Reinhart in Love

by Thomas Berger

  With ebbing zest, Reinhart dutifully followed her up through the house, finding one moment after another most propitious as to privacy—the inhabitants of the upper stories were apparently dead in their rooms and Clendellan was still crashing about two floors down—but though he finally had in mind nothing more than a bit of frottage, he got nothing more than a verbal concupiscence in which the building and its underprivileged occupants were her lovers. In short, he realized as they mounted the final stair to the loft, she was to be the Jane Addams of southern Ohio and this her Hull, and not whore, House. It was not until they rejoined Clendellan and not really until they all returned to Humbold’s car, where the realtor sat piecing together the remnants of his private documents, that Alice threw herself into Reinhart’s arms.

  “Happy, dear?” asked her husband, depositing the baby, now foul from the tenement, on Humbold’s blond upholstery.

  “Aroused!” She pulled Reinhart after her into the back seat and chose this moment to give him the kiss no longer looked for, no longer wanted, it was even a sort of horror.

  “Wonderful!” said Clendellan, and to Claude: “We’ll take it.”

  No sooner had Reinhart fetched in Margaret from the walk—applying quick artificial respiration to her little friend—than the boss, who had not wanted to sell the building, had produced papers in triplicate, got his clients’ signatures and a deposit for good faith, and barreled back to Vetsville at ninety.

  “You planned the whole thing, didn’t you?” Reinhart asked admiringly when they were again in Humbold’s office.

  “But,” said the boss, “it was better you didn’t catch on till after. You might have blown the deal.” He put away his hat and topcoat, which were all over tiny black handprints.

  “Claude, you are an artist.”

  Humbold’s right eye vanished in deprecation. “Tell you what I’m me, and I’m going to start right out on the square by giving you a full week’s commission for your work this P.M. Figure your sixty-five already earned with four days left to go. Now why don’t you take off home and tell your daddy you’re doing all right? He worries you’ll turn bum.”

  “Thanks, boss.”

  “Claude.”

  “Thanks, Claude.”

  “Yours sincerely, bud.”

  Reinhart closed the door and went into the outer office, where the secretary was painting a new mouth.

  “So you sold the Tenderloin,” she asked, “and think you’re pretty big. The next thing I know you’ll be getting fresh. Well, hands off: I’m engaged.”

  “No,” said Reinhart, “I just tagged along. But what I still can’t understand is how Claude was so sure I would suggest going there.”

  She opened her purse and pitched the lipstick down its gullet. Her penciled brows climbing, she whispered: “Brother, how dumb can you get? He’s been trying to peddle that for five years and always carries the Agreement to Buy with him…. What are you getting, half the commission?”

  “I don’t know anything about that,” Reinhart said pridefully, meaning everything. “But he’s giving me my whole week’s salary for whatever it was I did.”

  “Now that’s fair,” she cried, though still whispering. “He makes nine and a quarter and gives you sixty-five.” Her cute little chicken-rump head danced in scorn. “Who’s ever going to marry somebody so weak-minded? Not Genevieve Raven!”

  Reinhart was not in the least affected by her peevishness, which he believed to be a standard item in an office girl’s kit, so he bade her goodbye till the morrow and left, being careful with the door. Yet, in a moment he popped back, and the wind came with him.

  “Who in the devil is Genevieve Raven?”

  “Me!” she screamed.

  Chapter 7

  So Reinhart had much to tell his folks when he got home, except that of course he suppressed all mention of Mrs. Clendellan’s feeling-him-up because it was conventional in his family not to admit that sex existed—which in this case, and perhaps in many others as well, more than we suspect, agreed with reality. Maw, on her feet again, looked ill as he proceeded towards the triumphant denouement, and seconds before he announced the sale, she had brought the potatoes to a boil which overran the pot and steamed down onto the burner, extinguishing it.

  She threatened him with a potholder, shouting: “Don’t peeve me with your jabber, fellow, I warn you. This cancer can snuff me out like that gas, and if I go it will be you who drove me.”

  “But Maw!” Reinhart protested. “A fellow takes his accomplishments to his Old Lady.”

  With a long-handled fork she pursued one of the potatoes bobbing like baldheaded swimmers in the pan. “You know I won’t listen for one minute to brag. You so much as go to the privy and you’re back wanting a medal for it.”

  Reinhart retreated to visit Dad, who sat in bed reading the afternoon paper, his flannel pajama shirt opened to show whitening chest-hair.

  “Sit down and take the load off, Carlo. I’ll hand you the funnies.”

  His father had graduated from plain spectacles to bifocals, Reinhart noticed but forbore from mentioning it lest it introduce the subject of his own eyes.

  “What do you think of the Reds this year?” his old man went on, giving him a page of comic strips.

  “Well,” said Reinhart, seeing Winnie Winkle, a really fabulous piece, in panties and brassiere, as young as she had been before the war—he suddenly remembered his high school practice to which she had been muse, and thought he’d better get some nookie soon for health’s sake. “Well, I don’t know, Dad, I haven’t been following the news. That U.N. stuff is Pretty tedious.” It had been a lascivious day, and now Dixie Dugan was also in her underwear.

  “Make first division?”

  “Oh,” said Reinhart, during the transition to Popeye, “they have plenty of divisions, but we have the atom bomb….” He came to. “I’m sorry, Dad, I just realized you were talking about the baseball team and I about world affairs.”

  “Mmm. Well, as far as that goes, Carlo, I suppose you know I’m G.O.P. and expect to die that way—and may have to before we ever get another Republican in the White House. You never would have had to waste the flower of your youth on foreign soil if Roosevelt hadn’t recognized Hitler.”

  “I thought it was Stalin he recognized,” said Reinhart, feeling despair settle over him like a horse blanket. “Or John L. Lewis. Or both.” He decided to try a trick. “What, I wonder, ever became of Haile Selassie, Tony Galento, Wrong-way Corrigan, Dr. Townsend, and Alf Landon?” While his father considered these names, as he knew he would, Reinhart told the story of his new job.

  When he was done, his old man said: “Isn’t Claude a great guy!”

  “He’s very decent, Dad, but what I’m trying to get over to you is the real romance of business.”

  “Ah, you’ve got yourself a girl, Fine, fine. Time you settled down.” He picked up the comics, which Carlo had put aside.

  “No,” said Reinhart. “You must know what I mean, having been in insurance all your life. I mean adventure. Getting people to buy things they don’t want—you make them love, fear, and loathe you. You have a definite influence on shaping their lives. Now take a house—this one you sell them they might live in until they die, and when the children grow up they will take wives and husbands among the neighbor kids, and on and on. All resulting from the original real-estate sale, which they didn’t want until manipulated into it by the salesman. Whole cities can be made this way. It’s really a creativity not dreamed of in Renaissance.”

  Unmoved, Dad was intently reading the funnies; so Reinhart thought that in fairness he would expand his enthusiasm to include insurance.

  “Your own business, say: look at what can result from your having sold someone a policy. He is struck dead by lightning, and instead of his wife and children becoming wards of the public, they collect the insurance payment, invest it shrewdly, plough back all dividends except what is needed for a modest living, and one day before they die have amassed a fort
une, which the grandchildren inherit never suspecting, as they sit before their pressed duck and champagne, that they owe it to one George Reinhart, ace agent of Ecumenical Indemnity!”

  “Who is long dead and buried in a pauper’s grave,” responded Dad, folding his paper lengthwise like a passenger on a crowded streetcar.

  “But Dad,” said Reinhart, looking for a place to stride about in the room so clogged with the enormous bed. “I’m for you and your profession, which now that it won’t offend I can say for yean I thought was just about the dreariest way in the world for a man to waste his life. Nothing was worse in my opinion than commerce, economics, exchange, real property, securities, stocks, bonds, finance, annuities, comptrollers, town planning boards, auditors, accountants, ledgers, etc.—those are some of the words that just to hear turned my stomach. Now here are a few of the words I liked: paladin, epic, paramour, gourmet, wastrel, mistress, cognac, intrepid, leather, bronze, crimson, alabaster, lance, battle-ax, and so on. Do you know something? Those two vocabularies are not entirely incompatible.”

  He saw from the side window that a neighbor was broadcasting grass seed near a garage, assisted by, frustrated by a swarm of children who would grow up to be auditors and poets and epicures and sowers of lawns: everything. Reinhart was in love with everything.

  As to Dad, he was asleep under a rent of newsprint. Winnie Winkle, in flagrante delectable, was just above his nostrils, and his breathing caused her to do a bump and grind. Reinhart was finally coming out of half a year’s funk—his recent emotional history was far from a laugh—and he suddenly found himself wanting to sing and dance and make money, money, money and get drunk and do it with every girl in the world.

  But first he had to eat dinner with Maw: potatoes fried in bacon grease, frankfurters whose color came off on the plate, gaseous sauerkraut, and canned applesauce for dessert. They both ate enormously and in silence, until over his cup of instant coffee Reinhart waxed nostalgic and said:

  “Remember those drawings you used to make for me years ago of Peter Rabbit and Reddy Fox? And sometimes on summer afternoons we would pack a shoebox with cervelat sandwiches and cheese & crackers and Nabisco wafers and bananas, and go visit the zoo. Remember when Dad made home brew and drew it off into bottles with china stoppers? You two used to play rummy once a week with Charley and Mabel Welch, and little Gladys and I would play Old Maid at a tiny table alongside. Afterwards there’d be a cold snack, and if anybody’d ask Charley for the butter, he would pick up the whole stick and hand it to them for a laugh. Gladys wouldn’t drink anything but Orange Crush because it wasn’t carbonated.”

  “You sure can recall anything about food,” said Maw. “Want more applesauce?”

  “I’ll tell you, Maw, I don’t like that canned nearly as well as the kind you used to make with cinnamon on it.”

  “A person gets old, boy, and gets cancer…. Charley’n Mabel retired last year to Florida, for he always had TB and spat blood all winter long. Well, no sooner did they get settled down there in a nice subdivision, every cottage on the water, than along came the hurricane. Charley happened to be out in the car, going down to get a Collier’s—the change-in-address for the subscription not having gone through yet—when it struck. A great tidal wave carried him right off the coastal road and out to sea. When Mabel heard the news she fell into a coma and lived about a hour more, then passed away. As to ‘little’ Gladys, well you haven’t been away so long that you can’t remember she grew to five-eleven in heir stocking feet at fifteen years of age and stuck way out to here in front. In 1944, at eighteen, she up and gave birth to a baby without a marriage license being in evidence. Turned out to be real filth, breaking Charley ‘n Mabel’s heart, who had given her everything through the years: accordion lessons, a Pekinese pup, and a playhouse in the back yard. Well sir, last I heard she turned nun.”

  “I didn’t know they were Catholic,” said Reinhart.

  “They certainly were not!” answered Maw. “That’s the tragedy.” She drained her cup and went “Phew!” which Reinhart assumed was her reaction to the coffee; on that they were one. But she did it again: “Phew! You’re a free white and twenty-one, but if I ever thought you had truck with Filth, I’d slip you strychnine. Do you know what I’m talking about? Filth!”

  “What kind, Maw?”

  “Why, Smut. All the dirty, miserable, horrible things that bachelors in boarding houses think about; what goes on among the niggers in back alleys in the dead of night; what makes cats do that terrible evil whining in the wee hours and dogs run in packs with their tongues hanging out so disgusting; what ruined Gladys Welch. People touching one another in secret ways. Men rolling their eyeballs and wetten-ing their lips. Girls sticking way out here, fore and aft, wearing bathing suits no bigger than a necktie. The ads for foundations. The kind of pictures men like. Dirty lacy things you can order through the mail from Hollywood. Fiction. Racial comedians like the Marx Brothers, Mae West, Jean Harlow, Clara Bow, and of course everybody French: Morris Chevalier, Simone Simon, and the rest.” She rose from the table and stood glaring at him. “Everything warm, wet, soft, dark, private, crooning, sneering, itchy, sneaky, hairy, jokey, shivering, cynical, atheistic, and modern. That’s what. And don’t try to defend it or I’ll slaughter you at my own table.”

  “Without sex there’d be no people, Maw,” said Reinhart brightly. He seized an oatmeal cookie and ingested it whole. “And no animal life, for that matter—though true enough, animals are always more interested in finding food than in reproducing.” The next cookie he dunked in the coffee and got to his mouth just before it disintegrated.

  “I suppose you’re safe then,” Maw riposted, running hot water into the sink. “But I can’t see but what that’d be preferable,” meaning an earth barren of warm-blooded creatures and perhaps even fish as well—any things that touched one another; she was anti-friction. “Don’t flowers have it better, though? With seeds carried by the wind. Beautiful, just beautiful.”

  “Dunno,” said Reinhart, rising. “Some things are one way, some the other, and you and I can’t change them. I now stick only to what I can have an effect on.”

  His mother narrowed her eyes at him: “Sure those Russians in Berlin didn’t make a Communist of you?”

  Reinhart laughingly said absolutely not.

  “But you can’t be certain, now, can you? How would you know?” When Maw, who was diabolically intelligent, began to talk like a cretin, it was time to fade away. Which he did, into the living room, his ardor now on ice perhaps forever, Filth having suddenly been revealed as the reason why he liked girls. For Maw in an inverse way talked a kind of sense, not to mention that she had always made Filth inordinately attractive to him. Much of what we do in life, he saw, is mere reaction against someone else. God knows what you would do if you lived as a hermit in the North Woods, with nobody to defy, but even then you would have had originally to be born and that required a mother. At any rate, he was getting rather old to go around thinking of girls as merely one vulva after another.

  The telephone rang and added to his chastened mood; he no longer believed it a summons to sensuous indulgence.

  Maw set up a great din in the kitchen as proof she wouldn’t listen: it made a person feel too important if you were nosey about his affairs.

  A man’s voice said: “Carlo, the game’s afoot,” like Sherlock Holmes, and it was nobody but Splendor Mainwaring.

  “Carlo,” Splendor went on, “are you there? I haven’t heard from you in days, and as I know you are the soul of dependability, worried that you might have fallen ill or into incapacity. Oh tell me my fears are unwarranted…. Yes? Good. And you have read your Goody-kuntz, of course?”

  Reinhart cleared his throat, groping for an excuse, and luckily Splendor took it as an affirmative, anxious as he obviously was to get on.

  “And naturally are enthusiastic,” he said. “I don’t mean to discount your independence when I say this is as anticipated. You will then be equally happy to
learn that the introductory assembly has been scheduled for two nights hence, namely, Wednesday evening at eight o’clock. Please wear a severely conservative suit; white shirt, with if you will a button-down collar and staid necktie, regimental stripe preferred; other accessories in accord.”

  “Just a moment, Splendor, I—”

  “Sorry, Carlo, I was coming to that. Be assured you will be handsomely reimbursed from the first collection.”

  Reinhart began to perspire back of the knees. Being a good guy is the worst thing in the world; once, out of politeness he had praised his aunt’s awful sponge cake, and then found himself forced to eat two more pieces. To be constantly agreeable was actually against his ethic; yet he was, and to hell with it. Talked out of Filth; talked into some nutty project by a crank, who if that wasn’t enough was a Negro to boot, so that he couldn’t be refused with impunity, because Reinhart just could not bear to close the door on any unfortunate who opened it and asked for him.

  He groaned, and Splendor answered: “Grand. I have rented the empty store at 221 Wyandotte Street for the assembly and circulated notices by means of an exceptionally active individual who penetrates all quarters of this district.”

  Despite the deepest foreboding, Reinhart smiled at this point and asked: “That wouldn’t be The Maker?”

  “You too know him! That demonstrates his extensive coverage. Every augury is good. I’ll see you Wednesday at eight. Meanwhile, Upward to you and yours.”

  Reinhart, whose mind could move swiftly when he didn’t ask it to, realized in a flash that “Upward” was the Heil of Splendor’s projected group and would have been familiar to him had he read his Goody-kuntz. So to maintain his deception he answered likewise and hung up.

  Since in all of his anticipatory fantasies of Splendor’s meeting he was the conspicuous white, obviously humiliated figure creeping about front and center, he had to order himself next morning, after a night of them, to cease to think about it upon the count of three—a kind of self-hypnotic device he had invented and which usually worked very well, the mind being as craven as a citizen living in a dictatorship.