“Eh?” Wakefield said.
“I’ll tell you how it got there. Disraeli. He and Queen Victoria.” Mrs. Krafft nodded. “And it’s been since then—they used to have a soul. Back in the days of William Shakespeare. But not anymore. Now they’re shopkeepers, Mister Wakefield. And you know why.”
“Well,” Wakefield said, unconvinced, “I don’t see how I can approve of all that violence. I don’t think people should go out and kill other people.” Down in the little man’s core was a positive horror of violence. “Those Northern people sometimes do that. I remember a Finn, a janitor living down in the basement of an apartment building I once lived in—although I’m certainly not living there, now. One day he went completely out of his mind… Let me tell you, he took that wife of his and just cut her up terribly. It was the most awful thing in the world… They called the police and ambulance, but”—Wakefield made a gesture—“it was too late. Why, he just cut open that woman like you would butcher a hog. That’s the way those Northerners are. Berserkers, they call them.” Tautly, he finished: “Underneath their nice blue eyes and blond hair there’s something ugly. Something that frightens me. They look so pleasant, but sooner or later it comes out… It boils over and destroys and breaks and tears down.”
Mrs. Krafft was not paying much attention. “Germany had spirituality!” she cried indignantly. “Her music—Bach, Beethoven, Schubert—we have nothing like that here. Great painters, artists, poets, scholars. Germany was the soul of Europe, Mister Wakefield. And they killed her, the way they always kill those with souls. They can’t stand those with souls—it reminds them of their own bestiality. When Germany died, a light went out. And the darkness has been creeping in since.” She brooded. “I’ll tell you this, Mister Wakefield. We must reach all mankind. We must bring them warning, so they can save themselves. When the Great Battle begins, we’re going to need all the help we can get. It’s going to be a terrible ordeal.”
For a time neither of them spoke. Then Wakefield asked uncertainly: “Do you think the struggle between the free world and Communism is—the Great Battle? I mean, are we seeing Armageddon already? There’s some difference of opinion about this in the Movement. I know some feel we’re fighting it now, when we fight Asiatic Communistic atheism. But there’re others who feel that we’re just as materialistic and guilty as the Russians.”
“We’re contaminated,” Mrs. Krafft said furiously. “America has got to go, too. The purification of the world can’t begin until the war levels everything. I tell you, Mister Wakefield, I’m looking forward to this war! When the bombs begin to fall on the cities of men, when the walls begin to fall everywhere, the way they’re falling now in Korea—I know that’s the rain. The same rain that fell on the ancient world… And there will be those who’ll be saved, as Noah was saved. And the Lord is speaking to us now, telling us to come and save ourselves, speaking to us through this man—” She jerked savagely at the picture of Theodore Beckheim on the wall above their heads. “It will be through him that we’ll be saved. And the world will be scorched clean and pure by the sacred holy fire of God. And all the pestholes of iniquity, all the marketplaces, the slaughterhouses, the cities, the buildings, all the works that vain man has built up, his puny attempts to govern himself—”
“That’s so,” Wakefield agreed nervously, wishing she wouldn’t shout. “The League of Nations failed, and the UN is going to fail the same way.”
“Man can’t govern himself! Man is too sin-ridden, too corrupt!” Her voice soared excitedly. “Man denied God—man stood up to God and said: I can take care of myself. And now we’re paying the price! It’s scientists who’ve got us where we are, tampering with the universe. Scientists with their bombs—science is the devil’s way. They and their A-bombs and bacteriological warfare. It’s God’s judgment!”
Wakefield winced at the shower of saliva and words that poured from Mrs. Krafft’s impassioned mouth. “Yes,” he muttered, and edged away. It was easy to sense the deep forces rumbling inside the white-haired woman, and they made him uneasy. All the women in the Health Food Store were that way, all except Betty, who never got excited about anything, except the time the toilet drain leaked all over the drums of dried apricots down in the basement. The whole room buzzed with suppressed emotion; to Wakefield it was like twenty radios dinning in his ear at once. He thought of his room, his quiet little combination bedroom and living room. His piano, his books, and his easy chair. His old-fashioned lamp and slippers. In his microscopic kitchen he could fix himself a bowl of soup and some soy fritters. Potatoes and fresh string beans. Perhaps some stewed prunes for dessert. He didn’t have to eat at the Health Food Store; all at once he wanted terribly to get away.
“Good evening,” he muttered hurriedly, and got to his feet. “Thanks for the tea, Betty.”
“You’re going?” Mrs. Krafft demanded in astonishment.
“Home,” Wakefield muttered. “Things to do. Fix dinner. Company coming later. Glad to have met you.”
“You’re not going to go hear him?” Mrs. Krafft was incredulous. Several other ladies had ceased chattering and sat blinking in amazement at Wakefield as he stood indecisively at the door. “We’ll all be going down together—can’t you wait?”
He did want to hear Theodore Beckheim again. But it would be well over an hour. How could he sit there with Mrs. Krafft, feeling the tension of her body, hearing the roaring undercurrents of her pent-up hates? It was bad enough eating lunch there; at least he had his table in the back where nobody bothered him. Why couldn’t Theodore Beckheim visit him in his own little room, all by himself?
“You have to wait,” Mrs. Krafft said authoritatively. “You can’t go.”
“You sit down and wait,” Betty wheezed. “We’re all going over to the hall together in Mrs. Krafft’s car.”
“But I’m hungry,” Wakefield complained peevishly, feeling caught and helpless. “I still haven’t had my dinner.”
“We’ll fix your dinner right now,” Betty said. “Lulu!” she shouted. “Come out here and find out what Mister Wakefield wants for his dinner.”
Wakefield pawed his coat pocket anxiously. Did he have his knife and fork with him? He pulled the little leather and velvet case out and snapped it open. There they were, the two gleaming-clean shafts of silver. “Could I eat in the back?” he asked nervously. “I hate to eat out here with everybody.”
“Fix up the back table for Mister Wakefield,” Betty said to the tall brown-eyed colored woman who had emerged dutifully from the back, hands dripping with dishwater. “Clear it off and get him his chair.”
“There’s rice and cheese sauce with egg and tomato, macaroni salad and sliced bananas with cream,” Lulu announced. With a swirl of her heavy skirt she again disappeared into the back through the dusty yellow curtains. Wakefield hesitated, then followed anxiously after her.
He had hardly seated himself at the big wood table and was setting out his knife and fork, when Mrs. Krafft appeared.
“I’ll sit with you while you eat,” Mrs. Krafft announced, seating herself across from him. As Lulu methodically began getting out the food, Mrs. Krafft sucked in deep lungfuls of baked oven air. “Ah,” she said. Her sharp, alert eyes fixed themselves on Wakefield. “This place radiates peace,” she stated suddenly.
Wakefield nodded and muttered something, too dazed by misfortune to speak.
“It radiates peace,” Mrs. Krafft repeated. She gazed up at a display of pills for diabetes, high blood pressure, bottles of dark liquid for ulcers, varicose veins, special sugar-free cookies and pale dried honey, vitamin capsules, packages of cracked wheat and bran. “There’s a fullness about it. A completeness. There is no out-of-balance here. This store is wholly realized.”
Wakefield waited miserably for his cheese and rice and wished she’d leave.
He had seen them in there. He had gone past the door, caught the blur of female motion, heard the sharp shrill sounds, and continued on past. Behind the fruit and date display he saw
a brief glimpse of Horace Wakefield sitting in the middle of them, teacup in his diffident fingers, dabbing daintily at his lips with a paper napkin.
Now Stuart Hadley sat at the drug counter across the street, arms folded in front of him, a Coke glass of ice water by his elbow, a menu lying on its face. He gazed sightlessly at the moist counter, waiting for the memory and impressions of the Health Food Store to fade. Here and there a few patrons crouched over their hot beef sandwiches, coffee, apple pie a la mode. Behind the counter the pretty little dark-haired waitress, pert and busy in her starched white uniform, hurried to complete his ham and cheese sandwich.
The drugstore was dully noisy with cash register sounds, people’s voices, the coming and going of middle-class women buying Alka-Seltzer, Bayer aspirin, mineral oil, chewing gum, magazines. Down the counter from him a heavyset man in a black leather jacket was reading the comic section of the San Francisco Examiner.
Stuart Hadley brooded. How could he go there? Into a place like that, among people like that… The word came up in his mouth like sickness from his stomach. Cranks. All of them, cranks and crackpots—nuts. He couldn’t play games with himself: that was what they were, and if he went in there and sat and listened to the lecture, he would be a crank, too.
A young blond-haired man in a clean-cut blue suit: that was Stuart Hadley. Personable, likable, friendly, social—a good mixer. A good salesman. A good husband. A man who kept his shoes shined, his trousers pressed, his chin shaved, his armpits rubbed with aluminum sulfate. A man who looked good and smelled good, a man who could walk into the Top of the Mark and be speedily served.
Not a wild-eyed madman with a flowing beard, sandals, straw in his hair, and a sign grasped, reading:
JESUS SAVES
He couldn’t imagine himself apart from his shirts and cuffs and single-breasted light-colored suits. He couldn’t picture himself independent from his closet and dresser drawers, his jar of Arrid, his Wildroot cream oil, his Dyanshine shoe polish. And yet, there had to be something more to Stuart Hadley than that; surely there was a core, a center, beyond the bottles and clothes, beyond what was reflected by his shaving mirror perched on top of the dresser.
Could that core, the inner Stuart Hadley, be as crazy as Horace Wakefield? Inside the shell of affability, was there a demented, unstable entity, aching to come creeping out, a furious wailing larva struggling to emerge and crawl around, slimy and odd, not human, not ordinary, not pretty?
There was nothing pretty about the Health Food Store.
There was nothing attractive about Horace Wakefield with his hernia belt, Kleenex, and glasses. In his withered face, in the dead-fish eyes of the little prunelike people, there was a musty, stale, unhealthy fuzz. A stench of illness hung over them, not the usual kind, but a deeper illness. The Wakefields were a public sidewalk, sneezed on, spat on; there was a dried layer of filth over them that was so old it no longer could be identified as filth. It looked more like wax. Like varnish. Wakefield’s small face was carefully varnished with offal; behind it he grinned and talked and went about his business. He had polished it until it shone: he was proud.
Conjuring up the image of Wakefield made Hadley feel uncomfortable, as if he had given birth to Wakefield from his own body, out of his own mind. All at once he wished he could crack open the polished, brittle shell that was Horace Wakefield; a quick fantasy momentarily held him, a vision of the little head splitting open like a dried seedpod, and Wakefield’s brains scattering in tiny dry fragments, blown here and there by the wind. Perhaps to grow and take root all over again, in some dark, slimy place, where there was moisture and silence for nourishment. A race of Wakefields, growing up from the nocturnal soil, like mushrooms.
His fantasy surprised him; how could he consider hitting a harmless little crank? He imagined Horace Wakefield flying apart at the first touch, glasses going one way, perhaps his whole head, his legs and hernia belt another. Horace Wakefield was the sickly inner portion of his own mind, and he imagined himself stamping and jumping on the withered dried-up body until there was nothing left of it. The way, as a child in Washington, he had trod again and again on puffballs growing in the dirty open fields.
Shame touched him, and collapsed his fantasy. Without meaning to, he had recalled an event of his early childhood; now he sought to return it to the hidden parts of his mind, where he would not have to think of it or entertain its existence.
There he was, a child, a boy of five, scampering through the yellow sludge and ice of an eastern winter. Dressed in red mittens, knickers, rubbers, a stocking wool cap yanked down over his ears. What was he doing? Grimly, intently, he was chasing a little girl, a child’s hoe gripped between his hands. As he ran he slashed violently at her; the girl wailed and screamed as the two of them raced across the open field between the grammar-school building and the gym. Halfway there—the memory of it refused to depart—he savagely brought the hoe down on the child’s head. The child, with a shriek, fell face-forward on the frozen gravel; at that, Stuart Hadley turned and scampered back the way he had come, drained of hostility.
It seemed doubtful that he could have done such a thing. Something, perhaps, the girl had said; some reference to his stutter. As a child he had stuttered; it had been impossible for him to get out the thoughts and feelings that choked his throat. Laughing, poking fun at him…she deserved what she got. Only, he had spent the next six months in a special school operated by the city, for problem children.
“Say, you’re asleep.”
Hadley grunted and glanced up.
“Here’s your sandwich and Coke.” The counter girl, laughing and amused, pushed the plate in front of him. “Wake up.”
“Thanks,” Hadley said. He came gratefully back to the present. “Thanks a lot.”
The girl lingered, coy, innocent, cheeks warm with joking intimacy. “What’s your wife say about you sitting here? Don’t she fix your dinner?”
On Hadley’s left hand was the gold band of his wedding ring. He rubbed it self-consciously. “She’s sick tonight.”
“I bet,” the girl said, leaning against the counter. “Don’t kid me,” she said. “I’ll bet you’re going out,” she said. “This is Saturday night.”
Hadley ate his sandwich, Coke, plate of greasy potato chips. He pushed them into his mouth listlessly, eyes blank with thought, seeing only a vague white-cotton shape where the girl stood. Here he was, passing away the time until the lecture started. Wandering around aimlessly by himself, without Ellen, killing two hours until time to head for the Watchmen Hall with the rest of them, the Wakefields and the shrill overdressed women.
Why did the wealthy middle-aged women appear? What interested them? Wherever a movement of this kind arose, there came the fat old women with their money and leisure. Paying for, providing meeting places for, pulling wires for, listening to, whatever was done and said. Didn’t they have anything else in their lives? With their big homes, Chryslers, clothes, money, were they still unsatisfied?
It was a mystery.
Yet, it explained something. The wealthy old women were not the same as Horace Wakefield; the withered flower clerk lived in a single rented room with a tiny kitchen, a sterile, neat little cell where no bird sang and no warmth stirred the barren carpets and walls. The Movement drew different types: it drew fretful old women and impotent clerks; and he had seen solemn Negro faces row after row. What did sturdy Negro shapes have in common with the thickly perfumed old women? Laborers and their wives; he had seen them, too. And young people—a handful of skinny devout kids, overflow from Youth for Christ. Fervent teenage fanatics.
And himself.
Gloom descended over him again. For a brief moment he had thought his real self was revealed, trapped as it rose to the surface. Disgusting as it was, shoddy and terrible, it was the real Stuart Hadley: another Wakefield. He had been revolted, thinking of himself as another dour-faced clerk with a hernia belt and a private box of Kleenex…but at least he was located. Now that was gone. Agai
n he was lost: Stuart Hadley was going to hear Beckheim speak, but that did not tell him who or what Stuart Hadley was.
He might be a crank. Or he might not.
“Anything more?” the girl asked him as he pushed away his plate. “Dessert? Ice cream? I bet your wife fixes you your dinner every night and darns your socks and tucks you into bed at night. You’re so helpless… You spilled your water all over the counter.” Wistfully she added: “That’s sixty-five cents. You can have more coffee if you want; refills are free.”
He paid and left the drugstore.
The evening streets were cool and dim. Lonely. Hands in his pockets, he headed toward the hall, past the bright, modern stores of the downtown business section. He continued on, toward the Southern Pacific tracks that neatly divided the newer, more prosperous town from the older slums that had been Cedar Groves fifty years ago.
A commuter train from San Francisco was spilling out steam and weary trails of hunched-over businessmen in long coats. Their wives greeted them and hurried to drive them home to dinner and bed. Beyond the train tracks hulked warehouses and factories. Traffic slowed down as it felt its way along the twisting, narrow streets. Negro toughs lounged in front of yellow hole-in-the-wall grocery stores. Tiny wooden shops, dirty and ill-kept. Fat Negro women strolled by with bulging sacks of groceries. Then the slum business section: pool halls, cheap hotels, shoeshine parlors, run-down bars, dirty cleaning establishments, and a filthy garage with a field of rusted, ruined auto wrecks beside it.
Here the poor lived, while not more than half a mile back, modern dress shops, barbershops, jewelry and floral shops glittered swankly along El Camino Real. Here there was nothing but ramshackle old yellow-board tenements, ancient rubbish heaps left over from the turn of the century. Relics that had survived the earthquake. Trash and debris were strewn along the sidewalks and gutters; bits of the tottering buildings that had flaked loose and blown away.
Voices From the Street Page 9