by Irwin Shaw
He escorted Oliver to the outside door, and stood there, in the cold-autumn wind, his bright necktie blowing, watching Oliver get into his car and start off toward the hotel where he was to meet Tony.
Oliver went to the bar of the hotel to wait for Tony. He ordered a whisky to take the taste of the academic sherry out of his mouth, and thought over what the headmaster had said, the gentle warnings, the unfavorable judgments, the delicate avoidance of comment on the fact that Tony’s mother, in all the two years that the boy had been at the school, had never put in an appearance. Well, that was one of the things a teacher was for—to show you your son in the light that others saw him, to prepare you for what he was probably going to be like as a man. Staring somberly into his whisky glass, Oliver realized that, as kindly as possible, the headmaster had been trying to tell him that he foresaw Tony as a lonely and unpopular man, with no great taste or aptitude for work, and an unpleasantly sharp and mocking attitude toward the people around him. Oliver sipped his whisky, resenting the headmaster and his confidence in his own judgment and his sense of prophecy. All these people, Oliver thought defensively, are wrong most of the time. That’s why they became teachers in the first place. When he had been Tony’s age, his own teachers, he knew, had predicted vague but glittering glories for him. He had been a tall, handsome, easygoing boy who hardly had to study at all to get the highest marks in his class, who had been a leader in all games, a captain of teams, a president of clubs and classes, a precocious and graceful squire of young ladies. Well, Oliver thought grimly, hunched over his glass, they ought to come and take a look at me now.
Thinking again of Hollis, he wondered what made him so confident of himself. Having a small, definite, achievable aim, and achieving it early? Being surrounded by the gray, unchallenging, semi-failures who made up the faculties of small, country schools? Dictating, with affable severity, to hundreds of boys who passed out of his life before they became old enough seriously to oppose him, and whose later estimates of him would never come back to him? Living always by a comfortable curriculum that hardly changed from one year to the next—so many hours for Latin, so many for sport, so many for the neat, adolescent adoration of God and the laying down of proper, devout rules? Thou shalt honor thy mother and thy father, thou shalt learn to recognize the ablative absolute, thou shalt not cheat on examinations, thou shalt prepare thyself for Harvard. And, along with all these solid foundations and secure passageways, having a pretty, buxom young wife who had come to him with a little money of her own, and who saw him always in a position of command, and who, because of his job, worked with him daily, almost hourly, so that each year their interdependence became cozier and more useful and intimate. Maybe the next time Oliver went into that cheerful office and shook that hearty hand, he would murmur, delphically, “Remember Leontes …”
All goes well, Teacher? Oliver thought, grinning at his own vulgarity. Try sending your wife to the mountains for a summer.
He was about to order another whisky when through the open doorway of the bar, he saw Tony coming into the lobby of the hotel.
Tony hadn’t seen his father and Oliver watched him for a few seconds, as Tony peered, a little near-sightedly, through his glasses, around the hotel lobby. He wasn’t wearing an overcoat and his tweed jacket was too short in the sleeves for him and he was carrying, rather clumsily, a large square of drawing board under one arm. He was taller than Oliver remembered, although he had seen him only six weeks before, and he looked thin and undernourished and cold from the sharp November wind. His hair was long and fine, in contrast to all the other close-cropped students whom Oliver had passed on the campus, and he seemed to hold himself nervously and challengingly. He had a big head, too large for his thin shoulders, and his features had fined down and his nose seemed too long for the rest of his face and to Oliver he seemed to have the air of some queer, half-timid, half-dangerous bird, solitary, ruffled, uncertain whether to fly or attack.
Looking at his son, Oliver had a strange double image. In the long nose and the fair hair and the large gray eyes, even behind the glasses, he could see Lucy’s inheritance, and the broad, slightly domed forehead and the big, firm mouth made him remember, confusedly, photographs of himself when he was in school. But none of it seemed to hang together. The air of challenge, the feeling of suspicion, almost, that Tony brought with him, seemed to keep the elements of his face and body from fusing.
Then Tony saw him, and waved, and came into the bar, and when he was up close and shaking Oliver’s hand, familiarity wiped out the fragmentary impressions, and it was just Tony, grave, polite, well known.
They went into lunch and after the first ten minutes in which they discussed what they wanted to have and Oliver asked the usual questions about how Tony felt and how things were going in class and if he needed anything, and Tony gave the usual answers, the periods of silence grew, as usual, longer and longer and harder for each of them to bear. Oliver was sure that if he never came to see Tony, both he and Tony would be happier for it. But that was out of the question, although it would be hard to say why.
Observing Tony across the table, Oliver noted that the boy ate politely, spilled nothing, moved his hands deftly and with precision. He kept his eyes down, and only once or twice during the meal, when Oliver for the moment had looked away and then suddenly turned back, did he catch Tony watching him, thoughtfully, without malice or love. When Tony caught Oliver’s glance, he lowered his eyes, without haste, and continued eating, calmly and silently. It was only when they were eating dessert that Oliver suddenly realized that there had been something about the boy’s appearance that had been bothering him ever since they had shaken hands. A heavy, long, blond fuzz had come out on Tony’s upper lip and chin and there were isolated tufts of fine, curly hair along his jaws. It gave him a shaggy and unkempt look, like a puppy that has walked through a puddle.
Oliver didn’t say anything about it for a while, but he kept staring at the uneven, fine beard on his son’s face. Of course, he thought. He’s almost sixteen.
“Mr. Hollis,” Oliver said, “told me that he was going to invite you to Thanksgiving dinner at his house tomorrow.”
Tony nodded, without pleasure. “If I have time,” he said, “I’ll go.”
“He’s a pretty good fellow, Mr. Hollis,” Oliver said heartily, glad of a subject for conversation, avoiding, with a twinge of guilt, asking what other plans Tony might have for the holiday. “He’s been watching you pretty closely. He says you have a lot of talent. The cartoons, I mean, for the paper …”
“I draw most of them in his class,” Tony said, neatly spooning up his chocolate ice cream. “It keeps me from falling asleep.”
“What does he teach?” Oliver asked, avoiding a more searching question about Tony’s estimate of Mr. Hollis.
“European history. He’s crazy about. Napoleon. He’s only five feet four inches tall, so he’s crazy about Napoleon.”
Was I that mean, Oliver thought, was I that observant, when I was fifteen years old?
“I’d like to see some of the drawings,” he said. “If you happen to have any around.”
“They’re nothing.” Tony spooned away at his ice cream. “If anybody with any real talent came into this school, they’d never even look at mine.”
One thing this boy really can do, Oliver thought ruefully, is choke off conversation. He glanced around the room, to avoid looking at his son’s burgeoning beard, which, unaccountably, was beginning to get on his nerves. There were several boys eating with their parents at other tables, and directly across from the table at which Oliver and Tony were sitting, there was a handsome blond woman who didn’t look more than thirty-five, and who had gold bracelets on both sleeves that sounded all over the room when she moved her hands. She was sitting across from a tall, heavy-boned boy, who was obviously her son, with the same straight nose, the same direct, happy look of carefully tended health. The son had bright blond hair, cut very close, and his well-shaped head rose on a po
werful, thick neck from a fullback’s broad shoulders. Oliver noticed that he was very polite with his mother, smiling often and listening eagerly, quick at passing the butter and pouring water, holding her hand unselfconsciously on top of the tablecloth as their voices mingled in quiet, friendly murmurs. American youth, Oliver thought, advertisement.
He became acutely conscious of the impression that he and Tony must give in contrast. Tony, with his long, unfashionable hair, his thin shoulders, his glasses, his fragile neck, and the puppy hair on his chin and jaws. And he himself stiff and obviously ill-at-ease, trying, as must be plain to all the room, to strike up a conversation with his taciturn and unfriendly son. As he stared across at the mother and son at the other side of the room, the woman saw him, and smiled warmly, in parental convention, at him. She had shining, even white teeth, and when she smiled she looked much less than thirty-five. Oliver smiled back and nodded. He nodded again when the boy, following his mother’s silent greeting, saw Oliver, and gravely stood up and made a little, reserved, respectful bow.
“Who’s that?” Oliver asked curiously.
Tony glanced at the other table. “Saunders,” he said, “and his mother. He’s captain of the ice-hockey team, but he’s yellow.”
“Why do you say that?” Oliver felt that he had to protest, although he wasn’t quite sure whether he was protesting on the part of the boy or on the part of the mother.
“I’ve seen him,” Tony said. “He’s yellow. Everybody knows it. He’s the richest boy in school, though.”
“Oh, is he?” Oliver glanced once more at the couple at the table, noticing more carefully the golden arms. “What does his father do?”
“Chases chorus girls,” Tony said.
“Tony!”
“Everybody knows it.” Tony methodically cleaned off the plate of ice cream. “His father isn’t so rich. It isn’t that. Saunders makes the money himself.”
“Oh, does he?” Oliver regarded the large handsome boy with new respect. “How?”
“He lends money at interest,” Tony said. “And he has a copy of the last chapter of Ulysses and he rents it out for a dollar a night. He’s the president of the sixth form.”
Oliver was silent for a moment. Confusedly, he remembered reading Alice in Wonderland and Just So Stories to Tony when he was six years old. A chapter a night. After Tony had his bath and his supper and was in his slippers and bathrobe, ready for bed, smelling of soap, sitting on the edge of the armchair, his feet on Oliver’s knees, so that he could see the illustrations in the lamplight.
“What do you mean, the last chapter?” Oliver asked, certain that there was some childish misunderstanding or desire to shock here.
“You know,” Tony said patiently, “Mrs. Bloom in bed, and the tenor and the soldier in Gibraltar. Yes, yes, yes. All that stuff.”
“Have you read it?”
“Of course,” Tony said. “It’s worth a buck.”
“This is a hell of a school,” Oliver said, forgetting, for the first time during the meal, the constraint that had made conversation so difficult for him. “I think maybe I’d better let Mr. Hollis know about this.”
“What’s the difference?” Tony shrugged. “Everybody in the whole school’s read it by now.”
Oliver stared, baffled, at his son, sitting two feet away from him, shaggy, with the pimples and fuzz of puberty on his face, and a cold, unafraid, measuring light in his eye, removed, mysterious, unpunishable.
“Well,” Oliver said, more loudly than was necessary, “one thing we’re going to do before we leave here is shave that damned beard off your face.”
When they left the dining room, Mrs. Saunders smiled again, radiantly, shaking her golden bracelets. Saunders, immense, smooth-cheeked, bull-necked, smiling with the gravity of a young senator, stood up and made his mannerly, serious bow.
They walked to a drugstore and Oliver bought a heavy gold-plated safety razor, the most expensive one in the shop, and some shaving soap. Tony watched him impassively, asking no questions, standing there with the clumsy piece of drawing board under his arm, glancing from time to time at the covers of the magazines that were displayed near the soda fountain. Then they went to Tony’s room, walking side by side, as other fathers and sons were doing, across the dying grass of the campus, cold and wet through the thin soles of Oliver’s city shoes. Some of the fathers lifted their hats in salute and Oliver did the same, but he noticed that the greetings between Tony and the other boys, with or without their parents, were always curt and unenthusiastic. Oh, God, Oliver thought, as he followed Tony’s narrow back up the stairs of his house, what have I got here?
Tony had a room of his own, a somber cubicle with greenish walls, one window, a narrow bed, a small desk, and a battered wooden cupboard. It was severely neat. There was an open wooden box on the desk, with a stack of papers, evenly clipped together, in it, and the books on the desk were lined up in an orderly row by two granite bookends. The bed didn’t have a wrinkle on it and no clothing was hanging in sight anywhere in the room. Automatically Oliver thought, I ought to send Lucy here to take lessons in housekeeping.
On the wall above the bed was a large map of the world, with little colored pins stuck into it, here and there. And hanging from a string from the ceiling, in front of the cupboard, was a yellowed human skeleton, wired together, with several important bones missing. On the desk was Tony’s telescope.
This was the first time that Oliver had been in Tony’s room, and he blinked, taken aback, at the skeleton. But he didn’t speak about it for the moment, telling himself, with nervous reassurance, that it probably showed commendable zeal in a boy who was preparing for the study of medicine.
“I thought everybody here shared a room with another boy,” he said, unwrapping the razor and slipping in a blade.
“That’s the idea.” Tony was standing in the middle of the room, staring reflectively at the map on the wall. “I had a room-mate, but my cough drove him out.”
“Your cough?” Oliver asked, puzzled. “I didn’t know you had a cough.”
“I don’t.” Tony grinned. “But he was a nuisance and I wanted to be alone. So I used to wake up every night at two o’clock and cough for an hour. He lasted just over a month.”
Oh, Lord, Oliver thought despairingly, Hollis is earning his money keeping him in school. “Take off your shirt, so you won’t get wet,” he said, opening the tube of shaving cream.
Without taking his eyes from the map, Tony began slowly to unbutton his shirt. Oliver looked more closely at the map. There was a pin stuck in the city of Paris, and a pin stuck in Singapore and pins in Jerusalem, Assisi, Constantinople, Calcutta, Avignon, Beirut.
“What’re those pins for?” he asked curiously.
“I’m going to live in each of those places three months,” Tony said matter-of-factly, “after I get out of medical school. I’m going to be a ship’s doctor for ten years.” He took off his shirt and went over to the cupboard and opened the door, making the skeleton swing out into the room, with a dry, unpleasant clatter of loose bones. Tony hung his shirt neatly on a hook and closed the cupboard door.
Ship’s doctor, Oliver thought. What an ambition! He kept his eyes off Tony and stared at the map. Paris, Calcutta, Beirut. Distance, he thought.
“And where’d you get the skeleton?” Oliver asked.
“In a pawnshop on Eighth Avenue,” Tony said. “In New York.”
“Do they let you go to New York by yourself?” Oliver asked, beginning to feel that it was hopeless to try to keep up with the plans and movements of his son.
“No,” Tony said, thoughtfully touching the skeleton. “I tell them I’m going home for the week-end.”
“Oh,” Oliver said lamely. “I see.” For a moment, he had a vision of his wife and his son, unknown to him, unknown to each other, standing on opposite corners of the same avenue, waiting for the lights to change, crossing, in the crowds, close enough to touch, never touching. With a sense of revulsion, he watched Ton
y, naked from the waist up, thoughtfully fingering the skeleton. “How much did that cost?” he asked.
“Eighty bucks.”
“What?” Oliver couldn’t stifle the tone of surprise. “Where’d you get that much money?”
“I won it at bridge,” Tony said calmly. “We have a regular game. I win three out of four times.”
“Does Mr. Hollis know about this?”
Tony laughed coldly. “He doesn’t know about anything.” He raised his arm and touched the base of the skeleton’s skull. “The occipital bone,” he said. “I know the names of all the bones.”
A more normal father, Oliver thought, with a more normal son, would praise him for such proof of industry. But the sight of the bare, smooth adolescent torso, vulnerable, slender, balanced and neatly shaped, next to the yellowed sticks of the pawnshop skeleton was suddenly unbearable to Oliver.
“Come over here,” he said brusquely, going to the basin in the corner of the room, “and let’s get this over with. I have to be in New York by six o’clock.”
Tony gave the skeleton one last, affectionate pat, which started once more the dicelike clacking of the bones. Then,, obediently, he walked toward the basin and stood in front of Oliver.
“First, wash your face,” Oliver said.
Tony took off his glasses and turned the water on and washed his face. He did it thoroughly, meticulously. Then he dried his hands and turned toward Oliver, the fuzz on his cheeks darkened and flattened by the water.
Oliver rubbed the shaving cream carefully onto Tony’s face, feeling the sharpness and delicacy of the cheekbones under his fingertips. Tony stood patiently, unblinking, without moving. Like an old blasé horse being shod, Oliver thought.