Man and Boy Read online

  It came as such a surprise he just stood there. The draft blowing from her room was cool on his face.

  “Ohhh Warren—” she repeated.

  “Yes, Mother—” he said.

  “However I might feel personally, I have his name to think of. I am not one of these people free to do as they like— Warren, are you listening?”

  “Yes, Mother,” he answered.

  “—with their life.” She closed the door, then opened it again and said: “You say it is blue for Navy?”

  “For the Army it’s brown, Mother,” he said, “for the Navy it’s blue.”

  MOTHER

  Ad astra per aspera, Mrs. Dinardo, and in the dim light at the back of the closet, her eyes closed, she pulled the new girdle on. From one of five dresses—any woman with more than five dresses, Mrs. Cleev-Clodz, should have the dresses and the vote taken away from her —she selected the navy blue sheer with pink lace yoke and kerchief, short bolero. From a bookcase beneath the stairs, the top shelf holding books, the remaining four shelves full of I. Miller shoes, she selected navy blue pumps with cuban heel and small bow. Oh, we’re all of the flesh, Mrs. Dinardo, but between men and shoes you can give me shoes—I. Miller’s preferably. Backing from the closet, she hung the dress from the neck of the floor lamp, then used the yardstick to push the hatbox from under the bed. The hat— something had to be—was new. Navy straw with Shasta daisies, pink geraniums, and a navy blue veil with pink and white fuzzy dots. She held it out where the hat could be seen, front and side in the bureau mirror, without seeing—certain things cannot be helped, but they can be avoided, Mrs. Dinardo—to what the arm was attached. The hat on her head where it would not be lost, the slip tucked up to where it wouldn’t stretch, she seated herself on Audubon’s Birds of America. It had proved to be just about the right height. From the right-hand drawer of the sewing machine she removed a round stone with a flat sandy surface, and applied this surface to the calf of her left leg. Counting from one to twenty, her eyes closed, she rotated the stone, with a Spencerian movement, until the new hair— there had been a small crop—was honed down. It averaged one hundred forty strokes per leg. She also gave the rough spots on her knees a sanding, the callous on her right elbow, and the shiny surface where she was expecting a corn.

  The corn—seeing the corn, she was reminded … of something—and closing her eyes she saw Mrs. Dinardo’s wide flat feet. She liked to take off her shoes, pad around the house in her socks. “You’ve no idea how it helps with the dusting, Mrs. Ormsby,” she said.

  Using the yardstick, Mother reached one of the loops in the phone cord, slowly dragged the phone across the floor from the foot of her bed. Lifting the receiver she said: “Operator, would you get me Long Distance? ” then she made herself comfy, as it was apt to be a long call.

  MR. ORMSBY

  HEARING her voice, he came to the door and said: “Coming, Mother—” before he heard her laugh, and realized she was on the phone. If Mother laughed, she was on the telephone. She never found anything funny anywhere else. He often wondered why that was, but it was not clear to him until the day that Mother nearly laughed out behind the garage. She had found one of his new socks in the compost pile. She had held up the sock, but she hadn’t laughed because there was no real barrier between them, nothing between them but about thirty yards of weedy back yard. If she had found that sock on the phone she might have laughed to death. With nothing but the telephone there before her Mother could laugh and talk for hours, and there were times—when some bill was pending—that she sometimes did. But around the house she didn’t need to telephone—she could write him notes.

  As he stood there she stopped laughing and said:

  “A bag, Warren—you have packed a bag?”

  “A bag—?” he repeated. “Oh yes, a bag.”

  “I have Mrs. Dinardo on the wire—” Mother said, “and she says she can certainly take care of me. You and Mr. Dinardo—” laughing again, Mother turned back to the phone and said: “I’m just telling Mr. Ormsby that he and Mr. Dinardo can shift for themselves!” Above Mother’s laugh, like something suffocating, Mr. Ormsby could hear Mrs. Dinardo guffaw. “Now you run along—” Mother said, then she fell to laughing again, as of course Mrs. Dinardo, who was listening, thought that was for her.

  Closing the door, Mr. Ormsby turned away. Then he came back, opened it, and on tiptoe came up the stairway, as the bag, the overnight bag, was in the attic. As he crossed the bedroom he saw Mother, her bottom trim as a mermaid’s in her new girdle, squatted on the new autographed edition of Audubon’s Birds. Her new hat was on her head, the Shasta daisies rocking with her laughter, and the dotted-Swiss veil trembling before her tear-stained face. It was a standing joke that when Mother laughed, she cried.

  Mr. Ormsby went by, a little curious as to what the girls were up to now, but he hadn’t the time to stand around and find out. He entered the closet, saw that the light was on at the top of the stairs, and on his way up he stepped on a fig newton, Mother’s favorite snack.

  To get into the attic he had to wade through a barricade of suit-boxes, and carry the last half dozen or so to the top of the stairs. There at the top, right at the edge where he had been careful to leave them, were the cartons full of Grandmother Ames’s effects. A black net shopping bag full of old pine cones and conch seashells. That meant it had been eight years, no, nine, since he had put his head into the attic—a good deal longer since he had got his foot into it. He pushed three of the cartons aside, and then lunged, with one hand out before him, toward the corner where he had left his bag. His right foot, the toes bent up, jammed into something shaped like a bucket, and as his weight shifted he heard a crunching, gnashing sound. This sound he knew—as a boy he had stepped from the porch into a bucket of eggs, and now he seemed to feel the soft gooey mess around his leg. He stood quiet, his foot in the bucket, until he had fought his way up from childhood to where he stood, one foot in the bucket, but a man. As a man it occured to him that it shouldn’t be eggs. They were not listed as part of Grandmother’s effects. But as he could not see his feet—the light and the window were both behind him—he broke a sworn promise to Mother and struck a match. Not for long—just enough to see that it was a bucket he stood in, and that he was ankle deep in Christmas snow. In one step he had crushed everything but the tree. In one blow he had reduced all the pretty Christmas trifles to dust, some of it like eggshells, some of it like tinted fragments of glass.

  On the carton he found behind him, he sat down. Long ago he had given the boy a gun—and after that there had been no tree, no Yuletide season, no Christmas in the Santa Claus sense of the word. Mother had said—but never mind, in principle he agreed with Mother—but it had been a little hard on the boy. The tree had been the one thing that they both could do.

  Hunting the tree, buying the tree, hanging all of the beautiful things on the tree, had been something that kept them together for nearly a month. For a week they would sit up late together, just to watch the candles burning, as otherwise Mother wouldn’t permit them in the house. Somewhere at the store—his foot in the bucket seemed to help him remember—was an electric cord and bulb set he had never brought home. He had ordered it the same day he had ordered the gun. The gun had come first—but the lights were going to be a surprise, a great surprise, on the Christmas that never came.

  No, it had never come, but perhaps he had always believed that it would, as the thought that it wouldn’t, that from now on it couldn’t, was new to him. He couldn’t grasp it. How did one grasp something like that? Naturally, he knew the boy was dead—he knew that as well as the Navy knew it—but what did that have to do with something like this? Nothing. They were two different things. It was one thing to say that a boy was dead, but it was another thing entirely to say that some things, these things, would never happen to him. That was to be a good deal worse than dead. That was to miss the very reasons for being alive. Oh, it was one thing to be dead, but what was the word for describing what
it was to have been not quite alive? Well, he knew. The words for that were nipped in the bud. During a war one heard them everywhere. Nipped in the bud was the way one described, the way one grasped, that is, that the Christmas tinsel, the bright balls, and the lights, would never be hung. That Santa Claus, so to speak, would never come.

  “Warren—” he heard Mother say, otherwise he might have sat there, his foot in the bucket, and bawled like a kid who had finally grasped the truth.

  “Coming, Mother—” he said, but hearing her laugh, with the snort at the end, he realized she was still on the telephone. Holding the bucket down with his hands he slowly worked his foot loose, then took off his shoe and emptied the tinsel out of it. His shoe back on, he peered around in the twilight for his bag. He had bought it the spring they were married with both the honeymoon in mind and the fact that he had never had a real cowhide bag. One with a man’s nickel-plated toilet set built into the side. As an overnight bag it was a little fancy, for longer trips it was a little small, so he hadn’t really used it since that trip to Colorado Springs. Strangely enough, it was right where he had left it, but over the years, some twenty-three years, everything from Grandmother’s house but Grandmother herself had been piled on top of it. He looked around for something else. Not at all fancy, but handy—Mother used it on her Pocono bird hikes—was a black fiber case Grandmother had passed on. He had used it on one or two trips himself. Mother would let him use it at night if he was going to some place like Chicago, and it just so happened he never went anywhere else. He took down the bag, opened it up, and looked at a wadded striped silk shirt—one he had been missing, as he wrote the laundry, for many years. It was not the kind they were wearing much any more. He used it to dust off the bag, then, wondering what else he might turn up, he ran his hand around the elastic webbing at the sides. A pack of Gem razor blades, and a letter—a letter from the boy. His father was in Chicago, so the boy had written to him. It was dated June 12th, 1935, and written on his Camp Sheboygan stationery.

  Dear Father:

  Mother’s cherries are all ripe and the first thing you know somebody picked the cherries off the black cherry tree. However they will soon find out that Mother’s black cherries don’t get ripe until about the middle of July. They also left a nice red and green basket so that I can pick cherries off the ripe one. My own idea is to let the neighbors come and pick their own.

  Mrs. Dinardo’s little Jessie has the chicken pox. As a Counsellor at Camp I will have Max Wilson, and I suppose you recognize him as a great football star.

  Next year I am editor of the school newspaper, The Gossip. My staff so far is as follows—

  Editor in Chief—Virgil Ormsby

  Associate Editors—Robert Horton,

  Maurie Johnson

  Business Manager—Jimmy Ward

  Reporters (so far)—Janice Young, Julia Billings, Mabel Eiseley, Marge McCoy.

  The business of the Editor in Chief is to assign every Monday the work which the reporters are supposed to report. That means that every Friday I have my hands full. In practical matters I find that Mother is not much help.

  We have been having some fine weather, hot weather, rainy weather, and dry weather. Right now it is dry.

  YR. SON

  Virgil

  Mr. Ormsby sat there, not thinking, gazing vacantly at the cobwebs where the morning sunlight, high in the gable, filtered through. Then he put his hand back into the webbing, felt around. He found something hard, like a kernel of corn, and held it up to the light.

  A tooth—the boy’s first gold-filled wisdom tooth. It had been filled—he remembered the day—just below the gum line. All to no avail, as just a month or so later—but right there Mr. Ormsby stopped, the tooth clutched in his hand, and felt that he was going to be sick. A feeling of nausea, as if he had taken gas for the tooth himself, made him lean forward and put both hands to his face. What had come over him? The tooth. Nothing but the tooth.

  In a museum where he had taken the boy to see a mammoth, a great hairy mammoth, they had also seen the grave of a man who had lived, it was said, thousands of years ago. In the man’s skull, still in pretty good shape, were most of his teeth. But it turned out that was something that science had done —a scientist had put the teeth back in his head—as they had all been found like kernels of corn in a handful of dust. Something about it, even at the time, had troubled him.

  But that was all right, that was all right to happen to a man without a name, without friends or relations, without a home in the suburbs and a pension he could look forward to. A man who had lived, somehow or other, without these things. A man who had no future, no education to speak of, no doctor or dentist that he could turn to, and hardly a thing, as men reckoned these matters, for his old age. Neither Florida nor the Poconos to look forward to. What the devil did it matter if this man’s teeth fell out of his skull? Or if they should be found, like kernels of com, in a handful of dust? Who was there to care, who was there to worry over something like that? That was all right, and a different thing entirely for a man like that, who never knew any better, to die as he did and then have some strangers dig him up. To be found by people who screwed his loose teeth back into his head.

  All of that was all right, as there was nothing in common with a man like that and Virgil Ormsby, who was a hero, and who had most of his own teeth to boot. It was not possible that they would be found in a handful of dust. It was not possible that the boy’s soft hair, with his father’s right hand tangled in it, would ever be as brittle, as dry and lifeless, as the hair on a skull. That might happen to some man who had lived so long ago that few men knew it, but not to Virgil Ormsby, lying safe in his air-tight vault. That was the other man’s fault for being born so long ago. It was the other man’s fault for having died just when he did. But it would never happen to Virgil Ormsby, who had the good luck to die a hero, and who was now safe from the weather, the air, and all crawling things. Who was safe, you might even say, from time itself. Who had the good sense to be born at a time when his father could dress him in flannel sleepers, with mittens and feet, and a nightcap with flapping rabbit’s ears. Who had the good luck to be blessed by God, to have won five Bibles bound in limp leather, and to be known as Violet Ames Ormsby’s only son. Very little could happen, now or later, to a boy like that. True, it might have happened on Guadalcanal, where it was known strange things occurred, but it would never happen to a native of Bel Air. He would be, whenever they found him, just as he had been. He would have his mother’s soft brown hair, his father’s cleft chin. And except for the one in Mr. Ormsby’s hand, he would have all of his teeth. There in his mouth, not like seed corn in a handful of chaff. That’s how it would be, as that was how Mother wanted it.

  “Oh, Warren! ” mother called.

  “Yes, Mother—” he answered.

  “It is now eight twenty-seven.”

  “Coming, Mother—” he said, and put the letter he was still holding back into the bag. He closed it with a snap, pushed down the clips.

  “I’ve called Charlie Munger,” Mother said, Mr. Munger ran the local taxi, “and he’ll be here in ten minutes. Warren, are you listening to me?”

  “He’ll be here in ten minutes,” Mr. Ormsby said, and then spent three of them just standing there, the tooth in his hand, until Mother called him again.

  MOTHER

  READY and waiting, her gloves with her purse, her purse with the eggs, the eggs with her coat, Mother picked up the receiver and dialed the number on the pad. When the voice answered, she said: “Is this Miss Scallywag?” then waited, as there was nothing Mrs. Cleanth needed more than a good laugh. Not even Kagawa— “Evelyn dear, you have a pad handy? Yes, right from the horse’s mouth. One—give power of attorney to your daughter and also duplicate key to strong box. Two—keep handy list of items exempt from income tax. Three —bone up about interest rules at bank, and inquire how to cut corners. There’s more, dear, but that’s enough to start. I’m going to name a boat, dear—
I have told you but you wouldn’t believe it—New York. No, I’m leaving right now. There’s Warren calling for me now.” She put her finger on the hook, held it there for a moment, then let it up and dialed again. “Martha—” she said, “this is Aunt Vye.” Turning her head from the phone Mother read, while Martha talked, the inside page of last week’s Bulletin. It was spread over the back of the Empire chaise. WEIGHT LIFTER LIVES ON CARROTS & PRUNES it said, and she went on to read that a Mr. Sweigle, who ran a gas station in Upper Darby, had not touched a mouthful of meat in thirty years. He was now fifty-four, and rode a bicycle to work and back. Leaning forward, with her free hand Mother circled this item with her red pencil, then said: “Martha dear—I must run name a boat. Yes— in a pitiful state of mind result of what she thought was something out of joint—physically. Eyes in serious condition, perhaps glaucoma, and going in for Red Cross, Blue Cross, and knitting. Memory also, with shooting pains in back of neck. Myself put her through eye and ear man, but no trouble there. Verified that cancer does not act up that way. But by mistake—left her in hall while I ran to do a little telephoning—she walked down hall into wrong X-ray room. Treated her for bursitis right off the reel. Thank heavens was only a three dollar charge as specialist dismisses bursitis as silly, says trouble due to California man who used word psychosis very loosely. Only treatment needed is new iron formula. Aspirin when she thinks the pain is bad. He claims pain entirely due to undernourished sympathetic nervous system, registering complaint through impoverished gall bladder. Cure? My dear, we’re right back where we started with the little liver pills.” She paused, then called aloud:

  “Coming, Warren!”

  “Yes, Mother?” he replied.

  “There he is, my dear. Well, I’ve got to run and name this boat.” As Warren came into the room, she hung up. He crossed the room to stand before her and she buttoned the lower button of his vest, and unbuttoned the bottom button of his coat.