“I’d like to cry.”
“Don’t bother. It doesn’t mean a thing anymore. C’mon,” he patted her hand, “we’re old friends having a drink and some dinner together, so let’s keep it light and pleasant. You’ve got a good husband, two little girls, security, so what’s the point of getting depressed? No good at all.”
“What about afterwards?”
Afterwards took place in her bedroom. He sat in a soft-backed chair with a drink in his hand gazing at little figurines on her dresser. She had rolled down the bedspread, and there was a mauve satin quilt under it. All that was missing were the dolls. Other men’s beds, other bodies. The room was warm, and she opened the window, and then when she pulled the curtains they drooled listlessly in the faint breeze. She lit a cigarette, then brushed her hair without enthusiasm. The bedstead was brass and when she lay down her hair was reflected in the metal ball at the corner. He finished his drink and took her cigarette from her and puffed it.
“If you want another drink, there’s a bottle on the dresser.”
“Separate rooms, you and the doctor?”
“He reads late every night.”
“A good excuse.”
She rose from the bed angrily and went for the bottle of scotch, but he got there first and took her wrist.
“Jay, don’t play games with me. If you’re not interested . . . well, I’ve had to live with it long enough, so I’ll die with it.”
“What’s brought this on?” he asked with surprise.
“For God’s sake, I’ve been through it. Shall I tell you about Mitch? Would you like to hear?”
“No, I don’t think I would.”
“Well, I’ll tell you whether you care to hear or not. He has something wrong with him. Psychological, physical, who knows what? Whenever he comes near me, he has his, you know what, so we’ve never properly consummated our marriage vows. Do you understand? And it’s a mercy I’m grateful for.”
He wanted to ask her about the children, but she said: “We’ve had two children. And if you only knew the sickening things I’ve had to go through to have them, how it was achieved, maybe you won’t get all hypocritical about the kind of mother and wife I am.”
“I’m sorry,” he said ruefully. He had been toying with her, and he realized that she had regained her moral ascendancy over him; it was like a delicate watchmaker’s scale, and he had gambled with her and lost. He knew why he had gambled: to confirm and justify his decision to abandon her, but he was wrong, and he went towards her with a new sympathy that overwhelmed him by its fullness.
“I love you, Jay. Can you understand that? I’m not a housewife on the loose desperate for a man, any man. I’ve overcome that feeling years ago. So don’t think you have to go to bed with me because it’s expected of you. Nothing’s expected of you, and don’t treat me like a piece you can walk all over just because I was stupid one night a long time ago with you. In fact, if you believe I’m really like that, like I acted then, I’d prefer you to carry that memory around with you instead of the way I really am, the real one. I’d like you to be able to vindicate your judgment of me, and that way you can.”
He stared at his face in the mirror, and he wondered if he was as dissolute as he appeared. His eyes were bloodshot and small, but he was sober.
“I love you,” he said. “I wasn’t going to admit I did because I was let down, and I didn’t want you to have the satisfaction of knowing that I still do love you. But it’s silly really. The trouble is too much time’s passed, and it’s not possible to start again.”
She put her arms round his neck and pressed his face against hers.
“Don’t leave me again, Jay.”
Later the knowledge hit him like a thunderbolt. His blood insisted that he had done the right thing - he loved Terry. Somehow he would have to come to terms with Eva, for he sensed that the ruined mansion of his life might be restored, and not with plaster and mortar, but with love. He had to love; it was more important than being loved.
Neal was shipped to summer camp with the same dispatch as a soldier in wartime, to be trained, disciplined, toughened and taught how to survive in a forest. The camp had militaristic leanings and was under the charge of a maniacal spartan, a P.T. instructor in a Bronx high school whose wife’s inheritance provided the initial capital for the camp. It was called the Moscalero, after a degenerate and now extinct Apache band whose anarchy and vindictiveness were legendary. Carl Holtz, the commandant of Camp Moscalero, saw no contradictions, either moral or social, in the name or the training program he had devised for his initiates. “I want them to be braves. Like the Spartans of yore,” he told anxiety-ridden parents who wanted to get rid of their children for the summer. He usually genuflected when he provided his sales talk, then did twenty-five push-ups and twenty-five sit-ups in the middle of the living room to demonstrate that he practiced what he preached. The camp accommodated one hundred and ten boys, and that meant Carl did a lot of push-ups every year. “Not bad for a man of fifty-six?” he would demand with that peculiar hunger for praise that was at the back of every rhetorical question he asked - and he only asked this type of question.
On sight, Neal detested him. And when the bull-necked, squatly built, hawk-nosed, simian-shuffling man asked him to call him “Uncle Carl,” he could have killed his parents. What irked him was the knowledge that the camp represented a solution to both his parents’ problems. At the meeting that had been held in Jay’s office and was attended by both Rhoda and Sports, her minister without portfolio and without, as Jay learned, a pot to piss in, only Eva had come to Neal’s defense.
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t come to the beach house with us,” she said.
Jay could only think that he would be tied to Neal whenever he might be with Terry. He didn’t love Neal less than before, but he very definitely loved Terry more than he thought he could love any woman. So he rationalized: what he was offering Neal was supervision, the very opposite of neglect.
“He’d get bored in a week at the beach and there aren’t many kids to play with.”
Holtz had walked around the office on his hands to show just what a well-conditioned fifty-six-year-old man could do when he was a student of gymnastics.
“Don’tcha get tired?” Sports asked, out of breath watching him.
“Tired? I do this to relax. Well, Neal, wouldn’t you like to learn how to do this?”
“Not particularly,” Neal had replied flatly. He had developed the ironist’s tool of laconicism.
“You could show your friends, and boy’d they be jealous,” Holtz continued, his face the color of an overripe tomato, split-skinned and on the way to going rotten.
“They’d stop talking to me if I walked around on my hands.”
“Don’t be rude,” Rhoda ordered. She couldn’t afford to let Neal upset her summer plans.
“Yah, go on, Neal. What d’you wanta sweat yer head off in the city for? Go to public swimming pools and get athlete’s foot for?” Sports observed with what Neal had discovered to be a positive genius for irrelevancy.
Holtz had righted himself, and he took up Sports’ theme agilely.
“No athlete’s foot at Moscalero, I can tell you. We’ve got a lake, our own. Lake Crow. Exclusively ours” - he flapped the brochure in Sports’ face – “and it’s two miles across. Every boy over thirteen is required to swim it to pass his Junior Life-Saving Test, and then he can wear his Red Cross badge on his swimming trunks.”
“Neal loves to swim,” Rhoda said.
A document was brought out from the inside pocket of Holtz’s sweat-stained seersucker jacket that released the camp from its responsibility for the boys’ health and safety. This safeguard was interwoven among clauses dealing with camp uniforms and snaked out as “Untoward, unforeseeable accidents . . . Camp Moscalero . . . accepts no legal responsibility and no claims thereof will be entertained.”
Jay examined the document. It was six hundred dollars plus fifty dollars for spending money
on trips, and seemed exceedingly reasonable to someone in his income bracket. He picked up his pen and was poised to sign when Neal shouted out: “Don’t, Daddy, it’s a concentration camp.”
“Oh, dear me, it’s not. The only things we concentrate on are sports, self-reliance, swimming, and making men. No, no, you’re very wrong, Neal. You’ll change your opinion, you’ll see.”
Neal recognized the implicit menace in Holtz’s manner, and he reversed his tactics. His parents and Sports were insistent and diligent in their desire to be rid of him. Why Eva wanted him around was a mystery, but she no doubt had a motive, so he accepted the fait accompli, for there was nothing he could do. He dissolved the antagonism that had been built up in Holtz, by saying: “I’m probably wrong . . . Uncle Carl.”
Approval. A sinister smile that developed into a guffaw, a pat on the back, spiritual bonhomie. The pen did its work, the deed was done, and Uncle Carl got his check for $650 without a whimper and not on the special installment plan available to economically pressed parents. Jay, with an insight that shocked Neal, made a valiant effort to smooth over the terrain that Neal had disturbed.
“He comes from a divorced home, and he’s a little oversensitive.”
“Of course. I understand,” Holtz said, and he did, a bit.
“Don’t hang it around his neck like a dead albatross,” Eva said sharply. Defeat might be made to work for her. “You wouldn’t like Neal to use that as an excuse or hide behind it.”
Thoroughly perplexed but ruminating on the wisdom of this remark, Holtz rambled something vague about taking the middle ground. His casuistry was discernible to Neal.
One hundred and ten braves of varying sizes, ages and dispositions, some with pimples, some not yet old enough to have them, met at the beginning of July on an incredibly muggy morning at the bus terminal on Forty-Second Street. Parents forced their protesting charges into the buses, decorated with the green and red pennants of Camp Moscalero. A species of being Neal had never before seen entered his life; the camp counselor. Most of them were on the short side of twenty, and all went to colleges of some description. Uncle Don, Neal’s counselor, was nineteen, squinty-eyed, with toothpick-thin arms swarming in hair, and a crew cut. He had a red whistle on a lariat that he blew every five seconds to the consternation of everyone in the perspiring crowd. He didn’t seem very intelligent, and Neal sensed that he would be susceptible to flattery and brown-nosing. Neal’s bunk was made up of four other boys who looked as disconsolate as he felt. One of the boys, wearing a name tag the size of a hamburger, blubbered into a snot-filled handkerchief. His name was Artie Kahn. Uncle Don made several vain efforts to quiet him down by blowing the whistle in his ear, but nothing stopped Artie. He had been delivered, and left, by two fat parents who didn’t want to miss any sun on the beach.
Like some prophet announcing doomsday, Uncle Carl emerged from the center of the crowd, shouting through a large megaphone: “We’re off, folks. All parents off the buses. Leaving in one minute.” He slipped into a station wagon, and the buses started up and turned in small circles around the platforms to form a convoy. The trip took five hours to Milhaven, Connecticut. The buses made one stop at a roadside rest during which Artie vomited huge slabs of salami, and Bobby Fish, another bunkmate, made a break for freedom, but was caught by Uncle Don as he tripped down a steep gradient.
“Say you’re sorry,” Uncle Don demanded in a high-pitched adenoidal voice.
“Fuck yourself,” Bobby replied.
There were too many people watching Uncle Don for him to attempt to swat Bobby, but he did say that he was putting him down on his shit list.
“And when somebody’s on that list, they gotta work their asses off to get off.”
Neal was sure that he and Bobby would be allies if not friends.
Camp Moscalero rested on an acclivity just outside Milhaven. It was well laid-out, and the facilities reflected Uncle Carl’s caste of mind. High hurdles on a cinder track, a bar for high jumping, another bar for pole vaulting, tennis courts that were chapleted with weeds, a baseball diamond with eight inches of grass, a wooden basketball court, archery targets, and an enormous pit filled with sawdust to train Olympic long-jumpers. The bunks were a series of raw timbered, functional cabins, situated in a quadrangle, and the mess hall and Uncle Carl’s manse were on the top of the hill. It took a good five minutes to walk up the hill from the bunks to the camp proper, and Neal supposed that Uncle Carl wanted his braves to work up an appetite before they got to the dining hall. There was a showerhouse behind the bunks that served thirty boys, and each bunk contained a can and two sinks.
Half a dozen trunks were lying on the porch of Neal’s bunk, and Uncle Don announced that they’d have a swim after unpacking. The beds were laid out in a daisy chain, and Neal took the one next to Bobby’s.
“My name’s Neal Blackman,” he said. “And if that scumbag puts a hand to you, I’ll jump him.”
“Thanks,” Fish said, surprised. “Maybe they aren’t all fairies here. Where you from?”
“Brooklyn. And you?”
“The Bronx. Tremont Avenue. Know it?”
“No, I only know the Grand Concourse.”
“Been to camp before?” Fish asked.
“No, I didn’t want to come. But Uncle Fat Ass started walking around on his hands in front of my parents, so they signed me on.”
“Shake” - he extended his hand – “me too. My folks are going to Europe, so they had to park me. Boy, was I mad. Who needs all this crap? I coulda stayed with my grandma, but they wouldn’t let me go. My mother says she might die. Isn’t that a rotten thing to say?”
“Both mine’re dead,” Neal said.
“Well, maybe they were telling me the truth.”
“Your parents fight a lot?”
“Sometimes. Not very often. They’re not bad really. But this place stinks. Know any of the udder guys before?”
“No, never saw them.”
“Do you smoke?”
“Yeah. I got three packs of Old Golds hidden in my duffel bag.”
“Great. Let’s go to the showerhouse after swimming.”
“Any girls’ camps around?”
“Holtz told my parents they had dances once a week with some camp.” He gave Neal a lascivious stare and his blue eyes opened wide. “You got plans or somethin’?”
“Well, I don’t want to spend the summer jerking off.”
Fish scratched his long legs and then unbuttoned his shirt. His sandy hair fell into his eyes, and he pushed it back.
“How old’re you?”
“Thirteen.”
“And you been laid awready?”
“Sure.”
“No bullshit.”
“When you get to know me, you’ll see that I don’t tell stories,” Neal said haughtily, seizing the upper hand that was being offered him.
Uncle Don, stripped to his undershorts and tee shirt, came over to them.
“Want any help?”
“No, I’m okay,” Neal said.
“Well, you two share the third and fourth cubbies. Make it snappy, and we’ll get down to the lake.” He glared at Fish through his thick befogged lenses. “And you, none of that kinda language to me and I’ll forget what you said on the road.”
“You need a pair of windshield wipers for your specs, Uncle Don.”
“Oh, boy, you’re gonna get your ass in a sling before this summer’s over.”
“Lay a hand on me, and you’ll wind up in court,” Fish snapped.
“Okay, by me if that’s the way you wanna play it, Fishcake.”
“My name’s Fish, four-eyes.”
Uncle Don scratched his funky armpits and sneered.
They unpacked their clothes and placed them along the dusty shelves adjacent to the toilet. Trousers, jackets, and coats were hung in a community closet, and the boys at last, to their great relief, were allowed to put on bathing suits. They were told to sit on their beds, and Uncle Don sat on his, trying to look
like a sage and a military leader, in a tartan swimsuit.
“I wanner have a talk with everybody, but I’ll save it till after the swim. But a few things I gotta say, so’s we know where we stand. We’re gonna live together for a whole summer, and we might as well be friends, ‘cause if we’re not friends, you guys are gonna have a rotten time.”
Fish interrupted.
“I thought you were gonna save the speeches for lata.”
“No more lip from you, Fish.”
“What about freedom of speech?” Neal said.
“Sure there’s freedom of speech, but there’s got to be respect. Now we’ll adjourn this chat, ‘cause it’s pretty hot. You boys form a line on the porch, and when I inspect it, I want to see it straight as a ruler.”
On the porch, Fish murmured: “He’s a dick. I don’t know from respect, except for my parents.”
“Don’t talk too much,” Neal advised. “Let him shoot off his mouth, and then we’ll bury him in his own bullshit.”
The three other bunkmates hardly spoke. They were too intimidated by their new environment either to pledge friendship or risk making enemies, and they stood rigidly, waiting for approval.
“Size places,” Uncle Don shouted.
Fish moved to the back of the line, and Neal changed with the boy in front of him who was a bit taller. The path down to the lake was muddy, strewn with rocks, and along the sides of its meandering course, ferns, thick gorse, and miles of trees hedged them in. Uncle Don pointed out the poison ivy and the poison sumac.
“Any of you guys get lost, make sure you don’t touch that stuff, ‘cause it’ll give you a rash you won’t get rid of for years.”
Lake Crow was spectacularly beautiful. It was much larger than Neal had thought. It lay in the hollow of a valley and in the distance he could see the rolling Berkshire hills surrounding them like an emerald umbrella. Half a dozen counselors stood on a wooden pier that was divided into three sections by ropes.
“All non-swimmers in the crib,” a man with a megaphone called out. “Junior life-savers and intermediates into five-foot water. The raft for deep water swimmers only.”
Seventh Avenue Page 42