by Paula Fox
Last night, he had been working out how long he’d spent in the park, four weeks and three days. He’d never be able to figure out how many miles he’d walked, going back and forth between the park and the hotel, gathering cans and bottles with Buddy, wandering the streets.
He felt the cleanness of his skin and hair. His sores were healed. He thought of what it would be like to plunge through the net again, back to the iron-gray dirty pavements, the rusty-railed park, the newspapers smelling of urine, the itching and scratching, the gnawing in his belly, the awful grip of loneliness, of being outside of everything.
“My father lost his job,” he began. “That was maybe a year ago when his magazine folded. Ma learned to work computers and worked at night. She’s having a baby. I guess it’s born by now.” He glanced quickly at Mrs. Greg, wondering if she knew something he didn’t.
Mrs. Greg was looking at him attentively, her head cocked slightly forward as though to catch every word.
“Well, my father went away. Missing Persons couldn’t find him.”
“When do you think that was?” Mrs. Greg interrupted him.
“About seven months ago,” Clay replied. “Then Ma stopped working. Pretty soon we couldn’t pay the rent. Then we went to the hotel—after Ma went to Social Services. That’s where they put us—in that hotel. She went away too. She was gone when I woke up in the morning. I thought she’d come back. She didn’t.”
“How long ago was that?” Mrs. Greg asked.
“How long have I been in the hospital?”
“Ten days,” Mrs. Greg said promptly.
He thought for a moment. “About six weeks and four days,” he said. “That’s when she went away.”
“Someone took care of you in the park? A young black man?”
“Buddy,” he said. “And Calvin too. But Calvin drank too much and now he’s in a hospital and isn’t going to make it.”
Mrs. Greg stared at him for at least a minute. He didn’t mind. He felt easy now. After all, he’d told her only the truth.
“Do you have relatives anywhere?” she asked at last.
“My father’s mother, in Oregon. If she’s alive,” he replied. “But she won’t have anything to do with us.”
Mrs. Greg looked very interested.
“Why is that, do you think?” she asked.
“I know why. Because my mother is Italian. And my father’s mother said that that ended the family. But my father said she’s lost out on everything.”
For a second, Clay thought he might start yelling at the top of his lungs instead of speaking so calmly and coolly. Then he recalled what Calvin had said in his dry voice: “Families can let you down.” Maybe that was half-true. Calvin had a son he hadn’t seen in years, and if Calvin died, the son wouldn’t even know he’d left the world. Thinking of Calvin, how funny he could be even when he was sarcastic, made Clay feel less like yelling. “Life is like that,” Calvin would have said.
“You must feel you’ve been dropped from a cliff,” Mrs. Greg said softly.
Perhaps he did feel that way. But he didn’t want to be told how he felt.
Mrs. Greg was leaning forward. Suddenly she reached out and took his hand. Not quite meaning to, he made a fist, but she kept on holding it.
“Those two men were good to you?” she asked. “They didn’t mistreat you?”
“Yes,” he answered so loudly they both jumped. “They were so good to me!”
She let go of his hand and glanced down at her notebook. “Listen, Clay,” she began. “You’re not going back to the streets. We have to do a few legal things, like making you a ward of the court. That’s a formality. And we’re going to find you a really nice home with nice people—and very shortly, not in a hundred years and a day. Meanwhile, we’re going to look for your parents. I want you to write down your old address and your mother’s and father’s full names, and where you went to school and the name of the hotel. Also the name of anyone who came to see your mother, like someone from Social Services. All right?”
He thought of Miss You-can’t-fool-me. But he wouldn’t write that down.
“You may find it hard to believe, but your getting sick has a good side to it,” said Mrs. Greg. “You can think of this hospital as part of the net.”
She isn’t so bad, he thought. She probably wouldn’t look away from people lying on the sidewalk. She’d probably even worry about them. She had tried hard to understand what it was like for me, squinting her eyes to show me how much she wants to help.
“Okay,” he said. He felt older than the small plump woman who was looking at him with so much sympathy on her face. At least, part of him did.
9 The Biddles
Clay’s clothes had been washed except for the corduroy jacket. Dirt had worked into it so deeply it was nearly all one color, an ashy brown. The lining hung from the collar in shreds. He held up a sleeve to his nose. He thought he could smell the streets he had walked on, the ground he had slept on, even the dust-thickened pieces of blanket and canvas he had wrapped himself up in. He bundled up the jacket and held it on his lap, not knowing what to do with it, yet worried at the thought of leaving it in the hospital.
“You look good, Clay,” the nurse, Alicia, said on her way to one of the other beds, where she took the temperature of a child with a broken arm, who explained, “My Christmas skates did it.”
Clay was sitting on the edge of his bed, waiting. There was a big hole in the sole of his right shoe, but a wad of newspaper Buddy had slipped into the shoe was gone.
He hadn’t seen Buddy since Christmas morning. Today was January 2. A new year had begun. He wondered if he would ever see Buddy again. In a paper bag next to him was Robinson Crusoe and the English double-decker bus. It was only a toy. Real buses groaned and rumbled along streets, and the drivers in their high seats looked impatient and stony.
“Hello, Clay,” somebody said.
A tall, broad-shouldered woman was looking intently at him from just inside the door. She was wearing a thick, fuzzy gray coat. Little wisps of brown hair stuck straight out around her ears from under a black wool hat on her head. She was holding a pair of red mittens and a big black pocketbook in one hand. In the other, she gripped a black jacket.
“I’m Edwina Biddle,” the woman said. “I know Mrs. Greg explained to you I’d come to take you home with me today.”
She held out the black jacket.
“This is an old thing someone outgrew. But we’ll get you a proper coat as soon as we can,” she said. “It’s very cold outdoors today.”
“Thank you,” he said. His voice squeaked as though it needed oil.
Alicia smiled at him as she passed the woman on her way to the hall.
“I hope you’re hungry. I made a meat loaf for supper, and there’s tapioca pudding too.”
Clay felt tears spring to his eyes, wash down his cheeks, and touch the edges of his mouth. Edwina Biddle remained near the door. She said nothing but kept a steady gaze on his face. When his tears stopped as quickly as they’d begun, she came to the bed and held out her hands with all the things she was carrying hanging from them. He took hold of them and gave a jump so his shoes smacked the floor.
Later, he was glad she had not rushed over to him and hugged him, or said things like, Don’t cry—everything will be all right. At that moment, he would not have liked to be hugged by someone he didn’t know. He hadn’t, after all, been crying because he felt terribly sad or frightened. His tears had come from the burst of relief he had felt at the word home.
“I hope you’re not married, and I hope you don’t smoke cigars,” Mr. Biddle said that evening when he arrived home from work. He was a big man, broad in the shoulders like his wife. In his dark brown hair, just over his forehead, grew a startling streak of white hair. Clay smiled politely. Mr. Biddle was a joker.
“Have some gum,” he said, holding out the yellow-wrapped stick to Clay. “And call me Henry.”
“Don’t give him that before supper, Henry,
” said Mrs. Biddle from the kitchen. “The sugar will take away his appetite.”
“Will it?” Henry asked Clay in a serious voice.
Clay shook his head and took the gum.
“You’re the strong, silent type, are you?” Henry asked.
Clay coughed.
“I see,” Henry Biddle said. He bent over, placed his big hands on Clay’s waist, and lifted him straight up in the air. “You don’t weigh much,” he remarked. “We’ll fix that.” He held Clay close to him for an instant and set him down on his feet. Clay turned away to hide his smile. He felt there was a reason not to show how much he’d liked being lifted up and held, but he couldn’t work out what it was.
“There’s a letter from your sister,” Mrs. Biddle said to her husband as she came to the kitchen door, “and a rug-sale notice from Macy’s, the phone bill, a request to help save the tortoises, seven catalogues, and a mail-o-gram that says you may have won a million dollars. Or was it ten million?”
“You open them and read them,” said Henry, hanging up his green storm jacket on a peg in the hall. “Then collect that million and save the tortoises.”
Mr. Biddle was a postal clerk and worked all day sorting mail at the post office. Clay could understand why he didn’t care to look through mail when he came home.
Mrs. Biddle went back to the kitchen, and Mr. Biddle said, “I’ll take a wash and be ready in a jiff.”
By then, Clay had seen everything in the apartment, which was on the sixth floor of a seven-storied yellow-brick building on the west side of the city near the river.
The letters were in a pile next to the telephone on a small table in a narrow hallway. Down a few steps and to the right was a living room with a plump sofa and two armchairs, and a round table covered with magazines and a pot of roses. Clay discovered the petals were made of cloth. On one wall hung photographs in silvery-looking frames of children of various ages. A small television set on a metal stand occupied the space between the two windows. On the wall behind the sofa was a large painting of a ship, an old-fashioned kind of ship with four masts and dozens of sails, sitting on a puddinglike blue sea furrowed with neat white-caps, behind it all a red sun sinking on the horizon. The floor throughout the apartment was covered with peach-colored carpeting. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom. One of the bedrooms was his. A wall shelf held games and toys, some of which he could tell had been broken and then repaired. On another shelf sat about twenty books, all of which appeared to have been handled and read by many people.
Mrs. Greg had explained to Clay that the Biddles were a foster-parent family. They didn’t have children of their own, but they took in other people’s children, boys and girls who had no place to live because their parents had died or had gotten too sick to take care of them or, as in his case, had disappeared. Mrs. Greg mentioned that there were other circumstances in which children needed temporary homes, but she didn’t go into them. As far as Clay was concerned, she didn’t have to. He remembered Tony, his thin, bony, small self huddled up against the hotel wall, his bruised face.
The questions he most wanted to ask but dared not ask yet were about time. Did children stay with the Biddles until they were grown-up? How long would he stay? Would he at some point be sent to another foster family? Would he, one morning, be put out on the sidewalk? He knew this last question was what Calvin would have called wild foolishness. He was connected now, through Mrs. Greg, to Social Services. The net was under him. Still, anything could happen.
They ate supper at a Formica table in the kitchen, where the walls were covered with small framed pictures, a shepherdess watering a sunflower, a rooster crowing on the roof of a barn, two birds holding a wreath in their beaks over the head of a little girl whose chubby hands were crossed in her lap on top of a flounced pink skirt. On several pieces of varnished tree bark were sayings written in such curly letters it was hard to decipher them. Home Is Where the Heart Is, Clay spelled out after staring at one while he ate warm meat loaf, peas, and a boiled potato.
He began to feel less strange sitting there. It was as if this real food filling him up so pleasantly was making his first meal with these two large friendly people ordinary as well as unusual. When a green glass bowl filled with tapioca was placed before him, he didn’t make a face and growl the way he had when his mother used to urge it on him. Mrs. Biddle handed him a can of evaporated milk with a V-shaped opening and said the tapioca was twice as good with a bit of cream. The food in the hospital had been pale, as if all of it had been boiled for days.
Eating had taken up most of his attention, so he only half listened to the Biddles’ conversation. It was mostly about Mr. Biddle’s day in the post office, about people who tried to sneak ahead in the line to buy stamps, about his friend, a Mr. Nakashima, who’d found an open envelope addressed to a person and a street that didn’t exist, and out of which had dropped an enormous dead spider.
When Clay finished everything, he glanced at the Biddles. They were both smiling at him.
“Good?” asked Mrs. Biddle.
Clay nodded.
“Nice to have you here, Clay,” said Henry.
He wanted to smile back at them, but a thought got in the way. Was his old life now blotted out? That was what he’d felt when he’d discovered new people living in the hotel room.
“Thank you,” he said.
The next morning, Mrs. Biddle told Clay she would wash the corduroy jacket and reline it. She could see that Clay had long outgrown it.
Clay imagined a boy somewhere in the city at the very moment of being lost, and set on a path that would lead him through hard days and nights to Edwina Biddle’s apartment, where Clay’s old jacket, spruced up, would be waiting for him in a closet.
They went to shop on Broadway. Mrs. Biddle bought him two pairs of shoes, sneakers and brown oxfords, blue jeans and two pairs of corduroy pants, a sweater, three shirts, socks and underwear, a navy blue down jacket and a wool hat, a toothbrush, and a canvas bag for schoolbooks.
“That’s a nice belt for you,” she said, pointing to one curled on a counter, a silver eagle emblazoned on its buckle. He ran a finger over the eagle, feeling its taut wings stretched in flight.
“Would you like it?”
“Thank you. Yes, Mrs. Biddle.”
“Call me Edwina,” she said. “I’d love that.”
After supper, Henry cut his hair. When Clay went to look in the bathroom mirror, he didn’t look familiar to himself. Of course, he was taller. It was odd to think he’d been growing all the time he’d lived with Buddy and Calvin in the park. His face was very thin. His brown eyes stared into their own reflection. Did he really look like his father, as his mother had often remarked? What did his father look like?
The school he was to attend was a ten-minute walk from the Biddle apartment. After he took reading and arithmetic tests, he was placed in one of the four sixth-grade classes. His homeroom teacher, Miss Moffa, called him Charles for several days. In the end, she got his name right but didn’t pay much attention to him. He could see she had her hands full keeping the class quiet enough to give out assignments.
He was the thirty-third student in his class. His desk was next to a girl who, as soon as he sat down, gathered up her pen and pencils and a blue comb and moved them all away as though she knew he meant to grab them.
He had been worried the first day he’d entered the old gray stone building with its great dirty windows. A man in uniform had passed a device like a ray gun over him and the other children to make sure no one was carrying a concealed weapon.
But nobody bothered him much. During class changes, the corridors were packed. Some of the bigger boys and girls punched anyone they could reach with their jabbing fists. There was one who cursed and screeched with laughter whenever he landed a blow. His face was bone white, and bristles of hair stood up on his scalp like porcupine quills. Clay named him Son of Stump People.
In a week, he had made a friend. His name was Earl Thickens. His smi
le reminded Clay of Buddy’s. They ate lunch at the same table in the school cafeteria. Whenever there was a free period, they sat together. Neither Earl nor he asked each other about their families.
“Don’t let anyone see your belt with that eagle on it,” Earl advised him. “Somebody will take it off you.”
In the afternoons especially, the school was a crazy house of noise. There was fighting in the corridor, bells clanged, teachers shouted to try and bring about order. Clay set himself against it all. He discovered he wanted to read anything he could get his hands on, to learn everything.
When he couldn’t hear the teachers’ voices through the din, he watched their lips. In time, he got pretty good at guessing what they were saying. He wrote it all down and did his homework regularly. Sometimes he could escape into the library, which smelled of paste and dust and books, and where it was quiet like a cove you could row your boat into to get out of the gale wind.
In the long-ago days when he’d lived with his father and mother, a teacher had written on his home report that he daydreamed too much.
He didn’t daydream anymore. He remembered.
One bitter afternoon in late January when the wind blew fiercely through the streets and rattled signs and doors, he went downtown with Earl to a store that sold old comic books. While Earl went through stacks of Spider Man comics, Clay stared through the store window at the street. It had begun to look familiar. His gaze fell upon the entrance to an alley that ran alongside a big apartment house.
It was where he and Buddy had found a hoard of bottles and cans to redeem. He realized with a shock that made his knees quake that he couldn’t be more than a few minutes’ walk from the park.
Earl shook his arm. “Hey! You going into a trance?”
“I was thinking about something.”
“Think on this,” Earl said, holding an open comic book in front of Clay’s face. With one finger, he pointed to a vampire that seemed to have been drawn with black shoe polish except for her gruesome white fangs.
