Pat Boone Fan Club Read online

  I glance around. In one section sits a tour group of older women all wearing jaunty red hats. At least twenty of these hats turn in unison, searching the audience. No one else moves. The row in front of me seems to be mother-and-daughter pairs, but most of the daughters wear bifocals, while some of the mothers, I noticed earlier, used canes to climb the stairs. After a moment of silence, Pat Boone, cajoling, lets us know he found one young girl at his earlier, four o’clock show. He lowers the microphone to his side, waiting.

  Me. I want it to be me.

  A girl, her neck bent, silky brown hair shading her face, finally walks forward from the rear of the auditorium. Pat Boone hurries down the few steps, greeting her before she reaches the stage. He holds out the flowers, but she doesn’t seem to realize she’s supposed to accept them.

  “What’s your name?” he asks.

  “Amber.” She wears ripped jeans and a faded sweatshirt.

  “Here.” Again he offers her the tulips. “These are for a lovely girl named Amber.” This time she takes them.

  Strains of “April Love” flow from the four-piece band. His arm encircles her waist. Facing her, he sings as if just to her, “April love is for the very young . . .” The spotlight darkens, an afterglow of sunset. The petals of the tulips, probably placed onstage hours earlier, droop.

  After the song, Pat Boone beams at her and asks for a kiss. “On the cheek, of course.” He laughs, reassuring the audience, as he points to the spot. The girl doesn’t move. “Oh, please, just one little peck.” His laugh dwindles to a smile.

  I slide down in my seat. I lower the binoculars to my lap.

  Kiss him, I want to whisper to the girl, not wanting to witness Pat Boone embarrassed or disappointed.

  No, walk away from him. Because he’s old enough to be your father, your grandfather.

  Instead, he bends forward and brushes his lips on her cheek. She escapes down the aisle to her seat, the bouquet held awkwardly in her hand.

  The lights onstage are extinguished. His voice needs to rest, perhaps. Images of Pat Boone in the Holy Land flash on two large video screens built into the wall behind the pulpit, while the real Pat Boone sits on a stool. The introduction to the theme song from Exodus soars across the hushed audience. Atop the desert fortress Masada—the last outpost of Jewish zealots who chose mass suicide rather than Roman capture—a much younger Pat Boone, in tan chinos, arms outstretched, sings, “So take my hand and walk this land with me,” lyrics he, himself, wrote. Next the video pans to Israelis wearing kibbutz hats, orchards of fig trees, the Sea of Galilee, Bethlehem, the Old City in Jerusalem. The Via Dolorosa. The Wailing Wall. The Dead Sea.

  “Until I die, this land is mine.”

  A final aerial shot circles a sweatless and crisp Pat Boone on Masada. Desert sand swelters in the distance.

  This land is mine . . .

  For the first time I wonder what he means by these words he wrote. Does he mean, literally, he thinks the Holy Land is his, that it belongs to Christianity? Or perhaps, is he momentarily impersonating an Israeli, a Zionist, a Jew? Or maybe this appropriation is just a state of mind.

  Pat Boone, Pat Boone. Who are you? I always thought I knew.

  The lights flash on. Pat Boone smiles. The band hits the chords as he proclaims we’ll all have “A Wonderful Time up There,” a song with which I’m familiar.

  I’ve always been more attuned to Christian songs than those of my own religion. I frequented churches over the years, immersing myself in hymns and votive candles. Once I even owned a garnet rosary, magically believing this Catholic amulet offered luck and protection. At only one period in my life, in elementary school, when I lived with my family on the island of St. Thomas, in the West Indies, did I periodically attend Jewish services.

  We drove up Synagogue Hill some Saturday mornings, parking by the wrought-iron gate leading to the temple. We entered the arched stucco doorway, where my father donned a yarmulke. The air cooled, shaded from tropical sun. In my best madras dress, I followed my parents down the aisle, the floor thick with sand. My feet, in buffalo-hide sandals, etched small imprints behind the tracks left by my father’s heavy black shoes. I sat between my parents on one of the benches. The rabbi, standing before the mahogany ark containing the six Torahs, began to pray. I slid from the bench to the sandy floor.

  The sand was symbolic in this nineteenth-century synagogue, founded by Sephardic Jews from Spain. During the Spanish Inquisition, Jews, forced to worship in secret, met in cellars where they poured sand on floors to muffle footsteps, mute the sound of prayers. This was almost all I knew of Judaism except stories my mother told me about the Holocaust when bad things happened to Jews—even little Jewish girls.

  I sprinkled sand over myself throughout the service, as if at the beach. I trailed it down my bare calves. I slid off my sandals, submerging my toes beneath grains of coral. Lines of sand streaked the sweaty crooks of my elbows. Small mounds cupped my knees. I trickled it on my head until it caught in the weave of my braids. I leaned against one of the cool, lime-whitewashed pillars, smudging my dress. I traced my initials in the sand. No one in the congregation, not even my parents, ever seemed to notice. Perhaps they were too engrossed by readings from the Torah to see me . . . while, to me, none of their prayerful chants were as lovely as sand. Wands of light beamed through arched windows, glinting off flecks of mica, off me. I felt as if I, myself, could become one with whitewash, with sand, with light. Then, later that night, home in bed, maybe my father wouldn’t find me, wouldn’t be able to see or distinguish me. Maybe if I poured enough sand over my body I could discover how to hide all little Jewish girls, make us invisible. Instead, it seemed to be my own father’s footsteps that were muffled, for no one in the congregation ever heard or saw him. Not as he really was.

  After the concert, I slowly walk through the church lobby, exhausted. I stop at the less-than-busy sales booth to buy a CD and ask whether Pat Boone will be signing autographs. No one knows. I had assumed a throng of grandmothers would line up for autographs and snapshots. A gray-haired man limps past, the word “Security” stenciled on his black t-shirt. The church ladies stream out the door, not seeming to expect anything more of the evening.

  I could follow them.

  But at the far corner of the lobby is a hallway leading to the back of the auditorium, behind the stage. No one guards the entrance. I turn down its plush, blue-carpeted stillness. My footsteps are silent. It is a hush that might precede a worship service. Solemn, scentless air. Dim sconces line the walls. I am alone, gripping his CD and the letter I wrote to him.

  Two wide doors, shut, appear at the end of the corridor. I assume they’re locked, but when I try the knob it turns. Another hallway. I pass a second t-shirted guard, this one holding a silent walkie-talkie, his ear plugged with a hearing aid. I worry he’ll stop me. But my straight, solid footsteps, plus the determined look on my face, grant me entrance. I must act as if I belong here, as if I know what I’m doing.

  I do belong here. I do know what I’m doing.

  Beyond another set of doors I reach a small group wearing Dutch costumes, including the mayor and his wife. They appeared onstage earlier, in wooden clogs, to thank Pat Boone for celebrating the Tulip Time Festival. Beside them stands another security guard, this one a teenage boy, murmuring into his walkie-talkie. I approach, wanting to ask him where I might find Pat Boone. I decide to throw myself on his mercy. I’m prepared to beg, plead, cry. I will say I’ve been waiting my whole life. I will say the Voice of God Himself told me to speak to Pat Boone.

  The guard continues to mumble into his walkie-talkie. I wait for him to finish, until anxiety floods me. Suppose I miss Pat Boone? He might be preparing to leave the building right this minute. He’ll disappear before I find him.

  Then, as if pulled by unseen forces, I turn away from the guard. I retrace my footsteps back through the set of doors.

  I glimpse a white shirt. The back of a man’s head. Brown hair. Him.

 
He and another man are just opening a door farther down the corridor.

  I yell, “Mr. Boone. Pat Boone.”

  I rush after him, grabbing the door about to shut behind him. We stand in a small foyer just behind the stage. The other man, clearly not understanding the force of my need, tries to shoo me away. I ignore him, pleading, “Mr. Boone. I have to speak to you. Just for a minute. I’ve been waiting. Pat Boone.”

  I push past the assistant until I stand right in front of Pat Boone. His red- and blue-sequined jacket is off. He wears his white shirt, white pants, white shoes. His face, still in makeup, reveals few wrinkles. His eyes are almost expressionless. It’s as if his whole life all he’s practiced is his public smile, while the rest of his face is frozen—but familiar to me—the way he looks in photographs. There, as he smiles at me, albeit tentatively, are his white-white teeth.

  My words are garbled, rushed, confused. I don’t know when I’ll be ordered to leave, when I’ll be removed. So much to explain. I hardly know where to start. I tell him how much I loved that one particular photograph in Life magazine.

  “Oh, yes, that tandem bicycle,” he says. “I remember it.”

  “You saved my life,” I say.

  I am telling him about my father, what happened with my father, that it was he, Pat Boone, just knowing he existed kept me going, just seeing his photograph helped me stay alive . . . that he represented . . . what word do I use? “Safety”? “Holiness”? “Purity”?

  He has taken a step back, away from me. His smile may have dimmed by one decibel. Am I acting like a crazy woman? Am I the first woman who ever pursued him to confess that her father once hurt her and that he, Pat Boone, represented hope? Just thinking that one day he might . . .

  “Well I’m glad to know that I did something good,” he says. “That I helped someone.”

  “You did,” I say. “You were everything. Your family. Your daughters.”

  “I guess these things happen a lot,” he says. “To children. It’s terrible.”

  “Here.” I give him the letter. “This will explain how I felt.”

  He takes the letter, folded in an envelope. That hand—those clean fingers I studied by the hour.

  “I’ll write back to you,” he says. “After I read it.”

  My audience with him is over. “Thank you,” I whisper, turning to leave.

  I pause in the parking lot in the damp spring night. The massive walls of the church loom over me. Busloads of grandmothers rumble from the lot.

  I was too overwhelmed to tell him about the magnifying glass or his wristwatch. Nor did I say I want you to adopt me—the important thing I neglected to say last time—the one thing I’ve most wanted. Of course, even I know how crazy that would sound. Besides, is it still true?

  I get in my car but continue to watch the church. Maybe I’ll catch one last glimpse of him. Him. Did he help sustain me all those years? Did he offer hope?

  Yes. His image. His milky-white image. That sterile pose.

  I conjured him into the man I needed him to be: a safe father. By my believing in that constant image, he did save me, without my being adopted, without my even asking.

  At the end of the concert, the mayor of Holland and his wife came onstage to present Pat Boone with a special pair of wooden clogs painted to resemble his trademark bucks. Again, I had to lower the binoculars, embarrassed for him, unable to watch, just as when he gave the tulips to that young girl.

  I wonder if anyone else in the audience felt uncomfortable when this father, this grandfather, tried to coerce a kiss from that adolescent girl? Or did anyone notice her embarrassment, her shame? No, that’s not a thought that would trouble any of Pat Boone’s fans in Calvary. But Calvary doesn’t exist for me, cannot be made to exist for me—even by Pat Boone.

  Pat Boone! Those two short syllables stretch the length of my life. So, regardless of religion or illusion, his love letters offered me improbable safety—grooved in vinyl, etched in sand.

  The Wandering Jew

  My family and I live on the island of St. Thomas for over a year before I notice the tramp, on Dronningens Gade. He walks along unaware of tourists veering to the other side of the street, away from this man weighted in burlap crocus sacks stitched into layers of clothes—pants, shirts, jackets, cap—despite tropical heat. Only his feet are bare. He sounds a metal triangle the exact moment his right heel strikes the ground. While he’s not blind, his gaze seems distant, or as if he’s more at home wandering paths through forests, fields, and mountains. I watch him from in front of the Apollo Theatre, my destination this day after school. I plan to see a movie, as I frequently do, while waiting for my father to leave the West Indies Bank and Trust Company, where he is president, to drive me up Blackbeard’s Hill, home.

  I don’t follow the tramp, this first time I see him. I only watch. He passes Maison Danoise, Little Switzerland, Riise’s rum warehouse, Katzin’s Drug Store, before turning the corner toward Market Square.

  Even after he disappears, I gaze at the corner as if he might reappear, like an apparition. Faintly, I still hear the silver pitch of the triangle. I imagine sun-sparked Caribbean water—as if a sound can be seen.

  The next day at the Antilles School, high up a mountain, I stare out paneless windows. I don’t hear Miss Duvall conjugate French verbs. I don’t watch Mr. Waggoner chalk sums on the blackboard. My mates’ voices, chanting answers, seem remote. Far below, white sails gust the U-shaped harbor, the tessellated azure, aqua, viridian sea. Pastel houses dot green volcanic mountains. Daydreaming, I re-create the scene when the tramp turned the corner . . . see him again before he turned the corner. I want to know who he is, where he lives, where he goes, where he is now. As if he offers a secret message, I want to hear his triangle, follow his bare feet, know what he sees in his distant gaze. Yesterday afternoon, while watching a film about Martians landing on Earth, I couldn’t even pretend to be scared. Rather, his image continuously reels.

  A week later, again in front of the theater, I finally hear the ping of metal. I look toward Emancipation Park. The sound sharpens. I slip the coins meant for the purchase of a movie ticket into my pocket. I step back under the canopy of the marquee. I don’t yet want him aware of me. When he passes, it’s as if his presence deepens the shade in which I stand. Not as a bad omen, as in movies, foreshadowing a car crash or the arrival of a monster. Rather, his shadowed scent is of mangrove swamps, is the core of a calabash, rain-rubbed earth after a tropical storm. As I take my first step after him, this scent is what I seem to follow.

  He pays no attention to me. We continue along the main street past duty-free shops, tourists giving him a wide berth, and now me, as well. Again he turns toward Market Square. Here in the crowded market, I assume no one will notice me, even though I am a white girl trailing after him. I dawdle past booths of sugarcane, myrtle, Bombay mangoes, squawking guinea fowl. Men sit outside snackettes drinking small glasses of white rum. I pause beside a donkey to stroke his mangy fur, still aware of the man’s burlap-sack back. Even above shouts of women in headties selling guava ices, I hear the strokes of his triangle.

  He leaves the market, continuing along the marl alleys of shantytown. Here I will be noticed, in this place my parents forbid me to enter. I follow anyway, past shacks with corrugated tin roofs, walls constructed of newspapers, egg cartons, rusty biscuit tins. A woman watches me as she cups rainwater from a kerosene drum. Another woman, sweeping her dirt yard with a palm frond, pauses. I don’t know if I should smile, explain my presence. I do nothing. It’s not as if I’m scared to be here, not at all, and I don’t understand my parents’ warning. Rather, I worry that, because of my skin color, I am the one to cause concern even though I’m young. I hunch my shoulders as if this can make me seem even smaller, as if to say, I’m only a little girl who won’t cause trouble. I shuffle as quietly as possible in my buffalo-hide sandals, my toes now dusty with limestone soil. The man never slows his gait.

  Once we leave shantytown, we are in so
litude. We are at the point on the island where streets lead to alleys, alleys lead to fields of fever grass, fields flow up volcanic mountains or meander into donkey trails and goat paths, here, where streets aren’t streets at all but muddy footprints leading into mangrove swamps, into forests of mimosa, mampoo, coconut palm.

  He enters the woods. Reluctantly I pause just inside the entrance. If I don’t meet my father at the appointed time, he’ll be angry. Grasses sway as the tramp follows the trail, soon disappearing. Now, the ring of his triangle is the chirp of bananaquits and scarlet tanagers. Even though the island is small, finite, this place seems like an unearthly, overgrown, magical garden where cool trade winds sough flame trees, where sphagnum moss thrives, where phalaropes sleep. I clink my movie coins together, to mimic his sound.

  Around this same time, I first hear the story of the Pied Piper, probably at school, told as a caution, a warning: he leads children away from their parents. But I love the word “pied.” At first I imagine the piper as a sort of baker with a kitchen full of pies—a dessert I prefer to cookies or cake. When I understand that the word means someone dressed in patchwork rags, I of course think of the tramp. Does this story stay with me because I am already following him—following the sound of his triangle—even as I know that, unlike the piper, the tramp is perfectly safe?

  I also hear stories about ancient people wandering in faraway deserts—or about others being led to gas chambers. All stories seem equally real and unreal, true and untrue, at the same time. I don’t quite understand why gas would be in a chamber. After all, we get gas for our car at the Esso Service Center, located at the entrance to the airport. As the attendant pumps it, I love to watch British West Indian Airways or Caribair planes soaring toward Antigua, St. Kitts, San Juan. Sometimes I want to be aboard in order to explore distant places. Other times I don’t, knowing I’d miss my mates, my ballet lessons, and now, the tramp.