What Hearts Read online

  What Hearts

  Bruce Brooks

  Contents

  Title Page

  As If

  Not Blue

  Out

  What Hearts?

  About the Author

  Other Books by Bruce Brooks

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AS IF

  ONE

  Asa was amazed that he left first grade with so much stuff. As he ran down the winding tar path that led through the woods to the street, he took a quick inventory: his knapsack, straining at its straps, held a blank blue composition book and three unsharpened yellow pencils (for a summer journal; everyone had gotten these), a battered hardback copy of a book called The Little Prince (no one else had received this; the librarian had slipped it in secret to “my best little reader”), a mimeographed copy of the school handbook complete with all kinds of forms to be brought in on the first day of second grade in September (everyone, of course), six certificates stamped with foil medallions (one for completing the dumb first-grade reader with its “See Spot jump!” stories, one for being able to print the alphabet in upper and lower case, one for being able to sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag,” all of which everyone got, even Gordon Firestone, who never got the words right to the latter song and still couldn’t tell the difference between small “d” and “b,” “g” and “q” the other three were from gym class, for being able to run and jump and roll (some boys had gotten more than the three, but they were show-offs); a big, glossy black-and-white photograph of the whole class (for everyone, even the two lads who had missed school on the day the picture was taken; Asa had been sick with a bad cold himself, but his parents had ’ made him come for the picture, in which he was the only child wearing a jacket and tie); and, finally, a report card. Everyone had gotten a report card too, even Ronnie Wells, though the word was that he would have to repeat the year. Everyone had gotten one, a sky-blue cardboard report card with six boxes on it for final grades written in heavy black ink, grades for the whole year, grades summing up everything the kid had done; everything—but only Asa’s card held an A in each box, sharply drawn, lined up like six pointed missiles blasting off into a perfect future. Perfect! He was perfect, and he was the only one. Subtly, under the guise of friendly interest, he had checked: he had seen everyone else’s card except Ronnie’s (poor Ronnie could be fairly disregarded), and they all had at least one B. Rita Pennington had been closest; only her crinkly left-handed handwriting had kept her from sharing the pinnacle with Asa. He had a crush on Rita, but he was glad she had gotten a B in Penmanship. This made him ashamed, but there it was. Besides, she had won the lottery for the class hamster, so no one should feel too sorry for her.

  In addition to the treasures in his pack Asa clutched one more in his right hand: a bunch of fresh, hand-planted, hand-watered, hand-weeded, hand-picked radishes. He looked at them quickly; they were not believable. Nothing could become that color underground. Such a red had to be made by craft; surely it would take scientists, geniuses, to design the proper chemical sequence! Asa had chosen to plant radishes in the class garden when the first graders had pored over seed packets in February, simply because he did not believe they would come true. Today, just this morning, everyone had been allowed to undo all the work that had gone into keeping the vegetables hidden in the ground: they ripped their things out, shook the brown clods off them, and almost cried with revelation. Really: everyone, not just Asa, almost cried. The long orange carrots had been a hit, but the radishes stole the show. No one else had wanted to plant them, because they had all been thinking about eating what they grew. Asa had been thinking about growing what he grew, as an end in itself. But tonight he and his dad and his mom would all eat this wonderful redness. He was triumphant.

  As he approached the crosswalk, he worked one of his thirty-one radishes free from the tangle of greens and knobs, so that he could give it to Nadine, the policewoman whom he had seen twice a day through kindergarten and first grade, who had given him his first nickname (“Well hey, Ace—how you this morning?”), who allowed him his first joke of pretend mockery (“Fine, Captain—you caught any criminals yet?”). He stepped into the crosswalk.

  Before Nadine could greet him, he held out a radish to her. She drew her chin back to focus on it and shook her head. “No, I don’t love a radish. Thank you all the same, Ace.” She looked beyond him, wheeling her arm at a slowpoke. Asa was perplexed by the idea of not loving a radish, but he went on as he walked, turning backward so he could face her: “I got straight A’s, Captain. For the year.”

  “You have a nice summer,” she said, and went to help a kindergartner who was about to cry pick up a splaying fan of papers he had dropped. Asa hesitated, then turned back around toward home and kept walking.

  Well, maybe Bobby Levy would be more interested in what Asa had to share. In two minutes he would pass beneath the balcony on which Bobby always perched, only two feet off the uphill-slanting sidewalk but high enough to look down from. Bobby’s private school dismissed a half hour earlier than the public school, and Bobby spent that extra time watching TV. He made a point of waiting for Asa every afternoon with the blue-silver rectangle of a television set shining deep in the dark room behind him, implying pointedly the thirty minutes of fun Asa had missed by being so unwisely unprivate. During the thirty seconds in which Asa, walking resignedly uphill, was within the range of Bobby’s voice, Bobby, glib as a squirrel, always managed to chatter out a snappy summary of the rerun of I Love Lucy or The Real McCoys just for him. The summaries were remarkably clear, and Asa silently admired them even as he reminded himself that he disliked television comedies.

  In fact, Asa never spoke to Bobby at all. It was not part of the relationship. Bobby had something to say, and Asa was the listener; he received, and passed by. Once, in the fall, he had tried to turn the TV report into a conversation, but Bobby had glared at him, cranky and affronted; in the middle of Asa’s second sentence he snapped, “Father Knows Best is on right now!” and huffed through the sliding glass doors, pulling the curtains closed behind him. But today would be different. Asa had something to talk about, today. A radish, but more, too: those triangular black-ink A’s were poised tensely in his awareness like the heads of arrows on a bowstring, and he might have to let them fly.

  He looked ahead. Bobby, perched alertly on his balcony, was ready with his clipped, slightly bored tone, to begin: “So, Fred and Ethel win a trip to Cuba in a contest, but they entered under Ricky’s name because they thought it would help them…” or something like that. Asa’s heartbeats got quick. He knew he had to time this just right. If he let Bobby start his monologue, he would never be able to break in. He watched Bobby’s rabbity top teeth against his lower lip, and he walked, closer and closer. When he was within ten feet, the top teeth lifted. Asa shouted, “Bobby, I grew some radishes. And I got a book, about a prince, and I got straight A’s!” He came to a stop beneath the balcony, and motioned that he wanted to toss Bobby the radish Nadine had refused.

  Bobby stared down at him. He made no move to receive the offered radish. At last, after lifting his teeth a couple of times, he frowned and said, “I’m afraid there will be no more afternoon TV for you in the fall. You see, I’m starting piano. I am sorry for you.” Then he turned and went inside. This time he did not bother with the curtains.

  Asa stood for a moment. He held up his right hand and looked at the radishes. It was true that the greens were wilting pretty severely. But the red was fine. So were the grades in his knapsack; so was the prince in his book. He shrugged his shoulders in case Bobby was looking, and turned toward home. He knew his mother was there. She was waiting for him. But—just imagine!—she
had no idea about all this that was coming. It was as if the marvels he held right here in his hand and knapsack were not already certain—but they were, they were. She was in for some surprises, she and his father—especially his father: there was a guy who would know how to appreciate a radish. Asa stepped up his pace for home, full of the generous superiority of knowing exactly what you were about to give.

  TWO

  His mother was wearing a coat. This he could see, as he turned the corner and glanced ahead down the narrow sidewalk that ran in front of the apartments. She was sitting on something on the small stoop, looking straight ahead into the patios of the apartments across the green. Why wasn’t she looking in the direction she knew he would be coming from? Why was she wearing a coat? It was cool under the dense leaves of the high trees, but a coat was not right, not in Maryland in June. A coat was not right. As if to protest, Asa shivered. And as he closed in on her, he recognized the object she was sitting on. It was a large suitcase of black pebbled imitation leather. It looked new.

  She heard him and turned her head. He met her eyes. She stood up, her hands squeezed together in front of her. He looked at the suitcase briefly, then watched as she stared down at it and moved a step away, as if she expected something to open it from within now, and climb out.

  “Asa,” she said, looking up. “I have something to tell you.” She was shaking her hands up and down, clenched together. He would not have been surprised if she had suddenly opened them on a downstroke and dice had shot out and rolled onto the sidewalk. She often rolled off the board at games, because she threw too hard, as if serious effort would turn up better numbers.

  “Asa,” she said, “son.” Her face was moving in pieces; as he watched, the mouth twisted with one hard emotion, the eyes bulged with another that was softer, and the forehead twitched away from all these feelings. “Listen,” she said.

  But he did not. He leaped nimbly past her onto the porch, pulled and pushed his way through the screen door and the wooden door, and then found himself in nobody’s living room. That is how it hit him: when he had left for school that morning, the room had been his family’s, full of sofas and rugs and tables that belonged to him—but now it was empty, and it was nobody’s room. The sunlight slanted in through the windows across from him and made a weird shiny rhombus on the bare floor.

  Behind him, through the screen door, he heard his mother still talking. He was not listening, but he heard her. As he stared around the room—floor as spiffy as a pond with new ice, walls that looked forcefully flat, as if they were pulling away from him in four directions at once—he assembled the fragments of sound that joined him in the room, and made them into a summary of the facts, reciting them to himself in a dull but clear voice that he barely recognized as his own: your mother and father do not love each other anymore. There is to be something called a divorce. It is for your sake. Your father is gone, and soon you will be, too.

  He walked away from the voice and made a complete circuit of the empty place. Nobody was at home, throughout.

  THREE

  On the way to the airport in the taxi, Asa asked no questions, yet his mother continued to talk. She had talked the whole time they waited on the stoop, until a taxi had come—called in advance, the boy realized, to arrive just ten minutes after his return from school. The taxi driver was from India, and the colors of his skin and hair would normally have fascinated Asa, but not now.

  The man politely loaded the suitcase and knapsack into the taxi’s trunk, then held the door for Asa’s mother. But instead of getting in, she stood straight, facing the man, and pulled Asa to stand beside her. With her arm around him, she smiled down, gave him a shake, then looked at the taxi driver and said, “This little boy’s parents are getting a divorce. So we have to go to the airport and fly away to the beach.” She smiled at the driver as if the next move were his. Asa watched as the man tried to acknowledge the cheer of her smile yet register an appropriately sober concern for her news. Somehow he managed to pull it off. Asa admired his dexterity.

  His mother continued to stand and smile. Asa pulled away and got into the car.

  As they drove through Washington Asa looked out at the city. This was his city, his and his father’s; this had been their city. Perhaps it would continue to be his father’s—he did not know. He knew that he and his mother were moving to her childhood home in North Carolina, after an overnight visit to a beach on the way. He had been to North Carolina on visits, and did not much like it. It was full of white people who seemed to him overconfident and overfriendly, and black people who seemed to fake those same qualities and then hide. He liked Washington.

  “The whole world is in this town,” his father used to tell him as they drove through the streets, pointing out the Venezuelan embassy or a Japanese grocery or a parade of Pakistanis holding banners. His father sold things to physicians and pharmacists. Once every couple of months he had to call on every doctor and druggist in town. He took Asa with him a lot in the years before school, and then during the summer following kindergarten. They drove around, saw things, discovered nifty little parks where they played a quick bit of catch or newsstands where they bought unusual comics. They went to the zoo or aquarium in between drugstores, they ate odd brown sandwiches in small restaurants where all the other customers were Middle Eastern or Portuguese. Not a downtown day went by in which he did not hear at least four languages spoken around him.

  Now, in the taxi, his mother was speaking her own language, bringing him up to date with her ongoing explanation: He would see his father sometimes. His father still loved him. She still respected his father. She didn’t love him, but she respected him. He was not a bad man.

  Then Asa’s mother said something that made him sit up and look at her sharply. She said someone was going to meet them at the beach. A man was going to meet them there. His name was Dave. She said Asa would like Dave very much.

  Asa stared. His mother repeated her last sentence, about how he would like Dave very much. Then she stopped again, looking frightened by Asa’s stare.

  “You will like Dave,” she tried a third time.

  Asa said nothing. He stared her down. The cab made a left turn, then a right. The city bumped by. Finally, as they slipped over the banks of the Potomac onto the 14th Street bridge and left D. C. behind, Asa spoke. “Yes,” he said, “maybe so. Maybe I will like him. But the question is—will I respect him?”

  His mother said; “Oh!” and slapped him across the mouth, and lunged across his lap in a heap, chuckling out sobs that seemed to come from someone he didn’t know. He patted her hair as faintly as possible while her back heaved up and down. Heat came from her scalp. Asa looked up and met the pained eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror.

  “It is all right, sir?” asked the driver.

  “No,” said the boy. “It is not all right at all.”

  FOUR

  Dave was nearly bald. This surprised Asa, and right away he felt sorry for the man, as if thinning hair were a crippling strike of fate to be borne with bravery. The boy found himself feeling it was too easy to dislike someone who was bald, so he also found himself making a fabulous effort in the other direction, toward fondness. As they walked through the small airport and across a hot parking lot to Dave’s old car, Asa gabbed straight to him with startling chipperness—about the flight, about Washington, about the taxi drive, and, in the greatest detail, about a school play that had ended the first grade in triumph that very afternoon, a play in which he had brilliantly played the lead part of The Prince—a play that in fact had not, as he was perfectly aware, taken place at all.

  Dave seemed a little perplexed at the boy’s zippy attack of goodwill; he pulled himself askance a bit, nodding or grunting without comment, unencouraging but mildly congenial. But Asa’s mother watched her son with glowing beatitude, as if she had always known the two would get along just fine.

  A couple of times, in the car, Dave had to interrupt Asa’s chatter to say something about
their destination. Whenever this happened, Asa, who was standing on the hump in the floor just behind the middle of the front seat, jounced up and down and resumed his narrative at the earliest verbal opening. In a way, he wasn’t involved with this frantic speech; his intelligence seemed to be standing back, watching the show and wondering when it would stop. His mother, whose bliss had begun to lose its glow fast, held her hands to her temples, then brought them down sharply and turned on him. She remembered to smile, barely. Asa was in the middle of a description of his last season as the center fielder for a D. C. Little League team called the Jaguars, telling Dave with keen detail how he had caught a would-be last-inning grand-slam home run by toppling over the fence, then trotted dejectedly as if with an empty glove into the infield as if the game were over—and then touched second and first with the ball revealed in his mitt, for the world’s only unassisted triple play by an outfielder. Considering he did not even own a baseball glove, it was an excellent bit of storytelling.

  “Honey,” his mother said. Asa went into his jiggling pause. “Honey, Dave is tired.” She looked at Dave as if for confirmation.

  But Dave grinned straight ahead and said, “Oh, I don’t know. I’m feeling pretty fresh, actually. Love to hear if maybe the kid ever hit a big home run, or maybe starred in a movie. I bet he has. I bet he could remember if he thinks back. Love to hear that one.” He grinned even harder, and flicked a glance at Asa’s mother. Asa caught an edge of the glance. He was surprised to see that it was completely, unmistakably, mean. In that instant all of Asa’s energy swooped away from him, and he was left silent, calm and relieved. He was free to hate Dave now. He sat back.

  Dave made a couple of comments to goad him into stretching out again, but Asa looked out the window. They were passing a beach. He stared at the ocean, and when a motel interposed itself between him and the ocean he tried to keep his eyes focused on the distance, so that when the ocean came back into view it would be clear. It was a strange game, and he could do it, but he couldn’t figure out how he did it.