Testing the Current by William McPherson

Author:William McPherson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2012-01-08T05:00:00+00:00

It was very cold that day, but warm inside the house. Tommy could hear the furnace running all the time, and the radiators were too hot to touch. Rose set pans of water on them to keep the air from drying out. By nightfall it was storming. Playing at his desk, Tommy could hear the wind howl around the corner of the house. He went to his front window and stood there, watching the snow swirl around the trees on the roof, making them fade into the whiteness, reappear for a moment, and fade again. Sometimes he could not see the dark trees at all, only the glow of their lights, blurred and fuzzy in the snow. He looked down. The snow was so fine it had blown under the edge of his storm window and was piling up in a little drift against his pane. It was a bad night to go out, Tommy thought, but his parents didn’t mind. They were used to the weather.

His brothers didn’t mind, either. It was John’s night for his mother’s car, which made David really mad. He said he was taking it at midnight even if John had to walk Emily Sedgwick all the way through the snow from the country club to her house, which was a very long way. John got mad and they had a big fight and shouted at each other and fought over who would use the bathroom first, which David got by locking the door when John was called to the phone in the middle of his shaving. It was Emily, of course. “Tell her to be sure to put on her galoshes,” David shouted when John was on the phone. “It’s a long walk and there’s a lot of snow.” When John came back to finish shaving, he banged on the bathroom door and cursed at David—he said “God damn,” which they were never supposed to say, and called David a “son of a bitch,” which was even worse—but David was in the shower singing at the top of his lungs, and he let on that he couldn’t hear John’s shouting. David was singing the song that Emily had given John for Christmas, and that made John even madder. John hardly ever got mad, but he was sure mad now. Finally Tommy’s father came down the hall and told both of them to cut it out or their mother would take the car herself and they’d both walk. His mother was vexed. That was a new word Tommy had learned from Fingerfins, when the professor felt terribly vexed that he’d lost his prize fish; Tommy’s mother had explained what it meant. She told the boys when they were dressed—they looked very handsome in their tuxedos, even David—that that was no way to end the old year, and she hoped they’d try to begin the New Year on a better note. Then she told John that his language was terrible. “That’s no way to talk when your mother’s in the house,” she said.

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