The Centaur (33 page)

Lying awake beside you in the rose-touched dark, I wake on a morning long ago, in Vera Hummel’s guest bedroom. Her room shone in the aftermath of the storm. My dreams had been a bent extension, like that of a stick thrust into water, of the last waking events—the final mile staggering through the unwinding storm; my father’s beating at the door of the dark house, knocking and whinnying and rubbing his hands together in desperation yet his importunity no longer seeming absurd or berserk to me but necessary, absolutely in my blind numbness necessary; then Vera Hummel yawning and blinking in the bleaching glare of her kitchen, her unbound hair fanning over the shoulders of her blue bathrobe and her hands tucked in the sleeves and her arms hugging herself as she yawned; and the limping clump of her husband descending the stairs to receive my father’s outpour of explanation and gratitude. They put us in their guest bedroom, in a four-postered sway-backed bed inherited from Mr. Hummel’s mother, my grandfather’s sister Hannah. It smelled of feathers and starch and was so like a hammock that my father and I, in underclothes, had to cling to the edges to keep from sliding together in the middle. For some minutes I kept tense. I seemed stuffed with the jiggling atoms of the storm. Then I heard the first rasp of my father’s snuffly little snore. Then the wind outside the room sighed mightily, and this thrust of sound and motion beyond me seemed to explain everything, and I relaxed.

The room was radiant. Beyond the white mullions and the curtains of dotted Swiss pinned back with metal flowers painted white, the sky was undiluted blue. I thought,
This
morning has never occurred before
, and I jubilantly felt myself to be on the prow of a ship cleaving the skyey ocean of time. I looked around the room for my father; he was gone. I had sunk into the center of the bed. I looked for a clock; there was none. I looked to my left to see how the sun lay on the road and field and mailbox, and my gaze met instead a window giving on the luncheonette’s brick wall. Next to the window, its chipping veneer somehow grimacing, was an old-fashioned bureau with fluted glass knobs, a wavy-faced top drawer, and ponderous scroll feet like the toeless feet of a cartoon bear. The radiance beyond the house picked out the silver glints in the stems and leaves of the wallpaper. I closed my eyes to listen for voices, heard a vacuum cleaner humming at some distance, and must have slipped back into sleep.

When I awoke again the strangeness of it all—the house, the day so fair and sane in the wake of madness, the silence, inside and out (why had I not been wakened? what had happened to the school? wasn’t it Wednesday?)—held me from falling back, and I arose and dressed as much as I could. My shoes and socks, set to dry on a radiator in the room, were still damp. The strange walls and hallways, demanding thought and courage at every turn, seemed to suck strength from my limbs. I located the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face and ran my wet finger back and forth across my teeth. In bare feet I went down the Hummels’ stairs. They were carpeted with a fresh-napped beige strip held in place by a brass rod at the base of each riser. This was the kind of Olinger home, solid and square and orthodox, that I wished my family lived in. I felt dirty and unworthy in my weary red shirt and three-day underwear.

Mrs. Hummel came in from the front room wearing a pinned-up bandana and an apron patterned with starlike
anemones. She held a dainty straw wastebasket in her hand and, grinning so her gums flashed, hailed me with, “Good morning, Peter Caldwell!” Her pronouncing my name in full somehow made me completely welcome. She led me into the kitchen and in walking behind her I felt myself, to my surprise, her height, or even an inch taller. She was tall as local women went and I still thought of her as the goddess-size she had appeared to me when I first arrived at the high school, a runty seventh-grader, my waist no higher than the blackboard chalk-troughs. Now I seemed to fill her eyes. I sat at the little porcelain-topped kitchen table and she served me like a wife. She set before me a thick tumbler of orange juice whose translucence cast on the porcelain in sunlight an orange shadow like a thin slice of the anticipated taste. It was delicious for me to sit and sip and watch her move. She glided in blue slippers from cupboard to refrigerator to sink as if these intervals had been laid out after measuring her strides; her whole spacious and amply equipped kitchen contrasted with the cramped and improvised corner where my mother made our meals. I wondered why some people could solve at least the mechanical problems of living while others, my people, seemed destined for lifetimes of malfunctioning cars and underheated toiletless homes. In Olinger, we had never had a refrigerator, but instead a humiliating old walnut icebox, and my grandmother never sat down with us at the table but ate standing up, off the stove with her fingers, her face wincing in the steam. Haste and improvidence had always marked our domestic details. The reason, it came to me, was that our family’s central member, my father, had never rid himself of the idea that he might soon be moving on. This fear, or hope, dominated our home.

“Where’s my father?” I asked.

“I don’t know exactly, Peter,” she said. “Which would you prefer—Wheaties or Rice Krispies or an egg some way?”

“Rice Krispies.” An oval ivory-colored clock below the lacquered cabinets said 11:10. I asked, “What happened to school?”

“Have you looked outdoors?”

“Sort of. It’s stopped.”

“Sixteen inches, the radio said. All the schools in the county have cancelled. Even the parochial schools in Alton.”

“I wonder if they’re going to have swimming practice tonight.”

“I’m sure not. You must be dying to get to your home.”

“I suppose so. It seems forever since I
was
home.”

“Your father was very funny this morning, telling us your adventures. Do you want a banana with the cereal?”

“Oh, gee. Sure, if you have it.” That surely was the difference between these Olinger homes and my own; they were able to keep bananas on hand. In Firetown, on the rare times my father thought to buy them, they went from green to rotten without a skip. The banana she set beside my bowl was perfect. Its golden skin was flecked evenly all over just as in the four-color magazine ads. As I sliced it with my spoon, each segment in dropping into the cereal displayed that ideal little star of seeds at the center.

“Do you drink coffee?”

“I try to every morning but there’s never any time. I’m being an awful lot of trouble.”

“Hush. You sound like your father.”

Her “hush,” emerging from an intimacy that someone else had created for me, evoked a curious sense of past time, of the few mysterious hours ago when, while I was sound asleep in my great-aunt Hannah’s bed, my father had told of his adventures
and they had listened to the radio. I wondered if Mr. Hummel had been here also; I wondered what event had spread through the house this aftermath of peaceful, reconciled radiance.

I made bold to ask, “Where is Mr. Hummel?”

“He’s out with the plow. Poor Al, he’s been up since five. He has a contract with the town to help clear the streets after a storm.”

“Oh. I wonder how our poor car is. We abandoned it last night at the bottom of Coughdrop Hill.”

“Your father said. When Al comes home, he’ll drive you out in the truck to it.”

“These Rice Krispies are awfully good.”

She looked around from the sink in surprise and smiled. “They’re just the ones that come out of the box.” Her kitchen seemed to bring out a Dutchness in her intonation. I had always vaguely associated Mrs. Hummel with sophistication, New York, and the rest of it, she shone to such advantage among the other teachers, and sometimes wore mascara. But in her house she was, plainly, of this county.

“How did you like the game last night?” I asked her. I felt awkwardly constrained to keep a conversation up. My father’s absence challenged me to put into practice my notions of civilized behavior, which he customarily frustrated. I kept tugging up the wrists of my shirt to keep spots from showing. She brought me two slices of glinting toast and a dopple of amber crabapple jelly on a black plate.

“I didn’t pay that much attention.” She laughed in memory. “Really, that Reverend March amuses me so. He’s half a boy and half an old man and you never know which you’re talking to.”

“He has some medals, doesn’t he?”

“I suppose. He went all up through Italy.”

“It’s interesting, I think, that after all that he could return to the ministry.”

Her eyebrows arched. Did she pluck them? Seeing them close, I doubted it. They were naturally fine. “I think it’s good; don’t you?”

“Oh, it’s good, sure. I mean, after all the horrors he must have seen.”

“Well—they say there’s some fighting even in the Bible.”

Not knowing what she wanted, I laughed nevertheless. It seemed to please her. She asked me playfully, “How much attention did you pay to the game? Didn’t I see you sitting with the little Fogleman girl?”

I shrugged. “I had to sit next to somebody.”

“Now, Peter, you watch out. She has the look in her eye.”

“Ha. I doubt if I’m much of a catch.”

She held up a finger, gay-making in the county fashion. “Ahhh. You have the possibilities.”

The interposed “the” was so like my grandfather’s manner of speech that I blushed as if blessed. I spread the bright jelly on my toast and she continued about the business of the house.

The next two hours were unlike any previous in my life. I shared a house with a woman, a woman tall in time, so tall I could not estimate her height in years, which at the least was twice mine. A woman of overarching fame; legends concerning her lovelife circulated like dirty coins in the student underworld. A woman fully grown and extended in terms of property and authority; her presence branched into every corner of the house. Her touch on the thermostat stirred the furnace under me. Her footsteps above me tripped the vacuum cleaner into a throaty, swarming hum. Here and there in
the house she laughed to herself, or made a piece of furniture cry as she moved it; sounds of her flitted across the upstairs floor as a bird flits unseen and sporadic through the high reaches of a forest. Intimations of Vera Hummel moved toward me from every corner of her house, every shadow, every curve of polished wood; she was a glimmer in the mirrors, a breath moving the curtains, a pollen on the nap of the arms of the chair I was rooted in.

I heavily sat in the dark front parlor reading from a little varnished rack
Reader’s Digest
s one after another. I read until I felt sick from reading. I eagerly discovered and consumed two articles side by side in the table of contents: “Miracle Cure For Cancer?” and “Ten Proofs That There Is a God.” I read them and was disappointed, more than disappointed, overwhelmed—for the pang of hope roused fears that had been lulled. The demons of dread injected their iron into my blood. It was clear, clear for all the smart rattle of the prose and the encyclopedic pretense of the trim double columns, that there were no proofs, there was no miracle cure. In my terror of words I experienced a panicked hunger for things and I took up, from the center of the lace doily on the small table by my elbow, and squeezed in my hand a painted china figurine of a smiling elf with chunky polka-dot wings. The quick blue slippers sounded on the carpeted stairs and Mrs. Hummel made lunch for the two of us. In the brightness of the kitchen I was embarrassed for my complexion. I wondered if it would be manners to offer to leave, but I had no strength to leave this house, felt unable even to look out the window; and if I did leave, where would I look, and for what? My father’s mysterious absence from me seemed permanent. I was lost. The woman talked to me; her words were trivial but they served to make horror habitable. Into the shining plane of the table-top
between our faces I surfaced; I made her laugh. She had taken off her bandana and clipped her hair into a horsetail. As I helped her clear the table and took the dishes to the sink, our bodies once or twice brushed. And so, half-sunk in fear and half alive and alight with love, I passed the two hours of time.

My father returned a little after one. Mrs. Hummel and I were still in the kitchen. We had been talking about a wing, an L with a screened porch, which she wanted to have built onto the back of her house; here in the summers she could sit overlooking her yard away from the traffic and noise of the pike. It would be a bower and I believed I would share it with her.

My father looked in his bullet-head cap and snow-drenched overcoat like a man just shot from a cannon. “Boy,” he told us, “Old Man Winter made up for lost time.”

“Where have you
been?
” I asked. My voice ignobly stumbled on a threat of tears.

He looked at me as if he had forgotten I existed. “Out and around,” he said. “Over at the school. I would have gotten you up, Peter, but I figured you needed the sleep. You were beginning to look drawn as hell. Did my snoring keep you awake?”

“No.”
The snow on his coat and pants and shoes, testimony of adventure, made me jealous. Mrs. Hummel’s attention had shifted all to him; she was laughing without his even saying anything. His bumpy face was ruddy. He whipped his cap off like a boy and stamped his feet on the cocoa mat inside the door. I yearned to torment him; I became shrill. “What did you
do
at the school? How could you be so
long?
”

“Jesus, I love that building when there aren’t any kids in it.” He was speaking not to me but to Mrs. Hummel. “What they ought to do with that brick barn, Vera, is turn the kids out on
the street and let us teachers live there alone; it’s the only place I’ve ever been in my life where I didn’t feel like somebody was sitting on the back of my neck all the time.”

She laughed and said, “They’d have to put in beds.”

“An old Army cot is all I’d need,” he told her. “Two feet wide and six feet long; whenever I get in bed with somebody they take all the covers. I don’t mean you, Peter. Tired as I was last night I probably took ’em from you. In answer to your question, what was I doing over there, I brought all my books up to date. For the first time since last marking period everything is apple pie; I feel like they lifted a concrete block out of my belly. If I don’t show up tomorrow, the new teacher can step right in and take over, poor devil. Biff, bang; move over, buddy, next stop, the dump.”