Ice-Cream Headache (28 page)

Alice was just exactly his own age, but he didn’t know her very well because she wasn’t from his town and was only visiting here for the summer with her mother. She did every summer. And her mother had brought her by for the afternoon because she had to go somewhere. So feeling strangely scared and embarrassed, though he didn’t want to, he had taken Alice in between the garages where all the guys always went, and then had turned to go away until she was through, as he knew he was supposed to. But she had said in a funny voice didn’t he want to stay, maybe he had to pee too, and it was all right as long as he turned his back and didn’t look, and then she would turn her back and not look, that was the way the boys and girls all always did in her town where she came from.

And so that was what they had done, and the sequence they followed—except for one thing: when she asked him if he was done and he should have said no he said yes instead and she turned around and saw him still peeing, while his heart was beating in his throat like a triphammer. Alice had giggled and slapped his arm, and then she frowned and looked angry and turned back around and said in an angry voice that he shouldn’t have done that, that was bad. It was not exactly the reaction he was expecting. Or even why he had done it, really. Anyway, it didn’t matter because that was when his mother’s voice, shrill, strident, demanding and insistent, like some all-seeing all-knowing powerful dark angel of God, had come out sharply at him from the upstairs bedroom window over the back porch where she was supposed to be lying down taking a nap.
Johnnnnyy! What are you children doing? Where are you? Come here!
Hastily buttoning his pants, his mind fumbling and balking on him frightenedly, he walked slowly around from between the garages to stand looking up under the upstairs bedroom window, feeling like a criminal caught in the act and brought before the high bench of the stern judges of the bar of justice. And when she asked him again what they had been doing, he simply told her, his mind floundering and fumbling so badly that there wasn’t even any question of thinking of an excuse. Later he would wonder why he hadn’t lied; she couldn’t prove anything. Alice wondered why he hadn’t lied, too.

“What did you do that for? What did you tell her the truth for?” she whispered furiously, while they waited for her to come down. “Now you’ve got us both into trouble.”

He didn’t know what trouble Alice got into, when her mother came to take her home, but she had certainly been right about him anyway. His mother had separated them and made Alice stay in the livingroom and him in the bedroom upstairs. Then she had, first, washed his mouth out with soap on a wet washcloth (although he didn’t know why she had to do that to him; that was usually his punishment for lying, not for telling the truth) and then, second, she had given him a whale of a whipping on his bare bottom while she glared at him with angrily narrowed eyes and made it plain to him in no uncertain terms what a filthy, dirty thing it was he had done.

He never did find out what happened to Alice when she got home, because she never came back any more and he hadn’t seen her since.

Standing there between the garages to pee, where it had all happened, his heart beating dully with fright and fear again in his ears just as it had that day (although at least he didn’t have to listen to the high-pitched cackle of the Wisdom Club bridge ladies around here where you couldn’t hear it), he finished and then went back to the little porch, the enthusiasm for the tennis game all gone. And it was quite a while, sitting there hollow and empty and dandling the tennis racket lethargically, before he could work himself up to starting to play it.

The tennis game was a new one, one that he had invented only a few weeks ago, when he read a story about a championship tennis match in a
Collier’s
magazine that his mother had brought home. The idea for the story obviously came from Don Budge’s victory over Baron von Cramm in the Davis Cup and the Wimbledon, which John had followed in the sports pages with interest. The writer had taken that for his starter, and then had made up a story about this championship match, and these two men both of whom
had
to win it. It was a real battle of wills. Everything both men wanted from the world was at stake. The young American would lose his girl he wanted to marry and the big job her father had offered him if he lost the match, and the German Baron had been told by the Führer that if he did not win for Germany all his estates would be confiscated and himself imprisoned. All this came out in the story as the two men played the match, and you could read it tensely, liking both men, hoping both could win, but knowing only one could. In the end, in this great test of wills, the young American had won over the older German sportsman, and the Baron, rather than return to Germany and what he knew waited there, had shut the garage door and turned on his car motor, thinking he had been an adventurer all his life and now he was embarking upon the greatest adventure of all. It was a gripping story and John, who would be twelve before too long, in some strange way that he couldn’t describe was able to sense out and associate with the German’s sad but strong feelings his tragic courage. And in fact, in the story, he had liked the Baron much more than he had liked the young American who won.

And that was the story of his tennis game. Sometimes, when he played the match through against the garage doors, he would become so involved in it and its struggle that the play of emotions which ran through him became unbelievably intense, almost unbearable, exquisitely powerful. He
became
the German, and the young American too. Of course, he never played it when any of the other kids were around, and he never told anybody about it. He would have felt silly and embarrassed. So to all intents and purposes he was merely practicing tennis strokes against the garage. But the very secrecy itself added to the excitement of it, and even before he would begin to play out the match that secret, completely contained, private pleasure which caused his stomach to spin, would steal over him, as he marched out onto the court.

He had arranged it all so it would be very realistic. The playhouse was the grandstand, and the concrete driveway which was double for two car-lengths back from the double doors was the court. The garage doors, which were on rollers and slid from side to side one behind the other, were made with two-by-four braces that framed their edges and crisscrossed from corner to corner and were painted white, and the brace that ran across them cutting them in half horizontally across the middle was the net; every shot that hit below that was a lost point. And every shot that went off the concrete was an “out,” and another lost point. The crisscross braces themselves, as well as the offset door joint, gave an added element of chance to it since at times the ball would hit one of them and squirt off out of bounds to the side, or else hit the concrete where he could not possibly get it back. In spite of this element of chance, however, the deciding factor was once again, of course, as with the lead-soldiers’ battle, himself. He could make whichever one win he wanted to, and could be whichever one he wanted whether winning or losing, according to his mood. Usually he chose to be the Baron and to lose.

And today, after getting over the upset of the memory of Alice Pringle, that was who he was. After getting himself worked into it and beginning to get involved by the end of the first set (the Baron took the first one, building his tragic hopes unnaturally high), the cackling conversation of the Wisdom Club bridge ladies coming out to him from inside the house added a strange, new, exciting element. They were the crowd, chattering and talking excitedly among themselves as they sat happily in the grandstand. What did they know about the tragedy that was being enacted out here on the court as the Baron fought desperately to win? What did they know of his desperate effort to keep all his estates and keep himself from being put in a Nazi concentration camp? It was only a game to them, an exciting match to be enjoyed while they drank Cokes and ate sandwiches. Just for spite, as if Fate itself were playing nasty tricks on the plucky German, he let the Baron take the second set too. Now he was all set up. Just one more set to win, out of three, and he would have the championship and all it meant to him. But then, just as the German thought he had it, thought he was safe at last, he switched sides to the young American and really began to go to work.

Cold, calm, collected, the young American (he had always been noted as a pressure player) began to play tennis like he had never played in his life before. Ferocious drop shots, sizzling volleys, high lobs in the very corners, everything. He, and John with him, was everywhere on the court, growing steadily and relentlessly stronger in confidence and power. Even the crowd hushed and became quiet at such a brilliant exhibition. And slowly the score crept up on the weakening German. The American, playing brilliantly, took the third set 6-4. Then came back to take the fourth set 6-2.

And then, as the two of them stood staring implacably at each other across the net after their rest, John switched back to the Baron for the fifth and final set and the climax. The Baron already knew it was a lost cause now. Several years older than his opponent, weakening, tired, winded, his knees shaky, he fought on grimly, the handkerchief tied around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. Several times he, and John with him, staggered on the court going after impossible placements. But he did not go down. He lost the first two games without even a deuce. But then, almost completely exhausted, in actual physical pain almost, he rallied and took the next three straight games, all of them with at least two deuces, making one supreme effort, which was his last. Then, with the game score 3-2 in his favor, the American broke through his service, and on the last point he, and John with him, staggered and fell, trying to reach an impossibly brilliant drop shot, and he knew it was all over. Lying stretched out on the court, his racket still reaching across the concrete after that irretrievably lost ball, breathing convulsively, he rolled over, then got wearily up to one knee and looked across the net at the man who had defeated him. There would be no going back to Germany for him now. There was almost a luxury in knowing it, in knowing it was over, in embracing his defeat he had fought so hard against, a real happiness and pleasure almost. And, his stomach spinning almost sickly with excitement and emotion, John climbed back slowly to his feet.

The rest was an anticlimax. Everybody, even the crowd, knew it was over. For the next three games the Baron played grimly. Several times he staggered and nearly fell, and twice he, and John with him, went down on one knee. But it was all only a formality. And then it was finally over. Knowing what he must do, now, he walked slowly over to the umpire’s stand on the little porch in front of the grandstand to congratulate his opponent. And almost physically sick with excitement and emotion, the nerves in his arms and legs tingling with it, John dropped the racket and balls on the porch in beaten defeat and started around the garage to where the tree house was, out in back of it, to do what he always wanted to do when he felt like this. He wanted to play with himself. It was then that his mother’s voice followed him from out of the kitchen, where she was fixing the refreshments.

“Johnny! Johnny! What are you doing out there, falling around like that?”

“Playing,” he said grimly, his face a mask of German iron control, as became a Prussian.

And as he went on to the tree house, his peepee throbbing in his pants, behind him he heard his mother say laughingly to the Wisdom Club bridge lady who was helping her:

“Playing! Oh, well, you know how children are. They’re always playing some little game or other when they’re by themselves.”

This one’s really a bonus. Not even conceived except as a vague brief note when the Introduction for this collection was written, it was intended originally as simply another of the fairly uncomplex childhood stories mentioned earlier. Then it got away from me. The “near-but-not-quite-incest” thing, a much commoner experience in America than commonly admitted, got taken over by the failed-family theme and an attempt to understand the curse of family alienation and where it came from to so many of us in those years. And that, of course, changed everything. I think it’s better for the change. It was begun several months after
Go to the Widow-Maker,
that much misunderstood novel, was finished and handed over: ten years and three novels later than the last group of four stories, three of them also childhood stories; and it took a little over two months to write.

T
HERE WAS NOTHING SO
Faulknerian about the town, but there was sure something very Faulknerian about the family. Tom Dylan thought this gloomily. He was sitting on his stopped bike with his empty paperbag down his back and looking across a wide lawn through the faint predawn light of another summery day at the dark un-lived-in shell of his grandfather’s columned old colonial mansion on West Main Street. The house was a part of his paper route, but where lights would soon be coming on in the other big houses on West Main no lights would be coming on in there. Well. He was meeting two girls in there at around three o’clock this afternoon. One of them was his sister. The thought made his heart pound. Almost seventeen, tall and lanky, with a hawk’s nose, he pushed off with his right leg and rode the bike on in toward the middle of the town.

It was one of those Middlewestern villages in western Indiana which, in this modern age of 1935, liked to call themselves cities. Tom grinned. It had a courthouse with a square of grass around it from which the old trees had been cut down and around that a square of business buildings variously labeled 1880 or 1904 or some such year to indicate their date of construction. It all looked Faulknerian enough. But the town had not suffered in the Civil War as Faulknerian towns had suffered, because Indiana was Northern. This particular town had not suffered since the Campaigns of Mad Anthony Wayne for the Indiana Territory which meant, since the town had not even existed then, never.