The Short History of a Prince by Jane Hamilton Read Free Book Online Page A

know by the smell to expect great change. Smoke filled the air, spiraling into the pale blue sky. He used to think there was nothing as sad as Lake Margaret in the fall, and it seemed so again. Summer was over, school would begin, winter was upon them. All green things, the moss, the vines, the children at their desks, would soon experience a prolonged state of near death.
    In the daylight Walter sat far into the old white Adirondack chair, drinking coffee, and in the night he sat there also, under the heavens, wrapped in a quilt. He had never been out of doors by himself for that long, and it seemed to him enough of an occupation, watching the water change color, watching the fishermen holding their rods hour after hour in their metal boats. A morning went by, and he had only looked, and remembered, and looked, in the honest labor of smelling the change of season and waiting for absolutely nothing. He looked across the lake to the cow pasture and he looked at the water, where he sometimes saw his ghostly boyish form swim up to the surface. His was an ordinary tragedy, he knew. He had been happy as a child and had not realized it. But happiness was spent so quickly, he thought, and identifying it, feeling it, trying to hang on to it, made him nervous. Maybe it was better to be ignorant of bliss, unselfconscious, and later have the sense to recognize its traces.
    In May, Walter had applied for a job teaching English at Otten High, in Otten, Wisconsin. He had been back to school part-time in the last four years for his certification. It had been a marvel in thespring during his inquiries to hear the secretary at the school say “Otten,” and then “Wisconsin,” as if her vowels, the broad Wisconsin o , were on display for a freak show. Walter could have supplied good reason for wanting the job, but he had applied primarily on a whim. It was the secretary, Mrs. Oldenberg, and her bewitching voice, and it was also the fact that Otten was an hour from Lake Margaret. The town of three thousand people had been named for a temperance leader, Samuel Otten, an easterner who had hoped to build a temperance utopia out in the wild Wisconsin territory. Well over one hundred years later there were taverns dotting the village map. Walter didn’t know if such an inception, followed by the abandonment of the ideal, was a good sign. He and Samuel Otten were perhaps cut from the same cloth, two men from the East with ridiculous expectations. Maybe it was absurd to imagine he could teach farm boys Shelley’s “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty,” but from a distance it didn’t seem impossible. They might not heckle him; it might be worth a try.
    He had learned, a week before, that from the fifteen applications he’d submitted had come only two offers. It was a choice between a school in Queens and Otten High. He had grown accustomed to life in New York, and he wasn’t sure he could make the adjustment to a town with a one-screen movie theater, no bookstore, no cafe, no opera company, not one ballet troupe and no chain clothing stores. It was unlikely, too, that there would be very many of his own kind in Otten. Either pick involved the risk of death, he considered, one literal, the other spiritual. The Queens high school had metal detectors at the door, equipment that weeded out assault weapons and handguns. Box cutters, apparently, were not detectable by the scanner. A math teacher had bled to death after his throat was slit in May.
    Walter sat with his feet in the water pitting one place against the other, thinking of irrelevant specifics, weighing the appeal of the mangy city rodents, slinking along the subway tracks, against the type of rat sure to be found in Otten, the sleek, well-fed beast that made its living in the grain elevators on the edge of town. He listed the famous people who had grown up on Wisconsin soil: Spencer Tracy, Georgia O’Keeffe, Thornton Wilder, Harry Houdini and, of course, Liberace. Wladziu Liberace, born in the