Stop-Time

by Frank Conroy

  Hours later, when I crawled out of the bag and got to my feet, the rain was still falling. I stood by the door and slapped at my clothes to get the powder out. Clouds of it drifted from my head as I ruffled my hair. I waited for a lull in the rain and jumped to the ground.

  It took me some time to find my way back. I was amazed how far I’d run—at least a mile. Wet to the skin, I walked through the station doors, crossed the huge waiting room, and opened the door to Travelers Aid. She was there, standing behind the counter, her head coming up as I closed the door. I avoided her eye.

  “I hope you spent a pleasant night,” she said.

  “I slept in a boxcar.”

  She went to the end of the counter and raised the leaf. “Well, it’s traditional I suppose. Very foolish, though. You could have been locked in.” Holding up the leaf with one arm she said, “Come on. You’re soaking wet.”

  “It’s all right.”

  “Please don’t argue. You can dry off in the bathroom.”

  I moved down the counter and slipped under her arm.

  “My God, you smell awful. What was in the car?”

  “Fertilizer.”

  “You’d better wash too. There’s only a sink but you can’t go home like that.”

  “Did you get him?”

  “Yes. Before he left for work.”

  “What did he say?”

  “I explained the situation and he agreed to wire your fare.”

  “Nothing else?”

  She hesitated. “He asked if you were all right and I said you were.” I knew she was lying but I remained silent. She opened the door to the bathroom. “Take your things off and hand them to me through the door. I’ll see what I can do. I brought my iron.” She walked me to the bus station, both of us moving under her umbrella. After a few steps I took the shaft. “Let me hold that,” I said, shifting it to give her better protection. We covered the short distance in silence.

  At the terminal I stood by the bus while she went inside to get my ticket. I felt a flash of annoyance at Jean. He was too cheap to send the extra couple of dollars for the train, which I would have enjoyed, so I had to take the bus, which I hated.

  “Here’s your ticket,” she said at my shoulder. “And a dollar. Twenty cents is for carfare and eighty for a sandwich and milk at the rest stop.”

  “Thank you.” People elbowed past us. “I guess I’d better go on in.”

  “Yes, if you go now you might get a window seat.”

  “I’m sorry I had to run away last night.”

  “That’s all right. Think about what’s ahead now.” She took a step back.

  I climbed into the bus. There was a window seat in the rear, on the far side, and I moved quickly and sat down. Staring through the rain-streaked glass I watched the white puddles on the black asphalt of the empty parking area. After a while the driver climbed in, pulled the door shut, and started the engine. Turning back to the window I saw her standing outside, under her umbrella, watching me. She’d come around the back of the bus and stood about twenty feet away. Neither of us moved. Then, very slowly, the bus rolled forward and she was gone.

  13

  Death by Itself

  I DON’T remember how old I was, but the small steps and low banister of the up staircase in P.S. 6 didn’t seem small and low. Fourth grade, perhaps fifth grade—it doesn’t matter. Climbing the stairs with my pal Pete Stein, climbing through the gray light, I swung my heavy wooden pass and listened to his high child’s voice. When the subject of fathers came up I suspected nothing.

  “Your father has cancer,” Pete said. “He’s going to die pretty soon.”

  I stopped where I was, not really understanding, but aware that something important had been said. How was I to respond? What did the world consider a proper response at such a moment? “What did you say?”

  “You don’t have to put on an act.” Several steps above, he turned back to look at me. “I listened in on the extension when your mother was talking to my mother. She said you don’t even know him. She said you’ve hardly ever seen him in your whole life so you don’t have to put on an act.”

  I climbed a couple of steps and stopped again. Something in Pete’s tone made me realize he was telling the truth—a certain distance, a touch of haughtiness, faintly patronizing, that was entirely out of character. I realized he had been thinking about it for days. In some mysterious way he had appropriated it, absorbing the power into himself and filling me in on the facts as if I was only superficially connected to them. And because he in fact had a father, because he possessed a real father, I accepted his attitude. I knew Pete would cry, for instance, if his father died. I knew I wouldn’t.

  Walking home after school I resolved to force my mother to tell me. I would hide the fact that I already knew since it seemed reprehensible to have learned in such a casual, roundabout fashion. I wondered why she’d told Pete’s mother, whom she had never met, their entire relationship consisting of short phone calls when I stayed at the Steins’ for dinner. My mind stopped there—at wondering. I hadn’t the courage to think about it, sensing that more might be revealed about my mother than I wanted to know.

  I opened the door at home in a very odd mood—nervous, expectant, a little scared, but filled with a kind of righteous determination I had never before experienced, knowing with certainty that no one, no one, not even my mother, could deny me this moment. In claiming what seemed to me to be my birthright I felt I could not be ignored. My mother was in her room reading Life magazine.

  “Somebody in school asked me why Father doesn’t live here, with us.”

  “Hmmmn.”

  “I said because he was in the hospital.”

  She turned a page. “That’s right.”

  “And that half his face was paralyzed because of an operation.”

  She glanced up at me, looked away, and put down the magazine. “Is that the door? I thought I heard a key in the lock.” She got up and moved past me into the hall.

  “But that operation was a long time ago and he’s still in the hospital.” I followed her up the hall and stood at the open door while she went into the bathroom.

  “He’s been in and out of hospitals for a long time. Almost your whole life.” She lifted the lid of the toilet, hiked up her skirts, and sat down.

  “But this is a real hospital, not like those places in the country, those rest homes.” I felt very odd asking these questions. I knew what I said was true, but somehow it felt like I was making it up.

  “He’s still very sick. He has to stay in the hospital because they have all the things he needs.” A faint hissing sound as she made water.

  “What’s wrong with him? What does he have?”

  She didn’t say anything for several moments, sitting quite still staring at the bathroom wall as if I wasn’t there. Watching her profile I could see something happen to her face, a subtle change coming over it as she decided to tell me. “I guess it’s time you knew. I told Alison already because she’s older. Your father has been away so long I knew she wouldn’t be upset. These things happen and we just have to accept them.” She reached out and unrolled some toilet paper. “Your father has cancer,” she said, and reached between her legs to wipe herself. “Luckily it’s not the painful kind, but they don’t expect him to get well.” She stood up.

  “Is he going to die?”

  She looked at me in a very special way, a way she seldom used, letting me know she was about to tell me something important, something larger than herself. It was a tone of concern, and yet of abandonment. “Yes. That’s what the doctors said.”

  “Do they know when?”

  “They’re not too sure. Six months or a year.” She flushed the toilet.

  I went to my room.

  I had returned from Delaware, my mother and the baby from Europe. Jean, who hadn’t come out of his room when I came home (he slipped a letter into my room while I was in school saying he couldn’t understand why I’d run away, or what I was runn
ing from, and that I must have done it simply to hurt him; I slipped a letter into his room while he was out driving the cab saying it never occurred to me he would be hurt, that I’d run away for my own reasons, and that I felt better for it), emerged for Dagmar, and after a couple of tense weeks even convinced her to move back into their bedroom instead of the room Nell Smith had occupied. Mother had taken care of Miss Smith pronto. She put everything on the landing outside—clothes, suitcases, furniture, files—and told Nell over the phone that the Salvation Army had been instructed to pick it up in twenty-four hours. Nell charmed another cab driver and took it all away. When people called for her on the telephone mother would say, “She doesn’t live here any more and I don’t know where she’s gone” in one breath and hang up. But if Jean shared Dagmar’s bed it was all he shared. She never forgave his peccadillo and as a result finally completed the retreat into female strength and self-sufficiency with which she’d always threatened him. As the months passed Jean’s behavior became odder and odder.

  I remember sitting in the kitchen one evening watching my mother chop celery when Jean came home. We heard him striding up the hall and then he was at the kitchen door. He leaned against the counter and took the coin-changer off his belt.

  “What would you say if I told you I saw Kurt on the street today?” he asked me.

  “Who’s Kurt?”

  “Nancy’s husband.”

  “You mean the woman who painted Mother’s portrait?”

  “Yes.” Tremendously attentive, his eyes never left me, as if a great deal depended on my answer.

  “I don’t know. What am I supposed to say?”

  “What would you say?” he asked Dagmar.

  “I’d say you saw somebody who looked like him.”

  “Yes,” he said. “You would.”

  “Isn’t he dead?” I asked Mother. “Didn’t he die a while ago?”

  “Last winter,” she said, and went to the sink to wash the vegetables.

  “That’s what we were told,” Jean said. “We were told he died.”

  Working at the sink, my mother kept silent.

  “You mean he didn’t?” I asked.

  “I didn’t say that. I said what would you say if I said I saw him on the street.”

  “Did you?”

  “I’m not going to tell you. Let’s assume I did.”

  “Well, he can’t be dead and walking around at the same time,” I said. “You’ll agree to that.”

  “I’m not agreeing or disagreeing. I’m just asking.” He sat down at the kitchen table.

  “He’s either dead or he isn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know? Its obvious!” My voice rose a little.

  “You know so much. What happens to people after they die?”

  “They rot. They disintegrate.”

  “So in your opinion it couldn’t have been him?”

  I nodded.

  “But it was.”

  “It was somebody that looked like him.”

  “No, that’s out. I got a very close look.”

  “You mean you really saw him?”

  “Assume I did.”

  “Then he didn’t die. If you saw him he’s still alive.” I had a flash of insight. “Maybe he just wanted to get away from everybody: ”

  Jean lighted a Pall Mall and leaned back. “But everybody says he’s dead. There’s the death certificate and all the rest.”

  I turned to my mother. “What do you think?”

  “It was somebody that looked like him.”

  “But he says it wasn’t.”

  She lifted the colander and poured the vegetables into a pot. “I don’t know then.”

  I turned back to Jean. “He must be alive.”

  “No.” Jean’s face was expressionless. “He’s dead but I saw him in the street.”

  “Is he a ghost?”

  “Nonsense.”

  “I don’t understand, then.”

  “It’s very simple. He’s dead but I saw him walking down Fifth Avenue.”

  “That’s impossible,” I said. “You’re fooling. You’re talking about something else.”

  “No. I’m completely serious.”

  “Oh, Jean,” my mother said.

  His back straightened. “What do you mean ‘Oh, Jean’? I’m telling you I saw him on Fifth Avenue.” He spit a fleck of tobacco off the tip of his tongue. “I’m telling you!”

  My mother went back to the sink without looking at him. I kept quiet, feeling spooky, knowing there was more going on than I understood. They both seemed to be waiting for something. Then Jean got up and started out of the room. At the door he paused and looked back at me.

  “You see,” he said. “That’s why I’m not going to tell you if I really did see him. Because you’ve made up your minds in advance. I’d be talking into thin air.”

  One evening after a bad morning at school and a long afternoon at work I emerged from the Eighty-sixth Street station of the Lexington Avenue subway feeling reluctant to go home. Reading a magazine I ate dinner at my special seat in Wright’s Restaurant and then crossed the street for the double feature at the R.K.O. The movies were good, full of violence and color, lifting my mind to the level of life and death, pure good and pure evil, friendship, love, and honor. When the lights came on I sat in my seat for a long time watching the blank screen while the theater emptied around me. I left when the usher started folding up the seats.

  On the street, out of nowhere, desire swept me away. I wanted to live. I wanted to see something beautiful. Or to die. Anything definite, anything clear, visible and tangible, like dying, or saving someone’s life, or being kissed by Jean Simmons. Tears of frustration started in my eyes. Something strange started to happen. My body felt it first —warmth, a sense of something gathering, a feeling of being possessed by magical powers, as if I could make the parked cars rise in the air by simply willing it. Suddenly a tremendous force carried me away, some really immense, earth-shaking power igniting like the unexpected second stage of a rocket already in flight. I screamed in the street and started running, flat out, crossing the intersections without looking. At home, in the elevator, I bent over and ran my head into the wall again and again, stunning myself but feeling no pain, hearing the hollow boom echo down the shaft each time, hitting harder to increase the sound. At the fifth floor I got out and stood in the hall for a minute, trembling, my fists and jaw clenched, feeling the power race around inside me, burning out my nerves. I opened the door to the apartment. Jean and Mother were talking in the kitchen. I went to my room, closed the door, and sat down on the bed in the darkness.

  After a while the door opened and my mother stood silhouetted. “Where have you been?” she asked angrily. “It’s almost one o’clock and you have school tomorrow.”

  I didn’t answer, listening to my own breathing.

  “Well, where were you?”

  “In Brooklyn,” I said. “At a funeral.”

  “What?”

  “One of my friends from school was run over by a car and his parents asked me to be a pall-bearer. It was way out in Brooklyn so that’s why I’m late.”

  “What?” Incredulous, she almost laughed.

  “Leave me alone.”

  She stood silently in the doorway for several moments and then went away.

  14

  License to Drive

  I WENT back to Florida during a summer vacation when I was sixteen, with my mother’s blessing. It had been a hard winter for everyone, Jean and Dagmar fighting constantly, Alison tense about college, and myself either completely withdrawn or raging when Mother interfered with my life. At school I’d failed four subjects.

  I got on the train with thirty dollars, a suitcase, and my four-string guitar. Florida shone like a vision of paradise in my mind’s eye. At night I sat on the steel floor between the cars and sang, feeling the wind, watching the darkness, my heart bursting.

  “Lauderdale!” the conductor called. �
�Fort Lauderdale!” The hydraulic door closed with a hiss and he was with me in the rear of the car, moving past me to swing open the big side door and fold down the steps. I looked out at the scrub woods rushing past, momentarily perplexed. Then I realized we weren’t stopping in town, but at the inland station, seven miles from Fort Lauderdale and only a mile or two from Chula Vista. The brake shoes screamed against the wheels and the train slowed smoothly, winding down to the magic instant when it stopped completely. I followed the conductor down the steps into the sun.

  I walked a little way along the platform and stopped. The station was empty, desolate in the white glare. In the distance, where the long silver wall of the train began to curve out of sight, someone else was getting off. An old lady in black. A gust of wind blew across the platform and I smelled the woods. The train began to pull out. I sat down on my suitcase. Something was wrong. I listened to the sound of the train fading away. The old lady in black was met by a man with a small child and taken away in a car. The journey was over and something was wrong. The woods smelled the way they should, the stillness was as it had been years ago, the sun was hot—yet there was some indefinable lack, a peculiar hollowness to everything. I looked out at the woods, and then at the sky. Loneliness swept over me. I got up and moved toward the station house.

  There was a single taxicab behind the station. I put my stuff in the back seat and got in. The driver started the engine and turned to me. I stared at him.

  “Town?” he asked, breaking the silence.

  “Wait a second. I’m not sure.”

  “Didn’t you just get off the train?”

  “Yes. Just give me a second.” I wanted to go to Chula Vista, but for some reason I was afraid. “You know the drive-in out on Flagler Street?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. The place I want is just across from it.”

  The old trailer stood in the middle of a sandy lot ten yards back from the edge of the road. I went up and knocked on the door. “Flaviano!” He was an Italian house-painter who’d once parked his trailer on a corner of our Chula Vista lot. He hadn’t paid for the privilege, so when I’d written from New York asking if I could stay for a week or two he could hardly refuse. “Flaviano!” I tried the door but it was locked. I found the key under the concrete block which served as a doorstep and entered. Flaviano’s tiny bedroom was in the front, and the rest served as kitchen and living room. Across the rear wall was where I’d sleep, a built-in seat running the width of the trailer. I put my suitcase and guitar in a corner and sat down. It was very quiet. The light was filtered tawny yellow through the drawn shades. After a few moments I got up and went outside, locking the door behind me. At the corner I hitched a ride into town.