“Look out,” Mr. Vodena said, shaking his head, which was covered with fuzzy white hair like the seed sphere of a dandelion, and smiling impishly, “or Mahir will get your watch chain too, Mr. Pendleton, one of these days.”
At this sally the Turk and I both laughed. Mr. Vodena—a Hungarian or Bulgarian, I’m not sure which—enjoys poking fun at his pal who accepts his jibes good-naturedly. Usually the two of them would be playing checkers together—or draughts, as they called it—but since it was early I guess the day’s tourney had yet to begin.
We exchanged a few more light remarks and then I made my way through the labyrinth of umbrella stands, hookahs and rolled rugs to the front door and departed.
It being a fine, sunny day I chose to walk home. How splendid it would be if I had twelve thousand dollars to bestow on the shopkeeper, I dreamed, so that he could return to Byzantium—to his figs, halvah and shish kebab—and purchase that jewelry store in the bazaar. Unfortunately, however, the check in my wallet represented the whole of my wealth in this rather niggardly world.
At Kenmore Square I slowed my pace, the better to appraise and appreciate the many young college girls who stand about there, wiggling and giggling. Each summer, I’ve noticed, they wear less and less clothing. It makes one wish for a long life.
As sure as a parsnip is not a persimmon,
So is it certain, old men crave young women.
That’s from Engenar’s Leonidas the King. Engenar was sagacious.
4
SENESCENCE
The reason I am inditing this story is to establish the facts while my mind is at ease and my memory clear. Should the police come around making inquiries, then I’m sure to grow flustered and blurt out nonsense. If I have it all set down on paper, there will be no room for misinterpretation and no cause for them to think me a criminal.
That morning I visited the Turk—yes. And on my return I fixed the medicine cabinet in the second-floor bathroom which had come loose from the wall. While engaged in this little chore I had the disenchanting experience of seeing for the first time just how old I’d grown. As we age, nature mercifully dims our vision and so we scarcely note the slow insidious destruction of our youth. The wrinkles, the raised veins, the gaping pores, the dull and weary eyes, the flaccid flesh, the small odd growths, the brown freckles, the yellowed teeth—these ugly symptoms are hidden from, or mitigated by, our weakened sight. We are able therefore to retain our illusions.
That day, however, the grim truth was forced upon me, for as I worked by the window in the streaming sunlight with the mirror only a few inches away, my image was thrown back at me with merciless clarity. It was shocking. The melancholy sensation of having aged in moments grasped my brain like a hard cold hand.
“Decrepit!” I muttered in disgust at this caricature.
The nastiest transformation was that of my hair. Once it had been as thick and tawny as a lion’s mane, rich in curls and waves, luxuriant, vital. Oh, I was a handsome lad in those days! When I entered a room, every eye turned my way, while on a crowded street I could feel, literally feel, the good will of total strangers. People loved me. They vied with one another for my company and attended my every word as though I were an oracle. “What shall we do tonight, Al?” they would ask. Or, “Give me your opinion of this, Al.” Or, “What do you think of so-and-so, Al?” No god was more devoutly worshiped by his priestly retinue than I by my coterie. The world, say what it may, adores youth and beauty. For the elderly it has neither time nor tenderness. Who comes to me today? No one. Who asks my advice? No one. Who looks at me with even mildly friendly eyes? No one.
And as I stared into the scintillating mirror that morning, I could in some measure comprehend why. I was old. My pretty crown of hair was gone and in its place was a limp, yellow-gray mat—a morbid-looking object rather like the pelt of a rodent. Around my ears, which appeared outsized and grotesque, feeble filaments hesitantly wound, bringing too sharply to my mind the eerie fungi that biologists cultivate in dank and gloomy places for obscure scientific purposes. Those sickly strands revolted me.
Where was the young man who thought that destiny held grand things in store for him? Where was the laughing fellow who was sure he possessed all those attributes that
. . . eminence and lasting fame,
Fair fortune and an honored name,
Demand from those who seek acclaim?
Where was he? Where was the prewar Al Pendleton, the one without the wrinkles and the jingle brain?
“You’re ghastly,” I told myself. “Great-grampy, dead in his coffin at ninety-three, was better preserved than you are now. And you’re only fifty-one!”
How awful it is that a body should deteriorate to such a degree while the soul remains so vigorous! Yet that was the way it had to be. Bodies decay but souls are indestructible, and since souls were far more valuable than bodies, the arrangement was a wise one. In time my vigorous spirit would gain another vigorous vehicle, another new and handsome form—though not in this world.
Somewhat cheered by this thought I toggle-bolted the medicine chest back on the wall, avoiding my reflection as best I could. I lit a cigarette and rested for a few minutes on the window seat, watching the tennis players on the courts in the park below. They were all white-clad and flitted about like injured moths.
Then I went downstairs and watered the house plants—the ferns, the ivy and the philodendrons.
5
CONVERSATION WITH MY FRIEND
Later I returned to the second floor and called on Eulalia in the library. She was standing as she usually did on a doily in the center of the rope-legged occasional table, and appeared to be in a good humor. I related the complete story of my visit to Mahir Suleyman.
“And did he pay as much money as the last time?” she asked.
“Yes, forty dollars,” I said. “It’s a fair price. He’ll make a good profit, I’m sure, though not enough to take him back to his beloved Istanbul, poor chap.”
I then told her of my daydream, of being well off again and presenting the Turk with a grand gift of twelve thousand dollars as a kind of gesture. “Think what a magnificent deed it would be! And when it came time for my metempsychosis, I’d be granted a splendid body in the next world. Wouldn’t I, Eulalia—for such a fine disinterested action?”
“No doubt, but remember you haven’t the money,” she replied in her melodious voice. “Why worry about that fellow, anyhow? I’ll bet he’s rich as blazes, actually. You’re the one who’s poor, Al. What will you do when you’ve sold the last of Great-grampy’s curios? What will you do then, Al?”
“Oh my! I don’t know. I haven’t given it much thought. Start on the furniture, I guess.”
Eulalia snickered. “You’re impossible. No sense of money at all. One day you’ll peddle me to Suleyman.”
“Sell you? Never! That’s an awful remark to make!” I exclaimed, shocked. “How can you suggest it even in fun? Why, I’d sooner sell my soul, Eulalia—really I would.”
“Yes, so you say, but I’m not sure I believe you. There are times when I think you don’t care for me as much as you pretend to.”
“Oh, now!”
“I mean it! Yesterday you hardly spoke to me, Al, and on Monday you left the window open so wide that when it rained I was drenched. Had the wind been any stronger the curtains would have knocked me to the floor.”
“I know, I know. I’m awfully sorry, my dear. I saw it clouding up and I wanted to get back, but the bank was crowded and I had to wait to see Mr. Mayhew.”
“If you had gone earlier, instead of fooling with that dog, you’d have had no trouble. Banks are always crowded at lunchtime,” she said, while the sun, sifting through the leaves of the oak in the yard, danced upon her glittering fluted body. “Thank goodness you got rid of that mongrel! The way he bounded about, bumping into things.”
“How did you know?” I asked.
“Know what?”
“That I got rid of him. I don’t recall t
elling you. It was only last night that I did it, Eulalia.”
“Yes, and you came here immediately afterward. Your memory is not what it was, Al,” said she, though I needed no reminder of that debilitation. “But what about Mr. Mayhew? Was he friendly? Do you think he’ll take the house?”
“Oh, no—I don’t believe he’d do that. Not while I’m alive, he wouldn’t. He was cordial enough. He simply said that he couldn’t lend me any more money. Not a sou.”
“And why should he? Why should Mr. Mayhew lend money on a property that for all intents and purposes he already owns? You’re such a fool, Al! If you had managed the last mortgage money better, instead of squandering it on that Irish widow you picked up at Hall’s Pond, you wouldn’t be short now. You wouldn’t listen to me, though.”
As I did not want to start a spat by again attempting to explain that nothing had ever passed between Mrs. Clancy and myself—which, worse luck, was the absolute truth—I merely countered my friend’s argument by itemizing the many debts I’d settled with those funds, and by pointing out that we were virtually free and clear for another six months.
“Perhaps by then,” I continued cheerily, “Aunt Beaty down in Ellsworth might pass on, and leave me a few miles of that Maine shoreline she owns. What do you think?”
“I think you’re a child,” Eulalia said. Then she sighed once and added, “You really ought to go there and throttle her, you know.”
“Throttle Aunt Beaty? What a thing to say!”
“Why not? The creature’s eighty-nine years old. She’d be much better off. Expected inheritances are all well and good, but they can’t compare with hard cash—and hard cash is what you require, Al. Mr. Mayhew, cordial or not, will foreclose if you don’t make your payments.”
That was a disturbing idea. Both of us fell silent. A fly came in the open window, inspected the room and departed. I must install that screen, I thought.
Meanwhile the sunbeams went on flecking and flashing across Eulalia’s delicately curved spout, her graceful strap handle and her dainty bowl. How very lovely she was! Perfectly formed. Not a firing blemish of any sort. Nor was there a chip, a nick nor a single age crack on her pear-shaped body.
My father, who had bought her at Grosser’s auction rooms in 1939 and who was a connoisseur of such things, unequivocally proclaimed her “the finest Worcester porcelain pitcher in the whole damn world.” She was his favorite piece. Of course, not being attuned, he never heard her speak. Neither did I in those far-off days, for that matter. It was only after the war, by which time Dad had died of stroke, that my ears were finally able to distinguish the soft sound of Eulalia’s lyric voice. When it happened I was quite taken aback, I need scarcely mention, but I did have sense enough to accept the phenomenon for what it was, and not pretend it was some baseless fantasy. After all, people of acute awareness are familiar with much stranger things than talking china jugs. The universe teems with marvels.
Even before I heard her, however, Eulalia’s beauty attracted me. I could sit for hours gazing at her in deep fascination. Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn expresses clearly the warm, euphoric sensations that filled me during these interludes. On one side of her bowl there is a scene in a cartouche which is an incomparably sweet and beguiling reverie—a kind of innocent dream of the type preadolescent children sometimes have. In a bucolic setting a rose-cheeked milkmaid lounges on a grassy knoll, one white arm supported by an overturned milk pail, while her lustrous blue eyes are raised in manifest adoration to a smiling shepherd boy who looms above her, his right leg crossed in front of his left and his languid weight sustained by a slender, knobby crook. Over their pretty heads a pair of stylized larks in a stylized tree sing them a silent madrigal. The middle-distance contains a few fat cows grazing peacefully in a meadow, and beyond that there is a tiny thatched cottage from whose chimney pearly smoke ascends to the lucid azure sky.
How enchanting it is! One longs to enter it, as Alice entered her looking-glass. The tableau is encircled by pinkish-purple scrolls, and the rest of the smoothly glazed surface is abundantly adorned with sprigs of fruits and berries and sprays of leaves and flowers—the whole done in the mellowest greens, oranges, sienna browns, crimsons and buttercup yellows.
“What are you daydreaming about now?” she asked abruptly, dispelling my thoughts.
“Oh, nothing. . . nothing,” I answered. “I was dwelling on Aunt Beatrice. You say the old doll is eighty-nine? Do you believe I might live so long, Eulalia?”
“Not without money, Al,” she remarked dryly. “Not without money.”
6
MORE THAN WHAT MEETS THE EAR
Though a habitual reader, I cannot lay claim to being a genuinely studious man. My knowledge is considerable, but too diverse to make me an authority in any field. I am not sufficiently disciplined for scholarly labors, and so read only those books that provide me with easy pleasure. For this reason I’ve never acquired a sound store of scientific erudition, which lack I keenly feel. Nevertheless, I’m sure I can explain satisfactorily to anyone with an open mind how it is that an English porcelain pitcher can speak.
Of the universe in which we live, we know comparatively little. It is an established fact, for instance, that there are colors we cannot see, like infrared and ultraviolet, whose wavelengths are outside the narrow range of radiation visible to our imperfect eye. There are also forms that are too large or too small for man’s comprehension, substances too bland for his taste, pressures too light for him to feel, and odors too feeble to stimulate his organs of olfaction. The most famous of all these limitations, however, is that of sound. Who has not heard of (though not heard) those dog whistles whose pitch exceeds the adequacy of the human ear, while remaining fully audible to Fido or Rover? We are deaf to half the tones and tunes that charge the air around us. The wail of the wind, the songs of birds and insects, the crack of thunder and the roaring of the sea are all filtered and muffled before they register on our brains.
These are facts, as I have said, and quite beyond dispute. On the strength of them I submit that all the objects in creation have voices, but that we are unable to hear their speech because our ears were not designed for that sort of reception.
How, then, do I hear Eulalia—and occasionally other “inanimate” entities—if such is the case? I confess I do not know exactly. Once a medium told me that I was “clairaudient”—that the voices were really those of dead people—but I can’t believe that; I can’t believe it, I mean, in the sense that she intended. The voices belong to the objects as surely as my voice belongs to me. I’ve always been extraordinarily sensitive and perceptive. In my childhood I often saw and felt things that others missed completely. Then, during the war I suffered a brain concussion which I suspect altered and enlarged the wavelength range of my hearing. These two elements—my innate impressibility and the effects of cerebral shock—are in all likelihood responsible for my possession of this exceptional gift.
Perhaps the above explanation will seem like nonsense to some. I make no apology. The matter of vocal cords and all the other physiological accouterments of speech, the question of “inorganic” articles having brains and senses—these are mysteries I must leave for sages to solve.
Eddington, the illustrious astronomer and physicist, observes somewhere that any true law of nature is liable to seem irrational to rational man. Berkeley, Leibnitz, Descartes, Spinoza and all the other great minds of science unanimously recognized that our powers of observing and of knowing are inhibited by the deficiencies of our bodies. What is science, indeed, if not a determined effort to expand the bounds of human perception? The incomparably brilliant Albert Einstein, with whom I actually had several conversations when I was an undergraduate at Princeton, revealed with his theories of relativity and his wondrous concept of the four-dimensional space-time continuum, that the universe was a place far different from what we had previously imagined. Strange things occur out there.
And so, if one correlates the beliefs of the ma
thematicians and astrophysicists with those of the parapsychologists and metaphysical philosophers, it becomes impossible to deny the immortality of the soul and the ubiquity of life.
That I hear what I hear is beyond question. The voice of Eulalia is a reality. Why, then, should I pretend to myself that it doesn’t exist, merely because those around me are unable to detect its mellifluous sound?
Yes, she speaks to me all right—and a very good thing, too! Before she did so, my life was a bit desolate, what with one problem and another. If it hadn’t been for Eulalia I might well have slipped off the rails, somewhere along the way.
7
THE ARRIVAL
There’s a splatter of blood under the cloverleaf table, one that I missed this morning. Yes, and I see a lump of brain too. A drab object, the human brain. This glob looks exactly like a photograph in one of my old medical books. To think that it once generated bright thoughts! But I’d better clean it up.
That day—last Friday, less than seventy-two hours ago—I went to sit in the Burying Ground, and Mrs. Binney materialized at her fence and asked me if I was talking with the tombstones again, which is one of her standard quips. After I’d made some suitable reply, the old dear proceeded to tell me the latest news. Captain Kidd, her dachshund, was infested with fleas, she said. I commiserated. She’d gone over his coat with her vacuum cleaner, but the poor Captain was still scratching and gnawing, as I could see for myself. We dicussed the malignancy, adroitness and stamina of fleas. I mentioned that they lurked in dusty places. Offended, Mrs. B. declared that in her home there were no dusty places. They might have come from the yard, I suggested. She gasped twice—a speech mannerism—and said that maybe she’d “better Hoover the whole yard then.”
It was at this point in our entrancing conversation that my doorbell rang and I started back to the house. I remember admiring the wisteria as I approached the venerable curb-roofed building. Vines as thick as my wrist clambered up the porch posts and the yellow clapboard siding. They seemed bent on crushing the structure in a mad embrace. Once, years ago, I thought the triangular lavender flowers were the beards of sly elves whose faces were hidden in the clustered leaves. Atop one of the dormer windows there was a huge crow, so black that it might have been a hole in the sky. It gave a klaxon call.
The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton Page 2