The Man Without a Face (6 page)

“Who did?”

“Jake Rodman. He’s the older brother of my best friend, Joey. He’s now at Harvard.” I don’t know why I added that, maybe to show him that I copied only the eighteen- karat best. He surprised me by giving a short laugh, only there was more bite than ha-ha in it. “If you ever give me anything phony again, the old rules as stated apply. Out. Remember, it’s your choice. Do you want to learn or not? You came to me. Not I to you. Just who’s doing whom a favor?” After another of our silences he said, “Have you ever written anything entirely of your own?”

Back to the sore nerve. “Yes.”

“What was it about?”

I saw I couldn’t dodge the issue so I said grudgingly, “It was about an airplane, like it was a person; how it got started and how it felt when it first took off.”

“Well? What happened? What did you get on it?” “The teacher said it was ungradable.”

“Why?”

It was an occasion I don’t really care to remember. The new social science teacher had pulled the same trick as McLeod—write something on any subject you want. So I did this thing on the plane. How was I to know that he went rabid over any invention since the wheel, that he was a one- man antitechnocracy lobby?

Well, by the time he got through with my paper everybody knew. You would have thought it was Bob Hope up there, as he read aloud with expressions and gestures and a kind of between-sentences running commentary. He had them

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rolling between the desks. It was one of the great comic turns of the school year. Except I didn’t find it so funny.. When he finished and took out his handkerchief and wiped his eyes and got serious he gave the class a pep talk on ecology and nature and living in harmony with the earth and what America and technocracy had done to ruin the planet. Then he tore the paper up and threw it into the wastebasket and went on to the next. . . .

Even The Hairball, who was then married to Mother, said the teacher had gone a bit far, after he and the police had tracked me down on the New Jersey Turnpike where I was trying to hitch a ride to Colorado. (The Air Force Academy is in Colorado, and while I knew I didn’t have a chance of getting in—certainly not at my age and without at least a high school certificate—I thought I could nose around long enough and be near enough to leam the best approach. But I only got-as far as the first gas station past the tunnel!)

McLeod was staring at me. I couldn’t think of anything to say. I mean, absolutely nothing occurred to me.

“Well, why did he say it was ungradable?”

I. took a careful breath. “He hates planes. You know— ecology, antitechnocracy, all that jazz. Can I go now?” I didn’t know whether or not the three hours were up, but I wanted to get out.

“Not for another hour. We’ll have to go over what you have to cover by the end of the summer and I’ll give you your assignment for tomorrow.”

He finally sprung me an hour later. I all but ran down the road with Mickey pursuing, baying horribly, only by this time I had got the idea: He was all noise.

Was I sorry I had got myself into this? Yes, very. Was

k

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I going to shove it all in McLeod’s hideous face and put up with Gloria and her twin, Mother? Not if I wanted to get up and out in the fall.

I felt like a mouse in a trap.

CHAPTER 4

You might say that all the things-that happened, leading up to that terrible night in late August, fell into three stages. The next few weeks, when nothing too much seemed to happen except my going to McLeod’s house every day and lugging back homework, was the first stage.

It was all very quiet. Even Gloria didn’t give me her usual flak, being, at the time, occupied with her new boyfriend, Percy Minton (if you would believe the name), and was arrayed on the beach or down at the dinghy pier every day during those crucial hours of homework till I was sprung for the day at about three thirty.

Mother maintained a kind of hostile silence. She didn’t know where I was, of course, in the early mornings. And for the first time in my life I was grateful that, if the world is divided into larks and nightingales as Barry Rumble Seat says, then Mother is definitely a nightingale. She may be up, that is, her body may be in a vertical position, as early as seven or eight, but she doesn’t get assembled before about eleven. So if she were in the kitchen having some coffee or puttering in a vague way when I came back into the house from McLeod’s, she’d probably say nothing at all, assuming I had been out on the beach or pier with the kids. When she did ask, I’d simply say, “Around,” and she’d usually accept that, because one of the good things about today is that we have the older generation thoroughly housebroken.

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If they get too nosy you can drag in words like “authoritarian” and “over-compensatory” and they’re so well trained by TV and all those articles in magazines about adolescents and Dr. Spock that they immediately begin to feel inadequate. They know right away they’re doing something wrong.

Every now and then, of course, some deep instinct in Mother wells to the surface and she forgets all her good training and says, “Where?”

That’s when I say, “Down at the pier,” or “At the boathouse,” or something like that.

Once, out of some atavistic impulse, she pointed to the books under my arm and said, “With those books?”

“Is there any reason why I can’t have quiet and fresh air the same time as I study?” I asked, putting a lot of “wronged victim” in my voice. I saw then that if I went upstairs and stayed for three hours in the unfresh air she’d figure something was fishy, so I moved immediately onto the offensive. “Gosh,” I said, heading towards the back stairs, “you can see why kids take to drugs, it’s about the only place they can get away from being asked questions like it’s the FBI on your tail,” and I absently scratched the inside of one elbow.

“Let me see your arm.” There was so much panic in Mother’s voice that I wanted to laugh, but I also felt a bit sorry.

“I’m clean!” I shoved up the sleeves of my sweatshirt. “Okay?”

She stared and slowly let out her breath. Then she did a funny thing. She put her hands on my shoulders. “Chuck, I’m so frightened for you. How can I make you understand that whatever is the matter, taking a pill or a shot or anything like that will only make it worse. Please don’t. Please.”

I was hot and uncomfortable and wanted to get away.

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“Look, what’s the big deal about? Why all the drama? I’m not planning to turn on.’’

Suddenly she sat down. “All right.’’

For a minute there, I almost went back to the table. But sooner or later Gloria would come in, and whatever was going on between Mother and me she’d break up. Also, and this finally moved me upstairs, Mother is like me, not too bright, but Gloria would take one look at my books and I’d be fighting a rearguard action all the way up to my room. The answers that I could intimidate Mother into swallowing wouldn’t go over with Sister Gloria for one second.

Of course Meg knew where I was going, but I was, tentatively of course, beginning to trust her. Once, when we passed each other on the beach and there was no danger of anyone overhearing, she asked me, “How’s The Man Without a Face?’’

“Gruesome.”

“But is he going to get you through the exams?”

“Yes. I may be dead or nuts from brain-strain, but I’ll pass.”

Funny, until I walked on and was halfway along the beach I didn’t realize that I had no doubt that McLeod would, somehow, force me through those entrance exams.

I joined a bunch of kids at the pier.

“Where ya been?” they asked.

“Around.”

“Yeah? Around where?”

It was the same question as Mother’s, but this time I knew where I was.

“The mainland.”

“What’s on the mainland?”

I put a smirk on my face. “Nothin’ for you guys.”

It’s an updated version of the Tom Sawyer technique but

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it still works. Of course if there were anybody halfway smart enough they’d know it for a bluff and call it. The whole thing is not to let them have enough time to think. I jumped into one of the bigger dinghies that my family rented for the summer. “Anybody want to go up to the cove for a swim?”

For the time being I had the questions shelved. The cove was forbidden by all the authorities—the state, the township, the boat club, and the parents. Two kids had been drowned there in the past five years because of some kind of undertow, and a Coast Guard ship patrols the whole area during the summer. If any kid was caught there, his family was fined heavily, so the parents had a double reason for putting the cove out of bounds.

Naturally, we all went there. For one thing we could skinny-dip, and anybody knows that that’s a heck of a lot better than being all tractioned up in trunks.

Of course if I’d used my head I would have known that I couldn’t go on telling Mother one thing and the kids another forever. Everybody talks to everybody; all the kids’ parents knew Mother. Sooner or later adding-up time would come and I’d be in a mess.

Meg saw it and told me so.

One morning around dawn, which seems to be her favorite time for conversation, she came in and shook me awake and politely asked Moxie if she could sit down. By this time I suppose Moxie had, in his way, decided that she was okay, because while you couldn’t say he was a one-cat welcoming committee, he didn’t move when she plunked herself down on the bed. And if Meg sits on a bed you’re in, you know it. Light she isn’t.

“Why don’t you go on a diet?” I said, not too pleased to be waked up.

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“Don’t make personal remarks. It’s rude.”

“Big deal.”

She sighed. “I hate being fat. The whole Zeitgeist is against it.”

That was another of The Hairball’s favorite words. Being reminded of him at that hour just added insult. “Then why don’t you stop stuffing something in your mouth every time you open it?” I knew then I was sounding just like Gloria. “What is it you wanted to say?”

But Meg just sat there in her white nightgown not looking at me. Two big tears rolled down her cheeks.

I felt terrible. I didn’t even know I could feel that way. I thought afterwards how I could have told her how I liked her, fat or no fat, and maybe put my arm around her or something. But all I could think of at the moment was what a slob I’d been making her cry, particularly since she was the only member of the family that gave a hoot about me. “C’mon, Meg, I’m sorry. Don’t cry.”

She wiped her face and nose on the end of her nightgown. “It doesn’t matter,” she said, and of course she was lying. “I like you a heck of a lot more than I like Gloria.” “That’s not saying much.” It wasn’t.

“What did you come about?”

“That you’d better think up a good parent-and-gossip- proof reason for being on the mainland every morning and for having lied about it to Mother.”

“Why? What’s happened?”

Meg gave a sniff. “Do you have a Kleenex?” “There’re some in the drawer over there.”

She got up, got a fistful, and got back on the bed. “Nothing’s happened so far. But it’s only a matter of time. The kids think you go to the mainland to smoke pot and Mother thinks you’re studying under the trees. At the moment Glo

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ria’s not interested in you. But I think Percy’s beginning to get restless, and if he gets away, then you know what’ll happen: Gloria will give you her FULL attention.”

“Why can’t she hang onto her boyfriends, then she’d stay out of my life. I wish she’d elope or get married. But any guy who’d do that with her would have to have a death wish.”

“If she could get him hooked—I mean signed, sealed, and delivered with ring and everything—within the first weeks or couple of months of his falling in love with her, then she’d be okay. The trouble is, after that they start wanting out. It happened with Steve and Pete and Bill and Mike. And that just covers two summers.”

It was true. Gloria in a bikini is one of the great scenic attractions of the Northeastern Seaboard. There was even a rumor that she was in the pay of the local chamber of commerce but I never fully bought that. Personally, I think she ought to wear something a little more subtle than two Band-Aids and an eye-patch, but I don’t want to be called a square, so I hadn’t said anything before. Now I said, “I wish she wouldn’t strut around so naked. Why doesn’t Mother stop her?”

“Because she can’t. And if she tried, there’d be an awful row. Besides—Mother looks pretty good in a bikini herself.”

“What’s that got to do with it?” But the moment I said that I knew that in some way it had a lot to do with it. “Mother likes to think of Gloria as herself.”

“You’re out of your skull!” I said angrily. “Gloria’s mean. Mother isn’t—at least, by herself she isn’t. Just when Gloria’s around.”

“Yes. I know.”

There was such a sad note in Meg’s voice that I saw that

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while I thought I was always odd man out, she thought she was, too. “Why does she like Gloria better than us?”

“I don’t know. Maybe with me because I’m fat.” “C’mon, Megsy. You know that’s not so. Besides, I’m not fat and she doesn’t like me any better.”

“True.” I could almost feel Meg brightening up a little. And I wanted to get off the subject of Mother. “Anyway, Barry Rumble Seat thinks you’re great.”

Meg perked up even more. “Yes. He does. And I like him. I wish Mother would many him.”

At that I did laugh aloud. “Barry’s not her type. Not brainy enough.”

“Shh!” Meg said. “Do you want Mother or Gloria in here? And Barry has plenty of brains. He just doesn’t go around showing how intellectual he is. And he’d be very good for you, Chuck, if he did become our stepfather.”

“I don’t need a stepfather and I don’t want one. I’ve had enough already.” I don’t know why what she said made me angry, but I could feel it inside me. “Look, it’s getting light. I have to go soon because McLeod likes to start on the button, and I don’t want anybody awake when I leave. So far I’ve been able to get out without that. Maybe you’d better get back to your room.”