by Nick Joaquin
“Junior, I’ll kill you!”
“Will you stop that, children,” shouted their mother. “I can’t hear!”
“Bobby’s stowaway,” gloated Junior not lowering his voice.
For some reason he now had the satchel on his head and stood with one leg before the other, arms poised at his breast, the elbows crook’d: a black belter about to belch.
Sophie had stiffened up but her glitter of fury was not for the grunts of the judo expert.
“Bobby,” she keened, one hand still spread over her breast, as though the heart inside hurt, “would do anything, but anything, to destroy me! He went stowaway just to ruin my party!”
“Sophie,” yelled her mother, “didn’t I tell you—No, no, Mr. Henson, I understand perfectly. His father will be here before noon.”
At this, the two children at the breakfast table turned to look across the sweep of space that was living and dining room at their mother, in her winding sheet, perched on an edge of divan, clutching the receiver with one hand, the folds of cloth at her breast with the other, and firmly not looking toward, though facing, the banisters, over which, the two children now noted, their father leaned with careful indolence, pondering the safety razor in his hand, the cream now washed off his thin-nish, palish, still pretending face.
He was aware of their regard some time before he looked up to wink at them. They stared back, unsmiling; the maid dashed in with their chilled water and flounced out again; their mother put down the telephone.
“What’s this about before noon?” asked Totong Heredia, smiling at his wife.
“Bobby’s there, at the Hensons’.”
“Okay. So did you tell them to tell him to come home?”
“Mr. Henson is delivering him, at around eleven.”
“Why around eleven, why not right now?”
“Because Mr. Henson says so. He thinks you should be here.”
“Who’s this guy anyway giving orders—”
“Only mister lifesaver, in case you don’t know. It seems our boy has to be persuaded to come home, and Mr. Henson has volunteered. The least you can do is be here to accept delivery.”
“I can’t be home at noon, you know that.”
“And there’s the school yet. You’ll just have to drop in there and talk to them.”
“Oh sure, sure, I can take the day off. It just so happens to be our sales evaluation day.”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Totong.”
“It’s not our sales evaluation day?”
“Your son won’t come home and this man calls me up and not you. Shouldn’t this be man to man, father to father?”
“Suddenly it’s me that’s getting it. I didn’t run away. All I said was, today at the office—”
“You’re supposed to be an executive there, Tong. You don’t act like an executive. Surely they won’t all just fall apart if you took a morning off?”
“Oh no, no, darling. And all I have to do is show up there and tell the bastards I don’t feel like working today and would they please get the hell—”
“Children,” said Mrs. Heredia, “if you’ve finished breakfast—”
“No, dammit, Ineng, don’t you see? There’s this new man there, this younger man, and any time, oh, any time at all I don’t—”
“Sophie, Junior, if you’re through, wait in the driveway.”
But nobody moved. Not even the man at the banisters, head now sulkily slumped. Ineng Heredia, who had been glaring at her children, shifted impatient eyes to her husband. He sort of gave his head a shake but did not look up.
At that, as at a signal, Sophie, all this while clenching tighter, uncoiled.
“Oh, I hate you, I hate you! It’s my birthday and nobody cares! Oh, I hate you, Mommy, I hate you, Dad, I hate Bobby, I hate everyone!”
The outburst was swallowed in an intake of breath, a gasp or sob that caught in the throat and was not immediately expelled by a rush of breath. Standing there with held breath, Sophie, too, like her mother, seemed impatient, more expectant than emotional. In the pause the maid bounded in to clear the children’s end of the table. She had been with the family too long to create or prolong silences and was therefore unnerved enough by this one to stop bouncing and follow everyone’s stare at the man leaning over the banisters.
Ineng Heredia could not but burn. Having done so, she stood up, briskly if grimly, and tucking the cloth in at her breast strode to the center of the room, appearing, so imperative she looked, to be trailing more than a bedsheet.
“Sophie, I told you, wait in the driveway. No, Junior, you are to take that cat out of your bag at once. You can put on the señorito’s fish now, Inday. If the children are not to be late, Totong, shouldn’t you go and get dressed?”
The room came alive with a jerk. Junior’s cat sprang out of his satchel, spitting, and onto his shoulder, scratching. He wailed. Sophie stormed out through the kitchen, shoving Inday aside, who dropped a plate. It broke. Totong Heredia plodded back to the bathroom and, just for the heck of it, slammed the door. The wall shook. As Inday in tears threatened to depart the telephone rang again, and its start of surprise was this time even more justified. Somebody had got a wrong number today before breakfast.
• • •
The cake shop later that morning was a mother’s meet on teen-agers.
“So it’s your Bobby now, Ineng? How old is he?”
“Seventeen.”
“Welcome to the club.”
“She’s lucky. My Joey first went stowaway when he was thirteen.”
“But what makes them do it? My God, if we had at their age what we give them. My brother’s boy now, only sixteen today—the cake is for him—and he’s getting a car of his own, just to keep him in school. Your boy in school, Ineng?”
“Fourth year high.”
“Maura Cruz called me up simply hysterical yesterday morning. She lives three doors from the Heredias but she heard the shots distinctively while in the bathroom and almost fell off the you-know-what. It’s good she always leaves the door open so she can be heard—”
“Nobody,” said Ineng Heredia, leaning forward from her corner, “was hurt. Bobby was not firing at anybody.”
“What’s this about his aiming at Pompoy Morel?”
“But he didn’t fire at Pompoy.”
“Pompoy Morel,” one mother was explaining to another, “is Ed and Shirley’s boy that they left with her mother when they split. You must have noticed him, this big boy with the eyes? Handsome as the father and, I hear, just as fast.”
“What really happened,” said Ineng Heredia, smiling at her own patience, “was that Bobby’s combo was rehearsing on our piazza yesterday morning and it seems they didn’t want Pompoy there. Well, my boy is rather a practical joker and he thought he would give old Pompoy a scare by pretending to shoot at him.”
“Were you there, Ineng?”
“Why, yes, I was there.”
“Talking with the Morel boy, we hear, when your boy started shooting.”
“I didn’t know he had run in to get his father’s gun. I mean—”
Whatever suspense might have tensed was fortunately snapped by the shop’s proprietress bustling up to beg the ladies to please come and tell her pastry cook how they wanted their respective icings.
“The cats!” hissed Nena Santos. “Come on, Ineng, I’ll give you a lift.”
“My sister’s picking me up here.”
“Menchu? Is she back from abroad? Look, what did happen?”
“Nena, I wish I knew! I almost wish I had been flirting with that awful Morel boy. There would be that to see. But I swear to God I didn’t flutter an eyelash. All I did was go out there to see if they had cokes and sandwiches. I was being the good mother, you see, campaigning for her son. But Bobby, from the first moment I stepped out there, looked
at me in the oddest way. Though it’s only now I wonder about that, and how pale he became. Then, after all that shooting, I sent him to his room. I was a wreck. So I called up Father O’Brien and he said better get the boy to church. Yesterday was a Wednesday and we have this noon Mass in our parish. Bobby came with me willingly, he looked all right. We got to church some time before the Mass. So I asked him if he wanted to go to confession and he said yes. He was in the box waiting, I was watching, and when the priest opened the window Bobby jumped as though he had seen a ghost and rushed out of the church. So I ran out too and Bobby was on the steps pressing a hand to his eyes and shaking all over. I got him into a taxi and all the way home I was trying to calm him down saying Bobby this and Bobby that. And suddenly he jerked up and yelled at me: ‘I’m not Bobby, I’m not Bobby! Stop calling me Bobby!’ For a moment I wondered which of us had gone mad.”
“Now you take it easy, Ineng. Your boy’s just going through a phase.”
“I know. And Totong and I have decided the best way to handle this is by not making a fuss. Sophie’s having her party tonight as planned and I’ve convinced Pompoy Morel’s grandmother we’d all just make matters worse if we told the police.”
“The boy hasn’t come home?”
“I should have kept him in. But he looked all right at lunch, after being talked to by his father, which I made Totong do. And as I said we thought it wise to act as though nothing had happened, let him go to school as usual and all that. They had only afternoon classes yesterday. But it seems the moment he got there he insulted his professor and the principal. And the prefect of discipline.”
“My goodness!” laughed Nena Santos. “Whatever did he say?”
“They’re not things one cares to repeat,” said the prefect of discipline. “They’re bad enough but the implications are worse. Your son, Mr. Heredia, referred to certain, uh, secrets of the persons he insulted, which can only mean he had been spying on us or prying into our private lives.”
“That doesn’t sound like Bobby,” said Totong Heredia, whose concerned expression kept slipping off his face as he inhaled, in the prefect’s cubicle of an office, a lifetime’s steam of boredom, feeling again, as in baffled childhood, that what were trifles outside school walls became enormities inside them. He coughed short a yawn and suggested unthinkingly: “Couldn’t my son have been repeating what was merely common knowledge?”
The prefect flushed hard and shook with rage.
“If you’d only give me a hint of what my son is supposed to have said—”
“My lips,” said the prefect at last, grimly, and yet with a touch of coyness, “are sealed.”
All that Bobby probably said, thought Totong Heredia, nodding gravely at the prefect, is that you’re a damn old woman.
Aloud he scrupled: “But don’t you think that, if only from a sense of justice—”
“Ah, Mr. Heredia, that was why we called up your house. We wanted you to come and question the boy and decide for yourself if we be right in deciding he is not to remain in this school.”
“Yes, I know. My wife called me up to say you had called up but I couldn’t leave the office just then. Anyway she called up again to say you had called up again because the boy was gone.”
“I left him right here in this office. I had other matters to attend to. But I put him on his word of honor to stay here until you came. In this school, Mr. Heredia, we strictly adhere to the honor system.”
You bastard, thought Totong Heredia, you couldn’t bear the thought of an encore.
But it was time now (and his mouth soured with distaste) for the comedy, and he leaned toward the prefect in the attitude of one about to make a clean breast.
“Look, don’t get me wrong please, but this is man to man. You’re an educator, you’ve been with children all your life, and of course you know they are not complete in themselves. They’re also their homes, their parents, and what’s going on at the moment in their families. I’m not trying to justify my son. I’m sure he said things for which he should be punished, and punished severely. But you and I are adult, we can make allowances if we understand the background of an act. That’s what I want you to do in my son’s case.
“About a year ago I fell ill—oh, nothing serious—but it sort of slowed me down. Actually it wasn’t just the illness. We men, you know, we also reach a certain period of life when we begin to—I had turned forty then. Bobby and I used to have a pleasant, natural, spontaneous relationship, but I’m afraid I’ve been too worried of late with my own self. And I think, I just think, all this that’s happening to Bobby now, do you know, he just wants me to notice him again. But I don’t see why I’m telling you all this. You know more about these things than I do. I bet you saw through at once to what lay at the heart of the matter?”
“Well, I did take up psychology in—”
“You did? No wonder I felt at once I didn’t have to explain, thought I must say you rather scared me at first, man—but I sensed at once, I knew, you would understand.”
“Now wait, Mr. Heredia, I didn’t say—”
“Go on, please go on. I’m the father but I must confess I’m just as mixed up as the boy. Somebody has to straighten me out. I want to be told. You tell me.”
“Well—”
I’m a crook, thought Totong Heredia, oh, I’m a damn crook.
“I’ll tell you one thing, Mr. Heredia. When your boy insulted me I wasn’t really as shocked as I should have been because I was more engrossed, as a psychologist, in his emotional state. I don’t mean he was wild or violent or in any way hysterical. No, he was quite calm and he said what he said to me in a matter-of-fact manner. That should really make it worse, you know, indicating impudence and callousness, but I didn’t feel he was being brazen. What so interested me was the way he looked at me, as though he really saw—No, I can’t describe it. Nobody has looked at me that way since I was, I suppose, a baby. Were I not a psychologist I might have been terrified—”
Totong Heredia found himself trying to recall how the boy had looked at him during yesterday noon’s talk but could not remember anything peculiar, save that the boy had kept his eyes lowered most of the time, which had seemed merely natural in somebody young being talked to by authority. Or, thought Totong Heredia, with a dull ache at the heart, have I withdrawn so far I no longer see the most obvious things in those supposed to be close to me, things even outsiders like this old woman here spot at once?
“Where’s the boy now?” the prefect was asking.
“Damned,” said Totong Heredia in a burst of honesty, his paternal mission now obviously accomplished, “if I know.”
“He was at Pete Henson’s house last night,” said Sophie. “Right now where, I don’t know. Before that where, I don’t know. Stop asking where, Minnie. I am not my brother’s keeper, whatever Sister Corazon may say.”
“I think your brother’s heartless,” groaned Minnie Mota. “I’ll hate him forever for breaking my heart.”
“Oh, Bobby’s a jerk. You couldn’t hate him more than I do. I wish you’d try and stop crying here, my God. And don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“Have you got a coin, Sophie? Have they got ‘In Despair’ on this jukebox?”
The waiter set down their banana floats.
“If your heart’s broken,” observed Sophie curiously, “how can you eat all that?”
“I’m learning alraydy . . . It’s life, Sophie, it’s fate. Look, they didn’t put enough chocolate sauce in this.”
They were the same age, fifteen, but Minnie was ahead by being in love. This was, to Sophie, no progress. Sophie’s boy friends were furniture: what you had to have on outings, in basketball games, at dances, and to make your mark in society. But she couldn’t see herself falling in love with any of them, let alone liking them. In fact, she loathed most of them, and the few she didn’t loathe she despised. Boys were filthy, s
melly, sneaky, wild, corny, cowardly things. And dirty-minded, my God. How one’s best friend Minnie could have fallen for one’s brother Bobby, who was filthier, smellier, sneakier, wilder, cornier, cowardlier and dirtier-minded than any of them, was beyond Sophie. She gazed on her poor friend with rather contemptuous pity.
“So what did he do to you?”
“Oh Sophie, I am ashamed, I can’t talk about it! He was supposed to take me and Glo Ramos to a movie at 5 P.M. yesterday and Glo and I waited and waited and when it looked like he was going to injun us he showed up and right away he said how come Glo had so much hair at her age, did she keep shaving it off, and she slapped him and swore at me and left. So I asked him why did he do that and he said this is it, I’ve been kicked out of school. And I said what for and he said because I looked at them and saw.”
“He said that? How did he look?”
“Just like always, I think. He wore—”
“I mean, at you.”
“Oh, the way he always looks at me, maybe more so. Why?”
“I could have killed him the way he looked at me at lunch yesterday.”
“Did he really try to kill Pompoy Morel?”
“I hope he hangs.”
“Yes, he said he might have to go to jail. And I said so what, most boys I knew went to jail and I was willing to wait for him no matter how long because I loved him. You know what he did? He sneered in my face. He said what did I know about love, I was still stuck together like a Band-Aid. And other horrible things. Oh, Sophie, I’m dead alraydy!”
“I’m not. I’m going to have another float.”
“Yes, let’s. Look, I’m paying. This is my treat, remember? Happy birthday again, Sophie. And then I’ll take you home. You sure Mr. Henson said around eleven?”
“I thought you never wanted to see Bobby again?”
• • •
“Maybe he’s deadball already,” gasped Junior. “You fellows really saw the blood?”
“Pare, your brother was flat on the ground and that wasn’t ketchup on his face.”