Monkey Island by Paula Fox Page B

Henry asked Clay in a serious voice.
    Clay shook his head and took the gum.
    â€œYou’re the strong, silent type, are you?” Henry asked.
    Clay coughed.
    â€œI see,” Henry Biddle said. He bent over, placed his big hands on Clay’s waist, and lifted him straight up in the air. “You don’t weigh much,” he remarked. “We’ll fix that.” He held Clay close to him for an instant and set him down on his feet. Clay turned away to hide his smile. He felt there was a reason not to show how much he’d liked being lifted up and held, but he couldn’t work out what it was.
    â€œThere’s a letter from your sister,” Mrs. Biddle said to her husband as she came to the kitchen door, “and a rug-sale notice from Macy’s, the phone bill, a request to help save the tortoises, seven catalogues, and a mail-o-gram that says you may have won a million dollars. Or was it ten million?”
    â€œYou open them and read them,” said Henry, hanging up his green storm jacket on a peg in the hall. “Then collect that million and save the tortoises.”
    Mr. Biddle was a postal clerk and worked all day sorting mail at the post office. Clay could understand why he didn’t care to look through mail when he came home.
    Mrs. Biddle went back to the kitchen, and Mr. Biddle said, “I’ll take a wash and be ready in a jiff.”
    By then, Clay had seen everything in the apartment, which was on the sixth floor of a seven-storied yellow-brick building on the west side of the city near the river.
    The letters were in a pile next to the telephone on a small table in a narrow hallway. Down a few steps and to the right was a living room with a plump sofa and two armchairs, and a round table covered with magazines and a pot of roses. Clay discovered the petals were made of cloth. On one wall hung photographs in silvery-looking frames of children of various ages. A small television set on a metal stand occupied the space between the two windows. On the wall behind the sofa was a large painting of a ship, an old-fashioned kind of ship with four masts and dozens of sails, sitting on a puddinglike blue sea furrowed with neat white-caps, behind it all a red sun sinking on the horizon. The floor throughout the apartment was covered with peach-colored carpeting. There were three bedrooms and a bathroom. One of the bedrooms was his. A wall shelf held games and toys, some of which he could tell had been broken and then repaired. On another shelf sat about twenty books, all of which appeared to have been handled and read by many people.
    Mrs. Greg had explained to Clay that the Biddles were a foster-parent family. They didn’t have children of their own, but they took in other people’s children, boys and girls who had no place to live because their parents had died or had gotten too sick to take care of them or, as in his case, had disappeared. Mrs. Greg mentioned that there were other circumstances in which children needed temporary homes, but she didn’t go into them. As far as Clay was concerned, she didn’t have to. He remembered Tony, his thin, bony, small self huddled up against the hotel wall, his bruised face.
    The questions he most wanted to ask but dared not ask yet were about time. Did children stay with the Biddles until they were grown-up? How long would he stay? Would he at some point be sent to another foster family? Would he, one morning, be put out on the sidewalk? He knew this last question was what Calvin would have called wild foolishness. He was connected now, through Mrs. Greg, to Social Services. The net was under him. Still, anything could happen.
    They ate supper at a Formica table in the kitchen, where the walls were covered with small framed pictures, a shepherdess watering a sunflower, a rooster crowing on the roof of a barn, two birds holding a wreath in their beaks over the head of a little girl whose chubby hands were crossed in her lap