Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  “Only if you knew where to look,” Tommy said.

  “What was the matter with you Friday?” his mother asked.

  “Matter? Nothing was the matter,” Tommy said. “What do you mean?”

  “Ophelia asked about you last night. She said you’d called the club after school and told her you were sick.”

  “Oh,” Tommy said. “Oh, yes. I forgot. I guess I wasn’t feeling good. Ophelia made me a chicken sandwich and Mrs. Steer brought it home. I think I had a headache, that’s all. It wasn’t anything.”

  “Then why did you call?”

  “Because I wanted you to come home,” Tommy said, “but you’d already gone.”

  That afternoon his mother played the piano for a long time, and Tommy played by himself in his room and at his desk. He was having a good time. He liked playing by himself, and he loved hearing his mother at the piano, the music floating up the stairway, filling the house. After she had played a very long time—she played all of Kinderszenen twice and a lot of other pieces Tommy didn’t know, and it was beginning to get dark—the music stopped. There was silence downstairs. After a time, he heard his mother’s footsteps on the stairway.

  She stopped at his desk where he was playing. “Come into my room, Tommy, I want to rock you. Wouldn’t that be nice? Just like we used to do, when you were very young, when you were the sweetest, most adorable boy.” She took him by the hand. Together they walked into her room. She pulled the shades and the curtains, then sat down in the big rocker. “Wouldn’t that be nice?” She opened her arms to him. Tommy snuggled into her lap. It was harder to fit now. His legs were getting longer. “We’ll pretend there’s a blackboard,” his mother said, “we’ll pretend the mirror is a blackboard”—Tommy looked at the mirror—“and we’ll pretend there’s an eraser, and we’ll take that eraser and we’ll erase every meanness, every mean thing, every sad thing, every bad thing, and they will all be gone forever.” Tommy looked at the mirror. The room was dim. There were no lamps burning. The light from the hall was the only light, that and the last traces of the day fading at the edges of the curtains, where the curtains met the wall. “Like that,” his mother said, holding him in her arms. “Just like that. So simple. See, Tommy, wasn’t it simple?”

  “Yes,” Tommy said, entering into her game and settling deeper into her arms. “Yes, it was simple.” His head rested on her shoulder, his face in the soft flesh of her neck. He smelled her warm smell, and he was aware of something else, too, in his nostrils. Oh, yes, it was the faint odor of the cleaning fluid she had used that day. His mother rocked slowly in the chair and Tommy succumbed to the motion, content in his mother’s warmth. He thought of something Jimmy Randolph had told him: that babies come into the world covered with blood. That was a strange and ugly notion. Jimmy could have made it up. Still, his father was a doctor and sometimes Jimmy knew things that other children didn’t. He’d seen pictures, he said, in the medical books they weren’t allowed to look at, and the babies were covered with blood. Why would that be, Tommy wondered drowsily, and why had that thought come into his mind, but his mind, full of love, floated on to other things. “When I grow up,” he said, “I’m going to marry you.” His mother laughed and hugged him close. “No,” she said, “you won’t want to do that. You can’t do that,” she said softly. “Well,” Tommy said, “if I can’t marry you, I won’t marry anyone.”

  “You’ll change your mind,” his mother told him. “You’ll forget all this.” No, Tommy thought, he wouldn’t forget; he wouldn’t change his mind. “Mr. Wolfe didn’t,” he said. His mother gave him an odd look. “Tommy,” she said, “when you’re a fine young man you’ll find a girl—a nice girl—and you’ll forget all about your mother. You’ll fall in love, and you’ll want to marry her, and you will. And then someday you’ll have a little boy, a lovely little boy of your own, and you’ll love him very much.”

  “Like Daddy,” Tommy asked.

  “Yes, like Daddy,” she said, and began to sing her lullaby: “Bye baby bunting, Daddy’s gone a-hunting, Gone to get a rabbit skin to wrap my baby bunting in.” Tommy wondered if his father loved him that much. “And then you’ll settle down in a house of your own and live happily ever after.”

  “Like you and Daddy?”

  “Yes, like me and Daddy.”

  “But you and Daddy settled down in Grandma’s house. It wasn’t a house of your own.”

  “We tried to make it our own,” she said. His mother gazed across the room, but there was nothing there. “Someday,” she said, “you’ll understand about love, and about what it means. You’ll know it when it happens, and you won’t be able to help it. You won’t want to help it. Life is very lonely without it, and cold. She paused for a moment. “I can’t really explain it. It’s a mystery that I cannot explain.”

  Tommy heard the wind whistling around the corner of the house. “It’s going to be a blustery night,” his mother said. “You know what they say about March: it comes in like a lion and goes out like a lamb—and it’s acting like a lion tonight.” The curtains trembled and parted in the draft from the window. It was almost as if an invisible hand had reached in from outdoors, parting the curtains momentarily, disclosing a glimpse of a vista, before the hand released them and the curtains fell back into their accustomed folds. Tommy watched the curtains. They continued to move, to ripple with the barest perceptible motion, in the currents of air. His mind drifted to the book Mrs. Steer was reading. Anticipating the Eventual Emergence of Form. A strange name for a book.

  “It’ll be a good night for popcorn, don’t you think?”

  Tommy had hoped his mother would say that. “Yes,” he said. “Will you make some and we can have popcorn and milk for supper? That would be fun. We could have a fire.”

  “We’ll have popcorn by the fire,” his mother said. She rocked him a little longer, in silence, before they both went downstairs to the kitchen, where Tommy helped his mother make the popcorn. She let him shake the kettle. “Oh, Tommy,” she said, “I meant to tell you.”

  “What?”

  “About that silly business last night. It sounds so silly that I would have forgotten my key and that the night I did, that you would have locked the door.”

  “But, but—”

  “Everyone would think I was very foolish if they knew about that, and especially if they thought I had to use a ladder to break into my own house. Don’t tell anyone. I’d be embarrassed.”

  “But Mother,” Tommy said. He could feel the flush rising to his cheeks. “But Mother—”

  “No ‘buts,’” his mother said. “No ‘buts,’ just a promise.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “Okay.”

  Tommy continued shaking the kettle while his mother went into the living room to light the fire. By the time the popcorn was finished, and his mother had put it into the big bowl and melted the butter for it and salted it and shaken it up so that everything would be mixed, the fire was blazing in the fireplace. He and his mother sat beside it with their milk and their bowls of popcorn, and they had a nice time before Tommy had to go to bed.

  “That was a nice evening, Tommy,” his mother said, “a lovely, nice family day and evening, just as we’d planned.”

  “Yes,” Tommy agreed, kissing her good night, “it was.”

  Tommy’s father would be home soon. The damage to the Number One furnace had been repaired and the transformer rebuilt, but they couldn’t start it, David said, until his father had inspected everything very closely and was standing by to supervise the slow, difficult process of heating it up. David had returned from Chicago the first of the week and told everyone that he would be going back to college in the fall, which was a great relief to Tommy’s mother, and to his father too, when she told him over the telephone. David had brought him a present, a windbreaker jacket from Marshall Field’s for his birthday. It was a really good one, as good as David’s own. David might have been extravagant, but he could be really nice, too. Tommy’s father couldn’t get ho
me for his birthday. He was supposed to be home, and he tried, but he’d called two days before to say that he wouldn’t make it.

  Tommy’s birthday was just a small family party, an early supper. Mrs. Steer and Amy were there, and Mrs. Randolph and Jimmy; his brother David, and his mother, too, of course. She had made the angel-food cake and frosted it with lemon frosting and put nine candles on it, the ninth for him to grow on. Because he was so excited, his mother let him open his gifts at the table before they ate. They all sat at the big table in the dining room, Tommy at the head of it, unwrapping his gifts: the windbreaker from David and the beautiful box of crayons, Binny & Smith Crayolas, that his brother John had sent him in the mail from college. There were more colors in the box than Tommy knew existed. How did John know he’d wanted a big box of crayons, not one with only eight colors in it? Jimmy Randolph and his mother gave him an Erector Set like Jimmy’s, which Tommy knew would be a lot of fun—he liked putting things together—and Mrs. Randolph gave him a separate card with a message that she’d printed on it: “I.O.U. 6 COKES,” and there were six slips of paper in the card with “GOOD FOR 1 COKE, PAYABLE ON DEMAND” on each of them. Tommy was delighted with that. It would be like a game. He would give Mrs. Randolph the piece of paper and she would give him a Coke. Tommy laughed and showed everybody. Mrs. Randolph didn’t know that he didn’t drink Cokes at home, only Vernor’s ginger ale and not very often at that. But his mother smiled at the card and didn’t say anything. She was being very nice to Tommy and hardly ever got mad at him these days, no matter what he did. There was just one present from Mrs. Steer and Amy together. It was a small telescope that collapsed into itself but that extended quite a ways when you pulled it out. Tommy opened it and peered through it. He couldn’t see anything. “It takes practice,” Mrs. Steer said. “It’s just a beginner’s telescope, Tommy, but it works. You’ll be able to see things through it that are hidden from the naked eye. You just have to have some idea of what you’re looking for, and then it will bring that thing close so you can see it clearly. Point it out your bedroom window at the sky some night, point it at the Milky Way, and you’ll be surprised at what you’ll see.”

  David said, “That kid sees too much already,” and everybody laughed. Tommy liked the telescope. He turned it over in his hands, looked at the small gleaming eyepiece and at the larger lens at the other end. It was an interesting gift and unusual, just what Mrs. Steer would pick. She knew he was interested in astronomy.

  He saved his mother’s gift for the last. It came in a long slender box, about the size of Mrs. Steer’s. Tommy could tell that his mother had wrapped it herself, using the paper ribbons that you curled with the back of the scissors. He untied the ribbons and opened the box. It looked just like the telescope Mrs. Steer and Amy had given him, only the telescope was black and this was brightly colored, as if it had been sprinkled with confetti. Tommy picked it up. He didn’t know what it was. “Look through it, Tommy,” his mother said, “and point it toward the light. Close your other eye.” Tommy did. He saw tiny brilliant bits of color, as many colors as there were in John’s box of crayons. More. “Now turn it,” she said, and as Tommy did the colors began to flow and form new patterns and new shapes, beautiful patterns and shapes in all the colors of the rainbow, and as he turned the cylinder the old pattern dissolved and a new one took its place in an endless succession of combinations. It was fascinating, and it was beautiful. It reminded Tommy of the amethyst at the bottom of his mother’s jewelry drawer, and of the many colors he saw there when he put it to his eye. “It’s called a kaleidoscope,” she said.

  “I love it,” Tommy said. “Thank you, Mommy.” How funny, he thought, that both Mrs. Steer and his mother had given him something to look through, and that his mother’s was pretty and Mrs. Steer’s was plain. Actually, though, he realized, you didn’t look through the gift his mother had given him; you just looked into it and watched it do its magical things. He would have to learn to look through Mrs. Steer’s. He passed the kaleidoscope around the table, and while everyone took turns playing with it he turned away from the table and pointed the lens of the telescope out the window toward the thornapple thicket and the Slades’ house.

  “Everything is still blurred,” he said.

  “You have to focus it,” Mrs. Steer said, and she showed him how to turn it until things were clearer, and they did become clearer—not perfectly clear, but clearer than they had been.

  “Isn’t it funny that both of you gave me something interesting to look through,” Tommy said.

  “It’s quite a coincidence,” Mrs. Steer said.

  “What’s a coincidence?”

  “It’s when two things happen by chance at the same time,” his mother said. “Let me see if I can think of an example.” She thought for a moment. “Well,” she said, “if David were thinking of Margie,” and she laughed and looked at David, “and Margie suddenly showed up at the door, that would be a coincidence.”

  “I get it,” Tommy said, and Rose began serving their supper. Tommy was just thinking he was hungry, so it was a coincidence.

  They were finishing their meal—creamed chicken on toast, which Tommy liked—when the telephone rang. His mother answered and said it was long distance, for him, that the operator was asking for him by name. It was the first time in his life that he’d ever gotten a long-distance call, and he was very excited. He ran to the telephone. “Hello,” he said. The operator’s voice said, “Is this Andrew Thomas MacAllister?”—she used his whole name—and Tommy said, “Yes, it is,” and the operator said, “I have a person-to-person call for you from New York City. Go ahead, please.” There was some crackling on the line and then Tommy heard his father’s voice. That’s a coincidence, Tommy thought. Then he realized his father was trying to sing. “Happy birthday to you.” It was his father’s funny voice. “Happy birthday to you.” He went through the whole song, “Happy birthday, dear Tommy, happy birthday to you.” Tommy liked hearing his father’s voice; he knew how much he hated to sing.

  “I got a whole lot of presents,” Tommy said. “I got a telescope and an Erector Set and a kaleidoscope. And David gave me a windbreaker, and Daddy, John sent me a huge box of crayons from college! Daddy,” he said, “it’s the biggest box of crayons I’ve ever seen. There are forty-eight colors in it!”

  “That will give you a lot of choices,” his father said. “What will you do with forty-eight crayons?”

  “I’m going to lock them up in my desk drawer,” Tommy said.

  His father laughed. “I guess you want to make sure that nobody steals them,” he said. “It sounds as if they’ll be pretty safe, if you hold on to the key.” Then he asked if David was behaving himself. That was a joke, because he knew that David was always teasing him. “Are you taking good care of your mother?” he asked him.

  “Oh, yes,” Tommy said, “I’m trying to. But Daddy,” he said, “I’m only just eight.”

  “It’s never too early to start,” his father said, and then he asked him if he’d blown out all the candles on his cake.

  “We haven’t had the cake yet,” Tommy said. “We’re just finishing dinner.”

  “Don’t forget to make a wish,” his father said, and then he said goodbye. “I love you,” he said. “Goodbye.” He didn’t even ask to talk to anyone else; the call was just for him.

  When Tommy returned to the table, Rose and his mother had already cleared it and they were in the kitchen with the door shut. When it opened, his mother came in bearing the cake with its candles burning, the flames pale in the slanting afternoon light. She was singing “Happy birthday” and everyone joined in, even Rose, and then Tommy blew out the candles and took them off the cake and cut the first slice. His mother cut the rest. He couldn’t do it too neatly, and it was hard to get the cake onto the plate without spilling. Rose passed the plates as his mother filled them, and everyone had a piece, Rose too, who stood eating by the sideboard, the plate in her hand. “That’s a good cake,” she said, and ev
eryone agreed. Tommy loved it. He and Jimmy and Amy and Rose had another piece, and then Jimmy and his mother went home. Jimmy had homework to do.

  They were still sitting at the table when the doorbell rang a few minutes later. It was Mr. Wolfe. He’d come over for his piece of cake. He had a present, too, and he handed Tommy a small box wrapped in white tissue paper and tied with a green ribbon. Tommy wondered who had wrapped it. “I wrapped it myself,” Mr. Wolfe said. Well, Mr. Wolfe was a pretty good wrapper, Tommy thought; it looked perfectly fine. He opened the box and inside was a stack of silver, eight silver dollars—Tommy counted them—one for each year of his life.

  “Look at the dates, Tommy,” Mr. Wolfe said. He picked the one from the bottom and showed him the year, 1931.

  “That’s the year I was born,” Tommy said. He looked at the others and saw that each was different, that they were stacked in order from the year of his birth and they went up to 1939, skipping 1938 because Mr. Wolfe had already given him a 1938 dollar for Christmas. Tommy laid each one out before him. They were Canadian, just like the other one, and like that other one, they’d been struck from Mr. Wolfe’s own silver. That’s what he said. Tommy had never had so much money in his life. Eight whole dollars; nine, counting the one upstairs. What would he do with them? How would he spend them?

  “Have fun with them, Tommy,” Mr. Wolfe said. “There’ll always be more.”

  “Ah, the sweet solipsism of youth,” Mrs. Steer said. “They think that no matter what they spend, their resources are never depleted.” That was Mrs. Steer, all right. Tommy didn’t know what “solipsism” meant, and he bet no one else did either, not even his mother. He’d have to ask Mrs. Steer when they were alone.