Apt Pupil

5

Dick Bowden, Todd’s father, looked remarkably like a movie and TV actor named Lloyd Bochner. He — Bowden, not Bochner — was thirty-eight. He was a thin, narrow man who liked to dress in Ivy League style shirts and solid-colour suits, usually dark. When he was on a construction site, he wore khakis and a hard-hat that was a souvenir of his Peace Corps days, when he had helped to design and build two dams in Africa. When he was working in his study at home, he wore half-glasses that had a way of slipping down to the end of his nose and making him look like a college dean. He was wearing these glasses now as he tapped his son’s first-quarter report card against his desk’s gleaming glass top.

‘One B. Four Cs. One D. A D, for Christ’s sake! Todd,’ your mother’s not showing it, but she’s really upset.’

Todd dropped his eyes. He didn’t smile. When his dad swore, that wasn’t exactly the best of news.

‘My God, you’ve never gotten a report like this. A D in Beginning Algebra? What is this?’ ‘I don’t know, Dad.’ He looked humbly at his knees. ‘Your mother and I think that maybe you’ve been spending a little too much time with Mr Denker. Not hitting the books enough. We think you ought to cut it down to weekends, slugger. At least until we see where you’re going academically…’

Todd looked up, and for a single second Bowden thought he saw a wild, pallid anger in his son’s eyes. His own eyes widened, his fingers clenched on Todd’s buff-coloured report card… and then it was just Todd, looking at him openly if rather unhappily. Had that anger really been there? Surely not. But the moment had unsettled him, made it hard for him to know exactly how to proceed. Todd hadn’t been mad, and Dick Bowden didn’t want to make him mad. He and his son were friends, always had been friends, and Dick wanted things to stay that way. They had no secrets from each other, none at all (except for the fact that Dick Bowden was sometimes unfaithful with his secretary, but that wasn’t exactly the sort of thing you told your thirteen-year-old son, ‘was it?… and besides, that had absolutely no bearing on his home life, his, family life). That was the way it was supposed to be, the way it had to be in a cockamamie world where murderers went unpunished, high-school kids skin-popped heroin, and junior high schoolers — kids Todd’s age — turned up with VD.

‘No, Dad, please don’t do that. I mean, don’t punish Mr Denker for something that’s my fault. I mean, he’d be lost without me. I’ll do better. Really. That algebra… it just threw me to start with. But I went over to Ben Tremaine’s, and after we studied together for a few days, I started to get it. It just… I dunno, I sorta choked at first.’

‘I think you’re spending too much time with him,’ Bowden said, but he was weakening. It was hard to refuse Todd, hard to disappoint him, and what he said about punishing the old man for Todd’s falling-off… goddammit, it made sense. The old man looked forward to his visits so much.

That Mr Storrman, the algebra teacher, is really hard,’ Todd said. ‘Lots of kids got Ds. Three or four got Fs.’

Bowden nodded thoughtfully.

‘I won’t go Wednesdays anymore. Not until I bring my grades up.’ He had read his father’s eyes. ‘And instead of going out for anything at school, I’ll stay after every day and study. I promise.’

‘You really like the old guy that much?’

‘He’s really neat,’ Todd said sincerely.

‘Well… okay. We’ll try it your way, slugger. But I want to see a big improvement in your marks come January, you understand me? I’m thinking of your future. You may think junior high’s too soon to start thinking about that, but it’s not. Not by a long chalk.’ As his mother liked to say Waste not, want not, so Dick Bowden liked to say Not by a long chalk.

‘I understand, dad,’ Todd said gravely. Man to man stuff.

‘Get out of here and give those books a workout then.’ He pushed his half-glasses up on his nose and clapped Todd on the shoulder.

Todd’s smile, broad and bright, broke across his face. ‘Right on, dad!’

Bowden watched Todd go with a prideful smile of his own. One in a million. And that hadn’t been anger on Todd’s face. For sure. Pique, maybe… but not that high-voltage emotion he had at first thought he’d seen there. If Todd was that mad, he would have known; he could read his son like a book. It had always been that way.

Whistling, his fatherly duty discharged, Dick Bowden unrolled a blueprint and bent over it.