The Centaurus

Abruptly I felt exhausted, empty; still in my jacket, I sat down on the sofa and leaned back into its cushions. It seemed imperative to do this. The dog rested her head on my lap and wriggled her ice-cold nose into place beneath my hand. Her fur felt stuffed fluffy with chill outdoor air. My parents looked enormous and dramatic above me.

My father turned, his great face tense, as if refusing to undo the last clamp on hope. “Is that what he said?”

“He did think, though, you need a rest. He thinks teaching is a strain for you and wondered if there was something else you could do.”

“Huh? Hell, it’s all I’m good for, Cassie. It’s my one talent I can’t quit.”

“Well, that’s what he and I thought you’d say.”

“Do you think he can read X-rays, Cassie? Do you think the old bluffer knows what he’s talking about?”

I had closed my eyes by way of giving thanks. Now a large cool dry hand came and cupped itself over my forehead. My mother’s voice said, “George. What have you done with this child? He has a roaring fever.”

Muffled somewhat by the wooden wall of the staircase, my grandfather’s voice called down to us, “Pleasant dreams.” My father strode across the vibrating kitchen floor and called up the stairs after him, “Don’t be sore about the Sun,

Pop. I’ll get you one tomorrow. Nothing’ll happen until then, I promise you. The Russians are still in Moscow and Truman’s still king.”

My mother asked me, “How long has this been?”

“I don’t know,” I told her. “I’ve felt sort of weak and un real all afternoon.”

“Do you want some soup?”

“Maybe a little, not much. Isn’t it a relief about Daddy? His not having cancer.”

“Yes,” she said. “Now he’ll have to think up some new way of getting sympathy.” A quick bitter frown came and went in the soothing oval of her face.

I tried to get back into the little intricate world my mother and I had made, where my father was a fond strange joke, by agreeing, “He is good at that. Maybe that’s his talent.”

He came back into the room and a

Though I was too dizzy and sleepy for calculations, this sounded like an upward revision in his expectations.

My parents fed me and put me to bed and took a blanket off their own bed so I would be warm. My teeth had begun to chatter and I made no attempt to repress this odd skeletal vibration, which both released swarms of chill spirits within me and brought down from my mother warm helpless fluttery gusts of concern. My father stood by kneading his knuckles.

“Poor kid he’s too ambitious,” he moaned aloud.

“My little sunbeam,” my mother seemed to say.

To the tune of their retreating voices I fell asleep. My dreams did not embody them or Pe

Now he was saying downstairs in the high strained pitch he used like a whip on my mother, “I tell you, Cassie, I have it licked. Kill or be killed, that’s my motto. Those bastards don’t give me any quarter and I don’t give them any.”

“Well that’s certainly a very poor attitude for a teacher to have. No wonder your insides are all mixed up.”

“It’s the only attitude, Cassie. Any other attitude is suicide. If I can just hang in there for ten more years, I’ll get my twenty-five years’ pension and have it licked. If Zimmerman and that Herzog bitch don’t have me ca

“Because you saw her come out of a door? George, why do you exaggerate so? To drive us all wild? What good will it do you when we are wild?”

“I’m not exaggerating, Cassie. She knows I know and Zimmerman knows I know she knows.”

“It must be terrible to know so much.” A pause. “It is,” my father said. “It’s hell.” Another pause. “I think the doctor’s right,” my mother said. “You should quit.”

“Don’t be a femme, Cassie. That’s just Doc Appleton baloney, he has to say something. What else could I do? I’m an unemployable.”

“Couldn’t you quit and, if you can’t find other work, farm this place with me?” Her voice had become shy and girlishly small; my throat contracted with grief for her. “It’s a good farm,” she said. “We could do like my parents, they were happy before they left this place. Weren’t you, Pop?”

My grandfather did not answer. My mother hurried nervous little jokes into the gap. “Work with your hands, George. Get close to Nature. It would make a whole man of you.”

My father’s voice in turn had become grave. “Cassie, I want to be frank with you, because you’re my wife. I hate Nature. It reminds me of death. All Nature means to me is garbage and confusion and the stink of skunk-brroo!”

“Nature,” my grandfather pronounced in his stately way, after clearing his throat vehemently, “is like a mother; she com-forts and chas-tises with the same hand.”

An invisible membranous tension spread through the house and I knew that my mother had begun to cry. Her tears were half my own yet I was glad she had been defeated, for the thought of my father as farmer frightened me. It would sink me too into the soil.

They had left a potty by the bed and, kneeling humbly, I used it. Only the medallions of my wallpaper watched. Like a flayed hide stiff with blood my red shirt lay crumpled on the floor against the baseboard. The action of getting out of bed threw into relief my condition. I was weak-legged and headachy and my throat felt glazed with dry glass. But my nose had begun to-run and I could scrape together a small cough. As I resettled myself in bed I relaxed into the comfortable foreknowledge of the familiar cycle of a cold: the loosening cough, the clogging nose, the subsiding fever, the sure three days in bed. It was during these convalescences that my future seemed closest to me, that the thought of painting excited me most and sprang the most hopeful conceptions. Lying in bed sick I marshaled vast phantoms of pigment, and the world seemed to exist as the occasion of my dreams.

My father had heard me get out of bed and he came up stairs. He was dressed in his too-short coat and his imbecile knit cap. He was ready to go, and today my sleepiness wouldn’t hold him back. His face wore a gaiety. “How is it, kid? Boy, I gave you a rough three days.”

“It wasn’t your fault. I’m glad it worked out.”

“Huh? You mean about the X-rays? Yeah, I’ve always been lucky. God takes care of you if you let Him.”

“Are you sure there’s school today?”

“Yep, the radio says they’re all ready to go. The monsters are ready to learn.”

“Hey. Daddy.”

“Huh?”

“If you want to quit or take a sabbatical or something, don’t not do it on my account.”

“Don’t you worry about that. Don’t you worry about your old man, you got enough on your mind. I never made a decision in my life that wasn’t one hundred per cent selfish.”