A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  He hunted, too. His shotgun was a Purdey. He let me see it in its oak-and-leather case, luminous as if a fire burned beneath the French walnut stock, the metal covered with delicate English scrollwork. His deer rifle was almost too beautiful for my young eyes, and I have never seen another like it. It was made in Austria, between the wars, and had two barrels, over and under, like a shotgun, but with a high carved comb to the stock to bring Mr. Brown’s cool eye up to an iron sight. I held this masterpiece, a prince among our common Winchesters and Marlins.

  “I have it because, in its own way, it’s almost as beautiful as a deer,” he said. “I’m sure the deer couldn’t care less, but I do.”

  But precious as it was, I would have chosen my father’s Winchester. With that familiar weapon in my hand, my vision of myself as a Yankee boy, thin-lipped and taciturn, was complete. Such foreign beauties as the over-and-under could not seduce me from the common dream.

  One conforms, of course, without knowing it—and not only to the common dream, for I was skillfully eased into my after-school job at Trotevale’s without once questioning the justice of this sentence. Collusion it was, I know now, between my parents and their dream of Education. Mr. Brown was Trotevale’s shoe clerk, and that was how I got to know him a little better.

  Every day after school, and on the long Saturdays, I found myself a clerk among the socks and shirts, with a button on the cash register sacred to my hesitant finger. Hair combed, white shirt and bow tie, I hid down the long aisles of glass-fronted, varnished counters, pretending to be a customer.

  I couldn’t find anything. I couldn’t tie a knot on a parcel, I counted change too many times before reluctantly giving it up to a customer. “Where are the handkerchiefs?” I would desperately ask a passing clerk. “Where are the boys’ blue denim pants sizes three or four, and what does that mean—age, or inches?” All day I trotted back and forth between customer and source of information, and by the end of the first long Saturday I was amazed and a little frightened by the number of things there was to know, just to being a clerk. Having exhausted everyone else’s patience (how could they remember how many times I’d asked the same question?), I had taken to asking Mr. Brown everything. He never chided me for my profound lack of interest; he had an extremely dependable fund of gentle patience.

  “Don’t you have a family?” I asked him once. “Why do you live in our furnished room? Are you going to live here forever?”

  “No, I don’t have a family,” he said, no obvious opinion of families in his voice; “no mother, no father, no wife, no children. And most likely I won’t stay here or any place else forever. And that’s not such an uncommon way to be.” He smiled that private smile of experience. “I’m what you might call an old bastard. Nobody claims me but myself.”

  I know now that this is not so terribly uncommon. There are many nomadic old bastards come to Leah and pass through, not all of them bums or lumberjacks with a quick eye for a bottle. Many are short-order cooks, those skinny food-haters: you can see their bones, their silver identification bracelets, tattoos and spatulas in any diner, their sunken faces framed by the exhaust fan. There are other kinds: awning-menders, embalmers, one-shot salesmen fleeing some private suburban nightmare—and clerks, like Mr. Brown. They stay a year or two and head around the circuit once again: Rhode Island, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont. Old men, mostly, pretty set in their ways, they almost have to be single. The jobs pay little, but there’s always a job somewhere.

  Trotevale’s store is no longer on Leah’s square. A couple of years ago the Cascom Savings Bank, next door, took over both buildings, and now the two look like one. Built in 1854 of wood, modernized by a sheathing of red brick in 1907, they are now modernized again, rather gaudily, in three-colored cathedral stone which seems to be held together by chrome strips, like a modern automobile. You hardly notice the disappearance. Trotevale’s sign was black, framed by gilt paint, and the raised gilt letters said TROTEVALE’S. That’s all. Two counters ran down the middle of the store, piled with sweaters, shirts, gloves, and other kinds of “good” clothes. Work clothes were in the basement, piled on plain tables. On the left side of the main floor shoe boxes filled the wall from front to back, and Mr. Brown, if there were no customers, sat composedly in one of the four wooden armchairs. On the right, glass-fronted cases reached to the ceiling, and every ten feet or so a pair of long-handled tweezers, long enough to reach the highest five-dollar Dobbs, leaned against the cabinets. Ladies’ undisplayables were upstairs, along with the office and the tailor’s room, on a wide balcony that went all the way around, close below the stamped-metal ceiling. The balustrade was carved orange cypress: balls, flutes, grapes, Corinthian capitals and Roman arches. The whole store was fine, consistent 1907, except for the surface of the main floor, which had been covered with plastic tile in wide green and white squares. Upon this miraculous surface the old mahogany counters, the cast-iron adjustable tie racks, the jigsawed buttresses and varnished legs all seemed to float, as in a painting by Dali, an inch or so above the floor. It was Trotevale’s first concession to those two-page magazine ads (before and after), and of course it wasn’t enough. All it did was knock the pins out from under 1907.

  Each day after school I’d go home, change my clothes and go to Trotevale’s for the two hours until closing time. On Saturday I came in at eight-thirty in the morning. Eleven-and-a-half hours! And those long, dusty afternoons were rarely broken by anything amusing. I watched the second hand of the white-faced clock at the back of the store, and sometimes it stopped dead for what seemed like whole seconds. Long ones they were, too. Sometimes I looked at myself, back, front and sides, in the tricky fitting-mirrors, not caring at all for my profile. Better the front view, and I could practice my frigid Yankee stare—that bright aggressive look I found legitimate upon the faces of my friends—the one that declares equality and asks: What kind of a damn fool are you?

  At other times, in that mirror, I could wish upon my face bones the crisp dignity of Mr. Brown’s straight nose, the regal depth of those blue eyes. Old man that he was, I began to pay him the compliment of imitation. When he spoke—while showing me how to tie the string around a package without having to let go of one end to tie the knot, without asking the customer for the use of a finger—he emitted a low, rather kindly humming sound. “Mmrnm,” he would croon for “Yes,” or for “Oh, is that so?” or for mere wordless sympathy. I believe he meant to let you know that he was listening, or that he understood exactly how you felt, and this nonword was the least interrupting of all assents. I don’t know. Perhaps it led to a certain distance between himself and the person he communicated with, as meaningful words would not. But I’d hear it, deep in his chest somewhere, a kind of cellolike vibrato, as hard to locate as a partridge drumming in the deep woods.

  I began doing this myself, and found that Mr. Brown’s idiosyncrasies and his presence, in a way, were noted. “Listen!” my father said at supper, “he’s doing that, like Mr. Brown!” Strangely, I was pleased, rather than embarrassed. But of course I stopped doing it. I developed, instead, a slow smile—one that took several seconds to mature, like Mr. Brown’s. My mother’s comment was less pleasing: “If I didn’t know how old you were, I’d say you were filling your pants.”

  Bessie Sleeper was the secretary and bookkeeper for Old Man Trotevale, who had shingles and rarely came to the store. Bessie weighed two hundred pounds, but had tiny feet. In the back of the store an open-shaft service elevator ran from the basement to the office on the balcony, and this was known, not to Bessie, as Bessie’s Hoist. It creaked as she stepped upon it and pulled the rope which started huge flywheels in the basement. Clang went the collapsible gate that somehow never caught your fingers in its disappearing parallelograms, and Bessie rose. She walked as if she carried a bucket of water in each hand, her face bitterly clenched with effort, her tiny blue eyes stabbing about for a place to sit her burden down. She was always very nice to me. She loved Mr. Brown.

/>   Her feet were truly perfect, he said, and every week she bought a pair of shoes. I can see her, wedged into one of the old wooden armchairs, a spot of molten thrill somewhere deep, deep—certainly not showing—, as Mr. Brown, cool in his white shirt and black arm garters, held her foot in his strong, dry hand. She wasn’t the only woman in town who bought too many pairs of shoes.

  If any one person, in the continuing absence of Old Man Trotevale, ran the store, it was Mr. Hummington, a busy little middle-aged man who wore rimless octagonal glasses the color of an old photograph. You could see his eyes way down in there in the mauve twilight, moving around. They didn’t seem to have any whites. He had black hair that seemed to grow all on one side of his head, form a rigid slab across the top and end rootlessly above the opposite ear. I knew his secret: I saw him bend too far over one time, behind the overcoats, and as one expects something to follow when a cover flies open, I half expected his brains to fall out. He was always busy arranging things, changing things—the plastic floor was his project—, marking prices and code upon labels: an expert, a dynamo. It was he who totaled up the cash register and told jokes in a high and businesslike voice. I remember him best in a series of gestures: he breaks a roll of pennies over his finger (it didn’t hurt), spills them into a little rubber capsule, slaps the capsule into its carriage and snaps the handle which shoots it on a wire up to Bessie’s balcony cash register.

  “Was a clerk. Young feller. No longer with us.” (Snicker.) “Put a mouse in the tube and sent it up to Bessie!” All this in a tone as smooth as steel, with a look half warning, half prediction. Should I have laughed? Perhaps I tried one of Mr. Brown’s slow smiles.

  There were other clerks: pale, retail creatures who fade quickly from memory. One was Randall Perkins, whose father owned the Leah Paper Mill. His father, having evidently assessed his son’s talents, had arranged the job for him in the restful atmosphere of Trotevale’s. A tall, vacant boy, I see him standing with a suit of long winter underwear in limp hands, the virile red wool, the functional flaps in interesting contrast to his ennui.

  All this while there have been rumblings from above—a permanent, threatening overtone. In his little enclosure on the balcony my personal ogre was at work, his sewing machine ripping off machine-gun bursts. Oaths and maledictions! I dreaded Mr. Halperin, the tailor. He cursed in odd languages, he sat like a malignant toad and blamed me for the pants I brought him. His wet gray eyes glared across ridges of brown flesh. His head was large, bald, and thrust itself forward from shoulders hardly wider than his neck. His behind was as wide as a woman’s, and hid his stool completely, as if the legs went up and stuck right into meat. He always wore a complete black suit, and on the top of his head a black skullcap which I thought to be a mask, like an eye patch, covering some horrible concavity.

  “In Berlin I am a tailor! I do not make with such dreck!”

  I was unused to such foreign behavior. My Yankee family, had it come to such screaming, would have found itself wading in fresh blood. Occasionally I came close to crying under Mr. Halperin’s barrages, and I dreaded Mr. Hummington’s purposeful approach, suit folded over his arm: “Take this up to the Jew.”

  “I can’t stand it,” I said to Mr. Brown. “He yells at me.”

  “Mr. Halperin is a very good tailor,” Mr. Brown said.

  “Why doesn’t he tailor, then, and not yell at me?” To my shame, tears of injustice did come to my eyes.

  “Now, now. He doesn’t mean anything by it. Mr. Halperin’s had a hard life and he’s angry about it.”

  “I don’t like him,” I said. “I don’t like him one little bit.” With a bitter look toward the balcony, I retired to my hiding place behind the overcoat racks. Above, the machine rattled viciously.

  I held it against Mr. Brown that he and the tailor were friendly. The tailor never screamed at Mr. Brown, nor was he sullen, as he was with Mr. Trotevale and Mr. Hummington. A strange pair they were on the cozy, elm-lined streets of Leah! One was far too handsome, the other far too ugly: both deformed, I’m sure, in Leah’s eyes. They were watched and snickered after as they walked, one tall and too smoothly graceful; the other on thick legs, humping along to keep up.

  One evening Mr. Brown came downstairs and stood in our living-room archway, wearing a long silk smoking jacket. My mother and father immediately stood up, then sat down, embarrassed by their instinctive gesture of respect.

  “I came to ask,” Mr. Brown said formally, “if it would be all right if Mr. Halperin visited me in my room. We’ll play chess, which is a very quiet game, although by nature Mr. Halperin is not always quiet.” He smiled.

  “Oh, fine! Perfectly all right! Sure!” came from my mother and father at the same time. I’m sure they had hardly heard a word. An exquisite orange-and-gold dragon climbed about Mr. Brown’s chest and breathed scarlet fire over his breast pocket. We were all stunned by this animal.

  And so, a few days later, Mr. Brown introduced the old tailor to my mother and father. Mr. Halperin bowed, called my mother something German, and shook hands too much. After the introducing was done there was a short, deep silence while everyone’s eyes shifted here and there, and then Mr. Brown took the tailor upstairs.

  I didn’t consider myself especially sneaky. But there were two of me, and the separation was sometimes hard to mark. Blame could be shifted. And in that constant pursuit of personality I would have done away with one. The other I called Tabber, a sort of north-of-Boston Simon Templar, a creature of the erotic or violent night, a cool customer. The window of Mr. Brown’s room opened onto the front-porch roof, and so did the window of mine.

  Of course I expected to see, in that familiar room, nothing more horrifying than two old men playing chess. But Tabber, a dark blanket wrapped about his shoulders, eased himself along the shingles to his observation post beneath the whicking leaves of the black maple. He was not afraid of the dark. I was, occasionally. He was entirely fascinated by The Abomination. I was afraid of it. In my half-innocent mind the canon of sin was infinitely long: Demonology, Sex, The Elders of Zion, Werewolves, Toads with Jewels in Their Heads, Warts at a Touch, Step on a Crack and Break Your Mother’s Back! I didn’t want to believe any of it. Tabber depended upon his Winchester, I upon a skepticism that was too much a protest against the ghoulish residue of childhood.

  We crouched there in the cool September night, deliciously illegal, hidden from the neighbors by the tree and from Mr. Brown and Mr. Halperin by the photonic qualities of the window screen. My mother had lent Mr. Brown her card table, and there sat the two men. I looked directly over Mr. Brown’s square shoulder at the tailor’s thick scowl. Two empty beer bottles stood on the dresser, and beside Mr. Brown’s walnut chessboard were the two glass steins he had bought for the occasion. Both men smoked pipes, the tailor’s a hornlike meerschaum that rested against the knot of his tie, Mr. Brown’s a thin briar. Streamers of smoke passed slowly through the window screen and past my face without changing shape, like ghosts passing through a wall.

  I watched them for a long time as they played. They hardly spoke. When the tailor drank he didn’t take his pipe out of his mouth, just shoved it around to the side with his stein!

  “Well?” the tailor said.

  Mr. Brown didn’t answer for a second or two, then the white head began to nod. I could tell by his ears that he smiled.

  “Well done,” he said. “Very well done. I didn’t know it had happened to me until just now.”

  “Four moves,” the tailor said.

  Mr. Brown kept on nodding. “You are very good, Mr. Halperin.”

  “From you? A compliment.” Somehow the tailor managed to look pleased while still scowling. “You are not bad, Mr. Brown.”

  “I know that, but I’m nowhere near as good as you.”

  “It is good that you say it!” The tailor may have tried to smile beneath the rolls of his cheeks. “I knew you would be good, of course,” he said.

  “You did!”

  “Of course I d
id!”

  For some unaccountable reason the tailor was becoming angry. His gray eyes glittered, his baggy lids quivered. Tabber may have reached for his Winchester, but I was glad that the capable back of Mr. Brown screened me, even as little as it did, from the sight of the tailor’s anger.

  My admiration for Mr. Brown increased, too, because he remained perfectly calm. I could almost hear his basal hum—his sympathetic, yet impersonal purr.

  “Tell me why, Mr. Halperin,” he said soothingly.

  The tailor got up, jarring the card table and teetering the chessmen, and stamped around the room for a while. He began to breathe short, explosive little gasps, and finally he turned toward Mr. Brown. With an ominously quick hand he pulled out his wallet and extracted a photograph in a plastic cover.

  “Look at this! Look at it! And tell me if there is no resemblance!”

  Mr. Brown took the photograph. Over his shoulder I saw the two men in the picture, one short and one tall. They wore bathing suits with funny tops, like summer underwear, and that was all I could see.

  “It is my favorite picture. Why? Because next to me he is Adonis. Such a toad as me!” the tailor said proudly. “He was the same, like you. There are persons who are naturally beautiful, naturally graceful. It is my theory! They are good at everything.”

  Mr. Brown had been watching the tailor, not the picture, and he said, “Who was he, then?”

  The tailor scowled worse than ever, ground his teeth and began to make a high, whining noise, as if he were in terrible pain. He put his hands over his ears and his head began to sway from side to side. “He was my brother. My brother Hy…” (My face ached from unconscious imitation, as if I too were bound to speak.) “My brother Hyman!” And tears poured, a solid faucet-stream of tears poured down his face. “I am sorry! So stupid! Forgive me!” he said in a voice that seemed to come bubbling up from under water.