Tales of Natural and Unnatural Catastrophes

by Highsmith, Patricia

  Ricky was standing near the reception desk, talking to a TV man. “We’re going to clear it up. Maybe not tonight . . .”

  Another shift of switchboard girls had come on, and all three were talking. People were inquiring about the safety of their furniture and possessions, Mr. Clark gathered.

  “Our doormen will be on duty as usual,” one girl said to someone.

  “Paul, go get us something to eat, would you?” Ricky said to one of his men. “I can’t leave.”

  “There’s the Jade Cup,” said Mr. Clark. “Eggs and hamburgers—”

  “Jade Cup’s been closed since this morning,” an Ex-Pest man interrupted. “You should’ve seen the roaches in there! The big ones came down, y’see, and made for that kitchen. The lady manager—Well, the waitresses all quit this morning.”

  “Just because the roaches became immune to Ex-Pest Unique,” Ricky said to Sidney Clark. “Now when we—”

  “I’m sick of it! You’ve failed in your work and you’ve cost me my job!” Mr. Clark said, because the TV man had departed.

  “Want to see what we’re up against?” Ricky said. “Show him, Joey! Any corridor. Try the second.”

  Joey and, reluctantly, Sidney Clark, climbed the service stairs to the second floor. Mr. Clark saw roaches going up and down these stairs, maybe thirty of them, of all sizes. Ricky came with them, and he still had the energy to stamp on a few, cursing as he did so, but he was choosing the smaller, or younger insects, Mr. Clark noticed.

  Ricky pulled aside a stone cigarette ash receptacle, which stood beside the elevators. “See this?” One egg sac and two cockroaches were revealed, in what Mr. Clark took to be a mating position. “And it’s the goddam egg bags everywhere, hidden under everything. Under the carpets—Who’s going to find all these—ever?” asked Ricky rhetorically. “In closet corners, in some little crack in a bookcase—It’s hopeless.”

  “Then what’s to be done?” asked Sidney Clark, who still had a feeling that something could be done, even if it took time. “Develop a new insecticide?”

  “By the time we develop it—this place—” He waved a hand. “Torch it, that’s my advice.”

  The building? Sidney Clark was horrified. “I’m going out to get something to eat. I missed lunch and I’m bushed.”

  They all went down, and found that Paul and another man had returned with containers of coffee and bags full of sandwiches. Mr. Clark was invited to join them, and they ate at low tables in the lobby, of which there were quite enough for the thirty-odd men.

  Ricky looked better after a couple of sandwiches and a container of coffee, but he was still saying quietly to Sidney Clark, “Torch it, you’ll see. It’s a loss, okay, but there’s insurance, isn’t there? This is an Act of God thing, no? These cockroaches?”

  The words haunted Sidney Clark that night as he fitfully slept. Act of God. Cockroaches! Cushings’s silence was ominous. Was he planning to torch the Jade Towers? When would he himself get notice that he was jobless?

  A weary Sidney Clark was on duty at 9 the next morning, and the Jade Towers was again busy, with removal men now, and instead of taxis at the curb, there was a row of vans. Muscular shirtsleeved men stood around the lobby, waiting their turn to pull up their vans at one of the two larger doors in front and in back. The disorder that they presented illustrated the collapse of everything, it seemed to Sidney Clark. The three switchboard girls looked as if they hadn’t slept much either, and there was something desperate in the courtesy with which they spoke to every caller. A couple of newspapers on the reception desk, the Times and the Daily News, had pictures of a cockroach said to be five and three-quarter inches long, which had been photographed at the Jade Towers.

  Dollies with crates and cardboard boxes of household goods, with chairs and upended sofas, standing lamps, tables and desks and carpets, rolled all day toward the front or the back doors, and men shouted to one another, directing the pushers to wait or come ahead. They were going to work all night, one man told Sidney Clark, because the tenants were in a hurry to get their things out and into storage.

  By noon, the switchboard girl Madeleine was in tears. “Mr. Clark, they’re all sueing! We had at least fifteen calls this morning—and some people wanted to speak to you. We didn’t pass them on to you. We said—said the desk officer was somewhere else at the moment.”

  Sidney Clark was touched. “That’s kind of you, Madeleine. Go and get some lunch somewhere.”

  There followed a week of further disgrace for the Jade Towers, of jokes in the newspapers, and comments from people who had been tenants, some grim, others the “I surrender graciously to the super-roach” kind of thing.

  The Jade Towers was not put to the torch by hired torchers, as many predicted. Lawsuits from apartment owners and lease-holders bankrupted the Jade Towers owners, in spite of the Board of Management’s winning its suit against Ex-Pest, which had bankrupted Ex-Pest. Many were the damage claims for cockroach-chewed carpets, upholstery and books, and to lesser extent clothing.

  Only days after Ex-Pest had quit the scene, tacitly acknowledging the victory of the larger cockroaches, the Jade Towers stood empty, save for shifts of armed guards on duty day and night inside the front and back doors. New Yorkers and out-of-towners still gazed up at the tall building, but with a different kind of wonder now: it was a ghost building, inhabited by such large insects that people were afraid to live there.

  Ideas still came: seal the whole building and smoke the insects to death. Make the Jade Towers start repaying for itself by opening a “Cellophane Bar” on the ground floor. An architect’s plan was drawn up for this, the cellophane walls of the bar-with-piano would be taped to the floor and ceiling, ventilation assured by in and out fans, no food would be served, lest it attract roaches. But this never got off the ground, because there was too much negativity in the air: some cockroaches would still be walking around on the ground floor, wouldn’t they? Patrons of the Cellophane Bar would soon stop thinking this was amusing.

  Sidney Clark lost his job, along with the rest of the personnel, and received not a bad reference letter from the Board, though it was not a very good one. So he still had hopes of another, similar job. All New York knew of the travail that the Jade Towers staff had gone through in its efforts to conquer the cockroaches.

  The building was for sale, of course, though there was no for sale sign on it. The newspapers said “it has been rumored” (though it was true) that a couple of exterminating companies had come to take a look at the cockroach problem in the Jade Towers and had declined to take on the job. What were the cockroaches eating? The wall-to-wall carpeting in several apartments? The water had been cut off. But some remained in the pipes, and it rained, and the roaches had access to the roof. They lived. Some people claimed to have seen large roaches leaving the Jade Towers by night, presumably in quest of another building where there might be food. But this was never proved.

  The Jade Towers’ security guards had demanded and got “nuisance pay” for working in proximity to the insects, which they swore were growing ever larger. The guards were bored, of course, during their eight-hour shifts, since people kept their distance from the Jade Towers, and no one had tried to enter by stealth or force. The guards devised a game in the long service hall on the ground floor. They baited the back of the hall with sandwich crumbs, and shot at the cockroaches “from a fair distance” with air-rifles.

  “In the long run, we may kill more than the exterminators ever did,” one guard told an inquiring reporter.

  The guard added that in twenty-four hours, he and his coworkers shot maybe a thousand, and they swept up the corpses and disposed of them in garbage bins which were emptied as ever at the back of the Jade Towers by the city garbage service.

  Incredible, Sidney Clark thought, the Jade Towers having become a shooting gallery whose targets were cockroaches. Or maybe this shooting was another of the wild stories of which the newspapers seemed so fond? One day, when an appointment for a possibl
e job took him past the Jade Towers, Sidney went to the back of the building and put his ear close to the grey metal doors that closed off the service corridor from the street. He heard it: a muffled, even gentle pop—pop-pop followed by laughter.

  It was true.

  Maybe a thousand shot dead each day. Sidney didn’t want to think about it. The cockroaches had become some incomprehensible statistic, like the national debt, or the population of the earth by the year 2000. Okay, let them shoot, he thought. They weren’t going to diminish the cockroach population of the Jade Towers by any discernible measure.

  Rent-a-Womb vs. the Mighty Right

  Alicia Newton had never given much thought to the subject of surrogate mothers, until the Sunday her parents told her that the Reverend Townsend had based his sermon on it. This was at their Sunday midday meal, after her parents had come home from church.

  “He even mentioned Frick Medical Center,” said Alicia’s mother. “Didn’t you tell me that Geoff had done a few of these operations, Alicia?”

  Dr. Geoffrey Robinson, Alicia’s fiancé, was an obstetrician at Frick Medical Center.

  “I’m sure Geoff ’s done some,” Alicia replied. “But his main work is deliveries and some pre-natal—”

  “Townsend was saying the surrogate mother business is becoming a racket. To make money,” said her father, carving more pork roast.

  Alicia supposed that Townsend had quoted something from the Old Testament about the wrongness of interfering with nature. “It’s not particularly profitable for Frick, as far as I know. It’s such a short procedure, taking the egg out under a local.”

  “Profitable for the surrogate mothers,” Alicia’s mother said. “How’re they recruited, dear?”

  Alicia paused, puzzled. “They’re not recruited, Mommie, they volunteer. Lots of young women need the money, true, but it’s just a normal fee plus some maintenance, I think.”

  “Normal fee? Ten thousand dollars and up?” said her father.

  “I don’t think there’s a fixed rate. It’s by private contract,” said Alicia. “But the point is, a surrogate mother is for couples who can’t have a baby. If the wife is infertile or keeps miscarrying, for instance.”

  After a few murmurings from her parents, the subject was dropped, but the atmosphere remained a bit stiff, Alicia felt. Her parents had always been conservative, and in the last couple of years more so, in Alicia’s opinion, maybe because of the new conservatism in Meadsville’s churches (the town had more churches than schools), and what the Mighty Right was putting out via TV and radio. The Mighty Right was headed by the Reverend Jimmy Birdshall, and had its own TV and radio stations and publishing houses that printed fundamentalist magazines. The TV and radio stations asked for donations from the public and got them, so Birdshall had the money to support right-wing candidates running for all kinds of offices, from representatives in Congress to Attorney General. This bolstered the conservative President and had already led to conservatives being appointed to the Supreme Court. Birdshall—called Birdshit by his opponents—could shout his fundamentalism everywhere in America, because of his money.

  Alicia’s father David Newton was in the real estate business and had to keep on the good side of everybody, so he and her mother now went to church every Sunday, as did nearly everybody else in town. Her mother was active in local welfare societies and women’s clubs dedicated to good causes. Alicia had been encouraged to “do something for the public good,” so she had taken up nursing in the middle of university years, finished an arduous course, and now at twenty-two was employed at Frick Medical Center on the edge of town. There she had met Geoff whom she adored, and they intended to marry in a few months. At least her parents approved of Geoff, who was twenty-eight and already a highly respected gynecologist. He had a wild sense of humor which Alicia warned him to repress in the presence of her parents, so to them he appeared a well-groomed young man of cheerful mien, on the way up in his profession.

  Since Alicia was unmarried, Frick called on her before the married nurses, in case of emergency. It was almost the same for Geoff, since babies arrived at any hour, and Geoff said he had lost his biological time clock, if he had ever had one. Still, they managed to spend an evening or two a week together, and Geoff had a small apartment in town. Alicia told Geoff about the Reverend Townsend’s remark about surrogate mothers’ commercialism, when they met for a coffee in the Frick canteen.

  “Commercial—at ten thousand plus medical expenses?” Geoff gave a laugh. “I wouldn’t do it for that. Maybe these Birdshitters think we’re doing genetic engineering, creating a super-race, Ha-ha!—Oh, that reminds me, a nurse told me Sarah Morley—Morgan, I forget the last name, lost her job in Cleveland because of this.”

  “Because of what?”

  “Because she was a surrogate mother once. Here. She’s a Meadsville girl. Maybe she told another girl in the office who told the boss who’s maybe a Birdshitter. Anyway she’s short of money and needs another job—from us.” Geoff lifted his mug of black coffee and drank. “I told the nurse to write back, sure, come around for the usual physical, and we’ll try to set a date.”

  Alicia didn’t recall Sarah, but it didn’t matter. All the surrogates were in their early twenties, healthy and fit-looking. They received, by a simple operation that required no anesthetic, the in-vitro-fertilized egg that would become a baby. In a long lab room on the ground floor, where Geoff often worked and where Alicia went for blood test results, there were refrigerators for labeled eggs and sperm, incubators for fertilized eggs, and a room off the lab with a table, couch and TV, used by the lab technicians and the doctors for short breaks or a snooze. This room could be locked from the inside, Geoff said, and he had told her that this room was where the husbands went to “produce,” and that Frick had put some girly magazines on the table to inspire them, and that some men couldn’t make it even on the third and fourth visit, which Geoff found amusing, though quite normal. “Not sure I could either, under those circumstances!” Geoff had said with a guffaw. “But it’s a better atmosphere than these cabins I’ve heard about, with fellows lined up outside waiting their turn!” Geoff sat up taller. “I’d better split. You still free for Tuesday night?”

  Alicia smiled. “What a memory! Yes!”

  “See you!” Geoff ’s tall figure made for the canteen door, his unbuttoned white smock flying behind him.

  On Tuesday evening, Alicia cooked dinner in Geoff ’s apartment, and afterwards they drove to a roadside bar and restaurant where there was dancing. Then back to Geoff ’s, where Alicia stayed the night. They talked about the house they intended to buy. Geoff had put down option money on it, and he expected to strike a bargain with the owner. It was a two-story house, old enough to have personality, and on the side of town nearest the Frick.

  Alicia had almost forgotten the surrogate mothers subject, when she received a letter from her old school friend Stephanie Adams, who lived about sixty miles away in another town, and was now married and expecting a baby, Alicia knew. Stephanie wrote that the company she worked for, Jebson Parts, was not going to give her her job back after a two-month maternity leave, as they had promised nearly a year ago, and that it was because Jebson had found out she had been a surrogate mother once.

  . . . They brought it up, and I said yes, I had been, because I was broke. You’d think it was prostitution! And who’s behind this? The old Mighty Right people, yacking away in churches against abortion, contraceptives for teenagers, etc. Why doesn’t the Mighty Right attack prostitution which can spread AIDS, for instance, instead of lambasting the healthiest young women in the country? . . .

  I’m in touch with about ten young women who’ve been surrogates, because every one of them seems to know another surrogate, maybe married and living somewhere else now. I heard from one in Florida that the powers that be are trying to lower our average fee of $10,000 plus expenses. And how? By stigmatizing us as money-minded sluts, and/or paid slaves of “the rich” who either can’t acce
pt God’s will or are too lazy to bear their own kids. Switch on your radio or TV to one of these religious stations, Alicia, and you might get an earful . . .

  So I and some of the girls are thinking of forming a union called Rent-a-Womb. Don’t laugh, because we have to have a catchy name to get public attention. Then they can call us commercially-minded, if they want, but I bet we’ll win if we address the nation! A fat lot the present administration cares about America’s “growing class of young and poor,” as they call it in an article in today’s paper . . .

  When are you and Geoff tying the knot? Give him my best! George has sent off his novel to his New York agent with fingers crossed. And I’m expecting in three weeks exactly from now.

  Love from your ol’ pal

  Steph

  George Fuller, Stephanie’s husband, was a writer and had had some short stories published but not yet a novel, Alicia remembered. Steph had been a surrogate mother during the time Alicia was in nurses’ school. Geoff had delivered the baby, Steph had said, though at that time Alicia hadn’t yet met Geoff. Without the surrogate mother’s fee, Steph and George wouldn’t have been able to marry, or at least not as soon as they had. The parents had been so delighted with their baby boy, they had given Steph a five-hundred-dollar bonus. George Fuller, a college graduate, had been doing carpentering and house-painting jobs in Meadsville then, and he still did such work, Steph had said in her letter. Now, with Steph’s job gone, Alicia wondered how they were going to make ends meet.

  Alicia told Geoff about Stephanie’s letter at the next opportunity, which was around 3 one afternoon in the canteen. “Isn’t that hellish? She and George’re living on a shoestring, anyway,” Alicia said. “Remember Steph? Light brown hair, full of pep?”

  “Of course I do!” Geoff had pushed his white head-cover back and it dangled at his neck. There was a spot or two of blood on one sleeve of his white gown. He had told Alicia that he had helped deliver two babies in the last hour. “I remember her telling me she was surprised at how easy it was—having a baby. And that was her first.” Geoff smiled broadly. He had dark straight hair and a slender, neat moustache, which he thought made him look older, he had once told Alicia. “So now she’s forming a union. Good idea.—That reminds me. You know Mrs. Wilkes, reddish hair, talks a lot?”