Wait, wait — they all say Wait, and I too say Wait, Tracy’s face at the Welcome party in ’53 says Wait and Gail’s says Wait through the screen door with her still wet light hair tight back from her forehead line and slick-massed down behind her ear and below her neck: and even dear strong bland undemanding recently deflowered Perpetua says it to fortify an absent Bob against Admiral Worth and his Navy Yard—“Hey wait, Bobbie aimed at the Statue of Liberty”—
And if Darla (formerly Darlene, from the Philadelphia area) did not actively say it just before or as you left the fenestral rectangle and gravely and without a peep much less an epic whoop came down to us hard like an authentic fast ball suddenly swollen past the space of time in which one’s wrists might have snapped the bat through to meet it, she did surely feel that word Wait in all its intimate fear (I don’t care what Darla now at the end of our talk adds about well of course all she really cared about was like interrupting the whole ideological momentum and like profile of the Occupation-Protest): Ed moved between her and you: he was in profile and very close to you and for an instant she could not see you straddling the silclass="underline" Ed glanced at her, then wheeled around to his right toward you: while simultaneously one of your arms stuck out from behind Ed: whose right shoulder then moved so that his hidden right arm appeared to be in action: you shouted “Hey”; but it isn’t clear if Ed gave you an unprovoked shove (if you can even conceive of provocation being absent) or Ed shoved (or lightly pushed) in answer to a shove (or feint) from you: or there was nothing and you just shouted Hey! — and, so to speak, shoved off and went below: but Darlene, Darlink, Darla, Darley, Darla just before she briskly recovers her official self, has declined to a slow dream of uncertainty and as she betrays the doubleness of your defenestration, nay a far more than double field of human chance in which that gross event must be gauged, she forgets herself enough to lay her hand on mine. Having said already, I believe, in the sheets that your scientific son-in-law appropriated, perhaps I don’t need to prove all over again that (a) the vectoral muscle is rare even among its principal possessors, Only Children; (b) if you have it, you can perceive Field-State; but (c) only if you have a V.M. can you come down with the dreaded Vectoral Dystrophy which shrinks Field to Dichotomy. The relation of this result to problems of parabolic locus should by now be clear.
If, as the detective tenor said to the nervous woman, you are killed and you did it yourself, I can’t call it the anniversary of Doug’s suicide: only the anniversary of its eve: or if a Field-Rear Agnostician insists upon an anniversary, then say tonight was the calendar night Doug and I had it out while Al looked on embarrassed, and thus it is the anniversary of one of the three or four days on which Emma could have been conceived.
But that isn’t tonight any more.
Hugh saw it with his eyes before I did, but I felt it: but I felt it together with (at various distances, none equal): Akkie’s scissors poised open undecided whether to clip an article or not; Freddy Smith turning the plastic-enveloped contents of his fat black wallet from Lauren Bacall to Ann Sheridan to Bogart though thinking of my own Tracy Blood; Bernie Scheindlinger’s solemn red-haired daydream about the tennis team’s match tomorrow above what I was almost certain was his Problems of Democracy book (memory course, one-term course, sure A); and I felt too the minute-wand of the old clock on the north wall as it jerked up a notch nearer the hour-ending bell; and believe me felt so much else that you couldn’t donate enough reams of paper for me to etch in all that moment’s vectors and vectresses. Akkie had raised all the windows and I could smell the impinging wholeness of grass and ground and the stretched, shiny-dyed cloth of bookbindings and even the clean ropy odor of new fuzz on a Dunlop ball and somewhere ink with its medicinal and promissory order.
But Bob was running for the middle window, not the usual outside window that was almost on a line from his starting point behind his desk; so he was at an angle when he cut around the rear end of the last lengthways aisle and took three strides to his new take-off. Ye gods there was nothing wrong with his calculations and he could not have been thrown off by Hugh’s shrill but meaningless whistle which Akkie was too alerted to locate for punishment.
First, I saw Bob only from the waist up, over the heads, and then his feet left right kicked his legs out and as he passed through the middle window and his arms were up like a symphony conductor’s preliminary sign, the original angle of approach had been bent almost straight.
But at a slight cost in momentum.
Yes, that may have been it. Or it may have been a stray vector mistaking him for an only child and saying, “Middle window or outside window, you’ve been here before, Champ, and your old man wants you to go to Princeton and from what Cy said you missed maybe half the short answers yesterday from Meade and Sedgwick to Jubal Early and the states covered by the Emancipation Proclamation (which you know was 1863 but weren’t asked), and you’re probably kidding yourself about the essay question.”
I need not interrupt this scene; it interrupts itself. Since Bob’s feet-first proneward flight passed a hair more slowly than heretofore into the window’s area, his ready palms met the high-raised bottom edge of wood with insufficient force for him to ram himself back in across the sill. Instead, when Bob made contact and pushed, he succeeded only in making the window slide down a foot — and sensing that it might now come all the way down on his neck or chest leaving the rest of him outside the window arched and bent and maybe with a cracked back, he let go the moving window and flipped over, nearly losing the sill, and in our amazement at seeing all but his fingers and large white knuckles disappear, all fifty-odd of us sat still enough to hear in the fragrant air outside, that powerful long “Aoaww” of our harsh-tongued but much-beloved athletic director who had looked up to see not his air space violated by Bob’s flannels but an unmeasurable threat to another space in his soul, some hygienically toughened schedule in his school mind joining us to the athletic afternoon which would begin at ten to, and joining us with no other or better future than that: well of course it was measurable, what he saw, all of Bob hanging, and hanging three floors above a space of ground near but not near enough the in-any-event not soft enough broad jump / pole vault pit, and I imagined wrongly that our athletic director rushed for this place either to catch all one hundred seventy-five pounds of Bob or just to be there.