“You mean life is a give-and-take?” he said sardonically.
“Why not? Is it Huxley who says—I believe it’s in Point Counter Point—that no matter where we’ve been, we must all come back to truism at last? Is it in Intruder in the Dust that Faulkner remarks that all the wisdom of the world can be summed up in half a dozen clichés? You may recall that in The Wild Duck Ibsen emphasizes that we can’t go on dunning one another with the claims of the ideal—”
“You mean that, of the two class exquisites, since one became a cracker-barrel philosopher, the other might as well be a cop. Is that it?”
“Now just a minute, baby.”
“Don’t misunderstand me. I don’t say that selling out in itself—”
“All right, shall we step outside for a minute? The terrace will do.”
He finished off some white wine and seltzer he had in a glass and took another tack. “I think platitudes have their place. They are like the lower teeth in a smile.”
I took a meditative view of the draperies. After a measure of silence, I turned to him. “Epigrams are parasols and platitudes are umbrellas,” I said, grinning fixedly, “and which of the two is of more benefit to mankind I leave to you.”
This so irked him, especially as coming from a character whose conversation had been written off as scratch corn, that he suddenly lost all reserve, and began to pour out his grievances in a bitter indictment of me as their source. Tie that! I had duped and bamboozled him into a walk of life from which there was now no turning back, due to domestic living standards undertaken on the strength of it. He saw himself as a Jason who, in order to be kept from his rightful throne, was sent off on a wild goose chase for a Golden Fleece. “But he got the fleece,” I reminded him. “That was mythology,” he answered. “This is life.” Half an hour later we were still at it, raising our voices to such an extent that our wives warned us of the danger of the neighbors’ calling the police.
I drove home in a smoldering fury. That -bastard and his classic allusions. What had I not given up! From what kingdom had I not endured exile, or any of us, for that matter? Who is there past his first youth for whom the gold has not long since turned to straw, the snow to slush? Be grateful for small talents; one does not flog his goat because it-isn’t a faun. Thank God if you have an Argosy to distract you, the lure of a Magic Fleece which might still professionally exist for you to find, as it did in Nickie’s case but nevermore, alas, in mine. Here I was pushing thirty and HO sign whatever of fame and fortune. I wasn’t getting into Who’s Who and I wasn’t getting into Who’s Who. Nobody wanted to meet me, nobody asked what I was like; celebrity did not necessitate my slipping through the town in smoked glasses, as I had once no doubt it would. That was all over now, unless I might be imagined hurrying into New York, New York, in a mackinaw and cap with earflaps, to catch the premier of the latest Ma and Pa Kettle.
I gave Nickie’s beat a wide berth, as well as avoiding him socially. It was more than I could bear to see the Sad Sack on duty, lounging along with his truncheon or standing with that abject brilliance on street corners or before shop windows; perhaps gazing into Nothnagle’s, for which he had once done displays requiring exegesis. Once I saw him selling tickets to the Policeman’s Ball. At such times I felt he was right, and wanted to run up to him and tell him it was all a ghastly mistake. I wanted to throw my arms around his neck and blurt out the words with which Blücher had embraced the British officer at Waterloo: “Ich stinke etwas!” But what purpose would it have served? It was imperative that his faith remain unshaken in the wisdom on which his life was now founded.
Once I saw him approaching unexpectedly—he had apparently been shifted to a new and less populous precinct. He was twiddling the nightstick on its thong, and walking with that peculiar flat-footed waddle that cops seem to develop. I ducked into the entranceway of a deserted shop and flattened myself against the door, hoping he wouldn’t see me. He might not have, but a woman across the street did, and recognizing something cops-and-robberish in the tableau, made a sign to the officer and pointed at me. I heard his footsteps drawing measurably closer, slowly, cautiously.
“Boo,” I said, smiling as I came out. “Hi, Nickie. How are things? I saw you and thought we might have a bite of lunch, if you’re not tied up.”
“No, I’m free. The Greek should be having chicken and pilaf—it’s Tuesday.”
“Oh, let’s not go there. I don’t like chicken and pilaf. Let’s take a cab and go to that Armenian place you discovered. Where they do the shish kebab so well.”
There was a tale behind my avoidance of the Greek, whom I was steering clear of too, those days.
You will remember that the Greek also was a recipient of my wisdom. Along with Mrs. Thicknesse, I had urged him not to spoil his place. His respect for me as a person superimposed on my prestige as Lamplighter had moved Nachtgeborn to heed my words. The result? The teenagers on whom his trade increasingly depended swarmed into the remodeled, juke-boxed and chromium-plated Sugar Bowl across the street, while the Greek tottered on the verge of bankruptcy. Even the adults went to his competitor.
“They’re not adult in the matter of taste,” I explained to the Greek. “There, they’re immature.”
“And what do I use for money while they get mature?” he put to the man who was almost his sole connoisseur. “Where are you going?”
“I have an engagement. We’ll discuss it another day.”
“Is tomorrow too soon?” he called after me. “Maybe you don’t like the echo in here!”
The Greek did not take the role of curator of Americana in very good part, and he made no bones about it to the man who had saddled him with it. I would drop in for a sweet or a sandwich, only to have him mosey up as I bent over my food and inquire ironically, “How are things with you?” his dark eyes liquid with reproach.
“Well, spoil it then, damn it, spoil it!” I snapped at last.
“Now he tells me,” he said, flapping his hands at his sides. “The other guy’s got the trade now. What I wanted to do was jump the gun on him.”
“These things take time,” I said. “You’ll be discovered.”
“Yeah, with my head in the oven. Holding on to the past is all well and good, but I can’t eat nostalgia.”
I frequented the Samothrace with loyal regularity but flagging zest, for it is a fact that the Greek wore me thin with implied and finally outright claims that I had misguided his strategic thinking and “put him in a pool of blood,” financially speaking. He would have nagged me about it now as I sat waiting for Nickie, to discuss a little pool of blood of my own, but I had given him a prophylactic glare which told him” I was in no mood to be needled, or even talked to. The Greek, who knew a lot about people’s business from the polite interest he took in their conversations, contented himself with calling over, as Nickie entered the door and a cab drove off outside, “Here comes another one of your clients, I believe.”
“Hello, Nickie,” I said.
I watched him set his cap on a chair and give his Sam Browne belt a hitch before sitting down, for of course he was in uniform.
“Can you break away from your beat like this?”
“I was at the station-house when Carmichael called you.” (Carmichael was back at his post, the job in the state capitol having been only temporary.) “This is on my way back to the beat. Call it a long lunch hour. Now what the devil is this all about? How can you say Cheshire was with you? How can you be sure of that? What gives?”
“I didn’t say I was sure,” I said, crossing my legs. “Carmichael’s got it all twisted up. It’s all a skimble-skamble anyhow because Cheshire sees me regularly—the parole thing—and I can’t think on the spur of the moment when he’s been in. I had reason to hedge for time in this case because … Well, hold on to your hat. Here’s the whole story. I think you’ll find it rather amusing.”
I related my little caprice in the Continental manner that had become more or less second nature with us here, pa
using occasionally to wipe sweat off the palms of my hands. I told him everything, leaving out only the name of the lady. I punctuated the narrative with sips of coffee which the Greek had at one point interrupted it to serve.
When I was through, Nickie said, “Sweet Lord almighty.”
I don’t know whether he felt that famous first pang of pleasure we are supposed to on hearing of a friend’s trouble or not; he never smiled, and he was the gentleman throughout. And why shouldn’t he be? What was at stake was our separate hides, and neither could save the other’s without the gift of his own. If I retracted the alibi, Pete Cheshire would scandalize me to God knew what hellish ends; if Nickié took the heat off Cheshire to spare me that, all his brilliant deductions would go down the drain, and with it in all likelihood the chance for which he sickened: to get out of that uniform and into mufti. This was his Big Break, as they say in the theater. But I was curious about those brilliant deductions.
“By the way,” I asked him, momentarily forgetting my own woe in my admiration, “how did you dope out who the Smoothie was?”
He waved the question away with an airy it-was-nothing gesture. “I’ll tell you later. We’ve got to concentrate now on pulling the fat out of the fire, and fast. There’s not a moment to lose.”
“You mean I’ve got to pull the fat out of the fire. Because of course I’ll get you off the hook, Nickie.”
“Well, now wait. What’s at stake? Your domestic life, my career. Love versus Labor. And I think your home is obviously the more important, just as mine would be if it were the other way around. This way nobody’ll be any the wiser. I mean if you keep mum, things can’t get any worse; if you talk, they will.”
“Look, don’t think I don’t appreciate this, but it’s out. I’m going to Carmichael and that’s flat.” I nervously feared losing the chance for altruism which I now suddenly saw as cleansing away the selfsame stain which it laid bare. The poison would carry its own antidote. What the deed unearthed would put me in the doghouse with my wife; the deed itself would almost simultaneously be admired, getting me out. I might even come out a little ahead. I could hear them already saying, “He could have kept his mouth shut. It took guts to do what he did. No, I think you can be proud of your husband … Migh-ty proud …”
“Let’s weigh these pros and cons a little more carefully,” Nickie was saying. “My career could survive the setback but what of your marriage? Oh, I’m not saying Crystal would divorce you, but it’d rock the old matrimonial skiff, maybe disable it for the rest of the voyage. It’s easy to get another job, but not another wife.”
“Now cut it out,” I said. “We’re also talking about your marriage, not just your career. How much longer do you think Lila’s going to stand for your being a cop? Not much if I can read the signs. Not in the crowd she wants to hang around with. Your muffing this may be the thing that’ll curdle her for good on you. The chips are down and all your prestige is riding on the pot. This is it, for you. Thanks just the same, Nickie.”
“But I’ll have another chance. Now that I know Pete Cheshire’s the Smoothie, he’s a sitting duck. All I have to do is watch his every move. I’ll tail him myself if the force won’t—after hours!”
What gave here? Had he too a debit he was trying to crucify himself out of? As the bidding for the chance at nobility went forward, we seemed to me like a pair of auction-goers whose each successive offer raises in the eyes of the other the value of the object being striven for.
“He’ll only put the squeeze on me again and we’re back where we started,” I protested.
“But why should you do this—this …?”
“This act of self-sacrifice?” I suggested levelly. “This deed of honor few would be capable of in these crass times?” When he did not answer I went on, “This gesture of sterling worth so much more indicative of moral fiber than the peccadillo it exposed was of moral frailty?”
“Well, no, I only mean—”
“That it’s a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done before? A far, far better rest I go to than I have ever known?” I lowered my head and a sob caught in my throat, for heroism has always had the power to move me.
I thought it fitting that here, here at the Samothrace where Nickie and I had so often conceived of life as an intellectual feat, we learned that it is in fact a moral one. We had been clever so long that it was now necessary for one of us to be good.
In moments of stress, we often say things that seem to “come out of left field.” An inflamed association, a forgotten but vital nerve-end set tingling like a bell in some remote corner of the house during an electrical storm, possesses the moment. Now I remember an expression of my departed father-in-law’s.
“It was one of those colloquialisms that are so much more vivid than all your fine words can ever be,” I said. “Whenever something out of the ordinary, or outrageous, happened, he’d say, ‘Well, if that don’t beat the dogs a-fightin’!” He’d probably say it now.”
Nickie reached across the table and laid a hand on my forearm. “He probably also used to say, ‘It’ll all come out in the wash.’ It will.”
I dropped my brow on my hand and shook my head, “Dear God, what it all comes to. And in our youth we thought everything was possible.”
“Well,” said Nickie, picking up his blue cap from the chair as he rose, “it looks as though it just about is, doesn’t it?”
Eleven
I sat in the musty phone booth with the door open, waiting for Captain Carmichael’s line to be free. I had head-quarters but not him yet.
Just how much heroism would be entailed? Would I be put in jail for obstructing justice, if only for a couple of hours? Which was the corniest of the awful “illustrations” with which I had cynically batted out my column from day to day? Without a doubt the one about the artist who squeezed blood into his paints, thus putting something of himself into his work. That was what I was being called upon to do: I must put something of myself into my work. Yes, having preached platitudes I must now practice what I had preached. I must eat my own cooking.
The wait for Carmichael was a long one, and I got in a little more rehearsal.
Trailing a leaf across his cheek, the lovely Ramarosa asked: “What is a stalemate?”
“A wife who has begun to pall.”
“Then what is a checkmate?”
“One who handles the spondulics.”
So his legend spread from the islands to the mountains of the mainland, and from one continent to the next as eastward he flew from each new scrape. It would be hard to say from which his notoriety most sprang, his sexual prowess or his devilish wit, but together they kept him on the move, for he never, as he chaffered, “stayed for his downfall.” The old men with faces like parchment feared him on both counts, having daughters as well as populaces on whom holds might be loosened.
“You must flee,” he heard at last from Ramarosa. “The King my father has now been set against you.”
He leaned to a bowl of fruit and twisted a grape from its stem. “The King is a royal nuisance.”
“Do not. Your humor is already resented by those in high places who are the objects of its barbs.”
“These are only rube-barbs. Wait till you hear my city stuff.”
“Never has my father had a wise man and a jester in one, until the Lamplighter. Now the old jester and all the soothsayers both plot to kill him. The invitation to play chess was a plot. Now they have intercepted his notes, and have convinced the King that I have been made free with. The Duke is behind it all—the illegitimate son who wishes to be monarch.”
“I’ll crown the bastard.”
“The Lamplighter’s tongue is as swift as the hummingbird’s wing.”
“And as the hummingbird’s breast, so soft is my pale one’s cheek, and as sweet as the nectar of which the hummingbird rapes the flower.”
The Princess turned and sighed profoundly.
“I was glad for the hours heaped with more joy than the heart
can hold, and which it wishes in vain could be put by for another time. For as the Lamplighter has said, we sometimes have the moon by day, but never the sun at night.” She sprang to her feet and listened at the door, beyond which was the faint scuffle of feet. “I have not told you this till now. We have a yearly sacrifice for which the victim is to be chosen today. He will be the year god, but will die in the honor. His heart must be plucked out, still beating, and offered as a propitiation for the sins of all. Wear these veils, and slide down the vines at my window. Go to Smyrna, to the home of one Timon, a merchant. He is an important man in the community and knows the many wise sayings the Lamplighter has brought from Arabia, China and elsewhere. He is an importer—”
“Someone seems to be trying various keys softly in the door. Who can that be?”
“This is Captain Carmichael. Hello. Hello.”
“Oh, hello,” I said, snapping out of it, and drawing shut the door of the booth. “This is Swallow again.”
“Oh, hello. What can I do you for?”
“It’s about Nickie. Frank, I’ve been looking back, or rather thinking back on that Cheshire thing, and I don’t think he was in my office Thursday night at all.”
Silence at the other end. Then in a skeptical voice, “It was. just whipped up.”
“Yes—he did. I mean I’d like to withdraw that alibi. For Cheshire I mean. I was all mixed up a while ago.”
Another silence. “Did you find the appointment slips?”
“Not exactly …”
“How come you were sure one way an hour ago and the other way now?”
“Oh, I think it’s been more than that, Frank. And I didn’t say I was sure—did I? Anyhow, what I’m trying to say is that I am now.”
“Now that you know whose parade you peed on?”
“Frank. You wouldn’t accuse me of anything like that?”
“Look, I know how you feel about that brother-in-law of yours. I’ve been trying to get him out of my hair too, and, baby, he’s gum. But you understand I can’t let your story cut any ice one way or another now.”
Comfort Me with Apples Page 13
