A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  For the real dessert they had lemon pudding, which he didn’t like because it always tasted like the liquid soap in the tipping bowls over the lavatories in the Field House. He had to finish the chapter for English so he went right back to the dorm, where he snuck in the side door again and went as quietly as he could to the room.

  The second he opened the door he smelled the smoke from the Salem, and he knew that Doll had been there. The enormity of that crime almost made him bilious, and though he craftily stepped inside, shut the door and locked it in the dark, for a moment he tasted the lemon pudding again. Then Doll’s soft voice said, “Cliff, don’t turn on the light.” He saw the little red eye of her cigarette; she was there now, and he was really scared.

  But so was she. She couldn’t get her breath. She tried to talk without breath and the words just went out like little lights, and he’d hear a tooth click on a tooth.

  “Jimjo said he was sorry,” Doll said, nearly crying, “but we’ve…” and the breath left off. His eyes became adjusted and he could see the outline of her face, just a white disk against the dark. “I’ve got to explain,” she said, and then stopped for so long it seemed as though that was all she was going to say. She even sobbed; a little purr with a hiccup on it, and Cliff almost ran away. He almost ran to the door and out, but even in this circumstance it was not in him to be so impolite.

  “My father’s an absolute madman. He’s going to have Jimjo put in jail for rape. Because I’m too young in this state or something. Mrs. Bates found out from Mrs. Gilliam who found out from Dr. Parker and she—Mrs. Bates—told my mother and father.…” Silence, and hard breaths. “And if we don’t get married first, my father.…” Her teeth clicked three times. “He’s a madman, Cliff. He’s looked up all the laws. Jimjo tried to hide his car—not my father’s car, I mean Jimjo’s own car—but they found it down behind the swimming pool and got our suitcases.…”

  Doll was pregnant. She had a baby growing in her. She and Jimjo had gone all the way, and there was the vision of all that animal jerking and legs—Doll’s little skinny knees—and humped backs. He’d never thought of Doll like that, maybe because she was so young and skinny and boyish-looking. But now she was growing Jimjo’s baby in her.

  “And I was practically under house arrest, but I got away and hid in the bathhouse, in the boys’ john. It’s a mess, a terrible, terrible mess, Cliff. It would’ve been all right if my father.…” She stopped on that word and cried fluffy little noises, and her Salem dropped to the floor. She quickly picked it up.

  Then Jimjo himself slid in over the windowsill. “They’ve got my car,” he whispered. “For Christ’s sake the goddam Dean is sitting in it. Oh, the sons of bitches. It’s just a matter of time before they look in here again.”

  Doll had gone to him and they stood with their arms around each other. “I don’t know what to do,” Jimjo said. “I just don’t know what to do next.”

  Cliff felt again that frightening anger that made him fall, fall, and he must reach out to save himself. Grab the wrong branch and be killed. Jimjo had to come into his life and muck everything up, had to give him alternatives he couldn’t ignore. Now he had to do something, and for a moment he almost fainted at the thought of what he must do. It was like taking a full breath under water. But he took the breath.

  “I’ll borrow Lance’s or Joe d’Agostini’s car and meet you somewhere. Behind the Shell station, where they pile all the old tires. Now get out.”

  “Cliff!” Jimjo said. “For God’s sake, Cliff.…”

  “Get the hell out, you bastard,” he said in a violent whisper, and they got out; he meant it all right. He could have killed Jimjo, that stupid, careless animal.

  When they’d gone he turned on the lights and cleaned up any traces of Doll’s cigarettes, took the butts to the john and flushed them away. When he came back he met Bill Trippi trying the door, which he had locked on the way out. The anger was still in him, and the hall was all glowing with a brightness that hurt his eyes. He saw Bill Trippi so clearly, saw on his pale, self-satisfied face the intention never to knock before entering, always to use whatever power he had.

  “Ma Bates wants to see you right now,” Bill Trippi ordered in a voice he knew so well would be obeyed. Cliff came up to him, seeing things. How healthy Bill Trippi’s scalp was; each glossy black hair sprang rigid from its follicle, and the skin beneath was so clean, so white. It was as if in anger Cliff’s eyes were floodlights. He saw that the mesh covering the intercom box above Bill Trippi’s head was made of hardware cloth, that the little gold letters he had never bothered to read spelled Realistik, and that the screws that held metal to wood were Phillips screws.

  “I said, ‘Go down to Ma Bates’ office,’” Bill Trippi said like a purr, quietly, with understated authority; he had everything under such control. And for just a moment Cliff’s arms seemed to bloat with strength. He could hit Bill Trippi and hurt him very much, but not enough.

  “I’ll come right down,” Cliff said in a voice that was to his surprise a crafty imitation of itself—perfectly submissive. When you had a good thing going, as Jimjo said, you didn’t want to ruin it.

  “I’ll come right down,” he said again, for practice, and he followed Bill Trippi toward that cushioned, bright, official place. But this time he would come as a citizen of a world in which even a mother’s death could make you laugh out loud, and no meekness, no humbleness of knee or mind could make it love you quite enough. You had to outwit the sons of bitches.

  Ten Years Out

  In front were the estate-like facades—Tudor, Georgian, Gothic, with the Greek-lettered signs in light bulbs over the doors, the broad lawns and the handsome boys with their bucks and cardigans, who listlessly, gracefully twirled their lacrosse nets as they tossed a ball back and forth on a mild afternoon. In back, between fraternity row and Joe Dibbins’ back yard, was the no man’s land of abandoned floats with faded crepe paper shredding in the weather, an old car that could no longer pass inspection, and beer bottles. Joe had told his kids, and told and told them, not to go beyond the hedge, but they did, and now Joe, Jr. had cut his hand very badly. He sat very quietly, pale, six years old and ashamed of himself as they drove to the doctor’s house. Glennis sat with him in the back seat, and Gregg, who was three, stood leaning over the back of the front seat, pale himself, crying silently because of his brother’s wound. The old diaper Glennis held around Joe, Jr.’s hand had begun to soak through.

  “We’ll get that old hand fixed up,” Joe said. As they passed fraternity row he said, “Those little slobs! They’re slobs outside and slobs inside. They’re sneaky slobs. If they were real honest-to-god slobs they’d throw their beer bottles on their front lawns.”

  “You mean young, not little,” Glennis said. He turned to look at her. It was not the first crisis, and her face tiredly acknowledged that it would not be the last. Though pretty, she seemed tired, tired in a dragging deep way no sleep would cure. He turned back to his driving, and his hand ached in the place where Joe, Jr.’s cut divided the little palm.

  “It wasn’t on a beer bottle, it was on that broken window in that old car,” Glennis said.

  “We was trying to get inside,” Gregg said.

  “How many times have I told you to stay out of that yard?” Joe said angrily, and Gregg began to pucker up. Joe put out his hand—the one that ached—and touched Gregg on the head. The boy came tumbling over and put his head on Joe’s lap. In the back seat Joe, Jr. said nothing, just stared at the red bundle which enclosed his hand. Joe’s hands clenched around the wheel, and for a second he had the feeling he might pull the whole steering column out by the roots.

  The first trouble he’d had with the fraternity directly in back of his house, Sigma Beta, was a few months before at the climax of their hell week. He’d been working too hard, staying up too late, and the only time he could rest, when he absolutely had to have some sleep, was the night they kept throwing the GI can out of the window. It had something to
do with the initiation process—that and the firecrackers and the continual drunken shouting about castration. He’d stood at the bedroom window, both kids awake, Glennis awake too, and hoped they’d burn the Beta house down. It was too hot a night to close the windows. There was a town ordinance against firecrackers—fifty dollars per explosion, supposedly—and he counted up to a thousand dollars and then called the police, a thing he needed to be furious to do. The police seemed more interested in who he was, where he lived and what he did for a living than they were in the firecrackers, and later the amused shouts of “Gendarmes! Gendarmes!” made him even more furious. The firecrackers stopped, but nothing else did, and as he stood at the bedroom window in his pajamas he thought of calling the President of the University at two in the morning. He thought of sapping the foundations of the Beta house, then calling them up for a cryptic warning, then in ten seconds, crump.

  Glennis had kept asking him to come to bed. In the kids’ room Gregg was crying, but it was a tired, resigned cry and needed no immediate attention. “I knew it,” he said after one particularly shrill voice screamed again and again, with desire too obvious, sadism too little hid in it. “I knew it,” Joe said. “They castrate them all during initiation.”

  Now Gregg looked up and said, “We didn’t do it on porpose, Daddy.” Joe had the usual vision of his younger, more serious son riding the back of a playful yet demoniac mammal across the too blue waves of a child’s illustrated ocean. Blue, but ominous.

  “Purpose or not, I told you to stay out of there, Gregg.”

  The little boy answered, turning his head against the steering wheel, “I think we won’t do it any more, Daddy.”

  “He’s fainted,” Glennis said as they turned into Dr. Falle’s driveway. Joe, Jr. came to the second his head fell down between his knees, but Joe picked him up and carried him into the house. Glennis walked alongside, holding the diaper in place, and Gregg came after, carrying his mother’s pocketbook.

  Here we are, Joe thought, The Dibbinses, waifs one and all, cut, angry, fairly well broke. Also nervous: he already owed Dr. Falle sixty dollars for Joe, Jr.’s tonsilectomy.

  The doctor, called by his wife, came shouting. “So it’s you, is it?” he accused Joe, Jr. Joe, his face close to the gray face of his son, thought of his own mother’s description of the eyes of a sick child: “Two holes burned in a blanket.” He was always unpleasantly startled by Dr. Falle’s rough manner, and was again surprised by the tolerant, even affectionate look on his son’s face, as if the boy, wan, almost drained of fright by shock, could see that even though the bluster was an act, it was anyway a nice one.

  “Now what did he get into?” the doctor shouted. He had evidently been eating his lunch, and part of his paper napkin was still caught in his belt, which he wore, as does an aging athlete, below his belly.

  “Put him on the table, Daddy,” the doctor said. Already he was unwrapping the bloody diaper, his chubby, mottled fingers steady and purposeful—rather cruel. And there was the cut, impossibly deep and straight across the dirty little hand. The doctor’s left hand, like a clamp, closed off the arteries of the boy’s wrist. “You want to look at it, do you? Well, now, there’s a brave boy. No tears yet? Assay the damage, my boy! It’s your own hand. There, now. It’s only a little cut.” Joe, Jr. had cried out as the doctor bent his fingers back, back until Joe’s own fingers ached. “Now close your hand, Joey. Can you do it? It hurts like hell, don’t it? You’re a brave boy if I ever saw one, Joseph, and I’ve seen boys in all sorts of painful circumstances…”

  The doctor’s moosecall of a voice went on, and he bent the little fingers back, one by one. Joe, his arm around his son, felt the spasms of pain. “Ow, ow,” the boy said softly, then, “Ow!” then, “Ow, ow, ow,” softly again, as if in apology. It was no formless outburst; clearly he said, did not cry, the word. And all the time Joe wanted to tell the doctor, that character actor, to stop bending those goddam fingers.

  Glennis had taken Gregg out into the waiting room, but now she came to the door for a quick look.

  “He’s brave, Mother,” the doctor said. “Hand me that bottle,” he said to Joe. “This won’t hurt.” From the waiting room came Gregg’s worried voice: “Joey’s very brave, Mother.” The doctor swabbed Joe, Jr.’s hand with the colorless liquid.

  “Now I’ll tell you, Joey,” he said cheerfully, “You’re a lucky boy. That cut’s not so bad as it looks. You just might have cut some tendons. Hand’s full of ’em, you know! All those little strings in there to make your fingers go.”

  “Ow,” Joe, Jr. said interestedly, and the doctor told him all about the little strings.

  “Don’t try it right now, though, Joey,” he said. The cut had stopped bleeding, and as he explained about tendons he almost kept Joe, Jr. from being too interested in the hypodermic syringe he was preparing. “This isn’t going to really hurt, Joey, just sting a little. I’ll tell you what I’m going to do. I’m going to put some of this stuff in your hand around the cut, see? And then in a minute or so you won’t feel anything and then I’m going to take three or four little stitches across that cut to hold it together…”

  But the needle’s length and the needle’s hurt were too much, and Joe, Jr. lost his bravery. They held him and suffered his screams until the job was done.

  After the Novocain began to work Joe, Jr. got his bravery back again. The doctor pretended that he had never lost it.

  “I’m sorry I cried, Daddy,” Joe, Jr. said. He didn’t look at his hand while the doctor stitched it, but he answered the doctor’s questions in a deliberately rational voice: “It was on that old car. On the window.”

  The hand was bandaged. “We won’t want to move those fingers for a few days. Then you come back and we’ll have those stitches out,” the doctor said. “Nothing to it. One more little shot, now, Joseph—just a wee little tetanus shot, OK?” Joe, Jr. was shaken by this, but he rolled over and took the needle without a sound.

  “A brave boy. A brave boy indeed! I’ve seen grown men couldn’t take it so well!” Now that everything seemed to be over—the doctor was washing his hands in a final-looking way—Joe, Jr. let himself show signs of self-satisfaction. He held up his bandaged hand to admire it. “It’s going to be a little sore when that Novocain wears off, Joseph,” the doctor said, “but you can take it.” Joe, Jr. gravely nodded.

  “I wish there was somebody around to tell me how brave I am,” Glennis said. They sat in the kitchen drinking coffee. Joe, Jr. and Gregg were in bed, Joe, Jr. with an aspirin and his bundled hand, Gregg with his thumb and the satin binding on his blanket. Joe looked at his wife across the blue formica of the new kitchen table (the set unpaid for). Her right index finger was stained yellow at the first joint; her wrist was lean, her arm firm. She was thirty—two years younger than he—and he knew how old she felt. “Look at my eyes,” she had said once. “Look at the wrinkles. Look at my belly—look at the mush.” This had been six months after Gregg was born, and she had taken a handful of the loose skin. “Do you care?” “I care,” he’d said. “Every time you get an honorable scar I love you more.” They had been standing in front of the bathroom mirror, and she looked at him in the glass, unbelieving. What could she do about it?

  Now, at the kitchen table, she looked at him in the same way, her eyebrows slightly lifted, her mouth serious, composed. She dropped her cigarette butt, smoked so close to the filter he could smell scorched cellulose, into the dregs of her coffee. Another thing: she hated to owe money, and they owed everybody.

  “That old bull-thrower,” she said tolerantly. “I should cut my hand. Do you think he could convince me the way he did Joey?“

  “You want me to convince you?” Joe said.

  “Make it so I don’t have to be brave.”

  “I’m not worried,” he said. “What have we got to bitch about, really? We’ve got two bright kids, we own at least part of this house…” There followed, his voice sounding to him hollow—as if he overheard a stranger talk
ing on a floor below him—that straight accounting of good fortune that never cures a sadness. “I’ve got a job.…” As an assistant to the Director of the University Extension Service he made $4800 a year.

  “We’re right on the edge, Joe, and you know it.” As she spoke he saw, in the thin line of her upper lip, in the tilt of her slim shoulders, evidence of much thought. She was lean—like an old fighter, he suddenly thought—but her training was continual; night and day, spills, rips and sicknesses. She began to squint. “What if a tendon had been cut? What if one of a million things had happened? Happen? What have we got in reserve—I don’t mean just money. I watched you today. You nearly lost your mind. So didn’t I. We’re right out there on the edge.”

  Later, Pete Simpson came over. He’d just finished a chapter of his Ph.D. dissertation, and he wanted to celebrate. So he brought two six-packs of beer.

  “You are looking, children,” Pete said accusingly, “at the world’s foremost authority on something. What difference does it make what-thing?”

  Pete was short, already a little roly-poly beneath his tattersall vest. His weirdly youthful head looked as if it belonged to a large little boy, and turned and stopped like an owl’s, as if the body it really belonged to were inside of Pete, like the scrawny body of an owl beneath all those feathers, and thin. His brown, impudent eyes hardly ever seemed to blink. On his watch chain, along with his Phi Beta Kappa key, he wore a sterling-silver-handled folding beer-can opener, a gift, he said, from his mother. With this he skillfully opened three beers.

  “OK,” he said. “You know that jazz: an occupational hazard, and I don’t really believe it. Yes, I do, but I can’t let myself—or something.” He stared moodily at his pretty little can opener.

  “You don’t want to celebrate, you want to mourn,” Glennis said.

  “What I need is to go back to Harvard and get a fresh injection—or is it injection? That’s French—of dialectic from my fellow scholars.”