Chapter IV: Part 4

Just then we start rounding the golf course, and I whack the handle bar of my bike and say, “Hey, that’s it!”

“What’s it?”

“Golf. Let’s play golf. Not now, I don’t mean. Next holiday. We’ve got Election Day coming up. I’ll borrow Pop’s clubs and take the subway and meet you here. How about ten o’clock?”

“Hunh?” Mary looks startled. “Well, I suppose I could try, or anyway I could walk around.”

“It’s easy. I’ll show you.” The two times I played, I only hit the ball decently about four or five times. But the times I _did_ hit it, it seemed easy.

We get to Mary’s house and I put the bikes away and give her back her brother’s jacket. “I guess I’ll go right along. It’s getting late. See you Election Day.”

“O.K., bye. Say—thanks for the ferry ride!”

15

DOLLARS AND CATS

Wednesday night before Thanksgiving I go down to the delicatessen to buy some coke, so I can really enjoy myself watching TV. Tom is just finishing work at the flower shop, and I ask him if he wants to come along home.

“Nah. Thanks. I got to be at work early tomorrow.” He doesn’t sound too cheery.

“How’s the job going?”

“O.K., I guess.” We walk along a little ways. “The job’s not bad, but I don’t want to be a florist all my life, and I can’t see this job will train me for anything else.”

That seems pretty true. It must be tough not getting regular holidays off, too. “You have to work all day tomorrow?” I ask.

“I open the store up at seven and start working on orders we’ve already got. I’ll get through around three or four.”

“Hey, you want to come for dinner? We’re not eating till evening.”

Tom grins. “You cooking the dinner? Maybe you better ask your mother.”

“It’ll be all right with Mom. Look, I’ll ask her and come let you know in the store tomorrow, O.K.?”

“Hmm. Well, sure. Thanks. I’ve got a date with Hilda later in the evening, but she’s got to eat with her folks first.”

“O.K. See you tomorrow.”

“Right.”

Mom says it’s all right about Tom coming, so I go down and tell him in the morning. Turns out Mom has asked Kate to have dinner with us, too, which is quite a step. For Kate, I mean. I think she would have turned the invitation down, except no one can bear to hurt Mom’s feelings. Kate’s been in our house before, of course, but then she just came in to chat or have tea or something. It wasn’t like an invitation.

She comes, and she looks like someone from another world. I’ve never seen her in anything but her old skirts and sneakers, so the “good clothes” she’s wearing now must have been hanging in a closet twenty years. The dress and shoes are way out of style, and she’s carrying a real old black patent-leather pocketbook. Usually she just lugs her old cloth shopping bag, mostly full of cat goodies. Come to think of it, that’s it: Kate lives in a world that is just her own and the cats’. I never saw her trying to fit into the ordinary world before.

Cat knows her right away, though. Clothes don’t fool him. He rubs her leg and curls up on the sofa beside her, still keeping a half-open eye on the oven door in the kitchen, where the turkey is roasting.

Tom comes in, also in city clothes—a white shirt and tie and jacket—the first time I ever saw him in them. He sits down on the other side of Cat, who stretches one paw out toward him negligently.

Looking at Kate and Tom sitting there on the sofa, both looking a little ill at ease, I get a funny idea. My family is starting to collect people the way Kate collects homeless cats. Of course, Kate and Tom aren’t homeless. They’re people-less—not part of any family. I think Mom always wanted more people to take care of, so she’s glad to have them.

Kidding, I ask Kate, “How many cats at your home for Thanksgiving dinner?”

She stops stroking Cat a minute and thinks. “Hmm, Susan’s got four new kittens, just got their eyes open. A beautiful little orange one and three tigers. Then there’s two big kittens, strays, and one old stray tom. Makes eight, that’s all. Sometimes I’ve had lots more than that.”

“Doesn’t the landlord ever object?” Pop asks.

Kate snorts. “Him! Huh! I pay my rent. And I have my own padlock on the door, so he can’t come snooping around.”

We all sit down to dinner. Pop gives Cat the turkey neck to crunch up in the kitchen. He finishes that and crouches and stares at us eating. Kate gives him tidbits, which I’m not supposed to do. I don’t think she really wants to eat the turkey herself. She’s pretty strictly a fruit and yogurt type.

After dinner Tom leaves to meet Hilda, and I walk home with Kate, carrying a bag of scraps and giblets for her cats. While she’s fiddling with the two sets of keys to open her door, the man next door sticks his head out. “Messenger was here a little while ago with a telegram for you. Wouldn’t give it to me.”

“A telegram?” Kate gapes.

“Yeah. He’ll be back.” The man looks pleased, like he’s been able to deliver some bad news, and pulls his head in and shuts his door.

We go into Kate’s apartment, and cats come meowing and rubbing against her legs, and they jump up on the sink and rub and nudge the bag of scraps when she puts it down. Kate is muttering rapidly to herself and fidgeting with her coat and bag and not really paying much attention to the cats, which is odd.

“Lots of people send telegrams on holidays. It’s probably just greetings,” I say.

“Not to me, they don’t!” Kate snaps, also sounding as if they better hadn’t.

I go over to play with the little kittens. The marmalade-colored one is the strongest of the litter, and he’s learned to climb out of the box. He chases my fingers. Kate finishes feeding the big cats, and she strides over and scoops him back into the box. “You stay in there. You’ll get stepped on.” She drops Susan back in with her babies to take care of them.

The doorbell rings, and Kate yanks open the door, practically bowling over an ancient little messenger leaning sleepily against the side of the door.

“Take it easy, lady, take it easy. Just sign here,” he says.

She signs, hands him the pencil, and slams the door. The orange kitten has got out again, and Kate does come close to stepping on him as she walks across the room tearing open the telegram. He doesn’t know enough to dodge feet yet. I scoop him back in this time.

Kate reads the telegram and sits down. She looks quite calm now. She says, “Well, he died.”

“Huh? Who?”

“My brother. He’s the only person in the world I know who would send me a telegram. So he’s dead now.”

She repeats it, and I can’t figure whether to say I’m sorry or what. I always thought when someone heard of a death in the family, there’d be a lot of crying and commotion. Kate looks perfectly calm, but strange somehow.

“Has he been sick?”

Kate shakes her head. “I don’t know. I haven’t seen him in twenty years.”

There is silence a moment, and then Kate goes on, talking half to herself and half to me. “Mean old coot. He never talked to anyone, except about his money. That’s all he cared about. Once he tried to get me to give him money to invest. That’s the last time I saw him. He has an old house way up in the Bronx. But we never did get along, even when we were kids.”

“Did he have a wife or anything? Who sent the telegram?”

“He’s had a housekeeper. Just as mean as him. She’d buy him day-old bread and dented cans of soup because they were cheaper. She suited him fine—saved him money and never talked to him. Well, she’ll get his money now, if he left any. That’s what she’s been waiting for. She sent me the wire.”

Twenty years, I think. That’s a long time not to be speaking to your own brother, and him living just a ten-cent phone call away. I wonder. She couldn’t just not give a hoot about him. They must have been real mad at each other. And mad at the whole world, too. Makes you wonder what kind of parents _they_ had, with one of them growing up loving only cats and the other only money.

Kate is staring out the window and stroking the old stray tomcat between the ears, and it hits me: there isn’t a person in the world she loves or even hates. I like cats fine, too, but if I didn’t have people that mattered, it wouldn’t be so good. I say “So long” quietly and go out.

16

FORTUNE

“I always wondered if the poor soul had any relatives.” That’s what Mom says when I tell her about Kate’s telegram. “And now she’s lost her only brother. That’s sad.”

“I think it’s sad she never talked to him for twenty years. All these years I’ve wished I had a brother,” I say.

“If it’s her only brother, she’s going to have to do something about his estate,” says Pop. That legal mind, it never rests. I guess he’s got a point about this, though. How is Kate going to deal with lawyers, or undertakers, or anyone? She can’t hardly stand to _talk_ to people like that.

“What’ll she have to do?”

“Maybe I better go see her tomorrow,” says Pop. “There can be lots of things—see if he left a will, if he owes any taxes, if he has property that has to be taken care of or sold. You can’t tell.”

“Kate said he was a miser. Maybe he left her a million. Say, that’d be great!”

“Don’t be a dope!” Pop snaps, and he really sounds angry, so I pipe down.

The next morning Pop tells me to go over and see how Kate is. “The way she feels about people, I don’t like to just barge in. I’ll come by in ten minutes, like I was picking you up to go to a movie or something.”

I saunter round the corner onto Third Avenue and stop short. There are two newspaper cars pulled up in front of Kate’s building, one red and one black, and a sizable knot of people gathered on the sidewalk. I move in among them.

“That crazy cat lady ... he musta been a nut too ... left her about a million ... a lotta rich cats, how d’ya like that....”

So I guess he did leave her money, and all of a sudden I see it isn’t “great.” It’s going to be trouble. I push through the people and go upstairs without anyone stopping me. When I open Kate’s door, old stray tomcat shoots out. He’s leaving, and I can see why.

Kate’s room is tiny, and it looks like it’s filled with a mob. Maybe it’s only half a dozen guys, but the photographers are pushing around trying to get shots and the reporters are jabbering.

Orange kitten sticks his head out of the box. Then out he comes, into the sea of feet. I drop him back in and try to get across to Kate. She’s pretty well backed into a corner and looking ready to jump out the window. She has her arms folded in front of her, each hand clenching the other elbow, as if to hold herself together. A reporter with a bunch of scratch paper in his hand is crowding her.

“Miss Carmichael”—funny, I never even knew her last name before—“I just want to ask one or two questions. Could you tell us when you last saw your brother?”

“No, I couldn’t,” she snaps, drawing her head down between her shoulders and trying to melt into the wall.

“Watcha going to do with the money?” a photographer asks. He picks up a cat, one of the big stray kittens, and dumps it on Kate. The cat clings to her and the photographer says, “Hold it now. Just let me snap a picture.”

He takes two steps back.

At the first step the room is silent. At the second step a shattering caterwaul goes up. He has stepped on the adventurous orange kitten.

The scream freezes us all, except Kate. She shoots out of her corner, knowing instantly what has happened. The kitten is jerking slightly now, and bright, bright blood is coming out of its mouth. With one violent, merciful stroke Kate finishes it. She picks the limp body up and wraps it neatly in a paper towel and places it in the wastebasket.

The room is still silent for one congealed instant. Kate seems almost to have forgotten the crowd of men. Then two of them make hastily for the door. The photographer shuffles his feet and says, “Gee, m’am, I didn’t mean ... I wouldn’t for the world....”

Kate whirls and screams at him: “Get out! Get out, all of you! Leave me and my cats alone! I never asked you in here!”

At that moment my pop comes in the door. Of course he doesn’t know anything about the kitten, but he takes in the general situation and herds the two remaining newspapermen to the door. He gives them his card and home address and tells them to look him up a little later.

My knees suddenly feel weak and I slump onto the sofa, and my eyes swivel round to the little package in the wastebasket. It would be the strongest one. I really never saw anything get killed right in front of me before. It hits you.

Pop is trying to calm Kate down. She’s facing him, grabbing each sleeve of his coat. “What am I going to do? What can I do? I don’t want his money. I don’t want anything from anyone. I just want to be let alone!”

“Take it easy, Kate, take it easy. You don’t have to let anyone into your apartment. About the inheritance, well, I’ll have to look into that.” Over his shoulder Pop signals to me to go home and get Mom.

I go home and explain the situation to Mom, and she comes back with me. One photographer and a couple of reporters are still hanging around, and the guy snaps a picture of me and Mom at the door. Mom scoots on up. Bad as I feel, I still get a charge out of getting my picture taken for a paper.

“Hey, kid,” one of the reporters shoves in front of me, “about this Miss Carmichael. Does she act pretty strange, like talking to herself on the street and stuff?”

I see the story he’s trying to build up. While it’s true in a way, if you really know Kate it’s not. Anyway, I’m against it. I say, “Nah. She’s all right. She’s just sort of scared of people, and she likes cats.”

“How many cats she got?”

There have been up to a dozen on a busy day, but again I play it down. “She’s got a mother cat with kittens. Sometimes a stray or two. Don’t get sucked in by all that jazz these dumb kids around here’ll give you.”

“She gets all that money, you think she’ll buy a big house, set up a home for stray cats?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. She doesn’t want the money anyway. She just wants to be let alone.”

“Doesn’t want the money!” the photographer chips in. “Boy, she must be _really_ nuts! I’m going back to the office.”

The reporter says he’s going to wait and talk to my pop, and I go on upstairs to see what’s doing.

Kate is sitting on the sofa, sniffing and wiping her eyes and muttering, but looking calmer. Mom is making tea. Pop is looking out the window, scratching his head.

Kate gulps and draws a big breath. “Tell them I don’t want his old money. Tell them to give it to someone else. Tell them to leave me alone. I just want my own place and my cats. They can’t make me move, can they? I’ve lived here thirty years. I couldn’t go anyplace else.”

She gulps and sniffs some more, and Mom brings her a cup of tea. The stray kittens jump up to see if it’s anything good and nuzzle into her lap. Kate takes a sip of tea and asks Pop again, “They can’t make me move, can they?” This seems to be what worries her most.

“No-o,” says Pop, “it’s only....”

He’s interrupted by a knock on the door, and I go open it a crack. A guy says he’s the landlord. As soon as Kate hears his voice, she yelps at him, “I paid my rent, first of the month like always. Don’t you come bothering me!”

“It’s about the cats,” he says. “People outside saying you got a dozen cats in here. There’s a law, you know.”

He’s a seedy-looking, whining kind of a man, and he looks real pleased with himself when he says there’s a law about cats.

Kate jumps right at him. “I’m not breaking any laws. I know you. You just want to get me out of here and rent the place for more money. You leave me alone!”

The man whines, “There’s a law, that’s all. I don’t want no violation slapped on my building.”

Pop comes over and tells the man there’s just a mother cat with kittens. “There’s a couple of strays here, too, right now, but I’ll take them home with me.”

“There’s a law, that’s all. Also, I got a right to inspect the premises.” Pop shows no signs of letting him in, and he shuffles and grumbles and goes away.

“Lock the door,” Kate snaps. “I keep it locked all the time.”

Pop says he’s going home to make some phone calls and try to figure out what’s going on. He takes down the name and address of Kate’s brother and asks her if she’s sure there are no other relatives. She says she never heard of any. Pop goes, and Kate insists that I lock the door after him.

She gets up and starts stirring around getting food out for the cats. She buys fish and chicken livers for them, even though she hardly eats any meat herself. She listens at the back door a moment to make sure no one’s out there, then opens the door and puts out the garbage and wastebasket. There goes the adventurous kitten. You got to hand it to Kate. She has no sniffling sentimentality about her cats. Kitten’s dead, it’s dead, that’s all. She doesn’t mope over the limp mite of fur. In fact, anything to do with cats she’s got sense and guts. They’re her family. I don’t know that I could have put that kitten out of its misery.

Just as long as the world doesn’t throw any stray fortunes at her, Kate does fine. But when people get in her way, she needs someone like Pop.

Mom says she’ll stick around a while and tells me to take the two stray kittens home, just in case the landlord comes back trying to make trouble.

“O.K., great—Cat’ll have some company!”

Kate sniffs. “He’ll hate it. Cats don’t like other cats pushing into their house.”

She’s right, of course. I put the kittens down at home, and Cat hisses at them and then runs them under the radiator in the kitchen. Then he sits down in the doorway and glowers at them, on guard.

Things simmer down gradually. Mom and I and sometimes Tom, who’s right at the flower shop on the corner, take turns checking on Kate and doing shopping for her, or going with her so she doesn’t get badgered by people. But pretty soon everyone in the neighborhood forgets all about her and her inheritance. They see her buying just the same old cat food and cottage cheese and fruit, and they probably figure the whole thing was a phony.

It wasn’t though. Pop finds out her brother did leave a will. He lined up his funeral, left something to his housekeeper, something to a little restaurant owner way downtown—apparently that was his one big luxury, a decent meal twice a year when he went down to buy more stocks—and the rest to Kate.

Pop says it may take months or years to clear up the estate, but he says Kate can get her share all put in trust for her with some bank, and they’ll take care of all the legalities and taxes and just pay her as much or little as she wants out of the income. And she can leave the whole kit and caboodle to a cat home in her will if she wants to, which will probably make her tightwad brother spin in his grave. I asked her once, and she said maybe she’d leave some to the Children’s Aid, because there are a lot of stray children in New York City that need looking after, as well as cats. She’s getting to think about people some.

17

TELEPHONE NUMBERS

There are some disadvantages to not getting a girl’s phone number. This sort of date I had with Mary for golf on Election Day fell through. In the first place, I was sick in bed with the flu, and Mom wouldn’t have let me out for anything, and secondly, it was pouring rain. Without the phone number, there wasn’t any way I could let her know, and I didn’t even know a street address to write to later.

By the time I got finished with the flu, we were into Thanksgiving and then all the trouble with Kate. Time passed and I felt rottener about standing her up without a word, and I couldn’t get up my nerve to go out to Coney and just appear on her doorstep. I could have found the house all right, once I was out there.

The first week of Christmas vacation the phone rings late one afternoon and Pop answers it. He says, “Just one minute, please,” and I know right away from his voice it isn’t someone he knows.

“Young lady on the phone for you, Dave,” he says, and he enjoys watching me gulp.

“Hullo?” a rather tight, flat little voice asks. “Is this Dave—uh, Mitchell—uh, I mean, with Cat?”

I recognize it’s Mary, all right, even if she does sound strange and scared.

“Oh, hi!” I say. “Sure, it’s me! I’m awfully sorry about that day we were going to play golf. I was in bed with the flu, and then I didn’t know your phone number or....”

“Oh, that’s all right,” she says. “I wondered what happened.”

There’s a slight pause, and I see Pop grinning and pretending to read his paper. I turn around so I won’t see him.

“Where are you now, out in Coney?” I ask Mary.

“No, as a matter of fact, I’m in Macy’s.” Her voice trails off a little, but then she starts in again. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I called. You see, I was supposed to meet Mom here at five, and she hasn’t come, and I bought all these Christmas presents, and I forgot about the tax or something, and this is my last dime.”

She stops. I see now why she sounds scared, and I get a curdled feeling in my stomach, too, because what if the dime runs out in the phone and she’s cut off? I’ll never find her in Macy’s. It’s too big.

“Pop!” I yelp. “There’s this girl I know is in a phone booth in Macy’s and her dime is going to run out and she hasn’t anymore money. What’ll I do?”

“Get the phone number of the booth and call her back. Here—” He gives me a pencil.

What a relief. Funny I never thought of that. You just somehow don’t think of a phone booth having a number.

Mary sounds pretty relieved, too. I get the number and call her back, and with Pop making suggestions here and there we settle that I’ll go over to Macy’s and meet her on the ground floor near Thirty-fourth Street and Broadway at the counter where they’re selling umbrellas for $2.89, which Mary says she can see from the phone booth.

“O.K.” I say, and then I sort of don’t want to hang up. It’s fun talking. So I go on. “Look, just in case we miss each other at Macy’s, what’s your phone number at home, so I could call you sometime?”

“COney 7-1218.”

“O.K. Well, good-bye. I’ll be right over. To Macy’s, I mean.”

I grab my coat and check to see if I’ve got money. Pop asks if I’m going to bring her home for dinner.

“Gee, I don’t know.” I hadn’t given a thought to what we’d do. “I guess so, maybe, if her mother hasn’t come by then. I’ll call you if we do anything else.”

“O.K.,” Pop says.

I go out and hustle through the evening rush-hour crowds to the subway. The stores are all open evenings now, for Christmas, so the crowds are going both ways.

I get to the right corner of Macy’s, and I see Mary right away. Everyone else is rushing about and muttering to themselves, and she’s standing there looking lost. In fact she looks so much like a waif that the first thing I say is, “Hi! Shall we go get something to eat?”

“Yes, I’m starved. I was just going to get a doughnut when I found I’d run out of money.”

“Let’s go home and you can have dinner with us then. But what about your mother? Won’t she be looking for you?”

Mary shifts her feet and looks tired. “I don’t know. Probably if she came and I wasn’t here, she’d figure I’d gone home.”

I try to think a minute, which is hard to do with all these people shoving around you. Mary starts to pick up her two enormous shopping bags, and I take them from her, still trying to think. At the subway entrance I see the phone booth.

“That’s the thing,” I say. “Why don’t you call your house and see if your mother left a message or something?”

“Well....” Mary stands by the phone looking confused and in fact about ready to cry. I suddenly decide the best thing we can do is get home and sit down where it’s quiet. Waiting fifteen minutes or so to phone can’t make much difference.

We get home pretty fast and I introduce Mary to Mom and Pop. She sinks into the nearest chair and takes off her shoes.

“Excuse me,” she says. “I just bought these heels, and it’s awful wearing them!”

She wiggles her toes and begins to look better. Mom offers her a pair of slippers and Pop passes some potato chips.

Mom says, “Poor child, did you try to do all your Christmas shopping at once?”

“Well, actually, I was having fun just looking for a long while. I have two little cousins that I don’t really have to get much for, but I love looking at all the toys. I spent quite a while there. Then I did the rest of my shopping in a rush, and everything is so crowded, and I got mixed up on my money or the sales tax and only had a dime left, and I missed my mother or she forgot.”

She stretches out her toes to touch Cat, who is sitting in front of her. “I couldn’t think what to do. It’s so hard to think when your feet hurt.”

“It certainly is,” agrees Mom. She goes out to the kitchen to finish fixing dinner, and Pop suggests Mary better phone her home. She gets her father, and her mother has left a message that she was delayed and figured Mary would go home alone. Mary gives her father our address and tells him she’ll be home by nine.

We must have hit a lucky day because we have a real good dinner: slices of good whole meat, not mushed up stuff, and potatoes cooked with cheese in them, and salad, and a lemon meringue pie from the bakery, even.

After dinner we sit around a little while, and Pop says I better take Mary home, and he gives me money for a cab at the end of the subway. When Mary gives the driver her home address, I say it over to myself a few times so I’ll remember.

Suddenly I wonder about something. “Say, how’d you know _my_ phone number?”

“I looked it up,” she says simply. “There’s about twenty-eleven Mitchells in the Manhattan phone book, but only one in the East Twenties, so I figured that must be you.”

“Gee, that’s true. You must have had an awful time, though, standing in the phone booth with your feet hurting, going through all those Mitchells.”

Says Mary, “Oh, no. I did it one rainy afternoon at home, weeks ago.”

Well, what do you know.

18

“HERE’S TO CAT!”

The two stray kittens gradually make themselves at home. Somehow or other Cat has taught them that he’s in charge here, and he just chases them for fun now and again, when he’s not busy sleeping.

As for keeping cats in my room, that’s pretty well forgotten. For one thing, Mom really likes them. She sneaks the kittens saucers of cream and bits of real hamburger when no one’s looking, and she likes talking to them in the kitchen. She doesn’t pick them up, but just having them in the room sure doesn’t give her asthma.

The only time we have any trouble from the cats is one evening when Pop comes home and the two kittens skid down the hall between his legs, with Cat after them. He scales his hat at the lot of them and roars down the hall to me, “Hey, Davey! When are you getting rid of these cats? I’m not fixing to start an annex to Kate’s cat home!”

“I’m sure Davey will find homes for them,” Mom says soothingly, but getting a little short of breath, the way she does any time she’s afraid one of us is losing his temper.

In fact, one thing this cat business seems to have established is that me and Pop fighting is the main cause of Mom’s asthma. So we both try to do a little better, and a lot of things we used to argue and fight about, like my jazz records, we just kid each other about now. But now and then we still work up to a real hassle.

I’ve been taking a history course the first semester at school. It’s a real lemon—just a lot of preaching about government and citizenship. The second semester I switch to a music course. This is O.K. with the school—but not with Pop. Right away when I bring home my new program, he says, “How come you’re taking one less course this half?”

I explain that I’m taking music, and also biology, algebra, English, and French.

“Music!” he snorts. “That’s recreation, not a course. Do it on your own time!”

“Pop, it’s a course. You think the school signs me up for an hour of home record playing?”

“They might,” he grunts. “You’re not going to loaf your way through school if I have anything to say about it.”

“Loaf!” I yelp. “Four major academic subjects is more than lots of the guys take.”

Mom comes and suggests that Pop better go over to school with me and talk it over at the school office. He does, and for once I win a round—I keep music for this semester. But he makes sure that next year I’m signed up all year for five majors: English, French, math, chemistry, and European history. I’ll be lucky if I have time to breathe.

I go down to the flower shop to grouse to Tom. It’s after Valentine’s Day, and business is slack and the boss is out.

“Why does Pop have to come butting into my business at school? Doesn’t he even think the school knows what it’s doing?”

“Aw, heck,” says Tom, “your father’s the one has to see you get into college or get a job. Sometimes schools do let kids take a lot of soft courses, and then they’re out on a limb later.”

“Huh. He just likes to boss everything I do.”

“So—he cares.”

“Huh.” I’m not very ready to buy this, but then I remember Tom’s father, who _doesn’t_ care. It makes me think.

“Besides,” says Tom, “half the reason you and your father are always bickering is that you’re so much alike.”

“Me? Like _him_?”

“Sure. You’re both impatient and curious, got to poke into everything. As long as there’s a bone on the floor, the two of you worry it.”

Mr. Palumbo comes back to the shop then, and Tom gets busy with the plants. I go home, wondering if I really am at all like Pop. I never thought of it before.

It’s funny about fights. Pop and I can go along real smooth and easy for a while, and I think: Well, he really isn’t a bad guy, and I’m growing up, we can see eye to eye—all that stuff. Then, whoosh! I hardly know what starts it, but a fight boils up, and we’re both breathing fire like dragons on the loose.

We get a holiday Washington’s Birthday, which is good because there’s a TV program on Tuesday, the night before the holiday, that I hardly ever get to watch. It’s called _Out Beyond_, and the people in it are very real, not just good guys and bad guys. There’s always one character moving around, keeping you on the edge of your chair, and by the time it all winds up in a surprise ending, you find this character is not a real person, he’s supernatural. The program goes on till eleven o’clock, and Mom won’t let me watch it on school nights.

I get the pillows comfortably arranged on the floor, with a big bottle of soda and a bag of popcorn within easy reach. The story starts off with some nature shots of a farm and mountains in the background and this little kid playing with his grandfather. There’s a lot of people in it, but gradually you get more and more suspicious of dear old grandpa. He’s taking the kid for a walk when a thunderstorm blows up.

Right then, of course, we have to have the alternate sponsor. He signs off, finally, and up comes Pop.

“Here, Davey old boy, we can do better than that tonight. The Governor and the Mayor are on a TV debate about New York City school reorganization.”

At first I figure he’s kidding, so I just growl, “Who cares?”

He switches the channel.

I jump up, tipping over the bottle of soda on the way. “Pop, that’s not fair! I’m right in the middle of a program, and I been waiting weeks to watch it because Mom won’t let me on school nights!”

Pop goes right on tuning his channel. “Do you good to listen to a real program for a change. There’ll be another western on tomorrow night.”

That’s the last straw. I shout, “See? You don’t even know what you’re talking about! It’s not a western.”

Pop looks at me prissily. “You’re getting altogether too upset about these programs. Stop it and behave yourself. Go get a sponge to mop up the soda.”

“It’s your fault! Mop it up yourself!” I’m too mad now to care what I say. I charge down the hall to my room and slam the door.

I hear the TV going for a few minutes, then Pop turns it off and goes in the kitchen to talk to Mom. In a little while he comes down and knocks on my door. Knocks—that’s something. Usually he just barges in.

“Look here now, Dave, we’ve got to straighten a few things out quietly. Your mother says she told you you could watch that program, whatever it was. So O.K., go ahead, you can finish it.”

“Yeah, it’s about over by now.” I’m still sore, and besides Pop’s still standing in my door, so I figure there’s a hitch in this somewhere.

“But anyway, you shouldn’t get so sore about an old television program that you shout ‘Mop it up yourself’ at me.”

“Hmm.”

“Hmm, nothing.”

“Well, I don’t think you should turn a guy’s TV program off in the middle without even finding out about it.”

Pop says “Hmm” this time, and we both stand and simmer down.

I look at my watch. It’s a quarter to eleven. I say, “Well, O.K. I might as well see the end. Sorry I got sore.”

Pop moves out of the doorway. He says, “Hereafter I will only turn off your TV programs before they start, not in the middle.”

Just as I get the TV on and settle down, the doorbell rings.

“Goodness, who could that be so late?” says Mom.

Pop goes to the door. It’s Tom, and Hilda is with him. I turn off the television set—I’ve lost track of what’s happening, and it doesn’t seem to be the grandfather who’s the spook after all. It’s the first time Hilda has been to our house, and Tom introduces her around. Then there’s one of those moments of complete silence, with everyone looking embarrassed, before we all start to speak at once.

“Hilda came to the beach with us,” I say.

“I told Tom we shouldn’t come so late,” says Hilda.

Pop says, “Not late at all. Come in and sit down.”

Hilda sits on the sofa, where Cat is curled up. He looks at her, puts his head back and goes on sleeping.

Mom brings coffee and cookies in from the kitchen, and I pour the rest of the popcorn into a bowl and pass it around. Tom stirs his coffee vigorously and takes one sip and puts the cup down.

“Reason we came so late,” he says, “Hilda and I have been talking all evening. We want to get married.”

Pop doesn’t look as surprised as I do. “Congratulations!” he says.

Tom says, “Thanks” and looks at Hilda, and she blushes. Really. Tom drinks a little more coffee and then he goes on: “The trouble is, I can’t get married on this flower-shop job.”

“Doesn’t pay enough?” Pop asks.

“Well, it’s not just the pay. The job isn’t getting me anywhere I want to go. So that’s what we’ve been talking about all evening. Finally we went up to Times Square and talked to the guys in the Army and Navy and Air Force recruiting office. You know, I’d get drafted in a year or two, anyway. I’ve decided to enlist in the Army.”

“Goodness, you may get sent way out West for years and years!” says Mom.

“No, not if I enlist in the Army. That’s for three years. But I can choose what specialist school I want to go into, and there’s this Air Defense Command—it’s something to do with missiles. In that I can also choose what metropolitan area I want to be stationed in. I can choose New York, and we could get married, and I might even be able to go on taking college course at night school, with the Army paying for most of it.”

Pop says, “You sound like the recruiting officer himself. You sure of all this?”

“I’ll have to check some more,” says Tom. “The recruiting officer, as a matter of fact, tried to persuade me to shoot for officers’ training and go into the Army as a career. But then I would be sent all over, and anyway, I don’t think Army life would be any good for Hilda.”

“I can see you have put in a busy evening,” says Pop. “Well, shove back the coffee cups, and I’ll break out that bottle of champagne that’s been sitting in the icebox since Christmas.”

I go and retrieve my spilled bottle of soda. There’s still enough left for one big glass. Pop brings out the champagne, and the cork blows and hits the ceiling. Cat jumps off the sofa and stands, half crouched and tail twitching, ready to take cover.

Pop fills little glasses for them and raises his to Tom and Hilda. “Here’s to you—a long, happy life!”

We drink, and then I raise my glass of soda. “Here’s to Cat! Tom wouldn’t even be standing here if it wasn’t for Cat.”

That’s true, and we all drink to Cat. He sits down and licks his right front paw.

_Format by Jean Krulis_ _Set in Linotype Baskerville_ _Composed and bound by American Book-Stratford Press_ _Printed by The Murray Printing Co._ *HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS, INCORPORATED*