Expensive People (17 page)

“What? No, sit still, the bathroom can wait. You can go to the bathroom all night long when I get through! She had the doctor all lined up, Dickie-boy and it was a matter of money, and she called me up and started screaming over the phone and calling me every filthy name she knew that the niggers or somebody taught her, maybe those fake Russians that were crawling all over New York and trying to write poetry—they think they're so much better than the Reds but I say shit, at least the Reds stayed over on their side of the ocean and that's more than all those goddam other immigrants are doing, and I don't exclude those spies and crud coming up and landing in New York, and it's the same way in England, don't worry! Same goddam mess! And then she called me up next morning and said no, she didn't want the abortion, and she talked about it the way you talk about buying a new car, you
think you should wait until fall to economize, then she changed her mind again and said she did want it, she couldn't live with me and couldn't have any kid of mine—but she could have some nigger or spic or Jew kid, I suppose, I wouldn't doubt that, she's balled more Jews, Dickie-boy than I have blackballed in my clubs, and I kid you not. But listen,” he said, his voice breaking, “listen. She's run out again and it's just us and we gotta stick together, what if she doesn't come back? What if she doesn't come back? We gotta forgive her, she can't help it if she's a bitch and her father or somebody was nuts. We gotta forgive her and understand and …”

And he waddled his big buttocks over across the cushion to me and lowered his face onto my shoulder, weeping. He snuffled and bellowed and the whisky glass tilted so that whisky ran onto my leg and down inside my shoe, and I didn't care, I just sat there waiting for it to be over so that I could sleep. Even the nausea in my stomach was pressed down by this paralyzing heaviness that came over me, and I thought, Thank God I'm going to die. Thank God I won't be alive after this.

I stayed in that languorous trance for a few days. Then, on my birthday, I had enough foresight to ask Farley Weatherun if I could visit with him overnight, since Father would take me out to a restaurant and for dessert a simpering waitress would bring a cake adorned with a giant sparkler to our table, and I wasn't up to it, not quite up to it. So Farley said sure, why not, though it was a little strange because we weren't especially good friends, and we were fooling around with a few other kids in the dormitory when a gay, floating sensation rose in me and buoyed up my heart and I told them excuse me, I'd be back in a minute, and ran down the corridor and outside without bothering with my coat.

Intoxicated, serene, and mindlessly happy, I floated across the campus, and no stares or glares caught my eye, neither from bemused after-dinner-tramping instructors nor my classmates, so accustomed to nuts. We were brilliant, we Johns Behemoth brats, but we were nuts, and why hide it? But there are nuts and nuts, just as there are mothers and mothers, and far better to be a serene nut than one who overturns
tables. Oh, what did I have in mind when I ran out? Not a little was I buoyed along the walks by a pleasant thought having to do with how I could get her back, or how I could discover why she had left—what was lacking in me—how I could amend it, humbly and with slicked-down hair, a good kid, just a good kid trying to survive, preloboto-mized and prepubescent!

Now I beseech the fates to visit me once more with that eerie happiness, that dazzle of nutty chaste innocence that flooded my body on that day, seven-thirty on a March Wednesday, my eleventh birthday and first deathday! I beseech the fates, the saints, Christ, and God Himself in his gold foil robes to electrify my flabby waste of a body with the glow of that fire! I swear to you, my readers, that I was at last coming alive, and I had been in a trance for many days. Do you know what it is to be sleeping and yet awake, awake and yet sleeping? How you can't shake it off, can't quite open your eyes? My God, nothing is more terrifying! I had sunk into that kind of stupor listening to them argue, through the laundry chute, and rose temporarily out of it only to ebb back again when Nada tried to smooth out my sheet with her hand and told me everything I expected, and then I had sunk heavily into it when Father wept on my shoulder and told me … what he had told me—I won't go into that again (words on lavatory walls are poetry compared to Father's man-to-man combat), and now I was coming out of it again because—do you see?—it seemed to me I was going to find out an answer at last.

I vaulted up the steps of the Main Building but everything was dark. Did I let that stop me? No more than temporarily! I vaulted over the side of the little brick wall and ran around the corner, on the path that said DELIVERYMEN
USE THIS ENTRANCE
and that was off-limits for us scholars. The back door was locked and darkened too, but without hesitating, in my warming, dazed excitement, I tapped at the window-pane with my gnawed knuckle and it broke like magic, shattering down upon me. I brushed everything aside, splinters, slivers, tears (was I crying?), and crawled through the window, severing a small vein in my leg but never mind, never mind. Once inside, I ran along the dark corridor and even sped past my destination, braking suddenly and skidding into a porcelain drinking fountain, but whirling about, and there it was—the Records Room, the sanctuary where so many secrets lay entombed about us Johns Behemoth boys and we powerless to know them. I got
inside this room too, somehow, though the transom atop the door was rusty and cranky, and the blood that came from somewhere was slippery as hell, and once down inside the room I threw on with a triumphant flick of my wrist a whole galaxy of flickering, shivering fluorescent lights, and there it was! A wall of filing cabinets! This was heaven itself! My heart was pounding with excitement as if I were about to witness a vision. I ran, slipping and sliding, to the drawers and groped around looking for “E,” unable to find it for an agonizing few seconds, until I remembered sharply that “E” was near the beginning of what was called the alphabet. I yanked out the big drawer and pawed through the manila folders, panting, gasping, and when I found “Everett” a cloud seemed to pass over my mind and I was quite mad with happiness, but only for an instant. Then I yanked it out. I slashed through the papers—papers of graphs and numbers that looked like the exam I had taken, and there was my pathetic medical report, filled out by an indifferent quack who charged Nada sixty dollars, and my five letters of recommendation from former teachers, gibbering with enthusiasm no doubt, but I hadn't any time for them, and finally I found what I wanted. It was the IQ^score. There were two papers and one said 153 and the other, dated more recently, said 161. I stared from one paper to the other until it dawned upon me what those numbers meant.

Then the hot kernel of fire burst in my stomach and I began to sob. I sobbed with rage. What did she want from me then? What more could she want? I couldn't do any better. I had even pushed myself beyond what I could do, and still it wasn't enough for her—I wasn't enough for her—and what else could I do? I tore the papers in pieces. I picked the rest of the folder up from the floor and tore it, and I yanked out the drawer so that it fell and struck my leg (later a great black-and-orange bruise was to appear, big as a grapefruit, on my thigh), and suddenly there were folders everywhere, flying in the air, being torn, struck, ground underfoot, and I picked up a stool and sent it crashing into the flickering fluorescent tubing overhead with a strength I didn't know I had, and I swear to you—yes, I formally swear—that never in my life until that moment had I truly been alive! Never!

Now every cell and tube was throbbing with a joy that had no humor, was beyond humor, and my bones creaked, so much was demanded of them, and the little muscle in the center of me, my delicate, wheezing heart, swelled like any fine organ to take on this challenge
and sent blood pumping to all nooks and corners of my body! It was wonderful! Wonderful! I yanked more drawers out, I skidded on the papers, I crashed sideways into someone's desk and turned my rage to it, my fingers groping in a drawer and seizing a jar of ink that crashed against the wall not a half-second later, and the splattered droplets mingled with my hot, happy tears, and by the time they came for me I had thought of something further, the best and happiest trick of all: I was vomiting over everything, summoning up from my depths the most vile streams of fluid that had ever graced any Record Room in history.

That was the end of Johns Behemoth for me, and it got back to me from Gustave, via his mother, via the Spoons, from the very mouth of Dean Nash himself, that he had always had reservations about the Everetts, all of them. The cultural background was spotty, irregular, Bohemian when it wasn't just plain Philistine, the emotional maturation levels of both child and parents were clearly low, and Johns Behemoth would never again lower its standards out of a desire to accommodate someone's pleas. No, never! And Gustave imitated the way our good dean must surely have pursed and stretched down his lips and tilted his nose up as if to get a whiff of fresh aristocratic air unbesmirched by the stink of vomit that seemed always about me.

My body tingled for a few days, then I heard a high uncertain buzzing in my ears, then the tingling faded away and the buzzing disappeared as if someone had pulled out my plug.

I remember crying against Father's shirt front and feeling his big loving hands on me, patting my back. He forgave me. And now we had a new maid named Florence, who supposedly knew nothing of our troubles, and she said I was her good boy, her good, good boy, and her voice was always raspy and sincere. People came to visit—not me but Father, who needed visits—and I overheard Mavis Grisell and Tia Bell and Charles Spoon and the Griggses and Bebe and everyone tell Father to drop in for cocktails soon, and if he had to leave town they'd be glad to take in Richard (me) for a few days, and above all he shouldn't
worry.
Things would turn out in the end. After that we didn't hear from them anymore.

And life without Nada was a surprise, because it was so much like life with Nada. We discovered that she hadn't been around the house that much. It was good to discover that! “What do we care, huh? What the hell,” Father would say in a brave, gruff voice to me as we raided the refrigerator at midnight. We ate like pigs. Father gained weight and patted his stomach, saying to what few people stopped in around five for drinks, mostly businessmen on their way through the city, “Really putting it on, aren't I?” And he'd pat himself as if patting a dog.

With Nada went our old maid Ginger, for reasons I did not understand, and now we had a nice white, middle-aged lady with a kindly brow, and she lived in the maid's room above the kitchen, whereas Ginger had always been a nuisance: someone always had to drive her down to the bus stop, where she boarded a bus for a nine-mile ride down into the city, and out of Fernwood, Bornwell Pass, Pleasure Dells, and Oak Woods.

The first time I saw Florence a strange thing occurred. In pulling off her black, lint-specked gloves she made the same gesture that Father had made when he showed me his product, that strand of wire. Father had held the wire stretched between his hands, as if presenting something sacred to me, and Florence had pulled off one glove by tugging at the tips of the fingers, and as she said something to me—”Real cold for April, eh?”—she paused and the glove remained where it was, half on and half off, the middle finger stretched out grotesquely.

I was out of school for two weeks. It took about two weeks to arrange for a transfer to Fernwood Junior High (where, incidentally, I never ended up), and anyway Father thought it was a good idea for me to “rest.” So I lay around the big house, staring outside. The lawn was greening up. When Florence came in the room I left, not wanting to be pitied. Florence was always vacuuming and polishing and running water furiously. There was a soapy, steelwoolish, pitying odor about her, just as there had been an odor of something confused and fragrant and dark about Nada. But I really didn't think about Nada, I want you to know. I didn't think much about the way I had failed her, about being such a mess, a failure at eleven, but instead I just lay around and listened to my heart beat, wondering if it might stop someday soon and not caring much. I rested. I lost weight.

There was one room in the house we didn't “bother with,” and that was Nada's. Florence did not go into it with her vacuuming apparatus and rags and polish, nor did she allude to it once Father told her not to “bother with” it. She nodded and understood, as if all houses had one special nasty room.

I remembered Nada's room from the day Mr. Hansom had taken us through. That had been the best room on the second floor, with a lovely bay window looking out onto the sunny side yard with its fringe of evergreens so that it seemed as if you were balanced atop a magic forest—that magic, sinister room where Nada made noises on her typewriter and spent her secret hours away from us. Sometimes when Father was gone I walked back and forth past the door to that room, that Room,
that room,
thinking: What would happen if I went inside?