by John Donovan
Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert had decided to pile me and Fred into their Chrysler and take us and our stuff to Mother’s the day after Christmas. Everyone had agreed that this was the sensible thing to do. We would avoid train tickets and a lot of Railway Express charges for my stuff, and we would get Fred to New York with the least amount of noise from him. Fred loves cars, and nothing makes him happier than to take a long drive.
Mother’s house is in the middle of the block. It was built in 1834 and has high ceilings. There are a couple of fireplaces in her apartment and a nutty-looking porch over the kitchen of the people who live under her on the second floor. We’re all shivering with the cold when we come in, and it’s the back porch Mother wants to show us first. She calls it her terrace, and I can see right away that she thinks Fred can live out there. I tell her that Fred loves heat, and if she will show me where I’ll live, I’m sure Fred can squeeze in there too. She’s very real-estate agent about the whole thing though, so we have to wait to see my room. We see her study, which has a desk in it with a quill pen stuck in a china inkwell. Then we see her bedroom and her bed, which is a sight, with a big floppy lace ceiling over it. We see the kitchen, which must have been a closet in former days, and the bathroom.
“It’s for both of us,” she says. She opens four doors and finally shows me a shelf she calls mine. “For your personals, darling,” she says. “Shaving things and all that.” She laughs. This makes me mad. Some of the guys at home have already had one or two shaves, but I haven’t, and to tell the truth I’d like to. I haven’t even had any hair to speak of under my arms yet, but I think I’m getting some. I understand that after that, it will come to my upper lip pretty fast. The thing is, L. T. Murray had hair under his arms as long ago as the fifth grade. He showed it to me a lot and told me that if I would rub spit in this area, hair would come very fast. L. T. didn’t know what he was talking about of course, as I discovered.
We see Mother’s living room, which is great. It has some big couches and funny-looking leather chairs. She has a fire going, and Fred has already curled himself up in front of it, at home in five minutes.
“Now the pièce de résistance!” Mother declares. She flings open a door off her living room, and there is my room. It’s all boy, all right. She has had it paneled and has had some skinny drawers built in a skinny double-decker bed. She’s got a strange collection of stuff on the walls, and she tells me they are from Childcraft. They’re great of course, but they’re for kids about five. She’s also got a teddy bear sitting up on my pillow.
“You remember it, don’t you, darling?” she says. “I’ve kept it always.” I’m embarrassed because I don’t remember it. “It was your first toy. You loved it so.” She is sort of slobbering all over me. Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert look away, and I don’t know what to do.
“Sure,” I say. “I remember it. I wondered what happened to it.”
“I knew you would!” Mother says. She looks at Aunt Louise. “It was an important influence in his earliest years. It is a security symbol. That’s really why I kept it. I knew Davy would need it again.” She grabs the teddy bear off the bed and gives it a big kiss. By this time Fred has seen it and is sitting up begging to play with it. Boy, could he make something of that security symbol in three minutes! I tell Fred to get down, and Mother tells all of us that she has the loveliest family in the world and everything is going to be so wonderful now that Davy and she are together and it’s nice to have Fred living here too. They move back to the living room. I stay behind in my room for a minute. The mattress on my bed is OK, and it’s pretty neat that Mother had another bed built on top of mine. Both of them are so narrow though, that I’m not sure I’d want to sleep in the top bunk. That will be for the people I invite, I guess. Fred is sniffing away at everything. He’s having a marvelous time. I’m hoping he won’t lift his leg on anything which happens to smell too delicious not to baptize. At least not tonight.
Mother says she’s asked in one or two friends to meet me and that of course Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert will stay too. Aunt Louise says sure, and they go off in their Chrysler to find a hotel to live in for the night. Mother tells them to stay at the Chelsea. It’s only a few blocks away, and she says it is fabulous. It’s filled with writers and painters, and a man on the top floor keeps a lot of giant snakes in an apartment he has there. Aunt Louise’s shoulders rise up to around her ears on that one, and she gives Mother her “Oh, Helen” look.
“Really, darling,” Mother says, “it’s absolutely marvey. It has rooms large enough to divide by six, and still there’d be space enough for everyone. It’s where Dylan Thomas used to live when he was in New York. Arthur Miller stays there too. Thomas Wolfe lived there. If I were from someplace else, I’d want to stay there.”
Uncle Bert asks if the Statler isn’t nearby, and Mother gives him one of her laughs for people out of touch with the Chelsea Hotel. She says that what used to be the Statler is indeed nearby and they can get a room there if they want to, but what is the point of being in New York if they stay in a hotel just like any old hotel they might find in Boston.
With Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert out hotel-hunting, Mother asks if she can’t help me unpack. We open up my two suitcases and four cartons with all my junk in them. She’s great, taking my stuff out of the suitcases. She says that I have good-looking suits, but how come I have only two? I tell her two suits are plenty, and she says that I’ll have to get some more because this school she has got me enrolled in has a requirement about how people have to dress. She folds up all my shirts and my underwear so they will fit in the skinny drawers in the chest she got made for my room.
The funny thing about it is that she keeps telling me what she’s doing. She says Oh, another shirt; this is a blue one; isn’t it nice and fresh? Let’s shake it out and fold it long and narrow. Oh, here’s a lovely tattersall shirt; isn’t that nice? Is that the one I gave you for Christmas? It hasn’t been worn yet. And then she yells a little. I’ve stuck my finger on one of the pins, she says, and then she laughs and says What the hell, I’m not going to take out all the pins just to put it in your drawer. Here, she says, you take care of this one. Why haven’t you worn it yet? I tell her that I just opened the Christmas box two days ago, and she says, Of course, and was I saving the shirt for later? I say Yes. She asks do I like it? Sure, I say. You mean that, sweetheart? Sure. You wouldn’t put your mother on, would you? No, I say. Did you like it as well as anything you got for Christmas? Well, I say, I don’t know. You gave me some other stuff too. She says that’s right. What other things that she gave me did I like? I tell her I like the stopwatch I asked for and which she gave me. She says what do I need a stopwatch for? I tell her about my running and how I was probably the fastest runner in my class at home. And I tell her about the relay teams I have been captain of for the last three years and how they have won all the races for my age group ever since I’ve been the captain. She thinks that is wonderful.
“Have you really, darling?” she asks.
“Sure,” I say.
“I didn’t know an Olympic athlete would be moving in with me!” she says. But when she says it, I know it’s phony. She doesn’t care about the relay races in the same way Grandmother did. There’s nothing I can put my finger on, but I think for a minute that my mother is getting a big laugh out of me. I guess relay races don’t mean anything when you aren’t running in them, but when you have been the captain of a winning team for three years, as I was, and when the team had a couple of fat guys on it who weren’t good runners but who worked to be better runners than other fat guys and became pretty good runners anyway in spite of being fat, you don’t want somebody to make fun of the team. When I was living with Grandmother, she used to come to all the track meets I was in. She always told me that it was better to be part of a winning team than to win all by myself. I think she was just trying to make me feel OK because I could never win the hundred-yard dash o
r the pole vault or anything like that. I got some second- and third-place ribbons for those things though. One year I won the high jump. Grandmother told me that she was glad I had jumped higher than anyone else, but she still thought that the relay-team win was more impressive. She took me to the movies that night. It was the first time I had gone at night. I remember that night very well, because in addition to going to the movies, we had an ice-cream soda afterwards, and it was almost eleven o’clock when we got home. Fred was waiting for us at the front door, and we took him right out for his finals, but when we came back and I went upstairs to my bedroom, I discovered that Fred had been in my bed and ripped up my sheets. He didn’t like Grandmother and me to leave him behind while we celebrated. If there were any parties in his house, he wanted to be part of them. From then on when we had to be out at night, poor Fred was cooped up in the kitchen, which was OK I guess because it smelled of food and was always warm. It showed me that when you make a dog like Fred part of your family, he is a full-time member, not just someone who will be around when you want him to.
Mother and I get out about half of my stuff before her doorbell rings. That is all Fred needs. He really lets himself go when he hears the buzz. I knew he could bark, but I had never heard him wail before. I laugh.
“My God!” says Mother. “Can’t you keep the little bastard quiet?” She goes to her doorbell button and presses it. I can hear the noise of the buzzer downstairs and the sound of the front door of the house opening. But these are only dim sounds, crowding out the pounding in my head. She has called Fred a little bastard. It wasn’t her friendly voice. I have heard her call people bastards a lot before, but there was nothing to it. I call people bastards all the time, not to their faces but to myself. People are coming up the stairway. I want to grab Fred and run into my room, but Fred is standing at the living-room door, barking away.
“Stop it!” Mother yells at him.
Fred only barks louder.
“Davy.” She turns to me. “You’ve got to stop him!”
I go to Fred. “Here, Fred,” I say. He keeps barking at the footsteps coming up the stairs.
“My God, Fred,” Mother yells, “will you shut up!”
I grab Fred and pull him away from Mother’s door. He only barks louder as I carry him into my room. I pull him up onto my bed with me, holding a hand over his muzzle. He can’t make noise then, but he is wiggling in my arms as Mother’s friends come into her living room.
“Darling!” Mother says. “Davy’s chaining down the welcoming committee in the other room!” She laughs her loud, hysterical laugh.
“That’s fabulous, darling,” a lady’s voice says, laughing like Mother afterward.
“Really mad,” says a man.
My door is partly open. The guests brush their cheeks against Mother’s. I do not want to go out to meet them. Fred is squirming wildly in my arms. I give him a big kiss. This makes Fred happy, and he has a fine, slurpy time licking my face.
nine
Mother’s friends keep coming to her apartment for the next few days. The women always give Mother a big kiss, and Mother kisses them back, and they all call each other darling and things like that. All the men who come look like each other. When they say darling to Mother, they don’t say it loud like the women. When I am introduced to them, they ask me how I am and am I enjoying New York and what grade am I in. I am glad that Fred does a lot of barking because that gives me a chance to talk about how much Fred barks and to explain that in our town it was very quiet, and that the people who came to visit our house were usually people like Aunt Louise and Uncle Bert or maybe some ladies who used to come to play bridge with my grandmother. Fred barked then too, but that was different. Then he had to protect his turf only once a week. Now he has to protect it several times a day. Mother tells me that’s the way it is during the holidays, and I can see that she is ready to clobber Fred. So I take him out for a lot of long walks. There’s no question of letting him off his leash now. My walks are around the blocks near Mother’s. When she has a lot of people visiting her, I walk around her blocks two or three times. I think that I’ll get Fred tired out and he’ll go to sleep when he goes up to Mother’s apartment. He never does. He jumps all over Mother’s friends and barks at every new one who comes.
Fred also has a very hard time learning where it is all right to do his business. Before, if Fred made a mess on someone’s front lawn or right in front of someone’s front door, it wasn’t a big catastrophe. I used to push it into the street, and there weren’t any hard feelings. Not in New York. The block Mother lives on is all fixed up, like Mother’s place, to look like it looked a hundred years ago. It’s very pretty compared to other blocks I can see from walking Fred in the neighborhood. The trouble is that everyone on the block knows it’s very pretty. They spend a lot of time yelling at me not to let Fred plop in front of their houses. Fred doesn’t understand what the yelling is about, and after three days he takes a raised voice as his cue to evacuate. This is no way to make friends in a new neighborhood. I decide that the problem is not one I want to have a “heart-to-heart” with Mother about. There’s no one I can talk to about it. So I tell Fred what I guess are the rules of the game here in New York. Fred, gentleman that he is, is a good listener to my three-times-a-day lecture. I guess he thinks it’s lovemaking. I can see right away though that we’ve got a big problem on our hands.
The fourth day I am at Mother’s place sees Mother gloomier than usual at breakfast when Fred comes loping up to her chair and curls himself around her feet. She is wearing a bathrobe with light feathers around the bottom, and Fred enjoys nibbling at the hem. Mother keeps pulling it away from Fred. He thinks that’s a big game, until finally she says, “This is a Christmas present, Davy! I’m not ready to turn the whole house over to Fred yet!”
I say I’m sorry. Fred likes the feathers. They tickle him, and when she moves them away from him, he doesn’t understand that she isn’t playing with him. He thinks that if he likes feathers, feathers are his friends.
“How do you know what he thinks?” Mother asks. “Dogs don’t think. They just sit around and respond to every temptation they are faced with. I don’t know why Mother ever got you Fred in the first place. We never had dogs when we were growing up.”
“Grandmother loved Fred too.”
“Oh, yeah?” Mother says in a loud voice. Then she stops saying anything at all and speaks softly. “Sure she did, Davy. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I shouldn’t be angry with Fred. I’m not used to him yet.”
She gets up from the table and puts her arm around me.
“Give me a kiss.”
She bends down, and I sort of kiss her. She laughs, friendly, as she can be when she wants to be. She bends down to rub Fred, who has been jumping all over her while she was kissing me.
“Oh, that’s my Fred,” she says, talking goofy. “Fred, Fred, Fred. That’s a good doggie.”
Fred is wagging his tail like some machine. He has decided that Mother is some big love of his life now. If he only knew what she was saying about him two minutes ago! She goes out to the kitchen to get more coffee for herself, and Fred follows her like she’s Cleopatra. I can hear her making a few more goofy sounds at Fred in the kitchen. I’m pleased, I guess. But why did she say those things just a few minutes ago? I can’t figure it out, and maybe I won’t ever. So why bother? I pick up my plate, which is clean because I like scrambled eggs the way my mother makes them. She puts in cheese and onions and a whole lot of stuff so that they don’t taste like eggs at all. The first day she did that, I let Fred lick the plate, but she said that was obscene. When I looked up the word in the dictionary, I decided that I wouldn’t let Fred do that any more. Anyway, I pile a few other plates on my own to take them to the kitchen where Mother and Fred are making all that love, and I look into this mirror hanging on the wall. It’s hung so that I can see out into the kitchen. I’m not l
ooking into the mirror for any special reason, but I just happen to glance into it as I am bringing the dishes to the kitchen. I see Mother’s reflection. She has this bottle of whiskey in her hands. Her eyes are closed, and I can see that she has just had a big swallow of it. I shiver, I guess. It’s dumb, but I don’t want her to know I have seen her in the mirror. Or I don’t want her to know I have seen her at all is more to the point. I can’t look away from the mirror. I want to turn away, but I want to know if she’s going to have another drink out of the bottle. She raises it to her mouth and takes a big gulp. She’s still talking to Fred too, and I get the impression that she’s talking to Fred so friendly so that I will think what I thought, that there is some big love feast going on over the pot of coffee. She puts the bottle down with all the other bottles on her shelf and then pours coffee into her cup. I edge toward the kitchen with my plates.
“Hi,” I say as though we just saw each other for the first time today.
“Hi, darling!” she answers. “Fred and I are going to run away to celebrate the New Year together! What would you think about that? Would you be jealous, sweetheart?” She gives me one of her big hugs.
“Come on,” I say. “I’m going to break your dishes if you hug me.” She smells like she does when she kisses me good-night.
She takes the dishes from my hands and puts them into her metal sink. “Dishes, dishes, dishes,” she says. “What are dishes?”
Fred is sitting up on his hind legs now, begging for who knows what.