go breathless in the schoolyard clover. Her hair was almost as white as the Arnie twins’s; when the health nurse had inspected all the kids’ hair, Ramona was one of the ones that were sent home.
Between Sheldon Hurley and Sandy Cooper and Wimpy James and Ramona Peters there had been so much picking on the younger ones that his father said one night at supper: “I swear to God, I’m the principal of a zoo!” So now the grades were let out by twos, ten minutes apart, and Ambrose had only to fear that Wimpy, who could seldom be mollified by wit or otherwise got next to, might be laying for him in the hollyhocks off the playground. If he wasn’t, there would be no tears, but the blocks between East Dorset School and home were still by no means terrorless. Just past the alley in the second block was a place he had named Scylla and Charybdis after reading through
The Book of Knowledge:
on one side of the street was a Spitz dog that snarled from his house and flung himself at any passing kid, and even Peter said the little chain was going to break one day, and then look out. While across the street was the yard of Crazy Alice, who had not hurt anybody yet. Large of pore and lip, tangly of hair and mind, she wore men’s shoes and flowered chick-linen; played with dolls in her backyard; laughed when the kids would stop to razz her. But Ambrose’s mother declared that Alice had her spells and was sent to the Asylum out by Shoal Creek, and Ambrose himself had seen her once down at the rivershore loping along in her way and talking to herself a blue-streak.
What was more, the Arnie twins were in fourth grade with him, though half again his age and twice his size; like Crazy Alice they inspired him with no great fear if Peter was along, but when he was alone it was another story. The Arnie twins lived God knew where: pale as two ghosts they shuffled through the alleys of East Dorset day and night, poking in people’s trashcans. Their eyes were the faintest blue, red about the rims; their hair was a pile of white curls, unwashed, unbarbered; they wore what people gave them—men’s vests over BVDshirts, double-breasted suit coats out at elbows, shiny trousers of mismatching stripe, the legs rolled up and crotch half to their knees—and ghostlike too they rarely spoke, in class or out. Many a warm night when Ambrose had finished supper and homework, had his bath, gone to bed, he’d hear a clank in the alley and rise up on one elbow to look: like as not, if it wasn’t the black dogs that ran loose at night and howled to one another from ward to ward, it would be the Arnie twins exploring garbage. Their white curls shone in the moonlight, and on the breeze that moved off the creek he could hear them murmur to each other over hambones, coffee grounds, nested halves of eggshells. Next morning they’d be beside him in class, and he who may have voyaged in dreams to Bangkok or Bozcaada would wonder where those two had prowled in fact, and what-all murmured.
“The truth of the matter is,” he said to his mother on an April day, “you’ve raised your son for a sissy.”
That initial phrase, like the word
facts
, was a favorite; they used it quite a lot on the afternoon radio serials, and it struck him as open-handed and mature. The case with
facts
was different: his mother and Uncle Karl would smile when they mentioned “the facts of life,” and he could elicit that same smile from them by employing the term himself. It had been amusing when Mr. Erdmann borrowed their
Cyclopedia of Facts
and Aunt Rosa had said “It’s time Willy Erdmann was learning a fact or two”; but when a few days later Ambrose had spied a magazine called
Facts About Your Diet
in a drugstore rack, and hardly able to contain his mirth had pointed it out to his mother, she had said “Mm hm” and bade him have done with his Dixie-cup before it was too late to stop at the pie-woman’s.
This afternoon he had meant to tell her the truth of the matter
Between Sheldon Hurley and Sandy Cooper and Wimpy James and Ramona Peters there had been so much picking on the younger ones that his father said one night at supper: “I swear to God, I’m the principal of a zoo!” So now the grades were let out by twos, ten minutes apart, and Ambrose had only to fear that Wimpy, who could seldom be mollified by wit or otherwise got next to, might be laying for him in the hollyhocks off the playground. If he wasn’t, there would be no tears, but the blocks between East Dorset School and home were still by no means terrorless. Just past the alley in the second block was a place he had named Scylla and Charybdis after reading through
The Book of Knowledge:
on one side of the street was a Spitz dog that snarled from his house and flung himself at any passing kid, and even Peter said the little chain was going to break one day, and then look out. While across the street was the yard of Crazy Alice, who had not hurt anybody yet. Large of pore and lip, tangly of hair and mind, she wore men’s shoes and flowered chick-linen; played with dolls in her backyard; laughed when the kids would stop to razz her. But Ambrose’s mother declared that Alice had her spells and was sent to the Asylum out by Shoal Creek, and Ambrose himself had seen her once down at the rivershore loping along in her way and talking to herself a blue-streak.
What was more, the Arnie twins were in fourth grade with him, though half again his age and twice his size; like Crazy Alice they inspired him with no great fear if Peter was along, but when he was alone it was another story. The Arnie twins lived God knew where: pale as two ghosts they shuffled through the alleys of East Dorset day and night, poking in people’s trashcans. Their eyes were the faintest blue, red about the rims; their hair was a pile of white curls, unwashed, unbarbered; they wore what people gave them—men’s vests over BVDshirts, double-breasted suit coats out at elbows, shiny trousers of mismatching stripe, the legs rolled up and crotch half to their knees—and ghostlike too they rarely spoke, in class or out. Many a warm night when Ambrose had finished supper and homework, had his bath, gone to bed, he’d hear a clank in the alley and rise up on one elbow to look: like as not, if it wasn’t the black dogs that ran loose at night and howled to one another from ward to ward, it would be the Arnie twins exploring garbage. Their white curls shone in the moonlight, and on the breeze that moved off the creek he could hear them murmur to each other over hambones, coffee grounds, nested halves of eggshells. Next morning they’d be beside him in class, and he who may have voyaged in dreams to Bangkok or Bozcaada would wonder where those two had prowled in fact, and what-all murmured.
“The truth of the matter is,” he said to his mother on an April day, “you’ve raised your son for a sissy.”
That initial phrase, like the word
facts
, was a favorite; they used it quite a lot on the afternoon radio serials, and it struck him as open-handed and mature. The case with
facts
was different: his mother and Uncle Karl would smile when they mentioned “the facts of life,” and he could elicit that same smile from them by employing the term himself. It had been amusing when Mr. Erdmann borrowed their
Cyclopedia of Facts
and Aunt Rosa had said “It’s time Willy Erdmann was learning a fact or two”; but when a few days later Ambrose had spied a magazine called
Facts About Your Diet
in a drugstore rack, and hardly able to contain his mirth had pointed it out to his mother, she had said “Mm hm” and bade him have done with his Dixie-cup before it was too late to stop at the pie-woman’s.
This afternoon he had meant to tell her the truth of the matter
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