The Son of Someone Famous (2 page)

The girl in the drugstore buying the depilatory was not that sort, so I wasn't afraid of her or in awe of her. The druggist was back in the Prescription Department for quite some time, and I finally spoke up, because the silence was too heavy.

I said, “I thought most people with hair on the soles
of their feet were born without bones and only lived five hours.”

She was very good at keeping a straight face. She said, “Who said
I
have bones? Who said
I
was alive?”

“I'm Adam Blessing,” I said. My first name really was Adam. My mother's name had been Annabell Blessing. I doubt that anyone in the town of Storm remembered who she married, but I was playing it safe by dropping my father's name altogether.

“I know your name,” this girl said.

“That's the thing about a small town,” I said.

“What is?”

“Everyone knows everyone else's business,” I said.

“You know I'm buying a depilatory for my hairy legs,” she said, “and all I know is your name. Is that fair, even or equal?”

I laughed. I like funny girls. I always have. I sit beside most girls without being able to think of anything to say but what my father would classify under the heading “manifest knowledge.”

“A.J.,” my father likes to instruct me, “never discuss manifest knowledge. Never comment on the weather, or the news of the day, or anything generally known, obvious and unnecessary to mention. If you can't be original, be silent.”

Usually I am silent around girls. Billie Kay was a rare exception, but she was not a girl, she was a woman, and she was hilarious. . . . Maybe too hilarious for her own good. My father said he wanted a wife, not a performer. That was
one
of his excuses for ditching Billie Kay, anyway. Billie Kay's
version of their breakup was that my father would never love a woman because my mother's death had made him too guilty. That was probably true. In his cups, my father often said, “I should have loved your mother more. She loved me with a passion, A.J.—an unbelievable passion.”

I smiled at this girl in the drugstore and said, “Life isn't fair, or even, or equal, but I'll pretend it is and give you one of
my
secrets.”

“I'm waiting,” she said.

I put away my journal and walked toward her. “You have to remember, it really is a secret,” I said.

She said, “So is the fact I have hairy legs.”

“A lot of girls do,” I said.

“But this is the first time I've ever bought anything to remove it,” she said.

“My secret is a first, too.”

“What is it?” she said.

“I was expelled from school,” I told her, not even knowing why I was telling her. I hadn't planned to ever tell anyone in that town. “Usually I'm just suspended, or asked not to come back the next year. This time I was shipped out in midterm—pfffft,
fini
!”

“Was it a private school?” she asked.

“Yes. Choate.”

“Never heard of it.”

I shrugged, even though I was a little disappointed that she'd never heard of Choate. “Well, I can't impress you then.”

“Is it a fancy school?”

“Most people think so.”

“Why did you get expelled?”

“For cheating on an English exam,” I told her.

“You really cheated?”

“Yes. I really cheated,” I said. “But the thing is, I knew the poem by heart. I just blocked during the exam. I copied from the guy in front of me. But I really knew the poem. I still do. I can recite it right now.”

At that point the druggist appeared carrying a small green tube and reading the print on it. “Remove facial hair with soft cream care,” he recited. “Hairgo.”

It was obvious the hair she wanted to remove was no more on her legs than on the soles of her feet. I hadn't noticed a mustache on her face. I used to help Billie Kay remove hers when she was doing her upper arms. Perhaps I'd spent too much time with an older woman who treated me like her buddy instead of her stepson; all I knew was it didn't faze me one way or the other when the druggist mentioned facial hair. But it fazed the girl plenty. She clapped her right hand across her mouth and mumbled something to the druggist.

“What?” the druggist said.

“I said I'll take it.”

“Are you sure your mother knows you're fooling with this stuff?” the druggist said. For some reason he shot me a dirty look, and then continued, “It's one thing to take it off your legs, Brenda Belle, but you shouldn't play with something that can get into your eyes and blind you for life!”

Brenda Belle.

That
was an unlikely name for her. That was a name for some bovine blonde with a sweet disposition and nothing to say.

“I'll walk you home and recite the poem,” I horned in.

She still kept her hand across her mouth. “No!” she snapped back in a muffled exclamation.

“Why?” I asked.

“Stand aside, boy,” the druggist commanded.

I stood aside while she passed him three dollars.

“You tell your mother what you bought before you use it,” the druggist said.

“Skip the poem,” I said to her. “I'll just walk you home.”

She had two cents change coming, but she didn't wait for it. She headed out the door like the place was on fire.

“Hey, Brenda, wait!” I shouted, but she was out of sight before I could even get my coat from the hook.

The druggist eyed me coldly while I buttoned up and put my scarf around my neck. “What's the matter with a boy like you?” he said. “A boy like you ought to use his head. That was a highly personal transaction. A gentleman steps aside in such a circumstance, in case you didn't know!”

I didn't know how to answer him, how to get across that it hadn't seemed that highly personal because of knowing Billie Kay so well, all her beauty secrets and what she called “tricks of the trade.”

I didn't have to answer, because he went right on bawling me out. “Now, you're a newcomer,” he said, “and I don't know where you come from, but you learn yourself some manners, Mister, or don't show your face around my place!”

I was ashamed and then angry. There was a time when I'd have answered, “I don't think you know who I am!” and then told him. . . . But all that was in the past.

I was on my own, in Storm, Vermont, for the first time in my life. It was my own idea, because I was fresh out of ideas for my future. I wouldn't have blamed my father for completely disowning me at that point in my life. I was certainly nothing he could brag about, and everything that could disappoint him.

“The goddam trouble is,” I told him over the long-distance phone one week before that Wednesday, “I'm sick of being the famous man's son!” (I knew I was copping out when I said it, but I said it anyway.)

“That's not the goddam trouble,” he barked back. “That's the goddam excuse.” You don't fool a man like my father. What I wished I could say was something like: I'm sorry I'm a lousy son, and I don't blame you if you hate me. I could never say anything like that to him. I thought that was probably part of the problem: I could never seem to level with him.

“Listen,” I said. (I prefaced a lot of my sentences with “Listen” when I spoke to him; I guess it was because I was always so aware that he was forced to stop really important things to tend to my little messes.) “Listen, Dad, how about letting me go somewhere where no one knows who I am?”

“And where would
that
be?” he barked back at me.

“Couldn't I go live with Grandpa Blessing?”

There was a long silence. For a moment, I had this crazy
idea that my father was going to answer,
A.J., I want you with me.
It was really an insane thought, not only because my father travels so much, but also because how the hell would he explain me? I mean, was a man like my father supposed to introduce me by saying, “This is my son, the troublemaker. No school will keep him. I have him with me because there's no place else for him to go.”

During that silence, I was also thinking of a line from a Robert Frost poem: “Home is the place where, when you have to go there, They have to take you in.”

My father finally spoke. “Grandpa Blessing doesn't even know you.”

“He sends me a Christmas card every year. He asks me to visit him. He says he lives all alone.”

“Maybe he could use a little extra money,” my father said.

I said, “What?” I'd heard him very clearly, though; I sometimes say “What?” when I'm in shock. The idea of paying someone to take me in was what shocked me. It shouldn't have, I guess. After all, my father had paid Choate and all the other schools—why not a relative?

My father said, “I said maybe we can work something out with him. Maybe that's not a bad idea.”

So there I was, one week to the day later, on my own, with this hick druggist dressing me down for something I wasn't even sure I'd been that wrong in doing.

“I'm very sorry, sir,” I told the druggist as I picked up my books from the table. “You're absolutely right.”

I was just going to have to learn . . . and to unlearn. . . .
But I worried over how the girl felt about me, how Brenda Belle felt.

Oh, and incidentally, my grandfather refused my father's offer of money. He also told my father that I wouldn't need much of an allowance in Storm, either. No more than five dollars a week.

At Choate I'd been managing on one hundred and fifty a month.

Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.

Hairgo is a waxy substance you apply warm, let dry on your skin, and then rip off in exactly ten minutes. Seven minutes had passed that night when my mother entered my bedroom and said, “Always the clown, hmmm, Brenda Belle?”

What made her say that was the wax mustache I had made from Hairgo. It was colored pink and firmly attached to my upper lip.

I made a face and bowed low, letting her think I was just fooling around. I didn't want her to know my mustache was a depilatory, for fear she'd go into one of her famous panics.

“You know, Brenda Belle,” she said, sitting down on the edge of my bed, “playing the clown isn't a very feminine thing to do. A funny woman is rarely a lady. I'm telling you this for your own good.”

“You're probably right,” I said, watching the second hand on my alarm clock. I had two minutes to go before it was time to remove the wax.

“I don't want to criticize you,” my mother continued, “but it is a fact that very few female comediennes have happy lives.”

“I don't particularly want to be a female comedienne,” I said.

“Men laugh at funny women,” my mother said, “but they rarely fall in love with them. A man likes a serious woman, a quiet woman.”

“I plan to be a quiet, serious woman,” I told her. “I promise.”

“You don't seem to be headed in that direction, Brenda Belle. Even now you're intent on being the funny girl.”

“I'm just practicing for a part in a school play,” I said.

“Brenda Belle, you're not going to take a male role in a play, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I've decided against it.”

My fingers were playing with the wax mustache; I was seeing if it was possible to just pull it off in front of her, without her guessing its real purpose. The wax would not give an inch.

The ten minutes were up.

“You're at an age now when you should begin to grow out of your tomboy stage,” my mother said.

“I intend to,” I said. “Excuse me, I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Just a moment, Brenda Belle,” she said.

“What is it?” I said impatiently.

“Please sit down, dear. I came to have a little . . . to discuss certain . . . to explain—” her voice drifted away without finishing.

I suddenly realized what she was up to. It was a rotten time for it. “I know the facts of life,” I blurted out, and I
could tell by the look in her eyes that she was hurt because I wouldn't sit down.

She stood up. “I guess you don't have time for a talk with your mother.”

“Yes, I do,” I said. “I just want to go to the bathroom first.”

“I come in here for a serious talk with you, and you sit here wearing that mustache. Then you jump up and announce you know it all. I can see you're not in a receptive frame of mind.”

“Just let me go to the bathroom first,” I said desperately.

“Never mind,” she answered, walking toward the door. “You'd rather be a clown and a know-it-all. I can see that.”

I think she was really relieved that she didn't have to go through with it. She was hurt, too, but more relieved than hurt, because sex was number one on the list of the ten things she least liked discussing. My father was a close second.