Hearts In Atlantis

Don’t ask him what’s wrong with him, Mom, Bobby moaned inside his own head. Don’t you dare.

She didn’t. She asked what he’d done in Hartford instead.

“Accounting. I was in the Office of the Comptroller.”

“Bobby and I guessed something to do with education. Account-ing! That sounds very responsible.”

Ted smiled. Bobby thought there was something awful about it.

“In twenty years I wore out three adding machines. If that is respon-sibility, Mrs. Garfield, why yes—I was responsible. Apeneck Sweeney spreads his knees; the typist puts a record on the gramo-phone with an automatic hand.”

“I don’t follow you.”

“It’s my way of saying that it was a lot of years in a job that never seemed to mean much.”

“It might have meant a good deal if you’d had a child to feed, shel-ter, and raise.” She looked at him with her chin slightly tilted, the look that meant if Ted wanted to discuss this, she was ready. T hat she would go to the mat with him on the subject if that was his pleasure.

Ted, Bobby was relieved to find, didn’t want to go to the mat or anywhere near it. “I expect you’re right, Mrs. Garfield. Entirely.”

She gave him a moment more of the lifted chin, asking if he was sure, giving him time to change his mind. When Ted said nothing else, she smiled. It was her victory smile. Bobby loved her, but sud-denly he was tired of her as well. Tired of knowing her looks, her say-ings, and the adamant cast of her mind.

“Thank you for the rootbeer, Mr. Brattigan. It was very tasty.” And with that she led her son downstairs. When they got to the second-floor landing she dropped his hand and went the rest of the way ahead of him.

Bobby thought they would discuss his new job further over sup-per, but they didn’t. His mom seemed far away from him, her eyes distant. He had to ask her twice for a second slice of meatloaf and when later that evening the telephone rang, she jumped up from the couch where they had been watching TV to get it. She jumped for it the way Ricky Nelson did when it rang on the Ozzie and Harriet show. She listened, said something, then came back to the couch and sat down.

“Who was it?” Bobby asked.

“Wrong number,” Liz said.

In that year of his life Bobby Garfield still waited for sleep with a child’s welcoming confidence: on his back, heels spread to the corners of the bed, hands tucked into the cool under the pillow so his elbows stuck up. On the night after Ted spoke to him about the low men in their yellow coats (and don’t forget their cars, he thought, their big cars with the fancy paintjobs), Bobby lay in this position with the sheet pushed down to his waist. Moonlight fell on his nar-row child’s chest, squared in four by the shadows of the window muntins.

If he had thought about it (he hadn’t), he would have expected Ted’s low men to become more real once he was alone in the dark, with only the tick of his wind-up Big Ben and the murmur of the late TV news from the other room to keep him company. That was the way it had always been with him—it was easy to laugh at Franken-stein on Shock Theater, to go fake-swoony and cry “Ohhh, Frankie!” when the monster showed up, especially if Sully-John was there for a sleepover. But in the dark, after S-J had started to snore (or worse, if Bobby was alone), Dr. Frankenstein’s creature seemed a lot more . . . not real, exactly, but . . . possible.

That sense of possibility did not gather around Ted’s low men. If anything, the idea that people would communicate with each other via lost-pet posters seemed even crazier in the dark. But not a dan-gerous crazy. Bobby didn’t think Ted was really, deeply crazy, anyhow; just a bit too smart for his own good, especially since he had so few things with which to occupy his time. Ted was a little . . . well . . . cripes, a little what? Bobby couldn’t express it. If the word eccentric had occurred to him he would have seized it with pleasure and relief.

But . . . it seemed like he read my mind. What about that?

Oh, he was wrong, that was all, mistaken about what he thought he’d heard. Or maybe Ted had read his mind, read it with that essen-tially uninteresting adult ESP, peeling guilt off his face like a wet decal off a piece of glass. God knew his mother could always do that . . . at least until today.

But—

But nothing. Ted was a nice guy who knew a lot about books, but he was no mind-reader. No more than Sully- John Sullivan was a magician, or ever would be.

“It’s all misdirection,” Bobby murmured. He slipped his hands out from under his pillow, crossed them at the wrists, wagged them. The shadow of a dove flew across the moonlight on his chest.

Bobby smiled, closed his eyes, and went to sleep.

The next morning he sat on the front porch and read several pieces aloud from the Harwich Sunday Journal. Ted perched on the porch glider, listening quietly and smoking Chesterfields. Behind him and to his left, the curtains flapped in and out of the open windows of the Garfield front room. Bobby imagined his mom sitting in the chair where the light was best, sewing basket beside her, listening and hemming skirts (hemlines were going down again, she’d told him a week or two before; take them up one year, pick out the stitches the following spring and lower them again, all because a bunch of poofers in New York and London said to, and why she bothered she didn’t know). Bobby had no idea if she really was there or not, the open win-dows and blowing curtains meant nothing by themselves, but he imagined it all the same. When he was a little older it would occur to him that he had always imagined her there—outside doors, in that part of the bleachers where the shadows were too thick to see properly, in the dark at the top of the stairs, he had always imagined she was there.

The sports pieces he read were interesting (Maury Wills was steal-ing up a storm), the feature articles less so, the opinion columns bor-ing and long and incomprehensible, full of phrases like “fiscal responsibility” and “economic indicators of a recessionary nature.” Even so, Bobby didn’t mind reading them. He was doing a job, after all, earning dough, and a lot of jobs were boring at least some of the time. “You have to work for your Wheaties,” his mother sometimes said after Mr. Biderman had kept her late. Bobby was proud just to be able to get a phrase like “economic indicators of a recessionary nature” to come off his tongue. Besides, the other job—the hidden job— arose from Ted’s crazy idea that some men were out to get him, and Bobby would have felt weird taking money just