Stronghold

by Stanley Ellin

  And of course, Sarah Frisch, our housekeeper, is already at her place at the table, so now has to hop back and forth between dining room and kitchen, serving Emily and me. God knows when the Hayworths established the convention that household help must dine with the family, no matter the illogic or discomfort of it, but it may well have been when the early Hayworths, giving up their Massachusetts Puritanism for New York Quakerism, discovered they had to wrestle with their Quaker consciences about being masters over hired help. But I remember my grandfather when he ruled the roost, and he was a firm ruler for all his mild manner, complicating the lives of newly hired backwoods help when he insisted on their company at the dinner table, and I remember my father’s dilemma when housekeeper Wilhelmina Snyder, who came to us too well trained by some rich summer people on Lake George, flatly refused to ever take her place at the table, the final compromise being that, willy-nilly, she had to set that place for herself at every meal, and there she and the rest of us would face the reproach of an empty chair and untouched setting.

  Intransigence on my part and Emily’s? A wistful clinging to a dead past? Well, whatever the inconvenience, our housekeeper dines with us, and, in the old style, is always addressed by her full name.

  So Sarah Frisch bustles back and forth between kitchen and dining room, her own eggs cooling as she sees to ours—add a touch of guilt to the reserve already measured for me before breakfast—and Emily talks to Deborah about something to do with shopping, and Ray McGrath discusses with my son-in-law David some commune problem, and Janet sits silent and brooding over her usual breakfast of a cigarette and black coffee.

  I study Janet surreptitiously. For all she has lately managed to work herself down to skin and bone, and persists in wearing her hair in a straight, lank style like drapes on each side of her face, she is, in fact, a good-looking woman. All right, it was Deborah who brought David into the house, but why then couldn’t he have seen how much more suitable Janet would be for him? On the other hand, if he had, what would this have done to Deborah, who so openly and childishly adored him?

  Considering this, I am slow to get the point of his discussion with McGrath. It seems that some of the children of the commune people are past the age when they should have been registered in school, and the school board is taking a hard line about the failure to ship them down to Scammons Landing Elementary.

  “It’s a good school,” I cut in. “Why not send them there?”

  “It’s not our kind of school,” McGrath says.

  Since the school does impose a certain discipline on its students, I can understand that. “Well,” I remark, “I don’t see you have any choice, unless you’re looking for trouble with the law. And even the Amish defer to local regulations until their children are out of grade school.”

  “We’re not deferring to anybody,” McGrath says. “We are not going to have our children programmed by the other world.”

  “The other world?”

  “The world we’ve rejected,” McGrath says. “What we’ll do, as I’ve been explaining to David, is set up our own school. We’ve got one boy, Mike Roos, who could qualify for that if he completed his ed courses at college. Only he doesn’t have the money for it. I understand the meeting’s Community Services Committee does have some money in reserve, though.”

  McGrath and Lou Erlanger are occasional attenders at our meetings for business as well as meetings for worship and probably know as much about our affairs as any member.

  Janet abruptly presses her cigarette out and looks hard at McGrath. “Last week some of your pixies tore up half the Marcy sisters’ rose garden, and when Elizabeth Marcy caught them at it, they put her down in language she hasn’t heard in all her eighty years. Now just how much part of the community does that make you, McGrath?”

  “I’m sorry,” McGrath says. “I really am. But these are kids. And they haven’t been brainwashed to the importance of property rights over human rights. But I am sorry they stepped on your feet.”

  Janet’s lip curls. “How very kind of you.”

  With the atmosphere growing sticky, Emily says pleasantly to McGrath, “I’m afraid the idea of a scholarship fund for an outsider might be a bit traumatic around here. The last time we tried to fund a boy through college, it didn’t work out at all.”

  “Who was that?” David asks.

  “Jimmy Flood, wasn’t it?” Deborah says. “That must have been about ten years ago.”

  “An outsider?” David says. “What does that mean exactly?”

  Emily says, “A town boy. His father was a clerk at the bank for many years. The mother wasn’t too stable, really. When she ran off with some man, the father took to drink, so the meeting took Jimmy under its care. A brilliant boy. We used to give him odd jobs and a school allowance, and eventually we saw him right into college. He was very much scholarship material. Enormously intelligent and introspective.”

  “Now I remember,” Deborah says. “He shot a garbage collector in town when he was a kid, didn’t he?”

  Emily doesn’t like the way this is put. “It was an accident, dear. Entirely an accident.”

  “Well, we don’t have guns at the commune,” says McGrath. “For that matter, we don’t have garbage collectors. And I don’t think you folks should hold Jimmy Flood’s sins against us.”

  “If you’re talking about crazy Jimmy Flood,” Sarah Frisch remarks, coming in with a pot of fresh coffee, “I can tell you something I didn’t like to bring up before, considering everything. But he was in town again, about a month back.”

  This surprises me. “Are you sure? What reason would he have to be here now that his father’s dead?”

  “Don’t know,” Sarah Frisch says, “but he was. My nephew told me. Didn’t even know it was Jimmy at first, what with them dark glasses and beard and all, but it was. Told my nephew he was just passing through.”

  “At least he could have stopped up here to say hello,” Emily says.

  “He could have,” Sarah Frisch says, “and just as well he didn’t. Anyhow, he asked all about you, my nephew says. But he must have been glad enough not to run into you close up after what he got himself into, shooting and bombing people in college when he was supposed to be studying from his books. And on you folks’ money at that.”

  “Well, well,” David says, and Janet says pointedly to him, “Oh, yes. He joined the rip-off crowd in college and did some extensive bombing and burning before he dropped out. Not much of a recommendation for scholarship funding, is he?”

  “Look,” McGrath says to Janet, “you know damn well we’re trying to build a community of love and sharing down the road here. You people should be the ones to most appreciate and support that.”

  Janet says, “I appreciate you’ve got about two dozen healthy people in your commune who are only copping out. I don’t approve of copping out. I don’t see why we should support it.”

  “That’s something to think about,” David says. Janet glances at him sharply and McGrath looks surprised. After all, it was David and Deborah who had made the case for renting the property to the commune, much against my better judgment.

  McGrath says to David, “Hey, I thought you were on our side,” and David says, “I am. But I can see it from Janet’s angle too. You and your people have let that place get run-down as hell, Ray. And so far, all the talk about truck gardening there hasn’t turned up one radish.”

  “Well, once we get a little more structured—” McGrath says, and Janet wickedly cuts in, “But you keep pointing out you’re against any structuring.”

  “We want it to be voluntary, that’s the idea,” McGrath says. “We don’t take your line. We don’t want to impose demands on anyone.”

  David says, “If you’re suggesting that the meeting imposes demands on any Friend, Ray, forget it. I wouldn’t be a member if that were the case.”

  A mystic, my son-in-law. A man too much fascinated by Zen and ashrams and the like, and too easily won over by arguments of the half-bak
ed in favor of any weird social experiment.

  But, I must admit, a practical sort of mystic, and what else is a good Quaker supposed to be?

  James Flood

  All night in my bargain-rate hotel bed I dream of swamps.

  No.

  Not swamps. Bogs, quicksand, nothing green growing in or around them. An endless oozy morass, and myself, James Flood, solo in the world, caught in the middle of it, knee-deep in the warm ooze, slowly going down, down, down. Bog sand tickles my thigh, my hip, my belly. I wake gasping and sweating, understand I am in my creaking bed in a three-dollar-a-night Miami hotel room, but the tickling continues. It moves steadily up my chest, a piece of my nightmare crawling right into waking reality, and I look down at it and see a monstrous cockroach—one of those Florida roaches that come the size of the midget turtles you buy for souvenirs—which is steadily ascending my naked chest as if aiming at the jugular.

  I come out of bed with a yell, slapping away the animal from my chest, dancing around to keep it from starting a fresh ascent of me from the floor. I pull the cord of the overhead light—a dim bulb which doesn’t offer much more light than the predawn gray already filtering into the room—and I see other roaches, a pride of them, scurrying away to corners of the room, miraculously dragging their fat, glossy-brown bodies out of sight through spaces too small to even be visible from where I stand.

  Five o’clock.

  Still an hour to go before the Shanklins pick me up at the Greyhound terminal, but I can’t kill any of that time in this zoo. Anyhow, sweltering hot outside, it is even worse in here.

  Much as I want to get out of the room fast, I force myself to dress slowly. I need the time to pull my finger away from The Button. I started thinking of it as The Button maybe ten years ago, when I was sixteen. The Button that made fantasy into reality. The fantasy is the violent response to the infuriating event. Someone steps on your toe in a crowd. The fantasy has you stealthily draw the razor blade from the pocket, slice it across his thigh and slip away before he even feels the sting of it, feels the ooze of blood through the trouser leg.

  Fantasy, so far.

  But push The Button without realizing it, and suddenly there is a real blade between your fingers, the real yelp of pain as it slices across the thigh—in the reality after The Button is pushed things always happen faster and more unpredictably than they should—and so there must be a hard intellectual awareness of the existence of The Button, and an awareness, too, that if you press it, you may be springing a trap on yourself.

  The treading on the toe; the contempt of the big male for the smaller male in this generation of hulking, oversized males; the viciousness of the castrating female; the treachery of self-declared friends; the bullying of those who are invested with any authority over you—I won’t even lay stress on the police, who go around, gun and manacles on hip, always rooting for trouble like hogs in a truffle patch, always so righteously pleased when they manage to come up with yet another truffle—but needn’t go further than the humble garbage collector (in India without caste, in Scammons Landing without humility), who, overpaid to allegedly dump your garbage into his truck, manages to dump part of it over your sidewalk.

  How easy, watching this slob foul up the walk outside your home, so that you, age fifteen, will be commanded by your snarling papa to go out and scrape up the leavings, and how natural to fantasize the new Remington rifle, a .22 single shot, strictly hardware-store stuff, into your hands. Fantasize further, and you can feel the cartridge shoved into the chamber, feel the stock against your shoulder, see the garbage man in your sights. Oh, heart-hammering fantasy, a squeeze of the trigger and a .22 bullet goes slamming through that brimming pail he is preparing to heave up into his truck.

  Unconsciously you have pushed The Button. Somehow there is a .22 short, not slamming into that pail, but drilling into that brawny, hairy, garbage-scented forearm. The garbage slob has dropped the pail. He has grabbed the damaged arm with his hand, is staring at it in stupefaction. He is bellowing, “God damn it! God damn it!” staring around now, looking up at you in the window where you are frozen, rifle on display, not in Fantasyville, but right there in Scammons Landing, the old hometown.

  Without knowing it, you have pushed The Button, you have made the dream real. What then? Officer Duffy, a heavy-handed cop on the rise. Do you know what attempted murder is, kid? Now talk, you little son of a bitch. And, oh yes, Mr. Dillingworth, the probation officer. Two hundred and fifty pounds of false sympathy. A back-patter and hair-tussler. Mr. Dillingworth, sir, didn’t anyone ever tell you that a back-patter and hair-tussler is a groper who doesn’t have the guts to grope?

  So, no matter the sweaty agony, one must take care not to push The Button unknowingly. Consider that over-packed New York subway car when its doors opened at Fourteenth Street, and this hulk, along with a thousand others, shoved his way in, bearing down on my shoe with his, then kicking at my shoe for daring to be in his way. The razor blade in its wrapping was in my pocket, not meant for a smoother, smoother, smoother shave, but for scraping paint from a bathroom mirror. The fantasy was of a slash across that fat thigh wedged against mine, a flawlessly timed slash that would, as soon as I was through the door at the next station, suddenly gout blood in a fountain, jetting it over the other hulks who held me pinned against this foot-trampler and kicker. He would look down in disbelief and see his life spurting out of him, would glance through the closing door and catch a glimpse of me smiling at him—

  Reality rushed in. The hulk yelped, savagely thrust me back, and looked down at the slit in his trouser leg above the knee. He looked at the razor blade between my fingers. “Son of a bitch! You crazy son of a bitch!”

  He grabbed for the collar of my jacket, and this time I slashed with full awareness, slicing open the extended palm, then hurled myself like a battering ram at the mobs surging through the door as it opened on Thirty-fourth Street. The shock of that second assault on him held him back just long enough to give me a fair start. Then he followed roaring, the grizzly bear pursuing the fox, but too late.

  Maleness. The Shanklin brothers are not male merely because of a superabundance of muscle, but because when the Mob’s price was right, they willingly exercised that muscle on the chosen victim. Coco, doe-eyed artist with the sharpened blade, did not dull the needle point and honed edge carving loving messages on tree trunks. This is for the boys, but a man knows better uses for them.

  As for myself, J. Flood, it was The Button which earned me my credentials. The danger is that where sometimes I am in charge of the happening, sometimes I am not, and so run the risk of being overwhelmed by it, by winding up with howling pursuers hot after me.

  Now, in this roach-ridden three-dollar-a-night chamber of horrors, the stink of mildew in it so strong it almost gags me, I find a fantasy taking uncontrollable and dangerous shape. That scrawny night clerk at his desk downstairs, a junkie in full itch if I ever saw one, and his contemptuous reassurance to my query, “You’re sure this place is clean? No bedbugs?” “Sure, I’m sure. What the hell you think this is, a flophouse?”—that clerk, itching and scratching and eye-watering and nose-dripping, will be politely asked to refund my three dollars. He will be contemptuous in his refusal, that clerk, and then suddenly there will be the menace of a weapon in my hand, and he will eagerly thrust my money on me. All the man-in-charge pretensions will leave him like air from a pricked balloon. He will whine, moan, slobber gratitude that his windpipe is still intact, unaware that in another instant it will be pouring out whatever watery blood is stored in that scabby body. The body, blood clotting on it, will lie behind the desk, the roaches coming from all sides to sample the remains. There will be no body in a little while. Just a pullulating mass of roaches in the shape of a defunct desk clerk.

  So I dress slowly, allowing myself time to wipe away the fantasy before it swells into dangerous reality, before I press The Button without knowing it and actually find myself in that lobby downstairs standing over a nonent
ity I have butchered just three days before I am intended to come into my first million.

  Ironic to have abstained from women, alcohol, grass, pills, and every other encourager of the loose tongue for an endless three months and then to trigger myself into useless murder.

  I dress, and bag in hand, go full tilt down the stairs and out into the street, not allowing myself even a glimpse of the clerk, my hand a safe distance from The Button.

  An empty world around the bus terminal at one minute to six.

  Then a big LeSabre, dented, patched, its trim rusted but its motor purring, swings around the corner, considerably down at the back end. It pulls up before me, Coco at the wheel, Harvey and Lester in the back seat like a pair of touring linebackers out to view the local alligator works in charge of a spade chauffeur.

  Coco comes out to open the trunk and help me fit my bag in along with other assorted luggage and the dozen five-gallon cans the linebackers had loaded with daddy’s high octane.

  “Les wasn’t so far wrong,” I tell Coco. “This thing ever hits a pothole, the bumper’ll drive right through the pavement.”

  “No potholes on the dandy highways all the way up to New York, man,” says the foresighted spade. “By then, no big load to do damage.”