Eleven Read Online Free PDF Page B

she was staring at him with a frowning bewilderment that was almost like fear. Then she looked away and stretched superiorly high on her toes to peer over the bobbing heads—and the last thing he saw of her was her shining eyes with the determined, senseless, self-abandoned hope in them.
    And as he walked up Lexington Avenue, he did cry. Now his eyes were exactly like those of the girl, he knew, shining, full of a relentless hope. He lifted his head proudly. He had his letter to Rosalind to write tonight. He began to compose it.

THE TERRAPIN
    Victor heard the elevator door open, his mother’s quick footsteps in the hall, and he flipped his book shut. He shoved it under the sofa pillow out of sight, and winced as he heard it slip between sofa and wall and fall to the floor with a thud. Her key was in the lock.
    “Hello, Vee-ector-r!” she cried, raising one arm in the air. Her other arm circled a big brown paper bag, her hand held a cluster of little bags. “I have been to my publisher and to the market and also to the fish market,” she told him. “Why aren’t you out playing? It’s a lovely, lovely day!”
    “I was out,” he said. “For a little while. I got cold.”
    “Ugh!” She was unloading the grocery bag in the tiny kitchen off the foyer. “You are seeck, you know that? In the month of October, you are cold? I see all kinds of children playing on the sidewalk. Even, I think, that boy you like. What’s his name?”
    “I don’t know,” Victor said. His mother wasn’t really listening, anyway. He pushed his hands into the pockets of his short, too smallshorts, making them tighter than ever, and walked aimlessly around the living-room, looking down at his heavy, scuffed shoes. At least his mother had to buy him shoes that fit him, and he rather liked these shoes, because they had the thickest soles of any he had ever owned, and they had heavy toes that rose up a little, like mountain climbers’ shoes. Victor paused at the window and looked straight out at a toast-colored apartment building across Third Avenue. He and his mother lived on the eighteenth floor, next to the top floor where the penthouses were. The building across the street was even taller than this one. Victor had liked their Riverside Drive apartment better. He had liked the school he had gone to there better. Here they laughed at his clothes. In the other school, they had finally got tired of laughing at them.
    “You don’t want to go out?” asked his mother, coming into the living-room, wiping her hands briskly on a paper bag. She sniffed her palms. “Ugh! That stee-enk!”
    “No, Mama,” Victor said patiently.
    “Today is Saturday.”
    “I know.”
    “Can you say the days of the week?”
    “Of course.”
    “Say them.”
    “I don’t want to say them. I know them.” His eyes began to sting around the edges with tears. “I’ve known them for years. Years and years. Kids five years old can say the days of the week.”
    But his mother was not listening. She was bending over the drawing-table in the corner of the room. She had worked late on something last night. On his sofa bed in the opposite corner of theroom, Victor had not been able to sleep until two in the morning, when his mother had gone to bed on the studio couch.
    “Come here, Veector. Did you see this?”
    Victor came on dragging feet, hands still in his pockets. No, he hadn’t even glanced at her drawing-board this morning, hadn’t wanted to.
    “This is Pedro, the little donkey. I invented him last night. What do you think? And this is Miguel, the little Mexican boy who rides him. They ride and ride all over Mexico, and Miguel thinks they are lost, but Pedro knows the way home all the time, and . . .”
    Victor did not listen. He deliberately shut his ears in a way he had learned to do from many years of practice, but boredom, frustration—he knew the word frustration, had read all about it—clamped his shoulders, weighed like a stone in his body, pressed