Comfort Me with Apples

by Peter de Vries

  After covering my head with oil and kneading it to a muck, the barber applied to my skull one of those machines with which paved streets are torn up. When I had been sufficiently clobbered, I was led blind and groping in my toga toward a milking stool, onto which I was pushed and my head flung into a bowl. A stream of water was trained on it, and when I opened my eyes and got a glimpse of the inside of the washbasin, I thought I pretty well understood how these places stopped failing hair.

  What they do is systematically and vehemently loosen a year’s supply in advance. You go home and weeks pass, months, and it seems to you your hair is no longer falling out; and it isn’t, all the weak soldiers have been washed out for the nonce. Then it starts falling again—time to go back to that wonderful place where they stopped it for a while. You go back because you hadn’t chanced to glance into the basin the last time. Then they uproot another year’s loss, and so on.

  To postpone going back into the outside world for a bit, I let this man shave and then massage me. I brooded under a succession of scalding towels. No use trying to cut a figure in time for the trial. Fat, balding, with a missing tooth the press of events had prevented replacing, I would resemble no rogue of parts at all, but only what in fact I was: a cracker-barrel philosopher.

  On a mumbled complaint from me about the temperature of the towels, the barber snapped his fingers and a manicurist grasped one of my hands and immersed it in a solution; a shoeshine boy followed. I had somebody hanging on every member, and half expected a psychoanalyst to stop by and give me half a buck’s worth of brain picking.

  Having received a bill for nine dollars and twenty cents, I distributed tips with a malevolent grin and made for the exit, where another coin netted me my coat and hat. I paid the bill and the door was opened for me by a man who seemed the proprietor.

  “Come again,” he said, “and tell your friends about us.”

  “I will,” I said. “I know some masochists.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Not at all.”

  “Good-by.”

  “Good-by.”

  Our short-calendar appearance was on the twenty-fifth of November. I selected a jacket of barleycorn tweed, a canary-colored suede vest, white shirt and plain knit olive tie. Mrs. Lamplighter drove the tumbril. I insisted she come along, so she could report Nickie’s success, if any, to Lila, who we thought had best stay home, in case the rocket didn’t go off. The nonpareil himself sat in the back seat, mostly quiet. We hoped our hearing would come up before noon, so he could get back to at least some of his laundry rounds.

  As we wound our way toward Bridgeport, twenty miles away, I looked out at the familiar fields and woods, dearer now in the bright vestments of autumn.

  “I wonder if I’ll ever come this way again,” I said.

  Crystal cleared her throat and shifted up on the seat. She was silent most of the trip too. I smiled with Christianity out of one side of my face while with the other I expressed outrage. I saw her in the near future, my body claimed and the insurance collected, going about in widow’s tweeds (sic), and fetching at last a new and no doubt worthier father for her young. I turned to see what she had on now. She was wearing a belted beige cashmere coat, and a bright print dress covered with vegetables of colors not corresponding to those in nature.

  “There’s the courthouse,” I said. “You can start looking for a parking place any time now.”

  Twenty

  The judge’s name was Merle Walnut. I don’t know what he may have thought of that in more formative years, but as for now he breathed an air of comprehensive ennui; as though life had done its worst and never touched him, its best and left him unamused. He suggested vaguely a background of independent wealth, and of good living though not of joie de vivre—of enjoying himself. He was not that hale archetype who keeps the economy sound by splashing about in the advertisements with wife and child and exclaiming, “We never dreamed a Carey pool was within our means!” He owned such a pool but never used it. He presented, rather, a look of Weltschmerz, which gave you pause as to the rightness of that attribute on the bench. My lord had sideburns which stopped just short of being axhelves, eyebrows dense as mustaches, and a mustache trimmed to such a fine line that from a distance it appeared first to be a scratch across his upper lip. I thought that if you took one of the eyebrows and put it under his nose—now get this, because I’m only going to say it once—if you made a mustache of one of the eyebrows, separated the two parts of the already neatly segmented mustache and put half over each eye, shaved the sideburns and threw away the other eyebrow, you would have a pretty good-looking man. Of about fifty-five. He had a habit of scratching the backs of his hands and yawning unobtrusively.

  Appraising him from the first of two rows of benches and chairs that ran across the rear of the courtroom for spectators, and where my wife and Nickie and I sat while Sipperly wedged his way into the bedlam that boiled about his throne, I thought with a flicker of pleasure that I saw a kindred spirit: an ember of that continentalism which was my sometime daemon. It dwelt in the expression with which he heard arguments for and against motions of piddling moment for cases of no interest; in the gestures with which he granted or denied them; in the tone of voice, dry, pointed, with which he interrupted comments or injected them himself. We would surely understand each other when the instant came: when I would have but to rise and, a thumb hooked negligently into a pocket of my canary-yellow vest, murmur, “Man is conceived and bored in sin,” to resolve the whole brouhaha and send us home to our several concerns.

  Yes, there was a place for Weltschmerz on the bench.

  Except that something was funny here. The eyes beneath the shaggy brows lifted to follow, along with scores of other pairs, the figure of Sherry Budd entering from the door at the right rear. A long-headed man who appeared to be part schnauzer pattered in her wake, clutching a decayed briefcase. Bloodstein.

  “That’s her,” I whispered to my wife.

  She was wearing a pale blue suit, a white blouse of the kind that I believe is called waffle piqué, and a hat of pillbox persuasion matching the yellow bag she carried. Sherry had lost her excess weight, and beneath her eyes were shadows, skillfully applied. The din of voices dwindled to a hum, and that to near-silence as what was, after all, some pumpkins made its way into the other end of our row. She saw me and averted her face, abruptly sitting down. She lowered her eyes and drew the skirt of her suit demurely down over her knees. I crossed my legs and glanced at the carafe of drinking water at the judge’s elbow. The only other person in the bleachers was a fat woman in a pepper-green dress who was leaning forward and eating her beads.

  A day of short calendar consists in the judge’s reading off the cases listed for that term and of lending an ear to any interlocutory motions either side might care to make: requests for postponement, say, for physical examinations of principals, for time to locate a witness, for disclosures. Ours was to be a motion for disclosure—of evidence the other side planned to use against us. Many of the cases met with no such impediments at all and few took over a minute. It was shortly before noon, when the courtroom was almost cleared of lawyers, who had left one by one as their business was transacted to dash off elsewhere, that I heard the judge drone, “Budd versus Swallow.”

  Sipperly, who had come back to join us after one or two skirmishes at the front on other cases he had coming up, sprang to his feet and called, “Your Honor: As counsel for the defense, I should like to move for disclosure of evidence. Opposing counsel plans to feature a diary purporting to detail the stresses undergone by his client at the hands of mine, over the period of time concerned. Permission is respectfully requested to examine and copy the contents.”

  Bloodstein had by now joined him, and the two were standing shoulder to shoulder before the bar as the former countered:

  “Your Honor: May I protest this motion. The contents are of too personal a nature to justify such free exchange preliminary to trial, and I also submit it would set
an unfortunate precedent to make general the circulation of courtroom evidence at a period prior to the trial itself.” Bloodstein possessed to an evidently full-blown degree the lawyer’s knack of amplifying his effect by saying the same thing two ways.

  Walnut was reading the complaint. A copy had been handed him by a clerk seated on his left, who put things in and out of a file in front of him. Without looking up Walnut murmured, “It is rather late in jurisprudence to hope for precedent coming out of Bridgeport.”

  I laughed. I was on his side. A sheriff dozing on a nearby dais twitched erect like a puppet and slammed a gavel down. “Order in the courtroom!”

  Sipperly pitched into the argument again.

  “I submit, your Honor, that since this document will no doubt be central to the plaintiff’s case, it must also perforce figure in the defense’s. It may spare a good deal of the court’s trial time if the defense will have an opportunity to peruse its contents beforehand.”

  “The feelings of my client,” Bloodstein came in, gesturing with tender concern in her direction, “are already such that riding roughshod over them by such a demand would be highly inadvisable at this time. She is in a critical emotional state.”

  “But able to attend short calendar, an ordeal which most counsels spare even their sturdy clients.”

  “I see yours is here.”

  “He has no reason to be shaken.”

  Judge Walnut laughed through his nose with no expression of mirth on his face as he took us in, back there. “This is certainly getting to be a full-dress affair, for short calendar,” he said. I drafted a violent oath on the courtroom floor with the toe of my shoe. Walnut let the complaint fall from his fingers as a thought occurred to him. “Perhaps I might have a look at this diary first.”

  Bloodstein swept an arm at his client.

  “She has it, Your Honor.”

  Then with what cheesy dramatics didn’t he walk over, lay a deacon’s hand on her. shoulder and whisper something in her ear. Sherry lowered her head and nodded. She opened her bag and produced a book bound in red leather and fastened with a gilt clasp. Then she gave to Bloodstein a small key. He unlocked the book, returned the key to her, and carried the book up and laid it before the judge. I sighed sharply around, as if to ask didn’t we all think they might have cut that out in New Haven. All eyes, however, were fixed upon Walnut’s hands as, Weltschmerz all forgot, he reached to take the diary from Bloodstein.

  The judge read the book, which the gilt clasp made vaguely ecclesiastical in appearance, with his head leaning slightly into a propped-up hand, in that attitude favored in portraits of bibliophiles. He turned the pages slowly. Once his eyes lifted and sought me out. I tugged the vest down over a bulge where my shirt may have gaped between it and my trousers. Walnut must have been three or four minutes poring over the exhibit. Which at last he closed and said: “I think the defense’s request to examine and copy is a reasonable one.”

  Sipperly took it from him and carried it over to a council table, Nickie and I popped to our feet and joined him there. As we sat huddled over the diary, Sipperly was called back to the proceedings when Bloodstein moved for a delay in order that his client might have time for the thorough physical checkup she needed. This was granted (I learned later), but then Sipperly moved for disclosure of the canceled check, adding jocosely that he only wanted to see it long enough to make sure the Red Cross, to whom it had been sent on endorsement by the payee, had endorsed it in turn.

  “Look, this duel of wits is wasted,” Walnut drawled sardonically. “I’m not conducting the trial yet, appearances to the contrary. If you men are using the occasion to show respective strengths for bargaining advantages in settling out of court, I must remind you—”

  He was interrupted by Nickie’s voice, clear, firm, amused, and out of order.

  “This whole thing is so absurd it’s hard to know where to begin,” he said. “It’s obviously a fake.”

  Well, distraction was by now the better part of valor, and so, stark, staring mad, I heard myself say, “How do you figure that, Mr. Sherman?”

  “Who is that?” This from Walnut.

  “Mr. Sherman is assisting in my defense, Your Honor,” I said. “I’m the accused, and allowed to speak in my own defense, am I not? I’d be most grateful should it please the Court to hear him out, if he should have something to say on my behalf.” Aimed at a formally respectful tone, my words sounded curiously like Yiddish dialect. Turning to Nickie before Walnut—quite cured of Weltschmerz now—could answer, I asked, stooging amazement for what must be absolutely the last time, “How on earth could you tell the diary was a fake?”

  “Internal evidence. I’m sure His Honor knows the trust which can be put in handwriting as an index of the emotional state. It is a cardiogram of the nervous system, in which the least sign of agitation is reflected. But if ever I saw evidence of a tranquil spirit, this is it.”

  “I object!” Bloodstein huffed.

  “So do I,” said the judge. “But this is no proper trial, and I should think plaintiff would welcome a dress rehearsal by the defense in order better to prepare its rebuttal when the time comes. Nor does anything but custom circumscribe the bench’s interest at short calendar.” He was itching with curiosity. “Counsel for the defense may at any rate complete the point on which it has launched,” he said, scratching his hands.

  He thought Nickie was another of my lawyers! So we had a man accused of masquerading as a psychiatrist being defended by someone impersonating a member of the bar. Sipperly made a spastic motion of panic but I pulled him back by the coattail.

  “Thank you, Your Honor.” Nickie went on practicing law without a license. “You will no doubt have noticed the even line of the script, which never thickens and then thins again to show that the pencil used was ever sharpened, or had to be. But it is in pencil, and my suspicion is that it’s the new liquid lead. That’s only just on the market and was not, I believe, generally available at the time the first of these entries were supposed to have been made.”

  “Could have been an Eversharp. Makes an even line too,” said the judge, holding up his own.

  “Perhaps,” said Nickie, who was of course feeling around experimentally. “But continuing the point His Honor has instructed me to develop, may I refer the court’s attention to a passage in the diary dated August 19. I quote: ‘Today he hypmatized me for the first time. Oh, diary, I’m weak, like putty in his hands. He called me the apple of his eye.’”

  “But you turned out to be a little tart,” I evolved as a rejoinder three days later. Now I muttered under my breath, “Apple of my eye my eye.”

  “‘He leaves me so shaken with his ardor,’” Nickie read on, “‘that he seems to draw my very soul out of me whenever he takes me in his—’”

  I laid my head back and howled like a dog, mentally. A man is made of chalkstone—don’t take him for granite. No amount of incantatory scrawls could relieve the pressure building up inside me now. I was glad to hear Walnut himself interrupt at this juncture.

  “The details are perhaps not germane to your point. Which is?”

  “Simply that this diary is not bona fide, not in good faith. It wasn’t kept from day to day at all but dashed off at the last minute when the plan to milk my poor friend there—”

  Here both lawyers and Walnut broke in, the latter no doubt anticipating Bloodstein’s objection to the broad irregularities on which matters were proceeding. “Counsel for the defense has no right to make lurid claims of this sort without corroborating evidence.”

  “Right. What proof do you have?” Walnut demanded of Nickie.

  “That’s not what I—” Bloodstein began.

  “What I’m trying to say is that this particular entry is fraudulent even to the most superficial eye,” Nickie said. “The writer goes on to state that she was so shaken by the accused’s impetuosities that she had to have a drink when she left his office. ‘So I stopped and had a glass of whisky at the Samothrace. Two, dia
ry. Where will it all end?’ Well, that’s very interesting in view of the fact that the Samothrace did not install hard liquor until sometime early in September. On August 19 it was dispensing nothing stronger than ice-cream sodas.”

  As one, we turned to see what Sherry Budd had to say about that. She was looking into her lap, her hands gripping her bag.

  “This diary is obviously not in good faith. It was hastily thrown together when the plaintiff, or possibly some master mind in whose power she really is, suddenly figured the case needed a little more pizazz,” Nickie went on. “Perhaps Miss Budd will exp—”

  “I object!” Bloodstein barked, looking more than ever like a schnauzer. Smiling gently, the judge was jotting something on the back of an unexpectedly long envelope drawn from the judicial bosom.

  “—will explain the discrepancy. And also if the entire diary isn’t made out of whole cloth, and while she is at it, if the accused sabotaged her love life, how it is that she was sitting at the Samothrace with her fiancé as late as last week, happily drinking the highballs now available there, as these snapshots I happen to have here will—”

  The seat Miss Budd had occupied was empty. The swinging door at the rear flapped back and forth. Bloodstein rose and hurried through it in excited pursuit.

  I got to my feet, clapped my hands and shouted, “Bravo!”

  Some seconds went by without my being joined.

  “Bravo,” I continued. “Bravo.”

  Tipped slightly back in his chair, the sheriff looked sideways at me without expression, as though we were involved in some dreamy inexactitude of procedure about which nothing could be done but which would right itself momentarily. “Bravo. Bravissimo,” I persisted. Years passed; faces changed, became those around my father and me in an auditorium two decades ago when he had leapt to his feet following the convulsive close of a sonata rendered by a visiting pianist. Finally a man in a black coat had got up several rows ahead of us, then someone else to the right, and so on, till my father had the whole resentful and by now rather hangdog audience standing in a “spontaneous ovation” which had, however, taken an eternity to generate.