Reinhart in Love

by Thomas Berger

  It stood to reason, if not to the nervous system, that the genuine injustices could be amended only by discovering how to outwit clock and calendar. Reinhart wondered why Einstein, up at Princeton, did not put away spatial time and take up mortal—the time that was numbered for him, too, poor old Albert: minute by minute, the forward gears working famously but the reverse kaputt. A movie film run backwards, the diver undiving, the blasted mountainside imploding, were mere pathetic images of light: the diver may already be dead, and the mountainside is proven so.

  At any rate, from his regrets Reinhart derived nothing but an urge to escape, by any means less final than the Dutch act—“If life and death are just the same, why don’t you commit suicide?” “Because they are just the same,” said his favorite philosopher, whose name he didn’t know, which was probably why he was his favorite.

  Civilian life had more terrors than even he, who seldom knew a sanguine anticipation, dreamed of. Add to this the distinct impression he had that in America it wasn’t serious, either—because all tragedies here seemed to be specific rather than generic; mad little private hopelessnesses—and you had his dilemma. Which need not be permanent, however, because he would go back to college in June, when the next term started, in a year or so get a crash-program BA majoring in Vagueness, be instantly hired for the young-executive training by Whirlpool Inc., the great detergents empire of southern Ohio, and issued a wife, sedan, and six-room cottage from their stockroom and whatever the quota in kids. Living to a smooth old age, and a clean one owing to the employes’ discount on soap, in time retiring to a dotage of home-workshop puttering and a bland diet for his ulcers, he would finally and unobtrusively turn up his toes, leaving behind the means for his delinquents to accept the obligations of maturity and in their time follow suit.

  Who did he think he was? as Maw always asked.

  A fat man, for one. He hadn’t yet got around to using his weights, which he couldn’t locate; he suspected they had been sold during the iron shortage.

  After a time of this turbulence within and utter quiet without—Reinhart yet always had a feeling that something would turn up, from nowhere would come money or women or adventure and even an old friend, that is, an opportunity; Christ, it was the richest and most powerful country in the world, and you every day read about vagrants picked off park benches and made movie stars and John T. Nobody whose name was pulled from a hopper to win radio lotteries worth thousands—after a time during which the remarkable failed to happen, Reinhart issued forth on foot, though Dad offered the car, to seek out people. For several weeks he had been with Maw & Dad but hadn’t seen a person since he returned.

  He was at some disadvantage, having had in high school five years before three real friends and one girl, all of whom by now were as altered as he or had vanished. A pudgy little woman with bird’s-nest hair, trailed along Market Street by two slum urchins, turned out to be Bettysue English, once so merry and reckless. Mortimer Bother, though built like a water buffalo, had been tubercularly disqualified from the draft and did well at the bank, working up from third teller’s cage to first from the door. When he cashed Reinhart’s mustering-out check he coughed into a blue handkerchief, said “Hi fella,” and quickly affixed the little sign reading: GO TO NEXT WINDOW.

  From Hepworth Bax, whom he ran into coming from work at the pencil factory, smelling of wood shavings and graphite, carrying a lunchbox stenciled with someone else’s initials, he heard that “Doc” Joyce, who had always dreamed of West Point, was in fact still wanted as a deserter from the Coast Guard.

  “In my opinion,” said Bax, who had developed an eccentric stride, “he couldn’t stand that uniform. No pockets.”

  Bax had been tolerated in the foursome only because he admired the other three, being himself but a poor uncoordinated boob who did nothing well, running like a crab, showing too much tongue when he laughed too loudly at others’ wit, having none of his own, and still in 1941 wearing a jacket belted in the rear. He at least had not changed, and with his encouragement Reinhart, still in a uniform showing the Good Conduct ribbon and three more decorations issued to everybody who ever spent a month under arms, found it easy to brag about his European service.

  “Gee,” interjected Bax at points in the narrative, and later offered his friend a lift home in a specially equipped car the Veterans Administration gave him in exchange for the ankle he had lost at Utah Beach. When Reinhart, looking for a cat to give his tongue to, declined, Hepworth shook with the left hand—his right being aluminum—and saying don’t call me, I’ll call you, bluffed a hole in the traffic and shot off through it.

  Although his father kept pressing the Chevy keys on him, especially on weekdays when Dad needed the car for business, Reinhart wouldn’t take them. He knew his old man would travel the miles of collection-rounds on foot, and he disapproved morally of this demonic kind of martyrdom, having at last understood that Dad was much subtler with the needle than Maw.

  However, one Tuesday morning when Dad announced a dead battery and walked away—almost ran—down the block, Reinhart believed he might put himself into a feasible relationship with the car. His rump against the forward garage wall, hands on grille, he inflated his great chest and shoved. He was fat but not weak or stupid—he had remembered to open the doors, thus the car did not burst through them, only rolled at a speed not exceeding ten mph over the threshold, along the driveway, across the street, over the curb, and encountering on the bias an old elm belonging to Mrs. Bangor, sideswiped a shallow dent in the rear right fender.

  But when he sought to start the engine, he succeeded instantly, and pulled across her front lawn in two muddy furrows and was round the corner before Mrs. B. emerged screaming.

  At Joe Laidlaw’s All-in-One Service Station & Body Shop he approached the pop-cooler hangers-on, whom he remembered from before the war: Willard Millan, Hector Hoff, and “Pup” Agnew, all apparently 4-F from poor posture; they said little, moved only when the iceman dumped a twenty-pound block into the tepid water surrounding the Dr. Pepper, and chewed up in the aggregate perhaps two hundred toothpicks a day.

  “Joe around?” asked Reinhart.

  Willard looked at Hector, who dug “Pup” in the ribs, who swallowed a mouthful of coke and belched like distant thunder.

  “What’s that?” asked Reinhart.

  “I never chew my cabbage twice,” said “Pup.”

  Willard, who wore a felt hat on the back of his head, explained between snorts: “He went to crap and the hogs ate him.”

  “Hey,” said Hector, who had been staring at Reinhart while getting after a neckful of blackheads. “This here guy is old Carlo.”

  Willard wiped his face with his hat. “Sorry, Carlo, I took you for a rube from upstate. They stomp in here smelling of cowshit. Why are you wearing that getup?”

  “I’ve been away in the war,” answered Reinhart.

  “I be damn,” Hector exclaimed, cleaning his teeth with his tongue. “Thought you was in cawllege.”

  “That was before the war.”

  “I be damn.”

  “Overseas, too,” said “Pup,” intelligent flushes permeating the overcast of his acne. “Only a dumb sonbitch like Heck wouldn’t of seen them ribbons.”

  “Me!” Heck said. “It was me who made him out, you sonbitch.”

  Willard shook his hat. “You old sonbitch of a Carlo, overseas. I never. What’s it like to slip it in a gook girl?”

  “I don’t know,” said Reinhart, drifting towards the rear of the garage, which was intermittently illumined by the eerie blue light of welding. “I was in Germany.”

  “Thought he said he was overseas,” Hector noted to Willard, and “Pup” spat coke-brown upon the floor and streaked it with his foot.

  “Joe!” cried Reinhart, over the sputter, to the Martian in the welding mask, who turned off the torch and uncovered. Years over a hot flame had changed his race, as working in a hormone factory was said to change your sex. He was burned black as a Negro.
As Reinhart realized that he was a Negro, and not Joe, he got pretty sick of this annoying habit of misidentifying people, and believed he could hardly be considered well so long as it continued. But he was soon diverted—as he always was; which explained why he never improved his character—by going on from the specific to the particular. Not merely a Negro, the welder was a known Negro—a considerable difference and one which might, if Reinhart thought long enough about it, bring a lump to his throat. For here had been a Negro with remarkable gifts. They had gone to high school, if not together, at least at the same time.

  “Splendor Mainwaring!” said Reinhart with such hearty force that the welder lowered his mask as if in self-defense and kept it so. This was progressively more unnerving as the interview continued; through the square window, made of dark-blue glass, came not even a glint from Mainwaring’s great lemur eyes; yet you felt his surveillance, as in jungle movies the hero knows that when he sees least, his enemies see most.

  Reinhart tried to put his apprehensions aside, which were ridiculous in a Midwestern garage when fifteen feet away Hector had just goosed “Pup,” who squealed like a pig and put Willard in stitches.

  “Don’t you rememberme?” he asked the window.

  “I don’t blame you,” he went on, lowering himself onto a stack of tires. “All the while you were breaking records on the track, winning rhetoric contests, and getting A’s in class, I was doing nothing. I was—” A certain slipperiness under his fundament told him the top tire, smeared with grease, was printing a great target round his ass. A clucking issued from the mask, rather metallic and more statistical than laughlike.

  “Well anyway,” said Reinhart, rising from the nasty seat, “I had a little accident with the car. It’s outside.” He backed slowly toward the door, wagging his hand at Splendor every so many steps, who would move only upon this signal and stop in between. In this strange fashion they passed the three clowns, who occupied within their own glass bell of mock farts, real belches, and mucul clearances, paid them no mind.

  “See, a dent!” Reinhart for some reason said triumphantly when they reached the Chevy, and Splendor, kneeling, passed his hands lightly over the bruised body, just like a witch doctor in his motions and his mask, though now Reinhart got a more scientific perspective of the latter, for it was turned away from him and he could see the close-cropped back of the head that wore it.

  “What are you doing here, anyway?” he asked instantly and, he regretted, cruelly.

  Splendor inserted a clamped fist under the fender and with the other hand struck thrice upon the superior surface of the depression while pressing from beneath, as the vibrating cords in his left forearm testified. His right arm, power for the aggressive hand, was almost lax; and never more so than when upon the third blow, for which the first two had been exploratory, the dent sprang out along its entire length, leaving behind no memory but superficial scratchings in the paint—which he went on to eradicate with sputum and an oily rag.

  Splendor removed the welding shield and squinted in the reflection from a show windowful of chromium accessories, but didn’t smile. He was not too colored except in his color, that being darker than most, approaching the blue serge with a sheen of use. But his nose had a long Caesarean figure and overshadowed thin lips which, if anything, sank in rather than protruded over his teeth. What he suggested was a Calvinist in blackface—at this point, a weary one who had seen his code everywhere defied.

  But from looking at Reinhart he seemed to derive an energy, and he suddenly asked: “Why are you so anxious?”

  “I honestly don’t know,” Reinhart confessed. “I have everything to look forward to.” He leaned against the restored fender, feeling very immobile.

  “Yet you have the most excruciating doubts,” said Splendor, “and carry awful burdens. You yearn to prevail, but will at most times settle for survival. Unsure of persons, you are at ease with things, which of their inanimate nature are incapable of betrayal.”

  “That’s what you think,” said Reinhart, trying to resist, but he was so tired. “It’s the other way around—”

  “Silence!” ordered Splendor, though more in understanding than in anger. “Do not seek to fight it.” He clasped Reinhart’s shoulder and stared him in the Adam’s apple, which was how tall he stood, about the middle height.

  “Fight what?” Nevertheless, Reinhart knew a growing serenity. He had always been on the Negroes’ side, a position in which he had to deny their being reservoirs of primitive wisdom, because everybody who believed that was perforce Jim Crow. They were just like everybody else, except that in high school Splendor had been better.

  “Nor question it.” Splendor hung his head in the area of Reinhart’s heart. “You’re not with me. The force is congested somewhere between us, cannot reach the vital organs.” He rapped furtively upon Reinhart’s chest as if it were a brothel door, and remarkably enough Reinhart did feel a certain-vitalization, though not enough yet to rise, which was what Splendor now commanded him to do.

  Being so large, Reinhart always worried inordinately about how he looked to passersby, especially here in his home town; for, because she had no friends, his mother had ever used strangers as control, as if there were a host of people who prowled about making judgments—and as a matter of fact, there were; his mother was one, and he another. Had Reinhart seen a Negro poking a white man in the chest, he would have believed it the preliminary to a race riot, though this was not the South. That is to say, he realized that snobbery, and even more negative sentiments, was holding him down.

  “Ah,” Splendor intoned, flexing his eyes, “you are anchored by the leaden humors.” He struck Reinhart’s forehead with the flat of his hand, saying: “Rise.”

  That really got Reinhart’s goat and made him smart all the way to both temples, besides. Still sitting, he punched out with his right, which Splendor nimbly avoided.

  “Are you nuts?” cried Reinhart.

  Splendor slapped him again, same place, not hard but most penetrating. In a second the vibration reached the soles of Reinhart’s feet, and they danced in wrath. He leaped up, ready to give the fellow what for. Still grave as ever, his tormentor, who now had to reach high to do so, gave him another between the eyes. Now Reinhart grievously wished to take this witch doctor’s life. Forgetting service-station decorum, he chased him cursing round the concrete apron, among cars. He fell over a motorcycle with dual foxtails and was gored by a horned device for adjusting headlight beams. Meanwhile Splendor, recordholder in the 220 and high hurdles, trotted effortlessly by, or easily vaulted, the obstacles, his features still inhospitable to any kind of violent feeling; certainly he was not frightened. At one point, having run up a lead of perhaps fifty yards—for Reinhart, whose anger had in the exertion gradually altered to something else, followed his opponent’s precise route, that is, instead of dashing across the radius to intercept him, doggedly kept to the circumference and its barriers—with this lead, Splendor entered the garage, got himself a bottle of Dr. Pepper, emerged and, drinking, resumed the race, running so steadily that the liquid did not foam.

  What a garage! Reinhart groaned as he felt winded on the hood of Dad’s car. I’ve never seen the equal in all my life long. It’s not in the least realistic. Nevertheless, along with air, he received an authoritative access of well-being. Strange that this should result from defeat! He opened his eyes to see Splendor advancing on him with the pop bottle.

  “I’m finished, you understand,” he cried. “Just let me alone. I don’t like to fight. I killed a man once overseas. I don’t know my own strength. Besides, I don’t have anything against you and I think you’re nuts.”

  Splendor couldn’t have been more delighted. He made a weird smile that broke his face; his upper teeth made an arch, the center ones being shorter than his molars; rather imbecilic; Reinhart now didn’t blame him for being most of the time grave.

  Splendor said benevolently: “Fighting back now, eh? Your pride restored. Well done! That will
be one dollar.”

  Well, it certainly wasn’t exorbitant, considering the fender was as good as ever. Since Splendor was a maniac, though, Reinhart checked the car once more to make sure. He then paid him, still breathing strenuously and then couldn’t resist saying with obvious spleen: “You’re not charging me for the race? Oh thanks.” He climbed into the car and slammed the door.

  Splendor looked in through the window. “You’ll sleep tonight as you haven’t in months, and you’ll rise tomorrow purged of the grievous need to stuff yourself with carbohydrates—” Reinhart ran the glass up against him and swiftly backed off the apron, but Splendor, trotting alongside, suddenly struck himself on the forehead and began to make desperate signals. This time Reinhart was sure he could, with the Chevy’s help, outrun him, but since the chase was reversed, his pride—which he reluctantly admitted, had been stimulated by Splendor’s shenanigans, nuts or not—wouldn’t let him. He braked and having reached under the seat for a monkey wrench or other weapon, and typical of Dad’s car, found only a little whiskbroom, defenselessly lowered the window.

  “Sorry,” said Splendor, his eyes sad as cold fried eggs. “I better collect something for the fender, otherwise Joe will think you paid me and I stole it. He is an unsympathetic individual.”

  “So am I most decidedly,” Reinhart answered. “What do you believe the dollar was for?” But even as he asked he knew he had been hoist with his own petard. He joined his voice to Splendor’s, and in chorus they said: “For the treatment.”

  At supper Reinhart asked for either Maw or Dad, “Do you recall a boy went to high school with me named Splendor Mainwaring?”

  By now Maw had got into the habit of looking derisively at Dad whenever Carlo spoke. That done, she speared a piece of pork chop and masticated violently. Dad imitated the ceramic French cook’s head on the kitchen wall above him—a cavity behind the Frog’s distended cheeks hid a ball of twine, the end of which issued through his pursed lips—through Dad’s a string of spaghetti went the other way. While he swallowed, his eyes crossed briefly.