Best Man Page 3

  My bedroom was at the top of the stairs at one end of the house. Across the room from the doorway were the two windows that allowed me to see and hear the neighbors. The highest part of my room ran from above the doorway to the far wall, and the ceiling sloped down on both sides. The walls on the sides of the room were not high, and I could reach up to the place where the slanted ceiling began.

  As one entered my room, there was another doorway to the left, but it did not lead back out to the hallway at the top of the stairs. Instead, it connected to my mother’s bedroom, and it was always closed, at least in my memory. If I wanted to go into my mother’s room, or she into mine, it was necessary to first go out to the landing at the top of the stairs and then enter the other room.

  There was always a key in the lock on my mother’s side. At some point in my life, I examined it and found it extremely interesting. It was what my mother called a skeleton key, which sounded both mysterious and intimidating. She told me to put it back and instructed me not to play with it. It was to stay locked. The door and its key were off limits.

  Which, of course, brings me back to my bedroom with its own mysterious door at the back of the closet. The closet was below the slanted ceiling to the right after going into my room. The hatch, which is what my mother had called the small door at the back of the closet, was about three-and-a-half feet high and not quite as wide. When I opened it, I was able to step through, ducking my head only slightly. A grownup could not have done that, and I realized at once the reason my mother had described this storage area as a crawl space.

  The back of my closet was rather dim, and the crawl space was in complete blackness only inches beyond the hatch. However, there was a light in the closet, a bare bulb mounted to the ceiling above the clothing rack that turned on and off with a long pull chain. I turned on the light and ducked into the crawl space again.

  That second time, the light from the closet flooded into the crawl space and I could see the few things that had been stored there. An old suitcase and a cardboard box, both covered with a layer of dust. But everything beyond those two items was shrouded in darkness. The light in my closet may have seemed bright, but it was unable to turn corners. Beyond the small brightly lit area, it all seemed spooky to me. Dinner with my mother seemed much more attractive.

  It was a few months, or possibly a year, before I made another expedition into the crawl space. I had been thinking about it, and I resolved that I would overcome my apprehension. It was after all, our house. And I had studied the layout, lying in my bed or playing on the floor of my room, for what seemed like hours on end. I stared at the walls of my room, and how the closet extended farther toward the side of the house. At the back of the closet, the wall was no longer higher than my reach, and the ceiling came down to just above the hatch.

  I looked again, and inside the crawl space the celling slanted lower and lower until it met the floor. I had not yet ventured inside again, but I started to understand that I was looking at the skeleton of the house. The bones that held it up. There were horizontal beams, clearly extending beneath and across my room, and I realized that they were the frame that supported the floor. Later, I would learn that these were called joists.

  On a few occasions, I stood out in the yard and looked up at my room. I saw where my windows were, and I saw how the roof sloped down to the sides. I realized that the sloping roof matched the slanting ceiling in my room, and what I had seen inside the crawl space was the underside of the roof, unfinished and uncovered, just like the floor joists. Slowly, over some period of weeks or months, it dawned on me that there must be a space beyond the side wall of my bedroom, next to the closet, where the ceiling would be higher again.

  So, I steeled myself, and eventually I reentered the crawl space, this time armed with a flashlight. My mother had said it was for emergencies, but I used up the batteries more than once just playing the beam around my room in the dark of night.

  As I entered the crawl space, I stepped very carefully from one joist to the next. I had figured out by then that the surface below these beams was actually the ceiling of the room below. And the several cracks I had seen in the dining room ceiling made me suspect that it would be unwise to step there. Slowly, and cautiously, I stepped from the first beam to the second, and then to the third. When I looked around, the darkness had followed me, and while I could see the light from my closet coming through the hatch, it did not reach me. It surprised me, and I lost my balance and almost fell. Only by grabbing a support beam to my left did I keep myself upright.

  My only light came from the flashlight, and as the beam swept the area in front of me, the wall on my left, the back of my closet, had disappeared. Instead, there was what seemed like a huge, cavernous, opening in the dark. I was breathing so hard, I could hear myself, but I was able to regain my composure. My fright was replaced by exhilaration, as I began to comprehend the magnitude of my discovery.

  This was much more than a furtive venture undertaken by a child when his mother was not looking. This was a truly secret place. A hideout, or even a sanctuary. It was then, and would always remain, a secret. Until you began reading these words, no one has ever known of its existence. Not my mother, for she had told me early on that she would not even venture into the first few inches of the crawl space. Not my friends, not my schoolmates, and certainly no adults, whether authority figures from childhood or colleagues during my adult years.

  The first few times I visited my hideout, I would stay only a few minutes. I wished to remain undiscovered, so I could not simply disappear for an extended period while my mother was in the house. In addition, the thrill of my secret adventure would quickly submit to the discomfort of maintaining my balance in the dusty and cramped darkness. My solution developed slowly, but it provided the foundations for a new dimension of secrecy.

  I called it my hideout because it was a word I knew from television. It was where the bad guys, the desperados and villains in black hats, would hide from the heroes. I didn’t intend to cast myself as a villain or criminal. I think it was probably no more than the notion of a secret place, a refuge from external forces, whether those might be good or evil. I will admit, however, that the overwhelming driver was direct and dominant. It was secrecy.

  It was probably my second visit to my secret place when I noticed the dust. Or more accurately, the lack of dust. As I ducked back into my closet, the flashlight illuminated several of the joists I had traversed. Unlike the other joists, there was no coating of dust where my feet and been.

  In my imagination, it was no different from those times in a cowboy movie when the hero would kneel down and stare at the dirt. After a moment, he would nod sagely and announce that the bad guys had come that way just minutes before, and their footprints showed exactly which direction they went. If anyone were to look inside the crawlspace, they would quickly deduce where I had been.

  It was no matter that my mother would not enter the crawlspace. All she would have to do was look from the back of my closet. And that possibility was entirely real. In a near panic, I took a dirty T-shirt from my clothes hamper and swatted it blindly against the joists where my feet had left their mark.

  To my surprise and delight, the incriminating pattern had nearly disappeared. On close inspection, there was still no dust where I had stepped, and the dust remained thick on those parts of the beams where I had never stepped. But the demarcation between these areas had been eliminated. Heavy dust turned into light dust and then into no dust at all. If the inarguable evidence of my behavior had not been eliminated, it had been reduced to a level that even a curious observer would not see.

  As time passed, I became more and more desirous of using my secret place, but it had no use other than for standing in the dark where nobody could see me. I wished instead that my lair could be functional, and I thought frequently about how I might bring that about.

  The answer came one day a year or so later on the way home from school as I passed a house near ours tha
t was being remodeled. In the side yard was a scrap heap with pieces of unwanted lumber. And that was the answer. Floorboards! Consequently, there were several surreptitious trips to that other house when my mother went out to the store. My requirements were rather simple. Not too large. Not too small. The pieces of wood had to be long enough to span to or three of the joists, but they also had to be short enough that I could maneuver them upstairs and then through my closet into the crawl space.

  I found some discarded nails at the construction site, and using the hammer that my mother kept in the basement, I fastened everything in place. I was no expert at this, but my mother had previously allowed me to hammer some nails into a piece of wood in the basement, saying it was a good skill for a boy to learn. Once again, these activities were of short duration and carefully planned for those times when my mother would be out of the house for a few minutes. When the first stage was done, I had a floor that was probably three feet across and four feet in the other direction. It didn’t look like much, but I was pleased, and nobody else would ever see it.

  The final touches came over an extended period of time. Each step was carried out meticulously, using materials I found in the basement of our house. As far as I knew, these were all things that fell into the category of junk, so I was confident that they would never be missed. Nevertheless, I covered my tracks. When I discovered or decided on something I wanted to use, I first moved it to a new location in the basement. Then, after some length of time had passed without any mention, I would take it up to my hideout.

  In this way, I installed a carpet, although it was no more than two old towels that were destined for the trash heap or for conversion into dust rags. There were also several discarded throw pillows that I found beneath some other junk in the corner of the basement near the old coal bin. With one on the floor and the second against the wall, I fashioned what I considered to be a luxurious easy chair.

  The pièce de résistance was my overhead lamp. You might think that somewhat extraordinary for such a young boy, but it was actually quite simple. I discovered one day that there was an electrical outlet in the crawl space, just to the side of the hatch and rather high up on the overhead rafters. I had to turn my head at an awkward angle to see it, and it would have been even more difficult for a grownup.

  The last step of my secret renovation was probably the most daring of my steps in this entire process. In our basement, I encountered an unusual sort of extension cord, one that had a light fixture at one end. To my knowledge, my mother had never used it, but it was hanging in a coil on a hook where she would have passed it frequently when she did the laundry. Consequently, I was particularly careful with this item.

  My first step was to move it into a corner and place it on the floor. I then used an old piece of cardboard to sweep part of the floor and place a layer of dust on the extension cord. After waiting the better part of a month, I finally took it upstairs and installed it by hanging the end with the light over a nail that extended from one of the rafters.

  I remember when I smuggled a light bulb from the cupboard in the kitchen and screwed it into the fixture. My initial disappointment was reversed, when I realized there was a switch on the fixture just above the bulb. I pushed it, and like magic, my hideaway became a luxurious sanctuary. It was a place where I could reliably conceal objects that I did not want my mother to know about and where I could hide from the entire world when I needed a complete veil of secrecy for myself.

  • • • • •

  My mother seemed to be relatively free of intolerance. I recall that she spoke about the new President being a Catholic, and how Kennedy was the first one. It meant little to me at the time, because I was only five or so, and I didn’t understand very much about either Presidents or Catholics.

  I didn’t appreciate racial injustice at the time. As I grew older, I was taught that everyone should be treated the same. That it didn’t matter what color your skin was, or what your religion was. Although it certainly seemed to me that at other times, they said that our church was the only one that God liked.

  Because she was otherwise so broadly accepting of all people, I was surprised on one particular occasion. I had just returned home from school one afternoon, and she greeted me at the door with a question.

  “Who is that little girl you were walking with?”

  The query confused me. This was probably when I was in second or third grade, and I was walking home with Tommy and Jimmy, not with a girl. I recall my reaction quite vividly, and the mere suggestion that I might be hanging out with a girl was startling if not offensive. As I thought about the preceding minutes when Tommy, Jimmy, and I were walking back from school, the answer to my mother came to me.

  Through what was probably a puzzled look, I answered with the minimum explanation. “We weren’t walking together. She just lives near us. She was going home at the same time.”

  She was in my class at school, and like all the other students in a class of about thirty, we had known each other slightly for a couple of years.

  “She’s a cute little girl. What’s her name?”

  I ignored the comment and answered the question.

  “Angela.”

  “That’s a pretty name. What is her family name?

  “You mean her last name?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s Donatello.”

  “Oh. She’s Italian?”

  “No, I think she’s American.”

  My mother laughed and said, “Of course, she is. We all are.”

  * * *

  06

  Uncle

  Christopher D. Webster, III. My uncle. The guiding force of my life. He was my mentor, my only male role model. He was also our benefactor. He was wealthy. And I knew little if anything about him as I was growing up.

  His middle initial stands for Daniel, and his family claimed they were direct descendants of the great nineteenth-century senator and statesman.

  My earliest memories of Uncle Christopher have always been hazy. I’m fairly certain they were from our house in Washington near MacArthur Boulevard. It’s almost as though I’m watching a movie. An old silent movie, with parts obscured by poor lighting, the entire image grainy and scratched. I must have been in one of my hiding places. I see my uncle with her. I remember I was confused. Why were they in her bedroom? I didn’t understand, not then. I also knew that the question should remain unasked. Even after another ten years. Especially then, because by that time, I understood.

  Uncle Christopher had served in the army, just after the end of the Second World War. He’d been stationed overseas briefly as part of the occupation of Japan, and later he was sent to Korea. He invariably spoke of his disappointment that he had been too young for ‘the big one.’ I recall that he always talked about his younger days with great pride.

  When he returned home to Boston, he was twenty-six years old, and he joined the family business. As a child, I never quite understood what business his family engaged in, but over the years it became clear. They were involved in manufacturing. Not actually making things with their own hands but by running factories. They owned factories in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Connecticut, and Rhode Island, at least when I was a child. They made textiles, shoes, machine tools.

  I didn’t understand at the time what wealth meant. Uncle Christopher had a house in Boston, a townhouse. We had a house too, my mother and I. He had an automobile. So did we. But as I grew older, I began to understand the underlying differences. His automobile was newer and nicer than ours. I remember the time he drove up to our house in his brand new 1963 Cadillac Fleetwood. It was the first time I realized our 1958 Chevy was nothing special. And we lived in a modest two-bedroom wood-frame house that my mother told me had been built at the turn of the century.

  What probably made the greatest impact on my understanding of our economic differences came when my mother and I took a summer trip to New England. When I saw the Boston townhouse, the differences were remarkable.
The furnishings in our house in D.C. were pleasant but spare. In contrast, Uncle Christopher’s home was elegant, even to the eyes of a young boy. It had large rooms, beautiful wood-paneled walls, oriental carpets, paintings, even statues.

  • • • • •

  He was always nice to my mother. And to me as well. Three or four times each year, he would come to Washington.

  “Official business,” he said. “Government contracts.”

  He would stay with us, and my mother always had the guest room ready when he arrived. It wasn’t actually a guest room but the sun porch downstairs. And it wasn’t for him.

  I didn’t mind. The sunroom was a small pleasant room next to the living room on the first floor of the house, and originally it had been a screen porch. But someone had enclosed it before we moved in. The chance to sleep there was exciting to me, because it was another adventure. With all the windows, it was almost like being outdoors. As if I were camping in the wilderness with wild animals and cowboys and rustlers. But I was never afraid. Reality stayed with me, and I knew I was safe inside. In my own house.

  Of course, my temporary relocation to the porch came about because Uncle Christopher was given my room when he visited. It never struck me as unusual, because that’s just how it was. A visit from Uncle Christopher was something special, with festive meals and even a bottle of wine on the dinner table.

  After these dinners, filled with laughter and conversations in which I was included, we would sit in the living room. They would drink coffee, and I would have a cup of tea, or on special occasions, a Coke. When it was bedtime, I would brush my teeth, say good-night, and crawl under the covers on the old davenport. Soon the lights would go out, and I would hear footsteps on the staircase.

  I said previously that the door between my bedroom and my mother’s was always locked, but that isn’t quite accurate. Several times I remember finding it unlocked, and I took great pleasure in opening this portal, which I considered a secret passageway to my mother’s private sanctuary. But those occasions were rare. Always after Uncle Christopher had come to visit. I never thought to make any connection, at least until I was much older.