“Saw Shannon the other day, remember him? The doorman, at old 270 East. He’s still working, two doors down.” I’d passed him slowly but without stopping, thinking of causes and effects.
“Sure, Quent; I recall he had your same hair.” Buddy knows in a deal you sometimes shoot out sideways; he’s even savoring it. But he’s short on time. “I asked you, Quent.” He likes calling me that. “Who for?”
I leaned farther back. They had good armchairs in that hospital. To sustain the guests. “For me.”
“Y—. But you just quit architecture.”
He’s afraid I’m a quitter. They always are.
“Money is architecture.” A tour of his office taught me that.
“Builds houses, for sure.” His eyes veiled themselves, before he reached for his own shades, black-lensed tortoise-shell. “But I’ve an idea you don’t mean that.”
“No.”
“And MIT?”
“A computer is architecture. I’ll teach it that.” I leaned forward. “Other day, I finally looked up the word ‘actuary.’ Jesus.” I pulled the dictionary page from my pocket. Like an eye that might explode. “One whose profession is to solve monetary problems depending on Interest and Probability, in connection with life, fire, or other accidents.” Italics mine.
“Insurance actuary? Like Abe? You want to go back to being that?”
I wondered if Abe’d ever written him letters. I put the page back in my pocket. If I ever had office stationery, I’d put that quote on it. If I ever had a son. “Why couldn’t a computer handle all the probabilities?”
“What others are there?”
I could see them—for him. Memory and sadness, and the glass cage of family that had crashed from him, all joined together, keeping him alive and killing him, like a capon’s breastbone sticking out of a man’s throat. Even so, I whispered. “Why couldn’t it help organize—a whole single life?”
He reached out and took off my shades. To see if I’m nuts. Or to make plain he thinks I must be. Any layman would say so at once. But he’s had the course. And already he’s reacting like the first man at MIT I spoke to. And the second, and the one those two brought in, a day after. He’s already sold.
Just to say it, sells them. Just to hear it. “Can you implement?” they say, if they’re on the inside—and start telling you how. Just to think it. The chance of seeing your whole life, in a clear eye-cup—it maddens us. Once it must have been like that when they listened to Freud.
“You could end up providing a service just like laundry,” I said, not forgetting to laugh. A consultation service; organizing a man’s knowledge of his own life.” Not just for payrolls, or for interplanetary, either. For down here. And not just for crowds. You’d need whole banks of 7090’s, or better. “It would be a life-bank like the records the government is building. Only every man for himself.” But all I’d need to begin is old Batface. And me.
Experiment on yourself, that’s in the tradition, the MIT guy said. Pleased. Data processing’s a whole life for you kids, isn’t it. Anyway for a thesis, it will do.
I was hoarse, and no wonder. I’d just written him the hardest letter of my life.
“In exchange, I’ll handle Dave and Sol for you,” I said. “I’ll learn the banking business, so’s I can handle them.”
“Handling. That all it is to you.”
“I have got ambition, Buddy. Just not the old ones. Just—not yours.”
We looked at each other.
That’s all that’s different. That’s what’s so sad.
“The hardest thing is still to tell, Buddy.”
“Tell it.”
“I want to bring in Maeve.”
He leaned forward.
“I saw Janacek. He’s not a man to stay with steady. But he’s very needy. So I don’t know how long it will take.”
“Maeve down at the office again? You flatter yourself.” But he was still leaning.
“You’ll see.” I don’t tell him I plan to bring her in as a kind of partner eventually—the kind he would never let her be. Maeve once studied to be a broker, Blum said. I can just see her handling Sol and Dave. Just hold yourself open for anything, I’ll tell her. Like people our age. You can do it. You did it once.
“Yes, I can see it,” Buddy said. “It’ll happen when I die.” Suddenly he reached for my shades. Put his tortoise-shells on my nose. Put my shades on his.
I leaned forward. I saw blackly through his lenses. Behind mine, were his eyes exploding? It was a long time until spring. In the mirror-lenses, I saw myself, in him.
“Snap out of it,” I said. “It’s only a business deal. Abe liked Christian help, didn’t he? For the humility.”
The air in a hospital reverberates anyway—so why not?
“Won’t you want to travel again soon?” he said, from behind. And from between his teeth.
“Nossuh.” I could feel my old jauntiness rising between us. “I’ll be a world-bum at home.”
When I got up to leave, he was staring hopefully. I had brought him the right pill.
I wasn’t at all sure Maeve would ever come back. But meanwhile it all helps, along with the kidney machine.
We are taking his wastes.
“Take it easy,” I said, exchanging the shades. “You were brought up to expect the best, that’s all. Us to expect the worst. It’ll work out.”
“Smart,” he said. “Very smart.”
Outside the room, I stood against a wall, exhausted. Love is obligation. You lean forward; you lean back.
A nurse came along. “What’s the matter, kiddo?” When I raised my head, she said “Uh—ooooh … Kid-do.” Pretty girl, prepared to make something of it. When she saw I couldn’t, she put a hand up, and patted. My shoulder. My cheek. Smiled. And went on her way.
Grace always breaks me up. Anybody’s.
My tears for him sluiced through my fingers like his money. Nothing I could do for him either way. Live an imitation life, you get an imitation death.
HE WENT TO SEE Father Melchior. These days, when he left the office, he went on foot—there was such wonderful chance in neighborhoods. The days were growing cold and he wore his jacket again for the first time. Souvenir of the hunting world his father had tried to put him in, it brought him back the guerrilla ways of summer. Ducking two trucks, he let a Yellow Cab tickle his heel, stopped it dead on his turf—he had the light with him—said, “Yalla?” to it as city boys used to do, and made it to the faded red-brick compound across the street, and up a set of those high Roman Catholic steps.
… This is the neighborhood Shannon once came from. Found him going on his lunch hour like always, for a sandwich and a snifter at his brother-in-law’s bar. Shannon’s father worked in a saloon on Ninth Avenue all his life. The brother-in-law’s is still on Second Avenue, next door to a thrift shop. Used to be called Dugout For Buddies, now it’s the Green Beret—that’s how you missed it. Sure and I remember you boy, walk along. Getting to be hard, doing these ten blocks two ways every lunchtime; when I can’t, I’ll quit for good. Set ’em up, he said, when we were inside; here’s one of my boys. Used to steal my quarters, he said, leering fondly. Sure an’ it’s Eagle Eye, I said, fellas, when the boy came up to me. The line at the bar laughed; they knew he didn’t remember me. “He don’t play that shill-game here.” When they wanted to know where I’d been in the war, I said India. On reconnaissance. He’s looking for a profession, Shannon said. Sanitation was still good, the bar-line said. Union tight as drum. But the Port Authority is still open. He’s in with his father, you boobies. Shannon made eyes at them to let me ante for the beer after all. He’s a tenant, Shannon said.
Even so, it’s like standing on the beach, watching the worn glass roll in along with the stones; not many spars any more but lots of paper, and often it still says something readable, and just as you can bear to wrench your eyes away from that undertow, over there’s a button someone wore last week or eighty years ago—and you tug it out—saved. Not yours,
but related; nothing is lost.
Inside, the rectory feels like a trained audience. Hushed and respectful to all the sin and virtue that must come calling here. The old girl who led him into the empty study, telling him to wait, looked ready to clap for either side of it. Since he’d been summoned here, he couldn’t tell her which.
The window here was decorated for the season—cut-outs and pumpkins, on 42nd Street! Bottom remains of Hell’s Kitchen, still flowing with meat and fish and wholesale river air at the market end, working their way on up, from pimples-and-stiletto boys to that gun store just off Eighth Avenue, as it goes east. To the Main Library. And Bryant Park.
There were connections everywhere. He was finding them.
Coming out into the streets after a heady day at his console made him feel like an astronomer grounding himself, half-embarrassed at the purity of his work. Often it seemed to him that it was the computers who had the living-mindedness, and were only waiting to help the human mechanism free itself of the rote of history that held us back. He was no longer trying to record himself as the prime aim; that was the old post-uterine dream with which the psychiatrists had already grabbed off half a century. Process was the reality. No telling when—improvising one day at his keyboard—he might find another one.
He still went regularly to Cambridge, for workouts with “the boys”—as they called themselves—a group of men who had broken off from the university to form an agency for private projects, some as far-out as his, which they had housed in a ramped Bauhaus cube bought from one of the data-processors who had boomed and gone bust on Route 128. Weekdays, his hours in the office kept him from getting too rarified. Sometimes, with a weekend coming up, and when he felt his third-person sense of himself had honed itself down to the dangerline, he would give them a call: “Tell your boss, Bronstein says schizophrenia lurks—and how are you, Miss Cathcart?”—and whoever wanted a New York blow-out would fly down, bringing along any new material that interested them. Since he had put in a second console, more often, they sent somebody down on their own,—like kids to the boy with the most Tinker Toys. Salesmen of the infinite, he termed them privately—or in that daily-recorded realm which had once been private. Some had Radcliffe wives they were true to in the sack as well as the head; others wanted him to help them attack Sex City, in the bearded rock-style that was their Rotary. His celibacy of the moment didn’t frighten him. They were all ten years older than he. And though he was trying them out, one by one, no crony had as yet occurred; perhaps he was too old for it. Or they were too eager-beaver for him, on the commercial side of their own marvels. Since his last ploy with Buddy, he had been avoiding that. Though he knew as well as they, that every time pure science had stuck a real needle in the infinite, money for somebody had streamed out.
Sometimes, fantasy had them sending him down a girl. Though they had girls on the staff, he had never asked; the scenario required that she be sent. Some Madame Curie-to-be, though not necessarily with him—to whom, after a hard day together sifting for a new language in all the modes of expression that weren’t taken for granted any more, he could say “Allo, allo. Dos veedanya. Come close.” All the intellectual girls were gaudy beauties now, like from a new race of test-tube heroines. Meanwhile, Route 128 must now and then say what always would be said. “He’s a rich boy.”
…. Or did dos veedanya mean ‘Good-bye’? …
“LET ME LOOK AT you,” Melchior said deep. “I haven’t seen you since.” He turned me to the light. “You look fine.”
He’d only seen me once. And I no longer stand for social talk. Like that language must be changed. If we’re to find the other one. “Anybody’s superior who’s alive. Even a son. You can’t help feeling it.”
He has a great stone smile, like a natural phenomenon you can drive to see every Sunday, afterwards putting a sticker on the car to say you’ve been. Underneath though, is his hugeness different?—I only saw him once. He wears the smile like it’s just given him.
First they send for you. Then they wait for you to talk.
“Thought priests had to be strictly on norm,” I said. “Size and everything.” Witkower’s uncle hadn’t made it because the joint of his little finger had been cut off.
Melchior’s hand, the right one, perches on him like a rabbit, undisturbed by his chuckles. “In Friesland, I am normal.”
“Friesland. I always wanted to go there.” No reindeer but sub-Arctic dreams of them, and an endless skin of sea, spring like a short, bright-green pain. And the seven-foot people, like the Houyhnhnms surely, with seven-foot spirits to match—what a way to dwarf the world. “My grandmother was born in the town where Jonathan Swift went to school.”
“Ah-h—uh?”
Meaning—if he didn’t know what I was talking about, all was still received in the name of the angels. And the burden was still on me, to speak up.
I am trying. To say what I think—daily. But it’s much harder when someone is listening personally. Or worse—theologically.
“Hear your grandmother approves of Florida, wants to settle there.”
That why I’m here?
“Not to worry. I’m taking care of it.”
Near the end of the calendar year—Gran had written—until that date, she reminded me, I could still avoid capital gains on the sale of the flat if I bought her a house.
He raised his eyebrows. Three and a half inches, each of them. The change from ordinary scale was restful. If you had another face, Batface—should it be like this? Like a good ogre? Or a horse? “We were under the impression—that Mrs. Reeves—”
No, Batface. It shouldn’t.
“Had the money?” Poor Reeves. I didn’t want to incriminate her. “I could be wrong. But then—why would she be taking care of Gran?”
His mouth could look smaller. “We thought it was an exchange of gifts. Some of them—intangible.”
“Oy.”
“Beg pardon?”
“A Yiddish expletive. Mentioning the intangible brings out the Jew in me.”
“For it or against!”
I blew out my breath. He was hunched forward. All his lines of force. Cathedrals of them. Pointed at my little hack heart. It does make one feel valuable. “That why I’m here?”
“They did write. Asking for news of your progress.”
“They?”
“Mrs. Reeves is—taking instruction.”
“From Gran?” I started to laugh. Feeling in my pocket for Gran’s spidery witch-note. “Yeah, she has gits. Though I can’t see Reeves as a kleptomaniac.” At the Miami-Hilton especially.
“Pardon.” He gave it the German pronunciation.
I took out the folded note. “The note from her you gave me that day. Day I came back from Wales. I stuck it away. Just came across it this morning.”
He put on square specs. “‘Taffy was a Welshman.’” That was all. He handed it back. “What does that mean?”
“A nursery rhyme. The next line is ‘Taffy was a thief.’ When I was a kid. I stole a couple of old silver spoons from her. To give to Maeve.”
The specs slid forward. “Mrs. Reeves has been taking instruction from me.” He took the slip from me and tore it up.
“Thanks. That was kind.”
“Kind?”
“To both of us … Is that religious objectivity?”
“I mean the word, Mr. Bronstein. I hear it at the seminary all the time. Among the younger ones.”
“Instead of ‘good,’ you mean?”
He nodded. “When an English says ‘That’s kind,’ he used to mean only ‘That’s nice.’ But now—”
“It’s got its emotion back?”
He likes to nod, and wait.
Interlocutory conversion. Two can play at it.
Couldn’t smile at his smile though. Like dropping a pebble into Melchior’s Gap. So I put my head down to what I remember. The truth sticks there. “It’s a word comes to mind when you think of animals.”
He asked me to repeat: I sp
oke too low.
“Like Gran stinks as a person. But think of her as a cat—she’s a howl.”
He rubbed his hands. “That is religious objectivity.” Rang a bell at his side. “Tea or coffee, eh? If we are going to have a dialogue.”
“Two people don’t have a dialogue. What they pick to say is only a millionth of what they could.”
“I heard you were studying those machines. Thinking ones. Do they do it better?”
“In terms of multiples. But they have to be fed by people.”
He laughed aloud. “And are you kind to them?”
“The best dialogue is between a p-person, and a—what you call a machine.”
He stared at me. When the woman came in, he said, “Mrs. McMurter. Go down to the cellar and bring us each a bottle of wine.”
We fell silent. I wondered what Friesland women were like. I smelled religion cooking. Or the creeping daily habit of it, that was set to rise like dough in the back of a bake shop, and ended every morning in a yeastly bread-image of God. “The house listens for you, doesn’t it? Even when you don’t understand things.”
“The church does.”
When the woman brought the tray, he set out the glasses, put biscuits and cheese to one side of each of us, in equal portions, like a referee, then opened the bottles—drawing each cork as smooth as I ever saw it done—and set the bottles center field table and opposite each other, like guns.
“Rhine wine,” I said. “For dueling.”
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