When we got to the water Paul said, “That’s funny, there’s usually a little boat here the kids use to get out to the island.”
I was looking at the island, and I saw the skiff tied to a bush at the edge of the water. It looked like the same one we had used when I was a kid myself, and who knows, maybe it was. The island itself interested me more. It was a good deal closer to shore—in fact, the Kanakessee was a good deal narrower—than I had remembered, but I had expected that since everything in Cassonsville was smaller including the town itself. What surprised me was that the island was bigger, if anything. There was a high point, almost a hill, in the center that sloped down and then up to a bluff on the upstream end, and trailed a long piece of wasteland downstream. Altogether it must have covered four or five acres.
In a few minutes we saw a boy on the island, and Paul yelled across the water for him to row the boat over to us. He did, and Paul rowed the three of us back. I remember I was afraid the little skiff would founder under the load; the silent water was no more than an inch from pouring over the sides, despite the boy’s bailing with a rusty can to lighten the boat of its bilge.
On the island we found three more boys, including Peter. There were some wooden swords, made by nailing a short slat crosswise to a longer, thrust into the ground; but none of the boys were holding them. Seeing Peter there, just as he used to be when I was a kid myself, made me search the faces of the other boys to see if I could find someone else I had known among them. I couldn’t; they were just ordinary kids. What I am trying to say is that I felt too tall out here to be a real person, and out of place in the only place where I really wanted to be. Maybe it was because the boys were sulky, angry at having their game interrupted and afraid of being laughed at. Maybe it was because every tree and rock and bush and berry tangle was familiar and unaltered—but unremembered before I saw it.
From the bank the island had seemed nearer, though larger, than I recalled. Now, somehow, there was much more water between it and the shore. The illusion was so odd that I tapped Paul on the shoulder and said, “I’ll bet you can’t throw a rock from here to the other side.”
He grinned at me and said, “What’ll you bet?”
Peter said, “He can’t do it. Nobody can.” It was the first time any of the boys had spoken above a mumble.
I had been planning to pay for Paul’s gasoline anyway, so I said that if he did it I’d get his tank filled at the first station we came to on the way home.
The stone arced out and out until it seemed more like an arrow than a pebble, and at last dropped into the water with a splash. As nearly as I could judge it was still about thirty feet from the bank.
“There,” Paul said, “I told you I could do it.”
“I thought it dropped short,” I said.
“The sun must have been in your eyes.” Paul sounded positive. “It dropped four foot up the bank.” Picking up another rock, he tossed it confidently from one hand to the other. “If you want me to, I’ll do it over.”
For a second I couldn’t believe my ears. Paul hadn’t struck me as someone who would try to collect a bet he hadn’t won. I looked at the four boys. Usually there’s nothing that will fire up a boy like a bet or the offer of a prize, but these still resented our intrusion too much to talk. All of them were looking at Paul, however, with the deep contempt a normal kid feels for a welcher.
I said, “O.K., you won,” to Paul and got a boy to come with us in the skiff so he could row it back.
When we reached the car, Paul mentioned that there was a baseball game that afternoon, Class “A” ball, at the county seat; so we drove over and watched the game. That is, I sat and stared at the field, but when it was over I couldn’t have told you whether the final score was nothing to nothing or twenty to five. On the way home I bought Paul’s gas.
It was suppertime when we got back, and after supper Paul and Papa Palmieri and I sat out on the porch and drank cans of beer. We talked baseball for a little while, then Paul left. I told Papa a few stories about Paul hanging around with us older kids when he was small, then about me fighting with Peter over the frog, and waited for him to correct me.
He sat without speaking for a long time. Finally I said, “What’s the matter?”
He re-lit his cigar and said, “You know all about it.” It wasn’t a question.
I told him I didn’t really know anything about it, but that up to that minute I was beginning to think I was losing my mind.
He said, “You want to hear?” His voice was completely mechanical except for the trace of Italian accent. I said I did.
“Mama and me came here from Chicago when Maria was just a little baby, you know?”
I told him I had heard something about it.
“I have a good job, that’s why we come to this town. Foreman at the brick works.”
I said I knew that too. He had held that job while I was a kid in Cassonsville.
“We rented a little white house down on Front Street, and unpacked our stuff. Even bought some new. Everybody knew I had a good job; my credit was good. We’d been in the town couple months, I guess, when I came home from work one night and find Mama and the baby with this strange boy. Mama’s holding little Maria in her lap and saying, ‘Look there, Maria, that’s-a your big brother.’ I think maybe Mama’s gone crazy, or playing a joke on me, or something. That night the kids eat with us like there was nothing strange at all.”
“What did you do?” I asked him.
“I didn’t do nothing. Nine times outa ten that’s the best thing you can do. I wait and keep my eyes open. Night time comes and the boy goes to a little room upstairs we weren’t going to use and goes to sleep. He’s got an army cot there, clothes in the closet, school books, everything. Mama says we ought to get him a real bed soon when she sees me looking in there.”
“Was Mama the only one . . . ?”
Papa lit a fresh cigar and I realized that it was growing dark and that both of us had been pitching our voices lower than usual.
“Everybody,” Papa said. “The next day after work I go to the nuns at the school. I think I’ll tell them what he looks like; maybe they know who he is.”
“What did they say?” I asked him.
“They say, ‘Oh, you’re Peter Palmieri’s papa, he’s such a nice boy,’ soon’s I tell them who I am. Everybody’s like that.” He was silent for a long time, then he added, “When my Papa writes next from the old country he says, ‘How’s my little Peter?’“
“That was all there was to it?”
The old man nodded. “He stays with us, and he’s a good boy—better than Paul or Maria. But he never grows up. First he’s Maria’s big brother. Then he’s her twin brother. Then little brother. Now he’s Paul’s little brother. Pretty soon he’ll be too young to belong to Mama and me and then he’ll leave, I think. You’re the only one besides me who ever noticed. You played with them when you’re a kid, huh?”
I told him, “Yes.”
We sat on the porch for a half hour or so longer, but neither of us wanted to talk any more. When I got up to leave Papa said, “One thing. Three times I get holy water from the priest an’ pour it on him while he sleeps. Nothing happens, no blisters, no screaming, nothing.”
The next day was Sunday. I put on my best clothes, a clean sport shirt and good slacks, and hitched a ride to town with a truck driver who’d stopped for an early coffee at the cafe. I knew the nuns at Immaculate Conception would all go to the first couple of masses at the church, but since I had wanted to get away from the motel before the Palmieris grabbed me to go with them I had to leave early. I spent three hours loafing about the town—everything was closed—then went to the little convent and rang the bell.
A young nun I had never seen before answered and took me to see the Mother Superior, and it turned out to be Sister Leona, who had taught the third grade. She hadn’t changed much; nuns don’t, it’s the covered hair and never wearing makeup, I think. Anyway, as soon as I saw her I rememb
ered her as though I had just left her class, but I don’t think she placed me, even though I told her who I was. When I was through explaining I asked her to let me see the records on Peter Palmieri, and she wouldn’t. I’d wanted to see if they could possibly have a whole file drawer of cards and reports going back twenty years or more on one boy, but though I pleaded and yelled and finally threatened she kept saying that each student’s records were confidential and could be shown only with the parent’s permission.
Then I changed my tactics. I remembered perfectly well that when we were in the fourth grade a class picture had been taken. I could even recall the day, how hot it was, and how the photographer had ducked in and out of his cloth, looking like a bent-over nun when he was aiming the camera. I asked Sister Leona if I could look at that. She hesitated a minute and then agreed and had the young sister bring a big album that she told me had all the class pictures since the school was founded. I asked for the fourth grade of nineteen forty-four and after some shuffling she found it.
We were ranged in alternate columns of boys and girls, just as I had remembered. Each boy had a girl on either side of him but another boy in front and in back. Peter, I was certain, had stood directly behind me one step higher on the school steps, and though I couldn’t think of their names I recalled the faces of the girls to my right and left perfectly.
The picture was a little dim and faded now, and having seen the school building on my way to the convent I was surprised at how much newer it had looked then. I found the spot where I had stood, second row from the back and about three spaces over from our teacher Sister Therese, but my face wasn’t there. Between the two girls, tiny in the photograph, was the sharp, dark face of Peter Palmieri. No one stood behind him, and the boy in front was Ernie Cotha. I ran my eyes over the list of names at the bottom of the picture and his name was there, but mine was not.
I don’t know what I said to Sister Leona or how I got out of the convent. I only remember walking very fast through the almost empty Sunday-morning streets until the sign in front of the newspaper office caught my eye. The sun was reflected from the gilded lettering and the plate glass window in a blinding glare, but I could see dimly the figures of two men moving about inside. I kicked the door until one of them opened it and let me into the ink-scented room. I didn’t recognize either of them, yet the expectancy of the silent, oiled presses in back was as familiar as anything in Cassonsville, unchanged since I had come in with my father to buy the ad to sell our place.
I was too tired to fence with them. Something had been taken out of me in the convent and I could feel my empty belly with a little sour coffee in it. I said, “Listen to me please, sir. There was a boy named Pete Palmer; he was born in this town. He stayed behind when the prisoners were exchanged at Panmunjom and went to Red China and worked in a textile mill there. They sent him to prison when he came back. He’d changed his name after he left here, but that wouldn’t make any difference; there’ll be a lot about him because he was a local boy. Can I look in your files under August and September of 1959? Please?”
They looked at each other and then at me. One was an old man with badly fitting false teeth and a green eye-shade like a movie newspaperman; the other was fat and tough looking with dull, stupid eyes. Finally the old man said, “There wasn’t no Cassonsville boy stayed with the Communists. I’da remembered a thing like that.”
I said, “Can I look, please?”
He shrugged his shoulders. “It’s fifty cents an hour to use them files, and you can’t tear out nothing or take nothing out with you, understand?”
I gave him two quarters and he led me back to the morgue. There was nothing, nothing at all. There was nothing for 1953 when the exchange had taken place either. I tried to look up my birth announcement then, but there were no files before 1945; the old man out front said they’d been “burnt up when the old shop burned.”
I went outside then and stood in the sun awhile. Then I went back to the motel and got my bag and went out to the island. There were no kids this time; it was very lonely and very peaceful. I poked around a bit and found this cave on the south side, then lay down on the grass and smoked my last two cigarettes and listened to the river and looked up at the sky. Before I knew it, it had started to get dark and I knew I’d better begin the trip home. When it was too dark to see the bank across the river I went into this cave to sleep.
I think I had really known from the first that I was never going to leave the island again. The next morning I untied the skiff and let it drift away on the current, though I knew the boys would find it hung up on some snag and bring it back.
How do I live? People bring me things, and I do a good deal of fishing—even through the ice in winter. Then there are blackberries and walnuts here on the island. I think a lot, and if you do that right it’s better than the things people who come to see me sometimes tell me they couldn’t do without.
You’d be surprised at how many do come to talk to me. One or two almost every week. They bring me fishhooks and sometimes a blanket or a sack of potatoes and some of them tell me they wish to God they were me.
The boys still come, of course. I wasn’t counting them when I said one or two people. Papa was wrong. Peter still has the same last name as always and I guess now he always will, but the boys don’t call him by it much.
<
* * * *
In 1966 I was privileged to be one of the judges of a computer story contest sponsored by Data Processing magazine. The stories were all interesting, although most of them were unprofessionally written; some were very good, and as a group they presented a remarkably unanimous picture of the near future. (A computerized bureaucracy is going to run our lives, and there isn’t a damn thing we can do about it.)
Doris Buck, is a prime exhibit in my gallery of writers who have never grown up. Although she is a grandmother, well into the age of discretion, she is one of the least bored people I know; she is alert, interested, full of enthusiasm. (And her husband, Richard S. Buck, who is in his seventies and has a white beard to prove it, is just the same.)
The author did not enter this story in the computer contest, although I urged her to (she said she would rather sell it toOrbit, bless her heart); but in my opinion it is better than any of the winners, as well as much funnier.
* * * *
Why They Mobbed The White House
by Doris Pitkin Buck
“Hubert was glad he lived in an age when they still had jet transport. The big tunnels got you across the continent faster, but the two-hour jet trip gave you a chance to enjoy the landscape. And Lila loved to hear his description of the Rockies that looked for the whole of their length like a shelf canted over toward the west. Hubert and Lila planned to vacation there sometime. He saved up his credits conscientiously. But Lila’s health had been unpredictable ever since Hubert had volunteered for the late East Asian War.
“Even when Hubert topped his Congressional Medal of Honor and won the Legion of Purity’s Silver Halo for being the only private in the entire Third Expeditionary Force never to have entered a hot spot in Singapore, Saigon, Shanghai or Tokyo, Lila still showed vague, distressing symptoms. When more decorations were showered on him, she’d take days off from the family record-keeping that had once been Hubert’s chore. She’d spend this free time writing ecstatic letters. The itches, the spots, the hive-like bumps, the vein distensions with their sub-aches let up temporarily. But once she was back at the usual secretarial-computation routine that had succeeded housework as the Number One domestic bane, she was as physically wretched as ever, even in her pride.
“Hubert, who worshiped her as Arthurian knights adored their ladies, put a great deal of thought on her problem. If she met him on his return from business trips, an opaque veil over her once pert nose and swollen coralline mouth, Hubert saddened. He had imagination. He realized what having to hide her face meant to Lila. He kissed her on the temple. Even with this Victorian salutation, Hubert would feel Lila ca
tch her breath. It drew a little of the veil right into her mouth. They tried to laugh that off as something comic. But their eyes moistened with the tragedy of it.
“When Hubert reached his house after this business trip, Lila could not get out of bed. Her ankles were dropsical with edema. Far worse, her eyes were swollen shut. But this time her mouth was visible. Her rosy lips under her temporarily sightless eyes murmured, ‘Darling, do you know what day it is?’
“Hubert searched his prodigious memory for a forgotten anniversary. He knew perfectly well the day was April 7. But they’d been married in June. They were engaged on Valentine’s Day. They had both been born on September 9. It wasn’t Mother’s Day. It wasn’t Father’s Day. It wasn’t Remember-the-Grandparents Day. Nor Armistice Day. Nor Unknown Soldier’s Day. Nor Adopt-a-Veteran Day. Nor Corsage Day. Nor Let’s-Eat-Out Day. Nor National Safety Day. It was only April 7, which had the distinction of being no particular day.
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