Albert Barker had never come back to visit him. The kids had visited him once or twice, in the beginning, but then they’d stopped, because there wasn’t anything much to do, just sitting around the room like that. But his mother had said they were waiting for him to get better and be able to come out and play with them again and then they’d be just as good friends as ever.
He didn’t really mind their not coming to see him, because his mother was around all the time, but he’d have liked to see Albert Barker once more and get that straight.
He wondered if Susan Nickerson knew about it. She seemed to know a lot about a lot of things. Only she didn’t pay much attention to him. Every once in a while she would go swimming with him or she’d come around and talk to him, but she always seemed to be looking for something else or waiting for a telephone to ring, and if somebody else showed up, she’d go right off.
He wished the summertime would last longer. He’d figure out some way of making Susan Nickerson pay attention to him if the summertime lasted long enough. Summertime was better than winter. People were together more in the summertime. In the winter everybody was in a hurry. In the winter everybody separated and became absent-minded.
Jeff was going to college and he wouldn’t see him for months. Maybe forever. Forever. It was a bad word, but sometimes you had to face words like that. And even if he did see him, it wouldn’t be the same thing. People were one way if you saw them all the time, every day, and they were another thing if you only saw them every couple of months. They really were thinking about something else after a couple of months.
That was one of the reasons he didn’t want to go away to school—when he got back his mother would be thinking about something else. Grownups didn’t seem to mind that. When they left each other, they said good-bye and shook hands and they didn’t care if they didn’t see each other for months—for years—forever. Grownups didn’t really know how to be friends. Even when his grandmother had died and they’d buried her, his father hadn’t changed much. His father had read the paper at breakfast the next morning and the day after the funeral he’d gone off to work as usual and after a week or so he was playing bridge at night, just as though nothing had happened.
Tony shivered a little and pulled the blankets up around him. He was sorry he had started thinking about things like that. Still, if his mother died, he’d guarantee he wouldn’t be playing bridge a week later.
Maybe the thing to be was a doctor, a scientist. Then you could work on a serum to keep people alive forever. You could start with monkeys. You would keep it very quiet and then one day you would take the monkey to the auditorium of a college, and everybody would be sitting there, wondering, waiting to hear what you had to say, and you’d lead the monkey onto the stage and you’d say, “Gentlemen, forty years ago I injected this monkey with my secret serum, Number Qy zero seven. You will notice that he has no gray hairs and he can swing from the highest trees.”
Then you’d be very strict about who got any of the serum. You’d start with your mother and father and Jeff and Dr. Patterson, but there’d be a lot of people to whom you’d say, “No, I’m sorry, there isn’t enough to go around.” No matter what they offered you. You wouldn’t give your reasons, but you’d have darn good reasons, every time.
He chuckled to himself, under the blankets, as he thought of what people’s faces would look like when he said, “No, there isn’t enough to go around.”
He turned over on his side and he was just about to close his eyes, thinking of the immortal old monkey, when he saw someone coming across the lawn toward the house. He stopped breathing for a moment, and didn’t move, watching. Then he saw that it was his mother, in a loose, open coat, coming across the grass. There was a light mist, close to the ground, and his mother seemed to be floating toward him over a gray lake. He didn’t say anything until she reached the porch. She stopped then and turned around and looked out over the mist for a few seconds. It was very dark, just one little light coming through the curtains from inside the house, on the other side of the porch, but he could tell that his mother was smiling.
“Mummy,” he said, whispering, because it was so late and so dark.
Even though he spoke in a low voice, she jumped a little. She came over to him and leaned over him and kissed his forehead. “What’re you doing up?” she asked.
“I was listening to the owls,” he said. “Where were you?”
“Oh,” she said, “I just took a little walk.”
“You know what I’m going to be when I grow up?” he said.
“What, darling?”
“A doctor. I’m going to experiment with monkeys.”
She laughed and touched his hair with her fingers. “When did you decide that?”
“Tonight.” But he didn’t tell her his reasons. The reasons could wait.
“Well,” she said, “this has been a very important night, hasn’t it?”
“Yes,” he said.
She leaned over and kissed him. She smelled warm and her coat smelled of pine needles, as though she had brushed against saplings in the woods. “Good night, now, Doctor,” she said. “Sleep tight.”
She went into the house and he closed his eyes. He heard her moving around softly inside the house, and then the light was put out and it was quiet. It was lucky, he thought, that I didn’t go in to see if she was there when I woke up. I wouldn’t have found her and I’d’ve been scared.
The owls stopped hooting, because the dawn was coming up, and he slept.
9
TONY CAME HOME IN the middle of the afternoon, much earlier than he had expected. The hayride was supposed to have taken all day with a picnic lunch at Lookout Rock at the end of the lake and an expedition into the caves there. They’d had the lunch all right and they had taken a quick look at the caves but Tony had been glad when it began to rain a little bit and Bert, who was driving the team, had rounded them all up and started back around two o’clock. All the other children on the ride had been much younger than Tony and there had been a confusion of mothers and nurses and Tony had spent the day feeling alternately superior and deserted. He wouldn’t have gone on the ride at all except that Jeff had taken the day off to go into Rutland to the dentist. His mother had said that she was going to be busy and he could tell that she wanted him to go. But now it was only about four o’clock and here he was back at the cottage, alone. He looked through the house for his mother but she wasn’t there. There was a note on the kitchen table from her, saying that she had gone into town to the movies and that she would be back by five o’clock.
He took an apple and went out on the porch, eating it, and looked at the lake. It was a cold day and the lake looked gray and mean. He wished the sun would come out so he could go swimming. He finished the apple and wound up carefully and threw it at a tree. He missed the tree. Apple cores didn’t have enough weight for accurate pitching, he decided. He thought of trying to get a hitch into town with the hotel bus to look for his mother. Then he decided against that. Whenever he went looking for her and found her any place she would smile at first and seem very glad to see him and then she’d say, “Now, Tony, you mustn’t tag after me all the time.”