The Young Unicorns Page 15

  In the morning at breakfast Dr. Austin looked up from his cup of coffee. “Everybody listen carefully.”

  There was something in his voice that made the children put down knives and forks with a small clatter. Rob choked over a bit of French toast.

  “Emily, this is Dave’s day to pick you and Rob up at school, isn’t it?”

  “Yes. Vicky and Suzy have art.”

  “You and Rob wait inside the building until you’re sure Dave is there.” He turned to his daughters. “Girls, your mother will come for you.”

  Suzy was not pleased. “Nobody gets called for except the really little kids. It’s bad enough when you make me walk home with Vicky—”

  “Just because I try to make you behave—”

  “I do behave,” Suzy protested. “I can’t help it if the boys fight over who’s going to carry my books. I’ve got dozens of kids who’d walk home with me.”

  “Be quiet, both of you,” their father said. “You will walk home with your mother because I tell you to, and there is to be no more discussion of the subject. I want all of you to understand that you are not to go out of doors alone unless you are with Mr. Rochester, and even then not without our knowledge. I realize that you are undoubtedly safer with Mr. Rochester than you are with your mother or me, but we want to know where you are at all times.”

  “Can I go to the corner now with Rochester and get your paper?” Rob asked.

  This was Rob’s regular morning job. “Yes, Rob, but if anybody approaches you or tries to speak to you, let me know. And you are not to talk to anybody.”

  “But I talk to lots of people! Every morning! If I don’t say hello they’ll think I’m very rude.”

  Dr. Austin thought that Rob, with all his friends along the street, was probably the safest of the children. If anybody tried to accost Rob, one of his many acquaintances would be sure to see and come to the rescue. “All right, Rob. Go get the paper. Here’s the money. But I don’t want you to dawdle this morning.”

  When Rob had gone, Emily asked, “Dr. Austin, what’s wrong?”

  “You rubbed a lamp, Emily, and you called up a genie, and since that day the city has been a dangerous place for us.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s dangerous at the best of times,” Dr. Austin said. “These are just precautions, but I want you to observe them. You are not to go out alone, and that goes for all of you. Dave or Mother will meet you at school in the afternoons, and with permission you may go out with Rochester. Understand?”

  No. They did not understand. They only knew that this was not the time to ask any more questions.

  French toast was a special treat, but not one of them was able to finish.

  The Doctor walked them up to school. Mrs. Austin looked at the unappetizing mess of French toast and syrup that the children had scraped off their plates into Mr. Rochester’s bowl, put most of it in the garbage, got out the vacuum cleaner and set about cleaning house.

  In the late afternoon Mrs. Austin came in to the music room, where Dave was reading English literature to Emily. She dangled Mr. Rochester’s leash in her hand. “Dave, Rob and I are going up to school to walk the girls home. You’ll stay with Emily till I get back, won’t you?”

  “I am perfectly capable of staying by myself,” Emily flared. “I’m not totally incompetent! In my own house I can see just as well as you can.”

  Mrs. Austin cut her off. “Calm down, Emily, and remember what you were told at breakfast. Dave—”

  “I wouldn’t leave her,” Dave said. “She won’t have her work done by the time you get back, anyhow.”

  Mrs. Austin and Rob walked Rochester up through the park. Evening had fallen, and the street lamps glowed. But the park had lost its beauty for her. It seemed dark and comfortless and full of unknown terrors. She held Rob’s hand, forgetting that she had been trying to make him independent of her, to make him walk in the park and on the street without needing the security of the hand of parent or sister.

  A group of small boys in navy-blue pea jackets came tumbling out of the school, banging each other with their book bags, galloping up the street, and shouting. Three young mothers, looking tired, followed slowly, discussing their jobs and what they were going to have for dinner. There didn’t seem to be anything about the evening that was different from any other evening, and Mrs. Austin felt comforted. She said to Rob, “Stay right with Rochester, Rob. I’ll get the girls. I won’t be long.”

  Rob nodded acquiescence. He did not feel the same sense of comfort at the ordinariness of the school building and the noisy children as did his mother. His parents had never before showed fear in his presence, and only the Great Dane standing solidly beside him was unchanged, a symbol of security.

  He almost fell flat as Mr. Rochester jerked unexpectedly to the end of his leash, barking ferociously. Rob, regaining his balance, looked around and saw two boys in leather jackets standing close by him. One of them said, “Hi, kid.”

  Rob eyed the boys warily, for Mr. Rochester had now pressed close up against him and was growling, ears flattened, tail rigid. One of the boys stepped back.

  The other, holding his ground, asked, “Aren’t you a friend of Dave Davidson’s?”

  Rob opened his mouth just enough to say, “Yes.” He held Rochester on a short, tight leash. He knew that he was completely safe with the dog, and he also knew that Mr. Rochester never snarled in this way, lips drawn back, teeth bared, without reason.

  “We’re friends of his,” the boy said. “We’re his oldest pals. He sent us to tell you he wants you to meet him in the Cathedral. Come along. We’ll take you there.”

  Mr. Rochester moved slowly away from Rob and towards the boy, flattening himself as though he were about to spring. The boy took a step backwards. “Call your dog off.”

  Rob’s voice was thin and small. “Go away, or I’ll let Rochester at you.”

  The second boy called, “Let’s go, N.”

  Mr. Rochester took another slow, deliberate step. The boy turned and ran. The one called N, falling back, gave a sickly grin. “Not very friendly, are you?”

  “Go away,” Rob repeated. “Rochester—”

  The ferocious growl deepened, and the boy wheeled and ran down the street. Mr. Rochester gave a last warning bark, then moved back to Rob, his tail still pressed tightly against his body. Rob put his hand on Rochester’s head, and the great dog turned to lick him.

  The two boys had not in any way been menacing; the first one had said that he was a friend of Dave’s. But why would Dave send someone with a message? Wasn’t he still at the house with Emily?

  Mrs. Austin came out with the girls, who were busily talking about art class. Rob turned from them to bend over Rochester and pat his head lovingly, in case any fright still showed in his face. Because everybody else seemed to be keeping secrets, for the first time in his life he held back and did not blurt out what had just happened.

  On the way home they passed, as usual, the synagogue. The Rabbi lived above, and Rob looked up at his windows and saw that they were lit.

  “I want to speak to Rabbi Levy,” he said suddenly. “Is it all right if Rochester and I go up?”

  His mother, too, looked up at the lighted windows. “Are you sure you don’t bother him?”

  “I asked him to tell me if I got in his hair, and he promised he would.”

  Suzy giggled. “Well, he’s got more hair for you to get into than most people.”

  “More than Canon Tallis at any rate,” Vicky said.

  “You may go for fifteen minutes,” Mrs. Austin told Rob, “but not a longer visit this time.”

  She waited until the Rabbi’s buzzer released the latch and Rob and Rochester were safely through the door.

  The little boy and the dog climbed the stairs.

  If he could stay for only fifteen minutes there would not be time to tell everything, and this was what Rob really wanted to do, as he would have told his grandfather. He could trust his grandfather implicitl
y; he knew that he could also trust the Rabbi; and he knew that he could trust Canon Tallis: he knew.

  The Rabbi was waiting at the top of the stairs. Rochester’s tail was waving in delighted greeting: the wildly wagging tail was not an unmixed blessing; it had more than once been known to knock china or glass shatteringly off tabletops, including the Rabbi’s, so the old man and the little boy waited for the first excitement of greeting to die down before going into the Rabbi’s study. Rob loved the strange, mysterious books and was beginning to learn the Hebrew letters, but this afternoon instead of going directly to the book on the reading stand, as he would usually have done, he said, “Rabbi Levy, you’re my friend, aren’t you?”

  “Of course, Rob. And you are mine, I hope?”

  “Forever,” Rob said seriously. “And if friends are in danger, they come to each other’s rescue, don’t they?”

  “If they possibly can.”

  Rob reached into his pocket and drew out a roller-skate key; several pieces of string; three dog biscuits, one of which he gave to Rochester, who had to sit up and beg for it; an old pen of John’s that no longer held ink; a tongue depresser; a rusty Brownie knife inherited from Suzy; a scrap of a poem of Vicky’s which he had rescued from the wastepaper basket; an extra Braille stylus for Emily just in case she needed one; and finally several broken pieces of chalk. “If I ever need to be rescued,” he said, “I’ll try to write an R with this chalk where you can see it on the synagogue. I’d be much obliged,” he said formally, “if you’d kind of keep a look out for my R every day, just in case.”

  The Rabbi did not laugh. “Very well, Rob. But do you have any particular reason to feel that you are going to need rescuing?”

  “I’m not quite sure. I’d like to tell you all about it, but Mother said I could only stay fifteen minutes, and Rochester took up five of them, so there isn’t time. It would just make me feel lots better to know you were feeling ready to rescue me if necessary.”

  The old man regarded the child who was standing, looking white and small, on the dark Oriental rug of the study. “I will be ready to rescue you, Rob. Do your parents know about this—whatever it is?”

  “I’m not quite sure,” Rob said. “That’s why it’s all so very peculiar. There’s another thing I’d like to ask you, please.”

  “What’s that?” The light from the colored glass of a Tiffany lampshade flowed over the Rabbi’s long hair and beard, and brightened his deep, dark eyes. In the warmth of this strange, rather foreign room, with its heavy dark hangings and massive furniture, Rob felt warmed and safe, and no longer small and cold and afraid as he had been out on the street with the strange boys. “Daddy keeps saying it’s a small world in spite of the population explosion. Do you maybe know someone called Canon Tallis?”

  The Rabbi looked sharply at Rob. “Why, yes. I met him only last night. He was the speaker at an ecumenical meeting I attended. I thought him brilliant but questioned a few points, and we got into a long and amiable argument afterwards, a good argument, the kind of sparking dialogue one is seldom privileged to have.”

  “He’s all right, then, isn’t he?” Rob asked.

  “How do you mean, all right?”

  “Would my grandfather think he was all right?”

  The old man pondered for a moment. “He and your grandfather represent very different disciplines, as your grandfather and I do, and as Canon Tallis and I do. And yet we are very close, very close. Yes. Your grandfather would think he was all right. I presume you mean theologically?”

  Rob hesitated. “I’m not quite sure what that means.”

  “The word about God,” the Rabbi said.

  “Oh. Yes. Well, if he’s all right about that, then he’s all right, isn’t he? I mean, he has to be, doesn’t he?”

  “If he’s really all right, Rob, yes. But no human being can ever be wholly all right. If we could—you’re too young to have heard of Hitler, aren’t you? And I don’t suppose you’ve studied the Crusades—”

  “Vicky has.”

  “If we were really all right, then we wouldn’t be having race riots, or wars. We’d treat each other as human beings.”

  “But he does, doesn’t he? Canon Tallis? Treat people as human beings?”

  “Yes. I think he does.”

  “And you do.”

  “I try,” the Rabbi said, rather heavily.

  “And Mother and Daddy do. So that’s a start, isn’t it?”

  “It is at least a start,” the Rabbi said.

  “I think my fifteen minutes must be up. You will remember about the chalk, won’t you?”

  “I will remember.”

  As Rob went to shake hands goodbye, he said once more, anxiously, “Please don’t forget.”

  The Rabbi held the little boy’s hand. “This is more than a game, or something in your imagination, isn’t it, Rob?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will you come tell me about it tomorrow after school?”

  “Yes. I’ll ask Mother. Goodbye.”

  Rabbi Levy stood at the head of the stairs and watched after the little boy and the dog as they descended to the dim front hall, then went into his study and to his window and watched as they turned up the street, both of them running to get home. He felt distinctly uneasy about Rob, as though he ought to have made the child stay long enough to spill out whatever was on his mind. A phone call to Mrs. Austin would have taken care of the time restriction, would have reassured her that Rob wasn’t being a nuisance.

  He looked at the open volume of Hebrew on which he had been working when Rob rang the bell and to which he was eager to return. It was his life’s work, the study of the demand for obedience given by God to his people.

  He had tried to explain this demand once to Rob and Dave when the two boys, so utterly different in type and temperament as well as age, had been visiting him: at Rob’s instigation, he knew; every gesture and movement of Dave’s bespoke unwillingness.

  “In a life in which there is no demand,” he had told Dave, “there is no meaning.”

  “That’s nuts,” Dave had snarled rudely, then apologized. “Sorry, Rabbi, but demands are the whole trouble.”

  The Rabbi had stroked his shapeless beard, looking over his steel-rimmed reading glasses at the surly boy, who did not appeal to him at all. “If no demand is put on you, then you are in a sense excluded.”

  “From what?”

  “Life itself. To be demanded of gives us dignity.”

  Rob, obviously not understanding, was nevertheless listening. He stood on tiptoe by the reading stand and looked over it at the Rabbi. Dave shrugged.

  Rabbi Levy spoke severely. “If someone expects, demands something of you, it means he takes you seriously.”

  The angle of Dave’s shoulder said quite plainly that he couldn’t care less.

  The Rabbi found that he had the stale taste of anger in his mouth. “Don’t you see?” he asked, knowing that he was failing to make sense of any kind to Dave, “that the demand is that you take part in the huge cosmic struggle that is going on? Apathy is the gravest of sins.” He turned from Dave to the fair little boy he had come to love. “Even the tiniest creature can shake the universe …”

  He did not want Rob to be caught up and hurt in the battle.

  He stood, now, at the window, watching Rob and Mr. Rochester turn the corner of Broadway and head towards the river. When they were out of sight he went to his books and papers. “Only obedience,” he said aloud to the room, as though to convince himself, “is perfect freedom.”

  But obedience to what?

  Was he, at this moment, in letting Rob go when the child was obviously in distress, disobeying the command that gave meaning to his life?

  The Hebrew letters blurred and jiggled before his eyes. He took off his spectacles and wiped them on his beard.

  He could not work.

  He went out to the kitchen to make himself some supper.

  On the crowded subway on the way home from the hospital,
Dr. Austin looked again at Dr. Gregory’s cable. He had examined it the moment he got home the evening before, and he had seen then what no one had noticed: the cable said that Dr. Gregory was staying in Athens, but it had been sent from Liverpool. Had Dr. Gregory expected Dr. Austin to notice this? Was it supposed to be some kind of warning like CAREFUL OF FALLS, assuming that meant anything? And why had Emily’s father gone to Athens, and then, evidently, to Dr. Shasti and Dr. Shen-shu in Liverpool?

  Twelve

  After Mrs. Austin had left with Rob and Rochester to pick up the girls at school, Dave had found himself unusually restless, unable to concentrate on the book he was reading to Emily. He read her the words but his mind strayed far from the adventures of Achilles.

  “Mind what you’re reading,” Emily said. “The Iliad’s confusing enough as it is.”

  “Just pay attention and shut up.” He envied inchoately Emily’s singleness of purpose with her music. When he finished trade school in the spring he could, he knew, get a job, either with his English horn (but I will not be a starving musician) or in electronics. But he saw no reason for a job; he had no aim, except a vague desire to make a great deal of money, to get even with “them.” But he did not know who “they” were. Were “they” the Cathedral, who had opened doors for him and then left him on his own, to go through the doors or not as he chose? Or were “they” the Austins, who were so secure in each other that they could open the doors of their family wide for Emily, for Dave?

  Emily had walked in.

  Dave was afraid of open doors.

  —What’s in it for me? he thought.—If I go in, if I start loving them, I lose my freedom. Emily, okay. I accept Emily. She’s blind and her father lives in a world that’s been dead twenty-three hundred years, and Mr. Theo doesn’t see anything but music. Emily’s needed me. She couldn’t have managed without me. But she doesn’t really need me any more. She’s got the Austins …

  So when Mrs. Austin returned with the girls he put Emily’s book down, demanding gruffly, “Where’re Rochester and Rob?”