That night he went down to St. Lawrence in the east end to a neighborhood where Johnny Bruno was really a great hero and where he himself was an important figure. When he climbed the long stairs to the Coq d’Or he took care to carry himself with dignity. It was a big crowded garish hall with a dance floor and a quartet. The tables were crowded with young punks in sharp suits, most of them speaking French and they laughed noisily and clowned for each other and paid no attention to Josette, the singer, but when he, Ray Conlin, made his way through the tables, leaning well back, his hands in his pockets, his head high, taking his time, he heard some young fellow say, “Hey, look, Bruno’s manager,” and he smiled slightly but didn’t turn. All around the dance floor he went toward a table where a huge smiling gray-haired man sat alone. “A little business, a little monkey business,” Ray said casually, and he sat down. They tried to hold the conversation in whispers. Ray gave the details about Harry Lane, handed over a small roll of dollars, and left his phone number for further details.
When he was outside he began to feel great pride in his resourcefulness. On the hot summer night St. Catherine was crowded. The girls drifted by with linked arms, trailed by pimply-faced boys. The middle-aged couples looked in store windows. It was Bruno’s neighborhood. So Ray swaggered and brushed through these little people who were trying to brighten their lives looking in shop windows on a hot night.
He didn’t need Mike at all, he thought. The nice part of it was that by this time everybody would be figuring that Mike ought to have had Harry beaten up long ago, and he smiled.
Now he could see that all the trouble for him at Dorfman’s had begun because he has associated himself with Mike Kon, a mistake he wouldn’t make again. Last night Mike had looked worried and old. He remembered hearing Oscar Strauss, the promoter at the Garden, saying, “There’s a rule for getting along. Never associate with people on the downgrade.” Mike Kon was definitely on the downgrade.
✧ XIX ✧
That day in Mike’s store business had been slow and at five o’clock he went into his office and took out his books so he could compare this week with the week of a year ago. The comparison told him nothing. A year ago the business had only been building. Yet aside from the comparison it had been a dull week. I’m a fool, he thought. I sit here waiting for lightning to hit me. From the back room came the sound of Willie moving around and Mike went to the door and looked in, wanting to talk to him about “The Man with the Coat” piece in the paper, yet balding Willie’s impassive face as he stood there, the tape measure around his neck, now seemed alien; in the beginning Willie had said bluntly, “What’s the matter with you, Mike? It couldn’t have been the cleaning fluid.” Even now, as their eyes met, it seemed to him Willie was pretending, in his wooden British manner, to be unaware that there had been any further trouble.
At noontime next day I.L. Singerman, himself, a short broad man with a paunch and glasses, came into the store and said he had just dropped in, being in the neighborhood, and he talked about the hot weather, the textile strike and the damned union agitators.
Looking out the window Mr. Singerman asked what was this story he had heard at the Variety Club where he had been lunching with some movie exhibitor, about a coat for Harry Lane that had fallen to pieces.
“Mr. Singerman, I told your man about that piece of lining,” Mike said.
“Mike, I’ve got money in this business.”
“So have I, Mr. Singerman. All I have in the world.”
“So why didn’t you fix the man’s coat — like that?” he said, snapping his fingers.
“I asked him to let me fix the coat.”
“So?”
“He wouldn’t. It’s just spite.”
“You asked him and he wouldn’t. Spite. Is it possible? Does it make sense? A man everybody talked about for months.”
“What could I do, Mr. Singerman? I offered to fix the coat,” Mike said, and he leaned wearily against the long oaken table.
He knew he couldn’t explain his resentment of Harry to Mr. Singerman. The man had never read a good book. His knowledge of Mr. Singerman’s basic illiteracy suddenly helped him, it made him feel sane and patient. “It’s a complicated story,” he said. “A story that has to be figured out.”
Singerman said irritably, “So why should we hear any more about the damned coat? Go to his place, speak to him in a nice way as one substantial man to another. Make him a new suit, if he wants it, with an extra pair of pants. Hand-stitching on the lapels. Make it three pair of pants. But get that coat back from him. Well, go to it,” he said grimly on the way out, and Mike moved over to the window and watched him get into his car. How quick he is to push me around, he thought, trembling. How quickly he’d drop me if he thought I had a bad name. As he watched the people hurrying by his window he longed with all his heart to get the coat back so he could fix it.
When he tried to concentrate on making a plan he thought his head would burst, then suddenly he seemed to know what he could do; he could go to Harry and say, “I was wrong in throwing up Scotty’s death at you. I’ve thought about it and I’ve come to the conclusion I’ve no real knowledge of the facts. You could be blameless.”
Then he actually felt himself blushing. To say these things against all his conviction would be intolerably unworthy of his self-respect, he thought, and what was worse, anyone who heard of him doing it would despise him. All I need to do is to hold out in Dorfman’s till he cracks, he thought.
✧ XX ✧
At that hour Harry was in his room waiting in the chair by the window, the morning paper on his knee, and the radio his landlady, Mrs. Benoit, had loaned him, playing softly. It was hot and he kept dabbing restlessly with his handkerchief at the little beads of moisture on his forehead.
He stayed in his room because he didn’t want to go to the Ritz bar, or the M.A.A. Club or to any of the old places until the issue had been settled in Dorfman’s. Every day at noontime he waited in his lonely room for two hours, and he was there for the same time after dinner, but not really according to any plan; he didn’t admit to himself that he was waiting. Yet all his faith in himself prompted him to keep on believing that someone would come soon and tell him the stand he had taken had made people realize he must have been wronged. The power of his own imagination, the truth he was sure was in everybody’s imagination seemed to him to compel someone to take this step. Someone soon would have to come. Back in his mind he hoped Mike Kon would be the one. So far nobody had come.
A knock on the door made him turn hopefully. Any step in the hall, someone outside his door, always quickened him. It was only Mrs. Benoit. “Why, come in, Mrs. Benoit,” he said, graciously. His unaffected simple goodwill always made her feel she was a dignified and interesting person. Her gray hair was curled and she was dressed to go out, and she smiled apologetically. It had been so hot last night she said, and she wondered if he had been able to sleep. While she talked she poked around the room, straightening the magazines on his table and picking up his slippers, which she put in the clothes closet. The grim, humorless woman, who knew nothing about him, had taken a liking to him. She found excuses for coming into the room when he was there, knowing he was lonely. She believed he was looking for a job. Straightening the pillows on his bed while he smiled at her, she told him she had a cousin who was an insurance company executive; he needed someone to translate the French correspondence into English, and had told this cousin about the young man staying with her who spoke perfect French. “You could do it at home,” she said, “and it would carry you over. Why don’t you go over there now and see him?”
“Why, I will,” he said. “I’ll go down there right now,” and he thanked her.
On the way out he stopped and thought, to carry me over, and he smiled, and the radio was still playing. Mrs. Benoit hadn’t turned it off. He went down the street and across the square, and there were pigeons waddling on the walk, and he remembered the day he had crossed the square with Scotty Bowman. In the i
nsurance company office he talked with Mrs. Benoit’s cousin, a plump jolly man with a little black mustache and round bright eyes. “Harry Lane. Oh, Harry Lane,” he said, as if trying to remember, and then suddenly, half turning away he smiled. Waiting uneasily, Harry flushed. But the man told him he could have the work; he told him what he wanted done. But his smile, the way he had placed him with the smile, remembering something he had heard, bothered Harry till he got outside. Then he thought suddenly; no one used to smile remembering something they had heard or read about me and Scotty Bowman. It was only a little thing for the man was a stranger, yet it seemed to be remarkably significant. In that man’s smile, he told himself, there certainly hadn’t been any of that old uneasy resentment. The more he thought of it the more hopeful he felt, and for a change he went to a movie and when he got home, after eating, he telephoned Annie Laurie and told her about the job. From now on he would have a little income, he said, something to tide him over. They should celebrate, she said gaily, there was a circus in town, how would he like to take her to the circus, and he said he would be right over. Then he went to the window and looked out; it had clouded up. The window curtains hung straight and still. It might rain. Rain might end the unseasonable heat but he didn’t want anything to spoil the few free careless hours he could have at the circus before it was time to go to Dorfman’s.
The circus was on the outskirts of town and it was much cooler even under the lanes of lights than it was in the city, and he liked the way she walked through the crowd in her yellow dress. It was not a big circus, the side shows were nothing, although in the main tent there were three old clowns that made Annie Laurie laugh like a young girl. The Ferris wheel was small. Then they found the little red cars with the rubber bumpers and the unpredictable steering wheels and they took to them; for ride after ride he tried to master the tricky steering wheel. In the small area the cars bumped crazily into each other while the drivers tried to avoid a jam in the middle of the floor. Again and again Harry crashed into three other cars, though he jiggled the steering wheel frantically, yet he was always happy-eyed and laughing; he couldn’t successfully disengage the car and back out. “Look at me, Harry, look at me!” Annie Laurie screamed suddenly. Waving grandly she cruised freely around the other uncontrolled little cars, and twice again she circled them serenely before the ride was over. “Well, anyway, one of us did it,” he said, taking her arm and walking her toward the hamburger booth. “I guess it’s one of those things a woman is good at.” “Sour grapes,” she said. “I do the right things and crash into everybody,” he protested. “You do all the wrong things and sail merrily on your way.”
Sitting down at the counter stool he suddenly looked at his wristwatch and was uneasy, then their eyes met, and she knew he was thinking of getting to Dorfman’s on time, but she was afraid to say she wished he didn’t have to go there tonight. Now they never spoke of Mike Kon. While she was eating her hamburger he watched her, smiling to himself. He liked the enjoyment in her eyes and the way her small tongue touched her lips, and the way she kept moving the shoulder straps of her dress on her warm bare shoulders.
“You know, I have such a good appetite,” she said, swinging round on the stool. “I know I, too, am going to live to be an old woman.”
“You too?”
“Well, I had three uncles and they all lived to be over ninety. So in the family there’s this longevity or lonjevity, which is it, Harry?”
“It’s like lonjevity.”
“But why? It doesn’t make sense. Long is long.”
“Of course it doesn’t make sense,” he said. “But long is from an old Anglo-Saxon word, and longevity had a Latin source.”
“Well, fancy anyone knowing that. How about your people?”
“Both my mother and father died young.”
“Which one are you like?”
“Well, I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully, his elbows on the counter as he reflected. “They were very different in every way.” Gradually, as he remembered, he began to look troubled, and she waited. Finally his head went back proudly, “In their different ways they both had great self-esteem.” Then he seemed to be bothered by some implication in his own words, and he looked at her, expecting some comment, the stubborn light in his eyes. But she didn’t know what he wanted her to say.
He had looked at his watch for the third time like a man who knew he was going to be late for an appointment he did not really want to keep, and she turned away quickly, moved and understanding he was happy there and didn’t want to go to Dorfman’s; all his natural generosity was against it. He had picked up a paper napkin and was wiping his mouth. Out of the corner of her eye she watched him, then again she had to turn away from his silence and his ravaged face to hide the tears that came to her eyes, and hide too her knowledge that he was struggling with his pride which was driving him to Dorfman’s. In the uneasy silence between them the strident brassy music from the merry-go-round seemed to be far away. And while he struggled with himself she felt the anguish of half understanding, just by way of feeling and the look in his eyes, that his innocence which, in spite of his war years and his background, had made him Scotty’s dupe, the innocence which he had asserted and which everybody had rejected, had turned into a monstrous pride, and it was driving him on.
“The smell of that food cooking there isn’t right for such a hot night, come on,” he said, awkward and apologetic, and they started home.
On the way he said to her, “I’ve noticed something, Annie Laurie. When I suggest we eat someplace you always name a little place in the east end. Or we go to some place like this circus. Out-of-the-way places. Why?”
“Well, you don’t want to be seen everywhere with me, Harry?”
“Why don’t I?”
“In a little while you’ll want me to drop out of your life.”
“Annie Laurie, till the day I die I want you to be somewhere in my life.”
“Oh, you’ll drift back to your own place, the place you should have in this town. I can see that coming. It started today with that little job,” she said.
“Why not? Why not?” he said, then they both kept their thoughts to themselves. All evening she had been aware of his hopeful cheerfulness; now she was thinking that underneath his anger and disgust with so many people was his naturally optimistic nature prompting him to grasp at some happy little sign, like the talk with the insurance man, to strengthen his faith in himself and his imagination. He, on the other hand, was wondering if she believed his cheerfulness hid some despair and was trying to cheer him up, and suddenly he smiled at her.
When they got to her place it was only eleven, but she said she was going to bed. Standing at her door, half in the shadow, she laughed. “I’ll dream that everybody in town drives a little red car with a broken steering wheel. Everybody but me, Harry.” “Good night,” he said, and he kissed her. “I should get some sleep myself.” Still, she didn’t ask him where he was going.
He looked ahead at the light over Dorfman’s. Each night it got a little harder for him to go in, and now, the same as last night, he thought of his father and mother and how they used to go to Dorfman’s. There it was just ahead with its door under the wrought-iron light, a place full of familiar memories, always touching him so freshly now, and troubling him: it was that time when he was nineteen, a month after he had started college, and he had gone in there and had seen his father standing at the bar in his gray suit, his hair prematurely white, and wearing a red tie, and he had been embarrassed. Beckoning to him, his father had said to Alfred, “If my son is going to come to this bar, Alfred, then he should have his first drink here with you and me.”
Night after night in those days he had been there and had seen his father coming downstairs from the Peacock dining room. What would they say if they could see me in there tonight, he thought, looking at the slits of light coming from the curtained windows. No, they’d be with me, he thought. His father, a little flamboyant and explosive, would curse the
shame of the whole thing and shout, “By God, you’re my son, Harry, don’t let them do this to you,” and his mother, her fine blue eyes fierce with indignation, would say, “I’d never be ashamed of anything you do, Harry, if you believe it’s right.”
Maybe Mike Kon won’t be there tonight, he thought. Each night he said this hopefully to himself before turning in at the steps, and each night he felt a little more optimistic. Now he wanted this to be the one night when he could go in and sit there with the time passing till finally everyone realized that Mike had not shown up. If this could only happen two or three times in a row, he told himself, it would mean that Mike had grown ashamed of sitting there in his presence. It had to happen. All the signs were there. The focus of attention had shifted from him to Mike and therein lay the significance of the whole thing. The others, with their laughter, their derision and kidding, were putting it up to Mike. Soon there would be nothing for Mike to do but return from the place, laughed out of court, as the spokesman for Scotty Bowman, or come to him, shamefaced and good-natured, and try and negotiate a truce. In a sudden flight of fancy he seemed to see Mike coming over to him saying, “I can see how a man can get himself in a bad light with people. Maybe they don’t want to believe me, I don’t know. This could ruin me, just as people talking have tried to ruin you. Only a badly wronged man would go on like you do, Harry. Maybe I had no right to jump to conclusions.” If Mike could only have the simple human charity to make this gesture, it would be enough, he thought, and he could stop wearing the coat, for people would ask Mike what had happened, and Mike would have to explain; with these explanations of the dropping of his accusations, Mike, whether he liked it or not, would really become his advocate.
The Complete Stories of Morley Callaghan Page 23
