Annabel assumed a profound stillness of body and face. But Ralph, as he returned to the front door, seemed to have shed a dozen years. There was spring in his step and color in his cheeks. He swung the door open wide.
“Gentlemen,” he said, with a full gesture of the arm, “the pleasures of my humble house.” To Clinton and Annabel, he said: “These three kings will pause here tonight. Tomorrow they will continue the journey to Bethlehem.”
Now three peculiar men entered the room. Their appearances made it immediately apparent that Ralph had found them on that part of Euclid Avenue known as skid row. The first to enter was a tiny man of perhaps thirty-five; he clutched his hat in both hands and with a few quick and nervous movements of his birdlike eyes, studied the room suspiciously. The second, middle-aged, round-shouldered, seemed to retreat even as he advanced; he seemed intent on pleasing everyone, and bowed obsequiously in all directions. These two were followed by a jolly old wreckage of seventy, white stubble on his chin, a bright red baseball cap tucked under his arm; one leg seemed shorter than the other as he rolled vigorously into the room, hand outstretched, approaching Annabel. His toothless mouth agape with merriment, he had the air of some crazy politician campaigning in a ghost town. But his speech was impossible to understand: there were no teeth and too much spittle.
Annabel stood stiff as a board as the merry old gentleman smothered her hand in both of his own, and paid his gibberish compliments to the house and to its mistress. Her face was a terrible thing to behold: she smiled graciously, but in a frozen manner that would turn blood into ice.
“Ah bow t’de gwowne, putty wady, for dis kiness of de warmf of y’housh an’ harf.” He made a regular speech, gesturing about the room as he spoke. One could only guess at what he might be saying, but he had all the confidence of a golden-throated orator. “Ah shank you, fom de bottom mishole,” he concluded. Then he stepped back and folded his hands, resting them on his protruding stomach.
Annabel’s voice was not her own when she said: “Won’t you be seated, gentlemen?” It was the voice of some animal, pained and stricken, who could manage only one note. “Ralph? Would you excuse yourself? And help me prepare a drink for your friends?”
Annabel left the room. Then Ralph excused himself and followed her into the kitchen. Clinton remained in the living room until the two younger men had seated themselves uncomfortably on the edge of the couch. He glanced at the old politician, who had settled himself happily in an overstuffed chair. When their eyes met, the old man giggled wickedly and winked at him; it was as if they were all gathered here, Clinton included, to partake in some forbidden bacchanalian rites.
When Clinton heard voices in the kitchen, he had to excuse himself; he went to the dining room to listen at the door, behind which his parents whispered hoarsely at each other:
“Has it never occurred to you,” Annabel was saying, “that your son might wish to use his own bed on Christmas Eve, and how many diseases do you suppose these men are carrying around with them?”
“Berry-berry’s not gonna use that bed tonight or any other night and . . .”
“How do you know that at this very moment he is not racing toward this house at sixty miles an hour?”
” . . . and when a man is jobless that doesn’t mean he’s got diseases. They check ‘em over at the mission house before they let ‘em in, so . . .”
“I’m sure he’d love to walk in and find those filthy . . .”
“Before you make up any more excuses that make you sound like an ignoramus, why don’t you drink a glass of water and think about what it says in the Bible?”
“Thank you, Ralph, you don’t have to waste your time telling me what you think of my mind. It has long ago been conceded that the brains . . . ! Can you dare quote the Bible to me! Ralph, that is one area, I serve you warning, there are sacred matters that . . .”
” ‘There was no room at the inn.’ “
“You have an absolute contempt for the Bible and yet you dare . . .”
“I do not have contempt for the Bible. I have never in my life . . .”
” . . . you have the gall to hide behind Jesus Christ, just for the sake of those persons in the living room! Jobless, my big toe; why, do you know what they are? I’ll tell you what they are!”
“The Bible is one thing and religion is another. Now, you can take every religion in the world and you can wrap them all up in one big hairy package, and then you can take ‘em and . . .”
“Ralph, I warn you! You can have your Communism and your atheism and every other absurdism you can find, and I’ll leave you perfectly at peace with them, but I promise you . . .”
“You know goddam well what I think of Russia!”
“Ralph Williams, you don’t fool me one bit, you don’t care about those three tramps. If you did you’d give them some money and leave them alone. Do you know what it costs to fumigate a house?”
“They don’t want money. They want to spend the night in a warm house, in a good comfortable bed, and they want to eat some good food and drink some good liquor. So get some sheets and blankets on those beds and keep still.”
As Clinton heard the clinking of glasses he moved swiftly away from the door. Ralph passed him on his way to the living room. “Forgot all about you, Clint,” he said. “Go fetch yourself a glass.”
Clinton went to the kitchen. As he took a glass from the shelf, his mother stopped weeping and glared at him in horror. “I forbid you to drink liquor.” But Clinton instinctively allied himself with Ralph. He took the glass and left Annabel in the kitchen. “Et tu, Brute?” she said, as the door swung closed.
In the living room, Ralph poured four generous helpings of bourbon from the pint in his pocket, and one smaller share in the glass Clinton held out to him. He distributed the glasses among his guests, then, raising his own, he said, in a voice colored with emotion that Clinton knew to be utterly sincere:
“Honored guests, I would like to propose a toast in honor of the greatest man that ever drew breath. As you all know, tonight’s his birthday. So let’s all drink to him, to Jesus Christ—the founder of the Socialist Party!”
Clinton saw Annabel in the doorway. She raised her eyes to heaven as if begging forgiveness for this blasphemy. But Clinton drank with the others. When the liquor went down, he drew a deep breath and tensed the muscles of his throat. The burning was furious but not overwhelming, and he felt immediately drunk.
Annabel entered the room carrying her pocketbook, and accompanied by the dry swooshing of her skirts. Her manner was animated and gay, but her eyes shone with a cold, impenetrable glaze that demanded attention.
“Well! Surrounded by one-two-three-four-five handsome men! Aren’t I a lucky stiff? Now listen, gentlemen, it’s Christmas!” She perched herself brightly on the pouf. “And Christmas is the nicest time of all,” she continued, without a hint of malice. Then, addressing herself to the strangers: “We have one more son that you haven’t met yet, our Clinton’s older brother.” Clinton stood next to her. She took his hand, kissed it lightly, then went on holding it. “My husband and all of us miss him very much, especially at Christmastime.” The toothless old man at this point put in some incomprehensible remark. Annabel smiled appreciatively, and continued: “And we have this big old empty house just going to waste. So we’d just love to have you all stay the night and enjoy Christmas dinner with us. But only if you’d enjoy it, too. Isn’t that so, Ralph?”
Ralph looked at her, but he remained silent: there was no way of knowing how the wind blew. Annabel opened her pocketbook. “I’m almost sure I have here three crisp new ten-dollar bills.”
Clinton looked at the strangers: the eyes of each of them were fixed hungrily on Annabel’s pocketbook.
“So you can have your choice,” she concluded, rising from the pouf and holding the bills in her hand. The visitors rose too, their eyes on the money. The older man glanced briefly at his companions; then he stepped forward like the chairman of a committee and o
nce again engulfed Annabel’s hand in both of his own. When he had finished a speech of considerable length, the three bills were in his pocket and he had retreated to the front door. The other men followed him out.
Annabel closed the door. Ralph sank heavily into the easy chair vacated by the merry old tramp. Clinton looked through the front window at the three departing kings who huddled together on the lawn redistributing their wealth.
Annabel was more timid now. She approached her husband uncertainly, and spoke softly: “Ralph, it’s never my intention to go against your wishes, but there are times when . . .”
“Keep still,” he said, not even looking at her.
“All right, sulk if you have to.”
“Keep still.”
The telephone rang. Annabel hugged her own elbows: could it be Christmas? Had Christmas arrived? Was it Berry-berry? “Dear God in Heaven!” she said aloud, half prayer, half exclamation.
Clinton picked up the telephone in the dining room.
“Hello? —Yeah, just a minute. —Ralph, it’s for you. Long distance. Covington, Kentucky!”
Ralph rose quickly to his feet. “Covington?” He went to the phone. Annabel and Clinton formed a cluster at his elbow.
Clinton said, “Does Ralph know somebody in Covington, Kentucky?”
“It’s Berry-berry,” said Annabel. “He’s on his way home and calling to tell us.”
“Keep still,” Ralph said. “I can’t hear a goddam thing.” Then, into the telephone: “Talk up, will you? —Yes, I’m Ralph Williams, who wants me, who wants to talk to Ralph Williams?” After a moment, he shouted impatiently: “Well, put him on! Naturally I’ll pay for it, he’s my son!” Annabel made a deep sound of delight. Ralph looked at her. “Now you keep still, I want to hear what this is all about.” He squeezed the instrument with both hands, as if it were an empty water pouch and he was dying of thirst. “Hello, you big sonofabitch!” he shouted at last.
Annabel grimaced. “Oh, that language is so cute! So cute on Christmas Eve, I could vomit!”
“I can’t hear you,” Ralph said, “your mother’s here puttin’ on a show for us, she’s squawkin’ her head off and doin’ a fanny dance. I’ll see if I can talk her into shutting her goddam mouth.”
Ralph glanced at her. She glared back at him coldly.
“Now, what the hell’s this all about?” Ralph shouted good-naturedly into the mouthpiece. “You’re where? In the Covington what? Well, good for you, I knew you’d make the grade, you little shitass. Go on, tell me the rest of it.”
The next pause seemed interminable to Clinton. He had even lighted a cigarette before he realized that he never smoked in Annabel’s presence. Then he put it out.
Annabel held her silence for a long while. Finally, she whispered, “Doesn’t he want to talk to me?”
“Yeah, go on,” Ralph said, into the phone.
“Selfishness!” Annabel breathed. “Self, self, self!”
“Well, I don’t blame you one iota,” Ralph put in. “I wish I’d been there.” Another pause followed.
Annabel made no further effort at restraining herself.
“Give me that phone,” she demanded. “He wants to talk to his mother!”
“Hold on a minute, boy,” Ralph said. Then, covering the mouthpiece with his hand, he turned to Annabel and said, very distinctly, “He can’t talk to you because he’s in jail.” He watched the stunned silence fall about her like a shroud, then returned to the phone. “Go on, kid, I got rid of the interference.”
It seemed to Clinton that the old man was not entirely unhappy about this situation. Nor was he himself. After all, the idea of Berry-berry’s being in jail was not without its virtues: maybe he could get down to Covington before they released him and . . .
“Where do I send it?” The old man turned to Clinton: “Get me a pencil.” Clinton gave him paper and a pencil, and Ralph wrote down an address.
Annabel said: “Maybe the State of Kentucky doesn’t realize it yet, but this country has a Bill of Rights and a Constitution! This is not a police state! Ralph. Tell Berry-berry this is not a police state and he should demand . . .”
“Son?” Ralph said. “Your mother wants to say Merry Christmas. Now hold on a minute. Can you hold on?” He handed the receiver to Annabel. “Just say Merry Christmas, will you; he doesn’t want to hear about the Constititution.”
“Berry-berry, listen,” Annabel began, “I knew you’d call, I had this truly amazing letter from Bernice O’Brien. —What? —Oh, all right, Merry Christmas, and don’t worry. If we have to, we’ll mortgage this house so fast . . . ! All right, all right! —Clinton? A quick Merry Christmas to your brother; they’re breathing down his neck, so hurry!”
Clinton took the phone: “Berry-berry?”
There was a pause. Annabel said, “What’s he saying?”
Bewildered, Clinton placed the receiver in its cradle. “Nothing. He— He wasn’t there. I grabbed the phone and I said ‘Berry-berry,’ and he was just—he wasn’t there any more.”
Ralph was studying a blank space on the wall. Annabel moved quickly into his line of vision. “Will you please speak?” she said.
Ralph forced his mind to return from some great distance. “Oh, it’s nothin’. I’m to go to the Western Union and wire him fifty dollars, that’s all. It’s for bail.”
“Bail? What for? What are they holding him for?”
“Annabel, these things happen all the time. It’s just a matter of—well, they call it vagrancy. He got in a scrape in some bar, and one thing led to another . . .”
“Ralph. I’m going to insist, I have a right!”
“The connection wasn’t any good and you kept squawking all the time, so . . .”
“You heard plenty.”
“All right, he was sitting there, and somebody come up and started to bother him. So he took a poke at this—person. There’s not gonna be any pressing of charges, but there was some damage to the pinball machine, and the bird that operates this place got sore and I don’t know what-all. Give me my coat.”
“Are you holding back something dreadful?”
“Listen, if I was holding back something dreadful, the bail’d be one helluva lot worse than fifty smackers, so don’t get your hopes up.” He studied the scrap of paper: “Prob’ly a bail bondsman or some shyster lawyer. Anyway, I’m to send it to this bozo, and I’m to send it right away by Western Union. —Come on, Clint, you ride downtown with me.”
Clinton was delighted to be a part of this emergency. In a matter of seconds, he was in his winter coat and standing at the front door.
“Ralph,” Annabel said, as she handed him his car keys and opened the door for them, “I’m going to say something and I don’t want any filthy answer: I’ve always worshiped you for the way you are in a crisis. Always the complete master, and that’s a very Christian way to be. Now go ahead, say I’m silly.”
“Come on, let’s go,” Ralph said. He took hold of Clinton’s arm.
As they crossed the porch and descended the icy steps, Clinton felt that in a way the old man was leaning on him for support. He even felt, for that moment and during the ride downtown, that he was a necessary person, not just some nail-biting nuisance who was always underfoot.
“I got a load on my mind, boy,” Ralph said to him. They stopped for a red light and the two of them lighted cigarettes. “You know what that Galbralian did? You know who he took a poke at? You know what it was that big-assed brother o’ yours took and swung on? It was a woman, is what it was. That’s what he took a swing at, some woman.”
A horn sounded behind them. They moved forward. “Boy, he don’t fool, that big-assed Galbralian brother o’ yours, no-sir-goddamree!” He whistled like a man gravely impressed by the doings of another.
Then, his eyes on the traffic, he said, “What about you, Clint, you still hangin’ on to your cherry?”
Clinton went stiff with embarrassment and shame, but he did not like to tell lies. “Yes, sir, I am,”
he said. “I’ve still got it.”
“Well, there’s nothin’ wrong with that,” Ralph consoled him, with more gentleness than his words themselves could convey. “You just hang onto it for a while if you want to. It won’t hurt you. What are you, fourteen years old? —Well, I say there’s too goddam much song-and-dance about the whole matter anyway. You know they’s lots of women would like to have a man believe they got some priceless sonofabitch of an heirloom tucked away down there, but that’s not the case. That’s not the case atoll. It’s not platinum either, and it’s not some priceless goddam heirloom. If you want to know what it is, I‘ll tell you. It’s a crack, is what it is. And I’m not knockin’ it either, it has a perfectly scientific function, and the world’d be in one sorry spot without it. But what I’m gettin’ at is that big six-footer of a Galbralian of a brother of yours—he’s out of his goddam head on the subject.”
Ralph leaned forward in his seat. “Now I’ll just reconstruct this whole Covington, Kentucky, mess right now for you. What he did, he got hold of some bar-fly and he took her upstairs and he planked her. He planked her, and from then on she wouldn’t keep away from him, just kept suck-in’ around at his elbow till he let her have it.”
“Is that what he said?” Clinton asked.
“No, no. That’s what I say. I‘m doing the reconstructing. I’m reconstructing this whole thing, and there it is. —Course, she wasn’t no fiddling good, prob’ly a drunk to boot, and maybe even some kind of a maniac in the bargain. But you see, that Berry-berry, he can’t keep away from her in the first place, can he. O-hooo no! And it’s the old man that carries the gold down to Western Union!”
They drove in silence for a long time. Clinton pictured in his mind a dimly lighted tavern in the hills of Kentucky, Berry-berry flipping a coin at the bar while sloe-eyed, long-haired, smooth-skinned women cloaked their desire in cigarette smoke, tapped in time to the jukebox with high-heeled slippers; and waited, waited, waited. In his mind, everybody tapped out the time, nervously, even the bartender and the faceless men who sat against the walls watching, waiting; but Clinton, as the author of this picture, could not really get the thing moving; he could never see Berry-berry in operation, only this throbbing frieze of tension and desire.
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