“There are combats enough about this planet,” Henry said. “Doesn’t the significance of this occasion”-gesturing toward FDR-“inspire you to at least a mean civility? I am shamed for every Hellbender here.”
Curriden and Muscles gasped and sputtered.
Beside FDR’s car, Mister JayMac said, “Sir, he speaks for me too. I hope you’ll forgive-”
“Forget it, Jay,” Mr Roosevelt said. “Boys will be boys. High spirits and high stakes are a volatile mix, eh? We’re all susceptible to a bout of intemperance these days.”
“They’re out of Wednesday’s game against Cottonton,” Mister JayMac said.
“Not on my account, I hope. I’m inclined to believe their infra-dig donnybrook reflects a long and vexing day. Go easy. Roll out the velvet.”
“They’re suspended. You wouldn’t hang a medal around an erring battle captain’s neck either, sir.”
“Hear, hear,” Colonel Elshtain said.
FDR laughed. Surprisingly, he caught sight of Phoebe and me. “Ah, Miss Pharram, Mr Boles, fine evening for a stroll. I bid you a pleasant farewell.”
Colonel Elshtain said, “Mr President, if you would.” He and Miss Tulipa traded a look, and FDR regarded me like I was a kid hospitalized with tuberculosis. My stomach did a sudden trout flop. My fingers chilled blue.
“You played sharp as a blade today, Daniel,” Mr Roosevelt told me. “You’ve a splendid future ahead of you.”
I offered a strangled croak, trying not to look like a dumb orangutan.
“It’s all right. Your friends have told me of your handicap. Please regard it as a species of bond between us, different as our individual problems may appear.” FDR nodded at the colonel. “Very well. Let him in. I’m not going to do this in front of an admiring bog.”
Let who in? Do what in front of whom?
Colonel Elshtain opened the car’s rear door and nodded me in. “The President has something to tell you, Daniel. Ride down to the front gate with him.”
Me? I hung there doubt-riddled and confused.
“Go on,” Phoebe said. “He won’t bite.”
FDR thought that hilarious. “What big teeth I have, he’s thinking. What a set of choppers. Well, Miss Pharram’s right-I hardly ever bite a potential Democratic voter.” He sobered pretty quick. “Hop in, Daniel.”
With everyone looking-even Muscles and Curriden, both like unrecognizable bog monsters-I climbed in next to FDR, behind a black chauffeur and a Secret Service agent dressed to the Beau Brummel nines. The President gave me a nod, and we drove up the slope past Darius’s apartment and McKissic House and down one leg of the circular drive to Angus Road. Fireflies winked as we purred through the summer evening.
“Colonel Elshtain asked me to break this news to you as a favor for past services skillfully rendered,” the President said. “He seemed to think its coming from me might soften it. I doubt that. All I can do is leaven the inevitable pain with an expression of our nation’s sincerest gratitude.”
Inevitable pain? What the hell?
The President fished a piece of paper-a telegram?-from an inside pocket of his linen coat. “My goodness, that’s clumsy. Forgive me.” He opened the paper out and studied it for a moment. “Daniel, your father died in the Aleutian Islands, on the sixteenth of June, not too long after the Fourth Infantry had retaken Attu from the Japanese. He’d flown to Attu with some Eleventh Air Force personnel from Umnak; they arrived in the wake of mopping-up exercises, and on an expedition of some sort to the interior, your father, Richard Oconostota Boles, and four other brave Americans died.” The President handed me the telegram. “That presents the unadorned facts, Daniel. The details I have from Colonel Elshtain, who himself has them from an officer in Graves Registration with the Alaska Command. In any event, your father died an honorable death in the service of his country.”
I held the telegram. We’d reached the front gate. The limousine, with its escort vehicles and outriders, stopped and idled. A mockingbird meowed from a pine across the road. I saw myself receiving this sorry news like somebody watching a film might follow an overhead shot of a motorcade and eavesdrop on the mutterings of a make-believe president. But FDR sat close enough to touch, and the crumbs from a loaf of French bread had funneled together in a fold of the removable seat’s dove-gray upholstery.
“I hear your parents lived apart these past few years,” FDR said. “On the other hand, a child’s affection for a parent seldom dies utterly after an estrangement, and I imagine-indeed, I hope-you still recall your father with a measure of fondness. I’m deeply honored, and likewise deeply sorry, to be the messenger of your pain.”
I couldn’t cry. You don’t sob-not, at least, if you’re a seventeen-year-old pro ballplayer-in the presence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The gist of what he’d said didn’t corkscrew immediately into me anyway, and memories of my dad crowded fast and thick. I gave the Prez a nod, opened my door, and got out.
“A lift back up to the house?” he said.
Uh-uh. My surroundings had gone all blurry and foreign, I could’ve been standing on a twilit African mud flat.
“A privilege to’ve made your acquaintance, Daniel.”
I may’ve raised my head, or not. I turned and trudged back up the lawn towards McKissic House. FDR and his crew processed off the grounds, into the honeysuckle drench of the evening.
Phoebe met me halfway, on a dead run. I handed her the telegram. She didn’t read it. Someone’d already told her what it said. She lifted her hands. She walked in a half circle. She threw herself at me, like I was a tackling dummy, and clung to me in a glut of rainy griefs. I hugged her back.
“Phoebe,” I said.
39
More than a month had passed between my buggery by Pumphrey and word of Dick Boles’s death. Call that month a fugue of dummyhood. No one in Highbridge, except Mister JayMac, had known me as anything other than a mute. So it sometimes seemed to me, and probably to others, my affliction had existed from childhood and would go into the grave with me-to everlasting muteness. Ha.
On the other hand, just getting Phoebe’s name out didn’t open the door for a whole stifled dictionary of yawps. My old friend the stammer rode half the words I did say, maybe more. Besides, I’d cast off the habit of talking. Silence seemed easier sometimes, nobler others, and sometimes just happily worrisome for the persnickety folks who wanted either answers or explanations out of me. If my tongue didn’t hurry to comply with the speech signals from Language Central, well, I didn’t sweat it. People talk too much anyhow. I prove that with my throat mike and these damned interviews.
“Danny can talk,” Phoebe announced, leading me back to the others. “He said my name.”
Miss Tulipa embraced me. Then Miss LaRaina hugged me. Kizzy appeared-she rocked me to and fro with her forehead hard on my breastbone. Even Miss Giselle clocked in with a flurry of shoulder pats. Mister JayMac, the colonel, and the Hellbenders haunted the edges of my loss like clueless border guards.
“Such a trauma,” Miss Tulipa said. “Such a trauma to overcome your laryngitis.”
“You gots to be strong,” Kizzy said, her braids like spun-metal snakes in my hands. “Mr Roozerfeld never told you that sadness to have you go lint-simple, Danny Bowes.”
I pushed Kizzy far enough back to gaze into her face. “I d-d-don’t c-care. I’m gl-glad my d-d-daddy’s dead.”
“A kid of the new school,” Hoey said from nearby. “A real lover of the fifth commandment.”
I found Hoey’s silhouette among all the others and glared at him. “Sc-scr-screw you.” Nobody whooped or laughed. In those days, you didn’t talk dirty in the presence of ladies, even if one was a woman of color and another had at best only a slippery claim on the title. So my retort to Hoey shocked the fellas as much as it did the gathered womenfolk, my champions and my comforters. Maybe only Phoebe appreciated the hasseled defiance of it, and maybe she shouldn’t have. Everyone made allowances, though-not counting Hoey, I guess-and I got back to my room without being tarred and feathered.