Uncle Ned decided to move before he lost further ground. He slapped me rather heavily on the shoulder. “Are you hungry, Bob? It’s lunchtime. Why don’t we go and get something to eat?”
“No drinking,” Aunt Lola put in quietly.
“Nobody said anything about drinking.”
“I did.”
“All right. I heard you. No drinking.” Ned turned to me. “How about a glass of milk and a sandwich?”
I hesitated. It seemed that as the balance of power stood, it would be safe to oppose Ned, quietly. I said: “I promised Paul to wait for him.”
“Who the hell is Paul?”
“He got on the train at Lost Lake. He’s going to St. George’s, too. I told him maybe you’d give him a ride out to the school.”
“But you’re not going to the school today.”
“Paul is. He’s a real nice guy. His father’s a minister in Lost Lake. Paul says he’s thinking about being a minister, too.”
Ned looked at me as if I was a viper in his nest. “I don’t care if he’s Jesus Christ himself. I’m not driving him out to St. George’s School today.”
“Then I will,” Lola put in. “He sounds like the kind of friend that Robert should be making.”
“A bloody Christer?”
“Don’t you dare talk like that in front of this boy.”
“I’ll talk any bloody way I want to talk.”
“Then I’m not going to stand here and listen to it.”
Lola started away. I guessed that she wouldn’t go far, but I couldn’t be sure of that. She was the only friend I had in the city. Already she was almost out of sight in the swirling crowd. I turned and looked at Ned. He was standing behind me, stony-faced, holding on to the suitcase which contained everything I owned in the world. I made a quick grab for it. He held it back out of my reach.
Ned was smiling darkly, his teeth a bone-white gash in his lower face. “You’re not going to get it back,” he said, “till you get down on your knees and beg for it. If you don’t I’ll take it down and throw it in the river. And if you can’t keep a civil tongue in your head, I’ll throw you in after it.”
II
I was a boy going on fourteen, and Laurie was nearly nineteen, but we had somewhat the same position in my aunt’s apartment. She was an apprentice beauty operator (in my aunt’s “beauty parlor”), unable to work just yet because she was recovering from childbirth. She lay around the apartment reading Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, and looking so beautiful and wan that I fell in love with her.
My position in the apartment was this: When my mother’s relatives turned me out, Aunt Lola sent for me and put me in private school. My wandering father was her favorite brother. She seemed to like me in her dry stoical way, and sometimes invited me home from school for the weekend. This didn’t suit Uncle Ned. He didn’t like me. He didn’t even like Laurie, though she lolled like a fallen angel in the living room, and in her kimono at the breakfast table looked pale and pure as a young Madonna whose baby had been put out for adoption. (Her breasts were bandaged the first Sunday morning I saw her, to keep the milk from forming.) (“I had everything taken out,” Aunt Lola said instructively at the same breakfast.)
Looking back on the situation, I think I know why Ned couldn’t stand to have anybody around. He pretended to be a businessman and investor. He dressed in flannels like an Englishman and drove a big black Packard. But the Packard belonged to my aunt, and the main errands he used it for was going to the drugstore to pick up her headache medicine, or hauling cases of liquor for her parties. She gave orders nicely, but she gave them. He didn’t want Laurie and me around because we were witnesses to his humiliation. He was living on Aunt Lola the same as we were.
The apartment wasn’t a happy place to be; it always smelled of liquor and carnations, like a wild funeral. But it meant freedom from school, and this became important to me, especially after I started to get into trouble. Besides, there was a player piano in the living room, an electric player grand. I remember one Saturday night when Lola and Ned were at somebody else’s party (probably Mr. Castor’s in the penthouse) and Laurie and I played all the rolls of music in the house. She said when she was feeling better she would teach me to dance. We sat together on the davenport, it must have been for hours, and my soul was wafted out of my body and moved around and above her. She let me kiss her. When my soul came back to me, and the music stopped, it smelled of Laurie forever. I can still taste her sweetness on my tongue and hear that music.
Next Saturday night the party was at my aunt’s place. I was introduced to guests, given a taste of champagne and sent to bed. Laurie had her first drink and got high, and I couldn’t go to sleep. “In a Little Spanish Town.” I got homesick for my mother, and tried to comfort myself by self-abuse, as my mother’s relatives called it. I got a little high on sex and champagne and went into Laurie’s room to smell her clothes. I was in the closet when Laurie came in with Mr. Castor. He promised her things, including “ownership” of this apartment building. She refused, afraid of another baby, not over the last one.
“Didn’t Lola teach you to take precautions?” he asked her. “Who was its father?”
“Wouldn’t you like to know?”
He forced her by psychological threat….It wasn’t exciting at all. It made me sick.
Afterwards she sobbed. I crept out of the closet, and pretended to have come in through the door.
“You’re my only friend. I wish you were big enough to look after me….You’re so little, you won’t hurt me.”
I wasn’t so little….
I can still taste her sweetness on my tongue, mixed with the salt of tears.