“Just look at those smiling morons! If only all of those wires would snap!” Ignatius rattled the few kernels of popcorn in his last bag. “Thank God that scene is over.”
When a love scene appeared to be developing, he bounded up out of his seat and stomped up the aisle to the candy counter for more popcorn, but as he returned to his seat, the two big pink figures were just preparing to kiss.
“They probably have halitosis,” Ignatius announced over the heads of the children. “I hate to think of the obscene places that those mouths have doubtlessly been before!”
“You’ll have to do something,” the candy woman told the manager laconically. “He’s worse than ever tonight.”
The manager sighed and started down the aisle to where Ignatius was mumbling, “Oh, my God, their tongues are probably all over each other’s capped and rotting teeth.”
Three
Ignatius staggered up the brick path to the house, climbed the steps painfully, and rang the bell. One stalk of the dead banana tree had expired and collapsed stiffly onto the hood of the Plymouth.
“Ignatius, baby,” Mrs. Reilly cried when she opened the door. “What’s wrong? You look like you dying.”
“My valve closed on the streetcar.”
“Lord, come in quick out the cold.”
Ignatius shuffled miserably back to the kitchen and fell into a chair.
“The personnel manager at that insurance company treated me very insultingly.”
“You didn’t get the job?”
“Of course I didn’t get the job.”
“What happened?”
“I would rather not discuss it.”
“Did you go to the other places?”
“Obviously not. Do I appear to be in a condition that would attract prospective employers? I had the good judgment to come home as soon as possible.”
“Don’t feel blue, precious.”
“‘Blue’? I am afraid that I never feel ‘blue.’”
“Now don’t be nasty. You’ll get a nice job. You only been on the streets a few days,” his mother said and looked at him. “Ignatius, was you wearing that cap when you spoke to the insurance man?”
“Of course I was. That office was improperly heated. I don’t know how the employees of that company manage to stay alive exposing themselves to that chill day after day. And then there are those fluorescent tubes baking their brains out and blinding them. I did not like the office at all. I tried to explain the inadequacies of the place to the personnel manager, but he seemed rather uninterested. He was ultimately very hostile.” Ignatius let out a monstrous belch. “However, I told you that it would be like this. I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it.”
“Lord, babe, you gotta look up.”
“Look up?” Ignatius repeated savagely. “Who has been sowing that unnatural garbage into your mind?”
“Mr. Mancuso.”
“Oh, my God! I should have known. Is he an example of ‘looking up’?”
“You oughta hear the whole story of that poor man’s life. You oughta hear what this sergeant at the precinct’s trying…”
“Stop!” Ignatius covered one ear and beat a fist on the table. “I will not listen to another word about that man. Throughout the centuries it has been the Mancusos of the world who have caused wars and spread diseases. Suddenly the spirit of that evil man is haunting this house. He has become your Svengali!”
“Ignatius, get a holt of yourself.”
“I refuse to ‘look up.’ Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”
“I ain’t miserable.”
“You are.”
“No, I ain’t.”
“Yes, you are.”
“Ignatius, I ain’t miserable. If I was, I’d tell you.”
“If I had demolished private property while intoxicated and had thereby thrown my child to the wolves, I would be beating my breast and wailing. I would kneel in penance until my knees bled. By the way, what penance has the priest given you for your sin?”
“Three Hail Mary’s and a Our Father.”
“Is that all?” Ignatius screamed. “Did you tell him what you did, that you halted a critical work of great brilliance?”
“I went to confession, Ignatius. I told Father everything. He says, ‘It don’t sound like your fault, honey. It sounds to me like you just took a little skid on a wet street.’ So I told him about you. I says ‘My boy says I’m the one stopping him from writing in his copybooks. He’s been writing on this story for almost five years.’ And Father says, ‘Yeah? Well, don’t sound too important to me. You tell him to get out the house and go to work.’”
“No wonder I cannot support the Church,” Ignatius bellowed. “You should have been lashed right there in the confessional.”
“Now tomorrow, Ignatius, you go try some other place. They got plenty jobs in the city. I was talking to Miss Marie-Louise, the old lady works in the German’s. She’s got a crippled brother with a earphone. He’s kinda deaf, you know? He got himself a good job over by the Goodwill Industries.”
“Perhaps I should try there.”
“Ignatius! They only hire blind people and dummies to make brooms and things.”
“I am certain that those people are pleasant co-workers.”
“Let’s us look in the afternoon’s paper. Maybe they got a nice job in there!”
“If I must go out tomorrow, I am not leaving the house so early. I felt very disoriented all the while I was downtown.”
“You didn’t leave here until after lunch.”
“Still, I was not functioning properly. I suffered several bad dreams last night. I awoke bruised and muttering.”
“Here, listen to this. I been seeing this ad in the paper every day,” Mrs. Reilly said, holding the newspaper very close to her eyes. “‘Clean, hard-worker man…’”
“That’s ‘hard-working.’”
“‘Clean, hard-working man, dependable, quite type…’”
“‘Quiet type.’ Give that to me,” Ignatius said, snatching the paper from his mother. “It’s unfortunate that you couldn’t complete your education.”
“Poppa was very poor.”
“Please! I couldn’t bear to hear that grim story again at the moment. ‘Clean, hard-working, dependable, quiet type.’ Good God! What kind of monster is this that they want. I am afraid that I could never work for a concern with a worldview like that.”
“Read the rest, babe.”
“‘Clerical work. 25-35 years old. Apply Levy Pants, Industrial Canal and River, between 8 and 9 daily.’ Well, that’s out. I could never get all the way down there before nine o’clock.”
“Honey, if you gonna work, you gotta get up early.”
“No, Mother.” Ignatius threw the paper on top of the oven. “I have been setting my sights too high. I cannot survive this type of work. I suspect that something like a newspaper route would be rather agreeable.”
“Ignatius, a big man like you can’t pedal around on no bike delivering newspapers.”
“Perhaps you could drive me about in the car and I could toss the papers from the rear window.”
“Listen, boy,” Mrs. Reilly said angrily. “You gonna go try somewheres tomorrow. I mean it. The first thing you gonna do is answer this ad. You playing around, Ignatius. I know you.”
“Ho hum,” Ignatius yawned, exhibiting the flabby pink of his tongue. “Levy Pants sounds just as bad if not worse than the titles of the other organizations I have contacted. I can see that I am obviously beginning to scrape the bottom of the job market already.”
“Just you wait, babe. You’ll make good.”
“Oh, my God!”
II
Patrolman Mancuso had a good idea that had been given to him by, of all people, Ignatius Reilly. He had telephoned the Reillys’ house to ask Mrs. Reilly when she could go bowling with him and his aunt. But Ignatius had answered the telephone an
d screamed, “Stop molesting us, you mongoloid. If you had any sense, you would be investigating dens like that Night of Joy in which my beloved mother and I were mistreated and robbed. I, unfortunately, was the prey of a vicious, depraved B-girl. In addition, the proprietress is a Nazi. We barely escaped with our lives. Go investigate that gang and let us alone, you homewrecker.”
Then Mrs. Reilly had wrestled the phone away from her son.
The sergeant would be glad to know about the place. He might even compliment Patrolman Mancuso for getting the tip. Clearing his throat, Patrolman Mancuso stood before the sergeant and said, “I got a lead on a place where they got B-girls.”
“You got a lead?” the sergeant asked. “Who gave you the lead?”
Patrolman Mancuso decided against dragging Ignatius into the matter for several reasons. He settled on Mrs. Reilly.
“A lady I know,” he answered.
“How come this lady knows about the place?” the sergeant asked. “Who took her to this place?”
Patrolman Mancuso couldn’t say “her son.” It might reopen some wounds. Why couldn’t conversations with the sergeant ever go smoothly?
“She was there alone,” Patrolman Mancuso said finally, trying to save the interview from becoming a shambles.
“A lady was in a place like that alone?” the sergeant screamed. “What kinda lady was this? She’s probly a B-girl herself. Get outta here, Mancuso, and bring me in a suspicious character. You ain’t brought in one person yet. Don’t gimme no tips from B-girls. Go look in your locker. You’re a soldier today. Beat it.”
Patrolman Mancuso drifted sadly off to the lockers, wondering why he could never do anything right for the sergeant. When he was gone, the sergeant turned to a detective and said, “Send a couple men over to that Night of Joy some night. Someone there might’ve been just dumb enough to talk to Mancuso. But don’t tell him. I don’t want that goon taking any credit. He stays in costume until he brings me in a character.”
“You know, we got another complaint on Mancuso today from somebody who says a small man wearing a sombrero pressed up against her in a bus last night,” the detective said.
“No kidding,” the sergeant said thoughtfully. “Well, any more complaints like that, and we arrest Mancuso.”
III
Mr. Gonzalez turned the lights on in the small office and lit the gas heater beside his desk. In the twenty years that he had been working for Levy Pants, he had always been the first person to arrive each morning.
“It was still dark when I got here this morning,” Mr. Gonzalez would say to Mr. Levy on those rare occasions when Mr. Levy was forced to visit Levy Pants.
“You must be leaving home too early,” Mr. Levy would say.
“I was standing out on the steps of the office this morning talking to the milkman.”
“Oh, shut up, Gonzalez. Did you get my plane ticket to Chicago for the Bears’ game with the Packers?”
“I had the office all warm by the time everybody else came in for work.”
“You’re burning up my gas. Sit in the cold. It’s good for you.”
“I did two pages in the ledger this morning when I was in here all by myself. Look, I caught a rat near the water cooler. He didn’t think anybody was around yet, and I hit him with a paperweight.”
“Get that damned rat away from me. This place depresses me enough. Get on the phone and make my hotel reservations for the Derby.”
But the criteria at Levy Pants were very low. Promptness was sufficient excuse for promotion. Mr. Gonzalez became the office manager and took control of the few dispirited clerks under him. He could never really remember the names of his clerks and typists. They seemed, at times, to come and go almost daily, with the exception of Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant, who had been copying figures inaccurately into the Levy ledgers for almost half a century. She even wore her green celluloid visor on her way to and from work, a gesture that Mr. Gonzalez interpreted as a symbol of loyalty to Levy Pants. On Sundays she sometimes wore the visor to church, mistaking it for a hat. She had even worn it to her brother’s funeral, where it was ripped from her head by her more alert and slightly younger sister-in-law. Mrs. Levy, though, had issued orders that Miss Trixie was to be retained, no matter what.
Mr. Gonzalez rubbed a rag over his desk and thought, as he did every morning at this time when the office was still chilly and deserted and the wharf rats played frenetic games among themselves within the walls, about the happiness that his association with Levy Pants had brought him. On the river the freighters gliding through the lifting mist bellowed at one another, the sound of their deep foghorns echoing among the rusting file cabinets in the office. Beside him the little heater popped and cracked as its parts grew warmer and expanded. He listened unconsciously to all the sounds that had begun his day for twenty years and lit the first of the ten cigarettes that he smoked every day. When he had smoked the cigarette down to its filter, he put it out and emptied the ashtray into the wastebasket. He always liked to impress Mr. Levy with the cleanliness of his desk.
Next to his desk was Miss Trixie’s rolltop desk. Old newspapers filled every half-opened drawer. Among the little spherical formations of lint under the desk a piece of cardboard had been wedged under one corner to make the desk level. In place of Miss Trixie, a brown paper bag filled with old pieces of material, and a ball of twine occupied the chair. Cigarette butts spilled out of the ashtray on the desk. This was a mystery which Mr. Gonzalez had never been able to solve, for Miss Trixie did not smoke. He had questioned her about this several times, but had never received a coherent answer. There was something magnetic about Miss Trixie’s area. It attracted whatever refuse there was in the office, and whenever pens, eyeglasses, purses, or cigarette lighters were missing they could usually be found somewhere in her desk. Miss Trixie also hoarded all of the telephone books, which were stored in some cluttered drawer in her desk.
Mr. Gonzalez was about to search Miss Trixie’s area for his missing stamp pad when the door of the office opened and she shuffled in, scuffing her sneakers across the wooden floor. She had with her another paper bag that seemed to contain the same assortment of material and twine, aside from the stamp pad which was sticking out of the top of the bag. For two or three years Miss Trixie had been carrying these bags with her, sometimes accumulating three or four by the side of her desk, never disclosing their purpose or destination to anyone.
“Good morning, Miss Trixie,” Mr. Gonzalez called in his effervescent tenor. “And how are we this morning?”
“Who? Oh, hello, Gomez,” Miss Trixie said feebly and drifted off toward the ladies’ room as if she were tacking into a gale. Miss Trixie was never perfectly vertical; she and the floor always met at an angle of less than ninety degrees.
Mr. Gonzalez took the opportunity of her disappearance to retrieve his stamp pad from the bag and discovered that it was covered with what felt and smelled like bacon grease. While he was wiping his stamp pad, he wondered how many of the other workers would appear. One day a year ago only he and Miss Trixie had shown up for work, but that was before the company had granted a five-dollar monthly increase. Still, the office help at Levy Pants often quit without even telephoning Mr. Gonzalez. This was a constant worry, and always after Miss Trixie’s arrival he watched the door hopefully, especially now that the factory was supposed to begin shipment of its spring and summer line. The truth of the matter was that he needed office help desperately.
Mr. Gonzalez saw a green visor outside the door. Had Miss Trixie gone out through the factory and decided to reenter through the front door? It was like her. She had once gone to the ladies’ room in the morning and been found by Mr. Gonzalez late that afternoon asleep on a pile of piece goods in the factory loft. Then the door opened, and one of the largest men that Mr. Gonzalez had ever seen entered the office. He removed the green cap and revealed thick black hair plastered to his skull with Vaseline in the style of the 1920s. When the overcoat came off, Mr.
Gonzalez saw rings of fat squeezed into a tight white shirt that was vertically divided by a wide flowered tie. It appeared that Vaseline had also been applied to the moustache for it gleamed very brightly. And then there were the unbelievable blue and yellow eyes laced with the finest tracing of pinkish veins. Mr. Gonzalez prayed almost audibly that this behemoth was an applicant for a job. He was impressed and overwhelmed.
Ignatius found himself in perhaps the most disreputable office that he had ever entered. The naked light bulbs that hung irregularly from the stained ceiling cast a weak yellow light upon the warped floorboards. Old filing cabinets divided the room into several small cubicles, in each of which was a desk painted with a peculiar orange varnish. Through the dusty windows of the office there was a gray view of the Poland Avenue wharf, the Army Terminal, the Mississippi, and, far in the distance, the drydocks and the roofs of Algiers across the river. A very old woman hobbled into the room and bumped into a row of filing cabinets. The atmosphere of the place reminded Ignatius of his own room, and his valve agreed by opening joyfully. Ignatius prayed almost audibly that he would be accepted for the job. He was impressed and overwhelmed.
“Yes?” the dapper man at the clean desk asked brightly.
“Oh. I thought that the lady was in charge,” Ignatius said in his most stentorian voice, finding the man the only blight in the office. “I have come in response to your advertisement.”
“Oh, wonderful. Which one?” the man cried enthusiastically. “We’re running two in the paper, one for a woman and one for a man.”
“Which one do you think I’m answering?” Ignatius hollered.
“Oh,” Mr. Gonzalez said in great confusion. “I’m very sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I mean, the sex doesn’t matter. You could handle either job. I mean, I’m not concerned with sex.”
“Please forget it,” Ignatius said. He noticed with interest that the old woman was beginning to nod at her desk. Working conditions looked wonderful.
“Come sit down, please. Miss Trixie will take your coat and hat and put them in the employees’ locker. We want you to feel at home at Levy Pants.”
A Confederacy of Dunces Page 7
