by John Hersey
* * *
—
“HELLO.”
“Is this Mzz Elaine Quinlan?”
“Yes?”
“I’m calling for Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M, Incorporated. The company has asked me to put a few questions to you about the security of your apartment.”
“I…I don’t know exactly what you mean. You mean a guard? There’s a janitor that works around the building.”
“No no, Mzz Quinlan, I mean your personal apartment. It’s a question of a person living alone in an apartment.”
Silence.
“Especially in an old building. I presume there’s a buzzer latch on the main door? Those buzzer locks are worthless. There’s always one tenant in every building who’ll trip the latch when anybody rings, no matter who it is.”
“May I ask what you’re selling?”
“Safety, Mzz Quinlan. My company argues for sound locks, as opposed to alarm systems. But if you choose alarms, we have ’em. You name it, we have ’em. Magnetic, ultrasonic, microwave, light-source—we have ’em. But we prefer sturdy locks. We have a slogan: ‘A premium lock beats an insurance premium.’ ”
He has kept his voice upbeat, very courteous, but the woman’s voice says, “This is disgusting, to try to make a sale by playing on fears.”
“It’s a real world, baby. You know, you have these shit-kickers running around.”
Silence.
“The janitor you were talking about, bet he calls himself a custodian.”
“What does that prove?”
“Nothing, nothing. How old is the building you’re in?”
Silence.
“Thirty-two Academy Street? I can practically tell you. Our company knows this city inside out. Wooster Square was laid out in 1825. Most of the houses were built within the next fifteen years. So let’s say a hundred and twenty-five years. Of course, everything rides on when the latest renovations were made. I’m thinking of doors. Our company places great stress on doors. We’re not just locksmiths. We make doors, Mzz Quinlan.”
Silence.
“You may be all right, doorwise. These new buildings, you see, these cheapjack builders face the doorjamb with a one-by-five board, wet pine, practically as soft as balsa wood, and anybody could come along and tie a piece of toweling around his shoe, to muffle it, and he could boot the door, and if he held onto the knob as he did it, hell, he could tear the whole strike plate and everything out of there, and you’d never hear it, if you were in bed and asleep.”
Silence, then finally the woman’s voice: “You make me want to puke. I hate cerebral palsy victims that somebody makes phone you and sell you guaranteed five-year electric light bulbs and you buy them because you’re well and they burn out two hours after you put them in.”
Silence, then the man: “Still listening?”
Silence.
“All my company wants is for you to feel safe.”
“I felt safe till you called. You’re worse than a breather. If I could trace this call…”
“Mzz Quinlan—”
“How’d you get my name?”
“If you decide to do something about your lock—or your door—don’t go to just any locksmith. A lot of people are going into locksmithing these days. The company knows of a man, a former operative of our own, matter of fact, now runs a locksmithing school on the west coast, he teaches it in a high school, and he tells the kids who sign up for the course, you’ve got to get yourself registered and fingerprinted. Fully half of ’em don’t show up the next day. You can guess why. Here in this state there’s no regulation of locksmiths whatsoever. Are you listening? They have these locksmithing correspondence courses. There’s many a prison inmate taking those courses right today.”
“Disgusting disgusting disgusting.”
“Remember the name. Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M. First word is S-a-f-e-hyphen-capital-T. We’re in the book.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
He hangs up and lies back on the rumpled bedclothes with his hands folded behind his head. His face is as readable as the large-type edition of The New York Times. Behind it, were there a mind reader present, could be seen the myriad jumble of that busy head, but with one thought riding boatlike on the brain waves: That was some voice.
Chapter 3
MRS. Calovatto took to inviting Elaine for coffee every morning about eleven. Her espresso would have lifted a Boeing 747 off the ground. She said, “Walk up to Malley’s with me, honey. It’s only seven, eight blocks. You got to see the important stores.”
“O.K.”
* * *
—
ELAINE was waiting for the famous metamorphosis to happen to her. She wished to God she had never seen lugubrious Henry in those dopey cupids. She had been pushing and pulling her flotsam around for days, like Little Toot, the brave tug. Or what was the name of that undersized railroad engine in the other story?—I-think-I-can, I-think-I-can…She was beginning to feel as if she inhabited baby books. She lived a life of goo goo and bibble bibble. Lifting an ashtray involved a tremendous struggle for small-motor mastery. Yet she had certainly not been reborn. She disliked what she had been, and was. She felt increasing revulsion at all the clutter she had piled up in the past couple of years; she thought she and Greg must have fallen for every trendy item that came along. Candles with scents of the casbah, classy underground sheets like the London Oz, roach clips with semiprecious stones, fiberglass statuary, banana incense sticks, vegetarian toothpaste, shoes with boat-shaped platforms on which you could pitch and roll as if at sea, a book printed on edible paper so if you really dug it you could make it part of yourself—fads that mocked the bourgeoisie but took some good solid cash to buy. Could she really blame any of that shit on Greg? Hadn’t she really been the mad shopper?…
And besides, that spook on the phone the other night. She had slept badly ever since. Yes, she’d like to get out on the streets.
* * *
—
MRS. Calovatto reached back to undo her scarf. Unveiling of a sculpture. Elaine had never once seen Mary Calovatto out of her curlers. The arms, now languidly up, like a Matisse odalisque’s, were soft-round, pale-skinned, with black hairs on the forearms; the hands had short fingers with flat ends, their skin was from the Avon Lady, the bone structure was fragile, the motions were slightly awkward like those of the spoor-hunting flippers of an adolescent. The knot yielded, and Mary Calovatto lifted away scarf, curlers and all. The curlers were not engaged with her hair at all; they were sewn to the scarf in rows, and they came right away from her head.
“Jesus,” Elaine said. “Excuse me, but—”
“Haven’t you ever seen a set of these?” Mrs. Calovatto held up the scarf by two corners, curlers facing Elaine. “It just makes you feel so good to wear them—makes you feel like you’re getting ready to go out on a date. Know what I mean?”
She combed out her perm—every curl a whelky spiral, no need of plastic help—and they left.
Outdoors, Mary Calovatto put her short legs to work. Elaine’s sandals flapped on the sidewalk, and she grew breathless; she was in gruesome condition. She thought the two of them must make a picture. The wax-skinned dark lady with permed black hair, in an imitation pongee dress over a mighty fortress of a foundation, the skirt shielding the shame of knees—yet high heels like castanets tapping out invitations; and the other woman, trying to keep up with her companion at a shuffling half run, with long straight brown hair, wearing jeans a bit white-threaded around the ass, and bouncy there, and in a maroon velour pullover, braless. The beauty part of the picture must have been that these two were talking and laughing and having a really fine time together, as if they were peas in a pod.
* * *
—
AT the big store Mary Calovatto led the way to the sports department, where she ran those floppy, virginal hands over some seventy pai
rs of men’s swimming trunks. She chose two, both full in the seat and long in the shank—a wild red plaid and a Hawaiian print: pineapples, surfers, hula girls.
“Oh, good,” she said to the bald salesman behind the counter, a plump pyknic type who was dressed as if for a noon wedding in a dark suit, a striped shirt, a white collar, and a solid silver-gray tie. “You look just the right size. I never can tell Giulio’s size except by a person. Come out here,” she said, dribbling her fingers around the end of the counter and into the open in front of herself.
The clerk came warily out from his sanctuary. “Very good,” Mrs. Calovatto said. “Just right. Turn around.”
He faced away from her. Like a good soldier during an inspection, he was sucking in his gut, which now, however, seemed to be coming out behind under an assumed name. By way of measurement, she ran her hand flutteringly right down to the bottom of this protuberance, causing the clerk to execute an astonished bump, followed by a tiny involuntary grind.
“You’re him to a square inch,” she said. “I could have married you. Try them on.” She reached the trunks out for him to take.
He held one pair in fingertips at his hips.
“No no no no no,” she said. “You’ll have to try them on.” Seeing him hesitate, she said sharply, “You have dressing rooms, don’t you?”
He shot away with a bunny hop, looking this way and that.
“Isn’t it kind of rushing the season, swimming?” Elaine asked.
“We’re going away a week from Monday. Giulio’s vacation. Imagine us, the Virgin Islands!”
Elaine felt suddenly cold in the hands and feet. “How long?”
“Aren’t you cute, honey! You look real shocked.”
“I got this creepy phone call the other night.”
* * *
—
THE Calovattos were going to be away for three weeks. Giulio got two weeks’ regular vacation, and he had accumulated an extra week in overtime. Elaine was more surprised by the intensity of her reaction than she was by the reaction itself. She told Mrs. Calovatto about the call—how grossed out she had been by that scare merchant. Mrs. Calovatto didn’t seem to think anything of it.
“What I can’t understand is why I stayed on the phone so long.”
“Maybe he was making sense, honey.”
“It was so crass.”
Mrs. Calovatto said that was nonsense, Elaine should have taken advantage of the nice young man, and she reminded Elaine of what she had said about the need for a new lock because of the janitor’s having a master key. Then she said, “Look, honey, before I go I’ll take you down to meet the Plentaggers. They live in first-floor-back. He’s in pesticides. They’re homey people. They’ll watch out for you.”
Elaine thought she must have looked as if she would fly into Mrs. Calovatto’s arms again, because Mrs. Calovatto hastily said, “See here, dearie, we’re not going to the end of the world. It’s only three weeks.”
* * *
—
THE salesman came away from the dressing rooms, once again looking all around. After a manner of speaking the swimsuit—the Hawaiian number—fitted him. Besides the trunks he was wearing black shoes and black ankle-length socks with silver clocks.
“Oh, dear,” Mrs. Calovatto said. “You need sun.”
Chapter 4
EVERY morning, long before the undergraduate metabolism stirs to the new day’s moiling, a dignified gentleman in a gray sharkskin suit and a pork-pie hat, with a large attaché case and a shopping bag from The Pottery Bazaar, ranges along the sidewalk of Park Street discreetly ransacking the trash barrels outside Davenport and Pierson Colleges. Macaboy, out early himself on this Tuesday in dogwood time, sees him and feels that the indicators of the Macaboy horoscope must be in harmonious equipoise. It is good luck to meet this courtly fisherman in the seas of American waste. Macaboy has chatted with Mr. Tilton in the past—between barrels. Macaboy has enough savoir-faire to have grasped that you do not surprise a man of Mr. Tilton’s class at the lip of a garbage can. You may talk to him, gent to gent, in the pauses of the quest. But whenever Macaboy sees from a distance that the hand digging in the drifts of built-in obsolescence has come upon a thing of mysterious virtue, which then rises up like a most-desired gift from a Christmas stocking—an out-of-date copy of Oui, a burned-out Norelco electric razor, an empty Old Grand-Dad bottle, the endoskeleton of a McIntosh amplifier, a left Adidas sneaker (the right, out at toe, has been dropped back)—the expression on Mr. Tilton’s face infuses a wonderful radiance into Macaboy’s constantly flagging hopes for joys in this miserable earthly coil and for decent competence in harp-playing beyond it. The month of May brings a bumper harvest: the seniors of the college are jettisoning their youth. Now when he leaves a cluster of barrels Mr. Tilton’s pace bounces up and down as does the Dow-Jones index; he rises and dips like a flying swan on the heels and balls of his feet.
“Good morning, Mr. Tilton!”
“Good morning, Mr. Attaboy!” Mr. Tilton knows the real name; this is his speed at seven thirty in the morning.
“Beautiful day.”
“Not really,” Mr. Tilton says, as if he were telling the best news in weeks. “Did you hear the pollution counts this morning? Carbon monoxide is forty-one milligrams. Sulfur dioxide: four-twenty micrograms. Particular matter: two-ninety. Photochemical oxidants: two-ten. The Turnpike is Murder, Incorporated. There’s a heat inversion.”
Mr. Tilton’s eyes rise to heaven, where the programmer of this meteorological accident is presumed to have His console.
Macaboy fakes a deep, deep cough.
Mr. Tilton, his gaze level again, smiles a knowing smile, and nods.
* * *
—
MACABOY felt exalted even before he met Mr. Tilton: he is headed out to Branford to buy lumber. Good wood makes him nigh unto horny. He appreciates the look of the grain of well-cured hardwood from near the heart of the bole almost as much as he admires the sight of the circle of tiny goose-fleshlike bumps in the corona around an erected nipple. Yesterday, in the course of flinging a telephonic net across Fairfield and New Haven counties, he learned that Medary’s Builders Supply in Branford has a stack of two-inch walnut that has been sitting there for eight years. Who wants solid walnut when you can get it veneered onto pine plywood? Macaboy wants it! Macaboy leches after it! He has borrowed the notorious Chewy camper belonging to Finn Okvent, the second-year graduate student who takes computer science in the electrical engineering department and lives in the microflat above Macaboy’s rooms. Thanks to the buoyant gas in this Okvent’s skull, located in the pan of bone usually reserved for a brain, the man has a specific gravity just under that of air, and he floats around, about eight inches off the ground, dreaming up flow charts and loops of command and elegant algorithms. Using his camper as a laboratory, Okvent is in the process of inventing a minicomputerized fuel conservator for piston engines, and as a consequence, this death-machine of his, in the present state of its development, has an alarming way of alternately leaping out from under the accelerator, like a whippet goosed with English mustard by a corrupt dogtrack attendant, and abruptly stalling, usually in the middle lane of a freeway. But Okvent is generous and close at hand, and whenever Macaboy needs transport beyond the capacities of his bike, he borrows the killercar.
Mr. Tilton was right about the Turnpike. Okvent’s stuttering camper moves like a Jacques Cousteau minisub through deeps of poison, and Macaboy can feel his bronchial infundibula turning black. He is, nevertheless, still miraculously alive at the Foxon reservoir. At the Branford toll. Even when he parks in the Medary lot, on Main Street, Branford.
* * *
—
AT the order desk stands a young man in khaki clothes holding a transistor radio to his ear, like a hot poultice on a sore place. He is in a trance of concentration. At eight twelve in the morning The Temptations are giving t
he lucky world “With These Hands.”
Macaboy shouts, “I called yesterday about some walnut.”
“Wha?” Annoyed.
“Walnut!”
“Wha?”
“Lumber! Walnut!”
“Plywood’s over there.” Thumb slantwise over the shoulder. “Pick out your own.”
“No! Solid walnut!”
“Solid? We don’t have none.”
“I was told by telephone.”
The young man, without removing the compress, mashes a button on a squawk box. “Squeegie, we got any walnut?”
A hollow voice comes out of the speaker. “On the racks, man.”
“Nah plywood. He wants solid.”
“Walnut? Come on, Cube, I ain’t had my coffee yet.”
Cube turns off the squawk box. “We ain’ got none.”
“Where’s your boss?”
Now Cube lowers the radio and cuts the volume. Suddenly removed from the traffic jam of decibels, the young man’s voice pierces like an ambulance siren. “Man, I ain’ got all day.”
Macaboy persists.
* * *
—
MR. Medary, a tiny, bred-out Yankee with a bulging bald head and a network of veins on his nose like a roadmap of the glacier-scraped domain of John Calvin, stands now at the order desk beside Cube, who is lost to “Everything’s Going to Be All Right.” Mr. Medary says it was he who fielded Macaboy’s call yesterday. Yes, he knows exactly where the walnut is. It is, he says, in two-by-twelves and two-by-sixes, sixteen-footers. “What sizes do you wish?”
Macaboy says he’ll need two cuts ten inches wide and twenty-six long. From the smaller stock he wants two cuts of six by eighty, six of four by twenty-six, and six of four by forty.