Those who remain inside the school are ignorant of the weather and yet like fish taken up by a swifter ocean current they sense some change. The atmosphere of the auditorium accelerates. Things are not merely seen but burst into vision.
Voices carry further. Hearts wax bold. Peter leads Penny back up the aisle and into the hall. His head pounds with the promise he has made but she seems to have forgotten it. He is too young to know those points, those invisible intersections, on a woman’s face wherein expectation and permission may be detected. He buys her a Coke and himself a lemon-lime at the bin which the Student Council operates in the main hall. Its vicinity is busy; the couple is pushed to the wall. Here hang framed photographs of bygone track teams in a long chronological row. Penny tips the bottle with her little finger extended and licks her lips, in the wake of the sip and looks at him with eyes whose green seems newly minted.
Secret knowledge of his spots obsesses him; should he tell her? Would it, by making her share the shame, wed them inextricably; make her, by bondage of pity, his slave? Can he, so young, afford a slave? On fire with such cruel calculations, he turns his red back on the crowd shoving and sluggishly interweaving around the soft-drink bin. When an iron hand seizes his arm above the elbow and brutally squeezes, it might be one of a hundred idiots.
But it is Mr. Zimmerman, the Supervising Principal. Simultaneously he has seized Penny’s arm, and he stands there smiling between them, not letting go. “Two prize students,” he says, as if of two netted birds.
Peter angrily tugs his arm away from the grip. The grip tightens. “He begins to look like his father’s son,” Zimmer man says to Penny, and to Peter’s horror Penny echoes the principal’s smirk. Zimmerman is shorter than Peter but taller than Penny. Up close, his head, asymmetric, half-bald, and nodding, seems immense. His nose is bulbous, his eyes watery. An absolute rage against this fool wells up in the boy.
“Mr. Zimmerman,” he says, “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.”
“Full of questions like his father,” Zimmerman says to Penny, and drops his hold on Peter’s arm but not hers. She is wearing a pink angora sweater from whose very short sleeves her bare arms thrust like legs out of underpants. The old man’s broad fingers indent the cool fat; his thumb wanders back and forth across an inch of flesh.
“I wanted to ask you,” Peter says, “what are the humanist values implicit in the sciences?” Penny titters nervously, her face gone purely stupid. Zimmerman asks, “Where did you hear such a phrase?” Peter has overreached. He blushes in consciousness of betrayal but in the momentum of pride cannot stop. “I saw it in a report you wrote on my father.”
“He shows you those? Do you think he should?”
“I don’t know. What affects him affects me.”
“I am wondering if it doesn’t place too great a responsibility on you. Peter, I value your father enormously. But he does have, as of course you can see-you’re an intelligent boy- a tendency to be irresponsible.”
Of all possible charges this seems to Peter the least applicable. His father, that blind blanched figure staggering down the steps in a debtor’s cardboard box…
“It places,” Zimmerman goes on gently, “a greater responsibility on those around him.”
“I think he’s awfully responsible,” Peter says, hypnotized by the meditative caressing action of Zimmerman’s thumb on Penny’s arm. She submits to it; this is a revelation. To think he was about to confide in this whore, this doll, his precious spots.
Zimmerman’s smile stretches. “Of course, you see him from a different angle than I do. I saw my own father in the same way.”
They see many things the same way, these two; they both see other people as an arena for self-assertion. There is a ground of kinship which makes their grappling possible. Peter feels this, feels a comradeship intertwined with antagonism and a confidence in the midst of his fear. The principal has blundered in seeking intimacy; distance and silence are always most powerful. Peter stares him in the face and, an instant short of irrevocable rudeness, glances away. He feels the side of his neck blushing in the manner of his mother. “He’s terribly responsible,” he says of his father. “He’s just had to have stomach X-rays but what he’s more worried about is a little strip of basketball tickets he can’t find.”
Zimmerman quickly blurts, “Tickets?” To Peter’s surprise this seems to have scored. The principal’s wrinkles are shadowed forth at the new tilt of his head; he seems old. Triumphantly Peter feels descend upon him, his father’s avenger, this advantage over the antagonist: he has more years to live. Ignorant and impotent here and now, in the dimension of the future he is mighty. Zimmerman murmurs, seems in his mind to stumble. “I’ll have to speak to him about this,” he says, half to himself.
Overreached. The possibility of a truly disastrous betrayal makes Peter’s stomach grovel as it used to when he was a child and running tardy down the pike to elementary school. “Must you?” His voice thins in pleading, becomes infantile. “I mean, I don’t want to have gotten him into any trouble.”
Again, the strengths have shifted. Zimmerman’s hand leaves Penny’s arm and, finger braced against the thumb to flick, comes toward Peter’s eye. It is a nightmare second; Peter blinks, his mind blank. He feels the breath being crushed from him. The hand glides past his face and softly snaps a face in the framed picture by Peter’s shoulder on the wall. “This is me,” Zimmerman says.
It is a photograph of the O.H.S. track team in 1919. They are all wearing old-fashioned black undershirts and the manager wears white ducks and a straw hat. Even the trees in the background-which are the trees of the Poorhouse Lane, only smaller than they are now-look old-fashioned, like pressed flowers. A brownness hangs unsteadily beneath the surface of the photograph. Zimmerman’s finger, which with its glazed nail and crinkled knuckle is solid and luminous in the now, holds firm under the tiny face of then. Peter and Penny have to look. Though as a trackman he was slimmer and had a full head of black hair, Zimmerman is curiously recognizable. The heavy nose set at an uneasy angle to the gently twisted mouth whose plane is not strictly parallel to the line of the eyebrows gave his young face that air of muddled weight, of unfathomable expectation and reluctant cruelty, which renders him in his prime of age so irresistible a disciplinarian even to those who think they have found it within themselves to be defiant and mock. “It is you,” Peter says weakly.
“We never lost a meet.” The finger, dense with existence, everpresent, drops away. Without another word to the young couple Zimmerman moves off down the hall, huge-backed. Students jostle to clear him a path.
The hall is emptying, the varsity game beginning. The pressure of Zimmerman’s fingers have left yellow ovals in Penny’s naked arm. She rubs the arm briskly and grimaces in disgust. “I feel I should take a bath,” she says. Peter realizes he does love her really. They had been equally helpless in Zimmerman’s grip. He takes her down the hall, as if to return to the auditorium; but at the hall’s end he bucks the double doors and leads her up the dark stairs. This is forbidden. Often at night functions a padlock is placed on these doors but this time the janitors forgot. Peter glances behind them nervously; all who might cry “Halt” have hastened to see the game commence.
On the halfway landing they are out of sight. The bulb burning over the girls’ entrance below the steel-mullioned window here casts upward in distorted rhomboids enough light to see by. There must be light enough for her to see. Her naked arms seem silver, her crimson lips black. His own shirt seems black. He unbuttons one sleeve. “Now this is a very sad secret,” he says. “But because I love you you should know it.”