Luella and Brown walked arm in arm a few steps west on Geary Boulevard, one full block north to Clement Street, and east beyond the intersection of Clement Street with a dark little street known as Narrow Alley. Refer to David Schneiderman’s map on page 258 showing Narrow Alley and adjacent thoroughfares. Narrow Alley was one block long, north and south between Geary and Clement, and that was all. Under other circumstances (that is to say, had Luella been alone) Luella would have walked through the alley from Geary to Clement to her parked car.
But when she was with Brown she always avoided Narrow Alley. Her reasons will become obvious to us. Recall the artist’s map on page 258! “He’s a very nice young man,” Luella said.
“I think so,” said Brown. “We need educated policemen.”
“He must punish Stanley,” she said, as they turned the corner into Clement.
“Sweetheart, he can’t do that,” said Brown.
“Is my head unclear?” she asked.
“It will clear,” he said.
“Then you’d better drive,” she said, giving him her keys.
Well, that was better, Brown thought. She was recovering. When Stanley came to the city Luella fell into illusions. Then she returned to reality by stages. “I shouldn’t have gone to that headquarters,” Brown said. “It was in — well, you remember Mordecai’s Toys. That’s where it was. I raced after Schwarzlose to go down in the elevator with him. I should have waited for the next elevator.”
“You dream of reconciling with him,” she said. “Forgiveness is beautiful.”
“You’re a beautiful person for believing in forgiveness,” said Brown. “But I’m not.”
“I know he won’t be there when we get there,” she said, proving her clarity of mind to herself: Junie won’t be there, she meant, because Junie is dead. Upon nights when her mind was less clear she expected Junie to be at home in the house with all the lights ablaze, doing his homework, studying, reading a book, watching television, talking with a friend on the telephone.
“That’s correct,” said Brown, “he won’t.” He was driving east on Geary, crossing Park Presidio, thinking My Very Dear Officer Phelps, On a recent evening I happened to notice you made an illegal left turn from Park Presidio into Geary Boulevard. One of the worst violations of our civilization is the improper exercise of privilege. If police are above the law, continuing to Divisadero, and south on Divisadero through the sluggish night traffic of the black belt, where bleakness was at least concrete and visible, as opposed to the intangible bleakness of soul he felt tonight. At Divisadero & Oak Streets Luella turned her head slightly to see that store, now vacant, which had once been her father’s barber shop. As a girl of sixteen she had cut gentlemen’s hair for her father. With the corning of the blacks her father moved to the Avenues. At Castro & Market Streets they crossed the streetcar tracks beside the mouth of the tunnel through which Brown’s father for thirty-five years, piloted the “M” car back and forth. At Castro & Eighteenth Brown turned toward the Peaks and ascended, and soon to Yukon Street, turning up Yukon, hoping to see that Junie had left the lights ablaze throughout the house.
Brown had bought this house from Luella twenty years ago because he loved Luella with her little watch on a chain upside down on her bosom. Oh what a bosom Luella had! Often he asked her the time.
Here she brought Junie as a baby, too, moving out of Stanley’s apartment item by item, article by article, everything but Junie’s crib, so that in the beginning Junie slept in a bureau drawer, and then she brought the crib, too, piece by dismantled piece, and she was no longer Stanley’s wife but Brown’s now, who — Brown — had apparently quite departed the severity of his beginnings. A few years earlier he had been an earnest student advancing upon his ordination at Faith Calvary Central, but soon he was a writer (so to speak) for a newspaper avowedly secular and essentially godless, living in a house bought upon doubtful credit with a woman and child whose husband and father Brown had routed, and all this — most incredible! — with no sensation of his own wickedness, lawlessness, godlessness, or immorality, but as if, rather, God looking down upon his actions could easily approve these things he had done, and might have said, had God deigned to speak to someone so lowly, “Very well, Brown, I see that you saved that woman and child from a hell of their own. I will take your case under advisement.”
Needless to say, the house was dark, for Junie was dead. Buried in Asia. A boy’s bicycle stood in the driveway to remind them, as the owner intended, of himself, Christopher, who lived down Eagle Street. Christopher was the “neglected child” whom Brown had mentioned to Officer Phelps in Luella’s “real-estate office.” The boy ran unattended night and day. His parents worked at the Welton plant, manufacturing explosives for “danger pay.” Across the street the Fernes’ dog, Paprika, howled without interruption. Whereas Paprika had formerly howled only by day he now howled by night, too. Paprika would howl all night at every blowing leaf, at every wisp of drifting fog. “I’ve got to do something about this boy,” said Brown.
But it wasn’t the boy who angered him, or cost him sleep. It was the dog, Paprika, and the Fernes who owned him. He had acted without effect by mail and by telephone, and once having acted anonymously in any matter he judiciously disassociated himself from any outward complaint. Right-o. Why risk it? On some issues he was open, upon others he was anonymous, and things worked better that way: he was effective. Effective? Yes, look at the things he had accomplished, most notably — what? What was the most notable thing he had accomplished with his anonymity? Was it a telephone call? Was it a letter? Had anything good ever come of his letters to Loony Bin Johnson in envelopes addressed thus?
Former President Lyndon B. Johnson
“Greatest Mass Murderer of Recent Time”
Texas
Or to Harry Truman, addressed with as little courtesy?
Former President Harry S. Truman
Atomic Bomber of Japanese Men,
Women, & Children
Missouri
My Very Dear Mr. Former President:
How does it feel to know that you will be going down in history as the greatest mass murderer of recent time?
Yours very truly,
AN AMERICAN CITIZEN
Such letters would tend to antagonize their recipients. How could Brown even know if these letters reached their destinations? Could he have registered them? What, register anonymous insulting letters to former Presidents of the United States! Return receipts requested? No, he had no way of knowing his effect, if any. He knew only that these men seemed to go right along in spite of him — building libraries, inviting former associates to the dedications of these libraries, conferring, parading, barbecuing, striding along, telling their rules of health, submitting to physical examinations, proofreading their autobiographies, guarded by the Secret Service, and all this in spite of their having condemned to death thousands upon thousands of innocent men, women, and children, Japanese or otherwise. Were they to go unpunished for such things?
Therefore, in those cases Brown had no way of knowing whether he was effective. Was he even legal? Could he be prosecuted for those crimes — if crimes they were — or, if not punished, chastised, blacklisted, reproved, “placed under observation,” as the newspapers put it, in some first-rate hospital? By now he ceased to care. Let him be caught. He would be happy in a cell. Luella would visit him. Considering the violation of the world, Brown could scarcely complain of anything that might happen to him. He looked back upon his actions to date as generally useful, so that, if pressed to answer the question we have raised, “What was the most notable thing he had accomplished with his anonymity?” he would reply, “My letter to Stanley Krannick, Luella’s unspeakable husband, Junie’s father. . . .”
That letter was Brown’s first crime, and he knew it was a crime, too, and yet he proceeded, fully aware that he was intervening in processes established by law and precedent governing relationships between husbands and wives. On the other hand, Stanley’s cruelty to the baby Junie continued in spite of Luella’s complaints to the constituted agencies. What, then, when these agencies fail? When they lie on their backs? Even by that age, young as he then was, Brown had become weary of hearing of the virtue of “going through channels,” for it appeared to him that the channels were clogged, like the lines to God, and that all this piety in social controversy was only a way of preventing justice from occurring.
Take the law into his own hands? Certainly Brown would not have done so had the law appeared to function. He began to feel that he had not only a right but a duty to “take the law into his own hands.” In the matter of Junie he proceeded both legally and otherwise. He personally and in the most legal fashion carried his complaint to the Child Welfare Federation; but once this course appeared to fail he illegally proceeded to write threateningly to Stanley on stolen stationery above a forged or invented signature.
From the point of view of the Child Welfare Federation, located in those days in a low office building, now demolished, on Market Street near Second, Brown was a suspicious type well known to the Federation (it thought) — a troublemaker, a nut. Besides, the employees of the Federation had tons of things to do. They were behind in their filing. They were soon to move to a new building. And yet when Brown entered their office and saw the various employees at their leisure he wondered why no investigation could be conducted into the case of Stanley Krannick. On the morning Brown entered the office the workers were sitting about drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes, and munching candy bars, apparently feeling not the slightest contradiction between these actions and their statements to Brown that “we’re just so awfully short-staffed here we can’t undertake new investigations. It will be eight weeks before we can assign a worker to the case. But leave us your address. If you change your telephone number, please inform us.”
Brown’s primary relationship with the Federation was through a black man (called, in those days, a Negro) wearing cracked spectacles, whose name Brown soon forgot, but from whom, in another sense, Brown borrowed a name. “We can’t wait eight weeks,” said Brown to the black man. “In eight weeks the baby might be dead. This baby is being tortured every night.”
The black man with the cracked spectacles was experienced, thorough, and skeptical. “Have you ever seen this man torturing this baby?” he inquired. “Can you tell me exact dates and places?”
“His mother has told me repeatedly,” said Brown. “He pinches the baby’s nostrils. He suffocates the baby.”
“Are you a friend of the mother?” the black man asked.
“I’m trying to be,” said Brown.
“Are you presently a bachelor?” the black man asked.
“If you think I’m up to something,” said Brown, “why don’t you do something temporary while you investigate? Can’t you bring some temporary restraint against him?”
“Not without evidence certainly,” said the black man.
“Look at you standing there smoking cigarettes,” said Brown. “I detest you. I’m beginning to lose my temper. The child is being tortured to death. To death! I guarantee you. And you stand there so coolly. . . .”
“Why haven’t we heard from its mother?” the Federation worker asked.
“Its mother,” cried Brown, trembling with rage. “She called you several times. She never reached the same person twice. This child is a human being being tortured by another. He pinches the baby’s nostrils closed while he’s lying in the crib until the baby is almost dead, and then he releases the nostrils. His mother protests. His answer to that is to hit her with a golf club. Then he buys her a gift on Mother’s Day.”
Afterward, in the long psychological treatment Junie endured, the doctor discovered that Junie’s father, Stanley, smothering Junie daily, pinching Junie’s nostrils, clapping his palm over Junie’s mouth, had simply left Junie with the impression that this is how life must be — “Well, this is life, I guess,” the baby Junie concluded, lying in his crib — for, later, when Stanley was gone and Brown was Junie’s “father,” Junie continued voluntarily in the same way, smothering himself, pinching his own nostrils, “carrying on his father’s work,” in the language of the physician. This was the way things were supposed to happen. This was the father’s duty in life, to smother his child, and if the father (Stanley) went off and abandoned his work, then it was the duty of the son to carry on the father’s work, which included, also, the work of standing in the middle of the living-room hitting a little white plastic golf ball, and sleeping in the mother’s bed, too, until at last Luella expelled Junie from her bed and room besides. Brown remained, the “father,” and yet not the father, either. Oh, how confusing for the boy!
“I think we can speak of this without undue anger,” said the black man.
“I’m being quite calm,” said Brown, “and I’m telling you calmly that if you don’t attend to the matter very quickly I’m going to take the law into my own hands.”
“What will you do?” the black man asked with genuine curiosity.
“Sir,” said a second Federation worker, who had joined them at the counter, “you must leave things to the discretion of the proper agency.”
“I’ll kill him,” said Brown.
“Now, please,” said the black man, taking several sheets of Federation stationery from a shelf, and making notes of the substance of Brown’s remarks, but with less interest, Brown feared, in the data regarding Stanley than in Brown’s own furious and threatening manner of relation.
“We know you can’t mean what you say,” said the second worker.
“I mean what I say,” said Brown.
“Killing?”
“You’re not listening to me,” Brown said in a low, controlled voice. His hot rage had passed to ice, and to show how, from his point of view, the matter was ended, he snatched the Federation stationery from the hands of the black man, and walked away, out, down the wooden steps of the old building, into the street, and to the Chronicle office, where he composed an abusive letter to Stanley Krannick, signed his name, addressed an envelope, and sealed the letter within.
Luckily, however, before he mailed that letter he considered it, and in those moments of delay his life fortuitously altered. Was the letter productive? Could it persuade Stanley? Hardly. Perhaps Stanley already knew, as Brown had just learned, that carrying matters to constituted agencies was a long, tedious, futile process. “Why, for gosh sake,” Stanley might easily say, “I can go on torturing my baby as long as I golly-well please. I know all about the snail-like ways of these so-called constituted agencies,” and laugh, and crumple the letter and toss it in the basket, and whack Luella once or twice with a golf club.
At this point the Federation stationery, which he had carried away with him, appeared to be of potential use. He rolled one sheet into a typewriter at the Chronicle. But no, typewriters might be traced, might they not? If he were to impersonate the Federation, and forge a signature, as he now planned to do, it was well to leave no trace behind. Therefore, leaving the Chronicle office, he traveled all the way to Luella’s “real-estate office,” a distance of five miles, thinking he would use her typewriter, only to discover, when he arrived there, that her office was locked, she was gone, and his plan had in any case evaporated. How was Luella’s typewriter less traceable than Brown’s?
His fury impeded his mind. Why hadn’t he telephoned her first? Five miles to no purpose! No doubt she was out showing houses (so he imagined). Standing in the doorway of Luella’s “real-estate office” he forced calmness upon himself. Think! Think! He had been racing about like a simpleton from Federation to Chronicle to Luella’s. Was he some sort of primitive man unable to think ahead? He sensed the success of his project, if done right. Think of Junie, he thought. Think of Luella. Take your time and do it right.
At length, his mind clear, he drove from Luella’s “office” to Station M, United States Post Office, Sixth & Clement, where he bought a stamped envelope, and drove thereafter to the Public Library, McAllister & Larkin, and entered, and walked up the long, wide stairway to the row of coin-operated typewriters soon to become so tempting to him, like the coin-operated telephone, anonymous, untraceable, begging to be used. They were there. They were available. Use me, they cried. He inserted ten cents and a sheet of plain paper and he quickly drafted a brief letter. When that was done he inserted a sheet of stationery of the Child Welfare Federation and he carefully copied his draft, producing the letter which was to become in his opinion “the most notable thing he had accomplished with his anonymity.”
My Very Dear Mr. Stanley Krannick:
We have been receiving reports from many sources concerning your alleged mistreatment of your infant child, “Junie.” Although these reports are scattered and incomplete they are sufficiently numerous to warrant our investigation of them.
Therefore please be advised that a representative case worker of our Federation will visit you at eleven o’clock Saturday morning. We trust that you will be at home at that hour.
Yours truly,
DISTRICT SUPERVISOR
District Supervisor who? There was a problem. What sorts of names had people who worked for the Child Welfare Federation? Washington? Jefferson? Adams? Hamilton? Was Hamilton even a President? No. Brown named the Presidents as well as he could without striking upon a suitable name, and switched without success from the names of Presidents to the names of his classmates at Faith Calvary Central, and then to the names of city streets, his mind racing all over, and down Nineteenth Avenue — Wawona, Vicente, Ulloa, Taraval, Santiago, Rivera, Quintara, Pacheco, Ortega, and so forth and so on into the park in his mind — but once more without success. He could have risen and walked a short distance to the Union Catalogue and found therein within a half-minute (you’d think) dozens of appropriate names. Telephone books, directories of every kind, and immense lists of names were endlessly available, but Brown was unable to move. Against his knees the table throbbed, its clockwork measuring his thirty minutes. It couldn’t be stopped. Pay as you go; it was relentless. He could think of no name. No name. There was a name to consider. Perhaps it was Lithuanian. Everyname. Anyname. Smith, Jones, almost any name would do, or any name forward or backward. Dog was God spelled backward, live was evil spelled backward.
Why not initials? Even initials would suffice. Yet even initials required arrangement, and arrangement required invention, and that was it: inventing. He had never learned to invent because he had never been permitted to invent. He was of an austere parentage bent upon truth and facts, and he was only beginning to learn here, now, at this age, perhaps from Luella, for example, and certainly from students, artists, and rakes he met during the course of his journalist’s day, how to change or transpose reality toward the end of improving life, how to imagine.
Then he saw before him the black man with the cracked spectacles. McCracken Black. There was a name! Upon the page he had used to draft the letter Brown now practiced the signature, McCracken Black, writing it several times until he could write it swoopingly, rhythmically, with a flow, a flair, and when he had achieved confidence he signed the mailing copy of his letter, and he addressed the envelope.
To have invented a name! True, he had only gone from Brown to Black, and yet, for Brown, this was a tremendous breakthrough, a most satisfying departure from his past — to have been able to introduce the existence of a non-existent creature, to have manufactured a man out of his own mind; this was godlike and uplifting; and now, to alter events, too, that would also be satisfying, uplifting, and most godlike of all, for Brown would force Stanley to cease his cruelty to Junie, and thus rescue a child.
He sealed the envelope. Carrying his sealed envelope, he walked down the steps of the library, past the checkout desk, into the street, and a half-block to the corner of McAllister & Larkin, opposite Mordecai’s Toys, where, as Brown raised his hand to the mouth of the green mailbox, the wind from the west down McAllister Street almost seized his letter, almost ripped it from his hand, but of course it failed, for if winds made the rules . . . Could he now retrieve the letter from the belly of the green box? Could he legally reach down there? He wished to do so. He had done a bad, wicked thing, and he wished to recall his action. Was it a Federal offense to retrieve one’s own letter? Or did “one’s own letter” cease to be “one’s own” the instant it was dropped into the bowels of the ocean-green box? When was one’s own one’s own? After all, one was no longer who one was; one was now “McCracken Black,” like it or not. Tell that to the Feds.
“At Larkin & McAllister”
Headlines Writer Seized
in Mail Theft — Alias Told
Was this thing “the most notable” of Brown’s good deeds? Consider the outcome. What day of the week had it been? It was likely Tuesday or Wednesday, the letter delivered Wednesday or Thursday, announcing the hour of eleven o’clock on Saturday.
However, had “a representative case worker” designated by our friend McCracken Black visited the home of Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Krannick and their infant son, Junie, at eleven o’clock Saturday morning he would have learned from Luella that Stanley had stepped out an hour earlier with all his golfing equipment. He was expected home for dinner.
He never returned. He removed to a small city at a distance — probably Ukiah, conceivably Yreka — now and then returning for an afternoon of golf, or to harass Luella, or to express his scorn for Junie by telling the baby how ugly he was, how much a “mama’s boy,” by taunting him with the question, “Is your mother married to that man in her house?” and by frightening the boy with threatening gestures.
Stanley sometimes returned to this neighborhood, to the corner of Yukon & Eagle, pausing in his automobile to survey the house where Luella lived, which was dark now, this night — and Junie dead now and buried in Asia — which Luella entered now, followed by Brown, and both pursued by the incessant barking, howling, of the dog Paprika.
“It’s not only his barking,” said Luella to Brown. “He’s vicious, too. He bit the little girls.”
“He only bit one little girl,” said Brown, “although I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that he bit the other any day.”
Luella walked down the hall. Brown watched her to see if her mind had cleared. If she passed Junie’s room (that is to say, the room which had been Junie’s, where he had slept all the nights of his boyhood and young manhood) without entering it, without knocking on the door, and without making an unrealistic remark about it, Brown would know that she was far better now than she had been this morning, and on her way to clearheadedness. Very good, she went right past, not even glancing at the door. Therefore she was improved. Tomorrow she might be all right again, and Brown followed her down the hall, turning out lights behind him, and carrying with him Volume Twenty-Two of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, showing among other things United States of America, Constitution of. “You see what he did,” Brown said, sitting on the edge of the bed. “He had this big sign on the wall quoting the Constitution. Actually, however, he didn’t quote it fairly. He quoted some words of Article One, which is the first article of the Bill of Rights, and some of Article Two, only he ran it together to make it look as if he was quoting consecutively.”
“Why would he do that?” Luella asked.
“To give it his meaning,” said Brown.
“Well, he’s the one that’s running,” she said.
Her irrelevancies always charmed Brown. He smiled. “It’s really crooked,” he said. “That’s the point I’m making, he’s a crook, steal from the Constitution, misquote it, corrupt it, there’s no telling what such a man will steal next. I don’t see how you can vote for him.”
She didn’t plan to, really. “They all steal,” she said. She’d rather see McGinley dead than in Congress. “Who bombed him?” she asked.
“Nobody bombed him,” said Brown with all patience. “Somebody only phoned it in.”
“I understand that,” she said. She sounded perfectly clear now. “I mean who’d have wanted to bomb him.” She turned on the television for picture, not sound (that is to say, for light), switching off the overhead light of the bedroom. She had a tendency toward modesty. She “knew men,” as we have elsewhere said (page 37), but in her own bedroom with her own Brown she was still his shy “wife,” preferring a slight darkness when she disrobed. “Why did you tell the policeman you telephoned me?” she asked.
“I was just sitting in the telephone booth resting my feet,” said Brown. “Wouldn’t that have sounded silly?”
“I’m going to have a little something,” she said. Brown said he’d have a little “something,” too, whatever she was having. She discreetly lifted her skirt and lowered her stocking and removed a great deal of money. She preferred green money to checks, and Brown had always been charmed by this irrelevance, too. Possibly there was more to her attitude than he knew; if so, he’d rather not hear about it. Taxes, he supposed. Something she received under the table. The real-estate people were always concealing something from the general public, evading government regulations — charging “points” when forbidden to call it money, for example — and he’d as soon hear none of the details. Therefore, as usual, he took as little notice as possible of the money she withdrew from her stocking.
Luella, one stocking drooping, poured two small glasses of sherry, their little “something,” and sat with them before her at her dressing table and counted her green money, and entered the sum upon a deposit slip of the Hibernia Bank at Eighteenth & Castro Streets, and rolled the money and the deposit slip together into the shape of a small, tight tube, and bound it with a rubber band. Then she carried Brown’s sherry and the money to him, and she sat with her own sherry on the bed beside him, and she said, “The toy store depressed you.”
“That dog depresses me,” he said, sipping a little sherry. To help me sleep, he thought, for whenever he drank a spirituous beverage he felt the need to offer himself a reason for doing so. Luella thought of alcoholic drinks as “restoratives . . . relaxants,” borrowing medical terms from advertising.
“The astronauts are sleeping,” she said, watching the silent television.
“They’ve got no barking dogs out there,” he said.
“Or else they’re dead,” she said. “Nobody knows because of the radio problems. You should work on the grandmother because she’s as down on the dog as you are, on account of him biting the girls.”
“He bit only one girl,” Brown said.
“He bit her bad, however,” said Luella. “Tomorrow they’re going to land.”
“If they land,” said Brown.
“If they’re not dead,” she said.
“They’re not going to land,” said Brown, “they’re going to sea.”
She knew he meant this as a joke. He was big on words. But that was just his trouble, too, big on words and small on deeds, whereas, as far as she was concerned, she didn’t much care what she said so long as she did what she did. He talked a lot. He made jokes with words. He studied the Constitution. There he sat now, studying Volume Twenty-Two of the Constitution, pillows propped behind his head, knees up, shoes off, shirt open. He cared a great deal where someone claimed to stand upon an issue, but Luella cared nothing for claims; it didn’t matter where you claimed you stood. Why argue? Just do. She turned the sound up to hear the McGinley advertisement. Standing, watching McGinley, she removed her stockings. Here he came, wheeling his son in the wheelchair. The music was solemn. Now here came McGinley in his Legion cap. The music was patriotic. Here was McGinley, Chairman of the Draft Board, sitting at his desk signing papers. “Hello there, fellow-citizens,” said McGinley.
“Good-bye there,” said Brown.
“I’m Bob McGinley,” McGinley said, “and I’m going to tell you seven reasons why I know you’ll want to vote for me on Election Day.”
“Look at the Constitution up there behind him,” said Brown.
“Nothing can be done,” Luella said. “Don’t agitate yourself.”
Brown did not tell Luella that McGinley had cursed him. It came sharply to him now, the obscene phrase assaulting his mind, entering his mind like an invader. McGinley would go off to Congress — nobody ever said that life was just. A vacuum existed for McGinley to fill with the love of guns. Day after day, night after night, stupidity spiraled higher, shooting accelerating, guns improving, bombs growing larger, poison gas in long freight trains. McGinley was a very small thing considering the general slaughter of mankind during the last fiscal year alone.
“Stop thinking,” said Luella. “Put it out of your mind.” Although McGinley had passed from the screen Brown continued to stare at the advertisements, and Luella supposed he was thinking of Junie because of the toy store.
Stopping the meeting . . . what good had it done? Brown now briefly considered kidnapping the boy in the wheelchair, although not for ransom, writing My Very Dear Congressman-Elect McGinley (for he would be elected tomorrow), Resign your office and your boy shall be returned to you unharmed. But Brown was uncertain whether McGinley cared for his son in the first place. A man who could send boys to war hadn’t much in the way of fatherly feeling. Brown had heard of such things. Nothing in his reading had made so enduring an impression upon his mind as the story of Abraham and Isaac. He couldn’t believe it. It turned him off. He could neither read it nor resist it, reading forward with horror while averting his eyes, following Abraham and Isaac up the mountain into a land called Moriah transformed in the imagination of Brown the boy to Mount Davidson beneath the great cross, where he had gone with his father up the climbing streets. There went Abraham in his motorman’s cap, and axe, and knife, and there went little Isaac, asking his father over and over again, “Where is the lamb we’re supposed to sacrifice?” God will provide the lamb, Abraham replied, but God provided no lamb, no lamb, no lamb at all, and the boy became aware with new black terror each time that he was the lamb, the axe was for the burning wood, the knife for Isaac’s throat, although, luckily, just as Abraham stretched forth his hand to slay his son, the angel of the Lord called, saying, “Lay not thine hand upon the lad.” Whew!
McGinley might sacrifice his son to a seat in Congress. This now seemed clear to Brown: not that God had told Abraham any such thing, but that Abraham in his ignorance, ego, will, blindness, or stubbornness had invented God’s message for some end of his own, as McGinley would do or invent anything to win office. Brown, having kidnapped McGinley’s son, would be left stranded somewhere in a hideaway with the boy in the wheelchair. Certain kinds of men would abandon their sons to their own ambitions. Such men could never be instructed by loss. They considered themselves too manly to grieve. Loss never increased their compassion, but only hardened them, steeling them against their own best and softest emotions, they were he-men, they were men of practical affairs, they were men who got things done, balanced the budget, met the payroll. And they were numerous, and increasing, so that the world tonight, from Brown’s point of view, especially at such a late hour following upon the excitement of the event at McGinley headquarters, appeared to be especially bleak, gloomy, hopeless, and he himself, at such an hour, especially desperate to avenge the murder of Junie. Boys died for politicians. Let one politician die now for a boy. “I’m not thinking,” said Brown, “I’m just staring.”
“It’s midnight already,” Luella said, consulting the watch upon her bosom, appearing to be staring down at her bosom, as unavoidably she was. He loved to watch her consult the time. It was his little special affectionate pleasure. Maybe everybody has a soft spot. Anyhow, that was Brown’s — watching Luella consult the time on her bosom. She was mainly very shy (he supposed). He didn’t know that she “knew men,” as we have said elsewhere (page 37, and then again on page 53).
Soon Luella, too, lay with a pillow propped behind her head, and they watched an old motion picture which perhaps they had seen as children, or perhaps (as they sometimes speculated) even seen sitting side by side unknown to each other in the old palatial Fox beneath the soft glow of the fabulous chandeliers. In those days they hadn’t beans at home, but the Fox was a palace of Heaven. Often they compared their childhoods. Luella remembered brocade chaises at the Fox. Brown remembered velvet hand-railings. Perhaps, one day, Luella had been Brown’s father’s passenger on the “M” car on her way to the theater. Such an event appeared not only possible but likely. Possibly, sitting side by side as strangers in the old palatial Fox, they had touched one another; touched elbows. There sat Luella years ago, engrossed in the dream of the beautiful man upon the screen, and there beside her was the man who was to become the man of her life, one Brown, motorman’s son. Perhaps her father had cut his hair. Would she have turned her eyes from the screen to him and said, “It’s predestined, let’s go, no sense dreaming these other dreams”? It was almost beyond imagining, this, that they who sat side by side as children should be side by side again thirty-five years later, watching the same film under circumstances so altered, then sitting, now reclining, then the Fox, now Yukon Street, then Junie unborn, now Junie dead, murdered at war, and nothing as it was except this chicken-lady on the screen wiping the flour from her forearms and answering the door in her apron for the sheriff (we knew it was the sheriff) arriving with the news that someone was dead, and they were all dead now, the actor, the actress, the horses and the chickens all dead, poor things, in the terrible flood, and Paprika howling ceaselessly. . . .
Oh, that Paprika, woof, woof, woof, again and again, howling, howling, howling — how could the Fernes themselves sleep? But apparently the Fernes and their girls slept very well to the clamor of the dog’s barking through the night at every leaf and rare passerby, at every fantasy of the dog’s own. “He’s alert,” said Harold Ferne to Brown when Brown complained, “and that’s all I care about is an alert dog. I don’t care for the dog myself. I don’t mind the barking. An alert dog makes the wife feel safe; she doesn’t care about the noise.”
“As a friendly neighborly matter,” Brown asked, “couldn’t you prevent the dog from keeping me awake at night?”
“He don’t keep you awake at night,” said Harold Ferne excitedly. He believed it. If Harold didn’t see it it didn’t exist, it couldn’t happen.
“What can I say to someone like that?” Brown asked Luella.
“Don’t try,” she said, “just relax. Don’t agitate yourself.”
Brown hoped that the soothing old movie would put him to sleep, and the little “something” and Luella’s hands. In the end it wasn’t so much the barking that kept him awake as the thought of Harold Ferne. One forgave a dog its existence. But was such a man possible, unable to believe his dog’s barking disturbed a neighbor, unable to allow himself to accommodate a neighbor, unable even to discuss the matter toward a point of peace? Such a large man and such a child Harold was. The vision of Harold aroused Brown’s anger, as he lay tossing and turning, clapping his pillow over his head, and administering again and again that particular form of punishment reserved for Harold: death by overhead garage door, decapitation by electric eye. Harold was proud of his electric-eye garage door and he didn’t care who knew it. He immensely enjoyed its rising and its lowering, and he stood beside it at evening and watched it go up and down several times before entering the house for dinner, and one of these nights Brown would sneak up behind him and give him a timely push, and Harold would be guillotined by the garage door descending. Let’s hear it for the French.
Luella with her fingertips massaged his scalp, drawing his rage out of his brain, into herself. Her hands upon his scalp rested his brain. She had magic hands that way. She massaged his temples, his forehead, the shapes of his ears, his jawbone, his neck. She kneaded his shoulders with her wise and experienced hands, traveling lightly over his body, near his heart, lightening his heart of the burden of Junie’s death, relieving Brown of the burden of revenge.