Phyllis

by Howard Fast

  “I never implied that you were expendable,” I said desperately. “That was not any part of it, Phyllis; you know that it wasn’t.”

  “Oh, what do I know, Clancy? I know very little. But still I think I know more than you do. If a person’s love is expendable, is that any less important? Or a person’s one hope of paradise? When I was a kid, Clancy, my mother and I spent two weeks at a little boarding house in the Catskills. I climbed a mountain and I climbed it all alone. I don’t suppose it was much of a mountain, but it was a big adventure for me to climb it all alone. Then when I got to the top and stood there with all the world underneath me, feeling myself just as tall as God, I felt close to paradise. Do you know what I mean, Clancy? I felt the way I felt when I told myself that you loved me.”

  There was nothing I could say, and I said nothing. I drove downtown, concentrating on the changing lights; on the flow of traffic, on the rain-glistening streets, and trying to absorb myself and all that I was and thought and had ever been into the necessities of a job that had suddenly become aimless and pointless. It is passingly difficult to be a hero, but to be a deflated hero is certainly one of the most difficult things in the world. I was able to be brash and defiant with Comaday, to sneer at a United States senator, to put myself on the same level as the mayor of New York City. I was even able to walk around, knowing that two cretins called Jackie and Mr. Brown were out gunning for me, and tell myself that I didn’t care and that. I was not going to be intimidated by them. I was a very brave and depressed and desperate man, Thomas Clancy by name, and through all my depression and self-pity I had at least built up a picture of myself that conformed with all the desirable stereotypes that fill the mind of any fourteen-year-old American boy. I wasn’t quite certain how Phyllis had managed to deflate it and remove it so simply and gently and without being angry at me and without saying anything that was calculated to hurt me; but she had done this and done it most successfully. Now I would drive downtown to the Biltmore Hotel where Dmitri Grischov had engaged a suite of rooms and he and I would set about extracting from Phyllis’s mind information she didn’t know she had. That was to be our great coup and through it somehow we would save mankind from Peter Simonovsky and Alex Horton. Only the whole thing had become childish and meaningless and I had reached the point where I thought as little of Grischov as I did of myself.

  Phyllis was silent until after we had parked the car and were going into the hotel; and then, curiously and quietly, as if we had been speaking to each other all along, she asked me whether I believed in God.

  “Isn’t that the kind of question you never ask a person?”

  “Not even when you love him, Clancy? And what about your friend, Dmitri Grischov? It would be un-Russian or something of the sort for him, wouldn’t it?”

  “Do you believe in God, Phyllis?” I said.

  “Only if I was convinced that she was a woman,” Phyllis replied, smiling slightly. She took my arm as we went into the elevator; her fingers tightened and she looked up at me, still smiling. It was good to see her smile. Something happened to her face when she smiled and it became strange and rare and beautiful. “Clancy,” she said to me, “you’re a very nice man. You’re a brave man, too. I don’t want to hurt you.”

  I shook my head without replying. Inside of me, I had given up and for me it was all over. I was not a cop any more—I was not anything any more. It would take some time before I was able to resign from my profession and get out of it. There was still the job to be done and to be finished with, but that was a matter of time, not of perception. The changes inside of me had already taken place.

  We walked to the suite that Grischov had engaged. It had been his idea to take a place in a hotel. My own apartment was not fit to bring anyone into and he felt that the building the Soviets had on Park Avenue would intrude with too many factors not to the point and not to the problem. A hotel suite was impersonal. The three of us would enter it on an equal basis—or at least that’s what he thought and I saw no reason to disagree with him.

  He was not insensitive, Mr. Grischov. When he opened the door for us he examined both of us quickly and penetratingly and he drew his conclusions just as quickly. He went out of his way to be warm and gentle to Phyllis and as I watched him I wondered that anyone brought up in the place where he had been brought up and in the way he had been brought up could be so charming and thoughtful—and even courtly. I made up my mind that I would ask him about it some day—in fact, I had decided that when the time and the place were appropriate, Grischov and I would sit down and have a long talk.

  Right now there were other things and I let Grischov play it as he had planned it. He had ordered a tray of sandwiches and a pot of hot coffee. The table was set, the chairs drawn up to it, and he insisted that we must all have something to eat before we went into the serious part of our discussion. Phyllis barely touched the food, but I found that I was hungry and that I was bolting enough food to fill my stomach. I was nervous and tired and I had lost my last shred of pride, which was the worst thing of all. I ate too much and too quickly and then I felt heavy and sick. Like Phyllis, Grischov hardly touched the food. He was telling Phyllis about his wife, who lived in Moscow. He had never told me about his wife or about his children, and it had never occurred to me that a man like Grischov had such appendages, but at least it forced me to contemplate what my own feelings would have been had the circumstances been reversed, considering that I were in Moscow and I had left a wife and children in New York. The normal reaction was to comfort myself with the proposition that Russians really had no feelings compatible with mine or comparable to mine, and I suppose that to some extent I did this. I left them sitting at the table, talking about Moscow and Leningrad and Soviet physics, a new telescope they were building in the Soviet Union, and I walked over to the window and looked down. Far, far below me the traffic scurried north and south with distant and senseless abandon. God was a man, after all, whatever Phyllis proposed, and I could easily enough picture myself as God looking down at the random anthill of human existence; and I tried to know honestly and truly whether the fate, real or unreal, hanging over this city, moved me in any profound manner. Phyllis had given me a burden of truth to carry and the truth was that I did not really know what I felt or feared or dreamed or hoped. I had been in a war where bombs were dropped on the cities and the habitations of men; but somehow or other I could not associate my memories of war and bombing and death and mass mayhem and mass murder with the effect of an atom bomb melting this city and these streets and all they contained into hot and formless insanity. The atom bomb was an abstraction; and for the first time with the help of this abstraction, man’s existence had departed from all the strictures of reality.

  I turned back to Phyllis and Grischov. They had left the table. Phyllis was sitting in an armchair, her legs stretched out, her hands folded in her lap, her head back and her eyes closed. Howsoever he had done it, somehow Grischov had won her confidence, had enabled her to relax. Now he sat on the couch, his feet drawn up and his arms clasped around his knees, nodding at Phyllis and telling her,

  “Just go on, Miss Goldmark, because you see there’s nothing you can say about Alex Horton that isn’t important.”

  “The trouble is I know nothing that is important.”

  “Or you know everything that is important. For example, you’ve eaten lunch with him—perhaps you’ve eaten dinner with him. What did he like to eat?”

  “He couldn’t eat rich foods,” Phyllis remembered. “There was something wrong with his stomach. He always felt it was a part of the radiation sickness. I remember that in the cafeteria he would order poached eggs on toast. That always annoyed the women behind the counter. It wasn’t that they minded short-order things, it was the poached eggs.”

  “No rich foods at all?” Grischov smiled. “No stew, not even a piece of roast meat?”

  Phyllis shook her head. “Very often it would be just tea and dry toast.”

  “Such an existen
ce I. don’t envy,” Grischov sighed. “I don’t know what is worse, to have to eat the food they cook in this country or not to be able to eat it. What do you think, Clancy?”

  “I ate in a Russian restaurant once,” I said. “It was no bargain.”

  “The worldliness of Americans,” Grischov shrugged. “Everything withers under capitalism, including the taste buds.”

  He had managed to make Phyllis smile. She opened her eyes and sat forward, watching Grischov curiously.

  “Did he like the theater?” Grischov asked.

  “We went twice. No, I don’t think he liked it. I think he was bored.”

  “Movies?”

  “He didn’t like moving pictures—moving pictures frightened him. You must understand what I mean. I tried to explain it to Mr. Clancy. He was filled with fear. I tried to tell Mr. Clancy how that was something that brought us together. It was an odd kind of relationship.”

  She looked at Grischov tentatively and he shrugged and observed that most relationships were odd relationships. “Here I am,” he said, “a policeman, a kind of Soviet G man, or secret service man or brain washer.” He looked at me. “That’s the way you think of me, isn’t it, Clancy? I’m a brain washer. I may be even more sinister than that. And I marry a nurse in a hospital, a gentle, sweet little woman very much like yourself, Miss Goldmark, who has nothing but disdain for the work of a policeman. Yet our marriage manages to exist, even if I am away from home so much. But what did he wish for, Miss Goldmark?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I mean Horton. We all wish for something. I wish for a beautiful dacha in a suburb of Moscow. Clancy here—I don’t know. Maybe Clancy wishes to be a police commissioner, like Mr. Comaday. You, Miss Goldmark, well I wouldn’t dare even speculate about what you wish for, but a man like Alex Horton, what did he wish for? What did he want?”

  Phyllis thought about it a long time before she answered. Grischov got up and poured himself another cup of coffee. He drank his coffee sweet. He put four teaspoons of sugar into it and stirred it and couldn’t resist the temptation to make some observation about the United States having a corner on all the best coffee in the world.

  “But you will grow better coffee in Russia than they do in Brazil,” I assured him.

  “Give us time, Mr. Clancy, give us time.” He drank his coffee, watching Phyllis, who had still not answered his question.

  “Consider Hitler,” Grischov said, “he wished to rule the world. On the other hand, you had a President in your own country. Now he is retired and wishes no more than to play golf.”

  “What does Khrushchev wish for?” I asked caustically.

  “Easy, Mr. Clancy. I will not allow you to trap me into a position that could have such dire consequences for me. On the other hand, at the risk of being quoted, I can say that I have a little daughter of six years, who wished nothing in the world more than for me to bring her back from America a very large and beautiful doll with hair that you can wash and eyes that open and close. She claims that our Russian dolls are inferior, but of course she’s only a child. All this is silly, is it not, Miss Goldmark? But the fact remains that everyone wishes for something. It defines us as human beings. If we are angry at someone, we say that he is greedy. If we respect him, we say that he is ambitious. But even a saint cannot be accused of wanting nothing. The saint is very ambitious for his sainthood, isn’t he, Clancy?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “But Horton, Miss Goldmark, what did he wish for? What was he ambitious for? What did he want—wealth, power, notoriety? Did he want a great laboratory in which he could make all sorts of wonderful contraptions? Or did he want women? What did he want, Miss Goldmark? Try to think.”

  Phyllis looked at us strangely and shook her head again. “Nothing,” she said, “there was really nothing he wanted.”

  Grischov put down his cup and walked back and forth across the room. “That is impossible, isn’t it?”

  “He wanted nothing,” Phyllis repeated. And I said,

  “It’s not impossible, Grischov. He was sick. You don’t admit in your country that a man’s soul can be sick and dying inside of him. That presupposes a soul. But she answered your question. Horton wanted nothing.”

  “It makes no sense,” Grischov muttered.

  “It make more sense than you think,” I told him. “He wanted nothing. That’s a curious ambition, but don’t throw it away.”

  We continued. An hour passed and then an hour and a half. We were all becoming tense and ragged and I think that Phyllis was at the point of tears. If it had been me, I would have stopped. But Grischov would not stop. He kept picking at her, clawing at her, pulling bits and pieces of Alex Horton out of her mind. I will admit that I would not have thought such an evocation to be possible. Bit by bit, Alex Horton came into focus for us—as if Grischov, like an untalented but dogged and persistent sculptor, were shaping a formless mass of clay there in the room in front of us. He picked through emotions, habits, phrases, clothes, odors, fancies, and finally he had come to happiness.

  Again Phyllis shook her head and again Grischov fought it through, insisting that there must have been moments of happiness for Horton. He said to her, “Think, Miss Gold-mark. I know this has been a hard day for you; I know that this has been a terrible day for you. Just a little more. Soon we’ll stop. But now think; he must have been happy. There must be a moment in the life of every human being when he’s happy.”

  “Even in your country, Grischov?” I put in.

  “Even in my country, Clancy, people are happy. It defines them; it distinguishes them. An animal is content or he is discontent; an animal is not happy. We go through our lives being unhappy, but the unhappiness must be based on some flicker of revelation, of joy.”

  “I don’t see where this can lead to,” Phyllis said. “I want to help you, but I don’t see where it is going. What possible difference could it make? What will you do with it? Alex Horton was a sad man. He was filled with sadness. I know what you want, but how are we going to find it? If I remember that he was happy?”

  I went over to her and sat on the arm of her chair and touched her hair, and suddenly she looked up at me and smiled. That was better. Grischov walked over to the window and looked down. I whispered to Phyllis.

  “I’m jealous of Horton. That’s the truth, Phyllis.”

  She took my hand and said, “Oh no, no, Clancy. No, believe me, in all the times I was with him, there was only one moment when I felt close to him—when I felt anything from him. We were walking across town and we came to that big place, that big section near the park where they are tearing the buildings down—where it looks like a whole part of the city had been bombed out and only a wasteland left—you know where that is, don’t you, Clancy?”

  I nodded.

  “We walked there and it was evening and somehow I had the feeling that Horton was alive, as if that terrible sense of a wasteland had reacted upon him in terms of its opposite and he was alive and he said something to me and I felt this warmth for him, closeness to him—only that time, Clancy—”

  Grischov had leaped away from the window and stalked over to us and now he bent over Phyllis and snapped at her, “He was alive and he was happy, wasn’t he? You walked in something that looked like a wasteland and he became alive and was happy. You said that, didn’t you?”

  “I suppose so,” Phyllis whispered hesitantly.

  “Why there? Why there?” Grischov insisted.

  “I don’t know,” Phyllis said.

  “Think—think!” Grischov insisted. “I’m only asking you to think!”

  It was the last straw and too much. Her face quivered and the tears began to flow and I said to Grischov, “It’s enough, Grischov. For God’s sake, it’s enough. Leave her alone. Leave her alone.”

  I let her cry then. It had been building up all day and she wept loosely and easily like a little girl. Then I gave her my handkerchief and she dried her eyes and told us that now she
would be all right.

  part twelve THE TENEMENT

  WE LEFT the hotel and took my car and drove uptown. The three of us together in the front; the three of us strangely quiet and tense and perhaps a little somber too. The rain had stopped and the wild March wind tore the gray sky into ribbons of clouds. It was late afternoon now.

  “I’m glad the rain stopped,” Phyllis said.

  I knew what she meant. “I like the weather in March. It changes in the course of the day—it can rain and snow and then the sun can shine and then it can rain again—all in one day.”

  “Like ourselves?” Phyllis said.

  I shrugged and asked Grischov what was March in the Soviet Union and he replied sourly that he supposed March was March. We spoke a few more words about the weather but not about anything else until we were at the University. Then we agreed on a place for us to meet fifteen minutes later. Phyllis went to her office to freshen up. I took Grischov with me to the little hole in the wall that had served me as an office.

  As we walked through the corridors of the old building, Grischov glanced around him curiously and reflected upon the incongruity of a policeman who could teach physics. I observed that nothing was as simple as we like to make it out to be, and Grishcov looked at me shrewdly and said,

  “There are times when I could almost bring myself to like you, Clancy.”

  “I have felt something of the sort about you, I must admit,” I nodded.

  We met Vanpelt in the hallway there. He was coming from his office and I suppose he would have evaded me if he could, but we were caught in the same corridor and so he strode past me with a defiant stare. It made no difference. Phyllis had left too little of my pride for any of the remnant to be affected by Vanpelt.

  In my office I went through the messages that had been left for me and found a note to call Comaday. I dialed Centre Street and asked for him, and when he was on the phone he said to me, with that harsh annoyance that was part of his nature,