He was there just a split second before the tap of his mother’s heels startled them. Lew McReady was bent far over his girl on the sofa, whispering in her ear or kissing her, Bruce couldn’t see which. But he could see, in the spread of light that the table lamp shed, the white satin of the lady friend’s blouse, and Lew McReady’s fingers working like a cat’s claws in it.
Then they heard. McReady snapped around and spread his arm in a big elaborate gesture along the sofa back, and yawned as if he had just been aroused from a nap. The girl made a sound like a laugh. Behind Bruce his mother said in a tight voice (had she seen?), “I’m sorry, Bruce needs something for a thing he’s making at school. Excuse me … just a second … he’s making something …”
McReady crossed his legs and made a sour mouth. Bruce knew his son at high school, one of the big stupid ones, a football player who was supposed to star if he ever got eligible. But he couldn’t keep looking at McReady. He had to look at the nurse, who smiled at him. She seemed extraordinarily pretty. He couldn’t understand how she could be so pretty and let old McReady paw her. She had a laughing sort of face, and she was lost and damned.
She said, “What is it you’re making?”
“A castra—a Roman camp.”
“For Latin?”
“Yes.”
His mother was rummaging in the sewing basket. He wished she would bring the whole basket so that they could get out of there, and yet he was glad for every extra second she took. McReady, still spread-eagled elegantly over the couch, lighted a cigarette. He had a red face with large pores, and the hair on top of his head was thin, about twelve hairs carefully spread to cover as much skull as possible. When he took the cigarette from his lips and looked at the tip and saw the pink of lipstick there, he put the back of his hand to his mouth and looked across it and saw Bruce watching him. So he separated himself from the others and interested himself in a long wheezing coughing spell. His eyes glared out of his purpling face with a kind of dull patience, waiting for things to die down. The nurse smiled at Bruce, and loathing her he smiled back. She said, “I took Latin once. ‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.’ ”
“My Go-guho-guhod!” McReady said through his coughing, and his bulging eyes stared at her glassily. “An unexpec-uhec-uhected talent!”
Bruce’s mother was surprised, too. He saw both her surprise and her pleasure that something from the world of his school meant something to somebody, even though she herself couldn’t share it and even though the one who could was this lady friend of McReady’s.
Maybe she was as mixed about the girl as Bruce was, and he was truly mixed. He could still see that hand in her breast, and the softness under the satin was like the voluptuous softnesses that coiled around him in bed some nights until he lay panting and glaring into the dark, feeling his ninety-pound body as explosive as if his flesh were nitroglycerin packed on his bones. The girl looked at him with clear eyes, she had several wholesome freckles, she laughed with a dimple. Above all, she quoted Caesar (and what if it was only the first line, it was correct—most dopes said omnia instead of omnis) He could hardly have been more shaken if he had run into Miss Van Vliet having a snort of Sunnybrook Farm in his parlor. Actually that would have shaken him less, for Miss Van Vliet would never crawl naked and voluptuous through his dreams, and this one would. Oh, this one would!
He said sullenly and stupidly, “Quorum unum incolunt Belgae.”
“Elsa,” Lew McReady said, “we are dealing with a pair of real scholars.”
His mocking face was exactly the face of any number of the big and stupid at school. Bruce hated him. He hated his whiskey breath and his red face and the memory of his hand in this lost girl’s breast. He hated the way he called Bruce’s mother by her first name, as if she were some friend of his. He hated everything about McReady, and McReady knew it.
“Ma,” he said passionately, “I got to …”
“Yes,” she said, coming, but hesitating out of politeness for a few more words. “You’d think the world depended on it,” she said to the nurse. “He’s making this castra and he needed a bird for the standard. That’s what we came in to get. School is awful important to him,” she said with an abrupt, unexpected laugh. “If I didn’t chase him out to play he’d study all the time.”
The dining-room door slid back and Bruce’s father came in. His eyes were heavy on Bruce’s mother and then on Bruce, but only for a moment. He said heartily, “Well, well, old home week. Everything O.K.?”
“Just getting ready to beat it,” McReady said.
Bruce’s father flicked his towel across his hand. “One for the road?”
“Nah, we got to go.” McReady wadded out his cigarette, looking down with smoke puffing from his mouth and nose and drifting up into his eyes. The elk’s tooth on his watch chain jiggled with his almost noiseless wheezing.
The nurse rose. “I’ll bet he’s bright in school,” she said. (And what did her smiling mean? Did she find his face roguish?)
His mother said, “We hadn’t been here but two or three weeks before they moved him ahead another whole grade. That’s two he’s been moved up. He’s only thirteen. He won’t be quite sixteen when he graduates from high school.”
Bruce could have killed her, talking about him in front of those two, with her proud proprietary air. Their eyes were on him like sash weights—his mother’s full of pride, the nurse’s crinkling with her smile, his father’s suspicious, McReady’s just dull and streaked. Then McReady picked up a book from the end table by the sofa and knocked it on his knuckles. “This something you read in school?”
The book was Bruce’s all right. They must have been looking at it earlier, and seen his name in it. It was by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it was called At the Earth’s Core. It was about a man who invented an underground digger in which he broke through the crust of the earth into the hollow inside, where there was another world all upside down, concave instead of convex, and full of tyrannosauri and pterodactyls and long-tailed people covered with fine black fur. So McReady cracked it open and of course it opened to the page that Bruce had most consulted, a picture of the tailed furry girl who fell in love with the hero. She didn’t have anything on.
He showed it around. He and Bruce’s father laughed and the nurse smiled and clicked her tongue, and Bruce’s mother smiled, but not as if she felt like smiling. “You better stick to Latin, kiddo,” McReady said, and dropped the book back on the end table.
All of Bruce’s insides were pulled into a knot under his wishbone. He shivered like a dog. If asked, he could have given a very logical explanation of why McReady chose to humiliate a runty thirteen-year-old. The thirteen-year-old was too much smarter than his own dumb son, he had walked in on their necking party, he might talk. On that point he might have saved his worry. About things that happened in his house, Bruce never said anything, not a word, not to anyone, even his mother.
But though he could have explained McReady’s action, he didn’t survive it. It paralyzed him, it reduced him to a speck in front of them all, especially that girl. He left them laughing—some of them were laughing—and vanished. When he heard them leaving, he was back before the castra in the kitchen.
Almost as soon as the front door closed, he heard his parents, their voices coming plain through the register.
“What went on in here?” his father said. “Something drove him away. He was good for all night.”
“He was good for all night if we’d provided a bed,” said his mother in a strange, squeaky, trembling voice. It burst out of her in a furious loud whisper. “What a thing for him to see in his own parlor! Oh, Bo, I could … if we don’t …”
“What are you talking about? Talk sense. What went on? What do you mean?”
“I mean Lew and that girl. We came in to get something from my sewing basket, we didn’t hear them, so we thought they’d gone. They were so … They didn’t even hear us coming. His hands were all over her. Bruce couldn’t help seeing, because
I saw, and I was behind him.”
The register sighed with its empty rush of air. Bruce’s father said, “Well, God Almighty, I’ve told you a hundred times to keep him out of here. How do you suppose people like to have kids peeking around the corners when they’re out partying? Kids that know your own kids, for God’s sake! Do you think he’ll ever be back? Not on your life. Kiss him goodbye, and he was good for twenty or twenty-five dollars every week. Oh, God damn, if either of you had the sense of a …”
Bruce’s hands were shaking so that he could hardly stick the decapitated match stem down into the clay before the commander’s tent. When he pressed the pin into the end of the wood he split it, and threw it furiously aside. His mother was saying out of the register’s warm rush, “Will you tell me why—just tell me why—a boy should have to stay out of part of his own house, and hang out in the kitchen like the hired girl, for fear of what he’ll see if he doesn’t? Is that the way a home should be? How can he grow up right, how can he have any self-respect, how can he even know right from wrong, when all he sees at home is people like Lew McReady?”
The sigh and steady rush of air. Bruce’s father said, “This is a place of business, too, remember? This is how we make a living. We stop this, we don’t eat.”
“Sometimes I’d rather not eat,” she said. “So help me God, I’d rather starve.” She stopped, as if she had said more than she intended. Then she said, “I wonder how we’ll feel if he turns out bad. What if we make him into a thief, or worse?”
“Into something like me?” Bruce’s father said in a voice so soft and ugly that Bruce held his breath.
“I’m as guilty as you are,” she said. The register boomed so that with all his straining Bruce heard only a mumble. Then words again “… to pretend it was only bad times, sooner or later you’d get into something else. Do you have any idea how blessed it was, even though we were poor as mice, up there in Saskatchewan? Before you went back into the whiskey business? Bo, I … There’s a limit.”
“Yes,” he said heavily. “I guess there is.”
Bruce sat with his eyes squeezed half shut. His ears repudiated the quarreling voices. He was frozen in a frantic, desolate rejection of everything that threatened him. He hated this new outbreak of an old quarrel, with its threat of breakup. What they had, bad as it was, was better than the caving-in of everything. Did they ever think what might happen to him? He would be pulled out of school, he and his mother would have to move. Everything that he escaped to, as well as everything he escaped, would go if his mother pushed her quarrel too far.
The castra with its vallum and ditch and rows of tents swam distorted and watery. He ground his teeth in shame and rage. The register was silent. He could imagine them in there, glaring at each other, speechless.
A noise at the door made him turn. His mother came quietly in. Her face was white and still. She smiled and spoke, and her voice was low and matter-of-fact. “Does it work?”
It took him a moment to understand that she was talking about the pin. “No,” he said then. “It’s too big. It splits the match.” Accusingly he glowered at her where she wavered in the big lens of tears.
“Why, Bruce,” she said. “You’re crying! Oh, poor kid!”
She started for him, but he kicked his feet into his unlaced shoes and stumbled to the outside door. Down the steps he lurched and recovered and ran, and stopped in the shadow where the old pear tree tangled its branches with the overgrown lilac hedge. His mother’s silhouette was in the lighted rectangle of the door. “Bruce?” her high voice said. After that one call she stood still, listening. Then she bent her head and turned back in, and the rectangle of light narrowed and was gone.
Under the pear tree’s darkness it was still and cold. When he went out through the hedge he saw his breath white against the arc light. He stood with his fists clenched and his teeth clenched and his mind clenched against the sobs that rattled and shook him. He could hear the sounds of traffic from Ninth South, but in the park opposite, and up and down the street, there was no sound. It was as if they lived not merely at the edge of the park but outside the boundaries of all human warmth, all love and companionship and neighborliness, all light and noise and activity, all law.
He had never been able to bring a companion home from school with him, or even a neighbor boy casually encountered on the block. Once, when a good-natured older boy rode him home on his handlebars, he gave the boy a wrong address and stood at a strange gate until he went away. The very sight of his house, divided within itself but enclosing its secrets behind thick hedges, drawn blinds, closed doors, shook him with self-pity. He set off up the sidewalk, which along the Surplus Canal became a dirt path, and as he walked he cursed aloud in the filthiest words he knew.
He cursed his father and Lew McReady and the wicked girl who had started all this; she was as repulsive to him as if he had caught her copulating with animals. He shed tears for his mother and himself, forced to live in a way they hated. After a while, exhausted by tears and cursing, he stood shivering under trees that rattled stiffly in a little night wind, and imagined revenges, triumphs, ways of becoming rich and famous. He magnified himself in years, strength, confidence, and nerve. He whipped his father with his tongue until he cried and begged forgiveness for all his impatience and contempt. There was a brief tableau in which he stood humbly by while Bruce broke all the bottles of homemade Sunnybrook Farm, until the cellar was flooded with whiskey and they stood knee-deep in broken glass.
Stumbling along the path again with his mind full of carnage, he saw Lew McReady in a dozen postures of defeat, collapse, and cowardly apology. He saw the girl, too. She came up to him soft and beguiling, and for a moment his picture of her was totally obscured by the image of his own scornful eyes and contemptuous, repudiating mouth. But within seconds of that magnificent rejection he was thinking how it would be to touch her, and he was beside her in some very private place with a grate fire and soft music when he came to himself and fell to cursing again. Thinking how close he had come to letting her into those dreams of coiling limbs and silky skin, he shook with self-loathing. Passing a tree, he smashed his fist against it and howled with outrage at the pain.
There was a moon like a chip of ice; the air smelled of smoke and frost. He was the loneliest creature alive. With his hands tucked into his armpits, his eyes glaring into the dark, his throat constricted by occasional diminishing sobs, he went on. Now he was at the edge of the big cabbage field he had passed that afternoon. Out of the shadows the heads lifted in even rows, touched by the moon with greenish light.
Reminded of the castra with its rows of tents, he yearned for that job he had begun. He wanted to be back above the warm register, removed, intent, and inviolate. He saw the kitchen as sanctuary: though he had fled from it, he had already had enough of the cold and dark. And anyway, what he had fled from was the parlor. In the kitchen was not only warmth but the true thing that made it sanctuary—his mother, sitting with her magazine, glancing across from her isolation to his, making tentative humble suggestions that might for a few seconds gain her entrance to his world.
Understanding and shame dawned together, coming on like the rheostat-controlled light in a theater. He had had all the contempt he wanted, that day, but now he heaped more on himself. With his chin on a fence post he stared across the glimmering cabbage field and gnawed his chapped knuckles, thinking. There was this one person in the whole world who loved him, only this one he could fully trust. If he thought himself lonely, friendless, and abused, what should he think of her? Ever since they had left Canada she had been without friends, without even acquaintances beyond the company that came to the parlor. He had school, he was almost as used to praise as to contempt. Outside his hateful house he was able to gather approval with both hands, and bring it back to her and have it doubled. Who praised her? Who helped her? What did she have? He remembered the scuttle of coal he had deliberately not roused himself to get for her.
His father said, “If
we don’t do this, how do we eat? Did you ever hear of money?”
She said, “It might be better to starve. So help me, sometimes I’d rather.”
Bruce said, “I won’t let us starve. I’ll get a job. I’ll quit school if I have to. We won’t take anything from him. I’ll look after you.”
The roguish one, the ninety-pound volunteer.
In the moonlight the cabbages went row on row like the crosses in the poem. Their ranks swam and melted and reformed greenishly, shadowily, a great store of food left carelessly unharvested, while at his house they ran a speakeasy because it was the only thing his father knew how to do. His mother submitted because she must, or because of Bruce.
In his nostrils, shrunken in the cold, lay the sourish smell of the field. He dove under the fence and in a moment was wrestling with an enormous cabbage, trying to unscrew its deep root from the ground. Before he defeated it he was crying again with exhaustion and anger, but there it lay at last, a great cold vegetable rose. Stripping off its outer leaves, he rolled it under the fence, crept through after it, gathered it in his arms, and went staggering toward home.
He heard the phonograph the moment he opened the door. His mother was sitting alone in the kitchen. Her life was right where he had left it. As he stuck his head and half his body inside, she stood up. Her eyes went from his face to the front of his sweater, where dirt from the cabbage had rubbed off on him, and from that to where his hand was still out of sight holding the cabbage behind the door.
“Where did you go?” she said. “Are you all right?”
Already his confidence in what he had done was leaking away. The last block of the way home, the cabbage had weighed like solid lead. It seemed to him that all that day he had been carrying weights too heavy for his strength up to that house he hated and took refuge in. Now by its root he dragged the upended cabbage around the door, and watching her face for her response, said, “I brought you something.”
She was standing straight beside her chair. Her head did not move as she glanced at what he offered her; only her eyes flicked down and back up. She said nothing—not “Oh, how nice!” or even “Where did you get it?” Nothing.