‘Maybe,’ Todd said slowly, and Dussander could see he had already accepted it. His eyes were luminous with relief.
‘There is another resemblance,’ Dussander said.
‘There is?’
‘You said your mother was one-eighth a Jew. My mother was all Jewish. We are both kikes, my boy. We are two mockies sitting in the kitchen, just like in the old joke.’
He suddenly grabbed his nose between the thumb and index finger of his right hand. At the same time he reached over the table and grabbed the boy’s nose with his left hand.
‘And it shows!’ he roared. ‘It shows!’
He began to cackle with laughter, the rocking chair squeaking back and forth. Todd looked at him, puzzled and a little frightened, but after a bit he began to laugh, too. In Dussander’s kitchen they laughed and laughed, Dussander by the open window where the warm California breeze wafted in, and Todd rocked back on the rear legs of his kitchen chair, so that its back rested against the oven door, the white enamel of which was crisscrossed by the dark, charred-looking streaks made by Dussander’s wooden matches as he struck them alight.
Rubber Ed French (his nickname, Todd had explained to Dussander, referred to the rubbers he always wore over his sneakers during wet weather) was a slight man who made an affectation of always wearing Keds to school. It was a touch of informality which he thought would endear him to the one hundred and six children between the ages of twelve and fourteen who made up his counselling load. He had five pairs of Keds, ranging in colour from Fast Track Blue to Screaming Yellow Zonkers, totally unaware that behind his back he was known not only as Rubber Ed but as Sneaker Pete and The Ked Man, as in The Ked Man Cometh. He had been known as Pucker in college, and he would have been most humiliated of all to learn that even that shameful fact had somehow gotten out.
He rarely wore ties, preferring turtle-neck sweaters. He had been wearing these ever since the early sixties, when David McCallum had popularized them in The Man from U.N.C.L.E. In his college days his classmates had been known to spy him crossing the quad and remark, ‘Here comes Pucker in his U.N.C.L.E. sweater.’ He had majored in Education Psychology, and he privately considered himself to be the only good guidance counsellor he had ever met. He had real rapport with his kids. He could get right down to it with them; he could rap with them and be silently sympathetic if they had to do some shouting and kick out the jams. He could get into their hangups because he understood what a bummer it was to be thirteen when someone was doing a number on your head and you couldn’t get your shit together.
The thing was, he had a damned hard time remembering what it had been like to be thirteen himself. He supposed that was the ultimate price you had to pay for growing up in the fifties. That, and entering the brave new world of the sixties nicknamed Pucker.
Now, as Todd Bowden’s grandfather came into his office, closing the pebbled-glass door firmly behind him, Rubber Ed stood up respectfully but was careful not to come around his desk to greet the old man. He was aware of his sneakers. Sometimes the old-timers didn’t understand that the sneakers were a psychological aid with kids who had teacher hangups — which was to say that some of the older folks couldn’t get behind a guidance counsellor in Keds.
This is one fine-looking dude, Rubber Ed thought. His white hair was carefully brushed back. His three-piece suit was spotlessly clean. His dove-grey tie was impeccably knotted. In his left hand he held a furled black umbrella (outside, a light drizzle had been falling since the weekend) in a manner that was almost military. A few years ago Rubber Ed and his wife had gone on a Dorothy Sayers jag, reading everything by that estimable lady that they could lay their hands upon. It occurred to him now that this was her brainchild, Lord Peter Wimsey, to the life. It was Wimsey at seventy-five, years after both Hunter and Harriet Vane had passed on to their rewards. He made a mental note to tell Sondra about this when he got home.
‘Mr Bowden,’ he said respectfully, and offered his hand.
‘A pleasure,’ Bowden said, and shook it Rubber Ed was careful not to put on the firm and uncompromising pressure he applied to the hands of the fathers he saw; it was obvious from the gingerly way the old boy offered it that he had arthritis.
‘A pleasure, Mr French,’ Bowden repeated, and took a seat, carefully pulling up the knees of his trousers. He propped the umbrella between his feet and leaned on it, looking like an elderly, extremely urbane vulture that had come in to roost in Rubber Ed French’s office. He had the slightest touch of an accent, Rubber Ed thought, but it wasn’t the clipped intonation of the British upper class, as Wimsey’s would have been; it was broader, more European. Anyway, the resemblance to Todd was quite striking. Especially through the nose and eyes.
I’m glad you could come,’ Rubber Ed told him, resuming his own seat, ‘although in these cases the student’s mother or father—’
This was the opening gambit, of course. Almost ten years of experience in the counselling business had convinced him that when an aunt or an uncle or a grandparent showed up for a conference, it usually meant trouble at home — the sort of trouble that invariably turned out to be the root of the problem. To Rubber Ed, this came as a relief. Domestic problems were bad, but for a boy of Todd’s intelligence, a heavy drug trip would have been much, much worse.
‘Yes, of course,’ Bowden said, managing to look both sorrowful and angry at the same time. ‘My son and his wife asked me if I could come and talk this sorry business over with you, Mr French. Todd is a good boy, believe me. This trouble with his school marks is only temporary.’
‘Well, we all hope so, don’t we, Mr Bowden? Smoke if you like. It’s supposed to be off-limits on school property, but I’ll never tell.’
Thank you.’
Mr Bowden took a half-crushed package of Camel cigarettes from his inner pocket, put one of the last two zigzagging smokes in his mouth, found a Diamond Blue-Tip match, scratched it on the heel of one black shoe, and lit up. He coughed an old man’s dank cough over the first drag, shook the match out, and put the blackened stump into the ashtray Rubber Ed had produced. Rubber Ed watched this ritual, which seemed almost as formal as the old man’s shoes, with frank fascination.
‘Where to begin,’ Bowden said, his distressed face looking at Rubber Ed through a swirling raft of cigarette smoke.
‘Well,’ Rubber Ed said kindly, ‘the very fact that you’re here instead of Todd’s parents tells me something, you know.’
‘Yes, I suppose it does. Very well.’ He folded his hands. The Camel protruded from between the second and third fingers of his right. He straightened his back and lifted his chin. There was something almost Prussian in his mental coming to terms, Rubber Ed thought, something that made him think of all those war movies he’d seen as a kid.
‘My son and my daughter-in-law are having troubles in their home,’ Bowden said, biting off each word precisely. ‘Rather bad troubles, I should think.’ His eyes, old but amazingly bright, watched as Rubber Ed opened the folder centred in front of him on the desk blotter. There were sheets of paper inside, but not many.
‘And you feel that these troubles are affecting Todd’s academic performance?’
Bowden leaned forward perhaps six inches. His blue eyes never left Rubber Ed’s brown ones. There was a heavily charged pause, and then Bowden said: ‘The mother drinks.’
He resumed his former ramrod-straight position.
‘Oh,’ Rubber Ed said.
‘Yes,’ Bowden replied, nodding grimly. ‘The boy has told me that he has come home on two occasions and has found her sprawled out on the kitchen table. He knows how my son feels about her drinking problem, and so the boy has put dinner in the oven himself on these occasions, and has gotten her to drink enough black coffee so she will at least be awake when Richard comes home.’
That’s bad,’ Rubber Ed said, although he had heard worse — mothers with heroin habits, fathers who had abruptly taken it into their heads to start banging their daughters… or their sons. ‘Has Mrs Bowden thought about getting professional help for her problem?’
The boy has tried to persuade her that would be the best course. She is much ashamed, I think. If she was given a little time…’ He made a gesture with his cigarette that left a dissolving smoke-ring in the air. ‘You understand?’
‘Yes, of course,’ Rubber Ed nodded, privately admiring the gesture that had produced the smoke-ring. ‘Your
