Chapter 5 The Motives of a Dead Boy’s Dad An Essay Question #2
But I probably wasn’t LPGA caliber. I wasn’t consistent: that same mercurial part of me that could bash in a high school student’s windshield or go to hotels with a married man might cause me to lose focus when I needed it most. A month after I shot that sixty-eight at Winged Foot, I shot an eighty-one at Tallmadge.
(What distracted me that day at Tallmadge?
On the first hole, an excellent golfer ten years my senior knew that I didn’t like to talk much during a tournament…
and so she did. Began her babble on the first tee.
Got me off my game by the second, nattering on about my head covers, the clouds, and the colors of our golf skirts: Robin’s egg or summer sky?
What do you think, Mira? She joked that she was a real Chatty Cathy, and, sure enough, I bogeyed three of the first four holes.)
I was, let’s face it, the ultimate amateur, and a photo the size of a stamp, even a first-class one, was as big as I’d ever get.
Still, Coach Romming and I went on a walk a few days later.
We walked the neighborhood around her club because I didn’t want to be in Tallmadge, and she was as kind as any of the adults who tried to console me that month.
I wondered if my parents had recruited her to try to convince me to go to college as planned in a few weeks, but even if they had and she was with me because they had asked, I appreciated her kindness.
She tried to draw me out, but the problem remained: I was never going to share with her the salient cause and effect behind my decision, the peculiar, implausible, and yet incontrovertible linkage in my mind between fucking Theo Catton and killing Kenny Foster.
After that walk, I never saw Coach Romming again, though I did write her a decade later, after I had graduated from college and gotten married.
I wrote to thank her and tell her I was sorry I had been a brat after Kenny Foster’s death, but I was grateful for all the time she had spent with me when I was a teenager, and her efforts to comfort me and provide solace that August. The letter came back undeliverable. She had died.
The morning of Kenny Foster’s funeral, my father made one last attempt to convince my mother and me that it was inappropriate for us to attend, but he was a contracts lawyer, not a litigator, and failed.
His argument that he and my mother had never met the boy or spoken more than a few dozen words to his parents was a reason not to go suggested the sort of obliviousness that, perhaps, conjured why he did what he did, and lived a life amidst actuarial probabilities and protecting a corporation from human beings.
His contention that our attendance might intimate a sort of transitive culpability was defeated by my mother’s commonsense rebuttal that we lived in a small town, and not going was far more of a red flag of guilt.
Still, she remained worried about how the service would affect me emotionally.
But I was firm: I was going.
And so they went, too, and I agreed to their compromise: we would all sit in the back of the church and I would sit between them.
This was actually a pretty good decision on their part.
Afterward, as we exited the relative cool of the sanctuary for the blistering summer sun, they were standing beside me when the reporters from the local Westchester newspapers and the one TV station that covered the service surrounded me with questions.
The two of them served as human shields, my father snarling at the reporters with a firmness that was unbending and inimical, telling them that I had nothing to say and to please leave me alone. I was just a child.
Had Theo been at the funeral, we can safely assume that he would not have corrected my father.
The church was not full, but it was full enough: the Fosters should not have felt slighted by the turnout.
Kenny had been in the school but a year and was always going to be an outsider: he had simply arrived too late to ever be one of us.
(I remember one moment in the school’s smoking lounge, which, like the cafeteria, had a turntable, and the new Eagles album was playing.
When the needle reached the song “New Kid in Town,” a friend of Kenny’s started teasing him.
I thought he might wilt like a houseplant in need of water.
Instead, like a badass marine, he strolled to the stereo and picked a different record.) But he did have friends, and they were present, as were some of mine.
There were also kids who simply thought it would look good to be there—or bad to be absent—the sort who lived their lives for their college applications or their parents’ approval.
But the presence of the casket and the fact that inside it was not the body of a grandparent was sobering for even the most aggressive adolescent apparatchiks and lickspittles.
They might not have known Kenny Foster well, but he was our age and he was dead.
I’m unsure of the nexus between grief and fear, but separately they are each the sort of neurological trigger that can provoke angst and tears.
Combining them is like mixing meds that shouldn’t be mingled.
When I was seated in the pew between my parents, before the Fosters were led into the sanctuary, as the organist played Purcell, as I looked at the stained-glass windows the priest had pointed up at one afternoon during my confirmation class, the lyrics to Jesus Christ Superstar our study guide, I knew I was going to be sick.
I extricated myself from between my mother and father and ran downstairs to the ladies’ room, where I vomited into the single toilet, the expulsion seeming to have the power and arc of a shooting star.
Then I washed my face and reapplied my lipstick.
During my confirmation class, I had been one of the renegades (and there were three of us) who pressed the priest on why God allowed human slavery, Auschwitz, and the natural disasters and man-made cruelties that filled the newspapers daily.
Our questions weren’t new and neither was his response.
We discussed free will and the mysteries—I would now say vagaries—of God’s plan, and debated how much of our sorrow (and pain) he experienced with us.
A few years later, at eighteen, I still knew both the Apostles’ Creed and the Nicene Creed by heart, and the day of Kenny’s funeral I clung to the two words, life everlasting, that appear in the former but not the latter.
Before leaving the bathroom, I repeated the Apostles’ Creed hunched over the sink, staring down into the basin because I had seen myself in the mirror when I’d been running the lipstick over my mouth, and I loathed the person I saw.
When I started back upstairs, I ran into the whole Foster family in the corridor of the church behind the apse.
Excuse me: I ran into the whole living Foster family.
There were his younger sisters, Olivia in the eighth grade and Jane in the fourth.
They had the appearance of kids watching their house burn: the sort of hollow-faced shock that leaves one mute, stunned to a place beyond fear.
They gazed at me the way some Midwesterners gawk at an approaching twister, my presence at once hypnotic and terrifying.
The younger of the two was small-boned, and her black skirt fell just above little-kid knees: sunburned and scabbed from a summer outdoors.
The older was wearing a formfitting gray dress that seemed more appropriate for the stage than a memorial service: it was Debbie Harry cool, and I loved it.
I would have preferred it to the funereal smock my mother had put me in.
They both had hair the yellowish brown of shagbark leaves in October.
“Hey,” said Olivia, finding her voice, though still as stupefied as I was that we were running into each other before the funeral had begun.
“Hey,” I said back. I was about to say more, but then Sharon Foster and I locked eyes, and I braced for the vituperation that I felt I deserved.
The abhorrence I craved. She looked exhausted, but she was wearing a slim, pleated black dress that fell just below her knees, her sunglasses serving at the moment in lieu of a horseshoe headband.
Her husband put his hand on her shoulder, hoping to calm her, but she didn’t need calming.
She merely nodded at me, her maternal instincts subsuming the idea that I was the instrument of her son’s death. We were, suddenly, compatriots.
And I understood that as powerful as grief is, perhaps even because of the dominion it holds over countless lesser emotions, there is a beauty to it, as well.
In a place like Tallmadge, however, we never saw that side of grief.
We saw grief as weakness, a betrayal of Waspy stoicism.
To be caught grieving in a dramatic, uncensored display of emotions would have been as humiliating as being caught flat on your back with your legs spread and a dildo inside you.
To mourn too epically was to ask to be shunned.
I reentered the sanctuary, ignoring everyone in my efforts to return to my parents. I never told them I had been sick.
I never told anyone until now.
The night I returned from visiting my brother in Washington, I got the bat signal from Theo, the two rings on the telephone, and this time I was able to call him right back.
I told him what Nick Foster had said when I had been at their house, dropping the bombshell right after Theo had expressed his concerns for what I was enduring and, like most of the grown-ups around me, reminded me that it wasn’t my fault.
We agreed that I’d take a train into the city the next day and we’d meet for lunch in a place near Grand Central where, he assured me, no one would see us or recognize us.