Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  One night, for example, he came home from a walk and asked suspiciously, “Who called while I was out?”

  “How did you know anyone called?” I asked.

  He pointed to the phone. “It’s been put back from the right, which is the ear you listen with. I listen with my left and set it down that way. That’s how it was when I went out because I’d just phoned the drugstore. It’s the other way now, so you’ve been talking.”

  “Nickie, you ought to be a private eye.”

  Which put us back where we started, you think? Maybe so, but with one important difference. I had the case with which Nickie could reclaim his ego, and be taller than she was. I would be his first free-lance client.

  Lammermoor was an adversary made to order for him—if only I could draw his fire. At the same time, a fresh turn in my own affairs might resolve my domestic woes, provided it was for the worse. My reasoning was as follows. Crystal eventually dropped the threat of the heartbalm suit, if she had ever seriously meant it: But while that had blown over, she still wouldn’t let me come near her. The only solution was to make her come to me. I felt that I would have her at my side fast enough if I could only manage to get myself unjustly accused. Admiration would follow on sympathy when it was learned that I had deliberately put my neck in a noose in order to give my friend a second chance. I thought it over from every conceivable angle without seeing how I could lose by acquiring a martyr’s status. Only it would have to be a clean-cut martyrdom, not inconclusive and half-baked like the other two times. Of course Nickie might muff the rescue and it would be bye-bye baby for both of us, but it was a risk that had to be taken. I had nothing to lose but my head and he didn’t even have that, as it were.

  But how to make Lammermoor show his hand? Should I get involved with his decoy again? I was flogging my brain over the problem when the solution came to me, suddenly, one afternoon in a diner.

  I was alone, lunching on what the management represented to be macaroni. It was an off-white matter made of dried toothpaste, eraser crumbs and old regrets. The counterman stood by and watched with pity and loathing as I ate it. I wished now that I had gone to the restaurant across the street where the food had at least the merit of being tasteless.

  I chewed a mental cud as my earthly jaws wagged, reflecting on how true it was that experience kept a dear school but fools would learn at no other. A parody favored by my older son went through my head:

  Ho, hi-ho,

  It’s off to school we go;

  In mi-ser-y

  From nine to three,

  Hi-ho, hi-ho.

  Bad as the macaroni was, it was the coffee that separated the men from the boys. It was from the Mississippi River where she churns away between Missouri and Illinois, along about in there, and from well down in the bottom after the spring rains have roiled her rich brown depths. I drank about half of this fluvial guck and turned to see how the only other customer in the place, on the third stool over, was making out. It was a thickset, very sunburned woman with fingers indistinguishable from the French fries she was eating with them. She seemed to be enjoying herself. Maybe I was getting spoiled and fussy.

  Ho, hi-ho,

  It’s off to school we go;

  We eat some junk

  And then we flunk,

  Hi-ho, hi-ho.

  When I opened my wallet to pay, I saw no money in it.

  “I’m sorry,” I said to the counterman. “I’ll just have to leave a check.”

  He was quite grumpy about that. Then I remembered the secret compartment, in which I usually had a ten-dollar bill stashed away for just such an emergency. The bill was there—and so was the check from Sherry Budd. I had completely forgotten about it.

  I paid the counterman, who now groused about the size of the denominations which had been given him all day. As I stood at the cash register waiting for change, something nagged the back of my mind. That check—was it the answer? Then I realized in a flash what Lammermoor had been waiting for.

  I endorsed the check. I put it in an envelope and addressed it to the local Red Cross. Then, crossing my fingers, I dropped it into the nearest mailbox.

  Nineteen

  “I’m in help. I need trouble.”

  With these words I dropped on the dining room table at which Nickie sat poring over a chess problem a document that had been handed me earlier in the day by a deputy sheriff. He picked it up and read it.

  It was a summons for me to appear in the Bridgeport superior court and answer to a Charge of having emotionally impaired one Miss Sherry Budd through the illegal practice of psychiatry. It had been issued from the office of an attorney named Bruno Bloodstein and was most admirably worded. No state has a law forbidding the unlicensed practice of psychiatry as such, but the situation is covered by the law regulating that of medicine, and since a psychiatrist is expected to have a medical diploma (I found out now) it comes to the same thing. The complaint which the summons went on to set forth included allegations like “did willfully and irresponsibly practice hypnosis,” “did deliberately abort her emotional relations with a man whom she had expectations of marrying,” and so on. Damages in the amount of fifty thousand dollars were asked. I liked that, and I also liked the juxtaposition of “abort” and “illegal,” in what I had no trouble foreseeing in headlines as the Svengali Case. I was already mentally at work on a series of disguises; had, indeed, begun to prepare for the day when feeling would be running high, by slipping across town that afternoon in sneakers and dark glasses.

  “Is there any beer in the icebox?” I asked Nickie when he had finished his study of the greetings, conducted with ill-veiled fascination.

  “Let’s see.”

  I followed him into the kitchen.

  “They can’t pin anything on me,” I boasted in an old man’s voice. “I never practiced any psychiatry. Just human relations.”

  “That’s not the line to take. What you’ll do is not deny it but say it was psychoanalysis. It’s another breed of dog, and while the regulations are just as strict if not stricter for a full-fledged psychoanalyst, there’s no law against its practice in a lay form. I understand that’s the loophole all quacks and impostors use.”

  If this was my defense talking I couldn’t wait to hear the opposition.

  Watching him dig in the icebox with the old omniscience, knowing where everything was—cold beer, legal wrinkles—I felt better. Or at least that my sacrifice would not be in vain. In my first horror on reading the complaint I had thought of pleading insanity, but that probably wouldn’t look good for an analyst. I didn’t want to give the profession a black eye.

  We sat in shirt sleeves at the kitchen table, drinking beer and hammering out a plan of action. I told him everything about Lammermoor and Sherry Budd from their roots in the Mrs. Thicknesse business, and why the charges were, perforce, hogwash. Lammermoor’s plot was now at least clear, and no man could have asked for hotter water. The fox had probably read an article somewhere about the ambiguity concerning the law and psychiatry, the desire for a test case, etc., and had dreamed up this gimmick, which he figured was better than blackmail since it might drag in the newspaper.

  “That’s it!” Nickie brought his fist down on the table. “He’s banking on the Pick’s eagerness to settle out of court and hush it up. The paper’s liable, since you acted as their employee.”

  “And Bloodstain, I mean Bloodstein, fully expects us to dicker on that basis.”

  “Right. It’s just a bluff. He takes for granted the paper’ll settle for you, just to avoid a stink.” Nickie paused in the act of puncturing a fresh can of beer. “Didn’t Clammidge put pressure on you to dabble in this stuff?”

  “The Pick is to be kept out of this, anyhow by name,” I said.

  This was absolutely essential to my plan to become a scapegoat. Nothing less would fetch my wife around. I had to be a solitary figure, deserted by all—at first anyway. Later I saw people as rushing to my aid in great numbers, creating a suction agains
t which even an outraged wife would be powerless. But for the time being, all I wanted was to be treated shabbily.

  I added to Nickie on a note of quiet integrity: “You see, I’m going it alone.”

  There was a pause long enough for him to express admiration in. He licked his lips, after a copious swig of the beer, and lowered his glass to the table.

  “What I shall want is a private eye,” I went on. “I hereby retain you in that capacity, Nickie. To dig up what you can about this girl’s connection with Lammermoor, maybe some facts proving collusion, proving she isn’t emotionally ruined—anything. But no pulling a rabbit out of the logical silk hat. Dig. Meanwhile I suppose I ought to get a lawyer.”

  “Fifty grand is no geezer.”

  Well! Was he talking like a private eye already? Coming down out of the ivory tower to walk the earth at last? Or was it just your intellectual’s oral slumming? Much remained to be seen. Could he do this job at all? Or was I sending the China pitcher to the well again, putting tobacco in that bubble pipe again?

  “Yes, I’ll take a crack at it,” he said. “And do have a lawyer get in touch with Bloodstain—damn it, you’ve got me doing it now—with Bloodstein, and feel him out.” He drank off his beer after a few minutes and rose. “Now let’s get a good night’s sleep. We’re going to have to be on our toes.”

  I stood up.

  “Freud,” I said, detaining him, “would have no patience with what he called schlammerei.” It means sloppiness but I wasn’t going to tell Nickie that. Let him sweat it out. I could tell from his expression that I had him at last. This was for all that Rilke he had belched at me. “I have always tried to avoid schlammerei in my work and I’m sure you have in yours.”

  He nodded and started away.

  “Schlammerei,” I speared him back, drunk with power, “is the enemy of everything. What undoes the diplomat? What trips up the criminal?”

  He picked up his glass and tilted the last few drops of beer into his mouth.

  “It should be abhorred equally by him tracing the fruits of human evil and him searching out its even more treacherous roots in the dark loam of the mind. Let’s always be on guard against the foe—schlammerei, schlammerei, schlammerei!” I swayed against a chair, signifying that the interview was over. “Good night.”

  Lying in the bed I occupied in that apartment, I could hear him snoring away in the next room ten minutes after his head hit the pillow. I had been glad to see him acting with the old peerlessness, and not the newfound pathétique, but the least he could do was have a little trouble getting to sleep. My hands under my head, I stared up at the dark ceiling and got in some more rehearsal….

  The plan was to seize the Lamplighter in his bed, those to whom the plot was entrusted little dreaming that it would also be the King’s. For the same savoir-faire that excited interest among the natives made every woman singly met a Trilby to his will, and he mounted from princesses toward queens, to his final doom.

  That one Sheba lured him to her chamber with the assurance that the monarch was on a hunting expedition, as indeed she believed herself. In his arms, she unburdened herself of her cross. The King was impotent.

  “He’s a terribly mixed-up person,” she murmured in perfect English. “It all goes away back. He has a complex mother.”

  “And vice versa.”

  “Not so loud. Tee-hee. The walls have ears, and he is furious enough at the laughingstock your quips have made of him. In fact, what is that noise?”

  The door came down and eunuchs with drawn sabers poured across the parquet floor. Arms bound, the two were jostled side by side to prison. The doors clanged open and they were flung into separate dungeons.

  He was tried on some trumped-up political charge, but everyone knew the real source of the King’s jealousy—he himself was genitally defunct. The Queen had been released when it was learned that she was to bear him an heir, rather a farce under the circumstances. “He has no issue so he picks one with me,” the Lamplighter chaffered through prison bars. The guards loved him and secretly sent all his wisecracks out into the world, laughing like anything as they did. The King was always afterward to be known by the nickname the Lamplighter gave him: Barren von Munchausen.

  The trial was a mockery. The Lamplighter was denied counsel and sentenced to death by firing squad. He was executed bright and early and spirited away for secret burial, so there would be no remains for the populace to sanctify. That evening some travelers from a far country arrived, bent on seeking out the sage of whom they had heard so much, to ask him certain questions of philosophy which had baffled their own wise men. But it was too late. He was dead.

  While Nickie got to work on his front, I hustled around on mine. First I went to Clammidge’s office and rubbed his nose in the summons. I stood watching him as he read it in his desk chair. For some minutes the’ only reaction was a change of complexion. Then he cleared his throat. Ladies and gentlemen, our sponsor.

  “How could you—”

  “Please don’t reproach yourself.”

  “What?”

  “Because if you hadn’t told me to take this tack I wouldn’t have been put in a position where I could become a victim of such perjury—is that what you’re thinking? Forget it!” I laughed generously. “I’ll see to it that the name of the paper is kept out of it.”

  “Paper.” He plowed his hair and writhed a little. “Drag us into it. Scandal,” he continued in a kind of hysterical shorthand. His eyes faltered like dying bugs down to the summons again. “Some of these charges. I always thought you—”

  “Of course there’s nothing to them.” I sketched in something of the nature of the scheme behind them. “Absolutely nothing to the whole thing.”

  He looked at me askance. “Are you sure?”

  I got a job as a dock walloper and trundled him, boxed and gagged, on a handcart to the edge of the wharf, where I nudged him over into the water without being seen. I took a course in airplane writing and wrote obscenities on the sky. I befouled a summer’s day from horizon to horizon before I was caught—brought down by a pursuit plane over the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

  Slipping down in his leather chair, Clammidge dropped his hands on top of his head, let them flop there like exhausted birds onto a nest, and said, “Just when the missus and I were planning a Caribbean cruise.”

  “You will be on that boat. I shall never involve the good name of this paper. Do you think that I would even mention that memo from you calling for the change in the column, and also urging me to see readers in person who wanted that, come to think of it—a directive, as I suppose it would be called in court. Do you think I would breathe a word about that, which I’ve still got somewhere in my files?”

  “You need an ocean voyage yourself,” he bleated. “Have you ever been abroad?”

  “All expenses paid, is that what you’re insinuating? Why not, when this is over. Blackmail is a tough thing to have to go through, and I’ll need that vacation I’ve been putting off. My missus will too.”

  His palms slid down along the sides of his face like gastropods from a rock to which they no longer have the strength to cling. “All right.”

  “Not that I wouldn’t keep on working. As a matter of fact I could send my stuff from Europe.”

  “Europe!” He got a grip on himself and straightened in the chair. “Little vignettes about life there? How human nature is the same all over? Well, it might make a series. If you don’t end up in jail.”

  “We must avoid that at all costs. Do you suppose you should call Sipperly for me?” I asked, referring to the attorney the Pick retained.

  “Yes. As your lawyer—not ours.” He darted me a last panicky look and reached for the phone.

  And so to Sipperly, who laughed when he read the complaint. He got Bloodstein on the wire and the two chatted like old friends—about how the families were, and so on. After conferring about the matter on hand, Sipperly, a thin bent man who resembled a wilted reed, was able to assure me that se
ttling out of court was what the other side took for granted, and for a lot less than the sum named, or even a lot less than half of that. “It’s simply a question of how high the paper is willing to go to get a rather routine legal burr out of its hair,” he said.

  “I don’t want to settle,” I said, seeing my predicament being pulled out from under me before I had made the hay I intended. People were rushing to my aid too fast. “It’s our duty to fight these rascals. You can tell Bloodstein to go to—No, don’t tell him that, but what kind of case does he think they’ve got? What evidence?”