Lucy Crown

9

TONY CAME HOME IN the middle of the afternoon, much earlier than he had expected. The hayride was supposed to have taken all day with a picnic lunch at Lookout Rock at the end of the lake and an expedition into the caves there. They’d had the lunch all right and they had taken a quick look at the caves but Tony had been glad when it began to rain a little bit and Bert, who was driving the team, had rounded them all up and started back around two o’clock. All the other children on the ride had been much younger than Tony and there had been a confusion of mothers and nurses and Tony had spent the day feeling alternately superior and deserted. He wouldn’t have gone on the ride at all except that Jeff had taken the day off to go into Rutland to the dentist. His mother had said that she was going to be busy and he could tell that she wanted him to go. But now it was only about four o’clock and here he was back at the cottage, alone. He looked through the house for his mother but she wasn’t there. There was a note on the kitchen table from her, saying that she had gone into town to the movies and that she would be back by five o’clock.

He took an apple and went out on the porch, eating it, and looked at the lake. It was a cold day and the lake looked gray and mean. He wished the sun would come out so he could go swimming. He finished the apple and wound up carefully and threw it at a tree. He missed the tree. Apple cores didn’t have enough weight for accurate pitching, he decided. He thought of trying to get a hitch into town with the hotel bus to look for his mother. Then he decided against that. Whenever he went looking for her and found her any place she would smile at first and seem very glad to see him and then she’d say, “Now, Tony, you mustn’t tag after me all the time.”

He went in and looked at the clock in the living room. It hardly paid to go into town to look for her in the movies if she was going to be back by five. Anyway he had no money and he wouldn’t know how to get into the theatre. He had never been to the movies. First he was too young, his father said. And then it was bad for his eyes. His father disapproved of the movies. His father disapproved of a lot of things. His father kept saying, “When you’re older, Tony. When you’re older.” Tony had the feeling that when he was twenty years old he would be so busy catching up on all the things his father disapproved of now that he’d never have any time to sleep.

He went onto the porch again and put a record on the phonograph that Jeff had loaned him. The record was “I Get a Kick Out of You.” He listened critically to the words for a while and turned the volume up good and high so that it sounded as though he had a party going on the porch. Then he went into his mother’s room and picked up the long mirror on a stand that she had against the wall and carried it out to the porch. When he was younger and his mother wasn’t home and he was waiting for her he would very often go into her room and sit on her bed, refusing to move until he heard her coming into the house. But he was too old for that now.

There was a baseball bat leaning against the wall of the porch and he picked it up and rubbed his hand along it. Then he took up a stance in front of the mirror, his left leg out in front of him the way Jeff had shown him and a good distance between his feet. He waved the bat gently and menacingly over his shoulder, waiting for the pitch, staring at himself in the mirror with cold, alert eyes. He stepped in, in a nice clean movement, the way Jeff had showed him, and swung at a waist-high ball, bending his knees a little, watching himself closely in the mirror. He let two balls go past, twitching his bat a little, but they were wide. Then he swung four or five more times, remembering to snap his wrists and get his shoulders behind the ball and remembering not to step in the bucket. When he had enough of batting he went over and picked up the fielder’s glove and ball. He and Jeff had a game that they played. They threw pickups and backhand catches to each other and the one who missed ten first, lost. They kept the score with a pencil on one of the shingles of the porch. Jeff had won twenty-two times and Tony had won twice. With the ball, in front of the mirror, Tony practiced pickups and backhands and a funny catch with the glove held close to his belly for high pop flies that Jeff called a basket catch and which he said was a specialty of a shortstop called Rabbit Maranville who played for Boston. It wasn’t as easy as it looked, especially if at the same time you had to watch yourself in the mirror. While he was in the middle of it he heard someone come up behind him. He didn’t turn around and a moment later he saw that it was Susan Nickerson. She was dressed in the blue jeans and sweater which seemed to be her uniform. He had seen her earlier in the day at the hotel, just before the hayride. He’d asked her if she was going but she had said, “No. Hayrides’re for kids.”

He threw the ball up two or three more times, not too hard, making sure that he would catch it each time that it came down, conscious of Susan watching him. Finally she was the one to talk first. “Hi,” she said and he had a small sensation of victory.

“Hi,” he said, continuing to toss and catch the ball.

Susan came up closer to him and looked at him suspiciously. “What are you doing there?”

“Developing my hands,” Tony said. “One thing an infielder has to have is sure hands.”

“What do you need the mirror for?” Susan asked. She looked into the glass above Tony’s shoulder and pushed delicately at her hair. Her hair was long for a girl her age and was cut in a way that made her look much older than she was.

“To correct my form,” Tony said. “All the big ones use mirrors.” Susan sighed as if this subject, like all others, proved, upon examination, to be instantaneously boring. For a moment she peered closely at Tony with her animal trainer’s expression, as though she were figuring out just how to handle this particular beast at this particular moment. Then she began to prowl slowly around the porch, picking up books, staring at them coldly, letting them drop, touching a magazine with her fingertips, standing in front of the phonograph and listening without pleasure to the music that was blaring out of the loudspeaker. “Are you alone?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“This place sure is dead,” Susan said. “Isn’t it?”

Tony shrugged and turned away from the mirror, making a pocket in the glove with his other fist. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe for girls.”

“Where’s Jeff?” Susan asked flatly.

“He went into Rutland,” Tony said. “He had a bad tooth.”

“Uh-huh,” Susan said, in her policewoman’s voice. “Rutland.” She turned the volume of the phonograph down a little. “Where’s your mother?” she asked, in the tone of a hostess politely making conversation on a subject which was of no interest to her, for the benefit of an awkward guest.

“She went to the movies,” Tony said. “I’ll be able to go to the movies myself in about another month.”

“She went to the movies,” Susan said, putting only a fraction of a question mark at the end of the phrase.

“Yeah.”

“What’s playing?”

“I don’t know,” Tony said.

“Ask her when she gets back.” Susan turned the phonograph down even lower.

“Why?”

“Just curious,” Susan said. “Maybe I’ll ask my mother to take me tonight. Where did you get the phonograph?”

“It’s Jeff’s,” Tony said. “He got it from an aunt as a present when he went away to college. She’s rich and she’s always giving him presents. He has a library of eight hundred and forty-five records. He’s an expert on swing.”

“He thinks he’s something,” Susan said. “Doesn’t he?”

“He is something,” said Tony.

“He talks as though he’s fifty years old,” said Susan. From the tone in which she said it, it was clear that she considered this one of the gravest charges possible to make against a man.

“He’s the smartest man you’re ever likely to know,” said Tony combatively.

“That’s what you think,” said Susan.

Tony would have liked to say something crushing and final. But nothing crushing came to his mind. “Yeah,” he said lamely, and knowing that it sounded lame, “that’s what I think.”

Susan shrugged. She went over to the phonograph and switched it off. The music ended with a sliding, unpleasant sound.

“What did you do that for?” Tony asked.

“I hate jazz,” said Susan. “I only listen to the classics. I play three instruments.”

Tony went over to the phonograph and started it again. “Well, I like it,” he said. “And this is my house.”

“It’s your father’s house,” Susan said, like a lawyer. “He pays the rent.”

“If it’s my father’s,” said Tony, “it’s mine.”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow,” said Susan. “Still, if that’s the way you feel, I’ll leave.”

“Go ahead,” said Tony, but with no conviction in his voice.

“Okay,” said Susan. “I only came around because this place is so dead.” She started off the porch slowly, with her little, bumpy, beach-balloon walk. Tony watched her obliquely, glumly. Then with a sudden movement he picked the playing arm off the record and stopped the machine. “Aaah …” he said, “I’m not crazy about this record anyway.”

A bleak, swift smile of satisfaction crossed the girl’s face, the policewoman at the moment of confession. “That’s better,” she said. She came back onto the porch.

“What three instruments do you play?” Tony asked.

“The piano, the trombone and the cello.”

Impressed despite himself and determined not to show it, Tony competed with her by picking up the telescope and staring up with an expert air at the sky. “The sky,” he said, “is full of cirrus cumulus clouds. The ceiling is about a thousand feet and visibility is less than a mile.”

Susan shrugged. “Who wants to know stuff like that?”

“And at Mount Wilson, that’s in California, they got a telescope so strong they can see the stars in the daytime. I bet you didn’t know that either.”

“Who wants to know about that?”

Gently, triumphantly, Tony closed the trap. “Who wants to know how to play the cello?” he asked.

“I do,” said Susan. “I show a lot of promise.”

“Who told you?” Tony asked skeptically. He had discovered that a mixture of skepticism and hostility served to bridge the gap in age and sex between them and put him, at least for the moment, on a footing of approximate equality with her.

“Mr. Bradley told me,” Susan said. “He’s the music teacher at school. He conducts the orchestra and the band. I play the trombone in the band at football games because you can’t carry a cello around with you. Mr. Bradley says I have great natural ability. He tried to kiss me in the auditorium last winter. He tries to kiss all the girls. He kissed three of the first violinists last year.”

“What did he want to do that for?” Tony asked, trying not to show how fascinating he found the conversation.

Susan shrugged. “He likes it.”

“What did you do when he tried to kiss you?”

“I let him,” Susan said flatly.

“Why?”

“Why not?” Susan said. “But when he tried to rub me I told him I would go to the principal and he stopped. He’s very artistic, Mr. Bradley. When he plays the violin he closes his eyes. In the movies when they kiss they always close their eyes too. Your mother,” she said, “she’s at the movies now?”

“I told you.”

“I just wanted to make sure,” Susan said. She took a slow deliberate turn around the porch, going up on her toes like a ballet dancer on each step. “Did you ever kiss a girl?” she asked.

“I … I … sure,” Tony said.

“How many?”

Tony hesitated, searching for a reasonable number. “Seventeen,” he said finally.

Susan came up to him and stood in front of him. He noticed uncomfortably that she was at least two inches taller than he was. “Let me see,” she said coldly.

“What do you mean?” Tony, said, stalling for time and trying to make his voice low and gruff.

“Let me see.” A weary flicker of a smile twitched across Susan’s face without making a change in her cold, coinlike, mistrustful blue eyes. “I bet,” she said, “you never kissed a girl in your whole life.”

“I did so,” Tony said, feeling cornered and wishing he was at least two inches taller.

“I dare you,” said Susan.

“Okay,” Tony said. He felt as if he had a fever and he wished that somebody would come in quickly and interrupt them. But nobody came. He advanced warily and kissed Susan. His aim was off for the first kiss and he landed more or less on her chin. She bent her knees a little and this time he found her mouth. He kissed her quickly, just long enough to show that he wasn’t afraid to do it. “There,” he said, his arm still around her.

“Take your glasses off,” Susan said.

Tony took off his glasses and put them carefully on the phonograph. Then he kissed her again. She tasted pleasantly of spearmint chewing gum and he began to enjoy it.

Satisfied in her experiment, Susan stepped back. “This place is dead,” she said. She took a pocket mirror and a lipstick out of her blue jeans and fixed her mouth, making Tony wish that he didn’t feel so feverish and that he was at least five years older. “If there were any boys of my age group around,” said Susan, “I wouldn’t even be here.”

Tony stared at her, puzzled. He knew that he was hurt but he didn’t know why he should feel that way. Distractedly he picked up his telescope and stared at the sky. “The ceiling is lifting,” he said.

Susan studied him bleakly, the animal trainer deciding to try one last turn before closing the cage for the night. “Do you know what grownups do when they go to sleep together?” Susan asked.

“Sure,” Tony said falsely.

“What do they do?” Susan asked.

Tony remembered what young Barker had told him on this subject. But it was all so confused in his mind and Barker had been so vague about actual details that he was afraid that to try to repeat what he had heard to Susan would only show her how hopelessly ignorant he was. “Well,” he said uncomfortably, “I only know kind of …”

“Do you or don’t you?” Susan asked implacably.

Tony reached down and got his glasses and put them on again, fighting for time. “Jeff started to tell me something the other day,” he mumbled. “He said my father wanted him to. Something about … about seeds.”

“Seeds,” Susan snorted disdainfully. “That shows how much you know.”

“How do you know so much?” Tony asked, hoping to save himself by attack.

“I watched my mother and father one night,” said Susan. “My second father. They came home late and they thought I was sleeping and they forgot to close the door. Didn’t you ever watch your father and mother?”

“No,” said Tony. “They never do anything.”

“Sure they do,” said Susan.

“They do not.”

“Don’t be a kid,” Susan said wearily. “Everybody does.”

“Not my mother and father.” His voice was very high now. He didn’t know why he felt he had to deny it so hotly, but it had something to do with the grunting piglike noise Albert Barker had made.

“Stop saying that,” said Susan.

He felt himself on the verge of tears and he hated her for being there and talking like that. “You’re dirty,” he said. “You’re a dirty girl.”

“Don’t call me names,” Susan said warningly.

“You’re a dirty girl,” Tony repeated.

“Go see for yourself,” said Susan. “And not with your father either.”

“You’re a liar,” Tony said.

“The movies!” Susan made a contemptuous gesture with her hand. “There are no movies except on Saturday and Sunday. They can tell you anything, can’t they, and you’ll believe it? What a kid!” She made a savage, pointing gesture behind her. “You go down to his sister’s house and look through the window the way I did and you’ll see whether I’m a liar or not.”

Tony swung at her with the telescope, clumsily, but she was very quick and stronger than he was. They wrestled for the telescope for a moment and she tore it from his hands and tossed it onto the floor. They stood there facing each other, panting. “Don’t you hit me,” Susan said. She pushed him away disdainfully. “Baby,” she said. “Stupid little baby. And don’t forget to take your glasses.” She turned on her heel and went off, her hips swinging under the tight blue jeans.

Tony stared after her, biting back tears. Then, without knowing why he did it, he went into the house, into his mother’s room and sat down on his mother’s bed. The room smelled of his mother’s perfume and the special soap she used that she had sent up from New York. Then he jumped up and went out on the porch again. It was quiet and the clouds had come even lower and the lake looked meaner and grayer than before. He stood there in the silence for a moment, then jumped off the porch and began to run through the woods, along the lakeshore, in the direction of Jeff’s sister’s house.