My father had succeeded. Sometimes I felt very young, other times like an old man; no action for me.
As a menial (no pay, just pocket money), I dusted the shoes on display, helped take inventory, or polished the Brannock Device, which was a metal clamp-like contraption for measuring feet — the width and length. I also ran errands.
I was on one today; the errands were the only freedom I had. But it was always the same trip — picking up a pair of shoes, sometimes two, from a warehouse in Boston, near South Station, on Atlantic Avenue.
Before I left, my father raised his hand and said, “No Eddie,” meaning, “Don’t associate with Eddie Springer,” whom he considered a bad influence. What I liked about Eddie was his saying, “I’m a wicked-bad influence.”
I took the electric car to Sullivan Square, climbing the stairs, waited on the platform in front of Spitting Is Forbidden, then rode the subway to South Station, and repeated the shoe size to the man at the warehouse counter. He did not greet me or even comment. He made out an invoice by hand, measured a length of string, and tied the box while I leaned on the counter.
A woman at a desk behind him smiled at me. “You look just like your father.”
I didn’t know what to say. My father was more than fifty years old. I could smell her perfume, like strong soap, and I imagined that her blond hair, too, had a fragrance. Seated, she seemed small, doll-like, but sure of herself.
The man said, “Ask your father why he only buys one pair at a time.”
The woman winked at me. She said, “His father only sells one pair at a time.”
“And when is he going to pay me what he owes me?”
“I’ll ask him.” The suggestion that my father might be tricky did not dismay me; it reassured me in my own weakness and made me admire him.
As I left, holding the box with a clip-on handle, a wooden cylinder with wire hooked through it, the woman said, “Don’t listen to Grumpy. Your father’s a great guy. Tell him Vie was asking for him. Violet.”
Maybe that was his other side, a ladies’ man and a traveler, a man of the world now down on his luck as a widower and the father of a sulky teenager. But if so, that did not make him forgiving. It made him more suspicious. He knew what a boy was capable of, and was overprotective. He was puritanical and hated any kind of foolery — loud music and loud talk, mentions of girls, of sunny frivolous places like California or Florida, any sort of indiscipline.
But that woman Vie knew something about my father that I didn’t, and this idea that he was concealing a part of his life made me dawdle in the errand, in my own concealment.
I cut through South Station and bought a jelly donut. The woman at the counter wearing a white apron and white cap lifted the donut with tongs from the tray and dropped it into a small bag.
“Ten cents,” she said, and I gave her the dime. As I stepped away, a man with a mean face leaned over and said, “Give me that.” He looked like a gargoyle, and his smell and his ugliness made him seem violent.
Handing over the bag, I held on to the shoebox and hurried out of the station as though I’d done something wrong. I went up State Street, walking fast, until I got to Milk Street. I had the sense that the man might be following me. I went into Goodspeed’s bookstore. The old woman at the desk said, “You can’t bring any parcels in here.”
Near the corner of Milk and Washington I stopped at a shop that sold knives and cameras. I knew the shop. There was always someone, usually two or three men, looking at the window display of knives — all sorts of hunting knives, wide blades, jagged blades, shiny, bone handles, bowie knives, Buck knives, Swiss Army knives — and in the adjoining window the cameras were set out, all sizes.
A grinning man in a long coat and glasses said, “Hey, look at that camera, how small it is. That one down there.”
Like a toy, a tiny camera, propped on a small box with a tiny red roll of film.
“You could get some swell pictures with that. Fit in the palm of your hand,” the man said. “Take it anywhere.”
I said, “I guess so. It’s really small. Maybe German.”
He put his face near mine as the man had done in South Station, demanding my donut. “I took some pictures of my roommate when he was bollocky.” The man was smiling horribly and making a face, and he dislodged his glasses. He pushed them back into place with his dirty thumb.
But I was backing away. I said, “That’s okay.”
“I could take a picture of you bollocky,” he said. “Wanna let me?”
“No thanks.”
“You’re probably too shy.”
“No. It’s not that. I just don’t want to.”
I walked quickly away into the sidewalk crowd and ducked past Raymond’s department store. I crossed Washington Street and hurried up Brewer, lingered in front of the joke shop, then to Tremont, up Park to the black soldiers memorial and Hooker’s statue, and down Beacon. Just as I approached Scollay Square, five black boys, big and small, came toward me, filling the sidewalk.
My heart was beating fast as I hurried through traffic to the other side of the street, and I kept walking until I got to the Old Howard theater. Ever since leaving the shoe warehouse I’d been escaping, and it seemed strange that, trying to avoid trouble, I’d found myself here. I had come here with Eddie Springer one Saturday six months before. I’d bumped into him on another errand.
Eddie knew the corners of Boston and all the shortcuts. He had shown me the knife shop and Raymond’s and the joke shop; my father had shown me the memorial to the black regiment and Hooker’s statue and the Union Oyster House. Between my father and Eddie, Boston had no secrets for me.
It was all exteriors, though. I never went into any stores. What was the point? I had no money, I was afraid of being confronted. But Eddie knew all the stores, and had even been inside the Old Howard and seen a burlesque show and repeated the jokes. A stripper said to a heckler, “Meet me in my dressing room. If I’m late, start without me,” which made Eddie laugh so hard he didn’t notice that I had not understood.
We had come this way in the winter, this same route, from South Station toward the Common, then via Scollay Square — a detour — and along Cambridge Street to the back slope of Beacon Hill.
When I realized that in this afternoon escape I was retracing that winter walk with Eddie, through the same streets, making the same stops, I felt safer. I knew that I could make my way onward to North Station and Sullivan Square to the electric cars, to bring the box of shoes back to my father.
Eddie was a hero to me for his being so confident and for knowing Boston, which was like knowing the world. He had a girlfriend. We’d stopped to see her. He’d introduced me to her — Paige.
As on that day with Eddie, I had nothing to do and nowhere to go on this summer afternoon of hot sidewalks and sharp smells and strangers, the air of the city thick with humidity under a heavy gray sky. It all stank pleasantly of wickedness, and if I’d known anything of sensuality I would have recognized it as sensual. But I was fifteen, small for my age, soon to enter my sophomore year of high school. Away from my house I was not sure who I was; it was as though I was walking the streets searching for a self.
Eddie was three years older than me, a neighbor who was kind to me because he knew my mother was dead. He smoked, he drank beer, he had this girlfriend Paige, and it seemed that the farther I walked down the back slope of Beacon Hill the more I resembled him. I remembered Paige: blond, small — her smallness made me bolder. She had blue eyes and a lovely smile and didn’t say much. Eddie claimed she was an Indian, from Veazie, Maine, on the river, and he said she was a dancer.