The Man Without a Face (2 page)

And, although it’s hard to believe, Mother’s a whiz at telling stories of another kind. Her father had been a scholar of some sort or other and, prompted by Meg or me, she would suddenly break out into some really cool tale about people like Saladin, the Saracen leader during the Crusades, or some Welsh or Bulgarian or Chinese character, that she had picked up by osmosis when she was a child. But she was like that only when Meg and I were alone with her. Gloria and my last two stepfathers put her down if they heard her. As The Hairball once said when he walked in late for dinner and Mother was launched on Robert the Bruce or Cadwallader or Canute or somebody, it retards the development of social consciousness to feed a neurotic need for entirely mythical heroes. And did we know that Robert the Bruce (or Cadwallader or Canute) had scabies and syphilis and body lice? History, he said, sitting down and taking the last of the pot roast, was the chronicle of mass movements, and it was important that Meg and I shouldn’t forget it. Mother looked guilt-stricken, and for a second I felt sorry for her. But since she usually made amends for such lapses of social consciousness by pushing me around, my sorrow didn’t last long.

Gloria had the same effect on Mother and the general atmosphere as the professor. So I knew, when, she dropped her bomb about not going away to school, that I had to get myself out of there. I was due to sit for the entrance exams to St. Matthew’s that week, but even though I sat up every night it was too late to catch up the studying I hadn’t done. Of course, if I hadn’t been as stupid as everyone said I was, I would have studied right along just in case something like this came up. But Gloria had done nothing but talk about the splendors of Fenwick Academy (the finishing school she was supposed to attend) since I could remember. And I had simply not taken into account that with Gloria any on-the-spot heart interest would take priority over everything else, and that New York was a lot nearer to Princeton and Peerless Percy than Fenwick, Virginia. Besides which, since I had made up my mind to split anyway as soon as I had reached seventeen, I had got it into my head that boarding school would be a harder place for me to cut loose from than home, where at least I knew what the setup was. And so I just didn’t bother. And of course, when the result of the exam came in a letter from the headmaster of the school to Mother, just before we left to come up here for the summer, I had bombed out.

“And that’s that,” Mother said, refolding the letter and not even trying to sound unhappy. She didn’t approve of boarding school for boys anyway. The Hairball had told her that they turned out a high percentage of homosexuals, and Mother has a thing about homos.

So I knew then I was in serious trouble and I had to do something to get myself to school. So, just before we left New York, I wrote to the headmaster and asked him if there were any way—despite my lousy exam—I could get in.

The answer came the day after we bumped into The Man Without a Face, whose nickname should, strictly speaking, have been the man with half a face. One side of his face was, as Gloria said, gruesome. The other, if you ever got around to looking at it, which most people didn’t after the initial shock, was okay. He was also called The Grouch, because no one had ever known him to say anything that wasn’t absolutely necessary, such as “A loaf of bread and a pound of coffee, please.”

Anyway, in his letter the headmaster said that the only hope I had was to sit for the exam again at the end of the summer, at which point—and if I made at least a B average—my “case would be reviewed.”

Of course if St. Matthew’s had had any kind of standing among the prep schools I wouldn’t have had a prayer. As Gloria said, when the original result came in, “Who wants a semiliterate WASP?”

But St. Matthew’s (where my grandfather and a few great uncles had gone) had been going into a genteel decline for decades, and though it had a new headmaster, they couldn’t be choosy. St. Matthew’s got what Andover and Exeter and Groton and Choate and the rest of the decent schools wouldn’t have. And that was my one hope.

I showed Mother the letter.

“You’ve never cracked a book during the summer in your life, Chuck. What makes you think you’ll do it this time?”

“But if I do, can I go?”

“You’re perfectly safe, Mother,” Gloria said.

She was sitting at the kitchen table trying on a new set of false eyelashes. “He could no more do the kind of organized studying necessary to drag him from his present first-grade level to even poor old St. Matthew’s standard than he could swim across the harbor. In fact,” she pickec up her eyelashes off the floor, “since he’s more muscle than mind, that’s a bad analogy. Do you know what an analogy is, Chuck?” She looked at me with that sweet: expression that made me want to kick her.

I knew I was being baited. I also knew I was incapable of coming back with a snappy retort. If snappy retorts ever come to me, it’s several hours later or three o’clock in the morning, after I’ve been lying awake half the night trying to think of them. I ignored her.

“Can I, Ma?”

But Mother had been primed. “Of course. If you think you can.”

At the end of the week, I knew Gloria was right: I’d never make it alone. Every night she would ask, usually at dinner, “How’s the studying coming, Chuck? Are you on Caesar or Vergil yet ?” Or, “I’ll be happy to help you with your social studies.”

“Fine,” I always said, lying through my teeth and digging my own grave, because the more I said it, the less chance I’d ever have of getting any real help.

“That’s good,” she’d say, looking at me out of her cool brown eyes. “It just shows what you can really do when you try. It’s a pity that all these years, what with the tuition bills and everything, you haven’t tried before.”

I bit. “Why don’t you get off my back? If you want to be the head of the local women’s lib, try it on your boyfriends, or is that the reason Steve and Larry aren’t around this season?”

Now the one thing Gloria doesn’t do well (physically, list is) is blush. It comes up like a bad case of measles.

Spoken with the chauvinism of the stupid male who knows that the only superior thing he has is his musculature. That’s her new word, musculature.

My musculature’s great to push your face in with, Glory- old-girl. Let me demonstrate.” And I pretended to reach across the table.

Gloria is a physical coward. She panics if you throw a ball at her. “Stop him, Mother,” she squeaked.

If you’re going to study, then I suggest you do so,” Mother said, stuffing the dishwasher. “After all, it’s you who wants to go to boarding school.”

I went up to my room and closed the door. Then I stared

the books I had 'brought up from New York, the ones - hose contents would have to be in my head before I had a prayer of getting into St. Matthew’s. Maybe all the dreary moralists are right: You have to develop good habits. I had never developed the habit of studying, and now I didn’t know where to begin. I went to the kind of school in New York that would rather pass Rosie, the hippopotamus at the Central Park Zoo, than lose the tuition fee. Besides, it was the latest in do-your-own-thing places. No inhibiting structure. No outmoded methods. Lots of Rorschach tests, but no exams.

I have not cried since I was seven years old. I know that doesn’t sound possible. But it’s true. People who said I was incapable of applying myself to anything didn’t know what they were talking about. I had applied myself to not crying—no matter what. Not, you understand, because I’m hung up on being stiff with the upper lip or anything like that. But because it gave Mother some kind of queer hold on me. She loved it. When it did happen (before I was seven), I’d find myself pressed against her bosom, half smothered (while Gloria looked on) and for a while after that she’d be very sweet to me, which was nice. But it had a price. She felt then that I was HERS, and until I managed to get some space around me again by being really obnoxious, I could hardly go to the bathroom or make myself a sandwich or go for a walk without her wanting to know where I was going, what I did when I got there, and could she help? Yuch!

Or, if I want to be really truthful, if I had any crying that could not be avoided, I made very sure I was alone and unheard.

The trouble is, our house on the Island was not built for privacy. So I sat on the bed, staring at the books, and trying very hard to think about things that were truly hilarious, like Gloria falling off one of the cliffs around here into a pot of scalding oil. After a while, I turned off the light and got into bed and pushed my face into the pillow.

I must have gone to sleep because the next thing I knew I was awake, the moon was up, and there was a low, cushiony growl from the window, followed by a plop on my bed.

“Moxie,” I said, and put my arms around him.

The growl turned into a deep, rattling purr. I felt a wet nose against my cheek and smelled bad breath. Poor Moxie. On just about every count you can think of he’s socially unacceptable. Moxie’s a big yellow tom, with one and a half ears, patches where his fur has been yanked out in his many fights, and scars around his face that give him a positively evil expression.

He was a lanky kitten when I found him three years ago.

But of course with Mother’s allergy, I couldn’t keep him or take him to New York. He lives through the winter by hunting and handouts. I have asked some of the. native villagers to feed him, offering them money (when I thought they wouldn’t be insulted) or doing odd jobs for them during the summer. I guess they do. Feed him, I mean. Or somebody does. Because each summer he’s the first thing I look for, and he never misses our arrival. Sometime during the first three nights he comes over the garage roof to my window after it’s dark. He knows better than to come to one of the doors during the day. Quite apart from her allergy, Mother hates him. Two years ago she offered to let me keep him officially in my room if I would agree to have him altered. But I knew that this was just part of Mother’s wholesale plan for the taming and domesticating of the male species, and I refused.

As a result, Mother takes as a personal slight every ginger kitten around the harbor, and there are more each year.

“Don’t let that animal into the house, Charles,” she says every now and then for good measure. “He smells and he has bad habits.” All true.

“Moxie,” I muttered now into his scruffy fur. His pun- rattled louder. He stretched his long, battle-scarred body alongside mine. Mother was right about one thing: He stank. He must have been the gamiest thing this side of skunks. But I am the one creature, animal or human, he loves and it’s entirely mutual. The only reason I make my own bed in the morning, which otherwise I would consider a concession to female chauvinist imperialism, is to keep Mother from knowing he has been there. With the bed unmade, she would know the minute she hit the door.

Off and on that night I told Moxie about everything in a low voice, while he alternately purred and snored (I think he has a deviated septum or maybe one of his unsuccessful rivals whacked him over the nose). The walls of our house are thin, so I should not have been surprised to see the door open in the early light revealing Meg’s tub-shaped form. “What d’ya want?” I asked surlily.

Meg regarded the two of us. Moxie raised his head. His purring stopped. Without making a sound or moving a muscle, he was, I knew, watching with every hair and sinew. He tolerated Meg. If it had been Gloria or Mother he would have uttered his curious screeching growl and gone through the window in one leap. One of the things I feel I must say about Meg is that even with her thing about animals she isn’t jealous, which a lot of animal nuts are. They somehow feel threatened if every creature they meet doesn’t leap onto their laps.

She just stood there, her curly hair making her look like a short, fat saint with a halo. “About St. Matthew’s,” she said.

“What about St. Matthew’s?”

“You’ll never make it alone.”

I opened my mouth to tell her to keep her brilliant insights to herself, but before I could say anything she plowed on. “It’s no use getting on your high horse about it, it’s much better to face facts and go on from there.”

I mean really, this punk kid, coming over like one of the five psychoanalysts on the staff at school. I opened my mouth again to put her down once and for all when it hit me that that was just what I’d been thinking when I went to bed. All I could say was “So?”

“So, one of the rumors about The Grouch is that he was once a teacher. Maybe he’d coach you.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

“Why?”

I lay there in the semidark. Why indeed? The rumors about The Grouch, alias The Man Without a Face, alias Justin McLeod, were rife.

In our little community everybody knew practically everything about everybody. The one exception was McLeod, who lived off by himself in an old house on the mainland side of the little peninsula that keeps our Island from being a true island. This, of course, made him a fascinating source of gossip: One theory was that he’d been in jail. Another was that he’d been in the CIA and had been firebombed by a double, triple, or quadruple spy. Another was that he was a famous physicist who was living under a pseudonym because an experiment blew up in his face. Then there was the one about the car.

None of us really believed any of them, but with nothing to go on and all summer to speculate the stories got wilder and wilder. One or two of the kids had sneaked onto his property to see what they could nose out, only to be chased off by a huge dog that looked half horse and all homicidal. Everybody got the hint. He didn’t want company. So we left him alone.

Now Meg came up with this really tame idea about his having been a teacher.

“Well,” Meg said from the door. “You can try it out. All that can happen is for the dog to chew you to pieces.”

“Thanks.”

I didn’t go back to sleep. Moxie relaxed, purred, and even snored a little. But when it grew lighter and the birds started making a racket, his mind obviously turned to breakfast. Also, there was never any telling when the Enemy (Mother or Gloria) would get up and start sending unfriendly waves in his direction. With a final guttural meow and a rub of his head against mine, he gathered his mangy length, sprang to the window, and disappeared.