"Guess what?" my boy exclaims cheerfully, answering the phone (to my vast relief and amazement).
For Forgione, bless his noble heart, turns out fine. (I am more tense about gym than my boy at breakfast that morning. My coffee is flavored with the bitter taste of bile. Forgione is an executioner, masked in dire, enigmatic intentions, and I ponder all day long in my office over what kinds of criminal atrocities are being committed against my boy behind the brick walls, closed doors, and blind windows of that penitential institution of a school. I am more tense than my boy because I can objectify anxieties he does not even know he suffers from yet. I have an imagination that is infinitely more sophisticated and convoluted. He does not know yet about Leopold and Loeb, and I do. He does not know about cunning, older, polymorphous perverts, driven and deranged, who brutalize and murder children for no good reason. I have the same scorching foresights he has of strange, fierce, scowling men abducting, harming, dismembering him, and there are days — or used to be when we lived in the city, and still are, even now that we have retreated into the suburbs — when I will glare accusingly and belligerently, bluffing, of course, at every strange man I see in his vicinity — handymen, delivery men, construction men, insurance men, even clergymen — as potential kidnappers, sadists, ruffians, degenerates, or mad murderers who torture and mutilate their disbelieving victims before and after killing them, even though I know that's impossible. I picture it anyway. And now Forgione's face is swimming among them, heartless, symbolic, carnal, alien. I am crazy: no wonder my boy tends to be fearful. For a long time in the city I was too fearful to allow him to walk to school alone, even though the school building was only a few blocks away and other kids his own age were already doing it; at the same time, I kept urging him to get up the courage to try it, pointing out to him that he was big enough and intelligent enough and would have to do it someday, and assuring him that nothing would happen to him if he waited always for the light to turn green and looked in all directions before stepping from the curb and crossing each street. I was afraid he'd get lost. I am afraid of traffic accidents. I also feared drunkards, junkies, unhappy laborers, explosions, bigger, bullying schoolboys, and truants from high school come to prey on the smaller children in elementary school, most of them Black, Puerto Rican, or Italian, who would take his ice cream money, tear his clothes, bloody his face, or pull his ears off; I was even afraid of falling cornices, and so, I think, was he. I would telephone the house two or three times a day from my office to ask if any important mail had come or my dry cleaning, but really to make sure that everyone there was still alive, as far as anyone who was there could tell — if no one answered the phone when somebody should have, I would think of calling the police, the apartment building superintendent, or one of the neighbors — to verify that he had made it back home safely from school for lunch — which meant, by deduction, that he had made it to school safely after breakfast — and that he had found his way back home successfully again after schoo — which meant, once more, that he had made it back safely to school after lunch, that day.
"Do you want to talk to him?" my wife would ask.
"Only if he has anything he wants to say to me."
"He doesn't. Do you have anything you want to say to Daddy?"
"No."
"Do you want to ask him anything?"
"No."
"He doesn't. You sound disappointed." I would be disappointed. I'd feel he should want to talk to me, even though he had nothing specific to ask or tell. Hadn't I worried about him?
I would brood about that too: his ingratitude. After all, I was investing so much of my feelings in him, wasn't I?
Every trip from home for him then was, for me, another venture into unknown perils that were inching close. I would feel about him the way I believe I used to feel about my wife and daughter, the way some passive part of me still feels every time I walk up the ramp into an airplane on an ordinary business trip: I'm not sure I will ever come down. Wouldn't it be ridiculous for me to die on an ordinary business trip? Every day that he and I and the rest of us remain alive is another miracle. Isn't it wonderful that we can still be here and have not yet been knocked off by some accident or crime? I think that. I don't trust cars. God knows who may be driving the ones close enough to collide with us. I don't trust my wife when she is driving, especially now that I know she drinks during the day, and I don't like my daughter at night in a car driven by some kid who might be drunk also or loony with drugs. I don't really worry as much as I used to about my wife and daughter, possibly because they have both survived early childhood and seem old enough now to take care of themselves, or possibly because I no longer care for them as much as I used to, as much as I know I do care about my boy and myself. I do have morbid outlooks about myself; I don't like closed doors, sick friends, bad news. And my boy is still young and vulnerable enough, we feel, and he does too, to be very much in need of our love and our protection. And I know I do care for him, and I worry nervously about what jeopardy I have placed him in with Forgione, who — God bless him again — turns out to be just fine indeed.) Forgione, in fact, proves a surprisingly good-hearted man, and he is more generous and discreet with my boy than I would have thought him capable.
"I don't have to do anything in gym anymore," my boy continues with elation. "I don't even have to play. Until I want to."
And from that day on, my boy is a swaggering princeling. (But it does not, of course, last.) He treasures his respite in the beginning (he thinks he's smart); he basks in leisure, luxuriates in school and at home. Along with boys with plaster casts on hands and arms and legs and those with heart damage or other seriously crippling deformities, he is allowed to remain out of the games and races and to pass the time in the gymnasium watching and strutting, although he is required to report there and remain for the entire period. (There is one boy in the school his own age who is totally blind, and he is excused from gym. The school keeps him as an experiment.)
My boy spends his time in gym strolling around the outskirts of activities, he tells me, feeling superior. (He is pulling a fast one, he feels, and wants others to observe that.) He feels he ought to be envied. (He isn't. He is only a temporary novelty.) In a short while, though, and all at once, a transformation occurs, a draining of confidence, and he flickers in sallow indecision. He perceives that he does not want to be different (perhaps he is startled by the threat that what he thinks he is faking will prove to be real and that he is facing the risk of being excluded permanently, like those other boys his own age who do have heart murmurs of pathological origin and are not allowed to play, and all those others we always see wheeling and hobbling about who are disabled and deformed).