“Sure,” he said. “Do that.”
“Danny,” I said, “I have to go to school.”
“Sure,” he said. “Look, I’m busy. Write me a letter.”
After that I didn’t see much of Danny and in a few weeks I went away to school.
I turned to my mother, who was still holding the photograph.
“I guess I’ll go downstairs,” I said.
“All right,” she said.
“What was all that about Lesley’s sister? You said maybe she’s engaged, maybe she’s not engaged.”
“They got a telegram Lesley was killed on one of those games they play like it was war.”
“Maneuvers?”
“Yeah. Maneuvers. Your cousin Lesley was killed on them.”
We were never close; we didn’t see each other often. He was just a fat, humorless cousin I had I used to run across once in a while, but his death was a shock to me. After a while I thought, Poor Lesley, unconsciously eulogizing him with the gag name with which I had come to associate him. Poor Lesley, foolish Lesley, who should have died in bed, somebody’s fat and aged uncle, somebody’s loyal, uninspired employee in honor of whom maybe the office was closed a couple of hours the day of the funeral. And now he was dead who had this silly, lethal vision of himself, which was, ultimately, the correct vision, the true one, however ridiculous or inappropriate. Now my cousin was a dead Marine, killed in a war game which was no game, outmaneuvered. Poor Lesley, I thought. He played it straight. A straight man.
I went downstairs to the candy store. I wanted to cry. Fein was an old man, his candy was stale and hard, his egg creams without life. “My cousin died,” I told him.
“Condolences,” he said. I wondered if he remembered me.
“Where is everybody?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Where are the lousy people?” I asked him.
Some recognition came into his face.
“In a little while Belgium comes in to make his phone calls.”
“Belgium’s around? Good old Belgium. What phone calls, Mr. Fein?”
“He sells a policy. Between you and me, the policy is in drerd. You pay for sixty years, collect nothing. But he calls up people on the telephone. They buy from him sometime. Falls he sells football-parlay cards to school kids.”
I sat down on a stool to wait. It was getting dark. About seven-thirty Belgium came in. He gave Fein a dollar and Fein gave him a bunch of dimes. He went into the booth. I went up to the booth and hammered on it. Inside, he jumped as though he was very scared. “Just a minute,” he squeaked in his effeminate, pugnacious voice. Then he recognized me. He scooped up the dimes he had laid on the ledge and burst out of the phone booth. “Pal,” he shouted. “Pal, it’s you? No crap, it’s you?”
“Sure it’s me,” I said. “How’ve you been, Belgium?” I shook his little hand.
“Never better. Never better. You want to buy a policy? I sell policies. I’m in insurance. I’m an insurance man. You still go to school?”
“No more, Belgium. All through,” I said.
“Moving back? You moving back?”
“No,” I said. “Where are the lousy people?”
“No more lousy people,” he said. “Just me. All gone away. Want to buy some insurance? Fire? Comprehensive? Automobile? Accident? I got it. I got every kind of insurance. You need some? Shake hands. I show you fancy way I shake hands. In business world very important. Shake.” He pulled my hand toward him and began to pump it with ornate, mystical gestures. “In business world very important. Rockefeller. Vanderbilt. J. P. Morgan. Baruch. Those boys knew how to shake hands. Want to buy some insurance?”
“No. No insurance. I heard about your lousy insurance.” He looked hurt. “What do you mean all gone? Where’d they go?”
“Gone away,” he said impatiently.
“Old Guy?”
“Ain’t seen Old Guy three, four years. Upstate somewhere. Somewhere upstate,” he said, waving his hand vaguely.
“Shelly Malkin?”
Belgium shrugged.
“The Ox?Ox Hersh?”
“The Ox? The lousy Ox? Don’t speak to me about that mumser. Don’t say his name. He wrestles carnivals. Travels. Remember in the old days when I’d want to leave the bastard? Well, he left me. Travels all over the country, wrestles carnivals. Big bastard. I got a clipping from the paper where he broke a guy’s neck in Jersey. I got a clipping. You think they’d arrest the rat? No. Jersey’s crooked. You can break a guy’s neck in Jersey they don’t do a thing to you. How come he always gets away with it? How come? The Ox is married. Married a woman.”
“Belgium, where’s Danny? Where’s Danny Lubell?”
Belgium grinned. “You want to hear something about my pal Danny? Remember that car of his? Now you know well as me a thing like that got no right on the streets. I mean, it’s fun to play with, but it ain’t a car. It’s a toy. But I go up to him in all good faith after I become a businessman and I tell him, ‘Danny, for old times’ sake I get you coverage on the car.’ He looks at me like I’m nuts and says, ‘Look what happens. Look who all of a sudden is doing the protecting.’ That’s a hell of a thing to say to a pal, right? I try to tell him, ‘Danny, you got to provide, you got to provide,’ but you might as well talk to a wall. Well, the thing is, after the fat Ox started wrestling carnivals there was nobody to drive the car, so Danny takes it out himself. Well, don’t you think he smashed it up?” Belgium was grinning broadly now. “He smashed it up. It looked like a smashed can he got through with it. No insurance, nothing. He didn’t know how to provide.”
“Was he hurt?”
“Hurt? He was damn near killed. Hospital for a month.”
“He’s home now?”
“Yeah, he’s home. He’s home. He’s in a home, that’s where he is.”
I asked Belgium what he was talking about, but without Danny, or without the Ox, or maybe without even me there to watch him, Belgium had become just another self-centered nut. It was hard to get a straight answer out of him. He kept asking me if I wanted some of his insurance, and when I told him no, finally with real severity, he wanted to shake hands again. He kept saying that it was very important in the business world and that he was surprised I didn’t realize this and buy some insurance. Finally he told me that Danny had had what Belgium called a “nerve breakdown” and that he was a real nut now, and that this was all you could expect from a guy who didn’t know how to provide.
“You ever been up to visit him?” I asked Belgium.
“That nut?” Belgium asked with real outrage. “I ain’t got no time to be a fool. I give him good years. What I got to show? Ox breaking guys’ necks over in Jersey, Old Guy upstate somewheres, Danny in a home. I got a business to look after.”
I asked Belgium for the name of the place where Danny was. He told me he didn’t have it written down but that he thought it was on Long Island and that if he saw the name he might remember. Finally we got it from the operator. I told Belgium I was going to go out to see Danny and I asked him if he wanted to come with me. He said Sundays were his best days for making contacts and I didn’t press him. I saw that in a screwy way he was providing.
I said, “So long, Belgium,” and he looked at me shamefaced for a moment. I thought he was feeling guilty about Danny, but finally he said to me that he was in business now, and that if I could remember I should call him by his real name. “It looks better,” he said, “ you know what I mean?”
When I left the candy store I gave him my hand to shake, but he must have been thinking of something else. He merely took it and pumped it mechanically. There was no art.
On Sunday it rained but I went downtown and caught a train going out to Long Island.
There is something faintly disreputable and sad about people using public transportation on a Sunday. They are so obviously people on “outings,” desperately counted-on holidays complicated by train and bus schedules, or they are cautious visitors, stiffly carrying their inexpensive boxes o
f candy to luckier people than themselves. I had written down the name of Danny’s home on a slip of paper and beneath the name I had printed the address. On the train I showed this to a fellow passenger. Handing him the paper, I felt inexplicably sad and depressed, like a foreigner who does not know the language, or like an orphan shipped to relatives across the country with a tag pinned to his overcoat. It was as though I had no business going to Long Island by myself at all. I deliberately chose to ask directions of a well-dressed man, and as I handed him the slip I regretted having written down the name of what was so obviously an asylum. I almost told him it was a friend I intended to visit, just an old friend who had not taken care of himself.
The man was not positive, but he named a bus he thought I could take, and I did not check with any of the other passengers.
At my stop I got on the wrong bus. I should have asked the driver.
Waiting in the rain for a bus to take me back to where I had started, I thought for a moment that maybe the years with my friends had finally made me irresponsible too. Finally I got a cab and gave the driver the address. It cost me two dollars.
The home where Danny was seemed friendly enough, even in the rain. It was an old, sprawling, wooden building, but there were a lot of flowers, plenty of shade trees. It could have been a lot of places. I remember going to a funeral parlor not long ago. I had been apprehensive that the arrangements might be too stagey, but I was surprised to find I was really quite comfortable.
I told the volunteer I wanted to see Danny Lubell. She had to look up his name in her card file, and I guessed that not many people came to visit him. She called an attendant, who took me to the door of Danny’s room and then turned to leave.
“Shouldn’t you go in and tell him I’m here?”
“Don’t he know you?”
“I haven’t seen him in a long time. He doesn’t expect me.”
“It’ll be all right. He’s safe.”
I knocked softly, then with more force.
Danny opened the door. He was dressed in a suit. Except for the times we went to parties I couldn’t remember Danny in a suit.
“Hello, Danny,” I said.
“I’m nuts,” he said.
“You always were,” I said, and we went into the room.
He stood by the door. “You afraid for me to close this or anything?” he asked.
“No, of course not,” I said quickly.
“I don’t like people peering in at me. They visit their relatives and look into every damned room along the way.”
He seemed all right. The Sunday papers were sprawled out on the neatly made bed. Danny had probably been sitting in the chair by the window when I knocked.
“Back in town, hey?” he said.
“I’m visiting my mother.”
“Way it goes,” he said.
“Danny, you probably don’t remember, you only met him once. My cousin Lesley? He was killed.”
“The Marine?”
I nodded.
“Fat guy, shy around pussy-cat fur, joined the Marines. You told me about him. I remember. He was a beauty. The lousy people could have used a man like that. Yeah, I remember. Killed? Killed in the Marines?”
“He was on maneuvers.”
“Son of a bitch,” he said.
He went over and sat down on the bed on the papers. He looked at me for a long while.
“Bet you never thought you’d be seeing me in a place like this.”
“Belgium told me,” I said.
“That creep,” he said.
“Joey Stowka. He told me to call him Joey Stowka.”
“Joey Belgium Creep. Insurance Representative. Sometimes I think I’m pretty well off in here, but if people buy insurance from Insurance Representative Joey Belgium Creep I’m sort of sorry I’m not out there. There must be a whole new crop of beauties roaming around loose.”
I laughed. I started to laugh hard.
“Hey, cut it out, cut it out. They’ll think it’s me. They’ll come in and feel the bumps on my head.”
“Hey, Danny,” I said, “what’s it all about? I mean, you seem fine. How long—you know—will you have to be here?”
“I ain’t made my mind up,” he said.
“You can get out when you want?”
“You hear about Ox?” Danny said.
“From Belgium.”
“How’s your school? They taking care of you?”
“I’m through with school, Danny.”
“But they took care of you okay? They kept you busy?”
“What do you mean?”
“You never did nothing but look, you know that?”
“I was crazy about you people.”
“Sure, sure you were. But you never did nothing but look.”
“You look too.”
“I look harder. I strained my eyes I looked so hard. Not you.”
“That’s what I was there for,” I said.
“Sure,” he said.
“I was supposed to look.”
“That’s right, chief.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s okay. You tried to give us your jerky cousin Lesley. Poor Lesley, now he’s dead.”
“What’s that?”
“He’s dead too, your jerky cousin.”
“That’s right.”
“It’s a pile of crap,” he said. “It’s no deal at all.”
“Oh, Danny,” I said, my heart tearing.
“It’s no damn deal at all. It’s a pile of crap.”
He didn’t say anything else. He sat there, on the bed, but wouldn’t talk to me. I tried to tell him I was sorry, but he didn’t answer me. After a while I stopped talking and we just sat there together. I sat with him half an hour, then I had to get out of “ there. “I’ve got to catch my bus,” I said.
“I’ve got to get started, Danny. Danny?” He looked up at me when I stood, but he didn’t say anything. I walked toward the door slowly, wanting him to say good-by. There was nothing but my own footsteps going to the door. I turned around to look at him for the last time.
Still he said nothing, but I did not miss the broad wink in the wild and knowing eye.
PERLMUTTER AT THE EAST POLE
“It’s absurd,” Morty was saying to the chief, “three times around the world, attendance in eighty-two national capitals, fourteen days at one pole, eleven at the other—which reminds me: Did you know, you savage, there are four poles? Well, certainly. Read my write-up: ‘East Pole, West Pole.’ I got the idea from a popular song. That’s where the ideas are. I tell them and I tell them. Read my write-up. There’s a reprint in my knapsack. Anyway, it’s ridiculous, the basic paradox of my life: The places I’ve been. In the knapsack—you saw yourself: seventeen hand-drawn maps of unexplored territory. You know those white areas on globes—no, of course not; how would you—well, Morty Perlmutter’s been to most of them. Milonka? Check. Los Pappas, check. Frigtoony, check. Bishtumba, check. Bishtumba, check two times, once in summer, then in spring for the hatching of the slugs. It’s nothing, incidentally. Nature is nothing. Here it’s better. Wildnesses, wildnesses! Your Festival of Birth for example—those marvelous two weeks in Zum, our January, when all your women come to the clearing to have their babies in formation. Marvelous.”
“You must stay,” the chief said in Pragmatii, “for Lorp, your April.”
“I can’t. I can’t. It’s what I’ve been saying. I’ve been to Gishlunt, to Kakos, to Schwatl, but never to New York City.”
“Fa na batoogie New York City?” the chief asked absently, stringing another eye on the live-forever-have-fine-sons-win-many-noses necklace.
“A great city in my homeland, Chief, and I’ve never been there. Well, it’s easily understood. California, where I’m from, has its own ports, and then even with my patrimony there’s my terrific expenses and I’m always looking for bargain bays—Texas City, Texas; Tampa—No, no, not the turtle foot next to the pig ear, man. There, the gland, that should go with the
finger. Forgive me, but I understand these things. For three months I studied with the greatest jeweler in the Baktivian jungle.”
“We have our own ways,” the chief said shyly.
“There it is—that’s the curse—that’s it. Relativism. When are you people going to learn there’s only one truth?”
The next day Perlmutter pitched camp by the river and waited for the immunization boat. There was always an immunization boat. One of the ways he chose his jungles was by first learning of the prevalent diseases there and then finding out if there were serums to combat them. If there were, there would be an immunization boat somewhere in the woodpile and that solved his transportation problem.
He had to wait five weeks, and each night the chief came to his camp at the edge of the jungle to say good-by. Perlmutter was embarrassed one evening when the chief gave him the necklace he had seen him working on. Perlmutter gave the chief a reprint, but saw that the shy man was disappointed.
“Read it after I’m gone and make three wishes,” he told the chief.
On the afternoon the boat came Morty hailed it from the shore. “Take me to where I get the mule,” he shouted.
He wasted another day while the doctors immunized the natives.
As they were pulling away he heard a chorus of strange sighs from the direction of the clearing. Morty had never heard anything like it before.
“First of Lorp, must be,” the captain said to the doctor.
It took three weeks to get to where the mule was and two after that before the sandy beginnings of the highway. It was another six days from there in the jeep to the port. In ten days there was a boat that could take him to a place where the cook thought there might be a ship for Vancouver, British Columbia.
Morty worked on his book along the way. It was, he felt, his best effort in his lifelong struggle to synthesize the universe. Still, something was missing.
In the evenings he listened to the songs of the sailors. He took them down and translated them into English, but there was nothing new to be gleaned from them.
From Vancouver he made his way across Canada and entered the United States at International Falls, Minnesota. It was fitting, he thought, that he should approach New York from the West. He was, after all, a Westerner. New York he had saved for last. It was no use fooling himself. It would be last. He had a million diseases; a polyglot death worked in him—there’s your synthesis, he thought sadly—and as he made his way toward the East Pole he was troubled by his timing. He would be there in the final margins of his health and mind and resources, but it couldn’t be helped. He had come as one only could come: prepared, knowing a trillion things, having seen everything else. As though New York were the land and everything else the sea—so great was his hope—and he were some sea changeling swimming from western depths, out of all the old places, toward a drier fate. He did not know what to expect, but it would be tremendous.
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