When he showed his father his report card, with three Bs, his father was so thrilled with him that Terry almost jumped in and said, ‘So will you come back home, then?’ Only somehow he couldn’t say the words.
‘Missed your big chance,’ Eddie grumbled at him. Although he did not personally agree with Terry’s new image, he was involved in this campaign. His own father would never come back. ‘If he did, I’d walk out,’ he boasted.
‘There’ll be lots more chances.’ Terry was hopeful. People could get undivorced any time. His parents were just being divorced for a bit, like a vacation.
He had never earned any money, except for the odd quarters his father had paid him for doing jobs his mother said he should do for nothing; but when Randy Sparke got fed up with his newspaper route, Terry took over his job.
Three days a week, the van from the local paper dropped bundles at the drug store. Terry counted out his copies after school, slung them over his shoulder in a big orange bag, and bicycled around several streets. It was tedious work, and often wet and cold. In old movies, newspaper boys hurled rolled-up newspapers from a great distance on to porches and front paths without getting off their bikes. The Clarion prided itself on personal delivery. Terry had to get off his bike, trudge to whichever door the customer wanted him to use, ring the bell or knock, wait, sometimes for ever, until somebody opened the door, and hand over the paper with the celebrated ‘Clarion smile’. If nobody was home, you tucked the paper behind the storm door, and if there was no storm door, you put it in a plastic bag and left it on the step.
It took a long time for not much money, but secretly Terry quite enjoyed the routine and the serious purpose of it. He would not admit that to Eddie, who knew easier ways to get money.
He had to keep accounts, and have the right amount ready for the Clarion’s Mr Frazier, who called every week, counted the money with a face as if he were going to sneeze, and gave Terry his small share, which he often took round to Eddie, to see what they should do with it.
He had a lot of trouble with Mrs Jukes. She lived with ailing Mr Jukes, who was imprisoned somewhere within and could be heard calling for her feebly and without hope. Their violet-coloured house was fronted by a painfully neat garden, where the stiff bushes stood to even height, like soldiers, and the two square flower-beds had shiny metal edges round them.
For some reason, Mrs Jukes hated Terry. The first time he rang her bell, she stuck her big ugly purple head out of the back door and snarled, ‘Where’s Randy?’
‘I’m on his route now, ma’am.’
‘Why didn’t the paper tell me?’
Terry shrugged. ‘How should I know?’
‘Don’t be fresh. And don’t ring the bell again, do you hear? Never. There’s sickness here, whether you care or not. Put the paper in the mailbox.’
‘Suits me.’
Her mailbox was on a rustic post near the sidewalk. It was made like a little wooden model of her violet home, with her number on the hinged front door. On Friday, there was no money in it. Mr Frazier gave you a hard time if you didn’t collect from everybody, so Terry rang the bell.
Mrs Jukes raged and stormed. ‘I told you,’ etc., etc. Mr Jukes’s voice called very faintly, as if he were bricked up between the walls.
Terry swallowed and looked at his boots. ‘The money, ma’am.’ He kept his head down. It was raining. Water dripped off the hood of his rubber poncho. ‘I have to collect the money.’
‘Tell the Clarion to send me a bill. That’s what they did before.’
‘I don’t know nothing about that. Randy told me you paid him direct.’ ‘But it’s like blood out of a stone,’ Randy had added, ‘and she don’t tip.’
One Friday, the door of the little mailbox house was swinging on one hinge, and Mrs Jukes swore that Terry had wrecked it. She would get him fired. She’d sue the newspaper. She despised the Clarion’s politics anyway. She was going to call Terry’s mother. He was the worst boy she’d ever seen around here. She didn’t want to see his frizzy hair again (rain made Terry’s hair curlier) or his ugly grinning face (he was trying to calm her with the Clarion smile). She was cancelling the paper.
‘Suits me,’ Terry said, and ran off without collecting her week’s money.
When Mr Frazier told him he would have to go back, or pay it himself, Terry folded his arms sullenly and said, ‘No way,’ which upset Mr Frazier, tired, fussed, always in a stew about the paper carriers and their money.
‘Leave her to me,’ Eddie said, when Terry reported all this. ‘I’ll fix Mrs Pukes. Meet me at the corner around seven.’
When it was dark, Eddie stuffed paper soaked in kerosene into Mrs Jukes’s empty mailbox and set fire to it. Terry watched from the corner. It looked marvellous. Even the varnished rustic post burned up, right down to the ground.
Eddie was caught, because a neighbour saw him. A man in a car saw Terry running away from the corner, and a policeman came to his mother’s house. His father was in England, but when he came back, the whole fuss started up again.
‘I told you about Eddie,’ he said. ‘I told you to watch it. You’ve been doing so well, Terry. Why did you have to blow it?’
‘I didn’t do nothing.’
‘Anything. You’re old enough to speak properly.’
‘Didn’t do anything, Dad.’
‘Maybe not this time.’ His father brooded at him, his narrowed eyes alarmingly blue.
‘I’m sorry.’ Terry dragged that out of himself. It was no fun apologizing for nothing, but maybe it would help.
‘Just watch it, that’s all.’
‘Lay off him, Paul. He’s not a criminal.’ Terry’s mother had been giving him a hard time, until his father started.
‘You don’t keep an eye on him. You don’t know where he goes. What was he doing out there after dark anyway?’
‘Really, Paul, he’s not a baby.’
‘You’ve spoiled him enough to make him into one.’
‘I spoiled him! You’re out of your mind…’ And on and on in the front hall, until his father banged out of the house without calling goodbye to Terry, listening from the top of the stairs.
Things were desperate. After everything he’d done, working, boring himself with being good and not getting into rages, the rotten newspaper route and putting up with shit from stinkers like Mrs Jukes… His father was further away from him than ever.
There was only one thing to do. He would make the supreme sacrifice. ‘I did it for you,’ he would say, and his father would melt and smile again, and come back home. How could he resist such nobility?
Terry went to see Eddie. He was in the cellar, doing dangerous things with his chemistry set.
‘Hi!’ He looked up and grinned as Terry came slowly down the stairs. ‘C’mon and help. I’m making dynamite.’
‘You’re not.’ Terry began to back up the cellar stairs again.
‘Wish I could. We could put a bomb under Mrs Pukes’s window.’
‘The bathroom window.’
‘Inside, back of the toilet.’
‘In the toilet.’
They giggled and worked each other up as they always could together.
Then Terry stopped abruptly. ‘Look.’ He half turned away. ‘I didn’t come to fool around. I have to tell you. We can’t be friends any more.’ He had rehearsed how he would say it, strong and noble, but it came out in a rush, squeaky and feeble.
Eddie’s grin stayed on his cheeky, funny monkey face. ‘Oh, yeah?’ He grinned at Terry, waiting for the joke.
‘I mean it, Ed. This is it.’
‘Your mother said?’
‘No. I said.’
Eddie dropped the grin into a stuck-out lower lip.
‘Okay.’ He shrugged and turned back to the bench where he was mixing little piles of different coloured powder on squares of paper.
If he had raged or cursed or argued… Terry looked at the shoulders of Eddie’s torn sweater, raised towards his cup-handle ears.
‘Listen.’ Terry’s voice reached out like a groping hand. ‘I made almost three bucks last week. You can have it all, if you – ’
Eddie’s thin brown fingers moved busily, mixing the powders. Terry’s head exploded into black despair. He gave a gasp and stumbled up the stairs, dodged one of Eddie’s younger brothers and ran out of the back door and through the gap in the hedge that led towards his own street, blindly sobbing.
It was mid-term vacation, so he didn’t have to see Eddie at school. Not yet anyway. Terry hung around with some other boys, because if he stayed at home, his mother would say, ‘Given up on Eddie Waite at last. If you have nothing to do, my friend and helper, I have a hundred jobs for you.’
‘Your father called,’ she told him at supper, using that quotation-mark voice, as if Dad were not really his father, but only called himself that. ‘He wants you to call him.’
‘He still mad?’
‘He didn’t want to talk to me. He wants to talk to you.’
Terry made the call. From the depths of his unhappiness, he managed quite a sprightly, ‘What’s up, Dad?’
‘I’d like to see you. Want to come round for supper tomorrow night? I’ve got a piece of steak.’
If he was offering steak, he couldn’t be mad, so it was safe to ask, ‘Are you still mad at me?’
‘Of course not. I just want to talk to you.’
‘What about?’
‘Oh – things. My trip to England. Stuff like that.’
‘Did Mom say I could?’ The Law said that he was only supposed to be with his father one weekend in three.
‘I didn’t ask her. Get her to come to the phone.’
But she wouldn’t. ‘Go back and see what he wants, lover boy.’
‘He wants me to go round for supper tomorrow.’
‘Oh, you know? He’s supposed to check with me before he asks you.’
‘But you won’t go to the phone.’
‘But he asked you before he knew I wouldn’t.’
‘Cut it out, Mom!’ Terry screamed and stamped at her.
‘Oh, you and I understand each other, don’t we, honey?’ His mother tipped her chair backwards to put an arm round him, but he retreated to the doorway.
‘Yes or no?’ At this point he wasn’t even sure which he wanted.
‘I don’t see why not.’
‘What took so long?’ his father asked when he picked up the phone.
Terry did not say, ‘She wouldn’t talk to you.’ He would never tell either of them anything against the other, especially now when he was about to break the righteous news that was going to make everything all right again for all of them.
‘She says okay.’
He waited outside the house for his father to fetch him. He did not say anything about Eddie until they were upstairs in the apartment. It was at the top of an old bulbous-fronted yellow sandstone building at the outer end of a long avenue, that wandered through half a dozen jumbled neighbourhoods on its way into Boston.
His father’s apartment had odd-shaped rooms with funny angles and windows at the end of walls instead of in the middle, because it had been cut up from a larger one. There was not much furniture, but a lot of light and a jungle of plants clamouring to get out of the big rounded bay window. Across the broad avenue were the high brick buildings of a small college, where students went up and down the wide red steps, and hung about in groups. Between, endless traffic and the green trolley-cars sliding by below.
Terry liked the apartment and this busy view. A good place to break his sensational news. He turned indoors, and with his back to the plant forest, he called to his father.
‘By the way, Dad, I want to tell you something.’
‘What’s that?’ His father came through from the small kitchen, wiping his hands on a towel.
‘I’m not seeing Eddie now.’ Terry had his hands behind him on the edge of the windowsill, propping him up, because it was hard to say.
‘Why?’ His father came forward and sat on the arm of the sofa.
‘Oh – I don’t know. I guess I don’t like him any more.’
‘But he’s your best friend. You can’t suddenly not like him.’
‘Well, I don’t,’ Terry lied, ‘so you don’t have nothing to worry about no more.’ He deliberately said it that way, as a secret tribute to Eddie, but his father let it go.
‘I worry about you dropping him, just like that.’ He was not beaming and pleased, as Terry had planned. He was leaning forward crumpling the towel in his hands and looking serious. ‘A friend’s a friend, and Eddie’s been through a hard time, because he tried to get back at that Jukes woman for you. Okay, it was dumb and wrong, but you could say it was loyalty, I suppose. Where’s your loyalty to him?’
‘I thought you didn’t like Eddie.’
The conversation was going wildly wrong. Terry felt as if he’d been hit on the head.
‘Whether I do or I don’t is not the point. I don’t want you to be one of those fair-weather friends who takes people up and gets their trust, and then gets bored with them and skips off to the next person who beckons. Friendship is solid and real. You don’t turn it on and off like tap water.’
A lecture was the last thing Terry had expected. How could he say, ‘I did it for you! I did it so you’d see I want you to come home’? He couldn’t say anything.
He ate his steak and salad without tasting it, jaws, teeth, swallowing mechanism working by themselves, since the person who normally operated them had died. His father talked on about England, and the stuff he had bought for the store and the people he’d met and the horses he had seen, and didn’t seem to notice that Terry was a mute who could hardly hear either.
At the end, he pushed his plate away and finished his beer. Then he looked across the table at Terry and said determinedly, with a funny excited smile, not one of his wide amiable ones, ‘Now I have something important to tell you.’
‘Yeah?’ Terry did not look at him, but out of the window, at the bookshelf, at the blank television.
‘I’m going to marry again.’ Terry could feel his father watching his face. ‘Someone I met in England. Well, I’d met her before, some time ago. I’m sure this must be a shock to you, but you’ll like her, I know.’
Terry looked down. He should not have eaten the ice-cream right on top of the steak. If he threw up now, all over the rough pine table, what good would that do?
‘It won’t make any difference to you and me.’ His father reached out a hand across the table, palm curved up, and left it there, in case. ‘We’ll see just as much of each other. We’ll go off on our own and fish and walk up hills and explore and go to the movies, maybe start some riding lessons for you, how about that? And you’ll also have someone else here to have fun with. She’s longing to meet you. Her name’s Lily.’
‘Big deal.’ Of all the things Terry might have said, that was the only one he could manage.
In the car on the way home, he said two things. ‘I don’t want to have fun with her,’ and, ‘Does Mom know?’
‘Not yet. I wanted to ask you about it first, of course.’
But he had not asked. He had told.
He would never come home again.
Up in his room, Terry dropped the framed photograph of his father on the floor, put an undershirt over it to muffle the sound, and smashed into it with his baseball bat.
Never make me look at you. In the intense pain of the betrayal, Terry was as ashamed of his father as he was of himself, for betraying Eddie.
He gave up his paper route. He threw all Friday’s newspapers into Lion’s pond on a raw day when no one was about, and watched them soggily rising, like dead, bloated corpses. He stopped trying to behave well, although he had no heart for dangerous exploits, and no one to do them with, and no one to think up the great ideas, since Eddie, his leader, now had a bunch of other kids in tow at school, and was lost to him for ever.
Life was flat and shrivelled, like a burst balloon. His mother thre
atened to go into cyclical depression, and did. She gave up her part-time job and lay around a lot, or moved slowly about the house with a tan blanket over her shoulders, like a camel. Depression made her feel cold.
She hardly ever went out. She did not do her face or cook regular meals. That was okay. She gave Terry money to buy frozen dinners and french fries, but it wasn’t okay that she expected him to do more around the house, because she was ‘sick’.
Whether she ordered him irritably to run the vacuum, or wheedled him, it was just as bad.
‘Come on, lover boy. Help me out. Poor Mommy’s so sick.’
‘You’re not sick. You just need to get off your dead ass.’
It was surprising what he could get away with when she was in a camel-blanket phase.
Terry was not invited to go to England for the wedding.
‘Why didn’t he invite me?’
‘Well…’ His mother put on that small cup-shaped smile with the lips sucked in that she used for thinking about Lily. ‘I suppose he didn’t think you’d want to be asked. You wouldn’t have gone anyway, would you?’
‘Maybe.’ The actual wedding would be nothing, a lot of people in a church, dressed up, and Gramma mopping at her pale eyes. But he wanted to go to England. Everything he had heard about it attracted him; pictures he saw, old houses, greenness, weird-looking young people owning the streets of London.
‘Really, Ter? I thought you felt so terrible about it.’
‘Hunhnyah…’ Now that she was out of the depression, although she kept it by for future use, Terry felt quite close to his mother at this time, as you would with anyone with whom you were abandoned on a desert island; but he never discussed anything about his father.
What with school, and his mother taking him away at Christmas to her aunt in New York state, and then sticking rigidly to what she now called the Statutory Visiting Times, Terry did not meet Lily for quite a long time.
Dear Doctor Lily Page 8