The Edgar Pangborn Megapack

by Edgar Pangborn

  “Just Benjamin,” said Shawn, and straddled a chair, watching the old woman with somber upturned eyes, a darkness in him. Ben thought, with alcoholic irrelevance, that if Shawn were to reach out and squash poor Mistress Gundy with a twist of a sailor’s thumb, she would pop like any defenseless bug, but none of them need be astonished, Mistress Gundy least of all. But at one time she had been a child, a growing maid.… “Just Benjamin will do,” said Shawn, and spat in the fireplace.

  “Oh, marry will he, I’m sure.” Mistress Gundy giggled and remained genteel.

  “Anything new here, Nanny?”

  “A’n’t it alway new, Mr. Shawn?”

  “That it is not, and never was unless maybe for Adam, the poor sod, and for a boy the first time but not the second. Nanny, I’m wanting Laura for the boy. For meself I don’t care—anything that’ll bear me weight a moment.”

  “Mister Shawn, such a manner of conversation! Will you not mend, sir?” He only looked at her. “Well, Master Just Benjamin, dearie, Laura it shall be, and she so fresh and lovely, I’m sure, you’ll be most content, I’m sure.”

  Ben cleared his throat, mindful of Shawn’s rambling advice in the evening street. “Would you wish something to drink, Mistress Gundy, that we might have sent up from next door?”

  “Nay, I knew he’d find it, and with pleasant speech!” She cut her eyes at Shawn to make that a reproach, but he was remote, observing only the embers, or the South Pacific. “Well, dearie, ’tis early on in the evening for it, but since you speak of it and so pleasantly, a trifle to wet the whistle would not go amiss.” She patted her lips. “For my part, sir, ever since I resided in London I have been partial to a bit of hot buttered rum of a chilly evening, to settle the rifting-up and keep out the cold. It’s the Boston air, sir. Never do I grow accustomed to it, that I never.”

  “Yes,” said Ben.

  “I’ll send the servant,” said Mistress Gundy, and rose, about to potter away.

  “Do you send him,” said Shawn to the embers, “but bring in the wenches before he returns, Nanny, else you’ll be rambling on from here to hereafter and we biting the curbing of the stall, God damn it, with nothing to mount.”

  “Mr. Shawn, sir, one day your tongue’ll turn and bite you, sir.”

  “Then I’ll have thee kiss the place, old woman.” She sidled for the doorway, out of reach of his lazy hand. “But wait till I bleed.”

  “I marvel the sweet young gentleman ever took up with you, sir, you that come in with a smile and stay with a curse.”

  “Took up with me to see a bit of the world, Nanny, the way the world’s a troublesome thing for a boy to see at all and I’m part of it. Come give us a kiss!”

  “You leave me tell you this: you mark one of my poor girls on the face just once, just once, Mr. Shawn—”

  “And you’ll have law on me belike?”

  “Though it be the ruin o’ me I’ll say it: I think you’re a wicked man, Mr. Shawn.”

  “But not on the face is well enough?”

  “Mr. Shawn!”

  “Come now, give us a kiss and be friends!”

  Ben said involuntarily: “Don’t, Mr. Shawn! Leave her alone!”

  Shawn locked stares with him a moment, smiling, then spread his hands and folded them again on the chair back and dropped his jaw on them, watching the embers, alone on an island. Behind his back Mistress Gundy was beckoning, and Shawn paid no heed as Ben stepped into the hallway with her. “I don’t suppose he means too much by his talk, Mistress Gundy.”

  “Eh? Known him long?”

  “Not long, not very well.… I was astonished he should speak so.”

  She was sniffling, patting her lips. “Let it go.” In spite of the small gust of tears she was alert and brisk. “Be you paying or him?”

  “I am. How—how much?”

  “Ho, and if he’s not, how comes he to lay about him so?” She broke off, laughing indulgently. “Never thee mind, Master Just Benjamin. Two such lovely girls! Well now, if you’re a-mind to buy us a wee trifle of rum—so pleasant with a dab of butter, don’t you think?—and the girls.…”

  Ben re-entered the parlor with enlarged wisdom and a shrunken wallet. The books for Reuben, lying in a chair, comforted him: at least some of his money had been well spent.

  “Don’t allow her to rob you, a devil’s name,” said Shawn drowsily. “No highwayman liveth but could learn jolly tricks of a bawd.”

  Glancing down at the alien profile, wondering in passing whether he even liked Daniel Shawn, Ben felt disinclined to mention that the robbery, if that was the name for it, had already taken place. He jingled the few pence and farthings remaining, and waited, himself alone on an island within a cavern.

  She entered abruptly with good-natured bounce and giggle, plump and moon-faced, smelling of rose-water and sweat. As she paused in the doorway her transparent smock offered Ben a silhouette of cushiony thighs, by her intent maybe, and then she was coming to him directly with nothing for Shawn but a glance that might or might not have held recognition. “There’s the sweet cod,” she said, and cupped Ben’s chin in her hands, and was on his lap, heavy and squirming, elastic, moist and warm.

  In Deerfield, “whore” was only a word, seldom used except in back-of-the-barn profanity or Bible readings. It had never occurred to Ben, but did now as Laura twitched his shirt open and rubbed a knowing silky hand over his nipples, that a whore might be a human being, and friendly.

  Another girl, stately and yellow-haired, sat in dignity across the room from Shawn—surely not cowlike as he had said but quite beautiful in her stillness, conveying an impression that she was not really present. A woman on an island. Shawn had remained in his idle sprawl, studying the queenly repose of her like a man who might yawn any moment. “Be you pleased with me?” Laura whispered, and nibbled Ben’s ear.

  “Of course.” With some enterprise he found a smooth kneecap and sent his hand exploring, since she seemed to expect it; and then he thought: Too much of that damned ale—or maybe I’m ill—and now we must even have buttered rum!

  All the same, it was unmistakable relief when Mistress Gundy pottered back, ahead of a gangling servant with the drinks. “Well, I’m sure,” said the little madam—“to the Queen, God bless her!”

  Laura bounced off Ben’s lap at the call of patriotism. The tall quiet girl was on her feet, and Shawn too. But as Ben staggered, finding his leg half asleep, and drank dutifully, he was aware of a sudden annoyance in Daniel Shawn, and saw how with the mug at his lips the man was hardly tilting it at all. To Ben it was obscure, a thing he might tell himself he had not seen. This stifling moment, with fat Laura’s arm hugging his loins, held no fair opportunity to think about it. But surely for all his strange, sometimes cruel speech and wild ways, Mr. Shawn was not disloyal—surely nobody ever refused to drink the health of Queen Anne!

  Ben coughed as the cheap rum bored down his gullet. He saw Shawn grab the wrist of the tall girl and stride out of the room with her, not a word for courtesy. She had not even finished her drink.

  “A hard man,” said Mistress Gundy, comfortably stirring her mug. “Well, I told him. Just let him mark one of my girls, just once.…”

  “He won’t, Mother,” said Laura. “Why, that time—” A sharp glance from the old woman checked her. It held more than sharpness; they were exchanging some wry understanding, and Ben was oppressed at feeling himself a patronized, tiresome child. Laura tugged amiably at his arm. “Come to my room, love?” He followed her jiggling rear down a whispering hallway to a smaller cavern of stale roses. She had brought along the remains of his buttered rum. “Old bawd’d finish it, did you leave it there. A’n’t she a caution, love?”

  “Mm.” Ben gulped a little more of it, finding it not so bad. Here the bed was virtually everything, but Laura was fond of dolls; a dozen
of them sat about in comical attitudes, and Ben would have liked to say something about them. “Help me drink it, won’t you? I had enough.”

  “Nay, I had too, and too much.” She patted her stomach and yawned. With the casualness of habit, she pulled her smock up to her middle and dropped on the bed, fat thighs comfortably wide.

  Ben shoved his drink aside. In daydream, yes—he had pictured such mindless complaisance in a woman who never quite owned a face. The reality was no more voluptuous than a belch or a kick under the ribs. Yet Laura was neither gross nor unclean—indeed, pretty in her overblown way, and certainly friendly. Repelled and hypnotized, he stumbled toward her, meeting, across the bulk of her pink flesh, a drowsy smile that suppressed another yawn. “What’s the matter, love? Be you afeared of me?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Ah—sweet cod—my little goat—whatever’s the matter, love?” Her voice was thick and slow, the noise of a wave, her giggle the idle foam on a reaching wave. “Don’t you know nothing, little goat?”

  Ben fought with his clothes. For an instant in the candlelight the hair was golden, not dark, the pallid skin a damask rose. Then it was fat Laura again, nobody else—writhing, arching her heaviness, moaning, big arms reaching for him in practised simulation of hunger as Ben groped, struggled, and spent at the instant of contact with no pleasure, no excitement but that of fear and no relief but that of exhaustion.

  Laura cursed casually under her breath, but as she sat up she was not noticeably angry—more amused, maybe a little concerned. “First time, dearie?” Ben nodded in misery. “Ho, never mind! You’re very young.”

  “God damn, I’m seventeen.”

  “Hey! No cursing and swearing, boy!—I can’t abide it.… Did something happen maybe? You know—spill salt at supper? Something?” She was serious, lightly worried. Ben shook his head. “Why, there!” She pointed at his jacket tossed on a chair, a bit of his kerchief dangling from a pocket. “Swoonds, that’s bad luck as ever was,” she said, and rolled off the bed to push the kerchief out of sight. “No bloody wonder!”

  Ben knew she would take great offense if he laughed. Anyway the darkness of a new fear was killing laughter. She sat by a little square of wall-mirror to put her hair to rights. Ben ordered his clothes, finding his legs too large, blurred, disobedient. Maybe the last of that buttered rum would steady him. He gulped it down. “I’m sorry,” said Ben.

  “Hoo, it’s a nothing, boy, happens all the time. Come again some day,” she said, and could not resist a small parting cruelty: “When you’re old enough.”

  The darkness of the new fear followed him out of the room, and the name of it was Pox.

  Mistress Gundy sat as before with her rum, or somebody’s rum, and nodded to Ben, waving her puckered hand in some cryptic courtesy. Her eyes were swimming—sad or hilarious or both. Somewhere down the hallway a woman was whimpering rhythmically. “Top of the evening, young man. I’m bloody mellow.” Mistress Gundy patted her lips. “Going so soon? Parcel’s yonder, needn’t make out I’m keeping a den of thieves.”

  “Thank you. Had no such thought.”

  “No dallying with Venus? Up and off like a little bull? I’m bloody mellow or I wouldn’t speak so free, but I say a bit of broad speech never hurt no one, la, besides, I lived on a farm when I was a little maid. Lord, the Surrey countryside, and I’ll never see it again!” She wept comfortably, and burped. “A’n’t you waiting for your friend?”

  “I must be going. Tell him I couldn’t wait.”

  “Tsha!” She drank, her little finger thrust out for gentility. “Come again, do. I feel sorry for you. My weakness.” She held up her free hand earnestly to detain him. “Understand? I feel like a mother to you, but you—you—you—”

  “I must be going.”

  “That’s right, boy, turn away from an old whore. You—you—have—not—got the least notion wha’s like to be old and lorn and forsaken, every man’s bloo’ hand raised against you. Have you? Colonial. You never saw no earl, not in this Godforsaken land, marry you never. Why, one of the particular maids to ’is lady I was, and he got it in a linen-closet, now that’s no lie as your nasty-spoken Irish friend would say. Understand?—the very self-same sheets ’er ladyship slep’ on, the mere smell of lavender can still set me a-thinking of it, and her playing cards only two rooms away, if I’d so much as whimpered he might’ve been caught what they call flagrant delicious, and you think I’d do any such of a thing, loyal as I was? It shows your God-damned bloody ignorance, all the same there was a time you wouldn’t’ve turned away.”

  Ben fled downstairs. The smells in the blackness of Fish Street were fresher. He thought, as in prayer: No harm done. None at all, unless he had caught the pox. Probably you couldn’t, just from that much.

  He dropped Reuben’s books, his clumsiness a warning that he was drunk, his head grown to a foggy region of rising and roaring waves. He searched patiently for the parcel, since nothing could be done or considered till he found it. Stooping caused a rush of blood to his head, a tenor of collapse. He squatted, groping with clawed fingers, found the blessed hardness of the books and gathered them up. He knew a shrewd way to deal with this problem: he unfastened his belt, slid the end of it under the string of the parcel, and buckled it fast. Now the books bit his hipbone, but all was well—he would not lose them, and the not unwelcome discomfort would keep him sober on the long journey. The moon had not risen, or was covered by cloud. He supposed it was still early in the evening, but something had happened to his time sense.

  Maybe, he thought, I have grown old and am too stupid to know it. Maybe the sun will discover me with white hair. Dried like a summer apple and no teeth. Bent on a stick, poor old Ben Cory. “Yaphoo!”

  Yes, I heard that. That was me—old Cory, old Ben Cory, know him? A public shame in the middle of the street, but who’ll notice old Ben Cory in the dark?

  He advanced with precision on a street-lantern that showed him dingy house-fronts and the filthy gutter in the middle of the road, where a stray dog watched him sullenly, then slunk away, demoniac and lonely. Ben observed quietly that there were no pigs: his excellent judgment had chosen a time to walk on Fish Street when no pigs wallowed in it: alleluia. Of course only a fool would go to shouting “Yaphoo!” in such a place as if he were drunk, and he quite unarmed, carrying no money now to be sure, but dressed like one who had it. “I notice here,” he said, “a fortuitous yet welcome opportunity.” Stepping to the channel in the middle of the street, he relieved himself, with embarrassment. Untidy, but evidently in this part of town everyone did it. Startled, he thought: Oh, fine! Oh, wonderful!—now I could, while back there.… “Yaphoo!” There we go again! The rest of his comment came out as a harmlessly soft muttering: “…‘sn’t anybody remember poor old Ben Coree, late of Deerfield?”

  Someone, somewhere, not long ago, had pronounced his name in that odd foreign way. It would be pleasant to remember about that, for it had something to do with sunlight. Meanwhile, his breeches decently buttoned, he was making excellent progress toward another lamp, Reuben’s books were safe, and he was utterly sober, gruesomely sober, sober as Mr. Cotton Mather. “Sober as all the mamn Dathers,” said Ben, and stumbled on something soft and screamed a little. Just a dead cat. Now if he might walk on in this patient way, past the grim windows and their occasional furtive gleam, he would arrive at another wholly dark section where a man, offending no one, might run a finger down his throat, lighten ship, and proceed.

  He made it.

  His stomach empty, he noted that in spite of perfect sobriety he was still tremendously drunk, whereat he laughed, but wriggling companion shadows to left and right of him did not. No: they were heavy-cold, banishing all warmth of amusement; imaginary but nasty, having the creeping urgency of sick dreams. He knew them to be imaginary in the light of that pale flame of reason which stayed alive in him under a
long rising and subsidence of the waves, and here he asked himself acutely: how may one diminish the force of an imaginary creation, when naming it imaginary availeth not? Shall we assert, brethren, with overweening impudicity, that the imagination, by its own act of creation, hath given unto the shadow a substance akin to that which occupieth the carnal, corporeal yaphoo?

  Cannily they remained behind him, receding, if he dared turn his head, with contemptuous ease. He knew them, though: open-eyed but dead, trivial heads with nothing left of the body but a flabby band of hide such as might be left by the sliding drag of an axe. Double Indians—why? Why, because the body happens to possess a right side and a left. “Mother, I have but to remember the look of Union Street and Dock Square and Cornhill, and shall unquestionably know the Town House when I arrive at it, being in no sense too foxed for such, but deliver my mind from that page of Cicero, seeing I hurt him, heedless, heedless continually.…”

  The lump in his stomach swallowed that speech, bloating. How can you cancel a hurt when there’s no way to turn back the clock?

  You can’t.

  It happened. It’s over.

  “Nempe quod hic alte demissius ille volabat—” Ben retched, but the lump would not come up, and he lost interest in weeping. He supposed he ought to consider this plaguy longing to talk like a drunken man, above all to explain, thwarted by the absence of anyone who might listen. But wasn’t that someone lounging by the faint lantern which ought to mark the opening of Union Street? Two in fact, two women, not imaginary. He observed them with great intelligence, their shawls and full skirts—one tall, one short; alone in this region at night, certainly whores in search of business, but never mind. They were animated, and as he approached, Ben found he could explain things in an undertone which need not disturb them.