Good Boy - Jennifer Finney Boylan Page 0,6
didn’t say anything about it, because we were boys, and our code was clear: the only way to respond to some of the most important things in our world was with silence.
* * *
By the time I got home, Dr. Boyer had already called my parents. My mother told me to go into the den. “Your father wants to talk to you,” she said in a voice without pity.
Dick Boylan—a handsome man with a crisp white shirt, a thin tie, and slicked-back hair—sat in a black leather chair smoking an L&M King. Our dalmatian dog, Playboy, lay on the floor, his legs pointing into the air, displaying his pink belly and his not inconsiderable nether dog parts.
“Had a little run-in with Dr. Boyer?” said my father in a tone that was both sympathetic and disappointed.
“We were looking for Toby’s grave,” I explained, although why my father should believe this when it had failed with the woman we’d been told had actually buried the dog there I don’t know.
“Sit down,” he said, and I collapsed on the couch. The den was a small room off of the living room. There was a black-and-white TV in one corner and three walls of books. During the weekend, Lloyd and I sometimes glued together models of battleships here.
“We really were looking for it,” I said.
My father took a drag on his cigarette and held the smoke in his lungs for a very long time. Then he blew it out. He took off his tortoiseshell glasses, wiped them with a pocket handkerchief.
“Lloyd’s a good guy,” my father said thoughtfully. He put his glasses back on. “You’re very loyal to him.”
“He’s my friend,” I said.
“He’s got some challenges that you don’t have,” said my father.
“The diabetes,” I said.
“No,” said my father. “I wasn’t thinking about that per se.”
Playboy’s tail thumped against the hooked rug. I noticed that, at this inopportune moment, the dog’s private regions were beginning to pulse. A pink suggestion began to poke at the outer boundaries of its sheath.
“You weren’t?”
My father took another long drag on his cigarette.
“You know,” he said, “my father died when I was just about your age. When I was twelve.”
There was an oil painting of my grandfather that hung in our living room. I had nightmares about it fairly regularly. In my dreams, the old man was trying to get out of the painting. He wanted to get me.
“It can upend a young man,” my father said, “if he doesn’t have … determination.”
Lloyd’s father had died of a heart attack the summer before. We’d been shooting off model rockets on the playground one afternoon. I remember the strange feeling of being on the school grounds in summer, when the place was as abandoned as Dr. Boyer’s farm. I had a two-stage rocket called the Black Widow. We watched as it took off in the sky and disappeared. The parachute had malfunctioned. That night, Lloyd called me on the phone and said, “My dad had a heart attack. They took him to the hospital, but they couldn’t help him. So he died.”
I did not know what to tell my friend.
“Is that what you think he needs?” I said to my father, uncertain. “Determination?”
“I think,” he said, “it is the thing you need.”
I sat there, taking this all in. I wasn’t sure exactly what it was we were talking about. It was not entirely impossible that my father suspected what lurked in my heart and was suggesting that it might be resisted, if only I approached the question of being alive with the necessary resolve and firmness.
On the floor, Playboy’s exuberance burst forth. A lack of determination wasn’t one of his problems, that much was certain.
* * *
The following year I entered a new school, Haverford, which was for boys only. Lloyd, for his part, followed the rest of my classmates to Marple Newtown. I cried and cried in my parents’ bedroom the night before I started at Haverford, saying, Please don’t make me go. I’ll miss my friends.
This was not the real reason I did not want to go to an all-boys school, of course, but the real reason was not one that I could speak out loud. I could barely even whisper it to myself, because who could want the thing that I wanted? How could such a fate be granted? It was stupid to even think about.
But I thought about it.
On my first day at the new school, my father dropped me off at the gates on