Arthur McCann

by William Pitt

  ‘Nebuchadnezzar, the King of the Jews,

  Bought his wife a pair of shoes' My mother with stolid logic, declared that the Jews had the right religion because Jesus had been a Jew, so what was there to argue about.

  The family Green, ten houses up our street, were said to be Jews and one evening when I was there, playing Jig-saws with Emrys Green, I innocently asked his father what it was like in Jerusalem.

  He became suddenly and strangely ill-tempered at this and said that he had never been out of Newport in his life, and didn't want to, and if I wanted to know about Jerusalem I ought to ask my father because he went about making out that he knew God personally.

  But that was all. Today a boy of sixteen would know everything about the racial distinctions in the same way as they know everything about every variety of sex. But then it was not so.

  Mrs Nissenbaum bought me some new clothes and I went around to see her friends in her floating automobile. Until then I had never been in a car and to be drifting through the elongated city and its white suburbs in this vehicle, sometimes driven by a Peruvian chauffeur and sometimes by the stately Rebecca, was like living in a daily dream.

  Sometimes we went to restaurants and I could see she was very proud of me by the way she told the waiters and the people at the surrounding tables who I was, what maritime disasters I had braved and in which newspapers these adventures had been related. Once everyone in a restaurant put down their knives and forks and their wine glasses to applaud me until I had a nasty lump in my throat and a guilty technicolour (blue sea, blue sky, white boat, red and white mate) picture of Mr Gander toppling over the side of the lifeboat after I had clouted him with the spanner. People kept giving me money too and this collected in the pockets of my two suits and the drawer of my bedside table because I was never required to buy anything.

  Everywhere I went with Mrs Nissenbaum, whether it was up the Empire State Building to the Central Park Zoo or to one of the stores on Fifth Avenue I tried to look as though / was escorting her. I walked on the outside when we were in the street, but although I stretched myself to my fullest height and even on to tiptoe, I never reached above her shoulder. When we were in a group of people I found myself almost permanently on the balls of my feet at her side, a difficult position to maintain especially since I was required to nod my head to the conversation at the same time. Once, when we were going down the wide steps by the fountains in Central Park together I asked her openly if she would mind if I walked a couple of elevations behind her, so that, at least viewed from the front, we looked as though we were of the same height. My face was very young too, of course, and this worried me. I stopped my weekly shave in an attempt to grow a beard but nothing happened. It was no good my pretending we were together because it was plain for all to see / was with her not she with me. I belonged to her.

  Needless to say I was now grossly in love with Mrs Nissenbaum and her scented proximity was agony for someone so sensitive and impressionable as I was then. Her voice, the casual silk touches of those huge hands, her all-enveloping smile, her strong legs in her fine big, shapely shoes, her kiss on my cheek as I went each night burning to bed.

  Sometimes in the day she went out alone and left me to wander, pent up with love and need, through the lovely home that she and the now fragmented Benny Nissenbaum had made together.

  The maid, the housekeeper and the chauffeur seemed to melt into elegant wallpaper at these times of the day and I walked about touching things, looking behind doors, brimming with guilt and fear for her perfume was everywhere.

  I went into Benny's study, where his moustached photograph smiled remote encouragement to me from the desk. It was here, to fend off my base emotions, that I began to write my novel, 'All the Coloured Lights Of The World by Arthur McCann', a saga of the sea and other things now nearing completion after more than twenty years. I picked at the opening chapter on Benny's typewriter, wondering, I must confess, where the fingers that last touched it were now located. But I was drawn out by the sweet, beckoning, emptiness of the house, and I would begin to perambulate again like a visitor to a small, scented museum.

  It was full of old things I knew nothing about. Clocks and pieces of china and silver, displayed on shelves and in cases. The furniture was voluminous and the carpets like fields. I would play games, crouching in one corner of a settee and imagining myself again in the lifeboat, with Mrs Nissenbaum replacing Mr Gander, and a convenient air bed on the bottom boards. Or I would walk around and idly pull the curtains together by their gold-tassled cords, then open them again.

  I looked through the late Benny's books but found nothing to interest me until, between the pages of a life of Abraham Lincoln, I discovered a wafer-sized volume called The Red Light which was a guide to American soldiers on how not to catch pox when they were away from their loved ones. I read this with arid mouth and pounding ribs. The things that were described! And how easy it all was. All over the world there were women willing, eager even, as Mrs Nissenbaum would say, to do these things. It said so.

  My devilish excitement was accentuated because that evening we stayed at home and she lit the lamps and we sat on the cushions, on the floor, and listened to Jose Iturbi playing with the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra on the radio. Mrs Nissenbaum sat great and soft, her knees curling under her, her head laying back against the arm of the settee, her bosom rising to the music. She was like a lovely, tame, well-nourished creamy cow. I hardly dared to look at her. The combination of her presence, her perfume, and Iturbi clattering through Moonlight Sonata was almost more than sixteen-year-old flesh and blood could stand. Errol Flynn came in and with a little stiff legged-leap settled in her crutch, curled up in the enclosed intimacy of that erotic place.

  'What you done today, my lovely boy?' she asked fondly when the commercials interrupted Chopin.' You been busy ?'

  'Just resting,' I said. 'Walking about and that.'

  'Good for you to have a rest,' she agreed. 'After all you been through on the sea.'

  The next afternoon she went to the Jewish Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Slavs, or something, and I went to her bedroom. A dozen times I had stood outside the door, when she was in there or when she was away from the house.

  Just stood, trying to imagine what was the other side of the pink barrier with its looped beading picked out in gold, with a sort of golden football cup at its centre. Once, when the maid was making the bed, I had walked slowly by, paused for as long as I dared and see, Mrs Nissenbaum's exciting pink sheets being changed.

  Now I went in. I did a circuit of the house first. The sunlight coming through the delicate curtains only served to make the place more enclosed. It was like a perfumed prison. Then I stood outside her door, waited only a moment, opened it and stepped in.

  I stood and looked at Rebecca's room, a low sneaky feeling settling on me, making a layer of misery across my excitement. It was as I knew it would be, warm and light and rich; the bed like an altar covered with a drape, daylight coming muted through the lacy curtains, a photograph of the dismembered Benny on one side of the dressing table and, to my astonishment, one of me on the other. It was the original of one of the newspaper photographs. She must have sent for it. I felt so fearful there, and so ashamed, but thrilled that I was in the place where she rested that heavy, heavenly, body at night. I looked at the bed and imagined her in the dark, breathing at its centre, each sweet, deep-breasted snore sending out its own cloud of exclusive perfume. Stepping forward I touched the bed and pressed it with my hands, feeling its give. I warily pulled the quilt back and put my fingers against her pillows, looking at my fingers first to ensure their cleanliness.

  There was another embroidered door leading to her bathroom and I went in there too, my excitement, shame and fear, hugging together in my chest. The heady sensation was accentuated as soon as I stepped through the arch. The bath was sunken and I stood and imagined her lying in it like some marvellous hippopotamus, the water lapping about her breasts, her p
ink nipples lying just on the surface like the noses of attendant creatures. I touched and then put my cheek against the towels that were waiting for her, smelled her pearly soap, and held her gilt-handled back-scrubber. How I would have delighted in scrubbing that wide and fabulous back, soaping those tremendous buttocks and watching the slow descent of suds down the turned trunks of her legs.

  Then I did something quite despicable. I returned to the bedroom and, almost stifled by my guilt and exhilaration, I opened the drawers of her chests and dressing table. They were laid, like treasure trove, with coloured clothes, trinkets and handbags. I touched lace and silk and pulled erotically at elastic. Eventually, like the thief I was, I dipped into a drawer and came out with a magnificent pair of cami-knickers, emerald with lace about the waist and the legs. I let them run luxuriously through my hands, put them to my cheek and then, in a wild moment, stuffed them down the front of my trousers.

  It is always at moments like that, at the ultimate of shame and guilt, that the key is heard to turn in the front door, and this is what happened. I could even hear her talking to someone in the hall. From there I knew they could see the bedroom door. My body went to ice. I left the drawer open and with her knickers still wedged in my crutch, I went like a shrike on to the landing almost materializing in front of their eyes. They were standing there with Errol Flynn yapping around their shoes.

  'Arthur!' she exclaimed. 'Where did you come from?'

  'Hello, Mrs Nissenbaum,' I muttered weakly. I felt that my body was full of cold water. With difficulty I walked down towards her.

  'This is Mrs Rosnagel,' she said. 'She is the secretary of the Jewish Committee for the Rehabilitation of the Slavs. She's from Sutton Place. Come on down and say hello.'

  I contrived a tight, deliberate, walk which more or less kept the knickers jammed in place, keeping my knees almost together and descending the stairs with an odd mincing step.

  'He got something wrong with his legs?' inquired Mrs Rosnagel as I came down. Mrs Nissenbaum looked at her stonily. 'The lifeboat,' she said tersely. 'It's the lifeboat, can't you see? Maybe if you were in a lifeboat without food and water for . .. how many days Arthur .. . ?'

  ‘Six,' I gasped continuing my crippled walk. 'I think.'

  'Six!' she almost shouted at her guest. 'He thinks I You see, Sadie, he don't even know. The poor kid. And you go talking about the way he walks. It was the rowing that hurt his knees like that. It's only a wonder he can walk at all, after six days, or maybe more, even, in a lifeboat because of the filthy Germans. And you criticizing!'

  'Rebecca,' the other lady said sharply. 'I am not criticizing your boy. I was only making a passing comment like I might say he's got nice eyes or ears.'

  'He has,' said my hostess fondly. 'Thank God he didn't go blind in that lifeboat. With the sun he could just have gone blind.'

  Hesitantly I shook hands with Mrs Rosnagel for I knew her eyes were on my legs. With a sort of doomed shuffle I allowed myself to be ushered into the drawing room with them. As I did so the cami-knickers moved and began to slide down my trouser leg. I grabbed at them in pitiful panic and managed to arrest their descent just above my right knee. Hurriedly I sat down on an edge of the settee, with my loaded leg away from the two women. Mrs Nissenbaum rang and told the maid to get some coffee.

  'He's got a swelling on his leg,' said Mrs Rosnagel doggedly. ‘Look - on that leg right there.'

  ‘Sadie, will you leave his legs alone. He was in the lifeboat, like I told you.'

  ‘He's gone very white,' said the visitor. Christ, I would have liked to strangle her then and there. Her eyes went from my trousers to my face and back to my trousers again.

  'Who's to say he can't go white?' insisted Mrs Nissenbaum. 'With you going on about his legs.'

  ‘He was red on the stairs just now.'

  'I ... I have these turns,' I stumbled urgently. 'One minute red and the next minute white.'

  'Like a street signal,' said Mrs Rosnagel.

  ‘It's the lifeboat,' said Mrs Nissenbaum.

  'Your leg, it hurts?' asked the guest.

  'No. Not much.'

  Shit on her. I was holding the bloody thing to stop them dropping right there on the carpet.

  Then, inspired, I said: 'It does hurt a bit. It's not much. But I'll just go upstairs, if you don't mind.'

  Mrs Nissenbaum, concern plastered right across her beautiful, large face, moved towards me, but I evaded her and holding my leg and her garment with my right hand I went towards the door like some suddenly afflicted hunchback. Both women were staring at me and Errol Flynn followed me. The hairy little insect began sniffing and snap

  ping at my trouser turn-up.

  Outside the door I tried to take a stride too wide and keep the dog away at the same time, and the cami-knickers slid down the chute of my trousers and on to my shoe. In the moment that I turned to see if the two women had rounded the door, Errol Flynn had the green garment and went off with it as though he had captured his first rabbit.

  Mrs Nissenbaum came around the door and I dropped into my crippled pose again just in time. Mrs Rosnagel was just behind her. One all sympathy, one all suspicion. Fortunately neither of them noticed the dog and his capture. I repeated that I would be all right and staggered up the stairs.

  Then Errol Flynn, with idiotic delight, flew into the hall with the cami-knickers in shreds, dangling from his jaw like limp lettuce.

  Mrs Rosnagel bent to the dog. 'Looks like he's got a pair of your bloomers, Rebecca,' she growled.

  'Naughty Errol Flynn,' said Mrs Nissenbaum. But I looked around and saw that she was still watching me limping up the stairs, the light of pity, and sweetness, in those outsize eyes.

  Seven

  That night it was hot, the curtains limp at the open window, the air like rubber, the darkness bearing down on me in my bed. I lay, damp with desire, wondering if Mrs Nissen-baum's big body was hot all over too. In intervals of sticky sleep my eyelids scarcely dropped. I wondered where it was possible to buy Spanish Fly, or if it were possible to make it and what were the ingredients? How was it administered to the victim? Or should I creep in and tie her up, do my terrible thing, and vanish into the torrid night? That would seem ungrateful after all her kindness to me, and, in any case I had a horribly logical vision of her breaking my knots with one powerful pull of those magnificent wrists. Or perhaps I should just present myself at her door and lean idly naked against the frame until she woke and knew why I had come.

  The simplicity of this idea appealed to me and, after an hour of arguing with myself, working out the odds, and tossing heads or tails, the best of five, with a ten cent piece, I actually crawled out of bed and went out into the corridor. My heart seemed to be banging like a berserk pendulum against my ribs at either side. It had spent half its day swinging wildly. If this pressure continued I would have a seizure before I'd had a screw.

  Naked as a stone I crept along the shadows of the corridor and stood outside the pink embellished door. The house was loaded with silence but through it I thought I could hear her profound breathing. Just a lad of sixteen, I stood, calm outside, trembling within, facing the door, my ridiculously outsized erection pointing forward and slightly up like an ambitious naval gun. If she had opened the door I am certain I would have fainted.

  But nothing happened. I stood and stood. Then, sick with myself, I moved forward and let my forehead and the end of my willie touch the smooth paint of the door. I was there only for a second, in an upright dream. Then abruptly I realized what I was doing and in an embarrassed panic I scuttled back to my room. I sat on the bed and made up my mind to leave Mrs Nissenbaum and her lovely home. And it had to be right then.

  I got into one of my new suits and put all my money in the back pocket of the trousers. It was my intention to leave a note, but I thought if I waited my resolution would dilute, so I decided instead to send her a telegram in the morning saying I had been suddenly called home because of a family illness. Now I was dressed I paused
outside her door only to blow a faint sad kiss in the general direction of her bed.

  A minute later I was looking up towards that same bed-

  room, its curtain flapping like a gentle farewell, from the dimness of the tree-hung road. As if to aid and abet my escape a taxi, going back to the city, came along the main highway and I stopped it and told the driver to take me to Times Square. I sat, tired and defeated now, in the back, felt in my pocket and touched the door key which she had given me.

  Riverdale might have been sleeping, but it was only one-thirty and the centre of the city was full of lurid lights and people. I walked like a pasty ghost through them, not knowing where I was going, nor truly what I was seeking. Only that it was something sinful. I went into a place and had a hamburger, then I went into a taxidance, but none of the girls would take my money because they were too busy with soldiers, sailors and the like, still celebrating the end of the war.

  Next I went into a gallery where you put a dime into a machine to see some illuminated pictures of women undressing and dancing in the nude. There were three or four other customers in there, bent against the machines, like experts examining some rare finds in a museum. They were intent and isolated from each other and the rest of New York. The place was presided over by an unkempt young man sitting in a sort of a pulpit at one end who was apparently there to see that propriety, as set down in the law of the State, was observed. His eyes were almost hooded but he obviously observed every nuance of the proceedings, because at one point he called wearily into a little microphone: 'Number Three, your clothing is too near the observation machine.' The man curled over peep-show Number Three shuffled back what I suppose was a regulation number of inches.