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.”
7
[Illustration: Dave talking with veterinarian while holding Cat.]