A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  “What do you say, let's have some coffee?” broke in Leo's voice with a quavery, fearful brightness. Lowell looked over and discovered him sitting in his chair with his feet far apart and his hands resting limply in his lap, like he was paralyzed from the neck down and an unimaginative nurse had arranged his limbs for him. He looked inoffensive but not very lifelike, and there was a weak, hopeful little smile on his face. “How about it, what do you say? Coffee? Nice hot coffee for everyone? Maybe with a little cake?”

  “If you want it, go make it,” snapped his wife without taking her eyes off Lowell's face. Leo got up from his chair as though afraid his knees were about to suddenly bend backward like a flamingo's. He made a hesitant movement in the direction of the kitchen, looking around the room to see if one of the others would call him back. When no one did, he sort of sidled jerkily away, as though being manipulated by an unusually clumsy puppeteer.

  “Maybe we ought to sit down,” suggested Lowell when Leo was safely out of the room.

  “Not on your life,” said his mother-in-law. “You might decide to stay.”

  Lowell's wife went over to the window and stared out of it. Lowell looked at the narrow hunch of her shoulders, her bowed head, and he felt the last remnants of fight go right out of him. He hadn't known he had any left. “Will you come home with me?” he asked.

  “Home!” cried his mother-in-law, causing Lowell to start violently. “Home? Where is this home you speak of? An apartment without a husband in it? A falling-down rooming house in Bedford-Stuyvesant? These are homes? And you could have married Ira Miller!” she continued, apparently to her daughter. “Look where Ira Miller is today. A Park Avenue practice and a home in Forest Hills, that's where Ira Miller is today! One of the biggest men in his field, and you had to turn him down. Who cares about a few pimples? Anyway, they cleared up. I ask you, would Ira Miller have moved to a slum? You should live so long, believe me. Ira Miller has spent his whole life moving out of slums. I forget if I mentioned that he lives in Forest Hills. Tapestry brick.”

  “Huh?” said Lowell, both stupidly and despite himself.

  “Tapestry brick,” repeated his mother-in-law. “His house is made of tapestry brick. Only yesterday his mother was showing me some pictures.”

  “Oh,” said Lowell.

  “Listen, you want to know something about that neighborhood where you bought a house with my daughter's trip to Antigua?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Don't get smart. Our people moved out of that neighborhood twenty years ago. Twenty years!”

  “I don't think your people were ever allowed to live there,” Lowell heard himself say musingly. He hadn't known he was going to say anything like that. It just sort of came out of its own accord, like “soul food.” It was followed by a lengthy silence during which Lowell and his mother-in-law looked at each other almost speculatively, like a pair of philosophers mulling the implications of a fresh concept.

  “So,” she crooned at last, smiling poisonously. “So, now it comes out. Finally, it comes out. How long it took. Nine years.”

  Lowell opened his mouth to speak, but once again closed it without uttering a sound. Denial would be useless, and explanation would only be viewed as a cover-up. His mother-in-law had made up her mind and planned her scene, and she could no more have been deflected from her purpose than fate. She'd lived for this moment for too many years. It occurred to Lowell that if he'd overheard their conversation as an outsider, he probably would have been on her side, but the thought did not make him feel very bad. He regarded the bag of shit that was about to fall on him with a kind of fatalism. He'd always known this was going to happen. He'd always known it was going to be his fault. He only hoped they could get it out of the way quickly so they could get on with their real business.

  “Listen,” said his mother-in-law, putting on a face of great compassion and understanding, “believe me, I know how it is. I mean, nine years with a nice Jewish girl, having a good home and eating the best of food, it gets bottled up. God knows why you married a nice Jewish girl, I don't. Don't say a word, I don't even want to think about it.”

  “I wasn't going to say anything,” said Lowell.

  “Nine years,” his mother-in-law went on, ignoring him except as a kind of rhetorical device. “Nine years is a long time. Don't think you had me fooled for a minute. Many's the time I've said to my husband, `Leo,' I said, `it's got to come out. It's not natural it should take so long. Leo,' I said, `Leo, mark my words,' I said. Look at it my way, it's fate. You can't fight it. It was bound to happen. Just tell me one thing before you walk out of my life forever. One thing.”

  “One thing?”

  “What did I do wrong?” she almost whispered. “Where did I fail? How come my daughter married you? What happened to all those years of good upbringing, all those virtues I tried so hard to instill? Where was my mistake? Just tell me where my mistake was and I will go to my grave in peace.”

  “Shut up, Mother,” said Lowell's wife.

  Lowell had forgotten she was in the room. He had been hypnotized by the gentle, melodious tones of his mother-in-law's voice, totally engrossed in the unfolding of this latest chapter of his dreary and utterly predictable destiny, and she had completely slipped his mind. It was depressing to know everything that was going to happen to you in your life, but sometimes it could be pretty engrossing to watch an episode unfold, especially if there were unexpected variations in the script. Lowell had always assumed that his mother-in-law would rant and scream when the time came, and the fact that she had chosen to croon instead—crooning, in fact, the exact words he had always imagined her shouting—made the whole thing a good deal more interesting, like watching someone being tickled to death when you had expected that he would be shot. On the other hand, when it was over, he was just as dead. Lowell was especially glad now that he'd bought his house. He didn't know a thing that would happen to him in it.

  “Come on,” said his wife. “Let's get out of here.” She stomped over to the corner and began to wrestle with two enormous Samsonite suitcases Lowell had never seen before. They were brand-new.

  “Where did you get those suitcases?” Lowell asked.

  “On Fifth Avenue. I used the Master Charge.”

  Lowell went over and took the suitcases away from her. They were as heavy as if filled with damp sand. He couldn't imagine how his wife had ever managed them. It only went to show how mad she was. Slope-shouldered and red in the face from strain, he tried to look into his wife's eyes to get some idea of what was going on behind them, but she kept her face firmly in profile, her nostrils pinched and her mouth set in a thin line. Her mother remained in the middle of the room with her mouth open. From it came a faint, barely audible sound, somewhat like the noise Alka-Seltzer makes when dropped in water.

  “Close your mouth, Mother,” said Lowell's wife.

  Her mother's mouth snapped shut like a puppet's, and the sound began to come out her nose. When he was little, Lowell used to make an airplane noise like that. It was different from the airplane noises other children made, unlifelike but much harder to do. Making her noise, his mother-in-law pivoted slowly as they went toward the door, as though something had happened to her spine and it was the only way she could keep them in view.

  As they passed the kitchen door, Lowell caught a glimpse of his father-in-law. Leo was sitting at the kitchen table. He was staring off into space, and for some reason he'd taken off his shoes. The coffeepot had never been turned on.

  “Good-bye, Leo,” grunted Lowell in as amiable a tone as he could manage what with the suitcases.

  “So long, Lowell,” said Leo in a strangely cheery voice, moving only his mouth. The rest of his body seemed not to have heard. “Take care.”

  Lowell's wife held the door for him and followed him out, closing it softly behind them. His mother-in-law did not choose to speak.

  Later, in the cab that was taking them back to Manhattan, he said, “I'm glad you decided to
come back.”

  “I couldn't have stayed there a minute longer,” said his wife grimly, staring straight in front of her. “It was like being in the middle of a Jewish radio program.”

  “I didn't know there were any Jewish radio programs,” said Lowell.

  His wife did not reply, and they finished the trip in silence.

  6

  Lowell’s wife joined in the labor of cleaning the house the following day. She worked industriously if not exactly with zeal, cleaning and mopping while Lowell was smashing and hauling. Occasionally they found themselves in the same room, whereupon they felt obliged to speak to each other. For this reason they usually managed to stay in different parts of the house. It was not particularly hard to do with twenty-two rooms to choose from, all of them in need of much work. They worked and thought. At least, Lowell was thinking. He hoped his wife was thinking too. Every once in a while, on one of his toting and hauling expeditions, he caught a glimpse of her in some room or other, standing at the window and staring at it with unfocused eyes. He assumed that she was thinking.

  There were two conditions to their reconciliation, if that was the word for it. The first condition was seemingly minor: his wife would work in the house only during daylight hours, and only if Lowell would personally escort her to the subway station when night fell and wait with her on the platform until the train came. It cost Lowell an additional thirty cents to wait on the platform, a small enough burden, but one that he deeply and secretly resented. He tried to make a deal with the token seller, but nothing came of it. He had to pay thirty cents every single time, despite the fact that he never took the train. It was a rule.

  (His wife also said that she wasn’t going to live in the house when they finally got it ready. She was going to stay in the apartment. Lowell could do what he liked. He decided to cross that bridge when he came to it.)

  The second condition didn’t cost him a penny: he was no longer allowed to have any sex. In their old life they’d never made love, properly speaking; love had very little to do with what they did, except to establish a kind of moral precondition. They made fun, especially if they were either very drunk or very sober. It was about the only time in their lives when they did something just for the hell of it. Being generally content with placidity rather than fun, they didn’t do it very often, but they really cut loose when they got around to it.

  The fact that Lowell was no longer allowed to make fun came as something of a blow, but in the long run it didn’t bother him nearly as much as the thirty cents. It wasn’t as if they’d talked the matter over or anything, he just wasn’t allowed to do it anymore. He just came home at night and didn’t get any, and that was all there was to it. It didn’t make any difference whether his wife was awake or asleep, he was not allowed to do it. She didn’t want any fun, and that was that. He probably could have raped her; in fact, he almost certainly could have raped her. He knew exactly what she’d do if he tried it: she’d lie there like a corpse and let him go ahead. Screwing corpses was not his style, nor, when you came right down to it, was raping his wife, although there was a time when he liked her to wear high heels in bed, but he got over it.

  Actually, it wasn’t too hard for him to do without his fun because he was working himself to exhaustion. He came home a filthy mess every night. Sometimes he was so tired that he went to sleep in the bathtub. One night he nearly drowned when a cake of Ivory floated under his nose while he dozed. He’d never worked so hard in his life. From time to time he would stop by the window in the back room and stare down at his linoleum crater and wonder what was going to happen to him next, but he never came up with an answer, which was okay with him. He wondered about the window too. Why was it so clean? It was strange and possibly significant that the person who had occupied this room, alone of all the dozens of people who had occupied this house, had kept his window clean both inside and out. Why had he done that? Lowell tried to remember what he looked like, but all he could remember was a pair of bare feet and a vague, bent form. He couldn’t remember the face at all. The only things he knew for certain about the man were that he sometimes sat in his room with his shoes off, and he kept his window clean. And that his name was Bowman Parker. It made Lowell feel a little peculiar to know things like that about somebody whose face he couldn’t remember.

  “I bought the old Collingwood place out in Brooklyn,” he told people when they asked him what he was doing with himself these days. “The old Darius Collingwood place. I’m fixing it up.” He was a bore on the subject. He could talk about it for hours and frequently did. What he didn’t know about Darius Collingwood you couldn’t find in a book; Lowell had already read every book in existence that contained the faintest reference to the man. He could also give you a complete rundown on the origins and meaning of the word “filibuster,” and he knew more about architecture in the Brown Decades than almost anyone cared to know. He found that people had quietly begun to avoid him, falling suddenly into animated conversation with the nearest available third party whenever he approached, and frequently he and the nutty girl from the secretarial pool who read palms were the only persons in the cafeteria who enjoyed private tables during coffee break. It didn’t bother him a bit. He was just as happy to be alone with his thoughts.

  The Old South Brooklyn Historical Society had passed out of existence, and its building on Dean Street was occupied by a Puerto Rican trucking company. What had become of Darius Collingwood’s watch and Brazilian journal was anyone’s guess, but Lowell had come into possession of what he was reliably assured was one of the few surviving copies of The Autobiography of a Scoundrel. He found it in a bookstore on Nevins Street, and it cost him $12.89. It smelled powerfully of mouse shit, and its pages were the color and consistency of stale Finnish flat bread. Mechanically it was not an easy book to read. In some cases, whole pages disintegrated as Lowell scanned them, as though the weight of his gaze was too much for them to bear. The book told Lowell little that was new as far as mere facts were concerned; indeed, in some cases Darius Collingwood had covered up facts that Lowell already knew about. It was interesting for other reasons. For one thing, it revealed that Darius Collingwood was no titan of literature, whatever else he might have been; the best you could say for the book was that it was vigorously written. For another thing, it was mistitled. Darius Collingwood revealed himself on its pages as no mere scoundrel. He was one of the most perfect pricks that ever lived.

  “They say,” he remarked in a typical passage, “that the Jews are taking over the country. What a joke. The country was taken over twenty years ago. The Goulds and the Huntingtons and the Fisks and all that crowd did it, and nobody ever found out. Nobody’s ever going to find out, either. We’ll always be able to pin it on the Jews or the niggers or somebody.” In another place he wrote, “You might think they caught me, but I was ready to go. All those years of living with that saintly woman, my wife, had taken their toll, and I was glad to get shut of her. I only married her in the first place because she was a preacher’s daughter and made me look respectable to the neighbors. Take my advice and let them denounce you on the Senate floor, but keep your next-door neighbors happy; they can make life a living hell. Anyway, it was Birdcoat who took the rap—an honest simpleton if I ever saw one—while I went south and had myself a whale of a time with Phil Ryan. What do you think of that, dear reader?” Lowell got a big kick out of it.

  “The Irishman O’Dowd,” Collingwood revealed in another chapter, “tried to plug me at the Stock Exchange because he found out that I was cohabiting with his wife. Now, there was as tempting a little baggage as you ever saw. He went to the gallows protesting that he was not an anarchist and a drunkard but a Democrat and a cuckold, but nobody believed him. It is common knowledge that all anarchists are liars, as are Irishmen.” Lowell thought that was pretty funny.

  In order that there should be no doubt in anybody’s mind why he was writing the book, Collingwood explained himself with typical arrogance and candor on the ver
y first page. “I could have remained silent,” said Collingwood. “Others have. You may be wondering why I have chosen to speak. The reason is simple. I got away with ten million dollars of other people’s money, and I did it so slick that if I didn’t tell you about it, you’d never discover it. In California I had three men murdered for a pile of Confederate gold and the love of a beautiful woman, and I got away with that one, too. Once I cornered the national market in household nails. I got away with so many things that I am in danger of being ignored and forgotten, and we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we? There’s no sense in being clever unless you get admired for it.”

  Lowell admired old Darius quite a bit. He hadn’t read anything as entertaining since Horatio Hornblower. It was made even better by the fact that it had really happened, but so long ago that he didn’t have to feel upset about it. Scandal and chicanery, bribery and extortion, swindles, boondoggles, low cunning, and naked greed passed in colorful parade before his eyes, and he loved every minute of it. Perhaps the nefarious Montana Bubble had been plotted in his very parlor. Anything was possible, and Lowell owned it all. He couldn’t get over it.

  The only part of the book he didn’t like was the chapter about the Civil War. Collingwood had acquitted himself with honor and modesty, and he told about it with uncharacteristic diffidence, almost as though the story was being drawn from him somewhat against his will. He’d been frightened at Ball’s Bluff. The waste of life appalled and saddened him throughout the war. He wept like a schoolgirl when his horse was killed beneath him at Antietam. Lowell didn’t like it one bit.

  “I opened the door and discovered the President standing there,” said Darius Collingwood. “In some confusion I attempted to withdraw, acutely conscious of the mud and dried foam that befouled my uniform, but he stopped me with a gesture. `Arbuckle has told me the news,’ he said. `I believe we are deeply in your debt, Colonel. That was a fair piece of riding.’ He shook my hand and retired by the opposite door. I remained standing there for some moments.” Lowell thought the President should have gone straight out and washed his hand.