“His name is Franklin,” I told Winthrop. “On the boat, he was …”
“Not himself? I’m familiar with the condition. It’s a filthy business, you understand.”
“He’ll be all right,” Genevieve put in.
I wasn’t sure whether the rest of the slicker crew were feds or servicemen, and I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to know. I could tell a Clandestine Operation when I landed in the middle of one.
“Who knows about this?” I asked. “Hoover? Roosevelt?”
Winthrop didn’t answer.
“Someone must know,” I said.
“Yes,” the Englishman said, “someone must. But this is a war the public would never believe exists. In the Bureau, Finlay’s outfit are known as ‘the Unnameables,’ never mentioned by the press, never honoured or censured by the government, victories and defeats never recorded in the official history.”
The launch shifted with the waves, and I hugged myself, hoping for some warmth to creep over me. Finlay had promised to break out a bottle later, but that made me resolve to stick to tea as a point of honour. I hated to fulfil his expectations.
“And America is a young country,” Winthrop explained. “In Europe, we’ve known things a lot longer.”
On shore, I’d have to tell Janey Wilde about Brunette and hand over Franklin. Some flack at Metro would be thinking of an excuse for the Panther Princess’s disappearance. Everything else—the depth charges, the sea battle, the sinking ship—would be swallowed up by the War.
All that would be left would be tales. Weird tales.
“I Had Vacantly Crumpled It into My Pocket … But by God, Eliot, It Was a Photograph from Life!”
JOANNA RUSS
In an ancient rooming house in New York, where the dirt covered the molded plaster ceilings, where the creak of the stairs at night echoed like pistol shots in the dark, amid the rickety splendors of peeling red velvet wallpaper and indescribably varnished furniture, Irvin Rubin lived. He was a bookkeeper in a cheap publishing house: Fantasy Press; he worked there for the discounts. He told this story to a woman in the office, and she told it to me, one winter morning in a cafeteria with steam that covered the plate-glass windows running down in clear patches that displayed nothing at all, so distorted were they, but drops and streaks of the scene outside. Irvin Rubin, who never ate without a book propped up in front of his plate, his pale eyes fixed on it, his cheeks rhythmically bulging, and his fork blindly hunting in front of him, took all his meals in cafeterias. Then he read in his room. He had nothing in particular to do. He knew nobody. The woman who worked with him had tried to engage him in conversation, but fruitlessly, for Irv had nothing to say except shrill denunciations of the latest writers put out by Fantasy Press (“He called them a bunch of hacks,” she said) or complaints about his desk, or his office-mates, or his salary, for on other topics he had no opinion at all, but one morning he came over to her desk and stood with his hands behind his back, red, sweating, and trying visibly to keep calm.
“Miss Kramer,” he said to her, “where would you take a girl?”
“Goodness, do you have a girl?” she said lightly. He looked a little dazed.
“Where would you take a girl?” he repeated plaintively, apparently twisting his hands behind his back; then he said, “Where would you take a real lady, Miss Kramer?”
“I don’t know,” said she, “I don’t know any,” and Irvin—vastly relieved—dropped into the seat next to her desk. “Neither do I,” he said simply. At this point (she told me) he smiled and June Kramer saw with something like dismay that for an instant his face became distinctly human, rather young (he was twenty-eight), and even genuinely sweet. He frowned and it vanished.
“I certainly wouldn’t ask anybody else,” he said significantly. “I wouldn’t ask anybody else in this joint.” He got up; shifted from foot to foot. He frowned again. “Do you think she’d like to read something?”
“Well—” said Miss Kramer, “I don’t know—”
“Do you think she’d like to come to my place?” he burst out.
“Not right away,” she said, alarmed. He looked at the floor.
“Perhaps you should go for a walk,” said Miss Kramer cautiously, “or—or maybe she would like to go to the movies. Maybe you could see” (here Irv, looking at his feet, muttered, “it’s all trash anyway”) “well, maybe you could see—” but before she could finish her sentence, Irv started violently and then walked jerkily away—scuttled, rather. He had seen the supervisor coming.
“How’s the nut?” said the supervisor in a whisper to June Kramer, who looked at him over her glasses, set her lips severely, and said nothing.
It turned out that Irv had met his girl near Central Park, walking two dachshunds on a leash, though neither June Kramer nor I could see what such a girl would want with him. Perhaps she was not a girl exactly, and perhaps not exactly a lady either, for although he always described her as a compound of a “real lady” and a “glamour girl” with “that husky sort of whisper, Miss Kramer” like you-know-who in the movies, Irv Rubin’s girlfriend always seemed to me like the women drowned passively in mink or sable in the advertisement sketches—lost, lifeless, betrayed, undoubtedly kept by some rich sadist—at least that’s how they strike me. He had caught glimpses of her many days before he actually met her, for Irv’s furnished room was located in the decaying blocks near the rich section of Central Park West, and he had followed her pure profile down many side streets and even into the Park, catching glimpses of her black coat and bobbing, straining, double dogs in unlikely places—once, I believe, the supermarket.
Irv loved his girl. He dwelt on her obsessively with Miss Kramer, in a way that seemed new to him, as if he were awed, almost (said June Kramer) as if he were frightened by her superiority, by her elegance, by her fashion-model paleness, and most of all by the silence with which she tolerated him, by the way she listened to him as if he had a right to talk to her, to take her on walks, and to tell her (with spiritualized earnestness) that Howard Phillips Lovecraft was the greatest writer in the world.
He had met her, he told June Kramer, on Central Park West, on a cold, blue, brilliantly sunny Sunday afternoon, when every tree in the park was coated with ice and icicles hung from the eaves of the buildings along the street. Sundays were bad days for Irv; the bookstores were shut. (He gave Miss Kramer a recital of all the places he had been to on the last nine or ten Sundays; I forget most of them, but he went three times to the zoo and once rode up and down Fifth Avenue in a bus, though he said looking at expensive things in windows “was as nothing compared with the Imagination”; his own clothes were so old and in such bad repair that people noticed him in the street—at any rate, it was a pitiable catalogue.) He had seen the girl sitting on a park bench, reading a book, with her twin dachshunds nosing about in the snow in front of her, and he had crossed the street with his heart beating violently, knowing that he must speak to her. Luckily the book she was reading was by his favorite author. His voice cracking horribly, he had managed to excuse himself and inform her that the edition she was reading was not as complete as the one of 1939, and “pardon me, but it has everything; I got that book; it’s much better; do you mind if I sit down next to you?”
No, she didn’t mind. She listened to him, her thin, handsome face pale and composed, giving every now and then a little jerk to the leashes of the dachshunds who—thus caught up rather dryly in their explorations—whimpered a little. (“She’s got real leather gloves,” he told Miss Kramer, “black ones.”) What she told him I do not know, for he couldn’t remember it, but whatever it was (in her hoarse, husky whisper) it sounded to him like the assurance that he was the most intelligent man she had ever met, that she too thought the books of H. P. Lovecraft of the utmost importance (“He’s a real writer,” Irv used to say), and she thought she would like very much to take a walk with him. He told all this to Miss Kramer. He told of their walk through the park, amidst icicles falling to the ground with a
plink! and everything shiveringly, blindingly bright under the sun—the mica in the rocks, the blue sky, the shriveled leaves hanging infrequently from the trees, the discolorations of the snow where mud, or dogs—or her dogs—stained the white. All the time his radiant companion (she was a little taller than he) walked beside him, with her black coat blossoming into a huge enveloping collar that half hid her face, with her black elegance, her black stockings, and crowning all a hat—but not a blue hat, a hat almost violet, a hat the color of twilight winter skies where the yellows and the greens and the hot, smoky pinks riot so gorgeously in the west while all the time you are freezing to death. He really made it come across. The hat she wore was made of that silky, iridescent, fashionable stuff, “and get this!” (he said) “get this, Miss Kramer, that hat is the exact same color as her eyes!”
Alas, poor Irvin Rubin! Miss Kramer thought, but his lady did not get tired of Irvin Rubin. They went to the movies. They went on walks. They went to bookstores. I saw them myself, once, from a distance. And every evening Irv’s girl waved good-bye (though it is impossible to think of her doing anything even that vigorous) and walked into the park, into the blue with her blue eyes shining like stars. She lived on the fashionable East Side. Late one Saturday afternoon Irvin knocked on Miss Kramer’s apartment door in the Stuyvesant Town project, and then stood there miserably with his hands balled in his jacket pockets while she fumbled with the latch. She had women friends in for bridge, who were playing cards in the living room.
“Miss Kramer!” said Irv breathlessly, “you just got to help me!”
“Well—well, come in,” said she, sensing uneasily that her guests had stopped talking and were looking at Irvin in surprise. “Come into the kitchen. Just for a moment.” He followed her like some ungainly creature in a fairy tale, only stopping to remark in surprise, “Gee, you’re all dressed up” (her hair was newly set and she wore a suit), but otherwise taking no notice of his surroundings, not even the extreme tininess of the little kitchenette when the two of them had crowded into it.
“Now what is it, Irvin?” said Miss Kramer somewhat sharply, for she was thinking of her guests. She even made a mental note of the number of clean coffee cups left on top of the refrigerator. He looked vacantly round, his mouth open, his hands still in his pockets, one side of the ancient plush collar of his jacket turned up by mistake.
“Miss Kramer—”he faltered, “Miss Kramer—please—you got to help me!”
“Yes, what about, Irvin?” said she.
“Miss Kramer, she’s coming up to my place tonight. She’s coming up to see me.” (“Really!” thought June Kramer, “what’s so awful about that?”) He dropped his gaze. “What I mean, Miss Kramer—I mean—” (he breathed heavily) “I don’t want her to think—” and here he lifted his head suddenly and cried out, “Please, Miss Kramer, you come too!”
“I?” said June, thinking of her guests.
“Yes, please!” cried Irv. “Please! I want—I mean—” and with a sort of shuddering sob, he burst out, “I told her there would be people there!” He turned his back on her and doggedly faced the refrigerator, rubbing his sleeve back and forth across his nose.
“Irvin, don’t you think that was wrong?” said she. No answer. “Irvin,” she said gently, “I think that if this girl likes you, you don’t have to invent things that aren’t true and if she doesn’t really like you, well, she’s going to find out what you’re really like sooner or later. Now don’t you think it would have been better to have told the truth? Don’t you?”
“I don’t know,” muttered Irvin. He turned around. He looked at June Kramer silently, doggedly, the tears standing in his eyes, those pale-blue protuberant eyes that should have been nearsighted but were not, alas, too nearsighted to see silent, passive charmers sitting on park benches across Central Park West.
“Oh, all right,” said June Kramer; “all right, Irvin,” and she abandoned her friends, her cards, her little party, to make Irvin’s girl think Irvin had friends.
“That’ll look respectable, Miss Kramer, thank you,” said he, and then he added—with a cunning so foreign to him that it was shocking—“She’ll be impressed by you, Miss Kramer; you look so nice.”
So Miss Kramer put on her coat with the rabbit’s fur collar (to look nice) and they went to Irvin’s boardinghouse, first on a bus that churned the slush in the roads, grinding and grinding; and then in a subway where the platform was puddled with melted snow—but no weather, bad or good, ever drew a comment from Irvin Rubin.
It was cold in the hallway of his boardinghouse, so deadly cold that you might fancy you saw the walls sweating, a kind of still, damp, petrified cold as of twenty winters back. The naked radiator in Irvin’s room was cold. He took off his jacket and sat down on the ancient four-poster—the room held only that, an armchair, a dresser, and a green curtain across a sort of closet-alcove at the back—in nothing but his shirtsleeves. June Kramer shivered.
“Aren’t you cold, Irvin?” she said. He said nothing. He was staring at the opposite wall. He roused himself, gave a sort of little shake, said, “She’ll come soon, thank you Miss Kramer,” and relapsed into a stupor. It had begun to snow outside, as June saw by pushing aside the plastic curtains. She let them fall. She walked past Irvin’s bed—the bedspread was faded pink—past the dresser whose top held a brush, a comb, and a toothbrush, and whose mirror (set in romantic curlicues) was spotted and peeling, so that the room itself seemed to disappear behind clouds of ghostly shapes.
“This could be quite a nice room if you fixed it up, Irvin,” she said brightly. He said nothing. She saw that he had gotten a book from somewhere and was reading; so she walked about the room again, glancing at the armchair, the bookshelf under the single window, and the bridge lamp under which Irvin sat. Shoes protruded from under the green curtain. Miss Kramer sat down in the armchair, beginning to feel the cold, and noticed that Irvin had pinned a snap-shot on the wall next to it, in the least accessible part of the room, a photograph apparently taken many years ago, of a boy standing with a dog under a tree. It was the only picture in the room.
“Is that you, Irvin?” said Miss Kramer, and Irvin (after a pause in which his eyes stopped moving over the pages of his book) nodded without looking up. Miss Kramer sat for a moment, then got up and walked over to the bookcase (it was full of Fantasy Press books), again parted the plastic curtains, again looked out into the snow (it was beginning to stick to the cleared sidewalk and the streetlight), again contemplated the photograph, whose faded sepia seemed to have reduced the tree to a piece of painted canvas, and finally said:
“Irvin Rubin, are you sure this girl is coming tonight?” This question had a surprising effect on him; hastily slamming down his book, he jumped to his feet with both mouth and eyes open, his face working.
“Oh, please—” he stammered, “oh, please—”
“Oh, I’m sure she’s coming,” said June, “but is she coming tonight? Are you sure you didn’t get mixed up about the time? I don’t mean to suggest—” but here he ran over to the alarm clock that stood on the floor by the other side of the bed and shook it; he listened to it; he tried to explain something to her, stuttering so that he frightened her.
“That’s all right!” she cried; “that’s all right!” and Irvin Rubin, his chest heaving, stood still, subsided, wiped his eyes with his hand, shuffled back to the near side of the bed where—oh, wonderful Rubin!—he recommenced reading his book. She thought of asking him to put it away, but she was afraid of him, and afraid too of the silence of the room, which seemed to warn against being broken. I think she was afraid to move. It was not only the human desolation of that room, but the somehow terrifying vision it gave her of a soul that could live in such a room and not know it was desolate, the suggestion that this bleak prose might pass—by a kind of reaction—into an even more dreadful poetry. June Kramer began to wonder about Irv’s girl. It occurred to her with agonizing vividness the number of evenings Irvin had come home to that a
wful room, had come home and pulled out a book and peopled that room with heaven knows what; and then gone to bed, and got up, and gone to work, and eaten and come home and pulled out a book again until it was time to lie in bed for eight long hours (Irvin was a punctual sleeper), dreaming dreams that however weird—and this was less disturbing—were at least more like the lives led by others in their dreams. But now he read. She almost fancied she saw a kind of cold mist rise from the page. At last (she was stiff with sitting tightly on the horsehair seat of the armchair) Miss Kramer struggled to her feet and said in a voice that sounded weak and feeble in her own ears:
“I’m afraid I have to go, Irvin, I really can’t stay any longer.” She saw that he had closed his book and was staring at her with his brow wrinkled. The light from the overhead fixture gave him an odd look.
“Don’t go, Miss Kramer,” he said in a low voice.
“I’m sure your young lady meant next week,” said June desperately. “Or tomorrow. Yes, she’ll come tomorrow—”
“Please! Please!” cried Irv. “Please!”
“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” said June. “I have to,” and quite unreasonably terrified, she turned and rattled open the latch of the door, letting in at once a draught of that cold, dead, still air from the hall. All at once she knew perfectly well what she had been comparing it to all this time, and as she dove downstairs, followed by a distraught Irvin Rubin, crying breathlessly about his girl and this the first social event of his life, she saw before her only the open grave into which she had stared some forty years before, when as a small child she had been forced to attend the funeral of her youngest sister. In the street she ran away from him, clutching her purse to her side, but as she reached the corner and slowed down, something—she never knew exactly what—made her stop and turn around.
Irv’s girl had come. She was standing next to him on the steps. June Kramer saw clearly the coat and hat Irvin had described. She could even make out the black leather gloves and the black stockings. Although she could hardly see Irvin himself in the light from the streetlamp, she saw every feature of the girl’s pale, powdered face as if it had been drawn: the thin eyebrows, the expressionless profile like a sketch on paper, and most clearly of all, those wonderful, wonderful violet eyes—“she’s got such pretty eyes,” Irvin used to say. “She’s here, Miss Kramer, she’s here!” Irvin was shouting cheerfully, beaming down, coatless, at his pale, real lady, when a gust of wind momently froze the street. Irvin’s shirt flapped, Miss Kramer’s coat performed a violent dance about her calves, but the strange lady’s black envelope did not stir, nor did her black scarf, but hung down in carved folds as if it had been made of stone, as still as her hands, as cold as her face, and as dead as her expression, which seemed in its pale luminosity to be saying to June Kramer (with a spark of hatred) I dare you.…
Cthulhu 2000 Page 23