Leah, New Hampshire

by Thomas Williams

  At other times, in that mirror, I could wish upon my face bones the crisp dignity of Mr. Brown’s straight nose, the regal depth of those blue eyes. Old man that he was, I began to pay him the compliment of imitation. When he spoke—while showing me how to tie the string around a package without having to let go of one end to tie the knot, without asking the customer for the use of a finger—he emitted a low, rather kindly humming sound. “Mmmm,” he would croon for “Yes,” or for “Oh, is that so?” or for mere wordless sympathy. I believe he meant to let you know that he was listening, or that he understood exactly how you felt, and this nonword was the least interrupting of all assents. I don’t know. Perhaps it led to a certain distance between himself and the person he communicated with, as meaningful words would not. But I’d hear it, deep in his chest somewhere, a kind of cellolike vibrato, as hard to locate as a partridge drumming in the deep woods.

  I began doing this myself, and found that Mr. Brown’s idiosyncrasies and his presence, in a way, were noted. “Listen!” my father said at supper. “He’s doing that, like Mr. Brown!” Strangely, I was pleased, rather than embarrassed. But of course I stopped doing it. I developed, instead, a slow smile—one that took several seconds to mature, like Mr. Brown’s. My mother’s comment was less pleasing: “If I didn’t know how old you were, I’d say you were filling your pants.”

  Bessie Sleeper was the secretary and bookkeeper for Old Man Trotevale, who had shingles and rarely came to the store. Bessie weighed two hundred pounds, but had tiny feet. In the back of the store an open-shaft service elevator ran from the basement to the office on the balcony, and this was known, not to Bessie, as Bessie’s Hoist. It creaked as she stepped upon it and pulled the rope which started huge flywheels in the basement. Clang went the collapsible gate that somehow never caught your fingers in its disappearing parallelograms, and Bessie rose. She walked as if she carried a bucket of water in each hand, her face bitterly clenched with effort, her tiny blue eyes stabbing about for a place to sit her burden down. She was always very nice to me. She loved Mr. Brown.

  Her feet were truly perfect, he said, and nearly every week she bought a pair of shoes. I can see her, wedged into one of the old wooden armchairs, a spot of molten thrill somewhere deep, deep—certainly not showing—as Mr. Brown, cool in his white shirt and black arm garters, held her foot in his strong, dry hand.

  If any one person, in the continuing absence of Old Man Trotevale, ran the store, it was Mr. Hummington, a busy little middle-aged man who wore rimless octagonal glasses the color of an old photograph. You could see his eyes way down in there in the mauve twilight, moving around. They didn’t seem to have any whites. He had black hair that seemed to grow all on one side of his head, form a rigid slab across the top, and end rootlessly above the opposite ear. I knew his secret: I saw him bend too far over one time, behind the overcoats, and as one expects something to follow when a cover flies open, I half expected his brains to fall out. He was always busy arranging things, changing things—the plastic floor was his project—marking prices and code upon labels: an expert, a dynamo. It was he who totaled up the cash register and told jokes in a high and businesslike voice. I remember him best in a series of gestures: he breaks a roll of pennies over his finger (it didn’t hurt), spills them into a little rubber capsule, slaps the capsule into its carriage, and snaps the handle which shoots it on a wire up to Bessie’s balcony cash register.

  “Was a clerk. Young feller. No longer with us.” (Snicker.) “Put a mouse in the tube and sent it up to Bessie!” All this in a tone as smooth as steel, with a look half warning, half prediction. Should I have laughed? Perhaps I tried one of Mr. Brown’s slow smiles.

  There were other clerks, pale, retail creatures who fade quickly from memory. One was Randall Perkins, whose father owned the Leah Paper Mill. His father, having evidently assessed his son’s talents, had arranged the job for him in the restful atmosphere of Trotevale’s. I see him, a tall, vacant boy, standing with a suit of long winter underwear in limp hands, the virile red wool, the functional flaps in interesting contrast to his ennui.

  All this while there have been rumblings from above—a permanent, threatening overtone. In his little enclosure on the balcony my personal ogre was at work, his sewing machine ripping off machine-gun bursts. Oaths and maledictions! I dreaded Mr. Halperin, the tailor. He cursed in odd languages, he sat like a malignant toad and blamed me for the pants I brought him. His wet gray eyes glared across ridges of brown flesh. His head was large, bald, and thrust itself forward from shoulders hardly wider than his neck. His behind was as wide as a woman’s, and hid his stool completely, as if its legs went up and stuck right into meat. He always wore a complete black suit, and on the top of his head a black skullcap which I thought to be a mask, like an eye patch, covering some horrible concavity.

  “In Berlin I am a tailor! I do not make with such dreck!”

  I was unused to such foreign behavior. My Yankee family, had it come to such screaming, would have found itself wading in fresh blood. Occasionally I came close to crying under Mr. Halperin’s barrages, and I dreaded Mr. Hummington’s purposeful approach, suit folded over his arm: “Take this up to the Jew.”

  “I can’t stand it,” I said to Mr. Brown. “He yells at me.”

  “Mr. Halperin is a very good tailor,” Mr. Brown said.

  “Why doesn’t he tailor, then, and not yell at me?” To my shame, tears of injustice did come to my eyes.

  “Now, now. He doesn’t mean anything by it. Mr. Halperin’s had a hard life and he’s angry about it.”

  “I don’t like him,” I said. “I don’t like him one little bit.” With a bitter look toward the balcony, I retired to my hiding place behind the overcoat racks. Above, the machine rattled viciously.

  I held it against Mr. Brown that he and the tailor were friendly. The tailor never screamed at Mr. Brown, nor was he sullen, as he was with Mr. Trotevale and Mr. Hummington. A strange pair they were on the cozy, elm-lined streets of Leah. One was far too handsome, the other far too ugly: both were deformed, I’m sure, in Leah’s eyes. They were watched and snickered after as they walked, one tall and too smoothly graceful; the other on thick legs, humping along to keep up.

  One evening at our house Mr. Brown came downstairs and stood in the living-room archway, wearing a long silk smoking jacket. My mother and father immediately stood up, then sat down, embarrassed by their instinctive gesture of respect.

  “I came to ask,” Mr. Brown said formally, “if it would be all right if Mr. Halperin visited me in my room. We’ll play chess, which is a very quiet game, although by nature Mr. Halperin is not always quiet.” He smiled.

  “Oh, fine! Perfectly all right! Sure!” came from my mother and father at the same time. I’m sure they had hardly heard a word. An exquisite orange-and-gold dragon climbed about Mr. Brown’s chest and breathed scarlet fire over his breast pocket. We were all stunned by this animal.

  And so, a few days later, Mr. Brown introduced the old tailor to my mother and father. Mr. Halperin bowed, called my mother something German, and shook hands too much. After the introducing was done there was a short, deep silence while everyone’s eyes shifted here and there, and then Mr. Brown took the tailor upstairs.

  I didn’t consider myself especially sneaky. But there were two of me, and separation was sometimes hard to mark. Blame could be shifted. And in that constant pursuit of personality I would have done away with one. The other I called Tabber, a sort of north-of-Boston Simon Templar, a creature of the erotic or violent night, a cool customer. The window of Mr. Brown’s room opened onto the front-porch roof, and so did the window of mine.

  Of course I expected to see, in that familiar room, nothing more horrifying than two old men playing chess. But Tabber, a dark blanket wrapped about his shoulders, eased himself along the shingles to his observation post beneath the whicking leaves of the black maple. He was not afraid of the dark. I was, occasionally. He was entirely fascinated by the Abomination. I was afra
id of it. In my half-innocent mind the canon of sin was infinitely long: Demonology, Sex, the Elders of Zion, Werewolves, Toads with Jewels in Their Heads, Warts at a Touch, Step on a Crack and Break Your Mother’s Back! I didn’t believe any of it. Tabber depended upon his Winchester, I upon a skepticism that was too much a protest against the ghoulish residue of childhood.

  We crouched there in the cool September night, deliciously illegal, hidden from the neighbors by the tree and from Mr. Brown and Mr. Halperin by the photonic qualities of the window screen. My mother had lent Mr. Brown her card table, and there sat the two men. I looked directly over Mr. Brown’s square shoulder at the tailor’s thick scowl. Two empty beer bottles stood on the dresser, and beside Mr. Brown’s walnut chessboard were the two glass steins he had bought for the occasion. Both men smoked pipes, the tailor’s a hornlike meerschaum that rested against the knot of his tie, Mr. Brown’s a thin briar. Streamers of smoke passed slowly through the window screen and past my face without changing shape, like ghosts passing through a wall.

  I watched them for a long time as they played. They hardly spoke. When the tailor drank he didn’t take his pipe out of his mouth, just shoved it around to the side with his stein.

  “Well?” the tailor said.

  Mr. Brown didn’t answer for a second or two, then the white head began to nod. I could tell by his ears that he smiled.

  “Well done,” he said. “Very well done. I didn’t know it had happened to me until just now.”

  “Four moves,” the tailor said.

  Mr. Brown kept on nodding. “You are very good, Mr. Halperin.”

  “From you? A compliment.” Somehow the tailor managed to look pleased while still scowling. You are not bad, Mr. Brown.”

  “I know that, but I’m nowhere near as good as you.”

  “It is good that you say it!” The tailor may have tried to smile beneath the rolls of his cheeks. “I knew you would be good, of course,” he said.

  “You did!”

  “Of course I did!”

  From some unaccountable reason the tailor was becoming angry. His gray eyes glittered, his baggy lids quivered. Tabber may have reached for his Winchester, but I was glad that the capable back of Mr. Brown screened me, even as little as it did, from the sight of the tailor’s anger.

  My admiration for Mr. Brown increased, too, because he remained perfectly calm. I could almost hear his basal hum—his sympathetic, yet impersonal purr.

  “Tell me why, Mr. Halperin,” he said soothingly.

  The tailor got up, jarring the card table and teetering the chessmen, and stamped around the room for a while. He began to breathe short, explosive little gasps, and finally he turned toward Mr. Brown. With an ominously quick hand he pulled out his wallet and extracted a photograph in a plastic cover.

  “Look at this! Look at it! And tell me if there is no resemblance!”

  Mr. Brown took the photograph. Over his shoulder I saw the two men in the picture, one short and one tall. They wore bathing suits with funny tops, like summer underwear, and that was all I could see.

  “It is my favorite picture. Why? Because next to me he is Adonis. Such a toad as me!” the tailor said proudly. “He was the same, like you. There are persons who are naturally beautiful, naturally graceful. It is my theory! They are good at everything.”

  Mr. Brown had been watching the tailor, not the picture, and he said, “Who was he, then?”

  The tailor scowled worse than ever, ground his teeth, and began to make a high, whining noise, as if he were in terrible pain. He put his hands over his ears and his head began to sway from side to side. “He was my brother. My brother Hy…” (My face ached from unconscious imitation, as if I too were bound to speak.) “My brother Hyman!” And tears poured, a solid faucet-stream of tears poured down his face. “I am sorry! So stupid! Forgive me!” he said in a voice that seemed to come bubbling up from under water.

  Mr. Brown seemed completely unaffected. He gravely studied the photograph. The tailor wiped his face and blew his nose, emerging from this process unscathed, his face exactly as it had been before. Mr. Brown finally looked up.

  “Yes, there is a resemblance,” he said at last, and handed the picture back with a steady hand. I could see his other hand beneath the table, kneading his thigh.

  Beneath my blanket, kneeling on the mossy shingles, I watched and recovered with the tailor. Tabber had returned to his simpler world of bang-you’re-dead, and I was alone. I had never seen a man cry. I, myself, hadn’t really cried for a long time—maybe a whole year. And why were the sloppy tears of this old man, whom I disliked, so catching? I was absolutely disgusted with myself, and with whatever undependable lever had pulled those tears out of me. I felt tricked, unfairly manipulated by the tailor. “God damn you,” I whispered, “God damn you old bastard!” and wiped the traitorous tears into my blanket.

  The tailor, completely recovered, began to set up the chessboard again, but Mr. Brown said that he was too tired. I retreated into the leaves until they left the room. When Mr. Brown came back, the tailor then walking lumpily beneath the streetlight on his way home, I came back to the window. Mr. Brown sat down in his easy chair, motionless for a moment, his face tight and unhappy. Then he raised his hands to the level of his eyes. They were shaking. I watched him for a while, but he just sat there, so I left him.

  In the afternoons that followed Mr. Halperin’s outbreak and on the long Saturdays, he became, as I watched, overly friendly toward Mr. Brown. The tall man was as precisely friendly as before, but the tailor would rush downstairs to talk excitedly, his hands dangerously wild among the racks and stacks of the main floor. He was making Mr. Brown a suit, and to the barely perceptible annoyance of Mr. Brown descended upon him even when he was waiting on a customer, looped a tape about his chest, the thick arms roughly pushing, the ugly face brushing Mr. Brown’s ear. Then he whipped the tape off and brought it close to his eyes.

  “Forty! Thirty-two!” he roared for everyone in the store to hear. “Magnificent! It is for such men suits should fit!” Humming, nodding, grunting, waving his yellow tape, he rushed back upstairs to his shop.

  At times he came to argue, especially when Chief Atmon stopped by to talk to Mr. Brown about guns. The tailor did not like uniforms, and our Chief of Police did little to reassure him. To Chief Atmon, the tailor was a living joke, and the sight of him was enough to bring on a ponderous merriment. “Gay cock off in yawm,” he would suggest to the infuriated tailor.

  “If you are going to speak Yiddish, why don’t you correct yourself?” the tailor said.

  “I learned it in the Army,” Chief Atmon explained.

  Mr. Brown would not join the Cascom River Fish and Game Club, but he did listen—he had little choice—to Atmon’s hunting stories. Atmon was a big man, as big as anyone in Leah. His blue uniform fitted tightly as the bark of a tree around his great legs and torso. He was an excellent pistol shot, and it was always surprising to see the loud man so steady, so suddenly cool and precise, as he fired on the Cascom River range, then bursting again in the vacuum of a crushing bang, breathing the fumes of his smokeless powder, looking for the hole he always found in the black.

  When he hunted he cursed the animal he pursued. “There goes the son of a bitch! Kill the bastard!” he would yell as a deer slipped away through the alders. And when he killed: “I got the son of a bitch right in the boiler room! Right in the goddam boiler room!”

  He was a successful hunter, hunted legally, and got his deer through study and marksmanship. The boys of Leah admired him for this, and we grinned painfully but sincerely as our clavicles unbent after one of his whacks on the back. The big man was fierce and loud, but friendly—there was no doubt about that. He even wanted Mr. Halperin to like him—you could see the little eyes up there in the open red face, searching nervously for signs of affection.

  “A murderer,” Mr. Halperin said, staring at Chief Atmon’s departing back and at the huge Colt .44 that Atmon carried tight and black a
gainst his hip.

  Mr. Brown considered this. “No. But maybe he could be.”

  “He hates the animals,” Mr. Halperin said. “He kills out of hate. He carries proudly his pistol. He plays with it.”

  “Chief Atmon isn’t a bad man, though,” Mr. Brown said slowly. “Look how he loves his little beagle.…”

  “Of course! He is a sentimental slob. The worst kind of murderer. I’ve seen such swine crying over their dogs while men died. And what is this beagle? A murder dog, meant to break the backs of rabbits!”

  “No. A fine little dog, doing what he is meant to do. But Chief Atmon, now,” Mr. Brown said thoughtfully, “he loves his little dog. You see, it doesn’t run away from him. I suppose he believes the little dog loves him.” He smiled. “Don’t ever run away from him, Mr. Halperin.”

  “I have run away from worse than that punchinello,” Mr. Halperin said.

  “I neither like him nor dislike him,” Mr. Brown said. “I don’t hunt with him.”

  “Yes, you hunt, don’t you,” Mr. Halperin said disgustedly.

  “How can you? Do you gloat over the red blood you spill?”

  “Do you think I do?”

  “I cannot think of a reason for murder.”

  “If you think it is murder I can’t begin to explain it to you,”

  Mr. Brown said tolerantly.

  “But why? But why?” The tailor waved his hands in Mr. Brown’s face. “Look at it! Here is a beautiful deer, a fine animal; he eats only the little grasses, the little twigs from the trees. He hurts nobody. All he asks is to live, to grow tall and beautiful. You sneak to wound him, shoot big balls of lead through his living body. What did he do to you? He has pain! He falls!” The tailor’s eyes were full of tears.

  “Mr. Halperin,” Mr. Brown said calmly (but from my inconspicuous distance I remembered his shaking hands). “A buck is not a man. He is better-equipped than a man. If you want to make a man out of him, the man you make will be an unpleasant one. He is murderous in the rut. He lets his does go first across any dangerous ground. He is completely disloyal, completely selfish. I don’t make a man out of him, and I don’t judge him. He is beautiful and correct for what he is. We’ve driven off most of his natural enemies, like the wolf, because we thought they threatened us. And now he has two major enemies left, Mr. Halperin. Neither is man. One is starvation, and none of his fine talents gives him a chance against that horror. Another is the breeding of the defective among him, which will make him small, ugly, and stupid and even wipe him out. Hunting man is the only enemy left that he is equipped to overcome. And if the slow and the feeble among him are not killed, he will no longer be the most beautiful animal on earth.”