Wonder Boys - Michael Chabon [98]
I sat up straight and studied his pale, blurred, handsome young face, trying to believe him.
“James,” I said. “Come on. That man is obviously your father. You look just like him.”
He blinked and looked away. After a moment he took a deep breath, swallowed, and jammed his hands into the pockets of his hard-luck overcoat. Then he looked at me, his gaze steady, and when he spoke again, his voice sounded husky and uncomfortable.
“There’s a reason for that,” he said.
I thought about that for a second or two.
“Get out of here,” I said at last.
“That’s why she hates me. That’s why she makes me sleep in the basement.” He lowered his voice to a whisper. “In the crawl space!”
“In the crawl space,” I said, and just like that I knew he was lying again, “With the rats, and the casks of Amontillado.”
“I swear,” he said, but he’d gone too far, and he knew it. His eyes darted away from my face, and this time they remained averted. Those two people waiting downstairs could only be his natural parents; if she hadn’t said so to me, Amanda had certainly identified herself to Irene as James’s mother. I stood up and shook my head.
“That’s enough, now, James,” I said. “I don’t want to hear any more.”
I took hold of his elbow and guided him out of the bathroom. He went quietly. In the living room I turned him over to the custody of the Leers.
“Look at you,” said Amanda, as we came down the stairs. “Shame on you.”
James said, “Let’s just go.”
“What did you do?” She looked him up and down, horrified. “I threw that coat in the garbage, James.”
He shrugged. “I dug it back out,” he said.
She turned to me, looking, for the first time, truly grave. “He doesn’t wear that thing to class, does he, Professor Tripp?”
“Never,” I said. “No, I’ve never seen it before tonight.”
“Come on, Jimmy,” said Fred, wrapping his fingers around the thin upper stalk of James’s arm. “Let’s leave these good people alone. Good night, then, Grady.”
“Good night. Nice to have met you both,” I said. “Take care of him,” I added, and immediately regretted it.
“Don’t you worry about that,” said Amanda Leer. “We’ll take care of him, all right.”
“Let go of me,” said James. He tried to pull free, but the old man’s grip on him was humiliating and firm. As he was dragged out the front door into the night, James turned back to look at me, his mouth twisted and sarcastic, his eyes reproachful.
“The Wonder brothers,” he said.
Then his parents hustled him across the front yard and, like a couple of kidnappers in a low-budget thriller, stuffed him without ceremony into the back of their beautiful car.
AFTER JAMES WAS GONE, I went to stand in the doorway of Sam’s old room. The moon was shining in through the window and I could see the unmade bed, empty, admirably bare and cool. I felt myself drawn toward it. I went in and switched on the light. A few years after his death the bedroom that was Sam’s in the house on Inverness Avenue had been converted into a kind of sewing room or study for Irene, but this room in the country remained his, and the decor and furnishings were those of a long-ago boy. Threadbare cowpokes on horseback tossed their curling lariats across the bedspread. The books on the shelf above the three-quarter-size desk bore titles such as The Real Book of the Canadian Mounties, Touchdown!, The Story of the Naval Academy, and Lem Walker, Space Surgeon. The headboard and dresser and the aforementioned desk formed a matched set, vaguely nautical in design, trimmed with rope and mock-iron grommets. Everything was faded and frayed, speckled with mildew and the industry of termites. Irene and Irv never articulated any conscious desire to make it a shrine or museum to their dead—their irremediably biological—son, but the fact remained that they hadn’t changed a thing here, and some of his old belongings from Pittsburgh—a box turtle shell, a statue of Kali, a Reisenstein Junior High banner—had even found their way like finger bones to the reliquary, out to Sam’s bedroom at Kinship.
I sat down on the little bed and fell back.