The Business of Naming Things

by Michael Coffey

  “Have a catch, boys,” said Mr. Newman. “Michael seems to’ve brought plenty of equipment.” Turning directly to Michael, Mr. Newman confided that he boys’ own baseball gear was still in boxes. They all went down the two steps to the front yard, then to the side of the house, the little one, Phillip, skipping ahead, with a glove on his left hand and tossing a ball up with his right and staggering around underneath to catch it. Tommy, moving more slowly, had his glove on—that is, Michael’s current glove, the Willie Mays MacGregor model—and seemed to know what to do with it, but then he sat down on the grass. Michael didn’t know what to do. He picked up his old glove. Then he went over to Tommy and handed him the hardball. “That glove needs some breaking in. Pound it a bit.”

  And Tommy popped the ball into the pocket—whap, whap, whap, whap. And Michael played catch—at a little distance—with the smaller boy. Mr. and Mrs. Newman retreated to the porch and watched, Mr. Newman’s one arm around Mrs. Newman.

  They continued like this for a while. The parents went inside after advising their boys not to wander off and asking Michael if perhaps he would show them a few things. “It’s his town,” Mrs. Newman said, smiling at Michael, who was pleased to think of it that way.

  Michael showed them the sand pit where he used to play army men with Terry Dashnaw. He showed them where the brook ran out back. Michael was confused about Tommy’s head, but, other than the fact that Tommy moved slowly, his large skull drifting like a cloud above him, they were just three normal kids. The Newman boys were okay, he decided. The little one was funny and had crazy things in his pockets, like a little door hinge, a tiny flashlight, and a rubber worm. Tommy spoke quietly. He said he liked animals. Michael asked him what his favorite animal was. “Ungulates,” Tommy said, helpfully adding, “they sustain their entire body weight on their toes. Like zebras and hippos.” Michael noticed as he listened that all Tommy’s features were at a slant.

  Michael asked where they were from. Tommy said Slingerlands. He said his father was going to teach at the mental hospital in Dannemora. “He’s a psychologist,” he said.

  The boys stood for quite a while playing in the brook and looking at it. Michael showed them the wide, flat rock where you could get down and drink from the brook. He demonstrated. Phillip flopped right down and slurped the water. “Cold!” he declared. Tommy declined.

  When they went back to the house, Mrs. Newman had slices of banana bread on plates for them at the big dining room table they had set up in what used to be the Dashnaws’ living room. The boys sat down and she poured them each a tall glass of milk.

  The boys ate in silence. Michael wanted to go home. But Mrs. Newman said, “Tommy, will you play something? Dad is just finishing leveling the piano. Aren’t you, dear?” she yelled in a way that seemed teasing, like maybe he’d been at it awhile.

  Tommy rose and went to the little room that Michael remembered as a messy laundry when the Dashnaws were there. It now had plants, and bright, clean windows, and a shiny black upright piano. They all entered—the boys, that is, and Mrs. Newman. Mr. Newman was already there, on his knees, working a small tool under the piano. He removed a wedge of wood and said, “Piece of cake,” winking at Mrs. Newman, as if maybe he was kidding.

  When Michael looked behind him, there were four or five folding chairs along the wall, and they all sat down. Tommy maneuvered onto the piano bench, lifted the cover, and seemed to think for a moment.

  Then he played a song that Michael immediately recognized from his mother’s collection of sound tracks, which she would play every once in a while. Michael used to put the needle to this one himself sometimes, for just this song. He liked to look at the album cover, too, because it was a musical about baseball and had a long-legged lady in underwear on the front.

  Phillip belted out the chorus. By the time Tommy reached the end, they were all singing.

  “Damned Yankees,” Mr. Newman said when it was over. “Are you a Yankee fan?” he asked Michael. Michael definitely wasn’t that. “No!” he said. And then he surprised himself, “I’ve got miles of heart!”

  “So do we,” said Mr. Newman, looking warmly at his boys and at Michael in their chairs. “Red Sox fans.”

  OVER A RARE ITALIAN SPAGHETTI SUPPER, Michael’s parents were eager to know about his visit, what the house and the people and the Newman boys were like.

  Michael began by talking about the older boy’s piano playing, but his father cut him off. “Start at the beginning. Did you meet the Newmans?”

  “You mean the parents?”

  “Yeah, boy, I mean the parents.”

  “The father’s got one arm.”

  “Yeah, I heard,” said his father, shaking from a green can grated Parmesan onto his spaghetti.

  “You did?” said Michael’s mother.

  “Go on, Mick,” said Michael’s father.

  “Well, they have a real nice piano.”

  “Yeah, we saw it, didn’t we, moving in there. And you heard that—Gwendy, didn’t the lady tell you, ‘Oh, we have a piano’? Yeah, we know that. What else?”

  “Patrick,” Michael’s mother said. “Don’t be cross.”

  “Cross? I just want to know what our boy thinks of his new neighbors.”

  “Well,” said Michael. “The fifth grader is a nice kid—I can’t remember his name! Phillip! That’s it. The older boy, Tommy . . . is a little, different. He’s got something that might be wrong with him. But he’s nice.”

  “What’s that? What’s that ‘something might be wrong with him’ thing?” said Michael’s father, deliberately, as if he were stepping over stones in a stream, which signaled to Michael that something was up, like perhaps the drinking thing was a problem again.

  “Tommy has a . . . large . . . head,” said Michael.

  “Yeah-yeah-yeah-yeah,” said his father, finally digging into his spaghetti, the signal that everyone else could. “I heard there was a goddamned carnival show up there.”

  Michael’s mother twirled pasta onto her fork with the assist of her big spoon, and kept twirling it, and said nothing and looked at no one.

  GOT UP IN WHAT HE FELT was the least aggressive outfit—the quieter paisley and the black trousers—Michael left early for his first day of school. He’d admit he didn’t want to end up walking into the building with the Newman boys. It was hard enough dealing with his own new look. He walked by himself in sharp-pointed, shiny boots past the cowpats at the mouth of Larry Weldon’s driveway and past Downey’s scrawny little apple orchard and then the gas station, where the brook crossed under the road, before he got to the school parking lot and made the last endless one hundred yards in full view of anyone already at the school who cared to look through the glass doors. He’d made it. In the main hallway, he was greeted by Mr. Kenneally, the mean principal with the permanent five o’clock shadow, who was all smiles today and didn’t give Michael any trouble or teasing. Michael spent a little time looking at the trophy cases but really checking out just how out of place he looked amid the gleam of sports team memorabilia, and then he saw them, behind him: Mrs. and Mrs. Newman, Phillip and Tommy flanking, and the guidance counselor’s secretary, Miss Dubray, and the school nurse, Miss Gregoire, hovering.

  “Michael,” said Miss Gregoire. “Will you show Tommy to your homeroom? You’re both with Mrs. Davies. You know where that is.”

  Tommy looked pretty good in his denim outfit, pants and jean jacket, along with a white-collared soft cotton shirt and desert boots. Still, his head lolled like a slow fish in the sea and he’d see you with first one eye and then the other.

  Mrs. and Mrs. Newman didn’t make a big thing of saying good-bye, but instead followed Miss Dubray, who escorted Phillip to Mrs. Canning’s room.

  Michael and Tommy made their way down the staircase to the lower level. At the bottom—of course!—Jody Favaro and two other girls. The three of them were ready to say hello, but when Jody got a look at Tommy, she burst into a laugh, almost like a shout. Two fingers of yellow snot
slipped down her upper lip till she sucked them back up with a snort. Mortified! That was the new Sandy Champaigne she was with, all dark and cool and bored-looking. Jody went flailing off to the girl’s room, shrieking, “Freak!”

  “Who’s the freak,” Michael heard Sandy Champagne mutter in disgust, not really a question, walking in the opposite direction, indicting all. She had a cigarette behind her ear and was headed out the side door. “Some outfit, guy.” A comment meant for Michael. He didn’t know what to make of it.

  The next day, Michael, with the help of his mother and the nurse—Miss Gregoire had called Mrs. Touhey and they met in the nurse’s office—was able to understand what hydrocephalus was—called “water on the brain,” it was actually an excess of spinal fluid spilling into the skull. There were kinds of treatments—and Tommy had already had some—where they drained the fluid out of his head into his stomach. Michael asked if Tommy was going to die, and his mother reminded him that everyone dies, and Miss Gregoire added that Tommy might not live as long a life as Michael but that he could lead a good life. “And that’s what we all want.”

  That might’ve been all they wanted, but as the year got under way, it was awful for Tommy. His second day, there was a Mr. Potato Head sitting on his homeroom desk. When he got to study hall, there was a Mr. Potato Head drawn on the blackboard. In the second week, at recess, Dickie Trudeau had a big inflatable ball that he’d drawn a face on and they batted it around the school yard, yelling, “Come here, Newman!”

  Michael was so upset by the whole thing, he became mean. He put all his new clothes back in their boxes and stashed them in the closet, even if Sandy Champaigne (maybe) thought they were cool. He told his mother he was wearing blue jeans till the British style came into fashion in Oreville. “We’re behind the times,” he told her, and she seemed to agree. His father was no help, just staying on the sidelines, as if something he had long understood was just dawning on the rest of mankind.

  MICHAEL BECAME TROUBLED, in those early weeks of eighth grade, with the unfairness of everything. The things he didn’t understand—why the Dashnaws had moved away, why girls everywhere were screaming for the Beatles but not here, why the mooley got abused and starved by his own kind, and why his schoolmates were so cruel to Tommy Newman. Or why his big house had a mother always busy with her accounts and a father who seemed like he had no purpose in the world other than feeding cows or playing cards and dressing in the same clothes every day. Michael decided not to try out for the basketball team. He also decided not to go to the football games on Saturdays.

  Michael was moping around the house one brilliant autumn Saturday when his father, blowing into the house with a leaf in his hair, said that he should get down to the school. “Playing Beekmantown, big game,” he said. Michael remained silent. His mother was at the kitchen counter, preparing yet another pot of tea. “Why don’t you go up and see the Newman boys. Maybe they’d like to go,” she said.

  “The boy can go on his own,” barked his father as he left through the back door.

  His mother, to Michael’s surprise, had absorbed the afflictions of the new neighbors in stride. She talked to Mrs. Newman on the phone with some regularity. Though she took the calls at her desk, out of earshot, it was clear she thought the world of Mrs. Newman, who, she reported, had graduated magna cum laude and had been to Paris, and Mr. Newman who, she reminded all, was Doctor Newman, not mister. Michael’s father was not charmed by any of it. “If Newman calls himself a shrink, I can think of one thing he should—”

  “Patrick! I will not hear that again,” Michael’s mother said, cutting him off.

  “Root, root, root for the home team,” his father sang in taunting singsong from the backyard while aggressively raking the ground for leaves.

  Michael said to himself, “He’s pissing me off.” Michael got up, grabbed his football, ran through the backyard. Just to fool his father.

  “Attaboy.”

  Michael didn’t turn right toward the school and the football game, but walked straight up the hill to visit the Newman boys. He knew they wouldn’t be going to the game, at least not Tommy, as he’d been sick the last week or so, spending time in the nurse’s office with headaches, till his mother came to take him home.

  “Tommy’s sitting up in bed, but he’d love to see you,” said Mrs. Newman, “unless you are going to the game. Gerald has already walked down with Phillip.”

  “I don’t like football, Mrs. Newman.”

  “I’ll bring up some molasses cookies in a bit. Go on up.”

  Tommy was propped up in a kind of fort of pillows, his eyes closed. “Hey, Michael.”

  Michael didn’t now what to do, but it was very quiet and pleasant in Tommy’s room. Indeed, it was Pearl’s old room—which Michael had never been in. He’d imagined all sorts of things going on in that room. Now it was sort of a boy’s room. There was a poster of Beethoven above the bed, and a music stand with some sheet music on it. Tommy also had a few clay figures that looked handmade lined up on his dresser. His schoolbooks were on a chair next to the bed. Plus other books.

  “How are you doing?”

  “Well, I can’t see right now,” said Tommy, his eyes still closed. Michael was able to really look at Tommy. His features were all like afterthoughts, just the barest curl of hair at the top of his head, his eyes dots beneath the thin-slash eyebrows, his mouth a small line. He was put together like a quick sketch. Somebody was bound to dub him Charlie Brown soon.

  “Do you want the radio on?” Michael asked. Tommy had a cool old radio, but the boy said no.

  “But you know what? Have you read Mrs. Momot’s assignment?”

  Michael had not, and there was a quiz on Monday.

  So Michael read to him the opening pages of Ethan Frome, by Edith Wharton.

  I had the story, bit by bit, from various people, and, as generally happens in such cases, each time it was a different story.

  If you know Starkfield, Massachusetts [“that’ll be on the quiz—Starkfield,” said Tommy], you know the post-office. If you know the post-office you must have seen Ethan Frome drive up to it, drop the reins on his hollow-backed bay and drag himself across the brick pavement to the white colonnade: and you must have asked who he was.

  It was there that, several years ago, I saw him for the first time; and the sight pulled me up sharp. Even then he was the most striking figure in Starkfield, though he was but the ruin of a man. It was not so much his great height that marked him, for the “natives” were easily singled out by their lank longitude from the stockier foreign breed: it was the careless powerful look he had, in spite of a lameness checking each step like the jerk of a chain. There was something bleak and unapproachable in his face, and he was so stiffened and grizzled that I took him for an old man and was surprised to hear that he was not more than fifty-two [“That’ll be on it, too—fifty-two.”] I had this from Harmon Gow, who had driven the stage from Bettsbridge to Starkfield in pre-trolley days and knew the chronicle of all the families on his line.

  “He’s looked that way ever since he had his smash-up; and that’s twenty-four years ago [“and that.”] come next February,” Harmon threw out between reminiscent pauses.

  Every one in Starkfield knew him and gave him a greeting tempered to his own grave mien (What’s a mien? Tommy: means how a person looks.); but his taciturnity was respected and it was only on rare occasions that one of the older men of the place detained him for a word. When this happened he would listen quietly, his blue eyes on the speaker’s face, and answer in so low a tone that his words never reached me; then he would climb stiffly into his buggy, gather up the reins in his left hand and drive slowly away in the direction of his farm.

  “It was a pretty bad smash-up?” I questioned Harmon, looking after Frome’s retreating figure, and thinking how gallantly his lean brown head, with its shock of light hair, must have sat on his strong shoulders before they were bent out of shape.

  “Wust kind,” my informant assented
. “More’n enough to kill most men. But the Fromes are tough. Ethan’ll likely touch a hundred.”

  “Good God!” I exclaimed. At the moment Ethan Frome, after climbing to his seat, had leaned over to assure himself of the security of a wooden box—also with a druggist’s label on it—which he had placed in the back of the buggy, and I saw his face as it probably looked when he thought himself alone. “That man touch a hundred? He looks as if he was dead and in hell now!”

  Harmon drew a slab of tobacco from his pocket, cut off a wedge and pressed it into the leather pouch of his cheek. “Guess he’s been in Starkfield too many winters. Most of the smart ones get away.”

  “Can’t blame ’em,” said Tommy. And they both laughed for a bit. And then it wasn’t so funny.

  Mrs. Newman brought up the cookies and seemed to have been crying, even though she was smiling her bright smile. It’s just that Michael noticed her lashes looked dark, wet.

  TOMMY NEVER DID GO BACK TO SCHOOL. Mrs. Newman told Michael’s mother that, first, a fever, and then problems with his eyesight and headaches made it so he’d have to stay at home. Michael volunteered to collect his assignments, with Phillip in charge of turning in the homework. Although Tommy’s time in the school was long enough to mark Michael as a friend of “potato head,” it no longer mattered. Everyone in school forgot about Tommy Newman, like he’d never existed. But to Michael, he existed, his only friend.