Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

Muzza by Paul Horgan

“Muzza” from Things As They Are by Paul Horgan. Copyright © 1964 by Paul Horgan, renewed 1992. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.

Born in Buffalo, New York in 1903, Paul Horgan is the author of seventeen novels, four volumes of short stories, and several distinguished works of nonfiction. Although the author can by no means be described as a crime writer, the following is as fine an example of a crime story as one could hope to find. Tracings, a book of recollections by Mr. Horgan, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September of this year...

How do we manage to love at all when there is so much hatred masquerading in love’s name? I saw, if I did not understand, how this could be when I lost forever a friend whom I tried to rescue from peril. But a larger peril claimed him.

His name was John Burley. Nobody ever loved him enough to give him a natural nickname. Instead, he was the subject of mocking refrain.

“John, John, the dog-faced one,” sang the other boys our age when they saw John and me playing together in our neighborhood. He was my next-door neighbor, and I didn’t know there was anything really different about him until I saw him abused by other children.

Before we were old enough to go to school we owned the whole world all day long except for nap time after lunch. We played in the open grassy yards behind and between our houses, and when John was busy and dreaming with play, he was a good friend to have, and never made trouble. But when people noticed him, he became someone else, and now I know that his parents, and mine too, out of sympathy, wondered and wondered how things would be for him when the time came for him to go off to school like any other boy and make a place for himself among small strangers who might find his oddness a source of fun and power for themselves.

In the last summer before schooltime, 1909, everyone heard the cry of “John, John, the dog-faced one,” and even I, his friend, saw him newly. I would look at him with a blank face, until he would notice this, and then he would say crossly, with one of his impulsive, self-clutching movements,

“What’s the matter, Richard, what’s the matter, why are you looking crazy?”

“I’m not looking crazy. You’re the one that’s crazy.”

For children pointed at him and sang, “Crazy, lazy, John’s a daisy,” and ran away.

Under their abuse, and my increasing wonderment, John showed a kind of daft good manners which should have induced pity and grace in his tormentors, but did not. He would pretend to be intensely preoccupied by delights and secrets from which the rest of us were excluded. He would count his fingers, nodding at the wrong total, and then put his thumbs against his thick lips and buzz against them with his furry voice, and look up at the sky, smacking his tongue, while other boys hooted and danced at him.

They were pitiably accurate when they called him the dog-faced one. He did look more like a dog than a boy. His pale hair was shaggy and could not be combed. His forehead was low, with a bony scowl that could not be changed. His nose was blunt, with its nostrils showing frontward. Hardly contained by his thick, shapeless lips, his teeth were long, white, and jumbled together. Of stocky build, he seemed always to be wearing a clever made-up costume to put on a monkey or a dog, instead of clothes like anybody else’s. His parents bought him the best things to wear, but in a few minutes they were either tom or rubbed with dirt or scattered about somewhere.

“The poor dears,” I heard my mother murmur over the Burley family.

“Yes,” said my father, not thinking I might hear beyond what they were saying, “we are lucky. I can imagine no greater cross to bear.”

“How do you suppose—” began my mother, but suddenly feeling my intent stare, he interrupted, with a glance my way, saying,

“Nobody ever knows how these cases happen. Watching them grow must be the hardest part.”

What he meant was that it was sorrowful to see an abnormal child grow physically older but no older mentally.

But Mr. and Mrs. Burley — Gail and Howard, as my parents called them — refused to admit to anyone else that their son John was in any way different from other boys. As the summer was spent, and the time to start school for the first time came around, their problem grew deeply troubling. Their friends wished they could help with advice, mostly in terms of advising that John be spared the ordeal of entering the rigid convention of a school where he would immediately be seen by all as a changeling, like some poor swineherd in a fairy story who once may have been a prince, but who would never be released from his spell.

The school — a private school run by an order of Catholic ladies founded in France — stood a few blocks from our street. The principal, who like each of her sisters wore a white shirtwaist with a high collar and starched cuffs and a long dark blue skirt, requested particularly that new pupils should come the first day without their parents. Everyone would be well-looked-after. The pupils would be put to tasks which would drive diffidence and homesickness out the window. My mother said to me as she made me lift my chin so that she could tie my Windsor tie properly over the stiff slopes of my Buster Brown collar, while I looked into her deep, clear, blue eyes, and wondered how to say that I would not go to school that day or any other,

“Richard, John’s mother thinks it would be so nice if you and he walked to school together.”

“I don’t want to.”

I did not mean that I did not want to walk with John, I meant that I did not want to go to school.

“That’s not very kind. He’s your friend.”

“I know it.”

“I have told his mother you would go with him.”

Childhood was a prison whose bars were decisions made by others. Numbed into submission, I took my mother’s goodbye kiss staring at nothing, eaten within by fears of the unknown which awaited us all that day.

“Now skip,” said my mother, winking both her eyes rapidly, to disguise the start of tears at losing me to another stage of life. She wore a small gold fleur-de-lis pin on her breast from which depended a tiny enameled watch. I gazed at this and nodded solemnly, but did not move. With wonderful executive tact she felt that I was about to make a fatally rebellious declaration, and so she touched the watch, turning its face around, and said, as though I must be concerned only with promptness.

“Yes, yes, Richard, you are right, we must think of the time, you mustn’t be late your first day.”

I was propelled then to the Burleys’ house next door, where John and his mother were waiting for me in their front hall, which was always filled with magic light from the cut-glass panes in bright colors flanking their front door.

Mrs. Burley held me by the shoulders for a moment, trying to tell me something without saying it.

“Richard,” she said, and then paused.

She looked deep into my eyes until I dropped my gaze. I looked at the rest of her face, and then at her bosom, wondering what was down there in that shadow where two rounded places of flesh rolled frankly together. Something about her personality led people to use her full name when they referred to her even idly — “Gail Burley” — and even I felt power within her.

Her husband had nothing like her strength. He was a small grey man with thin hair combed flat across his almost bald skull. The way his pince-nez pulled at the skin between his eyes gave him a look of permanent headache. Always hurried and impatient, he seemed to have no notice for children like me, or his own son, and all I ever heard about him was that he “gave Gail Burley anything she asked for” and “worked his fingers to the bone” doing so, as president of a marine engine company with a factory on the lake-front of our city of Dorchester in upstate New York.

Gail Burley — and I cannot say how much of her attitude arose from her sense of disaster in the kind of child she had borne — seemed to exist in a state of general exasperation. A reddish blond, with skin so pale that it glowed like pearl, she was referred to as a great beauty. Across the bridge of her nose and about her eyelids and just under her eyes there were scatterings of little gold freckles which oddly yet powerfully reinforced her air of being irked by everything.

She often exhaled slowly and with compression, and said “Gosh,” a slang word which was just coming in her circle, which she pronounced “Garsh.” Depending on her mood, she could make it into the expression of ultimate disgust or mild amusement. The white skin under her eyes went whiter when she was cross or angry, and then a dry hot light came into her hazel eyes. She seemed a large woman to me, but I don’t suppose she was — merely slow, challenging, and annoyed in the way she moved, with a flowing governed grace that was like a comment on all that was intolerable. At any moment she would exhale in audible distaste for the circumstances of her world. Compressing her lips, which she never rouged, she would ray her pale glance upward, across, aside, to express her search for the smallest mitigation, the simplest endurable fact or object of life. The result of these airs and tones of her habit was that in those rare moments when she was pleased, her expression of happiness came through like one of pain.

“Richard,” she said, holding me by the shoulders and looking into my face to discover what her son John was about to confront in the world of small schoolchildren.

“Yes, Mrs. Burley.”

She looked at John, who was waiting to go.

He had his red and black plaid japanned collapsible tin lunch box all nicely secured with a web strap, and he made his buzzing noise of pleasure at the idea of doing something so new as going to school. Because he showed no apprehension over what would seem like an ordeal to another boy, she let forth one of her breaths of disgust. She had dressed him in a starched collar like mine which extended over the smart lapels of his beautiful blue suit, with its Norfolk jacket. His socks were well pulled up and his shoes were shined. She looked at me again, trying to say what she could not. Her white face with its flecks of fixed displeasure slowly took on a pleading smile. She squeezed my shoulders a little, hoping I would understand, even at my age, how John would need someone to look out for him, protect him, suffer him, since he was a child of such condition as she could not bring herself to admit. Her plea was resolved into a miniature of the principle of bribery by which her life was governed — even, I now think, to the terms on which Howard Burley obtained even her smallest favors.

“Richard,” she said, “when you and John come home after school” — and she pressed those words to show that I must bring him home — “I will have a nice surprise waiting for you both.”

John became agitated at this, jumping about, and demanding,

“What is it, Muzza, what is it?”

She gave one of her breaths.

“John, John, be quiet. Garsh. I can’t even say anything without getting you all excited.”

For my benefit she smiled, but the gold flecks under her eyes showed as angry dark spots, and the restrained power of her dislike of John was so great that he was cowed. He put his hands to his groin to comfort himself and said, using his word for what he always found there, “Peanut.”

At this his mother became openly furious at him.

“John! Stop that! How many times have I told you that isn’t nice. Richard doesn’t do it. Dr. Grauer has told you what will happen if you keep doing it. Stop it!”

She bent over to slap at his hands and he lunged back. Losing his balance, he fell, and I heard his head go crack on the hardwood floor of the hall where the morning light made pools of jewel colors through the glass panels. He began to cry in a long, burry, high wail. His mother picked him up and he hung like a rag doll in her outraged grasp. The day was already in ruins, and he had not even gone off to school. The scene was one of hundreds like it which made up the life of that mother and that son. I was swept by shame at seeing it.

“Now stop that ridiculous caterwauling,” she said. “Richard is waiting to take you to school. Do you want him to think you are a crybaby?”

John occasionally made startling remarks, which brought a leap of hope that his understanding might not be so deficient as everyone believed.

“I am a crybaby,” he said, burying his misery-mottled face in the crook of his arm.

A sudden lift of pity in his mother made her kneel down and gently enfold him in her arms. With her eyes shut, she gave her love to the imaginary son, handsome and healthy, whom she longed for even as she held the real John. It was enough to console him. He flung his arms around her and hugged her like a bear cub, all fur and clumsiness and creature longing.

“Muzza, Muzza,” he said against her cheek.

She set him off.

“Now can you go to school?” she asked in a playfully reasonable voice.

John’s states of feeling were swift in their changes. He began to smack his lips, softly indicating that he was in a state of pleasure.

“Then go along, both of you,” said his mother.

She saw us out the door and down the walk. Curiously enough, the self-sorrowing lump in my throat went away as I watched the scene between John and his mother. Things seemed so much worse with the Burleys than with me and my start in school.

I led John off at a smart pace, running sometimes, and sometimes walking importantly with short busy steps. We paused only once, and that was to look in the window at a little candy and news shop a block from the school, where with warm, damp pennies it was possible to buy sticky rolls of chocolate candy, or — even better — stamp-sized films which when exposed to light darkened in shades of red to reveal such subjects as the battleship New York or the Woolworth Building or the Washington Monument.

John always had more money than I.

“Let’s get some,” he proposed.

“No. After school,” I replied. “We will be late if we stop and we will catch the dickens.”

“Catch the dickens,” he said, and began to run away ahead of me. I overtook him and we entered the main door of the school — it was a red brick building with a portico of white pillars veiled in vines — and once in the dark corridors with their wood-ribbed walls, we seemed to lose ourselves to become small pieces of drifting material that were carried along to our classrooms by a tide of children. Boys went separate from girls. John and I were finally directed to a room containing twenty boys in the first grade, presided over by Miss Mendtzy.

She met us at the door and without speaking, but sustaining a kindly smile, sent us with a strong thin finger on our shoulders along the aisles where we would find our desks. We gave her wary glances to see what she was like. She had a narrow little face above a bird’s body. Her hair was like short grey feathers. Before her large, steady, pale eyes she wore a pair of nose glasses that trembled in response to her quivering nerves and sent a rippling line of light along the gold chain that attached her glasses to a small gold spring spool pinned to her shirtwaist.

John and I were at desks side by side. When all the room was filled, Miss Mendtzy closed the door, and our hearts sank. There we were, in jail. She moved trimly to her platform. Her slim feet in black, high-buttoned shoes looked like feet in a newspaper advertisement because she stood them at such polite angles to each other. On her desk she had placed a vase of flowers with a great silk bow to give a festive air to the opening day. Touching the blossoms with a flourish of artistic delicacy, she launched into a pleasant little speech. Everyone sat quietly out of strangeness while she said,

“Now I want all of my new first-graders to come up here one by one, beginning with this aisle on my left” — she showed where in a gesture of bloodless grace — “and shake hands with me and tell me their names, for we are going to be working together for months and years, as I will be your homeroom teacher until the sixth grade. Think of it! Quite like a family! And so we are going to become great friends, and we must know each other well. Miss Mendtzy is ready to love each and every one of you, and she hopes each and every one of you will leave love her. We are going to get along splendidly together, if everybody is polite and works hard and remembers that he is not the only by in this world or in this school or in this room, but that he is a boy among other boys, to whom he must show respect, even while playing. Now, shall we start here, with this boy at the front of the first row?”

One by one we went to her platform, stepped up on it, shook hands, spoke our names, received a bright, lens-quivered smile and deep look into our eyes, and then were sent on across her little stage and down the other side and back to our seats. Some among us swaggered, others went rapidly and shyly, hiding from such a public world, one or two winked on the final trip up the aisles, and all felt some thumping at the heart of dread followed by pride as we went and returned.

There was no incident until John’s turn came. When it did, he would not rise and go forward.

“Come,” said Miss Mendtzy, beckoning over her desk and twinkling with her chained glasses. “We are waiting for the next boy.”

I leaned over to John and whispered,

“It’s your turn, John. Go on. Go on.”

He went lower in his seat and began to buzz his lips against his thumbs, terrified of rising before a crowd of small strangers, who were now beginning to nudge each other and whisper excitedly at the diversion. I heard someone whisper, “John, John, the dog-faced one,” and I could not tell whether John heard it. But, a professional, Miss Mendtzy heard it. She smartly whacked her ruler on the flat of her desk. It was like a nice pistol shot. Silence fell.

She put on her face a look that we all knew well at home — that look of aloof, pained regret at unseemly behavior.

“I must say I am surprised,” she said quietly, “that some of us are not polite enough to sit silently when we see someone in a fit of shyness. Some of the finest people I know are shy at times. I have been told that our bishop, that humble, great man, is shy himself when he has to meet people personally. Now I am going down from my platform and down the aisle and” — she glanced at her seating plan of the classroom — “I am going to bring John Burley up here myself as my guest and help him over his shyness, and the only way to do that is by helping him to do the same things everybody else has done. So.”

She went to John and took his hand and led him to the platform and stood him where each of us had stood, facing her, in profile to the rest of the room. Speaking as though he had just come there by his own will, she said,

“Good morning, John. I am Miss Mendtzy. We are pleased that you are with us,” first giving us a sidelong glare to command our agreement, and then, like a lady, holding forth her hand to John, with a slightly arched wrist and drooping fingers.

John put his hands behind him and buzzed his lips and looked out the window.

“John?”

“John, John, the dog-faced one,” again said an unplaceable voice in the rear of the classroom, softly but distinctly.

“Who said that!” demanded Miss Mendtzy, going pink and trembling until her lenses shimmered. The very first day of school, she seemed to say, and already there was an unfortunate incident. “I simply will not have bad manners in my room, and I simply will not have one of my boys treated like this. Whoever said that is to stand up and apologize instantly. I think I know who it was” — but clearly she did not — “and if he apologizes now and promises never, never to do such a rude thing again, we shall all be friends again as we want to be. Well? I am waiting.”

The silence and the tension grew and grew.

John stood with head hanging. I saw his hands twitching behind his back. He was trying not to clasp them over himself in front.

“One more minute,” declared Miss Mendtzy, “and then I will do something you will all be very sorry for.”

Silence, but for a clock ticking on the wall above her blackboard.

John could not bear it. Moving as fast as a cat, he threw himself forward to Miss Mendtzy’s desk and swept her vase of flowers to the floor where it shattered and spilled.

All the boys broke into hoots and pounded their hinged desktops upon their desks, making such a clamor that in a moment the door was majestically opened and the principal, always called Madame de St. Etienne, who came from nobility in France, heavily entered the room. Even as she arrived, someone in the rear of the room, carried on by the momentum of events, called out, “Crazy, lazy, John’s a daisy.”

The principal was a monument of authority. Above her heavy pink face with its ice-blue eyes rose a silvery pompadour like a wave breaking back from a headland. Her bosom was immense in her starched shirtwaist. Over it she wore a long gold chain which fell like a maiden waterfall into space below her bust and ended in a loop at her waist where she tucked a large gold watch. Her dark skirt went straight down in front, for she had to lean continuously forward, we thought, if the vast weight and size behind her were not to topple her over backward.

She now glared at Miss Mendtzy with frigid reproach at the breach of discipline in her classroom loud enough to be heard down the hall, and then faced us all, saying in a voice like pieces of broken glass scraped together at the edges,

“Children, you will rise when the principal enters the classroom.”

She clapped her hands once and we rose, scared and ashamed.

“Now who is this?” she demanded, turning to the tableau at the teacher’s platform.

“This is John Burley, Madame,” replied Miss Mendtzy, and got no further, for John, seeing the open door, bolted for the hall and freedom.

Madame de St. Etienne gave another queenly, destructive look at Miss Mendtzy, and said,

“Pray continue with the exercises, Miss Mendtzy.”

She then left the room, moving as though on silent casters, for her skirt swept the floor all about her short, light steps, amazing in a woman so heavy and so enraged.

Burning with mortification, Miss Mendtzy began our first lesson, which was an exercise in neatness — the care of our pencil boxes and schoolbooks. There was a happy material interest in this, for the pencils were all new and smelled of cedar, and we went in turn to sharpen them at the teacher’s desk. Our erasers — promises of foreordained smudges of error — showed a tiny diamondlike glisten if we held them in a certain way to the light of the window. If we chewed upon them, little gritty particles deliciously repelled our teeth. Our schoolbooks cracked sweetly when we opened them, and the large, clear, black type on the pages held mystery and invitation. We became absorbed in toys which were suddenly now something more than toys, and our cheeks grew hot, and we were happy, and we forgot to want to go to the bathroom. I was hardly aware of it when the door opened again before Madame de St. Etienne. Late, but earnestly, we scrambled to our feet, as she said,

“Which is Richard—?” giving my full name.

“Pray come with me, Richard,” she ordered, ignoring Miss Mendtzy entirely. “Bring your boxes and books.”

A stutter of conjecture went along the aisles at this, which Madame de St. Etienne, gliding on her way to the door, suppressed by pausing and staring above the heads of everyone as though she could not believe her ears. Quiet fell, and in quiet, with my heart beating, I followed her out to the hallway. She shut the door and turned me with a finger to walk ahead of her to her office at the entranceway inside the pillared portico. I wanted to ask what I had done to be singled out for her notice, which could only, I thought, lead to punishment.

But it appeared that she had enlisted me as an assistant. In her office, John was waiting, under guard of the principal’s secretary. He was sitting on a cane chair holding a glass of water, half full.

“Finish it, John,” commanded Madame.

“I don’t like it,” he said.

“Hot water to drink is the best thing for anyone who is upset,” she answered. “It is the remedy we always give. Finish it.”

Raising a humble wail, he drank the rest of the hot water, spilling much of it down on his chin, his Windsor tie, his starched collar.

“You are John’s friend?” she asked me.

“Yes.”

“Who are his other friends?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has he none, then?”

“I don’t think so.”

John watched my face, then the principal’s, turning his head with jerky interest and rubbing his furry hair with his knuckles in pleasure at being the subject of interest.

“You brought him to school?”

“Yes.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“Yes, Madame.”

“And you will take him home?”

“Yes, Madame. After school.”

“I have spoken on the telephone with his mother, to arrange for him to go home. She prefers not to have him come home until the end of school after lunch. Until then, I will ask you to stay here in my office with him. You will both eat your lunches here and I will see that you are not disturbed. Tomorrow you will be able to return to your classroom.”

“With John?”

“No. John will not be with us after today.”

John nodded brightly at this. Evidently the principal had given an ultimatum to Mrs. Burley over the telephone. I can imagine the terms of it — careful avoidance of the words abnormal, special case, impossible to measure up to the progress of other boys his age, and such. With arctic, polite finality, Madame de St. Etienne would have read John out of the human society where his years put him but where his retarded mind and disordered nerves, so clearly announced by his rough, doglike appearance, must exclude him. Gail Burley’s despair can be felt. How could she ever again pretend even to herself that her child, if only thrown into life, would make his way like anyone else? How could she love anything in the world if she could not love the son who was mismade in her womb? What a bitter affront it was to her famous good looks of face and body, her hard brightness of mind, her firm ability to govern everything else that made up her life, if she must be responsible for such a creature as John. How to face a lifetime of exasperated pity for him? How to disguise forever the humiliation which she must feel? The daily effort of disguising it would cost her all her confident beauty in the end.

“Why don’t we go home now?” I asked.

“John’s mother thinks it would look better if he simply came home like the other children when school is dismissed this afternoon.”

Yes, for if they saw him come earlier, people would say once again what she knew they were always saying about John. I knew well enough the kind of thing, from hearing my own father and mother talk kindly and sadly about my playmate.

Let him come home after school, like everyone else, and tomorrow, why, then, tomorrow, Gail Burley could simply say with a shrug and a speckled smile that she and Howard didn’t think it was really just the school for John. There was something about those teachers, neither quite nuns, nor quite ordinary women, which was unsettling. The Burleys would look around, and meantime, John could be tutored at home, as Gail herself had been one winter when she had gone as a little girl with her parents to White Sulphur Springs. Leaving the school could be made, with a little languid ingenuity, to seem like a repudiation by her, for reasons she would be too polite to elaborate upon for parents of other children still attending it.

The day passed slowly in the principal’s office. At eleven o’clock there was a fire drill, set off by a great alarm gong which banged slowly and loudly in the hall just above the office door. The door was kept closed upon us, but we could hear the rumble and slide of the classes as they took their appointed ways out of the building to the shaded playgrounds outside.

“I want to go, I want to go!” cried John at the window. “Everybody is there!”

“No,” said Madame de St. Etienne, turning like an engine in her swivel chair, “we will remain here. They will presently return.”

John began to cry.

The principal looked to me to manage him and calmly turned back to the work on her desk, placing a pince-nez upon the high bridge of her thin nose with a sweep of her arm which was forced to travel a grand arc to bypass her bosom.

But at last, when the clock in the office showed twenty-five minutes past two, she said,

“Now, John, and now, Richard, you may take your things and go home. School is dismissed at half-past two. Perhaps it would be prudent for you to leave a little before the other boys. You will go straight home.”

“Yes, Madame.”

She gave us each her hand. To John she said,

“May God bless you, my poor little one.”

Her words and her manner sent a chill down my belly.

But in a moment we were in the open air of the autumn day, where a cold wind off the lake was spinning leaves from the trees along the street. John capered happily along and when we reached the candy store, he remembered how we would stop there. I wondered if stopping there would violate our orders to go “straight home,” but the store was on the way, and we went in.

John enjoyed shopping. He put his stubby finger with its quick-bitten nail on the glass of the candy counter, pointing to first one then another confection, and every time he made up his mind he changed it, until the proprietor, an old man with a bent back in a dirty grey cardigan, sighed and looked over his shoulder at his wife, who sat in the doorway to their back room. His glance and her return of it plainly spoke of John’s idiocy.

“There!” said John finally, aiming his finger and his hunger at a candy slice of banana, cut the long way, and tasting, I knew, of cotton mixed with gun oil. The candy banana was white in the center with edges stained orange and yellow.

I moved on to the counter where you could buy the magic photographic plates which showed nothing until you exposed them to the light. I wanted to buy one, but I had no money. John came beside me and said,

“Richard, I’ll get you one.”

“Oh no.”

“Oh yes, I’ll get you two.”

He put down four pennies to pay for two prints and the storekeeper gave me the box to choose my prints. On the edge of each little plate was the name of its subject. I chose the liner Mauretania and Buckingham Palace.

“Here,” I said to John, offering him one of them. “You keep one.”

He put his hands behind his back and blew his tongue at me between his thick lips.

“All right, then, thanks, we have to go home now. Come on, John,” I said.

Eating his banana, John was compliant. We came out of the store and went to the corner where we turned into our street. Our houses were a block and a half away. We could just see them. Under the billowing trees and the cool autumn light they looked asleep. They called to me. I wanted suddenly to be home.

“Let’s run, John,” I said.

We began to run, but we got no farther than a large hedge which ran up the driveway of the second house from the comer.

It was a great house, with a large garage in back, and a deep lawn. I knew the brothers who lived there. Their name was Grandville. They were a year or two older and very self-important because of their family automobiles and their electric train system, which occupied the whole top floor of their house.

They now jumped out from behind the hedge. With them were three other boys. They had all just come home from school. While we had idled in the candy store, they had gone by to wait for us.

“John, John, the dog-faced one!” they called and took John and dragged him up the driveway toward the garage in the windy, empty neighborhood. “Crazy, lazy, John’s a daisy,” they chanted, and I ran along yelling,

“Let us go, let us go!”

“Shut up, or we’ll get you too,” cried one of the brothers.

“Richie!” moaned John, “Richie!”

The terror in his blurry voice was like that in a nightmare when you must scream and cannot make a sound. His face was belly-white and his eyes were staring at me. I was his protector. I would save him.

“Richie! Richie!”

But I could do nothing against the mob of five, but only run along calling to them to “let go of us” — for I felt just as much captive as John, whom they dragged by arms and legs. He went heavy and limp. They hauled him through the chauffeur’s door — a narrow one beside the big car doors, which were closed — and shut the door after us all. The center of the garage was empty, for the big Pierce-Arrow limousine was out, bearing Mrs. Grandville somewhere on a chauffeur-driven errand.

“Put him there!” yelled one of the brothers.

Four boys held John on the cement floor by the drain grille while the other brother went to the wall, uncoiled a hose, and turned the spigot. The hose leaped alive with a thrust of water.

“Now let go and get back or you’ll all get wet,” called the Grandville boy. As the others scampered back he turned the powerful blow of the hose water on John. It knocked him down. He shut his eyes and turned his blind face to the roof. His shapeless mouth fell open in a silent cry. Still clutching his candy banana, he brought it to his mouth in delayed memory of what it was for, and what had been a delight was now a sorrowful and profitless hunger for comfort in misery.

“Get up, dogface,” yelled one of the boys.

Obediently John got up, keeping his eyes closed, suffering all that must come to him. The hose column toppled him over again. Striking his face, blows of water knocked his head about until it seemed it must fly apart.

“I know!” cried an excited and joyful young voice. “Let’s get his clo’es off!”

There was general glee at this idea. The hose was put away for the moment, and everyone seized John and tore at his clothes. He made his soundless wail with open mouth and I thought he shaped my name again.

When he was naked they ordered him to stand again, and he did so, trying to protect his modesty with his thick hands. They hit him with the hose again and buffeted him like a puppet. The hose water made him spin and slide on the oily floor. The noise was doubled by echoes from the peaked high roof of the garage.

Nobody thought of me.

I backed to the door and opened it and ran away. On the concrete driveway was a tricycle belonging to the younger Grandville. I mounted it and rode off as fast as I could. My chest was ready to break open under my hard breathing. My knees rose and fell like pistons. My face was streaming with tears of rage at John’s ordeal and the disgrace of my helplessness before it. I rode to John’s house and threw myself up the front steps, but before I could attack the door it was opened to me. Gail Burley was watching for us and when she saw me alone in gasping disorder, she cried,

“Why, Richard! What’s the matter! Where’s John!”

At first I could only point, so I took her hand and tugged at her to come with me. It was proof of the passion and power I felt at the moment that without more questioning she came. I remounted the tricycle and led her up the street to the Grandvilles’. In a little while as I went I was able to tell her what was happening.

When she understood, she increased her stride. She became magnificent in outrage. Her hazel eyes darkened to deep topaz and her reddish golden hair seemed to spring forward into the wind. She was like a famous ship, dividing the elements as she went.

“Oh! Those horrid, cruel little beasts!” she exclaimed. “Oh! What I would do to them — and Richard, you are an absolute darrling to get away and come for me. Oh! That poor John!”

We hurried up the driveway. The game was still going on. We could hear cries and the hiss of the hose. Gail Burley strode to the door and threw it open. She saw her son pinned against the far brick wall by the long pole of the spray. He tried to turn his face from side to side to avoid its impact. It swept down his white soft body and he continually tried to cover himself with his hands. Nonresistant, he accepted all that came to him. His eyes were still closed and his mouth was still open.

Stepping with baleful elegance across the puddles of the floor, Gail Burley threw aside the boys who were dancing at the spectacle, and came to the Grandville brother with the hose. She astounded him. In his ecstatic possession, he had heard no one arrive. She seized the hose and with a gesture commanded him to turn off the water, which he did. She dropped the hose and went to John and took him dripping and blue with cold into her arms. He fell inert against her, letting his hands dangle as she hugged him. But he made a word at last.

“Muzza,” he said thickly, “oh, Muzza, Muzza.”

“John-John,” she said, holding his wet head against the hollow of her lovely neck and shoulder. “It’s all right, It’s all right. Muzza is here. Poor John-John.”

The boys were now frightened. The oldest said,

“We were only trying to have some fun, Mrs. Burley.”

“Go to the house,” she commanded in her flattest tone, which held promises of punishment for all as soon as she could inform their parents, “and bring a big towel and a blanket. — Richard, you might throw together John’s things and bring them along.”

She was obeyed soberly and quickly. In a few minutes she and I were taking John home. He was huddled inside a doubled blanket. He was shivering. His teeth chattered.

“Where’s my banana?” he managed to say.

“Oh, never mind,” said his mother. “We can get you another banana. What were you doing with a banana anyway?”

“It was a candy one,” I explained.

“I see.”

Her thoughts were falling into order after the disturbance of her feelings by the cruelty she had come to halt.

My perceptions of what followed were at the time necessarily shallow, but they were, I am sure, essentially correct.

“Those wretches!” exclaimed Gail Burley, leading John by the hand while I trotted alongside. “What would we ever have done without Richard? You are a true friend, Richard! — Oh!” she said, at the memory of what she had seen. And then, as John stumbled because she was walking so fast and his blanket folds were so awkward to hold about himself, she jerked his hand and said, “Stop dragging your feet, John! Why can’t you walk like anybody else! Here! Pull up and keep up with me!”

At her suddenly cold voice, he went limp and would have fallen softly, like a dropped teddy bear, to the sidewalk. But she dragged him up and said with her teeth almost closed,

“John Burley, do you hear me? Get up and come with me. If you do not, your father will give you the whaling of your life when he comes home tonight!”

“No, Muzza, no, Muzza,” muttered John at the memories that this threat called alive. He got to his feet and began half-running along beside her, dragging his borrowed blanket, which looked like the robe of a pygmy king in flight.

I was chilled by the change in Mrs. Burley. Her loving rage was gone and in its place was a fury of exasperation. She blinked away angry tears. With no thought of how fast John could run along with her, she pulled and jerked at him all the way home, while her face told us after all that she was bitterly ashamed of him.

For at last she took the world’s view of her son. Represented by his own kind, other children, the world had repudiated him. Much as she hated the cruelty of the Grandvilles and their friends, sore as her heart was at what her son had suffered through them, she knew they were society, even if it was shown at its most savage. It was the determining attitude of the others that mattered. She had seen it clearly. Her heart broke in half. One half was charged with love and pity as it defied the mocking world which allowed no published lapse from its notion of a finally unrealizable norm. The other half was pierced by fragments of her pride. How could it happen to her that her child could be made sport of as a little animal monster? Gail Burley was to be treated better than that.

“John?” she sang out in warning as John stumbled again. “You heard what I said?”

Her cheeks, usually pale, were now flushed darkly. I was afraid of her. She seemed ready to treat John just as the boys had treated him. Was she on the side of his tormentors? Their judgments persuaded her even as she rescued her child. She longed for him both to live — and to die. Cold desire rose up in her. If only she knew some way to save this poor child in the future from the abuse and the uselessness which were all that life seemed to offer him. How could she spare John and herself long lifetimes of baffled sorrow? She made him dance along faster than he could, for being such a creature that others mocked and tortured him, at the expense of her pride.

When we reached her house, she said,

“Richard, you are an angel. Please drop John’s wet things in the butler’s pantry. I am going to take him upstairs to bed. He is having a chill. I’ll never be able to thank you enough. Your afterschool surprise is on the hall table, an almond chocolate bar. Come over and see John later.”

But that evening just before my nursery supper when I went to show John the developed prints of the Mauretania and Buckingham Palace, his father met me in the living room and said that John was ill — his chill had gone worse. His mother was upstairs with him, and I must not go up.

“Well, Richard,” said Howard Burley, “God only knows what they would have done to John if you hadn’t come to get his mother. They will catch it, never fear. I have talked to their fathers.”

I had been feeling all afternoon a mixture of guilt and fright for having snitched on the boys. Now I was sure they would avenge themselves on me. Something of this must have shown in my face.

“Never fear,” said Mr. Burley. “Their fathers will see to it that nothing happens to you. Come over and see John tomorrow.”

But the next day they said that John was really ill with grippe.

“Did they send for Dr. Grauer?” asked my mother.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He was our doctor, too, and we would have known his car if he had come to attend to John. But all day nobody came, and the next day, John was worse, and my mother said to my father, with glances that recalled my presence to him, which must require elliptical conversation,

“Grippe sometimes goes into pneumonia, you know.”

“Yes, I know,” replied my father. “But they know how to treat these things.”

“Yes, I know, but sometimes something is needed beyond just home remedies.”

“Then Grauer has not yet—?”

“No, not today, either.”

“That is odd. Perhaps he isn’t so sick as we think.”

“Oh, I think so. I talked to Gail today. She is frantic.”

“Well.”

“But she says she knows what to do. They are doing everything, she says. Everything possible.”

“I am sure they are. — Sometimes I can’t help thinking that it might be better all around if—”

“Yes, I have too,” said my mother hastily, indicating me again. “But of course it must only be God’s will.”

My father sighed.

I knew exactly what they were talking about, though they thought I didn’t.

On the third day, John Burley died. My mother told me the news when I reached home after school. She winked both eyes at me as she always did in extremes of feeling. She knelt down and enfolded me. Her lovely heart-shaped face was an image of pity. She knew I knew nothing of death, but some feeling of death came through to me from the intensity of color in her blue eyes. The power of her feeling upset me, and I swallowed as if I were sick when she said,

“Richard, my darling, our dear, poor, little John died this morning. His chill grew worse and worse and finally turned into pneumonia. They have already taken him away. His mother wanted me to tell you. She loves you for what you tried to do for him.”

“Then he’s gone?”

“Yes, my dearie, you will never be able to see him again. That is what death means.”

I was sobered by these remarks, but I did not weep. I was consumed with wonder, though I was not sure what I wondered about.

There was no funeral. Burial, as they said, was private. I missed John, but I was busy at school, where I was cautious with the Grandvilles and the others until enough days passed after the punishments they had received to assure me that I was safe from their reprisals. Perhaps they wanted to forget that they had given away death in heedless play. Howard Burley went to the office quite as usual. His wife stayed home and saw no one for a while.

“I cannot help wondering,” said my mother, “why she never called Dr. Grauer.”

“Hush,” said my father. “Don’t dwell on such things.”

But I dwelled on them now and then. They were part of my knowledge on the day when Gail Burley asked my mother to send me to see her after school.

“Mrs. Burley has some things of John’s that she wants to give you. You were his best friend.”

I knew all his toys. Some of them were glorious. I saw them all in my mind again. I went gladly to see his mother.

The housemaid let me in and sent me upstairs to Mrs. Burley’s sitting room. She was reclining against many lacy pillows on a chaise longue in the bay window. She was paler than ever, and perhaps thinner, and there was a new note in her voice which made her seem like a stranger — a huskiness which reflected lowered vitality. She embraced me and said,

“Do you miss John?”

“Yes.”

“Poor little John.”

Her hazel eyes were blurred for a moment and she looked away out the window into the rustling treetops of autumn, as though to conceal both emotion and knowledge from me. “Oh, my God,” I heard her say softly. Then she let forth one of her controlled breaths, annoyed at her own weakness as it lay embedded in the general condition of the world, and said with revived strength,

“Well, Richard, let’s be sensible. Come and pick out the toys you want in John’s nursery. What you don’t take I am going to send to Father Raker’s orphanage.”

She led me along the upstairs hall to John’s room. His toys were laid out in rows, some on the window seat, the rest on the floor.

“I suppose I could say that you should just take them all,” she said with one of her unwilling smiles, “but I think that would be selfish of us both. Go ahead and pick.”

With the swift judgment of the expert, I chose a beautiful set of Pullman cars for my electric train, which had the same track as John’s, and a power boat with mahogany cabin and real glass portholes draped in green velvet curtains, and a battalion of lead soldiers with red coats and black busbies and white cross belts tumbled together in their box who could be set smartly on parade, and a set of watercolor paints, and a blackboard on its own easel with a box of colored chalks. These, and so much else in the room, spoke of attempts to reward John for what he was not — and for what they were not, the parents, too. I looked up at his mother. She was watching me as if never to let me go.

“Your cheeks are so flushed,” she said, “and it is adorable the way the light makes a gold ring on your hair when you bend down. Richard, come here.”

She took me in her hungry arms. I felt how she trembled. There was much to make her tremble.

“Do you want anything else?” she asked, again becoming sensible, as she would have said. Her concealed intensity made me lose mine.

“No, thank you, Mrs. Burley.”

“Well, you can take your new toys home whenever you like. You can’t carry them all at once.”

“I’ll take the boat now,” I said.

“All right. Garsh, it’s big, isn’t it. John loved to sail it when we went to Narragansett.”

She took me downstairs to the door. There she lingered. She wanted to say something. She could have said it to an adult. How could she say it to me? Yet most grown people spoke to me as if I were far older than my years. Leaning her back against the door, with her hands behind her on the doorknob and with her face turned upward so that I saw her classical white throat and the curve of her cheek until it was lost in the golden shadows of her eye, she said,

“Richard, I wonder if you would ever understand — you knew, didn’t you, surely, that our poor little John was not like other children?”

“Sometimes, yes.”

“His father and I suffered for him, seeing how hard it was for him with the other children; and then we thought of how it would have to be when he grew up — do you know?”

I nodded, though I did not know, really.

“We are heartbroken to lose him, you must know that. He was all we had. But do you know, we sometimes wonder if it is better that God took him, even if we had to lose him. Do you know?”

She looked down at me as if to complete her thought through her golden piercing gaze. When she saw the look of horror on my face, she caught her breath. Conventional, like all children, I was amazed that anyone should be glad of death, if that meant not seeing someone ever again.

“Oh, Richard, don’t judge us yet for feeling that way. When you grow up and see more of what life does to those who cannot meet it, you will understand.” She was obsessed. Without naming it, she must speak of the weight on her heart, even if only to me, a first-grader in school. In my ignorance, perhaps I might be the only safe one in whom to confide. “Garsh, when you see cripples trying to get along, and sick people who can never get well, you wonder why they can’t be spared and just die.”

The appalling truth was gathering in me. I stared at her while she continued,

“John was always frail, and when those horrid boys turned on him and he caught that chill and it went into pneumonia, his father and I did everything to save him, but it was not enough. We had to see him go.”

Clutching John’s beautiful power boat in both arms, I cowered a little away from her and said,

“You never sent for a doctor, though.”

A sharp silence cut its way between us. She put one hand on her breast and held herself. At last she said in a dry, bitter voice,

“Is that what is being said, then?”

“Dr. Grauer always comes when I am sick.”

She put her hand to her mouth. Her eyes were afire like those of a trapped cat.

“Richard,” she whispered against her fingers, “what are you thinking? Don’t you believe we loved John?”

I said, inevitably,

“Did you have him die?”

At this she flew into a golden, speckled fury. She reached for me to chastise me, but I eluded her. I was excited by her and also frightened. Her eyes blazed with shafted light. I managed to dance away beyond her reach, but I was encumbered by the beautiful power cruiser in my arms. I let it crash to the floor. I heard its glass break. Escape and safety meant more to me just then than possession of the wonderful boat. I knew the house. I ran down the hall to the kitchen and out the back door to my own yard and home, out of breath, frightened by what I had exposed.

The Burleys never again spoke to my parents or to me. My parents wondered why, and even asked, but received no explanation. All of John’s toys went to Father Raker’s. In a few weeks the Burleys put up their house for sale; in a few months Howard retired from business and they went to live in Florida for the rest of their lives.