7

Ridpath at Home

Chester Ridpath parked his black Studebaker in his driveway and reached across the seat to lift his briefcase. Like the upholstery of his car, it had been several times repaired with black masking tape, and graying old ends of the tape played out beneath the gummy top layers. The handle adhered to his fingers. He wrestled the heavy satchel onto his lap-it was crammed with mimeographed football plays, starting lineups which went back nearly to the year when he had purchased the car, textbooks, lesson plans, and memos from the headmaster. Laker Broome spoke chiefly through memos. He liked to rule from a distance, even at faculty meetings, where he sat at a separate table from the staff: most of his administrative and disciplinary decisions were filtered down through Billy Thorpe, who had been assistant head as well as Latin master under three different headmasters. Sometimes Chester Ridpath imagined that Billy Thorpe was the only man in the. world who he really respected. Billy could not ever conceivably have had a son like Steve.

He exhaled, wiped sweat from his forehead back into his hair, temporarily flattening half a dozen fussy curls, and left the car. The sun burned through his clothes. The briefcase seemed to be filled with stones.

Ridpath found his bundle of keys in his deep pocket, shook them until his house key surfaced, and let himself into his house. Raucous music-music for beasts-battered the air. He supposed many parents came home to this din, but was it so loud in other houses? Steve had carried his phonograph home from the store, twisted the volume control all the way to the right, and left it there. Once in his room, he walled himself up inside this savagery. Ridpath could not communicate through a barrier so repellent to him; he suspected, in fact he knew, that Steve was uninterested in anything he might wish to communicate anyhow.

'Home,' he shouted, and banged the door shut - if Steve couldn't hear the shout, at least he would feel the vibration.

The house had been in disarray so long that Ridpath no longer noticed the pile of soiled shirts and sweaters on the stairs, the dark smudges of grease on the carpet. He and Margaret had bought the living-room carpet, a florid Wilton, on a layaway plan just after they had mortgaged his salary for twenty years to buy the house. During the fifteen years since his wife had left him, Ridpath had taken an unconscious pleasure in the gradual darkening and wearing away of the nap. There were places - before his chair, in front of the slat-backed couch - where the awful flower-spray pattern was nearly invisible.

Overlaying the piles of dirty clothing were the magazine clippings and pages of comic books which Steve used to make his 'things.' They had no other name. Steve's 'things' were varnished to his bedroom walls. Korea had supplied a surplus of the images Steve preferred in his 'things,' and by now the room was a palimpsest of screaming infants, wrecked jeeps, bloated dead in kapok jackets. Tanks rolled over muddy hills toward classrooms of dutiful Russian children (courtesy of Life). Mossy monsters from horror comics embraced starlets with death's-heads. Ridpath never entered his son's room anymore.

He dropped the briefcase beside his chair and sat heavily, wrenching his tie over his head without bothering to undo the knot. After he had dropped his jacket on the floor beside it, he reached for the telephone set on an otherwise empty shelf. Ridpath shouted, 'Turn it down, goddammit,' and waited a second. Then he shouted again, louder. 'For God's sake, turn it down!' The music diminished by an almost undetectable portion. He dialed the Thorpe number.

'Billy? Chester. Just got home. Thought maybe you should get the poop on the new boys. Look pretty good on the whole, but there are a few items I thought you'd want to know about. Sort of coordinate ourselves here. Okay? First off, we got one good, one real good football prospect, the Hogan kid. He might take a little watching in the classroom… No, nothing definite, just the impression I had. I don't want to prejudice you against the kid, Billy. Just keep him on a tight rein. He could be a real leader. Now for the bad news. We got one real lulu in the new intake. A kid named Brick, Dave Brick. Hair like a goddamned Zulu, more grease on it than I got in my car. You know what kind of attitude that means. I think we want to crack down on this kind of thing right away, or one bad apple like that could spoil the whole school. Plus that, there's a wiseacre named Sherman. The kid already lipped off, fooled around with his registration form… You getting these names?'

He wiped his face again and grimaced toward the stairs, How could a boy listen to that stuff all day long? 'One more. You remember our transfer from Andover, the orphan kid with the trust fund? Nightingale. He might of been a big mistake. I mean, Billy, maybe Andover was glad to get rid of him, that's what I mean. First of all, he looks wrong - like a little Greek. This Nightingale kid looks sneaky… Well, hell, Billy, I can't help the way I see things, can I? And I was right, too. I caught him with a pack of cards - yeah, he had the cards out. In the library. Can you beat that? Said he was showing Flanagan a card trick… Yeah, a card trick. Man. I confiscated the cards PDQ. I think the kid's some kind of future beatnik or something… Well, I know you can't always tell that kind of thing, Billy… Well, he did have those cards in his fist, big as you please, gave me a little tussle, too… Well, I'd put him in the special file along with Brick, that's what I'm saying, Billy… '

He listened to the telephone a moment, his face contracting into a tight, unwilling grimace. 'Sure, Steve'll be okay this year. You'll see a big change in him, now that he's a senior. They grow up pretty fast at that age.'

He hung up gratefully. 'Grow up' - was that what Steve had done? He did not want to talk to Billy Thorpe, who had two good-looking successful boys, about Steve. The less Thorpe thought about Steve Ridpath, the better.

Skeleton. God.

Ridpath shoved himself to his feet, knocking over the easeful of football plays, took a few aimless steps toward the stairs, then turned around and picked up the case, deciding to go down to his desk in the basement. He had to do some more thinking about the JV team before their first practice. When he walked out of the living room, he glanced into the kitchen and unexpectedly saw the gaunt, looming form of his son leaning over the sink. Steve was pressing his nose and lips against the window, smearing the glass. So he had somehow flickered down the stairs.