A Fine and Private Place

by Peter S. Beagle

  Chapter 10

  "Don't let it bother you," Michael said. "If she doesn't come today, she'll come tomorrow."

  "No she won't," Mr. Rebeck answered. They were sitting on the steps of the mausoleum, looking down the short path that led to Central Avenue. "Tomorrow is Sunday. She never comes on a Sunday. I don't know why, but she never does."

  Michael slanted a sly glance at him. "At least you know what day it is. I used to see you looking at my grave to remember the year."

  Mr. Rebeck scratched aimlessly on the step below him with a pebble. "I don't always remember what day it is. When I do, it's because a day on which Mrs. Klapper comes to visit is very different from a day on which Mrs. Klapper doesn't come. I have two kinds of days now. I only used to have one."

  "I only have one," Michael said. "One long one, with subdivision. Don't worry," he added when Mr. Rebeck said nothing. "She'll come today."

  "I'm not worrying. She'll come when she feels like it. What time is it?"

  Michael laughed. "Damned if I know. Time and Morgan have nothing in common these days."

  "One of us ought to know what time it is."

  "Well, it's not going to be me," Michael answered. The flatness of Mr. Rebeck's tone had disconcerted him somewhat. "Why do you care? What difference does it make?"

  Mr. Rebeck snapped the pebble away from him. "The gates are locked at five. If she comes late she won't be able to stay very long. I hate it when she just comes, says hello, and goes."

  "She doesn't have to go right away," Michael said. "Walters usually makes the rounds a couple of times an hour to see if anybody's locked in. She can stay later than five."

  "I've asked her. She always has to go home and start dinner." Mr. Rebeck scowled at the hot, shiny sky. "Or she has to babysit for somebody. She loves that. The parents go to the movies, and she sits in the living room and listens to the radio. The next day she spends hours telling me how she put the child to bed and what she did when it woke up in the night and wanted its mother."

  "Hasn't she any children of her own?"

  "No," Mr. Rebeck said. "A lot of nephews and nieces, though. She comes from a big family." He shoved his hands into his pockets and leaned back on the steps. "She's not going to come today. It's too late."

  "Don't panic," Michael said. "She's got time yet." He stood up and took a few steps on the grass. "I think I'll look around for Laura. Maybe we'll come back here later on and tell you a bedtime story."

  Mr. Rebeck smiled, stretching his legs in the afternoon sun. "All right. That would be fine." The bedtime story had been a standing joke between them since the morning more than a week ago when Campos, singing and staggering, guided patiently by Michael and Laura and obscenely by the raven, had carried him home, wrapped him in his blankets, and fallen asleep himself on the steps of the mausoleum. Mr. Rebeck had found him there when he woke in the early afternoon, and they had shared breakfast. He had not seen Campos since.

  "That was a good night," he said. He liked to think about it. "We ought to spend more nights like that."

  "Stick around," Michael said grimly. "We will." He came back to Mr. Rebeck and sat down two steps below him. "I've begun to develop a piddling but useful conception of eternity lately. Listen to me think."

  Mr. Rebeck waited, thinking, Of course I'll listen to your thoughts. That's what I do. That's what I am, really, your thoughts and the thoughts of others. He nodded to show Michael that he was listening.

  "I had a good time that night, too," Michael said, "but I kept thinking, This is forever. This is forever. You will have this good time again and again, a million times over, until it will be like a play in which you and Laura and a few fugitive lives sit around an imaginary fire and talk and sing songs and love each other and sometimes throw imaginary brands at the eyes blinking beyond the circle of imaginary firelight. And then I thought—and this is where I sounded just like a real philosopher— And even when you admit that you know every line in the play and every song that will be sung, even when you know that this evening spent with friends is pleasant and joyful because you remember it as pleasant and joyful and wouldn't change it for the world, even when you know that anything you feel for these good friends has no more reality than a dream faithfully remembered every night for a thousand years—even then it goes on. Even then it has just begun."

  The air was motionless, carved, a block of warm copper fitting neatly around the earth, molded while soft to fit every house and every human being on the earth, and now hardened forever so that no man could move and no air ever came through. The earth rumbled down its alley like a golden bowling ball, shining.

  Michael went on. "People used to imagine hell as a place where evil is done and being in hell as having evil things done to you eternally, praise God and don't push; there's plenty of room in the balcony for all the blessed souls. Well, Morgan amplifies this. Hell is forever. Hell is having anything done to you constantly, good or evil. There isn't any good or evil after a few billion millenniums. There's just something happening that has happened before. Think of it—forever. For ever. We don't know what the word means, and we die ignorant and unarmed. Don't ask me to come to any more jolly sessions around the campfire, old friend. I'll come, of course. Wouldn't miss it. Just don't ask me."

  He stood up again, moving down the steps and across the grass with the loose, bucking motion of a captive balloon; a manshaped reminiscence, a figment of his own imagination.

  "I can't help you," Mr. Rebeck said. He spoke very quietly, but Michael heard him and turned.

  "Why, I wasn't asking you to. I wasn't asking for help. I'm very fond of you, but I'd never ask you to help me. I'll never ask anyone to help me again. Say hello to Mrs. Klapper for me."

  He walked away and the sun devoured him quickly. Mr. Rebeck sat on the steps of the mausoleum, grateful for the shade the building offered. A cooling breeze sprang up suddenly, making itself audible by shaking the grass and hissing richly in the trees, but it did not reach Mr. Rebeck at all. He unbuttoned his shirt and pulled it out of his pants, but the breeze was gone and the trees stopped moving. His skin remained oiled with sweat and he could smell the familiar sourness of his own body. Later, when it was dark, he would go down to the lavatory and wash himself. He did not like the liquid soap that you squirted out of a glass jar, but it would have to do.

  I am tired, he thought. Maybe the heat is doing it, but I have sat through a good many summers here and never felt like this. I am tired of being helpful. I am tired of being comfortable. Why this should be I do not know, but my image of myself as an understanding old man, floating in kindness like a cherry in a sugared liqueur, is beginning to curl at the corners. I wish something would happen to me, something that would show me exactly how cruel and jealous and vengeful I can be. Then I could go back to gentleness because I chose it over brutality for its own sake, not because I didn't have the courage to be cruel. I might even like cruelty. I doubt very much that I would, but I ought to find out.

  He remembered the raven, clacking his beak and saying, "I'm stupid. I don't know how to help anybody. I was lost too."

  I believe myself to be good, he thought, and so I can afford to titillate myself by considering evil, like a child frightening himself with horror stories. I am not a bad man. But I am not a wise one, either, nor understanding. And yet, if I lose this rumpled and comfortable skin that I wear, how will I ever find anything to replace it? I wish I were younger and could grow skin easily.

  Then Mrs. Klapper called, "Hey, Rebeck!" and he scrambled hastily up from the cellar of his mind, jumped to his feet, and started down the path to meet the woman, who waved as she came toward him. He felt his loose shirt flapping around his waist, and he stuffed it into his trousers as he walked. He buttoned it all the way up to the top and then opened the collar button.

  Mrs. Klapper was wearing a blue dress that he had liked on her before, and an irrational crescent moon of a hat that she loved and defended violently. He had become fond of it himself,
but that was one of the things he refused to admit to her. Now he prowled around her, hands clasped behind his back and head thrust forward, staring at the hat. She twisted her neck to follow him.

  "All right, already," she said. She put one hand up to her head as if to protect the hat from any onslaught he might be contemplating. "I'm wearing it, I'm wearing it. You want I should wear a helmet like Doctor Livingstone? Leave the hat alone, Rebeck."

  "It fascinates me," Mr. Rebeck said. He stood with one hand in a hip pocket and the other scratching the back of his head. "I can't take my eyes off it. Do you pin it on?"

  "No, I had this jar of library paste, it seemed a shame to waste it. Rebeck, leave me the hat. The hat never hurt you." She was breathing hard and fanning herself ineffectually with her hand. "Hoo, it's hot. Ninety degrees, it says on the radio. Let's go somewhere we could sit down."

  "All right," he said. He noticed that she was carrying a light raincoat over her arm. This did not surprise him too much, even in the hot weather. He knew that Mrs. Klapper regarded the weather as about as dependable as bus schedules. Had she lived during an earlier time, she would have propitiated a weather god possessed of a vindictive intelligence and a squad of little helpers that rushed to inform him whenever Mrs. Klapper decided to go somewhere.

  As they walked back toward the mausoleum, Mr. Rebeck said, "I thought you weren't coming." He said it as casually as he could, not being by nature a casual man.

  "The subway got tied up in a knot," Mrs. Klapper said very quickly. "There was a train in front of us and a train behind us and we were in the middle and nobody was moving and there was a big tsimmis with the whistle and the buzzing and the fans didn't work right in the middle. Half an hour we lost, maybe more. So excuse my being late, please."

  "I waited all afternoon," Mr. Rebeck said. It was a straight statement of fact, but Mrs. Klapper took it as a mild reproach and an expression of self-pity.

  "It's good for you to worry a little. That way you never get fat." She walked as if all roads were sidewalks and every one of them ran uphill. "Anyway, I hurried. Look how I'm panting, like a dog. I run any faster, I'll have a stroke. Then you'll be happy?"

  "I'll dance in the streets," Mr. Rebeck said. They had reached the mausoleum, and Mrs. Klapper brushed off the top step as she always did and sat down with a large sigh of contentment. She took off one shoe and began to massage her toes, occasionally wriggling them to see if they were responding to treatment.

  "Completely numb," she said, looking up at Mr. Rebeck. "My toes got no more feeling than a salted herring. Also I think I busted an arch. Call the ambulance, Rebeck. Get a stretcher, carry me out of here, what are you standing around for?" She gripped her tortured toes in one hand and crackled them like peanut shells.

  Mr. Rebeck stood awkwardly in the presence of the unpretentious femininity involved even in the massaging of toes. Mrs. Klapper's foot, he noticed, was small and clean, marred only by the calluses on the ball and heel that a foot develops if its owner is in the habit of roaming around the house barefooted. An attractive foot, judged simply as a foot. He felt better when she slipped her shoe back on. "Would you like some water?" he asked. Mrs. Klapper nodded eagerly. "You got some? Bring it on." She frowned then. "Wait a minute. You got to go all the way back to the gate to get it, forget the whole thing. That thirsty I'm not. Forget it."

  Mr. Rebeck smiled and patted her shoulder. "Fear nothing," he said. "I'll be back in a minute."

  He left her, ran up the steps of the mausoleum, and emerged a moment later with a little plastic cup. Then he went around the building and walked twenty yards to where a rusty water faucet was set into the lawn near a bank of flowers. He filled the cup there and walked back to the mausoleum, where he presented the cup to Mrs. Klapper with a certain flourish. "I forgot your bouquet," he announced, "but you can take this home with you and raise your own."

  Mrs. Klapper wasted no time in badinage. She emptied the cup in three uninhibited gulps, tilted it again to get the last few drops, and said, "Thank you. I didn't know how thirsty I was." Then her face clouded and she looked guiltily at the empty cup.

  "Vey, Rebeck, I'm such a pig," she mourned. "I was so thirsty I didn't leave you any. Such a pig, Klapper."

  "It's all right," Mr. Rebeck said. He sat down beside her. "I didn't want any."

  "I tell you what," Mrs. Klapper said. "Tell me where's the water fountain and I'll get you some. Where is it, out back?" She started to get up.

  "Don't bother," Mr. Rebeck told her. "Really, I'm not thirsty."

  "In weather like this you're not thirsty? Don't be so noble, you'll live longer. I was so thirsty my mouth felt like a double boiler. Don't tell me you're not thirsty, just tell me where's the water fountain."

  "Look," Mr. Rebeck said, unconsciously adopting something of her tone of voice, as he always did if she was with him for any length of time. "I live here. The faucet is out back. I can get a drink whenever I want one, whenever I'm thirsty. I was thirsty a few minutes before you came, so I went and got a drink. Now I'm not thirsty. Sit down and stop running back and forth."

  "So who was running?" Mrs. Klapper asked, but she sat down again. She sighed. "Rebeck, you're a hard man to do a favor for. You're always one favor ahead. This is no way to keep your friends."

  Mr. Rebeck grinned. He felt very relaxed and unworried. "Fortunately—" he began, but Mrs. Klapper cut him off with a sudden yelp of remembrance. "Dope! Idiot! I knew I brought you something. What a dope! Here, for you, a big gift, compliments of the Salvation Army."

  Before he could speak, she had dropped her raincoat across his lap. "Here. You catch double pneumonia now, don't come blaming me. I did my best."

  Mr. Rebeck blinked down at the coat on his knees. He touched the smooth gray fabric. "This is for me?"

  "No, for President Eisenhower. Oh, is that a brain? Sure, for you. I'd bring it all the way out here for me? It's a raincoat, so you shouldn't get wet someday, catch a cold." She laughed, reaching over to turn down the collar of the coat.

  "It's a very nice coat," Mr. Rebeck said. He held it up off his lap to look at it. "Only I don't know—"

  "Know? What's to know? Sure it's a nice coat, it keeps the rain off, keeps you dry. You think it's going to rain, you carry it with you. It doesn't rain, good you don't need it. But if it starts to rain, you just put it on, there you are. Waterproof."

  Mr. Rebeck fingered the coat and did not look at her. "Yes. I know how it works." The unhappiness in his voice finally ate its way through Mrs. Klapper's gaiety. She looked at him in surprise.

  "What's the matter?" She snapped her fingers suddenly. "You think maybe it's too big? It's not too big. Here." She took the coat from him. "Stand up, put it on a minute. I'll show you it's not too big."

  Mr. Rebeck did not stand up. "No," he said. "It isn't that." He turned his body sideways so that he was sitting on the steps facing her. "Gertrude"—it was only the second or third time in their acquaintance that he had called her by her first name—"I thank you very much, but I can't accept this coat."

  The stricken look in her eyes made his stomach contract, even though he knew it would last only about two seconds. During those two seconds Mrs. Klapper was without defenses, and Mr. Rebeck felt guilty and weak. He had never known, and would never learn, how to handle unarmed people.

  Then Mrs. Klapper struck back. "You can't accept it? How come? What is it with you, Rebeck? Am I buying your soul? I'm giving you a raincoat. Something's wrong with that?"

  "I don't need a raincoat," Mr. Rebeck said.

  "What are you, a duck?" Her expressive mouth curved and curled like a catapult, hurling the separate words at him. "You got webbed feet, the water rolls right off your back? What is this, you don't need a raincoat? Everybody in the world needs a raincoat and all of a sudden you don't?"

  "It would be a waste," Mr. Rebeck said. "In all the time I've lived here, I've never used a raincoat."

  "Then you're a nut," Mrs. Klapper said promptly. "It's bad eno
ugh you live in a crazy place like this, but without a raincoat! In twenty years, you never once got caught in the rain? Never once?"

  "Of course I did. But there's shelter everywhere around here—trees, mausoleums, the office buildings. I never got really wet." He searched his mind for a proof that would mean something to her. "I've never been sick."

  Mrs. Klapper shook her head in disgust at his ignorance. "So you think that means you're never going to get wet, you're never going to get sick? Rebeck, believe me, when you get wet it's going to be right to the skin, when you get sick it'll be triple pneumonia, what'll you do then?" She dropped the raincoat back on his lap. "Look, just carry it around with you, it's such a big effort?" Her eyes brightened as she thought of a possible reason for his refusal of the coat. "You think I need it? I don't need it. I got a million raincoats. I got a closet full of raincoats, I could wear a different one every day. You're not stealing from me."

  Mr. Rebeck shook his head. "No, Gertrude." He folded the raincoat neatly and held it out to her. When she would not accept it he put it down between them on the step.

  "Thank you very much," he said, knowing that he did not dare to take the raincoat, and wanting desperately to soften the rejection. "It was a wonderful thing to do, Gertrude, but it would be a waste. I don't need it."

  "A straitjacket is what you need," Mrs. Klapper answered, but she said it absently, without malice. She smoothed her dress over her knees and smiled suddenly and warmly. "So all right, don't take it. Look at me, turning into a noodge in my old age. We'll talk about it later."

  "All right," Mr. Rebeck said. "Later" to Mrs. Klapper could mean anything from two minutes to two years. He hoped, for the sake of his resistance, that it was the latter she meant on this occasion.

  Now, without audibly shifting gears, she was off on another subject. "Listen, I was baby-sitting for my brother-in-law last night, the dentist. I told you about him. He wanted to take my sister to Lewisohn Stadium, so he calls me and he says 'Gertrude, you got a free evening, how about keeping an eye on Linda so she doesn't fall out of bed?' Well, his daughter is a doll. Six years old and an absolute doll. Sitting with her is a pleasure, not like with some children. I showed you her picture, didn't I?"