I was propelled then to the Burleys’ house next door, where John and his mother were waiting for me in their front hall, which was always filled with magic light from the cut-glass panes in bright colors flanking their front door.
Mrs. Burley held me by the shoulders for a moment, trying to tell me something without saying it.
“Richard,” she said, and then paused.
She looked deep into my eyes until I dropped my gaze. I looked at the rest of her face, and then at her bosom, wondering what was down there in that shadow where two rounded places of flesh rolled frankly together. Something about her personality led people to use her full name when they referred to her even idly — “Gail Burley” — and even I felt power within her.
Her husband had nothing like her strength. He was a small grey man with thin hair combed flat across his almost bald skull. The way his pince-nez pulled at the skin between his eyes gave him a look of permanent headache. Always hurried and impatient, he seemed to have no notice for children like me, or his own son, and all I ever heard about him was that he “gave Gail Burley anything she asked for” and “worked his fingers to the bone” doing so, as president of a marine engine company with a factory on the lake-front of our city of Dorchester in upstate New York.
Gail Burley — and I cannot say how much of her attitude arose from her sense of disaster in the kind of child she had borne — seemed to exist in a state of general exasperation. A reddish blond, with skin so pale that it glowed like pearl, she was referred to as a great beauty. Across the bridge of her nose and about her eyelids and just under her eyes there were scatterings of little gold freckles which oddly yet powerfully reinforced her air of being irked by everything.
She often exhaled slowly and with compression, and said “Gosh,” a slang word which was just coming in her circle, which she pronounced “Garsh.” Depending on her mood, she could make it into the expression of ultimate disgust or mild amusement. The white skin under her eyes went whiter when she was cross or angry, and then a dry hot light came into her hazel eyes. She seemed a large woman to me, but I don’t suppose she was — merely slow, challenging, and annoyed in the way she moved, with a flowing governed grace that was like a comment on all that was intolerable. At any moment she would exhale in audible distaste for the circumstances of her world. Compressing her lips, which she never rouged, she would ray her pale glance upward, across, aside, to express her search for the smallest mitigation, the simplest endurable fact or object of life. The result of these airs and tones of her habit was that in those rare moments when she was pleased, her expression of happiness came through like one of pain.
“Richard,” she said, holding me by the shoulders and looking into my face to discover what her son John was about to confront in the world of small schoolchildren.
“Yes, Mrs. Burley.”
She looked at John, who was waiting to go.
He had his red and black plaid japanned collapsible tin lunch box all nicely secured with a web strap, and he made his buzzing noise of pleasure at the idea of doing something so new as going to school. Because he showed no apprehension over what would seem like an ordeal to another boy, she let forth one of her breaths of disgust. She had dressed him in a starched collar like mine which extended over the smart lapels of his beautiful blue suit, with its Norfolk jacket. His socks were well pulled up and his shoes were shined. She looked at me again, trying to say what she could not. Her white face with its flecks of fixed displeasure slowly took on a pleading smile. She squeezed my shoulders a little, hoping I would understand, even at my age, how John would need someone to look out for him, protect him, suffer him, since he was a child of such condition as she could not bring herself to admit. Her plea was resolved into a miniature of the principle of bribery by which her life was governed — even, I now think, to the terms on which Howard Burley obtained even her smallest favors.
“Richard,” she said, “when you and John come home after school” — and she pressed those words to show that I must bring him home — “I will have a nice surprise waiting for you both.”
John became agitated at this, jumping about, and demanding,
“What is it, Muzza, what is it?”
She gave one of her breaths.
“John, John, be quiet. Garsh. I can’t even say anything without getting you all excited.”
For my benefit she smiled, but the gold flecks under her eyes showed as angry dark spots, and the restrained power of her dislike of John was so great that he was cowed. He put his hands to his groin to comfort himself and said, using his word for what he always found there, “Peanut.”
At this his mother became openly furious at him.
“John! Stop that! How many times have I told you that isn’t nice. Richard doesn’t do it. Dr. Grauer has told you what will happen if you keep doing it. Stop it!”
She bent over to slap at his hands and he lunged back. Losing his balance, he fell, and I heard his head go crack on the hardwood floor of the hall where the morning light made pools of jewel colors through the glass panels. He began to cry in a long, burry, high wail. His mother picked him up and he hung like a rag doll in her outraged grasp. The day was already in ruins, and he had not even gone off to school. The scene was one of hundreds like it which made up the life of that mother and that son. I was swept by shame at seeing it.
“Now stop that ridiculous caterwauling,” she said. “Richard is waiting to take you to school. Do you want him to think you are a crybaby?”
John occasionally made startling remarks, which brought a leap of hope that his understanding might not be so deficient as everyone believed.
“I am a crybaby,” he said, burying his misery-mottled face in the crook of his arm.
A sudden lift of pity in his mother made her kneel down and gently enfold him in her arms. With her eyes shut, she gave her love to the imaginary son, handsome and healthy, whom she longed for even as she held the real John. It was enough to console him. He flung his arms around her and hugged her like a bear cub, all fur and clumsiness and creature longing.
“Muzza, Muzza,” he said against her cheek.
She set him off.
“Now can you go to school?” she asked in a playfully reasonable voice.
John’s states of feeling were swift in their changes. He began to smack his lips, softly indicating that he was in a state of pleasure.
“Then go along, both of you,” said his mother.
She saw us out the door and down the walk. Curiously enough, the self-sorrowing lump in my throat went away as I watched the scene between John and his mother. Things seemed so much worse with the Burleys than with me and my start in school.
I led John off at a smart pace, running sometimes, and sometimes walking importantly with short busy steps. We paused only once, and that was to look in the window at a little candy and news shop a block from the school, where with warm, damp pennies it was possible to buy sticky rolls of chocolate candy, or — even better — stamp-sized films which when exposed to light darkened in shades of red to reveal such subjects as the battleship New York or the Woolworth Building or the Washington Monument.
John always had more money than I.
“Let’s get some,” he proposed.
“No. After school,” I replied. “We will be late if we stop and we will catch the dickens.”
“Catch the dickens,” he said, and began to run away ahead of me. I overtook him and we entered the main door of the school — it was a red brick building with a portico of white pillars veiled in vines — and once in the dark corridors with their wood-ribbed walls, we seemed to lose ourselves to become small pieces of drifting material that were carried along to our classrooms by a tide of children. Boys went separate from girls. John and I were finally directed to a room containing twenty boys in the first grade, presided over by Miss Mendtzy.