This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  Reinhart’s habit that most annoyed Gen (judging from her reaction) was rubbing his head while he talked. How long he had been wont to do this he could not have said: no one else had ever pointed it out; it was his sniffing that Maw had always objected to, but that tic disappeared when he had outgrown adolescence. Nowadays it seemed he could hardly utter a word without putting a hand to his scalp—at least, so stated Genevieve.

  Again it was his head in another of Genevieve’s criticisms: he didn’t take it to the barber nearly often enough. She was particularly averse to sideburns verging on the feathery, maintaining that feature linked a man to the Kentuckians who emigrated north to work in the factories of Ohio, a race which the aborigines in Reinhart’s town put only just above the Negroes. Having for years worn a crewcut and only recently let his thatch grow towards a length that an executive might show without embarrassment, Reinhart could only, as of this time, offer a feeble rebuttal to his wife’s argument. Thus, another point of abrasion between them.

  But, like the others, ridiculously inconsequential when you thought of all the problems that could arise from the impulse of the sexes to couple. Illegitimate births and VD of course were always on the increase. But to make it legal solved nothing. The divorce rate climbed. Naive brides were forever made frigid by the terrors of the wedding night. Husbands were castrated by the loss of their independence. More than half the national wealth was controlled by widows, who endowed dog kennels, Hindu seers, and health-food maniacs.

  Marriage was a creation of civilization, not nature: no two tigers cohabited for twenty years; and a rabbit will of course sock it into anything that crosses his path and then hop on, contrary to the fairy tales that bring him home each evening to a Mrs. Bunny waiting with easy chair and slippers. On the other hand, certain human fanatics disapproved even of legal coitus: St. Paul, Count Tolstoy, and Mahatma Gandhi. But there were those like Plato who maintained anybody could do it with anybody else as long as the state said when. The Gods assured Aeneas that founding Rome was more important than loving Dido, so off he sailed leaving her to suicide. St. Augustine screwed like a mink and then, going for priest, knocked off the sex absolutely. They made Abelard a bullock for hopping Heloïse, and Tristan and Isolde ended up scarcely better.

  You would get no comfort from literature or history: except for the exemplary Brownings, the great lovers always went mad, betrayed each other foully, or lost their taste. Thinking about this, Reinhart grew very impatient with tradition and decided that history was indeed the bunk: either that or you never heard of all the couples who hit it off, on the ground that harmony had no general interest. It was true that the one instance of absolute fidelity that mythology had to offer—Baucis and Philemon, who after a long life together died and were transformed into adjacent trees—was much more dispiriting than an account of how Venus and Mars put the horns on Vulcan. But the gods could handle themselves, whereas the miseries of love were sometimes disastrous to men.

  And Reinhart was utterly bored by any kind of wretchedness, suffering, despair, agony, negativism, and failure. There was no reason why you couldn’t be successfully married; no reason why the commonplace could not be enormously interesting, it was where most everyone spent their lives. Normality had been sneered at too long, said Reinhart—meaning: by Reinhart, who was intolerant towards the reckless opinions of his youth. So long as he was going to be a father, it made no sense to hold out any longer from joining the American Legion, the Masonic Lodge, and the Kiwanis. Let’s face it, you couldn’t support a family and also run away to New York and live in a penthouse.

  … Genevieve lay with her bottom pointed his way, pregnancy towards the wall. He used the outside half of the bed, so as to protect her against the world. Goddammit, you can have your chorus girls and riches and power, there isn’t anything that sets up a man like his own dear woman with a spark of new life glowing inside her. She stirs her shoulder and mumbles some dream gibberish: “Bur-bla-bloo-mmm-ba.” Asleep already, the healthy little savage, and radiating warmth. One of the cleverest acts of his life was marrying Genevieve Raven, and he derived a perverse satisfaction from remembering it had come about through accident or at any rate the sort of off-the-cuff volitions that depend so much on chance—Reinhart the schemer, ha! Making plans was merely a way to kill time while fate decided on the next move. Owing to his understanding of this state of affairs, he was curiously free of despair—and consequently nowadays suffered insomnia for the first time in his life. The despondent flee to the Land of Nod, but the happy man cannot bear to set aside his attention.

  Chapter 20

  Reinhart of course used the big blond desk that had been relinquished by Claude Humbold when that entrepreneur turned over his real-estate bureau to Cosmopolitan Sewers, Ltd., but there was now another, only slightly smaller, against the left wall of the inner office; and behind it sat an individual named, unless the sign was in error, Splendor G. Mainwaring, Vice-Pres. A conservative man, as one could see from his dress, which was navy-blue pinstripe of suit, white of shirt, and foulard of necktie.

  “Carlo,” he was saying to his superior across the way, “I hate to say it, but your cynicism is appalling.”

  Whatever the changes in the man, he still could outrage his friend and colleague. Although Reinhart had slept very little the night before and until this moment had been drowsily apathetic, he was now jerked awake. Splendor had criticized him more than any other non-relative he had ever known and while Reinhart used to tell himself that that sort of thing should be easier to take from a black man than from a white, owing to the history of the Negroes in this country, in actuality it was precisely the reverse, and probably for the same reason.

  “I don’t recall that I asked for that analysis,” Reinhart answered without lifting his head from the documents before him: specifications, as it happened, for that portion of the sewer called the East Link.

  “The only reason I am taking the liberty of making it,” said Splendor, who as a matter of fact had since taking this position been remarkably correct with the president of the firm, “has more to do with personal relations than with the welfare of the commonweal. Your father tells me there is no—”

  “Christ,” interrupted Reinhart, leaping up to close the door into the outer office, where foremen of the working crews were wont frequently to track in mud throughout the morning and leave with the secretaries certain papers detached from their dirty clipboards.

  Building anything at all meant you used more paper than cement, and every document concerning the sewer-in-progress (or, as Dad would have it, the non-sewer) came to Reinhart. Certainly no one could question that phase of the operation: everywhere you looked there stood filing cabinets, and papers littered the desks like leaves in the vale of Vallombrosa. Some glided to the floor and were there masticated by passing heels. Now and again a girl came in from the outer office to empty the Out box and to fill the In.

  The blueprints, to which Reinhart now referred, were to be measured yard by yard, too big for rolling; bound horizontally, along their upper margins, against a sheet of plywood, they made a great sheaf which hung from screw-eyes set into the ceiling near the windows. When not being examined, they had to be got out of the way so as not to obstruct the natural light: by means of a pulley arrangement, with ropes to the inferior corners of the plywood, the ensemble was drawn up against the ceiling. It weighed considerable, and as he now paid out rope, Reinhart was careful to give it leeway; however, it came down without miscarriage.

  “Look,” he demanded of Splendor, having lifted sheet after sheet until he found the appropriate plan, that for the West Bend, the conversion of which into reality was what Dad asserted had not taken place—though if that hadn’t been dug, it was also probable that there was no excavation anywhere else.

  “Look,” said Reinhart. “The blueprint is very clear on this matter. Here’s that manhole that Dad is so interested in, and … yes, here it is: the main. There definitely is a sewer main underneath it
on this plan.”

  “With all those blueprints over your head, I can’t hear a word you say,” said Splendor, which naturally Reinhart couldn’t hear, either. This kind of dialogue continued for a while, and was no more futile than their usual, for onward from that first encounter in the garage, these two men had alternated in miscommunicating with each other—or at least so Reinhart understood the situation as he emerged from the book of plans and let the leaves fall shut. He ran it back up against the ceiling, then through the intercom warned the girls they were not to be disturbed until further notice.

  “Now, Splendor, my fine-feathered friend,” he said, degrading him as a prelude to incrimination, “now don’t tell me you didn’t know this project is a swindle.”

  Splendor uttered a laugh, his indication of gravity rather than its reverse, for he was never gay.

  He answered: “There’s no need to get hysterical.” He adjusted his necktie with prissy fingers, in executive appearance outdoing Reinhart ten ways from the word go. “There do appear to be serious irregularities on the part of the subcontractors—”

  “Balls,” cried Reinhart, whose intent was to rub Splendor’s nose in it, for once to make this guy acknowledge that reality is here and not somewhere else. “Don’t be like the movie starlet who on her knees before the producer pretends she’s being knighted.” The vice-president winced and as a matter of fact Reinhart colored slightly, for Splendor had always set a sort of moral pace that was here being disordered.

  Just then the intercom buzzer sounded, and when Reinhart flipped its lever to the listening position he heard the secretary say: “Mail’s in, Mr. R.”

  “I said don’t disturb,” Reinhart told her and switched off. He appreciated that Genevieve had been a real gem for Claude; these girls were cretins. They were also still leery of Mr. Splendor Mainwaring and became apprehensive if Reinhart went out of the office leaving him behind. Everybody knows America’s crimes against the Negro, but who protests against what it has done to the office girl?

  “I just like to preserve whatever good I can find, rather than rejoice over the bad,” Splendor stated. “Otherwise, the world would seem hopeless.”

  Reinhart swept off his revolving chair some of the papers that had fallen there in his brief absence, and sat. It was horribly unfair that another man should line up with one’s father. “Well,” he asked in high dudgeon, “what the goddam hell do you and Dad want me to do?”

  “Let it suffice to say you know the right,” said Splendor.

  “Oh yeah?” Reinhart sneered, but he knew that there are no heights to which the human being cannot attain when impelled by the expectations of others.

  At that moment one of the secretaries, defying orders, entered with an armload of paper. It was as if she had to go to the toilet no matter what: the mail, etc., was piling up in the outer office; he had to deal with it. In the face of such desperation, Reinhart accepted the delivery without protest, but lurked behind her on the way out and locked the door.

  “Look at this crap,” he said to Splendor. “I believe most of it emanates from Claude. Bills, bills. Here’s one for a dozen outdoor oil-drum stoves of the type called salamanders. Three of them are in service at our worksites—I assume that’s what the diggers are doing when they’re supposed to be excavating; warming themselves—that leaves nine that to my knowledge have never been delivered. To boot, why should they be charged to Cosmo when they are used exclusively by the subcontractors? Now I also happen to know that the firm whose name appears at the head of this statement, Paramount Surplus Suppliers, is a dummy company consisting of Claude Hum-bold and a ream of letterheads. And he bought the oil drums, which used to hold creosote, from the Drako Shingle Company for two-bits apiece and charges us twelve fifty.”

  He shrugged despondently and opened the next envelope. “Here are the eminent-domain papers by which we are empowered to run a trunk sewer through the southeast corner of a marsh allegedly owned by one Walter Hasenbacher, for the ‘reasonable compensation’ of what figures out to be 1,000 dollars a square foot. Walter Hasenbacher of course is none other than Claude Humbold.”

  “What’s the point you’re making here?” asked Splendor, making his ruminative-camel mouth.

  “Just that while it is evident to everybody that the building of this sewer is crooked, the skullduggery is so complicated that nobody can understand it. At the same time, it can probably be proved that more people benefit this way than if the project were honest. For example, as you know there is a real Walter Hasenbacher—the brother-in-law of ‘Pup’ Agnew who hangs out at Joe Laidlaw’s garage: he married Pup’s sister Margie when she was three months gone, and works in the lumberyard. Naturally, Claude gives Walter something for the use of his name.… Then there are all the extra workmen on the payroll: they are all real people and family men besides. Not to mention the union. Why do you think the subcontractor isn’t bothered by the International Sewer Excavating Workers though his men aren’t organized? Because Claude—”

  “—pays them off,” Splendor broke in hastily, apparently in fear that the progression would soon reach the Negroes, for not only was there his vice-presidency, but the digging gang showed many dark faces.

  “Yeah,” Reinhart said flatly, because the payoffs were the lesser reason, the union being not so enlightened as Claude and the Gibbons; it could do without a membership of coloreds. In every human endeavor there is more than meets the eye. Sometimes less: Splendor was No. 2 executive of Cosmo and had been given nothing to do, a very grave error on the part of those responsible, thought Reinhart, and then realized he meant himself. When you came down to it, his own authority could be exerted only in reference to three people—Splendor and the secretaries—and several things all of them inside the office: furniture and the like. Outside, everything was controlled by the subcontractor, unless Reinhart had misunderstood the documents that covered this arrangement.

  “Mr. R. Mr. R.!” the other secretary now cried through the locked door. “Mr. Reo says you have to sign a requisition for galvanized siding.”

  “Awright,” said Reinhart, opening up. There stood Reo himself, the subcontractor, a swarthy, criminal-faced man with a little spurt of hair between his eyebrows. He wore hipboots and a plaid jacket, as well as a hunting cap with those integral earmuffs that when not in use tie across the crown.

  Reinhart was a great deal larger than Reo in body, but something less in assurance, though his intention was not to show it. For example, he asked here: “What part does galvanized siding play in the digging of a sewer?” He did make that emphasis, watching the subcontractor’s reaction. Result: nil.

  Reo merely answered, in his beastly manner: “Fuh duh hut.”

  “What does that mean?” demanded Reinhart. “What hut?”

  “Duh liddle houze.”

  “Since when does a little house have anything to do with a sewer?”

  Reo said something like “Wake Jack,” and Reinhart had him repeat it several times before being able to translate it as “work shack”: a place to safeguard fragile and/or valuable equipment at night without transporting it off the worksite, by day a refuge for malingerers. The latter Reinhart added gratuitously, playing boss to the hilt; just as, had he been a workman, he would have malingered.

  “Look,” he said to Reo, who was really too unshaven for one to see a reaction anyway, “why does Cosmo have to buy materials that you will use exclusively for your own purposes?”

  Reo had no more patience than others of his ilk of semiliterate specialists. He simply shoved the requisition at the president of Cosmo and said: “I done know. I done know, Mitter Reinhart. Just sign.”

  There was an old schoolboy retort that you made to the over-officious fellow: Who was your nigger last year? Of course with Splendor behind him Reinhart did not pronounce this, but it expressed his attitude: weak irony of the sort he wished to, and thought he had, got over. You can’t afford irony if you are seriously interested in acquiring power. Lucky that Sple
ndor was there. Once again his presence inspired Reinhart to rise above himself—as it always did. Reinhart suddenly understood the significance of the Negro in the human condition—but like all great pieces of knowledge this appeared at a moment when it could not immediately be exploited, and by the time it could, Reinhart decided he was guilty of bigotry towards the majority in characterizing as peculiar to a segment of mankind that which should distinguish the entire species from the other animals.

  First, though, Reinhart told Reo: “I’ll have no insubordination here. Be so good as to remember your place. I am the contractor, you are the subcontractor—not to mention that your honesty is seriously in question, while I am a man of integrity.”

  Reo’s mouth fell open at this heresy. “Kid, you know Claude Hum-bold? He ain’t gone like this.” Both secretaries looked up from their typing, frightened little geese, and back of him Reinhart heard Splendor say: “Don’t go too far.” But he would never have started it at all without the hope of being excessive, and brought forth the rest of the cards for his grand slam.

  “Furthermore,” he announced to Reo, “don’t think I am ignorant of those manholes without mains underneath them. By God, we’re going to have a real sewer or you’re going to the penitentiary.”

  At that, Reo fled as fast as his hipboots would carry him, the girls threw on their outer clothes and followed him out the door, and when Reinhart, with thrills of pride chasing up and down his spine, turned back into the inner office, he saw Splendor at the closet—

  “Mainwaring,” he commanded, “put your coat back on that hanger or I’ll have you shot. As I recall, you maintain your Army court-martial was unjust. Here’s a chance to clean the blot from your shield. Damn the torpedoes till you see the whites of their eyes! Full speed ahead and send us more Japs!”