A High New House

by Thomas Williams

  Jewell’s Club was the rage then, and the French and the tourists came to hear the jazz and eat Southern Fried Chicken. Sidney Bechet came to play his soprano sax, and it was popular with Le Jazz Club de France.

  “Jewell is broke,” Jean said. “Her landlord is kicking her out of the building. They’ll probably kick her out of France.” He looked hopelessly out the window, where the rain sifted down. “Will they take her back in America?”

  “Didn’t she give up her citizenship?”

  Jean stared at him fiercely. “Yes, but she’s no longer a Communist. Oh, don’t tell me! You know what they’ll do with Jewell? They’ll take her out to the middle of the Atlantic and push her overboard. She’s drinking now, too,” he added.

  “All Neutralists drink too much,” Richard said.

  “You aren’t drinking very much.”

  “I don’t know what I am yet.”

  “You’re a lousy American, that’s what you are,” Jean said.

  They walked up Boul’ Mich’ on the way to Jewell’s. The rain had turned into a fine mist, and Jean had to stop every once in a while to wipe his glasses. Richard waited for him, and then they’d continue.

  He remembered one time at Jewell’s. Eva had come to live with him just a little while before, and they were always together. She had loved him so damned much. He thought then that he would never tire of such self-effacement, such constant, undemanding love. She would stand behind him even at poker games, never saying a word, one hand lightly on his shoulder—always lightly—as if she didn’t quite dare to hold him. And she went to Jewell’s with him. Even MacGregor had stayed that night after the jam session. Perry was there, too. All three of them were apolitical, but Jewell liked them. She liked to see Perry eat.

  This night after the jam session they listened—Jean, Kris Le Barbu, Jewell and the rest, to the English language broadcast from the Warsaw Peace Conference. This was in 1950 or 1951. Henri Varniol was there, too, cleaning up behind the bar. He didn’t speak English, and occasionally Jewell would translate for him. Henri had fought in Spain.

  The voices of the Americans came across the Iron Curtain, across the old battlegrounds, all the way from Warsaw in the distance. He would never forget those honest Midwestern voices. The passion, the belief, the love.… Jewell cried silently. “Humanity!” the voices cried, “Love one another!”

  Jewell’s big black hand crept to her face, and tears made her wide cheeks shine. She loved. The word “humanity” alone could make her cry. They all loved Jewell and she protected them; Jean stared fiercely into the air, killing fascists and klansmen by the hundreds in his mind.

  Richard, Perry and MacGregor were embarrassed for Jewell. They smiled painfully at each other. He remembered the smiles vividly. It was unbearable.

  The voices pleaded, “Peace, peace…” voices out of time past, out of the thirties, refusing to give up the dream. One said, “Comrades! Comrades of all lands! I have here in my hand some dirt. It is good dirt, good soil. I smell it, I crumble it in my hand and see that it is good soil. But it is more than soil! It has been anointed by the blood of thousands of men and women who died for freedom! It is the soil of Stalingrad! Soil of the city named for our great leader, where the Red Army fought the Nazis and turned them back, where the spirit of these men will never be forgotten! Our leader will never forget! Our Stalin will lead us on to greater victories! Our comrade Stalin!”

  And the music, the hymns to Stalin, until MacGregor could stand it no longer. He jumped out in front of the radio, his awkward, skeletal arms raised, the deadly flush of the tubercular like spots of make-up on his cheeks.

  “Jewell!” he yelled, “Look!” And for Henri and Jean he said in his bad French, “J’ai ici une petite morceau de merde! C’est bonne merde! C’est merde délicieuse! Je mange! C’est la merde de Staline!”

  Henri threw him out into the street. Perry, Richard and Eva took him home. Jewell hired him back a week later, when he came to her hungry, coughing, already having had one small hemorrhage. Jewell was happy then and forgave everyone.

  Jean had stopped again to wipe his glasses.

  “When Stalin died, and all that business came out, it was bad enough, but after Hungary she went into mourning,” he said. “She wasn’t a red hot mama anymore.”

  Jewell let them in herself. She had gone all to fat and looked old and tired, her back flat above the buttocks, her belly beyond the help of girdles.

  “Richard,” she said, “Well, now, boy. How you doin’? Come into my night club, Richard.” She patted his cheek—a flash of soft, pink palm. Her voice was deep and husky, and she seemed a little drunk. The bar was littered with cigarette ashes and dirty glasses, and the huge clean-up light in the ceiling made naked the small cracks and smudges along the walls, fingerprints and evidences of spilled drinks. The twisted dead neon tubes along the ceiling, that had given cool blue light, looked in the glare of the great bulb like dirty plumbing. The room was much smaller than he remembered it to be.

  Kris Le Barbu came up behind, Jewell’s glass in his hand. His spats shone.

  “I say, old chap, your wife is smashing! Not half I say!” Coming from the depths of his black beard, where his moist red lips hid, the precise little voice seemed strangely innocent.

  Jewell took her glass away from him.

  “Go turn on the radio,” she said. Her voice was like coal rumbling down a chute. “Richard, have a drink on the house. Have some scotch, man. The beer’s flatter’n you know what. Kris, turn that radio on.” She still wore her funeral dress, now wrinkled and salt-white around the armpits. They took their drinks to a table.

  “That’s some wife you got there, Richard.” Her expression told him nothing at all.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  “Li’l Eva’s down to Lyon, I tell you that?”

  “Yeah, Jewell, I know.”

  “Li’l Eva, she married a big spender, Richard. He come in here once last year, she walkin’ slightly behind. Shocked, man! Wicked nightlife! Little bourgeois tightwad. He run a short-time joint down there, man. You know—they always got plenty hot water. Somebody told me. You happy, Richard?”

  “Not to see you like this, Jewell.”

  “Don’t you never mind Jewell. Kris! Bring me some ice, boy.”

  From the radio a strident voice said something about counterrevolutionary bandits.

  “I don’t dig that jazz no more, Richard.”

  “I never did, Jewell.”

  “You never got with it, Richard,” she said, smiling.

  Kris brought a bowl of ice cubes.

  “I really must go, Jewell,” Kris said. “Perhaps I can come back later on.”

  “Don’t ever try to fool me, Kris. I don’t give a damn,” Jewell said. Kris looked a little shocked, patted her on the shoulder and left.

  “I dig that Hindu the most,” Jewell said. She watched the scotch flow down the ice cubes in her glass, and Richard watched too; her concentrated expression pulled his eyes to the ice as though it were a crystal ball she were examining.

  “You happy, Richard? You love your wife?”

  “Jewell…”

  “Now, don’t git your water hot, Richard. We been friends a long time. What I mean, not like Jean and MacGregor. Never did care for no apron strings, man. I always liked you ’cause you never needed no care. Never had to wipe no puke off your vest, nor listen to you cry, nor put you to bed, thasall.”

  “That’s true, come to think of it,” he said.

  “Drink up, man!”

  The radio voice had changed, had become French. Static came in waves. Jean fiddled with the knobs and the voice faded, then came in clearly, “Capitalism withers…a world free from fear, from war…L’humanité.…”

  Jewell listened for a moment, her face implacable and mean, her big hands clasped together.

  “Weasel words, weasel words,” she said. “They got a nerve! You can take the lousy French, too.”

  “Where are you going to go, J
ewell?”

  She looked up at him and smiled. “That’s the tough one, Richard. I’m a woman without a country, Richard, singin’ those fat, black, homesick blues.” She took a little sip of her drink with her big lips, and went on, looking at him and away, then back to him, somewhat apologetically, he thought, as though she knew it was not her role to confide or to confess. “The only Hank Varniol. I come over here in forty-seven, I was married to a lieutenant in the U. S. of A. army, and that prissy, brownnose loo-tenant and me, we wasn’t compatible. He’s more interested in being a captain than he was a man.”

  Suddenly she drank up the rest of her drink and squeezed an ice cube back into her glass.

  “You never was in love with li’l Eva.”

  “I guess not really.”

  “Well, man, you sure married yourself a piece of blue eyes and hygiene, Richard. She about sweet enough to eat.”

  “Did you like her, Jewell?”

  “That don’t make no never mind.”

  “You think I should have married Eva? You said so once.”

  “Look, Richard, I ain’t no fortuneteller. I ain’t no gypsy palm reader. I been known to been wrong. And when I’m wrong, I’m in error. Alls I know is you marry what you want, not what wants you—not if you’re a man, anyways. You dint want li’l Eva’s all I know. She could been a radiant angel come down from Paradise, it wouldn’t of made no difference. I guess you wanted a piece of angelfood cake!” She laughed, her head thrown back and her big smooth hands flat on the table.

  Jean was still fiddling with the radio, and his head, bent toward the temperamental machine, was bony and sharp on his stiff neck. There had always been something angular and unforgiving about Jean, but now, without his rigid belief to hold him together, he no longer seemed all one piece, as though he had been put together out of children’s blocks.

  Not so with Jewell. She had taken on her new cynicism with a good deal of authority, even though it made her unhappy. She had always played the role of the experienced one who was willing to tell the facts of life to poor little white boys and girls, and in this there had always been a proper cynicism. But she had never acted out those principles of self-interest she ascribed to the world. She had been truly generous and magnanimous. Impulsively he put his hands across the table upon her big warm ones. Her eyes opened wide and she stared at his white hands covering hers.

  “Jewell,” he said, “how can I help you?”

  “You would, too,” she said.

  “You need money?”

  “Git me a passport to Seventh Avenue, Richard. Now with Hank dead and gone I got no call to stay in France.” She began to inhale sharply, in little gasps that were cut off as if by her teeth. “No,” she said, “I ain’t going to cry no more. Cried all last night and I ain’t going to cry no more.”

  He wrote down the address of his law firm and gave it to her. “You can reach me there,” he said.

  He countersigned five twenty-dollar travelers’ checks and gave them to her.

  “Richard, honey,” she said. “You do mean it, don’t you?”

  “I never was very impulsive, Jewell. You know that. You know damned well I mean it.”

  “Yeah, man. I never thought you could swing.”

  Then she smiled at him, and as she smiled she turned her big hands palms up and they enclosed his, so dark and warm they seemed to enclose his arms all the way to his elbows. He couldn’t follow her. He didn’t know what she meant; but she smiled and smiled, and it was her long white teeth, in the dark moving expanse of face, that he remembered—fixed and disciplined landmarks in that wide, warm darkness.

  After he left Jewell he wandered around to old places. He ate lunch at the Vietnamese restaurant where they’d fed poor starving Perry, looked into the black hole where he’d lived for a while once, bought The Paris Review and tried to read it while sitting at a small café tabac in a side street where he might avoid people he had known. But he could not forget Jewell’s face. There were the white teeth, and he saw them clearly, but there, also, were the eyes, and they said something bad about him. They judged. As for Jewell, she would find something else to believe in, someone else to love, because she was full of life. She hadn’t been thinking about herself, she had been looking straight at Richard, and it was as if she looked upon a dead man.

  He was not afraid; he was not even afraid not to be afraid. He had never loved Eva; that was something as wishful upon Jewell’s part as her crazy Stalinism, and she knew it. When he had played lover and happy clown, had played nervous, had played mooncalf, always there was inside him something like despair, which is death. And he thought now, Yes, I know it. There is no meaning to anything. That I poked Phyllis and knocked her up—is that supposed to mean something?

  At a quarter to five he walked back toward the Cujas, and arrived on time. They were there. They’d been to the Flea Market, to the top of the Eiffel Tower, to Napoleon’s Tomb and other such places. The day before they’d been to the Louvre. Mrs. Krause did all this sight-seeing with an interesting combination of attitudes—half dutifully, half apologetically. She knew a lot about things; at home in Des Moines she was the cultural attache of all her clubs. She also belonged to things like The League of Women Voters. Richard had admired her from the start, although she would insist upon talking to him in a language her husband couldn’t follow. Not in French, but in something that might have been called Cultural. “The Existentialists,” she would say. “The Existentialists:…” (he was always seeing colons in her sentences). “How does Camus change the meaning of Existentialism? Meurseault and Dr. Rieux: if Dr. Rieux is an Existentialist ‘saint,’ what is Meurseault?” and so on. She was willing to quote Sartre, too. As far as William Krause was concerned, the word “existential” did not exist. He didn’t hear it at all, and when his wife began to speak of such things she might as well have been speaking French. Actually she couldn’t speak French; she apologized for this, saying that she’d had Spanish in school (Cornell College, Mt. Vernon, Iowa) instead.

  When he came into the Cujas the three of them were sitting at a booth in back. Hannah Krause couldn’t see it, but her husband had his shoes off, and M. Claude, the patron, was amused by this. All three looked a little tired in spite of their fresh clothes and clean faces. When Phyllis looked around and saw him he had to admit to a distinct little shiver of pleasure. Her fur coat was off her shoulders. She wore a beige dress, and her fine shoulders were so straight beneath the cloth, her arms so lithe and well defined.

  How pleased William Krause was to see another man he could talk to! He loved his women, but he didn’t really talk to them.

  “Hey, Dick!” he said, smiling and shoving over, his feet on top of his shoes—they slid over, too. He was drinking beer, while the women were having aperitifs. “Have a seat,” he said. “What’re you having?” He pointed to the apéritifs. “It’s beer for me. If I had any of that stuff I’d be snockered before the meat course!”

  Richard said hello to everybody and sat down next to him, then shook hands with M. Claude, who had come over.

  “Doo bear?” William Krause suggested to M. Claude, holding two big fingers up as a help in translation, and at the same time raising his nearly invisible eyebrows at Richard. And he was right, beer was what Richard wanted. A small matter, but in a way a clue to the man’s nature; one had to know him for a while before one gave him credit for being right so consistently in small things. When he did make a mistake he saw it immediately, and Richard had the feeling that the man would have run at least a full mile, if necessary, in order to rectify it. William Krause’s guests would have what they wanted.

  He was a good businessman and, as far as Richard could tell, an honest one. He owned a contracting “outfit,” as he called it, and some real estate, including farms in the rich land of central Iowa. He liked to build houses, but especially he liked to build barns. “God, I love barns!” he would say.

  “I’m just nuts about barns!” Once, on Richard’s first visi
t to Iowa, William Krause had taken him out to one of his tenant’s farms. The occasion came about because a horse had sleeping sickness, and the tenant had called, desperate for men to help lift the horse up so that it could be slung upright in its stall. They drove fast, on the narrow Iowa highway, in William Krause’s Cadillac, and when they reached the farm four other men, the tenant’s neighbors, were there, and the veterinarian. In the dark stall, beneath a single light bulb shaded somewhat by cobwebs, a big brown horse slept upon its knees. The men were trying to put a rope from a block and tackle beneath its brisket, and the only sounds were breath and the voice of the tenant, who kept saying, “Good girl. Come on, girl. Wake up, girl. Get on your feet, girl.” William Krause went immediately to the horse and put his hands upon it, the men moving just out of his way. He stepped carefully toward its head, his rich overcoat brushing the brown hair and black mane, lifted the head and felt the horse’s eyes.

  “She ain’t going to get up by herself, Jim,” he said to the tenant. “I got another block and tackle in the trunk of my car. You got a canvas tarp? We got to have one at least twelve-ounce.”

  “Got a five-by-six fifteen-ounce tarp in my pickup,” one of the neighbors said, and went out to get it. William Krause tossed his car keys to Richard; by this time he was getting the rope under the brisket. When Richard came back with the surprisingly heavy blocks and rope, back from the night air into the humid, hay- and horse-smelling barn, the vet was putting a huge syringe back into his gladstone bag, and the front part of the horse had been raised a few inches from the sawdust.

  Eventually they got the horse off the ground, but it took all their strength, and all their clothes were sweat through before the fifteen-ounce tarp had been slung beneath the horse’s belly and over the sides of the stall. Richard’s most vivid memory of that night was the picture of William Krause, his overcoat and jacket off, his hands beneath and around the horse’s hind legs, her behind pressed against his white shirt and her black tail draped like a cloak over his straining neck and shoulders. The face was red, now, with great effort, and its fat had suddenly changed to hard muscle.