The Kiss of the Prison Dancer

by Jerome Richard

  The lobby was lined with brown marble and it too was not as Max had imagined. The people who came in the door with him broke in various directions and Max stood in the center of the large room and wondered why he had come. Then he remembered: he had come to see Holtz. It occurred to Max on his way to work that if he could just get a good look at Holtz he would know whether or not he was guilty. A man with a briefcase paused to light a cigarette and Max started to ask him for help, but the man moved on before Max could get his attention. In one corner of the room was a large information desk with several men ranged behind it, some busy answering questions. Max approached it and waited until a man in a crew cut and a square jaw stood opposite him and asked him what he wanted.

  “I want to see Mr. Holtz please.” But his request drowned in the noise of the lobby.

  “What?”

  “I want to see Mr. Holtz. Mr. Mortimer Holtz.”

  “Is he a prisoner?” the information officer asked.

  “Yes. Of course he is a prisoner.”

  The officer took out a form. “Are you his father?”

  “No,” Max said. He looked about, hoping to find someone else to talk to. This man didn’t seem to Max to know what he was doing. “No, I’m not his father.”

  “Are you his lawyer?”

  “No. I just want to see him.”

  “Sorry,” the officer said, returning the form to its drawer. “Only attorneys and immediate family are allowed to visit prisoners.”

  “I just want to see him for a minute,” Max said.

  The officer repeated the rule.

  “But you don’t understand. This is very important.”

  “I don’t make the rules,” the officer said, turning to someone else and leaving Max leaning against the counter with no one to talk to.

  Max walked about the lobby. He found the men’s room and he went in and urinated and then washed his hands and carefully combed his hair. There seemed to be fewer people in the lobby when he came out, but he was the only one who stood still. He felt a chill now, as if the coldness of the marble walls had reached him, and he began to walk to warm up. People headed for elevators and Max wondered why he couldn’t just go up and see Holtz. Imagining a row of cells with prisoners pacing back and forth in each one, he thought if he could just find the right cell he could see Holtz before anyone else asked him if he was Holtz’s father. There was a news and candy stand near him and he asked the operator where the prisoners were kept.

  “Take the elevator here to the sixth floor.”

  Max turned around and saw the elevator. “Thank you,” he said, and went to press the button. See, he told himself, it’s easy.

  When the elevator doors opened on the sixth floor he found himself confronted by bars. He had just room enough to take two steps off the elevator which closed behind him. With the bars in front and the closed door of the elevator behind him, Max suddenly felt he had made a terrible mistake. The chill came back and he put his shaking hands in his pockets. A policeman came up on the other side of the bars.

  “Who do you want to see?”

  Max stared at him, unable to decide whether to speak or turn and press the elevator button and hope the elevator came before anything further happened. Behind the officer Max could see two rows of small, glass enclosed rooms. In several of them people sat and talked. Perhaps the officer downstairs was wrong, he thought.

  “Who do you want to see?” the policeman repeated.

  Or perhaps having come this far, he would be allowed to see Holtz without being asked any more questions. He made up his mind and said, “I would like to see Mr. Mortimer Holtz.”

  “Let’s see your pass.”

  Max’s heart sank. He took his hands out of his pockets and took hold of the bars to steady himself. “I don’t have a pass.”

  The policeman told him he would have to get a pass at the information desk in the lobby.

  “Even if I just want to see him for a minute? You don’t even have to take him out of the cell,” Max said, already backing away from the bars.

  “Sorry. No visiting without a pass.”

  Max turned and rang for the elevator. Then he turned again and called the policeman back. “Excuse me,” he said. “Can anyone get a pass?”

  “Immediate family and attorneys only.”

  Max thanked him and stepped into the elevator. He wondered what would happen if he told the man downstairs that he was Holtz’s attorney.

  In the lobby again he waited until the officer he first spoke to was busy. Then he went up to another man at the information desk and asked for a pass to see Mortimer Holtz.

  “Relation?”

  “I’m his attorney,” Max said.

  “Can I see your credentials?”

  “Credentials?” Max started to reach for his wallet. The information officer waited. “I left them at home,” Max said. “I’ll come back.” He retreated across the lobby; when he got to the door he looked back to see if anyone was following him. No one was and Max stopped and felt a fist of rage in his stomach. It was too late to go to work now and he didn’t know what to do with himself for the rest of the day. He stopped at the newsstand to buy a paper.

  “Have you seen Holtz, the murderer?” he asked the newsstand operator.

  “No,” the man said, chuckling as he reached for Max’s quarter.

  Then Max looked up and saw that the man was blind. He ran out of the building and vomited in the gutter.

  6

  All night he wrestled with a chill that ravaged his body. Wearing a sweater over his pajamas and lying under every blanket he could find with his coat thrown on top, he wavered between sleep and waking. Once he put his icy fingers to his cheeks and swore he would not make such a fool of himself again as he had at the Hall of Justice. Just before dawn, he threw up. After cleaning up the mess, he stopped at the window and saw the dark sky open just over the roofs of the houses. He took a deep breath and then went back to bed and immediately fell asleep.

  When the alarm rang in the morning he sat up and discovered that he was not even tired. His cheeks were warm again and warmth flowed down to his fingers and toes. He thought about breakfast and it occurred to him that he might be out of eggs, but he soon discovered that there were two left and much relieved he put the water on for coffee and went to wash. While he shaved he thought about growing a beard; he trimmed the stubble on his cheeks and over his lip and then he washed away the rest of the lather and studied the effect in the mirror. There was not enough beard to tell but he decided after turning his head from side to side that his face was too small to support a beard. He lathered up again and finished shaving. It was not until after breakfast as he sat back and chewed the last of his third slice of toast that he thought of Holtz and the boy. He wondered what they must have thought of him at the Hall of Justice, a crazy old man trying to see a prisoner he didn’t even know. Well, he had tried, and he was lucky he hadn’t gotten himself arrested. As he dressed he thought about it once more, but it was already beginning to fade from his mind, ebbing away like a tide. How close he had come to getting involved. After all, he thought, Das geht mich nichst an. And remembering the resolution he made when he first came to the United States, he said it out loud in English: “It’s none of my business.” He had sworn never to speak German again.

  At work he had to explain to everyone that he had not come in yesterday because of an upset stomach. Only Shmuel was not satisfied.

  “A kind of burning sensation up here?” he asked, jumping up and indicating the area just under his ribs.

  “Not exactly,” Max said.

  “Have you had out your appendicitis?”

  “Yes,” Max said. “I had my appendix out a long time ago.”

  Dr. Resnick came in to tell Max that he borrowed some folders while Max was out. He put the folders on Max’s desk. When he left, Shmuel came over.

  “You know the best thing to settle a stomach?”

  “Leave me alone, Shmuel. I have lots of wo
rk.” Max indicated the pile of letters and folders on his desk.

  “You make some strong tea and you put in it honey and lemon and a little shnapps. That’s what my mother always made if she was sure it wasn’t the appendicitis.”

  Max looked across the desk at Shmuel who stood stooped and not much higher standing than Max was sitting. Under Max’s scrutiny Shmuel first smiled and then frowned, wrinkling his forehead like apiece of parchment. Max leaned out over his desk and pointed his finger. “Why don’t you go back to Poland, Shmuel, with your quack cures?”

  Shmuel retreated half way across the room. “Don’t talk like that, Max. You know I’ve thought about going back. There’s no one there for me any more.”

  Max suddenly saw his finger pointing at Shmuel’s desk as if at Poland. He withdrew it and said, “I didn’t mean it literally.”

  Shmuel turned and walked bent over to his desk. When he sat down he faced the door so that Max had only his back to look at. Something seemed to grow in Max’s throat; he swallowed hard and said, “I’m sorry, Shmuel. I didn’t mean anything. Open the mail already.”

  For once there was enough work to keep Max busy all day. It was really a part time job and if he could afford it he would suggest that he come in every other day, or else work only in the mornings. The only other solution he could think of was to fire Shmuel and take over both jobs himself. He thought about this, but then he shrugged his shoulders and reminded himself that hiring and firing was Dr. Resnick’s job not his and he put a pile of folders in the out basket and told Shmuel they were ready.

  The rest of the week went by quickly. On Friday there was a letter from Mrs. Greenberg in Mexico. Her husband was having second thoughts about the baby she was carrying; he threatened to go back to San Francisco and kill the father. Max pulled her folder out of the dead file, resisted the temptation to write I told you so! on it, added the letter to the folder and with a sigh tossed the whole thing into the box to go to Dr. Resnick again.

  He seldom thought about Holtz and the boy: Sometimes, when he thought he was thinking about something else, he would find them lurking in the corners of his mind, but when he found them there he dismissed them as he might dismiss the memory of an old movie or a dimly remembered drama and his life became as smooth as a tide washed beach. The whole affair in the park seemed to be slipping from the public memory as well, though he could not be sure of this for he stopped buying newspapers and he seldom heard the news on the radio, but no one talked about it any more and even Mrs. Thompson stopped asking him if he still went to the park at night. By Friday he was more interested in the Goldman case than in the park murder. Mr. Goldman’s teenage wife had disappeared while they were vacationing in New Orleans. Goldman said she had been kidnapped, but the New Orleans police were inclined to believe she had deserted him. Now Goldman, back in San Francisco, was appealing to the agency for help. Of course she deserted, Max thought, suspecting that Goldman was very rich and had bribed the girl to marry him. What did he expect? And with that, Max began to think about his own vacation which was only a week away.

  Every year Max went to visit his cousin Morris in Los Angeles. Morris had helped bring Max to America. When Morris came to San Francisco they had dinner together and each summer Max spent his vacation with Morris and his family. At first Morris only wanted to talk about Germany and what it had been like in the camps. He gave Max books that described the Nazi atrocities. “Tell me if this book is true,” he would say. “Was it really like that?” Max would read the first page or two and the next morning at breakfast he would say, “Yes, that’s the way it was.” But Morris finally ran out of books, or else his wife convinced him that Max did not like to talk about it, so now they did not talk about anything at all. Georgia went to all the movie screenings and she would tell Max the plots in great detail, but she always spoke to Max very slowly and distinctly and a little louder than she spoke to anyone else. It was the way, Max noticed, she spoke to the Japanese clerk at the cleaners. The boy, Arthur, was fifteen now and they did not exchange anything but hello and goodbye. Once he was there, Max counted the days until it was time to go back to San Francisco.

  He thumbed through the folders on his desk and wondered if Morris would be insulted if this year he went somewhere else. On his way home he stopped to look at the posters in the travel agency windows on Geary Boulevard. There was a picture of a beach in Hawaii with a young couple running toward an indigo ocean. He closed his eyes and imagined himself lying in the warm sand. The trouble with a vacation like that, he told himself, is that it left you with nothing to do but wonder who you were and what you were doing there. In the next window, a poster advertised a tour of England called “Shakespeare’s Country.” He went inside and got a folder describing the tour. Back in his room he tried to imagine himself touring Stratford. “To go or not to go?” he asked himself in the mirror. Finally, he decided that he could not face going back to Europe, not even to England, so he sat down and wrote to Morris, telling him when he would arrive.

  The night before his vacation began he told the Thompsons he would be gone for two weeks. They were just finishing dinner and Mr. Thompson said, “Have a good time,” and went into the living room to turn on the television. Mrs. Thompson was still cleaning up. “Are you going to Los Angeles again this year?” she asked.

  “Yes. To see my cousin.”

  Mrs. Thompson finished clearing the table and began stacking the dishes in the dishwasher. Max did not know whether to leave or offer to help. Over the noise of the machine she said, “That’s where I would like to live, but Fred says he can’t stand the smog.”

  Max murmured agreement and started to back out of the kitchen, but Mrs. Thompson patted back her hair and began to speak before he got out of the room.

  “I used to go there often before my sister passed away. Once I almost met Clark Gable.” She sat down and her eyes sparkled with memory. “It was at a party and he was supposed to be there. I stayed until three in the morning, but he never came. Of course, I was younger then.”

  “That’s too bad,” Max said.

  “Well,” she said. “I know you’ll have a good time there.”

  Max went upstairs to pack.

  7

  Georgia met him at the station, explaining that Morris was working late. Morris was a salesman for a company that manufactured hospital equipment and the thing Max liked best about his house was that all the beds except Arthur’s were hospital beds and Max could raise the top half of his bed when he wanted to read or the lower half when he wanted to rest his legs. Once he raised both halves and Morris had to come and get him out because he developed a cramp. “He’s meeting with one of the directors of a new sanitarium that’s opening in Pasadena,” Georgia said. “It could mean a big sale.”

  “Well, lots of luck to him.”

  Georgia had dyed her hair again; it was black this time and curiously thick, as if she had dyed it with shoe polish. Max would have complimented her on it just so she would know he noticed, but they were on the freeway and he was busy keeping an eye on the flying traffic around them. When they got to the house he said, “Your hair looks very nice.”

  “Do you think so?” she asked. “I don’t like it too much, but it is very nice of you to say you like it.”

  They had the same conversation every year. Max wished she would leave her hair alone, brunette with splinters of gray. She did one year and Max told her it looked very distinguished, but she dyed it the next day.

  Georgia called Arthur down from his room to say hello and then she excused herself to make dinner. As soon as she was gone, Arthur went back to his room. Max looked about. The only new thing was a picture over the electric fireplace where a mirror used to be. It was a full-size reproduction of a Van Gogh wheatfield; the brush strokes were so real that Max looked twice and then got up to examine it, even touching it before he sat down with the feel of the deceptive cardboard still in his fingers. The rest of the living room was the same: comfortable modern f
urniture, a champagne colored wall-to-wall carpet (when they first got it, Max remembered, Georgia made everyone take their shoes off when entering the living room), shelves with an assortment of books and glass knick knacks, and a television radio phonograph combination, but Morris would want Max to notice the picture so he made a mental note to mention it. Through the picture window Max could see the man in the house across the way standing by his window. The man saw Max and turned away. Max picked up an ash tray from the coffee table; it was of blue stone and had been made in Israel. Max held it awhile and then he put it down and went to his room and unpacked.

  “I was looking all over for you,” Georgia said as he put the last of his socks away, “but I see you found your room all by yourself.” She announced dinner and Max washed and joined Georgia and Arthur in the kitchen.

  “I hope you don’t mind if we eat in the kitchen tonight,” she apologized, serving him a slice of meat loaf. Max waved his hand. Georgia sat down and then suddenly, as if she just remembered to say grace, looked from Max to Arthur and asked, “Well, did you two have a nice conversation while I was busy?”

  Arthur looked down at his plate. Max said they had, and as always when he told a lie, he entered into the book of his life a mark on the debit side. He began to eat. The meat loaf was very good and he said so. “That’s very sweet,” Georgia said. Then he asked Arthur how he was doing in school and the only other thing that came to his mind was the picture and he was saving that for Morris. As if reading his mind, Georgia said, “Morris will be home around nine o’clock.”