“You’re beating around the bush,” said Adam.

“I know it. And I also know the best way would be just to tell it and get it over with.”

“You lost your money in a fan-tan game.”

“No. I wish that was it. No, I have my money. This damn cork’s broken—I’ll have to shove it in the bottle.” He poured the black liquor into his coffee. “I never drank it this way,” he said. “Say, it’s good.”

“Tastes like rotten apples,” said Adam.

“Yes, but remember Sam Hamilton said like good rotten apples.”

Adam said, “When do you think you’ll get around to telling me what happened to you?”

“Nothing happened to me,” said Lee. “I got lonesome. That’s all. Isn’t that enough?”

“How about your bookstore?”

“I don’t want a bookstore. I think I knew it before I got on the train, but I took all this time to make sure.”

“Then there’s your last dream gone.”

“Good riddance.” Lee seemed on the verge of hysteria. “Missy Tlask, Chinee boy sink gung get dlunk.”

Adam was alarmed. “What’s the matter with you anyway?”

Lee lifted the bottle to his lips and took a deep hot drink and panted the fumes out of his burning throat. “Adam,” he said, “I am incomparably, incredibly, overwhelmingly glad to be home. I’ve never been so goddam lonesome in my life.”

Chapter 36

[1]

SALINAS HAD TWO GRAMMAR SCHOOLS, big yellow structures with tall windows, and the windows were baleful and the doors did not smile. These schools were called the East End and the West End. Since the East End School was way to hell and gone across town and the children who lived east of Main Street attended there, I will not bother with it.

The West End, a huge building of two stories, fronted with gnarled poplars, divided the play yards called girlside and boyside. Behind the school a high board fence separated girlside from boyside, and the back of the play yard was bounded by a slough of standing water in which tall tules and even cattails grew. The West End had grades from third to eighth. The first- and second-graders went to Baby School some distance away.

In the West End there was a room for each grade—third, four, and fifth on the ground floor, six, seventh, and eighth on the second floor. Each room had the usual desks of battered oak, a platform and square teacher’s desk, one Seth Thomas clock and one picture. The pictures identified the rooms, and the pre-Raphaelite influence was overwhelming. Galahad standing in full armor pointed the way for third-graders; Atalanta’s race urged on the fourth, the Pot of Basil confused the fifth grade, and so on until the denunciation of Cataline sent the eighth-graders on to high school with a sense of high civic virtue.

Cal and Aron were assigned to the seventh grade because of their age, and they learned every shadow of its picture—Laocoön completely wrapped in snakes.

The boys were stunned by the size and grandeur of the West End after their background in a one-room country school. The opulence of having a teacher for each grade made a deep impression on them. It seemed wasteful. But as is true of all humans, they were stunned for one day, admiring on the second, and on the third day could not remember very clearly ever having gone to any other school.