With the cord trailing behind him he started for the kitchen door.
"Oh, Daddy, Daddy," Tony cried. "Don't, don't, don't," and he fell to his knees with his hands joined in a conventional, supplicatory position that he might have learned from watching some melodrama on the box.
"Eliot, Eliot," Nellie screamed. "Don't, don't. You'll be sorry, Eliot. You'll be sorry."
Tony ran to his mother and she took him in her arms. They were both crying.
"I'm not doing this because I want to," Nailles shouted. "After all I like watching football and baseball when I'm home and I paid for the damned thing. I'm not doing this because I want to. I'm doing this because I have to."
"Don't look, don't look," Nellie said to Tony and she pressed his face into her skirts.
The back door was shut and Nailles had to put the box on the floor to open this. The rain sounded loudly in the yard. Then, straining, he picked up the box again, kicked open the screen door and fired the television out into the dark. It landed on a cement paving and broke with the rich, glassy music of an automobile collision. Nellie led Tony up the stairs to her bedroom, where she threw herself onto the bed, sobbing. Tony joined her. Nailles closed the kitchen door on the noise of the rain and poured another drink. Fifth, he said.
All of this was eight years ago.
VI
Tony had gone out for football and had made the second squad in his junior year. He had never been a good student-he got mostly C's-but in French his marks were so low they were scarcely worth recording. One afternoon when he was about to join the squad for practice it was announced over the squawk box that he should report to the principal. He was not afraid of the principal but he was disturbed at the thought of missing any of the routines of football practice. When he stepped into the outer office a secretary asked him to sit down.
"But I'm late," Tony said, 'I'm late for practice already."
"He's busy," the secretary said.
"Couldn't I come back some other time? Couldn't I do it tomorrow?"
"You'd be late for practice tomorrow."
"Couldn't I see him during class time?"
"No."
Tony glanced at the office. In spite of the stubborn and obdurate facts of learning, the place had for him a galling sense of unreality. A case of athletic trophies stood against one wall but this seemed to be the only note of permanence. Presently he was let into the principal's office and given a chair.
"You've failed first-year French twice, Tony," the principal said, "and it looks as if you're going to fail it again. Your parents expect you to go on to college and you know you have to have a modern-language credit. Your intelligence quotient is very high and neither Miss Hoe nor I can understand why you fail."
"It's just that I can't say French, sir," Tony said. I just can't say any French. My father can't either. I just can't say French. It sounds phony."
The principal switched on the squawk box and said into it: "Could you see Tony now, Miss Hoe?" Her affirmative came through loud and clear. "Certainly." "You go down and see Miss Hoe now," said the principal.
"Couldn't I see her after class tomorrow, sir? I'm missing football practice."
"I think Miss Hoe will have something to say about that. She's waiting."
Miss Hoe was waiting in a room whose bright lights and pure colors did nothing to cheer him. It would soon be getting dark on the playing field and he had already missed passing and tackle. Miss Hoe sat before a large poster showing the walk of Carcassonne. It was the only traditional surface in the room. The brilliant, fluorescent lights in the ceiling made the place seem to be a cavern of incandescence, authoritative in its independence from the gathering dark of an autumn afternoon; and the power to light the room came from another county, well to the north, where snow had already fallen. The chairs and desks were made of brightly colored plastic. The floor was waxed Vinylite.
"Sit down, Tony," she said. "Please sit down. It's time that we had a little talk."
She might have been a pretty woman-small-featured and slender-but her skin was sallow and in the brightness of the light one saw that she had a few chin whiskers. Her waist was very slender and she seemed to take some pride in this. She always wore belts, cinctures, chains or ribbons around her middle and she sometimes wore a girlish ribbon in her brown hair. Her mouth, considering the strenuous exercise it got in French vowels, was very small. She wore no perfume and exhaled the faint unfreshness of humanity at the end of the day.
She lived alone, of course, but we will grant her enough privacy not to pry into the clinical facts of her virginity or to catalogue the furniture, souvenirs, etc. with which her one-room apartment was stuffed. As a lonely and defenseless spinster she was prey to the legitimate anxieties of her condition. There were four locks on the door to her apartment and she carried a vial of ammonia in her handbag to throw into the eyes of assailants. She had read somewhere that anxiety was a manifestation of sexual guilt and she could see, sensibly, that her aloneness and her virginity would expose her to guilt and repression. However, the burden of guilt must, she felt, be somewise divided between her destiny and the news in the evening paper. It was not her guilt that had caused the increase in sexual brutality. She had come to feel that some disorganized conspiracy of psychopaths was developing. Weekly, sometimes daily, women who resembled her were debauched, mutilated and strangled. Alone in the dark she was always afraid. Since she frequently dreamed that she was being debauched by some brute in a gutter she had to include guilt along with terror.
"When were you born, Tony," she asked.
"May twenty-seventh."
"Oh, I knew it," she said. "I knew it. You're Gemini."
"What's that?"
"Gemini is the constellation under which you were born. Gemini determines many of your characteristics and one might say your fate; but Gemini men are invariably good linguists. The fact that you are Gemini proves to me that you can do your work and do it brilliantly. You can't dispute your stars, can you?"
He looked past her through the window to the playing field. There was still enough light in the air, enough color in the trees to compete with the incandescence of their cavern; but in another ten minutes there would be nothing to see in the window but a reflection of Miss Hoe and himself. He knew nothing about astrology beyond the fact that he thought it to be a sanctuary for fools.