Wilde Lake(11)

And when they don’t get it, they can get very angry.





THE BOY IN THE BUSH


My family moved to Columbia, our future house rolled down the highway on a flatbed trailer, I was born, my mother died—and I remember none of it. These are the stories I was told. The first vivid memory that I trust as my own, in part because AJ agreed on every detail, is the August day in 1976 when we found Noel Baumgarten in our bushes, peering into our kitchen.

Teensy, rinsing the lunch dishes at the sink, shrieked when she realized there was a person in the bushes. His eyes, green as sea glass, might have passed for light-dappled leaves if they had not been moving rapidly back and forth, scanning everything he saw.

“Got-dammit.” Teensy belonged to a storefront church in West Baltimore and she never cursed, so this was serious business. She grabbed a broom and headed outside, AJ and I trailing her. We weren’t the least bit scared or disturbed by our Peeping Tom. We were excited because something was finally happening and so little happened on those slow summer days, when most of the kids we knew went to camp or the ocean or the mountains. We never went anywhere.

“What are you doing?” Teensy demanded of the boy in the bush.

“Taking photographs,” he said cheerfully, showing us the heavy, old-fashioned camera he wore on a cord around his neck.

“Whaaaaaaa—?” Teensy yelled, making futile passes with the broom, the boy ducking and swerving as if it were a dance.

“Of your house. It’s wild. What was it, before Columbia was built? Did George Washington sleep here? It’s a thousand times nicer than any other house around here, that’s for sure.”

“Why did you come up to the kitchen window if all you wanted to do was photograph our house?” That was AJ, not Teensy. She was now completely nonplussed, a first in my experience. Maybe it was those eyes. They were so big and green, like something you’d see on a tiny jungle animal in National Geographic. Or maybe it was his juicy confidence. Noel, as we would soon learn, was completely without guilt, even when he was doing things for which he should feel guilty. He could stare down any authority figure and proclaim his innocence.

“I bet people take photographs of your house all the time,” he said, ignoring the question put to him. “Don’t they?”

They did. And, like this boy, they assumed that the house had been there first, that the wood-sided split-levels were the interlopers who had forced themselves on this dignified matron. In that way, the house, although chosen to lure my mother to Columbia, was not unlike my father. A newcomer just six years ago, our father had been appointed to the state’s attorney’s office in 1975 and already seemed a fixture in the county. People often asked if the Brants went back as far as the Warfields, one of Howard County’s oldest, most storied families. That’s how my father’s brand of confidence worked. He found the place he wanted to be, kept still and poised, and eventually people assumed he had been there all along.

“I didn’t mean to scare you,” Noel said as he emerged from the bushes, brushing a stray leaf from his hair, blue-black and shiny, like Prince Valiant in the Sunday comics. His hair was all the more striking with those otherworldly green eyes and fair skin. “I just wanted to see if the inside of the house was as old-fashioned as what’s outside. I’m Noel Baumgarten.”

He offered his hand to AJ. At the time, he was considerably shorter than AJ, although that would change. But he was short enough so that it wasn’t crazy of me to hope he might be closer to my age than my brother’s, or at least right between the two of us, and therefore a suitable friend to both.

“Where do you live?” AJ asked. “Where are you going to school in the fall?”

“Up on Green Mountain Circle.” He hitched a thumb toward the long semicircle of a street that formed the closest thing our neighborhood had to a main drag. “I’ll be a freshman at the high school in the fall. It’s just me and my mom.”

“Did your parents get divorced?” I asked. “Or is your dad dead?”

“Lu!” AJ’s tone was reproving. “You don’t ask things like that.”

Noel laughed. “I do,” he said. “I ask questions like that all the time. I ask people how old they are and how much money they have and what kind of cars they drive and my mother says”—here, he put on a high, pained falsetto, cocked a fist on his hip—“my mother says, ‘You will be the death of me, Noel Baumgarten.’ And, no my parents aren’t divorced, but my dad works, like, twenty hours a day. He’s at the State Department. And he doesn’t want to add to his day by commuting, but my mom thought Wilde Lake would be better for me. I was at Sidwell Friends.” Dramatic pause. “I got kicked out.”

“For what?” That was AJ, for the record. It seemed far ruder to me than asking if someone’s dad was dead.

An enormous shrug, his eyes shining. “Marching to the beat of my own drummer.”

Years later, at Noel’s funeral service, we would meet the classmate whom Noel was discovered kissing in the boys’ bathroom at that exclusive private school. It turned out that neither boy had been expelled, not exactly. School officials conferred with both sets of parents and agreed the boys should be separated. For their own good. Yes, that was something well-intentioned, liberal parents did forty years ago; they tried to nip ho mosexuality in the bud, hoping it was a bad habit, like smoking. I wouldn’t be surprised if some still do it today. Your son is kissing a boy? Chalk it up to confusion, assume that one of them is a bad influence, and separate them, “saving” the one who was led astray. I think it was Noel’s mother, already deeply ambivalent about her marriage, who chose to put him in Wilde Lake High School, thinking its progressive open education style was an environment in which her unusual boy might flourish. She was a hard little number, Noel’s mother, but she loved her son. In my mind, I see her always in a high, tight ponytail and tennis whites, although that clearly is apocryphal. She would have worn real clothes on at least some occasions. I had a brief period of time hoping that our two single parents would marry, but Noel’s mother surprised everyone, even herself I think, by returning to Noel’s father when Noel graduated from high school. She had spent four years claiming she moved to Columbia just for Noel. Maybe she came to believe it.