It had felt right, this feeling, I hadn’t resisted it. History working things out for me in its inexorable but friendly way: my brother had got sick and my mother, overburdened with work and worry, had sent me to live half a year with Aunt Jane. I had hated this and had felt cheated somehow. This was natural. I didn’t even like Aunt Jane. But that was where, feeling lonely, I’d learned the piano, and it had been an important part of my life ever since. Just as when I’d followed my mother over to Arizona. She’d taken Harold to a sanatorium there and was helping to pay the hospital bills by cooking and scrubbing at the sanatorium. I’d felt guilty tagging along without helping, so I’d got a job in the Prescott rodeo, cleaning out the stables. I’d been as thorough at that as I was at everything else, and so they’d asked me to be a barker for their wheel of chance. This was a come-on, I’d discovered, for the dice and poker tables in the back room, but everything out front where they’d put me was legal, the prizes were real hams and bacon, and I’d earned a dollar an hour and praise from the old guys for all the business I brought them. In many ways, in spite of the money, it had been the worst job I’d ever had, I was nervous for hours each day before I started, was scared to death of some of the people in those crowds — a complete waste of time, I’d thought…but without that experience, I would never have survived the cruelties of that whistle-stopping campaign tour last autumn when news broke about the so-called secret fund. Destiny. My Dad decided to open a gas station in 1922. He could have had a site in Santa Fe Springs, but he chose the one in East Whittier. The next year they found oil — lots of it — on the Santa Fe Springs property: we would have been millionaires. It gave my father bleeding ulcers, but for me, what was being a millionaire? Being at the center was everything, and this meant having nothing in excess to throw you off balance. Except power. Power, I knew, was something that existed in the universe like electricity. There was no reason to be a conductor. There was no reason not to be.
I’d skirted the Tidal Basin and wheeled around toward the Lincoln Memorial, then had followed the Potomac around to Rock Creek, letting the old tunes on the radio—“Have You Ever Seen a Dream Walking”…“Me and My Shadow”—call up all the old feelings, the old scenes, the old dreams. No patterns, just a sweet nostalgic flow…the church picnics with homemade ice cream…the dense odor of the inside of my violin case… Tunney and Dempsey and the Irish Rebellion (how my father raged against it! “But aren’t we Irish, too?” I’d asked him; “Not that kind!” he’d bellowed)…a beautiful print we had in our house, an advertisement I think for Edison light bulbs, called “Shedding Light,” with a boy sitting on a purple rock in a misty rose and green landscape, gazing up at the light bulb glowing in the branches of a summery tree, looking for God up there, I supposed, as I always used to do while watching the clouds go by…or maybe it was a girl sitting there, I’d forgotten exactly. Passing the locks, “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi” fading in and out on the distant station, I’d had sudden total recall of Fredric March’s transformation from Dr. Jekyll into Mr. Hyde and back, which was nevertheless mixed up somehow with The Best Years of Our Lives, probably the greatest movie I’d ever seen, though I no longer remembered much of it. And so it had gone: the Armistice parade and a circus, Wallet finding a baby on his doorstep in “Gasoline Alley,” Grand Canyon through the stereoscope, the fear of Bolshevism, the strange light at Christian Endeavor meetings on Sunday nights, the 1924 World Series on our new radio and then Babe Ruth hitting sixty home runs when I was fourteen years old. But mostly school memories, ballgames, girls, clubs, bike rides, and things at home, Dad’s knuckled hands on a gas pump, the way his ears stuck out when he was dressed up, Mom’s smile when I brought things home from school, fights with my brother Donald, Harold’s vague grin, Dad coming home one day to tell us there was a little doll over at the hospital, a real live doll — poor little Arthur, who’d died so young. I’d once written a school composition about him, a kind of threnody…“And so, when I am tired and worried, and am almost ready to quit trying to live as I should, I look up and see the picture of a little boy with sparkling eyes, and curly hair; I remember the child-like prayer — If I should die before I awake, I pray Thee, Lord, my soul to take — I pray that it may prove true for me as it did for my brother Arthur…” I got an A for it. A for Arthur….
I’d swung off the deserted Parkway and up onto Massachusetts, better lit but just as empty, my fingers drumming on the wheel, picking out the song on the radio — Count Basie’s “One O’Clock Jump,” I think — I might have been a great jazz pianist, or a very good one anyway, if I’d had the time. This was the long part of the drive home, up past Washington Cathedral and American University, almost all the way to Maryland. But not quite all the way: we lived in Alexandria when we first came here, but now I wouldn’t live outside the District if they’d give me title to all of Montgomery County. I was dangerously close, I’d realized, to Inspiration House, headquarters for the pro-Rosenberg forces, and, wheeling around past the Naval Observatory, I’d flashed again suddenly on Ethel’s bare bottom by the kitchen stove, but I’d pushed it away before all the tenement stuff started crowding in, concentrating instead on the broad dirt streets of Yorba Linda, the scattered one-story wooden buildings, distant hills, the hair rolled tight on top of Grandma’s head, the elections I’d won, the first time I got to drive the truck alone, things I’d thought about when I was a janitor at the swimming pool. “My Wild Irish Rose.” The drunken Mexicans over in Jim Town. Snitching grapes. Throwing passes. Standing under the big lamp on the corner of Green-leaf and Philadelphia, talking with guys late into the night. A full moon one night that seemed to separate itself from the street lamp as I walked out from under it — it’s God! I’d thought, it’s proof! — and then a girl’s window, lit: but she was dressed, and then, unbuttoning her blouse with one hand, she pulled the blind with the other. My eyes had closed a moment, capturing that lowering shade — and I’d almost wrecked the car, two blocks from home, right on Wesley Circle. Easy, boy. Don’t let your guard down.
Checkers had greeted me, threatening to wake up everybody in the house. I’d petted him roughly and cracked his nose to shut him up. The most famous dog in the nation since Fala. The goddamn spare room was still full to overflowing with dog collars, handwoven dog blankets, dog kennels and baskets, and enough dog food to feed all of Southeast Asia, sent to us by dog lovers and other lonely people. Some of them had actually thought that my Checkers speech was an appeal for charity! Thus: one more profession, if all else failed. I’d found a rib bone in the refrigerator for Checkers, a bowl of vanilla pudding, three overripe slices of tomato, a french-fried chicken back, a partial tin of Spam, a plate of soft fudge, cole slaw, a Dr. Pepper, some sour gherkins, a peach half in syrup, and a cold hamburger for myself — more or less in that order and eaten as discovered. I was very hungry and it all tasted good. There was actually some red Jell-0 in there with canned mixed fruit in it: I wasn’t sure of the flavor, but I ate it up anyway, thinking: Who knows? it may be the last of its kind. I’d also cleaned up what was left of a jar of apple sauce, bottle of skimmed milk, bowl of tapioca, and tin can of cold baked beans, followed by caviar and strawberry ice cream, lit up a ceremonial pipeful of Rum and Maple, and sat down in an armchair to digest.