by John Hersey
* * *
—
SHE went with Greenie to Basel’s. Greenhelge knew Macaboy, she would understand. They were seated at a tiny table at the middle of the room. Greenie ordered a kebab. Elaine asked for moussaka, and when it came she found it riddled with eggplant, which had always put hair on her tongue; after the first mouthful she played fork-shove. The zithers were going, and a few real Greek derivatives and some drunken customers were doing a hypnotic dipping-and-hesitating dance with linked arms around the tables in a large circle, at the dead center of which was Elaine’s heart.
“Look, kid,” Greenie said, her pearly choppers making instant lam-burger of the kebab, “you’re just horny.”
“I hate that word.”
“People who are getting it don’t hate that word. When did you get it last?”
“You crummy slut.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“You slept with him, didn’t you?”
“Him?” Greenhelge’s long face, growing longer, seemed to Elaine to be stretching innocence to the breaking point. “What him?”
“You know what him. Him.”
“Oh, him!” She knew, all right. “No, Lainie. You’re way off the mark. All he wanted to do was talk about you.”“You’re putting me on.”
“Think whatever you want.”
That was Greenie’s way: to leave things hanging out. She couldn’t resist giving you a tiny bite for the positive part of your mind to take, then much wherewithal for the negative part to seize and choke on. Elaine began to eat eggplant
* * *
—
THIS time she asked Greenhelge to wait in her car until she had had a chance to check her apartment There was a letter in her mailbox in the entrance hall. She took it out and stuffed it in her purse as she pulled out her keys. Her apartment was locked; dark. She turned on lights and searched. All clear. She ran down and waved to Greenie, who drove off. Elaine climbed back up, put Carly Simon on the record player, and sat and rocked, thinking about how her impulse to flee had died out. It was nearly midnight before she opened the letter.
It was a printed form, with certain blanks filled in, among them one for her name, which was misspelled.
Dear Miss Quinlon:
Report to work at 9 a.m. the morning after receiving this notice.
Job classification: Clerical, Class C.
Job description: Filing. Occasional “stenography” in pool for “junior executive” ranks. Occasional “minuting” of supervisory staff “straight shooter” motivation stimulation meetings and shop stewards’ “bite the bullet” employe intelligence and demerit meetings.
Hours: 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
Breaks: 8-minute coffee, 9:30 a.m., 11:00 a.m., 2:30 p.m., 4:00 p.m.; 10-minute “Swedish roll” or “yoghurt”, 10:30 a.m.
All operations punched on time clocks. Tardiness penalized on paychecks pro rata until “dismissal cut-off,” after one hour cumulative delinquence.
Wages: $3.71 p/hr.
(Signed) Maxine Brallery
Director of Personnel
Elaine went directly to the phone. She heard sounds of Ma Bell’s busy synapses struggling for association, as if the telephone system were a vast failing memory. Seven rings and a weak hello.
“Hi, Mom!”
“Lainie? Have you any idea what time of night it is?”
“Sorry, Mom. Just wanted to touch base.”
“You’ve waked me up out of that first deep sleep. I’ll never be able—”
“I said I was sorry, Mom. I forgot. I never get to bed before two o’clock.”
“This is typical, Lainie, typical. There’s just a total lack of consideration for others.”
“I wanted to tell you I have a job.”
“You have never tried to put yourself in another person’s position. Your father and I—what kind of a job?”
“I’m manufacturing hand guns.”
“You’re what?”
“Saturday night specials.”
“Darling, are you on some…some medication?”
“It’s an outfit called the Lampson Gunsmithy. Big. I’m really not making the guns. I just make Xerox copies of clichés in quotation marks and stick them in metal drawers.”
“How long have you been working?”
“Three weeks.”
“Lainie! Shame on you! I can hear one of your little white lies four hundred miles away. I’ve always been able to tell when you were fibbing.”
“O.K., Mom. I start tomorrow.”
“Do you have a boyfriend?”
“Yep.”
“Oh, dear. Is he nice?”
“Of course.”
“Does he shave?”
“Yes, Mom. He wears a ponytail, though.”
“Oh, dear, Lainie, don’t make a mistake. Promise me one thing—you won’t get married without bringing him out to meet your mother.”
“Married? Who’s getting married?…You’d like him, Mom. He’s so…so exact.”
“What does he do?”
“He’s a locksmith. And a carpenter. You should see the door he made for me.”
“The what?”
“Door. Door! Door! Can you hear me?”
Sounds of weeping.
“Oh, Mom, for Christ’s sake.”
“On top of everything else you take His name in vain.”
“I’m sorry, Mom. I just wanted to fill you in.”
“Sometimes I can’t believe you’re Thomas Quinlan’s daughter.”
“Oh, shit, Mom, don’t start that…. I love you.”
“I wish I could believe that.” Click.
Chapter 20
THE heat was like a hawk. It soared with glittering parental eyes, looking for her; it saw her; it hovered directly over her, close-shouldered, slowly flapping its wings to stay in one place, poised to dive and kill. The image of a hawk came often to Elaine. She could not remember whether the bird had been set in motion in back of her eyes by a memory, or a dream, or something she had read as a child. It filled her with anxiety; or perhaps anxiety blowing through her started it wheeling. It was over her in heat that evening, as she walked out Chapel toward home after her first day at work.
Her head had been spinning all day—the hawk in high spirals—with something like the dizzy muddle she felt whenever she came back to familiar rooms after a long time away. (Stale air. Mail to be opened. Dust. Memories. Brown water from faucets. Motes of the past hanging in the air.) The office of the factory was a huge overlighted space of acrylic partitions and insect sounds. There was no sense at all of explicit manufacture. The company might have been in the business of fabricating amicus curiae briefs or petcocks for sump pumps, for all you could tell by the lazy, indifferent girls, mostly in very short skirts, whispering, flapping papers like signal pennants, eyes out for the bitch supervisor. No sense at all of guns but a great deal of killing. Of time. No one seemed to work at all. There was a high cunning in the goldbricking all around Elaine. The flirtation with idleness was almost like a game of sex. She felt quite stupid, doing what she had been told to do. The filing took no brains; she yearned for more stupidity than she would ever have. Invoices by date and number. The girls were not curious about her. They looked at her, she thought, reproachfully. She felt marked, like Hester Prynne, as if she had a shameful varsity letter embroidered on her breast In fact a college education might be far worse than adultery with some of these chicks. The windows were sealed; the air was chilly; the dead, egg-crated light made people’s eyes look like caterpillars. What kind of sadomasochistic apparatus had she wandered into? Why? In order to be able to tell her mother she had a respectable job? So as not to go dum-dum, rocking and staring at that ferking walnut door?
Late sunlight leaned in to her side of the street. She was sopping. How could she fa
ce a job in summer in an air-conditioned office?—going home was going straight to hell. She skidded past the pizza parlors, her gorge tightening at the mere thought of molten cheese. She had some raspberry sherbet in the freezer compartment of her fridge; she would try that, and some iced tea. Yes. She stopped at Cavaliere’s and bought a crisp, dewy bunch of mint out of the cold case. Starting up Academy Street she held the mint to her nose to sniff the coolth of some brookside copse she wanted to imagine, but the hairy leaves tickled her nostrils and made her sneeze.
Something reminded her of something…. A vague stimulus—eyes?—ears?—seemed to be trying to break through her confusion. There! Up ahead. That round-shouldered lope, leaning forward into the pace. Less than half a block up Academy. It was, without a doubt, the melancholy slant of Homer Plentagger. A man at the door of her memory, half draped, as if in used towels, in that huge terrycloth robe. She slowed her steps. She hoped he would not look back and see her. She thought of ducking across the street into the park, but she could tell that the shadowy murk trapped under the oaks and sycamores was simply heat so still as to have been condensed into darkness. She walked with care.
The poisoner was almost at the house. He would look in all his pockets for his keys, fumble in his letter box; clocks everywhere would stop their ticking over the time he would take. She was on the point of turning about face, to get away from something evitable in this world, when—
What? What was flipping up there? A fast blur from the mouth of Court Street, beyond. Then dark bees zigging around the pesticides man, some kind of dancing ritual. She made out three shapes dodging around the tall, mournful figure. His arms began to cut the air decisively, as if he were a speeded-up home-plate umpire.
Elaine, still walking, sweating, realized she was getting close to something she did not understand, did not want to understand. Sometimes she went to a movie rated R, in which it would turn out that the rating was to protect children of tender age from sights adults were presumed to take as matters of course. A blood-sopped horse’s head in a gangster’s bed. A writer rendered vegetable by a gang of clockwork nasties. She had learned to close her eyes fast. She did that now. She could not walk with her eyes closed. Before her whirling neurons could scramble together a halt, she looked to see where she was going.
Instead she saw three men running at her. They were wearing multicolored ski masks, the eye circlets like bathysphere portholes. Elaine’s useful thought was: In this heat? Then—they were running straight at her—she was blown off the sidewalk by a blast of terror. She ran up onto a porch of a red house which in recent weeks she had come to love, and even now, shaking and sweating, she recited, as if to summon up protective magic by incantation, her customary form of response to the polyglot thing this house was: Jesu, a Federal-period house with a Greek revival porch and a Queen Anne wing and God knows what kind of bay windows.
When she turned the men had run past and were gone. Her relief was mixed with a weird, bitter cognizance of not being at the center of things: they were not interested in her.
Leaning almost indolently against a fluted Ionian column, Elaine watched the trio run down Academy and around the corner. Then she looked toward home.
A heap of laundry on the sidewalk. No, it moved.
From somewhere in her viscera came a heat hotter than the hawk’s, and she ran up the street.
Homer Plentagger looked up at her with cow eyes and said, “Get Merle out here.”
Elaine had her movie reflex. Closed her eyes.
Seeing blackness she heard Homer Plentagger say, “Knife.” Then he offered her a groan. “Merle,” he said.
Opening her eyes, Elaine leaned down and placed the bunch of fresh mint on Homer Plentagger’s chest. Even as she straightened up she wondered why she had done that. She whirled and ran.
Her hands were shaking so badly she dropped her keys on the floor as she fished them out of her purse. The key tip chattered all around the jagged slot in the lock, and when she had finally opened the door she ran all the way to the Plentaggers’ in the back before she realized she had left her key ring hanging there in the front door lock. She tried to remember what she had seen in the street. It was as if she had forgotten a name, and in her struggle to recall it the name got jammed in a recess of her mind; the harder she tried to summon it back, the tighter the jam. She started to run out to the street to see what was out there, and at once it came back, all too clearly. She took her keys from the lock and said to herself, You stupid cunt, you’re wasting time. She ran down the hall and punched the Plentaggers’ bell.
Merle Plentagger looked cool and crisp as fresh Bibb lettuce at the heart of the head.
“Your husband’s been hurt. In the street.”
She was pointing like an idiot at the front door, which had just banged shut on its spring.
“Mother of God,” Mrs. Plentagger said. “They got him.”
“I think he’s dying.” Then at once: “No. No. I have no way of knowing that.”
“Where is he?”
“Just down the sidewalk.”
Mrs. Plentagger stepped back to open the apartment door wider, and she gestured to Elaine to go in. “Call the police. Get an ambulance.” And she was gone.
Elaine had a hard time finding the phone. It was in the bedroom. The apartment was so clean, it looked sick. The dust ruffles of the bedspreads were like evening gowns waltzing. The officer at the police emergency number sounded as if he would fall asleep. She said, “I saw three men, they knifed him.” Many questions. Her voice woggled. She became frantic. She shouted, “Do something, stupid!”
“Hold your horses, lady. We got a procedure.”
Afterward she felt herself pulled back out into the street. Where had all the people come from? A big crowd in a silent circle, doing nothing. Elaine, saying, “Excuse me, excuse me,” pushed her way to the center. Merle Plentagger was kneeling. Her chartreuse slacks were covered with blood. She had loosened Homer’s tie and collar.
“They’re coming,” Elaine said, and then she realized she was looking at the first dead person she had ever seen.
She became aware that the hawk was diving.
She pushed into the crowd, ducking down, so the plunging talons would not find her. When she broke out of the circle she walked away with a staggering dignity as if to declare she was not the sort of person who liked to suck on sensation. The hot day had turned cold. Her abdomen chittered with the chill like a loose jaw. She went up her stairs two at a time. When she had shut the walnut door she leaned her forehead against it After a few seconds she sprang away from it, bolted to the kitchen, swept up her straight chair there, carried it to the door, and wedged it aslant with its back tight under the door handle, so that even if Death knew how to pick locks, he would not be able to open the door. She was not ready for him.
Chapter 21
MACABOY bolts out on his bed in his baggy pajama bottoms and does a few dance steps. It is ten minutes to six; he’s a bit later than usual this morning, but he can accept his delinquency as a mere blip in his image on the tube of fate. He brims over. He has work to do. He is going to start a new door. The sun promises beyond the Georgian buildings on Park. Good! He sets water to boil, puts coffee grounds in his Chemex. Eats a soft peach with soshing and slucking noises. Flips on his radio. Zowie: Grateful Dead at five fifty-five a.m.! He walks out of the pajama pants and pulls on boxer shorts and jeans. Now a guy on the radio is trying to make the news sound new by emphasizing unimportant words and mispronouncing famous names. Macaboy doesn’t particularly listen. Sound to him is like oxygen: it is in the air, he needs it, he is not aware of the processes by which he takes it in and burns it with his body. He fries three eggs. Grills some white bread in the egg butter. In the midst of the sizzling he is suddenly sharply listening. A name has been mentioned that he has not really heard, and then, as a familiar word will sometimes jump out at him from the expa
nse of a newspaper page, he clearly hears a phrase which leaps into his ears and revs up his metabolism: “…of 32 Academy Street.” He can’t make out what happened to whom. “Police are looking into a possible underworld revenge motive. The victim had a record of arrests on gambling and numbers charges.” Macaboy dives for the phone, then realizes he can’t call her just after six in the morning. Now he doesn’t trust his hands to work wood. He oils tools.
At eight thirty he goes around to Greenhouse’s on Chapel Street and buys the morning Journal Courier. It is all over the front page.
He waits until nine to call. No answer.
He calls three more times during the day. No answer.
Twelve hours after he shot up out of bed good old Macaboy is in a state.
* * *
—
HE has passed the time between the phone calls by looking at the pictures in her album. It is almost like going to the movies. The best films tell their stories by indirection, and here, in a series of crude stills, a kind of plot is offered for deduction. A baby girl, perhaps twenty months old, stands foursquare in a pinafore, her hair cut in a bob, with bangs; she is holding a stuffed koala bear by a leg at an odd angle, out away from her body; her underlip is pushed slightly forward, and Macaboy sees in the wide eyes a certain stubborness—this child is on the verge of being spoiled by love. (The picture was taken, Macaboy figures, in the time of Truman. He sees a subliminal shadow photo, a cut from the film Point of Order, of Senator Joseph McCarthy holding up some papers: “I have here in my hand…”) On another page—he skips—she is four or five, straddling her father’s shoulders; they are at a beach, in bathing suits; she has coiled her pudgy arms around her father’s forehead, making him an odd royal crown; above that, her face is ecstatic; he looks a bit hectic and blurred, as if he has had a few beers, needed them, and what leaps forward from this picture is the abyss that lies between the child’s innocence, her absolute trust in the wisdom of her father and the hospitality of the world, and, on the other hand, the father’s knowledge, his effort to pretend, for her sake, his look of a hangover, his realization that he must salvage something somehow. It is a heartbreaking picture, taken in the time of decline of the Korean War. (Macaboy’s shadow snap: the President of the United States pushing his putter at a golf ball on a green on the White House lawn.) And this is a picture of two girls of about ten, with arms around each other; one is not interesting to Macaboy, a gamin, dirty-faced and pretentious, he feels, in her tomboyishness; the other fascinates him—trying to imitate her raunchy friend, to keep up; hair long, free, and straight, costume also straight; she has done her best to soil her clothes but has not quite succeeded; a begging look in the eyes, but the mouth quite firm and full: an odd impression, which the viewer gets but the girl herself obviously does not have, that she is more durable than the toughie beside her because she seems to have calmly accepted, as the other has not, her endowments: the Ten Commandments, Girl Scout’s honor, cheaters weepers, honest sweat, don’t tattle. (Shadow picture: John F. Kennedy, at the long table in the Cabinet Room, with C.I.A. reps and staff, ordering the Bay of Pigs, his hand raised in that decisive chopping gesture of his.) The mother does not appear for several pages, but here she is, with a long-wristed girl of about thirteen; they are posing in front of a fortuneteller’s tent in a traveling carnival, a rickety-looking ferris wheel looming like a huge clock in the background; the mother looking at the daughter with a manufacturer’s self-centered pride, bitterness however at some undefined loss playing hide-and-seek around the lips, a prudish lift to the sharp chin; the daughter not yet rebellious, meek, conscious of being the cynosure, desperately trying to conform to magazine definitions of what she should be; Macaboy can almost hear the accepted kid words of the time coming out of that eager little mouth: definitely, you know, cool, cram it. (Lee Harvey Oswald seen from the rear, in the window of the Dallas Book Depository, slowly moving the tip of his 6.5-mm Italian carbine as the first of the cortege below comes into the telescopic sight ring.) In this picture she must be in college, she is standing in front of a crimped-up VW bug with an idiot in an Esso grease monkey’s shirt who is making ten-year-old faces at the camera; she is wearing a Mexican serape, her brassy stance tells that she has come out from the mothball world of that father and mother; the face is a woman’s, she has had beneficial orgasms; yet there are glints of nostalgic obedience that flash off the teeth bared by saying cheese, and all the forced gaiety in the world cannot hide the inner centrifuge, the flying id-bits, the feeling that big bones are pulling out of their sockets, ribs are afloat, the tower of vertebrae totters—this is not a chick with a sense of her own integrity. (Picture behind the picture: Lyndon Johnson in the Oval Office, ordering McNamara to go to Saigon to report that everything is indeed just as it looks from Washington.) Now this is a damn good-looking young city woman, all pulled together and very unhappy, standing alone on a stoop of a house that can’t be far from Rittenhouse Square, holding her big sloppy canvas purse out away from her body, as if it were a koala bear; an escapee from one kind of middle class into another; in denim uniform; tucks of sensitivity around the cheeks and mouth which belie the overall look of cool indifference; burning intensity shooting out from under a relaxed brow; an unutterable scream trapped in her beautiful, easy throat (Macaboy looks for a long, long time at this photograph, seeing in haze behind it another: Richard Nixon talking to reporters after his defeat in California, with sweat on his upper lip, saying he will never again run for elective office, saying in flat, expressionless tones, the unctuous resonance of the duckbill nose in his voice tinged with bitterness, “You won’t have Nixon to kick around any more.”) And this picture shows