Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  “They can alter it. Where does it bind, or whatever?”

  The Captain closed the interview by extolling the beat for which Nickie was to report for duty at eight the next morning, under the guidance of a veteran patrolman named Pilsudski. He sent him off with a hearty handshake and an earnest “Good Luck.”

  I was by Nickie’s side as, setting his face like steel, he marched down the station-house stairs to the sidewalk. There his spirit failed him, and he gasped “Get me a cab,” which was the way he had come. “No,” I said, “walk in it now. I’ll stay with you for a bit. I’ll watch with you one hour.”

  “I can never do it. There’s Mrs. Sleet, our high-school teacher.”

  “It isn’t either. You’re getting hallucinations. Now pull yourself together!”

  We took a turn around the block, a sort of dry run. I had to support him. He said his sensation was like that of dreaming you are walking naked in public, only more so. “You’ll get over it,” I said. I told him that my faith in his future had never been more firm, nor my pride in his courage more keen, than this hour. I assured him that I would always walk his beat with him in spirit if not in fact, and that I would stake my professional reputation on the counsel which had brought him to it. “After all, Vocational Guidance is part of my field.” Then I said it was time he went it alone, and, enjoining him to avoid all agitation and to faint not, I took leave of him with every good wish and hope for an early fruitition to these proceedings. “Praise waits for thee,” I said, gripping his arm with great emotion. “Go.”

  He shot from my grasp and went, as one well might who had the sensation he had described, as fast as his legs could carry him without actually running; till he realized that nobody was paying him the least mind, while he himself was shuttling through the crowds more furtively than perhaps became a cop, and slowed down. He practiced strolling, as though already on his beat. Standing there watching him, I remembered his having once called Life “a carnival at which one should throw the balls at the prizes.” “How about two?” I’d asked him, for he was courting my sister at the time. “What?” he’d said, and I’d explained: “These epigrams are all about what ‘one’ should do. What if there are two? What are they supposed to throw the balls at?” Then there’d been three, and now of course there were four Shermans. But I had no doubts about the idealist—he would come through in the end. He strolled convincingly out of sight, already “picking ’em up and laying ’em down,” and I suppose the rest of the afternoon passed without incident for him.

  Not so for me. As I spanked my hands together, like a man who sees a job well done, or at any rate well launched, as Nickie’s figure melted into the noonday throngs, I saw materializing from those across the street a figure also, by now, familiar. It was that of Mrs. Thicknesse. I hurried over to greet her.

  Seven

  I had caught up with Mrs. Thicknesse, the day she flounced out of the bookstore, about half a block away. I pursued, in that interval, an imperially borne cornshock figure of a woman somewhat in excess of medium breadth but with the height to carry the surplus, and dressed, in addition, with such a fine sense of requirements—she was all nip and tuck in an azure summer print—that I slowed appreciatively a moment. But at last I was abreast of her, hat off, and apologizing for my brother-in-law. “Oh, it’s all right,” she answered with a laugh, “I suppose he meant well. I talked that way when I was his age, too.” “So did I,” I said, half in a comic nuance not entirely clear to me, half out of the true calcification that had already overtaken me as a result of my being Lamplighter.

  Mrs. Thicknesse gestured to a black Rolls-Royce parked at the curb and said, “May I drop you?” “Yes,” I said, an instinctive desire to ride in a Rolls limousine relegating as secondary the question of where I was going. I opened the back door for her to get in, at the same time glancing about for a chauffeur. “No, the front,” she said, and, going round, sprang in behind the wheel herself.

  I got in beside her and she slipped that automobile into gear and glided smoothly into the stream of traffic.

  “Your chauffeur off today?” I asked, neglecting as best I could the stares of the curious coming in at us from all sides.

  “I have no such thing. It seems to me an obscenity to be driven about when one is able-bodied. Don’t you agree?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, sliding down a little in the seat.

  She piloted us deftly around and past a prowl car, honking at the cops in it as we went by for some stupid move or other they had made. I slouched down farther in the seat, also dipping my hat over one eye. I could sense us sliding among the flanks of autos less princely than ours but not therefore any less aggressively driven, and at last I peered gingerly out over the window ledge. “This is the rush hour,” I observed keenly. Suddenly confronted, eight inches from mine, by a phalanx of massed faces looking in at me from a bus stop, I submerged again. The aristocratic life was evidently not for me.

  With Mrs. Thicknesse it was patently otherwise. She dilated on a variety of themes and I learned, in the course of our brief journey, a number of her cherished peeves. They included abstract Christmas cards, clocks embedded in cubes of lucite, and fiction in which the emotion is obliquely revealed. I peeped out again to take our bearings. Mrs. Thicknesse asked, “Where is it you’re going?” Just then I spied the familiar shopfront of the Greek’s. “There,” I said, pointing to it.

  “Oh, that’s that wonderful old ice-cream parlor I’ve heard about. I’ve always been meaning to visit it. Do you know the proprietor well?” she asked. And I suppose because the death wish is strong in all of us, I answered, “Yes. Would you like to stop in for a soda?”

  Mrs. Thicknesse backed the Rolls into a line of parked cars with unforgivable skill. As I crawled out I saw a newspaper on the back seat, open at the financial page on which was a story caption saying that cocoa prices had eased but had stiffened later.

  It had been hot as hell for days and was muggy even in the normally cool interior of the Samothrace. My seersucker, of which in deference to my position as shirtsleeve philosopher I declined publicly to shed the coat, was limp and shapeless as a surgical habit. But not a rill of perspiration stained my lady’s face. We ordered chocolate sodas, and as we bent over them we made hydraulic noises. Mrs. Thicknesse spoke a patois which on closer hearing turned out to be correct English: “Had I but been she,” she would say, and “anyone’s else” (could that be right?). As the ceiling fans whirled overhead, she imparted a further sense of her disfavors, adding to those of which she had already given notice, fabrics which are derived from legumes, store-window lettering from which the capitals are omitted, and eating matter produced by adding water to something. The desire to “rate” with so redoubtable a woman is natural, and some allusion of hers to popular thinking suddenly made it imperative that I know what she thought of me.

  “Just what can any one person do to better this world?” I began, circling cautiously toward the subject. “Of course the way to improve it is to improve the people in it—that goes without saying. But should you try to pull people up from your level or get down there and boost them up from theirs? Becuz, because progress seems to me a tree up which we all help one another shinny.” I sipped at my straws, watching Mrs. Thicknesse. “I don’t know whether you’ve caught my stuff.”

  Mrs. Thicknesse nodded, sucking at her own straws. Then it was to be a cat-and-mouse: she would not be drawn out. I executed a series of retaliatory dance steps under the table, and wrote an obscenity on the roof of my mouth with my tongue. These are both expedients to which I resort in moments of stress. I said aloud:

  “You have to take any approach the individual case calls for. The aim of modern—”

  “More mere mechanistic rot.”

  I inscribed another off-color retort on the roof of my mouth. Mrs. Thicknesse was evidently a wing shooter, aiming, like a hunter, a little ahead of the ducks in flight so they would be there when her shot arrived.

  “The seman
ticists,” I said very rapidly, “have of course pointed out that thinking isn’t the purely rational process we think it is but a form of behavior in which everything takes part, including the glands.”

  Mrs. Thicknesse discharged a small digestive bolt against the tips of her fingers. “Bologna,” she said.

  “Then there’s the psychological approach.”

  “A snare and a delusion.”

  I scrawled a harrowing rejoinder with my finger on the knee of my trousers as Mrs. Thicknesse developed her point about science.

  “It is a pack rat which, as you know, leaves something in return for what he steals from you but of considerably less value. It has taken our soul and left us a psyche—a zircon for a diamond. That’s the trouble, the whole mess we’re in. There’s only one ideal,” she continued earnestly, “that has enabled man to get as far as he has, and you know what that is.” I busied myself spooning up a gobbet of ice cream. Mrs. Thicknesse stood out, clearly now, as one of those people in whose eyes one stands in mortal fear of flunking. “It’s the aim to be greater than the sum of his parts.”

  “Naturally,” I said, crossing my legs. “We have to keep that constantly in mind.”

  “But you can’t do it on a psyche. You need the sense of a Soul for that.”

  I swallowed the spoonful of ice cream. Then I said, “My problem is, how to use that in my work? Now, for instance, I have a young fellow who’s been probationed to me. Not just somebody who’s written in for advice; no, this is somebody I’ve got quite under my wing. I’m one of the officers in this Big Brother Association you may know about,” I said, referring to the cause for which Chickering had died on third, and which I had inherited along with my job. “He’s robbed a candy store and a few other things like that. His name is Pete Cheshire, and how can I tell him to be greater than the sum of his parts?”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “What?”

  “It isn’t necessary to use those words,” Mrs. Thicknesse smiled. “People don’t have to know they’re being more than the sum of their parts, any more than your chap had to know he was less than the sum of his when he stole something, thereby taking something from himself. Make him understand he’s a moral being, don’t in the name of God tell him he’s maladjusted! I hope you haven’t done that.”

  I dropped my eyes guiltily into my soda and said nothing. Anyhow, it was the case workers; they made me do it; I had to build on what they’d told Pete Cheshire before he got to me.

  “These psychiatrists!” Mrs. Thicknesse said as though divining my reflections. “Trying to make people mature by puddling about in their infancies. Why don’t they get people’s minds off themselves, in order that they may have what is revealed unto babes and sucklings?” She ate a gob of her own ice cream, studying me, and at last said, “Have you read any of the Eastern philosophers?”

  To answer affirmatively on the strength of the Chinese and Arabian proverbs in which I rummaged for fillips in which to package my counsels would be stretching a point. But Mrs. Thicknesse was so formidable, and my fear of flunking now so great, that I didn’t dare admit complete ignorance. So feeling myself momentarily less than the sum of my parts, I answered, “Some.”

  “Not everyone can read the philosophers, of course, but those responsible for influencing others ought to drink at the purest springs.”

  “I thoroughly agree. Wasn’t it Confucius who said that the first step toward learning anything is to know that we don’t know anything?” I said, looking Mrs. Thicknesse squarely in the eye. Then I laughed and said, completely rhetorically, as I pulled a paper napkin out of the dispenser, “Maybe I ought to have you talk to Pete Cheshire.”

  “I should be happy to. When will you next see him?”

  I looked over at the Greek, feeling he must come over and break this up if I was not to go out of my ever-loving mind. Nachtgeborn liked to stop at tables if given the least encouragement, and I managed to catch his eye and dabbed the paper napkin to my brow as a humorous comment on the weather.

  He nodded. “Do you know how hot it is?” he chatted from the cigar counter at which he had been perfunctorily paging through a newspaper. There were no other customers in the place. “It’s so hot I can smell the frames of my glasses.”

  “I believe it,” I said. “How are things, Nachtgeborn?”

  He pocketed his spectacles and shuffled over. I introduced him, and Mrs. Thicknesse complimented him on the flavor of the soda and said it was a long time since she’d been in a bona fide ice-cream parlor. The Greek nodded and looked at the floor, pinching his nose. He had an announcement to make.

  “I’m going to fix the old place up,” he said.

  Mrs. Thicknesse became instantly alert. “Just what do you mean?”

  “Modernize.” The Greek executed gestures of demolition and revision. “I’m going to tear out that and that and that. I’m going to get rid of that. I’m going to put in booths—”

  “Hold on there.” Mrs. Thicknesse moved her empty glass aside and folded her hands on the table. “Am I to understand that these wireback chairs and marbletop tables, that counter with its delicately decayed hues, like a fine old Camembert,” she said, with gestures caressive where the Greek’s had been dismissive, which put back everything the Greek had thrown out, “am I to understand that all these period pieces, the mise en scène of a time that will be no more, are to be scrapped in favor of garish booths covered in leatherette and trimmed with deplorable chromium?”

  “Yeah, and upholstered in red I was thinking,” tie Greek beamed. He was tickled to death with the scope of the other’s response.

  I sprang into the act. I rolled my paper napkin into a ball between my palms and dropped it into my glass. “I have this to say to you, Nachtgeborn. That if you so much as lay a finger on this ice-cream parlor I shall never set foot in here again.”

  The Greek looked blank. “Why not?”

  “Because, man, you’ll spoil it.”

  “Spoil it.” The Greek ran a baffled eye around his worn interior. “This place?”

  “Certainly,” Mrs. Thicknesse answered. “My dear man, don’t you see that ‘fixing this place up,’ as you call it, would destroy something quite wonderful? Most nostalgic.”

  “That what that is?”

  “Not a stick that doesn’t delight the eye and refresh the spirit.”

  “How about that?” He pointed to a flaking mural of a maiden with bare feet and one fat braid, reading a love letter by a fountain about which doves flew, entitled “Tidings.”

  “That above all,” I put in, for Mrs. Thicknesse and I operated as a team. Here was ground on which I could “pass” with her. “That’s your pièce de résistance. Believe me.”

  “But isn’t it what they call corny?”

  “Precisely its charm.”

  “Because it’s olden times.”

  The Greek nodded, reappraising everything with a thoughtful pull on his lower lip. Then he pointed catty-corner across the street in a forensic way. “My competitor’s been talking about modernizing. All new fixtures, a jukebox—”

  “Jukebox!” The cry was torn from Mrs. Thicknesse and me simultaneously. She went on: “You mean you’d put in one of those horrors and throw out that nickelodeon? Surely you appreciate better than that what you’ve got here.” Nachtgeborn listened with bowed head as Mrs. Thicknesse and I together scored the current dissolution into a plastic wasteland, and urged the Greek to resist the stampede by preserving at all costs the endearing bower that was his. “Let’s hear that marvelous old thing,” Mrs. Thicknesse said, giving him a nickel to put into the piano.

  The strains of “In the Good Old Summertime” filled the room. Mrs. Thicknesse shut her eyes and rocked restrainedly to the oncoming rhythm. Lightly, she massaged the air with her fingertips. “How a sound like that mocks all our mechanistic civilization,” she said.

  “It takes a special mechanic from New York to repair it,” I said.

  She warily opened one v
iolet eye, to judge if some irony had leaked into the discussion; decided it had not, and closed it again. I watched her. How old was she? Not yet forty. Thirty-five? She emitted a costly musk which, together with the deranging metallic squalls of the music, stimulated me to pieces.

  I shifted nervously on my haunches to relieve the sense of glued trousers there, and just then the song came to an end. My companion opened both blue eyes and, drawing a sigh which inflated at length a bosom which it would be useless of me to deny was warm snow, smiled her great appreciation of the treat She thanked me and gathered up her bag and otherwise assembled herself for departure. I said that I would walk home from here.

  “Very well.” She paused to take a drink of water from her glass, rolling her eye at me as she gulped. She set the glass back on the table. “This Pete Cheshire, when did you say it was you were to see him again?”

  “Thursday night at eight. In my office.”

  I didn’t think Mrs. Thicknesse would come. Pete Cheshire at any rate showed up on time. (He had been put officially in my custody by the probation officer, you understand, and had to report to me regularly.) I was standing at my office window looking down into the street below when I saw the familiar form in a tight suit and a brightly banded straw boater come into view. I heard him walking up the wide frame stairway to the third floor and then his footsteps approaching down the hall to my door.

  “Hello, Pete,” I said, letting him in.

  “Greetings. Greetings and a bit of a howzit.”

  “You look sharp tonight.”

  “Well, I’m working steady, and when you make it you might as well look it.”

  “Sit down.”

  I got into my swivel chair but Cheshire stood. Having hung his boater on a wall peg he drew a cigarette case from the breast of his coat, and from a pants pocket under its long skirt, a lighter. “Still working for that wrecking company?” I chattily began, watching him set fire to the fag. Cheshire nodded, sucking back a cloud of smoke.