This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  Stony Jack, picking his teeth with a switchblade knife, asked: “You being sour-castic?”

  “Not necessarily,” Reinhart answered. “Gloria Monday, am I right or wrong?”

  She thought about it, hunched in her ancient green coat, her hair like a flight of starlings. “Well, I always kept myself clean, not like some of them girls you see who don’t take a baf between now and next Christmas. And while I drink some muscatel now and again and have smoked a stick of pot, I never fool with H, and there ain’t nobody can say I do, though they may be them who try—”

  “Put a sock in it, baby,” called the Maker from the doorway. He had doubtless picked up the phrase in England, when he ran his action at Bridgwater. “We come to hear the Reverent Dr. Goodykuntz, not you troubles, which are endless.”

  For the first time the audience responded as a unit: they coughed. Reinhart’s skull, very warm under the turban, was wet with perspiration, and his glasses had fogged. He saw glimmers of the essential truth here and there, but couldn’t seem to maintain a firm hold on it. So far he had delivered a series of disconnected notes, all sound enough as far as they went, but what his listeners needed, not to mention himself, was synthesis—the kind of thing Splendor was so good at, and the real Dr. Goodykuntz, neither of whom were present, though the audience and Reinhart were, neither of whom had come voluntarily. This situation in itself was enormously significant.

  “We all,” Reinhart said, “are in a world we never made, to use a necessary cliché—and what cliché isn’t necessary?—but as long as we are in it, we might as well make the best of what may be a mistake. I don’t mean we have to love anything or anybody—I discussed that just after the war with a fellow in Berlin, Germany; in fact, haha, he was a German; and decided that necessity and love don’t mix. I just mean that it might be nice if we do … if we love something, that is. Otherwise life is inclined to get pretty dreary, the electricity is turned off for nonpayment of the bill, the telephone never rings except when it’s people who want to swindle you, drugs fall from the medicine cabinet, friends let you down, and you never satisfy your parents, nor they you, and unkind people circulate lies about Gloria Monday. But furthermore, what I mean is, perhaps we should try loving even that dreariness and then it wouldn’t be so bad, or at least we can see that, in its own way, life is interesting. After all, there it is.”

  Stony Jack looked over a dirty Band-Aid on his right cheekbone, then spat upon the floor. “I was wrong afore. This here is the foolest thang I ever heard.”

  “But you have to admit,” said Reinhart, “that if it is the foolest, then it is interesting, because it never happened before. And did you ever think of this: that each new minute is occurring for the first time. I’m sorry we don’t have a wall clock here, to make the principle more obvious, for it’s the most extraordinary phenomenon of a life that is filled with them. For example, I am not the same person who began this sentence, but am several seconds older, all the little molecules of my blood are elsewhere in my veins than they were at the outset, my liver is slightly older, heart, lungs, pancreas, etc., have slightly degenerated. The same is also true of you. You are not the same people who earlier entered this building and took your seats; you are, indeed, some minutes nearer to the grave—if we look on the dreary side of the matter. But take heart! So long as time moves, so do possibilities open up. Keep waiting one minute more!”

  Reinhart was excited now, believing he had got to fundamentals and then showed a way out—for who wanted to drive life into a corner and leave it there? Better to dissipate it in the space between here and Neptune, like a meteorite bursting into cosmic dust. That is to say, he was all for expanse instead of contraction, but being at the same time an agoraphobe, he was suddenly struck hard by his essential contradictions and fainted, staying out for approximately thirty-two seconds, during which his turbaned head descended to his folded arms on the counter.

  He awoke to hear the Maker shouting: “O noble holy man, thou fallest into a trance!” and could not be sure whether his confederate was authentically impressed or merely resourceful. He himself was very drunk, but felt more desperately than ever his obligation.

  “Let me tell you more about Andorra,” he easily resumed, never having trouble with a place he knew nothing about—whereas he could have said very little about Ohio—“where they have a national lottery whose first prize is half a million dollars. And here’s the feature: everybody is guaranteed to win it once in his life.”

  “I be goddam if I gotta stan’ here listen to this,” said Stony, and lumbered to his chair, his jacket-back a great wrinkled sky of tweed lightning.

  “Kin I stay?” asked Gloria Monday. “Them other girls always pesterin’ me.”

  “Sure,” shouted Reinhart. “Anybody can do anything he wants.” He punched at the atmosphere, which seemed to disbelieve him, but the Maker’s claqueurs, long silent, rallied feebly: some merely with “Yeah”; others demanding: “Tell it to me, O Doc!”

  “You’re damned right I’ll tell it,” Reinhart roared back, the encouragement for some reason making him belligerent. “I’ll tell it to the Lord.”

  “The blessed Lord above?” muttered Gloria Monday, looking shyly at Reinhart as if to ascertain whether that was the one he meant.

  So as not to be sacrilegious, in case there actually was a standard God of the type in which he did not believe, Reinhart changed his tune slightly, no point in offending. “I’ll tell it to Zeus.” He really had a modicum of faith in the old Greek gods, who always did something crummy but feasible to human beings and certainly never considered dying for their sake.

  This all made a big hit with Reinhart’s listeners, a group that used silence, distended eyes, and fish mouths for their important demonstrations. The orator regretted his long-held conviction that Negroes were a noisy bunch. He also noticed that the latter half of the room was now empty, though he had actually seen no departures. That they were a devious crowd was at least confirmed.

  As long as there was still some purpose in so doing, he withheld from himself the realization that he had failed, since it surely took a while for his kind of wisdom, expressed with his kind of energy, to claim their kind of attention. Certainly any moment now he could expect the classic Negro response: they would rise as one man, screaming ecstasy, and cavort in the aisles…. One of the brush hairs fell off his lip. He was over the hump towards twenty-two, and already conscious of certain losses. Real estate was his game and not evangelism, yet he had told the truth about Andorra, which he had made up on the spot. He wished terribly that everybody would win, that you could look nowhere without being blinded by grandeur. He also wished he had either drunk more or drunk less.

  The Maker’s white coat and black visage had disappeared from the street doorway. Reinhart got a premonition of doom when he saw the color combination with which they had been replaced: policeman’s midnight blue and Slavic-red face, but the paste helped keep his upper lip stiff, and he remarked to Gloria Monday: “How nicel An officer of the law, of all people, has come to join our devotion.”

  But she had vanished, probably using Splendor’s route through the back window. As had Stony Jack and his small lackey—and indeed every other human being in excess of Reinhart and the uniformed newcomer. A nimble people; at the outset there had been thirty or forty souls in the room, and though Reinhart had seen nobody actually taking leave, now there were none. For a host of reasons he did not himself follow suit: pride, torpor, intoxication, his disguise, and, most important, he knew the patrolman as yet another schoolfellow from before the war.

  So he stood, or swayed, his ground, and when the officer had reached the counter, said: “Hi, Hasek.”

  “Hi, Reinhart,” answered Hasek, an incurious man. Far be it from him to ask after Reinhart’s unprecedented getup and environs.

  “God, Hasek, it must be all of three-four years.”

  “All of it,” said Hasek, his cheekbones a foot apart and his hairline beginning at his eyebrow
s.

  “Still on the force?”

  “Yes, sure.” Hasek blinked little round eyes.

  Reinhart made an overamiable mouth and, indicating his headdress, said: “I’m a little drunk, Hasek, but I guess that’s not against the law. Hahaha.”

  Very solemn in his blue hat, Hasek agreed: “That is correct.”

  “Uh, just what was it you wanted, Hasek? I’ve been giving a speech.”

  “Oh.” Hasek scratched his ass with the nightstick. His belt was like a big charm bracelet, with pistol, bullets, handcuffs, flashlight, notepad, holster for twin pencils, two kinds of whistle, leather billy, first-aid packet, and a book of green summonses whose white strings were intertwined into a sort of rag-doll head. “I reckonized you right off in your Mason outfit.”

  “Hell,” said Reinhart, “they make you carry a hardware store.”

  Something was laboring under Hasek’s low forehead, and at last produced issue. He suffered a slow spasm of mirth and said: “It’s a living.”

  “It’s a living!” Reinhart repeated, as if it were a riot. “That’s pretty funny, Hasek.” Laughing, he deftly covered his lip with one hand, went underneath it with the other, and plucked off most of his mustache. He removed the turban, cradling it in his elbow like a football, which left only the purple glasses between him and austere naturalism.

  “Now what was it you wanted, Hasek?”

  “Why.” Seen directly, the patrolman was not nearly so rubicund as he had appeared through the sun lenses; not for a moment, that is; then the blood rose in his cheeks and he averted his juju-bean eyes. “Why, we booked this Niggero. Why, and you know who he is? Old Splendor Mainwaring is who. That good old sonbitch who run every touchdown I ever blocked for. I loved that Niggero like a brother, and I onetime busted the mouth of the left guard from Cheeseman High for hollering ‘coon’ in the scrimmage. So now the dumb shine turns out to be a user. And it is very embarrassing to me on the force when the chief brings him in and cuffs him to the radiator with me on the desk having to book him. All the while he rides me like he used to on the field: ‘Keep your butt down. Hit ‘em low. Sixty-three, forty-two, hike!’”

  “Hasek, Hasek! Explain yourself!” shouted Reinhart. “Splendor Mainwaring was right here in this room not two hours ago. How could he have committed a serious crime within such a short period? Besides, he was sick.”

  “You don’t need no time nor anything but your own person to take dope,” Hasek explained. “It’s a peculiar crime in that respect. The only thing that’s more peculiar is suicide, which is a crime, but the punishment for it is unenforceable, if you get my drift.”

  “That I understand, Hasek,” said Reinhart, who felt he was dreaming all this. “But I tell you there must be some mistake. Splendor taking dope! It’s ridiculous. He is a nonchemical physician, among other things.”

  Hasek removed his cap and rubbed his elbow against the isinglass liner, to match which there was a round bald spot in the center of his crown. “I ain’t supposed to remark on charges against accused, whose rights include counsel of his own choice, in lieu of which court will appoint same. Due process, habeas corpus on posting of specified bail, prisoner remanded in custody of, etc., etc., a jury of his pears, hear ye, hear ye. Very interesting stuff, Reinhart. How long you been a counselor at law? I remember you was always very bright in reading English, was you not? Miss Beeler used to give us them poems by Woolworth and others. Well, if you want we can go down to the jail to see your client.”

  “He sent you here for me?”

  “Precisely.”

  “One minute, Hasek,” Reinhart demanded belligerently. “Your name’s not Hasek! It’s Capek, Michael Capek.”

  “Correct.”

  “Then why did you let me go on saying Hasek?”

  “Rules of the force,” said Capek. “No harassment of nor rudeness to the taxpayer unless apprehended in an act where a violation of law is evident. If you want to file a complaint against me, my number is Three.”

  Reinhart found his coat back of the partition; turned out the lights (no use being profligate with the cleaner’s current); hung onto the turban and glasses, which should have to go back to their owners; considered closing the windows and doors but decided the hell with it, why did he have to take responsibility for everything in the world?; and started with Patrolman Capek for the stationhouse.

  First time Reinhart had even seen a jail except in the movies, although in earlier years he had been once or twice in the front part of the station, accused of juvenile misdemeanors—throwing corn kernels against householders’ windows at Halloween, hooting in the park, etc.—charges dismissed, with a warning. Though this should have been obsolete experience, he felt like a current lawbreaker when Capek took a bunch of giant keys from a wall hook and led him clanking down the corridor to the cells. The pokey was too small to afford a warder, the suburb being too narrow for much crime. There were two cells and, at the dead end of the passage, a mop standing head up in a bucket, like a skinny old woman soaking her feet. Capek unlocked the first door and a drunk swayed out, shouting obscenely. They got him back in, Capek and Reinhart; and he sat down in the middle of the concrete floor and derided them.

  In Cell Two, which Capek tried next, on a bunk which really hung from the wall on chains, lay Splendor Mainwaring, who stared dully at the ceiling of light bulb and gooseflesh plaster. Capek banged with the key, saying above his own racket: “Accused, here’s counsel.” He opened the door for Reinhart and locked it behind him. “Kindly notify when ready.” Then he wedged his face between the bars and whispered: “He’s on the downgrade.”

  Reinhart put the turban on the floor. There was nowhere to sit, the toilet having no lid.

  “You’ve broken Capek’s heart,” he said to his late friend, who seemed always to be horizontal at their interviews. “Imagine having to arrest an old teammate. Why don’t you ever think about the next fellow?”

  Splendor moaned academically, his eyes showing no real feeling. He wore an aggressively white T-shirt.

  Reinhart squatted on his heels. “I gave the address tonight, if you want to know, and it was a total flop. And when I left, I didn’t close the windows and it looks like rain.”

  “Oh,” murmured Splendor, an absolute blank.

  “Capek told me the magistrate set your bail at five hundred dollars. I guess you expect me to raise it? What’s the idea of saying I’m your lawyer?” Reinhart was too tired to dramatize his resentment physically; he fell off his haunches onto his hams and reviled the nonchemical interne. “You’re a coward, a fourflusher, a welcher, a fink, and a shitheel. A complete washout as a man. What have you ever done for me that I should take care of you, you bum? Haven’t you got any more sense than to take dope? What’s so bad about reality that you want something else?”

  Reinhart knew the answers to these questions—because there is a cause for every effect, which circumstance if you think about it (and perhaps Splendor had) will send you to the nearest heroin forthwith—but as usual he was challenging him to fight back. And as usual he learned something about himself: he was always either provoking or placating.

  Splendor’s hands raised at the wrists and waved feebly, like the antennae of a dying insect; his head lay quiet and stark on the case-less pillow of striped ticking.

  Reinhart pulled the tendons in his weak gut as he rose and went to the bunk. Splendor’s lips were quivering. Lowering an ear, Reinhart heard in a gray whisper: “I die, Horatio; the potent poison quite o’er-crows my spirit.”

  “What’s that?” roared Reinhart.

  Splendor’s nostrils contracted and at last he blinked, saying some-what more loudly, since the man who was not passion’s slave had raised the decibel count: “Absent thee from felicity awhile, and in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain to tell my story.”

  Reinhart had not figured on this. He was about to yell for Capek to come running with a selection of the familiar antidotes listed on iodine bottles, Drano cans, etc.:
mustard, chalk, milk-of-magnesia—when checking Splendor again lest he expire before they had gone to all that trouble, he saw his friend grin like the radiator of a Buick.

  “What are you doing out there, Waldo?” said the nonchemist, still focused on the ceiling. Surely not the statement of a dying man. Reinhart decided to pay no mind to his badinage, and rather to establish the chronology of Splendor’s disaster, albeit he would get no help from the principal.

  “Let’s see.” He strolled to the barred window and, because it was night, saw only a reflection of himself in jail, a somewhat romantic image. “You left the shop, by means of French leave, at about eight. Distraught, you repaired to your house. By eight forty, the chief of police, acting on an anonymous tip, was already there to find you with a hypodermic needle, a warm spoon, and an aspirin-bottlecapful of a liquid which proved to be a solution of heroin and water. You were arrested and taken before the magistrate, who set your bail at five hundred dollars. I want you to know that I don’t have it, incidentally.”

  Splendor laughed with his tongue, and said in an execrable accent: “Ah’s the coon of Kuhn and Loeb.”

  “That’s all very well,” answered Reinhart. “Make your corny jokes, but you’re in serious trouble. I’m sorry I ever came into the garage that day.” He moved from the vicinity of the toilet, which had just gulped like a frog, though the bowl was bright and its water so crystalline that Reinhart had seen another image of himself in it.

  Splendor chortled. “Always call a spade a spade.”

  That did it. Having picked up the turban, Reinhart called for Capek, who came eating a monstrous ham sandwich valanced with white fat, which he explained had been ordered for Accused in accordance with regulations covering sustenance of prisoners, but since Accused had turned it down, the chief gave him, Three, authorization to otherwise dispose of said provisions, which he was doing with little pleasure. He unlocked the cell with a greasy key.