two

LENA WAS SETTING out nuts and potato chips on the terrace where we were to have our drinks. She is a horse, but at forty still firm in outline, beautifully rounded muscle, not fat. No, not by a long shot yet. We should have her carrying keyboard on the piano crew instead of Art! That was what I often thought working the heavy corner beside Art as we came downstairs under a soggy Chickering upright, most of the weight on my hump.

Lena is one of them Earth Mothers they call them, a burst of sheer Life Force that kills everything in its path. Flattens all oppositions in a scorched earth policy. A childless Earth Mother has to work off this creative energy in some form, and hers was disseminating birth control information for some society fighting the population explosion, endeavoring to educate people to the evils of overcrowding the planet and one thing and another. So she hands out tracks too but what a difference! “Don’t fill hungry bellies with more babies,” was a typical title. When she wasn’t distributing tracks she was meeting with reasonable Catholics who are trying to get the church to liberalize its stand.

There was no want of subjects for missionary work right here on Sparrow Street. Next door to the Salernos was a family named Gromulka with five, six, finally now eight kids, and the usual nother one on the way, no need to go to India with the pamphlets. Mrs. Gromulka, the neighborhood blimp, resented the pamphlets Lena was always trying to hand her, and finally refused to accept no more. So Lena would fling them over the high stockade fence that separated their back yards, calling out, “Read this through please, Mrs. Gromulka. See what you’re doing to the world. We must stop breeding from the bottom!” And back Mrs. Gromulka would holler in even shriller tones, “I’ll breed any way I damn please! What we do is none of your business,” and back the pamphlet would come over the top of the fence, fluttering like a dead bird at Lena’s feet.

There had been just such a low scene when I turned in at the alley gate I could tell. The tail-end of Mrs. Gromulka’s diatribe could be heard as Lena set out the snacks. I could tell she was boiling, her complexion having that mottled look it takes on when angry. The screen door over there banged shut on the wail of some child being dragged into the house.

“Mrs. G. sounds fit to be tied,” I says.

“She should be tied.” That’s our Lena—funny as a crutch and twice as perceptive. Her humor is bitter. “There ought to be a law demanding it—or sterilizing the husband. Serious thinkers are beginning to urge it. That when a man who already has more children than he can support has another one, he should be sterilized. It’s a simple operation that in no way interferes with sexual pleasure.”

I changed the subject by giving her a pat on the peach halfs and complimenting her on how she looked. She wore a watermelon red linen dress with a high neckline cut straight across the shoulders, a beltless thing under which her body, tanned the coppery red of tiger lilies, moved with animal ease. Lena is a proxide blonde.

She paused at the door, after taking my order for a beer, and said with one of them pregnant pauses that are the extent of her fertility, “I can’t ask you in, Stan. Art isn’t home yet.”

I hadn’t made a move to follow her in, but it was her way of indicating that there was Something Between Us. No minority report from me. She built it up by constantly denying it. The first inkling I had of it was the statement that it couldn’t be. We had been walking by the river one night, Art and Elsie up ahead and we behind, when she stumbled over a root or stone or so and I caught her hand. She withdrew it slowly with a significant look and said, “We better leave it the way it is, Stan.” There hadn’t been anything to leave the way it was, but now there was. I had no doubt she told Art out of a clear sky, “There’s nothing between Stan and me—absolutely nothing,” thereby putting the bee in his bonnet too. Lena don’t need no chastity belt but she needs a good belt across the chops three, four times a year. Oh, I suppose it’s all the human need to inject a little drama into our drab lives, or to use one of the phrases Lena is always stealing from writers she reads or plays she sees, “to recover a little of the lost poetry from the prose of existence.” Sometimes its fresh snow on the whatsis. Slush of disenchantment. Shenanigans with Lena would of involved all your waking hours, but there was another objection. The endless intellectualizing you’d have to pay for it with. You would have to get around to it by long discussions about the changing sexual morays of our time, the need to purge the Puritan ethic from the American conscience, et cetera. It just seemed too much red tape to go through to unknot a halter that when you got it unknotted you would have 2, 3 lbs. of potato salad. Still there were times when just to look at Lena made me feel like my blood was carbonated.

Now, standing out there in the back yard while she waited with the screen door in her hand for some sort of reply, I just said, “Stan Waltz has decided to take unto himself a wife but he hasn’t decided yet whose,” and thrun a peanut at her.

Waiting for my beer, I admired again what Lena had done with the yard. It was the dinky 25 by 50 ft. we all had on Sparrow Street, but she had laid it out beautifully in a single big cross of gravel walk with a bird bath in the center and four triangles of flower beds around it. The gravel was pink—a Japanese idea I think. “They do their decorations with such economy,” she said the evening we had initiated the new yard with an outdoor barbecue. “They have to, they don’t have no money,” said Art from the charcoal grill, and Lena said, “I’m talking about artistic economy. It’s space they don’t have.” Though I had thought what Art thought she meant too, I returned her look with an understanding smile, which was like copping a feel. I sometimes despair of ever meeting my standards. Still in all my faith in this human stuff was restored again as I thought how much we all meant to each other, taking in the garden there in the cool of the evening, how much we manage to do on our modest incomes while the wicked flourish like the green bay tree. Beyond the tracks was the vulgar element.

“Hey I want to talk to you before Els and Art get here,” I called into the kitchen. Just then she kicked the screen door open and came out with a tray with two drinks in tall glasses of plastic silver with foliage on top. Beer was never served with a sprig of mint to the best of my knowledge. “I thought you might like a Pimm’s Cup first,” she said. “You can have all the beer you want later.” It’s another one of her drinks with a cough remedy base, but I put it loyally down as I sit across from Lena getting her viewpoint on the crisis she knows all about and wants to hear the latest on.

“I’m living with a different person. I’m a different person,” I told her. “My life isn’t the same. It certainly isn’t my life. I no longer recognize my existence. Her faith is something she’s ‘got,’ like the personal hygiene. What am I going to do?”

Lena sits on the glider thinking. She crosses and uncrosses her legs, sprawls back, leans forward for potato chips and nuts, spanks the salt from her hands. She goes on thinking, the springs of the glider groaning under the strain, her face screwed up in a variety of expressions.

At last all at once the fruit of this deliberation: “I can’t communicate with Art.”

This deal I am familiar with—whole marriages are based on it—but it hardly answers my question. I don’t begrudge Lena her style of living, the dramatic airs, but how about me for a change? Besides a wife, I have a child.

“How should I handle it?”

“What?”

“Elsie. What am I going to do about this situation? That obtains?”

“I know exactly how you feel. Oh don’t I just! He needs a little more lemon in him! That’s his main trouble. If he’d only get up on his hind legs once and tell somebody something back …”

She rises and begins to pace, breathing smoke and wagging a cigarette holder the size of a clarinet. I take in the nutbrown legs, the thighs that churn you to butter. How would it be if I had married her instead of Elsie? She was always the intellectual of the crowd, not being able to communicate and so on, even in the old days when we were young. A copy of Red-book or Cosmopolitan always under the arm, always leading the boys in the drugstore from the soda fountain to the paperbacks. Always the one to stop on the way out of the movie and complain to the manager, “Why don’t you show some foreign films once in a while?” (Answer: “They’re in another language.”) Lena was always a big zaftig girl, dominating the group even without speaking. What would she do if Art reared back on his hind legs and started telling people where to get off at? It might start at home, this identity stuff, like charity. I open my mouth, but it is little use for the moment exept to eat another potato chip washed down with Pimm’s Cup.

“A little more starch! In everything, all walks of life. That’s what he needs. Starch.” She stops as though making a mental note to have him pick some up from the store on his way home from work. “Why for instance does he let you tell him to stay overtime and finish a crating job after he’s been out on the truck all day? Why doesn’t he tell you to hire him for one thing or the other? If you want him to crate, let him crate full time and you hire another helper for the truck.”

“We have an average of two, two and half days furniture to crate a week, Lena. We’re a one-horse outfit. Only two trucks.”

“He’s meek with waiters. Such a mollycoddle! He never tells them to take it back to the kitchen when they bring him the wrong thing and get them what he ordered, or the right thing but it’s burned. To a crisp! Or even when they bring me the wrong thing, his wife. When somebody bumps into him, he says excuse me. He apologizes to tables and chairs. A regular Casper Milktoast.”

I remember Lena’s admiration when I took the plunge and went into business on my own, mortgaging my kidneys to buy a truck, then her bewilderment when I can’t stand being cooped up in the office I aspired to and have to go out on the truck again to get the feel of a loaded dresser on my back or my shoulder under a piano—that weight a man can feel in his marbles. If I was her husband, would I have to take lip for this public forfit of social standing I had worked so hard to get? Would we be always clanging the status cymbals?

Lena sits down again, and in the silence that I haven’t taken advantage of, being sunk in these thoughts of my own, she continues but in a quieter, more brooding vane.

“So he has this sense of weakness that he has to make up for in little ways. He’ll deliberately leave his beer bottle in the living room after dinner when is it any trouble to take it to the sink on retiring? A gesture of independence, that makes me subservient. He’ll leave his socks where he drops them, and his underwear, for me to pick up and throw in the laundry—to assert his masculinity a minute. Then there’ll be little digs, things will start coming out, especially after a few drinks. You wouldn’t expect it from Art, would you? All this is a revelation. This is a total surprise to you, the quiet little lamb of a guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly. And he is, and he wouldn’t, exept with a little Dutch courage under his belt and the universal human habit of taking things out on those closest to us. They’re the only ones available at the time.”

A longer silence falls. I run the tip of my finger around the rim of my drink. An unexpected intimacy has sprung up between us. First Art’s socks, then his underwear, and now sly digs at her. A door closes somewhere, a car starts up in the alley and drives off, a tinkle of voices and laughter—the symphony of the summer night. Lena looks away, sitting against the side of the glider with her arm along its back. She drums the pad with her fingers.

“Did you know that he could belch whole sentences?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a trick. He started in to do it with a buddy in the war. They were drinking beer in a bar in Germany, fooling around, getting kind of high and crazy, and they began to talk in belch after a drink. That was what they called it. Then some other American soldiers at another table joined them, and they had a contest to see who could belch the longest sentence. One of the officers was educated and got this experiment really going. Have you ever heard of a writer named Oscar Wilde?”

“No.”

“Well, he defined all German poetry as attenuated beer belching, according to the officer, a Rhodes scholar. They began to belch the German classics. ‘Ich Weiss Nicht Was Soll Es Bedeuten Dass Ich so Traurig Bin.’ That’s that song we use to sing in school, remember, the ‘Lorelei,’ but it was originally a poem by Hiney. I don’t think this promotes international understanding, but they were going along with the gag like a bunch of kids. Kids do this you know. Anyhow Art got pretty proficient at it, and came home with that ability. Now when he’s horsing around the house he’ll start it, partly because he knows it annoys me—just exactly somewhat like kids doing something they know annoys their elders. He has to have a few drinks in him. Once he belched the entire Pledge of Allegiance. If he hadn’t done his share in the war I’d have reported him to the FBI. When he got to the ‘under God’ that Eisenhower stuck in, that he feels the same way about as you, it came out with such a roar that it was simply appalling. At such times he can be an absolute chlop.”

“The entire Pledge of Allegiance in one belch?” I said. Not that I asked out of anything but normal curiosity. I didn’t want any more information about this house. This would be quite enough, thank you. “In one running broad-jump?”

“No, no. You stop after a string of words to fuel up for air. What prompts a person to behave in such a manner? A person who’s had every opportunity, a fine marriage. What sense of satisfaction can there possibly be in it for them, what feeling of achievement? I honestly ask you that. You’ve been through eighth grade.”

I honestly couldn’t answer. It wasn’t for me to say. We’re complex creatures, infinitely mysterious is the human spirit. Why is everything so mixed in with its opposite? Nobility with moral squaller, love with hate, the sublime with the ridiculous. Once in a diner booth I seen a deaf and dumb couple, and they were quarreling. There they were blurting out things with their fingers they’d later regret. Should you laugh or cry? I remember it as a fantasy. The scene here was fantastic enough, because watch. See what happens next. Here I had come to wonder out loud, air, why I was married to Elsie, and staying to wonder what Lena was doing united to Art. Still you have to be careful about judging marriages from the outside. Anything ridiculous on the surface may have all the more value to it underneath. I have a rule. When I see something that makes absolutely no sense whatever, I figure there must be a damn good reason for it.

“Oh, God!” Lena suddenly exclaimed, swatting the table. “The things that go on! With what life does to all of us, how can people do the things they do to each other! Oh, God!”

“Oh, shut up!” came a voice from the next yard. “Can’t we ever have any peace and quiet around here?” It was Mrs. Gromulka probably listening at the stockade fence, thinking she was getting an earful of a marital squabble. Her way of lashing back no doubt. So again—where does reality leave off and fantasy begin?

“Oh, shut up yourself!” Lena called back without turning her head. “Go on back to your love life. There’s only two billion of us on the planet, half of them starving, so go on replenish it some more. Go on with the copulation explosion. We can hear you half the time. We lie there listening to you, like beasts. Of the field! What do I care? Where were we?”

“How Art has no gumption and is always tyrannizing over you with—”

At this point the screen door squeaked open and the object of this discussion himself came out—Art Salerno.

He couldn’t of been a nicer dark-complected guy with horn-rim glasses and a ready smile. Exept that the smile was kind of sly, coming at you around the corner, as though he knew something to your disadvantage. It was only out of the goodness of his heart that he wasn’t blabbing it around. Well neither did I blab it around that he left a lot to be desired on the keyboard, which is the least important position on a piano crew.

“Hello, paisan.”

“Hello, chlop,” I says, returning it in Polish. “Els is still waiting for the sitter, so I thought I’d mosey over and have a quick one with you all. Did you get the job finished?”

“Just—with the last nail in the keg. Remember to order some of the six-penny. And we’re nearly out of one-by-fours.”

I don’t know whether he kissed his wife when he came home or not as a general rule, but probably not judging from the clumsy production made of it now for my benefit. First he went around the table, kicking its leg and mumbling some apology to it as he went by, then he leaned down over the glider with one hand on the back rail of it, so that the glider swung back and made him lose his balance and miss Lena as he bent over her. She steadied it and helped him complete the ritual, rolling an eye at me as she raised her well-lipsticked mouth. “You smell like Naphthalene,” she said, the moth flakes we strew furniture that’s going into storage with. “Not that I don’t rather like it. I think some of the most wonderful smells are those you’d least expect. Coffee is another.”

“And gasoline,” I said. “I like gasoline fumes.”

We all looked at Art to see if he had some favorite fume to contribute to the discussion, and after a minute he says, “Tar.”

“Tar has a certain nostalgic quality to it,” Lena said.

“Not only that, it takes you back. To when you were kids. My whole past won’t go by me no faster when I drown than when I get a whiff of tar,” Art said. “Remember the smell of streets being paved, Stan? I can still remember that summer when they paved the street in front of the fireworks factory. The whole summer is in one whiff of tar. Vacations, going barefoot. We use to chew the stuff. It’s suppose to be good for your teeth.”

When Art went in to wash I sat on the glider beside Lena to show we had nothing to hide. “Where the hell is Elsie?” I said, glaring at my wristwatch. A few minutes later the gate opened and she came into the yard, her hair combed in a bun, in the shiny blue dress that sent up detrimental highlights.

Lena was always trying to give her pointers on how to dress and make up. She begged her to stay away from shiny “ribbon counter fabrics” she called them, which tended to drain out the little color she has in her face. Elsie has a clear but very pale skin, lily-like, and the exeptionally high cheekbones of the Wishnotski tribe sometimes make her cheeks look hollow, even sunken, when she isn’t careful about dresses and cosmetics. “Strive for soft fabrics and gentle colors that won’t wash out your skin and your pale blue eyes,” Lena said. Elsie never paid much attention, and now that she had her mind on eternal things and not the material aspects of this life that don’t matter, she didn’t pay any at all. I was surprised to see Tom traipsing after her through the gate, reading a comic as he walked.

“Do you mind if he has a Coke with us?” she said. “The Kovacs girl can’t sit tonight because her folks are going out and she has to stay home with their pack. But it’s perfectly all right to drop Tom off by Kovacs and leave him there.”

“Of course!” said Lena, zeroing in on the kid with a hearty smack. “Cokes I’m out of, but I just got a lot of Seven-Up to put in the Pimm’s Cups. Pimm’s Cup O.K. for you, Els?”

“Anything will do, Lena,” said Elsie with her freedom from all mundane matters. “It makes no difference.”

Tom wiped the lipstick from his cheek and sat on the glider with the comic. He hadn’t raised his eyes from it since coming in the yard, reading it with a steady grin on his fox face. He has a pointed nose that seems to grow sharper as his smile broadens.

“Why don’t you read a book once in a while, Tom?” I said, watching him. “Do you want to be a Polak all your life?”

“Paderewski was one, as I recall,” said Elsie.

I closed my eyes, thinking hard. “Paderooski,” I said, imitating her pronunciation. “I don’t believe I ever heard the name. Though there was a Paderevski some years ago who was a great concert pianist.”

Elsie’s Christian humility has an arrogant streak in it (like Christ’s). I’m not condeming or defending, only pointing out another example of opposites going together. Abraham Lincoln was suppose to’ve had this arrogant streak. Elsie’s came out in this pretending to be Americanized and so superior to the first and second generation Poles. But (here we go again with paradox) it took the form of not pronouncing Polish names the way the hunkies beneath her and the Americans above her would—that is correctly. So it was out of giving herself airs that she made mistakes, and out of the vow to make Tom educated that I tried to make him sound like the great-grandparents and other neighborhood oldtimers I wanted him to be as unlike as possible. Let him even learn some Polish, a second language. Human relations can become so screwy you can’t make head or tail of them. There was another skirmish in the war over religion.

“They’ve got books by the Kovacs,” Elsie said, “and they’ve certainly got a Bible. He can go on with the Old Testament stories. You’ve agreed about that.”

“As stories yes. I have no objection to that. As stories, some real, some myth, of an ancient people with their own particular tribal deity named Jehovah. How far have you got, Tom?” I asked him pleasantly.

Without raising his eyes from Toots and Casper he said, “Samson,” turning a page. “The part where he kills the lion with his bare hands.”

“Those are all exciting stories,” Elsie said. “The Bible is exciting—it doesn’t have to be dull. Far, far from it. But it’s important for a person to read it all the way through from beginning to end. Too many educated people are completely ignorant of spiritual matters.”

“What’s spiritual about tearing a lion in half with your two hands? Or rain coming down for forty days and forty nights, or living in a whale’s belly for a while? Let’s not use words like that too loosely.”

“What’s spiritual about it? Incidentally the Bible doesn’t say whale, it says a big fish. But let that pass. The length of time Jonah was in it was three days, thereby symbolizing Christ’s death and resurrection after three days. The Old Testament is a preparation for the New. It foreshadows the events in it.”

“Correction, foreshadows what some people think are events, others myths. What about this resurrection? Who said he arose? Where’s the witnesses? Affidavits please?”

Lena came out in the thick of this and said, “At it again? I’m not sure it’s good for two parents to make a debating society out of a marriage in front of the kids.”

“Why not?” I said, taking the beer which she now had the decency to hand me. “It gives the child both sides to the question and shows him his parents give him credit for enough intelligence to make up his own mind. Later of course, when all the votes are in, when all the precincts have been heard from. Let them hear from all the precincts, they can take it. Eh, Tom? Tom!”

The kid’s seeming indifference to the subject Els and I took to be just that, but Lena said it was a defense mechanism—there is a lot of that going around, to judge by the reports—concealing deep wounds resulting from the family division.

“Anyway, he doesn’t want to be a minister or a lawyer or anything like that,” I said, throwing a peanut at him. “He wants to quit school and work in the fireworks factory all his life. Or spend it humping pianos. Eh, Tomasko?” I reached over and rumpled his head, shaking an extra grin out of him. “And I’ll pay you ten cents an hour for washing your face.”

We dropped him at the Kovacs and drove in my car to a steak house by the river, where our eye was caught by an outdoor art exhibit. Or Lena’s was, and nothing would do but we see it before eating. For me this was one of those unexpected turns in the road that life takes us on without any warning and without our in the least dreaming what lies in store for us around the bend.

There were about ten or a dozen local artists with their paintings standing on easels and nailed to fences and even hung on bushes, the usual mixture of schools. Our foursome began to break up like an ice flow as generally happens when each follows his fancy, and so at one point I found myself standing before an oil of a horse that I figured was probably a self-portrait judging from the general execution, when someone appeared at my side who accepted responsibility for it.

She was a woman of about forty, so much like Lena in size and even appearance that I thought at first it was her, and checked a remark just in time. She explained it was an early effort of the kind she had outgrown for abstracts, to several of which she now led me. They weren’t bad. I know a lot of fun is poked at these things, but I’m usually able to enjoy a picture—or not—entirely irregardless of its type. Take it on its own terms, what’s all the sweat? A mass (or even mess) of color and lines for their own sake can give you a sort of kick. And as for those conglomerations of stuff with newspaper headlines, whiskey labels and chicken bones stuck in them, why not? What is life but a conglomeration of newspaper headlines, whiskey labels and chicken bones for each of us to make his own head nor tail out of? The colors in the oils the woman now showed me were laid on in thick layers in a kind of painting called antipasto painting or something like that I believe. Green-eyed and blonde, she made herself up in the same technique. She had a mouth like a shrimp cocktail like Lena. Her pictures had a zing to them, and I told her as much in so many words. One was a bitter commentary on the futility of trying to strive for the kind of beauty they did in olden times, when it was all a fraud and a delusion anyway but nobody knew it. This consisted of an old-fashioned gilt frame that the canvas was put around, in a hollow square, typifying she said a frank recognition that the artist no longer has anything to say.

“I’ll buy that,” I said.

“Oh, wonderful. Do you want to take it with you or leave it till the end of the show? A small deposit will hold it. I have a price of fifty dollars on it.”

“No, I don’t mean I want to buy the painting. I just mean that I agree with what you’re trying to say in it. I see eye to eye with you.”

“Oh,” she said rather sadly. I felt so embarrassed that I stood there letting her point out some of the painting’s merits I might otherwise of overlooked in a spiel lasting ten, fifteen minutes, while my party vanished completely from view. The use of a nasal spray to get a rippled effect on the paint for a finishing touch was honest despair, she said, not bad faith or intellectual perversity.

“I like it quite well, but I like that one even better, I think,” I said, pointing to another, just to give me something else to seem to be wavering between, and thus ease myself off the hook. “Oh, I like all these much better over here.”

“I’ll tell Bruno Hoffman,” she said. “His start over there.”

This was really a hell of a note. I couldn’t go and I couldn’t go till I had patched this booboo up somehow. This woman might be going through menopause, a nervous breakdown or what not. I caught a glimpse of my party way down at the other end of the exhibit, looking for me. But I couldn’t leave till I had smoothed this over, which meant hanging around to admire her work a little more in as casual a way as possible. It was a hot night. I had left my coat in the car, and I had on one of those Harry Truman sport shirts with the palm trees that are plenty representational and short sleeves. I stood in profile to the woman with my gut sucked in and a thumb hooked in my belt so as to show off the muscle of my right arm, the majority of which is covered with tattoos.

At last the woman came over.

“Have you ever posed?” she asked.

“No ma’am, I never have.”

“You have a magnificent build. What do you do, may I ask?”

“I’m a furniture mover.”

“Ah. Well I could use one of those too. I’ve got a piano I can’t get rid of.” She laughed. “Have you ever tried to discard a piano? It’s a sort of monstrosity my mother’s had in the apartment, that’s just cluttering the place up. But nobody wants it. The Salvation Army doesn’t want it, the settlement house doesn’t want it, even the town disposal won’t take it. Nor a private trash man I called about it. He said it isn’t ‘reasonable refuse.’” The woman laughed again. “It’s one of those crazy no-way-out Samuel Beckett situations.”

“He that new cartage outfit in town?”

“No, no, this is the theatre of the absurd, where there’s no solution to anything. Do you see any solution to it? I mean you must have situations like this, where somebody doesn’t want a piano moved to anywhere, just out. Where do old pianos go when they die? They must go somewhere.”

“To charity places, other people. Somebody who might want one for a rumpus room or something.”

“Nobody wants this. Don’t think I haven’t tried to unload it! So now what do I do? Chop it up and slip it piecemeal into the garbage? Pour kerosene on it in the back yard and burn it up? Or what?”

I stood there thinking, enjoying the smell of perfume and the rise and fall of a bosom in a green silk blouse while I turned over the crisis vexing their owner—who watched me through horn-rim glasses. I had seen a comedian eat a pair just like it on television the night before. His were props without lenses of course, probably carmel or taffy he could stuff into his mouth and chew up for a finish to a skit where he was distracted by lust. A state of mind I appreciated. Suddenly I had an inspiration. “Just a minute,” I said.

I turned and by dint of wigwagging like a lunatic got the attention of the other three and then got them to come back. When they did I asked Elsie, “Would the Gospel Mission like a piano? You have nothing but that portable organ you take out on the street don’t you? This lady has one she’ll very kindly give you.”

“Oh, that’s very charitable of you,” Elsie said to her, “but I think a family is donating us one. What kind do you have?”

“It’s an old Mendenhall upright.” I winced but said nothing. That’s a piece of antideluvian artillery that hasn’t been made since around 1920. I only saw two in my life, and I would rather move the truck up and down stairs.

We left it that Elsie would find out for sure about it and I would call the woman, who scribbled her name and number on a piece of paper in return for one of my business cards, which I always carried in my wallet. Elsie contributed to the exchange by handing the woman one of the leaflets she carried in her bag. “I don’t know whether you’re saved or not, but I’d like you to take this home and read it. It may change your life.” The woman saw what it was and quickly put it in the pocket of her skirt, not before I saw it was the one entitled “Where will you spend eternity?” with a picture showing heaven like a magnificent hotel and the line “You can make your reservations now. Simply call Jesus.” The woman’s name was Ona Mervin I saw as we walked away, and I lagged a step behind to make sure the telephone number on the slip of paper was elegible before tucking it into my billfold.

The incident made me a foul ball at dinner. We went to a fish house with outside tables where you could smell the cooking from a Chinese restaurant across the street. Parading within view of us was one of those religious nuts that it’s a mistake to think are limited to cartoons. I have seen them on the streets of New York and Chicago as well as here, ranting away and waving their Bible. This one didn’t preach. He carried a placard predicting the end of the world, besides handing out leaflets in which he specified the exact date of the Second Coming as worked out by his interpretation of Revelation—Monday, June 11. Two weeks from now.

“Let’s all remember to put it down on our appointment calendar,” I said.

Elsie was reading a leaflet she took from him when he passed us. She knew him from the mission, and had exchanged a few words with him. “I don’t think it’s right trying to prophesy the exact day,” she said, “but the end is coming some time, and he may be correct. Who knows? It says in Isaiah the heavens will be rolled together as a scroll. Have you ever thought what an atomic explosion looks like? Just like a scroll. Mock all you want, but you’re trifling with your immortal soul.”

I had drunk three whiskies by the time our fish came and now poured out some beer from my bottle. Art poked his trout with his fork, as though making sure it wasn’t still alive before tackling it. I said, “Did you know I could belch the entire Ten Commandments?” Lena laid a hand on my arm across the table and said, “Everything is relative. With the Persians it’s a sign of courtesy to your host. That you enjoyed the meal.” See, with Lena always the obscure fact, the little-known detail.

When we squared up I made sure again I had the slip with the woman’s name and phone number on it. But that wasn’t necessary. Two days later she telephoned me at the office to check whether the mission could use the piano, and I had to report that they already had one.

“Oh, dear. That leaves the last resort—the city dump. How much would you charge to take it there?”

“It’s twelve dollars an hour for three men, and five dollars for the first flight of stairs and three dollars for each additional flight. What floor are you on?”

“Third, at 21 Poplar Street. Just off the river.”

“It’ll come to over twenty dollars. I’ll make it twenty.”

“Lordy. That’s a lot of money just to throw something away. You couldn’t use a nice oil, could you? That blue and gold one with the leaves that you admired? I had a price of sixty dollars on it.”

“Oh, I couldn’t do that to you, lady. I know you artists need the money.”