by Trevanian
“Oh, I see. Well...I know what! You just put the nickel in your pocket.” She pushed the nickel over to me.
“I don’t want it.” I pushed it back to her.
“No, you keep it until I think of something you can do for me.” She pushed the nickel back to me.
I didn’t touch it.
She held out the plate of cookies to me, and I lowered my head and stared at the table top. Finally she put one on my plate. I didn’t look at it.
“Would you like to wash up, John-Luke?” she asked.
“Only my mother calls me that.”
“What?”
“Only my mother calls me Jean-Luc!”
“Oh...I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to...” She looked at me closely. “Would you like to wash up? You look a little...dusty.” She smiled sweetly.
I touched my forehead and felt the grit of the sand through which I had crawled all the way from Sidi-bel-Abbs to...Sidi-bel-Abbs. Having someone who wasn’t my mother tell me my face was dirty was humiliating: something left over from the time two young, syrup-voiced social workers swooped down on our apartment to see if my mother was taking proper care of us. They asked Anne-Marie if any men had been sleeping at our house, and one of them made me stand in front of her while she checked my hair for nits. I was so outraged that I pulled my head away from her and told her to go to hell, and the two do-gooders made little popping sounds of surprise and indignation and said they’d never seen such a badly brought up child. After they left, Mother told me that I had to be polite to social workers or they’d write up a bad report, and the three of us would have to run away to avoid their taking us kids away from her. Oh sure! It was all right for her to lose her temper and give social workers hell, and get her way by ranting and raving, but I couldn’t do it. Was that it?
I got up and went over to the McGivneys’ kitchen sink. In the little mirror over it, I could see that my dirty face was streaked with rivulets of sweat. I was embarrassed, so I twisted the faucet on angrily, and the water came squirting out of a little flexible thing at the end of the spigot and splashed onto my pants, making it look as though I had pissed myself, then I was really embarrassed. To cover my discomfiture I quickly soaped up my hands and scrubbed my face hard, then I splashed water into my face, but I couldn’t find anything to wipe it on, so I just stood there at the sink, dripping, the soap stinging my eyes, like some helpless thing. Like her husband, for crying out loud!
I felt her press a towel into my hand. I scrubbed my face dry and sat back in my chair, hard, very angry.
“You’re not going to eat your cookie, John-Luke?”
“I don’t want it.”
“Suit yourself. But they’re sugar cookies. Your favorites.”
“Oatmeal cookies are my favorites. The kind my mother makes.”
“...Oh.” There was hurt in her voice. “I just thought you might be hungry.”
“My mother feeds us real well.”
“I didn’t mean to suggest— I’m sure she does.”
Actually, I was still thirsty enough to down that milk in two glugs, but I sat there in silence, frowning down at the embroidered tablecloth I supposed she had put on just for me.
She made a little sound in the back of her throat, then she said, “Poor boy. You’re unhappy, aren’t you.”
“No. I’m just...awful busy.” I meant, of course, with my games, trying to get my fill of fun before school started and I became two digits old and had to start looking for work and war broke out all over the world, but she took it a different way.
“Yes, I was talking to Mr Kane, and he told me how you do odd jobs to help your mother out. Shining shoes and all. She must be very proud to have a good boy like you.”
I said nothing.
“I hope you don’t mind if I ask, but...” She paused a second for permission, but then pressed on anyway. “Your father, John-Luke. Is he dead?”
I don’t know what made me say it. A desire to shock her, I guess. “No, he’s not dead. He’s in prison.” Not until many years later did I discover that I had unknowingly told her the truth.
She drew a quick breath. “Oh! Oh, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry, I was just—oh, that’s too bad. You poor boy.” She reached towards me, but I twisted away.
“No, we’re proud of him! They put him in prison because he’s a spy! They’re going to hang him next month, but he doesn’t care. He only regrets that he has but one life to give for his country!”
“Wh...what?”
“I’m going home!”
I started to rise, but before I could move, she stood up and hugged me, saying, “No, please don’t go!”
I turned my head aside, so as not to have my nose buried in her bosom.
“You poor, poor boy. You’ve had such a lot of troubles and worries in your young life, haven’t you? No wonder you’re all worked up. But I know what will calm you and make you feel better.” She opened a drawer and took out the brush that had white hairs trailing from the bristles, her crazy husband’s hair, and she started towards me. I jumped up, snatched the door open, and plunged clattering down the stairs, the stair rail squeaking through my gripping hand.
On the first of September, the radio told us that Hitler had invaded Poland, whose courageous but useless cavalry melted before the German Blitzkrieg. Two days later, Great Britain and France declared war on Germany. It had begun, this new war, this Second World War.
By the Labor Day weekend that signaled the beginning of school, I had squeezed the last drops of adventure and danger out of that summer’s game of single-handedly defending Pearl Street and, by extension, the world from Nazi invasion. As a sort of farewell tour, I was mopping up the last of the Storm Troopers (I had finally learned their real name) at the end of our back alley, where I had not been since the day I fled down Mrs McGivney’s stairs to avoid the touch of that repulsive hair brush, the squeaking handrail rubbing the skin off the web between my thumb and forefinger and leaving a scab that took forever to heal because I kept popping it open by spreading my hand too widely: a child’s curious fascination with pain.
Wounded though I was in both legs, one shoulder, and in the web between my thumb and first finger, I managed to crawl from the shelter of one stable doorway to the next, making the sound of ricocheting bullets by following a guttural krookh with a fading cheeooo through my teeth, as a Nazi machine gun kicked up the gravel at my feet and the tap-tap-tap sound of a coin against glass that...what? I almost glanced up, but I converted the glance into a frowning examination of the space around me, searching for snipers, because I didn’t want her to know that I had heard her summons. Satisfied that there were no Nazi snipers on the rooftops, I made an intense mime of drawing a map on the ground. Again she tapped her three urgent taps, and I could imagine her looking down on me. I hunched more tightly over my map. She tapped again, but this time there were only two clicks, then she stopped short. That missing click told me she suddenly realized that I could hear her, and I was ignoring her on purpose. I kept my head down, knowing that if I looked up I would see her there, her eyes full of sadness and recrimination.
Miserable, and angry for being made to feel miserable, I pretended to see an enemy soldier down the alley. I shot at him with my finger then ran off in pursuit until I was out of Mrs McGivney’s sight.
For a long while, I kept out of the back alley that had been the principal arena for my story games. A couple of times over the following year I caught a glimpse of Mrs McGivney scuttling across to Mr Kane’s late in the evening, but I always avoided her. I never saw her hero husband again.
I am now considerably older than Mrs McGivney was when I first responded to the rap of her nickel against the window. For many years I have lived as far away in space, time and culture from Pearl Street as one can get this side of death. And yet, on those nights when the black butterflies of remorse flutter through a
sleepless nuit blanche, I still sometimes hear that broken-off summons, those two clicks followed by a recriminating silence; and my throat tightens with shame as I remember the lonely old woman who I didn’t have time for because I was too busy trying to save myself.
Night Thoughts
INFINITY GAVE me a lot of trouble. So did Time. And God.
I could define these words, but I didn’t really possess them, not in the way I possessed ‘house’ or ‘hate’ or ‘red’. “Infinity has neither beginning nor end.” I understood that in the sense that I knew what each of the words meant, but it was one of those slippery concepts that I could grasp, but not hold, and the harder I grasped, the quicker they would fly away...like trying to pick up a greased marble with chopsticks.
Late at night I would struggle with these awkward abstractions until I ended in a kind of intellectual vertigo that made me hug my pillow for comfort.
Take Time, for instance. I envisioned ‘Now’ as a bright instant of time racing forward from the Future into the Past, but the Past never grew longer by accumulating the constant flow of moments Now deposited into it, nor did the Future get any shorter for all the bits of Now that Time tore from it, because both Past and Future were infinite, and one cannot imagine infinity plus a bit, or minus a bit. Even that fleeting spark of Now is elusive, because as you pronounced the N, the W is still in the Future, and when you get to the W, the N is already in the Past, never to be seen again.22
In the end, I found respite from doubt and confusion by adding Infinity and Time and God to an ever-growing list of notions that were beyond my comprehension. I comforted myself with the assumption that I might come to understand them some day or, if not, that I would learn to accept that there were three categories of things out there: those I understood, those I would someday understand, and those I would never fully understand.23
• • • • • • • • •
I was born in 1930 when Hoover was president and Prohibition was still in force, so all the years of my life had been nineteen-thirty-something. But one afternoon as I was walking home from school I saw the date 1940 on a billboard advertising forthcoming models of Ford cars. I stopped and frowned at the number with a sense of foreboding. That 40 seemed ominous, a number that not only looked strange, but felt awkward in your mouth when you said it. Fooorrrtee. No, no, that was all wrong. Years ought to be 1935 or 1939 because that 3 was a nice round, safe, smooth, stable number. Who knew what harm this brash, unreliable 4 would bring, with its sharply protruding elbow and its precarious one-legged stance?
My misgivings about this new decade were confirmed when, by the end of 1939, Germany and the Soviet Union had divided Poland between them, and the Russians had gobbled up Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Then Stalin attacked Finland, whose small but fierce army fought the vast Russian war machine to a standstill through the winter. The courage and daring of the Finns was in stark contrast to the inactivity on Germany’s western front, where England dithered and France cowered behind the Maginot Line, frozen with incertitude, wincing at phantoms. Mr Kane said that Hitler could have been stopped back in March of 1938, when he marched into Austria. At that time, his army had consisted of fifty-four divisions as against the thirty-plus divisions of Czechoslovakia, France’s fifty-five divisions, and Poland’s thirty. Even discounting chronically unprepared Britain, Hitler would have been outnumbered by more than two to one, and both the tactics and the machinery of his later vaunted Blitzkrieg were so untested, so unreliable that when he marched into Austria to receive the acclamation of the people, more than seventy percent of his mechanized infantry broke down and were obliged to continue to Vienna on foot. But by the winter of 1940, the Czechs and Poles were out of the game, and Germany was ready for war, both in materiel and morale, while the English lacked the first, and the French the latter.
Despite Mr Kane’s gloomy predictions, there was reason to hope that we might not be swept up into a terrible European war after all. During Roosevelt’s campaign against Wendell Willkie, when the only real issue was that FDR was running for a third term against all precedent and tradition, he had assured us, “Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.” I can still hear the drawled, syllable-and-a-half Groton pronunciation of ‘your’ and ‘war’, an accent America had come to trust as the sound of truth.
But Mr Kane believed it was our duty to get involved in the European war as soon as possible because of the things the Nazis were doing, not only to Jews, but to Gypsies, Communists, the mentally deficient, and homosexuals. He knew about the Warsaw ghettoes because, hunched over his receiver late one night, he had intercepted a desperate Morse code message from a courageous short-wave enthusiast in Warsaw, a man who used what may have been his last moments to broadcast.
During the Christmas vacation that began in the last of the comfortable 1930s and ended in the first of the ominous-sounding 1940s, my mother ragged and pestered the principal of Our Lady of Angels school into letting me transfer in mid-year, then she took me out of P.S. 5 where I was making low grades and always getting into trouble. Mother, who had a gift for explaining away every fault or flaw in her children, put it another way: she said she wanted to send me to a Catholic school where my energies, abilities and talents had a better chance of being recognized. It is true that more was expected of us at Our Lady of Angels, and its greater discipline produced an atmosphere more conducive to learning. Those stunningly plain, no-nonsense nuns nurtured their brighter students while they dealt efficiently with the mediocre and gently with the backward, but they did not tolerate those who disrupted the calm of the classroom, neither the recalcitrant dummies nor the precocious show-offs. Those tough old birds would swoop down on the wings of their starched wimples and snatch a trouble-maker around with dexterity and style that was a wonder to watch, and if the boy fought back or continued his disruptive ways, they would simply kick him out of school and let the public system deal with him.
Our Lady of Angels was seventeen blocks up the Lexington Avenue hill, steep blocks on sleepy mornings, and long cold windy blocks in winter, when I walked against the prevailing westerly winds that seemed to gain momentum as they swept downhill towards the river. Parochial school started half an hour earlier than public school and continued for half an hour longer in the afternoon (although we got Holy Days of Obligation off), and we had at least twice as much homework, but that didn’t trouble me much. I could dash off the repetitive arithmetic problems or list the principal export products of the Belgian Congo or diagram compound sentences between my radio-listening hour and supper, and I would do the reading assignments at night, after Mother and Anne-Marie were asleep and before I began the nightly reading, mostly history and novels, that had become habitual to me, and remains so to this day. I enjoyed displaying my quickness at the blackboard in Math class, and I soon discovered that my knowledge of history was broader than that of the diligent, slightly baffled nun who taught the subject and who reacted to my occasional corrections or amplifications by lowering my grade on the basis of ‘attitude in class’.
There were two categories of tedium-stunned students in every classroom: the slow kids who had so completely lost their grip on things that the teacher’s instructions were meaningless clumps of sound, and the quick kids who got the idea somewhere in the middle of the teacher’s first sentence, and whose minds were beaten into a pulpy stupor by the endless repetitions and illustrations necessary to bring the first glimmers of comprehension to the rest of the class. Early on, I learned to sit with my eyes on the teacher, my face set in an expression of rapt attention, while my mind was light-years away, totally engrossed in some internal game. I felt safe from being called on because kids who didn’t know the answers seldom looked the teacher in the eye, fearing that to do so was to invite undesirable attention. Instead, they would frown into their textbooks and pretend to be thinking so hard that it would be a pity to disturb them with questions. But teachers were on to this ploy (probab
ly having used it themselves when they were kids) so the safest way to avoid being called on was to appear to know the answer and to be eager to produce it aloud. But occasionally I got caught out.
One afternoon I was sitting at the back of a social studies class taught by a nun who had kept me late one day to tell me that she enjoyed the essays I wrote for her, and to say that she was sorry I was sometimes bored in her class, but she had to make sure the average student understood the work. My eyes were locked on this teacher’s with the eager expression of a boy who knows the answer and is inwardly squirming for a chance to demonstrate his cleverness, while, in fact, my mind was off in some distant galaxy...and I’ll be damned if she didn’t call on me!
I stood beside my desk as we were required to do when our names were called, and after a moment of trying to remember what she had been rattling on about, and not coming up with anything, I said in an earnest voice tinged with wonder, “I don’t know the answer, sister. I thought I did, but I don’t. I honestly don’t. It was right on the tip of my tongue, but...” and kids around me grinned with pleasure at watching me string the nun along. I continued with my protestations of baffled regret until the sister interrupted me with, “All right, Luke. You can sit down.” But I wouldn’t be thwarted in my need to explain the astonishing phenomenon of being unable to produce an answer that I knew perfectly well, but for some reason just couldn’t bring up from the depths of my—“All right, Luke. That will do!” My eyes filled with injury I slowly sat down, muttering plaintively, “I can’t understand it. I knew it just a minute ago, but somehow it’s—”
“Be quiet, Luke!”
“Yes, sister. It’s just that I can’t—”
“I don’t want to hear another word from you!”
“Whatever you say, sister.”
“Shut up!”
“Yes, sister.” (This last muttered softly, so as to sneak in the ‘last touch’.)