A Teenage Runaway and a Lady Ventriloquist Meet on a Ship. And Then What?
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Whatever the opposite of homesickness is, that's what Lenny Valert has. He's sixteen, the child of British parents living in America, unsure of what to do or how to be. He doesn't know exactly why he wants to get away from his life but feels he needs to figure things out on his own. He is, well, a teenage boy.
He stows away on a boat crossing the Atlantic, where he meets a magnificent lady ventriloquist named Lottie. She begins teaching him her trade, but before long, a sort of romance develops between them. Imagine Harold and Maude with a dash of Water for Elephants and you'll get a sense of this topsy-turvy love affair, all rendered in technicolor by Elizabeth McCracken, one of our most dazzlingly original storytellers.
And if you're yearning to be dazzled even more, read another offbeat love story from McCracken here, and make sure to check out her upcoming short fiction collection, The Souvenir Museum, in which both of these stories appear.
"A Splinter"
When Lenny was sixteen he ran away from home. Sailed. Bussed, as in bussing tables. Walked, from table to table to the ship’s kitchen and back, round and round the decks of the Queen Elizabeth 2, on its voyage from New York to Southampton. His family knew he’d gone—his father had helped him land the job—they just expected him to turn around with the boat itself, same job, opposite direction, home in two weeks. But instead of spending a single day wandering Southampton he hitchhiked to London and tried to get a job in show business. “How stupid,” his mother said, when she heard the news. She was English. He was not. Or he was, but in a way that only he understood.
He had gone to London because he’d fallen in love with a lady ventriloquist on board the ship. If he could have smuggled himself off in her trunks he would have, but she already had a man packed away. A toy man: his name was Willie Shavers. She also had a parrot, a little girl with braids, and a yellow cat. It was the parrot she was famous for: the parrot’s name was Squawkanna, and with Lottie—Lottie was the woman, Lottie Stanley—she’d had a hit song, though that had been 10 years before, in the mid 1970s. Famous for a summer. If you heard her name and were English, you’d say Who? and if you heard the song you’d say, Oh, right. You might wince. It wasn’t a good song. On board the QE2, Lenny had watched her act every single night. She was plump in her sequined gowns, and wore her blond hair in an old-fashioned hairdo, lots of hairspray and a series of paste tiaras. She’d given him her calling card with a flourish, amused by his attention, and now here he was, ringing her bell at the address in Ladbroke Grove, being shown in by the doorman and sent down the hallway to her ground floor flat.
The hairdo had been a wig, the glamorous face largely makeup, the cheekbones trompe l’oeil. But she was there, like a developing photograph, younger than he’d thought, plusher. She might have been the age of his oldest sister, Eloise, who was 32.
“Huh,” she said, when she saw him. “You don’t belong here.”
“I do,” he said. Then, “I want to learn how to be a ventriloquist.”
She frowned at him then. “Good afternoon.” Her voice was different on its own, sing-songier.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “Could you teach me?”
“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Don’t tell me how old you are.”
“I’m sixteen,” he said, knowing he didn’t look it. His body hadn’t changed yet but his soul had: this year he had developed delusions of grandeur and a morbid nature and a willingness to die for love; next year, pubic hair and broad shoulders.
“Christ,” she said. “Come in.”
Her furniture looked serious, antique: she was a grownup. The sofa was red velvet. He could feel the wood at its heart, as though, if she manipulated it, she could give it a voice and a personality. He thought she was a very good ventriloquist, though he didn’t know much about what that entailed. She regarded her puppets with indifference, as though their energy tired her; he’d stared at her mouth, waiting to see her lips move. Eventually they would, a little, gleamingly, like a thin necklace you weren’t sure a girl was wearing: you looked for it to appear for the pleasure of having it disappear just afterwards.
“I’m not too young,” he said.
“If anything you’re too old. To be a vent. Most boys pick it up ten or so. Where are your parents?”
“Ithaca.”
“Greece?”
“Ithaca, New York,” he clarified.
“Yes, I thought you were American.”
He decided not to argue with that, though he disagreed. True, he’d been born in the United States, and raised there, but his parents were English, his older sisters were English, every single person he was related to was English. A dog is a dog though born on a sheep farm, he told himself.
She said, “Was anybody with you on the boat?”
“No.”
She extracted a cigarette from a tin box and lit it with a large chrome lighter that gave off the scent of fuel. In her act, she struck matches on Willie Shavers’s cheek, then smoked while he talked. “You didn’t stow away,” she said, leaking smoke.
He shook his head.
“But you want to stow away here.”
“I can’t go back,” he said.
“To Ithaca, New York,” she said, with an amused expression. “No? Why?”
He had his reasons but they were ineffable. The fact was he’d planned from the first day to walk off the boat in Southampton, track down one of his sisters—all three of them lived in England, Katie in Sussex, Fiona in Bath, and Eloise in a village in Norfolk called Little Snoring —and ask for sanctuary. His sisters would no doubt fling him back to his parents, and anyhow, he didn’t know exactly where his sisters lived. He felt the nap of the velvet sofa, toed the herringbone wood floor. One of the planks was loose under his sneakered foot and he knew he could kick it up and out. He wanted to take it with him. All around were pictures of Lottie Stanley with famous people he didn’t recognize. He could only tell they were famous, and English: the sideburns, the teeth, the ears. Americans weren’t better looking, they were only more ashamed. He stood to go.
She said, “Sit down, my darling,” and appraised him through her winding smoke. On the ship he’d stared at her face for an hour a night, every night for seven. He wasn’t used to being looked at, or being called my darling. “I’ve got a home I can’t go back to myself. Can you pay weekly rent?”
“A little,” he said. He hadn’t been paid for his work on the boat—that would have happened on the return—but in his knapsack he had a stack of traveler’s checks, his entire savings, withdrawn the day he left.
“Remind me your name?”
“Lenny.”
“Oh no,” she said. She reached over to an ashtray on a side table to stab out her cigarette, the same gesture she used to punctuate all conversations, including the ones she had onstage with her several varieties of self. Her hair was a strange tweedy combination of dark and light. “We’ve already got a Lenny. What’s your last name?”
“Valert.”
“Jack,” she said. “Jack Valert. Suits you.”
So he was Jack.
He called his parents six nights later, two in the morning on Lottie’s phone, with the knowledge that it would be cheaper at that hour though possibly still astronomically expensive. He’d never made a long-distance phone call in his life. It was the day before he was due to return.
“How are you?” his mother said. “Shattered, I expect.”
“I’m in London.”
There was a pause. He wondered how much each second would cost. He would have to pay Lottie back.
“Why are you in London?” his mother said at last.
“I’m fine. I’ll come back in time for school.”
“Better had,” said his mother. He could hear his father in the background, and his mother said, her hand over the phone lightly, so he could hear, “It’s fine, it’s Lenny, it’s long distance.”
He’d been Jack for less than a week but Lenny seemed lives ago. Of course his parents wouldn’t be alarmed. His youngest older sister had been twelve when they’d moved to New York, already boarding at Downe House in Berkshire. He had a faint memory of her as a womanish child or childish woman during school breaks. Fiona and Eloise, too, had gone to boarding school, came to the states for the summers and winter hols and then they graduated and went on to English lives. Months went by when they didn’t see the girls. Only Lenny had been raised as an American, sent by his parents to public school—public in the American sense, less impressive, as everything was, in the American sense—as an experiment or a form of surrender. They regarded him as a sort of hanger-on with a pot-metal accent.
“Come when you can,” his mother said to him. “Do let us know your plans.”
Lottie gave him her guest room, a narrow space at the back of the flat, with a window at the foot of the bed and a large dresser with a mirror along one wall. “For practice,” she said. “That’s the only way to learn, practice in the mirror. I can’t teach you. I can give you this book, and you can read it, but you’ll have to put in the hours.”
“Am I really too old?”
“No,” she said. “You’re young yet. You might make it.”
“Were you young?”
“I was, yeah. Ten. My brother had an Archie Andrews figure he’d lost interest in. It’s like a language or an instrument. Easier when you yourself believe in all the mysteries of the universe. But not impossible afterwards. Here.” From the top dresser drawer she got out a puppet shaped like a hen, brown with a yellow beak and a drooping red comb.
He put it on his hand. It was tight across the knuckles and abrasive around the wrist.
She turned him by the shoulders so they faced the mirror. Without puppet or pretense, she began to talk without moving her lips. “The hardest letter to say is B. Bottle of beer. The boy bought a ball. Barnum brought barnacles by Boston.” Then her mouth was mobile again. “The trick is you don’t really say it. You say D, but you think B.”
What he had loved about watching her on the boat: the hot cider of her voice against the dry toast of Willie Shavers’s, her measured exasperation with him. No: what he loved was Willie Shavers himself, the glass eyes that looked from side to side, his levering eyebrows, the mystery of his mouth with its stiff lips and painted tongue. Squawkanna the parrot bored him; ditto the yellow tom cat, whose name was Captain Sims. This nameless hen, too. They were mere puppets, animals, sweet, but Willie Shavers unsettled Lenny—Jack, now, he agreed, it suited him—Willie Shavers upset Jack in a way that felt very much like love. He realized, in this small room, shirtless, looking at himself in the mirror, that it was Willie he had come for. Willie, who was a bully but yet could be bullied.
Lottie collected his rent and assigned him chores. She was astounded by what he didn’t know. “Rinse out the tub after a bath!” she said. Also, “Sit down while you eat.” Also, “It’s a small flat, nothing can be higgledy-piggledy.” Also, “Time to draw the curtains.” She believed in putting the physical world in order in a way he would have thought impossible. She was a genius at it. She paid him for lugging her equipment to performances, took the money back for rent and groceries. Her bathroom was long, with a navy blue toilet and a navy blue tub with no shower and an entire mirrored wall: maybe she practiced her Bs and Vs in every room. He hated standing up from a bath to catch sight of his dripping, naked body, the acne he’d acquired down his breastbone, the all over insufficiency of him. Nights he sat with Lottie on the sofa and they watched TV. English television was shockingly dull. One night they showed a documentary about the 60s. “I slept with her,” said Lottie, all of a sudden, when they showed footage of a clothing designer with a short black bob.
“Oh!” said Jack.
“I slept with everyone for a while,” she said. Even at home, she favored a kind of dated glitz, rough blue lamé blouses and toreador pants. Her feet were bare, her toenails coral. “Men and women. What about you?”
It occurred to him that he’d shipped himself off to another country so that he could attend to his late puberty alone, like the injured animal he was. Why boys joined the navy in the old days. Why anyone went to sea.
“That’s all right,” she said. “You don’t need to know.”
Even later he could not decide whether she was trying to seduce him or be a listening friend.
Think of B while saying D. Think B, say D. But all his life he could only say what he thought. He never got any better at it.
He practiced with the hen, whom he loathed. He wouldn’t do it in front of Lottie. “The boy bought a ball,” he said to his reflection. The doy dought a doll. You could try it with Gs, too. The goy got a gall. That at least was a sentence. Maybe he hated the whole enterprise. With the hen on his hand he could feel half his soul, more, leak from his body into the puppet, Siamese twins, the hen the twin with the major organs. The thing he could never do—he saw, looking in the mirror—was hold still. The hen spoke. Jack raised his eyebrows, pecked at the air. He had no talent for making believe. He could not stop being himself.
He could hear his father say it. You just can’t stop being yourself, can you?
He’d thought he’d feel at home in England. In upstate New York they all were foreigners: despite his accent Jack’s childhood clothes were English, ordered through the mail, and his packed lunches, and his particular snobberies that drove his classmates crazy. He did not have friends at school because he felt superior to everyone, and also inferior.
But London was no better. Maybe he would enlist in the navy, but which one? He didn’t want to run away to join the circus: he loathed animals, and contortionists, and the sound of the whip. Perhaps he could sign back on with the crew of the QE2, and travel between countries for the rest of his life.
In England he could drink. It was legal. That was stunning. So he did. He accompanied Lottie on gigs: a glamorous one in a fancy house on Holland Park, where Lottie stood in the foyer and people lined the stairs to watch her; a depressing one in a basement theater near Brick Lane where nobody showed up. She always had to sing her song with the parrot, You’re My Bird. She asked Jack to come on television with her, not as a performer but an assistant, who took the figures in and out of their cases. She could have done it herself, she always did, but she dressed him in a suit that made him look like a dummy himself. “Not a dummy,” said Lottie, “we don’t call them dummies. Ventriloquial figure.”
One of these nights he woke up—it was dark—not in the narrow bed in the room with the mirror, but in Lottie’s bed, with Lottie. He’d not been so drunk that he couldn’t remember what had happened—it would be years before he drank like that—but he could not remember how it had begun, or whether he should be ashamed of himself.
In the morning she was blasé at the breakfast table.
“I hope you feel relieved,” she said.
“Yes,” he said while thinking no.
“We could get married. Do you need to get married?”
“What do you mean?”
“To stay in England.”
“I’m English,” he said, and she laughed out loud. He had to show her his passport to prove it.
They did not sleep together every night, just once in a while, and he could never tell whose idea it was, who first inclined a head for a kiss, put a hand to the other’s waist. They seemed to be operating each other’s body. He wondered whether she felt it, too, whether the whole world did. The Sex Act, his father had once called it in an unsuccessful conversation: in which another body compelled your body to move in a life-like way. It was a negotiation, but you were still yourself, there in your head, more than ever, actually. There were so many things to worry about. You could never lose yourself.
Why had she taken him in? There had to be a reason. An unhappy childhood? A child given up for adoption? She’d been beaten, she’d beaten somebody else, she’d been raised in a religion that forbid idolatry. She had a thing for teenagers. Once, in bed, he asked her.
“Why do I need a secret to be a terrible person?” she said.
“You’re not a terrible person.”
No solution to the puzzle of Lottie. No solution to the puzzle of Lenny.
Mornings, he thought about running away from running away, but where could he go? He could call his parents, who would give him the address of one of his older sisters, or some cousins—he remembered visiting an elderly person in a house in Kent when he was 7. But nobody was in London. He went out walking for hours, down Notting Hill Gate to Kensington Gardens, across Kensington Gardens to Exhibition Row, down the old Brompton Road. Everyone in London was from somewhere else. A game he invented: he would look at people, guess where they were from, then get close enough to hear them speak. Shoes and hair were the deadest giveaways. Every so often he would see a woman with a particular expression and he would know without analysis that she was American. The thrill of recognition. He would have to follow her until he heard her talk—to her companion, to a clerk in the chemist’s. In the drugstore. He was light-footed and invisible, and on this subject he was always right.
He’d been raised by wolves, then delivered to civilization. Then, at the end of the summer, the wolves came back to claim him after all.
*
Early September. In Ithaca, NY, his junior year in high school was about to start, but in London Jack was doing his chores, standing at the ironing board in the living room, the only space big enough to unfold it.
“Jack,” Lottie called from the door to the flat.
He hadn’t seen Fiona for two years, and Eloise for three. The word relations lit up in his head: what Eloise and Fiona were to him; what he and Lottie had, in a euphemism his father might have used. Did you have relations with that revolting woman. His older sisters had come to rescue him. They were grown-ups and had bank accounts. Five minutes before he believed his problems were complicated, immense, insoluble; now he understood that every one of them could be dismissed with money. He was so delighted he’d forgotten what the situation looked like: Lottie in an emerald green satin housecoat, he shirtless and smoking a cigarette over his ironing. Not his own shirt but a tiny blue suit for Willie Shavers. Lottie had promised him to Jack: she didn’t like Willie Shavers. You could bend emotion into the cloth puppets; Willie’s expressions were purely mechanical. Anyhow, he’d been a gift from her own mentor, an old man named Shappy Marks, long dead and—said Lottie—good riddance. But not yet. Jack would have to earn him.
“Lenny,” said Fiona, and Eloise said, “Lenny, my god, what happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“Look at you,” she said. “You’re a bag of bones.”
“This is Eloise,” said Fiona, the kinder one, she was wearing a pink dress with red roses and her hair loose and parted down the middle. “I’m Fiona. Get your things, Len.”
Eloise followed him to Lottie’s tidy bedroom. Jack was grateful for its orderliness. He wanted Eloise to admire it. From the top drawer of his dresser he extracted a green t-shirt, pulled it on. The bed was made. He felt Eloise study it, the paisley duvet, the two bedside tables, each with its ashtray.
“My God, Len.”
“It’s all right.”
“All right is not a phrase I would use, actually,” she said. She had the accent all of the family had except him, the voice that Lottie used on stage but not at home: posh, from nowhere. Lottie’s actual voice was Northern, from Manchester. That was one of the things he had learned in the past weeks. “Not any of this is all right.”
“My stuff mostly doesn’t fit me, anyhow,” he said.
“Leave it, then. Come on. We have to hurry.”
Was he just going to walk out with nothing, with nobody? Lottie kept the figures in cases beneath her bed, and he grabbed the one marked WS and stuck it into the duffle he’d arrived with. He’d been promised but he didn’t want to ask; he didn’t want to be refused. He swung the duffle behind his back, and it knocked into his legs, it hurt, that’s right, everything hurt, he was built of wire and wool.
In the living room, Fiona and Lottie were sitting on the red sofa, each holding a plate with a single untouched jaffa cake. If you didn’t know, thought Jack, you would not be able to guess what the two women had in common.
“All right?” Fiona said to them. “Going?” She handed her plate to Lottie. “Good.”
“Wait,” said Jack. He turned to Lottie. “Do you think,” he said, “there’s a chance—could I get the extra rent back?”
He was worried she’d get mad. Lottie didn’t have much of a temper but she didn’t like being contradicted. She didn’t like being asked for favors.
At this Fiona roared.
“You charged him rent?” she said. “You’re a grown woman!”
The plates with their cakes, one in each hand, seemed a prank Fiona had played on Lottie that pinned her to the sofa. Jack tried to assemble the right emotion for the moment—he might never see her again—and he rummaged through what he had: pity, gratitude, shock, love, disapproval, utter confusion. Her blond hair had been combed into a ponytail. He would never feel the lash of it again.
She said, perplexed, “Well, yes.”
*
Together two-thirds of Leonard Valert’s sisters jostled Leonard Valert himself into a black cab. Where are we going? Airport. I don’t have money. Daddy’s bought you a ticket. Did he? Of course. How did you find me? Saw you on the telly! How was I?
“How were you,” said Eloise incredulously. She was sitting on the jump seat, her feet resting on the duffle bag. She stared at him, then said, “You were wonderful.”
They were so embarrassed over everything they started to tease him. Jack, they said. Jack, I’m lonely. Where’s my monkey.
“She doesn’t have a monkey. She has a cat.”
Darling Jack, lovely Jack, come here, I’ll stick my hand up you.
Even Jack was laughing. It was horrible and hilarious.
Eloise said in her fancy voice, “What I would like to know is who the fuck is Jack.”
“Good name for a ventriloquist,” offered Jack.
“Better name for a dummy,” said Fiona, the nice one.
*
At Heathrow he opened the stolen case. He’d been so certain he would see Willie Shavers looking up at him he couldn’t make sense of it: Captain Sims, the woeful cat; how on earth did he get here? Lottie was meticulous, she said it made a difference, the figures cared where they rested, but it had been careless Jack who’d last packed them up after a performance in Brighton. He stared at the slack-jawed cat a while then shut the case and left it in the airport men’s room. Let the bomb squad explode it. Let it linger forever in lost property.
Years later, telling a story at a party, holding forth, cutting his eyes at his wife, shaking his head in deadpan disbelief, he understood in an awful rush how much of his grown up personality he’d taken from Willie. Willie, the artificial man, unconvincing, charismatic. No important part; just the part that allowed him to stand up straight in public. The part that let him ask strangers for their love, and not care if they said yes.
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