In the Middle of the Night by Robert Cormier
The telephone was ringing as he opened the door to the apartment. He slammed it shut, racing for the phone, but the ringing stopped a moment before he reached it. He picked it up anyway and heard only the dial tone.
Her hand is on the telephone and I say, Are you calling him again, Lulu?
Why not, she answers. It’s all part of the plan, isn’t it?
It’s more than just the plan, Lulu. It’s what you’re saying to him.
What am I saying to him, Baby? But she takes her hand away from the telephone, at least.
All those words. You’re toying with him, Lulu, and he’s just a boy. You’re leading him on.
But I have to lead him on. To make him want to meet me, make him come to me.
Her hand is on the telephone again.
I think it’s more than that, Lulu. I think you’re having a good time. I think you’re enjoying yourself saying all those things to him.
At first, anger flares in her eyes, then she slumps a bit and her face changes and it’s long with sadness.
Is that a sin, Baby? To have a little fun, a bit of make-believe? Look at me. I’ve never had real love. Never had somebody hold me, caress me, feel my breasts. No one ever placed his tongue in my mouth. I’ve never lived, Baby. Never drove a car or held a job. Never took a taxi. Or went shopping for a spring outfit. Nobody ever winked at me across a room or asked me to dance.
Oh, Lulu, I say, my heart breaking into a thousand pieces. I love you.
But it’s not the same, Baby. I love you, too. Aunt Mary loved us till the day she died but that’s not the kind of love I mean.
I know, I say, thinking of our long bleak years together.
I am writing all this down now and Lulu is watching me. She finally comes to me, her shadow falling across the page, and she says, Will you forgive me, Baby, for everything I’ve done and what I have to do? and I tell her yes because she’s my sister and we have been through so much together and I feel the old tenderness between us as she removes the roof that I hate, that makes my scalp burn like fire, and strokes my poor pathetic flesh while I keep on writing.
The U.S. history class was boring, Mr. O’Keefe’s voice droning on, tracing causes of the Spanish-American War which wasn’t really a war. Windows open, slight breezes coming in, the smell of burning leaves from somewhere.
Denny’s eyelids drooped. He stirred in his chair to keep awake. Looked up and around and straight into the eyes of Lawrence Hanson. Faint accusing eyes. Denny looked quickly away, disturbed, wondering why he was looking at him that way.
The bell brought the class instantly awake, as if a hypnotist had snapped his fingers. A rush for the doors as usual.
Slapping his books against his thigh, Denny came upon Hanson standing at the doorway.
“Have you got something to say to me, Colbert?” Hanson asked.
Denny shook his head. Guys squeezed by them in the usual mad rush to get from one class to another.
When the doorway was cleared, Hanson moved slightly, blocking Denny’s way out of the classroom. “You look like you’ve got something on your mind,” he said.
“You’re imagining things,” Denny said, feeling pinned down.
“I wish you’d tell me what’s bugging you,” Hanson said, as if he had all the time in the world, as if the bell for the next class would never ring.
Denny suddenly realized that something was bugging him about this guy. “Okay,” he said. “That day under the bleachers—why didn’t you fight back? You just stood there and let them push you around, let them hit you …”
“If I answer that, will you tell me why you ran away and didn’t stop to help?”
Students now converged at the doorway, wanting to enter for the next class. One big guy, obviously a football player, shouldered his way between Denny and Hanson.
“Think about it,” Hanson said, as the bell rang.
Denny did think about it. All during math, missing the homework assignment in social studies, sitting at the table in the cafeteria, isolated as usual from the other guys.
A few minutes later, he found himself wandering toward the athletic field, a place he’d avoided recently. He wasn’t surprised to see Hanson sitting in the bleachers, all by himself in the vastness of the place. Somehow, he had known Hanson would be there, waiting for him.
Hanson didn’t move as Denny approached. He didn’t look up, either, although Denny knew that he was aware of his arrival. Denny sat down beside him. They both looked down at the field as if a football game was going on.
“I don’t know what I’m doing here,” Denny said. Which was the truth.
“Same with me,” Hanson said. “But here we are.”
“I know why I didn’t stay around the other day,” Denny confessed. “Do you know why you didn’t put up a fight?”
“Sure,” he said. “Those guys had been on my case since school started. I accidentally spilled a bowl of soup on one of them in the cafeteria. They started hassling me. They cornered me here that day. They wanted to fight. I didn’t want to. What you didn’t know about, Colbert, was this: I told them to take their best shots at me. I mean, they couldn’t kill me, could they? So they pushed and shoved and knocked me down and got tired of it and walked away. Know what? I didn’t figure I was the victim that day. They were. Those guys avoid me now, they look ashamed like they did something dirty. And you look at me almost the same way …”
Jesus, Denny thought, what’s going on here? What kind of guy is this Lawrence Hanson, anyway?
“And I know why you didn’t stick around, Colbert.”
Denny didn’t answer. He looked at the field, the grass scuffed from the practice sessions. He felt scuffed, too, as if someone had been practicing on him.
“You don’t want to get involved with Normal, do you?” Hanson asked. “You don’t look at anybody. You sit alone at lunch. You’re worried about being exposed …”
Exposed caused Denny to look sharply at Hanson. A trigger word. Would a bullet follow?
“Your father, right? And that old disaster in Wickburg, at the theater there.”
“How do you know about that?” Denny asked.
“It’s no big deal. Normal’s a small school. Word gets around. Everybody knows about what happened. So what?”
So what? He thought of Halloween next week and Les Albert’s deadline tomorrow. “So everything,” Denny said.
“Know what, Colbert?”
“What?”
“You’ve got a lot to learn.”
That night, he couldn’t sleep. Tossed and turned in bed, body weary but mind awake, filled with images. And voices. Mostly one voice: Lulu’s. But the voice of Lawrence Hanson as well. You’ve got a lot to learn. Where do I begin? he wondered.
Finally, he got out of bed, put on his slippers and bathrobe, made his way through the shadows to the living room. Thought he’d have some orange juice, then decided against it. He sat down in his father’s chair, near the telephone, letting his eyes adjust to the darkness. He stared at the phone, thought of all the calls his father had received in the middle of the night. Wondered what he would do if the telephone rang right now, this minute. Suddenly, he wanted it to ring, wanted to take one call for his father.
Looking toward the doorway, he saw his father standing there like a pale ghost in his bathrobe.
“What are you doing, Denny?” he whispered.
“I couldn’t sleep. I’ve been sitting here like you for a thousand nights.”
“Not a thousand, Denny.” His father shuffled into the room, his slippers flapping on the floor. He sat on the ottoman, facing Denny. “What is worrying you, that you can’t sleep?”
He thought of all the times he and his father had been together but had never really talked to each other. The other night, watching his father sitting up alone at the telephone, he had simply withdrawn and returned to his room. Although there was no connection, Lawrence Hanson’s words came to him again: You’ve got a lot to learn.
“T
“What did you think, Denny?”
“I thought it would cause trouble. Like at Bartlett and the other places when I was a kid.” His father looked frail, his face gaunt in the gloom of night. “Worse than that. I was worried about myself. Not you …”
“You should not worry about me, Denny.”
But I do. Yet he’d never been able to tell his father that.
“You are sixteen, Denny. You should not have to worry about things like that. Your mother and I, we always tried to protect you from …” He sought the word, his hand trying to pluck it from the air. “From the world, I guess …”
“Sixteen, Dad. You were sixteen when it happened! You were my age.” The knowledge overwhelmed him. He didn’t know how he would have handled such a thing. All those children dead and all those accusations. But his father had handled it. Had endured, had survived. And all those years since then: No comment.
“Why don’t you ever talk about it, Dad? Not only to me but to the newspapers, television. You answer the telephone and listen. You read the letters. You do nothing to protect yourself. Why?”
His father sighed, placed his hands on his knees as if about to get up. Denny was afraid he was going to avoid talking again, that he would tell him to go to bed, ending the conversation.
But his father leaned forward, his face close to Denny’s.
“Maybe I was wrong, all these years, who knows? You do what you think is right, what you feel is right.” Paused, sighed, shook his head. “Words, Denny, they never come easy to me. Contractions still a bother.” Another pause. While Denny dared not move. “Those people, twenty-five years ago, the ones the children left behind. Fathers and mothers. The foster parents, sisters and brothers, what loss, what pain they felt. Time heals, like in the old saying. But for some, time does not heal. The pain stays, and it has to go someplace. It comes to me.”
He closed his eyes. “So. Let them use the telephone, let them write me letters. Let them accuse me. Call me names. Worse—threaten. It makes them feel better. I offer myself up to them.”
Eyes open again, looking into Denny’s eyes. “Know what, Denny? Maybe I am guilty, after all. Maybe I should not have struck that match in the theater. More than that. Maybe I should have investigated the balcony. But I hated to go up there. I was afraid of the place—the rats, the shadows. So, I confess my guilt, do my penance.”
For the first time ever, Denny felt he had been admitted to his father’s privacy, into a part of his life his father had finally trusted him to enter.
He wanted to fling himself into his father’s arms, and knew that was impossible. But they had grown close in these few moments. It wasn’t close enough maybe and there was a long way still to go, but it was a beginning.
“Go to bed now,” his father said tenderly, not with his usual voice of dismissal. Concern, that the hour was late and another day waited tomorrow.
He stood at the public telephone in a cubicle outside the 24-Hour Store. The glass windows were smeared; the telephone book had been torn from its chain and taken away. He hated placing his lips close to the mouthpiece.
He inserted the quarter, pressed O for Operator. Told the impersonal voice that he wanted to make a collect call. Gave the number. The name: Les Albert. Listened to blurts of noise, and finally a woman’s voice: “Wickburg Telegram …”
“May I speak to Les Albert?”
“Les is out right now. But he has a special answering machine. Want to leave a message—or shall I have him call you?”
He paused, frowning.
“He may be out most of the day on assignment,” the woman said.
“I’ll leave a message,” he said. But what message?
The blurting sounds, followed by the voice of Les Albert, still tired-sounding. “Not available now, leave a message when you hear the beep …”
The blurt, the beep.
And Denny knew instantly what he was going to say, remembering his father, and joining him somehow.
“Mr. Albert. This is Dennis Colbert. Here’s my answer: No comment.”
Lulu did not call for three days. He dreaded the possibility that she might never call again. He paced the room, frustrated at his inability to call her, track her down the way he had searched the streets for Dawn Chelmsford.
Anger sometimes interrupted his disappointment. She was probably toying with him or teasing him. He recalled her voice, her words, words that set him on fire: I want you to love everything about me. The memory of those words always excited him. I want you to love my body.
If she did not call by four o’clock—and she had never called later than three-thirty—he’d leave the apartment and its loneliness, even though he was tired of killing time in the streets or at the library or the 24-Hour Store. Dave had been absent from the store during his recent visits.
“Is Dave okay?” he asked the clerk on duty. The clerk had gray hair and a high chirping birdlike voice.
“I think he has the flu,” the clerk said, handing Denny his change, his hand birdlike, too, moving quickly in small jerking motions.
Denny slipped the Snickers into his pocket. Feeling abandoned, lost. No Lulu on the telephone. No Dave in the store. The only people he could call friends.
And then, the next day: Lulu.
“Hello.” Voice smoky as usual, thrilling.
“Are you waiting for my surprise?”
“Yes,” he said. Something in her voice caught him, something he had never heard before.
“Are you sad?” Taking a risk.
Lulu did not answer immediately. He heard her soft breath, a sigh. “Everyone has sad days, Denny. You know that. Know what makes me not-so-sad?”
“What?” he asked.
“You. Seeing you. Would that be a nice surprise, Denny? You seeing me, me seeing you?”
Beyond his wildest dreams, something he had not thought possible, as if their relationship had no reality beyond these moments on the telephone.
“Yes, that would be nice, yes.” Did he sound too eager, like a little kid?
“I can be with you Halloween night.”
With you.
“How?” His mind racing. “Where?”
“Be at the corner of your street. Seven o’clock, trick-or-treat time.” Pause, another sigh. “Wait for me, Denny. I’ll be there …”
She hung up.
Leaving him in a state of utter bliss, except for the sadness in her voice, like the blemish on a perfect curve of cheek.
DEATHS OF 22 CHILDREN
HAUNT AFTER 25 YEARS;
BARSTOW MAN HARASSED
By Les Albert
Telegram Staff
On a quiet street in Barstow, Mass.—25 miles north of Wickburg—a man lives whose days and evenings are shadowed by a tragedy that occurred 25 years ago.
The man’s name is John Paul Colbert.
The tragedy was the collapse of the balcony in the venerable Globe Theater in downtown Wickburg on Halloween afternoon, which took the lives of 22 children.
Cries of anguish still resound from that disaster, piercing the memory of countless people, including survivors and relatives of the victims.
Among those cries is a question that still echoes a generation later:
Does Colbert share the blame for that disaster?
Colbert, who was 16 years old and a part-time usher at the time, struck a match in the rubbish-strewn balcony, setting it afire moments before it crashed down as the innocent children below waited for a Halloween magic show to begin.
The official investigation cleared Colbert of any blame, citing the decaying condition of the balcony, which had been unused and neglected for many years.
Although he was never charged, accusations continue to plague Colbert’s life. Through the years, he is reported to have received harassing telephone calls and hate mail, plus occ
Colbert has maintained a strict silence on the abuse. Whenever he is questioned, his exact words are: “No comment.”
His son, Dennis, now 16, the age of his father at the time of the tragedy, continues in that tradition. “No comment,” Dennis Colbert said this week when asked about his father’s dilemma.
Meanwhile, friends and relatives of survivors still …
“Thank you, Denny,” his father said, putting down the newspaper they had both been reading.
“For what?” Denny asked, his mind still dazzled by the parade of words on the printed page and his own name in black type.
“For ‘No comment,’ for respecting what I have been doing.”
“I wanted to show my respect, Dad.” But I’m not you. They looked at each other for a long moment. Then, Denny asked: “Will this story start everything all over again?”
His father shrugged. “Who knows?”
“The reporter didn’t use our street address. Only Barstow. Barstow has a population of thirty thousand people. We had to do a paper on it at school.”
“They have a way of tracking us down,” his mother said. She had taken the Telegram from his father’s hands and quickly scanned the story, after having refused to read it when the newspaper first arrived. “A sin,” she had said, “bringing all this up again. Why can’t they just write about the poor children, make it a tribute to them?” Then, looking at her husband: “Maybe we should go away this weekend …”
The telephone rang.