Then, just before leaving for the store, he came up with something which was on his mind and spat it out, wet: “Tell Mrs Musto I’m concentrating on words. The Word. But also words that are just words. There’s so many kinds. You could make necklaces. Big chunks of words, for instance, and the shiny, polished ones. God,” he said, and the spit spattered on Waldo’s face, “is a kind of sort of rock crystal.”
Waldo was disgusted by his brother’s convulsed face and extravagant, not to say idiotic, ideas.
Although this started him off badly, as he approached down Mrs Musto’s winding drive of raked gravel he realized worse was in store for him. He could hear quite plainly the felted sound of tennis balls as they were struck thudding back and forth. The gathering of “youngsters”, judging by its numbers, was fully assembled on Mrs Musto’s lawns. There was positively a smell of tennis. The four elect performers, each older than himself, it seemed to Waldo, were also far more adept, more graceful, if not better born, at least wealthier. Young men reaching overhead with their rackets revealed their glorious ribs through transparent shirts. Delicious girls, in pearls of perspiration, appeared to have been at it all their lives as they controlled their skirts in running to dish up a ball.
Waldo was appalled.
He plodded farther, over the rocks of gravel, in the pants he had pressed under the mattress the night before, and the Barranugli High hat-band, from which Mother had tried to sponge the sweat-mark. He knew that he was poor, pimply, stupid, and if not ragged, definitely frayed.
Mrs Musto came. She was all in white. She smelled of white.
She said: “Waldo, I’m glad you came. I was beginning to be afraid yer’d found something better. This is Waldo,” she announced, “Waldo Brown.”
It sounded dreadful.
Several of the initiated youths and maidens compressed their faces in little set expressions of acceptance, as they had been taught.
Then Mrs Musto took him aside, and said: “Look, Waldo, we’re all only having fun. I’ve got a racket for yer inside. It’s pretty good, but mightn’t be good enough. You’ll have to think it over. You look nice. Oh, dear,” she complained, stepping back, “we’re upsetting the eatables! Whatever will Louie say!”
For during her diplomacy she had knocked a meringue off a trestle table, and had just crushed it with her blancoed toe.
Waldo hoped to withdraw, and did finally, to a less obvious position, behind a grazier of at least twenty, discussing rams with two young ladies worthy of his attention.
“But wool is so important,” said one.
“Yes, I realize. But I’d be terrified,” the other said, “of rams. I mean, they’re sort of curlier, they’re less direct than bulls.”
Then all three exploded into fruit cup and understanding.
Waldo hated their aggressive white. He envied them the language they spoke. Their eyes grew filmy observing over their shoulders somebody they had not known from childhood.
He went away.
Under the cedars a peacock, perhaps enamelled for the occasion, appeared more approachable, putting up its tail as though to oblige. The thrilling, quivering tail had eyes for Waldo alone. He tried to touch the bird, but it, too, slipped expertly out of reach.
He had nothing then.
He went and scorched himself with a glass of iced lemonade.
Mrs Musto was marshalling her pawns.
“Ronald and Dulcie, versus Dickie and Enid. There! I call that a match!”
Whether they liked it or not they were going out for Mrs Musto’s satisfaction.
Dulcie, it appeared, was expected to serve. Her arms were too thin, too pointed at the elbows. Too dark. She was wearing a pink pink dress.
“Who is that?” one of the young ladies asked.
Nobody exactly knew.
Anyway, Dulcie managed to get the ball over the net. Back and forth forth and back went the felted fated ball.
It was Dulcie’s in the end.
Dulcie scooped it.
How it soared its slow white rocket above the black cedars into taut sky returning into ball as it plummetted past the black cedars down. It hit the hard grass. And bounced. It hit Dulcie in her burnt face.
“Who is it?” they asked one another. “In the pink dress?”
No one knew, exactly.
“Coconut ice,” suggested a future barrister of whom answers and jokes were expected.
Everybody laughed.
The game finished eventually.
The girl Dulcie came off the court rubbing, washing her perspiring hands with a screwed-up handkerchief. She felt the need to detach herself from the others. Threw down the racket. Which probably only Waldo guessed was one of the instruments of torture Mrs Musto kept in the house. Dulcie’s fate confirmed his intention not to be made an exhibition of. By Mrs Musto or anyone else.
Now that he had stopped being afraid he had begun to despise their hostess, along with her kindness, her riches, and her choice of politely insulting guests. Poverty was the only virtue. The girl Dulcie was probably poor. In her pink, as opposed to white, dress. Not that he didn’t despise Dulcie as well. In his crusade of bitterness there was only room for one ardent pauper. The girl in pink, besides, was about his own age, and might handle too clumsily some of the truths he was anxious to establish.
So he avoided Dulcie. Even when he was looking at her you couldn’t have told. Or only Dulcie could have.
She appeared overheated. The uncontrolled tennis ball had plainly branded the side of her face. She was also plain. If not downright ugly. Waldo would have hated to touch her, for fear that she might stick to him, literally, not deliberately, but in spite of herself.
Then why was Mrs Musto bringing Dulcie through the cool ranks of immaculate white initiates, who stood about her lawn sipping fruit cup and giggling through the fragments of meringue?
Dulcie was equally mystified, but made some attempt at disguising it. Though she looked away, she was smiling, and breathing deep. Waldo noticed that her strong teeth formed a prow, as it were, in profile.
“You two, Dulcie and Waldo, ought to find something in common. You are about the same age,” Mrs Musto said — she was as stupid as that. “Aren’t yer stoking up?” she asked, looking sideways at the trestles, believing, and in this she was wiser, that food would fill silences.
So Mrs Musto went away.
Dulcie took and dropped a meringue, which she picked up, dusting off the lawn-clippings. Waldo chose a sandwich, of very thin wet cucumber, because it was nearest to him. He put it in his mouth whole, it was so dainty, and did not notice it after that.
They had nothing to say. Even if he had he would not have allowed himself, not to this ugly dark girl. If Arthur had been there he would have let Arthur bear the brunt of Dulcie. But they circulated a little, from necessity, and if nothing else, mere motion lubricated their stiffened minds.
“Do you live here?” she asked at last.
“Yes,” he said.
And blushed because he thought perhaps she despised him for something, his clothes for instance, which he had forgotten about, or his high-school look.
“Do you live here?” he asked.
“Yes,” she said, and quickly: “No.”
She came rasping out with what was intended as punctuating laughter.
“That is,” she said, “we have a house here. And come here on and off. When Daddy feels he wants a change of air.”
“Funny not having to live at Sarsaparilla,” he said, “and wanting to come here.”
“I don’t see what’s funny about it.”
He wasn’t going to tell her if she didn’t realize. It was too long, anyway. He couldn’t take an interest in her.
She did not seem in any way put out. She began swinging her thin dark arms. She began humming a tune, leading a life of her own. It irritated him not to recognize the tune, but admittedly he had not yet fully decided whether to develop a talent for music, or whether it might queer his pitch in literature. In the meantime they payed for him to take a lesson once a week from Miss Olive Fischer of Barranugli. He used to stay on after school, gnawing at a trotter on the journey home. Between lessons, if he remembered, he aspired to Schubert on the terrible upright in the living-room.