In any case I ran all the way down West Twelfth Street that night, and if I didn’t burst in on her, laughing and shouting and clowning around, it was only because I forced myself to stand leaning against the mailboxes downstairs until I’d caught my breath and arranged my face into the urbane, amused expression I planned to use for telling her about it.
“Well, but who do you suppose is putting up all the money?” she asked. “It can’t be out of his own pocket, can it? A cab driver couldn’t afford to pay out twenty-five a week for any length of time, could he?”
It was one aspect of the thing that hadn’t occurred to me—and it was just like her to come up with so dead-logical a question—but I did my best to override her with my own kind of cynical romanticism. “Who knows? Who the hell cares? Maybe Wade Manley’s putting up the money. Maybe Dr. Whaddyacallit’s putting it up. The point is, it’s there.”
“Well,” she said, “good, then. How long do you think it’ll take you to do the story?”
“Oh, hell, no time at all. I’ll knock it off in a couple hours over the weekend.”
But I didn’t. I spent all Saturday afternoon and evening on one false start after another; I kept getting hung up in the dialogue of the quarreling couple, and in technical uncertainties about how much Bernie could really see of them in his rearview mirror, and in doubts about what any cabdriver could possibly say at such a time without the man’s telling him to shut up and keep his eyes on the road.
By Sunday afternoon I was walking around breaking pencils in half and throwing them into the wastebasket and saying the hell with it; the hell with everything; apparently I couldn’t even be a goddamn ghostwriter for a goddamn ignorant slob of a driver of a goddamn taxicab.
“You’re trying too hard,” Joan said. “Oh, I knew this would happen. You’re being so insufferably literary about it, Bob; it’s ridiculous. All you have to do is think of every corny, tear-jerking thing you’ve ever read or heard. Think of Irving Berlin.”
And I told her I’d give her Irving Berlin right in the mouth in about a minute, if she didn’t lay off me and mind her own goddamn business.
But late that night, as Irving Berlin himself might say, something kind of wonderful happened. I took that little bastard of a story and I built the hell out of it. First I bulldozed and dug and laid myself a real good foundation; then I got the lumber out and bang, bang, bang—up went the walls and on went the roof and up went the cute little chimney top. Oh, I put plenty of windows in it too—big, square ones—and when the light came pouring in it left no earthly shadow of a doubt that Bernie Silver was the wisest, gentlest, bravest and most lovable man who ever said “folks.”
“It’s perfect,” Joan told me at breakfast, after she’d read the thing. “Oh, it’s just perfect, Bob. I’m sure that’s just exactly what he wants.”
And it was. I’ll never forget the way Bernie sat with his ginger ale in one hand and my trembling manuscript in the other, reading as I’d still be willing to bet he’d never read before, exploring all the snug and tidy wonders of the little home I’d built for him. I watched him discovering each of those windows, one after another, and saw his face made holy with their light. When he was finished he got up—we both got up—and he shook my hand.
“Beautiful,” he said. “Bob, I had a feeling you’d do a good one, but I’ll tell you the truth. I didn’t know you’d do as good a one as this. Now you want your check, and I’ll tell you something. You’re not getting any check. For this you get cash.”
Out came his trusty black cabdriver’s wallet. He thumbed through its contents, picked out a five-dollar bill and laid it in my hand. He evidently wanted to make a ceremony out of presenting me with one bill after another, so I stood smiling down at it and waiting for the next one; and I was still standing there with my hand out when I looked up and saw him putting the wallet away.
Five bucks! And even now I wish I could say that I shouted this, or at least that I said it with some suggestion of the outrage that gripped my bowels—it might have saved an awful amount of trouble later—but the truth is that it came out as a very small, meek question: “Five bucks?”
“Right!” He was rocking happily back on his heels in the carpet.
“Well, but Bernie, I mean what’s the deal? I mean, you showed me that check, and I—”
As his smile dwindled, his face looked as shocked and hurt as if I’d spat into it. “Oh, Bob,” he said. “Bob, what is this? Look, let’s not play any games here. I know I showed you that check; I’ll show you that check again.” And the folds of his sport shirt quivered in righteous indignation as he rummaged in the credenza and brought it out.
It was the same check, all right. It still read twenty-five dollars and no cents; but Bernie’s cramped scribbling on the other side, above the other man’s signature and all mixed up with the bank’s rubber stamp, was now legible as hell. What it said, of course, was: “In full advance payment, five write-ups.”
So I hadn’t really been robbed—conned a little, maybe, that’s all—and therefore my main problem now, the sick, ginger-ale-flavored feeling that I was certain Ernest Hemingway could never in his life have known, was my own sense of being a fool.
“Am I right or wrong, Bob?” he was asking. “Am I right or wrong?” And then he sat me down again and did his smiling best to set me straight. How could I possibly have thought he meant twenty-five a time? Did I have any idea what kind of money a hackie took home? Oh, some of your owner-drivers, maybe it was a different story; but your average hackie? Your fleet hackie? Forty, forty-five, maybe sometimes fifty a week if they were lucky. Even for a man like himself, with no kids and a wife working full time at the telephone company, it was no picnic. I could ask any hackie if I didn’t believe him; it was no picnic. “And I mean you don’t think anybody else is picking up the tab for these write-ups, do you? Do you?” He looked at me incredulously, almost ready to laugh, as if the very idea of my thinking such a thing would remove all reasonable doubt about my having been born yesterday.
“Bob, I’m sorry there was any misunderstanding here,” he said, walking me to the door, “but I’m glad we’re straight on it now. Because I mean it, that’s a beautiful piece you wrote, and I’ve got a feeling it’s going to go places. Tell you what, Bob, I’ll be in touch with you later this week, okay?”
And I remember despising myself because I didn’t have the guts to tell him not to bother, any more than I could shake off the heavy, fatherly hand that rode on my neck as we walked. In the alcove, out in front of the young bugler again, I had a sudden, disturbing notion that I could foretell an exchange of dialogue that was about to take place. I would say, “Bernie, were you really a bugler in the army, or was that just for the picture?”
And with no trace of embarrassment, without the faintest flickering change in his guileless smile, he would say, “Just for the picture.”
Worse still: I knew that the campaign-hatted head of the bugler himself would turn then, that the fine tense profile in the photograph would slowly loosen and turn away from the mouthpiece of a horn through which its dumb, no-talent lips could never have blown a fart, and that it would wink at me. So I didn’t risk it. I just said, “See you, Bernie,” and got the hell out of there and went home.
Joan’s reaction to the news was surprisingly gentle. I don’t mean she was “kind” to me about it, which would have damn near killed me in the shape I was in that night; it was more that she was kind to Bernie.
Poor, lost, brave little man, dreaming his huge and unlikely dream—that kind of thing. And could I imagine what it must have cost him over the years? How many of these miserably hard-earned five-dollar payments he must have dropped down the bottomless maw of second- and third- and tenth-rate amateur writers’ needs? How lucky for him, then, through whatever dissemblings with his canceled check, to have made contact with a first-rate professional at last. And how touching, and how “sweet,” that he had recognized the difference by saying, “For this you get cash.�
��
“Well, but for Christ’s sake,” I told her, grateful that it could for once be me instead of her who thought in terms of the deadly practicalities. “For Christ’s sake, you know why he gave me cash, don’t you? Because he’s going to sell that story to the Reader’s goddamn Digest next week for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and because if I had a photostated check to prove I wrote it he’d be in trouble, that’s why.”
“Would you like to bet?” she inquired, looking at me with her lovely, truly unforgettable mixture of pity and pride. “Would you like to bet that if he does sell it, to the Reader’s Digest or anywhere else, he’ll insist on giving you half?”
“Bob Prentice?” said a happy voice on the telephone, three nights later. “Bernie Silver. Bob, I’ve just come from Dr. Alexander Corvo’s home, and listen. I’m not going to tell you what he told me, but I’ll tell you this. Dr. Alexander Corvo thinks you’re pretty good.”
Whatever reply I made to this—“Does he really?” or “You mean he really likes it?”—it was something bashful and telling enough to bring Joan instantly to my side, all smiles. I remember the way she plucked at my shirtsleeve as if to say, There—what did I tell you? And I had to brush her away and wag my hand to keep her quiet during the rest of the talk.
“He wants to show it to a couple of his connections in the publishing field,” Bernie was saying, “and he wants me to get another copy made up to send out to Manny on the Coast. So listen, Bob, while we’re waiting to see what happens on this one, I want to give you some more assignments. Or wait—listen.” And his voice became enriched with the dawning of a new idea. “Listen. Maybe you’d be more comfortable working on your own. Would you rather do that? Would you rather just skip the card file, and use your own imagination?”
Late one rainy night, deep in the Upper West Side, two thugs got into Bernie Silver’s cab. To the casual eye they might have looked like ordinary customers, but Bernie had them spotted right away because “Take it from me, a man doesn’t hack the streets of Manhattan for twenty-two years without a little specialized education rubbing off.”
One was a hardened-criminal type, of course, and the other was little more than a frightened boy, or rather “just a punk.”
“I didn’t like the way they were talking,” Bernie told his readers through me, “and I didn’t like the address they gave me—the lowest dive in town—and most of all I didn’t like the fact that they were riding in my automobile.”
So do you know what he did? Oh, don’t worry, he didn’t stop the cab and step around and pull them out of the backseat and kick them one after the other in the groin—none of that My-Flag-Is-Down nonsense. For one thing, he could tell from their talk that they weren’t making a getaway; not tonight, at least. All they’d done tonight was case the joint (a small liquor store near the corner where he’d picked them up); the job was set for tomorrow night at eleven. Anyway, when they got to the lowest dive in town the hardened criminal gave the punk some money and said, “Here, kid; you keep the cab, go on home and get some sleep. I’ll see you tomorrow.” And that was when Bernie knew what he had to do.
“That punk lived way out in Queens, which gave us plenty of time for conversation, so I asked him who he liked for the National League pennant.” And from there on, with deep folk wisdom and consummate skill, Bernie kept up such a steady flow of talk about healthy, clean-living milk-and-sunshine topics that he’d begun to draw the boy out of his hard delinquent shell even before they hit the Queensboro Bridge. They barreled along Queens Boulevard chattering like a pair of Police Athletic League enthusiasts, and by the time the ride was over, Bernie’s fare was practically in tears.
“I saw him swallow a couple of times when he paid me off” was the way I had Bernie put it, “and I had a feeling something had changed in that kid. I had a hope of it, anyway, or maybe just a wish. But I knew I’d done all I could for him.” Back in town, Bernie called the police and suggested they put a couple of men around the liquor store the following night.
Sure enough, a job was attempted on that liquor store, only to be foiled by two tough, lovable cops. And sure enough, there was only one thug for them to carry off to the pokey—the hardened-criminal one. “I don’t know where the kid was that night,” Bernie concluded, “but I like to think he was home in bed with a glass of milk, reading the sports page.”
There was the roof and there was the chimney top of it; there were all the windows with the light coming in; there was another approving chuckle from Dr. Alexander Corvo and another submission to the Reader’s Digest; there was another whisper of a chance for a Simon and Schuster contract and a three-million-dollar production starring Wade Manley; and there was another five in the mail for me.
A small, fragile old gentleman started crying in the cab one day, up around Fifty-ninth and Third, and when Bernie said, “Anything I can help with, sir?” there followed two and a half pages of the most heart-tearing hard-luck story I could imagine. He was a widower; his only daughter had long since married and moved away to Flint, Michigan; his life had been an agony of loneliness for twenty-two years, but he’d always been brave enough about it until now because he’d had a job he loved—tending the geraniums in a big commercial greenhouse. And now this morning the management had told him he would have to go: too old for that kind of work.
“And only then,” according to Bernie Silver, “did I make the connection between all this and the address he’d given me—a corner near the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge.”
Bernie couldn’t be sure, of course, that his fare planned to hobble right on out to the middle of the bridge and ease his old bones over the railing; but he couldn’t take any chances, either. “I figured it was time for me to do some talking” (and he was right about that: another heavy half-page of that tiresome old man’s lament and the story would have ruptured the hell out of its foundation). What came next was a brisk page and a half of dialogue in which Bernie discreetly inquired why the old man didn’t go and live with his daughter in Michigan, or at least write her a letter so that maybe she’d invite him; but oh, no, he only keened that he couldn’t possibly be a burden on his daughter and her family.
“‘Burden?’ I said, acting like I didn’t know what he meant. ‘Burden? How could a nice old gentleman like you be a burden on anybody?’”
“‘But what else would I be? What can I offer them?’”
“Luckily we were stopped at a red light when he asked me that, so I turned around and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Mister,’ I said, ‘don’t you think that family’d like having somebody around the place that knows a thing or two about growing geraniums?’”
Well, by the time they got to the bridge the old man had decided to have Bernie let him off at a nearby Automat instead, because he said he felt like having a cup of tea, and so much for the walls of the damn thing. This was the roof: six months later, Bernie received a small, heavy package with a Flint, Michigan, postmark, addressed to his taxi fleet garage. And do you know what was in that package? Of course you do. A potted geranium. And here’s your chimney top: there was also a little note, written in what I’m afraid I really did describe as a fine old spidery hand, and it read, simply, “Thank you.”
Personally, I thought this one was loathsome, and Joan wasn’t sure about it either; but we mailed it off anyway and Bernie loved it. And so, he told me over the phone, did his wife Rose.
“Which reminds me, Bob, the other reason I called; Rose wants me to find out what evening you and your wife could come up for a little get-together here. Nothing fancy, just the four of us, have a little drink and a chat. You think you might enjoy that?”
“Well, that’s very nice of you, Bernie, and of course we’d enjoy it very much. It’s just that offhand I don’t quite know when we could arrange to—hold on a second.” And I covered the mouthpiece and had an urgent conference about it with Joan in the hope that she’d supply me with a graceful excuse.
But she wanted to go, and she
had just the right evening in mind, so all four of us were hooked.
“Oh, good,” she said when I’d hung up. “I’m glad we’re going. They sound sweet.”
“Now, look.” And I aimed my index finger straight at her face. “We’re not going at all if you plan to sit around up there making them both aware of how ‘sweet’ they are. I’m not spending any evenings as gracious Lady Bountiful’s consort among the lower classes, and that’s final. If you want to turn this thing into some goddamn Bennington girls’ garden party for the servants, you can forget about it right now. You hear me?”
Then she asked me if I wanted to know something, and without waiting to find out whether I did or not, she told me. She told me I was just about the biggest snob and biggest bully and biggest all-around loud-mouthed jerk she’d ever come across in her life.
One thing led to another after that; by the time we were on the subway for our enjoyable get-together with the Silvers we were only barely on speaking terms, and I can’t tell you how grateful I was to find that the Silvers, while staying on ginger ale themselves, had broken out a bottle of rye for their guests.
Bernie’s wife turned out to be a quick, spike-heeled, girdled and bobby-pinned woman whose telephone operator’s voice was chillingly expert at the social graces (“How do you do? So nice to meet you; do come in; please sit down; Bernie, help her, she can’t get her coat off”); and God knows who started it, or why, but the evening began uncomfortably with a discussion of politics. Joan and I were torn between Truman, Wallace, and not voting at all that year; the Silvers were Dewey people. And what made it all the worse, for our tender liberal sensibilities, was that Rose sought common ground by telling us one bleak tale after another, each with a more elaborate shudder, about the inexorable, menacing encroachment of colored and Puerto Rican elements in this part of the Bronx.
The Collected Stories Page 19