Red Clover Read Free Page A

had said disturbed him, but none had hurt as deeply as, “Do what you want. I don’t care.”
     
     

2 | Best in Class
     
     
    Eventually, the drama resulting from the Playboy magazine incident waned, and things in the Winekoop residence returned to normal. Lee steered clear of his father, which wasn’t hard to do, and refrained from asking his mother any more discomposed questions about his existence. Instead, he kept them safely bottled up inside and hoped when he got older he would understand why he was so different from his brothers, why his father seemed to hate him so...and what those naked girls in the magazine were doing.
    In spite of what his mother kept telling him, by the time he turned ten, Lee had eavesdropped on his parents enough times to know his father really did expect him to be like his brothers, and if he could be more like them, maybe his father would like him better. But he hardly knew his brothers. Bennett was a junior in high school, and Nelson was in his first year at Harvard. Bennett was okay...sometimes. But Lee still didn’t feel that comfortable talking to him. Nelson was so much older, he seemed more like an uncle than a brother, a distant uncle at that.
    Due to their age differences, they had no common interests and usually came together only at the dinner table. Lee remembered that when he was younger, Bennett had played with him a few times but never for very long, usually getting pulled away to do something else. After Bennett left, Lee would go on playing as though he was still there, pretending Bennett liked him and wanted to be his older brother. Even at ten, Lee knew that wasn’t right.
    Visits with Dr. Jerry often focused on Lee’s “self-esteem,” but Lee didn’t understand how he could possibly feel good about himself when he was such a disappointment to his parents. In Lee’s mind, there was his family...and then there was him. He felt like he didn’t have anyone, except for his mother, who would stick up for him when he needed it. And he almost always needed it when his father got involved, like on Lee’s first day of school.
    “The boy is not normal,” Lee had overheard his father tell his mother on that day.
    “That’s not true, Henry. All his tests come back in the normal range,” she responded.
    “So much for the tests.”
    Lee understood that his brothers were at the top of the so-called normal range. If they were any indication of normal, Lee conceded he was likely close to the bottom of the range. Had he tested high enough in their entrance exam, Lee would be attending the same elite private grammar school as his brothers. Instead, his mother had enrolled him in a less prestigious private school, and his first day had been disastrous. The other students had teased him, and his teacher had called him Leonard all day.
    “I’ve made arrangements to have him home-schooled by tutors,” his mother had told his father that evening.
    “Just because he had a bad first day doesn’t mean you yank him out of school. What a waste of your money.”
    For reasons unknown to Lee, it was clear that any money spent on him came from his mother.
    “Nelson and Bennett loved going to school at his age,” his father had said.
    “Don’t you understand, Henry? It doesn’t matter what happened to them. He’s so traumatized about this, nothing we say about Nelson and Bennett will make any difference.”
    “You deal with it then. He’s all yours.”
    Now, at ten, Lee had been exposed to fourteen tutors, some of whom had lasted just one semester. Unlike his brothers, he struggled to get passing grades. Unlike his brothers, he struggled with everything.
    “I’m not sure what to do,” Lee heard his mother say to his father one night when they thought he was asleep. “I consulted with Dr. Ballou last week when I was in New York.”
    “Who?”
    “You remember him, the one we met at the Silversteins last month, the one who was on Phil Donahue .”
    “Yes, I do remember