When they were alone together at last, there seemed to be nothing for them to say to each other. They undressed wearily in the darkness of the narrow bedroom in order not to disturb the baby. In bed side by side, they listened to each other’s deep and slow breathing, and when Paul could no longer bear the silence or his wife’s open, staring eyes, he turned on his side to take her into his arms.
But she lay as stiff and cold as Mrs. Fleischer, and when he began in terror to whisper desperate words into her ear, she opened her lips and ground her teeth so that he had to stop to hear what it was that she was saying.
“Murderer,” she whispered. “Murderer, murderer, murderer.”
A CHANCE ENCOUNTER
I couldn’t expect you to know anything about that kind of poverty,” the doctor said to me. “Consider yourself lucky. The man never would have called me, he never could have called any doctor, if it hadn’t been that the city welfare allowed me a buck for every house visited in those days. I used to count on those dollar bills for gas for my Chevy, even though it was nine for a buck then and they threw in premiums to boot and had three college students wiping your windshield while the tank was being filled.”
“But the call,” I started to say.
“I’m coming to that,” he replied so sharply that the ash flew like a breaking thundercloud from his clenched cigar and scattered among the horizontal pleats of his vest. He brushed his hand impatiently over his old paunch and continued, “I’m setting the scene for you. How else could you visualize it?
“The hallway was bitterly cold, with water leaking through the cracks in the plaster and curling down the walls like sweat leaking down your back. It wasn’t cold enough though to kill the smell of rat droppings and broken bags of garbage, of damp spots where kids had peed and of lard bubbling in pots behind the closed doors.
“I climbed three flights to earn my dollar, with the satchel getting heavier every step of the way, but I didn’t even give it a thought, partly because it was my job and I was used to it, and mostly because on my mind all the while was the man who must have gone down those three flights and then over to the drugstore and probably borrowed a nickel to call me and say his wife looked to be pretty bad off and what should he do, and then climbed back up the three flights and stood there next to the moribund woman, waiting for me. For me, of all people.
“They didn’t bother—they still don’t, except in the new housing-project slums—with name plates or even with numbers. Either you knew where you were going or you took your chances, and I made one wrong try before I found the man who had called me. At that I figured I’d made another bum guess when I rang his bell and pushed open the unlocked door, because the room was bare. It had two orange crates standing in the far corner, a midget radio plugged into the baseboard and sitting on the bare floor, and that was all, period. The walls were caving in, there were places where even the lath was chewed away behind the plaster, chewed away by you know what, and here and there you could see a stud sticking out like the backbone of a cadaver that this fellow had done his best to conceal decently with Hoot Gibson and Loretta Young and Richard Dix posters that he must have mooched from the local movie palace, and also with old calendars that he probably got from a garage after he was lucky enough to put in a day’s work flat on his back on the cold concrete draining crank-cases. They were ugly—the calendars, I mean—and the naked girls on them were scrawled over with phone numbers, but they helped to keep out the cold and conceal the decay.”
“You said there was a radio.”
“That was what made me realize the flat wasn’t empty. Even though it probably wasn’t working, even though the electricity was probably shut off anyway all through the building, I figured that nobody was going to move out and leave behind two or three dollars’ worth of tubes and wires. And besides—” the doctor’s moon face wrinkled up in what I took to be a grin, “—I heard voices.”
“Like Joan of Arc?”
“Real voices. Two men were talking very quietly in the kitchen, and as soon as I heard them I realized that the doorbell didn’t work either, and they hadn’t heard me come in. But when I walked across that floor they heard me all right, and the man that had called me came out to greet me.
“He was as black as they come. He reminded me of the Assyrian kings you see in the museums, with his beaked, flaring nose, and his forehead sloping steeply back to the curls, and an air of dignity dangerously quick to outrage. But he had a smile of such sweetness that I was ashamed for taking him to be one of those snobs who look down on white men, and I could tell simply by the way he stood there that he wasn’t ashamed at having to watch the finance company take back the furniture, or at having to pawn all his other possessions so that there was nothing in the world any more that he could call his own but the stuff in the kitchen and the two orange crates and the radio on the floor and the bed on which his wife was dying. And the clothes on his back.
“I looked down from his royal face to his splayed feet, that were covered after a fashion with torn ankle-high sneakers which gave him room for his bunions but must have been pretty miserable for walking through slush. The army pants he had on didn’t meet the tops of his sneakers, and there was an inch of black shin-bone sticking out. He didn’t wear a shirt, just two sweaters one on top of the other—a black one underneath, and a khaki-colored one with a kind of collar on it on the outside.
“I was about to follow him into the bedroom when something, a noise or maybe just a feeling, made me look into the kitchen. A white man like me, of about my age and size and disposition, maybe a little older and fatter and sloppier and sallower, was snapping shut a satchel on the lonesome kitchen table in the middle of a mess of sliced bread wrappings, opened-up tin cans, and dirty dishes. He raised his head and took one nervous look, like an alley cat glancing up at the toe of your shoe and calculating whether you’ll smash his ribs in if he doesn’t make tracks, and when he saw me standing there with my satchel his face caved in just as though I’d walloped him in the belly. I couldn’t help it, I felt my face turn red as if I’d discovered that I’d been walking around with my fly open.”
The doctor pinched his butt in the glass ash tray that lay between us on the table and looked up expectantly as he ground the cigar out between his thumb and forefinger, but I waited silently for him to go on.
After a pause he said, “It isn’t funny, when someone is crushed just because he looks up and sees you. Who feels guiltier, the one who is looking or the one who is being looked at? That’s a question for the philosophers. I had the feeling that he recognized me and I recognized him as a colleague, you see, maybe on account of the old-fashioned satchel on the table, maybe simply because there was something about him, God knows what, that nagged at my memory. I admit it, my memory is poor, I’m no good at names, and I was sure I hadn’t seen him in ten years. Probably I wouldn’t have been so embarrassed and my mind would have functioned a little faster if it hadn’t been for that trapped, desperate look he gave me, like a boy caught in the bathroom by his old man, before he ducked his head, but as it was all I could think of was how shameful it was that the nice comfortable middle-class professional front that some of us doctors love even more than our incomes had to be torn away here, so that we stood shivering in a cold-water flat, glaring at each other in our nakedness and hating ourselves for having to scrabble over a lousy dollar that the city would pay out for our helping an old colored woman to die gracefully.
“Or so I thought. But as soon as I said, ‘I’m sorry, Doctor, I didn’t realize there was somebody on the case already,’ he muttered something so low that I couldn’t even make out the tone of his voice, much less what he was trying to say, and he slipped past me fast with his head still down and scrambled through the open door with the heavy satchel bumping against his legs and his hat jammed cockeyed on his head. I didn’t try to stop him.
“Right then I didn’t even have a chance to think about him, because the old lady was waiting for me. She was
pleased at my being there, which was enough to make the trip worthwhile, even though she couldn’t really make me out and could barely hear me when I bent over the bed. There wasn’t much I could do for her beyond making her more comfortable, but I did think she should go to the hospital and not be allowed to die in this place without any heat or anybody to give her medication but her husband.”
The doctor blinked his baby-blue eyes three times in rapid succession, almost as if he were attempting to signal me some message that could not be conveyed with mere words. “Her husband and I went into the kitchen so she couldn’t hear us, and I told him that I thought she’d be better off in the hospital.
“‘I know that,’ he said, ‘and I thank you. But even at the end I’m selfish, and I keep thinking of myself. How much can I be with her in the hospital? How can I stay here all alone?’
“I didn’t answer him. I let him think about it while I made out a prescription and finally he said, just the way I knew he would, ‘You’re right, Doctor. I leave it in your hands. What should I do?’
“‘I’ll call the hospital from the drugstore,’ I told him, ‘and get her admitted. It may take a day. You can stay with her and ride with her in the ambulance when it shows up.’ And then I said, because I wanted to change the subject and because it was starting to eat at me all over again, ‘I was surprised to find another doctor here when I first came in.’
“He looked at me as if I was out of my mind. His face was shiny with grief and terror, and his eyeballs on either side of that jutting beak of a nose were as yellow as nicotine. For a moment it occurred to me that he was trying to bluff me by playing stupid—which made me feel that he couldn’t have much respect for my brains. It made me doubly sore when he didn’t even answer me.
“‘You know what I’m talking about,’ I said. ‘You were standing in the kitchen with him when I came in.’
“‘Him?’ He was amused and relieved. ‘He’s no doctor.’
“It was remarkable. As soon as I heard the words, He’s no doctor, it all fell into place, and I remembered everything at once about the man in the kitchen, his name, his background, everything.”
“So you were wrong about him,” I said.
The doctor shook his head. “On the contrary. How could I be wrong? It was only my memory that had been protecting me from the truth, like a well-intentioned relative. The man’s name was Stamler, I knew the kind of practice he had, where his office had been—although I’d never really met him except once or twice in the hospital corridor or at a medical society meeting—and I knew, the way you get to know those things, that he was going in for shady stuff.”
“When was this?”
“It must have been six or eight years before the meeting that I’m telling you about. I think it was women, but it might have been horses or bad investments or the desire to play God, or simply a rotten childhood and a rotten upbringing. I’m always leery of assigning an ultimate cause to a man’s behavior, especially when it’s eccentric or criminal. Whatever was behind it, Stamler began to go in for abortions. A girl died, and when they caught up with him he had another one screaming on the table, so that the smartest lawyer in the world wouldn’t have been able to get him off, or to keep him from being ruined—which he was, because he lost his license and got sent up the river, and I heard that an aunt and a cousin who were his closest relatives and who were stuck with the same name and had probably been living off him anyway, picked up and left town after he was convicted. That was the last I saw of Stamler, or heard of him, until we met in the kitchen.
“All the time I was thinking this—a matter of seconds, I suppose—the man was standing there showing me what teeth he had left, smiling not insolently or cruelly, but sympathetically, the way people do when you’ve pulled a hell of a boner. For all I know he might have been talking the whole time I was thinking about Stamler, but I didn’t hear a word until he began to tell me what Stamler had been doing in his kitchen.
“ ‘He’s a character,’ he said. ‘Everybody in the building knows him.’
“‘Why?’
“ ‘He keeps that old bag crammed full of shirts. I don’t know where he gets them, whether his wife makes them or he steals them or what, but he sells them for fifty-nine cents apiece, two for a dollar, first quality white shirts.’ I think he kept on talking because he was sorry for me and wanted to give me a chance to get the shocked expression off my face, and maybe partly because he just humanly wanted to keep me there as long as he could. He said wistfully, “They’re nice shirts, all right. I told him I’d buy a couple if I only had the money, but I just haven’t. Anyway, he’s no doctor.’
“Two for a dollar, I thought, and I asked, ‘Has he been around long?’
“The man shrugged. He said, ‘Long enough for everybody around here to know him. They call him the white shirt man.’
“So if you want you can say I was wrong about Stamler, as wrong as a man can possibly be. But I’m not so sure, and I can only tell you that it’s a thousand times harder to predict what a man will say or do in an extreme circumstance than it is to diagnose what’s wrong with his insides from the cast of his eye or the twitch of his hand. If you want to claim that he was subconsciously driven to pull the whole thing—profession, what there was of his reputation, and all—down around his ears, the years in prison should have done it, shouldn’t they? He shouldn’t have felt the need, should he, to return to the place from which his relatives had sneaked away so quietly that nobody saw them go, to the city where eventually somebody who had known him in his earlier incarnation was bound to find him hawking shirts in a Negro slum?
“Nobody can ever convince me, not after we looked into each other’s eyes in that awful moment, that he wanted—even subconsciously—to be discovered with his old satchel stuffed with shirts, a physician turned peddler to people who laughed when they talked about him.”
“Then why?”
“How do I know? Maybe when they let him out of the can he crawled back to his home town like a wounded animal that instinctively drags itself back to its lair even though it knows that the old stream is poisoned and that it will be ostracized by the other animals who bear different kinds of scars. Anyway that’s what I was thinking of while I stood there talking to my patient’s husband, who was shriveling up inside his two sweaters because he couldn’t press a bill into my hand as we parted. And then the worst thought of all occurred to me—maybe you’ve already thought of it.”
“No,” I said, “I don’t know what you mean.”
The doctor shifted his heavy shoulders and pulled a fresh cigar from his breast pocket. “It suddenly struck me,” he said wearily, “that they might both have felt I was making fun of them.”
“I don’t understand.”
“As far as he was concerned, it was preposterous that anyone should take the white shirt man for a doctor. And when I persisted in making a point of it, what else could he think but that I was trying to ridicule him in the worst possible way, that I was poking at the sorest spot of all? He couldn’t afford to put a shirt on his back, and here I was needling him about calling two doctors.”
“But you don’t really know he thought that.”
“Not any more than I know what Stamler thought, but don’t you see that as soon as he saw me staring at him he must have figured that I knew what he was doing? And as soon as I started to apologize he must have figured, remembering the kind of clown I am, that I was warming up to tease him in the most heartless and vicious way. Why else did he duck his head down and scuttle out without saying a word, without so much as answering me?”
“He was embarrassed. He was afraid he’d have to explain to you what he was doing there.”
“Maybe. I’m not sure. Even if that was so, I leave it to you to imagine what agony that first instant of recognition must have been for him.”
“That wasn’t your fault. There was a dying woman—”
“Whose final suffering he could have eased as well as any doctor
, even though the last woman he’d treated had died in agony under his hands? No, even if he didn’t think I’d been mocking him, I had to face it—Stamler was going through hell because he’d seen me, or because I’d seen him.
“I had to try to find him, and I had to get away from the man who was shivering in his sweaters. He was so decent about my breaking loose and heading for the door, he must have figured I was trying to spare him the necessity of thanking me, or maybe he was smart enough to understand that I still had the white shirt man on my mind.
“I went down the stairs fast, wondering whether Stamler mightn’t just be hiding behind one of the doors that I passed, but I didn’t see or hear any sign of him. For that matter I went all the way to the corner drugstore which was a kind of monument to the depression in its own way, with its windows displaying fly-specked before-and-after posters of patent medicines for skin diseases and its long row of empty soda fountain stools that nobody could afford to sit on; and I didn’t see Stamler, either on the street or in the lonely drugstore.”
“You never saw him again, did you?”
“I hate to disappoint you, but I never did. I’ll tell you what I did, though.” He stopped, coughed an old man’s dry cough, lit the fresh cigar which he had been toying with, and drew on it slowly.
I said a little impatiently, “You asked the druggist about him.”
“That would have been pointless. I remember him well—he was a sad-eyed Russian Jew with untrimmed mustaches and a look of absent-minded misery about him as though all he was worrying about was how to pay the rent on the store and turn up a miracle that would send his son to medical school. I put a dollar bill in an envelope—an advance against the check the city would send me for my call—and asked the druggist to give it to the man when he came in to pick up the prescription.”
NIGHTS IN THE GARDENS OF BROOKLYN Page 10