to nudge him awake. We drove back to the room in the car with the lights playing across our faces in a silence that seemed filled with my father’s satisfaction, as though just getting through this night were some kind of triumph.
In the room, as soon as he was in bed, while still in his clothes, Bob Painter began snoring.
My father snapped on a light. We were private, away from Bob. The light wouldn’t disturb him.
My father still had his hat on. We faced each other in chairs.
“How’s things at home?”
“Good.”
He nodded, searching for another topic. “You still go to the beach on Sundays?”
“Yes.”
“They say anything about me?”
“No.”
“I bet they do. I bet you’ve heard things.”
“Bobby’s sleeping with a girl,” I said.
It seemed strange to be saying it. It was the only thing I could think of. It also distracted us from the thing he’d just said.
He looked at me curiously, his eyes bright in the reflection of the lamp. “Is that right? How do you happen to know that?”
“George talks about it. On the beach.”
“In front of everybody?”
“No. Just me. We go away from everybody. George and Bobby and me.”
“They tell you that.”
“Yes.”
He rubbed his chin for a while.
“And does George sleep with a girl, too?”
“No.”
“Aha.”
He played with the chain of the lamp. “Don’t they think you’re a little young for that?”
I shrugged.
“Are you tired?”
“No.”
My father took my hand. He flattened out my palm, and moved his own finger against it, making the vague shape of the letter “W.”
“Do you know what I’m doing?”
He did it again. It was what Annie Sullivan had done in the movie, the painstaking secret language through which Helen Keller had finally received meaning.
“Remember?”
I nodded my head.
“Amazing.”
He shook his head.
“Listen, start bringing your glove on weekends, okay? We’ll play catch.”
He stared at me a moment, then he got up and made a bed for me on the floor.
In Ancient History, Mrs. Matheson (herself ancient, gold-plated, a figure seen as if through museum glass) divided us into pairs. A special project had been assigned, individually tailored for each pairing. “Luca Carcera, Andrew Weston,” she announced. “The Athenian character.”
We went to Andrew’s house, afternoons (his suggestion) to work on it. Andrew Weston lived with his mother on the upper floor of a two-family house on the other side of town, the poorer side, not far, in fact, from where my father lived with Bob Painter. It was a neighborhood of two- and three-family houses with postage-stamp yards, in the vicinity of the shuttered watch factory.
Andrew Weston’s mother sat at a large table pushed up to the window that caught the best light, with a pack of cigarettes (always, one was lit), an ashtray, and a stack of books. The table was full of plants, scraggly, half dead, but sometimes she would turn away from her book in order to push one further into the light, or to clip away a frond. She had long tawny hair she wore pulled close to her scalp, then hanging down in the back, a skeletal face that seemed always in motion. The books she read were the popular books of the time: Harold Robbins, Leon Uris, Written on the Wind. She read them all with a kind of annoyance, as if she were conducting a silent, impatient dialogue with the author. At any moment she might burst out with “Oh, that’s wrong,” or “That’s unworthy of you.”
Andrew did not treat her well. He was a small boy whose boner in the shower had astonished everyone. Any other boy would probably have had to leave school after an incident like that, but Andrew Weston managed to incorporate it into his persona. He was marked out, but he did not seem to care. His short hair flew up in the front into a dramatic stand of curls. In grammar school (the Westons had lived, briefly, near us), he had been a favorite of the girls, considered “cute,” called by the mothers “a young dreamboat,” but then he had made his transition, in the immense privacy of late childhood, and come out on the other side of it a friend of the girls, where the rest of us had made our lasting separation.
Within the confines of the top floor of the two-family house, he lorded it over his mother, barely acknowledging her as we entered the rooms. She glanced up with low expectations, her sharp features shrouded in smoke, caught between the cheap theatrics of her novels (even at twelve, I knew what was cheap and what was literature; John Steinbeck was literature, The Carpetbaggers was not) and the presence of two remote, silent boys who would give her, she seemed to know, very little. “The scholars,” she would always say upon our entrance. “And here I am, reading trash.”
From my first appearance, she looked upon me in a gauging, deeply focused way that let me know Andrew did not often bring friends home, and certainly not friends who were the epitome of regularity, such as I was in those days. “Who’s this?” she asked, and if I’d been older, I’d have read seductiveness in the “this.”
In his room, Andrew required no help at all in writing “The Athenian Character.” The first day, he went to his desk, opened the Ancient History text, and began writing. I sat on his bed. His walls were bare except for a Winslow Homer print. On the floor was a small record player and a stack of 45s. When Andrew caught me gazing at them, he suggested maybe I wanted to listen to a couple. “Go ahead, it’s okay,” he said. “Take advantage of my good taste.”
Then he looked at me there on the floor a second longer than he needed to, as if the sight of me in the midst of this perfectly ordinary pastime had leaked out a small but vital piece of information he was snatching up.
On his way out of the shower room, led by Mr. McCluskey, Andrew had held his head in the firm, tilted manner one held one’s head to staunch a nosebleed. But he had not cried. In the office, waiting with Mr. McCluskey, he affected the look of a boy who had already entered into some new compact with life.
As for me—as with the others, the larger group—we had made our own compact. We were not to speak of this, but it was okay to look at each other and raise our eyebrows and giggle. When the giggling
