Aberration of Starlight

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His mother was going to go out on a date, a real date, just like Helen Copan did with the lifeguard, but she wasn’t going out with any lifeguard, but with Tom Thebus. And they were going to go to the WigWam, just like she had said they might and like he had talked about a few days ago with Tom. His grandfather didn’t seem to like the idea, so maybe Tom was right when he said that he didn’t really like him. That was something that Billy couldn’t figure out at all. But he knew that his grandfather and mother had been arguing, his grandfather’s face got long and sour and he spent a lot of time sitting on the church steps and taking walks all by himself, sometimes as far as the Bluebird, and that was really far away. For some reason, Mrs. Schmidt talked to his grandfather a lot. She smiled like you would at a baby. Today his grandfather really had a sour puss.

His mother had gone into Hackettstown that afternoon with Dave Warren, who had come up to the farm to get some eggs for the Warren House just like he did every Saturday, and he was going to come back for supper like every Saturday too. When she came back she had a bag with her from the five-and-ten and two other bags. The five-and-ten bag had presents for him, a big white metal China Clipper, white as snow, really swell. And also his own bottle of rose oil just like Tom’s. She was smiling and happier than he ever remembered seeing her, except when he got that Certificate for Clear Speech from P.S. 170 in June. And maybe a few other times, but anyway, she was happy, that was for sure. In one of the other bags she had a pair of white summer shoes, all open on the top and with high heels and the other bag she didn’t open. She pulled off her canvas shoes and put the white shoes on and pulled her skirt around her legs so she could look down and see how the shoes looked. She almost did a kind of dance right there in her room, turning her feet different ways so she could see how the shoes looked when she moved. When she asked him how the shoes looked on her he told her that they were beautiful. They were beautiful. His mother had really small feet and these shoes made them look even smaller, maybe because they were all open on the top with only little strips of leather crisscrossed and a strap around the ankle and the heels were thin and high. It was a cinch that she would be able to dance better in them than in any of the other dress-up shoes she brought from the city, they were O.K., but they didn’t look like these and most of them, maybe all of them, were black anyway.

The idea of his mother and Tom going dancing at the WigWam fascinated him. He had imagined the WigWam a hundred times, but he only knew what it was like from the outside and he had only seen it at night once. But he remembered it perfectly. There was a sign in neon lights in the shape of a wigwam and written over it in script it said, also in neon lights, the wigwam. Under the wigwam sign and a little to the right of it, and also in neon lights, a smaller sign said, dance dine cocktails. The night he passed by, one time that they’d gone last summer with Eleanor and Dave to the amusement park at Lake Hopatcong, there were cars outside, a lot of cars, and the signs were really bright in the dark, and he could see men and women going in and coming out, laughing, and he saw one man kiss a woman he was walking with. From inside came music and you could tell it was a real band from the way it sounded. He’d heard a band at the Warren House but this was a different kind of band, you could hear that they really could play real songs, like “Maria Elena.” With trumpets. It wasn’t a dutchie polka band. He didn’t know what it was like inside but he thought that it was probably really big with tables behind a little low wall and a big shiny dance floor and the band had fancy suits on, the kind with the black bow ties. If people weren’t on the dance floor dancing they would be sitting at the tables, laughing and chatting and smoking cigarettes and drinking terrific cocktails. Really fancy drinks in all kinds of colors in those glasses with stems on them. The bartender was wearing a short white coat and shook these drinks up in a solid silver shaker while the band played. Once in a while when two people could really dance great, everybody else stopped and got off the dance floor and watched them. The bandleader probably had a moustache and a skinny stick that he waved to tell the band how to play all the songs. And also he knew that the place was all white, floor, walls, and tables. The works. He would go there every night in the summer when he got to be a man.

As soon as his mother got back from Hackettstown, his grandfather seemed to get more and more mad. Really sore. He came right into his mother’s room without even knocking when she was showing Billy the new shoes and told him to go out and play but he went into the bathroom just down the hall and tried to hear what they were saying. But his grandfather closed the door and the bathroom door was also closed, so he couldn’t hear much, just once he heard his grandfather say “a patch on a man’s ass,” and he also heard his mother say “some life,” and something like “cook and bottle washer,” and he knew that had something to do with his grandmother being sick in bed so long. He left the bathroom and ran down the stairs and out, then crossed the road and went into the churchyard where it was shady and cool under the big elm trees. He figured that his grandfather must be mad because he thought that maybe Tom Thebus and his mother were doing something bad like his father and Margie did. The bad had something to do, he was sure, with what was fucking. But his mother would never do that. He felt funny and sad even thinking about that word when he thought of his mother. And he didn’t think that Tom would ever do that either. It was different with his father and Margie, if that was the bad that they did, because his father was married to his mother when he was going out to see Margie and dancing with her or going out on dates or visiting, and Margie was a tramp which was the same as a hooer and Kickie told him a year ago that all hooers did was fucking. If you were married to a person, whether you were a man or a woman, and you danced and visited and went on dates with another person who was not married or who was married to some other person themselves then that was doing something bad, that was probably about fucking. But if you weren’t married, like his mother and Tom, what was bad? They were going on a date, like Helen Copan. Nobody thought that she was being bad when she went out with the lifeguard. Everybody thought it was cute. Mrs. Sapurty even said, “Aren’t they darling?” on the porch one night when they were going to the movies. So what was his grandfather so mad about? Tom was a great guy. It was easy to see why his mother wanted to go dancing with him. Billy wanted her to go and he’d tell his grandfather that if he asked him. His mother was pretty and should go dancing with a guy like Tom Thebus, who liked everybody and was always making everybody laugh. And maybe Tom would come and see them in the city and take him to a football game. And maybe sometime he would really be his father. Maybe his mother would get married to him. Once you were married you couldn’t do anything bad with the person you were married to, priests married you, you wouldn’t have to worry about fucking. If his mother and Tom got married his grandfather would have to stop.

He moped around the rest of the afternoon, only it wasn’t really moping, even though he wished that he’d gone to Budd Lake with Mr. Copan and the girls. He was just waiting for the time to pass because he wanted to see his mother and Tom get all ready and leave in Tom’s car. He fooled around on the lawn with a croquet mallet and Mr. Sapurty came out and asked him if he’d like to have a game and he said sure. It was always embarrassing to play with Mr. Sapurty because he could usually beat him and Mr. Sapurty would get annoyed and chew away at his cigar and say something about the wrong glasses he had and how he meant to get them changed. But he was just a lousy player. It was really funny to see him play his grandfather or Tom, they could beat him without paying attention to the game at all.

As usual, he beat Mr. Sapurty and he was going to play him another game when Tom came out on the lawn and sat down under the umbrella trees near the vegetable garden. Mr. Sapurty said that he had to clean out the inside of his car, but Billy knew that he didn’t want to play him and get beat with Tom watching. Billy went over to Tom and they sat together and Billy played with his China Clipper for a while but Tom didn’t say a word about the WigWam and he thought maybe that his grandfather had told his mother that he wouldn’t allow her to go. But just as he was thinking that maybe that was exactly what had happened, Tom said that he hoped it would be a cool night because he had to wear a tie. He said “a goldurned dadblasted tee-eye,” to make Billy laugh. Well, that was that. Tom would never wear a tie unless he was going somewhere special.

At suppertime everything went along as usual. Tom sat at their table and talked about Germany and how things looked bad and the Depression, and his grandfather looked at him with a kind of disgusted look. Billy knew that Mrs. Schmidt was a German and so were the Stellkamps and he figured that when Tom talked about Germany and that things were bad there he was probably doing what his grandfather called mortifying everybody. His mother smiled at Tom when his grandfather wasn’t looking and Mrs. Schmidt at the table with the Copans and Dave Warren was smiling every once in a while at his grandfather like she was sorry for him. Once she said something to Mrs. Copan, who was the skinniest woman Billy had ever seen, his mother said she was a bag of rags tied in the middle, and after she said it Mrs. Schmidt shook her head like she was very sad and smiled over at his grandfather again.

Then Billy just sat on the porch with the Copan girls and Dave Warren. His mother and Tom were getting ready and just about the time it was getting shadowy over in the churchyard where it always got dark first, Tom came out on the porch smoking his pipe and dressed in his blue coat, white pants, a white shirt and blue tie, and his white shoes. He sat on the porch railing and talked to Billy about the Dodgers and Giants and looked at his wrist watch once. The Copan girls were giggling and whispering together and Dave Warren sat smoking a cigarette and said just one thing, that it looked like it was going to be a nice evening. Then his mother came out. She had on a white dress with a white belt and a string of white beads that matched her earrings and her new white shoes. She was wearing silk stockings. She was carrying a white crocheted shawl and she looked really swell with rouge and lipstick on, really pretty and young, better than Helen Copan. She and Tom smiled at each other and he looked at his watch again and said that it was time they got going because it was kind of a drive. Dave Warren got up from the steps to let them pass and the Copan girls told his mother that she looked just beautiful. His grandfather came out on the porch and stood there with his hands in his back pockets and Billy kissed his mother and then looked over at his grandfather but his face was stiff and angry, even though Billy thought he said to his mother to have a nice time. He didn’t say anything to Tom. Tom and his mother walked down the path to the gate that opened on the road and everybody on the porch stood at the railing and watched them and Billy wished and wished that his mother would take Tom’s arm like Helen Copan but he knew that she wouldn’t in front of everybody, she looked, even, like she was blushing. When they got in Tom’s car and started off, everybody waved except his grandfather, who just stood at the railing with his arms folded the way he did when he made a good shot in croquet and he was waiting to see what the other player would do. Tom backed the car out of the spot he always parked it in next to the church and they started down the road the way you went to the Hi-Top and the Copan girls and Billy waved and his mother put her hand out the window and waved back and Tom blew the horn twice, just two short little beeps.

Billy went inside for a while and looked at the Stellkamps’ Sears, Roebuck catalogue, skipping all the pages with ladies in their underwear because Eleanor was still there pulling off the tablecloths and polishing. The pictures made him feel very strange and sometimes a little dizzy and hot. He couldn’t figure out why a lady would let somebody take a picture of her in her underwear. Maybe they were hooers. The pictures fascinated him because he learned the names of all those things that ladies wear under their dresses. There were a lot of pretty ladies wearing corsets but they didn’t look like his grandmother’s. He put the Sears catalogue back and went out on the porch again. His grandfather was sitting next to Mrs. Schmidt, both of them rocking back and forth. He was smoking. He told Billy that he had been looking for him to tell him that he was going to take a walk and that he expected Billy to take a bath and get to bed at the usual time. “Nothing special about tonight, young man.” Then he went in and came out a few minutes later with a sweater, a flashlight, and a bottle of citronella, and he and Mrs. Schmidt left together. It was funny that while his grandfather was gone, Mrs. Schmidt told him what a wonderful man his grandfather was, that he was a lucky boy to have such a man to take care of him and his mother, and that they should always be grateful to such a prince. Billy said he was glad she liked his grandfather and she got red and said that that was not exactly what she meant.

He didn’t take a bath but just ran water in the tub to get it wet. He washed his hands and arms and face and skipped brushing his teeth. It was a strange but very good feeling that his mother wasn’t there to make sure he took a bath and everything else. Maybe if she got married to Tom she wouldn’t pay so much attention to him. When he turned the light out in the bathroom he looked out the window that faced the farm buildings and the fields beyond and saw that it was a clear night but that there was no moon that he could see. The dark was full of fireflies. He went into the room he shared with his grandfather, said his “Now I lay me,” and got into bed. Right now, he guessed, his mother and Tom were at the WigWam, probably having a fancy drink in one of those glasses with the long stems, a Horse’s Neck or a Manhattan. He knew a Manhattan was a really fancy kind of drink because when they first came up this summer they had to wait for Louis to pick them up at Netcong and they went into a little café to get out of the sun and cool off and his mother said she felt like a Manhattan. He remembered his grandfather said, “These hicks will give you a Brooklyn, damn all they know about it,” and his mother laughed and had a Tom Collins instead and gave him the cherry.

The WigWam must have white everything. He figured that’s probably why his mother wore white and Tom had on white pants and stuff. Sure. He was absolutely delighted thinking of them dancing and talking and Tom smiling as he lit his pipe. Maybe they’d do this again. Maybe Tom would come to see his mother in the city all the time and take her out to the movies and to night clubs over in New York, maybe even to Coney Island and they could go to Feltman’s. That would be great, the waiters sang songs and everything. He fell asleep thinking of his mother and Tom chatting over a little bite of something, little sandwiches cut like diamonds. They had that liquor you put in a pail.

His grandfather was shouting at him from the roof to come up! come up! and he woke up and saw his grandfather in the dark, leaning out the window, shining a flashlight down and across the road. He was yelling and really mad, and he kept yelling about the time! the time! and what did he think his daughter was, and telling somebody to come up, goddammit to hell! Billy suddenly felt sick when he understood that he was yelling at his mother. And at Tom, too. But really mostly his mother. He said “Gramp” and his grandfather turned his head and told him to go back to sleep. Then he just stood at the window without shouting anymore but he kept standing there, shining the flashlight. Billy lay still, stiff, with his eyes closed, then heard his grandfather pull the window down halfway and hook the screen. In about a half a minute he heard the porch door close and footsteps on the stairs. It was his mother, he could tell. He wondered where Tom was and why he didn’t come in with his mother. She passed by the door of their room and started up the stairs to where her room was. She was crying very low, like she had a handkerchief to her mouth. Billy lay rigid, wondering what had happened. He heard a scratch and opened his eyes a little to see his grandfather light a cigarette and sit down on his bed. His grandfather said, in a whisper to himself, “One-thirty in the morning. A spectacle. One-thirty.” Billy wished hard but he was afraid that everything was spoiled. As he was going back to sleep he heard a man’s footsteps pass the door and start up the stairs. That must be Tom. Everything was really spoiled. He wanted to yell out curses but started to cry.