The Playground

The Playground

A thousand times before and after his wife’s death, Mr. Charles Underhill ignored the Playground on his way to and from his commuter’s limited train. He neither liked nor disliked the Playground; he hardly knew it existed.

But only this morning his sister Carol, who had occupied the empty space across the breakfast table from him each day for six months, quietly broached the subject.

"Jim’s almost three years old now," she said. "So tomorrow I’m going to start him at the Playground."

"Playground?" said Mr. Underhill.

At his office, he underlined a memorandum with black ink: Look at Playground.

That afternoon, the thunder of the train subsiding in his body, Underhill struck up through town on his usual path home, newspaper tucked crisply under his arm to prevent reading himself past the park. So it was, at five-ten in the late day, that he came to the cool iron fence and the open gate of the Playground, and stood for a long, long time, frozen there, gazing in at it all. . . .

At first there seemed absolutely nothing whatever to see. And then as he adjusted his attention outward from his usual interior monologue, the scene before him, a grey, blurred television image, came to a slow focus.

Primarily, he was aware of dim voices, faint underwater cries emerging from a series of vague streaks and zigzag lines and shadows. Then, as if someone had kicked the machine, screams jumped at him in full throat, visions leaped clear. Now he saw the children! They were dashing across the Playground meadow, fighting, pummeling, scratching, falling, every wound bleeding or about to bleed or freshly caked over. A dozen cats thrown among sleeping dogs could not have shrieked as loud! With incredible clarity, Mr. Underhill saw the tiniest cuts and scabs on knees and faces.

He weathered the first blast of sound, blinking. His nostrils took over when his eyes and ears retired in panic.

He sniffed the cutting odors of salve, raw adhesive, camphor, and pink mercurochrome, so strong it lay bitter on his tongue. An iodine wind blew through the steel fence wires which glinted dully in the grey light of the overcast day. The rushing children were hell cut loose in a vast pinball table, a colliding, and banging, and totaling of hits and misses, thrusts and plungings to a grand and as yet unforeseen total of brutalities.

And was he mistaken or was the light within the Playground of a peculiar intensity? Every child seemed to possess four shadows: one dark, and three faint penumbras which made it strategically impossible to tell which way their swift bodies were racing until they bashed their targets. Yes, the oblique, pressing light made the Playground seem deep, far away, and remote from his touching. Or perhaps it was the hard steel wire fence, not unlike those barriers in zoos, beyond which anything might happen.

A pen of misery, thought Underhill. Why do children insist on making life horrible for each other? Oh, the continual torture. He heard himself sigh with immense relief. Thank God, childhood was over and done for him. No more pinchings, bruisings, senseless passions and shattered dreams.

A gust of wind tore the paper from his hand. He ran after it down the Playground steps. Clutching the paper, he retreated hastily. For in that one brief instant, stranded in the Playground’s atmosphere, he had felt his hat grow too large, his coat too cumbersome, his belt too loose, his shoes too big; he had felt like a small boy playing businessman in his father’s clothes; the gate behind him had loomed impossibly tall, while the sky pressed a huge weight of greyness at his eyes, and the scent of iodine, like a tiger’s breath exhaled uponhim, blew his hair. He tripped and almost fell, running back.

He stood outside the Playground, like someone who has just emerged, in shock, from a terrible cold sea.

"Hello, Charlie!"

He heard the voice and turned to see who had called him. There on top a metal slide, a boy of some nine years was waving. "Hello, Charlie . . .!"

Mr. Charles Underhill raised a hand. But I don’t know that boy, he thought. And why should he call me by my first name?

The boy was smiling high in the misty air, and now, jostled by other yelling children, rushed shrieking down the slide.

Underhill stood bemused by what he saw. Now the Playground was an immense iron industry whose sole product was pain, sadism and sorrow. If you watched half an hour there wasn’t a face in the entire enclosure that didn’t wince, cry, redden with anger, pale with fear, one moment or another. Really! Who said childhood was the best time of life? When in reality it was the most terrible, the most merciless era, the barbaric time when there were no police to protect you, only parents preoccupied with themselves and their taller world. No, if he had his way, he touched the cold fence with one hand, they’d nail a new sign here: TORQUEMADA’S GREEN.

And as for that boy, the one who had called out to him, who was he? There was something familiar there, perhaps in the hidden bones, an echo of some old friend; probably the son of a successfully ulcered father.

So this is the playground where my son will play, thought Mr. Underhill. So this is it.

Hanging his hat in the hall, checking his lean image in the watery mirror, Underhill felt wintry and tired. When his sister appeared, and his son came tapping on mouse-feet, he greeted them with something less than full attention. The boy clambered thinly over him, playing KING OF THE HILL. And the father, fixing his gaze to the end of the cigar he was slowly lighting, finally cleared his throat and said, "I’ve been thinking about that playground, Carol."

"I’m taking Jim over tomorrow."

"Not really? That playground?"

His mind rebelled. The smell and look of the place were still vivid. That writhing world with its atmosphere of cuts and beaten noses, the air as full o

f pain as a dentist’s office, and those horrid tic-tac-toes and frightening hopscotches under his feet as he picked up his newspaper, horrid and frightening for no reason he could see.

"What’s wrong with that playground?" asked Carol.

"Have you seen it?" He paused in confusion. "Damn it, I mean, the children there. It’s a Black Hole."

"All the children are from well-to-do families."

"Well, they shove and push like little Gestapos," said Underhill. "It’d be like sending a boy to a flour-mill to be crushed into meal by a couple of two-ton grinders! Every time I think of Jim playing in that barbaric pit, I freeze."

"You know very well it’s the only convenient park for miles around."

"I don’t care about that. All I care is I saw a dozen kinds of bats and clubs and air guns. By the end of the first day, Jim would be in splinters. They’d have him barbecued, with an orange in his mouth."

She was beginning to laugh. "How you exaggerate."

"I’m serious!"

"You can’t live Jim’s life for him. He has to learn the hard way. He’s got to take a little beating and beat others up; boys are like that."

"I don’t like boys like that."

"It’s the happiest time of life."

"Nonsense. I used to look back on childhood with great nostalgia. But now I realize I was a sentimental fool. It was nothing but screaming and running in a nightmare and coming home drenched with terror, from head to foot. If I could possibly save Jim from that, I would."

"That’s impractical and, thank God, impossible."

"I won’t have him near that place, I tell you. I’ll have him grow up a neurotic recluse first."

"Charlie!"

"I will! Those little beasts, you should’ve seen them. Jim’s my son, he is; he’s not yours, remember." He felt the boy’s thin legs about his shoulders, the boy’s delicate fingers rumpling his hair. "I won’t have him butchered."

"He’ll get it in school. Better to let him take a little shoving about now, when he’s three, so he’s prepared for it."

"I’ve thought of that, too." Mr. Underhill held fiercely to his son’s ankles which dangled like warm, thin sausages on either lapel. "I might even get a private tutor for him."

"Oh, Charles!"

They did not speak during dinner.

After dinner, he took Jim for a brief walk while his sister was washing the dishes. They strolled past the Playground under the dim street lamps. It was a cooling September night, with the first dry spice of autumn in it. Next week, and the children would be raked in off the fields like so many leaves and set to burning in the schools, usingtheir fire and energy for more constructive purposes. But they would be here after school, ramming about, making projectiles of themselves, crashing and exploding, leaving wakes of misery behind every miniature war.

"Want to go in," said Jim, leaning against the high wire fence, watching the late-playing children beat each other and run.

"No, Jim, you don’t want that."