by John Hersey
The teacher is off to the right. Her manner is listless. Her towering panic has torn the roof off her habit of disapproval; her life is like a ruined house. What was it she could not wait to reach the windows to beg for?
And there is the grandmother, laughing hard at her window. She is having a beautiful high today. She does not really care whether little Robert learns to read. Relatives are a convenience to her; for fun she plays a table game in which the counters are her needs and theirs.
At the left and right ends of the line of turnstiles pairs of policemen sit at consoles, moving their hands like organists. They evidently control the turnstiles with switches; I presume they have some mechanism that keeps track of turns. When a petitioner wheels, bewildered, from his window, looks for exit, and walks dejectedly away, a turnstile here or there in the row clicks open, and one more excited, pent-up, sweat-wet creature hurries to the free place.
* * *
—
AT ONE OF THE WINDOWS to my right, two slots this side of Maisie’s, a man is suddenly shouting and waving his arms, like someone trying to warn a friend of danger coming—but no, he is both angry and afraid; he looks more like a receiver than a giver of warnings. Looking for help, he turns his head to right and left, and when his face shows on my side his mouth loops around its goose-honk noise like the tightened mouth of a dufflebag. He is facing straight ahead again, still roaring, and now he has the audacity to beat his fists on the bars of the window before him. I hear pounding feet—and an echo of pounding feet—in this box of a room with an old metal ceiling; two policemen come running from off to the right. They grasp the shouting man by both his arms, and they drag him away; he howls like a moonstruck dog. The officers take the man to the street exit at the far end of the room, and they throw him out.
* * *
—
NOW—CLICK!—BEFORE I have time to digest the fierce short drama I have just watched, my turnstile opens, and I am a racehorse let loose from its gate.
There is a free window to my right. I run forward fearful that someone else will leap from nowhere into the empty slot before me. As I rush toward it I realize that this is the window from which the shouting man has just been torn away. Does that matter? I have been waiting so long! I stand at last before the bars, the glass. Maisie is now two windows to my right. The teacher is next to me on my left. The petitioner between Maisie and me is the bald man with the liver spots and maple-burl nose.
My distractions now, at a moment when I want to aim my entire being in a laser beam of supplication, are perverse and may be expensive. Off at a rough edge of attention I hear Maisie’s voice raised in protest. All morning she and I have whispered or murmured to each other, and now to hear her contentious stridency is unsettling. This shouting Maisie is a stranger to me. She is a scold. The grandmother must have been right about Maisie’s chances; she seems to be faring poorly.
Repeatedly I hear the voice/voices from behind the nearby windows, exactly as Maisie had described it/them—they are mincing, pinched, legalistic. It/they sounds/sound like/like echo/echoes.
‘Name?’ (‘Name?’)
I am aware that the janitor has moved up to the window just beyond Maisie’s, and it strikes me as funny that, after all, he is so near to me. I had to move to the right from my turnstile to reach an empty window; he had to move to the left. Has he seen me?
The glass behind the bars has an irridescent quality, which I try to penetrate with imagination. Is a gnome-like man sitting beyond that shot-silk pane, with thin lips and thin hair, a very high forehead, wire-rimmed spectacles, a grasshopper body containing an immense negative power?
‘Name?’
It is a rather mechanical sound, insistent and penetrating—and it finally cuts into my unfocused mind as the voice behind my own window! I am startled and I answer.
‘Samuel D. Poynter.’
‘D for?’
‘Dead.’
‘Levity is not permitted at this particular bureau.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s been a long morning. D for David.’ Who, I always say to myself, slew Goliath.
‘Address.’
‘524 Whitney Avenue. Marinson Building. Entry Four.’
Age.’
‘Going on thirty-eight.’
‘You are thirty-seven?’
‘I am thirty-seven.’
‘Give accurate answers.’
‘I did. My birthday is less than a month away.’
I am getting off on the wrong foot. I came here to make a dignified request, not to crack nits between my fingernails.
The liver-spot man’s voice trembles. The teacher is weeping.
On the mahogany panel above the window there is a high relief of a draped garland of leaves of ivy and holly, exquisitely worked in reddish wood. Looking up, trying to pull myself together, I visualize callused hands holding a mallet and a chisel to carve those leaves. Did the woodcarver love his work, or did the monotony of it overcome him? Each of the sixteen windows has such a garland, and the higher moldings I saw earlier are of the same pattern. Did the craftsman live with excruciating boredom—leaf after leaf after leaf of ivy and holly, season upon season of endless and changeless foliation? The dust and crud of many years have settled in the crevices—a mealy-bug of time and indifference on the delicate leaves. Who cares about the carver’s patience now?
Who will ever care how much space I have? Who will ever wonder whether a writer of departmental reports loved his work?
I am aware that a question has been asked, or at least that a statement has been demanded of me. The gnome-like man of my imagination wishes to know what my petition is. Nestled deep among my distractions is the thin-voiced command that has just been uttered: ‘State your petition.’
What the hell, shall I change my petition to something else—to some idiot nothing that no authority could begrudge me? I am suffocated by a sense of the futility of asking for what I need and want most in this world. They will think I have come here only to mock them, and, alas, they may be right.
The voice speaks without emotion: ‘You are wasting other people’s time.’
‘First I want to give you some background. I am a writer——’
‘Which department?’
I don’t like that. Right away there is an assumption that I merely write departmental reports. The fact that I merely do is irrelevant. I am a writer——
‘State your petition.’
There is a certain kind of stubbornness—I face it at this moment—which locks me into its reciprocal: elusiveness. When I hear this flat, droning, obsessive, repetitive note in the voice of someone who has no give, I go slippery. There is no use my telling myself that I am the one here who wants something.
‘It is true that at the moment I merely write departmental reports. But that is not the point——’
‘You are not the best judge of what the point is. Or is not.’
‘If I may say so, the point is that the situation may change.’
Everything has changed within my lifetime—that is precisely what is so hard to accept. The day after a blizzard, once, when I was very small, my father hired a horse-drawn sleigh from a livery stable in Bethany. We drove out to the stable from New Haven on our snow tires; there were still privately owned vehicles in those days. By then horses were a flaming curiosity, the sleigh a money-making nostalgia-stunt. I remember my bliss that day—being tucked against my mother under a fur rug, the shiny brown haunches rising and falling before my eyes, the creaking of the runners on the snow. Miles and miles of just us three, and our driver made four, feathering the country air with the words we spoke. Bethany is now paved with concrete and asphalt very nearly from town line to town line; the last American horse was eaten before I was thirty.
Yet perhaps it can also be said that nothing has really changed. There is only more. What is hard to accept
is the lack of change within the change.
‘There is no law saying I have to write departmental reports all my life. I——’
‘If your petition is to change jobs——’
‘But it isn’t.’ These bureau people have kept me waiting all morning, and now I’m going to keep this one at my window waiting awhile. To judge my petition you have to know me. I was born——’
‘I already know you. “Poynter, Samuel David. Born New Haven Hospital by Caesarian section” etcetera etcetera etcetera.’
Oh God, of course these bureaucrats have access to the biobank; he must have punched out my name on a console as soon as I gave it to him. I can see myself all laid out in a rectangle of computer capitals; my entire existence is displayed on the dark field of a monitor, to one side of the bureau person’s window, as a meager system of squarish characters of laminated layers of light.
‘But there are some things that don’t show up on there,’ I say with some energy. ‘I’ll give you just one example of my mother’s kindness. I mean, it wasn’t a busybody thing—it was built in, and totally innocent. And, you know, it’s part of me. This was back when we lived in a private room on Howe Street. A repairman came one day—the broiler element in our oven had burned out, and——’
‘State your petition.’
What chills me is the uniformity of tone. There is no impatience, no force of feeling in this repetition of the command.
‘The statute book states that your bureau is required to give a fair hearing to every petition. I don’t think——’
When our bureau has been informed what your petition is, it will give you a fair hearing on it.’
‘You know something? I don’t think I’ve been able to finish a single——’
‘State your petition.’
Maisie is still talking in a loud, angry voice, and now Liverspots has begun to tune up into a whine. I cannot sift out from the general hubbub the sound of the janitor’s words, beyond the racket Maisie is making, but I will wager he is already desperate.
If I am honest with myself, I cannot say that I have had a bad morning in conditions of minimal space. The pleasures of discovery, of having one’s small wagers of self-confidence pay off, and of sharing what has seemed to be a secret—these still steady me; and Maisie’s complaisance, her breaking of the law along with mine, her knack of tilting her head back toward me to express appreciation—her traits and moves, as much as my own temperament, have given me the patience to deal now with the glass voice beyond the glass.
‘My petition’—I may as well come out with it—’is for more space.’
The building does not crash about my ears. The janitor is not driven howling from the windows. There is a slight pause, but there is no more emotion in the silence than there has been in the repetitions.
Then the voice says, What kind of space? Space in which to do what?’
I never expected such questions as these. I expected: Why? Why you? Why are you entitled to more than the next person?
I lamely bring in a literal answer. ‘Space in the sleeping-hall.’
‘For what purpose?’
For several months, some years ago, I did deep-breathing exercises. I forget now the theoretical basis for this gulping of air. There was some fourth-hand Yoga thrust to it. I was in a health phase: Tingling of the soma, quiet in the mind. In one…two…three…four…five…six…seven out. I remember the count of seven. It all went out in a rush. It was bad air, anyway. The rib cage was stretched to its limits. One vaguely guessed that one felt unworldly at least for the count of seven.
‘Purpose? Space where I can breathe deeply.’
‘Don’t you breathe in the space you have? Marinson, Entry Four?’
Yes, I hear the note of sarcasm. The Marinson—well known to be one of the buildings in New Haven that is not bad to live in. The same flat tone as before; the jibe is almost hidden. But I hear it, and hearing it is like going through a door. I enter a new chamber of this interview. I begin to understand the nature of the test. I must learn from the whole texture of sound around me. I must admit no anger, no whine, no haste, no weeping. My petition may be the only important one that has ever been made at these windows.
6
WHAT CAN ONE person do alone? My mother, who thought that humanity was perfectible, gave herself to a life of committees for improvement. There were certain committees she had to join, some in my sick father’s stead—our obligatory committee of fifteen, our block committee, an endless train of school committees; but she also volunteered for many, many others. I remember the often-repeated scene—like a sharply defined episode in a recurring dream—of her return to our Howe Street room from the meetings of these groups. The door would fly open and its foot would crash against the rubber-tipped doorstop beside the stove; the whole door would creak in protest. Mother would be standing in the doorway, a bag of groceries under an arm—one unfathomable bluejay look at Father, one at me. Not a word. Outwardly she was as serene as ever. In she came and over-carefully closed the door, leaned back against it a moment, took one resolute step forward, set the groceries gently down on the stove top, and moved toward the wall closet. She lifted a hand to the back of her neck to unzip her committee dress. Zip! She had a strange way of parting her teeth and sucking her lips into her mouth, so she would get no lipstick on her dress as she lifted it off over her head. When she grasped her dress cross-armed at the hips and raised it to curtain her face, her eyes were dry; by the time the hem rose above her head, a torrent of tears was pouring from them. That grotesque, old-womanish, wet, hollow-cheeked, sucking grimace, under the canopy of cloth held high by bare arms, was to me, and still remains, her most honest, and yes, somehow, her most beautiful countenance—the face she was obliged to make at human truth.
Later she would talk in subdued tones, in sadness rather than malice, never about agenda, actions, substance, or lack of them, but always about this one’s vanity, that one’s galloping tongue, and another’s drive for power, and later still she would gaze into my face with a look of appalling melancholy, which has haunted me ever since her death. In that gaze, the taproot of my pessimism.
* * *
—
I SAY, ‘Through part of my childhood and all of my adolescence, my father was ill. I was alone with him a great deal. His patience and courage were my bread and milk. If he had had a gift for generalization, he would have been a philosopher.’
The voice must be reading from the monitor: ‘Parkinsonism, sequel of encephalitis lethargica…’
Again it is the same tone, which says, We have this information already, this is nothing new to us—and mind you, within our infinite patience we have a little room for impatience with certain types of persons.
‘Yes,’ I say, adopting a new tone of my own, halfway between those of friendly intimacy and the indulgence one might grant a small child. ‘Yes, his hands trembled, and he walked with a peculiar gait, knees slightly bent—he shuffled. This was my father, you understand, the figure I was supposed to want to be like.’
‘What has that to do with space?’
‘I think he knew every line of Wordsworth by heart.’
‘I remind you: Petitions have a definite time allowance.’
Every utterance from behind the glass is designed to throw one off balance. I realize that a determination to be calm ruffles the surface of the calm.
I ask, ‘Are you listening to me?’
‘With some difficulty.’ Suggesting that even a bureau person has a right to rudeness.
‘Try to follow me. He also liked Hardy—the poetry, not the prose. I thought it a strange combination, Wordsworth and Hardy.’
‘You are eating up your time.’
‘My father had space. His sickness tried to pin him down, but he was strong and he made space for himself.’
‘So go make space for yourself.�
� It is listening. This answer was abrupt! Does the bureau after all have a skin that it is possible to get under?
‘That was a quarter of a century ago. There was space to make space in then. It’s different now.’
‘All spaces in the Marinson sleeping-hall are of equal size.’ A shift. Yes, we have come to the expected challenge. Why should I, rather than the next person, have more space?
‘You’re wrong. There are three different sizes.’ Single, married, married with child.
There is a pause. One can guess that the bureau does not relish being picked up on technicalities; that is the bureau’s own game. ‘All the spaces for single persons are of equal size. What do you say to that?’
I have waited for nearly four hours for this interview, and during that time…But something has changed in the texture of sound. I can hear the janitors voice, going now like a crosscut saw. This means—of course!—that Maisie’s voice is no longer a barrier. Has her time run out? Has her petition been denied? Has she left her window? I turn and look. No, she is still there. Her face is as white as a grocery bill. I am looking at the left—the humorous, the somewhat mischievous—profile of her face; the mouth is drawn down, that attractive bump above it no longer seems the gather of a half-smile. Her head is motionless, while beyond it the janitor’s rides up and down with his arguments like the head of a galloping horse.
I feel anger on Maisie’s behalf. Her petition is so benign. She wants no more than the sense of self-esteem, of superiority at worst, that would come from helping the walking wounded. The bureau has put her through an ordeal of anger and, now, of blood-drained humiliation. The time has come for me to present the argument that I am special, but my flash of anger, which is a restless afterglow of my emotion and my erection in the line, derails me, and I merely say, ‘The space for singles at the Marinson is forty-eight square inches less than the median of all single spaces in the city of New Haven.’
