“It was only near beer,” Karel said. “Don’t be a fool.”
Karel hoped his father would forget the whole thing as soon as the shiner went away, but it didn’t work like that. The bruise faded in a week; Karel was locked in the attic all summer. None of the boys from school would see him for months as he worked with Miihlstein in the attic, handed over tools when asked for them, learned how to apply lacquer and screw-down clamps without crushing the often flimsy wood. Karel didn’t really enjoy the work, but it was something to do. Otherwise, he would have gone half-crazed cooped up like that. Even Miihlstein himself, the old hermit, got out more than Karel did. On weekends Miihlstein met some Paris bohemians to play for tips outside Continental restaurants. Miihlstein on a hurdy-gurdy of the Hungarian style he’d picked up in Galizien, cranking out a buzzing noise for the Frenchies to paint a melody on. He gave Karel a chance to come along if the boy learned to play. He even offered to make a new hurdy-gurdy from a violin that would be Karel’s own. Karel didn’t go for that.
On days he was lucky, Maria sent Karel to the coal cellar to unearth some old dress or a sachet of papers, a bottle of sherry she’d deprived herself of on an unfortunate, moralistic whim. Karel didn’t care what he was supposed to retrieve. If it meant rooting in antiquities, that was good enough. He could fill a whole day down where it was cooler. He’d tried to help Anna with her crafts the first few weeks, but the way she worked frustrated him, how she scribbled with a nub of pencil or bent strands of wire this way then that. “What’s that you’re making?” Karel had bugged her. Anna turned her back to ignore him, and eventually her scribbles took shape. An octopus drawn in the overlaps of the repeating loops of her cursive a. A hare kinked out of wire. When Anna finished, she turned to show Karel. Almost always it was a discernible something, and looked first-rate, he had to admit, most of the time. Karel wasn’t artistic at all, even when he worked a project through in his mind first and tried his hardest—like when he bungled the repairs Miihlstein was making on an instrument. Karel limited himself to handing over tools instead. Any idiot, once he learned its name, could select the right gauge awl for the man requesting it.
When school began in the fall, Karel finally escaped the attic. He worried that the other boys might have forgot about him, but he shouldn’t have. Alfred Braun and Jimmy Mac were dying to hear what happened to Karel that night they took initiation in Mecklenburg’s.
“Jesus Christ!” Alfred said. “You get locked up or something?”
“Missus Maria told us you got in big trouble about what happened down there, yeah.”
Explanations were tendered once the boys had a chance, after school the first day of fifth grade. How Jimmy Mac’s mother was magically ignorant of what happened. Jimmy stank like beer when he came home late, red-faced and aquiver from dancing with a painted woman. But his mother said nothing. She let him go off to bed and even sleep in late the next morning. If his father had been around—if Mr. McHenry wasn’t out even later himself—then Jimmy might have earned some blows. As it was, he was left to wonder why he got away with carrying on in sin. Jimmy contemplated this mystery a full month before he carried his troubles to a kneeler one Sunday. Looking up at the Savior on a crucifix, Jimmy realized that the Lord saw all and remembered all. He promised to never do something like that again—not till he was older.
As for Alfred, there was no doubt Emil Braun would hear about his youngest boy being in a beer saloon. He did. But Braun didn’t punish Alfred, didn’t lock him up, didn’t leave him to come to terms with a mass of guilt on his own—the penance his friends faced. No. If Alfred found himself at a bar, then Braun figured the boy was old enough to see certain other things too. Thereafter he took Alfred to the Jobbers Canyon labor market twice a week to show what it really meant to be a workingman. That which wasn’t revelry. To face down a hiring manager, to make yourself appear useful, or else.