This Old Heart of Mine

by Thomas Berger

  “Now,” said Mr. Mainwaring, “I’ll tell you. Now that will be pure grape, Mr. Hart—”

  Splendor peevishly tapped a fork against his own glass. “Reinhart, Father.”

  “Now I tell you I am in the wrong,” Mr. Mainwaring said to the guest. “Now I never call a man out of his name.”

  “Father,” said Splendor, “I’m sure that Carlo Reinhart is wondering, as am I, why you must start every sentence with the word ‘now’. When do you think these remarks take place if not in the present, namely now?”

  Embarrassed, Reinhart said: “Go on, Mr. Mainwaring. I don’t mind the ‘now’s.’ Without them I’d think maybe you meant last year, wouldn’t you, Loretta?”

  She looked at her brother and said—

  Her long-awaited speech had been at the very point of utterance when Splendor, who would not be denied at his own table, arose in a clatter and a huff, and removed to the kitchen.

  “Grape, Mr. Mainwaring? How nice,” was Reinhart’s banal attempt to step into the breach. His original plan had been to ascertain whether Loretta had trod them with her little umber feet, which however, as she too now got up, to collect the soup bowls, he noticed were not small but rather long and wearing high, crooked heels.

  Nor was Mr. Mainwaring to be encouraged to sedition, though he put down his pipe, seized a cracker, and demolished it à la mode de Reinhart, a kind of allegiance, but with never a sound except those issuing from his dentures, which could be termed independent of his essence.

  The meat course was thin strips of beef reduced to charcoal. Splendor called it “London broil,” no doubt something he had got onto in the British Isles, though Reinhart could not confirm it, having himself eaten only fish & chips in England, from a folded newspaper. In accompaniment were peas, once frozen, green as poison, hard as jade; french-fried potatoes, still frozen more or less; and a dessert of butterscotch pudding all air, over a circle of sponge cake to which no exception was just. Namely^ Reinhart liked it, having a sweet tooth. Thus he ended the meal with a good taste in his mouth—until the coffee came in a midget cup, from which it oozed onto his palate in its own excruciatingly good time, being thick, bitter, and heavy, a sort of molasses distilled from bile.

  For the coffee they went into the living room. Splendor called the formidable decoction “Turkish,” and Reinhart shaped his grimace into a resemblance of approval and praised it, though no more than the rest of the meal. Splendor lighted like a marquee and, taking the queer pot he had brought along to the chairside table, refilled his guest’s cup. That was the unhappy reward for hypocritical charity—yet it wasn’t, for Splendor began to talk with such enthusiasm that Reinhart saw he wouldn’t have to drink it.

  “Carlo Reinhart,” said Splendor, “Carlo, Carlo Reinhart. In Spreading the News. Extraordinary. Ah, to have such a memory! Wonderful. How nice to have you as guest.” He had lost completely the hint of haunt that characterized him at the garage. “So you liked our humble fare? Loretta is the routine cook, I take over on special occasions, Mother is gone.”

  Reinhart knew not how to look, since he understood the statement to mean Mother is dead—and everybody hereabouts, apparently now including the West Side, pretended death was merely an absence—but Splendor suggested no bereavement. Loretta and Mr. Mainwaring: one looked at the rug, the other at the ceiling. Reinhart was conscious of the fundamental gutlessness of the overstuffed chair into which in deference to its sorry state he had lowered, rather than dumped, himself.

  Splendor elevated his own thimble, drained it, placed it smartly upon a chipped china tray of the same substance as the cup, and Loretta humbly took the coffee things and vanished.

  Mr. Mainwaring rose. “Will you be wanting me further, Son?”

  “Have you finished your Turkish, Father?”

  “All the way to the scum, Son. Now I never do with that, cause it’s all grainy like dust done got into the pot.” He shuffled to the hall door—strange, for he had been most nimble in the alley—and got out the old pipe. “Begging your pardon.”

  “Exasperating man!” Splendor blurted when his father had gone. “I understand he arranged things so that you would be a witness to his arson. Don’t worry, the insurance company knows him of yore and will simply ignore the claim. You can assure your own father of that.”

  “My dad,” said Reinhart, “insures persons, not things; he would be interested only if you set fire to a man.” Immediately he regretted the bad taste of his joke, and compensated for it by lighting one of his cheap cigars and, seeing Splendor’s nose go up at the first expulsion of smoke, realized that it was hardly better. “But how awful! Now he hasn’t got a car or the money either.”

  “Believe me, Carlo, that vehicle—” Splendor coughed dramatically into a fist—“hasn’t run since last year. Had it been in operating order, the owner would never have sold it to Father.” With his habitual gesture he struck himself in the forehead, where Reinhart noticed for the first time there was a vertical groove from his hairline to the upper root of the nose, as if years of similar batterings, begun as an infant when the skull was still plastic, had impressed it.

  Reinhart hastened to snub out the offending cigar, choosing as receptacle a complex objet de rebut made of oyster shells, pipe cleaners, turquoise paint, and shellac, commemorating Atlantic City. Here as elsewhere these days you couldn’t tell an ashtray without a scorecard, and he had made a terrible mistake. For Splendor dashed across the room as if he would high jump through the window, seized the object, and yelled for his sister. Reinhart expected momentarily to be assaulted for violating a sacred fetish.

  Loretta appeared through the bead curtain by half, forever in emergence, forever suspended, a warm nucleus to the cold sun from the dining room, the jet beads washing over her inferior shoulder like black rain. Splendor thrust the souvenir at her, crushing it in his fist, which took no great strength, for it was a sorry little thing of no stability of craftsmanship—and yet it was suddenly very dear and beautiful to Reinhart.

  “I told you to destroy that monstrosity!” said Splendor. His hand eluded hers outstretched to take it, and dropped the shells upon the floor, where they did not break but rather rolled, crazy yet living, beneath the couch.

  “Get it!” ordered Splendor. Loretta raised her dress above the knees and knelt upon the carpet. Reinhart thought he would die when he saw three inches of her bare thighs. Before he knew what he was doing, he ejaculated “No, no, no,” and crawled there beside her. He found time to be astonished that his hand under the couch encountered none of the balled-and-feathered filth that was standard under-furniture landscape in his own home. Splendor, overwrought, seemed to have left the room. Reinhart’s free hand, which sought to push Loretta up, was suddenly bitten by her beautiful pearl teeth; she socked him, as well, with considerable force, in the shoulder. He took these aggressions with a leaping heart: she was not indifferent to him. His hand smarted with love pangs; he withdrew it to rub it with the other and saw her little red brand forming: the Clenched Teeth Ranch, where never was heard an encouraging word. Free of his obstruction, she wriggled head and shoulders beneath the couch, and her skirt worked up…. Reinhart rose, fat and old, and went away, because lust was always being a spendthrift with his spirit. What a silly thing to do, to fall in love with a Negress. He sought out the hassock and fell upon it, it squirting sawdust, and deplored everything, including his vocabulary: the female suffix made her sound like an animal and he Clyde Beatty, whereas the reverse was the true state of affairs. His great difficulty lay in reconciling superficial desire, which was stirred in him by almost any member of the recessive sex, with this holy yearning, which he could not recall having felt for anyone before, toward Loretta. She was so pure, so whole, so simple, as well as so mistreated. He could have beaten Splendor to a pulp for it, but that would have confused the issue.

  When Loretta emerged from under the sofa and gave him a dirty look, he interpreted her ill will as anyone else’s tendresse and smiled sadly, sw
eetly.

  He beseeched her: “May I have that to keep?”

  She took stock of his hulk, considered the shells in one hand and then threw the other across her face and giggled behind it till tears coursed shining across her cheekbones: pretty, pretty, pretty, insane. She melted through the beads, as does butter into a waffle, leaving behind the same sheen.

  Splendor returned through the hall door, carrying a bottle of brandy the color of Loretta and two glasses. “Courvoisier,” he said as if he had never been other than dispassionate. “I drink nothing else in the way of cognac. And you?”

  Reinhart nodded vigorously, wondering whether these alternations of mood were generally Negroid or peculiarly Splendroid.

  The host decanted two inches of brandy into each glass, which looked to be ex-jam: Splendor would spend a fin or so for the Courvoisier, which once drunk was gone forever, yet not a dime for a real wine glass at Woolworth’s; this to Reinhart was curious.

  “The same with clothing,” Splendor went on illogically. “You buy something of good quality, it will never wear out or go out of style. These silly people who buy cheap and soon discard!”

  “Not me,” said Reinhart, still on his hassock. “I buy cheap and wear it forever.” He accepted the brandy from his friend and waited for a toast, not being the sort of fellow who would suggest one on his own.

  “Well, that’s another way,” said Splendor in tolerant good humor. He took the wingback chair that, being the piece with most gravity, was manifestly his, conspicuously inhaled the bouquet from his jam glass and then without drinking placed it alongside him on an end table that swayed at the contact. Just above his head on the wall behind was the framed picture of a cockeyed fat rogue in red, the size of a full page in Life magazine, which in fact it had once been: Raphael’s portrait of Cardinal Tomasso Somebody, according to the caption, which slightly nearsighted Reinhart, who had impatiently glutted some brandy as if it were the grape wine of recent memory and thus developed a sudden telescopic sight, remarkably could read from where he sat. Botticelli’s Venus on the Half Shell, which hung on another wall, he of course recognized. The brandy went down like a whole loaf of bread.

  “You are interested in pictures?” asked Splendor. “Art? I suppose it goes without saying, considering your devotion to the drama.”

  “Oh yes,’ said Reinhart, who had felt drunk on arrival and now, with mixed alcohols in his belly, was sobering and therefore assumed his host’s inconsistencies, disjunctions, and non sequiturs to be rather his own. “But I haven’t applied myself with anywhere near the proper—uh, application.”

  “And music, no doubt, as well. Sound.” Splendor imbibed some brandy and circulated it throughout his mouth, swallowing it finally as a giraffe might a cantaloupe, with bugged eyes and an agonized chin putting traction on his neck. Indeed he was the most ingenious caricature, the question was of what? “I could put on a record, André Kostelanitz Plays the Waltzes of Johann Strauss or Ferdy Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite—”

  “You wouldn’t have any jazz?” asked Reinhart, to put him at ease.

  “I wouldn’t permit that trash in the house,” Splendor said. “And I take it you make mention only in jest. Filthy stuff. The very name signifies sexual coition, and the lyrics to every song are Negro code for more of the same. This is what love has degenerated to. Your average fellow nowadays turns with a sneer from something beautiful, gracious, and solemn like the Lord’s Prayer as sung by Igor Gorin, which might provide an access to supernal realms, soaring above earthly shackles which bind us here below to animal pursuits which fittingly are termed by the ancients ‘the beast with two backs.’ I think, that can be found in Droll Stories, by Honoré de Balzac.”

  Reinhart shrugged.

  “That is to say, real love,” Splendor explained, “and freedom, which are one and the same. As to sex, that is no more than a foul captivity, as Count Leo Tolstoy has pointed out in the Crootzer Sonata.”

  All this while the initially faraway sound of a radio had been creeping closer. A sudden increase of volume established it as directly overhead; its program was apparently Gangbusters: there sounded sirens, whistles, and simulated machine-gun fire, and among these a portentous voice. Splendor found a cane beneath his chair and with it pounded furiously upon the ceiling. The din diminished gradually, decibel by decibel.

  “Father,” Splendor said, and pointed with his cane, which was banded in a metal foil commemorating the Great Lakes Exposition of 1937. “But to go on. Here we have what is established as the conditions of existence, and here”—he had indicated two articles of furniture, Reinhart’s hassock and his own chair, the first being the conditions of existence and the other—“man standing naked in his loneliness, and the ‘standing’ is significant. The best science believes it is a mistake that he arose from all four to the two back feet; apparently the internal organs are affected thereby adversely, hanging along the line of the body rather than the vice versa for which they were intended by Nature, namely, at right angles to the longitudinal axis of the body, in the fashion of animals; hence your heart trouble, intestinal malfunctions, and even corns of the feet, since they bear twice the load for which they were designed.”

  To humor him Reinhart asked: “You then advocate going on all fours?”

  “Not in the least!” said Splendor, listening with cocked ear to the last strain of dying sound overhead. “How you catch me up on my general observations! We’ll make a great team.”

  “For what?” demanded Reinhart, worried, and quickly drank his remaining brandy.

  “Have you,” asked Splendor, who had taken his seat again under Cardinal Tomasso’s eyes looking in two directions—his own bulged beneath narrow-slit lids, rather crocodilian—“have you ever longed to Break Through?”

  Now Reinhart began to suspect, my God, that the man was a fairy; he knew that queers habitually believed themselves prisoners in a Dachau of heterosexuality operated by the Amazon SS.

  “I mean,” Splendor went on, “to soar.”

  That did it. Reinhart rose and moved toward the hallway exit.

  “Notice,” said Splendor, “in your demonstration, how gravity impedes locomotion. Do you realize how many pounds of air we carry on our shoulders? No wonder arthritis, rheumatics, and assorted diseases of the bone.”

  Not only did Reinhart realize he had been wrong, but also Mr. Mainwaring suddenly crept in from the hall, apparently in search of his tobacco. He looked up at Reinhart with the most touching sympathy.

  “Rheumatic in a man you size! Ah, misery! Pity ain’t in Jawgia. Some blue clay like they done got in Jawgia and rep you in it like a feesh, lay you bake in the sun, poison come outn the bones, that clay come hard as stone, got to chip you out with a sledge, you be just fine except you was hit by that sledge in the taking out, but I tell you this, you ain’t got the rheumatic no more. That be all you could do this side of the witch woman, say my old granddaddy.” Mr. Mainwaring stooped to a little bookcase alongside the sofa and from between Papini’s Life of Christ and a bright copy of Mein Kampf, by Adolf Hitler, got a tobacco can, filled his old pouch, and from the pouch loaded his pipe.

  “Vox populace,” sneered Splendor when he had gone. “Populace wult dessippi. ‘The people yearn to be deceived.’ In this district there are, at quick count, ten evangelists, five voodoo centers, and more palmists and phrenologists than groceries.”

  Mr. Mainwaring poked his sleek little head back into the room. “You boys done miss a good show on the Gingbuster. Man done drive up and down a street shooting a masheegun inside ever house. Dint know none of them people inside, just wanted to do bad. Just a bad man is all he was, couldn’t hep it, just shot that masheegun laughin’ like a fien’.”

  Ignoring him, Splendor said: “Some explain this by the cheap pseudo philosophy of the malcontent, namely the writer Karl Marx, who you should always remember suffered from carbuncles and rectal hemorrhoids and because of these discomforts was led to sell his birthright for a mess of pot
ash. But there occasionally emerges an individual who is peculiarly gifted, call it science or sacred as you will-Father, you can stand there all night, but you won’t get a drop of brandy from me.”

  “Just believed I’d take a try, Son,” said the elder Mainwaring and withdrew for good.

  Splendor went on: “Who breaks through. Who strikes through the mask of appearances to the underlying reality. Such a man is Lorenz T. Goodykuntz of Pocatello, Idaho, and had further written about it in a series of books published by himself at a dollar seventy-five per copy, as well as a monthly journal entitled Enlight, as well as operating a noted college.”

  “Such a man,” said Reinhart, reseating himself, “is, I suppose, not known to anybody but a handful of devoted followers.”

  “To the contrary, he has world-wide renown, with honorary degrees from Harvard, Princeton, and has been decorated, among others, by the sovereign of Andorra. And I can explain your not having heard of him only by a brief mention of his powerful enemies—the American Medical Association, the Methodist Episcopal Church, General Motors Company, and the State Health Commissioner of Delaware—who have sworn to run him off the face of the earth, for such a man cannot swing a sword without leaving scars. I mean to lend you his literature.”

  “I look forward to it,” said Reinhart, who was dying of thirst and had hoped Mr. Mainwaring would get some brandy so that he might be offered another drink of it himself.

  “Well,” said Splendor, looking sheepishly pleased, “since I see you’re sympathetic, I can reveal that my story of this morning was at a salient point false. I did not just come by this art of healing—that’s the kind of thing an ignorant Negro like Father would believe. I took a correspondence course from Dr. Goodykuntz which cost 225 dollars and consumed the major part of a year, a lesson arriving every Saturday, and having completed my final examinations last week, am expecting any day a certificate for the degree of D.N.M., which is to say, Doctor of Nonchemical Medicine.”