Twisted Ones (4 page)

“It’s all right, dad. I didn’t mean to have such severe reaction.”

His father sighed again, staring at his large hands, while Charles Berrey pulled his chair out from his desk and sat on it.

“Did I say something wrong again?” said Charles.

“You don’t say anything wrong, Chuck. It isn’t that you say anything
wrong
, for Pete’s sake. Look, Chuck,” his father said, “I’ll try to demonstrate something. In my business, one demonstration is worth a thousand words. Now, look …” His father thought for a moment. Then he stood up. “Chuck,” he said, “Come over here and punch me. Punch me right smack in the belly as hard as you can!”

The boy regarded him momentarily with a puzzled frown. He got off the chair and walked across to the father. With his fist raised, he paused questioningly.

“Go ahead, Chuck! Sock me right in the belly, hard!”

Charles Berrey did as he was told.

His father winced. “Ow!” he said, “That hurt!”

“I’m sorry, dad.”

“No, now—wait a minute. I said, that hurt! It hurt, Chuck. Do you get that? Now, if I hadn’t expected it, and you’d just walked up and pounded on me that way, it might make me mad. Do you understand, Chuck?”

“I think so, sir.”

“So I’d be mad at you, see? And if you were to come to me later and apologize to me, I’d say: ‘Well, Chuck, I didn’t mean to get so mad.’ Do you see, Chuck?”

“Y-yes, I think so.”

“In other words, son, I wouldn’t go into all that stuff about severe reaction. I’d just plain say right out that it had made me mad.”

“Yes, dad.”

“Okay, Chuck?”

“Yes. Okay.”

“That’s all there is to it, Chuck,” said his father smiling. “You just say what you mean.”

“I see,” said Charles Berrey.

His father sat back down on the bed, more relaxed now.

He said, “How do you like being in the limelight, kid?”

“All right.”

“You know, Chuck, your mother and I are damn proud of you.”

“Thank you, sir … dad.”

“Now, it was your decision to go on again this week, right?”

“Yes.”

“And you’ll make it, kid. I’m not at all worried about
that.”

“What are you worried about, dad?”

“Worried? Well, Chuck, I’m not
worried
. You can’t call it being worried. I just want to have a chat with you.”

“All right, dad.”

“For instance, tonight. Jackie Paul’s going to ask you a few questions before you go into the Contemplation Chamber, right?”

“Yes, sir. I mean,
right!”

“Oh, you know—routine questions. What do you do for a hobby. What are you going to be when you grow up. That kind of stuff.”

Charles Berrey giggled. “I guess it’s pretty plain what I do for a hobby.”

“You mean read, Chuck?”

“Sure,” Charles laughed.

“Well, now, Chuck, you weren’t reading when I came in. You were playing with your knife collection, weren’t you?”

“Yes, dad.”

“Why don’t you say something about your knife collection? I bet Jackie Paul doesn’t even know you have one. Or any of the people watching television. They must think you’re all books.”

“I see,” said Charles Berrey.

“I’m not telling you what to say, Chuck, but people already know you read a lot. People already know that.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And remember when you were a kid you used to want to be a ball player. Remember that?”

“Sort of,” said Charles Berrey.

“You mean you don’t remember that? Remember how we used to throw ‘em out in the back yard? You and me and Howie?”

“Yes, I do, dad.”

“Well, tell ‘em that, kid. I mean, you have a lot of sides to you. You’re no darn bookworn, for Pete’s sake, Chuck.”

“All right, dad.”

“I don’t want you to get the idea I’m trying to influence you, son, but you want to make a good impression.”

“I see.”

“Okay?”

“Sure, dad.”

“That’s what counts, Chuck—the impression you make.”

“All rights.”

“Good!” said his father. He stood up and reached out to ruffle Charles’ hair. Charles Berrey backed into his knife rack and jumped away in a sudden motion, as though he had been burned.

“What’s the trouble?” said his father.

“Nothing.”

“That knife rack’s secure.” His father said. He walked across and patted the sides of the rack. “That knife rack’s okay, Chuck.”

“I
know
it is.”

“You jumped like one of those knives was going to pop out and fall on you.”

“They
could
fall,” said Charles.

“Fall out of there?” his father chuckled. “Now, come on. How could those knives fall out of there? They’re held tight.”

“I guess they simply make me anxious now and then.”

“You mean they
bother
you now and then?”

“That’s right,” said the boy, “they bother me.”

“Well, don’t worry about it, kid,” his father said.

“I won’t, sir.”

“One more thing, Chuck.”

“Yes?”

“Tonight when we meet Mr. Carter … Tell you what, Chuck, let’s spoof him a little. Want to?”

“Spoof him?”

His father laughed. “That’s right, spoof him a little, Chuck. Let’s tell him you got a B on your last report card.”

“B in what, dad?”

“Oh, anything. I mean, let’s just say you got a B. He’ll think you got all A’s, you know? I mean, you
did
get all A’s, but let’s spoof him.”

“Tell him I got a B?”

“Say you got a B in English or something. English! That’d spoof him. Say you got a B in English.”

“That’s my best subject, dad.”

“They’re all your best subject, for Pete’s sake,” said his father. “You never got a B in your life, did you?”

“No, sir. Never.”

“So say you got one, Chuck. In English. I mean, that’s irony, you know? You with your big words, you know
irony?”
“Yes, sir.”

“Well, wouldn’t it be ironical if you were to get a ? in English?”

“Yes, sir. I suppose it would.”

“Mr. Carter must think you’re all books and good marks, and it’d spoof him if you told him you actually got a B.”

“Yes, sir. Dad. I guess it would.”

“Want to do that, Chuck?”

“Sure,” said Charles Berrey. “I want to do it.”

“Thatta boy!”

“What about mom, though?”

“I’ll fix mom, don’t worry. She’ll play along. I’ll fix her!”

The boy hesitated as his father opened the door of his room.

Then he said, “Dad?”

“What, kid?”

“When you fix it with mom, dad. I mean, you won’t terrorize her?”

“I won’t
what?”
“Nothing.”

“Terrorize, for Pete’s sake? Terrorize!”

“I mean, make her mad. That’s all.”

“Where do you get a word like terrorize?” said his father.

“I meant make her mad, dad.”

“You’ve got to learn to say things the way other people say them,” said his father, “You’ve just got to, Chuck.”

“I’m trying, dad. I’m making every effort.”

“Oh, Chuck, for Pete’s sake! Every effort!”

“I’m trying, dad,” said the boy, “I meant to say I’m trying.”

“Well, don’t go and bawl on me!”

“I
won’t!”

“And don’t shout, Chuck.”

“I’m sorry. I apolog—I’m sorry, dad.”

“Okay, kid. Let’s just forget it. Okay?”

“Yes, sir,” said the boy. “Yes, okay, dad, sir.”

“Okay,” said his father, “Okay, kid,” and he shut the door behind him.

Charles Berrey stood alone, his glasses steamed up, and behind them, his eyes were filled with tears that began gradually to slide down his cheeks. He wiped them away angrily with the palms of his hands. He was bawling, just the way his father said not to; crying like some kind of baby; and even worse, he had wet his pants again.

REGINALD WHITTIER

“That would make it exactly fourteen days after my period,” Laura Lee told the boy, “I might not even have been ovulating.”

It was the same day and the exact hour that Brock Brown was getting into the green Mercury in Sykes, New York, and Charles Berrey’s ears were being cleaned by his mother in Reddton, New Jersey.

This was taking place in New England, in a small Vermont town famous for insurance companies and Red Clover Junior College. The setting was in complete contradiction to the conversation taking place between the slim, solemn nineteen-year-old boy and the short eighteen-year-old girl with the close-cropped, wind-blown, sun-colored hair. Auburn, Vermont, was a town typical of the state—sedate, unexciting and plain. And Whittier’s Wheel, the antique shop where the pair was holding this conversation, was as archaic and old-fangled in its appearance as the attitudes and opinions of its proprieteress, Miss Ella.

Miss Ella was the mother of the slim, solemn nineteen-year-old boy, but no one in the whole of Auburn or its surrounding county would think of calling her Mrs. Ella, nor even Mrs. Whittier. Who could, and who would want to remember back to the year when big, coarse, whiskey-ridden Theobald Bruce had seduced this fragile lady and put a life in her? He had married her and given her son a name, under the duress of the townspeoples’ angry threats, and for the same reason he had run off to Canada, never to be heard from since. Miss Ella did not bother to use the Bruce name, nor to allow her son to use it, but proudly called him by Whittier, called him by Reginald, the name of her father.

She was Miss Ella to everyone, a dear sickly soul whose courage in remaining there in Auburn, despite the chance of gossip and criticism, was remembered long after the incident with Theobald Bruce was. People in Auburn remembered what they wanted to, forgot the unpleasant and mean, went about their business and prayed in church for things to stay the same.

On the wall of Whittier’s Wheel, right above Reggie Whittier’s head, was one of his mother’s samplers, with the words stitched in lavender against a yellow background:

It would have come as a near-fatal shock to Miss Ella to know that it was this sampler which had ignited the spark responsible for the few moments of sudden fire between her son and a maid from Red Clover Junior College. The truth was that Reginald Whittier II did not want to be the best of whatever he was. He was, in fact, bent on being better than what he was. His experience with Laura Lee had not helped, but his determination in the matter was unique.

“I don’t know whether I was ovulating or not,” said Laura Lee, “You can’t really tell unless you take your temperature for a whole year.”

There it was—
more
mystery. Reggie Whittier decided there would never be an end to the mystery of woman; no matter how much he had read and been told, he would never know everything. He was, at the same time he realized this, vaguely uncertain that he wanted to know everything, and he pictured a thermometer in his mind, and thought of the way his mother always had one sitting in a glass of water beside her bed.

Reggie had been told the facts of life when he was sixteen years old. His mother had asked Mr. Danker, the town jeweler, to explain everything to him, and Reggie had sat in hot discomfort, listening, while his mother did her needlework across the room. Mr. Danker described everything in his precise, pontifical tone, and Reggie was torn between not wanting his mother present at this time and not wanting to be alone with Miles Danker while he discussed the subject.

It was not that he disliked the paunchy, balding jeweler. There was no one in the whole of Auburn who knew as much as Mr. Danker knew about everything, nor was there anyone as kind to Reginald Whittier as Danker was. But whenever the boy was alone with him, Reggie felt extremely nervous and at a loss for words. Reggie supposed it was because he was not accustomed to the company of men. Women were much easier for him to communicate with. Not girls—except for Laura Lee, who was both a fluke and a godsend—but older women like his mother, the kind of women who came to Whittier’s Wheel to look at antiques. Reggie could talk to them for hours on end about nothing at all.

• • •

Yet for all Miles Danker had told Reggie, and despite the fact that Reggie had read up on women in a book Laura had lent him, he felt that the female sex was the most mysterious thing in the whole world—felt that even now, after he had been with Laura Lee. Laura lived in a trailer on the outskirts of Auburn with her mother and father, who also worked at Red Clover. Miss Ella called them itinerant workers, because in the summer the Lees went to Florida to work in a hotel. They were no different than migrant workers, said Miss Ella, and she referred to the trailer camp as “Tobacco Road.”

“It isn’t that I object to you keeping company with a lady, Reginald,” she told him, “but that girl is not a lady. No doubt she has diseases. Ask Mr. Danker what kind.”

Reggie had no intention of asking Mr. Danker about it. Every time he remembered that session with Danker when he was sixteen, Reggie felt immensely guilty and depressed. There was really no reason for him to have that reaction, but there it was, and Reggie suspected his mother felt exactly as he did.

She once said, “I would not have put us through that horrible experience, Reginald, if I had not felt that it was absolutely necessary. There are certain sordid things in life one just has to face.”

Laura Lee had told Reginald Whittier something similar, only she had put it this way: “It’s never easy, Reg. Life don’t make it easy, but God made men and women different for a purpose. We’re supposed to.”

She had said that immediately after their sudden experience in the Lee trailer, that night Mr. and Mrs. Lee were down at the Green Mountain Movie House. Laura was trying to make him feel better about what had happened between them. It was the first time for both of them, and both of them had wanted it to happen. But afterward, neither one felt the least bit glad or wise.

“I suppose,” said Laura, “it’s because we weren’t really in love.”

“I never knew a girl like you,” Reggie said. “I could never talk to a girl before you.”

“Yes, but it’s not like love. We’re supposed to be thrilled or something.”

“I know it,” said Reggie.

“I’ll tell you one thing, Reggie Whittier. You’re the only boy I’ve ever wanted to do it with. You were never fresh and you never tried to maul me. You’re the nicest boy I know.”

“I really have a feeling for you,” said Reggie.

But nothing either one could say that night at the end of April could change the fact that both were sorry the thing had happened. Reggie always thought of it that way—as “the thing.” He had expected it to be so different. He had thought he would feel like a conquerer, feel the way he had seen the men in the movies behave. He remembered one movie in particular. The scene had faded on a man and a woman as they embraced, and then in the next scene, after time had elapsed, the man was dressing, tying his necktie and slicking back his hair with military brushes, grinning and whistling as though he had just inherited a hundred million dollars.

Reggie had felt like two cents.

“Well, what if I am pregnant?” said Laura Lee that afternoon in May as she faced him in Whittier’s Wheel.

“Shhh, Laur, please. Don’t shout.”

“I don’t want to shout, Reg.”

“I know you don’t. I’m sorry.”

“But what if I am?” she whispered.

“I’ll—I’ll marry you,” he said.

“Oh, Reg, you know we can’t get married. How can we get married? My father’d
kill
me!”

“So would my mother,” said Reggie. Then he changed his mind. “No,” he said, “It’d kill her.”

“Why
did we do it?”

“It was a dumb thing,” Reggie said.

“I don’t hold it against you, Reg. You know that.”

“Sure, Laur. It was my fault.”

“It wasn’t anyone’s fault, and that’s the truth,” she said, and then, “Do you think I’m pregnant?”

“Listen, Laura,” said Reggie, looking over his shoulder, back toward the stairs in the shop which led up to the apartment where he lived with his mother. “It makes me nervous to talk about it here. I’ll get the car tonight. Can you get off early?”

“At ten-thirty.”

“I’ll pick you up,” he said.

“What about your mother?”

“It’ll be all right.”

That was a lie, and Reginald Whittier knew it. Every Sunday his mother clipped out the television section from the
Times
and circled in red all the evening programs they were to watch together.

“It isn’t that I mind your going out,” she would tell him, “but I did buy the television for you, after all. Don’t you remember our decision, Reginald? We decided that it would be less embarrassing for you if you were to enjoy entertainment in your own home. You know how it used to embarrass you to go to the movies alone? I don’t blame you one bit, either. I’ve always hated going anywhere alone, but I’m an old woman, and I’m content to stay home now. I bought the set for you, dear.”

His mother had bought the television before he met Laura. In most ways, his mother understood him very well. Reggie was shy around anyone his own age, except for Laura—shy and slow and clumsy, but the worst part of all was that he stuttered. He was never sorry that he had not gone on to college, nor that he was declared unfit for military service, and that was the reason. In high school, he was a nonentity. You read novels and see television shows and hear all the time that stutterers are poked fun at, and mocked, and mimicked, but in Auburn High, Reggie was simply ignored. He was Miss Ella’s son. He helped her out in the Wheel. He was a jerk. That was all there was to it, and sometimes Reggie was not even sure he was thought to be a jerk, because most of the time he believed he simply wasn’t thought about at all by anyone.

• • •

When Laura came into his life last September, there was a radical change.

She had come up to him in Stoker’s Drugs on the corner, where he went for malts during one of the afternoon “breaks” which his mother allowed.

The girls from Auburn barely nodded to him, and the girls who went to Red Clover never looked at him. He never minded the fact that the Red Clover girls payed no attention to him, but he
had
gone to school with most of the Auburn girls. When they slighted him, Reggie felt more and more determined not to show his face anywhere.

“It’s only because you stutter,” his mother would tell him. “You’re a perfectly nice boy, but if they spoke to you, you’d have to answer back, wouldn’t you, Reginald? And you’d stutter. They’re only trying to save you embarrassment.”

Laura Lee was different. She had come up to him in Stoker’s and handed him her shoe. The heel was broken, she explained, and would he run across to the repair shop with it while she waited for him? She told him her name and smiled at him. It was something that could have happened to anyone, without the moment meaning anything at all, but it had happened to Reginald Whittier.

He had never known a warmer feeling than the one he had as he crossed Lowell Street with her shoe. He felt as though he had taken some sort of dreamy dope, or as though he were slightly intoxicated. He stood before Mr. Canzetti with his shoulders squared and a broad smile on his face, and he told an utterly preposterous lie. “Mr. Canzetti, my girl friend broke her heel. Can you fix it up?”

“Well now,” said the old man, “you got yourself a girl friend, huh, Reginald?”

“Why not?” Reggie answered.

He stood whistling and waiting while Mr. Canzetti banged on the shoe, and it was peculiar that he remembered again the man in the movie, tying his necktie and slicking back his hair with the military brushes.

When he walked back to Stoker’s and handed her the shoe with its heel repaired, she said: “Want to have a coke with me, or are you busy?”

“I wh-wh-wh—“

“You
want
to,” she said.

“Yes.”

She said, “My brother stutters. He’s a mechanic down in Sarasota.”

To Reggie, it was just as though she were saying: “My brother has brown eyes.”

He could almost feel tears start. That was another embarrassing thing. Reggie Whittier’s eyes always filled with tears over the least little thing. He seemed always to be on the verge of crying. But never because of anything sad—only because of things that were simple and happy. Once a week he cried when he watched This Is Your Life on television. Whenever they brought someone out of the subject’s past for an unexpected reunion, Reggie would sit with his eyes full. He cried at movies, and he cried if it was a sunny day and his mother said: “Aren’t we happy, though? Aren’t we lucky we’ve got all our limbs and our senses, Reginald?” He cried when Perry Como sang “The Lord’s Prayer”; and sometimes when one of the boys or girls he had gone to high school with
did
wave at him, he felt like crying.

His mother understood. “It’s not because you’re a sissy or anything at all like that, though most people would be the first to say it was. It’s just that you’re an extremely sensitive boy. That’s another reason I bought the television. You have a right to feel the way you do.”

After that initial meeting with Laura Lee, he saw her three or four times before she came to Whittier’s Wheel to seek him out. He saw her in Stoker’s, and on the corner of Clover Hill in her denim uniform, waiting for the bus to take her up to college, and he saw her once in McGovern’s Department Store. He would wave at her and smile, but not until she came to the antique shop did he have his second conversation with her.

Laura had picked a bad time to come. His mother was downstairs, on one of the few occasions when she checked over the stock and dusted off rockers, spinning wheels, and antiquated hundred-year-old clocks. When Reggie introduced Laura to her, he saw his mother’s lips purse, saw her eyes travel the full distance of Laura’s young and—suddenly in the light of his mother’s scrutiny—too ripe body.