above the phone begin to swap and swirl under his eyes. His mother sighs. “Yes, I suppose. Peter.”
“Yeah?”
“Take care of your father now.”
“I’ll try. It’s hard though.”
“Isn’t it? But he loves you so.”
“O.K., I’ll try. Do you want him back?”
“No.” She pauses, and then, with that theatrical talent for holding the stage that perhaps is the germ of sense in his father’s fantasy about putting her in vaudeville, she repeats with tremulous import, “No.”
“O.K., we’ll see you around eleven then.” His mother’s mind, shorn of her comforting body, is keenly exhausting to Peter. She senses this, and sounds even more hurt, more re mote, more miniature and stony. “The weatherman wants snow.”
“Yeah, the air kind of feels like it.”
“All right. All right, Peter. Hang up on your poor old mother. You’re a good boy. Don’t worry about anything.”
“O.K., don’t you either. You’re a good woman.” What a thing to say to your own mother! He hangs up, amazed at himself. It makes his scabs itch, the peculiarity of talking to her over the phone, where she becomes, incestuously, a simply female voice with whom he has shared secrets.
“Did she sound upset?” his father asks him.
“A little. I think Pop’s throwing an atmosphere.”
“That man can throw ‘em, too.” Caldwell turns and explains to Minor. “This is my father-in-law. He’s eighty-four and he can throw an atmosphere that knocks you out of your shoes. He can throw an atmosphere right through a key hole in a door. That man has more power in his little finger than you and I have from our bellies up.”
“Arrh,” Minor grunts softly, setting on the counter a suds-topped glass of milk. Caldwell drains it in two gulps, puts it down, winces, turns a shade paler, and bites back a belch. “Boy,” he said, “that milk took a wrong turn down there somewhere.” He still tends to pronounce “milk” “melk,” New Jersey style. He runs his tongue back and forth across his front teeth as if to clean them. “Now I’m off to Dr. Yankem.”
Peter asks, “Shall I go with you?” The dentist’s real name is Kenneth Schreuer and his office is two blocks down the pike, beyond the high school on the other side, opposite the tennis courts. Schreuer always has a soap opera going on the radio, from nine in the morning to six at night. On Wednesdays and Sundays from spring to fall he walks across the, trolley tracks in white ducks and becomes one of the county’s better tennis players. He is a better tennis player than he is a dentist. His mother works in the school cafeteria.
“No, hell,” Caldwell says. “What can you do, Peter? The damage is done. Don’t worry about this old heap of junk. Stay here where it’s warm and you have friends.”
So Peter’s first piece of work in carrying out his mother’s injunction to take care of his father is to watch the suffering man, his coat unbuttoned and too short and his knit bullet cap pulled down over his ears, head out the dark door alone into one more doom.
Johnny Dedman calls from his booth, sincerely, “Hey Peter. With you and your father standing up there against the light for a second I couldn’t tell which was which.”
“He’s taller,” Peter says curtly. Dedman as a sincere good boy doesn’t interest him. He feels in himself with the coming of night great sweet stores of wickedness ripen. He turns, pivoting on the weight of the five dollars at his hip, and tells Minor triumphantly, “Two hamburgers. No ketchup. And a glass of your watered milk and five nickels for your rigged pinball machine.” He goes back to his booth and relights the Kool he had stubbed out half-smoked. Polar ice thrills his proud throat; he preens on the empty stage of Minor’s place positive that all the eyes in the world are watching. The stretch of necessarily idle time ahead of him, a child’s dream of freedom, so exalts his heart it beats twice as fast and threatens to burst, tinting the dim air rose. Forgive me.
“Darling. Wait?”
“Mm?”
“Isn’t there some better place than your office?”
“No. Not in winter.”
“But we’ve been seen.”
“You’ve been seen.”
“But he knew. I could tell by his face that he knew. He looked as frightened as I felt.”
“Caldwell knows and yet he doesn’t know.”
“But do you trust him?”
“The matter of trust has never come up between us.”
“But now?”
“I trust him.”
“I don’t think you should. Couldn’t we fire him?”
He laughs richly, disconcerting her. She is customarily slow to see her own humor. He says, “You overestimate my omnipotence. This man has been teaching for fifteen years. He has friends. He has tenure.”
“But he really is incompetent, isn’t he?”
It disagrees with him, makes an uncongenial texture, when she turns argumentative and inquisitive in his embrace. The stupidity of women has a wonderfully fresh power to disappoint him.
“Is he? Competence is not so easy to define. He stays in the room with them, which is the most important thing. Furthermore, he’s faithful to me. He’s faithful.”
“Why are you sticking up for him? He could destroy us both now.”
He laughs again. “Come, come, my little bird. Human beings are harder to destroy than that.” Though her turns of anxiety are sometimes disagreeable, her physical presence profoundly relaxes him, and in his condition of innermost rest words seem to slip from him without trouble of thought, as liquid slips from high to low, as gas spins into the void.
She becomes vehement and angular in his arms. “I don’t like that man. I don’t like his smirky childish look.”
“His face makes you feel guilty.”
This surprising remark turns her inquisitiveness tender. “Should we feel guilty?” The question is actually shy.
“Absolutely. Afterwards.”
This makes her smile, and her smiling makes her mouth soft, and in kissing her he feels he is coming at last to a small sip after an interminable thirst. That the kissing does not quench the thirst, but quickens it, so that each kiss demands a more intense successor and involves him thereby in a vortex of mounting and widening appetite-that such is the case does not seem to him a cruel but, rather, a typically generous and compelling providence of Nature.
A tree of pain takes root in his jaw. Wait, wait! Kenny should have waited a few minutes more on the Novocain. But this is the end of the day, the boy is tired and hurried. Kenny \ had been one of Caldwell’s first students, back in the Thirties. Now this same boy, badly balding, braces one knee against the arm of the chair to win more leverage for the pliers which are grinding around the tooth and crushing it like chalk even as they try to twist it free. Caldwell’s fear is that the tooth will crumble between the pliers and remain in his head as a stripped and scraped nerve. Truly, the pain is unprecedented: an entire tree, rich with bloom, each bloom showering into the livid blue air a coruscation of lucid lime-green sparks. He opens his eyes in disbelief that this could go on and on, and his horizon is filled with the dim pink of the dentist’s determined mouth, odorous of cloves, the lips pressed together a bit lopsidedly: a weak mouth. The kid had tried to become an M.D. but hadn’t had the I.Q. so he had settled on being a butcher. Caldwell recognizes the pain branching in his head as a consequence of some failing in his own teaching, a failure somewhere to inculcate in this struggling soul consideration and patience; and accepts it as such. The tree becomes ideally dense; its branches and blooms compound into one silver plume, cone, column of pain, a column whose height towers heavenward from a base in which Caldwell’s skull is embedded. It is pure shrill silver with not a breath, not a jot, speck, fleck of alloy in it.
“There.” Kenneth Schreuer exhales with relief. His hands are trembling, his back is damp. He displays to Caldwell their prize in his pliers. As if emerging swollen from a dream, Caldwell with difficulty focuses. It is a little dull crumb of ivory, dappled brown and black, mounted on soft pink bow legs. It seems preposterously trivial to have resisted removal so furiously.