The elevator opened directly into the gymnasium, disgorging its occupants into what would certainly have been one of the circles of hell had Dante been prescient enough to have thought of it. Fortunately for him and the world of medieval literature, he had lived too soon to envision the ambiance of the gymnasium of an all-male school in the last third of the twentieth century. Kate Fansler, whom experience seemed incapable of preparing for the assault on her senses, paused to allow herself to regain what equanimity the scene allowed. It wasn’t much. The smell of twenty-five or more adolescent male bodies engaged in relentless athletics, while at first apparently beyond the bounds of adult human endurance, would, Kate knew from experience, be reduced by the blessed action of olfactory fatigue. The noise, emanating in the main from a loudspeaker system amplifying the latest rock at several decibels above that safe for human hearing, would subside, not, as seemed likely, from the deafness of the spectators, but from the beginning of the game, when the speaker system would be blessedly shut off. “But what,” Kate had asked her nephew Leo, “can be the point of that awful noise, that deafening cacophony?”
“We like it.” Leo was by now inured to his aunt’s tendency toward polysyllabic expression. “Besides,” he conceded in the interests of truth, “it psychs up the team.”
“My God,” Kate had answered. She was capable of monosyllables when shocked.
The noise from the loudspeaker system did not quite drown out the other sounds from the gymnasium—the screams of young males, varying from bass to soprano in range, but remarkably similar in tone and vocabulary; the bells and ancient car horns being practiced for subsequent use in the expression of joy at a basket, home team or not, as the case might be.
Having taken account of smell and sound, Kate turned to consider the next feat required of her: the climb, through obdurately unmoving male bodies, up the grandstand to a seat from which she might watch the game. A backless seat, of course, providing little foot room and no place for one’s coat and other accouterments: Kate had learned to limit these, and to wear only pantsuits to the gymnasium. One evening of tugging helplessly at her skirts had been enough.
“Hi, Kate!” John Crackthorne’s mature tones managed somehow to make themselves heard. He patted a place next to him, and Kate, waving wildly in recognition—for no lesser gestures would have been observable—began the search for footholds between the stolid bodies of small boys.
“Hey, you. Alderman, Watson, Levy, let the lady up, please.” Crackthorne accompanied this command with certain well-placed kicks and blows. The boys addressed, suddenly awakened to their roles of courteous youths, as opposed to athletic demons, arose, revealing ties, blazers, and the promise of civilization, and let Kate pass.
“Marvelous to see you,” Crackthorne said. “You are becoming one of our most faithful followers of the team. Is it vicarious pleasure or support of your nephew? Direct pleasure it can scarcely be, so I don’t suggest it.”
“Leo seems to like me to come,” Kate answered. “Of course, he never asks me or notices me while I’m here. But he does announce when the game will be, and I have observed that all the other starters have faithful parents who attend with touching regularity. When I ask Leo if I should come, he always says, ‘If you feel like it, it’s O.K.,’ which, translated, means: I would like to have you there, but I would rather feel that you had insisted upon coming over my demurrings. The translation may, of course, as translations so often are, be distorted by the preconceptions of the translator. Why do you attend so faithfully?”
“All five boys are in my English class, and by coming I gain a certain moral ascendance over the basketball coach. He tried to retaliate by attending my English classes, but couldn’t fit it in between practices; the one time he came he fell asleep. Alas, so often, do the boys, from too much basketball practice—but you don’t want to hear any more of our tedious school wrangles. I understand if we win tonight, we can scarcely fail to have an undefeated season, a fact which the boys and I partly regret. Why has it never occurred to anyone that God, if he existed, would clearly be seen to be regularly on the wrong, if winning, side? We ought to have lost gracefully, while gaining school fame with a smashing performance by the orchestra or dramatic society. But such is not life.”
Anyone watching them, Kate supposed, would assume them to be involved in a relationship of great intimacy. Through long practice, Kate and Crackthorne had discovered that if one put one’s mouth exactly as though one were about to kiss the ear of the other, words might actually be exchanged. To any visitor from Mars—who, however, if he were clever enough to get to earth, would be smart enough not to enter the gymnasium—it would appear that Kate and Crackthorne derived great pleasure from the lengthy kissing of one another’s ears.
“Ah,” Kate said. She by now knew the signs. The teams left the floor, either for last-minute instructions in their locker room or, as Kate rather suspected, to enable them to make an entrance in their handsome warm-up suits. Kate had learned from Leo that no uniform was too fine for varsity teams, though the science teacher had been heard muttering about the shortage of Bunsen burners, and the library, however elegant, could certainly have done with some judicious filling in.
Kate, under Leo’s relentless instruction, delivered for the most part as an accompaniment to televised Knick games, had become something of a basketball aficionado. To her own and Leo’s regret, she could never recognize when someone had set a “pick,” and she tended to admire the wrong members of any team she watched; also, her most regrettable failing from Leo’s point of view, she disapproved staunchly of the Wilt Chamberlain type, all those over seven feet tall. She maintained that the game should be limited to those six feet five or under, and no amount of explanation on Leo’s part of the grace and talent of these tall men could reconcile Kate to the unfair advantage of their height. Still, Leo forgave her these failings because she maintained both her interest and a knowledge of her ignorance; those elders who pretended to understand the game when they did not, which was mostly, were the scorn of the boys. Similarly, if Leo should want to know something about a work of literature for an exam, whose imminence always coincided with his first reading of the work to be examined, he would wander into Kate’s room and say: “Let’s hear a few bright remarks about ‘Prufrock.’ ” Kate rather admired this mutual exchange of needed information, made possible by her willingness to leave the initiation of all conversations to Leo. Those conversations whose nature required they be initiated elsewhere, Kate, with great cowardice, left to Reed. The system worked surprisingly well.
It was Leo’s parents’ unwillingness to leave any initiative at all to Leo that had shattered, once and for all, Leo’s ability to get along with them or even, eventually, to remain in the same house. Whether because he was the middle son of three, or because of odd personality clashes, or because, in Kate’s opinion, her brother was a stuffed shirt with a closed mind and her sister-in-law a beautifully dressed and coiffured busybody with no mind at all, Leo had needed to escape. Once before in his life he had turned up, so to speak, on Kate’s doorstep and lived with her for a summer. Now, in his senior year in high school, he was living with her again. Reed had agreed they would try it, and it had worked, not that either Kate or Reed deluded themselves about the reasons. First, their apartment was large; second, they had ample domestic help; third, they were able to maintain an indifference to Leo’s actions which, such is the perversity of adolescence, impelled him to discuss them and thus allow a certain degree of guidance; fourth, and most important, Leo wanted to get on with Kate and Reed, the alternatives being to live with his parents, which was unthinkable, or go to boarding school, which was undesirable.
It had, of course, been left to Kate once again to soothe the ruffled ego of her brother. He had argued with his eldest about the Vietnam war, alienated his second son, and seemed to suspect Kate, unladylike enough not to have produced any progeny of her own, of eyeing the third, Ted, now in the eighth grade. But Kate had been able to assure him that many adolescents like Leo were better off not living at home and boarded out, which was certainly true, and that Ted, the third son, already able to flatter his father into too large an allowance, was at thirteen too far down the primrose path for Kate to offer him house room should he want it. Sometimes, at the basketball games, Kate tried to picture her brother and sister-in-law watching, and failed wholly in this imaginative effort. “Some of us,” Kate had said to Reed, “were born to be aunts and uncles. A valuable and underrated role.”
“Still,” Reed had answered, “the roles might have been easier could you have managed to latch on to an uncoordinated nephew five feet six or, better still, a niece. One can grow tired of basketball.”
“It intrigues me,” Kate had said. And Leo was content to discuss other things with Reed. It made for pleasantness all around.
With a great whoop, mercifully accompanied by the cessation of the rock music, the teams returned. The starters doffed their warm-up regalia, and the loudspeaker began announcing the teams. As each name was announced, its owner rushed out to the court and stood there, avoiding all eyes. When the teams were assembled, the captains shook hands—Kate, watching this grudging gesture, was reminded that hand-shaking supposedly derived from an examination of the other man’s sleeve for hidden weapons—and the centers crouched to await the jump.
It was at this point that Kate and Crackthorne, their eyes upon the game, customarily began a discussion of literature, or gossip of the school or university. Kate had once attended a game without Mr. Crackthorne and had found it almost dull. She did not, of course, tell this to Leo. Crackthorne had been a student of Kate’s some years back, having completed all the work for his Ph.D. save the dissertation, which, in a fashion all too familiar to Kate, seemed to be dragging on over the years. To support himself he had come to St. Anthony’s to teach English. This year, however, he had begun to speak as though, with a certain amount of application in the coming summer, he might actually hope for the completion of what Kate believed would be a first-rate piece of work on those writers of the World War I generation in English who had survived.
She said as much to him, watching, out of the corner of her eye, the team’s ball handler dribble down the court with one hand while signaling plays with the other. One of Kate’s special delights in basketball arose from the analogy, for her, of the ball handler on the team and her own work in seminars, an analogy which earned only a snort from Leo, who considered Kate too prone to analogies anyhow.
“I am plunged in gloom,” Crackthorne said. “It is like trying to stuff a pillow into a case too small for it. Everything keeps lapping over. Of course, these English types all knew one another, so that one is forever following some trail which leads to new wonders. Meanwhile, what I have written seems tedious beyond words.”
“Inevitable,” Kate said. “That’s because you are so familiar with what you have that you assume it must he boringly familiar to everyone else. But it isn’t. Snip off the edge of the pillow, cram the feathers into what’s left of the case, sew up the edge as neatly as you can, and then think about other delightful paths down which you might be led. Beautiful shot! Hooray for Leo! You take my point, I trust, although basketball has a distinctly deleterious effect on my syntax and similes.”
Kate, with an eye on the electric scoreboard, realized that the quarter was ending and that the chances of St. Anthony’s having an undefeated season were good. As the end-of-the-quarter whistle blew, Crackthorne turned to Kate and began a discussion of Aldous Huxley, who, now he came to think of it, would have been in his youth an interesting prospect to an American coach, had he had decent eyesight and the misfortune to be born in the U.S. For a moment Kate tried to picture Huxley torn between basketball and the creation of Crome Yellow. She said as much to Crackthorne.
“Any of those English,” he said, with one eye on the court as the second quarter began. “In my wilder moments, I try to imagine the coach inducing coordination in Lytton Strachey. There’s someone who would have managed to puncture all this nonsense. The coach, as you might guess, dismisses all modern English writers of my period as pansies. I told him the word was buggers, but he thinks buggers were those employed by the Nixon administration. Speaking of Huxley, have you heard about the time . . .”
During the half, when the rock music resumed and the team disappeared, Kate and Crackthorne went downstairs to have a smoke and a little relative quiet. St. Anthony’s was leading by 34 points, which seemed to shed upon the rest of the evening a certain air of anticlimax; but Leo had warned her how often the Knicks had come back to win in the fourth quarter. Desertion was not, therefore, to be thought of.
As Crackthorne and Kate prepared to ascend to the inferno they were intercepted by Mr. Kunstler, the assistant coach, who was in charge of the junior varsity and remedial reading. With the ebullience inevitable in one able to follow such a career, he greeted Crackthorne with excited praise about how well his eggheads were doing on the basketball court and, upon being introduced to Kate, broke into little spurts of delight at the mention of her name.
“How proud you must be of your son, Mrs. Fansler. Leo gives some of the coaches a hard time, but I say he’s a good boy and shows the results of a mother’s loving care. One can always—”
“Kunstler, old boy—” Crackthorne began.
“I know it is no longer fashionable to praise motherhood,” Kunstler continued, raising an admonishing hand, “but one can always spot the boys who have had a true mother’s devotion. Some of our boys—?”
“Kunstler, old chap, shut up. This is Miss Fansler, Leo’s aunt, and she has never been a mother. If I were you, I would take my theories of motherhood and—”
“Well, well,” Kunstler responded with marvelous sangfroid, “a fine boy, even if his mother is dead. You have nobly stepped into her place.” Since there seemed no sane response to this but a formal bow, Kate bowed formally and allowed Crackthorne to lead her rather suddenly into the elevator, leaving Kunstler several paces behind as the door closed; doubtless he was still rapt in thoughts of devotion to motherhood.
But just as the elevator door was about to close, an arm, interfering, caused it to reopen. Six extremely large noisy boys occupied the elevator, as an invading army occupies a country, diminishing, belittling all other people and occupations and ways of life. There welled up in Kate a feeling of resentment against the young, already initiated male that nothing in years of sophistication or accomplishment had managed to still. They strutted; their self-absorption was absolute, their arrogance of status palpable. Crackthorne, if he did not share Kate’s visceral response, deplored the dissipation within the elevator’s enclosed atmosphere of a machismo indifference to all who were neither young nor masculine.
“Ricardo,” Crackthorne snapped. “Might we at least mimic, if we cannot experience, some consideration for others. This is an elevator, not a beer hall.” The door at that moment opened again upon the gymnasium, upon noise, rock music, and male sweat. But Kate moved gratefully from, as it were, condensed to diluted adolescence. Crackthorne caught up with her after a few more words to the invaders. Suddenly, the name he had snapped out in the elevator registered in her mind. “Ricardo?” she asked.
Crackthorne led the way up the grandstand, finding, and reserving for her use, footholds in the rows of boys.
“Chet Ricardo,” he said when they were seated. “One of the cool set. You know, women, drugs, and a general air of smoothness at age fifteen. By senior year they’re revealed as not terribly bright, having peaked too early. Leo, I am pleased to say, is not among them.”
“Any relation to the painter Ricardo?”
“But of course, I should have realized why you wondered. Yes indeed, grandson, and of the famous Cecily Hutchins, which is more to the point for you and me. Papa is, alas, a rather uninteresting businessman: the genes are lying low until at least the fourth generation, or so it would seem.”
“Funny Leo never mentioned him.”
“My dear madam, no class graduates but the parents say, ‘I was so astonished when sonny boy brought home his yearbook: there were at least ten boys I’d never heard of.’ ”
Not for the first time Kate pondered the strange habits of the young. In adolescence, the search for identity took many forms, most of them hideous. “Do you know,” she bellowed into Crackthorne’s ear, “I think we may safely consider this game won and our duty to the athletic young performed. I see they are taking out Leo and friends and putting in the second team. May I buy you a drink in the relative quiet of a singles bar, that being all the neighborhood affords?”
“No,” he said. “I’ll see it through and have some encouraging words for those on the second team who will now trip all over their feet, miss the great chance of which they have been dreaming, and need to be comforted in their discovery of the distance between hope of performance and performance.”
“I suspect you of being a born schoolteacher,” Kate said, “something apparently rarer in our day than a fine glass blower, and infinitely more desirable. Until our next victory, then.”
Later that evening Kate knocked on the door of her husband’s study and, on being commanded to enter, stuck in her head. “Busy?” she asked.
“Longing to be distracted. It is the end of March, and my thoughts turn inevitably taxward. Yet, I say to myself, I may be run over tomorrow, and what a pity to have started so soon.”
“If you are run over, how much easier for me to have all your financial affairs neatly in shape.”
“Unfeeling woman. What is it, Kate? I thought you were writing a speech which had to be at least forty minutes long, even allowing for a generous question period.”
“I was thinking of a classmate of Leo’s I encountered today. It was a one-way meeting; he did not encounter me, unless a tank can be said to encounter the weed in its path. May I lounge in that Swedish leather thing with the machinery?”
“Lounge away.” Reed leaned back in his swivel desk chair, and rested his feet on an open desk drawer. Kate noticed that no flesh appeared between trouser and sock.
“I keep being reminded of that day with Max,” Kate said.
“The tank reminded you? Kate, I’ve been meaning to ask, have you ever thought of coaching a female basketball team? You must be damned well qualified by now, ready to tell them they should be able to dribble with either hand without watching the ball. Not so different from teaching English, really.”
“Reed, I do love you. When is one of us going to start feeling tied up and run for life?”
“Never, is my plan. I not, because tied up is exactly what I want to feel. You not, because I mean to give you so much space to move about in you’ll begin to miss me and seek me out.”
“As I do now. Admirable man—and the house in the woods has helped. Reed, I’m the most fortunate person alive, and every now and then I’ve the feeling it’s all a charade, and if I stop, there will be the pain.”
“It’s hard to be happy, and safe, and applauded in a miserable world. What was it about the boy in the elevator?”
“He seemed like nemesis, or destiny, or just my troubled conscience. Oh, I don’t mean the boy himself, frightful male adolescent, than which, of course, when it is bad there is nothing worse. I just mean Cecily Hutchins, and Dorothy Whitmore, and Gerry Marston. I wonder where her portrait is now, and whether Max did sell the papers to the Wallingford.”
“Why not have him to lunch at the Cos Club and ask him?”
“Reed, did I say I loved you?”
“Twice,” Reed said, leaning over the desk and reaching out his hand.