by Dennis Smith
I can hear all six of them now running to the front window, and everyone is crying, “What, what, what?”
I am now bolting like a racehorse to the front door, and I can hear Henry in the background, saying, “It’s not even raining today.”
It was just about seven seconds, and I am now out in the hall, and I run down to 54th Street and onto Second Avenue and then to 56th Street.
I stop running in front of Billy’s Bar and Grill, and I am thinking hard about what I can do now. I still have nowhere to go. I can’t go home. Kips Bay doesn’t open for another hour or so. I will have to hang around somewhere, but where? My neighborhood is so big, maybe the biggest neighborhood in the country, and it is changing. There is a lot of construction, and the high buildings that are going up will make the neighborhood even bigger. My mother says that when they tear down the Third Avenue El, the whole neighborhood will get ritzy, and our apartment will finally be worth the thirty-two dollars a month we pay in rent.
The bright light of the sun is gleaming off the copper roof of St. John the Evangelist, and the sunbeam is like a halo over the church. Maybe I should stop in for a while. I could just sit in church until Kips Bay opens. To think about God, to ask Him to get Sister Alphonsus to change her mind. But it is too late for that. I could just go up to the altar and wait for the Virgin statue to smile at me like when I was a kid, and ask her to watch over me specially, to help me get better marks, to make me as smart as Billy, to make my mother happy.
I could add onto my night prayers for my father, to make him better so that he could come home again. But does anyone ever get better in one of those asylums? What is it really like there for him? Does he ever think about us? About me? But I’ve been praying to make his legs better for so many years, all wasted prayers when it had nothing to do with his legs, when I should have been praying that the Connors’ family would inherit a house in Cleveland or somewhere like that, so that Raymond wouldn’t be in the neighborhood and Marilyn Rolleri wouldn’t be going steady.
At least, a prayer like that could be on the level.
I know deep in my heart that I should be sorry for running away like this, that my mother is probably sick with trying to find me, and that I should feel sorry, too, that everyone thinks I am not worth anything if I don’t get all As in school. And if you’re sorry for something, there is no better place to be than in church.
But I don’t feel sorry at all.
I know that I should feel sorry, but I don’t want to go into church and pretend that I am sorry for being a holy terror for my mother, just so I could ask for things in my prayers. I’m not sorry.
I have to begin to do things in my own life that I want to do, not the things that people think would help me to recognize my abilities, and not spend my time going around being sorry for everything.
And if you’re not sorry, then I don’t think you should go to church and ask for all kinds of things.
So Uncle Tommy and my father and Sister Alphonsus and the Cleveland house for the Connors family will have to wait.
It is not yet noon, and Bobby Walsh and I are playing pool in the intermediate game room at Kips Bay. The room is reserved for boys between thirteen and sixteen years old.
In Kips, the little kids are called midgets and have black membership cards. The cards are made of a kind of hard graphite. You can’t get in the club without your membership card, which has your name imprinted on it, and which costs twenty-five cents a year. And you can only get a card if a parent comes in to sign you up. When you are ten, you get a junior card, which is red. I have the gray card for intermediates, ever since I turned thirteen, and Billy has a white card made of cardboard which is what the sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old seniors get.
Bill Egan is the instructor for the room. He’s an older man, retired from the post office, and a great Ping-Pong player. He’s swinging the paddle now on the other side of the room, near the three big windows that look out onto 52nd Street.
The room is bright, and filled with two big pool tables, a small pool table, and the Ping-Pong table.
Walsh is taking a shot on a big table in the corner of the room when I look up and see my brother Billy. He has rage in his eyes, and I have never seen him like this.
“There you are,” he says, “you freakin’ punk.”
He is coming after me. I am in the corner, behind the pool table, and he is on the other side of the table. He is coming fast, as if he can’t wait to get to me. So I sprint the other way. He stops and reverses himself. There is nobody as fast as Billy. I go back to the corner, and I wait here. He fakes to one side, and I fake to the other, and we both stop. It is like a standoff.
“You tried,” he says, snarling at me, “to steal Mommy’s money.”
“I did not,” I say, knowing that I was saying an outright lie.
“You’re nothing but a punk,” he says, “you know that.”
He fakes again. My heart is pounding. I know that he is going to beat me good when he catches me.
“Lookit,” I say, “just leave me alone. It is none of your business, anyway, what I do.”
“Just a goddamn punk,” he says, “stealing from your mother.”
“I didn’t steal anything,” I say. This, anyway, wasn’t a lie.
Walsh drops his pool cue on the table and slips past Billy in a flash. Bill Egan has stopped playing Ping-Pong and is looking our way. Billy picks up Walsh’s cue stick. He takes the small end in his hand, and I know now that I can’t get past, but I have to do something, I have to make my way to the door so that I can get to the street. And so I fake one way and then run the opposite way at full speed. Billy swings the pool stick, and it is a blur coming at me. I raise my arm, and the stick hits me just above my elbow.
It is like there has been an explosion, and I feel myself falling to the floor.
It feels like the stick is stuck in my arm, that the bone has broken and wrapped around it. The pain is shooting through every part of me, through my shoulders and into my head and down into my legs. The room gets dark for a moment, and I can’t see anything.
Bill Egan is now on his knee and has my face cupped in his hands.
“Dennis,” he is saying, “Dennis. Look at me. Say your name.”
“Dennis,” I say resentfully, like some cop has asked me a question.
“What’s my name?” he asks.
“Bill,” I say.
“Good,” he says, leaving my face go, “let’s see now.”
Billy is standing just behind Egan as he lifts my arm and squeezes it where it is now swollen. He is bending it, and squeezing it, and pulling on it. It hurts like the skin has been burned away, but I don’t say anything. I don’t want to give my brother the satisfaction that he has nearly killed me.
“It’s okay,” Egan says. “No break, anyway.”
“It’s okay?” I can hear Billy asking.
Billy’s voice seems nervous.
“Just hit a nerve is all,” Egan answers. “It will leave a bruise big as a house, though.”
Bill Egan turns to my brother. “What the hell is going on?” he asks. “You think your brother is a baseball or something?”
Right, I’m thinking, or an old rug to beat the dust outta.
“I just wanted to stop him,” Billy says. “It’s a family matter, you know?”
That’s all you have to say in the neighborhood if you don’t want anyone asking questions. Just mention the word family, and the mouths shut like clams.
We are outside the club now, and I am sitting on a car fender on 52nd Street.
“I have to take you home,” my brother says.
“Yeah?” I say. “Well, I don’t want to go.”
“Mommy is worried,” he says. “She was up all night.”
“I don’t want to go through it all with her,” I say. “Sister Alphonsus wants to see her, and they are going to kick me out of school.”
“They are not going to kick you out of school,” he says.
; “Sister said it, that I won’t graduate.”
“You just have to go home,” Billy says, “and talk to Mommy about this. Just tell her, and she’ll go see Sister Alphonsus and get it all straight.”
“I don’t want to go home, Billy,” I say. “She is going to hate me for causing all this trouble.”
Billy is quiet for a while. The cars going down Second Avenue are beeping their horns, and a bunch of kids are lined up now to get into Kips Bay. Finally, he grabs me by the neck, but gently, and pulls me off the car.
“Let’s walk a little,” he says as we begin to walk toward Second Avenue, “ ‘cause I want to tell you what I read at school yesterday. It’s a poem by this poet Robert Frost, and in it he is talking about what we are talking about now, and he says that home is the place that, when you go there, they always have to let you in. Get it?”
“So?” I say, because I really don’t get it.
“So,” Billy says, “you have to feel that there is something between you and Mommy that will let you tell her all about Sister Alphonsus, and let her at the same time believe in you so that she’ll go to Sister Alphonsus and work it out.”
It all sounds easy, but I know it is more complicated than just saying “work it out.”
“What about running away?” I ask.
“Work it out with Mommy,” Billy says, “and take your punishment.”
That’s the thing I don’t like, the punishment part, and I am wondering why Billy is saying “Mommy” all the time? I wish I could just get out of all this kid part of my life.
“What kind of punishment?” I ask.
“You can handle it,” he says.
“And why are you saying ‘Mommy’ like a kid?”
“I don’t know,” he says. “She’s feeling so bad, it just seems right. Mom, Mommy, what difference does it make? You know who I mean, right?”
Billy puts his arm around my shoulder as we walk the concrete. We walk a couple of blocks like this, without saying anything more.
Then, as we’re passing 55th Street, I look into his eyes. I never saw his eyes so blue. I smile at him, saying, “So they hafta let you in when you go home, huh?”
“Yeah,” he says, “they have to.”
Chapter Thirty-two
I am in the library now at Kips Bay Boys Club, a long and narrow room with polished wooden walls. It is like being in an apartment on Sutton Place, because it has a rich smell, and the furniture is all made of wood, and is shining.
Betty Fallon is the librarian, and I have been sitting with her almost every night for the last few months, trying to read more, like I promised my mother I would do. She has been giving me a different book every week, like The Last of the Mohicans and The Prairie, books that tell the story of how wild America was when it started to be a country with people from Ireland and France and England. I don’t take the books home, but read them in the library, sitting there at the end of a long, spindly table. We talk a lot about the books whenever I’m there, and I tell Betty how I pretend I am in the books, too, that I am behind a tree or hiding in a shed when everything happens, and I have to try to save my own skin. And Betty laughs. She is always laughing and putting her hand on my arm. I feel I can really talk to her. She gave me a book called The Corsican Brothers, and the book made me feel sad because of how close these brothers were. One could know what the other was doing even if one was in Italy and the other in England. I wish I had someone who I was so close to that I could feel it if they were hit in the head, even if they were in another country.
I guess I feel close to Billy, no matter what happened with the pool stick. But he is so much older than me, two years, that it would be hard for us to be close like the Corsican brothers. Maybe, if I had a girlfriend, I could be close to her.
“You know, Betty,” I say, “I don’t have anybody to be close to like in The Corsican Brothers.”
“You have your friends,” Betty says. She is sitting behind her desk at the front of the room, up on a step, like an altar.
“I do have a lot of friends, like Walsh and Scarry, and those guys.”
“Well, you can be close to them, can’t you?”
“No, not with guys. You can’t tell guys things that are bothering you ‘cause they’ll call you a faggot.”
Betty smiles in a kind of surprise.
“Oh, Dennis,” she says, “don’t use words like ‘fag.’ It’s like using bad words against Negroes or Puerto Ricans or the Italians.”
“Yeah,” I say. “My mother always says ‘guineas,’ and the other words.”
“She probably grew up with those words,” Betty says, nodding. “Some people just grow up combing their hair one way, and it never occurs to them to comb it another way. That’s true with the way we speak as well. I don’t think your mother means to be mean, ever. Do you?
“I don’t know,” I answer. “She doesn’t like the Italians much. But the only girls I like are the Italian ones.”
“Anyway,” Betty says, “now, what about you? What kind of things are bothering you?”
“Lots of things, I guess.” I say this looking away for a moment. “I am always thinking about things in my life.”
“Like what?”
Betty smiles at me, and I smile back at her.
I begin to think about the talk my mother had with Sister Alphonsus, and how I had to promise that I would work harder to do all my homework and to study for the tests. I never told them about the library down at Kips. Maybe if I told them, my mother would have let me come to Kips instead of keeping me in the house every night for a week because I ran away.
I close my eyes for a minute because I feel my heart beginning to beat like a tom-tom. I am thinking now how happy it makes me to talk to Betty. Not just having-a-good-time kind of happy, but I have a good feeling that she is my friend.
But no matter how things are going, if they are good or bad, I still am not crazy about school. And there’s something else lately. I’ve been thinking a lot about my father, that I don’t know what is going on with him, and what kind of a place he’s in, and if people are still being mean to him, tying him up or beating him. The thoughts about him just come up without expecting them. I could be washing my toes in the kitchen bathtub and I could suddenly wonder if my father washed his toes, too, or if someone was washing them for him. Or I could be in the movies and suddenly forget the movie and wonder if he ever goes to a movie, or if they have television there in that upstate hospital. Does he ever listen to Bing Crosby or to Dennis Day?
Shit, it bothers me all the time.
“Betty,” I say, opening my eyes, “can I tell you something that you can’t tell anyone ever?”
“Sure you can,” she answers.
“I mean it is like confession, where you can’t say anything even if I murdered someone.”
“Did you murder someone?” she asks, pretending to be surprised. “Maybe Father O’Rourke for his long sermons?”
I am laughing now. Betty makes things so easy.
“No,” I say, and I begin to choke on my words. “I … I… I want to tell you about my father.”
Betty leans over and cups her face in her hands.
“My father,” I say, “is in a place where they beat him up and give him shock treatments—you know, they put wires into his brain and all that.” I am trying to be as casual as I can be, like I am talking about the color of my brother’s basketball uniform.
“Your father is in a mental institution?” she asks.
I am staring at Betty. It is so hard to speak, and I think she knows this. She doesn’t say anything, but waits until I can put the words I want to say together in my mind.
“My mother always said,” I continue, “that my father was in the hospital because he fell from a truck when he worked for the Railway Express, and he can’t walk, but I heard my Aunt Kitty talking about him being in this mental place.”
“You mean a hospital?”
“A state asylum.”
“Oh,
Dennis,” Betty says, reaching out to hold my hand, “that’s too bad he is sick like that, but you know it is just another sickness, like having the mumps.”
I know Betty is just trying to put flowers around the coffin, which is something my mother says when she thinks people are trying to be nice.
“Yes,” I say, pulling my hand back a little, “I guess I know all that, but my mother doesn’t know that I heard Aunt Kitty, and she keeps talking about him being in the hospital because of his legs and all, and I can’t go because kids aren’t allowed in, and she thinks I don’t know about it being a different kind of hospital.”
I feel like crying now, bur I know I won’t. So I look around for something to count to take my mind off my mother and the way she lied to me.
I see all the books lining the shelves from one end of the room to the other, and I stare at them and begin counting the spines.
“What are you doing?” Betty asks. I guess she sees how I am trying to count the books.
“I am counting the books because …”
“Because?”
“Oh,” I say, now feeling a little embarrassed. “I… I don’t know, I just count things if I think I might start to bawl.”
“Oh, Dennis,” she says, putting her hand on my arm. “Why do you want to cry?”
I move away again, but just a little.
“Because my mother didn’t tell me the truth about my father being in the hospital because of something mental.”
“But can’t you see, Dennis,” Betty says, sitting back in her chair, “that your mother doesn’t want to hurt your feelings, that she wants to protect you?”
I see that Betty’s eyes, big and blue like the Virgin’s coat, have gotten bigger and shinier. She is such a pretty woman, and she is smiling. She has the kind of smile that tells you she could be anybody’s friend, if a friend was needed. I know that she doesn’t want me to feel bad about my mother, or about my father, either.
“Yes,” I say, “but… but… why should she lie to me? Why couldn’t she just trust me?”
“Did she tell Billy any different?” Betty asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, shrugging my shoulders. “I think I’m mad at Billy, anyway, because he hit me with a pool stick.”