by John Donovan
eighteen
The next day when I go out with my father and Stephanie, I am a regular gloomy Gus. My father doesn’t pay any attention to me, but Stephanie can tell right away that I’m not the usual trying-to-please me. I already mentioned that Stephanie is schmaltzy. She has a cool outside, but if everything isn’t hunky-dory she knows it in two minutes, and I can see her trying to find out what’s wrong. I try to be jolly as hell and it’s fake, and Stephanie knows it, so she works even harder, which makes me gloomier, and so forth. You get the picture. On some days it is not satisfactory to deal with people.
Today we go to a large department store uptown on the East Side in a part of New York people who live around Mother call fancy. Stephanie wants to look at some enameled pots she read about in The New York Times, and my father wants to get out of the store as fast as he can. He designs things like dinner knives, letterheads, lighting fixtures, doorknobs—all that kind of stuff. He is always talking about the low level of the public’s taste and says that particular store goes out of its way to find ugly. Stephanie tells him he is mad because he can never find anything there he designed. He says of course he’s mad for that reason and isn’t that reason enough. It’s not serious, the way my father and Stephanie talk. If I quoted them word for word, it would sound like an argument. It’s not that at all. It’s more like a joke where they both tell the truth to each other but without meanness. I wonder if my mother and my father were ever this way. Probably not. They could have been, I suppose. Would Father be a totally different person with Stephanie? Why does my father like Stephanie as a friend and not like my mother at all? I wonder whose son my father thinks I am. His? Mother’s? His and Mother’s? I don’t usually give much thought to stuff like this, but because of the strange things on the day before with both Altschuler and Mother I feel sorry for myself, I guess. Especially since Father didn’t say anything about bringing along Fred when he picked me up. And Fred knew right away when he saw Father that there was a real possibility that a lot of free food from Stephanie might be in the offing and that the alternative was to stay home with Mother, who loved him one minute and said some crazy things to him in the next.
The fact is that it’s not Mother I’m thinking about so much that makes me gloomy. I’m used to her. Lady Mercury. It’s Altschuler, and the way he ran away from me yesterday just because of today. What a twirp!
“I think I won’t stay with you for dinner tonight if that’s OK,” I say.
Stephanie practically falls through the floor. My father pretends that I said it looks like rain until I pursue the subject.
“You don’t care, do you,” I say, “about my not coming to dinner?”
“Of course we do, Davy,” Stephanie says. “We care very much.”
“Stop it, dear,” my father says to Stephanie. Then to me, “You don’t feel very well, kid? Is that it?”
Kid? What’s this kid stuff? I think to myself. I don’t always say what I want to say. Kid! It’s like a movie, my father calling me kid as though I am an object, as though he wouldn’t dream of being close to me or telling me things which are essentially private things, like the time a few weeks ago he told me about the Jewish cemetery and how Stephanie is Jewish. That was a personal and private thing for him to tell me. I know from the fact that I remember what he said that I was impressed with his having said anything to me about something like Stephanie being Jewish. Who the hell cares what anyone is? But if you talk about that stuff, it must be because it is important to you, and personal, or private, or whatever the hell you want to call it. I have so many thoughts about a lot of stuff lately. I used to have them before too, but with Grandmother there was a way to talk about something without actually coming out and saying let’s talk about—well—why Mother doesn’t come to see me very much. When I thought about this, and I thought about it a lot, it was possible to talk about how fast people could get around today, and Grandmother would say that the very rapidity which brings people together parts them as rapidly and things like that, which was our way of saying that even if Mother came to see me—and her—it didn’t matter because she would disappear in two shakes anyway. So they could all stay away for all we cared. For all I cared. Who needs a lot of people who see you because they think they have to? Not me, that’s for sure. I’d rather spend my time with Fred. There’s a bastard who wants to be around me twenty-four hours a day. He wants me.
“I feel fine,” I answer my father. “There’s a lot of stuff I want to do at home, that’s all.”
Stephanie is fidgeting so much that I say they should forget what I said and that I want to have dinner with them. They stumble over each other to say I should do what I feel like doing. They each say that about four times.
“I want to be left alone!” I say. And I say it loud. We are still in the store, but we have moved from the enameled pots to the place where they have louvred blinds for windows. A lot of people turn to look at me. My father and Stephanie look as though I had tossed some enameled pots at them. I am surprised. I have raised my voice in a public place and in front of a lot of people, and to adults.
“I’m sorry,” I say. “I didn’t mean it to sound that way.”
That’s all right, that’s all right, they both tell me. Maybe I should tell them honestly what I feel. Since they see me so infrequently, it’s more important for all of us to be straightforward than to be polite. The people who sell louvred blinds are looking at us with curiosity now. We have attracted a lot of attention from Saturday shoppers, so we leave the store. It’s my fault. I know it is. I have upset the day, and that is dumb, and my father and Stephanie don’t have anything to do with why I have ruined everything for them. And that makes me unhappy. They don’t really have anything to do with me, do they? We see each other because we see each other. If I am teed off at something and it’s my father and Stephanie I’m with, it’s Father and Stephanie I am going to seem to be teed off at.
“Your father wouldn’t take you to dinner?” Mother exclaims when I come home at six o’clock.
“Sure. They wanted to take me to dinner,” I answer. “I didn’t feel like it. That’s all.”
Mother is sloshed, it being a ritual with her that on Saturdays she can get sloshed earlier in the day than during the week. She knows that Father is supposed to keep me until late in the evening, and I have figured she does some serious gargling with Listerine around nine thirty every Saturday night so that when I arrive and Father takes me up to Mother’s apartment, Mother will be ready with the I’m-a-nun act she puts on for Father whenever she has time to prepare it. She wasn’t ready for me to come home at six, and not ready to see Father at all. Father understands this right away and doesn’t linger to hear Mother’s inevitable invitation to him to have a drink.
“Good luck, kid,” he says to me. In a few hours I have grown to dislike the word kid, so I don’t answer Father, or say good night to him either. He can really be a bastard when he’s not even half-thinking about it. What a team they must have been, my mother and my father.
“If they didn’t take you to dinner, you must be hungry. I’ll rustle up something fabulous,” Mother says in her dumb, sloshed tones.
“I’m not hungry, Mother.”
“Of course you are.”
“I’m not. Really.”
“If your father and Stephanie didn’t take you to dinner, you’re hungry.”
“No. I’m not.”
“They didn’t feed you, Davy. You’ve got to be hungry, sweetheart. I don’t understand why they didn’t take you to dinner, but that’s beside the point. Davy’s hungry. Stingy Daddy wouldn’t spring for dinner. That’s stingy Daddy for you. Mother’s got a good idea. Mother and Davy will get all dolled up and go out to a posh restaurant and charge it to Daddy. Would you love that, sweetheart?”
“No.”
“That’s what I think we’ll do. I’ll get all dolled up. M
other will be the doll, and you’ll be a regular wolf going out with an older woman. Wouldn’t that be fun, sweetheart?” Mother is laughing away as though she has said the funniest thing in the world.
“I’m going to take Fred out,” I say.
“They won’t serve him in the restaurants I go to,” says my mother the comic.
“I mean for a walk,” I say.
“Go ahead. You can always get away from me, can’t you, Davy?”
I tell her that I don’t know what she’s talking about, and she says I damn well do, and I tell her again that I don’t, and she says I can run away with my dog all I want to but that when I come home I’ll be coming home to Mother, and I’d better not forget that because it’s Mother’s life which is being wasted …
“You understand that, don’t you, Davy? My life is being given over to someone else. I’m giving up everything, just as I always have. Your father. Now you.”
I’m used to Mother sloshed, and I keep hearing about her lost life in one form or another, but she doesn’t usually accuse me personally of being the source of her problem with life and all that. The closest she gets is Fred. It’s Fred who is using up her life.
I take out Fred. It’s a long walk. When I come home, it’s seven thirty.
“Mother,” I call when I get in. She doesn’t answer. “Mother,” I say again. I want to tell her that I’m sorry she is wasting her life. She isn’t in the living room: “Mother!” I say once more. Her bedroom door is closed. I knock on it and go in. Mother is lying on her bed. She is dolled up. She is asleep too. She snores. Fred jumps at the side of the bed.
“No, Fred,” I say. “Mother’s tired. She’s wasting her life for us, Fred. Right?”
I think Fred says “wrong,” except that I know Fred doesn’t speak English. Maybe he speaks German. Right? Who knows? Fred, I guess. And Germans.
nineteen
Altschuler doesn’t speak to me very much the next week, and he doesn’t suggest that we walk home after school. Miss Stuart, our English teacher, gets us talking together again. She thinks it would be a good idea if we put on our own version of Androcles and the Lion. Altschuler gets himself elected to play Androcles. He is still basking in his triumph from Julius Caesar, so whatever part he wants is his. Malcolm the slow learner seems a likely lion, but I decide that I want to be the lion. In the few weeks I had been in school I had learned who the three or four guys were besides Altschuler who had a following among the rest of us. I get to be the lion. I ask Malcolm to coach me on roaring, so there are no hard feelings. There doesn’t have to be as much discussion about this play as there was about Julius Caesar. It is a simple story in which the slave Androcles does a good turn for the lion when he takes a thorn from his paw and the lion, in turn, remembers the kindly Androcles in the arena when the lion is about to eat him up. The important scenes are when the thorn is removed and when the lion recognizes Androcles. There’s also a lot of philosophical junk in the play, but you don’t have to pay attention to that.
“The play shows what a noble person Androcles is,” Altschuler tells the class, “and how he gains the lion’s eternal gratitude for all the noble things he does.”
I tell everyone, “The play is about how seemingly dumb beasts have memories and the power of understanding. The lion recalls Androcles’ acts. That shows how intelligent a lion can be. And how filled with gratitude.”
“It shows that Androcles has been such a magnificent person that even a lowly lion appreciates him,” Altschuler says.
“Don’t think animals are so dumb,” I tell the class. “I have a dog, a dachshund, and my dog is smart and truly understanding. Not just because he understands all these thousands of words I am sure he knows the meaning of, but because he knows people and can predict what they will do.”
“It is men, not animals, who should attract our attention,” Altschuler says, and he says it fairly loud so that even Malcolm will get what he is trying to say.
“Sure,” I say, just as loud as Altschuler. “Men are great. But sometimes animals aren’t as dumb as men think they are.”
“Is that right?” says Altschuler.
“Yes, that’s right,” I answer.
“What makes you think that’s the case?”
“Because I know it’s the case.”
“What? Because you have one dumb dog you think you know how a lion is supposed to think?”
“Why not? Besides, he’s not dumb.”
“Not as dumb as you.”
Malcolm thinks that Altschuler is a hit playwright by this time and just about falls out of his seat laughing at Altschuler and me. Miss Stuart says she thinks we have gotten off the track and if we are going to put on our version of the play we should stop yelling at each other and start preparing the script. Since most of the guys don’t have much to do in the play beyond being a gladiator or a wild animal, Altschuler and I have a script together in a couple of days by just working in the classroom, and we are ready to put on the play less than a week after Miss Stuart thought up the whole project. The school likes it. A lot of guys tell me they liked the way I licked my paw and cried like I was in pain, and a lot of them tell Altschuler that he was pretty funny when he came to the rescue and pulled the thorn out of my paw and again when he thought it was curtains for him. It’s really everyone telling Altschuler and me how great we are. So that afternoon Altschuler says that maybe we should walk home together.
“Sure,” I say.
“I’ll meet you at the bus.”
“Let’s go to Mrs. Greene’s candy store on the way home.”
Altschuler looks at me for a minute.
“OK,” he says, but without conviction.
We do meet, and we do go to the candy store, and Mrs. Greene tells him that he’s a bad boy not to come to see her, and she kisses him, and she cries a little bit about Larry Wilkins, and she gives us some chocolate-covered marshmallows because she just made them. Altschuler promises he won’t be a stranger, and she gives me a hug and tells me that I’m a good boy to bring Dougie back to her.
“She’s goofy,” Altschuler says after we leave.
“Sure,” I agree. Neither of us believes it. We both like her.
We walk along for several blocks, talking about how great we both were in the play and maybe we should become actors because we both know how much money you can make if you are a successful actor.
“And you don’t have to work too much either,” Altschuler says. “I could make one movie a year and make enough money so I could get to the Olympics with no sweat at all.”
I ask Altschuler to come to see Fred, and he says that would be fine. Mother is not at home, so dopey Fred has had a long day of snoozing and is in a state of ecstasy over our arrival. Altschuler and I take Fred out for a walk.
“I’m sorry about last week,” he says.
“What do you mean?”
“About not being friendly.”
“That’s OK.”
“The play makes up for it. We worked that out real well.”
“Yes,” I say.
“Together.”
“Sure.”
We are getting slurpy, we both realize. When Fred plops, it gives us something to look at rather than each other.
“That’s a good doggie,” I say to Fred.
“Good Fred,” Altschuler says. “He smiled at me.”
“Dogs don’t smile.”
“Fred can,” Altschuler insists. “He was pleased that I complimented him on his dump.”
“Maybe Fred can. He’s unusual.” I bend down to Fred. “Smile, nut.” Fred licks my face. “That’s not smiling.”
“He does it only for me.”
“Some people read human responses into animal behavior. My mother keeps telling me that.”
“Your mothe
r doesn’t know what she is talking about.”
“That’s true,” I say.
We go back to our house. Altschuler and I chase Fred around the apartment. Fred loves to duck under chairs and dart out from under them to see if we can catch him in a hurry. He wants to be caught, but he wants to be chased too. He has his favorite rag, and he uses that as though it is a prized object he knows I want from him. When he rests under a couch or a low chair, he is always looking to see in which direction he will be able to move to escape the feet pursuing him. It is fun to fall on the floor, down to his eye level, and threaten Fred with extinction unless he gives up the rag. Fred loves that.
I fall on the floor at one end of a couch in Mother’s living room. Altschuler falls to the floor, facing me. We are both threatening Fred, who is under the couch, with terrible consequences unless he gives up his rag. Fred is delighted. His eyes dart from Altschuler to me and back again, twenty times in less than a minute. Heaven! He is trapped, ready to be taken, rag and all. Both Altschuler and I reach out for Fred’s rag and—zoom!—Fred has tricked us. He snatches it back and makes his way along the wall away from us for his getaway.