by Sol Stein
* * *
COMMENT BY DR. GUNTHER KOCH,
PSYCHIATRIST
On Saturdays there is much to do that cannot be taken care of in the week, some shopping for breakfast things and for the evenings when I do not want to go to a restaurant, picking up light bulbs and whatnot at the hardware store, then home, skimming through professional magazines I am too tired to read on a weekday evening, and finally, when I can no longer take all this nothing, a walk in Central Park if the weather permits, and perhaps a film.
I find myself going to older films at the Symphony or the Thalia, things I have seen with Marta, because when I see a new film that is really good, I find I want to nudge Marta in the ribs or talk to her about it, so I keep with things we saw together. The film world is for me finite, finished, no more that is new. Karl, whom I share an office with, teases me I should marry again and recounts always the possibilities among the widows we both know. But it would be a housekeeping thing, not a marriage full of the interchange of emotions I had with Marta for thirty-four years. It could not be fair to the woman I married, Marta’s shadows everywhere, the constant mental comparisons. If I married a widow, she would have shadows, too. And who would want to marry a widow whose marriage had not been good?
Our big loss, of course, was grandchildren. Our one son, Kurt, married—was it in spite?—a young woman who had already had a needless hysterectomy. Was Kurt’s childlessness a willful attack on us?
I am quite convinced, after all these years of tiring practice, that the societies which enabled generations to live together and the children to be tutored by their grandparents were the best of all systems, avoiding the oedipal clash. I was too young when Kurt was a boy to raise him with the understanding that came to me, as it does to all of us, too late in life really to be of use. And so the hope was for grandchildren, even for a solitary grandchild, with whom I would now have my principal relationship and for which I would reserve, at the very least, all of my Sundays.
For what is there to do on a Sunday except read the enormous paper, or nap, or ask at a restaurant for a table for one, which elicits always a look of pity. I cannot interfere in the Sundays of my friends who have families full of grandchildren. I remember when Kolvick was taking his training analysis with me, and against my better judgment I went to his house for Sunday dinner, how swept up I was with his little boy, becoming in one afternoon an artificial grandfather full of feeling. But this could only be a nuisance interference in Kolvick’s analysis. I couldn’t get involved with his son without unsettling something.
That Sunday evening, as usual, I went for a long walk, directing myself toward the newsstand on Broadway that gets the first edition of the Monday papers early. Over a cup of cocoa at home I flipped through its pages when my eye first caught the story about the Japhet boy. I read it six times. Was I making another mistake by becoming interested in something like this? Sixteen is not a child. And why do I find the fact that he is a magician so compelling? I really should do nothing until I understand this better myself, but my hand sweats to pick up the telephone.
* * *
At six A.M. on Monday Terence Japhet awoke with a start. He had slept a long time. When he came out of the shower, which he started warm and gradually turned cold, Josephine was sitting up in bed.
“What’s the matter?” she said.
He didn’t answer. The expression on his face terrified her.
While he dressed, she called the hospital.
“They say Ed had a good night. Why are you looking like that?”
“Can you fix some breakfast, any kind, anything, just quickly.”
In five minutes he had finished only half his dish of cold cereal, coffee, and said, “I’m going to the police.” Driving to the station house on Croton Avenue, he kept his coat collar up. He worried for the first time about an object flying in through the open windshield and cursed himself for not taking his sunglasses from home.
“What’s up?” said the policeman behind the desk.
“Is Urek locked up?”
The policeman didn’t know what he was talking about. Mr. Japhet tried to explain calmly. The policeman dug around among his papers.
“Oh, we were waiting for you to sign the complaint.”
“The what?”
The policeman showed him the form.
“But I gave the officer at the hospital all the information.”
“His complaint isn’t valid.”
“What do you mean not valid?”
“He didn’t see it happen. His complaint’s got to have a deposition from a witness or the injured person.”
“The injured person is a boy who can hardly breathe or talk, and you let all of Sunday go by. That maniac could run away. My son was nearly killed.”
“Look, mister, calm down, we didn’t let anything go by. If you were in such a hurry, why didn’t you get yourself down here Sunday morning?”
“I didn’t sleep all Saturday night. I didn’t leave the hospital till late Sunday.”
The policeman, used to half-hysterical parents, exaggerations by complainants, pointed to the form impatiently. “If you’ll sign this one, we can tear the other one up. Yours doesn’t need any depositions, you’re an eyewitness, okay?”
Terence filled it out the best he could. While he was doing that, a sergeant came in. He was much more polite.
“I can okay this. We can get a judge to sign it at nine o’clock,” he explained.
“That’s a whole hour from now.”
“We need a warrant to pick up the Urek kid at his home.”
“But he’ll be in school by then.”
“Oh no!” said the sergeant. They hated to pick up kids at school. So many of them were hostile toward policemen. And they’d need the approval of the principal.
“We could wait till after school,” said the policeman.
“Please,” Mr. Japhet pleaded with the sergeant, “that boy is a maniac. You can’t leave him on the loose another minute. He tried to kill my—”
“We’ll handle it,” the sergeant interrupted. “Why don’t you go on home?”
Mr. Japhet’s hands were still shaking when he turned the doorknob to leave. When he was out the door, the sergeant shook his head, and the other policeman shrugged his shoulders.
“We’d better fill the chief in,” said the sergeant. “The school is his turf.”
Mr. Japhet stopped at the glass place on North Highland Avenue. They said they couldn’t get a windshield in till Friday. They’d have to order it. He drove to the hospital. They wouldn’t let him see Ed just then, though when they saw how wrought up he was they did get the resident for him, and the doctor said the boy was not in danger anymore.
“Are you sure?”
“As sure as we can ever be.”
The resident couldn’t give him any more time because a carload of skiers returning to New York City in the early-morning darkness had skidded into a stone wall on Route 9, and all seven of the people jammed into the small car were on the critical list.
He phoned Josephine. He said he was going straight on to the school for his nine-o’clock class. Yes, he said, he could have called in to have a substitute take over for the day, but he wanted to be there when the cops got Urek.
All his rage was coming back.
Chapter 9
The thick-packed auditorium bobbed with more than a thousand student heads, waves of chatter welling as Mr. Chadwick, the principal, tapped on the microphone for silence.
The entire faculty stood along the right and left walls under the high windows through which daylight streamed. When Mr. Chadwick started his career nearly thirty years earlier, the appearance of the principal on the stage was enough to turn a room of youngsters into a catacomb. Now boys and girls raucoused freely, defying him. He had permitted the longer hair. He had allowed rock in the music curriculum. He kept his door open, always, to student complaints. They had wanted freedom, they said. He had harvested rebellion. Was it ever diff
erent?
“I do not like,” he said into the uproar, “to allow the police into the school, but this morning we have no alternative.”
As if on signal, Chief Rogers strode down the aisle, the rows growing silent from back to front as he came into view. Rogers looked now, as always, as if he had just shaved and bathed and pressed his suit, the appearance not of a cop but the uniformed administrator of the community’s tensions. He spoke well, as if he had been to college, which in fact he had.
In five seconds he was onstage, facing the near-silent student body. Mr. Chadwick gladly relinquished the microphone.
“Boys and girls—a lot of you out there are my friends—I don’t think the police belong in a school either to discipline students or to guard against trouble. If we have to do that here, as they do in New York City, which is only thirty miles away, then there will be little difference between schools and reformatories—except you get to sleep at home.”
It got him a laugh, which was what he wanted. He thought of the thousand no longer chattering students as a mob, and the first thing to do with a mob is to relax it. Then he got down to business.
“Saturday night, after the midwinter prom, there was a serious occurrence just outside this building. It’s all over the morning papers, which isn’t good publicity for the community. Ed Japhet, an eleventh-grader, was beset and beaten by a gang of youths right outside these school doors. His father, who teaches here…”
All eyes turned toward Mr. Japhet, who was standing with his colleagues along the right wall.
“…had his windshield smashed by the same boys. And Ed, who put on a magic show here that night, had his equipment smashed irreparably. I have always placed a much greater emphasis in this community on physical harm to human beings than to property damage. Ed Japhet is still in Phelps, though his condition is no longer critical.”
Some students applauded the last statement, until the chief held up his hand.
“We believe that all four boys responsible for this attack are students of this school, and if so, are probably in this auditorium right now. I ask them to identify themselves.”
* * *
COMMENT BY GEORGE THOMASSY,
UREK’S LAWYER
Now, I take very strong objection to this kind of thing. Under our laws a person is innocent until proven guilty. No one has been proven guilty of anything as of now. And a person cannot be made to incriminate himself. That’s exactly what the chief did. He violated my client’s constitutional rights.
“Mr. Japhet,” said the chief, “has identified the alleged leader of the assailants as a student who was in his class last year, Stanislaus Urek.”
Heads turned toward Urek, sitting in the fifth row. And Urek, with all the force his lungs could muster, stood and shouted, “Stanley!”
“Is this the boy?” the chief asked Mr. Japhet across the heads of the audience.
“Yes,” said Mr. Japhet barely audibly.
Four uniformed policemen, who had been standing discreetly at the back of the auditorium, moved, three down the center aisle and one down the right-side aisle toward Urek. The students on both sides of Urek quickly spilled out in the aisles, leaving him alone in the row. The principal motioned them toward the empty seats on the other side.
“I didn’t do nothin’,” said Urek.
One of the three policemen in the center aisle started to sidle into the row toward Urek.
“I wanna talk to my father’s lawyer,” said Urek to the chief.
“As soon as we get to the station house.”
“I ain’t going to no station house!”
“Who were the other boys with you?” asked the chief.
“I ain’t snitching on nobody,” said Urek, suddenly darting towards the side aisle, where the row was now blocked by a lone policeman. The faculty members standing nearby against the wall scattered. The policeman seized Urek’s arm.
“Leggo my arm!” screamed Urek. Shaking free, he shoved the cop off balance, grabbed the high window ledge, and hoisted himself up.
The policeman tugged at Urek’s leg. Urek kicked backward, his heel hitting the cop’s face. A nostril gushed red blood as a moaning sound went through the student audience, suddenly all on its feet, with the chief yelling into the microphone, “Sit down! Sit down!”
Urek hoisted himself, first a knee, then altogether, up onto the windowsill, then turned, framed against the window light, shouting, “Let me alone!”
The hurt policeman wiped blood from his nose, cheek, and lip. The other three policemen were beneath the window ledge, looking up. One reached for his pistol.
“Put that away!” commanded the chief.
The policeman returned the weapon to the holster. Clearly, none of the three dared to try hoisting themselves onto the window ledge.
Mr. Chadwick whispered in the chief’s ear. “Shall I clear the auditorium?”
“No,” said the chief, “we’ll lose the other three. This’ll only take a minute.” Then to the back of the room, “Somebody bring a ladder or a chair.”
There was a bustling in back of the room as a chair from an adjoining classroom was brought down the side aisle by a faculty member.
“Now, you come down,” the chief said to Urek.
“Fuck you!” screamed Urek. “Fuck all of you!”
The tallest policeman was on the chair, grabbing for Urek’s leg. Urek stomped at the cop’s hand, which was quickly withdrawn. Another chair was brought down the side aisle and placed on the other side of the window ledge, and mounted by another policeman. With a signaled nod, both policemen reached for Urek’s legs at the same time, figuring he couldn’t stomp at both at the same time.
Urek kicked out at one, then the other, hitting neither. Then he started losing his balance. One of the cops grabbed at his ankle, throwing him further off balance, and Urek went crashing against the window, his shoulders breaking the glass as girls screamed and a shout filled the auditorium. For a moment it seemed that Urek was falling backward out the window, but the quick policeman was up on the ledge, sitting, grabbing the flailing feet, holding on as the second policeman hoisted himself to the large sill, and together they pulled with all their strength, sending Urek pitching forward into the room. There was a rush of people toward where Urek fell, the chief abandoning the stage and the microphone, rushing up the aisle, yelling, “Give him room!” He thought Urek was unconscious, some bone broken, or his spinal cord snapped.
But in an instant he knew otherwise, because as the chief leaned over, Urek reached up and grabbed his collar. Before Urek could do any harm, a mass of hands had seized his arms and legs and held him pinioned beyond need, breathless, yelling, “Lemme go!” A minute later he was being led from the auditorium, his hands handcuffed behind his back, while the principal tried to restore order and get everybody to sit back down.
Monday in the early evening, Ed was moved out of the intensive-care unit because of hospital rules: as more-serious cases came in, less-serious cases were moved out.
The doctors thought Ed probably should be in a private room. Mr. Japhet’s Blue Cross coverage provided for a semiprivate. Ed was put into a semi-private room which was otherwise unoccupied.
Ed was glad to get away from the other people in the intensive-care unit whose grim state led some of them not to another room but to the morgue.
The overhead light hurt his eyes until it was turned out by the nurse. A floor lamp in the corner cast a yellowish glow. A television set was rigged five feet up on the far wall, its potential less interesting to Ed than the telephone at his bedside, which he could not yet use because of the orange tube in his nose that went down into his throat and stomach. But it was a connection with the outside world he welcomed.
Now that he was no longer doped up, he could feel the dull pain of his bruised throat. If he breathed deeply, his rib cage ached, but instead of a hurt bundle of pain sleeping fitfully, he now began to feel alive again.
Though it was past visiting hours, t
he nurse stood at the door of Ed’s room with a very tall and seemingly shy young man in uniform. They were making an exception because the young man, who had seen the news about Ed in the Times, expected to be shifted out of Fort Dix by the end of the week. Ed was very glad to see Gil and motioned him to the bedside chair.
Gilbert Atkins, a stringbean six-foot-two, was three years older than Ed and had been inducted into the army some months previously. They had last seen each other at a meeting of the New York Chapter of the International Brotherhood of Magicians. The fact that they were the two “kids” in the organization had brought them closer than their three-year difference might otherwise have allowed. And they liked each other because they both did not merely buy or learn tricks to do, but experimented with inventing new ways of doing old tricks. Unlike some of the senior members of the brotherhood, they were both also intensely interested in the psychology of the audience, the willingness of most people under the right circumstances to suspend disbelief.
“Don’t try to talk,” said Gil. “They told me all about it. I brought you something.”
Even before the young soldier had unwrapped the present, it was clear it was a book, small, without a dust wrapper, and obviously much used. Ed took it in his hand. The gold printing on the cover had flaked off long ago, but the embossing of the title and author could be read. It was a copy of Jean Hugard’s little book of complex card tricks, the cornerstone of Gil’s library of perhaps three dozen volumes of books on magic.
Ed, overwhelmed, tried to say, “But it’s yours.” The tube made his words unintelligible.
“I didn’t have time to buy anything. Anyhow, I won’t be back for two years.”
Ed felt the cover of the book with the moist palm of his hand. “Thank you,” he mumbled.
Gil sat for a bit in silence, uncomfortable with the obligation of having to do all the talking.
“The gang that got you, are they the ones you told me about?”
Ed nodded.
“You know,” Gil said, “the army is full of guys like that. Rednecks, from every part of the country. Beer, bowling, hunting, car Simonizing. You should hear them talk about women, even their wives. Filling the old lady’s hole, is the way they think of it. These guys don’t even go to the movies, except drive-ins, and that’s not for the movies. Biggest thing they miss in the army is TV. Booze and poker, that’s it. I kind of keep to myself. If I weren’t tall, I think I’d be in fights all the time.”