The librarian came out of the kitchen with a tray almost as soon as Annette went in, and Al followed talking about when the priest could take him, they had anti-sub exercises with the Navy off Newport next week, and the librarian said over his shoulder, “Give it a stir, Annette.” So I went in the kitchen, passing them in the unlighted dining room, and Annette was tasting out of a blue enamel dipper.
“There’s nothing to it,” she said, “sweet and hot.” She looked in through the steam. “Got cloves floating around in it.” She reached for my hand without looking. “He doesn’t like me tonight.”
“Were you a little cuckoo at the restaurant?”
“I wasn’t drinking this afternoon; I don’t, anyway.” She held the dipper up to me; the punch was strong. “Well, I don’t have that sweet, strait-laced look of his sister.”
“He’s got a lot on his mind now,” I said, though I didn’t feel the simple truth of what I’d said. “After you and I had lunch that time I wondered how Al could get so shook about that encyclopedia and the birthday inscription — what was it? — and you said he was making educated guesses about some writing in the margin of Volume Twelve.”
“It was Uncle Cooley,” Annette cooed softly, crossing and uncrossing her eyes, “and he thinks he knows who Coo-ley is,you’re a little crazy too, so why don’t you admit it.” She put her fingers along the side of my neck, “let me taste the wine,” and she rand her tongue side to side between my barely parted lips, and when I opened she moved back. “I guess it’s ready.”
I said, “Don’t think Gail is strait-laced,” and Gail was suddenly in the kitchen door quietly agreeing, “No, I’m certainly not.”
“Well,” Annette said to me, “you certainly keep your distance,” and she began filling punch cups.
Al laughed in the living room, Fred was telling about his cat Epaminondas.
A minute later there would be a toast. Fred would drink off his Glögg and go back to the bourbon. I would feel that my distance to Al was even greater than to Tracy.
But before that, Bob had passed Doc fifty cents for the tunnel seven years south of Portland and in no time we were droning under the high ogival arches of Brooklyn Bridge, and Doc was refusing to look to his right at the vast harbor nor if he’d been around the next year would he have believed that Bob launched a boomerang off this bridge from the pedestrian boardwalk right out over the East River and chop-chop it looped on back and then some. The decision to come to Brooklyn had occurred on the Pulaski Skyway as we passed through the mouth-watering stink of the Jersey flats and were very hungry and saw the Statue of Liberty from behind and standing as if on the mainland on our side. Doc had been saying we didn’t sound like we came from Brooklyn but he’d heard Brooklyn was even worse than Philly. Bob said he should see Brooklyn Heights, and I reeled off Riis Park beach, Ebbets Field, Prospect Park, the finest Botanic Garden in the country, Brooklyn Museum with a very good American collection, Grand Army Plaza (to impress him with the sound but he wasn’t interested in the arch), and of course the docks — had Doc heard of the Moore-McCormack Lines? “And the Heights,” Bob added with quiet obstinacy. “And,” I continued, “a population greater than Finland’s.” So we had lunch at my apartment, Bob didn’t have either of the keys to his parents’ brownstone.
When the musty dark of our foyer succeeded the deep creak of the front door my ears then pounded me into a near-faint, for the light was on in the kitchen, so maybe my father was taking an earlier train to the country today and had come home for lunch, it was one subway stop under the river from Wall. But he had merely left the light on that morning. There was a dish in the sink with a corn flake stuck to the side, which Dom you know I could precisely botanize for you if I chose.
Doc said we had a lot of funny furniture, and didn’t we have any rugs? and what could I play on the piano. He said he’d never seen so many fucking books in his life and did my father read them all. I said most of them, hearing Doc’s casual adjective very solid here in my parents’ apartment. For a while I was prepared for someone to come in. Doc wanted to know if there was any brew, and I opened him a Budweiser and Bob had one too. Then Doc wanted to see my room, “my sanctum” I said as I switched on the glaring overhead bulb. In another room Bob turned back the shade to look out into our street and we heard him say it seemed so strange to be here in August, “it’s sort of weird”; and in my room Doc said, “Yeah? well I guess dad wouldn’t like to know we’re sneaking in here drinking his beer when you’re supposed to be on the train to Mass.” I wondered if they’d put air-conditioning in my father’s office yet, there were three women with baby carriages out on that hot street when we got out of the car and they’d made me feel we’d lost speed and been left here in an unrecognizable Heights as if it had been pivoted into a new time, a strange age. Doc moved into my parents’ room, let the shade up, and stared across the East River at the mirage of towers where my father worked, and then out left into the broad harbor and to the Statue I’d never been up in though I knew her vital statistics and one night had sat in the dark staring at her while my parents in the living room bickered over where to go that summer. And as Doc ran a hand over the white summer spread my father had neatened over the double bed, and then tapped one of the posts where a pair of undershorts hung, I found myself saying, “On the train to Mass., eh? All right then, I’ll make it worth your while to keep quiet.”
Doc said, “Yeah,” but he was looking at the view.
Bob was somewhere else. Our apartment was so big.
I said, “I’m fed up with your petty threats, I’m going to give you—” I went back to my room, the locus of every grandiose plan I’d ever made—“I’m going to give you this,” and Doc came after me. Yes, I said, if he kept quiet about me when we got to Heatsburg — about my expulsion and the money — he could have this encyclopedia.
Bob came to my door, Doc between us. Bob said, “You wouldn’t take it.”
“Sure he would,” I said, and started tilting books out. I heard Doc’s bottle rhythmically draining, and when I eyed him, there was savage reflection around his thick mouth, and he said sure he would. I added, “Consider it a going-away present.” Doc hesitated, and I said, “A present to go away.” He said where would we be if he did go away right now, and I said in that case I’d call my father and take the train with him.
The phone was ringing. I didn’t go out to pick it up.
It was after two-thirty when I dried our plates and turned out the kitchen light and we carried the dark red books down to Doc’s trunk. The Plymouth was like an oven. Bob looked up the street and we both saw Joey approaching on his bike-cart.
But I seem tonight despite this long memorial arc no nearer Bohack Joey and the fight, much less my stolen Corona.