A Spool of Blue Thread (3 page)

But Abby said, “We’re his parents! Parents are
supposed
to be excited.”

Although he guarded his privacy obsessively—behaved as if he had state secrets to hide—Denny himself was an inveterate snoop. Nothing was safe from him. He read his sisters’ diaries and his mother’s client files. He left desk drawers suspiciously smooth on top but tumbled about underneath.

And then when he reached his teens there was the drinking, the smoking, the truancy, the pot and maybe worse. Battered cars pulled up to the house with unfamiliar drivers honking and shouting, “Yo, Shitwank!”
Twice he got in trouble with the police. (Driving without a license; fake ID.) His style of dress went way beyond your usual adolescent grunge: old men’s overcoats bought at flea markets; crusty, baggy tweed pants; sneakers held together with duct tape. His hair was unwashed, ropy with grease, and he gave off the smell of a musty clothes closet. He could have been a homeless person. Which was so ironic, Abby told Red. A blood member of the Whitshank family, one of those enviable families that radiate clannishness and togetherness and just … specialness; but he trailed around their edges like some sort of charity case.

By then both boys were working part-time at Whitshank Construction. Denny proved competent, but not so good with the customers. (To a woman who said, flirtatiously, “I worry you’ll stop liking me if I tell you I’ve changed my mind about the paint color,” his answer was “Who says I ever liked you in the first place?”) Stem, on the other hand, was obliging with the customers and devoted to the work—staying late, asking questions, begging for another project. Something involving wood, he begged. Stem loved to deal with wood.

Denny developed a lofty tone of voice, supercilious and amused. “Certainly, my man,” he would answer when Stem asked for the sports section, and “Whatever you say, Abigail.” At Abby’s well-known “orphan dinners,” with their assemblages of misfits and loners and unfortunates, Denny’s courtly behavior came across first as charming and then as offensive. “Please, I insist,” he told Mrs. Mallon, “have
my
chair; it can bear your weight better.” Mrs. Mallon, a stylish divorcee who took pride in her extreme thinness, cried, “Oh! Why—” but he said, “
Your
chair’s kind of fragile,” and his parents couldn’t do a thing, not without drawing even more attention to the situation. Or B. J. Autry, a raddled blonde whose harsh, cawing laugh made everyone wince: Denny devoted a whole Easter Sunday to complimenting her “bell-like tinkle.” Though B. J., for one, gave
as good as she got. “Buzz off, kid,” she said finally. Red hauled Denny over the coals afterward. “In this house,” he said, “we don’t insult our guests. You owe B. J. an apology.”

Denny said, “Oh, my mistake. I didn’t realize she was such a delicate flower.”

“Everybody’s delicate, son, if you poke them hard enough.”

“Really? Not me,” Denny said.

Of course they thought of sending him to therapy. Or Abby did, at least. All along she had thought of it, but now she grew more insistent. Denny refused. One day during his junior year, she asked his help taking the dog to the vet—a two-person job. After they’d dragged Clarence into the car, Denny threw himself on the front seat and folded his arms across his chest, and they set off. Behind them, Clarence whimpered and paced, scritching his toenails across the vinyl upholstery. The whimpers turned to moans as the vet’s office drew closer. Abby sailed past the vet and kept going. The moans became fainter and more questioning, and eventually they stopped. Abby drove to a low stucco building, parked in front and cut the engine. She walked briskly around to the passenger side and opened the door for Denny. “Out,” she ordered. Denny sat still for a moment but then obeyed, unfolding himself so slowly and so grudgingly that he almost
oozed
out. They climbed the two steps to the building’s front stoop, and Abby punched a button next to a plaque reading
RICHARD HANCOCK, M.D
. “I’ll collect you in fifty minutes,” she said. Denny gave her an impassive stare. When a buzzer sounded, he opened the door, and Abby returned to the car.

Red had trouble believing this story. “He just walked in?” he asked Abby. “He just went along with it?”

“Of course,” Abby said breezily, and then her eyes filled with tears. “Oh, Red,” she said, “can you imagine what a hard time he must be having, if he let me do that?”

Denny saw Dr. Hancock weekly for two or three months. “Hankie,” he called him. (“I’ve got no time to clean the basement; it’s a
goddamn Hankie day.”) He never said what they talked about, and Dr. Hancock of course didn’t, either, although Abby phoned him once to ask if he thought a family conference might be helpful. Dr. Hancock said he did not.

This was in 1990, late 1990. In early 1991, Denny eloped.

The girl was named Amy Lin. She was the wishbone-thin, curtain-haired, Goth-costumed daughter of two Chinese-American orthopedists, and she was six weeks pregnant. But none of this was known to the Whitshanks. They had never heard of Amy Lin. Their first inkling came when her father phoned and asked if they had any idea of Amy’s whereabouts. “Who?” Abby said. She thought at first he must have dialed the wrong number.

“Amy Lin, my daughter. She’s gone off with your son. Her note said they’re getting married.”

“They’re
what
?” Abby said. “He’s sixteen years old!”

“So is Amy,” Dr. Lin said. “Her birthday was day before yesterday. She seems to be under the impression that sixteen is legal marrying age.”

“Well, maybe in Mozambique,” Abby said.

“Could you check Denny’s room for a note, please? I’ll wait.”

“All right,” Abby said. “But I really think you’re mistaken.”

She laid the receiver down and called for Jeannie—the one most familiar with Denny’s ways—to help her look for a note. Jeannie was just as disbelieving as Abby. “Denny? Married?” she asked as they climbed the stairs. “He doesn’t even have a girlfriend!”

“Oh, clearly the man is bonkers,” Abby said. “And so imperious! He introduced himself as ‘Dr. Lin.’ He had that typical doctor way of ordering people about.”

Naturally, they didn’t find a note, or anything else telltale—a love letter or a photograph. Jeannie even checked a tin box on Denny’s closet shelf that Abby hadn’t known about, but all it held was a pack of Marlboros and a matchbook. “See?” Abby said triumphantly.

But Jeannie wore a thoughtful expression, and on their way back
down the stairs she said, “When has Denny
ever
left a note, though, for any reason?”

“Dr. Lin has it all wrong,” Abby said with finality. She picked up the receiver and said, “It appears that you’re wrong, Dr. Lin.”

So it was left to the Lins to locate the couple, after their daughter called them collect to tell them she was fine although maybe the teeniest bit homesick. She and Denny were holed up in a motel outside Elkton, Maryland, having run into a snag when they tried to apply for a marriage license. By that time they had been missing three days, so the Whitshanks were forced to admit that Dr. Lin must not be bonkers after all, although they still couldn’t quite believe that Denny would do such a thing.

The Lins drove to Elkton to retrieve them, returning directly to the Whitshank house to hold a two-family discussion. It was the first and only time that Red and Abby laid eyes on Amy. They found her bewilderingly unattractive—sallow and unhealthy-looking, and lacking any sign of spirit. Also, as Abby said later, it was a jolt to see how well the Lins seemed to know Denny. Amy’s father, a small man in a powder-blue jogging suit, spoke to him familiarly and even kindly, and her mother patted Denny’s hand in a consoling way after he finally allowed that an abortion might be wiser. “Denny must have been to their house any number of times,” Abby told Red, “while you and I didn’t realize Amy even existed.”

“Well, it’s different with daughters,” Red said. “You know how we generally get to meet Mandy and Jeannie’s young men, but I’m not sure the young men’s parents always meet Mandy and Jeannie.”

“No,” Abby said, “that’s not what I’m talking about. This is more like he didn’t just meet her family; he
joined
it.”

“Rubbish,” Red told her.

Abby didn’t seem reassured.

They did try to talk with Denny about the elopement once the Lins left, but all he would say was that he’d been looking forward to taking care of a baby. When they said he was too young to take care of
a baby, he was silent. And when Stem asked, in his clumsy, puppyish way, “So are you and Amy, like, engaged now?” Denny said, “Huh? I don’t know.”

In fact, the Whitshanks never saw Amy again, and as far as they could tell, Denny didn’t, either. By the end of the next week he was safely installed in a boarding school for problem teenagers up in Pennsylvania, thanks to Dr. Hancock, who made all the arrangements. Denny completed his junior and senior years there, and since he claimed to have no interest in construction work, he spent both summers busing tables in Ocean City. The only times he came home anymore were for major events, like Grandma Dalton’s funeral or Jeannie’s wedding, and then he was gone again in a flash.

It wasn’t right, Abby said. They hadn’t had him long enough. Children were supposed to stick around till eighteen, at the very least. (The girls hadn’t moved away even for college.) “It’s like he’s been stolen from us,” she told Red. “He was taken before his time!”

“You talk like he’s died,” Red told her.

“I
feel
like he’s died,” she said.

And whenever he did come home, he was a stranger. He had a different smell, no longer the musty-closet smell but something almost chemical, like new carpeting. He wore a Greek sailor’s cap that Abby (a product of the sixties) associated with the young Bob Dylan. And he spoke to his parents politely, but distantly. Did he resent them for shipping him off? But they hadn’t had a choice! No, his grudge must have gone farther back. “It’s because I didn’t shield him properly,” Abby guessed.

“Shield him from what?” Red asked.

“Oh … never mind.”

“Not from
me
,” Red told her.

“If you say so.”

“I’m not taking the rap for this, Abby.”

“Fine.”

At such moments, they hated each other.

And then Denny was off to St. Eskil—a miracle, in view of his checkered past and his C-minus average. Though you couldn’t say college changed things. He was still the Whitshanks’ mystery child.

Not even that famous phone call changed things, because they never did talk it out with him. They never sat him down and said, “Tell us: gay, or not gay? Just
explain
yourself, is all we ask.” Other events followed too fast. He didn’t stay long enough in one place. After Christmas he used his return ticket to go back to Minnesota, probably on account of the girlfriend, and worked for a month or two at some kind of plumbers’ supply, or so they gathered when he sent Jeannie a visored cap for her birthday reading
THOMPSON PIPES & FITTINGS
. But the next they heard, he was in Maine. He got a job rebuilding a boat; he got fired; he said he was going back to school but apparently nothing came of that.

He had this way of talking on the phone that was so intense and animated, his parents could start to believe that he felt some urgent need for connection. For weeks at a time he might call every Sunday until they grew to expect it, almost depend on it, but then he’d fall silent for months and they had no means of reaching him. It seemed perverse that someone so mobile did not own a mobile phone. By now Abby had signed them up for caller ID, but what use was that? Denny was
OUT OF AREA
. He was
UNKNOWN CALLER
. There should have been a special display for him:
CATCH ME IF YOU CAN
.

He was living in Vermont for a while, but then he sent a postcard from Denver. At one point he joined forces with someone who had invented a promising software product, but that didn’t last very long. It seemed jobs kept disappointing him, as did business partners and girlfriends and entire geographical regions.

In 1997, he invited the family to his wedding at a New York restaurant where his wife-to-be worked as a waitress and he was the chef. The what? How had
that
come about? At home he’d never cooked anything more ambitious than a can of Hormel chili. Everybody went, of course—Red and Abby and Stem and the girls and both the girls’ husbands. In hindsight, there may have been too many of them. They outnumbered everyone else. But they were invited, after all! He said he’d like all of them there! He had used that intense tone of voice that suggested he
needed
them there. So they rented a minivan and drove north to throng the tiny restaurant, which was really more of a bar—a divey little place with six stools at a wooden counter and four round, dinky tables. Another waitress and the owner attended, along with the bride’s mother. The bride, whose name was Carla, wore a spaghetti-strapped maternity dress that barely covered her underwear. She was clearly older than Denny (who was twenty-two at the time, way too young to think of marrying). Her rough mat of hair was dyed a uniform dense brown, like a dead thing lying on her head, and her blue-glass-bead eyes had a hard look. She seemed almost older than her own mother, a plump, bubbly blonde in a sundress. Still, the Whitshanks did their best. They circulated before the ceremony, asking Carla where she and Denny had met, asking the other waitress whether she was the maid of honor. Carla and Denny had met at work. There wasn’t going to be a maid of honor.

Denny behaved quite sociably, for Denny. He wore a decent-looking dark suit and a red tie, and he spoke cordially to everyone, moving from person to person but returning betweentimes to stand at Carla’s side with one hand resting on the small of her back in a proprietary way. Carla was pleasant but distracted, as if she were wondering whether she’d left a burner on at home. She had a New York accent.

Abby made it her special project to get to know the bride’s mother. She chose the chair next to her when it was time to sit down, and the two of them began talking together in lowered tones, their heads nearly touching and their eyes veering repeatedly toward the bridal couple. This gave the rest of the Whitshanks some hope that once
they were on their own again, they would learn the inside story. Because what was happening here, exactly? Was it a love match? Really? And when was that baby due?