This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “Oh excuse me!” said Reinhart. As unobtrusively as you could when you were his size, he tried to slip by.

  The navy-blue man, however, hung on, his great hat riding at Reinhart’s right shoulder. “Say Captain,” he said, “you looking for action?”

  Disingenuously, Reinhart made a naive smile. “I come in peace,” he asserted, believing that the affected utterance was what might go over.

  Beneath the alligator band his companion chuckled with the sound of frying butter and said: “Well after the services, then, maybe a little action for the Blessed Lord?”

  It appeared to Reinhart that his companion—who was quite small, anyway—was not suggesting violence, but rather some sport. Besides which the other colored fellows had dematerialized as evil spirits might at the appearance of a shaman, or more likely vice versa, for he had seen the noted rolling of their eyes in apprehension and even the shill at his elbow suddenly asked: “You sure you ain’t The Man?”

  Calmer now, Reinhart looked down at him and said: “Frankly, sir, I don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “The Man, Captain, the bulls, the police. I guess you ain’t cause you wearing Army.” He tipped back his hat. Oddly, he wore no gold teeth, and the others were not startlingly white, that is, the others that could be seen, for the front ones were gone and he guarded what was left with his massive lips, speaking from the smallest possible aperture, as if he would rather whistle. “And ‘action,’ that’s action, which tonight is craps in the second-floor front over Honey Dove’s Turkish Lounge, which is two doors from Daddy Small’s Blessed Angel of Peace Church, which you already made an announcement you was in motion towards. Now if you is The Man, it will be you word only against mine that I be scout for said action, as you can appreciate by realizing potential witnesses to the otherwise has gone up the spout, as is said among our English cousins.”

  “England?” asked Reinhart. “Were you ever in England?”

  “England?” the man repeated. “I tell you, Ducks, I as English as George Rex! You make my action in Bridgwater? I was with the Army,” he added. “Ours.”

  “Never,” Reinhart answered. He would so have liked to give some assent to the man and call back the potential witnesses, but he feared that such a move would be exactly what they expected of a disguised policeman. “And I’m sorry I can’t make it here, but could you direct me to Mohawk Street?”

  The scout turned suspicious. “You collecting on in-surance or overdue liberry books?” He reconcealed himself under the hat. “See, I don’t live hereabout but come in on the commute, familiarizing only with this here corner.”

  “Now you don’t understand,” said Reinhart. “There’s nothing devious or illegitimate about my present endeavor. My purpose is essentially—”

  “Man, you do talk up a sirocco,” said the scout. “And verily I don’t pick up your pip on my radar a-tall. But being you change the motion of you de-sires, I am always available for consultation. My card.” He passed it on, a square of cream-colored cardboard, much thumbed, embossed: THE MAKER.

  Reinhart thanked him kindly and went to put it away.

  “You can’t keep it,” said the Maker. “I only got one.” He reclaimed the card, inserting it within a wonderful old fake-alligator wallet that matched his hatband but was somewhat older, several of the scales having come loose at one margin, like so many little trapdoors.

  Regretfully, Reinhart saw he must, for the present, make his way without the Maker’s help, and was about to move on when a potential witness filtered between them saying: “Maker, here come a john,” and returned to the fourth dimension. A lone white man ranged the far sidewalk and lit a new cigarette at every store window, in which he was terribly interested though they were each one dark.

  “Now I was wrong about maybe you,” said the Maker, with a jerk of his hat and a flash of his many rings and a whiff of his breath smelling of lavender and a tug at his camel’s-hair coat almost as white as his hat, “but if I ever saw a mortal ready to do business, it’s our slinky friend yonder.”

  “Action?” asked Reinhart.

  “Jelly roll,” answered the Maker. “I got me a stable of cows.” He waved goodbye. “Bridgwater, I see you around, hear?”

  A half hour of Limbolike wanders ensued. The passers-by in Splendor’s quarter were, to a man, deaf and dumb, though all very polite. When he at last found it by chance, Mohawk Street turned out to be what elsewhere would have been called an alley, its entrance posted with a platoon of trashcans captained by a broken beer bottle. Here a very large rat or a very small cat served as scout, and badly, for it deserted at Reinhart’s approach. As he climbed over the cans he smelled caraway seed, creosote, wet fur, hay, oilcloth, coal dust, linseed oil or putty, burned rubber, moldy literature, ink, some, sweet animal filth—but no food except banana, although that may have been rather the oil of the fruit, good for sundry purposes.

  No illumination, and little on the adjacent street, where the nearest lamp was shattered. But while Reinhart groped for the trusty Zippo that had lighted him through Berlin, a spark flashed at the end of the alley, became a flame and then a burning automobile. It was something to see as a small man, presumably an enemy of the owner, seemed to be throwing combustible materials into the back seat, though that was probably a mirage.

  “Say there,” called Reinhart, fifty feet away and already taking the heat on his face. But by now the combustion was nicely under way and noisy. What the newspapers, and no one else, called a “holocaust” filled the interior of the car, swirling behind the windows like a scarlet shirt in a Bendix.

  Reinhart was still calling, blinded by the flames, when he felt a touch on his arm. It was undoubtedly the man he had seen a moment earlier in silhouette, a version easier to discern than the present state of the fellow: a disembodied white shirt, for he was of a like blackness with the surrounding night or had been made so by soot from the conflagration.

  So Reinhart, with his big fat glowing face, was at a visual disadvantage; as if the moral one were not enough, for there he stood still holding the open cigarette lighter, precisely as a pyromaniac might when caught in the act.

  “Yes sir,” he said guiltily to the white shirt, “may I help?”

  Gleeful gleaming teeth appeared about three and a half inches above the collar, which was buttoned and tieless. Weird but benevolent. “Hep?” answered the teeth. “Thank you no. No hep will hep now. When, ah, it is hopeless. Car is gone, too bad, but in-surance will buy another…. Am I correct, you are Army and not the bulls?”

  “Oh cut it out,” said Reinhart, irked. He put away the Zippo. “Why do you people always expose yourselves first and then worry about the police? It’s self-destructive. I speak as a friend.” He thrust his white hand forward into the void, where it was not taken. “My name is Reinhart. For an hour I’ve been looking for a man named Splendor Gallant Mainwaring, who I’m supposed to have dinner with. He lives on Mohawk Street, which the sign says this is, but I see only a burning car, some rubbish cans, two sheds, and a fence full of dirty words in chalk. If you know Splendor, you can tell him I sure tried.”

  Reinhart reclaimed his unused hand and started towards the cans at the alley entrance. The animal had come back, and was neither a cat nor a rat, but an old sad possum. This time it was too weary to retreat again, and just closed its eyes, rolled over, and feigned sudden death. “Oh cut it out,” said Reinhart. Avoiding the bald tail, he collided with a can and made a fearful racket.

  A window came alight in a building he had hitherto not known was there, and a fuzzy head poked out screaming in dramatic soprano: “I see you, Henry Bligh, you goddamned dirty son of a bitch. You are a m-f-, is what you are and don’t say me nay.” And so on, becoming more immoderate by the second. Assuming White Teeth had now got a habitation and a name, as well as a profession, Reinhart did not stop to hear an essay on it, for he had given up on Negroes. They were simply one more line on a long roster that nobody could do anything about, and he rem
embered—perhaps because of the possum—that a man is rich in proportion to the number of things he can afford to let alone.

  But still clattering among the cans and under the shower of abuse, he felt a poking at his back, like a goose aimed too high, and the voice of White Teeth shouted: “Just refrain up there, Seneca Bligh! Your man is not present, I guarantee.”

  Reinhart’s elbow crook was now caught in a little fist strong with authority and good intentions. The ex-corporal supposed he was soon to be lynched for arson, without trial. Overhead, Mrs. Bligh answered: “Thank you, Mr. Mainwaring. You are indeed a gentleman, as I always say,” and closed her window.

  To his captive, Splendor’s father apologized, while guiding him onto the sidewalk. “Them boys turned that sign around. Mohawk is the street and can’t be the alley.” He pointed his shirt cuff toward a murky frame house, where a porchlight had been burning all the while, a light consisting of a bare yellow bulb, whose outer globe had been knocked away to a mere scimitar of milk glass.

  That last fragment was dislodged by Reinhart’s vibration on the porch boards, Reinhart’s alone, for Mr. Mainwaring returned to the glowing car with an admonition from his guest: “Look out for the gas tank!” To which he replied: “All drained, thank you,” turned, and became invisible: he must have been wearing a dark jacket or sweater which, opened, showed the white shirt before but not behind.

  The screen door, with torn mesh and splintered frame, allowed no signal to be made upon it; neither could it be pried away to get to the door inside, which was hardly better, its knocking surface studded with protruding nailheads, around each a triangle of torn paper: the Mainwarings were given to posting notices, and also to tearing them away when no longer current. Reinhart had not discarded the notion that he might be the victim of a hoax, and derived from it—while looking for a place to knock—certain intimations of unreality of the kind known to people who are awakened at 3 A.M. by the secret police, or, in America, to folks whose full bladders are a wee-hours Gestapo.

  Then the inner door suddenly opened and within the rectangle of rusty screening he saw the most beautiful girl on the planet. She was made of amber and, when the car exploded in the alley, for an instant turned to gold.

  What had happened was that though Mr. Mainwaring had drained the gasoline from the tank, enough vapor remained to blow up—fortunately injuring nobody and nothing except a shed belonging to the Blighs, and Mrs. Seneca B. appeared, wrapped in an Indian blanket, cursing her absent husband, and pardoned Mr. Mainwaring the gentleman, who promised to hand her a certain percentage of his auto insurance when that sum was paid him, which would surely occur in the nearest future. And of course a window or two in both houses dissolved in the blast, but everybody agreed that they had already been broken, either absolute or half, and there was no point in striving in this world unless you were willing to risk what you had to get more.

  As to Reinhart, his soul had fused with that of the amber girl, albeit unbeknownst to her, and he sat paralyzed on one of the trashcans, playing with his overcoat button, not helping one whit to extinguish the fire in the shed, although the girl herself was in action with a garden hose that leaked a fine spray in every particular, soaking the exquisite serpent of her body. She wore a beige woolen tube, cinctured with a belt of great copper seals joined one to another. Reinhart yearned to sweep her up and sprint off with the wind to a barbarian country of blood rituals, fig-eating, and bronze utensils, where it would be a capital crime to wear clothing or sneer at certain jealous gods.

  Eventually he did get into the Mainwaring house, as unlikely as that once had seemed—all fires, except his own, quenched and the cinder of the auto left steaming in the alley—and at last Splendor, in a maroon smoking jacket thin at the elbows, had descended from the upper reaches, untouched by the brouhaha, given his sooty father a snooty disregard, made Reinhart welcome, and with evidence of distaste introduced his sister. Her name was Loretta. They, he and she, did not shake. Wet through, she had put her back near a kerosene heater and trembled ever so lightly in the negation of cold. She acknowledged Reinhart with a mock death of her large eyes, the steep lids shining. He had an awful, though rather beautiful, suspicion she was dumb, that a malignant neighbor tribe had excised her tongue in some bestial, though sacred, rite, then lashed her to an altar for King Kong to ravage, defying the tradition that the victim be a Caucasian blonde with scarlet nipples and otherwise fair as cottage cheese.

  “Father,” ordered Splendor, “fetch the wine to the table. Carlo, if you move slowly towards the dining room, I shall have the bisque piping hot when you reach your place.” He strode through a curtain of jet beads depending from an archway above which showed a ticktacktoe of bare lath and missing plaster. Mainwaring Senior, whose contrasts were less radical indoors—for one thing, he was really burnt umber of skin, and for another, his splendid teeth clicked constantly like the escapement of an alarm clock, indicating they were as false as Reinhart’s father’s—Mr. Mainwaring respectfully slunk through the other exit, into the hallway of spavined hatrack, cracked umbrella jar, and ten-foot Victorian mirror with yellow silvering.

  Despite the cooking odors, which were unpleasant, suggesting burning hair, Reinhart smelled the bouquet of Loretta’s wet wool. At first he thought she slept on her feet, but then caught a distant sparkle from her lowered lashes. Rumpled, fat, hideous, he deserved her amused contempt, but even a stable-knave with his feet in horse manure can look upon a lady. And look he did, so forcefully that the power of his eyes opened hers in fright, and no longer his own master, he crossed the threadbare carpet, trapped the fluttering thrush of her hand, and kissed it, saying: “Excuse me, I love you.”

  Chapter 4

  “Soup’s on!” was what Splendor must have shouted from the kitchen, but since it was a rather vulgar call from his friend, Reinhart heard it as “soupcon,” a French word of which he could never quite recall the meaning, but the c had a little tail like the lower extremity of the figure 5. A little tail … lower extremity. In shame, he dropped Loretta’s hand, although he had not looked at her below the high ridges of her clavicles, which the dress was cut to display. It was well known that a man of the dominant race could take a woman of the recessive at his pleasure, and he deplored the sullying of love by power politics.

  The ludicrous aspect of his situation, however, was that Loretta had again closed her eyes when he took her hand and if she attended on either his passion or his loving-kindness, she did it in the most subtle way imaginable, which a volatile man might have taken for total indifference.

  “Excuse me,” said Reinhart, moving away. “Things like that just come over me.” The kerosene heater sat in the fireplace niche below a mantelpiece where stood sundry photographs of dark people, some curled, one technicolored, several of marriages with solemn brides in white lace and all the men looking like ministers. “I didn’t mean to offend, that’s certain,” Reinhart went on.

  This time Splendor yelled: “Come and get it or I’ll throw it out,” and there was unfortunately no other interpretation: when other than face to face, he became rather coarse, if not corny.

  “Coming!” said Reinhart, and then to Loretta: “Won’t you speak?”

  She thought about it for a second, the lobes of her small nose shining and choosing the negative, soughed through the bead curtain into the dining room, where he followed and was directed by Mr. Mainwaring to the foot of the table.

  Well, Reinhart was probably no gourmet, but the soup—or “bisque,” as Splendor, vis-à-vis, again called it—was pretty ghastly, with what purported to be clams being rather little snippets of inner tube.

  “Fust rate,” said Mr. Mainwaring to his son, but Reinhart detected the fundamental horror with which the older man brought his dentures into play.

  With each mouthful from his own spoon, Splendor grew more expansive and self-approving, and there was no doubt that he made a genteel decoration at the head of the board. The velvet smoking jacket, for one, with its
braided trim of gold, frayed here and there; inside it he wore a white turtleneck jersey, very clean in the light of the chandelier, though four of the six bulbs in the latter were cold and one was winking.

  “Ah,” said he, “how nice to see a friend across the comestibles! I’ve always regretted, Carlo, that we were never closer in high school.”

  “That’s true,” Reinhart responded, taking a soda cracker and eating it dry, causing a blizzard of crumbs. And Mr. Mainwaring and Loretta regarded him in courteous awe, which after a moment of resentment—if a white man eat, doth he not chew?—he took as flattery. Though he knew he did not eat well; for example, noticing Splendor’s technique, he remembered that he had forgotten to push the spoon to the far side of the soup bowl instead of in towards the body. Then too, he supposed he should have broken the saltine rather than shove it whole into his mouth.

  When Splendor spoke again, Loretta picked up her bowl and drank directly from it, as an Etruscan must have imbibed wine from one of those marvelous handled vessels glazed in black and red, and it was the most graceful thing Reinhart had ever seen, she with her red lips shining. Her hair was high, in short black curls, and lay soft as mink.

  Reinhart decided at once that he must finally establish himself, become mover rather than the moved he had been for two hours past: such a decision was always difficult for him who awakened as if from death each morning, never sure he would be able even to walk (but Maw would come banging into the living room, fetch the paper from the porch, and clout him on the bare feet which extended over the arm of the couch; and he had to). So he said to Mr. Mainwaring, who had sneakily given up on the soup and lighted an old pipe with much smoke and a beating of small black hands to dissipate it: “This wine is really excellent. I’ll bet it’s Burgundy, or something, and you made it yourself.”