The Centaur (23 page)

Through a sob in her throat she brought out, “My blouse: he tore it. It’s ruined and what can I tell my mother?”

And now I noticed that indeed the downslipping silver of one breast was exposed to the very verge of its ruddy puckered coin; I could not quite tear my eyes away, it looked so vulnerable.

“That’s all right,” I told her, debonair. “Look at
me
. My shirt is totally disintegrated.”

And this was true; except for flecks and glutinous threads of red, my chest was bare. My psoriasis was made manifest. A line had formed and, one by one, they walked by, Betty Jean Shilling, Fats Frymoyer, Gloria Davis suppressing a smile, Billy Schupp the diabetic—all my classmates. They had obviously come together in a bus. Each for a moment studied my scabs, and then moved on in silence. A few shook their heads sadly; one girl pressed her lips together and shut her eyes; a few eyes were thick and pink with tears. The wind, the mountaintops, had fallen still behind me. My rock felt padded and there was a tangy chemical smell all but smothered in the artificial perfume of flowers.

Last came Arnie Werner, the president of the senior class and the student council, captain of the football and baseball teams. He was a hollow-eyed boy with the throat of a god and heavy sloping shoulders all shining from the shower. He bent way over and stared at the scabs of my chest and touched one fastidiously with his index finger. “Jesus, kid,” he said, “what’ve you got? Syphilis?”

I tried to explain. “No, it’s an allergic condition, not contagious, don’t be frightened—”

“Have you had a doctor look at this?”

“You won’t believe this, but the doctor himself—”

“Does it bleed?” he asked.

“Only when I scratch too hard,” I told him, desperate to ingratiate myself, to earn his forgiveness. “It’s kind of relaxing, actually, when you’re reading or in a movie—”

“Boy,” he said. “This is the ugliest stuff I ever saw.” He frowningly sucked his index finger. “Now I’ve touched it and I’ll get it. Where’s the Mercurochrome?”

“Honest, cross my heart, it’s not contagious—”

“Frankly,” he said, and from the solemn-dumb way he said that one word I could see that he was probably a good president of the student council, “I’m surprised they let you bring a thing like that into the school. If it’s syphilis, you know, the toilet seats—”

I shouted, “I want my father!”

He came before me and wrote on the blackboard,

It was the last, the seventh period of the day. We were tired. He encircled the E and said, “Energy. That’s life. That little extra E is life. We take in sugars and oxygen and burn it, like you burn old newspapers in the trash barrel, and give off carbon dioxide and water and energy. When this process stops”—he Xed through the equation
—
“
this
stops”—he double-Xed out the E—“and you become what they call dead. You become a worthless log of old chemicals.”

“But can’t the process ever be reversed?” I asked.

“Thanks for asking that, Peter. Yes. Read the equation backwards and you have photosynthesis, the life of green plants. They take in moisture and the carbon dioxide we breathe out and the energy of the sunlight, and they produce sugar and oxygen, and then we eat the plants and get the sugar back and that’s the way the world goes round.” He made a vortex with his fingers in the air. “Round and round, and where it stops, nobody knows.”

“But where do they get the energy?” I asked.

“Good question,” my father said. “You’ve got your mother’s brains; I hope to hell you don’t get my ugly face. The energy needed for photosynthesis comes from the atomic energy
of the sun. Every time we think, move, or breathe, we’re using up a bit of golden sunshine. When that gives out in five billion years or so, we can all lie down and rest.”

“But why do you want to rest?” His face had gone quite bloodless; a film had been interposed between us; my father seemed flattened upon another plane and I strained my voice to reach him. He turned slowly, so slowly, and his forehead wobbled and elongated with refraction. His lips moved and seconds later the sound came to me.

“Huh?” He was not looking at me, he seemed unable to find me.

“Don’t rest!” I shouted, glad the tears had come, glad to hear my voice breaking on the spikes of grief; I hurled my words through with a kind of triumph, exulted in the sensations of the tears softly flailing my face like the torn ends of shattered ropes. “Daddy, don’t rest! What would you do? Can’t you forgive us and keep going?”

The top half of him was bent by some warp in the plane he was caught in; his necktie and shirtfront and coat lapels looped upwards along the curve and his head at the end of the arc was pressed into the angle where the wall met the ceiling above the blackboard, a cobwebby place never touched by a broom. From up here his distorted face gazed down at me mournfully, preoccupied. Yet a microscopic pinch of interest in the corners of his eyes led me to keep calling. “
Wait!
Can’t you wait for me?”

“Huh? Am I going too fast?”

“I have something to tell you!”

“Huh?”

His voice was so muffled and far that I willed to be closer to him and found myself swimming upward, with expert strokes, my arms lifting high at the elbow, my feet fluttering like
boneless fins. The sensations so excited me I almost forgot to speak. Coming up panting by his side, I told him, “I have hope.”

“Do you? That makes me awfully proud to hear that, Peter. I never had any. You must get that from your mother, she’s a real femme.”

“From
you
,” I said.

“Don’t worry about me, Peter. Fifty years is a long time; if you don’t learn anything in fifty years you never will. My old man never knew what hit him; he left us a Bible and a bucketful of debts.”

“Fifty years is
not
a long time,” I said. “It’s not
enough
.”

“You really have hope, huh?”

I closed my eyes; between the voiceless “I” inside my head and the trembling plane of darkness also there, there was a gap, of indeterminate distance but certainly not more than an inch. With a little lie I leaped it. “Yes,” I said. “Now stop being silly.”

C
ALDWELL TURNS AND
shuts the door behind him. Another day, another dollar. He is weary but does not sigh. The hour is late, after five. He has stayed in his room bringing the basketball books up to date and trying to unravel the tickets; there is a block of tickets missing and in rummaging through his drawers he came across Zimmerman’s report and reread it. It depressed him out of all proportion. It was on blue paper and looking at it was like falling upwards into the sky. Also he
has corrected the exams he gave the fourth section today. Poor Judy Lengel: she doesn’t have it. She tries too hard and maybe that has been his trouble all his life. As he walks toward the stairwell the ache low in his body revives and enwraps him like a folded wing. Some have the five talents, some have the two, some have the one. But whether you’ve worked in the vineyard all day or just an hour, when they call you in your pay is the same. He hears his father’s voice in the memory of these parables and this depresses him further.

“George.” A shadow is in the corner of his eye.

“Huh? Oh. You. What are you doing here so late?”

“Fussing. That’s what old maids do. Fuss.” Hester Appleton stands, arms folded across the ruffles of her virginal blouse, outside her doorway; her room is 202, just down the hall from Room 204. “Harry mentioned that you came to see him yesterday.”

“I’m ashamed to admit I did. Did he say anything else? We’re waiting for the X-rays to come through or some damn thing.”

“Don’t be worried.” The little step forward in her voice as she blurts this makes Caldwell tilt his long head.

“Why not?”

“It doesn’t do any good. Peter’s very worried, I could tell today in class.”

“The poor kid, he didn’t get much sleep last night. Our car broke down in Alton.”

Hester tucks a strand of her hair back and with an elegant touch of her middle finger pushes her pencil deeper into her bun. Her hair is glossy and not at all gray in the half-light. She is short, bosomy, broad in the beam and, seen from the front, dumpily thick-waisted. But seen sideways her waist is strikingly small, tucked in by her doughty upright posture;
she seems from her stance to be always in the act of inhaling. Her blouse wears a gold clasp shaped like an arrow. “He wasn’t,” she says, after considering once more in her life the face of the man hulking above her in the gloom of the hall, a strange knobbed face whose mystery, in relation to herself, is permanent, “his usual self.”

“He’s gonna come down with a cold before I’m through with him,” Caldwell says. “I know it and I can’t help it. I’m gonna get the kid sick and I can’t stop myself.”

“He’s not such a fragile boy, George.” She pauses. “In some ways he’s tougher than his father.”

Caldwell hears this slightly, enough to bend a bit what he was going to say anyway. “When I was a kid back in Passaic,” he says, “I never remember being laid up with a cold. You wiped your nose on a sleeve and if your throat itched you coughed. The first time in my life I went to bed with anything was with the flu in 1918; if
that
wasn’t a mess. Brrough!”

Hester feels the pain in the man and she presses her fingers against the gold arrow to hush the disconcerting flutter that has erupted in her chest. She has been in the classroom adjacent to this man for so many years that in her heart it is as if she had often slept with him. It is as if they had been lovers when younger and for reasons never sufficiently examined they had long ago ceased to be.

Caldwell feels this to the extent of being, in her presence, a shade more relaxed than anywhere else. They are both exactly fifty, a trick of birthdays that in their unthinking deeps does oddly matter. He is reluctant to leave her and go down the stairs; his illness, his son, his debts, the painful burden of land his wife has saddled him with—all these problems itch in his brain for expression. Hester wants him; she wants him to tell her everything. Her frame of manners strains to accommodate
this desire; as if to empty herself of decades of lonely habit she exhales: sighs. Then says, “Peter’s like Cassie. He has that way of getting what he wants.”

“I should have put her on the Burly-cue stage, she would have been happier there,” Caldwell tells Miss Appleton in a loud earnest rush. “I shouldn’t have married her, I should have just been her manager. But I didn’t have the guts. I was brought up so that as soon as you saw a woman you half-way liked the only thing you could think of to do was ask her to marry you.” This is to say,
I should have married a woman like you. You
.

Though Hester has sought this, now that it arrives it disgusts and alarms her. The man’s shadow before her seems about to dilate with anxiety and to overwhelm her physically. It is too late; she is insufficiently elastic now. She laughs as if what he has said were meaningless. The sound of her laughter afflicts the diminishing perspective of green lockers with a look of terror. Their air-slits seem aghast at what they see on the opposite wall: framed pictures of vanished baseball and track teams.

Hester straightens up, inhales, retucks the pencil into her bun, and asks, “What thought have you given to Peter’s education?”

“No thought. My only thought is that it’s going to take more money than I’ve got.”

“Is he going to attend an art school or a liberal arts college?”

“That’s up to him and his mother. They discuss this sort of thing between them; it scares the living daylights out of me. As far as I can tell, the kid knows even less than I did at his age what the score is. If I were to kick off now, he and his mother would sit out there in the sticks and try to eat the flowers off the wallpaper. I can’t afford to die.”

“It
is
a luxury,” Hester says. The Appleton ill-humor has in her taken the form of an occasional unexpected tartness, or irony. She once more examines the mysterious face above her, frowns at the diseaselike murmur in her breast, and moves to turn, dismissing not so much Caldwell as her own secret.

“Hester.”

“What, George?” Her head with its taut round hairdo is caught like a crescent moon half in the light from her room. An unimpassioned observer would conclude, from the light, glad, regretful way she smiles up, that he had once been her lover.

“Thanks for letting me rave on,” he says. He adds, “I want to confess something. Tomorrow it may be too late. There’ve been times in my years here when the kids have got me so down I’ve stepped out of the classroom and come here by the drinking fountain just to hear you in there pronouncing French. It’s been better than a drink of water for me, to hear you pronouncing French. It’s never failed to pick me up.”

Delicately she asks, “Are you down now?”

“Yep. I’m down. I’m in Old Man Winter’s belly.”

“Shall I pronounce something?”

“To tell you God’s honest truth, Hester, I’d appreciate it.”

Her face goes into its Gallic animation—apple-cheeked, prune-lipped—and she pronounces, word by word, savoring the opening diphthong and closing nasal like two liqueurs,
“Dieu est très fin.”

A second of silence hovers.

“Say it again,” Caldwell asks.

“
Dieu - est - très - fin
. It’s the sentence I’ve lived by.”

“God is very—very fine?”

“Oui
. Very fine, very elegant,
very
slender,
very
exquisite.
Dieu est
très
fin.”

“That’s right. He certainly is. He’s a wonderful old gentleman. I don’t know where the hell we’d be without Him.”

As if by stated consent, both turn away.

Caldwell turns back in time to check her. “You were good enough to recite for me,” he says, “I’d like to recite something for you. I don’t think I’ve thought of this for thirty years. It’s a poem we used to have to recite back in Passaic; I think I can still do the beginning. Shall I try it?”