by John Hersey
‘Are you trying to tell me that you didn’t cheat?’
‘Well, as the husband…’
‘Oh, Jesus!’ Vehemently whispered. What a strange name to invoke in protest against my stupid remark.
* * *
—
NOW IT is the janitor who is whispering. He inclines his head close to mine, aims his cleaver of a nose at my cheek. ‘I heard you, before.’
Is he some kind of operative? Informer? I do not want to exchange whispers with this creep in a green coverall with an eagle on his shoulder, and I say out loud, ‘Yes, I saw you were eavesdropping.’
But he insists on whispering. ‘I mean way before. About your petition. Look, if you louse me up, I’ll get you, sure as hell.’
Aloud: ‘Have you fallen out of your nest?’
Whisper: ‘Suppose we get to the windows exactly the same time, I’m at the window right next to you. The minute you start in, I’m done for.’ He suddenly says out loud, ‘We’re all finished.’
His shoulder trembles against my shoulder. He is pale. I do not feel threatened. It is he who feels threatened. I feel depressed.
The space I occupy is near the center of the Marinson sleeping-hall. It is defined by white lines, about an inch wide, painted on the varnished pine boards of the floor. What I think of as the head of my space, because I sleep with my head in that direction, is toward the north; I sleep, in other words, parallel to Whitney Avenue. On my right, lengthwise in the hall, is the passageway, eight inches wide, to the various spaces in our row and the next one. Each person tries to give his space a private style. I have adopted a quite common practice of bunking like a seaman on top of a long chest of drawers. The distinction of my space is that, apart from this chest-bed, it is bare. It is empty. Nothing but uncovered pine boards. No desk, no chair, no rug, no lamps, no TV, no books. Nothing. I have achieved a highly personal style by reducing my property—and my needs—to an absolute minimum. People think I am either pathetically poor or barren in imagination, but I have noticed that whenever I have guests, they get very high in my space, just from being in it. That is because so much of it is space. In a sense I have the largest home in New Haven.
But it is not large enough.
The grandmother is nudging me, and I turn toward her.
‘You haven’t told me what your petition is.’
The janitor’s fear and anger at my petition are on my mind; I haven’t dealt with him, and I don’t relish at this moment the idea of setting the circuitry printer’s active tongue in motion. Shall I make something up?
‘I think I’d rather not discuss it.’
‘You’re just like my son—big Robert. He keeps things from me. Deliberately. He does it to hurt me. When little Robert was born, do you know how I found out he had come into this world? Marcia had gone to the hospital—she was having some trouble with the veins in her legs—so I called the hospital, I got the nurses’ station on the floor where she was, and they said, “We aren’t allowed to give out information…. Hold on a minute. We can put you through to your daughter-in-law when she finishes nursing.” That’s how I found out—they let it slip out that she had little Robert at her breast. He was already a day old. See what I mean?’
I must turn this old talkpot back on herself. ‘You’re so interested in everyone’s petition—what’s yours?’
‘I’ll trade. You first.’ She is grinning.
I say, I’ll bet yours is about this little Robert of yours. Right?’
‘It is. Yes, it is. It’s about Robert.’ She pauses, then, unable to help herself, goes on. ‘I don’t want him to learn to read. I want him to have a useful skill.’
‘I thought you were so proud he’d been chosen.’
‘Of course I’m proud. But I’m also interested in his future.’
‘Don’t his parents have something to say?’
‘They want him to read.’
‘Do you always go over their heads this way?’
‘I have to stay active.’
The girl has turned her head to the left and is listening. I am distracted. A deep part of my attention is drawn to the front of my body. The part of my mind that carries on with the grandmother is the stilted part devoted to manners, courtesy. I answer her only because I feel it would be rude not to. Another part, concerned with survival and courage and hope and aggression, reminds me that the janitor is not at all satisfied with what I have said to him. At the edge of each layer of attention is a clamor of impressions: traffic hum, brick turrets, blue pompon, siren, sparrows, snarls from behind, resins, the nibbling of fear.
The girl says to the grandmother, ‘You mean to say you’re interfering this way just to keep your mind occupied?’
The glasses, like headlights, swerve and throw their baleful beams at the girl. ‘What’s the difference? They’ll turn me down.’
The girl snorts. ‘Then why stand in line this way?’
‘I like it. I enter a petition lots of days. I stand on line four, five times a week. You meet people. I’m talking to you right now.’
I say, ‘That’s a stupid thing to do. Look at the people behind you. You may be keeping somebody away from the windows who really has a hardship case.’
She bathes me with a pitying look. ‘You born yesterday? There’s lots of us come all the time.’
‘Can’t you see that hurts everybody?’
‘How hurts? Do you think you’d get a yes if I weren’t here?’
This waitline, which is agony for most of us, is the grandmother’s social life. She makes me feel that my pessimism, like my attention to her words, is shallow.
I laugh and say to her, ‘You’re a case!’
‘Listen,’ she says, ‘if you’d been through what I’ve been through…’
The girl is laughing, too, now.
The front I put up is earnest and hopeful, but truly I am pessimistic. Bureaucracy attracts such mediocre people; we are in the hands of imbeciles. It would make more sense to put this grandmother in charge of the petition windows than whoever is there now.
2
WE ARE STILL in the shade of the Church Street buildings; the day is going to be hot. In this weather, if one dresses for the waitline warmly enough for the early morning hours, while it is still dark and foggy, then he is bound to suffer from the heat of the forenoon. The front of my body, on which my sensory attention is focussed, is already tenderly heating up. I have no feeling at all in my back.
The breeze, when it comes, eddies capriciously, and the wisps of hair at the girl’s nape are stirred now this way, now that.
The siren keens again. How much time before I must leave for work? I cannot remember. What is this girl, this urgency, doing to my inner clock?
I write reports. The job to which I must make my way is in the state building out on Bassett Street, and I write reports for my department. My desklet is in a six-by-six cubicle with walls which do not go to the ceiling—plaster divider three feet high, crinkled acrylic panels above, to a height of five feet six. The four desklets are each two feet square; one tucks one’s knees under. From overhead come showers of fluorescent light and of confused sounds from all the other cubicles—a song of typewriters, calculators, duplicators, teletype machines, creaking chairs, shifting feet, clearing throats; murmurs of Acceptance with overtones of Wanting the Day to Be Done.
My reports invariably put a good face on things—their tenor goes against the grain of my pessimistic bias; perhaps that is why I occasionally have an angry stomach.
I doubt if anyone reads my reports. But if one is late I get a warning printout from the computer.
‘I wouldn’t mind changing jobs myself,’ I whisper to the girl—to the right side of her face.
‘I suppose everyone wants to,’ she whispers. ‘I suppose that’s why they’ll turn me down.’
‘But your petiti
on isn’t a selfish one.’ There is a slight note, I hope a playful one, of mockery in this echoing line.
‘It is selfish, really,’ she whispers, turning my ribbing into an accusation, ‘because I don’t enjoy what I’m doing now.’
She has told me that she works in a bakery. She squeezes frosting decorations onto cakes—edging, star-shaped kisses, furbelows, bunting swoops; birthday greetings, business messages, consolations. Cakes in the shapes of towers, books, sports cars, beds with covers turned down. Discussing her cakes back when we were getting acquainted, before dawn, she whispered to me, ‘A lot of people have the illusion that they can make things happen by eating shapes they connect with those happenings.’
‘Why would you like to change jobs?’ she now asks me.
‘So few higher-ups in my department can read. Who reads my reports? A good writer like me should have more readers!’
‘Isn’t it hard,’ she whispers, veering, ‘being separated from your daughter?’
‘I see her on rest days’—knowing it is not enough. It took so long—so many waitlines, less crowded ones than this, to be sure, in those days, but slow ones all the same—to get permission to have a child at all. Jill is twelve. I see her in my memory as being three, or perhaps four; her mouth is pursed as she works at weaving colored strips of paper together. She is in the bedlam of a daycare center, sitting cross-legged on the floor with a storm of hundreds of children whirling around her, she is one flake in a blizzard of innocence; yet at her weaving she is poised, serene, concentrated. Her generation does not seem to feel crowded. She floats in her natural medium. Her eyes, her ears work differently from mine. She has perceptions I cannot begin to share: Once, when she was six, she said, ‘When Jeremy claps his hands, one hand makes more noise than the other.’ In that her mind has been shaped by a more dense and shifting time even than mine, she and I will never understand each other. I adore her, but I cannot alert her. And if she tries to teach me something new, I either refuse to learn or mis-hear her; she strikes chords in an entirely new mode, to which I am deaf.
‘What is she like?’
‘She looks like me.’ My small claim to immortality.
‘But that doesn’t tell me anything. I can’t see your face.’
Of course that is true. Since well before dawn we have been so close-packed that the girl has not been able to turn her head far enough around to get a good look at me. I find this disturbing. The pressure of my body against hers does not tell her what sort of person I am; her sense of me comes only from what she hears in my voice. It is true that I don’t know how wide her face is, but at least I can see: the wisps of fine hair at her neck, the sky on her skin, the bump that I presume to be related to humor on the left side of her face. The three-quarters rear view shows her to be an easy person—no tense muscles, no started veins. The sight of her flesh so close to my own—her cheek, the side of her neck—makes her real and helps me define her.
She has seemed responsive. I remember how, a while ago, she leaned her head back toward me, when I put out a few sympathetic syllables at her sudden puzzling grief. But how can she come to have any feelings about me—negotiable feelings, I mean—without seeing me and perhaps being encouraged by what she sees?
What do you imagine I look like?’
‘Mmmm. You’re six feet two.’
‘You can feel that. What about my face?’
‘Dark brown hair?’
‘How did you know?’
‘I didn’t. I shot from the hip. There aren’t so many possibilities, you know. Black. Dark brown. Light brown. Blond. Three-to-one shot.’
‘Or gray.’
‘You don’t sound gray.’
‘Or red.’
‘Definitely not. I mean, I know you’re not a redhead…. Let’s not play this game. I’d rather imagine your face. You’re like a character in a novel: I have to create your face for myself.’
‘But then when you see me…’
‘You’ll be in the movie made from the book.’
‘You won’t like seeing a different face from the one you’ve made up.’
‘If it’s a good movie it won’t matter.’
I have a flash of line-fear…. It was not exactly fear that time; it was some kind of transmuted rage. Yet it was terror, too. Anger is frightening because we citizens have been lectured so often about the equivalence of control and survival. The slogan word, Acceptance, is a code word for steel—for that hard alloy of obedience and courage without which we could not live in circumstances like ours. This line-fear can build on itself; a person in a waitline can arrive at a pitch of frustration and desperation so towering as to tilt him over into a sensation of being frozen for eternity in a condition of waiting—and, what is most terrifying, a condition of waiting for something not worth waiting for. We have come to speak of this sensation as waitline sickness. One who is stricken in a line by this affliction can only stand there and scream. I have not been driven nearly so far as that, but I was frightened, for a fleeting moment there, of being trapped forever in this waitline, because of my rage at the grotesque imbalance in my relationship with the girl, which the line imposes on us. The line denies her one sense of me—the central sense.
* * *
—
AND SO I WONDER what the man behind me looks like. I cannot see him. I have a cartoon of him in my mind, sketched on the basis of the bitter short commands he barks out from time to time. Turning my head as far as I can, and my eyes in my head as much farther as they will swing, I bring his head into the edge of my field of vision. I try with great concentration to sharpen my peripheral perception, and I do make out a pale ellipse, and yes, I see that there is a nose, there are dark pools where eyes should be, but I cannot bring the features into focus. Is the hair gray? My heart sinks. That sort of blur is all I can be to her. I am frustrated by my failure to incarnate that narrow oval behind me, and I am angry that my own face cannot come to life in the girls eyes. I am sorry for myself, I am even a bit sorry for the blur behind me—and this weak push of compassion for someone who, like myself, cannot be seen for what he is, rouses in me a curiosity about him which I have, up to now, denied myself.
Over my shoulder I speak to him. ‘Hey, what’s eating you? Why are you in such a hurry?’
Then I realize that without thinking, I have turned my head to the right to ask these questions, and the janitor believes I am asking them of him. Already convinced that my petition will queer his, he is obviously taken aback by the challenge in my questions.
‘It’s easy enough for you,’ he shouts in my face, with his two eyes wedged between my two. ‘You’re in the second row. You ought to try being on the outside. I got all these people moving the wrong way. You get jostled out here. My whole right arm is futzed up.’
I shake my head no, as if I were trying to plug one of my eyes after another into the narrow two-holed electrical outlet the janitor’s eyes make. ‘No,’ I say, ‘I’m talking to the man behind me. Hey, I’m talking to you behind me there!’
Nothing.
I repeat.
Then from him a sharp ‘What?’
‘Why are you in such a hurry? Ever read about the whiting and the snail?’
‘Huh?’
‘Can you read? Did you ever read—?’
‘I’m a painter! Color!’
I want to see him in my mind. ‘How old are you?’
No answer. I don’t know whether I will hear anything more—aside from his bursts of impatience—from the painter. The janitor is still trying to burn me with looks.
But I keep my head turned right, and now I realize why the girl has been turning that way so much of the time to speak to me. This way is outward. Buildings loom to the left. There is much distracting motion to the right, but the bigger sky is there—fleecy clouds now, slowly drifting northeastward; the pleasingly tapered wooden steeples
; the wide idea of the lawn beyond the wall.
‘Thirty-six.’
He has answered after all. He is one year younger than I. He is at the age when husbands split up with their wives.
‘Do you paint houses or pictures?’
A short pause, then: ‘Anything wrong with both?’
‘You paint both? How do you have time?’
‘Keep moving! Let’s keep this line moving!’
So that is his itch—trying to cram two lives into one lifetime.
After a few moments I say to him, ‘Can you give me a word picture of yourself?’
‘What’s biting you?’ he bursts out. ‘All these questions all of a sudden.’
We’ve been here how long—four hours and some? I don’t know, I just want to have a mental picture of somebody I’ve been up against all morning. I mean an accurate one.’
‘Look. I charge money for portraits.’
His voice is edgy. I will have to settle for imagining his looks, as the girl chooses to imagine mine. Yes, I think I see him. There is something wrong with his mouth. But what do I look like? I feel as if my face is gradually dissolving.
* * *
—
SHE IS TALKING to the teacher on her right. The question that opens the way to acquaintance in the waitline has been exchanged between these two. I gather that the teacher’s petition has to do with conditions in her classroom. The policeman who has been assigned to her room has never before had school duty; he has come straight off the streets in a precinct where self-discipline is wanting. ‘He shouts for silence,’ this disapproving woman says. ‘You can’t shout for quiet. Shouting begets shouting. My room has gotten to be like a stadium.’
I am impressed by the intensity of her hatred of the policeman. I fear for some of her pupils.
The girl says, ‘I could never concentrate in school. I used to look out the window all the time. I have a kind of album in my head of all the views from all the school windows I spent all those years staring out of.’