Acts of Faith

Douglas

It is the day after his fifteenth birthday, and he is in his room with a pencil and spiral notebook, writing down six goals he is to achieve in the coming year. This exercise has been ordered by his father to sharpen his mental discipline and give him a sense of direction. He did poorly in his freshman year at the public high school he attended here in Tucson; next month he will be packed off to a rigorous boarding school a continent away—Milton Academy, his father’s alma mater. Dad had to pull strings to get him in, but he is being admitted on condition that he repeat ninth grade, an experience Douglas is not looking forward to.

It’s the middle of August, the rainy season in Arizona. There was a downpour last night, and the scent of the desert after a rain has seeped in through the air-conditioning vents—a tang of creosote bush. The cacti have bloomed, and summer poppies spill down the hillsides and through the forests of saguaro, spiny arms pointed skyward. The beauty outside his bedroom window distracts him. So does Pink Floyd, piped through the earphones plugged into his cassette player. So do the model planes that surround him. Prop planes and jets, fighters, bombers, and airliners climb and bank on plastic pedestals; they hang from the ceiling on slender wires, stirred into an imitation of actual flight by the air conditioner and the paddle fan twirling overhead. He pictures himself in a cockpit, alone, in complete control, answerable to no one.

Why six goals and not five or ten or some other number that makes sense?

He forces himself to concentrate and, when he’s finished, goes down a long corridor to the study, where his father is studying blueprints. Weldon Braithwaite, a tall man with the fleshy but still powerful physique of the aging athlete, is CEO of Web-Mar Associates, a development firm that has covered vast swaths of Arizona with strip malls, fairways, and retirement communities bearing faux Spanish names like “Rio Vista Estates.” Douglas announces himself with a cough. Weldon looks up. His son says, “Here it is,” and hands him the sheet of looseleaf.


1. TO GET A “B” AVERAGE AT LEAST.


2. TO WATCH MY TONGUE (DON’T TALK BACK TO TEACHERS).


3. TO GO OUT FOR A SPORT AND STICK WITH IT.


4. TO DO SOMETHING FOR THE POOR, LIKE WORK IN A SOUP KITCHEN ON XMAS VACATION.


5. TO LEARN ABOUT THE BIRDS IN MASSACHUSSETTS.


6. TO TAKE FLYING LESSONS & GET A PILOT’S LICENSE.

Weldon knows his son well enough to see that he’s telling his parents what he thinks they want to hear. Except for number six. That’s for the kid himself. Wanted to fly ever since he knew what an airplane was. One and two are intended to please Mom and Dad both, three to please Dad, four and five go to Mom, the family do-gooder. Weldon feels a twinge of resentment that two goals have been tailored to Lucy’s tastes, only one to his. The emotion troubles him. He would have thought himself too large-minded for such petty jealousy, though he knows that he and Lucy have been wrestling for years for possession of Douglas, the youngest of their three children and their only son.

Lucy had wanted a boy as much as he, and Weldon figures that’s one reason why they have waged a kind of custody battle for the greater share of Douglas’s love and loyalty. Then there are the differences between him and his wife. She’s a westerner, born in Flagstaff; he’s from New England, like every generation of Braithwaites going back to 1640; he was raised Presbyterian, she’s a Mormon, a lapsed one who nonetheless exhibits, in her crusades for the rights of Native Americans and Mexican immigrants, the self-sacrificial, and sometimes self-righteous, spirit of her proselytizing forebears. Weldon is all for helping the disadvantaged, but to his mind that’s best done with charitable contributions, preferably tax deductible, not by spending time away from your family teaching English in barrios or on Indian reservations.

He looks at the paper and then at his boy, so scrawny now, having grown four inches in as many months without gaining the weight to go with the height; scrawny and awkward, his brain unable to figure out how to communicate with the suddenly longer limbs. He is fidgeting, and Weldon guesses what he’s thinking: “The old man wants me to set an ‘A’ average as a goal; he’ll say he wants me to get a real job over Christmas vacation, not dish out soup to derelicts.” But that’s not what the old man is going to say. He’s had a flash of insight. What’s the kid really telling me with this list? That he doesn’t want to be the prize in a war between Mom and Dad. That he wants to please both of us because he belongs to us both.

“You misspelled ‘Massachusetts,’ ” Weldon says. “Look it up.”

“Okay.”

“Make you a deal. If you really do one through five, you’ll get six next summer.”

“Don’t say that if you don’t mean it,” Douglas pleads after several moments of silence.

“Solemn promise. You’ll be in the air when you’re sixteen.”

Douglas is there already.