Originally published in “New Mexico Quarterly” in 1953.
I was eleven when my uncle closed with the Rothermans. This was 1933, in a village on the south shore of Long Island that is now pure metropolis and that was then becoming a suburb. My uncle’s family and my sister and I (our parents were killed in an auto accident in the mid-twenties) had moved shortly before from a great, white-pillared, Georgian house that faced the new golf course. The vicissitudes of a stock called Vanadium were the cause of the move: the house, the Lincolns, Robb (the former dumptruck driver who chauffeured them), Anna and Maria, illiterate German housemaids in their teens, help that had been pressed a year before from “The Daisy Huggub Agency” in Hempstead, and some other ill-chosen earnests of marginal gain — all were let go at once. The Georgian house, a product of my uncle’s massive pride, was sold to the Jewish owner of a chain of retail jewelry stores.
There were a number of houses that we could have occupied when we moved. Like several local contractors, my uncle confidently plunged after the crash. He dug foundations for six “modified Normans” priced at thirteen and thirteen-five (the language of youth is forever the natural language, and it was thus that we were taught to announce the prices over the telephone when our guardians were absent). These fronted an unpaved way — that my aunt named Elderberry Court.
Four houses were completed before our family arrived at a darker sense of life. And for several years these stood vacant. They were tormenting years; my uncle, a powerful and dogged man, struggled fiercely with the bank for possession of the houses, resisted the bank’s asseverations that he had priced them out of the market.
The sale of the place opposite the golf course gave him means of retainh1g the new houses, or at least of meeting the bank’s immediate claims; and thus, as I said, we could have moved into any of them. My uncle’s choice was one of the thirteen fives: five bed rooms, three baths on the second floor, downstairs lavatory, “rumpus room.” Adjacent to this house, which was No. 4 Elderberry Court, was the empty foundation hole for No. 8. The Rothermans bought 12 Elderberry, on the other side of the hole.
On the afternoon of the closing day my uncle came home early; usually he spent each day, sitting with other idle contractors and two bootleggers reduced to cabdriving, in Middleton and Cowles, a real estate agency near the railroad station. The tone of our household was somber — as if some remnant of a Calvinistic “rule” retained a vague authority; but I had learned that closing days were often times of uncommon warmth and jollity: I was surprised when I came into the kitchen from school to find both my aunt and uncle gloomier than I had ever seen them before.
Neither spoke to me — they were either too depressed or pre occupied to note my presence. I sat down on the kitchen stool. After a long silence in which occasionally they looked blankly up at each other, my uncle said in a harsh voice:
“Money makes it turn.”
I assumed then that they had not gotten the telephone price but instead the bank’s “ridiculous” ten-five, and I wanted to interrupt to make certain of this.
”They’re probably respectable,” my aunt said before I could speak. “They’ll know how to keep to themselves.”
My uncle grunted and again the room was silent. Then he let his big fist drop down heavily upon the porcelain-topped table the silver clanged:
“They’ve got no right, that’s all.”
“Ed,” said my aunt dully.
“If it was nine, if it was nine-five — I’d of stopped it cold.”
(This was startling; I had not heard either of these numbers considered.)
“but twelve-five. I couldn’t say no. They knew I couldn’t say no before they ever went looking.”
“It’s done, Ed. We been through it — you did the best thing.”
“They’ve got the dough. Nobody else has a dime. All the money left in the whole damn world — that’s them.” He rose from the table as he said this; he was shaking his head. “What does he do?” my aunt asked.
“Diamonds. Belgium or Amsterdam, somewhere. Diamonds and gold and the rest — bucks, bucks, bucks. That’s them.”
“They’ll know how to keep to themselves, Ed,” my aunt repeated.
As I went out of the room, my uncle seated himself at the table again; he was still shaking his head slowly. He looked stunned.
The conversation was both troubling and exciting. The wealth of the Rothermans seemed to me incalculable in the light of my uncle’s estimate, and this was exciting. But beyond my uncle’s evident distress, there was the shock, the step forward into nowhere that child or man takes when he hears new phrases made of common words — phrases whose referents are unknown. In their house I learned many odd names of virtues: my aunt spoke of members of the circle at Middleton and Cowles as “clean sweeping” or “dirt leaving” men, and I “knew what the words meant.” But I had not before heard people praised for keeping to themselves. Moreover, the notion that people possessed of fantastic resources were most agreeable when most distant was confusing.
The mystery would open like others, I knew; but it did not in fact open until the next year: Leonard Rotherman was a grade ahead of me in school. In this time the houses on Elderberry Court passed from my uncle’s hands, and the Rothermans hardly existed. Sometimes I saw Mr. Rotherman, a small bald man with a flat black mustache, working in his rock garden by the fish pool (they later filled the pool in); and I noticed that the Rothermans were saluted only when they passed in their Buick. When they were walking by, or when they were in clear sight on the south side of their house, my aunt and uncle “did not see them.” There was activity when the Rothermans added a screen porch on the south with a handsome awning of hunter green; and I recall the gravel truck coming often to their house and brimming the drive with biuestone (our own drive I myself had nearly raked bare).
But I have no recollection of Leonard Rotherman earlier than that of my first day of high school.
The grammar school that I attended was quite close to our house: Elderberry Court was an outpost, but the authorities correctly guessed that the village would move beyond it. The high school was a mile away, at the old center of the village. I saw Leonard approaching our house as I stood in the hall with my hand on the screen door, listening to my aunt and nervously scraping the wales of the stiff new corduroy: at that school pupils in the seventh grade were hazed on their first day. When I saw Leonard passing, I flung open the screen door. He stopped, turned. He seemed to me aged and wan; he was tall, thin, pallid, land in some manner aloof and contained. He did not smile at me although I was grinning foolishly at him and even my aunt was smiling noncommittally at the front yard. It was a long, indecisive moment.
“Going down?” I finally asked.
“Come on,” he said carelessly. I jumped from the stoop to the flagstones and ran toward him.
We walked in silence nearly all the way to the school. I noticed nothing about him except that he was a full head taller than I was. Then, as we waited at the red light on Lakeview, he looked down at me and grinned a wide toothy grin that was ruinous to the posture of aloofness.
“Don’t let them get you,” he said.
“No,” I said.
He nodded brusquely; like an adult, and we crossed the street.
Then: “Don’t go in the basement. Do you have to pee?”
We were now in the school yard, walking on the secluded path between Edwards’ board fence and the school hedge. 1 didn’t answer him.
“You better. They work on you in there. You stop and pee — I’ll keep a eye out.”
l peed obediently; later I heard of gothic tortures in the latrine that I had avoided by following his counsel.
We walked to school together every morning after that. But our conversation was hardly more extensive than it had been on the first day. We parted as we approached the locker room, and did not walk home together; I rarely saw him during the school day, except in the halls, where he did not acknowledge me. Not until winter was there an occasion for us to have more extensive intercourse; it was then that we became friends.
I th1nk now that this friendship was not inevitable. True.the north end was relatively unpopulated — none of my own class mates lived nearby. Yet, as my aunt predicted they would, the Rothermans kept to themselves: except for the ragged, eroded foundation hole between our houses; I would not have gone to him at all.
A few of our new neighbors had asked my uncle to fill the hole in because it defaced the Court and was a hazard. My uncle regarded as conspirators of the bank the signers of the note that was presented him, and having no further cause to fight the bank (virtually all his property had by now been lost), he resisted them. In the “spring,” he said (a spring that never came), he would fill the foundation hole with concrete forms and finish what he had begun.
The residents of the Court could not retaliate, but that severe winter they made my sister and me aware of their resentment. We discovered that the bottom of the hole froze into a surprisingly smooth skating pond, and that the high mounds of dirt at the rear of the plot dropped off into the unfilled fields sharply enough for a swift sled run. We expected the neighborhood children — they were younger than we were-to crowd in upon us. But nobody came. We asked Billy Fitzgerald, who stood all morning on the sidewalk enviously watching us, why he didn’t get is skates.
“I can’t,” he told us. “My Mom won’t let me. She’s gonna make your uncle fill it in.”
At first we were delighted that the pond was prohibited. But before noon we were lonely: we seldom had anything to give and now there was no one to receive. I thought of Leonard; I went to the Rothermans’ side door. The maid answered and called him. There were three steps up from the door to the kitchen; he stood at the top step, peering down at me expressionlessly.
“Come on and skate,” I said.
“I have to finish something,” was his answer.
He appeared with his skates a half hour later. The pond was much too small for his long legs, and he quickly tired of it: I thought he would leave us. But he had the idea of making an obstacle course out of the sled run in the back. And then we had an occupation.
Through the winter after school we worked on the course, sliding on it infrequently and only to test the qualities of some new contrivance. In the late afternoon under the iron sky, we watered the course so that there would be a sleek ice top in the morning. Leonard made a map of the surface when we were well begun, with the contours exactly drawn; we banked the low mounds, and carefully placed the scrub bushes and a row of four apple trees and a long serpentine line of sewer pipes, and we built brick jumps across imagined water holes; the project would have delighted Trim or the most fanciful miniature golfer.
We said little to each other; still, there was a fine concordance of aims. And I rapidly learned from him that an expression of enthusiasm, a direct response to any accomplishment, was inessential: greatest pleasures are experienced in silence.
My aunt and uncle never referred to Leonard; boyishly prescient, I never spoke of him. l said only:
“I’m going out to the run.”
And my aunt returned:
“You’ll break your legs out there someday”
My uncle came once to inspect the course after Leonard had gone in for supper. Several times he pointed to improvements made by my friend and exclaimed: “How’d you dope that out? What’s holding it together?”
I didn’t correct him but I had no intention of taking credit for Leonard’s skills. I was certain that my uncle knew whose skills they were and did not need to be told.
The first thaw we overcame; the second was unendurable. We stood together at the starting point looking at the course in the morning before school. The sloppy swift-running grey water sliding over the melting bottom; the great ugly patches of black mud leering through the once clean white snow now black flecked; the snow drawn back under the bushes in the field widening circles of bare earth where before were highblown mounds of white that the branches scraped . . .
He looked down at me. He was wearing the shell glasses that made him seem even more serious and remote. I expected him to say something about the vanishing run before us; I wanted him to speak of winters to come, of astonishing inventions to be pursued.
“We’ll be late,” he said. “We better get going.”
I stood there overlooking the black field a moment after he turned; I kicked my foot into the pulpy ice to stop my tears.
…
In the spring I learned something about him that strengthened me. It was after school; presumably Leonard had gone home. We were playing Chinese handball on the concrete driveway and against the brick side of the school — Ned Jackman, myself, and a boy I did not know whose father owned the stationery store where my sister and I bought the black and white speckled practicing with “Name,” “Address,” and “Subject” printed in black letters on the front. The unfamiliar boy was a gifted handball player; he kept the end court, won game after game. Ned Jackman grew angry.
We stopped and Ned Jackman sat on the curb smoking a wet ended cigarette while I watched him and the winner went on practicing against the wall.
“Mockies and boogs,” said Ned Jackman. “They all got this curly hair, you notice? Hey, Izzo,” he said “Come off-it. You’re a boog, ain’t you? You’re no mockie.”
“Come on let’s play,” said the boy in the winner’s box.
Ned Jackman got up and walked into his box, eyed the boy with great care. The latter went on bouncing and slapping the ball. Ned Jackman called to me.
“C’mere, kid. Lemme show you the difference.”
I stood up.
“Now you take a light boog, sometimes you might not be able to tell the difference.”
“I’m not in your way,” said the boy I didn’t know. “Come on let’s play.”
“But when in doubt” — and then suddenly Ned Jackman reached out fiercely and grabbed the boy’s nose and yanked down hard. “When in doubt, that’s the ticket. No boog’s gonna have that kike hook like Iz, right Izzo?”
“Let’s play some more,” the boy said with an imperturbability I could not understand.
“Okay,” I said. “C’mon, Ned.”
Then we played three more games and Ned and I won none of them.
l thought of Ned Jackman and Leonard on the way home. Ned Jackman usually knocked the books out of my hand or ripped my fly in the locker room at least once a day, and I had been coldly planning an assault upon him that was to take place on my thirteenth birthday; I was pleased that, although I was available, he had picked on someone else. Moreover there was comfort in the belief that Ned Jackman would have said the same things to Leonard, and that Leonard’s response would have been similar to this boy’s. Until then I had thought that my need for Leonard was stronger than his for me. He never came to my side door; I went always to his. He never spoke first. Among the new people who were moving into the north end, there were some class mates of his; none of mine. Barely stated, out of the incident on the handball court I drew the strengthening conviction that Leonard needed me. I would not yank his nose and call him “kike”; there were some who would.
…
That fall we rigged an “intercom” from his window to mine. He had what in our house was my sister’s room; our windows faced each other over the excavation. Without special apparatus we could make ourselves heard in whispers, after we were supposed to be in bed asleep. But I had seen a blurred ad for the de vice in the front pages of a prizefighting story magazine that I read, and I was at once attracted to it. I had no money, but I showed the ad to Leonard, and although he was not enthusiastic, he sent a dollar to Chicago. Back came a box of thin, rubber hot water bottle tubing and two cardboard megaphones into which the ends of the tubing could be fitted. Leonard was amused; I insisted that we use them.
For the installation secrecy was essential: we set up Leonard’s end first. We stretched the tubing along the gutter and down the leader, and hid it in the shrubs. I do not remember what excuse I made; I was waiting for an afternoon when my aunt and uncle were both out of the house, so that I could bring Leonard and my end of the tube into my room. When that day came and we completed our task, I said:
“Let’s have some crackers and jam.”
“No,” he declined. “I have to get back home.”
“C’mon. You’ve got time.”
“You come back with me — we’ve got crackers.”
“No,” I said. We were in the kitchen and before he could leave I had the crackers down from the pantry shelf and the jam and a butter knife; I led him downstairs to the bare “rumpus room.” He ate two crackers and then said that we should try out the intercom. I made him stay while I emptied the box, even though I was afraid that my aunt and uncle would return and find us there, sitting on the cold, stone, cellar floor.
l do not recall the late hour conversations that I woke him for during the nights in which I was left in charge of the dark house. But some of the words that I think of as uniquely his I associate with these conversations. I kept my radio on (Leonard’s parents didn’t permit him to have a radio in his room) and we would listen to Benny Goodman for a half hour — a weeknight program, at ten o’clock or ten-thirty.
The “trio” would play — I remember particularly a song called ”More Than You Know” — very coolly and quietly. When it was over I would turn down the applause to hear Leonard whisper into the tube:
“Skillful.”
And occasionally he would offer a critical label: once after the bassist had plucked away intricately by himself or with the drummer, Leonard said:
“Harry Goodman. A very able bass.”
Words like “skillful” and “able” were not in my daily vocabulary but I followed Leonard in using them. There was a sort of measured, uncommitted distance about them, precisely the enviable quality in Leonard himself, that made me take them up.
Doubtless my aunt and uncle were aware of the “intercom” at the beginning. But the seasons turned and vacation came (Leonard went away to camp), and they said nothing. That empty summer I went each day to the Rothermans’ house; I talked in the kitchen with Julia, their maid, and played their piano, and sat idle in their magnificent living room, and ate the sweet butter that Julia let me taste. Then at lunch one day toward the end of August, my aunt said:
“School is almost here.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You want to make more friends in the neighborhood this year.”
“Uh-huh.”
“There ought to be some nice boys in your class this year. Boys your own age.”
“Nobody from up here.”
I had a sense of where the conversation would end: I gulped down my milk and got up from the table. But my aunt kept on. “Gerard,” she said, turning back to the stove after looking intently at me for a moment, “I don’t know why you don’t play with your own kind.”
“What?”
“You should play with your equals. Your uncle and I think you shouldn’t go out of your way playing with people that aren’t your equals.”
“Oh,” I said.
“You think about it,” she said vaguely.
“Uh-huh.”
“Don’t forget.”
…
My aunt’s remarks were in my mind only briefly after Leonard returned: I was held fast in a new enthusiasm — tennis — that he stimulated. As I noted earlier, he had a wider acquaintance in the neighborhood than I had; I became aware now of his friends — Jerry Landau, Art Eisenberg, Norm Sandman, others I have forgotten… Eisenberg was No. 1 on the school tennis squad and Leonard came back from camp eager to play him. I went and watched. Leonard lost and I think he was disappointed. But as I watched I myself had an overwhelming sense of the grace of this game — the pinging gut, the highreaching white figures, the quick bursting clack! when a powerful service struck the canvas border of the net.
I had to have a racket.
For my birthday in June, everyone in our family had contributed to the purchase of a Class E model sailboat, handmade, painstakingly rigged, for racing on Sunday afternoons at the Filter Beds. I learned soon after that I had little taste for the racing of model sailboats: the boat rested unused in the plywood mount on my bureau, its bright green keel and polished hull and white sails all dust-laden.
I brought Leonard up to look at it.
“How much will you give me?” I asked after he admired it.
“It’s very well done,” he said. “But I don’t need it.”
”It cost ten bucks. I’ll give it to you for five.”
“No — I don’t want it.” He went to the window and looked down at the foundation hole. I have no recollection of him sitting down in my room.
“I want to get a racket,” I explained.
“I’ve got an old one. Keep the boat.”
“Ah come on. You’ve got the money. You can sail it down at the Beds — race it.”
“I don’t want to sail it. I’ll give you my old racket — you can volley with it.”
“Five bucks,” I said. “That’s not much.”
“You shouldn’t sell it — I don’t want the thing,” he said rather sharply. It was the first time I had seen him angry.
“What a cheapie,” I said, sure then that he would buy it. “Five bucks … ”
“Oh give it here,” he said roughly. “Come on and I’ll get the money.”
I bought a silk-strung Wilson from the stationery store that the handball player’s father owned. It cost three dollars and something. That afternoon, for the first time, I bought Leonard a ten-cent orange ice from the Good Humor man. In the evening we went to the courts behind the Ewing school and volleyed against the practice board. Later he taught me how to serve, and Saturdays in late October when he and Eisenberg and Sandman grew bored with singles, and Jerry Landau had to usher in his father’s movie house, they let me play with them. It was understood that Leonard had to accept me as his partner.
The day I sold the boat I assumed that when my uncle learned what had happened to it, I would be strapped with his belt — this was the favored punishment in our house. But I was not strapped. He asked how much money Leonard paid for the boat. I told him. He asked me if Leonard knew how much the boat cost. I said I had told him that. His face reddened and he started to speak, but then he changed his mind suddenly, and without finding fault with me, went out of the room and down the stairs to my aunt. Bewildered I called after him:
“He didn’t want to buy it. I made him — he doesn’t like boats.”
The next evening when they came to my room to say good night, they sat on the edge of the bed and explained that from now on I would have to “see much less of the people next door.”
“They’ve got different ways, boy,” my uncle said. ”He might be all right. But they have different ways — you can’t get away from it.”
“You’ve got to find your equals and stick with them,” my aunt repeated. “You’ve got to be with your own kind.”
I nodded, and they kissed me — sorrowfully, I thought — and I cried a few token tears. When they were gone I thought of nothing else.
Much that was left unsaid I could provide, for the education begun by Ned Jackman on the handball court had no ending. Yet though I understood “kind” I could make no sense of “equals.” He was older, stronger, smarter than I was. With his money I bought the tennis racket; he had taught me how to play. And there was much more. The first day at school, the dollar for the intercom, the dimes for orange ice, the company in the lonely nights, the sled course…Against these “qualities” of his, as I thought of them, I could place only his need for me, and of that I had lately grown doubtful. How could the debtor presume to wrench the creditor’s nose?
I thought then of his house — the ankle deep bluestone in the drive, the piano. It was a Steinway baby grand, a much smaller instrument than ours. The depth of its tone startled me the first time I touched the keys — the depth of sound, the heavy movement of the keys, thick and warm like the rose and blue rugs up on their floors. Our piano was a Mehlin Angelus, a “ballroom grand” that occupied a third of the living room, an electric player piano for which no “rolls” had been bought since 1929. As I compared them a sense of the Rothermans’ living room suffused me and for a moment I believed that if I could bring my aunt and uncle into that room, if I could make them examine it as I examined it — appreciatively, studiously — they would tell me to forget what they had said.
There are objects in that room that I might recognize even if they were transplanted, severed from their world. The three towering chests piled massively upon each other in the hall. Peasants, Leonard called them. They were made of a light grained wood that contrasted with the great shining knobs of black and the glossy black panels; the panels had hidden keyholes and immense, unevenly shaped iron keys which, when turned, moved an entire panel with them. The doors, as thick as my fist, slid back upon a dark interior lighted by row upon row of glistening crystal — a thousand fragile cordials, delicately figured, a creamy pile of embroidered linen in one corner, a hundred cups with gold and scarlet borders, some standing on tiny golden feet. There was a long, high, flat-topped sideboard in the dining room: four wide doors, two that were taller than I was, and half doors at the center. The great key here could not be turned; I could not peer in. But on the outside, a carved pastoral in which the figures of a borzoi and a dragon-headed snake and a great willow coiled and uncoiled in a black mystery that I traced out with my fingertips. Along the border at the top someone carved: 1749-E.A.R.
On the wall that the piano faced, in a furbelowed frame of gold, there was a bluewashed painting of high redwheeled carriages, the red running in the wet street lined with tall narrow houses; two horses facing front and between the passing carriages, a bluecoated, bearded man wearing a black derby and carrying a sort of broom — surely it was Brussels. And in the hall three pictures mounted in a vertical line — a row of odd street scenes with perspectives I should compare now to the “contemporary” drawings of the Globe and the Swan that the makers of Elizabethan anthologies — choose for frontispieces. High, narrow windowed, sand-colored buildings, under a flat blue border of sky. The buildings all topped with minarets, all facing an open square where there were redwheeled carriages again, and two white dogs, a lady and a gentleman standing on a sundial-like white concrete slab in the foreground. At the bottom strange words:
“‘T Gesiaht van ‘T Binnen Hof Siende na de Zaal en Fransche Kerk.”
And the marvelous clock with the handpainted flower face and at the top a tiny sketch of a cheery house with a red roof and a fireplace at either end, and five windows and a center dormer in the attic directly above the doorway; and dull gold weights and chains and a brisk gold pendulum swinging before a carved wooden flower with eight leaves. Gold columns at either side of the face and black hands picked out with scarlet arrows — hands that pointed to one circle marked with Roman numerals and another with 60, 55, 50 and V’s upside down and reversed at the bottom: 6o above XII and 30 under IA. And at the center a water scene, a barge overflowing with flowers, docking in a canal.
I thought of these things and others — not as distinct entities: I cannot say that the blue street existed apart from the sweet butter on the black wooden salver with the burnished rim, apart from Leonard himself: everything was part of him, expressing and reflecting his qualities, his strength, his superiority. I went over our house — the Mehlin Angelus, the “Horse Fair,” the rose bordered sampler (which today I prize) that began, “May, as the moments speed their flight, Thee overtake some new delight.” — and found no equivalents. Confused, lying troubled, fearfully aware that he might have no need of me at all, I thought and waited, waited for some opening…I climbed out of bed and went to the window and whispered:
“Leonard.”
It was late then — a night all white with the moon; there were no lights in his house. He did not answer.
“Leonard,” I softly called.
There was still no answer. I went back to my bed. But then I heard his voice heavy with sleep:
“Gerard?”
I went again to the window.
“I called you,” I said aloud.
“I’m asleep. What is it?”
Standing, facing his window I sought for words that would hold him there while I went on thinking; I found none. I burst out:
“My aunt says you’re not my kind, you’re not my equal — but it doesn’t make any difference, does it. You’re my equal and it doesn’t matter, does it?”
I heard him turning in his bed; then the silence returned. I thought he had gone back to sleep, but I waited. At length he said:
“Can you get the trio on?”
“No,” I said.
“Well…It’s late.”
I went back to bed, alone with the moon in the room.
…
A few days later, while my aunt was out shopping, I made him come a second time into our house — I have forgotten upon what pretext. When he was in my room, I went quickly to the closet and pulled out a pair of black and white shoes that my grandfather had given me after wearing them once and finding them uncomfortable. They were three sizes too large for me.
“Like them?” l asked:
“Whose are they?”
“Mine.”
“Why don’t you wear them?”
“I don’t know,” I lied. ”Just don’t like them, I guess.”
He picked one shoe up from the bed.
“They’re okay. You should wear them — they’re sporty.”
“I’ll give them to you if you want.”
He laughed. ”Nah — I don’t mean that.”
“l do. Here.” I pushed them at him. “Take them — I’m giving them to you.”
“No,” he protested, drawing back into himself. “They wouldn’t fit. I don’t –”
“They don’t fit me,” I admitted. “They’re yours. You’ve got to take them.”
“Why?”
“Come on. I don’t wear them.”
He shrugged without looking at me. “I don’t see why,” he said.
I cannot say that either of us knew why I was thrusting them upon him. And I cannot say that he was attracted by them, that he truly thought them handsome, that there was one moment at which my gift pleased him. But he gave way; he accepted them.
I remember that I got a grocery bag from the kitchen for him to carry the shoes home in.
The same night my grandfather joshed me about the size of my feet. I would be wearing his black and white Schriner shoes on my next birthday. Usually I responded well to him, but at table I was silent, embarrassed.
“You still have the shoes in your closet, haven’t you, Gerard?” my aunt asked, the smile at my grandfather’s joke not yet gone from her face.
I stammered something — and the room was vacant and still.
They waited. I couldn’t speak.
“Answer your Aunt Betts,” my uncle said. My grandfather nearly turned them away.
“Let him be, let him be,” he said. “Just an old pair of wop boardwalk hoppers. Nigger shoes. I’d throw ’em away myself.”
“Well –” my uncle hesitated. “Why didn’t you give them to me, Pop?”
But my aunt persisted: “Where are the shoes, Gerard? Tell us what you did with them.”
I stood up at the table then, my mouth stuffed with lemon meringue pie. I shoved the chair back and blurted out as they gasped:
“I gave them to Leonard.”
My uncle was on top of me at that instant.
“Boy,” he said hoarsely. He grabbed my arm, held it tight. “Boy we reached the limit.”
After he strapped me in the garage, he dragged me with him to the Rothermans’ front door. He was sweating, his face splotched red-white, his hair pasted low on his forehead, the belt still in his hand.
Mr. Rotherman answered the door. He looked at us pleasantly and asked us to come in. He was as imperturbable as the handball player had been when Ned Jackman attacked him. He seemed to see nothing.
“Sit down, won’t you?”
My uncle, who was breathing heavily, did not move, but I stepped forward.
“Come back here, boy!” he commanded.
Then he caught Mr. Rotherman’s sleeve; he held it while he spoke.
“This boy’s got a pair of shoes. I beat him for it — he’ll be beat worse if he does it again. Your boy’s got the shoes. I want ’em.”
“Leonard,” Mr. Rotherman called.
Then my uncle said:
“He’s got the shoes, black and white Schriner shoes. He’s got this boy’s sailboat: I don’t know what else he’s got. I want it all.”
Mr. Rotherman, without trying to release himself, turned his head toward the stairway.
“Leonard,” he said in an even voice. “Don’t come down. I want you to hand me over the banister a sailboat and a pair of black and white shoes for Gerard.”
Leonard came to the landing with them.
“Don’t come farther, please,” Mr. Rotherman said briskly.
Leonard handed the shoes and the boat to his father, without looking at us; my uncle let go Mr. Rotherman’s sleeve.
“There you are,” said Mr. Rotherman.
As I stood there I thought of movies in which suddenly the quiet-mannered, grey-templed man in the handsome room has a gun in his hand and is firing, firing, blasting what stands before him. I thought that when the shoes and boat were in my uncle’s hands I would see Mr. Rotherman’s hand dart into his pocket and then the room torn apart, torn wide — a tiny silver crackling revolver firing and blood running red across the rose carpet.
But he only said, “There you are” again. He opened the door for my uncle, and looked neither at him nor at me. I did not move until my uncle turned about for me, and then I went slowly, knowing that I would not stand in this hall again.
…
The following term Leonard went off to a famous preparatory school in western Massachusetts; and in the spring, we moved to a neighboring town. The year before, I now know, my uncle had lost the house we lived in on Elderberry Court. He had arranged to rent it from the bank, but the rent finally proved to be beyond our means. We never moved back.
…
Fifteen years have passed since that day in the Rothermans’ hall. I know nothing of Leonard’s career. Twice I nearly met the elder Rotherman again, but these near meetings came eight or nine years after we had moved; once I heard from Leonard. On my terminal leave I became engaged and my aunt told me that if I had sense I would drop in at Rothermans’ office on Madison Avenue and ask his help in stretching my dollars over “a decent stone.” When I called him, he told me he was about to leave for the West Coast for a month, but that he would give a “paper of gems” to his assistant and that he was sure an arrangement satisfying to me could be made with this man. We did not speak of Leonard; he ended by congratulating me and wishing me good fortune.
Later that year I was in his office again, and again he was out. I had come up to see a literary agent, who occasionally handled articles that I wrote with another Washington reporter. The agent was enthusiastic about the story I outlined to him (it dealt with a “scandal” in the manufacture and distribution of prosthetic devices for disabled veterans), but his anteroom was crowded. He said that if I would bring him back a hundred words of an “opener,” he would take it that afternoon to the editorial offices of the mass circulation magazine with which he had some connection.
I intended to rent a machine in the library, but when I came out of the agent’s building, I saw that directly across the street was the building in which Rotherman had his office. I went up, identified myself to his secretary, who was eating her lunch at her desk. I used Rotherman’s own machine for a half hour…
I was in Washington when my fiance’s mother wrote to ask for a list of those whom my family wanted to attend the reception.
I jotted some names and sent them to my aunt, who I suppose concocted a list with an eye for the main chance. Leonard probably was at home no longer, and the announcement and the invitation were perhaps slow in reaching him. But in a month or two his present came: well mounted in a severe black frame, the print of the Fransche Kerk with the light blue border over the thin minarets in the white sky.
I found his card in the wrapping paper; “Cordially” was the single word scribbled over his name. It was overpowering — I nearly wept thinking of how we played together in the snow field that long ago. I told my wife I would write to him.
“You know you won’t,” she said. “You’ll just put it off.”
“No I won’t.”
“He ought to be thanked,” she insisted. “It was sweet of him. I’ll write a note and you can write too.”
“No, I’ll take care of it myself,” I said.
We had nothing to do — it was a Saturday afternoon — so we went on arguing, happy for the chance to invent and elaborate our eccentricities: my wife’s “morbid punctuality,” my own “neurotic putting-off.” Later I found the hammer and hung the print in the upstairs hall; after I finished I came downstairs, went directly to the desk, and began a note. Dear Leonard, I wrote and then I thought for a while and decided: better to let it go. In the evening my wife found the crumpled notepaper.
“You’re impossible,” she said in the extravagant tone of the afternoon argument. “Do you know that?”
“Give me time,” I said. “I’ll get better.”
“I doubt it,” my wife said. “I doubt it very much. You probably never did anything important on time in your whole life till you married me.”
“I don’t know about that,” I answered. We kept at it longer than we had before, still amusing ourselves; but then finally it became tiresome. When I realized that we had worn it out, I changed the subject: we left Leonard and his present and the unwritten note behind, and went on to something else that I have completely forgotten.