Monkey Island

by Paula Fox

  She smelled soapy, fresh, new, like everything in the apartment. He tried to think of her that way, part of the varnished floor of the living room, the standing lamp whose base was still wrapped in cardboard, the three small cabinets in the kitchen glistening with white paint.

  The baby’s crib was next to her bed in a room that was only large enough for one other piece of furniture, a small chest of drawers. There was beige tile in the bathroom, and a powdery new shower curtain that smelled chemical. In an alcove off the living room was a single bed covered with a blue blanket, and two long shelves for his books and clothes. “We’ll get a chest for you as soon as I start a job,” she said. He put the bus and his books on one shelf. His mother was taking his clothes from the shopping bag, folding them, and placing them on the other.

  “The Biddles bought you these,” she said. She sighed. He knew she was thinking that she ought to have gotten him the clothes. He had a sudden picture of her huddled in a doorway. She wasn’t new, any more than he was.

  “There are such angels in the world,” she said. He was startled, recalling the conversation about saints between Buddy and Calvin.

  “They get paid by Social Services,” he said.

  His mother looked at him thoughtfully. “Even angels have to make a living,” she said.

  “I have to call Edwina,” he said.

  She took him to the window in the living room, where she pointed across the street to a telephone booth. “We’ll get a phone in a week or so,” she said. “I’ll watch you from here. Do you have a quarter?”

  “I have one,” he said. “You don’t have to watch me. I go everywhere by myself.”

  “I know that,” she said. “I’d just like to.”

  When she answered the phone, Edwina said, “Now you’re really home.”

  At her words, he felt a stab of irritation. He didn’t want anyone to tell him where he was. Quickly, he described the apartment. “Even the stove and refrigerator are new,” he said. “And the halls aren’t marked up yet with anything, not even in the elevator.”

  Then, because he felt faintly ashamed of something he’d said to his mother, he couldn’t remember what, or because Edwina’s words about home had bothered him, he said, “My mother says you’re angels.”

  Edwina laughed. “Well, I must tell Henry at once. Until now, he’s not been sanctified.”

  When he left the booth, he looked up at the apartment house. At a window on the fourth floor, his mother stood holding Sophie, smiling down at him. He had an impulse to wave. Instead, he put his hand in his pocket and went across the street with his head down.

  Clay was able to attend the same school, although he had told himself he wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d been transferred to another. He had made himself ready for that possibility by not hoping for anything. Still, he was very glad there’d been no transfer, mostly because of Earl, and because of the new librarian, Miss Sanders. “A new book came in I think you’d like,” she would say, looking at him seriously. And a week ago, she suggested he take home David Copperfield. “You’re ready for it,” she’d said. “It’ll wither your timbers.”

  It was the beginning of May, and the breeze that blew down the streets along which Clay walked to school no longer had the sky smell of winter. Chicken roasting in the take-out place, whiffs of chemicals from the dry cleaner’s, the exhaust from buses and cars, and the faint citrus aroma of the grapefruit and oranges in their crates at the entrance to the fruit and vegetable markets, gave a human smell to the air. A few stunted trees planted in squares of earth at the edge of the sidewalk, their lower trunks surrounded by chicken wire, were veiled in green, their new leaves the color of pea pods.

  Clay’s mother had found a job two weeks earlier in an insurance office, and Sophie spent the day, until 4:00 P.M., with a young woman who lived on the floor above their apartment and who had two small children of her own. On weekends, Earl and Clay went to the places they liked, the comic-book store, the warehouse district, new building sites, and one they’d recently discovered, a promenade right on the Hudson River where boats were moored, bobbing on the water, their sails furled tight as the new leaves.

  But at least once a week, Clay went back to the park. He suspected that someday soon, he would give up the park. He had given up hope of finding Buddy.

  And then on a Friday afternoon at the end of the first week in May, he found him.

  He had been standing beside the tree that was next to where Calvin’s crate had been. It was late in the day, but the air was still warm, and there was a thin buttery light that softened the stony facades of buildings like a transparent yellow cloth hung over them. There were three new benches. On one of them sat an elderly man reading a newspaper. His shoes were shined, and he wore a light topcoat. A boy on a skateboard suddenly shot by on the path near where Clay was standing. A woman with a small, plump, white-furred dog on a long leash walked slowly the length of the park.

  Clay had turned to look at a building that had been dark and empty when he had lived in the park. Now it had many curtained windows. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a man on a bicycle waiting for the light to change at the corner. The man was looking at the park. His eyes suddenly fixed on Clay. He held up his arms to the sky, the bicycle started to topple, he leapt from it, dragged it to the sidewalk, and began to run just as Clay did.

  They met at the iron railing.

  “Where have we been!” Buddy exclaimed, leaning over and grabbing Clay’s shoulders. “I’ve been thinking and thinking about you! Every time I ride by here, I see little Clay in his corduroy jacket, and I say to myself, where is he? And now look at this. You’re here!”

  Clay was laughing, hanging on to Buddy’s arms. “I’ve been coming here for months, thinking maybe—and now you’re here too!” he cried.

  Buddy wore dark blue running shoes and a lightweight beige jacket. He was shaved close to his skin, and although the bicycle didn’t look new, it was in good shape.

  “Who goes first? You or me?” asked Buddy.

  “You,” said Clay.

  Buddy, smiling, climbed over the railing, and Clay leaned against him. Buddy placed his hand on Clay’s head the way he used to do. For a moment, they stood there like that. “Got to keep my eye on my wheels,” Buddy said, turning back to the railing. They both leaned on it.

  “Okay, here goes,” Buddy said. “I stayed in a shelter, had to—the weather would’ve killed me. I hated that place.… Well, I had nothing left for anybody to steal. I do now. My shoes, my jacket, my clean shirts. I found a new shelter with strong lockers. That was after I got a job. Messenger. It’s a Wall Street office—firm, they like to call it. I carry stuff all over the city, papers, letters, and like that. I was always good on a bike. I could take it upside of a building, you know, Clay. And I started high school, night classes. I’m fixed up. Beginning to be. I’ve saved eight hundred fourteen dollars. When I get a thousand, I’m going to get a place of my own. Queens, maybe. You have to have the deposit and two months’ rent. Nobody’s giving you anything. When I get the high school certificate and the place, I’ll see what to do next. I have plans. But I won’t speak about them yet. There’s no telling.”

  “You didn’t come back to the hospital again,” Clay said with a touch of shyness.

  “I knew you were going to be all right,” Buddy said. “I couldn’t come back. Too much on my mind.”

  “What happened to Calvin?” Clay asked.

  “He died,” Buddy said, and shook his head. “He was too sick. There wasn’t anybody or anything for him. I went to see him the last few days he lived. For about an hour, he came to and could talk. He asked about you—said, ‘Did that boy find his mother?’”

  “Yes,” said Clay, feeling he was telling it to both Buddy and Calvin. “I found her. Or Social Services did. I have a new sister. Sophie. My mother has a job, and we live in an apartment. I’m going to school. I can walk there from home.”

  “Home. That’s good,” said Bud
dy.

  The word had slipped out. Clay thought about it. He couldn’t take it back. That would mean trying to explain the tangle of feelings he had about his mother and his father—and home. The tangle was something inside him, alive and mysterious. When he’d said home just now, it seemed for a moment that everything in his life was clear, that the tangle had disappeared.

  “You hear anything about your daddy?” Buddy was asking.

  Clay shook his head. “We don’t know where he is,” he said, “but he’s not dead.”

  They stared at each other, both thinking, perhaps, of the huge country into which Clay’s father had disappeared, a country like an ocean.

  “You remember the night the stump people came to beat us up?” Clay asked. “That’s what Calvin called them—stumps.”

  “I’m not likely to forget them,” Buddy replied.

  “Maybe Calvin wouldn’t have died—” Clay began, but Buddy interrupted him.

  “He would have anyhow.”

  “Maybe they made it happen sooner,” insisted Clay.

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so. Something would have made him want liquor—a car banging into another car, a fight in the park.”

  “They called you that word,” Clay said.

  “Yeah,” said Buddy. “It wasn’t the first time, won’t be the last.”

  “If they said they were sorry, would you have forgiven them?”

  Buddy laughed aloud. “Forgive them! They’re just part of the sludge I got to make my way through. If a snake bit you, would you forgive it? It’s what snakes do. It’s what people like that do. Sorry is nice but short. Nigger is the longest word I know.”

  “What’s a place beyond forgiveness?” he asked Buddy urgently.

  “Your own room,” Buddy said. “You have to go your own way.”

  “Can we see each other again?” asked Clay.

  “When I get a permanent address,” Buddy replied. He took a pencil and a slip of paper from a jacket pocket. “Write down your phone number,” he told Clay.

  Clay wrote it down and, next to it, wrote his full name.

  “It may be a while,” Buddy said. “But you know I’ve got you in my mind. Now I’ve got to go a ways from here for a pickup. I’m truly glad you and your mother found each other. You’re lucky, one of the lucky ones. You know that, don’t you, Clay?”

  Clay nodded because Buddy had said it. The truth was he hadn’t thought about luck.

  On his way home, he remembered Calvin’s notebooks, and what he’d told Clay he’d been writing down—a history of his life and times. When the park was cleaned out, someone must have thrown Calvin’s notebooks into the back of a garbage truck.

  Perhaps the old man had simply liked writing things down, part of his staying neat in a cyclone. Clay smiled, imagining himself trying to tie his shoelaces and comb his hair as hurricane winds blew houses and trees past him. It made him think of Charlie Chaplin.

  His father had taken him once to see an old-fashioned movie. Clay recalled a scene where a blizzard was roaring around a tiny cabin perched on the edge of a cliff. Inside the cabin, Charlie had set out a dining place for himself at a rickety table, and with very delicate manners, was eating a plateful of shoelaces as though it were spaghetti. He’d like to see that movie again.

  When he saw his apartment house ahead, he began to run toward it.

  He opened the door with his key. His mother was sitting on the couch, resting, her head back. A foot away, Sophie was asleep in her stroller. His mother must have just brought her home from her day-care upstairs.

  “Ma,” he called, louder than he’d meant to. She started and looked at him. He went to her and touched her arm that lay along the arm of the couch.

  “I was lucky,” he said. “We were all lucky.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  There was a sudden cry.

  He turned. The baby was looking right at him, her hands flying toward him, her eyes bright with recognition.

  “Oh, Sophie!” Clay said.

  About the Author

  Paula Fox is a notable figure in contemporary American literature. She has earned wide acclaim for her children’s books, as well as for her novels and memoirs for adults. Born in New York City on April 22, 1923, her early years were turbulent. She moved from upstate New York to Cuba to California, and from one school to another. An avid reader at a young age, her love of literature sustained her through the difficulties of an unsettled childhood. At first, Fox taught high school, writing only when occasion permitted. Soon, however, she was able to devote herself to writing full-time, but kept a foot in the classroom by teaching creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, New York University, and the State University of New York.

  In her novels for young readers, Fox fearlessly tackles difficult topics such as death, race, and illness. She has received many distinguished literary awards including a Newbery Medal for The Slave Dancer (1974), a National Book Award for A Place Apart (1983), and a Newbery Honor for One-Eyed Cat (1984). Worldwide recognition for Fox’s contribution to literature for children came with the presentation of the Hans Christian Andersen Award in 1978.

  Fox’s novels for adults have also been highly praised. Her 2002 memoir, Borrowed Finery, received the PEN/Martha Albrand Award for the Art of the Memoir, and in 2013 the Paris Review presented her with the Hadada Award, honoring her contribution to literature and the writing community. In 2011, Fox was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame.

  Fox lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, the writer Martin Greenberg.

  All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1991 by Paula Fox

  Cover design by Connie Gabbert

  ISBN: 978-1-5040-3741-9

  This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.

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