The Man Without a Face (4 page)

“All right?” he said.

I nodded. “Yes, thanks.”

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I

“There’s some tea on the table. Drink it.”

I never much cared for being ordered around, but somehow I didn’t protest. The tea was hot, sweet, strong and had milk in it. On the whole it tasted good and cleared my head some. I remembered what I was here for.

“You can leave the clothes at the grocery store,’’ he said, “I’ll pick them up when I next shop. Now I’ll drive you home.”

“Look, about coaching,” I started desperately.

“I said no.” He turned the lamp down again and started towards the door. What I had half taken to be a large nig in front of the fireplace got up and became Mickey. There was nothing to do. I followed them through the house and out the front door. Mickey was left sitting on the front step as McLeod and I drove down the road to the gate.

We were going along the high cliff road, the sea far below, the lights of the village off to one side and curving around the little harbor, when I said something stupid, even for me. “I’ll pay you,” I said. “There’s money Dad left me and I’ve saved quite a lot. You can have all of it. It’s more than three thousand dollars.”

“I don’t want your money.” He said it in a perfectly ordinary voice but I felt ashamed.

“Did I—did I say something wrong?”

“I don’t know. Did you? Did you intend to?”

“No. Truly. It’s just—” My voice trailed off. Explaining Mother—let alone Gloria, the feeling that the comer I was in was getting smaller and smaller, Gloria at home all next winter, and die next, and the next—how could I explain that?

This is where girls cry, I suppose, and for a minute, only a minute, I wished I could, if it would wash away that tight, burning feeling inside me that was getting tighter and more

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burning. But I couldn’t. I rolled down the window to let the air cool my face and stared at the dark wall of trees rushing by.

After a minute McLeod said, “What’s the exam for?” “St. Matthew’s.”

“Why is it so important for you to go there?”

When I had gone up to his house I had the whole thing laid out, what I would say, and so on. It would have moved Grant’s Tomb. Now, thanks to the brandy or whiskey he gave me, everything was hopelessly confused. I tried to recapture the manly, straightforward sentences I had put together. Nothing came.

“Well?” He sounded exasperated.

I knew I had to say something even though I didn’t think he had the slightest intention of changing his mind. He’d undoubtedly think it was a big joke, the jerk. But what choice did I have?

I drew a long breath. “Because I’m sick of living at home with three women, my mother and two sisters, particularly since they’re both brighter than me and make nothing but A’s—my sisters, I mean. I thought Gloria, my older sister, the one who— Well, anyway, she was going away to boarding school. Now she’s not. She’s going to be home all winter and the year after that and the year after that. Messing me up. Putting me down. Making fun of everything I do. When I’m seventeen I’m going to join the Air Force. But that’s three years away and I can’t stand it.”

“I see,” he said, “What’s your name?”

“Charles Norstadt.”

He put the car in gear and we drove down onto the peninsula and then turned right into the road that curled around the harbor and went past our house on the other side.

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“All right. I’ll coach you. But you’ll have to do it my way, and that means the hard way. You must have sat for the exam already. St. Matthew’s doesn’t give the second exam unless it’s necessary. I take it you failed?”

“Yes,” I whispered, terrified he would change his mind. “Did you study for it?”

“No.”

“If you wanted to get in so much, why not?”

I explained again about Gloria’s change of plan.

“That wasn’t very farsighted, was it?”

“No.” Scared as I was that he would back out, I knew I might as well get one thing cleared up from the beginning. “I’m not terribly bright. Not like my sisters, anyway.” “Who told you that?”

“Practically everybody—besides, they have tests at school.”

“What school did you go to?”

I told him. He didn’t say anything.

Then, “Where, by the way, do you live?”

“The first house on the land side past the dinghy pier.” He stopped a few yards short of the house. “All right. Be at my house tomorrow morning at eight. I’ll coach you three hours every morning five days a week, and I’ll give you enough work to take you another three hours. That’s six hours a day during what should be your vacation. It will be tough. But if I ever find you haven’t done the work I’ve assigned you, you won’t come back. Are you sure it’s worth it?”

So with my usual luck I had found myself another Hitler. Repressing a desire to say Sieg heil with a snappy arm salute like in the movies, I said, “Yes. Sir.”

I could see right away we were going to have a lovely summer, he and I. But he didn’t need me. I needed him.

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And we both knew it. And to add to everything else, I would have to look at him three hours a day five days a week. I know it sounds pretty awful to say that, like not wanting to be seen with a cripple. But I can’t help it. The only thing it’s less awful than is being around Gloria for the next three years.

“Where’ve you been?” Mother asked as I walked through the back door into the kitchen. “Do you know what hour it is?”

“Nine,” I said, knowing it was after ten, and trying to get across the room as fast as possible.

“It’s ten thirty. And don’t walk out of the room while I’m talking to you. Have you had dinner?”

“Yes,” I lied, still moving towards the door to the back staircase.

“Where?”

I was thinking furiously, because until that moment it hadn’t occurred to me that I wasn’t going to tell her about McLeod’s coaching me. But it was as though the decision were already made and all I had to do was to find some acceptable explanation for being out so late and arriving home in strange clothes. My own I had strung on the back line as I passed on the way in.

“And whose clothes are those?” Gloria asked, as though she had been cued by what was going on in my head.

“Pete Lansing’s. I fell off the dock and Barney lent me these.” Barney was Pete’s younger brother. Pete was in Vietnam and therefore unavailable for questioning. And Barney would play dumb. Besides, he was due to go off to camp almost any day.

“I wish you’d be more careful,” Mother said. “You

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might hit your head on a rock and really hurt yourself. This isn’t Florida or Long Island with nothing but sand at the bottom.”

“First you have to have something in your head to hurt,” Gloria drawled, like some old Bette Davis heroine. She eyed McLeod’s pants. “I didn’t know Pete was that tall,” she said. “And you could get two of him in that sweater.” “Maybe just being away from you was enough to get his vitamins working,” Meg said, to my astonishment. She was sitting at the table reading, drinking a malted, and working her way through a box of chocolate chip cookies. It’s true that Pete Lansing had once seemed to have the hots for Gloria, along with all the other older boys. But none of them ever stayed that way for long. Which was one reason why our Gloria was so sour. Or maybe it was the other way around.

“You keep on stuffing yourself,” Gloria said to Meg, “and there won’t be any guys around you at all.”

Meg took another cookie. But I could see her cheeks get red. One good turn deserves another. “She may not get as many as you,” I said pointedly, “but seven gets you eight that anybody who likes her will go on liking her. Besides, you can lose fat, but there’s not much you can do about a naturally repulsive personality.”

Gloria doesn’t get red when she gets mad, the way Meg does. She gets white, and for a minute there she looked like skim milk. She got up. “Let’s see the label in those pants,” she said, and snapped out a hand toward me.

Now that was pretty cute of her. Pete was a snob about jeans, which he called Levi’s. Only the genuine cowpoke’s would do. His came from Jackson, Wyoming, where he had worked on a ranch part of every summer before he went

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-

into the army. I don’t know where McLeod got the ones I was wearing, but the chances of their coming from Jackson, Wyoming, were about zero.

There happened to be a ruler on the table; why, I don’t know. But there it was like the serpent in the Garden of Eden and of course I picked it up and whacked her hand away. I guess I hit harder than I really intended. . . .

The only thing I can say about what followed is that it took everybody’s mind off where I had been and what I’d been doing.

Mother’s lecture went on for what felt like half an hour while she bathed Gloria’s hand and mopped up the blood from the cut across her palm. The thin steel plate along the edge of the ruler had sliced the inside of her hand and it was no use my saying that it wasn’t deliberate. With Gloria sobbing as though she’d been attacked with a switchblade and Mother going on and on about my dangerous temper and what it had done to my father, who was listening?

“You’ll apologize to Gloria, do you hear me?” Mother said, as I tried again to split by the back staircase. “If you don’t we’ll come up and stay in your room until you do.”

What I would have given to say “So stay!” But Mother had learned early that that was the one threat that worked. All the rest of the house—or the apartment in New York— was theirs. My room was mine and I’d pay the price, usually an apology, to keep it that way. I turned and came down the stairs.

“I’m sorry,” I said, lying in my teeth and with my fingers crossed behind my back. I hope you get tetanus and die, was what I thought to myself. And then a kind of superstitious horror took hold of me. / didn't mean that, God, I thought quickly. Undo it, please. I didn’t want that on my conscience.

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In the middle of what The Hairball used to call this Sturm und Drang, old Barry Rumble Seat pushed open the screen door and came in.

“Hiya,” he said, as though it were midafternoon and everybody was sitting around having sweetness and light.

“Hello,” Meg said.

“Hi, Sweetheart.”

Meg digs Barry. Why, I can’t think, unless it’s what’s called a community of suffering. They’re both overweight. She gave him her best grin which even with braces and cookie crumbs packs a lot of voltage.

He grinned back. “What’s going on?”

What with the Band-Aids all over the table and the disinfectant making the kitchen smell like a hospital and Gloria sitting there with her blotched tears acting like a rape case, I can see why he’d ask. But it was the lead-in that Gloria the Wronged must have been praying for. As I eased out she was sounding her favorite theme. “Something simply has to be done about Chuck’s paranoid attacks. With his background and his father being the way he was . . .”

I got into my room, just barely managing not to slam the door. Gloria, the fink, knows where to shove in the needle, which is one reason why she is so universally beloved. . . .

I kicked the wastebasket and stood there, watching the paper and candy wrappers and peanut shells ricochet off the walls ail over the rag rug, thinking how stinking lousy everything was. Six hours’ work a day, Himmler McLeod, and if everything worked, a crummy boarding school in the fall where they probably goose-stepped you off to chapel six times a day.

“But you got what you wanted,” said the Judas voice inside me that always speaks up when I am about to enjoy my own misery.

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* * *

During the course of the night I contemplated my readymade decision not to tell Mother or Gloria about McLeod coaching me, although I might tell Meg since it had been her idea. But nobody else, because in a summer community like ours it would get back in less than twenty-four hours. I’m not sure why I felt so strongly about this, beyond the usual reason that if Gloria ever discovered that something was important to me, she’d mess it up if she could.

You’d think, considering the way we feel about each other, that she’d be happy to have me in boarding school when she’s home. But it isn’t so. The only thing I can figure is that it’s some kind of power thing with her. Once, long ago, when Gloria was up to her usual bag of tricks, I asked Mother, “Why does she act like that to me? I mean—what did I ever do to her?’’

Mother was ironing at the time and I think we were up here on the Island. I do remember she was wearing shorts and a long pink shirt abandoned by one of her husbands. With her dark hair down she looked, I swear, younger than Gloria—more like Meg after a successful diet. Anyway, she ironed for a minute, then said, “You got born, Charles, that’s what you did to her.”

“But that’s not my fault.”

“No. But when she was three, which is when you were born, she didn’t know that. All she knew was that somebody had arrived to take not only my attention away from her, but also her brand-new stepfather’s whom she was already flirting with.”

“But she hated my father. She’s always telling me what a jerk he was—the way you do.”

That was one of those minutes when I had the curious feeling that something that might have made me understand

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the whole business between Mother and me almost happened but didn’t quite. For a minute she looked terribly unhappy—sort of stricken. When she looks like that a queer desire to protect her comes over me and I have to hold onto myself and remember that if I give in the gates will clang to and lock behind me. So I clenched my teeth and said nothing.

“Charles—I never meant ... I didn’t want ...”

I wanted to tell her everything was all right and I didn’t mean it. (Mean what? I wasn’t sure, but it didn’t matter.) I wanted to kiss her cheek and tell her I’d take care of everything. Yes, I did. It’s incredible, but I did. I remember it very well—and then the door opened and Gloria walked in. Mother’s face closed up. She turned her back to pick up something else to iron and when she turned around again she just said, “We didn’t always feel like that about him.”