Asa, as I Knew Him Page 8

  At Andover everything looked exactly as it looked in Wallingford. There were white houses ringed around a common thick with beeches and oaks; there were fewer than seven shops, and those sold either food, books, or pharmaceuticals; there were handsome dogs sporting on the brown lawns. Waiting for the train to stop moving so he could descend, Asa had a moment of envying Roberto, who had all of Harvard Square to prowl through on his way to and from school. Why was it a privilege to be hidden away in these sleepy country towns?

  Reuben was leaning against the side of the ticket booth. For once he was dressed correctly, in a blue-gray tweed jacket, blue tie with white stripes, white shirt, and charcoal-gray pants. His clothes were of excellent quality and excellently tailored, but he seemed to be wearing a costume. Asa stopped at the top step and looked Reuben over, wondering how he managed to appear oddly dressed in what was, after all, the term-time uniform of everyone the two of them knew. It was the sneakers, Asa decided. Reuben wore once-white sneakers so old that his little toes popped through on both feet. Asa wore cordovans his father had bought him in tenth grade, which he hated because the color reminded him of slaughtering chickens with his grandfather. His father had said, as when he’d bought the cashmere coat, “These will last for the rest of your life.” It appeared he was right. Asa’s cordovans trod the grimy steel steps of the train down to the platform and went to Reuben’s side.

  The game began at one, so they went immediately to the dining hall, where a number of people said hello to Reuben. Asa hoped to be introduced but wasn’t. Then Reuben put Asa in an armchair in the library, gave him instructions to the playing fields (the grounds were enormous, far larger than Choate’s), and hurried to his pregame strategy meeting in the locker room. “Sit on the right side,” he called from the door, “that’s our side.” Asa read The Mayor of Casterbridge for a while and fell asleep. He had been up at six, and was accustomed to rising at seven-thirty; that tiredness combined with the lulling movement of the train, which persisted in his body, the chicken pie filled mostly with potatoes, and the deliberate unrolling of Hardy’s plot to stupefy him. He slept for a long time. When he woke up the sun was lower, brighter, and shining in a different window. He pulled out his pocket watch: three o’clock. Over the tops of trees, muted by the carpets in the library but clear and high, yells came from the direction Reuben had pointed him in hours before. Asa jumped out of his chair and began formulating excuses. I’ll just tell him I couldn’t get through the crowds to him, he thought. The first order of business, though, was to find out who’d won the game. Then he could make his way to the locker room with congratulations or comfort.

  He put on his coat and went outside under the elms flanking the library to overhear the news. It was clear that Andover had trounced Exeter. The yellow buses at the foot of the great lawn, which had brought the Exeter team and boosters, were filling with quiet pairs of boys; shirt-sleeved Andoverites were doing handsprings and somersaults on the stubbly grass. Asa went up to some boys standing near him who were describing the game play-by-play to each other, relishing their favorite moments.

  “Can you tell me how to get to the locker room?” he asked.

  “You from Exeter?” Everybody looked at him intently.

  “No, Choate. I’m a friend of somebody on your team.”

  “Who?” The one asking didn’t relax his suspiciousness, although the others seemed prepared to go back to their game review. He peered through his gold rims as though he suspected Asa of being a spy.

  “Sola,” said Asa.

  “What position does he play?” Gold Rims, Asa could see, had decided to make sport by grilling him. This was precisely the question he hadn’t wanted to be asked, because he hadn’t a clue to what position Reuben played.

  “Oh, leave him alone, Bowditch. I know Sola, he’s left wing,” one of the calmer boys said. “The gym is about three minutes that way, and the locker room’s on your right.” He pointed past the library. “Tell him he made a terrific goal there, at the end.”

  “Thanks,” said Asa. He buttoned his coat up and set off, pleased to have gotten two unexpected and useful pieces of information. He could congratulate Reuben on his goal.

  But when he got to the locker room and saw Reuben stripped and shiny among all the others, he didn’t want to lie. Reuben asked how he’d enjoyed himself, and Asa said, “I fell asleep and missed the whole thing.”

  “Wonderful,” Reuben said. “Just the thing to do. Not worth watching anyhow. It’s fun to play, but I don’t bother going to games I’m not in. It’s cold and boring.” He combed his wet hair back from his forehead with a small tortoiseshell comb that had a gold edge and looked as if it belonged to a woman. “Hold on a second, I’ll be dressed and we can go have something hot.” He winked; Asa wondered if he had a booze cache somewhere and supposed so.

  “That’s a very nice comb,” Asa said. Some demon motivated him; he knew it would be the wrong thing to say. Sure enough, Reuben’s face became blank and stiff.

  “Thanks,” he said, and slipped it quickly into the pocket of his pants, which were still hanging in his locker.

  “Was it your mother’s?” Asa persisted. He amazed himself; he couldn’t imagine why he was pursuing this dangerous topic, but his resolve to “get closer” to Reuben and to find out about Jewish family affairs seemed to justify snooping.

  “Forget it,” said Reuben. “Go outside and wait for me.” Asa obeyed. Reuben kept him waiting fifteen minutes as punishment. Asa used the time to formulate more invasive questions, which he resolved to ask late at night, when Reuben was tired. Who was your mother? he would ask, and, Why is she never discussed? What is your father really like? and, Who is Grace? How much money do you have? Where are your cousins? Do you have grandparents? How many kisses, and what besides kisses, have you and Jo exchanged? Do you prefer Parker to me? When he reached this question Asa realized he probably wouldn’t ask any of the questions. He resolved not to be petulant. After all, he, not Parker, was waiting for Reuben. He wondered why the answers to these questions interested him as much as they did.

  He thought perhaps the way to find the answers was to confide in Reuben; after all, their ignorance extended both ways. Reuben didn’t know about the whore in June, or Mrs. Thayer’s two stillborn children, one before, one after, Asa. These two pieces of information didn’t seem as thrilling as the information Asa was looking for, but that might be because he possessed them already. Maybe Reuben would find them valuable. He could only offer them and see what happened.

  It was dark and chilly outside on the northern wall of the gym, facing the fields and woods whose feathery outlines Asa could no longer see. He had a sense of having traveled north, and this made him long for New Hampshire. Thanksgiving would be at his grandparents’ farm as usual, and he had a vivid memory of tramping through icy mud in the morning to fetch eggs for breakfast from under the warm hens. He liked the cleanness of winter, the way the air was purified and thinned until it became nearly painful to breathe. He took a deep breath, waiting for the minty sharpness of the air, but October was too early for that. And then Reuben came out, with a mist of heat around him and his jacket open, and took Asa’s arm, so that Asa’s solitude was melted. They walked arm in arm back to the dining hall through the moist leaves that clung to the paths.

  This time Reuben introduced Asa to a few of the people who greeted him in the food line. But he steered them to a table in the corner that was unoccupied except for a thin, pale-brown boy bent over a plate of steak and potato. This fellow, who rose as they approached, was too tall for himself—his cuffs had not kept pace with his arms, and he wobbled when he stood, so Asa imagined he’d shot up five inches overnight and hadn’t adjusted. All his features were watered-down hazel and looked unhealthy; his hair was slicked sideways with an unguent that gave off an unpleasant glow, his eyes were bloodshot, and his face was nicked and chipped from acne. Instead of a tie he wore a red polka-dotted ascot. To Asa’s surprise, Reuben clapped this character o
n the shoulder and introduced him enthusiastically.

  “Kuhn,” he said, “meet Asa Thayer, my companion in Cambridge. This is Jerry Kuhn, without whom Andover would be unbearable.”

  Asa looked at Jerry Kuhn and wondered how he could improve Andover so much, then looked around the dining hall, wondering what had to be improved. It was a larger, more pleasant dining hall than Choate’s, because it was older and therefore had wood paneling, two chandeliers, and decent refectory tables. Choate had in the past five years been given an anonymous million and spent it on building a few new, ugly buildings, one of which was a dining hall with pastel walls and Formica-topped tables for easy cleaning. Asa much preferred this, which was an inflated version of his dining room at home. For that matter, it wasn’t very different from Reuben’s dining room. As to Kuhn, Asa couldn’t imagine what he had to offer. He felt himself sinking into a sulk, but was unable to stop it.

  The two of them were full of chat. Reuben was ribbed about being a “jock,” about his having saved the team’s honor with his goal, and then about his clothes.

  “You are really looking the part tonight—expecting somebody to take your picture for the yearbook? I see you’ve got your Andover tie on, that’s the school spirit we like to see here. Nice cloth”—Kuhn’s long finger massaged Reuben’s collar—“have that made up for you at Brooks by the dozen, eh?”

  “Jerry, you’re the worst snob on campus,” said Reuben cheerfully. He put a potato skin in his mouth and pulled it across his front teeth to extract all the pulp. Asa was glad to see his table manners weren’t any better at school than at home. But apparently Jerry found them offensive.

  “Christ almighty, learn to eat with your mouth shut, man, or you’ll never be part of the ruling class.”

  “Is that what I’m aiming for?” Reuben asked. They both laughed. Asa, not wanting to be left out, laughed as well, but he felt on dangerous ground. What was he laughing at? One must eat with a shut mouth. That was common knowledge. On the other hand, he took a mystifying but real pleasure in Reuben’s flouting of these fundamental rules; perhaps Jerry shared this pleasure, and it made him laugh. Reuben was satisfying because he didn’t bother with table manners, proper shoes, or proper grades—but Asa assumed this was by choice, not because he was incapable or ignorant. Reuben’s knowing better and behaving worse took courage.

  Reuben said, with his mouth full, “I am in the ruling class, Jerry, and don’t you forget it.” Jerry laughed some more and Asa stared at his plate where a half moon of fat was turning hard.

  “Money’s only half of it. Around here it won’t even get you in the door. Or just in the door. None of these fellows has any money.” Jerry waved his arm at the ranks of tweed backs. “They pride themselves on not having any money.” He turned to Asa. “How much money do you have at your disposal?”

  Asa bristled. This was one of the questions he was meaning to ask Reuben, but it was entirely different to have it posed by a stranger. “Not much,” he said evenly, and hoped he’d covered the topic. But he hadn’t.

  “And how much is that?”

  “Well, nothing, unless I ask for it.”

  “Aha,” said Jerry.

  “Come on,” Reuben said, “you’ve got an allowance or something, don’t you?”

  “No, I’ve got what I earned last summer, and my mother sends me fifteen dollars a month out of that.” They stared. “It’s not like I need money for anything,” Asa said. “What would I get?”

  “Cigarettes,” said Reuben.

  “Books,” said Jerry.

  “Booze,” said Reuben.

  “Tickets to the movies,” said Jerry.

  “I can’t smoke at school,” said Asa sadly. He missed it. “How about you?” He looked at Reuben beside him, with gravy on his shirt. “What have you got?”

  “Oh, Jesus, I don’t know. I have a checking account, and my father, or the bank, or someone, drops two hundred dollars a month into it.”

  “Two hundred dollars a month!” Asa leaned back in his chair. “You could—you could go around the world!”

  “If I saved it,” Reuben agreed. “But I don’t save it. I get stuff.”

  “Like the car?”

  “Oh no, Father got me that. Like these.” He shot his cuffs and showed Asa gold and mother-of-pearl cuff links in the shape of grape leaves.

  “And they’re absolutely hideous,” Jerry said. “You have no business wasting your money on horrible things. You ought at least to have some taste. Why don’t you take this young fellow with you when you get the urge to spend? He looks like a fellow of taste. Look at that nice coat. He wouldn’t let you buy these atrocities.”

  Asa bristled again at being called a young fellow by another young fellow, but was glad Jerry appreciated the coat. Still, he didn’t like the conversation. He didn’t like Jerry, either. “How much money do you have?” he asked sharply.

  “I’m somewhere between the two of you. I don’t have a fortune like Mr. Sola. On the other hand I don’t have cold, grasping Yankee parents who won’t give me enough to take my pals to the show. I assume your family is well-heeled enough to have bought that coat new? It isn’t something you found at Keezer’s?”

  “What’s Keezer’s?”

  “Point made,” said Jerry.

  “And how do you know my parents are cold and grasping?” Asa said this in such a halfhearted way that Reuben put an arm around him.

  “Don’t take offense at Jerry,” he said. “Jerry isn’t well brought up. He doesn’t know anything about your parents, he’s just making unpleasant generalizations.”

  “But Reuben, they dole out his own money to him, money he earned, for heaven’s sake, and they made him go out and earn it in the first place—”

  “They didn’t. I wanted to. I was sick of being sent off to the country, so I stayed in town and worked.”

  “No matter. It’s your money, and you shouldn’t have to wait for them to give it to you. Don’t you think I’m right?”

  Asa thought about it. He looked at his blood-red shoes and pondered. Jerry said softly to Reuben, “Portrait of a Yankee thinking.” Asa looked up, hurt.

  “Yes, I think you’re right, but I don’t think my parents would go along with it. And it’s not worth fighting about.”

  “What is worth fighting about? What do you fight with your parents about?”

  “I try not to. I mean, it wears me out. I’m not there most of the time …” This reminded him of a conversation he’d had with Parker during the summer. “I hate fighting,” he said.

  “I rather enjoy it,” Jerry said, and he leaned back in his chair, triumphant. “And you’re not bad at it either, Sola.”

  “Oh, I usually leave it to Roberto. Roberto and Papa have a battle going over honesty, so when I turn up I look like the good boy, which is fine. I’m sick of fighting. I’ve done plenty.”

  “But you’re always doing things that will get you into trouble,” Asa said.

  “It doesn’t matter. I’m the good son. I can do anything.”

  “I wish that would happen to me,” Asa said. “That’s the trouble with being an only child, you’re always the bad one.”

  “Or the good one,” Jerry said. “I’m the only son, and so I’m always the good son. My sisters can never be boys, so they’ve failed from the start. Every mother needs a little messiah of her own.”

  “That’s an interesting point,” Reuben said. Asa thought it was a crazy point; actually, he didn’t even think it was a point. But Reuben was chewing over this “point” with fascination. “I think you’re right, I think that’s the way it is.”

  “But you don’t even have a mother,” Asa protested.

  “Everybody has a mother to start with,” Jerry said, “even Reuben.”

  “And she thought you were—” Asa couldn’t get the words out.

  “Oh no, she wasn’t of that persuasion.” Reuben smiled at Jerry. “But I’ve seen it in other families.”

  Asa made a lunge in the
direction he thought Reuben had pointed in. “You mean she wasn’t Jewish?”

  Jerry folded his napkin into a tiny square; Reuben ate his cold, withered potato skin. But Asa, who had decided he too had a right to ask insulting questions, refused to be daunted. He felt himself momentarily in ascendance over them and repeated his question. “Was she?”

  Reuben turned his blank, ice-blond face toward Asa and said, “Yes, she was.” Then he got up and went to a table where apple pie was being topped off with vanilla ice cream by a starchy kitchen aide. Asa waited for a confidence from Jerry; surely he would lean across the table and explain, in two hurried sentences, why Reuben didn’t talk about his mother. Jerry sat straight, worrying his napkin as if he were folding the secret into the linen so it couldn’t get out, and didn’t say anything. Reuben came back with pie, which they ate without talking.

  “Let’s have coffee. Let’s go into town,” Reuben said when he’d finished his pie.

  “Can we do that?” Asa asked. Wallingford was off limits to Choate students; it required the same signed permission slip to walk into town as to take the train to Boston.

  “Who’s going to stop us?” asked Jerry. “They’ve got better things to do than keep track of seniors. Put on your coat.” He leaned across the table, as he had to touch Reuben’s collar, and stroked the sleeve. “Let me try it on.”

  “It won’t fit you,” said Asa promptly. He smiled at Jerry, but Jerry had stood up and was staring at the coat. “It won’t fit at all.”

  “I’m not buying it, for Chrissake, I just want to try it on.”

  Reuben yawned and raised his arms above his head. “I’m going to get a black leather jacket during vacation. With a big silver zipper. I think it’ll look good with my car.”