“Is he ever scolded? Punished?” Mrs. Mortimer asked.
“Nothing works,” Eleanor said. “We’ve tried everything short of confiscating his trumpet. We threatened once to take it away for a day. He held his breath until he passed out. He’s better now with his brothers. They do not suffer under the same ethical constraints as his parents or his teachers.”
Eleanor didn’t tell Mrs. Mortimer that Harry and Will had beaten Jack until his nose bled after he told his third-grade class that they had wet their pants when they were mugged in Central Park by a man with a gun and tattoos on his face. They had tried first to humiliate him—Mikado justice—but already at eight, he was inured to humiliation.
“Your wiener is smaller than my little toe,” Harry said.
“Tom’s wiener is bigger than yours,” Will said.
“I’m only a kid,” Jack said. “Wait until I’m grown. Mine’ll be bigger than your foot. Trumpet players have the biggest pickles. Everyone knows that.” Will pushed him to the floor; Harry put him in a headlock.
Will said Jack was the Dark Side of the Golden Rule. “He does unto others as he would have them do unto him, and the others want to kill him.”
Harry’s blurts were different. They fell into two categories. The first kind were excited utterances, spontaneous and thoughtless spoilers, admissible as hearsay. If Harry brought a gift, he’d announce the contents as the recipient was unwrapping. “It’s a Swiss Army knife, the big fancy one.” If he recommended a movie or a book, he’d tell the ending. “Ewell, the guy who killed Tom Robinson, tries to kill Scout and Jem. Boo Radley saves them and kills him.” If he was planning a surprise, he couldn’t keep it under wraps longer than a week. He told Lea he was going to propose a month before the actual event. “I think I’m engaged to be engaged,” she told her mother. Harry’s egoism was less pervasive than Jack’s but also less genial.
The second kind of blurts were unwelcome truths—hard, unpleasant facts he thought other people ought to know. It was an old story for Eleanor, but until Café Luxembourg, she had never been a blurt victim, only a witness. When he was fifteen, he told seven-year-old Tom there was no Santa Claus. Tom was furious with Eleanor. “Why didn’t you tell me? I look like a baby.” He was crying. Eleanor knelt down. “I believed in Santa Claus until I was eight,” she said. Tom wiped his eyes with his sleeve. “Really?” he said. She nodded. Tom put his arms around her neck and cried with relief. Eleanor was not telling the truth. Her awakening had come much earlier. She knew her mother would never let a fat man who smoked a pipe and trailed soot into their apartment. “I buy you all the things you need,” Mrs. Phipps had said when Eleanor, age four, had asked if Santa was coming. “Don’t be greedy.”
“Harry is mean,” Tom said. Eleanor considered her reply. “He can’t help himself,” she said.
When Eleanor asked Harry why he did it, he said, “It was time he knew. It was embarrassing that he still believed.”
“Who was embarrassed?” Eleanor said. “Tom or you? You’re too old to be embarrassed by another person’s behavior. Look to your own.” Harry flushed. He never again let someone else embarrass him. His brothers were the chief beneficiaries of this new policy, though Eleanor too benefited; she no longer had to mop up after him.
Eleanor’s Santa intervention worked only in cases of displaced embarrassment. Harry kept telling people things they didn’t want to know. When he was in his late thirties, Harry told a good friend his wife was having an affair; he’d seen the adulterous couple kissing on a street in the East Village. The good friend stopped speaking to him. Harry couldn’t understand why, when he was only telling the truth. “It’s killing the messenger,” he said to Sam.
“The messenger here is not innocent,” Sam said. “You’re not Western Union. There’s a difference between the person who writes the telegram and the person who delivers it.” Sam laughed. “Then again, you may have saved the marriage,” he said. “Your friend could get mad at you instead of his wife. One of the relationships had to go.”
Harry might have kept his friend if he had been willing to apologize, but he wasn’t. Apologies weren’t in his repertoire. “The two are related, the blurting and the not-apologizing,” Sam said to his mother. “He’s never wrong.”
—
Sam taught himself to read when he was four. “I had to,” he told his father, “I needed to read my Superman comics. No one will read them to me.” Harry and Will would be in the park throwing a ball, catching a ball, hitting a ball. Sam would be in his bedroom archiving his comics or building LEGO. As he worked, he would hum to himself, snatches of melodies he’d heard on the radio or in church. Sitting with Sam one evening shortly before his sixth birthday, Rupert realized the boy was humming a section from “Im Abendrot,” the last of Strauss’s “Four Last Songs.”
“Do you think you’d like to sing in the St. Thomas Choir?” Rupert asked.
Sam looked up from the instructions. “No, thank you,” he said.
“Do you sing at school?” Rupert asked.
“No,” Sam said. “I don’t like to sing. I listen to songs in my head. They sound better. The songs at school are rubbish.”
Sam was the only one of Rupert’s sons who’d picked up his Anglicisms. He’d use them when he was alone with Rupert, as if they shared a secret language. Sam liked especially the British English words that meant something else in American English: trainers, flat, bonnet, braces, dust, fringe, flannel, jumper. He kept a list in a strongbox. Sam was a collector and archivist, not only of comics. He never wanted to throw anything out.
“Can’t we at least toss the Duplo,” Eleanor asked him when he was six. On most days his room looked as if it had exploded. “What about the Lincoln Logs?”
“No, no,” Sam said. “I’m saving them for Tom.”