And Now the News (14 page)

“Billy!” squeaked his mother.

“Miss Horrocks got transferred to another school,” said Chris. “Thought we wrote you about it.”

“Oh, yes. Forgot. Read through the home gossip real fast,” said Billy carelessly.

Miz Binns said, “Mr. Magruder found us a new boarder for her room. A Miss Gerda Stein. We thought she'd be settled in by the time you arrived. But you didn't arrive tomorrow, did you?”

Billy laughed and kissed her. “I sure didn't arrive tomorrow. I'm going to arrive ten minutes ago.”

“Oh-h, you know what I … silly-Billy. Chris, come help me.”

Chris looked at her numbly for a moment, then got to his feet, jostling the table. Billy laughed and said, “I know you, Mom. You don't need help. You've got secrets.” He turned grinning to Tess Milburn. “They're prolly going to talk about you.”

“Oh, Billy, you're awful, just awful,” his mother said pinkly. Mr. Magruder only steadied his water glass as Chris bumped the table, and then began to butter a roll. Tess Milburn gave her embarrassed lip-flicker, and Miz Binns said, “Don't you listen to that wicked boy, Tess,” and shook a fond finger at Billy. She made an abrupt beckoning motion and disappeared into the kitchen.

Chris followed her out. She stood by the door, and when he was in the room, she reached out a practiced hand and stopped the door
from swinging. With the ignorance and acoustics apparently possible only to mothers, she began speaking intensely in a whisper which was totally inaudible to him, pointing and flapping toward the dining room, moving her lips too much and her jaw not at all.

“What?” he asked, not too softly. He was mildly irritated.

She cast her eyes up to heaven and shushed him violently. She took his arm and backed across the kitchen, looking past his shoulder all the while as if she expected everyone in the dining room to be pressing ears to the door. “I
said
what did you have to go and have
her
for dinner tonight of all nights, Billy home and all?”

“We had a date. Besides, I didn't know Billy was—”

“It's very inconsiderate,” she complained.

“Well, what do you want me to do?”

“It ought to be sort of a family thing, your brother home from school.”

The irritation rose to as high as it ever got with Chris—not very high. “Then let's get rid of Mr. Magruder, too.”

“That's different and you know it.”

He did know it. Mr. Magruder had his own bubble of a life within the lives they all led and he stayed unbreakably within it. He communed with himself, his newspaper and his habits, which were so regular that, once established, they required no imagination or conjecture from anyone else in the place. He could talk: but he needn't. They hardly saw him, which led them all to believe that he didn't see them much either.

“Well, all right,” said Chris. “I'll just explain it to her and take her home and come right back.”

“You can't, you can't,” she fretted. It was what she wanted him to do, but that disqualified it; she wouldn't have that on her conscience.

He shrugged and said, “Then what did you call me out here for?” The question was not rude, but a genuine request for information.

“It's a shame, that's all,” she answered. She squeezed her hands together and looked at them unhappily. There seemed to be nothing else for him to say and certainly nothing he could do. He turned to go back to the dining room, but she said, “Why is she here so much, Chris?”

“I don't know, Mom. She—” He made a vague gesture. He really didn't know. Tess dropped around occasionally—hadn't it been to visit Miz Binns, anyway at first? And since she was around so much, he talked to her.

Talked about what? Again, he couldn't recall clearly. Anything. Whatever was on his mind that could be talked about. His work—some of it; most of it couldn't be expressed in words; it was conceptual, or technical, or mathematical, or all three. His feelings—some of them; most of them couldn't be expressed in words, either; they were too conceptual, or unidentified, or occluded, or all three.

“We go to the movies sometimes,” he said at length. And, “It's nice sometimes to have somebody to talk to.” He said that, not “talk with.” He would have wondered why, but his mother interrupted his thinking the way people always did.

“I know this is no time to discuss it,” she said in that urgent whisper, “but what's she want? I mean are you, do you, are you planning to, you know.” She finished it like a statement, not a question.

“I—never thought about it.”

“You better. The way she acts.”

“All right. But like you say, Mom, it's not the time to think about it now.” The limited irritation was back again. He turned to the door which exploded inward and struck him a stinging blow on the right pelvis.

“Now what's going on in th' black hole?” Billy roared. “You engineers precessin' my gyros again?”

“Tell Mom what you want to eat,” said Chris painfully. He walked stiffly back to the table and sat down. He rubbed his hip covertly. He didn't look at Tess Milburn. He couldn't.

He picked at his food. She picked at her food. Mr. Magruder, who drank tea with his meals, drank his tea. And all the while, voices came from the kitchen. Chris was acutely embarrassed, but at the same time he was wondering about the filtering effect of the swinging door, because it passed Miz Binns' high frequencies—the sibilants and the hiss of her stage whisper—and Billy's lows, the woofs, the chest tones—all without transmitting a single intelligible syllable. But when Billy laughed, he understood it. He had heard that
laugh before.

Billy bumped the door and surged through without touching it again as it swung open and back. His mother caught it and held it open on her side and bleated, “No, Billy, no!” and Billy laughed again and said, “Don't you worry your pretty little head about it, Mom. Billy fix.” Miz Binns stood in the doorway wringing her hands, then sighed and went back in to get Billy's dinner.

Billy plumped down at the table and passed Chris a wide wink. “Well, Tess,” he said expansively. “So long since I've seen you. Grown a bit, filled out a bit. Hell around a bit too, I bet.” He ignored the silent drop of her jaw and the quick frightened smile that followed it. “You've been walled up in this haymow too long, girl. A little hurry an' noise will do you a world of good. How about you and me, we couple up right after chow and buzz this burg?”

Stricken, she looked at Chris.

Chris said, “Look, Billy, we—”

Just then, Miz Binns came in with a plate heaped and steaming. Serving dishes on the table not good enough for little Billee, Chris thought bitterly. Cold by now.

“Mom, what do you know! Tess and I got a date for right away!” Billy announced.

“Oh, now,
Billy!
” said Miz Binns in that he's-naughty-but-he's-so-sweet tone. “Your very first night and we haven't had a chance to chat even, and you have so little time, and—”

“Mom,” the cadet said cheerfully, “you and I, we have two solid weeks in the daytime to blow tubes and scavenge tanks to our hearts' delight, in the daytime when all good slaves are out digging gold. I hate to deprive you tonight, but gosh, Mom, don't be stingy. Spread it around. It's okay, isn't it Chris?”

It's okay, isn't it, Chris?
All his life, that special laugh and then this question. For a while, when he was nine and Billy was seven, he used to burst into tears when he heard that question. For a while before that and afterward, he had responded with a resounding “No!” And a little later on, he had reasoned, argued, or silently shaken his head. Nothing ever made any difference. Billy would watch him and smile happily through his countermeasure, no matter what, and when
he was finished would go right ahead and take, or do, or not do whatever the thing was that he wanted and Chris didn't. He had outweighed Chris since he was four years old, outtalked him always.

But this one time, this one lousy time, he wasn't going to get away with it.

Chris looked at his mother's anxious face, at Tess with a spot of pink on each of her sallow cheeks, a shine in her eyes that he had never been able to put there.
No, by God, no
.

He filled his lungs to say it out loud when the impossible happened. A hard hand closed on his left wrist, under the table. A voice spoke in his left ear: “Let him!”—soft but commanding. He looked down at the hand, but it had already gone. He looked at the face to his left, and Mr. Magruder impassively poured more tea. No one else seemed to have seen or heard.

It was Mr. Magruder, all right, with some knack of directional, perfectly controlled speech, two syllables formed and aimed from the side of the thin dry lips for Chris and Chris alone. It was unusual for the old man to say anything at all beyond “Pass the salt.” It was unprecedented for him to enter a conversation, advise.

Chris looked at Tess's troubled, almost beseeching face, the pink, the shine. “You want to go?”

She looked at Billy and back to him, and then dropped her eyes. Chris felt rather than saw the slightest movement of Mr. Magruder's foot against the floor. He did not touch Chris, but the movement was another syllable of command; there was no question about that. “Go ahead if you want to.”

Mr. Magruder nodded, or simply dropped his chin to watch his hands fold a napkin. Miz Binns said, “I still think you're
awful
, Billy,” and did not quite add, “dear boy.” Tess Milburn giggled.

Billy began to eat heartily, and what might have been a very strained silence indeed was canceled before it could become a problem.

The doorbell rang.

“I'll get it,” Chris said relievedly. He got up and turned to the open, screened doorway.

It must be a trick of the light
was the thought that flashed through
his mind, but there wasn't time to pursue it. “Yes?”

“I'm Gerda Stein. Mr. Magruder—”

“Oh, it's Miss Stein,” his mother called. “Come in, do come in.”

It had been no trick of the light. Chris opened the screen door and stood back, speechless. He had known there were human beings like this. TV and the movies were full of them. They smiled from magazines and book-jackets, crooned and called and sold coffee, crockery and cosmetics on the car radio. All these are the proper and established places for such creatures; they don't, they just
don't
stand breathtakingly under the porch light on warm summer evenings and then walk into your own familiar house.

Someone nudged him out of his daze—Miz Binns. “Dinner's on, I can warm up something, and your room's all, my son from the Space Academy just, no, this is Chris. Billy's the—”

“How do you do, Chris,” said Gerda Stein.

“Uh,” said Chris. He followed the girl and his mother through the foyer into the dining room.

“You already know Mr. Magruder and
this
, this is Billy.”

Billy shot up out of his chair like one of the Base rockets, and again Mr. Magruder steadied his water glass.

“Well-l-l,” Billy breathed, a sound like the last descending tones of a mighty alert siren.

Gerda Stein smiled at him and Chris could see him blink. “No,” she said in answer to something Miz Binns was saying, “I've had dinner.”

Chris came around the table and found his eyes on Tess Milburn's face. It was wistful. “And this is Tess Milburn,” he blurted. In that instant of empathy for the ignored girl, so shadowed by the great light cast by the newcomer, he fairly shouted. He looked like a fool and knew it.

Gerda Stein smiled warmly and took Tess's hand. Surprisingly, Tess smiled, too, and went on smiling after she had been released—a real smile, for once, substitute for nothing.

Chris felt embarrassed to see it—a strange embarrassment, starting with the consciousness of how hot his ears were, then going through a lightning intuitive chain to the insight that he was embarrassed
when he made someone happy, and that it had been worth the effort of thought because it was so rare, and then the conclusion that anyone who made people happy so rarely couldn't be worth much. Which led him, of course, to look at his younger brother.

Billy had stopped chewing when Gerda Stein came in and he had not swallowed. He seemed for these long seconds as preoccupied as Chris was most of the time, and the slight flick of his blue eyes from Tess's face to Gerda Stein's indicated the source of his deep perplexity. And suddenly Chris saw it, as if it had been imprinted across the golden tan of the cadet's bland forehead in moving lights.

If Billy now went on with his idea of a date with Tess, this vision would be left here with Chris and Mom and Mr. Magruder and—very soon now, Mr. Magruder and Mom would retire, and …

On the other hand, Billy shared with his mother a deep reluctance to face anyone with “Beat it, I don't need you around,” or any variation thereof.

Chris sat down slowly before his cold dinner and waited. He felt some things which taught him a great deal. One of them was that it was good to be involved with Billy in a situation where Billy couldn't win. If Billy backed out of the date, Chris would go; if not, not; and by this Chris learned that the date didn't really matter to him. This was a great relief to him. His mother's questions had disturbed him more than he had known until he felt the relief.

Billy sighed through his nostrils and finally swallowed his mouthful. “I'm backin' off my gantry, girl,” he said to Tess, “so start the count-down.”

Chris caught a quick puzzled flicker of expression on Gerda Stein's face. Miz Binns said, “He always talks like that. He means he and Tess are going out. Space talk.” Chris thought she was going to run and hug him, but with obvious effort she controlled her feelings and said to Miss Stein, “Well, come settle in the parlor until I can take you up to your room.”