Heir to the Glimmering World (23 page)

Arnold Partridge found a place for his train companion in the rooming house where the actors were boarding, and by the end of the next week's performances the Bear Boy was moving scenery and sweeping up, with a promise of a part in Johnstown, where they would all have to polish their lines for the new play. Johnstown was smaller than Altoona, and the theater more decrepit, but the rooming house there, with its musty overused damp smell, was nearly identical. This didn't trouble him; he was used to feeling at home with the provisional; he was used to rooming houses. The Johnstown play had a heroic theme: Lincoln, from boyhood to martyrdom. The ingenue's son played Lincoln as a child. He was shown before a painted hearth with its painted fire, reading book after book, but he did not speak. The Bear Boy too had no lines. They gave him a long black coat spotted with moth holes, and an old-fashioned thick-barreled rubber revolver; he was John Wilkes Booth. His job in the penultimate scene was to shoot Arnold Partridge and flee into the wings. Backstage he discovered that the ingenue's son could not read the books he put his face into as he lay on his belly warming himself at the painted fire. They had tried to get him to memorize a few lines, but he balked. Everyone else had a script, he didn't. If he wanted a script like the rest of them, his mother said, he'd have to learn to read. He refused, and ran off to hide in the company truck, burrowing into the pile of stained and mended costumes. His mother wasn't married to his father. His father had gone away a long time ago; he couldn't remember him at all. He was useful enough when they needed bodies to people a stage. Sometimes they wrote him in; once he played a dwarf, and once a king's page. And always he was the child Lincoln, buried in books.

The company went from town to town, three cars in procession behind the truck carting big flats of scenery and crates of jumbled wardrobe. The truck was decorated with the company's name in tall red, blue, and orange letters, and stopped at street corners to sound its carillon and hand out round cardboard fans on sticks. Often there was no theater in these places, so they rented the local American Legion hall, and put up posters in store windows and on telephone poles. The Bear Boy, meanwhile, advanced from silent action—a servant, a deaf uncle—to speaking roles. He was no better or worse at it than anyone else; he had been an actor all his life, a fabricator compelled to wear the Bear Boy's skin. In these little central-Pennsylvania hamlets—Bellefonte, Pleasant Gap, Port Matilda, Tyrone—he declaimed, he loudly whispered, he falsely wept; he was mocking his old self. Everything here was fake: the fake priest, the fake ingenue, the fake young Lincoln in front of the fake fire, faking reading.

Arnold Partridge and the ingenue—her name was Bridget—were lovers. When the director disappeared (this happened in Chambers-burg), taking with him three weekends' receipts, Arnold Partridge became the new director, by default, and Bridget fell into the Bear Boy's bed. She was too old—she was forty-seven—but she gave him nothing to complain of, and Arnold Partridge, now in charge of an impoverished company, was scarcely in a position to complain: the Bear Boy had instantly made up for the missing receipts, and then some. No one had imagined him as having any money, there was never a sign of it, it was a kind of miracle, it was the improbable third-act reversal. They had taken him for a species of roustabout, one of those hangers-on who attach themselves to theater folk on the road and are rewarded with bit parts in return for pushing the scenery. And wasn't he exactly that?

Yet he was not. They began to look up to him; Bridget was enraptured. He liked her tongue in his mouth, but preferred it curling on his member, a decent distance from his nostrils. She did whatever he told her to, so he sent her to a dentist in Harrisburg, to improve her teeth and her breath. He gave his part away and sat in the audience, as he had that first night, right off the train. Then he asked Arnold Partridge what he would think of hiring stagehands to push the scenery and load the truck, and whether he'd mind junking the old moth-eaten wardrobe and replacing it with everything new. "You're the boss," Arnold Partridge said. It was clear that the price of the stagehands and the new wardrobe was Bridget.

He told Bridget that her son ought to learn to read.

"He won't," she said.

"He will. I'll make him."

"Then you'd be a magician."

But he was already a magician. He had the power of surprise; money could surprise, it could bewilder. It was delectable to withhold it and delectable to let it fly out, like a jack-in-the-box on a spring.

They had arrived in Lemonville, and were performing in the school auditorium. It was a rundown town with a single gas station and a sleepy general store smelling of cloves and camphor, where half-bald aging cats lay stretched on patches of burlap. On one end of town farmland began; on the other a yellow wood rose, circling a pond veiled by a greenish shimmer. He had discovered this place, a sort of glen fringed by a stone wall, on a morning walk with Bridget.

"Meet me at the wall near the water right after the Saturday matinée," he told Bridget's son, "and I'll give you this." He held up a ten-dollar bill.

The matinée ran from noon to nearly three. Browning leaves speckled the dirt at the foot of the wall; it was early autumn. As the boy approached, horse-chestnut shells crackled under his tread and a mass of sparrows pecking in low weeds went rioting, escaping into the trees. He had chosen this spot for its isolation.

"Take this right now," he said to Bridget's son, "and you can have some more later."

"Why?" the boy said. He put the money in his pocket. A sullen confusion roamed in his eyes.

"I want to give you lots of presents, that's why."

"Only because you like my mother—"

"Your mother likes me. But she'd like me more if I got her to like you more."

"You can't make me go to the dentist. I won't go, no matter what, even if you give me"—he thought a moment—"fifty dollars."

"I'll give you fifty dollars right now, and not for the dentist."

"You're crazy," Bridget's son said.

"They've got a good script for David Copperfield, and no one to play the lead."

"That's all
you
know. We did David Copperfield year before last—"

"Was there another boy in the company then?"

"Sure. My mother."

He threw his laughter against the wall: Bridget as David Copperfield! Bridget, with her fleshy hips, in short pants! And was that any different from himself, with his rouged knees? A ferocity seized him: he would cause this boy to renounce fakery. He stuffed four more ten-dollar bills in Bridget's son's pocket, and showed him the primer he had shoved into his own pocket.

"If I pay you to do it," he said, "if I pay you and pay you, will you learn?"

"You're crazy," the boy said.

"Will you do it?"

"Sure," the boy said.

The lessons began, there against the stone wall, and continued in Clearville, and then in Pearstown, and then in Mansfield. It was achieved: the boy was bright and quick and angry and avaricious. It did not occur to the tutor to ask the pupil what he would do with the money he had accumulated; it wasn't his affair. He didn't suppose the boy would give it to his mother, not that he would care. It was a revelation, an intoxication—getting that boy to read. A little miracle of sorts. The miracle wasn't witnessing the dawning of comprehension; what was Bridget's son to him? The closer he came to the boy—the two of them in studious seclusion—the more he was repelled by him. Dirty straw hair, monkey-flat small ears, teeth green at the gums and as crooked as his mother's; sweat dribbling down the sides of a fat pubescent nose. Worse, the sulking greed; ambition fueled by greed. No miracle in that. Never mind the boy, the miracle was what he felt in himself. He hardly knew what to name it; he scarcely understood it, but it was something remembered, a long-ago sensation returned, a kind of piercing behind the eyes. A burning. A transcendence. A mastery. The doll house, with its miniature cubicles and tiny figurines; his father's anger. The presents, endless presents, boxes from far away, sent by what his mother called the Reading Public and his father called My Fans. They sent him toy bears, mostly—brown bears, panda bears, polar bears, and bears more human than bearlike. They sent him knitted socks and scarves, and wind-up cars and paint sets and cushions cross-stitched with replicas of himself. From Sweden (where, his father told him repeatedly, the Bear Boy outsold Selma Lagerlöf) came the doll house. It was a countrified cottage with a peaked roof and scalloped eaves, and tiny chairs and tables, and four tiny beds for the four tiny wooden children who lived in it. The children, like the house, were hand-carved; they had yellow hair painted on, and red circles on their cheeks, and even on their knees. On their knees! No grownups inhabited this house. He moved the children from room to room; they were his to command. Wherever he ordered them to go, they went—he had only to grip their yellow heads with his fingers. And sometimes he told them not to move at all, to stand very still in such and such a position. They always obliged him, and then an electric feeling ran through him, a strange warm tickle rushed down the whole length of his spine, and if at that moment his father called to him, he would never answer, because it was so delectable to squeeze his fingers on the yellow heads of the little doll house people, to be in command, to be the master of the doll house. But one day the doll house disappeared. His mother explained that it had been given away to the poor children who had no toys, just as the knitted socks and scarves were given away, and the bears, and all the things he had too much of and didn't need. He knew, though, that it was his father who had removed the doll house. His father blamed him for obsession, for freakishness, for unseemliness, for wasting time and not doing his duty, which was to come when called and then to stand very still while his father, looking up and then looking down again, made sketch after sketch of the Bear Boy.

He left the company, left Bridget whimpering, tried Chicago for a week, didn't like it, and got on the first interstate vehicle that grumbled into the grimy bus station, an elongated old tin lizzie, burning oil, with a battered blue snout. It rocked him to sleep, and he woke up in Elmira, a town like other towns, no different from the towns of central Pennsylvania, but self-conscious over the bones of Mark Twain, whose grave lured tourist cash. A town proud of dead bones! He spent a night there for the sake of a shave and a haircut (he had let his hair grow to his chin, in proper thespian fashion), and went on to Endicott, Johnson City, and big Binghamton, and then north to Syracuse, Rome, and Utica. On the roads in between (the bus was now a rusty brown) he smelled apples. These places might all be called New York, but they were as remote from the offices of Mr. Brooks and Mr. Fullerton as the winey scent of fallen apples. He rode eastward, passed through Amsterdam and Rotterdam and Schenectady (too big), and ended in Clarksville, not far from Albany, where he settled into a rooming house almost too respectable for his taste. A sign on the porch read
TOURISTS,
but it was occupied by a bevy of elderly women, widows and spinsters, all retired schoolteachers. Sweet powdery odors came out of them. They thought him a pleasant novelty, a faintly enigmatic young man with freshly cut hair and large strong teeth and flashing lenses. He had never before been among old women. They struck him as exceptionally ugly, their bobbing dewlaps and the accordion folds that dented their upper lips, but he liked their inquisitive attentiveness. They fluttered around him and asked what he "did," and he teased them and said he was an entomologist specializing in the anthills of upstate New York, which had layered tunnels and traffic patterns endemic to the region—but he knew these chattering ladies, with their white hair identically coiled, were too shrewd to believe him. Finally he told them he was a failed actor on the lookout for a more sensible line of work; he had done a bit of tutoring, and wouldn't mind doing some more. The ladies were quick to find him leads. They were all too familiar with reading problems in children, and admired him for choosing so useful a vocation.

But when, on the advice of his ladies, the local mothers began summoning him to prop up their faltering offspring, he strolled out to a flower shop and ordered masses of roses wrapped in tissue paper, and piled them on the porch under the
TOURISTS
sign, and caught the bus to Saratoga and gambled away as many dollars as he had paid out to Bridget's son. That same evening he landed in Thrace, where he hoped to find a rooming house that could never be mistaken for respectable.

His knapsack held—it had always held, for spite, for repudiation, for vengeance, for some precipitate opportunity (only God, in whom he had no belief, knew the reason he kept it there)—the very first copy of
The Boy Who Lived in a Hat,
the one his father had placed in his small son's hands. A million and a half copies in print one week after publication! His father said, "You see what a wonderful thing can come of listening to me when I tell you not to move and to stay perfectly still?" In the beginning it
was
a wonderful thing—look, it was himself in the pictures, imagine! He turned the pages, and turned the pages, and ate his bread and jelly, and turned the pages some more.

But in Thrace he gambled the wonderful thing away—he gave it away, he threw it away. It had turned into an atrocity, evidence of a secret murder, a cadaver in his knapsack that stank and stank, a stink he was compelled, until he ran into that fellow in the schoolyard, to carry on his back wherever he went. He never forgot the date he got rid of it, the fifteenth of February, a date that seemed to agitate the fellow—or anyhow he made much of it, it wasn't clear why. The fellow was sly, not stupid, and his dice were worn to a shine. So were his eyes, blinking shiny bulges set too far apart under wary lids. He said he was a teacher, which was plausible (the schoolyard being proof, after all, a cement patch adjoining red brick), and that he had a child, which wasn't—he was so obviously a man alone, and angry. He might or might not credit the value of that old kid book, he said, but he was glad to try for it, just on the chance, he was a man who trusted in luck, even though he hadn't been lucky yet; he was willing to wait; you could never tell, and if the thing was the real McCoy...