He drove away, bemused. Shortly after, Carter had put away the competition in New Hampshire and went on to Florida.
2
Walter Cronkite finished with the politicians and went on to the civil war in Lebanon. Johnny got up and freshened his glass of Pepsi. He tipped the glass at the TV. Your good health, Walt. To the three Ds—death,destruction, and destiny. Where would we be without them?
There was a light tap at the door. “Come in,” Johnny called, expecting Chuck, probably with an invitation to the drive-in over in Somersworth. But it wasn’t Chuck. It was Chuck’s father.
“Hi, Johnny,” he said. He was wearing wash-faded jeans and an old cotton sports shirt, the tails out. “May I come in?”
“Sure. I thought you weren’t due back until late.”
“Well, Shelley gave me a call.” Shelley was his wife. Roger came in and shut the door. “Chuck came to see her. Burst into tears, just like a little kid. He told her you were doing it. Johnny. He said he thought he was going to be all right.”
Johnny put his glass down. “We’ve got a ways to go,” he said.
“Chuck met me at the airport. I haven’t seen him looking like he did since he was ... what? Ten? Eleven? When I gave him the .22 he’d been waiting for for five years. He read me a story out of the newspaper. The improvement is ... almost eerie. I came over to thank you.”
“Thank Chuck,” Johnny said. “He’s an adaptable boy. A lot of what’s happening to him is positive reinforcement. He’s psyched himself into believing he can do it and now he’s tripping on it. That’s the best way I can put it.”
Roger sat down. “He says you’re teaching him to switch-hit.”
Johnny smiled. “Yeah, I guess so.”
“Is he going to be able to take the SATs?”
“I don’t know. And I’d hate to see him gamble and lose. The SATs are a heavy pressure situation. If he gets in that lecture hall with an answer sheet in front of him and an IBM pencil in his hand and then freezes up, it’s going to be a real setback for him. Have you thought about a good prep school for a year? A place like Pittsfield Academy?”
“We’ve kicked the idea around, but frankly I always thought of it as just postponing the inevitable.”
“That’s one of the things that’s been giving Chuck trouble. This feeling that he’s in a make-or-break situation.”
“I’ve never pressured Chuck.”
“Not on purpose, I know that. So does he. On the other hand, you’re a rich, successful man who graduated from college summa cum laude. I think Chuck feels a little bit like he’s batting after Hank Aaron.”
“There’s nothing I can do about that, Johnny.”
“I think a year at a prep school, away from home, after his senior year might put things in perspective for him. And he wants to go to work in one of your mills next summer. If he were my kid and if they were my mills, I’d let him.”
“Chuck wants to do that? How come he never told me?”
“Because he didn’t want you to think he was ass-kissing,” Johnny said.
“He told you that?”
“Yes. He wants to do it because he thinks the practical experience will be helpful to him later on. The kid wants to follow in your footsteps, Mr. Chatsworth. You’ve left some big ones behind you. That’s what a lot of the reading block has been about. He’s having buck fever.”
In a sense, he had lied. Chuck had hinted around these things, had even mentioned some of them obliquely, but he had not been as frank as Johnny had led Roger Chatsworth to believe. Not verbally, at least. But Johnny had touched him from time to time, and he had gotten signals that way. He had looked through the pictures Chuck kept in his wallet and knew how Chuck felt about his dad. There were things he could never tell this pleasant but rather distant man sitting across from him. Chuck idolized the ground his father walked on. Beneath his easy-come easy-go exterior (an exterior that was very similar to Roger’s), the boy was eaten up by the secret conviction that he could never measure up. His father had built a ten percent interest in a failing woolen mill into a New England textile empire. He believed that the issue of his father’s love hung on his own ability to move similar mountains. To play sports. To get into a good college. To read.