Chapter 5 The Motives of a Dead Boy’s Dad An Essay Question
The Motives of a Dead Boy’s Dad: An Essay Question
Why I am telling you this now? Well, Nick Foster is dead, and Sharon Foster is in an assisted-living facility in Phoenix with dementia.
My parents are gone, too, buried beneath a great, sweeping hydrangea in the tiny cemetery in Tallmadge.
(The graveyard is not quite two and a half acres.
To have a plot there, it helps to have family roots in the community that snake as deep into the soil as the Winston family’s.) And, as a culture, we have lived through the #MeToo movement and vilified, with cause, the older men who crave teen girls the way most of us want chocolate.
But, in all fairness, even now I am not certain that I view Theo Catton as a pedophile.
Would he have been in the eyes of the law?
Of course. But even when we had sex for the first time, when I was fifteen, I looked older.
I was five and a half feet tall, a thirty-four B, and I had a triangular bush as thick and dark as Brillo, and pudenda that—when we fucked—would become wetter than rainforest. (Am I bragging in an aberrant fashion?
Yes. But I lost all filters during the COVID pandemic.
And I am telling the truth.) My point is that I did not look like a child.
I did not look fifteen. I looked old…enough.
So, some days I merely classify Theo Catton as exploitive and despicable, but not perverted.
Some days. Not all.
Because even if I looked older than I was, there remained a fundamental power imbalance.
The sex between Donald J. Trump and Stormy Daniels may have been consensual in the most technical of senses, but, assuming it happened, she was twenty-seven and he was sixty; she was living hand (or other bodily parts) to mouth and he was among the richest men on the planet; she could give him one exquisite and ephemeral moment of pleasure, and he could transform her life entirely—if, in the world of transactional sex, he had the inclination.
Now, my classifications are irrelevant, though, arguably, I could be the Carl Linnaeus of Older Men Taxonomy, able to categorize by genus and species the ways men like Theo would choose girls like me.
As I have told you, he wasn’t the only older man who picked me—or, perhaps, whom I allowed to pluck me.
And, of course, my opinion doesn’t mean he wasn’t a pedophile. I looked eighteen, but I was fifteen. And even if I was a mature fifteen-year-old in terms of physical development, the first time he took me, I had not yet started my sophomore year of high school.
Think about that.
A married man with kids of his own, a neighbor in a tiny, insular suburb, choosing a girl in a golf skirt with puppy dog head covers on her clubs. Sounds absurd. But it wasn’t.
It isn’t.
There have always been men like him and girls like me, and there always will be.
So, Nick Foster.
Let’s talk motives.
In hindsight, after realizing he had seen his dead son’s schoolmate checking into a hotel with Theo Catton, he could have done any number of things, assuming he did anything at all.
(Yes, he could have done nothing. He had, obviously, other things on his mind, other tasks to occupy him.) He could go to my parents.
He could approach Theo. He could ask me if I needed some sort of intervention. And, yes, he could go to the police.
When he saw me in the hotel lobby, I was eighteen—which might have been an argument to leave the two of us alone. But he didn’t know that. I could have been seventeen. Or even a sixteen-year-old who’d skipped a grade.
What do you think he did? Pretend you’re back in high school and it’s an essay question. Compare and contrast. Defend your thesis.
My mother was closer to fifty than forty, but privilege—the golf and tennis, the impeccable stylist at a posh salon, the fact that shrimp is the caloric celery of the sea—kept her young.
Oh, she smoked, and she was the sort of careless smoker whose ashes were as likely to wind up on tabletops as ashtrays, and we know smoking wreaks hell on your skin, but still people would meet her and joke that she must have given birth to Spencer when she was eleven.
Alexis, how could you possibly have a son about to start his senior year at Princeton?
How? In 1978, she was a slender beauty with hair dyed chestnut, any gray faultlessly smothered, almond eyes that seemed to see through you—and capable of not seeing what was obviously there, if it was going to upset her meticulous equanimity.
She liked to wear sleeveless shirts in the summer, because her upper arms, in defiance of gravity and age, were sinewy and firm: nothing about my mother, back then, was quaggy or sloppy or tired.
Speaking objectively, I could see what Sam Stetson saw in her.
The night before Kenny Foster’s funeral, we sat outside on the terrace.
The sun had set, but it was August and still plenty warm.
She had pulled one of the wrought-iron chairs over beside the chaise, where I was curled up with my head on a pillow I had balanced on the armrest. She was leaning into me, her forearms on her slacks, occasionally stroking my head as if I were our dog.
“Your father doesn’t believe it’s smart for us to go to the funeral. But I think it’s worse if we don’t go,” she was saying. “He’s worried about the appearance of guilt if we attend. I’m worried that it looks like we don’t care if we don’t.”
“I’m going. I don’t care if you two go.”
“I know. But appearances really aren’t my biggest concern. We’ll all go, don’t fret. My concern is you.”
“Me?”
I liked the feel of her nails on my scalp. She got a manicure weekly. I leaned into them.
“You feel terrible already. The funeral is only going to make you feel worse. Seeing his family, his friends. I wish you were leaving for Yale tomorrow and could just get away from Tallmadge. From all of this.”
“I told you, I’m not—”
“I know, I know. You’re not going. My hope is you’ll change your mind.”
“I won’t. The whole idea of golf disgusts me.”
She pulled her fingers away and looked briefly at her nails. Then she shrugged and said, “So, don’t play golf. Most people don’t go to Yale to play golf.”
“It’s the association.”
She chuckled, and I understood why people liked her laugh. Even her laugh exuded self-possession and composure. “Things feel worse now than they will in a month. People heal.”
“His parents won’t.”
“No,” she agreed, and for a moment I was taken aback. But I appreciated her candor. “Not completely. I hardly know them, but I know I’d never be the same if something happened to you or Spencer.”
We heard my father coming outside from the kitchen. “None of us had dessert after dinner,” she said with sudden and clearly forced cheer. “I think your father and I will have some ice cream. Would you like to keep us company?”
I didn’t, because I didn’t want to try to feign normalcy. But since they were agreeing to attend Kenny Foster’s funeral, it felt like the least I could do.
My coach, Heidi Romming, and I spoke one more time that awful month.
“I know you don’t want to pick up your clubs right now,” she said on the phone, “but you might in a few days.”
“I won’t.”
“If you change your mind, we could—”
“We could what? Hit a bucket of balls at the range?” I barked at her, cutting her off.
“Mira, come on. I didn’t suggest that. Take a breath.”
I had been wrong to snap at her, and I apologized. But the fact was, part of her coaching was to watch me at the driving range—the real range nearby in Eastchester, not the net (now gone) at the Tallmadge club—as together we’d work on my drives from the tee and my long irons from the mat.
“Why don’t I stop by the house later this week,” she said. “You pick a day and a time, and I’ll see if I can make it work. Or I’ll pick you up, and we’ll just go for a walk.”
The idea of a walk fascinated me. I used to joke that the only reason golf was invented was so that men would be able to converse about meaningful things without having to look each other in the eye.
Perhaps this was true for me, too. The truth was, Coach Romming and I played golf together only a half dozen times in all the years I knew her.
Usually we would focus on one element of the game, either at her club or mine, or we would go to that driving range.
The reality was that she was making me a better player, but very likely she knew then as I do now that I was never going to be an LPGA champion.
I was good. I was very good. Exceptional even.
Back then, Sports Illustrated had a weekly half page highlighting impressive accomplishments by amateur athletes, while The Sporting News once in a while would devote twenty-five or thirty words to a remarkable feat by an exceptionally talented teenage athlete.
I appeared one time in each publication: in The Sporting News, it was when, at fifteen, I shot a sixty-eight at Winged Foot.
I appeared in Sports Illustrated at sixteen, when I had a hole in one at Buckeye.
The postage-stamp-size color photo of me made me look like one of the beautiful girls with beautiful skin in the Clearasil ads, and some editorial wag christened me the “Lynx of the Links.” (The nickname, for better or worse, didn’t stick.
If only we’d had TikTok back then…) I was never in a magazine dedicated to golf, because they largely featured male golfers for their male readers.
They probably should have thought this policy through: those men would have loved a picture of cheesecake-me in a golf skirt one size too small.