It was a good philosophy, but it was a futile one for my own purposes. I could take care of the present and not concern myself with the future, but the past was always with me. The smell of it was in my nostrils no matter how I tried to turn my head away from it. It was the smell of fresh sod piled on Ben Gennaro’s grave, the smell of the bridal bouquet his sister carried, and what I thought and felt was permeated with it. I invited all the Daniel Egans in me to argue me out of this, to jeer at me for it, to exercise their scornful wit against me for it, but in this they failed me. When it came to the past they shrank before it and shared only one feeling about it, and that was mine.
There were times when the past became more than mere feelings. One Sunday afternoon—Sunday had never been one of my good days—it walked into my room in the person of my uncle Charles, sleek, well-kept, the interested observer who liked on occasion to drop into the zoo to see a strange new species stored there. He looked around at my cage and at me and said, “Well, you’re looking fit enough,” his precise choice of words making it clear that my summer of yachting at Newport, and the squash rackets I indulged in every day had done me a world of good.
“You seem pretty fit yourself,” I said.
“I know.” He pulled off his overcoat and looked for a place to put it, finally draping it over the foot of the bed on which I was lying and seating himself on the bed beside it. “You’re probably wondering why I’m here. Well, I come as the bearer of interesting news. At least I hope you’re interested. Are you?”
“No.”
“Then I won’t bother you with it. Anyhow, the news was only intended to serve as my ticket of admission here. It’s a shame that I have to find an excuse to visit my own nephew, but there it is. And this cordial reception—you’ve changed considerably in some ways, but the bad manners are still there, aren’t they?”
“I guess I come by them naturally.”
“I won’t dispute that. But you don’t have to exercise them on me, Daniel. I’m here in quite a friendly spirit. Almost as an admirer, you might say. You know, I’ve thought of you often during the past few years. Whenever I was at a showing or at the theater or a concert, I’ve had half an eye out for you. I didn’t expect you to become so proletarianized that you’d give up these pleasures, so, very honestly, my one remaining regret for you is that you evidently have.”
I said, “You weren’t looking in the right place at the right time. Try the balconies and save your regrets.”
“I will. I take that to mean that you’re living with one foot in each world now. An interesting position. Have you been able to proselytize your fellow proletarians in favor of culture, or are you the isolated and shining example of the workman of tomorrow?”
“No, I’m the isolated and shining example of the workman who’ll take that kind of talk and not boot you right out of here for it. Who the hell do you think you are to talk that way?”
It was the first time I had ever seen him on the defensive. He said apologetically, “I’m sorry. I didn’t intend it to sound nasty. As it happens, I’m sincerely interested in this. It seemed impossible to me that you’d give up all your interests on an impulse, and I’m very glad you haven’t.”
“That’s nice of you.”
“No, it’s probably my clinical interest in people, you among others. And possibly because I do know you so well I couldn’t understand how you could make any sort of life among the people you work with and live with. How you could find any sense of identification with them. I still don’t.”
“Well, since you’re being clinical about it I’ll give you the word. I don’t have to identify with the people I work with or with anybody else. All I have to identify with is myself and that’s what I’ve been doing nowadays. So when I’m with the fags at the Modern Museum or the phonies at the opera all I have to worry about is what I’m personally getting out of looking at pictures or listening to music. The trouble with you and a lot of people like you is that you’re so concerned with bringing culture to the masses that you can’t have any fun yourselves. At least, not with the culture you’re always talking about. When you want to have real fun, you go off and bet on the horses and get drunk and go to bed with a woman just like the masses, me included. Even with these things you do so much damn talking and theorizing about them that they dry up on you. A lifetime of that makes a long dull lifetime, if you ask me. A lot duller than the job I’m doing or the people I work with.”
“The eternal romantic,” my uncle said. He got up from the bed and slowly walked around the room, scanning its details with a sardonic eye. “Fleeing from one conformity to an even more dismal conformity, all in the name of vim, vigor, and vitality.”
“Jesus,” I said, “don’t start on that conformity line. I know all about that talk. It’s the biggest thing since miniature golf.”
“It happens to be the serious concern of some highly intelligent people.”
“You can still shove it. Why not face the facts and admit that there’s always been conformity. As far back as the records go everybody always wanted to be a conformist except a few characters with scrambled brains. The new twist to it is that once upon a time the people on top used to think that only the peasants were conformists. Now they’ve learned that they are, too, and they don’t like it. So they talk about it.”
“So they do,” my uncle said. He seemed entirely ill at ease now. He picked up his coat and stood there frowning at me. “I wish I knew what to make of you, but it’s beyond me. I suppose you regard yourself as one of those fortunates with scrambled brains, is that it?”
“No.”
“No? Then you have me completely.” He happened to glance out of the window and catch a full view of Waterhouse’s masterpiece. “Good God, who did that?”
“A folk artist,” I said. “An incurable dreamer. And a vegetarian, too, if that helps explain it.”
“Nothing could help explain it.” He shook his head at the spectacle and turned away from it. “As far as my news is concerned I may as well deliver it whether you’re interested or not. At least it’ll allow me to feel that my visit had some point. Peg had a baby last week. A boy, much to your father’s relief. She had no intention of letting you know about it, because she’s never forgiven your failure to show up at the wedding.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“You conceal your tears admirably. But then you may not have fully considered the crass, commercial aspects of the matter. The last time I visited the house I observed that your old room had been made into a nursery for the baby. Symbolic, isn’t it? Judging from that and from certain remarks of your father I’d say that there’s a new heir apparent in the family. Your father, like most grandparents I know, seems to feel that God in His overwhelming mercy has given him a second chance at parenthood. It’s a miracle that the baby’s survived it so far, but if he continues to survive it he’s going to be an extraordinarily well-endowed young man some day. Financially, I mean.”
“Lucky boy,” I said. “Don’t tell me his name, I want to guess it. It’s Charles.”
“It is,” said my uncle, “and I fail to see anything funny about that.”
“So would Peg. But then she’s always been infatuated with that name. Always felt it could add so much to one’s endowments. Give her my regards when you see her, and tell her that she has all my admiration.”
“I will,” said my uncle, and his voice was brittle with the ice in it. “I must be going now. I don’t suppose we’ll be seeing much more of each other, will we?”
He knew the answer to that without my saying a word.
My uncle was one re-creation of the living past—a stranger one followed not long after him. It came to me in April, the cruellest month, a letter forwarded by the post office, a form letter turned out by a machine as proof that machines can err where people will not.
Dear Alumnus,
On June 6th we will celebrate the fifth anniversary of the graduation of the Class of ’54, and our first R
eunion. We look forward to seeing you here, and the following arrangements have been made for your convenience.
Stowe Hall, Darrow Hall, and all fraternity houses will be made available to you, and those alumni who wish to bring their wives—
I read this message from the past, wondering as I read, until I realized that my name must still be on the rolls of the class of 1954 even though I had been asked to depart from it a year before its graduation. It had been five years since the others had last answered to their names during roll call; it had been six years for me.
There seemed to be no point in keeping the letter, but I kept it. I folded it and put it in the top drawer of my dresser, and it lay there waiting, memento mori.
THIRTEEN
Now and then in the late springtime fog comes to the city. Inland it is only a mist, a thickening of the atmosphere, a nimbus around the street light overhead, but on the waterfront, where the first warm air sliding out of the west with summer on its tail blankets the winter water, it is palpable as a wet sponge against the face. It hangs low in the air like a damp gauze drapery, swirling around you as you move through it. It lies invisible on every piece of metal, coming to life as you touch it and condensing instantly into a trickle of water under your hand. It makes footing treacherous, and it makes the cigarette you try to smoke soggy and unpalatable.
Altogether it is unpleasant stuff to be in, never more so than when you also happen to be on the slippery floor of a drydock under the hull of an antique freighter. And the Preston Merchant was an antique if there ever was one. She wasn’t big by the standards of Universal or Slade, our next-door neighbors, but she was big enough for Voorhees, three thousand tons, and much of it, from the looks of her, solid rust. She had been in drydock for a week while the barnacles and slime were scraped and hosed off her shell, and now the night shift’s job was to work from one end of her to the other sounding out weak rivets and making them watertight. That meant crawling, squatting, and kneeling under her rotting hull, a peening hammer in one hand, a welding line in the other, tapping a rivet head to find its outline and then trying to lay a welding bead around the rivet which would make some impression on the scale and rust in which it was embedded. It was a bad job, made worse by the way I had to move around the piles of scrap metal littering the floor of the drydock, and I had my fill of it long before Joe Guion came along to tell me that I would be relieved of it briefly in a little while.
“One of the tugs is bringing a barge in here,” he said. “Wheelock’s tug, the Karen. It was supposed to be in a couple of hours ago, but the fog must have held it up. Anyhow, when you hear Wheelock blowing for a berth you go out and tell him to lay the barge up in the Basin and put the tug over by Pier One. And get the barge captain’s log and leave it in the box by Administration. Screw Wheelock, anyhow. I can’t wait here all night for him. I got to get over to the plate shop and make out these reports.”
I could hear everything afloat in the water around me trumpeting and bellowing warnings. It seemed hardly the weather to run a barge across the bay, and when I remarked this to Joe he shrugged. “Don’t I know it? And this scow happens to be one of them the old man’s had working down in the Gulf, so if it took three months getting up here what difference does one more day make? Only Wheelock picked it up at Bayonne, and if he had to lay over there it would mean a day’s rent for the dock. It would break the old man. It would take away his last nickel.”
“Go on,” I said, “you know you wouldn’t want the old man’s money if you had to take the troubles that came with it,” and he cursed me for that, and took one of my damp cigarettes, and made his way off.
I watched him go, then took a long time over my own cigarette before going back to work. It was some consolation to reflect while working that at least I was ashore while others had to pilot tugs through weather like this with a clumsy tow alongside and a chance of being cut down by some big boat before they even knew it was on them. It was my guess that anyone as experienced as Wheelock—he was one of Voorhees’ senior pilots and almost due for retirement—would give up long before he crossed the bay and take his chances with the old man’s temper rather than risk his boat.
But I was wrong about that. An hour later, while I was helping the Noonans, Big and Little, drag welding line deeper under the belly of the freighter I heard the unmistakable signal of the tugboat just offshore, and I mentally took off my hat to Jacob Voorhees’ temper. I left the Noonans there without regret and clambered the ladder that was fixed to the side of the drydock. From the heights of the dock’s platform I could barely make out the light at the masthead of the tug and her port and starboard lights, dim as ornaments on a Christmas tree seen through a frosted window. I clambered down the rickety stairway on the outside of the dock—it was a good fifty feet up and down that wall—and picked my way to the pier where the tug was waiting.
Wheelock was in the pilothouse, and while I could see his silhouette against the window there, he could not see me until he had a spotlight turned on me. I shaded my eyes against it while I gave him his instructions, and a moment later the boat’s riding lights disappeared, and all that was left was the thump-thump of its Diesels as it crept around the pier to the Basin, the barge a huge shadow alongside it.
By the time I got to the Basin the barge was moored there and the tug had pulled clear. I leaped on board the barge and walked to the deckhouse up forward, picking my way cautiously in the darkness over broken splintery boards and unknown objects in my way. When I knocked on the door of the deckhouse it took a long time for the knock to be answered. Then the door was pulled open, and a man stood there looking at me in the light of the kerosene lamp hung on the wall of the room behind him. A big man, inches taller than I was, broad-shouldered, barrel-chested, and with a big-beaked, craggy face under a mop of gray hair. A strange face. Its cheeks were sunken, its mouth as thin-lipped and tight as a piece of drawn wire. And the disapproval stamped on it was not the plaintive disapproval of a down-at-the-heels deckhand called to his duties, but the kind of look John Brown might have worn when he was facing his enemies. It was a curious look to be faced with at that time and that place, and it set my teeth on edge.
“Yes?” said the man, his voice rumbling from somewhere deep inside him. “What do you want, friend?”
“Your log,” I said in a way that meant he’d have to look elsewhere for his friends. “Put down the time of arrival, sign it, and give it to me. I have to turn it in to the office.”
The man nodded at this. “Ah,” he said, “they do things businesslike around here, don’t they?” not as if he were stating a grievance, but with a ponderous, contemplative admiration. He turned and went into the cabin, and I followed. Followed, and saw in that dirty, disordered, smoky room something well worth the seeing.
It was a woman holding a big coat tight around her and looking at me over its collar. A young woman, a girl barely arrived at womanhood and testing it on me. It would have been pleasant to think that I had been chosen for this test because she instantly saw in me something as potent as I saw in her, but I knew that was not the case. It happened to be my luck to come through that door then; anyone else marked male would have served her purpose as well.
She stood with the coat wrapped around her, barelegged, her feet in worn canvas sneakers, and even in that haphazard costume she would have lit up any room she entered, would have been a magnet for every man’s eyes. Not because she had succeeded in being the siren she was obviously trying to be, but despite that. Underneath the coat was a suggestion of ripe breasts and curved hips, but the face was clean-scrubbed, wide-eyed, yet sensually aware, and it was the face that provided the impact. When I had last seen Mia Gennaro I had imagined her the perfect model for Sargent, but only Modigliani could have done justice to this girl.
So I looked at her and recognized her pose—the head over the shoulder, the hands holding the coat together at waist and collar, the torso shyly offered yet not offered—as the Hollywood ideal, or, because the
sensual was so balanced by the transparent naïvete of her, a caricaturé of the Hollywood ideal. Come hither, come hither, but don’t touch, it sang. It was the nightingale song, and I came hither with the excitement and the sense of discovery growing in me. And dared to touch, putting a hand on an arm of the coat, which I realized with incredulity was mink. Splendid, lustrous, the luster of it alive in the flickering light of the kerosene lamp, it may have belonged on the girl—it was no more splendid in its way than she was—but it did not belong on a Voorhees’ barge. The men who tended the barges were called captain by courtesy, but they were the ragpickers of the watergoing trade. It was not for any woman of theirs to have a coat like this.
The girl shrank away as I touched it, the fine pose dissolving into an awkward wariness, and she said, “It’s real, if that’s what you’re wondering. It’s a sure enough mink coat,” her voice even in its defiance a soft drawl, yet not altogether of the Deep South.
“That’s what I was wondering,” I said. “Where’d you get it?”
The barge captain looked up from the log he was filling out. “I got it,” he said. “Bought and paid for it down Duval Street in Key West. Paid a thousand dollars cash, and I got the paper here to show for it, friend.”
“You never got that coat for a thousand,” I said. “Not from an honest man. It’s worth five times as much.”
“Bought and paid a thousand for it, friend, around the corner of Duval Street. Place there got three balls over it, and the man runs it ain’t your uncle or mine, but you can call him uncle when you go in. Berger is his name, and this paper of his says the coat’s all paid for. It’s a whore’s coat, it reeks from sin, but it’s paid for. Render unto Caesar, friend. Don’t try to make out I come by that coat dishonest, because I’m cursed enough without that.”
The Winter After This Summer Page 18