Asa, as I Knew Him (11 page)

The two of them were full of chat. Reuben was ribbed
about being a “jock,” about his having saved the team’s honor with his goal, and then about his clothes.

“You are really looking the part tonight—expecting somebody to take your picture for the yearbook? I see you’ve got your Andover tie on, that’s the school spirit we like to see here. Nice cloth”—Kuhn’s long finger massaged Reuben’s collar—“have that made up for you at Brooks by the dozen, eh?”

“Jerry, you’re the worst snob on campus,” said Reuben cheerfully. He put a potato skin in his mouth and pulled it across his front teeth to extract all the pulp. Asa was glad to see his table manners weren’t any better at school than at home. But apparently Jerry found them offensive.

“Christ almighty, learn to eat with your mouth shut, man, or you’ll never be part of the ruling class.”

“Is that what I’m aiming for?” Reuben asked. They both laughed. Asa, not wanting to be left out, laughed as well, but he felt on dangerous ground. What was he laughing at? One must eat with a shut mouth. That was common knowledge. On the other hand, he took a mystifying but real pleasure in Reuben’s flouting of these fundamental rules; perhaps Jerry shared this pleasure, and it made him laugh. Reuben was satisfying because he didn’t bother with table manners, proper shoes, or proper grades—but Asa assumed this was by choice, not because he was incapable or ignorant. Reuben’s knowing better and behaving worse took courage.

Reuben said, with his mouth full, “I am in the ruling class, Jerry, and don’t you forget it.” Jerry laughed some more and Asa stared at his plate where a half moon of fat was turning hard.

“Money’s only half of it. Around here it won’t even get you in the door. Or just in the door. None of these fellows
has any money.” Jerry waved his arm at the ranks of tweed backs. “They pride themselves on not having any money.” He turned to Asa. “How much money do you have at your disposal?”

Asa bristled. This was one of the questions he was meaning to ask Reuben, but it was entirely different to have it posed by a stranger. “Not much,” he said evenly, and hoped he’d covered the topic. But he hadn’t.

“And how much is that?”

“Well, nothing, unless I ask for it.”

“Aha,” said Jerry.

“Come on,” Reuben said, “you’ve got an allowance or something, don’t you?”

“No, I’ve got what I earned last summer, and my mother sends me fifteen dollars a month out of that.” They stared. “It’s not like I need money for anything,” Asa said. “What would I get?”

“Cigarettes,” said Reuben.

“Books,” said Jerry.

“Booze,” said Reuben.

“Tickets to the movies,” said Jerry.

“I can’t smoke at school,” said Asa sadly. He missed it. “How about you?” He looked at Reuben beside him, with gravy on his shirt. “What have you got?”

“Oh, Jesus, I don’t know. I have a checking account, and my father, or the bank, or someone, drops two hundred dollars a month into it.”

“Two hundred dollars a month!” Asa leaned back in his chair. “You could—you could go around the world!”

“If I saved it,” Reuben agreed. “But I don’t save it. I get stuff.”

“Like the car?”

“Oh no, Father got me that. Like these.” He shot his cuffs and showed Asa gold and mother-of-pearl cuff links in the shape of grape leaves.

“And they’re absolutely hideous,” Jerry said. “You have no business wasting your money on horrible things. You ought at least to have some taste. Why don’t you take this young fellow with you when you get the urge to spend? He looks like a fellow of taste. Look at that nice coat. He wouldn’t let you buy these atrocities.”

Asa bristled again at being called a young fellow by another young fellow, but was glad Jerry appreciated the coat. Still, he didn’t like the conversation. He didn’t like Jerry, either. “How much money do
you
have?” he asked sharply.

“I’m somewhere between the two of you. I don’t have a fortune like Mr. Sola. On the other hand I don’t have cold, grasping Yankee parents who won’t give me enough to take my pals to the show. I assume your family is well-heeled enough to have bought that coat new? It isn’t something you found at Keezer’s?”

“What’s Keezer’s?”

“Point made,” said Jerry.

“And how do you know my parents are cold and grasping?” Asa said this in such a halfhearted way that Reuben put an arm around him.

“Don’t take offense at Jerry,” he said. “Jerry isn’t well brought up. He doesn’t know anything about your parents, he’s just making unpleasant generalizations.”

“But Reuben, they dole out his own money to him, money he earned, for heaven’s sake, and they made him go out and earn it in the first place—”

“They didn’t. I wanted to. I was sick of being sent off to the country, so I stayed in town and worked.”

“No matter. It’s your money, and you shouldn’t have to
wait for them to give it to you. Don’t you think I’m right?”

Asa thought about it. He looked at his blood-red shoes and pondered. Jerry said softly to Reuben, “Portrait of a Yankee thinking.” Asa looked up, hurt.

“Yes, I think you’re right, but I don’t think my parents would go along with it. And it’s not worth fighting about.”

“What is worth fighting about? What do you fight with your parents about?”

“I try not to. I mean, it wears me out. I’m not there most of the time …” This reminded him of a conversation he’d had with Parker during the summer. “I hate fighting,” he said.

“I rather enjoy it,” Jerry said, and he leaned back in his chair, triumphant. “And you’re not bad at it either, Sola.”

“Oh, I usually leave it to Roberto. Roberto and Papa have a battle going over honesty, so when I turn up I look like the good boy, which is fine. I’m sick of fighting. I’ve done plenty.”

“But you’re always doing things that will get you into trouble,” Asa said.

“It doesn’t matter. I’m the good son. I can do anything.”

“I wish that would happen to me,” Asa said. “That’s the trouble with being an only child, you’re always the bad one.”

“Or the good one,” Jerry said. “I’m the only son, and so I’m always the good son. My sisters can never be boys, so they’ve failed from the start. Every mother needs a little messiah of her own.”

“That’s an interesting point,” Reuben said. Asa thought it was a crazy point; actually, he didn’t even think it was a point. But Reuben was chewing over this “point” with fascination. “I think you’re right, I think that’s the way it is.”

“But you don’t even have a mother,” Asa protested.

“Everybody has a mother to start with,” Jerry said, “even Reuben.”

“And she thought you were—” Asa couldn’t get the words out.

“Oh no, she wasn’t of that persuasion.” Reuben smiled at Jerry. “But I’ve seen it in other families.”

Asa made a lunge in the direction he thought Reuben had pointed in. “You mean she wasn’t Jewish?”

Jerry folded his napkin into a tiny square; Reuben ate his cold, withered potato skin. But Asa, who had decided he too had a right to ask insulting questions, refused to be daunted. He felt himself momentarily in ascendance over them and repeated his question. “Was she?”

Reuben turned his blank, ice-blond face toward Asa and said, “Yes, she was.” Then he got up and went to a table where apple pie was being topped off with vanilla ice cream by a starchy kitchen aide. Asa waited for a confidence from Jerry; surely he would lean across the table and explain, in two hurried sentences, why Reuben didn’t talk about his mother. Jerry sat straight, worrying his napkin as if he were folding the secret into the linen so it couldn’t get out, and didn’t say anything. Reuben came back with pie, which they ate without talking.

“Let’s have coffee. Let’s go into town,” Reuben said when he’d finished his pie.

“Can we do that?” Asa asked. Wallingford was off limits to Choate students; it required the same signed permission slip to walk into town as to take the train to Boston.

“Who’s going to stop us?” asked Jerry. “They’ve got better things to do than keep track of seniors. Put on your coat.” He leaned across the table, as he had to touch Reuben’s collar, and stroked the sleeve. “Let me try it on.”

“It won’t fit you,” said Asa promptly. He smiled at Jerry, but Jerry had stood up and was staring at the coat. “It won’t fit at all.”

“I’m not buying it, for Chrissake, I just want to try it on.”

Reuben yawned and raised his arms above his head. “I’m going to get a black leather jacket during vacation. With a big silver zipper. I think it’ll look good with my car.”

Asa was defeated; the jacket would supersede the cashmere coat, and he would find himself one step behind, as usual. He passed the coat over the sticky plates to Jerry. The coat transformed Jerry’s awkwardness into length and grace, and imparted an air of importance to his pallid, pocked face. “Gee, you look terrific in that coat,” Asa said, despite himself.

“Not my style,” Jerry said, but he didn’t take it off. He buttoned it and pushed his hands into the pockets. “Well, it’s warm. But doesn’t it make you look like a banker? I’m getting a trench coat—pockets and flaps and buckles.”

“You’ll look like a spy. Is that better than a banker?” Reuben asked.

Asa wanted his coat back. He moved from one foot to another and stared into space and wondered why he felt irritated and left out. Irritated—because he wanted his coat; that was simple. Also because his coat was being maligned, though he could tell Jerry liked it. It was Jerry who looked like a banker, Asa decided. Asa in his coat looked like a young man in prep school; his posturing in front of the mirror had been unconvincing. He was no playboy. Reuben, however, might transform the coat into an emblem of elegance; Reuben seemed to be more powerful than what he wore. Asa decided to offer Reuben the coat. That would get it away from Jerry and bring him closer to Reuben, which would, possibly, ease the feeling of being left out.

“Why don’t you try it?” he said. “I bet you won’t look like a banker in it.”

“Oh, let’s just go get some fucking coffee,” said Reuben. “Let’s just go. I can’t stand this place another minute.” His
face was pale and pinched, and he looked like his father for a minute, tightening his lips and grinding his teeth. Asa heard the faint crackle of his jaws moving. It was a distinctive Sola sound. They all did it when irked. Roberto had spent three years in braces to correct the injuries he’d inflicted on his bite; Reuben had knots of muscle at the base of his cheeks that bulged and trembled; Professor Sola sometimes sounded like a firecracker as he shuffled down the hall gnashing on the cud of his private rages.

What was bothering them? wondered Asa. Why were they such a nervous family? His family did not grind teeth, flunk courses, sulk, glower, whisper things to water. In his family everything went according to schedule and everything was as it should be. If Asa were to go to Princeton rather than Harvard, dinner might be more silent than usual for a few evenings, but there would not be scenes, there would not be people snarling in hallways, banging doors, or any of the other peculiar things he had seen at the Solas’. Asa had eaten a meal there in which Professor Sola addressed all his remarks to Roberto via Reuben, in the third person: “Does he think he’s going to get into college by virtue of his blond hair?” “Does he want more salad?” Reuben, playing according to the rules of this bizarre game, would repeat the question to Roberto, receive an answer, and repeat the answer, again in the third person, to their father. Asa was fascinated and uneasy. Neither of the boys had commented on it, and two days later everything was back to normal.

Reuben crunched vehemently. Jerry gave the coat back to Asa. They pushed their chairs up to the table, strode out of the dining hall (“The thing is to look innocent and determined,” Reuben whispered), and cut straight across the broad, brown lawn to the road into town. They turned right and walked downhill, Reuben and Jerry side by side, Asa bobbing
behind them, sometimes inserting his shoulder between them, more often kept back by the narrowness of the sidewalk.

After ten minutes of this they reached town, not a minute too soon for Asa, who wanted to flag down a passing bus or slouch off to the train station in the dark. Reuben could send him his socks and his toothbrush—he was not going to trail along like a baby brother. But there was the coffee shop, and Reuben holding the door open for him; maybe on the way back it would be Jerry who walked behind.

The coffee shop was in the back of a drugstore with high shelves ranked with blue glass bottles that read
DIGITALIS
and
PEROXIDE
in gold letters. “They put arsenic in the coffee,” Reuben said. Asa believed it. They were served their coffee in thick, white porcelain mugs with the Andover seal. Reuben took a flask from his pocket and put a large shot into his coffee without offering it around. Neither the proprietor, a fat person who looked as though he’d been dipped in talcum powder, nor Jerry took any notice.

Asa draped his coat over a stool and
The Mayor of Casterbridge
fell out of the pocket. Jerry jumped off his stool and snatched it up before Asa had a chance to move.

“You like this? It’s his worst. You ought to be reading
Tess
.”

“It’s assigned.”

“Why do they always assign the worst ones? I bet you’ve read
Adam Bede
and hated it. Right?”

“Yes. Last year.”

“Read
Tess
, read
Jude
, read
Daniel Deronda
—yes, read that. That will tell you something about the Jews.”

“I have too much reading to do already,” Asa said. “I have to read the
Metamorphoses
by Wednesday.”

“In Latin?”

“No.”

“It’s better in Latin.” Jerry had opened the book and was leafing through it as if it were a picture album. “It’s plodding, it’s safe, there’s more to Hardy than this.”

“No literature,” Reuben mumbled. He was bent over his coffee to inhale the evaporating brandy. “Fuck Hardy. Fuck the Jews in England and Victorian morality.” He put another shot in his cup. “I can’t wait to get to college. I’m so sick of this place—it’s dead. Thayer—” Asa winced. When Reuben called him Thayer it was a sign that a black, remote mood was coming on, one that Reuben would intensify by picking fights and increasing his isolation. “Thayer, if we were in Cambridge, we could go looking for bicycles to steal, you know? We could go down to the Casablanca and see how many drinks we could handle, and whether we could get somebody else to pay for them. We could drive out to the airport and watch the planes take off. No end of entertainment in dear old Cambridge.”