White Hot Light by Frank Huyler

Author:Frank Huyler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-06-19T00:00:00+00:00

II

Let the world burn through you. Throw the prism light, white hot, on paper.

RAY BRADBURY

The Bicycle

WE LIVED IN LONDON. I WAS SIX YEARS OLD. I WANTED TO ride a bicycle.

Looking back, I realize that my parents didn’t have enough money to run out and buy me a bicycle. My father was a graduate student. It was too extravagant; I would outgrow it. There was nowhere to ride it anyway, except for the park. And we were only in London for a year. I would receive a bicycle when we returned home.

Young children don’t understand these things.

There was a boy who lived nearby. I can’t remember where he and his mother were from. But they were foreigners also. Italian, possibly, or French—it’s a detail that’s lost. But they spoke English with accents that were neither British nor American, of that I’m sure.

The boy’s name was Eddie. He was about my age. He had a bicycle, and had learned to ride it.

The bicycle was red. Its wheels were solid black and spokeless. I remember it with impossible desire.

So my mother spoke to Eddie’s mother, and she lent us the bicycle sometimes. Eddie, in his experience, had lost interest, because when you can ride a bicycle, it is not that much fun to pedal around an English park alone in winter while your mother watches.

I remember the park. I remember leaves on the ground and rain in the trees. I remember my excitement, wheeling the bicycle from Eddie’s apartment to the park with my mother, and then getting on while she held it steady.

As I recall, the bicycle had a single training wheel. Not two, only one. And so I learned to ride it leaning over to one side, like the tilt of the head. My mother would walk alongside me as I pedaled.

It doesn’t take long for a six-year-old to learn to ride a bicycle. It takes only a day or two.

* * *

Eddie’s mother, I think, was a beautiful woman. She must have been in her early thirties. She had two children—Eddie, my compatriot, and an older boy, who is hardly more than a shadow. I believe he was thirteen or fourteen, and I forget his name.

I think, but I am not sure, that Eddie and the older boy were half brothers. I know that Eddie’s mother was unmarried at a time when this was uncommon. I remember a faint sense of stigma, but I don’t know why.

Sometimes Eddie and I would play together in the park, and sometimes we would play with his toys in his apartment. I don’t remember his toys, only that they were plentiful.

Eddie was not rich. That, somehow, I knew also. Despite the toys, and the bicycle, they were struggling. I think now that the toys, and the bicycle, had come from elsewhere, and had been gifts from others—Eddie’s father, perhaps, who was not there.

Eddie’s mother had come to London with her boys to be discovered. She was an opera singer.

* * *

My mother and Eddie’s mother were nearly the same age.

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