The Night Jaimie Grew Up

After his mother pleaded with him for a little while, standing on the other side of the locked door of his room, she went away. He lay on his bed in the long September dusk, looking out through the screen across the side yard. He could see, beyond the hedge, the white brightness of the kitchen windows of the Robbins house. He could see a lot of movement in the kitchen. They were having a big party over there. Their hifi was turned loud. People talked loudly in their back yard. Have fun, he said to himself. Have a big time, just as if nothing at all has happened.

His father knocked on the door. “Open up, Jaimie. I want to talk to you.”

He hesitated, then went slowly over and unlocked the door. He heard it open behind him as he walked back to the bed. “Don’t turn on any lights, huh?” Lights to show the red puffy eyes.

“Okay. No lights.” His father came to the bed, tall and solid in the shadows. “How about moving those size eleven feet out of the way, boy?”

Jaimie shifted his feet over to the wall. The bed stirred and sighed under his father’s weight. His father lighted a cigarette, the lighter flame momentarily bright against his face.

“Big doings next door,” he said quietly.

“I thought you and Mom were going.”

“Maybe we’ll stop over a little later. She’s upset about you not even answering her, Jaimie. It was rude.”

“Yes, I guess it was,” the boy said. “I just didn’t feel like answering.”

“You’re fourteen years old, boy. Too old to start acting like a little kid having a pout for himself.”

“If I haven’t got anything to say about anything... if I haven’t got any choice about what happens, then I am a little kid. Okay?”

“Maybe I haven’t got as much choice as you seem to think I have.”

“What do you mean, Dad?”

“In a lot of ways I don’t relish leaving here.”

“Then why do we have to!” the boy demanded, feeling himself close to tears again, trying to hide them by speaking more harshly.

“I don’t know how much of this you can understand. Some day you’ll understand all of it. I will now order you to listen carefully and try to understand. I work for an enormous corporation, boy. We’ve got branch plants all over the country.”

“I know about that.”

“Just listen a little,” his father said with heavy patience. “At your age this adjective may strike you as absurd, but I am considered to be one of their bright young men. I work hard. I guess I have good sense. I get along with people. I have a good education. I’m what they call an organization man, Jaimie. So they’ve been boosting me up the ladder faster than is usual. This is the next boost. In Philadelphia I’ll have the same job in that plant as the man I work for here.”

“But suppose you tell them you’d rather stay here, Dad?”

“Then this would be the dead end, boy. I’ve let the top brass believe I’m ambitious — to just the degree they like. It would mean that I’d been sailing under false colors when I accepted the other promotions. They moved me before, you know. And Philadelphia isn’t the last stop.”

“They haven’t moved you for a long time.”

“A long time in your life. Not so long in mine. Five years here. I admit that is longer than we’ve stayed in other places since you were born. Mary Ann can remember the place before this one, but Puss is too little to remember anything but living here. I’m supposed to be a successful man on the way up, Jaimie. They are seasoning me by moving me around. Like a ballplayer goes up through the minors. Philadelphia is Triple A ball. New York is the major-league team. Do you see what I mean?”

“I... I guess so, but...”

“But you want to stay here. Let me call your attention to something, Jaimie. This is a nice house. This room of yours is a good room. You have good clothes, a good bike, summers in a good camp. I can point out that some of the advantages you most enjoy are available to you because I am the kind of man I am. I am not asking for gratitude. I am asking you to understand that this rather... gypsy aspect of our life is one of the penalties that we, as a family unit, must pay for the things we enjoy. I’m going to have to leave by next Wednesday. When I find a house you’ll move and we’ll put this house on the market.”

“I guess you don’t want to hear my side of it.”

“I would take exception to that tone of voice, boy. Tell me your side of it, please.”

“The best friends I ever had... the best ones I’ll ever have are right here. I just started high school about two weeks ago. I... I know everybody and everybody knows me. I remember how it was coming here. You’re new and the kids stare at you. I didn’t... fit anyplace. Now I do. I’ll go there and I’ll be a nothing. I’ll be starting school late. I don’t make friends easy like Mary Ann does. I... I just don’t want to go. Honest. I feel like I’d rather die than go somewhere where I don’t know anybody. Mom will make friends easy. You’ll be the boss, so people will have to be friends with you. But where does it leave me?”

His father unhooked the screen and snapped the cigarette butt into the night. He did not speak for a long time.

“You talk about the nice things,” Jaimie said suddenly, heatedly. “They’re fine. Sure. But I don’t have to have them. I can sell my bike and the other stuff and give you the money. You can just forget how I’ve been asking for a motor scooter for my birthday. Dad, it’s more important just to be here. Just to stay where I belong. What good is it to have nice things and you go around feeling sick inside?”

“It will all seem different once you get there, Jaimie.”

“That’s what Mom kept saying and it made me mad. She said it over and over. It won’t be different at all. I’ll wish I was back here. I wish you could leave me here somehow. Honest.”

“A thousand miles from your family?”

“I... I guess so.”

“If I wasn’t certain your mother would never stand for a thing like that, I’d be tempted to make some sort of arrangement, just to prove to you how lost you’d feel.”

“I’d feel fine!”

“Let’s drop that idea, Jaimie. Act fourteen, at least. We’re all going to leave here.”

“Yes, sir. I guess that’s an order, sir. I guess I don’t have a damn thing to say about it, sir.”

“You tempt me to paddle you, boy.”

“Go ahead.”

“I... I keep thinking of what you said when I first came in here. About choice. It doesn’t seem right that you should have absolutely no choice. It doesn’t seem fair. And I am aware of the distinct possibility that, with your attitude, you’ll make a very poor adjustment to your new environment. You resent being thrown in with kids who have known each other since nursery school. Right?”

“I sure do! They’ll have their own clubs...”

“My boy, the element of choice is going to enter your life. I’ll make a deal with you. You try hard to fit into the Philadelphia environment. At the end of the school year you can come to me and tell me whether or not you want to continue. If you do, fine. If you do not, I will arrange to send you away to a private school the next year. You will be away from home, but you will be with a batch of kids just as uprooted as you will be. Your mother will put up a tremendous fight about sending you away at fifteen but I will guarantee her... eventual acquiescence, Jaimie. So you will have a choice.

“But if you make it evident that you are not making a decent effort to get along with the other kids, I will withdraw the choice. Okay?”

“I... I guess so. Can I come back to the same summer camp next summer?”

“Yes. Have we made a deal?”

“I... I guess so, Dad.”

“This is between us. A private matter. Now you can stop hiding in the dark feeling sorry for yourself. Act your age. Your mother is going to need a lot of help closing the house, and I expect you to give her that help willingly.”

“Okay.”

“Shake hands on it.” They shook hands and his father stood up. “I’ll tell your mother you’re more... resigned to your horrid fate. We’ll go next door. When you next see her, it wouldn’t be out of order for you to apologize for being rude.”

“All right, Dad.”

Ben Durmond went back to the kitchen. Eileen looked up at him anxiously. “He’ll be okay, honey.”

“You didn’t roar at him, did you?”

He grinned. “I came close a couple of times. It’s tough on the kid. But he’s a good kid. He’ll be reasonable.”

“I... I wish sometimes... we could stay right here.”

“You’ll get a kick out of furnishing a new nest. I’ll find you something gaudy in Philly. You’ll be happy as a clam trotting around measuring for draperies and squinching your eyes and staring into space. Let’s go join the party, party girl.”

About 15 minutes later Jaimie turned on the lights in his room. He glowered at himself in the mirror over his bureau. He rubbed a thumb along the infrequent hairs on the side of his jaw.

“You kids wouldn’t know how to act, even, in a big city like Philadelphia,” he muttered contemptuously.

He looked toward the corner where, from wires so fine as to be almost invisible, his collection of model jet aircraft hung, moving slightly in the breeze that came through the screen. He went over and tenderly unhooked the B-52 and turned it this way and that, frowning at the deadly lines of it. Suddenly it slipped in his hands that looked too big for the rest of him, and the wing snapped off close to the fusilage...

On the following Saturday morning Eileen Durmond looked into his room and saw him hunched over his work table. She went in and saw that he was working on one of the model airplanes he had built. “What are you doing, dear? I thought you said you were going to start packing.”

“Oh, I’m just fixing this one up. It got broke.”

“Broken,” she said automatically.

“So I’m fixing it up before I give the whole batch of them to Junior Robbins.”

“To the pest?”

“He’s all the time begging to come in and look at them. He promised he’d be careful with them. I’ll take them over in a little while.”

She put her hand on his shoulder. “Gosh, you worked so hard and did such a nice job on every one, it seems a shame. I think we could pack them so they wouldn’t get broken, darling.”

He glanced up at her. “Aw, Mom, I don’t need them any more. They’re... kid stuff. The pest can have them.” He looked back at the model. “You’d never know it was broke. Broken.”

She left his room and there was something tugging at her heart. Something in his face when he had glanced up at her. A maturity, a steadiness, a hint of the man he might become. As she started to make her bed she was praying. Make him the man Ben is. Give him the chance to be as strong and good and gentle.