“Poor chap!” sighed the Little Doctor, as he sat with Lucas over his fourth drink at the station café, waiting for the train to Marsilly. “It was a devilishly clever idea — to prey on thieves and all the while to live so prosaically, cooking his own breakfast... Do you know, there’s one thing that tempts me to strew flowers on his grave, and that’s Alice and her brothers. I’m sure he really meant to marry her, and he would have made them all very happy, there on the banks of the Loire. Alice is really out of luck.”
He shook his head sadly.
“How so?”
“Because now she has a very good chance of remaining an old maid!”
And turning to the waiter, he asked: “How much do I owe you?”
Only the Guilty Run
by Vin Packer
A sensitive study of an adolescent boy in love with his English teacher... a prize-winning story that will make you stop and think.
It was a few hours after dinner, that cool evening at the beginning of September. Charlie got up from the mauve stuffed chair in the living room and walked into the foyer, opened the closet and grabbed his red wool sweater from the hook. He said nothing to his parents and they said nothing to him. His mother had looked up from her sewing which was spread out in her lap, and smiled tentatively, and Charlie had winked in answer. His father had not taken his eyes from the ball game on the television screen. It was understood that they would not ask him where he was going, or what time he would return. This was his sixteenth summer, and when the new term started at school, Charlie would be a senior. If he wanted to, he could even smoke in front of his family, and he had done so once. In July he had camped out for two weeks with four of his best buddies far up into the Adirondacks. His allowance was increased from two dollars and a half a week to fifteen dollars a month, and as long as he did not run short, he did not have to account for the money. After Labor Day he would go to work from 4 until 8 in Allen’s Pharmacy, and open a savings account in the bank where his father was a teller.
Charlie stood in the hallway of the apartment building and pushed the button of the self-operating elevator. Little Billy Crandell’s mother was standing in front of 3C yelling, “C’mon now, Billy. It’s after 8. Billy, I said hurry!” Billy was trudging up the stairs slowly, dragging his coat on the cement steps, his dark eyes sad, his lips pouting. He passed Charlie, and Charlie ruffled the boy’s yellow hair and smiled to himself. He could remember when he was only eleven.
Downstairs in the lobby he paused before the large square mirror. He was tall, and not skinny any more. His shoulders were broad, and his legs and arms were muscular, firm. The deep tan gave his face a rugged, masculine look that set off his gray eyes and made his teeth seem very white when he grinned. The close-cropped haircut helped too. He looked older than he had in June. Even though it had only been three months, he knew he looked older — acted older too. He wasn’t a kid any longer. He was grown up. He was on his own.
Then he thought of her... Of course, he had never really stopped thinking of her. Not all summer. He had pretended to himself that she was not important, that she was merely a stage he had gone through, that it did not matter now. But in his heart he knew differently. It was crazy the way he had dreamed of her those days and nights during June, July, and August. In his sleep he would see her entering the classroom again, smiling with the dimples at her cheeks, her green eyes sparkling, the soft, long, flaxen-colored hair touching her shoulders. He had seen her that way countless times, but when he dreamed of it, he made it different. She called the roll the way she always did, but when she came to his name, she stopped and looked up, searching the room for him. Then, when their eyes met, a wistful expression came over her countenance. She said, “Oh, there you are,” and the tone in her voice was hallowed and tender. What she was really saying was, “Charlie, Charlie, I’ve missed you so!”
He would wake up from that recurring dream feeling glorious. He would sing I’ll Be Seeing You in the shower, shine his scuffed-up brown oxfords, and take long walks, humming to himself and watching the sky. It didn’t matter that it was only a dream. It didn’t matter that Miss Lattimore had never said anything of the kind to him. It was wonderful, wasn’t it? He was in love with her. She was his high-school English teacher and she was probably past 27, and he was just sixteen — but that didn’t matter either. Those mornings after the dream, he believed only in his love, in Jill — that was her name. Miss Jill Lattimore.
Sometimes he was depressed. He did not always sing or hum or smile or think it was wonderful to be alive. He read poetry — especially the plays and sonnets of Shakespeare — imitating the way she had read them aloud in class.
That was the one he read most of the time, and he would close the book, hold his head in his hands, and say, “Jill!” and then, “Jill! If you only knew...”
Charlie shook his head and stared at the mirror in the lobby of his apartment house where he had been standing, thinking of her. Suddenly he laughed and said to the mirror, “Shakespeare! Me like Shakespeare? Ha!” He shrugged his shoulders the way Sid Caesar might have done on television. “Yeah, me. Me — Charlie Wright. I like Shakespeare, that’s all. And because of her!” He laughed again, but his stomach did a flip, and when he walked out the door of the building, he was frowning.
It was getting dark. There were some kids sitting on the curb under the streetlight at the end of the block. He began to walk in the opposite direction, up the winding road of Overlook Terrace to Fort Washington Avenue. He had always liked living in Washington Heights. It was close to the river and the George Washington Bridge, and he used to sit on the low banks near the water and watch the tugs and barges go by. Last year he had found another reason for liking Washington Heights. Miss Lattimore lived on Cabrini Boulevard, a few blocks from where Charlie was walking right at that moment.
He had gone by the Excelsior Apartments dozens of times, and once he had gone inside and read her name on the mailbox. Lattimore-4B. Later, as he stood in the road behind the building, he picked out her apartment from all the others. It was in the rear, facing the Hudson. Sometimes in the early evening he would see the lights up there and wonder what she was doing. He would make a bet with himself. “If she comes to the window and looks out, she feels the same way I do.”... But she never came to the window and Charlie went home sorrowfully, moping around in his bedroom, angry at his mother’s questioning.
His mother would say, “Do you feel all right, dear?”
“Sure,” Charlie answered, “swell!” He would say it very sarcastically.
“Darling, if anything’s the matter...”
“Aw for Pete’s sake,” he would exclaim. “For Pete’s sake, mom!”
Then before he went to bed he would go to his mother, pat her under the chin with his finger and say, “ ’Night sweetheart. Pleasant dreams.” Because he was always sorry when he was rude to her. When you came right down to it, he had a swell family. His mother and dad always played square with him, and he used to think, “Why, I can tell them anything — anything!” But he couldn’t tell them about this. This was different. He was in love — desperately in love — with an older woman, and he had been in love with her for one whole year.