Chapter 1 #2
“Really, though,” Malcolm’s father had said to him, “I think it’s terrific that you’re interested in making your way on your own.
” (Malcolm slouched even lower in his seat.) “But do you really need the money that badly? I didn’t think the federal government paid that miserably, but it’s been a long time since I was in public service. ” He grinned.
He smiled back. “No,” he said, “the salary’s fine.
” (It was. It wouldn’t have been to Mr. Irvine, of course, nor to Malcolm, but it was more money than he had ever dreamed he would have, and every two weeks it arrived, a relentless accumulation of numbers.) “I’m just saving up for a down payment.
” He saw Malcolm’s face swivel toward him, and he reminded himself to tell Willem the particular lie he had told Malcolm’s father before Malcolm told Willem himself.
“Oh, well, good for you,” said Mr. Irvine. This was a goal he could understand. “And as it happens, I know just the person.”
That person was Howard Baker, who had hired him after interviewing him for fifteen distracted minutes to tutor his son in Latin, math, German, and piano.
(He wondered why Mr. Baker wasn’t hiring professionals for each subject—he could have afforded it—but didn’t ask.) He felt sorry for Felix, who was small and unappealing, and who had a habit of scratching the inside of one narrow nostril, his index finger tunneling upward until he remembered himself and quickly retracted it, rubbing it on the side of his jeans.
Eight months later, it was still unclear to him just how capable Felix was.
He wasn’t stupid, but he suffered from a lack of passion, as if, at twelve, he had already become resigned to the fact that life would be a disappointment, and he a disappointment to the people in it.
He was always waiting, on time and with his assignments completed, every Saturday at one p.m., and he obediently answered every question—his answers always ending in an anxious, querying upper register, as if every one, even the simplest (“ Salve, Felix, quid agis ?” “Um… bene ?”), were a desperate guess—but he never had any questions of his own, and when he asked Felix if there was any subject in particular he might want to try discussing in either language, Felix would shrug and mumble, his finger drifting toward his nose.
He always had the impression, when waving goodbye to Felix at the end of the afternoon—Felix listlessly raising his own hand before slouching back into the recesses of the entryway—that he never left the house, never went out, never had friends over. Poor Felix: his very name was a taunt.
The previous month, Mr. Baker had asked to speak to him after their lessons were over, and he had said goodbye to Felix and followed the maid into the study.
His limp had been very pronounced that day, and he had been self-conscious, feeling—as he often did—as if he were playing the role of an impoverished governess in a Dickensian drama.
He had expected impatience from Mr. Baker, perhaps anger, even though Felix was doing quantifiably better in school, and he was ready to defend himself if he needed—Mr. Baker paid far more than he had anticipated, and he had plans for the money he was earning there—but he was instead nodded toward the chair in front of the desk.
“What do you think’s wrong with Felix?” Mr. Baker had demanded.
He hadn’t been expecting the question, so he had to think before he answered.
“I don’t think anything’s wrong with him, sir,” he’d said, carefully.
“I just think he’s not—” Happy , he nearly said.
But what was happiness but an extravagance, an impossible state to maintain, partly because it was so difficult to articulate?
He couldn’t remember being a child and being able to define happiness: there was only misery, or fear, and the absence of misery or fear, and the latter state was all he had needed or wanted. “I think he’s shy,” he finished.
Mr. Baker grunted (this was obviously not the answer he was looking for).
“But you like him, right?” he’d asked him, with such an odd, vulnerable desperation that he experienced a sudden deep sadness, both for Felix and for Mr. Baker.
Was this what being a parent was like? Was this what being a child with a parent was like?
Such unhappinesses, such disappointments, such expectations that would go unexpressed and unmet!
“Of course,” he had said, and Mr. Baker had sighed and given him his check, which the maid usually handed to him on his way out.
The next week, Felix hadn’t wanted to play his assignment.
He was more listless than usual. “Shall we play something else?” he’d asked.
Felix had shrugged. He thought. “Do you want me to play something for you?” Felix had shrugged again.
But he did anyway, because it was a beautiful piano and sometimes, as he watched Felix inch his fingers across its lovely smooth keys, he longed to be alone with the instrument and let his hands move over its surface as fast as he could.
He played Haydn, Sonata No. 50 in D Major, one of his favorite pieces and so bright and likable that he thought it might cheer them both up.
But when he was finished, and there was only the quiet boy sitting next to him, he was ashamed, both of the braggy, emphatic optimism of the Haydn and of his own burst of self-indulgence.
“Felix,” he’d begun, and then stopped. Beside him, Felix waited. “What’s wrong?”
And then, to his astonishment, Felix had begun to cry, and he had tried to comfort him.
“Felix,” he’d said, awkwardly putting his arm around him.
He pretended he was Willem, who would have known exactly what to do and what to say without even thinking about it.
“It’s going to be all right. I promise you, it will be. ” But Felix had only cried harder.
“I don’t have any friends,” Felix had sobbed.
“Oh, Felix,” he’d said, and his sympathy, which until then had been of the remote, objective kind, clarified itself.
“I’m sorry.” He felt then, keenly, the loneliness of Felix’s life, of a Saturday spent sitting with a crippled nearly thirty-year-old lawyer who was there only to earn money, and who would go out that night with people he loved and who, even, loved him, while Felix remained alone, his mother—Mr. Baker’s third wife—perpetually elsewhere, his father convinced there was something wrong with him, something that needed fixing.
Later, on his walk home (if the weather was nice, he refused Mr. Baker’s car and walked), he would wonder at the unlikely unfairness of it all: Felix, who was by any definition a better kid than he had been, and who yet had no friends, and he, who was a nothing, who did.
“Felix, it’ll happen eventually,” he’d said, and Felix had wailed, “But when ?” with such yearning that he had winced.
“Soon, soon,” he had told him, petting his skinny back, “I promise,” and Felix had nodded, although later, walking him to the door, his little geckoey face made even more reptilian from tears, he’d had the distinct sensation that Felix had known he was lying.
Who could know if Felix would ever have friends?
Friendship, companionship: it so often defied logic, so often eluded the deserving, so often settled itself on the odd, the bad, the peculiar, the damaged.
He waved goodbye at Felix’s small back, retreating already into the house, and although he would never have said so to Felix, he somehow fancied that this was why Felix was so wan all the time: it was because Felix had already figured this out, long ago; it was because he already knew.
He knew French and German. He knew the periodic table.
He knew—as much as he didn’t care to—large parts of the Bible almost by memory.
He knew how to help birth a calf and rewire a lamp and unclog a drain and the most efficient way to harvest a walnut tree and which mushrooms were poisonous and which were not and how to bale hay and how to test a watermelon, an apple, a squash, a muskmelon for freshness by thunking it in the right spot.
(And then he knew things he wished he didn’t, things he hoped never to have to use again, things that, when he thought of them or dreamed of them at night, made him curl into himself with hatred and shame.)