“Were you in prison?”
“No,” he said, “I wasn’t.”
Among the people swirling like a bright lava through the terrace doors was Jack Flickenden, flushed with excitement. The crown of victory had slipped over one ear. The fish-man forged past, pointing to the bar. “Get stewed to the gills …”
The telephone rang at ten minutes to twelve. Swallow was standing alone in a corner, wincing under the need to wince, when he saw Helen Flickenden run to Nickie after answering it and whisper something in his ear. Nickie nodded, twisting out a cigarette, and rose.
Swallow put pity from him. A surgeon with tears in his eyes is worthless—a menace. God had no pity. He had compassion. Pity was the underside of the coin of contempt. It is the one emotion nobody gets anything out of … Such thoughts are scarcely beacons for an era verging toward its Night, Swallow mused. They relieved without dispelling the gloom, like fireflies garnishing a dusk over which hover the incurious and eternal stars. But they would have to do, both for the cruel brevity of life and its appalling length.
Everyone was piling into cars. Word had buzzed round about what Nickie Sherman had been summoned for, and a macabre gaiety was in the making. On the clipped lawn (resembling a rug so much more than the turf of shag inside) Swallow saw his wife glance speculatively over at him as she climbed into the Flickendens’ growling MG. Swallow found himself in a congested limousine with Nickie on his lap. Lila sat beside them, a hand on Nickie’s wrist; they had been like that all evening, affectionately linked again in the unity of their costumes. Swallow could hear her mind ticking: “This may be his Big Chance.” Nickie’s cap was switched to rights, the peak in front. Was it his elegibility for mercy? A word whispered in his ear that it was all a jape, and no one need drink up eisel. But wasn’t the whole idea that someone drink up eisel? It was how the prescription read …
The Markeys’ house was a blaze of lights. Sue met them at the door in a quilted wrapper, her hair loose and gesturing hysterically. She had always overacted on the stage; it was why she was a housewife now.
Nickie bustled importantly inside, an arm around Sue, while most of the thrill seekers, chastened and a little ashamed, waited in the yard or on the road in their cars. Swallow followed Lila and Crystal into the vestibule, then on into the parlor.
The body was sprawled face-up on a couch, its head hanging over the edge and its tongue lolling between clenched teeth. The sight reminded Swallow of those faces scrawled on schoolyard walls with the caption, “Teacher.” A length of cord, torn from some electric appliance, was twisted around the neck. Ted Markey was in pajamas.
Nickie Sherman went skillfully to work, combing the premises for clues. He avoided rather squeamishly the body itself, Swallow noted.
“When did you discover him, Mrs. Markey?” he asked, stooping to read the title of a book spread-eagled on the rug beside the couch. “I know this is difficult, but try to remember.”
“Why, just now,” Sue said, “when I called you. I had been washing some things out while Ted caught up on his reading. There’s the book. I went in to ask him something and found—this. Oh, God. He was only thirty-four!” She buried her face on Swallow’s shoulder. “We were so happy together. Why should anyone want to do a thing like this to Ted?”
Nickie opened and shut the drawers of a buhl cabinet, looked down out the open window. “Robbery was not the motive,” he said. “Have you notified the police?”
“I wanted you to see it first. The police never do anything. Your sitter told me where you were and I called there. I hope you don’t mind.”
“Of course not, Mrs. Markey. The police do their best,” Nickie said generously. “You might call them now. I’ll have seen all I need before they get here and disturb the scene. This was a wanton crime, committed by a man of medium height or slightly under, wearing a dark blue sweater and sneakers with thick crepe soles.”
“How can you tell?” Lila asked. “How did you know that, Nickie?”
“It’s possible to deduce both from the position of the body and something about the window. Entry was made through the window, which was only a third of the way open, not high enough for a man of any size. There are footprints in the flower bed of a pattern made only by those thick gum soles. There’s a snag of blue wool under this splinter on the sill. You see?”
Swallow was watching the figure on the sofa for signs of breathing, as playgoers do a corpse on the stage. No motion was discernible. Had Ted been in the theater too? Swallow couldn’t remember. Could the wire round the neck have accidentally got too …? He saw only the lewd judge droning sentence, the visitors bringing him tangerines on Sunday, the attempted suicide with rotten suspenders … Sue shifted a chair cushion and raked her hair. Evidently she was running out of dramatic resources. “He was going to get a promotion next month,” she stated into a handkerchief.
Nickie at last stepped over and examined the prostrate form more closely. He bent an ear to the chest and listened a moment, then transferred his study to the tongue. He drew the bottom lid of one eye down with his thumb and examined the eyeball. Swallow closed his own eyes and prayed that Ted Markey had had experience on the Elizabethan stage, or even the Grand Guignol, to account for the total lack of rise and fall of the torso. Nickie turned away and glanced in his strollings at Sue.
“Perhaps one of the others can phone them for you,” he said. “The police. You’re probably in no condition to.”
She buried her face in her hands, shaking her head distractedly. “I’d get the Fire Department.”
The sofa creaked as the corpse got to its feet.
“Better let me do it, darling,” Ted said. “You’ve had a trying night.”
Those in the room took steps in varying directions. Then they all froze, and looked at one another like participants in a ritual of which the exact sequence had been forgotten. Ted and Sue grinned at one another, then at the rest, who somewhat woodenly followed suit. People seemed to be baring their teeth for the purpose of comparing dental work. One side of Nickie’s face twitched up, like that of a man drawing a shred of food from his teeth. Swallow’s wife whispered to him: “I think this is the most …” Lila heard it and glared at him. Swallow rocked faintly on the balls of his feet, like the Ghost in more sensitive productions of Hamlet, while a deep sunburn overspread Nickie’s features.
Lila went to Nickie’s side and took his arm.
“He knew it all the time, only he didn’t want to spoil your fun,” she said. “Come on, Nickums, tell us when you first knew it was a hoax. Play fair now, be honest. When did you first tumble, and what was it that gave the game away? How did you know?”
Swallow sat on the back porch of his house, on the worn glider, staring over the trees at the rising sun. A drained coffee cup stood at his elbow. He looked up “eisel” for the third time, in as many dictionaries. This one defined it simply as vinegar, just like the others, but noted its use in Hamlet: “Woul’t drink up eisel?” As he set it aside he heard a footstep behind him. What is so personal as a tread? Like a signature on the stair. He knew Crystal was standing in the doorway in the faded flower wrapper.
“I didn’t sleep a wink,” she said.
“Do you think I liked doing it?”
“Oh, no more of that infinitely gentle, infinitely suffering business, please. You’ve been going around like a Graham Greene character all night. All that knowledge-of-weariness and weariness-of-knowledge, God-will-forgive-us-everything-but-our-optimism stuff.”
“Can I pour you some coffee?”
“There’s no more cream.”
Seeing her shuffle onto the porch in a robe even drabber than he’d remembered, Swallow felt an old tightening of the shackle of love. Why do we celebrate beauty when it is a threadbare house garment, a new wrinkle, a sagging shoulder that bind us with bands of steel? He recalled that he had married her not in a tide of passion but because her mother had sunburned her face through a basket, making the whole family too ridiculous to des
ert. There was an aunt who sold Christmas cards so awful you bought three dozen. Love was the prisoner of pity; lust fed on the very shocks of intimacy, renewed itself on pain and rage. Every embrace is a collision. And so on. He leaned over on the glider and pressed his hands against the sides of his head, as though by squeezing thought from his brain he might still the throb of paradox.
“I got so tired of whistling down the wind with him, Chris.” He willed himself not to vomit; what he let out instead was a gorge of verbalized misery. He spoke leaning over, and imagined what he said to constitute a widening pool on the rattan rug. “You see, the thing he had to be shown is that there’s no adversary for him. Not that he isn’t brilliant himself, but that life offers no Raffles to use it on. He’s like half of a pair of scissors. Therefore, no living in it. And my sister with huge rents to pay, and my nieces going around with them in their clothes. Huge rents.”
“Oh, Jesus.” She leaned her brow on the window frame, her arms hanging at her sides as though her nervous system were losing touch with parts of her at an alarming rate. “He threatened to kill himself. Did you know that?” Her foot of itself recovered a mule it had lost.
“I simply had to get him down out of that balloon. More is not asked of a man than he can take. We think of the failure of theology when what we ought to get straight is the theology of failure. That you have to deserve it. Those not up to defeat are not picked for it. Ezra Pound said:
For God, our God is a gallant foe that playeth behind the veil. Whom God deigns not to overthrow hath need of triple mail.
Kill himself? What’s that you say?”
“Yes. Can you take that on your conscience?” Swallow said nothing. He wiped his moist temples with the sleeve of his pajamas. “He’s been walking the streets all night. Lila says he was home three times and went away again. He was last seen going in the direction of the waterfront.”
It is because of our relationships that we suffer. What fools we are to fear solitude. Swallow remembered a week spent alone in Vermont in the dead of winter: the stark immaculate pines standing like Breughel trees, the snow falling like grains of Bromo-Seltzer. He thought: life is a tragedy perpetuated by the passion that relieves it.
“Have we any eisel in the house?”
He was not surprised to hear the telephone ring: stunned but not surprised. Crystal went to the kitchen to answer it. It would be Lila again, reporting.
When Crystal ran back from the kitchen the sound of her slippers was like a horde of rats hurrying in his direction. The sun was clear of the treetops. Where did it come from, what did it want? We groped in the dark, while the mysteries blazed down on us.
“That was Lila. She just heard a news report. A police bulletin from the waterfront precinct station.”
Swallow had once read a fantasy concerning a country in which light traveled at the rate of ten miles an hour. Her fact reached him with that kind of dreamy leisure, while he stood apart from himself, as it were, witnessing its impact on himself.
“Whuh—? Whah—?” He opened and closed his mouth several times, as though by so doing he might trap the right words out of the air as a dog does flies. “You’ve known me long enough. Let me know in easy stages,” he said. “One, did they find him wet?”
She came forward to the glider and smoothed a cushion on it. The female urge to narrate, to make a thing of tidings.
“What’s he done, for God’s sake, woman? Out with it, by degrees!”
“It’s not what he’s done. It’s what somebody else has done. Chick, the Flickendens were robbed last night. Twenty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels from their bedroom.”
Swallow was on his feet. “Pete Cheshire—”
She nodded, her face radiant with the relief that was flooding him too.
“They called Nickie immediately to retain him. As well they might, the way they laughed at the poor boy. It’s another chance for him, just in time to save his face. Or maybe even his soul.”
“Where is he?”
“Safe in bed. Went to sleep like a baby when he heard about it. There’s your other half of that pair of scissors. I’ll take that coffee after all, with milk. Nickie called the shot too, that’s another thing in his favor. Remember how he said at the party he wouldn’t be surprised if the Smoothie struck tonight? Oh, it’s like a kind of miracle. Just think, Chick. Twenty thousand dollars’ worth of jewels stolen. It makes you think there’s a God in heaven after all.”
the DOGHOUSE
Convention has always more heroes than revolt.
BEN HECHT: A Jew in Love
9
WHO kissed the Sleeping Beauty awake was none other than the Prince Charming of American letters. You know who I mean. That style was a glittering wand that had but to be flourished over the dreaming likes of Sweetie to make her sit up and rub her eyes. The long overtime childhood was finished. But it left in her a store of fissionable matter ready for the right sensibility to rearrange. By sensibility I do not mean that flabby impressionability thanks to which a man standing barefoot on a coin can tell whether it is heads or tails. I mean that almost ethereal attunement able to draw the data through shoe leather.
When I first mentioned Fitzgerald to Sweetie she thought I meant the translator of The Rubaiyat, and began one of those invitational and purely academic dashes through the gorse that were so much more wearing than the bacchanals would have been of which they were the empty blueprint. I thought to myself, “No, dearie, that ballet is over. Come meet your new choreographer,” and from under the wild cherry, bright in its dazzling pestilence of summer beetles, waggled The Great Gatsby and Tender Is the Night in my two hands. “I don’t mean Edward Fitzgerald—I mean F. Scott. See how he parts his name on the side. Come here. He won’t bite you. Have you read him?”
She came pouting back through the gorse.
“I don’t read novels.”
Then that was the whole trouble! She had been too long the prisoner of poets, who teach you only how to die, not live. This girl needed characters to ape, not verse forms—influences on her conduct. For if the principle of imitation is all it seems—and religions call believers to perfection by no other—then progress is a series of successful plagiarisms, and the good life a long, translucent parody on which God the Father will grade us at the last. All the world’s a stage—in our development.
I tumbled those glimmering pages into her lap together with This Side of Paradise and the best of the short stories, and left her there. I left her for thirty days and thirty nights. If, as I thought, she was Poetry’s little debutante, it followed as the night the day who must handle her coming out.
When I called again after dinner a month later I was met in the dooryard by another girl.
She emerged from the house carrying a glass of red wine from the dinner table. Her dress was a civilized summer print of a material known, I believe, as bleeding madras. The river of chocolate malted that had been her hair was gone—in its place a tuft of chopped gold. Even her feet were changed. She wore no shoes as yet, but there was something about them that it took me a second to place. She had been walking through money, that was it, lots of money, and you could hear it whispering like a green protective foliage in her path. (One hoped her father had enough to defray whatever little improvisation she had in store for us now!)
“Oh, Chick, we’re all so beautiful!” she cried. “I had no idea. From now on I’m going to live! I’m going to live if it kills me!”
“How will you begin?” I sat on the porch steps fanning myself with a straw boater. There was a hushed, almost erotic expectancy to the night. The moon sailed like a wedge of Persian melon over the far trees. When Sweetie drank her wine I imagined it running directly into her veins.
“I want to work on my poems,” she said. “I see what’s wrong with them now. They’re awful. Sweetie sorry. Sweetie ashamed.” Instead of behaving childishly as heretofore, she deliberately talked baby talk, thus keeping at a fashionable remove from herself, which was som
ething else altogether, and quite fabulous in its way. This gained degree of detachment put her poetry in its first perspective. “But maybe I can turn their very awfulness to account. Make conscious parodies out of the unconscious that you once mentioned. Maybe I could get a book of them published.” She laughed into her wine and then laid a hand over the glass, as though she were trying to bottle the night’s mirth, or had just jailed a bright bug. “Sweetie dying to go New York. Want toofums filled by someone better than old Decency dentist anyway. Sweetie want to see the Ritz.”
“It’s been torn down.”
“Then Sweetie go Plaza. Sit in lobby and see if the music makes the palm trees quiver. Oh Chick, the sands are running—every morning I’ve been rubbing another night’s worth out of my eyes and never knowing it. I want to do something. I’ve begun work on some of the poems already. Would you like to hear them?”
“Very much.”
She recited her revisions in an eager murmur, hugging her drawn-up knees and gazing at the sky.
Now, you sniveling hypochondriac,
Your sort of thing is done;
Drop that pillbox right away
And get inside of one.
Don’t throw up your hands because
Your stomach’s bent on bolting;
Don’t turn and run because you find
The masses are revolting.
“Auden,” I said.
“I yuv you!” She kissed me in a burst of gratitude for having guessed. A window slid either up or down—it makes no difference which. “It’s now a much better satire on the whole ivory-tower proletarianism of that day,” I said when I could speak. “What else?”
She reeled off several more, all showing the same ripening mondanité at work. One thing about the late-bloomer is that it usually blooms fast. I fancied I could see Sweetie improve the way you can see the hand of a clock move if you watch closely. I don’t know how long we sat there. The melon-slice of moon paled as it climbed the sky from Persian to cranshaw; from cranshaw to casaba. The stars struck me as a handful of hot rivets precariously holding together a night threatening to burst under the strain of too much ecstasy.
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