by John Hersey
Her recital of miseries has an undercurrent of primeval rage, but I do not feel threatened by it, any more than I was by the janitor’s more practical hostility. Quite the opposite; I respond to her in a new way altogether. It occurs to me that I could be an exception. I am willing to believe it. The layers of cloth between us are becoming thinner.
She has an onanistic habit, about which she gives me only oblique hints. It is some kind of ritual of self-indulgence; a mirror is involved; something about a childhood heroine of hers on whom she had what she calls ‘a crush’; bust measurements, her heroine’s then, her own now—I cannot make it all out, but I am touched by her unsuccessful effort to confess. Without even having seen my face, she is trying hard to give me a gift of trust.
* * *
—
LOUDLY THE TEACHER asks, ‘What time is it?’
It is obvious that the teacher does not like my whispering in the girl’s right ear. She has doubtless heard a bit too much of what the girl has just whispered back to me. I must assume that she is still put out with me for having set her straight on her plan to speed up the waitline.
‘The last siren must have been…Let’s see…’ I am glad to discover that the girl, like me, has lost track of time; she turns and asks the cigar man.
‘Getting on for a quarter to,’ he says. He is not one to lose track. He is a speculator; he licks his lips and blinks. I am sure he has made a bet with himself about the girl. I can almost feel, vectored to me, the lewd pressure of his arm against hers.
She tells the teacher what he has said.
‘Really?’ the teacher says. ‘Can it be?’ It seems to be in her nature to find whatever is said mistaken.
‘You sure of the time?’ the girl asks the cigar man.
‘Sure I’m sure,’ he says.
‘I would have thought,’ the teacher says to him across the girl, ‘that it was almost a quarter past.’
‘Nope,’ he says positively. ‘Quarter to. You’ll hear the god-damn siren in a few minutes, ma’am, five minutes. Three blasts. You’ll hear.’
‘Personally I think he’s wrong,’ the teacher says to the girl, in what she considers a confidential undertone, which however I can hear and which the man can also obviously hear, for he barks out a contemptuous one-note laugh.
In the same supposedly secretive voice, the teacher says, ‘I overheard what you were saying about that person’s petition!’ She has inclined her head to the left, so I understand she refers to Havana’s petition, not Handlebars’. She is suddenly off on a fierce lecture on male smoking habits. Cancer and emphysema are not her bugaboos; a certain kind of slovenliness is—male droppings. The stink of abandoned, damp, chewed cigar butts; the debris of pipes; ash and grains of tobacco strewn on tables and ground into carpets; holes burned in jackets and the laps of others’ clothing. ‘You just can’t sit next to a man with a pipe….’ Men and the mouths of men and the foul hot assumptions that come out of the mouths of men.
How much did she hear of what the girl was murmuring to me about her night sorrows? What has ever happened to this teacher in the dark? In the broad daylight a policeman shouts and shouts in her classroom. It seems to me that she asked the girl the time a few minutes ago just for want of something to say, because she is lonely. She suffers the friction of moving pedestrians on her right; her breath is pressed out of her by the line. There is no loneliness like this of hers, almost smothered as she is by flesh.
I have often been lonely in a crowd. I am a somewhat solitary person. But I have discovered something in the petition line—that to be lonely is not the same as to have a distance from people. Loneliness suffocates; one feels the pressure of many bodies; the crowd closes in and crushes one. But when one gets to know one’s neighbors enough to see how strange each one of them is, then a bit of space opens up between oneself and them; the pressure eases; the opposite of loneliness—a discriminating intimacy—becomes possible for the first time.
The siren gives out its cry of anguish at the passage of time. Three wails.
The teacher says to the girl in her confidential tone, ‘You see? I said it was a quarter to. I knew he was wrong.’
* * *
—
HOW LOST I am! A quarter to what?
There are so many distractions. How can I isolate pure feeling from this rush of impressions? I want to savor my gratitude to the girl, which I feel as a tension between the melancholy pain in my chest and a joyful lightheadedness, for her effort to be honest with me, but I feel the janitor’s dangerous nose chopping at my ear, and I see the teacher’s shoulder in the brown rep dress jerk as she shrugs off the grossness of the cigar man, and I smell the garlic again, see the immobility, now, of the blue pompon, hear the birds in the great cages in the Green, think of the possibility of little Robert poring over a primer. In a minute’s time a thousand pictures of heads and parts of heads in the waitline—a red ear, a stray lock, a jaw at work, an eyebrow lifted in disbelief—enter my brain, to be deposited there and held for the day or night when they will be cut up and rearranged and shown as never-before-seen pictures in future inaccurate memories and creative dreams.
* * *
—
IHAVE AN immutable past. I am stuck with it. I cannot exchange it for the past of the man with the red ear, the woman with the lifted eyebrow; mine is there behind me, attached like a cats tail to my backsides, and to no one else’s. It is part of me. This street teems with pasts, many of which I might rather have than my own, but I have mine.
The time will come—I trust it will—when, hoping to pry open a new kind of future, I will share my past with this girl in front of me. We will sit on the edge of my bed in my space and, kicking our heels on the chest, amid all the clatter and fuss of the sleeping-hall—the girl student with two braids typing in the next space, the old headscratcher up the line with his tummy TV tuned to a game, the pair of squat, dark-skinned women at the foot end of my space gossiping, as they do day and night—I will speak to her about my past in a low voice. I will look straight into her eyes (what color are they? how far apart are they?), and I will say that I want to tell her everything, but I will soon catch myself lying.
When I was a boy, anyone could learn to read…. Now this anyway is true: One evening, in Howe Street, on the way home from orchestra practice, I sneaked my left hand into the panties of a girl named Marion. I despised her after that…. My father tried to teach me to play chess, but his twitching fingers, reaching for the little pawns and rooks, knocked the larger pieces over, the kings, queens, and knights. I wept with anger…. While I was working at Sears I stole a blender and gave it to my mother as a birthday gift….
No, it’s no use! Small confessions do not add up to someone who is special.
I wish I could weave a web of memories of my mother’s acts of kindness, my fathers aspirations: Those essentials escape me, they are vaporous and indistinct.
I hear instead the sound of a music box—La ci darem la mano…The tinkling conjures up a space and an atmosphere. We were twenty. My friend had met a girl he wanted to try. It was our third year of labor duty, and we were bunked in what had been built as a school gymnasium—steel trusses overhead, an echoing space; someone owned that music box. Our arms ached with good physical weariness. My friend asked me if I would switch bunks with him for one night, as mine was against a wall and he thought he would make out better in it than in his own, islanded out on the floor. When I think of the silvery sound of the music box—at the moment when Zerlina sighs, ‘Andiam! Andiam!’—I can clearly see the girl’s face afterward; it had not been a success, she blamed herself, said she was ‘built wrong.’ She was mine for the asking.
Perhaps I could talk about Don Giovanni with this girl in front of me, when we sit on the edge of my bed, kicking our heels against the chest. Rosenkavalier. Otello. But all the talk about music would only encode memories of desire, of attempts
to take from strangers whatever I could get at any given moment
* * *
—
AND YET I remain sure that even in this jammed New Haven I am capable of fidelity, of steadfastness toward some as-yet-unknown right person. My life is a search. A glimpse, from the side and behind, of a cheek that is not tense—a whole realm of possibilities! I know objectively what a good meld is. I can tell in two minutes whether a husband and wife are in tune with each other. My mother nursed my ill father for twenty-two years and adored him all that time. She combed the drugstores to find agar-agar leaves for his constipation and admired him with all her heart. They were equals. I never heard a raised voice.
I do not mean to feel sorry for myself, but it was easier for them than it is for me. When they were alive, there was room for walls within houses. They seldom had to stand on queues for long—really only when they wanted to see exceptionally good movies.
All these hundreds of thousands of pictures of heads and parts of heads going into my brain in waitlines every day—my search is so fragmentary, so distraught.
‘By the way,’ I say out loud to the girl, what’s your name?’
* * *
—
IHAVE ALWAYS believed that a person’s name is an aspect of his temperament. It has to be—it was chosen by those who passed on the genetic information and set the daily tone. Call someone by the wrong name and like a mugger you run off with his personality. How incredibly careless! I have stood here against this girl four hours and have begun to mull over issues of loyalty and stability, and I don’t even know her name.
She says something, but the janitor sneezes, spraying my cheek, and I cannot hear her words. She waits to see whether he is a two-sneeze or a three-sneeze man.
Atchew!…That seems to be all. A two-sneezer. Wet. Hostile to me in his paroxysm.
‘Maisie.’
I am going to have to adjust my sights as I peer again at the fuzz at the back of her neck. ‘I’ll think about that name. I suddenly know all sorts of new things about this girl.
Now I resort again to whispering. ‘Why did you laugh when you learned that my name is Sam?’
‘I was happy. I’ve never known man, dog, or cat named Sam that anyone disliked.’
She knows what she is doing. ‘Oh,’ I say, with the cheap modesty of someone who for a moment can afford it, lots of people dislike me.’
‘No, Sam,’ she says out loud. That just about does it.
* * *
—
IHAVE NEVER liked being sneezed on, and I am feeling a stab of hostility of my own. I have a perfect right to enter any petition I want to. I am not frivolous, as the grandmother is, out here on the line to overcome her boredom. I am not absurd, as Handlebars is….
‘I hope that was just hay fever,’ I say to the janitor. ‘I’d hate to catch a summer cold from you.’
Under attack the janitor at first looks hungry again. I almost break out laughing at the look of a famished hound dog on his face, with its big nose and triangular hound bags under its mournful, close-together hound eyes.
‘It’s the heat,’ he says. ‘I get hot, makes me sneeze.’
But then I see the blood drain from his face. He hates the hint of apology in what he has just said to me. His hunger is anger.
My thoughts are still distracted: my cat tail; a new name to fit a person into; daydreams of a future, in which heels kick against furniture; and now at the edge of my mind a bee buzzing, the danger of a bad sting to which I may be allergic.
Perhaps I have made a mistake to turn on the janitor about his miserable pair of sneezes. He is terribly angry. My petition for more space is, it seems, almost unbearably threatening to him. I would guess that he does not dare to think how much he wants what I want. He may be, besides, one of those people who is oversensitive to the constant physical pressure of a waitline; he gets it from me on his left, the pedestrians on the right who, as he complains, have futzed up his whole right arm, the schoolteacher in front of him, and the toucher of my touchers behind him, about whom I have so far found out nothing—a stocky black woman who constantly sighs and says, ‘Oh, my,’ and ‘F-f-f-f-f,’ and ‘Whoo-o-o-o.’
As to space, when I think of it, the janitor is not too badly off. Each night he is alone on staircases. The work may not be pleasant, but he has hours of solitude in echoing stairwells. He is on his knees, facing the upward reach of risers and treads. There is a sense of fluidity about a stairwell; it goes somewhere, aspires, turns on itself and goes up and up. A very good space for a man alone. What more does he want? What a superbly solitary job!
But all he can think of, apparently, is his stacked-up home—two peoples belongings in a single persons space, with the rocking chair on top.
Perhaps on his knees at night on the stairs he is tormented; can think of nothing but what has made the steps dirty in this million-footed city. In his ears: scuff, scuff, scuff. I have been stuck in waitline crowds on stairways. I can imagine what he can imagine. Maybe as he swabs foot-filth his imagination never lets him be alone on the stairs; the city’s feet kick at his wet hands.
Now he says, squinting, so that anger seems to come in two flattened jets through the constricted nozzles of his eyes, ‘I’m going to let all these people know what your petition is.’ His nose chops; I see clearly what he means by ‘these people.’
I say coolly, ‘Why don’t you mind your own business?’ But I am not sure that I have succeeded in hiding my alarm. He is a leader of chants. I remember the odor of his armpit; and the look of his clenched hands beating out the rhythm for many of us.
* * *
—
STRANGE THAT I should have imagined the leaves on the maples in the Green whispering, ‘Forest, forest, brother leaf!’ For two generations there has been no such thing as a brother—or a sister. One child only, if any, to a family. My ideas of fraternity—like those of peasantry, royalty, slavery—are all literary. I have a peculiar bookish fantasy now, that the janitor and I are brothers. We are brothers in a brief passage on the bitter side of our tie. Without himself having any real interest in the girl, he resents my whispering with her. For my part I have a brother’s dismay at seeing in him traits that are also surely mine; I want them not.
In my imagination: I am the older brother. Perhaps mimicking my father, I have tried to teach him to play chess, but the first time I checked his king he lost his temper and knocked over the board.
In my imagination: His name is Cain. My flesh creeps.
* * *
—
YES, MY FLESH moves. I cannot call this anything so ugly now as lust. I feel a justifying tenderness.
My irritation at the janitor and my deep fear of a brother’s wrath are, for some reason, aphrodisiac. I am a little bit thrilled by the hunger on my right.
I have only been in a fight once. I did not like it. It was while I was on labor duty. We were laying concrete. I was aiming the chute from the mixer into the form. I pushed too hard. A big gob of the mix fell outside the form and buried the foot of my friend who had traded bunks with me. He accused me of doing it on purpose. We became angry. There was much daring of each other to cross an invisible line; in this we were like small boys. But then the blows began, and we were like men. Like grown brothers—out to kill. I gritted my teeth; he boxed my chin and I saw stars. He choked me until I began to pass out. But his nose was bleeding afterward, and his cheek was black and blue. Who had won? That night I scored with his girlfriend; she was not ‘built wrong’ at all.
The memory of cheating my friend, of the way in which the afternoon’s anger, fear, courage, and pain were converted into the night’s overwhelming gentleness, are strongly with me now.
Our loss of control by the concrete mixer that afternoon brought us a severe penalty. Our labor duty was extended by six months. Can I make myself think of penalties now?
I remember seeing an old film of two mountain goats, rams with huge curling horns, charging at each other over and over with booming collisions, to settle which would enjoy the ready ewe. We two friends weren’t like that; no one had won.’ Clear still pictures of the rams linger in my mind—he-goats, raunchy aggressors, their hind legs the legs of the satyr…. I remember that the Greek word for tragedy means goat’s song…. Had that to do with hairy nether parts?—burnt sacrifices?—the music Pan made?
All that holds me in check, I think, is the thought that the girl has had to invent a face for me. What if it is the face of the man she lost?
* * *
—
INOW BELIEVE I am going to reach the windows this morning. I am less than a hundred feet from the arched doorways.
The closer we get to the bureau building, the tighter the line is packed. The grandmother, disgusted that she cannot strike up a satisfying conversation, is red in the face and is breathing with some difficulty.
The cloth that separates me from Maisie is soaked with perspiration; the dampness between us is not unpleasant.
Here in the beginning of the shadow of the bureau building there is more excitement around us. The cigar man is talking in nervous bursts—not at all as my father used to talk. The fullness under his jaw shakes with each humorous thrust. He is trying to get Maisie’s attention.
I am also aware of Handlebars’ voice, which has a droning yet penetrating quality. He is talking to the painter about his memory of the taste of a certain cheese made in New York State; he dwells at length on the remembered sensation of the cheese dissolving in his mouth, the interplay of taste and touch on his tongue.