He sat down beside her on the bed, and because she seemed to be waiting he ran his hands over the satin slip. He was actually afraid to kiss his own wife, because the last time he had wanted to make love she had turned away. But now Ellen put her hands on his face and drew him to her, and after she started to kiss him Hennessy knew she wouldn’t turn away. He made love to her as if she weren’t his wife, and when she moved down to take him into her mouth, Hennessy thought he might explode. She had never done this before, she wouldn’t even listen when he asked for it in the past, begged for it, really, and now she was doing it all on her own. Afterward, when she moved on top of him, Hennessy made love to her as he’d never dared to before, but he knew she didn’t want him to stop because her arms were fastened around his neck and she was kissing him.
They fell asleep in the same bed while the moon rose in the sky, and in the morning they woke early, before the children, and they dressed in silence, as if stunned by what had gone on between them after all these years of marriage. Ellen found the black slip tangled in the sheets; she folded it carefully and put it in her top drawer. And when she told him, after breakfast, that she’d decided to take a job, Hennessy was too confused to argue with her. He spooned sugar into his first cup of coffee and stared at her for so long that Ellen leaned up against the sink and laughed, and if the children had not already been awake and calling for their clothes, she would have taken her husband back to bed.
THERE WAS A CALCULUS EXAM ON APRIL FOOL’S Day, for those few seniors who were allowed to take advanced math. The exam was more a matter of personal pride than anything else; all twelve students in the calculus class would be getting their acceptances to college in only a few weeks. That’s why it was particularly odd when Danny Shapiro didn’t show up on the day of the exam. The math teacher, Mr. Bower, waited until ten minutes past the bell, and finally had to distribute the exam booklets. It was a test Danny would have had no trouble with, he would have placed first in his class, but by the time Mr. Bower was handing out the number-two pencils, Danny Shapiro was already on his way to the bus terminal in New York City.
If he had thought it over he probably wouldn’t have left, but he didn’t stop to think. On Saturday he had smoked some marijuana and was sitting in his room, listening to the radio play in his sister’s room while she dressed for a date with her latest moron. Danny had known she wouldn’t have the guts to stay with Ace McCarthy and he pitied her for not having the courage to do anything more than what people expected of her. He pitied his mother as well. She had become something of a lunatic on several subjects. If anyone happened to innocently mention Lucy and Desi’s impending divorce, she would lambaste Desi, using language Danny hadn’t even guessed she knew. She despised cars and car salesmen. She’d insisted that Danny go with her to test drive a new Ford Falcon, and she screamed at the salesman, crying out that he was trying to cheat her, and finally Danny was so mortified that he dragged her to the auto parts department and begged her to stop.
What really got to Danny was not just that his father had left but that he had dumped everything on Danny. After their first Sunday dinner at Tito’s, Phil had waited until Rickie was in the ladies’ room and had told him in all seriousness that he was now the man of the house. Well, who had asked for that? He hadn’t applied for that job, hadn’t wanted it, but his father acted as if it were a kingship and Danny was the next in line. Like it or not, he could now change the fuses and wait up to make certain Rickie got home on Friday nights. Danny had actually been excited when he first heard his father was moving to Manhattan. Columbia was Danny’s first choice, he had dreamed of getting to the city, and he thought he could save some money if he moved in with his father. He had been stupid enough to help his father carry his boxes out to the car, and while he was watching Phil arrange them in the trunk he approached him about moving in with him after graduation. Right away Phil began to explain why that wasn’t a good idea; Danny would miss out on dormitory life, the apartment wasn’t big enough, it just wouldn’t work out, and then Danny knew that his father wasn’t escaping just from his marriage but from all of them.
And so he pitied his mother and sister, because he could see their blind faith, their belief that they were doing what they were supposed to do, and it was getting them nothing. He watched them after supper, washing the white dishes with the band of gold around the edge until they shone, chattering about nothing, absolutely nothing, like birds fluttering their wings and plucking their own feathers, and he grew to despise them. When Raymond Niles stabbed his father and the whole damned neighborhood clammed up about it and acted as if the Nileses were complete strangers, Danny felt something inside him turn off for good. He couldn’t bear to be where he was, the neighborhood was suffocating him, and when he saw Rickie wearing Doug Linkhauser’s I.D. bracelet he felt like breaking her wrist. When she had walked beside Ace along the parkway, her long red hair trailed behind her like a stream of fire. Now she seemed smaller, contained within crinolines and I.D. chains, and each time she walked through the hallways with Doug Linkhauser’s arm around her he seemed to block her out completely.
On the day before he left, Danny had waited for Linkhauser after school in the students’ parking lot. He stood by the new Corvair like a maniac, and even Linkhauser could sense his fury.
“Hey, Danny,” Linkhauser said easily.
Danny had left his books in his locker; but he was holding a baseball bat in one hand.
“You’re going out with my sister,” Danny had said.
“Well, yeah,” said Linkhauser, confused. Everybody knew that.
“And?” Danny said.
“And,” Linkhauser had repeated stupidly.
“What do you plan to do about it?”
“Oh,” Linkhauser had said and he’d leaned up against his car to think it over. He was planning to go to the state college in Farming-dale and live at home, so of course he’d still be seeing Rickie. “I guess when I finish school I’ll ask her to marry me.”
He looked over at Danny and smiled, thinking he’d said the right thing. His father owned a chain of carpet stores and he’d never thought about what he planned to do because he always knew he’d go into the carpet business. Now he felt as though he’d been put to the test and had done rather well. There were worse things than marrying Rickie Shapiro.
“God almighty,” Danny said.
“What?” Doug Linkhauser was alarmed.
“Maybe you’ll want to be a race car driver,” Danny said.
Doug Linkhauser stared at him.
“Maybe you’ll want to join the foreign service and Rickie won’t want to travel to Italy or Syria, did you ever think of that, Linkhauser?”
“I think you’re nuts,” Doug Linkhauser had said.
Danny had leaned up against the Corvair. “Yeah, maybe I am.”
And standing there in silence with Doug Linkhauser, staring at the blue sky and the windows in the gym, Danny Shapiro had felt a pain shoot through his left side, up into his shoulder and his arm. He wished he were twelve years old again, and he could meet Ace McCarthy in the field for baseball practice, he wished he could just block out everything he was feeling, but he couldn’t, and on his way to school the next morning he walked up to the Chemical Bank by the A&P and withdrew all his savings. He didn’t even bother to go home and pack.
The sky was bluer once the bus passed through New Jersey, and it grew wider and bluer with every mile. In Washington the azaleas were starting to bloom. Danny had two seats to himself, until some guy in his late twenties got on in Richmond and folded himself into the seat next to Danny’s. The guy lit up a cigarette and took out a deck of cards.
“You play poker?” the guy asked Danny, and when Danny shook his head, he asked, “Twenty-one?”
“I don’t play cards.”
“Yeah?” the guy said. He had a thick accent and Danny had to strain to understand him. “What do you play?”
“Baseball,” Danny said.
“Shit. B
aseball’s for kids.”
“Not where I’m headed.”
“Where’s that?” the guy asked, and he put out his cigarette in the ashtray between them so that smoke spiraled up into Danny’s face.
“Spring training,” Danny said. “Yankees.”
“No shit? And you travel on a Greyhound bus?”
“Sure,” Danny said. “Get to see the country that way.”
Right then all they could see was the dark highway and a line of shacks beyond a metal fence.
The guy’s name was Willie and he was going to Clearwater, Florida, to visit his mother, whom he hadn’t seen in something like seven years. “She won’t recognize me,” he kept saying to Danny. “I was a baby when I left. Younger than you.”
They slept just a little and in the morning they got off together when the bus stopped south of Greensboro for breakfast. The sky was so wide open Danny felt dizzy with joy. He had almost been swallowed up by his hometown and now he was ready for the world, not some safe, constricted suburb, or even a protected campus, like Cornell, his second choice. When he got to St. Petersburg he’d buy himself some new clothes, maybe even some cowboy boots, like Willie’s. But what he wanted now was the biggest breakfast he’d ever had, pancakes and eggs and two glasses of orange juice.
“We’d better get washed up first,” Willie told him. “Otherwise the waitresses will run in the other direction.”
Danny laughed and while the other passengers headed for the restaurant, he went over to the outside restroom.
“Hey, not there,” Willie called to him. He came and got Danny, grinning. “You really are one of the Yankees. That toilet’s for niggers.”
A black man came out of the restroom and looked straight at Danny, and Danny wanted to explain that he wasn’t really with the moron by his side in the cowboy boots, but he didn’t. He followed Willie into the restaurant and went to the restroom behind the counter. He washed up and peed and combed his hair and he realized he was feeling sick. Willie ordered breakfast for them both and Danny couldn’t even force himself to eat his platter of biscuits and eggs, and when they got back on the bus he didn’t feel like talking anymore. The air grew sweeter as the bus drove on, and after a while Willie found an empty seat where he could stretch out and take a nap and later he found some sucker to play poker with and that was fine with Danny. Willie didn’t know shit about baseball or anything else, and all Danny wanted was to get to Florida.
He had the sinking feeling that he should have thought more carefully about leaving home. He looked out the window and felt as if he were hurtling through space, weightless and completely at the mercy of gravity. When they crossed the Florida state line a whoop went up in the bus and the driver banged on the horn, but Danny felt sicker than ever. He’d been to Miami with his parents several times, but this didn’t feel like the same state, or even the same country. Everything looked washed out, the fronds of the palm trees were brown instead of green, the earth looked like plain old dirt. He didn’t have any luggage, so he went looking for a place to stay as soon as he got off the bus, and he found a motel two blocks down from the bus station. It had been a long time since Danny had eaten. After he washed up he went to a little market and bought some Scooter Pies and a bottle of Coke and had them standing out in the street, starving and wired and wishing he had a pair of sunglasses because the glare out here nearly blinded him. The air was warm and wet and pushed down on you and made you sweat even when you weren’t doing anything but standing still. When he went back to the motel it was even hotter in his room, and he couldn’t sleep all night; he didn’t even bother to try.
The first day at training camp he just watched through the fence. He’d bought three new T-shirts and a pair of dark glasses, and after seeing some of the rookies he felt so pumped up he did three hundred sit-ups before he went to bed, and all that night he saw pitches the way he’d seen headlights whenever he’d fallen asleep on the bus. In the morning he did more sit-ups to get loose, then went back to training camp, early, when the heat wasn’t yet grinding him down. He realized then that he wasn’t the only one waiting for the office to open; there was a group of hopefuls by the fence, junior-high kids and grown men, some of whom had brought their own bats. Danny Shapiro figured he had to make his move. The skin on his nose was sunburned and if he stayed down here much longer his hair would turn platinum. He headed for the office as soon as he saw the lights go on, but he was stopped just outside the gate by a guard, a middle-aged black man in a blue uniform.
“I have an appointment for a job interview,” Danny told him.
“Come on,” the guard said. “You expect me to believe that?”
“I’m a CPA,” Danny said. “Certified public accountant.”
“Prove it,” the guard said.
“What do you want?” Danny said. “For me to do your taxes?”
The guard laughed and motioned for Danny to come inside the gates. He walked him to the front office, then said, “Wait here.”
The dust from the field went up Danny’s nose as he stood outside the office. His hands were sweating, so he wiped them on his dirty blue jeans and looked up at the sky and tried not to breathe too fast. The guard brought out an older guy who wore a black wool suit that was much too heavy for Florida in any season.
“This the accountant?” the guy said.
“That’s him,” the guard said.
“What’s your name?” the guy asked.
“Danny Shapiro.” Out here the sun could blind you even if you wore sunglasses.
“Of Hebrew extraction?”
“Look,” Danny said. “I play ball.”
“What a fucking surprise,” the guy said. “Who doesn’t?”
“Yeah,” Danny said, “but I’m good.”
“Who told you that? Your high-school coach?”
Danny swallowed hard and wiped his hands on his pants.
“CPA.” The guy laughed. “That’s a hot one. That’s one I never heard before.”
He nodded and Danny stood stunned, realizing that he was meant to follow. Over by a bench near the batter’s cage three rookies who had shown up early for practice were leaning back against a wooden wall. The guy yelled out a name and a tall kid, not more than nineteen, with long, nervous arms, immediately stood up.
“How about pitching a few to my accountant,” the guy said.
“Sure, Mr. Reardon,” the rookie said.
When the rookie nearly bowed to Mr. Reardon, Danny realized that the guy was on the coaching staff. But the rookie looked Danny over only once, disinterested, as if Danny didn’t mean more than a piece of pie.
Danny slipped off his sunglasses and put them in his pocket, then grabbed a bat and went up to the plate. The sky looked white now, and amazingly close to the earth. Out in the field, the rookie was winding up his long, jerky arms. Danny closed his eyes and imagined Ace out on the pitcher’s mound. He heard the crickets the way they always sang in summer, and the groaning sound Ace made whenever he started to pitch. Danny missed the first two pitches completely. He started to think about the way the garbage cans were lined up on Hemlock Street and the way lawns turned green at this time of year, and he hit the next ball as hard as he could and he felt as if his heart were going right up with it. He kept on hitting them, and on the last pitch he knocked a sparrow out of the sky, and it fell to second base with a thud. Danny walked back and handed the bat to Mr. Reardon. He was shaking so hard that if he had tried to run the bases he would have fallen on his face.
Mr. Reardon lit a Pall Mall and studied the field. “You’re good,” he said to Danny. “But I see a dozen boys as good as you every week”
“You just saw me once,” Danny said.
“Look,” Mr. Reardon said, “just thank me for giving you the chance and get off the field.”
Danny got out of there as fast as he could, but once he passed the guard at the gate he had to double over just to breathe. Then he went to stand in the shade of a gumbo-limbo tree and he could se
e through the fence that the rookie who had pitched to him was now pitching to another rookie, a real joker who stuck his tongue out at the pitcher. And as soon as the rookie threw a curveball Danny could see that the pitcher had gone easy on him, because now the ball went faster than seemed imaginable and the kid up at bat hit it farther than Danny Shapiro could have if he had hit balls for the rest of his life. The rookie batter was a nothing, a nobody, he probably wouldn’t even make the final cut, but as soon as he hit the curveball Danny knew he didn’t have a chance. Not now. Not ever.
He used almost all that was left of his money to buy a one-way plane ticket to La Guardia and a box of oranges for his mother. He never had the chance to buy a pair of cowboy boots and he left the sunglasses on the shelf above the sink in his motel. When he got back to New York he took a cab home and he told his mother it was nothing, he just had to get away, and he told the same thing to Mr. Hennessy, who came over to talk to him because Gloria Shapiro had filed a missing persons report. He wasn’t missing at all, he told Hennessy as they sat across from each other in the Shapiros’ living room, and Hennessy assured Gloria that all boys had a wild week in them, it was natural, it was better for them to let it out and take off than to end up like Raymond Niles. They had oranges all through April, cut into quarters and made into thick, pulpy juice. On garbage nights Danny always took the silver cans out without having to be asked, and he listened to the sound of the Southern State as he lined them up on the curb, and when he got into both Columbia and Cornell, he sent back his acceptance to Cornell without thinking twice.
9
WHEN THE LILACS GREW
JACKIE MCCARTHY DIDN’T SEE his friends much anymore. He worked down at the station until closing, he avoided bowling alleys and movie theaters, he never took joy rides. He washed the kitchen floor for his mother on Saturday mornings and he watched TV every evening, sometimes falling asleep to it, and he was devastated when Lucy and Desi’s divorce became final.
“Ma!” he called when he heard it on the six o’clock news, and Marie had come rushing in from the kitchen, waving a wooden spoon, afraid he’d fallen off the couch and hurt himself. He even sent a present for Little Ricky to the TV studio in Hollywood, a model of a race car he’d put together and painted on Saturday nights. Marie urged him to go out at night. Go to a movie, she suggested. Get yourself a date. Jackie smiled and insisted he had better things to do, but the truth was he was afraid of the dark. He was afraid of more things than he’d ever thought possible, including his brother’s dog, who was now full grown and huge, a hundred and twenty pounds. Whenever Jackie and the dog were alone in the house the dog bared his teeth and made a horrible sound, as if he had swallowed a chain saw. If anyone else in the family was home, Rudy kept his head on his paws, but the ruff around his neck stood straight up and his eyes never left Jackie. Sometimes, late at night, Jackie would hear a rapping at the window.