Life Among Giants: A Novel by Bill Roorbach

Author:Bill Roorbach [Roorbach, Bill]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Tags: Fiction, General, cookie429, Kat, Extratorrents
ISBN: 9781616201562
Publisher: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill
Published: 2012-10-16T07:10:30+00:00

PART THREE

Children of War

12

Nicholas Bernhardt Hochmeyer. “The only,” he used to say, instead of “Junior.” He’d abandoned that suffix in high school after his own father’s suicide by drowning, history that seemed to hang in the shadows around him. I’m considerably older now than he ever got to be, and want to believe that his anger has worn out, that it can’t live on without him.

I look for the good in the man. He never bullied me, for example. He could spend all day playing catch, nailed a plywood target to the back of the garage for me to hit with a football when I wasn’t more than six, did a play-by-play as I threw, gave me prizes for ten bull’s-eyes in a row, later a hundred. He put on his Chippewa work boots and flannel shirt and built me a fort with free materials from the dump and from a collapsed barn up the road (no permission, not him)—big glass panels, corrugated steel roofing, old studs and siding, fancy doors—and then he sat in there with me playing cards at a tiny table till fall came and it just got too cold. He taught me to play poker so I wouldn’t get taken advantage of like he did when he was in the service. World War II and he was a grunt walking drunk through France after the liberation, never near a single bullet, got there after the real work was done, kisses for candy bars. He advised me not to register for the draft, to just sidestep the whole Vietnam thing, and that’s what I did, with no thought that it might be terrible advice but in the end no repercussions. He was right when he was wrong, and wrong when he was right; he couldn’t win and he couldn’t lose. He smelled good night and day. He didn’t drive well, very poorly, in fact, but he knew it and never broke a rule of the road. Handsome forever, with that strong chin and forged face, the charming light in his eye, at least when he wasn’t miserable.

My mother kept her distance, surrounded herself with a sense of mystery, anyway she wasn’t a big one for hugs or self-revelation, not with her kids, not with anybody. Barbara Makepeace Barton, of Grand Rapids, Michigan, where Dad had gone to attend a friend’s wedding. She had a reckless side, loved a martini, loved two martinis, liked a naked swim. She would have found Nick pleasingly cocky, insecurity recognizing its own—beauty, too. Anyway, they were married not long after they met and Katy was born not long after they were married and Mom was glad she’d moved east—exurban Connecticut never stopped seeming upscale to her. She had cultural pretensions, too, took Katy and me to pops concerts, all the museums in New York, to Sturbridge Village, flower shows, Shakespeare festivals, lectures at the library, but never really followed up in any way: these things were good for you, like oats. You ate them and you were done.

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