by Mark Harris
“I should be a notary public,” she admitted. “I never fussed with it.”
“Stanley Krannick,” said Officer Phelps, once more changing the subject. He suspected that she did not care to discuss the real-estate business. Perhaps she was doing poorly. “Does he harass you? Do you care to lodge a complaint? I’m worried about this Stanley. If he upsets you I want to do something about it.”
“He killed him in the cradle,” said Luella.
“It’s my duty to do something about it,” said Officer Phelps. Luella’s words had not yet reached him. He was responding to himself. “Do you really mean killed him?” he asked.
“Stanley did,” she said.
“It’s because he’s in town now, isn’t it?” Officer Phelps hopefully asked. “When he’s gone you’ll feel better, you’ll see it in a more actual light.”
“When he’s dead I’ll feel better,” Luella said. “In town or out of town, come or gone, no matter where he is I feel the same way — he should be dead.”
“You’re certainly for McGinley,” said Officer Phelps, addressing the McGinley pin upon her bosom. “He’s ahead.”
“Of course,” she said, although she wasn’t for McGinley at all; quite the opposite, she’d as soon see him dead as in Congress. “Junie’s dead,” she said; “why shouldn’t Stanley be dead?”
“Talk like that makes me uncomfortable,” said Officer Phelps. “I see that you have two telephones, but I just can’t help noticing how dusty they are, as if they’re never used.”
“I have another office,” she said.
“Another real-estate office?” he asked.
“You wouldn’t exactly call it that,” she said.
“What would I call it?” he asked. Somehow the words “another office” had quickened his young interest. What could she mean by that? Was it an office at the top of a gold mine? For a long time his imagination had been furnished with an office of just that sort, at the top of a gold mine: the gold came up through the floor into the hands of a beautiful gold-mining girl who gave it to him, and he drove it into town in an armored car and converted it to green money. The sums were staggering. Paper was lighter than metal, fortunately. Then the beautiful gold-mining girl washed the gold dust from her hands, freshened up, and met James in town for dinner and for events to follow. Another office. Another place! Perhaps a place darker than this, for the light was beginning to oppress him.
“We can take a stroll around,” she said.
“I know you’re upset,” he said, “but loose speaking isn’t really advisable — saying things like when he’s dead you’ll feel better, and so forth. People hearing it might think you mean it.”
“The word is author to the deed,” she said.
“You bet.”
“I appreciate your offer of help,” she said. “I can see that you have a warm heart. I could see it in your eyes last night.”
His warm heart leaped up. This expression of affection released sweet juices within him, and he was pleased with himself for having offered not only in the line of duty, but as Junie’s old friend, to assist Junie’s mother as she may have need. “Any time he comes to town,” said Officer Phelps, “I don’t care what time of day, if he distresses you, if he upsets you, let me know. I’m at the Potrero Station, or if I’m not there I’m home.” He looked about him for a piece of paper on which to write his telephone number, but her desk was bare. It simply wasn’t an awfully active office, he felt.
“Jimmy,” said Luella, “that’s so sweet of you I don’t know what to say.” She extended her hand to him, palm down, not to shake his hand but not to hold it, either, only to touch for a moment, and the young officer’s mouth became suddenly dry when their hands touched.
“Just give us a call,” he said. This resumption of his official tone restored the moisture of his mouth. “If you feel afraid, we’ll send someone, even if it’s only to sit and talk.”
“The police are kind,” she said.
“It’s our duty,” he said.
“The duty of the police to sit and talk?” she said. “I suppose it depends on the policeman.” She was amused, her eyes glistened, twinkling, and Officer Phelps had the impression, if only for a moment, that her eyes were passing over his body.
He realized, however, that such a thing could not have been, for she was a woman of great age — Junie’s mother, after all. “All these things vary from situation to situation,” he said. He could imagine his being summoned in the line of duty to comfort her, and their sitting together, perhaps like this, perhaps not, perhaps closer, perhaps nearly touching, so that he might be of even greater comfort to her than at a distance, and perhaps with less light upon them than this fluorescent light. “Is there any way of turning out the light?” he asked.
“We can’t sit in the dark,” she said. The present light showed her to advantage, slightly darkening her complexion, and diminishing the creases of her face. His face was so seamless, and his body so lean! She had watched gentlemen add weight over the years. Young men came lean, and grew to a prosperous thickness. “Anyhow, we’ll take a stroll around to the other office,” she said, “so you can see what it’s like.”
He followed her. She locked the door behind them. Yes, lean he was, walking beside her on Geary Boulevard, to the corner, where, for a moment, failing to anticipate her turning, he fell a step behind her, quickly catching up with her, however, and falling into step beside her again, and his hip touched hers, and she could feel his leanness, and Officer Phelps knew in the instant of that touching that they were going somewhere darker and more private than her “real-estate office,” to which he had come to be of assistance, if he could, to honor the memory of his friend, Junie, without having been aware that he had not so much gone to her as been fetched, brought, tempted by her, lured by an accidental encounter now promising a pleasure thus far unnamed, unsuspected, unspecified, something he had never known before and could scarcely have imagined. “I should phone in,” he said.
“I have a phone in my office,” she said.
“Parked by a hydrant again,” he said, walking with her with mounting excitement toward Clement, reading his own bumper on his own car illegally parked, Police Your Local Support, and turning with her into Clement Street along the very route she had walked with Brown last night, except that tonight, with Officer Phelps, she turned down Narrow Alley. At the far end of Narrow Alley, near Geary, a Street Cleaning detachment was hosing down, as after a bloody accident. She opened her fencegate, and she opened her door. Alleu’s Bath & Massage, said the script upon her glass.
“Bath and massage,” said Officer Phelps. He became suddenly breathless, and his mouth again became dry. “Who’s Alleu?”
“We discontinued the bath,” Luella said, reaching behind the door and removing from its dangling place the little glittering hanging sign which had correctly foretold that she would be “Back Soon” but had had no way of foretelling that when she was she would be accompanied by a twenty-three-year-old moonlighting policeman with a seamless face and a close-cropped head — a highly intelligent fellow, tall and gangling and mostly bones this year, entering, for the first time, with palpitations of his honest heart, this studio, this parlor, this loveliest of places, Luella’s, this paradise of lotions and creams and clinging steam, of angels floating in a world all dim, all blue, in their lovely light among the clouds upon the ceiling: a fellow as tall and athletic as Officer Phelps could almost jump and touch Heaven. He was hooked. He would enter here again and again beyond today in spite of repeated vows to the contrary, for nowhere in his young life in this hard city would anyone treat him with better love or better courtesy at any price. He inhaled deeply powder and fresh linen. “However,” she added, “we offer a bath under certain circumstances. Some men like baths.”
“Men?” he asked. He had supposed she served women only.
“You were wanting to
phone,” she said, showing him a telephone, “or if you prefer to be private there’s a phone in the bath, too.”
“I took a shower this morning,” he said, sitting at the telephone but not touching it, gathering his thoughts, collecting himself, planning his strategy. This telephone was no dust-trap like the telephones in her “real-estate office.” This phone was used. He sensed a real violation here, maybe a whole network of immoral conduct he’d stumbled upon. Beginner’s luck. Opportunity was knocking early: here began the rise of a great policeman whose fantastic reputation was launched with his uncovering the unbelievable underground world of massage. True, she was an old lady. Yet he had heard from his colleagues at the Potrero stationhouse that people were younger and more vigorous than you might think, age forty wasn’t by any means the end of things, and then too Benjamin Franklin said . . . what in the world had Benjamin Franklin said? . . . yes, an apple a day . . . no, Franklin said older women appreciate more: their bodies are younger than their faces. Good old Ben Franklin, capturing lightning in a pot-bellied stove. Though she was older she affected him, and she was certainly screwed on the subject of Junie, too, shockingly killed in Vietnam. It drove people out of their minds to have their sons taken from them, and themselves powerless to prevent such a violation of themselves. People pretended to be patriotic, but underneath they were unforgiving.
“You took a shower?” she asked. “Did you put it back?”
“You’ve got a terrific sense of humor,” said Officer Phelps.
“I cry a lot,” she said. In another room she had changed her clothes, and she was all in white now — white dress, white stockings, white shoes, all but the nurse’s cap and pin. Her McGinley pin was her pin, and he’d been dead two hours now.
“Is this legal?” asked Officer Phelps.
“I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t legal,” she said. “You wouldn’t be here, either. Some of my patients are policemen.”
“In uniform?” he asked.
“No, not in uniform,” she said, “because a patient doesn’t take a massage in uniform.”
If only they’d touch hands again, as they had over in the “office” on Geary! Then bumping her hip with his hip on the street! How about that? He could feel it yet. He could really see her shape in the white dress here, and not bad, either. It was a fantastic big tub on old-fashioned claws for feet, you could get a whole gang in there, and a telephone, too, as she said. He closed the bathroom door behind him. Now what in hell had he got himself into? He’d better stop. He’d better control himself and think it through. What would his father say? “What the hell, for Pete sake, look at him halfway thinking of taking a bath in some old lady’s joint.” He wouldn’t take a bath, not here. He preferred showers. Was he some sort of a queer? Maybe he was at that. It was said that half of all people tended toward queer, and the other half were O.K., or perhaps not half. Maybe 8 per cent. He couldn’t really think straight at the moment. His mind didn’t seem to be retaining things. “I changed my mind,” he said, opening the bathroom door.
“Very well,” she said, “we took a little stroll. I have a patient coming.”
“For what?” he asked.
“Why, for a massage,” she said, taking crisp linens from the shelf of a cabinet and swinging the door of the cabinet shut, which Officer Phelps expected to see bounce open again, but the door was held magnetically, and it was his eyes that bounced instead.
“I’m awfully dry,” he said.
“I have good cold water,” said Luella.
“You’re sure for McGinley,” said Officer Phelps, gazing upon her button and thinking Oh if only he could honestly be for McGinley too he’d kiss her on the button, and that was a bit queer too. “Hey kid” — he could hear his father’s voice — “you’re acting a little queer these days thinking about kissing old ladies ninety years old on their tittles are you?” “I suppose a massage does a person a great deal of good,” Officer Phelps said.
“It depends on the person,” Luella said, pouring him a glass of cold water. “It circulates the blood, increases bodily vigor, relaxes the muscles, eases psychological tension, soothes the nerves, and reduces mental fatigue when properly administered by a licensed practitioner.” She was deft with the linens. She was extremely spry, considering her age. Spry and deft, yes, and firm, too, her breasts were firm, though he supposed she supported them somehow, and her white dress made a rustling sound, silken against her body as she worked.
“Do you take massages too?” he asked.
“Of course I do,” she said, “when properly administered.”
“From a man or a woman?” he asked.
“From a masseuse or a masseur,” she said, “as long as they’re properly licensed.”
“Naked?” he asked.
“I don’t like that kind of talk,” she said.
“Nude?” he asked. How could he convey to her that he too was forming an interest in the whole idea? His muscles had long needed relaxing, actually, his psychological tension was acute, his nerves were shot, his bodily vigor was definitely down, but he couldn’t afford those prices on the wall. No sir. “I probably could use a massage myself to circulate my blood,” he said, “but those are backbreaking prices. I can barely afford to step in the shower.”
Full Body Massage (55 minutes) - $25.00
One Half Salt-Glo Massage - $15.00
Attended Bath - $15.00
Bath - $5.00
Shower - $5.00
These Prices Can Not Be Changed. All Treatments Cash In Advance. Relax & Enjoy A Health Giving Massage Administered By A Christian Lady. I Am A Wholly Legitimate Masseuse Licensed By The Health Department.
“Do you have a credit card?” she asked.
So you see, it was only the money she was after! That’s how she does, he thought, a shrewd businesswoman, she’d lured him over here to sell him her fancy massages. And just how “legitimate” was it? I’ll bet, he thought, thinking maybe he’d try her out just to see how truly and legally legitimate she was, and if she pulled any obscene illegitimate stuff he’d bust her. He’d put up with none of this immorality shit. “I don’t believe in all that credit-card shit,” he angrily said. “I live on cash. At the moment I have six lousy rotten dollars in my pocket and nothing more until payday.” He was furious, angry, bitter, and “on the verge of walking out,” as James Berberick had been, we recall, on page 182.
“I’m sorry I don’t have a six-dollar massage,” she said kindly.
“It looks like a slab in the morgue,” he said in a softer tone. He trailed his hand along the surface of her massage table.
“But go ahead and lay down on it,” she said, continuing her kindly way, “and I’ll just rub your feet and relax you a teeny bit until my patient comes.”
“I wonder if I have the time,” he said. “I should really be getting back.” Nevertheless, he lay upon her table.
She wrote his name in her ledger, as required by the laws governing taxes and health. Hundreds of names she had entered. She wrote “J. Phelps” and in the act of writing it foresaw herself at some future destroying it, as she had recently destroyed every page upon which she had ever written “Mack-gee” for McGinley, and every page upon which she had ever written “J. Berberick.” She apparently forgot, however, that she had said she’d massage the officer’s feet. True, she had loosened his shoes and removed them, slipped his socks from his ankles, “and snapped his socks like whips in the air, and with one sock polished up one shoe, and with the other sock polished up the other shoe,” as we saw her do on page 185; but then simply, it seemed, she’d forgotten his feet and gone to his head, where she gently massaged his temples with her fingertips while waiting (so she said) for her patient to arrive, and humming softly to herself a song of her era lately revived, entitled “Once in A While” whose words she momentarily lost, and so she hummed until she found them, and when she found them s
he sang them:
“Once in a while
Will you try to give one little thought to me
Though someone else may be
Nearer your heart”
and massaged “nearer [his] heart” too — we quote here the song itself, with permission of its copyright owners as duly announced on the appropriate page at the front of this excellent novel, book, or tale of rage and passion producing murder in an age and place where every man lives privately with his most violent bloodletting fantasies: which may eventually, however, as in the case of Brown, a newspaperman, living at 85 Yukon Street, overspill their private minds, as fantasies will, transmitting themselves through the air from man to man, man to woman, woman to woman, much as impulses move from neuron to neuron within a single brain. Thoughts become action. Brown, unable to save his “son” from that public event which was war, retreated within his mind to fantasies of the death and destruction of those presidents and messengers who had made that war.
His “wife,” Luella, however, was more practical, more direct, doing as she believed “a right-minded mother should do,” as we heard her say (page 188). Had she known how, she would have refused in the first place to entrust the life of her son to government. Unable to save her son, she revenged herself upon government when it strolled down Narrow Alley for a massage and shockingly proved to be only McGinley, Chairman of the Draft Board, candidate for Congress. In the name of all mothers she killed him, and, having done so, thought she’d now penalize her husband, Stanley, too, in the same way, for his early cruelty to the baby Junie in the cradle.
She massaged Officer Phelps’s eyes then, ’round and ’round the sockets of his skeleton, and his cheekbones, and his chin. “You need a shave,” she said.
Shit, shine, shave, shower, shampoo, he thought. That’s what they said on Eureka Street when he was a kid, and then he hadn’t heard it for years, but now he heard it again in his mind, perhaps because she’d shined his shoes with his socks like that, and offered him a shower. “I guess I do,” he said. “You do just about everything. It’s O.K., shave me. I think I’d like that because to tell you the truth your hands feel awfully good on my face.”
