The Centaurus

did. “You’ve clarified my thinking,” he told the drunk.

My father turned and walked back the way we had come, and I hurried to follow. The things we had been trying to reach-the black car, the sandstone house, my distant and by now, surely, intensely worried mother- tugged like weights within my skin, which seemed stretched transparent by starlight and madness. Walking this way we met the wind-that had arisen, and a glass mask of cold was clipped onto my face. Behind us, the drunk kept calling, like an eagle muffled in a storm, “You’re O.K.! You’re O.K.!”

“Where are we going?” I asked.

“To a hotel,” my father said. “That man brought me to my senses. We gotta get you into where it’s warm. You’re my pride and joy, kid; we gotta guard the silver. You need sleep.”

“We must call Mother,” I said. “Right you are,” he said. “Right you are.” The repetition left me with the impression that he wouldn’t do it.

We turned left into Weiser Street. The wealth of neon there made the air seem warmer. One place was grilling hot dogs in the window. Figures liquid in the light poured past, shoulders hunched, faces hid. But they were people and their existing at all exhilarated me, came to me as a blessing and a permission to live myself. My father turned into a narrow doorway I had never noticed. Inside, up six steps and through a blank double door, a surprisingly high open space contained a desk and an elevator cage and some massive stairs and a few frayed chairs all sunk in on themselves and creased. On the left a kind of screen of potted plants held voices and a systematic clink of glass on glass, like a flat bell ringing. There was an odor I had not smelled since, as a child, I would be sent on a Sunday evening to buy a paper pail of oysters at the place, half-restaurant, half-general store, called Mohnie’s. Mohnie was a great sluggish Dutchman in a buttoned black sweater and his place was a whitewashed stone house that had stood here along the pike when the town was called Tilden. A bell rang when you pushed open the door and rang again when it shut behind you. Glum counters of exotic candies and tobaccos ran along one wall and in the rest of the space square tables with oilcloth tablecloths waited for supper customers. In the meantime a few old men sat in the chairs, and I had supposed that the smell of the place was something they brought in with them. There was chewing tobacco in it, and wrinkled shoe leather, and wood cured in dust, and the oysters themselves; carrying the slippery little pail home, its top cleverly folded like a napkin at Sunday dinner, was like stealing a section of Mohnie’s air; I used to feel that I was trailing behind me in the bluish evening air a faint brownish trail, a flavor of oysters that made the trees and houses of the pike subaqueous. Now here the smell was again, fresh.

The clerk, a hunchback with papery skin and hands warped and made lump-knuckled by arthritis, put down his copy of Collier’s and listened, crinkled head cocked, as my father unfolded his wallet, elicited identification cards from it, and explained that he was George W. Caldwell, a teacher at Olinger High School, and that I was his son Peter, and that our home was way the hell over in Firetown, and that we would like a room but did not have any money. A tall red wall stood in the forefront of my skull and at its base I prepared to lie down and weep.

The hunchback waved my father’s cards away and said, “I know you. I have a niece, Gloria Davis, goes to you. She thinks the world of Mr. Caldwell.”

“Gloria’s a hell of a nice girl,” my father said limply.

“A little wild, her mother thinks.”

“I never noticed that.”

“A little too fond of the boys.”

“She’s always been the perfect lady with me.”

The other man turned and selected a key tagged with a great wooden disc. “I’ll give you a room up on the third floor so the noise from the bar won’t be a bother.”

“I certainly appreciate this,” my father said. “Can I give you a check now?”

“Why not wait till morning?” the little bent man asked, the dry skin of his face twinkling as he smiled. “I guess we’ll all still be here.” And he led us up a narrow stairway with a lightly twisted bannister whose varnished surface undulated under my hand like a cat ecstatic at being stroked. The stairs wound around the caged elevator shaft, and vistas of spottily carpeted halls seemed to open at every landing. We went down one hall and our footsteps rattled in the gaps between carpets. At the end of the hall, beside a radiator and a window overlooking Weiser Square, the clerk applied the key to a door and it opened. Here was our destination: all night in ignorance we had been winding toward this room, with its two beds, its one window, its two bureaus, its one naked overhead bulb. The clerk switched the light on. My father shook his hand and told him, “You’re a gentleman and a scholar. We were thirsty, and ye gave us drink.”

The clerk gestured with a shiny crippled hand. “The bath room’s behind that door,” he said. “I think there’s a clean glass in there.”

“I mean, you’re a good Samaritan,” my father said. “This poor kid here is ready to drop.”

“I’m not at all,” I said. Still irritated when the clerk had gone, I asked my father, “What’s the name of this awful place?”

“The New Yorker,” my father said. “It’s a real old-time flea-bag, isn’t it?”

Now I had to argue with him on the other side, this seemed so ungrateful. “Well he was awfully nice to let us in when we didn’t have any money.”

“You never know who your real friends are,” he said.

“I bet if that Davis bitch knew she did me a good turn she’d be screaming in her sleep.”

“Why don’t we have any money?” I asked.

“I’ve been asking myself that for fifty years. The worst of it is, when I write them a check it’ll bounce because I have twenty-two cents in the bank.”

“When do you get paid? Isn’t this the middle of the month?”

“The way I’m going,” my father said, “I never will get paid. The school board reads that report Zimmerman wrote they’ll be asking me for money.”

“Oh who ever reads his reports?” I snapped, angry because I did not know whether or not to undress in front of him.

I was shy with him about my spots, because the sight of them seemed to trouble him so. But then, he was my father, and I draped my coat over a rickety, wired-together chair and began to unbutton my red shirt. He turned and gripped the doorknob. “I gotta get on the move,” he said.

“Where are you going now? Why can’t you stay still?”

“I gotta call your mother and lock up the car. You go to sleep, Peter. We got you up too early this morning. I hate to do that, I’ve been trying to catch up on sleep since I was four years old. Can you go to sleep? Should I bring your books back from the car so you can do some homework?”

“No.”

He looked at me, and seemed on the verge of apology, confession, or a definite offer. There was a word-I did not know it but believed he did-that waited between us to be pronounced. But he only said, “I guess you can go to sleep. You don’t seem to have the jumps like I did when I was your age.” Tugging the door a touch impatiently, so that the half-retracted latch raked the wood, he went out.

The walls of an empty room are mirrors that double and redouble our sense of ourselves. Alone, I felt highly ex cited, as if abruptly introduced into a company of the brilliant and famous and beautiful. I went to the room’s one window and overlooked the radiant tangle of Weiser Square. It was a web, a shuttle, a lake where carlights trickling from all quarters of the city dammed. For two blocks Weiser was the broadest street in the East; Conrad Weiser himself had set the surveyor’s sticks, planning in the eighteenth century a city of width, clarity, and ease. Now here headlights swam as if in the waters of a purple lake whose surface came to my sill. The shopfronts and bar signs made green and red grass along the banks. The windows of Foy’s, Alton’s great department store, were square stars set in six rows; or like crackers made of two grains, the lower half of light yellow wheat and the upper half, where the tan shade was drawn, of barley or rye. Across the way, highest of all, the great neon owl by means of electric machinery winked and unwinked as a wing regularly brought to its beak, in a motion of three successive flashes, an incandescent pretzel. Beneath its feet, polychrome letters alternately proclaimed:

OWL PRETZELS