The Bell Tower

by Walter Blum

  There were, at the lunch table that day, six men capable of appreciating the wonders of the female form. All except Adam were in some sort of trade—an undertaker named Shapiro, a car dealer, two cousins who ran a haberdashery and, seated to his left, Max Goldman, who owned the largest furniture store in Canelius. It was said that he would soon be opening a branch down the road in Forest Glen, and if all went well by late 1956 there would be a Goldman Brothers outlet in every part of the state.

  Their conversation seemed oddly irrelevant. With so much happening in the world, it would have been natural for the talk to drift to politics, the Cold War, the bomb, perhaps even a mention of that lunatic in Congress who made a habit of waving papers in the air, papers he insisted contained the names of notorious Communists. But these were ordinary businessmen who, beyond the reaches of their own little universe, found little to bring a spark of excitement to their eyes.

  Adam ate sparingly. Since he worked the night shift at the station, breakfast often bumped into lunch and his desire for food was often dulled at this time of day. But there was, as well, something about the Fairmount Country Club that rubbed him the wrong way. He told himself he wanted to like these people, that he wouldn’t mind joining their circle if they would have him, but they were different. He wanted desperately to fit in, but they lived in another world.

  There was an indefinable snobbishness about them that derived, not from landed privilege or inheritance as it might have been in the old days, but wealth. They had earned their status the hard way, clawed their way to the top. Money was their badge of honor, their gold star for all that hustling and fighting and scrounging for patronage. And yet, being businessmen without titles or noble birth, they saw themselves as ordinary people.

  It was Goldman who had invited him to the club. Wally’s powers of persuasion had borne fruit, and there would soon be a hefty increase in the number of Goldman Brothers spots on WCAN. Max felt he should get better acquainted with the men who would be delivering his sales pitch.

  “You know,” he said, “I do believe you’re the first person we’ve had for lunch in your line of work.” Unlike the other men at the table, Goldman’s accent was strictly Northern.

  “My line of work?” Adam repeated.

  “Show business,” Goldman explained.

  Adam smiled faintly. “Well, it’s not really show business. I’m just an announcer on a late-night program.”

  “To me that’s show business.” Goldman’s words clunked like an old De Soto traveling down a country road. “Your father, what does he do?”

  “My father’s an accountant.”

  “In New York?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lionel and I started out in New York.”

  “Lionel?”

  “My brother. He and I started our first place twenty years ago. We pooled our savings—$4,000 between the two of us—and it cost us almost half that to get it looking respectable. But Lionel was in too much of a hurry. He couldn’t see building up a store in a place like Canelius when there was a fortune to be made in New York, which was where we were born. He insisted there was money to be made in discount furniture. I told him he was mashuga, crazy as a loon, I said. I told him he’d lose his shirt letting customers have chairs and sofas and dinette sets for twenty and thirty percent off. He wouldn’t listen.”

  “He started his own store?”

  “Not only started his own store but made a huge success of it. With those discounts and his easy credit policy, people practically broke the door to get in.”

  “How is he doing now?” Adam asked absent-mindedly, still distracted by the gorgeous blonde creature at the next table.

  “Lionel?”

  “Yes.”

  “Lionel is dead,” Goldman said. He was a small, fidgety man with bushy eyebrows, a long, aquiline nose and a black, pencil-thin moustache modeled on those worn by actors in movies of the 1930s. Even in a seated position he seemed to be balancing on his heels, as though preparing for a customer who was about to walk in the door. His voice was carefully calculated to express whatever emotion was called for at the moment. His hands were long and slender and heavily veined, as befits a man entering the final quarter century of life. Restlessness was an intrinsic part of his nature.

  “I’m sorry about your brother,” Adam said.

  “Well, that’s the trouble with misguided ambition.” Goldman glowered. “The store is making a fortune, but Lionel never lived to enjoy it. Leukemia.” Goldman picked up a fork and drew a line down the tablecloth. “Me, I’m from the old school. You build up a clientele by offering service and showing that you’re honest in your dealings.”

  “You’re right,” Adam agreed.

  “Yes, but things are changing. Your friend Wally what’s-his-name, the one who’s running my commercials on your station, he knows what the market is like these days. You can’t do things the old way, not any more. Listen, I want you to come down to the store and have a look.”

  Suddenly, he seemed to change the subject. “Her name’s Susan.”

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “The one you’ve got your eye on. The girl you’ve been staring at ever since we sat down at this table. You think I’m blind? I’m not that old yet.”

  “You know her?” Adam asked.

  “I should,” Goldman said. “She’s my daughter.”

  Adam felt as though a trapdoor had opened beneath him. Being caught in the act of goggling at another man’s daughter filled him with great waves of embarrassment. Later, Goldman insisted on introducing them. Adam was tongue-tied, and she clearly had other things on her mind, although she switched on a smile and a look that turned his stomach to water.

  It should have ended there, but it didn’t.

  The next morning, he looked in the mirror while shaving and saw her smiling back at him. He found himself thinking of her in odd moments, when he should have been concentrating on something else. Her face became stuck like a piece of paper that had gotten caught in the sidewalk gratings of his mind. He couldn’t pry it out. Wherever he went, he saw the long cascade of shiny blonde hair that almost touched her waist, the soft lips, the eyes that glowed. In the privacy of his room, standing before the mirror that hung behind the door, he practiced saying her name. Susan, Susan.

  It was such an ordinary name, and yet for him it took on a kind of elegance that was unique. He couldn’t think of anything to say after it—if there was a third time they saw each other, he would probably still be at a loss for words—but he had to try.

  The next time their paths crossed was at a country club dance. Although not a member, he’d been invited anyway for logistical reasons—in a town like Canelius, where young Jewish women outnumbered males, it was necessary to have representatives of both sexes if you wanted to fill a dance floor.

  The dining room where Adam had lunched a month before was cleared of tables. A bandstand had been set up, with more than enough space for a five-piece combo called the Mellow Tones. The room was festooned with flowers and plants, and a long table against one wall held canapés and fruit punch, much too bland, but since there were teenagers present, the use of alcohol in drinks was out of the question.

  Everyone knew everyone else. The community was a small one. There was a synagogue but it was out of town, halfway between Canelius and Forest Glen and served both communities on the High Holy Days. However, most of the families who worshipped there were also members of the Fairmount Country Club. Unlike larger, wealthier gentile clubs, the Fairmount had no golf course—couldn’t afford one—but the grounds were ample and well manicured and included a pretty little natural lake at the foot of the hill, where mothers often spent the warm days of summer, gossiping and keeping an eye on the children.

  The lake was shallow enough so little ones could get their feet wet without being in danger. The fathers would join them on weekends. Single people, like Adam and those of his age, found the place boring. There was too little to do, too much time to be was
ted. Many in their teens and twenties were members in name only, but for Adam it was somewhere besides the library to spend his spare time, especially on warm days.

  The dance was held on a Saturday night in late March. Adam came by after his shift had ended. It was a little past midnight. The band was still playing, although many of the dancers had already wandered off. He found himself waylaid at the door by Jack Shapiro, manipulating his large gray moustache as though it were a violin that needed constant retuning. Shapiro’s job, as head of the membership committee, was to coax young men into joining the club, but he was well aware that Adam wasn’t much of a prospect.

  “He’ll be gone in six months or less,” someone had said, and Shapiro felt there was wisdom in that advice.

  After Shapiro had wandered off, Adam had a chance to take a second look at his surroundings. Most of the Fairmount Country Club was contained in a single, low-slung stucco building with an ornamental facade meant to resemble carved wood. Two miniature pines flanked the front door. A pair of glass French doors in the back of the big room led out to the lawn that sloped down to the lake. There was a full kitchen off the main room, available for lunches and special social occasions. An antenna protruded from the roof, but since the membership hadn’t yet bought a TV set, it stood waiting, in lonely splendor.

  To reach the club, you drove south and east from Canelius on County Road 4. A small white sign, easily overlooked, was the only indication that it was there, almost as though it were in hiding from the outside world.

  Adam installed himself in an unoccupied corner of the room, from which he could see Susan at the drinks table, flanked by a couple of her regular crew-cut admirers. A friend of the two huskies stopped by; they chatted a while, and then the three excused themselves and went off in the direction of the bandstand. In a moment of inexplicable boldness, Adam made his way to where she was standing and introduced himself. Her face brightened.

  “Of course,” she said. He was astonished that she remembered him. “I’ve heard you on the radio a couple of times. I like the way you speak, but you’re younger than I expected. Are you from up North?”

  “New York.”

  “You don’t have a New York accent.”

  “You don’t have a Southern drawl,” he said, which seemed like the more obvious observation to him.

  She laughed. “I spent a year in France,” she explained. “A school near Paris called the Ecole Biarritz. Most of the girls couldn’t understand what I was saying—everybody spoke English, but it was like one of us was speaking a foreign language, and that was me—so I had to force myself to speak like this.”

  “You’re quite good at it.”

  “Why, thank you, kind sir.” Again the smile, warming him all over. “It’s easy to fall back, though. At least you don’t have to worry about things like that when you write.”

  “I don’t do much writing,” he said. “Do you?”

  “A little.”

  His head was swimming. He had never expected her to conduct a conversation with him, much less talk about personal things.

  “What do you write?”

  “Poetry, mostly.”

  “Are you good at it?”

  “No. But, it really doesn’t matter as long as I don’t have to pass my poems around.”

  She surprised him again by accepting his invitation to dance. The band had just finished a jitterbug and began playing a ballad, The Song from Moulin Rouge. Adam swung his arm around her and they edged out onto the floor. He felt remarkably at home. To compensate for his awkwardness, he had made himself into a pretty fair dancer. The low-cut blouse she wore revealed just enough of her breasts, and although she wasn’t that large, there was a soft roundedness about them that sent a wave of lust through him. He wanted desperately to touch them, but he knew that wasn’t permitted.

  Instead, he pulled her toward him. He could feel the warmth of her perfume, lascivious but demure.

  “That was nice,” she said when it was over and they had returned to the drinks table. “I really enjoyed it—” She touched his cheek. He shivered inside at the sensation. He had never met anyone so full of joy, so eager to soak up life, to sweep every speck of existence into a jar that could be dipped into, again and again, for reassurance. He prayed for time to stop, for the chance to freeze this moment like a tintype in an album of perpetual yesterdays.

  “Adam? It’s Adam, isn’t it?”

  He nodded.

  “Yes, of course it is. We must do this again sometime, Adam.”

  He was crushed. Not only couldn’t she remember his name, but she had offered him the standard cliché remark, the one all girls her age used when they wanted to brush someone off.

  What were the chances of another encounter? Practically zero. The only way it would ever happen was if he called her on the telephone, and that was out of the question. He would be instantly tongue-tied. He would stammer and make a fool of himself, as he had on previous occasions.

  But there was a way to suppress the pain, he had discovered, and that was by deadening himself, by turning away from what he couldn’t have, holding down the soft pedal on the piano so the music receded into the background.

  Muted music was always easier to deal with than the kind that banged in your brain.

  He kept thinking of the guys with the crew cuts—tall, athletic-looking guys who could give her what she needed—who were waiting for her after they’d finished their dance. They were her type; he was just a voice on the radio, something a girl could listen to, could relate to, maybe even fantasize about. Was it possible she felt about him the way he did about her? Not a chance.

  In the days that followed he played back that evening a thousand times. What good was the romantic “line” he presented on the radio now? The Casanova of the airwaves was a fraud, and everyone knew it. How could the words he spoke into a microphone be replicated when a beautiful, desirable girl floated in his arms on a dance floor? He thought of all the things he might have said, all the things he should have said. The wheel went around like a lazy Susan—but not this Susan, she was hardly lazy. He reached out and grabbed for it each time as it sped by him, a bit of salt, some pepper, a bottle of ketchup six stories high. It hurt, it stung. There was no way he could make it go away.

  One morning he awoke groggy after a restless night and clutching reality by the tips of his fingers. He realized that things had gone too far, that he had to put an end to whatever was happening to him. He had passed beyond infatuation; he was now caught up in a full-blown obsession, a phantom serpent that if he wasn’t careful could wrap itself around his throat and destroy him.

  But there was still time. Get hold of yourself, he commanded. Have patience, don’t panic, let the fever subside.

  Half awake, he turned on the radio. It was almost nine-thirty; The Breakfast Club was in full swing. Don McNeill was leading the march around the breakfast table. Sam was entertaining the crowd. Fran Allison as Aunt Fanny had stopped by with a load of cheery witticisms—and then it hit him. Something strange was going on. Between segments of the show an unfamiliar voice came on giving a brief commercial and the station break. Puzzled, he waited for The Breakfast Club to end. The same announcer returned, read a hardware store spot and gave the break again.

  Where was Simon Denning?

  He got up and sat on the edge of the bed, studying his bare feet and wondering what was going on at the station. Had he missed something? In all the time Simon had been there, he hadn’t once called in sick or missed so much as a station break. What was happening? Could he have been in a stupor for almost a week? Was love that debilitating? The sensation was both unfamiliar and actually a little frightening because it robbed him of his will. His mind was locked onto that golden hair, the shining eyes, the feel of her body, the voice that followed him no matter in what direction he headed.

  He waited for a third station break, just to make sure.

  No doubt about it, this wasn’t Simon. You couldn’t mistake the voice. T
hey hadn’t been that close, but it bothered him that the station might have dumped one of his fellow announcers without his knowing it. Could he have fallen into some sort of time warp, dreaming his private dreams, floating on a cloud while the rest of the world sped by around him?

  Dressing quickly, he visited the B&B Diner for his usual eggs and grits (they almost always threw that in, whether he wanted them or not). He hated the damned stuff. It made him feel like throwing up. For the rest of his life, he was certain he would be unable to escape the smell of that thick, porridge-like substance. It was an odor that stayed with you all your life.

  He then drove up to the station. In the control room he found a young man with a wisp of blond mustache and huge skinny hands, languidly occupying the steno chair that Denning usually overflowed. The familiar array of cigarette butts and half-empty plastic coffee cups that invariably followed Simon around was gone.

  The young man introduced himself. His name was Brian Hathaway. He worked as a part-time salesman and a backup announcer while putting himself through chiropractic school. He had a high-pitched alter ego named Squeaky, with whom he conducted tiresome little conversations about the weather and news reports and the songs they were going to play. Adam didn’t much care for these gimmicks, but it was the changed appearance of the control room that piqued his curiosity.

  “Where’s Simon?” he asked.

  “Gone,” Brian said. “Hey, don’t I know you?”

  “I do the evening show,” Adam said. “What happened to Simon?”

  “Haven’t the foggiest,” Brian said. “Finished his show, grabbed a couple of Nat ‘King’ Cole albums from the library and never came back. They asked me to fill in. I’m hoping they’ll make it permanent for me, because I like the morning shift.”