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

word. I resolved to try delivering it some evening, if I could find an acolyte, a young novice to sit in the chair opposite me, someone to educate and belittle. I might even try smoking one of Dudley’s pipes. In the befuddled logic of adolescence, becoming more like Dudley seemed somehow to be a way of getting the better of him.

I didn’t stay long in the living room. There wasn’t much there that seemed likely to provide the answers I was seeking, nor did I find what I was after anywhere else in the house that night. Over the course of the next couple of weeks, I visited the house daily, as Eliza had asked me to do, and sometimes I visited twice a day, to find what I could find, to learn what I could learn. I investigated every inch of it. I came to know everything that was in every dresser and cabinet and bedside table. I knew the title of every book on every bookshelf, and I flipped through many of them. I knew everything that was in the desk in Dudley’s study. I tried on Dudley’s life as if it were a suit of clothes. I sat in his chair in the living room, drinking his Scotch, reading his diary. I read his mail, the letters he had saved and the copies of letters that he had sent. I sat at his desk, and I took notes on a pad that I found there, writing with Dudley’s pen. I used his toilet and bathed in his tub, where I read the little volume on Diogenes from which he had taken the text of his lecture on the Cynics. I slept in his bed, on the side that the contents of the bedside table told me was his, beside the side that Eliza would have occupied.

Did I come to understand what it had been like to be Dudley Beaker? Somewhat, I think. Did I find any evidence that he was my father? Yes. What I found wouldn’t have convinced anyone; it didn’t even convince me, but it did suggest that further investigation was called for. This is what I found: some photographs of my mother in an album in the bottom drawer of Dudley’s desk. There was nothing sexually suggestive about these photographs, but there was in his having kept an album exclusively devoted to photographs of my mother something strongly suggestive of his having played the essential role in my paternity, it seemed to me. Dudley had been an amateur of photography, and he was always volunteering to take photographs at family gatherings. Apparently, he had kept copies for himself of the pictures in which my mother appeared. I would say that the photographs showed my mother from about thirteen to twenty-four, her age when she gave birth to me. In the last photographs of her that he had pasted into the album, she was pregnant. At that point, he had stopped adding pictures to the album. It contained no pictures of me.

Chapter 6

One Handy Package

THERE WAS AT THAT TIME a vogue for combining everything one might want in a particular area of interest or endeavor into “one handy package,” and the cult of miniaturization had already begun. Devotees of the backyard barbecue, for example, instead of buying separate tongs, fork, spatula, and similar implements could instead buy the Hand-e-Que, which combined tongs, fork, spatula, spoon, skewer, and salt and pepper shakers in one handy package. In the supermarket (actually, at that time, the grocery store) one could buy Box o’ Supper, a box that held a bag of macaroni, a can of cheese sauce, a can of peas, a can of brown bread, a small package of cookies, a couple of paper napkins, and a short stack of antacid tablets. The intrepid traveler could buy an Aeronautomobile, a vehicle with folding wings and a “leakproof ” hull that could navigate the skies, the seas, and the highways. In cynics, Diogenes would have been everything one could have wanted in one handy package. In sexpots, it would have been Patti Fiorenza.

I was, at that time, obsessed with Patti. She was a year older than I, which meant that she was fourteen. She had many admirable qualities. I might mention her pretty face, her quick mind, her sparkling personality, her winning smile, or the cooing voice in which she sang backup for the Bay Tones, the Four Plays, the Half Shafts, the Glide Tones, and the Love Notes.

I see from a quick skim of the preceding paragraph that I neglected to mention that Patti possessed, to a degree unmatched in the experience of Babbingtonians until that time, a quality that was then called “sex appeal.” She had an amazing little body, tiny but breathtaking. That tiny body was bursting with the promise of sexual gratification. From the long view of fifty-six, I see that Patti was the walking, talking embodiment of a hoary old fantasy, the child-woman, sexually a woman, but in so many other ways still a child, but what I remember from that time was the impression I had that under the right conditions I could pick her up and put her in my pocket, hide her in a shoe box under my bed and take her out and play with her under the covers at night. (I was, at that time, I ask you to recall, and enter as a plea in my defense, an adolescent boy.)

I do not have the talent to do justice to Patti’s body here. Any description I attempted would, in the estimation of a couple of hundred of the aging men and women who once were boys and girls with me at Babbington High, fall laughably short of the mark.

The best I can do is try to make you understand the effect that Patti had on us. Imagine a day in the spring, that first warm and brilliant day that takes everyone by surprise. Let’s say that, after