The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken (acx book reading txt) 📕

and hair were the deadest giveaways. Every so often he would see a woman with a particular expression and he would know without analysis that she was American. The thrill of recognition. He would have to follow her until he heard her talk—to her companion, to a clerk in the chemist’s. In the drugstore. He was light-footed and invisible, and on this subject he was always right.

He’d been raised by wolves, then delivered to civilization. Then, at the end of the summer, the wolves came back to claim him.

Early September. In Ithaca, New York, his junior year in high school was about to start, but in London Jack was doing his chores, standing at the ironing board in the living room, the only space big enough to unfold it.

“Jack,” Lottie called from the door to the flat.

He hadn’t seen Fiona for two years, and Eloise for three. The word relations lit up in his head: what Eloise and Fiona were to him; what he and Lottie had, in a euphemism his father might have used. Did you have relations with that revolting woman. His older sisters had come to rescue him. They were grown-ups and had bank accounts. Five minutes before, he believed his problems were complicated, immense, insoluble; now he understood that every one of them could be dismissed with money. He was so delighted he’d forgotten what the situation looked like: Lottie in an emerald-green satin housecoat, he shirtless and smoking a cigarette over his ironing. Not his own shirt but a tiny blue suit for Willie Shavers. Lottie had promised him to Jack: she didn’t like Willie Shavers. You could bend emotion into the cloth puppets; Willie’s expressions were purely mechanical. Anyhow, he’d been a gift from her own mentor, a man named Shappy Marks, long dead and—said Lottie—good riddance. But not yet. Jack would have to earn him.

“Lenny,” said Fiona, and Eloise said, “Lenny, my God, what happened to you?”

“What do you mean?”

“Look at you,” she said. “You’re a bag of bones.”

“This is Eloise,” said Fiona, the kinder one, she was wearing a pink dress with red roses and her hair loose and parted down the middle. “I’m Fiona. Get your things, Len.”

Eloise followed him to Lottie’s tidy bedroom. Jack was grateful for its orderliness. He wanted Eloise to admire it. From the top drawer of the dresser he extracted a green T-shirt, pulled it on. The bed was made. He felt Eloise study it, the paisley duvet, the two bedside tables, each with its ashtray.

“My God, Len.”

“It’s all right.”

“All right is not a phrase I would use, actually,” she said. She had the accent all of the family had except him, the voice that Lottie used onstage but not at home: posh, from nowhere. Lottie’s actual accent was northern, from Manchester. That was one of the things he had learned in the past weeks. “Not any of this is all right.”

“My stuff mostly doesn’t fit me, anyhow,” he said.

“Leave it, then. Come on. We have to hurry.”

Was he just going to walk out with nothing, with nobody? He dropped to the floor and pulled the case marked WS from beneath the bed and zipped it into the duffel he’d arrived with. He’d been promised, but he didn’t want to ask; he didn’t want to be refused. He swung the duffel behind his back, and it knocked into his legs, it hurt, that’s right, everything hurt, he was built of wire and wool.

In the living room, Fiona and Lottie were sitting on the red sofa, each holding a plate with a single untouched jaffa cake. If you didn’t know, thought Jack, you would not be able to guess what the two women had in common.

“All right?” Fiona said to them. “Going?” She handed her plate to Lottie. “Good.”

“Wait,” said Jack. He turned to Lottie. “Do you think,” he said, “there’s a chance—could I get the extra rent back?”

He was worried she’d get mad. Lottie didn’t have much of a temper, but she didn’t like being contradicted. She didn’t like being asked for favors.

At this, Fiona roared.

“You charged him rent?” she said. “You’re a grown woman!”

The plates with their cakes, one in each hand, seemed a prank Fiona had played on Lottie to pin her to the sofa. Jack tried to assemble the right emotion for the moment—he might never see her again—and he rummaged through what he had: pity, gratitude, shock, love, disapproval, utter confusion. Her blond hair had been combed into a ponytail. He would never feel the lash of it again.

She said, perplexed, “Well, yes.”

Together two-thirds of Leonard Valerts’ sisters jostled Leonard Valert himself into a black cab. Where are we going? Airport. I don’t have money. Daddy’s bought you a ticket. Did he? Of course. How did you find me? Saw you on the telly! How was I?

“How were you?” said Eloise incredulously. She was sitting on the jump seat, her feet resting on the duffel bag. She stared at him, then said, “You were wonderful.”

They were so embarrassed over everything they started to tease him. Jack, they said. Jack, I’m lonely. Where’s my monkey?

“She doesn’t have a monkey. She has a cat.”

Darling Jack, lovely Jack, come here, I’ll stick my hand up you.

Even Jack was laughing. It was horrible and hilarious.

Eloise said in her fancy voice, “What I would like to know is who the fuck is Jack.”

“Good name for a ventriloquist,” offered Jack.

“Better name for a dummy,” said Fiona: the nice one.

At Heathrow he opened the stolen case. He’d been so certain he would see Willie Shavers looking up at him he couldn’t made sense of it: Captain Sims, the woeful cat; how on earth did he get there? Lottie was meticulous, she said it made a difference, the figures minded where they rested, but it had been careless Jack who’d last packed them up, after a performance in Brighton.

What was the emotion he felt? Less than loss and more than longing. He stared at the slack-jawed cat awhile then shut