“You mean he got scared off just because he thought they’d believe you if you told them he set the fire? What a wimp.”
“Well, there’s a little more to it than that, but I’ll spare you the sordid details. That’s history. Oh, by the way, I’ve got a present for you.”
She drew Beryl’s check from her pocket and handed it to him. “Gee, great,” he said with a beaming smile. “I wasn’t sure you’d keep your end of the bargain.”
“Thanks a lot. I told Beryl I’d promised to pay you for painting the playhouse. Oh yes, we had a most satisfactory talk. She’s raising my allowance and agreed to see the family lawyer about making certain changes in the trust fund. Beryl’s rather a dear — when she has to be. And I do have to protect her from rats like Gordon.” Her smile, both pious and resolute, betrayed only the faintest shade of satire. “A daughter’s duty, you know.”
Muzza
by Paul Horgan
“Muzza” from Things As They Are by Paul Horgan. Copyright © 1964 by Paul Horgan, renewed 1992. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, Inc.
Born in Buffalo, New York in 1903, Paul Horgan is the author of seventeen novels, four volumes of short stories, and several distinguished works of nonfiction. Although the author can by no means be described as a crime writer, the following is as fine an example of a crime story as one could hope to find. Tracings, a book of recollections by Mr. Horgan, will be published by Farrar, Straus & Giroux in September of this year...
How do we manage to love at all when there is so much hatred masquerading in love’s name? I saw, if I did not understand, how this could be when I lost forever a friend whom I tried to rescue from peril. But a larger peril claimed him.
His name was John Burley. Nobody ever loved him enough to give him a natural nickname. Instead, he was the subject of mocking refrain.
“John, John, the dog-faced one,” sang the other boys our age when they saw John and me playing together in our neighborhood. He was my next-door neighbor, and I didn’t know there was anything really different about him until I saw him abused by other children.
Before we were old enough to go to school we owned the whole world all day long except for nap time after lunch. We played in the open grassy yards behind and between our houses, and when John was busy and dreaming with play, he was a good friend to have, and never made trouble. But when people noticed him, he became someone else, and now I know that his parents, and mine too, out of sympathy, wondered and wondered how things would be for him when the time came for him to go off to school like any other boy and make a place for himself among small strangers who might find his oddness a source of fun and power for themselves.
In the last summer before schooltime, 1909, everyone heard the cry of “John, John, the dog-faced one,” and even I, his friend, saw him newly. I would look at him with a blank face, until he would notice this, and then he would say crossly, with one of his impulsive, self-clutching movements,
“What’s the matter, Richard, what’s the matter, why are you looking crazy?”
“I’m not looking crazy. You’re the one that’s crazy.”
For children pointed at him and sang, “Crazy, lazy, John’s a daisy,” and ran away.
Under their abuse, and my increasing wonderment, John showed a kind of daft good manners which should have induced pity and grace in his tormentors, but did not. He would pretend to be intensely preoccupied by delights and secrets from which the rest of us were excluded. He would count his fingers, nodding at the wrong total, and then put his thumbs against his thick lips and buzz against them with his furry voice, and look up at the sky, smacking his tongue, while other boys hooted and danced at him.
They were pitiably accurate when they called him the dog-faced one. He did look more like a dog than a boy. His pale hair was shaggy and could not be combed. His forehead was low, with a bony scowl that could not be changed. His nose was blunt, with its nostrils showing frontward. Hardly contained by his thick, shapeless lips, his teeth were long, white, and jumbled together. Of stocky build, he seemed always to be wearing a clever made-up costume to put on a monkey or a dog, instead of clothes like anybody else’s. His parents bought him the best things to wear, but in a few minutes they were either tom or rubbed with dirt or scattered about somewhere.
“The poor dears,” I heard my mother murmur over the Burley family.
“Yes,” said my father, not thinking I might hear beyond what they were saying, “we are lucky. I can imagine no greater cross to bear.”
“How do you suppose—” began my mother, but suddenly feeling my intent stare, he interrupted, with a glance my way, saying,
“Nobody ever knows how these cases happen. Watching them grow must be the hardest part.”
What he meant was that it was sorrowful to see an abnormal child grow physically older but no older mentally.
But Mr. and Mrs. Burley — Gail and Howard, as my parents called them — refused to admit to anyone else that their son John was in any way different from other boys. As the summer was spent, and the time to start school for the first time came around, their problem grew deeply troubling. Their friends wished they could help with advice, mostly in terms of advising that John be spared the ordeal of entering the rigid convention of a school where he would immediately be seen by all as a changeling, like some poor swineherd in a fairy story who once may have been a prince, but who would never be released from his spell.
The school — a private school run by an order of Catholic ladies founded in France — stood a few blocks from our street. The principal, who like each of her sisters wore a white shirtwaist with a high collar and starched cuffs and a long dark blue skirt, requested particularly that new pupils should come the first day without their parents. Everyone would be well-looked-after. The pupils would be put to tasks which would drive diffidence and homesickness out the window. My mother said to me as she made me lift my chin so that she could tie my Windsor tie properly over the stiff slopes of my Buster Brown collar, while I looked into her deep, clear, blue eyes, and wondered how to say that I would not go to school that day or any other,
“Richard, John’s mother thinks it would be so nice if you and he walked to school together.”
“I don’t want to.”
I did not mean that I did not want to walk with John, I meant that I did not want to go to school.
“That’s not very kind. He’s your friend.”
“I know it.”
“I have told his mother you would go with him.”
Childhood was a prison whose bars were decisions made by others. Numbed into submission, I took my mother’s goodbye kiss staring at nothing, eaten within by fears of the unknown which awaited us all that day.
“Now skip,” said my mother, winking both her eyes rapidly, to disguise the start of tears at losing me to another stage of life. She wore a small gold fleur-de-lis pin on her breast from which depended a tiny enameled watch. I gazed at this and nodded solemnly, but did not move. With wonderful executive tact she felt that I was about to make a fatally rebellious declaration, and so she touched the watch, turning its face around, and said, as though I must be concerned only with promptness.
“Yes, yes, Richard, you are right, we must think of the time, you mustn’t be late your first day.”