The Son of Someone Famous Read online

  Copyright © 1974 by M. E. Kerr.

  All rights reserved.

  Reissue Edition

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  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission of the publisher.

  Please direct inquiries to:

  Lizzie Skurnick Books

  an imprint of Ig Publishing

  392 Clinton Avenue #1S

  Brooklyn, NY 11238

  www.igpub.com

  ISBN: 978-1-939601-30-8 (ebook)

  For Barbara Dicks

  Contents

  Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.

  From the Journal of A.

  Notes for a Novel by B.B.B.

  This story begins the winter I thought I was turning into a boy. It isn’t a story about that, though; I’m still a girl. It’s the story of the son of someone famous. You’d know the name instantly. You may even guess it before I’m finished. But I’m not going to tell you outright. If I did, I’d have to leave out a lot so that I wouldn’t be sued. I don’t intend to leave out anything. Therefore I’m going to call the boy Adam Blessing, which was what he called himself when he came to live with Charlie Blessing, his grandfather.

  Adam came to Storm, Vermont, during one of those freezing weeks before Christmas, when I was trying to figure out some way to vanish from the face of the earth forever. That winter, the two things I thought about most were a) ending it all, and b) running away to New York City, where no one knew me, or cared that my name was Brenda Belle Blossom and that I was growing a small fringe of hair above my upper lip. My voice was deepening, too. I am almost sure that was the winter certain telephone operators first began answering me, “Yes, sir,” and “Just one moment, sir, while I look up the number.”

  Adam Blessing looked like any other average sixteen-year-old boy: red hair, freckles, green eyes—neither handsome nor homely. If I had known then who he really was, I probably would have seen his famous father in his face. I know that now every time I see a photograph of his father, or see his father on television, I see Adam, even though Adam never spoke with that much confidence or looked that sure of himself.

  All anyone really knew about Adam was that he was one of Charlie’s grandsons, and that he had come to live with Charlie. As my Aunt Faith said when she heard the news, “Heaven help that poor kid.”

  I was just fifteen that winter. I was the town tomboy, fatherless, flat-chested, and an only child. The only thing I did well was grow things. I had, and maybe still have, the greenest thumb in Burlington County. I can grow anything, even orchids if I put my mind to it, but what I love to grow most is garbage: avocado pits, pineapple tops, grapefruit seeds, sweet potatoes that have gone soft—things that are usually thrown out.

  My mother and my Aunt Faith and I live in the white house at the very top of Maple Hill. From my bedroom window I can look down on Charlie Blessing’s bungalow at the bottom of the hill, on Ski Tow Avenue.

  Sometimes in the middle of the night I’d have a dream that my father wasn’t dead. He’d appear in my room looking as handsome as he does in his photographs, and he’d hold out his hand and tell me he was taking me back to Omaha with him. (He was born and raised in Omaha, Nebraska.) I’d be all smiles, all set to go with him, and then he’d keep repeating Oma-ha-ha, Oma-ha-ha-ha, Oma-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha, until all that was left was the sound of laughter. I’d wake up angry and hurt, because the joke was on me. He wasn’t alive and I wasn’t going anyplace.

  Sometimes after that dream I’d get up and go to the bathroom. I always felt very lonely after that dream. I’d stare out the window, and at those times I’d always be grateful for Charlie Blessing’s lights. They were on, no matter the time of night. My Aunt Faith said it was because Charlie drank. She never said Charlie drank quite a bit, or Charlie sometimes got drunk; she said flatly: “Charlie drinks.” She said, “Charlie drinks by himself, which is the worst kind of drinking. It means he’s brooding. It means he’s bitter.”

  The fact that you almost never saw Charlie drinking in public did not mean that you never saw Charlie drunk in public. My aunt said Charlie couldn’t afford to drink in public. But we’ve all seen him under the influence more times than we can count on our fingers. I think that’s the reason I call him “Charlie’’ instead of Dr. Blessing, and it’s probably the reason my mother and my aunt let me get away with it. He’s the only adult in Storm I call by his first name.

  Charlie wasn’t an M.D.; he was a veterinarian. He was supposed to have been the best vet in the state of Vermont at one time. Christine Cutler’s father was his assistant in those days. Then Charlie’s only daughter, Annabell, was killed in an automobile accident, and Dr. Cutler began to run the Storm Animal Shelter single-handed. People began to prefer Dr. Cutler, and by the time Charlie was over his grief, no one wanted to bring sick pets to him. Eventually Dr. Cutler bought Charlie out. That was all years ago, before Charlie became a drinker, but there are still bad feelings between Dr. Cutler and Charlie.

  The first day that I ever met Adam Blessing was a Wednesday in the late afternoon. In Storm, the afterschool hangout is Corps Drugs on Central Avenue. From 3:30 until 5:00 p.m., it’s packed. Around 5:30, it’s dead.

  That afternoon I was waiting for it to be dead. I was about to buy something called Hairgo from Mr. Corps. It was for my upper lip. I didn’t want the kids around when I asked for it. I particularly didn’t want Christine Cutler anywhere within earshot, since I had an idea she already thought of me as a freak of some kind. I had a small reputation as something of a comedian, but not around Christine Cutler ever. I had this crush on her, which would be enough to make anyone want to puke, but the winter I thought I was turning into a boy, my crush on C.C. made me really begin to detest myself. I had decided there was probably something grossly wrong with me, and as a result I had developed a little hunched-over walk, as though I’d be less conspicuous instead of really kinky going around that way. I also used to never take off my coat. I also used to stand behind people a lot.

  There I was, for a good part of that Wednesday afternoon, standing in Corps Drugs with my coat on, hidden by Marlon Fredenberg, the football captain, holding my right hand over my upper lip, pretending to be having another really swell afternoon with the gang at the old afterschool hangout. I don’t have to describe Christine Cutler to you; there is a Christine Cutler in every town. It wouldn’t be enough to say she was blonde and blue-eyed. The Christine Cutlers of the world can have any color hair or eyes—they are still all alike. If you had to choose only one word to describe them, it would be Special. They are The Most Beautiful, The Most Popular, The Most Likely To Succeed; they are It.

  That afternoon, Christine Cutler was holding court, as usual, in the front booth. Everyone was flocked around her, hanging on her every word, practically drooling. I was drooping around over by the jukebox, clock-watching. 3:30, 4:15, 4:31. . . . Finally at 5:25, Ty Hardin, Christine Cutler’s steady, stood up, took Her Majesty’s coat from the hook and helped her into it. (Ty Hardin is the male It in Storm.) As soon as they left, the place cleared out so that you could have rolled a cannon through it.

  “What is it you want?” Mr. Corps said. “Say that again.”

  “Hairgo,” I said.

  “Hairdo?” he said.

  “Go,” I said. “Go.”

  “What is it?” he said.

  “It is something to make hair go,” I said.

  “Go where? Go back on your head? A hair net?”

  “Mr. Corps,” I said, “it is a depilatory.”

  At that moment I saw Adam Blessing.

  He was sitting by himself in the very last booth, in the back of the store. He was writing in a notebook, but he stopped writing and looked up.
Our eyes met, while Mr. Corps said to me, “Did you say you wanted a depilatory?”

  “Yes, I said that was what I wanted,” I answered. “I have a great deal of unsightly hair to remove from the soles of my feet.”

  I faced away from Adam because I knew that he was listening.

  “You have hair on the soles of your feet?” Mr. Corps said.

  My face felt hot and red, and my stomach was knotting up in panic, but my mouth went right on with the act. As far as my mouth is concerned when it comes to an embarrassing situation, there is no business like show business.

  I can’t even remember my next wisecrack . . . but that was the first day I ever spoke to Adam. That was A-Day.

  From the Journal of A.

  “You have hair on the soles of your feet?” the druggist said.

  “Doesn’t everyone?” this girl said.

  “I don’t,” the druggist said. “I don’t know anyone who does.”

  “Do you have to know someone who does to sell Hairgo?”

  “No,” the druggist said. “Just a moment and I’ll see if I carry it.”

  There was something really dizzy about her. I mean that in a nice way. She had this way of scrunching up her shoulders which made it look like she was hiding inside her parka. She kept glancing back at me, and she was blushing—I guess because she’d asked for a depilatory before she knew there was someone else in the store. (She should only have known how often I used to help Billie Kay, my ex-stepmother, remove the hair from her upper arms.)

  What I liked most about her was her voice. It was this low, husky voice. It was the way Billie Kay’s voice sounded over the telephone if you called her when she was just waking up in the morning. In fact, it was the way Billie Kay’s voice had sounded just a week before that Wednesday, when I called her around noon to give her the latest bad news about yours truly. “Oh, no, honey,” she had said sadly in that throaty tone. “No, baby. They made a mistake, didn’t they? You wouldn’t do a thing like that.”

  This girl in the drugstore had black hair and brown eyes, my favorite combination . . . and she was very skinny, though I couldn’t tell that on that first afternoon, since her body was camouflaged by her coat.

  Before I’d overheard her conversation with the druggist, I’d been writing down my impressions of one Christine Cutler. She was the kind of girl I’d always been attracted to. She could have been enrolled at Miss Porter’s School, at the Spence School, Miss Hewitt’s, any one of those schools that turns out a certain kind of self-assured girl who knows what to wear and say, how to toss back her hair and look slightly bored, how to meet your eye and make you look away first—there is a certain privileged air about her. I had never had trouble getting a date with such a girl, once they knew who my father was, but I had always had difficulty maintaining the relationship once they discovered I was certainly not exactly a chip off the old block. Far from it.

  The girl in the drugstore buying the depilatory was not that sort, so I wasn’t afraid of her or in awe of her. The druggist was back in the Prescription Department for quite some time, and I finally spoke up, because the silence was too heavy.

  I said, “I thought most people with hair on the soles of their feet were born without bones and only lived five hours.”

  She was very good at keeping a straight face. She said, “Who said I have bones? Who said I was alive?”

  “I’m Adam Blessing,” I said. My first name really was Adam. My mother’s name had been Annabell Blessing. I doubt that anyone in the town of Storm remembered who she married, but I was playing it safe by dropping my father’s name altogether.

  “I know your name,” this girl said.

  “That’s the thing about a small town,” I said.

  “What is?”

  “Everyone knows everyone else’s business,” I said.

  “You know I’m buying a depilatory for my hairy legs,” she said, “and all I know is your name. Is that fair, even or equal?”

  I laughed. I like funny girls. I always have. I sit beside most girls without being able to think of anything to say but what my father would classify under the heading “manifest knowledge.”

  “A.J.,” my father likes to instruct me, “never discuss manifest knowledge. Never comment on the weather, or the news of the day, or anything generally known, obvious and unnecessary to mention. If you can’t be original, be silent.”

  Usually I am silent around girls. Billie Kay was a rare exception, but she was not a girl, she was a woman, and she was hilarious. . . . Maybe too hilarious for her own good. My father said he wanted a wife, not a performer. That was one of his excuses for ditching Billie Kay, anyway. Billie Kay’s version of their breakup was that my father would never love a woman because my mother’s death had made him too guilty. That was probably true. In his cups, my father often said, “I should have loved your mother more. She loved me with a passion, A.J.—an unbelievable passion.”

  I smiled at this girl in the drugstore and said, “Life isn’t fair, or even, or equal, but I’ll pretend it is and give you one of my secrets.”

  “I’m waiting,” she said.

  I put away my journal and walked toward her. “You have to remember, it really is a secret,” I said.

  She said, “So is the fact I have hairy legs.”

  “A lot of girls do,” I said.

  “But this is the first time I’ve ever bought anything to remove it,” she said.

  “My secret is a first, too.”

  “What is it?” she said.

  “I was expelled from school,” I told her, not even knowing why I was telling her. I hadn’t planned to ever tell anyone in that town. “Usually I’m just suspended, or asked not to come back the next year. This time I was shipped out in midterm—pfffft, fini!”

  “Was it a private school?” she asked.

  “Yes. Choate.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  I shrugged, even though I was a little disappointed that she’d never heard of Choate. “Well, I can’t impress you then.”

  “Is it a fancy school?”

  “Most people think so.”

  “Why did you get expelled?”

  “For cheating on an English exam,” I told her.

  “You really cheated?”

  “Yes. I really cheated,” I said. “But the thing is, I knew the poem by heart. I just blocked during the exam. I copied from the guy in front of me. But I really knew the poem. I still do. I can recite it right now.”

  At that point the druggist appeared carrying a small green tube and reading the print on it. “Remove facial hair with soft cream care,” he recited. “Hairgo.”

  It was obvious the hair she wanted to remove was no more on her legs than on the soles of her feet. I hadn’t noticed a mustache on her face. I used to help Billie Kay remove hers when she was doing her upper arms. Perhaps I’d spent too much time with an older woman who treated me like her buddy instead of her stepson; all I knew was it didn’t faze me one way or the other when the druggist mentioned facial hair. But it fazed the girl plenty. She clapped her right hand across her mouth and mumbled something to the druggist.

  “What?” the druggist said.

  “I said I’ll take it.”

  “Are you sure your mother knows you’re fooling with this stuff?” the druggist said. For some reason he shot me a dirty look, and then continued, “It’s one thing to take it off your legs, Brenda Belle, but you shouldn’t play with something that can get into your eyes and blind you for life!”

  Brenda Belle.

  That was an unlikely name for her. That was a name for some bovine blonde with a sweet disposition and nothing to say.

  “I’ll walk you home and recite the poem,” I horned in.

  She still kept her hand across her mouth. “No!” she snapped back in a muffled exclamation.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Stand aside, boy,” the druggist commanded.

  I stood aside while she passed him three dollars.


  “You tell your mother what you bought before you use it,” the druggist said.

  “Skip the poem,” I said to her. “I’ll just walk you home.”

  She had two cents change coming, but she didn’t wait for it. She headed out the door like the place was on fire.

  “Hey, Brenda, wait!” I shouted, but she was out of sight before I could even get my coat from the hook.

  The druggist eyed me coldly while I buttoned up and put my scarf around my neck. “What’s the matter with a boy like you?” he said. “A boy like you ought to use his head. That was a highly personal transaction. A gentleman steps aside in such a circumstance, in case you didn’t know!”

  I didn’t know how to answer him, how to get across that it hadn’t seemed that highly personal because of knowing Billie Kay so well, all her beauty secrets and what she called “tricks of the trade.”

  I didn’t have to answer, because he went right on bawling me out. “Now, you’re a newcomer,” he said, “and I don’t know where you come from, but you learn yourself some manners, Mister, or don’t show your face around my place!”

  I was ashamed and then angry. There was a time when I’d have answered, “I don’t think you know who I am!” and then told him. . . . But all that was in the past.

  I was on my own, in Storm, Vermont, for the first time in my life. It was my own idea, because I was fresh out of ideas for my future. I wouldn’t have blamed my father for completely disowning me at that point in my life. I was certainly nothing he could brag about, and everything that could disappoint him.

  “The goddam trouble is,” I told him over the long-distance phone one week before that Wednesday, “I’m sick of being the famous man’s son!” (I knew I was copping out when I said it, but I said it anyway.)

  “That’s not the goddam trouble,” he barked back. “That’s the goddam excuse.” You don’t fool a man like my father. What I wished I could say was something like: I’m sorry I’m a lousy son, and I don’t blame you if you hate me. I could never say anything like that to him. I thought that was probably part of the problem: I could never seem to level with him.