Recapitulation (6 page)

“Oh!” she said, pleased. “It’s a little fort!”

“It’s a
castra
,” he said in scorn. “A Roman camp.”

About seven-thirty his father came in again. “Have your pie now,” Bruce’s mother said. “I’ve kept it warm. Who’s in there?”

He took the slab of pie in his clean, round-nailed hand. “Just Lew McReady and his lady friend, now.”

“His lady friend. One week he’s here with his wife, and the next with his lady friend. Which one, that nurse?”

“Yeah.”

“I wonder if she knows he’s got children seventeen years old?”

“Oh, Lew’s all right. He just likes a change.”

He was trying to kid her, but she would not be kidded. Glancing up under his brows, Bruce saw her unbelieving look. “What a life we lead,” she said. “What friends we have.”

“If you can’t tell the difference between a friend and a customer you don’t know which side your bread’s buttered on.”

“Maybe that’s the trouble. All we have is customers.”

“If we’re starting on that again,” he said, “I’m going back in the dining room and read the
Post.
”

With a push of the shoulder he was gone from the doorway. Bruce’s mother smiled at him bleakly. He made no response—went on smoothing with the back of a paring knife the triangular bits of clay that served as tents. Their wrangling was not his concern. He did not live in that house. He lived at school, where teachers lighted up when he came around and girls thought he had a roguish face. In this country inhabited by hostile barbarians he erected his defenses and mounted guard.

“It’s beginning to look real good,” his mother said after five minutes of clock-ticking, stove-ticking, tap-dripping silence. “You do a nice neat job of things.”

Praise made him businesslike. “I wish I had a little eagle.”

“A what?”

“An eagle. Legion standards had eagles on them. In camp they planted the standard in front of the commander’s tent.”

“I guess … I don’t quite know what a standard is,” she said.

He didn’t bother to answer.

For a while she read a magazine at the other table. Bruce had not heard any noise, either from his father or from the company in the parlor, for some time. The radiator puffed its warm breath against his legs, the dust puppies fluttered in its grill, the tin pipes sighed and popped.

“I’ve got a pin shaped like a bird,” his mother said. “Would that help you? Maybe you could fasten it onto this—standard—some way.”

She bothered him, trying to horn in on this thing she didn’t even understand. On the other hand, maybe he
could
use the pin. He leaned back. “Let’s see it.”

“We’ll have to wait till they go, in there. It’s in my sewing basket.”

“I think they’re gone.”

“I haven’t heard the door.”

“They’re gone. I’d hear them through the register.”

He was already up, skating on stocking feet across the slick linoleum. “Well, I’ll have to find it for you,” she said. “You’d never know where.”

Down the darkish hall, lighted only by a high dim bulb that brought a shine out of the newel post and tangled in the shadows of the coatrack, he stroked with skating strides, made a detour to pass his hand across the cold stream of air at the bullet hole, and slid up to the half-open parlor door.

He was there just a split second before the tap of his mother’s heels startled them. Lew McReady was bent far over his girl on the sofa, whispering in her ear or kissing her, Bruce couldn’t see which. But he could see, in the spread of light that the table lamp shed, the white satin of the lady friend’s blouse, and Lew McReady’s fingers working like a cat’s claws in it.

Then they heard. McReady snapped around and spread his arm in a big elaborate gesture along the sofa back, and yawned as if he had just been aroused from a nap. The girl made a sound like a laugh. Behind Bruce his mother said in a tight voice (had she seen?), “I’m sorry, Bruce needs something for a thing he’s making at school. Excuse me … just a second … he’s making something …”

McReady crossed his legs and made a sour mouth. Bruce knew his son at high school, one of the big stupid ones, a football player who was supposed to star if he ever got eligible. But he couldn’t keep looking at McReady. He had to look at the nurse, who smiled at him. She seemed extraordinarily pretty. He couldn’t understand how she could be so pretty and let old McReady paw her. She had a laughing sort of face, and she was lost and damned.

She said, “What is it you’re making?”

“A
castra
—a Roman camp.”

“For Latin?”

“Yes.”

His mother was rummaging in the sewing basket. He wished she would bring the whole basket so that they could get out of there, and yet he was glad for every extra second she took. McReady, still spread-eagled elegantly over the couch, lighted a cigarette. He had a red face with large pores, and the hair on top of his head was thin, about twelve hairs carefully spread to cover as much skull as possible. When he took the cigarette from his lips and looked at the tip and saw the pink of lipstick there, he put the back of his hand to his mouth and looked across it and
saw Bruce watching him. So he separated himself from the others and interested himself in a long wheezing coughing spell. His eyes glared out of his purpling face with a kind of dull patience, waiting for things to die down. The nurse smiled at Bruce, and loathing her he smiled back. She said, “I took Latin once.
‘Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres.’
 ”

“My Go-guho-guhod!” McReady said through his coughing, and his bulging eyes stared at her glassily. “An unexpec-uhec-uhected talent!”

Bruce’s mother was surprised, too. He saw both her surprise and her pleasure that something from the world of his school meant something to somebody, even though she herself couldn’t share it and even though the one who could was this lady friend of McReady’s.

Maybe she was as mixed about the girl as Bruce was, and he was truly mixed. He could still see that hand in her breast, and the softness under the satin was like the voluptuous softnesses that coiled around him in bed some nights until he lay panting and glaring into the dark, feeling his ninety-pound body as explosive as if his flesh were nitroglycerin packed on his bones. The girl looked at him with clear eyes, she had several wholesome freckles, she laughed with a dimple. Above all, she quoted Caesar (and what if it was only the first line, it was
correct
—most dopes said
omnia
instead of
omnis
) He could hardly have been more shaken if he had run into Miss Van Vliet having a snort of Sunnybrook Farm in his parlor. Actually that would have shaken him less, for Miss Van Vliet would never crawl naked and voluptuous through his dreams, and this one would. Oh, this one would!

He said sullenly and stupidly,
“Quorum unum incolunt Belgae.”

“Elsa,” Lew McReady said, “we are dealing with a pair of real scholars.”

His mocking face was exactly the face of any number of the big and stupid at school. Bruce hated him. He hated his whiskey breath and his red face and the memory of his hand in this lost girl’s breast. He hated the way he called Bruce’s mother by her first name, as if she were some friend of his. He hated everything about McReady, and McReady knew it.

“Ma,” he said passionately, “I got to …”

“Yes,” she said, coming, but hesitating out of politeness for a few more words. “You’d think the world depended on it,” she said to the nurse. “He’s making this
castra
and he needed a bird for the standard. That’s what we came in to get. School is awful important to him,” she said with an abrupt, unexpected laugh. “If I didn’t chase him out to play he’d study all the time.”

The dining-room door slid back and Bruce’s father came in. His eyes were heavy on Bruce’s mother and then on Bruce, but only for a moment. He said heartily, “Well, well, old home week. Everything O.K.?”

“Just getting ready to beat it,” McReady said.

Bruce’s father flicked his towel across his hand. “One for the road?”

“Nah, we got to go.” McReady wadded out his cigarette, looking down with smoke puffing from his mouth and nose and drifting up into his eyes. The elk’s tooth on his watch chain jiggled with his almost noiseless wheezing.

The nurse rose. “I’ll bet he’s bright in school,” she said. (And what did her smiling mean? Did she find his face roguish?)

His mother said, “We hadn’t been here but two or three weeks before they moved him ahead another whole grade. That’s two he’s been moved up. He’s only thirteen. He won’t be quite sixteen when he graduates from high school.”

Bruce could have killed her, talking about him in front of those two, with her proud proprietary air. Their eyes were on him like sash weights—his mother’s full of pride, the nurse’s crinkling with her smile, his father’s suspicious, McReady’s just dull and streaked. Then McReady picked up a book from the end table by the sofa and knocked it on his knuckles. “This something you read in school?”

The book was Bruce’s all right. They must have been looking at it earlier, and seen his name in it. It was by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and it was called
At the Earth’s Core.
It was about a man who invented an underground digger in which he broke through the crust of the earth into the hollow inside, where there was another world all upside down, concave instead of convex, and full of tyrannosauri and pterodactyls and long-tailed people covered with fine black fur. So McReady cracked it open and of
course it opened to the page that Bruce had most consulted, a picture of the tailed furry girl who fell in love with the hero. She didn’t have anything on.

He showed it around. He and Bruce’s father laughed and the nurse smiled and clicked her tongue, and Bruce’s mother smiled, but not as if she felt like smiling. “You better stick to Latin, kiddo,” McReady said, and dropped the book back on the end table.

All of Bruce’s insides were pulled into a knot under his wishbone. He shivered like a dog. If asked, he could have given a very logical explanation of why McReady chose to humiliate a runty thirteen-year-old. The thirteen-year-old was too much smarter than his own dumb son, he had walked in on their necking party, he might talk. On that point he might have saved his worry. About things that happened in his house, Bruce never said anything, not a word, not to anyone, even his mother.

But though he could have explained McReady’s action, he didn’t survive it. It paralyzed him, it reduced him to a speck in front of them all, especially that girl. He left them laughing—
some
of them were laughing—and vanished. When he heard them leaving, he was back before the
castra
in the kitchen.

Almost as soon as the front door closed, he heard his parents, their voices coming plain through the register.

“What went on in here?” his father said. “Something drove him away. He was good for all night.”

“He was good for all night if we’d provided a bed,” said his mother in a strange, squeaky, trembling voice. It burst out of her in a furious loud whisper. “What a thing for him to see in his own parlor! Oh, Bo, I could … if we don’t …”

“What are you talking about? Talk sense. What went on? What do you mean?”

“I mean Lew and that girl. We came in to get something from my sewing basket, we didn’t hear them, so we thought they’d gone. They were so … They didn’t even hear us coming. His hands were all over her. Bruce couldn’t help seeing, because
I
saw, and I was behind him.”

The register sighed with its empty rush of air. Bruce’s father said, “Well, God Almighty, I’ve told you a hundred times to keep him out of here. How do you suppose people like to have kids
peeking around the corners when they’re out partying? Kids that know your own kids, for God’s sake! Do you think he’ll ever be back? Not on your life. Kiss him goodbye, and he was good for twenty or twenty-five dollars every week. Oh, God
damn
, if either of you had the sense of a …”

Bruce’s hands were shaking so that he could hardly stick the decapitated match stem down into the clay before the commander’s tent. When he pressed the pin into the end of the wood he split it, and threw it furiously aside. His mother was saying out of the register’s warm rush, “Will you tell me why—just tell me why—a boy should have to stay out of part of his own house, and hang out in the kitchen like the hired girl, for fear of what he’ll see if he doesn’t? Is that the way a home should be? How can he grow up right, how can he have any self-respect, how can he even know right from wrong, when all he sees at home is people like Lew McReady?”

The sigh and steady rush of air. Bruce’s father said, “This is a place of business, too, remember? This is how we make a living. We stop this, we don’t eat.”

“Sometimes I’d rather not eat,” she said. “So help me God, I’d rather starve.” She stopped, as if she had said more than she intended. Then she said, “I wonder how we’ll feel if he turns out bad. What if we make him into a thief, or worse?”

“Into something like me?” Bruce’s father said in a voice so soft and ugly that Bruce held his breath.

“I’m as guilty as you are,” she said. The register boomed so that with all his straining Bruce heard only a mumble. Then words again “… to pretend it was only bad times, sooner or later you’d get into something else. Do you have any idea how blessed it was, even though we were poor as mice, up there in Saskatchewan? Before you went back into the whiskey business? Bo, I … There’s a limit.”

“Yes,” he said heavily. “I guess there is.”

Bruce sat with his eyes squeezed half shut. His ears repudiated the quarreling voices. He was frozen in a frantic, desolate rejection of everything that threatened him. He hated this new outbreak of an old quarrel, with its threat of breakup. What they had, bad as it was, was better than the caving-in of everything. Did they ever think what might happen to
him?
He would be
pulled out of school, he and his mother would have to move. Everything that he escaped to, as well as everything he escaped, would go if his mother pushed her quarrel too far.

The
castra
with its
vallum
and ditch and rows of tents swam distorted and watery. He ground his teeth in shame and rage. The register was silent. He could imagine them in there, glaring at each other, speechless.