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

by De Vries, Peter

  “How much are they?”

  “I let you have them for a nickel apiece. You sell them for whatever you want. Lots of guys get as high as half a buck.”

  “I’ll take some,” Tattersall said.

  So he became again a white-collar salesman, peddling cans of fresh air door-to-door. He liked this work. Sometimes, on good days, he would take Raymond the backward boy with him, trailed in turn by the poorly trained dog. He made a fairly good day’s pay at it. Things went along like that for several months, with Mrs. Yutch watching with moderate expectancy for the rung this advancement might next yield to, and then suddenly Mrs. Yutch died, leaving him with the boy and the dog. Her manner of passing might have been anticipated (as we always say after such a thing has happened) though scarcely prepared for.

  They were throwing a party for some neighbors early the following spring. They all sat in shirtsleeves around a picnic table in the back yard, eating fried chicken and drinking cold beer. Bursts of laughter became bawdier and more boisterous as the hour grew later and the jokes more robust. Midnight found them under the Japanese lanterns swapping stories of the kind to which most all parties come, those of the lower orders perhaps a little sooner. Tattersall had little capacity for “stories,” but he set a brisk example in extemporaneous byplay. One story had to do with a present with which a fictional adulterer tried to hoodwink his wife, and it prompted some lively banter among the women on the subject of general male delinquency in not bringing flowers and candy home simply on general principles. A neighbor named Jerry Caxton began a twit another called Al Bohack over his exposed parsimony on this score. “Don’t you ever feel the urge to do something just to make Millie feel good?” he asked. “Just to tickle her pink?”

  “Tickle her pink what?” Tattersall said, and they all roared.

  They threw their heads back and screamed with laughter, some banging their beer cans on the table-boards in sheer delight. Mrs. Yutch, who had been in stitches all evening, now became positively hysterical.

  It was so late that the left over platters of cold chicken had been again brought out for a midnight snack, together with the potato salad and coleslaw. She had been eating a drumstick at the time Tattersall made his joke, and, not surprisingly, choked on a piece of it. The trouble was so habitual with her that no one thought anything of it, until her predicament was seen to be serious. Then they began thumping her on the back—to no avail. Periodically one hears or reads of somebody choking to death in a restaurant, or at home before the amazed eyes of friends or family, but it is never anybody you know, and the occurrences have nothing to do with real life as it is commonly experienced. No one there would believe his senses when Mrs. Yutch simply toppled forward to the ground. She was rushed to a doctor’s office three blocks down the street, but it was too late.

  Tattersall was left with the mongoloid boy and the mongrel dog, and a free hand to affirm negation as he could.

  Eleven

  Fortunately he could throw himself into his work, which steadily advanced his study of human folly. When Raymond was not along, traipsing without trouble in his wake, he was an ideal companion to come home to, after a day of selling tins of fresh air. The table would be set, ready for the steak Tattersall would broil outside or the beef Stroganoff he would cook inside. The boy was eleven or twelve, but like his kind could easily have been confused with twenty or thirty. He could get the table ready and clear it, he could be trusted to turn the stove off and on, and would fetch what you pointed to, gargling unintelligibly as he waddled over with it. It suited Tattersall’s purpose at this juncture to treat him as an equal.

  “Joyce used to say that the only true colors are to be found in a grocery store,” he chatted as he unpacked the day’s shopping. “And he was right. Look at that orange, that peach, those string beans. They quite undermine the assumption that there are three primary colors, don’t you think? There are dozens! Fruit and vegetables I find more exhilarating than flowers, for color. More genuinely satisfying.”

  The idiot washed the provisions at the sink, making mouths and chewing his tongue as he worked, occasionally giving out some guttural, gurgling noise which Tattersall would take up and develop.

  “Yes, I quite agree. The present status of Joyce is rather a mixed one. The farther you get into his epic works the more, it seems to me, the more you’re confronted with something to be admired rather than enjoyed. You remember Mary Colum’s remark after his famous Paris reading from Finnegans Wake. ‘It’s outside literature,’ she told Joyce, shaking in her shoes though she was. Incidentally, Hemingway was in that audience. It would be interesting to know what he said, if anything. Well, as I was saying, I enjoy Finnegans Wake less than I do Ulyssess, Ulysses less than the Portrait. So there you have it. I’m not a true Joycean any more than I am a true Jamesian, I fear. I prefer his early novels to the Late Great Phase. All that upholstery! And in all those miles of criticism, I don’t think there’s a line that sums James up better than his aunt’s remark. That he chewed more than he bit off.”

  The vegetables went into a casserole called Chicken Haute Loire, which Tattersall baked in a bedpan. He had found one in an upstairs cabinet, never so far put to any purpose, judging from the label he had had to scrape off before sterilizing it in the dishwasher, and it struck him as ideal for culinary purposes, certainly a waste not to use, especially as there was no casserole among the jumble of pots and pans under the kitchen sink. The dish simmered succulently in its juices, and in the white wine later added. With it, he drank the rest of the bottle, a Corton Charlemagne of an unimpeachable year. He grew more expansive at table.

  “While I’m not prepared to say of Joyce what is often said of Eliot, namely that he is a good writer but a bad influence, anyone who has ever taught knows the evidence for either charge.” He paused to hold his glass up by the stem and study its deep gold contents appreciatively. The idiot ate lustily, bent over his plate and snuffling into the chicken which he picked up with his fingers. Tattersall decided that he loved him. And that they both alike loved the poorly trained dog whom the idiot paused to smile down at, and who, oddly nameless as yet, wheezed and slobbered ruefully as he watched the banqueters from below. “Lazarus,” Tattersall said, baptizing him with a dollop of white wine, which the dog thirstily licked from his coat. He tossed him a gobbet of meat. Then he returned to his point.

  “Now, that may be universally true of the really original artist, that he becomes a headache in his imitators. He thins out, you see, turns into a cliché. Christ becomes his disciples, the disciples the apostles, the apostles the church, and the church—yicch! Still, getting back to the subject, you can’t, you know, expect from talent what you do from genius. Talent—how shall I put it?” He paused again to sip his Burgundy. “Genius gives us a vision, talent merely a view. Something like that. I’m sure you’ve thought all this out for yourself long ago, so I shan’t bore you any longer by laboring the obvious, my dear Raymond.”

  The boy took out a handkerchief to blow his nose.

  “Oh, indubitably. And I agree absolutely that we must always bear that end of it in mind. But to get back to what we were discussing. The paradox here is that genius often learns from talent, as well as the other way around. I’m thinking of the interesting phenomenon of the forerunner. Freud had his Janet, Eliot his Laforgue, and it is supposedly the ‘ethereally divided violins’ of the Lohengrin Prelude, as well as some of Wagner’s other aching near-dissonances, that put the bug in Schönberg’s bonnet for the twelve-tone scale.”

  He finished off his wine and rose, stretching. The discussion had put him in the mood for music. He set some Schönberg going on the phonograph. The sound whetted rather than slaked his thirst for discord. With the Schönberg going full blast, he sat down at the piano and played something else, next singing at the top of his voice something altogether different again. The house reverberated with a cacophony that shook the walls. Keeping Schönberg for a background, he pounded out Little Gray Home in the We
st while singing the words of I’ll Be Glad When You’re Dead, You Rascal You. He rose a moment to turn the radio on, getting some rock and roll, then went back to the piano and combined Jesus Wants Me for a Sunbeam with It Ain’t No Sin to Take Off Your Skin and Dance Around in Your Bones, thumping the keys and singing the words with all his might. By now the racket was so deafening that he did not for some time notice that the jangle of the telephone had been added to it. The caller was a neighbor bleating, “Could you turn it down a little? My wife is dying.”

  The idiot could not be entirely entrusted with the dishwasher, so Tattersall stacked the dishes in the sink for the time being to muck about a bit. Cockroaches on which he could not personally lay hands and against which he neglected to pit an exterminator traversed the kitchen in growing numbers. He would brush them away with a whisk broom, saying to an occasional scuttler, “Gimme a break, will ya!” The centuries brought really little change in what man had to put up with, or what he devised to make the remainder coherent or tolerable. Even speech styles on which the acutely contemporary preened themselves were not all that new, or without precedent. Mod youngsters able to bear that antiquated fuddy-duddy, Carlyle, long enough to read The French Revolution would be rewarded with the sentence: “Dandoins stands with folded arms, and what look of indifference and disdainful garrison-air a man can, while the heart is like leaping out of him.” Christ, how grotesque things could be, how unexpectedly and in what unlikely quarters one could be getting his hacks!

  Tattersall sucked on a bottle of beer as he mucked about. Scraping some leftovers into the dog’s dish, he. remembered how eagerly it had lapped up the wine. He poured the rest of his beer into the empty water pan. He did so in a playful spirit, but also out of a certain whimsical curiosity. It amused him to see the dog lap it up greedily. He opened another bottle and split it with him. Having drunk his fill, the dog proceeded to wobble and stagger around the house, its stubby legs buckling under it. It stumbled against the furniture and slid about on the linoleum floor. It hiccuped. Tattersall was by that time three sheets to the wind himself. Toward midnight they repaired to their separate sleeping quarters, the dog flopping down on his kitchen bed and Tattersall, fully clothed, on his upstairs.

  The next evening, the dog barked insistently, looking up at Tattersall in a manner leaving little doubt about what he was trying to communicate. Tattersall said, “No, no,” but the dog followed him around, nipping at his heels. There was no peace until he had opened a can of beer and poured it into the dog’s pan. The mutt guzzled it thirstily till it was gone. The next night the same thing happened. The dog refused water. He simply wasn’t interested. By the end of the week Tattersall realized he had an alcoholic on his hands.

  This completed the menage into which, toward the close of that month, a woman walked who identified herself as a social case worker for the city, come to check on it. Their little paradise was threatened.

  Twelve

  She was a slender woman past forty, with brown eyes at which it took some doing to get a good look because of a seeming reluctance to meet your own gaze head-on. She would begin a statement, or a question, with her eyes shut. Only as she approached its conclusion would they flutter violently open, and she would look at you. Their behavior was a little like that of fluorescent lights. Then the process would start all over again. Tattersall had known several people with this mannerism, all women as it happened, and he wondered whether it was in fact more frequent among them than among men, or whether it was merely an accident of his own impression. Emerson had closed his eyes when he smiled, which may have accounted for his benign optimism: he never really saw what he beamed on.

  Mrs. Seltzer’s habit was, at any rate, not in evidence when she looked around the room. That she took in with a wide stare.

  “I’m afraid the house is a mess,” Tattersall said, smiling.

  Mrs. Seltzer gave the impression of thinking the spectacle deserved rather a stronger word, or one of another order altogether; that this was the product of something other than mere neglect. Soiled dishes and glasses standing everywhere were only the beginning. A drip-dry shirt hung from the chandelier, from one of whose sockets depended also a length of electric cord ending in no visible appliance, but just vanishing under the piano among an assortment of empty bottles. It was like a strand of vine in an untended yard. There was some leftover beef Stroganoff in the bedpan, along with a spoon from which, supposedly, it was extemporaneously eaten cold on impulse by any resident epicures. Half-finished tongue twisters lay everywhere. In one corner the dog was sleeping off a drunk. An electric razor seemed plugged into a can of lard. That was an example of something not the product of neglect, but only of a conscious intelligence. There might have been lurking about the premises someone waiting just to be asked about it, in order to be able to answer, “Oh, I forgot to disconnect it.” Unless it was to be accounted for on some other ground, such as free-form improvisation in creative therapy. The chair to which Mrs. Seltzer was eventually waved had first to be cleared of a pile of frayed sheet music. That was dropped on the floor with a thud that disturbed the dog. Putting a hand to his head, as it were, the dog rose and wobbled into the kitchen. Seeing him stagger through the door, Mrs. Seltzer asked, “What is the matter with him?”

  “He hasn’t been himself lately.”

  An insistent barking from the kitchen sent Tattersall into it, excusing himself. He took a cold half-gallon bottle of beer from the refrigerator and poured some of it out, murmuring, “Hair of the dog?” When he returned, the caller, fluttering her eyelids, said, “Is that animal drunk?”

  “I’m afraid he does hit the bottle.”

  She had opened a notebook on her lap, and now paused over it, doubtful of her first entry. “Is this of long standing?” she asked at last.

  “Oh, no. And he may pull out of it. Of course it’s hard to say. Bassetts are notorious bums, you know.”

  “He’s a mutt.”

  “He’s a mutt, but mostly bassett. He’d probably be worse if he was purebred, because you know the reputation they have. That there’s a bassett bum hanging around every supermarket. We try to understand.”

  She had been waggling a pencil inconclusively over the notebook. Now she said, “You say we. Which brings us to my business. Where’s Raymond? I’m supposed to check on him, as you probably realize. That’s why I’m here. He’s not, of course, yours.”

  “I intend to adopt him.”

  “Do you think this is a good environment for an idiot?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “I intend to. But as for adopting anyone, you have to go through channels, of course, and while that’s not precisely my end of it, they’ll ask you the same questions. Do you think you’d make a good parent?”

  “I won’t know till I try.”

  “You mean you don’t know whether or not you can talk Polish, you’ve never tried.”

  “Not exactly a parallel, would you say? Anyone can grow vegetables. And I rather like talking to plants.”

  Mrs. Seltzer drew a long breath, by way of transition, and then, with the point of her pencil poised rather more resolutely over the notebook, she said: “We’ve had to check on him from time to time even when his mother was still alive, because she would put him in a public institution now and again, for varying periods. Not just when she went on vacation, or thought the worry about how he was getting along alone at home interfered with her work, but on general principles. There are always two schools of thought about what to do with children like that. Sometimes it’s better for the family not to … Well, I mean the martyr policy is often a waste. They don’t really care where they are, and they’re often happier with other unfortunates around. Though that may not be a word you’d use. Anyway, where is he now?”

  “I’ll go see.”

  In Tattersall’s brief absence at the back of the house, the woman read one or two of the tongue twisters. She could do so without leaving her chair or even reaching out to pick o
ne up. They were everywhere. Merely by turning her head she read: “Appalled Paul Pawling perished putrescently pickling putrid pickerel parts.” And “Dreadful diseases dilapidated drunken Duncan Dunkenfield during diabolically diversified deliriums.”

  Mrs. Seltzer straightened in her chair as a faint smile came to her lips. She was not going to be put out, put off, or, above all God knew, put on. She would bite her tongue to keep from asking about the electric razor plugged into a can of lard. She knew very well the story about the man who hauled a horse up the stairs and left it in the bathtub, simply to excite inquiry, to which he would give a nonchalant answer explaining nothing. And as for the pièce de resistance over there on her left, she could play that as cool as anyone too.

  Tattersall returned with the information that the boy had wandered off somewhere in the neighborhood, as he often did, and would drift back in his own good time, if she cared to wait. “I could fix you a bite of lunch,” he said. “What are you staring at?”

  “Isn’t that beef Stroganoff in there?”

  “Yes. Why do you ask?”

  “Well, I’m curious about one thing, if you don’t mind a personal question.”

  “Not at all. What is it?”

  “Why do you fix it with tomato paste? I just use sour cream.”

  “Matter of personal taste,” Tattersall said. “Have you had lunch?”

  “Yes, I’ve eaten, thanks just the same.”

  “How about a Coke? I’m a little thirsty myself.”

  “A Coke would be fine.”

  They sat sipping their soft drinks while she fired her questions at him and he answered. The interview took its inevitably purposeful course, and resolved though she was to remain unperturbed about what she saw, the point was reached when direct queries about it had to be put.

  “Just what is this all about?” she said.

  “What is what all about?” Tattersall said.