Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  Yet I was a man old enough to take a certain reasonable satisfaction in everything’s suddenly stopping still the way it did in the Depression and giving me the chance to look at the city the way I could then. It has a beauty, a town like Chatham does. Even with things getting mighty shabby, as they were in 1933, Division Boulevard was a magnificent street with handsome stone and tile-faced office buildings and store buildings downtown, with the automobile showrooms taking up beyond the overpass at the Union Station—a cathedral of a building!—and after that a half mile of old mansions from the last century, most of them long since turned into undertaking parlors, all of them so well built that no amount of abuse or remodeling seemed to alter them much; and then almost a mile of small apartment houses, and after that the clinics and the State Medical Center and the two big hospitals.

  Beyond the hospitals, Division Boulevard runs right through Lawton Park. On one side you get a glimpse among the trees of the Art Gallery; farther along on that side, there is the bronze monument to the doughboy. On the other side is a mound with Lawton Park spelled out in sweet alyssum and pinks and ground myrtle; and away over on that side you can see among the treetops the glass dome of the birdhouse at the zoo. It’s a handsomely kept park—was all the way through the Depression even—and when you come out at the other end, there before your eyes is the beginning of Singleton Heights!

  From Singleton Heights on out past the Country Club to the Hunt and Polo Grounds it’s all like a fairyland. Great stucco and stone houses, and whitewashed brick, acres upon acres of them. All of them planted round with evergreens and flowering fruit trees, with wide green lawns—the sprinklers playing like fountains all summer long—lawns that are really meadows, stretching off to low stone walls or rustic fences or even a sluggish little creek with willow trees growing along its banks in places. It’s the sort of thing that when you’ve been off to New York, or maybe to Europe for the summer, and come back to it, the very prettiness of it nearly breaks your heart.

  But I ought to say, before speaking of Hugh again, that Singleton Heights and the Country Club area beyond are not the only fine neighborhoods in Chatham and it is not of those sections of Chatham that I think when I’m up at the lake in the summer or away on a business trip. My own house, for instance, is in one of the gated-off streets that were laid out just north of Lawton Park at the turn of the century. The houses there are mostly big three-story houses. There’s a green parkway down the center of the street, and we have so many forest trees you would think you were in the middle of Lawton Park itself. But, actually, it’s not even the Lawton Park area that’s most typical of Chatham, any more than Singleton Heights or the Country Club area. And, in my mind, it is certainly not the new do-it-yourself ranch-house district that means Chatham to me. . . . It is the block after block of modest two-story houses, built thirty to forty years ago now, that seem most typical and give me a really comfortable feeling. It was the people in those houses who managed to keep paying something on their loans in the Depression. Whenever I think of Chatham when Mary and I go away in the summer and think of how pleasant it can be to be there despite the awful heat, I think first of those bungalows built of good wire-cut brick, with red and orange tile roofs and big screened porches, of the little privet hedges that divide their sixty-foot lots, and of the maples and oaks and sycamores whose summer shade their front yards share.

  The summer Hugh was seventeen I must have seen him hoofing it along the sidewalk or standing at the curb of every block of Division Boulevard. I could never be certain that the men with me recognized him, and once I asked Joe McNary, “What were those kids doing back there on the curb?”

  “They’re hitchhiking, Will,” he said.

  “Hitchhiking?” I had never heard the term before, but I knew at once what it meant. “Where are they going?” I said.

  “Nowhere. They’re just doing the town. There’s no harm in it, I guess.”

  I guess he was right. Hugh never got into any trouble that I know of, except over a car that he and his buddies made a down payment on, one time. They put down seven dollars on an old Packard touring car and drove it around town till it ran out of gas. They had bought the car in Hugh’s name, and so when the police found it parked at the roadside out near the Polo Club, they gave me a ring. I told them just to take it back to the dealer and that I’d pay whatever fine it was. But they were pretty inquisitive, and I had to go down to the police station and answer a lot of questions. It was an embarrassing experience for me, because I had to confess that I hadn’t known of Hugh’s part in the adventure and didn’t know the names of the other boys who went in on it with him. From the police station I had to get Hugh on the telephone at the high school and find out the names of the other boys. He didn’t want to tell me. And we had to argue it out right then, which was the bad part, with him talking from the principal’s office and with me at the sergeant’s desk at the police station. Hugh ended by giving me the boys’ names, and we never heard any more about it from the police, though I did have to pay the used-car dealer something to make him forget the whole business.

  Hugh Robert was in the dumps for a couple of weeks afterward. Instead of excusing himself from the dinner table, as he had always done when his mother and I sat dawdling over our coffee, he would sit there pretending to listen to what we had to say, or he would just gaze despairingly up into the glass prisms of the chandelier above the table. One night when I felt I couldn’t stand his black mood any longer, I gave his mother a sign to leave us alone. At first she frowned and refused to do it. Finally though, when I grew as silent as Hugh, she invented a reason to have to go to the kitchen. As soon as I heard her and the cook’s voices out there, I said, “What’s the matter, Hugh. What are you thinking about?”

  He said, “I was thinking about how sorry I am. I really am, Dad.”

  “What’s this?” I said.

  “I’m sorry you had to pay that money on the car.”

  “Is that all?”

  “No. Worse than that was their having you down at the station. I know you hated that worse than paying the money.” Right away, you see, he was making me out as some kind of pantywaist.

  “I didn’t give a hoot in hell about going to the police station,” I said. “But it was a damn-fool idea you boys had.”

  “You don’t have to tell me that,” he said. “It was the stupidest idea I’ve ever had. It was an awful mistake.”

  What could you say to such a boy? I wanted to ask him where they would have gone if they had had more gas, but his mother came bustling back from the kitchen then, followed by Lucy May, the cook, who began pressing Hugh to have a second helping of chocolate pie, which, if I remember correctly, he did.

  One other time, when I was out with another group of men, and in another part of town, I asked, “What do you suppose those kids are doing out here?”

  “Out here?” one of them said, and I could tell from his lack of interest that he hadn’t recognized Hugh. But I think the fellow who was driving the car that day must have known that what I meant was: What was a son of mine doing so far from home?

  “Oh,” he said, “I can guess pretty well what they’re doing. They’ve heard there’s a drugstore in this end of town that sells milk shakes for a nickel. It’s something like that; you can just count on it.” We were in a perfectly decent neighborhood out on the south side, where a lot of the rich Germans used to live. It’s a nice section and didn’t get too awfully run-down during the Depression. I could hardly have told the difference between it and my own section if I hadn’t known Chatham well.

  Still another time, we had parked the car and were crossing the street toward a little Italian grocery store and lunchroom, a place just west of Court Square and near the old canal. It was a pretty rough and slummy part of town. (Not long afterward FDR had the whole area demolished and put one of his housing projects there.) But the little joint, which was called Baccalupo’s Quick Lunch & Grocery, was getting to be well known for its rye and pro
sciutto and its three-point-two draft beer. As we headed across the street, I saw Hugh and two other boys running out of the place, with Tony Baccalupo, a swarthy little dwarf of a man, after them. I watched Tony overtake them and snatch some fruit away from them. Then the boys went off laughing together at Tony, who stood shouting something in Italian at the top of his voice. Tony was himself a sort of half-wit, I suppose. He was not the proprietor but the proprietor’s younger brother—or older brother. When we got inside, I found the opportunity to ask him about the boys who had gone out just before we came in.

  “They jelly beans,” he said. “They just-a jelly beans. They think they plenty smart and I see ’em making the fun of me, winking in the mirror over the counter. But they got no money, got no jobs, not even know how to make-a the real trouble. They steal them grapefruit just-a to make-a me hafta run out in the street and get a sweat.” He spat in the sawdust on the floor, and began taking our orders.

  It got so, instead of watching for Hugh, I tried not to see him. All summer, he was wandering about town, hitchhiking from one point to another, never with any real destination, sometimes driving my old Pierce-Arrow, when his mother didn’t need it. He didn’t really like to take the car, however; it was an old limousine with a glass between the front and back seats, and used too much gas. He and his friends drifted about town, not ever knowing where they were, really, because to them the different parts of the city didn’t mean anything. I would be riding in the backseat of a car or walking on the sidewalk, aware only of how all business and progress had bogged down, wondering if and when we could ever get it going again, searching for the first sign of a comeback. Hugh and his gang were searching for something, too, you might say. Searching for mirrors to admire themselves in. Or that’s how it seemed. Every time I saw them, I would think of Tony’s word: jelly beans.

  One night when I got up from the dinner table, Hugh was just coming in from one of his days of wandering about town. We met in the dining-room doorway. “I hope you’re making the most of your freedom, son,” I said.

  He looked at me for a moment, almost squinting. Then he opened his eyes wide, and turned his blue gaze on the room in general, blinking his eyelids two or three times as though they were camera shutters, his eyes registering everything, including the black cook; Mary had buzzed for her when she heard Hugh shut the front door, and Lucy May was now holding the swinging door a little way open. Finally he squinted at me again—squinted so that you couldn’t have told the color of his eyes. And I repeated, “I hope you’re making the most of your freedom.”

  “I wonder if I am,” he said, smiling, with a tinge of contempt in his smile and in his voice, I thought.

  I looked over my shoulder at his mother, and she shook her head, meaning for me not to say anything more.

  It was as though Hugh and I were drifting about through two different cities that were laid out on the very same tract of land. I used to feel we were even occupying two different houses built upon one piece of ground—houses of identical dimensions and filling one and the same area of cubic space. It was just a feeling I had. It first came to me one afternoon when I watched Hugh looking at himself in the mirror. I imagined that the interior that Hugh and I saw there wasn’t the same as the one I stood in. That’s all there was to it. But probably even to mention that feeling of mine is carrying things too far. I don’t want to be misleading about this mirror business. I don’t think the mirror-gazing itself was any real fetish with Hugh. In the first place, he didn’t always make for the mirror as soon as he came in. Sometimes he would slip his books into the hall cupboard and go straight to the telephone; he was a great one for the telephone.

  And what a lot of common talk we had to listen to on the telephone: “Did he say that? . . . I saw her looking at me and I wondered what she thought. . . . ‘What do you mean?’ I mean what she thought about me. . . .”

  Always himself. Often as not, one of his girls would call him.

  There was a girl named Ida, who nearly drove us all crazy. In the beginning, Hugh was mightily smitten by her. Of that I am quite certain. She was the belle of the class when Hugh entered the tenth grade at the high school, and throughout most of that year it seemed as though he looked for excuses to mention Ida Thomas’s name at the dinner table. We didn’t get much notion of her except that she was “a gorgeous redhead” and that she had so many admirers that Hugh “couldn’t get near her with a ten-foot pole.” Nevertheless, he clearly liked for us to tease him about her, though he would always insist that “she didn’t know he existed.” But at last—and after considerable effort, I gather—he managed to make Ida aware of his existence. From that day the girl gave him no peace.

  She would telephone him two or three times in one evening: She was a brash little thing and would engage Hugh’s mother in conversation if she answered the telephone, or even me, if I answered it: “How are you, Mr. Perkins? . . . How’s Mrs. Perkins? . . . And how’s that good-looking son of yours—your pride and joy, so they tell me?” Hugh had a time shaking her, I guess. He got so he wouldn’t come to the telephone if Mary or I answered and recognized Ida’s voice, and he would never answer it himself. She took to writing him letters at home and finally tended to embarrass the boy with his family. One card said, “Roses are red, violets are blue. Sugar’s sweet and so is Hugh.” Another said, “Someday I’ll ride in your Pierce-Arrow, Hugh Robert Perkins.”

  One Sunday, I got Hugh to go for a walk with me while his mother was at church, and I asked him outright why he put up with so much nonsense from the girl. “I feel sorry for her,” he said. As though that were any kind of an excuse.

  “She’s not as popular as she used to be?” I asked.

  “Certainly she is!” he said.

  “Oh,” I said. “Then you feel sorry for her because she has all the other fellows but not you?”

  He laughed aloud. “I never thought of it that way, Mr. Perkins,” he said, as if he thought I was only joking.

  So I laughed, too, and took the opportunity to ask another question. “Tell me, son,” I said, “what turned you against her? Was it the telephone calls?”

  “No. Not exactly. You see, it wasn’t even me she was interested in. She was impressed by your old Pierce-Arrow. And still more by our living in West Vesey Place.”

  “But you didn’t exactly like those telephone calls. And what about those postcards, Hugh?”

  “Why, she didn’t know any better, Dad!” For a minute he stopped there on the street on Sunday morning and looked at me as though it was I who didn’t have good sense about such things. “That’s why I had to put up with it. That’s why I felt sorry for her.”

  He was very cagey, and I didn’t bother him any further about Ida, since it was all over by then anyway. But judging from the gloom he dwelt in for several months, he must have considered Ida one of his worst mistakes.

  Hugh wouldn’t study, and he wasn’t really too hot an athlete, although certainly for a while he thought he was going to be. He made several of his “mistakes” in the athletic line, and would, of course, fall into a black mood each time he was dropped from a team or was even kept on the sidelines. His mother said he couldn’t excel in athletics because he had to compete with the big, tough fellows who went out for sports at Chatham West High. And she said that the schoolwork at the public school was too easy and didn’t occupy him. Maybe she was right. I know that when his two brothers had finished at Chatham Academy they had had trigonometry and Latin and even some Greek. Both of them passed the College Board examinations with flying colors and had a summer in Europe before starting college. Hugh wouldn’t even talk about going to college—not to any local college that I could afford to send him to. Since the war, of course, he has gotten himself some kind of degree at Columbia University on the G.I. Bill. But during high school, when we mentioned college to him, he only laughed at the idea. One Sunday in his senior year, when the other children were at the house and the subject came up, he said, “Why, I’ve already been
to the best college in our part of the country, the College of William and Mary”—meaning his mother and me, of course. “I’ve been studying diplomacy, and next June I’ll be ready for the foreign service.”

  The others took this as a joke, but it made me realize how soon he might be gone from us to wherever he had in mind going. I was only half through my meal, but involuntarily I began searching my pockets for my pipe and a match. It’s hard having your youngest be the one who disappoints you. I sat there searching for my pipe, thinking that I could just imagine how the letter he would leave would look on the library table, or how he would come down to breakfast one morning and say he had written off and gotten himself a job somewhere away from us—away from Chatham! I suppose it was rather simpleminded and old-fashioned of me to think about it the way I did.

  In his senior year, Hugh actually began to show an interest in his schoolwork—in a certain part of it, in a part I wouldn’t have called work. You would just hardly believe the things they offered in the curriculum of that school. But anyway, the first indication I had of what was stirring was Hugh’s coming to me one morning with a very odd sort of request. From some neat, dark, and no doubt carefully protected corner of the house, known only to himself, he had pulled out an old dictation machine—a Dictaphone—which I had given him as a little fellow. It was an old model that I had brought home from the office and let him use as a plaything. I had forgotten about it. It had been seven or eight years since he had asked me to take the wax cylinders downtown and have them scraped so he could use them again. But he came to me after breakfast one morning, when he was all ready to leave for school, carrying the case of cylinders that came with the Dictaphone. He looked a little shamefaced, I must say, like any big boy caught playing with one of his old toys. I was touched to see that he had hung on to something I had given him so long ago. He handed the case to me and as I examined it I remarked silently that it seemed to be in as good condition as on the day I gave it to him. “Where did you resurrect this from, Hugh?” I asked.