The Theory of the Leisure Class

Roy did not so much mind the two feet of new snow that had fallen overnight, but ice had hardened during the early morning hours and created a carapace upon the sidewalks that made them dangerous to negotiate. The elderly and enfeebled were advised to stay home. Stepping cautiously on his way to school, Roy stopped in front of Walsh’s drugstore on Blackhawk to take a copy of that day’s Sun-Times from the bundle on the ground in front of the entrance. Walsh’s would not open for another hour, so Roy left a dime on the bundle, rolled up the paper, stuck it under his arm and continued toward the school.

He wished he could be with his father right now in Havana, Cuba, where the temperature was in the mid-80s and the trade winds were blowing. His dad had gone to Cuba on business and was staying at the Hotel Nacional, his regular place of residence when he was on the island. Roy enjoyed sitting out on the terrace there early in the morning, when it was coolest, drinking lemonade and munching lightly toasted and sweet-buttered Cuban bread. After breakfast at the Nacional, Roy would usually go swimming in the hotel pool, then he would get dressed and walk by himself over to the Sevilla Biltmore to have lunch with his father. Most of the time, Roy’s father would be there already, seated in a booth at the rooftop restaurant with two or three other men. There were framed black and white photographs on the walls of the restaurant, in two of which his dad could be seen smiling and holding a cigar. Roy’s mother was in one of the photos, taken at Oriental Park Racetrack in Marianao, her long, auburn hair pulled back tightly, wearing the calico jacket Roy liked so much. Often when he thought about his mother, he pictured her wearing that jacket.

Roy’s parents had been divorced for five years. He was ten now, and he lived with his mother most of the time, but his parents remained close friends. Roy had never seen or heard them argue or say a harsh word to or about one another. It seemed to him that they got along better than many of his friends’ parents who were still married and lived together.

Roy took a seat in the last row of his classroom and opened the newspaper on his desk. The first thing he looked at was the sports section, which was full of news about the Dodgers and Giants abandoning Brooklyn and New York City and moving to the West Coast. Both owners of those teams, Walter O’Malley and Horace Stoneham, had received dozens of death threats from furious and forlorn fans. Roy did not blame them for being angry; he would be, too, he knew, if the Cubs and White Sox left. On the front page of the paper was a story about a shooting on a river bridge in rural Wisconsin. Two teenagers, a boy and a girl, had been parked in a car with the motor running on the bridge at night when a man wearing an orange cap with earflaps came out of the nearby woods carrying a shotgun, walked up to the car and ordered the girl, who was sitting in the front passenger seat, to roll down her window. He then pushed the barrel of the gun into the car and fired it at the boy, blowing away most of his face. The girl fainted. When she woke up and saw the boy, she screamed, then got out of the car, its motor still running, and hiked three miles back to their hometown and told the sheriff what happened. She didn’t know where the man who had shot the boy had gone, but he was not there when she regained consciousness.

The next morning, at first light, the sheriff organized a manhunt. His posse gathered on the river bridge, and as the sheriff was giving them their instructions, a man wearing an orange hat walked out of the woods holding a shotgun above his head with both hands and surrendered. The man gave his name, age and place of residence as Gunnar Hamsun, thirty-eight, from Duluth, Minnesota. The girl later identified Hamsun as the killer. No motive for the murder had been determined. One member of the posse was quoted as saying that the man taken into custody had a tattoo of a cross with a snake wrapped around it in the center of his forehead.

Roy’s teacher told him to put away the newspaper and pay attention to what she was saying.

“School is for learning,” she said, “not for leisure.”

Roy pictured his father and his cronies sitting in a booth at the Sevilla Biltmore, smoking Montecristos and drinking mojitos or sipping the strong Cuban coffee that smelled so good. Roy did not like the taste of coffee so much as he loved the odor. The next time his father was going to Havana, Roy would ask him to take him along, even if it was during the school year. He could learn what he needed to in Cuba, Roy figured, as well or probably better than he could in Chicago. His father and his friends did business, but they conducted it, it seemed to Roy, at their leisure. They had the right idea, he decided, and the weather undoubtedly had something to do with it.