The boy brooded, said nothing.
“Obligations are inhuman,” Peter added.
“Dad,” Phil said, looking into himself, his eyes ravaged by some intolerable comprehension, “was the reason you never asked me to come and live with you before because you didn’t want to do it out of obligation? Is that why?”
Peter shook his head, his throat so dry that it seemed no words would ever come out of him again.
“Anyhow, I’m glad you asked me now,” Phil said.
The waitress took the lemonade glasses away, mopped the table with a white cloth. “Will there be anything else?” she asked.
“Nothing else,” Peter said.
“Would it be all right if I had some ice cream, Dad?”
They each ordered banana splits — Peter’s first, if he could trust his memory, in over twenty years. Though it was sweeter than he might have liked in ordinary circumstances, he managed to enjoy it, enjoyed the boy’s enjoyment of it — Phil humming to himself as he ate.
“So far I really like New York,” the boy said, licking the syrup from his lips. “It’s a neat town.”
“It’s a town to conjure with,” Peter said.
‘Yeah,” the boy said as though he knew what it meant. “It’s a town to conjure with, all right.”
Whatever his reservations about the boy before, he was whole-hearted now — a boy to conjure with, he thought. And then it struck him — the purpose of things suddenly becoming clear — that there was something he had to do, that had to be done now, the moment of its awareness the moment of its necessity.
In the phone booth before he made his call, he had to wipe his eyes, the confusion of tears perennially blurring his purpose.
He called Lois at work.
“What did you do with your son?” she wanted to know.
“He’s here.” He looked through the glass of the phone booth to make sure. Phil was waiting for him, looking mild and pleased and a little worried. “We’re at Schrafft’s.”
Silence, then a laugh. “Peter, you’ve always hated Schrafft’s.”
She knew him better than he knew himself. “We’ve had banana splits,” he said, as if it were an accomplishment.
“Which one’s the son and which is the father? I can tell you’ve really hit it off like brothers.” She bit her tongue.
“The reason I called, Lois, is that I … that I think …” He started over: “Why don’t we get married?”
She took a deep breath. “And adopt Phil?”
“And adopt Phil.” Now that it was done, yet nothing actually done — his book only slightly more than half finished — his spirit soared. There was too much of him for the phone booth to contain, the air crowded with spirit, so he opened the door. The sudden draft of air conditioning, the unexpectedness of it, chilled him.
“You’re mad, Peter,” she said in the voice of love. “Must I give you an answer this very minute?”
“You know I’m impatient,” he said.
“You’re out of your mind. Do you want to come to my place for dinner?”
“We’ll go out to eat somewhere. Why don’t we go to Chinatown? It’s on the boy’s list. Okay? His grandmother gave him this list of places to see. And Lois, in the rush I nearly forgot to mention it — I love you. And the boy. All of us.” (And Diane, he neglected to add, but that was another matter.)
“You really are mad.”
“I’ve never felt better in my life.”
“That’s what they all say.”
They arranged to meet at five-thirty on the northeast corner of Fifth Avenue and Fifty-first Street, the three of them: the father, the son and the former wife.
It was four-thirty. They went to Peter’s apartment by cab — an interim trip — to wash up (and dress for dinner) and to get rid of the packages, which by this time were becoming a burden. While the boy showered, Peter dreamed. Was it the heat? He had an incredible feeling of clarity. His life seemed to lay itself out before him. In a series of slidelike recollections, half-forgotten events recalled themselves to him with extraordinary vividness of detail — a day in the country with his father and mother and Herbie, a game of stick ball in the schoolyard, his first meeting with Lois — not quite as they had happened, but as he would have wished them to be, happening now like a command performance, a family reunion, the best and least likely fragments of his past coming together into some ultimate focus of meaning. At the last, he saw himself sitting with Rachel at the edge of a lake; her green eyes, when he looked at them, the image of the boy’s. It was almost, the sum of it, too much for him to bear. Peter made an entry in his notebook. “One has only to wait for the past,” he wrote. “At the end is clarity.” He felt compelled to add, “All clarity perhaps is illusion,” but then crossed it out.
It was ten after five. A heavy breath of storm in the air. The sky in shadow, the clouds like a congregation of mourners. The sun still burning somewhere, streaks of fire in the distance like the faded shreds of a scarf. They set out.
“Do you think you can walk it?” Peter asked the boy. “It’s about a mile and a half to where we’re going.”
“I can walk it if you can,” the boy said.
“Let’s see if you can.”
They went down Broadway from Seventy-third Street to Fifty-ninth, Peter setting a fast pace, Phil asking questions of his father as they walked, Peter slowing down only to answer them.
They were at Fifty-fifth Street and Fifth Avenue at twenty-five past five. It had started to drizzle. A hot wind, almost liquid, raising dust from the pavement. Steam. The dark sky hanging so low that it seemed to Peter that he could reach up if he wanted to and puncture it with his finger. It tempted him to try — a sore temptation it was — but he was not fool enough actually to do it, the gesture performed only in the presumption of his imagination. It began to rain a little harder. Peter increased his pace, began to jog — the boy keeping up with him — the worst of the storm apparently ahead. Lois waiting. Fifth Avenue and Fifty-fourth.
“Race you to the next corner,” the boy said. Go! They were off.
Peter slipped on a sheet of newspaper which had floated under his feet, but managed, as a matter of will, not to fall. Phil nearly bumped into a fat woman carrying an umbrella and a small dog, stopped to apologize, and came in second to his old man. They embraced, winner and loser. What seemed remarkable to Peter was not that he had gotten to the corner ahead of his son but that he wasn’t even out of breath. He had never felt better in his life. They took shelter under the canopy of a store, the rain beginning to fall in earnest.
“Phil, I’ll tell you what — I’ll race you the rest of the way,” Peter said.
“This time I’m going to run you into the ground,” the boy bragged.
“Don’t make any promises you can’t keep.”
Now! “Go!”
The boy got a good jump and Peter, saving himself for the end, found himself almost two steps behind as they approached the corner. Though the light apparently had just turned green, Peter worried about the boy running blindly across the street; cars (especially taxis) had a way in New York of coming out of nowhere. So he opened up, for his son’s sake, increased the length of his stride — the boy would see, a matter of pride between the two of them, that his father could still outrun him, could outrun anyone if he had to. It gave him a marvelous lift to run with total freedom, the rain a blessing, birds singing to him as he ran. He had never, his legs like springs, moved so quickly in his life. At forty, he may have been — no way of knowing for sure — the fastest man in the world. He flew by his son at the corner, who seemed merely a shadow as he passed him, an imprint on the landscape. It was then that he felt something snap, a weight of metal cracking into him — or was it the storm? — lifting him, turning him over and over. And still he raced. Until it was too dark for him to go any farther. He saw the face of lightning. The rains fell.