A Cavalcade of Lesser Horrors

Good-bye to Libertyville

89 Good-bye to Libertyville It was a Saturday evening in early September, and my mother, my father, my buddy, and I were in the tan 1962 Chevrolet Biscayne nine-passenger station wagon driving to Glenview where I was to catch the overnight Milwaukee Road train to Minneapolis and college. A cousin of mine had tried college a year earlier, then opted to go into the air force instead. He’d given me his off-tocollege trunk, and I’d packed it, taken it to the Railway Express office, and shipped it on ahead. The rest of my stuff was in an army surplus duffel bag riding between my buddy and me in the back of the station wagon. It was a beautiful evening in the suburbs. One of those late summer cool fronts had come down out of the northwest—the kind that drops the temperature into the fifties for a night or two and makes it all but impossible not to think about autumn and going back to school. Inside the station wagon, there was the faintest whiff of “don’t let the door hit you in the ass” in the air. My parents had seven more children at home behind me. They needed the space I occupied—both physically and emotionally. Especially since I was their largest—I towered over them the way Li’l Abner towered over Mammy and Pappy Yokum. Now, lolling in the back seat, left elbow atop the duffel bag, smoking a Pall Mall (in front of them now that I was a college man), I had the strangest sense that maybe they weren’t all that sorry to see me go. Were they 90 GOOD-BY E TO LIBERT Y V ILLE gloating up there? Were they mourning the loss of a son or secretly celebrating shedding a two-hundred-twenty-pound obligation? My parents were little, precise, proper people with impeccable manners. They paused before speaking and chose their words carefully. Their clothes fit them with Brooks Brothers perfection. They had furnished their home in a scale that fit them and surrounded themselves with books, magazines, and art that fit, too. I, on the other hand, seemed to have my elbows on life’s table. I hurtled between bouts of loud, often boorish behavior and stints of dark, adolescent moodiness. I instantly rumpled whatever clothing I fell into and had been too big for the living room furniture since eighth grade. At times, they seemed genuinely appalled to have spawned so large a churl. They had been horrified when, years ago, I’d brought home the buddy who was riding along to see me off to college—a large and even-moreoa fish fellow traveler. Like two astronauts in a space capsule going behind the moon, he and I had lost communication with the rest of the species as we entered our teens. The blackout phase had been long, dark, and isolating, and now I seemed to be coming out of it first. I had reestablished contact enough to be going to college. My buddy was staying home, continuing to clerk at the drugstore, waiting for something in life to enthrall him enough to warrant vocation. So far, with the exception of underage alcohol, nothing really seemed to have caught his imagination. Wearing yesterday’s clothes over yesterday’s bleach-yellowed underwear, he wandered from a morning of work at the drugstore home to the afternoon Cubs games on WGN-TV and the Schlitz beer his parents had cached to drink with their coffee in the morning. Even I was concerned. The beer that made Milwaukee famous was making my buddy a listless lump. He was not even particularly interested in girls. He already had declared himself one of life’s larger losers . He had abandoned all hope as he entered adulthood. GOOD-BY E TO LIBERT Y V ILLE 91 Two roads diverged in that tan Biscayne. Only four months earlier, weeks before graduation, he’d found a dead dogfish beside the lake behind the school during gym class. He’d smuggled it into study hall, and we’d had a fine time kicking it up and down the aisles. There had been all those summer and autumn evenings, wandering the quiet, tree-lined backstreets of Libertyville, smoking cigarettes, setting tin-can traps to unnerve passing motorists, looking for our signature brand of low-grade...