by Irwin Shaw
They shook hands.
“I’ve enjoyed our walk,” Hazen said. “Perhaps, if we’re both in town next Saturday morning, we can do it again.”
“I’ll be in town,” Strand said.
“I’ll call you. Enjoy Berlioz.”
Strand watched as Hazen got spryly into a cab, his big form filling the doorway.
Buster Keaton, for God’s sake. As the cab sped away Strand took the envelope out of his pocket and looked at the tickets. They were for fifth row orchestra. The glorious uses of money, he thought. He put the tickets back into his pocket with a tingle of pleasure and started toward home.
4
BERLIOZ. A ROARING FLOOD of dark sound. Unfairly treated by posterity.
A cool, woman’s hand on his forehead. “I need you,” someone had said. He tried to open his eyes to see whose hand it was on his forehead, but the effort was too great. Whoever…
“I don’t get it,” the boy was saying in Strand’s little office. Strand had told Romero that he would like to see him for a moment after classes were over and had been a little surprised when the boy actually appeared.
“I explained to you,” Strand said, “that I mentioned you to a…a friend of mine, a new friend, who happens to be an influential man, and he said that if you were interested in continuing your education he would try to get you a scholarship…”
“Yeah, yeah,” Romero said impatiently. “I heard all that. I mean, man, why’s he picking on me?”
“I said you were promising,” Strand said.
“I’m not making any promises,” Romero said sullenly.
“I wasn’t using the word in that sense,” said Strand. He found it difficult, after the long day, to keep his patience with the short, ragged boy, his face hard and suspicious under his tangled hair. Dressed in shapeless blue jeans, dirty sneakers, and a faded football jersey that was much too large for him and had probably been stolen from some locker room seasons ago, Romero lounged carelessly against the desk, impudently fingering an unlit cigarette. The number on the jersey was 17. The boy wore it to school every day, and sometimes in Strand’s dreams the number 17 crossed against a confused cloudy background. “What I meant was that of all the students in my classes who might not otherwise go on to college, on their own, that is, you showed the most original intelligence.”
“You’re kidding, ain’t you, Professor?” Romero said, smirking. “What’d you really say—that you got a kid in your class who proves that Puerto Ricans’re all some kind of nuts? What’s the game?”
“It isn’t any game,” Strand said shortly, regretting that he had ever said anything to Hazen about the boy. “And leave the Puerto Ricans out of it, please. My friend is interested in education, he has useful connections, he feels that out-of-the-ordinary students should be given a chance…”
“I still don’t get it, Professor,” Romero said stubbornly.
“Don’t call me Professor. I’m not a professor.”
“Okay—Mr. Strand—I mean, like what’s in it for him? Some guy I don’t even know.”
“There’s nothing in it for him,” Strand said. “Except perhaps some personal satisfaction if you do well and embark on a successful career later on.”
“What do I have to do—sign a contract or something giving him half of what I make for ten years?” Romero took a battered Zippo lighter out of his pocket, then thought better of it and put it back. Strand shook his head sorrowfully. The boy obviously did not confine his reading to books on history and science. The gossip columns about Hollywood and show business and agents clearly had not been neglected in his choice of reading matter. “Romero,” he said, “did you ever hear of charity?”
“Charity.” The boy laughed, meanly. “I sure have heard of charity. My old lady’s on welfare.”
“This has nothing to do with welfare. I’m not going to sit here and argue with you all day. If you want to devote a year or two of your life to really studying hard—there’s a good possibility you can get a scholarship for a college. I think you can make it, if that means anything to you. I suggest you go home and talk it over with your mother and father.”
“My father.” The boy laughed again, his teeth gleaming white in the dark, smudged face. “That man’s long gone. I ain’t seen him since I was nine years old.”
“Your mother, then.”
“She won’t believe me. She’ll beat the shit out of me for making up stories.”
“Then consult with yourself, Romero,” Strand said angrily. He stood up. “If you decide you want to make something of yourself, come and tell me. If you want to be a bum all your life, forget it.” He collected some papers and stuffed them into his briefcase. “I’ve got a lot of work to do at home. I have to leave. I’m sure you have many important things to do yourself this afternoon,” he said sardonically, “and I won’t keep you any longer.”
Romero looked at him, smiling, as though making the teacher angry gave him some points in a secret competition with his classmates.
“Get out of here, get out of here,” Strand said and then was ashamed because he had spoken so loudly.
“Whatever you say, Professor,” Romero said and went to the door. He stopped there and turned. “I can take care of myself, understand?” he said harshly. “Nobody has to lose any sleep about Jesus Romero.”
Strand went over to the door and closed it, hard. Then he went to his desk and sat down and put his head in his hands.
As he loped down the steps of the school building Strand overtook Judith Quinlan, of the English department. He had overheard some of the students calling her Miss Quinine, although as far as he knew not to her face.
“Good afternoon, Judith,” Strand said, slowing down. She was a small woman and when they walked to the bus together, as they did frequently, there was no way for her to keep up with his usual pace unless she trotted along beside him. She had a delicate but nicely rounded body and a sad little indoor face, and she used no makeup. Her favorite color, at least for school, was a dun brown. Her reputation as a teacher was good and he liked her and they occasionally lunched or had a cup of coffee together. He never could make up his mind how old she was—somewhere between thirty and forty, he thought.
“Oh, Allen,” she said as they reached the sidewalk and she automatically began to walk faster, “how nice to see you.” She glanced sidewise at him. “You look as though they’ve been grinding you today.”
“I didn’t know it showed. It was only the usual.” Strand slowed down even more. “Thirty lashes.”
She laughed. She had a nice laugh, low and unforced. She wasn’t really pretty, but she had pale gray direct eyes that squinted a little as though in an effort to find out exactly what he was saying to her. “I know what you mean. I was going to stop for a coffee. Would you like to join me?”
“I feel as though I could use a bottle of Scotch,” Strand said, “but I’ll make do with coffee.”
They passed the fat man with the baseball cap at the corner.
“I’ve heard he sells heroin to the kids,” Strand said.
“I’ve heard he sells numbers tickets to them,” Judith said.
“Probably both. Or maybe he’s just a simple child molester.”
“There’re some children in my classes I’d gladly have him molest.” She glanced at Strand again. “You look as though you’re about to come to a slow boil. Has it ever occurred to you that you’re not really cut out to be a teacher?”
“I’d have to consider that,” Strand said thoughtfully.
“I shouldn’t have asked that question.”
“Why not? Recently I’ve been asking it myself.” He didn’t tell quite how recently it had been—since Saturday morning. “I’m of two minds. There’s an answer for you.” She smiled. “Wouldn’t it be nice,” she said, “if we actually did have two minds—one to go off and work, the other to sit at home and ponder.”
“Well, there are certain things we can safely say in favor of our profession,” Strand sai
d. “It is underpaid, arduous, unappreciated, dangerous from time to time, and we have long holidays. We can also go on strike, just like the garbage collectors.”
In the coffee shop, over their steaming mugs, Judith said, “All this term, I’ve been trying to decide whether or not to come back next year.”
“What do you mean by that?” Strand poured sugar into his mug.
“Aren’t you afraid of diabetes or getting fat or anything like that?” Judith asked, shaking her head as Strand offered her the sugar dispenser.
“I glory in my health,” Strand said. “It’s the one thing I’m comparatively sure of. Now—are you serious about what you just said?”
“Yes.” Judith nodded slowly, her neatly bobbed black hair, a few streaks of white showing in it, moving gently around her face.
“What would you do if you didn’t come back?”
Judith shrugged and took the coffee mug up to her mouth with both hands, making her look momentarily childish. “Become a veterinarian, maybe,” she said. “Handling wild animals would come easy after what I’ve been going through. Or become a nun. I’m a lapsed Catholic, but for the peace of a convent maybe I could unlapse.”
“Did you ever think of marriage?”
Judith blushed and Strand was sorry he had asked the question.
“Of course,” Judith said. “But the offers haven’t been—well—brilliant.”
“You’re an attractive woman.” As he said it, Strand realized that he almost believed it.
“I’ve been waiting, as the girls say, for Mr. Right to come along. So far,” she said, sounding defiant, “Mr. Wrong has shown up. Several times. I’m a simple woman, but I’m not simple enough to believe that marriage would solve any of my problems. Has it solved any of yours?” she asked challengingly.
“Some,” Strand said. “And created others,” he added, to keep from sounding smug. “Children…” He was about to say “money” but refrained. Instead he said, “There are a lot of places in this world I’d like to see. But on a teacher’s salary you don’t do an awful lot of traveling. I encourage it in my offspring and tell them to bring back photographs. One of my daughters is thinking of going to Greece this summer.” He didn’t know why he had brought that into the conversation.
“I made a tour of the Lake District last summer,” Judith said. “The English teacher’s dream.”
“How was it?”
“Dreary.” Judith laughed sourly. “It rained all the time and I was with a group of English teachers from the Middle West. We discussed Wordsworth for one day and spent the rest of the time on how to present Hamlet to teenage children. I didn’t say much. It’s hard to explain that most of the children I have anything to do with have seen murders—real murders—on their own blocks and would gladly kill their uncles, and their mothers and fathers, too, if they had the chance.”
“I must go to Vienna some day with a group of history teachers,” Strand said, “and tell them about the difficulties I have in explaining the position of Metternich at the Congress of Vienna to my classes.”
They both laughed. “Ah,” Judith said, “we’ll both come back next year, won’t we?”
“Doomed,” Strand said. “Obsessed. Though we have our triumphs, don’t we?” He thought of Jesus Romero that afternoon. “Some of them pretty hard to bear.”
“A girl I taught some time back and told she could be a writer had a short story in Penthouse last month,” Judith said. “Pretty damned sexy. I hid the magazine from my mother when she came to visit me.”
“Tomorrow will be a better day,” Strand said, finishing his coffee and standing.
“Don’t bet on it,” Judith Quinlan said, as she stood, too.
There was nobody in the apartment when Strand got there, and he took advantage of Leslie’s absence to take a nap. He felt exhausted and it was delicious to fall asleep.
He awoke with the feeling that someone else was home.
It couldn’t have been Leslie or she would have come into the bedroom. He smoothed the bedcover so that she wouldn’t see that he had been napping and put on his shoes and went into the hallway. He could hear dishes being rattled in the kitchen and went in there. Caroline was sitting at the table drinking a glass of milk and eating a piece of cake. He saw from the white cotton collar above her sweater that she had been playing tennis.
“Hi, Daddy,” she said. “Join me?”
Strand looked at his watch. “I’ll wait for dinner.”
“I couldn’t,” she said. “I’d swoon with hunger.” She put a big hunk of cake in her mouth. It had soft chocolate icing and she licked the smudges off her fingers. “Yummy,” she said.
He sat opposite her, smiling, vicariously enjoying her appetite. “If people can have chocolate cake,” she said, her mouth full, “I can’t understand their going for cocaine. Oh, I met our friend again.”
“Which friend?”
“Mr. Hazen. He came around to the courts. He sure looks a mess. Like a lopsided cantaloupe. That ski hat. It must have been knitted by a blind Norwegian troll.”
“Be kindly, Caroline, please,” Strand said.
“He’s okay, though. Really. He said he came to make sure I got home safely. He said he didn’t want me to get into any more incidents. That was some incident the other night. Mother! I’d still be playing, only he kept looking at his watch and fretting. We had a nice talk on the way home.”
“Did you?” Strand said. Somehow, the thought that a busy man like Hazen would take the time to walk a seventeen-year-old girl across the park made him uneasy. He remembered what he had said to Judith Quinlan when they had passed the fat man in the baseball cap at the street corner—“Maybe he’s just a simple child molester.” It was just a joke, of course, but child molesting itself was no joke and older men in all walks of life were not immune from the disease. He himself had been deeply troubled by a lovely high school friend of Eleanor’s who was constantly around the apartment. He had to make a conscious effort to keep from touching her and he had to hide what he felt when she kissed his cheek in greeting and he was tortured by the most realistic and explicit erotic dreams about her. He was not the sort of man to go beyond these involuntary excursions, but who knew what sort of man Hazen really was? People didn’t go around wearing signs that read “Child molester.” And he had to face the fact that Caroline was no longer a child but fast becoming an attractive young woman. He knew he couldn’t say anything of this to Caroline, but if there were any developments that looked ominous he would speak to Leslie, whose instincts were more dependable than his. “What did you talk about?” he asked Caroline.
“A lot of things.” Caroline took another chunk of cake and washed it down with the milk. “He watched me and he commented on the way I played. I was surprised. He knew what he was talking about.”
“He was an athlete when he was young and he belongs to the Racquet Club.”
“Is that so,” said Caroline, unimpressed. “Anyway, he said I was pretty good, and that I should try to get more spin on my second serve and hit my backhand flatter and I agree with him one hundred percent. He asked me if I wanted to go in for tennis seriously—you know, coaches and training and all that jazz—and I told him no, I wasn’t good enough, I’d never make it and I’d just eat my heart out getting put out of tournaments in the first round. He said that was wise, we should recognize our limitations. On a tennis court,” she said grimly, “it’s no big deal recognizing your limitations I told him, and he laughed.” She laughed. Then she became more serious. “What did I intend to do with my life, he asked. He doesn’t mind asking questions, does he?”
“What did you tell him?”
Caroline gave him a sidelong, covert glance, hesitated, as though she were about to say something, then changed her mind.
He was conscious of a lie, a subterfuge. It was not like Caroline. She was not a secretive girl. She had gone through the usual choices as she was growing up—ballet dancer, actress, nurse—but that was only until she was a
bout twelve. Since then she had been content, it seemed, merely to pass in school and play tennis when she could. He was surprised that she had spoken as openly as she had with Hazen. She was a shy girl who spoke very little and guardedly, except with the family; she had few friends, all of them girls, and he knew from Leslie and Eleanor that she thought boys were making fun of her when they made any advances and fled from them.
“What did you tell Mr. Hazen?” Allen repeated.
“I told him I intended to grow up,” Caroline said, almost defiantly.
“Did he laugh?” Strand asked.
“He doesn’t laugh much, Mr. Hazen,” Caroline said. “He said he was very much impressed with Eleanor. Naturally.” She spoke without a trace of jealousy, as though she accepted the fact that Eleanor was the star of the family. “He said if there were more young women like that there’d be no need for the Equal Rights Amendment or magazines like Ms. They must have had a real heart-to-heart conversation in the taxi. He didn’t mention Jimmy.” She scowled, as though she considered this a slight to her brother. “Has he got any children?”
“Three,” Strand said. “A boy and two girls. Approximately the same age as you three.”
“It’s funny, he never said a word. Do you go around bragging about us?”
“Bragging isn’t the word,” Strand said. “I mourn your mother’s fecundity.”
“I bet,” Caroline said, smiling. She got up from the table and leaned over and gave Strand a kiss. “Oops,” she said, “chocolate on the foredeck.” She took out a handkerchief and wiped the chocolate off, then put the remains of the cake in the refrigerator and tossed the empty milk carton into the trash basket. “He’s going to call you tonight, he said.”