Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  The hero was not yet ready for glory. From his typewriter he ripped a sheet of. paper on which was begun an answer to a letter beginning: “Dear Lamplighter: When we first got married my husband used to say I slept with my lips slightly parted. Now he says I sleep with my mouth open. How can I bring back …?” He tore the letter and the answer to shreds and flung them away. A tumbler full of pencils shattered against a far wall. A jar of rubber bands, a handful of memo pads, a box of paper clips followed. I can’t vouch for the exact order, except that the paper clips were last. Because the door opened just then and Clammidge got a spray of them in his face.

  “You need a rest,” he said, stooping to tidy things up somewhat. “I’ve been watching you.” I stood over him breathing heavily as he retrieved paraphernalia. He gave this up after a moment, and, rising, began combing office equipment out of his hair. “Why don’t you take a little trip?” he asked.

  I laughed hollowly. “How far? It’s nothing,” I said. “If only people could manage to be a little adult …”

  “I know lots of the letters are silly, and shall I tell you something?” He dropped into the club chair. “Don’t waste your time with those. Concentrate on the people in real trouble, who need help. Doing a good job of analyzing people and their troubles takes a lot—which brings me to what I came to see you about.” He drew a breath so deep his belt groaned like a spike being drawn from a plank. “You ought to tighten your column up as a psychological advice feature. That’s the coming thing. I’ve been going over several columns in the big city dailies, New York and so on, and the trend is definitely to psychoanalyzing the readers who write in. Their family patterns and all.”

  “I’ve been giving it that slant.”

  “But not enough. Read these.” Clammidge tossed over a sheaf of cuttings. “You’ve got to practice psychiatry to run a worry column these days. Correspondents are patients, is what I’m trying to say, and they want to be treated as such. We’ve got to go along with the times.”

  “What about the Pepigrams?” I asked, soliciting outrage in order to enrich my grievance. “Will they have to be clinical too now?”

  “It goes without saying you’ll have this whole new field to explore.”

  “Like: ‘Say Stability and you’ve also said Ability’? Like that?”

  “Write that down before you forget it!”

  He rose and started for the door. But I wasn’t through rubbing salt into my wounds.

  “‘You may not be suffering from a real depression—just a recession.’”

  “By George! Don’t let those get away from you.” At the door, Clammidge paused with his hand on the knob and glanced concernedly down at the shambles. “You’re happy here, aren’t you?”

  “I couldn’t be any happier.”

  “And you like Decency as a whole?”

  “As a hole it’s fine.”

  He nodded. “Well, carry on. I’ll send you a full memo with my thoughts on the change in the column. Meanwhile, get some recreation—you’ll need it. The missus wants you and your missus for dinner next week. She’ll probably have all the social heavyweights in town, including the new Episcopal minister and his wife. I think your wife will want to meet-them.” He smiled and added, “I guess we all become climbers in the end.”

  The climber is a creeper, I wanted to say. A nice thought-for-the-day—but the right day. When I collected my severance pay, perhaps.

  Clammidge gone, I turned the key quietly in the lock and had a nip from a bottle I kept in a bottom drawer, now whisky rather than sherry. I sat with my feet on the desk and looked down at the litter with a detached interest, and saying, “Didley-boo, didley-bah, didley beedy-o-day.” I spat on the rug. I would do this everywhere, I would have no consideration. I would be a sonofabitch indoors and out. I would pursue every facet of nonconformity until my name, rather than provoking amusement, would excite respect.

  Sipping the whisky slowly, I ruminated on that “trip.” I would go, but as for coming back, that was a horse of another color. For the hero was now in training; now began the rehearsals for glory:

  After many days of travel, footsore and weary, driven from villages by barking dogs, the Lamplighter reached the blue Pacific. He set sail across her broad waters, and settled at last among islands fragrant with Eastern spices and no paper clips. The natives were friendly—but the tribal chiefs were not. For he taught the people new ways, which the jealous chiefs said were evil.

  One evening there were soft footfalls without and Olakanoa slipped into his tent.

  “You must flee for your life.”

  “Why?”

  She drew a long, sad breath.

  “The Lamplighter’s words are wiser than the wise men’s and they are angry and have stirred the people up to kill him. Here is some food and papaya juice. I have prepared them with great danger to myself, for my father is one of the higherarchy here.”

  “Tell your papaya simply won’t stand for this.”

  “Do not joke. The old men have great power.”

  “Yes … Your toothless sharks are the deadliest.”

  “Such words enrage them—they fear your wit. They have roused the populace with rumors that you were driven from your own land, where you were once nobly thought of, even one of the higherarchy.”

  “I’ve got to think.”

  “There is no time. Someone has taken down the tribal drum and is beating it.”

  “And I must do the same?”

  “Olakanoa has smiled many times at the Lamplighter’s jokes, and the many ways of humor he has taught her. But in her heart she will never smile again.”

  “I won’t go.”

  A boat is ready at the water’s edge. Under the palm which slants toward the setting sun …”

  And so he became a legend among the islands. For though he was never seen in those parts again, many recalled his words, and even those who had never laid eyes on him or even heard of him still speak the many proverbs which he taught them, and which they cherish to this day.

  I shook my head to break free of the daze which enveloped me, and, finishing off the drink, went downstairs to my favorite bar.

  I didn’t tell Mrs. Thicknesse what was afoot, for the time being. I would keep it off her doorstep as long as I could. My own first wrestlings with my dilemma (a dilemma with only one horn, the familiar “or else” dilemma in which no alternative need be stated) were resolved with the plan to wait. Take each problem as it came. Obviously I must weigh what I owed society, in the form of the cops (if they called), against what I owed my wife and family. The question of one’s probity is who it’s for. One’s wife is the beneficiary of more than one’s insurance. Morality is the premium paid Respectability for benefits accruable, and computed on the actuarial tables of social … uh … uh … well, what I’m trying to say, I guess, is that conscience is a lightning calculator as much as it is anything else, including a small voice.

  I hadn’t formulated any plan, except to let the spirit move me when the time came, when my office phone rang and it was Captain Carmichael asking whether my ward, Pete Cheshire, had spent the preceding Thursday evening with me there.

  “Let … me … see,” I said, reaching for my engagement calendar. “Thursday evening …” I was intensely curious about what I was going to say. I hung on my every word—you could even put it that way. “I have seen him recently, but I couldn’t swear to the day. I don’t keep my appointment sheets—I throw them away. Why do you ask, Frank?”

  “These jobs that are being pulled by someone who calls himself the Smoothie. Cheshire’s been picked up for questioning on the latest—he’s here with me right now as a matter of fact—and he claims he was with you at the time of the crime. Is that right?”

  “Well, that reminds me of a story,” I said, just like Abraham Lincoln, the way he met many of his crises. Good old Honest Abe. “It seems there were two Swedes—”

  “I know. I read that one in your column yesterday. Just tell me whether Cheshi
re was with you then.”

  “That’s a hard question for me to answer, Frank. He was in here sometime last week, I know.” That’s it—stall for time.

  “Were you in the office working last Thursday night?”

  “Oh, yes. Yes, I was.”

  “Will you swear?”

  “Yes, I will,” I said, and did so under my breath.

  “And he could have gone up to see you?”

  “He could have.”

  “He’s been reporting to you regularly?”

  “Oh, faithfully. In fact he comes in to see me oftener than the probation rules require.”

  Carmichael paused a moment.

  “Well, as long as you give him a clean bill of health, that’s good enough for me,” he said at length. “God knows he’s walked the chalk line up to now, as far as we can tell. Except for that liquor permit shenanigans, which I thought was pretty clever of him. In fact I think he’s got a kick coming, on that. But that’s neither here nor there. I was pretty surprised when one of our men put the finger on him.”

  “How did that happen, Frank?”

  “Oh, some extra fancy detective work. Highfalutin’ deductions. Too highfalutin’ to suit me.”

  A prickle of anxiety went up my spine.

  “On whose part, Frank?”

  “As if you didn’t know! Look, that relative of yours is one smart apple, and I’m tickled to death to have him on the force. But I wish he’d come down out of the clouds. If there’s anybody who has to have two feet on the ground it’s a cop. All these beautiful patterns he weaves. I wish you’d talk to him.”

  My mouth suddenly felt as though it were full of peanut butter. It was a moment before I could manipulate my tongue.

  “I will,” I brought out at last. “I’ll check into this whole thing and call you back.”

  I hung up, already sliding the bottom drawer open with my other hand.

  I was pouring a second drink when the phone rang again. This time it was Nickie.

  “I’d like to talk to you,” he said. “Can you meet me at the Greek’s in fifteen minutes? Be there without fail. It’s urgent There’s something very peculiar going on.”

  Ten

  It’s a rum business. The reason I hedged with the Captain was, I’m in a bit of a box. You see, this Smoothie you’ve got by the scruff has got me by mine. He’s got hold of some letters I wrote a lady in question, and you know how it is to have them come to light. The embarrassing metaphors, the overwriting. The hazards of the Renaissance man, old boy. I was prepared to sit tight, weather it out somehow, but now that I learn what this means to you, Nickie—well.” And I parted my hands in a gesture of knightly grace.

  The gesture provoked some consternation in the Greek who was watching from the soda fountain, for it was executed across a table at which no one else as yet sat: I was rehearsing for Nickie’s arrival. He hadn’t come yet

  I was installed inside, and from time to time glanced at the door, wishing the sight I dreaded would hurry. It was a sight all too familiar to me, nor one of which familiarity had, over the long months that lay behind, ever quite managed to abate the shock.

  Patrolman Sherman had plied his rounds, from the start, with every insistence on the primacy of the intellect. But opportunities for the stylized sort of thing he did seemed rather few, somehow, and it was my task ceaselessly to shore up his faith in the advice which had steered him into this line of work. Nickie had set himself a period of six months for the promised advance to plain clothes, and that time up without a sign from Carmichael, he went into the Captain’s office and asked him bluntly whether covenants made were to be honored by those party to them, or whether he was to be left in Limbo.

  “I thought you were in Kenwood,” Carmichael said, slapping about in his everlasting papers. “But let me check into the civvies setup again and see if I can spot an opening coming up. They didn’t enlarge the detective bureau like they promised me,” he said, crossly appropriating half the grievance.

  Six months became nine. The seat of Nicky’s blue pants was now shiny, and “reflected the chicanery of elements which could be named.” These undoubtedly included me. The next time he applied to see Captain Carmichael he was told by the secretary in the outer office, “You mean Captain Quagmeyer. Carmichael took a job in the state capitol.”

  Buckling in with a bit of a grin, we arranged for an interview with this new superior with whom we would now have to start from scratch. I went along as Nickie’s chief counsel, to see that he got a square deal.

  Quagmeyer was a blond mountain of a man with a hand like a ham. We both shook it, and then Nickie turned and sauntered to the window.

  “Cook breakfast every morning do you, Captain?”

  Now, all of us have semantic land-mines which a single word will trip. “Breakfast” was one of the Captain’s. Each morning since his wedding he had had to rise while his wife spent a last hour in the sack, “dozing to”; then when he had the orange juice quite squeezed, the coffee brewed and the eggs and bacon on the table, she would appear and, her hair looking like last year’s bird’s nest, sit down to them. At first Quagmeyer’s relatives and friends kidded him about this aspect of his henpeckedness; then no longer dared; and now this rookie cop.

  “Oh, yeah?” he said, which already tipped us off that this was haywire, because what kind of answer is that to a sentence which is itself a question? “Who are the smart alecks around here that they can’t give a new man time to take his coat off before—who told you I fix breakfast every morning?” he demanded.

  “No one had to. You see, the finger and thumb of your right hand tell me the whole story. The stains on them resemble the dye used on oranges, which comes off under pressure sufficient to squeeze them. True, they’re faint now, but to the incisive eye—”

  “Oh, yeah? Well, get this. Who makes breakfast in my house, or why or when or how often, is none of anybody else’s goddam beeswax! Is that clear? Is that clear!”

  “Yes, sir. I was only—”

  “All right. Never mind what you were only. Just remember what I say, and tell any other snoots around here that goes for them too. My private life is none of anybody’s business.” Quagmeyer, who had risen, sat down. “Now then, what did you want to see me about?”

  “It can wait.” Nickie started out, but he paused at the door. “It’s just that I entered the service with a sort of understanding with Captain Carmichael, which you might feel you inherit. It’s that the very first opening on the detective force—well, he promised to keep an eye on me.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll do that!”

  I snatched up my hat and scuttled out behind my protégé.

  Days afoot in Kenwood gave Nickie an appetite with which he could legitimately indulge his taste for food, for he had become a full-fledged gourmet. “When they saw how tight his pants were they thought they’d split,” seemed soon a more relevant version of the glossy backside than his own mot. After a day of pounding the pavements, he liked to relax with a spot of pâté, or maybe a swatch of smoked salmon, and a glass of chilled vermouth, or white wine when he wasn’t having that for dinner. His wit increased in dryness like the wines of his prospering fancy. Asked one evening what he’d had for dinner at a party from which flu had kept his wife, he answered curtly, “Provisions.” “You’re so stuck up,” she’d said.

  Lila had changed, as was blessedly inevitable, for the better, under the role of wife and mother. No motion-picture chic or embezzled gestures now. She was realistically bent on installing Nickie and herself in the solid country-club set—which, Nickie said, had. two subjects of conversation, Martinis and tennis, and even they were indistinguishable because what you heard of either was:

  “Five to three …”

  “Four to one …”

  “Three to two …”

  He often sat on the sidelines trying to guess whether they were talking about scores or strengths. His wife asked him if that was his idea of putting down roots, of acquiring tha
t sense of belonging in a community which he must want for his children if not for himself or her. They had an apartment of their own now, and it was time they had some of these people up. She said they did talk about other things than Martinis and tennis. She loved to hear the wives discuss the servant problem, a vexation to which she aspired. She had them in for bridge on Wednesday afternoons, but that wasn’t enough; they must repay some dinner invitations.

  In the process of making Nickie into an acceptable member of society she had extracted repeated promises to swear off aphorisms and nuance. But making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse was much harder in his case than it had been in mine, and all his guarantees were vain. At the first of the dinner parties they gave, he said at one juncture, “Failure is the tragedy of being shot to death by one’s lover; success that of being bored to death by one’s wife.” There was an embarrassed stir around the cocktail table, and mutters of resentment from many. An all-star fullback rose and went out on the terrace. Thank God they had one to go out on, or he might have gone home.

  “Do you have to talk like that?” Lila asked when all the guests had departed except Crystal and me, for we were there too.

  Nickie shrugged. “A man is what he is.”

  “That’s a defeatist attitude.” Lila appealed to me. “Can’t you speak to him, Chick? Get him to talk English?”

  Nickie awaited my words with a twisted little smile of anticipation, as the girls went off into the kitchen to make us some midnight coffee. Nevertheless I said what had to be said: That we must all of us make our peace with life. That we cannot linger on mountaintops but must descend into the valley and live on daily bread, on that humble plane of which my own remark at table that I eschewed gum—which had gotten such a laugh—was the clearest of illustrations.