Only two assets remained following her husband's departure to parts unknown. One was the framed Pulitzer nomination for that book of hers. The other was the house where Morris had grown up, situated in the nicer section of the North Side. It was mortgage-free because she had steadfastly refused to co-sign the bank papers her husband brought home, for once immune to his rhapsodizing about an investment opportunity that was absolutely not to be missed. She sold it after he was gone, and they moved to Sycamore Street.
"A comedown," she admitted to Morris during the summer between his freshman and sophomore years, "but the financial reservoir will refill. And at least the neighborhood is white." She paused, replaying that remark, and added, "Not that I'm prejudiced."
"No, Ma," Morris said. "Who'd ever believe that?"
Ordinarily she hated being called Ma, and said so, but on that day she kept still, which made it a good day. It was always a good day when he got in a poke at her. There were so few opportunities.
During the early seventies, book reports were still a requirement in sophomore English at Northfield. The students were given a mimeographed list of approved books to choose from. Most looked like dreck to Morris, and, as usual, he wasn't shy about saying so. "Look!" he cried from his spot in the back row. "Forty flavors of American oatmeal!"
Some of the kids laughed. He could make them laugh, and although he couldn't make them like him, that was absolutely okay. They were dead-enders headed for dead-end marriages and dead-end jobs. They would raise dead-end kids and dandle dead-end grandkids before coming to their own dead ends in dead-end hospitals and nursing homes, rocketing off into darkness believing they had lived the American Dream and Jesus would meet them at the gates of heaven with the Welcome Wagon. Morris was meant for better things. He just didn't know what they were.
Miss Todd--then about the age Morris would be when he and his cohorts broke into John Rothstein's house--asked him to stay after class. Morris lounged splay-legged at his desk as the other kids went out, expecting Todd to write him a detention slip. It would not be his first for mouthing off in class, but it would be his first in an English class, and he was sort of sorry about that. A vague thought occurred to him in his father's voice--You're burning too many bridges, Morrie--and was gone like a wisp of steam.
Instead of giving him a detention, Miss Todd (not exactly fair of face but with a holy-shit body) reached into her bulging book-bag and brought out a paperback with a red cover. Sketched on it in yellow was a boy lounging against a brick wall and smoking a cigarette. Above him was the title: The Runner.
"You never miss a chance to be a smartass, do you?" Miss Todd asked. She sat on the desk next to him. Her skirt was short, her thighs long, her hose shimmery.
Morris said nothing.
"In this case, I saw it coming. Which is why I brought this book today. It's a good-news bad-news thing, my know-it-all friend. You don't get detention, but you don't get to choose, either. You get to read this and only this. It's not on the schoolboard's Approved List, and I suppose I could get in trouble for giving it to you, but I'm counting on your better nature, which I like to believe is in there somewhere, minuscule though it may be."
Morris glanced at the book, then looked over it at Miss Todd's legs, making no attempt to disguise his interest.
She saw the direction of his gaze and smiled. For a moment Morris glimpsed a whole future for them, most of it spent in bed. He had heard of such things actually happening. Yummy teacher seeks teenage boy for extracurricular lessons in sex education.
This fantasy balloon lasted perhaps two seconds. She popped it with her smile still in place. "You and Jimmy Gold will get along. He's a sarcastic, self-hating little shit. A lot like you." She stood up. Her skirt fell back into place two inches above her knees. "Good luck with your book report. And the next time you peek up a woman's skirt, you might remember something Mark Twain said: 'Any idler in need of a haircut can look.'"
Morris slunk from the classroom with his face burning, for once not just put in his place but rammed into it and hammered flat. He had an urge to chuck the paperback down a sewer drain as soon as he got off the bus on the corner of Sycamore and Elm, but held on to it. Not because he was afraid of detention or suspension, though. How could she do anything to him when the book wasn't on the Approved List? He held on to it because of the boy on the cover. The boy looking through a drift of cigarette smoke with a kind of weary insolence.
He's a sarcastic, self-hating little shit. A lot like you.
His mother wasn't home, and wouldn't be back until after ten. She was teaching adult education classes at City College to make extra money. Morris knew she loathed those classes, believing they were far beneath her skill set, and that was just fine with him. Sit on it, Ma, he thought. Sit on it and spin.
The freezer was stocked with TV dinners. He picked one at random and shoved it in the oven, thinking he'd read until it was done. After supper he might go upstairs, grab one of his father's Playboys from under the bed (my inheritance from the old man, he sometimes thought), and choke the chicken for awhile.
He neglected to set the stove timer, and it was the stench of burning beef stew that roused him from the book a full ninety minutes later. He had read the first hundred pages, no longer in this shitty little postwar tract home deep in the Tree Streets but wandering the streets of New York City with Jimmy Gold. Like a boy in a dream, Morris went to the kitchen, donned oven gloves, removed the congealed mass from the oven, tossed it in the trash, and went back to The Runner.
I'll have to read it again, he thought. He felt as if he might be running a mild fever. And with a marker. There's so much to underline and remember. So much.
For readers, one of life's most electrifying discoveries is that they are readers--not just capable of doing it (which Morris already knew), but in love with it. Hopelessly. Head over heels. The first book that does that is never forgotten, and each page seems to bring a fresh revelation, one that burns and exalts: Yes! That's how it is! Yes! I saw that, too! And, of course, That's what I think! That's what I FEEL!
Morris wrote a ten-page book report on The Runner. It came back from Miss Todd with an A+ and a single comment: I knew you'd dig it.
He wanted to tell her it wasn't digging; it was loving. True loving. And true love would never die.
The Runner Sees Action was every bit as good as The Runner, only instead of being a stranger in New York City, Jimmy was now a stranger in Europe, fighting his way across Germany, watching his friends die, and finally staring with a blankness beyond horror through the barbed wire at one of the concentration camps. The wandering, skeletal survivors confirmed what Jimmy had suspected for years, Rothstein wrote. It was all a mistake.
Using a stencil kit, Morris copied this line in Roman Gothic print and thumbtacked it to the door of his room, the one that would later be occupied by a boy named Peter Saubers.
His mother saw it hanging there, smiled her sarcastic curl of a smile, and said nothing. At least not then. Their argument over the Gold trilogy came two years later, after she had raced through the books herself. That argument resulted in Morris getting drunk; getting drunk resulted in breaking and entering and common assault; these crimes resulted in nine months at Riverview Youth Detention Center.
But before all that came The Runner Slows Down, which Morris read with increasing horror. Jimmy got married to a nice girl. Jimmy got a job in advertising. Jimmy began putting on weight. Jimmy's wife got pregnant with the first of three little Golds, and they moved to the suburbs. Jimmy made friends there. He and his wife threw backyard barbecue parties. Jimmy presided over the grill wearing an apron that said THE CHEF IS ALWAYS RIGHT. Jimmy cheated on his wife, and his wife cheated right back. Jimmy took Alka-Seltzer for his acid indigestion and something called Miltown for his hangovers. Most of all, Jimmy pursued the Golden Buck.
Morris read these terrible developments with ever increasing dismay and growing rage. He supposed he felt the way his mother had when she disco
vered that her husband, whom she had believed comfortably under her thumb, had been cleaning out all the accounts even as he ran hither and yon, eagerly doing her bidding and never once raising a hand to slap that sarcastic curl of a smile off her overeducated face.
Morris kept hoping that Jimmy would wake up. That he would remember who he was--who he had been, at least--and trash the stupid and empty life he was leading. Instead of that, The Runner Slows Down ended with Jimmy celebrating his most successful ad campaign ever--Duzzy-Doo, for God's sake--and crowing Just wait until next year!
In the detention center, Morris had been required to see a shrink once a week. The shrink's name was Curtis Larsen. The boys called him Curd the Turd. Curd the Turd always ended their sessions by asking Morris the same question: "Whose fault is it that you're in here, Morris?"
Most boys, even the cataclysmically stupid ones, knew the right answer to that question. Morris did, too, but refused to give it. "My mother's," he said each time the question was asked.
At their final session, shortly before the end of Morris's term, Curd the Turd folded his hands on his desk and looked at Morris for a long space of silent seconds. Morris knew Curd the Turd was waiting for him to drop his eyes. He refused to do it.
"In my game," Curd the Turd finally said, "there's a term for your response. It's called blame avoidance. Will you be back in here if you continue to practice blame avoidance? Almost certainly not. You'll be eighteen in a few months, so the next time you hit the jackpot--and there will be a next time--you'll be tried as an adult. Unless, that is, you make a change. So, for the last time: whose fault is it that you're in here?"
"My mother's," Morris said with no hesitation. Because it wasn't blame avoidance, it was the truth. The logic was inarguable.
Between fifteen and seventeen, Morris read the first two books of the Gold trilogy obsessively, underlining and annotating. He reread The Runner Slows Down only once, and had to force himself to finish. Every time he picked it up, a ball of lead formed in his gut, because he knew what was going to happen. His resentment of Jimmy Gold's creator grew. For Rothstein to destroy Jimmy like that! To not even allow him to go out in a blaze of glory, but to live! To compromise, and cut corners, and believe that sleeping with the Amway-selling slut down the street meant he was still a rebel!
Morris thought of writing Rothstein a letter, asking--no, demanding--that he explain himself, but he knew from the Time cover story that the sonofabitch didn't even read his fan mail, let alone answer it.
As Ricky the Hippie would suggest to Pete Saubers years later, most young men and women who fall in love with the works of a particular writer--the Vonneguts, the Hesses, the Brautigans and Tolkiens--eventually find new idols. Disenchanted as he was with The Runner Slows Down, this might have happened to Morris. Before it could, there came the argument with the bitch who was determined to spoil his life since she could no longer get her hooks into the man who had spoiled hers. Anita Bellamy, with her framed near-miss Pulitzer and her sprayed dome of dyed blond hair and her sarcastic curl of a smile.
During her February vacation in 1973, she raced through all three Jimmy Gold novels in a single day. And they were his copies, his private copies, filched from his bedroom shelf. They littered the coffee table when he came in, The Runner Sees Action soaking up a condensation ring from her wineglass. For one of the few times in his adolescent life, Morris was speechless.
Anita wasn't. "You've been talking about these for well over a year now, so I finally decided I had to see what all the excitement was about." She sipped her wine. "And since I had the week off, I read them. I thought it would take longer than a day, but there's really not much content here, is there?"
"You . . ." He choked for a moment. Then: "You went in my room!"
"You've never raised an objection when I go in to change your sheets, or when I return your clothes, all clean and folded. Perhaps you thought the Laundry Fairy did those little chores?"
"Those books are mine! They were on my special shelf! You had no right to take them!"
"I'll be happy to put them back. And don't worry, I didn't disturb the magazines under your bed. I know boys need . . . amusement."
He stepped forward on legs that felt like stilts and gathered up the paperbacks with hands that felt like hooks. The back cover of The Runner Sees Action was soaking from her goddam glass, and he thought, If one volume of the trilogy had to get wet, why couldn't it have been The Runner Slows Down?
"I'll admit they're interesting artifacts." She had begun speaking in her judicious lecture-hall voice. "If nothing else, they show the growth of a marginally talented writer. The first two are painfully jejune, of course, the way Tom Sawyer is jejune when compared to Huckleberry Finn, but the last one--although no Huck Finn--does show growth."
"The last one sucks!" Morris shouted.
"You needn't raise your voice, Morris. You needn't roar. You can defend your position without doing that." And here was that smile he hated, so thin and so sharp. "We're having a discussion."
"I don't want to have a fucking discussion!"
"But we should have one!" Anita cried, smiling. "Since I've spent my day--I won't say wasted my day--trying to understand my self-centered and rather pretentiously intellectual son, who is currently carrying a C average in his classes."
She waited for him to respond. He didn't. There were traps everywhere. She could run rings around him when she wanted to, and right now she wanted to.
"I notice that the first two volumes are tattered, almost falling out of their bindings, nearly read to death. There are copious underlinings and notes, some of which show the budding--I won't say flowering, it can't really be called that, can it, at least not yet--of an acute critical mind. But the third one looks almost new, and there are no underlinings at all. You don't like what happened to him, do you? You don't care for your Jimmy once he--and, by logical transference, the author--grew up."
"He sold out!" Morris's fists were clenched. His face was hot and throbbing, as it had been after Womack tuned up on him that day in the caff with everyone watching. But Morris had gotten in that one good punch, and he wanted to get one in now. He needed to. "Rothstein let him sell out! If you can't see that, you're stupid!"
"No," she said. The smile was gone now. She leaned forward, set her glass on the coffee table, looking at him steadily all the while. "That's the core of your misunderstanding. A good novelist does not lead his characters, he follows them. A good novelist does not create events, he watches them happen and then writes down what he sees. A good novelist realizes he is a secretary, not God."
"That wasn't Jimmy's character! Fucking Rothstein changed him! He made Jimmy into a joke! He made him into . . . into everyone!"
Morris hated how weak that sounded, and he hated that his mother had baited him into defending a position that didn't need defending, that was self-evident to anyone with half a brain and any feelings at all.
"Morris." Very softly. "Once I wanted to be the female version of Jimmy, just as you want to be Jimmy now. Jimmy Gold, or someone like him, is the island of exile where most teenagers go to wait until childhood becomes adulthood. What you need to see--what Rothstein finally saw, although it took him three books to do it--is that most of us become everyone. I certainly did." She looked around. "Why else would we be living here on Sycamore Street?"
"Because you were stupid and let my father rob us blind!"
She winced at that (a hit, a palpable hit, Morris exulted), but then the sarcastic curl resurfaced. Like a piece of paper charring in an ashtray. "I admit there's an element of truth in what you say, although you're unkind to task me with it. But have you asked yourself why he robbed us blind?"
Morris was silent.
"Because he refused to grow up. Your father is a potbellied Peter Pan who's found some girl half his age to play Tinker Bell in bed."
"Put my books back or throw them in the trash," Morris said in a voice he barely recognized. To his horror, it sounded like his
father's voice. "I don't care which. I'm getting out of here, and I'm not coming back."
"Oh, I think you will," she said, and she was right about that, but it was almost a year before he did, and by then she no longer knew him. If she ever had. "And you should read this third one a few more times, I think."
She had to raise her voice to say the rest, because he was plunging down the hall, in the grip of emotions so strong he was almost blind. "Find some pity! Mr. Rothstein did, and it's the last book's saving grace!"
The slam of the front door cut her off.
Morris stalked to the sidewalk with his head down, and when he reached it, he began to run. There was a strip mall with a liquor store in it three blocks away. When he got there, he sat on the bike rack outside Hobby Terrific and waited. The first two guys he spoke to refused his request (the second with a smile Morris longed to punch off his face), but the third was wearing thrift-shop clothes and walking with a pronounced list to port. He agreed to buy Morris a pint for two dollars, or a quart for five. Morris opted for the quart, and began drinking it beside the stream running through the undeveloped land between Sycamore and Birch Streets. By then the sun was going down. He had no memory of making his way to Sugar Heights in the boosted car, but there was no doubt that once he was there, he'd gotten into what Curd the Turd liked to call a mega jackpot.
Whose fault is it that you're in here?
He supposed a little of the blame could go to the wino who'd bought an underage kid a quart of whiskey, but mostly it was his mother's fault, and one good thing had come of it: when he was sentenced, there had been no sign of that sarcastic curl of a smile. He had finally wiped it off her face.
***
During prison lockdowns (there was at least one a month), Morris would lie on his bunk with his hands crossed behind his head and think about the fourth Jimmy Gold novel, wondering if it contained the redemption he had so longed for after closing The Runner Slows Down. Was it possible Jimmy had regained his old hopes and dreams? His old fire? If only he'd had two more days with it! Even one!