“They played Scriabin rather badly I thought,” he said. “But then how can you tell when Scriabin is being badly played?”
“Ah, Tanglewood,” I said, hunched over my plate. “The soft summer nights, the lovers strolling, the Brahms bursting in air.” For the aim to sicken and subdue had never wholly left me; just as I had once fought tooth and nail to keep him out of here, now that he was here I would fight to the last ditch to drive him back.
The maid, thrusting in a bowl of viands over my shoulder, laughed like the horse she resembled. Just so had the stenographers at the Picayune Blade at the same joke. Alone in my office later, I had slumped in my swivel chair, utterly discouraged at my success with this type of material. Was it, after all, my speed, rather than the Continental wit on which I had once preened myself? It seemed now second nature to me. I had undergone a sea change: the parody wagged me—not I, any longer, it What hurt was not so much that I was the Lamplighter, but that nobody appeared to find anything odd in the fact.
When the newlyweds retired for their first night together under my roof, I stood in the vestibule and called, this time up the stairs instead of down, “Remember—no children!”
Chris and I went on a few days’ motor trip into Vermont, and when we returned it was to find that Nickie had made no efforts to get a job. The steady clatter of a typewriter in his room was no consolation, especially when I learned he was recasting Wise Acres into verse. He was experimenting with a new kind of rhyme which went even farther than the techniques which had impressed him in the early work of Auden. He showed me some manuscript.
“Assonance is partial rhyme, or half-rhyme,” he explained, “like, oh, ‘lady’ and ‘baby.’ Well, my line ends are as much beyond assonance as assonance was beyond rhyme. Call it half-assonance.”
“I will,” I said, handing him back the samples I had read. “Now, look. I’ve been giving this job thing of yours some thought.”
So I had, all through Vermont. What, I had asked myself, would be an industrial niche for Nickie? What were his qualifications? A certain opalescence of mind coupled with an amused skepticism, a sense of life’s random substance and of its charming cloud formations, all adding up to a fine tensile play of thought and a knack for drawing conclusions. Any employer in the market for these, and with a taste for the personal bond to which such lambency of mind might additionally conduce, could do worse than hire him on the spot. Pending the discovery of any application blanks calling for their specification, however, more prosaic proposals seemed to me indicated. I was going to make a suggestion when Nickie said:
“I see you have the Indian point of view—let the squaw do all the driving.” He nodded at my right arm. “That’s the only one that’s sunburned, meaning it’s the only one the sun got at through the car window. Ergo, Crystal did all the driving on this second honeymoon of yours. If ‘ you’d done any yourself the left one would have got some sun—you old tyrant you.”
“You ought to be a detective,” I said, packing a pipe from a jar of tobacco on the mantel. Nickie’s whole future, and a calamitous slice of my own, had passed before us in a word, as they had once before when I’d made that dry rejoinder, but neither of us dreamed it then. Then, I watched him as I sucked the match flame into the bowl of my pipe, squared my shoulders and said: “What would you say to taking a crack at a little selling? You’d have your own hours,” I hurried on, “no clocks to punch, turning on the charm from door to door for the housewives—”
“Why not?” Nickie engagingly enough returned. “I see no harm in giving it a whirl, certainly.”
In the course of the next months, Nickie handled many items. They included vacuum cleaners, matched sets of aluminum cookery, encyclopedias, electric mangles, and cemetery lots. He sold one of each—to me—before going on to the next “line.”
Meanwhile he got squared away on a new play, of which he regaled us with bits at dinner one evening. “There’s this country house in Essex with a wonderful retired Scotland Yard inspector living alone in it except for servants,” he said. “And this Dalmatian dog. Every time he sits down to write a letter, the Inspector calls the Dalmatian and shakes his fountain pen out over him to see if there’s any ink in it.”
He and Lila smiled at me expectantly. When I had thoroughly masticated a mouthful of food, I asked: “Any other action?”
“Oh, yes. The letter he starts writing when the curtain goes up is to tell a cousin not to come, but the cousin turns up as he finishes it, and he has to write another letter summoning his son back home to thrash out some family matters involving the cousin.”
“Calling the Dalmatian back to shake the pen out over him.”
“Right. It flows poorly. The theater is visual of course. And no more than he’s sent the cousin off to post the letter, he realizes he needs his lawyer there, so he has to write another—”
“Look,” I said, still irritable from having that afternoon purchased the plot of ground in which I would be laid to rest, “plays vary in the amount of story they need, but you can’t splatter a Dalmatian for three acts.” I suddenly gestured at Lila and said, “What does she think of all this?”
Lila was making nervous, fidgety movements most untypical of her.
“He was never meant to be a salesman,” she blurted out. “Oh, if we only had a decent connection,” she went on with a deploring glance at me, “somebody who could get him a decent job! If we only knew some people who count!”
“I can introduce you to a couple of bank tellers,” I said, mashing peas into the tines of my fork.
“Maybe that’s what he ought to be!” Lila said and burst into tears. My mother and Crystal rose and hovered cluckingly over her. “You should know better than to talk to her that way,” they said, glaring at me. “Don’t you realize she’s pregnant?”
“Pregnant! But that’s expressly—” I began, and broke off and looked at Nickie. He hung his head. There was a long hassle, at the height of which Nickie rose, and what we saw now was pure theater. He put his napkin down with a martyred look and said:
“I know what you’re all thinking. Why doesn’t he write something popular? Well, shall I tell you something? That’s just exactly what I’m going to do. I’m going up to that room and write a series—for television!”
He stalked upstairs and stayed there for five months. He emerged with a popular program, which nobody wanted. That summer Lila gave birth to a baby girl. It, too, looked like Madame Ouspenskaya.
“Now let’s pull ourselves together and stop this,” I said to everybody. “We’ve just simply got to get hold of ourselves. Now I must ask you to regard this as final: No—more—children.”
A fat lot of good my laying down the law was going to do, I thought to myself. I had learned that this crazy great-aunt of Nickie’s, who lived alone in a huge house where it was rumored she spent her evenings stitching obscene needlepoint, had offered to give the young couple a bonus of a thousand dollars for every child they had. A standing offer. Now I could never retire without wondering, as I hurried past the Shermans’ closed bedroom door, whether some fumbling lark in the dark might not at that very moment be compounding the miserable errors of existence. I could not police this place forever! I decided to put my foot down once and for all.
We were looking at television in the main living room, the five of us adults, one evening. We were watching all the junk there was, to see where Nickie had gone wrong. “He needs a good kick in the tail,” I muttered to my wife in the gloom. “There’s a time and a place for everything,” she whispered back as she clawed the rind from an orange. When there was a brief pause for station identification, I rose and gave my belt a hitch. “I’d like to talk to you,” I said to Nickie. “Come to the silo.”
“For some more corn?” he said with a guffaw, as he followed me to the library. Was his own humor beginning to thicken up? That would certainly be a step in the right direction. Nevertheless, I was ready for him with a no-nonsense attitude when he sauntered into th
e silo. I was planted squarely before the mantel with my feet apart, having hurried ahead a little so I could be striking that tableau when he entered.
“So now you’re a father,” I began with just the proper blend of astringency and sentiment.
“Yes,” he said. “It’s a great experience. It’s already knit Lila and me closer.”
“It’s knitting us all closer!” I gave back to him. “That’s what I want to talk to you about. Our little ménage à—I make it huit, now.”
“Not that we needed it. We’ve always had that fine respect for one another’s—oh, call it one another’s Individuality that true love is based on.”
Hm, true love. Another good sign of schmaltz. I watched my man as he browsed along a row of German philosophers my father had left behind. Nothing had been touched here since the day of his death.
“Have you ever read Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet?” Nickie asked.
“Steady,” I said, backing into the mantel stone to scratch the itching spot which I had inherited from my father along with this house in which I ruled.
“Der Liebe die darin besteht, dass zwei Einsamkeiten einander schützen, grenzen und grüssen.”
“You don’t know what you’re saying.”
“Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and salute each other.”
“Rilke, Schmilke,” I said, attempting to recover the offensive. “You don’t have to tell me it’s congested around here. Now here’s what I’ve done.” I drew a long breath which had the quality of a gun being loaded and cocked. “I talked to old man Nothnagle today, and it turns out luckily that he needs an all-around esthetic handy man for his department store. You know-—window dresser, sectional decorations, one thing and another. How would that suit you, eh? … Ah, I thought you’d find it rather amusing. I took the liberty of putting in a word for you.”
“Thanks a lot. Yes, it might be worth a whirl. I’ll go see old man Nothnagle.”
Nickie’s maiden window was a crate of rich stuffs turned open on its side and its contents sprawling higgledy-piggledy toward the glass: the art of the haphazard. Old man Nothnagle saw him from the street as he was touching up the disarray, getting the right note of easy dishevelment, and rapped on the glass. “Keep in heaven’s name the curtain shut till you’re finished,” he called, gesticulating. “It is finished,” Nickie informed him. The display, he pointed out, was in the tradition of understatement, very like something he’d once seen in a Lord and Taylor window on one of his trips to New York, as a matter of fact. That had been simply a gored bale of cotton signalizing the washable print season to all who had eyes to see.
“It’s what they call inverted snobbishness,” Nickie explained to Nothnagle, who was now dancing with passion.
“That’s all right for Fifth Avenue,” Nothnagle said. “Our customers like things pretty. Get those dummies in there and put the aprons on them. And you might go and get some leaves to tack up. That’s always nice.”
Nickie’s next conception was even more abstract: a single vase from the ceramics department set on a width of black velours. Pedestrians thought the Nothnagles had had a death in the family (as they damn near did when Nothnagle with his bad heart clapped an eye on it) and that the store was closed. Nickie was shifted to the toy department and put to work demonstrating a Tinker Toy. He was a charming success, but after the holidays toys went dead and he was switched, in a kind of free association of the management’s own, to furniture-easily-assembled. But that palled and we knew the end was near. Nickie was fired one morning for telling the sectional manager, “There is nothing so monotonous as unrelieved novelty.”
Now it was imperative that some hard, cold thinking be done. I did it—and reached a conclusion that took my own breath away.
The answer to the question, “What ought Nickie to do?” had been under our noses all these years. We’d missed the trick because it was so obvious. The solution came to me like a kind of epiphany. I got the inspiration in the morning and phoned him right away to come down to my office at the newspaper, which was where I was when the light struck. We agreed on half past two.
He was punctual. He drifted in and asked was los was. My own mood was no longer so buoyant. Tension over the approaching interview, which I sensed to be absolutely critical for both of us, had given me a bad headache, and his knock on the door had found me searching under my desk for my last two aspirin, dropped as I’d nervously fished them out of their tin. On raising my head to call “Come in!” I’d cracked it an awful one on the underedge of the desk. I skipped the aspirin as my headache was now so splitting, fore and aft, that I knew they wouldn’t touch it anyhow.
“Have a seat,” I said, waving to a leather club chair I had for visitors who came to see me in person about their problems.
A fresh copy of the day’s edition of the Pick, folded open to my column, lay on the chair, and Nickie couldn’t get out of glancing at it a moment before setting it aside. It featured an anecdote which ran:
There was once a great artist who got into his canvases a red so dazzling that painters from many lands came to look and to marvel. How did the man achieve such a crimson? No pigments known to them contained it. It was only on his deathbed that the artist revealed his secret. Into the squeezed-out paints he mixed—a drop of his own blood.… If there is anything to be extracted from allegories, we know what we can extract from this: that the secret of success is, Put something of yourself into your work.
Nickie hitched a leg up over the arm of his chair and settled back.
“I notice you’ve got yourself a pair of glasses,” he said, looking, not at the glasses on my desk, but at the indentations in the bridge of my nose. “Let’s see how you look in them.”
“So you think,” I said, donning the spectacles to humor him, “that you might make a good detective.”
“What?”
“We’ve had it under our noses all the time and never realized it. This brilliant knack for observation; that keen, analytical mind … How could we have kept your light under a bushel all these years?”
“Is this what you called me down to say?”
“Inclinations are there as well as the talent,” I continued, bustling round a file to adjust a window blind, “and maybe you’ve been realizing it, moving toward it, all along. Subconsciously, I mean. The detective in Wise Acres—your creation. And now this wonderful inspector in your new play, who shakes his pen out over the Dalmatian all the time!” Since my spectacles were for reading, I had a little trouble getting him into focus. So it was over their rims that I fixed him as I finished: “You could be another Fabian of the Yard.”
The alacrity with which he’d acceded to suggestions we knew were only stopgaps was missing. He rose and walked to the window, where he stood looking thoughtfully down into the street three floors below. He scratched the foil from a roll of fruit drops. “Do you really think so?” he asked indifferently.
An ambition had indeed, I sensed, been born in him. An enlargement, say, of our old dream of dexterity, a sort of private ideal too intimate for him to discuss (as I might have put it in one of the paradoxes for which I had used to be sent up to my room) in any way but casually. I, however, pressed the point with zest. I Tasked his leave to let me think of him as one who would indeed always find “some way incomparably light and deft,” as our old friend Eliot had put it; to preview his destiny as unfolding under skies more splendid than we had yet dreamed, and in this most glittering of contemporary lights. Oh, I could see him in his coming prime, summoned at midnight to decipher the hieroglyphs of violence; stirring from funks as fabulous as Flaubert’s to resolve perplexities in a dressing gown.
“It so happens Frank Carmichael, our Chief of Police, is a friend of mine,” I said. “I got to know him well in my reporter days, and I’d be more than glad to—”
“Oh, come now,” Nickie said, extending the fruit drops to me. I declined them with a shake of my head.
“You’ll go far,
but of course you’ll have to start at the bottom. You’d want to start there: the experience on a city plain-clothes force would be terrific. I mean a doctor begins as an intern, a lawyer chases—”
“You know this Carmichael well?” Nickie asked, grinding up the last of a fruit tablet in his fine teeth. He immediately tucked another between them, and then with his thumbnail prised a third lozenge away and offered it to me as being of another flavor than that which I had rejected. I shook my head again.
“Frank is a prince. Hiring in this city is open and above-board, but that doesn’t mean that a word dropped into the right ear by someone with influence … I mean you’d go on to become a brilliant detective, but meanwhile it’ll be a job you can support a family on, with a steady income on a city payroll, with regular increases for years of service and a pension for your widow. Well, what do you say?”
“Perhaps I can discuss it with the Captain over lunch one day.”
“Frank takes his lunch. So unless you feature carrying one of your own to his office and sitting down there and eating it with him, why, forget that part of it. I think the way to go about it is for me to take you down to headquarters and introduce you personally.”
“Why don’t you make a date with him then, if that’s what you want?”
“How’s tomorrow afternoon at three?” I asked. That being the time for which, squaring my jaw, I had already set up the appointment before his arrival.
“That will be O.K.”
“Done and done. I’ll stop by the house for you at two-thirty. And if I don’t get a chance to talk to you about this later, for God’s sake be on your toes. This can be the turning point of your life.”
I paused a moment to regard my brother-in-law, who presented once more, from the window, a dorsal view. I had removed my glasses some time ago, but had been fiddling and gesturing with them ever since. Now I set them down on my desk. Then, going over to where Nickie stood looking into the street, I slung a hand rather urbanely round his shoulder and said: “Whatever one’s lot in life is, one ought, you know, old boy, to build something on it.”
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