Fergesson carried the broom and dustpan upstairs and began to sweep the main display room. The television sets were covered with dust; high school kids had traced their names and obscene words here and there. Traced across a huge RCA combination were two bloated female breasts. The primordial dust had been stirred by abortive creation, not his own. He savagely wiped the outlines off; they had never lived or stirred. Finding a greasy rag he began vigorously polishing the sets.
Somewhere in his desk upstairs, lost in the litter of papers and notes and tags, was the name of a TV salesman the RCA people had sent around from time to time. A tall thin dull-faced man who looked as if he had a perpetual cold. Sloppy and slow of speech, mechanical smile and bobbing Adam’s apple. Just what RCA could be expected to send. A snail, a tortoise, creeping around with a silly grin. A mediocre man with no possibilities. A few tricks, infinite patience, impervious to insult: the perfect modern salesman. The replacement to take the job of Stuart Hadley.
There was Joe Tampini. But Tampini didn’t have it. He wasn’t a born salesman. He was too shy, too retiring with people. Tampini had no push. He couldn’t wade in and get people. He didn’t have the ability to spin grandiose tales, manipulate the customer in body and mind; Tampini wove no magic spells around his prey. He’d never be more than a tag book and a pencil: he’d let the customer make up his own mind.
Stuart Hadley, somewhere down deep inside him, had something. There had been a possibility there. If Fergesson had got him early enough . . . if he had been able to train him his own way, really bring him up right, all the way from the bottom . . . But four or five years wasn’t enough. A whole lifetime was needed.
Fergesson thought how it would have been if he could have got Hadley at, say, fifteen. When he was in high school, a kid in jeans and white shirt. Or younger—say, ten. When he was in grade school, still just a boy. Supervised his whole training as he grew up. Set him on the right path. Made sure he didn’t pick up the goofy notions kids today picked up.
Hadley was twenty-five years old. Born in 1927. If only he could have got hold of him before Franklin Delano Roosevelt . . . before the New Deal. All during those crazy years of starry-eyed liberalism, all those years the pinks were running the country. And they still ran it. Sidney Hillman, that Russian Jew. Morgenthau, another Jew. And the worst of all—Harry Hopkins.
Memory of Harry Hopkins swam up before Fergesson and the big Philco TV set he was polishing. The stooped, angular body. The crooked smile. The sunken cheeks, fever-ridden eyes. The painful gait of the “half man.” Something like the TV salesman RCA had sent over. They were coming in that way more and more. Tall, vacant-eyed men, smiling foolishly, good-naturedly, turned out by the Roosevelt mold. The shrewd, mean, small men were gone. The earlier race, the men who had come before and built up the country. The cigar-smoking men. The little hard practical men who had fathered these empty-eyed dreamers.
If he had had a son, would he have come out this way? Fergesson polished furiously. No, his son wouldn’t have been like this. His son would have turned out different. If he had had a son he would have come out right.
Finished with polishing, Fergesson tossed the greasy rag under the counter, turned off the ball game, and made his way upstairs to the office. He pulled the cover from the adding machine and began running a tape on the accounts receivable. As he was sitting down at the desk to check the tape, there came a faint, echoing click, metallic and sharp in the silence of the store.
Somebody was at the door. Fergesson glanced up, his pencil poised over the tape. A form loomed up in the doorway, dark and opaque. It took him a moment to recognize it; at first he thought it was some blundering customer, trying to get in, wanting a radio fixed, tubes checked. Then he realized, with a thrill of pain, that it was Stuart Hadley.
For a moment he rose to his feet and stood watching Hadley try the lock futilely, saw him flush with rage and hurl the key off into the gutter. He saw Hadley start away from the door, then turn abruptly and move back to press his hand and face against the window.
The sound of Hadley’s voice came, muffled and dull, blurred by the thick shatterproof glass. “Let me in!”
A ghostly sound. Fergesson listened, heard the words, then pushed the adding-machine tape up on his desk . . . it had begun to slither off. He tried to ignore Hadley; he tried to pretend that nobody was out in the street shouting and pounding. The leaden thumps of Hadley’s fist against the glass echoed through the store; more ominous thunder to disturb his work and make his routine impossible.
The pounding ceased. Hadley stood glaring stupidly into the store, inert and helpless. The sight made Fergesson nervous; didn’t the damn fool understand he couldn’t get in? He tried to go on with his work, but it was hopeless. Outside the locked door the opaque shape remained, cutting off the sight of the gray sidewalk and the parked cars.
“Let me in!” Hadley shouted.
Fergesson winced; the tape slid from his hand and he sat immobile, head bent down, waiting for the next blast. He realized it was coming; he prepared himself and stiffened his body.
He had not known there was such hostility in Hadley. He had never comprehended the real extent of Hadley’s rage; now all of it was coming to the surface. Fergesson was amazed, and frightened. Again he tried to resume his work, but it was futile. There was no possibility of ignoring what was happening outside his store; there was no way he could pretend it was not out there.
Booming reverberations rolled through the store; Hadley had thrown his entire weight against the glass. Shocked, Fergesson glanced involuntarily up. The expression on Hadley’s face was dark and ugly, a baffled, animal frenzy that clouded his eyes and made his cheeks puffy and unhealthy. He was pressed tight against the door, staring blindly in, seeking some living thing to fasten his attention on.
He was not going away.
Fear touched Fergesson, and shame. Not for himself but for Hadley. Behind the man, a handful of people had collected, passersby who had been attracted by the noise. They darted quick, amused looks . . . Fergesson turned away, humiliated, wondering if he could endure what was going to happen. Wondering if there could be any sense or meaning to a world in which such things were permitted.
“Let me in!” Hadley screamed.
There was no point in saying no. It did not need to be said; it was evident. Fergesson did not bother even to look up; he concentrated on the glass paperweight at the edge of his desk. The paperweight was a hollow globe, in which a miniature scene lay, a tiny house, a tree, a gravel path. Bits of white lay over the roof of the house: particles that swirled through the liquid of the globe when it was revolved.
Silence.
Fergesson peered up warily. Hadley had disappeared. Had he gone away? Had he given up? Did he finally understand that he could never get back in, that he had forfeited his right to admittance, by his own acts, with his own hands?
As Fergesson began breathing again, Hadley reappeared. He had something in his hands. A brick.
Fergesson found himself on his feet. He snatched up the telephone and dialed. “Send a cop,” he said to the answering switchboard operator at the city hall.
“Yes sir,” the male operator said quietly. “What is the address?”
Fergesson gave him the address and slammed down the phone. He was halfway down the stairs, almost to the main floor, when the brick crashed through the glass door. He heard it instead of seeing it; he heard the shattering burst of glass as the door flew apart. When he reached the front of the store he saw that Hadley had succeeded in making a hole the size of a basketball in the glass. Through the hole Hadley’s face peered, furious and distorted, streaked with thin bloody trails from the splintering glass.
As Fergesson watched, Hadley reached through the hole and groped around for the inside door handle. It made no difference; the lock was thrown and the key was in Fergesson’s pocket. Hadley continued to explore the inside of the door, plucking and examining the jagged shards of glass blocking his way. Then,
abruptly, he put his shoulder to the hole and shoved.
Glass tumbled in, spilling noisily onto the floor. A whole section gave and collapsed inward; the hole expanded to the proportions of a gaping diagonal slot, two feet long and a foot wide. Hadley’s coat was ripped; it hung in shreds around his arms and shoulders. Behind him the knot of people had grown to a good-sized crowd. Nobody stirred; nobody made any attempt to approach the crazed man. White-faced they watched, fascinated and terrified, as Hadley stepped back from the door and stood with his legs planted apart, gasping and wiping blood from his cheek.
“Let me in!” he pleaded. His voice came through clearly, a raw and agonized sound, not particularly human. But Fergesson made no move to open the remains of the door. Listening tensely, rigidly, he wondered where the police were, and why they hadn’t come.
He knew what Hadley was going to do even before the man began to move. For an instant Hadley stood poised on the balls of his feet, swaying and trying to get his balance. Then, head down, shoulder forward, he lumbered straight at the jagged hole in the door. He struck with stunning force; the glass burst everywhere, raining down on Fergesson, slashing into the floor, the TV sets, the counter. Outside, the crowd gasped in horror.
Hadley was wedged in the hole. Mangled, a grotesque, bleeding thing, he struggled aimlessly. His body flopped at random, a mindless conglomeration of reflexes and muscles, without a central intelligence. His broken fingers traced their way around the remaining glass; his body shuddered and then gradually began to ooze its way inward. Shards of glass stuck from his back and arms, embedded in his flesh. The shocking white of his cheekbones glistened moistly. His left eye hung by a thread on his cheek; part of his lower jaw had been sheared away.
As the flapping, struggling thing plunged head forward into the store, the police ambulance wailed dismally up to the curb. Police appeared; the crowd pulled aside for them, and they quickly approached the doorway.
Fergesson made his way forward and opened the door. He managed to get it all the way aside before he was sick, terribly sick, off in a corner by the end of the counter, where the ghostly blue of the night-light flickered forlornly. The medical team shoved inside the store and clustered around Hadley. After a prolonged interval they got him onto the stretcher and back across the sidewalk to the ambulance. A moment later the siren growled back into existence and the ambulance nosed its way out into traffic.
“You put in the call?” a policeman was saying to Fergesson. “You’re the owner of this store?”
“Yes,” Fergesson managed. He sank down on the window ledge, among the cardboard displays and dust rags, beside the staple gun. “How hurt is he? Will he live?”
“He’ll be all right,” the policeman said. “They’ll patch him up. Most of him, anyhow.” He had his notebook and pencil out; another policeman was clearing away the crowd of frightened, curious people. “You know the individual?”
“Yes,” Fergesson said. “I know him. I know the individual.”
“You want to prefer criminal charges? Or you want to let it go?” The policeman turned a page in his notebook. “Maybe you ought to let it go.”
“I’ll let it go,” Fergesson said. “I don’t want to prefer any charges.”
“You’re insured?” the policeman asked, indicating the ruins of the glass door. One of the policemen was clumsily trying to close the frame.
“Yes,” Fergesson said. “I’ve been insured twenty years.”
Through the torn, gaping hole of the door filtered sounds, the whirr of cars and the hushed voices of people. Uneven sounds, carried by the night wind, the mixed voices, human and mechanical, from the street.
“I’ll call his wife,” Fergesson said, getting unsteadily to his feet.
“We can call her,” the policeman said.
“It’s my fault,” Fergesson answered, going to the phone and taking hold of it. “So I’ll call her.”
PART FOUR: Night
In the front seat of the Hillman Minx, Dave Gold sat gripping the wheel and solemnly scrutinizing the street ahead. He drove cautiously, conscious of his responsibility. He avoided holes and ruts; the diminutive English car glided through traffic, over the railroad tracks, past factories and dingy stores, past towering wooden houses drab with age and decay.
“Does your rib hurt?” Laura asked anxiously, turning around in her seat to face Stuart Hadley.
“It’s fine,” Hadley answered.
Beside him, Ellen squeezed his hand. “We’re almost there. I hope you’re not too disappointed—it isn’t anything like the place we had. It’s a little—” She gestured nervously. “I mean, it’s all run-down, darling. But it can be fixed up; it could be really lovely.”
Laura Gold still peered intently at Stuart Hadley. “How does your jaw feel?” she demanded.
“Fine,” he answered, grinning slightly. “It’ll be all right.”
Satisfied, Laura sank back into her seat and turned her attention on the street. “It’s hot,” she said. “Dave, turn on the cooling system. I’m baking.”
“I don’t know how to work it,” Dave answered. “Look in the dashboard compartment; that book is there somewhere.”
“What’d you buy it for if you can’t work it?” Laura demanded. Sniggering, she turned to face Stuart and Ellen. “He got all the extras. He went out of his mind. The schlump!”
“I have to have a car,” Dave said doggedly. “I have to drive around.”
“He won’t let me drive it,” Laura said. “It’s too good for me to drive. It’s his car, not mine.” She winked coarsely at Ellen. “The lion asserts himself.” She winked at Hadley. “Some lion.”
He didn’t see the house at first. It was on the left side of the street, his blind side. Ellen watched anxiously, holding on tight to Pete, as Hadley climbed painfully from the car and onto the sidewalk. The heavy late−September sun glared down on him and he stood blinking and adjusting. Then he reached out to take Pete, and Ellen followed after him.
“What do you think of it?” she asked quickly, eyes bright and searching.
While Hadley was studying the ramshackle building, the Hillman Minx coughed into activity and hurried off past him. Dave and Laura waved frantic good-byes; the little car rapidly disappeared into traffic and was gone. Stuart and Ellen stood by themselves on the sidewalk.
“Why did they go?” Hadley asked, with mild curiosity.
“They’ll be back later on.” Ellen took his arm lightly. “Want to go in? Ready?”
“Sure,” Hadley said. He forgot the Golds and started stiffly toward the house.
The ancient wooden structure had once been a respectable, imposing mansion; when this portion of town was new the house had dominated the block. Its ornate turrets indicated that the turn of the century had been its brightest period. Dark shingles covered its sides like rough brown hair; stained and broken, the shingles stretched in uneven rows up to the roof itself. The house stood three stories high. A rusty iron fence surrounded the large lot; a vast dirty palm tree squatted in one corner, by what had once been a garage. Tattered curtains hung in the upstairs windows. The asphalt roofing was a dull, corroded red. Around the cracked gray concrete path grew wilted geraniums. The massive front porch was a series of chipped, sagging boards, a faded blue expanse on which a wicker chair and a potted plant rested; in one corner stood a heap of moldy newspapers.
“A coat of paint,” Ellen said hopefully, “would certainly fix it up.” She guided her husband up the three cement steps to the heavy gate and stood waiting while he dutifully fumbled with the catch. “I guess it’s sort of old.”
“Which is our part?” He held the gate aside for her and closed it after. Frail and uncertain, he started toward the porch; Ellen stopped him and led him gently around the side of the house.
“We don’t go in that way; we have our own entrance.” As they walked she explained briskly: “The woman who owns it, Mrs. Nevin, lives upstairs on the top floor. She has her floor stuffed full of furniture; I
saw it the day I answered the ad. The second floor, according to her, is filled with trashy young people from Los Angeles; he’s an ad writer and the woman has men friends over when he’s away. The people on the ground floor are very quiet, although once in a long while they have a party, but it doesn’t last very late, except that once Mrs. Nevin had to go down and ask them please to pipe down.”
“And us?” Hadley asked.
“We’re on the bottom. In the basement.” Ellen stooped and turned the handle of a low door. “It’s locked.” She got out her key and unlocked it. “Anyhow, this is us. We go in here, like Mister and Mrs. Mole. Do you mind?”
He didn’t mind. The two of them stepped into a dark, moist interior; Ellen yanked back a dust-thick curtain and sunlight streamed in. The ceiling bulged with furnace pipes, huge tunnels of metal covered with spiderwebs and soot. Water and gas pipes ran up the wall; the room was long, gloomy, low-ceilinged, silent. There was no furniture. Two walls were without windows; and beyond a third one grew the vast old palm tree. At the far end of the room a door opened into a second room; Hadley gave Pete to his wife and walked toward it.
Beyond the long, low living room was a tiny cramped kitchen. A massive icebox was jammed into one corner; a sink and corrupted black gas stove filled the balance of the room. “No cupboards?” Hadley asked, amused.
“They’re in the next room,” Ellen said, coming after him.
Beyond the kitchen branched out a series of tiny cells, a labyrinth of passages that ended in a dinette, two bedrooms, a bathroom, a shower stall, and finally a laundry room. There was an additional room still unclaimed from the original cellar; its floor was heaped, wet dirt. The plasterboard walls were stained and yellowed. Over the apartment hung the smell of dampness and mold. Somewhere in the walls a mouse scampered; beyond that there was no sound. The palm tree cut off noises from the street. The ceiling above them was thick, impenetrable. They were totally isolated.
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