The Early Stories (26 page)

“What's the trouble?” Uncle Quin's voice asked.

My father said, “The poor kid's got something into his eye. He has the worst luck that way of anybody I ever knew.”

The thing seemed to have life. It bit. “Ow,” I said, angry enough to cry.

“If we can get him out of the wind,” my father's voice said, “maybe I can see it.”

“No, now, Marty, use your head. Never fool with the eyes or ears. The hotel is within two blocks. Can you walk two blocks, Jay?”

“I'm blind, not lame,” I snapped.

“He has a ready wit,” Uncle Quin said.

Between the two men, shielding my eye with a hand, I walked to the hotel. From time to time, one of them would take my other hand, or put one of theirs on my shoulder, but I would walk faster, and the hands would drop away. I hoped our entrance into the hotel lobby would not be too conspicuous; I took my hand from my eye and walked erect, defying the impulse to stoop. Except for the one lid being shut and possibly
my face being red, I imagined I looked passably suave. However, my guardians lost no time betraying me. Not only did they walk at my heels, as if I might topple any instant, but my father told one old bum sitting in the lobby, “Poor kid got something in his eye,” and Uncle Quin, passing the desk, called, “Send up a doctor to Twenty-eleven.”

“You shouldn't have done that, Quin,” my father said in the elevator. “I can get it out, now that he's out of the wind. This is happening all the time. The kid's eyes are too far front in his head.”

“Never fool with the eyes, Martin. They are your most precious tool in life.”

“It'll work out,” I said, though I didn't believe it would. It felt like a steel chip, deeply embedded.

Up in the room, Uncle Quin made me lie down on the bed. My father, a handkerchief wadded in his hand so that one corner stuck out, approached me, but it hurt so much to open the eye that I repulsed him. “Don't torment me,” I said, twisting my face away. “What good does it do? The doctor'll be up.”

Regretfully my father put the handkerchief back into his pocket.

The doctor was a soft-handed man with little to say to anybody; he wasn't pretending to be the family doctor. He rolled my lower eyelid on a thin stick, jabbed with a Q-tip, and showed me, on the end of the Q-tip, an eyelash. My own eyelash. He dropped three drops of yellow fluid into the eye to remove any chance of infection. The fluid stung, and I shut my eyes, leaning back into the pillow, glad it was over. When I opened them, my father was passing a bill into the doctor's hand. The doctor thanked him, winked at me, and left. Uncle Quin came out of the bathroom.

“Well, young man, how are you feeling now?” he asked.

“Fine.”

“It was just an eyelash,” my father said.

“
Just
an eyelash! Well, I know how an eyelash can feel like a razor blade in there. But, now that the young invalid is recovered, we can think of dinner.”

“No, I really appreciate your kindness, Quin, but we must be getting back to the sticks. I have an eight-o'clock meeting I should be at.”

“I'm extremely sorry to hear that. What sort of meeting, Marty?”

“A church council.”

“So you're still doing church work. Well, God bless you for it.”

“Grace wanted me to ask you if you couldn't possibly come over some day. We'll put you up overnight. It would be a real treat for her to see you again.”

Uncle Quin reached up and put his arm around his younger brother's shoulders. “Martin, I'd like that better than anything in the world. But I am solid with appointments, and I must head west this Thursday. They don't let me have a minute's repose. Nothing would please my heart better than to share a quiet day with you and Grace in your home. Please give her my love, and tell her what a wonderful boy she is raising. The two of you are raising.”

My father promised, “I'll do that.” And, after a little more fuss, we left.

“The child better?” the old man in the lobby called to us on the way out.

“It was just an eyelash, thank you, sir,” my father said.

When we got outside, I wondered if there were any bookstores still open.

“We have no money.”

“None at all?”

“The doctor charged five dollars. That's how much it costs in New York to get something in your eye.”

“I didn't do it on purpose. Do you think I pulled out the eyelash and stuck it in there myself?
I
didn't tell you to call the doctor.”

“I know that.”

“Couldn't we just go into a bookstore and look a minute?”

“We haven't time, Jay.”

But when we reached Pennsylvania Station, it was over thirty minutes until the next train left. As we sat on a bench, my father smiled reminiscently. “Boy, he's smart, isn't he? His thinking is sixty light-years ahead of mine.”

“Who? Whose thinking?”

“My brother. Notice the way he hid in the bathroom until the doctor was gone? That's how to make money. The rich man collects dollar bills like the stamp collector collects stamps. I knew he'd do it. I knew it when he told the clerk to send up a doctor that I'd have to pay for it.”

“Well, why
should
he pay for it?
You
were the person to pay for it.”

“That's right. Why should he?” My father settled back, his eyes forward, his hands crossed and limp in his lap. The skin beneath his chin was loose; his temples seemed concave. The liquor was probably disagreeing with him. “That's why he's where he is now, and that's why I am where I am.”

The seed of my anger was a desire to recall him to himself, to scold him out of being old and tired. “Well, why'd you bring along only five dollars? You might have known something would happen.”

“You're right, Jay. I should have brought more.”

“Look. Right over there is an open bookstore. Now if you had brought
ten
dollars—”

“Is it open? I don't think so. They just left the lights in the window on.”

“What if it isn't? What does it matter to us? Anyway, what kind of art book can you get for five dollars? Color plates cost money. How much do you think a decent book of Vermeer costs? It'd be cheap at fifteen dollars, even second-hand, with the pages all crummy and full of spilled coffee.” I kept on, shrilly flailing the passive and infuriating figure of my father, until we left the city. Once we were on the homeward train, my tantrum ended; it had been a kind of ritual, for both of us, and he had endured my screams complacently, nodding assent, like a midwife assisting at the birth of family pride. Years passed before I needed to go to New York again.

The Kid's Whistling
 

Things were nearly perfect: Christmas was three weeks away, Roy worked late every evening and was doubling his salary in overtime, and tonight rain was falling. Rain was Roy's favorite weather, and he never felt more at rest, more at home, than when working nights in his hot little room on the third floor of Herlihy's—the department store stretching dark and empty under him, the radio murmuring, maybe the rain tapping on the black skylight, the engines shuttling back and forth in the Fourth Street freight yards, half a mile away.

The one trouble was the kid's whistling. For ten months a year Roy had the Display Department to himself. If the orders for counter cards piled up, Shipping lent him a boy to help out. But at the beginning of November, Simmons, the store manager, hired a high-school kid to come in weekday evenings and on Saturdays. This year's helper was called Jack, and he whistled. He whistled all the time.

At the hand press, Jack was printing counter cards and rendering “Summertime.” He seemed to feel the tune needed a cool, restrained treatment, for which Roy was grateful; he was all set to begin the Toy Department sign and wanted things to go well. Though the customary sans-serif or bold roman would have done, he planned to try Old English capitals. It was for his own satisfaction; no one would appreciate the extra effort, least of all Simmons. On a plywood board, ½″ ×
1
½″ ×
11
′, primed with off-white, Roy ruled the guidelines and pencilled the letters lightly, mostly to get the spacing. He lit a cigarette, puffed it a moment, not inhaling, then set it on the edge of the workbench. His drawing board was hinged to the second of four shelves; in working position, the board rested upon and overhung the rim of the waist-high bench at an angle of thirty degrees. When not in use, the board was supposed to hook into a loop screw attached to the top shelf, but the screw had worked out of the
soft pine, and the board always hung down. This way, the lowest shelf was half concealed, and had become a cave of empty paint jars, forgotten memos, petrified brushes, scraps of Masonite. On the second shelf, in rainbow order, the jars of poster paints sat. The third shelf held jars of nails, boxes of tacks and staples, two staplers (one broken), colored inks (dried up), penholders in a coffee mug, pen points in a cigar box, brushes in a beer mug, three hammers, two steel rods intended to brace the arms of mannequins, and a hand-jigsaw frame without a blade; these things were not as well ordered as the poster paints. The tall space between the fourth shelf and the ceiling contained a blackened chaos of obsolete displays—silhouettes of Indians, firecrackers, reindeer, clouds, dollar signs. Shelves in ascending degrees of muddle also covered the wall on Roy's left. To his right, at some distance, were the kid and the hand press and the door out. Behind him were the power tools, some timber, and the mannequin closet, built into the dimmest corner of the room. Though Roy had a long-legged stool, he stood at his drawing board. He chose a No. 9 wedge brush and a jar of Sky Blue poster paint. He glanced into the lettering book, open to “Old English.” He made certain the shaker of Silverdust was within reach.

Then, with no more hesitation, Roy dipped the brush and touched it to the board. The great crescent of the
T
went on without a tremor. The broad curve capping it had just the proper jaunty hint of a left-to-right downslant. With a No. 2 brush he added the hairlines. He quickly sprinkled Silverdust over the moist letter, blew the loose stuff away, and stepped back, pleased.

In his head Roy slammed a door shut on Jack's insistent version of “Lady Be Good.” He shook his brush clean in a jar of water and executed the
O
in Deep Yellow. He was not sure that the yellow would stand out enough against the white, but it did, especially after the Silverdust was added.

Jack switched to “After You've Gone,” doing it loud, tapping a foot. It got so trumpety that, in the middle of putting the hairline on the
Y
, Roy, afraid his hand might shake, turned and stared burningly at Jack's spine. It made no impression. Jack was tall, about six inches taller than Roy, and thin. His neck, no thicker than an arm, led into a muff of uncut hair. Clapping two pieces of wooden type on the table, the kid leaned back and let fly four enormous, jubilant notes.

“Hey, Jack,” Roy called.

The boy turned. “Beg pardon?” He looked startled, exposed. He wasn't one of these mean kids, actually.

“How about a Coke?”

“Sure. If you're having one.”

Roy didn't want a soft drink; he wanted quiet. But he had worked himself into a position where there was nothing to do but go out into the dark hall, dig two dimes from his pocket, insert them in the machine, wait for the cold wet bottles to bump down, and take them back to the Display Department. When he gave Jack one, the boy offered him a nickel and five pennies. “Keep it,” Roy told him. “Buy yourself a saxophone.”

Jack's pleasant, ignorant face showed that the hint had been too subtle for him. “Want some peanuts?” he said, gesturing toward an ink-smudged can labelled
PLANTERS
.

The cold weight of the bottle in Roy's fingers made salted nuts seem appropriate. He took a good handful, then, noticing the can was nearly empty, dropped some back into it. As he fed them to himself, one by one, the kid watched him, apparently expecting conversation. Roy pointed with a loosely clenched hand at the sheaf of orders on the spindle. “Good night's work there.”