The Centaur (20 page)

The clerk, a hunchback with papery skin and hands warped and made lump-knuckled by arthritis, put down his copy of
Collier’s
and listened, crinkled head cocked, as my father unfolded his wallet, elicited identification cards from it, and explained that he was George W. Caldwell, a teacher at Olinger High School, and that I was his son Peter, and that our car had broken down beside the Essick’s plant and our home was way the hell over in Firetown, and that we would like a room but did not have any money. A tall red wall stood in the forefront of my skull and at its base I prepared to lie down and weep.

The hunchback waved my father’s cards away and said, “I know you. I have a niece, Gloria Davis, goes to you. She thinks the world of Mr. Caldwell.”

“Gloria’s a hell of a nice girl,” my father said limply.

“A little wild, her mother thinks.”

“I never noticed that.”

“A little too fond of the boys.”

“She’s always been the perfect lady with me.”

The other man turned and selected a key tagged with a great wooden disc. “I’ll give you a room up on the third floor so the noise from the bar won’t be a bother.”

“I certainly appreciate this,” my father said. “Can I give you a check now?”

“Why not wait till morning?” the little bent man asked, the dry skin of his face twinkling as he smiled. “I guess we’ll all still be here.” And he led us up a narrow stairway with a lightly twisted bannister whose varnished surface undulated under my hand like a cat ecstatic at being stroked. The stairs wound around the caged elevator shaft, and vistas of spottily carpeted halls seemed to open at every landing. We went down one hall and our footsteps rattled in the gaps between carpets. At the end of the hall, beside a radiator and a window overlooking Weiser Square, the clerk applied the key to a door and it opened. Here was our destination: all night in ignorance we had been winding toward this room, with its two beds, its one window, its two bureaus, its one naked overhead bulb. The clerk switched the light on. My father shook his hand and told him, “You’re a gentleman and a scholar. We were thirsty, and ye gave us drink.”

The clerk gestured with a shiny crippled hand. “The bathroom’s behind that door,” he said. “I think there’s a clean glass in there.”

“I mean, you’re a good Samaritan,” my father said. “This poor kid here is ready to drop.”

“I’m not at all,” I said. Still irritated when the clerk had gone, I asked my father, “What’s the name of this awful place?”

“The New Yorker,” my father said. “It’s a real old-time flea-bag, isn’t it?”

Now I had to argue with him on the other side, this seemed so ungrateful. “Well he was awfully nice to let us in when we didn’t have any money.”

“You never know who your real friends are,” he said. “I bet if that Davis bitch knew she did me a good turn she’d be screaming in her sleep.”

“Why
don’t
we have any money?” I asked.

“I’ve been asking myself that for fifty years. The worst of it is, when I write them a check it’ll bounce because I have twenty-two cents in the bank.”

“When do you get paid? Isn’t this the middle of the month?”

“The way I’m going,” my father said, “I never will get paid. The school board reads that report Zimmerman wrote they’ll be asking
me
for money.”

“Oh who ever reads his reports?” I snapped, angry because I did not know whether or not to undress in front of him. I was shy with him about my spots, because the sight of them seemed to trouble him so. But then, he was my father, and I draped my coat over a rickety, wired-together chair and began to unbutton my red shirt. He turned and gripped the doorknob. “I gotta get on the move,” he said.

“Where are you going now? Why can’t you stay still?”

“I gotta call your mother and lock up the car. You go to sleep, Peter. We got you up too early this morning. I hate to do that, I’ve been trying to catch up on sleep since I was four years old. Can you go to sleep? Should I bring your books back from the car so you can do some homework?”

“No.”

He looked at me, and seemed on the verge of apology, confession, or a definite offer. There was a word—I did not know it but believed he did—that waited between us to be pronounced. But he only said, “I guess you can go to sleep. You don’t seem to have the jumps like I did when I was your age.” Tugging the door a touch impatiently, so that the half-retracted latch raked the wood, he went out.

The walls of an empty room are mirrors that double and redouble our sense of ourselves. Alone, I felt highly excited, as if abruptly introduced into a company of the brilliant and
famous and beautiful. I went to the room’s one window and overlooked the radiant tangle of Weiser Square. It was a web, a shuttle, a lake where carlights trickling from all quarters of the city dammed. For two blocks Weiser was the broadest street in the East; Conrad Weiser himself had set the surveyor’s sticks, planning in the eighteenth century a city of width, clarity, and ease. Now here headlights swam as if in the waters of a purple lake whose surface came to my sill. The shop-fronts and bar signs made green and red grass along the banks. The windows of Foy’s, Alton’s great department store, were square stars set in six rows; or like crackers made of two grains, the lower half of light yellow wheat and the upper half, where the tan shade was drawn, of barley or rye. Across the way, highest of all, the great neon owl by means of electric machinery winked and unwinked as a wing regularly brought to its beak, in a motion of three successive flashes, an incandescent pretzel. Beneath its feet, polychrome letters alternately proclaimed:

This sign and the lesser signs—an arrow, a trumpet, a peanut, a tulip—seemed to possess reflections in mid-air, to shimmer on the transparent plane that extended over the square at the height of my hotel room. Cars, stoplights, twinkling shadows that were people, all merged for me in a visual liquor whose fumes were the future. City. This was city: the room I stood alone in vibrated on its paper walls with the haloes of advertisement. Well back from the window, seeing but unseen, I
continued to undress, and the patches of scabbed skin I touched seemed the coarsely mottled outer petals of a delicate, delicious, silvery vegetable-heart I was peeling toward. I stood in my underpants, on the edge of a swim; reeds and mud took the print of my bare feet; Alton seemed herself already bathing in the lake of the night. The windowpane’s imperfections rippled the wet lights. A virginal sense of the forbidden welled over me like a wind and I discovered myself a unicorn.

Alton distended. Her arms of white traffic stretched riverward. Her shining hair fanned on the surface of the lake. My sense of myself amplified until, lover and loved, seer and seen, I compounded in several accented expansions my ego, the city, and the future, and during these seconds truly clove to the center of the sphere, and outmuscled time and tide. I would triumph. Yet the city shuffled and winked beyond the window unmoved, transparent to my penetration, and her dismissal dwindled me terribly. Hurrying as if my smallness were so many melting crystals which would vanish altogether if not gathered swiftly, I partially redressed and got into the bed nearest the wall; the cold sheets parted like leaves of marble, and I felt myself a dry seed lost in the folds of earth.
Dear God, forgive me, forgive me, bless my father, my mother, my grandfather, now let me sleep
.

As the sheets warmed, I enlarged to human size, and then, as the dissolution of drowsiness crept toward me, a sensation, both vivid and numb, of enormity entered my cells, and I seemed a giant who included in his fingernail all the galaxies that are. This sensation operated not only in space but in time; it seemed, as literally as one says “a minute,” an eternity since I had risen from bed, put on my bright red shirt, stamped my foot at my mother, patted the dog through the frosted
metal mesh, and drunk orange juice. These things seemed performed in photographs projected on a mist at the distance of the stars; they mixed with Lauren Bacall and Doris Day and via their faces I was returned to the bracing plane of everyday. I became aware of details: a distant rumble of voices, a spiral of wire holding together the leg of a chair a few feet from my face, the annoying flicker of lights on the walls. I got out of bed and lowered the shade and returned to bed. How warm the room was, compared with my room at Firetown! I thought of my mother and for the first time missed her; I longed to inhale her scent of cereal and to forget myself in watching her plod back and forth in our kitchen. When I saw her again I must tell her I understood why she moved us to the farm and that I did not blame her. And I must show my grandfather more respect and listen when he talks because … because … he will not always be with us.

My father seemed to come into the room at this moment, so I must have fallen asleep. My lips felt swollen, my bare legs boneless and long. His great shadow cut across the strip of pink light that the lowered shade left standing along the wall by the corner. I heard him set my books down on our table. “You asleep, Peter?”

“No. Where have you been?”

“I called your mother and Al Hummel. Your mother tells me to tell you not to worry about anything, and Al’s going to send his truck in for the car in the morning. He thinks it sounds like the driveshaft and he’ll try to get second-hand parts for me.”

“How do you feel?”

“O. K. I was talking to an awfully nice gentleman downstairs in the lobby; he travels all over the East consulting with these big stores and companies about their advertising programs
and clears twenty thousand a year with a two-month vacation. I told him that was the kind of creative work you were interested in and he said he’d like to meet you. I thought of coming up to get you but figured you could probably use the sleep.”

“Thanks,” I said. His shadow cut back and forth across the light as he took off his coat, his tie, his shirt.

His voice chuckled. “The hell with him, huh? I guess that’s the attitude to take. A man like that would walk over your dead body to grab a nickel. That’s the kind of bastard I’ve done business with all my life; they’re too smart for me.”

When he got into bed, after his body stopped rustling the sheets, there was a pause, and he said, “Don’t worry about your old man, Peter. In God we trust.”

“I’m not worried,” I said. “Good night.”

There was another pause, and then the darkness spoke: “Pleasant dreams, as Pop would say.” And his evoking my grandfather unexpectedly did make this strange room safe enough to sleep in, though a woman’s voice giggled down the hall, and doors kept slamming above and below us.

My sleep was simple and deep and my dreams scanty. When I awoke, all I remembered was being in an endless chemical laboratory, like a multiplication with mirrors of the basins and test tubes and Bunsen burners in Room 107 at Olinger High. There was on a table a small Mason jar such as my grandmother used to put up applesauce in. Its glass was clouded. I picked it up and put my ear to the lid and heard a tiny voice, as high in pitch as the voice that calls numbers in a hearing test, saying with a microscopic distinctness, “I want to die. I want to die.”

My father was already up and dressed. He stood by the window, its shade raised, and looked down at the city stirring
itself into the gray morning. The sky was not clear; clouds like the undersides of long buns unrolled beyond the brick horizon of the city. He opened a window, to savor Alton, and the air tasted different from yesterday’s: milder, preparatory, stirred. Something had moved nearer.

Downstairs, our clerk had been replaced by a younger man, who stood straight and did not smile. “Has the old gentleman gone off duty?” my father asked.

“It’s a funny thing,” the new clerk said, without smiling at all. “Charlie died last night.”

“Huh? How could he do that?”

“I don’t know. It happened around two in the morning, they said. I wasn’t supposed to come on until eight. He just got up from the desk and went into the men’s room and died on the floor. Heart, it must have been. Didn’t the ambulance wake you?”

“Was that siren for my friend? I can’t believe what you’re saying. He was a wonderful Christian to us.”

“I didn’t know him very well myself.” The clerk accepted my father’s check only after a long explanation, and with a doubtful grimace.

My father and I scraped together the change in our pockets and found enough for breakfast at a diner. I had one dollar in my wallet but did not tell him, intending it to be a surprise when things got more desperate. The counter of the diner was lined with workmen soft-eyed and gruff from behind half-asleep still. I was relieved to see that the man working the griddle was not our hitchhiker. I ordered pancakes and bacon and it was the best breakfast I had had in months. My father ordered Wheaties, mushed the cereal into the milk, ate a few bites, and pushed it away. He looked at the clock. It said 7:25. He bit back a belch; his face whitened and the skin under
his eyes seemed to sink against the socket bone. He saw me studying him in alarm and said, “I know. I look like the devil. I’ll shave in the boiler room over at school, Heller has a razor.” The pale grizzle, like a morning’s frost, of a day-old beard covered his cheeks and chin.

We left the diner and walked south toward the high dull owl of dead tubing. A tenuous winter mist, released by the rise in temperature, licked the damp cement and asphalt. We boarded a trolley at Fifth and Weiser. The interior was gay with the straw of the seats, and warm and nearly empty. Few other people were heading outwards against the pull of the city. Alton thinned; the row houses split like ice breaking; a distant hill was half tranced green and half new pastel houses; and after the long gliding stretch beyond the ice-cream stand crowned by a great plaster replica of a cone, the motley brick houses of Olinger took hold around us. The school grounds and then the salmon-brick school appeared on the left; the boilerhouse smokestack admonished the sky like a steeple. We got out by Hummel’s Garage. Our Buick was not there yet. We were not late today; cars were still nosing into their slots. An orange bus racily heaved through a loop and swayed to a stop; students the size of birds, colored in bright patches, no two alike, tumbled from the doors in pairs.