by John Hersey
Now there is just the one scream. I take the painter’s cue and shout soothing encouragements to the teacher. Her trouble is stubborn, but I know that thanks to the song the waitline as a whole is safe.
The high hot wind in the teacher’s frame finally spends itself, and the sound in her throat climbs down to a long groan, and then to nothing. The song is drawn into the vacuum her quiet makes, and it, too, gradually subsides.
* * *
—
WHAT A LUXURY silence is!
* * *
—
IT IS A TRANSIENT luxury. A general buzzing begins. The pedestrians and the traffic move again.
So does Maisie, ever so slightly, under my hands. I am surprised by the sudden return of my prodigal desire; it has come riding in on my relief. Yes, I am having reason to be surprised, and not only by its alacrity. My infraction is impressive.
But now I am drawn aside: ‘All I ask,’ the janitor says to me, his expression now quite friendly, ‘is, you don’t stand at the next window to me.’ He talks in an even voice, as if nothing at all unusual has been happening.
‘I don’t know if I can have any control over that.’
‘Sure you can. Look, when we go through the doors, there’s a rush, see, for these turnstiles. You ever been here?’
‘Not actually to the windows.’
‘Okay, they have these turnstiles, the police control them. They let you through the doors to go inside when one of the turnstiles in there is empty. So all you have to do is, when we go through the doors, you rush to the left, I rush to the right.’
‘I’ll try.’
‘It’s a deal.’
What interests me is not that the janitor has decided against resuming his effort to keep me from the windows—probably he is aware that once line-sickness has broken out and been controlled, it remains dangerously close beneath the surface—but rather that I have decided to go ahead with my petition.
The cigar man is looking at me in a peculiar way.
* * *
—
WE REALLY ARE approaching the Romanesque arches in the dark brick wall. Before the doors there are two steps up, then a landing. There is a police barrier on the landing just outside the doors. The uniformed men let people through two or three at a time—that is obviously when the rush comes.
I know I should be thinking of what I will say at the window. But as usual I am distracted. The painter is consoling Handlebars, who is abjectly apologetic. The teacher is weeping. Oddly, it is the seedy lottery man who is trying to comfort her over the right shoulder of his bush jacket. The grandmother is pleased; she hasn’t had such an entertaining morning in a month of rest days. How much to talk about! ‘Right behind me! Like he was being stuck with an ice pick!’ The janitor is trying to tell me that he is the one who pulled us all through, by leading the song; he thinks maybe the authorities will take that into account as they hear his petition. Would I mind mentioning it? Has he already forgotten that he wants as much distance as possible between us?
Yes, Maisie now knows that the prodigal is home. Once again her head leans back toward mine. But my great pleasure now is not sensory; it is my enjoyment of what she and I share: a secret event.
Or is it a secret? Havana is still staring at me. He looks as if he is trying to decide whether to make a purchase.
And all the while, fragmentary images of waiting humanity enter my distracted brain. I see a wart, a wen, a blackened tooth, a bent nose and a blue lip, a roll of fat at the back of a neck, a hairy ear, a satin cheek, greedy eyes, a too-neat pair of dark braids, a balding crown, a sag in a jowl, a pain-line at the edge of a mouth, a dimple, crow’s-feet, and pink wriggling veins—scraps of hope, bits of revealed struggle, signs here and there that it is already too late.
* * *
—
THE LINE IS one long held breath. False notes that have been coming from the janitor, of friendliness, of appeal, are in key with the hung mood of the whole waitline. Everyone has the sense of having narrowly missed going over the waterfall, there is great relief; but wariness, too. People are speaking words they don’t mean. Being so close to the arched doorways gives all of us at the front of the line a giddy, unready feeling. I see the cops on the steps at the doors, dressed in the dark blue of our social contract, and I can even hear their voices, which in their way are in uniform, too: the sound is clean, well pressed, and buttoned up, and like neat dark cloth it makes respectable the impulse to crime in the crime-fighter. ‘You next….’ ‘Okay, ma’am….’ ‘Hold it up! Not so fast!…’
Pompon has reached the steps. Up one. He certainly is a tall man. The back of his shirt is soaked.
‘Good luck,’ I say out loud to Maisie.
She turns her head and whispers, ‘Are you going through with it?’
‘Sure,’ I say, ‘I couldn’t not.’ I hear the falsehood in my claim. Maisie does not know what I know—that I was on the point, when the out-chant was loudest, of changing my mind. I have made myself sound much more steadfast than I have actually been. The screams have shaken me, like everyone else, out of the truth groove.
Will I have regained my balance by the time I go through the turnstiles? I wonder how I am going to start off. I will clear my throat and say, ‘My petition is for more space in the sleeping-hall.’ That is direct, but it sounds weak. I must assert my right to what I want. I must get across to whoever or whatever is behind the window that I am special. How can I do that, though, in a few sentences? I am not aware that I have succeeded, in more than four hours, in conveying this to Maisie.
* * *
—
WE ARE ALMOST to the doors. My heart beats hard. The lottery man goes up one step. The back of his bush jacket is soaked. Maisie’s sweat is mixed there in the expensive whipcord with his.
The grandmother is saying good-bye to her new acquaintances, as if a party were drawing to a close. ‘Nice knowing you,’ she says to me, seeming to have forgotten the noggin-snapping zest with which she asked for my ouster not many minutes ago. Her eyes are huge, sentimental. ‘I live at the Elmhurst, Elm Street, just near the Broadway branch of the First National Bank, you know? Look me up, huh? I make such good friends in these lines. I don’t know, it seems like people that take the trouble to put in petitions—well, they’re special. Really are. You, too, honey,’ she says toward Maisie.
All these packed people, stretching still back to the corner of Church and Elm and around it down toward Orange—all special? This loose language of the circuitry printer punches my claim in the solar plexus…. But she is not with me any more. She is saying over her right shoulder, ‘As for you, Harry boy….’ Harry seems to be Handlebars’ name. The grandmother’s insensitivity to him, after what he has gone through, is monstrous. Heaving with a sense of fun, she calls him an old card and reminds him of some tired morsel of self-centered porno he tossed off earlier, and she explodes with jollity. Handlebars has made an astonishing recovery; I would say he has over-recovered, for now he comes right back with more of the same, in the same tone as before, muted now, perhaps, but still brass-edged. That he should already be capable of being precisely himself seems horrifying to me, but the grandmother, I realize, understood much better than I that this would be the case. She is having a first-class morning.
The cigar man, who has been staring at me off and on, sharply says to me, ‘That your hand?’ He jigs his chin downward; his jowl is squeezed outward, like a trumpeter’s lip on a high note.
I see a blush scramble up Maisie’s neck.
I do not think I should answer. I think perhaps I should say something to the painter behind me, speaking over my right shoulder, and so presenting the back of my head to the cigar man, who already, worse luck, has had the back of my hand.
But Maisie, coming to my rescue, says to Havana, ‘I asked him to put his hands on my hips. I was very frightened.’
‘Oh,’ says Havana, and swallows. He really must have thought she had been cozying up to him. Now he blushes.
Once when I was small my father spanked me with a felt bedroom slipper. What had I done to provoke him? It is the only memory I have of punishment at his hand, and it strikes me as a sad small parable of correction that I cannot even remember the crime for which I was paying a penalty. What I do remember is that the slipper was soft. I made the costly error of giggling. My father dropped the slipper and reached to the bureau top for a hairbrush, the back of which, I soon learned, was not soft.
‘Want to know something funny?’ I say to Havana. ‘You remind me of my father. That is, you do and you don’t.’
His blush deepens. Then he says in a manly voice, ‘How old do you think I am?’
‘I mean,’ I say, ‘the way I remember him when I was a kid.’
This helps very little. Havana turns his head away.
Lottery moves to the upper step and Maisie rises up on the lower one—and almost exactly with her, Havana steps up on one side of her and the teacher on the other. It is a convenient time for me to recover my hands. I am tempted to set my lips to the vulnerable in-curving place at the nape of Maisie’s neck, but I have the sense not to. I do whisper directly into her ear, ‘Thank you for what you said.’
She turns her head to the right and whispers, ‘You mean to Daddy?’
I groan out loud, and she laughs.
I do want to speak to the painter. These hours in the line have been like a voyage. I have made one friend I want to see again, but the others, the painter among them, will have come into my life and gone out of it again forever, like fellow passengers briefly encountered on travels. Before the painter vanishes that way, I want to thank him for his common sense, to which we all owe our sanity, and, yes, for his crankiness, to which he probably owes his. He will be hostile to gratitude. He follows two crafts, he has no time for pleasantries. Keep moving! Keep it going! I respect his misanthropic urgency, and in the end I decide I have no words to say to him that won’t just waste his time.
The janitor—the survivor—is busy trying to persuade everyone around him to put in a word for him at the windows, to say that it was his leadership of the song that saved the waitline. He has already rearranged history, dropping from the record the inconvenient fact that it was really the painters cool, contrary head that saved us. The janitor takes his revisionism so far as to ask the painter himself to put in a good word.
The painter just says, ‘Look, friend. I have problems of my own.’
Maisie climbs the second step; I, the first. Taking this first rise under pressure is most awkward. I wedge my left knee between Maisie’s left leg and the cigar man’s right leg, but because of the crowding I cannot properly shift my weight to the left, and I am canted forward before I am ready to go up. Nevertheless, I push down with my left leg and rise in good order, in my narrow chute of touchers.
After a time Lottery is let through the police barrier and Maisie moves against it, and I rise onto the upper step. The barrier seems to be (I cannot quite see it, only sense it from what has been happening) a waist-high railing, in which, I gather, there are hinged gates, each manned by a policeman. Beyond the railing is a space of about three feet on the upper landing before the doors, where there is much awkward jostling as the petitioners who are let through shove past the policemen and into the building.
I take a chance and say out loud to Maisie, ‘Don’t forget to wait for me.’
Once more she answers with a nod.
‘Off to the right, okay?’
Another nod.
Then, before I can fetch out any more of the disorderly stock of things I want to say to her, she goes through. The back of her dress is dark blue from her sweat and mine. The wet cloth clings to her buttocks, and to the curving small of her back. I see a flash of her, full-length, as she pushes a swinging door in one of the arches. I have a fleeting hope that she will turn and look back, and I will see her whole face, but of course she does not. I would not say that her body from a rear view is sensational, but I realize that the big stain of our shared warmth on her back is not flattering.
She is gone. I am against the railing.
* * *
—
THE RAILING is greasy with the wipings of a decade of anxious palms. The officer in front of me is a harassed man who looks to be, as so many of New Haven’s policemen are, of Italian descent. His dark cheek glistens, he has not been shaving that chin for many years. He frowns and lets fly with his elbows on passing petitioners as they crowd through the gate, but he gives instructions in the meticulously courteous tones I heard earlier, his cop’s dress-uniform voice.
Now that the railing is cutting into my gut, the wait seems interminable. Maybe my sense that time has gone into an appalling stretch-out comes from the fact that Maisie is no longer in front of me. In a rush of fear that I will be separated from her after our petitions have been denied, I try to remember her address, and my fear grows into panic. I have forgotten it. It is on Park Street, that much I remember. Wasn’t it a round number? 320? 410? There must be ten thousand people living in the span on Park between 320 and 410. I can’t search every sleeping-hall. She knows I’m in the Marinson Building, but if we miss each other here, would she try to reach me, expecting, as she would, that I would get in touch with her?
I remind myself that she nodded when I asked her to wait for me; she will be there.
The grandmother knows the policeman in front of her from previous encounters at the railing. She calls him by his first name, Frank. He greets her with a warmth that may be feigned; understandably he cannot remember her name, and he calls her ‘Mrs.’
The janitor is asking his policeman if there have been any hitches inside the building this morning.
‘What you mean, hitches?’
‘You know, disturbances, or like some son of a bitch asks for more space?’
‘Don’t know, sir,’ the policeman says in his dark blue voice. ‘You’d have to ask inside.’
This last flare-up of the janitors hostility to me seems strangely smoky and wavering. He does not swing his nasal cleaver toward me, does not look at me with those close-set charcoals. He has asked the question as if it stemmed from some blurred memory of the distant past.
‘Listen,’ he is now urgently saying to the policeman. ‘You heard those screams a while ago, right? You heard the singing, right? Listen…’ And he tries to persuade the policeman to go inside with him and vouch at the windows for his role in stemming a disaster. All the while the cop is saying things over the janitor’s head in his official voice, ‘Take it easy, there…Don’t push…You’ll get in…’
* * *
—
I SEE THAT there is a system of signal lights attached to the rail. A blue bulb flickers near my left hand, and the grandmother’s policeman, Frank, raises the bar in front of her.
Over her shoulder she says one last party farewell. ‘Bye, Harry. Look me up, now.’ And goes through. She squeezes past her uniformed friend, saying, ‘See you, Frank.’
He suddenly drops his parade voice and says with a strange vehemence, ‘I believe you will.’ Then he turns back to watch the light again, shaking his head without compassion. What it must be like to have his duty day after day after day!
The janitor’s light and mine flash at almost the same moment. Our bars go up. The impatience of the petitioners behind me propels me through the narrow opening, which tears at both my hips, and bumping past my man in blue I am impressed by the great strength of these barrier cops. Mine claps down the bar behind and against my back with a weight-lifter’s arm, holding the painter, and all the surge of hopes in back of him, in check. I crowd past the policeman into the archway slightly to my right and going through the doorway jostle the janitor—and I find his frame, after the running-guard meatiness of the cop’s, light, del
icate, fragile, as if his bones are hollow like a bird’s. I feel that I may break his bitterness in two. I do believe he is hungry. I hold to our deal and run to the left inside the door, along a row of metal-pipe turnstiles at which petitioners are waiting. The fourth turnstile from the left is free. I duck into it.
After five hours of sardinehood, I feel, now, in this space, as large and free as a shark. I can almost see why the grandmother is hooked on petitions. One has slowly built to this sudden incredible high.
The ceiling, like my whirling brain, is also high—an ancient stamped-tinware affair, a curio of a ceiling, crusty with generations of layers of paint. The light, after the brilliance outside, is crepuscular, and for a moment I see a flickering dream-picture of myself in ecstatic twilight flight along the shoulder of West Rock. This is that same light from the center of a drop of amber, from the center of a sexual wish. The petition windows stand in a varnished mahogany bulkhead, with heavy carved-leaf moldings. The spirit of the distant past in the room, with its signs of lavish, painstaking handcrafts, speaks a bitter irony, when one considers the sorts of scraps of life-left-overs the citizens streaming past these turnstiles beg for at the blank, faceless windows. These are just as Maisie described them. Bars; then opalescent empty glass. Have you ever looked into the eyes of sixteen blind men standing side by side?
I see Maisie. She is about five windows down to the right. The weight of her body is on one leg; the other leg, knee cocked, crosses inward; her hips are revolved a half turn on their sweet axis. Her dress still clings to her back. From here she looks all right. She is using her hands to argue; she knows that the window is not, after all, blind.
The cigar man is straight ahead of me. The back of his neck is scarlet over the black lapel of his synthetic-fabric suit coat.
I see the lottery man leave, walking to the right. He is crestfallen. His unshaven cheeks sag. He was surely entitled to more time at a window than he has taken. He is a person who lacks conviction, gives up easily, walks away hanging his head and muttering. Another day he’ll think of another hopeless scheme.