Nine Stories
Page 5
«But I shall never again consider myself even the remotest judge of human nature. You may quote me wildly on that.»
«What happened?» Ginnie repeated.
«Oh, God. This person who’s been sharing my apartment for months and months and months—I don’t even want to talk about him…. This writer,” he added with satisfaction, probably remembering a favorite anathema from a Hemingway novel.
«What’d he do?»
«Frankly, I’d just as soon not go into details,” said the young man. He took a cigarette from his own pack, ignoring a transparent humidor on the table, and lit it with his own lighter. His hands were large. They looked neither strong nor competent nor sensitive.
Yet he used them as if they had some not easily controllable aesthetic drive of their own. «I’ve made up my mind that I’m not even going to think about it. But I’m just so furious,” he said. «I mean here’s this awful little person from Altoona, Pennsylvania—or one of those places. Apparently starving to death. I’m kind and decent enough—I’m the original Good Samaritan—to take him into my apartment, this absolutely microscopic little apartment that I can hardly move around in myself. I introduce him to all my friends. Let him clutter up the whole apartment with his horrible manuscript papers, and cigarette butts, and radishes, and whatnot. Introduce him to every theatrical producer in New York. Haul his filthy shirts back and forth from the laundry. And on top of it all—» The young man broke off. «And the result of all my kindness and decency,” he went on, «is that he walks out of the house at five or six in the morning—without so much as leaving a note behind—taking with him anything and everything he can lay his filthy, dirty hands on.» He paused to drag on his cigarette, and exhaled the smoke in a thin, sibilant stream from his mouth. «I don’t want to talk about it. I really don’t.» He looked over at Ginnie. «I love your coat,” he said, already out of his chair. He crossed over and took the lapel of Ginnie’s polo coat between his fingers. «It’s lovely. It’s the first really good camel’s hair I’ve seen since the war. May I ask where you got it?»
«My mother brought it back from Nassau.»
The young man nodded thoughtfully and backed off toward his chair. «It’s one of the few places where you can get really good camel’s hair.» He sat down. «Was she there long?»
«What?» said Ginnie.
«Was your mother there long? The reason I ask is my mother was down in December.
And part of January. Usually I go down with her, but this has been such a messy year I simply couldn’t get away.»
«She was down in February,” Ginnie said.
«Grand. Where did she stay? Do you know?»
«With my aunt.»
He nodded. «May I ask your name? You’re a friend of Franklin’s sister, I take it?»
«We’re in the same class,” Ginnie said, answering only his second question.
«You’re not the famous Maxine that Selena talks about, are you?»
«No,” Ginnie said.
The young man suddenly began brushing the cuffs of his trousers with the flat of his hand. «I am dog hairs from head to foot,” he said. «Mother went to Washington over the weekend and parked her beast in my apartment. It’s really quite sweet. But such nasty habits. Do you have a dog?»
«No.»
«Actually, I think it’s cruel to keep them in the city.» He stopped brushing, sat back, and looked at his wristwatch again. «I have never known that boy to be on time. We’re going to see Cocteau’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and it’s the one film where you really should get there on time. I mean if you don’t, the whole charm of it is gone. Have you seen it?»
«No.»
«Oh, you must! I’ve seen it eight times. It’s absolutely pure genius,” he said. «I’ve been trying to get Franklin to see it for months.» He shook his head hopelessly. «His taste.
During the war, we both worked at the same horrible place, and that boy would insist on dragging me to the most impossible pictures in the world. We saw gangster pictures, Western pictures, musicals—»
«Did you work in the airplane factory, too?» Ginnie asked.
«God, yes. For years and years and years. Let’s not talk about it, please.»
«You have a bad heart, too?»
«Heavens, no. Knock wood.» He rapped the arm of his chair twice. «I have the constitution of—»
As Selena entered the room, Ginnie stood up quickly and went to meet her halfway.
Selena had changed from her shorts to a dress, a fact that ordinarily would have annoyed Ginnie.
«I’m sorry to’ve kept you waiting,” Selena said insincerely, «but I had to wait for Mother to wake up…. Hello, Eric.»
«Hello, hello!»
«I don’t want the money anyway,” Ginnie said, keeping her voice down so that she was heard only by Selena.
«What?»
«I’ve been thinking. I mean you bring the tennis balls and all, all the time. I forgot about that.»
«But you said that because I didn’t have to pay for them—»
«Walk me to the door,” Ginnie said, leading the way, without saying goodbye to Eric.
«But I thought you said you were going to the movies tonight and you needed the money and all!» Selena said in the foyer.
«I’m too tired,” Ginnie said. She bent over and picked up her tennis paraphernalia.
«Listen. I’ll give you a ring after dinner. Are you doing anything special tonight? Maybe I can come over.»
Selena stared and said, «O. K.»
Ginnie opened the front door and walked to the elevator. She rang the bell. «I met your brother,” she said.
«You did? Isn’t he a character?»
«What’s he do, anyway?» Ginnie asked casually. «Does he work or something?»
«He just quit. Daddy wants him to go back to college, but he won’t go.»
«Why won’t he?»
«I don’t know. He says he’s too old and all.»
«How old is he?»
«I don’t know. Twenty‑four.»
The elevator doors opened. «I’ll call you laterl» Ginnie said.
Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.
The Laughing Man
IN 1928, when I was nine, I belonged, with maximum esprit de corps, to an organization known as the Comanche Club. Every schoolday afternoon at three o’clock, twenty‑five of us Comanches were picked up by our Chief outside the boys’ exit of P. S. 165, on 109th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. We then pushed and punched our way into the Chief’s reconverted commercial bus, and he drove us (according to his financial arrangement with our parents) over to Central Park. The rest of the afternoon, weather permitting, we played football or soccer or baseball, depending (very loosely) on the season. Rainy afternoons, the Chief invariably took us either to the Museum of Natural History or to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Saturdays and most national holidays, the Chief picked us up early in the morning at our various apartment houses and, in his condemned‑looking bus, drove us out of Manhattan into the comparatively wide open spaces of Van Cortlandt Park or the Palisades. If we had straight athletics on our minds, we went to Van Cortlandt, where the playing fields were regulation size and where the opposing team didn’t include a baby carriage or an irate old lady with a cane. If our Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades and roughed it. (I remember getting lost one Saturday somewhere on that tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of the western end of the George Washington Bridge. I kept my head, though. I just sat down in the majestic shadow of a giant billboard and, howeve
r tearfully, opened my lunchbox for business, semi‑confident that the Chief would find me. The Chief always found us.) In his hours of liberation from the Comanches, the Chief was John Gedsudski, of Staten Island. He was an extremely shy, gentle young man of twenty‑two or -three, a law student at N. Y.U., and altogether a very memorable person. I won’t attempt to assemble his many achievements and virtues here. Just in passing, he was an Eagle Scout, an almost‑All‑America tackle of 1926, and it was known that he had been most cordially invited to try out for the New York Giants’ baseball team. He was an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and an expert, uncontemptuous first‑aid man. Every one of us, from the smallest hoodlum to the biggest, loved and respected him.
The Chief’s physical appearance in 1928 is still clear in my mind. If wishes were inches, all of us Comanches would have had him a giant in no time. The way things go, though, he was a stocky five three or four—no more than that. His hair was blue‑black, his hair‑line extremely low, his nose was large and fleshy, and his torso was just about as long as his legs were. In his leather windbreaker, his shoulders were powerful, but narrow and sloping. At the time, however, it seemed to me that in the Chief all the most photogenic features of Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix had been smoothly amalgamated.
Every afternoon, when it got dark enough for a losing team to have an excuse for missing a number of infield popups or end‑zone passes, we Comanches relied heavily and selfishly on the Chief’s talent for storytelling. By that hour, we were usually an overheated, irritable bunch, and we fought each other—either with our fists or our shrill voices—for the seats in the bus nearest the Chief. (The bus had two parallel rows of straw seats. The left row had three extra seats—the best in the bus—that extended as far forward as the driver’s profile.) The Chief climbed into the bus only after we had settled down. Then he straddled his driver’s seat backward and, in his reedy but modulated tenor voice, gave us the new installment of «The Laughing Man.» Once he started narrating, our interest never flagged. «The Laughing Man» was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.
The only son of a wealthy missionary couple, the Laughing Man was kidnapped in infancy by Chinese bandits. When the wealthy missionary couple refused (from a religious conviction) to pay the ransom for their son, the bandits, signally piqued, placed the little fellow’s head in a carpenter’s vise and gave the appropriate lever several turns to the right. The subject of this unique experience grew into manhood with a hairless, pecan‑shaped head and a face that featured, instead of a mouth, an enormous oval cavity below the nose. The nose itself consisted of two flesh‑sealed nostrils. In consequence, when the Laughing Man breathed, the hideous, mirthless gap below his nose dilated and contracted like (as I see it) some sort of monstrous vacuole. (The Chief demonstrated, rather than explained, the Laughing Man’s respiration method.) Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man’s horrible face.
Acquaintances shunned him. Curiously enough, though, the bandits let him hang around their headquarters—as long as he kept his face covered with a pale‑red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals. The mask not only spared the bandits the sight of their foster son’s face, it also kept them sensible of his whereabouts; under the circumstances, he reeked of opium.
Every morning, in his extreme loneliness, the Laughing Man stole off (he was as graceful on his feet as a cat) to the dense forest surrounding the bandits’ hideout. There he befriended any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. Moreover, he removed his mask and spoke to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues. They did not think him ugly.
(It took the Chief a couple of months to get that far into the story. From there on in, he got more and more high‑handed with his installments, entirely to the satisfaction of the Comanches.) The Laughing Man was one for keeping an ear to the ground, and in no time at all he had picked up the bandits’ most valuable trade secrets. He didn’t think much of them, though, and briskly set up his own, more effective system. On a rather small scale at first, he began to free‑lance around the Chinese countryside, robbing, highjacking, murdering when absolutely necessary. Soon his ingenious criminal methods, coupled with his singular love of fair play, found him a warm place in the nation’s heart.
Strangely enough, his foster parents (the bandits who had originally turned his head toward crime) were about the last to get wind of his achievements. When they did, they were insanely jealous. They all single‑filed past the Laughing Man’s bed one night, thinking they had successfully doped him into a deep sleep, and stabbed at the figure under the covers with their machetes. The victim turned out to be the bandit chief’s mother—an unpleasant, haggling sort of person. The event only whetted the bandits’ taste for the Laughing Man’s blood, and finally he was obliged to lock up the whole bunch of them in a deep but pleasantly decorated mausoleum. They escaped from time to time and gave him a certain amount of annoyance, but he refused to kill them. (There was a compassionate side to the Laughing Man’s character that just about drove me crazy.) Soon the Laughing Man was regularly crossing the Chinese border into Paris, France, where he enjoyed flaunting his high but modest genius in the face of Marcel Dufarge, the internationally famous detective and witty consumptive. Dufarge and his daughter (an exquisite girl, though something of a transvestite) became the Laughing Man’s bitterest enemies. Time and again, they tried leading the Laughing Man up the garden path. For sheer sport, the Laughing Man usually went halfway with them, then vanished, often leaving no even faintly credible indication of his escape method. Just now and then he posted an incisive little farewell note in the Paris sewerage system, and it was delivered promptly to Dufarge’s boot. The Dufarges spent an enormous amount of time sloshing around in the Paris sewers.
Soon the Laughing Man had amassed the largest personal fortune in the world. Most of it he contributed anonymously to the monks of a local monastery—humble ascetics who had dedicated their lives to raising German police dogs. What was left of his fortune, the Laughing Man converted into diamonds, which he lowered casually, in emerald vaults, into the Black Sea. His personal wants were few. He subsisted exclusively on rice and eagles’ blood, in a tiny cottage with an underground gymnasium and shooting range, on the stormy coast of Tibet. Four blindly loyal confederates lived with him: a glib timber wolf named Black Wing, a lovable dwarf named Omba, a giant Mongolian named Hong, whose tongue had been burned out by white men, and a gorgeous Eurasian girl, who, out of unrequited love for the Laughing Man and deep concern for his personal safety, sometimes had a pretty sticky attitude toward crime.
The Laughing Man issued his orders to the crew through a black silk screen. Not even Omba, the lovable dwarf, was permitted to see his face.
I’m not saying I will, but I could go on for hours escorting the reader—forcibly, if necessary—back and forth across the Paris‑Chinese border. I happen to regard the Laughing Man as some kind of super‑distinguished ancestor of mine—a sort of Robert E. Lee, say, with the ascribed virtues held under water or blood. And this illusion is only a moderate one compared to the one I had in 1928, when I regarded myself not only as the Laughing Man’s direct descendant but as his only legitimate living one. I was not even my parents’ son in 1928 but a devilishly smooth impostor, awaiting their slightest blunder as an excuse to move in—preferably without violence, but not necessarily—to assert my true identity. As a precaution against breaking my bogus mother’s heart, I planned to take her into my underworld employ in some undefined but appropriately regal capacity. But the main thing I had to do in 1928 was watch my step.
Play along with the farce. Brush my teeth. Comb my hair. At all costs, stifle my na
tural hideous laughter.
Actually, I was not the only legitimate living descendant of the Laughing Man. There were twenty‑five Comanches in the Club, or twenty‑five legitimate living descendants of the Laughing Man—all of us circulating ominously, and incognito, throughout the city, sizing up elevator operators as potential archenemies, whispering side‑of‑the‑mouth but fluent orders into the ears of cocker spaniels, drawing beads, with index fingers, on the foreheads of arithmetic teachers. And always waiting, waiting for a decent chance to strike terror and admiration in the nearest mediocre heart.
One afternoon in February, just after Comanche baseball season had opened, I observed a new fixture in the Chief’s bus. Above the rear‑view mirror over the windshield, there was a small, framed photograph of a girl dressed in academic cap and gown. It seemed to me that a girl’s picture clashed with the general men‑only decor of the bus, and I bluntly asked the Chief who she was. He hedged at first, but finally admitted that she was a girl. I asked him what her name was. He answered unforthrightly, «Mary Hudson.» I asked him if she was in the movies or something. He said no, that she used to go to Wellesley College. He added, on some slow‑processed afterthought, that Wellesley College was a very high class college. I asked him what he had her picture in the bus for, though. He shrugged slightly, as much as to imply, it seemed to me, that the picture had more or less been planted on him.
During the next couple of weeks, the picture—however forcibly or accidentally it had been planted on the Chief—was not removed from the bus. It didn’t go out with the Baby Ruth wrappers and the fallen licorice whips. However, we Comanches got used to it. It gradually took on the unarresting personality of a speedometer.
But one day as we were on our way to the Park, the Chief pulled the bus over to a curb on Fifth Avenue in the Sixties, a good half mile past our baseball field. Some twenty back‑seat drivers at once demanded an explanation, but the Chief gave none.