Eagle Eye

by Hortense Calisher

  “Upright.”

  “Better be. We don’t move grands.”

  When they had loaded up, he cadged a ride with them. Weren’t supposed to, the boss man said, then relented. Couldn’t believe Bunty was only the false sixteen he’d said he was, anyway. “Looks like seventeen, don’t he, boys? Here kid, stick this cap on your head, they’ll think you’re only another Irishman. Can’t sit up front though; I could be fired for it.”

  Back of the van was where he wanted. And since the van was even less than half full, and the last thing in—the piano—was securely strapped and shrouded, they let him keep open the door. Laughing at him. At first he let his legs dangle, but that mightn’t be too good for their insurance either, so he stood up. Turning a corner in the midst of car-owners sitting lone in their small housings, jogging handsomely over east, then south, over rubble and through the deference of cab-drivers and even busses, he saw the streets as he never had before. Inside the van, there were curved struts, not a straight, dull vanside; the opening where he balanced was shirred like a great horseshoe, canvassed like an old canteen. Between him and the pile of khaki wrap-cloths there was really a line of calico curtain. Behind the calico, somebody lay sick; there was always somebody sick, in a covered wagon. His eyes were sharp but he didn’t know for what. Not for Indians.

  When they rolled up to the awning, the new building, which he hadn’t seen yet, turned out to be more or less like the one he’d left, only bigger. There were some ornaments though, to distinguish it by. And a new doorman. He jumped off the truck and watched the crew of two unload, knowing better than to offer help. When they came down for the last time, and clapped the van door closed, he went around front to the cab with its contents, and held up the cap. “Thanks very much for the ride. It was super. And please, could I give you this?”

  They were shocked to the gills, he could see that, and refused at first, meaning it. But he stood his ground. “Please. The guy it was for back there, didn’t show up. And I’ll remember the ride.”

  “Damtootin’ you will.” They took the gold coin, vowing to split it between them, or toss for who would keep it for his kids. Once they’d decided to take it, he saw he was out of it. When they drove off, he didn’t need to wonder what they said of him. But the ride really had been of use to him. Like a perspective pointed back, it had shown him that even if he were to send the goldpiece as planned, carefully wrapped, stamped and addressed to Doorman, Shannon—a talkative man with all the boys and girls in the house, as well as a man of few phrases—mightn’t know who had sent it. Even if Bunt put a return name on it, Shannon mightn’t know from which of his brood of eaglets the “penny” had come.

  Yes, the new building was made of the same sturdy, dank stone, a solidified gloom that entered the chest, surrounded him from behind, and took him two or three flights up in the elevator to forget. But the apartment, eight rooms, spiked around an anteroom with a weak, white mantel which hung there like a mouth waiting to be shut or stuffed, did have the look of a family place, even in spite of the one feature that gave Maeve such glee. A black-and-white terrazzo floor, put in by the last tenant, began at the halldoor like a mad dream of Italy, and stopped well in the field of vision one and a half rooms down.

  “What’s so funny?” Maeve scowled, under the headscarf she kept for moving-days.

  He leaned there hysterically pointing to where the dream floor stopped. “He woke up.”

  By nightfall the furniture was in and placed; Maeve and a decorator had planned it like a battle this time; they were into Swedish maids now, and a Helga was there to help. His books were in his room. When he complained, with a venom new to him, that one of them—“the one book I needed”—was lost, it was found for him. Whatever his mother was learning, she was very apologetic toward him. In return, he allowed nothing in his room except the servants’ bed and dresser that the maid Marlene had once had, a load of bricks he made bookshelves from, and the last tenant’s wallpaper, loud as bagpipes, which, as the rest of the place came to a discreet, fawn-gray completion, went off with a bang every time he opened his door. “But your room’s so central!” Maeve wailed. No dice; he wouldn’t let her change it. Usefully maybe, it taught him the architectural liabilities of a circular house. And brought him and Buddy into what one of the Brooklyn cousins—this time the move had smoked out a few well-wishers snoopy enough to pay Manhattan parking-rates—had called “a lovely relationship between a father and his boy.” Buddy often came into his room now to watch TV, dragging his posture-chair.

  “What do you think of the joint?” he said one night, swinging the chair to look out at it.

  Bunty shrugged. “It looks like—you know—.” He shrugged again. Not a joint.

  “You could copulate in this place at a teaparty,” Buddy said. “The mirrors would be too well-bred to notice it. With twelve Mrs. Reeves’s you could do it, God forbid. And her mother.” Then they went back to TV.

  Otherwise, they were all three on even keel again. This place was soundproof for real, and he was glad of it, as the only way to build secrets and wrench his personality away from the Bunty-doll they had bought for him. As Buddy’s propositions for him became more acute, he realized that this might always have been the case, but there were hazards there too. The more space his father delicately strained to leave around him for his own growth, the more he thought he could see how his father’s space must already be crisscrossed and hedged.

  Meanwhile, away at school, where they were being taught to log computers, he and a boy named Betts often went back after hours; cronies sharing only this, like a couple of garage mechanics. The school’s two pieces of equipment—one gift horse, one boughten—which were set up in an angle off the science lab that had once been a butler’s pantry, and were always breaking down, began to seem to him like a pair of older brothers who had worn themselves out in the service of the young. For a while, no matter what permutations and combinations he practiced, he seemed to be working out some likely simpler tensions in himself. Until a time came when it occurred to him that the more vocabulary he would have, the more complicated would become the offering. The spring day outside the lab window suddenly seemed to him more—whatever. And switching to soccer and swimming, he never went back.

  One vacation home, coming in from a very adequate day—morning at the Metropolitan Museum, lunch in the Modern’s garden, and a two o’clock track meet at the Garden, he found Maeve displaying his room with a certain pride, like the cage of some freak she fondly kept there. He passed her with a swat “Hi, Ma,” and went in. Calling her that kept the distance, though “Pa-ing” Buddy was still impossible. Outside his closed door he heard the cousin say, “What a nice normal boy!”—Brooklyn’s tribute to his short hair, which when longer kept his fair scalp too itchy with pool chlorine. He smiled, his heart pounding as if in fact he’d just made it back to his lair. He knew he was as normal as a boy dared to be these days. He got merely good grades in a class where half were rated as gifted, had just made it up from second swimming team to substitute on first, and was in steady pursuit of three girls, one of whom had already been caught.

  EOF—as Betts used to say. END OF FILE

  This was the end of the linear life.

  THE WEEK BEFORE HE was twenty-one, Quentin wired him to one of his maildrops, the last one. He’d been on a Scottish walking-trip now over—two tents, three men, four girls. “You can come home now from finishing-school,” the wire said. He stopped off at the PO in Malleig, apologizing for his dripping boots and hands as if the weather were his, not theirs, and sent a return cable: “Buy a yarmulka for August fifth.” The postmistress, a young woman, wrote it out for him. As he started to spell “yarmulka” aloud, she pushed the slip back at him, accurately done, and he reminded himself that the Scots were the best-educated plain people in the Isles, especially on religion—one more pennyworth of acquired knowledge he would now have to carry home with him. He grinned at her, tipping the soaking tam he had discarded a tarboosh
for some weeks back. The twenty-pocketed jacket he wore signaled to any gamekeeper that he was one of earth’s exalted, but he had forgotten this. The girl behind the counter was about his age, a buxom bit with the rosy, open face that was always lucky for him, but there was a child by the grate, and as the girl went toward it he saw she had another bun in the oven. On impulse he handed her his father’s cable to read. “He means—we’ve ended the war.”

  Her hand went to her breast, her mouth quivered for him. “Are you on the run, then? You’ve been?”

  What a sweetheart. In fancy his flesh emigrated back again from the America it was going to, and clove with hers, which would be grooved with all the firm feelings it must harbor: one man, one gun, one cot, one sod.

  “N-not officially.” He saw his boots had stopped puddling.

  They shook hands anyway. As he left, her glance, straying from child to him, was the same for them both.

  He knew what it was as well as she; he was a man—deferred.

  Luckier than some. He knew how that went, too. Buddy’s cable made him sore, though—as if his father had the idea he hadn’t thought about it.

  By the time he’d left home for his lineup of schools, all the “better” ones had become expert in the art of obtaining military exemption—in New England they were partisan. Sharing with the Pentagon, as a master had said, a taste for the best material. Halfway through the tenth grade, they’d already pointed out to him that if he were to veer just slightly off-center of his stated interest, to a more mathematically involved one, he might qualify for a national science fellowship—for reasons that had nothing to do with need. By the time he got a draft number, he was onto the fact that the odds in his crapgame with time were nevertheless better, since his draft board, whatever its stand on “educational” deferment, had at hand the great body-pool of New York. So he’d become part of his part of his generation, of the equilibrating young Americans flying the world on their trapezes, along with their girls. In summers and other off-times, or even when a boy’s number, a man’s, had been pulled—but while there were still maybe two kinds of delaying action, or one, or maybe none—they ate up the world in tramp-travel. Not a dodging yet, just out on the road. In his nine months abroad he’d been on a bus to India, a dirty barge in France and a clean one out of Bruges before he had ever stopped to stare at a major city; his kind knew rat-corners of the world that even the artists hadn’t got to yet.

  “Waddya mean—we are artists,” a big Californian had said to him in a hostel in Wales. “At not doing what we want. Or not finding it out.” All the big guy had wanted at the start was to go into the land business in Orange County with his father. “Raise kids and a big fat bankroll—and what woulda been wrong with that?” His blond Tarzan jaw worked belligerently on the target that had escaped. He had boondoggled nearly eight years of school—engineering mostly—through a really ace set of grad school ploys, only to discover, now that the simple life he wanted was legal again, he couldn’t get himself to go back to it. He spat on the floor, then looked guilty, suffering from manners he had once had. The hostel was full of ruddy-cheeked eighteen-year-olds from the Midlands, and singing French schoolboys even younger. “I know too much. I’m twenty-six years old.” He and his pals didn’t usually middle-class it in places like this. “But hell—it is armistice.” Actually, he hadn’t been vulnerable to the draft for some time. When he could no longer explain his inertia, and the home money had stopped, he’d joined up with the hippies for a while, selling leather on the Spanish Steps, doing chalk pavement-pics in front of the National Gallery. “I did blueprints of bombers, from aerodynamics class. One of the profs must of had a defense tie-in.” A London paper got onto it, and he was stopped. “Some American general must of walked on it.” Hell, he couldn’t care less about politics. “Know what my ambition was?” he said, his big angel-lips shaping the word. In the flickering gloom of the hostel, he looked like a boy in a dormitory, whispering what the prefects shouldn’t hear. “I wanted to be a young father.”

  His friend in the upper bunk, who after identifying himself as a writing student out of Stanford, had then buried his head, now raised it. The three Americans looked at one another. Names weren’t the route these days, as against addresses and food-tips along the way, or an exchange of tags. A fall admission to Yale, architecture and life, Bunty had said. For one year.

  “Pol-i-tics,” the other student said, looking down at the big boy. “Don’t you know what you are? You’re a veteran, just like the rest of us. Whether you took a CO, or went to Sweden, or took our route. You’re a fatality. Who’s alive.” He fell back, staring at the low roof, on a splinter of which he had hung his woolen drawers. His aquiline nose brushed them, and his crooked black brows. “You fought your war—to keep your legs and arms, or your balls—or your brain maybe—and now you’re being—” He sat up again. “What’s that word they called it last time?”

  They waited. He was twenty-three, he’d told them, and he attributed his deferments not to his academic fellowship, but to the fact that the town he came from knew his father had died as a naval officer.

  “Demobbed.” He lay back. He wasn’t going home to finish his thesis—a novel. “To Paris, why not? That’s where all the second-coming Hemingways went last time or stayed on after; we’ll be the third.” He already had a pouched vein in one cheek, that jumped like a cud. He knew one of those boys from the Korean war—a guy who by now had been reduced to writing travel stuff for the Sunday sections—but such were the risks. “Gonna live with my girl.” The vein moved with his smile, too. “She makes wind-sculpture. It sells.” Her father, a wealthy French poulterer, was giving them a shed in Meudon. Lending it. He pulled the hanging underwear over his face until only his nostrils showed, puffing white air. The hostel was at the foot of Mt. Snowdon, and the fire had gone down. Sleepers lay mounded down the vaulted hut in everything they had—duffels, car rugs and plastic ponchos, a sombrero marked “Brighton.” Summer soldiers. Bunty put a log on. One of the little Frenchies called out approvingly. They had their own wine.

  “My book’s a bummer,” the upper bunk said.

  “You were doing what you wanted, though,” Tarzan said.

  Sometime during the night, Tarzan skipped, without paying up for his share of the cheese and beer.

  “You’re lucky,” the student said to Bunty the next morning. “Getting out now. It’s the grad school hanging around that gets you marble-ized.” He smiled. Rightside up and uncovered, he looked mellower. “My girl’s expression once. Not this girl. Gotta girl?”

  “Not at the moment.”

  They shook hands and parted. “Look us up in Meudon, you ever get there. You can’t miss it. A big yellow shed.” How long “ever” might mean he didn’t bother to say.

  “Do that,” Bunty said. “See you around.” He wasn’t expected to give his American address. Even if he knew it. Maeve had written him the new one, not long back, but nowadays he always wrote to his father’s office anyway. One Chase Plaza. You can’t miss.

  On the plane home, he made time with one of the stewardesses, who gave him her address in Jackson Heights.

  “Quite the Don Juan, aren’t you?” the man who was his seatmate said. He was working from a portfolio, had a wedding band, and wore a flowery tie. All of a piece.

  “Nah,” Bunty said. “It just works out.” Since that first girl, Paulina, it more or less had, though he’d never counted—a Don Juan deal that repelled him. Next to the guy next to him though, he was probably an ace, their style.

  “Really does, huh? How?”

  Bunty turned. No, not a put-down. Except from age fifty to twenty-two. He leaned back, sliding the tarboosh down his forehead. “Stewardesses? Just never shoot the breeze with both of them. Start off right away on only one.” And play it harder the nearer New York, or other home bases. When they were going back to whatever they weren’t into yet. Or were—and were wondering about it.

  The guy was closing his portfolio. Oy. Co
nversation.

  “You wouldn’t believe it, but a friend of mine once got a dose from one of them, from a stewardess. One of ours, too.”

  “I guess they get very international.”

  “You a student?”

  “No, I’m in m-mufti.” The stewardess passed, and he gave her the nod. “I—f-fought in the war.”

  “But that was the other girl,” the guy said. “Or wasn’t it.” He peered after her down the aisle.

  It wasn’t. “This is the one that’s pushing dope.”

  “You don’t mean it. Good God. So you were over there.” He sneaked an uneasy glance at the Egyptian tarboosh, which had been acquired en route from India, in the airport at Nice.

  Bunty smiled. “That’s a very emotional tie you’re wearing, sir.” In his best Massachusetts accent.

  “Countess Mara. Like it?” The stranger spread a little. Then caught his eye. “You kids. You infernal kids.” He launched into an account of his own kids, which since they were several, and all on his tail in various ways, lasted until Kennedy.

  As they were filing out, the first stewardess smiled at Bunt. She meant it. His seatmate bent modestly aside, to snag his overcoat from the hatch.

  “Not to worry,” Bunt said in his ear. “She sounds like a nice girl, lives in Queens. And is thinking of running off to be one of the Children of God. Well, goodbye.”

  “Good Lord, that’s a sect, isn’t it. Think twice.”

  “Oh, I’m looking to be serious. So far, it hasn’t worked out.”

  “Keep trying. Look—my name’s Carroll Monteith. Ever want a job in a paper company, come see me. Here’s my card.”