Then the weather changed, the days and nights becoming hotter and stickier than he’d ever experienced. This was a valuable piece of information left out of most of the Washington books, and he already included it in the What to Wear section at the opening of the book. (DC’s weather is ideal for the gracious Southern clothing store owner. Here there are truly four distinct seasons—the fall and early spring being as delightful and pleasingly capricious as any city in the U.S. But the heat spells of late spring and summer? Let me inform you, dear travelers. It would be as insufferably stifling as the muggiest of Middle Eastern and Asian cities I’ve lived in if not for the ubiquitous air-conditioning.) And with the late May heat came jarring street noises, loud arguments and TV sounds from surrounding apartments, and the disturbances in the schoolyard of St. James: from the 8:25 morning lineup to the P.T. classes and after-school games of the neighborhood, kids. A week ago he decided that only at night and on Sundays would he ever find the peace to get work done at home. So during the day he now got up when the first few kids came into the yard, downed a quick breakfast and spent most of the time walking around the city, reading and napping in Rock Creek Park, editing copy there that he’d written the previous night when he’d drunk too much, and going to another tedious double feature in an air-conditioned theater.
All of a sudden it was silent outside. Maybe the kids had been kicked out of the yard or went to play somewhere else. He relaxed in bed, felt himself getting sleepy, for a while imagined himself playing Capture the Flag, freeing all the prisoners. Henry the Kid beating the other team home with the flag and being congratulated as he scored the winning point.
But a boy shook him out of his thoughts: “By the count of ten you pimps better be over that line or you lose the flag. One, two, three, four, five, six…”
Henry wanted to yell for the boy to get the hell away from his window.
“Capture the flag. Free him, free him,” a boy and girl screamed as Henry got out of bed. “I got the punk,” another boy shouted as Henry turned the shower on in the bathroom and put his head under it. When that didn’t cool him off and calm his nerves, he got in the tub and let the cold water rise around him.
He ducked his head into the water and thought God, if this isn’t nice, so nice, so perfect, so goddamn completely perfect, and came up for air, held his nose and dropped underwater again. It was so peaceful and comfortable in the tub that he pictured himself working here. He’d seen it done in a movie once—Spencer Tracy or Clark Gable sitting in a half-filled tub, typewriter and writing paper on a wood plank set up in front of him like a bed table, a cigarette stuck confidently to his bottom lip as he knocked off the last few lines of a prize-winning news article or novel. Confident and cheerful now himself, he scrubbed his face and hair with a washrag and through a soap bubble forming on his lips began to sing “Oh Suzanna.”
“Oh Suzanna, oh don’t you cry for me. For I come from Alabama with a banjo on my knee.”
It was all he knew of the song and he repeated those lines twice more and was giving out with what was possibly his highest range since his college chorus days, when a group of intentionally clashing voices outside joined in with him. He got up and slammed down the window. He still heard them mimicking him, so he threw on his terrycloth robe, drying himself with it as he went into the kitchen, and yelled from the partially opened curtains “Will you kids please stop!”
They continued to sing—the entire song.
“Didn’t you hear? Now you had your little joke, so can it.”
He couldn’t see them. They were behind a row of bushes inside the yard’s mesh fence, about fifteen feet from his building. The only other time he shouted at them was last week. They were fighting among themselves, whistling, screeching, cursing, and rattling the fence when one boy climbed it, then throwing pebbles at the boy when he was perched on top. “Stop that; you’re going to kill him,” Henry yelled, and the kids scattered and the boy climbed down on Henry’s side and ran away. Now he felt he was their target, and a regular sitting duck also. Having finished the “Oh Suzanna” song, they now baited him with the first stanza of “Lulu had a baby, she named him Sunny Jim.” By the time Lulu got excited and grabbed Jim by his cocktail, ginger ale, five cents a glass, Henry was in the bedroom, angrily zippering up his Bermuda shorts and prepared to show his face at the window for the first time to them and demand they stop bugging him.
They’d ended the song when he reached the living room, and didn’t follow it with anything. Relieved, he flopped into the easy chair with a book. It was one of the forty-odd history and guidebooks about Washington he’d borrowed from several public libraries—the main purpose being to condense what this writer and others had said into tiny sections of his own book. The title of his book, as his unpublished books on Philadelphia, New Orleans and San Francisco has been similarly titled, was: Henry Sampson’s Modern Guidebook to Washington, DC. Below that would be the subtitle: “Your most perfect little companion to all places for all people. Meet the natives and their environment and be as comfortable and knowledgeable as you would in your own hometown.”
He never got to know these other cities that well, having only enough time and money to stay in Philadelphia for a long weekend and never having the bus fare to get to New Orleans. And he’d only spent a few hours in San Francisco—where he first came up with the idea for a series of guidebooks—before shipping out on a World War II troopship to Australia. The Washington book would be different. Not only was he getting a true feeling of the city but the writing was more informal, something his other books, which now seemed like staid travelogue scripts, entirely lacked. These would be the keys to getting it published. And publication would create such a demand for his previous books, once he changed them to first person and did a bit more personal research and lightened up on the language, that he didn’t think it’d be more than a few years before he’d be known as one of the most readable authorities on American travel. He was musing about all this—the money, notoriety, delicious free meals and luxurious hotel accommodations that would accompany his success—when he heard the children shouting outside again.
“Louie, you’re the stupidest ass I ever seen,”
“You are, you mother.”
“My mother, what?”
“Just your mother, you mother.”
Henry tried to ignore their argument. He sat at his work table, typed “–37–” on the upper lefthand corner of the page, and continued typing and erasing for two minutes and six satisfying lines. “One especially intriguing area often missed by most tourists is DC’s own Chinatown, which is only a stone’s throw from the Capitol Building. It’s made up of an assortment of exotic shops run by native Chinese, some of the wares, a reliable source informed me, reputed to be smuggled straight from Red China, and under the very noses of your congressmen, no less! One particularly hospitable Mandarin restaurant I had several outstanding dinners at is the…” He was looking through his dining-out notebook, which didn’t list the restaurants he’d eaten in but only the more expensive places he’d jotted down many of the dishes and prices from the menus posted out front, when he heard another shouting match in the schoolyard.
“I said get your freaking hands off me, Ronnie,” a girl said.
“What’re you, crazy?” the boy said. “I wouldn’t touch you with a cruddy pole.”
“Yeah, I bet,” she said; “On your mother’s life,” he answered, and so it went, till Henry ripped the page out of the type-writer and bunched it up and flung it to the floor. That’s it,” he said, and he rushed out of the apartment and down the service stairs to the rear entrance. He calmed his rage once he got outside, moved closer to the schoolyard till he stood under the plaque above the door in the fence—a mutilated crucified Christ dangling over the school’s name and motto, both written in Latin.
“Pighead Sylvia’s got a hole in her sock,” a boy was singing to “Glory, Glory, Halleluiah,” but stopped when Henry entered the yard.
�
�No need to stop,” he said. “You have a pretty good voice, in fact, although the words are a bit nasty. Anyway, I only came down from that building there to ask if you kids could tone it down some.”
They all stepped back a few feet. He smiled and tried to think of something to say that would make them trust him. His eyes settled on tough-looking girl with messy hair and holes in her socks. Has to be Sylvia, he thought, laughing to himself. And the short kid there is probably Junior. He was trying to determine which ones were Ronnie and Louie when a boy came forward and said “Yeah, and who chose you to tell us what to do—God?”
Which intolerable bastard is he? Henry thought, but said “And who might you be, my good friend?”
“I might be Ronnie Peterson, that’s who, and I’m not your good friend.” He turned around to the others and squeezed his nose, and they all laughed uneasily.
Of course. The more the boy talked and swaggered, he knew it could only be Ronnie; the one who yelled the loudest, complained the longest, had the foulest mouth, constantly tried to feel up Sylvia and was always bullying someone. How many times had he heard his ugly shrill mouth, pictured these pugnacious mannerisms. Ten pages. Ten pages at least he could be advanced in his book if it wasn’t for this one kid alone.
“Look, Ronnie…that’s your name, right? What are you—ten, eleven, twelve? So you’re old enough to understand what I mean. Because every day I’m awakened by your loud games—”
“I’m not here any morning but Saturday and Sunday, so don’t be blaming me for those other days.”
“Who’s blaming anyone? I’m just saying I’ve got a very important government night job, and sleeping Sunday morning means a lot to me.”
“Well, I don’t know, mister, because Sundays this yard’s a public playground for everybody, and today’s Sunday.”
The yard’s also part of a religious school, and because today’s Sunday you should treat it with particular respect.”
“It isn’t my school.”
“It’s others’, though—Catholic people. And it means a kind of holiness to them that took almost two thousand years to create.”
“Well, school’s closed today, so it isn’t nothing.”
That’s right,” a boy said, getting next to Ronnie.
Henry tried to put the voice and face of this boy together. Then it clicked and he blurted out “Timmy Santangelo.”
“How’d you know?” the boy said, then glanced at Ronnie. Ronnie returned his dumbfounded look.
“Don’t be surprised,” Henry said. “I’ve been hearing you kids so long, I’m bound to know your names. Let’s see now,” and he ran his finger across his bottom lip as he observed a tall thin girl. “You’re Mary,” he said, and she nodded. “Mary…? Mary…?”
“Mitchell,” she said, covering her face with her hands and giggling.
“Mary Elizabeth Mitchell.” Some of the other kids inched up as if they wanted to be identified too.
Henry pointed at one of the boys, closed his eyes and thought Who the hell could this one be? Louie? Maybe Walt, or Larry, even. He knew it’d floor them all if he could say the boy’s name when he opened his eyes.
That’s Junior, mister,” Ronnie said. “And the little shrimp next to him is Walt. And after Walt is Louie and Carole. But what do you want to know for—you a cop?”
“Far from it,” he said, wishing Ronnie had given him a few more seconds. “And also, I think I deserve something like a little more respect from you. After all,” and he stepped closer to Ronnie, who suddenly looked frightened and yelled “Run, you dumb pimps, run,” and all of them except Ronnie and Timmy took off and stopped about twenty feet away.
“Why’d you tell them to run?” Henry said. “I’m not after any of you.”
“Just take a walk, mister.”
That goes double for me,” Timmy said, catching his thumbnail under his top front teeth and snapping it at Henry.
Jesus, he thought, he’s seen cocky kids before, but these two take the limit. So what does he do now? If he turns around, they’ll jeer him till he reaches his building, and then let him have it under his window for a while, embarrassing him in front of his neighbors and of course prevent him from getting any kind of work done. All he can do is stand firm where he is and let them know he means no harm, though this time directing his entreaties to the other kids.
“Listen, boys and girls,” he yelled at them. The reason I came down here—”
“Yeah, for what?” Ronnie said.
“Was I talking to you?—The reason I came down here,” he shouted over Ronnie’s head, “was because—”
“Ah, you already said that, so stop it.”
He lunged forward, just to grab Ronnie’s arm and maybe cover his mouth till he finished what he’d started to say, but Ronnie dodged out of his reach and Henry tripped and fell. Lying on the ground, he heard the slapping of the boys’ sneakers against the asphalt as they ran to their friends. When he looked up, all of them were laughing and pointing at him. He thought he must really look a sight. What with his knees scraped and arms dirty and blood trickling out of his stinging right hand, which had broken his fall. Really looking like the prize patsy of all time. He wiped his hand with a handkerchief, dabbed the knee cuts and tied the red-blotted rag around one of them. He stood up, laughing along with the kids.
“I feel like a real kid again, with my knees scraped and all,” he said to Ronnie and Timmy, who had moved to within ten feet of him.
“Well, you don’t look like one.”
“He looks like a donkey,” Timmy said, and repeated it to the others. One of them hee-hawed back.
“Hey,” Henry said. “When I was your age we also used to give the older guys the business. But when we went too far with it we also knew they had a perfect right to pin back our ears. So how about us calling a truce now and you kids running up to Columbia Road and having a soda each on me—okay?”
The two kids smiled, “Sure, mister, anything you say,” Ronnie said, and held out his hand.
Henry reached into his pants pocket for his money clip, and when he couldn’t find it, searched through his other pockets for a spare dollar and change.
“So?” Ronnie said.
“I left my money and keys home. Usually, I never leave without them. Wait here and I’ll throw a couple of bucks down from my window.”
“Quit stalling. What you’re going to do is throw down burning hot water on us, you mean.” He waved over the others, and once together, they all laughed about something and ran to the other end of the yard.
He watched them awhile, thinking he’d give his eye teeth to know what they were saying about him. He looked at his slippers—another thing that must have seemed funny to them—tried to think of the least humiliating way of leaving the yard, and finally, with a helpless shrug of his shoulders, started for his building.
It was quiet when he got to the apartment. He cleaned his cuts, sat at his worktable and thought he’d once been very much like Ronnie and Timmy. You put up a valiant resistance—you’re the leaders, so it was expected of you in front of your friends—but once the old grouch left, it wasn’t fun to rib him anymore. So you walked away, even felt petered out by the excitement, and you forgot whatever you were arguing about with the guy.
When some kids in the yard—he didn’t bother to look outside or try to place their voices—started up again a half hour later, he decided to call it a day. He changed into slacks, put in an attaché case a box of fig newtons, cold bottle of No-Cal root beer, two books and the first thirty pages of his manuscript, and left the apartment.
He spent the next few hours in Rock Creek Park and felt unusually good there. He couldn’t quite explain why but it could have been the glowing sun, his dream-filled sleep on the cool grass, the pleasure in watching people—kids playing quietly, babies and their adoring mothers and elderly couples picnicking in the shade, and especially this beautiful girl in shorts teaching her Great Dane to hurdle benches. She was alone, lived on h
is street three blocks away, so if it wasn’t for the possible misunderstanding of her giant dog, he might have approached her. Later, while walking back from downtown where he went to the National Gallery and took in another double feature and had dinner at Scoll’s Southern-style cafeteria, his original intention just to delay his return home, he felt that today had been his best day so far in Washington. (Life in the nation’s capital around early dusk has all the tranquil flavor and drowsy lush charm of the Old South. So prepare to rest your tired feet along the Potomac, weary wanderers, and some places dip your toes in it, or take a leisurely stroll along the old C&O Canal, hearty visitors, and enjoy the most soul-stirring balminess of any city in the U.S.) And in a way this was true. He’d never liked living alone, although he understood the present necessity of it to write his books, but if there was one American city where a single man could enjoy himself—free museums, plenty of safe clean parks, ratio of single women to men around five to one, price of alcoholic beverages much cheaper than in most cities because of no state taxes—it was Washington. So really nothing should bother him again when there was so much to see and work to get done—especially not the minor annoyances of those kids outside. In the morning he’d buy a huge fan at Goodwill, close the rest of the windows and write six hours every day no matter what, have the book finished in a month and rewritten and sent off to the publisher a few weeks after that, which should be just around the time his money was running out. Then when the book was at the printers—a New York editor of a fairly large house had expressed interest in it and in fact was the one to suggest the first-person approach—he’d be off celebrating somewhere, with not a care in the world except for the forthcoming reviews and the size of his royalties, which he had a strong feeling wouldn’t be anything but very good.
He opened the door to his apartment and heard the screams of children, but thought Hell, it’s getting late, so it won’t last too long. In the bedroom where the screaming seemed even louder, he calmly took off his shoes and socks and stepped into his zoris. When he was in the kitchen getting a beer, he only found it amusing when a girl yelled hoarsely to her mother that she didn’t want to go home.
What Is All This? Page 45