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It's Like This, Cat

<h1>6</h1> <div class="tei tei-figure" style="width: 100%; text-align: center"><ANTIMG src="images/image06.png" width-obs="459" height-obs="450" alt="Illustration: Dave wheeling his bike across Belt Parkway." /></div> 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.” <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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