The odds (a local weekly said) against “contracting” polio that August at the farm camp were considerable. But even more considerable that my parents would hear the news. But they didn’t. So they didn’t call me home, but by coincidence I’d been kicked out so I was coming home anyhow. Bob’s father’s message was waiting for Bob that Thursday when he arrived from a ten-dollar day pulling rutabagas; he was to leave at once, train to Easton, then through New York and on up to Providence where he’d be met. He wired his father there was no train that night.
We had a ride the next day with one of the assistants — Doc — who was eighteen and going home to the Cape to be drafted; we’d cross the Delaware well south of Easton and save time. Of course, I phoned my father who was in New York, and he was stunned about the polio and said leave tonight, no don’t travel at night, leave first thing in the morning, he’d call my mother in the country; he added irrelevantly that my uncle was coming from Washington the weekend after this. My father was scared; I didn’t tell him we were driving. Doc said he had a heavy date in Hartsville and in the morning we’d leave as soon as he could get himself up.
He was liverish in the morning and farted during the whole trip. He knew about my getting booted, I didn’t tell him the truth. And Dom, you know that if I chose to forget my timetable for getting the truth out of Annette while Al and the librarian were in the kitchen, I could ramble over to the echoing Quaker gym for that two-hour unrefereed valedictory that night in which on me but more conclusively on the potential all-state big-ass it was proved that basketball is a body-contact sport in spite of what Al’s librarian friend said in ’52.
“Any friend of hisn ’s a friend of myun,” said the librarian’s scruffy friend the goateed bookseller Fred Eagle hauling himself out of his chair and shaking hands with me and bowing to the girls. The stubble on his cheeks was a day or two long, his gray hair looked like a six-or-eight-week-old crew cut. He was somewhere between thirty-nine and fifty, and above little blue pufflets his wild eyes restlessly watched us.
The girls giggled as Al said, “A savant, a great man.”
Fred, as if promptly on cue, said, “I am a miscellaneous person full of self-knowledge,” and Al laughed and said, “It’s better than being a mislaid person,” and Fred said, “You’re merely misled not mislaid,” and they both laughed at that.
When I said I was Al’s subversive friend from New York City, Fred became cordially serious and said he’d heard all about me, and when I said “New friends are best,” Gail took my hand and leaned her wholesome shoulder against me and said, “Oh you”; and smelling in the house an old sweetness of wine mulling — with raisins, I thought — and not even Halloween yet — I asked myself why the hell I’d stood up Tracy in Northampton and come here this weekend to check how much Al knew.
The librarian had been to Scandinavia for three weeks and was making Glögg. He had a neat gray crew cut and a yellow button-down and belt-in-back khakis. Gail held my elbow and gently pulled me with her onto the sofa as Fred said So I was the famous New York friend. The librarian said to have some appetizers — mixed nuts and pale brown goat cheese — and he went out to the kitchen with Al, telling him the priest in question would be glad to help Al with his Latin. Gail’s hand fell off my arm as I made a move for the glass bookcase behind Annette’s chair. Annette asked me for some matches but Fred jumped over with his, and his hand shook a bit as he mashed a couple before he got her Kool lit. His nostril-flares were red but he didn’t have a cold. He was fifty.
“Here’s the Everyman Encyclopedia,” I said. “I forget, what’s Al’s?”
But Fred said, talking very fast, “There’s a better one right beside it, the works of Charles Dickens. All you need to know.”
“His isn’t that one,” said Annette turning around in her chair and looking up over her shoulder.
“What you want’s the Eleventh Edition of the Britannica,” said Fred. “Say, there’s Kingsley’s Hypatia, ever open that book?”
I said no but I knew who she was.
Annette went to the kitchen. I heard the icebox door close. If I keep things apart do I make them equal?
Doc was kidding me about being thrown out of the work camp, but Bob interrupted telling me I’d have time to read Great Expectations now for English in the fall, he’d been telling me to read it, it was great, there was a woman in it who was crazy about cleaning because (Akkie Backus had told Bob) she wasn’t getting enough from her husband.
Eleven-thirty feet to the near lift. If I were typing, they’d hear. All hands to quarters, I go slow, A and B are side by side, who am I between? Doc’s Plymouth turns into a tense room, the librarian’s parlor moves us at devious speeds around the evening.
Downstairs if Ev has made progress in her inquiry I may find on arrival home that I’ve been discovered dead. She’ll leave the guests’ glasses, crumbs, ashes, and scurf till the morning or even later, she always does. I love Ev. It does not take time to love. I loved at first sight Tracy’s succulent legs each one and Perpetua’s plain strong mouth and Gail’s collar-bone and sweet moles, though one Sunday when I happened to pass the Episcopal church as early service was letting out, Tracy’s hips from behind deceived me I admit into thinking they barely interrupted a tall thin girl, when in fact they were alive all by themselves. An only child dwells upon others with a private thoroughness unmatched even by animal want, though perhaps by art.
Salacious junk! mutters Tracy’s brother Hugh Blood, who always knew I’d wind up doing something trivially personal if not treacherously intimate; but Hugh will never know how many U.N. member nations Tracy and I got through, slowly and joyfully, the afternoon of April 19, 1946, honoring each with a differently appropriate kiss from Iraq and Iran to Greece and all the way to Nicaragua and on down to Australia, in observance of the old League’s bequeathing its physical assets to the new body the day before.
Out there in the hall the two feet slip away and the arrived elevator closes.
As in the librarian’s parlor with its glass-front bookcase and what Annette knew: so in Doc’s Plymouth with its windshield and its polio epidemic.
You like such transitions no more than I do, Dom.
“You’re not the type,” Doc glanced at me in the mirror; I was in the back next to his tan Palm Beach suit hanging over one window, he was making me mad, I don’t know where we were in Jersey but it was pretty close to New York. “Getting kicked out, steady type like you—” “He’s got a terrific temper,” Bob interrupted, but Doc said, “Kids like you just don’t get expelled from—” “Expelled!” said Bob, “from a frigging farm camp?” “What’ll your father say?” “He’s got other things on his mind,” I said. “Like what?” said Doc and at this point I think wanted to let it drop, but without backing down. I said, “Like the polio epidemic, and the stock market, and the War.” “The War.” Doc guffawed, “I bet he wasn’t even in it. I’ll tell him about the War.” “What,” said Bob, “about how you kept Rommel out of Alexandria while freeing all those girls in Paris?” “Well who’s going in the Army tomorrow, I ask you that,” said Doc; “you kids ought to show me a good time in New York today. Especially you,” he said into the mirror. “Don’t do me any favors,” I said, lamely but bored. “O.K.” said Doc, “then I guess your dad better know how his little private school kiddie got kicked out after he spent his summer pay—” “Doc,” said Bob humbly, “it’s one of the best private schools in the country, every member of this year’s senior class made—” “Spent all my money on what, Doc?” I said with careful menace. “Whatever it was, you had a grand total of six bucks in the camp bank yesterday.” “That’s none of your business,” said Bob. I said, “And I gave that to Bob, and I owe him twelve more.” “What you been buying, dirty Big-Little Books off the kid from Chester? I’ll sell you a Rameses I didn’t use last night.” “You never touched her,” I said.