The mean yellow-glass eyes, the conical chins, the sharp white teeth, the dreadful wiry hair, the brambly sweaters, the iron-colored hands covered with a day’s battle stains. Their breath moved out to him, dark licorice and mint and Juicy Fruit so sickeningly sweet, so combined as to twist his stomach.
And over this the hot mustard smell of someone tolerating an early chest cold: the greasy stink of flesh smeared with hot camphorous salves cooking under a flannel sheath.
All these cloying and somehow depressing odors of pencils, chalk, grass and slate-board erasers, real or imagined, summoned old memory in an instant.
Popcorn mortared their teeth, and green jelly showed in their sucking, blowing nostrils. God! God!
They saw Jim, and he was new to them. They said not a word, but as Jim cried louder and Underhill, by main force, dragged him like a cement bag along the walk, the children followed with their glowing eyes. Underhill felt like pushing his fist at them and crying, ‘You little beasts, you won’t get my son!’
And then, with beautiful irrelevance, the boy at the top of the blue metal slide, so high he seemed almost in a mist, far away, the boy with the somehow familiar face, called out to him, waving and waving.
‘Hello, Charlie…!’
Underhill paused and Jim stopped crying.
‘See you later, Charlie…!’
And the face of the boy way up there on that high and very lonely slide was suddenly like the face of Thomas Marshall, an old business friend who lived just around the block, but whom he hadn’t seen in months.
‘See you later, Charlie.’
Later, later? What did the fool boy mean?
‘I know you, Charlie!’ called the boy. ‘Hi!’
‘What?’ gasped Underhill.
‘Tomorrow night, Charlie, hey!’ And the boy fell off the slide and lay choking for breath, face like a white cheese from the fall, while children jumped him and tumbled over.
Underhill stood undecided for five seconds or more, until Jim thought to cry again, and then, with the golden fox eyes upon them, in the first chill of autumn, he dragged Jim all the way home.
The next afternoon Mr Underhill finished at the office early and took the three o’clock train, arriving out in Green Town at three twenty-five, in plenty of time to drink in the brisk rays of the autumnal sun.
Strange how one day it is suddenly autumn, he thought. One day it is summer and the next, how could you measure or tell it? Something about the temperature or the smell? Or the sediment of age knocked loose from your bones during the night and circulating in your blood and heart, giving you a slight tremble and a chill? A year older, a year dying, was that it?
He walked up toward the Playground, planning the future. It seemed you did more planning in autumn than any other season. This had to do with dying, perhaps. You thought of death and you automatically planned.
Well, then, there was to be a tutor for Jim, that was positive; none of those horrible schools for him. It would pinch the bank account a bit, but Jim would at least grow up a happy boy.
They would pick and choose his friends. Any slam-bang bullies would be thrown out as soon as they so much as touched Jim. And as for this Playground? Completely out of the question!
‘Oh hello, Charles.’
He looked up suddenly. Before him, at the entrance to the wire enclosure, stood his sister. He noted instantly that she called him Charles, instead of Charlie. Last night’s unpleasantness had not quite evaporated. ‘Carol, what’re you doing here?’
She flushed guiltily and glanced in through the fence.
‘You didn’t,’ he said.
His eyes sought among the scrabbling, running, screaming children. ‘Do you mean to say…?’
His sister nodded, half amused. ‘I thought I’d bring him early—’
‘Before I got home, so I wouldn’t know, is that it?’
That was it.
‘Good God, Carol, where is he?’
‘I just came to see.’
‘You mean you left him there all afternoon?’
‘Just for five minutes while I shopped.’
‘And you left him. Good God!’ Underhill seized her wrist. ‘Well, come on, find him, get him out of there!’
They peered in together past the wire to where a dozen boys charged about, girls slapped each other, and a squabbling heap of children took turns at getting off, making a quick run, and crashing one against another.
‘That’s where he is, I know it!’ said Underhill.
Just then, across the field, sobbing and wailing. Jim ran, six boys after him. He fell, got up, ran, fell again, shrieking, and the boys behind shot beans through metal blowers.
‘I’ll stuff those blowers up their noses!’ said Underhill. ‘Run, Jim! Run!’
Jim made it to the gate. Underhill caught him. It was like catching a rumpled, drenched wad of material. Jim’s nose was bleeding, his pants were ripped, he was covered with grime.
‘There’s your Playground,’ said Underhill, on his knees, staring up from his son, holding him, at his sister. ‘There are your sweet, happy innocents, your well-to-do piddling Fascists. Let me catch this boy here again and there’ll be hell to pay. Come on, Jim. All right, you little bastards, get back there!’ he shouted.
‘We didn’t do nothing,’ said the children.
‘What’s the world coming to?’ Mr Underhill questioned the universe.
‘Hi! Charlie!’ said the strange boy, standing to one side. He waved casually and smiled.
‘Who’s that?’ asked Carol.
‘How in hell do I know?’ said Underhill.
‘Be seeing you, Charlie. So long,’ called the boy, fading off.
Mr Underhill marched his sister and his son home.
‘Take your hand off my elbow!’ said Carol.
He was trembling, absolutely, continually trembling with rage when he got to bed. He had tried some coffee, but nothing stopped it. He wanted to beat their pulpy little brains out, those gross Cruikshank children, yes, that phrase fit them, those fox-fiend, melancholy Cruikshank children, with all the guile and poison and slyness in their cold faces. In the name of all that was decent, what manner of child was this new generation!
A bunch of cutters and hangers and bangers, a drove of bleeding, moronic thumbscrewers, with the sewage of neglect running in their veins? He lay violently jerking his head from one side of his hot pillow to the other, and at last got up and lit a cigarette, but it wasn’t enough.
He and Carol had had a huge battle when they got home. He had yelled at her and she had yelled back, peacock and peahen shrieking in a wilderness where law and order were insanities laughed at and quite forgotten.
He was ashamed. You didn’t fight violence with violence, not if you were a gentleman. You talked very calmly. But Carol didn’t give you a chance, damn it! She wanted the boy put in a vise and squashed. She wanted him reamed and punctured and given the laying on of hands.
To be beaten from playground to kindergarten, to grammar school, to junior high, to high school. If he was lucky, in high school, the beatings and sadisms would refine themselves, the sea of blood and spittle would drain back down the shore of years and Jim would be left upon the edge of maturity, with God knows what outlook to the future, with a desire, perhaps, to be a wolf among wolves, a dog among dogs, a fiend among fiends. But there was enough of that in the world, already.
The very thought of the next ten or fifteen years of torture was enough to make Mr Underhill cringe; he felt his own flesh impaled with BB shot, stung, burned, fisted, scrounged, twisted, violated, and bruised. He quivered, like a jellyfish hurled violently into a concrete mixer. Jim would never survive it. Jim was too delicate for this horror.
Underhill walked in the midnight rooms of his house thinking of all this, of himself, of the son, the Playground, the fear; there was no part of it he did not touch and turn over with his mind. How much, he asked himself, how much of this is being alone, how much due to Ann’s dying, how much to my need, and how much is the reality of the Playground itself, and the children?
How much rational and how much nonsense? He twitched the delicate weights upon the scale and watched the indicator glide and fix and glide again, back and forth, softly, between midnight and dawn, between black and white, between raw sanity and naked insanity. He should not hold so tight, he should let his hands drop away from the boy.
And yet—there was no hour that looking into Jim’s small face he did not see Ann there, in the eyes, in the mouth, in the turn of the nostrils, in the warm breathing, in the glow of blood moving just under the thin shell of flesh, I have a right, he thought, to be afraid.
I have every right. When you have two precious bits of porcelain and one is broken and the other, the last one, remains, where can you find the time to be objective, to be immensely calm, to be anything else but concerned?
No, he thought, walking slowly in the hall, there seems to be nothing I can do except go on being afraid and being afraid of being afraid.
‘You needn’t prowl the house all night,’ his sister called from her bed, as she heard him pass her open door. ‘You needn’t be childish, I’m sorry if I seem dictatorial or cold. But you’ve got to make up your mind.
Jim simply cannot have a private tutor. Ann would have wanted him to go to a regular school. And he’s got to go back to that Playground tomorrow and keep going back until he’s learned to stand
