A Fine and Private Place

by Peter S. Beagle

  To laugh at the Wiremans, she thought, this is easy. Lena is stupid, she knows from nothing, she's fun to talk to like a flounder. Wireman knows nothing but the store. His feet are flat from standing up all these years; sitting down he's forgotten. To both of them, money is God on earth. Sarah—she did not want to be hard on her—all right, so Sarah is smart. What good does it do her? In such a family, to be born smart is a curse. Better she should never have learned to read. She sighed. But I feel for them. Do me something. I feel for them. Am I so smart I should laugh at Lena? Am I so popular I should sit with the old women and say, "Lena Wireman sits by herself, good. Just so she don't sit with us"? Who are they? Her husband runs a store, he sells things to people. Are they so useful? Am I?

  Mrs. Klapper was not an introspective woman, or, usually, a very analytical one. Thinking about Lena Wireman irritated her, and she walked quickly when she passed the grocery again, having no desire for a return match. She saw Sarah through the window for a second and wondered if she had seen her go by.

  Some other time I'll go over to Ida's, she decided. Today I don't feel like walking. The baking-powder tin, atop the loaf of bread, caught her eye, and she tried to remember why she had bought it. I could bake a cake, maybe, and then call up Ida and say, "Look, come on over, we'll get fat together. Who can eat a whole cake?" She nodded. First she would bake the cake, then call Ida.

  Passing the line of chairs—Morris had once called them "Murderers' Row"—she recognized old acquaintances. Sitting, as always, under the green awning of the corner candy store, which spot was hers owing to both seniority and squatter's rights, was a tiny gray-haired woman named Lapin. She had been old when Mrs. Klapper had moved into the neighborhood, and guesses as to her exact age ranged between eighty and one hundred. She was a dried-up comma of a woman, but Mrs. Klapper liked her and had found her good company.

  "Hey, Lapin," she called loudly, Lapin's first name was Bella, but nobody ever used it. "Lapin, look up, say a hello."

  Lapin looked up slowly from her omnipresent knitting needles and hank of black yarn. "Hello, Gertrude," she said in a surprisingly deep voice. "So how are you?"

  "Managing. You look fine, Lapin."

  The old woman tapped her chest. "I got a rattle in here two days now, and in my stomach it's all the time growling. Sit down already."

  Mrs. Klapper shook her head. She had time, but the idea of taking even a temporary place in the row of chairs always frightened her. "I got to go in a minute, Lapin. Eat a little, so your stomach won't growl so much."

  Lapin shook her head. "I been talking to the rabbi. He says at my age I got to be prepared. Why should I stuff myself? Any day—boom!" She smiled at Mrs. Klapper. "Any day."

  "God forbid," Mrs. Klapper said. "You will outlive me and the rest of the buzzards. The rabbi too."

  "Any day." Lapin's voice sounded a little petulant. She beckoned Mrs. Klapper close with a long-nailed forefinger. "But I'm ready, believe me. When I die the House of Sages will say Kaddish, regular like Rosh Hashonah."

  Mrs. Klapper knew what question was expected of her. "So what about your nephews? Better the family should say Kaddish."

  Lapin's mouth twisted, and she wrinkled her nose. "Kaddish they don't believe in, my nephews. For their children they wouldn't say it." Her face relaxed again. "For me the House of Sages will say Kaddish."

  For at least thirty years, Mrs. Klapper knew, Lapin had lived off the sums her three nephews sent her every month. She needed very little to live, and so she kept a steady current of five-dollar bills flowing into the House of Sages. Once or twice Morris had been prevailed upon to send ten dollars in her name, and Mrs. Klapper had done so more often than she had let Lapin know.

  "The House of Sages will give me a good funeral," Lapin said contentedly.

  "Lapin," Mrs. Klapper said, "I only got a few minutes. Talk about something else, please."

  The old woman went on, her eyes closed. "I will be buried in my robes." She had fallen into Yiddish. "And there will be some earth from Israel in the coffin."

  "Why is it with you always funerals?" Mrs. Klapper asked a little nervously. Lapin kept on in Yiddish, her voice low and droning.

  "And I will live in a beautiful house of my own. I will live forever. I will live in God—"

  "So?" Mrs. Klapper's voice was harsh and querulous. "So how many floors will there be in this house, Lapin? And who will be the landlord?"

  Lapin seemed to withdraw into her shawl. "Don't make fun. I don't care how many floors."

  Mrs. Klapper regretted her words. "I'm sorry, Lapin. So have a beautiful funeral, live in a beautiful house. You got it coming."

  The black eyes stared at her, and Lapin pointed the long forefinger. "You come to the funeral."

  "Me?" Mrs. Klapper recovered quickly. "All right, Lapin. I'll come."

  "Tell my nephews I said they should give you a ride to the cemetery." Lapin was staring absently down the street. "The rabbi will tell everybody how holy I was."

  "Sure, Lapin. I got to go now. Take care." Mrs. Klapper had almost turned the corner when she heard the old woman call, "Gertrude!"

  She turned and walked back to Lapin's chair. "So?"

  "I was thinking," Lapin said slowly. "The funeral."

  Mrs. Klapper waited, but Lapin said nothing. "What were you thinking, Lapin?"

  "For you it's all right." Lapin turned her head stiffly to look up at Mrs. Klapper. "You come to the funeral, you say good-by, Lapin, you cry, you go home. You go home and have supper." She kept knitting her black yarn. "Me, I got to stay there. You'll all go home and have supper and leave me there."

  Mrs. Klapper muttered something, patted a bony shoulder, and fled.

  She almost ran the rest of the way home, stopping only in the lobby to catch her breath before she rang for the elevator. A straight-backed bench stood near the elevator door; she sank into it as if it were a hot bath. Her breathing became slower and shallower, and she gradually unclenched her hands that clung together in her lap. "Hoo-boy!" she said aloud. "What a morning!" The elevator arrived, and she stepped into it.

  Lapin's predictions of and plans for her own death were nothing new to Mrs. Klapper. They were issued on a regular basis, like weather forecasts and stock-market reports. Morris had laughed at them, referred to them as "the ghetto preoccupation with a superghetto," but Mrs. Klapper had been brought up in a house and a neighborhood where even the mention of death was warded off with a "God forbid." A certain pride was to be taken in the knowledge that your children or your relatives would see that you were buried properly and with all honor, but Mrs. Klapper felt that Lapin was overdoing it a little.

  Still, she reflected, entering her apartment, what else has Lapin got to talk about? Her nephews throw dice, the loser should go visit her; the rabbi comes over to tell her the House of Sages will give her a good funeral; what else can she talk about? At least it's not gossiping all day long like the others. She kept seeing the long row of chairs and the old women leaning to one another like bushes in the wind.

  Don't worry, Klapper. She hung up her coat and walked slowly into the kitchen. For you there is also a seat waiting in Murderers' Row. Drop in any time. She put the milk in the refrigerator and wandered into the living room.

  "So now what?" She looked defiantly at the books and paintings. "It is now twelve o'clock and I'm back where I was at eleven. Any suggestions?" But the living room belonged to Morris. It had no intention of suggesting anything.

  Mrs. Klapper had, as a child, woven sturdy legs and a lot of curiosity into a real talent for getting lost. Even as an adult she was perfectly capable of getting lost in Brooklyn or Queens. If there was one emotion she could recall in totality it was the feeling of standing on a strange street under a five-o'clock sky, making tentative, trotting casts in one direction after another, knowing that each was the wrong one. She had always been afraid to ask people, for they looked gray and thick-fleshed, not at all like the people of the Bronx, and they went by without lo
oking at her, except the children, who knew she was lost and delighted in it. There were no familiar subways, and the buses were colored differently and had strange numbers. So she might remain, as balanced between forces as the hub of a wheel, for half an hour or an hour before she called home and her father—later on, Morris—came and got her. So she remained in the living room, her hands at her sides, seeking a reason to move from the dark square of rug on which she stood.

  She thought again of Jonathan Rebeck and wondered if he had found his watch. A watch is a small thing, she thought. You could look for days. Remembering that she had planned to call Ida, she went to the telephone, lifted the receiver, and slowly replaced it in its cradle.

  So I call Ida and I say, "Ida, come over because I'm an old woman and I don't know what to do with myself." She watched the second hand sidling around the face of the kitchen clock. What do you do tomorrow, Klapper? Better start counting your relatives.

  As she turned from the telephone, her glance fell on the small framed photograph of Morris she had kept hanging in the foyer. She stared at it, remembering the long jaw and the high, prominent cheekbones, the cattail eyebrows and the wisps of hair that clung to his head as scraps of meat do to a gnawed bone. Morris had been fifty-nine when he died, but his face was strikingly smooth and unlined, as if wind and water had rolled over him for thousands of years, whittling and polishing his face, eroding away the scars of human anger; not so much a face at peace as a face from which the marks of war had been worn away.

  I could go down to the cemetery, Mrs. Klapper thought, and maybe keep Morris company a little. She toyed with the telephone dial but did not lift the receiver again. I got no place else to go. A few more days like this, I'll go looking for Lena Wireman, we'll sit down on boxes and talk about how lousy people are. This I don't need.

  She headed for her closet. Besides, it's quiet, and I could maybe think about what I should do for the next thirty years.

  After a long deliberation, she chose her new light wool coat and went into her bedroom to look at herself in the mirror.

  "Hmmmm," she murmured in admiration. "Beautiful, Klapper. Like a young bride. Only—" She took off the coat and went back to the closet. "Only a young bride would not be going out to a cemetery. Act your age, Klapper."

  A little regretfully, she put on a dark spring coat and went to the mirror again. "Nu, it'll do. To a cemetery you don't wear a trousseau." She smiled at the mirror and sighed. "Be a little honest with yourself, Klapper. With Morris also."

  She turned off the light and went from room to room, making sure that all the lights and gas jets were off and that all the faucets were shut. Finally she stood in the hall with the door open and looked back at the darkened apartment.

  "Morris," she said softly, "I feel a little bit guilty because I'm not sure if it's just you I'm coming to see." She hesitated. "Morris, I would bring you something. I would do something for you, only I can't think of anything you need."

  Mrs. Klapper closed the door behind her and walked to the elevator.

  Chapter 6

  The raven was tired of flying. He had been all over the Bronx that morning, trying to find a restaurant that sold ready-made sandwiches. All the cafeterias were jammed with the lunch-hour crowd, and the Automat represented a problem in logistics that the raven had never quite solved. Finally he twitched a roast-beef sandwich out of the hands of a telephone linesman before his victim had even unwrapped the waxed paper. The telephone linesman was not a philosopher. He threw a rock at the raven. The rock missed—the raven had a sense for these things—and clipped a policeman above the kidneys. The policeman was also not a philosopher.

  But it was a long flight out to the Yorkchester Cemetery, and the raven's wings ached. He found himself struggling to keep from losing altitude, and the roast-beef sandwich was getting heavier with every flap of his tired wings. He flew under the Broadway El, and this was a terrible blow to his pride. The raven held trains in deep contempt and usually went out of his way to fly high above them, matching their speed as long as he could, shrieking insults after them for as long as he could see them. When he was much younger he had loved to chase the Lexington Avenue Express underground at 161st Street and scream what he thought of a worm that fled into the earth without the slightest gesture of defiance, for all it was a glandular monstrosity.

  His adolescence ended abruptly on the day when he flew down the tunnel in pursuit of a great worm that shrieked with terror. Even now, winters and moltings later, he refused to talk about it.

  Flying wearily over the cemetery gates, he caught sight of a small pickup truck a little ahead of him. He recognized it; the cemetery's caretakers used it to travel back and forth from the distant corners of the cemetery to the main office by the gates. It was rolling along the paved path at an easy twenty miles per hour; and, looking at it, the raven fought against a sudden impulse to hitch a ride.

  He had never done such a thing before. Because he was too arrogant to walk, too heavy for telephone wires, and too unpopular for bird sanctuaries, an amazingly large portion of his life had been spent in the air. He felt no particular pride in having been born a bird, and he subscribed to no avian code of ethics, but he had never seen a bird make use of human transportation, and pioneers made him nervous.

  The decision had to be made quickly. His wings felt like flatirons, and the truck was pulling farther and farther ahead. The raven glanced quickly around, saw nobody, hesitated, felt oddly guilty, said, "Ah, screw it," raised one last small chinook of flapping, and fell, gasping, into the back of the truck.

  He lay on his side for a few minutes, content simply to breathe and feel the ache slowly go from his folded wings. Then he stood up carefully and looked over the tailgate at the road spinning away behind the truck. He had no way of appreciating the truck's exact speed, but he knew that it was far faster than his normal cruising pace, and he laughed in the sun at his own epochal cleverness.

  "By God," he said aloud, "this is the way to travel. Damned if I ever fly another stroke." He turned, hopped up on the front rim of the truck body, and craned his neck to see through the narrow glass slit at the back of the cab.

  There were two men in the cab. One was a huge dark man named Campos, who slouched on the seat with his feet stretched out in front of him, his hands in his pockets, and his eyes half closed. The driver was a medium sort of man named Walters, who had a cold and kept taking one hand off the wheel to wipe his nose on his sleeve. He talked incessantly, frequently glancing eagerly at the silent Campos to see if he was paying attention. Campos's cap was pulled down over his eyes, with the visor neatly resting on the bridge of his nose, and he seemed sound asleep.

  "A real good guy," Walters was saying, "and a hell of a driver, but not very bright. He used to drive for some perfume company up around Poughkeepsie, and he was always picking up guys. Hitchhikers, you know. Anybody he saw walking along the road, he'd stop and pick them up. Anybody at all. He used to come rolling into Poughkeepsie with eight or nine guys on board. They'd sit in back with their legs hanging out, or up front with him. It looked like they'd all get together and chartered him. So finally—You listening, Campos?"

  Campos remained immobile, but the brim of his cap quivered.

  "So anyway," Walters went on, reassured, "one day he picks up these two tough kids in Fishkill, and they beat the hell out of him, dumped him off, and stole the truck. Kind of spoiled his outlook."

  He grinned at Campos. "He wouldn't pick up nobody, from that day to this." Campos did not move. Walters sighed loudly. "You try to be a good guy," he said, looking straight ahead, "but they get you sooner or later."

  Campos gave a small noncommittal grunt. Walters nodded. "Sooner or later, boy." He looked out the window, took a deep breath, and sneezed. "Beautiful day. Beautiful goddam day."

  The truck jounced over an unpaved section of road, and Campos slipped even lower on the seat. Walters looked at him a little nervously. "Someday you're gonna break your ass doing that." Ca
mpos grunted again.

  "All right," Walters said. "I don't give a damn." He sneezed again and drove in silence for a few minutes. Then he turned hopefully to Campos again and asked, "You catch the game last night?"

  He was off before Campos had even shaken his head. "They lost, five to four. Cepeda hit two, but Kirkland struck out with two on in the ninth." He spat out of the window. "The bastards gave them the game, anyway. They made four errors. Wagner dropped a fly ball and Spencer threw one into left field. . . ."

  He described the game with the sad relish of the messenger to Job, blinking his pale eyes rapidly as he talked. Beside him, Campos slumped in his seat and grunted and nodded now and then, and he might have been nodding to Walters or to something else.

  Walters sniffed, wiped his nose on his sleeve, and began to sing Perry Como's latest. He chanted the song as if he weren't sure of the tune, and he appeared startled when Campos stirred beside him, sat up a little, and said, "You got it wrong."

  "Better'n any goddam Puerto Rican," Walters said delightedly.

  "Cuban, you bastard," said the big man without rancor. He slipped down in his seat again and looked out of the window.

  In the back of the truck the raven had been joined by a small red squirrel who had dropped out of an overhanging tree as the truck passed under it. The squirrel was thin, with large bright eyes, and he sat on one of the chains that held the tailgate shut and demanded, "What on earth are you doing?"

  "Making a good-will tour," said the raven, who disliked squirrels even more than pigeons. "What does it look like I'm doing?"

  The squirrel drew his front paws close against his furry chest. "But you're a bird!" he said in amazement. "Why aren't you flying?"

  "I've retired," said the raven calmly.