Chapter 4A Lot to Learn

AS SOON AS ELIZA HAD LEFT for Europe, I visited the house on my own. I told my parents that, as a diligent lad who took his duties seriously and meant to go about them in an organized way, I intended to get right down to work . . .

“I’d like you to take care of this house for a while,” she said. I felt a great disappointment, as you might expect. Arrivederci, Roma. So long to Germany. Farewell to France.

A COUPLE OF WEEKS LATER, about a month after Dudley’s death, his wife, Eliza, telephoned me and said that she would like to see me. She had, she said, a proposal that she would like me to consider. A proposal? A proposition? I was on my bicycle in a minute.

ANY FATHER WOULD DO, any one but the one I supposedly had. I chose Dudley Beaker; by that I mean that . . . I chose to believe that my mother had chosen Dudley Beaker.

BASTARDY has been good to me. I don’t actually know that I am a b*****d, but I’ve tried legitimacy and I’ve tried bastardy, and, on the whole, bastardy has been more rewarding.

MANY YEARS LATER, I had attained some small success. . . .

AFTER THE CANDY-MAKING FAILURE, my mother tried nothing else; she didn’t even talk about trying anything else. She had been defeated. She was finished. One day when I came home from school, she was sitting at the dining room table, looking straight ahead, weeping.

MY FATHER WOULD BE HOME in two or three hours. I think that I felt the pressure of that deadline more than my mother did, . . .

TRY SHE DID. I came home from school one afternoon to find the kitchen glazed with sugar. Threads of crystallized sugar crackled when I pushed the back door open, and they webbed the room, running along the walls, across the countertops and the stove and the sink, across the faces of the white metal cabinets.

WHEN PEOPLE ASK what my mother was like, I tell them the story of her lunch launch, because in that story so many of her best attributes show to good advantage — particularly her enthusiasm . . .