Algren at Sea

by Nelson Algren

  “The tide ebbed yesterday,” she explained crisply. “Now they’re suing us.”

  Rapietta handed me a morocco-bound sheaf of 399 pages of single-spaced figures. Adding them up to see if they came out right was interesting work. I had never done addition before. It was one more first time.

  “Get up off the floor,” she reproached me.

  “But what does it mean, dear?” I asked.

  “It’s your bill as of the fiscal year ending today at 1200 hours. Four researchers, five shysters, Morris Ernst and an alley-fink have been working night and day in your interest, compiling your account.”

  “Why, I thought Doubledge Deadsinch & O’Lovingly took my case on contingency,” I protested.

  “Where is your compassion?” Rapietta reproached me, “Are Doubledge Deadsinch and Pyrhana to be pauperized by a legal technicality? Is a layman to impoverish men of good family? Is that their reward for giving of themselves selflessly in your interest?”

  “When did Pyrhana join us?” I inquired.

  “When O’Lovingly retired,” she informed me, and turned her back to me. I felt awful.

  “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Rapietta,” I tried to explain, approaching her. But she kept her back to me. It was a swivel chair.

  “I’m putting it up to you,” was all she would say.

  She was putting it up to me.

  “Not to mention a C.P.A.,” she reminded me over her shoulder. I heard the catch in my counselor’s voice. When I put my hands on her shoulders they were quaking.

  “You are a brave girl,” I told her; “you haven’t mentioned yourself.”

  Rapietta captured my hand and clasped it between her own. When she turned her eyes to mine they were shining.

  “I am yours on contingency,” the self-sacrificing girl confessed. And, taking me by the hand, led me into her inner office, opened a drawer, and from it withdrew a document which she handed me.

  It was a one-way passage on the SS Meyer Davis, departing from Pier 86, Tuesday, at 1600 hours.

  “What does it all mean?” I wanted to know.

  Rapietta’s face grew stem. “It means that our opponents have discovered that you marched in a demonstration protesting the bombing of Ethiopia in 1936, or somewhere along in there, and you have to get out of the country before you are subpoenaed. If this evidence comes to light they will be able to establish that if you had a mind you’d be dangerous! Our defense will go sky-high.”

  “But I have never been at sea before,” I protested.

  “You’ve been at sea for some time,” Rapietta told me.

  I wondered what she meant by that.

  “Can I afford an ocean voyage?” was my next poser.

  “Candidly, you can’t afford a trip to the drugstore for an airmail stamp,” she told me candidly.

  “I already made that trip.” I revealed that my memory, at any rate, was still functioning. “Now I’d like to go somewhere else. But I’d like to return someday.”

  “We can’t chance that,” she informed me. “You’ll have to stay abroad until things blow over.”

  “How will I know when they have blown?”

  “You will receive a message par avion—that means ‘Welcome to Paris,’ dear boy.”

  And wasting no time in useless indignation, she drew a document from her desk she had already prepared, in order to avoid losing even more time in useless indignation.

  “I have completed arrangements for you with my trustworthy cousin, Trustworthy Ex-Naval-Eye Roger Blueblade of Blueblade, Suckingwise, Scalpel & Tourniquet, Trustworthy Publishers, whom I deeply admire, as he comes from the venal branch of our family.”

  “I admire Venal Roger Blueblade, Ex-Naval Eye, too, Rapietta!” I assured her with an eager cry.

  “You preposterous nut”—Rapietta was suddenly put out with me—“you don’t even know the sneaky little usurer and you’re admiring him—for what?”

  “Keep your voice down, darling,” I felt forced to reprove her; “there is no need of getting rowdy simply because I happen to know that, as Mr. Blueblade has published some of the most trustworthy volumes in circulation, hence his name of Trustworthy Roger is not unearned.”

  This speech, delivered with an aloof take-it-or-leave-it air, raised me in Rapietta’s eyes at the same moment that it reduced her to sitting down heavily. The judicial burden she was carrying on my account was almost too heavy for her childish shoulders, I perceived.

  “Let us look at it this way.” I took a kindlier tone. “People who really matter hardly ever enter a Chicago hallway. But there is no telling whom a first-class passenger may meet. I might even meet Abraham Ribicoff.”

  While Rapietta had her back turned to me, I signed the papers swiftly to make certain she would not change her mind. When she turned about and handed the papers to me to sign, I shook my head stubbornly.

  Rapietta paled.

  “What is the meaning of this?” she asked sternly.

  “Oh, I just don’t want to,” I teased her.

  Rapietta sneered.

  “Look at yourself,” she told me, “standing there in one British walker and a button-down sneaker and no socks, presuming to impose a layman’s judgment upon legal counsel.”

  Though shaken, I held my ground. I did not make PFC by happenstance. I just happened to be inducted when the army needed cowards in that classification.

  “If you don’t sign you can’t have a Bon Voyage party,” she informed me with finality.

  “I don’t care.” This was turning out to be a real fun day.

  “You won’t get to meet Abe,” she threatened me.

  I gave ground.

  “Say please,” I demanded.

  She refused. It was a test of strength between two strong souls.

  “A Bon Voyage party!” I suddenly caught the picture. “For me?” I asked, and began jumping in and out, as both shoes happened to be unlaced.

  “What does it all mean?” I cried.

  “It means you will soon be rubbing elbows with ‘celebs,’” she informed me quietly.

  “‘Celebs ’? Such as people seen wecently in Bwoadway pwoductions by Tennessee Rilliams?” I inquired, getting myself under contwol.

  “Such as Chinless Kilgallen, Hedda Eczema, and Norman Manlifellow, Boyish Author.”

  Rapietta put her hands on my shoulders in event I should begin jumping again, but I was feeling too faint for that.

  “Do you mean Norman Manlifellow, Boyish Author, might come to a party for me? ”

  “Might?” Rapietta scoffed. “He wouldn’t dare stay away.”

  “And what of Leon Urine, author of The Whole World Looks Jewish When You’re in Love?”

  Rapietta touched forefinger to thumb in the gesture employed by the fast international set to indicate Leon was in the bag.

  “And shall we play Verités?”

  “No, dear, Françoise won’t make it. But Giovanni Johnson shall!”

  My breath caught.

  “You don’t mean Sixteenth Arrondissement Johnson, America’s greatest gift to Mecca since Ahmad Jamal?”

  “None other.”

  “And will he wear his fez?”

  “I guarantee it.”

  She was too late to hold me down. I got in six jumps before I could stop.

  “Roger Blueblade is our man!” I cried, coming down for the last time. “Give me the papers, dear girl, dear girl”—and I reached for the shining sheaf.

  Rapietta snatched it back.

  “You’ve already signed them when I wasn’t looking, you mischievous marmoset,” she taunted me. The clever creature had been on to my game all along!

  She flung herself across my lap in a burst of gaité Parisienne but slipped through my knees to the floor with her dirndl tumbling capriciously under her armpits. This was a woman I had never glimpsed before.

  “Is that what is called a foundation garment, sweetheart?” I made bold to ask.

  “Why do you ask, awful boy?”

&nb
sp; “Because it’s raking the hell off my sternum, awful girl.”

  “It’s a foundation garment alright,” she chuckled merrily—“a Guggenheim Foundation garment—Yuck! Yuck! Yuck!” and in an access of womanly passion she grasped me to her change belt.

  I extricated myself from her grip and filled two long-stemmed glasses with imported manzanilla, taking care not to spill a drop.

  “There is one question I have to ask, sweetheart,” I told her seriously.

  “You have only to ask.”

  “Did Ethiopia finally get free?”

  “They must have. They now belong to us.”

  “Then here is to Haile Selassie,” I proposed, clinking my glass against hers although she was nowhere near it.

  “The Lion of Judah!” Rapietta responded, seizing her glass and flinging the contents full in my face.

  Taking me upon her lap, the changeful creature dried my face on her doeskin bag while reproaching me for not keeping my knees together when she had sat upon mine. As her fingers kept trailing the catch of my change purse, I had to shift position now and again.

  Yet in trading a cabin-class hallway for a first-class stateroom on a first-class ocean, I could not help but feel I must have outwitted somebody.

  “I feel I’ve made a shrewd move for a layman,” I assured my friend and legal counsel, Rapietta Greensponge, Decorous Public Defender.

  “Son,” Rapietta confided in me, “you are all layman.”

  So much for World War II.

  If all that was needed for a successful Bon Voyage party was one clever move, I’d already made it by buying a gallon of sauterne for $2.98, putting it under the soda recharger until it fizzed, and then pouring it into bottles labeled “Mumm’s.” Because if there was one thing I wanted my New York friends to have, it was the aura of success. I didn’t wish them success itself—in fact, I longed passionately for the total ruin of them one by one—but I did want to arrange some sort of aura for them.

  “How does a hack like that manage to serve champagne at all hours?” my New York friends often marvel. My Chicago friends don’t bother with that. They just say, “Where’d you get the cheap wine?” and toss the remains of their drink in the sink. So much for bobsledding at Garmisch-Partenkirchen.

  My next move was to snip whiskey ads of Scotsmen playing bagpipes and glue them onto old root-beer bottles, into which I poured the contents of a curious brew distilled on Amsterdam Avenue to which nobody has yet given a name, probably because it has to be got down without fooling around or it won’t go down at all. Labeling these “The Best Scotch Procurable” would, I hoped, raise the fascinating issue of where one might purchase the best scotch that is unprocurable; thus providing even inarticulate guests with a topic of conversation.

  Rapietta arrived first, as might have been expected, with the excuse that she had news so good it couldn’t wait.

  “I am as much for good news as your next client,” I reproached her, “but couldn’t it have waited till you’d finished dressing?”

  “Just because a person’s girdle snags on her navel is no sign a person isn’t well dressed,” Rapietta pointed out.

  “A flimsy alibi,” I had to tell her, for she is the only counselor in the jurisdiction of New York State with a dollar-shaped navel.

  “Any jury that has eyes in its head,” she began, but I cut her off. “I know, I know,” I told her quickly. I just didn’t want to go through that blind-judge routine again.

  New York was sharpening me up, as the reader may have noticed.

  What the SS Meyer Davis could do for me remained to be seen.

  “What I want to know is how much we’re going to wipe them jackals out for, Rapietta,” I demanded.

  “A good round sum,” she assured me. “I am dropping a writ of Non Compis Barracuda into the hopper, and when it hops out we will be legally entitled to bone our opponents like a fish.”

  “Then that’s one of the best kinds there are,” I realized, doing a Bon Voyage jig even though the party hadn’t begun.

  “Now slip me five hundred in small bills, and into the hopper she goes,” Rapietta invited me.

  “Five hundred?” I asked, bewildered anew.

  “For Non Compis Bonefish just like I said,” she reminded me.

  I lacked eleven dollars of five hundred, but Rapietta, generous friend, drew the balance out of the dollar-shaped navel, accepted my Parker 51 as collateral at 40 per cent, and glanced at her watch to check the hour of the transaction. A moment later we were friends again.

  But where were my guests?

  A rich Old-Plantation contralto came wafting up the cotton-pickin’ stairs. It mounted ahead of the singer flight after flight:Dis train don’t carry no gamblers

  Dis train

  Dis train

  Dis train don’t carry no ramblers

  Dis train

  Dis train

  We’s ridin’ to Freedom on de Freedom Train

  Gonna git to Freedom on a daisy chain

  Dis train

  Dis train

  “Giovanni is here!” I cried, and I had barely cried it when a small, sandpiperish person, wearing a fez, and deeply tanned, sandpipered into the room.

  “Où sont tous les garçons?” He skipped gaily about. “Allons-nous jouer?” He stretched out on a divan, put his fez under his head for a pillow, picked up the phone, crossed his sandals, and dialed languidly.

  “Hello, Da-aady,” he informed the phone, “still angwy with me? No, I can’t see you; I’m flying south, and one goodbye is enough. Yes, I’m holding Roy Wilkens responsible for my nephew’s well-being while I’m gone. No, I don’t have to worry about my niece; they take care of themselves. Of course I don’t like my nephew as well I do you; it’s a different thing, like related—oooo, aren’t you the dzealous daddy! Did I tell you Normy has decided to be mayor, and I’m infuriated with him, sacrificing himself that way? Why should he be responsible for juvenile delinquency and technocracy and all like that, Da-aaady? Isn’t that Jack Kerouac’s job? The first thing you know, he’s going to want to be president of something, I don’t think he cares of what. But what I say, let that to somebody who is ready for the responsibility, like Eddie Fisher. Well, kiss-kiss and huggy-vous, see you in the Seizième Arrondissement, Daddy-doo. No. Don’t bring Faulkner.” And he hung up.

  I was pleased to see a young man devoted to his father but I didn’t understand why he didn’t want anybody to bring Faulkner.

  “For the same reason I don’t want anybody to bring Hemingway,” he read my mind; “Faulkner is full of soupy rhetoric, and Papa wrote a novel that is boyish and romantic.”

  “What we need is more novels that are girlish and unromantic,” I hurried to agree, because I saw his point.

  “No!” he refuted me fiercely, “all we need is as much truth as we can bear!”

  He stood up, the better to look commanding. I quailed.

  “I can’t stand much of that crazy stuff,” I had to admit. “Can you?”

  “All I can do,” he informed me proudly, “is attempt to prove, by hard precept and harder example, that people can be better than they are!”

  “Oh, good for you, Giovanni Johnson,” I exclaimed, “and I’ll help you—between us we’ll make the rats better than they are whether they like it or not! We’ll cram goodness down their stinking throats! By God, you and I are going to show the scum a few tricks—in three months we’ll both be rich!”

  “Where’s the booze?” he asked me quietly, “you nut.”

  And it is a pure wonder how many people you’ve never met will go out of their way to wish you a pleasant journey if you’ll only keep liquor on hand. In the space of several minutes there were more people partying about me than I could have hoped to meet in a year on Milwaukee Avenue.

  “Have you been in a Bwoadway Pwoduction wecently?” I would ask a guest, and then move to another. When they began replying, “You’ve asked me that twice,” I refused to be offended.

  A fellow w
earing a sandwich-board advertising himself approached me.

  “I am Norman Manlifellow,” he introduced himself, sheathing a nine-inch jackknife, “Hemingway never wrote anything that would disturb an eight-year old.” He began working the lighting of the board by a battery concealed in his pocket, with the result that his candidacy for the Presidency of American Writers was spelled out alternately in red and blue lights. I realized that I was dealing with none other than the boyish author of The Elk Paddock, or Look, Ma, My Fly Is Open.

  “It’s a nice thing if a fellow can hold down two jobs,” I offered, thus intimating that I knew he was running for two offices, but before he could pick up the intimation someone began kicking the door in and I had to hurry there before the hinges gave way.

  It was Ginny Ginstruck, whose own hinges gave way some decades ago.

  “I may stagger—but I never fall down!” Ginny trumpeted triumphantly, swinging her handbag heavily at my head. Ginny may hold onto that bag when she swings it. Then again, she may let go. As it holds a one-pound jar of Pond’s cold cream and a fifth of Haig & Haig, you’re better off if she lets go. Somebody farther off is more likely to go down then than yourself.

  They never stagger. They just go down.

  “I may fall down,” Ginny explained, knocking guests sidewise and every whichway, “but you can’t pinch me without a warrant!”

  It’s true that Ginny has never been pinched. Ever since forming a literary agency with Zazubelle Zany, in fact, she has been picking victories out of defeat.

  “We may have returned that rotten book to the wrong writer,” is the view of Ginstruck & Zany, “but goddamn it, we got it in the mails, didn’t we? Alright, so that rotten novel got thrown out with that rotten Sunday-Times Book Review but goddamn it, we got the rotten carbon around the joint somewhere. Ain’t we? Alright, maybe we did sell something to Hollywood without asking some idiot’s permission, but goddamn, that agent acted like he was drunk too.”

  Typewritten pages fluttered across the floor every time Ginny opened her bag to take a drink. She fell across the divan, using a dozen crumpled pages for a pillow.

  “Did you misplace these, Ginny?” I asked, after I had assembled sections of a treatise entitled Cerebrum to Cerebellum: How We Think, the lifework of a brain surgeon whose own mind had recently snapped. Or he wouldn’t have dispatched it to Ginstruck & Zany.