Foreign Affairs - Alison Lurie [84]
Chuck’s “folks,” he told Vinnie during their first dinner together, were uneducated, “dirt-poor,” and none too law-abiding. “My dad—he was no good. He spent most of his adult life in jail, if you want to know the truth. And he never gave a hoot in hell for any of us.”
As near as Vinnie can make out, Chuck and his too many brothers and sisters grew up in a kind of rural slum, with an overworked and frequently drunken mother. “She wasn’t a bad woman,” Chuck explained, forking up an overload of Wheeler’s sole véronique and parslied potatoes (his table manners leave something to be desired). “Only she wasn’t home much to keep an eye on us. And when things weren’t going too good for her she got pissed, and then she slammed us around.”
Unsupervised, half neglected, Chuck and his siblings began to get into trouble as soon as they hit puberty. “I ran with a rough crowd for a while. By ninth grade we were cutting school pretty regular to hang out in pool rooms and go joy-riding.”
“What’s that?” Vinnie asked, marveling at the inappropriateness of Chuck and his history to the old-fashioned British elegance of Wheeler’s.
“Aw, you know. You find some car with the keys left in, or you jump start it, and a bunch of you go for a ride. Take the heap out onto the highway and see what it’ll do; maybe pick up some girls and drag to the next town. Then when you think the cops might be onto you, or the gas runs out, you shuck it. Or sometimes we’d borrow a couple of horses instead.
“When we got tired of that, we started breaking into empty houses. For the thrill mostly; but if you saw something you wanted, you took it. I used to go for the cameras Then one time the house wasn’t empty; we had to run for it. Afterward nobody wanted to admit he was chicken, so we started talking big, how next time we would bring a gun, and if anybody gave us trouble we would fucking blow him away. One of the guys, he knew where his dad kept a pistol. Wal, we were lucky. Before we could get shot up, or hurt somebody, the law caught up with us. Most of the guys got probation, but they took a look at my family and sent me to a home for bad boys.”
“Hell, no, that didn’t reform me.” Chuck continued with his story later, as he and Vinnie sat in the stalls at Covent Garden waiting for Fidelio to begin. “Are you kidding? You ever seen one of those places? . . . Naw, what stopped me was the war. I got drafted, and went to the Pacific with an engineer’s unit. If it wasn’t for that, I probably would have gone on the way I was going; maybe ended up like my dad. Only after the war, killing a guy didn’t look so cute anymore. It was bad enough when it was some Jap that would’ve got you first if he could. You get home, you hear some old buddy talking, how he went into this all-night gas station maybe, with a gun, and there was this guy. He didn’t intend him any harm, but he thought he heard a noise in the back room, he panicked. Pretty soon the guy’s laying there dead, and your buddy took the rest of his life away, for what? For maybe a couple hundred dollars. That wasn’t for me, y’know?”
“I see what you mean.” Vinnie looked around the great opera house, with its multiplication of shaded lamps and crimson velvet, its festooned golden tiers of balcony—and then, with a sense of the collision of worlds, back at Chuck in his plastic raincoat and leather string tie. “So you went straight,” she remarked.
“I guess you could say that.” Chuck laughed awkwardly. “Anyways, after I was discharged I didn’t hang around home for too long. I had the G.I. Bill, and the tests said I was smart enough for engineering college, so