The Collected Stories (29 page)

Kitty's kids have kept an eye on her from their dear tiniest times. They listened to her reasons, but the two eldest, without meaning any disrespect, had made different plans for their lives. Children are all for John Dewey. Lisa and Nina have never believed that Kitty's life really worked. They slapped Antonia for scratching the enameled kitchen table. When Kitty caught them, she said, “Antonia's a baby. Come on now girls, what's a table?”

“What's a
table
?” said Lisa. “What a nut! She wants to know what a table is.”

“Well, Faith,” said Richard, “
he
got the key for me.”

Richard and Philip were holding hands, which made Richard look like a little boy with a daddy. I could cry when I think that I always treat Richard as though he's about forty-seven.

Philip felt remarkable to have extracted that key. “He's quite a kid, Faith, your boy. I wish that my Johnny in Chicago was as great as Richard here. Is Johnny really nine, Kitty?”

“You bet,” she said.

He kept his puzzled face for some anticipated eventuality and folded down to cross-legged comfort, leaning familiarly on Nina's and Lisa's backs. “How are you two fairy queens?” he asked and tugged at their long hair gently. He peeked over their shoulders. They were reading Classic Comics,
Ivanhoe
and
Robin Hood.

“I hate to read,” said Antonia.

“Me too,” hollered Tonto.

“Antonia, I wish
you'd
read more,” said Philip. “Antonia, little beauty. These two little ones. Forest babies. Little sunny brown creatures. I think you would say, Kitty, that they understand their bodies?”

“Oh, yes, I would,” said Kitty, who believed all that.

Although I'm very shy, I tend to persevere, so I said, “You're pretty sunny and brown yourself. How do you make out? What are you? An actor or a French teacher, or something?”

“French …” Kitty smiled. “He could teach Sanskrit if he wanted to. Or Filipino or Cambodian.”

“Cambodge …” Philip said. He said this softly as though the wars in Indochina might be the next subject for discussion.

“French teacher?” asked Anna Kraat, who had been silent, grieved by spring, for one hour and forty minutes. “Judy,” she yelled into the crossed branches of the sycamore. “Judy … French …”

“So?” said Judy. “What's so great? Je m'appelle Judy Solomon. Ma père s'appelle Pierre Solomon. How's that, folks?”

“Mon père,” said Anna. “I told you that before.”

“Who cares?” said Judy, who didn't care.

“She's lost two fathers,” said Anna, “within three years.”

Tonto stood up to scratch his belly and back, which were itchy with wet grass. “Mostly nobody has fathers, Anna,” he said.

“Is that true, little boy?” asked Philip.

“Oh yes,” Tonto said. “My father is in the Equator. They never even had fathers,” pointing to Kitty's daughters. “Judy has two fathers, Peter and Dr. Kraat. Dr. Kraat takes care of you if you're crazy.”

“Maybe I'll be your father.”

Tonto looked at me. I was too rosy. “Oh no,” he said. “Not right now. My father's name is Ricardo. He's a famous explorer. Like an explorer, I mean. He went in the Equator to make contacts. I have two books by him.”

“Do you like him?”

“He's all right.”

“Do you miss him?”

“He's very fresh when he's home.”

“That's enough of that!” I said. It's stupid to let a kid talk badly about his father in front of another man. Men really have too much on their minds without that.

“He's quite a boy,” said Philip. “You and your brother are real boys.” He turned to me. “What do I do? Well, I make a living. Here. Chicago. Wherever I am. I'm not in financial trouble. I figured it all out ten years ago. But what I really am, really …” he said, driven to lying confidence because he thought he ought to try that life anyway. “What I truly am is a comedian.”

“That's a joke, that's the first joke you've said.”

“But that's what I want to be … a comedian.”

“But you're not funny.”

“But I am. You don't know me yet. I want to be one. I've been a teacher and I've worked for the State Department. And now what I want to be's a comedian. People have changed professions before.”

“You can't be a comedian,” said Anna, “unless you're funny.”

He took a good look at Anna. Anna's character is terrible, but she's beautiful. It took her husbands about two years apiece to see how bad she was, but it takes the average passer, answerer, or asker about thirty seconds to see how beautiful she is. You can't warn men. As for Kitty and me, well, we love her because she's beautiful.

“Anna's all right,” said Richard.

“Be quiet,” said Philip. “Say, Anna, are you interested in the French tongue, the French people, French history, or French civilization?”

“No,” said Anna.

“Oh,” he said, disappointed.

“I'm not interested in anything,” said Anna.

“Say!” said Philip, getting absolutely red with excitement, blushing from his earlobes down into his shirt, making me think as I watched the blood descend from his brains that I would like to be the one who was holding his balls very gently, to be exactly present so to speak when all the thumping got there.

Since it was clearly Anna, not I. who would be in that affectionate position, I thought I'd better climb the tree again just for the oxygen or I'd surely suffer the same sudden descent of blood. That's the way nature does things, swishing those quarts and quarts to wherever they're needed for power and action.

Luckily, a banging of pots and pans came out of the playground and a short parade appeared—four or five grownups, a few years behind me in the mommy-and-daddy business, pushing little go-carts with babies in them, a couple of three-year-olds hanging on. They were the main bangers and clangers. The grownups carried three posters. The first showed a prime-living, prime-earning, well-dressed man about thirty-five years old next to a small girl. A question was asked: would you burn a child? In the next poster he placed a burning cigarette on the child's arm. The cool answer was given:
WHEN NECESSARY.
The third poster carried no words, only a napalmed Vietnamese baby, seared, scarred, with twisted hands.

We were very quiet. Kitty put her head down into the dark skirt of her lap. I trembled. I said, Oh! Anna said to Philip, “They'll only turn people against them,” and turned against them herself at once.

“You people will have to go,” said Douglas, our neighborhood cop. He had actually arrived a few minutes earlier to tell Kitty to beg Jerry not to sell grass at this end of the park. But he was ready. “You just have to go,” he said. “No parades in the park.”

Kitty lifted her head and with sweet bossiness said. “Hey Doug, leave them alone. They're O.K.”

Tonto said, “I know that girl, she goes to Greenwich House. You're in the fours,” he told her.

Doug said, “Listen Tonto, there's a war on. You'll be a soldier too someday. I know you're no sissy like some kids around here. You'll fight for your country.”

“Ha ha,” said Mrs. Junius Finn, “that'll be the day. Oh, say, can you see?”

The paraders made a little meeting just outside our discussion. They had to decide what next. The four grownups held the tongues of the children's bells until that decision could be made. They were a group of that kind of person.

“What they're doing is treason,” said Douglas. He had decided to explain and educate. “Signs on sticks aren't allowed. In case of riot. It's for their own protection too. They might turn against each other.” He was afraid that no one would find the real perpetrator if that should happen.

“But Officer, I know these people. They're decent citizens of this community,” said Philip, though he didn't live in the borough, city, or state, let alone vote in it.

Doug looked at him thoroughly. “Mister, I could take you in for interference.” He pulled his cop voice out of his healthy diaphragm.

“Come on …” said Kitty.

“You too,” he said fiercely. “Disperse,” he said, “disperse, disperse.”

Behind his back, the meeting had been neatly dispersed for about three minutes. He ran after them, but they continued on the park's circumference, their posters on the carriage handles, very solemn, making friends and enemies.

“They look pretty legal to me,” I hollered after Doug's blue back.

Tonto fastened himself to my leg and stuck his thumb in his mouth.

Richard shouted, “Ha! Ha!” and punched me. He also began to grind his teeth, which would lead, I knew, to great expense.

“Oh, that's funny, Faith,” he said. He cried, he stamped his feet dangerously, in skates. “I hate you. I hate your stupid friends. Why didn't they just stand up to that stupid cop and say fuck you. They should of just stood up and hit him.” He ripped his skates off, twisting his bad ankle. “Gimme that chalk box, Lisa, just give it to me.”

In a fury of tears and disgust, he wrote on the near blacktop in pink flamingo chalk—in letters fifteen feet high, so the entire Saturday walking world could see—
WOULD YOU BURN A CHILD?
and under it, a little taller, the red reply,
WHEN NECESSARY.

And I think that is exactly when events turned me around, changing my hairdo, my job uptown, my style of living and telling. Then I met women and men in different lines of work, whose minds were made up and directed out of that sexy playground by my children's heartfelt brains, I thought more and more and every day about the world.

Some boys are very tough. They're afraid of nothing. They are the ones who climb a wall and take a bow at the top. Not only are they brave on the roof, but they make a lot of noise in the darkest part of the cellar where even the super hates to go. They also jiggle and hop on the platform between the locked doors of the subway cars.

Four boys are jiggling on the swaying platform. Their names are Alfred, Calvin, Samuel, and Tom. The men and the women in the cars on either side watch them. They don't like them to jiggle or jump but don't want to interfere. Of course some of the men in the cars were once brave boys like these. One of them had ridden the tail of a speeding truck from New York to Rock-away Beach without getting off, without his sore fingers losing hold. Nothing happened to him then or later. He had made a compact with other boys who preferred to watch: Starting at Eighth Avenue and Fifteenth Street, he would get to some specified place, maybe Twenty-third and the river, by hopping the tops of the moving trucks. This was hard to do when one truck turned a corner in the wrong direction and the nearest truck was a couple of feet too high. He made three or four starts before succeeding. He had gotten this idea from a film at school called
The Romance of Logging.
He had finished high school, married a good friend, was in a responsible job and going to night school.

These two men and others looked at the four boys jumping and jiggling on the platform and thought, It must be fun to ride that way, especially now the weather is nice and we're out of the tunnel and way high over the Bronx. Then they thought, These kids do seem to be acting sort of stupid. They
are
little. Then they thought of some of the brave things they had done when they were boys and jiggling didn't seem so risky.

The ladies in the car became very angry when they looked at the four boys. Most of them brought their brows together and hoped the boys could see their extreme disapproval. One of the ladies wanted to get up and say, Be careful you dumb kids, get off that platform or I'll call a cop. But three of the boys were Negroes and the fourth was something else she couldn't tell for sure. She was afraid they'd be fresh and laugh at her and embarrass her. She wasn't afraid they'd hit her, but she was afraid of embarrassment. Another lady thought, Their mothers never know where they are. It wasn't true in this particular case. Their mothers all knew that they had gone to see the missile exhibit on Fourteenth Street.