A Meaningful Life

by L. J. Davis

  “‘Raising the Imperial Standard at Cucuí, Collingwood moved toward Manaus, trapping a government column in a sharp bend of the Río Negro called "the Hinge of Fate” and virtually annihilating it. Town of Barcelos surrendered without a fight, May 2. On May 3, Sousa e Bragançatelegraphed his famous list of demands to the government (the "Declaration of Barcelos") and publicly assumed the name João VII. On May 21 Collingwood's forces were swelled by a second contingent of adventurers that appeared at Cucuí as mysteriously as the first. June 17, audacious night attack on Manaus repulsed by garrison and inhabitants. June 18, second attack on Manaus fails. June 19, Cucuíoccupied by Venezuelan troops, cutting Collingwood's line of supply and reinforcement. June 23, Barcelos abandoned in river-boats and escape attempted up the Río Branco. July 5, Catrimani captured. João calls for royalist insurrection ("Plea of Catrimani,” July 7, 1895). Catrimani abandoned, July 10. Failure of northern breakout, July 18, in Maxim gun ambush of the boats by Bôa Vista garrison. Collingwood divided his forces the following day and returned to Catrimani with the wounded and fever-stricken. July 26, surrender of Darius Collingwood to Col. Alves of the Manaus garrison. July 30, Collingwood tried by a military court, condemned, executed by firing squad, and, over the strenuous protests of the American consul, buried without honors in an unmarked grave. The fate of "João VII” is unknown.

  “‘On February 3, 1894, a band of four men, led by Collingwood's wife, the redoubtable La Piranha, reached Fort Napier, British Guiana, where they surrendered their weapons to the District Commissioner. (For details, see With Collingwood in Brasil by Archie [sic] Burritt, a survivor, whose book, while shedding absolutely no light on the mysteries surrounding the episode, gives a gripping and truly harrowing account of the overland trek of the last contingent of the so-called Imperial Brazilian Liberation Army. It would perhaps be more accurately entitled With Mrs. Collingwood in Brasil. New York, 1901.) The second Mrs. Collingwood subsequently remarried and at the moment of this writing lives in Tampa, Florida. She has four children and two grandchildren.

  “‘Darius Collingwood's watch and Brazilian journal, together with his Civil War memorabilia, may be viewed at the Society's headquarters, 37 Dean Street, Brooklyn, on the fourth floor between the hours of noon and four p.m. Ring the bell."'

  5

  “I wish to God you'd stop harping on it,” said Lowell's wife, standing in the middle of what had been Henry's room. She had a broom in one hand, and the other was holding a crumbling shoebox filled with what appeared to be petrified human shit. She took it over to the barrel in the middle of the floor and dropped it in. The barrel was filled with all manner of things that Henry had left behind, very few of them identifiable and all of them worthless. “Old what's-his-name only lived here for a couple of months. Henry lived here longer than that.”

  “Six months,” said Lowell, peeling off another huge patch of linoleum from the floor. It was more brittle and somewhat cleaner than the last layer, and he broke it into pieces before throwing it into the barrel. Lowell couldn't guess how many more layers there were, each one cleaner than the last; they seemed to go down for inches more. Henry's layer, the top one, hadn't even been a layer, properly speaking; it was a sort of jigsaw puzzle of chunks and strips and squares, usually of linoleum but almost never of the same pattern, frequently filled in with some alien substance like burlap or bathroom tile, all of it haphazardly affixed to the floor with something that appeared to be a mixture of roofing tar and vomit. Lowell had been forced to wear a handkerchief soaked in camphor over his nose as he pulled it up; he nearly suffocated, but it really cleaned out his sinuses. When he finally got the first layer pulled up, he put it in the garbage cans. The garbage men refused to take it. Next he tried to burn it in the backyard, but the stench was so horrible that he extinguished the fire even before the police and firemen arrived and served him with various summonses. It was still out there now, with a big charred pit in the middle of it where the fire had been, like some kind of squat volcano. He thought maybe he would bury it or something one of these days, but he had so many other problems that he never got around to it. He gazed at it from time to time from one of the rear windows.

  “Six months,” he said. “October to March. I don't think I'm harping on it. I think it's interesting. Don't you think it's interesting?”

  “No,” said his wife. “I don't.”

  “Bankrupt at nineteen. A colonel at twenty-three. A part of history?”

  “Who cares?” said his wife.

  Lowell shrugged pleasantly and went about his work. He had a long row to hoe, but he was industriously hoeing it. His marriage was a shambles and the house was a mess beyond his wildest dreams, but the odd thing was that, though surrounded by wreckage, he felt he was actually getting somewhere for the first time in his life. Where exactly he was getting or what he would do when he got there were matters for conjecture, but there could be little doubt that he was on his way at last. He was struggling against forces and odds. He was pulling a load. He was thinking. He was actually thinking. Using his brain, he was attacking problems that were not only relatively coherent but in some cases capable of rational achievement. He'd actually solved some of them. It was amazing, looking back, to realize how little of his life he'd spent thinking, especially when you contrasted it with all the things he was doing now. Meanwhile, of course, his marriage was going down the drain. He supposed that was bad, but he didn't think about it much, one way or the other. He just stood there and watched it go. It made him feel a little strange; not unhappy, exactly, but strange.

  The old dim pleasantness had departed from their dealings as completely as if there'd never been any to begin with, but a peculiar side effect of this development was that Lowell found himself interested in his wife's personality. He couldn't remember a time when he'd been so interested in it, not even in college, when what had principally interested him had been her ass, if the truth had to be told, although he had also concerned himself with her personality at least to the extent of finding out whether she had a good one or a bad one. He'd decided that she had a good one. Since then he'd thought about it very little except on the infrequent occasions when something seemed to go awry with it, but it always seemed to get fixed pretty quickly, and then it was all okay again, like a table whose wobble had been repaired. The rest of the time it just sort of stood there, a good and serviceable object whose height, width, length, shape, color, and approximate density were assumed to be known. You could always count on it; it was exactly the same when you returned as it was when you left, never mind those phone calls to her mother and the midnight crying fits in the bathroom. It was a good little piece of furniture. For nine years Lowell had been married to a table.

  The true villain, he realized now, was not his wife, and no doubt she would be glad to hear it, if only she would allow Lowell to talk about it one of these days; he would have to choose his words carefully. The true villain wasn't Lowell, either, although his part in the affair could scarcely be described as distinguished. The real villain was their marriage. Lowell saw it all now. Starting as a contract haphazardly entered into, their marriage gradually evolved into a kind of conspiracy to protect Lowell and his wife from the unpleasant shocks of what passed with other people as normal life. Soon it became bigger than both of them; it absorbed and simultaneously diminished them to the point that, finally, they lived almost exclusively on its terms, like citizens who have inadvertently voted a tyrant into office. It defined their roles in relation to each other, which meant that it also defined in large measure the roles they would play in relation to the world even when they were apart, preventing them from getting themselves into situations where outside forces might come into play and make them excited or discontent or something. They weren't married to each other, and it was doubtful if they ever had been, at least for long; they were married to their marriage. It was a wonderful thing. It was the most sensible arrangement imaginable. So long as you abided by its terms and never questioned
its premises, all paths were made smooth and all questions were answered, principally because you never tried to go anyplace that was hard to get to and you never asked any questions if you knew what was good for you. In the end you just sort of withered away like the state. No wonder they never had any children.

  Now Lowell had kicked over the whole structure with a single rash, intemperate, and totally uncharacteristic act, and their marriage no longer stood between them. A fat lot of good it did him. His wife just sort of stood there, looking bewildered and a little sad. Sometimes she got cross, but most of the time she just moped around and did as she was told. There was no fight in her at all, and he could not seem to get through, no matter how hard he tried. He didn't want his wife to mope and do what she was told. He wasn't exactly sure what he did want, but that sure wasn't it. He brooded about it a lot as he stood in one or the other rear window and gazed out at his linoleum volcano, but nothing useful occurred to him, which only made him brood more.

  At least one problem in his life was solved. He no longer had to worry about what to do with his time. He no longer had enough of it. Every evening he came straight over to Brooklyn from the office, changed his clothes, and started right to work, demolishing partitions and cardboard closets, ripping extension cords from the baseboards, obliterating all the fragile artifices of his impoverished predecessors with a fine unholy glee. By special arrangement with Mr. Grossman, he was allowed to commence his work of destruction before the final closing. “Yeah, go ahead,” said Mr. Grossman over the phone. “Bust up anything you like, none of it's worth a shit anyway. Might persuade some of them holdouts to leave. Save us a little money, know what I mean?”

  Lowell did not know what he meant, and it disturbed him that he'd never met Mr. Grossman face to face, but he was still pleased to have permission. He got together his tools and went right over.

  It appeared that everybody was a holdout. No one was preparing to move. Henry wanted his two thousand dollars and Mrs. Blouse didn't seem to understand what was expected of her, but the motives of the others remained obscure, at least to Lowell. He could understand how poverty and lack of education drove people to live in such accommodations, but he simply couldn't conceive of them getting so attached to their miserable rooms that they would refuse to leave if someone asked them nicely. Rationally he could understand it—or at least, he could understand the literature about it—but he had no capacity for imagining it; and although he kept explaining over and over to himself that there were a lot of good reasons why these ignorant, deprived people refused to abandon their squalid habitations, in actual practice he went ahead and helped kick them out with scarcely a second thought. The people had to go just the same as the partitions before Lowell could start putting things back the way they belonged, and that was that. They were probably just after money anyway, just like Mr. Grossman said. Lowell was not pleased to discover that he agreed about something with Mr. Grossman, although that didn't make him change his mind. On the phone Mr. Grossman had the kind of voice that made you feel he was standing too close to you, holding on to some part of your clothing. Maybe Lowell would feel differently about him if only he could meet him. At least, maybe he would feel better about agreeing with him. He hated people who stood too close to him and held on to his clothing, and he had always taken pains to avoid them.

  Henry refused, incoherently but emphatically, to help Lowell in any way, attempted to order him from the house, threatened to call the police, and finally went into his room and slammed the door. Left to his own devices, Lowell wandered upstairs with his brand-new box of tools. He poked around here and there until he finally found an empty room. Its door hung open, and dust balls lay thickly on the floor; apparently no one had lived in it for a long time. It was difficult for Lowell to imagine anyone living there at all. It was the kind of room where normal people kept their empty cardboard boxes: low, narrow, badly lighted, and curiously shaped, serving no purpose in the overall plan of the house except to make the other rooms on the floor come out square. Along one wall, on an iron bedframe of such brutal massiveness that it seemed intended to support some kind of heavy machinery, lay a filthy, misshapen mattress that looked as though someone had been tortured to death on it. Against the opposite wall were a metal closet and a water-stained cardboard bureau. Lowell decided to start with the bureau because it looked easy to crush. First he changed into his work clothes, doing so without sitting down or touching the walls with any part of his body. It was a procedure that necessitated a great deal of hopping around, first on one foot, then the other, and pretty soon someone began to bang on the ceiling of the room below with a broomstick, which made Lowell self-conscious but did not make him stop. After all, he owned the place, or at least he would soon. He only hoped that nobody would come in and try to talk to him. Even if they spoke English, it was like a foreign language, and he had a feeling that he didn't want to hear anything they might want to tell him.

  He didn't notice when the banging stopped, but it had definitely ceased by the time he'd emptied the old rags out of the bureau drawers and had stamped and kicked the bureau itself into flinders. He made bundles of the pieces and tied them up neatly with twine. The metal closet contained a single suit, which looked like a refugee from Mrs. Blouse's collection in the basement. Lowell wadded it together with the rags from the drawers and rolled them up in the mattress. Next he dismantled the immense bedframe and carried it down to the garbage piece by piece. Then he carried down the metal closet with the mattress inside it, being extremely careful neither to fall to his death nor to make any more marks on the walls. When he returned to the room for his bundles of cardboard, he found a Negro man standing in the doorway. He was about sixty years old and stooping in a way that gave the impression that his hands were too heavy for his body. His face was hard to read.

  “Can I do something for you?” asked Lowell.

  “My furniture,” said the man tonelessly.

  “Your furniture?”

  “My good suit of clothes,” said the man, staring into the room. “My underwear.”

  Though Lowell now understood what had happened, he was understandably reluctant to comment on the situation. He had a feeling the old man was about to become either unpleasant or boring, and he wished he could think of some way to get rid of him both swiftly and quietly. There did not seem to be such a way. “The door was open,” he remarked gruffly, assuming an expression that he hoped would intimidate the old man without making him mad. “You'll find your property downstairs by the garbage cans.”

  “My bed,” said the old man like Rachel reciting the names of her children. “My cabnit. My chester draws.”

  “They're all downstairs,” repeated Lowell in a loud, firm voice. “They're downstairs by the garbage cans. Help yourself.”

  “Downstairs. By the garbage cans.”

  “That's right,” said Lowell. “Now, if you'll excuse me.”

  The old man stood there as though rooted to the spot. Lowell waited for him to ask for money or have a fit, but nothing happened. Lowell thought about going back to work on the room, but somehow he didn't think he could do it with the old man watching him like that. He was pretty sure he couldn't do it. He knew he couldn't do it. “Listen,” he heard himself saying, “I'll give you a break.” He wondered why he'd said that. He didn't have anything special in mind, and he found himself looking at the old man for some kind of clue as to the nature of the break he ought to give him.

  “That's okay,” said the old man in a sad but soothing voice. “Don't you go worrying about me. I can always sleep down at the mental hospital if nothing else comes up. That's where I work at, the mental hospital. I expect they'll let me have one of the empty beds. They do that sometimes.”

  Lowell scarcely knew how to reply. “That's nice of them,” he said lamely.

  “I got a good job there,” said the old man, motionless as a rock, his huge hands still hanging limply at his sides. “Pays good money. Ain't much to do. Just fucking th
e dog. That's all, just fucking the dog. Food's good too. We eats just what the crazy people do. They eats good.”

  Fidgeting and embarrassed, Lowell wondered how long it would go on, but he suspected that the old man was capable of standing there, droning on and on like a radio recounting the bleak details of some utterly crushing national disaster, much longer than Lowell was prepared to wait for him to stop. He pictured himself grabbing the old fellow by the shoulders and trundling him down the stairs like another piece of furniture, but he didn't think he could really bring himself to do that. The old man probably wouldn't let him, anyway. He decided to go and look in his toolbox in hopes that it would distract him or give him a good idea; he couldn't imagine what. He bent over it and threw back the lid.

  “See you around,” said the old man suddenly. He was gone like a shot, leaving Lowell to stare after him with some surprise and a great deal of relief. He guessed he'd never figure out these people, but then he turned back to his toolbox and experienced a moment of insight.