by Henry Miller
These questions drive her frantic. Meanwhile she’s got to think about burying” George. And there’s a bastard under her belt.... That also has to be disposed of. But how? How?
She looks about the room with terror-stricken eyes. His books are still scattered about, plaguing her with memories of quiet, peaceful evenings—so many of them—spent just with him. Mechanically she gets up and examines the titles of the books. She hasn’t the faintest idea what it is all about. The titles baffle her. His mentality is the one thing she has left unexplored.
An hour later her mind is made up: She is at the telephone, calling Dion’s home. Her voice is faint and timid.
“Please tell Dion that George is dead. Yes, that’s all. He will understand.”
At breakfast next morning Dion is given the message.
“What George is that?” asks his father.
“George? Huh … just an acquaintance. You don’t know him.”
He sips his coffee and goes on reading the newspaper. The news affects him, but not in the way Pauline had pictured. He is sorry for her, if it is true. But is it? Isn’t this possibly just another trap?
A week later Pauline becomes panic-stricken. She is absolutely convinced of her lover’s faithlessness. He has become a monster in her eyes. She’d like to strangle the bastard in her womb. She’ll strangle him, too, if she can lay her hands on him....
Day after day, as soon as dark approaches, she stations herself outside his home. A loaded revolver is in her bag. And every evening, after a forlorn, fruitless wait, she returns to her room and takes the revolver out of her bag. Distracted, beside herself with rage and grief, she toys with the weapon and practices by taking aim at herself in the mirror….
Will she have the strength to pull the trigger? Her fingers are weak with fear and dread.
“This is no solution,” she whispers to herself. “God, he must come back! He can’t leave me alone like this.”
She throws the gun aside and weeps.
A guardian angel must be watching over this lover of hers, preserving him from harm and from a fate that he would be unable to cope with. He hasn’t the slightest suspicion of Pauline’s doings. If someone were to tell him about the revolver he would laugh. “She’ll get over it,” he repeats to himself. He grows more and more hardened each day, more and more disgusted with himself.
If we had been with Pauline and Dion one evening in early summer, just a few weeks before these dramatic events, we might have had an inkling of the tortures which brought about this determined resolution on the part of Pauline’s lover.
It was a very warm night and Pauline had complained of a stifling feeling. They decided to take a ride to Coney Island. As they listen to the band concert at Luna Park they are entertained by a slack-wire performance high up above the artificial lake. Boats filled with merrymakers shoot down the steep incline and smack the surface of the water. The woman with the parasol slides dexterously above the blare and confusion. She seems to float in the air, like the opening notes of the Tannhäuser Overture. Presently they get up and saunter over to the dance pavilion. He thinks it would do Pauline good to exercise a bit.
As they come abreast of the pavilion he begins to doubt whether, in her present condition, it is the wisest thing to cause her this exertion. Little does he realize the ordeal he is to go through.
On the very steps of the pavilion, watching him breathlessly, is Cora.
She watches him fully a minute before he becomes aware of her presence. Cora takes Pauline in with one devastating glance. She notes the way the woman hangs on his arm. No words are necessary to convey the intimacy of these two. All the ugly rumors that she had given the lie were true, alas. Dion was living with this woman.
“The strumpet!” she thought. “Taking a boy for her lover.” Ugh! It was abominable. She could forgive him if he had taken a woman off the street, but this … She notes the dejected way he drags along. “Ashamed of himself, is he? Well, he ought to be! She’s old enough to be his mother.”
Dion has averted his eyes. He knows that he is under fire.
“Christ! How long will it take to get by her?”
He squeezes Pauline’s arm so as to hasten her steps. He is like a soldier being drummed out of the regiment. There is no room in his mind for anything but the disgrace which shackles him.
To pass Cora without a greeting is out of the question. He must lift his face for just an instant, if only to nod to her…. If only Pauline wouldn’t cling to him so. He might pass her off as an aunt. A wave of disgust passes over him as he thinks of her figure. How much does it show?
God, what a cruel predicament! (He is thinking of himself.)
At last he can put it off no longer. Another step and it must happen. His temples are hammering, his tongue is dry and thick. He knows what an ass he is. Nevertheless, he tries to appear calm.
His lips form a hollow, noiseless salutation. He thinks he is saying “How do you do,” as if he were a gentleman out strolling with a lady of his acquaintance … as though it were the most casual greeting ever. His spine stiffens as he makes a slight bow and doffs his hat.
It all happens so swiftly that Pauline almost fails to notice the gesture. They walk in silence for a few paces. Presently Pauline asks in a pleasant voice, “Who was it?” Then, noticing the color in his cheeks, “Why Dion, how you’re blushing!” He begins to stammer. “Tell me,” she begs, drawing him close to her, “who was it?”
He implores her not to look back. “I’ll tell you in a minute. Am I really blushing so? Pshaw! I thought I was over that nonsense. I don’t see why I should be blushing. What the devil! Who was it, you say?”
By this time Pauline was eyeing him gravely. There was no escape. And yet, he didn’t wish to hurt Pauline. This business with Cora was done for. Was he still blushing, he wondered.
“Look here, Pauline, don’t go thinking a lot of fool things. It’s nothing at all—just a girl I knew once. A pretty kid, but nothing much to her. Once I thought I liked her a good deal… ah, but that was ages ago. I forgot about her long ago.... Funny we should bump into her down here, though.” He shut up like a clam.
His “ages ago” did not deceive Pauline. She detected in this expression about as much sincerity as one attributes to the slips of a slack-wire performer. And just as one’s heart leaps to his mouth at every purposive slip of these performers, so her fears assailed her in spite of his assurances. One can sometimes carry these assurances too far. The air was heavy with danger. However, she told him nothing about her fears.
It was much later—after she had put the revolver away permanently—that she understood his blushes. They imparted meaning to her fears.
6
LESLIE’S PARENTS HAD JUST RETURNED FROM A successful carnival tour. They had been away eighteen months. The time which elapsed between greetings had been sufficient to transform a hobbledehoy into a raw, brass-lipped youth whose affection had soured and whose obedience was a mirage.
Leslie’s mother was a loving, trustful creature whose devotion had been imposed on, first by her husbands, and then by her son. Her first husband was a railroad man who beat her in her cups. He died during an attack of delirium tremens. Leslie had only a vague remembrance of him, but it was a memory that he cherished. He had absolutely no use for his stepfather, a stranger whom his mother had married in order that she might later reform him.
This individual had failed in the first flush of his career as a “con” man, and after serving a term in the penitentiary, married Leslie’s mother; thereafter he attempted to repudiate his past by eking out a precarious living “playing the grifts and the grinds.” As a boy Leslie accompanied these two in their wanderings over the face of the earth; there was hardly a civilized country they had not traversed. Speaking of his experiences, Leslie always referred to his people as circus folk, a vague description which permitted the credulous to glut their fancy. Pinned down, he spoke more definitely, as the whim dictated, of lion tamers, equestrians, acr
obats, and so on. The fact was, he was ashamed of his folk. Not of his mother so much (he recognized her helplessness), but of his stepfather.
In the last three years he had been left behind to acquire a less desultory education. Alas, his education was already in advance of his years. The placid, sterile, surrogate form of instruction of the schools proved unpalatable to him. At fifteen he knew more about life—the vital aspects of it—than the spinsters and eunuchs whose desiccated, bankrupt emotional vitality makes them regarded by our age as the fit mentors of youth.
During his parents’ last tour he had kicked over the traces and taken a job. A job is incorrect. In the course of a year he had held over a dozen jobs. He had what employment managers and entrepreneurs recognize as personality. To sell himself was so simple a trick that he became enamored of it. A fit of malaise was sufficient to make him surrender his job—there was always another around the corner. He had no more difficulty securing recommendations than a bank president has in slipping into a silk-lined tuxedo jacket. Just as he had been fascinated by the gaping yokels under the carnival tent, so now he longed to probe the rich gullibility of hornswoggled employers.
Moloch put him to work in the spirit of a pickpocket engaging a confederate. He wasn’t the least taken in by Leslie’s “savoir faire.” “Play the game,” he warned him at the outset, “or I’ll give you a thrashing.” And forthwith he proceeded with diligence, at every turn of the road, to undermine Leslie’s conceit. Never for a moment did he allow Leslie to believe that he was anything but a convenient (and submissive) tool—one that he could dispense with arbitrarily at an instant’s notice. In these matters he was a despot.
There was another sort of training going on, however, that acted as compensation and eased the chafing which smarted Leslie’s spirit. Moloch introduced him to the companionship of such exiles as Herbert Spencer, Winwood Reade, Kropotkin, De Gourmont, Nietzsche, Latzko, Ambrose Bierce....
And so Leslie gradually came to behave with the conviction that he was employed by a god, a very warm, human, personable deity who was accessible and with whom he could be as intimate as a sympathetic older brother. He saw his savior as a sturdy immoralist, a dispassionate liar who cared deeply about the larger truths, a skeptic among fanatics, an iconoclast who destroyed from a sheer superabundance of health and strength. … He imitated—sometimes disastrously. A fierce hunger gnawed him to break his fetters and test his eagle wings in truly empyreal realms.
The aunt to whose care he had been confided was the only relative the family possessed. Leslie’s mother was not without misgivings concerning the wisdom of sheltering her son under her sister-in-law’s roof. Aunt Sophie was a woman approaching forty, rather plump, and unmistakably gross and sensual. Her husband had died soon after their marriage and left her in the predicament of proving her charms to the world. She had a meager talent which she leased for a pittance to the services of the Jewish stage. Her life was hectic, disordered, and without a foundation of any sort. The remnants of an intellect with which she confronted the exigencies of life were salvaged from the swamps of adolescence. Her movements oscillated between the satisfying of her appetites and the meretricious arts of the theater. Incapable of attracting a permanent consort, she converted her boudoir into a lupanar. In this flourishing atmosphere Leslie sprouted like a weed. Here he found such treasures as Aphrodite, the Satyricon, and Flossie, gifts which had been deposited by her whilom admirers. The pernicious influence of this premature initiation into the splendors of an antique world his Aunt Sophie supplemented by making him privy to her scandalous amours, occasionally exploiting him as an instrument to abet her passionate intrigues. Later he became the turbid spring at which she slaked her unquenchable thirst.
It was to dispel the premonitions of impending disaster that Leslie’s mother had taken him to task, in a gentle way, one morning shortly after her arrival. She was amazed at the flagrant disrespect her son exhibited toward his aunt. There was in it a great deal more than the mere defiance of rebellious youth; a painful intimacy obtruded and buried its corruption in her heart like a canker. She observed with grief that her son had thrust her out of his heart, that he reveled in the possession of vile secrets, oppressive and suffocating in their turpitude.
“Leslie, you must come and live with us,” she remonstrated. “Your father has been anxious about you.”
“He’s not my father,” Leslie replied with bitterness. “He’s a dirty kike. I don’t want to hear anything about him.”
“Shame, Leslie, shame! What a way to speak. Is that the way you have learned to behave in my absence?”
Harsh and ugly as these words appear, they were not the first that his mother had listened to. Hitherto she had made excuses for these outbursts. She attributed his vehemence to jealousy. But the word “kike” rankled. It lent an unfamiliar interpretation to his hostility.
“My father wasn’t like him, you know that. You say he used to beat you. I never saw it… maybe I was too young to notice. But he treated me all right. That kike—the only education he ever gave me was in crime.”
“Why do you use that word? I’m a Jew just as your step-father is. You’re a Jew, too, though you’re proud of your drop of Gentile blood. Don’t be a silly little boy. I don’t like to speak of such things—I know how much you love your own father—but Leslie, my child”—”child” irritated him beyond words—”your father wasn’t half as good to me as …”
“Well,” he snarled, “he wasn’t a jailbird. His worst fault was drink. You could have stopped that. Instead of complaining about him you should have trained him differently. At least he didn’t make his living trimming a bunch of poor suckers. That bum would steal the pennies off a dead man’s eye!”
“Leslie, I forbid you to speak this way about your stepfather. If he ever heard of this he’d beat you within an inch of your life.”
“Oh, he would? Let him try. I guess I can handle myself against a tub of fat like him.... Tell him what I said. I’m not afraid of him—anymore.” (The beatings he had received reminded him that he had yet to establish his supremacy.)
His mother became conciliatory. She recognized his father’s sullen obduracy, the futility of combating him with threats.
“Why have you become so bitter against your own people?” she asked. “Haven’t I brought you up to be a good Jew? Have I ever said anything against the Christians like you’re talking now about your father … your stepfather, I mean?”
“You bring me up like a Jew and you two masquerade as Christians—because it’s better for your business. Is that being a good Jew? Besides, I’m only half a Jew, and from now on I disown that half. It’s only a religion anyway and I can choose what I like to believe in. … I don’t believe in anything—but I won’t be a Jew! Nobody takes me for one, so why should I pretend to be what I don’t want to be? I’m not taking your religion away from you, Mom, but I want to be free to lead my own life, to think as I please, and believe what I please. I’ve been doing a lot of reading … and thinking”—an afterthought— “since you left. My ideas are changed.”
“I’m sorry that they haven’t improved, Leslie,” said his mother sadly. She had been intending to speak to him about the strange books she had noticed in his possession. She feared they were corrupting him.
“Who has been giving you these books?” she asked. She knew they were not of his own choice.
“Moloch,” he answered.
“Moloch? who is that?”
“My boss.”
“Don’t you say Mister Moloch?”
Leslie smiled disdainfully. “It ain’t necessary. I’m his friend. We pal around together.”
“I should like to meet this man. What can he find so interesting in a boy like you? You’re hardly out of your short pants. You’re not a man yet.” Leslie glowered at her. “Oh! I know you think you are.”
Leslie ignored the thrust and swept on enthusiastically about his employer. “That’s just it, Mom. He doesn’t treat me like a bo
y. He trusts me and lets me into his confidences. Why, I know all about him. When I’m with him I feel as if I were a man, too, just like him. He’s my idea of a real guy.”
“What a way to speak about your boss. How old is he?”
“Aw, I don’t know. He must be thirty or forty. He’s married and has a kid … a pretty little girl, and bright—you ought to hear her speak. He treats her great. Gee, if I had a kid that’s the way I’d like to bring it up. You never see him get angry with her or scold her. He talks so sensibly to her … that’s the way he is, Mom. He treats every one the same. He’s a prince!”
Several times during the course of this panegyric his mother restrained her emotions. She wanted to laugh, at first—his ideas were so diffuse—and then, impressed by his sincerity and earnestness, the passion of his avowals, a new feeling surged up in her and put a catch in her throat. Was she being dispossessed so soon? She had hardly come to know her boy and he was being snatched away. Already the worship which she had always counted on, which warmed her and sustained her in her secret trials, had been transferred to this being who was strange to her and whom she feared instinctively. The influence of this man whom she had never met, who in the space of a few months had taken complete possession of her boy, filled her with trepidation.