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

could run from the spare room or the basement, she had one triumph after another, moving on to a new venture whenever inspiration blew in and blew her up. She had become famous, within Babbington, for Ella’s Lunch Launch, and people wanted to know her. As Jasper Milvain, a writer who learned how to tailor his work to the tastes of a lucrative market niche, famously said, you have to become famous before you can secure the attention that would give fame. My mother had done the trick. She had inflated a dog, and all Babbington marveled at her talent for it. So did she. Every now and then, even at the most unlikely times, while she was cooking, say, or sorting the laundry, I would see a light come into her eyes, and her face would brighten, and I would know that she was relishing afresh the surprise arrival of someone she had always wanted to meet: Ella Piper Leroy, local tycoon, Babbington notable, somebody.

One day when I came home from school, she was sitting at the dining room table, talking to Betsy Gaskell, the columnist who wrote the profiles that appeared in the Babbington Reporter under the rubric “We Pay a Call” and the pseudonym Egbert Penman. As my mother spoke, dispensing advice on making one’s “crazy dreams” — her term — come true, her eyes gleamed with self-satisfaction, and my little chest swelled with pride. What a woman. What a mom. I stopped inside the door, dumbstruck, immobilized, awed by this confirmation of her fame, until I regained my composure sufficiently to tiptoe through the kitchen and up the stairs to my room, leaving her to savor her celebrity without the distraction of a son or sidekick. At the top of the stairs, before I closed my door, I could just hear her saying, “To succeed in business, you’ve got to have the common touch — ”

MY FATHER never ceased to believe that Elegant Excursions and the Lunch Launch had been Porky White’s ventures. He thought that my mother had been only an employee, and even afterward he thought that she continued to play a part because Porky required it. My mother never tried to convince him otherwise. I’m sure she knew that she never could have convinced him otherwise. My father was a man of firm convictions, one of those men who think that it is a very fine thing to have what they like to call the courage of one’s convictions, one of those men that the rest of us consider pigheaded.

The week that he had spent on the boat with us changed him in one wonderful way: it made him realize how much he enjoyed my mother’s company, what a pleasure it could be to work together. He retired early. I think he had been sick of working at the garage for quite a long time. He became my mother’s partner in her subsequent ventures, and I never saw him exhibit anything but admiration for her undertakings forever after.

PATTI AND I saw each other almost every day at school, of course, and sometimes I walked her home, but Eliza had returned from Europe, Dudley’s house was no longer available to us, and Patti and I both considered the experiment complete, my paternity determined, so she and I returned to being friends again, and only friends, and she went back to dating thugs.

Then she vanished from Babbington for a few months, and the rumor was that she had gone away to have a child. When she returned, she was subdued, and her attitude made me think that the rumor must have been true. I wondered, and when I got tired of wondering, I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said, and she began to sniffle. “It’s true. I gave him up, you know, for adoption.”

“Oh,” I said. I was so completely incapable of saying anything that might have been of any use to her that I said nothing else.

She sniffled a bit more, then wiped her eyes and said, “I’ve gotta go.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Me too.”

We hugged, and parted, and I didn’t see her again in person for forty years. For a while I entertained the notion — and entertained myself with the notion — that I might have been the father of Patti’s child, that I might even have taken the big first step on the way to becoming the sort of profligate rogue who leaves a trail of bastards where’er he rambles, but it was just a game that I was playing with myself. The timing was all wrong, off by a couple of months.

Patti dropped out of school and embarked on a small career in music, first singing backup for doo-wop groups that never quite made it, not even at the one-hit-wonder level, and then as lead singer of her own group, Little Patti and the Sexpots, a group that didn’t get much air play but enjoyed a certain underground popularity. Their records were treated as novelties, something passed from hand to hand under the table, like the blues songs of Dirty Red. Her cover of “I Want a Hot Dog for My Roll” was excellent, I thought, and I also liked “Madman’s Dog,” one of her own compositions. Her voice was not strong, but it was clear and sweet, and that made a curious contrast with the raunchy lyrics. She never got very far, but recently she has enjoyed a new popularity. I’d call it a comeback, but that would imply an earlier success. Albertine and I caught her late show at the Silver Hound, downtown, a couple of weeks ago. She was hot. Her voice has a bit of gravel in it now, and she sang a slow, wise, and wistful version of “When You Dance” that made my eyes as misty as Captain Mac’s were when he told us that he really did have to sell Arcinella.

USING PARTS FROM WRECKED MOTORCYCLES, I built a single-seater airplane the following year. I flew the plane