This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  She swung her legs into the cavity provided for them below the desk. “You don’t look like an Italian, but you have Roman eyes.” She bit her lips, which were small but full and permanently drooped in exigence. Every so often she widened her gray eyes and then squinted, at which times the point of her little nose was depressed and the back of her brown bob seemed to lift like the behind of a chicken in flight.

  She was really kind of cute, and Reinhart turned on for her his winning grin. He fundamentally liked all girls, especially those who worked in an office and took it seriously; a woman’s life being ever threatened with disorder—for example, at least once a month—he found both delightful and touching a secretary’s illusion she had hers arranged.

  “How did you know it was me?” he asked, meaning the counterfeit Fed, and she understood. He also liked clever people, or tried to.

  “I remember voices like a sensitive person remembers slights.” This was perhaps too clever, and she meant it to be, and flipped both her pretty, insolent head and the switch of an intercom, reporting: “Mr. Humbold, a person to see you.” Dirty with static, a reply was metallically audible: “Hen or rooster?” Miss X answered: “Rooster,” and superciliously pointed coxcomb Reinhart to the private door.

  Humbold, sitting behind a blond desk, next to a rubber plant in a bamboo-wrapped urn, lost no time in demonstrating his disappointment; nor could the gravel in his voice be blamed on static any longer; he had a throatful of saliva and was too lazy or arrogant to clear it. Frankly, Reinhart would never understand such a person, and thus at a moment which called for strength had only weakness to offer. On the other hand, perhaps the weakness was just as good, since Hum-bold would not permit the offering of anything. It was his office, his secretary, and shortly Reinhart discovered that he himself was owned by Humbold, having hypnotically assented to an oral indenture which he failed to hear properly except for the wage terms, which were extraordinarily generous: sixty-five dollars a week.

  Reinhart was suddenly rich; at the same time, he felt distinctly deprived of something he had with him when he entered the office. He studied his employer, to see if he had taken it.

  Humbold wore his trousers very high to cover his wide belly; the end of his gaudy necktie was secured under the waistband of his pants, and a golden safety pin fastened his tie to his shirt, which was white with a white figure, looking at which you were sure your vision was failing. He wore a pin at the collar as well: conspicuous consumption, for the collar was also button-down. In his shirt pocket, fastened to an isinglass liner bearing on its fold an advertisement for his own business, he carried a matched pen and pencil of silver with onyx topknots, though no cigars. His face was smooth as a bladder and as fat, but harder. He had unusually long and loose earlobes; like a turkey’s wattles, they continued to move when he did no more than stare. His eyes were smaller than the muzzles of his shotgun nose.

  “O.K., bud,” said Humbold, “never had a job? You ain’t paid for gawking.”

  “Excuse me.” Reinhart collected himself—which was what had turned out to be missing—and asked: “Mr. Humbold—”

  “Call me Claude,” said the boss.

  “I just wanted to be sure you knew who I was.”

  “No danger of that,” jeered Humbold. “You just flush when I pull the chain. Your daddy called me every day. I done a lot for your old man, and I’ll do more, though ten years younger than him. I’m making this job for you, bud, there being no opening. Everything I got, I built for myself.” He touched the knot of his tie with a hand wearing two rings, a watch, a manicure, and hair fine as a baby’s. “Now get to your work.”

  “Just what would that be?” Reinhart asked, choosing this moment to sit upon a chair of metal tubing.

  “Well it ain’t sitzing!” cried Humbold. “Bud, you ain’t one to appreciate opportunity. A man give me a opportunity like this and I’d have his bidniss inside a year.” He rose, impudently rejecting the swivel chair with his large hams. His face grew so amiable as to appear imbecilic: his eyes vanished, his ears grew, his teeth showed, and his tongue dangled. Rubelike, he sauntered to Reinhart and squeezed his hand as if it were a cow’s udder. He doffed an imaginary straw hat and droned: “Take a piece of propitty off muh hans? You an me’ll mosey later to take a look at whut I got fuh sale, but fust we drink a bourbon and branch water?”

  Humbold came out of his role and explained: “That technique is for the city type, contrary to what you might think. You always be different from the client. What a man buying a property don’t want is for the salesman to be no more than him. Now if you get a hick, you act hoity-toity and then show a property near a exclusive golf club, tell him everybody in the neighborhood eats supper in a Tuxedo and set their dogs on Baptists. Get the point? You always work against the grain.”

  Humbold returned to the other side of the room, where two different kinds of his own calendars were hung, turned, put a twist on his hip, and waltzed back like a fruit.

  “The mosth darling little place,” he lisped, “that you’ll dearly love! … The approach for a crude, physical type with a mousey wife. You have to watch he don’t belt you, but you’ll make a real hit with the little woman. On the other hand, you get a sissy, you lay on the threat: you start by hurting his hand when you shake. You belch, sneeze, spit, and pee in a deserted hallway. You pull him inta some tough saloon and show only slum properties near a factory where the air stinks.”

  It had taken Reinhart all this while to understand that he was being hired as a real-estate man, and he was very gloomy about it, disliking nothing more than houses and lots, dreaming invariably of palaces in parks on the one hand and urban apartments on the other. For a moment he hated Dad for having had to do him this favor.

  “Never,” said Humbold, “sell a man what he wants!”

  “Why?” Reinhart asked. “Why are people like that?” For if Hum-bold said they were, they were; he did not challenge his employer, the one man hereabouts who had made an unqualified success and was worth, they said, six figures, and continued to live in the same neighborhood as Reinhart’s parents only because he had the biggest house there.

  Contrary to what his employe expected, Humbold looked pleased at the query and answered ecstatically: “Because that’s not what they want!” He plunged into a closet and brought out the jacket to his pin-striped suit, a fawn-colored topcoat, and a kind of Confederate cavalry hat of light gray with a narrow black band. From the lapel of his jacket sprouted a crimson feather-duster boutonniere, apropos of the predominant color, in a melange of others, in his necktie. An Alp of white handkerchief rose from his breast pocket. He cocked his hat and cried to Reinhart: “Let’s move out, bud!”

  Struggling into his old trenchcoat, Reinhart followed Humbold through the outer office and past the secretary. Their air swept her correspondence to the floor again. She shook her little fist at Reinhart, and he stopped to make things right. “Bud!” shouted Humbold, half through the street door, admitting a March wind that mocked any efforts at reorder. “Step lively before it gets away!”

  “Before what does?” Reinhart screamed into the wind. He was now outdoors; Humbold, already in his eight-cylinder Gigantic, started the engine. The vehicle began to move as Reinhart caught the door handle, and he had to run alongside for half a block before a red light halted it and he could enter.

  The boss played the pushbuttons of the radio as if it were an organ, producing a mishmash of sound. At last he settled for a rancorous raving about a deodorant: You’re a dirty pig unless you use Dream Mist.

  He thrust his face down into his coat and alternately sniffed at both armpits. “Why,” he then answered, “whajuh think? Life!”

  By the end of Reinhart’s first working day there were two new developments, both encouraging. One, Maw was up and around again, showing no damage from whatever her trouble had been, but obstructively trying to talk of some amidst Reinhart’s account of his triumph. Two, there was Reinhart’s triumph, a feature of which was tha
t suddenly after all these years he ceased to think of Humbold as an enemy.

  Humbold was generous—irrespective of the sixty-five per week, which was not exactly a salary but an estimate of what Reinhart could earn by making sales, fair enough. He had driven first to Gents’ Walk, the local clothiers, and got Reinhart reoutfitted from sole to scalp (or, as Humbold put it, “from corns to dandruff”), charging it to his own account, the squaring up to come from his employe’s future earnings.

  Humbold was egalitarian: he vigorously pressed Reinhart to dress after his, Humbold’s, fashion; and while the apprentice politely rejected the pinstripes, the aurora borealis neckties, and any kind of hat, he did appreciate his boss’s selfless concern—your typical employer would rather have striven to maintain the distinctions. (Gents’ wasn’t where Reinhart would have gone on his own; yet he managed to find a harmless brown sports jacket, gray flannels, cordovan-dyed oxfords which might or might not run in the rain, and a single-breasted gabardine raincoat which might or might not shed it; he gave his old clothes to the halitosic clerk to burn. “I’ll package them and send them to MISSIONARY, in care of your local postmaster,” said the clerk. “An appeal in which your neighborhood clothiers are cooperating, to cover the nakedness of certain tribes in New South Wales.”)

  Humbold had authority: he operated his great car as if it were a chariot fitted with hub-scythes and the pedestrians were Roman infantry. Walking, Reinhart had always condemned such driving; he saw now how the grass could be green in one’s own yard. He felt, if not power, at least his adjacency to it. Their next call was to a gas station, where Humbold flashed a credit card and a herd of lackeys swarmed over the vehicle and filled it and cajoled it and laved it with a variety of their fluids, and stood in platoon formation, saluting, as the Gigantic at length blasted off, just missing a fox terrier with his nose at the tail of another upon the edge of the blacktop.

  Humbold had esprit: they roared towards a couple of “live ones,” which was to say, clients, people in the market for a house, and the boss already had the scent of prey in his big nostrils; he increased the volume of the radio and whistled through his teeth in accompaniment of the musical commercials; he sideswept his hat brim like an Anzac; he ground two sticks of gum between his molars and winced as if in some excruciatingly sweet pain.

  “Keep your eye on me, bud,” he said. “It’s worth a college course.”

  Since the boss was going to this trouble over him, Reinhart believed it was only fair to advise: “Which reminds me, sir—”

  Humbold buried him in an avalanche of derision. “Sir! That went out with Tom Thumb golf and near-beer, bud. You never make a dollar calling ‘sir’ like a Limey butler. To a client, I repeat, you got to be boss. And as to me”—on a shaded avenue, going fifty, he suddenly squashed the brakes, which hurled Reinhart against the dashboard and permitted a woman to wheel a baby carriage across the street in the middle of the block; or rather, she was forced to cross by Humbold’s sweeping arm; it was doubtful whether she had really wanted to—“as to me,” Humbold repeated, then parenthetically told Reinhart to snap out of it, the dashboard would break sooner than his head, and accelerated forward, waving his hat at the woman. “As to me, everybody calls me Claude, but nobody forgets who pays the bills.”

  He shot past a stop sign onto an arterial highway, greeting with one raised finger, as if in the schoolroom signal of Number One, the motorcycle cop hiding behind the billboard there, among the early poison ivy. Reinhart cracked his neck to turn and read what wind and weather, or a cunning vandal, had made more eloquent:

  CHOICE PROPERTIES SEE HUMBOLD REAL

  He decided there was little point in hastily telling the boss he could work only until school started, since at this moment culture seemed irrelevant even to himself. Uncomfortable in his new clothes, he drew a cigarette and punched the dashboard lighter, which instantly glowed like a witch’s eye.

  “No boy no!” cried Humbold, at the same time gunning off the highway onto a washboard dirt road, the Gigantic much bumpier than the ads, with their photos taken by stroboscopic light at the Gigantic Torture Test Track, Dearborn, Mich., admitted. “Stamp out the King Brothers!”

  By the time Reinhart had puzzled this through—he was really very pleased to have been able to: Smo King and Drin King—they had drawn up on the village green, only it was mud, of a cannibal village, only instead of shrunken heads, diapers were everywhere hanging out to dry on sagging lines between the huts, which were made of corrugated iron rather than palm fronds, and the children who burst ululating upon him and the boss were white beneath the dirt.

  Humbold broke a passage by flinging a handful of nickels in another direction, saying to Reinhart: “When I was a boy, you could buy off a kid with a penny. I made it my bidniss to be completely nauseating and soon I had more cents than anybody.” He asked nothing for his wit, however, and didn’t smile himself, but rather studied his shoe-tips in annoyance, which were gathering a film of dust as they padded towards the nearest Quonset.

  A respectful half-step behind, Reinhart asked, trying to be professional: “Is this hot territory?”

  But he learned that you either knew the jargon or not, simulation was ill advised. Thus Humbold answered as if he had been questioned on the weather: “Temperate.”

  “Sorry,” Reinhart said, and he lowered his voice, for they were almost at the door of the hut. “I mean, this place looks pretty low-class. Are there many clients here who could afford a house?”

  Humbold banged the door, the same rusty metal as the siding, with his foot. Instantly it was opened by a skinny young man in eyeglasses, a T-shirt, and an expression of ancient apology. Humbold seized his hand and under the guise of shaking it performed a neat judo type of throw which lifted the man from his threshold and literally dropped him on Reinhart.

  “Meet Bobby Clendellan.”

  Ah, thought Reinhart while helping Clendellan settle shakily on his own two feet, the strong-arm technique. But this fellow didn’t seem effeminate, only confused and guilty, other things entirely.

  Humbold retrieved poor Clendellan before Reinhart could do too much for him, and holding him by the scruff of his T-shirt, finally answered Reinhart’s earlier question: “Can these jokers afford a house? Bud, this is Vetsville, these boys got all them benefits from a grateful country. Ain’t that right, Bobby?”

  Clendellan adjusted his glasses back of the ears, while looking cravenly through their lenses at Reinhart. He said: “I was a yeoman in the Navy.”

  “He killed two regulations and wounded a fountain pen,” said Humbold. He propelled Clendellan into the hut, patting his slack behind. “Go get your ball and chain and your deductions, if they haven’t been eaten up by the vermin in this dump: I got a nice place to show you.”

  Clendellan poked his head out the door again, and called to Reinhart: “I had limited service because of bad vision.”

  “That’s quite all right,” Reinhart answered grandly. He waved the client to his errand.

  While they waited, Humbold pawed the ground like a bull and snorted, to maintain his role, but sotto voce he advised his apprentice: “A fairly uncommon case, noncombatants being usually the tough ones, with paratroopers and Marines being soft and easy to work.”

  “I get it,” said Reinhart. “Noncombatant service is more like civil life than combat is, and—”

  “Wrong, bud. All wrong. Just the opposite: life, real life, is exactly like the fighting, except in the latter you use guns and therefore don’t destroy as many people. But if you already had your combat one place, you don’t want it in another…. The present client is the black sheep, the foul ball, of the moneybags clan who own among other items the Clendellan Building in the city. He lives here like a goat while his family could buy the state from their petty cash. You figure out why?”

  “Because he wants to Make His Own Way,” whispered Reinhart.

  “Absolutely incorrect,” the boss said, beheading his gum ball again and again wi
th chipmunked incisors and restoring it with his tongue. “Because he’s a Commonist.” He let that soak in for a moment, but it didn’t faze Reinhart, who had been in Berlin with the real Russians. “Or a Fachist,” Humbold continued. “I don’t know which, whatever kind of crank it is who likes to live like a nigger when he ain’t one. That’s seldom a real nigger, by the way. Say bud, do you have a politics?”

  “Not so’s you can notice,” Reinhart answered, sure at last he had said the right thing.

  But Humbold turned away in chagrin and punched the side of the hut. Something fell from the wall within and broke, and Clendellan’s contrite voice was heard: “Be with you in a minute. We’re changing the baby’s diapers.” Perhaps because they didn’t answer, he came to the door and explained to Reinhart: “I was stationed at the Norfolk Naval Base throughout my service, which is how I could raise a family.”

  Reinhart shrugged cynically.

  Humbold removed his big hat and extended it, with the hole upwards, in supplication. “All right, then. Can you at least pretend to be a Red?”

  “I’m sorry, Claude. I thought we always went against the grain.”

  “With the men, bud, the men. Look.” He literally buttonholed Reinhart—or tried to, but in fact the lapel slot on the new jacket was still sewn shut; Humbold settled for a grip on the notch. “Your job is the wife.”

  Reinhart felt himself blush in involuntary, anticipatory lasciviousness; his id, or whatever it was, always made its own translation of remarks that linked him with a woman no matter what the intended relation. Humbold however noticed nothing amiss. He was almost a foot shorter than his assistant, but didn’t admit it. This was another reason why Reinhart had begun not to dislike him: Humbold was superior to details unless they had a practical application to an immediate purpose. For example, he would never mention Reinhart’s size until he wanted someone beaten up.

  “You got it?” asked the boss.