I'll Get There. It Better Be Worth the Trip.

by John Donovan

  That afternoon when everyone is piling into the bus to go home, my young buddy, Frankie Menlo, is waiting for me next to the door. He asks me how come Caesar got killed in the play and that was the end of it. He says that on television the play didn’t end that way. Brutus is the villain on television, not Caesar. I tell Menlo about the vote and about how much longer we spent putting the play together than Miss Stuart wanted us to and about how Caesar probably wasn’t such a kind gentleman anyway.

  Altschuler comes along and says he is going to walk home today if I want to come with him. He tells Menlo he can come too. Menlo beams and suddenly thinks Brutus is the greatest hero who ever walked the earth.

  “You mean it? I can walk home with you?” the kid says.

  “Sure,” Altschuler says.

  Menlo runs onto the bus. I can hear him yelling to all his buddies that he’s walking with Altschuler and Ross today, so the bus shouldn’t wait up for him. The driver asks him what he thinks he’s talking about. He tells Menlo that Altschuler and I live about half a mile from school, while he, Menlo, lives about four miles away, somewhere up on Riverside Drive.

  “That’s all right,” Menlo swears. “I don’t mind walking the rest of the way by myself.”

  “You won’t get home until tomorrow morning,” the driver tells him.

  “No, no,” Menlo yells. “Ross and Altschuler said I could walk with them.”

  “You may never get home!” the driver threatens. “Do you know what happens to rich kids walking the streets alone in the middle of New York?”

  Menlo doesn’t ask for the answer but only looks at the driver and walks to the door.

  “I’ll give you guys a rain check on that walk,” he says. “I have to be home early today.”

  The driver thinks Menlo is funny and laughs very loud. Menlo looks at him as though he wants to wrap the steering wheel around his neck and then waves back at Altschuler and me.

  “See you, Altschuler,” he yells as though we are a hundred yards away. “See you, Ross.”

  Altschuler and I walk along without saying anything. When we come to the avenue where Altschuler’s friend has the candy shop, he crosses over to the other side of the street so we won’t pass in front of the shop.

  “Everyone liked the play,” I say. “Or everyone who spoke to me about it.”

  “I’m sorry you had to come out on the short end,” Altschuler says.

  “Oh, that’s OK. I guess Miss Stuart won’t let us do that again anyway. She was pretty mad about it ending when Caesar is killed.”

  Altschuler laughs. “That’s history for you.”

  I laugh too. And then we don’t say anything for another few minutes.

  “Did I tell you that Larry Wilkins died yesterday?” Altschuler says.

  “No,” I answer.

  “He did.”

  “Oh,” I say.

  “I’ll be going to his funeral tomorrow. That’s when it’s going to be. I saw him the day before. He was just asleep all the time.”

  “Oh.”

  We don’t say anything else now but just walk along fast toward home. I don’t know what I’m supposed to tell Altschuler, because I don’t want to slobber all over him on account of Wilkins, whom I never knew. It would be like me trying to tell him about Grandmother and expecting that he would understand the way I thought of her, like her getting Fred for me, for example, and all the other things she did, and I did, which made it possible for Grandmother and me to be friends. Some things are personal. When you talk about them, they lose the private quality which makes them important.

  “Maybe you’d like to meet my dog Fred,” I say when we get to my corner. “He’s great.”

  “Sure,” Altschuler says.

  Altschuler follows me down my street. I ring my doorbell five or six times in short and long beeps and in a variety of sounds and combinations so that old Fred can get excited about me coming home from school. Mother isn’t usually home when I come in, on account of her job. She works uptown somewhere, in advertising. But she’s home a lot too, working there, writing stuff for her job. She’s all the time griping that her job saps her of her creative energies and doesn’t leave her enough time to write the important things she knows she is capable of. I’m muttering something about this to Altschuler, trying to explain why it’s OK for me to play this symphony I’m playing on the doorbell for Fred while I’m digging into my pocket and hunting for my keys. I get the keys and open the front door, but not before giving another long beep on the doorbell for Fred. By this time the crazy old dog is barking away like a gorilla, and when the front door is opened, I can hear him jumping up against the door inside the apartment, waiting for me to come and claim him.

  “Don’t be afraid if he barks at you for a minute or two,” I tell Altschuler. “He is suspicious of everyone he doesn’t know.”

  I open the door, and Fred runs out into the hallway and jumps all over me and squirts a little on the floor. He sees Altschuler standing behind me and doesn’t bark at all. He jumps on him, just as he did on me, and lets another little squirt pop out onto the floor. Altschuler bends down to Fred and rubs him under the muzzle for a second until Fred runs back to me. We go into the apartment with Fred jumping all over both of us, one at a time.

  “My mother isn’t home. If she were, you would have heard her tell me something about the bestiality of dogs by now.”

  We both get a laugh from that one, and I explain to Altschuler about how often Fred got to go out in Massachusetts, and how he sometimes gets out only three times a day here in New York and then for only ten or fifteen minutes, and how difficult it has been for Fred to learn to contain himself over such a long period of time, so if he doesn’t mind, we will take Fred out right away so that he can do his business. Altschuler says fine, so the three of us trot back downstairs. I put Fred’s leash on him, and we take the doggie out for his late afternoon. Fred lifts his leg about four times in the first minute out, and I know how hard it has been for him to hold back, so I tell him how good he has been, and before I know it, Altschuler is telling him the same thing, and we both have another big laugh.

  “How would you feel if you could make only three times a day?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” Altschuler says.

  “So what are we laughing about? This is a serious matter.” We laugh.

  Fred, emptied, now has time to look at Altschuler, and I can see right away that Fred approves of him. He works himself around so that he will walk between us, except when he wants to sniff out something some other dog has left behind. Altschuler says isn’t that unsanitary, and I tell him that maybe it is, but it’s very dog.

  “Right, Fred?” I ask.

  Fred jumps into the gutter—surprise!—and plops. For three weeks he has been plopping in a variety of places, a couple of times right in the middle of the sidewalk. On those occasions I have been very angry with him, and he knew it. In my mind, I had compromised on the small dirt plots around the trees planted on the block, because it seemed dangerous to me to walk him in the streets themselves. Some drivers speed even in city streets, and some of them pass slow cars without bothering to see if there are dangers. I had just about given up on having Fred plop in the street, which is where he should and good dogs do. One of the things Fred does when he is plopping is to look at me with his is-this-OK-boss? look, and because I love him so much I don’t really care what he does so long as no one is hurt or significantly bothered. I always say goofy things like “That’s my wonderful doggie” or “Oh, look at what a good dog Fred is,” and he finishes and we both go on feeling we have done the right thing by each other. But on this occasion, when Fred has plopped in the gutter, something special is called for. So I bend over and rub him and tell him what an amazing creature he is and so forth. Altschuler looks away like I’m crazy, so of course I have to give him the
background. And then he bends over and tells Fred he is wonderful. Fred jumps up and gives Altschuler two licks on the face.

  Fred gets to have a longer walk than usual, and when Altschuler and I bring him back to the house it is getting dark. My mother has come home, and she begins to tell me from the other room how worried she was about me and Fred. She finally stops talking long enough so that I can call to her that I have a guest.

  “Who is it?” she calls.

  “It’s Douglas Altschuler,” I call back. “From school.”

  “Hello, Douglas,” she says.

  Altschuler just stands there.

  “Douglas, hello,” she says.

  “Hello, Mrs. Ross,” he calls out.

  “The first Mrs. Ross,” she yells, then laughs. She comes into the living room from the kitchen. Her hand is held out to Altschuler, and they shake hands. They tell each other how glad they are to meet each other, but Fred wants none of this. He has a few special toys he likes to have me try to get away from him, his hard ball and an old rag of a T-shirt I have knotted up for him which he grabs between his teeth as though I want to get it from him. He likes me to chase him around the apartment, trying to get these things away from him. Sometimes he works it so that I will get them and then toss them into another room where he can run after them and play the whole keep-away-from-Davy game all over again. Fred has grabbed the T-shirt this time and flaunts it before me and Altschuler, wanting one of us to grab it, or try to grab it, from him.

  “I’m so glad Davy has a school chum in the neighborhood,” Mother says. “You can be friends, can’t you?”

  Altschuler and I both mutter something indistinct to Mother and to ourselves.

  “Of course you’ll be friends!” Mother declares, ever the gentle urger. “Ask him to come over to play with you tomorrow, Davy.”

  I know that this is a game. Mother knows that Father has been getting me on Saturdays for the last few weeks, so if Altschuler is here it will make it awkward for everyone.

  “I can’t, Mrs. Ross,” Altschuler says. “I’m doing something else tomorrow.” And I remember about Wilkins, whose seat I occupy in most of my classes.

  “Well, you’ll be good friends, won’t you?” Mother says.

  Altschuler tells me that he thinks Fred is great and it would be fun to get to know him better. His mother won’t let him have a dog because of it being the city and all, and he’d really like to have one someday. Mother says that Altschuler should listen to his mother about everything and that Mrs. Altschuler is obviously a lot smarter than Mrs. Ross. Mother thinks that she has cracked a big joke, and she carries it further when she tells Fred not to worry, that she wouldn’t think of breaking up the love affair of the century.

  Altschuler says that he has to go home now, that he is late. Mother says he must stay for dinner and the three of us will have a card game after.

  “We’ll do anything you want, Douglas,” Mother says.

  Altschuler says that that would be nice some other time, but not tonight. Mother says OK, he can suit himself, but that he has a home away from home any time he wants it.

  Mother the gracious hostess is someone I don’t know so well, so it takes me quite a bit of time to collect my thoughts after Altschuler has gone. A home away from home, she told him, and he hadn’t even been here for a half hour. And what about me? I have only talked with the guy a few times plus the two walks home from school. Plus I admire the way Altschuler is the class jock and plays basketball better than anyone else in the school. And I must say that he was pretty smart to get the whole class to make a hero out of Brutus and a heel out of Caesar. He’s pretty good-looking too, but not as good-looking as the kid who played Mark Antony in the play. He invited Frankie Menlo to walk home with us today. Fred likes him.

  You should choose your own friends though, not have some dopey mother who invites strangers to make our home their home.

  sixteen

  The next part isn’t part of the story, so it is all right to skip over it. It’s about what happened to me inside, after just a few weeks of being away from my real home and being in New York. I dreamed some of these things, and some of them are real. It doesn’t matter which are which.

  The very night Altschuler visited me in the apartment for the first time I dreamed a crazy dream. I was walking along the beach at home, my real home, and I never seemed to stop walking. The beach isn’t that long in real life, so it wasn’t my very own and familiar beach. It was an imaginary beach. But I thought it was the very one I used to take Fred to. At least I thought it was that beach in the beginning of the dream because naturally the little bastard was trotting along beside me. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been at the beach. It was late in the year, and the only time I went there then was to walk Fred. So the dream started out to be a recollection of the good, free walks I used to have with Fred. We started out OK. Maybe I was wishing that our walks now didn’t have to be so short and always in the same places.

  But after a while, as the beach got longer and longer and less the beach I knew but some other beach, the beach, the one that rims the beautiful ocean that people think about, the one without seaweed and jellyfish, poor Fred wasn’t in the picture any more. I was. Just me. And the great expanse of sand and sea. And me running along that beach sometimes throwing myself in the sand and flinging it up in the air and sometimes splashing in the water that tickled my feet. I took off my clothes in the dream and then ran along the beach. I ran along the very rim of the tide, and it became windy and the sand blew all over me. I threw myself on the beach because the sand began to sting me as it blew against my body. Then I didn’t know where I had left my clothes. I couldn’t stand now because the wind was fierce. When I could stand up, the stinging was violent. How would I get my clothes? And what if I couldn’t? Would I have to go back without them? Back where? I didn’t know. I only knew that I didn’t have what I needed to go on, to do anything. There was just me, and all I could do was lie there in the sand and try to bury myself against the fury of the wind and the awful stinging when I tried to get up.

  I think the wind stopped. Or maybe I stopped it with some miracle which dreams make me think I have a supply of. Whatever the reason, I did get up, and I did walk back, and Fred did trot into the picture I was dreaming about, and the beach did get smaller, and I must have found my clothes, and it all came out OK in the end.

  Except that in the morning I began to think. It was a Saturday morning, and the rule is that Mother and I play dead until it is inevitable that one of us gets up. That usually happens around the middle of the morning, though Fred and I have been awake for a few hours, just messing around in my room. And I think of all the reasons for my being here. I feel guilty as hell that I haven’t thought of Grandmother for a long time. She’s the only person I may ever know I didn’t have to put on some big act around. She’s the only person I could be myself with. My mother and my father don’t know me yet. But I think of them more than of Grandmother, who will be the most important person in my life forever. And they aren’t worth my not thinking of Grandmother. I love them and all that. They are trying to feel so goddamned responsible that they should be encouraged, but it’s Grandmother who matters to me. And she is dead. And I’m forgetting her. Like a bastard. And I think of the beach in my dream and how I kept running farther and farther along it so that Fred and everything I knew and loved faded away. There was only me and that terrible wind and the stinging until I stopped it, which must have meant that I could go back to where I understood how everything fit together. Except I can’t. She is dead. It has been many, many weeks now. There has been great cold, and snow, and she is back there in Massachusetts in that terrible box they put her in, in the ground. She is there, and it makes no sense that Grandmother and Fred and I are not sniffing around each other in our own ways. I cannot get buried in all this stuff happening to me now. The new stuff doesn’t matter. As
long as I remember.

  It’s dumb thoughts like these which occupy me while I try to stay in my room on Saturday morning. There is a limit though, and Fred reaches it when he gives me his special don’t-blame-me-if-I-make-here look.

  seventeen

  For the next couple of weeks the most important thing to happen to me is that Altschuler and I get to be buddies, for a while anyway. He kept telling me that my mother was a real gas but also that he wasn’t being friendly to me because Mother kept telling both of us that it was nice we were such friends. If the truth is to be known, we got to be buddies in spite of Mother rather than because of her. Altschuler, a native New Yorker, knew all kinds of places, and he took me to a lot of them.

  Mother’s house is right across the street from an Episcopal seminary. Mother never went inside the seminary. She likes it because it is pretty to look at. Whenever anyone came to visit her for the first time, she made a big thing out of the view she had from her living room, and from my bedroom too at the front of the house, looking out across a little park and into a dark chapel. She never thought of going over to the seminary, but Altschuler took me there a lot just to schmooze around. Some kid whose father got his call to be a minister late in life was a buddy of Altschuler’s, and that kid had some buddies, so we messed around in the little park a lot. One of the seminary kids had a football, and we played touch a few afternoons. They wouldn’t let me bring Fred. They said it was because they didn’t want a lot of dogs to make all over the place. I planned in my mind to work out something for Fred later. Just to run around on some grass would make Fred happy. Besides, I had already seen about eighty wild cats jumping through their fence, and I’ll bet they make all over the place when no one is looking.