by David Mamet
They warmed each other in the frozen apartment. After making love she hurried, shivering, from the bed. She took his heavy overcoat from the hook on the back of the door, and put it on.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“Make tea,” she said.
She hugged the overcoat around her and ran on tiptoe into the alcove that was his kitchen. She took the matchbox, shook it, and found it empty.
Mike opened the bedside table drawer and took out a book of matches, and a pack of cigarettes. She came back toward the bed for the match.
She glanced down into the open drawer and looked quizzically at Mike. He closed the drawer, sparing her the sight of the Luger. She waited for Mike to answer her unasked question. He lit the cigarette and looked away.
She took the book of matches, walked back to the stove, struck a match, and lit the rear burner. Shook the teakettle, and, satisfied, set it over the flame.
She crouched down by the stove door, opened the overcoat, and flapped the sides to bring the heat close.
The stove was lit and its door open, as in any of the apartments occupied during the day; for though the city allowed the landlords to shut down the furnace, they were prohibited from restricting the flow of gas, and the apartments, in the winter months, stank of the gas and of the stove.
She rubbed her hands, and turned back toward the bed to grin. “No one,” he thought, “has ever seen anything so lovely.”
He raised himself against the headboard, and gathered the bedclothes tight around him. He sat on the edge of the bed, looking at her.
He saw her, smiling, start to speak, and then she cocked her head, slightly, toward the door. Mike was looking at her when the man kicked the door in.
He was a large man in a heavy coat, holding a large revolver. Mike remembered later that he brought the winter in with him, in that back-of-the-nose smell of weeks below zero, and the Lake, and the outdoors, and that the man smelled of smoke.
“Laborers have that smell,” Mike thought. “Hunters, and vagrants. It’s the soldier smell, but it’s not. No, perhaps it is. The Germans had it.”
He had turned to the door. His mind tried to frame the sentence which would explain to her father and her brother and/or their emissary that all would be well, that he was sorry he had taken her virginity, but that they were going to be married, that he had asked to go to her people, but she had said to wait.
The first shot hit the girl as she stood and turned to him.
He thought, “No. She’ll be burned, she’ll fall on the stove.”
He rose to attack the killer, to explain that it wasn’t her fault. To stop him.
The man buttstroked him with the heavy revolver, and Mike went down unconscious.
Chapter 14
On the first afternoon he had taken her up to his room, she stepped out of her shift and shivered.
He turned down the sheet and the old army blanket, and put her in the bed. He tucked the covers in around her.
He saw that she was neither afraid nor apprehensive, and wondered how that could be. A verse from a long-ago Bible class came to him; and though he was thereafter sure he had not uttered it, she had absolutely nodded in response. She had drawn his face down to her. He saw it suffused not primarily with love, but with compassion. “She is,” he thought, while he made love to her, “the queen of heaven.”
The verse, as he remembered it, ran, “There are three things I do not understand: the serpent on the rock, the eagle in the air, and the way of a man with a maid.” But the way of the man was clear, and blunt, and simple: he took the woman or he asked her, and that was that; the mystery was the way of the maid, who accepted or acquiesced with a generosity and trust at which a man could only wonder.
Each time after they made love she went to confession. She would dress and take her heavy coat from the hook near the door, and fit herself into it. She would take the flowered shawl from the coat pocket and drape it over her head, transforming herself into a penitent. Then she would nod at him and leave.
After her death, and when they had taken her away, the shawl remained, and the coat remained, as did the clothes she had left folded on the chair, and the shoes underneath it.
He’d thought the police might have taken them, but they were, apparently, not considered germane to the crime.
One of her brothers glared at him at the graveside.
Was it sufficient to say, “We were going to be married”? He thought that any attempt at exculpation would be cowardice and a betrayal not only of the memory but of the soul of her who had been so brave.
At the interment, the brother had looked at him not with what would have been a bearable rage, but with a contempt which, however long he lived, would be among his last memories of Earth.
The brother came to Mike’s apartment, but he would not progress beyond the door. Mike took the brown paper package of the girl’s effects, and handed it to him, and the man walked away.
But why had she died? And why had they let him live?
Mike had at first believed that the girl’s death had been an “honor” killing, and that the murderers, her family, had left him to live with both the anguish of her loss, and his guilt.
But their grief, witnessed at the funeral, was overwhelming, and he saw they would never have done anything to harm their beloved daughter.
But, then, why had the girl alone been killed?
Other than the loss of her chastity there was nothing of which she could possibly be guilty.
She had been killed, then, as a lesson to him. But administered by whom? By those he had offended, certainly, but by whom, other than her family? Whom had he offended?
In the course of his near ten years in Chicago journalism, he had offended anyone the exposure of whose actions caused them discomfort, shame, anxiety, incarceration. His job, as he understood it, was to uncover and to tell the truth about acts most of which someone had a large interest in concealing.
He had revealed facts about the South Side Italians, which is to say Capone; the North Side Irish, captained by O’Banion; the vagaries of the police force; the vice and vice lords of the Levee; and the ever-reliable procession of wife beaters, child abusers, white slavers, dope fiends, thieves, con artists, perverted rich and depraved poor, and, in short, the lifeblood of his chosen and beloved city.
He had, many times, cautioned himself to be careful, and some few times he had even acted upon the advice. But, in the main, he dealt with fear as he had trained himself to do in the airplane. He learned to live with it.
Now they had killed his love.
And as it was not her fault, it was surely his. And now he understood what he had not understood before: the lot of the German flier.
And he remembered the aviator’s deepest prayer, not “Do not let me die,” but “Don’t let it be my fault.”
He had gotten the girl killed.
And there was nothing that could make that go away.
The rabbit had flown with Mike eight months over the Western Front. “There may be some fellas,” he said, “who trust their luck to magic incantations or somesuch. I myself rely only upon skill. And this rabbit.”
It was celluloid, yellow-brown, one inch long. Issuing from the top of its head, between the extended ears, was a thick loop of red string.
It had been part of the seal of a pack of opium.
The opium packet was wrapped in thick brown paper, bound with red string, and stamped, clumsily, with Chinese characters Mike could not decipher.
It came as part of the, to that date, most expensive night of his life, in Paris, when he had spent the totality of eight months’ flight pay on a Chinese courtesan, whose charms and abilities surpassed even the awestruck endorsements of her previous clients.
The room was dark red, the woman’s skin ivory; the japanned night table held a bottle of Pernod, a carafe of water, a packet of American cigarettes, the blackened opium pipe, the deck of opium, the appurtenant needle, bowl, and candle. The s
eal on the deck of opium was black, and pressed into the wax seal was the loop which held the rabbit.
Thereafter he’d flown with the rabbit buttoned into the left breast pocket of his tunic.
Back in Chicago, still in uniform, the blouse was thrown over the back of a hotel room chair. A brunette from the bar went hunting in his clothes for a match. Mike woke up to see her holding the rabbit by the string. “Did this keep you safe?” she asked.
Had the rabbit kept him safe?
What a fool question.
It was, to his mind, a question beyond foolish: it was the utmost blasphemy, not in that it questioned, but in that it named a power, obeisance to whose unnamed and unnameable self had of course kept him safe.
He had survived the War to awake, drunk, in Chicago, listening to the mockery of a power which, obviously, held his life in an esteem higher than he held it himself.
“I don’t fucking know why I’m here,” he thought. “Do any of us?”
And was it necessary to despise every intangible thing in order to think oneself wise, or chic, or whatever the hell people strove to think of themselves for want of other idleness?
“The rabbit,” he said, “or, say, the display of same, may indeed have been or be an error of taste. I am newly returned and unaware of How You Do Things Here. I have been away.”
He saw that she was moved by his oration, and pitied her credulity; for it was not that he had suffered, he knew, but that he could speak which won her sympathy.
“Who knows what keeps us safe,” he said, “or if we are safe?”
Through the next nine years he had carried the rabbit in the ticket pocket of his jacket.
Now Mike stood some twenty yards away from the girl’s funeral party. He held back out of respect for the ceremony, and he was held back from his grief.
The Orthodox priest spoke in Gaelic; then he prayed the body into the ground in Latin. The women wailed, the men stood aloof and unmoving.
When the family had gone, the gravediggers appeared. They began to clear the many floral tributes hiding the mounded earth, and shoveled the grave closed. Mike took off his gloves. He took the charm from his jacket pocket, and held it between his hands. They quickly became freezing cold, and he relished the feeling.
He intended to drop the charm in the earth of the closing grave, and was waiting for an inspiration as to the correct moment. He stood in the cold, as close to unbeing as it is possible to be. One of the gravediggers looked over to him. Mike felt his look, and raised his eyes.
He knew the look. It was the perception of a threat. The gravedigger had sensed something just below consciousness that was out of place.
Mike thought, “Of course. He was a soldier.” And he nodded at the man. The man held his gaze until he had evaluated the threat. Then he returned to shoveling the earth.
“He sensed me,” Mike thought, “as I did not belong. Most here are overcome by emotion. Many are indifferent, but most feel grief. Why did he find me different? He felt my guilt.” Mike shrugged. He walked away from the grave, still holding the charm.
He had expected her brothers to come for him.
They barred him from the hospital morgue, standing, by turns, in the corridor. He saw them again at police headquarters, and he knew that they saw him. But they would not come kill him. And after a while he ceased to wonder why.
He was not afraid, for he no longer wanted to live. He thought his murder would be fitting, even if not deserved. And he felt it was deserved. For not only had he failed to protect her, he knew they were correct that he had, somehow, gotten her involved in that which had led to her death.
There was a certain calculus, Mike knew, of rage, and of revenge. The Iberians and the Italians could mature a grudge through generations. But the Irish were a different race.
They didn’t shun revenge, but they adored fighting. And would not forgo even the least legitimate of pretexts for bloodshed.
Parlow had taught him the principles: when you cannot find the correct answer, ask a different question.
For the family’s lack of vengeance was their own concern. If they acted, they would act when and how and if it appeared good to them to do so. Should they so choose, Mike realized, he would then or soon after be dead, and his travail completed. And if they had forgone revenge, that, also, was their choice, curious as it might be.
He himself could certainly dispatch the one person of whose guilt he was assured. But he embraced his anguish in inaction with a ferocity equal to that with which he had embraced the girl.
Chapter 15
There were the stories one told, and the stories one never told. There were those which killed you if you kept them in, and those you would die before retelling. Parlow’s favorite story had been the Croquet Ball.
The rich and wife-swapping natives of the North Shore had finally outdone themselves, to the shock and horror of the City Desk, who’d previously held that they could not be surprised.
Everyone knew the names, but no one could print them, as they belonged to the clans of the paper’s two largest advertisers. But the event occurred, and had to be covered, and it fell to Parlow to express the paper’s sympathy, for the death of the two-year-old girl.
He sat and wrote a “They have it all yet they have nothing,” noting the vast lakefront estate where the nurse, daily, led the little tyke (something of a flirt) down to admire the sun, the waves, the seabirds, and the family yacht, Unity, bobbing at the dock.
He also fantasized her princess bedroom, full of toys, and the One Sad Doll, laid on the coverlet, awaiting the return of her owner, dead of a cerebral hemorrhage.
Parlow had written as assigned, but in a rage detectable only by his fellow reporters, who understood his claptrap as a self-abasement in disgust at a community whose stupidity and boorishness transgressed the human.
For the unnamed of that number had scrawled a “Meet me in the garden” mash note to the woman of the mansion, tied it around a croquet ball, and heaved the ball through what he believed was the lady’s dressing room, but which proved, in the event, to be the nursery.
Yes, Parlow said, the ball crushed the child’s skull, but her sainted blood obliterated much of the message, thus saving her mother from the temptation to adultery. Some of the wags at the Port held, per contra, that the little girl was going to hell, having been involved, however unwittingly, in a plot to transgress the Seventh Commandment.
“Yes,” said Mike, “we cannot know. We live in a cloud; but what of predestination, and so on; as, reflect, ‘He threw the ball through the wrong window.’”
The Catholics held the child was blameless; the Protestants that we are all damned, and it had just caught up with her; and Mike was asked to pontificate as, since the school fire at All Saints, he had become the arbiter of theological disputes.
His position carried no perquisites save the preemptory challenge “Now let’s change the subject.” All complied with his rulings, and the subject reverted to the various and endless depredations of those modern Robin Hoods, the city’s knights of the blued steel, as Parlow had once written.
But on the night of the croquet ball, the ginned-up repartee between the Prods and the Micks down at the Port wore thin; the girl had died a death beyond the absurd, Mike called for a new topic, and the silence after his ruling kept extending. “Oh, for chrissake,” he said. “The kid’s dead. Who was, just moments before, alive and gurgling. Now she’s in her grave. No one knows she did not ‘expire of a cerebral hemorrhage’ save her family, her father, you, me, their staff and their friends, our friends, and the gardener, who, no doubt, had to clean the croquet ball and sneak it back into the set.
“The wretch who threw it will, for the nonce, have to fuck his own wife. The family of the intended cuckold will, no doubt, petition that god in their employ for a reason for the innocent death, and forsake croquet for contract bridge. Thus the mysterious tide called ‘fashion.’”
One Sad Doll was understood to be the work o
f a good man doing a loathsome job and worrying the wound.
Parlow was not only excused for his One Sad Doll, but subsequently congratulated when a report leaked from the copy desk confirmed that the phrase originally concluded, “waiting with wistful eyes for that embrace which would never again come.”
One had only so much sympathy, and that expended on the travails of others was unavailable for expenditure upon one’s own.
Further, all realized that the sympathy they were to arouse in their readers was, finally, an effect independent of whatever the actual facts and merits of an action or an incident might be. And to whom could one repair for their verification? To no one, all realized, save to the press, all of whom knew each other to be not only jaded unto death, but distrustful of every human utterance and gesture.
The understanding of this horror was, of necessity, repressed in those doing the job of reporting; it broke through, time to time, in suicide, or retirement from the profession (considered to be the worse of the two similar alternatives). It broke through in their humor and callousness, and it broke out, occasionally, in the idiosyncratic expression of self-loathing, and disgust at the world and all its works. This was the Sally Port’s understanding of Parlow’s “wistful doll, waiting for that embrace.”
Each man at the desk had his own sad story. It was the story he would never tell.
The croquet ball would fade from memory, and disappear with the deaths of those who had heard it. Policemen, Parlow said, are by profession closemouthed to all outside the clan. Upon retirement, however, no one can shut them up. Reporters are your gossips; but when they hang it up and leave the club, they simply shake their heads in wonder and drink themselves to death.