Year After Henry (4 page)

Katherine Grigsby had left Larry his balls, but she had taken his heart. That had been seven months ago and there was nothing he could do about it. At one time, he'd have phoned up Henry. “Let's go get a beer,” he'd suggest, and Henry would be there, sitting on a stool at Murphy's Tavern by the time Larry even arrived. They would sit side by side at the bar, Larry trying not to look at Evie's ass if she was working, knowing all about Henry and Evie but pretending that he didn't. He and Henry would toss back a few beers, catch whatever ball game was on the tiny TV dangling from the ceiling behind the bar. And when it came time to go home, Larry would feel better, as if he'd actually
talked
to someone about his problems. Henry's physical body sitting there on the bar stool next to him was word enough, a paragraph, a whole book
. I'm here for you, buddy
, Henry was saying. Now, Henry was dead. Larry had lost a brother, but he had gained a court order restricting him from intruding upon Ricky Santino's classroom, upon Ricky Santino's life, upon Ricky Santino period. He now had to stay fifty yards from Ricky Santino, who had stolen his wife and child away from him.

Larry knew that he shouldn't have barged into Ricky's classroom as he did that day when he first found out about the affair. Katherine had been in the teacher's room, smoking another one of her three cigarettes a day, no more, no less. And Larry had come in during study period to find her there. “I think we should take Jonathan to Washington, DC, this summer,” he had said, thinking his son, their son, was now old enough to take a deep interest in the nation's capital. But instead of agreeing or even disagreeing, Katherine had prematurely stubbed one of those three daily cigarettes in the ashtray, straightened her skirt, and said, “I need to get back to class.” And she had walked out past him, as uncaring as though he were a coat rack. At least that's how he felt then, but he had flattered himself, because no coat rack would ever be given a restraining order. What Larry Munroe didn't know, as he stood there wondering what he had done to warrant the present cold shoulder of Katherine Grigsby, his wife, who had refused all offers of the Munroe name herself, was that he was only days away from losing Jonathan. Or that his life was about to go to hell in a mail sack, the proverbial handbasket being reserved for coat racks. That's when Maurice Finney had come into the teacher's room, his aging hippie look barely contained in his corduroy jacket with the brown patches on the elbows, and the matching corduroy slacks. “Jesus, man,” Maurice had said, giving Larry a gentle slap on the back. “I just heard about you and Katherine breaking up. Fucking bummer, man. How are you taking it, buddy? You cool? How's Jonathan taking it? I wouldn't be this together, man, if it was me. I mean, if this was still the sixties, different story. You could pretend it was a bad case of Karma. But these days? Well, this kind of shit really hurts in the new millennium.” Then Maurice found the book he had come looking for and was gone again, down the lime-green hallways of Bixley High School.

Larry had stood there for a time, staring at the cigarette butt still smoking in the ashtray, doing the math on what he'd just heard, adding in Katherine's mood minutes before, adding up the weeks and months—my God, it had been months!—that she had turned away from him in bed, had been sullen and withdrawn at the breakfast table. And she never complained anymore that he spent his Saturdays fishing or golfing. It had been since that previous spring that he even remembered her caring where he was going when he left the house. Two plus two equals four. Even a history teacher knew that. So Larry had left the teacher's room and strode on down to Katherine's own room. Before he knocked, he stood at the door and peered through the glass window. She was talking about some poem, most likely, her eyes on fire with meter and rhyme. Maybe even love. He remembered her this way when they first met and later married. They had passion to burn back then, especially Katherine, who was only eighteen and a freshman in college. At twenty-eight and already teaching history, Larry probably appeared mature and worldly to her. But then Katherine got older too, and that's when she found Larry Munroe out. Maybe he hadn't been mature and worldly after all. Maybe he had just been
older.

So Larry had knocked on her classroom door that day. When Katherine looked over at him, she knew. He could see it in her face.
She
knew
he
knew. She came to the door, stepped outside, and closed it behind her. He was about to ask her who it was, but in a second he realized. How had he been such a fool? How could he have been so stupid, so blind? “You and Ricky Santino,” was all he said to her. “You and Ricky.” She looked like she might give him an A for answering the test question correctly. “I was about to tell you, a long time ago,” she said, “and then, well, Henry died. I thought it best to wait. But now you know.” And she had backed away from him, receded into her classroom where he heard her distant voice rising again with the rhythm of the poem.

Lawrence Munroe the Fourth didn't stand outside the door and peer through the window at Ricky Santino, when he finally reached room 16. That's when he realized he had run all the way from Katherine's room in the English wing, up to the main hall, down the main hall, and over to the left wing. What if Mr. Wilcox, the principal, had caught one of his teachers running in the hall? Larry didn't look at Ricky through the window at all. Instead, he had tossed open the door and barged in. Ricky, his fellow history teacher and Bixley High's respected basketball coach now that the team had actually won a game or two, must have been discussing Italy—the Italian Renaissance maybe—because Larry remembered the shape of a boot on the map hanging from the wall as he lunged across the room, taking Ricky down in front of twenty-some screaming students. Talk about visual aids. They should have made him Teacher of the Year for finding a way to get students to pay attention. Damn Katherine for turning him into a mailman.

Do
you
remember, oh my precious girl, that little cottage we rented at the beach? I shall never forget those nights of firelight, and moonlight, and the gentle probing of your tongue. Please don't keep me from you, nor you from me, for too much longer. My heart, no, my body, needs you and needs you now. I am all fire as I write.

Larry heard the whine of the Toyota truck again as it pulled into the yard. Its door opened and closed. The front door of the house opened and closed. Five minutes passed.

“Larry!” His mother's voice. Her second assault of the day had arrived right on time. Larry brought his hand quickly away from his genitals—yes, so what if it was one old spinster writing a letter to another one? Who cares as long as the words are pure and genuine? What healthy man who still possessed his balls could turn away from the
swell of white breasts
, that
gentle, probing tongue
?

“Jesus,” Larry said, and flung the blanket aside. He was forty-three years old and he'd just been interrupted while masturbating in his old bedroom, in his mother's house, by his mom herself. Once, she had even caught him in the act, the summer he was eleven years old and Davey Pryor had given him the aging stack of Mr. Pryor's dog-eared
Playboy
s—God bless Hugh Hefner, one of America's most unsung sociologists, for having the foresight, if maybe not the foreskin, to publish through snow, through rain, through sleet and hail, a monthly issue of breasts rising up like soft white mountains. God bless that man! And it didn't matter that the magazines were old, as it would with
Newsweek,
or
Time,
or
TV
Guide
. Tits never age, at least not on the page. Nightly, beneath his blanket, Larry had hovered over issue after issue, burning up a hundred flashlight batteries after Henry had fallen asleep and only snores wafted down from the top bunk, reveling in the wonder of a naked woman and touching himself for the first
real
time, and knowing that life was going to be good, oh, life was going to kick some ass if this feeling was any indication. But then his mother had appeared—what does a kid who's just discovered the mechanics of his penis know about the value of a locked door?—his mother had materialized by his bed. And how could Larry hear her coming, what with the blood rushing to his penis, to his heart, flooding his ears, the blood rushing to his very soul? She had appeared with an armful of his laundry, clean, pure, pristine shorts and T-shirts and folded jeans, a stack of laundry in her arms, she herself smelling like June Cleaver. She had lifted the blanket and there he was. If the damn thing hadn't been in his hands, if he hadn't been gripping it so sincerely, as though it were a microphone and he was singing “Mister Sandman” into it, maybe he could have come up with an excuse. “What's
that
doing here?” he might've asked. But he couldn't, and although he hadn't bothered to struggle with the fine print, he could almost bet as he looked up into his mother's horrified face that nowhere in that printed material had Hef offered any advice on what to do if your mom catches you with your prick in your hand. On the cusp of a nervous breakdown, his mother had ordered him to burn the issues, along with colored piles of autumn leaves, in a rusty steel drum in the backyard. Early that next morning, young Larry Munroe had stood and watched tender nipples turn browner than a nipple could ever imagine before they crumbled and disappeared in orange tongues and licks of fire. He had seen breasts white as goose down grow black and cindery in the mouth of the flames, and then fly like feathers up to heaven. Tits rising on wisps of smoke as though they had wings. Slender, tender thighs turning to ash. And he had known right then, his two feet planted wildly on each side of the steel drum, that maybe life wasn't going to be so good after all. Maybe it wasn't.

But Larry had no idea how bad it would get, just thirty-one short years later, when his brother Henry would die early of a heart attack, having inherited his ancestors' penchant to deliver the mail but not their longevity. Henry was the only one Larry wanted to talk to about Katherine and Ricky Santino. And it wouldn't be with words. It would be with the closeness of two brothers sitting in a canoe, fishing, saying absolutely nothing about anything but fish and beer and the Red Sox.

“Open the door, Larry,” his mother said now. He could hear the veiled anger behind her words. “Your father is home for lunch and is standing behind me, listening to this,” she added.

“I'm standing behind your mother,” he heard his father say. “I'm listening to this.” Larry smiled. Do couples who have lived together longer than they've lived apart not realize that, at the last of it, they become vaudeville acts? Aging, dazed parrots? Had he and Katherine been saved from this same fate?

“Two days of not delivering the mail is one thing,” his mother now said. “But this is three days, Larry, and unless you're ill, it's quite enough.”

“It's been three days, son,” his father said.

“What's worse,” his mother continued, “is that Gil thinks you have some undelivered mail. For crying out loud, that's a federal offense. You're lucky your father is listening to this and can do something about it.”

“Where's the mail, son?” he heard his father ask, and Larry knew that the long face must be almost reaching the kneecaps by now. The first time Larry ever saw a rerun of
Car
54, Where Are You?
was the only time he had seen another human face as long as his own father's, when Fred Gwynne had appeared, wearing a policeman's uniform and not a mailman's, but with a face so long it was almost impossible for it to ever appear happy. What must his father's face think about a mailman breaking postal regulations, not to mention committing the most vile offense of all, which was purloining the mail.

“I don't have any mail,” Larry told the voices outside his door, as he pushed the mail pouch under his bed. He quickly grabbed up the letters on the floor and shoved them under the edge of his mattress. He got out of bed and picked up the torn envelopes he'd tossed on the floor. These he hid under the top mattress that had been Henry's bunk, back in those glorious growing-up years. Henry wouldn't care. Henry hadn't wanted to be a mailman either. He had admitted this to Larry, one night at Murphy's during a commercial break in the Super Bowl. “But hey,” Henry had added. “There's no other job where a pretty woman will invite you in for a coffee while she's still in her nightgown.” Larry would never tell anyone that Henry admired him for walking away from a heritage of registered letters, and money orders, and fountain pens that were chained like helpless dogs to the post office counter. May email destroy the American postal service forever. May it put the sucker out of business.

The letters well hidden, Larry crossed the room and, quietly as possible, he unlocked the door. Then he hurried back to his bottom bunk where he covered himself with the sheet. His mother knocked again.

“How much more do you expect your parents to bear?” she was now wondering aloud. “First, you get into a barroom brawl at school, at
school
, mind you, in a
classroom
. And Dad is good enough to hire you at the post office,
good
enough
, where you should have been working in the first place, like your brother. And now this? How much more should we bear, Larry?”

“I'm listening to this,” his father reminded him.

“The door is open,” Larry said, the sheet now pulled up to his chin.

“No it isn't,” said his mother.

“It isn't, son,” said his father.

“Yes, it is,” said Larry.

And then they were both standing in his room, his mother looking older than sixty-seven, her face flushed with anger, the same anger as the day of the
Playboy
s, his father's face longer than the day when his son told him he wanted to teach history and not receive the silver letter opener after all. Longer than the day when Larry Munroe had walked into his parents' kitchen and told them that their younger boy, Henry, was dead. Would they ever forgive him for being the harbinger of such bad news? Should he have written a kindly letter instead, put it in a yellow envelope scented with lilac, given it a few days to flutter its way to their street, to the pretty mailbox with the bluebird painted on its front, bringing the horrible word.
Henry's had a heart attack. Jeanie found him dead this morning. He died in his sleep
.
Please
don't forget to use your zip code.