This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  The girl next to Reinhart, whose name was Helen Tarmigan, raised her hand and asked when recognized: “What are some other differences among Homer and Virgil?”

  “Of course they are both profound but in a different way,” answered Mr. Pardy. “And then it goes without saying”—he sniffed in amusement—“one wrote in Greek, the other in Latin.” The class laughed very meagerly at this, and he hastened to add: “I don’t mean that altogether with levity. Mutatis mutandis, the Roman tongue is another species of—” he coughed. “Perhaps you recall from your high-school Caesar the rubric under which the legions marched: S.P.Q.R. Small profit, quick returns.” He consulted the pocket watch he had placed upon the lectern at the outset. The room by now was beastly warm and no one laughed.

  Pardy found a piece of chalk in his seersucker jacket and wrote upon the blackboard:

  SUNT LACRIMAE RERUM

  VARIUM ET MUTABILE SEMPER FEMINA

  And explained: “These are two quotations you might wish to remember from Virgil before we pass on. The first is useful at exam time; the second when you get married. The first means ‘The tears of things,’ or loosely, ‘There are tears in things.’ The second, ‘Oh, various and changeable is always the woman.’” Miss Tarmigan snickered. “But then,” Mr. Pardy said deprecatingly, “I guess you all read Virgil in Latin in high school, and it is a very hot day.” He tended to sour when his jokes weren’t widely picked up. He now added: “Troia fuit, which is the ancient Roman equivalent of Alles kaputt. Don’t you know Alice Kaputt? She sits in the back row.”

  He saturninely swung back to the lectern, and crumpled against it. “Well now, if there is no further objection, we move on to Dante, but ah”—he seized his watch and squinted histrionically close to its face—“we have only forty-five minutes left, and that’s hardly time to introduce a giant figure such as Dante. May I suggest that we adjourn, then, to meet again tomorrow same time and place. Be sure to read the condensed version of the Divine Comedy in your text. What the editor has done is cut out the lard, as it were. You’ll find you have read far worse things that were written only yesterday. There are slow moments, true, but there will be other rewarding passages. In the story of Paolo and Francesca you will even find a bit of sex! So bear with it. Good morning.”

  He clapped his notes together and dashed for the exit, but came nowhere near making it as a number of zealous students swarmed into the aisle and set upon him like mad dogs. The rest of the class melted softly away. Reinhart waited out the zealots, which meant following Pardy and party down several corridors to the teacher’s office door and listening to much irrelevant dialogue as the sycophants sought to impress Pardy without doing any actual work and he to get rid of them without their realizing rejection: it should have been a fine exchange but was in fact gross. Miss Tarmigan, last in line before Reinhart, wanted to know how Virgil’s opinion of women contrasted with that of the man who wrote a book called Generation of Vipers attacking the American female.

  “Interesting,” mumbled Pardy, smiling wanly at her bosom, and sidled into his office. Miss Tarmigan clopped away on her high heels, waggling her head in a smug manner at whatever had been proved.

  “Excuse me, Dr. Pardy,” said Reinhart as the office door came towards his nose. No response, so he pushed in after. He had checked on Pardy in the catalogue and found him to be sans Ph. D., but used the superior title anyway since he was asking a favor. “Sir, I know how busy you must be, and I wouldn’t ask did I not feel it’s really an outstanding piece of work.” He fished out Splendor’s MS from between his books.

  “What’s that?” said Pardy, still with his back towards Reinhart. “Part of your novel?” He hurled his notes into an open drawer and lighted a cigarette in the desperate, amateurish fashion of professors just out of class.

  “Oh no, sir,” Reinhart began. “I’m not—” But he suddenly understood the imposition of asking him to evaluate an outsider’s work and let the erroneous identification stand. “That is, it’s not a novel but a kind of story.”

  “What kind of story?” Pardy asked pettishly. “You fellows with your ‘kind of’s.’ Why not just call it a story?”

  Not wishing to jeopardize Splendor’s chances, Reinhart ignored this piece of rudeness and said humbly: “I wondered if you would have time to read it—”

  In lanky movement towards the window, under which stood, like an indoor plant that had died, a leather bag of golf clubs, Pardy corrected: “‘I should like to have you read it …’”

  “Well, will you?” blurted Reinhart, anyway laying the manuscript on the desk.

  “There’s no career in fiction,” said Pardy with acidulous glee, then snapped the elastic on the suede glove that covered the head of his brassie. “Not for somebody out here. You have to be in New York, you see, and go to their parties. We’re all hicks, you see.” He snarled at Reinhart, though the venom was directed at somebody not present.

  “Pardon?” asked Reinhart.

  “Well, go on, then,” said Pardy, opening his long lower jaw like a steamshovel. “Find out for yourself what happens when you send a book to a New York publisher.”

  It didn’t take Reinhart long to see the light. “You’re a writer yourself, aren’t you, sir?”

  Pardy made some ironical disclaimer, but he jerked his mouth in pleasure and seized the manuscript in rough good will, dog-earing the early pages. Seeing Splendor’s last name and first initial in the upper left-hand corner, he said: “O.K., Mainwaring, I’ll look at your stuff, but you mustn’t expect to be a Louis Bromfield or a J. P. Marquand first time out.”

  “I certainly don’t,” said Reinhart, and escaped.

  Two days later they had finished Dante & His Times, and since Reinhart in that period had managed to read the entire Divine Comedy, in addition to the assignments in his other courses, plus the performance of his various duties as householder, husband, and realtor, he assumed that Pardy, a professional reader as it were, had had ample time to assess Splendor’s talent.

  So he had. “Sorry, Mainwaring,” he told Reinhart in his office after class, “I’m afraid you don’t quite make it. I’m afraid you just don’t get off the ground. One, it is not credible when a young fellow writes in the character of an elderly man. Two, where did you get this crazy job of law-copyist? Don’t tell me lawyers have not discovered the typewriter. Hahah.” He laughed sadly and gestured towards Splendor’s surrogate. “One plus two, and the story falls on that.”

  “But you see, Dr. Pardy, it is historical, which explains your Number Two, and as to your One, what if you read it without knowing the author’s age?” Reinhart smiled plaintively. “Dante was never in Paradise, after all.”

  “Hell.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “You mean, ‘Dante was never in Hell.’”

  “Or there, either.”

  Pardy frowned in derision, his nostrils flared. “Not ‘either.’ Just there, in Hell. That’s what the Divine Comedy is about. I thought I made that clear this morning. But, my God, if the students can’t even get that straight.”

  “Yes,” said Reinhart. “I know that the excerpts in our text are from only the Inferno. But on my own I read the other two books, where he goes to Purgatory and to Paradise, though I preferred the Hell.”

  Pardy stared at him keenly. “Where did you get those books, may I ask?”

  “The University library.”

  “Purgatory and Paradise, eh? I suppose it never occurred to you that they might be spurious?” Pardy took Splendor’s manuscript from the desktop and thrust it angrily at Reinhart. “Look here, Mainwaring. If you want to be a writer, you had better write some instead of reading so abundantly and without authentication. You might also try to cultivate feeling rather than pseudo-intellectualism. Get real people in real situations. What do you know about Wall Street? Write about college. That’s all you know at present. Don’t make a fool of yourself by pretending to a wider experience than you can know and feel.”

  Curiousl
y enough, Reinhart himself had begun to believe it was his own story, and on the spot developed the writer’s syndrome: he pressed the button which abolished everybody but admirers of his work, though in this case “everybody” was only poor Pardy, who, himself an unsuccessful writer, had abolished “Mainwaring” before he read him.

  In several months with Claude, Reinhart had learned something about business, yet was still a novice before its fundamental mysteries. From one incident, however, and (as usual) under a counterfeit identity, he had learned the only essential secret of literature as a career: spite.

  He certainly couldn’t pass Pardy’s reaction on to Splendor. As usual, he was sorry he had ever got into the situation. He was also sick of being sorry; obviously there was some element in his unconscious that urged him to simulate generosity—if he read his Psych assignments rightly, he was probably, behind the mask, a sadist. Be that as it may, he had now discharged his obligation. But where to, now? If being an author’s agent was an unpleasant job, how much more rotten to be an author! What at the outset seemed Splendor’s new health had taken very little time to prove his new sickness. Of course Pardy was a buffoon who must have got his job during the war years when 1-A instructors were in uniform—yet his criticism had made a mark on Reinhart. Was Splendor’s story any good? What did an Ohio Negro know about Wall Street?

  He went to the periodical room of the University library and pawed through the magazines on the tables there, lousing up their shinglelike arrangement. He had never before appreciated the abundance of scribbling that came monthly from the world’s pens, not to mention the daily newspapers that were in another room and the yearly books in subterranean stacks, and this library was small potatoes as such institutions went. Did all these words serve any purpose? Was all this shit worth shoveling? Reinhart savagely, rhetorically asked, for it was getting on towards noon and he was hungry and had not yet found the right magazine. He now doubted whether the story was good, but no one could question its honesty—which immediately disqualified it from any of the periodicals he had yet examined.

  Having worked his way through the weeklies and monthlies, he waded into the quarterlies: squat, drab things, their covers lined with unbelievable names opposite nonsensical titles: “John Brabson Slink: ‘Alloy in the Golden Bowl’ … Murray Marcus: ‘Ain’t Gonna Give Ya None of My Jelly-Roll: A Roundup of Recent Verse’ … Croon Jameson and James C. Wallaby: An Exchange of Correspondence” … and so on, but the paper was book quality and they ran no ads.

  Reinhart selected The Midland Review (edited by John Brabson Slink, except that he was now on a sabbatical and Philip Downing Urn and Irving Washington were alternating as guest editors until he came back), gave Splendor’s story a quick, serviceable title (“Arthur”), wrote in the upper left-hand corner “S. Mainwaring, % Reinhart” and below it the Vetsville address, and mailed it off in a stamped envelope purchased from the campus P.O.

  For two weeks he pounced on the mails so avidly that Gen was at last stirred to ask why, and before he knew what he was doing Reinhart had told her about “Arthur” as if it were his own.

  “Oh!” cried Genevieve. She even rose from the couch to come embrace him. “Carl, I never knew you would be a writer, too.” She hugged him and, bending back, studied the underside of his chin. It was surely nice to be so admired by your little woman and feel her swelling breasts against your upper abdomen.

  “Well,” said Reinhart in deprecation, “I clown around with it.” When The Midland Review sent its acceptance, he would direct them to replace the pen name “Mainwaring” with his real one—he actually went so far in his mind at that point.

  Two days later, before his inner judge he pleaded that here too he had been clowning. But that was after the manuscript came back with the following note:

  DEAR MR. MAINWARING:

  This has been a masterpiece ever since the 1850’s, when Herman Melville published it under the title of “Bartleby the Scrivener.” Your changing the name of the central character is not, in our opinion, a sufficient revision to warrant its republication at this time.

  You owe us 18¢ in return postage.

  The note was unsigned, and whether it had been written by Philip Downing Urn or Irving Washington, Reinhart would never know.

  Chapter 13

  Luckily the manuscript had come back on Saturday morning when he was home to seize and hide it and describe the mail for Gen’s benefit as a handful of throwaways.

  “Gee,” she said in commiseration, throwing down her book and rising as she had begun to do at any mention of his art. This reverence was what hurt. “You’re waiting to hear about your story, aren’t you?”

  “Of course they may not take it,” Reinhart muttered, slinking towards the corner where they kept the carpet sweeper. Time for Saturday housecleaning, ten o’clock, Gen not long up. He had been alive since eight, reading his assignments in the back doorway, where it was cool.

  “So much the worse for you,” said Gen, meaning “them,” but being unwittingly right. “That’s unthinkable.”

  To elude his shame he became cross with her for the first time since they took their vows. “How can you say that? You haven’t even read it.”

  “Ah,” she said, blinking, “I know it is good if you did it.” She winked again; there was a lash in her eye. “Besides, you told me the plot.”

  “Yes,” he admitted, and made the carpet sweeper whirr, “but you know the way it’s done may be awful. I can’t say…. We need a vacuum cleaner; this damn thing won’t pick up the lint. Maybe the paper will list a used one.”

  “The check for your story will cover that amply,” said Genevieve pretentiously. “But I hope we can find a more exciting way to spend it.”

  He began to suspect her of malice based on an intuition of the true state of affairs. After all, she had lots of time, did nothing but lie around the house the livelong day…. The busy little sweeper wheels suddenly became intractable. He found a bobby pin enmeshed among them—evidence that his wife was everywhere to brake him. Yet when, as long as he was at it, he took the sweeper outside and emptied its dust chamber into the trashcan, among the dirt that matted into long, feltlike strips he discerned other clues to her existence—more hairpins, half-a-Kleenex red with lipstick, the stamen of a paper flower—and instantly throbbed with affection.

  He returned to the hut almost chortling, for it was marvelous to admit a wrong to someone you loved. But no wife did he see throughout the length and breadth of his home: she had run away from his bad manners. Ah, there she came from around the front partition. “Darling,” she said, “I don’t want to bother you, but—well, would you mind looking at—” She held something with both hands behind her and grinned foolishly, putting her right toe forward.

  “Speak freely, dear,” encouraged Reinhart with a great smile of loving approbation.

  “Well …”

  “Come on.”

  “It really concerns Daddy.”

  Reinhart caught his chin as it fell. He had thought they observed a gentleman’s agreement to forget about that man. “Have you been in touch with him?” he asked, trying to be nonchalant, but his teeth must have grated.

  For Gen answered sharply: “Of course, he’s my father.”

  “What’s that got to do with it? He’s a swine,” Reinhart naturally did not say. The sound that came out was a noncommittal mumble. Then he asked: “When?”

  Genevieve smiled hypocrisy. “Oh sometimes he comes over during the day.”

  “When I’m at work.”

  “Or school,” she amplified. “He’s sorry he hasn’t been able to stay till you get home, but he usually has to run.”

  “Too bad,” murmured Reinhart. “Now what was it you had to show me?” He turned and started back for the sweeper.

  “If you aren’t interested …”

  “Didn’t I just say I was?” The bad thing about this exchange, which was probably routine in other marriages, was that for the first time since establishi
ng a domicile, they had different aims. Or perhaps it was just that they were revealing them. However, it was only fair that he find out the precise nature of hers.

  His grin was probably too obviously disarming—it seemed to annoy her. He said: “Give it here.”

  She stayed where she stood, and he had eventually to walk to that point. Once there, though, he was instantly reimbursed. Gen kissed him.

  “Wouldn’t it be kind,” she said, “if you would read this and give it your professional criticism.” Her mouth was barely off his and the words tickled. He felt a sheaf of paper insinuate itself between his hand and her waist.

  He drew back and looked, and my God it was another manuscript: a very thin one, but bearing a thick title in compensation: The Confessions of a Gentleman, by Blaine Raven.

  “Where’s the rest?” he asked lamely.

  “That’s all I could get him to write so far,” said Gen. “But maybe the two of us together, you and I—”

  “Are you kidding? He detests me.”

  “Don’t jump for conclusions.” Gen wrinkled her nose and sniffed. “My ambition is still to bring you two together.” Wasn’t it strange that all the while she had stuck stubbornly to her premarital ideas! And never said a word. For the first time he understood that she was deep and, it went without saying, devious.

  “Everybody has a story in them,” she announced, suddenly defiant, and he daydreamed a ghastly vision of literally that: a great host of human beings vomiting manuscripts. His modest lie had exposed him to a horror hitherto unsuspected.