The Centaurus

II

MY FATHER and my mother were talking. I wake now often to silence, beside you, with a pang of fear, after dreams that leave a sour wash of atheism in my stomach (last night I dreamt that Hitler, a white-haired crazy man with a protruding tongue, was found alive in Argentina). But in those days I always awoke to the sound of my parents talking, voices which even in agreement were contentious and full of life. I had been dreaming of a tree, and through the sound of their words I seemed to twist from an upright trunk into a boy lying in bed. I was fifteen and it was 1947. This morning their subject seemed to be new; I could not make out its form, only feel within myself, as if in my sleep I had swallowed something living that now woke within me, its restless weight of dread. “Don’t feel bad, Cassie,” my father said. His voice had a shy sound, as if he had turned his back. “I’ve been lucky to live this long.”

“George, if you’re just trying to frighten me, it’s not funny,” my mother answered. Her voice was so often expressive of what I wanted to hear that my own brain sometimes thought in her voice; indeed, as I grow older, now and then, usually in instances of exclamation, I hear her voice issue from my mouth.

I seemed now to know the subject: my father thought he was ill.

“Cassie,” he said, “don’t be frightened. I don’t want you to be frightened. I’m not frightened.” His voice blanched in repetition.

“You are frightened,” she said. “I wondered why you kept getting out of bed.” Her voice was white too. “I can feel the damn thing,” he said. “I can feel it in me like a clot of poison. I can’t pass it.”

This detail seemed to balk her. “You can’t feel such things,” she said at last, in a voice abruptly small, like a chastened little girl’s.

His voice gathered size. “I can feel it in me like a poison snake wrapped around my bowels. Brooo!l”

Lying in bed, I pictured my father making this noise- his head shaken so abruptly his jowls wagged, his lips a vehement blur. The picture was so vivid I smiled. Their con versation, as if they knew I had awakened, was closing up; the tone of their voices darkened. The little pale piteous bit, like a snowflake at the center of their marriage, which I had glimpsed, still half a tree, in first light, retreated behind the familiar opacities of clownish quarreling. I turned my head, as sleep’s heaviness lifted from it, and looked through the window. A few frost-ferns had sprouted from the lower corners of the upper panes. The early sun lay tan on the stubble of the big field beyond the dirt road. The road was pink. The bare trees took white on their sun side; a curious ruddiness was caught in their twigs. Everything looked frozen; the two strands of telephone wire looked locked into place in the sky’s blue ice. It was January and Monday. I began to understand. After every weekend, my father had to gather his nerve to go back to teaching. Dur ing the Christmas vacation he became slack and in a fury of screw-turning had to retighten himself. “The long haul,” he called the stretch between Christmas and Easter. Last week, the first week of the new year, something had happened that had frightened him. He had struck a boy with Zimmerman in the room: he had told us that much.

“Don’t be dramatic, George,” my mother said. “What does it feel like?”

“I know where I got it.” He had a way of not speaking to her, but performing in front of her, as if there were an invisible audience at her side. “The damn kids. I’ve caught their damn hate and I feel it like a spider in my big intestine.”

“It’s not hate, George,” she said, “it’s love.”

‘ “It’s hate, Cassie. I face it every day.”

“It’s love,” she insisted. “They want to love each other and you’re in their way. Nobody hates you. You’re the ideal man.”

“They hate my guts. They’d kill me, and now they’re doing it. Biff, bang. I’m through. Haul away the garbage.”

“George, if you feel this seriously,” my mother said, “I’d waste no time seeing Doc Appleton.”

Whenever my father received the sympathy he sought, he became brusque and antic. “I don’t want to see the bastard. He’ll tell me the truth.”

My mother must have turned away, because it was my grandfather who spoke. “Truth is ev-er a comfort,” he said. “Only the Devil loves lies.” His voice, interposed between the two others, seemed vaster but fainter than theirs, as if he were a giant calling from a distance.

“The Devil and me, Pop,” my father said. “I love lies, I tell ‘em all day. I’m paid to tell ‘em.”

Footsteps sounded on the uncarpeted kitchen floor. My mother was crossing to the bottom of the stairs, at the corner of the house diagonally opposite my bed. “Peter!” she called. “Are you awake?”

I closed my eyes and relaxed into my warm groove. The blankets my body had heated became soft chains dragging me down; my mouth held a stale ambrosia lulling me to sleep again. The lemon-yellow wallpaper, whose small dark medallions peered out from the pattern with faces like frowning cats, remained printed, negatively in red, on my eyelids. The dream I had been dreaming returned to me.

Penny and I had been beside a tree. The top buttons of her blouse were undone, pearl buttons, undone as they had been weeks ago, before Christmas vacation, in the dark Buick on the school parking lot, the heater ticking by our knees. But this was broad day, in a woods of slim trees pierced by light.

A blue jay, vivid in every feather, hung in the air motionless, like a hummingbird, but his wings stiffly at his sides, his eye alert like a bead of black glass. When he moved, it was like a stuffed bird being twitched on a string; but he was definitely alive.

“Peter, time to get u-up!”

Her wrist was in my lap, I was stroking the inside of her forearm. Stroking and stroking with a patience drawn thinner and thinner. Her silk sleeve was pushed up from the green-veined skin. The rest of the class seemed gathered about us in the woods, watching; though there was no sense of faces. She leaned forward, my Penny, my little dumb, worried Penny. Suddenly, thickly, I loved her. A wonderful honey gathered in my groin. Her flecked green irises were perfect circles with worry; an inner bit of her lower lip, glimmering with moisture, glittered nervously: the aura was like that when, a month ago in that dark car, I found my hand between her warm thighs which were pressed together; it seemed to dawn on her slowly that my hand was there, for a minute passed before she begged, “Don’t,” and when I withdrew my hand, she looked at me like that. Only that was in shadow and this was in brilliant light. The pores of her nose showed. She was unnaturally still; something was going wrong.

The back of my left hand felt hot and moist as it had when it was pulled from between her thighs; sap flowed from my extremities toward the fork of my body. I seemed delicately distended in the midst of several processes. When from downstairs a loud bumble came crashing, signaling that my father was going to look at the kitchen clock, I wanted to cry, No, wait-

“Hey Cassie, tell the kid it’s seven-seventeen. I left a whole mess of papers to correct, I got to be there at eight. Zimmerman’ll have my neck.”

That was it, yes; and in the dream it didn’t even seem strange. She became the tree. I was leaning my face against the tree trunk, certain it was her. The last thing I dreamed was the bark of the tree: the crusty ridges and in the black cracks between them tiny green flecks of lichen. Her. My Lord, it was her: help me. Give her back to me.

“Peter! Are you trying to torment your father?”

“No! I’m up. For Heaven’s sake.”

“Well then get up. Get up. I mean it, young man. Now.”

I stretched and my body widened into the cool margins of the bed. The sap ebbed. The touching thing was, in the dream, she had known the change was overtaking her, she had felt her fingers turning to leaves, had wanted to tell me (her irises so round) but had not, had protected me, had gone under to wood without a word. And there was that in Penny, which now the dream made vivid to me, what I had hardly felt before, a sheltering love, young as she was, recent as our touching was, little as I gave her; she would sacrifice for me. And I exulted through my length even as I wondered why. This was a fresh patch of paint in my life.

“Rise and shine, my little sunbeam!”

My mother had reverted to a cozy approach. I knew the shiny gray paint of my windowsill would be cold as ice if I reached out my hand and touched it. The sun had fraction ally climbed higher. The dirt road had become a band of glowing salmon. On this side of the road, our side lawn was a sheet of old sandpaper that had rubbed green paint. It had not snowed yet this winter. Maybe this would be the winter when it would not snow. Was there ever such a one?

“Peter!”

My mother’s voice had the true tiger in it, and without thinking I leaped from bed. Careful to keep my skin from touching anything hard, using my fingertips to pull the glass bureau knobs like faceted crystals of frozen ammonia, I set about dressing. The house was a half-improved farmhouse. The upstairs was unheated. I stripped out of my pajamas and stood a moment relishing my martyrdom of nakedness: it seemed a smarting criticism of our moving to this primitive place. It had been my mother’s idea. She loved Nature. I stood naked, as if exposing her folly to the world.

Had the world been watching, it would have been startled, for my belly, as if pecked by a great bird, was dotted with red scabs the size of coins. Psoriasis. The very name of the allergy, so foreign, so twisty in the mouth, so apt to prompt stammering, intensified the humiliation. “Humiliation,”

“allergy”-I never knew what to call it. It was not a disease, because I generated it out of myself. As an allergy, it was sensitive to almost everything: chocolate, potato chips, starch, sugar, frying grease, nervous excitement, dryness, darkness, pressure, enclosure, the temperate climate-allergic, in fact, to life itself. My mother, from whom I had inherited it, sometimes called it a “handicap.” I found this insulting. After all, it was her fault; only females transmitted it to their children. Had my father, whose tall body sagged in folds of pure white, been my mother, my skin would have been blame less. “Handicap” savored of subtraction, and this was an addition, something extra added to me. I enjoyed at this age a strange innocence about suffering; I believed it was necessary to men. It seemed to be all about me and there was something menacing in my apparent exception. I had never broken a bone, I was bright, my parents openly loved me. In my conceit I believed myself to be wickedly lucky. So I had come to this conclusion about my psoriasis: it was a curse. God, to make me a man, had blessed me with a rhythmic curse that breathed in and out with His seasons. The summer sun melted my scabs; by September my chest and legs were clear but for a very faint dappling, invisibly pale seeds which the long dry shadow of the fall and winter would bring again to bloom. The curse reached its climax of flower in the spring; but then the strengthening sun promised cure. January was a hopeless time. My elbows and knees, pressure areas of skin, were capped with crust; on my ankles, where the embrace of my socks encouraged the scabs, they angrily ran together in a kind of pink bark. My forearms were mottled enough so that I could not turn my shirt cuffs back, in two natty folds, like other boys. Otherwise, when I was in clothes, my disguise as a normal human being was good. On my face, God had relented; except for traces along the hairline which I let my hair fall forward to cover, my face was clear. Also my hands, except for an unnoticeable stippling of the fingernails. Whereas some of my mother’s fingernails were eaten down to the quick by what looked like yellow rot.

Flames of cold flickered across my skin; the little proofs of my sex were contracted into a tense cluster. Whatever in me was normally animal reassured me; I loved the pubic hairs that had at last appeared. Reddish-black, metallic, they curled, too few to make a bush, tight as springs in the lemon-tinted cold. I hated being hairless; I felt defenseless in the locker room when, scurrying to hide my mantle of spots, I saw that my classmates had already donned an armor of fur.

Goosebumps stiffened the backs of my arms; I rubbed them briskly, and then like a miser luxuriously counting his coins I ran my palms across my abdomen. For the innermost secret, the final turn of my shame was that the texture of my psoriasis-delicately raised islands making the surrounding smoothness silver, constellations of roughness whose un even spacing on my body seemed living intervals of pause and motion-privately pleased me. The delight of feeling a large flake yield and part from the body under the insistence of a fingernail must be experienced to be forgiven.. Only the medallions watched. I went to the bureau and found a pair of Jockey shorts that still had life in the elastic. I put on a T shirt backwards. “You’ll outlive me, Pop,” my father downstairs said loudly. “I’m carrying death in my bowels.” His saying this so bluntly affected my own innards, made them feel slippery and urgent.

“The boy’s up, George,” my mother said. “You can stop the performance any time.” Her voice had left the bottom of the stairs.

“Huh? You think I’ll upset the kid?”

My father had turned fifty just before Christmas; he had always said he would never live to be fifty. Breaking the barrier had unbridled his tongue, as if, being in mathematical fact dead, nothing he said mattered. His ghostly freedom at times did frighten me.

I stood before the closet deliberating. Perhaps I foresaw that I would be wearing for a long time the clothes I chose. Perhaps the weight of the coming ordeal made me slow. Scolding my hesitation, a sneeze gathered in the bridge of my nose and itched. My bladder ached sweetly. I took from their hanger the gray flannel slacks, though their crease was poor. I had three pairs of slacks; the brown were at the cleaners and the blue were disgraced by a faint pallor at the bottom of the fly. It was a mystery to me, and I always felt unfairly condemned when they came back from the cleaners with an insulting printed slip about No Responsibility For Ineradicable Spots.

As for shirts, today the red seemed the one. I rarely wore it because its bright shoulders pointed up the white specks that showered from my scalp like a snow of dandruff. It was not dandruff, I wanted to tell everybody, as if this exonerated me. But I would be safe if I remembered not to scratch my head, and anyway a generous impulse brushed the risk aside. I would carry to my classmates on this bitter day a gift of scarlet, a giant spark, a two-pocketed emblem of heat. Its wool sleeves felt grateful sliding onto my arms. It was an eight-dollar shirt; my mother couldn’t understand why I never wore it. She rarely seemed conscious of my “handicap,” and when she was, it was with a too-bold solicitude, as if it were a piece of her. Her own case, except for her fingernails and scalp, hardly existed in comparison with mine. I did not resent this; she suffered in other ways.

My father was saying, “No, Cassie, Pop should outlive me. He’s led a good life. Pop Kramer deserves to live forever.”

Without listening for her reply, I knew how my mother would take this-as a jab at her father for living so long, for continuing, year after year, to be a dependent burden. She believed that my father was deliberately trying to heckle the old man into his grave. Was she right? Though many things fitted her theories, I never believed them. They were too neat and too grim.

I knew from the noise at the sink below me that she had turned away without answering. I could picture her, her neck mottled with anger, the wings of her nose white and the skin above them pulsing. I seemed to ride the waves of emotion below me. As I sat on the edge of my bed to put on my socks, the old wooden floor lifted under my foot.

My grandfather said, “We never know when we will be called. The world never knows who is needed above.”

“Well I know sure as hell they don’t need me,” my father said. “If there’s anything God doesn’t need, it’s my ugly face to look at.”

“He knows how much we need you, George.”

“You don’t need me, Cassie. You’d be better off with me on the dump. My father died at forty-nine and it was the best thing he ever did for us.”

“Your father was a disappointed man” my mother told him. “Why should you be disappointed? You have a wonderful son, a beautiful farm, an adoring wife-”

“Once the old man was in his grave,” my father continued, “my mother really cut loose. Those were the happiest years of her life. She was a super-woman, Pop.”

“I think it’s so sad,” my mother said, “that they don’t al low men to marry their mothers.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Cassie. My mother made life a hell on earth for him. She ate that man raw.”

One sock had a hole which I tucked deep into the heel of the loafer. This was Monday, and in my sock drawer there was nothing but orphans and a heavy English wool pair my Aunt Alma had sent me this Christmas from Troy, New York. She was a children’s clothes buyer for a department store there. I guessed that these socks she had sent were ex pensive, but when I put them on they were so bulky they made my toenails feel ingrown, so I never wore them. It was a vanity of mine to have my loafers small, size 10 ½ instead of 11, which would have been proper. I hated to have big feet; I wanted to have a dancer’s quick and subtle hooves.

Tapping heel and toe, I left my room and passed through my parents’ room. The covers of their bed were tossed back savagely, exposing a doubly troughed mattress. The top of their scarred bureau was covered with combs, in all sizes and colors of plastic, that my father had scavenged from the high school Lost and Found department. He was always bringing junk like this home, as if he were burlesquing his role of provider.

The country staircase, descending between a plaster wall and a wood partition, was narrow and steep. At the bottom, the steps curved in narrow worn wedges; there should have been a railing. My father was sure that my grandfather with his clouded downward vision was going to fall some day; he kept vowing to put up a bannister. He had even bought the bannister, for a dollar in an Alton junk shop. But it leaned forgotten in the barn. Most of my father’s projects around this place were like that. Tripping in grace notes like Fred Astaire, I went downstairs, in my descent stroking the bare plaster on my right. So smooth-skinned, this wall shallowly undulated like the flank of a great calm creature alive with the chill communicated through stone from the outdoors. The walls of this house were thick sand stone uplifted by mythically strong masons a century ago.

“Close the stair door,” my mother said. We didn’t want heat to escape the downstairs.

I can still see everything. The downstairs was two long rooms, the kitchen and the living-room, connected by two doorways side by side. The kitchen floor was of broad old pine boards, recently sanded and waxed. A hot-air register cut into these boards at the foot of the stairs breathed warmly on my ankles. A newspaper, the Alton Sun, that had fallen to the floor kept lifting one corner in the draft, as if begging to be read. Our house was full of newspapers and magazines; they flooded the windowsills and spilled from the sofa. My father brought them home by the bale; they had some connection with the Boy Scout scrap-paper drive, but never seemed to get delivered. Instead they slithered around waiting to be read, and on an evening when he was caught in the house with nowhere to go, my father would disconsolately plough through a whole pile. He could read at terrific speed, and claimed never to learn or remember a thing.

“I hate to get you up, Peter,” he called to me. “If there’s anything a kid your age needs, it’s sleep.”

I couldn’t see him; he was in the living-room. Through the first doorway I glimpsed three chunks of cherry wood burning in the fireplace, though the new furnace in the basement was running as well. In the narrow space of kitchen wall between the two doorways hung a painting I had done of our back yard in Olingr. My mother’s shoulder eclipsed it. In the country she had taken to wearing a heavy-knit man’s sweater, though in her youth, and in Olinger, when she was slimmer, and when I first recognized her as my mother, she had been what they called in the county a “fancy dresser.” With a click like an unspoken scolding she set a tumbler of orange juice at my place at the table. Between the table and the wall was a kind of corridor she filled. Balked by her body, I stamped my foot. She moved away. I walked past her and past the second doorway, through which I glimpsed my grandfather slumped on the sofa beside a stack of magazines, his head bowed as if in prayer or sleep and his fastidious old hands daintily folded across the belly of his soft gray sweater. I walked past the high mantel where two clocks said 7:30 and 7:23 respectively. The faster clock was red and electric and plastic and had been purchased by my father at a discount. The slower was dark and wooden and ornamented and key-wound and had been inherited from my grandfather’s father, a man long dead when I was born. The older clock sat on the mantel; the electric was hung on a nail below. I went past the white slab of the new refrigerator’s side and out the doors. There were two; the door and the storm door, a wide sandstone sill compelling a space between them. From between the two, I heard my father saying, “Jesus Pop, when I was a kid, I never had any sleep at all. That’s why I’m in agony now.”

There was a little cement porch where our pump stood. Though we had electricity, we had no indoor plumbing yet. The ground beyond the porch, damp in summer, had contracted in freezing, so the brittle grass contained crisp caves that snapped shut under my feet. Eddies of frost like paralyzed mist whitened the long grass of the orchard slope. I went behind a forsythia bush too close to the house. My mother often complained about the stink; the country represented purity to her but I couldn’t take her seriously. As far as I could see, the land was built on rot and excrement.

I suffered a grotesque vision of my urine freezing in mid air and becoming attached to me. In fact, it steamed on the mulch intimately flooring the interlaced petticoats of the leaf less forsythia bush. Lady in her pen scrabbled out of her house, spilling straw, and pushed her black nostrils through the wire fencing to look at me. “Good morning,” I said, gentlemanly. When I went to the pen, she leaped high in the air, and when I thrust my hands through the frosty lattice of metal to stroke her, she kept wiggling and threatening to uncoil into another leap. Her coat was fluffed against the cold and bits and wands of straw clung in it. The texture of her throat was feathery, the top of her head waxen. Under her hair, her bones and muscles felt tepid and slender. From the way she kept hungrily twisting her long skull, as if to seize more of my touch, I was afraid my fingers would slip into her eyes, which protruded so vulnerably; lenses of dark jelly. “How are you?” I asked. “Sleep well? Dream of rabbits? Rabbits!” It was delicious, the way my voice made her swirl, thrust, wag and whine.

As I squatted, the cold came up behind me and squeezed my back. When I stood, the squares of wire my hands had touched were black, my skin having melted the patina of frost. Lady leaped like a spring released. She came down with a foot on her pan and flipped it over and I expected to see water spill. But the water was ice solid with the pan. For the instant before my brain caught up with my eyes, it seemed a miracle.

Now the air, unflawed by any motion of wind, began to cake around me, and I moved quickly. My toothbrush, glazed rigid, was of a piece with the aluminum holder screwed to the porch post. I snapped it free. The pump dragged dry for four heaves of the handle. The water, on the fifth stroke rising from deep in the stricken earth, smoked faintly as it splashed the grooved brown glacier that had built up in the pump trough. The rusty water purged the brush of its stiff jacket, but when I put it in my mouth it was like a flavorless square lollipop. My molars stung along the edges of their fillings. The toothpaste secreted in the bristles melted into a mint taste. All the time, Lady watched my performance with a wild delight that swelled and twitched her body, and when I spat, she barked in applause, each bark a puff of frost. I replaced the brush and bowed, and had the satisfaction of hearing the applause continue as I retired behind the double curtain, the storm door and the main door.

The clocks now said 7:35 and 7:28. The great wash of warm air within the honey-colored kitchen made my movements lazy, though the clocks jabbed at me. “Why is the dog barking?” my mother asked.

“She’s freezing to death,” I said. “It’s too cold out there; why can’t she come in?”

“Cruellest thing you can do to a dog, Peter,” my father called, invisible. “Get her used to being in the house she’ll die of pneumonia like the last dog we had. Don’t take an animal out of nature. Hey Cassie: what time is it?”

“Which clock?”

“My clock.”

“A little after seven-thirty. The other has it before.”

“We gotta go, kid. We gotta move.”

My mother said to me, “Eat up, Peter,” and him, “That cheap clock of yours runs ahead of time, George. Grandad’s clock says you have five minutes.”

“That’s not a cheap clock. That clock was thirteen dollars retail, Cassie. It’s General Electric. If it says twenty of, I’m late already. Gobble your coffee, kid. Time and tide for no man wait.”

“For a man with a spider in his bowel,” my mother said, “you’re awfully full of pep.” To me she said, “Peter, don’t you hear your father?”

I had been admiring a section of lavender shadow under the walnut tree in my painting of the old yard. I had loved that tree; when I was a child there had been a swing attached to the limb that was just a scumble of almost-black in the picture. Looking at this streak of black, I relived the very swipe of my palette knife, one second of my life that in a remarkable way had held firm. It was this firmness, I think, this potential fixing of a few passing seconds, that attracted me, at the age of five, to art. For it is at about that age, isn’t it, that it sinks in upon us that things do, if not die, certainly change, wiggle, slide, retreat, and, like the dabs of sunlight on the bricks under a grape arbor on a breezy June day, shuffle out of all identity?

“Peter.” My mother said it in the voice that had no margin left.

I drank the orange juice in two swigs and said, to worry her, “The poor dog is out there without even anything to drink, she’s just licking this big chunk of ice in her pan.”

My grandfather stirred in the other room and pronounced, “Now that was a favorite saying of Jake Beam’s, who used to be stationmaster at the old Bertha Furnace station, before they discontinued the passenger station. Time and tide,’ he would say, so solemn, ‘and the Alton Railroad wait for no man.’”

“Yeah but Pop,” my father said, “did you ever stop to think, does any man wait for time and tide?”

At this absurdity my grandfather fell silent, and my mother, carrying a pot of simmering water for my coffee, went into the other room to defend him. “George,” she said, “why don’t you go out and start the car instead of tormenting everybody with your nonsense?”

“Huh?” he said. “Did I hurt Pop’s feelings? Pop, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I meant what I said. I’ve been hearing that time and tide line all my life, and I don’t know what it means. What does it mean? You ask anybody, and the bastards won’t tell you. But they won’t be honest. They won’t admit they don’t know.”

“Why, it means,” my mother said, and then hesitated, finding, as I had, that my father’s anxious curiosity had quite drained-the-saying’s simple sense away, “it means we can’t have the impossible.”

“No, now look,” my father said, going on in that slightly high voice that forever sought a handhold on sheer surfaces, “I was a minister’s son. I was brought up to believe, and I still believe it, that God made Man as the last best thing in His Creation. If that’s the case, who are this time and tide that are so almighty superior to us?”

My mother came back into the kitchen, bent over me, and poured the smoking water into my cup. I snickered up at her conspiratorially; my father was often a joke between us. But she kept her eyes on my cup as, holding the handle of the pan with a flowered potholder, she filled it without spilling. The brown powder, Maxwell’s Instant, made a tiny terrain on the surface of steaming water, and then dissolved, dyeing the water black. My mother stirred with my spoon and a spiral of tan suds revolved in the cup. “Eat your cereal, Peter,” she said.

“I can’t,” I told her. “I’m too upset. My stomach hurts.” I wanted revenge for her snub of my flirting overture. It dismayed me that my father, that silly sad man whom I thought our romance had long since excluded, had this morning stolen the chief place in her mind.

He was saying, “Pop, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings; it’s just that those old expressions get me so goddam mad I see red when I hear ‘em. They’re so damn smug, is what gets my goat. If those old peasants or whoever the hell invented ‘em have something to say to me, I wish they’d come right out and say it.”

“George, it was you,” my mother called, “who brought it

up in the first place.” He changed the subject. “Hey what time is it?” The milk was too cold, the coffee too hot. I took a sip and scalded my palate; following this the chill mush of the corn flakes was nauseous. As if to make good my lie, my stomach did begin to hurt; the ticking minutes pinched it.

“I’m ready,” I shouted, “I’m ready, I’m ready.” I was like my father in performing for an unseen audience, but his was far off and needed to be shouted at, whereas mine was just over the footlights. Boy, clutching stomach comically, crosses stage left. I went into the living-room to gather up my coat and my books. My pea jacket, crusty, faithful, was hanging behind one door. My father was sitting in a rocking chair turned away from the fire that hissed and danced in the fire place. He had on his overcoat, a tattered checkered castoff with mismatching buttons, which he had rescued from a church sale, though it was too small and barely reached his knees. On his head he wore a hideous blue knitted cap that he had plucked out of a trash barrel at school. Pulled down over his ears, it made him look like an overgrown dimwit in a comic strip. He had just recently taken to wearing this cap, and I wondered why. He still had a full head of hair, barely touched by gray. Understand that to me my father seemed changeless. In fact he did look younger than his years. When he turned his head toward me, his face was that of a sly street urchin prematurely toughened. He had been a child in an humble neighborhood of Passaic. His face, compounded of shiny lumps and sallow slack folds, to me seemed both tender and brutal, wise and unseeing; it was still dignified by the great distance that in the beginning had lifted it halfway to the sky. Once I had stood beside his knees on the brick walk leading to the grape arbor of our house in Olinger and felt him look level into the tops of the horsechestnut trees and believed that nothing could eyer go wrong as long as we stood so.

“Your books are on the windowsill,” he said. “Did you eat your cereal?”

I rebuked him sharply. “There isn’t time, you keep telling me.” I gathered up my books. Faded blue Latin, its covers all but unhinged. Smart red algebra, freshly issued this year; every time I turned a page, the paper released a tangy virginal scent. And a weary big gray book, General Science, my father’s subject. Its cover was stamped with a triangular design of a dinosaur, an atom blazing like a star, and a microscope. On its side and butts a previous possessor had lettered in blue ink the huge word FIDO. The size of this inscription seemed pathetic and abject, like an abandoned religious monument. Fido Hornbecker had been a football hero when I was in the seventh grade. In the list of names written inside the cover, where my own was last, I had never been able to locate the girl who had loved him. In five years, I was the first boy to be assigned the book. The four names written above mine-

Mary Heffner

Evelyn Mays “Bitsy”

Rhea Furstweibler

Phyllis L. Gerhardt-

had melted in my mind into one nymph with inconstant handwriting. Maybe they had all loved Fido. “Time stolen from food,” my grandfather said, “is time stolen from yourself.”

“The kid’s like I am, Pop,” my father said. “I never had time to eat either. Get your carcass away from the table is all I ever heard. Poverty’s a terrible thing.”

My grandfather’s hands were folding and unfolding gingerly and his hightop button shoes twiddled in agitation. He was an ideal foil for my father because as a very old man he imagined that, if listened to, he could provide all answers and soothe all uncertainties. “I would see Doc Appleton,” he pronounced, clearing his throat with extreme delicacy, as if his phlegm were Japanese paper. “I knew his father well. The Appletons have been in the county since the beginning.” He was sitting bathed in white winter windowlight and seemed, in comparison with my father’s bullet-headed shape bulking black against the flickering fire, a more finely evolved creature.

My father stood up. “All he does, Pop, when I go to him, is brag about himself.”

There was a flurry in the kitchen. Doors squeaked and slammed; hot claws scrabbled on the wood floor. The dog came racing into the living-room. Lady seemed to hover on the carpet, crouched low as if whipped by joy. Her feet in a frantic swimming motion scratched one spot on the faded purple carpet that was never so worn it could not release under friction further small rolls of lavender fluff-”mice,” my grandmother had called them, when this carpet lay in Olinger and she was alive. Lady was so happy to be let in doors she was a bomb of good news, a furry bustle of vortical ecstasy that in vibrating emitted the scent of a skunk she had killed a week ago. Hunting a god, she started toward my father, veered past my legs, jumped on the sofa, and in frantic gratitude licked my grandfather’s face.

Along his long life’s walks he had had bitter experiences with dogs and feared them. “Hyar, hyaar” he protested, pulling his face away and lifting his shapely dry hands against Lady’s white chest. His voice was shocking in its guttural force, as if it arose from a savage darkness none of the rest of us had ever known.

The dog pressed her twittering muzzle into his ear and her rump wagged so wildly the magazines began to slide to the floor. We were all churned into motion; my father rose to the rescue but before he could reach the sofa my grandfather lifted himself to his feet. We all three, while the dog swirled underfoot, pressed into the kitchen.

To my mother we must have looked like an accusing posse; she shouted at us, “I let her in because I couldn’t stand to hear her bark.” She seemed nearly in tears; I was amazed. My own anxiety for the dog had been pretended. I hadn’t heard her continue barking. A glance at my mother’s mottled throat told me that she was angry. Suddenly I wanted to get out; she had injected into the confusion a shrill heat that made everything cling. I rarely knew exactly why she was mad; it would come and go like weather. Was it really that my father and grandfather absurdly debating sounded to her like murder? Was it something I had done, my arrogant slowness? Anxious to exempt myself from her rage, I sat down in my stiff pea jacket and tried the coffee again. It was still too hot. A sip seared my sense of taste away.

“Jesus kid,” my father said. “It’s ten to. I’ll lose my job if we don’t move.”

“That’s your clock, George,” my mother said. Since she was defending me, I could not be the cause of her anger. “Our clock says you have seventeen minutes.”

“Your clock’s wrong,” he told her. “Zimmerman’s after my hide.”

“Coming, coming,” I said, and stood up. The first bell rang at eight-twenty. It took twenty minutes to drive to Olinger. I felt squeezed in the dwindling time. My stomach ground its empty sides together.

My grandfather worked his way over to the refrigerator and from its top took the gaudy loaf of Maier’s Bread. He moved with a pronounced and elaborate air of being in conspicuous that made us all watch him. He unfolded the wax paper and removed a slice of white bread, which he then folded once and tidily tucked entire into his mouth. His mouth’s elasticity was a marvel; a toothless chasm appeared under his ash-colored mustache to receive the bread in one bite. The calm cannibalism of this trick always infuriated my mother. “Pop,” she said, “can’t you wait until they’re out of the house before you start tormenting the bread?”

I took a last sip of the scalding coffee and pushed toward the door. We were all jammed into the little area of linoleum bounded by the door, the wall where the clocks ticked and hummed, the refrigerator, and the sink. The congestion was intense. My mother struggled to get past her father to the stove. He drew himself in and his dark husk seemed impaled on the refrigerator door. My father stood fast, by far the tallest of us, and over our heads announced to his invisible audience, “Off to the slaughterhouse. Those damn kids have put their hate right into my bowels.”

“He rattles at that bread all day until I think I have rats in my brain,” my mother protested, and, the psoriatic rim of her hairline flaring red, she squeezed past Grampop and pressed a cold piece of toast and a banana at me. I had to shift my books to take them into my hands. “My poor unfed boy,” she said. “My poor only jewel.”

“Off to the hate-factory,” my father called, to goad me on.

Bewildered, anxious to please my mother, I had paused to eat a bite from the cold toast.

“If there’s anything I hate,” my mother said, half to me, half to the ceiling, while my father bent forward and touched her cheek with one of his rare kisses, “it’s a man who hates sex.”

My grandfather lifted his hands in his squeezed space and in a voice muffled by bread pronounced, “Blessings on thee.”

He never failed to say it, just as, in the early evening, when he climbed “the wooden hill,” he would call down to us, “Pleasant dreams.” His hands were daintily lifted in benediction, a gesture also of surrender and, as if tiny angels had been clutched in them, release. His hands were what I knew best of him, for, the one in the family with the youngest eyes, it was my job to remove with my mother’s tweezers the microscopic brown thorns that on his weed-pulling walks around our farm would gather in the dry, sensitive, translucently mottled skin of his palms.

“Thanks, Pop, we’ll need ‘em,” my father said, wrenching the door open with a quick undercurrent of splintering. He never turned the knob quite enough, so the catch always resisted. “My goose is cooked,” he said, glancing at his clock. My mother’s cheek brushed mine as I followed him.

“And if there’s anything I hate in my house” she called after my father, “it’s cheap red clocks”

Safe on the porch, my father striding around the corner, I looked back, which was a mistake. The toast in my mouth turned salty at the sight. My mother, in the momentum of her last cry, went to the wall and, silent through the glass, tore the electric clock from its nail on the wall and made as if to dash it to the floor but then, instead, hugged it with its trailing cord like a baby to her bosom, her cheeks wetly shining. Helplessly her eyes widened, confronting mine. She had been a beautiful young woman and her eyes had not aged. Each day her plight seemed to startle her afresh. Behind her, her father, his head bowed obsequiously, his elastic jaws munching, shuffled across the floor back to his place in the living-room. I wanted to move my face into some expression of consolation or humorous communication but felt it frozen with fear. Fear for her and of her.

And yet, love, do not think that our life together, for all its mutual frustration, was not good. It was good. We moved, somehow, on a firm stage, resonant with metaphor. When my grandmother lay dying in Olinger, and I was a child, I heard her ask in a feeble voice, “Will I be a little debil?” Then she took a sip of wine and in the morning she was dead. Yes. We lived in God’s sight.

My father was striding across the sandpaper lawn. I chased him. The little tummocks raised by moles in warm weather made it buckle in spots. The barn wall was full in the sun, a high dappled pentagon. “Mother almost smashed the clock,” I told him when I caught up. I meant this to shame him. “She’s in a funny mood,” he said. “Your mother’s a real femme, Peter. If I’d been any kind of man I would have put her on the burlesque stage when she was young.”

“She thinks you tease Grampop.”

“Huh? Does she? I’m wild about Pop Kramer. He’s the nicest man I ever knew. I worship that man.”

Words seemed whittled and diminished by the still blue volumes of cold air that clove our cheeks. Our black Buick, a ‘36 four-door, waited by the barn, facing downhill. That car had had a beautiful swanky grille; my father, unexpectedly-for material things meant little to him-had taken childish pride in those slim parallels of chrome. Last fall, Ray Deifendorfs muddy old Chewy had stalled on the high school lot and my father with his usual impulsive Christianity had volunteered to push him and, just when they had reached a good speed, Deifendorf through some stupidity braked, and our car’s grille smashed on Deifendorfs bumper. I wasn’t there. Deifendorf himself told me, laughing, how my father had rushed around to the front and gathered up all the bits of broken metal, muttering to himself, “Maybe they can weld it together, maybe Hummel can weld it together.” This hopelessly shattered grille. The way Deifendorf told it I had to laugh too.

The bright fragments still rode around in the trunk, and our car’s face had jagged front teeth. It was a long, heavy car, and the cylinders needed to be rebored. Also it needed a new battery. My father and I got in and he pulled out the choke and switched on the ignition and listened, head cocked, to the starter churn the stiff motor. There was frost on the windshield that made the interior dim. The resurrection felt impossible. We listened so intently that a common picture seemed crystallized between our heads, of the dutiful brown rod straining forward in its mysterious brown cavern, skid ding past the zenith of its revolution, and retreating, rejected. There was not even a ghost of a spark. I closed my eyes to make a quick prayer and heard my father say, “Jesus kid, we’re in trouble.” He got out and frantically scraped at the windshield frost with his fingernails until he had cleared a patch for the driver’s vision. I got out on my side and, heaving together on opposite doorframes, we pushed. Once. Twice. An immense third time.

With a faint rending noise the tires came loose from the frozen earth of the barn ramp. The resistance of the car’s weight diminished; sluggishly we were gliding downhill. We both hopped in, the doors slammed, and the car picked up speed on the gravel road that turned and dipped sharply around the barn. The stones crackled like slowly breaking ice under our tires. With a dignified acceleration the car swallowed the steepest part of the incline, my father let the clutch in, the chassis jerked, the motor coughed, caught, caught, and we were aloft, winging along the pink straight away between a pale green meadow and a fallow flat field. Our road was so little travelled that in the center it had a mane of weeds. My father’s grim lips half-relaxed. He poured shivering gasoline into the hungry motor. If we stalled now, we would be out of luck, for we were on the level and there would be no more coasting. He pushed the choke halfway in. Our motor purred in a higher key. Through the clear margins of the sheet of frost on our windshield I could see forward; we were approaching the edge of our land. Our meadow ended where the land lifted. Our gallant black hood sailed into the sharp little rise of road, gulped it down, stones and all, and spat it out behind us. On our right, Silas Schoelkopf’s mailbox saluted us with a stiff red flag. We had escaped our land. I looked back: our home was a little set of buildings lodged on the fading side of the valley. The barn overhang and the chicken house were gentle red. The stuccoed cube where we had slept released like a last scrap of dreaming a twist of smoke that told blue against the purple woods. The road dipped again, our farm disappeared, and we were unpursued. Schoelkopf had a pond, and ducks the color of old piano keys were walking on the ice. On our left, Jesse Flagler’s high whitewashed barn seemed to toss a mouthful of hay in our direction. I glimpsed the round brown eye of a breathing cow.

The dirt road came up to Route 122 at a treacherous grade where it was easy to stall. Here there was a row of mailboxes like a street of birdhouses, a stop sign riddled with rusty bullet-holes, and a lop-limbed apple tree. My father glanced down the highway and guessed it was empty; without touching the brake he bounced us over the final hurdle of rutted dirt. We were high and safe on firm macadam. He went back into second gear, made the motor roar, shifted to third, and the Buick exulted. It was eleven miles to Olinger. From this point on, the journey felt downhill. I ate half of the toast. The cold crumbs got all over my books and lap. I peeled the banana and ate it all, more to please my mother than to satisfy any hunger, and rolled down the window enough to slip the peel and the rest of the toast into the skimming countryside.

Round and rectangular and octagonal advertisements spoke from the edges of. the farmland. One weathered barn’s whole side said pony cut plug. The fields where in summer Amish families in bonnets and black hats harvested tomatoes and where fat men on narrow-nosed scarlet tractors swayed through acres of barley seemed, shorn of crops, painfully exposed; they begged the sky to blanket them with snow. At a curve a two-pump gasoline shack wrapped in tattered soft-drink posters limped into our path and fell away wheeling, reappearing in the rear-view mirror ludicrously shrunk, its splotched flying horse sign illegible and dwindling. A dip in the highway made the door of the glove compartment tingle. We passed through Firetown. The village proper was four sandstone houses; here the old squirearchy of Fire Town ship had lived. One of these houses for fifty years had been the Ten Mile Inn, and there was still a hitching rail by the porch. The windows were boarded. Beyond this kernel, the village thinned into more recent developments: a cinder-block store where they sold beer by the case; two new houses with high foundations and no front steps, though families lived in both; a rambling hunting hut well back from the road, where on weekends parties of many men and sometimes a few women came and made the lights burn; some pre-war com position-shingled houses, built tall as if in a city and filled, my grandfather maintained, with illegitimate children dying of malnutrition. We passed an orange school bus waddling in the opposite direction, toward the township school. I lived now in this school’s district, but my father’s teaching at Olinger High saved me from going there. I was frightened of the children in the land around us. My mother had made me join the 4-H Club. My fellow members had slanting oval eyes and smooth dun skins. The dull innocence of some and the viciously detailed knowingness of others struck me as equally savage and remote from my highly civilized aspirations. We met in the church basement, and after an hour of slides illuminating cattle diseases and corn pests, I would sweat with claustrophobia, and swim into the cold air and plunge at home into my book of Vermeer reproductions like a close-to-drowned man clinging to the beach.

The cemetery appeared on our right; tablet-shaped tomb stones rode at various tilts the settling tummocks. Then the stout sandstone steeple of the Firetown Lutheran Church leaped higher than the trees and dipped its new cross an instant into the sun. My grandfather had helped build that steeple; he had pushed the great stones in a wheelbarrow up a narrow path of bending planks. He had often described to us, with exquisite indications of his fingers, how those planks had bent beneath his weight.

My father and I began going down Fire Hill, the longer, and less steep, of the two hills on the road to Olinger and Alton. About halfway down, the embankment foliage fell away, and a wonderful view opened up. I saw across a little valley like the background of a Durer. Lording it over a few acres of knolls and undulations draped with gray fences and dotted with rocks like brown sheep, there was a small house that seemed to have grown from the land. This little house presented to the view from the highway a broad bottle-shaped chimney built up one wall from field stones and newly whitewashed. And out of this broad chimney, very white, its rough bulk linking the flat wall to the curving land, the thinnest trace of smoke declared that someone lived here. I supposed that all this country looked this way when my grandfather helped raise the steeple.

My father pushed the choke all the way in. The needle of the temperature gauge seemed stuck in its bed on the left side of the dial; the heater refused to declare itself. His hands as they controlled the car moved with a pained quickness across the metal and hard rubber. “Where are your gloves?” I asked him.

“In the back, aren’t they?”

I turned and looked; on the back seat the leather gloves I had bought him for Christmas lay curled palms up between a rumpled road map and a snarl of baling rope. I had paid nearly nine dollars for them. The money came from a little “art school” account I had started that summer with money earned from my 4-H project, a patch of strawberries. I had spent so much for these gloves I only bought my mother a book and my grandfather a handkerchief; I so wanted my father to care about his clothes and his comfort, like the fathers of my friends. And the gloves had fit. He wore them the first day, and then they rested in the front seat, and then when one day three people crowded into the front seat, they were tossed into the back. “Why don’t you ever wear them?” I asked him. My voice with him was almost always accusing.

“They’re too good,” he said. “They’re wonderful gloves, Peter. I know good leather. You must have paid a fortune for ‘em.”

“Not that much, but aren’t your hands cold?”

“Yeah. Boy, this is a bitter day. We’re in Old Man Winter’s belly.”

“Well don’t you want to put the gloves on?”

Roadside scruff in a scratchy stream poured past my father’s profile. He emerged from thought to tell me, “When I was a kid, if anybody had given me gloves like that, I would have cried real tears.”

These words hurt my stomach, weighted as they were by what I had overheard while awaking. I had gathered only that there was something in him, and this thing, which I thought might be the same thing that made him resist wearing my gloves, I hoped I could elicit; though I did suspect that he was too old and too big for me to purge or change completely, even for my mother’s sake. I leaned closer and studied the edges of white flesh where his fists gripped the steering-wheel. The wrinkles in his skin seemed fissures; the hairs, bits of captured black grass. The backs of his hands were dappled with dull brown warts. “Doesn’t the steering wheel feel like ice?” I asked. My voice sounded like my mother’s, when she had said, “You can’t feel such things.”

“To tell the truth, Peter, my tooth hurts so much I don’t notice it.”

I was surprised and relieved: a toothache was new; per haps this mere thing was what was in him. I asked, “Where?”

“In the back.” He sucked; his cheek, cut in shaving this morning, wrinkled. The blood of his cut seemed very dark.

“You ought to have it looked at. That’s simple.”

“I don’t know which one it is. All of ‘em probably. I ought to have.every tooth in my head yanked. Slap a plate in there. Go to one of these butchers in Alton that pulls ‘em out and puts ‘em in the same day. They push ‘em right into your bloody gums.”

“Is that really what they do?”

“Sure. They’re sadists, Peter. Mongoloid sadists.”

“I can’t believe it,” I said.

The heater, thawed by our run down the hill, came on; brown air baked by rusty pipes breathed onto my ankles. Each morning, this event had the tone of a rescue. Now that a margin of comfort had been promised, I turned on the radio. The little dial, thermometer-shaped, glowed wan orange. When the tubes warmed, cracked and jagged nighttime voices sang in the bright blue morning. My scalp tingled and tightened; the voices, negroid and hillbilly, seemed to pick their way along the tune over obstacles that made their voices skip, lift, and stagger; and this jagged terrain seemed my country. It was the U.S.A. the songs conveyed: mountains of pine, oceans of cotton, tan western immensities haunted by disembodied voices cracked by love invaded the Buick’s stale space. A commercial delivered with an unctuous irony spoke soothingly of the cities, where I hoped my life would take me, and then a song came like a choo-choo, clicking, irresistible, carrying the singer like a hobo on top of its momentum, and my father and I seemed ourselves irresistible, rolling up and down through the irregularities of our suffering land, warm in the midst of much cold. In those days the radio carried me into my future, where I was strong: my closets were full of beautiful clothes and my skin as smooth as milk as I painted, to the tune of great wealth and fame, pictures heavenly and cool, like those of Vermeer. That Vermeer himself had been obscure and poor I knew. But I reasoned that he had lived in backward times. That my own times were not backward I knew from reading magazines. True, in all of Alton County only my mother and I seemed to know about Vermeer; but in the great cities there must be thousands who knew, all of them rich. Vases and burnished furniture stood upright around me. On a stiff tablecloth a loaf of sugary bread lay sequined with pointillist dabs of light. Beyond the parapet of my balcony a high city of constant sun named New York glimmered in its million windows. My white walls accepted a soft breeze scented with chalk and whole cloves. In the doorway a woman stood, shadow-mirrored by the polished tiles, and watched me; her lower lip was slightly heavy and slack, like the lower lip of the girl in the blue turban in The Hague. Among these images which the radio songs rapidly brushed in for me the one blank space was the canvas I was so beautifully, debonairly, and preciously covering. I could not visualize my work; but its featureless radiance made the center of everything as I carried my father in the tail of a comet through the expectant space of our singing nation.

After the tiny town of Galilee, gathered, no bigger than Firetown, around the Seven-Mile Tavern and the cinder-block structure of Potteiger’s Store, the road like a cat flattening its ears went into a straightaway where my father always speeded. Passing the model barn and outbuildings of the Clover Leaf Dairy, where conveyor belts removed the cows’ dung, the road then knifed between two high gashed embankments of eroding red earth. Here a hitchhiker waited beside a little pile of stones. As we rose toward him I noticed, his silhouette being printed sharply on the slope of clay, that his shoes were too big, and protruded oddly behind his heels.

My father slammed on the brakes so suddenly it seemed he recognized the man. The hitchhiker ran after our car, his shoes flapping. He wore a faded brown suit whose pattern of vertical chalkstripes seemed incongruously smart. He clutched to his chest as if for warmth a paper bundle tightly tied with butcher’s cord.

My father leaned across me, rolled open my window, and shouted, “We’re not going all the way into Alton, just to the bottom of Coughdrop Hill!”

The hitchhiker drooped at our door. His pink eyelids blinked. A dirty green scarf was tied around his neck, keeping his upturned coat lapels pressed against his throat. He was older than his lean figure glimpsed at a distance suggested. Some force of misery or weather had scrubbed his white face down to the veins; broken bits of purple had hatched on his cheeks like infant snakes. Something dainty in his swollen lips made me wonder if he were a fairy. I had once been approached by a shuffling derelict while waiting for my father in front of the Alton Public Library and his few mumbled words before I fled had scored me. I felt, as long as my love of girls remained unconsummated, open on that side-a three-walled room any burglar could enter. An unreasoning hate of the hitchhiker suffused me. The window my father had opened to him admitted cold air that made my ears ache.

As usual, my father’s apologetic courtesy had snagged the very progress it sought to smooth. The hitchhiker was be wildered. We waited for his brains to thaw enough to absorb what my father had said. “We’re not going all the way into Alton,” my father called again, and in impatience leaned so far over that his huge head was in front of my face. As he squinted, a net of brown wrinkles leaped up behind his eye.

The hitchhiker leaned in toward my father and I felt absurdly pinched between their fumbling old faces. And all the while the musical choo-choo was clicking forward on the radio; I yearned to board it.

“How far?” the hitchhiker asked. His lips hardly moved.

His hair was lank and sparse on top and so long uncut it bunched in feathery tufts above his ears.

“Four miles, get in,” my father said, suddenly decisive. He pushed at my door and said to me, “Move over, Peter. Let the gentleman up front by the heater.”

“I’ll get in back,” the hitchhiker said, and my hate of him ebbed a little. He did have some vestige of decent manners. But in getting into the back seat, he did not lift his fingers from the sill of my window until with the other arm, awkwardly pinching the bundle against his side, he had worked open the back door. As if we were, my selfless father and my innocent self, a treacherous black animal he was capturing. Once safe in the cavity behind us, he sighed and said, in one of those small ichorous voices that seems always to be retracting in mid-sentence, “What a fucking day. Freeze your sucking balls off.”

My father let out the clutch and did a shocking thing: turning his head to talk to the stranger, he turned off my radio. The musical choo-choo with all its freight of dreaming dropped over a cliff. The copious purity of my future shrank to the meager confusion of my present. “Just as long as it doesn’t snow,” my father said. “That’s all the hell I care about. Every morning I pray: ‘Dear Lord, no snow.’ “

Unseen behind me the hitchhiker was snuffling and liquidly enlarging like some primeval monster coming to life again out of a glacier. “How about you, boy?” he said, and through the hairs on my neck I could feel him hunch forward. “You don’t mind the snow, do ya?”

“The poor kid,” my father said, “he never gets a chance to go sledding any more. We took him out of the town where he loved to be and stuck him in the sticks.”

“I bet he likes the snow real good,” the hitchhiker said. “I bet he likes it fine.” Snow seemed to mean something else to him; he certainly was a fairy. I was more angered than frightened; my father was with me.

He, too, seemed disturbed by our guest’s obsession. “How about it, Peter?” he asked me. “Does it still mean a lot to you?”

“No,” I said.

The hitchhiker snorted moistly. My father called back to him, “Where’ve you come from, mister?”

“North.”

“You heading into Alton.”

“Guess so.”

“You know Alton?”

“I been there before.”

“What’s your profession?”

“Annnh-I cook.”

“You cook! That’s a wonderful accomplishment, and I know you’re not lying to me. What’s your plan? To stay in Alton?”

“Ihnnn. Just to get a job enough to get me south.”

“You know, mister,” my father said, “you’re doing what I’ve always wanted to do. Bum around from place to place. Live like the birds. When the cold weather hits, just flap your wings and go south.”

The hitchhiker giggled, puzzled.

My father went on, “I’ve always wanted to live in Florida, and I never got within smelling distance of it. The furthest south I ever got in my whole life was the great state of Maryland.”

“Nothin’ much in Maryland.”

“I remember in grammar school back in Passaic,” my father said, “how they were always telling us about the white stoops of Baltimore. Every morning, they said, the housewives would get out there with the bucket and scrub-brush and wash these white marble stoops until they shone. Ever see that?”

“I been in Baltimore but I never seen that.”

“That’s what I thought. They lied to us. Why the hell would anybody spend their life washing a white marble stoop that as soon as you scrub it up some moron with dirty shoes comes along and puts his footprint on it? It never seemed credible to me.”

“I never seen it,” the hitchhiker said, as if regretting that he had caused such a radical disillusion. My father brought to conversations a cavernous capacity for caring that dismayed strangers. They found themselves involved, willy-nilly, in a futile but urgent search for the truth. This morning my father’s search seemed especially urgent, as if time were running out. He virtually shouted his next question. “How’d you get caught up here? If I was in your shoes, mister, I’d be in Florida so fast you wouldn’t see my dust.”

“I was living with a guy up in Albany,” the hitchhiker said reluctantly.

My heart shriveled to hear my fears confirmed; but my father seemed oblivious of the horrible territory we had entered. “A friend?” he asked.

“Yeah. Kinda.”

“What happened? He pull the old double-cross?”

In his delight the hitchhiker lurched forward behind me. “That’s right, buddy,” he told my father. “That’s just what that fucking sucker did. Sorry, boy.”

“That’s O.K.,” my father said. “This poor kid hears more horrible stuff in a day than I have in a lifetime. He gets that from his mother; she sees everything and can’t do a thing about it. Thank God I’m half-blind and three-quarters deaf. Heaven protects the ignorant.”

I dimly appreciated that my father had conjured up Heaven and my mother as a protection for me, as a dam against the flood of vile confidences with which our guest was brimming; but I vividly resented that he should even speak of me to this man, that he should dip the shadow of my personality into this reservoir of slime. That my existence at one extremity should be tangent to Vermeer and at the other to the hitchhiker seemed an unendurable strain.

But relief was approaching. We came to the crest of Cough-drop Hill, the second, and steeper, of the two hills on the way to Alton. At the bottom, the road to Olinger went off to the left and we would have to let the hitchhiker out.

We began the descent. We passed a trailer truck laboring toward the crest so slowly its peeling paint seemed to have weathered in transit. Well back from the road, Rudy Essick’s great brown mansion sluggishly climbed through the down-slipping trees.

Coughdrop Hill took its name from its owner, whose coughdrops (“sick? Suck an essick!”) were congealed by the million in an Alton factory that flavored whole blocks of the city with the smell of menthol. They sold, in their little tangerine-colored boxes, throughout the East: the one time in my life I had been to Manhattan, I had been astonished to find, right in the throat of Paradise, on a counter in Grand Central Station, a homely ruddy row of them. In disbelief I bought a box. Sure enough, on the back, beneath an imposing miniature portrait of the factory, the fine print stated made in alton, pa. And the box, opened, released the chill, ectopiasmic smell of Brubaker Street. The two cities of my life, the imaginary and the actual, were superimposed; I had never dreamed that Alton could touch New York. I put a coughdrop into my mouth to complete this delicious confusion and concentric penetration; my teeth sweetened and at the level of my eyes, a hollow mile beneath the ceiling that on an aqua sky displayed the constellations with sallow electric stars, my father’s yellow-knuckled hands wrung together nervously through my delay. I ceased to be impatient with him and became as anxious as he to catch the train home. Up to this moment my father had failed me. Throughout our trip, an overnight visit to his sister, he had been frightened and frustrated. The city was bigger than the kind he understood. The money in his pocket dwindled without our buying anything. Though we walked and walked, we never reached any of the museums I had read of. The one called the Frick contained the Vermeer of the man in the big hat and the laughing woman whose lazily upturned palm un consciously accepts the light, and the one called the Metropolitan contained the girl in the starched headdress bent reverently above the brass jug whose vertical blue gleam was the Holy Ghost of my adolescence. That these paintings, which I had worshipped in reproduction, had a simple physi cal existence seemed a profound mystery to me: to come within touching distance of their surfaces, to see with my eyes the truth of their color, the tracery of the cracks whereby time had inserted itself like a mystery within a mystery, would have been for me to enter a Real Presence so ultimate I would not be surprised to die in the encounter. My father’s blundering blocked it. We never entered the museums; I never saw the paintings. Instead I saw the inside of my father’s sister’s hotel room. Though suspended twenty stories above the street, it smelled strangely like the lining of my mother’s fur-collared winter coat of thick green-plaid cloth. Aunt Alma sipped a yellow drink and dribbled the smoke of Kools from the corners of her very thin red lips. She had white, white skin and her eyes were absolutely transparent with intelligence. Her eyes kept crinkling sadly as she looked at my father; she was three years older than he. They talked all evening of pranks and crises in a vanished Passaic parsonage whose very mention made me sick and giddy, as if I were suspended over a canyon of time. Down on the street, twenty stories below, the taxi lights looped in and out, and that was abstractly interesting. During the day, Aunt Alma, here as an out-of-town children’s-clothes buyer, left us to ourselves. The strangers my father stopped on the street resisted entanglement in his earnest, circular questioning. Their rudeness and his ignorance humiliated me, and my irritation had been building toward a tantrum that the coughdrop dissolved. I forgave him. In a temple of pale brown marble I forgave him and wanted to thank him for conceiving me to be born in a county that could insert its candy into the throat of Paradise. We took the subway to Pennsylvania Station and caught a train and sat side by side as easy as twins all the way home, and even now, two years later, whenever in our daily journey we went up or down Coughdrop Hill, there was for me an undercurrent of New York and the constellations that seemed to let us soar, free together of the local earth.

Instead of braking, my father by some mistake plunged past the Olinger turnoff. I cried, “Hey!”

“It’s O.K., Peter,” he said to me softly. “It’s too cold.” His face was impassive under the cretinous cap of knitted blue. He did not want the hitchhiker to be embarrassed by the fact that we were going out of our way to take him into Alton.

I was so indignant I dared turn and glare. The hitch hiker’s face, unfrozen, was terrible-a puddle; it mistook my motive and moved toward me with a smear of a smile and an emanation of muddy emotion. I flinched and rigidly cringed; the details of the dashboard leaped up aglitter. I shut my eyes to prevent any further inwash of that unwelcome unthinkable ichor I had roused. Most horrible in it had been something shy and grateful and girlish.

My father reared back his great head and called, “What have you learned?”

His voice strained under a high pain that bewildered the other. The back seat was silent. My father waited. “I don’t follow you,” the hitchhiker said.

My father amplified. “What’s your verdict? You’re a man I admire. You’ve had the guts to do what I always wanted to do: move around, see the cities. Do you think I’ve missed out?”

“You ain’t missed a thing.” The words curled back on themselves like offended feelers.

“Have you done anything you like to remember? I was awake all last night trying to remember something pleasant and I couldn’t do it. Misery and horror; that’s my memories.”

This hurt my feelings; he had had me.

The hitchhiker’s voice scribbled; maybe it was a laugh.

“Last month I killed a goddam dog,” he said. “How’s that?

Damn suckin’ dogs come up outa the bushes and try to grab a piece of your leg, so I get myself a hell of a big stick and I was walkin’ along this cock jumps out at me and I cracked him right between the eyes. He drops down and I thump him a couple times more good and boy there’s one suckin’ dog won’t be tryin’ to grab a piece of your leg just because you ain’t got no car to go haulin’ your ass around in. Christ right between the eyes the first crack.”

My father had listened rather dolefully. “Most dogs won’t hurt you,” he said now. “They’re just like I am, curious. I know just how they think. We have a dog at home I think the world of. My wife just worships that animal.”

“Well I fixed that one bastard good I tell ya,” the hitch hiker said, and sucked back spittle. “You like dogs, boy?” he asked me.

“Peter likes everybody,” my father said. “I’d give my eyes if I had that boy’s good nature. But I see your point, mister, when a dog comes up to you in the dark along a strange road.”

“Yeah and then nobody picks ya up any more,” the hitchhiker said. “Stand there all day your balls freezin’ off and yours was the first car in a hour stopped for me.”

“I always pick ‘em up,” my father said. “If Heaven didn’t look after fools I’d be in your shoes. You said you’re a cook?”

“Annh-I done it.”

“My hat’s off to you. You’re an artist.”

I felt within myself like a worm hatching the hitchhiker beginning to wonder if my father were sane. I cringed with the desire to apologize, to grovel before this stranger, to explain. It’s just his way, he loves strange people, he’s worried about something.

“There’s nothin’ to it except keep the griddle greased.” This response came cautiously.

“You’re lying, mister,” my father shouted. “There’s a fine art to cooking for other people. I couldn’t learn it if you gave me a million years.”

“Buddy, that’s horse poop,” the hitchhiker said, lurching into intimacy. “Just keep the burgers thin’s all the bastards run these suckin’ joints give a dick about. Give ‘em grease and spare the meat; if I had one of those bastards gimme the word I had a hundred. The great god Dollar’s the only one they’re looking out for. Christ I wouldn’t drink the nigger piss they call coffee.”

As the hitchhiker grew more and more expansive I felt myself shrivel and shrink; my skin itched furiously.

“I wanted to be a druggist,” my father told him. “But when I got out of college there was no do-re-mi. My old man left us a Bible and a deskful of debts. But I don’t blame him, the poor devil tried to do what was right. Some of my kids-I’m a schoolteacher-go off to pharmaceutical school and from what they tell me I just wouldn’t have had enough brains for it. A druggist is an intelligent man.”

“What are you goin’ to be, boy?”

My desire to become a painter embarrassed my father. “That poor kid’s as confused as I am,” he told the hitch hiker. “He ought to get out of this part of the country and get down where there’s some sun. He has a terrible skin problem.”

In effect my father had torn off my clothes and displayed my prickling scabs. In the glare of my anger his profile seemed that of a blind raw rock.

“That right, boy? How so?” ‘

“My skin is blue,” I said in a congested voice.

“He’s just kidding,” my father said. “He’s a hell of a good sport about it. Best thing in the world for him would be to go down to Florida; if you were his father instead of me he’d be there.”

“I expect to be down in two three weeks,” the hitchhiker said.

“Take him along!” my father exclaimed. “If ever a kid deserved a break, it’s this kid here. My wad is shot. Time to trade in on a new old man; I’m a walking junk heap.”

He took the image from the great Alton dump, which had appeared beside the road. A few fires smoldered here and there across its tattered gay acres. Things revert, through rust and rot, to a hopeful brown, and in their heaps of ash take on fantastic silhouettes, frazzled and feathery as ferns. Like a halted host of banners colored bits of paper were pressed by a constant riverside breeze against upright weed stalks. Beyond, the Running Horse River reflected in its strip of black varnish the cobalt blue silently domed above. Elephant-colored gas tanks, mounted to rise and fall in cylindrical frames, guarded the city’s brick skyline: rose madder Alton, the secret city, lining the lap of its purple-green hills. The evergreen crest of Mt. Alton was a slash of black. My hand twitched, as if a brush were in it. Railroad tracks slipped silver along the highway; factory parking lots flashed full; and the road became a suburban street curving between car agencies, corroded diners, and composition-shingled homes.

My father said to the hitchhiker, “There it is. The grand and glorious city of Alton. If anybody had ever come to me when I was a kid and told me I’d die in Alton, PA, I would have laughed in his face. I’d never heard of it.”

“It’s a dirty town,” the hitchhiker said.

To me it looked so beautiful.

My father stopped the car at the intersection of 122 and the Lancaster Pike; the light was red. The pike to the right became a concrete bridge, the Running Horse Bridge, on whose other side Alton began in earnest. To the left it was three miles to Olinger and another two miles to Ely. “This is it,” my father said. “We got to put you out into the cold.”

The hitchhiker opened his door. Since my father had announced my skin, the flirtatious emanations in the car had weakened. Nevertheless, perhaps by accident, the back of my neck was touched. In the open air the hobo hugged the paper tight against his chest. The liquid face turned stiff. “I’ve enjoyed talking to you,” my father called to him.

The hitchhiker sneered. “Nnnnyeah.” The door slammed. The light turned green. My heart slowed its beating. We nosed onto the pike and drove against the current of the Alton-bound traffic. Through the dusty rear window I watched our guest, looking like a messenger with his undisclosed bundle, dwindle. The hitchhiker became a brown wisp at the mouth of the bridge, flew upwards, vanished. My father said to me in the most matter-of-fact tone, “That man was a gentleman.”

There was a tantrum rich and bristling within me; I coldly intended to berate him all the way to school. “This is really great,” I said. “Really great. You’re in such a hurry you won’t let me eat a rotten bite of breakfast and then you pick up some rotten bum and go three miles out of your way for him and he doesn’t even thank you. Now we will be late for school. I can just see Zimmerman, looking at his watch, stamping up and down in the halls, wondering where you are. Really, Daddy, I’d think you’d have more sense once in a while. What do you see in these bums? Is it my fault I was born so you couldn’t be a bum? Florida. And then telling him about my skin. That was very nice, I thank you very much. Whyncha make me take off my shirt while you’re at it? Maybe I should have showed him my crusty legs. Whydya keep telling everybody every damn thing there is to tell? Who cares, nobody cares, all that moron cared about was killing dogs and breathing on the back of my neck. The white stoops of Baltimore, for Heaven’s sake. Really, Daddy, what do you think about when you babble like that?”

But you can’t keep scolding when the other person says nothing. For the second mile to Olinger we were silent together. He was pressing, panicked now at being late, passing entire rows of cars and hogging the center of the pike. The steering wheel slithered in his hands when our tires got caught in the trolley tracks. He was lucky; we made good time. As we passed the billboard on which the Lions and Rotary and Kiwanis and Elks all welcomed us to Olinger, my father said, “Don’t worry about him knowing about your skin, Peter. He’ll forget. That’s the one thing you learn in teaching; people forget everything you tell ‘em. I look at those dumb blank faces every day and it reminds me of death. You fall through those kids’ heads without a trace. I remember, when my old man knew he was dying, he opened his eyes on the bed and looked up at Mom and Alma and me and said, ‘Do you think I’ll be eternally for gotten?’ I often think about that. Eternally forgotten. That was a terrible thing for a minister to say. It scared the living daylights out of me.”

The last children were crowding into the doors when we pulled into the high school lot. The bell must just have rung. In turning to get out of the car and scoop up my books, I glanced into the back seat. “Daddy!” I called.”Your gloves are gone!”

He was already some paces away from the car. He turned and swept his wart-freckled hand across his skull and re moved his blue cap. His hair stood up with static electricity. “Huh? Did that bastard take ‘em?”

“He must have. They’re not there. Just the rope and the map.”

He spared this revelation the space of a blink. “Well,” he said, “he needs ‘em more than I did. That poor devil never knew what hit him.” And he was on his way again, consuming the cement walk with generous strides. Grappling with my books, I could not catch up, and as I followed at an increasing distance behind him, the loss of the gloves, the way he permitted my expensive and painstakingly deliberated gift to sift through him generated a clumsy weight where my books were clasped against my abdomen. My father provided; he gathered things to himself and let them fall upon the world; my clothes, my food, my luxurious hopes had fallen to me from him, and for the first time his death seemed, even at its immense stellar remove of impossibility, a grave and dreadful threat.