by ALEXANDER_
“How could you be so inconsiderate?”
“How can you be so irresponsible?”
Or, the real joker in the pack, “The truth is, Chuck, you just don’t care about anybody but yourself—you don’t love me.” Followed by Mother in tears. Followed by me wishing I were dead.
It finally turned dark, but I still couldn’t move. I pulled my knees up and rested my head on them. Poor old third-rate St. Matthew’s seemed like a vanished golden dream.
then, inside of me, I just quit. Turned everything off. Nothing mattered. Periodically this happens to me. Sooner or later I snap out of it, or something snaps me back, but for a while I’m not there, if you know what I mean, though I guess if it hasn’t happened to you you don’t. But it is w hat has made all five school analysts rush around trying to be helpful from time to time. When I finally come out of it and there they are, still making noises and jumping up and down, I usually think it’s pretty funny. But until I do, it's like everything is going on in another galaxy and anyway, what’s the point?
I raised my head to see two headlights focused on the gate. I hadn’t even heard the engine, but McLeod and his
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car were back. I watched while he pulled the gate-bars back, but instead of getting into the car he came towards me.
“Why haven’t you gone home?’’ he asked in that knifey voice.
What could I say? My mind was absolutely blank. So I said nothing and sat there like a dummy.
“Get up!”
I got up, but I had been sitting so long I half stumbled. Wherever my jeans had touched the grass they were wet. The night wind was cold, as it always is up around here. I was cold inside and out and I knew I had to get home and into a hot bath if I didn’t want to get one of the chills this area is famous for.
“Where do you live?”
“Th-the other s-side of the h-h-harbor. ” It wasn’t a stammer this time. My teeth were chattering.
“Do you know you’ve been here for nearly four hours? What have you been doing?”
When I didn’t answer he took my arm in a punishing grip and pushed me towards the car. “Get in.”
Instead of turning around and taking me back to the Island, he drove through the gate and up the path, not stopping to close it again.
Sure enough, the Hound of the Baskervilles came out to greet us baying as though he could hardly wait for his dinner: me.
“All right, Mickey. Shut up!”
Mickey. Like calling a Bengal tiger Cuddles.
“Get out,” McLeod said, leaning across me and pushing my door open.
When there is absolutely no alternative. I can be quite brave, and with McLeod blocking one exit and Sudden
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I
Death shoving his great jaw through my window, what choice did I have?
“Go on,” McLeod said. “He won’t hurt you. Not as long as you’re with me.”
I got out. Mickey reared. His doomsday voice bayed again. I closed my eyes.
“Sit!” McLeod said.
I opened my eyes. Mickey was sitting on his haunches, his head on a level with my shoulders, his tongue hanging out like a chopping block.
“Are you coming?” McLeod said, standing at the open front door.
A long time afterwards Mother or someone asked me what the house was like inside. No one had ever been there—at least not within memory. All anyone knew was that it had belonged in one family for quite some time. But no one living now in the village had ever been up there. I don’t know what they expected. Dracula’s lair? Cobwebs from the ceiling?
Anyway, I wasn’t in much of a state to notice anything that night.
“Go straight ahead through that door at the end of the hall,” he said, when I stumbled over the threshold. “The light’s on. I’ll be there in a minute.”
The door led into a smaller hall and then into a kitchen. It was a big room with a stone floor and low ceiling. An old-fashioned lamp, giving out a yellow light, hung from a rafter. There was a sink along one side beneath a window, a big table in the middle, and a chair. Along the other side was what Mother would call an old-fashioned iron range and open grate, and from it came a delicious heat. I backed
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up to it and was all but sliding my buttocks across the warm top when the door burst open and the dog loped in. Seeing me, he stopped. A bass growl started in the huge throat. I stood rigid. McLeod followed, holding a glass with some golden liquid. “Quiet,” he said to Mickey. To me he said, “Drink this,” and handed the glass to me.
I did, and it burned all the way down.
“Now go through that door and up the stairs and into the bathroom at the top of the staircase. I’ve drawn some hot water. Get in and stay in long enough to get warm. Then get out, dry off, and put on the clothes you find there. They’ll be big but they’ll have to do. Then come back down again. Now move!”
I didn’t argue, whether because I had been softened up by the drink or because I was too chilled or because of something in his voice.
I was down again in about twenty minutes, warm, dry, and rather drowsy. The dark blue sweater I had on was like a tent. The trousers were folded halfway up to the knee and I had to use the belt he’d left out, but he must be leaner than I thought because they weren’t that loose. I was carrying my own sodden garments.
He was standing staring out the window above the sink to the sea beyond and below when I came back in, his profile to me. In the half light from the lantern and from that side his disfigurement wasn’t that visible. Whatever had happened to him had not touched the bones of his face, which were good, with the nose slightly aquiline, the forehead high and the jaw firm. Then he turned and became Quasimodo again. It wasn’t just the awful red. The scars were here and there gathered or pitted like a relief map.
“All right?” he said.
I nodded. “Yes, thanks.”
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I
“There’s some tea on the table. Drink it.”
I never much cared for being ordered around, but somehow I didn’t protest. The tea was hot, sweet, strong and had milk in it. On the whole it tasted good and cleared my head some. I remembered what I was here for.
“You can leave the clothes at the grocery store,’’ he said, “I’ll pick them up when I next shop. Now I’ll drive you home.”
“Look, about coaching,” I started desperately.
“I said no.” He turned the lamp down again and started towards the door. What I had half taken to be a large nig in front of the fireplace got up and became Mickey. There was nothing to do. I followed them through the house and out the front door. Mickey was left sitting on the front step as McLeod and I drove down the road to the gate.
We were going along the high cliff road, the sea far below, the lights of the village off to one side and curving around the little harbor, when I said something stupid, even for me. “I’ll pay you,” I said. “There’s money Dad left me and I’ve saved quite a lot. You can have all of it. It’s more than three thousand dollars.”
“I don’t want your money.” He said it in a perfectly ordinary voice but I felt ashamed.
“Did I—did I say something wrong?”
“I don’t know. Did you? Did you intend to?”
“No. Truly. It’s just—” My voice trailed off. Explaining Mother—let alone Gloria, the feeling that the comer I was in was getting smaller and smaller, Gloria at home all next winter, and die next, and the next—how could I explain that?
This is where girls cry, I suppose, and for a minute, only a minute, I wished I could, if it would wash away that tight, burning feeling inside me that was getting tighter and more
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burning. But I couldn’t. I rolled down the window to let the air cool my face and stared at the dark wall of trees rushing by.
After a minute McLeod said, “What’s the exam for?” “St. Matthew’s.”
“Why is it so important for you to go there?”
When I had gone up to his house I had the whole thing laid out, what I would say, and so on. It would have moved Grant’s Tomb. Now, thanks to the brandy or whiskey he gave me, everything was hopelessly confused. I tried to recapture the manly, straightforward sentences I had put together. Nothing came.
“Well?” He sounded exasperated.
I knew I had to say something even though I didn’t think he had the slightest intention of changing his mind. He’d undoubtedly think it was a big joke, the jerk. But what choice did I have?
I drew a long breath. “Because I’m sick of living at home with three women, my mother and two sisters, particularly since they’re both brighter than me and make nothing but A’s—my sisters, I mean. I thought Gloria, my older sister, the one who— Well, anyway, she was going away to boarding school. Now she’s not. She’s going to be home all winter and the year after that and the year after that. Messing me up. Putting me down. Making fun of everything I do. When I’m seventeen I’m going to join the Air Force. But that’s three years away and I can’t stand it.”
“I see,” he said, “What’s your name?”
“Charles Norstadt.”
He put the car in gear and we drove down onto the peninsula and then turned right into the road that curled around the harbor and went past our house on the other side.
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“All right. I’ll coach you. But you’ll have to do it my way, and that means the hard way. You must have sat for the exam already. St. Matthew’s doesn’t give the second exam unless it’s necessary. I take it you failed?”
“Yes,” I whispered, terrified he would change his mind. “Did you study for it?”
“No.”
“If you wanted to get in so much, why not?”
I explained again about Gloria’s change of plan.
“That wasn’t very farsighted, was it?”
“No.” Scared as I was that he would back out, I knew I might as well get one thing cleared up from the beginning. “I’m not terribly bright. Not like my sisters, anyway.” “Who told you that?”
“Practically everybody—besides, they have tests at school.”
“What school did you go to?”
I told him. He didn’t say anything.
Then, “Where, by the way, do you live?”
“The first house on the land side past the dinghy pier.” He stopped a few yards short of the house. “All right. Be at my house tomorrow morning at eight. I’ll coach you three hours every morning five days a week, and I’ll give you enough work to take you another three hours. That’s six hours a day during what should be your vacation. It will be tough. But if I ever find you haven’t done the work I’ve assigned you, you won’t come back. Are you sure it’s worth it?”
So with my usual luck I had found myself another Hitler. Repressing a desire to say Sieg heil with a snappy arm salute like in the movies, I said, “Yes. Sir.”
I could see right away we were going to have a lovely summer, he and I. But he didn’t need me. I needed him.
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And we both knew it. And to add to everything else, I would have to look at him three hours a day five days a week. I know it sounds pretty awful to say that, like not wanting to be seen with a cripple. But I can’t help it. The only thing it’s less awful than is being around Gloria for the next three years.
“Where’ve you been?” Mother asked as I walked through the back door into the kitchen. “Do you know what hour it is?”
“Nine,” I said, knowing it was after ten, and trying to get across the room as fast as possible.
“It’s ten thirty. And don’t walk out of the room while I’m talking to you. Have you had dinner?”
“Yes,” I lied, still moving towards the door to the back staircase.
“Where?”
I was thinking furiously, because until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t going to tell her about McLeod’s coaching me. But it was as though the decision were already made and all I had to do was to find some acceptable explanation for being out so late and arriving home in strange clothes. My own I had strung on the back line as I passed on the way in.
“And whose clothes are those?” Gloria asked, as though she had been cued by what was going on in my head.
“Pete Lansing’s. I fell off the dock and Barney lent me these.” Barney was Pete’s younger brother. Pete was in Vietnam and therefore unavailable for questioning. And Barney would play dumb. Besides, he was due to go off to camp almost any day.
“I wish you’d be more careful,” Mother said. “You
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might hit your head on a rock and really hurt yourself. This isn’t Florida or Long Island with nothing but sand at the bottom.”
“First you have to have something in your head to hurt,” Gloria drawled, like some old Bette Davis heroine. She eyed McLeod’s pants. “I didn’t know Pete was that tall,” she said. “And you could get two of him in that sweater.” “Maybe just being away from you was enough to get his vitamins working,” Meg said, to my astonishment. She was sitting at the table reading, drinking a malted, and working her way through a box of chocolate chip cookies. It’s true that Pete Lansing had once seemed to have the hots for Gloria, along with all the other older boys. But none of them ever stayed that way for long. Which was one reason why our Gloria was so sour. Or maybe it was the other way around.
“You keep on stuffing yourself,” Gloria said to Meg, “and there won’t be any guys around you at all.”
Meg took another cookie. But I could see her cheeks get red. One good turn deserves another. “She may not get as many as you,” I said pointedly, “but seven gets you eight that anybody who likes her will go on liking her. Besides, you can lose fat, but there’s not much you can do about a naturally repulsive personality.”
Gloria doesn’t get red when she gets mad, the way Meg does. She gets white, and for a minute there she looked like skim milk. She got up. “Let’s see the label in those pants,” she said, and snapped out a hand toward me.
Now that was pretty cute of her. Pete was a snob about jeans, which he called Levi’s. Only the genuine cowpoke’s would do. His came from Jackson, Wyoming, where he had worked on a ranch part of every summer before he went
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into the army. I don’t know where McLeod got the ones I was wearing, but the chances of their coming from Jackson, Wyoming, were about zero.
There happened to be a ruler on the table; why, I don’t know. But there it was like the serpent in the Garden of Eden and of course I picked it up and whacked her hand away. I guess I hit harder than I really intended. . . .
The only thing I can say about what followed is that it took everybody’s mind off where I had been and what I’d been doing.
Mother’s lecture went on for what felt like half an hour while she bathed Gloria’s hand and mopped up the blood from the cut across her palm. The thin steel plate along the edge of the ruler had sliced the inside of her hand and it was no use my saying that it wasn’t deliberate. With Gloria sobbing as though she’d been attacked with a switchblade and Mother going on and on about my dangerous temper and what it had done to my father, who was listening?
“You’ll apologize to Gloria, do you hear me?” Mother said, as I tried again to split by the back staircase. “If you don’t we’ll come up and stay in your room until you do.”
What I would have given to say “So stay!” But Mother had learned early that that was the one threat that worked. All the rest of the house—or the apartment in New York— was theirs. My room was mine and I’d pay the price, usually an apology, to keep it that way. I turned and came down the stairs.
“I’m sorry,” I said, lying in my teeth and with my fingers crossed behind my back. I hope you get tetanus and die, was what I thought to myself. And then a kind of superstitious horror took hold of me. / didn't mean that, God, I thought quickly. Undo it, please. I didn’t want that on my conscience.
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In
the middle of what The Hairball used to call this Sturm und Drang, old Barry Rumble Seat pushed open the screen door and came in.
“Hiya,” he said, as though it were midafternoon and everybody was sitting around having sweetness and light.
“Hello,” Meg said.
“Hi, Sweetheart.”
Meg digs Barry. Why, I can’t think, unless it’s what’s called a community of suffering. They’re both overweight. She gave him her best grin which even with braces and cookie crumbs packs a lot of voltage.
He grinned back. “What’s going on?”
What with the Band-Aids all over the table and the disinfectant making the kitchen smell like a hospital and Gloria sitting there with her blotched tears acting like a rape case, I can see why he’d ask. But it was the lead-in that Gloria the Wronged must have been praying for. As I eased out she was sounding her favorite theme. “Something simply has to be done about Chuck’s paranoid attacks. With his background and his father being the way he was . . .”
I got into my room, just barely managing not to slam the door. Gloria, the fink, knows where to shove in the needle, which is one reason why she is so universally beloved. . . .
I kicked the wastebasket and stood there, watching the paper and candy wrappers and peanut shells ricochet off the walls ail over the rag rug, thinking how stinking lousy everything was. Six hours’ work a day, Himmler McLeod, and if everything worked, a crummy boarding school in the fall where they probably goose-stepped you off to chapel six times a day.
“But you got what you wanted,” said the Judas voice inside me that always speaks up when I am about to enjoy my own misery.
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* * *
During the course of the night I contemplated my readymade decision not to tell Mother or Gloria about McLeod coaching me, although I might tell Meg since it had been her idea. But nobody else, because in a summer community like ours it would get back in less than twenty-four hours. I’m not sure why I felt so strongly about this, beyond the usual reason that if Gloria ever discovered that something was important to me, she’d mess it up if she could.