J. Salinger - Three Stories

His shoes turned up. My mother used to tell my father that he was buying Kenneth’s shoes too large for him, or to please ask somebody if his feet were deformed. But I think his shoes turned up because he was always stopping on the grass, rolling his seventy-five or eighty pounds forward to look at things, to turn things over his fingers. Even his moccasins turned up.

He had straight new penny-red hair, after my mother, which he parted on the left side and combed unwetted. He never wore a hat and you could identify him at great distances. One afternoon at the club when I was teeing off with Helen Beebers, just as I pressed my pin and ball into the hard, winter-rules ground and was getting into my stance, I felt certain that if I turned around I would see Kenneth. Confidendy I turned around. Sixty yards or so away, behind the high wire fence, he was sitting on the bicycle, watching us. He had that kind of red hair.

He used a southpaw’s first basemen’s mitt. On the back of the fingers of the mitt he copied down lines of poetry in India ink. He said he liked to read it when he wasn’t at bat or when nothing special was going on in the field. By the time he was eleven he had read all the poetry we had in the house. He liked Blake and Keats best, and some of Coleridge very well, but I didn’t know until over a year ago — and I used to read his glove regularly, — what his last careful entry had been. When I was still at Fort Dix a letter came from my brother Holden, who wasn’t in the Army then, saying he had been horsing around in the garage and had found Kenneth’s mitt. Holden said that on the thumb of the mitt was one he hadn’t seen, and what was it anyway, and Holden copied down the lines. They were Browning’s “I would hate that death bandaged my eyes and forbore, and bade me creep past.” They weren’t such hilarious lines quoted by a kid with the severest kind of heart trouble.

He was crazy about baseball. When he couldn’t get up a game, and when I wasn’t around to knock out flys to him, for hours he would throw a baseball up on the slant of the garage roof and catch it on the roll down. He knew the batting and fielding averages of every player in the major leagues. But he wouldn’t and didn’t go to any of the games with me. He went just once with me, when he was about eight years old, and had seen Lou Gehrig strike out twice. He said he didn’t want to see anyone really good strike out again.

“I’m going back to Literature again, I can’t keep this thing under control.”

He cared for prose as well as poetry; chiefly fiction. He used to come into my room at any hour of the day and take one of my books down from the case and go off with it to his room or to the porch. I rarely looked up to see what he was reading. In those days I was trying to write. Very tough work. Very pasty-faced work. But once in a while I looked up. One time I saw him walk out with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender is the Night”, and another time he asked me what Richard Hughes’ “The Innocent Voyage” was about. I told him, and he read it, but the only thing he would say about it, when I asked him later, was that the earthquake was fine, and the colored fella in the beginning. Another day he took from my room and read Henry James’ “The Turn of the Screw”. When he finished it, for a week he wouldn’t talk to anyone in the house.

I’m doing fine.

I can remember every detail of that tricky, dirty Saturday in July, though.

My parents were at the summer theater singing a first matinee performance of “You Can’t Take It With You”. In summer stock productions they were two very irritable, passion-tearing, perspiring players, and my younger brothers and I rarely went to see them. My mother was especially poor in summer stock. Watching her, even on a cool evening, Kenneth used to cringe in his seat till he was almost on the floor.

On that Saturday I had been working in my room all morning, had even eaten my lunch there, and not till late afternoon did I come downstairs. At about three-thirty I came out on the porch and the Cape Cod air made me a little dizzy, as though it were stuff brewed too strong. But in a minute it seemed like a pretty good day. The sun was hot all over the lawn. I looked around for Kenneth and saw him sitting in the cracked wicker, reading, with his feet drawn underneath him so that he was supporting his weight on his insteps. He was reading with his mouth open, and he didn’t hear me walk across the porch and sit down on the railing opposite his chair.

I kicked his chair with the toe of my shoe. “Stop reading, Mac” I said. “Put down that book. Entertain me.” He was reading Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.”

He put down the book when I spoke to him, recognizing my mood, and looked up at me, smiling. He was a gentleman; a twelve year-old gentleman; he was a gentleman all his life.

“I get lonesome up there,” I told him. “I picked a lousy profession. If I ever write a novel I think I’ll join a choir or something and run to meetings between chapters.”

He asked me what he knew I wanted him to ask me. “Vincent, what’s the new story about?”

“Listen, No kidding Kenneth. It’s terrific. Really,” I said, getting set to convince us both. “It’s called The Bowler’. It’s about this guy whose wife won’t let him listen to the fights or the hockey matches on the radio at night. No sports. Too noisy. Terrible woman. Won’t ever let the guy read cowboy stories. Bad for his mind. Throws all his cowboy story magazines into the wastebasket.” I watched Kenneth’s face like a writer. “Every Wednesday night is this guy’s night to go bowling. After dinner every Wednesday night he takes his special bowling ball down from a shelf of the closet, puts it in a special little round canvas bag, kisses his wife good-night and goes out. This goes on for eight years. Finally he dies. Every Monday night his wife goes to the cemetery, puts gladioli on his grave. One day she goes on a Wednesday instead of a Monday, and sees some fresh violets on the grave. Can’t imagine who could have put ‘em there. She asks the old caretaker, and he says, ‘Oh, that there same lady that comes every Wednesday. His wife, I guess.’

‘His wife?’ screams the wife. ‘I’m his wife!’ But the old caretaker is a pretty deaf old guy and he isn’t much interested. The woman goes home. Late in the night her neighbors hear the crashing sound of broken glass, but they go on listening to the hockey game on the radio. In the morning, on his way to the office, the neighbor sees a broken window in the next house, and a bowling ball, all dewey, glistening on the front lawn.”

“How do you like it?”

He hadn’t taken his eyes off my face while I had told him the story.

“Aw, Vincent,” he said. “Aw, gee.”

“What’s the matter? That’s a damn good story.”

“I know you’ll write it swell. But, gee, Vincent!”

I said to him, “that’s the last story I’m going to read to you, Caulfield. What’s the matter with that story? It’s a masterpiece. I’m writing one masterpiece after another. I never read so many masterpieces by one man.” He knew I was kidding, but he only gave me half a smile because he knew I was blue. I didn’t want any half smiles. “What’s the matter with that story?” I said. “You little stinker. You redhead.”

“Maybe it could’ve happened, Vincent. But you don’t know that it happened do you? I mean, you just made it up didn’t you?”

“Sure I made it up! That kind of stuff happens Kenneth.”

“Sure, Vincent! I believe ya! No kidding, I believe ya,” Kenneth said. But if you’re just making stuff up, why don’t you make up something that’s good. See? If you just made up something good, is what I mean. Good stuff happens. Lots of times. Boy, Vincent! You could be writing about good stuff. You could write about good stuff, I mean about good guys and all. Boy, Vincent!” He looked at me with his eyes shining — yes, shining. The boy’s eyes could shine.