The Stranger at the Palazzo D'Oro (19 page)

In the tent my mind was racing. I could not think. I picked up
Weird Tales
but let it drop, and turned off my flashlight. I lay in the dark and reflected that what I had just seen was stranger than anything I had ever read. And that bold and unexpected oddness beckoned to me. I wanted her to come back and do it again; I wanted a better look. I had had no prior notice of it, and only a little glimpse when it happened, yet the sight filled me with thirst and eagerness: I wanted more.

Entering the house that night, I squinted in the glare of the kitchen, my eyes dazzled and half blinded after the darkness outside, and saw in a terrifying blur my mother and father watching me from across the room. My father had just finished shaving and he was fingering his cutthroat razor, easing the blade into the tortoiseshell handle, folding it like a jackknife. Without a word, my mother turned her back on me, saying something sweetly to Louie, who was at the supper table.

My father's eyes were dark and unreadable, he watched me closely, and I was blinking and wiping my eyes as I grew accustomed to the light. The better I saw, the more frightened I felt.

“I've got a bone to pick with you.”

Of all my father's repeated phrases, that one held the severest warning.

I braced myself, narrowing my eyes at the brightness.

“What've you been doing?”

“Nothing.”

“Shame on you.”

My mother's face was hidden in her shoulder as she held Louie; but I also had the feeling she was fearful of my father's anger, and her timidity made me afraid.

“You should be horsewhipped,” my father said, “within an inch of your life.”

Now I was shaking, nervous, afraid, clutching my dented army flashlight.

“Your body is a temple. You've soiled it with impurity, you've blackened it. God is everywhere, God sees everything—you think that's funny?”

My eyes still hurt from the glare of the kitchen lights, and as I strained to see, it might have seemed that I was smiling. But I was not smiling, I was terrified. I shook my head and knew I looked pitiful, and now I saw that my father had put his razor down but was holding his razor strop in his hand. It lay folded on his palm, the metal clip at one end, the narrow stitched handle at the other.

“You're filthy,” he said, and speaking these words his face was like that of an angry yellow-faced brute in a horror comic.

Seeing what was coming, I turned away as he lifted the strop and struck at me with it, using it like a whip, slashing my shins, raising a red welt on the flesh of my skinny legs. The end of the leather strop gripped my knee and tripped me, and as I fell my father lashed at my legs, cut at me again, while my mother screamed.

I was too timid, too guilty, too afraid to cry out: I deserved my thrashing for my dirty mind.

“Get out!”

My mother was saying no, no, but I hurried outside and didn't stop until I got into my pup tent, my heart pounding, and thinking: It doesn't hurt that much now, at least it's over, he won't hit me again. I lay there not caring that I had been thrashed, but feeling that I had been punished fairly; and not hating my father but fearing him and feeling sorry for him, for he was angry that I had disappointed him. He did not know what to do.

I was so sorry—sorriest because I knew I would never change. I lost Evelyn Frisch. My mother must have said something to her parents. I was alone. That was how I wanted it. I was a sinner, and would stay that way because I wasn't sorry. I didn't care. I only knew that my life would be harder because of my sins and my secrets, but at least I was on my own and in the world.

M
OST DAYS
in Medford nothing happened—or the same thing happened. But the day Harry Truman's train made a whistle stop at Medford Station, everything happened, and a lot of it to me. I told my mother I was going to see him with my friend John Burkell. She said, “Mind your p's and q's,” helplessly, because she couldn't prevent me from going, even though, as she sometimes said, Burkell was a bad influence. Seeing Truman was my excuse to stay out late in the early dark of October. But the event was bigger than she was. The president's visit made me free.

In Miss Bunker's class that afternoon, I passed Burkell a note saying
Meet me outside the gate.
As he tried to sneak a note back to me, Miss Bunker said, ‘And I'll take that.” She picked it open and read it with no expression, which meant she was angry. “Mr. Burkell, you will stay after school.”

He didn't look like a bad influence. He was fattish and pale, with spiky sweaty hair cut in a whiffle. He tried to shock the other kids with morbid songs, but he was teased for seeming weak, for looking uncertain, pink-eyed like a rabbit, his lids crusted (“It's conjunctivitis”) from his rubbing them. He was always chewing his necktie, or else poking wax out of his ears with the wire of a twisted paper clip. “Stop doing that, Mr. Burkell.”

Burkell's mother saw me as John's protector—the Burkells were new to Medford, where I was born. His pretty mother always hugged me, crushing the cones of her bra against my ears, when I went to their house. This pressure and the aroma of cigarette smoke and perfume made my head ring. “You're getting so big, Andy!”

I guessed his note was saying yes to seeing Truman, and so I hung around the schoolyard after the bell. There was so much shouting and pushing—everyone high-spirited because of the president's visit—I did not see Burkell leave. His house was on the way to the trolley line, so I stopped there. I liked seeing his mother, I liked her smell and the way she hugged me.

I thought I was early because he wasn't at home, then I thought I might be late because he wasn't at home. Not knowing whether to stay or go, I just stood there looking at a Hood milk truck parked in front of a Nash Rambler with whitewalls. I was half hiding against Burkell's big hedge. The truck confused me. Milk trucks were never parked in a street but always on the move, stopping and starting, the engine running, the empties clinking, the side doors open for the milkman to jump out with his rack of bottles. This truck was locked and silent.

Creeping past Burkell's hedge, I went up the stoop to the piazza and looked into the front window. Staring at the slanted sunlight and furniture inside, I sensed footsteps—not heard them but felt the tramping movement through my own foot soles on the wooden piazza planks, maybe Burkell's big feet. He seldom heard his own doorbell because of his habit of poking paper clips into his ears.

Feeling conspicuous on the piazza, I drifted down the stairs and wandered around the house, past the side entrance and his rusted ash barrels, to the rear. The back door was open a crack, so I went in, calling out “Burkey!,” and stepped hard on the stairs as a way of announcing myself.

Then I threw a door open and saw a big naked man smoking a cigarette in the middle of the room. He had a pale body and a long loose cock and was standing in his white stockings in Burkell's bedroom.

“What are you looking at, kid?”

I had never seen Burkell's father before and this man's nakedness made him seem fierce. A pain shot through my belly and I almost peed. I backed away, struggling to speak.

“You don't see nothing, right?”

The words I tried to utter gagged my mouth. I could not look at him. I saw Burkell's cigar boxes, an orange crate, a peach basket—holders for Burkell's yo-yos and horror comics.

“Run along, kid.”

But the white clammy skin with so much black hair on it terrified me. I was too nervous to move fast.

“You heard me. If your old man did his homework I wouldn't be here,” the man said. “Beat it.”

As soon as I got out of the room, away from his naked body, I moved fast, feeling guilty and afraid, as though I had done something seriously wrong. The door at the side of the house swung open as I passed it and Mrs. Burkell stopped me. She was breathless, a cigarette in one hand and buttoning her flowered housecoat with the other. My mouth was open, trying to say sorry.

“Johnny's down the station seeing the president, Andy,” she said, not listening to me. I was amazed that she wasn't angry, and relieved that she was so nice. She didn't hug me, though. She took a pack of Herbert Tareytons out of her housecoat pocket. A dollar bill was tucked inside the cellophane. She pressed the dollar into my hand with damp insistent fingers and held on to me. “But if you tell anyone where you got it, I'll have to call your mother. Want a Hoodsie?”

It was a sundae cup, the plump one, with a wooden spoon in a slip of paper stuck to the underside. I backed away from Mrs. Burkell but she was still explaining.

“I've been ironing,” she said, smoothing her housecoat. Her body gave off a sharp cat smell of effort that made me think she was telling the truth. ‘Aren't you going down to see Harry Truman?”

“Yup.”

“Better hurry,” she said. “Johnny's probably already at the station.” She looked panicky and pushed me gently and said, “You're going to be late, Andy.”

When she said that, which I understood as clearly as the man's
Beat it,
I hurried off and tried not to think about what I had seen. But the cold wet Hoodsie cup in my hand reminded me of the naked man, so I stopped at the corner of Salem Street and peeled the lid off. Spooning the ice cream into my mouth so fast made my teeth ache from the coldness, and when I finished it I had an icicle in my stomach that reminded me even more of the man. I wished I had thrown it away.

I walked to the Fellsway and waited for an electric car, staring at the bed of stones and the splintered wooden ties under the shiny, fastened rails. Soon those iron rails rang and a tall tottering orange-paneled trolley car appeared at the Fulton Street curve, its upright rods shaking against the overhead wires.

“Shitface,” I heard when I dropped my dime and pushed through the turnstile.

Small worry-eyed Burkell was sitting on a smooth wooden-slatted bench at the front, the end of his necktie in his teeth. He looked glad to see me, but still he seemed lost, a Drake's cake wrapper in his hand, chewing his tie, his jacket on his lap, rubber bands on his upper arms to shorten his shirtsleeves. He took his tie out of his mouth and began biting his fingernails.

“Andy's got a mustache,” he said.

His accusation made me afraid. I rubbed my arm across my mouth and tried not to look guilty.

“Bunker kept me after school,” he said, before I could think of a reply to his accusation. “She sees my note and goes nuts.”

“What did it say?”

“
Harry stepped in the oomlah.
She says it's disrespectful. ‘How would you feel if the president saw it?' I goes, ‘How would he see it?' She goes, ‘I should show your mother.' I goes, ‘She's at work.' She goes, ‘Impudence.'” He looked pleased with himself, gnawing his fingernail, his fingers sucked white from his nailbiting. I had no idea what
Harry stepped in the oomlah
meant, but I liked Burkell's odd words. “You got chocolate gobs in the corners of your mouth.”

I licked them, tasting the sweetness that reminded me again of my fright at his house.

He said, “Let's get off at the car barns and walk.”

I looked down at his weak bony knees showing where the texture of his corduroys was worn flat. His tie was a chewed rag. Above his head was a
Learn to Draw at Home
sign. The hanging leather hand-straps swung together as the trolley car made the curve at the car barns.

The folding rear doors of the trolley opened and we got off, stumbling at the long drop from the running board to the gravelly trackside.

Walking up Riverside Avenue to Medford Square, Burkell began chanting slowly, “Who'll dig the grave for the last man that dies?”

Other people on the sidewalk gathered around us and bore us along in their excitement, heading for the station.

“The worms crawl in, the worms crawl out, the worms play pinochle upon your snout.”

Burkell winced as he recited in an impish way, to get their attention and defy them, as though expecting someone to say, Quit it, kid. But no one took any notice of his teasing, and Burkell went back to chewing his tie.

The great crowd of people, mostly men, was outside the station, all over the tracks and in the street, for the train had already stopped and someone on it was giving a speech. We were small enough to make our way through pant legs to the front of the crowd. A group of men, too many to fit, were standing on the back platform of the last car, one of them shouting, an angry-faced man in a felt hat, shaking his fist. It was the president.

“Because of these phony Republicans!” he cried out, looking as though he meant it and was very angry.

He was a live version of the pale black-and-white pictures I had seen, so pink and physical I was too fascinated watching him to listen to what he was saying. He was smaller than I had imagined and his anger made him seem fearsome.

Burkell said, “Hey, there's my old man.”

His saying that startled me, and I didn't want to see the man, but Burkell called out to him and I glanced up and saw an older rounder man than the one I expected. He wore a snap-brim hat and looked like a fatter version of Burkell, the same plump cheeks, turned from smiling at the president to smiling at us. In a striped vest and shiny suit and smoking a cigarette, he looked overdressed and comical and had the same slack smile as his son. Under his arm was a loaf-sized brown paper bag.

“Johnny,” the man said. He was pleased to see him. “Harry's giving them hell!”

But at that moment there was applause and Truman waved and the whistle blew. The train pulled away, leaving a space of light and silence, a void where the president had been. We were still standing on the railway track, but awkwardly now, for the crowd had thinned. I thought; The men are here, the women at home, smoking.

“Who's your friend?”