I had rather a time getting up a short flight of steps to the rear platform near which he parked, before clomping up to a desk to which I was ushered for the discharge of my business. There, under the supervision of a proper official, I made out the necessary form for the recovery of my mail, identifying myself to his satisfaction by writing out the name and address of the intended recipient in handwriting that, of course, matched the original on the envelope, and rattling off some of the opening paragraph of the letter. He then returned the letter to me, explaining that regulations required his retaining the envelope, a forfeit I was glad enough to make.
Though the Post Office was now closed, a couple of doors were unlocked for me which let me out the front entrance of the building. Fortunately the outside steps were broad and shallow enough to accommodate my descent in an upright position, though even so I attracted a number of gazes as I made my way down them toward the curb. There I presently managed to hail a cab, into which I sank with a sigh, exhausted but happy, clutching the letter in the pocket of my robe. In that was also enough for the taxi fare, a crumpled bill and some change left over from transactions with my vintner. Now I could, without a cloud in sight, sing of how the burden of my heart had rolled away. Indeed I hummed a few measures of the hymn under my breath.
There was an instructive object lesson in my deliverance—the moral of the episode it could very well be said. Salvation had come from precisely that quarter from which I had all along feared danger. Predicament and solution have often enough a common source. I had been so blindly engulfed by my own share of the bottomless folly of mankind that I had forgotten its universality. Littlefield was as big an ass as I. The next man generally is as great a fool as oneself. Egotism and vanity guarantee it.
As Shakespeare said, “Why should I fear the likes of me?”
Or did he?
fourteen
ONE ADVERSARY, however, yet remained to be faced. In my elation that fact had slipped my mind, but the high heart in which I had it again forcibly brought to my attention made it less hard to bear than might otherwise have been the case. I was seated on the third step inside the house, ready to fire my crutches up the stairs in preparation for my sedentary climb, when Mrs. Duncan silently materialized in the parlor doorway, looking grimmer than ever.
“I’d like a word with you, Professor Waltz.”
“Certainly.”
I got to my feet again, or rather foot, and swung into the parlor with a few of the pendulum strokes at which I had become fairly deft.
“What is it, Mrs. Duncan?”
“I’m afraid I must ask you to leave. I think you know why.”
The discovery that I had been drinking having already been made, along with the violation concerning foodstuffs and the attendant responsibility for ants in the upper reaches of the house, there remained only one further revelation about my habits at which umbrage could be taken—if one excepted the presence of contraceptives in my room.
“You’ve been reading my poems,” I said, attempting to wrest from her the role of the injured party.
“I won’t ask you to leave until you’re physically able, of course. That should be in a few weeks, when you say you’ll have your cast off.”
“Another will be put on.”
“I’m just giving you the notice.”
“Was ‘Christmas at the Whorehouse’ one of them?”
“I wouldn’t care to go into details about the type of person I mistakenly took into my house.”
Invoking the invalid’s exemption from the rules of amenity by dropping into a chair though she remained standing, I exhaled a long breath and looked at her. I sat very erect, with my hands along the arms of the chair, somewhat in the attitude of the seated Lincoln in the St. Gaudens memorial.
“Mrs. Duncan,” I said, “you’re not being fair. Quite apart from the question of which is worse, writing frank poetry or snooping into other people’s things, that poem is not indecent. I deny it absolutely. In fact it has a moral—or will have when I finish. I plan to show how sin never pays and evil is requited—in this case rancor in the human heart. I could prove it by the notes I have for the rest. Let me just show you—”
“No, I wouldn’t be interested,” she said, checking my offer to go fetch my preliminary drafts. “I’ve seen quite enough of everything, from drink to ants—not to mention missing silver.”
I sensed the futility of trying to explain to her that the sob ballad tradition in which I was working was one of nostalgic innocence rather than salacious appeal; that, indeed, its innocence was one with the beaded lamps and wall chromos with which we were surrounded in this very parlor; with the horsehair chair in which I sat, and the antimacassar on it. It was one with the etching “The Deathbed Promise” which hung in my own mother’s bedroom, part of the mise-en-scène of my inflamed childhood. It showed a woman ravaged by illness, gazing from her pillow at a kneeling son, while the father stands with his face to the wall in the attitude of one playing hide-and-seek, though beating it with his fists. Taken together, these constituted the kind of corn to which I was myself more than half addicted, though its victim; or perhaps because I was its victim, nostalgia being so intermingled with pain. The tearjerkers I collected in an ostensibly humorous vein actually released emotions deeply felt, though forbidden expression by sophisticated fashion and intellectual restraint.
I hobbled haughtily off, assuring Mrs. Duncan that I would not encumber the house she ran or taint the air she breathed any longer than was absolutely necessary.
That you can’t go home again is a truth inseparably linked to the fact that neither can you ever get away from it, as I had tried to tell Marion. The train of associations unloosed by my defense of “Christmas at the Whorehouse” now poured out of hiding (like ants over a sweetmeat), seeming to emerge from every crevice of memory. I remembered the time I had stood at the foot of my mother’s sickbed reciting “The Destruction of Sennacherib” with all the expression with which I had “rendered” the selection at the school “Christmas exercises” which her illness prevented her attending. I remembered her wan face, framed in the pool of hair upon the pillow, so like that of the woman in “The Deathbed Promise” etching hanging on the nearby wall. I remembered my father, then in his prime, before the hangover that had so untimely felled him, sitting in a chair, smiling with the same pride as hers in the resonance of my elocution and the sweep of my gestures. “And there lay the steed with his nostrils all wide …” I remembered my next having to sing one or two of the carols in which we had raised our voices at the mission service from which her illness had also kept her, and to which I had dutifully gone in her stead. My mother had briefly joined in the carols, and then my father, “on a secular basis, remember. And then me and Tom will go pick out a tree, to commemorate the winter solstice like the pagans of old.” I recalled hating him for the intellectual rigidity insisted on even in that sickroom—so much so that I freely gave a testimonial for Christ to make my mother feel better. I recoiled equally from that in turn, though—from her hand fondling my head after I had done so. I similarly shook my father’s hand from my shoulder as we trudged through falling snow toward the vacant lot where Mr. Lubek sold his evergreens. In this way I resented all the family schrecklichkeit that converged on me from opposing directions in the formative years of my childhood. If formative is the right word for so chaotic and jumbled a human result as I.
Now I lay on a bed in Mrs. Duncan’s rooming house, hating the hate that modern enlightenments so freely urge our airing, as an aid to the comprehension of family relationships and the cultivation of mental health. “Your conversions were aimed at your father, your blasphemies at your mother,” a guidance counselor had told me when I was a student at Polycarp. He had even drawn a square with a cross inside it to illustrate the diagonal intersection of hostilities that formed my character. “Recognize that and be free.” I had recognized it and was free—to attend divine service on Sunday, and on Monday to read Bertrand Russel
l’s A Free Man’s Worship to my English class, with equal zest and a raging fury that its dark declarations were so.
Feeling wretched now, I went out to the hall telephone and called my mother (whom I had not told about my broken leg). She was at the warehouse.
“Ma? It’s me.”
“Hello, Tom. How are you?”
“Fine, Ma. And you?”
“All right. Busy.”
“That’s good. How’s Pa?”
“Same.”
“I read a hangover remedy in the paper the other day. I’ve got it here. Shall I read it to you?”
“I’ll get a pencil.”
We had never given up hope. Now I read off the ingredients of something that, with the simple addition of gin, would have made one of today’s more favored cocktails. So many hangover remedies have that ring. “Lemon juice, tomato juice, Worcestershire …” That done, my mother asked me whether I went to church regularly, and I told her yes, while bridling with resentment.
Closing the door, I lay on my bed with Chopin going softly on the portable phonograph. Poland may justly claim him, despite his French origins. His father was a refugee from Lorraine, but Chopin was a spirit instinctively vibrant to the rhythms of Polish folk songs, a heart through which flowed Slavic blood. Even the Polish skies seem to be in his delicate chromatic tints. They are not blazing azure we are told, but a blue delicate and fine. In Mazovia, his birthplace, it is touched with an exquisite mauve, the familiar hue of all his music. The miraculously hardy hybrid resulting to the permanent literature of romantic music is perhaps not so miraculous after all, for the temperaments blended to produce it are not all that dissimilar. There is a flamboyance in the Polish nature that has made people call us “the Frenchmen of the north.” Viscont de Vogüe called us “the Italians of the north.” The wincing strains of the preludes and nocturnes catch a certain pathétique that people now rather sentimentally associate with Slavic history. Sainte-Beuve said, “Even the word Poland is touching.” Here, at any rate, was a level on which one could with impunity satiate the taste for unabashed emotion. Here an outlet for one who believes in the scarlet thread of pain: tearstained letters, marble fountains, maidens waiting, floating swans and people spitting blood—all that.
After an hour of this, I decided I had to see somebody, and made up my mind to call Marion Wellington. As I was thinking about it, the telephone rang, and that was who it was.
Marion said she had had me on her mind and had wanted to call on me for some days, but had been laid up with a cold herself. The next day, Friday, she was going to run up to Chicago to spend the weekend with her parents, but perhaps we could get together Monday or Tuesday. I told her I was scheduled for a visit to the doctor’s on Monday at two, and that it would be nice if she could take me. To which she readily agreed.
“Where is Hodges!?” I asked.
“Gone back to Chicago. He’s flying to Rome, you know. I’ll look forward to seeing you Monday, Tom. If you could change the appointment to later in the afternoon, we might go on to dinner.”
This development restored my spirits, and I returned to the bed to contemplate the evening thus guaranteed as in store for me. I realized at length that I was lying in the position natural to me, on my stomach, my arms embracing the pillow, so indicative of starved affection and retreat from reality into infantile evasion. I quickly rolled over onto my back in the face-up attitude which shows a more healthy masculine self-assurance together with a willingness to shoulder adult responsibilities.
I had been given an approximate date when the removal of my cast might be hoped for. I had no idea that the cast would also have to be temporarily taken off for the x-ray which was to be part of Monday’s interim examination, and was therefore completely unprepared for the sight of a strapping blonde nurse, armed with a power saw, approaching the table on which I lay. Marion Wellington had moreover insisted on coming along into the treatment room to watch.
She stood with folded arms while the nurse pulled my trousers off, preparatory to the carpentry, and hung them on a hook. As the nurse plugged in the power saw and picked it up, I recalled with horror the still unrecovered contents of the cast, mentally tallying what was to fall out as it was dismantled. There was a complete dinner service for one, as well as a desk ruler, and the carcasses of God knew how many ants. As for the stains just below the groin, where the whiskey and insecticide must have discolored the orthopedic stocking lining the inside of the cast, these were of a kind that did not bear thinking about. Fortunately I lay on my side with my face to the wall for the first incision, which the nurse prefaced by saying as she picked up the saw, “Now, this little disc on here, this blade, doesn’t rotate—it vibrates from side to side. So there’s absolutely no danger of cutting you. The orthopedic stocking will itself stop the blade before it touches your skin. So there’s no need to be alarmed.”
I mumbled something into the crook of my arm, which I didn’t catch. Then the nurse switched on the electricity, starting the motor. She bisected the plaster of Paris from the haunch down, lifting my shirttail up as she began the steady cutting motion. For a few minutes everything went smoothly. Then suddenly the insane whine of the saw was interrupted, or augmented, by a metallic screech that drew from the nurse an exclamation audible above the combined dins. “What on earth was that?”
I raised my head without turning it and mumbled something inarticulate again, at the same time shrugging to profess total ignorance of what she was talking about—even disassociating myself from the proceedings going forward under her charge. Then I lowered my head onto my arm again.
The obstruction, as far as I could infer, was bypassed with a roundabout incision by which she also circumvented other objects encountered in her downward passage, which became increasingly gingerly and tentative. However, that side of the cast was slit in due course, and I turned over for the other side, which was slashed without incident, though the nurse continued with a caution born of experience. Once she said something to Marion that I didn’t get, but the gist of which seemed to have to do with the extraordinary articles sometimes recovered from children’s casts. Marion nodded and smiled, watching with no change in her posture and none in her expression, except perhaps for a slight tightening of her lips. Her arms were folded over a white and blue peasant blouse, with a scoop neck and drawstring, like that of a purse with precious contents. Such is the metaphorical line of thought set going in me by sight of girls so dressed.
When the cast had been split down both sides and two short transverse incisions made in the foot, the nurse shut off the power saw, laid it by, and picked up a large pair of pincers with which she pried the halves apart. The cast cracked open noisily, like a nut. As she separated the two portions, the contents began raining to the floor. First the knife fell with a clatter, followed by the spoon, ruler and fork. I joined the women in glancing down curiously at these articles, as though I had never seen them before.
“Would you like these?” the nurse asked, after stooping to pick them up. I shook my head, closing my eyes. She disposed of them, along with the fragments of the cast, in a large waste container.
“Now then, sit up. Up we go.”
My broken leg, dangling down over the side of the table, was surprisingly weak and frail. What was more unnerving, it quivered uncontrollably, and also, exposed to the air for the first time, began to itch unbearably. The ants were as nothing compared with this. I sat for fully five minutes scratching with both hands in an ecstasy almost orgiastic. Marion averted her eyes from my face, the expression on which must have been distasteful, even obscene. The nurse, apparently used to this phenomenon, ignored it except for the humoring smile common to her kind. Dead skin, clawed free, fell to the floor like snow.
I was given a tunic in which to hobble across the passage to another room, where the leg was x-rayed and found to be knitting beautifully. “You’ve got the bones of a three-year-old,” the doctor said. Then I was led back to the room I had been in previous
ly, where a fresh cast was put on, this one reaching only below the knee. Thus at last sufficient mobility for getting up and down stairs was restored to me.
“How do you feel now?” Marion asked, as we drove off.
“I can dance as well as ever,” I answered from the back, where I sat with my leg stretched out on the seat.
“Now you’ll be able to resume your classes.”
“Has Hodges! gone?”
“Yes, he’s in Rome. Where would you like to eat?”
“How about the Blue Lantern. If the school office is still open you might run in and pick up my salary check.”
The Blue Lantern was a country restaurant halfway to the Illinois border. We drank wine by candlelight, at a corner window over an illuminated waterfall. Nothing was said about the flatware that had fallen out of the cast, or what I had yelled in chapel, or what was thought of these and other matters connected with the basic train of events, though I could sense Marion turning them all over in her mind as she appraised me with the speculative compassion peculiar to her. The veil of silence having best fallen, I did not discuss Norm Littlefield’s reactions either, or the turn in my own fortunes brought about by his unexpected misconstruction of my behavior. I began to suspect that everybody knew Littlefield had been the intended butt of the remark except Littlefield himself. It seems likely now that Marion had not been sitting with him in chapel, as I had originally thought, only next to him; that they had never been in one another’s company and had gone their separate ways when chapel was over, and so had never discussed the incident. I now wisely saw that all these sleeping dogs must be let lie, but there was one unfortunate feature about that. It was a pity that I could not share with her Norm Littlefield’s misapprehension, because masculine folly seemed to magnetize her. That gave me my first uneasy inkling of what I had in common with Hodges! It was plain that she was not a woman to be “won,” swept off her feet, mastered or overpowered, or anything of that sort. She rather required an object for salvation.
Let Me Count the Ways: A Novel Page 16