Alive with curiosity, I crept up the stairs. I realized, on attaining the head of the flight, that the source of the noise was the summer guest room. The door was closed. I knelt before it and peeked through the keyhole, which, being as ancient as the house itself, was nearly the size of a judas window.
Norbie was seated in the quilted chair. He was dressed in a bright Hawaiian shirt and a capacious pair of taupe Bermuda shorts. Down his broad, puffy face, great tears streamed. With each roomph-roomph his chest heaved as though he were undergoing a severe convulsion, and the flowered shirt front went up and down like a meadow in an earthquake. For an instant I supposed that he was ill; then he wiped his eyes with a soggy handkerchief and shook his head sorrowfully, and I recognized that he was simply crying.
My first impulse was to throw the door open and ask my friend what was wrong, but I hesitated, deterred by a sense of delicacy. In a like situation, I myself would not have welcomed an intruder. So I sneaked back down the stairs, considerably puzzled by what I had witnessed.
As the lugubrious sound filled the house, I fled out the back door and went to sit in the Burying Ground. It was a fine day. The rich blue sky was speckled with ragged swatches of white clouds that looked like exploding antiaircraft shells. In the stand of oaks, some jays were whistling. A faint echo of their calls reverberated from the office buildings on Carlton Street.
What in the world could make Norbert Hess so miserable? I asked myself.
13
THE GREEN SPIRIT
I returned an hour later to find my guest in the leather chair in the parlor drinking a glass of milk. Except for red rims around his bulging eyes, he appeared quite normal. His sleep had been a sound one, he told me, and he had not gotten up until ten-thirty.
“I had that box of doughnuts for breakfast and a couple of cups of jamoke, and now I feel like a million. Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as they say,” he said, grinning.
The tumbler of milk in his chubby hand had an odd brownish color. Then I saw the open bottle of whiskey on the table and understood why.
“How about an eye-opener?” he asked, noticing the direction of my glance.
“No, thanks,” I said, grimacing. “Not for me. I’m not blessed with your iron constitution, Norbie.”
“You mean you don’t have my fat gut,” he replied, patting his monstrous belly. “That’s what it takes—a fat gut. The booze just floats around in there, like raindrops in the ocean. I can’t even get drunk any more, honest to Pete! Bourbon, vodka, gin, Scotch—I might as well be drinking chicken broth. Only one thing—just one—really gives me a glow.”
“And what’s that?” I asked.
“Absinthe, buddy. Absinthe.”
“Absinthe? Where the deuce would you get that?”
Lowering one of his already droopy eyelids in a slow wink, he smiled at me cunningly.
“I know for a fact it’s been outlawed,” I said.
“Yeah, it sure has, Al, but I know a guy. He’s an old Canuck—a Frenchy from Quebec. He brews the stuff in the woods near Whitefish Point on the Peninsula. I found out about it when I was up there hunting once.” Norbie smacked his thin lips. “Absinthe! There’s nothing like it—nothing at all!”
I rummaged in my memory for details regarding this almost legendary liquor. Toulouse-Lautrec had drunk it, and so had the poet Verlaine. It was said that regular use of absinthe had a disastrous effect on the mind. They called it “the green muse.”
“I’ve heard that it’s deadly,” I remarked.
“Horseshoe nails!”
“Isn’t it made from wormwood? And doesn’t wormwood—”
“Wormwood—yeah. But that will never hurt you, Al,” he cut in. “Old ladies have been drinking wormwood tea for years and years. They sell it in health-food stores. As far as ingredients go, absinthe is just like any other hooch—grain alcohol and some vegetable extracts to give it taste and color. That’s all. Now, this Frenchy only uses the purest ingredients. He has to, because he drinks it himself. All the plants—the dittany, the anise, the angelica—he grows right in his own little garden up there.”
My guest swirled the milk and whiskey in the glass, then raised it to his mouth and finished it. “He used to work for Pernod, Al, in Spain. You’ve heard of Pernod. Spain was the last place that produced absinthe legally, but the civil war back in the thirties put them out of business.”
“A man in Paris once assured me it was poison,” I said. “He knew people who died from it, he claimed.”
“Bushwah! Listen, bootleggers gave it a bad name. Absinthe is complicated to manufacture, so guys took shortcuts—you understand, buddy? The bastards used chemicals to make it turn green. They’d throw in copper sulfates and Christ-only-knows-what-all, because it was cheap and easy. Naturally, it killed people. It was like the racketeers with the wood alcohol during Prohibition. Plenty died from that, too, or went blind.”
As plausible as he made it sound, I remained openly skeptical.
Annoyed, he said, “It’s true, Al. When some of those bootleggers got into the French army before the First World War, and the soldiers started to get sick and everything, the government had to clamp down. But good pure absinthe? That wouldn’t hurt anybody. Never!”
“What makes it so marvelous then, Norbie?”
“Ha!” he exclaimed, setting the goiterlike lump of flesh beneath his chin to quivering. “It’s a hundred and fifty proof! That’s almost twice as strong as other booze. Yes, sir! It’s not what you’d call sarsaparilla. When you swallow absinthe, by God, your stomach knows you’re drinking.”
“And you really enjoy it? More than whiskies and brandies and wines and beer?”
“Hell, yeah! Did you say beer? I haven’t drunk that slop since I left the Navy. Beer! I’d rather be hit on my fat ass with a bass fiddle than guzzle a glass of beer, Al.”
He laughed resonantly.
A bit later I sneaked off to the library and consulted my Encyclopaedia Britannica. According to that venerable and highly reliable authority, Norbert Hess was badly mistaken about his favorite beverage. The habitual drinker of absinthe, it stated, could anticipate the following calamities: anxiety, giddiness, loss of brain power, feelings of mental oppression, hallucinations, muscular trembling, emaciation, loss of hair, idiocy, paralysis and eventually death. An evil spirit indeed! Wormwod, as I had thought, was the noxious agent. Absinthe contained so much of this herb that it was virtually a toxic narcotic. Wormwood tea, on the other hand, contained so little of the substance that a person would have to drink many gallons of it to achieve the same dose as that found in a single glass of the liquor.
I was going to show my friend the article, but then I realized how futile it would be. He’d refuse to believe it. He’d insist it was all untrue. Therefore I put the volume back on the shelf and kept my knowledge to myself.
14
I PRESENT NORBIE
For lunch I prepared steaks, baked potatoes, canned string beans and a tossed salad; Norbie gobbled up everything and then ate a loaf of bread. To him it was a snack, I suspect—a mere refection. Afterward he went out on the porch, lay down on the iron-framed couch and was soon snoring clamorously. I washed the dishes, then went up to speak with Eulalia.
She knew of my visitor, of course, and since our lives—Eulalia’s and mine—are not rich in incident, she was in a state of some excitement. Earlier in the day I had described our night on the town. Now I was asked for additional details and an account of all that had happened that morning. When I told of how I’d seen him weeping in his room, her interest was further quickened.
“Is he mad, do you suppose?” she asked. “Why haven’t you brought him here so that I can see him?”
“I will. I will,” I said.
“He sounds very peculiar, Al. You’d better watch yourself. He could be a raving maniac. When will you bring him?”
“Oh, five-thirty . . . or six. When he comes up to dress for dinner, my dear.”
“If you forg
et, Al, I’ll be furious.”
I vowed not to. We gabbed for nearly an hour. I polished her with the chamois and moved the rope-legged table a little closer to the window so that she could see the field of daisies in back of the garage. At three I left her.
On the porch Norbie still slept soundly, his batrachian visage like a Mardi Gras mask. I went to the supermarket. Returning a while later, I found that he had at last awakened and was watching a baseball game on television in the parlor, a glass of whiskey in his hand. I put the groceries away and joined him. It proved to be a suspenseful game, not being decided until the ninth inning when a Red Sox player scored on a long fly ball. Norbie enjoyed it thoroughly. After draining his glass, he struggled out of the chair, said he was going to take a shower and then lumbered up the stairs. I followed, and on the pretext of showing him the books that my great-grandfather had written, steered him into the library.
“Gracious me, he’s gigantic!” exclaimed Eulalia as we entered. “He’s a whale! A hippopotamus! An absolute monster!”
Though Norbie couldn’t hear these crude remarks, they made me uncomfortable nonetheless. My little pitcher—because of loneliness, I suppose—often behaves in a somewhat hostile manner toward strangers. It’s a paradox, like so many things on this planet. And, of course, in the presence of strangers I can’t openly rebuke her for her rudeness without appearing peculiar. At the time of my mother’s death I did on one occasion forget myself and chastised Eulalia in front of Reverend Wayne, our minister. Luckily, the good man attributed this queer conduct to my recent bereavement, but it was a bad gaffe just the same. I hesitate, therefore, to take people into the library.
Norbie, clearly indifferent, looked at the dusty volumes I showed him, and uttered a few polite comments.
Eulalia chattered on. “In those old photographs, dressed in his blue uniform, he was handsome,” she said, “but now he’s disgusting. Doesn’t he have a face just like a frog’s, Al? Do you think it’s really him? Maybe he’s an impostor. He’s too ugly for words. And why has he come here to visit us?”
Behind my back I made frantic motions for her to be quiet—all in vain. She continued to bombard me with inquiries, knowing perfectly well that I couldn’t answer them.
“How did he ever get so blubbery, Al? Why don’t you ask him? He’s a blimp! Have you noticed how he wobbles when he walks? His arms are so fat that they stick out from his sides like penguin’s wings. Don’t bring him near me, please! He’s bound to jostle the table and knock me off.”
I pretended deafness, though it wasn’t easy. To talk with Norbie I was obliged to drown her out, which apart from being a trifle ungentlemanly was very confusing. She was still jabbering when we finally left the room.
15
THE SECOND EVENING
That night—Saturday night—we ate at a Chinese restaurant near Cleveland Circle. At the sight of my friend’s gastronomic heroics, the almond eyes of the waiter grew as round as poker chips. It was another stupendous feast. Even Norbie himself seemed to feel that he’d overdone it and confessed to a measure of logy discomfort at the very end.
“The bean-curd cheese,” he muttered from behind a plateau of sparerib bones. “It’s good, but it’s awfully solid. And those eggs with oyster sauce are kind of heavy too.”
Once more he paid the entire bill. We went directly home afterward, however, and I was grateful for that.
No sooner were we in the door than he said to me, in an odd, conspiratorial way, “Come on up to my room a minute, Al. I got something to show you.”
So we went up, the staircase creaking and grumbling beneath our feet.
“Can you throw that small valise on the bed for me, buddy?” he asked when we reached the room. “If I bend over I’ll bust a seam—sure as sugar’s sweet.”
I did as he requested, and he released the catches and opened the bag. To my surprise I saw that there was no clothing inside. What the suitcase contained instead was three square decanters of a dark-green liquid, and surrounding them a multitude of small parcels wrapped in brown paper. These last were wedged together as tightly as bricks in a chimney.
“Know what’s in those jugs, Al?” Norbie asked.
“No,” I said. “What?”
“Absinthe, that’s what. Absinthe.”
“Really?”
“You bet your booties! You don’t think I’d leave home without my tonic, do you? Look at them—pretty as flowers after the rain.” He drew one of the decanters from its nest and held it aloft. “I don’t know what I’m going to do when they’re gone,” he murmured thoughtfully, setting the bottle on the night table. Then a sly grin burgeoned on his broad face. He pried one of the brown packets from the valise, waggled it in front of my nose and said, “There’s something green in here, too.”
Unable to fathom this remark, I made no reply.
His fat fingers clumsily stripped pieces of Scotch tape from the wrapper. When he’d opened one end, he said, “Look!”
I did. The packet was composed of money. It was a neat, compact sheaf of crisp bills. “Where in the world—” I began.
But he broke in on me. “Don’t worry, Al. It’s not embezzled. No siree! This dough is mine, every buck of it. Try to guess how much is in that bundle!”
“I don’t know,” I said, staring at it.
“Make a guess!”
“I couldn’t, Norb. I have no idea.”
“Five thousand dollars, nearly. And it’s all in small bills—fives, tens and twenties. I made them change the fifties and hundreds. Big bills can be a pain in the butt.”
My eyes returned to the valise and the other parcels.
“Those are the same thing,” said Norbie, resealing the wad of money in his hand and then jamming it back in with the rest. “Altogether there’s fourteen of them. Sixty thousand shinplasters—give or take a few.”
“My God! Sixty thousand dollars? That’s a fortune!”
“Yeah,” he allowed, nonchalantly closing the suitcase lid and snapping the catches. “I suppose so, buddy.”
Nor did he tell me anything more about it. Where the money came from, why he was carrying it with him or what he planned to do with it—all this was left to my imagination. As curious as I was, I couldn’t very well interrogate him.
With the absinthe cradled in his arms, my guest waddled from the room. I trailed along behind him.
“What we need now is ice water,” said he while we descended the stairs. “A pitcher of it. Then we’ll have ourselves a little eau de vie, as the Frenchy calls it.”
I fetched the ice water and two goblets from the kitchen. On my return he immediately uncorked the decanter and poured an inch of the emerald liquid into each of the glasses. The stuff flowed sluggishly, like oil. Next, in the manner of a vaudeville magician, he brought forth from one jacket pocket a box of cubed sugar, and from the other a peculiar-looking spoon with a short, looped handle and a perforated bowl.
“This here is the absinthe spoon,” he said. “You can’t drink absinthe without one, by God! And it’s got to be made out of sterling silver, if the thing’s going to taste right.”
“Oh,” I responded, though I hadn’t the smallest clue as to what he was talking about.
Norbie proceeded to polish the already glittering silver utensil with a napkin, balanced it on the lip of a goblet and then dropped in its bowl a lump of sugar from the box.
“Now comes the critical operation. Watch how it’s done,” he declared pedantically.
With great care he tilted the pitcher over the glass, but only enough to permit the ice water to dribble from the spout a drop at a time. The beads of moisture landed on the sugar cube, quickly saturated it and seeped down through the tiny holes in the spoon to the absinthe below. And an eerie thing happened. The brilliant green fluid lost its color, becoming in a second or two a writhing cloudy yellow. It was quite striking—strangely beautiful, in fact—like some artifice of a medieval alchemist. By this method he filled the goblet a third full, a
nd then, transferring the spoon to the other one, duplicated the process.
“If it don’t drip, Al, it won’t change color, and that spoils the booze,” he explained in a reverent voice.
When he’d completed this second ritual he passed me one of the drinks, took the other himself and plopped into the leather chair.
“Sip it,” he said.
I raised the goblet to my nose. It reeked of licorice.
“Go ahead,” he urged me. “Try it.”
Remembering what the encyclopedia had to say about the stuff, I was naturally loath to do so. Loss of brain power . . . muscular trembling . . . hallucinations . . . idiocy . . . paralysis—the list of miseries came back to me with awful clarity.
“Take a sip, for crying out loud!” Norbie exclaimed.
I cast aside my misgivings, shrugged my shoulders and did as he instructed. Bitterness and the caustic taste of alcohol seared the lining of my mouth. Then the spirit trickled down my esophagus like a rill of fire. I gave a little gasp and said, “Goodness me! That’s powerful!”
“You’re not just humming a hymn!” he replied with gleeful satisfaction. Taking a gulp from his own glass, he swallowed it and licked his lips. “Ah! It’s the best damn hooch in the world, Al. Yes sir!”
Again I sampled the absinthe, rolling it around on my tongue. My palate puckered and my eyes began to water. Noticing my grimace, Norbie assured me that I’d soon learn to handle it, but though I did eventually finish the drink, I would not accept another, much as he insisted. I made myself a whiskey highball instead. He pretended disappointment. It was manifest, however, that he was really rather pleased to see me capitulate to the potency of his pet elixir. Indeed, he became quite jovial and began to tell jokes. And what a number of them he knew!
“This lady goes into a grocery store and she says to the clerk, ‘Young man, do you have dates?’ The clerk says, ‘No, ma’am.’ So the dame says, ‘Well, do you have nuts?’ And the guy says, ‘Ma’am, if I had nuts—then I’d have dates!’ ”
The Secret Life of Algernon Pendleton Page 5