This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  The voice that wheedled through the coils in the black earpiece was old, all right, far enough away to have its origin in Manhattan, and spoke of a splendid opportunity—to work for Humbold. It was Dad.

  “But first, how’s Maw?” Dad sneezed directly into the phone; it sounded like some crank had blown up the Bell System’s main transformer. “I’m coming down with something, myself. Likely the flu.”

  “Where are you, Dad? Out of state?”

  “Just at the corner drugstore, Carlo, and on my way home. I nearly collapsed while on the rounds collecting my premiums. Thought I’d better stop here first and load up on Vicks, Rem, Analgesic Balm, Ex-Lax, Kleenex, and a Benzedrine Inhaler or two. Will you just check a minute on our atomizer—the bulb may be rotten. Also the toilet-paper supply—Maw uses the Kleenex, but t.p.’s good enough for me to blow my nose in.”

  Reinhart laid down the receiver alongside a Dresden shepherdess, product of Japan, and went to the bathroom, feeling very giddy, as if, indeed, he must go to the bathroom. He saw Doc depressing Maw’s tongue with a stick as he passed her room; in one second she would bark in Doc’s face, which was averted to avoid just that.

  When he opened the medicine chest above the washstand, the coiled copperhead of an enema hose sprang out and struck Reinhart at the jugular. He wrung its neck just back of the shiny black head. Ah, the atomizer! Just there behind a cartridge clip of cocoa-butter suppositories. He reached for it, but the heebie-jeebies split his vision and he saw two hands where but one was extended. The rectal bullets began to fire at him like dumdums. He seized the atomizer and, crouching below the washbowl, down by the gurgling gooseneck, in which was stuffed a wet rag, sent up a burst or two of ephedrine spray.

  An ominous quiet reigned on the middle shelf as his head rose slowly to its level. Then hell broke loose. A red hot-water bag slapped him to the floor, and Argyrol made brown water on his chest. Gauze wound him in cerements, assisted by Adhesive Tape, who paid out white binding as it traversed his trunk on its unicycle. He fought back, crushing Merthiolate, who died in a pool of gore. Under an enfilading fire of codfish-oil pellets, he crawled to the linen closet and pried open the door, seeking asylum as if in a church, never suspecting the ambush that lay in wait. Down sprang the bath brush, the boa constrictor of the rubber spray with its evil pimpled mouth, the toilet swab, bath salts and bubble bath, a reserve phalanx of Lifeboy, washcloths and Cannon towels, pillow cases, shave stuff, Epsom salts, bicarbonate, Dr. Scholl’s, Lydia Pinkham’s, rubbing alcohol, camphor ice, hair tonic, Nervine, Stanback, Empirin, Anacin, and Bayer’s, the bath mat, rubber gloves, hair clippers, corn trimmers, mustard plasters and a thing for cuticles; floor mop and dust rags, Sani-Flush, Drano, Bon-Ami, Lysol, Listerine, Windex, and the bottles, capsules, tubes, boxes, canisters, jars, casks, decanters, canteens, buckets, tubs, carboys, firkins, and demijohns of outmoded prescriptions. Down came the footbath, leg splints, back braces, and a crutch; an eyepatch, an enamel basin, a portable urinal shaped like a duck; a doughnut cushion for the rump, a cane for the gout, a truss, elastic stockings, finger stalls, oral, anal, and axillary thermometers; depilatories, deodorants, dental floss, Vaseline, Noxema, Iodex, suntan lotion, zinc oxide, and manicure equipment; wrist straps and bellybands, an athletic supporter, an insulin set; compresses, traction bandages, and tourniquets; a fever chart and a blood-pressure gauge; an ice bag and nose drops, eyewash, forceps, scalpels, tweezers, throat swabs; Absorbine Jr., Vitalis, Pepsodent, Mexican Heat Powder, Unguentine, Castoria, Alka-Seltzer, Bromo-Seltzer, and Eno Effervescent Salts; Sal-Hepatica, Pond’s Honey and Almond Cream, Zymol Troches, and creosote shampoo…. A final avalanche of Waldorf Tissue buried Reinhart beneath scores, hundreds, thousands of rolls, carrying tens, nay, hundreds of thousands of thirsty-fiber sheets.

  And everything in the linen closet was but a duplicate of that more quickly to hand in the medicine chest and on the top-of-toilet. When, beaten, Reinhart ceased to struggle, it grew very quiet under the mélange, except for certain siftings when he breathed; a kind of existence might have been feasible there, with instant nourishment from the vitamin capsules and instant embalming in Lysol if one died. And Dr. Goodykuntz talked of nonchemistry.

  No, they did not need ass-wipe in the Reinhart household—thus did responsibility at last rear its uncomfortable head from the burial mound, and in answer Carlo must needs struggle up and go inform his father. Who by the time he reached the phone had desperately rung off and bought a regiment-sized carton of the item in question, along with the other medicaments promised, and indeed was already on the front porch with them, struggling at the door.

  “Ah-oof,” groaned Dad when he was in, dropping the packages every whichway. “I’m in bad shape, Carlo. Might as well face it. I’m on the way out. The job devalves on you now.” He wore his hat like a clown, down so far on the back of his head that it fanned his ears. He grasped the hog’s thigh of Reinhart’s upper arm. “How you feeling? Looked a bit peaked. What’s that dried blood on your chest?”

  “Not blood but Argyrol,” said Reinhart. “I had an accident in the bathroom.”

  In anguish Dad crumpled his hat and wiped his face with it like Wallace Beery. “Owowowowowow,” he cried. “Argyrol? You’re going blind!” He staggered down the hall in a stupor of despair and presumably crashed to the floor of the bedroom, for there was a great soggy noise, Maw cried out in ecstasy, and Doc Perse, who had only one patient other than the Reinharts—a seventy-year-old woman who believed the King of Siam was poisoning her through thought waves—began to chortle and clap hands.

  Reinhart decided then and there to flee for parts unknown, having a conviction that nothing but his departure would bring his parents out of bed, where for as long as he could remember they had threatened permanently to retire, to wane a while in agony, and then to die. As a naughty child he had always received this threat rather than whipping, for they were very modern in their methods. Make the next guy feel it’s his fault, rather than An eye for an eye.

  But being a practical as well as impulsive fellow, first he had to count his money. He owned ninety-four dollars, thirty-two cents, and a five-franc piece made of zinc; all of it in his wallet, bills in the paper pocket, coins in the little compartment fastened by a snap; where his identification documents had been before he discarded them as obsolete, was a contraceptive in a tin-foil wrapper, the way the Army issued them. Staring at it through the glassine window, Reinhart was almost overcome with nostalgia: how lusty he had been as a youth! Since he had sailed under the Statue of Liberty two months earlier he had had no great zest for tail, he couldn’t say why. He grew old, he kept his rubbers rolled. He had, however, acquired a taste for cultivation and begun to look forward to college again. He thought he might take off for New York and enter one of the many universities in that metropolis, living the while in a seedy furnished room illuminated by a candle in a bottle, eating a bit of spaghetti now and then for the inner man, and perhaps finding a girl with a brain and celebrating with her the magnificent legacy of Western Civilization rather than merely fornicating mindlessly night and day.

  Unfortunately, his civilian clothing, from which he had taken a white shirt and gabardine trousers just that morning, was stored in a basement trunk, and to get there by the usual route he must pass his parents’ bedroom. His plan was to get his gear and cut out before the doc left, for otherwise he would feel grossly guilty of abandonment, even though the whole project was in great part, he felt, to their interests. They had never much liked him, was the bare fact, and who could blame them? he asked quite objectively as he crept out the front door, around the house, and into the outside entrance to the basement.

  He shared his skin with an enemy. For example now, when he had every reason to hurry, he was helplessly fascinated by the closet next to the trunk, where, between the hoarded canned goods, were a number of valuable old possessions: an unstrung bow with rubber-tipped arrows; a fishing reel, put there years ago after undergoing an inextricable backlash—
nor could he still undo the snarl; a game of tiddley-winks—which, notwithstanding the anxiety like a burr at his sacroiliac, he took down and started to play upon the cement floor! Tiddley … wink. There was also a jigsawed map of the U.S., with Fla. looking like a water pistol and the western border of Montana a kind of face peering into the back of Idaho’s head. Precisely above him on the first floor, the toilet flushed incessantly. He was mad as a hatter, for in reality his childhood had been morose.

  At last however he knocked off the silly crap, which had been a mere access of cowardice, put away the toys, marveled at the approximately 200 cans his parents had laid away against, originally, an invasion of the Japanese and no doubt kept for the next war—they had a rather touching faith that Ohio was a prime target for whatever enemy—and fished from the trunk, smelling of mildew but unfortunately not of insecticide, his favorite tweed suit of 1941, now like a seine from moth holes. A trenchcoat in sorry condition. One leather glove. Deep in the corner, a ball of neckties like a nest of snakes making mass love: who did what to whom?, like the queer who brought a Lesbian to his room. Everywhere he saw analogies, and thought he might at heart be a poet.

  The interior of the trunk was the cellar’s only refuge for disorderliness and unpredictability, like the Gothic ruin in a formal garden. All else was arranged, stacked, whitewashed, and policed. He dug deeper and came up with a pair of pegged pants, cuffless; a clump of new pencils bound in a rubber band, which gave off a pleasant odor; and an old college notebook in zoology, on the first page of which in his childish handscript he read some forgotten data on the amoeba, to the effect that it reproduced by binary fission. Life was most colorful on the lower, microscopic levels, and chiefly liquid and thronged, exactly the opposite of your macrocosms with their untenanted interstellar space and inhuman distances all cold air.

  He realized he was interested in depth, not expanse: what he would have liked to do was take a cubic inch of matter and spend his life watching what went on in it, molecule by molecule. He might stay here if only he didn’t have to be nurse to his folks. He put on the tweed jacket, notwithstanding its air conditioning and its girth too meager for his, and pulled a plain blue necktie from the embrace of its fellows. From the closet he brought his Army duffel bag, and put into it the pegged pants and—no more outer clothes because, beyond the trenchcoat which he would wear, there weren’t any; he accepted the possibility that the rest he had left behind in ‘42 were ripped into cleaning rags. He packed the pencils and the notebook, on the chance that this idea that he was basically a poet might arise once again, and went into the ex-coal bin, now laundry, in quest of his Army underwear which Maw had presumably washed. He rooted through the wicker basket, and trying to get his spirits up, sang a robust ditty.

  Five pairs of undershorts and -shirts, and wearing one; all olive drab, they were exempt from urine’s insidious dye. A couple of socks, and he was ready, fastening the ingenious grommets, staples, and hooks that secured the bag, which was now so light and lifeless: civil life for him was an immediate retrenchment. He invariably started on voyages with a hopeless heart, an anti-Ulysses fleeing from his Ithaca.

  Had he stayed he might, by fair means or foul, have persuaded Maw to give him the laundry as his room. It was private; it was under ground; it had poor light—all of which he held most attractive: a good place to scheme, and also to study minor nature at close quarters, for the single little window opened onto the level of the earth. To ascertain exactly what he was leaving, he slid back the curtains and peered out upon the roots of certain bushes, on one of which a tribe of aphids were in convoy, dedicated little beasts. A sleek black beetle trotted along, gauging things with his aerials. From the damp turf of early March, which would take forever to dry in a feeble sun that hardly reached the ground, an earthworm made his deliberate egress for a breath of air, so near the glass that Reinhart could see the workings of the primitive blue entrails within its translucent tube: there was a little creature who embraced reality as close as it could get; a moot point whether it moved through the earth or the earth through it. Reinhart believed some lesson was being dramatized as the worm lay in the sparse winter grass and simply breathed; it wants were few. But he saw the great flying monster of a blackbird alight nearby and begin an evil, nosey stalking which would soon have led it to his invertebrate friend and murder, had he not waved his hand behind the glass. The bird flew off in a bursting, messy manner. Meanwhile the worm knew nothing of these larger incidents. How small an event must be to fit into its ken!

  Convinced that the humble beast had a message for him, if one could only find its idiom, Reinhart pulled a straw from an old broom in the corner. He meant to reach out and tickle the worm, and opened the window towards that purpose. Because the job, being benevolent, must be done with caution yet firmness, he would rest his wrist on the brown rock near the outer sill—a dull, quotidian object with yet a precious jewel in its head, which vanished as his hand descended. He withdrew. At once the jewel reappeared, and the rock—which was actually a toad—spat out an incredibly long tongue, snatched up the earthworm, and ingested it whole.

  Well! The old fellow must have come from hibernation. Reinhart tickled him with the straw, on the quivering goiter, very gently. The toad opened his mouth slightly, showing a blob of tongue, but didn‘t throw it because he couldn’t see a target; toadlike, he had only one perspective. He ran down the shutter over his gemmed eye, as if in satisfaction rather than fear; anyway, he kept sitting there with his warts and the little behind that ended in a point, which Reinhart now suddenly goosed, uttering the traditional goosing call with pursed lips. The toad’s eye shot open and he flexed his front fingers. His dignity in question, he might move on, like a Republican taunted by a radical, any moment now.

  Reinhart’s straw was relentless. The toad prepared the muscles of his thigh; he was giving Reinhart every opportunity to desist, and the ex-corporal admired the pluck and integrity that the amphibian stood for: a better lesson than the earthworm could have demonstrated, who, unlike Reinhart and the toad, had no central dorsal spine ending in a rump that could be goosed. Reinhart felt his link with animate Nature and received intimations of immortality. Meanwhile he kept his straw at work: he had determined the quality of the toad’s response; now for the quantity. He looked for a great, splendid leap beyond the bushes, freedom in a single spring, and then a bounding series of celebrations across March’s gray lawn, high arcs separated by instants of invisibility. The toad gathered himself, looking desperate at the nostrils—I’m telling you, just once more and—he got it and jumped … about a quarter of an inch. A hard character to provoke.

  A lesser man would have made a pet, but Reinhart had the greatest moral objections to domesticating animals. Midget imitation men in fur coats and long ears turned his stomach; as a boy he kept his dog outside and fed it raw meat, but once when he was ill, Maw brought Spot into the house and put it on the canned crud, and before long its teeth went bad, it whimpered at loud noises, and it would screw your leg till you kicked it loose.

  Reinhart said a grateful wiedersehn to the toad and closed the window, determined to stay home but on his own terms. He proceeded to make the laundry his quarters, and brought from the closet a folding canvas cot and assembled it. The Rinso, blueing, etc., he removed from the shelf above the wash machine to a corner of the outer basement, along with the clothespins, ball of rope, and wicker basket. On the shelf he placed his zoology notebook and pencils, and underneath drove in a few nails for garment hooks. In his old room were several items which would make life down here considerably cozier—radio, mounted pike’s head, pencil sharpener, the portrait of a stallion, and a rug his aunt had braided from discarded neckties—but Emmet Swain, the roomer, no doubt would be reluctant to part with them and had a legal right to be so.

  Having at last heard Doc’s departure overhead and the flatulence of his ancient Ford in the street, Reinhart went upstairs to his parents’ chamber and its loaded bed. At the collar of hi
s father’s pajamas he spied a fringe of woolen underwear, and before he could utter a word Dad said through chattering dentures: “Just run me my muffler from the chiffonier, Carlo, and then we’ll talk about your eyes. Can you make it out? Here, get against the wall there and grope your way around.”

  “Ha,” said Maw, balling her big fists, “watch out he doesn’t throttle you with it now you’re down.”

  Dad mildly disagreed with her while pulling the blanket up to his nose, but when Reinhart came towards him with the scarf he nervously met it at arm’s length and put it on himself.

  Reinhart asked ritually: “How’d Doc say you were?”

  “Look at him!” snarled Maw. “Already starting to gloat over the goods we’ll leave behind. Can’t wait till we cash in our chips. All we worked and strived for, in one instant will be nought when Mr. Big takes over. Streetwalkers will sweat in this very Simmons Inner-spring. My beautiful kitchen will be knee-deep in booze.”

  Reinhart sank onto the top of the cedar chest. “I don’t know why you’re taking on so. All you have is the grippe.”

  “Why you—why you—why you dirty—” Maw rolled over and blasted wily Dad, who in anticipation had wadded the muffler round his ears. “George, you going to lie there like a gourd and let me take that?”

  “Why won’t we all aim wown,” groaned Dad, inside his swaddles. “Provolone ill bet us mohair.”

  “There you are,” said Maw to Reinhart as she settled back, immediately drained of spite. She had an erratic but authentic respect for Dad and relied on him for certain interpretations, on others not; when sick more than when well, though now he was ill too the lines of motive were complicated, and her acquiescence probably owed to her true woman’s sense that his message required translation. “‘Calm down,’ says your father, ‘and don’t provoke, which won’t get you anywhere.’” She smiled; like anyone else, she was pleased to have met a responsibility and, if she did say it herself, well.