by John Hersey
He walks left on Academy, on the built-up side. The woods in the square across the way are dark, as in the beginning of a Grimm brothers’ tale. Number 32 is about three-quarters of the way up the square, not far beyond Court Street. It is a big cube in the Italian-Villa style, fancied forth with a central pediment—sheathed, however, in most un-Italian clapboard. By the light of a sputtering street lamp Macaboy contemplates the ornamented window trim—workmanship, he can tell even in the dark, that would be out of the question today. There are nine windows on the façade, three of them tucked up under the bold Tuscan eaves. He wonders…
He turns and floats away toward his apartment.
* * *
—
THIS time he does not bother to pick his lock; he uses a key. Inside he peels off his shirt and lets it flutter to the floor. With a finger he tests one of the beads of glue between the splines of the door panel. Perfect. The glue is firm yet rubbery. It will cut easily without smearing and is not so set as to crimp a tempered-steel edge. He sharpens a chisel and trims the beads wherever he can without loosening the clamps. Opens a bottle of beer. Flops on his bed. Picks up Nostromo and reads. Falls asleep, against his own will, as Nostromo and Decoud are crossing the gulf in the night on their lighter loaded with bars of silver.
Chapter 8
PEOPLE change, Elaine decided.
“Have some more sangría!” Bottsy Feldman shouted. She told Elaine she had mixed this gore herself. She was on the third chapter of her dissertation on Peter Kropotkin. Her Lake Place room was a slaughterhouse of literary materials: broken-spined books, slashed leaves of Xerography, pages and pages of crossed-out longhand, all over desk and bed and floor. It was as if this red sangría of hers had been made from the blood of the body of Western learning.
“No, thanks, no more right now,” Elaine said.
“Have you read Kropotkin?”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve heard of him, of course.”
Elaine knew at once that that little lie, told out of an innocent wish to be acceptable, was a booby trap, and she knew, too, who the born booby was. Bottsy went on and on. Elaine weaved her questions around her delicate but finally inescapable condition of ignorance about this Kropotkin of Bottsy’s. Bottsy called him Pyotr Alekseyevich in husky tones as if he were her lover. Bottsy had grown a bit butchy. As a boy Pyotr Alekseyevich was a page to the Czar. That much came out. It didn’t help.
Elaine was thinking of the spottiness of her Bennington gleanings. She had been certified as educated, with a Bachelor of Arts degree from an accredited institution of higher learning, without having taken a single course in math beyond algebra, or in physics, chemistry, biology, geology, astronomy, archaeology, or anthropology, or econ or poli sci. She had been a whiz in Russian. She had picked up a smattering of Sanskrit, now totally wiped out. As a junior she had been up to her nates in psych and then been turned off by Professor Ouda, who was into feelies, particularly of nates. Then she finally got on a proper Bennington kick—architectural design. What griped her now was that all her Slavic studies hadn’t told her Word One about this Pyotr Alekseyevich.
There was a puzzling reference to a lecture Kropotkin gave at Wellesley. Bottsy let it out of the bag that French workingmen called him “notre Pierre.” The great gesture of dropping his Russian princely title!
Elaine felt that she was getting warm, but at this point Bottsy kicked off her shoes and began to cry.
Elaine was fascinated by Bottsy’s bare feet. How stubborn they were! They were chunky, with short, fat, blunt toes. Tears fell on them.
At Bennington, Bottsy had been winsome, compactly put together, and neat fun. She had majored in studio art. Sang folk songs with sweet thin oboe reeds in her neck. She had seemed to be rich. She had flapped around, as carefree as a catbird. Elaine had never seen her bare feet at Bennington.
First there had been Ruth Greenhelge, transformed. Now Bottsy. Everyone changed except Elaine Quinlan.
Elaine wanted to comfort Bottsy somehow. Showing an evasive interest in Kropotkin had apparently not been helpful. “Want to hear about my first job interview in New Haven, Connecticut?” she asked.
Bottsy snuffled and pushed at her nose with her thick forearm.
“Charter Oak Bank,” Elaine said. “I didn’t get the job.”
“God how I wish I could work in a bank,” Bottsy burst out. “I’d do stenography. I’d sit on the boss’s lap. Anything!” She began to cry again.
Elaine wanted to say, “You can’t change back into what you were before,” but instead she said, “Oh, I can do shorthand, old Botts. Pitman system. Three hundred words a minute. I bet you thought I’d been wasting my time all these years.” Elaine felt a tiny push of malice. Where did Bottsy Feldman get off, thinking the spilt milk of this world was all hers?
“The old twot in the personnel office asked me about schooling, and the moment I said Bennington College I saw a teeny gate close in her eyes, and I knew she was going to hand me a douche bag. I’m afraid you’re overqualified, my dear.’ ” Elaine talked through the personnel woman’s nose, which was overdue for a defrosting. “I know what I should have said. I should have said, ‘It’s O.K., Miss Bubblegum. I didn’t learn zilch at Bennington College. I’m dumb enough to do a real dumb job’—that’s what I should have said. I should have asked her, ‘Haven’t you got any real dumb jobs?’ ”
Bottsy looked suddenly cheerful: her eyes were dry, and her teeth looked like the keyboard of a not-brand-new accordion. “You always did run yourself down,” she said. “It was a way you had of making the rest of us seem conceited. Or masculine. Maybe you wanted us to look masculine. That it?”
You could have played a pretty tune on Bottsy Feldman’s smile.
* * *
—
JUSTY was blocking her way on the stairs. Elaine stood with a heavy grocery bag in each arm, waiting for him to move aside. Her back ached. He was sweeping the steps without seeming to touch the broom to them, as if the stairs had a fever and needed to be fanned. She cleared her throat. He turned full around in two slow clicks. Signs of pleasure spread on his face from the nose outward. The whopped jaw gaped into a twisted grimace of sweet recognition and deference.
“Could I get by?”
“Oh, yes’m, Missus Quillan. Come ahead.”
Click click click. But there was not room to pass.
He was propping the broom against the wall of the stairwell. “Hep you carry them bundles,” he said.
“No thanks, Justy,” she said. “I’m all balanced.”
She was trying to push past. His arms reached out. She dropped down one step. “Here,” he said. “Give me this.” For a blurred second she thought he had said: Give me a kiss. The back of his hand pressed her left breast. She began to fight for her life. His will was strong. She felt her heart accelerate. She heard the start of a paper-tearing sound. Then he had wrenched the bag from her grasp and—click, click, click—he turned with creaks and moans of effort and went slowly up ahead of her, the machinery in his pants hinging and unhinging.
In the kitchen she thanked him, saying he was very kind, and to confirm what she had said he aimed the full blast of his awareness of his kindness from his eyes to hers. She hated herself for moving so as to put the kitchen table between him and herself, and she began at once to take things out of the bags. Justy stood his ground. “If you’ll excuse me,” she said, beginning to be frightened by her fear. Then she heard him clicking off. “I’m a fucking racist,” she thought.
* * *
—
SHE went walking in the park at sunset. She had begun to wonder whether she should call Greg. His laughter kept bouncing around in her head, like the barking of dogs on a full-moon night. She strolled south toward Columbus. Suddenly, as if she were swimming up from sleep, she realized something was—there was a man looming over her in the flickering shade, and she felt a leap
of panic. He was tall, grizzly. The face was haggard, the eyes burned with lust. It was Homer Plentagger. She made a quick adjustment: those were not the embers of lust, he just looked dangerously friendly. “I saw you walking,” he said. “We got a card from Mary Calovatto. She said, ‘Say hello to the girl in second-floor-back.’ ”
“Fantastic,” Elaine said, surprised by the shock of delight this message had given her, even though it seemed Mrs. Calovatto had forgotten her name. “Are they having fun?”
“Yeah,” the pesticides man said, beaming down on her like a spray can. “Yeah. That’s just what she said. Having fun.”
“Wish we were there,” Elaine said, to make a little joke in postcardese.
But that “we” may have been a mistake. Mr. Plentagger turned to walk along beside her, and with a new stab of fear she divined that he would ask about her terrariums. He would want to look them over. He would show up in that seedy terrycloth bathrobe. He would stand in the hall and flash the wings of the robe open, and there would be nothing underneath but a ragged carrot, its curly foliage lightly dusted with insect repellent.
“What would Mrs. Plentagger think,” Elaine asked, as demurely as possible, “if she knew that hubbykins was walking in the park with a girl half his age?”
“Merle?” Pesticides guffawed, and Elaine thought she could see clouds of Lindane and Captan and what was his own patented death powder?—Supalgran?—billowing forth from the regions of his uvula. “She could care less.”
He raised a hand to scratch an ear. It was, Elaine saw, a surprisingly strong hand, full-muscled between thumb and forefinger, with black hairs from knuckle to knuckle. She was aware of goosebumps on her buttocks and a queer dissolved feeling in her abdomen. And she knew she was angry—but she didn’t know exactly at what—perhaps at Greg. She would never go back. Never. She would stay right here. And get a job. And change—for the better, unlike Greenie and Bottsy. She hardly noticed, near the statue of Columbus, that Mr. Plentagger had peeled off.
* * *
—
THE telephone was sitting there on the floor, like a black turtle, beside the rocking chair. She knew it had a bell in its bowels. How strange! She had forgotten Greg’s number—her own number for so long. An hour ago she had gone to the notebook that she kept in her small tin strongbox with her junk jewelry, and had looked the number up. She had written it on a torn slip of paper with a green felt pen. The slip was on the floor next to the phone. The notation looked like flecks of dried seaweed. She rocked. Once in a while she looked at the seaweed. She could not seem to move anything but her pushing foot and leg. She was in warm water and a strong hand with hair between the joints of the fingers was sliding along her flank….
She woke with a headache and blundered to bed, where she lay awake, waiting for something to happen, until the window rectangle was gray; then she fell into a dreamstorm of a nap.
* * *
—
SHE woke a little after eleven and went right to the phone.
“Is this Helena Beadle?”
“It is.” Elaine could see the hips in that voice.
“This is Elaine Quinlan. You found me this apartment on Wooster Square?”
“Yes, dear. I hope everything’s così così.”
“It’s fine. Except. I gather from the other people in the house that the security here isn’t so good. I was wondering. Do you happen to know of a locks—?”
“Did you lose your keys, honey? We all do that when we first move in. I don’t know, maybe Freud—or Jung—my friends all say Jung is—maybe Jung has an explanation. Never fails.”
“No, I just—”
“I’ve been in this business twenty-eight years. Never fails.”
Elaine decided not to try to explain why she was calling; she didn’t know whether she could make her reasons clear to herself. “I wondered if you—”
“My Girl Friday knows of one. We’ve had to, on account of this—”
“Your girl who?”
“Just an expression, darling.” Aside: “Liz, what’s the number of that locksmith we keep recommending?” Pause. “Got a pencil, honey? Three six five. Four two oh seven. The name is peculiar—you have to spell it out. S-a-f-e-hyphen-capital-T…”
“Oh, no.”
The Beadle continued spelling.
“Are you sure? They’re reliable? I got a bad phone call from them.”
“We get raves from people. Absolute raves. They’re out of this world.”
“Are they trustworthy?”
“Honey, they’re like the First National Bank.”
“Well…. If you say so.”
* * *
—
“SAFE-T Securit-E Syst-M!”
“Hello, this is—”
“Oh hello, Mzz Quinlan. We’ve been expecting your call.”
Long pause.
“Could you send someone to change the tumbler, or cylinder, whatever, in my lock?”
“Indeed. Indeed. May I ask what type lock it is?”
“I’ll have to look.” Sound of footsteps. “Yale. What else, in this burg?”
“Yale, we have Yale. When would be convenient?”
“This afternoon?…Like say two o’clock?”
“Very good.”
“Will you send somebody who’s…I mean, the telephone people sent this incredible creep to install—”
“All our people are bonded, Mzz Quinlan. Let’s see. We’ll send this young fellow, Eddie. He’s a mechanical genius—really—and a nice gentle person in the bargain. Very good-looking. He’s tall, wears this ponytail effect…”
“Look, mister, I want a lock installed, I don’t want a call-boy.”
Chapter 9
THERE is no form of flying for Macaboy that is higher in the sky than his joy in the clean fielding of door panels. The panels are to be let into the frame with rabbets: these will give the door the integrity, from the outside, of a bank vault. And of all the operations in joining, what sweeter and prouder one than rabbeting well across the end of the grain? Macaboy has sharpened the little gossipy tongue of the spur of his rebate plane, has set the width fence and the depth stop, and has let down the razor-edged cutter only so much as would barely peel away that atomic skin of a body of water which is called surface tension. He starts with utmost care at the far end, with caressing strokes allowing the spur, first, to define the width of the rabbet without breaking away any grain ends, then whispering the so-sharp cutter with goose-down strokes along the full width of the channel—seven-eighths of an inch—and off the end with never a fiber carried away. Now he gradually works backward, still with short air-weight strokes, until he has started the work on the whole edge; after that he shoots the entire length of the cut with even, light runs of the blade that have the sound of faraway skis schussing on corn snow. A light dry dust comes away. He stops now and then to take out the cutter blade and whet it, honing the edge on the oilstone until it is as keen and biting as the mind of Joseph Conrad—for Macaboy, who has seen many places, thinks he has never had pictures cut so sharply into his mind as are those of the wholly imaginary landscape of Costaguana he was reading about last night. He reinserts the tongue and goes back to work. Each stroke requires two soft-padded ocelot steps along beside the upended panel.
B-r-r-r-i-n-g-g-g!
With the reflex of a man who has touched the fierce heat of dry ice, Macaboy jerks the plane away from the wood: It is his instinct, when an alarm sounds, to save the artifact first and then look to his own skin. But it is only the phone. He takes the black box onto the bed.
“Safe-T Securit-E Syst-M!”
“Hello, this is—”
“Oh, hello, Mzz Quinlan. We’ve been expecting your call.”
Macaboy has read of Oriental mystics who have learned to regulate their pulse rate and blood pressure by processes of medi
tation, and while planing, even in his daydream of Costaguana, Macaboy has managed for the sake of absolute steadiness of hand to approach their level of control. It is therefore all the more noticeable to him that the governor of his fuel pump has now suddenly gone haywire. He cannot seem to command his tongue to explain to the client why “tumbler” is wrong; he senses, as part of the blurred landscape shooting past the window of this rushing train, a lame joke about Yale locks and New Haven, but it is gone by before he realizes what it was. The important thing is to fix a time. Today—the client suggests—two o’clock. He must remember. Considering his lack of focus he describes rather well the person who is to be sent.
* * *
—
THEN it is all over. His mind is fuzzy, his brain has grown gray fur, like bread left too long in the breadbox. What time did the client suggest? He really can’t recall. Early afternoon? Two? Three? Should he go at two thirty to be safe?
He goes back to the bench, picks up the plane. One shot along the rabbet channel tells him he must stop and wait for a better time. The grain seems to have turned hummocky; his unsteady hand sings with a vibrato.
* * *
—
SHE swings the door open.
He turns his back to her, so she can read the legend on his blue twill coverall.
“You’re the locksmith.”
He waves a yellow work order in his hand. “Forgive me, the office gave me—the name was—?”
“Elaine Quinlan.”
“Just making sure I have the right door.” He does not bounce a name back but points to the cursive Eddie on his breast pocket.