Loveman told me that if I came back the next day, he’d show me some of Howard’s poems, in a rare letterpress edition. “Just to look at, not to buy, you understand.” I grinned and told him I couldn’t buy them, anyway. I didn’t have five cents for the subway back to Brooklyn. “Is that so?” Loveman asked. “Why don’t you come talk to Mr. Pine?” So I did: an old disconsolate Einstein of a man, unevenly poured into a purple cardigan sweater. He hired me to shift stock in the back of the store for seven-fifty a week. After paying rent to Pohl, it would leave me two-fifty for food and car fare; but I figured Pohl’s mother wouldn’t let me starve, which turned out to be more or less true. I started immediately. The back room was actually a basement, and the stock was countless boxes of moldy books that Dauber or Pine had bought from the estates of individuals who had died, judging by the look of the books, in the late nineteenth century. My first task was to make pathways so the boxes in the back could be reached. Have I mentioned that the basement was cold and wet? It was cold and wet. And in its corners, the spoor of what I hoped were unusually large mice.
I wouldn’t have lasted even a week there, except that Loveman and I became friends. When I looked especially hungry, he took me to Fleischmann’s Vienna Model Bakery on Broadway, where my nose tingled with familiar yet unplaceable smells. Over pastrami and coffee and Linzer torte, he told me stories about Howard and the many other famous people he had known. Loveman had been friends with the poet Hart Crane—had I heard of him? And with Ambrose Bierce, too. In fact, he said, Bierce had written to him from Mexico in December 1913, asking Loveman to please send a copy of Giambattista Vico’s Scienza Nuova to him care of the Hotel Imperial. Bierce went missing in the desert just a few weeks later, and Loveman had often wondered whether the book was a clue to where that great man had gone: whether, having spent his life tearing down hypocrites and imbeciles, Bierce had decided to create himself anew. “I still dream of going to look for him,” Loveman said. “Wouldn’t he be very old?” I asked. “Ninety-seven,” Loveman said. “But he had a remarkable vitality.” He shared with me a theory that he had been toying with for the last several years, that some people, not all, but some, are equipped with an extra soul, the way some people have an extra digit, or webbing between their toes. “An accident of metempsychosis,” Loveman said. “They may not even know it. But gradually, as one soul ages, the second awakens from its dormancy and becomes ascendant.” “What’s metempsychosis?” I asked. “It means, reincarnation,” Loveman said. “The transmigration of souls from one body to another.” “Oh,” I said, “like in that story where they sew that one guy’s head onto the other guy’s body.” “Yes,” Loveman said, smiling. “Sort of.”
I was curious about Loveman’s famous friends, but far more curious about Pohl’s girlfriend, Doris. The Futurian Society had weekly meetings in the Flatbush Young Communist League’s hall, upstairs from a deli on Kings Highway. The meetings were part lecture and part shouting match; they were very entertaining, and Doris came to nearly all of them. She stuck close to Pohl, but sometimes I managed to talk to her, and I had the impression that she liked me. Once, when I got into an argument with Wollheim about his proposal to start an American Futurist Party—it should be the North American Futurist Party, I insisted—Doris was the only one who took my side. Another time, I read aloud a story called “World Peace,” which was just the reflections of a brain in a jar. The Futurians hated it, but when the meeting ended, Doris asked me where I had got the idea from. I said it had come to me in a dream, which was true. “It’s so sad,” Doris said. “Maybe,” I said, “but did you like it?” Doris just looked at me. “What are you doing here, Leo?” she asked. “I’m fighting for the future,” I said. “Of people?” Doris asked. “Or of brains in jars?” She walked away before I could answer.
From Pohl, subtly, I learned that Doris was an art student at The Cooper Union, and that she lived with her parents—her mother was some kind of minor aristocrat—but she was nagging Pohl to move out of his mother’s apartment and go to college. She refused to see what was so clear to Pohl, namely, that college was at best a waste of time, and at worst an indoctrination into the ovine values which he and the rest of the Futurians were working so hard to eschew. Worse, she wanted Pohl to go with her to Mississippi, to educate Negro farm-workers: a harebrained project if there ever was one, Pohl said. Not that he had anything against Negroes or farmworkers, but why couldn’t Doris see that the future had to be won here, in New York City? They’d been fighting about it, but, Pohl said, “It’s like fighting Lilliput. Stomp your foot and all the little Dorises run away. But go to sleep for a minute, and they tie you to the ground.” I wanted to tell Doris that I’d go to Mississippi with her, but I didn’t dare. I made do with looking at her sidelong, while Wollheim raged against the fascists, and Asimov delivered an interminable speech about Cro-Magnon Man, and Pohl talked about the lessons of Spain. Sometimes I caught Doris’s eye. Sometimes, for an ecstatic second or two, she did not look away.
In the last week of August, Wollheim organized an expedition to the beach. The Hitler-Stalin pact had just been announced, and the Futurians were aghast: the future was taking shape, it could not be denied, without us. The expedition was Wollheim’s way to make us feel better, those of us who were still around, anyway. Michel, who suffered from osteomyelitis, had gone into the hospital to have an operation on his bones; Lowndes had long since gone back to Connecticut; and no one wanted to invite Asimov. So the expedition party was Wollheim, Pohl, me, Doris, and her friend Rosalind Cohen, a heavy girl with brown hair whose father ran a catering business. Rosalind owned a Plymouth convertible with a top that was permanently down: “It’s nice in the summer,” she said in response to my compliment. She drove us to Coney Island and talked the whole way about the strange letters she had received from Doc Lowndes. He had begun by proposing marriage, she said; then, when she turned him down, he sent her a series of poems, some of which he’d written, and some of which he’d copied from a book of French poetry; and these, when translated, turned out not to be love poems at all. One was about the Pope and some airplanes, and another seemed to be about trains and a Ferris wheel. “But the ones he wrote are disgusting!” Rosalind said. “I think your friend is very sick.” “Why do you say that?” Wollheim asked, innocently. “He admitted to being a necromancer,” Rosalind said. It soon became clear that she was confusing necromancer with necrophiliac. Fortunately, by this point we were at the beach. Art Deco stands sold caramel popcorn and stuffed animals, and the bright crinkled water of the harbor stretched out on the other side of them, dotted with pink bathers. A weathered sign warned of dangerous currents, but no one paid it any attention. Doris spread a blanket on the sand, and Rosalind set down a hamper of food. We removed our outer clothes. Doris was wearing a white bathing dress which accentuated the rise of her breasts and hugged the curve of her stomach. Pohl took off his shirt and sat on the sand with his arms around his knees.
I said something about flying cars, and Wollheim explained why flying cars were a stupid idea. “The big problem,” he said in his high, nasal voice, “would be traffic. Can you imagine? If cars could go up and down, you’d have to have signs everywhere. No climbing. No descending. And cops. The sky would be full of cops.” “Well,” I said, blushing, “maybe you wouldn’t have them in big cities. But in the country, a flying car would come in handy!” “We have those already,” Wollheim said. “They’re called airplanes.” “But what’s the point of the future,” I asked, plaintively, “if they don’t have flying cars?” Pohl and Doris rose from their blanket and went to splash around in the surf. I watched Doris’s legs, her wide white thighs. Suddenly Pohl pushed her into a wave, and she disappeared under the lip of the water. The wave broke but Doris didn’t reappear. I stood up, my heart racing. I could see one of Doris’s feet. Then Doris shot out of the water and knocked Pohl onto the sand. “Ah, young love,” Wollheim said, unpleasantly. Rosalind opened the hamper. “We have pastrami, we
have meatballs, we have egg salad,” she said. “Who’s hungry?” This was more food than I had seen in weeks, but I said, “Maybe in a minute.” Pohl and Doris were coming back from the water. Pohl grabbed the blanket and dried himself with it. Doris continued past him into the dunes. All of us watched her go—it was impossible not to. “Fred,” Wollheim said, “what do you think about flying cars?” “I think they can go fuck themselves,” Pohl said, distractedly. “I’m going to get a beer.” Rosalind got up to visit the ladies’ room, and I was alone with Wollheim. I knew that he, too, had met Lovecraft, and I wanted to ask him about their friendship, but Wollheim did not look like he wanted to be questioned. “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “We should think more about what all these new gizmos would mean.” “Thank you, Spinks,” Wollheim said. “If you really believe that, you’re just about the only man in America who does.” “In North America,” I said reflexively. Wollheim glared at me. “Think I’ll go for a walk,” I said. I left him sitting alone on a pink towel, staring out at the water with a fixed unhappy expression. If you were going to make a painting of the last man on Earth, I thought, it would look like Donald A. Wollheim at Riis Park. I followed the path until he was out of sight; then I cut across into the dunes.
Doris was walking in a shallow valley parallel to the path that led to the changing house and the restaurant. She had taken off her bathing cap, and her auburn hair stuck out from the sides of her head. She wasn’t especially happy to see me. “Are you all right?” I asked. “Yes,” she said, “are you?” “Well, of course I am,” I said. “I was just worried that you were upset.” “Don’t worry about it,” Doris said. I walked along beside her without talking for a moment. “I wish there was something I could do to make you happy,” I said. Doris laughed. “Leo,” she said, “you don’t even know me. Why does it matter to you if I’m happy or not?” She picked up a stick and hit the dune grass as we walked farther from the shore. “I’m tired of New York,” she said. “I want to go to Paris. I want to meet Picasso and Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. I want to meet Gertrude Stein’s little white dog. I want to drink red wine all day and sleep in a garret. I want to starve, and hunt pigeons for food.” There was something Pohl-like about the way she spoke, and I could see why Pohl wouldn’t like it. The last thing Pohl wanted was another Pohl. “I want to go with you,” I said. Doris stopped hitting the grass and looked at me, finally. “I suspect you do,” she said. “But unlike Fred, I don’t need fans.” “I don’t want to be your fan,” I said. I was terrified. If Nazi frogmen had come out of the surf with submachine guns, I would have been relieved, but they didn’t, and I still had to act. I put my hand on Doris’s waist and kissed her. Doris folded against me briefly, and stepped away. “Leo, you’re very nice, but I’m not going to run away with you,” she said. “You already have,” I said. “We must be half a mile from our blankets by now.” Doris laughed. “Well,” she said, “if we’re runaways, we’d better have a destination in mind.” “There,” I said. I pointed to the top of a sandy hill. We climbed up. From the top we could see the beach and the ocean; in the other direction lay Canarsie and Brighton Beach. I sat on the sand, and Doris sat beside me.
There was something terrible about the moment. It was so perfect that any change would ruin it, but doing nothing wasn’t interesting. “Who’s Gertrude Stein?” I asked. “She’s the person who said, Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose,” said Doris. “I’ve never heard that before,” I said. “Well, it’s true,” Doris said, laughing. She stood up. “That was quite an escapade, Mr. Spinks,” she said. “What do you have planned for us next? Maybe we’ll stow away on the ferry and visit Staten Island?” “I don’t know,” I said, “but if you tell me your telephone number, I’ll call you.” “My father’s name is Hans Gustav Baumgardt, with a D,” Doris said. “If you know the alphabet, you can look me up.” She started walking down the hill, and I stood up to follow her. “Hold on there,” she said. “It’s better if I go back first, alone.” “How long should I wait?” I asked. “As long as you want,” Doris said. She ran down the hill, slid, fell, got up, and turned onto the path without looking back. I stayed where I was. The sun got low in the sky, and over by the changing house, a band started playing. Chains of white lights came on up and down the beach. I had no desire to move. This is the pinnacle of my life, I thought, and nothing that happens to me, however great or grand, will ever delight me more than having kissed Doris Baumgardt at Riis Park on August 26, 1939. Finally, I walked back. I expected the Futurians to have left, but when I returned to their spot on the beach, I found Wollheim and Doris dancing before a driftwood fire, snapping their fingers and laughing while Rosalind clapped and Pohl watched with an intense expression, as though he were trying to remember everything so he could write it up later in his report to some unforgiving authority. I sat next to Rosalind on the blanket. “Is there anything left to eat?” I asked. Silently she handed me a plate of egg salad.
5.
Back at Dauber & Pine, I asked Loveman about Gertrude Stein. “Miss Stein? I know her slightly,” he said. He told me that she had come to speak at the Algonquin Hotel in 1934. She’d given a lecture about how enjoying was the same thing as understanding, and how there was no such thing as a normal American. Then she and Loveman and Max Bodenheim* had gone for a walk in Greenwich Village, and when they came to Washington Square Park, Bodenheim had said, “Pigeons on the grass, alas!” Which made Miss Stein laugh, because it was a line from one of her plays. “Why do you ask?” Loveman asked. “I was just curious,” I said. Loveman beamed. “You’re becoming a modernist,” he said. At the end of the day he took me to the Brittany Hotel for a drink. In the tranquil gloom of the bar, he told me a story about the time, in the summer of 1922, when Lovecraft had come to Cleveland, and Loveman introduced him to Hart Crane. The meeting did not go well. Hart had just discovered the Symbolists, and he wouldn’t stop talking about Rimbaud’s “Sonnet of the Asshole.” “It was childish,” Loveman said, “but on the other hand you could see Hart growing into himself, stretching his ailes de géant, so to speak.” Lovecraft was quietly outraged. “Howard, the New England gentleman! He let Hart talk, and when he was done, Howard said, ‘That reminds me of something interesting which I read the other day, about the possibility that Pluto has one or possibly several moons.’” The conversation ended icily. “Which was tragic,” Loveman said, “because Hart and Howard were both such great artists, and they had the same tendencies.” “What tendencies?” I asked. “The same tendencies,” Loveman said. “And that was where Howard stumbled, and Hart flew. A poet can’t be afraid of what people think. He must speak. Don’t you agree?” He put his hand on my knee, and I shifted away. “I guess,” I said. “Hey, can we order some sandwiches?” Loveman smiled bitterly. “Chacun à son goût,” he said.
I walked back to Brooklyn that night with the feeling that a curtain had been lifted partway. Clouds hung over Manhattan’s tip; beacons blinked in the harbor. Everything was somber and mysterious. Loveman was certainly queer, I thought, but what about Lovecraft? The possibility that he, too, had had those tendencies didn’t bother me much—I knew a couple of homosexuals in Parry Sound, and nothing about them was remotely alarming—but I did feel that I was passing from a child’s understanding of things to an adult’s understanding. I wondered what I would say to Loveman the next day at Dauber & Pine, but when I got back to Pohl’s, I found him sitting on my sofa, smirking. “Spinks,” he said, “you’ll be pleased to hear that Doris and I are getting married.” He told me he’d found a job, editing two magazines for Popular Publications, and on the strength of it, he’d signed the lease on a house south of Prospect Park. He and Doris would move in at the beginning of September, three days hence. “You’re welcome to stay here and keep my mother company,” he said. “The rent is twenty dollars a month.” I had been paying all of it.
The next morning, heartbroken, I moved into the Ninth Street YMCA, and from its lobby I placed a collect call to Parry
Sound. It was the first time I’d called home in three months, but when Charlotte answered, it was as if we’d never been out of touch. “Leo, thank god,” she said. “You can’t imagine what has happened.” Walter had had a heart attack. No one knew if he would recover. “Come home now if you want to see him,” Charlotte said. “If you wait even until tomorrow, he might be gone.” She wired me thirty dollars for the bus. In a daze, I packed my clothes in my Scout knapsack and collected the money from Western Union; then I went to a phone booth and called three H. Baumgardts before I got Doris. We agreed to meet in the Forty-Second Street Cafeteria. It was a hot, hazy evening, and my shirt was soaked by the time I got to Midtown. Doris was already there, looking cool as usual. She asked about my father. “He’s not my father,” I said. I told her where I had come from, and what I remembered of that. Doris listened with interest. “Do you speak any foreign languages?” she asked. “French,” I said, “and English.” Doris laughed. “Leo,” she said, “you’re a surrealist without trying.” Then we talked about the war which had just begun. “Are you going to enlist in the Canadian Army?” Doris asked. “I don’t know,” I said. “I guess I could wait to be drafted.” “They’ll never draft Fred,” Doris said. “He tried to volunteer for the Lincoln Brigade and they laughed him out of the office.” “Anyway you’re getting married,” I said in a rush. Doris’s fine black eyebrows went up. “Where did you get that idea?” she asked. “From Pohl,” I said. “Fred and I were engaged for about a day and a half,” Doris said, “and to tell you the truth, I think it was only because he thought I was going to run off with you.” “Oh,” I said. “Well, aren’t you going to live together?” “Nope. Fred is on his own.” “Oh,” I said again.
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