The Centaur (15 page)

She was occupying one side of a booth and there was space
beside her. Across the table, two ninth-graders she dimly knew, a girl and a boy, were tugging at each other’s buttons, blind to everything. She was gazing at them and did not see me until my body, easing in, pushed hers. “Peter!”

I unbuttoned my pea jacket so the devil-may-care flame of my shirt showed. “Give me a cigarette.”

“Where have you been all day?”

“Here and there. I’ve seen
you
.”

Nicely she tapped one of her Luckies from her purple-and-yellow plastic case, which had a little sliding door that opened and shut. She looked at me with flecked green irises whose perfect circles of black seemed dilated. I did not understand my ability to dissolve her composure and in my heart honestly took no credit for it. But her dissolution was welcome to me; it couched a kind of repose I had never known before. As a baby wishes to be put to bed, my hand wished to be between her thighs. I dragged and inhaled. “I had a dream about you last night.”

She looked away, as if to give herself space in which to blush, “What did you dream?”

“Not quite what you think,” I said. “I dreamed you turned into a tree, and I called ‘Penny, Penny, come back!’, but you didn’t, and I was leaning my face against the bark of a tree.”

She took it a bit dryly, saying, “Why how sad.”

“It
was
sad. Everything around me is sad these days.”

“What else is sad?”

“My father thinks he’s sick.”

“What does he think he has?”

“I don’t know. Cancer?”

“Really?”

My cigarette was stirring in me its mixture of nausea and giddiness; I wanted to put it out but instead, for her sake, inhaled.
The booth partition across from us leaped a foot closer and the girl and the boy had fallen to bumping heads, like a pair of doped rams.

“Sweetie,” Penny said to me. “Your father’s probably all right. He’s not very old.”

“He’s fifty,” I said. “He just turned fifty last month. He always said he’d never live to be fifty.”

She frowned in thought, my poor dumb little girl, and tried to find some words to comfort me, who was so infinitely ingenious at evading comfort. At last she told me, “Your father’s too funny to die.” A ninth-grader, she only had him as a teacher in study-hall; but the whole school of course knew my father.

“Everybody dies,” I told her.

“Yes, but not for a long time.”

“Yes, but at some point that time has to become now.” And with this we carried the mystery to the far rim, and could only return.

“Has he seen a doctor?” she asked, and, as impersonally as an act of weather, her thigh under the table had become tangent to mine.

“That’s where he is now.” I shifted my cigarette to my right hand and casually dropped, as if to scratch an itch, my freed left hand onto my thigh. “I should be with him,” I told Penny, wondering if my profile looked as elegant as it felt, jut-lipped under a plume of smoke.

“Why? What could you do?”

“I don’t know. Be of some comfort. Just be there.” As naturally as water slips from higher to lower my fingers moved to her thigh from my own. Her skirt had a faunish weave.

This touch, though she did not acknowledge it, interrupted the flow of her thought. She brought out jaggedly, “How can you? You’re just his child.”

“I know,” I said, speaking quickly lest she think my touch was more than an accident, an incident of innocent elements. Having gained my place, I expanded it, fanning my fingers, flattening my palm against the yielding solid. “But I’m the only kid he has.” My using my father’s word “kid” brought him too close; his wrinkling squint, his forward-leaning anxiety seemed to loom in the unquiet air. “I’m the only person in the world he can talk to.”

“That can’t be,” she said very softly, in a voice more intimate than the words. “Your father has hundreds of friends.”

“No,”
I said, “he has
no
friends; they don’t help him. He just told me.” And with something like the questing fear that made my father, in conversations with strangers, gouge deeper than courtesy found common, my hand, grown enormous, seized the snug wealth of her flesh so completely my fingers probed the crevice between her thighs and my little finger, perhaps, touched through the muffle of faun-feeling cloth the apex where they joined, the silken crotch, sacred.

“Peter, no,” she said, still softly, and her cool fingertips took my wrist and replaced my hand on my own leg. I slapped my thigh and sighed, well-satisfied. I had dared more than I had dreamed. So it surprised me as needless and in a shy way whorish when she added in a murmur, “All these people.” As if chastity needed an outer explanation; as if, if we were alone, the earth would sweep up and imprison my forearms.

I stubbed out my cigarette and pleaded, “I must go after him.” I asked her, “Do you pray?”

“Pray?”

“Yes.”

“Yes.”

“Will you pray for him? My father.”

“All right.”

“Thank you. You’re good.” We both looked back amazed at what we had said. I wondered if I had been guilty of blasphemy, using God as a tool with which to score myself the deeper on this girl’s heart. But no, I decided, her promise to pray did genuinely lighten my burden. Rising, I asked her, “Are you coming to the basketball game tomorrow night?”

“I could.”

“Shall I save you a seat?”

“If you like.”

“Or you save me one.”

“All right. Peter.”

“Huh?”

“Don’t worry so much. Not everything is your fault.”

Now the couple opposite us, classmates of Penny’s, whose names were Bonnie Leonard and Richie Lorah, came out of their nudging trance. In a burst of derisive triumph Richie yelled at me, “The Pumpkin Eater!” Bonnie feeble-mindedly laughed, and the air of the place, where I had felt so secure, became dangerous with words aimed at my face. Senior boys sporting adult pockets of shadow under their eyes called to me, “Hey, Eater, how’s your old man? How’s Georgie Porgie puddin’ ’n’ pie?” Once a student had had my father, he did not forget it, and the memory seemed to seek shape in mockery. An emotion of fermented guilt and fondness would seek to purge itself upon me, the petty receptacle of a myth. I hated it and yet it did give me importance; being Caldwell’s son lifted me from the faceless mass of younger children and made me, on my father’s strength alone, exist in the eyes of these Titans. I had only to listen and seem to smile as sweetly cruel memories tumbled from them:

“He used to lie down in the aisle and holler, ‘Come on, walk all over me, you will anyway’ …”

“… about six of us filled our pockets up with horsechestnuts …”

“… seven minutes to the hour everybody stood up and stared as if his fly was open …”

“Christ, I’ll
never
forget …”

“… this girl in the back of the class said she couldn’t see the decimal point … he went to the window and scooped some snow off the sill and made a ball … hard as hell at the fucking blackboard …”

“ ‘Now can you see it?’ he said.”

“Christ, what a character.”

“You got a great father there, Peter.”

These ordeals usually ended with some such unctuous benediction. It thrilled me, coming from these tall criminals, who smoked in the lavatories, drank hooch in Alton, and visited Philadelphia whorehouses staffed by Negro women. My obliging laugh stiffly dried on my face and, suddenly contemptuous, they turned their backs. I rethreaded my way to the front of the luncheonette. Someone in the booths was imitating a rooster. In the jukebox Doris Day was singing “Sentimental Journey.” From the rear a chorus of cheers rhythmically rose as the pinball machine, gonging in protest, gave up one free game after another. I looked back and through the crush saw that it was Johnny Dedman doing the playing; there was no mistaking those broad, faintly fat shoulders, the turned-up collar of the canary-yellow corduroy shirt, the baroque head of wavy hair crying for a haircut and scooped behind into a wet ducktail. Johnny Dedman was one of my idols. A senior flunked back into a junior, he performed exquisitely all the meaningless deeds of coördination, jitterbugging and playing pinball and tossing salted nuts into his mouth. By an accident of alphabetization he sat next to me in
one study hall and taught me a few tricks, how to make a wooden popping noise by pulling my finger from my mouth, for instance—though I could never do it as loudly as he. He was inimitable and no doubt it was foolish to try. He had a rosy babyish face and a feathery mustache of pale unshaven hair and an absolute purity of ambitionlessness: even his misbehavior was carried forward without any urgency or stridence. He did have a criminal record: once in Alton, wild on beer at the age of sixteen, he had struck a policeman. But I felt he had not sought this out but rather fell into it coolly, as he seemed on the dance floor to fall into the steps that answered his partner and made her, hair flying, cheeks glowing, ass switching, swing. The pinball machine never tilted on him; he claimed he could feel the mercury swaying in the Tilt trigger. He played the machines as if he had invented them. Indeed, his one known connection with the world of hard facts was an acknowledged mechanical ability. Outside of Industrial Arts, he consistently got E’s. There was something sublime in the letter that took my breath away. In that year, the year I was fifteen, if I had not wanted so badly to be Vermeer, I would have tried to be Johnny Dedman. But of course I had the timid sense to see that you do not will to be Johnny Dedman; you fall into it at birth, ripe from the beginning.

Outdoors I turned the points of my wide jacket collar against my throat and walked up the Alton Pike two blocks to Doc Appleton’s office. The trolley car released from waiting at the turnout by the trolley that was going westward into Alton as my father and I left the school swayed up the pike, full of gray workers and standing shoppers coming home, going eastward toward Ely, the tiny town at the end of the line. I had lost perhaps ten minutes. I hurried and, having told Penny to pray, prayed
Let him live, let him live, do not let my
father be sick
. The prayer was addressed to all who would listen; in concentric circles it widened, first, into the town, and, beyond, into the hemisphere of sky, and, beyond that, into what was beyond. The sky behind the eastward houses already was purple; above, it was still deep daylight blue; and behind me the sky beyond the houses was aflame. The sky’s blue was an optical illusion that, though described to me in General Science class by my father himself, my mind could only picture as an accumulation of lightly tinted crystal spheres, as two almost invisibly pink pieces of cellophane will together make rose; add a third, you have red; a fourth, crinkling crimson; and a fifth, such a scarlet as must blaze in the heart of the most ardent furnace. If the blue dome beyond the town was an illusion, how much more, then, of an illusion might be what is beyond that.
Please
, I added to my prayer, like a reminded child.

Doc Appleton’s house, which had his office and waiting-room in the front part, was a custard-colored stucco set deep on a raised lawn sustained by a sandstone wall a little less than my height. On either side of the steps up to the lawn there were two stone posts topped by large concrete balls, a device of exterior decoration common in Olinger but rare, I have since discovered, elsewhere. Abruptly, as I raced up the sloping walk toward the doctor’s door, all the lamps in the homes of the town began to burn—as in a painting the slight deepening of a shade will make the adjacent color glow. The broad line between day and night in this instant had been crossed.

PLEASE RING AND WALK IN
. Since I was not myself a patient, I did not ring. I imagined that somehow if I did, Doc Appleton’s accounts would be thrown off, like a checkbook with an uncashed check from it. In the vestibule of his house there was a cocoa mat and an immense stucco umbrella stand ornamented,
higgledypiggledy, with chips of colored glass. Above the umbrella stand hung a small dark print, frightful to look at, of some classical scene of violence. The horror of the spectators was so conscientiously dramatized, the jumble of their flung arms and gaping mouths rendered with such an intensity of scratching, the effect of the whole so depressing and dead, that I could never bring myself to focus on what the central event was—my impression was vaguely of a flogging. In the corner of the print, before I snapped my head away as if from the initial impact of pornography, I glimpsed a thick line—a whip?—snaking about a tiny temple etched with spidery delicacy to indicate distance. That some forgotten artist in an irrevocable sequence of hours had labored, doubtless with authentic craft and love, to produce this ugly, dusty, browned, and totally ignored representation seemed to contain a message for me which I did not wish to read. I went into Doc Appleton’s waiting-room on my right. Here old oak furniture padded in cracked black leather lined the walls and encircled a central table laden with battered copies of
Liberty
and
The Saturday Evening Post
. A three-legged coat rack like a gaunt witch glowered in one corner and the shelf above its shoulder supported a stuffed crow gone gray with dust. The waiting-room was empty; the door of the consulting-room was ajar and I heard my father’s voice asking, “Could it be hydra venom?”

“Just a minute, George. Who came in?”

With the broad bald face of a yellowish owl Doc Appleton peered out of his office. “Peter,” he said, and like a ray of sunlight the old man’s kindness and competence pierced the morbid atmosphere of his house. Though Doc Appleton delivered me, I first remembered him from a time when I was in the third grade and, worried about my parents’ fights, bullied
by older boys coming back from school, ridiculed at recess for my skin whose spots under the stress had spread to my face, I came down with a cold that did not go away. We were poor and therefore slow to call a doctor. On the third day of my fever they called him. I remember I was propped up on two pillows in my parents’ great double bed. The wallpaper and bedposts and picture books on my covers beside me all wore that benevolent passive flatness that comes with enough fever; no matter how I wiped and swallowed, my mouth stayed dry and my eyes stayed moist. Sharp footsteps disciplined the stairs and a fat man wearing a brown vest and carrying a fat brown bag entered with my mother. He glanced at me and turned to my mother and in an acid country voice asked, “What have you been doing to this child?”