The Early Stories (34 page)

“I'm
not
a materialist.”

Hub lifted his dreadful hands in half-blessing. “Have it your way. I'm determined to minimize friction.”

“Damnit, Hub, all the friction between us comes from
you
.”

“How? What do I do? Tell me, and I'll change. I'll give you the shirt off my back.” He began to unbutton, and stopped, seeing that the laugh wasn't going to come.

Orson felt weak and empty, and in spite of himself he cringed inwardly, with a helpless affection for his unreal, unreachable friend. “I don't know, Hub,” he admitted. “I don't know what it is you're doing to me.”

A paste of silence dried in the air between them.

Orson with an effort unstuck himself. “I think you're right, we shouldn't room together next year.”

Hub seemed a bit bewildered, but nodded, saying, “I told them in the
beginning that I ought to live alone.” And his hurt eyes, bulging behind their lenses, settled into an invulnerable Byzantine stare.

One afternoon in mid-May, Orson was sitting stumped at his desk, trying to study. He had taken two exams and had two to go. They stood between him and release like two towering walls of muddy paper. His position seemed extremely precarious: he was unable to retreat and able to advance only along a very thin thread, a high wire of sanity on which he balanced above an abyss of statistics and formulae, his brain a firmament of winking cells. A push would kill him. There was then a hurried pounding up the stairs, and Hub pushed into the room carrying cradled in his arm a metal object the color of a gun and the size of a cat. It had a red tongue. Hub slammed the door behind him, snapped the lock, and dumped the object on Orson's bed. It was the head of a parking meter, sheared from its post. A keen quick ache cut through Orson's lower abdomen. “For God's sake,” he cried in his contemptible squeaky voice, “what's
that?
”

“It's a parking meter.”

“I
know
, I can
see
that. Where the hell did you
get
it?”

“I won't talk to you until you stop being hysterical,” Hub said, and crossed to his desk, where Orson had put his mail. He took the top letter, a special delivery from the Portland draft board, and tore it in half. This time, the pain went through Orson's chest. He put his head in his arms on the desk and whirled and groped in the black-red darkness there. His body was frightening him; his nerves listened for a third psychosomatic slash.

A rap sounded on the door; from the force of the knock, it could only be the police. Hub nimbly dashed to the bed and hid the meter under Orson's pillow. Then he pranced to the door and opened it.

It was Dawson and Kern. “What's up?” Dawson asked, frowning as if the disturbance had been created to annoy him.

“It sounded like Ziegler was being tortured,” Kern said.

Orson pointed at Hub and explained, “He's castrated a parking meter!”

“I did not,” Hub said. “A car went out of control on Mass. Avenue and hit a parked car, which knocked a meter down. A crowd gathered. The head of the meter was lying in the gutter, so I picked it up and carried it away. I was afraid someone might be tempted to steal it.”

“Namely, you,” Orson said.

“Nobody tried to stop you?” Kern asked.

“Of course not. They were all gathered around the driver of the car.”

“Was he hurt?”

“I doubt it. I didn't look.”

“You didn't
look!
” Orson cried. “You're a great Samaritan.”

“I am not prey,” Hub said, “to morbid curiosity.”

“Where were the police?” Kern asked.

“They hadn't arrived yet.”

Dawson asked, “Well, why didn't you wait till a cop arrived and give the meter to him?”

“Why should I give it to an agent of the state? It's no more his than mine.”

“But it
is
,” Orson said.

“It was a plain act of Providence that placed it in my hands,” Hub said, the corners of his lips dented securely. “I haven't decided yet which charity should receive the money it contains.”

Dawson asked, “But isn't that stealing?”

“No more stealing than the state is stealing in making people pay money for space in which to park their own, heavily taxed cars.”

“Hub,” Orson said, getting to his feet, “you give it back or we'll both go to jail.” He saw himself ruined, the scarcely commenced career of his life destroyed, his father the doctor disgraced.

Hub turned serenely. “I'm not afraid. Going to jail under a totalitarian regime is a mark of honor. If you had a conscience, you'd understand.”

Petersen and Carter and Silverstein came into the room. Some boys from the lower floors followed them. The story was hilariously retold. The meter was produced from under the pillow and passed around and shaken to demonstrate the weight of pennies it contained. Hub always carried, as a vestige of the lumberjack country he came from, an intricate all-purpose pocket knife. He began to pry open the little money door. Orson came up behind him and got him around the neck with one arm. Hub's body stiffened. He passed the head of the meter and the open knife to Carter, and then Orson experienced sensations of being lifted, of flying, and of lying on the floor, looking up at Hub's face, which was upside down in his vision. He scrambled to his feet and went for Hub again, rigid with anger and yet, in his heart, happily relaxed. Hub's body was tough and quick and satisfying to grip, though, being a wrestler, he somehow deflected Orson's hands and again lifted and dropped him to the black floor. This time, Orson felt a blow as his coccyx hit the wood; yet even through the pain he perceived, gazing into the heart of this forced marriage, that Hub was being as gentle with him as he could be. He saw that he could try in earnest to kill Hub and be in no danger of succeeding.

He renewed the attack and again enjoyed the tense defensive skill that made Hub's body a kind of warp in space through which his own body, after a blissful instant of contention, was converted to the supine position. He got to his feet and would have gone for Hub the fourth time, but his fellow-freshmen grabbed his arms and held him. He shook them off and without a word returned to his desk and concentrated down into his book, turning the page. The type looked extremely distinct, though it was trembling too hard to be deciphered.

The head of the parking meter stayed in the room for one night. The next day, Hub allowed himself to be persuaded (by the others; Orson had stopped speaking to him) to take it to the Cambridge police headquarters in Central Square. Dawson and Kern tied a ribbon around it, and attached a note: “Please take good care of my baby.” None of them, however, had the nerve to go with Hub to the headquarters, though when he came back he said the chief was delighted to get the meter, and had thanked him, and had agreed to donate the pennies to the local orphans' home.

In another week, the last exams were over. The freshmen all went home. When they returned in the fall, they were different: sophomores. Petersen and Young did not come back at all. Fitch returned, made up the lost credits, and eventually graduated
magna cum
in history and lit. He now teaches in a Quaker prep school. Silverstein is a biochemist, Koshland a lawyer. Dawson writes conservative editorials in Cleveland, Kern is in advertising in New York. Carter, as if obliged to join Young in oblivion, disappeared between his junior and senior years. The dormitory neighbors tended to lose sight of each other, though Hub, who had had his case shifted to the Massachusetts jurisdiction, was now and then pictured in the
Crimson
, and once gave an evening lecture, “Why I Am an Episcopalian Pacifist.” As the litigation progressed, the Bishop of Massachusetts rather grudgingly vouched for him, and by the time of his final hearing the Korean War was over, and the judge who heard the case ruled that Hub's convictions were sincere, as witnessed by his willingness to go to jail. Hub was rather disappointed at the verdict, since he had prepared a three-year reading list to occupy him in his cell and was intending to memorize all four Gospels in the original Greek.

After graduation, he went to Union Theological Seminary, spent several years as the assistant rector of an urban parish in Baltimore, and learned to play the piano well enough to be the background music in a Charles Street cocktail lounge. He insisted on wearing his clerical collar, and as a consequence gave the bar a small celebrity. After a year of overriding
people of less strong convictions, he was allowed to go to South Africa, where he worked and preached among the Bantus until the government requested that he leave the country. From there he went to Nigeria, and when last heard from—on a Christmas card, with French salutations and three black Magi, which arrived, soiled and wrinkled, in South Dakota in February—Hub was in Madagascar, as a “combination missionary, political agitator, and soccer coach.” The description struck Orson as probably facetious, and Hub's childish and confident handwriting, with every letter formed individually, afflicted him with some of the old exasperation. Having vowed to answer the card, he mislaid it, uncharacteristically.

Orson didn't speak to Hub for two days after the parking-meter incident. By then, it seemed rather silly, and they finished out the year sitting side by side at their desks as amiably as two cramped passengers who have endured a long bus trip together. When they parted, they shook hands, and Hub would have walked Orson to the subway kiosk except that he had an appointment in the opposite direction. Orson received two A's and two B's on his final exams; for the remaining three years at Harvard, he roomed uneventfully with two other colorless pre-med students, named Wallace and Neuhauser. After graduation, he married Emily, attended the Yale School of Medicine, and interned in St. Louis. He is now the father of four children and, since the death of his own father, the only doctor in the town. His life has gone much the way he planned it, and he is much the kind of man he intended to be when he was eighteen. He delivers babies, assists the dying, attends the necessary meetings, plays golf, and does good. He is honorable and irritable. If not as much loved as his father, he is perhaps even more respected. In one particular only—a kind of scar he carries without pain and without any clear memory of the amputation—does the man he is differ from the man he assumed he would become. He never prays.

Dentistry and Doubt
 

Burton knew what the dentist would notice first: the clerical collar. People always did. The dentist was standing not quite facing the door, as if it had just occurred to him to turn away. His eyes, gray in a rosy, faintly mustached face, clung to Burton's throat a moment too long for complete courtesy before lifting as he said, “Hello!” Shifting his feet, the dentist thrust out an unexpectedly soft hand.

He noticed next that Burton was an American. In Oxford Burton had acquired the habit of speaking softly, but susurration alone could not alter the proportionate emphasis of vowel over consonant, the slight drag at the end of each sentence, or any of the diphthongal peculiarities that betray Americans to the twittering English. As soon as Burton had returned the greeting, with an apology for being late (he did not blame the British buses, though they were at fault), he fancied he could hear the other man's mind register: “U.S.A.… pioneer piety … RC? Can't be; no black hat … nervous smile … rather heavy tartar on the incisors.”

He motioned Burton to the chair and turned to a sink, where he washed his hands without looking at them. He talked over his shoulder. “What part are you from?”

“Of the States?” Burton enjoyed saying “the States.” It sounded so aggregate, so ominous.

“Yes. Or are you Canadian?”

“No, I'm from Pennsylvania.” Burton had never had such a good view from a dentist's chair. A great bay window gave on a small back yard. Black shapes of birds fluttered and jiggled among the twigs of two or three trees—willows, he guessed. Except for the birds, the trees were naked. A wet-wash sky hung, it seemed, a few feet behind the net of limbs. A brick wall looked the shade of rust, and patches of sky hinted at blue, but there was little color in any of it.