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

working-class town of West Allis;Wladziu, Polish for Walter, had been called Wallie when he was a boy. Surely the Liberace connection was as good as a marker, showing him the right direction.
    Mr. McCloud, from Otten, Wisconsin, Walter said to himself. He rolled up his pants and slowly let his legs slip into the lake. If it warmed up he might swim out to the raft. There were very few boats around on the weekdays, and if he got a cramp and started to drown no one would see him flailing. In the years that he had been gone from the Midwest, his father and Uncle Ted had planted cedar and maple trees along the fence line to keep the neighbors from the family’s intimate moments. Francie and Roger Miller had gotten married at the water’s edge with a string quartet in the grass on one side of them and a brass ensemble on the other. There had been two memorial services, three weddings and numerous office parties. Walter had missed a good many of the celebrations. He couldn’t help reminding himself that Daniel would not have strayed so far from home, would not have fled the way Walter had after high school. Daniel had not ever really left the 600 block of Maplewood Avenue in Oak Ridge. He was forever eighteen, forever the child who would not willingly leave his parents for adult life. It was so easy to imagine that Daniel would have become successful in a conventional way, someone who moved confidently through the halls of a venerable financial institution in the heart of the city. Daniel might well have bought a house down the street from the McClouds, calling on Joyce and Robert in the evenings, to ask their advice, to dispense his own wisdom.
    It was a trap, rusty, clanking, stinking, Walter knew, to glorify the lost brother, the kind of son who would have driven up to Lake Margaret every weekend to spare his father the trip, who would have mowed the lawn, checked the locks, weather-stripped the windows, cleaned the gutters. Walter tried to imagine himself on the tractor mower, wearing a chambray work shirt, a baseball cap, canvas pants with compartmentalized pockets down the thigh that snapped shut. It didn’t require more than five or six minutes to get the picture in focus, to see all of the accoutrements clearly: Walter, revving the engine, wearing a dark blue cap, Ray-Bans, and his new mail-order fanny pack, complete with water bottle, securely fastened at his waist. Afterstruggling for nearly seventy-two hours to imagine a future, and coming at last to the vision—Walter McCloud dressed for lawn care—he said to himself, Maybe. Maybe I could live in Otten.
    He had read in the paper that there was a trend, a tide that could be charted, people of his generation who had moved away from their birthplaces and were coming back home in middle age. Walter could be part of a legitimate trend, a pattern that as far as he could see was not harmful to his or anyone else’s health. “A trend,” he said out loud, as if the word might charm him into casting the deciding vote: Otten or Queens. Aside from the comfort of being at last a part of a movement, he thought that it was probably time to return to a place where he had imagined himself, even if the image was farfetched. He leaned back against the Adirondack chair and pictured himself mowing the slope down to the lake, the sunset in the distance, through the trees, the bats hanging by their little feet in the barn, staying put, and all the summer insects, every one of them, fluttering around the yellow porch light.

    On Walter’s fourth day at Lake Margaret his old friend Susan drove up from her parents’ house in Oak Ridge with her two children. She lived near Miami now, in Coral Gables. There had been very few students at the Kenton School of Ballet who were star quality, and from her beginning there she was best girl. She’d left Illinois for Manhattan when she was seventeen, and at eighteen she became a member of the New York City Ballet. She was one of the last dancers