My Petition For More Space

by John Hersey

  ‘Do you have that feeling this morning—ahead of time, I mean? About your petition to change jobs since you can’t move?’

  ‘The old spoilsport next to you doesn’t seem to think I have much chance, does she?’

  How can I claim more space than my neighbors? Already convinced that I have the largest home in New Haven, how can I want an even larger one? Well…I am special. I have valuable gifts. I am a writer. I need scope. I need room to think.

  What will the thin, epicene, lawyerish voice say to those assertions? Will there be laughter behind the glass?

  * * *

  —

  IT WAS MY MOTHER who gave me the conviction that I am special. She did this not so much with words as by an endless series of hand signals—a tap of praise on the arm at the right moment; dirt cleaned off my chin by a licked finger; a magician’s palm waved mysteriously over my head, as if she might at any moment pull a live rabbit out of it. She had confidence-giving fingertips. She believed in work, trust, printed words, forgiveness, and, as I have said, yogurt. Except for a bit of hypochondria, brought on, I believe, by her tendency to blame herself for my father’s errors, a weakness which he forgave her, she seemed not to have any serious worries. I was one of the lucky sons.

  My father, who did worry, paradoxically gave me courage. He had good reason to be fearful and to pretend not to be—Parkinson’s disease. In his tremorous suffering and uncertainty he sent me messages I have never forgotten—and now, knowing that defending my dangerous petition will take some of the staunchness he transmitted, I am so grateful to him that I am willing to move again outside of the box of my four touchers and make some contact with the man in front of the circuitry printer, who has reminded me of him.

  I approach him through the girl with a whisper. ‘What’s the fellow on your left petitioning for?’

  ‘Cigars.’

  I cannot whisper a laugh; I make it heard. Then I murmur, ‘That’s one petition that ought to get by.’

  ‘I doubt it. He wants imported cigars. Havanas.’

  ‘Come on.’

  ‘Ask him then.’

  ‘Tell him I want to know why Havanas.’

  She speaks to him, and his head slowly turns.

  I see him fresh, and I am astonished at how inaccurate my first impression was. His face is wider and rounder than my father’s. His eyes make an appeal, then the whole face breaks into a grin—the question about the Havanas has brought out a corner-cutter’s canny vigor. I would bet that he likes practical jokes. Makes friends easily. Covertly evades regulations. A fullness under the jaw, a hearty fold of flesh of a man who eats the fat along the edge of the steak, is tightened by the grin, and the face is immensely attractive. There is corruption in it, and cruelty, but not sickness.

  ‘You smoke?’ he asks me.

  ‘You think I’m crazy?’

  He squints. ‘I have no way of judging.’ Then he adds, ‘Yet.’ And gives a laugh that is like a hungry man’s bite.

  ‘Why Havanas?’

  ‘My mouth—I’m going to have to turn it in for a pants pocket.’ The appeal, the cruel relish, linger in and about the eyes. ‘Tampas, Puerto Ricanos, those terrible firecrackers they’re putting out in Georgia now—all the so-called native specials. They just make your mouth into an incinerator. Look.’

  Suddenly he hangs out a dog’s length of singed flannel tongue.

  ‘You need Havanas,’ I say. ‘I can see that.’

  ‘What I like about Havanas,’ he says, through a grin, ‘they’re so hard to get.’

  He is not the least bit like my father. He is coarse and selfish. I dislike his likableness, I am actually quite angry with him for being unlike my father.

  There is something besides that Cape Cod sand dune at the edge of my mind about my father and space. How big our room on Howe Street was by today’s standards I Within those four walls I watched the stealth of his sickness. He and it were always there when I got home from school. His disease was a powerful wrestler. I stayed as much as possible on the other side of the room from their grappling. My father kept looking up from the match, telling me to study, use a better light to read by, practice my violin. One day he told me in a shaky voice, ‘It’s not hereditary, Sam.’ Having indeed been fearful that the wrestler might at some moment let go his terrible half-nelson on my father and suddenly raise me up, whirl me in the air, and throw me to the ground in the manner of a bearded wrestler with his sodden victim I once had seen on television, I considered this good news, and after that I let myself move a bit closer to him. He sat at our eating table and wrote poetry in a longhand which, because of his tremor, no one could read, not even he. I did my homework on the opposite side of the table. Sometimes he kissed me goodnight. The pulsations of the tremor in his neck muscle worked his bristles on my cheek like sandpaper.

  I wonder: Why did I think the man in front of the grandmother was so like my father? Could it be that he is like the man my father was but is unlike my memory of what he was?

  * * *

  —

  NOW I THINK I SEE the thrust of the first question everyone asks in this waitline. Acquaintance is not the aim. To know another’s petition is to push him away from oneself. Here is knowledge that creates space. There is not only a girl, there is also a thick pillar of antipathy, between me and the man who wants to set up a money lottery; I am very far indeed from a desire to keep Roberts nose out of books; there is an ocean, or perhaps a generation, between me and the Havana man.

  I am far from all of them, but are they far from me? They all want what I want.

  Between me and the girl there are only a couple of layers of cloth. Her petition does not distance me as much as some of these others’ do, as the petition for protein on my right does, for example. I am well enough fed; hungry sometimes but never weak. But like the girl I would gladly change jobs, knowing however that I would then soon gladly change jobs all over again. Her petition does not make her distant, it only makes her seem short-sighted. I am sure that she, like me, would wish to have more space. I am happy that our two petitions do not so much separate us. I do not want more space between us. I want to be close to her; to enter her.

  3

  UP TO THE LEFT, the tall black man in the red cap with a blue pompon is tipping out big dollops of excitement to those around him. His head snaps back and forth; when it turns our way, we see his active tongue and teeth more clearly than his eyes.

  Some message ripples back along the line from him. One can see the faces flashing, the mouths working, but there is no meaning yet in this agitation which moves like a puff of wind along the surface of our stream of people.

  Now the crest of the urgency is coming closer.

  Around comes the face of the Havana-cigar man. He looks at me as he says, ‘Woman’s fainted. Wedged in. Pass the word back to ease up so they can get her out.’

  I turn my head and speak for the first time to a toucher of touchers of mine to my left rear, behind the grandmother and next to the painter. This is a good-looking young man of about twenty, I would say, with a large dark mustache that droops down on either side of his mouth. I give him the message, and his head turns to relay it.

  As this young man’s eyes swing away from mine, I am struck by the thought that most of the people in the waitline for the petition windows are middle-aged. He and the girl are fairly young; all the others around me are getting on; and so am I.

  Fainting in waitlines is one hazard of our lives that brings out an automatic compassion in everyone. I try, as I assume everyone else is now trying, to push backward. My feet give me little leverage. The forward pressure of the line all morning has been expressive of hope, of melioristic optimism, of thoughts of a bearable future, and now the effort to push back seems to me to be bearish, foreboding. I do not want to pull away from the girl. I say to her out loud, ‘We ought to try to push back.’

/>   ‘I’m trying,’ she says. ‘You’re in the way.’

  I laugh at her joke, and I am pleased at her awareness of me as a force of resistance.

  Gradually, minutely, as the wave of the appeal moves back along the line, the pressure eases, but we reapply it, backward now, to give as much relief as possible up ahead where the woman has fainted.

  The man in the cap is struggling, the pompon waggles. Little by little we see in front of him a body lifted straight upward, like a cork from a bottle’s neck—a lolling head with hair disarranged, an ashen face, shoulders in white, a slender waist. Arms reach up on all sides to prop the limp form. For a time there is an impasse; the unconscious woman floats upright, hip-high, in the air.

  Then her body, held up by stanchions of many arms, is eased out flat and is passed to the right over the heads of those in the line.

  But this is no help. The two pedestrian streams, one moving toward Elm Street and one toward Chapel, are as tightly packed as our waitline. Traffic is solid in the street and moving at the regulated rate. There is no room anywhere to let the body down. It is carried slowly overhead, like an honored corpse in a Wagner opera, for a time in one direction, then for a time in the other.

  Out of the press and up in the air the woman revives. She happens to be quite near us, lying up there on upraised hands, when she comes to, and I see on her face a blurred look of amazement. She must wonder if she inhabits a dream. The last she remembers from before she fainted must be of standing tight-pressed in the line; doubtless she had been talking petitions, knew her touchers and some of their touchers, was encouraged by the closeness to the bureau building. Now, after a brief voyage in darkness, she wakes up high in the air, on a couch of tense palms, moving toward Elm Street and the end of the line.

  People are shouting all sorts of contradictory advice. I hear the painter behind me shout, ‘To the windows! Heist her to the windows!’

  This, from the crotchety complainer, is surprisingly generous, yet also practical. At the petition windows, and only there in this whole block, can she be let down to stand on the ground.

  I am confused. I want to help pass the painter’s message to those pedestrians near us who are now holding up the woman, but there is so much shouting that it seems futile for me to raise my voice.

  The janitor turns his head around toward the painter, at his left rear, and says, ‘You got a good idea there. The only way—we got to shout in unison. Like a ball game, right? Kill the ump, right?’ His eyes sparkle; he is greatly enjoying himself. ‘Everybody shout!’ he shouts. ‘To the windows! To the windows! To the windows!’ With difficulty he raises his arms and begins beating time like a cheerleader, or indeed like a baseball fan leading a chant for the murder of a walleyed umpire; he also marks the bursts by nodding his head in rapid jerks. I smell his armpit close beside my face.

  I catch his exuberance and join in, and the painter does, and the girl does, and the grandmother does—and so, after a few pulses of the cry, do others in the line, as they understand the point of what we are urging. Our chant becomes jaunty and irresistible.

  But it is only we in the waitline who have our minds so tightly bound to the windows. Most of the pedestrians have no idea what we mean by ‘windows.’ Some seem to think we mean the windows looking into the Green across the street; I see some bearers’ heads turn that way. Perhaps they think that we think that the sight of the empty expanse of lawn would restore one who had succumbed to crowd pressure. But it is absurd! How get her there through the traffic?

  The woman herself immediately understands the shouts, and a look of cunning and eagerness erupts on her still pallid face. She writhes, trying to give instructions to those who are supporting her.

  The pedestrians whose hands now hold her are hoping to get to various destinations, and they are baffled by the chant now being roared by hundreds of petitioners. As if by common consent, they resolve their uncertainty by discarding the woman and the problem; if the people in the line are so vocal, let them handle her and it. The bearers unceremoniously roll her back onto the waitline, a little behind where we are.

  At once the petitioners, laughing now, begin propelling her forward. She is being bounced and rolled. It is a game. She squeals with pleasure that sounds like alarm, like someone being tossed in a blanket. She knows that her swoon is paying off. She will reach the windows much sooner than she would have otherwise.

  She goes over us, and I get my hands on her. Her thighs are soft, a bit clammy. This shaking up will restore her circulation.

  She moves quickly up the line. The excitement in our vicinity gradually subsides.

  Still cheered by our spirit of cooperation, I congratulate the janitor for his presence of mind in organizing the chant. ‘I’m really impressed,’ I say.

  ‘You son of a bitch,’ he says. ‘Are you still in the line? We ought to lift you out and send you the hell back that way.’ He slants his head back toward Elm Street.

  Cooperation? With a mental shiver I remember his gleeful phrase, the icy light in his eyes, ‘Kill the ump!’

  Now there is some kind of ruckus at the doors of the bureau building, where I can see the woman still supported overhead. Can it be that the people at the front of the line, having waited more than four hours for their chances at the windows, refuse to let her into a position ahead of theirs?

  At last she is passed in, still overhead, through one of the doors. She does not re-emerge, she must have been given room…. I wonder what she is asking for, standing in front of the bars and the one-way glass.

  * * *

  —

  NOW THAT I have seen how knowing others’ petitions gives a little distance from them, I am able to have some curiosity about another toucher of touchers of mine—the young man with the handlebar mustaches to whom I passed the word on the woman’s having fainted a few minutes ago.

  I turn and ask him the required question.

  ‘My wife and I—putting in for a baby,’ he says.

  ‘This the first time you’ve asked?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘I’ve been through that meat grinder. I have a child. It’s rough. When my wife and I were asking for permission it was done in a different way—they had a special bureau. It was all paperwork then. Fill out a form. Rejected—answers incomplete. Try again. Rejected—insufficient tax stamps. Try again. Rejected—one signature illegible. They never said we couldn’t have a baby, just kept finding technicalities.’

  ‘I know,’ the young man says. ‘Everyone tells me it won’t happen the first time. May never. It must be a lot tighter now than when you tried.’

  He sees me as an aging man. My pessimism asserts itself. ‘It took us three years,’ I say, ‘even back then.’

  ‘We don’t care. We want to try.’

  ‘What makes you want to bring a baby into…?’ My chin points in three wide swoops at the stream of people waiting.

  We think trying’ll make our sex more—you know—three-dimensional.’

  ‘How’s that again?’

  ‘You know—function of the testes, manufacture sperm. Her cycle, the ovum comes down to look for sperm. It’s nature. We think we can have a lot better orgasms if—well, you know.’

  Now I have my distance from the young man, and I breathe easier.

  ‘It’s already better,’ he says. ‘I mean, just talking about the petition, the idea—it already has trickled down from our heads into our—you know. I mean, last night, instead of foreplay we discussed the petition, and then we started in and she came like a thunderclap, it almost knocked her into the next space where this old carpenter lives. I mean it almost killed her the way she came. See what I mean? It wasn’t all that good for me, I mean I came, it was maybe a six-throbber, no world-beater, but she was really sweet to me after, and the whole thing was good. We think it’ll really make a difference.’

  ‘Good lu
ck,’ I say, raising the kid.’

  * * *

  —

  ITURN BACK to the girl. ‘Did you hear that?’ I murmur to her.

  ‘No, what?’

  ‘I was talking with this lunk back here…’ And I begin to tell the girl what the young man with the handlebar mustaches has said. But I find as I get into the story that I am suddenly shy, I cannot force the thunderclap and the six throbs out through my larynx. The account loses its point.

  Some strange flotsam, however, apparently gets through the net of my reticence, because when I have finished, the girl says, ‘I sucked my thumb until I was nearly ten. Put me to sleep. Do you love sleep as much as I do?’

  ‘I’m a light sleeper,’ I tell her.

  We confide to each other quirks of our night life in our separate beds; my heart begins to beat rapidly. She is courageous, more open than I, and she begins to tell me about her capers with men. She has frankly not had much luck. For openers, there was a hairy slob, a kind of sex pickpocket. She is not going to get the advantage of me by boasting, that is immediately certain. Her first big love was an oaf who didn’t know how emotion lubricates the way to the egg; through ignorance he was a cruel rapist. She taught him, and his gratitude turned him against her. Next…