“I doubt it like hell. He needs me to keep him going, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue yet. I can’t fade out before he has the clue. You’re lucky, your kid has the clue.”
This is a sad piece of flattery that makes Phillips shake his head. The rims of his eyes deepen in tint. Ronnie Phillips, now a freshman at Penn State, is brilliant in electronics. But even while in the high school he openly ridiculed his father’s love of baseball. He bitterly felt that too many of the precious hours of his childhood had been wasted playing cat and three-stops-or-a-catch under his father’s urging.
Phillips says weakly, “Ronnie seems to know what he wants.”
“More power to him,” Caldwell shouts. “My poor kid, what he wants is the whole world in a candy box.”
“I thought he wanted to paint.”
“Ooh.” Caldwell grunts; the poison has wormed an inch deeper into his bowels. Sons are a heavy subject for these two.
Caldwell changes the subject. “Coming out of my room today I had a kind of revelation; it’s taken me fifteen years of teaching to see it.”
Phillips asks quickly “What?” eager to know, for all the times he has been fooled.
“Ignorance is bliss,” Caldwell states. Seeing no light of welcome dawn on his friend’s hopefully wrinkled face, he repeats it louder, so it echoes down the empty diminishing hall. “Ignorance is bliss. That’s the lesson I’ve gotten out of life.”
“God help us, you may be right,” Phillips fussily exclaims, and makes as if to move toward his room. But for a minute longer the two teachers stand together in the hall, finding a measure of repose in familiar company, and some ambiguous warmth in the sense of having failed each other without blaming each other. So two steeds in the same pen huddle through a storm. If men were horses, Caldwell would have been the drudging dappled type, somewhat anonymous but not necessarily ill-bred, known as a “big gray,” and Phillips a gallant little Morgan, chestnut, with a prissy tail and nicely polished hooves-practically a pony.
Caldwell has a last thought. “My old man went and died before he was my age,” he says, “and I didn’t want to double-cross my own kid like that.” With a yank that makes the legs chatter and screech, he pulls a small oak table, much gnawed, from its place against the wall; from off this table basketball tickets are to be sold.
A panicked shout wells in the auditorium and lifts dust in the most remote rooms of the extensive school even while paying customers still stream through the entrance and down the glaring hall. Adolescent boys as hideous and various as gargoyles, the lobes of their ears purple with the cold, press, eyes popping, mouths flapping, under the glowing overhead globes. Girls, rosy-cheeked, glad, motley and mostly ill-made, like vases turned by a preoccupied potter, are embedded, plaid-swaddled, in the hot push. Menacing, odorous, blind, the throng gives off a muted shuffling thunder, a flickeringly articulate tinkle: the voices of the young.
“So I said, That’s your tough luck, buddy boy.’ “
“♪ I hear you knockin’ but you can’t come in ♪”
“I thought it was real doggy.”
“The bitch rolled over and, no shit, said, ‘Again.’ “
“Use common sense. How can one infinity be larger than another?”
“Who says he says, that’s what I’d like to know.”
“You can tell with her, because there’s this little birthmark on the side of her neck that gets red.”
“He’s his own best lover if you ask me.”
“Box lunch-sluurrp!”
“I’ll put it this way to you: infinity equals infinity. Right?”
“So then I heard that she said, so I said to him, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, I guess.’”
“If he can’t stop it, he shouldn’t have started it.”
“His mouth just dropped. Literally dropped.”
“When did it all happen, ages ago?”
“But if you take only every odd number that exists and add them up, you still get infinity, don’t you? Do you follow that much?”
“Was this at the one in Pottsville?”
“♪ I’m in my nightie and it’s awful thi-in ♪ ”
“ Tough luck?” he said, and I said, ‘Yes. Yours.’”
“Finally,” Peter calls to Penny as she comes down the auditorium aisle and sees him. She is alone, he has a girl, she is alone, his girl has come to him alone: through the circuit of such simple thoughts his heart spins. He calls to her, “I saved you a seat.” He sits in the middle of the row; the seat he has saved for her is piled high with other students’ coats and scarves. Herolike, she swims the strait between them, pursing her complacent mouth impatiently, making others rise from their seats to let her by, laughing as she nearly tumbles on an obtruded foot. While the coats are removed from her seat, Peter and Penny are pressed together, he having half-risen. Their knees interlock awkwardly; he playfully blows and the hair above her ears lifts. She seems, the skin of her face and throat a luminous stillness in the midst of hubbub and thumping, delicious to him, edible, succulent. Her smallness makes this succulence. She is small enough for him to lift: this thought makes him himself lift, in secrecy. The last coat is removed and they settle side by side in the happy heat and chaos.
The players, exulting in all the space reserved for them, gallop back and forth on their plain of varnished boards. The ball arches high but not so high as the caged bulbs burning on the auditorium ceiling. A whistle blows. The clock stops. The cheerleaders rush out, the maroon O’s on their yellow sweaters bobbling, and form a locomotive. “O,” they call, seven brazen sirens, their linked forearms forming a single piston.
“Ohh,” moans back Echo, stricken.
“L.”
“Hell,” is the answer, deliberately aitched, a school tradition.
“I.”
“Aaiii,” a cry from the depths. Peter’s scalp goes cold and under the cover of a certain actual ecstasy he grips his girl’s arm.
“Hi,” she says, pleased, her skin still chilly from the outof-doors.
“N.”
The response comes faster, “Enn,” and the cheer whirls faster and faster, a vortex between the crowd and the cheerleaders, until at its climax it seems they are all sucked down into another kingdom, “Olinger! Olinger! OLINGER!” The girls scamper back, play resumes, and the auditorium, big as it is, subsides into a living-room where everybody knows everybody else. Peter and Penny chat.
“I’m so glad you came,” he says. “It surprises me, how glad I am.”
“Why thank you,” Penny says dryly. “How’s your father?”
“Frantic. We didn’t even get home last night. The car broke down.”
“Poor Peter.”
“No, I kind of enjoyed it.”
“Do you shave?”
“No. Should I? Am I ready?”
“No; but it looks like a bit of dried shaving cream in your ear.”
“You know what that is?”
“What? Is it something?”
“It’s my secret. You didn’t know I had a secret.”
“Everybody has secrets.”
“But mine is very special.”
“What is it?”
“I can’t tell you. I’ll have to show you.”
“Peter, aren’t you funny?”
“Would you rather I didn’t? Are you frightened?”
“No. You don’t frighten me.”
“Good. You don’t frighten me, either.”
She laughs. “Nobody frightens you.”
“Now there you’re wrong. Everybody frightens me.”
“Your father even?”
“Oh, he’s very frightening.”
“When will you show me your secret?”
“Maybe I won’t. It’s too horrible.”
“Peter, please do. Please.”
“Listen.”
“What?”
“I like you.” He cannot quite say “love”; it might prove unfair.