Arthur McCann

by William Pitt

  I was astonished to see him for, not only did we make a point of never buying anything at his shop (my mother insisted that he got rich on the wartime black market, although he certainly never showed the least sign of this underground affluence), but we never even spoke to him.

  'Arthur,' he said. 'You've got to come quickly. It's the telephone. It's your father. He says he's dying, Arthur.'

  In a faintly confused way I wondered why, if my father were dying, he would tell Mr Tyler about it first. I went across to the shop and amid the bags of beans and tins of custard powder I saw the telephone lying like a dread hand.

  I picked it up. 'Hello.'

  'Hello, Arthur.' His voice sounded dusty.

  'Yes, it's Arthur. Are you all right, dad?'

  'Of course I'm not all right, you fool! I'm bloody dying. Didn't that twat Tyler tell you?'

  'Yes, well he did mention it. But I thought he might be joking.'

  'Joking! About somebody bleeding to death under a Newport Corporation bus ?'

  'Well, he didn't say anything about that. Nothing about a bus. Is that what's happened to you?'

  'Shut up, for Christ's sake, you everlasting bugger. Just keep your wits about you and listen. I haven't got long left.'

  'Can I ask you something first?'

  'Shut up! All right. What? Hurry up.'

  'If you're under a Newport Corporation bus, how can you be telephoning?'

  'Initiative,' he said.' We're not all like you, you know son. I am at present trapped under the counter of Lewis's the hardware shop, because I was in here and the bloody bus came off the road and crashed right through Mr Lewis's window. Now have you got the situation? I can only just move a finger and I've got every bone in my body broken and I'm spilling out my life's blood, but right next to my nose is Mr Lewis's telephone and the Newport directory. So I rang that fool Tyler and told him to go and get your mother, seeing as he's the only sod who can afford a phone in the street. Why ain't you at your bloody office anyway?'

  'If you're dying,' I said evilly,' don't you think you ought to moderate your language?'

  'I'm dying,' he moaned sorrowfully as though the import had just come to him. 'Son, I'm dying. I've got my own blood on my hands.'

  A strange calm, coldness came over me. I stood holding the phone, offering neither advice nor sympathy.

  'Listen,' he croaked. 'And listen carefully.' His tone changed appeasingly. ' Just be a good boy and do a couple of things for your dying father.'

  'What?'

  'In my bedroom, in the middle of a book called Babylon and its Environs remember that, Babylon and its Environs. Can you remember it?'

  'I'll write it down if you like,' I suggested nastily.

  'No, there's no time. The weight of this Corporation bus is pressing down on me, boy, and it's sodding heavy, I can tell you. I'm in a very bad way. Bleeding. Now listen. In the middle of that book is a Savings Bank Book with ninety-four pounds in it. Your mother doesn't know about it, so don't mention it to her because she won't be without, and I know you'll always be good to her. So what I want you to do is to put that bank book in an envelope and send it to this address . . . Have you got a pencil and paper?'

  'Yes,' I lied.

  'It's Miss Gerda Peasbody, 109, Sutcliffe Gardens, Bristol. Got that?'

  'Yes,' I lied again.

  He seemed to weaken, his voice whispered in the phone. 'I knew you'd understand, Arthur. We're men of the world, you and me, son. You've had your little experiences, as we well know, and I might as well tell you I've not been innocent all my life, although I've always been very good to your mother. It's just that this lady, Miss Peasbody, lent me some money a long time ago and I'd like to go now . . . knowing that I've paid her back. And Arthur . ..'

  'Yes.'

  'Call me father.'

  'Father.'

  'There's one of your aunts I would like to send a last message to.'

  Inside I jumped eagerly. 'Yes, which one, father?'

  'Your aunts are all nice, jolly, girls son. The most beautiful sisters in Newport they used to call them, although, you've got to admit, they're wearing a bit thin now. And they've put poor Ramona away because she's bats. But one has always stood out from the rest . . . just one . . .'

  Oh Christ, why didn't he get on with it? Those double-deckers were heavy. 'Yes, father,' I whispered encouragingly.

  With the secret of the unfurgled aunt a syllable away there was a silence on the line, broken by brief groans and sobs. Then my mother rushed into the shop, knocking over a pile of tinned pineapple chunks - the staple Sunday luxury of the district - as she came in.

  'Oh, Arthur, what's happened? Oh, my God, what's happened?' The street knew by now, of course, because the grapevine was ever lively. My mother had been told of my father's mishap as she alighted from a bus, informed by neighbours who were actually catching the same bus back into town in order to view the catastrophe. They were the same people who during the war used to go on outings to see the bomb damage.

  'Arthur,' she moaned. 'Is he there? Is he speaking?'

  'He's groaning,' I answered, unfeeling for him not her.

  She pulled the receiver from me. 'Phil!' she howled into it. 'Phil! Are you there? Oh, my God, Phil, what's happened? Speak to me, Phil.'

  I decided to go down to Commercial Road and take a look for myself. Even then I couldn't trust him. I got a bus quickly and from the front seat on the top deck I saw the crowd, and the fire engines, and the bus half buried in the shop. There was no pity in my heart for my father, only a cool void, and a suspicion that he would escape as he had always escaped. At the fringe of the crowd I stood, speaking to no one, watching the firemen moving the timbers and the bricks, watching the bus being carefully hoisted away.

  Three people died in the rubble of Lewis (Hardware) Ltd., including Mr Lewis (Hardware) himself. My father, covered in red paint, was brought out with slight bruising. In the hospital they used three bottles of turpentine on him and sent him home. He had his picture and his courageous story in all the newspapers.

  I went immediately back to the house, took the secret bank book from Babylon and its Environs, forged his signature and gave the ninety-four pounds to my mother as a parting present before I went away to sea. My father never mentioned it again. It was as though it had never been.

  Ten

  That night the wind got up while I was in bed and I could hear it leaping about the empty street. My bed, even if it were moored for ever alongside the Food Office, was stationary and warm, and I thought the sea would be a rough and lonely life. Which it is.

  After Pamela's departure from our outside privy and my father's resurrection from the rubble of Lewis (Hardware) Ltd., I signed on for a six months voyage to Panama, through the Pacific to Suva, down to Australia, and back by way of New York.

  There were no pineapples in the crew, at least no obvious and active pineapples, but there was an old sailor who prayed aloud in his bunk for hour upon hour, asking the benevolent God to save him from the sea. Between Suva and Brisbane he must have decided to put his faith to the test because he jumped overboard and wasn't missed for three hours until his watch came. The ship turned and went back three hours, as required by the hopeful regulations, looking forlornly into the enormous sea for one poor little man. The word of the law having been accomplished we continued on our way, and there were no more loud prayers to disturb our peace.

  Propped in my bunk I continued to write 'All The Coloured Lights Of The World by Arthur McCann' and I would lie, too, and think of Mrs Nissenbaum and Rose, comparing their respective characters and anatomies. Sometimes I also included one layer of Pamela in this fantasy, but it was generally a disagreeable comparison, and I discontinued it after a few weeks at sea.

  With the others I could see their faces and remember their warmth, although, naturally, Mrs Nissenbaum, being the later, somewhat obscured the accurate remembrance of Rose beneath the balloon. Against them the five minute experience of Pamela in the rain-
rattled closet, the trembling breasts beneath the candlelight, and the terrifying conelusion of the romantic interlude, seemed sordid and all too real.

  I told myself fiercely that if Mrs Nissenbaum was to remain a lovely memory, despite the bruising of it occasioned by the accident to Errol Flynn, then I must not see her again when I returned to New York. She had not written to me and for her it was obviously over. Then, I did not realize just how much it was over.

  But as we went, day on day, climbing back up the Pacific, through the canal, and then moving up the eastern seaboard of the United States, my resolve to leave, her untouched in my heart weakened. By the time we picked up the pilot at the mouth of the Hudson I was in the bath giving myself a shampoo and an energetic scrub underneath (there had been an incident with a casual girl at King's Cross, Sydney, which had worried me a little) and I came on to the deck in the winter sun to be greeted by that broad chested figure of Liberty, arms spread, gown folded over huge and welcoming body. By then I knew that I must find Rebecca again and take my chance with her memory.

  As it happened her memory was never disturbed. As soon as I could get ashore I got a cab to Riverdale. The house in the winter seemed worn and when I got closer I immediately sensed that she no longer lived there. The lace curtains were still against the windows but, peering through, I saw that the elegant hall and the soft rooms were now empty boxes. The telephone was sitting like a spider in the middle of the floor and beside it was a New York directory. There was nothing else.

  Riverdale was not like Newport, where it would have been easy and natural to knock on someone's door and ask what had happened to Mrs Nissenbaum, so I went back into the City. But the emptiness of that place, and the dumb telephone and directory on the bleak floor, was on my mind. Eventually it was the directory which prompted the thought of telephoning Mrs Rosnagel, the friend of Mrs Nissenbaum.

  There were several people called that in the book, but I asked each one if she or he knew Mrs Nissenbaum, and eventually the right Mrs Rosnagel said: 'Rebecca Nissenbaum. Sure I knew her.' I told her who I was and she sounded interested and suggested I went to her apartment on the south side of the Park right away. All the way in the taxi I kept wondering why she had used the past tense.

  Mrs Rosnagel was not like Mrs Nissenbaum. She was a short, spare woman. Her corners seemed, somehow stapled together, pinched, including those at the edges of her mouth for she had a tight smile.

  'Come in, come in, Arthur,' she invited. She was very well dressed, but I thought that it probably wasn't just for me. You could not imagine her having any old clothes. I went into one of those New York apartments that just close around you, warm, luxurious, so isolated, insulated from the city and the world that you wonder if those places are still outside the door.

  'My, you've sure grown, Arthur,' she said measuring me from feet to head with her studded glasses held slightly away from her face.' In just a few months. Will you have a drink?'

  'Thank you,' I said. 'Whisky if you've got any.' I thought I would show her I had grown in all sorts of ways.' I suppose I have got taller and put on some weight.'

  'And how,' she said, getting the drinks. ' Boy, I certainly wouldn't like to try and lift you.'

  I couldn't make up my mind whether that was just a chance apt remark, or whether Mrs Nissenbaum had told her that she had carried me from my bed. I watched her expression carefully as she turned from the drinks cabinet, but she was still wearing the same tight smile, so I couldn't tell.

  I did not ask about Mrs Nissenbaum right away. Something made it difficult to introduce. I raised my glass and said a manly: 'Cheers'. It was bourbon which I had never tasted until then. It surprised my throat and I had a fight to stop choking. She said: ' It was clever of you to find me.'

  'I tried nearly all the Rosnagels in the book. It's not all that much of a common name.'

  'It's from the French Rosnagel,' she smiled. 'Rosnagel, the nightingale. We Rosnagels like to think of ourselves as singers.' To my surprise she sat down at a little white piano and began crooning ' Where the Blue of The Night Meets the Gold of the Day' while I stood wooden with embarrassment. 'The nightingale,' she shrugged again, getting up from the piano.

  'How is Mrs Nissenbaum?' I asked at last.

  'Not too good. She's dead,' she said bluntly.

  I felt the whisky go cold in my stomach.

  'Oh no, Mrs Rosnagel, not her.'

  'Oh yes, Arthur. Her.'

  I thought I was going to cry. I dropped my face away from her and drank deeply to hide my expression. This time I did choke and she came to me and gave me a sympathetic pound on the back.

  'Oh, thank you,' I said. 'That's terrible.'

  'It's strong stuff,' she said. 'Especially if you're not used to it.'

  'I mean about Mrs Nissenbaum,' I said, marvelling at her stupidity. 'She was so . . . big . . . and alive.'

  ' She's small and dead,' she said. ' He came back.'

  'He?'

  'Benny Nissenbaum.'

  'Her husband? But he was dead.'

  She sighed: 'The same Benny Nissenbaum. The Japs didn't get him, the finks. No wonder they lost the war. The atom bomb's too good for them.'

  I knew what the answer was going to be before I asked. 'And what happened to Rebecca?'

  'She did what I would have done, honey, if Benny Nissenbaum had come back from the dead to me. She jumped off the Queensborough Bridge.'

  'Christ.'

  'Sure, Christ. Believe me, if a guy like Benny is dead then it's good to be alive. If he turns up alive, then you've got to be dead.'

  'I thought she . .. loved him. She told me so. She even

  said I was a sort of walking memorial to him.'

  'Well, you ain't a memorial any more. So relax. And she loved him okay. But she loved him dead. Don't you get it? That's why she was so happy and bounding all around town like a great big bouncy ball while you were around. It was great, just great, to have Benny dead. Then he came back. They'd screwed it up. She sure would have liked to get her hands on those rat fink Japs.'

  'And he was terrible to her.'

  'To her? To everybody. And noisy and lousy. That guy's got a mouth like the Lincoln Tunnel, and he knows how to use it. It's a wonder you didn't hear him when you came up the Hudson.'

  'Christ.'

  'Christ, Schmist! Don't keep saying Christ. It ain't relevant. It was Benny Nissenbaum. Him coming back from the dead so soon after her dog going off to the Hereafter, if that's what dogs have. And you going away. She couldn't have had so many lousy things happen to her at once. So she took off from the bridge.'

  She gave me another drink without asking and I sat on the edge of one of her deep chairs and stared into the pond of bourbon. ' Drowning,' I muttered. ' Nasty death.'

  'She didn't,' said Mrs Rosnagel, decisively. 'She must have misjudged the wind speed. She went off course and hit Welfare Island. Welfare, farewell, Rebecca.' She spread her hands emphatically.

  ' I wrote to her,' I said stupidly. ' That's why I didn't get a reply.'

  'Can you think of a better reason?' she said logically.

  'I can't believe it. Not her.'

  'I never can believe things about anybody,' she said philosophically. 'My own husband. Says he's in Europe on business. Tells me that. Sends me messages, flowers from Paris. And he's not a mile away at this minute. I could show you the apartment. Getting somebody else to send me love and roses. He didn't even go and fight the Japs. At least there was a chance of Benny Nissenbaum getting knocked off, but not mine. I can do without him. Say, Arthur why don't you have another drink and stay to dinner?'

  I promised I would see her the next day, although I never intended to do so. I got a cab to the bridge and stood crying over the parapet, looking down to the ferocious river and to the hard bank of the cigar shaped island in the middle. I could imagine her lying there her pink nightdress spread all around her, her big feet sticking out. A policeman came along and told me it was illegal to jump. I said I wasn't go
ing to jump. I was just weeping for somebody who had. He said they shouldn't have because it was illegal, but he seemed to understand because he nodded and walked on.

  In the days after that all I could think about was my dear, big, dead Mrs Nissenbaum. The ship went south again to Maracaibo in Venezuela, stopping at Port de Loupe on the way. All the time, when I wasn't on deck, working, I was propped in my berth, staring at the porthole as though I expected her lovely head to be framed in it like a splendid portrait. To have had her die so near to the going of my grandfather, Murky, was a hard blow because they were two of the most unusual people I ever met in all my life.

  I composed some doleful pages of 'All The Coloured Lights Of The World by Arthur McCann' which I have only to read now, to realize the fullness of my grief and loneliness following her launching herself over the bridge and on to the uncharitable ground of Welfare Island.

  By the time we docked at Port de Loupe in the French Antilles I had made up my mind that I must set my life on a firm foundation. To do this, I realized, it was necessary, imperative, to marry as soon as possible. When we got ashore I went to the cable office in Port de Loupe and sent a telegram begging Pamela to be my wife. Then I sat down in the wooden bar of the Cockatoo Paradise Loungette and Bar, drank, and looked at the bitterly shining sea.

  We were loading sugar cane and unseasonal rain had made the roads thick so the carts from the plantations were taking longer than usual. I went back to the cable office on the second day but they said there was nothing for me. By the next afternoon there was still no word from my beautiful, steady, Pamela, and the memory I had of her sitting in our outside lavatory, breasts bulging from her clothes, became hotter and more poignant as the hours went.

  The loading of the cane was almost finished and we were to sail in the morning as soon as the pilot could be roused from his bed and sobered (such things were very unofficial in those days, especially in that part of the world). In the evening I asked at the cable office again. The old, patient woman there knew me, of course, by now, and she said I could stay there, sleeping on the floor, if I was so anxious to get the message as soon as it came in. She said she had never seen a young man so eager to get married before. Her daughter's fiance had run away to Trinidad.