Peter Abrahams - Crying Wolf

Freedy had never made tea before, but how hard could it be? He opened the box, took out a handful of teabags, dropped a few into each cup, poured in the boiling water.

They sat at the table, drinking tea. “My goodness, Freedy,” she said after the first sip. “You’ve got a knack.”

“Don’t mention it.”

She smiled at him. “It’s nice having you home, Freedy.”

“Yeah.”

“Any idea how long you’re-any idea what your plans are?”

“Yeah, as a matter of fact. But it’s too early to say, if you know what I mean.”

“I do, Freedy. I know that one very well.” She turned her shadow eyes on him. “We have something in common after all.”

The fuck we do. “This, uh, father thing,” Freedy said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Walrus.”

“Walrus?”

“Wasn’t that what he was called? My father, I’m talking about.”

“I beg you not to raise your voice, Freedy. You know I can’t deal with violence of any kind.”

“I’d just like a few facts about him, is all. I’m not a Portagee or something, am I?”

“Please, Freedy, no discrimination.”

“But am I?”

“No. You come from bland ethnic stock, just like me.”

Freedy missed that one. “What was his real name, for starters?”

“Real name,” she said. “I don’t even know what that means.”

“Like on the goddamn birth certificate.”

She leaned closer to him; he could smell the pot smoke trapped in all her hair. “I’ve told you before, Freedy. It was a one-time thing. Very special, of course, but one-time. He was a stranger, really, passing through. In a mental sense, more than physical. Try not to judge me too harshly. The times were different then, and the person that was me…” Her eyes focused on something distant. He heard music coming faintly from her bedroom: Cat Stevens, or some other artist of the first water, whatever that meant.

He finished her sentence for her: “No longer fucking exists.”

Later he thought of examining the envelope the money had come in, maybe checking the postmark or whatever that thing was called. By that time the kitchen was cleaned up, sort of, and the envelope gone.

Peter Abrahams

Crying Wolf

“Did you bring a sample of your writing?” asked Professor Uzig.

Second semester, first day back at Inverness, 8:00 A.M., Professor Uzig’s office in Goodrich Hall. Nat, petitioning to enter Philosophy 322, Superman and Man: Nietzsche and Cobain, handed Professor Uzig several essays from the first term, as well as the prize-winning “What I Owe America.”

Professor Uzig flipped quickly through the school essays, came to “What I Owe America,” paused. His eyes darted back and forth, scanning with a speed and intensity that Nat, sitting across his desk, could feel. Professor Uzig glanced up.

“Do you believe this bilge?” he said.

“Which part, specifically?” Nat said; a composed reply, perhaps, but his face had grown hot at once, a change he hoped his fresh tan concealed.

“Here, for example,” said Professor Uzig, turning a page. He seemed so much harsher than the dinner guest at Aubrey’s Cay, didn’t even look the same. He wore a charcoal gray tweed jacket, white shirt, and navy blue tie, his hair was combed, and his tan, which had been much deeper than Nat’s, had almost completely faded. “Where you write, ‘The nation is like a monument continuously under construction and the job of the citizen is to make it better.’ ”

The question: did he believe that? Professor Uzig watched him, the papers steady, absolutely still in his hand, almost an extension of his fingers. It struck Nat that no written material presented any challenge to Professor Uzig, that all texts were instantly transparent to him. “What’s the alternative?” Nat said.

“To your metaphor, or to the action of the citizen, the metaphor accepted?”

“The latter,” said Nat.

Professor Uzig didn’t move, didn’t speak, just watched Nat over the papers in his hand. After a while Nat couldn’t stand the silence any longer, and said: “I meant what’s the better alternative.”

Professor Uzig laid the papers on his desk, aligned them neatly, squarely, and sat back in his chair. “You used continuously in the proper manner,” he said. “And you can write a periodic sentence. Admission is granted.”

“Thank you,” Nat said.

“The first class is today at one-thirty. You will have read the first part of Beyond Good and Evil. ”

“By Nietzsche?”

Oh, how Nat wished he could have that question back.

A s for continuously, he’d used it by chance, having no clue that it differed from continually until that moment. It was also the first time he’d heard the expression periodic sentence.

Back at his desk in room seventeen on the second floor of Plessey Hall, overlooking the quad, Nat had just begun reading the preface to Beyond Good and Evil — “Supposing truth to be a woman”-when he heard a knock at the door. Unusual, because almost everybody simply walked in.

“Come in,” he said.

A woman in a long fur coat entered. For a moment he didn’t recognize her. Then he did: Wags’s mom. He rose. “Hi.”

“Hello,” she said. “Nat, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

She glanced around the room, then back at him. “Nose to the grindstone, I see.”

“Just trying to keep up. If you’re looking for Wags-Richard-he’s not in right now. I haven’t actually seen him yet.”

“You won’t. Richard won’t be coming back, at least not this semester.”

“But… but we don’t even have the results yet. And he was doing fine. Better than me.”

She gave him a look that might have been cold; but why? They didn’t know each other at all. She took off her black kid gloves, snagging one for a moment on a ring. “He needs rest.”

“Why? What happened?”

“You’d know better than I.”

“What does that mean?”

A cold look, beyond doubt. “No one is blaming you, but it might have been nice if you’d drawn our attention, or the college’s, to the kind of shape he was in.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Don’t you? Richard should have been under a doctor’s care. He is now.”

“But for what?”

She regarded him in puzzlement, slightly exaggerated puzzlement. “You act like someone not very bright, yet Richard says you are most emphatically the opposite. Are you really saying you had no idea of the mental state he’s been in?”

“Everyone’s under a lot of stress here.”

“I’m sure. But not everyone is driven to a breakdown.”

“Wags had a breakdown?” Nat wasn’t even sure what the word meant, not in practice.

“Wags, as everyone calls him for some reason, had a breakdown.”

“Is he all right?”

“Just dandy.”

She stood over Wags’s desk, gazing at something he’d scratched into its surface: Help! We’re prisoners of the future! or something like that, as Nat remembered. Her eyes moistened, but nothing leaked out. When she spoke again, her voice had lost its edge. “He’s a little better, in fact, and thanks for asking. They’re probably letting him come home next month.”

“From where?”

“A very nice place, not far from here.” Her hand went to Wags’s chem lab notes, stacked neatly on the desk by Nat before vacation; squared the way Professor Uzig had arranged Nat’s papers on his own desk not long before.