I thought I remembered the first word of it, and sure enough after a while I found it. “Denny, you know what it means?”
“Not noticeably.”
“‘We who are about to die salute you.’”
“Well?”
“Is that how he feels?”
“Why not? He’s on the end of the plank.”
“Is that how you feel, Denny?”
“... I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do when we graduate, Denny?”
“Point of Rocks.”
Point of Rocks is a place on the Potomac, thirty or forty miles up from the District on the Maryland side, where Mr. Deets had a little farm, but he used it mainly when he felt like fishing. That Denny would hole up there just gave you an idea how far things had gone in the way of jobs. Of course there hadn’t been much out of him about pro football since I cracked my knee. It turned out in a professional game if he didn’t have me to take him through the line he wasn’t going through the line, so after getting the liver, lights, and gizzard knocked out of him a couple of times he didn’t get called any more. “You really going to Point of Rocks?”
“Well, where the hell would I go?”
If it was the beer wearing off, or he’d been worrying, I don’t know, but he was disagreeable and sounded bitter. That was when I got it through my head at last: if it could take the starch out of Denny, it was bad. So that’s why I talked like I did to Mr. Legg. That wasn’t a nice kid talking to a nice father about a nice girl. It was a guy that was losing his nerve making the best of things he could.
10
All that time, not only after the New Year’s party but before it, when I’d be booked to appear with Margaret or tagged for one of her parties or seeing her for one reason or another, little Helen was growing up. When Margaret and I first began doing shows together she was around two and couldn’t talk yet. Just the same she knew me whenever I came, and I’d have to stand there and listen to her tell me all about it or anyway think she was telling me, and a little later, at the parties, I’d stuff her full of ice cream and the more I saw of her the more wonderful she thought I was and the more wonderful I thought she was. She was just a little tyke, with blue eyes and yellow hair, but I had never run into anything like her, for prettiness and friendliness and the smile that lit her up like a Christmas tree. When she was a little older we’d go out together, to the drugstore for a soda or wherever it would be, and we didn’t exactly walk, but we did a pretty good sashay: her in front, dancing along backwards, me coming along behind, with a doll in my arms or one of the puppies on a leash or the stroller, so I could push her if she got tired. A little later we’d go to the picture show. Then a little after that, when I was in college and she was in the Sarah Read School around the corner, she’d see my picture in the paper and call me up after the games and want to know why I hadn’t sent her tickets. I’d say she was a little young yet. It wasn’t until after the New Year’s party that I began coaching her in arithmetic. She was just naturally dumb at it, and there was some talk about it at dinner one night. Her father kept saying, “It’s all right, we’ll get a tutor,” but Mrs. Legg was pretty disagreeable about it that Helen didn’t study the subject, as she said. Then she got off a lot about the honors she had taken when she was a young girl at school, and you kind of got the idea she was sore because Helen wasn’t a credit to her. I kept thinking how easy everything, the music at least, had been for me at that age when Miss Eleanor made a game out of it, and then I heard myself say: “Mrs. Legg, why can’t I be her tutor?”
“You, Jack?”
“At least I know my math.”
“Whoo!”
Margaret exploded like it was the funniest thing she ever heard in her life, and Mrs. Legg was crossed up because she wasn’t in favor of a tutor. But Mr. Legg jumped at it. I don’t know why, but my guess is that even at that time he had his eye on me, on account of Margaret’s career bug, and this was just one more knot he could tie in my tether. The upshot was she was to come up to the house Saturday mornings, and I was even to get paid for it. I squawked at that, said I’d be glad to do it for nothing, but he was set that I had to get something, so we made it five dollars for two hours, ten to twelve.
“Well, of all the cheap, chiseling suh-lugs, my overgrown friend, you certainly take the hand-whittled potato masher!”
“Sit down and speak when I speak to you.”
“Even gypping little chee-yildren!”
“Little hoodlums, more like.”
“And for a measly five bucks!”
Hanging under some prints was a riding crop my father had had when he had chased the deer around Tara Hill, and I took it down and whacked her with it. Then we had some light scrimmaging around the study until Sheila came in with some cookies for the new pupil, when Helen turned from a brat into an angel, which was something she could do at the drop of a hat. “Oh, you darling! Cookies! I just love them!” She ran over and kissed Sheila, who didn’t quite know what her cue was, so I took over: “Nothing to get alarmed at, Sheila. Just inculcating a little discipline around the classroom, but she’s got a hide like a rhinoceros, so it’s a little noisy.”
“But, Jack! You could injure her!”
“Any change would be an improvement.”
When we were alone again, she draped herself over my chair and told me what she thought of me for a while and I did the same for her and then I got out my big inspiration. It was an abacus, that I had got at a bazaar, as they call it in Baltimore, out on East Baltimore Street. They’re a Chinese adding machine, with little red and green and blue and yellow and purple and black balls that slide on wires in a frame. I figured that with her eyes telling her how to add and subtract and multiply and divide it would be easier. “What is it, Mr. Loathsome?”
“You use it to count.”
“You think I’m weak in the mind?”
“Yes, only more so.”
“Well, I’ll be—”
“So far, I figure the trouble has been that nobody, anyway nobody on the arithmetic assignment, has any idea how dumb you are. But I have. By dint of this hard application your mother keeps talking about, I have finally worked down to it, that alongside of you, a backward tree toad would look like a glee club of Einsteins, so—”
“Cookie?”
“O.K.”
She stuck a cake in my mouth, picked up the abacus, shook it, smelled it, and tried it sidewise. “Cute.”
“Listen, stupid, I have an idea.”
“Then let’s have it.”
“That teacher of yours—”
“Lamson? She’s a dope.”
“However—”
“I owe it to her to do something with the subject. But why? Tell me that.”
“You could harpoon her.”
“... I don’t get this at all.”
“I don’t say, Miss Legg, that she’s not a dope. If you ask me, they’re all dopes. If they weren’t dopes they wouldn’t be teachers in the Sarah Read School. If you ask me the arithmetic’s no good to you and you’ll never have any use for it that a third assistant bank clerk couldn’t straighten out for you in five minutes and no charge for the service. Just the same, there it is. The rule book says you’ve got to learn it. And if, all at the same time you could learn it and give this Lamson a nice kick in the teeth—”
“You mean, with this thing, I could learn?”
“Well, you could try.”
Her face lit up the way it had when she was a little thing and you’d stuff lemon ice cream into her. She wasn’t that little any more, but she certainly wasn’t big. She was about medium, on height, but awful slim, even in the plaid skirt and red sweater she wore to make herself look thicker, and with the yellow curls hanging down her back in thick snakes. They had a little gold in them, and were soft and glossy and silky. Her eyes were blue, and right now they were dancing. Pretty soon she was cackling out loud, and I was. Putting one over on Miss Lamson seemed to be the funniest thing we could think of. I knew that if she, I, and the abacus could do it, Miss Lamson was due to have a surprise.