Rafael Yglesias - Hide Fox, and All After

“It certainly was.”

Richard got into the car and slumped as if exhausted. The three sat without purpose or direction.

A green station wagon with a U-Haul attached stopped next to them, and the fat man driving it leaned out, laughing, and called, “Alec, me boy, tell your friend Richard to follow me — got a little job for you.”

Alec, astonished, said, “What are you doing here?”

“I’m toothless. I’m to pick up your grandmother’s couch, and I’ll need some help. So you follow me in your car.”

“Well, Richard’s waiting for Stephie,” Alec said, “so how about Raul and I helping you? On one condition, though.”

“Oh, you’re going to bargain with me.”

“Ayea. Simple bargain — after we help you, drive us to school. We have tryouts to go to.”

“Sure. Get in.”

Alec got out, a little too eagerly to please Richard, and let Raul out, who whispered in his ear, “Is that your father?” Alec nodded. “Who was with your mother the night of the play? Your stepfather?” Alec nodded again, and the two waved good-by to Richard’s diminishing form as they drove away.

David Shaw had been pleased to escape from the small pretensions Alec’s mother had developed in her modest career on Broadway. The woman he had since married pleased him more; she shared with him a scorn for stable, bourgeois life, a love for the makeshift, and indolence. He enjoyed his paunchy middle age; enjoyed even more its display.

Having hated the years he spent under strict parents, he maintained an indifference to his children’s actions that eventually pervaded his emotional responses. In Alec’s case, this was a comforting balance to the influence of his mother. But in the case of his stepdaughter and his son by his second marriage, it had created strangely flippant creatures. He rarely saw Alec and, almost as if he put more emotional faith in the first marriage, found himself at times awfully proud of him.

He also found himself disliking certain qualities in Alec which he attributed to Alec’s mother: what he thought at first was an effeminacy, which later became dandyism, something even more distasteful to him; Alec’s ambition, which seemed limitless; and the direction that ambition took — acting.

He winced at Alec’s disdainful way of dealing with his half brother and stepsister; an Olympian egoism that regarded them as beings beneath him to be tolerated with a smile — an attitude that mimicked his own. Father and son in fact, were almost exactly alike.

“Your new teeth driving you crazy?” Alec asked, after they were under way.

“I’ll tell you the nightmare after you introduce me.”

“ ‘Introduce me,’ ” Alec mimicked. “If you had been at Aria da Capo, you’d know.” Alec, in fact, had been glad, after his mother’s criticisms of his performance, that his father couldn’t make it.

“I can see I’ll go to my grave with this shame hanging over me. Is this the actor Anita raved about?”

Alec nodded.

“I’m surprised the two of you are on such good terms.”

There were verbal groans of protest from Alec and Raul.

“Oh, come now,” Mr. Shaw said, laughing, “aren’t actors naturally jealous?”

“On the contrary,” Alec said.

“Quite on the contrary,” Raul agreed.

David Shaw laughed. “What is your background?” he asked Raul. “Are you Latin?”

Raul answered in an informative, exact tone. “I am one half Latin, one half Jew. The Latin in me is divided into one fourth Cuban, one fourth Spanish — the province of Galicia. As for the Jew, he is one fourth Russian, one fourth Polish.”

“That’s funny, and it happens often. It’s true of our family. Alec’s mother is Russian and, get this, French Jew.”

Raul laughed. “Isn’t that ridiculous? I really don’t believe it’s possible.”

“Why not?” Alec asked.

“I’m sure it’s so. It just doesn’t seem likely.”

“That’s true,” Raul said judiciously, “one doesn’t think of a Jew being French.”

“As for my side of the family,” David went on, “it becomes perverse.” They all laughed. “My mother was a converted Jew; my father was the WASP who converted her.”

“Did I ever meet them?” Alec asked.

“No, no. Papa died two years before you were born. Mother obligingly died a year after.”

“You sound bitter,” Raul said.

He laughed in a slightly hollow way. “Just kidding.”

There was an uneasy silence. They pulled over to a corner, and David got out quickly.

“Well, that was fast,” Alec said, obviously to say something. Alec and Raul got out; Mr. Shaw was opening the U-Haul. “So what happened with your teeth?” Alec asked.

David Shaw grunted and shook his head. He moved toward the building they had stopped in front of, Alec and Raul following. “You know Dr. Mercer?” Alec nodded. “And sadist that he is, one can’t blame him, it’s natural for dentists, he told me that I had to have every one, without exception, of my teeth removed.” They stopped before the elevator, David holding the door, and got in. He pressed the sixth floor.

“The bills on these things are just enormous — and sneaky. It takes him, maybe, seven to ten minutes to tell me this. I had gone to him, oh…say, a week before. He had taken X rays, etc. That alone cost me seventy-five dollars. And now I got charged for the same things all over again.”

“Why did you have to get X rays again?” Alec asked.

“Ah. After he took those X rays, he told me my teeth were fine.”

“You’re kidding!”

“No. But I went to him again and insisted. He said there had been some mix-up with the X rays.” The elevator stopped. “I’ll finish the story when we get downstairs.”

He rang Alec’s grandparents’ door. A black maid answered, telling them that Alec’s grandparents were out but that they should pick up the couch anyway.

It was a Victorian couch, light green and in good condition, but the armrests were threadbare. To fit it in the elevator, they stood it on end, but since that left little room, they slid it in and sat on it while going down, a situation that caused Alec and Raul to laugh all the way. Mr. Shaw was thoughtful.

While getting the couch to the car, David Shaw said, “I don’t know why your mother’s side of the family believes in maids. They make me nervous.”

“Mother doesn’t really have a maid. She’s an old friend.…”

“I suppose so,” he said with mild irony.

Outside, they put the Victorian couch in the U-Haul, Raul commenting on how large it was, a pointless comment, he thought, totally pointless.

In the car, Alec asked David to continue.

“What was I saying?”

“That you had to have the X rays taken all over again.”

“Oh yes. So he took the X rays for a second time — another seventy-five dollars — and asked me to return. So I returned and he said, ‘Mr. Shaw, I think I made a mistake.’ But for telling me that, just for telling me that, he charged me thirty-five dollars.” He looked at Raul and Alec for sympathy.

“Oh, God!” Alec said.

“That’s barbaric,” Raul said.

“Isn’t that crazy? So that’s one hundred and eighty-five dollars, and my teeth are still rotting away. So then comes the operation and the new dentures. They cost twelve hundred dollars. Altogether — thirteen hundred and eighty- five dollars.” Alec, who had been looking very seriously at his father, smiled. His father began to snicker; Alec broke out laughing.

“Come on, be quiet,” David said.

Alec, still laughing, said, “Okay, okay, I will.” He suppressed his amusement.

“But that wasn’t all.…”

Alec keeled over in laughter.