by Irwin Shaw
One book, open and face down, lay on the bed. Rudolph leaned over to see what it was. The Plague, by Camus. Peculiar reading for a fourteen-year-old boy and hardly designed to rescue him from melancholy.
If excessive neatness was a symptom of adolescent neurosis, Billy was neurotic. But Rudolph remembered how neat he had been at the same age and no one had considered him abnormal.
Somehow, though, the room oppressed him, and he didn’t want to have to meet Billy’s roommate, so he went downstairs and waited in front of the door. The sun was stronger now, and with the groups of boys, all shined up for chapel, advancing across the campus, the place no longer seemed prisonlike. Most of the boys were tall, much taller than the boys Rudolph had gone to school with. Increasing America. Everybody took it for granted that it was a good thing. But was it? The better to look down upon you, my dear.
He saw Billy at a distance. He was the only boy walking alone. He walked slowly, naturally, with his head up, nothing hangdog about him. Rudolph remembered how he had practiced walking himself at that age, keeping his shoulders still, trying to glide, making himself seem older, more graceful than his comrades. He still walked that way, but out of habit, not thinking about it.
“Hello, Rudy,” Billy said, without smiling, as he came up to the front of the building. “Thanks for coming to visit me.”
They shook hands. Billy had a strong, quick grasp. He still didn’t have to shave, but his face was not babyish and his voice had already changed.
“I have to be up in Whitby this evening,” Rudolph said, “and since I was going to be on the road anyway, I thought I’d drop in and have lunch with you. It’s only a couple of hours out of the way. Not even that.”
Billy eyed him levelly and Rudolph was sure that the boy knew that the visit wasn’t as off-hand as all that.
“Is there a good restaurant around here?” Rudolph asked, quickly. “I’m starving.”
“My father took me to lunch at a place that wasn’t too bad,” Billy said, “when he was up here the last time.”
“When was that?”
“A month ago. He was going to come up last week, but he wrote that the man who was going to lend him the car had to go out of town at the last minute.”
Rudolph wondered if originally Willie Abbott’s picture had been on the neat desk, next to the photographs of Gretchen and Colin Burke and had been put away after that last letter.
“Do you have to do anything in your room or tell anybody you’re going out to lunch with your uncle?”
“I have nothing to do,” Billy said. “And I don’t have to tell anybody anything.”
Rudolph suddenly became conscious as they stood there, with boys passing them in a steady stream, laughing and fooling around and talking loudly, that Billy hadn’t said hello to a single one of them and that no one had come up to him. It’s as bad as Gretchen feared, he thought. Or worse.
He put his arm briefly around Billy’s shoulder. There was no reaction. “Let’s be off,” he said. “You show me the road.”
As he drove through the lovely school grounds, with the somber boy beside him, past the handsome buildings and playing fields, so intelligently and expensively designed to prepare young men for useful and happy lives, so carefully staffed with devoted men and women of the caliber of Mrs. Fairweather, Rudolph wondered how anyone dared to try to educate anybody.
“I know why the man didn’t lend my father the car last week,” Billy was saying as he went at his steak. “He backed into a tree getting out of the parking lot here when we had lunch together and crushed the fender. He had three martinis before lunch and a bottle of wine and two glasses of brandy after lunch.”
The censorious young. Rudolph was glad he wasn’t drinking anything but water.
“Maybe he was unhappy about something,” he said. He was not there to destroy the possibility of love between father and son.
“I guess so. He’s unhappy a lot of the time.” Billy went on eating. Whatever he was suffering from had not impaired his appetite. The food was hearty American, steaks, lobster, clams, roast beef, hot biscuits, served by pretty waitresses in modest uniforms. The room was large and rambling, the tables were covered with red-checkered cloths and there were many groups from the school, five or six boys at a table with the parents of one of the students, who had invited his friends to take advantage of the parental visit. Rudolph wondered if one day he would claim a son of his own from a school and take him and his friends out for a similar lunch. If Jean said yes and married him, perhaps in fifteen years. What would he be like in fifteen years, what would she be like, what would his son be like? Withdrawn, taciturn, troubled, like Billy? Or open and gay, as the boys at the other tables seemed to be? Would schools like this still exist, meals like this still be served, fathers still drunkenly ram into trees at two o’clock in the afternoon? What risks the gentle women and comfortable fathers sitting proudly at table with their sons had run fifteen years ago, with the war just over and the atomic cloud still drifting across the skies of the planet.
Maybe, he thought, I will tell Jean I have reconsidered.
“How’s the food at school?” he asked, just to break the long silence.
“Okay,” Billy said.
“How’re the boys?”
“Okay. Ah—not so okay. There’s an awful lot of talk about what bigshots their fathers are, how they have lunch with the President and tell him how to run the country, how they go to Newport for the summertime, how they have horses at home, and how their sisters have debutante parties that cost twenty-five thousand dollars.”
“What do you say when they talk like that?”
“I keep quiet.” Billy’s glance was hostile. “What am I supposed to say? My father lives in one room and he’s been fired from three jobs in two years? Or should I tell them what a great driver he is after lunch?” Billy said all this in an even, uninflected conversational tone, alarmingly mature.
“What about your stepfather?”
“What about him? He’s dead. And even before he died, there weren’t six boys in the school who ever heard of him. They think people who do plays and make movies are some kind of freak.”
“What about the teachers?” Rudolph asked, desperate to find one thing at least that the boy approved of.
“I don’t have anything to do with them,” Billy said, putting more butter on his baked potato. “I do my work and that’s all.”
“What’s wrong, Billy?” It was time now to be direct. He did not know the boy well enough to be indirect.
“My mother asked you to come here, didn’t she?” Billy looked at him shrewdly, challengingly.
“If you must know—yes.”
“I’m sorry if I worried her,” Billy said. “I shouldn’t have sent that letter.”
“Of course, you should have sent the letter. What is it, Billy?”
“I don’t know.” The boy had stopped eating by now and Rudolph could see that he was fighting to control his voice. “Everything. I feel like I am going to die if I have to stay here.”
“Of course you won’t die,” Rudolph said sharply.
“No, I guess not. I just feel as though I am.” Billy was petulant, juvenile, for a moment. “That’s a whole different thing, isn’t it? But feeling is real, too, isn’t it?”
“Yes, it is,” Rudolph admitted. “Come on. Talk.”
“This is no place for me,” Billy said. “I don’t want to be trained to grow up into what all these fellows are going to grow up into. I see their fathers. A lot of them went to this same school twenty-five years ago. They’re like their kids, only older, telling the President what to do, not knowing that Colin Burke was a great man, not even knowing he’s dead. I don’t belong here, Rudy. My father doesn’t belong here. Colin Burke wouldn’t have belonged here. If they keep me here, by the end of four years they’ll make me belong here and I don’t want that. I don’t know …” He shook his head despondently, his fair hair swinging over the high forehead he had inherited
from his father. “I guess you think I’m just not making any sense. I guess you think I’m just another homesick kid griping because he wasn’t elected captain of the team or something …”
“I don’t think that at all, Billy. I don’t know whether you’re right or not, but you certainly have figured out your reasons.” Homesick, he thought. The word had reared up from the sentence. Which home?
“Compulsory chapel,” Billy said. “Making believe I’m a Christian seven times a week. I’m no Christian, Mom isn’t a Christian, my father’s not a Christian, Colin wasn’t a Christian, why do I have to take the rap for the whole family, listen to all those sermons? Be upright, have clean thoughts, don’t think about sex. Our Lord Jesus died to cleanse our sins. How would you like to sit through crap like that seven times a week?”
“Not much.” The boy certainly had a point there. Atheists did have a religious responsibility toward their children.
“And money,” Billy said, his voice low but intense, as a waitress passed nearby. “Where’s the money going to come for my big fat education now that Colin’s dead?”
“Don’t worry about that,” Rudolph said. “I’ve told your mother I’d take care of it.”
Billy looked at him malevolently, as though Rudolph had just confessed that he had been plotting against him. “I don’t like you enough, Uncle Rudy,” he said, “to take that from you.”
Rudolph was shaken, but he managed to speak calmly. After all, Billy was only fourteen, only a child. “Why don’t you like me well enough?”
“Because you belong here,” Billy said. “Send your own son here.”
“I won’t comment on that.”
“I’m sorry I said it. But I meant it.” There was a pressure of tears in the long-lashed, blue, Abbott eyes.
“I admire you for saying it,” Rudolph said. “By the time boys reach your age they usually have learned to dissemble for rich uncles.”
“What am I doing here, on the other side of the country, when my mother is sitting alone, all by herself, night after night, crying?” Billy went on, in a rush. “A man like Colin is killed and what am I supposed to be doing—cheering at a silly football game or listening to some Boy Scout in a black suit telling us Jesus saves. I’ll tell you something—” The tears were rolling down his cheeks now and he was mopping them with a handkerchief, but speaking fiercely at the same time. “If you don’t get me out of here, I’m going to run away. And, somehow, I’m going to turn up in that house where my mother is, and anyway I can help her I’m going to help her.”
“All right,” Rudolph said. “We can stop talking about it. I don’t know what I can do, but I promise you I’ll do something. Fair enough?”
Billy nodded miserably, mopped some more, put the handkerchief away.
“Now let’s finish our lunch,” Rudolph said. He didn’t eat much more, but watched Billy clean his plate, then order apple pie à la mode and clean that plate. Fourteen was an all-absorbing age. Tears, death, pity, apple pie, and ice cream mingled without shame.
After lunch, in the car driving over to the school, Rudolph said, “Go up to your room. Pack a bag. Then come down and wait for me in the car.”
He watched the boy go into the building, neat in his Sunday go-to-chapel suit, then got out of the car and followed. Behind him, a touch-tackle game was in progress on the drying lawn, boys crying, “Throw it to me, throw it to me,” in one of the hundreds of games of their youth that Billy never joined.
The Common Room off the hallway was full of boys playing Ping-Pong, sitting over chess boards, reading magazines, listening to the Giant game on a transistor radio. From upstairs came the roar of a folk-singing group from another radio. Politely, the boys around the Ping-Pong table made way for him, older man, as he walked across the room, toward the doorway of the Fairweathers’ apartment. They seemed like fine boys, good looking, healthy, well mannered, content, the hope of America. If he were a father he would have been happy to see his own son in this company this Sunday afternoon. But among them, his nephew, misfitted, felt that he was going to die. The Constitutional right to be a misfit.
He rang the bell to the Fairweather apartment and the door was opened by a tall, slightly stooping man, with a lock of hair hanging over his forehead, a healthy complexion, a ready and welcoming smile. What nerves a man must have to be able to live in a house full of boys like this.
“Mr. Fairweather?” Rudolph said.
“Yes?” Amiable, easy.
“I hate to disturb you, but I’d like to talk to you for a moment. I’m Billy Abbott’s uncle. I was …”
“Oh, yes,” Fairweather said. He extended his hand. “My wife told me you paid her a visit before lunch. Won’t you please come in?” He led the way down a book-lined hallway into the book-lined living room, the noise from the Common Room miraculously extinguished with the closing of the door. Sanctuary from youth. Insulation from the young by books. Rudolph wondered if perhaps when Denton had offered him the post at the college, the book-lined life, he had made the wrong choice.
Mrs. Fairweather was sitting on the couch, drinking a cup of coffee, her child sitting on the floor leaning against her knee, turning the pages of a picture book, the setter sprawled, asleep, against her. Mrs. Fairweather smiled at him, raised her cup in greeting.
They can’t be that happy, Rudolph thought, conscious of jealousy.
“Please sit down,” Fairweather said. “Would you like some coffee?”
“No, thank you, I’ve just had some. And I can only stay a minute.” Rudolph sat, stiffly, feeling awkward because he was an uncle, not a father.
Fairweather sat comfortably next to his wife. He was wearing green-stained tennis shoes and a wool shirt, making the most of Sunday afternoon. “Did you have a good talk with Billy?” he asked. There was a little pleasant holdover of the South in his voice, gentlemanly Tidewater Virginia.
“I had a talk,” Rudolph said. “I don’t know how good it was. Mr. Fairweather, I want to take Billy away with me. For a few days at least. I think it’s absolutely necessary.”
The Fairweathers exchanged glances.
“It’s as bad as that, is it?” the man said.
“Pretty bad.”
“We’ve done everything we can,” Fairweather said, but without apology.
“I realize that,” Rudolph said. “It’s just that Billy’s a certain kind of boy, certain things have happened to him—in the past, recently …” He wondered if the Fairweathers had ever heard of Colin Burke, mourned the vanished talent. “There’s no need to go into it. A boy’s reasons can be fantasy, but his feelings can be horribly real.”
“So you want to take Billy away?” Mr. Fairweather said.
“Yes.”
“When?”
“In ten minutes.”
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Fairweather said.
“For how long?” Fairweather asked calmly.
“I don’t know. A few days. A month. Perhaps permanently.”
There was an uncomfortable silence. From outside the window, thinly, came the sound of a boy calling signals in the touch-tackle game, 22, 45, 38, Hut! Fairweather stood up and went over to the table where the coffee pot was standing and poured himself a cup. “You’re sure you don’t want some, Mr. Jordache?”
Rudolph shook his head.
“The Christmas holidays come in just two and a half weeks,” Fairweather said. “And the term-end examinations begin in a few days. Don’t you think it would be wiser to wait until then?”
“I don’t think it would be wise for me to leave here this afternoon without Billy,” Rudolph said.
“Have you spoken to the headmaster?” Fairweather asked.
“No.”
“I think it would be advisable to consult with him,” Fairweather said. “I don’t really have the authority to …”
“The less fuss we make, the fewer the people who talk to Billy,” Rudolph said, “the better it will be for the boy. Believe me.”
Again the Fa
irweathers exchanged glances.
“Charles,” Mrs. Fairweather said to her husband, “I think we could explain to the headmaster.”
Fairweather sipped thoughtfully at his coffee, still standing at the table. A ray of pale sunlight came through the windows, outlining him against the bookshelves behind him. Healthy, pondering man, head of family, doctor of young souls.
“I suppose we could,” he said. “I suppose we could explain. You will call me in the next day or two and tell me what’s been decided, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
Fairweather sighed. “There’re so many defeats in this quiet profession, Mr. Jordache,” he said. “Tell Billy he’s welcome to come back any time he wishes. He’s bright enough to make up any time he’s lost.”
“I’ll tell him,” Rudolph said. “Thank you. Thank you both for everything.”
Fairweather escorted him back along the hallway, opened the door into the turmoil of boys, didn’t smile as he shook Rudolph’s hand and closed the door behind him.
As Rudolph drove away from the school, Billy, in the front seat beside him, said, “I never want to see this place again.” He didn’t ask where they were going.
It was half-past five when they got to Whitby and the street lights were on in the wintry darkness. Billy had slept a good deal of the way. Rudolph dreaded the moment when he would have to introduce his mother to her grandson. “Spawn of the harlot,” might not be beyond the powers of his mother’s rhetoric. But he had the appointment with Calderwood after the Calderwood Sunday supper, which would be over by seven, and it would have been impossible to take Billy back to New York and then arrive in Whitby on time. And even if he had had the time to drive the boy down to the city, to whom could he have turned him over? Willie Abbott? Gretchen had asked him to bypass Willie in the matter and he had done so and there was no having it both ways. And after what Billy had said about his father at lunch, being put in Willie’s alcoholic care could hardly have seemed like much of an improvement over staying in school.