Indignation Read Free Page A

boy with a magnificent future before you—how do I know you’re not going to places where you can get yourself killed?
    During that fall I began Robert Treat as a freshman, whenever my father double-locked our front and back doors and I couldn’t use my keys to open either and I had to pound on one or the other door to be let in if I came home at night twenty minutes later than he thought I ought to, I believed he had gone crazy.
    And he had: crazy with worry that his cherished only child was as unprepared for the hazards of life as anyone else entering manhood, crazy with the frightening discovery that a little boy grows up, grows tall, overshadows his parents, and that you can’t keep him then, that you have to relinquish him to the world.
    I left Robert Treat after only one year. I left because suddenly my father had no faith even in my ability to cross the street by myself. I left because my father’s surveillance had become insufferable. The prospect of my independence made this otherwise even-tempered man, who only rarely blew up at anyone, appear as if he were intent on committing violence should I dare to let him down, while I—whose skills as a cool-headed logician had made me the mainstay of the high school debating team—was reduced to howling with frustration in the face of his ignorance and irrationality. I had to get away from him before I killed him—so I wildly told my distraught mother, who now found herself as unexpectedly without influence over him as I was.
    One night I got home on the bus from downtown about nine-thirty. I’d been at the main branch of the Newark Public Library, as Robert Treat had no library of its own. I had left the house at eight-thirty that morning and been away attending classes and studying, and the first thing my mother said was “Your father’s out looking for you.” “Why? Where is he looking?” “He went to a pool hall.” “I don’t even know how to shoot pool. What is he thinking about? I was studying, for God’s sake. Iwas writing a paper. I was reading. What else does he think I do night and day?” “He was talking to Mr. Pearlgreen about Eddie, and it got him all riled up about you.” Eddie Pearlgreen, whose father was our plumber, had graduated from high school with me and gone on to college at Panzer, in East Orange, to learn to become a high school phys-ed teacher. I’d played ball with him since I was a kid. “I’m not Eddie Pearlgreen,” I said, “I’m me.” “But do you know what he did? Without telling anybody, he drove all the way to Pennsylvania, to Scranton, in his father’s car to play pool in some kind of special pool hall there.” “But Eddie’s a pool shark. I’m not surprised he went to Scranton. Eddie can’t brush his teeth in the morning without thinking about pool. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went to the moon to play pool. Eddie pretends with guys who don’t know him that he’s only at their level of skill, and then they play and he beats the pants off them for as much as twenty-five dollars a game.” “He’ll end up stealing cars, Mr. Pearlgreen said.” “Oh, Mother, this is ridiculous. Whatever Eddie does has no bearing on me. Will I end up stealing cars?” “Of course not, darling.” “I don’t like this game Eddie likes, I don’t like the atmosphere helikes. I’m not interested in the low life, Ma. I’m interested in things that matter. I wouldn’t so much as stick my head in a pool hall. Oh, look, this is as far as I go explaining what I am and am not like. I will not explain myself one more time. I will not make an inventory of my attributes for people or mention my goddamn sense of duty. I will not take one more round of his ridiculous, nonsensical crap!” Whereupon, as though following a stage direction, my father entered the house through the back door, still all charged up, reeking of cigarette smoke, and angry now not because he’d found me in a pool hall but because he hadn’t found me