Seventh Avenue (51 page)

“
Shake” - he
extended his hand – “me too. My folks are going
to
Europe,
so they had to park me. Boy, was I mad. Who needs all
this crap? I
coulda
stayed with my
grandma,
but they wouldn’t let
me go. My mother says she might die. Isn’t that a rotten thing to say?”

“
Both
mine’re
dead,” Neal said.

“
Well, maybe they were telling me the truth.”

“
Your parents fight a lot?”

“
Sometimes. Not very often. They’re not bad really. But this
place stinks. Know any of the udder guys before?”

“
No, never saw them.”

“
Do you smoke?”

“
Yeah.
I
got three packs of Old Golds hidden in my duffel bag.”

“
Great. Let’s go to the
showerhouse
after swimming.”

“
Any girls’ camps around?”

“
Holtz told my parents they had dances once a week with some
camp.” He gave Neal a lascivious stare and his blue eyes opened
wide. “You got
plans
or somethin’?”

“
Well, I don’t want to spend the summer jerking off.”

Fish scratched his long legs and then unbuttoned his shirt. His
sandy hair fell into his
eyes,
and he pushed it back.

“
How
old’re
you?”

“
Thirteen.”

“
And you been laid
awready
?”

“
Sure.”

“
No bullshit.”

“
When you get to know me, you’ll see that I don’t tell stories,”
Neal said haughtily, seizing the upper hand that was being offered
him.

Uncle Don, stripped to his undershorts and tee shirt, came over
to them.

“
Want any help?”

“
No, I’m okay,” Neal said.

“
Well, you two share the third and fourth cubbies. Make it
snappy,
and we’ll get down to the lake.” He glared at Fish through his thick
befogged lenses. “And you, none of that kinda language to me and
I’ll forget what you said on the road.”

“
You need a pair of windshield wipers for your specs, Uncle Don.”

“
Oh, boy, you’re gonna get your ass in a sling before this summer’s over.”

“
Lay a hand on
me,
and you’ll wind up in court,” Fish snapped.

“
Okay,
by me if that’s the way you wanna play it, Fishcake.”

“
My name’s Fish,
four-eyes
.”

Uncle Don scratched his funky armpits and sneered.

They unpacked their clothes and placed them along the dusty
shelves adjacent to the toilet. Trousers, jackets, and coats were hung
in a community closet, and the boys at last, to their great relief, were
allowed to put on bathing suits. They were told to sit on their
beds,
and Uncle Don sat on his, trying to look like a sage and a military
leader, in a tartan swimsuit.

“
I
wanner
have a talk with everybody, but I’ll save it till after the
swim. But a few things I gotta say, so’s we know where we stand.
We’re gonna live together for a whole
summer,
and we might as well
be friends, ‘cause if we’re not friends, you guys are gonna have a
rotten time.”

Fish interrupted.

“
I thought you were gonna save the speeches for
lata
.”

“
No more lip from you, Fish.”

“
What about freedom of speech?” Neal said.

“
Sure there’s freedom of speech, but there’s got to be respect.
Now we’ll adjourn this chat, ‘cause it’s pretty hot. You boys form a
line on the porch, and when I inspect
it,
I want to see it straight as a
ruler.”

On the porch, Fish murmured: “He’s a dick. I don’t know from
respect, except for my parents.”

“
Don’t talk too much,” Neal advised. “Let him shoot off his mouth
,
and
then
we’ll bury him in his own bullshit.”

The three other bunkmates hardly spoke. They were too intimidated by their new environment either to pledge friendship or risk
making enemies, and they stood rigidly, waiting for approval.

“
Size places,” Uncle Don shouted.

Fish moved to the back of the
line,
and Neal changed with the boy
in front of him who was a bit taller. The path down to the lake was
muddy, strewn with rocks, and along the sides of its meandering
course, ferns, thick gorse, and miles of trees hedged them in. Uncle
Don pointed out the poison ivy and the poison sumac.

“
Any of you guys
get
lost, make sure you don’t touch that stuff,
‘cause it’ll give you a rash you won’t get rid of for years.”

Lake Crow was spectacularly beautiful. It was much larger than
Neal had thought. It lay in the hollow of a valley and in the distance
he could see the rolling Berkshire hills surrounding them like an emerald umbrella. Half a dozen
counselors
stood on a wooden pier
that
was divided into three sections by ropes.

“
All
non-swimmers
in the crib,” a man with a megaphone called
out.
“Junior life-savers and intermediates into five-foot water.
The
raft for deep water swimmers only.”

Uncle Don marched them into the bathhouse and gave them all
numbers for their bathrobes and towels, formed them into a line,
and when he was satisfied that it was as straight as it could be, inasmuch as none of them had yet had
Moscalero
training, he led them
out to the pier.

“
Since I don’t know how any of you swim, you’ll have to be in
the crib, till the waterfront
counselors
decide where you can go.”

“
It’s only about three-feet deep,” Artie Kahn protested. “And I
passed my J.L.S. test in school last winter.”

“
The crib, Artie,” Uncle Don said.

There were about thirty other boys paddling in the shallows of
the crib, most of
them
much smaller than Bunk 11.

Neal turned to Bobby and said: “You and me stick together no
matter what.”

They shook hands under water because Uncle Don was glaring
at Fish.

“
It might not be so bad,” Fish said. “It’s just that it’s all so strange.
One minute you’re running around in the streets, and nobody telling
you what to do. Then all of a sudden they put you in the army.”

“
I’m glad I’ve come,” Neal remarked. His forehead became
ruckled
and pensive, and he stared down at the clear water. He could see his
feet, and there were only small pebbles on the bottom.

“
I thought you didn’t like it,” Fish asked with some confusion.

“
Anything’s better than being with my parents. They’re divorced.”

In the summer, Jay and Eva usually went to Southampton. They had
a large, rambling
beach house
that
Jay had bought from an architect, and he liked the timbered atmosphere, and the enormous copper
fireplace
that
fluted up to the chimney. It was conveniently situated;
he could drive from his office in Manhattan to the house in about two
hours.

He and Terry met whenever they could, but the time they had
together possessed a fugitive quality
that
unnerved them, and created an air of charged desperation when they resumed the respectable functions of their lives. But midway through the summer fortune
smiled on them, for Eva suggested that a “getting-to-know-each-other” period with Lorna might relieve the tension and anxiety that
overwhelmed her whenever she and her daughter were together. Jay
graciously offered the
beach house
and Eva accepted. She had been
scared when confronted with the prospect of being on her own with
Lorna, but Jay had saved the situation by saying: “We’ll ask your
mother to come with you. She’s on her own, and it’ll give the three
of you a chance to get acquainted” - which went to prove that improvisation was the handmaiden of love. Eva had flung her arms
round
Jay and murmured: “Oh, God, Jay you’ve saved the day.
You’re wonderful.”
Which might have confirmed for cynical people
the efficacy and value of having enough money to get rid of one’s
wife.

Jay telephoned Terry as soon as he was out of the house. She
shared his
excitement
but told him that it was impossible for them
to meet because Mitch was coming home for dinner.

“
Impossible?” He was astounded. “I’ve got to see you.”

“
What’s the point if we can’t be alone?”

“
I don’t give a damn.”

“
Jay,
you’re being
unreasonable.”

“
Don’t tell me what I’m being.” The ground had been cut from
under him, and a sleepless night, a hangover, and the airless phone
booth, conspired to make him irritable.

“
How do you think I feel, knowing you’re free?”

“
I
wonder .
. .”

“
Well, you can stop wondering.”

“
I’ll come to dinner.”

“
How can you?”

“
Easy. I’ll just show up. You tell him that you invited me.
That
you met me and Eva at Park Knoll.”

“
It can’t be done out of the blue.”

“
It’ll have to be. See you at six.” He hung up as she started to protest. He was becoming desperate, and the sensation both terrified
and exalted him. For a man who prided himself on carefully planning most of the moves of his life, he perceived a
quirkish
change of
character in his technique. He was behaving stupidly and carelessly,
exposing himself to a position from which no retreat could be made.
Any unconsidered action could break up two marriages, but he was
prepared for it, and indeed hoped that he would emerge with the
prize he sought: marital happiness with Terry.

Dr. Lawson wore one of those badly cut navy-blue doctor’s suits,
complete with baggy trousers and ironing
sheen
on the tail of the
jacket. He was more hospitable than Jay expected in view of the fact
that he was entertaining a stranger who had crashed in on a quiet
family dinner, and with whom he had nothing in common save the
fact that unknown to him this stranger performed with complete success certain duties
that
the doctor attempted energetically but
disastrously at a cost of incalculable anguish. Neither of them appreciated the irony of the situation: they were both ignorant of French
farce, and epigrams did not come easily to either of them. Terry
behaved with the cold and distant manner of a surgical nurse; she did
everything perfectly, so perfectly in fact, that it was evident to Jay,
although not to her husband, that she might begin to scream at any
moment during the laborious hour of small talk and lethal highballs
that
preceded dinner. She could not make up her mind about Jay’s
action. Perhaps it would be best to come out in the open and risk hurting Mitch, very suddenly, and so sharply that the shock would be
violent and almost painless? A ruthless solution to an impossible
situation. The other course would involve deceit and slyness and inevitably force him into the position of witness and abettor of his own cuckolding. This seemed to her ignoble and disgusting, but she could not act until Jay made the decision. The two men sat on the sofa, facing each other, like cocks in wooden cages, each with his morsel of cornmeal, affable, both the same generic breed, until they were armed with spikes and shoved into the sawdust pit. One would be the killer, the other the victim, and she watched with that peculiar horrified fascination that transcends all human decency, and centuries of civilization, when one is a spectator at any form of combat.