Hearts In Atlantis

“It’ll be all right.” Not saying it because I really thought it would be—I couldn’t know a thing like that—but because it’s what you say, isn’t it? Just what you say.

“My dad’s not the reason I went with Harry and George and the rest. It’s no big Freudian rebellion, or anything like that.”

She flicked her cigarette away and we watched it fountain sparks when it struck the bricks of Bennett’s Walk. Then she took her little clutch purse out of her lap, opened it, found her wallet, opened that, and thumbed through a selection of snapshots stuck in those small celluloid windows. She stopped, slipped one out, and handed it to me. I leaned forward so I could see it by the light falling through the dining-hall windows, where the janitors were probably doing the floors.

The picture showed three kids of eleven or twelve, a girl and two boys. They were all wearing blue tee-shirts with the words STERLING HOUSE on them in red block letters. They were standing in a parking lot somewhere and had their arms around each other—an easy pals-forever pose that was sort of beautiful. The girl was in the middle. The girl was Carol, of course.

“Which one is Sully-John?” I asked. She looked at me, a little sur-prised . . . but with the smile. In any case, I thought I already knew. Sully-John would be the one with the broad shoulders, the wide grin, and the tumbled black hair. It reminded me of Stoke’s hair, although the boy had obviously run a comb through his thatch. I tapped him. “This one, right?”

“That’s Sully,” she agreed, then touched the face of the other boy with her fingernail. He had a sunburn rather than a tan. His face was narrower, the eyes a little closer together, the hair a carroty red and mowed in a crewcut that made him look like a kid on a Norman Rockwell Saturday Evening Post cover. There was a faint frown-line on his brow. Sully’s arms were already muscular for a kid’s; this other boy had thin arms, thin stick arms. They were probably still thin stick arms. On the hand not slung around Carol’s shoulders he was wearing a big brown baseball glove.

“This one’s Bobby,” she said. Her voice had changed, somehow. There was something in it I’d never heard before. Sorrow? But she was still smiling. If it was sorrow she felt, why was she smiling? “Bobby Garfield. He was my first boyfriend. My first love, I guess you could say. He and Sully and I were best friends back then. Not so long ago, 1960, but it seems long ago.”

“What happened to him?” I was somehow sure she was going to tell me he had died, this boy with the narrow face and the crewcut carrot-top.

“He and his mom moved away. We wrote back and forth for awhile, and then we lost touch. You know how kids are.”

“Nice baseball glove.”

Carol still with the smile. I could see the tears that had come into her eyes as we sat looking down at the snapshot, but still with the smile. In the white light of the fluorescents from the dining hall, her tears looked silver —the tears of a princess in a fairy-tale.

“That was Bobby’s favorite thing. There’s a baseball player named Alvin Dark, right?”

“There was.”

“That’s what kind of a glove Bobby had. An Alvin Dark model.”

“Mine was a Ted Williams. I think my mom rummage-saled it a couple of years ago.”

“Bobby’s got stolen,” Carol said. I’m not sure she knew I was there anymore. She kept touching that narrow, slightly frowning face with her fingertip. It was as if she had regressed into her own past. I’ve heard that hypnotists can do that with good subjects. “Willie took it.”

“Willie?”

“Willie Shearman. I saw him playing ball with it a year later, down at Sterling House. I was so mad. My mom and dad were always fighting then, working up to the divorce, I guess, and I was mad all the time. Mad at them, mad at my math teacher, mad at the whole world. I was still scared of Willie, but mostly I was mad at him . . . and besides, I wasn’t by myself, not that day. So I marched right up to him and said I knew that was Bobby’s glove and he ought to give it to me. I said I had Bobby’s address in Massachusetts and I’d send it to him. Willie said I was crazy, it was his glove, and he showed me his name on the side. He’d erased Bobby’s— best as he could, anyway— and printed his own over where it had been. But I could still see the bby, from Bobby.”

A creepy sort of indignation had crept into her voice. It made her sound younger. And look younger. I suppose my memory could be wrong about that, but I don’t think it is. Sitting there on the edge of the white light from the dining hall, I think she looked about twelve. Thirteen at the most.

“He couldn’t erase the Alvin Dark signature in the pocket, though, or write over it . . . and he blushed. Dark red. Red as roses. Then—do you know what?—he apologized for what he and his two friends did to me. He was the only one who ever did, and I think he meant it. But he lied about the glove. I don’t think he wanted it, it was old and the webbing was all broken out and it looked all wrong on his hand, but he lied so he could keep it. I don’t understand why. I never have.”

“I’m not following this,” I said.

“Why should you? It’s all jumbled up in my mind and I was there. My mother told me once that happens to people who are in accidents or fights. I remember some of it pretty well—mostly the parts with Bobby in them—but almost everything else comes from what people told me later on.

“I was in the park down the street from my house, and these three boys came along—Harry Doolin, Willie Shearman, and another one. I can’t remember the other one’s name. It doesn’t matter, anyway. They beat me up. I was only eleven but that didn’t stop them. Harry Doolin hit me with a baseball bat. Willie and the other one held me so I couldn’t run away.”

“A baseball bat? Are you shitting me?”

She shook her head. “At first they were joking, I think, and then . . . they weren’t. My arm got dislocated. I screamed and I guess they ran away. I sat there, holding my arm, too hurt and too . . . too shocked I guess . . . to know what to do. Or maybe I tried to get up and get help for myself and couldn’t. Then Bobby came along. He walked me out of the park and then he picked me up and carried me back to his apartment. All the way up Broad