“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.
“It seemed like it just happened,” Edward said, hoping that this expianation, which satisfied him, was truthful and accurate, would also satisfy his father. “I left my arithmetic book in my desk at school and had to go back and get it.”
Pleased to have recalled this detail, he stopped and then saw that his father was waiting for him to go on.
“When did the boys decide they weren’t going to deliver their papers, before you got there or after?”
“After.”
“But the trouble had already started?”
“Not exactly.”
“You mean it was like any other evening.”
Edward shook his head. What he could not explain was that the boys were always threatening to strike, to quit, to make trouble of one kind or another.
“What are you striking about?”
“The collection. We’re supposed to go around collecting on Saturday morning. And people are supposed to pay us, and we’re supposed to pay the Star. We pay Mrs. Sinclair seven cents and keep three. Only lots of times when we ask for the money, they — You want to see my collection book?”
“No. Just tell me about it.”
There were times when, if it hadn’t been for the reassurance of Edward’s monthly report card, Harrison Geliert would have been forced to wonder if his son were a mental defective. No doubt he was passing through a stage, but it was a very tiresome one.
“Sometimes we have to wait five or six weeks for the money,” Edward said.
“But you get it eventually?”
Edward nodded. “But she takes her share right away, out of whatever we do collect, and it’s not fair.”
“What’s unfair about it?”
“She has lots of money and we don’t.”
“What else are the boys striking for?”
“When the press breaks down, sometimes we don’t get home until after seven o’clock. One night it was nearly eight.”
“It isn’t Mrs. Sinclair’s fault that the press breaks down.”
To this Edward made no answer.
“What else?”
“We want more money.”
“How much more?”
“Oh, let the poor child alone!” Mildred Geliert exclaimed, raising her wan, unhappy face from her salad and looking at her husband.
“He’s not a child,” Harrison Geliert said. “And I’m not picking on him. How much did you make this week?”
“Thirty-three cents,” Edward said. “But some of it was back pay. I only have thirteen customers. Barney Lefferts has the most. He has fifty-two. He makes about a dollar and a half a week when he gets paid.”
“That’s very good, for a boy.”
“I guess so,” Edward said.
“Did anybody take the trouble to explain to Mrs. Sinclair why you were refusing to deliver the paper?”
“Oh, yes, but she didn’t listen to us. She was awful mad. And Homer was standing there, too.”
“What did she say to you?”
“She was inside, where the press and the linotype machines are.”
“But what did she say?”
“She tried to get us to deliver the papers. So we all went outside and left her.”
“And then what happened?”
“The other guys jumped on their bicycles and rode off.”
“And what did you do?”
“I came on home.”
“Who’s going to deliver our paper?” Virginia asked.
“Nobody, I guess. They can’t, if we’re all on strike.” Edward turned back to his father. “Do you think I did wrong?”
“It’s something you’re old enough to decide for yourself,” Harrison Geliert said. Edward was relieved. On the other hand, it wasn’t the same thing as being told that he had his father’s complete and wholehearted approval to take part in a strike any time there was one. If he hadn’t gone on strike with the others, it would have been uncomfortable. He would have had enemies. The school yard would not have been a very safe place for him, and neither would the alley in the back of the Star Building, but actually he had wanted to go out on strike and he had enjoyed the excitement.
“They’ll have to take us all back, won’t they?” he asked. “Since we all did it together?”
“Finish your potato, dear,” Mildred Geliert said. “You’re keeping Mary waiting.” She was not young any more; she had given up searching for her destiny and had come home, for the sake of the children. Acceptance has its inevitable meager rewards. The side porch was now enclosed, and it was generally agreed that the new green brocade curtains in the living room had cost Harrison plenty.
During dessert, Edward remembered suddenly that he was saving his money to buy a bicycle, and the rice pudding stuck in his throat and would not for the longest time go down. When the others left the dining room, he lingered until Old Mary finished clearing the table and with her hand on the light switch said, “You figure on sitting here in the dark?”
Edward got up and went into the library, where his mother and Virginia were. His mother was sewing. She was changing the hem on Virginia’s plaid skirt. Edward sat down, like a visitor waiting to be entertained. He heard the front door open and close, and then his father came in and sat down in his favorite chair and (quite as if he hadn’t understood a word of all that Edward had been telling him) opened the evening paper.
WHEN the paper boys ran out of the building, Harold West got as far as the door when Homer called to him. Homer said, “You stay here, Harold,” and Harold stayed. After he had delivered his own papers, he rode back downtown and with a list supplied by the front office, he and Homer had started out together. Ever so many houses had no street numbers beside the front steps or on the porch roof; or else the numbers, corroded, painted over five or six times, could not be seen in the dark. Not every subscriber to the Draperville Evening Star got a paper that night. The lists were incomplete, and there is no adequate substitution for habit. The office stayed open until ten, and there were a few telephone calls, but most people were not surprised that the evening paper, arriving at such different times every night, should finally have failed to arrive at all.
On Saturday morning, Edward went downtown. He saw a knot of boys standing on the sidewalk in front of the Star Building. The riot was over, the strike had collapsed, and though they had counted on him to act with them, they had not bothered to inform him of their surrender. If he hadn’t been led there by curiosity, he would have been the only one not now apologizing and asking to have his route given back to him.
Riot, in the soul or in an alley, wears off. It is not self-sustaining. Reason waits, worry bides its time. The recording angel assigned to mark the sparrow’s fall took a little extra space in order to record the fact that George Gibbs, Harry Lathrop, John Weiner, Bert Savage, Dave O’Connell, Marvin Shapiro, Barney Lefferts, Edward Geliert, and nine other sparrows were flying and fluttering against a net of their own devising.
One at a time the boys were allowed to go inside. Through the plate-glass window Edward saw Barney Lefferts, sitting in a straight chair beside Mrs. Sinclair’s desk, with his eyes lowered, anxiously twisting his dirty old cap while she talked on and on. Once, with an odd gesture of pleading, he interrupted her; he said something that she brushed aside. When Edward looked in the window again, Barney Lefferts was crying. While you are learning the value of money, you learn also — you can’t, in fact, help learning — that whoever has it has the right to withhold it. Courage doesn’t count, in these circumstances.
When Barney Lefferts came out of the building, all that was behind him and he was triumphant. He said, “Jesus, I got my route back!”
Edward’s interview with Mrs. Sinc
lair was short, and the scolding he got from her was restrained, out of respect for his father’s credit and certain social distinctions that both Edward and Mrs. Sinclair were aware of.
“I’m very disappointed in you, Edward,” she said. “I know, of course, that you wouldn’t have done what you did if you hadn’t been led astray by the others. But there was somebody who didn’t let himself be led astray. Harold West delivered papers until eleven o’clock last night, and Mr. Sinclair and I are very grateful to him.” She played with a paper clip, and then said, “I know you are sorry, but that isn’t the same as if you had behaved in an honorable way, is it? I’ve decided to let you have your route back, but I want you to promise me, on your word of honor, that if such a thing ever happens again around here, you will be on the side of the Newspaper.”
Edward promised, conscious of the fact that her thin, flat chest would not be comforting to put his head on, in time of trouble. He was grateful, but not to her. While he was waiting his turn outside, he had made a bargain: He had offered to give up, from now on, for the rest of his life, the secret, sinful practices that would fill people with horror if they knew and that made God (who did know) sad, if God would give him back his paper route, and God had done it.
“We were thinking of giving you a larger route, Edward,” Mrs. Sinclair said, “but I’m afraid, in the light of what happened yesterday … Well, we won’t talk about it anymore. What’s done is done. Suppose you go and do your Saturday-morning collecting.”
THE promise to Mrs. Sinclair, Edward never had an opportunity to keep. The promise to God he broke, over and over and over. He prayed, he made new promises, he offered acts of kindness, acts of self-denial, in place of the one renunciation he could not manage. And though he knew it could not be so, it almost seemed at times as if God did not mind what he did as soon as he had the house all to himself; or else He was trying to make Edward feel worse, because he did get the larger paper route, with fifty-three customers, in a much better part of town, and the total in his bankbook rose higher and higher, with compound interest in red, and finally, on a clear bright windy day in September, Edward went to his father’s office after school and a few minutes later they walked around the courthouse square to the bank, and from there they went to Kohler’s bicycle shop, where Edward, with his father’s solemn approval, parted gladly with his savings and rode off on his heart’s delight. The new bicycle was blue and silver, and stood out conspicuously among all the other bicycles in the two long racks in the school yard. It had a headlight and a tool case. He adjusted the handlebars so they were low like the handlebars of a racing bike, and then rode without using them at all, unless it was a matter of keeping the front wheel out of the streetcar track. Boys asked to try his new bicycle out, and rather than get into a fight about it he let them have a brief ride, but it was agony to him until they jumped off and let him have his Blue Racer again. When the bicycle got rained on, he dried it with a rag he kept in his canvas bag. At night he stood it in the woodshed, out of the dew. He would have taken it into his bed if this had been at all practical.
The bicycle was still new, he had only had it a few weeks, when it was run over. It happened on a Saturday noon. Hungry, in a hurry to get home for lunch, he rode up in front of the Star Building. A voice in his head reminded him that the boys were not allowed to leave their bicycles in front of the building, and another voice said promptly, She won’t see it, and even if she does, this once won’t matter.… He leaned his bicycle carefully against the high curbing and went inside. There were two boys ahead of him. While he was counting the money in his change purse, a boy opened the street door and shouted, “You better come out here, Geliert! Somebody just ran over your new bicycle!”
Without any feeling whatever, as if he were dreaming, Edward went outside, and a man he’d never seen before said, “I didn’t know it was there, and I backed over it.”
Edward kept right on, without looking at the man, until he reached the edge of the sidewalk and could look down at what ought to have been somebody else’s ruined bicycle, not (oh, please not) his.
His mouth began to quiver.
The man said, “I’m sorry,” and Edward burst into tears. What had happened was so terrible, and he felt such pity for the mangled spokes, the tires torn from their rims.
Mrs. Sinclair, seeing that there was trouble of some kind in front of the building, left her desk and went to the door. She looked at the bicycle and then at Edward standing there blindly, with the tears streaming down his face. “You’re not supposed to leave your wheels in front of the building,” she said, and went inside. People gathered around Edward, trying to console him. The man who had run over Edward’s bicycle got into his car and drove away. Someone told Edward his name, and where he lived.
That night Harrison Geliert backed the car out of the garage and, with Edward in the front seat beside him, drove out to the edge of town and stopped in front of a one-story frame house in a poor neighborhood. “You wait here,” he said, and got out and went up the brick walk. A man came to the door, and Edward saw a lighted room. His father said something and the man said something. Then he held the screen door open, and his father stepped inside and the door closed. Edward waited in perfect confidence that his father would tell him that it was all settled and the man was going to buy him a new bicycle. Instead, his father came out, after about five minutes, and got in the car and started the engine without saying a word. They were halfway down the block before he turned to Edward and explained that the man didn’t know anything about his bicycle.
“But they said it was him!”
“I know,” Harrison Geliert said. “He may not have been telling the truth.”
Conscious of how quiet it had become in the front seat, he added, “Would you like to drive downtown for an ice-cream soda?”
They parked in front of the ice-cream parlor, and his father honked and a high-school boy came out, with a white apron around his hips, and took their order. A few minutes later he reappeared with two tin trays and two tall chocolate sodas. The soda was as good a comfort as any, if Edward had been allowed to eat it in silence, but Harrison Geliert was genuinely distressed and sorry for his son, and his sympathy took the form (as it had in the past when he tried to comfort his wife) of feeling sorry for himself. “As you get older,” he said, “you will find that a great many things happen that aren’t easy to bear. Things you can’t change, no matter how you try. You have to accept them and go right on, doing the best you can.”
“But it isn’t right!” Edward burst out. “He ran over it. It’s his fault!”
“I know all that.”
“Then why doesn’t he have to pay for it?”
“If it was his fault, he ought to pay for having your bicycle repaired. But you can’t make him do it if he doesn’t want to.”
A year earlier, Edward would have cried out, “But you can!” He thought it now, but he didn’t say it.
“We’ll find out from Mr. Kohler how much it will cost to have your bicycle fixed, and I’ll go fifty-fifty with you, when it comes to paying for it.”
Edward thanked his father politely, but there was no use talking about having his bicycle fixed. It would never be the same. The frame was sprung, and you could always tell a repainted bike from one that was straight from the factory. His father could go to court if necessary, and the judge would make the man pay for ruining his bicycle, and maybe fine him besides.
“It may be cheaper in the end to get a secondhand bicycle,” Mr. Geliert said.
With an effort Edward kept the tears from spilling over. He didn’t want a secondhand bicycle. He wanted not to leave his new bicycle in front of the Star Building where it would be run over.
And Mr. Geliert wanted to say and didn’t say, “I hope this will be a lesson to you.”
It was a lesson, of course, in the sense that everything that happens, good or bad, is a lesson.
EDWARD Geliert was thirteen going on fourteen when the paper boys went
on strike against the Evening Star, and he was fourteen going on fifteen when his bicycle was run over. One half the individual nature never seems any different, from the cradle to the grave; the other half is pathetically in step with the slightest physical change. Edward’s voice had deepened, hairs had appeared on his body where Darwin said they should appear, his feet and hands were noticeably large for the rest of him, and something would not allow him to kneel in the dark beside his bed and ask God to give him back his new bicycle. People might be raised from the dead, as it said in the Bible, but a ruined bicycle could not by any power on earth or in heaven be made shining and whole again.
A Game of Chess
ON a mild evening in June, when the light in the sky, the softness of the air, the damp odors rising from the ground, and the roses everywhere all seemed to support the fiction that there is a natural harmony running through all natural things, Hugh and Laura Cahill came in from the country to have dinner with his older brother and sister-in-law, from Chicago. The train was crowded, and they had to sit across the aisle from each other. Hugh sat facing a little girl of two, who was dressed in white — starched white dress, white shoes and stockings, and a white piqué bonnet to show off her dark skin and immense dark Neapolitan eyes. She was restless. She bounced and jounced, she hung from her mother’s neck, she got up and she got down, she flirted with the conductor, and from time to time, in spite of her mother’s conscientious efforts to avoid this, the soles of her white kid shoes brushed against Hugh’s light gabardine trousers. The smiles of apology that her mother and grandmother directed at him also asked him to tell them truthfully if there was ever since the beginning of time a more marvellously beautiful child. As the train plunged into the tunnel at Ninety-eighth Street, he leaned across the aisle and said, “I can hear Ellen saying to Amos, ‘If we don’t call them, they may find out we were in New York and be hurt.’ ”
“Would you have been hurt?” Laura asked.
All the Days and Nights Page 10
