Thrill Kids

by Packer, Vin

  6

  Q. Who is Ina, Bardo?

  A. Ina who?

  Q. You mentioned her to the others at one time. Do you remember? You said she was your girl.

  A. Lady! She is a lady! Do youthink a gentleman would divulge a lady’s name?

  — From a psychiatric interview with Bardo Raleigh

  THE RING was always kept on the right-hand side of the top drawer of the bureau in his mother’s room. Bardo considered it ironic that such a cheap piece of ten-carat gold should be encased in a fine velvet box. Often, while his mother was sitting at the dressing table putting on the finishing touches of her make-up, Bardo would play with the ring. He could remember very little about the man who had given it to her. Bardo’s father had died when he was not quite three. What he could recall about Thornton Raleigh was mostly inventions of his imagination, inspired by things his mother said about him from time to time. Things like:

  “He was brilliant, Bar, but he was a little lost boy. He’d lose a button on his shirt and never notice it….

  “Some people can take liquor, others can’t. Thorn couldn’t. It was stronger than he was. It finally killed him …

  “Aw, Bar, there was a lot wrong with him, but he was a lovable bum.”

  That Saturday evening, before Flip and Manny and Johnny were to arrive, Bardo stood by the bureau where he could see the ring’s case in the open drawer. His mother sat at the dressing table, brushing her hair. Her hair was light brown, feather-cut and softly curled. She had a wide mouth with lips that were soft and curving, and large eyes the same blue as her son’s. They looked as if their owner possessed a delightful secret that could not, unfortunately, be shared with anyone. There was not a single feature of her face that was not exactly right, and combined with her trim, well-molded body, with its slim, long legs and full, ripe breasts, she made a wonderfully impressive appearance. She had married too hastily, too young, and she had never remarried after the sudden death of her husband. She was thirty-five. Men who saw her on the street turned and stared as she passed, and they said to themselves and each other, “There goes a beautiful woman.”

  Beauty, in a sense, was her business, and she aptly personified the title of the magazine on which she had worked for thirteen years. She was now an associate editor at Beautiful Lady. At work, she wore a hat; usually the kind of hat other women would shy from buying, fearing themselves not quite dramatic enough for it. Her clothes were always in good taste, but they were never ordinary either; never the sort anyone would wear. Few would or could.

  She was a woman who had worked hard for everything she had, and “everything,” to her mind, was Bar. Immensely proud of him, she was both amused and bemused by him, and at times the only thing she seemed to understand about him was her love for him; yet nothing Bar did or was met with her disapproval. She believed that she would be quick to censure him, and equally quick to forgive him, should the occasion arise, but it never had. Aware that he was certainly different from most boys, she accepted the difference without being able to define it.

  “I just can’t see Bardo at a baseball game, yelling his lungs out for his favorite team,” Claude McCoy, her most enduring and persistent suitor, had once remarked.

  “He’d think it was vulgar,” she’d agreed, laughing.

  She saw nothing remotely offensive in the statement.

  Now as she saw Bardo behind her, through her mirror, she smiled. Despite the sophistication he had cultivated in his four years away from her, he still toyed with her jewelry as he had done when he was a little boy; and still he stayed close to her, watching her prepare dinner in the kitchen, following her from room to room.

  He had begun calling her by her first name several years ago. He did it in a kidding, affectionate way that she thought of as cute. That, and his habit of referring to himself as “he,” were affectations that diverted and somehow pleased his mother. She was at first surprised and then gratified to realize that Bar was interesting, quite apart from the fact that he was her son. “Bar?”

  He put down a box he was holding in his hands, and his eyes met hers in the mirror. “Hmm?”

  “What are they like, the boys who are coming over this evening?”

  “Oh, Ivy, I don’t know. I guess you might say they’re younger than I am. Not just in years, you understand.” He crossed the bedroom and sat on the edge of her bed, opposite her.

  Ivy Raleigh said, “Do you know them well?”

  “No, I told you I just met them a week ago. One of them is something of a zoot-suiter. Most amusing.”

  “And the others?”

  “Typical, I would say. Ingenuous.”

  “There. Do you like the way Leo cut my hair this time?”

  “Very agreeable, yes.”

  “It’s not too short?”

  “Perfect!”

  “Pearls or rhinestones?” “Let me see…. Pearls.” “I think so, too. Pearls it is!”

  He stood and walked over to the window, pushing the draperies aside so he could see down into Fifth Avenue. He looked across at the Park side, where there were benches spaced at intervals in front of the stone wall.

  “Peculiar how they loiter,” he said, nodding toward the people who sat idle on those benches. Then he said, “Do you think you’ll ever marry Claude, Ivy?”

  “Should I? I don’t know. I’m fond of him. I always said I’d wait until you were graduated.”

  “He doesn’t like me, does he?”

  “Darling, don’t be a silly goose. Of course he does!”

  “Not very well, he doesn’t,” Bardo mused, watching one person in particular from the window. It was a man stretched out on one of the benches, apparently asleep. “Only because of you,” he continued.

  “That’s not true, Bar.”

  Distracted momentarily, Bardo observed, “The police never patrol Fifth. Vagrants just lie around down there.” He was frowning as he stared out.

  “What makes you think he doesn’t like you?”

  “Intuition.”

  “Oh, darling!” “He’s jealous.” “Jealous!”

  “It’s infinitely feasible. We’re so close.” “Claude isn’t like that.”

  Bardo shrugged, still watching the man who slept on the bench. He said, “They’re like cockroaches, these vagrants. In the dark they crawl out of the woodwork. Night comes and there they are. Eyesores!”

  “It’s this weather,” Ivy said. “It’s too hot for people who live in dilapidated buildings to stay indoors.” She finished fastening the tiny pearl earrings to her lobes.

  “Even in winter they find their way to those benches. And they’re dirty. They’re unbelievably dirty!”

  Ivy stood up and turned before the long mirror on the back of the closet door. The deep olive-green dress she wore hugged her body tightly; the front and back of it dipped low to reveal a soft white back and bare chest to the gradual round rising of her bust, where a heart-shaped pearl pin was clipped to a side of the dress. Her hips curved out generously from her slim, pinched waist, and the straps of her open-toed slippers wound around thin ankles.

  “You know, you really haven’t any grounds for believing that, Bar, darling,” she said as she looked at herself, turning to see her stocking seams. “I wish you didn’t.”

  He whirled around, his eyes suddenly alive with intense concern. “Ivy, good Lord! A bum is a bum in any season, and he’s filthy, and he reeks! I can smell a bum when I see him from the window! Foul-odored and unkempt! Clothes falling off him! What would you have me do? Sympathize with a filthy — “

  His mother held her hand up, interrupting him. “No, no, no, no, honey! I don’t mean about vagrants. I mean about Claude!”

  Bardo looked vaguely disappointed.

  “Oh,” he said flatly. He walked away from the window. “Are you still on that?” Sinking his hands into the pockets of the gray cord trousers he wore, he regarded his mother. The frown on his face went, and his features softened.

  “I just want it clear
, honey. Claude does like you.”

  “All right,” he said. “He does.” He smiled. “Ivy, Bardo Robert Raleigh thinks you look utterly lovely.”

  “My darling,” she said. “Thanks.”

  “Infinitely stunning.” He stood there while she walked over to him, her hand touching his cheek. “Bar, you’re very sweet,” she said.

  “And you’re the only lady B. R. Raleigh knows.”

  “Thanks, darling. Hey, say — I’d better get those Cokes on ice. Do you know it’s practically eight? Good heavens, your friends will be here.”

  She started from the room as Bardo said, “Not friends.”

  “What, darling?” She was already in the hall outside the bedroom.

  “They aren’t friends,” Bardo called after her. “Merely acquaintances.”

  Ivy Raleigh went, through the living room into the kitchen. The apartment looked deceptively spacious. Although it actually was a small flat, it was not an inexpensive or even a moderately expensive one. It was more than Ivy could afford, yet like so many things, she miraculously managed to afford it. Claude was right when he said, “You know it’s ridiculous for us to live apart this way, Ivy. You killing yourself on that job to maintain this place, and me with a good-sized house in Clifton that I’m never in. Except of course this damnable summer. Why don’t you marry me? Or at least let Bar face the facts of life?”

  “Oh, he knows about us, darling,” she’d answered.

  “He knows we go out together.”

  “Do you think that’s all?”

  “I’d swear to it.”

  “It’s funny. I really don’t know…. But in either case, I dislike indiscretion of any kind.”

  “Then for Christ’s sake, marry me.”

  “You know?” she had answered. “I might.”

  Before she had met Claude, three years ago, Ivy had shunned the idea of remarrying. At Thorn’s death she had found a job that paid forty-two dollars a week. She moved back with her parents in Yonkers, taking little Bar with her. Thorn had left her with nothing but debts, and scarcely any good memories. The fact that she had loved him completely every day he was alive, and long after he was dead, did not alter the insurmountable fact of his failure as a husband and a father.

  Marriage no longer seemed a profitable goal, and for it she substituted success in a career. But when she found Claude McCoy, she found also that her career was instantly and infinitely less important to her, and that

  Claude was incredibly more a man she could love than Thornton Raleigh had ever been. When she became sure of this, Bar was in his junior year at Sandside. Out of fairness to him, she thought, she would wait until after his graduation and until his plans for the fall had solidified before making any decisions about her own future.

  It was curious, she realized, as she set the Cokes in the refrigerator and covered the sandwiches she had made for Bar’s friends, that he had mentioned marriage that evening. He had never done it before. Curious, and coincidental, for even that afternoon she had thought of gradually introducing the subject into their conversations this summer. Whatever it had been that had caused him to think of it, she decided, it was fortunate. Typical, too — for they were very close, and in the long run her son was not the enigma she sometimes imagined he was. In the long run, he was as transparent as any son is to his mother.

  From the bedroom, where he was once more standing at the window, watching the bum on the bench, Bardo heard the doorbell. It was the downstairs bell, and he heard Ivy press the button that unlocked the entrance and call out, “Bar? Better come along. Your friends are here.”

  “Directly!” he answered. But he did not hurry.

  For a moment he stayed peering down. His eyes were unblinking, their expression bland. Only an almost indiscernible vein pulsing near his neck belied his calm appearance. When he finally did turn away, he stood for another moment unmoving, looking now at the open bureau drawer. Then, going quickly to the bureau, he removed the box in which the ring was enclosed, and put it in the hip pocket of his trousers. Carefully closing the bureau drawer, he walked from the bedroom. There was a new spring to his step.

  7

  Hello, young fellow — hey!

  Are you feeling strange today?

  Do you wonder at the way

  Everybody seems to say

  What’s on your mind?

  — “Love-Bitten”

  MANNY WAS THE FIRST to arrive, at three minutes after eight. He sat forward uncomfortably on the edge of the straight-backed chair in the Raleigh living room, rubbing his hands together. He wore his best suit, a thinly pinstriped cord, pressed and clean. Actually it had belonged to Irving, but Irv had worn it only once or twice before he enlisted, and after he was killed it had been cut down for Manny. Whenever he put it on, his mother invariably said the same thing: “I remember the day your brother and I went to buy that suit. Afterward we ate chow mien in Longchamps, and saw ‘The Big Sleep.’ Humphrey Bogart was in it.”

  Manny straightened his carrot-colored clip-on bow tie and cleared his throat. He sat dumbly while Bardo settled himself back on the couch opposite him.

  “What’s the matter?” Bardo asked him. “Are you nervous?”

  “Uh-uh. I mean, no.” “Take it easy, then.” “I guess I’m early.”

  “No, you’re not, mister. You’re on time. I like punctuality. It shows self-discipline.” “You said eight,” Manny said.

  Bardo took his silver nail clipper and file from his pocket and worked on his fingers as he talked. “I understand you like snakes, Pollack.” “I’ve got one.” “That’s what I understand.” “I call him Sincere.” “May I ask why?”

  Manny shrugged, grinning a little, blushing in a pleasant way. “I don’t know. I guess because that’s the way he looked to me. He was in this box poking around in the grass, as though he had to hide himself or something, because people in the store there said, ‘Oh, look — eeee!. A snake!’ You know how people are.”

  “Infinitely immature,” Bardo said. “The snake is one of God’s most graceful creatures.”

  “People think they do harm,” Manny said, “but they don’t. Kinds like Sincere — the kings, and kinds like bulls and milks — they help. I mean, they eat rats and mice and things.”

  Bardo said emphatically, “Exactly! They rid the world of many filthy rodents. They move swiftly and surely upon their prey, and they kill with dignity.”

  Manny leaned back in the chair and crossed his legs. “You know,” he said, “most snakes really walk on their ribs. They grip the ground with the sharp edges of the scales on the lower sides of their body. It’s the muscles inside that pull them along the ground. Did you know that?” There was a short silence then; Bardo was paring his nails with the clipper, not looking at Manny.

  Manny said, “I get too wound up, I guess, when it comes to snakes.”

  “Not at all! You ought to be a herpetologist, Pollack. You seem infinitely interested in herpetology.”

  “Thanks.” Manny smiled. He paused before he spoke again. “That’s someone who knows all about snakes, huh?”

  “An authority on them.”

  “I wasn’t sure. I thought that was probably it.”

  “You really ought to be a herpetologist, mister.”

  “I never thought of that. I mean, it just never occurred to me I could do something like that. Around snakes and all.” Manny crossed his arms on his chest, his face alert with the expression of one who has made a significant discovery. “Gee, Bardo,” he said. “Maybe I will!”

  “Of course you will, mister!”

  “I just — never — thought of it,” Manny said, as though he were talking to himself now. “It never occurred to me.”

  Bardo continued to discuss the snake, dwelling again on its value as a killer of filthy rodents, but Manny sat only half listening, off on a flight of fantasy. He imagined himself telling his mother and father, Dr. Mannerheim too: “Well, I’ve made up my mind I’m going to be a herpetologi
st.” He was still thinking of this when Ivy Raleigh came into the living room.

  “Pop to, mister!” Bardo said.

  Surprised by Raleigh’s sudden terse tone, Manny looked across at him, and saw Bardo on his feet.

  “Pop to!” Bardo barked again. “A lady is present!”

  Manny stood up slowly, uncertainly. Ivy Raleigh was smiling, moving forward to take his hand. “Hello, there,” she said. “You mustn’t let Bar order you around. What’s your name, dear?”

  “I don’t mind, ma’am,” Manny answered. He took her hand and pumped it awkwardly. “I’m Emanuel Pollack.” He wondered why he felt like adding, “I’m going to be a herpetologist.”

  “What would you like to drink, Emanuel. Coke? Ginger ale?”

  “I don’t know,” Manny said. “Whatever’s easiest.” “They’re both easy. What’ll it be, hmmm?” Manny said, “Gee, I don’t care. I — ” “Coke rots your teeth, mister,” Bardo announced. “Have ginger ale.”

  Ivy chuckled, winking at Manny. “That’s just his theory, Emanuel. You have what you feel like having.”

  Pollack hesitated. Then he said, “I guess I will have ginger ale, if you have plenty.”

  • • •

  Claude McCoy was eager to begin this evening with Ivy, but he knew he would have to wait in the elevator of 1011 Fifth until old Henry was good and ready to take him up. He did not really mind the wait. McCoy was not an impatient man. Other men hurried, and they often stumbled and fell and frequently were unable to right themselves. Other men’s grasps exceeded their reach. McCoy’s did not.

  “Do it slow and do it sure” was his motto. The words were typewritten on a piece of release paper that hung above his desk in the U. P. offices of the News Building.

  “Hell of a motto for a newspaperman!” a colleague had cracked once. “Speed! That’s the motto for a guy in this business.”

  “You’re still green,” McCoy had told him. “Someday you’ll stop fighting the wire. Someday you’ll be the wire’s boss, and some skin’ll get a chance to grow over those raw nerves.”