THAT SPRING, when I had a great deal of potential and no money at all, I took a job as a janitor. That was when I was still very young and spent money very freely, and when, almost every night, I drifted off to sleep lulled by sweet anticipation of that time when my potential would suddenly be realized and there would be capsule biographies of my life on dust jackets of many books, all proclaiming: “. . . He knew life on many levels. From shoeshine boy, freelance waiter, 3rd cook, janitor, he rose to . . .” I had never been a janitor before and I did not really have to be one and that is why I did it. But now, much later, I think it might have been because it is possible to be a janitor without really becoming one, and at parties or at mixers when asked what it was I did for a living, it was pretty good to hook my thumbs in my vest pockets and say comfortably: “Why, I am an apprentice janitor.” The hippies would think it degenerate and really dig me and it made me feel good that people in Philosophy and Law and Business would feel uncomfortable trying to make me feel better about my station while wondering how the hell I had managed to crash the party.
“What’s an apprentice janitor?” they would ask.
“I haven’t got my card yet,” I would reply. “Right now I’m just taking lessons. There’s lots of complicated stuff you have to learn before you get your card and your own building.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“Human nature, for one thing. Race nature, for another.”
“Why race?”
“Because,” I would say in a low voice looking around lest someone else should overhear, “you have to be able to spot Jews and Negroes who are passing.”
“That’s terrible,” would surely be said then with a hint of indignation.
“It’s an art,” I would add masterfully.
After a good pause I would invariably be asked: “But you’re a Negro yourself, how can you keep your own people out?”
At which point I would look terribly disappointed and say: “I don’t keep them out. But if they get in, it’s my job to make their stay just as miserable as possible. Things are changing.”
Now the speaker would just look at me in disbelief.
“It’s Janitorial Objectivity,” I would say to finish the thing as the speaker began to edge away. “Don’t hate me,” I would call after him to his considerable embarrassment. “Somebody has to do it.”
It was an old building near Harvard Square. Conrad Aiken had once lived there and in the days of the Gold Coast, before Harvard built its great Houses, it had been a very fine haven for the rich; but that was a world ago, and this building was one of the few monuments of that era which had survived. The lobby had a high ceiling with thick redwood beams and it was replete with marble floor, fancy ironwork, and an old-fashioned house telephone that no longer worked. Each apartment had a small fireplace, and even the large bathtubs and chain toilets, when I was having my touch of nature, made me wonder what prominent personage of the past had worn away all the newness. And, being there, I felt a certain affinity toward the rich.
It was a funny building; because the people who lived there made it old. Conveniently placed as it was between the Houses and Harvard Yard, I expected to find it occupied by a company of hippies, hopeful working girls, and assorted graduate students. Instead, there were a majority of old maids, dowagers, asexual middle-aged men, homosexual young men, a few married couples and a teacher. No one was shacking up there, and walking through the quiet halls in the early evening, I sometimes had the urge to knock on a door and expose myself just to hear someone breathe hard for once.
It was a Cambridge spring: down by the Charles happy students were making love while sad-eyed middle-aged men watched them from the bridge. It was a time of activity: Law students were busy sublimating. Business School people were making records of the money they would make, the Harvard Houses were clearing out, and in the Square bearded pot-pushers were setting up their restaurant tables in anticipation of the Summer School faithfuls. There was a change of season in the air, and to comply with its urgings, James Sullivan, the old superintendent, passed his three beaten garbage cans on to me with the charge that I should take up his daily rounds of the six floors, and with unflinching humility, gather whatever scraps the old-maid tenants had refused to husband.
I then became very rich, with my own apartment, a sensitive girl, a stereo, two speakers, one tattered chair, one fork, a job, and the urge to acquire. Having all this and youth besides made me pity Sullivan: he had been in that building thirty years and had its whole history recorded in the little folds of his mind, as his own life was recorded in the wrinkles of his face. All he had to show for his time there was a berserk dog, a wife almost as mad as the dog, three cats, bursitis, acute myopia, and a drinking problem. He was well over seventy and could hardly walk, and his weekly check of twenty-two dollars from the company that managed the building would not support anything. So, out of compromise, he was retired to superintendent of my labor.
My first day as a janitor, while I skillfully lugged my three overflowing cans of garbage out of the building, he sat on his bench in the lobby, faded and old and smoking in patched, loose blue pants. He watched me. He was a chain smoker, and I noticed right away that he very carefully dropped all of the ashes and butts on the floor and crushed them under his feet until there was a yellow and gray smear. Then he laboriously pushed the mess under the bench with his shoe, all the while eyeing me like a cat in silence as I hauled the many cans of muck out to the big disposal unit next to the building. When I had finished, he gave me two old plates to help stock my kitchen and his first piece of advice.
“Sit down, for Chrissake, and take a load off your feet,” he told me.
I sat on the red bench next to him and accepted the wilted cigarette he offered me from the crushed package he kept in his sweater pocket.
“Now I’ll tell you something to help you get along in the building,” he said.
I listened attentively.
“If any of these sons-of-bitches ever ask you to do something extra, be sure to charge them for it.”
I assured him that I absolutely would.
“If they can afford to live here, they can afford to pay. The bastards.”
“Undoubtedly,” I assured him again.
“And another thing,” he added. “Don’t let any of these girls shove any cat shit under your nose. That ain’t your job. You tell them to put it in a bag and take it out themselves.”
I reminded him that I knew very well my station in life, and that I was not about to haul cat shit or anything of that nature. He looked at me through his thick-lensed glasses. He looked like a cat himself. “That’s right,” he said at last. “And if they still try to sneak it in the trash be sure to make the bastards pay. They can afford it.” He crushed his seventh butt on the floor and scattered the mess some more while he lit up another. “I never hauled out no cat shit in the thirty years I been here and you don’t do it either.”
“I’m going up to wash my hands,” I said.
“Remember,” he called after me, “don’t take no shit from any of them.”
I protested once more that, upon my life, I would never, never do it, not even for the prettiest girl in the building. Going up in the elevator, I felt comfortably resolved that I would never do it. There were no pretty girls in the building.
I never found out what he had done before he came there, but I do know that being a janitor in that building was as high as he ever got in life. He had watched two generations of the rich pass the building on their way to the Yard, and he had seen many governors ride white horses thirty times into that same Yard to send sons and daughters of the rich out into life to produce, to acquire, to procreate and to send back sons and daughters so that the cycle would continue. He had watched the cycle from when he had been able to haul the cans out for himself, and now he could not, and he was bitter.
He was Irish, of course, and he took pride in Irish accomplishments when he could have none of his own. He had known Frank O’Connor when that writer had been at Harvard. He told me on many occasions how O’Connor had stopped to talk every day on his way to the Yard. He had also known James Michael Curley, and his most colorful memory of the man was a long-ago day when he and James Curley sat in a Boston bar and one of Curley’s runners had come in and said: “Hey Jim, Sol Bernstein the Jew wants to see you.” And Curley, in his deep, memorial voice, had said to James Sullivan: “Let us go forth and meet this Israelite Prince.” These were his memories, and I would obediently put aside my garbage cans and laugh with him over the hundred or so colorful, insignificant little details which made up a whole lifetime of living in the basement of Harvard. And although they were of little value to me then, I knew that they were the reflections of a lifetime and the happiest moments he would ever have, being sold to me cheap, as youthful time is cheap, for as little time and interest as I wanted to spend. It was a buyer’s market.
II
IN THOSE DAYS I BELIEVED myself gifted with a boundless perception and attacked my daily garbage route with a gusto superenforced by the happy knowledge that behind each of the fifty or so doors in our building lived a story which could, if I chose to grace it with the magic of my pen, become immortal. I watched my tenants fanatically, noting their perversions, their visitors, and their eating habits. So intense was my search for material that I had to restrain myself from going through their refuse scrap by scrap; but at the topmost layers of muck, without too much hand-soiling in the process, I set my perceptions to work. By late June, however, I had discovered only enough to put together a skimpy, rather naïve Henry Miller novel. The most colorful discoveries being:
(1) The lady in #24 was an alumna of Paducah College.
(2) The couple in #55 made love at least five hundred times a week and the wife had not yet discovered the pill.
(3) The old lady in #36 was still having monthly inconvenience.
(4) The two fatsos in #56 consumed nightly an extraordinary amount of chili.
(5) The fat man in #54 had two dogs that were married to each other, but he was not married to anyone at all.
(6) The middle-aged single man in #63 threw out an awful lot of flowers.
Disturbed by the snail’s progress I was making, I confessed my futility to James one day as he sat on his bench chain-smoking and smearing butts on my newly waxed lobby floor. “So you want to know about the tenants?” he said, his cat’s eyes flickering over me.
I nodded.
“Well, the first thing to notice is how many Jews there are.”
“I haven’t noticed many Jews,” I said.
He eyed me in amazement.
“Well, a few,” I said quickly to prevent my treasured perception from being dulled any further.
“A few, hell,” he said. “There’s more Jews here than anybody.”
“How can you tell?”
He gave me that undecided look again. “Where do you think all that garbage comes from?” He nodded feebly toward my bulging cans. I looked just in time to prevent a stray noodle from slipping over the brim. “That’s right,” he continued. “Jews are the biggest eaters in the world. They eat the best too.”
I confessed then that I was of the chicken-soup generation and believed that Jews ate only enough to muster strength for their daily trips to the bank.
“Not so!” he replied emphatically. “You never heard the expression: ‘Let’s get to the restaurant before the Jews get there’?”
I shook my head sadly.
“You don’t know that in certain restaurants they take the free onions and pickles off the tables when they see Jews coming?”
I held my head down in shame over the bounteous heap.
He trudged over to my can and began to turn back the leaves of noodles and crumpled tissues from #47 with his hand. After a few seconds of digging he unmucked an empty paté can. “Look at that,” he said triumphantly. “Gourmet stuff, no less.”
“That’s from #44,” I said.
“What else?” he said all-knowingly. “In 1946 a Swedish girl moved in up there and took a Jewish girl for her roommate. Then the Swedish girl moved out and there’s been a Jewish Dynasty up there ever since.”
I recalled that #44 was occupied by a couple that threw out a good number of S. S. Pierce cans, Chivas Regal bottles, assorted broken records, and back issues of Evergreen and the Realist.
“You’re right,” I said.
“Of course,” he replied as if there was never any doubt. “I can spot them anywhere, even when they think they’re passing.” He leaned closer and said in a you-and-me voice: “But don’t ever say anything bad about them in public; the Anti-Defamation League will get you.”
Just then his wife screamed for him from the second floor, and the dog joined her and beat against the door. He got into the elevator painfully and said: “Don’t ever talk about them in public. You don’t know who they are and that Defamation League will take everything you got.”
Sullivan did not really hate Jews. He was just bitter toward anyone better off than himself. He liked me because I seemed to like hauling garbage and because I listened to him and seemed to respect what he said and seemed to imply, by lingering on even when he repeated himself, that I was eager to take what wisdom he had for no other reason than that I needed it in order to get along.
He lived with his wife on the second floor and his apartment was very dirty because both of them were sick and old, and neither could move very well. His wife swept dirt out into the hall, and two hours after I had mopped and waxed their section of the floor, there was sure to be a layer of dirt, grease, and crushed-scattered tobacco from their door to the end of the hall. There was a smell of dogs and cats and age and death about their door, and I did not ever want to have to go in there for any reason because I feared something about it I cannot name.
Mrs. Sullivan, I found out, was from South Africa. She loved animals much more than people and there was a great deal of pain in her face. She kept little pans of meat posted at strategic points about the building, and I often came across her in the early morning or late at night throwing scraps out of the second-floor window to stray cats. Once, when James was about to throttle a stray mouse in their apartment, she had screamed at him to give the mouse a sporting chance. Whenever she attempted to walk she had to balance herself against a wall or a rail, and she hated the building because it confined her. She also hated James and most of the tenants. On the other hand, she loved the Johnny Carson Show, she loved to sit outside on the front steps (because she could get no further unassisted), and she loved to talk to anyone who would stop to listen. She never spoke coherently except when she was cursing James, and then she had a vocabulary like a sailor. She had great, shrill lungs, and her screams, accompanied by the rabid barks of the dog, could be heard all over the building. She was never really clean, her teeth were bad, and the first most pathetic thing in the world was to see her sitting on the steps in the morning watching the world pass, in a stained smock and a fresh summer blue hat she kept just to wear downstairs, with no place in the world to go. James told me, on the many occasions of her screaming, that she was mentally disturbed and could not control herself. The admirable thing about him was that he never lost his temper with her, no matter how rough her curses became and no matter who heard them. And the second most pathetic thing in the world was to see them slowly making their way in Harvard Square, he supporting her, through the hurrying crowds of miniskirted summer girls, J-Pressed Ivy Leaguers, beatniks, and bused Japanese tourists, decked in cameras, who would take pictures of every inch of Harvard Square except them. Once, he told me, a hippie had brushed past them and called back over his shoulder: “Don’t break any track records, Mr. and Mrs. Speedy Molasses.”
Also on the second floor lived Miss O’Hara, a spinster who hated Sullivan as only an old maid can hate an old man. Across from her lived a very nice, gentle, celibate named Murphy who had once served with Montgomery in North Africa and who was now spending the rest of his life cleaning his little apartment and gossiping with Miss O’Hara. It was an Irish floor.
I never found out just why Miss O’Hara hated the Sullivans with such a passion. Perhaps it was because they were so unkempt and she was so superciliously clean. Perhaps it was because Miss O’Hara had a great deal of Irish pride and they were stereotyped Irish. Perhaps it was because she merely had no reason to like them. She was a fanatic about cleanliness and put out her little bit of garbage wrapped very neatly in yesterday’s Christian Science Monitor and tied in a bow with a fresh piece of string. Collecting all those little neat packages, I would wonder where she got the string and imagined her at night picking meat-market locks with a hairpin and hobbling off with yards and yards of white cord concealed under the gray sweater she always wore. I could even imagine her back in her little apartment chuckling and rolling the cord into a great white ball by candlelight. Then she would stash it away in her breadbox. Miss O’Hara kept her door slightly open until late at night, and I suspected that she heard everything that went on in the building. I had the feeling that I should never dare to make love with gusto for fear that she would overhear and write down all my happy-time phrases, to be maliciously recounted to me if she were ever provoked.
She had been in the building longer than Sullivan, and I suppose that her greatest ambition in life was to outlive him and then attend his wake with a knitting ball and needles. She had been trying to get him fired for twenty-five years or so and did not know when to quit. On summer nights when I painfully mopped the second floor, she would offer me root beer, apples, or cupcakes while trying to pump me for evidence against him.
“He’s just a filthy old man, Robert,” she would declare in a little-old-lady whisper. “And don’t think you have to clean up those dirty old butts of his. Just report him to the Company.”
“Oh, I don’t mind,” I would tell her, gulping the root beer as fast as possible.
“Well, they’re both a couple of lushes, if you ask me. They haven’t been sober a day in twenty-five years.”
“Well, she’s sick too, you know.”
“Ha!” She would throw up her hands in disgust. “She’s only sick when he doesn’t give her the booze.”
I fought to keep down a burp. “How long have you been here?”
She motioned for me to step out of the hall and into her dark apartment. “Don’t tell him”—she nodded toward Sullivan’s door—“but I’ve been here for thirty-four years.” She waited for me to be taken aback. Then she added: “And it was a better building before those two lushes came.”
She then offered me an apple, asked five times if the dog’s barking bothered me, forced me to take a fudge brownie, said that the cats had wet the floor again last night, got me to dust the top of a large chest too high for her to reach, had me pick up the minute specks of dust which fell from my dustcloth, pressed another root beer on me, and then showed me her family album. As an afterthought, she had me take down a big old picture of her great-grandfather, also too high for her to reach, so that I could dust that too. Then together we picked up the dust from it which might have fallen to the floor. “He’s really a filthy old man, Robert,” she said in closing, “and don’t be afraid to report him to the property manager any time you want.”
I assured her that I would do it at the slightest provocation from Sullivan, finally accepted an apple but refused the money she offered, and escaped back to my mopping. Even then she watched me, smiling, from her half-opened door.
“Why does Miss O’Hara hate you?” I asked James once.
He lifted his cigaretted hand and let the long ash fall elegantly to the floor. “That old bitch has been an albatross around my neck ever since I got here,” he said. “Don’t trust her, Robert. It was her kind that sat around singing hymns and watching them burn saints in this state.”
There was never an adequate answer to my question. And even though the dog was noisy and would surely kill someone if it ever got loose, no one could really dislike the old man because of it. The dog was all they had. In his garbage each night, for every wine bottle, there would be an equally empty can of dog food. Some nights he took the brute out for a long walk, when he could barely walk himself, and both of them had to be led back to the building.
III
IN THOSE DAYS I HAD forgotten that I was first of all a black and I had a very lovely girl who was not first of all a black. We were both young and optimistic then, and she believed with me in my potential and liked me partly because of it; and I was happy because she belonged to me and not to the race, which made her special. It made me special too because I did not have to wear a beard or hate or be especially hip or ultra–Ivy Leaguish. I did not have to smoke pot or supply her with it, or be for any other cause at all except myself. I only had to be myself, which pleased me; and I only had to produce, which pleased both of us. Like many of the artistically inclined rich, she wanted to own in someone else what she could not own in herself. But this I did not mind, and I forgave her for it because she forgave me moods and the constant smell of garbage and a great deal of latent hostility. She only minded James Sullivan and all the valuable time I was wasting listening to him rattle on and on. His conversations, she thought, were useless, repetitious, and promised nothing of value to me. She was accustomed to the old-rich whose conversations meandered around a leitmotiv of how well off they were and how much they would leave behind very soon. She was not at all cold, but she had been taught how to tolerate the old-poor and perhaps toss them a greeting in passing. But nothing more.
Sullivan did not like her when I first introduced them because he saw that she was not a hippie and could not be dismissed. It is in the nature of things that liberal people will tolerate two interracial hippies more than they will an intelligent, serious-minded mixed couple. The former liaison is easy to dismiss as the dregs of both races, deserving of each other and the contempt of both races; but the latter poses a threat because there is no immediacy or overpowering sensuality or “you-pick-my-fleas-I’ll-pick-yours” apparent on the surface of things, and people, even the most publicly liberal, cannot dismiss it so easily.
“That girl is Irish, isn’t she?” he had asked one day in my apartment soon after I had introduced them.
“No,” I said definitely.
“What’s her name again?”
“Judy Smith,” I said, which was not her name at all.
“Well, I can spot it,” he said. “She’s got Irish blood, all right.”
“Everybody’s got a little Irish blood,” I told him.
He looked at me cattily and craftily from behind his thick lenses. “Well, she’s from a good family, I suppose.”
“I suppose,” I said.
He paused to let some ashes fall to the rug. “They say the Colonel’s Lady and Nelly O’Grady are sisters under the skin.” Then he added: “Rudyard Kipling.”
“That’s true,” I said with equal innuendo, “that’s why you have to maintain a distinction by marrying the Colonel’s Lady.”
An understanding passed between us then, and we never spoke more on the subject.
ALMOST EVERY NIGHT the cats wet the second floor while Meg Sullivan watched the Johnny Carson Show and the dog howled and clawed the door. During commercials Meg would curse James to get out and stop dropping ashes on the floor or to take the dog out or something else, totally unintelligible to those of us on the fourth, fifth and sixth floors. Even after the Carson Show she would still curse him to get out, until finally he would go down to the basement and put away a bottle or two of wine. There was a steady stench of cat functions in the basement, and with all the grease and dirt, discarded trunks, beer bottles, chairs, old tools and the filthy sofa on which he sometimes slept, seeing him there made me want to cry. He drank the cheapest sherry, the wino kind, straight from the bottle; and on many nights that summer at 2:00 A.M. my phone would ring me out of bed.
“Rob? Jimmy Sullivan here. What are you doing?”
There was nothing suitable to say.
“Come on down to the basement for a drink.”
“I have to be at work at eight-thirty,” I would protest.
“Can’t you have just one drink?” he would say pathetically.
I would carry down my own glass so that I would not have to drink out of the bottle. Looking at him on the sofa, I could not be mad because now I had many records for my stereo, a story that was going well, a girl who believed in me and belonged to me and not to the race, a new set of dishes, and a tomorrow morning with younger people.
“I don’t want to burden you unduly,” he would always preface.
I would force myself not to look at my watch and say: “Of course not.”
“My Meg is not in the best health, you know,” he would say, handing the bottle to me.
“She’s just old.”
“The doctors say she should be in an institution.”
“That’s no place to be.”
“I’m a sick man myself, Rob. I can’t take much more. She’s crazy.”
“Anybody who loves animals can’t be crazy.”
He took another long draw from the bottle. “I won’t live another year. I’ll be dead in a year.”
“You don’t know that.”
He looked at me closely, without his glasses, so that I could see the desperation in his eyes. “I just hope Meg goes before I do. I don’t want them to put her in an institution after I’m gone.”
At 2:00 A.M., with the cat stench in my nose and a glass of bad sherry standing still in my hand because I refused in my mind to touch it, and when all my dreams of greatness were above him and the basement and the building itself, I did not know what to say. The only way I could keep from hating myself was to talk about the AMA or the Medicare program or hippies. He was pure hell on all three. To him, the medical profession was “morally bankrupt,” Medicare was a great farce which deprived oldsters like himself of their “rainy-day dollars,” and hippies were “dropouts from the human race.” He could rage on and on in perfect phrases about all three of his major dislikes, and I had the feeling that because the sentences were so well constructed and well turned, he might have memorized them from something he had read. But then he was extremely well read and it did not matter if he had borrowed a phrase or two from someone else. The ideas were still his own.
It would be 3:00 A.M. before I knew it, and then 3:30, and still he would go on. He hated politicians in general and liked to recount, at these times, his private catalogue of political observations. By the time he got around to Civil Rights it would be 4:00 A.M., and I could not feel sorry or responsible for him at that hour. I would begin to yawn and at first he would just ignore it. Then I would start to edge toward the door, and he would see that he could hold me no longer, not even by declaring that he wanted to be an honorary Negro because he loved the race so much.
“I hope I haven’t burdened you unduly,” he would say again.
“Of course not,” I would say, because it was over then and I could leave him and the smell of the cats there and sometimes I would go out in the cool night and walk around the Yard and be thankful that I was only an assistant janitor, and a transient one at that. Walking in the early dawn and seeing the Summer School fellows sneak out of the girls’ dormitories in the Yard gave me a good feeling, and I thought that tomorrow night it would be good to make love myself so that I could be busy when he called.
IV
“WHY DON’T YOU TELL that old man your job doesn’t include baby-sitting with him?” Jean told me many times when she came over to visit during the day and found me sleeping.
I would look at her and think to myself about social forces and the pressures massing and poised, waiting to attack us. It was still July then. It was hot and I was working good. “He’s just an old man,” I said. “Who else would listen to him?”
“You’re too soft. As long as you do your work you don’t have to be bothered with him.”
“He could be a story if I listened long enough.”
“There are too many stories about old people.”
“No,” I said, thinking about us again, “there are just too many people who have no stories.”
Sometimes he would come up and she would be there, but I would let him come in anyway, and he would stand in the room looking dirty and uncomfortable, offering some invented reason for having intruded. At these times something silent would pass between them, something I cannot name, which would reduce him to exactly what he was: an old man, come out of his basement to intrude where he was not wanted. But all the time this was being communicated, there would be a surface, friendly conversation between them. And after five minutes or so of being unwelcome, he would apologize for having come, drop a few ashes on the rug and back out the door. Downstairs we could hear his wife screaming.
We endured and aged, and August was almost over. Inside the building the cats were still wetting, Meg was still screaming, the dog was getting madder, and Sullivan began to drink during the day. Outside it was hot and lush and green, and the summer girls were wearing shorter miniskirts and no panties and the middle-aged men down by the Charles were going wild on their bridge. Everyone was restless for change, for August is the month when undone summer things must be finished or regretted all through the winter.
V
BEING IMAGINATIVE PEOPLE, Jean and I played a number of original games. One of them we called “Social Forces,” the object of which was to see which side could break us first. We played it with the unknown nightriders who screamed obscenities from passing cars. And because that was her side I would look at her expectantly, but she would laugh and say: “No.” We played it at parties with unaware blacks who attempted to enchant her with skillful dances and hip vocabulary, believing her to be community property. She would be polite and aloof, and much later, it then being my turn, she would look at me expectantly. And I would force a smile and say: “No.” The last round was played while taking her home in a subway car, on a hot August night, when one side of the car was black and tense and hating and the other side was white and of the same mind. There was not enough room on either side for the two of us to sit and we would not separate; and so we stood, holding on to a steel post through all the stops, feeling all the eyes, between the two sides of the car and the two sides of the world. We aged. And, getting off finally at the stop which was no longer ours, we looked at each other, again expectantly, and there was nothing left to say.
I began to avoid the old man, would not answer the door when I knew it was he who was knocking, and waited until very late at night, when he could not possibly be awake, to haul the trash down. I hated the building then; and I was really a janitor for the first time. I slept a lot and wrote very little. And I did not give a damn about Medicare, the AMA, the building, Meg or the crazy dog. I began to consider moving out.
In that same month, Miss O’Hara finally succeeded in badgering Murphy, the celibate Irishman, and a few other tenants into signing a complaint about the dog. No doubt Murphy signed because he was a nice fellow and women like Miss O’Hara had always dominated him. He did not really mind the dog: he did not really mind anything. She called him “Frank Dear,” and I had the feeling that when he came to that place, fresh from Montgomery’s Campaign, he must have had a will of his own; but she had drained it all away, year by year, so that now he would do anything just to be agreeable.
One day soon after the complaint, the Property Manager came around to tell Sullivan that the dog had to be taken away. Miss O’Hara told me the good news later, when she finally got around to my door.
“Well, that crazy dog is gone now, Robert. Those two are enough.”
“Where is the dog?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but Albert Rustin made them get him out. You should have seen the old drunk’s face,” she said. “That dirty useless old man.”
“You should be at peace now,” I said.
“Almost,” was her reply. “The best thing would be to get rid of those two old boozers along with the dog.”
I congratulated Miss O’Hara again and then went out. I knew that the old man would be drinking and would want to talk. I did not want to talk. But very late that evening he called on the telephone and caught me in.
“Rob?” he said. “James Sullivan here. Would you come down to my apartment like a good fellow? I want to ask you something important.”
I had never been in his apartment before and did not want to go then. But I went down anyway.
They had three rooms, all grimy from corner to corner. There was a peculiar odor in that place I did not want to ever smell again, and his wife was dragging herself around the room talking in mumbles. When she saw me come in the door, she said: “I can’t clean it up. I just can’t. Look at that window. I can’t reach it. I can’t keep it clean.” She threw up both her hands and held her head down and to the side. “The whole place is dirty and I can’t clean it up.”
“What do you want?” I said to Sullivan.
“Sit down.” He motioned me to a kitchen chair. “Have you changed that bulb on the fifth floor?”
“It’s done.”
He was silent for a while, drinking from a bottle of sherry, and he offered me some and a dirty glass. “You’re the first person who’s been in here in years,” he said. “We couldn’t have company because of the dog.”
Somewhere in my mind was a note that I should never go into his apartment. But the dog had not been the reason. “Well, he’s gone now,” I said, fingering the dirty glass of sherry.
He began to cry. “They took my dog away,” he said. “It was all I had. How can they take a man’s dog away from him?”
There was nothing I could say.
“I couldn’t do nothing,” he continued. After a while he added: “But I know who it was. It was that old bitch O’Hara. Don’t ever trust her, Rob. She smiles in your face but it was her kind that laughed when they burned Joan of Arc in this state.”
Seeing him there, crying and making me feel unmanly because I wanted to touch him or say something warm, also made me eager to be far away and running hard. “Everybody’s got problems,” I said. “I don’t have a girl now.”
He brightened immediately, and for a while he looked almost happy in his old cat’s eyes. Then he staggered over to my chair and held out his hand. I did not touch it, and he finally pulled it back. “I know how you feel,” he said. “I know just how you feel.”
“Sure,” I said.
“But you’re a young man, you have a future. But not me. I’ll be dead inside of a year.”
Just then his wife dragged in to offer me a cigar. They were being hospitable and I forced myself to drink a little of the sherry.
“They took my dog away today,” she mumbled. “That’s all I had in the world, my dog.”
I looked at the old man. He was drinking from the bottle.
VI
DURING THE FIRST WEEK OF SEPTEMBER one of the middle-aged men down by the Charles got tired of looking and tried to take a necking girl away from her boyfriend. The police hauled him off to jail, and the girl pulled down her dress tearfully. A few days later another man exposed himself near the same spot. And that same week a dead body was found on the banks of the Charles.
The miniskirted brigade had moved out of the Yard and it was quiet and green and peaceful there. In our building another Jewish couple moved into #44. They did not eat gourmet stuff and, on occasion, threw out pork-and-beans cans. But I had lost interest in perception. I now had many records for my stereo, loads of S. S. Pierce stuff, and a small bottle of Chivas Regal which I never opened. I was working good again and did not miss other things as much; or at least I told myself that.
The old man was coming up steadily now, at least three times a day, and I had resigned myself to it. If I refused to let him in he would always come back later with a missing bulb on the fifth floor. We had taken to buying cases of beer together, and when he had finished his half, which was very frequently, he would come up to polish off mine. I began to enjoy talking about politics, the AMA, Medicare, and hippies, and listening to him recite from books he had read. I discovered that he was very well read in history, philosophy, literature and law. He was extraordinarily fond of saying: “I am really a cut above being a building superintendent. Circumstances made me what I am.” And even though he was drunk and dirty and it was very late at night, I believed him and liked him anyway because having him there was much better than being alone. After he had gone I could sleep and I was not lonely in sleep; and it did not really matter how late I was at work the next morning, because when I really thought about it all, I discovered that nothing really matters except not being old and being alive and having potential to dream about, and not being alone.
Whenever I passed his wife on the steps she would say: “That no-good bastard let them take my dog away.” And whenever her husband complained that he was sick she said: “That’s good for him. He took my dog away.”
Sullivan slept in the basement on the sofa almost every night because his wife would think about the dog after the Carson Show and blame him for letting it be taken away. He told her, and then me, that the dog was on a farm in New Hampshire; but that was unlikely because the dog had been near mad, and it did not appease her. It was nearing autumn and she was getting violent. Her screams could be heard for hours through the halls and I knew that beyond her quiet door Miss O’Hara was plotting again. Sullivan now had little cuts and bruises on his face and hands, and one day he said: “Meg is like an albatross around my neck. I wish she was dead. I’m sick myself and I can’t take much more. She blames me for the dog and I couldn’t help it.”
“Why don’t you take her out to see the dog?” I said.
“I couldn’t help it, Rob,” he went on. “I’m old and I couldn’t help it.”
“You ought to just get her out of here for a while.”
He looked at me, drunk as usual. “Where would we go? We can’t even get past the Square.”
There was nothing left to say.
“Honest to God, I couldn’t help it,” he said. He was not saying it to me.
That night I wrote a letter from a mythical New Hampshire farmer telling them that the dog was very fine and missed them a great deal because he kept trying to run off. I said that the children and all the other dogs liked him and that he was not vicious any more. I wrote that the open air was doing him a lot of good and added that they should feel absolutely free to come up to visit the dog at any time. That same night I gave him the letter.
One evening, some days later, I asked him about it.
“I tried to mail it, I really tried,” he said.
“What happened?”
“I went down to the Square and looked for cars with New Hampshire license plates. But I never found anybody.”
“That wasn’t even necessary, was it?”
“It had to have a New Hampshire postmark. You don’t know my Meg.”
“Listen,” I said. “I have a friend who goes up there. Give me the letter and I’ll have him mail it.”
He held his head down. “I’ll tell you the truth. I carried that letter in my pocket so much it got ragged and dirty and I got tired of carrying it. I finally just tore it up.”
Neither one of us said anything for a while.
“If I could have sent it off it would have helped some,” he said at last. “I know it would have helped.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I wouldn’t have to ask anybody if I had my strength.”
“I know.”
“If I had my strength I would have mailed it myself.”
“I know,” I said.
That night we both drank from his bottle of sherry and it did not matter at all that I did not provide my own glass.
VII
IN LATE SEPTEMBER the Cambridge police finally picked up the bearded pot-pusher in the Square. He had been in a restaurant all summer, at the same table, with the same customers flocking around him; but now that summer was over, they picked him up. The leaves were changing. In the early evening students passed the building and Meg, blue-hatted and waiting on the steps, carrying sofas and chairs and coffee tables to their suites in the Houses. Down by the Charles the middle-aged men were catching the last phases of summer sensuality before the grass grew cold and damp, and before the young would be forced indoors to play. I wondered what those hungry, spying men did in the winter or at night when it was too dark to see. Perhaps, I thought, they just stood there and listened.
In our building Miss O’Hara was still listening. She had never stopped. When Meg was outside on the steps it was very quiet and I felt good that Miss O’Hara had to wait a long, long time before she heard anything. The company gave the halls and ceilings a new coat of paint, but it was still old in the building. James Sullivan got his yearly two-week vacation and they went to the Boston Common for six hours: two hours going, two hours sitting on the benches, and two hours coming back. Then they both sat on the steps, watching, and waiting.
At first I wanted to be kind because he was old and dying in a special way and I was young and ambitious. But at night, in my apartment, when I heard his dragging feet in the hall outside and knew that he would be drunk and repetitious and imposing on my privacy, I did not want to be kind any more. There were girls outside and I knew that I could have one now because that desperate look had finally gone somewhere deep inside. I was young and now I did not want to be bothered.
“Did you read about the lousy twelve per cent Social Security increase those bastards in Washington gave us?”
“No.”
He would force himself past me, trying to block the door with my body, and into the room. “When those old pricks tell me to count my blessings, I tell them, ‘You’re not one of them.’” He would seat himself at the table without meeting my eyes. “The cost of living’s gone up more than twelve per cent in the last six months.”
“I know.”
“What unmitigated bastards.”
I would try to be busy with something on my desk.
“But the Texas Oil Barons got another depletion allowance.”
“They can afford to bribe politicians,” I would mumble.
“They tax away our rainy-day dollars and give us a lousy twelve per cent.”
“It’s tough.”
He would know that I did not want to hear any more and he would know that he was making a burden of himself. It made me feel bad that it was so obvious to him, but I could not help myself. It made me feel bad that I disliked him more every time I heard a girl laugh on the street far below my window. So I would nod occasionally and say half-phrases and smile slightly at something witty he was saying for the third time. If I did not offer him a drink he would go sooner and so I gave him Coke when he hinted at how dry he was. Then, when he had finally gone, saying, “I hope I haven’t burdened you unduly,” I went to bed and hated myself.
VIII
IF I AM A JANITOR it is either because I have to be a janitor or because I want to be a janitor. And if I do not have to do it, and if I no longer want to do it, the easiest thing in the world, for a young man, is to step up to something else. Any move away from it is a step up because there is no job more demeaning than that of a janitor. One day I made myself suddenly realize that the three dirty cans would never contain anything of value to me, unless, of course, I decided to gather material for Harold Robbins or freelance for the Realist. Neither alternative appealed to me.
Toward dawn one day, during the first part of October, I rented a U-Haul truck and took away two loads of things I had accumulated. The records I packed very carefully, and the stereo I placed on the front seat of the truck beside me. I slipped the Chivas Regal and a picture of Jean under some clothes in a trunk I will not open for a long time. And I left the rug on the floor because it was dirty and too large for my new apartment. I also left the two plates given to me by James Sullivan, for no reason at all. Sometimes I want to go back to get them, but I do not know how to ask for them or explain why I left them in the first place. But sometimes at night, when there is a sleeping girl beside me, I think that I cannot have them again because I am still young and do not want to go back into that building.
I saw him once in the Square walking along very slowly with two shopping bags, and they seemed very heavy. As I came up behind him I saw him put them down and exercise his arms while the crowd moved in two streams around him. I had an instant impulse to offer help and I was close enough to touch him before I stopped. I will never know why I stopped. And after a few seconds of standing behind him and knowing that he was not aware of anything at all except the two heavy bags waiting to be lifted after his arms were sufficiently rested, I moved back into the stream of people which passed on the left of him. I never looked back.