And something nipped her sharply on the calves; she yelped and turned and found the lace of her black negligee was on fire. She twisted back and gathered the cloth and ripped it away. The pain had sobered her and she was bewildered now, weak and beginning to be frightened. She started for the window and tripped and fell heavily, and when she got up the smoke was suddenly like a scalding blanket over her head and shoulders and she didn’t know which way to go. She knelt and peered and found the window in an unexpected direction, and made for it. As she tumbled through, the ceiling behind her fell, and the roof after it.
On her belly she clawed away from the house, sobbing, and at last rose to her knees. She smelt of smoke and burned hair and all her lovely fingernails were broken. She squatted on the ground, staring at the flaming shell of the house, and cried like a little girl. But when her swollen eyes rested on that square patch in the grass, she stopped crying and got up and limped over to it. Her cotton print, and the picture … she picked the tidy package up and went tiredly away with it into the shadows where the hedge met the garage.
XIII
O’Banion raised his head groggily from the fly-leaf of his Blackstone and the neat inscription written there:
The law doth punish man or woman
That steals the goose from off the common,
But let the greater felon loose,
That steals the common from the goose,
—a piece of eighteenth-century japery which O’Banion deplored. However, it had been written there by Opdycke when he was in law school, and the Opdyckes were a darn fine family. Princeton people, of course, but nobody minded.
All this flickered through his mind as he swam up out of sleep, along with “What’s the matter with my head?” because any roaring that loud must be in his ears; it would be too incredible anywhere else, and “What’s the matter with the light?”
Then he was fully awake, and on his feet. “My God!”
He ran to the door and snatched it open. Flame squirted at him as if from a hose; in a split second he felt his eyebrows disappear. He yelled and staggered back from it, and it pursued him. He turned and dove out the window, landing clumsily on his stomach with his fists clenched over his solar plexus. His own weight drove the fists deep, and for a full minute he lay groaning for air. At last he got up, shook himself, and pelted around the house to the front. One fire engine was already standing by the curb. There was a police car and the knot of bug-eyed spectators who spring apparently out of the ground at the scene of any accident anywhere at any hour. At the far end of the Bittelman lot, there was a sharp scream of rubber and a glare of lights as a taxicab pulled in as close to the police barrier as it could get. The door was already open; a figure left it, half running, half thrown out by the sudden stop.
“Sue!” But no one heard him—everyone else was yelling too: “Look!” “Somebody stop her!” “Hey!” “Hey, you!”
O’Banion backed off a little to cup his hands and yell again, when directly over his head a cheerful small voice said, “Mommy runs fast!”
“Robin! You’re all right—” He was perched on top of the fire engine with one arm around the shining brass bell, looking like a Botticelli seraph. Someone beside him—good heavens, it was Miss Schmidt, disheveled and bright-eyed, wrapped up in some tentlike garment—Miss Schmidt screamed, “Stop her, stop her, I’ve got the baby here!”
Robin said to Miss Schmidt, “Tonio runs fast too, shall we?”
Now they were all yelling at O’Banion, but in four paces he could hear nothing but the roar ahead of him. He had never seen a house burn like this, all over, all at once. He took the porch steps in one bound and had just time to turn his shoulder to the door. It was ajar, but couldn’t swing fast enough under such an impact. It went down flat and slid, and for one crazy moment O’Banion was riding it like an aquaplane in a sea of fire, for the foyer floor was ablaze. Then the leading edge of the door caught on something and spilled him off. He rolled over twice in fuming debris and then got his feet under him. It was like a particularly bad dream, so familiar, so confusing. He turned completely around to orient himself, found the corridor, and started up it, yelling for Sue at the top of his voice. He saw a left-hand wall lean down toward him and had to scamper back out of the way. It had barely poured its rubble down when he was on, in, and through it. Over the crash and roar, over his own hoarse bellowing, he thought he heard a crazy woman laughing somewhere in the fire. Even in his near-hysteria, he could say, “Not Sue, that’s not Sue Martin. …” And he was, before he knew it, at and past Sue Martin’s room. He flung out a hand. He bounced off the end wall and turned as he did so, like a sprint swimmer, and swung into Sue Martin’s room. “Sue! Sue!”
Was he mistaken? Did someone call, “Robin—Robin honey …”?
He dropped to his knees, where he could see in relatively clearer air. “Sue, oh Sue!”
She lay half buried in rubble from the fallen ceiling. He threw off scorched and broken two-by-fours and burning lath, took her by the shoulders and lifted her out of the heap of broken plaster—thank the powers for that! it had protected her to some degree. “Sue?”
“Robin,” she croaked.
He shook her. “He’s all right, he’s outside, I saw him.”
She opened her eyes and frowned at him. Not at him; at what he had said. “He’s here somewhere.”
“I saw him. Come on!” He lifted her to her feet, and as she dragged, “It’s the truth; do you think I would lie to you?”
He felt strength surge into her body. “You forgot to say, ‘I, an O’Banion,’” she said, but it didn’t hurt. They stumbled to the window and he pushed her through it and leaped after her. For two painful breaths they lay gulping clean air, and then O’Banion got to his feet. His head was spinning and he almost lay down again. He set his jaw and helped Sue Martin up. “Too close!” he shouted. Holding her up, he half-dragged her no more than a step when she suddenly straightened, and with unexpected and irresistible strength leapt back toward the burning wall, pulling him with her. He caught at her to regain his balance, and she put her arms tight around him. “The wall!” he screamed, as it leaned out over them. She said nothing, but her arms tightened even more, and he could have moved more easily if he had been bound to a post with steel chains. The wall came down then, thunder and sparks, like the end of the world; madly, it occurred to him just then that he could solve one of his problem cases by defining the unorthodox contract under suit as a stock certificate.
But instead of dying he took a stinging blow on his right shoulder, and that was all. He opened his eyes. He and Sue Martin still stood locked together, and all around them was flame like a flower-bed with the rough outline of the house wall and its peaked roof. Around their feet was the four-foot circular frame of the attic vent, which had ringed them like a quoit.
The woman slumped in his arms, and he lifted her and picked his way, staggering, into the friendly dark and the welcome hands of the firemen. But when they tried to lift her away from him she held his arm and would not let go. “Put me down, just put me down,” she said. “I’m all right. Put me down.”
They did and she leaned against O’Banion. He said, “We’re okay now. We’ll go up to the road. Don’t mind about us.” The firemen hesitated, but when they began to walk, they were apparently reassured, and ran back to their work. Hopeless work, O’Banion amended. But for a few sagging studs and the two chimneys, the house was little more than a pit of flames.
“Is Robin really—”
“Shh. He’s really. Miss Schmidt got him out, I think. Anyway, he’s sitting on the fire engine enjoying every minute. He watched you going in. He approves of your speed.”
“You—”
“I saw you too. I yelled.”
“And then you came after me.” They walked a slow pace or so. “Why?”
Robin was safe, of course, he was about to say, so you didn’t have to—and then there was within him a soundless white flash that lit up all he had ever do
ne and been, everything he had read, people and places and ideas. Where he had acted right, he felt the right proven; where he had been wrong, he could see now the right in full force, even when for years he had justified his wrong. He saw fully now what old Sam Bittelman had almost convinced him of intellectually with his searching questions. He had fought away Sam’s suggestion that there was something ludicrous, contradictory about the law and its pretensions to permanence. Now he saw that the law, as he knew it, was not under attack at all. As long as a man treated the body of law like a great stone buttress, based in bedrock and propping up civilization, he was fortifying a dead thing which could only kill the thing it was built to uphold. But if he saw civilization as an intricate, moving entity, the function of law changed. It was governor, stabilizer, inhibitor, control of something dynamic and progressive, subject to the punishments and privileges of evolution like a living thing. His whole idea of the hair-splitting search for “precedent” as a refining process in law was wrong. It was an adaptive process instead. The suggestion that not one single law is common to all human cultures, past and present, was suddenly no insult to law at all, but a living compliment; to nail a culture to permanent laws now seemed as ridiculous a concept as man conventionally refusing to shed his scales and his gills.
And with this revelation of the viability of man and his works, O’Banion experienced a profound realignment in his (or was it really his) attitude toward himself, his effortful preoccupation to defend and justify his blood and breeding and his gentleman’s place in the world. It came to him now that although the law may say here that men are born equal, and there that they must receive equal treatment before the law, no one but a complete fool would insist that men are equal. Men, wherever they come from, whatever they claim for themselves, are only what’s in their heads and what’s in their hearts. The purest royal blood that yields a weak king will yield a failure; a strong peasant can rise higher and accomplish more, and if what he accomplishes is compatible with human good, he is surely no worse than a beneficent king. Over and above anything else, however, shone the fact that a good man needs least of all to prove it by claiming that he comes from a line of good men. And for him to assume the privileges and postures of the landed gentry after the land is gone is pure buffoonery. Time enough for sharp vertical differentiations between men when the differences become so great that the highest may not cross-breed with the lowest; until then, in the broad view, differences are so subtle as to be negligible, and the concept “to marry out of one’s class” belongs with the genesis of hippogriffs and gryphons—in mythology.
All this, and a thousand times more, unfolded and was clear to O’Banion in this illuminated instant, so short it took virtually no time at all, so bright it lit up all the days of his past and part of his future as well. And it had happened between pace and pace, when Sue Martin said, “You followed me. Why?”
“I love you,” he said instantly.
“Why?” she whispered.
He laughed joyously. “It doesn’t matter.”
Sue Martin—Sue Martin!—began to cry.
XIV
Phil Halvorsen opened his eyes and saw that the house was on fire. He lay still, watching the flames feed, and thought, isn’t this what I was waiting for?
Now there can be an end to it, he thought peacefully. Now I never need worry again that I’m wrong to be as I am, and other people’s needs, the appetites and rituals of the great Average will no longer accuse me. I cannot be excluded unless I exist, so here’s an end to being excluded. I cannot be looked down on when I can no longer be seen.
The ceiling began to develop a tan patch, and hot white powder fell from it to his face. He covered it with the pillow. He was resigned to later, final agonies because they would be final, but he saw no reason to put up with the preliminaries. Just then most of the plaster came down on him. It didn’t hurt much, and it meant the thing would be over sooner than he thought.
He heard faintly, over the colossal roaring, a woman scream. He lay still. As much as anyone—perhaps more—he would ordinarily be concerned about the others. But not now. Not now. Such concern is for a man who expects to live with a conscience afterward.
Something—it sounded like an inside wall—went down very near. It jolted the foot of his bed and he felt its hot exhalation and the taste of its soot, but otherwise it did not reach him. “So come on,” he said tightly, “get it over with, will you?” and hurled the pillow away.
As if in direct and obedient answer the ceiling over him opened up—up; apparently a beam had broken and was tipping down into an adjoining room, upward here. Then the tangle of stringers it carried fell away and started down. High above was blackness, suddenly rent by smoky orange light—inside of the roof, a section of which was falling in with the stringers.
“All right,” said Halvorsen, as if someone had asked him a question. He closed his eyes.
He closed his eyes on a flash of something like an inner and unearthly light, and time stood still … or perhaps it was only that subjectively he had all the time in the world to examine this shadowless internal cosmos.
Most immediately, it laid out before him the sequence of events which had brought him here, awaiting death on a burning bed. In this sequence a single term smote him with that “well, of course!” revelation that rewarded his plodding, directive thoughts when they were successful for him. The term was “Average,” and his revelation came like a burst of laughter: for anyone else this would have been a truism, an inarguable axiom; like a fool he had let his convoluted thinking breeze past “Average,” use “Average,” worry about “Average” without ever looking at it.
But “Average”—Average Appetite—was here for him to see, a line drawn from side to side on a huge graph. And all over the graph were spots—millions of them. (He was in a place where he could actually see and comprehend “millions.”) On that line lived this creation, this demigod, to whom he had felt subservient for so long, whose hungers and whose sense of fitness ought to have been—had been—Halvorsen’s bench-mark, his reference point. Halvorsen had always felt himself member of a minority—a minority which shrank as he examined it, and he was always examining it. All the world catered to Average Man and his “normal” urges, and this must be proper, for he was aware of the reciprocities: Average Man got these things because these things were what Average Man wanted and needed.
Want and need … and there was the extraordinary discovery he had made when Bitty asked him: if people really needed it, would there have to be so much high-pressure salesmanship?
This he threw on the graph like a transparent overlay; it too bore a line from side to side, but much lower down, indicating with much more accuracy just how interested Average Man was in the specific appetite about which he made so much noise. Now bend close and look at those millions of spots—individual people all, each with his true need for the kind of cultural pressure which was driving a man, here, to his death from guilt.
The first thing Halvorsen saw was that the dots were scattered so widely that the actual number falling on the line Average Man was negligible: there were countless millions more un-average people. It came to him that those who obey the gospel of Average Man are, in their efforts to be like the mass of humanity, obeying the dictates of one of the smallest minorities of all. The next thing to strike him was that it took the presence of all these dots to place that line just where it was; there was no question of better, or worse, or more or less fit. Except for the few down here and their opposite numbers up there, the handful of sick, insane, incomplete or distorted individuals whose sexual appetites were nonexistent or extreme, the vast majority above and below the true average were basically “normal.” And here where he, Halvorsen might appear on the graph—he had plenty of company.
He’d never known that! The magazine covers, the advertisements, the dirty jokes—they hadn’t let him know it.
He understood now, the mechanism of this cultural preoccupation; it came to him in t
he recollection that he had appeared at work for three hundred consecutive working days and nobody noticed his ears. And then one day a sebaceous cyst in his left lobe had become infected, and the doctor removed it and he showed up at work with a bandage covering his ear. Everybody began to think about Halvorsen’s ear! Every interview had to begin with an explanation of his ear or the applicant would keep straying his attention to it. And he’d noticed, too, that after he explained about the cyst, the interviewee would always glance at Halvorsen’s other ear before he got back to business. Now, in this silver place where all interrelationships were true ones, he could equate his covered and noticeable ear with a Bikini bathing suit, and see clearly how normal interest-disinterest—acceptance—can be put under forced draft.
Selected Stories Page 39
