Inflating a Dog (The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy) by Eric Kraft (novels to read for beginners .txt) 📗

was what he said. More laughter, with Mayor Gerber leading it. “You can laugh if you like,” said my father, nodding his head, “but Chester leaped in while you stood there spluttering like a — a windbag — and a blowhard!” That occasioned much nervous laughter among the excursionists, who sensed a town scandal in the making.

My mother handed Sweetie a couple of towels, and I squeezed through the crowd to the wheelhouse. Mayor Gerber followed me. I was expecting a lecture — or worse, since the thought had occurred to me that as mayor he might be able to command bailiffs to clap me in irons and throw me in the pokey when we got back to town. Instead, he took a bottle of champagne out of the bucket, popped the cork, sank onto the deck, and begin drinking it as if it had been prescribed. I set to work, untying the wheel and turning Arcinella toward home. In a while, I heard the mayor begin singing “Nobody Knows the Troubles I’ve Seen.” I allowed myself a quick glance backward. He was at the stern, sitting on the deck, his shoes off and his pants legs rolled up, his legs dangling overboard, swishing his feet in Arcinella’s wake.

A few well-dressed, good-looking people, the very sort my mother wanted to attract to her elegant excursions, were standing beside the wheelhouse. One of the men in the group raised his glass in the direction of the drunken mayor and said, “Isn’t that elegant?”

His audience tittered.

A second man said, “Oh, very elegant, very, very elegant, but — ” and he held aloft a little sandwich on bread tinted robin’s-egg blue “ — this is the very heighth of elegance.”

His audience roared.

My mother, far enough away not to have heard the remark but near enough to have heard the laughter, turned toward the group and smiled. Her eyes shone. The second well-dressed man raised his sandwich again, in her direction, and leaned toward her in a suggestion of a bow. She acknowledged it with the suggestion of a curtsey, and the group laughed again.

Chapter 43

The Morning After

MORNING SUN FILLED the dining room, but to me the day seemed gloomy, despite the fact that I found Patti at the dining room table across from my mother.

(An aside, before I allow the morning after the grand opening to continue, on the subject of moods and weather: Why does the weather so rarely conform to our moods when our moods are so often willing to conform to the weather? Having written that, I realize that my moods are no longer as willing to conform to the weather as once they were. Maybe the weather no longer has any influence on my moods. Maybe the weather has only a negative influence on my moods, all weather. A sunny day doesn’t inflate me, despite the promises in songs, but a cloudy one can certainly deflate me; so can a sunny one, now that I think about it. More to the point, perhaps, is the fact that I am so rarely blown up and buoyant these days that I seem to be slowly sinking all the time. Maybe, at fifty-six, I have become a grumpy guy.)

Though I was gloomy, my mother’s mood was as sunny as the day. . . .

WHEN I WAS READING a draft of this memoir to Albertine, she interrupted me at this point to say, “You should take that out, Peter. The whole aside.”

“Should I?” I said, surprised and, to my additional surprise, disappointed to hear her say so.

“Yes, you should.”

“Why?”

“Because it isn’t honest.”

“It’s not?”

“No. I have been silent about this for a long time, but now that you seem to be about to misrepresent yourself in print, I cannot remain silent any longer.”

“Yikes,” I said, if I recall correctly.

“For some reason — and I suspect that I know the reason — it has become one of your cherished self-delusions to think that grumbling and cursing and beetling your brows and gnashing your teeth will erase your reputation as a happy screwball and turn you into a respected and awful curmudgeon. Face it: the moment you enter a room people start giggling. You scatter hilarity in every gloomy corner of this painful kingdom.”

“I do?”

“Yes. You do. You’re inflationary.”

“Gosh.”

“You blow people up.”

“They couldn’t be persuaded to think of me as deep?”

“No.”

“Weighty?”

“No.”

“Not even if I affected the dark foreboding grumbling of a thundercloud? If without a warning, without any cause or provocation that anyone could see, I sucked the sunlight out of the day — ”

“That would be very dramatic, but no.”

“But I have some sad tales to tell, and I have some verbal sludge to sell. If people would only go down below and look, they’d see that my bilge is full of turbid — ”

“No,” she said, “they wouldn’t. They wouldn’t see it. They’d only see the glint of silvery light shimmering on the surface of your bilgewater.”

“But if I took them down there, down belowdecks — ”

“They’d think you were being whimsical.”

“Shit.”

“Droll.”

“God damn it.”

“Charming.”

“Fuck.”

“You’re just not any good at playing the sinking ship,” she said, slipping a consoling arm across my sagging shoulders. “You might as well float.”

MORNING SUN FILLED the dining room. My mother’s mood was as sunny as the day.

“Wasn’t that a wonderful night!” she said.

Patti and I exchanged a glance. My mother really seemed to think that the night had been a success. On the table in front of her was a copy of the Babbington Reporter with the banner headline

“ELEGANT EXCURSIONS” MAKES A SPLASH

On the front page there was a large photograph of Sweetie Gerber going overboard. There was a smaller photograph of Porky White, standing in the water, holding Sweetie. Inside, an eyewitness account of the episode filled most of the gossip column, “Bruited About Old Bolotomy,” since my mother had had the foresight to invite Deirdre Perkle, who wrote “Bruited About,” and another version of it had aired on “Wake Up with Ann ’n’ Andy,” the morning show on WCLM, since my mother