Cold Spring Harbor (11 page)

And Evan gave him a slightly mocking glance. “What makes you so sure we’re going to win?”

“Oh, I didn’t say I’m
sure
, Evan; I mean I guess it could go the other way; all I meant was—”

“Fucking right. Fucking right it could go the other way. And wouldn’t that be something?”

This was the first time Phil had ever heard him say “fucking,” though he probably said it often at work every day. Maybe he even said it to Rachel when they were alone, or maybe not; but then, what the hell did he say to Rachel when they were alone? And what, apart from “darling,” did she say to him?

“Wouldn’t that be something? Having Hitler in charge of everything? We’d be taking orders from the German army around the clock, and probably from the Japs as well. Can you imagine that?”

No, he couldn’t. Phil Drake hadn’t yet been able to imagine very much about the war; he couldn’t even picture himself in the army, despite all the talk at school about an imminent lowering of the draft age to eighteen. It wouldn’t happen to him for two more years, and nothing that far in the future was worth imagining now. Still, Evan Shepard’s bleak vision of national defeat was disturbing—or would have been, if it hadn’t prompted Phil to remember Evan Shepard’s perforated eardrums; then he let himself relax a little in the car upholstery.

“Well, anyway,” he said, “I guess I’ll be lucky even to finish school before I’m taken in.”

Phil Drake might not be much bigger or heavier at eighteen,
but he’d be stronger and smarter and hardly ever silly any more. Except for a few widely scattered Irving School boys there would be nobody to remember what a jerk he’d been, and so the army might be the making of him; it might be the time of his life. Just before going overseas he would come home on furlough, wearing a uniform that could only make Evan Shepard weak with envy, and he’d say “Well, how’re things going at the plant, Evan?”

Or, to be fair, Evan might have found his way into some second-rate engineering school by then, years older than any of his classmates, with Rachel at some menial daily work to make ends meet. But even a line like “How’s college, Evan?” would be good enough, coming from a soldier in wartime. It would take care of the situation; it would do the job.

“This’ll be as good a place as any,” Evan said as he brought the car to a stop on a straight, empty blacktop road between a great many trees; then he got out and came walking solemnly around the hood.

Squirming and sliding over into the driver’s seat as uneasily as if he knew he would never belong there, Phil made a frowning, nodding little show of attentiveness while his brother-in-law hunched close beside him to explain the gear shift.

“Keep the letter H in your mind,” Evan said. “The gears are arranged in an H pattern, and it’s very easy to remember once you’ve learned: it gets to be second nature. Watch, now. First; second; third; reverse. Got it?”

“Well, I think so,” Phil said, “but I’ll have to go over it a few more times. I mean it’s not exactly second nature yet, if you see what I mean. Another thing: I don’t quite get what it is the different gears do. The three forward gears, I mean.”

“What they ‘do’?”

“Well, I didn’t say that right. What I mean is, I understand
they provide three different degrees of power, but I don’t quite—”

“Well, no; the power’s in the engine, Phil,” Evan said patiently.

“I know, I know; I mean of course I know the power’s in the engine; all I meant was, they provide for the transmission of power in three different—”

“No, the transmission is what turns the rear axle.”

“Yeah. Well, look, I don’t think I’m really as dumb about this as I may seem, Evan; I’m probably only asking a lot of questions because I’m nervous, is all.”

And Evan gave him a quizzical look. “What’re you nervous about?”

Later, when the car was carefully set in motion with Phil at the controls, things only got worse. “… No, easy; easy on the
clutch,
” Evan had to tell him, more than once, because Phil’s trembling left foot kept working the pedal heavily and in spastic haste. Then the car did accelerate nicely for a few hundred feet, and he felt the thrill of its gathering speed until Evan said “Jesus!” and wrested the wheel from him with one quick, strong hand—just in time, as it turned out, to keep them from veering into a roadside ditch that looked about four feet deep.

Another time, when Phil was trying again to find the knack of letting the clutch in and out, they lurched and stalled dead in an embarrassing smell of gasoline.

“You flooded it,” Evan told him.

“I what?”

“You flooded the fucking carburetor.”

That was how the lesson went until darkness began to fall—nothing really taught; nothing really learned—and when Evan drove them silently home he appeared to be sulking, as though he’d been offended by the afternoon. It was clear now that there would be no further driving lessons unless Rachel could find some agreeable way of encouraging
them; it seemed too, from the set of Evan’s handsome profile, that he might now be thinking of ways to let her know, tonight, what a hopeless fucking idiot her brother was.

And Phil knew there might not be much profit or future in hating your brother-in-law, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t figure him out and see him plain. This dumb bastard would never get into college. This ignorant, inarticulate, car-driving son of a bitch would never even be promoted to a halfway decent job. This asshole was going to spend the rest of his life on the factory floor with all the other slobs, and it would serve him right. Fuck him.

“Well, hi!” Rachel called, looking up from the sofa as they came in, and her lips were shaped for saying “How’d it go?” but instead she said nothing. For years, ever since she’d been ten or eleven, her face had taken on this troubled, frightened look whenever there might be reason to dread an unfortunate report of Phil’s performance in the outside world.

Gloria was sitting across from her, hunched in the middle of a reminiscent anecdote and talking steadily. She didn’t even seem to notice that Evan and Phil were home—she had apparently forgotten her fears of violent wreckage on the road—and she didn’t seem aware that Rachel was no longer listening to her.

Then it was dinnertime. When Rachel had plugged in the electric fan she plugged in her radio, too, and placed it on the table. They were just in time, she announced, for
Death Valley Days
.

“For what, dear?” Gloria asked.

“
Death Valley Days
. It’s my favorite program. And they have a different story every week, you see, so it’s not like a serial. If you happen to miss a few weeks, that doesn’t spoil your enjoyment of it the next time.”

And nothing, clearly, was going to spoil Rachel’s enjoyment
of it tonight. Absorbed in the opening lines of radio dialogue, she tucked into her meat and potatoes with the look of a girl determinedly at peace.

Beneath the cowboys’ amiable voices you could hear their boots clumping along a hollow wooden sidewalk; then came an unexpected pistol shot. There were several masculine calls of command, one of them delivered in falsetto, and soon, with the music rising to suggest dramatic tension, there was a thundering of horses out across the great desert plain.

Gloria’s face was terrible with weakness and reproach as she brought a wrinkled paper napkin to her mouth and blotted it in two or three places. She seemed to be trying several different ways of sitting in her chair, as if no position were comfortable or even secure. Then she wiped a few damp strands of hair from her forehead, lifted her chin to make herself heard above the cowboy sounds, and said “Well; personally, I’ve always thought the dinner hour was for conver
sa
tion.”

On some days, with Evan gone at work, the house seemed to be steeped in idleness. Almost any activity, any way of stirring up the air in new directions, was worth considering.

“
I
know what let’s do,” Gloria cried as she and Rachel were clearing away the lunch dishes. “Let’s go to the movies.”

And Phil could see at once that Rachel wasn’t sure if she cared for the idea. As a mature young woman, thoroughly familiar with sexual intercourse and other intimate matters of that kind, could she really be expected to take part in an afternoon at the movies with her mother and her little brother? Still, she was visibly tempted; she was thinking it over.

“Well,” she said at last, “all right—if you’re sure we’ll be back before Evan gets home. I don’t want him ever coming home to an empty place.”

“Oh, that’s silly, dear. There’s all the time in the world, if you’ll just give me a minute to change my clothes. Do you want to change too?”

Rachel said she guessed she did, and it took longer than a minute; soon, though, their party of three was ready to set out, on foot, for the village. This was like old times.

When the Drake family went to the movies, wherever they happened to be living, they never bothered to find out what time the main feature began: much of their pleasure came from waiting for a prolonged confusion to clarify itself on the screen. Eventually, after various tantalizing elements of plot had gained more and more coherence either in development or in resolution, each of the Drakes would try to be the first to turn and whisper “This is where we came in”; then, more often than not, they would agree to stay through the end again, in order to intensify the story they already knew.

The movies were wonderful because they took you out of yourself, and at the same time they gave you a sense of being whole. Things of the world might serve to remind you at every turn that your life was snarled and perilously incomplete, that terror would never be far from possession of your heart, but those perceptions would nearly always vanish, if only for a little while, in the cool and nicely scented darkness of any movie house, anywhere. And for Phil Drake, the light-dappled shadows of this particular movie were especially sweet: he could sense the hushed presence of his mother here and his sister there, where they belonged. Oh, it might only be further proof of how young he was for his age and of what a wretched year he’d had at school, but these two women were still the people who mattered most to him.

It was probably better to go to the movies at night, when nothing much but sleep was expected of you afterwards; going in the daytime always meant you had to come out into the blinding streets of reality and find some way to face whatever was left of the afternoon. Even so, the Drakes liked to take a little time to let a movie clear itself out of their minds—they didn’t want to lose the comforts of artifice any sooner than necessary—and they would often walk together in silence for a hundred yards or more before one or another of them broke the fading spell by speaking.

“Well,” Gloria said. “That was nice, wasn’t it.”

“Oh, it certainly was,” Rachel said. “And it would have been perfect if Evan could’ve come too.”

“Well, I don’t know, though,” Phil said. “I sort of liked having it be just the three of us again.”

But his sister turned on him crossly. “What an unpleasant thing to say,” she told him. “Would you begrudge Evan a movie?”

“Oh, come on,” he said. “Jesus, ‘begrudge.’ Why do you always want to talk that funny way?”

And the two of them might have gone on cutting and bruising each other all the way home that day if a tall boy on a bicycle hadn’t pulled up at the curb, shaded his eyes from the sun with one arm and waved the other in an extravagant greeting.

“Hey! Phil Drake!”

It was Gerard “Flash” Ferris, one of the more dismal social outcasts of the Irving School, and he looked as pleased as if his fortunes had just taken a surprising turn for the better.

“… Well, how
nice,
” Gloria said when the introductions were over. “And what a coincidence, isn’t it? Finding another Irving boy here, of all places? Does your family live here, Flash?”

“My grandmother does, yes ma’am. Out a little ways off Route Nine.”

“Are you just visiting, then? Or will you be here all summer?”

“No, I’ll be here. I mean I live with my grandmother, you see.”

“Wonderful. Then you and Phil can have someone to—” and she almost said “to play with,” but caught herself in time. “Someone to sort of kick around with,” she said instead, uncertainly, as though she could only hope a phrase like that might be acceptable in adolescent usage.

Watching them talk, Phil felt he could almost read his mother’s mind. Certain things about Flash Ferris—the good manners, the flawlessly tasteful sports clothes, the expensive bicycle—suggested at once that his people had money; and here in Cold Spring Harbor it might easily turn out to be the kind of “old money” that figured so importantly in her yearnings.

“… Well, we’ll certainly have to keep in touch, then, Flash,” she was saying.

“Oh, we will,” he promised her, and he tucked the Drakes’ phone number carefully into his shirt pocket before he took a courteous leave of them and pedaled away.

“What a nice boy!” Gloria said when the family was walking again, and Phil decided he had better acquaint her with a few facts.

“Listen,” he began. “Can you listen a minute, please? That kid’s a—that kid’s really a—I don’t want anything to do with that kid. He’s a jerk.”