Testing the Current

by William McPherson

  “Dear Mother and Dad,” the letters would begin, and John would launch into a discussion of life in the Beta house. His father would look pleased; he liked fraternities and he was proud that John was president of his, with a special room of his own on the first floor. He didn’t even mind the house bills. Then the subject would turn to his classes. “Astronomy seems fine,” his mother would read as Tommy and his father ate and listened, “it’s a pipe,” which would bring a trace of a frown to his father’s face. He didn’t mind the house bills, but he didn’t believe in paying for pipes. For a long time, Tommy thought John was learning in astronomy class how to make telescopes from the kind of pipes they had in the cellar, and he wanted his brother to show him how until John explained that a pipe course was something different. It was easy. “But I’m really worried about economics.” John always worried about economics, which made his father mad. He thought economics was important, a lot more important than astronomy, and if he had learned to run a business, he didn’t see any reason why David and John couldn’t. “I guess we’ll just have to wait and see,” John would say. “Time will tell.” John invariably ended his discussion of economics with “Time will tell,” and his father just as invariably exploded.

  “What the hell does he mean, ‘Time will tell’?” his father would ask. “Why doesn’t he know?” Once he even exclaimed, “What kind of a dumbbell is he?” Tommy would try not to giggle, his usual reaction to his father’s passing rages, except when they were directed toward him, and if he had giggled then, this one surely would have been. He wondered why John bothered to tell his parents what he worried about; even he knew better than that, and he was fourteen years younger than John. He thought he’d tell him sometime to forget that sentence because it made his father so angry, especially when the next paragraph—a short one and the last—usually began, “By the way, I’m a little short of the old cash”—he always called it “the old cash”—“and I sure could use a little extra to see me through this month.” His father would scowl. “This month? It was the same story last month! He might not spend so much money if he’d learn some economics. Has he been up to Appleton lately?” he would ask Tommy’s mother, and she would reply, attempting to soothe him, “Why, I don’t know, dear. I don’t suppose so. At least, he didn’t mention it.” John went to Northwestern, which was near Chicago, and Emily Sedgwick went to Lawrence, which was in Appleton, Wisconsin. They weren’t very far apart, and it seemed likely to Tommy that John might have been to Appleton, but at least he knew better than to say so. Tommy knew John and Emily went back and forth a lot, visiting each other’s colleges. That seemed very grown-up to him: train trips and corsages and housemothers and chaperones and homecoming weekends and spring dances; sorority sisters and fraternity brothers, college songs and secret codes and handshakes and nighttime rituals—a lot more exciting than playing marbles with Paul Malotte, the boy who lived at the end of the street and went to the Catholic school, whose nose ran all the time and whose father had been bitten by a rabbit and died. Emily was a Pi Phi—like her mother and grandmother, she liked to explain—but she would not explain the meaning of the mysterious characters on the gold and jeweled pin she wore on her sweater. “It’s Greek,” she said, “and it’s a secret.” Chained to that pin was his brother’s Beta Theta Pi pin, and everybody expected that eventually, when they were both graduated and John was working, Emily would get his grandmother’s diamond. That pleased Tommy’s mother and father, even if John did take too many trips to Appleton, and it pleased the Sedgwicks, too.

  It was different with David. Whenever David tried to please his parents, especially his father, he produced the opposite effect, or so it seemed to Tommy. He started college the year after John—the same year Tommy started kindergarten—to study business, and he joined John’s fraternity. His father liked that, but David didn’t. He didn’t like business, and he stayed in college only two years. The next year, when Tommy was seven and in second grade, David stayed home and worked for his father. His father didn’t like that, although David was out so often and so late that it seemed to Tommy as if he were hardly there at all. His father didn’t like that, either.

  In the fall of the year David was home, Tommy and his parents took the train to Chicago. David couldn’t go; he had to work. It was the second time Tommy had been there, and the second time was a lot better than the first. He thought the train was exciting, sitting on the blue plush seats in their compartment that turned into a bedroom at night, sleeping in berths as the train pulled west and south, eating in the dining car, where Tommy spilled his peas and they rolled all over the floor, to his embarrassment but real relief, since he hated peas almost as much as he hated beets and asparagus, and only a little less than he hated carrots. The porter shined his shoes that night, just as if he were a grown-up, and in Chicago he saw a lot of skyscrapers, a lot of stores with escalators, and more people than he had ever seen in any one place. They stayed at the Palmer House, not in his Aunt Clara’s apartment, and Tommy had his own room that connected to his parents’. They kept the door open, though. On Saturday they took another train, to Evanston, to go to a football game and to visit his brother John at his fraternity house, one of the biggest houses Tommy had ever seen and he’d thought that he lived in a big house. John’s fraternity house seemed full of light and huge leather couches and chairs. It had a double staircase that divided above the front entrance, wrapping around the doorway as it descended grandly to the foyer. Tommy liked to run up one side of the sunlit double stairway and down the other. There was a bar in the basement with a drawing of a naked woman above it and a Wurlitzer nickelodeon. Tommy was embarrassed by the picture, but he stared at it when he thought no one was looking, memorizing its detail, which was sort of shadowy. There was a big dog named Whisky, who did tricks. People were always coming in and going out, and the place was filled with shouts and laughter and pretty girls in fur coats. Tommy and his parents had dinner there, in the big dining room. There were a lot of other parents too. Everyone treated Tommy’s very politely, and they all asked about David. After dinner his parents went back to the Palmer House and Tommy was allowed to spend the night in his brother’s room on the first floor. He spent the entire next day exploring, playing on the staircase, looking at the trophies, the fraternity paddles, the figure in the bar, playing with the dog, listening to John’s fraternity brothers joke about cramming for exams, about beer busts, about who was losing at bridge and how much, about girls and especially about the girl they called the punching bag. She was a Tri Delt. They joked with Tommy, just as if he were one of them, and they told him that when he grew up, he’d probably be a Beta too. Like Phil Meyer, Tommy thought, but it turned out that Phil Meyer wasn’t a Beta. Tommy wasn’t sure he’d ever grow up that much, to be as easy, as assured, as handsome as John and his friends. It seemed a fearsome and not altogether likely prospect.

  The train, the skyscrapers, the escalators, John’s fraternity house, his friends, the Palmer House, the porters on the train, the bellhops in the hotel—it was all one grand adventure to his wide eyes, almost as exciting as Richard Halliburton’s Book of Marvels that his mother had read to him, the Chicago River as exotic as the Bosporus, and Lake Michigan, the China Sea. Tommy could hardly wait to tell David all about it; but David wasn’t home when they arrived late that autumn afternoon.

  The house was gleaming but cold. Tommy could still smell the floor wax and the furniture polish, a little like lemons. Mrs. Munter, the Finnish lady whose husband worked for Tommy’s father, must have cleaned it that day and had probably turned down the furnace, as she was very frugal, his mother said, and wouldn’t have wanted to waste heat on an empty house. Tommy always called the Finnish lady Mrs. Munter, as did his mother, but he called the Indian girl Rose, and he called her husband, who only helped on the Island, Bill. His mother said that Rose liked children, although she and Bill never had any of their own, and she was good to her mother, who spoke only Indian and traded baskets for old clothes.
Rose was always urging him to eat cookies and doughnuts, which she herself devoured, and his mother had to speak to her about that; he wasn’t supposed to eat so many sweets. Rose was good to Tommy, but he didn’t think his mother thought Rose was always good to her; sometimes Rose was unreliable.

  A fire had been laid, fresh-cut kindling placed carefully like lattice over the andirons and beneath the logs, and every trace of ash had been scoured from the hearth. It looked immaculate, almost too clean to use, but it was gloomy that afternoon, and dark. Tommy longed to have a fire and asked his father if he wouldn’t light it. “Who did this?” his father asked, looking at the fireplace. “You can’t have a fire without ashes. Who took all the ashes out of the fireplace?” His father seemed angry. Why had he asked, Tommy wondered, and why couldn’t there be a fire without ashes? Somehow, sometime, perhaps when his grandparents had lived there and the big old house was almost new, perhaps when he was a tiny baby and they had just moved in, a fire must have been started without ashes. Of course David must have done it; Tommy knew immediately. It was David’s job to empty the ashes. Usually he just took a few scoops and threw them into a bucket, leaving Mrs. Munter or Rose to clean up after him, but when he put his mind to it David could be extremely neat. Sometimes he cleaned and ordered his room until it looked like a doctor’s office, everything spotless and everything in its place. It was like David to do this, if he took the notion, and yes, he had swept and washed every speck of ash from the fireplace and laid the new fire, neatly crossing stick over stick to make a bed for the logs, the big one at the back, a smaller one on top resting against the bricks and two of the same size in front, just so.

  Tommy learned that night that a fireplace should never be emptied of all its ashes, and David, when he came home, learned it too. His father seemed very angry, for reasons Tommy did not understand. He could not understand why there should be a lot of arguing over a little pile of wood ash in the fireplace. He was not sure his father understood, either.

  After a supper of milk toast, which his mother served him on his own small table in a corner of the dining room, Tommy went to bed, feeling very sad for his brother, who was only trying to please.

  Tommy loved his brother David that night without reservation; there was no vengeance in him, which was unusual in the ordinary course of his life with David. David cheated at Steal-the-Pack and made him play Fifty-two Pickup. He teased him without mercy, but David himself could not be teased. David tattled. He told his mother that Tommy had asked Mr. Lamontagne to give him an ice cream cone, though he naturally expected that David would charge it with the other groceries, and his mother spanked him with the Ping-Pong paddle. “Mr. Lamontagne’s not in business to give you ice cream cones,” she told him. “He’s got better things to do with his money.” She was mad at David, too; he’d bought the wrong vanilla. It was imitation. “It looks the same but it’s not,” she had said, and made David take it back when she had finished with Tommy. Once David told his mother that Tommy had stolen a nickel from his dresser, which he had, and again he was punished but that time he didn’t get spanked. David tantalized Tommy with quick glimpses into his special box, the one he kept locked on his dresser, and then, before Tommy could catalogue its contents or seize an object, David would snap it shut, lock it, and slip the key into his pocket. All Tommy ever saw, amid the profusion of treasures, was a deck of playing cards secured with a rubber band, a pair of cuff links, and three sets of dice, one red, one black, and one very small ivory pair, his favorite. Tommy wanted more than anything a box of his own that he could lock. David told Tommy that he was a nuisance, and he knew he could be. David hardly ever wanted to play with him. He really wanted to be somewhere else with someone else.

  David’s main interest was his girl. It certainly wasn’t his work, Tommy knew that, and his father had said that David didn’t understand that college was work, too. One day in David’s room, when Tommy was delving into his brother’s mysteries, he discovered a slim packet of letters, tied with a blue silk ribbon and addressed to his brother at college. It was strictly forbidden to read other people’s mail—“Yes, even postcards,” his mother had said—but these envelopes had already been opened. Tommy knew it would be wrong to read them, but impossible not to. He resisted only for a moment. Tommy was certain they would be much more interesting than the family letters that came to the house addressed to his parents and were read to everyone, and he was right. They were delicious. They were hilarious, and the handwriting was easy to read, too. “Dearest darling, I love you so much and miss you. . . . Dearest angel, I am sending you kisses and wish you were here so I could deliver them in person, on your eyes, your ears, your funny nose, your lips. . . .” It was true, Tommy thought, his brother did have a funny nose, and the thought of his being kissed, of her kissing him—on his eyes, ears, nose, and lips—astounded him. He was amazed, but he was gleeful. His brother would be furious, but what revenge! His mother was furious, too, when she found Tommy lying on David’s bed, reading David’s private letters. She didn’t care if the envelopes had been opened, and he was spanked. But she did not tell David—one punishment was enough, she said—and Tommy’s revenge was indeed sweet.

  He took his time about it, wanting to be positive his mother had not told David, waiting for his mother to forget about the incident. But one night at dinner, Tommy began crooning to himself, “Dearest darling, dearest angel, I am sending you kisses and wish you were here so I could deliver them in person”—his father looked at him as if he were crazy—“on your eyes, your ears”—suddenly louder—“your funny nose!” His brother by then had looked up from his preoccupations, and knew. He turned red. He turned white, and red again. He jumped up from the table and started around to the other side to grab Tommy, who had moved quicker and was already on his way up the stairs, shouting now, “your eyes, your ears, your funny nose, your lips, I love you so much,” and into the bathroom where he locked the door. He waited for a long time to come out, until his mother said they would remove the door from its hinges unless he unlocked it that minute. For some days, whenever David was around, Tommy stuck pretty close to his mother.

  In the spring, right after Easter, when everyone but David, who had to work, was on vacation from school and the thornapple thicket had begun to show a little green, David’s girl friend came to dinner with John and Emily. It was the first time Margie Slade had been to the house for a meal, although his brother had known her for a long time. Margie was twice an orphan. Her real mother, who Tommy’s mother said was a poor but a good woman—he imagined her walking down the street in a threadbare coat, smiling sadly—had died shortly after her birth and her father had gone to Detroit. Margie had another name then, until the Slades adopted her and changed it to Margaret, which she hated, but everyone called her Margie. Margie’s father and his brothers owned the coal company and a big dock. Tommy had never known Margie’s parents, and both of them had died, two years apart, her father just last winter. She was still in high school, and now she lived in their house with guardians instead of parents and a maid who brought her orange juice and black coffee every morning. Bob Griswold gave her an allowance and paid all her bills. It didn’t seem like an altogether bad deal to Tommy, and he sometimes wondered who would be his guardian if his parents were killed, and if a lawyer would bring him an allowance every week, and if he would be rich.

  Margie’s aunt, whose name was Maxine, lived next door to Tommy in the house that had once belonged to the former governor of the state. Tommy thought it was one of the nicest houses in town. It had a library with a fireplace and a complete set of Jenny Slade’s Nancy Drew mysteries, which Tommy always wanted to read but didn’t because he was a boy. It had another room that Mrs. Slade called the drawing room, which also had a fireplace and several pieces of spindly furniture covered in light blue silk that no one ever sat on. The Slades’ living room was cavernous and dark—Governor Wentworth had kept his books there but Mrs. Slade had torn out the shelves—and directly above it
was Mrs. Slade’s bedroom, equally large, with a small refrigerator and a wall that was all mirrors. Above that was a game room paneled in wood containing the governor’s billiard table covered in green felt and so big Tommy couldn’t imagine how it got up there. However it got up there, Tommy guessed the governor couldn’t get it out because it was still there. Tommy was very curious about the Slades and their house. His own house was comfortable enough but lacked mystery, except for his secret places in the attic, the cellar with its fruit room, and the back stairway, and his family sat down to breakfast every morning and dinner every night, not always together but always in the dining room. He never saw the Slades eat a meal together, and he never saw any of them use the dining room. Mrs. Slade liked soft-boiled eggs, which she ate with butter from a little cup, sometimes in the kitchen but usually in her bedroom. The Slades didn’t belong to the country club anymore, and they never seemed to go out for dinner; they hardly went out at all. In the morning Mr. Slade did drive to the dock in the Dodge, and return at the same slow pace in midafternoon. Once in a while, in the afternoon, Mrs. Slade went out in her Packard, sitting alone in the back seat while Reilly, the furnace and yard man, drove. “Take me for a ride, Reilly,” she would call down from the sun porch off her bedroom as Reilly worked around the garden, “I want to see the river,” and a few minutes later she would appear downstairs, dressed. Mrs. Slade often yelled at Reilly for one thing or another, yet she seemed to like him and sometimes she would call him up to her bedroom to talk to her. Mrs. Slade’s yelling didn’t mean much. Mrs. Slade could be very grand, but at one time or another she yelled at almost everyone: Etta, the maid, Mr. Slade if he was around—he spent most of his time in his own room—once in a while at her daughters who were three and five years older than Tommy and kept away from their mother as much as they could. Lily and Jenny were Tommy’s excuse for going to the Slades’ house in the first place, but his real reason was Mrs. Slade, the only woman he knew who could really swear, who stayed in bed a lot, who wore negligées or even used the word, and who would fling a fur coat over her shoulders and say, “Well now, Tommy, how does Mrs. Rich Bitch look today?”