The Miseducation of Henry Cane - Softcover

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Charles Brooks is an editor and publisher. He lives in New York City with his two daughters. The Miseducation of Henry Cane is his first novel.

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The Miseducation of Henry Cane

CHAPTER ONE

Two months earlier . . . June 1, 1994

“Will you miss me?”

Caroline had asked me this twice already, and each time I gave her the required “Yes, of course . . . very much.”

I wondered if she’d ask a fourth time, and I told myself that if she did I’d come up with something more clever. In fact, I started practicing witty things I could say in my mind, but they all sounded cheesy and lame, so we rode the rest of the way in silence.

Before she got out of the car at the British Airways doors at JFK I gave her an awkward hug, because, for all intents and purposes, we’d broken up the night before in a very courteous and official way. She’d be spending the summer in London interning with the Royal Shakespeare Company and hoped to stay on in the fall as an associate producer. We’d gone back and forth for months about the idea of staying together. I needed her to be the one to break it off. I’d always been terrible at making big decisions. If I’m being honest I was used to women making all my decisions for me: first my mom, then Caroline. I’m not gonna lie about the fact that I liked it. I functioned best when things just sort of happened to me. When Caroline finally announced we were definitely calling it quits, in an act that involved plenty of tears and bold proclamations about what we both really deserved and needed, she told me she still wanted me to be the one to see her off at the airport. I’d never once told her no during the course of our three-year relationship, and I saw no reason to start.

I carried her luggage to the curbside check-in and tipped the guy there twenty bucks for no real reason except I wanted Caroline’s last image of me to be me handing off her bags and tipping some guy too much. She leaned in and kissed me goodbye on the side of my mouth the way you’d accidentally kiss an elderly aunt.

Caroline Alby. I’d loved her the moment I set eyes on her, but by the time I was back on the Long Island Expressway I felt a strange relief, the kind of feeling that comes when winter becomes spring and you get to take off a too-heavy and too-itchy sweater. I would have stayed with Caroline as long as she wanted me to. I hadn’t known the freedom would feel both sweet and terrifying.

My mother kept threatening to sell our beach house. Every single June that I can remember, Deidre Cane packed two suitcases for each of us and drove the three hours from our town house on East Eighty-Third Street to the beach house in Sag Harbor. Once she was there she flung open all the windows, wiped her finger through the collected winter dust, and declared, “We should get rid of this old wreck and get an apartment in Paris.”

For a long time I believed that was actually what she wanted. Only in my teen years did I understand it was sarcasm or maybe irony. It took a while before I became fairly certain my mother just enjoyed being unhappy.

The house, a weather-beaten colonial revival, had certainly seen better days, but it wasn’t a wreck by any means. This was the Hamptons after all. The peeling paint and the floors that forever smelled a little like salt, sand, and damp towels only made me love it more. I knew my mother secretly took pride in our rickety old house with its musty furniture. Old-money houses out east tended to have an up-market thrift-store decorative style, whereas new-money houses were all white leather and sharp edges. I once attended a party with my parents at the home of this Internet millionaire. That’s what everyone was calling him, “that Internet millionaire,” like it was a strange sort of profession, an encyclopedia salesman or that guy who sells you potions out of a briefcase. “That Internet millionaire” helped build Prodigy or had a diaper delivery service you ordered through AOL or something like that.

“It looks like it was decorated by a Colombian drug lord,” one of my mother’s friends said to another woman. “And not even one of the interesting ones.”

But this summer, Deidre had gotten her Parisian wish, or at least a taste of it. My father had been invited to teach a summer session at the Sorbonne, something about publishing the great American novel, and Mother said if he didn’t take it she was finally going to leave him for Stan the butcher, a man she insisted knew how to take a damn vacation. How she knew anything intimate about Stan, a man who also had a lazy eye and was missing a canine tooth, was beyond me, but Mother did have the ability to talk to anyone about anything, and maybe she’d managed to unlock secrets about Stan beyond how he trimmed a pork shank.

My father suggested renting out our old house at the beach, but my mother wouldn’t hear of it.

“Strangers putting their filthy feet on my furniture,” she scoffed.

“I thought you couldn’t stand that wreck of a place anyway,” my father replied with a bemused smile.

“It’s my wreck, and I don’t want anyone else in it. Henry will spend the summer there before he starts work with you in the fall. Let him relax a little before you and the cutthroat world of publishing break his spirit.”

I couldn’t object. Having the beach house all to myself for the entire summer was a better plan than staying in our place in the city, which, by the way, was also the complete opposite of a wreck—a four-floor town house with actual servants’ quarters. There hadn’t been any servants in the house since at least the turn of the last century, but the quarters were still there all the same. Mother used them for storing holiday ornaments and one time for an au pair from Germany who Deidre said smelled like sauerkraut.

Their house wouldn’t be my house for that much longer. Beginning in September I had a lease on a studio on West Eighth Street. I would never say out loud that I wanted to escape the Upper East Side. I just wanted something new, something different. And maybe a part of me liked the fact that my mother didn’t love trekking below Fourteenth Street unless she was picking up whitefish from Russ & Daughters.

Relaxation was a foreign concept to my father, but because my mother was keen on it he accepted it and Paris all the same. I’m fairly certain I inherited my desperate need to please beautiful women from him.

It took only two hours to get to the beach from the airport. That’s what happens when you leave on a Wednesday afternoon. I rolled all the windows down and indulged in the guilty pleasure of singing at the top of my lungs to the entire CD of Madonna’s greatest hits, which Caroline had left in the six-disc changer. I hadn’t exactly forgotten to remind her about it.

Nothing had changed about the beach house since I’d seen it last September, and its sameness comforted me. By the time I opened all the windows and swiped away enough of the dust from the furniture, I had no idea what I wanted to do next. Endless days of nothing stretched ahead of me. I had a stack of novels I’d been meaning to read, and part of me relished the idea of staying put in the house for an entire week as I made my way through them in delicious silence.

I didn’t get that luxury

“Hey, dildo.”

Sperry never knocked. He hadn’t knocked since he started wandering into our beach house when he was five years...