“Well, shit. It was an idea.”
“Yes, you’re good at that.”
“Oh, balls.”
Lately Sally had been like this; she wanted things to change, she wanted a new apartment or even a home of their own, she wanted Jack to begin to find a career for himself, or at least a better-paying job; yet she didn’t like any of the ideas he came up with, and seemed always to be making fun of him. It was irritating. Most of the time they were getting along better than they ever had, but there was this one argument about changing their circumstances that always left Jack with a bad taste in his mouth; and also there would be times when Sally would hardly speak to him, and he would be made to feel guilty and would not know why, and would get angry about it and ask her what was bothering her, and if she said anything at all it would be, “Nothing. Does something have to be wrong?” And he would still feel guilty. But otherwise, things were fine. The baby had really helped. Jack had been right about that. But he was careful never to say this to Sally.
Twenty-Three
When Billy was around seven months old, he caught something, and was terribly sick for three days. It was the first time he had been really sick, and Jack felt a combination of terror and sheepishness; but sheepish or not, he stayed home from work. Sally was worried, too, but contemptuous of Jack.
“He’s got the flu, for Christ’s sake. He’s not going to die or anything. I can take care of him. Don’t you trust me?”
“I’d just as soon stick around,” Jack said. “Tell me what the doctor said.”
“I already told you. What’s the matter, don’t you trust me?”
“It’s that goddam doctor I don’t trust. What does he care?”
On the second night, Billy’s fever went to 105°, and he just lay there hot and flushed, not even crying or fussing. Jack and Sally stood over the crib, afraid to touch each other, or even speak, for fear of making a corny gesture. Jack wanted to call the doctor again and inform “the son of a bitch” that if he did not get over there in five minutes flat, Jack would personally guarantee that the doctor would never have another child of his own. But he did not call the doctor. The doctor would be very patient, but Jack would know that secretly the doctor would be laughing at him. The high fever was expected. It was supposed to get very high and then break. It was called “The Crisis.”
Jack and Sally went into the living room and sat waiting for it, with the FM radio on. They listened to a panel discussion on the plight of California agricultural workers, and then a series of Beethoven sonatas, with comment. Then the radio station went off the air, and neither of them got up to tune in another. After a minute Sally went into the back, and then returned, her face drawn.
“He’s not so hot, now,” she said. She sat down and picked up a copy of Ring Magazine, thumbing through it idly.
Jack got up and went into the back to check, and she gave him an irritated glance, but did not speak. He looked down at the baby through the gloom. The baby just lay there, eyes open, not moving. Jack put his hand on the baby’s forehead. It seemed cool, almost cold. It occurred to Jack that his baby was dead. His legs felt weak. He went into the kitchen and sat down. It was impossible that Billy could be dead. The doctor said it was just the flu. Babies don’t die of the flu. Or do they? With proper care? Could you do everything and still lose your baby? Jack knew the answer, but he would not let the words form in his mind. He knew what he had to do. He had to get up on his legs and go in there and see if the baby was dead or not. A strange thought occurred to him and helped him stay in the chair. What did you do with a dead baby? Did you have to call the police, or just a mortician? Jack remembered what had happened to a man he had known in the old Portland poolhall days. The man’s wife had her baby, and then on the third day it died, and the hospital told the man how much the little coffin, the hearse, and the ceremony would cost, and the man had to tell the people at the hospital that he didn’t have any money at all, and no job, that he had used up his last cent paying for the birth; and so the hospital put the dead baby in a plastic bag and handed it to the man to dispose of himself. They also gave him a mimeographed sheet of city and county regulations concerning the disposition of bodies. Jack would not have believed the story, except the man came into Ben Fenne’s with the dead baby and the sheet of regulations and wanted somebody to help him. The two men at the front billiard table looked at the man, and then at each other, laid down their cues, put on their coats, and led the man out. Jack never did find out what happened after that. Nobody seemed to want to ask.
But he had tortured himself enough. He had to get up and go in there. He did, knowing that very near the surface of his mind was the hope, the wish, that the baby was dead. It was only curiosity, the need to see if he would feel glad, that conquered his cowardice.
The baby’s eyes were shut, and its mouth open slightly, bubbling. Jack felt its forehead. Cool, but not cold. He picked Billy up and held him for a long time. By the way he felt now, he knew his previous wish for the baby’s death had been a lie, and he absolved himself easily.
Jack went back into the front room. Sally looked up from nothing and said, “What took you so long?” There was a terrible anxiety in her voice which she did not bother to conceal.
“He’s fine,” Jack said quickly, passing up the temptation to be dramatic and torture Sally. “He’s cooled down and breathing easily. Jesus Christ Almighty, no wonder they call it `The Crisis’! Whew!”
But Sally got up and went in there and took the baby’s temperature with a rectal thermometer anyway, and came back with the exact figures. “Ninety-nine,” she said proudly. “That’s nothing.”
“Nothing at all,” Jack said happily.
Every once in a while, Jack wondered how long Sally could take it. The incident with the flu was just one—admittedly dramatic—example of the things a mother, a parent, had to put up with. Jack could take it because he was away more than a third of the time, but Sally—she was there day and night, and being responsible for the care of a child, especially one you were learning to love more and more each day, was a dangerous, complicated, and boring job. Day after day it could sap your inner energy until there was nothing left; it could nibble at your courage until one day you awakened in terror and hatred. Jack felt all this in himself sometimes, and he knew it must be even worse in Sally. Of course she was a woman, and women were supposed to be better equipped to handle this kind of thing, but still...And anyway, this housewifely business was not Sally’s world at all. She had been used to a more exciting life, running around with famous and wealthy people, drinking a lot, being admired and chased and desired—and now she stayed home most of the time, did dishes, washed diapers, cleaned house, played with Billy, read magazines, watched television on their tiny set, and that was about all. They didn’t go out much. Jack worked afternoons and nights, and on his one night off a week he liked to sit home and watch the fights on television. When they did go out, it would be around the corner to the Royal Theater to a movie. Once they saw Sally’s ex-husband playing a dogcatcher with a conscience who ends up letting all the dogs loose, and somehow gets himself a big country estate and a rich, lovely wife, and they all live happily ever after, 87 dogs and all. It was a terrible movie, but her ex-husband was good—he was really a very good actor—and it was fun watching all those mutts running through the town.
Afterward Jack and Sally walked home, and Jack paid off the Chinese baby-sitter while Sally got undressed right away and went to bed without saying anything to Jack. He followed her, thinking she wanted to make love, but when he put his hand on her shoulder she shrugged it off. He wanted to be angry at her, but he couldn’t. He understood. She was thinking about the fact that she was now a lumpen-proletariat housewife, scrimping pennies and washing the shit out of endless diapers (you had to do that before you took them to the Laundromat), and was losing her looks; while her ex-husband was rich and famous, and getting handsomer every year as his face grew older and more manly. All because she had
married Jack. He wondered if all the housewives in the world felt this way sometimes, even without the rich and famous ex-husband. He wondered why they didn’t all flip their lids and go on periodic rampages. Especially the beautiful or formerly beautiful ones. Life promises them so much, and then it all comes to nothing. It has to, because the promises are false; they have to be false, because they are too promising.
It was all right for him, he got out of the house every day, he was in the midst of the Broadway crowds and could see how stupid it all was, this frantic search to be entertained and enraptured which ends up with your being stalled in traffic on Broadway, red-faced and furious, blowing your horn at the drunken idiot in front of you. He got to see that almost every night, and so he knew; and anyway, after work he always stopped in Vesuvio’s and had a pitcher of beer and kidded the pretty waitresses and talked to the Vesuvio crowd, before he had to walk up Broadway and home through the tunnel. But Sally—she was always there. It was not like her at all.
So when she blew up at last he was not surprised, just hurt and guilty.
He had come home from work and Sally happened to be up. She was learning how to knit and it had turned out to be more challenging than she had suspected, and she was on the couch knitting something bright green. She would never tell Jack what she was working on, but it looked like a sweater or something for Billy.
He plopped himself down in his easy chair and picked up the book he had been working his way through: The Hamlet by Faulkner. After a while he got up and went into the kitchen for a can of beer, and then came back. In a few minutes, he snickered. He had a habit of snickering when he read something he liked, and snorting when he read something complicated or stupid. This time he was snickering at some woolly deal of Flem Snopes’s, when Sally cried, “What the fuck is this!”
“Huh?” He looked up at her, wide-eyed. It was hard to pull himself up out of Yoknapatawpha County.
Her eyes were blazing at him. “You’ve got some whore’s lipstick all over your mouth!”
Jack rubbed his mouth guiltily, trying to remember. Oh, yes. The barmaid had kissed him when he gave her a fifty-cent tip. “It was nothing,” he said. “Some barmaid.”
“No wonder you don’t go to bed with me any more,” she shouted. “You’ve got some whore barmaid fucking you!”
“Do you really believe that?” he asked angrily.
“I’ll bet you sat yourself down and decided it was time you had yourself a mistress. You cheap hood. I’m leaving in the morning. Nobody does that to me.”
“And nobody has. Goddam it. She kissed me, I didn’t kiss her. I gave her a tip, that’s all. Christ!”
It was one of those arguments that nobody ever wins. She accused him of throwing their money away. He denied it. She accused him of slopping up beer after work every night. He refused to answer her. She called him every dirty name she could think of, and he replied that she ought to know. Eventually, she got up and went to the telephone and called Myron Bronson. Jack went in and took the instrument out of her hand and hung it up. She slapped him. He walked away from her, plopped back down in his chair, picked up his book and beer can, and pretended to go back to his reading. She went into the bedroom and packed. Then she unpacked. She came back and asked him, “Was it really a barmaid?”
He bit off the sharp answer and said, “Yes. It was nothing. Really.”
“I’m sorry,” she said.
“It was my fault,” he said.
“I just imagined a lot of things.”
“I don’t blame you.”
But they did not make love that night, or the next night, or the next, because unfortunately it was her period, and by the time her period stopped she was gone. She took the baby with her.
Twenty-Four
Not long after Sally left him Jack was released from parole, and with a shock he realized he had been out of San Quentin three full years. He had been out for longer than he had been in. He wanted to celebrate, but there was no one to celebrate with. He did not want to go down to Vesuvio’s and entertain the lushes with his release from parole. They were fun to talk to, but they would not understand this. He had called Myron Bronson, of course, right after Sally left, really hoping she had gone to him, because at Bronson’s Jack was certain the baby would get good treatment. But Bronson did not know where she was. Jack knew Bronson wouldn’t lie to him. He even volunteered to help Jack look for her, but Jack said he would not do that; when she was ready, she would come home. He was not sure he believed it; he was not even certain he knew why she left.
He decided he would have to celebrate his release alone, and so he took the night off and went down to the Tenderloin to do his drinking. There was an urge in him to be among thieves and losers; it would be relaxing to be with thieves; he might even meet somebody from San Quentin and they could talk about old times and how good it was to be on the street.
It was no fun at all. He began drinking at a place on Mason, a block off Market, and after eight straight shots his gut felt tight but the rest of him was still empty. The customers were all strangers and the whole place seemed cheap and dull. He left, and on impulse went around the corner to the poolhall, up the dark double flight of stairs, past the empty wine bottles, the urine- and vomit-stained walls, through the glass doors, and into the huge mellow old room. Right at the door was the long row of billiard tables, all but one in use, old men in dark pants and white shirts leaning into the flood of light over the emerald green baize. He walked past them and the big English snooker tables to the long counter, ordered a bottle of beer, and sat watching a pair of young punks playing six-ball. Other punks lolled in the theater seats behind the tables, and Jack saw among them one or two old men, asleep in out of the cold. Poolhalls never changed. The punks never changed, either. The same knowing, wolfish smiles, the same sharp haircuts, the same wise talk.
In fact, the only difference Jack could see between this place and the Rialto in Portland was that this place stayed open 24 hours a day, and along the dim walls large old paintings hung, illuminated by special lights. The paintings seemed strange but not out of place. There was one, very badly done, of some old men playing billiards, but none of the others was appropriate to a poolhall except perhaps the reclining nude, in the pose of Goya’s naked Alba. The two on the other side of the room fitted the place only in the sense that they were of an era past; one of a group of harem women, the other of a pride of lions on a sandy rise in the greenish North African twilight—a strange picture anywhere, but here a kind of silent, moody comment on the roomful of small-timers. Jack sat and stared at the lions for a long time.
“Levitt? Jack Levitt?”
He turned around. The man speaking to him had thin blond hair, and cold gray eyes, and appeared to be in his middle thirties. Jack did not recognize him. “No,” he said.
The man smiled. “Sure you are. You haven’t changed much. Kol Mano. Portland. About a hundred years ago.”
Mano, the gambler. Jack recognized him now. They shook hands and Mano sat down next to him. “What’s been happening?” Jack said.
Mano shrugged. “I hear you were in Q. How long you been on the street?”
“Three years. Where’d you hear about me?”
“Around. You remember Denny Mellon? You used to run with him in Portland. He’s around, too. I saw him a month ago in Emeryville.”
“You sure got a good memory.”
“I got to. That’s my business.” He explained to Jack that he was still a gambler, and they ordered bottles of beer. Jack was not particularly glad to see Mano, but it was better than nothing.
“I got off parole today,” Jack said.
“Hey, we got to celebrate.”
“Yeah. Well. How’s old Portland?”
“Terrible. I haven’t been back in a long time. They closed the Rialto, tore down Ben Fenne’s building, shut up the card-rooms for poker action, everything. They got a lady mayor up there a few years ago came in and really cleaned house. Man, what a gas. She
calls in all the cops and tells them, `Boys, I know what’s shaking; I know the location of every gambling club, brothel, after-hours joint in town. Tomorrow I want them closed and the operators on their way out of town. Get it? ’.” Mano laughed. “So the cops, they go to the Scotchman—you remember him?—and tell him, `Jesus, this broad is serious!’ and he thinks about it for a minute and then says, `Okay, that’s all she wrote.’ Closed up shop and moved back to Aberdeen. So the whole town is tighter than a tick. The only action is a couple of poker and pan games in Vancouver, and they cut the pots so bad there’s no point. And, of course, the country clubs, University Club, and that kind of shit. But that never gets closed down.”
He squinted at Jack. “Say, it’s been a good ten years since I saw you, no? Lots has happened, man. Remember how I used to have to hold my finger over that hole in my throat? All fixed up.”
“Great. You feel better?”
“Well, I lost a great psychological advantage. You remember Mike? The big one, his mother was the abortionist? Well, he opened his own joint up on 14th, near the ball park, half the thieves in town started hanging in there, guys like Clancy Phipps, Jack Morgan, all those heavies. Anyway, he had a little combo playing there, and one night he gets in an argument with the bass player, I guess this was last year some time, and the bass player gets real pissed off, goes home, gets his old man’s shotgun, comes back and blows Mike’s head off. So he’s dead. So’s Dale Phipps.”
“Huh? I thought he was in the Marines. How’d he get killed? I heard from Denny he killed a bunch of people over in Korea.”
“Yeah. Well, he came back to Portland and was stationed out on Swan Island, got married, had a couple of kids, everything. And one night he comes back from duty and there’s his house on fire and fire trucks there, and a bunch of people standing around, dig? And he rushes into the house to save his wife and kids, and the whole place collapses on him. So he died. But his wife and kids were out of the place. They saw him run in.” Mano shook his head. “Man, what a hero.”
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