He stopped, and looked at the phone as though it had bitten him. Rather slowly, he said, “You mean I just send her home? Are you sure she wasn’t …? Damn! I’m sorry, I should have checked with you first, but I never thought you’d have reached her so quickly. Okay, I’ll have her taken home. … What?”
He listened. Sarah Howson felt a stir of interest disperse the cloud of her apathy, and found that if she paid attention she could just catch the words from the phone:
“No, keep her there a few minutes. I’ll drop in as soon as I can. I would like to have another chance to see her, though I doubt if we can use more information on Pond then we have already—there’s a two-hundred-page dossier here now.”
The officer cradled the phone with a shrug and opened the pocket of his jacket to extract a pack of curious cigarettes with paper striped in pale-gray and white. He gave one to Sarah Howson and lighted it for her with a lighter made from an expended shell case.
The door opened and the woman came in briskly—the one with man-short hair and Israeli shoulder patches. Sarah Howson crashed out her cigarette and looked at her.
“I’ve seen you before,” she said.
“That’s right.” A quick smile. “I’m Ilse Kronstadt. You were in the city hospital when I called there the other day.” She perched on the edge of the desk, one leg swinging. “How’s the baby?”
Sarah Howson shrugged.
“You’re being looked after all right? I mean, you’re provided with proper rations, proper services for the kid?”
“I guess so. Not that—” She broke off.
“Not that diaper service and formula coupons help much with the real problem,” Ilse Kronstadt murmured. “Isn’t that what you were going to say?”
Sarah Howson nodded. Distractedly, she played with the dead butt of her cigarette. Watching her, Ilse Kronstadt began to frown.
“Is it right—about your grandfather, I mean?” she said suddenly.
“What?” Startled, Sarah Howson jerked her head back. “My grandfather—what about him?”
Sympathy had gone from the Israeli woman, as though a light had been turned off behind her eyes. She got to her feet.
“That was bad,” she said. “You weren’t any shy virgin, were you? And you knew you shouldn’t have children, with your family history! To use a pregnancy as blackmail—especially on a man like Pond, who didn’t give a damn about anything except his own dirty little yen for power! Ach!” Her accusing gaze raked the older woman like machine-gun fire, and she stamped her foot. The Pakistani officer looked, bewildered, from one to the other of them.
“No, it’s not true!” stammered Sarah Howson. “I didn’t —I—!”
“Well, it’s done now.” Ilse Kronstadt sighed, and turned away. “I guess all you can do is try and make it up to the kid. His physical heredity may be all to hell, but his intellectual endowment should be Okay: there’s first-rate material on the Pond side, and you’re not stupid. Lazy-minded and selfish, but not stupid.”
Sullen, resentful color was creeping into Sarah Howson’s face. She said after a pause, “All right, tell me: what do I do to—to ‘make it up to the kid’? I’m not a kid myself any longer, am I? I’ve no money, no special training, no husband! What’s left for me? Sweeping floors! Washing dishes!”
“The only way that matters, to make it up to the kid,” Ilse Kronstadt said, “is to love him.”
“Oh, sure,” Sarah Howson said bitterly. “What’s that bit about ‘flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone’? Don’t preach at me. I had nothing but preaching from Gerald, and it got him a shot in the head and me a crippled boy to nurse. Can I go now? I’ve had enough.”
The piercing blue eyes closed briefly, and the lids squeezed and the lips pressed together and the forehead drew down to furrows at the top of the sharp nose.
“Yes, you can go. There are too many people like you in the world for us to cure the world’s sickness overnight. But even if you can’t love the kid wholeheartedly, Miss Howson, you can at least remember that there was a time when you wanted a baby, for a reason you aren’t likely to forget.”
“He’ll remind me every time I look at him,” Sarah Howson said curtly, and got up from her chair. The officer reached for the phone again and spoke to a different number.
“Nurse, bring the Howson baby back to the lobby, please.”
When the unwilling mother had gone, he gave Ilse Kronstadt a questioning glance.
“What was that about her grandfather?”
“Never mind,” was the sighing answer. “There are a million problems like hers. I wish I could concern myself with all of them, but I just can’t.”
She became brisk. “At least the big problem is soluble. We should be out of here in another month, I guess.”
iii
Things continued badly for a while longer. Stores remained closed; sporadic outbreaks confirmed that the thwarted terrorists were still capable of striking blindly, like children in tantrums. There were some fires, and the main city bridge was closed for two days by a plastic-bomb explosion.
Little by little calm oozed back. Sarah Howson made no attempt to chart its progress. There was news on TV when the broadcasting schedule was restored; there was also—had been, throughout the crisis—radio news. Sometimes she caught snatches of information: something about the new government, something else about advisers and foreign loans and public-welfare services. … It was beyond her scope. She saw black headlines on discarded newspapers when she went down the street, and read them without understanding. There was no association in her mind between the arrival of technical experts and the fact that water became available at her kitchen sink whenever she wanted it, as in the old days, rather than for two hours morning and evening, as during the “crisis.” There was no connection that she could see between the new government and the cans of baby formula issued against coupons at the corner store, labeled in six languages and bearing a colored picture as well, for the benefit of illiterates.
It was agreed by everyone that things were worse now. In fact, from the material point of view things were slightly better. What depressed people so much was a subjective consideration. It had happened here. We, our families, our city, our country, have been shamed in the eyes of the world; murder was done on our streets, there were dynamite outrages and acts of terrorism here. Shame and self-condemnation turned readily to depression and apathy.
There was no true economic depression, and little unemployment, during the next few years, but some of the savor of life seemed to be missing. Fashions no longer changed so quickly and colorfully. Cars no longer sported startling decoration, but became functional and monotonous. People felt obscurely that to treat themselves to luxuries was a betrayal of—of something; as it were, they wanted to be seen to concentrate on the search for a new national goal, a symbol of status to redeem their world-watched failure.
Extravagance became a mark of social irresponsibility, the badge of the fringe criminal—the man with influence, the black-marketeer. These latter regarded the average run of the population—puritanical, working hard as though to escape a horrible memory—as mugs. The “mugs” condemned as parasites those who were blatantly enjoying themselves.
Through this epoch Sarah Howson moved like a sleepwalker, measuring her life by routine events. For a while there was some sort of an allowance, issued in scrip and redeemable at specified stores, which was just about enough to keep her and the child. She didn’t bother to wonder about it, even though it was much discussed by ordinary folk: usually they condemned it, because it was available to women like Sarah Howson, who had committed the double crime of bearing an illegitimate child and also associating with a known terrorist. But these discussions she seldom heard; now hardly anyone talked to her in the street where she lived.
When the period of the allowance expired, she got work for a while cleaning offices and serving at the counter of a canteen. Wages were low, part of the general syndrome of reaction against affluence which
had followed the upheaval. She hunted without much success for better-paid employment.
Then she met a widower with a teen-age son and daughter who wanted a housekeeper-mistress and didn’t mind about the brat or her decaying looks. She moved across the city to his apartment in a large, crumbling near-tenement block and was at least secured against poverty. There was a roof and a bed, food, a little spending money for clothes, for the child, for a bottle of liqour on Saturday night.
Young Gerald endured what happened to him without objection: being placed in a nursery while his mother worked as a cleaner, being put aside, like an inanimate object, at the widower’s apartment when they moved there. At the nursery, naturally, they had clucked sympathetically about his deformity and made inquiries into his medical record, which was already long. But there was nothing to be done except exercise his limbs and enable him to make the best possible use of them. He learned to talk late, but quickly; surveying the world with bright grave eyes set in his idiot’s face, he progressed from concrete to abstract concepts without difficulty, as though he had delayed speaking deliberately until he had thought the matter through.
But by then he was no longer being sent to the nursery, so no one with specialized knowledge noted this promising development.
Crawling hurt him; he did it only for a short period, whimpering after a brief all-fours excursion like a dog with a thorn in its pad. He was four before he got his awkward limbs sufficiently organized to stand up without support, but he had already learned to get around a room with his hand on the wall or clutching chairs and tables. Once he could stand without toppling, he seemed almost to force himself to finish the job; swaying on slow, uneven legs, he set out into the middle of the room—fell—rose without complaint and tried again.
He would always limp, but at least when it came time for schooling he could walk a straight line, achieve a hobbling ran for twenty yards, and climb stairs with alternate feet rather than using both feet for every step.
His mother’s attitude was one of indifference by now. Here he was—a fact, to be endured. So there was no praise or encouragement when he mastered some difficult task such as the stairs—only a shrug of qualified relief that he wasn’t totally helpless. The widower sometimes took him on his knee, told him stories, or answered questions for him, but showed no great enthusiasm for the job. He would excuse himself by saying he was too old to be much interested in young kids; after all, his own children were of an age to leave home, maybe to marry. But sometimes he was more honest, and confessed that the kid disturbed him. The eyes—maybe that was it: the bright eyes in the slack face. Or else it was the adult form of the sentences that emerged in the hesitant babyish voice.
When she was feeling more than usually tolerant of her son, Sarah Howson took him around the stores with her, defiantly accepting the murmurs of false pity which inevitably echoed around her. Here, in this part of the city, she wasn’t known as Gerald Pond’s mistress. But taking him out involved getting the folding wheelchair down the narrow, many-angled stairway of the apartment house, so she didn’t do it often. Before she left to get married, the widower’s daughter took him a few times to a children’s park and put him on swings and showed him the animals kept there—a pony, rabbits, squirrels and bush babies. But the last time she tried it he sat silent, staring at the agility of the monkeys, and tears crawled down his cheeks.
There was TV in the apartment, and he learned early how to switch it on and change channels. He spent a great deal of time gazing at it, obviously not understanding a fraction of what was going on—and yet perhaps he did; it was impossible to be sure. One thing was definite, if surprising: before he started school, before he could read or write, he could be trusted to answer the phone and memorize a message flawlessly, even if it included a phone number of full cross-country direct-dialing length.
He had seen few books before he began school. Neither his mother nor the widower read for pleasure, though they took a daily paper. The son bought men’s magazines for the spicy items and the nudes; the daughter bought fashion magazines occasionally, though the climate was still against excessive elegance, and romantic novels and love comics.
His first steps toward reading came from TV. He figured out for himself the sound-to-symbol idea, and school only filled in the details for him—he already had the outline. He progressed so rapidly that the teacher into whose care he was put came around to see his mother after six weeks. She was young and idealistic, and acutely conscious of the prevailing mood of the country.
She tried to persuade Sarah Howson that her son was too promising to be made to suffer the knocks and mockery of the other children in a regular school. The government had lately set up a number of special schools, one of them on the outskirts of the city, for children in need of unusual treatment. Why not, she demanded, arrange for his transfer?
Sarah Howson was briefly tempted, although she had visions of forms, applications, letters to write, interviews, appointments, all of which dismayed her. She inquired if he could be sent to the special school as a boarding pupil.
The teacher checked the regulations, and found the answer: No, not when the home was less than one hour’s travel by public transport from the nearest such school. (Except as provided for in clause X, subsection Y, paragraph Z … and so on.)
Sarah Howson thought it over. And finally shook her head. She said, “Listen! You’re pretty much of a kid yourself still. I’m not. Anything could happen to me. My man isn’t going to want to be responsible for Gerry, is he? Not his kid! No, Gerrry has to learn to look after himself. It’s a hard world, for God’s sake! If he’s as bright as you say, he’ll make out. To my mind, he’s got to. Sooner or later.”
For a while thereafter, she did take more interest in him, though; she had vague visions that he wasn’t going to be useless after all—support in old age, earn a decent living at some desk job. … But the habit wasn’t there, and the interest declined.
There was trouble sometimes. There was taunting and sometimes cruelty, and once he was made to climb a tree under goading from a kids’ gang and fell from a ten-foot branch, a fall which luckily did no more than bruise him, but the bruise was huge and remained tender for more than three weeks. Seeing it, Sarah Howson had a sudden appalling recollection of her meeting with the Israeli woman, and firmly slapped down the memory.
There was also the time when he wouldn’t go to school, because of the torment he underwent. When he was escorted there to stop him from playing hooky, he refused to cooperate in class; he drew faces on his books, or sat gazing at the ceiling and pretended not to hear when he was spoken to.
He got over that eventually. The mood of the city, and the country, was changing. The trauma of the “crisis” was receding, a litle joy was no longer suspect, frills and fun were coming back into style. Relaxing, people were more tolerant. He made his first friends when he was about thirteen, at about the same time that local storekeepers and housewives found that he was willing to limp on errands or feed the cat when the family was away— and could be trusted to complete the job, unlike other boys, who might equally well decide to go to a movie with the gang instead.
He was considering a career when the widower died. He had vague thoughts of some job where his deformity and other, newly discovered peculiarities were irrelevant. But the widower died, and he was legally of age to quit school.
And his mother was ill. It was some months before it was known to be from inoperable cancer, but he had suspected it ever since the first symptoms. Before she was ill enough to be hospitalized, he was having to support her by what odd jobs he could find: making up accounts for people, washing-up in a nearby bar and grill on Saturdays, and such like. He had had little acquaintance with hope in his life so far. By the time of his mother’s death, which left him alone at seventeen—ugly, awkward, a year lost on the schooling which he had figured would continue to college if he could get a public scholarship—he was embittered.
He found a room a couple of bloc
ks from the old apartment, which had been claimed by the municipal housing authority for a family with children. And kept going as he had been: with odd jobs for subsistence, with books and magazines, with TV when he could beg entrance to someone’s home, and a movie occasionally when he had spare cash for escapism.
At twenty, Gerald Howson was convinced that the world which had been uncaring when he was born was uncaring now, and he spent as much time as possible withdrawing from it into a private universe where there was nobody to stare at him, nobody to shout at him for clumsiness, nobody to resent his existence because his form blasphemed the shape of humanity.
iv
The girl at the box office of the neighborhood movie theater knew him by sight. When he limped to join the waiting line, she made a kind of mental check mark, and his ticket was already clicking from the machine before he could ask for it; one for the cheapest seats, as always. He appreciated that. He was given to speaking rather little now, being so aware of the piping, immature quality of his voice.
Some few things about himself he had been able to disguise. His height, naturally, wasn’t one of them. He had stopped growing at twelve, when he was barely five feet tall. But an old woman had taken pity on him a year back; she had formerly been a trained seamstress and worked in high-class tailor shops, and she got out her old needles and remade a jacket he had bought, setting shoulder pads into it and cunningly adjusting the hang of the back so that from the waist up he could pass a casual inspection. Also he had a high heel on the shoe of his shorter leg. It couldn’t stop him from limping, because the leg still dragged slightly, but it gave him a better posture and seemed to lessen the endless ache from the muscles in the small of his back.