Dick walked along kicking at the pavement with his toes.
“Say, we might go around and have a soda… they have awful good sodas at Dryer’s.”
“Got any dough?”
Dick shook his head.
“Well, you needn’t think I’m goin’ to treat you…. Jimminy criskets, Trenton’s a rotten town…. In Philadelphia I seen a drugstore with a sodafountain half a block long.”
“Aw, you.”
“I bet you don’t remember when we lived in Oak Park, Dick…. Now Chicago’s a fine town.” “Sure I do… and you an’ me going to kindergarden and Dad being there and everything.”
“Hell’s bells, I wanta smoke.”
“Mother’ll smell it on you.”
“Don’t give a damn if she does.”
When they got home Aunt Beatrice met them at the front door looking sore as a crab and told them to go down to the basement. Mother wanted to see them. The back stairs smelt of Sunday dinner and sage chickenstuffing. They hobbled down as slowly as possible, it must be about Henry’s smoking. She was in the dark basement hall. By the light of the gasjet against the wall Dick couldn’t make out who the man was. Mother came up to them and they could see that her eyes were red. “Boys, it’s your father,” she said in a weak voice. The tears began running down her face.
The man had a grey shapeless head and his hair was cut very short, the lids of his eyes were red and lashless and his eyes were the same color as his face. Dick was scared. It was somebody he’d known when he was little; it couldn’t be Dad.
“For God’s sake, no more waterworks, Leona,” the man said in a whining voice. As he stood staring into the boys’ faces his body wabbled a little as if he was weak in the knees. “They’re good lookers both of them, Leona… I guess they don’t think much of their poor old Dad.”
They all stood there without saying anything in the dark basement hall in the rich close smell of Sunday dinner from the kitchen. Dick felt he ought to talk but something had stuck in his throat. He found he was stuttering, “Ha-ha-hav-have you been sick?”
The man turned to Mother. “You’d better tell them all about it when I’m gone… don’t spare me… nobody’s ever spared me…. Don’t look at me as if I was a ghost, boys, I won’t hurt you.” A nervous tremor shook the lower part of his face. “All my life I’ve always been the one has gotten hurt…. Well, this is a long way from Oak Park… I just wanted to take a look at you, good-by…. I guess the likes of me had better go out the basement door… I’ll meet you at the bank at eleven sharp, Leona, and that’ll be the last thing you’ll ever have to do for me.”
The gasjet went red when the door opened and flooded the hall with reflected sunlight. Dick was shaking for fear the man was going to kiss him, but all he did was give them each a little trembly pat on the shoulder. His suit hung loose on him and he seemed to have trouble lifting his feet in their soft baggy shoes up the five stone steps to the street.
Mother closed the door sharply.
“He’s going to Cuba,” she said. “That’s the last time we’ll see him. I hope God can forgive him for all this, your poor mother never can… at least he’s out of that horrible place.” “Where was he, Mom?” asked Henry in a business like voice. “Atlanta.”
Dick ran away and up to the top floor and into his own room in the attic and threw himself on the bed sobbing.
They none of them went down to dinner although they were hun gry and the stairs were rich with the smell of roast chicken. When Pearl was washing up Dick tiptoed into the kitchen and coaxed a big heaping plate of chicken and stuffing and sweetpotatoes out of her; she said to run along and eat it in the back yard because it was her day out and she had the dishes to do. He sat on a dusty stepladder in the laundry eating. He could hardly get the chicken down on account of the funny stiffness in his throat. When he’d finished, Pearl made him help her wipe.
That summer they got him a job as bellboy in a small hotel at Bay Head that was run by a lady who was a parishioner of Dr. Atwood’s. Before he left Major and Mrs. Glen, who were Aunt Beatrice’s star boarders, gave him a fivedollar bill for pocket money and a copy of the “Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come” to read on the train. Dr. Atwood asked him to stay after the bibleclass his last Sunday and told him the parable of the talent, that Dick knew very well already because Dr. Atwood preached on it as a text four times every year, and showed him a letter from the headmaster of Kent accepting him for the next year as a scholarship pupil and told him that he must work hard because God expected from each of us according to our abilities. Then he told him a few things a growing boy ought to know and said he must avoid temptations and always serve God with a clean body and a clean mind, and keep himself pure for the lovely sweet girl he would some day marry, and that anything else led only to madness and disease. Dick went away with his cheeks burning.
It wasn’t so bad at the Bayview, but the guests and help were all old people; about his own age there was only Skinny Murray the other bellhop, a tall sandyhaired boy who never had anything to say. He was a couple of years older than Dick. They slept on two cots in a small airless room right up under the roof that would still be so hot from the sun by bedtime they could hardly touch it. Through the thin partition they could hear the waitress in the next room rustling about and giggling as they went to bed. Dick hated that sound and the smell of girls and cheap facepowder that drifted in through the crack in the wall. The hottest nights he and Skinny would take the screen out of the window and crawl out along the gutter to a piece of flat roof there was over one of the upper porches. There the mosquitoes would torment them, but it was better than trying to sleep on their cots. Once the girls were looking out of the window and saw them crawling along the gutter and made a great racket that they were peeping and that they’d report them to the manageress, and they were scared to death and made plans all night about what they’d do if they were fired, they’d go to Barnegat and get work on fishing boats; but the next day the girls didn’t say anything about it. Dick was kinda disappointed because he hated waiting on people and running up and down stairs answering bells.
It was Skinny who got the idea they might make some extra money selling fudge, because when Dick got a package of fudge from his mother he sold it to one of the waitresses for a quarter. So Mrs. Savage sent a package of fresh fudge and panocha every week by parcel post that Dick and Skinny sold to the guests in little boxes. Skinny bought the boxes and did most of the work but Dick convinced him it wouldn’t be fair for him to take more than ten percent of the profits because he and his mother put up the original capital.
The next summer they made quite a thing of the fudgeselling. Skinny did the work more than ever because Dick had been to a private school and had been hobnobbing with rich boys all winter whose parents had plenty of money. Luckily none of them came to Bay Head for the summer. He told Skinny all about the school and recited ballads about St. John Hospitaller and Saint Christopher he’d made up and that had been published in the school paper; he told him about serving at the altar and the beauty of the Christian Faith and about how he’d made the outfield in the junior baseball team. Dick made Skinny go to church with him every Sunday to the little Episcopal chapel called St. Mary’s-by-the-Sea. Dick used to stay after the service and discuss points of doctrine and ceremony with Mr. Thurlow the young minister and was finally invited to come home with him to dinner and meet his wife.
The Thurlows lived in an unpainted peakedroofed bungalow in the middle of a sandlot near the station. Mrs. Thurlow was a dark girl with a thin aquiline nose and bangs, who smoked cigarettes and hated Bay Head. She talked about how bored she was and how she shocked the old lady parishioners and Dick thought she was wonderful. She was a great reader of the Smart Set and The Black Cat and books that were advanced, and poked fun at Edwin’s attempts to restore primitive Christianity to the boardwalk, as she put it. Edwin Thurlow would look at her from under the colorless lashes of his pale eyes and whisper meekly, “Hilda, you oughtn’t to talk like that”; then he’d turn mildly to Dick and say, “Her bark is worse than her bite, you know.” They got to be great friends and Dick took to running around to their house whenever he could get away from the hotel. He took Skinny around a couple of times but Skinny seemed to feel that their talk was too deep for him and would never stay long but would shuffle off after explaining that he had to sell some fudge.