Fletch, Too

“It could be a honeymoon. Barbara might like it.”

Fletch remembered. Growing up, he had not been exactly the center of Josie Fletcher’s universe either. There were her detective novels, always. He called them her defective novels. Because none had sold particularly well, there had had to be a lot of them. Other people made jokes about his mother’s books. She had not written many novels, people said, she had written one novel many times. People joked that her publisher kept her writing one novel until she got it right. True, her producing murder and mayhem for quiet libraries throughout the land had kept them reasonably sheltered and reasonably fed. For that he was grateful to her.

Josie Fletcher lived in a world in which fictional characters had reality and real people were forgotten, blinked at, treated vaguely. The characters in her novels seldom had breakfast, lunch, and dinner all in the same day, never had cuts on their elbows, black eyes, broken fingers, itchy pubic hairs, or teachers deeply mistaken in their student’s mathematical potential. They never went shopping to replace trousers that had risen up the shank of the leg or split in the back when the wearer stooped for a drink from the school water bubbler.

Independence was not something for which Fletch had ever had to strive. There had been moments when he had deeply resented it.

Yet here he was, on his wedding day, in a moldy motel room, having a sandwich with his mother, listening to her surprise at his expressing “mild curiosity” regarding his father. She had never, never told him about their marriage.

In fact, he was curious about both of them. Always had been.

“Why haven’t you?” he asked.

“Why haven’t I what?”

“Ever told me about my father, your marriage?”

“Fear and fairness.”

“Fear?”

“Your masculinity, too, my son, is something I’ve never been able to come to grips with. Don’t think a mother doesn’t know. You’ve been ripping your jeans on garden fences since you were nine years old.”

In front of his mother, Fletch blushed. “Men aren’t born virgins, you know.”

“You weren’t, at any rate.”

“A man has nothing to give up but his energy.” Fletch laughed.

“Oh, God.”

“I can’t help it if I’m energetic.”

“Is that what you call it?”

“May I have some of your french fries?”

“Of course. Do keep up your energy.”

“I had pizza about three this morning. Supper or breakfast. I don’t know which.”

“Despite all my last chapters, not all mysteries have solutions. How does a mother explain to a son that she doesn’t understand a husband, a father? That she was in a marital situation she doesn’t understand?”

“By beginning with Chapter One?”

“And there’s the element of fairness. I could have spewed forth what I thought about your father, my confusion, my hurt, my puzzlement, the mystery, but he wasn’t around, you see, to defend himself, to give you his side of whatever story. I loved him, you see.”

“You could have told me he left you, not that he died, for Christ’s sake.”

“I never knew that, you see.” Her face turned whiter. “You show up today with, frankly, a blank piece of paper …”

Fletch watched his mother try to gather together in one hand another quarter of her three-decker sandwich.

“You know that we had to have your father declared assumed dead, after seven years. Otherwise, I couldn’t have married Charles.”

“I remember him.”

“He wasn’t with us long, was he? Or Thad.”

“You’ve kept the name Fletcher.”

“Well, I had published books under that name, you see, and it was your name. And Charles, and Thad, and … weren’t your father.” She wiped under her eyes with her paper napkin. “It was the impossibleness of your father that I loved. If that blank piece of paper you showed me means anything, if he did go somewhere, I would have loved to have gone with him.”

“But you say you didn’t understand him.”

“Oh, who the hell understands anybody? Damn fools keep asking me why I write mystery stories. Maybe because there’s a big mystery in my life I’ve never been able to solve. So, neurotically, I keep setting up simulated mysteries and arriving at simulated solutions. Frustrated practicing.”

“Writers have an uncontrollable compulsion to control compulsion,” Fletch said. “I read that somewhere, too. Remembered it, in my effort to understand you.”

“Lots of luck,” she said.

“Chapter One.” Fletch snuck a look at her wrist watch, “I’m trying to make a decision here. Am I flying to Denver, Colorado, or Nairobi, Kenya?”

“I don’t know what to tell you.”

“Chapter One,” he repeated.

“Chapter One,” she said. “High School. Montana. I was the pretty little thing. Cheerleader. Honor student.”

“I’ve read this book,” Fletch said. “Several times. And he was the big man on campus, president of the class, captain of the football team.”

“Far from it. He was way out.”

“Sorry. Wrong novel.”

“Way out, skidding his overpowered motorcycle around his parents’ dirt-poor ranch. Bright enough. He once wrote this paper for English class, this long, somber, brilliant analysis of a Shakespearean sonnet. The teacher gave him an A-plus-plus, and complimented Walter in class. Walter roared with laughter. He told everybody he had written the ‘Shakespearean’ sonnet himself and then analyzed it. Nearly destroyed the teacher.”

“Ah,” said Fletch. “So it was Daddy who wrote Shakespeare.”

“When they expelled him for that—”

“They expelled him for that?”

“Suspended him. At the time, the object of education was obedience, not intellectual freedom. Has anything changed? Anyway, Walter took an airplane without permission from a neighboring ranch—”

“He could fly a plane in high school?”

“No one knew he could. First he buzzed the high school a few times, while it was in session. Then he bombed it. With a volume called The Collected Plays of Shakespeare. Made a perfect hit, too. Smashed the skylight over the stairwell. The book and all this glass came crashing down three floors.”

“And you’ve never wanted to tell me about this man?”

“Wild. You mentioned football. One Saturday at a home game, suddenly he appeared on the field, standing up in the saddle of his motorcycle. He caught a pass, sat down, roared down the field and through the goalposts, ball cradled under one arm.”

“Did he ever spend any time in jail?”

“Some. He was so handsome, so …” Josie shrugged. “… energetic, everyone should have loved him. Everyone hated him. Everything he did jeered at everything we held sacred. He jeered at the school by fooling the teacher with his Shakespearean sonnet. He jeered at football by saying, If the object is to get the football down the field, through the goalposts, use a motorcycle. He’d show up at school dances drunk, and dance energetically, satirically, I now realize. Everybody else would go home.”

“Dance with you?”

“To my embarrassment, yes.”

“What was a nice girl like you doing with a rogue like him?”

“Maybe I had a little understanding of him. At least between someone very feminine and someone very masculine, if not much ability to understand, there is a very strong chemistry? Electricity?”