Norman nodded, dodging the hail of words. And yet many of them struck him. He saw the long, shallow shadow beside each of her wrinkles, the flat, sightless look of her brown eyes, which were opaque with what she wanted to see. And the intimacy that was forced on him was an irritant to which he was no longer immune.
“Just what kind of trouble is he in?” he asked, knowing, but needing to get something back from her.
“Oh . . . it really isn’t any . . . that is, a young man . . .” She giggled nervously, realizing the full extent of her indiscretion. “I’m just saying that a young fellow shouldn’t get . . . I mean, it’s lucky he has, that we have . . .”
“Has he gotten some girl pregnant?” He was surprised at himself, at the way things whistled into and out of him.
“Oh my, what a thing, of course . . . It’s really a personal problem . . . Here I am, just going on . . . You probably have things to do. The rent, you’re waiting for the rent.” Her squaw wrinkles bunched up, intersected each other, making innumerable tic-tac-toe games.
“Yes, the rent.”
“It’s just that people sometimes feel they have to talk about things and they don’t dare talk to themselves.” She made it a plea.
“Yes, well, I’ll be back next week.
“You understand.”
“Oh yes, sure, I understand,” he said harshly, wondering what he wanted from her. He got up, leaving the receipt. “And this is only the first call.”
“I beg pardon?” Her courtesy was sleazy, threadbare.
“I have dozens of other apartments to call on,” he said. “I don’t look forward.”
“I’m sorry,” she said, humiliated.
But he wasn’t able to cut her completely off. “It’s just that I’ve been sick—my nerves are still not right.”
“You should rest. Rest is the only way.”
“Okay, Mrs. Baily. I’ll see you next time.”
“I’m sorry if I . . .”
“That’s all right. Next week.”
He had to hurry to the next apartment as though the empty hallway were enfiladed by a rifle equipped with a silencer.
Betty Jacoby let him in, went to the living-room table where her pocketbook lay, and then seemed to explode in a burst of acid-white light. She and Norman looked up, stupefied, at the window shade, still spinning, rolled up at the top of the window. She was old and crippled, and her skeletal fingers, knobbed with arthritis, quavered beside a mouth that radiated wrinkles and looked like a great, stitched scar.
“Oh my, that gave me a start,” she said. She turned to Norman and put a hand up to her hair for some feminine protection. “I’m sorry, I’m afraid I look a fright. I haven’t had a chance to do anything. Heavens, I wouldn’t want Arnold to walk in on me like this.”
Norman tried to fit himself over the shape of that. It was impossible and wrong. He went toward her with his hand out, and she backed away, smilingly frightened.
“No, no, the shade,” he said. “I’ll just fix the shade for you.”
“Oh, please do!” she cried. She watched him pull a chair to the window and silently ask her permission to stand on it, which she gave with a quick, single dart of her head. When she spoke, it was with a mixture of wistfulness and terror, and he felt it behind him as he stood spread-eagled against the glass and the daylight. “It’s not that I have anything to hide from you, of course. But then, people, people who must live with one another for great lengths of time, must have things just so. Arnold and I have worked things down to . . . to this. People who must live intimately must be oh so delicate about what they surround themselves with.”
Norman took the roller off the hooks and stepped down. “Do you have a fork?” he asked. “I think that’s how to do it.”
She almost backed into the kitchen. “A fork,” she announced, coming back and handing it to him.
He didn’t look at her face again until he had rewound the spring, replaced the roller, and drawn down the shade. “One tine is a little bent,” he said.
“Don’t let them tell you about the ease of old age,” she said, the guile restored to her by the dimness. “They say that old people aren’t concerned about appearances. Oh, no, that’s not true at all. We, Arnold and I, keep more things from each other than ever. It’s hard to make you see. If he walked in like you did . . .” Her breath shuddered audibly, and Norman was forced to look around for the monstrous source of horror; he saw only the shabby darkness of the apartment, like some abandoned stage-set that was lent mystery only by its antiquity.
“But was there something I was supposed to do?” he asked, feeling a sensation of brutishness. “It wasn’t you who had the trouble with your stove?”
“No, no, I’ll tell you when there’s something for you to do,” she answered with a chuckle.
She paid him, and he left; and, in the hallway, that was all he could account for. But he felt like a man unused to exercise who has been forced into an unpleasant scuffle. He was breathing hard, and his heart made itself known in his temples. The hallway looked strange and filled him with uneasiness; from the way his body strained against imbalance, its floor might have been tilted. For a moment he looked at the rough, dust-pocketed stucco on the walls, wondering if this were dream and the prismatic reminiscences of his illness were the real life he lived. A faintly familiar smile warmed his mouth as he thought of an ancient course in logic, a lecture about the evidence of The Now. “What is dream?” he said to himself with exaggerated theatricality, but then lost his smile as he felt the walls press their texture on him with breath-taking clarity. Nothing had ever been so real! He could see himself in the large, shapeless suit, the comical bootlegger’s hat, a slight bundle of a man with a clean, new, discount-store shirt and a tie so somber that it lay like an apology over his chest. He could see his frail mouth and his bruised-looking eyes planted on a thin man’s face that caught the faint reflection from the top of a ballpoint pen in the breast pocket. He could see even the Red Cross button from another year, caught in the clumsy lapel—one of the tags he used to identify himself.
For just an instant he felt a flash of horror, a sensation as visceral as that felt by a child who glimpses the great, complex gut of adults for the first time; he had a real hint of how thin and light his long childhood had been, and wondered how in the world he would support the weight he suspected. The hollow coughing from a distant apartment, the child’s ranting cry from another, alarmed him by their intimation of great size.
A bulb flicked on in that presupper hour of November. Great flexings took place on all sides. He slapped his receipt book and rushed to the next door.
Carol Hauser let him in, one hand up to her structured hair. Under her pink, quilted robe she wore black nylon stockings and red-leather shoes with needle-thin heels.
“We’re going out,” she said, stilt-walking over to the table where the lamp-shade river flowed endlessly. “To Radio City and then Lindy’s. I’m in the middle of dressing.”
He wondered what he could say to that and looked at the child for a cue. The little boy hovered near his mother, sniffing her strong scent and waving his hands. His face had the scared-thrilled expression of a rider on a roller coaster.
“Once a month we go out like this; the rest of the time it’s just cards with friends. I like to go out,” she said, turning an unusually soft smile on Norman. “I like to see Sherman in his best suit, his shoes all shined, his face pink from shaving. And I like to feel bright and dressed up and to say good night to Bobby when the sitter comes, and see how impressed he is at my fancy duds. That’s one thing about this country, Mr. Moonbloom. When a person gets dressed up, there’s no telling which are the rich and which are the poor. I mean, my husband and I may fight a lot, like other people, but when we go out like this, to a night club or a show, we’re like on a date. All this boring routine and everything is like it never happened. Sherman is a good dancer too. He looks good in clothes too. Right Bobby? Doesn’t Daddy look nice when he’s all d
ressed up?” She took the child’s hand and began doing a little dance with him; his small feet tripped all over each other trying to follow her cha-cha steps.
Norman watched their feet as he waited for his money, and somehow the child’s seemed crippled and lost.
“Ohh, I’m sorry,” Carol said, stopping and reaching once more for her pocketbook. “I’m in a silly mood.”
“Why can’t I go too?” Bobby asked. “I’m big.”
“When you get grown up, darling, then you’ll go too. And Daddy and Mommy will be grandparents.” She turned to Norman with the money. “My husband is graying at the temples. It’s very becoming. I’m thinking of having my hair frosted.” She turned back to Bobby. “And Mommy and Daddy will stay home with your children, and you’ll go out to swell places.”
“But now,” Norman said. “He’s worrying about now. What guarantees can you give him?”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know,” Norman said, looking at the fake fire in the fireplace. “I just look around here and I wonder what he thinks is real, what he believes.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Carol said, a hard edge returning to her voice as she sensed some kind of disparagement. “Bobby knows what’s what, don’t you, Bobby?”
“Yes, I want to go now, not when I’m a daddy. I’m not ever gonna be a daddy, never never never. I want to go with you this night, now!”
“I think you’ve gotten him all upset with your nutty talk, Mr. Moonbloom. We have enough trouble when we want to go out. He gets all overstimulated and then he sleeps badly. Sherman and I come home late, wanting to . . . have a little privacy, and he’s moaning in his sleep and we’re always afraid he’ll get up.”
“I’m sorry,” Norman said, looking at the thick cosmetic mask, which made her eyes exceptionally harried and restless. “I hope you have a good time,” he said, somehow frightened by the sight of the child, who stood waving his plump little body as though he were in the midst of a high wind, as though he were whirling so quickly that his gyrations were imperceptible. Norman had an impulse to reach out and touch the boy, to be sure he was there. He raised his hand, and Carol drew Bobby close to her.
“He’s all right, Bobby understands,” she said defiantly.
“Well, good night,” Norman said, using the lifted hand for that. Then he went out of there, punched in his vertebrae by whatever it was that abided behind him in the room with the lamp-river and the bulb-fire.
And just that much more battered, he pressed the Lublins’ bell button, focusing on the noise he heard ahead of him in preference to the silence of the household he had just left behind.
Sarah opened the door but continued talking to someone in her apartment, and for a moment Norman considered leaving before she knew who it was.
“Please, please,” she called back over her shoulder to the room from which could be heard Aaron’s angry voice. “Someone is here, stop for a while.” And she drew Norman in by the arm as she spoke to Aaron, the gesture so intimate and demanding that Norman had an impulse to dig his feet in stubbornly and resist. “The door is open, calm down, everyone doesn’t have to hear.” Aaron’s voice could not be heard then, but the considerable silence made his anger still apparent. Sarah turned to Norman without surprise, though she couldn’t have seen his face till then, and continued leading him in. “I’m sorry,” she said shyly, her hand out to encompass the room full of Aaron and an old man. The two children stood in a doorway, edging furtively in from their exile to their bedroom.
Aaron didn’t acknowledge him, but continued to stare ferociously at the old man, who sat on a straight-backed chair, his hands folded on his lap and a blithe smile on his rubbery mouth; he looked like a tough, defiant adolescent, grown old under some chastisement he scorned.
“Sit down, Mr. Moonbloom,” she said nervously. And when the old man turned his disparaging face toward Norman, she held one hand out to each of them like a referee calling two fighters to the center of the ring, balancing between a desire to have them shake hands and a concern about keeping them from premature combat. “Fehteh, this is the rent agent, Moonbloom. Here, Mr. Moonbloom, is Aaron’s uncle. Mr. Hirsch.”
“How do you do,” Norman said, inwardly straining backward against the liquid rings of rage in the room.
“I do . . . Esk him how I do,” Hirsch replied with a mocking wave toward his nephew.
“Stop it!” Aaron cried. “You’re pushing me too far, Uncle. Don’t keep pretending I’m a Gestapo agent. I’ve kept you all these years, I would still support you. You cannot make me out a brute because I do not want you to crowd in here with us.”
“I live with strangers. You are my blood,” the old man said, reading his lines without feeling, merely filling in the parts between Aaron’s speeches.
“Besides the fact that we are crowded, that it would be disturbing for the children and for us, the owners would not like such overcrowding. Is there not a rule on this, Moonbloom?”
But Norman had always been audience and was not used to these experimental dramas in which the audience was asked to participate. He smiled with embarrassment and gave a few short huffs; he patted his breast, reassured himself that the receipt book was there, licked his lips. “Well-l,” he said, staring at the wall molding.
“I would take up little room; I am sanitary and quiet,” Hirsch said.
“You never tried to live with others,” Aaron shouted. “You have spent years perfecting your suffering. Oh, they have written me, those people you were staying with. They told me how they introduced you to people, how they invited older men and women to the house, made card games, took you to the Community Center, where they had a club for older people. And always you were rude and insulting, laughed at the others. Now you feel you are ready, you have refined your martyrdom enough to condemn me.” Aaron’s gray face shone with a sick anger that was so terrible because most of it was directed at himself. He waved his finger, spoke from a twisted mouth; the hatred in his black, shiny eyes was frightening, and Norman, an outsider by vocation, hoped to be forgotten.
Surreptitiously, he slipped the receipt book out and began filling in the familiar lines while Sarah shushed and jerked her head warningly toward Norman.
“So all right, don’t get all fahtumult,” Hirsch said with heavy-lidded blandness, his desiccated body barely defined under his age-greened suit. “What do you have to go crazy? So I’m only your father’s brother, only the last relative you have. You don’t have to have me here; there’s no law. I’m grateful that you send me a few cents I shouldn’t starve in my little corner among the strangers in Baltimore. I know, I know, it’s a jungle, I don’t expect. Behind me is Hell, ahead of me . . . Eh, at least I’m peaceful, nobody hits me, I can die in my own good time. So okay, I’ll go back to Baltimore, I’ll ride all night on the bus—it’s cheaper than the train and, after all, it’s my nephew’s money—I should be a hog, I should ride a jet? No, no, it’s all right, I’ll shlep my little valise back through the streets—thank God it’s not heavy, I have so little—it hardly hurts my angina. I’ll ride in the bus with my head knocking—heh heh, I get a little tiny bit carsick, nothing serious—and in the morning I’m back in Baltimore, knocking on their door, saying, ‘I made a slight mistake, it didn’t work out with my nephew, let me go up to my little cot to rest.’ And if they look surprised, I’ll say, ‘No, don’t blame him, I don’t blame him, he has his own tsoris.’ ”
“Moonbloom!” Aaron shouted suddenly.
Norman snapped his head around with the impact.
“Isn’t it multiple occupancy?” Aaron demanded harshly. “Can I?”
“They wouldn’t even hear a extra set of footsteps,” Hirsch said to Norman. “I wear slippers in the house, I weigh only a hundred twenty. Besides, I get in bed after supper and only get up for the bathroom.”
The children stood with gaping mouths, suddenly impressed by the familiar figure of the agent. Five pairs of eyes bored into him
, and, transfixed, Norman fluttered his hands and shifted his feet. No one had ever made demands on him, he had never been capable of making enemies. He searched in the dusty recesses of his mind for precedents, and came up with only picture post cards of hushed, solitary hours that were all the same though they stood before a variety of backgrounds. He had never asked anything of himself—what then was there for others to find? How vivid and large were their faces! His fingers groped aimlessly for the light, soft, immensely strong coverlet his grandmother had wrapped around him one night when she had cried and given him strawberry ice cream. He smiled and winked and shrugged, but they just waited.
“I’m only the agent,” he said. Not a breeze of sound touched their faces. “I suppose I really . . . I mean the owner . . .” The old man looked ready to laugh; he had seen the cash and the fictitious amount written on the receipt, and the way his nephew’s wife had crumpled the receipt up by habit. Norman turned his supplicating palm to Aaron, but could not really be sure what answer he would have preferred. Norman took a deep breath and looked down at his hands solemnly, composing himself for an act of power.
“I don’t see why not,” he said. “I’m sure it would be all right.”
Stillness, and then a long, shuddery sigh from Aaron. Sarah gave a tiny gasp, and the boy started to pull his sister’s hair in the doorway. Norman looked up to see Hirsch studying the window with a benign expression.
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 11