My father and I parted by the railroad station. He walked left, toward the hospital. I walked on, to Weiser Street, where five movie theatres advertised their shows. The downtown crowds were streaming home. The matinees were dismissed; the stores, their windows proclaiming January White Sales and drifted deep with cotton sheets, were stringing pad locked chains across their doors; the restaurants were in the lull of setting up the tables for dinner; the old men with the soft-pretzel carts draped them with tarpaulins and pushed them away. The city excited me most at this hour, when my father abandoned me and I, a single cross-current in the tidal exodus, strolled homeless, free to gaze into jewellers’ windows, to eavesdrop at the mouths of cigar stores, to inhale the breath of pastry shops where fat ladies in rimless spectacles and white smocks sighed behind bright trays of bear-claws, sticky buns, glazed doughnuts, pecan rolls, and shoo-fly pies. At this hour when the workers and shoppers of the city were hurrying by foot, bus, car, and trolley home to their duties, I was for a time released from mine, not merely permitted but positively instructed by my father to go to a movie and spend two hours out of this world. The world, my world with all its oppressive detail of pain and inconsequence was behind me; I wandered among caskets of jewels which would someday be mine. Frequently at this moment, my luxurious space of freedom all before me, I thought guiltily of my mother, helpless at her distance to control me or protect me, my mother with her farm, her father, her dissatisfaction, her exhausting alternations of recklessness and prudence, wit and obtuseness, transparence and opacity, my mother with her wide tense face and strange innocent scent of earth and cereal, my mother whose blood I was polluting in the gritty inebriation of Alton’s downtown. Then I would seem smothered in a rotten brilliance and become very frightened. But my guilt could not be eased, I could not go to her, for of her own will she had placed ten miles between us; and this rejection on her part made me veng ful, proud, and indifferent: an inner Arab.
The five movie palaces of Weiser Street in Alton were Loew’s, the Embassy, the Warner, the Astor, and the Ritz. I went to the Warner and saw “Young Man with a Horn,” starring Kirk Douglas, Doris Day, and Lauren Bacall. As my father had promised, it was warm inside. My best piece of luck for the day, I came in on the cartoon. The day was the thirteenth of the month so I did not expect it to be lucky. The cartoon was, of course, a Bugs Bunny. Loew’s had Tom and Jerry, the Embassy Popeye, the Astor either Disney, the best, or Paul Terry, the worst. I bought a box of popcorn and a box of Jordan Almonds, though both were bad for my skin. The sidelights were soft yellow and time melted. At the end, when the hero, the trumpeter who was based upon Bix Beiderbecke, had finally fought free of the rich woman who with her insinuating crooked smile (Lauren Bacall) had been corrupting his art, and the good artistic woman (Doris Day), her lover restored to her, sang, and behind her own trans parent voice Harry James’s trumpet pretending to be Kirk Douglas’s lifted like a silver fountain higher and higher into “With a Song in My Heart”-only here, on the last note, an absolutely level ecstasy attained, did I remember my father. An urgent sense of being late caught me up.
The sidelights turned bright. I fled from my seat. In the floor-to-ceiling mirrors that lined the sloping glaring lobby I saw myself full-length, flushed, pink-eyed, the shoulders of my flaming shirt drenched with the white flakes I had scratched from my scalp in the dark. It was a habit of mine to scratch when unseen. I brushed my shoulders wildly and on the cold street was startled by the real faces, which seemed meager and phantasmal after the great glowing planetary visions I had been watching slowly collide, merge, part, and recombine. I ran toward the Y.M.C.A. It was two blocks up from Weiser Street, at Perkiomen and Beech. I ran along the railroad tracks. The narrow pavement was lined with small bars and shut barber parlors. The sky was an un steady yellow above the tenements and even at the zenith paleness drained stars from the night. The smell of cough-drops coming from a distance mocked my panic. The perfect city, the city of the future, seemed remote and irrelevant and conceived in cruelty.
The Y.M.C.A. smelled of sneakers and the floor was scuffed gray. At the center desk a Negro boy sat reading a comic book underneath a bulletin board shingled with obsolete posters and bygone tournament results. Far away down a strangely green hall, green as if lit by bulbs shining through grape arbor leaves, a game of billiards studiously muttered. From the other direction drifted the patient ga-glokka, gaglokka of a ping-pong game. The boy behind the desk looked up from his comic book and frightened me; there were no Negroes in Olinger and I was superstitiously timid of them. They seemed to me wizards, possessing the black secrets of love and song. But his face was all innocence, all innocence and the shade of malted milk. “Hi,” I said and, holding my breath, swiftly walked to the passageway that led to the downward flight of concrete that in turn led, through the locker room, to the pool. As I descended, the odors of water and chlorine and a third, as of skin, grew upon me.
In the great tiled chamber where the pool lived, a barking resonance broke everything into fragments. On the little wooden bleachers at the poolside my father sat with a wet and naked boy, Deifendorf. Deifendorf wore only the skimpy black official trunks; the droop of his genitals was limply defined between his spread thighs. Hair flowed down his chest and forearms and legs and a stream of water was running across the wood where his bare feet rested. The curves and flats of his hunched white body were harmonious but for his horny red hands. He and my father greeted me with grins that looked much the same: snaggled, ignorant, conspiratorial. To annoy Deifendorf I asked him, “Ja win the breast stroke and the two-twenty?”
“I won more than you did,” he answered.
“He won the breast stroke,” my father said. “I’m proud of you, Deify. You kept your promise to the best of your ability. That makes you a man.”
“Shit if I’d seen that guy in the far lane I’d’ve taken the two-twenty too. Bastard he sneaked in on me, I thought I’d won it, I was just gliding in.”
“That kid swam a good race,” my father said. “He won it honestly. He paced himself. Foley’s a good coach. If I was any kind of a coach, Deify, you’d be king of the county; you’re a natural. If I was any kind of a coach and you’d give up cigarettes.”
“Fuck I can hold my breath eighty seconds as it is,” Deifendorf said.
There was in their talk a mutual flattery that annoyed me. I sat on the other side of my father and concentrated on the pool: it was the hero here. It filled its great underground cage with staccato glitter and the eye-flagellating stink of chlorine. The reflection of the bleachers across the pool, where the opposing team and the judges sat, made on the rattled water a figment that for split seconds seemed a bearded face. Shattered again and again, the water yet sought with the quickness of crystalline reaction to recompose itself. Shouts and splashes broken by echoes and countersplashes made in collision new words, words of no language I knew, garbled barks that seemed to be answers to a question I had un knowingly asked, cecrops! inachus! da! No, it was not me who had asked the question, but my father beside me.
“What does it feel like to win?” he had asked aloud, speaking straight ahead and thus equally to Deifendorf and me. “Jesus, I’ll never know.”
Flecks and blobs skidded back and forth across the volatile aqua skin. The lines of lane demarcation on the pool bottom looped and wavered, refracted, toward the surface; the bearded face seemed about to constitute itself when, each time, another boy dived. Everything was over but the diving. One of our divers, Danny Horst, a runty senior with a huge mane of black hair that for diving he did up in a hairband like a Greek girl, came forward on the board, muscles swirling, and executed a running forward somersault, knees tucked, toes taut, so perfectly, uncoiling into the water through a soft splash as symmetrical as the handles of a vase, that one of the judges flashed the 10 card.