Mission Flats by William Landay Read Free Book Online Page A

naps or kissed on the lips or laughed over obscure incidents in their secret history. Other times, the strain between them was obvious, like the creaking of a rope under a heavy load. As a kid I assumed this was what true love looked like – that love was inherently unstable above a certain temperature.
    I pushed the door open a crack to spy and was immediately seen.
    Dad spotted me – wide-eyed, the doughnut glutinizing in my fingers – and something, some small breath of shame, went out of him. To my astonishment, he surrendered to Mum immediately, asking only, ‘How long till I can come back?’
    ‘Until I’m ready’
    ‘Annie, come on. Just tell me how long.’
    ‘A week. Then we’ll see.’
    ‘Anne, where am I supposed to go? I’m exhausted.’
    ‘Go to the station. Go wherever you want, I don’t care. Except the doughnut shop.’
    Later that morning, after Dad had gone, Mum took me into town to return the box of doughnuts. Dad’s friend Liz Lofgren was behind the counter that morning, and Mum waited until the store was empty to inform Liz that she’d better have nothing more to do with Chief Truman if she knew what was good for her. Liz pretended not to understand for a minute, but when Mum said, ‘You don’t want to be on my wrong side,’ Liz seemed to agree.
    Anne Wilmot Truman was raised in Boston, and the imprint of that city stayed with her. It was in her voice, in the mangled r s and odd archaic colloquialisms (she always called soda tonic; the dry cleaner, the cleanser; milk shakes, frappes). But the deepest impression was left by her father, a striver named Joe Wilmot.
    Joe had clawed his way up from a Dorchester tenement. In the 1930s and ’40s he built a small chain of grocery stores in Boston, a respectable success if not a spectacular one. It was enough to propel him out to the suburbs, anyway. But even after he’d made it, Joe could never quite shake the sense that his new neighbors – all those WASPy Juniors and The Thirds with their tennis games and rumpled clothes – possessed something he did not, something more than money. It was an attitude more than anything else, a sort of at-homeness among the big green lawns and tree-shaded streets. For lack of a better word Joe called it ‘class,’ and he knew it would always be out of his reach. Of course, this is the frustration of arrivistes everywhere. They cannot acquire ‘class’ because they cannot envision themselves having it. It is a failure of the imagination. They are anti-Gatsbys.
    So Joe did what would-be Gatsbys have so often done: He tried to inculcate the elusive stuff in his only daughter. After all, this was Boston in the age of that real-life Gatsby, Joe Kennedy. And what had Old Man Kennedy learned if not that class is granted only to the second generation? So Joe Wilmot sent Annie to a private school, and when he deemed the education there inadequate, he made up the difference by paying her directly for educating herself: nickels and dimes for good posture, for reading Yeats or Joyce, for teaching herself a Mozart lied on the piano. The payola did not stop when she got older either. Right through the Winsor School and Radcliffe – between ballet recitals and voice lessons and a semester in Paris – Annie could always earn a buck or a fin by reciting a speech from Shakespeare or some other feat of cultivation. It was a game father and daughter played on the road to refinement.
    Then the unthinkable happened. Its name was Claude Truman.
    He was a thick-wristed policeman – a policeman! – from some godawful backwater in Maine. They were wildly mismatched. What Mum saw in him, nobody could understand. My guess is it was precisely his muscular rudeness that made Claude Truman appealing. He was cocksure and strong, a bull moose in springtime. He was different. Not dumb, far from it. But at the same time this was a man who thought John Cheever was a hockey player and Ionesco a corporation. It must have been a relief to