A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  “I work hard. Everybody knows I have to, so lay off the psycho stuff, Jimjo. Give it a rest.”

  Whenever Jimjo got on this subject he wouldn’t let it alone until Cliff began to get mad at him. Jimjo would start looking deep with those crazy blue eyes, like a doctor, and Cliff would begin to feel the thing he was most afraid of, anger. Because whenever this feeling began to grow in him it was as if he stared suddenly at a world of bright light and color. Terrible possibilities and alternatives occurred to him, and sometimes he thought of falling down a cliff from which various branches, bushes and little trees stuck out, and if he grabbed the right one he would be saved; if he grabbed the wrong one he would be killed, but if he just ignored them all he would fall unharmed through the air forever.

  “Please don’t get me mad, Jimjo,” he would say. “Please take it easy.”

  Now he went to Jimjo’s desk and turned his lamp on. It was late—five o’clock—and no Jimjo. He should have been back by now. The window was dark, and the only green was a glint of light here and there where dew on a grass blade reflected the lamplight. Where could Jimjo be? If he was still talking to the Dean maybe there was some hope. Ma Bates was back from that meeting already, though, because he heard her call Bill Trippi to her office on the intercom. She could talk to any hallway in the dorm, or just turn on the intercom and listen. Jimjo called the intercoms “bugs.” “She’s got us all bugged, Cliff,” Jimjo would say. “How do you know the rooms aren’t bugged too? And how about the johns?” He’d go on in a whisper, “I bet she’s got every stall bugged! She can sit there in her office and hear every goddam grunt!”

  This would begin to make Cliff angry, and he’d tell Jimjo to lay off. Jimjo hated Ma Bates, and it wasn’t natural. It wasn’t natural to hate a woman of her age. Whenever Cliff thought about Ma Bates he remembered that he had once had a mother—everybody had—but Ma Bates got in the way of his creepy memories of that time before he was nine years old. Everything after that year was clear enough, but sometimes earlier things crept in, like that sweet time of the wee, sleekit mouse that the man loved and pitied so much. His mother seemed as big as a davenport to him, and then the memory stopped. It was as if his life began one day, it was so clear. He stood in the bathroom and wrote his name on the clean and squeaky mist of the window, and through the fingertip lines of his name he saw the black branches of the maple tree, black beneath their skins of ice. Mother was away; that is, mother was not, because she had passed away. Dad never noticed that he’d written his name on the window, because that night the shade got pulled down and always after that they left it down even during the day and turned on the light whenever they used the bathroom. The radiator next to the toilet got little rust spots all over it. Then one day in the spring the light burnt out with a little blue squeak and he raised the shade. He put his hand on the warm glass and twisted, but the letters just smudged a little and twisted a little bit out of shape. His name was still there but he was a few months older; the maple was all yellow-green.

  That was when he began to be himself more or less as he was now—recognizable. But sometimes a brightness would come all over everything in that house, and he’d see doors and doorknobs and things like little shelves he wouldn’t have remembered in a million years. And powerful sweet dark things that somehow had to do with what they had done to his mother. Smells, choky smells like a cat’s bed and wet fur. Sneeze smells, and a big pink pillow with a ribbon handle in a round box he could only open slowly, and below the pillow was powder so soft he couldn’t feel it between his fingers. There was Vick’s Vapo-rub, and hot wet sheets that felt wrong like wetting the bed but were all right because he had bronchitis. Behind the bathroom closet door, where he could never go nor touch, was a big siphon hose hanging from only half of a hot-water bottle, and every time the door shut it knocked softly as a fingertip three times, and rubbed once before it stopped.

  Jimjo’s desk and his books were covered with little pieces of Prince Albert, and his ash tray was half full of the gray, loose little butts of homemade cigarettes. Five-thirty. Where could he be? Cliff walked down the room to the door, then back again. The room was higher than it was wide, and the dark walls went up and seemed to meet at the top up there in the haze like walls of a high tent. By bending over he could see up the grass hill to the delivery entrance of the Union, where a Cushman’s Bakery truck was just pulling away under the floodlight. But where was Jimjo?

  Then someone walked into the room. He turned around and it was Bill Trippi, who had forgotten to knock again. Jimjo said next time Bill Trippi walked in without knocking he was going to punch him out—which was ridiculous considering their weights.

  “Cliff, Ma Bates wants to see you,” Bill Trippi said in his military voice. He knew what he was doing at all times—a fairly big boy with bone-white skin and a short black crewcut. No matter from what angle Cliff looked at his head he saw a curving line of white scalp through the hair bristles. Bill Trippi always seemed about to disapprove of something, and Cliff had the idea that there were many things he disapproved of besides Jimjo. He was going to be an electrical engineer, and there was no doubt about it. He even treated Ma Bates in a funny way, except that he was polite—sort of gave her orders, it sometimes looked like. You’d think she was his own mother, he spoke so plain to her.

  He hadn’t waited for an answer, and was at least ten steps ahead of Cliff all the way to her office. Going in there from the bare hall was like stepping into another building altogether. His feet stopped gritting on the terrazo and he stepped into the deep mauve wall-to-wall carpet, and there was a spindly, polished mahogany tea table, big white gauze curtains and little corner shelves with photographs in silver frames and a big oil painting of a sailing ship on a green sea, with the sunset coming through its sails, and little homey doodads like china elephants on doilies about as big as silver dollars.

  Ma Bates’ first name was Veronica, and her hair was exactly the color of that spun glass on Christmas trees. Her cheeks went down into soft jowls as warm-looking and tender as fresh bread, and she always looked clean as a bakery. She acted as though she weren’t the housemother at all, and whenever Cliff came in she was so delighted to see him, and it was so nice of him to come. She called him Clifford, and made him shake hands. A funny feeling, because from four feet away she was a round, soft, large woman, and when he had to come close enough to shake her hand she got smaller and smaller and the clean soft white little hand with the colorless nail polish and the rings went into his big hand like a tiny rabbit into a hole; and as it quivered in there he realized that she was very small.

  “Clifford,” she said, just as pleased as she could be, “sit down!” He sat deep down into an easy chair and put his hands square on the doilies. Bill Trippi had gone right over to her desk where Cartier and Ross, the other proctors, were fiddling with the knobs on the intercom. Out of the loudspeaker came long, hall-like echoing sounds, and footsteps, and then, “Hey, you shit!” Friendly voices. Ma Bates must have heard that, but she ignored it.

  “Clifford, have you seen James?” She still seemed very happy, but serious-happy now. She was happy about him, but not about Jimjo. Her dress was made out of material like a washcloth, with millions of little loops of thread that came out and turned around and went back in, and it was the exact same color as the rug—mauvish purple. She had little diamonds set into the hinges of her glasses, and her blue eyes were twinkly and clean with little wrinkles and one very delicate-shanked wart about a quarter of an inch long on the lower lid of her right eye. It didn’t get in the way, but bent down underneath the lash.

  In answer to her question he just shook his head and tried to look helpful and friendly.

  “Now, that’s the truth, Clifford?” she said as if he might be lying a little, boyishly, but it was all in fun. “Oh, I know you’d never tell me anything but the truth, Clifford.” Which was true; he couldn’t conceive of lying in any official place, because he had no secrets.

  Bill Tripp
i looked at her, and she looked at him, and Bill went out of the office.

  “You’re sure you haven’t seen him this afternoon, Clifford?“

  “No, I haven’t seen him since.…” Cliff broke off because it didn’t seem proper, or in good taste, somehow, to mention the meeting with the Dean, because of what it was all about—the dirty words. Jimjo had been mad because of the letter Ma Bates had written to Doll’s parents.

  The phone rang softly and Ross answered it, saying,

  “Banning Hall, Mrs. Bates’ office,” very officially, and then he said, “Dean Pruitt on the line, Ma.” She pushed herself up out of the davenport and went to the phone, where she talked so softly he couldn’t hear what she said. All the deep material on the chairs and rug, and the curtains, soaked up the sound. Not like the halls where echoes had a high ring in them.

  He tried not to disarrange the doilies on the chair arms, but his fingers just fit into a series of little octagonal holes, and it was hard to remember not to poke his fingers right through, like putting on gloves. Where was Jimjo? He felt that he would get the answer, the real, responsible, official answer, when Ma Bates wanted him to know.

  She kept her office very hot, and though he was hungry—the training table in Commons would be open in a few minutes—, in that soft heat and quietness he grew sleepy. Ma Bates stood at the telephone murmuring to the Dean. She wore white silk stockings, white as mosquito netting. He’d never seen any women but nurses wear white silk stockings. But then he noticed that one of her legs was just a fraction thicker than the other, and he could just make out that puttee look of an Ace bandage spiraling down. Hard to notice. And there were the two little clips over her ankle, just bulges as flat as the heads of thumbtacks. Ow: a vision of thumbtacks sticking right into her leg, and for a second his legs tingled unbearably, like his arm did when he had fallen asleep on it and it was just waking up, with all the nerves thrashing around, cold and hot.

  Once his father told him they had cut his mother’s breast off; he’d thought of white meat on a turkey, as if the flesh had no blood and veins but was firm and white all the way through, and the knife just carved right on through and took off a big slice. But he knew better, and he didn’t like to think of this because suddenly what he knew would explode in his mind like a gush of blood. Deep and horrible; what they did to women. Birth. Babies’ heads and shoulders driving the bones and tubes and flesh apart like a bowel movement as big as a bathtub. Afterbirth and womb. All that power. Not like football where the lurch and crunch and the slap of plastic set him back down but not really hurt inside. Football was all outside and healthy and seldom angry, or if it was the anger was contained within the game, and he knew every single rule.

  There was another memory of his mother, so clear, but she had no face. They were on a train, but where were they going? He knew that he knew then, but everything that happened he almost had to believe had happened to some other little boy, because he couldn’t recognize himself. But certain parts were so clear, like print right on his brain. He sat next to the window, and the poles bent and whipped by but the wire went down and up, down and up, never bothering to stop or even to hesitate where he knew it was hitched to the glass knobs on the poles. The land turned like a dish, faster near them and slower as it spread off across fields and roads to the horizon, but always just perceptibly turning. And when he looked inside he never looked up quite far enough to see his mother’s face. They played a game with the sign

  NO SMOKING

  and it was so clear. She had a voice, but when he tried to hear it all he got was parts of it, and it said no complete words. Something was left like the smooth slide of a drawer shutting before the last shut sound. They played anagrams with the sign, and he quickly got king, in, kin, ink, and then she got on, moon and soon, and he came back with gismo (she didn’t know it, but it was OK), mink and gink (which she hadn’t heard of either), and she got Ming, but it began with a capital letter. Then he got gin, goon, nook and son, and she got sin, sing and song. Then he got sag, smog, OK, oink and sink, right in a row, and there was no doubt he had won! Or that other little boy did, whoever he was, whose memories he had stolen—that boy who quickly transposed the syllables, who for praise cut word upon word from the jumbled letters.

  There were so few of those memories—maybe that was why they were like bright lights in a wide black place, scattered here and there over a wide plain at night.

  Bill Trippi came back, and he and Ma Bates looked at each other again. She finished on the telephone, and came over to stand just too close in front of Cliff. If he’d tried to get up his head would have pressed against her stomach. He smelled the powder that came from the round, hydraulic box. No, not hydraulic; air pressure had made the cover have to go on so slowly, while a mist of powder rose all around it.

  “Clifford?” She cocked her bright head at him, and her twinkly eyes, as if to say it was all in the family. “If James comes back, or if you see him, will you come straight and tell me?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She looked at her silver wrist watch that was so small he’d never been able to get a clear glimpse of its face, and said, “You’d better scoot along to Commons if you want any of that nice training food!” She stepped back to let him go, and he had to go—it was as if she held a door open for him and he had to go right through. He was halfway down the hall toward the front door before he remembered he had to wash and get his meal ticket. And he hadn’t asked where Jimjo was or what was going on.

  He went back to the room, got his towel and kit, went to the john and washed, then just as he was about to leave for Commons, just after he turned out the lights, there was a tap-tap-tap on the window, and he could just see the outline of Jimjo’s head out there. He unlocked the bottom part of the window and let him in. Jimjo came half-jumping over the windowsill into the dark room and whispered, “Dammit, Cliff. I would’ve come in over the top but you left the lights on and they’ve probably got this place staked out.”

  “Why, Jimjo?”

  “You know what she’s done now? She’s got Doll’s parents in on this again. Now we can’t see each other.” While he whispered Jimjo was hauling out his suitcase from under his bed and throwing things at it. “They say,” he said. “It would’ve been all right except for that crummy bitch.”

  “Where you going?”

  Jimjo panted and ground his teeth—something he did in his sleep sometimes, but never when he was awake.

  “Where are we going, you mean. Why d’you think they’re after me? I’ve got Doll hid, that’s why. Oh, those bastards.” He panted and fussed, trying to see what he was getting out of his drawer. “Oh, that bitch, that bitch,” he whispered. “What’s bugging her, Cliff? And that Trippi bastard. I could kill him. You know he was just in here going through both our desks? The Christly mothering FBI around here. Alma mothering mater.”

  “Why don’t you pull the shade, Jimjo? Then you can have some light.” Cliff went to do this but Jimjo jumped at him and grabbed his arm with a fierce little claw.

  “Cliff! What d’you think, I’m dreaming? They might see it and know I’m in here. Now use your stupid head!”

  “But why?”

  Jimjo gave a long sigh and stood still, his big head still too, for once. Cliff’s eyes were getting used to the dark, and he could almost see the red in Jimjo’s hair.

  “Why?” Jimjo said wonderingly. “Why? Sometimes I wonder, Cliff. You got a good thing going.” Then he was all nervous jumping-around again. He heaved his suitcase over the sill and let it down softly on the grass. “So long, baby,” he said, slid out and moved off along the building into the shadows of the trees.

  Cliff decided to go out the side entrance so he wouldn’t have to pass Ma Bates’ office and have to feel that he was being dishonest. As he made the turn toward that door he felt a dull irritation with Jimjo for having to do it. This kind of involvement led to chaos. Was Jimjo quitting school? He’d graduate in a couple of months, at the end
of the fall semester. Why didn’t he just sit on it, whatever it was, or promise to be good, or petition or something? Couldn’t he wait for just a couple of months? It was crazy. Jimjo was out of his mind.

  As he passed Ad building he noticed that the little blue light on the tower was lit. That meant that the campus cops were supposed to call in. He hadn’t seen that light on since last spring when somebody tried to revive panty-raids, but they’d been too much out of style. Ma Bates had been all roguish and giggly over that: “Boys will be boys!” she said. But the proctors found out and the raid never developed. Jimjo said she was disappointed. “Why, even Ma Bates has panties,” Jimjo said. “As long as all you’re after is panties it’s OK.” She and Jimjo had never liked each other.

  At the training table they had Swiss steak, which he liked, and fruit salad, which always seemed as though it ought to be dessert. He was so nervous he almost didn’t feel like eating. The other guys talked about the St. Agnes’ movies and how their line play was real vicious. Cliff hadn’t thought it was—just pretty good. Maybe Jimjo would just take off and be out of his life forever, that madman. But he knew that sooner or later he’d have to tell on him to Ma Bates, and he got so nervous his stomach began to ache.

  Maybe he should have moved to the house this year. But he didn’t want to get involved in all that, either. Damn Jimjo, he thought, but then took it back: I do not damn Jimjo. To him words like that were too literal and magic.

  So Jimjo was going to run off with Doll? But why? Two months to go, and why not wait? Not Jimjo; he was too fierce for that. Doll was like him in a way. Cliff had met her once or twice in the Union, and she was a kind of little bird-girl with dark, cottony hair and thin legs you could see all the muscles on. She smoked about a million Salems a day, and her fingers were always stained. She drank black coffee and talked breathlessly about somebody named Kierkegaard.