friend Dena’s house, leaving her room to Eliza. Had Prudence, the girl with whom Harriet had until recently shared a bed, shown jealousy or exasperation or the territoriality which Harriet herself had refined, Harriet would have known how to suffer this guilt. Instead Harriet was the one who felt jealous, of the mysterious people with whom Pru was now content to spend her time. There were new kids in Jude’s life, too—boys showing up at the door with guitars, leaning their bikes against her house. Harriet let Eliza do her makeup. At the second-run theater, Harriet and Eliza saw Moonstruck.
Meanwhile, the music stabbed through the ceiling of the basement.
Harriet asked Eliza to translate the lyrics for her, but even she could make out only a handful of words. If Jude were to name his own children after the songs of his youth, they might be named Truth, Strength, or Justice. Purity, Brotherhood, Loyalty, Trust. The words filled Harriet with a measure of gratification—her son was singing the merits of purity!—but they also amused her, embarrassed her, and concerned her. What kind of teenage boys sang songs about purity? What had happened to songs about getting stoned? Getting laid? And if one had to sing songs about purity (she didn’t mind songs about purity!), why did they have to be so hard on the ears? They were awfully angry, these songs. The classics of her own youth, about getting stoned and getting laid, were strummed on the guitar, they were hummed in the shower, there were harmonicas.
Les had attempted to take up the harmonica one summer, but it was a phase. He had other passions to cater to. When Harriet had first met him, when he was not much older than Jude was now, he had embraced drugs with the same unqualified exuberance with which their son now refused them. That, it turned out, had not been a phase. She hoped Jude’s newfound sainthood was not a phase, either.
But how could it be anything else? Her son’s life story was a series of phases: scooters, BMX, skateboards; metal, punk, hardcore. He had ADD, he grew out of a pair of shoes in six weeks, and the songs he now sang were an average of forty-five seconds long. He would be over it by the end of the summer.
Harriet watched the boys come and go. From the basement to the van, from Jude’s room to the fridge. She listened for them on the stairs, on the fire escape, to the ring of the phone and the drone of their showers and the puerile wail of their guitars. She observed Jude’s romance with straight edge as she might have observed his first love—warily, with a mother’s pride, hoping that, in the end, his heart wouldn’t break too hard.
Thirteen
The Champlain Recreation Center, like Jude’s house, had over the years served Lintonburg in a number of faces. During the French and Indian War it was erected as a tavern, where the Green Mountain Boys were said to have raised their glasses and laid their heads. Burned down in the mid-nineteenth century, it was rebuilt to house the local headquarters of the Sons of Temperance. Now the brick building across the street from Ira Allen High School functioned as a voting poll, bingo hall, tutoring center, AA meeting room, and headquarters for the only Lamaze class within a fifty-mile radius. For years, the twin handrails along the front steps had been prime skating ground for Jude and Teddy, but they’d only been through the doors once.
Inside, there was not the scorched, masculine smell of armpit and feedback. The walls were not plastered with the syrupy film of dried sweat or the stickers and flyers of past performers; the bathroom stalls did not advertise Cro-Mags lyrics, anarchist doctrine, or the telephone numbers of girls who swallowed. Instead, across a scarred floor the waxy yellow of school buses and number two pencils, a pair of basketball hoops faced off. At the back of the room were a plywood platform painted barn red, a handful of old par can stage lights with the color burned out, and a sound system that was equipped to handle the karaoke nights, pageants, and poetry slams of the likes of Prudence Keffy-Horn. Jude and Johnny and Kram and Delph had moved a hundred folding metal chairs to either side of the stage, behind the piano, the volleyball net, and the chalkboard-on-wheels that said WELCOME TO SPAGHETTI DINNER FAMILY NIGHT! PLEASE FORM 2 LINES!