The Collected Stories (28 page)

Something is wrong with the following tenants: Mrs. Finn, Mrs. Raftery, Ginnie, and me. Everyone else in our building is on the way up through the affluent society, putting five to ten years into low rent before moving to Jersey or Bridgeport. But our four family units, as people are now called, are doomed to stand culturally still as this society moves on its caterpillar treads from ordinary affluent to absolute empire. All this in mind, I name names and dates. “Mrs. Finn, darling, look at my Richard, the time Junior took his Schwinn and how Richard hid in the coal in the basement thinking of a way to commit suicide,” but she coolly answers, “Faith, you're not a bit fair, for Junior give it right back when he found out it was Richard's.”

O.K.

Kitty says, “Faith, you'll fall out of the tree, calm yourself.” She looks up, rolling her eyes to show direction, and I see a handsome man in narrow pants whom we remember from other Saturdays. He has gone to sit beside Lynn Ballard. He speaks softly to her left ear while she maintains her profile. He has never spoken to her Michael. He is a famous actor trying to persuade her to play opposite him in a new production of
She.
That's what Kitty, my kind friend, says.

I am above that kindness. I often see through the appearance of things right to the apparition itself. It's obvious that he's a weekend queer, talking her into the possibilities of a neighborhood threesome. When her nose quivers and she agrees, he will easily get his really true love, the magnificent manager of the supermarket, who has been longing for her at the check-out counter. What they will do then, I haven't the vaguest idea. I am the child of puritans and I'm only halfway here.

“Don't even think like that,” says Kitty. No. She can see a contract in his pocket.

There is no one like Kitty Skazka. Unlike other people who have similar flaws that doom, she is tolerant and loving. I wish Kitty could live forever, bearing daughters and sons to open the heart of man. Meanwhile, mortal, pregnant, she has three green-eyed daughters and they aren't that great. Of course, Kitty thinks they are. And they are no worse than the average gifted, sensitive child of a wholehearted mother and half a dozen transient fathers.

Her youngest girl is Antonia, who has no respect for grownups. Kitty has always liked her to have no respect; so in this, she is quite satisfactory to Kitty.

At some right moment on this Saturday afternoon, Antonia decided to talk to Tonto, my second son. He lay on his belly in the grass, his bare heels exposed to the eye of flitting angels, and he worked at a game that included certain ants and other bugs as players.

“Tonto,” she asked, “what are you playing, can I?”

“No, it's my game, no girls,” Tonto said.

“Are you the boss of the world?” Antonia asked politely.

“Yes,” said Tonto.

He thinks, he really believes, he is. To which I must say, Righto! you are the boss of the world, Anthony, you are prince of the day-care center for the deprived children of working mothers, you are the Lord of the West Side loading zone whenever it rains on Sundays. I have seen you, creepy chief of the dark forest of four ginkgo trees. The Boss! If you would only look up, Anthony, and boss me what to do, I would immediately slide down this scabby bark, ripping my new stretch slacks, and do it.

“Give me a nickel, Faith,” he ordered at once.

“Give him a nickel, Kitty,” I said.

“Nickels, nickels, nickels, whatever happened to pennies?” Anna Kraat asked.

“Anna, you're rich. You're against us,” I whispered, but loud enough to be heard by Mrs. Junius Finn, still stopped at the mouth of the playground.

“Don't blame the rich for everything,” she warned. She herself, despite the personal facts of her economic position, is disgusted with the neurotic rise of the working class.

Lynn Ballard bent her proud and shameless head.

Kitty sighed, shifted her yardage, and began to shorten the hem of the enormous skirt which she was wearing. “Here's a nickel, love,” she said.

“Oh boy! Love!” said Anna Kraat.

Antonia walked in a wide circle around the sycamore tree and put her arm on Kitty, who sewed, the sun just barely over her left shoulder—a perfect light. At that very moment, a representational artist passed. I think it was Edward Roster. He stopped and kneeled, peering at the scene. He squared them off with a filmmaker's viewfinder and said, “Ah, what a picture!” then left.

“Number one!” I announced to Kitty, which he was, the very first of the squint-eyed speculators who come by to size up the stock. Pretty soon, depending on age and intention, they would move in groups along the paths or separately take notes in the shadows of the statues.

“The trick,” said Anna, downgrading the world, “is to know the speculators from the investors …”

“I will never live like that. Not I,” Kitty said softly.

“Balls!” I shouted, as two men strolled past us, leaning toward one another. They weren't lovers, they were Jack Resnick and Tom Weed, music lovers inclining toward their transistor, which was playing the “Chromatic Fantasy.” They paid no attention to us because of their relation to this great music. However, Anna heard them say, “Jack, do you hear what I hear?” Damnit yes, the overromanticizing and the under-Baching, I can't believe it.”

Well, I must say when darkness covers the earth and great darkness the people, I will think of you: two men with smart ears. I don't believe civilization can do a lot more than educate a person's senses. If it's truth and honor you want to refine, I think the Jews have some insight. Make no images, imitate no God. After all, in His field, the graphic arts, He is pre-eminent. Then let that One who made the tan deserts and the blue Van Allen belt and the green mountains of New England be in charge of Beauty, which He obviously understands, and let man, who was full of forgiveness at Jerusalem, and full of survival at Troy, let man be in charge of Good.

“Faith, will you quit with your all-the-time philosophies,” says Richard, my first- and disapproving-born. Into our midst, he'd galloped, riding an all-day rage. Brand-new ball bearings, roller skates, heavy enough for his big feet, hung round his neck.

I decided not to give in to Richard by responding. I digressed and was free: A cross-eyed man with a red beard became president of the Parent-Teachers Association. He appointed a committee of fun-loving ladies who met in the lunchroom and touched up the coffee with little gurgles of brandy.

He had many clever notions about how to deal with the money shortage in the public schools. One of his great plots was to promote the idea of the integrated school in such a way that private-school people would think their kids were missing the real thing. And at 5 a.m., the envious hour, the very pit of the morning of middle age, they would think of all the public-school children deeply involved in the urban tragedy, something their children might never know. He suggested that one month of public-school attendance might become part of the private-school curriculum, as natural and progressive an experience as a visit to the boiler room in first grade. Funds could be split 50-50 or 30-70 or 40-60 with the Board of Education. If the plan failed, still the projected effort would certainly enhance the prestige of the public school.

Actually something did stir. Delegations of private progressive-school parents attacked the Board of Ed. for what became known as the Shut-out, and finally even the parents-and-teachers associations of the classical schools (whose peculiar concern always had been educating the child's head) began to consider the value of exposing children who had read about the horror at Ilium to ordinary street fights, so they could understand the Iliad better. Public School (in Manhattan) would become a minor like typing, required but secondary.

Mr. Terry Koln, full of initiative, energy, and lightheartedness, was re-elected by unanimous vote and sent on to the United Parents and Federated Teachers Organization as special council member, where in a tiny office all his own he grew marijuana on the windowsills, swearing it was deflowered marigolds.

He was the joy of our P.T.A. But it was soon discovered that he had no children, and Kitty and I have to meet him now surreptitiously in bars.

“Oh,” said Richard, his meanness undeflected by this jolly digression:

He really wrote that, my Richard. I thought it was awfully good, rhyme and meter and all, and I brought it to his teacher. I took the afternoon off to bring it to her. “Are you joking, Mrs. Asbury?” she asked.

Looking into her kind teaching eyes, I remembered schools and what it might be like certain afternoons and I replied, “May I have my Richard, please, he has a dental appointment. His teeth are just like his father's. Rotten.”

“Do take care of them, Mrs. Asbury.”

“God, yes, it's the least,” I said, taking his hand.

“Faith,” said Richard, who had not gone away. “Why did you take me to the dentist that afternoon?”

“I thought you wanted to get out of there.”

“Why? Why? Why?” asked Richard, stamping his feet and shouting. I didn't answer. I closed my eyes to make him disappear.

“Why not?” asked Philip Mazzano, who was standing there looking up at me when I opened my eyes.

“Where's Richard?” I asked.

“This is Philip,” Kitty called up to me. “You know Philip, that I told you about?”

“Yes?”

“Philip,” she said.

“Oh,” I said and left the arm of the sycamore with as delicate a jump as can be made by a person afraid of falling, twisting an ankle, and being out of work for a week.

“I don't mind school,” said Richard, shouting from behind the tree. “It's better than listening to her whine.”

He really talks like that.

Philip looked puzzled. “How old are you, sonny?”

“Nine.”

“Do nine-year-olds talk like that? I think I have a boy who's nine.”

“Yes,” said Kitty. “Your Johnny's nine, David's eleven, and Mike's fourteen.”

“Ah,” said Philip, sighing; he looked up into the tree I'd flopped from—and there was Judy, Anna's kid, using my nice warm branch. “God,” said Philip, “more!”

Silence followed and embarrassment, because we outnumbered him, though clearly, we tenderly liked him.

“How is everything, Kitty?” he said, kneeling to tousle her hair. “How's everything, my old honey girl? Another one?” He tapped Kitty's tummy lightly with an index finger. “God!” he said, standing up. “Say, Kitty, I saw Jerry in Newark day before yesterday. Just like that. He was standing in a square scratching his head.”

“Jerry?” Kitty asked in a high loving squeak. “Oh, I know. Newark all week … Why were you there?”

“Me? I had to see someone, a guy named Vincent Hall, a man in my field.”

“What's your field?” I asked.

“Daisies,” he said. “I happen to be in the field of daisies.”

What an answer! How often does one meet, in this black place, a man, woman, or child who can think up a pastoral reply like that?

For that reason I looked at him. He had dark offended eyes deep in shadow, with a narrow rim of whiteness under the eyes, the result, I invented, of lots of late carousing nights, followed by eye-wrinkling examinations of mortalness. All this had marked him lightly with sobriety, the first enhancing manifest of ravage.

Even Richard is stunned by this uncynical openhearted notation of feeling. Forty bare seconds then, while Jack Resnick puts his transistor into the hollow of an English elm, takes a tattered score of
The Messiah
out of his rucksack, and writes a short Elizabethan melody in among the long chorus holds to go with the last singing sentence of my ode to Philip.

“Nice day,” said Anna.

“Please, Faith,” said Richard. “Please. You see that guy over there?” He pointed to a fat boy seated among adults on a park bench not far from listening Lynn Ballard. “He has a skate key and he won't lend it to me. He stinks. It's your fault you lost the skate key, Faith. You know you did. You never put anything away.”

“Ask him again, Richard.”

“You ask him, Faith. You're a grownup.”

“I will not. You want the skate key, you ask him. You have to go after your own things in this life. I'm not going to be around forever.”

Richard gave me a gloomy, lip-curling look. No. It was worse than that. It was a baleful, foreboding look; a look which as far as our far-in-the-future relations were concerned could be named ill-auguring.

“You never do me a favor, do you?” he said.

“
I'll
go with you, Richard.” Philip grabbed his hand. “We'll talk to that kid. He probably hasn't got a friend in the world. I'm not kidding you, boy, it's hard to be a fat kid.” He rapped his belly, where, I imagine, certain memories were stored.

Then he took Richard's hand and they went off, man and boy, to tangle.

“Kitty! Richard just hands him his skate, his hand, and just goes off with him … That's not like my Richard.”

“Children sense how good he is,” said Kitty.

“He's good?”

“He's really not so good. Oh, he's good. He's considerate. You know what kind he is, Faith. But if you don't really want him to be good, he will be. And he's very strong. Physically. Someday I'll tell you about him. Not now. He has a special meaning to me.”

Actually everyone has a special meaning to Kitty, even me, a dictionary of particular generalities, even Anna and all our children.

Kitty sewed as she spoke. She looked like a delegate to a Conference of Youth from the People's Republic of Ubmonsk from Lower Tartaria. A single dark braid hung down her back. She wore a round-necked white blouse with capped sleeves made of softened muslin, woven for aged bridesbeds. I have always listened carefully to my friend Kitty's recommendations, for she has made one mistake after another. Her experience is invaluable.