Lead Us Not Into Penn Station by Bruce Ducker

Author:Bruce Ducker
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Permanent Press
Published: 2014-05-31T02:54:27+00:00

-14-

Mr. Meadoff enters his son’s room, pushes the light, looks around. He has not come in here in months. Not that he is barred. It is merely that no occasion has arisen. This is where Danny does his growing, sleeping at night and growing. His children are the reciprocal of plants — plants inhale their breath, grow in the sunlight. His children live off the sweet oxygen of new leaves, sprout in the moon’s eye.

He wanders around the walls, touching his distance like a blind man. Studying the baseball photos. There a scorecard signed by a utility infielder. For Danny’s seventh birthday, a Wednesday, the two of them at Ebbets Field. Danny wanted to be the first ones at the stadium, so they arrived before lunch. On their way in they passed the players’ entrance, on Bedford. Danny recognized a man sitting morosely in his convertible and the man signed the scorecard, but it turned out he couldn’t hit the curve and was sent down in the middle of the season. A woman was driving the car, a pretty woman with brown, curly hair and lips red as some tropical fruit. She was very pretty. She wore a saucer hat of white straw and Mr. Meadoff looked at her and realized she was watching him watch Danny and they smiled at each other. “Maybe we should get your autograph too,” he said to her and she said with a laugh, “Oh, no. I’m not anybody.” The ballplayer hadn’t liked that but she had, you could tell. He was angry and he hadn’t had an at-bat in weeks. She looked like a movie star.

Mr. Meadoff walks to the spare bed and sits on its corner. It is covered with handouts and order forms, neatly stacked. Danny will make a good businessman. He’ll keep an orderly desk. Not like mine. He thinks of his crowded room at work, visualizes the disarray. Chaos to a stranger. To me, order. I can close my eyes and name every piece of paper. Read it back, if you want. That’s not chaos. Look at this crap, Lindenauer had said. Look at this debris. A man’s work should not be thought of as debris.

His eye sweeps over the bookshelves. Plane and boat models separate authors and sets. A P-48 props up the end of Mark Twain and a Flying Fortress sits poised by the collection of Albert Payson Terhune. The wallpaper is a pattern of overlapping plaids in tans and browns. Masculine, his wife had called it. On the floor is a hooked rug they had bought on a trip to the Finger Lakes. Where they used to live, the old apartment, Danny’s wallpaper had fighter planes on it. He had picked it out and Danny had loved it. All sorts of airplanes and Danny knew them by name and manufacturer. Then one day, Danny was no more than a kid, he and a friend took crayons to it. They drew tracer bullets and smoke from the guns, and when pilots scored hits they drew bushy explosions in red and flame orange.

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