least he’s surrounded himself with men who understand business. Three on Wednesday, Craig, and don’t be late. I have no patience with tardiness.”
“Nothing risqué, either,” Dad said. “Time enough for that when he’s older.”
Mr. Harrigan also promised this, but I suppose men who understand business also understand that promises are easy to discard, being as how giving them is free. There was certainly nothing risqué in Heart of Darkness, which was the first book I read for him. When we finished, Mr. Harrigan asked me if I understood it. I don’t think he was trying to tutor me; he was just curious.
“Not a whole lot,” I said, “but that guy Kurtz was pretty crazy. I got that much.”
There was nothing risqué in the next book, either—Silas Marner was just a bore-a-thon, in my humble opinion. The third one, however, was Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and that was certainly an eye-opener. It was 2006 when I was introduced to Constance Chatterley and her randy gamekeeper. I was ten. All these years later I can still remember the verses of “The Old Rugged Cross,” and just as vividly recall Mellors stroking the lady and murmuring “Tha’rt nice.” How he treated her is a good thing for boys to learn, and a good thing to remember.
“Do you understand what you just read?” Mr. Harrigan asked me after one particularly steamy passage. Again, just curious.
“No,” I said, but that wasn’t strictly true. I understood a lot more of what was going on between Ollie Mellors and Connie Chatterley in the woods than I did about what was going on between Marlow and Kurtz down there in the Belgian Congo. Sex is hard to figure out—something I learned even before I got to college—but crazy is even harder.
“Fine,” Mr. Harrigan said, “but if your father asks what we’re reading, I suggest you tell him Dombey and Son. Which we’re going to read next, anyway.”
My father never did ask—about that one, anyway—and I was relieved when we moved on to Dombey, which was the first adult novel I remember really liking. I didn’t want to lie to my dad, it would have made me feel horrible, although I’m sure Mr. Harrigan would have had no problem with it.
* * *
Mr. Harrigan liked me to read to him because his eyes tired easily. He probably didn’t need me to weed his flowers; Pete Bostwick, who mowed his acre or so of lawn, would have been happy to do that, I think. And Edna Grogan, his housekeeper, would have been happy to dust his large collection of antique snow-globes and glass paperweights, but that was my job. He mostly just liked having me around. He never told me that until shortly before he died, but I knew it. I just didn’t know why, and am not sure I do now.
Once, when we were coming back from dinner at Marcel’s in the Rock, my dad said, very abruptly: “Does Harrigan ever touch you in a way you don’t like?”
I was years from even being able to grow a shadow mustache, but I knew what he was asking; we had learned about “stranger danger” and “inappropriate touching” in the third grade, for God’s sake.
“Do you mean does he grope me? No! Jeez, Dad, he’s not gay.”
“All right. Don’t get all mad about it, Craigster. I had to ask. Because you’re up there a lot.”
“If he was groping me, he could at least send me two-dollar scratch tickets,” I said, and that made Dad laugh.
Thirty dollars a week was about what I made, and Dad insisted I put at least twenty of it in my college savings account. Which I did, although I considered it mega-stupid; when even being a teenager seems an age away, college might as well be in another lifetime. Ten bucks a week was still a fortune. I spent some of it on burgers and shakes at the Howie’s Market lunch counter, most of it on old paperbacks at Dahlie’s Used Books in Gates Falls. The ones I bought weren’t heavy going, like the ones I read to Mr. Harrigan (even Lady Chatterley was heavy when Constance and Mellors weren’t steaming the place up). I liked crime novels and westerns like Shoot-Out at Gila Bend and Hot Lead Trail. Reading to Mr. Harrigan was work. Not sweat-labor, but work. A book like One Monday We Killed Them All, by John D. MacDonald, was pure pleasure. I told myself I ought to save up the money that didn’t go