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

I had taken over the authorship of a series of books for boys — the Larry Peters adventure series — and I was being paid fairly well for the tales I was churning out. With some of the spoils I bought a classic car, a powerful Kramler V-12, gleaming white, redolent inside of rich leather and leaking brake fluid. My parents had retired to a small house near but not on a small lake in a small town nowhere in New Hampshire. When Albertine and I and the boys arrived in the Kramler, my mother was delighted by the sight of it.

A few days after we had returned home, a gift from my mother arrived in the mail: a pair of driving gloves. The gift card read, “To my son with a very special car.” She had read the Kramler correctly; she understood what it had been designed and built to say, and she understood why I had bought it: to say that I was a success, and she thought of me as a successful person — which, I think, for her meant someone who had succeeded in defining himself. At the time I thought it ridiculous that she assumed that I had defined myself as the driver of a powerful Kramler, that she thought I was someone who might want to define himself in that way, but, more than that, I felt sorry for her because I saw from her gift to me that she would have liked to have been someone who had earned herself a powerful Kramler. Mark my words: I didn’t say that she would have liked to own a Kramler; I said that she would have liked to have been someone who had earned herself a Kramler. She would have liked to have made herself into such a person. She would have liked to have made herself into someone, someone she thought of as someone.

BEFORE SHE DIED, I visited my mother in an intensive-care ward. She was fettered by wires and tubes, bloated with accumulated fluids, barely able to speak. She was dying of lung cancer brought on by regret, by the tens of thousands of cigarettes she had smoked while she sat in the dark, sipping mediocre wine and mourning the loss of her hope, mourning the spunky self who had chased so many harmless follies, the young and ambitious Ella Piper Leroy who had died years before.

If things had gone as they ought to have gone, we should have been able to talk about her success. There should have been one business that finally succeeded, and we should have been able to reminisce about the crazy things that had happened while she was running it. We should have had some laughs. She should have been able to sigh and smile and shake her head in wonder at all that she had done, and she should have been able to say, “It was quite a ride.”

Instead, she had almost nothing to say, and I had almost nothing to say to her — unless I talked about myself. I retreated into that, but when I realized what I was doing I caught myself and we fell again into silence.

I held her hand, and when the silence between us became embarrassing, I squeezed it and said that I would see her again the next day. I didn’t. She died in the night, as Ella Piper Leroy, housewife.

MUST IT BE? Must it be as it was when the way it was was wrong? No. Not while I’m around. Time has made me see that I might have helped her. Maybe all she needed was a sidekick. All the cowboys I lionized as a little boy had sidekicks, descendants of Sancho Panza who carried the luggage of comic relief. I should have learned from them the lesson that even the boldest of us needs a little help from a friend, needs somebody on his side, even if it’s a bumbling simpleton who lards the earth when he walks. I could have been that comical sidekick, and if I had been, who’s to say that with me taking pratfalls by her side she might not have made a success of something?

That’s why, when people ask me about my mother, I don’t tell them about Ella’s Lacy Licks or any of her other failures; I tell them about Ella’s Lunch Launch. I tell them how she bought a clam boat that was slowly sinking from the day she stepped aboard it; how, together, we repainted it in tropical colors, fitted it out with a rudimentary kitchen, rigged a canopy over the deck and flew pennants from a dozen poles; how we plied the bay selling chowder and sandwiches to vacationers and baymen; and how I kept the boat afloat all summer without ever letting her know that it was sinking. I tell them about the mishaps and merriment; I tell them how my mother became known (not far and wide, but near and narrow, which was enough) as “Ella, who runs Ella’s Lunch Launch”; and I tell them how the lunch launch, in the fall, when I was back in school and unable to keep it pumped dry, sank.

At the end of that story, as you've seen, my mother and I stand on a bulkhead at the edge of Bolotomy Bay looking down at the sunken boat, reminiscing about the crazy things that happened while she ran it, with me at her side as first mate, sous chef, busboy, and sidekick. When we have run out of stories, my mother puts her arm across my shoulders and gives me a squeeze. She sighs and smiles, shakes her head and says, “It was quite a ride,” and I agree.

Peter Leroy

New York City

December 24, 2000

About the Author: Peter Leroy

Peter Leroy spent his childhood and youth in the town of Babbington, New York, which lies on the South Shore of Long Island, between Nassau and Suffolk counties. As a