by ALEXANDER_
I knew I was being baited. I also knew I was incapable of coming back with a snappy retort. If snappy retorts ever come to me, it’s several hours later or three o’clock in the morning, after I’ve been lying awake half the night trying to think of them. I ignored her.
“Can I, Ma?”
But Mother had been primed. “Of course. If you think you can.”
At the end of the week, I knew Gloria was right: I’d never make it alone. Every night she would ask, usually at dinner, “How’s the studying coming, Chuck? Are you on Caesar or Vergil yet ?” Or, “I’ll be happy to help you with your social studies.”
“Fine,” I always said, lying through my teeth and digging my own grave, because the more I said it, the less chance I’d ever have of getting any real help.
“That’s good,” she’d say, looking at me out of her cool brown eyes. “It just shows what you can really do when you try. It’s a pity that all these years, what with the tuition bills and everything, you haven’t tried before.”
I bit. “Why don’t you get off my back? If you want to be the head of the local women’s lib, try it on your boyfriends, or is that the reason Steve and Larry aren’t around this season?”
Now the one thing Gloria doesn’t do well (physically, list is) is blush. It comes up like a bad case of measles.
Spoken with the chauvinism of the stupid male who knows that the only superior thing he has is his musculature. That’s her new word, musculature.
My musculature’s great to push your face in with, Glory- old-girl. Let me demonstrate.” And I pretended to reach across the table.
Gloria is a physical coward. She panics if you throw a ball at her. “Stop him, Mother,” she squeaked.
If you’re going to study, then I suggest you do so,” Mother said, stuffing the dishwasher. “After all, it’s you who wants to go to boarding school.”
I went up to my room and closed the door. Then I stared
the books I had 'brought up from New York, the ones - hose contents would have to be in my head before I had a prayer of getting into St. Matthew’s. Maybe all the dreary moralists are right: You have to develop good habits. I had never developed the habit of studying, and now I didn’t know where to begin. I went to the kind of school in New York that would rather pass Rosie, the hippopotamus at the Central Park Zoo, than lose the tuition fee. Besides, it was the latest in do-your-own-thing places. No inhibiting structure. No outmoded methods. Lots of Rorschach tests, but no exams.
I have not cried since I was seven years old. I know that doesn’t sound possible. But it’s true. People who said I was incapable of applying myself to anything didn’t know what they were talking about. I had applied myself to not crying—no matter what. Not, you understand, because I’m hung up on being stiff with the upper lip or anything like that. But because it gave Mother some kind of queer hold on me. She loved it. When it did happen (before I was seven), I’d find myself pressed against her bosom, half smothered (while Gloria looked on) and for a while after that she’d be very sweet to me, which was nice. But it had a price. She felt then that I was HERS, and until I managed to get some space around me again by being really obnoxious, I could hardly go to the bathroom or make myself a sandwich or go for a walk without her wanting to know where I was going, what I did when I got there, and could she help? Yuch!
Or, if I want to be really truthful, if I had any crying that could not be avoided, I made very sure I was alone and unheard.
The trouble is, our house on the Island was not built for privacy. So I sat on the bed, staring at the books, and trying very hard to think about things that were truly hilarious, like Gloria falling off one of the cliffs around here into a pot of scalding oil. After a while, I turned off the light and got into bed and pushed my face into the pillow.
I must have gone to sleep because the next thing I knew I was awake, the moon was up, and there was a low, cushiony growl from the window, followed by a plop on my bed.
“Moxie,” I said, and put my arms around him.
The growl turned into a deep, rattling purr. I felt a wet nose against my cheek and smelled bad breath. Poor Moxie. On just about every count you can think of he’s socially unacceptable. Moxie’s a big yellow tom, with one and a half ears, patches where his fur has been yanked out in his many fights, and scars around his face that give him a positively evil expression.
He was a lanky kitten when I found him three years ago.
But of course with Mother’s allergy, I couldn’t keep him or take him to New York. He lives through the winter by hunting and handouts. I have asked some of the. native villagers to feed him, offering them money (when I thought they wouldn’t be insulted) or doing odd jobs for them during the summer. I guess they do. Feed him, I mean. Or somebody does. Because each summer he’s the first thing I look for, and he never misses our arrival. Sometime during the first three nights he comes over the garage roof to my window after it’s dark. He knows better than to come to one of the doors during the day. Quite apart from her allergy, Mother hates him. Two years ago she offered to let me keep him officially in my room if I would agree to have him altered. But I knew that this was just part of Mother’s wholesale plan for the taming and domesticating of the male species, and I refused.
As a result, Mother takes as a personal slight every ginger kitten around the harbor, and there are more each year.
“Don’t let that animal into the house, Charles,” she says every now and then for good measure. “He smells and he has bad habits.” All true.
“Moxie,” I muttered now into his scruffy fur. His pun- rattled louder. He stretched his long, battle-scarred body alongside mine. Mother was right about one thing: He stank. He must have been the gamiest thing this side of skunks. But I am the one creature, animal or human, he loves and it’s entirely mutual. The only reason I make my own bed in the morning, which otherwise I would consider a concession to female chauvinist imperialism, is to keep Mother from knowing he has been there. With the bed unmade, she would know the minute she hit the door.
Off and on that night I told Moxie about everything in a low voice, while he alternately purred and snored (I think he has a deviated septum or maybe one of his unsuccessful rivals whacked him over the nose). The walls of our house are thin, so I should not have been surprised to see the door open in the early light revealing Meg’s tub-shaped form. “What d’ya want?” I asked surlily.
Meg regarded the two of us. Moxie raised his head. His purring stopped. Without making a sound or moving a muscle, he was, I knew, watching with every hair and sinew. He tolerated Meg. If it had been Gloria or Mother he would have uttered his curious screeching growl and gone through the window in one leap. One of the things I feel I must say about Meg is that even with her thing about animals she isn’t jealous, which a lot of animal nuts are. They somehow feel threatened if every creature they meet doesn’t leap onto their laps.
She just stood there, her curly hair making her look like a short, fat saint with a halo. “About St. Matthew’s,” she said.
“What about St. Matthew’s?”
“You’ll never make it alone.”
I opened my mouth to tell her to keep her brilliant insights to herself, but before I could say anything she plowed on. “It’s no use getting on your high horse about it, it’s much better to face facts and go on from there.”
I mean really, this punk kid, coming over like one of the five psychoanalysts on the staff at school. I opened my mouth again to put her down once and for all when it hit me that that was just what I’d been thinking when I went to bed. All I could say was “So?”
“So, one of the rumors about The Grouch is that he was once a teacher. Maybe he’d coach you.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“Why?”
I lay there in the semidark. Why indeed? The rumors about The Grouch, alias The Man Without a Face, alias Justin McLeod, were rife.
In our little community everybody knew practically everything
about everybody. The one exception was McLeod, who lived off by himself in an old house on the mainland side of the little peninsula that keeps our Island from being a true island. This, of course, made him a fascinating source of gossip: One theory was that he’d been in jail. Another was that he’d been in the CIA and had been firebombed by a double, triple, or quadruple spy. Another was that he was a famous physicist who was living under a pseudonym because an experiment blew up in his face. Then there was the one about the car.
None of us really believed any of them, but with nothing to go on and all summer to speculate the stories got wilder and wilder. One or two of the kids had sneaked onto his property to see what they could nose out, only to be chased off by a huge dog that looked half horse and all homicidal. Everybody got the hint. He didn’t want company. So we left him alone.
Now Meg came up with this really tame idea about his having been a teacher.
“Well,” Meg said from the door. “You can try it out. All that can happen is for the dog to chew you to pieces.”
“Thanks.”
I didn’t go back to sleep. Moxie relaxed, purred, and even snored a little. But when it grew lighter and the birds started making a racket, his mind obviously turned to breakfast. Also, there was never any telling when the Enemy (Mother or Gloria) would get up and start sending unfriendly waves in his direction. With a final guttural meow and a rub of his head against mine, he gathered his mangy length, sprang to the window, and disappeared.
CHAPTER 2
I mulled over Meg’s suggestion the rest of the day, mostly fooling around the pier and the harbor.
“No studying today?’’ Gloria asked, as I headed towards the porch door after breakfast instead of upstairs.
“I’m taking a day off.’’ What business was it of hers?
“You’re that far ahead?” Her expression reminded me of Moxie’s when he’s bird-watching.
“Leave him alone, Gloria,” Mother said from the stove where she was turning bacon over in the skillet.
I waited, standing at the door, for the hooker. It’s a running bet with myself. When Mother comes out on my side it usually means something I don’t like is on the way. It came.
“Charles, you know I don’t like that filthy wild cat in your room and on your bed at night. He smells up the whole house.”
How did she know?
Raging, I looked at Meg. But without even looking up from spooning her heaping bowl of cereal she was shaking her head. And I knew that, bratty as she sometimes is, Meg wouldn’t nark on me.
But there sat Gloria, picking at her scrambled egg like she was the heroine of that moronic story about a princess and a pea that Mother used to read to us when we were both small. I think Gloria got her permanent self-image from that female.
“Thanks,” I said, looking right at her.
“Does it occur to you,” she said languidly, “that your feline friend is crawling with parasites? You can practically *se them keeping house in his fur.”
Since Moxie’s tail balloons out and his back arches every time he sees Gloria, I don’t think it’s his parasites that bug her (if you’ll excuse the pun).
“Yes, but he has such good taste in people,” I said, -rather pleased with myself for once. “Besides, I thought · 3u were big on wildlife and ecology—or was that just until Steve decided he could live without you?”
Gloria’s face went psychedelic pink. “You rat. You wait. Mother—”
But I was out the porch door and down the steps. That kind of conversation had been going on almost as far back is I could remember and I wanted out.
There weren’t too many kids of my age around this summer. Some from last year had gone off to camp or another summer place, and my best friend, Joey Rodman, who also goes to my school in New York, was still in Europe with his parents where they were force-feeding him culture in the hope of boosting his IQ. That’s what drew us together: IQ. And, if anything, his case is even worse than mine, because, as he says, if you’re Jewish with a ho-hum IQ, man, you’re in real trouble. The family looks on it as a disgrace second only to converting to Christianity. But Joey wasn’t here now when I needed him, so after exchanging a few insults with a couple of kids bailing out a dinghy, I walked along the harbor skipping stones and thinking about what Meg said.
After several dreary hours relieved only by four hot dogs, a hamburger, and an occasional ice cream cone, bought whenever I circled back to the village, I came to see that it was all summed up in the question: What’s the alternative?
And the alternative was living for the next three or four years in a five-room apartment in New York, with my snotty older sister putting me down every time she sees me, having to walk through a forest of wet stockings and underwear every time I want to take a shower, and trying to find my toothbrush in a jungle of false eyelashes, hair pieces, makeup glop, and I don’t know what all. And if I complained, Mother would take Gloria’s side. There’s no dignity in living crashed in a small pad with a bunch of women. So, wondering how it felt to be chomped on by a man-hating dog, I went off to look for Justin McLeod.
It was a fairly long walk and uphill most of the way. Between thoughts of The Grouch and his dog the butterflies in my stomach were threatening to become bats, so to keep my mind occupied I tried to remember everything I had ever heard about Justin McLeod. It wasn’t difficult. The answer was all but zilch. Totted up, the items amounted to:
He had come to live in the house on the cliff about twelve years ago. Occasionally he closed the house and went away. But not often.
He lived there alone with his carnivorous dog, which meant that nobody who had dredged up some excuse or other to call on him and poke around had gotten much beyond the gate. There was a sort of P.S. to this, that the dog had been known to devour small children, but I dismissed that as unlikely. The whole thought about the dog was depressing me, so I went on to
Despite all the really interesting theories as to how he got his mutilation and his past in general, the only reliable evidence of professional activity was that he received letters and parcels from some publishing house in New York. Some of the letters had windows in them and looked as though they might be checks. (I'm not sure how this was known. The postmistress is a glacial female who seems to view her job as a Vocation. She looks as though she wished hot pincers could be applied to her fingernails by Communist agents so she could heroically refuse to tattle about who gets what mail in the village. Despite this, somebody had :talked, and there was a fairly well accepted idea that, whatever else he might have been, McLeod was a writer.)
The trouble with item 3 is that no one had ever seen his name on a book. This gave rise to the hypothesis (if you’ll excuse one of Gloria’s show-off words) that
He writes pornography under a pseudonym.
The moment this theory took hold, everybody—that is, all the young people—descended on our one bookstore and, when that proved to be a bust, on the store in the nearest town on the mainland, to buy up all the porno and go through it for what the sleuth novels call internal evidence. But all they found was the usual dreary run of reprint paperbacks. Not one real hard-core porno among them. But then as Joey pointed out (his father’s in publishing), you could hardly expect any, this being a very backward and uptight part of the country.
All these cogitations got me nowhere except, physically, where I was going.
McLeod’s house is on top of a cliff, several miles north of the harbor, and you have to go around the long way to get to his gate, the only opening in a stone wall built by some people-hating New Englander of the past. On the other side of the gate you can see bunches of pines and a path winding through them. The house is hidden from the road and the whole thing is pretty bleak. There was no sign saying “Beware of the Dog.” Still, I loitered there for a few minutes, and by doing so saved myself (I thought) a lot of trouble. Because I heard the sound of an engine and round the path came McLeod’s venerable but still rather handsome foreign car. Stopping, he go
t out, and I saw he was going to open the gate. I could have kicked myself then for failing to make a good impression by springing to attention and doing it for him. But I didn’t think fast enough (as usual). He’s a big man and he covered the few feet to the gate before the idea clicked. He stared at me over the gate as he unlatched it, and it was like a cold wind coming at me. “What do you want?” were the words he said. His voice said Keep away from me.
Everything I had been planning to say, a kind of savvyI introduction to my problem, went out of my head. For one thing, there was his face, closer than I had seen it before. And it was pretty unnerving. Glazed raw beef all over most of one side and flowing across his nose to the other. I just stared, then pulled my gaze off his face as though my eyes were suction cups, looked down, sideways, above, anywhere but at him, shuffled my feet like a rube, and stammered, “I—I h-heard you were a t-teacher—once.”
Silence. “So?”
Gazing at the nearest pine I mumbled, “I was wondering if you could c-coach me. I n-need to pass an entrance exam.”
“No. Certainly not.”
And he got back in the car and drove through the gate.
After he had gone I realized how I had really loused it up. To tell you the truth, I could have cried. I leaned with my elbows on the stone wall for a while. I couldn’t go back to the house. I just couldn’t. After a while I sat down with my back against the wall. Why did I always do things the *Tong way? Why did nothing ever come out right?
I knew it was getting colder and darker. I was facing east and the sky was turning charcoal gray. The wind whistled and whispered through the pines. I had just a loose sweatshirt on and jeans, and I was beginning to realize the grass wasn’t all that dry. But I couldn’t make myself move. It would be dinner before too long. I hadn’t been back to the house all day and if I didn’t show at dinnertime I’d have :o go through everything I hated most: