Expensive People (12 page)

Farley, with his amiable slowness, had a difficult time. He spent hours copying other boys' homework (at that time it cost you fifty cents to copy homework from a good student; the rates have probably risen), and even copying seemed hard for him. He'd leave out whole sentences or, in mathematics, ledges of numerals, decimal points, or digits that rendered everything invalid. Gustave and I liked him, but playing chess with him was frustrating because he took so long to make his moves. He had a pale, freckled face, a milky skin beneath the freckles that was rather like Nada's skin, hands that were just as freckled as his face, and gnawed knuckles. It seemed to me that he was as sickly as I, because he was always taking medicine and pills of one kind or another.

He'd stare at the move I had just made, look up at me keenly, gnaw at a knuckle, and say, “'Cuse just a minnit.” He would go to his closet, inside which was a small refrigerator, and take out a bottle and drink from it. The bottle had an angular, medicinal appearance. If Gustave was with us, curled up on the bed and studying French, I would notice how Gustave glanced up at Farley's back and how, if I caught his eye, he would ignore me. If I was alone I speculated about cheating, moving a strategic piece while his back was turned; but I never quite dared to do this. And anyway I always won. Gustave usually beat me, and I usually beat Farley, and Farley would laugh and say, “Shit. Lost again,” in the kind of happy, self-pitying voice Father sometimes used.

One afternoon he kept going to the refrigerator after every move of mine and finally he brought the mysterious little bottle back to the table with him. “Lemme fix y'up some Coke,” he said. He sounded sleepily pleased. He dropped some ice cubes in two scummy glasses, poured in Coke for us, and said, raising his reddish eyebrows in exactly the same way Father raised his when making a drink, “Y'want some of this?” holding up the bottle for me to see.

It said “Log Cabin Maple Syrup.”

“But what's that?” I said.

His glance slurred by me as if I were beyond hope, and he poured
what remained of the dark liquid into his own glass. “Now, son,” he said, “stand back 'cause I'm gonna make my move.”

He was the first alcoholic I had ever met, and he was only thirteen. It was a surprise to me at that time, though very shortly I was to encounter Blazes Jones, a dazed, moony child of twelve who not only drank secretly but went around humming and muttering under his breath and making pawing motions in the air. Rumored a genius, Blazes was the center of a special clique in which I was never quite allowed—or, to be truthful, I was never allowed in it at all, they didn't want me. So much for him. He has since died.

And I was shortly to meet Francis Bean, Jr., who took pills of various kinds to keep awake and to keep going merrily; he was sporty and wild, affecting boxlike jackets of olive wool and fur-lined, cream-colored gloves. His sister Greta, a lovely child of fourteen, took these mysterious pills also, and in the last month of my hopeless stay at Fernwood she was reported to “juvenile authorities” for having offered a marijuana cigarette to Suzie, a worker at the Pandora's Box Beauty Salon, in lieu of a dollar tip. All this got around; it was a mild scandal, soon forgotten.

Farley was my friend. I desperately needed a friend that wretched; he gave me hope in the midst of my hopelessness. I recall him lurching down the corridor to the lavatory, smiling a sick, tilted smile, and, as the snows abated and a false spring came to us in March, plodding around out in the colorless park (called our “green”), kicking last year's leaves around. He wore bedraggled and outgrown clothes, poor pleasant Farley, socks that did not match, underwear with holes in it. His family sent him money in spasms, forgetting him for long periods, and he used what spending money he received for liquor. His sweaters were always worn thin at the elbows, and he forgot to wear a white shirt under them,
de rigueur
at Johns Behemoth, so his necktie was no more than a bowtie on a black elastic band that fastened around his neck. Sometimes I saw him late in the morning, just rushing out of his dormitory with his bowtie crooked around his bony, doomed neck and his red hair rising in ghastly dry tufts above his face—stumbling and staggering, his eyes no more than slits against the light. He bought his liquor from someone in the village, a restaurant owner who had once said hello to Admiral-Playboy Weatherun and was inordinately proud of this fact. Farley was rumored to get a very reasonable price.

“There is this boy at school, from Boston, who's so miserable and mean,” I told Nada. There was a galaxy, a menagerie of odd misfits in the fake Johns Behemoth I had constructed for her, all extensions of myself, with problem parents that were extensions of my parents; I made everything up, out of a peculiar distrust of the truth. It would never have occurred to me to tell my parents the truth about anything. “His mother is an alcoholic and he loves her a lot, I guess. He worries about her.”

“That sounds terrible,” Nada said.

She fixed her eyes upon me, not to see if I was lying—why would I lie?—but to see how far my childish mind had assessed the gravity of the situation. I made a habit, in those days, of saying things I couldn't possibly have understood, in my innocence.

“Are there many unhappy boys in your school, Richard?”

“I don't know. Maybe.”

“Do the boys miss their parents?”

“Sure.”

“I hope you're friends with them. Don't ignore them.”

She had the sunny, myopic belief, like all mothers, that her son was popular and had the power to “make friends” with anyone. I always fooled her, and maybe that was my mistake, because if my poor health wasn't enough to keep her at home, maybe my failure as a social organism would have done the trick. But I had too much pride. And anyway I liked to please her. There was nothing so nice as Nada pleased, smiling a real smile, an unfake smile, and showing her lovely teeth. On the day I agreed to take the examination over, she showed her teeth in a breathtaking smile and hugged me, and after I took it she dragged me around to the expensive and pretentious village “shoppes” and bought me a tennis racket, what she thought to be a handsome shirt, two dozen pairs of identical dark blue socks, a book in a series of novels about a boy detective which I had stopped reading years before, and other presents. I remember that day well—it's coming back to me. Yes, I remember it well though I haven't thought about it for years. Let me see: sharp, tangy wood smoke in the air, perhaps an advertising gimmick, and a fine late winter sun, and Mother jauntily beautiful and suburban,
leading me around, her precious son, her darling prodigy who was to carry the genes of genius into the future, brought all the way to America from sad, dark Russia.

We went into a teen-agers' hangout, luckily deserted at this time on Saturday, and had luxurious ice-cream sundaes for lunch. Have I ever mentioned how Nada ate? She ate as if she expected a disembodied hand suddenly to pull her plate away from her, and if it had she would have continued eating, leaning over the table until she could no longer reach the plate. She was a hungry, greedy woman. She loved food, and when she ate I must admit she let her shoulders slouch a little toward the table, her long-fingered hands delicate and a little bony with the intensity of her eating. Spoons and forks were manipulated in Nada's fingers impatiently; they got in the way, they often clicked and clanked against plates. I believe she ate more than Father did, though she never gained any weight.

And what a fine day that was! Nada was to be informed the following week that I had done extremely well on the examination, raising my IQ^score by a healthy margin, and Nada was to hug me for this, and talk feverishly of my “career.” I somehow think she wanted me to be a great writer, like Mann and Tolstoi and herself, though she never mentioned this to me. She probably thought it was in my blood and that it would emerge by itself. But even though I didn't yet know I had done so well, I felt that I had at least improved the score that had so disappointed her and that I would carry the Russian genes on to the next generation without damaging them. I was burdened with boxes and bags, all the presents that I greeted with the same smile of gratitude and humility, saying, “Nada, you really don't have to …”

“Of course I don't,” she said in her parody of Bebe Hofstadter, lowering her voice until it seemed to scrape the back of her throat.

She surprised me by driving down to the zoo, which was inside the city limits. We rarely descended into the “city,” though Father worked downtown. There was a tradition, stemming from Wateredge, when I had been recovering from rheumatic fever for many months, that I loved the zoo and that Nada and I, and not Father, visited the zoo whenever we could. This was all phony, because Nada hadn't taken me for several years, and I really did not care that much for the animals; abstract, ambiguous puzzles like the chess board now interested me, and the enigmatic conversations I overheard on the upstairs phone
while Nada downstairs talked to some man in New York. I did not know it at the time but I was beginning the second stage of my disintegration, marked, as most degenerative processes are, by a false cheerfulness. Yes, I was cheerful!

And, on that day, what else did we encounter? A gigantic silver balloon in the sky, like a remnant of some lost ahistoric age, a monster descending to gobble up my lovely mother and myself and keep us locked forever in his warm, dark belly. Just the two of us. But the balloon turned slowly in the blue sky and exhibited a most disappointing tail:
Buy Baxters Buicks.
I remember that the omission of the apostrophe annoyed me very much. There were the usual kids riding bicycles along the edge of the highway, real kids in blue jeans, canvas jackets, legs pumping with the kind of energy I was never to know. I remember touching my eyes and making my vision go slightly out of focus, so that the cyclists became cloudy and vague and no longer seemed children like myself, competitors. And the cloudiness did not go away but remained with me like magic, as if protecting and soothing me; it must have been the kind of mistiness Nada inhaled at her dinner parties here and in our other homes. If only Nada and I could have shared the same magical dream …

Near the zoo we noticed a small crowd milling around a drive-in bank, and Nada, always adventuresome, turned in to the asphalt drive. “What's going on here, Richard?” she said. She had a polite, gallant habit of asking any man in her presence what was happening, though she could see for herself. This time it wasn't so clear what we were seeing though. Four teen-aged girls in slacks and boots and windbreakers stood in unnatural silence, staring at the front of the little bank (there's one near you: colonial brick with wide white shutters, very nice, a place just like home to store your $10,000), and a woman in a dazzling pink sports car was also staring. At the door of the bank were several men in trench coats, and it passed through my mind that the air was still too cold for coats like that. One man was carrying a small suitcase in an unnatural way, balanced up against his hip.

Nada pressed a button and her window slid down jerkingly “Do you think something strange is happening here, Richard?” Her nose seemed to lengthen. The teen-aged girls looked around, puzzled. One of them was trying to talk the others into walking away. Nada leaned out the window, letting one gloved hand pat against the car door. “Good
God!” she exclaimed. She jerked back and seized the steering wheel but drove nowhere.

Out of the bank's wide white doors rushed three men, and the men standing outside in trench coats opened fire on them. I saw a blaze of fire from the barrel of a big hip-hugging gun. Two of the three men fell, and the door, which was slowly and automatically closing, was pushed open again; a woman in a white skirt and lavender sweater stood there with her hand to her mouth in an exaggerated gesture of awe. One of the men who had fallen jumped up and brushed off his clothes. He began to argue with the trench-coated men, and another man joined them from somewhere to the side.

“Oh, Christ,” Nada said faintly, “it's a television show or something. A rehearsal.”

I was trembling as much as she was but I didn't let on. “Oh, Nada, what did you think it was?” I said.

When we got to the zoo we saw the disappointing sign,
WILL OPEN MAY
10. “I should have known better,” Nada said. She glanced at me to see how badly I was taking this, but I was her darling, her good genius, and of course I didn't care about the zoo but only about her, and I was still upset from the fake bank robbery. I had never seen anyone killed in front of me, even if it did turn out to be make-believe.

“We'll come by again on May tenth, Honey. I promise,” Nada said.

But the wonderful day had not yet come to an end. We swung around and drove back home, seeing for ourselves how handsomely Fernwood emerged out of the anonymous miles of suburban wasteland that lay between it and the city. First you passed by a jumble of motels, gas stations, bowling alleys, discount stores, drive-in restaurants, overpasses, underpasses, viaducts, garished by giant signs of plump-cheeked boys holding hotdogs aloft, and one sign that caught my attention: a very American-looking man holding aloft a can of beer, with a puzzled expression, the caption being,
Read a beer can tonight.
Do you think I could have made up something so marvelous myself? Never, never! America outdoes all its writers, even its amateur writers!

Then you made your way through the first suburb, proletarian and proudly white Oak Woods, a dinky, arrogant neighborhood with a preponderance of American flags waving in the wind, and many used-car lots along the “Miracle Motor Mile.” Then came the slightly better suburb of Pleasure Dells, as bereft of dells as Oak Woods was bereft of
oaks, but decked out perhaps with pleasure and equipped with three vast, sprawling magnamarkets that sold not just food, apparently, but lawn chairs, cheap clothing, and all the drugs you might want to kill a vacant hour or so; an oceanic tide of automobiles was parked around these buildings.

We sped up a bit for the next suburb, where the highway's shoulders fell back and buildings were built farther from the road. This was Bornwell Pass, inferior to Fernwood but acceptable for certain kinds of shopping. One shopping plaza here with its parking lot must have covered several acres. The stores were not “shoppes” like those in Fernwood but just plain stores. “Isn't that vulgar?” Nada said.