The twins gasped, and Buddy lunged forward and asked with great eagerness, “Was there blood? Was there?”
“Why,” demanded Betty icily, “do you make up such ridiculous things to tell them? What do you expect to gain?”
I glanced at Betty. Her face was angry. “It happened,” I said. “It really happened.” I glanced at her again and saw a questioning uncertainty in her eyes.
“All right. It happened, Hal. That’s no reason for telling the children.”
“I was telling Janet so that she could understand why I was unintentionally rough.”
“You were rough, Hal, because you’re always irritated when we have to stop. Your idea of a trip is to keep traveling until everybody is a ragged ruin. You were rough because you were cross.”
“Was there any blood?” Buddy demanded.
“We are not going to talk about that ridiculous bear,” Betty said firmly. Buddy sat back where he belonged. Janice whispered something to Janet and the twins giggled.
I was content not to talk about it. I had never told Betty about it. I had never told anyone all of it.
It had happened when we had lived in West Hudson, the summer before I had gone away to school. We had moved to West Hudson when I was ten and in the fifth grade. Judy Hoover was a year younger and in the fourth grade. I cannot remember how I met her. She was on the fringe of my awareness and she moved gradually and steadily into focus. I remember that she was not a pretty child. She was brown and blond and skinny and active, very fleet of foot. In the dusk games of summer evenings she was very difficult to catch, and even more difficult to evade. She was constantly in motion. I cannot remember her ever being still. I used to help her with arithmetic and, later, plane geometry and algebra. She was bright in everything but math.
She was an only child and she lived with her father and mother in a big old house two blocks from us. I would go over there and we would go up to her room and I would try to hammer the plausibilities of mathematics past the bland incomprehension of her blue blue eyes. I remember when, after I had turned thirteen, Mr. Hoover suddenly made a rule that we could not study in her room. It seemed to both of us to be an incomprehensible ultimatum. He changed toward me that year. He had always been very friendly and jolly. He grew cooler. I thought it was because I had offended him in some way. I did not understand until much later.
In school, in the early years, I was popular enough and husky enough to be able to risk having a girl as a good friend. And Judy was a good friend. We both read a lot, read the same books, talked about them. After reading a book we particularly liked we would become characters out of the book — until the next good one. I would not say we were inseparable. That came later. Sometimes we would not see each other for a week. But we always picked up where we left off without effort.
I was fifteen and beginning my second year of high school when Judy entered high school as a freshman. The beginnings of awareness have been so exhaustively dealt with that it is hard to speak of what happened between us without uncomfortable triteness. We both thought it was our special miracle and had never of course happened to any other two people in exactly that way. I can even remember the very moment when she stopped being Judy my friend and became Judy my girl.
I was walking along the second floor corridor of the high school building toward the drinking fountain. Adolescence had filled me with curious imaginings and lurid dreams. With my new awareness of the flesh, I watched a blonde girl walking ahead of me, watched her good legs and the swing of her skirt and the feminine shoulders. She turned, and I saw with amazement that it was Judy, and saw that she had somehow become pretty. It was never the same again.
Though high school children did not go steady then to the extent that they do now, we became a unit, an entity, in the social life of the school. Judy and Hal. Hal and Judy. It was unthinkable that either of us would go out with anyone else. My parents accepted the situation more readily than hers. Judy told me many an account of household combat over our design for living. But Judy had a firm line of jaw and it was eventually accepted — though with not the best of grace. She told me once that her father had tried to get a transfer so they could move her away from me. I said that if that happened, we would run away together. She said it was the only possible thing we could do.
Mr. Hoover was cool toward me. He was a tall loose-jointed man with many awkwardnesses of posture and movement. He spoke in an abrupt jerky way. His hair was very dark, and his skin had a glossy yellowish look to it. I thought him quite old but now, looking back, I realize with a feeling of shock that he was young. His awkwardnesses I would now classify as boyishness. They had married very young. Judy’s mother was a handsome woman who played a harp, an instrument I thought highly exotic.
Judy and I were closely supervised by Mr. Hoover. He intended to afford us no opportunity for sexual experimentation. But in my last year in the high school, before that last summer, we found opportunity for greater closeness. She was a virgin when she died, but I had the memory of my hand touching that young breast, memories of bruised lips, of aching closeness. I now believe that without the difficulties placed in our path by her father I would have possessed her. We were very much in love. All the path of our life from then on was clear to us. There could be no greater certainty than ours.
Judy was good. I do not mean that in a moralistic sense. She was stubborn as mules, sometimes moody, often capricious. But she was gay, honest, intelligent. And pretty, and clean as a cat.
It happened on the twenty-third day of August. It was a Friday. I was pumping gas that summer, paying off the loan that had gone toward my Model A Ford. I had permission to take it away to college with me — if I paid off the loan. The station was owned by a man named Shinley. It was on Bay Street near the railroad crossing. It was a little after three in the afternoon, a hot afternoon. I knew that Judy had gone swimming at the West Hudson Country Club with Martha Baer. Had I not been working, I would probably have been there too. It is a small inexpensive club with a big pool.
I brought change to a man and when he drove away, I saw Martha Baer standing there looking at me with a strange expression. She was a stocky girl with glossy black hair and a happy smile. She wasn’t smiling. She seemed to be looking at something right behind me, so intently, in fact, that I turned around to see if Judy was sneaking up on me.
I asked Martha what was up. She answered me in a flat, singsong, recitative voice. “Mose killed Judy. Mose killed Judy a little while ago.” She turned and walked away, a dumpy girl in red slacks, walking slowly through the August afternoon.
It took a long time for the words to make any sense. It was like throwing a rubber ball at a wall, aiming at a hole just big enough for the ball. It keeps missing and bouncing back. Then it goes through the hole. The afternoon stopped. Everything stopped. I felt like ice. Then I realized I was in my car, going too fast toward the edge of town, half-crying, so that it was hard to see.
You could get sandwiches and cold drinks at the club, but it was expensive. We all used to walk down the highway from the club to a lunch stand run by a bald man named Goekel and his redheaded daughter. They did a good business. In June Mr. Goekel had acquired a bear. It was a black bear, not large. Some friend of his had acquired it somehow in the Adirondacks. Mr. Goekel had it in a big, sturdy cage and he planned to turn it over to a zoo when the weather got cold. In the meantime I imagine it improved business because a lot of people would stop to look at it. I believe it was Ginny, the redheaded daughter, who named him Mose, Old Man Mose.
Judy and I always stopped at the cage to say hello to Mose. Mose trudged forever back and forth inside the bars, swinging his head, turning ponderously at the corners. Sometimes he would give a sigh that seemed very human. He wasn’t very big, and his coat had a dusty look. His muzzle was blunt. He had little weary-looking piggish eyes. “Poor old Mose,” Judy would say. “Poor tired old Mose.”