This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “Which is a Christian sin,” Splendor noted mildly, yet keeping his eyes front and fingers at the seams of his trousers.

  “That’s typical,” said Reinhart derisively. He realized only now that he should have gone in seriously for officer’s training during his Army career, or better yet, posed as a lieutenant; unlike Splendor he would have succeeded, for he had real command presence. Thinking about which he grew so pleased with himself that he lost authority—which should have been a lesson to him.

  Splendor relaxed from attention, though not from pride. “I needed that,” he said. “A good bracing now and again puts a man into a relationship with the high powers.”

  Reinhart now himself fell upon the tire and gazed dreamily into a nearby pool of grease, which gave a thick, sort of Negroid cast to everything it turgidly reflected. He threw an old bolt into it and waited forever for the viscid splash to subside.

  “I don’t know,” said Splendor, “when I ever met a man before of whom I could say he, as has been pointed out by some thinker or other in reference to the quality which should be sought in prose, is so characterized by justice, a term I infinitely prefer to reason.”

  “That’s most kind of you,” Reinhard replied. “But in all fairness, I spent my last six months of service in the booby hatch.”

  “Doesn’t it figure!” Splendor neighed in exasperation and rippled his body skin like a horse. “What I’m getting around to, though, is—”

  Joe stuck his head through the doorway and whined from a mouth distorted with grease and grievance: “Customer! I got to do everything?”

  Splendor rolled his eyes at Reinhart. “Joe is really what you call a good guy. He commands with pathos. What’s become of the good old-fashioned tyranny that made you feel like a man? Anyhow, I got to go now, without having a chance to tell you you were wrong: I have my plans, which I only needed you to come along and crystallize.”

  “Glad to have been of service,” said Reinhart, rising slowly like a mountain coming through a cloud.

  Splendor seized his hand and shook it; he was one of the persons who try to damage you thereby, avoiding the palm and catching the fingers down near their ends where they are resourceless. Now fat, contrary to popular supposition, has no deleterious effect on strength; and despite Splendor’s conspicuous musculature, Reinhart could have seized any part of him and squeezed it lifeless. For just that reason, he did not, and accepted his brief suffering, even taking some satisfaction in it since it was unnecessary.

  “But,” said Splendor, releasing him, “your obligation is only beginning. I want you to have dinner at my house tonight, and shall look for you about eight. Don’t let me down.”

  His profound stare, all expanding iris, elicited an assent from Reinhart before the ex-corporal understood what iconoclasm he was in for. Though they did not live on Rebel ground, nobody in Reinhart’s suburb ever broke bread with, or talked to a person of the opposite sex who was a, though you might walk down the street with, give a ride to, take a school shower near, and slap on the back someone of your own sex identified as a: Negro.

  Reinhart muttered expletives as he slunk through the areaway and into a back alley, where a small woolly dog instantly harassed him. He could foresee being spat upon by the drugstore-corner sentinels, perhaps even pursued through back yards of washlines and rotting fences and howling curs, and at last ensnared in some Aunt Jemima’s circus-tent bloomers, getting his lumps from a gantlet of furious natives.

  The dog at his feet presently locked its teeth in his pants cuff. His mind as usual on troubles to come, Reinhart plucked it off by the scruff of the neck and flung it yelping way up on the roof of the garage, where it sat for a long time barking at a whirling ventilator and at last made water on it—something to see.

  Chapter 3

  When Reinhart informed Maw of his dinner appointment, of course withholding his host’s identity, she shut off the wash-machine for her question, prepared to turn it on again to kill his answer, and asked abrasively: “Dinner?” She wore a bandanna headdress, being suspicious of the basement’s clemency, although this cellar—Reinhart’s first since the home of subterranean friends in Berlin—was paved, painted, calked, drained, weatherstripped, and the little windows were curtained in dotted Swiss. Screens were stacked in the beams. It was all very nice and sound, and brighter than the up stairs living room. They had put in an oil burner just before Pearl Harbor: the ex-coalroom was Maw’s laundry and colored in green like a marine cavern.

  “Thank you,” Maw went on. “And I been bothering all morning about your dinner, putting on galoshes and tramping to the groshery to get smear cheese and ham sausage and real rye and sweet jerkins for Mr. Big, because he’s home from the Army.” She peered malevolently through the washer’s porthole, like a shipboard husband spying on his wife and the steward, then opened the airlock and removed a cocoon of damp sheets. Although, once she came out of the laundry, Reinhart was the only obstruction in a basement of wide vistas, she steered towards, and managed to collide with, him; ordering, “Clear the way, Lump.” Which, though the English that it sounded like also applied—he was indeed something of a lump—was really a kind of German, meaning “bum.”

  “Ah,” said Reinhart, clasping the clammy end-of-sheet she thrust to him, “I got it, Maw. We’re using different lingoes! I mean evening dinner—”

  “You mean ‘sthupper,’ ith what you mean.” Maw took one clothespin from a series of them, like split cigars, in her mouth and stabbed it over sheet-end and ceiling line. “And it isn’t evening, but five-thirty, which is when we eat, and if it isn’t good enough for you, you can lump it.” Here of course she meant the American colloquialism, but the German also made sense: you can bum it—which in a sense was what he was going to do. An eloquent woman, and rather proud of him in her own way, for although his invisible claque had ears too poor to hear it, he had already detected within her symphony of negation a piccolo note of acquiescence.

  And surely enough, when he had secured his end of the sopping percale she disapproved of the job, resituated the clothespin, yet said: “‘Spose you’re going to shave? And don’t think Dad’ll let you use the car, because he’s going to Lodge and you can just walk. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, my fine feathered friend.”

  FFF, who saw the moment as hardly propitious for revealing the name of his host, let alone the race, wiped his damp hands on his olive-drab behind and steered upstairs, calling back: “Look forward to the gherkins, Maw. See you at lunch.”

  “Dinner, you galoot!” yelled Maw. “And stay out of the living room once.” The washer began its idiot tumble.

  Later, circa 5:25 P.M., after an inconvenient afternoon—denied the living room, and wherever else he tried to go Maw found good reason for his exclusion, Reinhart took refuge in the garage, very cold with its concrete floor, and threw an old sheath knife at a knothole on the wall—at about 5:25, without taking off his shirt, he shaved. He defied the house rule of open-bathroom-door-except-when-crapping-or-full-immersion-bathing. A rule observed even by the defense worker, whose name was Emmet Swain, except that Swain seldom used the bath, by reason of seldom being around; he owned an old fat Hudson of the kind usually parked in platoons before blatant roadhouses, and was presumed to be generally out in it when not working on the swing shift. Reinhart had met him but twice in rapid passage: he was small, hairy, and saturnine.

  Lathering with the old GI-issue brush, Reinhart heard a sound outside the door not unlike what he supposed obsolete novelists meant by “a scratching in [or on or at] the wainscot,” whatever that was. Couldn’t be Maw, who would have split the wood. He asked Dad in, thinking it would please him to be recognized unseen.

  And surely it did; yet the old fellow showed worry behind his good manners, saying “Thank you, Carlo, I don’t want to intrude, but…”

  “Be my guest.” Reinhart indicated the toilet seat in its green chenille envelope, and Dad went there and sat.

  “Carlo, I was wondering�
��look here, why don’t you use my gear? Seen it?” He rose and in the linen closet found an enormous giftbox of men’s toiletries, matched: powder and lotion and scalp-goo, a blade for corns, nailclippers, rotary mower for nose-hair, and a paste to allay underarm offending. “Your aunt’s Xmas idea for me. Pearls in front of swine. I wish you would use it. I don’t.”

  Pointing to his own porcine face in the mirror, Reinhart asked: “Why then cast it in front of me?”

  “Good-looking fellow like you?” His father in embarrassment leaned against the toilet tank behind, agitating its heavy lid, and the Epsom-salts and bicarbonate jars thereon made their clinking remarks. “Fellow with all the advantages?”

  “Going out to dinner,” said Reinhart, trying to get a new blade out of its many wrappings without cutting his thumb, and as usual failing. With all his liberalism he rejected a negative worry about going into a Negro district with an open wound: all those germs.

  “I knew you’d make swell friends in no time,” said Dad. “If I’d known, would have given you a dollar to go to the while-you-wait cleaner’s and have your uniform done.”

  At least Reinhart hadn’t cut his face so far. His cheeks emerged bright pink from the shearing; in the colored section he would shine like a dime among pennies. The white race was screwed when it came to camouflage.

  “They give you a barrel to stand in,” his father went on, a man who could sit forever without adjustments to the life force: nose-picking, scratching, etc.; he had never even chewed gum. “No they don’t, Carlo, but you have seen those cartoons, I imagine. Have you caught up again on the funnies?” Had Dad found a profession that could be conducted in, or from, a bathroom, he would have made his fortune; he took ease there and even wore a faint smile; and taken as bowels and epidermis, Caesar, Napoleon, et al., were hardly more than he.

  “Tell you what was on my mind,” he apprehensively changed the subject. “Now, no criticism intended, it goes without saying, but I was contemplating what you figure on doing till school starts. Because I know you’ll be taking advantage of the GI Bill, full tuition paid and in addition this generous emollient per the month of expenses. A wonderful opportunity, and one never before vouchfaced to the American veteran.… You will take advantage of this wonderful opportunity?”

  Dad attended patiently on Reinhart’s deliberate opening of the tap—the son refused to assent before the plumbing did; at last scalding his finger, Carlo nodded.

  “Righto,” agreed Dad. “But till the onset of the summer session, if I have sized you up, with all your pep you can’t stand laying around the house. Mentioned my calculation to Claude Humbold today, and as you might expect, that good-hearted man—who thinks almost as much of you as your mother—well, to put it in a word, he’s ready to make you an offer.”

  Reinhart left the Nirvana of the hot washrag and asked, with open pores: “For what, Dad?”

  “A job, Carlo. Or rather, if I know him, a position. Till college starts and even then, maybe, for late-afternoon and Saturday morning, ess etera, ess etera.”

  It sounded like a gangland killing up the hall towards the kitchen, double-barreled shotguns and Italian venom, but it was rather Maw’s announcement: “Fine time to pick for going on the throne, George. I slave for hours over this supper to see it turn to cold grease on account of your bullheadedness. Well I can tell you, one minute more and you eat it out of the garbage can.”

  “Coming, Maw,” called Dad, rising warily to the thin ground between him and Carlo, who realized by that movement that his own silent malevolence was stronger than Maw’s noise—and that Dad was bullheaded and most formidable, despite his disguise. Reinhart had never concealed his distaste for Humbold, having nothing particular against the man but everything in general.

  “Ah, Dad, you never give up. You’ve been throwing that bastard at me all my life. I cut his grass and washed his car, and he beat my price down ten cents less than I got from anybody else. I walked the rotten dog he had before Popover, which tore my cuff, and Hum-bold simply laughed when I told him. Before I left for college you had me go see Humbold, I’ll never know why, because he left school in the eighth grade and is, so he told me, an enemy of higher education who could buy up the entire faculty of the Municipal University from his petty cash.” Reinhart milked the water from his shaving brush and tossed it into the medicine cabinet between tincture of merthiolate and cocoa-butter suppositories, feeling a pain the latter could never assuage. “You are the Mahatma Gandhi to my British Empire, Dad, and I see your strength but don’t get the moral behind it.”

  Dad showed him a back of rumpled shirt and baggy seat, handkerchief three-quarters out of the rear left pocket, cuffs scouring the floor and frayed where the shoe heels bit them.

  “Okay, okay, okay.” Dad’s voice issued from the little end of a megaphone, and his expiration seemed imminent. He would never reach Maw’s overcooked repast, but die like a dog in the hall.

  On the way out, Reinhart dropped by the kitchen, where his parents sat forlorn over their coffeecups—surely not because of his absence, but rather owing to a habitual postprandial tristitia: belly full, what was left?

  At least Maw got some fun from his intrusion. “Oh great!” she chortled. “Late for your first dinner invite. That’ll go over big! Everything cold with the grease congealed, your hosts sitting around ravenous. You know other people work all day and need their food. You’ll get punched right in the mush, and never think you’ll come waltzing back here to get your grub. You’ll have to go that boogie joint on the West Side and order ptomaine goulash.”

  Could she suspect his destination? While his back was turned, Dad slipped out to the living room.

  Reinhart took the load off his feet, on Dad’s empty chair. “I might take some of your coffee.”

  “Pretty egotistical, eh? Half-hour late is not enough, make it an hour. To heck with the next fellow.” She seized the pot from the adjacent stove and filled a cup which was already waiting at his table-place. This cup was of course decorated with Chinese (?) birds, summerhouses, etc., in blue and had a chip where your lips would go if you drank it right-handed. Before he could catch her, Maw turned the coffee blue to match with a great flood from the milk bottle.

  “Don’t have to be there till seven,” said Reinhart.

  “Aren’t we grand?” sneered Maw. “Their nigger chauffeur picking you up?”

  Again he was startled by the relevance of her images, but laid it to the psychic sympathy between mother and son—even such an unlikely Mutter und Sohn as those having coffee at this moment, once had used a common bloodstream, and Reinhart was but a maverick projection of Maw’s essence. Thinking this over, he seemed to recall certain tendernesses tendered him when he was but a babe, the last time he had been satisfactory, even to himself, and he now put a hand on Maw’s forearm irregular with tendons.

  “Ah, Maw, don’t fight it.”

  She shook him off, rose, and began a brutal clatter in the sink. Sometimes the gall gathered in her throat in a kind of tumor, as at present. She sought to hum some private Horst Wessel Song and choked.

  “You all right?” asked Reinhart, making a treaty with the rancid coffee, i.e., leaving it.

  “Sure, it’s only my cancer. Now git!” She shooed her apron, which had dual pockets for potholders, at him; and held a copper-bottomed pan as if it were a missile.

  “Oh, is that all?” He fled, having as a child served many times for her target practice. She rated Expert with all the kitchen implements, and what with age and weight he had lost the old agility.

  When he reached the front door Dad crept from behind a bookcase and tried to press the car keys on him.

  “What about Lodge?” asked Reinhart, patting his father’s spongy shoulder.

  “I’ll walk,” whispered Dad. He kept advancing the key case, which had a little replica of a Chevrolet embossed in its leather as well as the incised address of the dealer, to whom it could be mailed if lost and found.

  “No, I�
�ll walk,” said Reinhart, and they Alphonsed and Gastoned for a time, but being very quiet about it, and heard the kitchen clatter testify to their success.

  Finally pointing to the waist flap of his ETO jacket, which missed closure by a half inch, Reinhart established the fact that he could use the exercise and escaped, though not without suffering a folded dollar bill from Dad, who advised: “Be sure to take along some candy or flowers. That’s the way to make a hit with swell people.”

  The evening was falling rather shabbily as Reinhart set out on the two miles to the West Side, a murky cloud or two melting like old dumplings into the stew of the sky. He sniffed for rain, and got the bouquet of some neighbor’s fried haddock. On the main East-West axis, three-quarters of the journey behind him, he bought several cheap cigars from a tobacconist who himself represented the transition: he was white, but gradually darkening from the ills of aging man and the cares of storekeepers. For example, he assured Reinhart that the people who had mobbed him for black-market cigarettes during the war, with the same zeal avoided his place of business now that smokes were plentiful.

  “Your typical customer is a louse, I must say,” he must have said, though Reinhart, choking on the El Ropo, heard him imperfectly. “You servicemen got yours for a nickel a pack, I know, and sent loads home, but I don’t complain of that.”

  “You don’t?” asked Reinhart sympathetically, lighting the cigar again at the little blue gas flame which sprang pistil-like from a kind of metal tulip planted on the counter.

  “Nah? Where you think I got my extras to peddle? A son in the Navy, hoho. But you can bet I never sold any to the boogies.”

  It seemed the whole white world knew where Reinhart was going for dinner and tried to make him feel guilty about it, no great job with a person of his temperament, but shortly he was at the frontier. Just as he feared, the hour was not too early for the drugstore guard. They stood with their striped shirts and keychains and cuffs choking their ankles and hair in their necks, and one fellow, whose skin was navy-blue, wore a great white fedora banded in alligator. As Reinhart approached, nobody looked directly at him, yet he was under a keen surveillance. He walked with his eyes tight and his hams followed suit, and he bumped right into the man with the white fedora.