Prudence (8 page)

He told his friend from Triangle not to worry, truly, not to worry at all. And then he got up and walked the sixty blocks back to Penn Station. In a state of numb exhaustion he found himself walking across the campus at dawn, wishing the campus mists were the mists of the lake, that the flagstones would melt somehow into the marshes and sloughs of the woods north of the Pines, and that Billy would appear from behind an arch as though from around the boathouse. But Billy didn’t appear at Princeton. He never did.

*   *   *

B
illy had appeared, as something of a surprise, one morning when Frankie was ten. Frankie had woken early, as usual. Jonathan was still in Chicago. Frankie lay in bed and listened for Emma’s voice. Light, strong already, came through his open window, diffused by the metal screen. No sound from the garden. He heard the metal grate on the cookstove being rattled by one of the kitchen girls, shifting the ash down to the pan. But if Emma had been there he would have heard her caviling, and he would have heard the girls’ polite, patient responses: nothing.

He sat up and took off his pajamas and put on his T-shirt and overalls. He didn’t bother with socks. At least Emma didn’t hector him about socks in the summer. He rubbed his teeth with his sleeve rather than brush them with water from the pitcher on the stand in the corner. If he were getting ready for a day at Fenwick’s she would have put him through a full inspection—hair, nails, teeth, face, clothes, comb, handkerchief, pocket money, satchel. And he would
have had to sit there, back straight, forearms on the table, staring at the piece of liver on his plate that didn’t resemble meat or nourishment so much as leather covered in sand. Meanwhile, Emma (
Oh, I’m not really feeling all that hungry, a glass of tomato juice is enough for me, thank you
) and Jonathan (a plate of eggs, three of them, and nothing else) would shake their heads at what Jonathan referred to as Frankie’s “stubbornness” and Emma would coo about his “need to get his strength up” for the long school day. Frankie didn’t feel stubborn, nor did he feel weak. He just hated liver. More than that, at age ten he hated how such standoffs were the only way his parents could express their fear. Fear that he—and by extension, their lives—was not turning out as expected. Their inability to address their own fears, their own failings, their own disappointments reduced the present and the future not to ash but to fog. A slow-creeping, heavy fog of sadness that hung over his childhood.

Even then he knew, he
knew
: what Emma considered love (the constant worry, the constant checking, the constant amendments, the constant admonishments) was performed with as much regard for what other people would say about him as it was about his actual well-being. At the Pines, with no one around but Felix and the kitchen girls and the occasional drop-in from Chicago, she didn’t put him through all that. As for Jonathan, he wasn’t there, and so much the better. Felix never bossed him around, never made him feel inadequate. Felix let him try his hand at whatever job Emma had set him to, without seeming to care one way or the other if Frankie accomplished it. As a result, Frankie knew how to fillet a fish, bait a hook, pull weeds, swing a hammer, work a jack plane, tie a painter, and split kindling; things that, if his parents had to do them, would never get done.

Frankie paused at the top of the stairs and listened. She wasn’t in the front room, the “lobby,” as she liked to call it, and she wasn’t in
the “maid’s room” off the kitchen that she used as an office. She had to be outside somewhere. That meant Frankie could skip breakfast and go down to the boathouse, where Felix was working on something, and then he would be with Felix till lunch at least.

He took the stairs two at a time, his tanned feet gripping the treads. He passed through the front room at a trot and banged out the screen door into the sun at a full run. The grass on the lawn was slick with dew, and by the time he got to the boathouse his feet were covered in grass clippings and the cuffs of his overalls were wet past his ankles. He was about to peer into the boathouse to see if Felix was inside when he saw another boy standing on the dock. With his dark skin and tan dungarees, his once-white cotton duck shirt with buttons up the front, he blended in with the cattails. He was so still that Frankie hadn’t seen him at first. He stopped short and stood there. He didn’t know where Felix was and he didn’t know who the boy was, except that he was an Indian. He hadn’t moved from where he stood on the dock, except to raise his hand slightly, and when Frankie didn’t wave, he let the hand drop back to his side. He was thin, almost as thin as Frankie. His wrists and anklebones stuck out, all the more so because his shirtsleeves (the cuffs brown from use, Frankie could see) were too short and his dungarees a size too small. But his hands were long and wide and his bare feet were brown and strong and he stood still but steady on the dock.

“Hi,” said Frankie. Someone had to say something. “Hi, I’m Frankie.”

The boy regarded him and then turned his head upriver and brought a hand up to shield his eyes, even though the sun was behind him. “There’s ducks in them cattails. Close, too,” he said.

“Yeah?” asked Frankie, moving closer.

“Yeah, they don’t got no feathers yet. Not flying feathers.”

Soon they were shoulder to shoulder, peering into the cattails. It
took Frankie a minute to see what the other boy was looking at. But then there they were, like grown mallards but dun-colored and smaller, paddling slowly in the cattails, sticking their beaks down past the scrim of algae and weeds and bringing them back up again, chattering soundlessly.

“They’d be good-tasting right now,” said the boy.

“You think?”

“You bet. They ain’t flown yet. Them’s baby ducks there.”

Frankie liked the way the boy spoke.

“We could ask Felix for the gun. Maybe he’d shoot them.”

The boy considered this. His hand was in his pocket and he tapped it against his thigh. Frankie could hear something hard rattling in there. A warm scent came off the boy. Frankie looked at him, at the way his black hair fell over his ears, and the light down of black hairs barely visible against his brown skin. He was probably Frankie’s age, maybe a little younger.

The boy stood taller. “We don’t need a gun. We got these.”

He drew his hand from his pocket and showed Frankie five stones, all smooth and oval, each about half the size of an egg.

“You think you could get one with those?” asked Frankie.

“Watch me,” said the boy.

Frankie didn’t know what was more amazing, that the other boy was so confident or that he was willing to try.

He took a rock in his left hand and squinted, then, like a pitcher, wound up, lifted his right leg, and threw. Frankie, who had been looking at the boy’s form, tried to see where the rock landed but his eyes were too slow. The ducks scattered, clucking, through the cattails, and the ripples disappeared.

“Oh, well,” said Frankie, trying to be nice.

“Look and see,” said the boy. “Look and see,” he said again, as he dusted off his hands.

Frankie did as he was told, not sure if the other boy was playing a
joke on him. He put his hands on his knees and bent forward, trying to see something in the cattails. The other boy did the same. Then Frankie saw. He saw a patch of white and what looked like two orange twigs, poking up in the air.

“That him?” asked Frankie in wonder.

“They look different on the bottom. You always got to look for the white.”

“Jesus,” whispered Frankie. “Will you look at that? Will you look at that.”

The door of the boathouse slammed but Frankie didn’t register the sound until Felix said, “Mr. Frankie.”

Frankie turned and said, “We got one, Felix. We got one.”

“Did you?”

“Yep,” said the boy. “We did.”

Felix walked to the edge of the dock and flipped the canoe over and fed it into the water. “We’ll get him on the way.”

Felix steadied the canoe and the boys got in, the other boy in the bow and Frankie in the middle. Felix nosed the canoe into the cattails. The boy picked up the duck by the feet and held it up for Frankie to see.

“She’s a beaut,” said the boy.

He still hadn’t offered Frankie his name.

Felix turned upriver and the boys spent the morning pulling minnow traps out of the current and dumping the minnows into a tin pail. Then they coasted back down the river and filled the bait cage with the minnows. By the time Frankie sat down to lunch in the big house, he was starving. He told Emma excitedly about the duck, and how the boy killed it with a rock and how the ducks were good eating this time of year.

“Billy’s going to help Felix out around the place,” Emma said. “He’s from the village.”

“Oh?”

“Some things Felix can’t quite manage by himself, you know. Some jobs take two people.”

“Oh?” he said between mouthfuls. And then: “What a throw.”

“I’m sure,” said Emma. “But it’s not sporting, you know. It’s not sporting. They can’t even fly. I’m sure your father would agree.”

Frankie said nothing. But that night as he was going to sleep, he saw the little ducks skittering away in the cattails, and Billy’s long lean brown arm whipping through the sunlight. He saw the bait traps rising from the depths filled with the bright coin splash of wriggling bodies—rainbows and shiners and the bronze-black warty heads of chubs—and he heard Billy saying, “She’s a beaut” and the strong, calm, calming stroke of Felix’s paddling and he knew he was happy.

Now all that was behind him—seven months, sure, but more than simply those months. He was a different man. He was, now, in fact, a man. The job of the bombardier was to drop bombs onto cities, rail yards, bridges, ships, factories, and troop concentrations, and he had been trained to do it efficiently. His job was to drop bombs and kill people. What was a kiss in a cabin or in the woods compared to that? What was any of it—those many years at the Pines and that one terrible day they searched for the German prisoner—compared to the clear purpose to which he was now bent? Billy’s attractions weren’t, at the end of the day, any more substantial than Jonathan’s disappointment or Emma’s worry—just a warm, silly childhood wind that blew through the cabins in the dark and was gone. He wasn’t even sure any of it had happened.

*   *   *

H
is training at Montgomery, his first taste of life in the Air Force, had been encouraging. What mattered there was not how you seemed but how hard you worked and how willingly you submitted to the larger cause, no matter how mindless it struck you. That said, the
first two weeks at Maxwell were confusing: there were no billets available for new cadets, so they had to sleep in canvas tents, and instead of basic or advanced training they completed “on-line training,” which was what the officers called menial work. They cooked, mopped, painted, and mucked for twelve hours a day, six days a week. Frankie had wondered at first how all that would help win the war against the Germans, but it became clear that the question was hopelessly romantic, almost idiotic—as though one or two or twenty or two hundred men would have any direct effect on the outcome of the war. But he did as he was ordered. And he liked it.

He liked, also, that he had to be in uniform and that the uniforms were, by definition, all the same. At Princeton and even at Fenwick’s, Frankie had felt pressed flat under the pressure to look a certain way. Three buttons or four? Shirts were tucked in of course, but the smartest among them knew how much to blouse them so as not to look too formal. And with what agony did Frankie scuff his bucks—too new-looking and you seemed desperate, too worn out and you could be mistaken for poor. Should the pants break an inch or an inch-and-a-half? What knot should he use for his tie this year, this month, this week? Was a four-in-hand too formal? Was a half-Windsor too casual? It was maddening. But in the Air Force he wore what he was given and maintained it the way he was instructed, and beyond that he didn’t worry about it. That was freedom.

When a billet opened up and he and a few of the most junior cadets finally got spaces, they still didn’t learn anything that could be remotely useful. Instead, they spent six weeks marching in formation, running two and a half miles at five every morning, throwing and catching logs, doing push-ups, and running an obstacle course in full gear. This, too, was fine. Everyone knew that it didn’t matter if you were the fastest (so long as you weren’t the slowest) or the
strongest (as long as you weren’t the weakest). All that mattered was that you did it, and that you did it as a group.

Finally, after six weeks of basic training, he and his class graduated to the classroom. He had studied physics and math at Princeton. He studied them again, and also fluid dynamics, the mechanics of flight, circuitry, deflection shooting, and geometry. He graduated at the top of his class. But instead of being sent to pilot school they sent him on to train as a bombardier, with the rank of second lieutenant. And after his intial disappointment, he didn’t mind.

Likewise, when he was younger he hadn’t minded being thin, or “anemic.” His body had always done more or less what he wanted it to. He wasn’t naturally inclined to worry in front of a mirror or in front of other people. But Jonathan minded. The doctor minded. Jonathan regaled Frankie with stories of the marches he’d undertaken in the First World War and boxing matches he had won when he boxed for Princeton, and his appearance at the 1928 Olympiad in Amsterdam as a member of the U.S. Modern Pentathlon Team. He made a great show of buying the Winchester in Chicago and bringing it up to the Pines, where he stood on the dock in late summer and shot at the ducks as they shuttled up and down the river at dusk. He never got one, as far as Frankie could remember. Felix had looked on, saying nothing, and when Jonathan was done, he had taken the dip net and scooped the waxed cardboard shot shells from the water.

Frankie’s agony as a child had been the result of his good nature—his desire not to cause his parents any pain. For their sake, not his, he had faked interest in being “robust” as much as he later faked interest in being “artistic.” God, what a relief it had been after all to end up as a bombardier—a job that didn’t demand either strength or creativity, and for which his slight frame was an asset. All in all, being in the Air Force represented freedom. Freedom from senselessness, freedom from affect, freedom from humor, freedom from socializing, freedom from feeling.