Mary McCarthy

by Thomas Mallon

  “Tell him I’ll call him back in an hour,” Mr. Sheer invariably whispered, or if he were stepping out, as he called it, for a few minutes, he would not fail to remind me, “If Bierman calls, tell him I’ll call him back in an hour.” Since Mr. Sheer never did call Bierman back, and since, as the days passed, the frequency of Bierman’s calls increased until they were coming at fifteen-minute intervals, I protested against having to repeat this farcical sentence, and begged Mr. Sheer to change the message, to suppress it altogether, or to speak to Bierman, who was getting very angry. But Mr. Sheer refused. The sentence, in his eyes, was a mark of civility to Bierman. To leave no message would be the equivalent of cutting him on the street. The sentence, moreover, had, for him, a kind of magic that I did not understand until I had had a longer experience of Mr. Sheer and his promises. Mr. Sheer’s promises were a kind of fiat money issued at will and with no regard to fulfillment, or, indeed, to plausibility. He differed from the ordinary debtor who, under pressure, offers a promise as a substitute for cash, in that the ordinary debtor is not deceived by the substitute, but expects the creditor to be, while Mr. Sheer was himself deceived and concerned himself hardly at all with what the creditor might think. And it was not only to creditors that Mr. Sheer extended his gilded pledges. He showered them about him like an obstinate philanthropist. He knew where he could get me an ermine wrap for practically nothing (I had nowhere to wear it). He knew a man that would place Elmer, the colored boy, in the Cotton Club floor show (Elmer was a serious-minded youth who did not dance). Objectively, none of the promises had any validity. Their usefulness was of a different sort. They acted as a kind of transmission belt to the real world from the world of Mr. Sheer’s fancy, the powerhouse of dreams that kept his life’s wheels turning. So this sentence which I kept passing on reassured Mr. Sheer in the same measure that it infuriated Bierman.

  When the man commenced to shout at me on the phone and, what was worse from Mr. Sheer’s point of view, to mention a lawyer, Mr. Sheer reluctantly abandoned that particular magic. Instead, he drew me into the dark inner room, seated me on the velvet couch, and announced with an appealingly gloomy air that he was going to take me into his confidence. Bierman was a jeweler, he said, and it was a question of diamonds. The story branched out and became more elaborate, and on subsequent days he gave me different versions of it, but this was all I was ever certain of: Bierman was a jeweler and it was a question of diamonds.

  I know this because very early in the game I talked to Bierman himself in his office.

  Even here perhaps I am too cocksure, for I remember, uncomfortably, a scheme by which Mr. Sheer at a later date staved off a creditor. He had borrowed a hunting bronze featuring some falcons from a lady art dealer, and had got Abernethie and Rich to display it in a window full of hunting equipment. Through them, he had sold it to one of the Long Island sporting people. When Mrs. Martino, the dealer, wanted her money, it had already been parceled out to the landlord, the stationer, the photographer, and the telephone company. It was true, Mr. Sheer informed her, that he had sold the picture, but he had not yet been paid. This held Mrs. Martino at bay for some months, but at the end of that time, she began to make herself unpleasant, and Mr. Sheer saw that it was time to act. He went around to Abernethie’s and asked for the loan of one of their offices “to talk to a client in.” They gave him an office marked VICE-PRESIDENT. He arranged to have Mrs. Martino meet him there, and arrived himself a little ahead of time, accompanied by an old vaudeville actor he knew. The vaudevillian hid his hat and sat down behind the desk. When Mrs. Martino was shown in, the man was introduced by Mr. Sheer as Mr. Brown of Abernethie’s. The vaudevillian then explained to her in a Keith-time version of a fox-hunting dialect that the bronze had indeed been sold “to an old and valued client,” who “settled his accounts” only once a year, “the English system, you know; we can’t hurry a man like that.” Mrs. Martino, who was Spanish, was powerfully impressed, and it was six months before she went back to Abernethie’s to question Mr. Brown again. Then Mr. Sheer was obliged to pay up instantly, but the next day he borrowed back half the money from Mrs. Martino’s husband.

  Bierman must have been real, however, for in the interview Mr. Sheer projected it was I who was to pretend to be someone else.

  He had borrowed some diamonds from Bierman, he said, to show to a friend, a playboy named Carew. But Carew, who was considering buying them for a chorus girl he was keeping, had disappeared with the diamonds before coming to any decision. It was a criminal offense to let jewelry that you had taken on consignment go out of your possession, so Bierman would have to be kept from legal action until Carew could be found. Now supposing I were to go to Bierman and say that I was a rich widow who had bought the diamonds from Mr. Sheer but would be unable to pay until my next dividend fell due. . . .

  “But what if he should ask to see them?” I said.

  “Tell him you sent them home to Pittsburgh to have them reset.”

  “But I don’t look like a rich widow—”

  “You married young,” said Mr. Sheer. “Do you want me to go to Sing Sing?”

  In the end I persuaded him that my impersonation of this character would only evoke catcalls from Bierman. But I would go to him in my own person, I said, tell him the truth, and beg him to wait a little. I could go, Mr. Sheer finally conceded, if I promised not to mention Carew. I should merely say that the stones had been sent out for resetting and there had been an unavoidable delay.

  Just as I was leaving, Mr. Sheer had an afterthought. I was to tell Bierman, he said, that if anything should go wrong, Mr. Sheer would make good because his mother had a diamond that was worth more than all of Bierman’s stones put together, and he would be glad to wire his mother in California to send this diamond for Bierman to hold as security.

  “But does your mother really have a diamond?” I asked, and indeed I was surprised to hear that Mr. Sheer really had a mother.

  “Of course,” he replied impatiently. But he never spoke of it again. Whether it was out of respect for Mr. Sheer’s mother or out of respect for Mr. Sheer’s imagination, I do not know, but neither Bierman nor I, whatever the provocation, was ever so tactless as to remind him of this promise.

  In a little office back of a jewelry store I told Bierman, a small, all-gray man, the story Mr. Sheer had prepared for me, including, at the end, the vision of the fabulous diamond in California. I did not expect him to believe me. But when I finished he seemed convinced. It was not so much that he believed in a literal sense what I was saying (he could hardly have been so naïve), but he appeared to trust what was behind what I was saying, the intention to make things right. It occurred to me after this episode that Mr. Sheer was fond of me and sometimes paid my salary, not, as I sometimes thought, out of snobbism because he believed me to be a lady, nor out of cultural aspiration because he believed me to be educated, but simply because I was the only one of his retinue who had an honest face.

  Already I had fobbed off the city marshal, now I had pacified Bierman, and it was not long before I was being sent on errands of the most dubious nature, leaving Mr. Sheer behind in the Savile Galleries, secure in his confidence that my good faith would not be questioned. After this, it was I who was sent to get credit from tradesmen, I who cashed checks, I who would walk down Madison Avenue with a clock under my arm, going from door to door of the jewelers in the attempt to sell it for cash. It was even I who in a dark room taken by the hour in a questionable hotel showed a tiny, eight-by-ten Rembrandt, which I now think must certainly have been stolen, to various rat-faced men who came by appointment to examine it, while Mr. Sheer in the closet waited for results.

  Of course, if I were to remain valuable to Mr. Sheer, I would have to believe that the checks were good, that the Rembrandt was genuine and legally acquired, that if the story I was telling Bierman were false, nevertheless the story that lay hidden behind it was true and not discreditable. And here lay Mr. Sheer’s dilemma: if he kept me in a state of inn
ocence (which was difficult since I handled all his business), I might blunder on one of my errands and get him into trouble; but if he allowed me to be corrupted by knowledge of his affairs, I would lose that earnest sincerity that could never be properly simulated. The dilemma was insoluble, as he discovered later. Meanwhile, his brain was kept working overtime, for each of his deceptions had to be double-barreled, one set of lies for his creditors and one for me.

  Looking back, I see that, in the Bierman case, the Carew story was the lie intended for domestic consumption. Surely Carew must have been fictional, for when the finale of the diamond business took place, there was no Carew in it at all, and, in the years I have known Mr. Sheer since, I have never seen or heard of that playboy, as Mr. Sheer always called him, who figured so largely in my life that summer. Neither have I ever seen the name in Winchell’s column.

  I returned to the gallery from Bierman’s store, ready for action. The thing to do, I said, was to find Carew at once. Mr. Sheer, it seemed to me, had been strangely apathetic about looking for him. He had heard a rumor, he finally murmured, that the girl Carew was keeping had been seen in Atlantic City.

  “We must look for him in Atlantic City then,” I announced energetically. “What hotel do you think he would be staying at?”

  Mr. Sheer named a hotel and I called it by long distance. There was no Thomas Carew registered there. I called a second and a third, but there was still no Carew. Mr. Sheer began to find the search enlivening, and together we called all the hotels in Atlantic City, but it was quite fruitless. Then I remembered having read in detective stories that people who went to seaside resorts with girls would often register under false names but use their own initials so that the name on the register would match the luggage. I suggested that we try asking for anybody whose initials were “T. C.” Mr. Sheer was enthusiastic about the idea, and we called all the hotels over again, but either the clerks would not co-operate with us or the people we got on the wire were indignant when Mr. Sheer would open the conversation by asking if they were Tom Carew. Mr. Sheer was positive, however, that none of the men he talked to had Carew’s voice. We passed a whole afternoon this way, an afternoon we both enjoyed, I because I felt myself hot on the trail of the fugitive, like a particularly bright and wily bloodhound, and Mr. Sheer, no doubt, because he had a taste for practical jokes, and found this search for an imaginary Carew a pleasant diversion from his troubles.

  But his mood changed when I remarked that though we had not been able to find Carew, our idea was still good, and we might now try looking for the girl. What was her name, I asked. Mr. Sheer did not reply directly.

  “You know, Miss Sargent,” he said, getting up, “I’ve just been thinking that we’re wasting our time this way. The best thing to do is to get a detective on it. I think I’ll just run around and talk to O’Bannon. If Bierman calls tell him I’ll call him back in an hour.”

  He took up his hat, paused at the door as he always did to look up and down the corridor, and went on out.

  O’Bannon was a friend of Mr. Sheer’s, a private detective who was known in the trade for having a particularly choice collection of strikebreakers on call, but who had lately achieved a wider notoriety when he had been jailed for an attempt to burgle the district attorney’s safe during a political investigation. I had seen him once or twice waiting for Mr. Sheer, a short, thick-set man with flat feet who smoked a black cigar and wore his hat on the back of his head. With these salient occupational characteristics, he had intensified the sinister air of our outer room as he sat in a red velvet chair and stared pugnaciously at the glittering priests’ robes on the wall. (Mr. Sheer generally had a friend waiting for him in the outer room—there were a silver forger, a racetrack tout, a typewriter salesman, a men’s tailor, a professional gambler, and there was also, of course, Billie, Mr. Sheer’s red-haired mistress who drank. He would keep them there for hours while he talked to me in the office or made phone calls or “stepped out” on mysterious errands. When he was finally ready to see them he would come out and beckon them into the inner room with that hushed, ingratiating, yet faintly sadistic air that a dentist uses to summon his patients from the anteroom. At this time, however, O’Bannon, though fully qualified by his unprepossessing appearance, was not an habitué.)

  After this day, there was a lull during which O’Bannon was supposed to be looking for Carew. At length, Bierman began to call again, and soon Bierman was replaced by his lawyer, whose telephone manners were more suave but also more ominous. Still O’Bannon reported no success. I was growing frightened, and Mr. Sheer took on a hunted look; his nose stood out more sharply in his sunken face and his pale-green eyes burned with a desperate light. We stopped writing letters altogether and made no attempt to solicit business. I took to bringing a volume of Proust to the office with me, and Mr. Sheer passed the days listlessly reading the Social Register. But finally one morning Mr. Sheer brought the news that O’Bannon had got on the track of Carew’s girl. Carew himself, he said, had completely disappeared. The girl had the diamonds all right, but she demanded five hundred dollars before she would give them up. She and Carew had had a fight, Mr. Sheer said, and she maintained that Carew owed her money, and she was holding the diamonds as security.

  “But the diamonds don’t belong to her,” I exclaimed. “She will have to give them up.”

  Mr. Sheer shook his head sadly. “It’s just a hold-up,” he explained, with a certain worldly resignation.

  “I wouldn’t do it, Mr. Sheer,” I protested. “And where are you going to get the five hundred dollars?”

  For it seemed obvious to me that if Mr. Sheer had had anything salable he would already have sold it.

  “Well,” he said thoughtfully, “there’s that bronze.”

  “What bronze?”

  “Oh, you know, Custer’s Last Stand,” he answered impatiently.

  I had never heard anything of this bronze before, and it was a surprise to find Mr. Sheer dealing in Americana. His tastes in general were sumptuous and European, and while every other dealer of Mr. Sheer’s category would feature a portrait of Lincoln or a Revolutionary bedspread showing the Continental Congress, Mr. Sheer, for some reason, eschewed anything with a patriotic theme, and would even speak contemptuously of Paul Revere silver. But what I did not yet realize was that he would sell anything he could get his hands on. Now and then he would sell a live dog, and on the day I was displaying the Rembrandt in the hotel room, I was also empowered to offer an Isotta-Fraschini for a thousand dollars. And, of course, if he were telling the truth, he had been trying to sell Bierman’s diamonds.

  When the colored boy had gone out and returned with a huge bronze, showing one tall American with a gun and a cowboy hat standing on a hill, surrounded by some dervish-like Indians, I could see that the work had a certain sporting character that must have attracted Mr. Sheer. But I could not imagine that it would be readily marketable. I was mistaken.

  Mr. Sheer telephoned Caporello, the little white-faced Italian silver forger who spent his spare time in the outer room of our gallery.

  “What are you going to do?” I said. “It would take him quite a long time to forge a copy of this thing, and besides how do you know that he can work in bronze?”

  Mr. Sheer was displeased by this levity toward the bronze, which he was in the very act of admiring.

  “He told me once he thought he could sell it,” he replied shortly.

  When Caporello arrived, Mr. Sheer took him into the inner room, and after a time Caporello went away and then came back again, and the colored boy wrapped the bronze in brown paper and took it down in the elevator and put it in a taxi with Caporello, who drove off and was not seen again for three days.

  “He’s lit out for Italy, it’s a sure thing,” Mr. Sheer would say, pacing gloomily up and down the gallery. And each time he said this we would both laugh. For Mr. Sheer had a kind of calamitous humor, which when his mishaps seemed to take on an artistic shape or unity, he would turn wryly
on himself. Death was always comic for him, and even while he was telling you that so-and-so’s end was “a terrible thing,” you could see the tension with which his face was held grave and almost hear the laughter bubbling underneath. He told me once of the death of his closest friend. “He was drunk,” he said, “and dived in a swimming pool [pause, and then the explosion of laughter], but there was no water in it.” Next, with a quick recovery of sobriety, “Oh, Miss Sargent, it was a terrible thing. He broke his neck.” Another time, several years later, I came to see him in his office and found him convulsed with merriment. “You know what happened?” he said. “My best customer just dropped dead.” One of his most hilarious anecdotes concerned the death of an old man, a wealthy soap manufacturer (“Miss Sargent, he was like an uncle to me”), who met his end in a Broadway hotel, signing checks for the entire floor show of the Rainbow Restaurant, twenty or thirty strapping blondes who crowded around the deathbed, guiding the fountain pen in his failing hand.

  Our doleful laughter finally penetrated to the corner where Elmer, the colored boy, had been sitting for days, brooding about his unpaid salary and a pair of field glasses that he wanted to buy for his R.O.T.C. work.

  “Mr. Sheer,” he murmured, “are you worried about this Caporello? I never did trust him myself, so when I put the bronze in the cab with him I took the driver’s number.” The atmosphere of the detective story had infected us all.

  Mr. Sheer was extremely proud of this quick-wittedness on Elmer’s part. “He’s a smart nigger,” he said. He even paid the boy his salary that Saturday, but was indignant when he learned that Elmer had used it to buy the field glasses, and so he did not pay him again for a long time. “That nigger played on my sympathies,” he said. “I thought I was contributing to the support of his poor old mother who does laundry.”