Scalpel: A Novel

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Scalpel

A Novel

Horace McCoy

THIS BOOK IS FOR

Leonard Rosoff, M.D. and

John Mock

Contents

Chapter 1

1.

2.

3.

4.

Chapter 2

1.

2.

3.

4.

Chapter 3

1.

2.

3.

4.

Chapter 4

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Chapter 5

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Chapter 6

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Chapter 7

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9.

Chapter 8

1.

2.

3.

A Biography of Horace McCoy

1

1.

33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38:

Coal, yes. Coal. Hopper car after hopper car, gondola after gondola, being backed slowly across the spur. PENNSYLVANIA R.R., ERIE RAILROAD, B. & O., LEHIGH VALLEY, C. & E.I., LACKAWANNA, C.M. & ST.P., NEW YORK CENTRAL LINES, N.C. & ST. L., GREAT NORTHERN, MISSOURI PACIFIC, L. & N., A.C.L., NICKEL PLATE, K.C.S., the stenciled legends said, CAPACITY 80,000 POUNDS, fully loaded, all of them—

—a thousand tons of soft bituminous coal, raw rugged power for the blast furnaces that were glowing cadmium orange-red along the ice-edged Monongahela, coal for the strength of mighty America (and hurry, beloved land, hurry):

...39 ...40...

I got out of the automobile and stood down. The westbound traffic was piling up behind me and a few fools were banging their horns, like Miro’s dog barking at the moon. (Patience, there! This is a long train. More cars are coming, many more. All you have to do is look.)

...41 ...42 ...43 ...44:

coal, yes.

I knew about coal.

I, Thomas Owen, knew about coal.

You do not suspect that I, the man beside the cheap convertible, who has the top down on this cold March midnight, waiting, as impatiently as you are, you presume (but you are mistaken), for the coal train to clear the spur and reopen the highway, am of the United States Army. The uniform tells you that. I am a Colonel. The silver eagles tell you that. I am Medical Corps. The caducei tell you that: a doctor. I am a doctor, and now you do not wonder (if you are given to people-wonderment) about the man. The symbol of medicine has made the man ageless, as the symbol of the church has made the man ageless: this is what he is, this is what he always has been, this is what he always will be. These symbols, created by men of antiquity (and much less selfless and sublime now) have thus conditioned you, but the symbol of the church could very well hide the murderer and the coal miner (and no doubt has) as the symbol of medicine could very well hide the murderer and the coal miner (and no doubt has).

Coal. I knew about that: for four generations we had been of coal.

There are but two ways to be of coal: Above and below. Above is the comfortable way, reserved for the few who are talented; below is the uncomfortable way reserved for the many who are untalented. We Owens were below coal. For four generations, almost four, not quite, for 323/40 generations. I am the fourth generation, forty-three years old, and twenty-three years ago I pulled the string on coal and sent it boiling through our brand-new inside plumbing towards the lyrical Ohio. Twenty-three years removed from coal; twenty-three years removed from my father’s rigid bedtime inspection of my eyes and ears and teeth and neck and face and elbows and hands and feet to see if I was clean, not just clean, but as clean as Lloyd, which I never was, because Lloyd competed against me in this too, and Lloyd had a gift for getting clean.

But now I was clean. I had finally gotten the dirt from under my fingernails and the bitter black dust out of my lungs. I had finally become a gentleman. Authentic and absolute: by Act of Congress, Dec. 21, 1941. The date was there on my commission for all to see. Another Owen at last a gentleman. That would have pleased my father John and my grandfather Micah (especially Micah), and my great-grandfather. It also pleased me.

...45 ...46 ...47 ...48—

these were filled with Culm, which also is called Slack, the mixture of fine coal and dirt after all the lump has been taken out; and it used to be, when I was a boy in Coalville, that this was regarded as valueless and was dumped near the mines to accumulate in unsightly piles and, when the wind was right (which it always was), sift into all the houses below Tipple Hill. But one day Old Man Reasonover, who even then was on the way to his second million (but had not yet moved to Pittsburgh) discovered that this waste could be pulverized and forced through pipes and fuel jets, like oil, to generate steam: and after that the piles began to melt, wheelbarrow by wheelbarrow. I helped with the melting. I was a barrow boy, six loads an hour, forty-eight loads a day, $9.00 a week (that was where I started building the shoulders that thirteen and fourteen years later were to wreck Yale and Harvard and Princeton and Dartmouth and, one year, Cornell).

...49 ...50 ...51:

the last two were hopper cars, possum-bellied, and on their sides in big white letters was REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA. and that startled me because only a single car ago I had been thinking of Old Man Reasonover and Coalville and now here they were, inseparable, each the other, being backed slowly across my heart.

...52 ...53 ...54 ...55 ...

REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA. Gondolas, too. CAPACITY 100,000 POUNDS. Monsters. Fifty-tonners. The Pennsy’s and the Lackawanna’s and the B. & O.’s and the L. & N.’s were not big enough, not for Old Man Reasonover. He had to have his own. Buckwheat 2 and Buckwheat 3 in the last two, which is how the sizes of coal were specified: Lump, Egg, Stone, Nut, Pea, Buckwheat, Rice (which was Buckwheat 2), Barley (which was Buckwheat 3), Screenings, Run-of-the-mine, and Culm. Obscure information, completely without practical use, but when you grew up where I did this was the sort of thing you learned long before you ever heard of the Niña and the Pinta and the Santa Maria.

I remembered, I remembered ...and now I was glad that I had not tried to beat the train across the tracks. That had been my first thought when ahead down the highway I had seen the wigwag flashing. I had had an open shot at him and I had been tempted strongly to step on the gas and beat him in there before the safety jig could be lowered. I was in a hurry to get to Pittsburgh and get to the Schenley and have a shower and hit the sack. I was all in. Less than ten hours before, at 2:45 P.M., I had landed in New York from Berlin. I had had little sleep since Berlin and virtually none there, the General’s fraulein being what she was and the General being what he was not. But I consoled myself with the thought that once the plane was spread out over the Atlantic I could sleep.

This was not to be, either. The connection in Shannon was delayed just long enough for me to get mildly stinking with a Father James (he not so mildly), who was venturesome for listeners, being full of wondrous success at having just come from Rome where he had gotten an audience with the Pope for a very rich Jewish couple he had been hustling, and why not, he said: why let them stumble around and get themselves proselytized by the Christian Scientists? He was a real charmer, young and scholarly and articulate, and he talked of many things, but mostly he talked of the Jews and the glory of Judaism, which, he said, was now being forsaken by an alarming number of the rich ones (alarming, that is, to the Synagogists) for Christian Science and Catholicism, and of these prideless ones his church, he reported, was getting the greater majority. From behind a snifter of Courvoisier, he said that this was perfectly understandable: what the rich Jew was after was not solace or spiritual vitality but personal contacts with the Gentiles, hoping for eventual social acceptance, and how better could this be done than by working on the many dull and tedious charities committees? They were very good at this, he said; they were panning out fine. He knew several who already had crossed the line and were at last eligible for sit-down dinners with Knights of the Holy Sepulchre. We had a thirty-five-mile head wind all the way to Gander, which pleased him because it gave him three extra hours in which to talk; and by the time they had closed the bar, an hour out of New York, and set the glide pattern for the field at Idlewild he had convinced at least me and the nylon stocking salesman from Great Neck that when and if the Holy Father did authorize a branch of the church in Tel Aviv he was certainly the man to manage it.

New York was by air only two hours from home, but anxious as I was to get there, I was not that anxious. That was much too fast for a man who had not seen his country in ten years. After ten years there was much looking and feeling to do, and much smelling too, and these you should not hurry.

So from a little Swede in a Tyrolean hat I had rented a convertible and argued him into putting the top down: and now I had come the 350-odd miles through New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania, through Harrisburg, which is the most beautiful city on the face of the earth, and down past what in my student days were the kinds of towns and villages so adored by the primitive painters but which now had been drained into geographical zombies by the sparkling dynamics of the fabulous Turnpike, as old friends die when their river is diverted.

I had done the looking and the feeling and the smelling and now I was exhausted.

...56 ...57 ...58 ...59:

REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA... REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA... REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA... REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA...

Old Man Reasonover on the way to his thirtieth or fortieth or one-hundredth million.

Well, he’d need ’em.

When I got through with him he wouldn’t have so much money.

The bellboy had my B-4 and I was following him across the lobby of the Schenley when I felt a tentative touch on my elbow and glanced around but did not stop. It was a woman. Now I stopped: and she moved beside me, and I thought: Right here in the lobby of a high-class joint like the Schenley? Things have changed. ...some other time, I said.

She smiled and said: I beg your pardon, Colonel. I’ve been sent to fetch you. An old friend of yours is over there—

She spoke in the highly regarded ever-so-slight nasal tone that comes only after assiduous practice, and now I looked at her. She was an attractive woman. She was thirty-five, maybe more. She wore a silver-blue mink coat over a white evening gown and her hair was cut short and her face, cast in a high thin mold, was without make-up save for pale lipstick. She had the style of well-bred ease with something added—hauteur. I knew something about these qualities, too. In Europe, now that the serious mending was done with and I seldom had anything more scientific or official to do than yank a tonsil or set a broken limb or give the younger officers advice on prophylaxis effectuality, one of my virtuosities had been, as befits a gentleman (Dec, 1941), the collecting of women of well-bred ease and hauteur. What I had thought about this woman when I had glanced at her was wrong now that I had looked at her. She was no hustler. Not this one. ...where? I asked.

Well, well, well— a man’s voice said. He was moving towards me. He was a slender man in dinner clothes, a double-breasted jacket with a shawl collar, and he was bareheaded and the lobby lights glistened on his white hair. An old friend? I had never seen him before. We must be three other people, I thought. Tom Owen! he said, and took my hand.

Then I recognized him. Old Man Reasonover. That jarred me a little. The coal train, the hopper cars and the gondolas and now Old Man Coalville himself. I couldn’t get over the way things were happening. When I left Berlin I told myself: Don’t think about this until you get home. There’s absolutely nothing you can do about this until you get home and find out the facts. Not a thing. Don’t think about what Mom’s doing to Dick and don’t think about what Lloyd was doing in the mine shaft until you get there. But how could I help thinking about them when I was being hit in the face with all of them? ...hello, Mister Reasonover, I said.

Called to you, but you didn’t hear me, he said. He shook my hand, grinning at me. Colonel, eh? I heard about that. He had changed. When I had last seen him, fifteen, seventeen years ago, he was a hefty man with black hair and a leathery face; and now he was slender, almost skinny, with white hair and a grayish face that had begun to take on some of the minor smoothnesses for which first-generation millionaires always do desperately strive. No wonder I had to look at him three or four times before I could make him out. Was this what thirty or forty millions did to you? ...to work for me, he was saying to the woman. Whole family used to work for me. To me, he said: Just going to have a bite of supper. Join us?

No. Thanks, I said.

My daughter. Helen Curtis, he said.

So that’s who this woman was. Helen Reasonover-Rouffault-Hotzendorff-Curtis. I had heard of her. It was pretty hard not to have heard of her if you read the newspapers, American, English, French or Italian and, for all I knew, Yugoslav and Shereefian. She had had three husbands and it had cost her half a million each to get rid of them. I nodded to her.

I want you to know how sorry I am about Lloyd, she said.

I can think of nicer ways to die, myself, I said.

At this, some of the joy at having discovered a former employee, from a long line of former employees, went out of the Old Man’s face and a little darkness came in. I want to talk to you, Tom, he said.

I wanted to talk with him too, but not until I had gone home and gathered a few facts from the people on my side of the fence. Not now, I said. I’ve just flown in from Berlin.

In that case, Helen Curtis said, a drink ought to be in order.

She touched my elbow again, but not tentatively this time, smiling the thin superior smile of a woman who has never been accustomed to taking no for an answer. I had seen many of these smiles in the past five years, very many, but there was a difference here, the difference being that this one belonged to a woman who was not enfeebled, whose face was not enameled, whose name I could pronounce and whose castle, I felt sure, had unit heat and inside plumbing. ...not now, I said to her.

"Not even one?" Her tone was bolder and more authoritative. She had obviously finished making up her mind about me. I had finished making up my mind about her too. So there was no hurry. I had a ten-day leave.

Not even one, I said. The expression on her face didn’t change but there was an almost imperceptible pique in her eyes, a degree of disappointment. It was a nuance that a woman can satisfactorily use only with a pro. I liked her for that. We spoke the same language. My luck is changing, I said. This is the kind of charming situation that always develops on the last day of my leave—never on the first. To the Old Man, I said: I’m going home early in the morning. At the crack of dawn.

I suppose I’ll be hearing from you then, he said, nodding slowly.

Probably, I said. Good night— I said to Helen Curtis, and walked over to the desk where the bellboy was standing with my B-4.

2.

Gray at dawn, of course, the same blunted soiled and lifeless shade of gray; spring, summer, fall and winter, always the same shade; and that was why I had got up at four o’clock in the morning and come the thirty-five miles down the Ohio, just north of where the river bends and starts southwest—to see the tipple house in the early dawn because this was how I remembered it, the only way I could remember it: trudging up the hill morning after morning, hating myself as a gutless clod for not dynamiting it in the night, as I was forever so fervently swearing to do. It had been burned into my brain like a branding iron cast in its precise silhouette and scaled to fit between the walls of my skull, burning a little deeper in the same place morning after morning until it seemed that everything since then that had fallen into my mind fell within the confines of the scar, as building materials are poured into the fixed form of a foundation. And there it was, Taygetus, Upsala, Ipalnemohuani,

on the hill

against a paling sky, a sky reluctant to pale; the tipple house, a geometrical bastard, part equilateral triangle, part trapezoid, part rhombus, part circle, part quadrangle, part polyhedra, part straight line. REASONOVER COAL CO., COALVILLE, PA., it said on the chute. The visibility was good. The visibility was always good. No weather ever hid the tipple house, neither sleet, snow, rain, clouds nor fog. When I was a kid I used to think the weather was afraid of Old Man Reasonover. Now I’m a grown man—and I still think so.

I parked the car on the shoulder of the road and got out and started up the hill to do to the tipple house what I had come to do. Nothing had changed. The hill was still scarred by the old strip mine and the scrub grass was dark and dirty; the path was still covered with cinders (what kid was now replenishing them after every rain, I wondered, and did he too want to lie down there and dump the blanket of grit over him and never get up?) which made the same wailing crunch as once more after these long years I trudged upward. But this time, thinking of what I would do when I got there, I felt pleased with a small kind of beatific anticipation.

HALT! came a boom from somewhere, and I halted as you do when without warning your consciousness explodes and only your reflexes function. The concussion of hostility that came rolling behind the boom nearly knocked me down, and I looked up.

Fifty feet away, a rifle held at the ready, a man was tromping down the path towards me. You are whistling softly and your heart beats pleasurably and on a muddy gray dawn in a world in which you are the only living creature you are on your way to gratify an insignificant ambition and all of a sudden your ears are filled with the reverberations of a boom and the crunching of cinders and your eyes are filled with an image with a rifle in his hands coming towards you and you stand rooted to the spot in cave-fright, detesting yourself because a man who can read and write and who knows a little of science has come far too far to surrender to cave-fright—but you have. He wore a badge on his black overcoat and a blue cap on his head and with every step he shoved his heels hard into the cinders, taking no chances with his footing on the treacherous surface, as if keeping his balance meant the difference between life and death. Looking beyond him, up the hill to the top, I saw something I had not noticed before, and the thought struck me that this had the convenience of inept dramaturgy, like the character who can end the play any time he speaks the solution, which nobody will permit until it is time for the audience to go home. He should have spoken before: I should have noticed before. The tipple was silent. There was no smoke from the slate heap and the beltway was stopped. The man-trip cars at the pit mouth were empty and there were no miners. But there was movement up there, one man, two, four, five, forms only against the backlight, but they had rifles too. Then I knew. These were strikebreakers. A strike was on. But why? Lloyd? Lloyd wasn’t a miner. He was a Reasonover executive. Reasonover miners didn’t strike because a Reasonover executive had died in their mine. Or did they?

Who are you? the guy hollered at me from fifteen feet away where he had stopped.

What’s going on around here? I asked.

State your business and state it fast, he said.

I’m trying to find out what goes here, I said, all the lethal hatred that for generations my kind has felt for his kind churning inside of me; however, that’s not what I came for because how could I when I didn’t know about it when I started.

"Whaddya want? What did you come for?" he asked suspiciously.

I came to take a piss on the tipple house, I said.

He slanted his ugly macrocephalic head, staring at me, and said in a tone from which some of the gusto had been knocked: "You what?"

I tried to think of how I could reduce this to a more simple term, but before I could push the thought of the strike far enough back in my mind to find the words, or the colloquialism, there was the noise of a movement beside me, from slightly behind me, and another strikebreaker appeared. He was younger but no less hostile than the other. He carried a Browning machine gun on which was stamped the insignia of the U. S. Army. How long’s the strike been on and why? I said to him.

Get back on the road, he said.

Hey— the first strikebreaker called to him, beckoning with his finger. The one with the machine gun eased up to where he was and they put their heads together. Almost coyly, the first strikebreaker whispered something to him, and they both looked at me, and now that they had a screwball to deal with instead of a saboteur in a Colonel’s uniform, they relaxed their grips on their guns.

Not here, the younger one said. You can’t do nothing like that here.

I won’t be a minute, I said.

Go do it somewhere else.

This is not the kind of thing you go do somewhere else, I said. This is very special. I’d be perfectly agreeable to having you go along with me to make sure I don’t dynamite the place, of which there used to be a danger but of which there is no danger now.

What the hell is this? the first strikebreaker said, almost to himself, a little flabbergasted, looking around behind him, high up on the hill, and he could only have been wishing that the others were down here too with him to hear this with their own ears, knowing that when he told the story, even with corroboration, it would not be believed.

This is private property, the younger one said. Get off before I run you in. Beat it.

He was right, of course. There was nothing left for me to do but beat it. Some other time, I said.

Yeah, Napoleon. Some other time, he said. And consider yourself lucky you didn’t get hurt.

I turned and went back down the hill. A strike. There’d never been a strike against Old Man Reasonover, not that I’d heard of. Did Lloyd’s death have something to do with this?

Two more strikebreakers, also armed with rifles and also cast in the traditional fearsome pattern with only minor variations, were slouched by the convertible, looking it over.

What about the strike? I asked. Why was it pulled?

Ask in Coalville, one of them said. You’ll find out.

This one wore in the lapel of his coat an Army discharge emblem. I slowly touched it with my forefinger. You overseas? I asked.

Anzio Beach good enough?

That prompts one other question, I said. How is it that your kind of bastard always manages to avoid the antipersonnel mines?

He just looked at me.

I got in the car and drove off, down the hill towards town.

Across the street from Union Hall, parked against the curbing, each one properly spaced behind the other with touching respect for the law, were four patrol cars; and gathered around one of them in a brightly uniformed but ominous knot were eight state troopers. Seven of them were holding tear-gas guns but all the eighth trooper had in his hands was a small microphone that he had pulled through the window of the patrol car and into which he was now speaking, a color broadcast (from the laziness with which his lips were moving it was plainly nothing more than this), just pregame fill-in, just chitchat: the Hall’s not open yet, eleven, twelve old women over there waiting for the grub handout, sixteen, seventeen miners milling around, no sign of trouble, they may let off a little steam when the crowd gets big enough, but we can handle ’em—

11, 12 old women, gathered already, this early in the morning, each anonymous in a black yarned shawl, defeat and futility riding their sloping shoulders (as it always has: this a birthright), sitting on the steps, baskets in their laps or on their arms, waiting for the commissary to open, and

16, 17 miners in their hard-hats and work clothes and hard-toed shoes, their faces no more wan than the faces of other men who almost never see the sun, standing a little distance away from the women on the steps, closer to the pavement, putting themselves between the women and the troopers. This was not only to protect the women in case of trouble, but to keep them from hearing whatever might be said. What the women didn’t know they couldn’t use in tearful argument with the men to end the strike. Their eyes were glinty and their lips thin: they were ready for anything and hopeful it would come. I could tell that not so much from their eyes and lips as from the way they wore their hard-hats, loosely on the tops of their heads, making them easy to grab off, for what good is a lethal weapon if it is not instantly accessible? Flung spinning by a capable arm, a hard-hat can up to a distance of twenty feet very nearly decapitate you.

...I asked and found out.

The dead:

Bozidar Dorinka, age 51 years. (My friend.)

Peter Dorinka, age 40 years. (My friend.)

William Rusher, age 38 years. (My friend.)

Ragusa Kashko, age 44 years. (My friend.)

Marko Ogibene, age 31 years.

Lloyd Owen, age 46 years. (My brother. And a son of a bitch, and close the parentheses hurriedly)—think it but don’t say it

because Lloyd had died a hero’s death, and all I had to do to get my head torn off was to say: he was a son of a bitch and I don’t care how he died, I don’t forget so easily, not after forty years; this man took the everyday trade of son-of-a-bitching at which virtually everybody else in the world is at best only a mediocrity and with a weird kind of persistence raised it to a form of art. That was all I would have had to say. They were waiting for something on which to vent their smoldering rage and they were hoping, tear-gas guns and patrol-car arsenals to the contrary, that it would be the state troopers. But they would have settled for me. They would have torn my head off. They would have slashed my face to ribbons with their hard-hats and when I was finally down they would have stomped me to death with their hard-toed boots. This was the way they fought when they felt strongly about something, as about a company executive who had rushed away from his Hunt Club, leaving his horse saddled, his hounds yelping, having time only to take off his red coat, to die with them. They said he did not have to die with them. This was what had impressed them. Once the shoring below had begun to give way, the pit mouth was closed to all but the experts of the rescue crew. But Lloyd was the Safety Engineer and he wanted to get the facts from the trapped miners so that a disaster like this could never happen again: he was a miner’s son, a miner’s grandson, a miner’s great-grandson, a miner’s great-great-grandson, and all his life he had heard the preachment of safety. He was obsessed with safety. So he went below, and in an entry four miles back under the hill, 450 feet down, he had died.

What had caused the tragedy? The Union said faulty installations. This was the finding of its own investigating committee, sent down immediately after the first report of the accident was received. Old Man Reasonover promptly blew his cork. He accused the Union of trying to prejudice the public mind by issuing a report before the Bureau of Mines had completed its official investigation, and insinuated that perhaps one of the reasons for the haste in the miners’ committee going below was either to conceal or distort evidence. Wrathfully then, the Union called for a strike vote: under the terms of their charter with the U.M.W. it had the right to strike independently of the National, and the members so voted: a wildcat strike. A lonely and precarious wildcat strike...

This was the place from which I had sprung and to which I had now returned on a cold gray drabbly dawn: Coalville, which had the squalid durability of towns that live eternally under the shadow of disaster and by the very patterns of their existences surrender themselves to death.

3.

In my time it was called Slav Slope and Polack Hollow, but, its real name was Hill Street and this is where I was born. It was only a block long, but it was a long block, between Fourth and Fifth, steep and cobbled, crested on one side by Mr. Upham’s stout squat brick building, and on the other by Mr. Stollenwerck’s stout squat brick building, and I remembered very well the apprehension with which I used to brood over the probability that some night one or both would come loose from their bases and slide down the hill, pushing over the houses below as if they were tenpins or dominoes standing on end, killing everybody in them. And of such indestructibleness are childish fears that even now I was mildly surprised to see that this had not yet happened. They were still there, stout and squat and permanent as ever, but much dirtier: Mr. Upham’s Drugstore and Mr. Stollenwerck’s Furniture Store. Still there too, below them on the long hill, were the company houses, fifteen on each side, precisely alike in the pattern so familiar to industrial development in the 90s: two-and-a-half deckers with little daylight and no ventilation, bleak, faded and desolate; paleolithic offal; and the street itself was depressing and swollen, as if each cobble was pregnant with more ugliness. You would not believe that any miracle could ever change the foulness of this, but one could: snow. In the wintertime when the snows came it was a lovely and sparkling street and fine for sledding, and the houses wore their white crisply and with great charm, like nuns sitting on a cathedral bench. This was when it was beautiful, in the wintertime when the snows came.

Our house was the fifth down from Upham’s, No. 914. I parked the car in front and crossed the pavement to the rickety porch, tiptoeing to the door. It had four glass panels in the upper half and through the lace curtains behind I could see straight down the narrow hall to the kitchen, to the drainboard against the back wall and the window sill where there was a fruit jar in which a potato was sprouting. The light was on but there was no other sign of life. Noiselessly, I turned the knob and pushed the door open and went in and my head suddenly swam in the smell of lamb stew, the moist warm wonderful smell of lamb stew, and I quivered a little and thought, My God, of all the mornings for the house to be full of the smell of lamb stew this has to be the morning. It was as if I was the ghost of my father returning, and not unexpectedly, to eat of the dish that he loved best of all the dishes in the world, and that I loved too, but not for the same reason, not palate-pleasure. Nothing so honest as that. It was because all day of the day (which was almost always Sunday), of the night that my father knew we were having lamb stew for supper, his mood would be more cheerful and his discipline would be less strict (except in the matter of dirty fingernails) and he could much more easily be promoted for nickels and sometimes a dime, which Lloyd and I would have changed into pennies to jingle sumptuously in our pockets in front of the little girls. That was what the smell of lamb stew meant to me: an occasional stick of licorice and the covetous looks of little girls.

I threw back my head and whistled a short sharp shrill blast, the way my father used to summon me when I was around the neighborhood and it was time for me to come home. He would stick his head out the door and whistle, and I would answer in the same key, which told him I was on the way. Always these authoritative summonses would catch me in the process of some project that had caused me to forget the time, and I would pound home with a worried heart, knowing that Lloyd was already there, of course, one, two minutes early, never more; realizing that by shaving it this close he was not only proving his awareness of filial responsibility, but was emphasizing my own dereliction, the son of a bitch.

Mom exploded out of the kitchen, took two steps and stopped in the hall with a spastic jerk. Her eyes were wide and her face was full of absolute shock.

I did not speak or move. She had to have time to realize that I was not my father.

...I dropped my bag on the floor and she blinked her eyes and I knew that the trauma was over.

Mom— I said.

She said nothing. She was incapable of speech. She held out her arms and I went into them and she closed them about me and I was glad that at this moment she couldn’t see my face, couldn’t see what I was thinking. I was thinking, this is a hell of a place for a son to feel like a stranger, in his mother’s arms; but I did. Had I been there before? I couldn’t remember. Probably. Lloyd had. I could remember that...They were big arms, and they had a strength that was enormous, actually, and why not, since my father was dead and Lloyd was dead