Authors: Richard Yates
“Oh?” And instead of looking up into his eyes she looked down at the dress. “Well,” she said, “it’s as old as God.”
Bobby had left the sofa when they went back into the living room; he was over near the far wall, keeping his distance, fooling around with a fielder’s glove. He would repeatedly sock his fist into its pocket and then stand with his feet well apart, squinting along his left shoulder with the glove and the imaginary ball nestled close to his chest in a fairly good imitation of what real pitchers do when they’re holding a man on first. At nine and ten
and eleven he had done things like this for hours, lost in fantasy, sometimes audibly whispering to himself.
But he seemed to tire of it quickly now. He put the glove away in the closet under the stairs, where Marge kept a lot of his belongings, and came toward her across the carpet. “Hey, Mom?” he said. “Be okay if I take a shower here?”
And that did it for Driscoll. Days and even hours later he was able to acknowledge the innocence of the question, but at the time no power on earth could have held back his rage.
“No,” he said. “No, it would
not
be okay. You’re going to pick up your stuff, right now, and you’re going to go up to the dorm and take your shower with the other boys. If you’re ashamed to get undressed in front of the other boys that’s not at all surprising, and it’s regrettable, but maybe it’s something you ought to think about the next time you want to lie around stuffing yourself with
marsh
mallows all day.”
Bobby’s eyes seemed to have gone out of focus. He was just standing there and taking it; and Marge, over by the fireplace, didn’t look angry this time. It was worse: she looked hurt – stunned and waiting for the pain to start – and she looked older than her age.
Driscoll sat down, taking off his glasses, and rubbed his eyes hard and slowly with his fingers. After a while he said “I’m sorry, Marge,” but she didn’t say anything.
With the new jeans and sweatshirts folded over his arm, Bobby walked to the front door. When he opened it Driscoll called, softly, “Bobby?”
The boy turned back, but they didn’t quite look at each other. “I’m sorry, son,” Driscoll said.
Much later that night, when he left the house carrying a flashlight in one hand and a clipboard in the other, to make his
rounds, Driscoll was able to assure himself that it hadn’t been too bad. He had managed to make it up with Marge – not in the way he would have liked to, but they’d had what he now considered a good talk. The only unfortunate part had been at the end, when she’d said she was too tired to wait up for him.
“Oh? How come?”
“What do you mean, ‘how come’? I’m
tired
, that’s all.”
Things would be all right in the morning – he was certain of that – and time would settle it all out.
There was rarely anything out of the ordinary to be dealt with on his nightly rounds: he would proceed counter-clockwise around the quadrangle, and at each stairway landing a dorm inspector would be waiting to say “Everything okay, Pop,” or “Everything okay, sir.” Some of them were more reliable than others – he never felt wholly comfortable with MacKenzie, for instance, on the second floor of Three building; there was something a little shifty about MacKenzie’s face, suggesting that perhaps he shouldn’t have been appointed a dorm inspector in the first place – but in general the rounds were a time of peace and satisfaction.
And that was the way it went tonight: everything was so thoroughly okay in all the dorms that he found himself standing for a long time around the Four building archway, fiddling with his flashlight, wondering how best to kill the hour or two before he could sleep.
Only half of Four building’s dormitory space was used for that purpose – the school hadn’t yet achieved a large enough enrollment to fill it – but now the other half had come to serve as quarters for the kitchen help, since the gasoline shortage made it no longer possible to bring them out from Hartford and back each day. There were six or eight of them, gaunt, solitary-looking men in stained white cotton. They were at work before
anyone else was up in the morning, but you could see them walking home at dusk, one at a time, slow with fatigue, cupping roll-your-own Bull Durham cigarettes in their hands. Driscoll had been a little uneasy about this Four building arrangement at first – boys did tend to romanticize the lives of characters like that – and the uneasiness must have been general, because the barracks were sealed-off from the rest of the school with heavy plywood partitions and locks, but nobody needed to have worried. The boys behaved as if the kitchen help didn’t exist, and the kitchen help kept entirely to themselves. It occurred to Driscoll to wonder sometimes what they must think of this place as they sat hunched in their underwear on their bunks upstairs, looking out over the quadrangle, putting themselves to sleep with bottles of cheap wine in paper bags.
Well, the world was funny; nobody had ever said it wasn’t. And he was walking again now, beginning to feel a nice tingle of expectation, because he had decided it wasn’t too late to drop in on the Drapers for a drink.
By daylight, the sandy area out behind Four building was the only drab part of the campus. Crazy old Mrs. Hooper had originally planned on a school twice this size, and partial foundations had been laid for a second quadrangle that would have stood here. They were like long, low ruins of an ancient place, those unfinished foundations; they jarred your sense of symmetry; they cluttered the view on your way to the infirmary, or over to the science building and the Drapers’ house. And at night, if you weren’t careful, you could stumble over the masonry.
In the distance the Drapers’ kitchen windows blazed with light – good; they were up – and for a few moments Driscoll allowed his thoughts to dwell on what he planned to do in school tomorrow. “Oh, it’s ‘Tommy this’ and ‘Tommy that,’”
he recited just under his breath as he walked, “and ‘Tommy, stay outside,’ but it’s ‘Special train for Atkins’ when the troopship’s on the tide . . .” He had taken his fifth-form class through any number of English poets this year, starting with Donne; all fall and winter they had drowsed in the tedium of verse that took an effort of will to read, let alone to understand, but now it was spring; they were well into the nineteenth century, and tomorrow he would introduce them to Kipling. “Then it’s ‘Tommy this’ and ‘Tommy that,’ and ‘Tommy, ’ow’s your soul?’ But it’s ‘Thin red line of ’eroes’ when the drums begin to roll.”
He knew they’d like it. Oh, bless their hearts, he knew they’d like it, and he knew they’d like the way he read it aloud. It was more than a little appropriate for them, too: their own troopships would be on the tide soon enough; the drums were beginning to roll for them now.
Jack Draper was sitting alone at the bright kitchen table. Driscoll saw that through the panes of the kitchen door as he rang the bell; then he saw him look up and smile and go through the slow procedure of getting to his feet and coming forward. “Hello, Bob,” he said. “Good to see you. Come on in.”
“I know it’s late,” Driscoll said. “I just thought I’d drop by in case you were still up. Alice in bed?”
“No, she’s – out,” Draper said. “Pull up a chair. Here, let me get you a drink.”
It soon became clear, as Driscoll took small sips of the powerful highball set before him, that Draper must have been boozing here for some time. He wasn’t drunk, exactly, but he had drunk himself into the kind of expansive mood that made him apt to say the first crazy thing that came into his head.
“. . . No, but seriously,” he was saying. “Seriously, Bob, have
you ever stopped to consider what a tremendous amount of sheer sexual energy we’re harboring here? Especially at this time of night? Just imagine what we’d find if we could make those big stone dormitory walls fall away: a hundred and twenty-five kids all beating their meat at once.”
And Driscoll laughed – it
was
pretty funny – but when Draper’s voice started up again, building toward the next laugh, he glanced out into the shadowed hallway beyond the kitchen and turned quickly back with one forefinger against his lips, saying “Sh-sh.”
Millicent Draper came in, seven years old, shading her eyes against the brightness. Her rich tan hair was rumpled from bed; she was wearing what looked like a brand-new cotton nightgown, and she carried a very old stuffed animal that could have been either a dog or a bear.
All the drink seemed to vanish from Jack’s face and voice. “Well,” he said. “Hello, lovey.”
“Daddy? Mommy said we could each have a cookie if we woke up.”
“Well, then, I guess you’d better go and get one. Can you reach them?”
“Yes.”
“Did Jeff wake up too?”
“Yes.”
“Then I guess you’d better get two. Have we been talking too loud down here?”
“No,” she said, “we just woke up anyway.”
Draper watched her as she moved through the kitchen. Then he said “Wow. That certainly is a nice-looking nightgown. Is that one of the nightgowns Mommy bought in Hartford today? With Mrs. Driscoll?”
“Yes. The other one’s pink and the other one’s blue.”
When she was ready to leave he turned partly away from the table and said “How about a hug?”
And she gave him a good one, both arms going up and around his neck, both wrists turned back to accommodate the animal and the cookies. The sight of Jack Draper’s crippled hands pressed against her back brought a sweet rush of pain to Driscoll’s eyes and throat. He wished he had a daughter.
When she was gone Draper sat looking at his drink for a while; then he glanced over and saw that Driscoll’s glass was empty. “Help yourself, Bob,” he said. “Here, wait, I’ll get you some ice.” And he began the struggle to stand up.
“No, really,” Driscoll said, “I’d better get home.”
“Sit still.”
“Well, okay, one more. But hell, let me get the ice, Jack.”
“Sit
still
, I said.” He sounded angry, making his way to the refrigerator, and he added “I can do
some
things.” Then came the clatter of an ice tray in the sink and the hiss of hot water running over it, while Driscoll sat feeling apologetic. It wasn’t easy to know how to behave with a handicapped person.
“So where were we?” Draper demanded when he was settled at the table again. “Oh, yes. Sexual energy. What we’re harboring here.” And he took a long drink. “Well, old man, I don’t suppose I’m telling you anything you don’t know, or haven’t heard, or haven’t guessed, but the fact is we’re harboring a short little rat-faced bastard here whose sexual energy knows no bounds, and of course it wouldn’t do to reveal his identity, but his name is Frenchy Fucking La Prade.”
“I don’t get it,” Driscoll said.
“You don’t get it? Why not? Everybody
else
seems to get it, all the way down to about the kids in the third form – you oughta see the way those little buggers look at me all day. Come on, Driscoll, don’t be dense. Where the hell do you think she is
tonight? Where do you think she’s been damn near every night since way back last spring when I was too dumb to know what the hell was going on?”
It broke over Driscoll in little waves of incredulity – Alice
Draper
? Frenchy La
Prade
?– and then the worst thing was that he didn’t know what to say. He was afraid he might be blushing. “Well, Jack,” he said at last, “I had no idea you were going through something like this.”
And Draper looked wretched now, probably hating himself for having divulged it. “Yeah, well, it hasn’t been very jolly,” he said. “Sometimes I think I’d rather be dead.”
“You don’t mean that. You know you don’t mean that.”
When he’d first met the Drapers, Driscoll had performed a secret little arithmetic problem in his head, and now he did it again, just to make sure. Jack had been stricken with polio when he was twenty-nine, the year after his marriage. He was thirty-eight now; Millicent was seven and Jeff was five, and that proved the disease hadn’t affected his reproductory system.
Then he was confronted by what seemed a significant moral question: should he tell Marge about this? And he had just resolved that he wouldn’t – a thing like this was much better kept to himself – when it occurred to him that Marge might already know. She and Alice could easily have discussed it at length on those drives into Hartford, or over their chicken salad at the Drake hotel, and maybe Marge had decided to keep it from
him
. Well, but why would she want to do that?
“Listen, Jack,” he said, leaning across the table, and he would have clasped Draper’s arm if he hadn’t been afraid to find out how thin it was. “Listen: I don’t understand women any better than you do, but you can’t let yourself go to pieces over this. You’ve got to take care of yourself, that’s the main thing now. You’ve got to take care of yourself.”
“Thanks, old friend,” Draper said in a flat voice, “but you’re missing the point. I’ve been taking exquisitely good care of myself for years. All cripples do.”
Dining tables occupied only half the refectory; the other half, the far end of it, was used as the assembly area. Every day, at the chime of a small table bell after the lunch dishes were cleared away, the entire student body and faculty would rise and move, heavy with food, to the rows of folding steel chairs that stood facing a speaker’s podium against the far wall. The faculty sat in the rear, and the boys were ranked ahead of them from the sixth form down, with the little kids in front. Knoedler always made the day’s announcements when he was home – any of several other masters took over when he was gone – and he liked to make a little drama out of them: he would start off with unimportant things and save the big stuff for the end. When there wasn’t any big stuff, which was most of the time, he would contrive to give his final announcement the sound of something more important than it was; sometimes too, as a change of pace, he would save some comic item for last, though he usually spoiled those jokes by telegraphing them with a sly little smile.
From his bearing at the podium one Monday in April, as he neared the climax of his performance, everyone could tell it was the most ordinary of days: there would be no big stuff, no funny stuff, probably nothing even Knoedler could dramatize.