Man and Boy by Wright Morris

Author:Wright Morris [Morris, Wright]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0265-9
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2017-08-17T16:00:00+00:00

At this point Private Lipido sat quiet and looked out the window, his helmet a little low on his head. Now that he had it on again, Mr. Ormsby was at a loss to know just which Lipido he was. With it off he was Mr. Lipido, a perfectly normal boy—with it on he was Private Lipido and might do anything. It was the same with his eyes, one moment they were the color of water, and the next they were like dark buttons with bright little lights. When he said “Ha!” his eyes went from the one to the other, and sometimes without saying “Ha.” Mr. Ormsby had seen his own eyes behave that way when he stood in the bathroom, in the dark, and suddenly turned on the lights. But he had never talked with a person whose eyes did that right in front of your face. Part of this was due to the helmet—although Mr. Ormsby had never seen the boy, Virgil, that is, in a helmet—he was sure, positive, that his eyes would act like that. Even without a helmet the boy’s eyes never seemed to focus on some things, on his Mother for instance. He had trouble when she was standing right in front of him. It was so plain that he didn’t seem to see Mother very clearly that she had taken him to an optometrist. Eyes like a cat, the man had said, but this didn’t explain why he couldn’t see people standing right in front of him. Mr. Ormsby had felt it himself—the feeling that he was obstructing something that would be clear enough if he stepped out of the way. Mr. Ormsby usually did, but Mother was more persistent and she would just stand there as if she was one of these alphabet cards. The boy would always look at her as if there was something blurred about her, and after four or five years the boy won. It was certainly one of the reasons that Mother took to talking to them from her room, from the top of the stairs, or behind the kitchen cabinet. Along with this was the way the boy—bright as he was in other matters—was sometimes baffled by the simplest things. Most of Mother’s best sayings seemed to puzzle him. “Man is a social animal,” she often said, as it was one of her favorite sayings, but the boy would just stand there as if trying to remember something. There was nothing to do but just hurry out of the room.

Mr. Ormsby felt like that now—on the other hand he didn’t feel like that, he didn’t know for sure what he felt. He was still undecided, when just as quiet as you please the boy up and took his helmet off. He placed it once more in his lap, upside down for an ashtray, and felt about in his pocket for cigarettes. There he was again, his other self, and as he tapped out two cigarettes he turned to Mr.

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