Charles Ardai - Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 102, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 618 & 619, October 1993

“Now let go and get back or you’ll all get wet,” called the Grandville boy. As the others scampered back he turned the powerful blow of the hose water on John. It knocked him down. He shut his eyes and turned his blind face to the roof. His shapeless mouth fell open in a silent cry. Still clutching his candy banana, he brought it to his mouth in delayed memory of what it was for, and what had been a delight was now a sorrowful and profitless hunger for comfort in misery.

“Get up, dogface,” yelled one of the boys.

Obediently John got up, keeping his eyes closed, suffering all that must come to him. The hose column toppled him over again. Striking his face, blows of water knocked his head about until it seemed it must fly apart.

“I know!” cried an excited and joyful young voice. “Let’s get his clo’es off!”

There was general glee at this idea. The hose was put away for the moment, and everyone seized John and tore at his clothes. He made his soundless wail with open mouth and I thought he shaped my name again.

When he was naked they ordered him to stand again, and he did so, trying to protect his modesty with his thick hands. They hit him with the hose again and buffeted him like a puppet. The hose water made him spin and slide on the oily floor. The noise was doubled by echoes from the peaked high roof of the garage.

Nobody thought of me.

I backed to the door and opened it and ran away. On the concrete driveway was a tricycle belonging to the younger Grandville. I mounted it and rode off as fast as I could. My chest was ready to break open under my hard breathing. My knees rose and fell like pistons. My face was streaming with tears of rage at John’s ordeal and the disgrace of my helplessness before it. I rode to John’s house and threw myself up the front steps, but before I could attack the door it was opened to me. Gail Burley was watching for us and when she saw me alone in gasping disorder, she cried,

“Why, Richard! What’s the matter! Where’s John!”

At first I could only point, so I took her hand and tugged at her to come with me. It was proof of the passion and power I felt at the moment that without more questioning she came. I remounted the tricycle and led her up the street to the Grandvilles’. In a little while as I went I was able to tell her what was happening.

When she understood, she increased her stride. She became magnificent in outrage. Her hazel eyes darkened to deep topaz and her reddish golden hair seemed to spring forward into the wind. She was like a famous ship, dividing the elements as she went.

“Oh! Those horrid, cruel little beasts!” she exclaimed. “Oh! What I would do to them — and Richard, you are an absolute darrling to get away and come for me. Oh! That poor John!”

We hurried up the driveway. The game was still going on. We could hear cries and the hiss of the hose. Gail Burley strode to the door and threw it open. She saw her son pinned against the far brick wall by the long pole of the spray. He tried to turn his face from side to side to avoid its impact. It swept down his white soft body and he continually tried to cover himself with his hands. Nonresistant, he accepted all that came to him. His eyes were still closed and his mouth was still open.

Stepping with baleful elegance across the puddles of the floor, Gail Burley threw aside the boys who were dancing at the spectacle, and came to the Grandville brother with the hose. She astounded him. In his ecstatic possession, he had heard no one arrive. She seized the hose and with a gesture commanded him to turn off the water, which he did. She dropped the hose and went to John and took him dripping and blue with cold into her arms. He fell inert against her, letting his hands dangle as she hugged him. But he made a word at last.

“Muzza,” he said thickly, “oh, Muzza, Muzza.”

“John-John,” she said, holding his wet head against the hollow of her lovely neck and shoulder. “It’s all right, It’s all right. Muzza is here. Poor John-John.”

The boys were now frightened. The oldest said,

“We were only trying to have some fun, Mrs. Burley.”

“Go to the house,” she commanded in her flattest tone, which held promises of punishment for all as soon as she could inform their parents, “and bring a big towel and a blanket. — Richard, you might throw together John’s things and bring them along.”

She was obeyed soberly and quickly. In a few minutes she and I were taking John home. He was huddled inside a doubled blanket. He was shivering. His teeth chattered.

“Where’s my banana?” he managed to say.

“Oh, never mind,” said his mother. “We can get you another banana. What were you doing with a banana anyway?”

“It was a candy one,” I explained.

“I see.”

Her thoughts were falling into order after the disturbance of her feelings by the cruelty she had come to halt.

My perceptions of what followed were at the time necessarily shallow, but they were, I am sure, essentially correct.

“Those wretches!” exclaimed Gail Burley, leading John by the hand while I trotted alongside. “What would we ever have done without Richard? You are a true friend, Richard! — Oh!” she said, at the memory of what she had seen. And then, as John stumbled because she was walking so fast and his blanket folds were so awkward to hold about himself, she jerked his hand and said, “Stop dragging your feet, John! Why can’t you walk like anybody else! Here! Pull up and keep up with me!”

At her suddenly cold voice, he went limp and would have fallen softly, like a dropped teddy bear, to the sidewalk. But she dragged him up and said with her teeth almost closed,

“John Burley, do you hear me? Get up and come with me. If you do not, your father will give you the whaling of your life when he comes home tonight!”

“No, Muzza, no, Muzza,” muttered John at the memories that this threat called alive. He got to his feet and began half-running along beside her, dragging his borrowed blanket, which looked like the robe of a pygmy king in flight.

I was chilled by the change in Mrs. Burley. Her loving rage was gone and in its place was a fury of exasperation. She blinked away angry tears. With no thought of how fast John could run along with her, she pulled and jerked at him all the way home, while her face told us after all that she was bitterly ashamed of him.

For at last she took the world’s view of her son. Represented by his own kind, other children, the world had repudiated him. Much as she hated the cruelty of the Grandvilles and their friends, sore as her heart was at what her son had suffered through them, she knew they were society, even if it was shown at its most savage. It was the determining attitude of the others that mattered. She had seen it clearly. Her heart broke in half. One half was charged with love and pity as it defied the mocking world which allowed no published lapse from its notion of a finally unrealizable norm. The other half was pierced by fragments of her pride. How could it happen to her that her child could be made sport of as a little animal monster? Gail Burley was to be treated better than that.

“John?” she sang out in warning as John stumbled again. “You heard what I said?”

Her cheeks, usually pale, were now flushed darkly. I was afraid of her. She seemed ready to treat John just as the boys had treated him. Was she on the side of his tormentors? Their judgments persuaded her even as she rescued her child. She longed for him both to live — and to die. Cold desire rose up in her. If only she knew some way to save this poor child in the future from the abuse and the uselessness which were all that life seemed to offer him. How could she spare John and herself long lifetimes of baffled sorrow? She made him dance along faster than he could, for being such a creature that others mocked and tortured him, at the expense of her pride.