This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  Nevertheless, he spent all day Tuesday in a shadow cast by the Mainwarings. Even the initial stimulation of his work had diminished like a suntan in two weeks of rain. He wondered whether the midweek slump at the office was habitual. Genevieve failed to be insulting and wore a blouse with smudged cuffs, a real heresy in a person of her profession. She might be enduring her Period; but what of Claude, who had lost his paternalism as quickly as he had, on the first day, assumed it, and now pretended Reinhart wasn’t there, staying in his office with the door shut.

  When Reinhart finally applied to Genevieve for a ruling on the matter—she being the sort who always had an answer; he had begun to admire that gift above all others—he managed to evoke from her an expression of impatience almost as comforting to him as the information imparted.

  She pointed her pencil at the window, which ran with rain. “At last I’ve met the person dumb enough not to come in out of it.”

  “I get it!” said Reinhart, rising from the long table where he had sat for hours browsing in the literature of some international real-estate firm which offered for sale Spanish castles, Scottish moors, and all of Austria. “You can’t sell a house in this weather.”

  “Gawd,” moaned Genevieve, “the girl who gets you! I’ll bet you also eat like a horse.” All this while she efficiently typed away with her fingers, never looking at a text. When he inquired, she stated that, one, the forms were in her head and, two, conversation with him was hardly a distraction.

  At five, after Claude had blundered out like a sick bullock, unspeaking, Reinhart left too. Genevieve wrinkled her little nose at him when, from the sidewalk, he glanced back through the window. On an impulse, he kissed the palm of his hand and pushed it towards her with a gesture used by policemen to halt traffic. Her face stretched in mock superciliousness, eyebrows way up there, mouth way down here.

  Wednesday morning the weather was worse, and Reinhart suffered some painful ague from the night in his basement chamber. You could have got a drink by running a goblet through the atmosphere there; his old zoology notebook was swelling up and bursting open page on page; and the walls leaked not only water but mud as well, in long rivulets which ever replenished his bedside pond. On such a day his parents were sure to develop hideous symptoms if he were present to see them. Therefore he dried himself on an old shirt, dressed in damp clothing, and left without breakfast by the cellar exit. Got coffee at the Trojan Cafe, where he exchanged hubris with Achilles, the proprietor, while at the same time keeping an eye on a number of swarthy little Myrmidons who circulated behind the counter violating the pastry.

  Sucking on the first Turn from a handy pocket roll, feeling a certain sandiness between the duodenum and the jejunum, he reported to the office, where Genevieve, since Claude had telephoned that he was taking the day off, assumed the scepter and bossed him about as one might a serf. He knew then the annoyance of a job whose status wasn’t specified, and after straightening the books in Claude’s office, dusting the window sills, and fetching lunch as ordered, he balked at a four o’clock command to run out for coffee light, hold the sugar, and said something insubordinate like: “Who do you think you are?”

  Genevieve glared at him for a moment, then ran weeping into the anteroom lavatory and stayed there for forty-five minutes, during which time—damned if he had anything to apologize for—Reinhart tried Claude’s swivel chair on for size. What he needed was a real desk of his own. He began to dislike Claude again, he loathed Genevieve Raven, he dreaded sleeping another night in the cellar…. He threw hostility around at various imaginary targets—anything to distract him from anticipating an evening among black fanatics.

  “Splendor,” Reinhart was pleading, three and a half hours later as he towered over his friend in the Mainwaring hall. “Splendor, here I must absolutely put my foot down. I mustn’t wear that turban. No, never.” The command to wear a dark suit he had obeyed to the best of his ability. Since he owned none, he borrowed a blue serge jacket of his father’s, sufficient in girth but clownishly short in trunk and arms. As trousers he wore a pair of ancient oxford-gray flannels tracked through the ragbag, a Siberia to which clothes were banished from the trunk prior to total liquidation. Their legs had been wadded in close community with a woolen scarf used for camphorated-oil rubs: Reinhart therefore exuded an odor from his shanks, but it warded off chills and small dogs.

  The turban, however, was too much. Splendor continued to press it on him soberly—indeed, downright morosely for a man with such a gaudy project, his eyes rather obscured as if he wore contact lenses cut from snapshot negatives. The only reason Reinhart finally accepted it was that Splendor manifestly felt worse than he.

  “There is only one size,” Splendor said dolefully. “So it should fit. Oh, I’m sorry!” he exclaimed as Reinhart stoically put it on. “Did you want one, too?”

  “This isn’t mine?” asked Mohammed Reinhart, giant monarch of the revolting hill tribes. In the yellowed hall mirror he was properly Mongoloid, as well. Relieved that Splendor was not asking this of their friendship, he jokingly barked: “You call me mad, English dog? Haha, Alexander the Great was mad, Caesar was mad, and Napoleon was the maddest of the lot. Look towards yon plain and see my cavalry, mounted on valiant chargers—”

  Splendor, who had no sense of humor, wrinkled his thin eyebrows and took back the white-satin cocoon. He placed it on his head himself, but asked Reinhart to adjust it dead center, with the hen’s-egg ruby and the little shaving brush that rose from it in vertical alignment with his nose. “Next time, Carlo, if you wish. The costumer’s will be closed by now.”

  From the kitchen Reinhart heard muffled soprano shrieks; Loretta had either damaged herself or been sent hysterical by his act. In either case she was responding to life with more affirmation than her brother, who looked most ill. His turban suggested a bandage rather than the traditional headdress of the seer; his rented dinner jacket jutted high in the back of his neck; and he teetered on tiptoe, as if a giant policeman were plucking him up for vagrancy.

  “Do you know something?” asked Reinhart, slouching in synthetic nonchalance. “Since this is the first meeting, you could just as well hold it tomorrow night or next week, for that matter. Besides, it’s started to rain again.”

  Groaning, Splendor sank to the bottom stair, knees in his face.

  Reinhart went on: “Really more sleet than rain, in fact. A cold front is moving down from British Columbia. Yesterday there was five inches of snow in Minneapolis, and a man in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, bent over to tie his shoe and froze in that position. So as I say, since this is the first of your meetings, you don’t have any obligation.”

  “Except to the truth,” said Splendor, rising manfully. “If it’s sleeting here, think what the weather must be in Pocatello, Idaho. Yet you can be sure Dr. Goodykuntz is not letting down for a moment.”

  Reinhart was embarrassed when they left the house and met a thick fog, indeed a warm, suffocating one; yet it served his purposes of camouflage, and Splendor, a petty man only to his own family, did not chide him but rather walked mumbling some private catechism of which Reinhart could catch only discrete words, the usual ones: Prime Mover, life force, etc. He was practicing his address, poor fellow, and did not realize that being profound was the easiest thing in the world. You could say anything at all, and it would be, or come, true, because life was everything. This seemed very clear to Reinhart, to whom it had in fact just occurred, and he felt a faint pity towards everybody who didn’t know it—which put him in an ease unprecedented that day, and he stalked along suddenly regretting the presence of the fog, for he wouldn’t have minded letting people look at the combination of serenity, authority, and compassion that must show upon his face.

  He had gone some distance in such a mode before he noticed that his companion had disappeared in thick air. His calls got no answer; his searches, radiating like spokes from the hub of which he was certain—as advised in the Boy’s Guide to the Wilderness which fortuitously he ha
d lately found among his childhood memorabilia—made no human contact. It was likely that he, and not Splendor, was lost. He heard a purr and felt fur at his ankles, for cats, unlike small dogs, invariably took to him. A soft voice wrapped, as it were, around his neck at the same time: “Daddy, you like to circumvent the globe?” “No thanks,” answered Reinhart. “I’m just lost.” “Ah show you to the promised land,” said the girl. Reinhart declined again with a thank-you no, the cat meowed, and high heels clopped away leaving behind a giggle like Loretta’s. This was the kind of thing Reinhart was wont to do in emergencies, he reflected in shame: panicking, to suspect his friends of dishonor; they were Negroes and the time was night; he was disgusting. Nevertheless, when he heard male footsteps in the murky vicinity and had reason to suppose they were Splendor’s, he involuntarily groped for his little pocket knife, with its half-inch blade.

  “Wadduh you say, Pops?” asked a person, not Splendor yet very familiar to him. Reinhart saw a suggestion of white in the black fog. “Man, this weather is hard on the real estay, don’t tell me never. Water fallin’ from the sky make that Humbold keep to his bed and you can’t fight it. And that hincty little chick G. Raven, she give you many a bad time, which ain’t nothin to what she do if you get married to one another. Mind me of my second wife, who give me numerous scars. Whyn’t you tell me that time I assed you about Bridgwater that you had the gift, man? I coulda made you a better deal than Splendor G. Mainwaring. He what you call a stone, man, and will never sprout.”

  “Obviously it’s the Maker,” said Reinhart.

  “Well it ain’t the Verderber, which is Dutch for the opposite,” answered the Maker in mock indignation. “As you well know, being Dutch as they come. No wonder you never made my action in Bridg-water. You was in the Pantser division of the Liftwaffle!” He laughed like crazy, and added: “Don’t you take no never mind to me, Rudolph, I just been turned on.”

  “That’s all very well,” said Reinhart, still disturbed at having mislaid his friend, “but how do you know so much about me?”

  There was a long silence, and Reinhart, who realized it was quixotic on the West Side, or perhaps anywhere else, to look for causes and effects in geometric progression, had given up and was about to resume his search for the missing nonchemical physician, when the Maker illuminated a pencil-flashlight, opened his great wallet, and withdrew a folded document. He read from it in much the same voice with which, years ago, Splendor had played the magistrate in Spreading the News: a Negro’s parody of white authority, constipated, effeminate, and unjust, even when, as in this case, granting a right.

  “‘Dee following named purr-son is licensed under dee lows of deez state to prectice as a private detective … Nicholas Graves,’ which is how yours truly was undersigned at birth.”

  “I never knew a man who had so many professions,” said Reinhart, “but—”

  “In spite of which,” the Maker interrupted, “I ain’t got a brown bare-ass penny I can call my own. What ain’t grabbed by them ex-wives is et up by a houseful of relltives. I mean to take a gun after them any time now. And them hoors. Now you never hear nobody give a good word to a procurator, but I tell you it far from easy. You got to keep after them girls for holdin’ back their cash, and then they always comin’ down sick and needin’ a quick fix and I tell you horse ain’t gettin’ cheaper. Tellphone alone run into money: you don’t call them fwequently, they get sulky. ‘Sweet man, mah feet hurt god-awful.’ ‘Awright, baby, you get yoursel a new hat.’ ‘Green, with a little bit of lace.’ ‘Sure, anythin’ you want, so long as it don’t run past 1.98.’ Trouble is, you give in like that and they won’t cruise all week.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Reinhart, “but that’s your problem. Mine is that I don’t like the idea of you spying on me. Who hired you?”

  “Hunred dollars a day and expinses is what I generally get,” said the Maker, “but I’ll tell all I know for a picture of George.”

  Reinhart gave him a dollar bill, in return for which the detective revealed: “Your daddy. He worries you’ll be a bum.”

  “You haven’t told him about me coming over here?” Reinhart could have bitten off his tongue. What an insulting thing to say to the Maker, who had no other bailiwick! But the informer set him at ease without prejudice.

  “It’s a weakness of mine that I always report good about everbody. I never flipped a lip towards him since you sold that tinement house.”

  “So,” said Reinhart. “Much obliged. You’re a good fellow, Nicholas.”

  “I try,” answered the Maker, blinking off his flash in modesty. “But I sometimes wonder if I ain’t batty in the bell tower.”

  “That’s occurred to every good fellow since the dawn of man,” Reinhart said pontifically.

  “And what been decided?”

  “No decision. But one may be forthcoming at any moment.”

  “Man,” cried the Maker, “could I only talk like you, I’d be the meanest sonbitch ever drawn breath. Why be good if you can say ‘forthcoming.’“

  Now he was getting invidious, so Reinhart laid a responsibility on him: Where might the missing Splendor be found, or, failing that, where was the store-front house of worship?

  “You standin’ in the door,” said the detective.

  Reinhart felt about him, and it was quite true that he stood in some entranceway, flanked by plate glass or, rather, the cardboard surrogate for the same.

  “But it must be almost eight o’clock. Where are the lights? Where is Splendor? Where are the people?”

  “Now nobody can say I done a bad job,” the Maker protested, too much. “But you ain’t gonna get off the ground on a expense account of seven dollars eighty cents. There’s twenty-nine dollars alone owing on the lectric power, and my cousin’s in stir.”

  “What’s he got to do with it?”

  “She. That there is Big Ruthie, who had a nice policy trade but the bulls closed her up, which left the store empty, and she not going to pay the Power & Light and not get no use from it in stir. And as to the audience, well how many marks you gonna draw on seven-eighty? Hunred handbills, soon lost. No posters, two-colored or otherwised. No public-dress system to scream your message. No big fat soprano on the back of a truck, accompanied by horn men playin’ ‘I Look Over Jordan and Whut.’ No ads in the West Side Bugle, bearing pichers of the Reverend or whatever Splendor G. Mainwaring call hisself. I tell you, man, he no more likely to go aloft than a i-ron paperweight.”

  “Poor guy,” said Reinhart. He struck out in pity and inadvertently knocked the cardboard from the window and what was left of the glass. “Well, we’ve got to do something.” He heard the Maker prepare to flee, and grabbed him. The private eye went through several Protean transformations, monsters, serpents, the bounding sea, but Reinhart held fast, saying: “That’s right, you and me. Because we’re good fellows. Put on your light and look here. I’ve got fifty-two dollars in this billfold. What can that do for us by nine o’clock?”

  The Maker showed the yellow of his eyes and skillfully plucked through the wad while holding the flash in the other hand. “By nine? I can deliver maybe three-four my girls if the meeting won’t last beyond eleven, when business pick up.”

  “How about your boys that hang around the drugstore?”

  “That would be Winthrop and the Prince and Webster Small and Little Clyde. Frenchy got cut up lately and Baby Al got extadited to Dee-troit. Man, why don’t we pick another night?”

  “Got to be now.”

  “Got to be,” the Maker muttered. “Hmm. I could cruise a few saloons, but I tell you, don’t look for much. They be a audience all right, but I can’t guarantee they be human beans. And you get a cigar box at the door with a sign readin: ‘Check weapons here,’ and put another one on the wall like the city bus, sayin: ‘No spittin’, chewin’, talkin’, cussin’, going to the toilet, jazzin’, or nothin’ else while the vehicle in motion, especially with the driver.’ Meanin’ your friend Splendor G. Mainwaring. Man, he’s n
owhere.” The Maker opened his clothes at the neck and put the bills inside his undershirt, snorting: “Seven dollars eighty!”

  Reinhart said: “That’s all he had.”

  “It ain’t up to me to destroy your faith in human nature,” said Nicholas Graves. “But I’ll get you the audience, I’ll get you the lights—”

  “God,” cried Reinhart, “I’d forgotten about that. It’s too late now even if we paid the bill; the Power & Light offices are closed.” In the interest of symmetry, he knocked the cardboard and glass from the left-hand window.

  “You worryin’ about the only thing I ain’t. We just tap into the line of the dry cleaner next door; both got the same cellar. Little Clyde do that in his sleep; he was lectrician in the Navy.” Reaching high as he could, the Maker patted Reinhart on the shoulder. “Now don’t worry, Daddy, we going to come out all right. I just wish you was the preacher. Got to be by nine? I’m in motion.”

  “One more thing, Nicholas. I wonder where Splendor is.”

  “Take my flash,” said the Maker, “and go in the back of the store behind the partition. If you don’t find him there passed out cold on Big Ruthie’s davenport, then the angels done carried him off to the Isles of Bliss.”

  Reinhart followed the suggestion and found the man of many callings was right, as he had begun to suspect he always was.

  Chapter 8

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Reinhart began, drunk as a lord, and then brayed in laughter, for their titles might be many, but never those two. He began again to himself, while the persons of the audience stirred respectfully: “Whores, pimps, cutthroats, degenerates, and fiends,” an address that better suited his drunken compulsion towards the truth. “Uh,” he went on, “you may smoke.” Several people instantly lighted brown-paper cigarettes that exuded a sweetish aroma, and two felonious types, propped against the left wall, took the liberty to drain a flat pint of maroon liquid.