The Sight of the Stars Read online

  So now he knew that he was different. His father had said that the world could be stupid and cruel, but so far he hadn’t felt any cruelty. No doubt the time would come. It came back to him that Rachel had told him a few days before about her cousin who had not been allowed to go walking with a young man from a “bad family.” What, then, he wondered, was Adam Arnring’s family? Except for those people asleep downstairs, he had none. Who was he, then?

  Oh, come on, Adam, he scolded himself. You’re at the head of the class. You’re the best pitcher in the whole school.

  And didn’t Pa just call you his right hand?

  On the floor between the bed and the window, Arthur, dreaming about a squirrel that had outrun him, whimpers in his sleep. Light from the white sky falls on his skinny old flanks. Fourteen, he is, and hasn’t got much longer. He’s ending, while I’m beginning. But we started out the same way, Arthur. Both of us were unwanted.

  Chapter 2

  The idea of leaving home is a long time coming. It might even have begun, Adam was to think much later, with some readings in a high school history class, when the word “west” first lured him with its “wide skies” and “high plains,” along with its romantic Indian names: Nebraska, Dakota, and Idaho. Or it might have come on that night in the attic when he was thirteen.

  Once it came, it stayed.

  After his graduation from high school, Adam began to work full time in the store. Then it was that he began his evening walks alone out toward the ocean, where he would sit down on a rock or in the sand and gaze ahead to where the clouds and waves came together. It was the sense of space that he craved; his attic room, the store, and the town itself were all too small.

  It was probably this same need that brought him to the job as caddy in one of the new golf clubs that had been built on the farmlands not far from town. Every Sunday morning during the summer, a certain Mr. Herman Shipper would call for him, and they would ride together in Mr. Shipper’s carriage and pair to the club.

  On the drive back after a good game, for Mr. Shipper was a skillful player, the conversation was not the kind he heard at home. Mr. Shipper read a great deal, he had traveled abroad, and most of all, he seemed to enjoy conversing with Adam.

  “You’re a bright young man,” he said. “I predict you’ll go far in the world. I noticed a comment you made this morning about a house we were passing. You admired the columns. Like the Parthenon, you said. Not many young men would have noticed that.”

  “I’ve liked looking at houses ever since Mrs. May—she’s a history teacher—showed me her books on architecture.”

  “Have you thought about studying architecture?”

  “Not really.”

  One day Adam was invited to the Shipper house on Seaside Drive for lunch. High up it stood, with a magnificent view of the Atlantic. The entrance hall was high and white. He had a hasty impression of chandeliers, a winding stairway, a vast room with sofas, a piano, and a patterned rug that felt like sponge underfoot before they passed through tall doors and came out onto a terrace.

  Luncheon was already on a table under a striped umbrella. The noon sun glittered alike on the ocean and the collection of silver implements that lay alongside the food. Adam blinked, and sought something to say.

  “Look there through the trees, Adam. You can just get a glimpse of that house. Can you name the style?”

  Through the leafage one could see a pale tan wall crossed with beams of dark brown wood.

  “It looks Elizabethan. Half-timbered oak.”

  “Right. I was pretty sure you’d know. Adam, you’re meant to be an architect.”

  “Not possible. You have to go to college for that. And since that’s out of the question—” Adam spoke simply, and stopped.

  “Can’t you manage with some loans?”

  “No. Any loans we might be lucky enough to get must go to my brother.”

  “Why so?”

  “Well, because Jonathan is very special. He’s an unusual boy. Only eleven, nearly twelve, and he’s doing high school science and math. They skipped him two years in those subjects. He wants to be a doctor, and there’s not enough money to educate both of us.”

  “It’s highly unusual for someone to sacrifice himself on behalf of his brother,” said Mr. Shipper, shaking his head. “In fact, I’d call it heroic.”

  “I don’t feel like a hero. It just seems to be common sense.”

  “And what about the other brother?”

  “Just average, like me.”

  “Adam, you are not average. I know you pretty well by now. You have talent, and you also have a good head for business. And if you’ll excuse me, you don’t belong behind the counter of a little neighborhood store. You have a future, young man. You need to be thinking seriously.”

  “Well, I have been thinking. I thought that maybe if I could get some sort of job in a factory, I could earn more than my help at home in the store is worth—”

  Mr. Shipper put up his hand and interrupted. “There’s nothing worthwhile in this town. It’s 1907, and we’re in a bad state in this country. Three of the largest banks in New York have failed. You need to get out of this town. There’s nothing here now, and there isn’t going to be for a long time. Get out. Get out.”

  Good advice, but no job, Adam was thinking as he took his leave. Well, of course not. What would an investment banker do with me?

  He looked back at the row of houses that fringed the shore. Surrounded as they were by hedges, lawns, and flowering shrubs, they were all, even the ugly ones, delightful. They were the homes of rich men. Were they the homes of the most intelligent, the most industrious, or merely the most lucky?

  Whitecaps rolled in parallel lines and broke into froth upon the shore. Far out, he recognized the New York–bound steamer; now and then—oh, very now and then—he had ridden it to that city with just enough coins in his pocket to take him there and back: fifty cents one way, sixty for the round-trip, and a couple of dimes to spend while in the city. One day when I am old, he supposed, I will reminisce about those trips the way old people do. Some things you never forget. . . .

  Coming up ahead lay the curve in the sandy bluff where he had lain one day with Rosie Beck, the prettiest girl in the senior class; she had a doll’s face, and her waists were so tight that her breasts were outlined as if she were naked. Her body was hard in some places and soft in others; lying close, he used to imagine her with all her clothes off.

  “I can’t go with you to the prom,” she had said that day.

  “You can’t? But you promised me!”

  “I have to go with Jake instead. I have to.”

  “But that’s crazy! Why do you?”

  “He asked me, and my father says I have to accept.”

  “Your father says! I want to know why.”

  “Oh, Adam, I’m sorry, it’s nasty, but they’re saying I’m getting older and it’s time to be with people I could someday marry. Families who—Jake’s mother is—oh, Adam, I like you so much and I’m sorry.”

  To hell with her. He wouldn’t want to marry her anyway.

  After a while he turned and made his way inland to the heart of town. A Sunday quiet lay upon the streets that on the other six days were crowded with carriages and delivery wagons. Here was the “Shipper” side of the town. Storefronts were freshly painted. Window boxes were filled with flowers. Striped awnings protected the displays. The bank’s brass door frames glistened like gold, as did the trim on the sign above the theater advertising vaudeville and movies.

  At this last, Adam had to laugh. Pa was still warning him—at nineteen, almost twenty—about the lewd women in vaudeville who rouged their faces and kicked up their legs in pantalettes! Poor Pa had apparently never stopped to think that his son was a fairly steady visitor not so much to the theater as to Gracie’s place, where he had seen and had enjoyed every kind of sex that had been written about for the last few thousand years.

  Now, having passed the department store’s fine, ca
rved stone entrance, he turned a corner and beheld a different scene. Here were the trolley car barn, the hospital, the blacksmith shop, and the livery stable. Then came the long streets filled on both sides with dull wooden houses, all with the same front porch behind a scrap of brown grass, and finally Arnrings’ meager, neglected little house.

  No sea breezes cooled the kitchen. It was hot. At the head of the table sat Pa, his eyes heavy after a Sunday afternoon’s nap. He isn’t old enough, Adam thought, to look so tired. He’s in a rut and can’t get out of it.

  “I’m late. I’m sorry,” he said, for they were already finishing the roast chicken that was standard on Sundays. “Mr. Shipper invited me to lunch, and after that I took the long way home.”

  “I suppose,” Leo said, “you’ll be moving over there, next thing.”

  “You’re wrong. I’m not foolish enough to think I can ever live the way those people do.”

  “Oh, sure. That’s all you think about.”

  He should save that tough sneer for school, and maybe he wouldn’t be the butt of other kids’ sneers. But he can’t help it, can he? Nature’s played a mean joke on him. He’s a born victim—born victim like the perfectly nice girl at the dance, the wallflower whom nobody wants. It’s wrong, it’s mean, but I don’t know when it’s ever been any different. My God, can it be that his hair is already receding? Sixteen years old and going bald? No, it’s the bulbous forehead that makes it look that way.

  Calmly, Adam replied, “What did you do today? Out with Bobby?”

  “I wasn’t out with him. We were in. He has a Japanese newspaper, and I’m able to start reading it a little. Mrs. Nishikawa was astonished, she said.”

  “Well, it is astonishing,” Rachel said.

  “I have a gift for languages. I’m teaching Bobby to speak German.”

  “How much German do you think you know?” asked Pa, who could be terribly tactless.

  “Plenty. I hear you and Ma, don’t I?”

  “That doesn’t mean you can speak German. You know a few phrases, that’s all. Don’t go boasting about it in school. There are some new German immigrants in the neighborhood, and you’ll make yourself look foolish.” Pa, meaning well, continued to lecture. “People don’t like boasters, Leo.”

  “I don’t boast. I don’t have to. I’m smarter than ninety-five percent of the people in that high school. They’re a bunch of illiterates, and they know they are.”

  Nobody except Jon and me, Adam thought, would guess how smart Leo really is. But he’s sixteen years old, and he talks so childishly. And why are his grades so poor? Why doesn’t he take the trouble to do better?

  “They all know it,” Leo repeated, waiting for someone to argue with him.

  Instead Rachel, ever the peacemaker, changed the subject. “Jonathan, you haven’t told anybody you’re marching in the Fourth of July parade. Of course, the whole class is marching, but I didn’t know you were to carry the flag. Mrs. Ames told me yesterday.”

  “That’s no big honor, Mom,” Jonathan objected. “They draw lots for it. Anybody can get it.”

  That was not true, although Rachel wouldn’t know it. It was only Jonathan being modest, and considerate of Leo’s feelings.

  A remarkable child. Jonathan has a rare mind and a rare spirit.

  The guidance counselor had summoned Simon and Rachel, but they had lacked the confidence to go, and had sent Adam instead.

  Every effort must be made to send him to college. It would be a tragic waste otherwise.

  Pa and Rachel don’t really understand the need to send Jonathan to college, Adam thought. They look at it as a luxury. But if Mr. Shipper is right about my head for business, then I will take care of Jonathan. And then perhaps take care of myself, too. I’ll never be an architect, but I’ll be something else.

  On the porch in the evening, the rocking chairs creaked. Simon and Adam were watching Leo and Jon walk down the street. The eleven-year-old was taller than the sixteen-year-old, but no comment was made about that except for the father’s long sigh. Then, after a while, he spoke.

  “I try to be patient, but Leo’s just—you can’t depend on him. When he’s in a good mood, he’s all right, but you never know what mood he’ll be in. Sometimes he’s even unfriendly to customers. Fortunately, it’s a neighborhood store and everybody around here knows him. They know him well.”

  “You can’t expect him, at his age, to be tactful when he doesn’t like working at the store.”

  “Why not? I had to do it when I was his age. You did it. You’re still at it. He’s old enough now to get used to the idea. He’s lucky there’s a business for him to go into. He’ll never be unemployed.”

  That much was true. Bobby was already learning to help out in the Fugi restaurant. Mr. Shipper’s son was also going into his father’s business. Investment banking. Slightly different.

  Dusk fell, and the rocking chairs still creaked, while a battle roared through Adam’s head.

  “Pa,” he said suddenly, “I don’t want to work in the store anymore.”

  Pa was surprisingly calm. “I’ve been thinking about that. Sort of expecting it for a pretty long time.”

  “I’m restless here. I’ve never been anywhere. And I admit I want to see other places. But there’s more to it. I have a feeling—maybe it’s foolish, maybe it isn’t—that I can do something big, that I can make money to help you all.”

  “A big heart you have. A good heart. But how do you see yourself doing it? Is it Mr. Shipper’s house that’s put this into your head?”

  “Maybe a little. I don’t know.”

  He’s hurt, Adam thought, in spite of what he says.

  “Well, I left home, too,” Simon said, “so how can I object?” He swallowed hard. “Tell me one thing. Does this have anything to do with—with the business about your mother and me? Do you ever think about that anymore?”

  “No, I put it aside years ago,” Adam said gently.

  He supposed it would always stay in the back of his mind, forgotten just as a significant book, once read and now neglected, rests on the topmost shelf.

  Pa knocked the ashes from his pipe, his chair stopped creaking, and neither of them said any more. Then sorrow and tenderness moved Adam, and reaching across the little space between them, he laid his palm upon his father’s hand.

  Rachel made Adam’s favorite pancakes for the last breakfast. Every time he looked up, he caught her worried, wistful gaze. Pa had put a “closed until noon” sign in the store’s front window. The brothers, unsure about what to make of this break in the family circle or of how to behave, veered back and forth from curious glances to silly jokes to all kinds of questions that Adam was unable to answer.

  Pa had provided him with a first-class, ten-dollar suit, railroad fare, and one hundred fifty dollars, which Adam had been loath to accept. Was he perhaps accepting these precious dollars only to waste them in the end? Would they not be better put toward future expenses?

  Leo’s eyes were wet when he left with Jonathan for school. Tears and a hug from Leo were rare, so rare that Adam could not at first remember when he had last seen them. Ah, yes, it must have been when Arthur died and was buried in the backyard. And he wondered now, as he watched him, what else might be hidden inside that prickly outside.

  The day was vigorous and clear; the autumn air had a tang as he walked with Pa toward the ferry that would take him to that fabled westbound train, the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe.

  “For the first time I understand what my parents must have felt when I left them,” Pa said.

  “They knew they would never see you again. This is different.”

  When Pa’s silence spoke, Adam countered it. “It may still sound ignorant to you in spite of all the times I’ve said it, but I’m determined that Jonathan’s going to be a doctor, and you’re not going to work so hard anymore, and Leo—well, I’m going to do something for him, too.”

  “You’re a good boy, a good son, only—only don’t do anything
foolish.”

  They were late and Adam had to run for the boat. It was just as well. A prolonged good-bye embrace would have hurt too much.

  “Adam, take care of yourself. I wish I could have done—” That was all he heard before the wind took the rest of the shouted words away.

  Wish he could have done what? But he’s done all he’s able to do, so I will do the rest. I will. I may be a fool, but right now, this minute, I feel I could conquer the world.

  Under the morning sky, the old hometown gleamed white in its nest of reddening leaves. Three church steeples, the towering gas tank, the thick brown hulk that was the high school, the Ferris wheel in the amusement park, and the thread of fine houses that lined Seaside Drive all passed by. Then, in a burst of energy, the ferry gained speed and the town slid out of sight.

  Chapter 3

  On the third day, the train slowed and came to a screeching halt. A little bustle of talk broke out, remarks about a water stop and stretching one’s legs on the platform. Sure enough, there stood the water tank and a place where people could look out into the level, blue-gray distance and see the narrow river that made a graceful curve around a town.

  The conductor, standing beside Adam, remarked that it was a pretty sight, Chattahoochee. “There must be a powerful lot of money there. A lot of people get off this train at the capital and then take the Interurban back to Chattahoochee.”

  “Where does all the money come from? The place looks pretty small.”

  “Oh, ranches and farming.”

  “Since when do people get so rich from farming?”

  “It’s not what you’re thinking of from back east. There’s good black soil here, very rich, good for sheep, lumber, cotton—just about everything.”

  Farms. He knew nothing about them. Maybe he should have stayed with Pa. Maybe he could have helped him build up the store. But no, Pa was too set in his ways. It wouldn’t have worked. Maybe he should try this town, do something, anything, to get some cash and then go on to California. Maybe the Indian name was a good omen. Chattahoochee!