So Shelly Page 2

  Manfred is the story of an American boy expatriated to the care of distant relatives after the death of the boy’s parents in an automobile accident (41 percent of all accidental deaths). Consigned to his ancestral home in the Scottish highlands, he meets and studies under the mentorship of a mountain wizard from whom he learns the secrets of conjuring, shape-shifting, and the controlling of spirits, including those of his mother and father. The novel made an impressive splash in the young-adult market. I was astounded that a boy nearly the same age as me and from my own backwater town had been allowed to swim in the deep end of literature at all. I became not only an ardent but also an envious admirer.

  The remainder of my knowledge of Gordon was attained through the grapevine of rumor that sprouted incessantly around him. Regardless of the source, I have no doubt that much of what I’m about to share has been exaggerated, but, I swear, this is how I heard it.

  I grew up and still live in a crowded low-class neighborhood of single-dwelling homes on the east end of Ogontz, less than a mile from the entranceway to the Strand but millions of dollars distant. If I walk one block north to the shore on the bay side, I can look northeast across the water to see the palaces rising over their putting-green lawns. These lawns run to backyard beaches from which wooden docks extend, Gatsbyesque, lined with WaveRunners and sailboats and powerboats of varying lengths. The two most prominently visible Georgian monstrosities, at which I still sometimes stare from my cement-footed poverty, belong to Gordon’s and Shelly’s families. The families are next-door neighbors; although, you could fit ten of my neighbors’ homes between the two houses.

  Prior to the events that followed the stealing of Shelly’s ashes, the only intimate connection between Gordon and me, outside of our unrelated friendships with Shelly, had been that we’d both lost our fathers. Gordon’s father abandoned him and his mother when Gordon was still an infant. The little that Gordon knows of him was dripped like poison from his mother’s vengeful lips.

  Gordon is the final bud on his father’s Ohio branch of a patrician family of Virginia. The family’s sons, all Annapolis-trained, had made their reputations in the United States Navy and their fortunes in the boatbuilding trade in the Chesapeake Bay region and along the Ohio shores of Lake Erie, where for more than a hundred years the Byron brand of cruising and fishing boats have dominated the waters of the Great Lakes.

  When he was forced to retire with a less-than-honorable discharge after a female ensign’s never-litigated claim of sexual harassment, Gordon’s father, the handsome John Byron, still in his midthirties, took his partial pension, returned home, and assumed position on America’s inland seas as chief executive officer of the Byron Boatyards. As the incompetent father of a two-year-old daughter, Augusta (the unwanted product of his putting into port with an admiral’s not-quite-eighteen-year-old daughter between dinner and dancing at the said admiral’s ball), he was desperate to marry. In exchange for John’s assuming complete guardianship of the child (meaning the infant, not the teenager), the admiral agreed not to pursue charges.

  Not long after his return to Ohio, through mutual friends at the Ogontz Yacht Club, he was introduced to Catherine Gordon, a thirty-year-old never-been-married still-living-at-home only child, and the last bearer of one of Ogontz’s most respected family names. Pale, plain-faced, and plump, Catherine was not John’s type—or any man’s type, for that matter—but she came from good stock, and the pickings were slim in Ogontz for a fast-approaching-middle-age man with a toddler and a penchant for burning through money.

  Soon after the tented and trellised backyard wedding at their newly purchased Acedia home, Catherine became pregnant. When Gordon was born on a frigid January day and officially christened, according to his maternal grandfather’s insistence, as George Gordon Byron, the Byron and Gordon names were extended into the seemingly forever-rosy future. Rosy, except for one thing. Gordon had been born with a clubfoot and an underdeveloped calf and ankle, an ill-omen that Catherine thought of as the sole mark of imperfection on the otherwise angelic child. As Gordon grew older, Catherine couldn’t assuage Gordon’s own self-conscious contempt for his deformity. Despite the painful therapeutic manipulations and serial castings endured during his infant and toddler years, and the doctors’ claims of success, Gordon developed a slight limp, which he still labors to hide.

  Catherine, soon bored by motherhood, joined every social club and service organization that would have her, leaving Gordon and her newly adopted stepdaughter, Augusta, in the full-time care of Missy Fanning, a fresh-from-the-university early-education-major-turned-nanny who boarded in a guest bedroom next to the nursery.

  The drudgery of permanent anchorage and the daily mundanities of running a business exacted a wearisome toll on Gordon’s father, who, during his navy years, had earned the nickname of “Mad Jack” Byron. One afternoon, Catherine returned home early from her book club to discover her husband, ten toes down on the floor of the nursery, on top of the nanny, whose bare legs were coiled around his frantically thrusting bottom, while Gordon watched, wide eyed, from behind the bars of his crib. Catherine kept the children but sent Mad Jack packing, an exile during which he managed to deplete the remainder of his, and much of her, once-substantial funds. Catherine’s remaining resources, though large by my family’s standards, barely covered living expenses and the maintenance of the surface appearances required of those living on the Strand. According to Shelly, the interior of the Byron house was sparsely furnished and no one was ever invited in. She once remarked that the mansion was nearly as empty inside as Gordon was.

  When Gordon was three, his father died of a massive heart attack in a Washington, D.C., hotel beneath a one-thousand-dollars-an-hour call girl, who, Gordon liked to brag, his father had stiffed three times. (“Although the risk of a heart attack is higher during sexual activity than it is during rest, the risk is still very low.”—The Merck Manual of Medical Information)

  Mad Jack’s was a story that Catherine shared—with no detail spared—regularly with Gordon (and anyone else who would listen). It explained her vitriolic hatred of men and Gordon’s spiteful admiration for his dissolute dad. She never dated again.

  The children received a new nanny named May Gray, a never-been-married Pentecostal Christian in her midthirties who alternately doted on and physically abused Gordon while giving nominal notice to the attention-starved Augusta. May tended to Gordon’s body and his soul. His every morning, from the age of two until thirteen, began with prayer followed by a ritualistic cleansing bath, which May administered with a bar of coarse pumice soap, until long after Gordon was capable of washing himself. The inherited wickedness of Mad Jack had polluted Gordon’s insides, she believed, and the devil’s brand marked the boy’s foot. May Gray’s divine purpose was to reclaim Gordon for Jesus. If her methods were oddly pedophiliac or abusive, the contradiction was lost on her as she caressed, kneaded, stroked, smote, and ultimately sucked the demon’s seed out of him. Gordon never complained.

  Gordon’s exquisite exorcisms ended when Catherine—she had encouraged her children to call her by her first name—passed his wide-open bedroom door as he stood unashamedly naked, admiring himself in the full-length mirror hung on the inside of his bedroom closet door. Her presence inspired no humility or shame in her son. Suspicious, the next day she installed several “nanny-cams,” and that night watched three stomach-turning seconds of a grainy black-and-white video of May masturbating Gordon with her left hand while reciting scripture from a Bible in her right. Only Catherine’s embarrassment and desire to spare herself the publicity and spectacle of a trial kept May Gray from prison.

  The Byron children were educated at home via an online Montessori school, which Catherine had paid the nanny (she would never refer to May by name again) extra to supervise. Both Augusta and Gordon were intellectually gifted and shared their mother’s passion for literature; Catherine’s extensive personal library of literally every book she had ever owned was theirs for carte blanch
e exploration. She made no allowances for age-appropriate texts, trusting that their natural interests and curiosities would either pique or repulse at the proper developmental stages. Her faith in nature was somewhat shaken one winter night, however, when Gordon was ten and Augusta twelve. She stumbled upon Gordon reading, by flashlight, Erica Jong’s erotic novel Fear of Flying to his half sister as the two of them lay giggling beneath the covers on Augusta’s bed.

  Still, books were the one extravagance Catherine lavished upon them without guilt or reservation. The first Saturday of every month was set aside for excursions to Cleveland area bookstores, where daylong book hunts bagged armfuls of reading material sufficient to sustain their voracious literary appetites for the next four weeks. Their challenge was always to consume whatever was purchased before the next month’s safari.

  As neighbors, Shelly and the Byron children were play partners during warm weather months; however, winter on Lake Erie is an inhospitable crone, shooing mortals indoors and out of her frosty company. From early November until late March, Lakers rush from house to car, from car to work, from work to car, and back from car to house, heads down, chins tucked, hands buried in pockets, and eyes, stinging with cold, trained on the nearest portals to warmth and light. A next-door neighbor might as well be the man in the moon, for all the likelihood of any prolonged social intercourse. But during the summer, in the child-starved Acedia, Augusta, Gordon, and Shelly formed a threesome that, according to the ever shortsighted Gordon, “only God or death could destroy,” and he dared either one to try.

  Their front yard was a Great Lake. The backyard was a shallow bay perfect for every kind of water toy imaginable: Jet Skis, sailboats, wakeboards, paddleboats, Kodiaks, kayaks, and canoes. Between the two families, they owned them all. It was swimming, however, that Gordon did best and loved most. Shelly loved the water as much as Gordon, and, even though she wasn’t his match as a swimmer, she’d play with abandon in the shallows, and captain any craft.

  If Shelly could be believed—her affection for Gordon sometimes clouded her judgments and remembrances of him—Gordon performed several swimming feats of Beowulfian proportion. One feat included a swim across the Ogontz Bay—congested with boats and Jet Skis—with Shelly, inside her life jacket, rowing alongside in a chop undulating at two to four feet. The two of them went to and around Johnson’s Island, which lies off the coast of downtown Ogontz, and on which a Confederate prison had been located during the Civil War, long prior to which an elaborate cave system had been carved underground by the Ottawa Indians who had once populated the area. (It was on Johnson’s Island that Gordon unearthed the skull he still uses as a drinking cup.) The distance swam, though great, wasn’t as impressive as his avoidance of the propellers of the boats captained by inebriated skippers, who were hard-pressed to see the boat traffic crossing their bows, much less to spot a boy foolhardy enough to be in the water, accompanied by a girl in a dugout canoe (approximately twenty boating-related deaths in Ohio every year). But that was Gordon: taking risks and accepting all challenges, doing anything to prove that, despite his withered foot, he was as good as, if not better than, any “normal” kid.

  On many other summer days, the three of them would sail, motor, or paddle to the island, build a camp, tell ghost stories, and conduct séances in the Confederate cemetery, or perform their own reenactments of Gordon’s favorite battles from the War of Northern Aggression. Shelly would agree to represent those whom Gordon, true to his paternal Virginia roots, referred to as the “tyrants of the North,” as long as he would later return the favor and play the interloping settlers trespassing on the sacred Ottawa grounds. Unlike Gordon’s war games, Shelly’s play scenarios were usually of peace councils and treaty signings in which she played a fictional female sachem named Me-no au-quay, which she translated as “good woman.” She used to carry a small homemade lexicon of handwritten Ottawa words and expressions she’d transcribed from various websites and library books. Her version of the Ottawa language was, in fact, a mishmash hybrid of the Ojibwa tongue from which the various Ottawa tribes derived their own. During their excursions, Gordon and Augusta would randomly point to objects, which Shelly would identify in her particular translation of the Ottawa tongue.

  Augusta, though older, responded compliantly to any and all of her half brother’s whims and requests, playing whatever role and representing whichever side Gordon designated for her in the reenactments.

  Fearful that his mother would improve upon her typically lax supervision should she learn of Gordon’s tests of his manhood, he swore Augusta and Shelly to eternal secrecy on a sacred oath, sealed with commingled blood from fingertip pinpricks.

  Shortly before her death, on a night when she had drunk too many hard lemonades stolen from her father’s pool house refrigerator, Shelly shared much of this history and the secret of her, Augusta’s, and Gordon’s many midnight skinny-dipping sessions during those innocent summers. She described how the three of them would shamelessly slip out of their clothes on the back beach and walk hand in hand, with Gordon in the middle, to the bay, where they’d languish in the shallow spa-warm waters.

  It was two events in the summer before high school that destroyed the innocence and, ultimately, the triad itself. First, Gordon found his life’s purpose when he lost his virginity to Annesley Chaworth, a cousin on his father’s side from back East. A sophomore marketing major at the University of Virginia, Annesley came to Ogontz partly to complete a mini-internship at the boat works and partly to spy on Catherine for her mother, Mad Jack’s sister, who was, at least ostensibly, “concerned for the well-being of her deceased brother’s children.”

  Although Mad Jack had left him little of monetary value, Gordon had at least inherited his father’s fitness-model body type. Largely because of the hours spent swimming, he’d also already developed broad shoulders that tapered to a chiseled chest, washboard abs, and an impossibly thin waist. The incessant kicking had produced a rock-hard ass and explosive thigh and calf muscles. He was only fourteen years old, but at six feet and two inches tall, he could have easily passed for a college boy.

  His first night with Annesley was less than memorable. Her stimulations were less skillful than May Gray’s, but within seconds of entering her, he had spent himself, and Annesley, underestimating what would soon prove to be Gordon’s nearly supernatural powers of resurrection, slunk back to the guest room. Over the next two weeks, Annesley performed as his nightly succubus—despite Augusta’s jealous snooping and attempts at obstruction. Annesley rounded out Gordon’s sexual education, teaching him how to tease and please a girl, and together they nearly exhausted the potentialities of human coupling.

  When their respective internships were completed, she limped home with a glowing report regarding the well-being of Augusta and Gordon under the care of Catherine. In fact, she self-servingly reported that while all was well in the Byron home, she might make her visit to Ogontz an annual event, just in case.

  For his part and for the first and only time in his life, Gordon made the association of sex with love. In the aftermath of Annesley’s departure, Gordon fell into a deep depression during which he rarely exercised; instead, he either ate or slept most of the day.

  With summer a month already exhausted, Shelly had been waiting impatiently for Gordon to appear and begin their play, for Augusta, lacking her half brother’s vivacity and imagination, had proved an inadequate substitute. Besides, she seemed distracted and angry, though she wouldn’t tell Shelly why. Whenever Shelly would inquire about Gordon and why he wouldn’t return her texts or calls, Augusta would answer, “He’s depressed,” with no further explanation.

  It was the Fourth of July (typically, seven people die each year in the United States as a result of direct strikes by fireworks) before Shelly saw him for the first time that summer. Augusta had dragged Gordon out to the back beach in order to watch Ogontz’s firework display launched from a barge in the middle of the bay. In the sporadic bursts of explosive
light, Shelly saw that he had put on a few pounds and that dark circles surrounded his eyes. When she finally approached him, the stench of alcohol, which she recognized from her father’s own exhalations and its constant seeping from his pores, poured from Gordon. Shelly was unable to mask her disappointment, which sent Gordon sprinting back into his hermitage.

  At around three in the morning, Shelly’s cell lit up and vibrated on her night table, rousing her from a fitful half-sleep in which she’d been wrestling with the possible causes of Gordon’s fallen state and the stratagems for rescuing him.

  “The dock,” Gordon’s text read.

  When Shelly arrived, barefoot and wearing her summer sleep attire—boys’ low-slung cotton boxer shorts and a form-fitting T-shirt that hugged her breasts and left her belly button exposed—he was sitting with his feet swinging limply from the end of the wooden dock. His toes tickled the surface of the bay. A flotilla of clouds blocked the moon. The air was humid, heavy, and wet. In some way not totally comprehensible to the mind of a fourteen-year-old girl, Shelly had come hoping to be desired by him. Though she was still petite, since last summer her body had lost its lean, boyish shape and assumed more womanly proportions; she desperately wanted Gordon to notice. She’d been imagining their night-swimming with great anticipation and with a newfound fascination for their respective bodies.

  When Shelly sat down next to him, her long jet-black hair washed over her face and brown calf’s eyes. Several strands settled in the corner of her thin-lipped mouth when the rest receded, except for the straight bangs that repositioned themselves in soldierly alignment across her forehead and tickled her fluttering eyelashes. Seated with her hands palms-down beneath the backs of her bare thighs, she was unable to reach the tepid bay water with her feet.