But Petty and Bob and I didn’t enjoy sitting around in my living room discussing what Poly would do about Bob’s cutting the game and what his father would do if Bob went through with his abortive vow to abjure Princeton. We took a long walk. They were sober and dull and they needed me there with them maybe to have someone to exclude. The Heights was bigger twenty-three years ago. We moved past the famous Gothic exterior of Petty and Tracy’s school, and we got all the way to the Greek Revival colonnades on Willow Place and a Gothic Revival house Petty pointed out with recessed spandrels over and under the windows later used in—
My block returned like an idea, after an hour, and Hugh appeared from the Bloods’ brownstone on the corner and there were some others, Freddy Smith and Wit Holmes and North the minister’s son and Angus Moore and the Negro superintendent’s ten-year-old Abra (for “Abracadabra”) — her real name I think was (with the a as in “saber”) Sabra. She had a ball and she was dying to play, and I got a broomstick from her father.
We had played three innings by the time Joey came slowly into the long block with, on the sidewalk but walking beside his bike-cart, two guys I’d seen with him before.
Ted’s no groupy and neither is his girl. But I think they’re out of phase now. I feel I should keep pot as well as booze. It’s only polite. You, Dom, smoked for your blood pressure. Its effect on the vectoral triangle is not known.
We didn’t usually play in this street. My father’s shade was down. For home we used the sewer cover up opposite the Historical Association’s brownstone. I was glad not to bother my father if he was asleep. On a spring evening five years before when I’d had my supper of liver and bacon and gone out again to have a catch on roller skates with Freddy Smith who was still Bart Smith then, my father came home after working late. And, for some reason I half divine now long after, and long after I began this private confession, I called across the street, “Hi, Dad; soused again?” and Arnie the Good Humor Man standing with that rear icebox-door of his white truck open reaching in to find a burnt almond or a sundae for one of the kids who were around him with their money in their fists, turned to look, though his arm was still inside; but he saw merely a man in a gray worsted suit, a gray fedora, and black (not wing-tip) shoes, with his New York Sun twice-folded under his arm. At my weird words my father started to smile with a puzzled frown then interrupted himself and turned in the door of our apartment house. My father came back out before he’d even gotten to the elevator and asked me to please come in, he wanted to speak to me: for my father was barely even a social drinker, the doctor eventually had to urge him to take a drink before dinner: and as for me, I had never even imagined him drunk, had never seen him drink too much and knew I never would because he never would: unlike Bob’s father and old Eben Smith, whose dragging guffawing chat and sweaty untrussing of sentiment and distrust seemed to me when I was nine or ten to close their bodies — there, yes, I’ve come upon the right word for the first time in my life, Dom, on your Sphinx bond paper, “close”—yet also loosen and coarsen and supplant those great laborious bodies. It must have been all of eight o’clock the evening after the boomerang incident that my father and the others were talking about Europe’s future and Russell Pound asked my father if he still thought history a succession of moral lessons — when Eben Smith interrupted, “a succession of moral lessons no less” and then said to Bob’s father and Russell Pound (though not within earshot of the glamorous guest of honor just back from the Arizona sun) that Mara Bolla’s estranged husband was basically a perfumed fart. Russell Pound’s mouth was at once governed into an immobility the resultant of two vectors which (even if this isn’t very good physics — and I confess I learned physics on my own) were directed one horizontally smilewards the other vertically talkwards, the tolerant male chum (which actually Russell Pound never was with those two if with any man) countered by a lover’s loyalty (though indirectly on behalf of the man Mara had walked out on). He did point out (with a bright hospitableness no doubt nourished by the sight of Bob’s mother in her gray Persian lamb approaching with Bob’s father’s dark blue overcoat over her arm and doubtless herself debating whether they’d get as far down Fulton as Gage and Tollner’s lamb chops and the dear hierarchy of epauletted Negro waiters, or stop at Joe’s for Long Island duck) that hardly four years ago Signor Bolla served on one of the famous Italian subs that, approaching the Gibraltar passage between Punta de Europa and Punta de la Almiña, would cut the engines and in the mysterious westward current deep deep below the great Atlantic eastward influx, would ride silently out past the British listening posts. I interrupted to say that the ancients had wondered why the Med doesn’t overflow, and Bob’s father, the glow of Bob’s boomerang fading, said, “Balls.”
Russell Pound’s model ships were rigged to the last stay and their lacquer personally dusted by Petty. They were all over the library as if independent of each other and of everything else there: they were in glass boxes, there was one out on a table under the rare little portrait of a Colonial militiaman (paint cracking on his musket); there was another ship on top of a display case full of Indian things. The Pueblo mugs reminded Bob’s father of German steins, and Bob’s mother thought the prairie dog vase was darling. On a wall was a faded Navaho rug, patterned from those fluid, calm, vulnerable dry-paintings poured in powdered sandstone color by color upon smooth ground, made and destroyed while the sun was up but exactly remembered by medicine men who no doubt saw to it that to let evil spirits escape, the rug-weaver left a break in the design — in the yellow blossoms of the sagebrush, or in the stubborn buffalo, or in the god. My father made a point of remembering what Russell Pound told him, from the Navaho swastika to Albert Ryder in New York not knowing what his bathtub was for.
Mrs. Smith’s first name was Lydia.
I’ve gone to the near john: left at the foyer, and left again: on the tub’s yellowed porcelain bottom that in the ’30’s for decoration more than safety they ribbed longitudinally with wavy parallels, a slivery oval of translucent amber lay among a dozen dark hairs at the far end from the drain. The water in the toilet keeps swaying in and then out like the water in our west toilet downstairs, as if on the other side of a ragged valve an open ocean moves, or some passing craft. In the cabinet are a bottle of Measurin with the cotton still in the neck, a punctured plastic sheet holding now only three Contac capsules, and a four-inch unsqueezed aluminum tube on whose red-framed label “Apply Externally” has been penned by (I believe) our own cut-rate man two blocks down. Recrossing the foyer’s white and black diamonds — and for the second time in the choice acre of my life coming upon the thought (though now accepting it) that it must have been my father who created those latter puzzles in the Hour, the frigate and the ziggurat and those others that in turn made mild trouble in that Heatsburg family that once preoccupied me so — I have to confess to myself that there’s a limit to what any of my outgoing vectors can do to that elevator rising in its own, other time; yet faced with ’46 and the Joey Neurohr Three advancing at one end and my father’s third-floor shade down at the other end, I’m nonetheless here to say that quite as if adolescence brought with it some breakdown like my grandmother’s pre-fatal aphasia that at seven I’d knowingly discussed with my mother when it got her down, Hugh Blood would think Bob had it in for him if Bob failed to greet him enthusiastically. Hugh made the same mistake with yours truly though I corrected it; he didn’t make this mistake with silent Wit Holmes, who was a loner, but he did with Binocular Bill Smith who called Hugh “You” and once in a while when they sighted each other would neglect to share with Hugh their regular hog-holler borrowed from some movie, “Suey! pig pig piggy!” Dom, in this same earlier time maybe a year past Pearl Harbor, imperturbable Petty stopped playing with us. She might — or might not — spare half an hour Saturday before she went off hand in glove with her “Pappy” to the Manhattan galleries. And she suddenly developed an indiscriminate sweetness with Bob and Hugh and the Smith twins and once Joey too and of course me which I happen to know Bob in private told her to knock off for it was phony and which to me bespoke some inescapable bounty of which she had made up part. Joey had dark down on his upper lip when he was only thirteen, and he rooted for the Giants. Where was Tracy? She didn’t like sports. The handsome creature in our basement laundry room here in this benighted building asked the Super if he gave up booze for Ramadan. He looked at her and moved toward the door then halted—suddenly, so you were reminded that as usual he’d been limping. Then with his back to us head down he said, “I guess you might say we’ve put the salaam back into the salami,” and she said as if on cue, “Is that black humor?”