condensed in great, roaring sobs of laughter. He slumped in his chair, head thrown back, hands clutching his belly, tears streaming down his face. He laughed himself hoarse. He would almost stop and then some line from Ms. Avery’s well-meaning critique would catch his eye and he would be off to the races again. He didn’t see his father come to the door, look in at him with puzzled, wary eyes, and then leave again, shaking his head.
At last he did become aware that Mrs. Shaw was still sitting on his bed, looking at him with an expression of friendly detachment tinctured with faint curiosity. He tried to speak, but the laughter pealed out again before he could.
I gotta stop, he thought. I gotta stop or it’s gonna kill me. I’ll have a stroke or a heart attack, or something.
Then he thought, I wonder what she made of “choo-choo, choo-choo?,” and he began to laugh wildly again.
At last the spasms began to taper off to giggles. He wiped his arm across his streaming eyes and said, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Shaw—it’s just that . . . well . . . I got an A-plus on my Final Essay. It was all very . . . very rich . . . and very sym . . . sym . . .”
But he couldn’t finish. He doubled up with laughter again, holding his throbbing belly.
Mrs. Shaw got up, smiling. “That’s very nice, John. I’m happy it’s all turned out so well, and I’m sure your folks will be, too. I’m awfully late—I think I’ll ask the doorman to call me a cab. Goodnight, and sleep well.”
“Goodnight, Mrs. Shaw,” Jake said, controlling himself with an effort. “And thanks.”
As soon as she was gone, he began to laugh again.
21
DURING THE NEXT HALF hour he had separate visits from both parents. They had indeed calmed down, and the A+ grade on Jake’s Final Essay seemed to calm them further. Jake received them with his French text open on the desk before him, but he hadn’t really looked at it, nor did he have any intention of looking at it. He was only waiting for them to be gone so he could study the two books he had bought earlier that day. He had an idea that the real Final Exams were still waiting just over the horizon, and he wanted desperately to pass.
His father poked his head into Jake’s room around quarter of ten, about twenty minutes after Jake’s mother had concluded her own short, vague visit. Elmer Chambers was holding a cigarette in one hand and a glass of Scotch in the other. He seemed not only calmer but almost zonked. Jake wondered briefly and indifferently if he had been hitting his mother’s Valium supply.
“Are you okay, kid?”
“Yes.” He was once again the small, neat boy who was always completely in control of himself. The eyes he turned to his father were not blazing but opaque.
“I wanted to say I’m sorry about before.” His father was not a man who made many apologies, and he did it badly. Jake found himself feeling a little sorry for him.
“It’s all right.”
“Hard day,” his father said. He gestured with the empty glass. “Why don’t we just forget it happened?” He spoke as if this great and logical idea had just come to him.
“I already have.”
“Good.” His father sounded relieved. “Time for you to get some sleep, isn’t it? You’ll have some explaining to do and some tests to take tomorrow.”
“I guess so,” Jake said. “Is Mom okay?”
“Fine. Fine. I’m going in the study. Got a lot of paperwork tonight.”
“Dad?”
His father looked back at him warily.
“What’s your middle name?”
Something in his father’s face told Jake that he had looked at the Final Essay grade but hadn’t bothered to read either the paper itself or Ms. Avery’s critique.
“I don’t have one,” he said. “Just an initial, like Harry S Truman. Except mine’s an R. What brought that on?”
“Just curious,” Jake said.
He managed to hold onto his composure until his father was gone . . . but as soon as the door was closed, he ran to his bed and stuffed his face into his pillow to muffle another bout of wild laughter.
22
WHEN HE WAS SURE he was over the current fit (although an occasional snicker still rumbled up his throat like an aftershock) and his father would be safely locked away in his study with his cigarettes, his Scotch, his papers, and his little bottle of white powder, Jake went