A thousand accidents may and will interpose a veil between our present consciousness and the secret inscriptions of the mind; accidents of the same sort will also rend away this veil; but whether veiled or unveiled, the inscription remains forever; just as the stars seem to withdraw before the common light of day; whereas in fact we all know that it is the light which is drawn over them as a veil, and that they are waiting to be revealed when the obscuring daylight shall have withdrawn.
—Thomas De Quincey
Mr. Pivner stepped out of his office building, to the street. He moved warily, for not long before he had almost been knocked down by a cab. The December sky was gray, and the air dissolved in rain. To the south, however, lay a small portion almost rectangular in shape and extravagantly blue. It was banded by an arrogant streak of purple. He walked into the street without disturbing himself to verify the color of the sky, exposing his face and the pinched knot in his necktie to the rain which he could hear drumming on the brim of his hat. At three o’clock in the afternoon Eddie Zefnic, the office boy who daily during summer observed Mr. Pivner’s wilting collar with the greeting, —Hot enough for you Mister Pivner? stopped to brood beside one of the long office windows. He stared out on the city until Mr. Pivner reached that critical point in his signature, the capital “P,” which he liked to make a figure of dashing individuality even on order forms. As the pen touched paper, —It’s a real winter day out all right Mister Pivner, interrupted. He looked up, startled, botching the initial miserably. In other parts of the world, as unreal as New York was inevitable, the sky may have been sporting snow, sleet, cumulus clouds and thunderheads, the consoling pattern of a mackerel sky, or only itself, tenanted by a sun in the vastness of even blue so immense that it would seem darkness had never existed. But when Mr. Pivner returned to his signature, the sky was settled for him. It was a lowering but safely remote, dull and unconscious gray.
Consequently there was no reason for him to stand idly in the wet, looking about and questioning the sky, when he came out of that office building. Little good would it have done him had he bothered. Tons of concrete and other opaque building materials stood between him and that impudent portion of blue.
In the fragment of sky which the buildings permitted above him flags were being lowered. For the full day they had floated, as much as the rain would allow, heraldic devices of marvelous power, far more impressive than a fiery cross, or the six balls of the Medici. A great bell signaled a telephone company which was omnipotent. Three strokes of white lightning on a blue ground hailed an electric company which controlled the allegiances of an office force equal to the medieval duchy of Mantua. The whole scene was lit by electricity, escaping statically in incandescent bulbs and, in splendidly colored fluidity adding a note of metaphysical (Bergsonian) hilarity to the air of well-curbed excitement, in tubes of glass cleverly contorted to spell out cacophonous syllables of words from a coined language, and names spawned in the estaminets of Antwerp. Any natural light which fell in from the sky, pale in impotence, was charitably neglected; but that sky, as has been noted, was a safe distance away.
Beneath these failing banners, these crippled ensigns depressing earthward under their own sodden weight, Mr. Pivner “walked through the streets, head covered but bowed. Marvelous constructions passed him: a blackened truck with blackened men and pails hanging from every projection, dragging a cart bellied with open fire under a tub of molten asphalt, came almost over his feet. He barely glanced at it. The names AJAX and HERCULES borne in gold thundered by at an arm’s reach, but Mr. Pivner did not appear to read. He stepped back, respectful as all ages of the expedition of heroes.
He had made this trip, a distance never measured in miles but in minutes, hundreds of times. Fortunately he had formed it as habit, for he accomplished it without thinking for a moment of where he was going, leaving his mind emptily cordial to the reflections of vacancy in the faces which stared with the same incurious anxiety at his own. If he had not rehearsed the trip many times, he might more easily have found himself among the flaming piles of rubble on a nearby city dump, which was a comparable distance away, far easier to reach, and whose central incineration plant had won a prize in functional architecture only ten years before.
Over and under the ground he hurried toward the place where he lived. No fragment of time nor space anywhere was wasted, every instant and every cubic centimeter crowded crushing outward upon the next with the concentrated activity of a continent spending itself upon a rock island, made a world to itself where no present existed. Each minute and each cubic inch was hurled against that which would follow, measured in terms of it, dictating a future as inevitable as the past, coined upon eight million counterfeits who moved with the plumbing weight of lead coated with the frenzied hope of quicksilver, protecting at every pass the cherished falsity of their milled edges against the threat of hardness in their neighbors as they were rung together, fallen from the Hand they feared but could no longer name, upon the pitiless table stretching all about them, tumbling there in all the desperate variety of which counterfeit is capable, from the perfect alloy recast under weight to the thudding heaviness of lead, and the thinly coated brittle terror of glass.
The subway stopped under a river. It stayed there for minutes, while the occupants looked at one another, surreptitiously, appraising the company with whom they were trapped to meet disaster. One or two, not alone, started explanations for the delay, —Lines wet . . . —Somebody probly jumped . . . and stopped speaking, embarrassed at the sounds of their own voices. It stayed there for minutes, as though to iterate to their consciousness that they were unprotected, unknown, that they did not exist singly but only in aggregate, material for headlines. Mr. Pivner stared at an advertisement which, like 90 per cent of the advertisements he read, had no possible application in his life. He had no sewer; but with glazed attention he read, “Look, darling, he found my necklace,” spoken by a lady, of the Roto-Rooter Service man, who offered to come “to Razor Kleen that clogged sewer . . . No charge if we fail . . .” The subway stayed there for long enough to send one woman (who looked foreign, they said later at dinner tables) into hysterics, moaning that her head was swelling, tugging the tight hatband away from it and running down the car to thrust her head into people’s faces, couldn’t they see it was swelling? And they withdrew, abashed at this articulation of their own terror. Then the subway started and flashed its way into rock.
Mr. Pivner came out upon the street, to see a crowd gathering at the far corner. He turned his coat collar up again and pulled his hat down. When he reached the crowd, he looked where they were looking, up: at a man poised on a ledge eight stories above. Lights shone on him. Figures leaned from nearby windows. The crowd shifted impatiently. —Don’t he know it’s raining? I wish he’d get it done, if he’s going to do it, a man said to Mr. Pivner. Mr. Pivner only stared. As he did, the rhythm of the crowd’s voice took shape. They chanted, —Jump . . . jump . . . jump . . . and the figure above drew back. —JUMP . . . JUMP . . . JUMP . . . they chanted. A priest appeared at the window nearest him.—JUMP. . . JUMP . . . JUMP. . . The figure drew back, further, toward the priest. A young man leaning from the door of a car with a Press card in the windshield said to his companion, —The son of a bitch isn’t going to jump . . .
Two blocks further on, Mr. Pivner stopped to buy a newspaper. There a man was arguing with the news-vendor, hatless, weaving slightly. He had started to leave, but turned saying, —Now don’t start to get obnoxious . . .
—Hello, Jerry, Mr. Pivner said, taking a paper. Jerry said, —Wet enough for you? Mr. Pivner said, —What’s the matter with that fellow?
—Him? Aw, drunks get lonely sometimes. You know, he don’t care what he says, he oney wants to talk to somebody.
—You’re quite a philosopher Jerry, said Mr. Pivner, and went on, stopping in anxious habit at curbs, turning corners, glancing at passing shoe-tops, stockinged legs and trouser legs. Then with the city’s suddenness someone was walking beside him. Their steps matched in a precise off-beat, ordained syncopation of doom on the wet pavement. Mr. Pivner walked faster, from fear was it? or revulsion? and still the man came on, beside and just behind him. Could he stop to light a cigarette? or for an untied shoelace? But the rain beat down around him and he walked on, again quickening his footsteps as they were echoed close upon him. When he turned down his street he looked back. The other continued straight, hat pulled down against the rain.
That street was quiet. There were no leaves dead and blowing in the gutters, because there were no trees within hope of the most boisterous wind. But there were forlorn bits of paper, candy wrappers, newspaper, paper bags, as satisfactorily dead and un-mercied as winter’s brown leaves in any village side street.
Like the others, Mr. Pivner spent little time at ground level. He was usually moving rapidly beneath it, or taking his spurious ease some ells above. Up he rose in the elevator, out into the passage, and he opened his door with one of a number of keys he carried, a satisfaction no one can know who does not keep a secret and private self locked away from eight million others. He stood for a moment in his open doorway, as he always did, lighting the rooms with the button at his hand and looking through the rooms in that instant of anxiety which waited always to be expanded into full terror at finding the place burgled, finding under the hand of the careless burglar the intimate slaughter of his secret self. But everything was in order, silently waiting to affirm him, holding there the sense of the half-known waiting for eventual discovery in a final recognition of himself. He took off his hat and shook it (having hurried home as though his own coronation were waiting), and moved now with the slow deliberation of lonely people who have time for every meager requirement of their lives. He took off his coat, shook it, and looked at the spots he had made on the wallpaper.
The small apartment was as inoffensive as himself. Like the defiantly patternless botch of colors he wore upon his necktie, signal of his individuality to the neckties that he met screaming the same claim of independence from the innominate morass of their wearers, the apartment’s claims to distinction were mass-produced flower-and hunting-prints, filling a need they had manufactured themselves, heavy furniture with neither the seductive ugliness of functional pieces nor the isolate dumb beauty of something chosen for itself: in matching, they fulfilled their first requirement, as did the hopeless style of his brown pleated trousers which matched his brown coat, double-breasted over a chest resigned to be forever hidden like a thing of shame, whitening to yellowness with the years so that to show it now would be indeed offensive. It was a part of the body which he had never learned to use, never having been so poor that he was forced to feel the strain and growth of its muscles in the expansion of labor; nor rich enough to feel it liberated in those games (requiring courts, eighteen-hole courses, bridle-paths) which rich people played. Totally unconscious of itself except when something went wrong, that body served only to keep his identity intact, and was kept covered, like this room, to offend no one.
He turned the radio on, and adjusted his hearing, so that he heard only a comforting confusion of sound. An electric reading lamp, capable at a turn of a finger of three degrees of intensity, stood (just out of reach) beside a large chair. Behind was a veneered secretary of anonymous century and unavowed design, holding protected behind glass an assortment of books published by the hundred-thousand, treatises on the cultivation of the individual self, prescriptions of superficial alterations in vulgarity read with excruciating eagerness by men alone in big chairs, the three-way lamp turned to its wildest brilliance as they fingered those desperate blazons of individuality tied in mean knots at their throats, fastened monogrammed tie-clasps the more firmly, swung keys on gold-plated monogram-bearing (“Individualized”) key-chains, tightened their arms against wallets in inside pockets which held the papers proving their identity beyond doubt to others and in moments of Doubt to themselves, papers in such variety that the bearer himself became their appurtenance, each one contemplating over words in a book (which had sold four million copies: How to Speak Effectively; Conquer Fear; Increase Your Income; Develop Self-Confidence; “Sell” Yourself and Your Ideas; Improve Your Memory; Increase Your Ability to Handle People; Win More Friends; Improve Your Personality; Prepare for Leadership) the Self which had ceased to exist the day they stopped seeking it alone.
——I knew it couldn’t work out. I knew he was too good. I should have known . . . said a girl’s voice on the radio, ——O God, what have I du-un . . .
On the end-table stood a ship model, a square-rigged man-o’-war set with so much sail (it was all metal) that it would have tumbled stern-over-prow in the idlest wind, furnished with so many guns that one of its own broadsides would have sent it heeling over to the bottom. The telephone was here too, and it was here that Mr. Pivner suddenly appeared from the bathroom, to pick up the receiver. —Hello? Hello? There was nothing. He dialed. —What number were you calling, ple-as? —I thought I heard the telephone ring, operator. Did you ring my telephone? —Excuse it, ple-as. —Hello? Hello?
——then and only then do you decide. The decision, my friends, rests with you. First come, first served. Don’t wait, don’t delay, don’t hesitate. And remember, you are under absolutely no obligation . . . said the radio.
Mr. Pivner returned from the bathroom with a bottle and a hypodermic needle, which he put down beside a photograph album. No one had opened the album for months. Shut in it were mean-sized prints, snapshots taken on vacations, of himself and other refugees. Some enclosed views of water, shreds of mountains, corners of sky, taken to remind him at moments like this of an outdoors whose wonders he was permitted to see some fifteen days in four hundred. But he had forgotten, not that sunsets did occur, but what a sunset was; or the flight of a bird; the movement of water against a shore; the freshness of air consciously breathed; distances seen over land; the sound of wind in a green tree; or the silent, incredible progress of a snail.
And his camera photographs, having cast these phenomena into static patternless configurations of gray, recalled nothing. They served, waiting locked up in undimensional darkness here, as witnesses: that he had had more hair twelve years ago; that he had started to wear (rimless) glasses nine years before; that his brown suit was seven, not five, years old.
—Ladies, now is the time to save and save. Women are flocking to . . .
He sat down, and before filling the needle took a letter from his pocket which he put on the chair arm and did not read. He had read this brief letter enough times, at his desk and in the office lavatory, over coffee and over meals. He would read it again after supper, study his own name in counterfeit signature at the bottom. Otto wrote to say that he would call to arrange a meeting place; but gave no number where he might be reached. Therefore there was nothing to do but wait. Some months before there had been a call, a drunken boy’s voice shouting for Otto, asking him who the hell he was anyhow. Mr. Pivner took up the bottle and read the directions. Diabetes is a serious disease. No one can afford to take chances; there is no reason to take them, when the marvels of medical science are worked out to the most minute point, making the notion of hazard contemptible, if only one follows the directions on the bottle. True, he had had four attacks in these past seven years, suddenly rendered helpless in public, going down with the reeling fall of a drunkard: but those had been moments of excitement. One had only to be careful, keep hold of one’s self. That poor woman in the subway tonight, for instance . . . (he had for the moment forgot the man on the ledge). One had only one’s self to blame for catastrophe, with Science concentrating its huge forces on bettering the human lot. (Had he not read, only the week before in a newspaper, of a new medicine which would prolong human life? Men might live to be two hundred years old, unclothed perhaps and unfed since there would be so many, but Science took care of details when they arose (had he not read only this week that very palatable foods were being made from seaweed, coal, and cotton? and clothing: the same article said that very durable cloth could be made from soy beans, meat extracts, and vegetable products). Two hundred years old! and, as he understood it, alive.)
After the injection, he picked up his newspaper. The Sunday edition, still in the rack beside him, required fifty acres of timber for its magic transformation of nature into progress, benefits of modern strides in transportation, communication, and freedom of the press: public information. (True, as he got into the paper, the average page was made up of a half-column of news, and four-and-one-half columns of advertising.) A train wreck in India, 27 killed, he read; a bus gone down a ravine in Chile, 1 American and 11 natives; avalanche in Switzerland, death toll mounts . . . This evening edition required only a few acres of natural grandeur to accomplish its mission (for it carried less advertising). Mr. Pivner read carefully. Kills father with meat-ax. Sentenced for slaying of three. Christ died of asphyxiation, doctor believes. Woman dead two days, invalid daughter unable to summon help. Nothing escaped Mr. Pivner’s eye, nor penetrated to his mind; nothing evaded his attention, as nothing reached his heart. The headless corpse. Love kills penguin. Pig got rheumatism. Nagged Bible reader slays wife. Man makes own death chair, 25,000 volts. “Ashamed of world,” kills self. Fearful of missing anything, he read on, filled with this anticipation which was half terror, of coming upon something which would touch him, not simply touch him but lift him and carry him away.
Every instant of this sense of waiting which he had known all of his life, this waiting for something to happen (uncertain quite what, and the Second Advent intruded) he brought to his newspaper reading, spellbound and ravenous. Man fights lion in zoo, barefisted. Cow kills woman. Rooster kills woman. Dogs eat Eskimo. As he turned the pages, folding them smartly back over the bulk of the newspaper, he relaxed a little at his comparative safety away from the news, drew comfort from the train wreck (he was not in it), the bus accident in Chile (nor in that), the meat-ax slaying (he had not done it), the headless corpse (not his), and so the newspaper served him, externalizing in the agony of others the terrors and temptations inadmissible in himself. Even though the evening paper repeated the news of the morning paper, he read attentively again, reworded, of the hunt for the unknown person who was releasing birds from an uptown zoo, of the discovery of two priceless art treasures, original paintings of Dierick Bouts, in a pawnshop in Hell’s Kitchen, of the murder trial in Mouth, Mississippi, where just that morning the husband’s heart had been exhibited in court. All of these civilized wonders were brought together, he was made to feel, expressly for him, by the newspaper. True, they kept him in such a state that he often bought late editions of the same newspaper, seeing different headlines than those tucked under his arm, only to read the story from column six suddenly elevated to a banner across columns one to four. True, often the only way he could know whether he had read a newspaper was to turn to the comic strips, where life flowed in continuum; and recognizing them, he knew that he must have read everything else closely and avidly, that nothing had evaded his eye, nor penetrated to his heart round which he had built that wall called objectivity without which he might have gone mad. As the tales of violence seemed daily to increase it hardly occurred to him that he was living in such unnatural density of population that it daily supported disasters sufficient for a continent. Added to this came the blood of the world, piped in on wires, and wireless, teletype, undersea cables, and splashed without a drop lost in transit upon Mr. Pivner, who sat, hard, patient, unbending, wiped it from his eyes, and waited for more.
Mr. Pivner elevated himself slightly upon one narrow ham and broke wind, a soft interrogative sound which went unanswered. Then he sagged and stared at the newspaper, untroubled by the notion that this might have been a demon leaving its residence inside him. Not only would he, albeit embarrassed, scoff at this medieval reality; but he could, in all reason, believe that even had he lived then, he would have scoffed. Incubae and succubae, the shriek of the mandrake root pulled from the ground which drove a man mad if he heard it, chloroform a decoy of Satan, smallpox a visitation of God: all those, and many more, he could believe that he would not have believed, but would have stood forth, as he was submerged now, in Reason. It was true, there were things he did not understand, realms where Science advanced upon the provinces of God, where he felt rather uncomfortable, looking forward, secretly, to the day when Science would explain all, and vindicate the Doubt which he kept hidden in case it should not.
His thumb over the headline, Campanile at Venice Periled, his eyes blinked closed behind the glasses which were steadily weakening them, until one day they might be as little good in light as they were now in darkness: his trouble had been diagnosed as nyctalopia, caused, he was told, by a vitamin deficiency (and not, “like people used to think,” from sleeping in the moonlight). He had a shelf-full of bottles (labeled Afaxin, Pancebrin, Natola, Multi-Vi Drops, Vi-Dom-A Pillettes, and others) to help correct this condition; but he had got the glasses “just to make sure.” Nonetheless, he still stumbled in the dark.
Now, the headlines had commenced to run together before his eyes. He had read the letters written to the editors (written by the editors), and the columns of the columnists, an assortment of aggressive ulcerated men, self-appointed authorities who wrote intimately of people they had never seen and places they had never been, or colyumists with the “common touch,” who simulated and encouraged the average reader’s lack of intelligence, talent, and sensitivity. But now, Holy See Bans Psychoanalysis . . . , Giant Robot Runs Amok . . . , Lobotomy to Cure Man of Writing Dud Checks . . . , the black letters swam before his eyes, and he started to doze over the news that the bell tower of Saint Mark’s was in danger of falling, cracked in the cool nights of summer after the scorching sun of the days.
——The Rootsicola Company now brings you the correct time. The time is six P.M. Have you tried Rootsicola? Rootsicola tastes better and is better for you, and remember, friends, Rootsicola keeps its flavor twice as long, and you get twice as much Rootsicola in the familiar big bottle . . .
(Better than what? he wondered faintly. Twice as long as what? Twice as much as what?)
——Rootsicola. That’s right, friends. Remember the root. Rootsicola, for the smile of happiness . . . the uprooted voice went on, bursting with aggressive vitality, leveling Mr. Pivner’s weariness to chronic decrepitude. True, he it was to whom they all appealed; and he did try, with all the attention his consciousness could muster under the attrition of the sameness of their words, to maintain his responsibility as a citizen. He listened to the radio during periods of political heat, the speech in which one senator told the truth about another (this was known as a “smear campaign”); and then the raucous gathering where people were paid in five-dollar bills to shout, clap, parade, and otherwise indicate the totally irrational quality of their enthusiasm for a man they had never met to take office and govern them. Occasionally, it is true, Mr. Pivner slipped into listening to these conventions in much the same spirit as benighted members of certain Latin cultures listen to the drawing of the National Lottery; but even when this expression disappeared he had as much difficulty reconciling his sense of public duty and responsibility with his feeling of total helplessness as a Central American Indian might, upon being told that he shared the responsibility for the number drawn in Panama on Sunday afternoon; and as far as that goes, the Indian could call in powers which Mr. Pivner knew nothing about, dreams and spells, magic numbers and meretricious deities, a seedy band to call in where Reason reigned, however staunch they might prove as allies there where the Indian sat silent with his radio on a peak in Darien.
Science assures us that “If man were wiped out, it is extremely improbable that anything very similar would ever again evolve.” Threat and comfort: we need only turn the particle of the earth’s crust read with such eager pride to make one of the other. Here in the foremost shambles of time Mr. Pivner stood, heir to that colossus of self-justification, Reason, one of whose first accomplishments was to effectively sever itself from the absurd, irrational, contaminating chaos of the past. Obtruding over centuries of gestation appeared this triumphal abortion: Reason supplied means, and eliminated ends.
What followed was entirely reasonable: the means, so abruptly brought within reach, became ends in themselves. And to substitute the growth of one’s bank account for the growth of one’s self worked out very well. It had worked out almost until it reached Mr. Pivner, for so long as the means had remained possible of endless expansion, those ends of other ages (which had never shown themselves very stable) were shelved as abstractions to justify the means, and the confidently rational notion that peace, harmony, virtue, and other tattered constituents of the Golden Rule would come along of themselves was taken, quite reasonably, for granted.
Retirement? the word shook him hollow, left him in a void where nothing remained to be done. With survival a triumph, the means themselves had become an end constantly unfulfilled; and now the specter of retirement formed its expression, leering within sight. He found himself surrounded by the rights of others who had ceased to grow more recently than himself, having earned that right the instant they mastered some fundamental technique of making a living, which they called education. Assured that they were under no obligation, and would do very well as they were, they advanced to take his place and relive his dilemma.
——and do you feel run down at the end of the day? that dull logy tired feeling that just seems to creep through you? Well friends, modern science has developed . . . .
It was to him that these voices appealed, siding with him in this conspiracy against himself, citing him splendidly satisfactory just as he was, heralding his privileges, valuing the mass of his concurring opinion with guarantee of his protection against dissenters, justifying his limitations, and thus proving, by their own successful existence, that he was obliged to seek no further than himself for the authority which justified them both, pledged at last to secure and defend him in all these things, which they called his rights.
The newspaper now lay open to a feature story (exclusive) on the imminent canonization of a Spanish child, a feature not because the little girl was soon to be a saint, but because she had been raped and murdered. He stared, started, and felt suddenly for the keys in his pocket, always terrified that, losing them, the finder would know to whom they belonged, what they guarded. The newspaper tipped in his hand, and lay quiet on his lap, as the tic which came in his lip when he was tired pulled his mouth out of line. His half-opened eyes met those of the two faces before him, both pictures indistinct because they had been sent by radio, not that there was any hurry, but to show that this newspaper afforded its readers the most modern news service possible. He summoned his attention to read the article, for it was in such “features” that he found the satisfaction which life never suggested, that of a beginning, a middle, and an end. (Though occasionally one beginning got confused with other middles and other ends, he knew that these events were really taking place; and he even had the sense that he was slightly ahead of them, with evening papers out in the morning, and next morning’s papers out that night.)
His eyes met the penetrating eyes of the murderer, fixed in a round face whose limp flabby quality was belied by a exquisite mustache and a sharp cleft in the widow’s peak of black hair. He read the man’s name, and that of his victim, confusions of foreign syllables which he did not try to align, and then details of the crime so rewardingly grisly and sharp that it might have happened the day before, instead of four decades. “Very soon after her death, the village of San Zwingli, its façades splashed blue with vine-spray, where the peasants live a mixed life with their goats, chickens, and burros, became the scene of a series of miracles. There were miraculous cures among sick peasants who insisted on attributing them to the little girl who appeared to them in visions, in a mist, carrying lilies of purity . . .” Even the criminal testified, “ ‘I see her against the light, coming to me with lilies in her hands. But when she offers them to me they become flames. It is in these flames that I find remorse and penitence, and peace! . . .’ ” Through his drooping eyes, Mr. Pivner stumbled on to an interview with the priest who had promoted recognition of the child’s sanctity, “A candle gave an extra flicker and lit up his face, the color and texture of antique parchment, surmounted by the black satin biretta . . .” With a gesture of “his pale El Grecoesque hands . . .” he went on, “ ‘The Devil’s Advocate took the information and after two years’ study passed it to the Preparatory Congregation, which was held in the presence of the Cardinals. The following year, the Pope was present at the General Congregation, with his Cardinals, Prelates, and consultative Padres. They all cast votes in favor of the Martyrdom . . . We started without a single lira, and it takes a great deal of money to promote a saint. Apart from the expenses of bringing witnesses to Rome and making out the documents, it costs 3,000,000 lire to hire Saint Peter’s for a canonization . . . ’ ”
There the little girl stood before Mr. Pivner in long white stockings, and stared out at his dozing face wistfully, for the harsh newspaper reproduction, sent by radio, made her look cross-eyed.
——Friends, don’t take our word for it. You owe it to your own health . . .
The newspaper slipped to the floor, and Mr. Pivner sat up as though called. A half-pound of ground beef waited in the kitchen, for his supper. (—Is it all beef? he had asked insistently; and assured that it was, did not ask how old it was, and so was not told that it had got its succulent redness from sodium sulphite rubbed into it when it had turned toxic gray the day before.)
——Exhaustive scientific tests have proved . . .
He breathed, a sigh, and sat back, his senses glazed, insulted and injured, a brave man, assailed on all sides, supporting with his last penny those things which tore from him the last sacred corner of his privacy, and with it the dignity which churchmen called his soul.
——Prominent medical specialists agree . . .
He looked at that letter again, on the chair arm, and his eyes widened as the stain of perfect metal in his alloy cried out for perfection.
——tastes better, looks better, smells better, and is better for you . . .
And that perfect particle was submerged, again satisfied with any counterfeit of itself which would represent its worth amongst others. As his eyes closed again, the letter slipped from the chair arm to the floor, and with it the precious metal of youth which it had suggested, alloyed in age with weariness, doubt and dread, circumstances constantly unpropitious to any approach to perfection. Gold was never seen, never passed from one hand to another, no longer currency, not only unexpected but against the law: only the compromises worn smooth which Exchangers do not even bother to ring but pass on, giving and receiving or losing and taking reciprocally their leaden counterparts.
Worth his weight in gold, Mr. Pivner would have brought seventy-four thousand and four dollars (at the official rate; 
105,720 on the black market). But somewhere in the shadowy past, in that penumbra of Science called chemistry, lay the assurance that his body was worth ninety-seven cents: a faint sigh led him nearer sleep, a sound of anticipation, as though awaiting the strategic moment to sell out.
Even in sleep, he was waiting, a little tense like everyone waiting within reach of a telephone, for it to ring. And still, even in sleep, he knew there would be time. Adam, after all, lived for nine hundred thirty years.
Beside the empty cradle of the white telephone, a vase held erect against green six bird-of-paradise flowers, Strelitzia reginae, also called wild banana in South Africa where they grow naturally profuse, blue-tongued exotic orange protrusions from the deep purple-green bill, silently mating there among the native white pear, the red ivory, black stinkwood, and umzimbiti.
Mickey Mouse pointed to four o’clock.
—Am I in a state of Grace? But darling . . . Agnes Deigh paused, to reach beyond the oval-framed miniature of a young man in uniform, for the cigarettes on her desk. She got one and put it into her mouth at an extreme angle and, lighting it, listening, looked for that moment like a billboard picture into whose lips someone has stuck a cigarette. —Yes I know, that’s sweet but I can’t pray for you, she went on, the cigarette bobbing. —I know, darling, another time. But thank you for the divine flowers just the same.
When she’d hung up she sat staring for a moment at the news clipping one of the girls had sent in as a joke: Offer Husband’s Heart in Evidence. A woman named Agnes Day of Mouth, Mississippi, was on trial for stabbing her husband to death. It was not funny. She crumpled it to throw in the basket, and rummaged in her bag, took out a French enameled thimble case, set it aside, and looked until she found another pill box. Then as she poured water from the carafe, she stared at the mini-ature in the oval frame. It was her brother, whom she’d known only in the intent intimacy of childhood, before he ran away, before she was sent away to school; and she found herself again counting the months since he’d been listed missing in a war which no one spoke of but as a political blunder. She turned her chair away from the desk to take her pill.
Across the court from Agnes Deigh’s office there were two windows she could look directly into. One, she was certain, was a psychoanalyst. The Venetian blinds were usually drawn, but she had seen the couch, and the sight of its familiar length upset her. Her own analysis had taken three years, under one of the best analysts (he had made a name for himself with a paper he had published on one of his patients, a nun, who became a bear trainer when he had done with her). But there were still moments, when she thought of her husband, or when she looked at the picture in the oval frame, when Agnes Deigh was unsure whether she had correctly reassembled the parts he had spread out before her, as when a novice dismantles a machine, and putting it back together finds a number of parts left over, each curiously shaped to some definite purpose.
The other window was a dentist. Late every afternoon he appeared there in an undershirt, to shave before the mirror hung in the window frame. For some reason she always thought of her husband, Harry, when she looked across at him. But he never noticed her, he never glanced across the court, never anywhere but the mirror, not even when, one day, exasperated at his sloven obduracy, she had stood at her window with her blouse undone, pretending, as a breast slipped into conspicuous sight while she watched him from her eye’s corner, to be adjusting an undergarment. He’d neither looked over nor seemed consciously to keep from doing so, but went on to shave, the flesh of his arms hanging loosely, suspenders dangling to his knees. Every time she looked up he was there, absorbed in some activity of the body, his own or someone else’s, now washing his hands, now drying them, talking to someone unseen.
She returned to her desk to put down the glass of water, took a macadamia nut from the jar there, and sat exposing a face where time weighed out unconscious of exposure, a face even she herself had never seen in her mirror. Then her telephone rang.
—Yes? she whispered, and then, getting her voice, —Send him in.
Otto had left a copy of his play for her to look at (one of four made at alarming expense by a public stenographer, which he carried in a proportionately expensive pigskin dispatch case). When he arrived late that afternoon, he could hear her voice from an office or two away, ringing from the dark green walls, ricocheting off the white plaster approximations to tropical plants which were the indirect lighting fixtures, glancing from one unsympathetic modern surface to another, skipping across the edges of other sounds to attempt escape through the jalousies of the Venetian blinds, caroming off the absurd angles of the hats on other women who infested the place and who, themselves, rebounded among telephones. The whole scene, on the long-piled dark green carpet bore grotesque parody to those earlier caricatures of Nature sponsored by shades of the Sun King, where women of exhausted French sophistication dressed as shepherdesses to toil weary sins in new silks across carpets of false grass.
—Simpotico, came that voice, —I say they’re so simpótico . . . what? Harry? Oh God no, not for months, he’s still in Hollywood where they’re filming his novel . . . yes, it was changed a little. What? . . . yes, the homosexual boy to a Negro and the Jew to a cripple. Sensitive minorities . . . Of course I’m interested in politics . . . Don’t be tiresome, I couldn’t care less about Harry using me in his ghastly book, but giving me a name like Seraphina . . . No, of course I don’t need the money, I’m just suing him because money is the only language he understands . . .
—She’s frightfully busy, said one of the hats to Otto. —She’s on the phone, and she has someone in there now. Have you an appointment?
Some minutes later, during which Otto almost set fire to his sling trying to light a cigarette, Agnes Deigh appeared with an immaculate boy before her, saying to him, —But you will hurry with it? Buster Brown’s third book will be out in the spring, and he’s only twenty-three.
—Buster twenty-three! Agnes, he’s twenty-eight if he’s a day. And really, how can he pretend to write about depravity, why I told him myself about Leda and the swan, do you know what he said? Human beins cain’t copulate wif bihds, silly . . . Really, he’s a very wicked boy. You’re coming to the party tonight? I’ll tell you who I’m going to be or you’ll never know me, Cleopatra! . . .
Otto followed her into her office, after her incurious smile and a glance, not at him but his fading suntan. Hers glistened richly. —Now . . . she paused behind her desk, —what was it? You are . . .
—The Vanity of Time, my play, my name . . .
—Oh yes. Sit down? She found it, under things, and sat a long silence staring at it. When he cleared his throat to speak, she said, —Well I liked it a great deal, you know . . . as though to indicate that no one else had. —But we’ve talked about it . . . Apparently no one else had. —It’s not really that it isn’t a good play, you do have an admirable eye for dramatic situation, and some very sensitive perceptions. But . . . possibly the theme is a little ambitious for someone your age? When you’ve really lived these things . . . as they happen . . . it isn’t really topical, you see. If you look carefully at the plays and novels that are successful now . . . The white telephone rang. —Yes, Monday? sixish? Just drinks, yes, I want to talk to you about it. He left a moment ago, he said he’d have a copy for you in two or three weeks, and frankly I think it’s worth ten thousand simply in pre-publication advertising, after all he is just the sort of thing we’ve made popular. I? . . . no, I haven’t had a chance to read it yet myself.
As she spoke she twisted forward, looking past him, lips distorted to accept the cigarette he offered round the Strelitzia ambush. But before he could manage to light it, she’d hung up and held a flaming silver machine across to him. —There is something else I should mention, she went on-as he sank back. —All of us had the feeling that parts of it were familiar, I hardly know how to say . . . She coughed, looked at the cigarette, and put it out. —No, I didn’t mean to say you’d stolen it, not at all, but there was the feeling . . . some of the lines were familiar . . . The telephone rang. —Thank you for letting us look at it, she said lifting the telephone, and then lowering her eyes to vacancy as he stood. —Of course I have your key darling, the one to your box? . . . but you told me I wasn’t to let you have it . . . She smiled down at space. —Oh, for the party tonight? . . . She looked up, and spoke around the telephone mouthpiece, —But you’ll show us anything else you do, won’t you . . . ? her voice followed him, out the gate, across the greensward among those shepherdesses gesticulating their telephone crooks, up the garden path.
One of them passed him, carrying a letter to the office he’d just left, a letter which quivered, open, in Agnes Deigh’s hand a few moments later. It was from the War Department, to inform her that the body of her brother had been recovered and identified. Did she want it? Please check yes or no.
—Darling, is something the matter?
—Please . . . just . . .
—What . . . ?
—Leave me alone . . . for a minute. Then the slight sound of the letter quivering in her hand roused her from the numbness which had diffused itself through every sensible part of her body. —Not so cruel, she murmured, —but . . . how can they be so stupid? . . . Then she let go the paper and swung her chair away abruptly to face the window, to deny the familiar room, and the picture on her desk, seeing her wipe her eyes. She did that; and sat staring through the glass.
Check yes or no
Although she could not hear across the court, it was evident that the dentist was shouting. She could make out a girl of about twenty. Then Agnes Deigh leaned forward. She got up and went to the window and stared. He had hit her. He had hit the girl and he hit her again. He had the razor strop in his hand, and he brought it down against the arms protecting her bosom. Agnes Deigh’s hand shook with excitement as she turned and lifted the white telephone, opening the directory with her other hand, to say, —Get me Spring seven three one hundred . . . Hello? Yes, I want to report a case of malicious cruelty. Or sadism. Yes, sadism. What? Of course, my name is Agnes Deigh . . .
As she spoke she stared at the Strelitzia; and as she spoke the words of an earlier conversation rehearsed in her mind. —Your flowers are lovely, are they for Christmas?
(—Yes Agnes but I sent
them because I knew they’d amuse you, aren’t they sweet, they’re so obscene, but Agnes darling you know I’m mercenary, really quite venial, and I want someone to pray for something for me, darling are you in a state of Grace . . . ?)
Immediately
she had hung up she stood, put on her hat slowly, her coat quickly, and went through the door. Check yes or no In how many years? she thought, no one has sent me flowers for love.
She’d gone direct to the bank of elevators, but turned suddenly to the figure behind a near desk, and brought out, breathless, confused, not the words she expected, not, Are you Catholic? but, —Do you believe in God?
—Why yes, darling . . . in a way . . .
—Will you go to Saint Vincent Ferrer? . . . and have them say . . . you, you can go tomorrow, yes, go on your lunch hour? . . . The elevator doors opened behind her, and she said more clearly over her shoulder as she turned, —And put it on your expense account.
In the street she walked briskly, not a stitch or line out of place, her make-up set in a mask. An unshaven cripple, who’d come forth with an open hand, to be charitably avoided by a turn of her hips, retired saying to a passer-by, —You couldn’t take her out in the rain.
She went into a bar, and ordered a martini.
—With pumpkin seeds in it?
She just stared at him. The girl next to her had one beside her book. She was reading The Compleat Angler.
“What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this poor body of mine (which you love, and for the sake of which you dotingly dream that you love me), not a gesture that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not any look from my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but has belonged to others? Others, ages dead, have wooed other men with my eyes; other men have heard the pleading of the same voice that now sounds in your ears. The hands of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me, they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but reinform features and attributes that have long been laid aside from evil in the quiet of the grave . . .”
The dead lilies stood beside her in a fruit jar, where she read, slowly as though bringing these words into concert for the first time herself.
The sign pinned to her door said, Do Not Disturb Me I Am Working Esme: and she had closed that door and bolted it, delighted to be alone. But as the afternoon passed, she moved less excitedly and less often. For a few minutes she sewed at a dress she was making, singing one of her own songs. Then she got up, with a cigarette, and walked about the double room, replacing things. Then she sewed again, sitting like a child of five sewing, and like a five-year-old girl singing unheard. But before that sewing was done she was up, rearranging her books with no concern but for size. There was, really, little else their small ranks held in common (except color of the bindings, and so they had been arranged, and so too the reason often enough she’d bought them). Their compass was as casual as books left behind in a rooming house; and this book of stories by Stevenson, with no idea where she’d got it, she hadn’t looked into it for years, now could not put it down, and to her now it was the only book she owned. Even so she had never read for the reasons that most people give themselves for reading. Facts mattered little, ideas propounded, exploited, shattered, even less, and narrative nothing. Only occasional groupings of words held her, and she entered to inhabit them a little while, until they became submerged, finding sanctuary in that part of herself which she looked upon distal and afraid, a residence as separate and alien, real or unreal, as those which shocked her with such deep remorse when the features of others betrayed them. An infinite regret, simply that she had seen, might rise in her then, having seen too much unseen; and it brought her eyes down quick. It was Otto’s expression, when his cigarette had burnt a cleft on her table, and he recovered it and looked up sharply to see if she’d noticed. It was Max’s expression, when he’d taken a paper with her writing on it, whatever it was, she didn’t know, but taken it from the table and slipped it into a pocket away from her, looking up with his smile to see if she’d seen him, his smile fixed and barely breaking as he started to talk hurriedly, looking at her with eyes which sent hers to the floor lest she weep for the lie in his.
The sole way, it seemed to her often enough when she was working at writing a poem, to use words with meaning, would be to choose words for themselves, and invest them with her own meaning: not her own, perhaps, but meaning which was implicit in their shape, too frequently nothing to do with dictionary definition. The words which the tradition of her art offered her were by now in chaos, coerced through the contexts of a million inanities, the printed page everywhere opiate, row upon row of compelling idiocies disposed to induce stupor, coma, necrotic convulsion; and when they reached her hands they were brittle, straining and cracking, sometimes they broke under the burden which her tense will imposed, and she found herself clutching their fragments, attempting again with this shabby equipment her raid on the inarticulate.
So for instance she stole comatulid, and her larceny went unnoticed by science which chose it to mean “a free-swimming stalkless crinoid . . .” and crinoid: lily-shaped (though this word belonged to the scientists too, Crinoidea, a large class of echinoderms). And the phylum Echinodermata she left far behind, left the starfishes, the sea urchins, and their allies to grope in peace in the dark water of the sea. Comatulid lay on the paper under her pen; while she struggled to reach it through the rubble amassed by her memory.
It was through this imposed accumulation of chaos that she struggled to move now: beyond it lay simplicity, unmeasurable, residence of perfection, where nothing was created, where originality did not exist: because it was origin; where once she was there work and thought in causal and stumbling sequence did not exist, but only transcription: where the poem she knew but could not write existed, ready-formed, awaiting recovery in that moment when the writing down of it was impossible: because she was the poem. Her hand tipped toward the paper, black stroke the pen made there, but only that stroke, line of uncertainty. She called her memory, screamed for it, trying to scream through it and beyond it, damned accumulation that bound her in time: my memory, my bed, my stomach, my terror, my hope, my poem, my God: the meanness of my. Must the flames of hell be ninety-story blazes? or simply these small sharp tongues of fire that nibble and fall to, savoring the edges and then consume, swept by the wind of terror at exposing one’s self, losing the aggregate of meannesses which compose identity, in flames never reaching full roaring crescendo but scorch through a life like fire in grass, in the world of time the clock tells. Every tick, synchronized, tears off a fragment of the lives run by them, the circling hands reflected in those eyes watching their repetition in an anxiety which draws the whole face toward pupiled voids and finally, leaves lines there, uncertain strokes woven into the flesh, the fabric of anxiety, double-webbed round dark-centered jellies which reflect nothing. Only that fabric remains, pleached in the pattern of the bondage which has a beginning and an end, with scientific meanness in attention to details, of a thousand things which should not have happened, and did; of myriad mean events which should have happened, and did not: waited for, denied, until life is lived in fragments, unrelated until death, and the wrist watch stops.
The pen quivered over the paper, added inae to comatulid, and then carefully crossed out that free suffix; and then brought comatulid into the tangle of black ink, as she moved toward that world not world where the needle took her. It was the uncircumscribed, unbearable, infinitely extended, indefinitely divisible void where she swam in orgasm, soaring into a vastness away from the heaving indignity of the posture she shared; the world of music so intensely known that nothing exists but the music; it was the world of ecstasy they all approximated by different paths, one world in which temporary residence is prohibited, as the agonies of recall attest: “Love’s dart” that wounds but does not kill; the ill complained of, but prized above every joy and earthly good; “sweet cautery,” the “stolen heart,” the “ravished understanding,” the “rape of love”: in Provençal, conoscenza. Thus Saint Teresa, quadrupedis, “dying of not being able to die.”
What did the devil teach Gerbert, Archbishop of Ravenna, in exchange for his soul which Gerbert bartered to learn all, and become Pope? The devil taught him algebra and clock-making, for a world where there is no space, only distances; no time, only minutes and hours; where things are numbered, and even Christ bowed with finite care when he gave SS Elizabeth Matilda Bridget a written account of the kicks, blows, and wounds he had received, numbered the skull fractures 100, the drops of blood 38,430 (though another girl was later to receive a letter through her guardian angel numbering those drops of blood 3,000,800). The world in which the Virgin’s titles number 305; and Sir Arthur Eddington decides that the electron is not subject to scientific law. The cosmos of Sir James Jeans, reigned over by a deity whose symbol is the square root of minus one, where in closed rooms they argue the weight of the crucified man sufficient to cause strangulation, and the Irish mathematician Sir William Rowan Hamilton calculates that Jesus in assumption, being drawn up through space at a moderate rate, would not yet have reached the nearest of the fixed stars.
When the devil appeared to Gerbert, to claim his soul, Gerbert resisted; and disappeared in a fork of flame.
The tracking point of the pen moved on the paper, and it was gone, Esme had lost it, and lay in the agonized exhaustion of this recovery of her temporal self. Still, on the edge of the chasm into which she could not fall, Esme quivered with anticipation of a sound which would interrupt, waiting fearfully for the signal to recall her from that edge. In the silence of waiting, she recovered herself; slow, she stepped back; silence, she began to talk with herself; stillness, she moved with exaggeration as though she were being watched, needed to be watched suddenly, to have another consciousness present, aware of her, containing her, to assure her of her own existence. There was no one. Even her voice sounded with a disembodied quality which frightened her. She sat there quiet again with the pen over paper, reduced in despair, her face expressing nothing but empty misunderstanding at being alone.
Across the air shaft from her closed window a woman ironed on a board. A man in underclothes appeared to stand beside her for a moment, talk silently and disappear. Then with no change in her expression Esme was crying and she turned her face from the window where she had been watching unbeknown. On the paper she wrote,
In a nicely calcimined
Apartment is a left-behind
Opera chair against the wall
Masquerading for a ball,
an exercise as significant as those ceremonies carried out at the insistence of the people during papal interdicts in the medieval Church, when saying the Mass was forbidden, but “the brethren had only to ring their bells, and play their organ in the choir; and the citizens in the nave were quite happy in the belief that Mass was being said behind the screen.”
Esme wrote regretfully, pouting,
Your name is said in a far-off place
By someone alone in a room
You do not hear it
but it was spent. And the miracle of transubstantiation? only a glimpse; and only the fragrance of its death remained, the heavenly fragrance, as of lilies, which rose from the body of Saint Nicolas of Tolentino, after he had reproved his sorrowing brethren who brought him a dish of doves on his sweltering deathbed, and with a pass of his hand restored their plumage and sent them flying out of the window of his cell; only the scent of lilies, rotting in the fruit jar beside her.
She lit a spirit lamp, and sat beside it for a moment before finding a teaspoon in which to liquefy an injection of heroin, staring into the flame, and the lilies beyond it. —If I am not real to him, she said aloud, staring at the dead lilies, —then where am I real? And the book of Stevenson, which she had laid open on a pile of books beside the lamp, threatened to catch fire. She took it down, and read there, again, “You are a man and wise; and I am but a child. Forgive me, if I seem to teach, who am as ignorant as the trees of the mountain; but those who learn much do but skim the face of knowledge; they seize the laws, they conceive the dignity of the design—the horror of the living fact fades from their memory. It is we who sit at home with evil who remember . . . and are warned and pity . . .”
knock knock knock sounded on her door, in ruthless precision of recall to time in its aseptic succession of importunate instants. Her lips tightened. —Who is it? she called.
—Chaby.
—Jesis Christ why don’t you put some lights on? he said when she let him in. He walked past her to the light cord.
—Because I’m alone, Esme said. Her weight hung on him, and without a word he bore her down.
As the afternoon ended, Otto was walking alone, south, on Madison Avenue, his own face expressing an extreme of the concentration of vacancy passing all around him, the faces of office messengers, typists turned out into the night air, dismally successful young men, obnoxious success in middle age, women straining at chic and accomplishing mediocrity who had spent the afternoon spending the money that their weary husbands had spent the afternoon making, the same husbands who would arrive home minutes after they did, mix a drink, and sit staring in the opposite direction. With his dispatch case, and an unkind thought for everyone he knew, Otto carried his head high. Affecting to despise loneliness, still he looked at the unholy assortment streaming past him as though hopefully to identify one, rescue some face from the anonymity of the crowd with instantly regretted recognition, and so rescue himself. He even strongly considered conversation with strangers; and with this erupted the thought of his father whom he had arranged to telephone, and appoint a place for their first meeting. With this, Otto took sudden new interest in every very successful middle-aged man who passed, coveting diamond stickpins, a bowler hat, an ascot tie, and even (though he would have been shocked enough if this were “Dad”) a pair of pearl-gray spats. It was a problem until now more easily left unsolved; and be damned to Oedipus and all the rest of them. For now, the father might be anyone the son chose. The instant their eyes met in forced recognition, it would be over.
—I must call the Sun Style Film man, he thought suddenly. —Peru, and northern Bolivia . . . Someone beside him was asking him how to get to Vesey Street. Otto held the impatient man with long and intricate explanation, two sets of alternate routes and was commencing a third when the poor fellow retreated down wind, thanking him, retiring to a policeman to ask directions for Vesey Street.
On the corner a tall black man with an umbrella towered in a hat of unseasonal straw, though on him no more out of season than the permanent attire of a statue. He stood as far as possible from the black poodle dog as their leash would allow, atolls of a formidable reef casting the white-caps to one side and the other. —He’s very handsome, Otto said of the strangely familiar animal.
—I takin her to the veterinary, said Fuller, not looking at this young man whom he did not know but at the dog. —Seem like she sufferin with the worms, he added with relish, looking at the dog which ignored him.
—That’s a shame, said Otto. —Beautiful dog.
—Yes, mahn, said Fuller, looking up and back at the poodle, —seem like she sufferin from the worms, he repeated, watching her face as though hoping to see discomfort and embarrassment cloud it.
The light changed, and the sea moved reuniting its currents, bore the reef away north and Otto south toward Esme. He had left her late the night before after what might have been an argument, except that he found no way to argue with Esme. He had worked for so long to develop his weak capacity for dialectic into equipment for a sophistical game that he was useless now against her blank simplicity. When she had asked him not to spend the night with her there, —because it’s so Greenwich Village . . . he realized that none of his cleverness would change her mind. Still he was jealous enough of her: she had a way of bending one shoulder down almost upon the table and looking up across at him, laughing, which rose into his mind now, and he hurried toward the pit of the subway.
—Wait a minute, Esme called, after he had climbed her stairs wearily. Chaby was still fastening his clothes when he knocked.
Otto and Chaby did not exchange any greeting. They had come to behave together like two animals of different zoological classes in a private zoo, each wondering at their owner for keeping the other. Otto made it evident that he was waiting. Esme treated the three of them together as though they were well-met friends, or as happily, thorough strangers, while Otto smoked industriously. Chaby left, after keeping Esme at the door in a conversation audible enough to drive Otto to turning on the radio, which he did with an air of long habit. After Chaby had gone, Esme sat down beside the truculent smoker on the daybed. He suggested that they go to dinner, making the invitation in a tone tired but duty-bound, as a gentleman, a concept which labored mightily in his mind as it does in many, who find it the last refuge for insipience.
She agreed readily; at which he sulked more oppressively still. When she drew off her dress to change it, he tried to put his arms around her. —You don’t do that to ladies who are dressing themselves, she said to him. —Besides your funny bandage gets in the way.
—I may have to go to Bolivia and northern Peru, Otto said soberly, and as though in direct answer. —Soon enough, he added, somewhat menacing. While she sought another dress, he opened his dispatch case and took out the play with business-like aversion. He separated the pages quickly to Act II scene iii, and immediately found the line. Enough times he had found it with a fond smile. Now he took his pen and drew it blackly through
PRISCILLA (with tragic brightness): But don’t you understand, Gordon? These are the moments which set the soul yearning to be taken suddenly, snatched out of the heart of some fearful joy and set down before its Maker, hatless, disheveled and gay, with its spirit unbroken.
He wrote in:
Don’t you understand the sudden liberation that’s come over me?
and sat pouring smoke down on the wet ink.
Out on the street, Otto said, —How does it feel to be with a gentleman for a change?
—Ot-to.
—But he is such a ratty little creature, Chaby. How can you stand him.
—Isn’t he bad? she said laughing, on Otto’s arm. —Do you know what he did when I first knew him? He had something in his hands, and he told me to reach into his pants pocket and get some matches, and I reached in and he’d cut the bottom of the pocket off, my hand just went in and in. Wasn’t that bad?
—Yes. What did you do then?
—I didn’t do anything.
—Well what did he do?
—I don’t remember.
—Where do you want to have dinner?
—At the Viareggio?
—Esme, that place is always so full of . . . well, I don’t know, all the rags and relics below Fourteenth Street. It’s like Jehovah’s Witnesses when you sit down at a table there, everybody comes over. Why do you go there anyhow?
—I don’t go there.
—Esme!
—People take me there, she said. And by now they were at the door of the Viareggio, a small Italian bar of nepotistic honesty before it was discovered by exotics. Neighborhood folk still came, in small vanquished numbers and mostly in the afternoon, before the two small dining rooms and the bar were taken over by the educated classes, an ill-dressed, underfed, overdrunken group of squatters with minds so highly developed that they were excused from good manners, tastes so refined in one direction that they were excused for having none in any other, emotions so cultivated that the only aberration was normality, all afloat here on sodden pools of depravity calculated only to manifest the pricelessness of what they were throwing away, the three sexes in two colors, a group of people all mentally and physically the wrong size.
Smoke and the human voice made one texture, knitting together these people for whom Dante had rejuvenated Hell six centuries before. The conversation was of an intellectual intensity forgotten since Laberius recommended to a character in one of his plays to get a foretaste of philosophy in the public latrine. There were poets here who painted; painters who criticized music; composers who reviewed novels; unpublished novelists who wrote poetry: but a poet entering might recall Petrarch finding the papal court at Avignon a “sewer of every vice, where virtue is regarded as proof of stupidity, and prostitution leads to fame.” Petrarch, though, had reason to be irritated, his sister seduced by a pope: none here made such a claim, though many would have dared had they thought of it, even, and the more happily, those with younger brothers.
—Is that really Ernest Hemingway over there? someone said as they entered. —Where? —Over there at the bar, that big guy, he needs a shave, see? he’s thanking that man for a drink, see him?
—I suppose you’d call me a positive negativist, said someone else.
—Max seems to have a good sense of spatial values, said a youth on their right, weaving aside to allow Esme to pass, —but his solids can’t compare, say, with the solids in Uccello. And where is abstract without solids, I ask you?
While Otto looked dartingly for Max, Esme entered with flowing ease, and pleasure lighting her thin face as she smiled to one person after another with gracious familiarity. —There he is, Otto said, as they sat down. The juke-box was playing Return to Sorrento. Otto adjusted his sling, and smoothed his mustache. Esme sat, looking out over this spectral tide with the serenity of a woman in a painting; and often enough, like gallery-goers, the faces turned to look at her stared with vacuity until, unrecognized, self-consciousness returned, and they looked away, one to say, —I know her, but God knows who he is; another to say, —She was locked up for months, a couple of years ago; and another to listen to the joke about Carruthers and his horse.
At Max’s table, among his and six other elbows, a number of wet beer glasses, a book titled Twit Twit Twit and a copy of Mother Goose, lay The Vanity of Time. Max rose, and came over with it.
—What did you think of it? Otto asked, pleasantly, not getting up. He rescued the pages, and wiped off a couple of spots which were still wet.
—Well Otto, it’s good, Max said doubtfully.
—But what? What did you think?
—Well, I’ll tell you the truth. It was funny sometimes, reading it. Like I’d read it before. There were lines in it . . .
—You mean you think it’s plagiarized? Otto named the word.
—Well, Max said, laughing like a friend.
—Look, you had it out, I mean, at the table. Did they . . . I mean, did all those other people see it?
—They were looking at it. I didn’t think you’d mind, and you see, I did want to ask them what they thought, about . . . recognizing it.
—Well? Otto opened his dispatch case, turning it away from view so that it was not apparent that the play went in to join its duplicates.
—What did they think? Pretty much the same thing, I think, Max admitted. —George said he felt like he could almost go right on with one of the . . . one of the lines. And Agnes . . .
—Agnes Deigh? You mean you talked to her about it?
—Well, it came up in conversation. I was up at her office this morning, talking with her about my novel. It’s coming out in the spring. She’s trying to arrange the French rights now.
—But what did you think it was plagiarized from, if you’re all so sure I stole it.
—Nobody said you’d stolen it, Otto. It was just that some of the lines were a little . . . familiar.
—Yes but from what?
—That’s the funny thing, nobody could figure it out, one of us would be just about to say, and then we couldn’t put our finger on it. But don’t worry about it, Otto. It’s a good play. Then he straightened up, taking his hands from the table where he’d rested them, and said, —I’m showing some pictures this week, can you come to the opening?
—Yes, but . . .
—Thanks for letting me read it, Otto . . .
—There was one line I borrowed, I mean I put it in just to try it out . . . Otto called after him, but Max was gone to his table, where he talked to the people seated with him. They looked up at Otto.
Esme ate quietly, across from Otto’s silent fury, weighted now to sullenness with four glasses of whisky, before his veal and peppers had appeared.
—Hello Charles, Esme said looking up, kindly. —You look very well tonight. Charles smiled wanly. Silver glittered in his hair. His wrists were bandaged, his glass empty. —Do you want my glass of beer, Charles? Because I can’t drink it. She handed it to him, and murmuring something, without a look at Otto, he left.
—Really, Esme.
—What is it, Otto? she said brightly.
—Well I mean, I can’t buy beer for everybody in the place.
She smiled to him. —That’s because you don’t want to, she said.
—You’re damned right I don’t, he said, looking round, and back at his plate.
—Of course I know it’s near Christmas, said someone behind him. —For Christ’s sake, what do you want me to do about it, light up?
There was a yelp from the end of the bar; and a few, who suspected it of being inhuman, turned to see a dachshund on a tight leash recover its hind end from a cuspidor. The Big Unshaven Man stepped aside. —I’m God-damned sorry, he said. —Oh, said the boy on the other end of the leash, —Mister Hemingway, could I buy you a drink? You are Ernest Hemingway aren’t you?
—My friends call me Ernie, said the Big Unshaven Man, and turning to the bar, —a double martini, boy.
Though the place appeared crowded beyond capacity, more entered from the street outside, crying greetings, trampling, excusing themselves with grunts, struggling toward the bar.
—Elixir of terpin hydrate with codein in a little grapefruit juice, it tastes just like orange Curaçao. What do you think I was a pharmacist’s mate for.
—When I was in the Navy we drank Aqua Velva, that shaving stuff. You could buy all you wanted on shipboard.
—Yeah? Well did you ever drink panther piss? the liquid fuel out of torpedoes?
The juke-box was playing Return to Sorrento. A boy with a sharp black beard sat down beside Esme. —Have you got any tea? he asked her. She shook her head, and looked up at Otto, who had not heard, had not in fact even noticed the person sitting half behind him. —Sometimes I really hate Max, he said, then noticed the beard. —I mean, I mistrust him. There were no introductions. —That poor bastard, said the beard. —He’s really had it, man. So has she.
—Who? Otto asked incuriously.
—His girl, she’s getting a real screwing. She wanted to marry him last year but she wanted him to be analyzed first. Max didn’t have any money so she paid for it. Now his analyst says he’s in love with her for all the neurotic reasons in the book. It don’t jive, man. He’s through with her but he can’t leave her because he can’t stop his analysis.
—Does she know it?
—Who, Edna? She . . .
—Edna who?
—Edna Mims, she’s a blonde from uptown. He used to bring her down here to shock her, and then take her home and ball her . . .
—Edna? said Otto, unable to swallow. —With him?
Everyone silenced for a moment at a scream of brakes outside, anticipating the satisfaction of a resounding crash. They were disappointed. Instead, as their conglomerate conversation rose again, Ed Feasley rode in upon its swell. Behind him a blonde adjusting a garter followed with choppy steps like a dory pulled in the wake of a yawl on a rough sea. —Get a drink, was all Ed Feasley could say, as he sat down at Otto’s table.
Mr. Feddle was there. He stood with difficulty, his hand on the hip of a tall light-haired girl, her delicately modeled face and New England accent manifest of good breeding. —His mother is the sweetest little Boston woman, she said, —awfully interested in dogs, awfully anti-vivisection. They were looking at Anselm, who looked about to drop to his knees. Behind her, Don Bildow said, —He is an excellent poet, when he tries. He’s been taking care of my daughter when we’re out, my wife and I. I haven’t looked at another woman since we were married. Then with his hand on the man’s-shirted shoulder of the light-haired girl, —Do you find me attractive?
The beard at Otto’s table said, —Is that Hemingway? Ed Feasley looked over at the Big Unshaven Man, who had just said, —No queer in history ever produced great art. Feasley looked vague, but said, —There’s something familiar about him.
—That’s the damnedest thing I ever heard, Otto said, looking at Max, partially recovered. He motioned for another drink. When he had finished it he said, —I’ve got to make a phone call. I may have to go to Peru and northern Bolivia.
—Tonight? said Feasley. —You going to fly down? I’d like to go with you, but . . . say, if you can wait until tomorrow afternoon
. . . I’ve got to go to a wedding tomorrow, but . . .
—No, I mean I’ve just got to call my father now, Otto said casually as though he had known that man all his life.
—Say hello to the old bastard for me, Ed Feasley called after him.
Otto called, made a rendezvous for a week later with the anxious voice at the other end of the line. They would meet in the lobby of a midtown hotel, at eight (—If you’ll wear that green scarf I sent you for Christmas two years ago, Otto, I have one just like it. We’ll know each other that way. And I wear glasses . . . said the voice, murmuring, after the telephone at the other end of the line was hung up, —Should I have said rimless glasses?). Otto had agreed quickly, he didn’t know where his green muffler was but to push the thing further would have been too much, bad enough to need recourse to such a device to know your own father.
There were seven people at the table when he returned to it. The painters could be identified by dirty fingernails; the writers by conversation in labored monosyllables and aggressive vulgarities which disguised their minds. —Yeh, I’m doing a psychoanalysis of it, said one of them, tapping Mother Goose on the table.
—I tell you, there’s a queer conspiracy to dominate everything. Just look around, the boy with the red hunting cap said. —Queers dominate writing, they dominate the theater, they dominate art. Just try to find a gallery where you can show your pictures if you’re not a queer, he added, raising a cigarette between paint-encrusted fingers. —What do you think women look so damned foolish for today? It’s because queers design their clothes, queers dictate women’s fashions, queers do their hair, queers do all the photography in the fashion magazines. They’re purposely making women look more and more idiotic until nobody will want to go to bed with one. It’s a conspiracy.
Near their table, the tall dark girl who had been talking with Anselm said to someone she knew, —Do you know that girl? I want to meet her.
With his hand on Esme’s shoulder, Otto leaned down to say, —Let’s get out of here. Ed Feasley looked up to say, —You want to go to a party? A big ball a bunch of queers are giving up in Harlem.
—Drag? someone asked.
—What’s drag?
—Where they all dress like women.
—This ball is drag, someone else said. —High drag.
There was a loud yelp. Anselm, on all fours, had met the dachshund, and had one of its ears in his mouth. The tall dark girl looked up at the doorway to see a timid Italian boy with no chin start to enter, and get pushed aside. —God, she said, —there’s my stupid cousin. I’m going next door. —I’ve got a doctor for her, a young man was saying. —He’ll do it for two hundred and fifty, but I can’t get hold of her. Every time I call all I get on the phone is Rose, her crazy sister Rose.
Otto and Ed Feasley, with Esme between them, moved toward the door. The Big Unshaven Man turned away when Feasley passed. —Of course I know him. A damn fine painter, Mr. Memling, he was saying, as he took a quart flask out of his pocket. —Would you mind filling this up with martinis? Yes, what you read about me is true, I like to have some with me. Sure, I’ll look at your novel any time, he finished, as the boy handed a ten-dollar bill across the bar.
—I sure as Chrahst know him from somewhere, Feasley said.
—That’s because he’s Ernest Hemingway, said a voice nearby.
—Paris? said the light-haired girl. —I wouldn’t reach up my ahss for the whole city.
Mr. Feddle was being pushed out the door ahead of them. There they met Hannah. —Is Stanley in there? she asked. —Haven’t seen him. —He had to go to the hospital to see his mother, said Hannah. —She just won’t die. Then Hannah melted into the stew, where the juke-box was playing Return to Sorrento.
—Where’s Adeline? Otto asked.
—I don’t know. The hell with her, Feasley said.
They found Adeline asleep in the car. Fortunately it was a new model, with a low chassis and a low center of gravity, which saved it from overturning at the corners. They had some difficulty getting in to the party, when Ed Feasley offered to fight anyone who kept them out. They were saved when a crapulous Cleopatra appeared, waving a rubber asp at Esme and Adeline, thought it knew them, squealing in rapturous welcome that their costumes were divine.
It was quite a party. There must have been four hundred.
They arrived as a beautiful thing in a strapless white evening gown finished a song called I’m a Little Piece of Leather, followed on the stage by a strip-tease in two parts. The first performer was all too obviously a woman, gone to fat. This tumbled about in the spotlights, wallowed a great unmuscled expanse of rump and bounced a mammoth front at the audience, jeering with laughter, railed off the stage in grisly flounces of flesh. Then towering loveliness appeared, bowed to thunderous applause, and moving with perfect timing slipped off one after another garment to reveal exquisite limbs (hairless but a trifle muscular) with long gathering motions of blond hair to the waist, serpentine caresses rising over the spangled brassière. Ed Feasley, who had muttered with virile disgust at the first, watched this exhibition with wondering pleasure, until, in finale, the brassiere was waved aloft leaving a chest uninhabited, leaving Feasley sitting forward in astonished indignation, leaving the stage through a curtain of wild applause.
—Are you really a girl? a young Bronzino in velvet asked Esme, punching in disbelief at her small bosom. She laughed, and Otto turned to brandish his sling; like Infessura, perhaps, writing of the papal court of Sixtus IV, “puerorum amator et sodomita fuit,” he ordered a drink.
There was, in fact, a religious aura about this festival, religious that is in the sense of devotion, adoration, celebration of deity, before religion became confused with systems of ethics and morality, to become a sore affliction upon the very things it had once exalted. Quite as festive, these halls, as the Dionysian processions in which Greek boys dressed as women carried the ithyphalli through the streets, amid sounds of rejoicing from all sexes present, and all were; glorious age of the shrine of Hercules at Coos, where the priests dressed in feminine attire; the shrine of Venus at Cyprus, where men in women’s clothes could spot women immediately, for they wore men’s clothes: golden day of the bride deflowered by the lingam, straddling the statue of Priapus to offer her virginity to that god who, like all gods, even to the Christian deity who exercised it with Mary in the form of the Holy Ghost, had jus primae noctis, and no subterfuge permitted. So enough of these young brides had backed up upon the Priapean image and left their flowers there. So a voice said now, —Then let’s go to Vienna, they’ve announced that you can wear drag in the streets if you don’t offend public morals! Isn’t that sweet? To which a dark-haired person in an evening gown of green watered silk said, —More than once I’ve dressed as a priest, just so no one would be troublesome about my wearing skirts. Sometimes I just can’t breathe in trousers.
So priests down through the ages, skirted in respectful imitation of androgynous deities who reigned before Baal was worshiped as a pillar, before Osiris sported erection, before men knew of their part in generation, and regarded skirted women as autofructiferous. When they made this discovery, the sun replaced the moon as all-powerful, and Lupercalia came to Rome, naked women whipped through the streets around the Palatine hill, and the cross became such a glorious symbol of the male triad that many a religion embraced it, so notorious that when the new religion which extolled the impotent man and the barren woman triumphed over a stupefied empire, the early skirted fathers of the Church forbade its use.
So even now, under a potted palm with silver fronds, a youth making a solemn avowal held another youth by that part where early Hebrews placed their hands when taking oaths, for it represented Jahveh.
Ed Feasley had a hand on a smooth chocolate shoulder which rose from a lavender evening gown in organdy, standing in the less-lighted shelter of a pillar.
There were women there. At a large table near the dance floor one sat, with broad tailored shoulders, flat grosgrain lapels, shortcut hair and heavy hands (she looked rather like George Washington without his wig, at about the time he married Martha Dandridge (Custis) for her money), recently in trouble, someone said, over kidnaping a seal for immoral purposes. She had not spoken to a man for sixteen years. Somewhere submerged in childhood lay a little girl’s name which had once been hers. Only her bankers knew it now. Friends called her Popeye. Now she was saying, to an exquisitely pomaded creature whom thousands knew as a hero of stage, screen, and radio, —I wish I were a little boy, so that I could dance with you. They were interrupted by Big Anna, in dinner clothes. —Have you seen Agnes? said the Swede. —My dear she has the key to my box, and simply everything’s locked up in it. The most delicious gown Jacques Griffes made for me especially to wear tonight, and I’ve had to come in this silly tuxedo suit, simply everyone thinks I’m a woman . . .
The second in order of the strip-tease performers stood beside them, dressed now in silver lamé. —Rudy! the Swede said, —your dance was excruciating.
—I feel simply ghastly, Rudy said. —I’ve been having hot flashes all evening. What divine perfume. Have you seen a book of mine?
—It’s only My Sin, I borrowed it from Agnes. Is this your book? Rudy reached for it. —But what are you doing reading Tertullian?
—For my work of course. I’m designing sports costumes for an order of nuns, and I’ve been told that their ears simply must be kept covered, by a very dear friend. He lent me this book, Rudy said, fondling Tertullian. —De Virginibus Velandis, on the necessity of veiling virgins. Val told me the most divinely absurd stories this afternoon. Do you know why nuns must have their ears covered? My dear, so they won’t conceive! The Virgin conceived that way, the Logos entered her ears. I have no idea what a logos is, but it doesn’t sound at all nice does it. Val quoted Vergil and all sorts of dead people. Why, they all used to believe that all sorts of animals conceived that way. They thought that mares were made pregnant by the wind. And so I have to read this to really know what on earth I’m doing, covering their ears, because evil angels are waiting to do the nastiest things to them. Can you imagine conceiving on the badminton court?
—It sounds really celestial, said Big Anna. —But what perfume are you wearing?
—I can’t tell you, really. A very dear friend makes it himself. Fuisse deam, that’s what he calls it. An aroma remained, you could tell a goddess had just appeared, Rudy said, waltzing toward the dance floor.
—I’d prefer French, Big Anna muttered, looking bitterly after Rudy’s silver lamé. —Where is Agnes, he said, wringing his hands.
Otto was trying to order another drink. He stared on the festival with glazed eyes, and had decided for safety’s sake to sit still until he could summon energy to leave. He waved with a heavy hand at a passing mulatto whose black hair stood out four inches behind his conical head in anointed streamlining, and that one was gone with his tray. Instead Cleopatra fluttered up to ask him for Maude Munk’s telephone number, —because she’s getting the most gorgeous baby by air mail from Sweden, and we want one so much . . . With the concentration of applied memory, Otto invented a telephone number. —Do you want to dance? Cleopatra asked him. Adeline returned to the table alone. —I was dancing with some guy and he suddenly let go of me and said, You are a girl, aren’t you, and left me right in the middle of the floor. See him, that big handsome boy, he looks like he went to Princeton.
—He probably did, Otto mumbled. Then he swung around at Cleopatra. —Will you get that God-damned thing out of my sling? he said, and the queen removed the asp, alarmed. —That’s the cutest disguise you wear, said Cleopatra, and then, abruptly, and as indignant —Aren’t you queer?
—Of course not, Otto said, indignantly unoriginal.
—What a shame, said Cleopatra. —I must find my barge.
Otto looked for Esme, did not see her. He looked for Feasley, did not see him. He was about to speak to Adeline when she left the table and went toward the dance floor saying, —I see a gentleman.
A voice said, —I’ve never seen so much bad silk on so many divine bodies. Another said, —Let’s elope. And another, —You can’t touch me, because I’m in a state of Grace. I’m going to be received tomorrow, only think! Tomorrow . . .
—Pony boy, a voice crooned.
—But I thought Victoria and Albert Hall were going to be here. Have you read her book? Have you seen his play? Where are they? said Big Anna, looking, as he had each minute of the evening, nearer to weeping. —Oh Herschel! Herschel! Will you stop that singing and console me?
—What is it, baby?
—It’s Agnes. She has my key.
—Yes, baby, Herschel said. He was almost immobile, but still standing. —I have to get home to work, he said in a voice which was more a liquid presence and barely escaped his throat. —Work. Work. Work.
—What work?
—Haf to write a speech. Have you ever read The Trees of Home? It stinks, baby. It’s a best seller. I’ve been writing speeches for the author of the best seller Trees of Home, baby. Moral regeneration, insidious influences sapping our very gzzzhuu huuu I’m going down to Dutch Siam yes I am . . . he sang.
—I haven’t seen you since the boat docked! At this, Big Anna turned around. —Victoria! Where’s Albert? I’m so glad to see you baby.
—He’s dancing with an archbishop. But darling tell me have you seen a tall dark girl here? Her name is Seraphina di Brescia, I just hoped she might be here, I know she’s in New York. I met her at the Monocle in Paris . . .
—No, but have you seen Agnes? Agnes Deigh?
—You’re joking, darling. Tell me, did you ever get your little what-was-his-name over from Italy?
—Little Giono! said the Swede, wringing his hands again. —No, and I’ve been after the immigration people, but they won’t help. Why he’ll be fifteen by the time I can get him over here, and he won’t do for a thing. I’m going to have to adopt him, it’s the only way out. But before I adopt him I have to join the Church my dear, think of it. He has to have a Catholic parent. I’m going back next week.
—Oh yes, I can’t bear it here a moment longer.
Otto, seeing Feasley approach, struggled to his feet. —Let’s get out of here, he said. —Where are Esme? and Adeline?
—The hell with them. Just wait a minute. There’s a little colored girl here I want to take along. See if you can find her while I go to the head. She’s in a purple dress.
—We met in Paris, someone said, —in the Reine Blanche . . .
—In the Carrousel . . .
—In Copenhagen . . .
—The Drap Dead . . .
—The Boof on the Roof . . .
—Seraphina? The one they call Jimmy? I know she has money, but what does she spend it all on? —Don’t be silly. She spends it on girls.
—Yes darling, said Adeline’s dancing partner into her blond hair resting against the grosgrain lapels. —We have to follow Emerson’s advice to treat people as though they were real, because, perhaps they are . . .
From somewhere in the middle of the floor, in a quailing voice, —Baby and I were baked in a pie, the gravy was wonderful hot . . .
—Of course there’s time, Agnes Deigh’s voice said, —just take the key and hurry. And don’t let me forget to give you my mother’s address in Rome . . .
—And the address of Monseigneur Fé, he has his own chapel right near the Vatican where he performs the most divine marriage ceremonies . . .
So they danced, as though ridden with the conscience of the Tarahumara Indian, whose only sin can be not having danced enough.
Feasley said, —Come on, let’s get out of here, not stopping as he passed the table. —Chrahst, I found her, the girl in the purple dress. Standing right beside me at the next urinal . . .
—I hate women, a voice said. It paused. Then, —I hate men too.
And so, as the Lord prophesied through the Greek Clement: I am come to destroy the work of the woman, that is, concupiscence, whose works are generation and death.
It broke up and spread itself, in couples and threes and figures of stumbling loneliness, into the streets, into doorways, they all went into the dark repeating themselves and preparing to meet one another, to reassemble, rehearse their interchangeable disasters; and the place looked like a kingdom stricken by papal anathema, as when Philippe Auguste, cunning pitiless monarch of France, was excommunicated for marrying Agnes while his wife Ingeborg still lived, and in his kingdom under the interdict there was neither baptism, marriage, nor burial, and corpses rotted on the high road.
—Wasn’t it fun, said Agnes Deigh leaning against a garbage can. Herschel, scratching the sotted front of an evening shirt beside her, agreed, with the sound of a thing drowning. He excused himself, and when he had thrown up in an empty doorway returned singing. No doubt about it: tonight he was going to manage it. —Your strip-tease danse was shocking, Rudy, he said. —Where’s Tertullian? I can’t lose him, Rudy said, and slipped a white hairless arm through Herschel’s, pulled the evening cape tighter and with almost masculine exasperation thrust the long blond hair out over the fur. —Call a cab, baby, for God’s sake. I feel awful. I feel like I was going to have a miscarriage.
Agnes Deigh returned a moment later, from between two parked cars. She was talking. But there was no one to talk to. There was no one there at all. The sound of thunder approached from the street’s corner, a Department of Sanitation truck stopping every ten or twelve yards to open the huge maw at its back and masticate the immense portions left out to appease it with gnashings of reckless proportions, glass smashed and wood splintered between its bloodless gums. Agnes, leaning alone there, was suddenly frightened less than ten bites away. She was, as much as her haze of consciousness would allow her, terrified, and set off up the street in the opposite direction, loping in frantic steps as though dodging among trees, an injured doe in a landscape of Piero di Cosimo fleeing the patient hunter. She reached a lighted doorway, struggled into the vast and empty interior, and collapsed into a pew.
Ed Feasley and Otto were moving at seventy-three miles an hour. But neither of them wanted to go to Connecticut, and when they realized that they were taking that direction the car swung about with a scream, and was saved from what might have been a fatal skid by hitting its sliding rear against a lamppost. It headed south. —I want to see how fast I can make that ramp around Grand Central, Ed said, full of spirit. As long as he was conscious, he liked to have a good time. He had been having one, continuous, for years, and never a moment of craven doubt in any of it. He was not afraid: not a grain of that fear which is granted in any definition of sanity. In college, he had entertained himself and others, quiet evenings in his rooms when his allowance was cut off, by beating the back of his fist with a stiff-bristled hairbrush, then swinging his hand in circles until the pressure of descending blood broke small capillaries and spotted the rug and ceiling with spots turned brown by morning; or standing before a mirror with thumb and forefinger pressed against his carotid arteries until his face lost all color and he was caught by consciousness as he fell; or dropping lighted cigarettes into the trouser turn-ups of a friend’s two-hundred-dollar suit; or setting fire to his hand dipped in lighter fluid; or setting fire to the extended newspapers of people in subways just before the doors closed, leaving him on the platform overcome with laughter at the fugitive conflagration. He liked a Good Time.
The car stopped so suddenly it might have hit a wall. Otto straightened up from the dashboard holding his head. They were in front of a hospital. —What is it? he asked, brushing at a spot on his sleeve until he realized that it was a band of light from the streetlamp above.
—I’ve always wanted to pat a stiff on the head. They shave them, Ed Feasley said. A minute later they were in a basement corridor of the hospital, talking to the watchman. He was lonely. They just wanted to know how to get to Connecticut. They were told. The watchman left on his round.
In a large refrigerated room, Ed Feasley raised a sheet and stroked a smooth pate. He groaned with pleasure. Otto opened drawers, and closed them. Then he turned with his prize. It was a leg, small enough to be a woman’s, quite old, slightly blackened around some of the toes and its detached end neatly bound with tape. But Ed’s felicitous imagination had been busy too: with some effort, he had brought together two lonely corpses of opposite sex, erected now in the act of life. But even that mortal pleasure failed to change their expressions, leveled into disconsolate similitude by their shaven heads.
Otto was having trouble keeping the leg wrapped. —You ought to get rid of that sling, Ed Feasley said. —It’s just a gag anyway, isn’t it? Here, give me the leg, and he left with it partially wrapped in the bit of blue cloth under his arm.
The car roared south in the dawn’s early light. —We have to do something with it, said Feasley, nodding back at the fragmentary passenger in the back seat. —We ought to give it to somebody. Somebody who needs it.
—There’s a girl I’d like to give it to, Otto said. —I’d like to give it to Edna Mims, God damn it, in a box, a nice long white flower box from Max Schling.
—That’s it! said the driver. —She’s the girl you used to go around with in college? She’s a good lay. We’ve got to get the box now.
The sudden light of Madison Square showed day approaching rapidly, though the sky was not yet colored with dawn; but with this clearing sky above, and the knock he had got on the head, sobriety and trepidation descended upon Otto. —We’d better not, he said.
—No, come on, it’s a fat idea.
They thundered into Washington Square. Otto tried desperately to think of an alternative, something safer, someone defenseless. Then he said, —Stanley.
—Stanley?
—We’ll tell him it’s a relic. He’s a Catholic, and he must want a relic. We’ll give him the Pope’s left leg.
—He won’t believe it.
—He’ll believe it.
—I wouldn’t believe it, even if I was Catholic.
—He’s a Catholic. He’ll believe it. How does he know what the Pope’s leg looks like?
—How does anybody know, except the Pope?
—Except the Pope. There’s more than one pope.
—The rest are dead.
—All right, they’re dead. This is from a dead one.
—Well then he can’t have been dead very long.
—Look, we don’t have to tell him it’s a pope’s leg. Stanley lives in a basement apartment. All we have to do is break the lock on the grating, we can do that some way, and slip it into bed with him. He’ll wake up and think it’s the Pope.
—The Pope in bed with him?
—But then he’ll find that there’s no one attached to it. Then he’ll know.
—What’ll he know?
—Why then he’ll know that the Pope is dead.
The car turned toward Sixth Avenue.
At four in the morning, the nurse told Stanley that his mother was sleeping well, that he had better go home and get some rest, they would get in touch with him immediately if anything happened. Mother lay in one of those bed machines which can be cranked and warped in any direction, to accommodate whatever vagary of accident or human ill. But even now, though the black beads lay quiet in her fingers, she was not asleep. Not at all. After a reassuring look at her teeth in the glass she had closed her eyes and pretended sleep, so that they would go away, mortally tired she was of all of their quietened voices in hope that she would live, their faces drawn in dolefulness trusting that she would not die when that, in unequivocal reason, was all she wanted.
For one thing, she was certain that somewhere along the way they had left a pair of scissors inside her. For another, they had played music to her when they made the amputation (this was called therapy), and she could not get the tune out of her head. When she thought of her missing limb, she remembered the tune; then as her weary unmusical mind dragged her helpless through that tune, she remembered the leg, which would at this point begin to itch. When she inclined to scratch it, it was not there. And as she bent her body, the scissors would shift. Then the tune would commence again. Could she wait? while one after another of her parts was carried away, in a bottle, in a glass, on a tray. What shabby presentation would she make, when she appeared at her final Destination? Her thumb twitched on the crucifix, and a lonely movement of the sheet toward the end of the bed betrayed her wakefulness, where her foot tapped against a metal rung. No one noticed it. Stanley went home.
He let himself into his room, bolted the door and fixed the chain, and lay down on his back, fully dressed, staring at the crack in the ceiling above. At first, he had only measured that crack once a week, but in these last few months he measured it every evening, and since the beginning of December, two ways: along its broken length, and the straight distance from the corner of the room to the end of the crack. In twenty months it had lengthened one and five-eighths inches. How long could it go on? before that ceiling, with the sudden impatience of inanimate things, would yawn open over him, and fall with the astonished introduction of the lives above into his own. Who could live in a city like this without terror of abrupt entombment: buildings one hundred stories high, built in a day, were obviously going to topple long before, say, the cathedral at Fenestrula, centuries in building, and standing centuries since. A picture of that cathedral hung on the wall across the room, and when he lay down it was either to stare at the ceiling, or, on his side, at that print, the figure which seemed to be gathered toward heaven in the spired bulk of the cathedral. Fenestrula! If ever he should get to Italy, it was in that cathedral that he wanted to play the organ; a lonely ambition, solitary epiphany. Meanwhile he carried concealed a small hammer and chisel, escape tools, and tried to avoid travel underground.
On the ceiling grew the graph of Stanley’s existence, his central concern: Expendability.
Everything wore out. What was more, he lived in a land where everything was calculated to wear out, made from design to substance with only its wearing out and replacement in view, and that replacement to be replaced. As a paper weight, on the pile of lined music composition paper tattered by erasure, lay a ceramic fragment from the Roman colony at Leptis Magna in North Africa. It was slightly conical, a triangular shape, dull, unglazed, and thumb prints were almost discernible in the scalloped edge: valueless as objet d’art, it had what might be credited as tactile value, and little else, except that it had been made to last. And Stanley, eating in the neighborhood with pressed metal cutlery, drinking from paper cups and plastic cups, often sat silent at table for minutes, weighing the dishonest weight of a plastic salt shaker, considering Leptis Magna, still standing on the Libyan shore of the middle sea. Phonograph needles? razor blades? thrown away entire, when their edges and points were worn. Automobile batteries? someone had told him that batteries in European cars lasted for years, but here companies owned those long-life patents, and guarded them while they sold batteries to replace those they had sold a year before. But there was more to it than gross tyranny of business enterprise; and advertising, whose open chancres gaped everywhere, only a symptom of the great disease, this plague of newness, this febrile, finally paretic seizure dictated by a beadledom of time monitored by clocks, observatories, signals on the radio, the recorded voice of a woman (dead or alive) who dissected the latest minute on the telephone when you dialed NERVOUS.
Stanley looked at his wrist watch. He was almost never seen in any but frayed and soiled clothing, but he owned others. In the closet at his head, which was locked, were three suits, two almost new and the third never worn. There were two pairs of shoes, brown and black, which he took out and dusted every week. He had two hundred new razor blades, and a porous stone on which he could get old ones almost sharp, which accounted for his half-shaven look. (Some day he hoped to own a Rolls razor; but he understood their sales were discouraged here by American razor blade manufacturers.)
Those were the outward signs. But like every legitimate terror, this obsession with expendability ran through every instant of his body’s life. Stanley had haircuts infrequently, and even then only a trim. He did not wash often. People must suspect this. What did they think? But better, perhaps: let them think what they would. Every abrasive contact with the wash cloth and caustic soap must wear down the body a little. But here came another enigma: if washing wore things out, what of clothes? He always wore a shirt just one more day, not only making it last but keeping his supply of clean ones (and some never worn) ready. But when, eventually, the one he wore went to the laundry, wasn’t it necessary to use the most harsh soaps and treatment to get it clean? Therefore wasn’t it wearing out faster?
Still, he was most upset in these calculations over the prospect of the Last Moment. Would he have time to wash himself to perfect newness, dress in unworn, uncreased garments? Perhaps not. Perhaps he would be snatched up as he was! a picture so discomfiting that when it really came upon him, he would surprise everyone by appearing spotless for a day or two, leaving unanswered (except in his own apprehension) the cordial question, —Where are you going, Stanley? Perhaps what had happened to him when he went for an army physical examination was meant to be a lesson: told to undress, he was so mortified at the dirt on him that he went to the bathroom where the only place he could find to wash in privacy, in secret if you will, was the toilet bowl itself, Would he have time?
The perfect naked death of a baby (right after baptism).
What of Saint Catherine? appeared in pieces, did she? rolling that wheel before her. But there, she had that wheel, Saint Lawrence the gridiron, as witness to their unseemly appearances. But not in this world: things wore out, and you lost them in a thousand ways, preposterous and unconnected with any notion of devotion, martyrdom, sacrifice . . . What of Mother? a thought which had been running under the surface of all these others. What of her?
And at that moment a stab of pain penetrated a tooth, and slowed to a blunt ache as he turned his face to the wall, and his eyes to the crucifix there. The dull throbbing persisted, he took his jaw in his hand of cold thin fingers and turned his face again. On a low table near his head, under gathering dust and black flecks from the river and a railroad shunting track, were newspaper clippings, sequestered for no reason but to avoid throwing them away, un-matching pictures and unrelated information one shred of which might, at some extremity, be demanded. On top lay the most recent, the feature story on the Spanish girl to be canonized in the Easter week of the year ahead. The pain in his jaw subsided as he stared at her picture upside-down hanging from the table’s edge, and his mind confused its thoughts and images, more vivid and irrelevant, as it did always when he lay this way, as unable to sleep at night as he was torpid during day.
He shuddered at Esme, seduced by an apprehension in a world real enough to her: appalled one day when an airplane moving with the speed of sound had disemboweled the heaven above them and eviscerated its fragments in nausea from their bodies walking below. Alone, he might have thought nothing of it, but shut it out as he did all the frenzied traffic of the world. But her terror shook him; and she was right. And if on the other hand, they’d met that early Jesuit Father Anchieta in the street on a sunny day, sheltered under the parasol of birds he summoned to hover over him and keep pace, she would have appreciated such resourcefulness without profane curiosity, probably not have repeated what she’d seen to a soul. But the airplane! Had she met Saint Peter of Alcántara, Saint Peter Nolasco, Saint Peter Gonzalez, walking, as they did, upon the waves of the sea, why, there was more reason in those excursions than that streak of cacodaemonic extravagance sundering the very dome of heaven.
Stanley moved suddenly, sitting up as though to break a spell. He sat rigid on the edge of the bed, clenching his teeth as though to discipline the activity of his mind, which he could hardly stir during the day when he tried to work. How could Bach have accomplished all that he did? and Palestrina? the Gabrielis? and what of the organ concerti of Corelli? Those were the men whose work he admired beyond all else in this life, for they had touched the origins of design with recognition. And how? with music written for the Church. Not written with obsessions of copyright foremost; not written to be played by men in worn dinner jackets, sung by girls in sequins, involved in wage disputes and radio rights, recording rights, union rights; not written to be issued through a skull-sized plastic box plugged into the wall as background for seductions and the funnypapers, for arguments over automobiles, personalities, shirt sizes, cocktails, the flub-a-dub of a lonely girl washing her girdle; not written to be punctuated by recommendations for headache remedies, stomach appeasers, detergents, hair oil . . . O God! dove sei Fenestrula?
Still he did not get up, but sat staring toward the dim shape of the print of the cathedral. Beneath it was the table where he worked, a cardboard practice keyboard in the center, piled at both ends with papers in uneven stacks, one weighted with the ceramic fragment, another with the Liber Usualis opened upon the Missae pro Defunctis, his own cramped scribblings in the margins of majestic words between the bars, —Quántus trémor est futúrus, Quando judex est ventúrus . . . And one page was marked with a tattered piece of notepaper. It was a Misereris omnium, and on the paper was written this piece of verse by Michelangelo, and beside it Stanley’s broken attempt at translation:
| O Dio, o Dio, o Dio, | O God, O God, O God, |
| Chi m’a tolto a me stesso | Who has taken me from myself from me myself |
| Ch’a me fusse piu presso | Who was closest (closer) to me |
| O piu di me potessi, | And could do more than I most about me |
| che poss’ io? | What can I do? |
| O Dio, o Dio, o Dio. |
Specks of dirt on the floor caught his attention from the corner of an eye, and as was his habit he reached out and flicked at them, to see if any moved of their own volition. The tooth throbbed; and as he lay back he thought again of his mother, to whom his work was to be dedicated when it was finished. He looked at his wrist watch, turned off the light, and in closed eyes embraced a vision of the antiphonic brass of Giovanni Gabrieli pouring forth from the two choir lofts in Saint Mark’s, to meet over the heads of those congregated below.
His work, always unfinished, was like the commission from a prince in the Middle Ages, the prince who ordered his tomb, and then busied the artist continually with a succession of fireplaces and doorways, the litter of this life, while the tomb remained unfinished. Nor for Stanley, was this massive piece of music which he worked at when he could, building the tomb he knew it to be, as every piece of created work is the tomb of its creator: thus he could not leave it finished haphazard as he saw work left on all sides of him. It must be finished to a thorough perfection, as much as he humbly could perceive that, every note and every bar, every transition and movement in the pattern over and against itself and within itself proof against time: the movement in the Divine Comedy; the pattern in a Requiem Mass; prepared against time as old masters prepared their canvases and their pigments, so that when they were called to appear the work would still hold the perfection they had embraced there. Not what was going on around him now, a canvas ready when it had been stretched and slavered with white lead, or not prepared at all, words put on paper, flickering images on celluloid, with no thought but of the words and the image and the daub to follow. (Stanley’s work was done on scrap paper which he ruled himself and on envelope backs, old letters, or old scores which he had erased. He was saving a pile of new paper for the final composition.)
As dawn neared outside he was still fully awake, lying under the crack in the ceiling, under the yellowed ivory (thirteenth century) crucifix over the bed. He heard the truck collecting rubbish at the far end of his block. Christmas so near, again? Suddenly he looked at the watch strapped to his wrist, a rage of figures battling through his mind. He saw Anselm, and shuddered; Esme, and moaned: what unholy thing was that? what knowledge of evil did they share? for so they did, antipodal, but embracing in his mind, images profaning his love in their coupling. He stretched his arms above his head. Did one wear a watch in the tomb? A long walk, he decided; and then he would go to Mass. Why had Agnes Deigh refused to go to Mass with him, one day when they had met; it was just time, and near enough. —I’ve got to have drinks with someone, business is business darling, he could hear her voice again. Then her profane images shouldered his missionary intentions aside, and the more he thought of her.
He had turned his face to the window just above him, where uncertain light entered to show things as they had been left in each other’s shadows the night before, shadowless now, older, wearing out separately and all together. This window he had to keep open in summer, so that passers-by could look in, upsetting to him, as though the friction of their glances might wear things down further; the window open in summer so that things might be thrown in, as some children one day, playing, had thrown something a dog had done on the sidewalk in behind the radiator.
There was a slight tapping on the door, as though someone were knocking who did not want to be answered to, knocking to find no one instead of someone there. Stanley sat up on the edge of his low couch, the door handle turned a slow quarter-circle, and back.
—Who is it? he cried out. —Who is it out there?
—Stanley? A girl’s voice: it was Hannah, he let her in. —It’s so cold, she said, —I’m sorry, but can I sleep in your chair?
—Stay here, he said. —Lie down, Hannah. I’m going out.
—But no, don’t leave for me. Go back to bed. But you’re all dressed?
—Yes, stay here. I’m going out.
—Is everything all right, Stanley? Has anything . . .
—Nothing has changed. Go to bed here, Hannah. I’m going out to Mass.
In the hall, where he stopped in the communal toilet, he was troubled again by the problem in arithmetic penciled on the wall there. Someone had multiplied 763 by 37, and got 38,231. He had checked it, idly, two years before; then carefully, at every sitting since. Who had made the mistake? Was it too late to find them and tell them? 10,000 . . . what? Had that person gained it? or lost it? Was it too late? Stanley looked at his wrist watch. He walked out into the cold morning asking himself this heretical question: Can you start measuring a minute at any instant you wish?
—I’ll go in and try the door first, said Otto.
Feasley got out to follow, returned to get the leg out of the back seat, and rejoined him. The door was locked. —There’s somebody awake inside, Otto said. Out on the sidewalk, he twisted the lock on the window grating. Feasley said, —I’ll get a wrench, handed the leg to Otto and went back to the car. Suddenly the window shade shot up in Otto’s face, the sash after it.
—Oh, I . . . Hannah, I . . . I mean we . . .
—What are you doing here at this window anyhow?
—Why nothing I . . . Hannah was dressed only in a shirt, for all he could see. —We just . . . well, so long Hannah. See you later, he called as he heard the car’s engine racing behind him, and he ran toward it, the bare foot waving his goodbye to Hannah from under his arm.
—He’s got a girl in there, Hannah’s sleeping with him, said Otto as they roared away. —Say listen, he said looking round him, —have you seen a little tan bag, a pigskin dispatch case? Suddenly frantic, he turned to look behind them in the car. The car slid around a corner, leaned to one side in a skid, recovered, skidded in the other direction, and Feasley was cursing as it went head-on into a pole. They got out. Otto looked, found nothing but the leg. —Come on. The hell with it.
—But what about this thing? Otto said, wrapping the cloth around it more tightly as they walked fast up Little West Twelfth Street.
—O Chrahst put it in an ashcan.
He started to, but three men rounded the corner, and he tucked it back under his sling. They got a subway, vapidly curious people appearing on all sides around them.
Stanley had taken a long bus ride, returning to the neighborhood of the hospital, and been walking for some time, it seemed, when he heard six o’clock strike nearby. Following the direction of the bells, he found the church and went in, mind seething as he stopped and genuflected. He moved toward a pew in the back, and had almost knelt beside her when he recognized Agnes Deigh. He clutched at her wrist. She started in terror away from him, awakened.
—Stanley?
—You’re here, he whispered.
—Oh God. Her head lolled forward and away from him. —Take me home.
—But you’re here, at Mass.
—I know it. Take me home. Stanley, now.
—Look, we can’t carry this thing all over town in broad daylight. It’s beginning to smell, too.
—Let’s have a look. Chra-ahst, it’s turning gray.
Across from them a woman stared, but did not see them, her mouth working, her fingers working at her beads. It was the first car of the train, and at stops a voice rose, where at the glass which looked forward into the tube a woman talked, so close to her own image in that glass that it was steamed by her breath. —They told us all about it, there it is in letters where anyone can read it, everyone knows, they’re killing each other, boys killing each other millions of American boys are being killed you can read all about it . . .
The roar of the train drowned her out.
—What shall I do with it?
—Leave it on the seat, there in the corner. We’ll get off at this stop.
—he cut them both up and put them in suitcases and those are the people who travel on airplanes . . . The doors clapped to behind them, and they waited on the platform for another train. —My old man’s going to get me this time, for mucking up that God-damned car again.
A girl stood in front of them, waiting for the next train, on her way to work in a chewing-gum factory: Hestia, Vesta, virgin-sworn, the hearth and the home (a cheap fluff of a jabot she wore, imitation coral earrings, crippling shoes, under a thin elbow a tabloid catalogue of the day’s misinformation). —Chrahst, I don’t know whether it’s a boy or a girl, after that little nigger at the party last night. Hey honey, do you want to make thirty-five cents?
—No, I’m really not a Catholic any more, I just put that picture of Cardinal Spellman up there because that corner of the room needs a little red, said Agnes Deigh, almost recovered. —Do you want a drink?
—Now?
—Stanley, you look exhausted too, she said. —Here, drink this, it will warm you. She handed him a glass of port, and swallowed down, herself, almost choking, some whisky. —What a God-awful mess this place is. He must have got here. Agnes looked around, at her own underclothing scattered broadcast in the living room. One of her best gowns was hung over her sunlamp, which was turned on.
—It is warming, Stanley said, drinking, —I can feel it all through me.
—God, I’m so tired, she said, beginning to undress. —Will you help me? He followed her into the bedroom. —Thank God you found me.
—What’s this? Stanley said, aghast holding up a card he’d taken from the table, reading in a whisper —“Christ has come!”
—Oh Stanley, you’re not supposed to see that. It’s a Christmas card.
—Christmas card! But who . . .
—Don’t be upset, Stanley. From that Swedish boy they call Big Anna.
—But it’s . . . disgusting, this picture . . .
—I know, Stanley. But these things happen in the world. Throw it in the wastebasket. No, don’t tear it up, just throw it in the basket.
—But . . . why do you know those people?
—Oh Stanley, she said, and paused bent double over a rolled-down stocking. —Don’t you see, Stanley, sometimes people like that are . . . are easier for a woman. They’re safer somehow . . . She had taken off her stockings then, in the pause, and stood up dressed only in her slip. She picked up a plant, and carried it into the other room. —I just can’t stand to have anything living and breathing in the same room where I’m trying to sleep. She sat down on the bed again with a glass of water, and laid two sleeping pills beside it. —God, what a smell of perfume he left in the place. He must have dropped the bottle. Oh, come Stanley, sit here. You do understand about people like that don’t you? Just don’t think about them. You’ve got to be philosophical, darling. Thank God you found me in that church.
—Yes, thank God, who led you there.
—But Stanley dear . . .
—You were at Mass, he said.
—I’m not a Catholic any more, I tell you.
—You will always be a Catholic. It is not for you to say. But why have you strayed so far? he asked, sitting beside her.
—Even when I was a child, I was frightened out of it, it seemed. Once in my convent school, I remember when we were all sent to look at a reliquary. It was . . . I don’t know, a splinter of the Cross, or a crumb of something. They even had one that they said contained a bit of the original darkness that Moses called down on the world, imagine. Yes, I think it was a crumb, from the biscuit that bled when it was trampled by Zwingli’s soldiers. But I didn’t go, I went to a movie instead. The next day in class I was told to get up and describe the reliquary, and I gave a wonderful description, about it being big and fancy and gold, with a peep-hole and a magnifying lens so you could see the speck inside. Then they whipped me, and told me that it hadn’t even been on exhibit, it was away being cleaned . . .
—But these things are our trials as children to prepare us . . .
—And I used to chew the wafer, she went on, almost somnilo-quent, in an arrested whisper. —I couldn’t hold it in my mouth without chewing it. The more I knew it was sinful, the more I chewed His Body, I had to chew it . . .
—These sins we commit as children . . .
But now Agnes had breathed deeply and sat back. She glimpsed her face in a boudoir mirror and said, —Don’t I look awful, my eye . . .
—What happened to it?
—At that party, that terrible party, in the ladies’ room, another woman hit me with her hand bag. This has gone far enough, she said. She didn’t think I was really a . . . she thought I was one of the people in costume. Agnes was staring at the floor. Then she sniffed and turned to Stanley with a smile forcing her lips. —But analysis is safer, and you have the same confessional.
—But don’t you understand what happened this morning? he brought out fervently. —You didn’t know you were coming to Mass, but you were directed there, as I was, as He led me there to . . .
She put an arm around his shoulders, and her strap came undone. Mickey Mouse pointed to 6:45. —Stanley, she said. —You’re such a boy.
Dawn, somewhere beyond the incinerator plant which had won first prize in functional architecture a decade before: Fuller was busy in Mr. Brown’s bathroom, picking up every piece of Mr. Brown’s hair he could find and putting it into an envelope. Esme wakened for a moment in a strange bed, looked at the arm round her, could identify neither its owner nor its sex, and went back to sleep. Esther woke, hearing sounds which seemed to have been going on for a long time; as though she’d heard a key turn in the lock hours before, and footsteps, and the sound of a voice, or voices. But she lay still, and closed her eyes, as she did always on the dull sounds of Rose’s dreams. In the street below, young policemen raced the engines of their motorcycles to arrogant pitch, and roared to duty. In the East Fifty-first Street station-house, Big Anna sat on a bench weeping. —But nobody even saw my gown, he cried. —We saw it, Jack, said the man behind the desk, turning to another policeman in shirtsleeves, —Is he known? Anselm was descending the steps of the I.R.T. West Side subway, on all fours. Adeline had just closed a door behind her, having wakened beside someone with short-cut hair and heavy hands, whom she remembered having taken for a man the night before. Herschel was not to be wakened until some hours later, by two sailors in a Chelsea hotel room, where he lay bandaged over chest and back, the protective gauze of Dutch Siam, tattoo artist.
Dawn, just as it came to Australian skies, a woman of bad character in a cloak of red possum skins.
What Stanley marveled at most was the wealth of her that had appeared as her garments came off. There was so much of her. She stood, wiping the make-up from her face turned away, and he stared at her thighs from behind, as a collector stares at the fine patina glazed over the courses of worms, for those vast vermiculated surfaces were furrowed so. Terror struck him. He started to rise from the bed and reach for his shirt. Too late. She was there, tumbling the marvelous cucumiform weights down upon a chest which looked as though it would cave in under such manna. —Look, she said, joy of this world recovered, raising herself so that her front swung pendulant over him, unequaled, and unequal lengths untouched by baby’s hand, —you can play telephone with them.
Trains from great distance over barbarous land, ships from civilized shores and airplanes from nowhere aimed at the island, dived at it, into it, unloaded lives upon it. Far uptown Mr. Pivner lay, unconscious arabesque in nervous imitation of sleep (he was, in fact, enduring a train wreck in Rajputana), that part of him already vigilant which would reach the control of the alarm clock an instant before it went off.
In Harlem, walking alone, Otto looked at his watch, forgot to see the time and looked again, as he sought the scene of Saturnalia where he hoped to recover the pigskin dispatch case.
The streets were filling with people whose work was not their own. They poured out, like buttons from a host of common ladles, though some were of pressed paper, some ivory, some horn, and synthetic pearl, to be put in place, to break, or fall off lost, rolling into gutters and dark corners where no Omnipotent Hand could reach them, no Omniscient Eye see them; to be replaced, seaming up the habits of this monster they clothed with their lives.
The newspaper quivered in Basil Valentine’s hands, clasped behind him. Music, from another corner, plucked at his back. It was a pavan by a dead Spaniard.
Hungary to Sell Famed Paintings . . . Vienna . . . Diplomatic sources here said today that Hungary was attempting to sell in the West masterpieces from Budapest’s National Art Gallery. The Gallery included paintings by Raphael, Tintoretto, Murillo, and others collected by the Austro-Hungarian emperors and princes. The informants said some of the paintings were being shipped to the United States as diplomatic luggage in the hope of interesting American art collectors.
He brought the newspaper up before him and read that again in the dull light of the dawn where he stood at the windows.
The desk in the far corner of the room was still littered with the papers he had spent the night over, finally snapped off the light and sat in a deep chair with his fingertips resting against his eyelids, and his head erect. The Vulliamy clock on the mantel had struck three times gently, at regular intervals, before he moved; and then, only his fingers moved, to remain arched before his face, meeting their tips in gothic contemplation, his eyes clear as though he’d done no more than blink them.
Now he gave an impatient sigh, dropped the newspaper on the window shelf, and stood looking straight out at the gray sky. —Another blue day? he murmured, as the stately strokes of the harp came to an end, and he turned from the window.
The letterheads among the sheaf of papers on his desk witnessed important oppositions in the world, languages as various as the devices and crests which adorned them. He sat down and hurriedly checked over a coded message against its original, —Put Inononu in touch immediately, have received necessary information . . . which he crumpled in his hand. He slipped the rest of the papers into a dispatch case, and was gone for a moment into the bedroom to lock it in a wall safe behind the chest. Then he went to the bathroom, dropped the crumpled note into the basin and put a match to it, washed the ashes down the drain, washed his hands slowly and with care, and went in to make tea.
There was exquisite correspondence between the Sèvres cup and the back of his hand, where blue veins showed making the flesh appear translucent: it was not a reflection of mutual fragility, but rather the delicacy of the porcelain completed a composition enhancing, as it did, the tensile strength of the hand which raised it. In the other, he opened a book, and read. Now and then his lips moved, as he turned the pages of Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises which he had, contrary to habit, lent out (for this was not the only, certainly not the nicest copy he had). A fly landed on the print, and he struck at it. The fly rose and crossed the room to settle busily upon a golden figure, a bull lowering its jewel-collared head to thrust with its horns at the egg floating in the rock cavity before it. The figure was small, and stood on a column at the end of the couch.
He turned another page. A fine-sprung coil of brown hair lay in the inner margin. Basil Valentine leaned down to blow at it. The hair did not move. He made a sound with his lips, and flicked it away with a finger. Then he read for less than a minute more, closed the book abruptly and bent down, searching the floor for the coil of hair. He found it on the carpet, put it into an ashtray, opened the book again and gazed at the page. There was a faint hum, from the corner where the phonograph had shut itself off. His gaze shifted to the ashtray. Then he moved quickly, to stand, take the coil of hair from the ashtray, into the bathroom and drop it into the bowl. He flushed the toilet and washed his hands, studying his face in the mirror as he did so.
The expression of anxiety which he had worn all this time did not leave him as he returned to the living room, tightening the cord of his dressing gown, and taking the gold cigarette case from its breast pocket. Snapped open, without taking out a cigarette he snapped it closed again and stood looking at the inscription worn almost smooth on its surface. —Damn him, he whispered. —Damn him. He turned to look at the Vulliamy clock. It was adorned with a cupid. He loosened the cord of his dressing gown.
A few minutes later Basil Valentine had exchanged his black pumps for a pair of equally narrow black shoes, the dressing gown for a blue suit, and he returned pulling at the foundations under his trousers. Among the books at the back of his desk, he pushed aside La nuit des Rois and quickly found the copy of Thoreau. He pulled on his coat, and on his way out opened a panel closet and took out a large flat envelope. He paused in the doorway to look the room over quickly, and then locked the door with two keys, leaving the Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius of Loyola open on the desk, where the fly had already alighted before the second key turned in the lock.
In the street door below, he paused to look in all directions. A slight drizzle had commenced. He came forth damning the wind, the hand with the gold seal ring holding his hat on as he hailed a cab with the other.
The wind from the river was quite strong. It was, in fact, strong enough to support a man; and this, at a corner on Gansevoort Street, is exactly what it was doing. The man himself, on the other hand, did not seem grateful. He was talking to the wind; and, as occasional words took shape from the jumble of sounds he poured forth, it became evident that he was calling it foul names. At this, the wind became even more zealous in its attentions to him. He hit at the skirt of his tattered coat as it flew up around him, addressing it somewhat like this, —Gway gwayg . . . yccksckr . . . until, its caprice satisfied, the wind flung him round a corner and went on east.
Abandoned, he swayed, and fortunately found a wall with the first throw of his hand, instead of the face of the man who approached, for he had struck out at just about that level.
—Here, my good man. Could you tell me whereabouts Horatio Street . . . good heavens.
Thus called upon, he took courage: the sursum corda of an extravagant belch straightened him upright, and he answered, —Whfffck? Whether this was an approach to discussion he had devised himself, or a subtle adaptation of the Socratic method of questioning perfected in the local athenaeums which he attended until closing time, was not to be known; for the answer was,
—Stand aside.
—Here, don’t goway. Here, how do youfffk . . . He licked a lip and commenced again, putting out a hand. —My name Boyma . . . he managed, summoning himself for the challenge of recognition. —And you must be Gro . . . go . . . raggly!
He seemed to have struggled up on that word from behind; and he finished with the triumph of having knocked it over the head. He did in fact look down, as though it might be lying there at his feet. It was such a successful combat that he decided to renew it. —Go . . . gro . . . gorag . . . His hand found a wrist, and closed thereon. Bells sounded, from a church somewhere near. —Go . . . ro . . . grag . . . But the sharp heel of a hand delivered to the side of his head stopped him, and he dropped against the wall with no exclamation of surprise whatever.
The door was opened to the length of a finger.
—You . . . !
—I . . .
—How . . . how did you find me?
—It hasn’t been easy. You might put Rouge Cloître out here on your bell, at least.
—Rouge . . . put what?
—The name of the convent that took van der Goes in, you know. May I come in?
—Oh, why . . . yes, yes come in.
—I’m not disturbing you? Basil Valentine asked, entering the room. —Coming at such an odd hour?
—Yes it is, but no, not if . . . you don’t need the sleep?
—Unfortunately I do, I need it badly, Valentine answered with a smile. —Here, I brought down these van Eyck details. And your Thoreau. I went off with that quite by mistake.
—That, thank you for that. And you . . . your . . .
—My coat? Yes, it’s wet. I’ll take it off in a moment. First I’d like to wash my hands, Valentine went on, turning toward a door, —I had a rather disagreeable encounter on my way here. The room was the kitchen; and with one look at the sink, he returned to say, —Are you aware that there’s something growing in here? A delicate plant, growing right up out of the drain?
—Oh no, but that, it must be a melon then. Some melon seeds washed down . . . here, here’s the bathroom here.
A minute later, Valentine’s voice came from there. —A towel?
—Yes, here, use this.
Valentine came out, drying his hands on a wad of cotton waste. —It’s pretty stuff, isn’t it, he said smiling again, and threw it into the fireplace. —And tell me, it’s your habit to cover up mirrors? as they do in a house where someone’s died?
—The one in the bathroom? it’s only . . . something drying. But you, he asked Valentine suddenly, —don’t you get tired of the image you dodge in mirrors?
—I don’t dodge. Valentine had not lost his smile. He took off his coat, and put it with his hat on the bed, where he sat on the unmade edge and leaned back against the rumpled covers, hands clasped round one knee. —So, you’re working, are you? he said agreeably. —You’ve been at it all night?
—All night, I’ve been working all night. I just finished it.
—What? could I see it?
—It’s this one, this big one here.
Valentine got up to help him move it out from the wall, and stand it face out against the inside of the door. He offered his cigarette case, lit their cigarettes, and studied the painting for some time before he said, —Brown won’t like this, you know. The face there, how badly you’ve damaged it.
—But the damage? It isn’t as though I’d done that. A hand was flung up before him. —The painting itself, the composition took its own form, when it was painted. And then the damage, the damage is indifferent to the composition, isn’t it. The damage, you know, is . . . happens.
Valentine shrugged. —I know, of course, he said. —But I doubt that Brown will. It will cut the price down badly.
—The price! What’s that to do with . . .
—Good heavens, I don’t care about it. But your employer is rather sensitive about those things, you know. After another pause, without taking his eyes from the painting, Valentine stepped back, and the figure behind him moved as quickly as his own shadow in the glare of the bare light above them. —It’s magnificent, isn’t it, Valentine said quietly. He stood entirely absorbed in it, and when he spoke murmured as he might have talking to himself. —The simplicity . . . it’s the way I would paint . . .
There was no sound after his voice, and nothing moved to move him; until his eyes lowered to the shadow streaking the floor beside him: at that Basil Valentine turned abruptly and cleared his throat. —Yes, a splendid sense of death there isn’t there, he went on in the tone usual to him, more forceful and more casual at once. —Death before it became vulgar, he went on, walking down the room away from the painting, —when a certain few died with dignity. And the others, the people who went to earth quietly like dung. Eh? he added, turning. He threw his cigarette into the fireplace, lit another without offering one, and blew the thin smoke out compulsively in a steady stream. —Yes, there is what you wanted there, isn’t there, in this painting?
—Almost . . .
—Almost? Valentine repeated. He brought up the cold brilliance of his own eyes, to drive the feverish stare fixed upon him down to the floor between them. —Almost what?
—The . . . strength, the delicacy, the tenderness without . . .
—Weakness, yes. Valentine kicked a book on the floor at his feet. —Pliny? what, for his discourse on colors? Yes thanks, I wouldn’t mind a little of that myself, cognac is it? He held out the unwashed glass he was given while the bottle-neck clinked against it, but still looking at the damaged painting. —You do work fast, don’t you. Yes, van der Goes was a fast painter himself, but one, the Portinari triptych I think it was, took him a good three years. But after all this is rather different isn’t it, you know where you’re going all the time. None of that feeling of, what was Valéry’s line, that one can never finish a work of art? one only abandons it? But here there’s none of that problem, is there. Eh? What’s the matter.
—If one minute, first you say, or people say It’s beautiful! and then if, when they find out it isn’t what they were told, if it’s a painting when they find out it was done by, or rather when they find out it wasn’t done by who they thought . . .
—No, no, not this evening, or not today is it? No, really, we won’t settle that here now. It’s not . . . not the point, is it. Drawn by his eyes, Valentine faltered for the first time. —Or if it is the point? the whole point? And he looked away, to the damaged painting.
—What you said, about signing a picture? About that, that being all they care about, the law . . .
—Modern forgeries, forgeries of modern painters, Valentine dismissed him quickly, but looking about the room found only the man and the damaged painting to draw his eyes. —And be careful, he said, forcing the ease in his voice. —If Brown should decide that there’s as much money in modern painters as there is in his old masters, no, it’s not funny, he’s already threatened you with van Gogh . . . He had commenced to pace the room, and paused to draw to him, with a toe of a black shoe, a detailed drawing which he picked up and studied. He held it up between them and said, —A remarkable likeness.
—A study, from the . . . last work.
—Yes, I see. And reversed, the mirrors? Backwards, like a contact print. Exactly like, and yet a perfect lie. The thing dropped from his fingers and he laughed. —You? the, what was it you said, the shambles of your work? What a pitifully selfish career! being lived, as you said? by something that uses you and then sheds you like a husk when its own ends are accomplished?
—Yes, but if the gods themselves . . .
—Is it worth . . .
—If they cannot recall their . . . gifts, to . . . redeem them, working them out, do you understand? living them through . . . ?
And Valentine turned quickly from those eyes back to the damaged painting leaned against the door, to murmur, —On second thought I believe I would have put another figure or two there in the lower left, the sense of ascendance in the upper part of the composition would gain a good deal . . .
—You?
—and the blue is rather light isn’t it. I think if I’d done it myself I would have used a more . . .
—But you didn’t.
Basil Valentine turned on him slowly, and studied him for a few moments before he spoke. —My dear fellow, he brought out finally. —If you are this sensitive to any sort of criticism, I didn’t come down here to . . .
—Why did you come down here?
—I came down to ask a favor of you. But if you are so painfully sensitive to criticism, such a self-conscious artist that . . .
—No I, it’s just, listen, criticism? It’s the most important art now, it’s the one we need most now. Criticism is the art we need most today. But not, don’t you see? not the “if I’d done it myself . . .” Yes, a, a disciplined nostalgia, disciplined recognitions but not, no, listen, what is the favor? Why did you come here?
Basil Valentine had dropped a cigarette on the stained floor; and stooping to get it, a suspender button at the back of his trousers came off, and he straightened up feeling half his trouser-seat hanging and the other half binding high. —That Patinir? he said. —The painting that Brown has just inside the door, hung opposite that idiotic portrait. I wanted to ask you if you’d mind making a copy of it for me. He put his hands in his pockets, to hitch his trousers up square, and spoke rapidly. —It wouldn’t even have to be a perfect copy, you know, since the original doesn’t exist. You didn’t know? Brown had the painting heavily insured, and it was destroyed in a fire. At least he had the evidence that it was when the insurance company’s experts came. He’d sawed off one end of it and he showed them that, pretty badly charred but not so much that it couldn’t be identified as all that was left of the original, which he’s waiting now to dispose of again, “in secret” of course. Yes, what’s the matter? what’s funny?
—These. I’ve done the same thing with these.
—What do you mean, the same thing? sawed the ends off and . . .
—Kept them.
—What? What for?
—Proof.
—Proof? Basil Valentine stepped aside quickly as he passed, and watched him pull canvases away from the wall.
—This! he said holding one up. —Do you see? It was going to be a study, it was a study for this . . . this new work, this van Eyck.
—But what? The Annunciation? Valentine hitched up the sagging side of his trousers. —And it’s not turning out what you wanted? But it’s an old thing. On linen? What is it? and this, these, earrings? Who is she? These old Byzantine-looking hoops, what is it? Who is she? This? a study for a van Eyck?
—No, but for what I want.
—What are you talking about? And this, what is it? It’s exquisite, this face, the reproach, like the faces, the Virgin in other things you’ve done, the reproach in this face. Your work, it’s old isn’t it, but a little always shows through, yes something, semper aliquid haeret? something always remains, something of you. But what are you talking about? Valentine found the feverish eyes fixed on him. —Here, this . . . I’ve brought down these pictures, these photographic details of, here, if you’re going to bring the critics back to believing in Hubert van Eyck? And the, why we may enshrine your arm in a casket right over the door here? in Horatio Street? like Hubert van Eyck’s right arm over the portals of the church of Saint Bavon’s in Ghent? But what is it? what’s the matter? what are you talking about, this proof? to prove what? Valentine demanded.
—Listen, this, if I wanted to go on with this work, myself? And to clear up the other things I’ve done? The Bouts, the van der Goes? If I want to tell them, and I have the proof, off every one of them, a canvas or a panel, I cut a strip off the end when it was done, and I have them.
—Where? Valentine asked quickly.
—Yes, they’re safe.
—Where? Valentine repeated.
—And that will be proof, won’t it.
—Proof? Valentine stood up. —Do you think it’s going to be that easy? Yes, do you think they want to be told? Any more than Michelangelo’s Cardinale di San Giorgio? Yes, he’d kept aside an arm from his “antique” cupid, and he went to get the Cardinal’s help starting his career, showed him the arm from the statue to prove he’d done it, do you think the Cardinal thanked him? Valentine picked up his glass and finished it. —Do you think it’s that simple? Why . . . He put a hand out to the shoulder before him. —That you can do it alone, that simply? He withdrew his hand slowly. —But you’re wet, your jacket’s damp. You’ve been out?
—Earlier, just before you came, for a walk . . .
—But you told me, when I came in you said you’d been working here all night.
—Yes, but, I went out, I’ll tell you, I went out, I took those fragments, those strips from the ends of the paintings, where they’d be safe.
—Where? Valentine demanded.
—I took them up . . . where I used to live.
—Where you haven’t lived for, two years is it? To your wife, your wife, so you trust her? You trust your wife to watch over them?
—She doesn’t even know. She wasn’t there. Only her sister, yes her sister, we hid them.
But Basil Valentine had turned from him, to pace to the end of the room, where he stood looking at him, at his impatient eyes, and the crumpled damp black jacket hanging from his shoulders. —Your wife, eh? He paused, but spoke more rapidly as he went on, —The Rouge Cloître? Yes, and where’s the mother superior? Who keeps house for you here, then? This floor, how do you keep it so dirty? Why . . . so you trust her with it, do you? these fragments that are so important. And here, this van der Goes, what happens to her face in that, eh? All the rest of them, yes, the men, you out of your mirrors, you’re there half a dozen times, backwards? Drawing death and modeling it under your own hand, but what happens to her face? Oh, the damage doesn’t respect the composition? No, not a bit, not a bit of it. He stopped; the vein stood out like a bulb at his temple. He touched it with a fingertip, dropped his shoulders back against the empty irregular brick mantel, and lit a cigarette. Immediately the draft caught its smoke and drew it up the flue behind him. —And this, who’s this in this study on the easel? It’s old, isn’t it. Your wife?
Standing under the bare bulb, facing Valentine, he started to speak, but all he said was, —She . . .
—Yes, or your mother?
—Yes. My mother, he admitted in a whisper, looking back at the picture on the soiled gesso, his face drawn up in lines of confusion as though he had just remembered.
—Yes, is it? Valentine muttered. —The Visitation, then? He laughed. —A Stabat Mater? No. No more, thank you. Suppose . . . like Nicodemus I come down here? Yes, the Pharisee Nicodemus in Saint John, that . . . least reliable of the gospels? “Except a man be born again”? Yes, verily, “. . . Nicodemus saith unto him, How can a man be born when he is old? can he enter the second time into his mother’s womb, and be born?” Valentine coughed and cleared his throat. He’d snatched up his coat before he seemed aware of the clouding of anxiety which had risen in the eyes fixed on his sudden movements, an expression near a wince drawing up the face, and the figure seated unbalanced on a high stool, retreated there from avoiding him with the alert caution of a shadow, the crumpled shoulders sunk unevenly and still. Nonetheless Valentine pulled on his coat, but slowed, and his voice recovered its sharp ease. —You want to get on with this work, don’t you. But we might go up together sometime, and have a look at that Eden? The snake there, he laughed, gripping his lapels and lifted his overcoat into shape at the front. —The snake of consciousness? And there she is, Eve, the woman. The same woman, personalizing everything. Good Christians, good targets for advertising, because they personalize everything. A deodorant or a crucifix, they take it and make it part of them. He picked up his hat, dropping his voice to an irritating monotone. —What was it, in Ecclesiastes? God hath made man upright, but the women have sought out many inventions . . . ?
—Wait . . .
—Eh?
—Do you think . . . here, do you want some more brandy?
—I’ll get along, I don’t want to keep you, Valentine said, in his voice a tone of cordial deference; and back a step, something rolled away from his foot, and he stooped to retrieve it. —Rose madder? he read from the label.
—Oh that, it’s nothing. Rose madder, it’s too late.
—Too late? Valentine looked up pretending surprise at the eager distress in the voice, and the unsteady hand where he surrendered the packet.
—I got it for a Bouts, the first Dierick Bouts, but these colors, . . . madder lake wasn’t used until the sixteenth century. And Bouts was dead. Dierick Bouts, he . . . he was dead. Wait . . . listen, do you think something might go wrong?
—Go wrong?
—If I try to tell them, about these pictures?
—Have it your own way, Valentine shrugged. —If you think you can do it alone.
—But the proof? even with that?
—You’re sure they’re safe? Valentine’s lips drew to a thin smile.
—Well, wait then. Wait. If you . . .
—I? If I could help you?
—Yes, these fragments . . .
—Bring them along, then, if you like. We’ll work this thing out. Basil Valentine put on his hat; and his eyes, gone hard under the black brim, were drawn over the wrinkled shoulder from the lined face before him to the clear face on the easel, as he added, —Bring them up to my place, then. Do you hear? There’s no room for mistakes. He stood like that, staring at the picture up on the easel whose unsurprised eyes looked beyond him; and finally, murmuring, —Your mother, eh? he took his eyes from it with abrupt effort. —A Stabat Mater? Not a girl, not a woman at all.
He turned on his heel and pulled open the door. —It’s going to smell strange out there, after this . . . odor of sanctity? The gold seal ring shone against the edge of the open door, glittering softly in the light of the bare electric bulb, as the slow light of day entered behind him with the sound of bells. —Hear Saint Bavon’s? Another blue day. I’ll be waiting for you. And many thanks for the cognac.
There was not a cab in sight.
—Blood is all they know, every hour boys being killed, an airplane just crashed and who was surprised, forty-one people killed, though there is some hope that the stewardess, who survived, will be able to tell police, because it is all there in the newspapers that anyone can read . . .
What was it?
Stanley sat down. Across from him a woman stared into his face, lips moving, fingers moving on her beads. He clutched the chisel in his pocket, the first time in years he had been on the subway, as though overcome with the necessity to dive down into darkness and not emerge until he reached home. He was not shivering from the cold, though it was cold in the subway. He was still buttoning his shirt. What was it she had cried to him when he asked her to kneel beside him, beside the bed; and then as he retreated through one door, fled toward another, escaped naked with all of his clothes in his hand, out into the hall where her voice died but the smell of her perfume followed him. He pulled his necktie’s knot to his throat. The train roared into its rock firmament where lights twinkled in warning ahead of this front car and the woman’s voice disappeared while her lips still moved, steaming the glass before them, and Stanley realized that he was on the wrong train, going in the wrong direction.
He looked up anxiously; as though another passenger might have made his mistake and, confirming him, prove everyone else misguided, misdirected. (It was an expression Stanley wore much of the time.) Standing across from him, gazing as though able to see through the dirty glass, a tall man stood with a handkerchief held to his nose and mouth. Gold glittered at his cuff. Then a woman of an uncertain age and massive shifting proportions trod on Stanley’s foot, and swung, with grand inertia, into a white pole.
—You never see Jews drunk like that, said the person next to Stanley.
—Yehhh? the woman shouted, turning to them. The train was nearing a station. Stanley got up and went to the door where the tall man stood with his handkerchief to his face, turned, now, to the car. —Yehhh? the woman shouted, swinging round with Stanley. Both her hands were free. —Is that what you want? That’s what you want is it? she cried, and as she did gripped the hem of her dress, and it became immediately apparent that it was the only garment she had on.
Stanley staggered into the tall man with the handkerchief, whose eyes had frozen in a cold blue horror, who whispered, —Good God! . . .
—Here! Come and get it! Come and get it!
Then a commotion started in the other end of the car, where a shabby old man had found something: but the commotion was his, only two others got up to look; the others stared in dreadful scorn, just as these seated near Stanley stared, not at the woman, but at him and the man beside him.
—Come on, both of you, you scared . . . ? The train lurched, approaching a station, and her skirt sagged and dropped as she caught a pole. The doors opened, and she kept shouting after them, —Come on, come on, you . . . throw a toilet seat around your heads and we’ll all use it . . .
HE WAS WOUNDED
for our
transgressions,
he was bruised
for our iniquities:
. . . and with his
stripes we are
healed,
read the placard against which the tall man steadied himself. Across the top someone had scribbled, Jesus a comunist. He stood there with his handkerchief covering his face, and Stanley stopped, himself beside a placard which called public attention to a lower East Side knishery, where someone had penciled, Hitler was right. The handkerchief came down slowly, and the man caught a glimpse of a dirty shade of himself in the mirror of a chewing-gum vending machine. —Excuse me . . . are you all right? Stanley ventured.
The handkerchief was withdrawn, and he said in a level voice to Stanley, —Those, my dear young man, are the creatures that were once burned in witch hunts.
When Basil Valentine got home, he ran his bath immediately; and as the warm water closed over his shoulders, and one dry hand supported a cigarette, he exhaled, looking up at the clean ceiling, and his lips moved as though, all this time since he had taken his fingertips from his eyelids, seated out there in the big chair waiting for the dawn, he had been talking to himself.
Trucks were moving, loaded, toward the docks, and loaded away from the market as Stanley hurried toward his locked place, already assaulted. Why had he let Hannah stay? the last person he wanted to explain to now: even running, the odor of perfume from Agnes Deigh’s nakedness rose to him. Birds clustered loudly at a horse trough. It was daylight.
His room was empty when he got there. Immediately, he noticed that the window over the bed was open, but he had no strength to pull it down. He dropped on the bed and lay still in the cold. What was it she had cried out as he ran, the cry and the voice of her a thing almost tangible hurled through the air between them, which entered and froze him in flight, as though an eternal abstraction were materialized in cast metal and bone, and Love showed its scarred steel jaws edged with broken teeth.
What was it? With his ear against the mattress, he stared at the cathedral of Fenestrula; and the beats of his heart were magnified in the bedsprings and sent back to him with the regular clattering resonance of snare drums. Crang, crang, crang, they went in regular familiar rhythm, missing a beat, or doubling one, in faithful accompaniment to something.
On the walk outside, a man approached unsteadily rubbing a rough cheekbone with a rough hand. The lucidity of the blue day rising over him seemed to prompt him to clarify the immediate issue of that turbid pool which, if questioned later on, he would call his memory, but found now resident in his cheekbone, where the blood was already dry. —He was Boyma, the man muttered, —then I must be Go . . . ro . . . gro . . . go . . .
Crang . . . crang . . . crang What was it? With his last breath of consciousness he realized that he had left his glasses on the table beside her uptown bed. Crang crang crang came the drums over the hill and into sight. They were playing Onward Christian Soldiers.
Two feet away from Stanley, the man stopped in the shallow covert that the window afforded to commit a nuisance, never glancing down at the face which lay in exhaustion under the open window at his feet.