Peter Taylor

by Peter Taylor

  “I’ve had it put by against a rainy day,” he said.

  “Do you still have the machine itself?” I asked.

  “Oh yes, of course,” he said.

  I held the case of cylinders and then I said, “You intend to sell it, I suppose—the whole outfit?”

  “Why no, Mr. Perkins. I want you to have these cylinders scraped for me.”

  “You know it costs something to have it done?” It occurred to me that as a child he mightn’t have realized that.

  “Oh, certainly. I’ll pay for it. I have some money put by, too,” he said, giving me one of his quick winks, “against the same rainy day.” He was no spendthrift, to be sure. I doubt that there was ever a week when he spent the whole of the small allowance his mother gave him.

  I set the case of cylinders on the floor beside me and picked up the paper I had been reading when he came in. “What are you going to use them for?” I said from behind the paper.

  “In connection with one of my classes,” he said. “A readings course.”

  I looked at him over my paper. He was still standing before me and was clearly willing for me to pursue the subject. “A reading course?”

  “Oral readings,” he explained. “A class in oral readings, for additional speech credit.” He was in dead earnest. He said they were graded according to some kind of point system and that it had been wonderful help for him to be able to hear himself on the Dictaphone, that he had already made terrific progress.

  “You’ve already been using the Dictaphone, then?” I inquired. “The cylinders were clean when you got them out?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Don’t you remember, I got you to have them scraped before I ever put them away?”

  “No, I didn’t remember,” I said. “It’s been a pretty long time, Hugh.”

  Now I found myself wondering how many nights had he already been up there in his room listening to his own voice on the Dictaphone. I went back to my paper again, because I knew I didn’t want to hear any more about this business. Sooner or later, I thought, he will see it as just another of his mistakes.

  But for some months to come, Hugh’s concern with his voice was all we did hear about. My theory was that the boy had been trying a long while to decide what it was about himself that charmed him most. And at last he thought he knew. All that winter he was as busy as a beaver with his “speech lessons” and “exercises.” I would bring home the set of cylinders freshly scraped, and they wouldn’t last him much more than a week. Finally, I guess he wore them out because well before spring he quit asking me to take them. But his interest didn’t stop there. He continued to engage me now and then in discussions of his current “problems” in speech, as openly and seriously as though he were talking about math or history. And first thing his mother and I knew, he was on the debating team, was trying out for a part in the class play, was even getting special instructions from the teacher in “newscasting.”

  It occurred to me once during this time that maybe Hugh had fallen in love with his speech teacher, Miss Arrowood. In recent months his mother had complained of a tendency in him to resent any questions about the girls he was having dates with on the weekends. If, under pressure, he mentioned the name of a particular girl, it wasn’t a name that his mother knew. I couldn’t explain such a business to Mary—there was no use in it—but I think I understood pretty well what Hugh was going through in that respect. And I could remember that a boy, hating himself for his own fallen and degraded state, is apt at such times to begin idealizing some attractive, sympathetic woman who is enough older than himself to seem quite beyond his aspiration—particularly if she is even vaguely the intellectual type. I didn’t ask Hugh how old Miss Arrowood was or what she looked like. I just dropped by the school one afternoon in March when I knew there was to be a rehearsal of the class play.

  It wasn’t even necessary for me to go inside the auditorium to see what I had come to see. Through a glass panel in one of the rear doors I could see the whole stage. The play they were practicing for was one of those moronic things that they give big grown-up boys and girls to act in. (They did it even in the private schools when my older children were coming along.) This one was called Mr. Hairbrain’s Confession: A Comedy. I read the title in a notice on the bulletin board beside the auditorium door.

  After two seconds I spotted Miss Arrowood, who was giving directions from a position at the side of the stage, and I knew that my conjecture had been a false one. I say “after two seconds” because for about two seconds I mistook that lady to be one of the cast and already in costume and makeup. Her bosom was of a size and shape that one of the youngsters might have effected with a bed pillow. Her orange-colored hair may really have been a wig. On the far end of her unbelievable nose rode the inevitable pince-nez. The woman’s every gesture had just the exaggeration that you could expect from any member of the cast on the night of the performance.

  I realized who she was when she started giving some directions to Hugh, who was now posturing in the center of the stage. No, she wasn’t directing him, after all, she was applauding something he had already done or said. Hugh, like his fellow actors, was reading his lines from the book. Every time he opened his mouth or so much as turned his dark head or struck a new position, she either nodded approval or shook with laughter. She hardly took her eyes off him. Hugh no doubt had a comic role, but I knew that nothing in that play was so funny or so interesting as Miss Arrowood’s conduct would have led me to believe. I can’t say exactly how long I stood watching, lost in my own damned thoughts. When finally I did leave it was because someone in the cast—not Hugh—saw me and called Miss Arrowood’s attention to my presence. At once she began motioning to me to go away, waving her book in the air and shooing me with her other hand. She didn’t know who I was and didn’t care. Miss Arrowood knew only that she wasn’t going to have any interruption of the pleasure she took from watching Hugh.

  There was no more to it than that. Miss Arrowood was just another old-maid schoolteacher with a crush on one of her pupils. I doubt very much that Hugh’s experience with her had any influence on his finally going into the theater the way he has. Quite naturally she must nowadays imagine herself to have been his first great influence and inspiration, but if Miss Arrowood has ever gotten to New York and found her way over to the East Side, to that little cubbyhole of a theater where my son Hugh Robert directs plays, I’ll bet she doesn’t understand the kind of plays he puts on any better than I do. At any rate, she didn’t succeed in turning him into any radio announcer or even into an actor, thank God. I doubt that she hoped to, even; for in my opinion Hugh Robert didn’t have any better voice than any of the rest of the family. Physically he is very much like the rest of us. But it is my opinion also that the lady tried to play upon Hugh’s vanity for that year, for the sake of keeping him near her. And it must certainly have been she who arranged for a certain phonograph record, which he made on a machine at school, to be put on the local radio. This happened one miserable Sunday afternoon in May. It capped everything else that had happened.

  Hugh rose early that Sunday morning in order to plug in the charger to the batteries of the radio. Our set was an old battery-type table model, one that I had paid a lot of money for when it was new. Hugh was fond of giving it a big thump and saying in his best smart-aleck voice, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore.” But he would have been the first to admit—especially on the Sunday I’m speaking of—that there are times when the electricity goes off just as you want to hear some program. I hung on to my battery set all through the Depression, just the way I did my Pierce-Arrow. And it is true, of course, that we did sometimes find, when a favorite program was due to come on, that we had forgotten to charge the batteries.

  But the batteries didn’t need charging at all that Sunday in May, and Hugh knew they didn’t. He simply wasn’t taking any chances. When I came down to breakfast, I saw the ugly little violet light burning in the charger at the end of the living room. I ob
served Hugh coming in there to check on them off and on all morning. Apparently when the idea of charging the batteries first struck him, he had jumped out of bed and thrown on some clothes without bothering to comb his hair or put on his shoes. He came down wearing his old run-over bedroom slippers, his everyday corduroy pants, and a wrinkled shirt that he must have pulled out of the clothes hamper. He wandered around the house like that all morning. When his mother was leaving for church at ten-thirty, I asked her if she didn’t think she ought to remind him to get properly dressed before the other children came for dinner. But either she forgot to, or she decided against it, or she just “hated to” and didn’t.

  During the two hours his mother was gone, I could hear Hugh moving about all over the house. First he would be in the basement, then at the closet in the back hall, then upstairs somewhere, even on the third floor. Every so often he would come back to the living room to have a look at the batteries. He would sit down and try to get interested in some section of the Sunday paper. But he couldn’t stay still except for short intervals. Every time he got up, the first thing he did was to go and look out one of the living-room windows. I suspect that during his wandering through the house he must now and then have stopped and looked out windows in most of the other rooms, too. To him, that day, the weather outside was the most important matter in the world.

  And in spite of its being May, the weather outside was quite wintry and nasty. Rain fell during most of the morning, and there was occasional thunder, with streaks of lightning away off across town. We had been having a series of electrical storms, which generally come to us a month earlier than they did that year. This bad weather was what Hugh had pinned his hopes on. The understanding was that if the ball game—the third of the season—was called that Sunday, then Station WCM was going to fill in the first ten minutes or so of the time with a recorded reading Hugh had made of “A Message to Garcia.” Though I had been unaware of it before, it seems that the station made a practice of devoting such free periods to activities of the public schools. Hugh managed that Sunday to make us all keenly aware of the fact.

  I seldom missed listening to the Chatham Barons’ home games. When it was a good season, I even used to go out to Runnymede Park and watch the games. The Barons, however, hadn’t had such a season in almost a decade. The last time they had won their league’s pennant was in 1925. But, even so, I have never been one to go running off to Cincinnati or St. Louis to see big-league games when we have a team right in Chatham to support and root for. It happened that this year the Barons had won their first two games, and I was hopeful. In particular, I hoped to be listening to the broadcast of a third game in what might turn into a winning streak. I knew why Hugh kept looking out the windows, and soon I was looking out windows, too. The rain came down pretty steady all morning and only began to let up about noon. I found I was pitting my hopes against his. I was, at least, until I saw how awfully worked up the boy was. Then I tried my best to hope with him. But I don’t think I ever before had such mixed feelings about so small a thing as whether or not a ball game would be rained out.

  Hugh’s mother returned from church at twelve-thirty. The other children came for dinner just before one. Hugh was off upstairs when the others arrived, and had to be called to come to the table. I supposed that he had finally gone up to get himself dressed, but he came down in the same state of undress, with his hair still uncombed, and I saw at once that it offended his brothers and his sister. I saw Sister trying to signal her mother, indicating that Hugh ought at least to go and comb his hair. But her mother’s eye was not to be caught that day.

  Hugh was unusually silent during the meal, and his silence was contagious. From time to time I saw every member of the family taking a glance out the window to see how the weather was. After raining all morning, the skies seemed to be clearing. It was mostly bright while we sat there, with only an occasional dark interval. During those dark intervals, Hugh ate feverishly; otherwise he only picked at his food. I’m afraid that with the rest of us the reverse was true.

  Once, while Lucy May was passing around a dish, I even saw her turn her black face toward a sunlit window at Hugh’s back. Just as she did so, there came from outside the clear chirping of a redbird, which brought a beautiful smile to her face. The others were making a show of keeping up the conversation while a servant was in the room, and so when she offered Hugh the dish she was able to mumble to him without their taking notice, “You hear that redbird, don’t you, Hugh! He say, ‘To wet! To wet!’ That’s a promise of rain, honey!” Hugh may or may not have heard the redbird. But he paid no more attention to Lucy May’s encouraging words than he had to the encouragement and applause of Miss Arrowood.

  The very instant we rose from the table, there was a flash of lightning so close to us that it brightened the windows. And there followed a deafening crack of thunder. Hugh galloped across the hall into the living room and commenced disconnecting the batteries from the charger and hooking them up to the radio. The rest of us followed, just as if there were no other room in the house we could have gone to. By the time I got in there, Hugh was tuning in on WCM. There was a roar of static, and then, as the static receded, the announcer’s voice came through saying, “The next voice you hear will be that of Hugh Robert Perkins,” and went on to tell who Hugh’s parents were, to give his street address, and to say that he was a senior at West High and a member of Miss Arrowood’s class in oral readings. Outside, a sheet of rain was falling, and there was more thunder and lightning than there had been all morning.

  Through the loudspeaker the voice of Hugh Robert Perkins began with some introductory remarks, telling us how, why, when, and by whom “A Message to Garcia” had been written. It didn’t sound especially like Hugh’s voice, but even at the outset the static was so bad that I missed about every third word. After the first half minute of the “Message” itself, it seemed hopeless to try to listen. Yet we had to sit there, all of us—and without any assistance from Miss Arrowood or Lucy May—and suffer through the awful business with Hugh. At least, it seemed to us we had to, and we thought that’s what we were doing.

  Hugh never once looked around from the radio. His eyes were glued to the loudspeaker, which was placed on top of the set. He had pulled up a straight chair, and he sat with his legs crossed and his hands clasped over one knee. He held his neck as straight and stiff as a board and didn’t move his head to left or right during the entire ten minutes. The storm and static got worse every second, and he didn’t even try to improve the reception. He didn’t touch the dials. Toward the very end, I saw his mother raise her eyebrows and tighten her mouth the way she does when she’s about to cry, and I shook my head vigorously at her, forbidding it. I knew what she was feeling well enough; we were all feeling it: Poor boy had endured his uncertainty, had for days been pinning his hopes on the chance of rain, and now had to hear himself drowned out by the static on our old radio. I thought it might be more than flesh and blood could bear. I thought that at any moment he might spring up and begin kicking that radio set to bits. But I knew, too, that his mother’s tears wouldn’t help matters.

  What a fortunate thing for us all that I stopped her. Because not ten seconds after I did, the reading was finished and Hugh was on his feet and facing us with a broad grin of satisfaction. I saw at once that for him there had been no static. Or, rather, that he had heard the clear, sweet, reassuring tones of his own voice calling to him through and above the static, and that his last doubts about the kind of glory he yearned for had been swept away. He ran his hand through his tangled hair self-consciously. His blue eyes shone. “There!” he said. And after a moment he said it again, “There!” And I felt as strongly then as I feel it now that that was the real moment of Hugh’s departure from our midst. He tried to fix his gaze on me for a second, but it was quite beyond his powers to concentrate on any one of us present. “It’s a shame . . .” he began rather vaguely, “it’s a shame you had to listen to my sorry voice instead of hearing t
he game. But maybe the game will come on later. . . . Did you hear the place where my voice cracked? That was the worst part of all, wasn’t it? I’m glad it’s over with.” He gave a deep sigh, and then he said, in a voice full of wonder and excitement and confidence, “Gosh!”

  At once, he went upstairs and dressed himself in his Sunday clothes and left the house, saying that he had a date, or maybe it was that he was going to meet some of his cronies somewhere. I didn’t bother to listen. I knew that he would be back for supper that night and that he wasn’t really going to leave us for some time yet. And I knew it wouldn’t be a matter of a letter on the breakfast table when he did go, because it couldn’t any longer be a matter of a boy running away from home. While the other children were laughing over what had happened and were talking about what a child Hugh still was, I was thinking to myself that Hugh Robert Perkins hadn’t many more of his “mistakes” ahead of him. I felt certain that this afternoon he had seen his way ahead clear, and I imagined that I could see it with him.

  The other children left the house soon after lunch that Sunday. Mary went upstairs to take a nap, as she often did when we had been through something that there was no use talking about. I wandered through the downstairs rooms, feeling not myself at all. Once, I looked out a window in the library and saw that the weather had cleared, and I didn’t go and turn on the radio. And I had a strange experience that afternoon. I was fifty, but suddenly I felt very young again. As I wandered through the house I kept thinking of how everything must look to Hugh, of what his life was going to be like, and of just what he would be like when he got to be my age. It all seemed very clear to me, and I understood how right it was for him. And because it seemed so clear I realized the time had come when I could forgive my son the difference there had always been between our two natures. I was fifty, but I had just discovered what it means to see the world through another man’s eyes. It is a discovery you are lucky to make at any age, and one that is no less marvelous whether you make it at fifty or fifteen. Because it is only then that the world, as you have seen it through your own eyes, will begin to tell you things about yourself.