What Hearts Read online

  Mrs. Brock glanced a quick smile at him, then gave her attention to the principal. It was a good smile that said Let’s get this official guy out of the way and well have plenty of time to get together. Asa exhaled silently with relief.

  As soon as the principal withdrew, Mrs. Brock pulled Asa into the room and guided him over to the huddle of boys. A waft of soft perfume rose warmly from the arm that lay across his shoulders. “All right,” she said, handing him a sword, “you’ll be—let’s see—oh, Antonius. Thursday you and these three senators will present a report to the tribunal on the prospects for war with Carthage. You be the one to talk about the elephants, okay? Okay, guys?”

  “I was going to do the elephants,” said a large boy with a thick shirt, eyeing Asa.

  “Then you do the weapons of Carthage now, Mark,” said Mrs. Brock. “You’re the wicked type, so that ought to keep you happy. Do pikes and hooks and scimitars and whatever else the Carthaginians planned on sticking into your flabby pink Roman rib cage. Have you,” she said, turning to Asa with what he could only recognize as brilliant intuition, “ever seen an elephant?”

  “African or Indian?” he said. He blushed, ashamed of showing off, for he had seen both in the National Zoo.

  “Lord help us, a smarty-pants,” she said, turning away to go rewrap the girls in togas.

  “So,” said Mark, pointing at Asa with his sword and bringing him across the threshold of the class with the easy nature of the threat, “you better give us a good idea what we should use to kill those suckers.”

  He did. His report a few days later stunned them all. Oh, Asa knew how to make the most of an opportunity for debut. He was aware that every time he came to a new class he had the chance to create himself in the eyes of the strangers with whom he would spend the next little while—a chance the hometown kids never got, being familiar with each other since the beginning of kindergarten or earlier. Asa, by now, knew what land of attention would be aimed at him, knew which aspects of curiosity to exploit and which to deflect. He was good. He could put on a show.

  In the middle of the tribunal presentation he unfurled huge drawings done on the floor of his bedroom on sheets of manila paper, taped together to twelve times the usual size—strangely colored drawings of grotesque exaggerations of elephants as they might have been imagined by Romans who had, after all, never seen one. He struck a senatorial tone that vacillated between military bravado and fascinated fear, emphasizing with wonder the fabulous violence that could be wrought by these wild things driven by wild men. He finished with a roaring challenge to the citizens to “see to our defenses lest we be torn, gored, and rent asunder by the ravaging fury of unknown forces not so distant in time and place!” The boys rose spontaneously to their feet with a roar, shaking their weapons defiantly, devotedly. The girls stared, impressed; they could appreciate a good report. One girl later asked soberly where he had acquired the archaic language. He confessed it was from the Bible. She nodded thoughtfully.

  Even before his debut Asa had found ways into and out of the needs and enthusiasms of quite a few of his classmates. Steve was afraid of being stupid; so when talking to Steve, he used words that were long but common, and left sentences unfinished, groping for a word Steve could leap to provide. Cheryl liked to laugh at things no one else would find funny, so Asa dotted their talks with quirky details and reacted with a surprised thrill when she cackled. Lee was a comic-book freak who mystified other kids by comparing the subject of every conversation to some obscure subplot from a superhero tale, which he related with awkward, rushed specificity. Asa, who knew all the subplots, brightened Lee’s eyes by providing a detail here and there (and a crisp translation, for Lee’s confused listeners).

  Everyone had an opening. Finding it only took alertness. As for slipping through the openings—well, it just seemed to happen. Asa was not being artificial or even artful. He did not pretend or dupe. With Steve, for example, it seemed he really couldn’t think of that missing word, though at another time he had words by the hundreds to fill every blank. It was all managed above anyone’s notice. This gave the illusion of naturalness, even, sometimes, to Asa himself.

  After Rome was finished, he imagined he had made up for the weeks lost at the beginning of the year, if not for the years lost from kindergarten on. He had roles; he could be counted on for certain things. On the playground he had shown what he could do with the various tops, yo-yos, pocketknives, and harmonicas that demanded demonstrations of proficiency from every boy, in every school. Though he had never been anywhere long enough to learn team sports, when it came to portable skills, he could play. In the classroom his strengths had come out clearly, too, as he was called on for this and that. He could be counted on to whip through big-number multiplications and divisions in his head with an arrogant immediacy. And his long sentences—which filled themselves in as they wound their way around the subject of a question, opening impossible challenges of tense and sense in their early clauses but always, always coming to a brilliant conclusion—became a kind of group exercise in suspense and release as everyone felt the momentum pick up, heard the possibilities for error accrue, kept track of the bits that would be required for final resolution, and applauded with laughter as he boisterously provided them. He would have bet that his classmates, if asked about him, would not have recalled in their first thought, or even their fifth, that he had been inserted into the class six weeks into the year.

  So it was something of a shock when Mrs. Brock clapped her hands one afternoon early in his third week and said, “All right, my little prima donnas, we’ve been taking it easy, but now it’s time to rehearse for Show Night,” and everyone separated into configurations he had never seen, twos, fives, boys with girls, singletons. He stood at his desk, blinking, uncertain. Right away Mrs. Brock noticed him, and put her hands on her cheeks in mock horror.

  “Asa, what a chucklehead I am,” she said. “I completely forgot.”

  She explained that every year the PTA kicked off its membership drive in the late fall with a variety show put on by a single class. This year was the fourth grade’s turn. During the second week of school, each child had chosen something to do for the show. Six of them together were enacting a play they had written about the first Thanksgiving. Two others were putting together a clown act, in which, she suspected, they planned to throw a few of the pies used as props by the earlier pilgrims. One girl was dressing up as Robert E. Lee and giving short speeches about how the South actually had won the Civil War. What, she asked, did Asa want to do?

  What did Asa want to do? Well, his project had been making friends, his concentration so keen that, at this moment, he was unable to think of himself doing something alone.

  It did not take Mrs. Brock long to sense that he was at a loss. She motioned to the three solo acts, two boys and the girl who would be Robert E. Lee. They came over. “Okay,” she said. “Who wants a partner? Amy Louise?”

  “Mrs. Brock I cannot possibly,” said the girl, clearly offended, perhaps by the implication that Robert E. Lee could be joined as an equal by anyone, or perhaps by the implication that she herself could.

  “Fine. Generals can be very difficult colleagues anyway, Asa,” said Mrs. Brock. “How about you, Harold?”

  Harold looked confused. He often did. “It ain’t nothing but radio,” he said.

  “Of course, of course.” Mrs. Brock patted his shoulder. “Harold is a ham radio nut. His performance is to set up his receiver and pull in a broadcast from Russia. Very exciting, but not the sort of thing that invites collaboration. Well, Joel?”

  Joel was a tall boy with fuzzy hair and a red face, all the parts of which seemed to be straining outward in a parody of aggressive friendliness toward all: his eyes popped, his nose arched, his cheeks bulged, even his teeth seemed to reach. He had spoken to Asa often, especially in his first days in the class; he had even invited the new boy over to play at his house after school two or three times. Asa had not been much interested; he had mor
e challenging conquests to mount. Now, at the prospect of sharing, Joel was about to burst with goodwill.

  “Mrs. Brock, Asa would be welcome to recite with me.” He shifted his grin to Asa and held out a very old book.

  “Joel is going to recite a poem,” she explained. As Asa made no move, she took the book herself and thumbed through it. “Something by Eugene Field, wasn’t it?”

  Joel nodded. “ ‘Little Boy Blue,’” he said. “Not the nursery rhyme with the ‘come blow your horn’ stuff. This is a really neat poem. We can say it together, if you like. That would be fun. We can practice so we match. Like the Everly Brothers.”

  Mrs. Brock winced slightly. “That might, well, be a little much, boys. I mean, two voices in unison would sort of draw attention away from the—the lonesome sadness of the single child passing away, you see. Break up the effect. But maybe you could alternate stanzas….” She held the book out to Asa. He had no choice but to take it.

  “Sure!” said Joel.

  Asa frowned into the text. “Well,” he heard himself say, “okay. Thanks.”

  At home, in his room alone, he thought of a dozen things he would rather do for the show than recite a poem called “Little Boy Blue” with Joel. Each inspired him to get up and go to the telephone. He even looked up Mrs. Brock’s number. Look, he would tell her, I want to juggle large chrome rings, or I want to present the calls of twenty birds, or I want to play my guitar. He would make a point of sounding very simply excited, as if Joel did not enter into it at all, as if his own sheer creativity were driving him to nix the deal he had made that afternoon.

  The only thing that made Asa pause before dialing Mrs. Brock’s number was the fact that he could not juggle, he could not imitate the calls of birds, he owned no guitar. There was no doubt in his mind that he could scramble and master one of these tasks by the time he needed to perform; he could do anything he thought of doing, he was certain. But Joel had told him Mrs. Brock asked the other students to give a quick demonstration of their tricks so that she could approve or redirect their showmanship. In fact, she had suggested that two of them make changes: Susan, a haughty, religious girl, had wanted to sing three Baptist hymns; but she could not carry a tune, so she was now slated to recite three psalms; and Peter, whose voice-and-gesture impressions of John Wayne, President Eisenhower, and Ed Sullivan had all seemed exactly alike, was now going to sing “The Yellow Rose of Texas” and “The Streets of Laredo” while dressed as a cowboy. However, Joel reported with ecstasy, however, Asa was approved without audition to recite “Little Boy Blue.” Imagine! Well, Asa, who had a feeling Mrs. Brock knew she was taking a pretty slim risk in letting him mumble a few lines unapproved, did not want to test that faith. He had a feeling it would not extend to juggling and birdcalls.

  He sat in his room looking out the window. Outside, the moon sat high and round and white in the dense, dark sky. The moon was isolated, touching nothing, having no effect on the darkness around it; it seemed as if any minute the vastly greater darkness would simply take over, and the moon would be no more. Yet down in his backyard a small apple tree was casting a thick shadow on the lawn. The shadow was there because the tree was standing in the way of the moonlight, which shone bright as lightning on everything in sight. How could this be? How could the moonlight get all the way here through the sky without leaving some silver trace? Asa felt his curiosity and intelligence quicken, and he knew he could figure it out in time, and after he did, he would love moonlight. From insight to love was not a big step.

  This is what he was good at, he realized. This is what he did. He placed himself in the world, and the world drew his thoughts outside himself, where they multiplied and spiraled and led him in silent, thrilling flights. And as he expanded into the world, he expanded inside. At these moments an endlessness beyond thought opened inside him. Outside, his mind was whizzing through things, but inside, he was silent, still; sometimes, he knew he was not even breathing.

  How do you put on a show of that? Asa felt that these abilities and experiences must appear, somehow, in everything he did, in what he was; but how could anyone be expected to know what he was? He was alone. That was it, really. Even when he was scurrying around figuring the angles and openings of other people, he was operating alone. He was a singleton, not a showman.

  He got up from the window and found Joel’s book. He thought of taking it back to the window and reading it by the moonlight, but he could not do it—not a poem called “Little Boy Blue.” The ghost of Eugene Field was probably hovering somewhere begging him to read it in the moonlight, then cry silver tears. He switched on his overhead light.

  He found the poem and read it. When he finished, he stared at the wall. It was difficult to believe that someone had written this. He read it again, and this time, he found it difficult to believe that someone else, even a kid, had chosen it to recite, on a stage, in front of other people. A sweet little boy pats his stuffed animals and drops dead in the night, and oh what a sad, sad world it is. Asa tried to laugh, but found that despite his scorn, he could not easily shake the heavy sadness the poem labored so shamelessly to create. This made him furious.

  A few months ago, he and his mother and stepfather had been at a restaurant. While they were waiting for their food, Dave had gotten up and gone to the jukebox. He studied the selections for a moment, dropped in a coin, and pressed two buttons. A song bloomed from the small speaker over their booth, a song his mother apparently recognized, for as Dave sat down again next to Asa, she looked across at him and said, “Oh, honey, thanks.”

  The song was sung by a man with a high, rather nasal voice. It was a personal narrative about his darling young wife. She had come to him one spring, they had been in love for a year, then for some reason—something woeful that happened between the second chorus and the third verse, during the violin solo—she died. In the last verse, he was looking at a tree in the yard and noticing that it had grown. She, of course, being dead, had not, which (Asa thought) must be what made his mother so sad. For she was crying by the time the violins—hundreds of them by now—faded back into the speaker.

  They sat in silence, except for his mother’s snufflings. Asa said nothing. The air at the table was suddenly very tense; there was danger popping like ions. Asa would not have spoken for a hundred dollars. He held his breath and hoped the food would come. He saw the waitress emerge from the kitchen, carrying a tray with three plates. He let his breath out as she approached. He had made it.

  But then, just before she arrived, Dave held up a hand to stop her. He turned his head slightly and looked sideways at Asa with a thin, amused smile. “Well?” he said.

  Asa stared at the waitress. She stood, holding the heavy tray. “Well what?” the boy said, innocently.

  Dave lifted his chin in a little nod at him. The smile held. “Well, what did you think of the song?”

  Asa looked at his stepfather. Across the table, his mother had sniffed to a halt, and was wiping her eyes with a napkin. “I’m hungry,” the boy said. “Please let’s just eat.”

  The waitress made a move to put the tray down, but Dave held his hand out again and stopped her. “Now, I think it’s a fair question to ask a boy, don’t you? Just a simple question. And a boy ought to answer when he’s spoken to.” He lifted his chin again, and the smile tightened. “So answer me, unless you want to be reminded of your manners when we get home.”

  Asa took a deep breath and tried to hold it. He couldn’t hold it forever. “All right,” he burst out, louder than he wanted to be. “Okay. It’s a stupid song designed to suck the easy stupid sad feelings out of people who have plenty of other things to feel sad about, and it’s about as real as the sunshine in cigarette commercials, and I hate every stinking word.”

  He sat, breathing hard and quaking, his eyes bulging hard against the insides of his eyelids with every pounding heartbeat, making the restaurant disappear in flashes of white, white, white. His mother exploded into sobs once more, but worse this time: rea
l. Dave apparently gave the waitress a signal, for she now began to place the food in front of them. Asa stared down at his plate of spaghetti and said, “I have to get up. I’m going to be sick.” Dave did not move to let him out of the booth, but leisurely stuck his fork into his own spaghetti, and twirled until a large mass hung on the end. This he raised until it was just in front of his face. He studied it. Asa’s mother wailed across the table.

  Dave said, “Well, yes. I guess—I guess you have to have a heart to like that song. Not just a brain.”

  Now, it seemed, Asa would once again have to make public his heartlessness: he hated every word of “Little Boy Blue,” which, probably, all other human beings on the planet adored, and unless he wanted to recite “And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue/Kissed them and put them there” about a toy dog and a tin soldier, he would have to say so.

  Before he knew it, he was standing on his bed. He bounced up and came down, hard. This was forbidden; Dave and his mother could hear in their bedroom below. It was sure to bring Dave up, scowling and storming. “ ‘Now don’t you go till I come,’” Asa recited loudly, bouncing again, “ ‘And don’t you make any noise!’” He bounced one, two, three times, found a comfortable rhythm, bowm, bowm, bowm, bowm.

  “ ‘And toddling off to his trundle bed,’” Asa shouted, “ ‘He dreamt of the pretty toys.’ Hoo boy! Are those poor little toys in for a big surprise!” He cackled and lifted his knees, dropping even deeper into the mattress, whong!, springing even higher. Again he laughed, louder and wilder, and as long as his mouth was open and his voice sounded good, why not go ahead and holler this stupid poem that seemed to have stuck in his memory after only two readings? So he launched into a full-blown recitation, emphasizing the special moments of pathos with hoots or moans; except for a line or two (which he filled in by singing “Blue-d’dee blue-d’dee” bowm, bowm, bowm) he had the whole thing by heart. He built up to a big finish by bouncing higher, shouting louder, higher, louder, higher…until he arrived at the end and sprang spread-eagled off his bed out into the air of his room, singing “What has become of our Little Boy Blue?” in falsetto as he soared. Then his heels hit the floor with a stunning jolt, and he sprawled. He lay there, panting, waiting.