Cold Spring Harbor Read Online Free PDF Page A

always knew what he looked like, and he knew it gave him a decided advantage with girls.
    Soon the sherry was flowing again for everyone except the boy, Phil, a melancholy kid who didn’t seem to mind being left out. He was fooling around on the floor with the cat. Rachel had taken a chair some distance away from Evan’s, almost as though she didn’t trust herself to be any closer, and he looked her over carefully as she exchanged a few courtesies with his father. He liked her skin and her brown hair and wide brown eyes. Nobody would ever call her “saucy”; still, everybody knew there were thousands of kinds of prettiness in girls; and besides, with this particular girl you didn’t think of kinds or categories. She was herself: a little thin and soft, but with a wonderful look of having newly come to life. His mind began to play with the implications of words like “tender” and “fresh” and “perishable”; this was a girl you could cherish and protect. And the best part was that he knew it would be easy to come back to this place and see her again, soon, and take her out.
    The boy Phil was sitting in a chair now with his thighs pressed together; he was holding the cat on his lap, stroking and fondling it, bent over and murmuring to it, and hewas apparently still too young to know what a pansy-looking way that was to sit. When he looked up there were shadows under his eyes as plain as dust. He probably spent a lot of his time like this—indoors, hearing his mother’s relentless talk and longing for it to stop, dying a little when the alcohol began to thicken her tongue—and Evan had to feel sorry for him. Well, but even so, if he didn’t like this kind of afternoon, why didn’t he go outside? Why didn’t he get into stickball games in the street, or get into fights with Italian kids and learn a few things about life?
    “How old are you, Phil?” Evan asked him.
    “Fifteen.”
    “Oh? You look younger than that.”
    “Yeah, I know.”
    “You go to school around here?”
    “Yeah, I go to—” Phil began, but his mother broke in and talked him quickly down.
    “Oh, well, that doesn’t matter any more,” she explained, “because he’s our wonderful big prep-school boy now. He’ll be going to
prep
school in the fall; isn’t that exciting?”
    Evan said it was fine, and Charles mumbled something appropriate too; but then Charles had to blink a few times, looking around into various parts of the room. There was nothing about this place, or these people, to suggest the kind of money a preparatory school would probably cost. Whoever the absent father was, he must now be writing out an avalanche of other checks, on top of the alimony, paying for more and ever more unnecessary things.
    “… Well, it’s a small school,” Gloria Drake was saying, “and it’s not as old as some of the better-known ones, but it has a certain character of its own. I think he’ll have a marvelous time there, and I think it’ll do him a world of good …”
    When the man from West Village Motors came to the door, Evan left the building with him and took him downthe street to have a look at the car. It didn’t take long. A very few minutes later Evan was back in the Drakes’ apartment, accepting more sherry, turning to face his father with a mixture of humor and apology as he reported that the man had told him the car would have to be towed away and scrapped. “He said to me ‘This is junk you got here, pal. Nothing but junk.’ ”
    “Oh!” Rachel Drake cried. “What a terrible thing for anyone to say about your
car
.” And she looked instantly shy because those were the first words she’d spoken to Evan.
    “Oh, well, it’s a very old car,” he explained to her, not quite brave enough to meet her lovely eyes. “I should’ve known it was practically finished.”
    “Well, I think you’re wonderful,” she said, and she was consciously flirting with him now, “if you can take something as important as a