The Cat's Pajamas & Witch's Milk: Two Novels

by De Vries, Peter

  “Come on home, fellow,” Wurlitzer said almost without preamble, laying a hand on Tattersall’s shoulder.

  “I am home. This is where I live.”

  Sherry and Wurlitzer rocked on the glider, while Tattersall perched his heels on the porch railing, up to which he had hitched his chair in order to be more sociable. He nodded to neighbors as they passed by on the sidewalk. “Evening, Mrs. Larkin. Evening, Bill. How’s the new baby? Still teething, eh? Oh, shucks, don’t you fret yourself about that crying. It don’t bother us none. You forget all about that now, hear?” When the pair had gone by, he said to his callers, “Nice folks. Like all of them in this neighborhood, including my landlady, Mrs. Yutch. You’ll meet her soon.”

  It was difficult to assess his features in the thickening twilight, but Wurlitzer’s had visibly paled. He shot a look around the porch. “Christ, can’t we go someplace else and talk? This place gives me the creeps.”

  “Does it now, Harry? Well, some folks just can’t seem to relax and set a spell any more these days, seems like, and that’s the truth. Just take things as they come.” Tattersall had by now packed a pipe, lighting it with the match struck on his thumbnail. He puffed a few times, savoring the aroma of the smoke drifting away into the warm air. He shoved his cap forward a little farther on his head and grinned his easy-going, sociable grin. “How’s Lucy?”

  “Terrible!” Wurlitzer said with a sudden twitching motion. “She’s just as upset as the rest of us about you, Hank, but she couldn’t stand the thought of coming here. She’s broken out in a rash. Everywhere!”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. I remember how it was always more than she could do to visit friends in the hospital, because it upset her so. You tell her I was asking about her, hear?”

  “So I came along with Sherry.”

  “Like I say, people can’t seem to relax any more and, I don’t know, just plain enjoy the things that really count. The simple things. The real values. And speaking of values, there’s a clearance sale down to the corner drugstore, and there’s some remarkable values there, if you need anything in that line. I mean from raincoats to automobile bumpers, cause, like I say, it’s a drugstore,” he added with a sly chuckle.

  He rapped out the pipe against the rail and drew from his hind pocket a harmonica, which he began to play. He blew a soft, sentimental tune, fluttering his hand over the instrument in a way that sent the melody drifting off through the darkness in gently plaintive, pulsing waves. When he finished he wiped the mouth organ on the side of his pants and put it back into his pocket.

  Wurlitzer popped to his feet and pulled his double-breasted jacket down over his bulging middle. He seemed to stand at attention, staring straight ahead at the houses across the street, and his voice had an odd, cracked quality as he spoke. “Is there anything we can do? Will you let us recommend a doctor?”

  “Naw, I don’t need any doctor.”

  “Well, I do!”

  “All I got’s the occasional sour, and Doc Moreland’s syrup more’n takes care of that. Thanks just the same though.”

  Tattersall removed his heels from the porch rail and climbed to his own feet.

  “And now let’s go meet Mrs. Yutch.”

  “Is that the woman who means the world and all to you?” Sherry said.

  He led the way into the cottage. Passing through a small vestibule very nearly filled by a hall seat with a back consisting of an oval mirror encircled by iron pegs, on all of which articles of clothing hung, and to one of which he adroitly added his cap, they entered a parlor whose sole occupant was a broad, muscular woman in shorts and halter. Her masses of brown hair were piled in arrangements that suggested an attempt to incorporate a variety of passing fads at once, as well as numerous shades of its basic color. She was in her forties. Her thick bare legs were crossed, and on one knee was propped a composition pad on which she was writing with a pencil stub. She paused from time to time to consult a dictionary. She was chewing her lips in thought as they entered, but when they did she put her materials aside to shake hands. “Ha da do,” she said, pumping vigorously. “Pleased to meet you.”

  When the visitors were seated, she suggested a cold glass of beer, which they all agreed would hit the spot. “Hank, do you want to do the honors? I’m sure there’s a half a gallon bottle on the ice. Well now!”

  In Tattersall’s brief absence from the parlor, the callers had a chance to take it in. Its mistress would certainly have had no way of knowing that its contents—button-leather sofa and chairs, beaded lamps and tables covered with lace doilies—were camp, any more than she could have been expected to know that the pattern of her shorts were derivative of Mondriaan. She sat under a sign reading: POSITIVELY NO SMOKING.

  When Tattersall returned with the beer and four tumblers on a tray, Mrs. Yutch was explaining what she had been writing.

  “Those damn tongue twisters. You’ve seen them in the papers?”

  “Oh, yes,” Sherry said. “I try one in my head occasionally, but I never get very far. They pay five dollars, don’t they?”

  “Ten. Don’t let the bug get a hold of you. I could kill the guy who started it, like you could kill the guy who invented solitaire. But I’m bound and determined to get one accepted. I submitted three, with no luck. Hank here helps me—I don’t think!” She threw a magazine at him.

  “Mrs. Yutch is really smitten,” Tattersall said, finding a chair for himself. “Recite some you’ve written, Mrs. Yutch. Can you remember any?”

  “Ah, nuts,” she declined, with humorous self-belittlement. “Well, here’s what I’ve got so far on this one.” She took a pull of her beer and licked the foam from her lips. “Wild Willy Walker woke Wilhelmina Wakefield with—That’s as far as I’ve got. You need ten words, and that’s only five.”

  “Isn’t it seven?” Sherry asked.

  Mrs. Yutch shook her head, gulping again. “Proper names only count for one.”

  “My name’s Wurlitzer,” Harry said, edgily. “You’re welcome to use it instead of Wakefield. It’s more tongue-twisty.”

  “Gee, thanks. That is a mouthful of peanut butter.” Mrs. Yutch briskly erased Wakefield and jotted in the substitution. “But that don’t give me no new words. What are some more that begin with W? The bigger the better. Hank here is the one who knows the big words. Come on, Hank, let’s have some jawbreakers!”

  Tattersall threw out a few suggestions, smiling with amused affection across the room. “Walloping, whithersoever, Wiener schnitzel, woebegone …” To which the others added such contributions as “wobble,” “waterlogged,” and “Wauwatosa.” “Water ouzel,” said Wurlitzer hoarsely, twisting a handkerchief in his fingers.

  Mrs. Yutch periodically interrupted this alliterative spate to go to the foot of a stairway and shout an order up to some child. “Go to sleep now!” she would call, or “I hear you up there, don’t think I don’t!” Sometimes she would tramp up three or four steps in a threatening manner, always stopping partway. Once she was heard to say, “And keep your hands above the covers. You know what that habit will do. First the insane asylum. Next stop—the graveyard!”

  One such sortie was completed, however. She went all the way up, and could be overheard in one of the bedrooms, moving about and talking. Tattersall took this opportunity to tell the others something.

  “I don’t know quite how to say this,” he began. “It has to do with something between Mrs. Yutch and me that’s a little more than the landlady-boarder relationship, if you know what I mean. Mrs. Yutch is a widow. Her husband died a few years ago, leaving her with these five children. Well, now it seems like she’s going to have her sixth, if you know what I mean, thanks to yours truly.”

  Wurlitzer still seemed jumpy. He popped to his feet again and started to pull a package of cigarettes from his pocket, but remembering the sign on the wall hastily shoved it back again. Tattersall’s pipe apparently implied that smoking was permitted on the porch. Sherry picked something from her drink with a neat crimson f
ingernail. The occasion would seem to call for some such rejoinder as, “Why, Henry Sedgewick Tattersall!” but the words did not occur to her.

  “It just doesn’t seem fair,” Tattersall went on. “We know a fellow is responsible for his actions, and is expected to do the right thing for a momentary indiscretion. But to get six at a clip.”

  “Will you be sucked into supporting the lot?” Sherry asked.

  “We’ll just have to see what we see.”

  “You’ll marry Mrs. Yutch then?”

  “I’ll do the right thing, whatever that is. We’ll see.”

  “In any case now there’s no point in our trying to patch it up, is there? I’ll give you a divorce.” Sherry sighed and looked at Wurlitzer; or, more accurately, to him, as to the moderator of a discussion come to an impasse, and which it is his responsibility to revive. He turned and gave some more determined hitches to his clothing.

  “Hank, this is a mell of a hess. Of whose making I don’t know, and can’t stop to figure out.” He started to pace, which in the congested interior consisted largely in circumventing articles of furniture. “You’re in a bind because of some slide you’ve been going through, starting how or when or why God only knows, but of which this is the tail end. At least we hope it’s the tail end! You’re your own unbeatable foe, is the way it’s beginning to look to me. But that’s neither here nor there. The thing is, Sherry’s and my very presence here proves we won’t give you up, whatever you’re trying to do to yourself. We’ll all give you another chance, but you’ve got to agree to make some effort to pull yourself together. I’ll let bygones be bygones, and more. I’ll even take you back into the firm, for another crack at that. At, say—well, salary we can talk later. I’ll tell you what. You can write speeches for me. I’ve been in more and more demand, and can’t possibly keep up with it myself. I’ve got three kickoff dinners lined up for this fall alone. I need somebody who can write a good speech for me, and that might be more up your alley than copy. So come pack your things and let us take you at least out of all this. You can do right by this Mrs. Yutch woman, or whatever you want to call her, without staying here.”

  “No, Harry, thanks just the same. It’s good of you to make the offer, but I got to be honest. There’s no guarantee I won’t take and throw another bonus back at you, come Christmas.”

  “I won’t give you a bonus. Now what could be fairer than that? Not that you’re apt to find any temptation on that score any more. We’ve abandoned the tradition—as you can well imagine after that episode. You say it made you all look like a pack of beggars being thrown alms. All I was trying to do was keep a one-happy-family feeling. Maybe they had reason to resent it. I don’t know. Life can get so damn screwed up sometimes you begin to wonder if it’s any damn use. And I’m a guy who’s supposed to have made it.”

  Tattersall was adamant. His place was here, which, moreover, he advised them to leave before Mrs. Yutch returned, possibly to reopen under that much more awkward circumstances a conversation better terminated. He bundled them out of the house to the car. Before climbing in, Wurlitzer paused and gave him a well-wishing swipe across the arm with his fist. “Keep pitching, fellow.”

  When Tattersall went back into the house, Mrs. Yutch was once again in her chair, working on the tongue twister.

  “You said Mrs. Tattersall. She your wife?”

  “Yes.”

  “Quite a looker. And neat’s a pin. What did you ever leave her for?”

  “She left me.”

  “That figures,” said Mrs. Yutch, with a burst of good-natured laughter that exploded in turn into an even more voluminous fit of coughing. She was always choking on something, if not her mirth then her food, and sometimes both. She had got out a bag of popcorn in their absence, to have with the beer, and once in the course of the evening Tattersall had to cross the room to thump her on her back when she got a husk caught in her throat. “Thanks,” she said with watery eyes. He did this almost without interrupting his reading of the evening paper. He returned to his chair with it.

  He was reading a front page story about a gruesome triple murder that had just been commited in a rural area of the state. He told Mrs. Yutch about it. “He killed three members of his family, including a mother-in-law, sawed the bodies into sections with a hacksaw, and stuffed them down a well.”

  “I hate that sort of thing,” Mrs. Yutch said.

  “It’s a crime,” Tattersall agreed, turning a page.

  So the evening passed like many another. It was another cozy evening at home. He had met Mrs. Yutch when, ringing her doorbell to solicit work, he had been given some odd jobs to do around the place. They had hit it off instantly. Her hair was in curlers when she had let him in. “The house is a mess,” she had explained, of the empty beer cans, the bushel basket of unmended clothes beside which a poorly trained mongrel snoozed, and even the skillet full of cold beans with a spoon in it resting on top of the upright piano. The secret smile had come to Tattersall’s lips at the sight of it. He was indefinably braced by it. This was so clearly and unmistakably the destination toward which his footsteps had tended that he would have been a fool not to recognize it. This was It There was a ROOM TO LET sign in the window, which he told her might now be removed. It had been there so long, behind the fly-blown glass between the soiled curtains, that she had forgotten it. For a moment she didn’t know what he was talking about. “Oh, that. I gave up hopes of ever renting the spare room. People go away when they see it. They ain’t interested.”

  “I’ll take it,” Tattersall said, without asking to see it.

  Mrs. Yutch asked three dollars a week for it, and was indifferent about collecting that once she saw what Tattersall could do around the house. She ran a cash register at a check-out counter in a nearby supermarket. She made it clear that the hospitality of her own bed was his for the taking, but he declined. This out of an integrity more intellectual than moral. He had by now come to see the meaning of his life, his mission on this earth, as it were. He was out to prove the purposeless squalor of human existence, but he could not both deplore it and be guilty of it. It would have undermined his position, cost him his case against fate. And his case was more valuable to him now than any amelioration of the lot on which it was based. The right to his hate must be earned, as the right to love must be. Being in any way outrageous would have forfeited him his outrage.

  So the story he had told Sherry and Wurlitzer was completely fictitious, a way of compelling them once and for all to write him off. They could now forget him and go their way, leaving him to go his. He was now off everyone’s back but his own. Mrs. Yutch had only one child, a halfwit son who was all Tattersall needed to sell him on this house as his terminal abode, if he needed anything. It was the last missing piece in the mosaic, the capstone of the arch. The boy grinned wickedly at him from around a corner when he carried his things up to his room, and Tattersall grinned understandingly back at him.

  Tattersall tried his hand at a few tongue twisters himself. “Vile Vernon Vogelsand violently vomited vast—” Stumped for a noun at a crucial juncture, he switched to another initial. “Poor Peter Plunkett puked putridly putrescent portions.…”

  The evening wore pleasantly on. There was many another. Then Mrs. Yutch caused rather a tarnish on their life together by telling him that he should try to make something of himself. He had just noticed that an old movie was playing on television before which he had hoped they might settle down with their beer and peanuts. It was The Phantom of the Opera. In proposing it, he had pronounced it “phanthom,” the way she did. But instead she insisted on nagging him about the matter she had raised, just like a wife. “You weren’t meant to be a handyman,” she said.

  “I was once known as Handout Hank,” he reminded her, of the interval when he had in fact panhandled on the street, wearing a frayed tweed coat, slouch hat, and an ascot that had also seen better days. “So you can say I have made something of myself.”

  “You can make still more. D
idn’t you say you were once a door-to-door salesman?” She bit off a length of thread with which she was darning some clothes. “You can do it again. Why don’t you try to better yourself? Go to night school, or even take a correspondence course in something.” She opened vistas of self-improvement, held out the hope of an occupational ladder slowly climbed, and a social one with it, a future in which he might one day reach the better part of town, and then at last even the suburbs, where people not merely lived but resided.

  Tattersall was willing to sell door-to-door again provided he could find an item openly and honestly pointless, not snidely so, like the toilet goods and kitchen aids he had once peddled, or the commodities for which he had once tried to write copy. In his canvassing kit had been, for example, a hair curler that “lets your hair breathe,” a piece of patent nonsense to which he would not again stoop, as he would not to the combs for cleaning brushes and the brushes for cleaning combs. But something frankly idiotic, possibly even symbolically so, yes, he might consider. He was now testing his own tensile strength as much as he was the folly and fatuity of the world.

  One night in a bar to which he had been driven by Mrs. Yutch’s calls to greatness, he heard something that made him prick up his ears. Another drinker was talking about having got the wholesale regional agency for cans of fresh air.

  “What did you say?” Tattersall asked.

  “It’s a gag item, a novelty. Conversation pieces, or whatever you want to call them. Lots of people buy them to give away at Christmas, especially to people who live in the cities with all this air pollution. Or when your house is full of cigarette smoke when you’re giving a party, you can trot one out then for a laugh. Time to break out the fresh air and take a whiff. Although you’d be surprised, some people take it seriously. I remember once—”