Iris Osgood replaced her; the girl was crying. Tears streamed down her cheeks, soft and bland like the sides of a Guernsey, and she did not have the wit to wipe them away. She was one of those dull plain girls who was totally unfashionable in the class and yet with whom I felt a certain inner dance. That half-shaped fatness of her figure secretly roused the hard seeds in me; I showed it by being quick and bantering of tongue. But today I was tired and wanted only to pillow my head upon her low I. Q. “Why the tears, Iris?”
Through a sob in her throat she brought out, “My blouse: he tore it. It’s ruined and what can I tell my mother?”
And now I noticed that indeed the downslipping silver of one breast was exposed to the very verge of its ruddy puckered coin; I could not tear my eyes away, it looked so vulnerable.
“That’s all right,” I told her, debonair. “Look at me. My shirt is totally disintegrated.”
And this was true; except for flecks and glutinous threads of red, my chest was bare. My psoriasis was made manifest. A line had formed and, one by one, they walked by, Betty Jean Shilling, Fats Frymoyer, Gloria Davis suppressing a smile, Billy Schupp the diabetic-all my classmates. They had obviously come together in a bus. Each for a moment studied my scabs, and then moved on in silence. A few shook their heads-sadly; one girl pressed her lips together and shut her eyes; a few eyes were thick and pink with tears. The wind, the mountaintops, had fallen still behind me. My rock felt padded and there was a tangy chemical smell all but smothered in the artificial perfume of flowers.
Last came Arnie Werner, the president of the senior class and the student council, captain of the football and baseball teams. He was a hollow-eyed boy with the throat of a god and heavy sloping shoulders all shining from the shower. He bent way over and stared at the scabs of my chest and touched one fastidiously with his index finger. “Jesus, kid,” he said, “what’ve you got? Syphilis?”
I tried to explain. “No, it’s an allergic condition, not contagious, don’t be frightened-”
“Have you had a doctor look at this?”
“You won’t believe this, but the doctor himself-”
“Does it bleed?” he asked.
“Only when I scratch too hard,” I told him, desperate to ingratiate myself, to earn his forgiveness. “It’s kind of relaxing, actually, when you’re reading or in a movie-”
“Boy,” he said. “This is the ugliest stuff I ever saw.” He frowningly sucked his index finger. “Now I’ve touched it and I’ll get it. Where’s the Mercurochrome?”
“Honest, cross my heart, it’s not contagious-”
“Frankly,” he said, and from the solemn-dumb way he said that one word I could see that he was probably a good president of the student council, “I’m surprised they let you bring a thing like that into the school. If it’s syphilis, you know, the toilet seats-”
I shouted, “I want my father!”
He came before me and wrote on the blackboard,
C6H12O6 + 6O2 = 6CO2 + 6H2O + E.
It was the last, the seventh period of the day. We were tired. He encircled the E and said, “Energy. That’s life. That little extra E is life. We take in sugars and oxygen and burn it, like you burn old newspapers in the trash barrel, and give off carbon dioxide and water and energy. When this process stops”-he Xed through the equation-”this stops”-he double-Xed out the.E-”and you become what they call dead. You become a worthless log of old chemicals.”
“But can’t the process ever be reversed?” I asked.
“Thanks for asking that, Peter. Yes. Read the equation backwards and you have photosynthesis, the life of green plants. They take in moisture and the carbon dioxide we breathe out and the energy of the sunlight, and they produce sugar and oxygen, and then we eat the plants and get the sugar back and that’s the way the world goes round.” He made a vortex with his fingers in the air. “Round and round, and where it stops, nobody knows.”
“But where do they get the energy?” I asked.
“Good question,” my father said. “You’ve got your mother’s brains; I hope to hell you don’t get my ugly face. The energy needed for photosynthesis comes from the atomic energy of the sun. Every time we think, move, or breathe, we’re using up a bit of golden sunshine. When that gives out in five billion years or so, we can all lie down and rest.”
“But why do you want to rest?” His face had gone quite bloodless; a film had been interposed between us; my father seemed flattened upon another plane and I strained my voice to reach him. He turned slowly, so slowly, and his forehead wobbled and elongated with refraction. His lips moved and seconds later the sound came to me.
“Huh?” He was not looking at me, he seemed unable to find me.
“Don’t rest!” I shouted, glad the tears had come, glad to hear my voice breaking on the spikes of grief; I hurled my words through with a kind of triumph, exulted in the sensations of the tears softly flailing my face like the torn ends of shattered ropes. “Daddy, don’t rest! What would you do? Can’t you forgive us and keep going?”
The top half of him was bent by some warp in the plane he was caught in; his necktie and shirtfront and coat lapels looped upwards along the curve and his head at the end of the arc was pressed into the angle where the wall met the ceiling above the blackboard, a cobwebby place never touched by a broom. From up here his distorted face gazed down at me mournfully, preoccupied. Yet a microscopic pinch of in terest in the corners of his eyes led me to keep calling. “Wait! Can’t you wait for me?”
“Huh? Am I going too fast?”
“I have something to tell you!”
“Huh?”
His voice was so muffled and far that I willed to be closer to him and found myself swimming upward, with expert strokes, my arms lifting high at the elbow, my feet fluttering like boneless fins. The sensations so excited me I almost forgot to speak. Coming up panting by his side, I told him, “I have hope.”
“Do you? That makes me awfully proud to hear that, Peter. I never had any. You must get that from your mother, she’s a real femme.”
“From you,” I said.
“Don’t worry about me, Peter. Fifty years is a long time; if you don’t learn anything in fifty years you never will. My old man never knew what hit him; he left us a Bible and a bucketful of debts.”
“Fifty years is not a long time,” I said. “It’s not enough”
“You really have hope, huh?”
I closed my eyes; between the voiceless “I” inside my head and the trembling plane of darkness also there, there was a gap, of indeterminate distance but certainly not more than an inch. With a little lie I leaped it. “Yes,” I said. “Now stop being silly.”
VII
CALDWELL turns and shuts the door behind him. Another day, another dollar. He is weary but does not sigh. The hour is late, after five. He has stayed in his room bringing the basketball books up to date and trying to unravel the tickets; there is a block of tickets missing and in rummaging through his drawers he came across Zimmerman’s report and reread it. It depressed him out of all proportion. It was on blue paper and looking at it was like falling up wards into the sky. Also he has corrected the exams he gave the fourth section today. Poor Judy Lengeclass="underline" she doesn’t have it. She tries too hard and maybe that has been his trouble all his life. As he walks toward the stairwell the ache low in his body revives and enwraps him like a folded wing. Some have the five talents, some have the two, some have the one. But whether you’ve worked in the vineyard all day or just an hour, when they call you in your pay is the same. He hears his father’s voice in the memory of these parables and this depresses him further.