“Man, that’s rough,” the shorter of the two soldiers said, and his grin included Fallon, who grinned back.
“Oughta be a law against wavin’ it around that way,” the tall soldier said. “Bad for the troops.”
Their accents were Western, and they both had the kind of blond, squint-eyed, country-boy faces that Fallon remembered from his old platoon. “What outfit you boys in?” he inquired. “I oughta reckanize that patch.”
They told him, and he said, “Oh, yeah, sure—I remember. They were in the Seventh Army, right? Back in ‘forty-four and-five?”
“Couldn’t say for sure, sir,” the short soldier said. “That was a good bit before our time.”
“Where the hellya get that ‘sir’ stuff?” Fallon demanded heartily. “I wasn’t no officer. I never made better’n pfc, except for a couple weeks when they made me an acting buck sergeant, there in Germany. I was a B.A.R. man.”
The short soldier looked him over. “That figures,” he said. “You got the build for a B.A.R. man. That old B.A.R.’s a heavy son of a bitch.”
“You’re right,” Fallon said. “It’s heavy, but, I wanna tellya, it’s a damn sweet weapon in combat. Listen, what are you boys drinking? My name’s Johnny Fallon, by the way.”
They shook hands with him, mumbling their names, and when the girl in the tan skirt came out of the ladies’ room they all turned to watch her again. This time, watching until she had settled herself at her table, they concentrated on the wobbling fullness of her blouse.
“Man,” the short soldier said, “I mean, that’s a pair.”
“Probably ain’t real,” the tall one said.
“They’re real, son,” Fallon assured him, turning back to his beer with a man-of-the-world wink. “They’re real. I can spot a paira falsies a mile away.”
They had a few more rounds, talking Army, and after a while the tall soldier asked Fallon how to get to the Central Plaza, where he’d heard about the Friday night jazz; then they were all three rolling down Second Avenue in a cab, for which Fallon paid. While they stood waiting for the elevator at the Central Plaza, he worked the wedding ring off his finger and stuck it in his watch pocket.
The wide, high ballroom was jammed with young men and girls; hundreds of them sat listening or laughing around pitchers of beer; another hundred danced wildly in a cleared space between banks of tables. On the bandstand, far away, a sweating group of colored and white musicians bore down, their horns gleaming in the smoky light.
Fallon, to whom all jazz sounded the same, took on the look of a connoisseur as he slouched in the doorway, his face tense and glazed under the squeal of clarinets, his gas-blue trousers quivering with the slight, rhythmic dip of his knees and his fingers snapping loosely to the beat of the drums. But it wasn’t music that possessed him as he steered the soldiers to a table next to three girls, nor was it music that made him get up, as soon as the band played something slow enough, and ask the best-looking of the three to dance. She was tall and well-built, a black-haired Italian girl with a faint shine of sweat on her brow, and as she walked ahead of him toward the dance floor, threading her way between the tables, he reveled in the slow grace of her twisting hips and floating skirt. In his exultant, beer-blurred mind he already knew how it would be when he took her home—how she would feel to his exploring hands in the dark privacy of the taxi, and how she would be later, undulant and naked, in some ultimate vague bedroom at the end of the night. And as soon as they reached the dance floor, when she turned around and lifted her arms, he crushed her tight and warm against him.
“Now, look,” she said, arching back angrily so that the cords stood out in her damp neck. “Is that what you call dancing?”
He relaxed his grip, trembling, and grinned at her. “Take it easy, honey,” he said. “I won’t bite.”
“Never mind the ‘honey,’ either,” she said, and that was all she said until the dance was over.
But she had to stay with him, for the two soldiers had moved in on her lively, giggling girlfriends. They were all at the same table now, and for half an hour the six of them sat there in an uneasy party mood: one of the other girls (they were both small and blonde) kept shrieking with laughter at the things the short soldier was mumbling to her, and the other had the tall soldier’s long arm around her neck. But Fallon’s big brunette, who had reluctantly given her name as Marie, sat silent and primly straight beside him, snapping and unsnapping the clasp of the handbag in her lap. Fallon’s fingers gripped the back of her chair with white-knuckled intensity, but whenever he let them slip tentatively to her shoulder she would shrug free.
“You live around here, Marie?” he asked her.
“The Bronx,” she said.
“You come down here often?”
“Sometimes.”
“Care for a cigarette?”
“I don’t smoke.”
Fallon’s face was burning, the small curving vein in his right temple throbbed visibly, and sweat was sliding down his ribs. He was like a boy on his first date, paralyzed and stricken dumb by the nearness of her warm dress, by the smell of her perfume, by the way her delicate fingers worked on the handbag and the way the moisture glistened on her plump lower lip.
At the next table a young sailor stood up and bellowed something through cupped hands at the bandstand, and the cry was taken up elsewhere around the room. It sounded like “We want the saints!” but Fallon couldn’t make sense of it. At least it gave him an opening. “What’s that they’re yellin’?” he asked her.
“‘The Saints,’” she told him, meeting his eyes just long enough to impart the information. “They wanna hear ‘The Saints.’”
“Oh.”
After that they stopped talking altogether for a long time until Marie made a face of impatience at the nearest of her girlfriends. “Let’s go, hey,” she said. “C’mon. I wanna go home.”
“Aw, Marie,” the other girl said, flushed with beer and flirtation (she was wearing the short soldier’s overseas cap now). “Don’t be such a stupid.” Then, seeing Fallon’s tortured face, she tried to help him out. “Are you in the Army too?” she asked brightly, leaning toward him across the table.
“Me?” Fallon said, startled. “No, I—I used to be, though. I been outa the Army for quite a while now.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“He used to be a B.A.R. man,” the short soldier told her.
“Oh, yeah?”
“We want ‘The Saints’!” “We want ‘The Saints’!” They were yelling it from all corners of the enormous room now, with greater and greater urgency.
“C’mon, hey,” Marie said again to her girlfriend. “Let’s go, I’m tired.”
“So go then,” the girl in the soldier’s hat said crossly. “Go if you want to, Marie. Can’tcha go home by yourself?”
“No, wait, listen—” Fallon sprang to his feet. “Don’t go yet, Marie—I’ll tell ya what. I’ll go get some more beer, okay?” And he bolted from the table before she could refuse.
“No more for me,” she called after him, but he was already three tables away, walking fast toward the little ell of the room where the bar was. “Bitch,” he was whispering. “Bitch. Bitch.” And the images that tortured him now, while he stood in line at the makeshift bar, were intensified by rage: there would be struggling limbs and torn clothes in the taxi; there would be blind force in the bedroom, and stifled cries of pain that would turn to whimpering and finally to spastic moans of lust. Oh, he’d loosen her up! He’d loosen her up!
“C’mon, c’mon,” he said to the men who were fumbling with pitchers and beer spigots and wet dollar bills behind the bar.
“We—want—‘The Saints’!” “We—want—‘The Saints’!” The chant in the ballroom reached its climax. Then, after the drums built up a relentless, brutal rhythm that grew all but intolerable until it ended in a cymbal smash and gave way to the blare of the brass section, the crowd went wild. It took some seconds for Fallon to realize, getting his pitcher o
f beer at last and turning away from the bar, that the band was playing “When the Saints Go Marching In.”
The place was a madhouse. Girls screamed and boys stood yelling on chairs, waving their arms; glasses were smashed and chairs sent spinning, and four policemen stood alert along the walls, ready for a riot as the band rode it out.
When the saints
Go marching in
Oh, when the saints go marching in . . .
Fallon moved in jostled bewilderment through the noise, trying to find his party. He found their table, but couldn’t be sure it was theirs—it was empty except for a crumpled cigarette package and a wet stain of beer, and one of its chairs lay overturned on the floor. He thought he saw Marie among the frantic dancers, but it turned out to be another big brunette in the same kind of dress. Then he thought he saw the short soldier gesturing wildly across the room, and made his way over to him, but it was another soldier with a country-boy face. Fallon turned around and around, sweating, looking everywhere in the dizzy crowd. Then a boy in a damp pink shirt reeled heavily against his elbow and the beer spilled in a cold rush on his hand and sleeve, and that was when he realized they were gone. They had ditched him.
He was out on the street and walking, fast and hard on his steel-capped heels, and the night traffic noises were appallingly quiet after the bedlam of shouting and jazz. He walked with no idea of direction and no sense of time, aware of nothing beyond the pound of his heels, the thrust and pull of his muscles, the quavering intake and sharp outward rush of his breath and the pump of his blood.
He didn’t know if ten minutes or an hour passed, twenty blocks or five, before he had to slow down and stop on the fringe of a small crowd that clustered around a lighted doorway where policemen were waving the people on.
“Keep moving,” one of the policemen was saying. “Move along, please. Keep moving.”
But Fallon, like most of the others, stood still. It was the doorway to some kind of lecture hall—he could tell that by the bulletin board that was just visible under the yellow lights inside, and by the flight of marble stairs that led up to what must have been an auditorium. But what caught most of his attention was the picket line: three men about his own age, their eyes agleam with righteousness, wearing the blue-and-gold overseas caps of some veterans’ organization and carrying placards that said:
SMOKE OUT THIS FIFTH AMENDMENT COMMIE
PROF. MITCHELL GO BACK TO RUSSIA
AMERICA’S FIGHTING SONS PROTEST MITCHELL
“Move along,” the police were saying. “Keep moving.”
“Civil rights, my ass,” said a flat muttering voice at Fallon’s elbow. “They oughta lock this Mitchell up. You read what he said in the Senate hearing?” And Fallon, nodding, recalled a fragile, snobbish face in a number of newspaper pictures.
“Look at there—” the muttering voice said. “Here they come. They’re comin’ out now.”
And they were. Down the marble steps they came, past the bulletin board and out onto the sidewalk: men in raincoats and greasy tweeds, petulant, Greenwich Village-looking girls in tight pants, a few Negroes, a few very clean, self-conscious college boys.
The pickets were backed off and standing still now, holding their placards high with one hand and curving the other around their mouths to call, “Boo-oo! Boo-oo!”
The crowd picked it up: “Boo-oo!” “Boo-oo!” And somebody called, “Go back to Russia!”
“Keep moving,” the cops were saying. “Move along, now. Keep moving.”
“There he is,” said the muttering voice. “There he comes now—that’s Mitchell.”
And Fallon saw him: a tall, slight man in a cheap double-breasted suit that was too big for him, carrying a briefcase and flanked by two plain women in glasses. There was the snobbish face of the newspaper pictures, turning slowly from side to side now, with a serene, superior smile that seemed to be saying, to everyone it met: Oh, you poor fool. You poor fool.
“KILL that bastard!”
Not until several people whirled to look at him did Fallon realize he was yelling; then all he knew was that he had to yell again and again until his voice broke, like a child in tears: “KILL that bastard! KILL ’im! KILL ’im!”
In four bucking, lunging strides he was through to the front of the crowd; then one of the pickets dropped his placard and rushed him, saying, “Easy, Mac! Take it easy—” But Fallon threw him off, grappled with another man and wrenched free again, got both hands on Mitchell’s coat front and tore him down like a crumpled puppet. He saw Mitchell’s face recoil in wet-mouthed terror on the sidewalk, and the last thing he knew, as the cop’s blue arm swung high over his head, was a sense of absolute fulfillment and relief.
A Really Good Jazz Piano
BECAUSE OF THE midnight noise on both ends of the line there was some confusion at Harry’s New York Bar when the call came through. All the bartender could tell at first was that it was a long-distance call from Cannes, evidently from some kind of nightclub, and the operator’s frantic voice made it sound like an emergency. Then at last, by plugging his free ear and shouting questions into the phone, he learned that it was only Ken Platt, calling up to have an aimless chat with his friend Carson Wyler, and this made him shake his head in exasperation as he set the phone on the bar beside Carson’s glass of Pernod.
“Here,” he said. “It’s for you, for God’s sake. It’s your buddy.” Like a number of other Paris bartenders he knew them both pretty well: Carson was the handsome one, the one with the slim, witty face and the English-sounding accent; Ken was the fat one who laughed all the time and tagged along. They were both three years out of Yale and trying to get all the fun they could out of living in Europe.
“Carson?” said Ken’s eager voice, vibrating painfully in the receiver. “This is Ken—I knew I’d find you there. Listen, when you coming down, anyway?”
Carson puckered his well-shaped brow at the phone. “You know when I’m coming down,” he said. “I wired you, I’m coming down Saturday. What’s the matter with you?”
“Hell, nothing’s the matter with me—maybe a little drunk is all. No, but listen, what I really called up about, there’s a man here named Sid plays a really good jazz piano, and I want you to hear him. He’s a friend of mine. Listen, wait a minute, I’ll get the phone over close so you can hear. Listen to this, now. Wait a minute.”
There were some blurred scraping sounds and the sound of Ken laughing and somebody else laughing, and then the piano came through. It sounded tinny in the telephone, but Carson could tell it was good. It was “Sweet Lorraine,” done in a rich traditional style with nothing commercial about it, and this surprised him, for Ken was ordinarily a poor judge of music. After a minute he handed the phone to a stranger he had been drinking with, a farm machinery salesman from Philadelphia. “Listen to this,” he said. “This is first-rate.”
The farm machinery salesman held his ear to the phone with a puzzled look. “What is it?”
“‘Sweet Lorraine.’”
“No, but I mean what’s the deal? Where’s it coming from?”
“Cannes. Somebody Ken turned up down there. You’ve met Ken, haven’t you?”
“No, I haven’t,” the salesman said, frowning into the phone. “Here, it’s stopped now and somebody’s talking. You better take it.”
“Hello? Hello?” Ken’s voice was saying. “Carson?”
“Yes, Ken. I’m right here.”
“Where’d you go? Who was that other guy?”
“That was a gentleman from Philadelphia named—” he looked up questioningly.
“Baldinger,” said the salesman, straightening his coat.
“Named Mr. Baldinger. He’s here at the bar with me.”
“Oh. Well listen, how’d you like Sid’s playing?”
“Fine, Ken. Tell him I said it was first-rate.”
“You want to talk to him? He’s right here, wait a minute.”
There were some more obscure sounds and then a deep middle-aged
voice said, “Hello there.”
“How do you do, Sid. My name’s Carson Wyler, and I enjoyed your playing very much.”
“Well,” the voice said. “Thank you, thank you a lot. I appreciate it.” It could have been either a colored or a white man’s voice, but Carson assumed he was colored, mostly from the slight edge of self-consciousness or pride in the way Ken had said, “He’s a friend of mine.”
“I’m coming down to Cannes this weekend, Sid,” Carson said, “and I’ll be looking forward to—”
But Sid had evidently given back the phone, for Ken’s voice cut in. “Carson?”
“What?”
“Listen, what time you coming Saturday? I mean what train and everything?” They had originally planned to go to Cannes together, but Carson had become involved with a girl in Paris, and Ken had gone on alone, with the understanding that Carson would join him in a week. Now it had been nearly a month.
“I don’t know the exact train,” Carson said, with some impatience. “It doesn’t matter, does it? I’ll see you at the hotel sometime Saturday.”
“Okay. Oh and wait, listen, the other reason I called, I want to sponsor Sid here for the IBF, okay?”
“Right. Good idea. Put him back on.” And while be was waiting he got out his fountain pen and asked the bartender for the IBF membership book.
“Hello again,” Sid’s voice said. “What’s this I’m supposed to be joining here?”
“The IBF,” Carson said. “That stands for International Bar Flies, something they started here at Harry’s back in—I don’t know. Long time ago. Kind of a club.”
“Very good,” Sid said, chuckling.
“Now, what it amounts to is this,” Carson began, and even the bartender, for whom the IBF was a bore and a nuisance, had to smile with pleasure at the serious, painstaking way he told about it—how each member received a lapel button bearing the insignia of a fly, together with a printed booklet that contained the club rules and a listing of all other IBF bars in the world; how the cardinal rule was that when two members met they were expected to greet one another by brushing the fingers of their right hands on each other’s shoulders and saying, “Bzz-z-z, bzz-z-z!”
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates Page 13