Libra - Don Delillo [4]
When it got cold they banged the pipes to let the super know. They had a right to decent heat.
She sat and listened to the boy’s complaints. She couldn’t fry him a platter of chops any time he wanted but she wasn’t tight with the lunch money and even gave him extra for a funnybook or subway ride. All her life she’d had to deal with the injustice of these complaints. Edward walked out on her when she was pregnant with John Edward because he didn’t want to support a child. Robert dropped dead on her one steamy summer day on Alvar Street, in New Orleans, when she was carrying Lee, which meant she had to find work. Then there was grinning Mr. Ekdahl, the best, the only hope, an older man who earned nearly a thousand dollars a month, an engineer. But he committed cunning adulteries, which she finally caught him out at, recruiting a boy to deliver a fake telegram and then opening the door on a woman in a negligee. This didn’t stop him from scheming a divorce that cheated her out of a decent settlement. Her life became a dwindling history of moving to cheaper places.
Lee saw a picture in the Daily News of Greeks diving off a pier for some sacred cross, downtown. Their priests have beards.
“Think I don’t know what I’m supposed to be around here.”
“I’ve been all day on my feet,” she said.
“I’m the one you drag along.”
“I never said any such.”
“Think I like making my own dinner.”
“I work. I work. Don’t I work?”
“Barely finding food.”
“I’m not a type that sits around boo-hoo.”
Thursday nights he watched the crime shows. Racket Squad, Dragnet, etc. Beyond the barred window, snow driving slantwise through the streetlight. Northern cold and damp. She came home and told him they were moving again. She’d found three rooms on one hundred and something street, near the Bronx Zoo, which might be nice for a growing boy with an interest in animals.
“Natures spelled backwards,” the TV said.
It was a railroad flat in a red-brick tenement, five stories, in a street of grim exhibits. A retarded boy about Lee’s age walked around in a hippity-hop limp, carrying a live crab he’d stolen from the Italian market and pushing it in the faces of smaller kids. This was a routine sight. Rock fights were routine. Guys with zip guns they’d made in shop class were becoming routine. From his window one night he watched two boys put the grocery store cat in a burlap sack and swing the sack against a lamppost. He tried to time his movements against the rhythm of the street. Stay off the street from noon to one, three to five. Learn the alleys, use the dark. He rode the subways. He spent serious time at the zoo.
There were older men who did not sit on the stoop out front until they spread their handkerchiefs carefully on the gray stone.
His mother was short and slender, going gray now just a little. She liked to call herself petite in a joke she really meant. They watched each other eat. He taught himself to play chess, from a book, at the kitchen table. Nobody knew how hard it was for him to read. She bought figurines and knickknacks and talked on the subject of her life. He heard her footsteps, heard her key in the lock.
“Here is another notice,” Marguerite said, “where they threaten a hearing. Have you been hiding these? They want a truancy hearing, which it says is the final notice. It states you haven’t gone to school at all since we moved. Not one day. I don’t know why it is I have to learn these things through the U.S. mails. It’s a blow, it’s a shock to my system.”
“Why should I go to school? They don’t want me there and I don’t want to be there. It works out just right.”
“They are going to crack down. It is not like home. They are going to bring us into court.”
“I don’t need help going into court. You just go to work like any other day.”
“I’d have given the world to stay home and raise my children and you know it. This is a sore spot with me. Don’t you forget, I’m the child of one parent myself. I know the meanness of the situation. I worked in shops back home where I was manager.”
Here it comes.