Freedom

There ensued yet another press from Eliza, but this one was halfhearted because she was pursuing Richard now as well. When Walter made good on his threat to call Patty, she found herself inclined to see him, both for his connection to Richard and for the frisson of being disloyal to Eliza. Walter was too tactful to bring up Eliza again, but Patty was always aware of his opinion of her friend, and some virtuous part of her enjoyed getting out and doing something cultural instead of drinking wine spritzers and listening to the same records over and over. She ended up seeing two plays and a movie with Walter that fall. Once her season started, she also saw him sitting by himself in the stands, red-faced, enjoying himself, and waving whenever she looked his way. He took to calling her the day after games to rave about her performance and display the kind of nuanced understanding of strategy which Eliza had never even bothered to try to fake. If he didn’t reach her and had to leave a message, Patty had the additional frisson of calling him back and hoping she might talk to Richard instead, but Richard, alas, seemed never to be home when Walter wasn’t.

In the tiny gaps between the blocks of time she spent answering Walter’s questions, she managed to learn that he came from Hibbing, Minnesota, and that he was helping pay for law school by working part-time as a rough carpenter for the same contractor who employed Richard as a laborer, and that he had to get up at four every morning to do his studying. He always started yawning around 9 p.m., which Patty, with her own busy schedule, appreciated when she went out with him. They were joined, as he had promised, by three female friends of his from high school and college, three intelligent and creative girls whose weight problems and wide-strapped dresses would have provoked acid commentary from Eliza had she ever met them. It was from this adoring troika that Patty began to learn how miraculously worthy Walter was.

According to his friends, Walter had grown up living in cramped quarters behind the office of a motel called the Whispering Pines, with an alcoholic father, an older brother who regularly beat him up, a younger brother who studiously copied the older brother’s ridicule of him, and a mother whose physical handicaps and low morale so impaired her performance as the motel’s housekeeper and night manager that during high season, in the summer, Walter often cleaned rooms all afternoon and then checked in late arrivals while his father was drinking with his VFW buddies and his mother slept. This was in addition to his regular family job of helping his dad maintain the physical plant, doing everything from sealing the parking lot to snaking drains to repairing the boiler. His dad depended on his help, and Walter provided it in perennial hope of winning his dad’s approval, which his friends said was impossible, however, because Walter was too sensitive and intellectual and not enough into hunting and trucks and beer (which the brothers were). Despite working what amounted to a full-time year-round unpaid job, Walter had also managed to star in school plays and musicals, inspire lifelong devotion in numerous childhood friends, learn cooking and basic sewing from his mother, pursue his interest in nature (tropical fish; ant farms; emergency care for orphaned nestlings; flower pressing), and graduate valedictorian. He got an Ivy League scholarship offer but instead went to Macalester, close enough to Hibbing to take a bus up on weekends and help his mom combat the motel’s encroaching decay (the dad apparently now had emphysema and was useless). Walter had dreamed of being a film director or even an actor but instead was studying law at the U. because, as he reportedly had put it, “Somebody in the family needs to have an actual income.”