The Stories of J.F. Powers (New York Review Books Classics)

by J.F. Powers

  “At the beginning of the last war—this was in Innsbruck—we had a geometry teacher, very droll. He’d get furious and throw the squares and triangles at the pupils. He also rode a horse, as if in battle, to school. He would say, ‘Miller, what color should I make this line?’—some line in geometry; he’d be standing at the blackboard. ‘Red,’ Miller would answer. ‘Why red, Miller?’ You see the pupils knew what to say, I among them. ‘Red for the blood of the Serbs, Herr Professor.’ ‘Very good, Miller! And this line, Scheutzer?’ ‘Yellow—for the enemy.’ ‘Very good!’ You know,” Renner said, “the man of action,” and was silent.

  “I know.”

  “Delightful task,” as one of the cheery English poets says, “to rear the tender thought, to teach the young idea how to shoot.”

  I almost added that the geometry teacher, if living, must be cherished by the Fatherland today, but I thought better of it: such men are everywhere, never without a country.

  Emil was begging Mr Ross to stay for a bite to eat. At first Mr Ross refused and then, overcome by the fervor of Emil’s invitation, he said he would look at the menu.

  “You won’t need to look today, Mr Ross.” Emil rubbed his hands in polite ecstasy, became intent, his eyes glazed, as though savoring some impossible dream. “The pike,” he said, “is delicious.” But rare Mr Ross was reluctant to have pike. “Well, then!” Emil said, pretending outrage; he handed Mr Ross his fate in the menu. He folded his arms and waited scornfully.

  Immediately Mr Ross proclaimed: “Chicken livers and mushrooms.”

  Emil showed a suffering cheerfulness, shaking his head, the good loser. Plainly Mr Ross had divined chicken livers and mushrooms against all Emil’s efforts to keep them in the kitchen for himself. “Ah, they’re very excellent today, Mr Ross.”

  All this playing at old world délicatesse seemed to annoy Renner too much. Slowly he began to ramble, his eyes fixed on Emil, as though it were all there to be read in his face. “You wouldn’t think a little stenographer would remember what you said for ten years back and write it down every night—and the day they sent for you (bring two suits of underclothes and a roll of toilet paper; we’ll do the rest) you’d hear it all then, also recordings they’d made of your telephone conversations . . . because there were little telephone operators like the little stenographer . . .” Renner stopped speaking when Emil went into the kitchen, as if the inspiration to continue were gone with Emil.

  “Is Mr Ross Jewish?” I asked.

  Renner nodded indistinctly.

  On occasion I had wondered whether Renner was Jewish, always halfheartedly, so that I forgot what I was wondering about, and it would be a while before I wondered again. His being a refugee proved nothing so specific or simple as that: his species, spiritually speaking, tends to make itself at home in exile.

  Emil came out of the kitchen with bread, butter, and a dish of beets.

  “I don’t want those,” Mr Ross said—cruelly, it seemed to me, for Emil dearly wanted him to have them. Then it occurred to me that it was part of Mr Ross’s grand manner. He had considered the saving to Emil and his own loss in waving aside the bread, butter, and beets. It had been a telling act and there could be no turning back. Emil propitiated him with a devout and carefully uncomprehending look, such as he must have fancied appropriate to menials like himself and soothing to men of business like Mr Ross.

  The Entrepreneur leaned forward and spoke passionately in German to the fat one, who agreed with him, nodding and grunting.

  “Now what?” I asked Renner.

  Renner listened further before venturing a translation. “Well,” he said finally, as though I would not be getting the whole story. “A certain man is a good bookkeeper, but not a good businessman.”

  “But the Entrepreneur is?”

  “He is.” Renner began to deliberate in a familiar voice, not his own. “It’s all right, this tobacco. But I”—a very capital I—“I would never pay twenty-five cents. I would pay, say, twenty.” He struck a match, touched the flame to his pipe, looked shrewd, and blew out a mouthful of smoke to close the deal. It was the voice of the superintendent where we both worked, and it was Renner’s theory, to which I subscribed, that the super haggled about everything because secretly he yearned to be a purchasing agent.

  Renner watched the cardplayers. “The Entrepreneur has a very expressive head, too.” I could see what Renner meant. Seen, as now, from the rear, the Entrepreneur’s head was most expressive. I had noticed his face before; it was gross and uninteresting.

  “In fact,” Renner said, “they are almost identical.”

  “What?”

  “Their heads par derrière, the Entrepreneur’s and the super’s. I think it’s mostly in the ears. They both have histrionic ears. Seismographic instruments. See. The Entrepreneur needs no face or voice or hands. His ears tell all.”

  The back of the Entrepreneur’s head grimaced, his ears blushed, and his hand slapped a losing card on the table. He snarled something in German.

  “You see!” Renner said. “Just like the super—dynamic!” When Renner used a word like “dynamic” he thought he was very American.

  I took out my pipe. Renner shoved the package of tobacco across the table. “Stalin imports tobacco from this country, did you know? No one else in Russia may.” A revealing sidelight, it seemed to me, and I hoped Renner’s source was obscure, if not reliable. “Edgeworth,” Renner said. “Stalin smokes only Edgeworth.”

  “Think of the dilemma Stalin’s endorsement must constitute for the Edgeworth company,” I reflected. “One faction wants to launch the product as the choice of dictators.”

  Renner took up the idea. “Another faction doggedly holds out for the common man.”

  “Finally,” I said, slightly excited, “a futile attempt (by visionaries in the advertising department) to square the circle.”

  “We can’t all be dictators,” Renner broke in like a radio announcer, “but we can all—”

  “Exactly.”

  A stocky man plodded out of the washroom. The cardplayers hardly noticed him. I could not help thinking of him in terms of deus ex machina, for we had not seen him before and we had been in the place too long. He stood in the middle of the floor, a crumpled, somewhat parliamentary figure, and said:

  “If I was sober . . .”

  Then, accounting for his long exile in the washroom, he dislodged from his coat pocket a newspaper, folded editorial page out, and threw it with a sigh across the mahogany bar. He sat down in the empty fourth chair at the card table. This, too, seemed to be foreordained. The fat one dealt him in without comment. Emil laid down his cards, disappeared into the kitchen, and returned with a cup of something, probably black coffee. The stocky man received it silently, his just due, and drank. He put the cup, wobbling, down and said:

  “If I was sober . . .”

  “Irish,” I said.

  “An age-old alliance,” Renner said. “The Irish and the Germans.”

  There was, in fact, a rough unity about them. The fat one and the Entrepreneur thrust themselves in and seemed to maintain their positions with a forcefulness suggesting fear. Emil, with whom cordiality was a method, never granted a more confidential glance to one than to another, and by the very falsity of his servility distinguished himself as a strong character. The stocky Irishman, who had pleasant puffy eyes and vigorous wattles, loomed up as a most accomplished fact. He was closer to the furniture than the others, a druid. While the fat one and the Entrepreneur experienced mortal joy and sorrow, according to their luck at cards, and Emil dealt nervously in camaraderie, the Irishman was satisfied to be present and one with the universe. One thing was sure: they all belonged.

  Emil sacrificed his place at the card table and plied efficiently among his patrons. He brought us beer, the cardplayers drinks and matches, and Mr Ross delicacies and homage. When Emil came by the cardplayers’ table, I heard them urge him to get through with the carriage trade. That could mean only Mr Ross, for he
was being smiled and grunted at among them. They could tell that he had a romantic concept of the place. It was celebrated now and then by broken book reviewers as the erstwhile hearth of the nation’s literary great. Perhaps poor, tweedy Mr Ross was drunk with longing for a renaissance in letters and took the cardplayers for poets. They, I suspected, were all worried about how Mr Ross made his money where he’d just come from and aggravated to think (the Jews got all the money!) he’d be going back to make more when he left. It seemed to pain Renner that Mr Ross could confide in Emil and permit him clucking around his table.

  Renner breathed over his empty glass and resumed his autobiography. Some middle chapters seemed to be missing, for we were in New York in 1939. “Some employment agencies had signs saying sixteen or seventeen dishwashers wanted. I just stood in the doorway and the agent waved his hand—No! Others, too; one look at me and—No! They’re very good, they know their business, the agents.”

  “What about teaching?”

  “Ja, sure. That was interesting, too. ‘Of course you’ve taught for years at the University of Vienna’”—Renner reproduced a stilted voice and I knew we were at an interview he must have had—“‘but surely you must know that what counts in this country is a degree from Columbia, Harvard, or here, the only schools for political science. I thought everyone knew that. I suggest you try one of the smaller schools.’

  “So I tried one of the smaller plants. I went to a teachers’ agency and eventually entered into correspondence with a Midwestern college. ‘It is true’”—here was another, more nasal voice—“‘that there is an opening on our staff for a qualified man in your field, but it is true also that it will remain vacant till doomsday before we appoint a tobacco addict, especially one constrained to advertise that sorry fact.’ A veiled reference,” Renner laughed, “to the pipe in the snapshot I sent.”

  “American Gothic,” I said.

  “Just as well,” he said. “I was through with teaching when I left Europe. Too much guilt connected with it. Although clergymen and educators are not so influential as might be supposed from pulpits and commencement addresses, and the real influences are the grocer, the alderman, the radio comedian (and of course the men who pay them), still that’s pretty shabby exoneration . . .”

  I noticed that Renner had become angry and disheveled. Poor Renner! It was his wife’s lament that nothing roused him. She had made herself an enemy to the Heimwehr in Vienna and been forced to leave Austria long before the Nazis arrived, bringing their own brand of fascism to the extermination of the local product. Renner had stayed on, however, reading in the cafés (he’d lost out at the University through his wife’s activities) and thinking nothing could happen to him—until everything did. His wife, in judging him lethargic, was wrong in the way such vigilant people can never detect. Renner, I believe, was only insensitive to political events, to the eternal traffic jams of empires, and felt it was hardly his fault that he lived when and where he did in time and space. If he had been a boy, he would not have believed he might someday be President, nor even have wished it.

  I could understand from this what he meant when he said, in one of his extravagant statements, that he loved horses and foxes and could not forgive the English for what they do to both. Those were the symbols he chose through which to make himself known (at least to me), although it was by no means certain that they were only symbols to him. When he spoke of foxes and horses it was with no shade of poetry or whimsey or condescension. His face became intense and I could easily imagine him in a kind of restricted paradise: just foxes, horses, himself, and a lot of Rousseau vegetation. Of all the animals, he said, only the horse lives in a state of uninterrupted insanity.

  Renner took a large swallow from his glass and set it down with a noise. “For nineteen hundred years they’ve been doing that.”

  “Who? What?”

  “Plato’s learned men. Capitulating. I say nineteen hundred years, though it’s longer, because Christ cut the ground from under them—the Scribes and Pharisees of old. He gave us a new law. Martyrdom, indecent as it sounds to our itching ears, is not supposed to be too much to suffer for it.”

  “Speak for yourself, Renner,” I said.

  “Aren’t you a Christian?”

  “Of course. But my idea of Christianity is the community fund, doing good, and brisk mottoes on the wall.”

  “Copulating with circumstance,” Renner said.

  I looked at the cardplayers and there they were, overwhelming aspects of human endeavor: the fat one and the Entrepreneur throwing themselves soulfully into their best cards, the table dumbly standing for it, the Irishman piled up warmly and lifelessly, except for his fingers flicking the cards and his eyes which blinked occasionally, keeping watch over the body. I caught Emil’s eye, which he proceeded to twinkle at me, and he came over for our glasses. Renner kept his eyes down and so I was stuck with meeting Emil’s smile. I could not bring myself to return it. I told him the beer was good, very—when he waited for more—very good beer. When he came from the bar with our glasses filled he explained in detail how the beer came to be so good and did his smile until I felt positively damp from it.

  “A little tragedy took place in our department this afternoon,” Renner said, after Emil had gone. “Victoria Marzak versus the super”—for whom Renner indicated the Entrepreneur; I was confused until I remembered their heads were alike. “It was three acts, beginning with Victoria giving the super hell because working conditions are so bad in the stock rooms (which they are). She delivered a nice little declaration of independence. I thought the day had finally arrived. The workers of the world were about to throw off their chains and forget their social security numbers. The super said nothing in this act.

  “In the next, however, he went into action. He surpassed Victoria in both wrath and righteousness. His thesis, as much of it as I could understand, was that Victoria and the girls could not expect better conditions—for the duration. Victoria said it was the first she’d heard of our being a war plant. The super mentioned our ashtrays and picture frames, and said she ought to feel ashamed of herself, always complaining, when there were boys dying in foxholes—yes, boys who needed our products. Ashtrays in foxholes! I thought he was laying it on too thick at this point, even for him, and I did a foolish thing. We won’t go into that now, as it might obscure the larger meaning of the tragedy.

  “Act Three was classic, revealing the history of human progress, or the effects of original sin (reason darkened), depending on your taste in terminology. The super introduced Victoria to the supernatural element, which in our department goes by the name of Pressure From Above. He invoked Pressure as the first cause of all conditions, including working. In short, the less said about conditions, the better. Victoria wilted. But Pressure, besides being a just and jealous god, is merciful. The super forgave her trespasses, said he was working on a raise for her, and she went back to her job (under the same conditions), beating her sizable breast and crying mea culpa for having inveighed against them—conditions, that is—as things sacred to Pressure. Curtain.”

  Renner rubbed his eyes and gazed past me. Mr Ross had risen from the chicken livers and mushrooms. Emil stacked the dishes for removal.

  “I want to pay you for everything,” Mr Ross said, meaning, I presumed, the bread, butter, and beets. The cardplayers looked at each other wisely at this, as though the law had thus been fulfilled.

  “In case you are wondering,” Renner continued, “Victoria represents suffering humanity suffering as it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end.”

  “Amen,” I said.

  Renner’s voice cracked and he began again. “How did the Austrian Socialists, the best organized working-class group in history and pacifists to boot, reconcile themselves to the war in 1914?”

  “No doubt they organized committees,” I said, “or took the ever-lovin’ long view.”

  “Worse. Dressed in the Emperor’s uniforms and crammed in boxcars or
dinarily reserved for cattle, they rode off shouting—imagine—‘Down with the Czar and Imperialism!’”

  “A distinction to make a theologian blush,” I said. “But tell me, what was this foolish thing you did in the second act?”

  “I stood up to the super and told him a few things, mostly concerning the rights and dignity of man.”

  I considered the implications of this for a moment. “Then, as we say, you are no longer with the company?”

  “Yes.”

  “You were fired?”

  “Yes. Insubordination.”

  Emil was telling Mr Ross how much everything was. Mr Ross pulled out a couple of bills and pressed them blindly into Emil’s hand.

  “And the rest is for the house,” Mr Ross said. The cardplayers sniffed at each other and shared their disgust. Emil thanked Mr Ross from the bottom of his heart, shook his hand, put it down, and took it up for a final shaking.

  At the door Mr Ross turned smartly and waved a large farewell which seemed to include Renner and me and the poets playing pinochle. Then he vanished into the street.

  “Good-bye, Mr Ross,” Emil said plaintively, as if to his memory. Emil went to the card table, sat down, and fooled with his sleeves. The Entrepreneur, dealing, jerked his head at the door, snarled something in German, and went on dealing. The fat one nodded and belched lightly. The Irishman closed his eyes in a long blink. Emil grinned at his cards.

  “That was Mr Ross,” he said.

  “So that was Mr Ross,” the Entrepreneur said, attempting Yiddish dialect.

  Abruptly Renner stood up, jolting our table sharply, his face all swollen and red, and started across the floor. Before I could get up and interfere, he came to a wavering halt. Looking at him were four surprised faces and there seemed to be nothing about them familiar or hateful to Renner. Evidently he was bewildered to find no super: he had seen his head a moment before. He gave me an ashamed look which was not without resentment. Then he walked back to our table, stuck his pipe, which was lying there, in his pocket, threw down some money, and went out the door.