by John Donovan
“Foiled!” Altschuler yells.
“By the smartest dog in Christendom!” I shout.
We laugh. I would have said that all three of us laughed except that Fred is at the opposite end of the room, far from us. Altschuler and I are lying on the floor, our arms still stretched out for Fred’s rag. We laugh louder and louder. Fred has proved himself the smartest, the most uncapturable dog in the world. He is an animal! And what are we? Mere men.
Mine and Altschuler’s laughing dies down, but we stay on the floor. I look at Altschuler, and we smile, sort of. And I’m not quite sure what happens now. I think we both intend to get up and chase after Fred, but there we are, lying on the floor, Fred peering at us from across the room, us half peering at Fred and wanting to chase after him again, but also not wanting to get up at all. I close my eyes. I feel unusual. Lying there. Close to Altschuler. I don’t want to get up. I want to stay lying there. I feel a slight shiver and shake from it. Not cold though. Unusual. So I open my eyes. Altschuler is still lying there too. He looks at me peculiarly, and I’m sure I look at him the same way. Suddenly Fred jumps in between us. First he licks my face, then Altschuler’s, and back and forth between us. I think that this unusual feeling I have will end, but in a minute the three of us are lying there, our heads together. I guess I kiss Altschuler and he kisses me. It isn’t like that dumb kiss I gave Mary Lou Gerrity in Massachusetts before I left. It just happens. And when it stops we sit up and turn away from each other. Fred has trotted off, maybe tired of both of us by now.
“Boy,” I say. “What was that all about?”
“I don’t know,” Altschuler answers.
We get up, and we avoid looking at each other. When our eyes meet, we laugh, but not like before.
Fred comes back and we horse around with him for ten minutes. Altschuler says he has to go home. I tell him he doesn’t have to go home because of what happened on the floor. He says he knows that, and he also says that we were pretty great in the play.
“We’re just a couple of great kids,” I say.
“We sure are,” Altschuler says. Then he sort of lunges toward me with his fists up like a boxer. We mess around for a few seconds, pretending we are two bantamweight tough guys. I mean very tough. I mean a couple of guys like Altschuler and me don’t have to worry about being queer or anything like that. Hell, no.
twenty
The next day both Altschuler and I have to run for the school bus in the morning, so there isn’t time to say more than hello until we are on the bus, and then nutty little Frankie Menlo insists that I sit with him and tell him about how I learned to be such a good lion.
“I went to a lot of zoos,” I say.
“What ones?”
“Zoos all over the place. Haven’t you ever been to a zoo?”
“Sure. But which zoos did you go to to learn lion behavior?”
“Actually I didn’t go to any zoos,” I tell him truthfully. “I remembered lion behavior from going to movies.”
“Which ones?”
“How do I know which ones! Any movie I ever saw with lions in it. I remembered those, and that’s how I knew how to be a lion in the play.”
“Did you see Born Free?” Menlo asks.
“Yes,” I say.
“Is that the movie which taught you most about lion behavior?”
“I don’t know. Maybe.”
“It’s my favorite movie of all time. That’s why I asked you if that’s the one you learned from.”
“Sure. I guess I did.”
“That is my seventh movie.”
“What about the ones on television?”
“They don’t count.”
Menlo wants to know which parts of Born Free I liked the best, and I tell him I guess it’s the end when Elsa comes back to show off her cubs. Menlo likes that part too, but his favorite part is Elsa riding on top of the wagon. We both like when Elsa is a cub herself, running around knocking stuff over and having a hell of a time.
“I’d like to own a lion,” Menlo says.
I tell Menlo that he probably never will, not in New York anyway. He says that he will probably go to Africa to live. And then I tell him the truth about how I learned to be a lion.
“My dog taught me,” I say.
“Your dog! What kind of lion can a dog teach you to be?”
“He taught me animal behavior.”
“Animals aren’t all alike.”
“Enough alike.”
Menlo looks dubious, but we are at school now, and it is enough that Menlo has had a talk with me on the bus to keep him in the power position I know he now has in the third grade.
Altschuler shoots off the bus in a hurry. There’s no chance to talk during the day. He isn’t at the bus after school. I walk home alone. It’s Friday. I have to admit to myself that I want to talk to Altschuler about yesterday and all the goofy business on the floor. And then I don’t want to talk to him either. Just as well it is Friday, and the weekend.
My father calls on Friday night to tell me Stephanie has a terrible cold, so maybe we should wait until Sunday to get together, if that’s all right with me. I tell him to forget this weekend, and he tells me that he won’t forget it at all, and I tell him that I don’t mean what I said to sound unfriendly, that I understand about Stephanie’s cold, and there’s nothing wrong with missing one weekend every now and then. It’s really OK, I keep telling him. And he keeps saying that it’s awful. Then he tells me that with spring coming on he is going to take me and Stephanie and Fred to Montauk for a nice long weekend at the beach, and I’ll love it there, that it is wild and desolate and Fred will be able to run and be as close to heaven as any New York dog can be. He assures me that the beach will be covered with smelly fish, just like at home in Massachusetts except that New York fish will be twice as big and ten times as smelly as those at home, and that maybe in another year or so he and Stephanie will even buy a house on the beach at Montauk and Fred and I can come out every weekend. This sounds pretty great, I must say, so at the end of the telephone conversation after I have told him about my lion performance and Stephanie has got on the phone to insist that I roar for her, and I do, and she roars back (she tries to make me feel as though I’m an over-achiever all the time), I’m laughing a lot.
“What did your father want?” Mother asks.
“Stephanie has a cold. I’m not going to see them tomorrow.”
“Not see them! I’ve made plans, Davy! You see them every Saturday.”
“It’s Stephanie’s cold. She feels lousy.”
“So she feels lousy! What’s that got to do with it?”
“Don’t bother about me. I’m all right.”
“What kind of mother do you think I am? Of course I’ll bother about you. Your father may take his responsibilities lightly, but I don’t. I wouldn’t dream of leaving you alone for the whole day and the evening.”
“It’s all right, Mother.”
“Who says?”
“I don’t care, Mother.”
“I do!”
Then she gets started on one of her solos, all about my grandfather and how he always teased her when she was a little girl and made fun of her every time she got a new dress, how my Uncle Jess used to tell her she was the world’s most human dog, and about my father and all the years and talent she wasted with him and her family, which she mentions as though it’s someone other than me, some third person entirely, some enormous burden she has carried day after day for the last four hundred and forty years. I know the end of these solos: a trip to the kitchen and an even more elaborate encore. In an hour or so Mother gets back to the problem though.
“What will I do with you tomorrow?”
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Of course I will, my precious,” Mother says, giving m
e one of her warm hugs. She runs her hand through my hair and tosses it around. She can be a real lovable kid when she wants to be. “Mother worries about Davy because she loves him dearly,” she says, her family suddenly no longer a burden but the thing that keeps her going. She’s a hot-and-cold girl, there’s no denying that.
I whip up some scrambled eggs, and Mother talks on into the evening of the good times we are having together. Fred eats Mother’s eggs, and Mother thinks that Fred is the cutest animal in the world. I keep urging Mother to leave us alone tomorrow.
“All right, angel,” she acquiesces. “Why don’t you call your boy friend Douglas and invite him for the day?”
“No,” I say.
“Why not? He’s a nice boy. It isn’t far, and you could have a lot of fun together. Call him up.”
“No.”
“You see him all the time. Why wouldn’t you call him up and invite him over for the day?”
“He’s busy.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“That’s ridiculous. Did he tell you he was busy tomorrow?”
“He’s busy every Saturday.”
“Call him up, Davy. I won’t leave you here alone.”
“I don’t want to.”
“Then I’m going to call his mother myself.”
I tell Mother not to, but she says that she knows what is best for me, and if I want to ruin her day that’s entirely up to me. She will not go out to enjoy herself, even though this is one of the few occasions since I have come to live here that she has planned a whole day with friends for the express purpose of self-indulgence, unless someone is here with me. I tell her that I’ll call someone else from school, and she asks me who, and I tell her about Malcolm, and she wants to know where he lives, and it is on Park Avenue somewhere in the Seventies, which is like another country. I even tell her about little Frankie Menlo, who must live nearer than Malcolm because we ride the same bus. When she hears how old he is, she decides I’m some kind of loon and starts to leaf through the front of the Manhattan phone directory. Mother calls Mrs. Altschuler and tells her who she is and invites Altschuler to spend the day with me. Mrs. Altschuler tells Mother that she has been hearing all about me and the lovely apartment we live in and what great friends Altschuler and I have become in a few short weeks. She accepts Mother’s invitation for Altschuler without even asking him, so I can imagine how happy he is. Mother is pleased with herself and tells Mrs. Altschuler that it would be nice if the two mothers got together sometime.
“And Mr. Altschuler too, of course,” Mother adds. There is a long wait while Mrs. Altschuler explains that Mr. Altschuler lives in Old Greenwich, Connecticut, with his present wife and their three children. I can tell right away that the conversation may go on for hours, as Mother starts to explain about Father’s present wife too, and about how she, Mother, went without so many things while he was finishing his studies at Parsons School of Design, and how he then worked for years without contributing anything substantial to the family except when he started to make money and began to contribute his absence. The whole damn story pours out. The only thing stopping Mother from describing some of the grimmer details is that she has to stop every now and then to listen to the same story from Mrs. Altschuler. I take Fred out for his finals. When I come back, Mother tells me that she has just hung up, that Douglas is a wonderful boy, that Mrs. Altschuler thinks I’m a wonderful boy, and that Douglas and I are going to have a wonderful day together. He is going to stay over Saturday night, Mother tells me.
twenty-one
My mother does not come home until very late on Saturday, so she is still snoozing when Altschuler leaves on Sunday morning. It is the strangest, weirdest good-bye I ever had to say to anybody—somebody I saw every day last week, including Saturday, and will see every day this week. We horse around over some fried eggs I make and talk about Miss Stuart and stuff like that, but I have a new way of looking at Altschuler because of what we did together last night. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not ashamed. There was nothing wrong about it, I keep telling myself. We got to talking about all the girls we had made out with. I told him about Mary Lou Gerrity and how I am more or less engaged to her, and that I haven’t made out in New York because of being faithful to her. He told me about some girl named Enid Gerber he made out with at summer camp last year, and they are engaged too. That’s how it happened.
“So I guess I’ll see you on the bus tomorrow,” Altschuler says.
“Sure,” I say.
“What are you going to do this afternoon?”
“I usually hang around with my mother on Sunday,” I say, “if she ever wakes up. She takes me to a movie or something like that.”
“Oh, sure.”
“When do you see your father?” I ask.
“I talk to him a lot on the telephone. Connecticut’s a real drag.”
“Oh, sure.”
He is gone now, so there’s nothing else to do except take out Fred and buy The New York Times when I see that Mother did not bring it home with her last night. I don’t like to do that on Sunday because the paper is so fat. It’s hard to manage both Fred and that big newspaper at the same time. I do all the things I usually do, and I even anticipate Mother’s waking up and make coffee for her. You could call me a regular kitchen hand. But today it is not like before. I mean I feel weird. I want to call up that bastard Altschuler and have a good long chat with him. What about? I don’t know. Do you have to have a reason? So I call him.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
He tells me that he is eating more fried eggs because when his mother heard that I made breakfast and the supper last night, she got worried. We both think that is pretty funny, and I say something to show how smart I am, about maybe he will end up crowing like a rooster, especially if they have chicken for dinner today, which I know they will because Altschuler already told me that his mother makes a chicken every Sunday. It’s real dumb conversations like ours which give teenagers such a bad reputation for using the telephone.
“Well, OK,” I say. “I just thought I’d call you up.”
“What are you doing later?” Altschuler asks.
“I don’t know. My mother isn’t awake yet.” Altschuler has the same problem I have, only in reverse. His mother never sleeps. He told me that if she gets three hours’ sleep a night she thinks she’s a regular Rip Van Winkle and wants to know what happened while she was out.
“I’ll see you tomorrow then,” Altschuler says.
“On the bus.” I hang up.
And then I moon around. Today I don’t care about The New York Times, not even the travel section, which I usually read first, or the business section, which I read because the biographies of smart businessmen are interesting and I think that maybe someday I’ll read one about my father and how clever he is as a designer and how he got to be rich because everyone had to start using his doorknobs, or some knives of his, or something. I am glad Mother isn’t awake. It is pleasant to be alone here with Fred, the only living creature I can speak to about Altschuler.
When my mother does wake up, I can tell right away that she won’t be interested in a movie, so I give coffee to her and walk away without more than three or four words.
“What’s the matter with you today?” Mother asks.
“Nothing.”
“Why so quiet?” she says.
“I thought you wanted it that way.”
“Where’s Douglas?”
“He left after breakfast.”
Mother makes a motion to silence me. She tells me about the magic power of sleep. She goes back to her room and closes the door. She sleeps the day away. I am alone with Fred. I decide not to call Altschuler again. Besides, isn’t it his turn to call me?
There’s nothing wrong with Altschuler and me, is there? I
know it’s not like making out with a girl. It’s just something that happened. It’s not dirty, or anything like that. It’s all right, isn’t it?
twenty-two
Altschuler and I see each other in school every day of the next week. We are friendly. As captain, he always chooses me to start on his side in the basketball games we play every day during the sports hour. I’m not as well-coordinated as Altschuler, and I don’t move as fast as a lot of other guys, but I usually lob in a basket when I get the basketball. I just stand there and toss them in. I don’t know why I should be so good at this, since I’m not a jock. I’m strictly average when it comes to sports except for swimming, when I’m on my own, and in track meets, where there may be a team but it’s really everyone on his own. I’ve already told about what a great track star I was back home.
We don’t have much to say to each other until Friday, when I run after Altschuler after school.
“Let’s walk home,” I say.
“No.”
“Are you going someplace?”
“I want to get home early.”
“We get there almost as fast walking as on the bus.”
“All right.”
We walk along together, and Altschuler is going so fast that I’m glad I am a track star.
“Hey, wait up,” I say. “I wanted to talk with you. That’s why I wanted to walk home with you.”
“Sure,” he says. He slows down. “I’m sorry.”
Then I tell him there’s no reason we shouldn’t be friends like before. Does he agree with that? He says he does, but he doesn’t sound convincing. I ask him if he thinks what we did last Saturday was wrong, and he says he doesn’t know, that he hasn’t thought about it much. I tell him that I thought about it all week.
We walk along without saying anything for five minutes.
“OK,” Altschuler finally says. “I thought about it a lot.”