Tommy thought Mrs. Rich Bitch looked like a movie star, with her blond head, her red lips, her negligées, furs, and jewels. He was sorry when she got mad one day and threw the fur coat in the furnace, but she had others, and she looked terrific in all of them. Mrs. Slade liked to show Tommy her clothes—she had a lot of them—and her jewelry, which glittered like no jewelry he had ever seen. She would reach into a drawer and pull out a necklace with stones the size of hazelnuts, hold it up to her throat for him to admire, and drop it on the floor, reaching for a bracelet, another necklace, a brooch.
“Are those really rubies?” Tommy asked her, staring wide-eyed at the baubles littering the floor, the dressing table, piling up on her wrists.
“Hell, yes, they’re rubies,” Mrs. Slade said. “Well, some of them are. They’re all red, anyway. And see, emeralds are green.” She pawed around in the drawer and produced a green ring, flashing it before his eyes. “That was my mother’s. She liked emeralds a lot more than she liked old Daddy.”
Tommy had never seen jewelry like that. His mother had a small pair of diamond earrings with a sapphire in the middle, a diamond arrow, and a sapphire ring that if you held it right you could see a star in it, but nothing like this. Not even Mrs. Hutchins had jewelry like this. Nobody did. Tommy thought it must be worth a fortune, and he was dazzled, not so much by the stones as by Mrs. Slade, who seemed as glamorous, as beautiful, and as rich as any movie star.
Tommy had been with Mrs. Slade the afternoon of the day David’s girl friend came to dinner, which gave him plenty of things to talk about should anyone ask him anything, which Margie finally did.
“What have you been up to today, Tommy?” Margie asked, giving him his chance.
“Mrs. Slade showed me the needle she sticks into herself,” Tommy said, full of excitement, “and she did it right while—”
“You’re not eating your carrots, Tommy,” his mother interrupted.
“Yes,” Tommy said, “she did, right in her leg, and—”
“Tommy,” his father said, “that will be all.” It was a command. His mother reached over to his plate, picked up his fork, and stuffed carrots in his mouth. “You’re not eating your carrots or your mashed potatoes. Finish your plate at once. That child,” she said to no one in particular, “is a terrible eater.”
Well, Tommy thought, it was interesting that Mrs. Slade stuck needles in herself, just like a doctor. Anyone would think so. Mrs. Slade was the most interesting person he knew, and he didn’t care what his parents thought. No one else threw a fur coat in the furnace, or fired her maid and ordered a whole staff of men in white jackets from Marshall Field’s in Chicago, but they stayed only a week or two and then Etta came back, or kept a safe on her sun porch that once he put a peanut butter sandwich in, or showed him her operation. He knew better than to mention the operation. When Tommy was in kindergarten, Mrs. Slade had gone away for a long time, to the Mayo Clinic, and when she came back her breasts were gone, or part of them anyway. Tommy didn’t know that then, but later she told him. “You never know how you feel about your tits, Tommy, until they cut ’em off,” and she opened her negligée and showed him the tubes of flesh flapping from her chest like laundry on a line. To the best of his knowledge they looked like ordinary breasts except they were a little short and had no nipples. That was when she started taking her shots. And then, when he had just started first grade, her bed caught fire and burned her. The fire department came, Mrs. Slade went to the hospital, and her bedroom had to be painted. After she came home she had to have more shots and she lay for some weeks swathed in bandages like a mummy, only her eyes peering out. She liked to have Tommy visit her then. She didn’t like the nurses, and Dr. Randolph couldn’t be there all the time. “You’ll keep me cheered up, won’t you, Tommy? A few bandages won’t bother you,” she said. The bandages didn’t bother Tommy, and he was glad that he could cheer her up. He used to see her a lot, and finally she got rid of the bandages and the nurses, and Dr. Randolph taught her how to give herself the shots. When she got better, she went to New Orleans with Dr. Randolph. Mr. Slade didn’t like to travel. As far as Tommy knew, that was the only time Mrs. Slade ever went on a trip, except to the Mayo Clinic. Right after that, Dr. Randolph went on a trip by himself, and he was gone a long time. He wasn’t even home for Christmas.
So what, Tommy wondered, had he done? It was sure he had done something, because his parents and his brother David looked very disturbed, and Margie distinctly uncomfortable. Emily started talking about college—she wondered if Margie was considering Northwestern—and his mother began to talk about what she’d read in the paper that day. She seemed to have read the whole thing. No one else said a word, and Tommy stared at his carrots, lying in a sea of sticky gravy on his plate. It made him sick when his mother mashed his food around, mixing everything up. He was always very careful to make sure the carrots never touched the potatoes, or the potatoes the meat, even though he knew they all ran together in his stomach. He didn’t like to think about that. He wanted to leave, and he asked to be excused, which he was, and he went outside to play. No one looked at his plate.
That night, when Tommy was getting ready for bed, his brother John told him some things he didn’t know about the Slades. “Mrs. Slade’s a dope fiend,” he said.
“A dope fiend,” Tommy asked—“what’s that?”
“It’s someone who takes morphine,” John said. “That’s what Mrs. Slade gives herself in the shots.”
“How do you know that?”
“Everybody knows that. Everybody knows it but nobody talks about it, except you, blabbing away in front of Margie.”
“If nobody talks about it, how does everybody know about it?” Tommy asked. “She doesn’t wear a sign.” But he knew what his brother meant. He meant it was one of those things they weren’t supposed to talk about, like Mrs. Hutchins’ twitching in the bar, as if not mentioning it meant it didn’t happen.
“Why does Mrs. Slade take morphine?” Tommy asked. It sounded delicious.
“Because she’s a dope fiend,” John said. “Sometimes you’re sure a dope. Watch out, or you’ll be a dope fiend too, or an alcoholic like Mr. Slade. They’re both drunks, just like Margie’s parents were, and Mrs. Slade’s a dope addict besides. The whole family’s crazy. Look, stop asking questions,” his brother said, “and don’t tell where you heard it.”
Tommy didn’t tell, but it certainly was interesting. It made Mrs. Slade seem even more exciting. A real dope fiend, and living right next door! Tommy could hardly wait to see her again. But at least he understood now what he’d said at dinner, and why everyone looked so stunned. He wasn’t supposed to know about Mrs. Slade’s shots; he wasn’t old enough.
The next morning his mother told him he was spending too much time at the Slades’, and he was not to play over there for a while. “It’s not a suitable place for a child your age,” she said.
That same spring, before John’s graduation but after Margie came to dinner the first time and while the house was still being redecorated, Tommy’s parents went away for a while and Mrs. Moran came to run the house and cook the meals for him and his brother David. Mrs. Moran was an old lady whose husband had been an engineer on the railroad but was now dead, and she liked to tell stories about roundhouses and cowcatchers and blizzards so thick the great headlight on the locomotive shone straight into a swirling wall of whiteness but the engine steamed through, sparks flying, pistons churning, boiler hissing. She would tell him about Pembine Junction, where the sleeping cars were switched in the middle of the night to the Chicago train, and if you weren’t in a sleeping car you had to get off that train and wait for another or else you’d end up in Minneapolis. She would tell him about riding to Trout Lake in the cab of the locomotive, and of country people flagging down the train at Engadine or Paradise Crossing; of waiting at the railroad yard for her husband’s train to pull in, and how its coming would be signaled by the clanging of its bell, and then the engine would round the bend;
and she would tell him of the sound of whistles in the night, and of their meaning. Every whistle had a meaning.
Tommy liked Mrs. Moran very much, and he was always happy when she came to stay. She smelled of face powder and talcum the way he remembered his grandmother smelling, and she never seemed to tire of playing cards with him or of telling him stories, nor did he ever tire of listening. Sometimes she would take him to see her friends, people with names like Carrie and Pearl whose husbands had also worked on the railroad but who were now widows like Mrs. Moran and Mrs. Addington, and who would give him a cookie or two to fatten him up. “Doesn’t his mother ever feed him?” one of the women asked Mrs. Moran, as if he weren’t in the room. “He’s all skin and bones. That boy must eat like a bird!” Then Tommy would remember that he didn’t like visiting, that he didn’t like dark houses with doilies on the backs and arms of chairs and under the lamps, that he liked cookies but he didn’t like being talked about as if he weren’t there, although he had grown used to it, and that it was the journey he liked, not the destination. But he didn’t let it show.
While his parents were away and Mrs. Moran was taking care of him, David got engaged to Margie. It happened in May on the big couch in their living room that his mother was getting a new slipcover for, and Tommy was all but a witness to it. Certainly he was the first to know. School had been dismissed early that day, and Mrs. Moran was going to be out until evening. Rose was supposed to fix dinner for them, but Rose was a terrible cook and Tommy hoped that David would take him out for a hamburger, which was something Tommy never got to do when his parents were home because they ate ground round and at a hamburger stand you never knew what kind of meat you might get.
Tommy ambled slowly home. It was a beautiful day. He stopped on the bridge for a while and looked over the railing at the canal swirling by below him. The canal was very dangerous; sometimes people drowned in it because the current was so swift. The canal drove the turbines that made the electricity for his father’s plant—an odd name, Tommy thought, for a place in whose dust and shadow no green thing could possibly have grown. He walked on, looking at the tulips in Mrs. Steer’s garden, shuffling along his street toward his house, happy in his own thoughts. When he came up to the porch he noticed that the mail was still in the mailbox. That was fun. Tommy loved being the first to get the mail, and he opened the box and stood on the porch sorting through the letters. Nothing for him. There never was, unless his parents sent him a postcard, which they hadn’t. Nothing for David, either—ha, ha—not even a letter from Miss Pink, the Mercurochrome lady. Of course, she hadn’t written in a long time, as far as Tommy knew. There was just the ordinary mail for his parents, which was never very interesting, and something that wasn’t ordinary. It was a letter with the strangest and most beautiful stamps on it, and more than one, too. They were not at all like ordinary stamps. Mr. Sedgwick might like these, Tommy thought. Perhaps he should show him the envelope. Mr. Sedgwick had a big stamp collection that his father had started and he had continued, adding to it as he found new stamps that he liked. Mr. Sedgwick said that it was very valuable, and he kept it locked up. Stamps were valuable, but not all stamps, just unusual stamps. Tommy wondered if these might be valuable. He thought he’d better handle the letter carefully. It was addressed to his mother, in a handwriting that Tommy didn’t recognize—it wasn’t any of his aunts’, or his brother John’s. He didn’t recognize the pictures on the stamps, either. The statue of the animal didn’t look like anything you’d find in the woods around Grande Rivière, and he had never seen a volcano. Tommy could hardly wait until they studied geography in school. That wasn’t for two more years, fourth grade, when they got to go to the second floor. Until you were in the fourth grade, you weren’t allowed on the second floor. It would be a long wait. Tommy liked geography. He had a set of books his parents had gotten, the same time they’d given him The Book of Knowledge which had a lot about astronomy. The set was called Lands and Peoples, and they were beautiful books, full of pictures of jungles and ruins, European cathedrals and villages in England, polar bears in the Arctic and penguins in Antarctica. There were pictures of Mexico, too, and these stamps said MEXICO on them. He’d have to see what it said about Mexico in his books, and look at the pictures again. He had another book about Mexico, too, and a boy named Pedro.
Tommy opened the door and threw the letters on the table in the hall with the rest of the mail they were saving for his parents. He looked into the living room and found David and Margie on the couch. “No mail for you, ha, ha,” he said. It was strange that they hadn’t even picked up the mail. He must have startled them because Margie had jumped up and was standing by the couch pulling at her sweater, and David just sat there looking irritated. Tommy forgot all about the mail. He went into the living room. There was an air of anticipation about David and Margie, and they acted as if they wanted to be rid of him, which made Tommy eager to stay. His mother would say he was being contrary. Tommy sat down on his chair, the brown silk one that his mother was going to move upstairs because it didn’t go with her new color scheme. There was nothing particular he wanted to do anyway, so he just swung his legs over the arm of the chair and leaned against the other side—he liked to sit that way when no one was there to tell him to straighten up—and he tried to get David and Margie interested in something, but there was no talking to them.
“Don’t you have some homework to do?” his brother finally asked him.
“There’s no homework in second grade,” Tommy said. “Let’s play cards.” He was giggling with excitement.
“We don’t want to play cards,” David said, sounding more annoyed. Margie was looking bored, as if at any moment she might begin to drum her polished fingernails on the table.
“Not even Fifty-two Pickup?” Tommy asked.
“No,” David said. “Hey, I almost forgot. Mrs. Randolph has something for you.”
“What?”
“A plant.”
“A plant?” Why would Mrs. Randolph have a plant for him? But it was nice of her if she did.
“It’s for Mrs. Moran,” David said. “She wants you to go over and pick up a plant for Mrs. Moran.”
“That’s funny,” said Tommy. Sometimes he thought he believed anything anyone ever told him, and at other times he didn’t believe anything. This was one of his doubtful times. It was clear, though, that there was to be no playing with David and Margie, so he finally left.
The Randolphs lived across the street. Mrs. Randolph was one of Tommy’s good friends, more predictable than Mrs. Slade, funnier than Mrs. Steer. Mrs. Randolph laughed a lot, enjoying her own jokes and encouraging his, and Tommy liked that. She and Dr. Randolph had a beautiful rose garden that they’d put in the spring before, which Tommy also liked. Their youngest son, Jimmy, was two years older than Tommy but still, if Tommy had a best friend, he supposed that Jimmy Randolph was it, despite the difference in their ages. He’d let Tommy try his bike. Like Tommy, Jimmy was a lot younger than his brothers, although he did have a sister eight years older, but she was big, too.
The Randolphs bought Cokes by the case, and even Jimmy was allowed to drink as many of them as he wanted. Dr. Randolph drank it all the time. “Two years ago I used to drink whisky by the bottle,” he would shout—he always seemed to shout—“and now I drink Coke by the case!” And straight from the bottle, too. “No,” said Tommy’s mother, who would sometimes buy Vernor’s ginger ale but not Coke, “you mustn’t drink it from the bottle. You never know whose mouth it’s been in.” She was right, of course, you never did know whose mouth it had been in, but Dr. Randolph did it and he was a doctor. Tommy didn’t care much about Vernor’s anyway, and he got all the Coke he wanted, straight from the bottle, at Dr. Randolph’s, who no longer allowed whisky or cigarettes in his house.
Dr. Randolph told his father that he should drink Coke instead of whisky, too, and stop smoking cigarettes as well, but his father wouldn’t listen to him. Dr. Randolph wasn’t his doctor, anyway; he
went to Dr. Rodgers, if he ever had to go to the doctor, and once in a while Dr. Scanlon, who was the doctor at the plant. But Tommy didn’t. He wouldn’t go to anyone but Dr. Randolph now. Once his father had taken Tommy to the plant to see Dr. Scanlon because he had a boil on his neck, and Dr. Scanlon had put him under the lamp. Dr. Scanlon was famous for his lamp, but Dr. Randolph didn’t approve of Dr. Scanlon or his lamp. Dr. Randolph didn’t approve of any other doctor. He called them all quacks, or frauds, or sons-of-bitches, or dumbbells, or tit-pinchers. “He ought to know,” Tommy had heard his father say to his mother. “There’s nobody like a reformed drinker. Any day now he’ll get religion.” But Dr. Randolph had noticed the boil on his neck, and he asked Tommy what he was doing about it. Tommy told him that Dr. Scanlon had put his lamp on it.
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