This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “Have a lozenge?” asked Dad, producing a white paper bag.

  No, it was too horible. Reinhart seized the olive-drab bag instead and hurried his pop down the ramp towards the car park. Lozenges! What could be more telling? In the old days Dad habitually chewed caramels; obviously now his teeth were gone with the vanished years 1942–45. Reinhart had distinctly heard a hideous clicking, and nothing around the station front was loose. Reinhart was grateful for his own lack of condition and tried to look even fatter, weaker, whiter, and more slovenly as he ambled slowly so his puffing father could keep stride.

  Nevertheless they had gone but halfway when Dad seized his arm and failingly groaned: “I can’t walk too fast, being not as young as arsewhile—on guard, here comes a taxi!” He sprang in terror upon the curb and almost collapsed on the footwalk. In the little things which menaced no one else he was a great coward. As a boy Reinhart could never hold a pocketknife, even closed, without hearing his father’s augury of accidental bloodshed; had never ejected a pea through a shooter without a warning of punctured eyeballs. Preparing to go to the corner letterbox, his father issued a formal farewell; in the hundred yards between here and there were possibilities of lightning, drunken drivers who might leap the curb, hydrophobic Airedales, and that legendary staple of quiet neighborhoods, the ordinary householder who suddenly goes mad as an elephant in must, ignites his window curtains, and attacks passersby with a Stillson wrench. If you cross your eyes in horseplay, they might lock so. Sitting on concrete will give you piles. A jovial backslap will dislocate a spine. He who lifts stacked newspapers is a ruptured man. Never drink milk while eating fish: your bowels will worm. One drink of champagne makes you reckless; a second and you’re out like a light, and someone will rifle your pockets. Remove the screens by the first frost, or a burglar will assume you’re on a late vacation and make violent entry. Never lower your guard before the relatives or they will apply for a loan.

  Walking in the deep gutter as compromise, Reinhart said to his father, up on the walk—they were now the same height—“I never did find Granpa’s family in Germany.”

  Immediately his dad recovered from the fright, and indeed Reinhart had only mentioned it as therapy.

  “Guess you lost no sleep over that.” The son of a native Berliner, his father knew as much German as he did Patagonian. He also had about as much in common with his own son as he had with F. D. Roosevelt, whom he had voted against four times. Yet walking there both below him and on his level—the complexities of physics having some reference to the moral order—Reinhart realized his fundamental feeling towards his father was not contempt, as it had seemingly been from roughly the age of sixteen to approximately five minutes ago. He did not much like him, but he probably loved him.

  “Dad?”

  “Huh?” His father warily edged towards the spiked winter shrubbery on the far side of the pavement. Another fluorescent lamp, the usual undertaker, jutted from a high post like an opening straight razor; good old right angles had been everywhere outmoded since Reinhart donned the knapsack and marched away.

  “Dad, do you mind? We haven’t shaken hands yet.” Reinhart put out his large right, with the dirty nails.

  “Is that the thing to do?”

  “Who gives a damn?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t stand in the street—here comes another cab!” He referred to a vehicle at the entrance to the esplanade, a good quarter mile away.

  “O.K.,” answered Reinhart. “I wouldn’t want to hurt it.” He climbed to the sidewalk and took his dad’s hand and squeezed it until the taxi passed them. Whether his father returned the emotion he didn’t know—for Reinhart’s fist was bigger than everybody else’s and perforce commanded every shaking—but the old chap’s head came entirely out of his coat collar for the first time. He had not shaved well, and some of his whiskers were white. He smelled of Aqua Velva, as of yore.

  “Dad, you know what David Copperfield’s aunt once said to him? ‘Never be mean, never be false, never be cruel.’ You never have been, and I guess that makes you unique.”

  They had arrived at a point where they had no option but to cross the roadway to the parking lot.

  “That’s very considerable of you, Carlo,” said Dad, “but in this place, look out that a car don’t back over you without a signal.”

  Reinhart’s father drove the gray sedan slow as a hearse; otherwise it bore no resemblance to your typical funeral wagon, being drab and small. The man who in life drives a Chevrolet, in death is chauffeured in a splendid Cadillac like a South American dictator. Reinhart could not shake off the mortuary suggestions, for which he blamed the Stygian approaches to his bailiwick. He only wished he had got a little jar of instant Golden Bough. Certainly they passed enough delicatessens, even a supermarket or two burning bright in the forests of the night; here people trapped particolored containers and pushed them around in wire cages on wheels.

  They passed taverns full of testy men glowering into tumblers served up by morally enervate bartenders. The waitress in a chili parlor wore a nurse’s white cap and a butcher’s apron gory with catsup. Some strange howling unruly animals under a streetlamp proved to be pubescent males. From the public-library door sidled a small, bug-eyed man, clutching his guide to poisons. At one corner an inebriate confessed down the slot of a postal box to a midget priest within, but before they got the green and Dad shuddered into low, the drunk finished his peccavi and prepared to sin again, hooting obscenities at their rear tires, which smooth as eggs habitually lost traction on the streetcar rails.

  “How many miles on your heap now?” asked Reinhart.

  Wincing at a boor’s bright headlights, which violated a law never enforced—his father said: “Whatever you see on the speedometer, plus a hundred thousand.” And then swallowing and blinking, sprang his surprise: he waited on the list for a new convertible.

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Yes I am,” Dad admitted smugly, then had to shy the car from a suicidal dog, missing it but almost killing the vehicle: a piece of metal, probably the motor, clattered behind on the trolley-car rails. Reinhart decarred and went to fetch the part, only a hubcap; even Dad’s accidents, like his humor, were innocuous. Declining to squat upon the blacktop and fit it to the wheel while passing autos singed his posterior cheeks, Reinhart tossed it onto the rear seat and got back in in time to hear the end of what he assumed to be the comments Dad had started earlier, for his old man was habitually oblivious to whether or not anyone heard him, being utterly without ambition. “… a standard two-door is good enough for me.”

  His tone reminded Reinhart of a second parent, the woman of their threesome, who whenever he had brought home a college friend stated across the dinner table: “Start right in. We’re just plain folks here,” seeing it as something to brag about.

  They had come to the colored ghetto west of town and as they waited for another light a slender Negress minced diagonally across corners, articulating in the midsection of the best ball bearings extant since the Eighth Air Force razed the factories at Schweinfurt. She was all girl.

  “Look at those coons,” wistfully noted Dad, being plural because he meant a group of male hangers-on in front of a drugstore, digging each other’s ribs, yacking and saying Man! twelve times a minute. “They sure have fun.” But just as well nothing fell from the car in that district, for he would have been scared to let Carlo get out and retrieve it; even more fun for a black man than standing before a windowful of trusses and Lifeboy, was to assault lone Caucasians.

  So much for the old man, who was free, white, and past fifty. As they neared home, Reinhart’s concern was his mother, a person who could be rather formidable if she caught you in the uncalloused places.

  “How’s Maw?”

  “About time,” answered his male progenitor. This was the only theme upon which he was capable of even a minor remonstrance. “She’s thought of nothing but you for the past three years. You know you’re all she’s got.”

>   “Poor woman,” said Reinhart sarcastically. “What about you?”

  “Ah, what am I?” Dad paused a moment to strip the gears. “But a very old geezer.”

  They turned left at the Presbyterian church which looked like a fire-house; passed the high school, which looked like a church, and a pencil factory that resembled Christ’s College, the alma mater of many old poets, in some textbook illustration; and finally the town hall, looking by God like what it was, the air cigar-blue in the lighted upstairs windows. Reinhart suddenly chose now as the time to wonder what he was doing here at all, at this precise moment in late February 1946, at 9:31 P.M., alongside an inappropriate father, bumping over streets not germane to his idea of his own identity, approaching an irrelevant home. Every atom of the human substance has been renewed in the course of seven years: a hundred of Reinhart’s pounds were of another meat than he had carried away, and this change was little beside that of the spirit. In the school yard he saw his grammar-school self in dunsel cap and leather boots waterproofed with neat’s-foot oil smelling like a wet hound; he toted an oilcloth bookbag in the depths of which a banana was turning black. From a candy-store doorway slouched Reinhart the adolescent, who suffered from unprovoked hard-ons and blotches of the forehead, and wore a fake press card in the ribbon of his hat. Through the last three blocks, residential, level as a bowling alley, deserted now except for an impatient man roped to a pet doing its business, walked an apparition of College Carlo, hitchhiked home for the weekend, supercilious, penniless, flunking.

  They pulled into the driveway on parallel tracks of concrete, divided by a strip of grass Reinhart had once been commissioned to trim weekly. He stared at a vision of the squatting boy in merciless sunshine. Art thou there yet, truepenny? The lad thumbed his nose. Night returned, and Reinhart, fat, twenty-one, a veteran, was Home.

  His father was all for slinking around to the back door like a felon, his usual mode of entry, but ceremonious Reinhart demanded the front. On the way around, they saw under the nearest streetlamp the man walking the spaniel, which was the inevitable neurasthenic quaking with emotional ague. In great disgust Reinhart recalled them both: Claude Humbold, a realtor with whom his father was in some kind of cahoots, writing insurance for the houses Humbold peddled, and Popover, the dog.

  The latter salivated over Reinhart’s combat boots while the former, who wore a red balloon for a face and had painted on it a hairline mustache, shouted in the timbre of a washtub being kicked, though coming so close he clipped Reinhart’s gut with an elbow: “Hiya Georgie!”

  “I’ll be a son of a bitch,” said Reinhart as Humbold managed at the same time both to walk through him and ignore him. But as of yore he went unheard, Humbold’s rubber soles sucking the pavement and letting go in a series of deafening belches. This man was his old nightmare, and he should have known that small things like a war, reaching manhood, going halfway around the world, etc., were like taking aspirin for syphilis.

  “I must say,” said Dad, “that next to your mother there goes the human being who thinks more of you than anybody.”

  “Yeah?” asked Reinhart on the porch steps. “What about you?”

  “Ah,” said Dad, “you’ll be buried in pauper’s field if you got no more assets than me.” He fished beneath his overcoat for a key with which to free the door he locked against wandering brigands—poor cutthroat who would break in and face Maw!

  “Wipe your shoes!” commanded a martial, metallic voice as they crossed the threshold. Its source then receded, taking with it his father, into the blackness of the living room—no sense in paying the electric company for needless lights. An overstuffed chair, with pelt of mohair, attacked Reinhart in the thighs while a footstool bit his shins. When a wrought-iron bridge lamp joined the fray he surrendered and ignited his cigarette lighter. No folks, much furniture. On the radio, a photo of his maternal uncle in lodge fez, looking vicious as a Cairo procurer. In the bookshelves above the secretary desk, ninety of the World’s Hundred Best Short Stories; Volume Seven had not yet been found. Nor had the spot on the rug where the dog had once puked ever quite gone. A real kerosene lamp wired for electricity, and a fake one fitted down to a mock wick which could be elevated, flanked one another on an end table so giddy it quaked when a truck went by, to which as if castanets the windows joined with their clatter. Plastic acorns terminating the shade pulls. One shade showed a stain where it had been rained on in 1939. New shade on the bridge lamp, which had an adjustable transverse member that you could clutch and turn and play tommy gun with at an enemy behind the hassock-fortress.

  All the while Reinhart took inventory he was conscious of being stared at by a photographic image within a golden frame on the drum table behind him. If he did not face it down now, he might have to in a nightmare, where things like that always begin with the upper hand. It was the likeness of a perfect idiot of twelve, wearing hair grooved in the middle of the scalp and a degenerate grin that claimed the entire terrain south of the part. He preferred to think his visions of himself from the car were sounder than the camera’s, but unfortunately could not, being bluffed by any kind of science. Choosing the only mode of rebuke the little swine would understand, he counseled the picture: “Siss on you, pister; you ain’t so muckin fuch,” and moved into the hall, at the end of which was a glow signifying the kitchen and perhaps life.

  Dad stood behind the refrigerator, arranging for the woman known as Maw to upstage him. She held a hot iron as if she might force Reinhart to accept it in handshake, then dangled it from her pinky, for she was terribly strong. Yet Reinhart was of course larger, and perhaps threatened by that fact as he filled the doorframe, she cocked her pugnacious jaw and snarled: “Here comes six more shirts per week.”

  “Welcome home,” said Reinhart.

  Maw answered: “You should be mighty grateful you got such a lovely home to come back to.”

  He said he was, and eventually she thawed to the degree that she catalogued for him a number of catastrophes having as their principals nobody he knew. At last, too, he ascertained that his old room was still occupied by the defense worker, and Supply Sergeant Maw issued him 2 blankets and 1 pillow. He was assigned a billet on the living-room couch, to which he repaired when permitted and where, his head on one doily, socks on another, and being goosed by a loose spring, he immediately fell asleep and dreamed of love and criminality in an exotic mise en scène.

  Chapter 2

  For the next two weeks Reinhart made wan attempts to tell his European reminiscences to the folks, doing this from a sense of obligation, since as yet nobody had mentioned a word about board payment, and while he didn’t really have a room and ate only moderately (for him) of his mother’s insipid cuisine, which agreed with his intent to diet, he was certain he owed them something, though he wasn’t certain what.

  To these accounts, from which of course all sex and violence were stricken, leaving almost nothing, Dad’s reaction, or lack of it, was polite boredom and Maw’s a rude interest. Dad, with his head—now snow-capped!—in the Intelligencer’s sports pages, was privy to the personal lives of ballplayers, knew what songs they sang in the showers, when their children had scarlatina, where their wives were birthmarked. Nevertheless he said the right things at the right places: “Well, I’ll be!” “Is that right!” And even repeated the dénouement—“So Marsala gave his candy ration to the German kid”—while all the while he was actually down in Florida with Chuck Rafferty, who had reported to spring training with hemorrhoids.

  On the other hand, Maw resisted an anecdote from start to finish, no device being too extreme: stew onto tablecloth, coffee into Dad’s lap, counterstories about neighbor lads introduced just before Reinhart’s punchline, the boiling kettle with its whistle; once she caught a fork in the cloth and pulled the whole table setting to disaster, to kill a pretty meager thing about a taxi-tour of London. Yet, having taken the field, with Reinhart in total rout, she might dramatize Churchill’s In Victory, Magnanimity: dishes done, the s
cene removed to the living room, glaring at him in a kind of bellicose affinity (he being both repugnant and hers) she would demand: “Go on, what about Wallis Warfield Simpson’s house? I got to drag your stories out word for word. My, I expected when you came back from the war we could never stop you talking. Looks like the other way around!” And here, one of her rare laughs, the sound of steel wool against rust, showing strong sarcastic canines.

  That she was in many ways an impossible woman went without saying and actually suited Reinhart’s sense of himself as a highborn orphan. On the other hand, he did respect her grievance. As a girl she had showed a gift for sketching, which Philistine time and circumstance had gone on to deny her as a vocation. Art is short and life is long. No girl of her class and place became an artist. It was probable that she had yearned to be a man, and the evidence of her failure was Reinhart. Thus he, Exhibit A, could hardly condemn her, and concentrated instead on defending himself. From time to time she still drew fine-penciled heads of old-fashioned ladies with Gibson coiffures. He occasionally came across one in the margin of a woman’s magazine—these first days he spent much time sunk in apathy and overstuffed chairs, reading whatever he could reach without getting up—a gracious, shaded, high-haired head of circa 1910 hovered wraithlike above the fatuous pink housewife of a 1946 ad making an instant roast beef that hubby would never distinguish from the authentic.

  The olden time before Reinhart was born—Reinhart too was nostalgic for it when one day he realized that all Maw’s sketches were self-portraits. For a time he backslid to an earlier conviction which six months’ therapy was supposed to have obliterated: namely, that his purpose on earth was to rectify life’s dirty deals. Damn, damn, damn, his head reeled and his heart overpumped, and he lost his place in “Frost on the Hyacinths,” A Novelette Complete in This Issue, by Persephone Claxon, about a young woman named Jennifer married to a genial accountant who soon after the nuptials turns bilious, cynical, and cryptic owing to (concealed from Jennifer) the reap pearance of an old flame with whom he thought it had been finis when she fled to the Virgin Islands the year before and cabled one word: “Adios.” When Jennifer finds….