Chapter II: Part 2

“No, ma’am,” says Tom firmly. “I live at the Y. I’ve got a summer job in a filling station over in Brooklyn, starting right after Memorial Day.”

“That’s fine,” Mom says. “I wish Davey could get a job. He gets so restless with nothing to do in the summer.”

“Aw, Mom, forget it! You got to fill in about six-hundred working papers if you’re under sixteen.

“Listen, Mom, what I came up for—we thought we’d make some sandwiches and go up to Inwood Park.”

“Inwood? Where’s that?” So I explain to her about the Indian arrowheads, and we get out the classified phone book and look at the subway map, which shows there’s an IND train that goes right to it.

“I get sort of restless myself, with nothing to do,” says Tom. “We just figured we’d do a little exploring around in the woods and get some exercise.”

“Why, yes, that seems like a good idea.” Mom looks at him and nods. She seems to have decided he’s reliable, as well as respectable.

I see there’s some leftover cold spaghetti in the icebox, and I ask Mom to put it in sandwiches. She thinks I’m cracked, but I did this once before, and it’s good, ’specially if there’s plenty of meat and sauce on the spaghetti. We take along a bag of cherries, too.

“Thanks, Mom. Bye. I’ll be back before supper.”

“Take care,” she says. “No fights.”

“Don’t worry. We’ll stay out of fights,” says Tom quite seriously.

We go down the stairs, and Tom says, “Your mother is really nice.”

I’m sort of surprised—kids don’t usually say much about each other’s parents. “Yeah, Mom’s O.K. I guess she worries about me and Pop a lot.”

“It must be pretty nice to have your mother at home,” he says.

That kind of jolts me, too. I wonder where his mother and father are, whether they’re dead or something; but again, I don’t quite want to ask. Tom isn’t an easy guy to ask questions. He’s sort of like an island, by himself in the ocean.

We walk down to Fourteenth Street and over to Eighth Avenue, about twelve blocks; after all, exercise is what we want. The IND trains are fast, and it only takes about half an hour to get up to Inwood, at 206th Street. The park is right close, and it is real woods, although there are paved walks around through it. We push uphill and get in a grassy meadow, where you can see out over the Hudson River to the Palisades in Jersey. It’s good and hot, and we flop in the sun. There aren’t many other people around, which is rare in New York.

“Let’s eat lunch,” says Tom. “Then we can go hunting arrowheads and not have to carry it.”

He agrees the spaghetti sandwich is a great invention.

I wish the weather would stay like this more of the year—good and sweaty hot in the middle of the day, so you feel like going swimming, but cool enough to sleep at night. We lie in the sun awhile after lunch and agree that it’s too bad there isn’t an ocean within jumping-in distance. But there isn’t, and flies are biting the backs of our necks, so we get up and start exploring.

We find a few places that you might conceivably call caves, but they’ve been well picked over for arrowheads, if there ever were any. That’s the trouble in the city: anytime you have an idea, you find out a million other people had the same idea first. Along in mid-afternoon, we drift down toward the subway and get cokes and ice cream before we start back.

I don’t really feel like going home yet, so I think a minute and study the subway map inside the car. “Hey, as long as we’re on the subway anyway, we could go on down to Cortlandt Street to the Army-Navy surplus store. I got to get a knapsack before summer.”

“O.K.” Tom shrugs. He’s staring out the window and doesn’t seem to care where he goes.

“I got a great first-aid survival kit there. Disinfectant and burn ointment and bug dope and bandages, in a khaki metal box that’s waterproof, and it was only sixty-five cents.”

“Hmm. Just what I need for survival on the sidewalks of New York,” says Tom. I guess he’s kidding, in a sour sort of way. If you haven’t got a family around, though, survival must take more than a sixty-five-cent kit.

The store is a little way from the nearest subway stop, and we walk along not saying much. Tom looks alive when he gets into the store, though, because it really is a great place. They’ve got arctic explorers’ suits and old hand grenades and shells and all kinds of rifles, as well as some really cheap, useful clothing. They don’t mind how long you mosey around. In the end I buy a belt pack and canteen, and Tom picks up some skivvy shirts and socks that are only ten cents each. They’re secondhand, I guess, but they look all right.

We walk over to the East Side subway, which is only a few blocks away down here because the island gets so narrow. Tom says he’s never seen Wall Street, where all the tycoons grind their money machines. The place is practically deserted now, being late Saturday afternoon, and it’s like walking through an empty cathedral. You can make echoes.

We take the subway, and Tom walks along home with me. It seems too bad the day’s over. It was a pretty good day, after all.

“So long, kid,” Tom says. “I’ll send you a card from Beautiful Brooklyn!”

“So long.” I wave, and he starts off. I wish he didn’t have to go live in Brooklyn.

6

AND BROOKLYN

You can’t really stay sore at a guy you’ve known all your life, especially if he lives right around the corner and goes to the same school. Anyhow, one hot Saturday morning Nick turns up at my house as if nothing had ever happened and says do I want to go swimming, because the Twenty-third Street pool’s open weekends now.

After that we go back to playing ball on the street in the evenings and swimming sometimes on weekends. One Saturday his mother tells me he went to Coney Island. He didn’t ask me to go along, which is just as well, because I wouldn’t have. I don’t hang around his house after school much anymore, either. School lets out, and there’s the Fourth of July weekend, when we go up to Connecticut, and pretty soon after that Nick goes off to a camp his church runs. Pop asks me if I want to go to a camp a few weeks, but I don’t. Life is pretty slow at home, but I don’t feel like all that organization.

I think Tom must have forgotten about me and found a gang his own age when I get a postcard from him: “Dear Dave, The guy I work for is a creep, and all the guys who buy gas from him are creeps, so it’s great to be alive in Beautiful Brooklyn! Wish you were here, but you’re lucky you’re not. Best, Tom.”

It’s hard to figure what he means when he says a thing. However, I got nothing to do, so I might as well go see. He said he was going to work in a filling station on the Belt Parkway, and there can’t be a million of them.

I don’t say anything too exact to Mom about where I’m going, because she gets worried about me going too far, and besides I don’t really know where I’m going.

Brooklyn, what a layout. It’s not like Manhattan, which runs pretty regularly north and south, with decent square blocks. You could lose a million friends in Brooklyn, with the streets all running in circles and angles, and the people all giving you cockeyed directions. What with no bikes allowed on parkways, and skirting around crumby looking neighborhoods, it takes me at least a week of expeditions to find the right part of the Belt Parkway to start checking the filling stations.

I wheel my bike across the parkway, but even so some cop yells at me. You’d think a cop could find a crime to get busy with.

On a real sticky day in July I wheel across to a station at Thirty-fourth Street, and nobody yells at me, and I go over to the air pump and fiddle with my tires. A car pulls out after it gets gas, and there’s Tom.

“Hi!” I say.

Tom half frowns and quick looks over his shoulder to see if his boss is around, I guess, and then comes over to the air pump.

“How’d you get way out here?” he says.

“On the bike. I got your postcard, and I figured I could find the filling station.”

He relaxes and grins. I feel better. He says, “You’re a crazy kid. How’s Cat?”

But just then the boss has to come steaming up. “What d’ya want, kid? No bikes allowed on the parkway.”

I start to say I’m just getting air, but Tom speaks up. “It’s all right. I know him.”

“Yeah? I told you, keep kids out of here!” The guy manages to suggest that kids Tom knows are probably worse than any other kind. He motions me off like a stray dog. I don’t want to get Tom in any trouble, so I get going. At the edge of the parkway I wave. “So long. Write me another postcard.”

Tom raises a hand briefly, but his face looks closed, like nothing was going to get in or out.

I pedal slowly and hotly back through the tangle of Brooklyn and figure, well, that’s a week’s research wasted. I still don’t know where Tom lives, so I don’t know how I can get a hold of him again. Anyway, how do I know he wants to be bothered with me? He looked pretty fed up with everything.

So long as I got nothing else to do, the next week I figure I’ll get public-spirited at home: I paint the kitchen for Mom, which isn’t so bad, but moving all those silly dishes and pots and scrumy little spice cans can drive you wild. I only break one good vase and a bottle of salad oil. Salad oil and broken glass are great. In the afternoons I go to the swimming pool and learn to do a jackknife and a backflip, so Pop will think I am growing up to be a Real American Boy. Also, you practically have to learn to dive so you can use the diving pool, because the swimming pool is so jam-packed with screaming sardines you can’t move in it.

Evenings Cat and I play records, or we go to see Aunt Kate and drink iced tea. One weekend my real aunt comes to visit and sleeps in my room, so I go to stay with Aunt Kate, and I pretty near turn into cottage cheese.

I’ve about settled into this dull routine when Mom surprises me by handing me a postcard one morning. It’s from Tom: “Day off next Tuesday. If you feel like it, meet me near the aquarium at Coney Island about nine in the morning, before it’s crowded.”

So that week drags by till Tuesday, and there I am at Coney Island bright and early. Tom is easy enough to find, pacing up and down the boardwalk like a tiger. We say “Hi” and so forth, and I’m all ready to take a run for the water, but he keeps snapping his fingers and looking up and down the boardwalk.

Finally he says, “There’s a girl I used to know pretty well. I didn’t see her for a while till last week, and we got in an argument, and I guess she’s mad. I wrote and asked her to come swimming today, but maybe she’s not coming.”

I figure it out that I’m there as insurance against the girl not showing up, but I don’t mind. Anyhow, she does show up. It can’t have been too much of an argument they had, because she acts pretty friendly.

Tom introduces us. Her name is Hilda and a last name that’d be hard to spell—Swedish maybe—and she’s got a wide, laughing kind of mouth and a big coil of yellow hair in a bun on top of her head, and a mighty good figure. She asks me where I ran into Tom, and we tell her all about Cat and the cellar at Number Forty-six, and I tell them both about my Ivy-League haircut, which I had never explained to anyone before. They get a laugh out of that, and then she asks him about the filling-station job, and he says it stinks.

I figure they could get along without me for a while, so I go for a swim and wander down the beach a ways and eat a hot dog and swim some more. When I come back, I see Tom and Hilda just coming out of the water, so I join them. Hilda says, “Come have a coke. Tom says he’s got to try swimming to France just once more.”

I don’t know just what she means, but we go get cokes and come back and stretch out in the sun. She asks me do I want a smoke, and I say No. It’s nice to be asked, though. We watch Tom, who is swimming out past all the other people. I wish I’d gone with him. I say, “Lifeguard’s going to whistle him in pretty soon. He’s out past all the others.”

Hilda lets out a breath and snorts, “He’ll always go till they blow the whistle. Always got to go farther than anyone else.”

I don’t know what to say to that, so I don’t say anything.

Hilda goes on: “I used to wait tables in a restaurant down near Washington Square. Tom and a lot of the boys from NYU came in there. Sometimes the day before an exam he’d be sitting around for hours, buying people cokes and acting as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Some other times, for no reason anyone could tell, he’d sit in a corner and stir his coffee like he was going to make a hole in the cup.”

“Tom was at NYU?” I ask. I don’t know where I thought he’d been before he turned up in the cellar. I guess I never thought.

“Sure,” Hilda says. “He was in the Washington Square College for about a year and a half. He lived in a dormitory uptown, but I used to see him in the restaurant, and then fairly often we had dates after I got off work. He has people out in the Midwest somewhere—a father and a stepmother. He was always sour and close-mouthed about them, even before he got thrown out of NYU. Now he won’t even write them.”

This is a lot of information to take in all at once and leaves a lot of questions unanswered. The first one that comes into my head is this: “How come he got thrown out of NYU?”

“Well, it makes Tom so sore, he’s never really told me a plain, straight story. It’s all mixed up with his father. I think his father wrote him not to come home at Christmas vacation, for some reason. Tom and a couple of other boys who were left in the dormitory over the holidays got horsing around and had a water fight. The college got huffy and wrote the parents, telling them to pay up for damages. The other parents were pretty angry, but they stuck behind their kids and paid up. Tom just never heard from his father. Not a line.

“That was when Tom began coming into the restaurant looking like thunder. The college began needling him for the water-fight damages, as well as second-semester tuition. He took his first exam, physics, and got an A on it. He’s pretty smart.

“He still didn’t hear anything from home. He took the second exam, French, and thought he flunked it. That same afternoon he went into the office and told the dean he was quitting, and he packed his stuff and left. I didn’t see him again till a week ago. I didn’t know if he’d got sick of me, or left town, or what.

“He says he wrote his father that he had a good job, and they could forget about him. Then he broke into that cellar on a dare or for kicks.

“So here we are. What do we do next?”

Hilda looks at me—me, age fourteen—as if I might actually know, and it’s kind of unnerving. Everyone I know, their life goes along in set periods: grade school, junior high, high school, college, and maybe getting married. They don’t really have to think what comes next.

I say cautiously, “My pop says a kid’s got to go to college now to get anywhere. Maybe he ought to go back to school.”

“You’re so right, Grandpa,” she says, and I would have felt silly, but she has a nice friendly laugh. “I wish I could persuade him to go back. But it’s not so easy. I guess he’s got to get a job and go to night school, if they’ll accept him. He won’t ask his father for money.”

“You two got my life figured out?” Tom has come up behind us while we were lying in the sand on our stomachs. “I just hope that sour grape at the filling station gives me a good recommendation so I can get another job. The way he watches his cash register, you’d think I was Al Capone.”

We talk a bit, and then Hilda gets up and says she’s going to the ladies’ room. She doesn’t act coy about it, the way most girls do when they’re sitting with guys. She just leaves.

“How do you like Hilda?” Tom asks, and again I’m sort of surprised, because he acts like he really wants my opinion.

“She’s nice,” I say.

“Yeah.” Tom suddenly glowers, as if I’d said I _didn’t_ like her. “I don’t know why she wastes her time on me. I’ll never be any use to her. When her family hears about me, I’ll get the boot.”

“I could ask my pop. You know, I told you he’s a lawyer. Maybe he’d know how you go about getting back into college or getting a job or something.”

Tom laughs, an unamused bark. “Maybe he’ll tell you to quit hanging around with jerks that get in trouble with the cops.”

This is a point, all right. Come to think, I don’t know why I said I’d ask Pop anyway. I usually make a point of not letting his nose into my personal affairs, because I figure he’ll just start bossing me around. However, I certainly can’t do anything for Tom on my own.

I say, “I’ll chance it. The worst he ever does is talk. One time he made a federal case out of me buying a Belafonte record he didn’t like. Another time playing ball I cracked a window in a guy’s Cadillac, and Pop acted like he was going to sue the guy for owning a Cadillac. You just never know.”

Tom says, “With my dad, you _know_: I’m wrong.”

Hilda comes back just then. She snaps, “If he’s such a drug on the market, why don’t you shut up and forget about him?”

“O.K., O.K.,” says Tom.

The beach is getting filled up by now, so we pull on our clothes and head for the subway. Tom and Hilda get off in Brooklyn, and I go on to Union Square.

After dinner that night Mom is washing the dishes and Pop is reading the paper, and I figure I might as well dive in.

“Pop,” I say, “there’s this guy I met at the beach. Well, really I mean I met him this spring when I was hunting for Cat, and this guy was in the cellar at Forty-six Gramercy, and he got caught and....”

“Wha-a-a-t?” Pop puts down his paper and takes off his glasses. “Begin again.”

So I give it to him again, slow, and with explanations. I go through the whole business about the filling station and Hilda and NYU, and I’ll say one thing for Pop, when he finally settles down to listen, he listens. I get through, and he puts on his reading glasses and goes to look out the window.

“Do you have this young man’s name and address, or is he just Tom from The Cellar?”

I’d just got it from Tom when we were at the beach. He’s at a Y in Brooklyn, so I tell Pop this.

Pop says, “Tell him to call my office and come in to see me on his next day off. Meanwhile, I’ll bone up on City educational policies in regard to juvenile delinquents.”

He says this perfectly straight, as if there’d be a book on the subject. Then he goes back to his newspaper, so I guess that closes the subject for now.

“Thanks, Pop,” I say and start to go out.

“Entirely welcome,” says Pop. As I get to the door, he adds, “If that cat of yours makes a practice of introducing you to the underworld in other people’s cellars, we can do without him. We probably can anyway.”

7

SURVIVAL

Cat hadn’t got me into anymore cellars, but I can’t honestly say he’d been sitting home tending his knitting—not him.

One hot morning I went to pick up the milk outside our door, and Cat was sleeping there on the mat. He didn’t even look up at me. After I scratched his ears and talked to him some, he got up and hobbled into the house.

I put him up on my bed, under the light, for inspection. One front claw was torn off, which is why he was limping, his left ear was ripped, and there was quite a bit of fur missing here and there. He curled up on my bed and didn’t move all day.

I came and looked at him every few hours and wondered if I ought to take him to a vet. But he seemed to be breathing all right, so I went away and thought about it some more. Come night, I pushed him gently to one side, wondering what I better do in the morning.

Well, in the morning Cat wakes up, stretches, yawns, and drops easily down off the bed and walks away. He still limps a little, but otherwise he acts like nothing had happened. He just wants to know what’s for breakfast.

“You better watch out. One day you’ll run into a cat that’s bigger and meaner than you,” I tell him.

Cat continues to wait for breakfast. He is not impressed.

But I’m worried. Suppose some big old cat chews him up and he’s hurt too bad to get home? After breakfast I take him out in the backyard for a bit, and then I shut him in my room and go over to consult Aunt Kate.

She sets me up with the usual iced tea and dish of cottage cheese.

“I had breakfast already. What do I need with cottage cheese?”

“Eat it. It’s good for you.”

So I eat it, and then I start telling her about Cat. “He came home all chewed up night before last. I’m afraid some night he’s not going to make it.”

“Right,” says Kate. She’s not very talky, but I’m sort of surprised. I expected she’d tell me to quit worrying, Cat can take care of himself. She starts pulling Susan’s latest kittens out from under the sofa and sorting them out as if they were ribbons: one gray, two tiger, one yellow, one calico.

“So what you going to do?” she shoots at me, shoveling the kittens back to Susan.

“I—uh—I dunno. I thought maybe I ought to try to keep him in nights.”

“Huh. Don’t know much, do you?” she says. “Well, so I’ll tell you. Your Cat has probably fathered a few dozen kittens by now, and once a cat’s been out and mated, you can’t keep him in. You got to get him altered. Then he won’t want to go out so much.”

“Altered?”

“Fixed. Castrated is the technical word. It’s a two-minute operation. Cost you three dollars. Take him to Speyer Hospital—big new building up on First Avenue.”

“You mean get him fixed so he’s not a real tomcat any more? The heck with that! I don’t want him turned into a fat old cushion cat!”

“He won’t be,” she says. “But if it makes you happier, let him get killed in a cat fight. He’s tough. He’ll last a year or two. Suit yourself.”

“Ah, you’re screwy! You and your cottage cheese!” Even as I say it I feel a little guilty. But I feel mad and mixed up, and I fling out the door. It’s the first time I ever left Kate’s mad. Usually I leave _our_ house mad and go to Kate.

Now I got nowhere to go. I walk along, cussing and fuming and kicking pebbles. I come to an air-conditioned movie and go up to the window.

The phony blonde in the booth looks at me and sneers, “You’re not sixteen. We don’t have a children’s section in this theater.” She doesn’t even ask. She just says it. It’s a great world. I go home. There’s no one there but Cat, so I turn the record player up full blast.

Pop comes home in one of his unexpected fits of generosity that night and takes us to the movies. Cat behaves himself and stays around home and our cellar for a while, so I stop worrying. But it doesn’t last long.

As soon as his claw heals, he starts sashaying off again. One night I hear cats yowling out back and I go out with a bucket of water and douse them and bring Cat in. There’s a pretty little tiger cat, hardly more than a kitten, sitting on the fence licking herself, dry and unconcerned. Cat doesn’t speak to me for a couple of days.

One morning Butch, the janitor, comes up and knocks on our door. “You better come down and look at your cat. He got himself mighty chewed up. Most near dead.”

I hurry down, and there is Cat sprawled in a corner on the cool cement floor. His mouth is half open, and his breath comes in wheezes, like he has asthma. I don’t know whether to pick him up or not.

Butch says, “Best let him lie.”

I sit down beside him. After a bit his breath comes easier and he puts his head down. Then I see he’s got a long, deep claw gouge going from his shoulder down one leg. It’s half an inch open, and anyone can see it won’t heal by itself.

Butch shakes his head. “You gotta take him to the veteran, sure. That’s the cat doctor.”

“Yeah,” I say, not correcting him. It’s not just the gash that’s worrying me. I remember what Aunt Kate said, and it gives me a cold feeling in the stomach: In the back-alley jungle he’d last a year, maybe two.

Looking at Cat, right now, I know she’s right. But Cat’s such a—well, such a _cat_. How can I take him to be whittled down?

I tell Butch I’ll be back down in a few minutes, and I go upstairs. Mom’s humming and cleaning in the kitchen. I wander around and stare out the window awhile. Finally I go in the kitchen and stare into the icebox, and then I tell Mom about the gash in Cat’s leg.

She asks if I know a vet to take him to.

“Yeah, there’s Speyer. It’s a big, new hospital—good enough for people, even—with a view of the East River. The thing is, Mom, Cat keeps going off and fighting and getting hurt, and people tell me I ought to get him altered.”

Mom wets the sponge and squeezes it out and polishes at the sink, and I wonder if she knows what I’m talking about because I don’t really know how to explain it any better.

She wrings the sponge out, finally, and sits down at the kitchen table.

She says, “Cat’s not a free wild animal now, and he wouldn’t be even if you turned him loose. He belongs to _you_, so you have to do whatever is best for _him_, whether it’s what you’d like or not. Ask the doctor and do what he says.”

Mom puts it on the line, all right. It doesn’t make me feel any better about Cat. She takes five dollars out of her pocketbook and gives it to me.

I get out the wicker hamper and go down to the cellar and load Cat in. He meows, a low resentful rumble, but he doesn’t try to get away.

Cat in the hamper is no powder puff, and I get pretty hot walking to the bus, and then from the bus stop to the animal hospital. I get there and wait, and dogs sniff at me, and I fill in forms. The lady asks me if I can afford to pay, and with Mom’s five bucks and four of my own, I say Yes.

The doctor is a youngish guy, but bald, in a white shirt like a dentist’s. I put Cat on the table in front of him. He says, “So why don’t you stay out of fights, like your mommy told you?”

I relax a bit and smile, and he says, “That’s better. Don’t worry. We’ll take care of tomcat. I suppose he got this gash in a fight?”

“Yeah.”

“He been altered?”

“No.”

“How old is he?”

“I don’t know. He was a stray. I’ve had him almost a year.”

All the time he’s talking, the doctor is soothing Cat and looking him over. He goes on stroking him and looks up at me. “Well, son, one of these days he’s going to get in one fight too many. Shall we alter him the same time we sew up his leg?”

So there it is. I can’t seem to answer right away. If the doctor had argued with me, I might have said No. But he just goes on humming and stroking. Finally he says, “It’s tough, I know. Maybe he’s got a right to be a tiger. But you can’t keep a tiger for a pet.”

I say, “O.K.”

An attendant takes Cat away, and I go sit in the waiting room, feeling sweaty and cold all over. They tell me it’ll be a couple of hours, so I go out and wander around a lot of blocks I never saw before and drink some cokes and sit and look up at the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge to Queens.

When I go back for him, Cat looks the same as ever, except for a bandage all up his right front leg. The doctor tells me to come back Friday and he’ll take out the stitches.

Mom sees me come in the door, and I guess I look pretty grim, because she says, “Cat will be all right, won’t he, dear?”

“Yes.” I go past her and down into my room and let Cat out of the basket and then bury my head under the pillow. I’m not exactly ashamed of crying, but I don’t want Mom to hear.

After a while I pull my head out. Cat is lying there beside me, his eyes half open, the tip end of his tail twitching very slowly. I rub my eyes on the back of his neck and whisper to him, “I’m sorry. Be tough, Cat, anyway, will you?”

Cat stretches and hops off the bed on his three good legs.

8

WEST SIDE STORY

The regular park man got sunstroke or something, so I earned fourteen dollars raking and mowing in Gramercy Park in the middle of August. Gramercy Park is a private park. You have to own a key to get in, so the city doesn’t take care of it.

Real paper money, at this time of year especially, is very cheering. I head up to Sam Goody’s to see what records he’s got on sale and what characters are buying them. Maybe I’ll buy something, maybe not, but as long as I’ve got money in my pocket, I don’t feel like the guy is glaring at me for taking up floor space.

Along the way I walk through the library, the big one at Forty-second Street. You go in by the lions on Fifth Avenue, and there’s all kinds of pictures and books on exhibit in the halls, and you walk through to the back, where you can take out books. It’s nice and cool, and nobody glares at you unless you either make a lot of noise or go to sleep. I can take books out of here and return them at the Twenty-third Street branch, which is handy.

Sam Goody’s is air-conditioned, so it’s cool too. There are always several things playing on different machines you can listen to. Almost the most fun is watching the people: little, fat, bald guys buying long-haired classical music, and thin, shaggy beatniks listening to the jazz.

I go to check if there are any bargains in the Kingston or Belafonte division. There’s a girl standing there reading the backs of records, but I don’t really catch a look at more than her shoes—little red flats they are. After a bit she reaches for a record over my head and says, “Excuse me.”

“Sure.” Then we catch each other’s eye and both say, “Oh. Gee, hello.”

Well, we’re both pretty surprised, because this is the girl I met out at Coney Island that day with Nick when I had Cat with me, and now we’re both a long way from Coney Island. This girl isn’t one of the two giggly ones. It’s the third, the one that liked Cat.

We’ve both forgotten each other’s names, so we begin over with that. I ask her what she’s been doing, and she’s been at Girl Scout camp a few weeks, and then she earned some money baby-sitting. So she came to think about records, like me. I tell her I’ve been at Coney once this summer, and I looked around for her, which is true, because I did.

“It’s a big place,” she says, smiling.

“Say, you live out there, don’t you? How come you get all the way in here by yourself? Doesn’t your mom get in a flap? Mine would, if she knew I was going to Coney alone.”

Mary says, “I came in with Mom. Some friend of hers has a small art exhibition opening. She said I could go home alone. After all, she knows I’m not going to get lost.”

I say, “Gee, it’d be great to have a mother that didn’t worry about you all the time.”

“Oh, Mom worries.” Mary giggles. “You should have heard her when I said I liked _Gone With the Wind_ and I didn’t like _Anna Karenina_. I pretty nearly got disowned.”

“What does she think about science fiction?” I ask, and Mary makes a face, and we both laugh.

I go on. “Well, my mom doesn’t care what I read. She worries about what I eat and whether my feet are wet, and she always seems to think I’m about to kill myself. It’s a nuisance, really.”

Mary looks solemn all of a sudden. She says slowly, “I think maybe it’d be nice. I mean to have someone worrying about whether you’re comfortable and all. Instead of just picking your brains all the time.”

This seems to exhaust the subject of our respective mothers, and Mary picks up the record of _West Side Story_ and says, “Gee, I’d like to see that. Did you?”

I say No, and to tell the truth I hadn’t hardly heard of it.

“I read a book about him. It was wonderful,” she says.

“Who?”

“Bernstein. The man who wrote it.”

“What’s _West Side Story_ about, him?” I ask cautiously.

“No, no—he wrote the music. It’s about some kids in two gangs, and there’s a lot of dancing, and then there’s a fight and this kid gets—well, it isn’t a thing you can tell the story of very well. You have to see it.”

This gives me a very simple idea.

“Why don’t we?” I say.

“Huh?”

“Go see it. Why not? We got money.”

“So we do,” she says slowly. “You think they’ll let us in, I mean being under sixteen?”

You know, this is the first girl I really ever talked to that talks like a person, not trying to be cute or something.

We walk around to the theater, and being it’s Wednesday, there’s a matinee about to start. The man doesn’t seem to be one bit worried about taking our money. No wonder. It’s two dollars and ninety cents each. So we’re inside with our tickets before we’ve hardly stopped to think.

Suddenly Mary says, “Oops! I better call Mom! Let’s find out what time the show is over.”

We do, and Mary phones. She says to me, “I just told her I was walking past _West Side Story_ and found I could get a ticket. I didn’t say anything about you.”

“Why, would she mind?”

Mary squints and looks puzzled. “I don’t know. I just really don’t know. It never happened before.”

We go in to the show, and she is right, it’s terrific. I hardly ever went to a live show before, except a couple of children’s things and something by Shakespeare Pop took me to that was very confusing. But this _West Side Story_ is clear as a bell.

We have an orangeade during intermission, and I make the big gesture and pay for both of them. Mary says, “Isn’t it wonderful! I just happened to meet you at the beach, and then I meet you at Goody’s, and we get to see this show that I’ve wanted to go to for ages. None of my friends at school want to spend this much money on a show.”

“It’s wonderful,” I say. “After it’s over, I’m going back to buy the record.”

So after the show we buy it, and then we walk along together to the subway. I’ll have to get off at the first stop, Fourteenth Street, and she’ll go on to Coney, the end of the line.

It’s hard to talk on the subway. There’s so much noise you have to shout, which is hard if you don’t know what to say. Anyway, you can’t ask a girl for her phone number shouting on the subway. At least I can’t.

I’m not so sure about the phone-number business either. I sort of can’t imagine calling up and saying, “Oh, uh, Mary, this is Dave. You want to go to a movie or something, huh?” It sounds stupid, and I’d be embarrassed. What she said, it’s true—it’s sort of wonderful the way we just ran into each other twice and had so much fun.

So I’m wondering how I can happen to run into her again. Maybe the beach, in the fall. Let’s see, a school holiday—Columbus Day.

The train is pulling into Fourteenth Street. I shout, “Hey, how about we go to the beach again this fall? Maybe Columbus Day?”

“O.K.!” she shouts. “Columbus Day in the morning.”

“Columbus Day in the morning” sounds loud and clear because by then the subway has stopped. People snicker, and Mary blushes.

“So long,” I say, and we both wave, and the train goes.

9

FATHERS

That operation didn’t make as much difference to Cat as you might think. I took him back to the clinic to get the stitches out of his leg and the bandages off. A few nights later I heard yowls coming up from the backyard. I went down and pulled him out of a fight. He wasn’t hurt yet, but he sure was right back in there pitching. He seems to have a standing feud with the cat next door.

However, he’s been coming home nights regularly, and sometimes in the cool part of the morning he’ll sit out on the front stoop with me. He sits on a pillar about six feet above the sidewalk, and I sit on the steps and play my transistor and read.

Every time a dog gets walked down the street under Cat’s perch, he gathers himself up in a ball, as if he were going to spring. Of course, the poor dog never knows it was about to be pounced on and wags on down the street. Cat lets his tail go to sleep then and sneers.

Between weathercasts I hear him purring, loud rumbly purrs, and I look up and see Tom there, stroking Cat’s fur up backward toward his ears. Tom is looking out into the street and sort of whistling without making any sound.

“Gee, hi!” I say.

“Hi, too,” he says. He strokes Cat back down the right way, gives him a pat, and sits down. “I just been down to see your dad. He’s quite a guy.”

“Huh-h-h? You got sunstroke or something? Didn’t he read you about ten lectures on Healthy Living, Honest Effort, Baseball, and Long Walks with a Dog?”

“No-o-o.” Tom grins, but then he sits and stares out at the street again, so I wait.

“You know,” he says, “you give me an idea. _You_ talk like _your_ dad is a real pain, and that’s the way _I_ always have felt about _mine_. But your dad looks like a great guy to me, so—well, maybe mine could be too, if I gave him a chance. Your dad was saying I should.”

“Should what? You should go home?”

“No. Your dad said I ought to write him a long letter and face up to all the things I’ve goofed on. Quitting NYU, the cellar trouble, all that. Then tell him I’m going to get a job and go to night school. Your dad figures probably he’d help me. He said he’d write him, too. No reason he should. I’m nothing in his life. It’s pretty nice of him.”

I try to digest all this, and it sure is puzzling. The time I ran down that crumb of a doorman on my bike, accidental on purpose, I didn’t get any long understanding talks. I just got kept in for a month.

Tom slaps me in the middle of the back and stands up. “Hilda’s gone back to work at the coffee shop. I guess I’ll go down and see her before the lunch rush, and then go home and write my letter.”

“Say ‘Hi’ for me.”

“O.K. So long.”

* * * * *

The weather cools off some, and Pop starts to talk about vacation. He’s taking two weeks, last of August and first of September, so I start shopping around for various bits of fishing tackle and picnic gear we might need. We’re going to this lake up in Connecticut, where we get a sort of motel cottage. It has a little hot plate for making coffee in the morning, but most of the rest of the time we eat out, which is neat.

We’re sitting around the living room one evening, sorting stuff out, when the doorbell rings. I go answer it, and Tom walks in. He nods at me like he hardly sees me and comes into the living room. He shakes hands like a wooden Indian. His face looks shut up again, the way it did that day I left him in the filling station.

He reaches in his pocket and pulls out a letter. I can see a post-office stamp in red ink with a pointing hand by the address. He throws it down on Dad’s table.

“I got my answer all right.”

Pop looks at the letter and I see his foot start to twitch the way it does when he’s about to blow. But he looks at Tom, and instead of blowing he just says, “Your father left town? No forwarding address?”

“I guess so. He just left. Him and that woman he married.” Tom’s voice trails off and he walks over to the window. We all sit quiet a minute.

Finally Pop says gently, “Well, don’t waste too much breath on her. She’s nothing to do with you.”

Tom turns around angrily. “She’s no good. She loafs around and drinks all the time. She talked him into going.”

“And he went.” There’s another short silence, and Pop goes on. “Where was this you lived?”

“House. It was a pretty nice little house, too. Dark red with white trim, and enough of a yard to play a little ball, and I grew a few lettuces every spring. I even got one ear of corn once. We moved there when I was in second grade because my mom said it was near a good local school. I lived there till I went to college. I suppose he sold it, or got a loan, and they lit off to drink it up. Soon’s they’d got _me_ off their hands.”

Tom bites off the last word. Suddenly I can see the picture pretty clear: the nice house, the father Tom always talked down and hoped would measure up. Now it’s like somebody has taken his whole childhood and crumpled it up like a wad of tissue paper and thrown it away.

Mom gets up and goes into the kitchen. Pop’s foot keeps on twitching. Finally he says, “Well, I steered you wrong. I’m sorry. But maybe it’s just as well to have it settled.”

“It’s settled, all right,” Tom says.

Mom brings out a tray of ginger-ale glasses. It seems sort of inadequate at a moment like this, but when Tom takes a glass from her he looks like he’s going to bust out crying.

He drinks some and blows his nose, and Dad says, “When are you supposed to check in with the Youth Board again?”

“Tuesday. My day off. And I wind up the filling-station job the next week, right after Labor Day.”

“Labor Day. Hm-m. We’ve got to get moving. If you like, I’ll come down to the Youth Board with you, and we’ll see what we can all cook up. Don’t worry too much. I have a feeling you’re just beginning to fight—really fight, not just throw a few stones.”

“I don’t know why you bother.” Tom starts to stand up. But while we’ve been talking, Cat has been creeping up under the side table, playing the ambush game, and he launches himself at Tom just as he starts to stand. It throws him off balance and he sits back in the chair, holding Cat.

“You’ve got nothing to worry about,” Pop says. “Cat’s on your side.”

10

CAT AND THE PARKWAY

Cat may be on Tom’s side, but whether Pop is on Cat’s side is something else again. I worry about this all the time we’re planning the vacation. Suppose the motel won’t take cats? Or suppose he runs away in the country? If he messes up the vacation in any way, I know Pop’ll say to get rid of him.

I practice putting Cat back in the wicker hamper to see if I can keep him in that sometimes, but he meows like crazy. That’d drive Pop nuts in the car, and it certainly wouldn’t hide him from any motel-keeper. So I just sit back and hope for the best, but I got a nasty feeling in the bottom of my stomach that something’s going to go haywire.

Pop’s pretty snappish anyway. He’s working late nearly every night, getting stuff cleared up before vacation. He doesn’t want any extra problems, especially not Cat problems. Mom’s been having asthma a good deal lately, and we’re all pretty jumpy. It’s always like this at the end of the summer.

Tuesday night when he gets home, I ask Pop what’s happened about Tom.

“We’ll work something out,” he says, which isn’t what you’d call a big explanation.

“You think he can get back into college?”

“I don’t know. The Youth Board is going to work on it. They’re arranging for him to make up the midyear exams he missed, so he can get credit for that semester. Then he can probably start making up the second semester at night school if he has a job.

“Apparently the Youth Board knew his father had skipped—they’ve been trying to trace him. I don’t think it’ll do any good if they find him. Tom had better just cross him off and figure his own life for himself.”

You know, I see “bad guys” in television and stuff, but with the people I really know I always lump the parents on one team and the kids on the other. Now here’s my pop calmly figuring a kid better chalk off his father as a bad lot and go it alone. If your father died, I suppose you could face up to it eventually, but having him just fade out on you, not care what you did—that’d be worse.

While I’m doing all this hard thinking, Pop has gone back to reading the paper. I notice the column of want ads on the back, and all of a sudden my mind clicks on Tom and jobs.

“Hey, Pop! You know the florist on the corner, Palumbo, where you always get Mom the plant on Mother’s Day? I went in there a couple of weeks ago, because he had a sign up, ‘Helper Wanted.’ I thought maybe it was deliveries and stuff that I could do after school. But he said he needed a full-time man. I’m pretty sure the sign’s still up.”

“Palumbo, huhn?” Pop takes off his glasses and scratches his head with them. He looks at his watch and sighs. “They still open?”

They are, and Pop goes right down to see the guy. He knows him fairly well anyway—there’s Mother’s Day, and Easter, and also the shop is the polling place for our district, so Pop’s in there every Election Day. He always buys some little bunch of flowers Election Day because he figures the guy ought to get some business having his shop all messed up for the day.

Dad comes back and goes over to the desk and scratches off a fast note. He says, “Here. Address it to Tom and go mail it right away. Palumbo says he’ll try him out at least. Tom can come over Thursday night and I’ll take him in.”

Tom comes home with Pop Thursday about nine o’clock. They both look pretty good. Mom has cold supper waiting, finishing off the icebox before we go away, so we all sit down to eat.

“Tom’s all set, at least for a start,” Dad says. “He’s going to start Tuesday, right after Labor Day. Palumbo can use him on odd jobs and deliveries, especially over the Jewish holidays, and then if he can learn the business, he’ll keep him on.”

“Never thought I’d go in for flower-arranging.” Tom grins. “But it might be fun. I’m pretty fair at any kind of handiwork.”

Remembering how quick he unlocked the padlock to get Cat out in the cellar, I agree.

He starts for his room after supper, and we all say “good luck,” “have a good time,” and stuff. Things are really looking up.

I get up early the next morning and help Mom button up around the house and get the car loaded before Pop gets home in the afternoon. He hoped to get off early, and I’ve been pacing around snapping my fingers for a couple of hours when he finally arrives about six o’clock. It’s a hot day again.

I don’t say anything about Cat. I just dive in the back seat and put him behind a suitcase and hope he’ll behave. Pop doesn’t seem to notice him. Anyway he doesn’t say anything.

It’s mighty hot, and traffic is thick, with everyone pouring out of the city. But at least we’re moving along, until we get out on the Hutchinson River Parkway, where some dope has to run out of gas.

All three lanes of traffic are stopped. We sit in the sun. Pop looks around, hunting for something to get sore about, and sees the back windows are closed. He roars, “Crying out loud, can’t we get some air, at least? Open those windows!”

I open them and try to keep my hand over Cat, but if you try to hold him really, it makes him restless. For the moment he’s sitting quiet, looking disgusted.

We sit for about ten minutes, and Pop turns off the motor. You can practically hear us sweating in the silence. Engines turn on ahead of us, and there seems to be some sign of hope. I stick my head out the window to see if things are moving. Something furry tickles my ear, and it takes me a second to register.

Then I grab, but too late. There is Cat, out on the parkway between the lanes of cars, trying to figure which way to run.

“Pop!” I yell. “Hold it! Cat’s got out!”

You know what my pop does? He laughs.