“Very fine, healthy septic tank,” Herb would say. “Very fine flagpole. Good lawn—no dandelions.”
Now, as he stood in front of the glass-paned door, Robert wondered again if this was where he wanted to be, what he wanted to do. Once he turned the little bell crank he would be committed to that constant irony, and he didn’t know how it would react upon the really terrible blankness of his own mood. He had trouble swallowing, and even though he could breathe, he felt that he wasn’t getting quite enough air. Alice was sitting home alone, with reason to worry about him—was she sitting there still, in her white blouse, her coffee growing colder? But it was too late not to go in. Someone might have seen his car, and in his precarious mood he didn’t want to cope with someone’s thinking that he was acting strangely. He twisted the crank, and the flat, grinding, clinking sound of the bell stopped the banjo. Herb came and opened the door, his banjo still in his hand.
“Robert, you sentimental slob, you’ve come!” Herb said. His little monkey face grinned and grinned. His tight, wiry hair looked artificial—maybe it was; nobody knew much about Herb. He must have been in his late twenties, but sometimes he looked older. He was a veteran of the Korean war, but he never talked about that. Robert followed him into the living room, which was empty.
“Dick’s in the basement, bottling, Pete’s upstairs playing poker, I’m sittin’ here blowin’ banjo,” Herb said. “I’ll get you a glass.” He had a pitcher of home brew all decanted, and when he went out to get the glass Robert stood looking at the rather startling room. On all the available wall space, above the series of broken-down davenports, eternally healthy Morris chairs, an upright piano with the ivory missing from every white key so that the keys were all gray and looked like dirty teeth, were tacked-up front pages of the Birmingham Bugle-Union and Blazon.
“That newspaper is my hobby,” Herb said as he came back with Robert’s glass. “Without it I would surely waste away and die. It keeps me from becoming paranoid—Christ, nobody in this state has to be paranoid; he can have all the fun and remain perfectly sane.”
Robert supposed it was true; whatever depths of disgust a fairly literate person had for the stupid, the half-literate—disgust he tried to hide from himself for reasons of happiness and sanity—were constantly publicized, reveled in, by the Bugle-Union. It never told the truth if it could help it, and it could safely be said that it didn’t officially believe in truth at all, an attitude fairly well proven by its slogan, printed above the masthead: “Truth Will Prevail.”
“Which means,” Herb had once said, “that prevailing prevails, for what prevails gets its own definition accepted. The most cynical slogan I’ve ever seen.”
In the place of honor above the mantel of the bricked-up fireplace was the headline
COMMIES INFEST “LENINGRAD U.”
—and underneath was an article of about fifty words in all saying that a member of the government department “could not deny” that Das Kapital was on the departmental reading list.
On another wall:
ATHEISM TAUGHT AT “LENINGRAD U.”
—and so on. All in all, Robert could not help thinking, a highly improbable newspaper with a highly improbable name. Yet there it was, the only morning daily in the area, read by everybody. In 1961 its editorial policy seemed at the same time out of date and (if one dared think about it) frighteningly new. Herb had another name for it beside “The Paranoid Press”; he sometimes called it “The Birch Bark,” for its policies went right along with those of the John Birch Society. McCarthy had been murdered and had achieved sainthood; J. Edgar Hoover was a kind of saint, too; the film Operation Abolition told the unvarnished truth; Eisenhower had betrayed not only McCarthy but his country; the Russians had neither photographed the back of the moon nor sent a man into orbit; and finally, “Democracy” was a hoax, and dictatorships of the right were the best and most stable governments with which to do business. There was one even more final policy: bomb Russia, bomb China, bomb Cuba, bomb everybody except perhaps Chiang Kai-shek. The Bugle-Union Corporation also owned a television station and an AM-FM radio station. It was also acknowledged, by the VFW and the American Legion, to be very patriotic.
And in spite of its unbelievable, nightmarish qualities, its outright falsifications of all kinds of news, and the half-amused, half-embarrassed laugh its mention brought forth from most people connected with the University, it was there, and in many ordinary and necessary parts of Robert’s life—when he had to deal with garages, for instance, or repair shops—he had a tendency to feel defensive about teaching at “Leningrad U.” This same feeling had something to do with the high annual turnover in the faculty.
Herb filled his glass for him. “This is vintage stuff—three weeks in the bottle, aged carefully and truly with Old World Knowhow and New World Craftsmanship.”
It wasn’t bad after the first sip, which reorganized Robert’s expectations. After that it became home brew rather than peculiar-tasting, rather cidery beer.
“By the way,” Herb said, “where’s Alice? You promised that if you ever remotely considered this visit you would bring Alice, if I would keep my speedy little hands off her.”
Robert tried to explain—tried, he realized with surprise, to explain exactly why he had come away alone. It was the intelligence he knew would be there behind Herb’s grin. He told Herb about Geoff Lubie’s child, about the air base and the major, and about Forrest Sleeper, the trailer, the woman and the child.
“And you have no children,” Herb said.
“I don’t think it’s all that—but haven’t you ever had a few experiences all at once that seemed to add up to the whole world? One day you’re fairly well organized, and the next you might as well be on the moon?”
“Oh, yes,” Herb said. “Indeedy.” He filled Robert’s glass again. “But you see I came to the conclusion that I was sane and the world was stark, staring ape shit.”
“When I saw that…child, I choked up.”
“In the Game of Life, son, you can’t choke up.”
Down deep in those black little eyes, beyond the dark wrinkles which his grin had caused to be permanent, peeped out an expression much like Geoff Lubie’s. I have the goods on you, Robert thought. Herb saw his look, and began to play his banjo. The precise, clean notes filled the room—a quick rhythm, complicated but immaculate, and somehow highly impertinent. Then he stopped and said, “By the way, that H-brew you’re guzzling with such ferocity is about ten per centum ethyl alcohol. Just a bit of information.”
Robert could feel it; his ears felt warm.
“So why do you keep all this proof around?” He pointed to the newspapers on the walls.
Herb tapped his forehead and crossed his eyes. “That’s simple. I don’t want to go to sleep and have a nice dream, and wake up to it all again. Too hard on the sanity.”
“But other places aren’t like this.”
“Where you been, lately? Sonny Jim, the rest of the whole ape world is like this. Example: I just read in the Sunday Times about how they play soccer in South America. I mean how the audience plays it—the players are relatively sane, just kickin’ that ball around—but before you go into the stadium you buy insurance on your poor fragile body, and between the spectators and the field there’s a moat, a high wire fence, police armed with rifles, clubs, tear gas and other little police toys. The police are in concrete dugouts. Fact of life. The audience tears itself apart instead of the valuable players—what you might call a true spectator sport.”
Underneath all this was the banjo—as if its gaiety did for Herb’s usual ironic counterpoint.
He went on: “Vanity, vanity, saith the preacher. ‘Vanity, vanity’ saideth Old Man Hemingway, too, rest his soul. Isn’t that what he was always talking about, only nobody listened? They heard it, but they heard it with their big cojones, not with their little minds. He kept saying it over and over and over.…”
Here the banjo sneered a series of arpeggios.
“
…saying that the human race has one quality above all others—Courage! or call it bravery, or balls, or whatever you want to call it. Why, Papa never said it was a virtue, he was talking about something else all the time!”
Here the banjo began to reinforce the words, and his tone became half song, like the sound track of a documentary film done in the 1930’s—but always with a slightly irreligious edge to it, as if at any moment it might turn into a jape, a jigajigajig.
“Papa said we all got these fierce instincts in us, didn’t he? He never said the world was full of cobardes, no, no. This world is full of gutty little men ready to die for any cause, as long as it’s really the cause of vanity. And man, we loved Papa ’cause it looked like he said there weren’t many brave men! So we all said to ourselves, ‘That big man has included me in—’cause I know I’m brave!’
“But what Papa really said was that bravery is the cheapest virtue known to man. That’s what he always said, and I give him credit. Spunk is junk, Papa really said. It stinks. It smells of dead bodies; it smells of gangrene.…”
“RAM!” said the banjo, and Herb stopped. He took a drink, and said, grinning, “What do you think of my exegesis, Roberto?”
Robert was a little woozy. He burped and tasted chili.
“Oh, God, I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe he did, but if he did I don’t think he knew it.”
“Oh, you’re making that same old mistake, Robert. The same one everybody likes to make. Your balls tell you he was a genius, but they don’t tell you why. On it goes. ‘Tolstoy was a fool!’ they say, and Dostoievsky was practically a moron, when it comes right down to it. Oh, yes! And Hemingway didn’t understand women, and he was politically naive, and he liked to go hunting! In fact, he was a moron! Oh, yes! And Faulkner’s illiterate, but not so bad as Dreiser; and Melville, the stupid jerk, wrote Pierre. Should I go on? How we exercise our vanity; how brave we are to stand up for our vanity in whatever form it takes, even before the firing squad, if necessary—and no blindfold, thank you!”
“I don’t know whether you’re trying to make me feel good or bad,” Robert said, although he seemed to be just slightly separate from the person who said it; he actually heard himself say it.
Herb looked at him curiously, now, and it was another face Robert saw, like a bad photograph in which you hardly recognize a good friend.
“Robert,” Herb said, and his voice was quite new, too. Lower, and full of a kind of dangerous authority. “What did you ever do that was so bad?”
“Father, I committed the sin of…of stealing.” Now who was evading the straight statement? Herb saw it, of course, and with tact said, “What did you steal, son?”
“I stole a plug in the shape of a frog, with three treble hooks.”
“Son, did you return it?”
“Only when I was accused of it, Father, and then I only put it on the running board of their car.”
“May God forgive it thee.”
Herb waited. Must he continue this? Not to, now, would seem an admission either of lack of wit or of unspeakable sin. But why did this seem so important? It was like a night in which he woke from one of those nightmares in which scenes could be repeated at will, in which even a slight change of expression on one of the character’s faces could be unbearably gruesome in the night black as cloth against his open eyes. The lifting of an eyebrow—a second look by the enthralled will—and everything might dissolve into writhings and violence. And yet here he sat wide awake. It was as though, like an epileptic, he could just barely begin to predict; as though he could just barely see ahead toward the subject which he must not let himself discuss.
“Father, I also committed the sin of cheating.”
“Son, what kind of cheating?”
“I misread a poker hand, and after I’d gathered in the chips I saw that I didn’t have a straight, yet I told no one.”
“May God forgive it thee.”
“Father, I committed the sin of.…” What? Couldn’t he think of another blessed sin? Watch out, now, a voice said. Let’s not get too near the bone. “Father, I committed the sin.…”
“What sin, son? Son, what sin? Keep it light, son, keep it tight.”
“Father, I committed the sin of toughness.”
“When did you commit the sin of toughness?”
“When I was young, Father.”
“You haven’t been to confession for a long time.”
“No, Father.”
“So what have you done for the devil lately?”
“Father, I committed the sin.…” Some lines from The Parson’s Tale came into his mind, and the Parson’s good, didactic words were as clear as if they had been spoken aloud: Thou ne shalt not eek peynte thy confessioun by faire subtile wordes, to covere the moore thy synne; for thanne bigilestow thyself, and not the preest.
“But you’re not a priest!” he said, and suddenly it was not even mildly amusing any more, because without warning his eyes were full of tears, and there was a huge piston in his chest about to push out godawful noises.
“And you’re not a Roman Catholic!” Herb said quickly. “So let’s drop it; you don’t have to go through channels—go straight to the Old Man Himself.” As Herb said this he got up abruptly, grabbed the pitcher as an excuse, and left the room.
Robert was in a positive rage at himself. What in God’s name had gotten into him lately? This was the third time recently he’d almost broken down, and he didn’t know exactly why, or what for. There was the sudden fit in the car coming home from Lubie’s, and a near one right in class a few days ago when they’d been discussing, of all things, Hemingway’s The Killers (Hemingway again, for God’s sake—he hadn’t thought much about Hemingway for years until the man had shot himself, and now everybody brought him up all the time). The Killers had made him remember something that had happened in the army. During a problem in mine detection a man had blown his face practically off with nitrostarch, and as he lay there with nothing but blood for a face nobody wanted to pick him up. A cadre sergeant came up and said, “Pick him up—he ain’t shit!” and Robert had never forgotten this strange way, this crude and shaming way, of expressing the man’s humanity in spite of the horror of his face. When this sudden memory intruded itself he’d lost his voice for a moment. No tears, though, thank God.
But what was the matter? He thought of nervous breakdowns, counseling (that was for students), psychiatrists (that was for other people). What was the matter was that in some way just outside his understanding he was terribly unhappy, and none of the little things that had lately happened to him—not even Forrest Sleeper’s invasion—added up to a reason for such ridiculous behavior on his part.
Now, as Herb brought back the pitcher, he felt constrained to resume some sort of normal behavior. Herb looked at him once, sharply, and then they talked of other things (other than what? Robert thought wonderingly) until midnight, and then he went home.
Alice was in bed reading when he came home. He told her where he’d been, but they were still suffering from distance—a kind of fourth-dimensional distance he hadn’t the energy to try to solve. He was so tired he must have gone to sleep before she turned out the light.
At breakfast the distance was still there. They spoke to each other logically enough—he could even try to be funny about Herb’s “exegesis” of Hemingway’s philosophy, but they weren’t talking about what they were thinking about.
“Herb said Hemingway believed that bravery was cheap.”
“What kind of bravery?” Alice said.
“Well, we didn’t get into that.”
Although he had to walk by the window through which he might have seen Forrest Sleeper’s encampment, Robert got himself another cup of coffee without looking out, and he wondered why people tried to fool each other even though they knew it was impossible.
“She’s his daughter-in-law,” Alice said.
“Who is?” he lied, compounding his hypocrisy.
“Her husband’s in the army
. She’s not very bright, but she’s really awfully nice. She loves that child.”
“Why doesn’t she clean its nose, then?” he said, trying without hope to sound the way a normal person should.
“She was upset by having to move. Things like that scare her.”
Me, too, he thought.
“She’s afraid of the dark, she told me.”
“Are they going to stay here permanently?”
“Bob, that’s the kind of thing she’d never know.”
Of course; nobody ever knew that kind of thing. Even the major never asked himself that question. He stood up and went to the window, this time daring to look across the road. Compared to that ugly scene of junk and trailer and broken-down car his neat lawn and chaste white fence seemed fragile and impermanent. That lively mess over there was what was real. They’d left the filthy, gobbet-covered mattress out all night, too, and they’d probably leave it there until the wind and rain eviscerated it and its lumpy innards dropped out. He’d seen enough of the houses and yards of the Forrest Sleepers of the world to know that once a thing stopped being used each day it stayed exactly where it had been left. It turned invisible, became part of the landscape.
“She has no friends,” Alice said. “I told her I’d take care of the baby when she had this next one.”
“Take care of the baby,” he said vaguely.
“Somebody has to. Forrest Sleeper has to work.”
“And only you have nothing else to do,” he said, the words simply words. He didn’t know what connotations they ought to have; he could only hear them bare and blank in his own voice, their phonemes and syllables bare as skeletons, with diacritical symbols printed over them right in the air, cold as an exercise. He did see Alice’s tension, though; it had been a hard thing for her to tell him.
“She doesn’t even know if she’s going to the hospital or not. Anyway, hospitals scare her half to death.”
A High New House Page 5