And yet, as Mr. Ricker said at least once in every class. And yet!
There was Tina to think about, that was one very large and yet. Many of her friends from the old neighborhood on the West Side, including Barbara Robinson, whom Tina had idolized, were going to Chapel Ridge, a private school that had an excellent record when it came to sending kids on to good colleges. Mom had told Tina that she and Dad didn’t see how they could afford to send her there directly from middle school. Maybe she could attend as a sophomore, if their finances continued to improve.
“But I won’t know anybody by then,” Tina had said, starting to cry.
“You’ll know Barbara Robinson,” Mom said, and Pete (listening from the next room) could tell from the sound of her voice that Mom was on the verge of tears herself. “Hilda and Betsy, too.”
But Teens had been a little younger than those girls, and Pete knew only Barbs had been a real friend to his sister back in the West Side days. Hilda Carver and Betsy DeWitt probably didn’t even remember her. Neither would Barbara, in another year or two. Their mother didn’t seem to remember what a big deal high school was, and how quickly you forgot your little-kid friends once you got there.
Tina’s response summed up these thoughts with admirable succinctness. “Yeah, but they won’t know me.”
“Tina—”
“You have that money!” Tina cried. “That mystery money that comes every month! Why can’t I have some for Chapel Ridge?”
“Because we’re still catching up from the bad time, honey.”
To this Tina could say nothing, because it was true.
His own college plans were another and yet. Pete knew that to some of his friends, maybe most of them, college seemed as far away as the outer planets of the solar system. But if he wanted a good one (Brown, his mind whispered, English Lit at Brown), that meant making early applications when he was a first-semester senior. The applications themselves cost money, as did the summer class he needed to pick up if he wanted to score at least a 670 on the math part of the SATs. He had a part-time job at the Garner Street Library, but thirty-five bucks a week didn’t go far.
Dad’s business had grown enough to make a downtown office desirable, that was and yet number three. Just a low-rent place on an upper floor, and being close to the action would pay dividends, but it would mean laying out more money, and Pete knew—even though no one said it out loud—that Dad was counting on the mystery cash to carry him through the critical period. They had all come to depend on the mystery cash, and only Pete knew it would be gone before the end of ’14.
And yeah, okay, he had spent some on himself. Not a huge amount—that would have raised questions—but a hundred here and a hundred there. A blazer and a pair of loafers for the class trip to Washington. A few CDs. And books. He had become a fool for books since reading the notebooks and falling in love with John Rothstein. He began with Rothstein’s Jewish contemporaries, like Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Irwin Shaw (he thought The Young Lions was fucking awesome, and couldn’t understand why it wasn’t a classic), and spread out from there. He always bought paperbacks, but even those were twelve or fifteen dollars apiece these days, unless you could find them used.
“The Rocking-Horse Winner” had resonance, all right, bigtime resonance, because Pete could hear his own house whispering There must be more money . . . and all too soon there would be less. But money wasn’t all the trunk had contained, was it?
That was another and yet. One Pete Saubers thought about more and more as time passed.
???
For his end-of-year research paper in Mr. Ricker’s Gallop Through the Glories, Pete did a sixteen-page analysis of the Jimmy Gold trilogy, quoting from various reviews and adding in stuff from the few interviews Rothstein had given before retreating to his farm in New Hampshire and going completely dark. He finished by talking about Rothstein’s tour of the German death camps as a reporter for the New York Herald—this four years before publishing the first Jimmy Gold book.
“I believe that was the most important event of Mr. Rothstein’s life,” Pete wrote. “Surely the most important event of his life as a writer. Jimmy’s search for meaning always goes back to what Mr. Rothstein saw in those camps, and it’s why, when Jimmy tries to live the life of an ordinary American citizen, he always feels hollow. For me, this is best expressed when he throws an ashtray through the TV in The Runner Slows Down. He does it during a CBS news special about the Holocaust.”
When Mr. Ricker returned their papers, a big A+ was scrawled on Pete’s cover, which was a computer-scanned photo of Rothstein as a young man, sitting in Sardi’s with Ernest Hemingway. Below the A+, Mr. Ricker had written See me after class.
When the other kids were gone, Mr. Ricker looked at Pete so fixedly that Pete was momentarily scared his favorite teacher was going to accuse him of plagiarism. Then Mr. Ricker smiled. “That is the best student paper I’ve read in my twenty-eight years of teaching. Because it was the most confident, and the most deeply felt.”
Pete’s face heated with pleasure. “Thanks. Really. Thanks a lot.”
“I’d argue with your conclusion, though,” Mr. Ricker said, leaning back in his chair and lacing his fingers together behind his neck. “The characterization of Jimmy as ‘a noble American hero, like Huck Finn,’ is not supported by the concluding book of the trilogy. Yes, he throws an ashtray at the television screen, but it’s not an act of heroism. The CBS logo is an eye, you know, and Jimmy’s act is a ritual blinding of his inner eye, the one that sees the truth. That’s not my insight; it’s an almost direct quote from an essay called ‘The Runner Turns Away,’ by John Crowe Ransom. Leslie Fiedler says much the same in Love and Death in the American Novel.”
“But—”
“I’m not trying to debunk you, Pete; I’m just saying you need to follow the evidence of any book wherever it leads, and that means not omitting crucial developments that run counter to your thesis. What does Jimmy do after he throws the ashtray through the TV, and after his wife delivers her classic line, ‘You bastard, how will the kids watch Mickey Mouse now?’”
“He goes out and buys another TV set, but—”
“Not just any TV set, but the first color TV set on the block. And then?”