No. It had been better when the weather had matched his inner climate, when his nose had run, his lips had cracked, and his hands had chapped and bled clenching the steering wheel. At least then, in February and March, he had the sense of combat, the bitter exhilaration that grew from pride in his own stoic courage. Now the spring sun was melting it all into mush, and Ralph was invaded by terror lest the trap he had spent these lonely months preparing with such patient care would spring (maybe it had already sprung!), only to leave him, its designer, caught beyond any possibility of release or rescue. For every evening when he came home there awaited him not only the same sights and sounds that made it all worth while for his similars in Happy Valley—the sizzling roast in the oven, the baby in the belly, the news of other people’s troubles on the radio—but above his head, rustling softly like a squirrel rousing himself and his rattling hoard from the winter’s hibernation, the unique brother who stuck in his throat, choking him with the knowledge that de Angelis the builder was not his, but Ray’s to command.
What was more, there was no quarter of the city that did not bear an immediately recognizable emblem of his youth. For most people the very word childhood was supposedly nostalgia itself, transformed by the gentle miracle of selective memory into a synonym for happiness, in which even rare moments of deprivation or grief were mollified by the lenitive ointment of parental love. For Ralph it was the reverse. Childhood was a hateful word, and the city (which he thought he had pulled down in his mind) rose up before him once again in all its ugly actuality, reminding him at every street corner of the despair which he had never succeeded in eradicating.
Here, at this intersection named for dead presidents, the trolley line he had taken to high school from the pharmacy had been abandoned, and the tracks pulled out as if the curving street were a deveined shrimp. But within arm’s reach of his open convertible was the same newspaper stand before which he had jumped up and down every winter morning for years, first on one foot and then on the other, his hair freezing to the roots as he awaited the lurching dismal ride to school. The same girlie mags still dangled like fish on a string, the same movie stars and princes too, or nearly; if Rita’s swelling bosom had been replaced by Brigitte’s, King Farouk’s bemedaled bosom by the Shah’s, no matter. The interchangeable Communist and Free World Spacemen confronted each other in their cereal-box bubble suits. Over them all presided the same Polish newsdealer who had lurked in this same cavern fifteen and twenty years earlier. The same cigarette butt depended from his stubble-fringed lips, the same leer played across his wizened and cynical countenance. My sentinel, Ralph said to himself, the guardian of my erotic daydreams; he will outlive me yet.
In the old Eighth Ward, at an intersection named not for dead presidents but for dead German poets, there still stood the tavern called The Spot, where he had drunk his first beer, read Pierre Louÿs to a girl who made him tremble, and studied a whole new vocabulary. In the merciless spring sunlight, peering from the car as he waited for a signal to change, he could see the phony knotty-pine paneling, and to the side the alleyway down which he had staggered at sixteen to vomit up everything, his ears ringing with the mocking laughter of the girl who had repaid him for The Songs of Bilitis by making fun of his wacky family.
In the old Thirteenth Ward, he cruised by the Settlement House where he had sawed away his Saturday mornings under the tutelage of violinist Martin Stark, whose limp was as distinguished as his University Shop tweeds. If it had been a miserable place under its original name, with the runny-nosed children of the poor tripping each other in the corridors and passing dirty books under the ping-pong tables, it looked no better now as the Boys’ Club, with a new generation of Afro-Latin brats, black now and brown, some seemingly as haunted and wretched as he had been, others as conniving and shrewd as Mel had been.
That too was trapped inside himself, unexplainable to any other living soul but one, and he locked away. The city was a monument not only to what he himself had been, but also to Mel. If one street, one Spot, one Settlement House, was irrevocably his until the moment when it should be bulldozed and pulverized, the same could be said of Mel and innumerable corners and moments in the life and death of the city.
What would pass through Mel’s mind if he in his turn were to come back and walk these streets? Would he too be frozen at those intersections where his own life had crossed that of his brother and of all those others who had taught him hate?
Walking, brief case in hand, through the collapsing business district, in a neighborhood now as then crushed under crumbling loft buildings tenanted by tanneries, jewelry repair depots, plastic toy wholesalers, broom and rag dealers, and furtive employment bureaus exploiting pearl divers, bus boys, migrant laborers, and field hands, Ralph came upon Commerce Alley. There he stood with his eyes unfocused for a long moment, at the very spot where sixteen years earlier he had frozen at the sound of Mel screaming in pain. Here, transfixed, the beauty parlor handbills he had been stuffing into mailboxes dropping from his fingers like so many petals, he had watched helplessly while Mel was kicked and beaten senseless by three vengeance-seeking hoods.
Two blocks ahead bulked the soot-blackened mass of the County Courthouse, a battlemented monstrosity surely designed by a demented architect in the fashion of an earlier Teutonic bedlam. Up its forbiddingly endless steps trooped the innocent in search of dog licenses and title deeds. But for Ralph it would forever be the hell where he had escorted his silently weeping mother, past lounging bail bondsmen and small-time fixers, unshaven elevator starters, and other weeping women, to the juvenile court where Mel, again Mel, always Mel, was to be produced, questioned, prodded, poked, and catalogued for another of the acts which defined him as antisocial.
There was, finally, at the fringe of Agassiz Park, the Sisters of Mercy Hospital, another turreted relic of Victorian horror. For Ralph it was the worst of all. If I owned it, he thought, if it had been willed to me, I would ram the earth-mover into it myself, I would raze it with my own hands and let the flowers of the Agassiz Botanic Garden grow over the spot where it had been. In the pebbled courtyard the chimney of its outbuilding, not even decently concealed with ivy, smoked constantly with the burning placentae of religiously fertile mothers, the tonsils of their wailing children, the tripes of trussed-up collision victims, and the amputated digits of careless employees of the Agassiz Car & Foundry Co. Here Jenny Kadin Land had been taken much against her will, hands pressed to her face in the ambulance, to spend her final weeks, only the stubborn refusal of her heart to go on working finally stilling her feeble cries for her lost pride, the runaway oldest son, deserter of a foundering family. Here, waiting for Dr. Stark in the bile-green corridor under a cheap polychrome statuette of Mary Mother of Jesus, dying for a smoke and learning to hate his brother, Ralph had been accosted by a stranger, an intern in rumpled white who approached silently on rubber-soled shoes. Ralph had been astonished to see that he had tears in his eyes. The young doctor had stammered awkwardly, “Your mother is gone,” and Ralph’s only immediate reaction had been confusion: how come it was not he himself, but the doctor, a stranger, who was crying? And why?
In the years that had followed his mother’s death Ralph had been positive that he knew what was wrong with this world, as it shaped itself in his native city, and what kind of world ought to replace it. Now that he was back, though, and now that his temporary winter had gone on to look like a permanent spring, always promising but never fulfilling, he was tormented with the suspicion that—while he was firmer than ever in his hatred of what he saw about him and felt as a menace that would continually encircle him until he himself wiped it out—maybe he did not have the unique answer any more than did Mel or Ray. What if the answer was not an apocalyptic bulldozer appointed by history to push aside the city’s heaped-up rubble, but an evolution of the city in ways unforeseen by any of the Lands? What then? Who would control and master it?
Oddly, his uncertainty took the outward form, not of humility, but
of a heightened determination to win through, and of a cold arrogance toward those who seemed to feel that he had slipped back almost imperceptibly into their provincial lives. Upon his arrival childhood acquaintances had regarded with open envy the traveler returned to claim his birthright. Now they nudged each other knowingly when they saw him, prosaic like themselves, in a barbershop or drugstore.
He still found his name in the paper from time to time, but no longer as a man of the world briefly returning home. Now he was simply part of a running story as the only visible survivor of a line of peculiar people, whose peculiarity was hardly less newsworthy than their whereabouts.
On the first prematurely hot day of the season there was flung at Ralph, like a taunt, the sense of what he had become for the locals. Characteristically he responded with the harsh and bristling self-protectiveness that he had learned during his adult years of struggle in New York.
In the elevator of a downtown office building he suddenly found himself face to face with Billy Bauer. Back in the days when things were going bad between himself and Mel, when he was being ostracized because of Mel, and when he was unusually receptive to any rare appeals for his comradeship, Billy had insisted despite the lack of reciprocation that Ralph was his best friend. Billy, a lout who had sat behind him in his high-school home room, had befriended him because he was himself friendless, and because he had sensed in Ralph a vulnerability lacking in all the others. Ralph had had to accept the fat boy’s offerings—the Milky Ways, the Spicy Detectives, his father’s press pass to the pro football games—because to reject them would have thrown on Ralph the ultimate responsibility for Billy’s being quite completely alone, embedded in fat and misery. For two long years Billy had clung to him with the obstinacy of a snail fastened to a wall, phoning when he couldn’t come (and who else would enter the Land flat behind the pharmacy?), writing when he couldn’t phone.
In the elevator Billy, sweat still beading his upper lip, pants still too tight around the belly, squeezed Ralph on the arm. He exuded his horribly familiar mixture of damp armpits and Pinaud hair tonic. His manner was exactly what it had been during their adolescence—at once fawning, jovial, and calculating.
“You’re looking good, boy. Better than your picture in the papers. Come back for a cut of that dough, didn’t you? I guess it hasn’t been as easy as you thought, or you wouldn’t have settled down in the old house and taken a job. Well, they all come back sooner or later. It’s not such a bad town, you’ve got to admit. Especially compared with New York. I was there last year—Christ, nobody speaks English there any more.”
Ralph was unable to protest even to this slob, whom he thought he had eliminated from his life so long ago, that one ought not mistake appearance for reality, expedience for change of heart. He dared not indulge himself with boasting that he was playing a part, and would be on his way as soon as the accounts were settled. But he did have the learned ability, acquired in the hard years since high school, to be ruthless.
“I’ve been expecting that you’d give me a ring.” Billy Bauer blocked the elevator exit, clutching Ralph’s forearm with his gross fingers, grinning hopefully in his idiot innocence. “Wouldn’t you and your bride like to get together some night with me and my wife?”
Ralph freed his arm, looked Bauer up and down, and replied deliberately, “I think not.”
Lying naked in bed beside Kitty that night, Ralph re-experienced the grandiose satisfaction that had been his at the sight of the frozen fat man, unable even to stammer a reply to Ralph’s calculated rebuff. But then, remembering the flush that had crept over his former friend’s slowly comprehending features, Ralph could no more sustain the cheap satisfaction than he could disregard the heat which, like Billy Bauer, had appeared as unexpectedly as a creditor demanding payment for a forgotten debt.
With his father’s pillow propped behind his head and his hands locked at the nape of his neck, Ralph lay semirecumbent beside his swollen sleeping wife, staring up into the darkness. Kitty had complained about the unseasonable weather, and he had reassured her that it would not last. Then she had turned over, in the pajamas whose buttons she had already reset for greater comfort, assumed the fetal position, and given herself over contentedly to a profound plunge into unconsciousness.
At last he too, thinking of the smell of his mother’s lap, warm and fragrant when she rocked him after he had come in freezing from sledding with Mel, felt exhaustion invading his system. He eased himself down silently alongside his wife, in order not to rouse her to the querulous demands of pregnancy. Only then, closing his eyes, did he release his clutch on what passed for reality and allow himself to be transported to other deeper regions.
His dreams were first of four ragged children he had known by name in Pusan, and a toothless crone, somebody’s mother, gumming sunflower seeds by the roadside and crooning at him when he dropped PX parcels into her lap. As she tore open a box of Uncle Ben’s rice, the kids took wing and flew up into the sky, waving good-by as they disappeared. Then Grandma herself was suddenly a hostess at a faculty-student get-together, her shaggy white hair the only reminder of her previous incarnation. She offered him a plate of Uncle Ben’s rice and inquired kindly after his progress as a young man of letters under the G.I. Bill. “I have been liberated from my uniform, just as you have been liberated from yourself,” Ralph replied, and walked through the college wall behind her. He scratched his face and hands on the ivy, but it was more than worth the discomfort to find himself in a paradise where he needed neither discharge papers, identity card, nor ticket stub. A city boy, he had no idea where he was, nor even whether he was indoors or out. But he had arrived after much travail at his ultimate goal, that much was sure. The air was filled with fragrance and the faint sound of soft music. Strollers, moving neither languidly nor agitatedly, greeted him as though they knew him and accepted him. The sense of being at once adventurous and at home, discovering a terra incognita and returning to the green fields of childhood, was actually voluptuous. This sensuousness alerted Ralph to a new presence, as a lover will quickly feel the threat of a rival.
Ralph tried to contain himself, much as one waits impatiently for the passage of a presumptuous little cotton wadding of cloud which has the audacity to blot out the sun and, in the sudden chill shadow which follows, can even cause the dark wind to rise sullenly and the paling leaves to shudder violently. But then this shapeless nameless intrusion grew a cloak, as the Lamont Cranston of his boyhood had changed into The Shadow, blotting out light and warmth, making Ralph’s paradise dark and horrid. For a moment he was paralyzed with horror, as much at the disappearance of his Eden as at the gloomy Oriental apparition thrusting itself between him and the light, like those earlier Orientals who had swarmed over the 38th parallel, eclipsing the sun for Ralph and the other innocents of his age and company.
If one dream ended, so did both dreams—and if both, then all. The apparition was real, and so was the intent: not only to kill the dreams but to extinguish consciousness as well. Arms extended like an organist, the shadow groped for Ralph’s windpipe. An animal sound of fear and outrage welled up in Ralph’s throat, as he reared back to avoid the hands, plunged suddenly into a reality more terrifying than a nightmare, more naked than his own body.
The form was upon him in the dark, pressing him down into the damp twisted sheets, panting and grunting over and over, like a wild pig, “Where? Where? Where? Where? Where?”
Without answering Ralph wrenched free and hurled his assailant away, the adrenalin flowing through him like wine.
“Ralph!” Kitty’s cry was breathless and frightened. But she was not numbed with terror, and already she was reaching for the bed lamp at her side.
“Leave it off,” Ralph grunted, crouching on one knee to ready himself for a renewed attack.
Then the intruder was at him, still faceless, but smelling of beer, sweat, and fury. Ralph gripped hard. A wet T-shirt gave way beneath his fingers. They had each other by the upper arms, rocking an
d tumbling across the foot of the bed, staggering like a marathon dance team drunk with exhaustion, each supporting the other not from love but from hatred of his partner and of the watching world. Half falling, they swayed across the room in slow motion to the open window, then to the bureau. A loose knob of the top drawer hooked the torn T-shirt; as Ralph lurched back, his assailant’s saliva trickling down hot and wet onto his own bare chest like a slow stream of piss, the drawer came along, crashing loudly to the floor.
They were both entangled in the debris of the overturned drawer, their feet catching on Kitty’s scarfs, panties, stockings, suffused with Miss Dior perfume. Ralph kicked frantically at the snakelike silks and nylons, but his bare foot skidded on the plastic case of Kitty’s abandoned diaphragm and he fell down hard on his behind, his antagonist leaping on top of him like a rapist, both of them enveloped in the characteristic sweetish odor of vaginal cream.
They fell to hugging, fighting to prevent each other’s hands from clawing or closing into fists. Clumsy wrestlers both, they rolled over and over on Leo Land’s carpet, panting, sweating, unable to release each other—they might have been ardent lovers. Once again they brought up against the bed. Ralph stared up into Kitty’s clenched teeth, gleaming even in the darkness. The breath was hissing through her parted lips.
“Now get the light,” he muttered.
At once it was burning his eyeballs. Blinking, he made out a bulky rolled-up magazine that Kitty was thrusting at him. It was no real weapon, but he grasped it like a pikestaff and rammed its end with all his force into the spit-flecked squinting face, suddenly as horribly familiar as though it had always been there before him.
The Will Page 18
