Underworld

by Don DeLillo

“This is a subject so immense.”

  “Of course. What else?”

  “Big, big, big, big.”

  “Too much, too much,” the barber said.

  “I can only say one thing.”

  “There’s only one thing to say.”

  “Every marriage, every marriage. Not just mine or yours.”

  “Exactly.”

  “How can I put it, George? Un po’ complicato.”

  “Of course. What else can we say?”

  “What else is new?”

  “What else is new?” the barber said.

  Albert licked at a dusting of chestnut on his fingers. A woman and child came in and George moved into the front of the shop and Albert drained his glass and followed because he did not want to presume on the man’s hospitality.

  He spoke to the woman while George arranged the boy’s special seat. Then he put on his hat and coat and left. He stopped in Mussolini park and spent a few minutes talking with the old men. The fake priest went past, Benedetti, wearing a lumber jacket and a black biretta and carrying a breviary. He moved his lips as if in prayer but held the book unopened to his chest.

  Albert had to sit. He realized he was slightly woozy, Umbriago the mayor of New York or of Chicago, and he sat on a bench and waited for the feeling to pass.

  The other men drifted off. The sun was edging behind the extended mass of the hospital for the incurable and it was colder now, with flurries in the air, and the men drifted off to a storefront social club, or a candy store, or home.

  A tow truck went by at a crazy speed, rushing to get to the wreck before the competition.

  Albert sat on the bench and waited for his head to clear. The important thing is to sit and wait, to be patient. The other important thing is not to vomit. You see a man every so often standing over a curbstone vomiting. He did not want to think of himself as that kind of man.

  He sat there feeling all right, feeling slightly less dizzy now and generally all right. Bad a tutti, he thought. To everyone on the street, yes, kisses, and the faces went muddling through his mind, the bread makers, grandmothers, street sweepers, to the priests who are and those who aren’t.

  The kids called it heave. I think I’m gonna heave, Johnny.

  A car pulled up and he heard the hoarse voice of the butcher calling across to him.

  “Albert, che succese?”

  “Hello, Joe. Merry Christmas.”

  “It’s snowing. Go home.”

  “I’m fine, I’m fine, I’m fine.”

  “You want a ride?”

  “Go, go, go, go. Merry Christmas, I’m fine, goodbye.”

  He heard the train pull into the station about a block away. He heard it shriek around the bend and rumble into the station and he sat in the wind’s high howl waiting for his head to clear completely.

  4

  * * *

  There were a thousand sameshit nights when he played knock rummy with a guy named Fontana in Fontana’s father’s plumbing supply store, a nominal nickel a point, or shot a game of pool and had a slice of pizza at Half Moon with JuJu and Patsy, nights that always ended down, disappointed someway, and once he phoned Loretta from the candy store and told her he had his dick in his hand and studied the pause at the other end, knowing she was in a room with her mother, her brothers, her grandfather and who knows who else, and he went downstairs sometimes and stood smoking alone, late, in the doorway of Donato’s grocery, spitting occasional grains of tobacco into the wind.

  He had a little money now. He gave most of what he earned to his mother but at least he had something in his pocket, approaching age seventeen, and he went to the show and sat in the balcony with Allie and Ray, two guys who talked back to the screen, but after a while what could you say to a movie that wasn’t the sameshit thing you’d said a thousand times before?

  • • •

  Klara was in the room, the spare room, the room she was painting inch by inch, and she stood at the easel working.

  Yes, Albert thought painting relaxed her. It was a break, he thought, from the other things she did.

  She stopped when it was time to pick up the child. For a moment she forgot where she’d parked the child. Upstairs with the regular girl or across the street with the woman whose husband made coats for rabbis.

  Painters are supposed to have a line. Klara thought she had a scribble.

  She went upstairs and got the child and came down saying something like, Naptime for little girls. But Teresa wasn’t ready for her nap. Sleepy creepy time. But Teresa let her mother know this was not going to happen right now. She did not soften her yeses and noes. She was an open wound of need and want and powerful refusal.

  Klara sat by the bed talking to her. After a while she went into the spare room and stood by the easel and looked at what she’d done. What had she done? She decided she didn’t want to know.

  She looked in on the child, who was sleeping now. Then she looked in on Albert’s mother. Mrs. Ketchel, the woman who sat with her, was putting on her coat. Mrs. Ketchel seemed to be putting on her coat a little earlier every day. The days were getting longer now, technically, so maybe Mrs. Ketchel had so many other things to do, to fill the longer days, that she couldn’t sit with Albert’s mother for extended periods anymore.

  Klara thought the child resembled her grandmother. A mournfulness about the eyes, she thought. But that can’t be true, can it, in a child so young? A darkness, a brooding sense of misfortune. But she was making it up, wasn’t she, looking for signs and omens.

  She sat in the room with Albert’s mother. The woman was awake and turned her head to look at Klara, an incomplete movement that brought her to the point of exhaustion, but then exhaustion was all that remained, although that’s not true either. Her gestures had force, still. They were halting but strong. They showed a willful woman who could dismiss entire populations with a singsong waggle of the hand.

  The gestures did not refer to practical things. They had a range that extended to another level. The hand that sweeps under the chin. The pushed-out mouth. The way the eyes close and the head tilts up.

  To Albert. When it’s time to die, I’ll die.

  To friends who sat with her. God doesn’t know everything. Only the things he has to know.

  To Albert. Why do you want to talk about your father when all I see when I hear his name is lost opportunity?

  To Albert. Be careful. That’s all I’m saying.

  To Klara. Go live your life. I’m not worth your time or attention.

  This last is a gesture of hand and eye that both women know to be insincere.

  Klara did not tell Albert that she found it an odd comfort, at times, to sit with his mother. They had one parent left between them, dying. She played Perry Como records for the woman. She brought the child in so the grandmother could touch her hands and face. The woman did not see well, or saw two things where one occurred, and her hand on the child’s face seemed to work a marvel of retrospection.

  Her skin was getting browner, her hair whiter, hands spotted and blotched, but there was still something strong about her, something Albert seemed to fear, a judgment, a withering conviction of some kind.

  She had a gesture that seemed to mark a state of hopelessness too deep to be approached with words.

  Klara sat there and talked to her a little. She kept the window open slightly to let the mustiness escape, the slow waste. She heard fire engines some distance off and watched the light fade.

  Albert’s sister came to visit sometimes, Laura, unable to accept the impending death, scared, dependent, betrayed, and Klara could imagine she’d try to climb into the gravehole when the time came.

  How strange it was to find herself here, listening to Perry Como with a woman she didn’t know, who was dying, and with everything else as well, this chair, that lamp, this house and street, and to wonder how it happened.

  When Albert came home she was in the kitchen.

  “How is she?”

  “Sleeping.”<
br />
  “Did she eat anything?”

  “I made a little soup.”

  “Did she eat it?”

  “Ate some, spilled some. Your daughter caught a cold from the baby-sitter.”

  “I’ll make it go away,” he said.

  She heard him telling stories to Teresa, nonsense tales he’d been told as a boy, characters with funny rhyming names, and he overpronounced certain words for effect, his voice rounded and melodic, but she shut the kitchen door because she didn’t want to hear it anymore.

  The story voice, the play voice was all too Albertlike, rippling with incidental music and fanciful plot. She put the dinner on the table and spoke his name.

  They talked through dinner, inconsequentially. She smoked her last cigarette of the day in the spare room, looking at the wall. She put out the cigarette by grinding it into the bathroom mirror and then she flushed it down the toilet and went to bed.

  The first one ran into the playground, the one with the dark cap. Nick was punching the other one, both of them skidding on the icy surface.

  He’d never seen the guy before and this is why he was punching him. He punched the guy to his knees, or the guy skidded to his knees, and then Nick looked into the playground. JuJu was chasing the first one but skidded and fell, a leg flying up. JuJu sat there a moment watching the guy run toward the steps that went down to the lower level. The playground was white and still, swings hanging empty, an inch of snow on the seats.

  The other one was on his knees, looking embarrassed to be there. Nick crouched and set himself and threw a punch. He knew it was not necessary to throw this punch but he’d hit the guy only glancing blows to the face and he wanted to hit him solid. It was a chance to hit someone solid that he didn’t want to miss. He punched him under the eye, a short-stroke blow, and the guy rocked back on his haunches, hands to his face, and Nick felt better now.

  JuJu came out of the playground and took some frozen dog shit out of the snow. He wasn’t wearing gloves. He picked it up and mashed it into the guy’s head, into his hair and ears.

  He said, “Here, stroonz, this is for you.”

  Then he washed his hands in the snow and they walked over to Mike’s to shoot a game.

  Matty knotted the blue tie. The Catholic school boys wore white shirts and blue ties. For a long time his mother had to knot his tie for him. And he couldn’t figure out how to put his jacket on, how to hold it so that a certain arm goes in a certain sleeve hole, and sometimes he had to place the jacket flat on the ground, sit down in front of it and then match an arm to a hole, sort of lying down backwards into the jacket.

  Imagine what Nicky said, watching this spectacle.

  But he was over that now. He was over the tantrums, pretty much, and the silent treatment he used to give his mother when he was mad at her, and the times he locked the bathroom door and tried to suffocate himself with the shower curtain.

  He was over the tantrums because he wasn’t playing chess. Mr. Bronzini called it a sabbatical. One of those words of his, to be spelled, explained and acted out. Matty had his own word. Sick.

  He could not take the losing. It was too awful. It made him physically weak and massively angry. It sent him reeling through the flat, arms windmilling. His brother bopped him on the head and that made him madder. He did not have enough height and weight to contain all his rage. He was past the point of crying. Losing made his limbs shake. He gasped for air. He did not understand why someone so small, young and unprepared should have to squat in the path of this juggernaut called losing.

  He put on his tie and went to school. First he slipped the new dog tag over his neck, for atomic attack, with his name and school inscribed on the disk, and then he put on his blue tie and walked the five blocks to school.

  Matty sat in the row next to the cloakroom and was one of three pupils who opened and closed the sliding doors of the cloakroom at designated times. They worked in unison, with a whoosh and bang. This was their assignment.

  It was Catherine Conway’s assignment to clap the erasers every Friday, out the back door above the schoolyard, her eyes smarting in the chalk dust.

  Richard Stasiak was assigned to open and close the windows. He took the window pole with the hook at one end and he fitted the hook into the loop at the top of the window and then pushed or pulled. Richard Stasiak was big and tall and this was the logical job for him.

  They sat at their desks, forty boys and girls, sixth-graders, this drab gray day, backs erect, feet together, watching Sister Edgar.

  Sister prowled the space between her desk and the blackboard, moving in a rustle of monochrome cotton, scrubbed hands flashing. She recited questions from the Baltimore Catechism and her students responded in a single crystal voice.

  Matty believed in the Baltimore Catechism. It had all the questions and all the answers and it had love, hate, damnation and washing other people’s feet, it had whips, thorns and resurrections, it had angels, shepherds, thieves and Jews, it had hosanna in the highest.

  He didn’t know what that meant, hosanna in the highest, and was afraid to ask. They were all afraid. They’d been afraid for a week, ever since Sister had banged Michael Kalenka’s head against the blackboard when he gave a snippy answer to an easy question. They were studying the Creation and the Fall of Man, lesson five in the Baltimore Catechism, and Sister pointed to a picture in the book of a man and woman standing more or less undressed beneath an apple tree with a serpent coiled on a limb and she called on Michael Kalenka and asked him to identify the man and woman, the easiest question she’d ever asked, and Michael Kalenka stood up and looked at the picture, and he thought and looked and thought, and Sister said, “The original parents of us all,” and Michael Kalenka thought and grinned and said, “Tarzan and Jane.”

  Sister flew at Michael Kalenka and collected the boy in the wing-folds of her habit. He was practically out of sight until she suddenly propelled him toward the blackboard headfirst. The impact was strong and true. There was a sound so real, a thud and a subsequent hum, the whole panel vibrating, that the boys and girls went slack in their seats, wide-eyed and semiliquid. Blown out of their rigid posture. And Michael Kalenka stood stunned and rag-dollish, sheepish, guilty, grinning but mostly just stunned and rag-armed and sagging.

  Sister asked questions from the catechism and they responded in unison. Matty liked doing this. To hear the assigned questions and to recite the right answers was the best part of the school day.

  Sister knew the catechism by heart and Matty knew each day’s lesson by heart, with more time for homework now and with a secret respect for Sister Edgar, who was known throughout the school as Sister Skelly Bone for the acute contours of her face and the whiteness of her complexion and the way her lean hands seemed ever ready to administer some grave touch, a cold and bony tag that makes you it forever.

  He liked the way the response to each question repeated the question before delivering the answer.

  Sister said, “What do we mean when we say that Christ will come from thence to judge the living and the dead?”

  The class replied in unison, “When we say that Christ will come from thence to judge the living and the dead, we mean that on the last day Our Lord will come to judge everyone who has ever lived in this world.”

  Then Sister told them to place their dog tags out above their shirts and blouses so she could see them. She wanted to make sure they were wearing their tags. The tags were designed to help rescue workers identify children who were lost, missing, injured, maimed, mutilated, unconscious or dead in the hours following the onset of atomic war.

  Sister went up and down the aisles, bending to read each tag. At approach distance she smelled laundered and starched, steam-ironed, and her nails were buffed to a glassy lava finish, and the rosary beads that hung from her belt like a zoot-suiter’s key chain were blinky bright, and when she rustled low and near she smelled more intimately of tooth powder and cleansing agents and the penance of scoured skin.

  She s
aid, “Woe betide the child who is not wearing a tag or who is wearing someone else’s tag.”

  It had been known to happen, in other classes, that a boy and girl switched tags to signify a kind of atomic fondling.

  When Sister was finished with her inspection she said nothing, which surprised the class. They were expecting a drill, the duck-and-cover drill, which they’d rehearsed before the tags arrived. Now that they had the tags, their names inscribed on wispy tin, the drill was not a remote exercise but was all about them, and so was atomic war.

  Instead she went back to the catechism, to questions and answers, until Annette Esposito, an eighth-grader, came in with a note from the principal. Sister read the note and looked at Annette Esposito and said, “What are these?”

  At first nobody knew what she meant. Then the class realized she was looking at Annette Esposito’s chest, her breasts, which caused bulges under her blue jumper.

  “What’s all this? Get rid of this. I don’t want to see this next time you come in here.”

  The boys and girls went low in their seats, tingling a little at the exposure of Annette Esposito as a freak of nature. Their eyes went shifty and bright. They bit their knuckles and made small damp throat noises. When Annette Esposito walked out the door, not unproud, flouncing slightly, shoulders thrown back, every eyeball in the room clicked in her direction, fastened on her breasts of course, not a common object of contemplation in the life of the sixth grade.

  Sister did not call the drill. She did penmanship instead, demonstrating on the blackboard the cursive flair of her own hand. She showed the slant, the loop, she stressed the need to stay between the ruled lines, she told them to take their fountain pens and follow the motions she made in the air, and they did, working the wrists, looping in unison, and they shaped a tempestuous capital T that resembled a rowboat in a rainstorm.

  Matty sat there nearly spellbound, writing in the air with his brother’s old Parker vacumatic, a streaked green model with an arrow clip, but his mood went flat when the bell rang for lunch and Sister crook’d a forefinger in his direction.