A Fine and Private Place

by Peter S. Beagle

  "You know," he said, "I always thought that there should be a graciousness to life. It was very important to me. Sometimes I would say to myself, 'When the world learns how to be gracious, then I will go back. Not before.' I thought I would know, you see."

  An empty taxicab pulled abreast of them as they stopped for a traffic light (Campos was capricious about traffic lights; sometimes he stopped for them), and the driver and Mr. Rebeck stared at each other with real curiosity until the light changed and the cab vanished between the pillars like a deer among trees. Campos turned left and drove up a long paved street choked with two-family houses. There was a light on in one of them, and a middle-aged woman standing at a window. Her eyes were tired but amused as she watched the little truck rattle by.

  "And now I've left the cemetery," Mr. Rebeck went on, "with no guarantee that the world has improved at all. In fact, I am sure it hasn't, not in any way that means anything. But it doesn't bother me, for some reason. Not right now, anyway. Maybe tomorrow, or a little later. Right now all that makes me sad is a feeling that I have wasted almost twenty years of my life. It would not be waste if I had learned something, if I were a better man because of those years. But I am as I was, only older, and that makes it waste. And waste to me is a terrible thing, a crime."

  He was sure as he spoke that Mrs. Klapper would agree with him, but he was also sure that she would shrug and say, All right, so you wasted. So what? What can you do about it? At least, you didn't get sick and die there, thank God. What else counts? He needed her reassurance.

  Instead she said slowly, "Everybody wastes time. A little here, a little there. You wake up in the morning, it's all bright and shiny, you get out of bed and say to yourself, Today is the day! Today I'm going to be a great man. Then you look out the window, you see a pretty girl on the sidewalk—zoom, into the pants, into the shirt, downstairs, 'Hello, did you drop this?' And you say to yourself, All right, so tomorrow I'll be a great man. Who ever got anywhere by rushing? Tomorrow positively, Thursday for sure. . . . Tell me, Rebeck, that's not wasting time?"

  Mr. Rebeck only looked at her. Her forehead was in shadow, but he could see her eyes.

  "So let's say you marry this girl. All right, you can still be a great man. Look at all the great men who had wives. Go ahead, be a great man, don't let me stop you. Only first you should stop by the grocer and pick up something for the dog. Also for the baby, soft, because he's getting his teeth. To do this, you have to have a job five days a week, you can be a great man on week ends."

  The streets were very empty. The few cars that passed were all taxicabs. Once a cat galloped across the street in front of them and hid behind the fender of a parked car, watching them until they were safely past.

  "Rebeck, this is not a waste? This is the big waste. Five minutes here, an hour there, maybe a week somewhere else. You count it all up, you got your twenty years, and maybe more. At least you got yours over with in one lump. Now you got them out of the way, you can go be a great man."

  "Only I'm not a great man, Gertrude," Mr. Rebeck said quietly. "I could never be. It isn't in me."

  "So who's breaking your arm, be great? Did I say it like an order? Don't be great, you don't feel like it. Just don't do anything you don't want to, that's all I'm saying. You shouldn't have to do something you don't like."

  She looked at him thoughtfully, nibbling at her gloved forefinger as she always did. "Rebeck, what are you going to do, now you're out of the cemetery? You got any idea?"

  "I don't know," Mr. Rebeck said. "Pharmacy is the only trade I ever learned. I suppose I could go back to it."

  "Pharmacy is good," Mrs. Klapper agreed. "A druggist makes a very nice living. Only it's changed a lot in twenty years; they have a lot of new things now. Miracle drugs."

  "I could study. It would be funny, going back to school at my age."

  "What's funny? Lots of people do it, people older than you." Mrs. Klapper frowned. "I'm trying to think of all the new drugs they got now you'd have to know about. Penicillin. You know about penicillin?"

  "Yes," Mr. Rebeck said. "I read about it in the newspapers."

  "Good, so at least you know penicillin. They also got a lot of things that sound alike. I mean, they end the same way. Let me think a minute—"

  "The sulfa drugs?" Mr. Rebeck suggested. "The myacins?"

  Mrs. Klapper stared at him. "Rebeck, you know all this, what are you bothering me for? What are you hocking me you got to go back to school? You're out of the cemetery five minutes, already you're a druggist again."

  Mr. Rebeck laughed. "No. I just read about those drugs. I don't know how they work. I'd have to study."

  "All right, so study. Sometimes you worry me, Rebeck."

  When they stopped for another traffic light, Mr. Rebeck saw a group of boys standing on a street corner. They wore sports shirts and heavy cowboy boots. All of them had pale faces, and they leaned against a wall and one another, looking idly at the truck. They looked weakly vicious, and lonely.

  "Hoods," Mrs. Klapper said, following Mr. Rebeck's glance. "This I'm sorry you had to see. Bums, all of them. What good could they be doing, up so late? Nudnicks."

  Mr. Rebeck grinned at her as the truck jerked forward again. "And what are you doing up so late, a respectable Bronx woman like you?"

  "My fault? My fault? I said, Hey, let's go over to Mount Merrill and drop off a corpse? This was my idea? I got nothing to do with this, Rebeck. If a cop stops us, you kidnapped me. You and the big one over there."

  She yawned and stretched, looking past Mr. Rebeck at the unlighted apartment houses and the moon going down behind them. Her forearm rested gently on Mr. Rebeck's shoulder as she looked out of the window.

  There weren't any trolleys any more, he remembered. The raven had told him. The flimsy-looking cars were gone, all of them, and the tracks they had run on were paved over. Now and then, looking carefully, he could catch a wink of silver out of the hidden heart of the street, and then he would know that a trolley track still ran there, wrapped in ragged tar and asphalt.

  He looked back once, through the glass slit behind him, because he wanted to see Laura once more. But the back of the truck was empty, except for the smugly stark coffin and the few tools that rattled beside it. There was nothing of Laura herself, neither dark hair nor autumn voice, neither gray eyes nor remembrance of soft laughter. Only a coffin in the back, and a pick, and a shovel, and a crowbar. Of Laura, who had sung to him and loved Michael, nothing.

  And yet he knew she was there. As surely as he knew that he would never be able to see ghosts again.

  Well, I made the choice myself, he thought. I knew what I was doing. Sooner or later I would have had to choose. No man can speak with both the living and the dead forever.

  Then he heard Campos humming in a kind of metallic harmony with the snarling engine, and he thought, Campos can. Campos will always be at ease in both worlds, because he belongs to neither. He loves no one—no, forget that. Morris Klapper was right; love has nothing to do with it. Campos simply does not care about either world, and it is caring about things that grinds down our souls and makes us do stupid things. He will always be able to see ghosts and people, because neither of them can touch him, to please him or to hurt him. I thought I was like that.

  For a little time he thought of Laura, and envied Campos the life that he himself had left. Then he forgot envy as he watched the houses pass by in silence. The houses amazed him. There was an unreality about them, a cleanness of glass and new bricks that made it impossible to imagine people living in them, eating and making love and flushing toilets. Yet obviously people did. He saw ashcans in front of most of the buildings, and baby carriages; these are the two sure signs of human occupancy anywhere. He wondered if Mrs. Klapper lived in a place like these.

  "Gertrude," he said, nudging her elbow, "is this still Yorkchester we're in?"

  Mrs. Klapper blinked and sat up straight. She had been half asleep, he realized.

  "No," she said,
trying to get her bearings by the street names. "Where we are, I'm not sure, but it's already way out of Yorkchester."

  "I hope Mount Merrill isn't far," Mr. Rebeck said. "We haven't got too much time."

  "Hey, you," Mrs. Klapper said to Campos, familiarity having whittled away her fear of him. "You. Sitting Bull. How long to Mount Merrill?"

  For answer Campos turned the truck so sharply to the left that Mrs. Klapper was thrown against Mr. Rebeck, jarring the breath out of him. The big man drove the truck up a steep, pebbly hill, flanked on both sides by a few small private houses. When the hill leveled off he let the truck coast a little and then brought it to a stop in front of a gold-painted iron gate. There was no watchman behind the gate, and no light in the wooden caretaker's shack.

  "This is it?" Mrs. Klapper asked, sounding mildly chagrined. "This little thing is Mount Merrill?"

  "Back entrance." Campos grunted. Leaving the motor on, he got out of the cab and walked forward to investigate the lock on the gate.

  "Hoo-hoo," Mrs. Klapper said. "Back entrance. We come in with the groceries, huh?"

  "It's easier this way," Mr. Rebeck explained. "They always have someone on duty at the main entrance, Campos says."

  Campos flicked the padlock casually with his forefinger and went around to the back of the truck. He returned a moment later, carrying a crowbar, which he fitted into the hasp of the lock. Without preamble, he placed both hands on the crowbar and pushed down. He actually rose on his toes and threw his whole weight on the bar. The long muscles of his wrists and forearms swelled briefly, and then the lock flew apart with a sound like that of a spoon being dropped into a glass. Campos opened the gate wide and came back toward the truck.

  "My God!" Mrs. Klapper said in the whisper she ordinarily reserved for hurricanes and quadruplets. "Rebeck, my God, didn't he ever go to school? What are we doing here?"

  "There was no other way to get in." Mr. Rebeck was a little worried himself. Having broken his own lock, he would have broken a good many more to bring Laura to Michael, but he was beginning to think that it had not been wise to bring Mrs. Klapper. If they were arrested, would she be also? He had never considered that possibility.

  Mrs. Klapper was considering it. "For that kind of thing," she muttered as Campos climbed back into the cab, "for that kind of thing they put you in jail and eat the key for breakfast."

  "It can't be that bad," Mr. Rebeck said, sure that it was.

  "No? Rebeck, I don't think they even let you get mail. They probably read you the newspaper once a month."

  And so they drove through the Mount Merrill Cemetery, staring ahead in the cottony dark for a place to bury Laura Durand. In time they found one, a rather arid patch of land with a few small graves around it, and none close by. It would have been good, Mr. Rebeck thought, to bury her close to Michael's grave, but it would have been merely a nice gesture, and the dead do not appreciate the importance of gestures to the living.

  Campos marked out the lines of the grave with the edge of his spade and began to dig. Mr. Rebeck and Mrs. Klapper sat in the cab, Mr. Rebeck's offer of help having been silently refused. For a long time neither of them said anything. They watched Campos standing ankle deep, calf deep, knee deep in the earth, hurling the dirt over his shoulder with an odd, blind twist of his body. Dawn was not near yet, but the dark had softened as the stars went out, so that Campos was no longer the black shape that waits where man thinks his destiny should be standing; he was just Campos, no one's friend, digging a grave for Laura for his own reasons, or for no reason at all.

  Presently Mrs. Klapper looked at Mr. Rebeck and said thoughtfully, "You know, Rebeck, this whole thing is crazy. Everything. Look, it's after four in the morning, the sun's going to come up soon. Everybody's going to wake up. I'm an old woman, I should be waking up too. So instead I'm sitting in a graveyard in a truck, at four in the morning, watching King Kong tearing up the grass, and waiting for the police to come along. Rebeck, for you maybe this is not crazy, God alone knows. For me, believe me, this is crazy."

  "I know," Mr. Rebeck said, wanting to tell her about Laura and Michael, and knowing that it was the one thing he could never tell her. "But it really is a last favor to a friend. Someday I'll tell you about it, if I can."

  Mrs. Klapper shrugged. "Tell me, don't tell me. I believe you. It's too late not to believe you. Anyway, Rebeck, when you are my age you find out it doesn't make any difference if you don't believe something somebody said to you. Who cares? It leaves you with nothing. A woman my age has no choice. Believe. Who knows, maybe it'll come out right."

  She pushed her thick hair back from her forehead and scavenged frantically in her purse, trying to hold back a sneeze until she found a handkerchief. Watching her at the especially unbecoming moment, Mr. Rebeck felt his heart grow warm for her. Wanting his features to show at least something of this, he contorted them into an awkward smile.

  "You're not old," he said quietly.

  Mrs. Klapper smiled then, rubbing the back of her neck, her eyes half closed.

  "I know it," she said happily. "You think I could say I was if I was?"

  Then Campos was finished digging the grave, and the rest was all three of them lowering the coffin into the hole and Mr. Rebeck helping Campos fill the grave with earth and stamp it smooth. Watching them hopping and prancing under the blue dark, big scarecrow, little scarecrow, Mrs. Klapper burst out laughing. "Like the kids in the candy store," she said.

  No matter how flat they tried to make it, how flush with the ground, it looked like a grave where no grave should be. They could only hope that no Mount Merrill official would pass that way until the ground had settled. The winter would freeze it and frost the turned-up brown earth to the color of the earth around it, and in spring the ferny wild grass would grow on Laura's grave, hiding it and warming it.

  "Anyway, it's got no headstone to give it away," Mr. Rebeck said. He paused and added, "Isn't it strange? Laura will be buried here and no one in the world will know it except us. Everybody will see her headstone in the Yorkchester Cemetery and think she is buried there. And for them it will be just as if she were."

  "People don't know," Campos said surprisingly. He leaned on his spade, sweating again, but breathing easily. "The stone's all they want. Put up a stone, tell them their mother's buried under it. That's all they want. They go to the stone and say, Sorry, Ma, I'm a bastard. Makes no difference."

  They walked slowly to the truck, but Mr. Rebeck kept turning to look back at the grave. He did not really expect to see Laura spring lightly from the ground, lovely and immortal, and run among the stones until she found the man who loved her, but he would have liked to see them together. There are no happy endings, he knew, because nothing ends; and if there were any being dispensed, a great many worthier people would be in line for them long before Michael and Laura and himself. But the happiness of the unworthy and the happiness of the so-so is as fragile and self-centered and dear as the happiness of the righteous and the worthy; and the happiness of the living is no less short and desperate and forgotten than the joys of the dead.

  Campos drove them back to the gate, which he closed carefully and pointlessly behind them, and then drove the truck down the steep hill. A young couple sat on the porch of one of the houses, talking softly, very close to each other, but not touching. They looked up as the truck passed the house, and then looked away.

  "That's the best way in the world to catch cold," Mrs. Klapper said. "Dopes." But she was smiling sleepily.

  At the bottom of the hill Campos stopped the truck. Mr. Rebeck and he looked at each other.

  "Well?" the big man asked. "You coming back?"

  Mr. Rebeck sat quite still. Mrs. Klapper drew her hand from his and waited.

  Meeting Campos's passionless eyes, he thought, This man is pure, and as beautifully sterile as all cemeteries. I am neither pure nor sterile. I am infected with life and will die of it in time. Sainthood is not for me, nor wisdom, nor purity. Only pharmacy, and suc
h love as I have not buried and lost. This is a very little out of all a man might have, but it is all a man ever gets. I will sell coltsfoot candy, if there is any left in the world.

  So he shook his head and said, "No, Campos."

  Campos nodded and started the engine again. Mrs. Klapper climbed out of the truck, but Mr. Rebeck remained behind for a moment.

  "Good-by," he said. He held out his hand.

  Campos looked at the thin, brown hand without much interest. Finally he took it briefly in his own, which was rough-skinned and dry.

  "See you," he said, and drove away.

  The man and the woman watched the truck with much greater intentness than it deserved until it turned a corner and was gone. Then Mrs. Klapper stretched elaborately, still without looking at Mr. Rebeck, and said, "So?"

  "So?" he mimicked her. "So what?"

  "So where to now? It's almost dawn, Rebeck. You got a place to go?"

  The man looked at the strange houses, and at the street lights, which were going out like stars. He put his arm around the woman's shoulders.

  "It's not dawn yet," he said, smiling at her. "This is what they call false dawn."

  "All right, dawn, false dawn. I'm not going to fight with you. Come on home with me, have at least a cup of coffee. It'll wake you up."

  "I'm up," Mr. Rebeck said. "I've been up all night."

  "Rebeck, you're a trial and a trouble to an old woman. So you're coming or not?"

  "I'm coming, Gertrude."

  They walked along the street together, slowly, because they were both very tired. Mrs. Klapper's heels clicked on the sidewalk. They were the only people on the street, as far as they could see.

  "There's a subway around here," Mrs. Klapper said. "Gets you right home." She looked up at him—a pleasurable feeling, he thought. "Rebeck, you like sour cream with cottage cheese?"