Every Third Thought (5 page)

 

Even to a callow first-grader, the contrast with Narrator’s own family was stark. Fred Newett—sometime insurance salesman, sometime car salesman (he’d arranged the Prospers’ purchase of that LaSalle), and sometime other things—was never an
unkind
father to his only child, just an impassive, distracted, and not very interested one, no doubt in part because of the double burden of the nation’s economic and his wife’s psychological depression. Aside from whatever might have been Lorraine Irving Newett’s congenital disposition and any marital problems unrecognizable by a six-year-old, she had been much saddened by the stillbirth of her and Fred’s first child (a girl, two years pre-George) and the late-term miscarriage of their third (another girl, two years post-). While declaring herself quite satisfied with her son, she made no secret of her disappointment at not having a daughter as well. “It would’ve been so
nice
[her signature adjective] if you’d had a sister. Wouldn’t that’ve been nice?” Narrator supposed so; what did
he
know? The Prosper siblings bickered and teased good-naturedly, and since the boys’ kindergarten friendship they more and more included Narrator in their high-spirited taunts and tussles, which he quite enjoyed. While he didn’t really
mind
returning home to only-childhood and his comparatively indifferent parenting—Dad buried in his newspapers and desk-business after a long day’s whatever,
Mom busy in kitchen or sewing-room or working crossword puzzles in her front-porch rocker and inevitably replying (as when Narrator later recounted to her this adventure-still-in-progress), “Now wasn’t
that
nice!”—the contrast didn’t escape him. Dave and Mary Prosper were forever attending or hosting dinners, club and church and school events, outings with their friends and their children’s friends; the Newetts, while cordial to their Bridgetown neighbors, had almost no social life.

 

Nay
to both propositions, the parents agree, clever Ruthie adding however that if
both
of those silly propositions were true, the answer would still be five.

“Atta
girl
!” applauds Mom, while Narrator is still sorting out the arithmetical logic. And, “Look carefully now, Georgie-boy: How many
pairs
of platforms must we daring climbers climb before we reach that tower’s top? Count every second platform
.
”

“And the order of the ascending climbers shall be:
First
,”—Mr. P. indicating himself—“the heaviest member of the troupe, to make sure the CCC’s construction job is sound.
Second
, the winner of our hard-fought Cow Poker match, its contestants neck and neck until that Texaco station in Rock Harbor cost the birthday-boy half his herd.”

“But while you’re looking it
up
,” Ned adds, “Don’t look
down
.”

All hands laugh, Narrator included, who doesn’t yet understand the joke but recognizes that there is one, and
does
understand his friend’s whispered follow-up advice: “Look up Ruthie’s dress instead!”

“Naughty naughty!” his sister scolds, who’s anyhow wearing those cold-weather leggings. Her dad having opened the padlock with borrowed key, through the gate and up the first steep flights of metal stairs we go in designated order, gloved hands gripping the stair rails, four-fifths of us rehearsing silently, as we climb, our respective parts in the little five-step ceremony that Ned’s parents have devised without his knowing it. At the first “second platform,” Mrs. Prosper calls out, “
Landing Number One!
” Then she gathers us together, holds up one forefinger, points the other at her wondering son, and declares in a loud singsong:
“When he was
one
year old, he was wetting the bed!
”

“Was
not
!” Ned protests, but “Were
so
,” his sister smugly affirms.

“Onward and upward, and enough of that,” directs Dad. Pausing us next at “
Landing Number Two!
” (i.e. platform four) he picks up his wife’s singsong: “
When you were
two
years old, you were
walking
, Ned!
”

But “Not so fast, young man,” his mother says, and instructs us all to appreciate the changing perspective on our
surroundings from the successive platforms. “Like the way we get a better view of things as we grow up,” she explains: “ourselves included.” To which her husband adds, “It’s what’s called an
incremental perspective
, okay? Try
that
one on your teachers sometime.”

And indeed, by the next even-numbered platform—where Ruthie, in her turn, announces, “
Landing Number Three!”
and then recites to her brother, “
When you were
three
years old, I was
six
already, so
nyah!”—the assembled are approaching treetop height, and Narrator is wondering already whether on Maryland’s table-flat Eastern Shore and in low-rise Stratford/ Bridgetown, where few if any buildings are more than four stories high, he has ever been farther off the ground than he’ll be at . . .

“Landing Number Four!
” he calls out when they’ve climbed there, per their secretly pre-rehearsed program; then adds, in rhyme with the verse before, “
When we were
four
years old. I didn’t know you yet, Neddy.”

“The
what
?” Ned wants to know, and his parents explain.

“But when you were
five
years old
,” Mrs. Prosper recites at
“Landing Number Five!
”—the last platform before the tower-top observation booth
—“you two were kindergarten friends.
...
”

“And now you’re
six
years old!”
we choristers then proclaim in unison, one of us at each platform-corner and the eyerolling birthday boy at its center.
“And here’s how your birthday poem ends:

“Boys . . . ” tut-tuts Mrs. P.

Had Narrator ever even seen a proper sunset before? Certainly not such a view of one, from such a viewpoint. The great Chesapeake itself—“Largest estuarine system on the planet,” Mrs. Prosper informs us, having first defined
estuarine
“for any who mightn’t know”—is visible to westward beyond the snow-patched marsh-grass and loblolly pines; a few last workboats are motoring in toward Rock Harbor, and Maryland’s western shore—which Narrator had seldom set foot on, but the Prospers often ferried over to, to Annapolis, Washington, and Baltimore—can be made out on the far horizon. Toward it the great orange sun has already descended to an altitude of no more than one Solar Diameter (term supplied by Ned, who some minutes later will officially announce, “Lower limb touching!” and bump his left leg against Narrator’s right).

Despite Dad Prosper’s warning, what youngster could
not
steal furtive glances aplenty as the grand disk first touches the hazed horizon and then steadily sinks behind and below it, its movement perceptible for the first time in Narrator’s life? “And
remember,” Mrs. P. reminds all hands, “it’s not the Sun that’s moving, but
us
: the Earth spinning on its axis from west to east.” A literally dizzying idea, at that height and in those circumstances: Narrator grips the platform-rail to steady himself as, with parental permission once the sun is two-thirds set, they attend its final disappearance, hoping to see the legendary green flash reputed to occur under just the right atmospheric conditions at sunset’s last moment, but which none present has ever witnessed.

“Maybe on Birthday Seven?” either Mom or Dad offers, and the other says, “Time for
us
to go down now, while there’s still light to see by.
Hasta mañana, O sole mio,
and pardon my French.” And on the merry ride back to Bridgetown, amid the back-seat/front-seat banter and more talk of solstices and equinoxes, “Just remember what the Good Book tells us,” Mr. Prosper mock-solemnly bids all hands: “
To every thing there is a season
.”

A
ND THERE ENDED “Gee’s”
Solstitial Illumination of Post-Equinoctial Vision #1
, as he seems to have dubbed his first-drafting thereof. No green flash at
its
close, either—when with gratified relief he transferred it from loose-leaf binder to desktop computer, editing as he typed—but an afterglow of further associated memories, not all of them warm. Such a contrast between his old pal Ned’s family life and his own! (“Now wasn’t that
nice
,” Mom Newett granted, scarcely looking up from her dinner plate of Smithfield ham, steamed kale, and mashed potatoes while he recounted his adventure; and Dad once again disdained such “three-initial make-works” as CCC and WPA: “We Piss Anywhere,” he would sniff at the sight of road- and bridge-builders standing about.) That last line of Ned’s birthday song,
When the winter is through
, reminded G. now not only of the heavy literal winters of his childhood—snow forts and snowmen and snowball fights under the leafless maples of Bridge Street; the creeks and rivers frozen hard
enough for ice-skating, and even the Bay itself ice-locked at times from shore to shore, as almost never happens nowadays; coal bins and coal furnaces in those years before most folks switched to oil or gas; even free-standing wood- and coal-stoves in the houses still without central heating—but also of the long economic winter of the Great Depression, more burdensome to
his
parents, he came to understand, than to Ned and Ruth’s, who were on the state payroll. As Fred Newett more than once dryly observed, “Schoolteachers mightn’t get paid
much
, but at least they get paid
regular
.”

“And that means something,” G.’s mother would agree, characteristically not troubling to explain to her son just what, in fact, it meant: the security of knowing that however much the family might have to scrimp and save while FDR’s New Deal gradually improved the nation’s general welfare, at least they wouldn’t likely be standing in breadlines or squatting in “Hoovervilles” like so many of their less fortunate countrymen.

“Et cetera,” G. concluded now to
his
wife, who supposed she was lucky to have been born twelve years after her spouse—just in time for World War Two?