The Big Clock

by Kenneth Fearing

  She went away, then, and in the quiet that came back to the little shop I firmly proved I would pay what I said I would and no more, and eventually we went away, too, and I had my prize.

  Pauline still had some time, and we stopped in at the cocktail lounge of the Van Barth. I left the canvas in the car, but when we’d ordered our drinks Pauline asked me why on earth I’d bought it, and I described it again, trying to explain. She finally said she liked it well enough, but could not see there was anything extraordinarily powerful about it.

  It became evident she was picture-blind. It wasn’t her fault; many people are born that way; it is the same as being colorblind or tone-deaf. But I tried to explain what the work of Louise Patterson meant in terms of simplified abstractionism and fresh intensifications of color. Then I argued that the picture must have some feeling for her since she’d surely picked the right title for it.

  “How do you know it’s right?” she asked.

  “I know it. I feel it. It’s just what I saw in the picture myself.”

  On the spur of the moment I decided, and told her, that Judas must have been a born conformist, a naturally commonsense, rubber-stamp sort of fellow who rose far above himself when he became involved with a group of people who were hardly in society, let alone a profitable business.

  “Heavens, you make him sound like a saint,” Pauline said, smiling and frowning.

  I told her very likely he was.

  “A man like that, built to fall into line but finding himself always out of step, must have suffered twice the torments of the others. And eventually, the temptation was too much for him. Like many another saint, when he was tempted, he fell. But only briefly.”

  “Isn’t that a little involved?”

  “Anyway, it’s the name of my picture,” I said. “Thanks for your help.”

  We drank to that, but Pauline upset her cocktail.

  I rescued her with my handkerchief for a hectic moment, then left her to finish the job while I called the waiter for more drinks, and he cleared the wet tabletop. After a while we had something to eat, and still more drinks, and a lot more talk.

  It was quite dark when we came out of the lounge, and I drove the few blocks to 58 East. Pauline’s apartment, which I had never been in, was in one of those austere and permanent pueblos of the Sixties. She asked me to stop away from the entrance, cool as she explained: “I don’t think it would be wise for me to go in with a strange overnight bag. Accompanied.”

  The remark didn’t say anything, but it gave me a momentarily uncomfortable measure of the small but nevertheless real risks we were running. I erased that idea and said nothing, but I ran past the building and parked half a block from the lighted, canopied entrance.

  There I got out to hand her the light valise she had brought with her to Albany, and for a moment we paused.

  “May I phone?” I asked.

  “Of course. Please do. But we have to be—well—”

  “Of course. It’s been wonderful, Pauline. Just about altogether supreme.”

  She smiled and turned away.

  Looking beyond her retreating shoulders I vaguely noticed a limousine pull in at the curb opposite the building’s entrance. There was something familiar about the figure and carriage of the man who got out of it. He put his head back into the car to issue instructions to a chauffeur, then turned for a moment in my direction. I saw that it was Earl Janoth.

  He noticed Pauline approaching, and I am certain that he looked past her and saw me. But I did not think he could have recognized me; the nearest street lamp was at my back.

  And what if he had? He didn’t own the woman.

  He didn’t own me, either.

  I stepped into my car and started the motor, and I saw them disappearing together into the lighted entrance.

  I didn’t feel very happy about this unlucky circumstance, as I drove off, but on the other hand, I didn’t see how any irreparable damage could have been done.

  I drove back to Gil’s. There, it was the usual raucous Saturday night. I had a whole lot of drinks, without much conversation, then I took the car around to my garage and caught the 1:45 for home. It was early, but I wanted to be clear-eyed when Georgette and Georgia got back from Florida in the afternoon. I would return by train, pick them up in the car, and drive them home.

  I brought in my own bag, at Marble Road, and of course I didn’t forget The Temptation of St. Judas. The picture I simply laid down on the dining room table. It would have to be cleaned, repaired, and framed.

  I glanced at the Pattersons in the downstairs rooms and at the one upstairs in my study, before I went to bed. The Temptation was better than any of them.

  It occurred to me that maybe I was becoming one of the outstanding Patterson collectors in the United States. Or anywhere.

  But before I went to bed I unpacked my grip, put away the belongings it had contained, then put the grip away, too.

  Earl Janoth I

  BY GOD, I never had such an evening. I flatter myself that I am never inurbane by impulse only, but these people, supposedly friends of mine, were the limit, and I could have strangled them one by one.

  Ralph Beeman, my attorney for fifteen years, showed damned little interest and less sympathy when the question of the wire renewal for Commerce Index came up, or was deliberately brought up. The whole bunch of them quite openly discussed the matter, as though I myself were some sort of immaterial pneuma, not quite present at all, and as though I might actually lose the franchise. Really, they weighed alternatives, when I did lose it.

  “Ralph and I have something to say about that,” I said, heartily, but the mousey bastard didn’t turn a hair. He was just plain neutral.

  “Oh, certainly. We’ll renew no matter whom we have to fight.”

  To me, it sounded as though he thought the fight was already lost. I gave him a sharp look, but he chose not to understand. It would have been well, had Steve been present. He is immensely alert to such winds and undercurrents as I felt, but could not measure, everywhere around me.

  Ten of us were having dinner at John Wayne’s, and since he is a smooth but capable political leader, if we were discussing anything at all it should have been politics. But by God, since I came into his home, a festering old incubus dating back at least a hundred years, we hadn’t talked about anything except Janoth Enterprises, and what difficulties we were having. But I wasn’t having any difficulties. And I wasn’t having any of this, either.

  Then there was an awkward moment when Hamilton Carr asked me how I had made out in Washington. I had just returned, and I had an uncomfortable feeling that he knew exactly everyone I had seen there and what I was about. Yet it was really nothing. I had thought of broadening the corporate basis of Janoth Enterprises, and my trip to Washington was simply to obtain quick and reliable information on what procedure I might follow to achieve that end and fully observe all SEC regulations.

  Ralph Beeman had gone down with me, had not said much while we were there, and I gave him another emphatic thought. But it couldn’t be. Or were they all, in fact, in some kind of a conspiracy against me? Voyagers to new continents of reason have been caught offguard before.

  But Hamilton Carr was no enemy; at least, I had never thought he was; he was simply my banking adviser. He had always known, to the last dime, what the paper issued by Janoth Enterprises was worth, and who held it. Tonight, he said: “You know, Jennett-Donohue still want either to buy or merge.”

  I gave him a huge laugh.

  “Yes,” I said. “So do I. What will they sell for?”

  Carr smiled; it was icy dissent. God damn you, I thought, what’s up?

  There was a blasted foreign person present with a fearful English accent who went by the name of Lady Pearsall, or something equally insignificant, and she told me at great length what was wrong with my magazines. Everything was wrong with them, according to her. But it hadn’t crossed her mind that I had gone far out of my way to obtain the very best writers and edi
tors, the broadest and richest minds to be had. I had combed the newspapers, the magazines, the finest universities, and paid the highest salaries in the field, to hire what I knew were the finest bunch of journalists ever gathered together under one roof. She gobbled away extensively, her Adam’s apple moving exactly like a scrawny turkey’s, but to hear her tell it, I had found my writers in the hospitals, insane asylums, and penitentiaries.

  I could smile at everything she had to say, but I didn’t feel like smiling at what Carr and Beeman and finally a man by the name of Samuel Lydon had to say.

  “You know,” he told me, “there may not always be the same demand for superior presentation there has been in the past. I’ve been getting reports from the distributors.” Anyone could. It was public knowledge. “I think you would like me to be quite candid with you, Mr. Janoth.”

  “Certainly.”

  “Well, the returns on some of your key magazines have shown strange fluctuations. Out of proportion to those of other publications, I mean.” I placed him now. He was executive vice-president of a local distributing organization. “I wondered if there was any definitely known reason?”

  This was either colossal ignorance or outrageous effrontery. If I knew of definite reasons. I looked at him, but didn’t bother to reply.

  “Maybe it’s that astrology magazine of yours,” said Geoffrey Balack, ineffectual, vicious, crude, and thoroughly counterfeit. He was some kind of a columnist. I had hired him once, but his work had not seemed too satisfactory, and when he left to take another job I had thought it was a fortunate change all round. Looking at him now, I couldn’t remember whether he’d quit, or whether Steve had fired him. Or possibly I had. Offensively, now, he brushed a hand back over the rather thin hair on his head. “That’s one I never understood at all. Why?”

  I was still smiling, but it cost me an effort.

  “I bought that little book, Stars, for its title alone. Today it has nothing to do with astrology. It is almost the sole authority in astrophysics.”

  “Popular?”

  That didn’t deserve a reply, either. This was what we had once considered a writer with insight and integrity. And good writers cost money, which I was more than glad to pay.

  But they were growing more expensive all the time. Other publishing organizations, even though they were not in the same field at all, were always happy to raid our staff, though they rarely tampered with each others’. The advertising agencies, the motion pictures, radio, we were always losing our really good men elsewhere, at prices that were simply fantastic. A man we had found ourselves, and nursed along until we found just the right way to bring out the best and soundest that was in him, might then casually leave us to write trash for some perfume program, or speeches for a political amplifier. Contract or no contract, and at a figure it would be almost ruinous to the rest of the organization if we thought of meeting it.

  Either that or they wanted to write books. Or went crazy. Although, God knows, most of them were born that way, and their association with us merely slowed up and postponed the inevitable process for a time.

  Well. We still had the finest writers to be had, and the competition only kept us on our toes.

  When it came to the point where Jennett-Donohue or Devers & Blair offered twenty-five thousand for a fifteen-thousand-dollar editor, we would go thirty thousand. If radio offered fifty thousand for a man we really had to keep, we’d go to sixty. And when Hollywood began raiding our copy boys and legmen for a million—well, all right. No use being morbid. But sometimes it’s impossible not to be.

  It was ten o’clock—the earliest moment possible—before I was able to leave. I had enough to worry about, without taking on any extra nonsense from this particular crowd.

  It is all a matter of one’s inherited nerves and glands. No matter how much one rationalizes, one has either a joyless, negative attitude toward everyone and everything, like these people, and it is purely a matter of the way in which the glands function, or one has a positive and constructive attitude. It is no great credit to me. But neither is it any credit to them.

  In the car, I told Bill to drive me home, but halfway there I changed my mind. I told him to drive to Pauline’s. Hell, she might even be there. Home was no place to go after an evening squandered among a bunch of imitation cynics, disappointed sentimentalists, and frustrated conspirators.

  Without a word Bill spun the wheel and we turned the corner. It reminded me of the way he had always taken my orders, thirty years ago during the hottest part of a circulation war out West, then in the printer’s strike upstate. That was why he was with me now. If he wouldn’t talk even to me, after thirty odd years, he would never talk to anyone.

  When we drew up in front of the place and I got out, I put my head in the window next to him and said: “Go on home, Bill. I’ll take a taxi. I don’t think I’ll need you until tomorrow evening.”

  He looked at me but said nothing, and eased the car away from the curb.

  Earl Janoth II

  ON THE SIDEWALK I turned to go in, but as I turned, I caught sight of Pauline. She was leaving someone at the next corner. I couldn’t see her face, but I recognized her profile, the way she stood and carried herself, and I recognized the hat she had recently helped to design, and the beige coat. As I stood there she started to walk toward me. The man with her I did not recognize at all, though I stared until he turned and stepped into a car, his face still in the shadows.

  When Pauline reached me she was smiling and serene, a little warm and a little remote, deliberate as always. I said: “Hello, dear. This is fortunate.”

  She brushed away an invisible strand of hair, stopped beside me.

  “I expected you’d be back yesterday,” she said. “Did you have a nice trip, Earl?”

  “Fine. Have a pleasant week end?”

  “Marvelous. I went riding, swimming, read a grand book, and met some of the most interesting brand-new people.”

  We had moved into the building by now. I glanced down and saw that she carried an overnight bag.

  I could hear though not see somebody moving behind the high screen that partitioned off the apartment switchboard and, as usual, there was no sign of anyone else. Perhaps this isolation was one of the reasons she had liked such a place in the beginning.

  There was an automatic elevator, and now it was on the main floor. As I opened the door, then followed her in and pushed the button for five, I nodded toward the street.

  “Was he one of them?”

  “One of who? Oh, you mean the brand-new people. Yes.”

  The elevator stopped at five. The inner door slid noiselessly open, and Pauline herself pushed open the outer door. I followed her the dozen or so carpeted steps to 5A. Inside the small four-room apartment there was such silence and so much dead air it did not seem it could have been entered for days.

  “What were you doing?” I asked.

  “Well, first we went to a terrible place on Third Avenue by the name of Gil’s. You’d love it. Personally, I thought it was a bore. But it’s some kind of a combination between an old archeology foundation, and a saloon. The weirdest mixture. Then after that we went up and down the street shopping for antiques.”

  “What kind of antiques?”

  “Any kind that we thought might be interesting. Finally, we bought a picture, that is, he did, in a shop about three blocks from here. An awful old thing that just came out of a dust-bin, it looked like, and he practically kidnapped it from another customer, some woman who bid for it, too. Nothing but a couple of hands, by an artist named Patterson.”

  “A couple of what?”

  “Hands, darling. Just hands. It was a picture about Judas, as I understand it. Then after that we went to the Van Barth and had a few drinks, and he brought me home. That’s where you came in. Satisfied?”

  I watched her open the door of the small closet in the lobby and drop her bag inside of it, then close the door and turn to me again with her shining hair, deep eyes, and perfec
t, renaissance face.

  “Sounds like an interesting afternoon,” I said. “Who was this brand-new person?”

  “Oh. Just a man. You don’t know him. His name is George Chester, in advertising.”

  Maybe. And my name is George Agropolus. But I’d been around a lot longer than she had, or, for that matter, than her boy friend. I looked at her for a moment, without speaking, and she returned the look, a little too intently. I almost felt sorry for the new satellite she’d just left, whoever he was.

  She poured us some brandy from a decanter beside the lounge, and across the top of her glass she crinkled her eyes in the intimate way supposed to fit the texture of any moment. I sipped my own, knowing again that everything in the world was ashes. Cold, and spent, and not quite worth the effort. It was a mood that Steve never had, a mood peculiarly my own. The question crossed my mind whether possibly others, too, experienced the same feeling, at least occasionally, but that could hardly be. I said: “At least, this time it’s a man.”

  Sharply, she said: “Just what do you mean by that?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “Are you bringing up that thing again? Throwing Alice in my face?” Her voice had the sound of a wasp. Avenue Z was never far beneath the surface, with Pauline. “You never forget Alice, do you?”

  I finished the brandy and reached for the decanter, poured myself another drink. Speaking with deliberate slowness, and politely, I said: “No. Do you?”

  “Why, you goddamn imitation Napoleon, what in hell do you mean?”

  I finished the brandy in one satisfying swallow.