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"Just for five minutes while I shopped."
"And you left him. Good God!" Underhill seized her wrist. "Well, come on, find him, get him out of there!"
They peered in together past the wire to where a dozen boys charged about, girls slapped each other, and a squabbling heap of children took turns at getting off, making a quick run, and crashing one against another.
"That’s where he is, I know it!" said Underhill.
Just then, across the field, sobbing and w
ailing, Jim ran, six boys after him. He fell, got up, ran, fell again, shrieking, and the boys behind shot beans through metal blowers.
"I’ll stuff those blowers up their noses!" said Underhill. "Run, Jim! Run!"
Jim made it to the gate. Underhill caught him. It was like catching a rumpled, drenched wad of material. Jim’s nose was bleeding, his pants were ripped, he was covered with grime.
"There’s your playground," said Underhill, on his knees, staring up from his son, holding him, at his sister. "There are your sweet, happy innocents, your well-to-do, piddling Fascists. Let me catch this boy there again and there’ll be hell to pay. Come on, Jim. All right, you little bastards, get back there!" he shouted.
"We didn’t do nothing," said the children.
"What’s the world coming to?" Mr. Underhill questioned the universe.
"Hi! Charlie!" said the strange boy, standing to one side. He waved casually and smiled.
"Who’s that?" asked Carol.
"How in hell do I know?" said Underhill.
"Be seeing you, Charlie. So long," called the boy, fading off.
Mr. Underhill marched his sister and his son home.
"Take your hand off my elbow!" said Carol.
He was trembling; absolutely, continually trembling with rage when he got to bed. He had tried some coffee, but nothing stopped it. He wanted to beat their pulpy little brains out, those gross Cruickshank children; yes, that phrase fit them, those fox-fiend, melancholy Cruickshank children, with all the guile and poison and slyness in their cold faces. In the name of all that was decent, what manner of child was this new generation! A bunch of cutters and hangers and bangers, a drove of bleeding, moronic thumb-screwers,with the sewage of neglect running in their veins? He lay violently jerking his head from one side of his hot pillow to the other, and at last got up and lit a cigarette, but it wasn’t enough. He and Carol had had a huge battle when they got home. He had yelled at her and she had yelled back, peacock and peahen shrieking in a wilderness where law and order were insanities laughed at and quite forgotten.
He was ashamed. You didn’t fight violence with violence, not if you were a gentleman. You talked very calmly. But Carol didn’t give you a chance, damn it! She wanted the boy put in a vise and squashed. She wanted him reamed and punctured and given the laying-on-of-hands. To be beaten from playground to kindergarten, to grammar school, to junior high, to high school. If he was lucky, in high school, the beatings and sadisms would refine themselves, the sea of blood and spittle would drain back down the shore of years and Jim would be left upon the edge of maturity, with God knows what outlook to the future, with a desire, perhaps, to be a wolf among wolves, a dog among dogs, a fiend among fiends. But there was enough of that in the world, already. The very thought of the next ten or fifteen years of torture was enough to make Mr. Underhill cringe; he felt his own flesh impaled with b-b shot, stung, burned, fisted, scrounged, twisted, violated, and bruised. He quivered, like a jelly-fish hurled violently into a concrete-mixer. Jim would never survive it. Jim was too delicate for this horror.
Underhill walked in the midnight rooms of his house thinking of all this, of himself, of the son, the Playground, the fear; there was no part of it he did not touch and turn over with his mind. How much, he asked himself, how much of this is being alone, how much due to Ann’s dying, how much to my need, and how much is the reality of the Playground itself, and the children? How much rational and how much nonsense? He twitched the delicate weights upon the scale and watched the indicator glide and fix and glide again, back and forth, softly, between midnight and dawn, between black and white, between raw sanity and naked insanity. He should not hold so tight, he should let his hands drop away from the boy. And yet—there was no hour that looking into Jim’s small face he did not see Ann there, in the eyes, in the mouth, in the turn of the nostrils, in the warm breathing, in the glow of blood moving just under the thin shell of flesh. I have a right, he thought, to be afraid. I have every right. When you have two precious bits of porcelain and one is broken and the other, the last one, remains, where can you find the time to be objective, to be immensely calm, to be anything else but concerned?
No, he thought, walking slowly, in the hall, there seems to be nothing I can do except go on being afraid and being afraid of being afraid.
"You needn’t prowl the house all night," his sister called from her bed, as she heard him pass her open door. "You needn’t be childish. I’m sorry if I seem dictatorial or cold. But you’ve got to make up your mind. Jim simply cannot have a private tutor. Ann would have wanted him to go to a regular school. And he’s got to go back to that playground tomorrow and keep going back until he’s learned to stand on his own two feet and until he’s familiar to all the children; then they won’t pick on him so much."
Underhill said nothing. He got dressed quietly, in the dark and, downstairs, opened the front door. It was about five minutes to midnight as he walked swiftly down the street in the shadows of the tall elms and oaks and maples, trying to outdistance his rage and outrage. He knew Carol was right, of course. This was the world, you lived in it, you accepted it. But that was the very trouble! He had been through the mill already, he knew what it was to be a boy among lions, his own childhood had come rushing back to him in the last few hours, a time of terror and violence, and now he could not bear to think of Jim’s going through it all, those long years, especially if you were a delicate child, through no fault of your own, your bones thin, your face pale, what could you expect but to be harried and chased?
He stopped by the Playground, which was still lit by one great overhead lamp. The gate was locked for the night, but that one light remained on until twelve. He wanted to tear the contemptible place down, rip up the steel fences, obliterate the slides, and say to the children, "Go home! Play in your backyards!"
How ingenious, the cold, deep playground. You never knew where anyone lived. The boy who knocked your teeth out, who was he? Nobody knew. Where did he live? Nobody knew. How to find him? Nobody knew. Why, you could come here one day, beat the living tar out of some smaller child, and run on the next day to some other playground. They would never find you. From playground to playground, you could take your criminal tricks, with everyone forgetting you, since they never knew you. You could return to this playground a month later, and if the little child whose teeth you knocked out was there and recognized you, you could deny it. "No, I’m not the one. Must be some other kid. This is my first time here! No, not me!" And when his back is turned, knock him over. And run off down nameless streets, a nameless person.
What can I possibly do? thought Underhill. Carol’s been more than generous with her time; she’s been good for Jim, no doubt of it. A lot of the love she would have put into a marriage has gone to him this year. I can’t fight her forever on this, and I can’t tell her to leave. Perhaps moving to the country might help. No, no, impossible; the money. But I can’t leave Jim here, either.
"Hello, Charlie," said a quiet voice.
Underhill snapped about. Inside he Playground fence, seated in the dirt, making diagrams with on finger in the cool dust, was the solemn nine-year-old boy. He didn’t glance up. He said "Hello, Charlie," just sitting there, easily, in that world beyond the hard steel fence.
Underhill said, "How do you know my name?"
"I know it." The boy crossed his legs, comfortably, smiling quietly. "You’re having lots of trouble."
