All the Days and Nights (12 page)

In a place where everybody could easily be traced back to his origin, people did not always know who the paper boy was or care what time he got home to supper. They assumed from a general knowledge of boys that if the paper was late it was because the paper boy dawdled somewhere, shooting marbles, throwing snowballs, when he should have been delivering their paper.

Every afternoon after school the boys rode into the alley behind the
Star
Building, let their bicycles fall with a clatter, and gathered in the cage next to the pressroom. They were dirty-faced, argumentative, and as alike as sparrows. Their pockets sagged with pieces of chalk, balls of string, slingshots, marbles, jackknives, deified objects, trophies they traded. Boasting and being called on to produce evidence in support of what ought to have been true but wasn’t, they bet large sums of unreal money or passed along items of misinformation that were gratefully received and stored away in a safe place. Easily deflated, they just as easily recovered their powers of pretending. With the press standing idle, the linotype machine clicking and lisping, the round clock on the wall a torment to them every time they glanced in that direction, they asked, What time is the press going to start? — knowing that the printing press of the Draperville
Evening Star
was all but done for, and that it was a question not of how soon it would start printing but of whether it could be prevailed upon to print at all. When the linotype machines stopped, there was a quarter of an hour of acute uncertainty, during which late-news bulletins were read in reverse, corrections were made in the price of laying mash and ladies’ ready-to-wear, and the columns of type were
locked in place. The boys waited. The pressroom waited. The front office waited and listened. And suddenly the clean white paper began to move, to flow like a waterfall. Words appeared on one side and then on the other. The clittering clattering discourse gained momentum. The paper was cut, the paper was folded. Smelling of damp ink, copies of the Draperville
Evening Star
slid down a chute and were scooped up and counted by a young man named Homer West, who never broke down or gave trouble to anyone. Cheerful, even-tempered, he handed the papers through a wicket to the seventeen boys who waited in line with their canvas bags slung over one shoulder and their bicycles in a tangle outside. One of them was Homer’s brother Harold, but Homer was a brother to all of them. He teased them, eased the pressure of their high-pitched impatience with joking, kept them from fighting each other during that ominous quarter of an hour after the linotype machines fell silent, and listened for the first symptoms of disorder in the press. When it began chewing paper instead of printing, he pulled the switch, and a silence of a deeply discouraging import succeeded the whir and the clitter-clit-clatter. The boys who were left said, I can’t wait around here all night, I have homework to do. And Homer, waiting also, for the long day to end and for the time still far in the future when he could afford to get married, said, Do your homework now, why don’t you? They said, Here? and he said, Why not? What’s the matter with this place? It’s warm. You’ve got electric light. They said, I can’t concentrate. And Homer said, Neither can I with you talking to me. He said, It won’t be long now. And when they insisted on knowing how long, he said, Pretty soon.

The key to age is patience; and the key to patience is unfortunately age, which cannot be hurried, which takes time (in which to be disappointed); and time is measured by what happens; and what happens is printed (some of it) in the evening paper.

Just when it seemed certain that there would be no more copies of that evening’s
Star
, the waterfall resumed its flowing — slowly at first, and then with a kind of frantic confidence. One after another the boys received their papers through the wicket, counted them, and, with their canvas bags weighted, ran out of the building to mount their bicycles and ride off to the part of town that depended on them for its knowledge of what was going on in the outside world in the year 1922.

After their first mild surprise at finding Eddie Geliert in the cage with them, the other boys accepted his presence there, serene in the knowledge that they could lick him if he started getting wise, and that they had
thirty-seven or forty-two or fifty-one customers in a good neighborhood to his thirteen in the poorest-paying section of town. His route had been broken off one of the larger ones, with no harm to the loser, who, that first evening, went with him to point out the houses that took the
Star
, and showed him how to fold the papers as he went along and how to toss them so they landed safely on the porch. After that, Edward was on his own.

The boys received their papers from Homer in rotation, and it was better to be second or third or fourth or even fifth than it was to be first, because if you were first it meant that the next night you would be last. “Pay-er …” Edward called, like the others. “Pay-er?” — with his mind on home. His last paper delivered, he turned toward the plate kept warm for him in the oven, the place it would have been so pleasant to come to straight from school. But he was twelve now, and out in the world. He had put the unlimited leisure of childhood behind him. As his father said, he was learning the value of money, his stomach empty, his nostrils burning with the cold, his chin deep in the collar of his mackinaw.

How much money his father had, Edward did not know. It was one of those interesting questions that grown people do not care to answer. Since his mother was also kept in the dark about this, there was no reason to assume he could find out by asking. But he knew he was expected to do as well some day, and own a nice home and provide decently for the wife and children it was as yet impossible for him to imagine. If all this were easy to manage, then his father would not be upset about lights that were left burning in empty rooms or mention the coal bill every time somebody complained that the house was chilly. Life is serious and without adequate guarantees, whether your mother takes in washing or belongs to the Friday Bridge Club. Poverty is no joke — but neither is the fear of poverty never experienced. Every evening Edward saw, like a lantern slide of failure, the part of town he must never live in, streets that weren’t ever going to be paved, in all probability, houses that year after year the banks or the coal company or old Mr. Ivens saw no need for repainting or doing anything about, beyond seeing to it that the people who lived in them paid their rent promptly on the first day of the month.

On Saturday mornings he came with his metal collection book and knocked and the door was opened by a solemn, filthy child or a woman who had no corset on under her housedress and whose hair had not been combed since she got out of bed. The women gave him a dime and took
the coupon he held out to them as if that were the commodity in question. If they asked him to step inside he held his breath, ignoring the bad air and an animal odor such as might have been left by foxes or raccoons or wolves in their lair. The women wadded the coupon into a ball or, if they were of a suspicious turn of mind, saved it for the day when he would try to cheat them, and they could triumphantly confront him with the proof of his dishonesty. If they didn’t have a dime (often the case in that part of town) or were simply afraid, on principle, to part with money, they put him off with every appearance of not remembering that they had put him off the week before and the week before that. He turned away, disappointed but trying desperately to be polite, and the paper kept on coming.

Regardless of how many customers paid or put off paying the paper boy, the
Evening Star
claimed its percentage every Saturday morning. Any other arrangement would have complicated the bookkeeping, and the owners of the paper did not consider themselves responsible for the riot that broke out, one Friday afternoon, in the cage next to the pressroom. The boys refused to take the papers Homer held out to them through the wicket, and nothing that he said to them had any effect, because their grievances were suddenly intolerable and they themselves were secure in the knowledge (why had they never thought of this before?) that the
Star
was helpless without them. The word “strike” was heard above the sound of the press, which had started on time, for once, and which went right on printing editorial after editorial advising the President of the United States to take over the coal mines — with troops if necessary, since the public welfare was threatened.

At quarter of five, home was not as Edward had remembered it. There was nothing to do, nobody to talk to except Old Mary, and she said, Now don’t go spoiling your supper! when all in the world he wanted was company. He went back through the empty uneasy rooms and settled in a big chair in the library with a volume of
Battles and Leaders of the Civil War
on his lap. He didn’t read; he only looked at the pictures (a farmhouse near Shiloh, the arsenal at Harpers Ferry) and listened for the sound of a step on the front porch. It was dark outside, and people all over town were beginning to look for the evening paper. His mind was still filled with remembered excitement, triumph that blurred and threatened to turn into worry. But then he turned a page. This had the same effect as when a dreamer, waking, escapes from the nightmare by changing his position in bed.

Virginia carne in, and Edward called out to her, but she rushed upstairs, too absorbed in her own world of spit curls and charm bracelets, of what Ossie Dempsey said to Elsie McNish, of TL’s and ukuleles, to answer her own brother. And where was his mother?

Mildred Geliert, unable to get along with her husband, unable to bear his bad temper, his nagging, had tried leaving him. Sometimes she took the children with her and sometimes, with her suitcases in the front hall, she clung to them and told them they mustn’t forget her, and that when they were older they would understand. The trouble was, they did understand already. For a time it was very exciting, full of subtle moves (she communicated with Harrison through her lawyer) and countermoves (his mother came and kept house for him) like a chess game. The Gellerts’ house, no matter who ordered the meals and sat at the opposite end of the dining-room table from Harrison Geliert, had a quality of sadness. This was partly architectural, having to do with the wide overhanging eaves, and partly because the shrubbery — the bridal wreath and barberry — had been allowed to become spindly and the trees kept the sunlight from the lawn. Neither surprised by its own prosperity, like the Tudor and Dutch Colonial houses in the new addition to Draperville, nor frankly shabby, like other old houses of its period, the Gellerts’ house and yard were at a standstill, having reached their final look, which owed so much, apparently, to accident, and so little to design or intention or thought.

When Edward walked into Virginia’s room she was lying on the bed reading a movie magazine, and she implied that she would just as soon he went somewhere else. Not that he cared. He sat slumped in a chair until she said, “Do you have to breathe like that?”

“Like what?”

“With your mouth open like a fish.”

Nothing made him so uncomfortable as being reminded of some part of himself that there was no need to be reminded of. It took all the joy out of life. “This is the way you breathe,” he said indignantly. “Just let me give you an imitation.”

She laughed scornfully at his attempt to fasten on her a failing she did not have, and so he reminded her — a thing he had meant not to do — that she owed him thirty cents. This led to more insinuations and denials, in the heat of which he forgot he was home early until his mother, standing in the doorway with her hat on, said, “If you children don’t stop this eternal arguing, I don’t know what I will do!” Neither of them had
heard her come upstairs. They looked at each other, conspirators, on the same side. “We’re not arguing.”

Convicted without a hearing (their mother went on to her own room), they drew apart from each other again. Virginia said, “That was all your fault. I didn’t ask you in here, and you’re not supposed to come in my room unless I ask you in.” Which was a rule she made up, along with a lot of others.

Before they even realized they were arguing again, a voice called, “Children, please! please!” Their mother’s voice, so nervous, unhappy, and remote after the Friday Bridge Club. It embarrassed them, reminding them of scenes at the dinner table and conversations between their mother and father that floated up the stairs late at night after they were in bed.

Edward went into the bathroom and ran lukewarm water into the washbasin. It takes patience and some native skill to make a pumice stone float. Absorbed in this delicate task, Edward forgot about his grimy hands and also about the hands of the clock. A warning from his mother as she started down the stairs (how did she know he was in the bathroom?) woke him from a dream of argosies, and the stone boat sank. He arrived in the dining room out of breath, his blond hair slicked down and wet, his hands clean but not his wrists, and an excuse ready on his tongue. He had decided not to mention the strike but it came out just the same. Halfway through dinner it burst out of him, and he felt better immediately.

“How did it start?” Harrison Geliert asked. The lamp that used to hang low over the dining-room table, with its red and green stained glass, its beaded glass fringe, had been replaced, in the last year or two, by glaring wall brackets, a white light in which nothing could be concealed.

“I don’t know,” Edward said. He passed his plate for a second helping. The plate was filled and passed back to him, and then his father said, “You were there, weren’t you?”

“Yes.”

“Well, all I’m asking you to tell me is what happened. Something must have happened. How did the strike get started in the first place?”

“I don’t remember,” Edward said.

He glanced at his sister, across the table. She had stopped eating and with a lurking smile, as if to say
You’re going to catch it
, waited for him to flounder in deeper and deeper. He did not hold this against her. The shoe was often enough on the other foot.