“Boston.”
“But you’ve all been to Europe.”
“With Father.”
“What were you doing in Harpers Ferry when you were seventeen?” Abbie asked, from her pillow.
“I went to Washington with a special train, from high school. We saw Mount Vernon, and Annapolis, and Fredericksburg, and Gettysburg. We saw George Washington’s false teeth. And we had our picture taken in front of the Capitol Building. It was one of those moving cameras, on a track, and I was standing at one end of the group, and the boy who was standing next to me said, ‘Come on!’ and ran around in back, so I did too. We got in the picture twice. I had on an ice-cream suit. Twins is what it looked like. And perfectly plausible, except that I had one leg in the air because I’d just arrived. The next picture, everybody tried it and they had to give the whole thing up.”
“Do you still have that picture?” Nathan asked. “I’d like to see it. I’d like to see what you’d be like if you were twins.”
“It’s somewhere. There isn’t anything to look at in Gettysburg but wheat fields, but Harpers Ferry is remarkable. Three states meet there.”
“Which three?” Nathan asked skeptically.
“West Virginia, Virginia, and I forget what the other is. But anyway, there are three states right in front of you — three mountains, green all the way to the top, with rivers between them, and the town is on a hill, and it’s very old, and the streets are winding, and when I was seventeen I got off the train and ran all through the town and came back and picked violets by the tracks before the train started again. All this was in April.”
“Haller, there’s no such place, but I love you just the same.” Abbie threw the quilt aside and sat up stretching.
“You haven’t heard anything?” Nathan said. “No letter, I mean?”
“No,” Haller said.
FOR three weeks, one of the people who was often in this unnaturally quiet room had been missing from it. A rubber stamp descending on a printed form separated Francis Whitehead from his civilian status. It was a grey day, and there was some snow mixed with rain. Governors Island offered a foretaste of things to come. Though now and then someone was sent back, the lines mostly moved one way. He was set down in a muddy Army camp, with a rifle and bayonet to take the place of his Leica and light meter, a footlocker for his earthly possessions — which, as it happened, he was indifferent to — and a serial number. He didn’t really need a number to distinguish him from other soldiers, because he was the only one who could tell, in the dark, that the crease in the middle of the sheet he was lying on was not in the exact center of the bed.
There had been two letters from him since he went in the Army and they didn’t say anything. He was not a letter writer, it seemed. He wrote notes, instead — on the backs of envelopes or other people’s letters to him or laundry lists or old bank deposit slips. Not because of anything the messages were in themselves but because of something elusive in his character that made any clue seem interesting, Haller could never bear to throw these scraps of paper away. They drifted through his socks and handkerchiefs, in the top dresser drawer: Why are you never home? If you want to lead a double life it’s all right with me but I think you ought to live on the second floor. I’m tired of climbing these stairs. F.… Or, That new sport jacket is a mistake, you should have asked me to come with you. I can’t make it tonight. What about Thursday? F.… Or, You are so pompous. F.
When Francis Whitehead laughed his eyes filmed over with tears, but he kept his mouth closed, to cover his receding gums. This condition was apparent to his dentist and to him and to no one else. Like everything about him, his tight-lipped smile was charming. Before he went into the Army he was on the fringe of the world of fashion photography. Before that, he had been in the theater. His looks, the way he wore his clothes, his jokes, his talent for choosing just the present that would please above all other presents, his tormented smile enslaved people, but he himself did not quite know what he wanted, and so there was little prospect of his getting it.
Haller had written to remind him that today was Abbie’s birthday. He didn’t say — he didn’t need to say — that if Francis could manage to call up from a pay station somewhere it would give her more pleasure than any present possibly could.
“Dinner’s ready, children,” Mrs. Mendelsohn said through the closed door. Abbie and Nathan scattered to wash. When Haller walked into the dining room, Dr. Mendelsohn was sitting down at the head of the table.
“Good evening, Haller,” he said kindly and whisked his napkin into his lap. Mrs. Mendelsohn lit the candles, while Haller stood behind her chair. The others appeared one by one during the soup course. First Nathan. Then Leo, who had stayed at school for a meeting of the Geographical Society. He came into the dining room quietly, a tall thin youngster with the grey cat balancing serenely on his shoulders. Abbie was the last to turn up. She looked at the dining table and then said, “Mother, how could you?” but she was not really angry. The moroseness was overdone, and deliberately comic. It was true that she hadn’t wanted any birthday celebration, but equally true that she was trying hard to grow up. And part of growing up was learning to accept the way her mother and father were, and not to hold it against them that they weren’t the things she used to think they ought to be. If her mother wanted to decorate the table and bring home a birthday cake, it surely was possible to treat this as natural and not a crime, though silly.
She saw the package on her chair and said, “What’s this?”
“It looks rather like a birthday present,” Haller said.
“Do you mind if I don’t open it until after dinner?” she said, and put the package on a chair at the far end of the room. And so indicated — rather too subtly for the people present to understand, but the guppies in the fish tank got it and so did the still life over the sideboard — that Haller had done something to her that, even if it was a long time ago, she had no intention ever of forgiving, though from time to time she forgot about it and from time to time she remembered and reminded him of it, and still he didn’t understand. There was very little, as she observed to Nathan, that Haller did understand.
Haller didn’t mind that his present had ended up in the far corner of the room. That is, he pretended that this, too, was funny and partially succeeded in believing that it was.
When Dr. Mendelsohn talked at the dinner table it was usually to one person only. Tonight it was Haller. He was telling Haller about one of his patients. “She’s neurotic and self-pitying, you know what I mean? I gave the same treatment to somebody else that same afternoon and the whole thing was over in half an hour and the woman went home. But this patient was screaming before I ever got her on the table. Finally I had to say to her, ‘Mrs. Weinstock,’ I said, ‘if you don’t stop thrashing around, the instrument will pierce your bladder and you’ll get peritonitis and die!’ ”
“Did she quiet down after that?” Haller asked politely.
“Yes, but she wouldn’t go home. It was one-thirty and I was supposed to be at the hospital, so I …”
Haller didn’t feel it was respectful to eat while Dr. Mendelsohn was addressing him, and his plate sat untouched in front of him. He compromised, however, by snitching cashew nuts out of the little crepe-paper basket. When he had eaten all there were, the two boys passed their paper cups around the table and Abbie slyly emptied them and finally her own into Haller’s basket. He ate them all absentmindedly, and when Dr. Mendelsohn finished his story and took up his knife and fork, Haller saw that the crepe-paper basket at his place was empty and said indignantly, “Somebody’s been stealing my cashew nuts!”
The boys leaned against each other with laughter.
“Mr. Napier called today, Father,” Mrs. Mendelsohn said, and the Doctor quickly and furtively raised his napkin and wiped away the particle of food that was clinging to his mouth.
He had his office on the ground floor of the apartment building, and the waiting room, with dark-green walls and unc
omfortable, turn-of-the-century oak furniture and dog-eared back numbers of Time and Field and Stream and the Saturday Evening Post, was always full. His working day began at seven and he had every excuse to be tired and cross by six-thirty at night. Actually, the practice of medicine was pure pleasure to him; it was his family, not his patients, that made him irritable. He had grown up on the Lower East Side, in extreme poverty — the oldest son of an immigrant couple who did not speak English. When there was nothing to eat he went through the neighborhood searching for food in the refuse cans. Certain storekeepers knew this and took to leaving something for him. Working at odd jobs before and after school, he earned what money a boy could. He got conspicuously high marks in school, and he cured himself of a speech impediment by imitating Demosthenes — that is to say, he took the Coney Island Express to the end of the line and walked up and down the deserted beach reciting the Gettysburg Address with pebbles in his mouth. The rabbi had no fault to find with him, and neither did his father and mother. But he had no childhood whatever. When his favorite sister died of tuberculosis, the direction of his future was fixed. By a long unbroken chain of miracles he put himself through medical school. And how, lacking the hardships that had shaped his character, his children’s characters were to be shaped and made firm was a riddle he could not find the answer to. Abbie had an excellent mind, and she was an affectionate daughter, but she did not know how to cook and keep house and sew, the way his sisters had at her age. When she was just out of college she and a dancer in a Broadway musical stepped into a taxi and got out at the Municipal Building and went inside, to the chapel on the first floor. The marriage lasted ten days. All she ever said, in explanation, was that they couldn’t talk to each other. She was now working in a public-relations firm. Nathan didn’t finish school. He had a job but could not have lived on his salary. His father considered him immature for his age, and lazy. And Leo had a preference for low company. Loudmouthed roughnecks, and their vulgar girls. When Dr. Mendelsohn looked around the dinner table a spasm of irritation would come over him — at the thought of what his children might be making of themselves and all too obviously weren’t — and he would put his napkin beside his plate and push his chair back and go off and eat by himself at Longchamps.
His children understood how he felt, but at the same time there was very little they could do about it. They couldn’t very well go and live on the Lower East Side, in conditions of extreme poverty. No one would have taken them in. Their Hungarian grandparents were dead and their father’s brothers and sisters had, through their own efforts and his, all risen in the world. And if Abbie and Nathan and Leo had tried to sleep in an areaway their father would have come and stood over them, impatient and scolding, and made them come home where they belonged.
Dr. Mendelsohn’s irritability was, so far as Haller could see, a matter of pride to his family. It gave him an authority that his physical presence alone — he was smaller than his wife — would not have provided, and it made all their lives more interesting. They never hesitated to provoke him, while pretending to go to considerable lengths to avoid this. His explosions were brief and harmless. But Nathan said that his father didn’t like Gentiles, and Haller didn’t know whether he came under this proscription or not. On the other hand, Dr. Mendelsohn didn’t like most Jews either. This much Haller knew: He was a wonderful doctor.
AFTER dinner, Abbie tore the wrapping off her present, which proved to be an album of Sibelius: “Night Ride and Sunrise” and “The Oceanides.”
“I bought them on account of the titles,” he said.
“The titles are beautiful,” Abbie said. “And I’m sure they are too.”
“I haven’t the faintest idea what they’re like,” Haller said.
Unfortunately there was no way of finding out. When they went into the living room to play the records, they discovered that the machine wasn’t working. It was connected to the amplifier and speaker of the radio, and where there should have been an empty space on the dial, free from broadcasting, three kinds of music were fighting for first place, none of them Sibelius.
Leo explained that it was a tube, and he and Nathan went out to buy a new one. Haller and Abbie sat down together on one of the beds in her room. He was expecting the telephone to ring, and his hand was ready to reach out for it as he watched her worrying over the sick kitten.
“You poor thing,” she said, holding the kitten’s head against her cheek. “Probably it’s nothing but imagination — because he’s only been this way since last night — but he seems thinner than the others, and his fur is dry and sickly looking.”
“He doesn’t look very happy,” Haller agreed.
First she tried to make the kitten stand up, and then she took the others away and left the sick kitten with the mother cat. He soon lost interest, and Abbie tried to make him suck and found that it couldn’t be done. She felt the kitten’s vertebrae thoughtfully, and announced that its back was broken; there was a ridge that was definitely out of place. She made Haller feel it. When he said that if the kitten’s back was broken oughtn’t they to chloroform it, she decided that its back wasn’t broken after all — though it was just possible that somebody had stepped on it. And moved by a sudden inspiration she gave the kitten cod-liver oil out of an eyedropper.
The boys came back with a new tube. When that didn’t help, Leo sat down on the floor and began taking the radio apart with a screwdriver. Haller, with an unlit cigarette in his mouth, discovered that he had no matches.
“Leo, do you remember the time you soldered my glasses when they broke?” he asked fondly, going from table to table and not finding what he was looking for.
“Yes, I remember,” Leo said.
“And do you remember how much it cost me afterward to have them fixed?” Haller said as he left the room and went down the hall. If he hadn’t gone to the kitchen for matches he wouldn’t have known about the plate that Renée was keeping warm in the oven. It was eight-thirty by the kitchen clock. Renée was sitting at the kitchen table. Her normally kinky hair was shining with pomade and hanging in straight bangs about her face. He saw the plate in the oven and said, “Who’s that for?” She giggled mysteriously, and he opened his eyes wide in astonishment. “Tonight?” he exclaimed, and at that moment the doorbell rang.
By the time Haller got to the front hall, Francis Whitehead was inside, and Abbie and Nathan and Leo each had a piece of him, and were trying to go off somewhere with it. He put his little zipper bag down and then grinned at them. “A soldier,” he said. And what a soldier. “Everything I’ve got on is several sizes too large for me,” he said. “And I’ve lost ten pounds.” With his hair clipped close to his skull he looked mistreated and ill. Haller was shocked.
“I’ve got till Tuesday,” Francis said, rocking happily on his heels. “I’ve got thirty-six and a half more hours to do with exactly as I like. What do you think of my World War One pants?”
“They’re lovely,” Abbie said.
“Did you know he was coming?” Nathan and Leo were asking each other. “Did you know, Haller?”
“No,” Haller said. “Renée is the only one who knew about it. All I was hoping for was that he’d call up.”
“I called yesterday morning,” Francis explained. “I picked a time when I was sure you’d all be out.”
“That Renée,” Abbie said, and began pulling him away from the others. “Have you eaten?”
Francis shook his head.
“Renée’s got the whole dinner saved for you,” Haller said.
Pushing and bumping into each other, they followed Francis Whitehead through the hall and the serving pantry into the kitchen. At the sight of them, the black woman turned her head away and laughed.
“Renée, you’re wonderful!” Francis said, and threw his arms around her and hugged her. Then he sat down at the place she had just now set for him at the kitchen table. Abbie and Nathan drew up a stool and both of them perched on it, unsteadily. Leo sat on the kitchen stepladder.
Haller paced back and forth, unable to settle anywhere, and asked questions that nobody paid any attention to. Francis looked at his plate heaped with chicken and creamed potatoes and asparagus and said, “I haven’t seen food like this in so long. In the Army you never get a whole anything — just pieces of something. I dream about having a whole lamb chop.” They were waiting to see him raise his fork to his mouth and he did, but then he put it down, with the food still on it. “I must go speak to your mother,” he said, and got up and left the kitchen.
“How like him,” Haller said, “to leave us all sitting here admiring his empty chair!”
• • •
WHEN they couldn’t get Francis to eat any more they tried to put him to bed but he curled up on the sofa in Abbie’s room, with the other boys sitting on the floor as close to him as they could get, and he talked till one o’clock in the morning. He began with the group that had left Grand Central Station together. He described their clothes, and what they said, and how they acted. How the boy from Brooklyn who sat opposite him on the train nearly drove him crazy by reading a furniture ad in the Daily News over and over. He told them about the induction center: about the psychological examination, which consisted of hitting you on the kneecap and asking, “Any nervous disorders in your family, buddy?”; about the medical examination, which was perfunctory but nevertheless took hours, in a place so jammed with naked inductees that there was nowhere to stand without touching somebody. And how, one by one and still naked, they were started down the length of a long room while voices called out the sizes of shoes, socks, shorts, shirts, trousers, and they found themselves at the other end, fully clothed and outfitted in four minutes.
He didn’t really mind being continually pushed and shoved, herded from place to place, and sworn at. After all, it was the Army. It was not a school picnic. What he couldn’t stand, as the day wore on, was the misery that he saw everywhere he looked. A great many of the men were younger than he was, and they became so worn out finally that they lost all hope and leaned against the wall in twos and threes, with the tears streaming down their faces. Eventually, he worked himself into such a fury that he began to shake all over, and a tough Irish sergeant came up to him and put both arms around him and said, “Wait a minute, buddy. You’re all right. Take it easy, why don’t you?” in the kindest voice Francis had ever heard in his life.
All the Days and Nights Page 18
