IV
Mabel Lacker looked around at young Stanley, who was wandering around the kitchen at loose ends. So far today, he had dumped his toys out of his toy box, holding the box over his head so everything hit with a crash and scattered all over the floor; refused to pick things up; got up on the dining room table, where she’d put the mail, and torn the cover off of Liberty; tried to climb up on the chandelier in the dining room; and now she had the impression he was working up toward some horrible climax even she couldn’t imagine. According to an article she’d just read, you shouldn’t hit them, you should “guide the child lovingly but without coercion; violence breeds violence; to be attacked by the parent is the ultimate traumatic experience . . .” She did think Al was too rough sometimes, but just lately—
Little Stanley reached up on the white enameled top of the stove and took down the box of kitchen matches where she had set them after lighting the oven. He looked at her with a tentative little smile and a glint in his eye.
She took one quick step, the remembered advice to “use the superior resources of the adult to distract the child” all but blotted out by an uprush of savagery she hardly understood herself—but then the familiar position of the hands of the clock on the wall over the stove briefly caught her attention.
Five o’clock. Captain Kong came on the radio at five. Little though she cared for the captain’s deep voice and the sickly piping soprano of his junior assistant, still, he did provide fifteen minutes of blessed relief every weekday afternoon.
“Stanley,” she said craftily, “it’s time for your program. Go turn on the radio, dear.”
Stanley hesitated, then started for the living room, and she deftly wrenched the matches out of his hand on the way by.
He stopped, defiant.
“Captain Kong is on,” she said, turning him toward the living room.
A faint look of perplexity crossed his face, then he went on out the door toward the living room.
She looked after him with a sense of relief, but also with a faint impression of something missing, something out-of-focus. She looked around, frowning.
On the stove, the water began to boil. The red needle of the thermometer in the oven door showed that the oven was hot. She shrugged, and got back to work.
From the other end of the house came the deep voice of Captain Kong:
“. . . boxtops from roasted toasted Choc’m-Hulls and I will send you my exclusive official signet ring, which pops open to reveal a secret spy mirror . . .”