“Where is everybody going?”
“Home, son! Time for a two-bit square and a working man’s nap. This is nothing. You should see it Monday morning.”
Could a street hold more people? Inside the station the trains were still shrieking, the sound of digestion in the belly of that monument. Like an Aztec temple drinking blood. Mother’s parting advice: Try to put a positive face on things, the man hates whining, let me tell you.
“Union Station looks like a temple.”
“A temple.” Father gave a sideways look. “How old are you now, fourteen?”
“Fifteen. Sixteen this summer.”
“Right. Temples. Built with government money by Hoover’s swindlers.” He scowled at the trolley stop, as if the city had slyly shifted around behind his back while he was in the station. A freckled, pinkish man, the pale moustache discolored along its bottom edge. The photograph hadn’t recorded the unheroic complexion—that skin would broil to a crisp in Mexico. One mystery solved.
He dodged into the crowd and moved fast, leaving no choice but to tuck-chin like a boxer and watch out for horse droppings, tugging the behemoth trunk. Mother’s driver had put it on the train; porters carried it after that. No more help now, America was help-yourself.
“They’re planning to put up a whole string of your temples here on the south side of Pennsylvania. See that eye-popper? Washington’s Monument.” He pointed into a leafless park, the pale stone rising above the trees. A memory rose with it: the long, narrow box of hallway rising like a dark mouse tunnel. An echoing argument in the stairwell, Mother’s hand pulling downward, back to safety.
“We went in there, didn’t we? One time with Mother?”
“You remember that? Small fry. You got the screaming heebies on the stairs.”
He’d stopped at a corner, panting, emitting breath in bursts of steam like a kettle. “They’ve put an elevator to the top now. One more temple to Hoover’s swindlers, if you ask me.” He chuckled, tasting his clever remark again after the fact, like a belch. People were gathering here, a trolley stop. An officer clopped past on a huge bay horse.
“Mother said you worked for President Hoover.”
“Who says I don’t?” A hint of ire, suggesting he might not. Or not in any capacity Mr. Hoover would know about. A bean counter in a government office, Mother said, but one of the last men in America with a steady job, so it serves him right to get his boy sent him on the train.
“President Hoover is the greatest man ever lived,” he said, overly loud. People looked. “They’ve just had a telephone put in on his desk, for calling his chief of staff. He can get MacArthur quick as snapping his fingers. You think your president of Mexico has a telephone on his desk?”
Mexico will be held as a grudge, then. Probably for reasons to do with Mother. Ortíz Rubio does have a telephone; the newspapers say he can’t make a move without ringing up Calles first, at his house on the Street of Forty Thieves in Cuernavaca. But Father didn’t want to hear about that. People ask without wanting to know. He boarded the trolley through the brew of people, shouldering his way toward the seats. The trunk wouldn’t fit under the wooden bench, but hunched in the aisle: an embarrassment. People coming on the trolley flowed around it like a river over a boulder.
The ride was long. He stared out the window. It was impossible to imagine this man in the same room with Mother, the same bed. She would swat him like a fly. Then call a maid to wipe up the residue.
The men here wear suits like businessmen in Mexico City, but with more layers due to the cold. The women have complicated stuff, long scarves and things to put their hands in, hard to name. One had a shawl around her neck made from a whole fox with its head still on, biting its tail. If Cortés came here, he could write the Queen a whole chapter about the ladies’ clothes.
After many stops, Father said: “We are going out to the school. They said it’s the best to start right away, in your situation.” He spoke slowly, as if “situation” meant a boy with a damaged brain. “It’s bread and board. You’ll bunk there with your pals, Harry.”
“Yes, sir.” (Harry. It will be Harry now?)
“That’ll be a barrel of laughs.” He bit his moustache, then added, “It better be.”
Meaning, it is costing some money. Harry. Harry Shepherd looked out the window. Whoever pays the bill, names the boy.
Scenes passed by: marble edifices, parks of skeletal trees, boarded warehouses. Pale white men in black suits and hats. And then the opposite: dark-colored men in pale shirts and trousers, no hats at all. They were digging a long trench with pickaxes, their muscled arms bare even in this cold. In all Mexico there is not one Indian so black as those men. Their arms had a shine, like the rubbed wood of black piano keys.
At the end of the trolley ride, a motorbus. The great trunk occupied its own seat, with a window for viewing the scenery of mansions strung along a river. Father took long fishing expeditions into his pocket to find his watch, pull it out, and frown at its face. Did he remember the other watch, the one Mother took, later on pinched again from her jewelry case? The memory of it feels like a sickness now, not for the sin of thievery but for the dreadful longing pinned to it. For this man. This father.
17 January
Most Lofty Excellent Empress, the place called Potomac Academy is marvellous bad. A prison camp in brick buildings built to look like mansions, where native leaders called Officers rule over the captives. The Dormitory is a long house of beds like a hospital, with every patient required to go dead at Twenty One Hours. Lights Out means no more reading or else. In the morning the corpses rise again on command.
The strangest thing: the captive boys don’t seem to wish for escape. In class they take their orders and knuckle under, but the minute the officer leaves the room, they commence to rapping heads with inkwells and aping the language of radio men named Amos and Andy. In the dormitory they gawk at someone’s eight-pager with a girl called Sally Rand in it, naked with feathery fans. She looks like a cold baby bird.
The captives are released Saturday afternoon, no classes or exercises for once, and the dormitory empties out. Boys go to homes if they have them. The morning is Chapel first, then Mess Hall, then Freedom.
All the other boys in form nine are younger. But taller than the cretins anyway, and less spittle. Form nine was a compromise, because of being too tall to go all the way back to form six. The officers teach Latin, maths, and other things. Drill and psychomotricity. Best is literature. The officer recommended a pass to the form-eleven literature class, Samuel Butler, Daniel Defoe, and Jonathan Swift. Who gives a fig if they are Restoration or neoclassicists? New books in endless supply.