It was not a loathing of death that froze me. I had taught myself to think of death as a friend.
It was not heartbroken rage against injustice that froze me. I had taught myself that a human being might as well look for diamond tiaras in the gutter as for rewards and punishments that were fair.
It was not the thought that I was so unloved that froze me. I had taught myself to do without love.
It was not the thought that God was cruel that froze me. I had taught myself never to expect anything from Him.
What froze me was the fact that I had absolutely no reason to move in any direction. What had made me move through so many dead and pointless years was curiosity.
Now even that had flickered out.
How long I stood frozen there, I cannot say. If I was ever going to move again, someone else was going to have to furnish the reason for moving.
Somebody did.
A policeman watched me for a while, and then he came over to me, and he said, "You all right?"
"Yes," I said.
"You've been standing here a long time," he said.
"I know," I said.
"You waiting for somebody?" he said.
"No," I said.
"Better move on, don't you think?" he said.
"Yes, sir," I said.
And I moved on.
41
CHEMICALS ...
FROM THE EMPIRE State Building I walked downtown. I walked all the way to my old home in Greenwich Village, to Resi's and my and Kraft's old home.
I smoked cigarettes all the way, began to think of myself as a lightning bug.
I encountered many fellow lightning bugs. Sometimes I gave the cheery red signal first, sometimes they. And I left the seashell roar and the aurora borealis of the city's heart farther and farther behind me.
The hour was late. I began to catch signals of fellow lightning bugs trapped in upper stories.
Somewhere a siren, a tax-supported mourner, wailed.
When I got at last to my building, my home, all windows were dark save one on the second floor, one window in the apartment of young Dr. Abraham Epstein.
He, too, was a light ning bug.
He glowed; I glowed back.
Somewhere a motorcycle started up, sounded like a string of firecrackers.
A black cat crossed between me and the door of the building. "Ralph?" it said.
The entrance hall of the building was dark, too. The ceiling light did not respond to the switch. I struck a match, saw that the mailboxes had all been broken into.
In the wavering light of the match and the formless surroundings, the bent and gaping doors of the mailboxes might have been the doors of cells in a jail in a burning city somewhere.
My match attracted a patrolman. He was young and lonesome.
"What are you doing here?" he said.
"I live here," I said. "This is my home."
"Any identification?" he said.
So I gave him some identification, told him the attic was mine.
"You're the reason for all this trouble," he said. He wasn't scolding me. He was simply interested.
"If you say so," I said.
"I'm surprised you came back," he said.
"I'll go away again," I said.
"I can't order you to go away," he said. "I'm just surprised you came back."
"It's all right for me to go upstairs?" I said.
"It's your home," he said. "Nobody can keep you out of it."
"Thank you," I said.
"Don't thank me," he said. "It's a free country, and everybody gets protected exactly alike." He said this pleasantly. He was giving me a lesson in civics.
"That's certainly the way to run a country," I said.
"I don't know if you're kidding me or not," he said, "but that's right."
"I'm not kidding you," I said. "I swear I'm not." This simple oath of allegiance satisfied him.
"My father was killed on Iwo Jima," he said.
"I'm sorry," I said.
"I guess there were good people killed on both sides," he said.
"I think that's true," I said.
"You think there'll be another one?" he said.
"Another what?" I said.
"Another war," he said.
"Yes," I said.
"Me too," he said. "Isn't that hell?"
"You chose the right word," I said.
"What can any one person do?" he said.
"Each person does a little something," I said, "and there you are."
He sighed heavily. "It all adds up," he said. "People don't realize." He shook his head. "What should people do?"
"Obey the laws," I said.
"They don't even want to do that, half of 'em," he said. "The things I see--the things people say to me. Sometimes I get very discouraged."
"Everybody does that from time to time," I said.
"I guess it's partly chemistry," he said.
"What is?" I said.
"Getting down in the dumps," he said. "Isn't that what they're finding out--that a lot of that's chemicals?"
"I don't know," I said.
"That's what I read," he said. "That's one of the things they're finding out."
"Very interesting," I said.
"They can give a man certain chemicals, and he goes crazy," he said. "That's one of the things they're working with. Maybe it's all chemicals."
"Very possible," I said.
"Maybe it's different chemicals that different countries eat that makes people act in different ways at different times," he said.
"I'd never thought of that before," I said.
"Why else would people change so much?" he said. "My brother was over in Japan, and he said the Japanese were the nicest people he ever met, and it was the Japanese who'd killed our father! Think about that for a minute."
"All right," I said.
"It has to be chemicals, doesn't it?" he said.
"I see what you mean," I said.
"Sure," he said. "You think about it some more."
"All right," I said.
"I think about chemicals all the time," he said. "Sometimes I think I should go back to school and find out all the things they've found out so far about chemicals."
"I think you should," I said.
"Maybe, when they find out more about chemicals," he said, "there won't have to be policemen or wars or crazy houses or divorces or drunks or juvenile delinquents or women gone bad or anything any more."
"That would sure be nice," I said.
"It's possible," he said.
"I believe you," I said.
"The way they're going, everything's possible now, if they just work at it--get the money and get the smartest people and get to work. Have a crash program," he said.
"I'm for it," I said.
"Look how some women go half off their nut once a month," he said. "Certain chemicals get loose, and the women can't help but act that way. Sometimes a certain chemical will get loose after a woman's had a baby, and she'll kill the baby. That happened four doors down from here just last week."
"How awful," I said. "I hadn't heard--"
"Most unnatural thing a woman can do is kill her own baby, but she did it," he said. "Certain chemicals in the blood made her do it, even though she knew better, didn't want to do it at all."
"Um," I said.
"You wonder what's wrong with the world--" he said, "well, there's an important clue right there."
42
NO DOVE,
NO COVENANT ...
I WENT UPSTAIRS to my ratty attic, went up the oak and plaster snail of the stairwell.
While the column of air enclosed by the stairs had carried in the past a melancholy freight of coal dust and cooking smells and the sweat of plumbing, that air was cold and sharp now. Every window in my attic had been broken. All warm gases had been whisked up the stairwell and out my windows, as though up a whistling flue.
The air was clean.
The feeling of a
stale old building suddenly laid open, an infected atmosphere lanced, made clean, was familiar to me. I had felt it often enough in Berlin. Helga and I were bombed out twice. Both times there was a staircase left to climb.
One time we climbed the stairs to a roofless and windowless home, a home otherwise magically undisturbed. Another time, we climbed the stairs to cold thin air, two floors below where home had been.
Both moments at those splintered stairheads under the open sky were exquisite.
The exquisiteness went on for only a short time, naturally, for, like any human family, we loved our nests and needed them. But, for a minute or two, anyway, Helga and I felt like Noah and his wife on Mount Ararat.
There is no better feeling than that.
And then the air-raid sirens blew again, and we realized that we were ordinary people, without dove or covenant, and that the flood, far from being over, had scarcely begun.
I remember one time, when Helga and I went from the head of a splintered staircase in the sky down into a shelter deep in the ground, and the big bombs walked all around above. And they walked and they walked and they walked, and it seemed that they never would go away.
And the shelter was long and narrow, like a railroad car, and it was full.
And there was a man, a woman, and their three children on the bench facing Helga and me. And the woman started speaking to the ceiling, the bombs, the airplanes, the sky, and to God Almighty above all that.
She started softly, but she wasn't talking to anybody in the shelter itself.
"All right--" she said, "here we are. We're right down here. We hear you up there. We hear how angry you are." The loudness of her voice jumped sharply.
"Dear God, how angry you are!" she cried.
Her husband--a haggard civilian with a patch over one eye, with the recognition button of the Nazi teachers' union on his lapel--spoke to her warningly.
She did not hear him.
"What is it you want us to do?" she said to the ceiling and all that lay above. "Whatever it is you want us to do," she said, "tell us, and we'll do it!"
A bomb crashed down close by, shook loose from the ceiling a snowfall of calcimine, brought the woman to her feet shrieking, and her husband with her.
"We surrender! We give up!" she yelled, and great relief and happiness spread over her face. "You can stop now," she yelled. She laughed. "We quit! It's over!" She turned to tell the good news to her children.
Her husband knocked her cold.
That one-eyed teacher set her down on the bench, propped her against the wall. And then he went to the highest-ranking person present, a vice-admiral, as it happened. "She's a woman ... hysterical ... they get hysterical ... she doesn't mean it ... she has the Golden Order of Parenthood ..." he said to the vice-admiral.
The vice-admiral wasn't baffled or annoyed. He didn't feel miscast. With fine dignity, he gave the man absolution. "It's all right," he said. "It's understandable. Don't worry."
The teacher marveled at a system that could forgive weakness. "Heil Hitler," he said, bowing as he backed away.
"Heil Hitler," said the vice-admiral.
The teacher now began to revive his wife. He had good news for her--that she was forgiven, that everyone understood.
And all the time the bombs walked and walked overhead, and the schoolteacher's three children did not bat an eye.
Nor, I thought, would they ever.
Nor, I thought, would I.
Ever again.
43
ST. GEORGE AND
THE DRAGON ...
THE DOOR of my ratty attic had been torn off its hinges, had disappeared entirely. In its place the janitor had tacked a pup-tent of mine, and over the pup-tent a zigzag of boards. He had written on the zigzag boards, in gold radiator paint that reflected the light of my match: "Nobody and nothing inside."
Be that as it may, somebody had since ripped a bottom corner of the canvas free of its tacks, giving my ratty attic a small, triangular flap-door, like a tepee.
I crawled in.
The light switch in my attic did not respond, either. What light there was came through the few unbroken window panes. The broken panes had been replaced with wads of paper, rags, clothes and bedding. Night winds whistled around these wads. What light there was was blue.
I looked out through the back windows by the stove, looked down into the foreshortened enchantment of the little private park below, the little Eden formed of joined back yards. No one was playing in it now.
There was no one in it to cry, as I should have liked someone to cry: "Olly-olly-ox-in-freeeeeee."
There was a stir, a rustle in the shadows of my attic. I imagined it to be the rustle of a rat.
I was wrong.
It was the rustle of Bernard B. O'Hare, the man who had captured me so long ago. It was the stir of my own personal Fury, the man who perceived his noblest aspect in his loathing and hounding of me.
I do not mean to slander him by associating the sound he made with the sound of a rat. I do not think of O'Hare as a rat, though his actions with regard to me had the same nagging irrelevance as the rats' scrabbling passions in my attic walls. I didn't really know O'Hare, and I didn't want to know him. The fact of his having put me under arrest in Germany was a fact of submicroscopic interest to me. He wasn't my nemesis. My game was up long before O'Hare took me into custody. To me, O'Hare was simply one more gatherer of windblown trash in the tracks of war.
O'Hare had a far more exciting view of what we were to each other. When drunk, at any rate, he thought of himself as St. George and of me as the dragon.
When I first saw him in the shadows of my attic, he was seated on a galvanized bucket turned upside down. He was in the uniform of the American Legion. He had a quart of whisky with him. He had apparently been waiting for me a long time, drinking and smoking the while. He was drunk, but he had kept his uniform neat. His tie was straight. His cap was on and set at the proper angle. The uniform was important to him, was supposed to be important to me, too.
"Know who I am?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"I'm not as young as I was once," he said. "Haven't changed much, have I?"
"No," I said. I've described him earlier in this account as having looked like a lean young wolf. When I saw him in my attic, he looked unhealthy--pale and stringy and hot-eyed. He had become less wolf than coyote, I thought. His post-war years had not been years of merry blooming.
"Expecting me?" he said.
"You told me I could," I said. I had to be polite and careful with him. I supposed correctly that he meant to hurt me. The fact that he was in a very neat uniform, and that he was smaller and much lighter than me, suggested that he had a weapon on him somewhere--most likely a gun.
He now got off the bucket, showing me, in his ramshackle rising, how drunk he was. He knocked the bucket over in the process.
He grinned. "Ever have nightmares about me, Campbell?" he said.
"Often," I said. It was a lie, of course.
"Surprised I didn't bring anybody with me?" he said.
"Yes," I said.
"Plenty of people wanted to come along," he said. "There was a whole bunch wanted to come down with me from Boston. And after I got to New York this afternoon, I went into a bar and got talking to some strangers, and they asked if they could come along, too."
"Um," I said.
"And you know what I said to them?" he asked me.
"Nope," I said.
"I said to them, 'Sorry, boys--but this is a party just for Campbell and me. That's the way it's got to be--just the two of us, face to face,'" he said.
"Um," I said.
"'This thing's been a-building over the years,' I told 'em," said O'Hare. "'It's in the stars--' I told 'em, 'in the stars that Howard Campbell and me meet again after all these years.' Don't you feel that way?" he asked me.
"What way?" I said.
"It's in the stars," he said. "We had to meet like this, right here in this very
room, and neither one of us could have avoided it if we'd tried."
"Possibly," I said.
"Just when you think there isn't any point to life--" he said, "then, all of a sudden, you realize you are being aimed right straight at something."
"I know what you mean," I said.
He swayed, steadied himself. "You know what I do for a living?" he said.
"No," I said.
"Dispatcher for frozen-custard trucks," he said.
"Pardon me?" I said.
"Fleet of trucks goes around to factories, beaches, ballgames--anywhere there's people--" O'Hare seemed to forget all about me for a few seconds, to reflect murkily on the mission of the trucks he dispatched. "Custard machine's right there on the truck," he murmured. "Two flavors is all--chocolate and vanilla." His mood was exactly what poor Resi's mood had been when she told me about the ghastly pointlessness of her job at a cigarette-making machine in Dresden.
"When the war ended," O'Hare said to me, "I expected to be a lot more in fifteen years than a dispatcher of frozen-custard trucks."
"I guess we've all had disappointments," I said.
He didn't respond to this feeble try at brotherhood. His concern was for himself alone. "I was going to be a doctor, I was going to be a lawyer, a writer, an architect, an engineer, a newspaper reporter--" he said. "There wasn't anything I couldn't be," he said.
"And then I got married--" he said, "and the wife started having kids right away, and I opened a damn diaper service with a buddy, and the buddy ran off with the money, and the wife kept having kids. After the diaper service it was Venetian blinds, and after the Venetian-blind business went bust, it was frozen custard. And all the time the wife was having more kids, and the damn car breaking down, and bill-collectors coming around, and termites boiling out of the baseboards every spring and fall."
"Sorry," I said.
"And I asked myself," said O'Hare, "what does it mean? Where do I fit in? What's the point of any of it?"
"Good questions," I said softly, and I put myself close to a pair of heavy fire-tongs.
"And then somebody sent me a copy of that newspaper with the story of how you were still alive," said O'Hare, and he relived for me the cruel excitement the story had given him. "And then it hit me--" he said, "why I was alive, and what the main thing was I was supposed to do."
He took a step toward me, his eyes wide. "Here I come, Campbell, out of the past!"
"How do you do?" I said.
"You know what you are to me, Campbell?" he said.
Mother Night Page 14
