“How about Jane?” Julie asked round-eyed. Nobody had yet asked her for a date, and she lived vicariously, following Mike’s romances the way some housewives watch soap operas.
“What’s Jane got to do with it?” Mike asked.
“Well, with basketball practice and this picture-taking stuff, when are you going to see her?” Julie asked, in a mild state of shock.
“Look, kid.” He always called her kid when he was annoyed with her. “Jane’s got her own life to lead. And anyway, I think a relationship needs room to breathe.”
Julie had difficulty swallowing. “Boy, I never heard that one before.”
Ellie came to the rescue: “Didn’t Gibran say, ‘Let there be spaces in your togetherness’?” With two teenage girls in the family, The Prophet is well-thumbed and much-quoted.
Ellie and I were familiar with Mike’s pattern with girls, but in this case Julie had been the first to see it emerge. The process, however, is highly visible when his intentions become clear. Besides the new career in photography, Mike suddenly became very conscientious about homework. In addition, the basketball team became a possible entrant in the District Championship, which meant extra practice on weekends. “Can you imagine that, Jane? A chance to be the top team of all,” I heard him telling Jane as I went by the telephone. There had been a time when all their phone conversations had been intimate, when he’d snake the cord into his room and close the door. Now he didn’t mind standing in the front hallway in sight of anyone going by.
“How’s Jane these days?” Julie asked, carefully casual at dinner that evening.
“Great,” Mike answered. “Pass the potatoes, will you?”
“I haven’t seen her around here lately,” Julie persisted.
“We’re going to the movies tonight,” Mike said.
“Big deal,” Julie snickered.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mike asked.
But nobody answered. Everyone was busy eating, although I noticed that Mike didn’t finish the steak that he usually devours, and he passed up dessert.
“What movie are you going to see?” Julie asked.
“I don’t know,” he said morosely, toying with his food. Ellie shot Julie a quick glance that said, Drop the subject.
Mike was still morose when he stalked into the house from the movie. He was early, which was unusual. Julie fluttered down the stairway, anticipating his return. “Mike …”
He held up his hand like a traffic cop, but she pressed on. “Did you and Jane have a good time?”
“I had a rotten time,” he said.
“What happened?”
“Hey, Julie, lay off, will you?” he said.
Surprised at the anguish in his voice, I interrupted, reminding Julie that it was past her bedtime for a school night. She ascended the stairs with reluctant steps, muttering something about missing all the drama.
There was not much drama, really. Ellie had gone to bed early with a headache, and I had a data report to complete, and Mike banged around the kitchen, making the usual noise that accompanies his late-evening sandwich productions. After a while he emerged, carrying a sandwich in one hand and a quart of milk in the other. He sat down on the floor in the same Buddha-like pose Jane had assumed.
He took a bite of the sandwich and chewed without appetite: the condemned prisoner having his last meal.
“Know what’s the matter with girls, Dad?”
“What?”
“They get on your nerves. Like Julie—poking her nose in everybody’s business. And Jane. She’s just great, but …”
“But what?” I asked, laying down the pencil.
“I don’t know. Like, she combs her hair about a million times a day. Every time I turn around she’s running a comb through her hair. And she’s the kind of a girl that, if a song is playing on the radio, she sings along with it. And you can’t really hear the song.”
“She seems like a sweet girl,” I offered.
“She is,” Mike admitted. “She’s just great, but …”
But. That monster of a word.
He pushed the sandwich aside; it was intact except for the half-moon that represented his only bite.
“It’s all over between Jane and me,” he said, finality in his voice like the slam of a door. “She wanted to know what had happened between us. And what could I say? I don’t know what happened, Dad. I just …”
“You just don’t feel the same way toward her,” I said, trying to be helpful.
“Right,” he said. “I feel like a rat …”
“You should feel like a rat,” I said.
When he looked up in surprise, I said, “You can’t help what happens to your emotions, Mike. Not at your age. Not at any age, I guess. It would be terrible to fake it with Jane or anybody else. If you didn’t feel bad about it, you’d really be a rat.”
He looked at me, and I felt again that fleeting moment of sharing. It wasn’t triumphant this time, like the basketball sinking through the hoop, but it was a sharing, anyway.
“Poor Jane,” Ellie said later when I had brought her up to date.
“It was inevitable.”
“I wonder what the next one will be like,” she said.
“Like all the others,” I said. “Except the next one will probably have another word instead of wow.”
I heard that wow again a week or so later when I stopped by a downtown drugstore for an evening newspaper.
“Hi, Mr. Croft. Wow! It’s cold, isn’t it?”
I didn’t spot her at first. My glasses were fogged. And the stools at the soda fountain were occupied by teenagers wearing the same navy-blue jackets and faded jeans. But I’d have known that wow anywhere, and then I saw her waving.
Someone abandoned the stool next to her, and I sat down. “Hi,” I said, groping for her name and then pinning it down: “Jane.”
A sundae, strawberry apparently, stood before her; it looked regal and frigid and gaudy. I shivered from the cold that had followed me into the store, and she sat there, spooning ice cream into her mouth.
“How’s your sketching going?” I asked, signaling the clerk for a cup of coffee.
“To tell you the truth, I haven’t done much, Mr. Croft. Like, I’m not too ambitious. I guess I lack motivation.” She sneezed and wiped her nose with a tissue.
“Well, you have plenty of time to develop ambition.”
As usual, I burned my tongue on the coffee.
“How’s Mike?” she asked.
“Fine.”
“I hate myself,” she announced, taking a huge bite of ice cream dripping with syrup. “I promised myself I wouldn’t mention his name for at least six months, and here I am, wow, asking about him.”
“Never hate yourself, Jane. You’re too sweet a girl for that.”
“Not many people think I’m sweet,” she said, tossing her hair, revealing again the sprinkle of acne. She sniffed. “And I’ve got a cold on top of everything else.”
I wondered: Where’s the summer girl, the girl who went to the beach with Mike and splashed in the water, bikini clad and tanned and lovely?
“You’re not a mess, Jane. You’re pretty and talented. And someday you’re going to knock some fellow off his feet.”
She looked up, smiling wanly. “You’re a nice guy, Mr. Croft.”
Not really, I thought. I had been her enemy for a while because she had threatened Mike’s scholarship. And I had gritted my teeth at all her wows. And I felt sad now about it all.
“I wish there were something I could do, Jane,” I said, turning toward her. Despite the eyes that were bloodshot from the cold and the reddened nostrils, she was still lovely, those television commercial teeth and that shining hair. The sadness grew in me because I wished with all my heart that I could make her happy and knew there was no way for me to do so.
“There’s nothing anybody can do, Mr. Croft,” she said, “but thanks, anyway.” She finished the sundae, licking the spoon, and then groped in her handbag for
another tissue.
She got up from the stool and looked at me again, almost as an afterthought, as if she had forgotten my presence. And why not? I was Mike’s father, not Mike. “Say hello to Mrs. Croft,” she said, easing herself off the stool. “And to Julie.”
I watched her walking toward the door: the faded jeans, the long hair, the jacket emblazoned with a school name. You couldn’t tell her from a million others. The sadness remained as I finished the coffee. I looked into the mirror and saw my reflection there: Mr. Croft, you’re a nice guy, like a million others. I saw the lines like parenthesis marks enclosing the lips, the receding hairline, the small tugs of flesh beneath the eyes. And the wisps of gray in the hair. If all the young girls looked alike, then all the fathers looked alike too, didn’t they?
I paid for the coffee, bought the evening newspaper on the way out and wondered whether I had been feeling sad all along for the wrong person. And I told myself: Except when you’re shaving, don’t look into mirrors anymore.
President Cleveland, Where Are You?
INTRODUCTION
There’s a sentence in “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” which is probably the most significant I have written in terms of my development as a writer. The sentence echoes back to a lost and half-forgotten story I wrote in the days when I was scribbling stories in pencil at the kitchen table. The story was about a boy from the poorer section of a town who falls desperately in love with a girl from the other side of town where the people live, or so he thinks, grandly and affluently. The story was told in the first person, the narrator was a twelve-year-old boy.
The problem concerned description. The narrator (and I, the writer) faced the problem of describing the girl’s house, a thing of grandeur and beauty, white and shining, alien to the three-story tenement building in which the boy lived. How to describe such a house? I knew little about architecture, next to nothing at all. The house had an aura of graceful antiquity—was it a relic of some earlier era? It seemed that I had seen such houses in books—but what books? I knew nothing about researching such a subject and, anyway, I didn’t want to burden the narrative with a long description of the house. In fact, this would not only be fatal to the forward thrust of the story but would not be consistent with what a twelve-year-old boy would know about architecture. Yet, I wanted to describe it as more than just a big white house.
The problem brought the story to a complete halt. I walked my hometown streets, desolated by the thought of all the things I did not know. How could someone so ignorant about so much ever become a writer? Back home, chewing at the pencil, I read and reread the words I had written. The lean clean prose of Ernest Hemingway and the simplicity of William Saroyan had affected me deeply, and I always told myself: Keep it simple, don’t get too technical. So, let’s apply those principles to the girls house. Forget architecture—what did the house look like? Not what did it really look like, but what did it look like to this twelve-year-old boy?
Yes, that was the key—the viewpoint of the boy and not the writer. And from somewhere the description came. It looked like a big white birthday cake of a house! I knew this was exactly the kind of image I had sought. I felt the way Columbus must have felt when he sighted land.
In that moment, I had discovered simile and metaphor, had learned that words were truly tools, that figures of speech were not just something fancy to dress up a piece of prose but words that could evoke scene and event and emotion. Until that discovery at the kitchen table, I had been intimidated by much of what I encountered in books of grammar, including the definitions of similes and metaphors. Suddenly, the definitions didn’t matter. What mattered was using them to enrich my stories—not in a “Look, Ma, how clever I am” way, but to sharpen images, pin down emotions, create shocks of recognition in the reader.
At any rate, the story of the boy and the birthday cake of a house has been lost through the years. I doubt if it was ever published. In “President Cleveland, Where Are You?” I resurrected the description. It occurs in the second sentence of the third paragraph, a tribute to a marvelous moment in my hesitant journey toward becoming a writer.
President Cleveland, Where Are You?
That was the autumn of the cowboy cards—Buck Jones and Tom Tyler and Hoot Gibson and especially Ken Maynard. The cards were available in those five-cent packages of gum: pink sticks, three together, covered with a sweet white powder. You couldn’t blow bubbles with that particular gum, but it couldn’t have mattered less. The cowboy cards were important—the pictures of those rock-faced men with eyes of blue steel.
On those wind-swept, leaf-tumbling afternoons we gathered after school on the sidewalk in front of Lemire’s Drugstore, across from St. Jude’s Parochial School, and we swapped and bargained and matched for the cards. Because a Ken Maynard serial was playing at the Globe every Saturday afternoon, he was the most popular cowboy of all, and one of his cards was worth at least ten of any other kind. Rollie Tremaine had a treasure of thirty or so, and he guarded them jealously. He’d match you for the other cards, but he risked his Ken Maynards only when the other kids threatened to leave him out of the competition altogether.
You could almost hate Rollie Tremaine. In the first place, he was the only son of Auguste Tremaine, who operated the Uptown Dry Goods Store, and he did not live in a tenement but in a big white birthday cake of a house on Laurel Street. He was too fat to be effective in the football games between the Frenchtown Tigers and the North Side Knights, and he made us constantly aware of the jingle of coins in his pockets. He was able to stroll into Lemire’s and casually select a quarter’s worth of cowboy cards while the rest of us watched, aching with envy.
Once in a while I earned a nickel or dime by running errands or washing windows for blind old Mrs. Belander, or by finding pieces of copper, brass, and other valuable metals at the dump and selling them to the junkman. The coins clutched in my hand, I would race to Lemire’s to buy a cowboy card or two, hoping that Ken Maynard would stare boldly out at me as I opened the pack. At one time, before a disastrous matching session with Roger Lussier (my best friend, except where the cards were involved), I owned five Ken Maynards and considered myself a millionaire, of sorts.
One week I was particularly lucky; I had spent two afternoons washing floors for Mrs. Belander and received a quarter. Because my father had worked a full week at the shop, where a rush order for fancy combs had been received, he allotted my brothers and sisters and me an extra dime along with the usual ten cents for the Saturday-afternoon movie. Setting aside the movie fare, I found myself with a bonus of thirty-five cents, and I then planned to put Rollie Tremaine to shame the following Monday afternoon.
Monday was the best day to buy the cards because the candy man stopped at Lemire’s every Monday morning to deliver the new assortments. There was nothing more exciting in the world than a fresh batch of card boxes. I rushed home from school that day and hurriedly changed my clothes, eager to set off for the store. As I burst through the doorway, letting the screen door slam behind me, my brother Armand blocked my way.
He was fourteen, three years older than I, and a freshman at Monument High School. He had recently become a stranger to me in many ways—indifferent to such matters as cowboy cards and the Frenchtown Tigers—and he carried himself with a mysterious dignity that was fractured now and then when his voice began shooting off in all directions like some kind of vocal fireworks.
“Wait a minute, Jerry,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” He motioned me out of earshot of my mother, who was busy supervising the usual after-school skirmish in the kitchen.
I sighed with impatience. In recent months Armand had become a figure of authority, siding with my father and mother occasionally. As the oldest son he sometimes took advantage of his age and experience to issue rules and regulations.
“How much money have you got?” he whispered.
“You in some kind of trouble?” I asked, excitement rising in me as I remembered the blackmail plot of a movie
at the Globe a month before.
He shook his head in annoyance. “Look,” he said, “it’s Pa’s birthday tomorrow. I think we ought to chip in and buy him something …”
I reached into my pocket and caressed the coins. “Here,” I said carefully, pulling out a nickel. “If we all give a nickel we should have enough to buy him something pretty nice.”
He regarded me with contempt. “Rita already gave me fifteen cents, and I’m throwing in a quarter. Albert handed over a dime—all that’s left of his birthday money. Is that all you can do—a nickel?”
“Aw, come on,” I protested. “I haven’t got a single Ken Maynard left, and I was going to buy some cards this afternoon.”
“Ken Maynard!” he snorted. “Who’s more important—him or your father?”
His question was unfair because he knew that there was no possible choice—“my father” had to be the only answer. My father was a huge man who believed in the things of the spirit, although my mother often maintained that the spirits he believed in came in bottles. He had worked at the Monument Comb Shop since the age of fourteen; his booming laugh—or grumble—greeted us each night when he returned from the factory. A steady worker when the shop had enough work, he quickened with gaiety on Friday nights and weekends, a bottle of beer at his elbow, and he was fond of making long speeches about the good things in life. In the middle of the Depression, for instance, he paid cash for a piano, of all things, and insisted that my twin sisters, Yolande and Yvette, take lessons once a week.
I took a dime from my pocket and handed it to Armand.
“Thanks, Jerry,” he said. “I hate to take your last cent.”
“That’s all right,” I replied, turning away and consoling myself with the thought that twenty cents was better than nothing at all.
When I arrived at Lemire’s I sensed disaster in the air. Roger Lussier was kicking disconsolately at a tin can in the gutter, and Rollie Tremaine sat sullenly on the steps in front of the store.
“Save your money,” Roger said. He had known about my plans to splurge on the cards.