…and he upon thy lap oft flings himself back, conquered by the eternal wound of love; and then pillowing his shapely neck (tereti cervice) upon thee and looking up he feeds with love his greedy eyes, gazing wistfully towards thee (inhians in te, dea), while, as he lies back, his breath hangs upon thy lips.
The JV game is over. Though Mark Youngerman’s face is purple, his panting painful, and his body as slippery as an amphibian’s, Olinger lost. The buzz of the crowd changes pitch. Many leave their seats. Those who step outside discover that it is snowing. This discovery is ever surprising, that Heaven can so prettily condescend. Snow puts us with Jupiter Pluvius among the clouds. What a crowd! What a crowd of tiny flakes sputters downward in the sallow realm of the light above the entrance door! Atoms and atoms and atoms and atoms. A furry inch already carpets the steps. The cars on the pike travel slower, windshield wipers flapping, headlight beams nipped and spangled in the ceaseless flurry. The snow seems only to exist where light strikes it. A trolley car gliding toward Alton appears to trail behind it a following of slowly falling fireflies. What an eloquent silence reigns! Olinger under the vast violet dome of the stormstruck night sky becomes yet one more Bethlehem. Behind a glowing window the infant God squalls. Out of zero all has come to birth. The panes, tinted by the straw of the crib within, hush its cries. The world goes on unhearing. The town of white roofs seems a colony of deserted temples; they feather together with distance and go gray, melt. Shale Hill is invisible. A yellowness broods low in the sky; above Alton in the west a ruby glow seeps upward. From the zenith a lavender luminosity hangs pulseless, as if the particular brilliance of the moon and stars had been dissolved and the solution shot through with a low electric voltage. The effect, of tenuous weight, of menace, is exhilarating. The air presses downward with an unstressed sibilance, a pedal note, the base C of the universal storm. The streetlights strung along the pike make a forestage of brightness where the snowfall, compressed and expanded by the faintest of winds, like an actor postures- pausing, plunging. Upward countercurrents suspend snow which then with the haste of love flies downward to gravity’s embrace; the alternations of density conjure an impression of striding legs stretching upward into infinity. The storm walks. The storm walks but does not move on.
Those who remain inside the school are ignorant of the weather and yet like fish taken up by a swifter ocean current they sense some change. The atmosphere of the auditorium accelerates. Things are not merely seen but burst into vision.
Voices carry further. Hearts wax bold. Peter leads Penny back up the aisle and into the hall. His head pounds with the promise he has made but she seems to have forgotten it. He is too young to know those points, those invisible intersections, on a woman’s face wherein expectation and permission may be detected. He buys her a Coke and himself a lemon-lime at the bin which the Student Council operates in the main hall. Its vicinity is busy; the couple is pushed to the wall. Here hang framed photographs of bygone track teams in a long chronological row. Penny tips the bottle with her little finger extended and licks her lips, in the wake of the sip and looks at him with eyes whose green seems newly minted.
Secret knowledge of his spots obsesses him; should he tell her? Would it, by making her share the shame, wed them inextricably; make her, by bondage of pity, his slave? Can he, so young, afford a slave? On fire with such cruel calculations, he turns his red back on the crowd shoving and sluggishly interweaving around the soft-drink bin. When an iron hand seizes his arm above the elbow and brutally squeezes, it might be one of a hundred idiots.
But it is Mr. Zimmerman, the Supervising Principal. Simultaneously he has seized Penny’s arm, and he stands there smiling between them, not letting go. “Two prize students,” he says, as if of two netted birds.
Peter angrily tugs his arm away from the grip. The grip tightens. “He begins to look like his father’s son,” Zimmer man says to Penny, and to Peter’s horror Penny echoes the principal’s smirk. Zimmerman is shorter than Peter but taller than Penny. Up close, his head, asymmetric, half-bald, and nodding, seems immense. His nose is bulbous, his eyes watery. An absolute rage against this fool wells up in the boy.
“Mr. Zimmerman,” he says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“Full of questions like his father,” Zimmerman says to Penny, and drops his hold on Peter’s arm but not hers. She is wearing a pink angora sweater from whose very short sleeves her bare arms thrust like legs out of underpants. The old man’s broad fingers indent the cool fat; his thumb wanders back and forth across an inch of flesh.
“I wanted to ask you,” Peter says, “what are the humanist values implicit in the sciences?” Penny titters nervously, her face gone purely stupid. Zimmerman asks, “Where did you hear such a phrase?” Peter has overreached. He blushes in consciousness of betrayal but in the momentum of pride cannot stop. “I saw it in a report you wrote on my father.”
“He shows you those? Do you think he should?”
“I don’t know. What affects him affects me.”
“I am wondering if it doesn’t place too great a responsibility on you. Peter, I value your father enormously. But he does have, as of course you can see-you’re an intelligent boy- a tendency to be irresponsible.”
Of all possible charges this seems to Peter the least applicable. His father, that blind blanched figure staggering down the steps in a debtor’s cardboard box…
“It places,” Zimmerman goes on gently, “a greater responsibility on those around him.”
“I think he’s awfully responsible,” Peter says, hypnotized by the meditative caressing action of Zimmerman’s thumb on Penny’s arm. She submits to it; this is a revelation. To think he was about to confide in this whore, this doll, his precious spots.
Zimmerman’s smile stretches. “Of course, you see him from a different angle than I do. I saw my own father in the same way.”
They see many things the same way, these two; they both see other people as an arena for self-assertion. There is a ground of kinship which makes their grappling possible. Peter feels this, feels a comradeship intertwined with antagonism and a confidence in the midst of his fear. The principal has blundered in seeking intimacy; distance and silence are always most powerful. Peter stares him in the face and, an instant short of irrevocable rudeness, glances away. He feels the side of his neck blushing in the manner of his mother. “He’s terribly responsible,” he says of his father. “He’s just had to have stomach X-rays but what he’s more worried about is a little strip of basketball tickets he can’t find.”
Zimmerman quickly blurts, “Tickets?” To Peter’s surprise this seems to have scored. The principal’s wrinkles are shadowed forth at the new tilt of his head; he seems old. Triumphantly Peter feels descend upon him, his father’s avenger, this advantage over the antagonist: he has more years to live. Ignorant and impotent here and now, in the dimension of the future he is mighty. Zimmerman murmurs, seems in his mind to stumble. “I’ll have to speak to him about this,” he says, half to himself.
Overreached. The possibility of a truly disastrous betrayal makes Peter’s stomach grovel as it used to when he was a child and running tardy down the pike to elementary school. “Must you?” His voice thins in pleading, becomes infantile. “I mean, I don’t want to have gotten him into any trouble.”