There are some disadvantages to not getting a girl’s phone number. This
sort of date I had with Mary for golf on Election Day fell through. In the
first place, I was sick in bed with the flu, and Mom wouldn’t have let me
out for anything, and secondly, it was pouring rain. Without the phone
number, there wasn’t any way I could let her know, and I didn’t even know
a street address to write to later.
By the time I got finished with the flu, we were into Thanksgiving and
then all the trouble with Kate. Time passed and I felt rottener about
standing her up without a word, and I couldn’t get up my nerve to go out
to Coney and just appear on her doorstep. I could have found the house all
right, once I was out there.
The first week of Christmas vacation the phone rings late one afternoon
and Pop answers it. He says, “Just one minute, please,” and I know right
away from his voice it isn’t someone he knows.
“Young lady on the phone for you, Dave,” he says, and he enjoys watching
me gulp.
“Hullo?” a rather tight, flat little voice asks. “Is this Dave—uh,
Mitchell—uh, I mean, with Cat?”
I recognize it’s Mary, all right, even if she does sound strange and
scared.
“Oh, hi!” I say. “Sure, it’s me! I’m awfully sorry about that day we were
going to play golf. I was in bed with the flu, and then I didn’t know your
phone number or....”
“Oh, that’s all right,” she says. “I wondered what happened.”
There’s a slight pause, and I see Pop grinning and pretending to read his
paper. I turn around so I won’t see him.
“Where are you now, out in Coney?” I ask Mary.
“No, as a matter of fact, I’m in Macy’s.” Her voice trails off a little,
but then she starts in again. “As a matter of fact, that’s why I called.
You see, I was supposed to meet Mom here at five, and she hasn’t come, and
I bought all these Christmas presents, and I forgot about the tax or
something, and this is my last dime.”
She stops. I see now why she sounds scared, and I get a curdled feeling in
my stomach, too, because what if the dime runs out in the phone and she’s
cut off? I’ll never find her in Macy’s. It’s too big.
“Pop!” I yelp. “There’s this girl I know is in a phone booth in Macy’s and
her dime is going to run out and she hasn’t anymore money. What’ll I do?”
“Get the phone number of the booth and call her back. Here—” He gives me a
pencil.
What a relief. Funny I never thought of that. You just somehow don’t think
of a phone booth having a number.
Mary sounds pretty relieved, too. I get the number and call her back, and
with Pop making suggestions here and there we settle that I’ll go over to
Macy’s and meet her on the ground floor near Thirty-fourth Street and
Broadway at the counter where they’re selling umbrellas for $2.89, which
Mary says she can see from the phone booth.
“O.K.” I say, and then I sort of don’t want to hang up. It’s fun talking.
So I go on. “Look, just in case we miss each other at Macy’s, what’s your
phone number at home, so I could call you sometime?”
“COney 7-1218.”
“O.K. Well, good-bye. I’ll be right over. To Macy’s, I mean.”
I grab my coat and check to see if I’ve got money. Pop asks if I’m going
to bring her home for dinner.
“Gee, I don’t know.” I hadn’t given a thought to what we’d do. “I guess
so, maybe, if her mother hasn’t come by then. I’ll call you if we do
anything else.”
“O.K.,” Pop says.
I go out and hustle through the evening rush-hour crowds to the subway.
The stores are all open evenings now, for Christmas, so the crowds are
going both ways.
I get to the right corner of Macy’s, and I see Mary right away. Everyone
else is rushing about and muttering to themselves, and she’s standing
there looking lost. In fact she looks so much like a waif that the first
thing I say is, “Hi! Shall we go get something to eat?”
“Yes, I’m starved. I was just going to get a doughnut when I found I’d run
out of money.”
“Let’s go home and you can have dinner with us then. But what about your
mother? Won’t she be looking for you?”
Mary shifts her feet and looks tired. “I don’t know. Probably if she came
and I wasn’t here, she’d figure I’d gone home.”
I try to think a minute, which is hard to do with all these people shoving
around you. Mary starts to pick up her two enormous shopping bags, and I
take them from her, still trying to think. At the subway entrance I see
the phone booth.
“That’s the thing,” I say. “Why don’t you call your house and see if your
mother left a message or something?”
“Well....” Mary stands by the phone looking confused and in fact about
ready to cry. I suddenly decide the best thing we can do is get home and
sit down where it’s quiet. Waiting fifteen minutes or so to phone can’t
make much difference.
We get home pretty fast and I introduce Mary to Mom and Pop. She sinks
into the nearest chair and takes off her shoes.
“Excuse me,” she says. “I just bought these heels, and it’s awful wearing
them!”
She wiggles her toes and begins to look better. Mom offers her a pair of
slippers and Pop passes some potato chips.
Mom says, “Poor child, did you try to do all your Christmas shopping at
once?”
“Well, actually, I was having fun just looking for a long while. I have
two little cousins that I don’t really have to get much for, but I love
looking at all the toys. I spent quite a while there. Then I did the rest
of my shopping in a rush, and everything is so crowded, and I got mixed up
on my money or the sales tax and only had a dime left, and I missed my
mother or she forgot.”
She stretches out her toes to touch Cat, who is sitting in front of her.
“I couldn’t think what to do. It’s so hard to think when your feet hurt.”
“It certainly is,” agrees Mom. She goes out to the kitchen to finish
fixing dinner, and Pop suggests Mary better phone her home. She gets her
father, and her mother has left a message that she was delayed and figured
Mary would go home alone. Mary gives her father our address and tells him
she’ll be home by nine.
We must have hit a lucky day because we have a real good dinner: slices of
good whole meat, not mushed up stuff, and potatoes cooked with cheese in
them, and salad, and a lemon meringue pie from the bakery, even.
After dinner we sit around a little while, and Pop says I better take Mary
home, and he gives me money for a cab at the end of the subway. When Mary
gives the driver her home address, I say it over to myself a few times so
I’ll remember.
Suddenly I wonder about something. “Say, how’d you know _my_ phone
number?”
“I looked it up,” she says simply. “There’s about twenty-eleven Mitchells
in the Manhattan phone book, but only one in the East Twenties, so I
figured that must be you.”
“Gee, that’s true. You must have had an awful time, though, standing in
the phone booth with your feet hurting, going through all those
Mitchells.”
Says Mary, “Oh, no. I did it one rainy afternoon at home, weeks ago.”
Well, what do you know.
18
[Illustration: Raised champagne glasses toasting Cat.]
“HERE’S TO CAT!”
The two stray kittens gradually make themselves at home. Somehow or other
Cat has taught them that he’s in charge here, and he just chases them for
fun now and again, when he’s not busy sleeping.
As for keeping cats in my room, that’s pretty well forgotten. For one
thing, Mom really likes them. She sneaks the kittens saucers of cream and
bits of real hamburger when no one’s looking, and she likes talking to
them in the kitchen. She doesn’t pick them up, but just having them in the
room sure doesn’t give her asthma.
The only time we have any trouble from the cats is one evening when Pop
comes home and the two kittens skid down the hall between his legs, with
Cat after them. He scales his hat at the lot of them and roars down the
hall to me, “Hey, Davey! When are you getting rid of these cats? I’m not
fixing to start an annex to Kate’s cat home!”
“I’m sure Davey will find homes for them,” Mom says soothingly, but
getting a little short of breath, the way she does any time she’s afraid
one of us is losing his temper.
In fact, one thing this cat business seems to have established is that me
and Pop fighting is the main cause of Mom’s asthma. So we both try to do a
little better, and a lot of things we used to argue and fight about, like
my jazz records, we just kid each other about now. But now and then we
still work up to a real hassle.
I’ve been taking a history course the first semester at school. It’s a
real lemon—just a lot of preaching about government and citizenship. The
second semester I switch to a music course. This is O.K. with the
school—but not with Pop. Right away when I bring home my new program, he
says, “How come you’re taking one less course this half?”
I explain that I’m taking music, and also biology, algebra, English, and
French.
“Music!” he snorts. “That’s recreation, not a course. Do it on your own
time!”
“Pop, it’s a course. You think the school signs me up for an hour of home
record playing?”
“They might,” he grunts. “You’re not going to loaf your way through school
if I have anything to say about it.”
“Loaf!” I yelp. “Four major academic subjects is more than lots of the
guys take.”
Mom comes and suggests that Pop better go over to school with me and talk
it over at the school office. He does, and for once I win a round—I keep
music for this semester. But he makes sure that next year I’m signed up
all year for five majors: English, French, math, chemistry, and European
history. I’ll be lucky if I have time to breathe.
I go down to the flower shop to grouse to Tom. It’s after Valentine’s Day,
and business is slack and the boss is out.
“Why does Pop have to come butting into my business at school? Doesn’t he
even think the school knows what it’s doing?”
“Aw, heck,” says Tom, “your father’s the one has to see you get into
college or get a job. Sometimes schools do let kids take a lot of soft
courses, and then they’re out on a limb later.”
“Huh. He just likes to boss everything I do.”
“So—he cares.”
“Huh.” I’m not very ready to buy this, but then I remember Tom’s father,
who _doesn’t_ care. It makes me think.
“Besides,” says Tom, “half the reason you and your father are always
bickering is that you’re so much alike.”
“Me? Like _him_?”
“Sure. You’re both impatient and curious, got to poke into everything. As
long as there’s a bone on the floor, the two of you worry it.”
Mr. Palumbo comes back to the shop then, and Tom gets busy with the
plants. I go home, wondering if I really am at all like Pop. I never
thought of it before.
It’s funny about fights. Pop and I can go along real smooth and easy for a
while, and I think: Well, he really isn’t a bad guy, and I’m growing up,
we can see eye to eye—all that stuff. Then, whoosh! I hardly know what
starts it, but a fight boils up, and we’re both breathing fire like
dragons on the loose.
We get a holiday Washington’s Birthday, which is good because there’s a TV
program on Tuesday, the night before the holiday, that I hardly ever get
to watch. It’s called _Out Beyond_, and the people in it are very real,
not just good guys and bad guys. There’s always one character moving
around, keeping you on the edge of your chair, and by the time it all
winds up in a surprise ending, you find this character is not a real
person, he’s supernatural. The program goes on till eleven o’clock, and
Mom won’t let me watch it on school nights.
I get the pillows comfortably arranged on the floor, with a big bottle of
soda and a bag of popcorn within easy reach. The story starts off with
some nature shots of a farm and mountains in the background and this
little kid playing with his grandfather. There’s a lot of people in it,
but gradually you get more and more suspicious of dear old grandpa. He’s
taking the kid for a walk when a thunderstorm blows up.
Right then, of course, we have to have the alternate sponsor. He signs
off, finally, and up comes Pop.
“Here, Davey old boy, we can do better than that tonight. The Governor and
the Mayor are on a TV debate about New York City school reorganization.”
At first I figure he’s kidding, so I just growl, “Who cares?”
He switches the channel.
I jump up, tipping over the bottle of soda on the way. “Pop, that’s not
fair! I’m right in the middle of a program, and I been waiting weeks to
watch it because Mom won’t let me on school nights!”
Pop goes right on tuning his channel. “Do you good to listen to a real
program for a change. There’ll be another western on tomorrow night.”
That’s the last straw. I shout, “See? You don’t even know what you’re
talking about! It’s not a western.”
Pop looks at me prissily. “You’re getting altogether too upset about these
programs. Stop it and behave yourself. Go get a sponge to mop up the
soda.”
“It’s your fault! Mop it up yourself!” I’m too mad now to care what I say.
I charge down the hall to my room and slam the door.
I hear the TV going for a few minutes, then Pop turns it off and goes in
the kitchen to talk to Mom. In a little while he comes down and knocks on
my door. Knocks—that’s something. Usually he just barges in.
“Look here now, Dave, we’ve got to straighten a few things out quietly.
Your mother says she told you you could watch that program, whatever it
was. So O.K., go ahead, you can finish it.”
“Yeah, it’s about over by now.” I’m still sore, and besides Pop’s still
standing in my door, so I figure there’s a hitch in this somewhere.
“But anyway, you shouldn’t get so sore about an old television program
that you shout ‘Mop it up yourself’ at me.”
“Hmm.”
“Hmm, nothing.”
“Well, I don’t think you should turn a guy’s TV program off in the middle
without even finding out about it.”
Pop says “Hmm” this time, and we both stand and simmer down.
I look at my watch. It’s a quarter to eleven. I say, “Well, O.K. I might
as well see the end. Sorry I got sore.”
Pop moves out of the doorway. He says, “Hereafter I will only turn off
your TV programs before they start, not in the middle.”
Just as I get the TV on and settle down, the doorbell rings.
“Goodness, who could that be so late?” says Mom.
Pop goes to the door. It’s Tom, and Hilda is with him. I turn off the
television set—I’ve lost track of what’s happening, and it doesn’t seem to
be the grandfather who’s the spook after all. It’s the first time Hilda
has been to our house, and Tom introduces her around. Then there’s one of
those moments of complete silence, with everyone looking embarrassed,
before we all start to speak at once.
“Hilda came to the beach with us,” I say.
“I told Tom we shouldn’t come so late,” says Hilda.
Pop says, “Not late at all. Come in and sit down.”
Hilda sits on the sofa, where Cat is curled up. He looks at her, puts his
head back and goes on sleeping.
Mom brings coffee and cookies in from the kitchen, and I pour the rest of
the popcorn into a bowl and pass it around. Tom stirs his coffee
vigorously and takes one sip and puts the cup down.
“Reason we came so late,” he says, “Hilda and I have been talking all
evening. We want to get married.”
Pop doesn’t look as surprised as I do. “Congratulations!” he says.
Tom says, “Thanks” and looks at Hilda, and she blushes. Really. Tom drinks
a little more coffee and then he goes on: “The trouble is, I can’t get
married on this flower-shop job.”
“Doesn’t pay enough?” Pop asks.
“Well, it’s not just the pay. The job isn’t getting me anywhere I want to
go. So that’s what we’ve been talking about all evening. Finally we went
up to Times Square and talked to the guys in the Army and Navy and Air
Force recruiting office. You know, I’d get drafted in a year or two,
anyway. I’ve decided to enlist in the Army.”
“Goodness, you may get sent way out West for years and years!” says Mom.
“No, not if I enlist in the Army. That’s for three years. But I can choose
what specialist school I want to go into, and there’s this Air Defense
Command—it’s something to do with missiles. In that I can also choose what
metropolitan area I want to be stationed in. I can choose New York, and we
could get married, and I might even be able to go on taking college course
at night school, with the Army paying for most of it.”
Pop says, “You sound like the recruiting officer himself. You sure of all
this?”
“I’ll have to check some more,” says Tom. “The recruiting officer, as a
matter of fact, tried to persuade me to shoot for officers’ training and
go into the Army as a career. But then I would be sent all over, and
anyway, I don’t think Army life would be any good for Hilda.”
“I can see you have put in a busy evening,” says Pop. “Well, shove back
the coffee cups, and I’ll break out that bottle of champagne that’s been
sitting in the icebox since Christmas.”
I go and retrieve my spilled bottle of soda. There’s still enough left for
one big glass. Pop brings out the champagne, and the cork blows and hits
the ceiling. Cat jumps off the sofa and stands, half crouched and tail
twitching, ready to take cover.
Pop fills little glasses for them and raises his to Tom and Hilda. “Here’s
to you—a long, happy life!”
We drink, and then I raise my glass of soda. “Here’s to Cat! Tom wouldn’t
even be standing here if it wasn’t for Cat.”
That’s true, and we all drink to Cat. He sits down and licks his right
front paw.
_Format by Jean Krulis_
_Set in Linotype Baskerville_
_Composed and bound by American Book-Stratford Press_
_Printed by The Murray Printing Co._
*HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS, INCORPORATED*