The Centaur (27 page)

Heller hugs to his rusty heart the underside of this high school. It was the promotion of his life when he was lifted from the custodial staff of the elementary building, where the little children, ticklish-tummied as lambs, daily made a puddle or two of rancid vomit to wipe up and perfume with sal ammoniac. Here there was no such indignity; only the words on the walls and now and then a malicious excremental mess in one of the male lavatories.

The memory of people and people’s clothes touches the halls with a dry perfume. The drinking fountains wait to spurt. The radiators purr. The side door slams; a member of the JV basketball team has entered with his gym bag and gone down to the locker room. At the front entrance, Mr. Caldwell and Mr. Phillips meet on the steps and enact, one tall and one short, an Alphonse and Gaston routine as to who is to go in the door first. Heller stoops and sweeps into his broad pan his gray mountain of dust and fluff, enlivened by a few paper scraps. He transfers this dirt to the great cardboard can waiting at this corner. Then, setting himself behind the broom, he pushes off and disappears behind the corner, piddle, pat.

There he goes!!!!

“George, I hear you haven’t been feeling too well,” Phillips says to the other teacher. In the light of the hall in front of the trophy case he is startled to observe a trickle of blood leaking from the corner of Caldwell’s mouth. There is usually some imperfection or oversight of grooming about the other man that secretly distresses him.

“Sometimes up, sometimes down,” Caldwell says. “Phil, a strip of missing tickets has been preying on my mind. Numbers 18001 to 18145.”

Phillips thinks and as he thinks takes—his habit—a jerky sidestep, as if smoothing the infield. “Well, it’s just paper,” he says.

“So’s money,” Caldwell says.

He looks so sick in saying it that Phillips asks, “Have you been taking anything?”

Caldwell makes his pinched stoic mouth. “I’ll be O. K., Phil. I went to the doctor yesterday and an X-ray’s been taken.”

Phillips sidesteps the other way. “Show anything?” he asks, looking at his shoes, as if to check the laces.

As if to drown out the implications of Phillips’ extraordinary softness of voice, Caldwell virtually bellows, “I haven’t found out yet. I’ve been on the go steadily.”

“George. May I speak as a friend?”

“Go ahead, I’ve never heard you speak any other way.”

“There’s one thing you haven’t learned, and that’s how to take care of yourself. You know now, we’re not as young as we were before the war; we mustn’t act like young men.”

“Phil, I don’t know any other way to act. I’ll have to act childish until they put the half-dollars over my eyes.”

Phillips’ laugh is a shade nervous. He had been a year on the faculty when Caldwell joined it, and though they have been through much together Phillips has never quite shaken his sense of being the other man’s senior and guide. At the same time he cannot rid himself of an obscure expectation that Caldwell out of his more chaotic and mischievous resources would produce a marvel, or at least say the strange thing that had to be said. He asks, “Did you hear about Ache?”—pronounced Ockey. A bright and respectful and athletic and handsome student from the late Thirties, the kind that does a teacher’s heart good, a kind once plentiful in Olinger but in the universal decay of virtue growing rare.

“Killed,” Caldwell says. “But I don’t understand how.”

“Over Nevada,” Phillips tells him, shifting his armload of papers and books to the other arm. “He was a flight instructor, and his student made a mistake. Both killed.”

“Isn’t that funny? To go all through the war without a scratch and then get nailed in peacetime.”

Phillips’ eyes have a morbid trick—little men are more emotional—of going red in the middle of a conversation if the subject were even remotely melancholy. “I hate it when they die young,” he blurts. He loves the well-coördinated among his students like sons, his own son being clumsy and stubborn.

Caldwell becomes interested; his friend’s neat centrally parted cap of hair suddenly seems the lid of a casket in which might be locked the nugget of information he so needs. He asks earnestly, “Do you think it makes a difference? Are they less ready? Do you feel ready?”

Phillips tries to direct his mind to the question but it is like trying to press the like poles of two magnets together. They push away. “I don’t know,” he admits. “They say there’s a time for everything,” he adds.

“Not for me,” Caldwell says. “I’m not ready and it scares the hell out of me. What’s the answer?”

There is silence between the two men while Heller passes with his broom. The janitor nods and smiles and passes them by this time.

Again, Phillips cannot bring his mind to touch the issue squarely; it keeps shying gratefully into side issues. He stares intently at the center of Caldwell’s chest, as if a curious transition is taking place here. “Have you spoken to Zimmerman?” he asks. “Perhaps a sabbatical is the answer.”

“I can’t afford a sabbatical. What would the kid do? He
couldn’t even get to high school. He’d have to go to school in the sticks with a lot of clodhoppers on the bus.”

“He’d survive, George.”

“I doubt it like hell. He needs me to keep him going, the poor kid doesn’t have a clue yet. I can’t fade out before he has the clue. You’re lucky, your kid has the clue.”

This is a sad piece of flattery that makes Phillips shake his head. The rims of his eyes deepen in tint. Ronnie Phillips, now a freshman at Penn State, is brilliant in electronics. But even while in the high school he openly ridiculed his father’s love of baseball. He bitterly felt that too many of the precious hours of his childhood had been wasted playing cat and three-stops-or-a-catch under his father’s urging.

Phillips says weakly, “Ronnie seems to know what he wants.”

“More power to him,” Caldwell shouts. “My poor kid, what he wants is the whole world in a candy box.”

“I thought he wanted to paint.”

“Ooh.” Caldwell grunts; the poison has wormed an inch deeper into his bowels. Sons are a heavy subject for these two.

Caldwell changes the subject. “Coming out of my room today I had a kind of revelation; it’s taken me fifteen years of teaching to see it.”

Phillips asks quickly “What?,” eager to know, for all the times he has been fooled.

“Ignorance is bliss,” Caldwell states. Seeing no light of welcome dawn on his friend’s hopefully wrinkled face, he repeats it louder, so it echoes down the empty diminishing hall. “Ignorance is bliss. That’s the lesson I’ve gotten out of life.”

“God help us, you may be right,” Phillips fussily exclaims, and makes as if to move toward his room. But for a minute longer the two teachers stand together in the hall, finding a measure of repose in familiar company, and some ambiguous
warmth in the sense of having failed each other without blaming each other. So two steeds in the same pen huddle through a storm. If men were horses, Caldwell would have been the drudging dappled type, somewhat anonymous but not necessarily ill-bred, known as a “big gray,” and Phillips a gallant little Morgan, chestnut, with a prissy tail and nicely polished hooves—practically a pony.

Caldwell has a last thought. “My old man went and died before he was my age,” he says, “and I didn’t want to double-cross my own kid like that.” With a yank that makes the legs chatter and screech, he pulls a small oak table, much gnawed, from its place against the wall; from off this table basketball tickets are to be sold.

A panicked shout wells in the auditorium and lifts dust in the most remote rooms of the extensive school even while paying customers still stream through the entrance and down the glaring hall. Adolescent boys as hideous and various as gargoyles, the lobes of their ears purple with the cold, press, eyes popping, mouths flapping, under the glowing overhead globes. Girls, rosy-cheeked, glad, motley and mostly ill-made, like vases turned by a preoccupied potter, are embedded, plaid-swaddled, in the hot push. Menacing, odorous, blind, the throng gives off a muted shuffling thunder, a flickeringly articulate tinkle: the voices of the young.

“So I said, ‘That’s
your
tough luck, buddy boy.’ ”

“
I hear you knockin’ but you can’t come in
”

“I thought it was real doggy.”

“The bitch rolled over and, no shit, said, ‘Again.’ ”

“Use common sense. How can one infinity be larger than another?”

“Who says he says, that’s what I’d like to know.”

“You can tell with her, because there’s this little birthmark on the side of her neck that gets red.”

“He’s his own best lover if you ask me.”

“Box lunch—
sluurrp!
”

“I’ll put it this way to you: infinity equals infinity. Right?”

“So then I heard that
she
said, so I said to him, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, I guess.’ ”

“If he can’t stop it, he shouldn’t have started it.”

“His mouth just dropped. Literally dropped.”

“When did it all happen, ages ago?”

“But if you take only every
odd
number that exists and add them up, you still get infinity, don’t you? Do you follow
that
much?”

“Was this at the one in Pottsville?”

“
I’m in my nightie and it’s awful thi-in
”

“ ‘Tough
luck?
’ he said, and I said, ‘Yes. Yours.’ ”

“Finally,” Peter calls to Penny as she comes down the auditorium aisle and sees him. She is alone, he has a girl, she is alone, his girl has come to him alone: through the circuit of such simple thoughts his heart spins. He calls to her, “I saved you a seat.” He sits in the middle of the row; the seat he has saved for her is piled high with other students’ coats and scarves. Herolike, she swims the strait between them, pursing her complacent mouth impatiently, making others rise from their seats to let her by, laughing as she nearly tumbles on an obtruded foot. While the coats are removed from her seat, Peter and Penny are pressed together, he having half-risen. Their knees interlock awkwardly; he playfully blows and the hair above her ear lifts. She seems, the skin of her face and throat a luminous stillness in the midst of hubbub and thumping, delicious to him, edible, succulent. Her smallness makes
this succulence. She is small enough for him to lift: this thought makes him himself lift, in secrecy. The last coat is removed and they settle side by side in the happy heat and chaos.