Eyes in the Fishbowl (7 page)

When the Grovers moved into our downstairs flat, they made an arrangement with Dad for Mrs. Grover to clean our apartment once a week, and in exchange they got a big hunk taken off the rent. Well, the Grovers still pay the low rent, but recently Mrs. Grover’s headaches have gotten worse, especially on Tuesdays when she’s supposed to be cleaning our apartment. Oh, she usually makes it up, all right, but she’s discovered what a good listener my dad is. I’m not there on Tuesdays, but the guys upstairs are in and out and they say that any minute Dad isn’t busy with a student, Mrs. Grover corners him and starts crying into her dust cloth about her headaches and life in general. Anyway, the result is the house isn’t much cleaner at the end of the day, so once in a while I try to straighten things up.

That’s what I was doing that Sunday morning when I ran across the letter from the Wentworth School. It was lying there wide open, on top of the usual pile of debris that covers my dad’s desk: unpaid bills, unsharpened pencils and unfinished symphonies. So I read it, and at first I was all excited.

Wentworth is a private high school out in the suburbs on the north side, and John Hubell, who is one of Dad’s oldest friends, has taught music there for years and years. There was going to be an opening in the music department, so John had recommended Dad. And the headmaster was willing to consider him. The salary wasn’t terrific, but it would be steady and a lot better than promises and stale doughnuts; best of all, we’d have to move. At least that’s the way I looked at it. I charged into the kitchen where Dad was making a pot of lentil soup, waving the letter over my head.

“Hey,” I babbled, “why didn’t you tell me? Did you get it? When do you start?”

Dad looked at the letter and then he looked at me and then he went over to the table and sat down and started lighting his pipe. Lighting his pipe slowly and thoughtfully while you wait for an answer is one of the most maddening things he does. Finally he got it lit and took a deep puff and let it out slowly before he said, “You’d like for me to teach at Wentworth?”

It occurred to me just about then that John was always complaining about what a lousy place it was to teach. It’s a private school for girls, and according to John the girls are mostly spoiled brats and the administrators are a bunch of two-bit tyrants.

“Well, it’s a steady salary,” I said. “And if it’s as bad as John makes out, why doesn’t he quit?”

“John has a family, and he doesn’t have his degree,” Dad said. “It would be hard for him to find a job anywhere else. Besides, the time for John to break away has passed. He’s been at Wentworth too many years….” Dad took the pipe out of his mouth and put it down on the table, where he’d probably forget it and let it go out. “I have a great deal of sympathy for John’s situation, but not enough to make me want to share it, I’m afraid. And the salary is really not a consideration. By the time I paid for transportation, it would be very little more than I’m making now. But I certainly didn’t realize that you’d be so enthusiastic. It didn’t occur to me—”

There were a lot of things that didn’t occur to Dad where I was concerned. I shrugged and mumbled something about thinking maybe we could move to the north side. But I didn’t wait for an answer. It was pretty plain that Dad had already turned down the chance to teach at Wentworth, so that was that. He was starting in on some of his reasons for not wanting to sell the house as I left the kitchen. I’d heard them all before.

Out in the hall I stumbled over Charity, so I picked her up to put her out. The window at the end of the hall opens on the fire escape, and the cats always use that route to get to our floor. When I opened the window and dumped Charity out, I decided to climb out, too. I hadn’t done that for a long time, but when I was younger I had used the fire escape landing a lot. It was one of my favorite places to sit with my guitar and make up songs and sing them. It’s on the south side of the house, sheltered from the wind, and on sunny days it can be warm there even in the midst of winter. The trapped sunlight warms your skin, but the thin air stays as cold as ever in your lungs. If you stay too long the air wins out, but for a little while it feels wonderful.

Charity had started down the fire escape, but when she looked back and saw me, she came right back up and climbed into my lap. I’m not crazy about cats in general and Charity in particular, but she made a good hand warmer so I let her stay. Prudence and Charity are Dad’s cats. At least he was the one who brought them home because somebody was about to drown them. They’re real nothings, as cats go, scrawny black-striped alley cats, both of them; but at least Prudence has enough originality not have kittens two or three times a year.

Charity was so surprised to have me hold her that she started purring up a storm, and it felt good on my hands, warm and vibrating. I leaned back against the sunwarmed shingles and vegetated. I tried not to think about anything, but in a couple or minutes I was thinking about the job at Wentworth and what it would have been like if Dad had taken it.

First of all, if we had moved it would have meant no more Randolph High. There were a lot of reasons why I would have been glad to see the last of Randolph. I felt then that it was really a lousy place to go to school—unless you happened to be part of the “in” group that ran everything. And if you weren’t a part of it, there was nothing much you could do about it. I knew because I’d tried.

A year and a half before, when I had started in at Randolph I’d had high hopes. I’d never felt like I really belonged to a school before—I’d always been a real outcast at Lincoln—but I’d decided that things were going to be different at Randolph. All the time at Lincoln I’d had this vague idea that everybody else, all the other kids, had some kind of secret that I wasn’t in on—something that made them able to talk and laugh and kid around together. And I was so sure that I couldn’t find out what the secret was I didn’t even try. I just did my work and left. But then in the eighth grade I began to see things differently.

I was noticing a lot of things along about then. I began to watch people—I mean, really watch them—and I decided that nearly everyone was afraid, at least a little, and there wasn’t any big secret. Only a lot of little ones. One of the little secrets was to dress like everyone else, or just a little bit better. And another was to talk like everyone else and about the same kinds of things. Another one, for a boy, was to be a good athlete. Of course, that was out for me, but I decided there wasn’t any reason why I couldn’t work on the other things. I knew I was smart—everyone said so and my grades were always good—so why couldn’t I learn how to be just like everyone else? Only at Lincoln it was too late to start.

So I concentrated on getting ready for Randolph. I saved money for clothes and practiced remarks and wisecracks that might come in handy. I even dropped out of orchestra because the violin didn’t fit my new image. Dad didn’t like my quitting, though he didn’t try to make me change my mind, but Mr. Cooper, the orchestra teacher, almost had a fit. It was too bad, I guess. But it couldn’t be helped.

Then I’d started high school and things weren’t anything like I’d planned. Oh, it was better than Lincoln and I made a few friends, but not anything like I’d been counting on. I did get to know this one kid in my English class right away. His name was Jerry Davidson and he was almost as quiet as I was, but he had a good sense of humor when you got to know him. He lived up in Hill Groves and he asked me up to his house a few times. His family had this terrific place with a swimming pool and a rumpus room and the whole bit and they were all very nice and friendly.

I also began to find out that girls thought I was good-looking, but the ones who seemed to like me usually weren’t the ones I was interested in—and most of the time I couldn’t get up my nerve to talk to any of them, anyway. I still panicked and got tongue-tied at times, particularly around kids I used to know at Lincoln before I started work on the new me. So I’d finally decided that what I needed was a new start. A new start in a school where nobody remembered how I’d been at Lincoln.

For quite a while I’d been thinking that if Dad would just get a job, or even a new batch of students in a part of town where people had enough money to pay a decent fee for their lessons, we could sell the old house and move into a house or apartment in another part of the city. It didn’t have to be anything fancy. Just a normal place, instead of a kind of perpetual open house for all the kids and bums and college students and animals in the neighborhood.

So Wentworth would have been the answer. But Dad had turned it down already so that was that. I knew from past experience there was no use discussing it with him any further. It all had to do with a difference in the way we looked at things that was absolutely basic.

My dad’s life is the kind of life he picked out for himself a long time ago, and it suits him fine. His mother’s family had a lot of money at one time and Dad was brought up in a very strict and proper home with all sorts of rules and regulations. So, when he was still pretty young he ran away from home and lived in Paris for several years with a lot or artists and writers and types like that. Then when his money was gone and he had to come back home, he just brought his Paris way of living back to Cathedral Street. By renting part of the house and teaching a little, he made enough money to get by and the rest of the time he spends “living” as he calls it. He composes some and plays a little—accompanying and with chamber orchestras—and he goes to all the cheap musical events at the university and to standing room at the opera and symphony. Besides that he reads a lot and spends time with his thousand and one friends—and then there’s the mountains. He has this thing about the wilderness, and every few months he takes off with a friend or two and they back-pack into the mountains for a week or so. I’ve gone with him a time or two, but I’m not much of a hiker because of my leg, so usually I stay home with whoever happens to be living here at the time.

It’s a great life I suppose—a lot of people say so. Phil and Dunc and their friends are always raving about how Dad is one guy who dropped out of the rat-race and made it stick. I don’t argue with them. I can’t even explain to myself exactly how I feel about it. But I know that day on the fire escape I decided it must be a lot bigger kick to drop out of something than not to be
in
in the first place.

T
HE NEXT DAY
on my way home from school I stopped by Alcott-Simpson’s again. I was planning on walking right through from the east entrance to the west—just to have a quick look around. At least that’s what I had in mind when I went in. Everything seemed quiet, and there was a fairly good-sized crowd of shoppers. If there still seemed to be something not quite normal—well, I thought maybe it was only my imagination. I was almost to the west entrance when somebody touched my arm.

I glanced around, and there was this fantastically sophisticated-looking woman. Since I couldn’t imagine what she wanted of me, I decided I must have been in her way, so I said, “Excuse me” and stepped to one side. But then this dame, instead of breezing on by, put her arm through mine and smiled at me. I nearly passed out.

She looked like a model who had just stepped out of one of those really far-out fashion magazines. Her hat was an egg-shaped helmet that completely covered her hair and sloped down to a little slanted brim over her eyes. Her suit was kind of egg-shaped too, and made out of some very heavy material with a thick stand-out collar. She was wearing very short black boots with high heels and some huge wrap-around dark glasses that covered more than half her face. Everything she was wearing positively reeked of money, but like most of those high-style things, the whole effect was just a small—but important—inch away from being ugly. But there was one thing you could really say about it, it made a great disguise. Until she started to talk, I hadn’t the slightest idea who she was.

“Don’t you know who I am?” was the first thing she said.

I started to laugh. The minute she opened her mouth, it ruined the whole effect. All of a sudden it was like some little girl dressed up in her mother’s clothes.

“I didn’t even know you,” I said.

“Do you like it?” she asked. She tugged at the helmet where it came down tight and flat against her cheeks. She sounded worried.

“Like it? You look like something from another planet.”

She turned around and looked at herself in a mirror on the counter. “Another planet?” she said thoughtfully. “I saw a model wearing it, and I thought it would make me look different. So no one would know me. But you don’t like it?”

“It’s fantastic,” I said. “You look better than most people would in it.”

She smiled again and took hold of my arm. “Let’s go to the Tea Room and eat something.”

That shook me a little. I’d never taken a girl anywhere to eat anything before, for one thing. And for another, I didn’t have a whole lot of money along. At the Alcott-Simpson Tea Room, even a milk shake isn’t exactly cheap. I didn’t have the slightest idea what I’d do if she ordered a whole lot of stuff. And she certainly might. A teen-age girl who could afford to buy an outfit that probably cost several hundred dollars, just because she wanted to look different, probably wouldn’t think anything of ordering everything on the Tea Room menu. Of course, there was the other possibility—that the outfit was stolen, and Sara was a thief, a shoplifter. But that didn’t make my problem any better. It wouldn’t be any easier to predict what a girl who could
steal
an outfit like that would do.

But when we got to the Tea Room, Sara didn’t even look at the menu. She just said, “What can we have? I don’t have any money. Do you have any?”

I was right in the middle of making feverish plans to keep her from knowing that I wasn’t carrying a bank roll, but the way she asked—straight out—surprised me into answering the same way. “Not much,” I said. “But we could have a shake or something.”

“Could I have one of those?” Sara asked, pointing to a soda that a waitress was serving. I checked the menu and told her it was okay. I had enough for two sodas.