The Cuckoos of Batch Magna

The chapter in which Humphrey finds that, when it comes to surprises, life hasn’t finished with him yet.
Chapter Thirty

Shelly changed her mind again later that morning. Sitting with her son in the kitchen after breakfast she decided she would tell him, after all.
They had been talking about Humphrey’s younger sister, Betty.
Betty had gone up in the world as far as she considered it decent for people like them to go, by marrying a druggist in Illinois, and thought Humphrey’s new station in life a load of la-di-da poppycock. She thought he should drop the title, sell up, and share out the proceeds.
Everything else was so much applesauce, yet another of her doodle-brained brother’s get-rich schemes.
She shared her mother’s opinion of Sylvia but felt obliged, along with other members of the family, to ask when she phoned if a date had been set yet. Humphrey had looked embarrassed when Shelly mentioned this, and mumbled something about not having bought the engagement ring yet.
But it wasn’t that that had made his mother change her mind. It was when she’d joked about the sex of her grandchildren in Illinois, the boys who had turned her into a grandmother twice, and prompted two new emergency hair dye jobs. She’d told Humphrey that she wanted him to produce two girls, to make the set.
It was then, something in her son’s demeanour then, as he sat, almost sulkily, moving his empty coffee mug about. It was that which made her, although still not clear why, decide that she would tell him after all.
She fell silent, and when Humphrey looked up at her he was met with a smile of quite unnerving tenderness.
“What?” he asked, startled. “What!”
She said in a rush, “I still don’t know if I was right to tell you what I told you in the first place and whether I’d be right to tell you what I think I ought to tell you now.”
She paused, as if she’d made it plain enough, and was waiting to see what he thought about it.
He looked blankly at her.
Shelly smiled at him again.
“What, Mom – What?” Humphrey said, irritated and a little alarmed.
She laughed briefly and nervously. “Well,” she began carefully, “well, you know that apartment we had when you and Betty were tiny?”
Humphrey nodded. “The one in Manhattan. On the Upper East side, overlooking the park. With a doorman to keep the bums out.” He reeled off the familiar details. “Yeah. What?”
“Well – well, we did live on the Upper East side. But not overlooking the park.” Shelly paused, as if that was all. Wishing that that was all. And then went on: “No. No, what we really had, Humphie, what we really had, honey, was a service apartment. That’s what we had. In the basement. Overlooking the garbage area. Your dad was a janitor there,” she said, and laughed again briefly.
Humphrey smiled, waiting for the punch line.
“Humphrey,” she said, something she did sometimes, call him by his full name, when she was serious about something, or telling him off, or kidding him. “Humphrey. Humphie – I lied to you. I lied to you, sweetheart, I lied to you. I made it all up.”
Humphrey was still waiting for the punch line.
“Is this a joke, Mom, or what?” he said then, inviting her to get on with it, and snapped off an executive glance at his watch. In five exactly he should be on his way out of here, gunning for Wall Street. Anything later than that for no good reason and he’d have to give himself a motivation check, the way Frank advised.
Shelly shook her head. “No, it’s no joke, honey. I made it up.”
Humphrey grinned at her. “Dad, a janitor?” He laughed. “Yeah, right!” he said, and it was his turn to shake his head then, looking at his mom and laughing and shaking his head, finding it funny, even if he didn’t get it.
“Humphrey!” Shelly said sharply. “It is not a joke. I made it up. I lied to you.”
“Are you serious, or what!” he scoffed. “Dad a janitor – yeah, yeah. What is this?” he said, laughing, hands spread.
“Humphreee!” his mom growled warningly. “I’ll hit you with something in a minute. I am serious. And it’s hard enough as it is. Listen to me. Listen to me, Humphrey – I-made-it-up. ”
That got through to him. When she hit him with something, rolled up newspapers, magazines, a broom once, she was serious, no question.
Mother and son stared at each other.
Outside, 160th Street went past with a hiss of airbrakes, buses and delivery trucks grinding and banging over the potholes, horns blaring and a siren wailing up near the intersection, frantically beating its way through the morning traffic.
Humphrey spoke first.
“You’re not kidding?” he said in a small, younger-sounding voice.
His mother shook her head. “No, Humphie. I’m not kidding.”
“You made it up?”
“I made it up. I rewrote the past, honey.”
Humphrey’s eyes widened. “All of it?”
“Well, the big bucks part of it, anyway. The money bit. The swanky apartment. What your dad was – what he did. What I did. And I think you should know the truth now. I said I didn’t know if I was right to lie to you. Well, I know now. I wasn’t right. I was wrong. Okay?”
“Dad was a janitor …?”
Shelly shrugged. “Among other things. He was between fortunes, between dreams. Your dad janitored and I went out temping. The apartment went with his job.”
“He wasn’t a hotshot, a go-getter, and everything? He wasn’t rich? He didn’t lose a fortune for being too trusting, and all that?”
His mom shook her head.
“He was a janitor,” Humphrey said to himself. “My dad was a janitor. Among other things. He wasn’t – What other things?”
“Things, things,” Shelly said impatiently. “Door to door things, over the phone things, loading things, clerking things. Clearing snow for the City things. Whatever he could get things. Things.”
She got up from the table. “Now, wanna another coffee before you go?”
“Clearing snow?”
“And a Santa Claus once. At Bloomies. You want the coffee?”
Shelly sighed and sat down again.
“Humphie … Humphie, look, your father didn’t have a fortune to lose, that’s true. But he was too trusting – like you. And he was a go-getter. It was just he never got, that’s all. He was a dreamer, honey, like you. Till all this happened, that is. And I wonder how much of a blessing it will turn out to be,” she said, looking at him almost accusingly, and sounding near to tears, her way of trying to shift some of the heat from herself.
But Humphrey wasn’t listening. “Santa Claus?”
“Yeah. Not long after the war. Betty wasn’t born but I took you to see him. You were just a kid then of course, barely walking.”
“My dad was a Santa Claus at Bloomingdale’s,” Humphrey told himself.
“Had his own Santa Land up on the eighth floor. He was good at it, too. Looked the part, being big. Know what I mean? And loud? Jeez, you could hear him coming up in the elevator. Haaaap-py Christmas! Ho-Ho-Ho!” She laughed. “He sat you on his lap and you bawled your head off. Got a picture of it somewhere. You bawled again then, when it was your turn to meet his playful elves. They were all midgets from Coney Island. And he had Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, a real reindeer from the Park. It was a winter wonderland, Humphie!” she said, as if urging him to stop sulking and get with the spirit of it. “With an ice grotto and a log cabin, and snow and candle-lights, and the little playful elves singing a song with Frosty the Snowman in a top hat about Santa Claus’s home in Lapland. And then Santa arriving on his sleigh, bells jing-alinging, with his big red sack of presents. Ho-Ho-Ho! You got a candy cane and an orange. Oh, and a colouring book,” she remembered, and smiled at him as if at a much younger Humphrey. “Your dad loved that, handing out the presents, you could see it. Loved it. To some of the kids it was just store things in shiny paper and ribbon they were getting, you know? To Ralphie it was Christmas. He was giving Christmas. Haaap-py Christmas! Ho-Ho-Ho!”
Humphrey’s head was wobbling in disbelief. “I don’t believe this. I just do not believe it.”
“Believe it,” his mom advised him. “It’s what it is. You want that coffee, or what?”
Humphrey’s mouth opened and shut a couple of times on things he wanted to say, wanted to ask, and then he said, “Why? Why did you lie about it, Mom?”
Shelly flapped a hand at him. “Because, because.”
Because she wanted him to believe that he could do it. Wanted him to think that if his dad could do it, so could he. That he didn’t always have to be looking on, another loser at the feast. Because she didn’t think he could do it, not without help. And lies were all she had to offer.
“Because I wanted to spur you on or something, honey, I don’t know. I shouldn’t have done it. That’s what I know now. It sold you both short, and I’m sorry. All right? I’m saying I’m sorry. Okay?”
Humphrey stared at her. “So – let me get this straight here – so, there was no apartment overlooking Central Park. No uniformed doorman dressed like a Russian admiral. No maid called Bridget, who adored me,” he sneered, “and no chauffeur called Louis. Right?”
Shelly sighed again. “Yes, there was no any of that.”
“And no charity coffee mornings and lunches.”
“And no charity coffee mornings and lunches. That’s right, you got it.”
“And no – what about the dogs?” he suddenly remembered. “What about the two little dogs. The ones that Louis used to walk in the park. There were no dogs, either, were there? Not even a couple of dogs.”
No, she said. Not even a couple of dogs.
“We weren’t allowed dogs as employees.”
They weren’t allowed dogs in their present apartment, either, which was the reason, she’d told him, that she’d had to give away her Manhattan fashion accessory of two French butterfly dogs, when the dice sent them down the ladder to a walk-up in the Bronx.
Humphrey stared at her some more.
“And who knows about … what about Betty? Does Betty know about it?”
“No, she doesn’t. And I’m not going to tell her. Neither are you. She’s spent the last God knows how many years turning up her nose at it all. Or pretending to. It’s really only because we didn’t manage to keep any of it for her.”
Humphrey looked confused. “But we didn’t have any to keep. Did we?”
“No, of course we didn’t. What I have been telling you? We just don’t tell her we didn’t, that’s all. She’s bad enough now, when she thinks we should have. We’d never hear the end of it if she knows we couldn’t have.”
Humphrey wrestled with that for a moment, and then gave up.
“Well, who does know?”
“That he was or wasn’t?”
Humphrey moved his head impatiently. “That he wasn’t. What about Frank? Does Frank know?” He had just remembered the number of times he’d boasted to Frank about what a hotshot his dad had been.
“Frank never met Ralph. It was all before Frank’s time. I met him and his wife first through your Aunt Doris. And no, Doris doesn’t know, either. I mean, she doesn’t think he was, right? Nobody in either family knows – doesn’t think he was, know what I mean?”
Humphrey didn’t look as if he did altogether.
“What I mean is,” Shelly said, “they know he wasn’t, okay? And it wasn’t easy, over the years, on family visits, and weddings and funerals, and all that, I can tell you. You can imagine, right?”
She sighed then, when Humphrey didn’t respond, and said, “Look, your dad was a good man. That’s all you have to remember. He was a good man, and he was a rare one. Hell, I found that out long since.”
She laughed. Hadn’t she just! That’s what her laugh said. She had always said she’d marry again if the right man happened along, and she was still waiting.
“Remember Sergeant Daly, pride of the forty-second?” she asked, referring to one of her past dates, a cop who’d wanted to bring his handcuffs into the bedroom. Shelly laughed again. “One kiss and he wants to arrest me!” That’s what she’d told Humphrey. Her friends had got the full unedited version. “Hey! I mean, come on here! What, I kiss that bad?”
But Humphrey wasn’t to be cajoled.
He was frowning down at the table, the way he used to sit there with his school work, frowning over naming the main mountain ranges of America or some past president.
His mother smiled at him, briefly and unseen, a slight, wistful smile she was hardly aware of.
And then she reached across and put a hand on his. “I thought I was helping you, honey,” she said, telling it to herself as well as him. “I thought it was a place you wanted to go. Like when you were young, and I used to read to you. And you’d point at a picture, some place in a storybook, and say, wanna go there. It always sounded good to me, because you knew no matter what happened after that in the story, it would all come right on the last page. All end happily. Sure, I used to tell you, sure, we’ll go there, all of us. We’ll all go there. Do you remember that? Wanna go there, you’d say. Wanna go there.”

Posted 11 Years Ago