“What’s early?” Boylan asked.
“Five,” Rudolph said.
“Good God!” Boylan said. “What in the world does anyone do up at five o’clock in the morning?”
“I deliver rolls on a bicycle for my father,” Rudolph said.
“I see,” Boylan said. “I suppose somebody has to deliver rolls.” He laughed. “You just don’t seem like a roll-deliverer.”
“It’s not my main function in life,” Rudolph said.
“What is your main function in life, Rudolph?” Absently, Boylan switched off the headlights. It was dark in the car because they were directly under a lamppost. There was no light from the cellar. His father hadn’t begun his night’s work. If his father were asked, would he say that his main function in life was baking rolls?
“I don’t know yet,” Rudolph said. Then aggressively, “What’s yours?”
“I don’t know,” Boylan said. “Yet. Have you any idea?”
“No.” The man was split into a million different parts. Rudolph felt that if he were older he might be able to assemble Boylan into one coherent pattern.
“A pity,” Boylan said. “I thought perhaps the clear eyes of youth would see things in me I am incapable of seeing in myself.”
“How old are you, anyway?” Rudolph asked. Boylan spoke so much of the past that he seemed to stretch far, far back, to the Indians, to President Taft, to a greener geography. It occurred to Rudolph that Boylan was not old so much as old-fashioned.
“What would you guess, Rudolph?” Boylan asked, his tone light.
“I don’t know.” Rudolph hesitated. Everybody over thirty-five seemed almost the same age to Rudolph, except for real tottering graybeards, hunching along on canes. He was never surprised when he read in the papers that somebody thirty-five had died. “Fifty?”
Boylan laughed. “Your sister was kinder,” he said. “Much kinder.”
Everything comes back to Gretchen, Rudolph thought. He just can’t stop talking about her. “Well,” Rudolph said, “how old are you?”
“Forty,” Boylan said. “Just turned forty. With all my life still ahead of me, alas,” he said ironically.
You have to be damn sure of yourself, Rudolph thought, to use a word like “alas.”
“What do you think you’ll be like when you’re forty, Rudolph?” Boylan asked lightly. “Like me?”
“No,” Rudolph said.
“Wise young man. You wouldn’t want to be like me, I take it?”
“No.” He’d asked for it and he was going to get it.
“Why not? Do you disapprove of me?”
“A little,” Rudolph said. “But that’s not why.”
“What’s the reason you don’t want to be like me?”
“I’d like to have a room like yours,” Rudolph said. “I’d like to have money like you and books like you and a car like you. I’d like to be able to talk like you—some of the time, anyway—and know as much as you and go to Europe like you …”
“But …”
“You’re lonesome,” Rudolph said. “You’re sad.”
“And when you’re forty you do not intend to be lonesome and sad?”
“No.”
“You will have a loving, beautiful wife,” Boylan said, sounding like someone reciting a fairy story for children, “waiting at the station each evening to drive you home after your day’s work in the city, and handsome, bright children who will love you and whom you will see off to the next war, and …”
“I don’t expect to marry,” Rudolph said.
“Ah,” Boylan said. “You have studied the institution. I was different. I expected to marry. And I married. I expected to fill that echoing castle on the hill with the laughter of little children. As you may have noticed, I am not married and there is very little laughter of any kind in that house. Still, it isn’t too late …” He took out a cigarette from his gold case and used his lighter. In its light his hair looked gray, his face deeply lined with shadows. “Did your sister tell you I asked her to marry me?”
“Yes.”
“Did she tell you why she wouldn’t?”
“No.”
“Did she tell you she was my mistress?”
The word seemed dirty to Rudolph. If Boylan had said, “Did she tell you that I fucked her?” it would have made him resent Boylan less. It would have made her seem less like another of Theodore Boylan’s possessions. “Yes,” he said. “She told me.”
“Do you disapprove?” Boylan’s tone was harsh.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“You’re too old for her.”
“That’s my loss,” Boylan said. “Not hers. When you see her, will you tell her the offer still holds?”
“No.”
Boylan seemed not to have noticed the no. “Tell her,” he said, “that I cannot bear to lie in my bed without her. I’ll tell you a secret, Rudolph. I wasn’t at Jack and Jill’s that night by accident. I never go to places like that, as you can well imagine. I made it a point to find out where you were playing. I followed you out to my car. I was looking for Gretchen. Maybe I had some foolish notion I could find something of the sister in the brother.”
“I’d better go to sleep,” Rudolph said cruelly. He opened the car door and got out. He reached into the back for his rod and creel and net and the fireman’s boots. He put on the ridiculous felt hat. Boylan sat smoking, squinting through the smoke at the straight line of lights of Vanderhoff Street, like a lesson in drawing class in perspective. Parallel to infinity, where lines meet or do not meet, as the case may be.
“Don’t forget the bag, please,” Boylan said.
Rudolph took the bag. It was very light, as though there were nothing in it. Some new scientific infernal machine.
“Thank you for your delightful visit,” Boylan said. “I’m afraid I got all the best of it. Just for the price of an old pair of torn waders that I was never going to use anymore anyway. I’ll let you know when the skeet trap is up. Roll on, young unmarried roll-deliverer. I’ll think of you at five A.M.” He started the motor of the car and drove off abruptly.
Rudolph watched the red tail lights speeding off toward infinity, twin signals saying Stop! then unlocked the door next to the bakery and lugged all the stuff into the hall. He turned on the light and looked at the bag. The lock was open. The key, on a leather thong, hung from the handle. He opened the bag, hoping that his mother hadn’t heard him come in.
There was a bright-red dress lying in a careless heap in the bag. Rudolph picked it up and studied it. It was lacy and cut low in front, he could tell that. He tried to imagine his sister wearing it, showing practically everything.
“Rudolph?” It was his mother’s voice, from above, querulous.
“Yes, Ma.” He turned the light out hurriedly. “I’ll be right back. I forgot to get the evening papers.” He picked up the bag and got out of the hallway before his mother could come down. He didn’t know whom he was protecting, himself or Gretchen or his mother.
He hurried over to Buddy Westerman’s, on the next block. Luckily, there were still lights on. The Westerman house was big and old. Buddy’s mother let the River Five practice in the basement. Rudolph whistled. Buddy’s mother was a jolly, easy-going woman who liked boys and served them all milk and cake after the practice sessions, but he didn’t want to have to talk to her tonight. He took the key of the bag off the handle and locked the bag and put the key in his pocket.