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A Mother's Kisses

A Novel

OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA

Once, when he was five, a Negro woman had been assigned to watch him through the summer, allowing him to wander only twenty paces in each direction. Each time he reached the edge of a building and tried to go around it she would rein him back to her side. He spent the summer a lidless city pavement animal, tied to a chain, wheeling drugged and lazy in the sun. Now, twelve years later, it seemed to Joseph that he was chained again and that there was nothing to do but stand in front of his apartment house and stretch and try to breathe and wait for the days to pass. There did not seem to be any way for him to get off by himself around some corner. He had finished high school and sent out applications to two colleges for the fall, Columbia and Bates, the latter because he liked the name. Once, at a summer resort, he had watched a short scrappy fellow with heavy thighs play basketball, staying all over his man, hollering out catcalls, giving his opponent no quarter. The fellow said he went to Bates and Joseph had come to think of the school as a scrappy little heavy-thighed college full of fast little fellows who pressed their opponents. He chose Columbia in case the out-of-town school rejected him for not being scrappy enough.

Although Joseph did very well in high school, he did not get very much in the way of college guidance. All such assistance came under the direction of a folksy old hygiene teacher named Pop Frebble who walked with a cane; when Joseph approached him in the hall one day about colleges, he winced and held his side as though the question had slashed at his hip. It was understood that each term Pop Frebble took only two boys under his wing for guidance, the one with the best grades in the eight-hundred-man graduating class and the fellow with the keenest sense of union arbitration problems, since Frebble had excellent connections with an upstate labor school and could slip any man he wanted to into its freshman ranks. It was generally felt that two careers were about as many as you could expect a folksy old man with a hip condition to oversee; all other graduates knew that they were to fend for themselves. When Joseph asked his mother about college, she said, "The money will be there."

"I don't mean that. I don't know which ones to send off to."

"Don't worry about the money," she said. "We'll get it somehow. It'll be there."

And so Joseph stood pat with his original two college ideas. One day a letter arrived from Bates, slightly astonished that he should want to go to it and informing him that the freshman quota was full. Joseph consoled himself with the thought that there was nothing really substantial behind all those scrappy hollering fellows out at Bates and that scrappiness would be of little use off the basketball court, in a room, for example, when you were trying to read or talk. He settled back, waiting to hear from Columbia. Of his ten neighborhood friends, eight or nine had already been accepted by various out-of-town schools and had lit out for summer resorts to work as waiters and earn money for their tuitions; only two people he knew remained behind in the city, one a boy named Himber who was going to be a doctor and had decided to get a head start by putting in a summer learning facts.

"I'll have you a contest on names of Cabinet members, Wilson to Roosevelt's second term," he said to Joseph in the street. "Up in my room this afternoon."

"What good are they going to do you?" asked Joseph.

"I just want to know them, as many as I can learn. What's the capital of Ecuador? Southern Rhodesia?"

Joseph brushed off Himber, but had a premonition one day that the boy might be right and spent an evening memorizing names of hydroelectric projects.

The other neighborhood person remaining in the city was a girl named Eileen Fastner who had matured early and was nicknamed "Fasty"; in junior high school she was always being brought home drooling by hygiene teachers after having been violated by rowdies in the school clothing closet. In recent years, however, she had straightened out and was now a comely brunette with shiny hair and a sophisticated manner, one semester of Syracuse already tucked beneath her belt. Joseph whiled away some of his days sunbathing on the roof of his apartment building; she would take a chair next to him, lowering her halter straps sophisticatedly and giving him leads on what to expect in the way of freshman Beowulf lectures. But she was still "Fasty" to him and he could not erase the picture of those post-clothing-closet marches at the side of hygiene teachers.

Joseph was a tall and scattered-looking boy with an Indian nose; sometimes, as he sat on the burning tar of the apartment building roof, he wondered whether he should be sending off applications to other colleges, ones whose catalogue names had a good ring to them. Wouldn't Duke, for example, be a fine-sounding, masculine kind of place to tell people you were going to. And Bowdoin, which was right next to Bates in the catalogue and might turn out to be just as scrappy, only in a quiet, more scholarly way. Why not get one off to Colgate, a scrubbed and beaming, crew-cut place, and Bucknell, too, brash, white-sneakered and cocky as a pup. How about more contemplative-sounding ones, Brown, for example, a leafy poetic place, good for taking nostalgic walks through low-hanging leaf arbors. It seemed to him that almost any of those fine-sounding places would do very nicely; but since he had told Bates that he had wanted to go to it ever since he was a child ("Why do you want to go to Bates?"), he could not bring himself to inform Ithaca and Carnegie Tech he had been thirsting to attend them, too. Besides, his one turndown had been wounding; he felt certain that something in the tone of his applications would tip off Kent State and Oberlin that he was a Bates reject. Perhaps Bates had gotten out a circular on all its castoffs, mailing it to the other scrappy schools in its hustling little conference.

And so he waited for Columbia, bored and stifled, unable to find a place to put himself, the Bensonhurst sun gnawing a warm circle on top of his head. Sometimes, when the hot roof cinders filled his nose, he would take long oppressive walks to a track inside an abandoned stadium and jog around it until a stitching pain, like loose glass in his ribs, forced him to stop and sit alone in the ruined box seats. Or he would stroll for miles in the patched shade of an el, trains screaming above his head, hoping to wind up somewhere lovely, perhaps on the rolling scented lawns of Rollins College or in Hamilton's cool tradition-haunted halls. Other days he would stand opposite an endless railroad yard, listening to the squawk and clatter of nearby power generators, feeling a little bad he did not really know what all the machinery was for; people who did were ushered warmly into Bates and Antioch and Purdue. All he seemed to be good at was feeling flat and lonely standing next to such things; he knew how to smell them and get their carbon flakes in his mouth. Sometimes he would wind up the afternoons sitting on a giant stone courthouse lion; when he was a child, leaps from its neck to the pavement had seemed courageous death-defying plunges, but now his feet dangled over, almost touching the concrete paws. The lion, the railroad yard, the abandoned track — all were boyhood relics; he seemed to have them laid out like infield bases, running around them, stepping on them one last time as though he could then gather up the lot in a bag and present them as an admission ticket to the gates of one of those wondrous, faraway places such as Tufts or Coe or S.M.U.

Often he tried to stretch his sleep so that he could perhaps skip a day; once his mother put her head into the covers and said, "Why not a date with the Fastner girl? She turned out nice and there's money."

"I remember things about her and I've got to have a college before girls."

"I'm having some time with you," she said. "They tell me daughters are hard. They never heard of boys."

When there seemed no way to sleep through the whole summer, he would walk out of the apartment, often meeting the fact-gathering Himber's mother in the elevator. Her son had been accepted by Rochester University, one of the few catalogue names that sounded unappetizing to Joseph, a slatelike and industrial place of little mystery. But in her mind, all other boys in the Western world were frustrated Rochester applicants.

"Dickie's set for Rochester," she said once. "What about you?"

"I don't know yet."

"They can't take everybody. It's one of those things. I wouldn't brood about it. There are plenty of other good colleges, and you can't always get what you want. Have you heard Dickie on dates of great battles?"

"Not yet," Joseph answered.

The drugstore was a good place to slouch and languish and trace pictures on the counter in the wet overflow of sodas. But Shep Varnes, the proprietor, had a son who was to start Southern Cal in the fall. Varnes's brother, a man who made rims on panties, had gotten him in for engineering, using West Coast political influence. In the drugstore, knowing Joseph's plight, he would run his hand through the boy's hair and chuck him under the chin, cheering him along by saying "C'mon" and "Awwww" and "Hey, boy." But Joseph knew he hadn't chin-chucked and hey-boyed his own son. What he'd done for him was to go on his knees to his panty-rim brother and plead him into college; that's what he'd done.

"Get close to your father," Joseph's mother said to him. "This is a good time for it."

The father was a quiet man who worked on sectional couches. One morning Joseph awakened early to accompany him to his plant, crusty-eyed, dressing glumly in the dusk, feeling he was going to a hospital. His father stopped at the corner to buy a newspaper and said, "I buy a paper here." In the subway car he said, "I usually stand at this end and hold on to a strap."

He took Joseph up to a great gray loft full of couch skeletons, steering him directly over to a machine. "This cuts couches," he said to Joseph. He flipped it on, letting it slice a piece of couch in half.

"It's plenty sharp, isn't it? I use that machine a lot. If you go over and fool around with it, I'll smack you."

When they had taken off their coats, Joseph's father went right to work, spreading a large piece of paper on a table and writing on it. "I draw up my couch on this and then I do the couch right next to the table here."

His father's boss came over then and put his hand on Joseph's shoulder, his eyes at the ceiling.

"What do you want to be when you're ready?" he asked, looking past Joseph to the end of the loft.

"I don't think I want to be in couch work," said Joseph.

The boss seemed greatly relieved. He began to dart about excitedly, finally picking up a piece of leather and handing it to Joseph. "Here, kid," he said. "Keep it. Take it home with you." Then he said to Joseph's father, "You got a nice son there. Smart boy."

Joseph's father worked a while on his paper, then said, "The fellow I'm going to bring over now, I'm the boss of him."

A terribly round-shouldered Greek man approached. "This is Freddy," Joseph's father said. "He works for me."

The man gave Joseph a wringing-wet hand. "Hi, kid. I work for your dad."

When the man walked away, Joseph's father whispered, "He only makes ninety-eight a week. Imagine that."

At lunchtime, Joseph and his father had a sandwich at a crowded counter nearby. The older man tossed down his last few bites, then began to walk briskly back toward his office, finally breaking into a trot. "I only take a fast bite," he said to Joseph, who was trotting by his side. When he got back to the loft, the father flung off his coat, looking warily about him, then buried his head in his planning paper. At the end of the day, closing up the loft, Joseph's father locked the front door and said, "I've been in the couch game for twenty-seven years." Then on the subway, he said to Joseph, "Now is when I read my paper."

That night, after dinner, Joseph and his father walked silently across the park, finally ducking into a neighborhood movie to break the tension. Inside the theater, Joseph saw the fact-gathering Himber and Fasty together on a side aisle; he slid down in his seat, not wanting them to know he went to movies with a father and no girl.

Sitting next to his silent couch-making dad that night, it seemed to Joseph that outside the streets rocked and thundered with news of children who had smashed down the barriers of proud Villanova, been welcomed warmly into snowy Colorado U. Great armies of proud-breasted aunts patrolled the city, all abuzz with stories of nephews who were "going up to Maine," nieces "heading down to Miami." As he walked home later with his father, one such woman stopped them, told of a grandson who'd be "on his way to Lehigh" in September, then asked, "Where is your boy going out to in the fall?"

"I don't know," Joseph's father chuckled. "He hasn't said a word to me about it yet. Where are you going, kid?"

"To some college," Joseph said.

How he yearned to be one of those nephews and nieces going up to, down to and out to some golden, fragrant knowledge-heavy institution. How he longed even to be "burrowing underground to," "working his way overland toward," or even "sailing across the damned ocean in the direction of" one of those fine proud catalogue places.

To duck people, Joseph spent the next three days indoors wearing a bathrobe. It was a tradition in his family to get right into one during periods of crisis. Once, during the only extended quarrel Joseph could remember his parents' having, his mother had stayed in one for a month. It broke up a romance of his. He had been standing on the sidewalk about to kiss a twig-thin dark-haired girl who lived in the next building and whose father had recently been snatched off to prison as a forger; out of the corner of his eye he spotted his mother making her way up the hill wearing the bathrobe. He hadn't counted on her making a street appearance in the robe and hoped she would cross to the other side. But she moved forward, irrevocably, until the thin girl spotted her.

"Why does your mother wear bathrobes downstairs?"

"She just wears them," he said, knowing the romance had been snapped off right there.

Those three bathrobed days, Joseph dreamed that in some miraculous way wonderful catalogue colleges would learn of people such as himself, leftover boys with special qualities, hailing them forward grandly under a special no-application-needed quota. Each morning, with bathrobe tightly furled about him, he would go downstairs to the family mailbox slot to peer inside for Columbia letters; but he kept one tense and lonely eye out, too, for the friendly, outgoing letterhead of Nevada Southern, the prim ascetic seal of Claremont Men's.

On one such morning Joseph's mother followed him to the mail slot in a robe of her own and said, "All right, that settles it. No more having a crazy son. I'm taking a place in the country and getting you into a camp across the lake. There'll be health and getting your mind off colleges. I've had enough of you in that bathrobe."

"I'm not budging until I've got Columbia straightened out. How can I go to the country when I'm not going anywhere yet?"

"Instead of fainting here you'll faint at the camp. I'm going to go upstairs and start getting into my girdle."

In the apartment Joseph's mother asked, "Have you seen my girdle around?"

"No," said Joseph. "And I don't want to know about it either. Why do I have to be brought in on your girdle-wearing?"

"Watch your mouth. Get dressed. I'm taking you over to see Doc Salamandro about the camp. He's tough, but I can handle that kind."

Joseph had heard about Doc Salamandro, the director of Camp Fleetwind, had once seen a picture of him handing over a bag of charity in a local newspaper. He was a short gray-haired man with great bulging legs, who was known to jump up on people's fenders. Once some men had knocked him down and robbed the camp, fleeing in a car. Doc Salamandro had chased them, leaped up on their fender and pummeled the driver through the car window. He did the same thing to some parents who had tried to escape without paying.

On the way to his office, Joseph said, "The only way I'll go to this camp is if I can work there and get some money. It would be nice to have a good hunk in case a miracle happens and I get to go to college somewhere."

"You're always worried about money," she said to Joseph. "You know what money's always meant to me?"

"What's that?"

"Crap."

She took that approach often. But other times, giving Joseph some money, she would say, "Be careful how you spend it. Your father's labor is in every dollar." And she kept her bills crumpled up in sorrowful little black change purses. Whenever she tried to buy Joseph a suit, he would say, "I don't need it," knowing it would have to be paid for with tear-soaked dollars from the little black jobs.

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Excerpted from A Mother's Kisses by Bruce Jay Friedman. Copyright © 1964 Bruce Jay Friedman. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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