Extravagance became a mark of social irresponsibility, the badge of the fringe criminal—the man with influence, the black-marketeer. These latter regarded the average run of the population—puritanical, working hard as though to escape a horrible memory—as mugs. The “mugs” condemned as parasites those who were blatantly enjoying themselves.
Through this epoch Sarah Howson moved like a sleepwalker, measuring her life by routine events. For a while there was some sort of an allowance, issued in scrip and redeemable at specified stores, which was just about enough to keep her and the child. She didn’t bother to wonder about it, even though it was much discussed by ordinary folk: usually they condemned it, because it was available to women like Sarah Howson, who had committed the double crime of bearing an illegitimate child and also associating with a known terrorist. But these discussions she seldom heard; now hardly anyone talked to her in the street where she lived.
When the period of the allowance expired, she got work for a while cleaning offices and serving at the counter of a canteen. Wages were low, part of the general syndrome of reaction against affluence which had followed the upheaval. She hunted without much success for better-paid employment.
Then she met a widower with a teen-age son and daughter who wanted a housekeeper-mistress and didn’t mind about the brat or her decaying looks. She moved across the city to his apartment in a large, crumbling near-tenement block and was at least secured against poverty. There was a roof and a bed, food, a little spending money for clothes, for the child, for a bottle of liqour on Saturday night.
Young Gerald endured what happened to him without objection: being placed in a nursery while his mother worked as a cleaner, being put aside, like an inanimate object, at the widower’s apartment when they moved there. At the nursery, naturally, they had clucked sympathetically about his deformity and made inquiries into his medical record, which was already long. But there was nothing to be done except exercise his limbs and enable him to make the best possible use of them. He learned to talk late, but quickly; surveying the world with bright grave eyes set in his idiot’s face, he progressed from concrete to abstract concepts without difficulty, as though he had delayed speaking deliberately until he had thought the matter through.
But by then he was no longer being sent to the nursery, so no one with specialized knowledge noted this promising development.
Crawling hurt him; he did it only for a short period, whimpering after a brief all-fours excursion like a dog with a thorn in its pad. He was four before he got his awkward limbs sufficiently organized to stand up without support, but he had already learned to get around a room with his hand on the wall or clutching chairs and tables. Once he could stand without toppling, he seemed almost to force himself to finish the job; swaying on slow, uneven legs, he set out into the middle of the room—fell—rose without complaint and tried again.
He would always limp, but at least when it came time for schooling he could walk a straight line, achieve a hobbling ran for twenty yards, and climb stairs with alternate feet rather than using both feet for every step.
His mother’s attitude was one of indifference by now. Here he was—a fact, to be endured. So there was no praise or encouragement when he mastered some difficult task such as the stairs—only a shrug of qualified relief that he wasn’t totally helpless. The widower sometimes took him on his knee, told him stories, or answered questions for him, but showed no great enthusiasm for the job. He would excuse himself by saying he was too old to be much interested in young kids; after all, his own children were of an age to leave home, maybe to marry. But sometimes he was more honest, and confessed that the kid disturbed him. The eyes—maybe that was it: the bright eyes in the slack face. Or else it was the adult form of the sentences that emerged in the hesitant babyish voice.
When she was feeling more than usually tolerant of her son, Sarah Howson took him around the stores with her, defiantly accepting the murmurs of false pity which inevitably echoed around her. Here, in this part of the city, she wasn’t known as Gerald Pond’s mistress. But taking him out involved getting the folding wheelchair down the narrow, many-angled stairway of the apartment house, so she didn’t do it often. Before she left to get married, the widower’s daughter took him a few times to a children’s park and put him on swings and showed him the animals kept there—a pony, rabbits, squirrels and bush babies. But the last time she tried it he sat silent, staring at the agility of the monkeys, and tears crawled down his cheeks.
There was TV in the apartment, and he learned early how to switch it on and change channels. He spent a great deal of time gazing at it, obviously not understanding a fraction of what was going on—and yet perhaps he did; it was impossible to be sure. One thing was definite, if surprising: before he started school, before he could read or write, he could be trusted to answer the phone and memorize a message flawlessly, even if it included a phone number of full cross-country direct-dialing length.
He had seen few books before he began school. Neither his mother nor the widower read for pleasure, though they took a daily paper. The son bought men’s magazines for the spicy items and the nudes; the daughter bought fashion magazines occasionally, though the climate was still against excessive elegance, and romantic novels and love comics.
His first steps toward reading came from TV. He figured out for himself the sound-to-symbol idea, and school only filled in the details for him—he already had the outline. He progressed so rapidly that the teacher into whose care he was put came around to see his mother after six weeks. She was young and idealistic, and acutely conscious of the prevailing mood of the country.
She tried to persuade Sarah Howson that her son was too promising to be made to suffer the knocks and mockery of the other children in a regular school. The government had lately set up a number of special schools, one of them on the outskirts of the city, for children in need of unusual treatment. Why not, she demanded, arrange for his transfer?
Sarah Howson was briefly tempted, although she had visions of forms, applications, letters to write, interviews, appointments, all of which dismayed her. She inquired if he could be sent to the special school as a boarding pupil.
The teacher checked the regulations, and found the answer: No, not when the home was less than one hour’s travel by public transport from the nearest such school. (Except as provided for in clause X, subsection Y, paragraph Z … and so on.)
Sarah Howson thought it over. And finally shook her head. She said, “Listen! You’re pretty much of a kid yourself still. I’m not. Anything could happen to me. My man isn’t going to want to be responsible for Gerry, is he? Not his kid! No, Gerrry has to learn to look after himself. It’s a hard world, for God’s sake! If he’s as bright as you say, he’ll make out. To my mind, he’s got to. Sooner or later.”
For a while thereafter, she did take more interest in him, though; she had vague visions that he wasn’t going to be useless after all—support in old age, earn a decent living at some desk job. … But the habit wasn’t there, and the interest declined.
There was trouble sometimes. There was taunting and sometimes cruelty, and once he was made to climb a tree under goading from a kids’ gang and fell from a ten-foot branch, a fall which luckily did no more than bruise him, but the bruise was huge and remained tender for more than three weeks. Seeing it, Sarah Howson had a sudden appalling recollection of her meeting with the Israeli woman, and firmly slapped down the memory.
There was also the time when he wouldn’t go to school, because of the torment he underwent. When he was escorted there to stop him from playing hooky, he refused to cooperate in class; he drew faces on his books, or sat gazing at the ceiling and pretended not to hear when he was spoken to.
He got over that eventually. The mood of the city, and the country, was changing. The trauma of the “crisis” was receding, a litle joy was no longer suspect, frills and fun were coming back into style. Relaxing, people were more tolerant. He made his first friends when he was about thirteen, at about the same time that local storekeepers and housewives found that he was willing to limp on errands or feed the cat when the family was away— and could be trusted to complete the job, unlike other boys, who might equally well decide to go to a movie with the gang instead.
He was considering a career when the widower died. He had vague thoughts of some job where his deformity and other, newly discovered peculiarities were irrelevant. But the widower died, and he was legally of age to quit school.
And his mother was ill. It was some months before it was known to be from inoperable cancer, but he had suspected it ever since the first symptoms. Before she was ill enough to be hospitalized, he was having to support her by what odd jobs he could find: making up accounts for people, washing-up in a nearby bar and grill on Saturdays, and such like. He had had little acquaintance with hope in his life so far. By the time of his mother’s death, which left him alone at seventeen—ugly, awkward, a year lost on the schooling which he had figured would continue to college if he could get a public scholarship—he was embittered.
He found a room a couple of blocks from the old apartment, which had been claimed by the municipal housing authority for a family with children. And kept going as he had been: with odd jobs for subsistence, with books and magazines, with TV when he could beg entrance to someone’s home, and a movie occasionally when he had spare cash for escapism.
At twenty, Gerald Howson was convinced that the world which had been uncaring when he was born was uncaring now, and he spent as much time as possible withdrawing from it into a private universe where there was nobody to stare at him, nobody to shout at him for clumsiness, nobody to resent his existence because his form blasphemed the shape of humanity.
iv
The girl at the box office of the neighborhood movie theater knew him by sight. When he limped to join the waiting line, she made a kind of mental check mark, and his ticket was already clicking from the machine before he could ask for it; one for the cheapest seats, as always. He appreciated that. He was given to speaking rather little now, being so aware of the piping, immature quality of his voice.
Some few things about himself he had been able to disguise. His height, naturally, wasn’t one of them. He had stopped growing at twelve, when he was barely five feet tall. But an old woman had taken pity on him a year back; she had formerly been a trained seamstress and worked in high-class tailor shops, and she got out her old needles and remade a jacket he had bought, setting shoulder pads into it and cunningly adjusting the hang of the back so that from the waist up he could pass a casual inspection. Also he had a high heel on the shoe of his shorter leg. It couldn’t stop him from limping, because the leg still dragged slightly, but it gave him a better posture and seemed to lessen the endless ache from the muscles in the small of his back.
The jacket had been worn almost every day for a year, and was fraying, and the old woman was dead. He tried not to think about that. He went across the lobby to the kind darkness of the auditorium, with occasional snatched glances at the advertisements on the wall. Next week’s show—the same as this, held over by public demand.
Consequently, with the house lights up and minutes still to go before the start of the program, there were many people to stare at him over popcorn-full mouths as he went down toward the base of the gigantic screen. He tried not to be aware of that, either.
The center front rows were all full of teen-age kids. He turned down a side aisle and went to an unoccupied end seat; the view of the screen would be badly angled, but it was that or a tedious business of stumbling over other people’s feet, maybe treading on toes with his dragging shorter leg. He sat down and looked at the blank screen, his mind filling as always with fantasy images. The mere environment of the theater seemed to take him out of himself, even before the movie started. Snatches of conversation, pictures, moods of elation and depression, all flickered past his atttention, and brought a sense of taut excitement. Some of the material in this mental variety show could startle him with its unfamiliarity, but he had always assumed it was due to his surroundings provoking a recurrence of otherwise forgotten memory. He had seen hundreds of movies here; they must be the source of the ideas crowding his mind.
And yet … that wasn’t too satisfying as an explanation, somehow.
A man in brown came striding down the main aisle, all the way to the front, turned sharply toward the side where Howson sat, took the seat diagonally in front of him, and threw an overcoat across the seat adjacent. He shrugged aside his sleeve and stared at his watch before leaning back and turning his head toward the screen.
That, or the fact that he was well-dressed, and should by appearance have been in the expensive seats, or something not available to consciousness, attracted Howson’s attention to him. For no definable reason, he was sure the man in brown hadn’t consulted his watch simply to know how much time remained before show time. The man was not … not exactly nervous, but on edge about something, and it wasn’t the prospect of a good movie.
His puzzlement was cut short by the darkening of the auditorium, and he forgot everything except the huge colored images parading across the screen. By night and day his dreams were populated from movies, TV and magazines; he preferred movies because his fellow watchers didn’t care about his presence, and although people were willing enough to let him sit and see their TV, there was always that tense awkwardness.