashaunt with Belle, but Charlie’s mother packed him up when, not trusting the New Bedford Hospital, she went home to give birth and deposited him with Gaga and Grampa in Grace Park. For a time, then, things were better. There was a baby, Percy. He was tiny, strange and charismatic. Everybody loved him, Charlie too, who viewed him with particular gratitude because he’d been born healthy, a week late, a pet monkey who would stare into your eyes, and if he screamed or messed his diaper, there was the baby nurse descending and you could hand him off. You’re so good with him, his mother told Charlie. You know just how to hold his head up; where did you learn a thing like that? She crooned to the baby, grew dreamier, mellower. When Percy was just a few weeks old, they went back to Ashaunt, and with the baby there, everyone seemed to forget that Charlie had been grounded for the summer. His burns had turned to scabs and would soon disappear, except for one little scar above his right cheekbone. His eyelashes were growing back. “I’ve never been this happy,” his mother announced one night as they all sat on the back porch eating ice cream, Percy kicking in his pram. “All that matters is right here.”