All Fall Down

by James Leo Herlihy

  “Wouldn’t Annabel do a double take,” Berry-berry said, “if she knew I was running a whorehouse?”

  “Yeah, she sure would. Boy, she really would all right. How have you got it? Divided up in little cubicles?”

  “You’ll see.”

  But neither of the brothers made any move toward the house. They just stood there, under the light rainfall, separated by a dozen paces of rich black earth. Each of them seemed to be engaged in a desultory study of his surroundings. Occasionally their eyes met.

  “Berry-berry?” Clinton said.

  “What?”

  “Why are there people? Anyway.”

  “You mean in the world?” Berry-berry said.

  “Yeah.”

  Berry-berry thought for a long time. He stretched his arms and took a deep breath of air. Then he held one hand out in front of him, and looked at it, its fingers extended. He let the rain fall on it and watched it get wet. As he did this, there was a startled and innocent look on his face; to Clinton, the entire scene was like an illustration from a children’s book: Berry-berry, a man-child, lost in a forest, examining some precious treasure, his own hand. “I don’t know,” Berry-berry said at last. “I guess for screwing.” And then he smiled and made a series of big sounds that were almost like laughter. “Come on,” he said; and he led the way into the little farmhouse.

  Clinton felt, at the first moment, like an intruder in the domestic peace of some poor and respectable family. Paper drapes from the ten-cent store hung at all the windows and wrinkled lace doilies sagged on the back and arms of a badly worn davenport. There were a rocking chair, a big old-fashioned radio, a false fireplace with a gas heater dusty and cold on its hearth; there were pictures on the walls, including a calendar that still showed April, with an illustration of two angels at the tomb of Christ, depicting Easter Sunday.

  Agricola, a fat and swarthy black-haired man of forty-five, had been asleep in an easy chair when the brothers entered the house. But he came instantly awake and studied their faces with his black, dying-tiger eyes. Then his mouth opened and his tongue, like some eyeless red creature in search of its own lips, popped out and began to dance about over the surface of his mouth.

  “Jeez! I could’ve swore that was real.”

  “You shouldn’t sleep down here, Vinnie. You ought to go upstairs to sleep,” Berry-berry said.

  “D’you ever have a dream where it’s so goddam real you say to yourself, ‘Christ, this is just like a dream, only it ain’t?’ And then you wake up and it is?”

  Berry-berry said, “Anything going on?”

  But Vinnie was still absorbed in his dream. “I even half woke up like; and I heard some noise in the kitchen. It must’ve been her out there.” A nod of his head indicated a lighted area beyond the small dining room. A woman sat on the kitchen table, eating a piece of salami and reading a magazine; her bare legs swung back and forth nervously.

  “But I thought it was Gloria,” Vinnie continued, “like she was alive. I could’ve swore it. So I dozed off again and I thought, Well, Gloria’s out there cleanin’ up the place, and she’s not dead or nothing any more. See what I mean, how it all fit in?”

  There was an open bottle at his side. He took a drink from it. Before he had swallowed all of it, he started to laugh. This caused him to choke and he spat liquor on his shirt and trousers. Berry-berry slapped him hard on the back. When this seizure was over, Agricola went on laughing. He grabbed hold of Berry-berry’s hand and looked up into his face: “But when I woke up and seen you, buddy-boy, I knew where I was. I knew I was right back in the front room of a lousy whorehouse.”

  This joke was followed by another drink, and a renewal of his convulsions. He got to his feet and went to the kitchen, where he began to repeat the story to the woman on the table. But she made no show of listening. Without even a glance in Agricola’s direction, the woman walked out of the kitchen and into the living room. She was a dark-eyed French-Canadian, plump and untidy, but not unattractive. Her toenails were painted red.

  She approached Clinton, and tousled his hair, giving him a big-eyed look of approval. Then she took his hand and guided his arm around her waist.

  “For this I get paid?” she said.

  “Where’s your shoes?” Berry-berry said.

  She held her foot straight forward and displayed freshly pedicured toes. “They’re still wet, doll. Listen, I asked you something. Is he mine?”

  Berry-berry looked at Clinton. “You want her?”

  “Not just now,” Clinton said, politely. He turned to the girl: “But thanks, anyway.”

  “Well now,” she said, “don’t you lose that raincheck!”

  “Okay,” Clinton said.

  “Listen, mess,” Berry-berry said. “Do something about yourself, will you?”

  “My name,” she said to Clinton, “is Dorothy.”

  “You hear me?” Berry-berry said, eyeing her in an expressionless way that seemed to change her mood.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll go get all pretty, okay?” She blew a kiss in Clinton’s direction and hurried into the bathroom.

  Agricola came stumbling in from the kitchen, his big frame falling against the woodwork as he entered the room, a newly opened can of beer foaming over his hands. He was still laughing in his fierce and morbid way. “So I woke up—plunko—in the middle of a crummy whorehouse!”

  “Why don’t you shut up, Vinnie?” Berry-berry said. And then, to Clinton, “Come on upstairs.”

  He led the way through the kitchen, with its squalid array of empty beer cans and unwashed coffee cups, and up the back stairway. They had to walk single file up the stairs because half of each step was used as a shelf for empty soda bottles. At the top of the stairs was a tiny hallway, with one attic room on the right and another on the left. Berry-berry entered the room at the left, feeling his way into the darkness.

  “Wait’ll I get the light,” he said. “I can never find the damn string. —Come on, you bastard, where are you? There!” Now the room was illuminated by a bulb in the ceiling, covered by a ten-cent store shade; a long piece of butcher’s string had been tied to the chain. There were a double bed, a chest of drawers with a mirror over it, and an easy chair. One corner of the room, fitted out with a broomstick-clothes pole and a curtain on a wire, was used as a makeshift closet. Clinton imagined that in the days of Gloria, the room had been cheerful and modestly attractive.

  But nothing he had yet seen corresponded with Clinton’s imagined picture of what a real whorehouse should be. Nor was he disappointed: oh, perhaps if he ran the place himself he might put one of the prostitutes to work cleaning up the place now and then, and put a few colored light bulbs around; but he guessed Berry-berry simply hadn’t got around to these finer points as yet.

  “Is this room all yours?” he asked.

  “What, this?” Berry-berry said, with a deprecating gesture that took in the room.

  “I mean, if you get like a—a rush hour—will we have to get out and let . . .”

  “Are you kidding?” Berry-berry said, with a touch of annoyance. “You think I have those tramps up here? Listen, they wouldn’t dare cross that threshold. Look, Clint, I’ll tell you something right now. This is a strictly temporary operation. I don’t like it at all; it’s not what I’m used to. In fact, it’s the first time I’ve ever had anything to do with a house. I’m only doing it now for the experience! Christ, look at that mess down there; you think I can live like that? Never. This is strictly for the jolts, and to tell you the truth, I’ve had ‘em, all the jolts I want. It’s nothin’ but a headache. See, the kind of a pig that likes to work a house is just too damn lazy for the better stuff. No initiative, no class. You can’t even get ‘em to shave their goddam legs unless you keep after ‘em like a house mother. To hell with it. Look, I wanted to try a house, just once; okay, now I’ve done it. I’m ready to move on. —Why? Do you think I’m trapped here?”

  Clinton said, “Huh?”

  ”
‘Cause I’m not. Look here, I want to show you something.”

  He opened the bottom drawer of the bureau. It was empty, except for a copy of the Cleveland telephone directory. “See that?” he said.

  “What, the telephone book?” Clinton said.

  “Is that all it is? A phone book?”

  “Well, I guess so.”

  “Look.” Berry-berry turned back the cover. The centers of all the pages had been cut out, and the big directory was used as a hiding place for certain small treasures: several articles of jewelry, a bundle of twenty-dollar bills, and a revolver. “See? This is my freedom. I keep my freedom in here. And any time I want to, I put this stuff in my pocket, and take off like a big-assed bird. Go ahead, look it over, if you want to. I got a real sapphire in there, worth seven hundred and fifty.”

  He removed a bottle of brandy from under the bed, and took a swallow from it. “Here, you want a drink.”

  Clinton hesitated for a moment. “Yes, please.” He reached for the bottle. Berry-berry held it away from him.

  “Look, if you don’t want a drink, you don’t have to take it just because . . .”

  “But I do.”

  “Okay.” He handed Clinton the bottle. Clinton took a drink from it.

  “You know where I got that ring?” Berry-berry said. “A woman from Palm Beach gave it to me. She and her husband had this yacht—an eighty-footer worth I don’t know how much—they had it tied up in Key Bonita. She gave me that ring; no kidding. I may never sell it, either, I may just keep it.” He breathed on the ring and rubbed it against his sweat shirt. “See those cuff links? Those I bought. And that night, I wore them with a two-hundred-dollar black suit. Everybody else was in white and cream and beige. Not me. Black. Listen, I could’ve had any woman there. I mean any. You think that’s bragging?”

  “No,” Clinton said, “but where?”

  “At this party on the yacht. And you know why I got invited? Not because I own half the town or because I’m the mayor or some other hot-shot. Because I’m not. I’m nothing. But, Clint, I’ll tell you, I don’t understand it myself, but there’s something about me that a woman—well, they take risks, they lie, they’ll do anything—just to latch on to some of it, whatever it is, this thing I got. And it’s not that I’m hung like a horse or anything either. ‘Cause in that respect I’m just a normal healthy guy. —Anyway, here’s what happened. You won’t even believe it. I was standing in a bookshop. A bookshop, for godsake, just hanging around, and—you remember Madeline Carroll? Well, just like that, only black-haired, and she came walking into the place. Really bored, you know. So bored, oh, boy. And pretty soon we were having this conversation. Nothing; just, I need a book for a sick friend, and all that; just a conversation. And so she bought a book and started to walk out of the place. Then she stopped, you know, like she’d forgotten her change or something, and said: ‘By the way, have you got a white suit and a black tie?’ I looked her up and down and I said, ‘Why, have you got one you’ve outgrown?’ And then she told me to come to this party on the yacht. I said, ‘How do you know I’m not some dangerous maniac that goes around murdering beautiful women?’ And then she said, ‘Well, in that case I won’t need a sleeping pill tonight, will I?’ And she walked out and got in her car. So I walked out there, real slow, you know, not anxious or anything, and I said, ‘Look, are you serious? Because I may just show up on that yacht.’ She said, ‘You’d better!’ So I said, ‘I thought you had a husband.’ And you know what she said then?”

  “No, what?”

  “She said, ‘Yes, I do, but I don’t think he’ll appeal to you.’ And drove off. Just like that. And Clint, I swear, things like that happen to me all the time. Wild things; I don’t even understand it myself. So who knows, maybe next winter I might even try some of these resorts. Palm Beach, Nassau. And I mean, breathe some air. D’you know a reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “No, why?” Clinton said.

  “No. I mean, can you name one. A reason why I shouldn’t?”

  “Oh.” Clinton thought for a while. Then, “No, I can’t think of any right off.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do next,” Berry-berry said. “I never know myself. I just follow the breeze.”

  “Or else you get kicked out of town, huh?” Clinton said.

  Berry-berry searched his face quickly, and finding no malice in it, he smiled and said, “Yeah, I’ve had my share of that, too. You can say that again.”

  “What the hell, though,” Clinton said, “that’s part of the game, huh?”

  Sure.

  “How old,” Clinton said thoughtfully, “does a guy have to be?”

  “For what?” Berry-berry snapped.

  “Oh, I just mean, to travel around, without having a cop put you on the bus and send you home.”

  “Clint?”

  “What?”

  Berry-berry had his mouth open, but he said nothing. His eyes seemed not to focus on anything in the room, but on something inside his head.

  Clinton said, “What’re you thinkin’ about?”

  “Peanut butter.”

  “Peanut butter?”

  “Yeah. You still eat it?”

  Clinton nodded. “Uh-huh. Why?”

  “Nothin’. I just got to thinking about peanut butter is all. The time Annabel couldn’t find it in the kitchen, and you had it in bed with you.”

  “I did?”

  “You used to eat it with your fingers. You don’t remember, hunh?”

  “Huh-uh.”

  Berry-berry, lost in his own thoughts, looked at Clinton for a long time. Clinton knew that he himself was somehow the subject of these secret thoughts, and so he studied Berry-berry’s face, hoping to get some clue to whatever it was that was unspoken. The two brothers went on looking at each other in this way, without speaking, until at last, in combination with the brandy he had drunk, this staring created in Clinton a sense of dreaming. All feeling of flesh-and-blood reality eluded him: Berry-berry was not there any more. He was an image he had dreamed up, a private fiction of his own making. Then Berry-berry, no longer real to him, lay back on the bed and closed his eyes. Clinton sat in the easy chair and went on looking at this projected image of his brother.

  Suddenly he felt that he had to move, do something, speak, or he would himself cease to exist. He stood up and looked at the opened bureau drawer. He glanced at the contents of the treasure box, his brother’s freedom: the gun, the money, the jewelry. Then he closed the cover of the directory, closed the bureau drawer, and walked over to the other side of the bed. Berry-berry was asleep. Clinton quietly lowered himself onto the bed and lay there next to him, his head propped up on his arm, and scrutinized every detail of Berry-berry’s sleeping face. He thought of the many times, before the move, that he had been in this position as a child, studying his brother.

  Now Berry-berry had revealed to him many secret matters. But still, almost as if he, Clinton, were thirteen again, he had to reach over with his fingertips and touch his brother’s nose—to make sure he was really there.

  He wondered, if the choice were put to him, whether he would go traveling with Berry-berry or stay around Cleveland to be where Echo was. His last thoughts before falling asleep were of this sudden confusion of riches in his life.

  But when Berry-berry awakened him at dawn, Clinton’s mouth was bitter from cigarettes and brandy, and his thoughts were black.

  The morning itself was decent enough: the sky was blue, birds were singing, the country air had in it the scent of apples and earth. Berry-berry had bathed and shaved himself. He had put on fresh khaki trousers and a clean white shirt, open at the throat, the sleeves rolled up; and out of this linen whiteness, the flesh of his arms and hands, of his neck and face, retained that faint patina of green-blue that Clinton had seen there yesterday, the puzzling color of some remote, unheard-of race, sad and beautiful, and so subtle that only the eye of love, or hatred, could ever perceive its presence.

  But the fine morning, and
Berry-berry himself, had no power to bring him pleasure. Because some dream that he could not even remember lingered heavily in him. He felt that while he slept, and as the earth had completed another turn, some mysterious event of the night had blighted his good fortune. His whole body ached with the disquiet these thoughts brought with them and, at length, he determined to stop their progress, if he could, by an act of will.

  Berry-berry said: “Come on, wake up, Clint. I got to drive you home, for godsake.” He led the way downstairs to the bathroom, where Clinton splashed cold water over his face and rinsed his mouth. Then they went out the kitchen door, and into the rich morning of the orchard. They gathered up many of the good apples that had fallen from the trees and filled a bushel basket with them.

  “You might as well take these with you,” Berry-berry said. They placed the basket in the back of the truck.

  Berry-berry drove fast, but not with the reckless speed of the night before. He frowned slightly, looked straight ahead; and kept both hands on the wheel. He did not speak.

  Clinton also stared straight ahead, seeing nothing. He lighted a cigarette but it tasted as if someone had stuffed it with poison; so he stepped on it with his heel and threw it out the window onto the highway. He could feel, without even looking at it, the nearness of Cleveland. In a way it seemed that they were standing still and Cleveland was coming at them at sixty miles an hour.

  And he knew something else: that even though Berry-berry was at the wheel of this truck, his brother was, in real fact, headed in some other direction, to a region more distant even than Key Bonita or Brazil. Berry-berry would drop him off at the house on Seminary Street, maybe even help him unload the bushel of apples, and then move on and away, body and soul, all by himself, to that faraway place. Clinton wondered if he might have preferred that Berry-berry had stayed away altogether. Because he was like some drug to which the family, he and Ralph and Annabel, were all addicted; and after this small taste, wasn’t there a danger they might go crazy with yearning for him? No, Clinton answered himself, they wouldn’t go crazy, but they might continue to languish for another couple of years, or forty, Ralph in the basement, Annabel on the first floor, himself on the second, in the kind of haunted silence, broken only by occasional lies and hollow half-talk, that had filled so much of the past. But Berry-berry had given him a lot to write down, to think about, and for this Clinton was grateful. Then he realized, too, that there was an off chance Berry-berry might continue for a while at Apple Mountain; and that Echo O’Brien would be around after that, to save them from themselves, and from one another.