So Shelly

So Shelly Read Free Page A

Book: So Shelly Read Free
Author: Ty Roth
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returned home, and assumed position on America’s inland seas aschief executive officer of the Byron Boatyards. As the incompetent father of a two-year-old daughter, Augusta (the unwanted product of his putting into port with an admiral’s not-quite-eighteen-year-old daughter between dinner and dancing at the said admiral’s ball), he was desperate to marry. In exchange for John’s assuming complete guardianship of the child (meaning the infant, not the teenager), the admiral agreed not to pursue charges.
    Not long after his return to Ohio, through mutual friends at the Ogontz Yacht Club, he was introduced to Catherine Gordon, a thirty-year-old never-been-married still-living-at-home only child, and the last bearer of one of Ogontz’s most respected family names. Pale, plain-faced, and plump, Catherine was not John’s type—or any man’s type, for that matter—but she came from good stock, and the pickings were slim in Ogontz for a fast-approaching-middle-age man with a toddler and a penchant for burning through money.
    Soon after the tented and trellised backyard wedding at their newly purchased Acedia home, Catherine became pregnant. When Gordon was born on a frigid January day and officially christened, according to his maternal grandfather’s insistence, as George Gordon Byron, the Byron and Gordon names were extended into the seemingly forever-rosy future. Rosy, except for one thing. Gordon had been born with a clubfoot and an underdeveloped calf and ankle, an ill-omen that Catherine thought of as the sole mark of imperfection on the otherwise angelic child. As Gordon grew older, Catherine couldn’t assuage Gordon’s own self-conscious contempt for his deformity. Despite the painful therapeutic manipulations and serial castings endured during his infant andtoddler years, and the doctors’ claims of success, Gordon developed a slight limp, which he still labors to hide.
    Catherine, soon bored by motherhood, joined every social club and service organization that would have her, leaving Gordon and her newly adopted stepdaughter, Augusta, in the full-time care of Missy Fanning, a fresh-from-the-university early-education-major-turned-nanny who boarded in a guest bedroom next to the nursery.
    The drudgery of permanent anchorage and the daily mundanities of running a business exacted a wearisome toll on Gordon’s father, who, during his navy years, had earned the nickname of “Mad Jack” Byron. One afternoon, Catherine returned home early from her book club to discover her husband, ten toes down on the floor of the nursery, on top of the nanny, whose bare legs were coiled around his frantically thrusting bottom, while Gordon watched, wide eyed, from behind the bars of his crib. Catherine kept the children but sent Mad Jack packing, an exile during which he managed to deplete the remainder of his, and much of her, once-substantial funds. Catherine’s remaining resources, though large by my family’s standards, barely covered living expenses and the maintenance of the surface appearances required of those living on the Strand. According to Shelly, the interior of the Byron house was sparsely furnished and no one was ever invited in. She once remarked that the mansion was nearly as empty inside as Gordon was.
    When Gordon was three, his father died of a massive heart attack in a Washington, D.C., hotel beneath a one-thousand-dollars-an-hour call girl, who, Gordon liked to brag, his father had stiffed three times. (“Although the riskof a heart attack is higher during sexual activity than it is during rest, the risk is still very low.”—
The Merck Manual of Medical Information
)
    Mad Jack’s was a story that Catherine shared—with no detail spared—regularly with Gordon (and anyone else who would listen). It explained her vitriolic hatred of men and Gordon’s spiteful admiration for his dissolute dad. She never dated again.
    The children received a new nanny named May Gray, a never-been-married Pentecostal

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