Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  Tommy piled up the coins again, in order from 1931. They made a neat little stack. “Maybe your mother will take you to Canada soon,” Mr. Wolfe said, “and you can spend them there.”

  “Wouldn’t that be fun?” his mother said.

  “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “I think I may keep them. I like them. Thanks, Mr. Wolfe. Thank you very much.”

  Everyone left a little while later, and a while after that Tommy carried his presents upstairs. He put his telescope and the kaleidoscope on top of his dresser, next to his front window. He slipped the crayons into his desk drawer and locked it, and he put the stack of silver dollars on his windowsill, next to the one Mr. Wolfe had given him for Christmas.

  “Aren’t you going to keep them in your desk?” his mother asked when she was tucking him in for the night.

  “No,” Tommy said. “I like to look at them. They shine in the dark.” Like the lights on the fish in Fingerfins, he suddenly thought, only the fish were living things.

  “I’m going to the club a little later,” his mother said. “Mr. Wolfe is going away tomorrow, back to Canada, and a few of us are having a farewell drink with him. Rose will be here.”

  “Okay,” Tommy said. “Good night,” and he gave his mother a kiss. “I had a nice birthday,” he said. “I’m glad Daddy called. I hope he comes home soon.”

  “He will,” his mother said. “He’ll be home soon.”

  When his father did come home, three days later, he brought him a beautiful black fountain pen, a grown-up pen in its own case, a lot like his own. Tommy had never used a fountain pen. He’d never used any kind of pen. They hadn’t started script yet in school, but when they did, next year in third grade, they used wooden pens with steel points, and you dipped the point in the inkwell. They had desks in third grade, too, not like the big tables that everyone sat at in second grade, and each desk had its own inkwell. Tommy was eager to learn.

  “I got this in New York, Tommy. It’s for your birthday,” his father said. “I’m really sorry I missed it, but I’ll bet you ate a lot of cake.” He gave him a big hug. “Did you blow out all the candles?”

  “Yes.” Tommy giggled.

  “Did you make a wish?”

  “Yes, I made a wish.”

  “Well, don’t tell it,” his father said, “or it won’t come true.” Tommy wouldn’t tell it. The truth was, he didn’t know it; he couldn’t remember his wish.

  “I’ve never used a fountain pen,” he said. “I’ve never had one.”

  “You’ll learn,” his father said. “You’ll learn to use it.”

  Tommy was almost afraid to try. He looked at it for a long time that day, turning it over in his hand, feeling it, admiring it, taking the cap on and off and touching the gold point, looking at the little window that told you there was ink in it. He hadn’t filled it yet; he didn’t have any ink of his own. He could use his parents’, of course, but he didn’t. Finally he put the pen in his drawer. He’d use it when he felt old enough. In the meantime, he was happy just to admire it, and he was filled with love for his father for giving it to him.

  The Number One furnace started without incident a few days later, and the terrible accident became a memory. It was comforting to see the glow back in the sky as bright as ever, to have his father home, and to return to the smooth regularity of their places and their days.

  It was very smooth, his life: the house, the Island, the country club, his school, the people on his street, the swimmers in his sea. It was a smooth and regular life, with only an occasional interruption like the redecorating of their house, which his mother hadn’t seemed to be able to interest herself in very much when his father was away but which she now threw herself into with a vengeance. That was his father’s word. The books of wallpaper multiplied; samples were spread on tables, on chairs. The floors were too dark; they ought to be redone. It would be more modern if they were light. Perhaps she should do something with the kitchen; with the boys’ bathroom, which was such a wreck. Of course, if David would just learn to hang up his towel instead of dropping it on the floor, it might not look such a wreck, his mother said. There were any number of possibilities. She could redecorate her bedroom—a new rug, new curtains, get rid of the rocker, slipcover her boudoir chair—that’s what she called it: her boudoir chair—a pretty new bedspread. Mrs. Sedgwick was consulted frequently because she was known for her taste. His father and his brother David were enlisted in the project; even Tommy was asked his opinion, and together they looked at the various wallpapers as his mother turned the pages of the book and then another book and another. There was enough wallpaper to cover every room in every house in the entire world, Tommy thought. When his brother John came home for Easter vacation, he too got into it. Nobody escaped, but it was his mother who really cared. Everyone else liked the house just the way it was, especially Tommy, who couldn’t remember it any other way. Nor did he particularly want to see it any other way. But he didn’t have a choice in that. It was going to look different, like it or not.

  It turned out that Margie had a flair for decoration, too. The first time she came to dinner in their house, when John was home for Easter and Emily was there too—everybody was on Easter vacation, except his parents and David—they were all sitting in the living room having their drinks before dinner. Margie didn’t have one, though; she didn’t drink. “That’s because of her parents,” Emily whispered to John when they went together to freshen their own. Tommy had just gotten back from Mrs. Slade’s. It had been an exciting afternoon and he wanted to tell about it, but his mother was talking about her favorite project and Tommy couldn’t interrupt. Margie got quite interested in it. She thought the pale gray wallpaper with the white plumes and the fine yellow stripe would look wonderful in the living room, and then they could put the gray and yellow and white-striped paper in the hallway and up the stairs, and perhaps in the upstairs hallway, too, though she hadn’t seen that, of course. “Of course not,” Emily said. “Off limits to us girls,” and she laughed in that way she had. It was sort of a silly way, Tommy thought.

  “It would look wonderful with yellow curtains,” Margie said. Tommy could tell she was trying to be helpful, but she also seemed truly interested.

  His mother was quite surprised. “Why, yes,” she agreed, “wouldn’t it?”

  “Let’s do it,” his father said. Tommy thought he was tired of looking at wallpaper.

  “It would pick up the yellow in the rug,” his mother said. The rug was mostly red and blue, but there was a yellow something-or-other here and there. In fact, there was almost every color you could think of in the rug. It was a complicated rug, and hard to figure out the pattern in it.

  “I was at Mrs. Slade’s today,” Tommy said, but nobody paid any attention.

  “And you could cover this couch”—Margie was sitting on the big comfortable couch—“with blue. The color of iris,” she said; “and throw some pale gray pillows on it.” Margie was getting as excited about the whole thing as his mother. “I love irises,” she said, “and I love the gray in this wallpaper. It catches the light.”

  “Mrs. Slade’s nice,” Tommy said.

  “Why, yes, of course she is, Tommy,” Emily said. “You know she’s Margie’s aunt.” Tommy knew that.

  “That settles it,” his father said. “That settles the wallpaper.”

  “Well, almost,” his mother said. “We still have to think about the bedrooms.”

  “But not now,” he said. “It must be time for dinner.” Tommy could tell his father was getting impatient. His mother went into the kitchen to see what remained to be done, and when she returned she announced that the soup was on the table. They all trooped into the dining room and began to eat. It was mushroom soup, Tommy’s second-favorite, next to tomato. Margie helped Rose clear the soup plates, and then his father carved the roast and served the mashed potatoes and carrots. Tommy could hear Rose washing up in the kitchen. He was trying to eat, but the soup had filled him up. He ate some of h
is meat, though, and he was looking at the carrots, wondering how he could avoid them, when Margie asked him what he’d been up to that day. Margie was trying to be nice to him, Tommy could tell. And he started to tell his story about Mrs. Slade and her needle, and everybody froze and his mother stuffed carrots into his mouth and started talking about what she’d read in the paper that day and Emily started talking at the same time about college and where did Margie think she’d like to go, and Tommy was excused from the table and went outside to play for a while. It was still light. Tommy was mad at all of them, except Margie, who was only trying to be nice. He didn’t even get to finish his story.

  When he came back he said good night to everybody and went up to his room. John came upstairs a few minutes later. “What are you doing?” Tommy asked him.

  “I’m getting a sweater for Emily,” he said. “She’s cold. Listen, Tommy, you don’t have to tell everything you know. Don’t tell it all.”

  “I don’t know anything,” Tommy said, but whatever he knew, he was afraid he’d already told it. It was then that John explained to him about Mrs. Slade’s shots, and after he had told him Tommy pulled his shades and went to bed. The next morning his mother told him he wasn’t to play at the Slades’, so Tommy didn’t go over there that day, though he wanted to. He waited until the next day when his mother was playing bridge and Mr. St. John was there and he was supposed to stay out of the house as much as possible.

  Mrs. Slade was in her bedroom, her hair up, trying on hats.

  They looked sort of funny with her negligée, Tommy thought. “My mother’s got a new hat,” Tommy told her. “It has a veil. She got it for Easter.”

  “Well, I’ll bet she looks real fancy,” Mrs. Slade said. “How do you like this one?” she asked Tommy. “Don’t answer,” she said. “I don’t like it,” and she tossed it to the floor. “You didn’t like it either, did you? We’ll try another,” and she reached into one of the boxes that surrounded her and pulled a hat out of the tissue. “What the hell do I want a hat for?” she asked herself, looking at the hat in her hand. “I never wear one. Well, hardly ever.” But that didn’t stop her from putting it on. She sat there in front of the mirror in her negligée, with the hat on, looking.

  “Where’s Luke?” she asked him.

  “Luke?”

  “Luke Wolfe,” she said, “wicked Luke Wolfe, everybody’s sweetie.”

  “He’s away,” Tommy said.

  “Yeah, I know he’s away,” Mrs. Slade said. “Where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. I think he had to go up North to look at his mines,” Tommy said. “He’s not everybody’s sweetie.”

  “No, of course he’s not, Tommy,” Mrs. Slade said. “Just mine. I wish.” She laughed. “Every girl needs a sweetie. You be mine.” She hugged him, knocking her hat askew. “I’m sick of hats.” She threw it to the floor with the others and loosened her blond hair so that it streamed down her back.

  “He might go to Mexico, too,” Tommy said. “That’s what he said. He might end up in Mexico, you never know.”

  “He likes it where it’s hot,” she said, “not in this iceberg. He’ll go there, if he’s not there already. Yes,” she said, “every girl needs a little love, and Tommy, right now you’re all I’ve got. Think you can handle it?” She laughed, and winked at him. “Do you have enough love for me, Tommy?”

  “It’s a mystery,” Tommy said.

  “What’s a mystery?” she asked.

  “Love,” Tommy said. “That’s what my mother said. That you know it when it happens, but you can’t explain it. You just can’t help it.”

  “Help it? Who’d want to help it? Not this one,” Mrs. Slade said. “It’s no mystery, honey, I can tell you it ain’t no mystery. It just makes you feel real good. Real good. That’s all there is to it. Simple. But it can be a son-of-a-bitch.” Tommy giggled, fascinated, puzzled. And then he was sad.

  “Mrs. Slade,” he said, looking at the reflection of her back in the mirrored wall.

  “Yes?” she replied.

  “Mrs. Slade, umh, I’ve got to stay home more. I, I probably won’t be over for a while.”

  “Why, that’s all right, honey.” She hugged him to her again. “That’s all right. You’ll still be my sweetie, and I’ll miss you. But you come back when you can.”

  “Mrs. Slade?”

  “What?”

  “Mrs. Slade, may I ask you a question?”

  “Fire away.”

  “Mrs. Slade, why do you use those needles?” He could see one of them now, the glass tube and the steel shaft with the point, lying on her dressing table.

  “My needles?” She brightened. “Why, they make me feel good. They make me feel real good”—but her face seemed strange. A frown passed over it, and suddenly she looked very sad. She struggled up from the dressing table, kicking a hatbox out of her way. “I’ll tell you why I use the needles,” she said. “For the pain. You understand that? For the pain!” Tommy didn’t know Mrs. Slade was in pain.

  “Don’t you think this hurts?” she said, throwing open her negligée. “Don’t you think it hurts when they cut off your tits? Any woman knows that, even if she’s got ’em. Ask your mother, if you don’t think it hurts. She’d tell you. She’d tell you that it hurt like hell.” Tommy looked at her bare scarred chest. He looked at her reflection in the mirrored wall, and saw his own small self there, too. He looked back to her chest. He’d seen it before, but he was shocked. He was truly shocked. “And that’s not the only thing that hurts,” she said, “that’s not the only thing. . . .”

  Tommy wanted to throw his arms around her, to hug her and make her feel better. He didn’t want her to hurt, and in his own pain and confusion his eyes filled. He couldn’t stop it. He was afraid to speak. He didn’t think he would be able to. He couldn’t move. He just stared speechless at her, her blurred face, her white negligée streaming to the floor, her yellow hair and white panties, and the mirrored wall swirling around him.

  “There, there,” Mrs. Slade said, moving toward him, “there, there.” She drew her negligée around her and pulled him toward her. “It’s all right. Everything will be all right, Tommy,” she said, brushing his hair back from his face, holding him lightly. “You run along home now, but remember your pal Maxine. Remember your pal Maxine.”

  Tommy left the house. Lily and Jenny were at the dock with their father. Tommy was glad of that. He didn’t want to see them. He didn’t want to see anybody. And he walked slowly through Mrs. Slade’s yard toward the greening thornapple thicket and the fence between them, and he climbed it and sat for a while in the sunlight on top of the tall stone pillar in the corner, between his house and the Slades’. Mr. St. John and his men had started to sand the floors in his house that day, and Tommy wasn’t supposed to go in if he could help it. From his perch he could hear the roar of the sanding machines.

  While they were sanding the floors there was dust everywhere, and a kind of hot smell that was a mixture of the sanding machines and sawdust, and then that smell was replaced by the smell of varnish, which took a long time to dry and while it was being put on and drying they had to go in and out through the kitchen door, and go upstairs by the back stairway. They couldn’t go into the living room, the library, or the dining room at all. When they did the upstairs floors, everything was in an even worse mess and everybody slept in different rooms on different nights, and they did half the upstairs hallway one day and half on another day so that they’d have someplace to walk. But finally the sanding and the varnishing were finished—it was true, the dark floors came out light—the smell of sawdust and varnish faded, and the smell of wallpaper paste took over.

  All the wallpaper had been decided on and a lot of it was up, including the new paper for Tommy’s room, which had a green design on it. His mother, though, insisted it was blue. Sometimes Tommy had a hard time telling the difference between blues and greens. It looked green to him but probably it was blue, if his mother said so. They put the paper Margi
e liked in the living room and the other paper she liked in the big hallway and up the stairway and all over the upstairs hall, and Mrs. Matson was making new yellow curtains for the living room. The house began to look fresh and new and sparkling clean. About the only thing that didn’t change was his parents’ bedroom. Tommy’s father refused to have new wallpaper; he liked the old, so Mrs. Munter came with her cans of wallpaper cleaner and cleaned it. Tommy loved to watch Mrs. Munter clean wallpaper. She took a handful of the pink dough from the can and kneaded it into a ball, and then she wiped it across the wallpaper in broad downward strokes, starting from the top, kneading the ball again and again as it grew darker and darker until finally it turned almost black and she threw it away and took a bright new piece from the can. As she stroked the wall, the soil magically disappeared, and Tommy could see by the line of her stroke that the paper, which had never looked dirty to him before, really was. After the wallpaper had been cleaned, the curtains, freshly aired, were rehung. The curtains were the same too, but his mother did get a new rug that was lighter than the old rug and Mrs. Matson made a slipcover for the chair and his mother ordered a new bedspread from Marshall Field’s, but it hadn’t arrived yet. His grandmother or his great-grandmother, one of them, had made the old white spread all by hand. It was too good to throw out; maybe his Aunt Martha would like it, his mother said. In the meantime, she put it on the bed in the room they called the big guest room now to distinguish it from the other guest room, and she moved the telephone table her father had made, which used to stand beside her boudoir chair, there too. Her father hadn’t made it for a telephone, because they didn’t have any then. Her father was very good at making things, and the table was elaborately inlaid with many different kinds of wood. His mother put a plant on it, and she found another table for her telephone.

  Tommy didn’t like Mr. St. John very much, and he could hardly wait for him to be finished. He might have been the best painter and wallpaperer in town, but he liked to tease, too, and not in a very funny way. The day Tommy took some of David’s Vaseline hair tonic and put it on his hair—something neither of his parents liked him to do, or David either, for that matter—Mr. St. John swiped him with a sheet of the wallpaper he was putting on the stairway, and his hair left a greasy mark on it. Mr. St. John put it on the wall anyway, and Tommy could still see the mark. Tommy asked Mrs. Munter if she’d try to get it out, but she was no more successful than his mother had been when she tried to remove Mr. Wolfe’s footprint from her curtain. Both stains were so faint, though, that nobody else ever noticed either of them.