The Complete Collection. William Wharton

are lightning bugs flying around; we don’t have any in L.A. or Paris. Every time one of those bugs lights up in the corner of my eye, I think it’s a searchlight and we’ve had it. Dad looks at me.

      ‘Billy, we’ll just have to break in. They’re expecting us; they only forgot and locked the screen door.’

      You never know with Dad; now he’s leading us into five to twenty for breaking and entering. He finds a cellar window with a cracked pane of glass. We wiggle it around till the putty falls out. We lift the two pieces, reach in, open the window and lower ourselves into the cellar. We go upstairs to the screen door. The key’s there all right. Then Dad goes back down to the cellar and fits the pieces of glass in place. He’s too much. He doesn’t want the Hills to know they blew it and locked us out. I’ll never understand that generation.

      On the dining table is a note. It says there’s beer and hoagies in the refrigerator. The Hills know Dad’s an absolute fiend for these Italian sandwiches stuffed with cheese, spiced meats, tomatoes, lettuce and who knows what else. At least it’s a step up from pizza. The note says they’re visiting friends and will be back later.

      We demolish those sandwiches. Probably they’re the Philadelphia equivalent to tacos. We guzzle the beer. Then we go sit in the living room. Man, this is a beautiful home. Three of Dad’s paintings are on the walls. We’re sitting on low couches in a living room carpeted wall-to-wall with a ruby-red deep-pile rug. It’s like being inside a heart. Dad starts telling me about the Hills.

      Pat is a physicist and Rita, his wife, is a mathematician; they have four kids, two about my age. One daughter’s at Harvard, the other at MIT. The young kids are geniuses, too.

      Come to think of it, Dad has practically no artist friends. All his buddies are scientists; biochemists, physicists, astronomers; or they’re mathematicians, doctors, dentists. Maybe he’s in the wrong business. There’s for sure something of the scientist in him. He’s always full of weird semiscientific ideas and questions. He continually reads crazy books about black holes or genetic engineering. Or he’s trying to explain gravity or working up half-assed all-inclusive field theories for the universe.

      But, in another way, he could never be a scientist. He’d never bugger himself with all the facts and memory part. He’s not one-eyed enough to make it; he’s always seeing too many sides, more sides than there are most times.

      There’s a mob of pets around the house. First, a dog named Natasha trotted downstairs when we came up from the cellar. She doesn’t bark, just goes to Dad when he calls her name, and nuzzles him. She’s some kind of giant, grayish poodle. Two or three cats slither out of the woodwork, too. They brush against us, purring, then go their way. Upstairs, we find a medium-sized boa constrictor, some gerbils, a guinea pig, two parakeets, three fish tanks, six or seven lizards, what looks like a baby squirrel and a litter of hamsters. This place is a private zoo.

      In the living room there’s a grand piano with a cello leaning in one corner, French horn beside the fireplace and piles of music on top of the piano. It’s a TV setup for ‘This Is Your Life, Albert Einstein.’

      It’s hotter than hell. The humidity followed us all the way. We settle in a dining nook attached to the kitchen. There’s an electric fan there and we turn it on to push the air around some. There’s also a small television. We switch on and watch one of the local stations; it’s amazing how the Philadelphia accent comes through even on TV.

      At about nine, a car pulls into the drive. The people fit the house. Pat is tall, thin and bald. If you can imagine a Midwestern Oppenheimer, you’ve got it: a quiet, deep-voiced, slow-spoken, deliberate man. Dad had told me about Pat’s strange childhood but I didn’t believe it. Pat was born to deaf parents on an isolated farm in South Dakota. He didn’t hear anybody speak till he was five years old. His home language is sign, and he has a slight finger accent in English. When he talks, it sounds like a simultaneous translation at the UN.

      Later, I ask about all this. You never know what embroidery Dad’s working up. But it’s truth.

      Pat feels he has an enormous advantage over other people because spoken language is something he can tune in or out as he wants.

      Rita is small, smooth, quick-moving and good-looking. This is the first of my parents’ friends who turns me on. I don’t know what it is; her moves, her voice, her vitality; and she doesn’t seem old. She has laugh lines down the sides of her face and wrinkles at the eyes. After you’ve seen lines like that on a woman’s face, young-girl faces are empty maps, undeveloped country, waiting for something to happen. I spend a good part of the evening sneaking looks at Rita.

      The two daughters aren’t there. They’re both off working summer jobs trying to help pay off those enormous tuition bills. One’s working on a horse farm; she wants to be a vet. The other is waitressing at the shore in Atlantic City. They call the beach the shore here. The younger ones, Sandy and Kim, are quiet, bright-eyed, listening to everything happening. We have a great time.

      Rita lights mental fires and Pat blows gently, keeping them burning. We talk about everything. Halfway through the evening Dad begins telling about what’s been happening in California. For the first time, I get the unexpurgated version. If he’s telling the truth, then I don’t know how he stuck it out long as he did. I hope he doesn’t expect me to put up with anything like that for him.

      That evening I give the university thing another think. What’s physics or mathematics got to do with whether a conversation is interesting or not? Nothing I can see. But these people are interesting no matter what they’re talking about. They have a way of approaching any subject with curiosity, originality, a personal viewpoint. They know how to think. They’ve read a lot, they know about music and painting; but that’s not it either.

      It’s hard putting a finger on it; they’re in tune, have good antennae. They know the rhythms of listen and respond. It’s three in the morning before we stop.

      Rita shows us the upstairs bedrooms, the older girls’ rooms. Everything on the walls is interesting. By letting your eyes wander around you’re constantly learning. There’s the periodic table pasted on the ceiling over each bed. There are star maps stuck on the walls. There are classification trees for animals, insects, plants, everything, all in color, beautiful. There are rock and shell collections on the window sills. Each desk has a professional-type microscope. Just lying in one of those beds, scanning the walls, you could almost educate yourself. These people are deep into knowledge. I’m not sure I could make it here.

      I lie there under the periodic table. Maybe I made a mistake. Maybe it was because I felt they were babying me. Maybe if I’d gone to a big university like UCLA or Berkeley I’d’ve made it.

      Dad’s already out of bed and downstairs when I wake up. It’s raining like crazy. At least the rain makes the humidity bearable. This whole East Coast is one gigantic hothouse.

      Dad and Rita are in the kitchen drinking coffee and eating doughnuts. They’re having a very heavy private conversation and hardly notice me come into the kitchen. Probably Dad’s unloading on her about California again.

      I sit down and dig in. I’ve never seen doughnuts like these. There are some with holes, both glazed and sugared. There are solid ones with jelly filling, lots of jelly; and even fancy variations like maple-syrup fillings.

      Rita asks how I want my eggs and pours orange juice. This is the best food we’ve eaten in weeks. Dad’s quiet; I have the creepy feeling I’ve interrupted something. But I’m not giving up on those doughnuts, no matter how much he needs that broad, firm, smooth shoulder.

      I’m into my fourth, seconds on the sugar-coated, solid, jelly-filled ones, when Pat comes down. He’s dressed for the university. I can see him at a lectern all right, the perfect university professor: bald head gleaming in the light; trying to be gentle and clear but scaring the shit out of his students because he gives off an aura of accumulated knowledge and know-how tucked behind those eyes, under that bald head.

      Pat takes a glass of orange juice and some coffee. He chooses one of the plain glazed ones with a hole. Rita gives me two fried eggs with