Eyes

by William H. Gass

  You may personally contact me at between 3pm and 5pm Monday thru Friday as I am working other hours and a friend accepts my calls if I am not available.

  My gratefull appreciation in advance.

  Sincerly

  Actual begging letter to author; only the name of the writer is deleted.

  Hardy held the can firmly in his fat little fingers. He was old enough to be ashamed of the label: a cheap brand of brown bean soup—or was it chili? He slipped from his seat and walked warily to the front of the room where he placed the soup, facedown, on the heap of cereal boxes, pasta packages, and miscellaneous tins of mixed fruit, Spam, creamed corn, sauerkraut, sugar peas, and sardines. He heard jingling behind him that sounded like loose change. And the patterpad of sports-shod feet. This shouldn’t be happening on K Street. He began walking as rapidly, as purposefully, as vigorously as he could. A dark arm swung itself alongside him. Sir. Sir. It said. Some kids had come with two cans or one bag of rice and one round box of quakered oats. We’ve already given—in my homeroom—quite a lot, Hardy’s father felt he had to remind his son. I have to set an example for the kids—in my own homeroom—show benevolence. But—you know—we’re not here to feed the world. We can take on—through my homeroom—just one unfortunate—one less unfortunate—one deserving family per year. Sir. Whatever change you have would be helpful. Hardy could hear the coins the man had already commanded jingachinging in a pocket, chinging because the extorter had to be loping to catch up with his extortee. Maybe the sound was meant to prime the pump. Hatcheck girls put a bill or two in their tip glasses for the same reason. She said if you must you must but you must promise to stop your begging, poor boy. The face alongside him had huge eyes. Pupils dark as dirty dimes. On bright hard paper. It was not coins but chains that were jingling. Hardy was offended by a row of square white teeth, plump moist lips, bumpy black skin that needed a bit of sanding. The man—the panhandler—had short stiff hair like a brush all business. A little change will do a lot of good here. Hardy looked straight ahead at the hollow of her throat so he saw her breast out of the corner of his eyes when she pulled aside her bra the way he caught sight of the box of fig newtons among all those bags and cans, and surprised himself, even at that age, by experiencing desire’s definite tug. He judged himself cowardly. He couldn’t confront. He was consumed by anger, cornered on a big street. Was the world without shame? Running alongside him like another train. At goddamn noontime. Hardy hastened back to his desk and sat with solemnly folded hands while others went forward to deliver their contributions. The class had already recited the Pledge of Allegiance. The pledge scarcely bound you beyond a single day; it could no more be counted on to last than the visit of a fly, because it had to be renewed so frequently, like a magazine subscription that ran for five minutes. Allegiance must surely lapse altogether during weekends. There were kids in the class, poorer than any probable beneficiary, who had brought ostentatiously large bottles of juice or packages of cookies featuring biggish pictures of the plump round toothsome sweets, cut open (in their pictures) to show they were full of filling. He was daily made aware he had no secretary; one of the few in the firm to be without such a sign of success; but he slit the envelope deftly nevertheless and angrily blew it open. I’m not paid for this. How could Hardy claim he had no change when the fellow could hear it rattling around inside him as though flung about in the dryer. After all, if Hardy could hear his pursuer jingle, his pursuer could certainly hear the frightened jangle of his prey. Big brown bull’s-eyed white eyes as advertised, toast-flecked, Nigerian maybe, skin dark enough to be nighttime, and like a crescent moon a confident and shiny smile. Hardy hated him. He could escape by turning into a store. And if he did? Shirts, ties, even hats nobody ever wore anymore were on sale, and Hardy imagined he’d see straight ahead at the rear of the shop a changing room he might scoot into to hide until the coast was clear. Her nipple stared directly at him, pink and perky in a brown pool that made his pulse hear itself in his head, hardly pounding yet, but audible to his reddening ears. The sheet was folded neatly in threes according to convention—Hardy always noticed that—and began with improper propriety: “Dear sir. I understand you have helped people like myself in the past…” Into the big pink palm he put his handful of nickels dimes and quarters. Good quality. Not a penny among them. Bless you, sahr, the face said, beaming. Sir was sahr now? Hardy hated himself for giving in, for being a coward, an easy mark. How did the fellow know? It probably took years or weeks and days of experience. To spot them. Him. The EZ mark. She called it the Cringe; he called it the Gratitude Game. He begged and then was grateful. She acquiesced and accepted. The arm was black not because it was bare and belonged to a very blueblack man, but because the blueblack man was wearing a black turtleneck and black pants and black-and-white athletic shoes. His hair was brisker than a cold breeze. He was…well…he was well dressed. The King of K Street. Requests came in the mail—constantly. Scarcely a day at his desk and his secretary—if he had one—would have slit open some charity’s appeal, just slit, since Hardy liked to throw away the slush himself, examine everything, the envelopes designed to look as if they contained a government check, at catalogues full of motorcycle parts, even ads for health insurance, so he would have her just open them—slit ’em—he imagined that she had a slick wrist—and pile them on his desk in a neat stack—biggest on bottom, next, next—for him to sneer or laugh or growl at before tossing them into recycle. National Preservation. The Heart Association. Multiple Sclerosis. Red Cross. March of Dimes. Give generously. Your contribution will enable us to make more mailings. Save the Whales, the Environment, the Seals, the Whooping Cranes, the Sea Turtles. Your contribution will feed a future thief for a whole week. Stop the Loggers. Defeat Cancer. Support the Fraternal Order of Police. The Salvation Army. The United Way. Your contribution will enable our board to enjoy luxurious surroundings when we next meet in Coral Gables. Protect and Serve is the blue-coat motto. Just who is the lucky recipient of this attention? The police themselves, my boy, who are never about when the panhandlers pan. He’d been shaken down at high noon, shaken in full public view, shaken till his change withdrew from an embarrassed pocket and fell out of his crestfallen paw. It was humiliating but she loved to have him lick her like a puppy. Why did he do it? He did it because he was a coward. He did it because she was better at being beautiful than any woman he would ever be likely to know. Broad pink nails, so striking on fingers so blackly barked. A coward a coward they called it a wuss, being a wuss, nothing worse. Miss Rudge, who will our food bags be given to? Why, a poor family, of course. But what one. You should say, Hugh, to whom. To whom, okay? Well, we don’t want to embarrass anyone, do we? Would you like folks to know if you had to wear another kid’s cast-off things? I wear my older brother’s worn-out rags. She gave her body. He gave her gratitude. It seemed a fair exchange. But we’re just asked to bring food. There will be—from the teachers, I expect—some no longer needed things. From good folk here and there. Items of benevolence added. Anyway, what if you had to eat leavings? Hardy had selected the can himself. He’d been told to. Pick out one we really don’t want. Like these peas? Of course not, we love peas. Granny’s Sweet Brown Beans. Let’s see the label. Oh them. Take that one then. It’s soup. With the dent. Or chili beans conless of carne. After all, we have to give so much to your father’s homeroom, Miss Rudge will understand your modest compliance. Anyway, sweets are good, sweets are just the ticket; they’ve all got mouths full of sweet teeth rotted to their roots. Hardy knew his father’s room had to sport the best—that meant most bountiful—box. The other teachers would admire—well, envy—how much more Hardy’s father could extort from his kids, so much more than they pried from theirs. Out of others only modest contributions. He remembered midget Frigidaires. And cooling closets. You are such a silly, she said, letting her skirt slip past her knees. He went to his. Please. Please. Just a bit of change, whatever you have, bless bless. Damn black bastard’s nerve. Neck hung with gold
-colored chains. At least nothing hanging from his ears or piercing his nose. No scars scratched onto his face like some cosmetic hex. How could that be attractive? Hardy hurried on instead of watching where the fellow went when he finally had his handful. The homeroom of his father boasted a bigger charity box than the others. It held hundreds of lemons once. Brought out year after year like a lawnmower. The box was married—but just—to a lid buckshotted with little holes. Its regular reuse enabled the room to maintain a measured kind of gift giving, a steady match of one Christmas with another, Hardy’s father said, though he was forgetting inflation. Everybody drowned in a sea of sympathy. An entire town smothered in molten lava. The track of the tornado. F4. Wind whistle. No one in Africa has food. Even the stones are starving. Hardy knew his parents liked to watch the box being unpacked, can by jar, mitten by glove, bag by carton. As a surprise, there’d be a toy ingeniously repaired. She lifted her bare foot free of the cloth lifted her bare foot free lifted her bare foot. Gee. Oh gee, “…and would like you to consider helping me at this time.” That guy hadn’t looked as if he lived on a Metro grate. And if he were an African with a smidge of sense, he’d never wear any kind of chain. But they didn’t think things through, did they? This guy lived so much for show he wouldn’t even pretend to be stricken and shabby. More gun butt than pan handle. How Hardy disliked D.C. The homeless were everywhere. Passing the time. That was all. Waiting like plants for a little sun a period of rain a rewarding response. In Santa Monica it was the beach, the Palisades with all those fruit trees, but in Washington it was the plethora of public buildings that drew them, the many benches in Union Station where they were rarely run off because bigwigs didn’t take the train. In Santa Monica they were nuts and bolts. The nuts talked to their reflections in store windows. The bolts waited till you got near and then ran. Ran in an alley. Ran into a vacant lot. Made you feel like a fucking leper or the local dick. Here they looked cold and old whatever age and lay rolled in snaggy blankets on grates and museum lawns. In Santa Monica they were fed by the city and without urging would sometimes gather in groups to chat, occasionally blocking paths and walks. Many of them had been nuts from their first Sunday. Don’t make eye contact was the word to the wise. In the window a soulmate would be similarly gesticulating. See me see you seeing me. How did they like the way their stew was served on those loopy paper plates? Where a brown liquid ran from beneath the carrots potatoes beef like a primeval seep. He hoped his soup was okay though containered by a dented can. “I am a negro male senior citizen trying to cope with the following problems: 1.” ONE. Hardy hated an empty day. Sundays. Below him, he could see souls on their stroll to church where a minister would try to make sexless love sound attractive to rows and rows of continuous semishiny seats. Sunshine on the caramel carpet. Bare brown walls. Otherwise empty streets. Sunshine on cement. Silent but for bells. Sunday, day of good deeds, the homeless were fed a hot meal at the city hall. Cardboard sign, nailed to a pole in Palisades Park, said so. D.C. was installing new hoop-shaped grates even a contortionist wouldn’t find comfy. Where would they go when the seasons neared cold? There’d be Santas standing by grocery-store doors. Ringing a red bell. Rattling a worn clapper. Dang. Tending a red pot suspended from a tripod. Dang. Every damn day of the week. Dang. Those bells, Hardy thought, had lost their dings and had no dongs. It helped him to think that. So Hardy would go elsewhere and take his refusals with him—in effect, boycott the entire chain. That would teach them. But how forlorn and futile the single gesture always was. Still, show some guts. Never cross a pleader’s line. Pots the size of sandbox pails. Because it was empty, Sunday seemed so large. By eleven, everyone inside their suits and silks, listening to the Lord’s word, singing hymns with no names but numbers. Waiting for the gimme plate. Is that why singers said: I’m going to sing a little number…? Hymn forty-nine. Convict ten-oh-three. Hardy remembered reading about the dinky fridges the English cooled their ardors in. Like seeing the picture of a pygmy before you saw one in a sideshow. Couldn’t store a lot, nothing large, consequently you didn’t buy a lot, nothing large, didn’t buy a lot because you couldn’t shop with a car unless you could find a place to park which you couldn’t, so you shopped every morning if you were a missus, you just walked to the store pushing the baby buggy sometimes, sometimes with a baby in it, visiting first a dinky butcher shop for red meat, internal organs, and muscular chicken before going on to where a clutch of bins were bunched on the sidewalk heaped with big sprouts and bigger beets and bigger yet cabbages to stuff and stretch your string bag, proceeding then to a dinky bakery to purchase tea cakes and tea buns and tea sweets and devil’s foods whose frosting was hard as plaster, all the while making time with the butcher, the dry goods chap, or the sweetmeat dearie, passing the morning like a gassy emission, parking the kid in a braked pram outside the shop but in any weather—the fresh air was good for all and sundry—so the tot’s slobber froze on his slobbered cheeks and made him look healthy forever because he, or—worse—she, soon wore little networks of faint red capillaries to prove she was…they were…well…to prove they were hardy: that was the series of connections—the chain—what was it called?—the chain of inconvenience which held the society together, since it was your semidetached house with its annoying shrunken spaces that made you shop every morning, consequently requiring everyone to get to know everyone, neighbors very much in the neighborhood of one another, chatting away like chickens, hence everyone carried a string bag and tried to be genial, trudging from counter to counter with big British change that weighed too much for a pocket to hold for long—pence in the pants—so that even men, imagine, had to carry a purse and a wadded thing of string just to buy cigs; nor could a customer cut the connections and free itself by purchasing a big two-door Sub-Zero flown in from America even though it wouldn’t fit against any wall except the one in the parlor, because you wouldn’t be able to carry home enough potatoes lard and fish to fill it, on account of your car was of no use to you if you had to park it by the greengrocer’s or by the baker’s or by the fishmonger’s and by the hosier too. The fact was that these various dink-sized things, spaces, human routines were knotted together very like string sacks imported from the Third World to make a social net, a net veined much like the ones he’d seen on a score of ruddy cheeks riding the Underground, the owners of the cheeks carrying bags openly abulge with cheap-peep purchases—this resemblance had impressed Hardy. The fact took residence in his mind where it served as a kind of universal pattern—a grid—to arrange his insight into things. A vast set of shabby supportive circumstances surrounded every newswrapped sleeper or pimp-appareled beggar or unwed widow with dollybaby at her bosom huddled at the door of a church to break your heart. He’d been accosted in New York by a trim earlymiddleaged lady several shades from plain—she had spotted him like a Shriner on the street—sir—always sir, as if he’d been knighted—well, hell, he was known to have helped deserving needy persons in the past—sir, she said—and then entered her spiel as if his slowing step had been a rising curtain. She needed money to get to Yonkers. Seven seventy-eight was what she needed, was with tax, the fare. His fingers failed of ten and gave her five, though afterward, walking away in shame in humiliation in a rage that reddened his face, he wished he’d counted out just the seventy-eight cents to help her evenly on her way. Coward. Lily-livered. Wuss. The Tree of Lights Campaign always fell short and was never declared over until February. Hardy’s idea of how to lure new businesses to town was to promise that the Community Chest would leave them alone. Solicitations by phone: at noon, at six, when you’d be home. Someone on the other end pretending to be an old friend from the class of ’88. For the honor of our Class. This phonathon’s for dear old Alma, my second mother. Mother of my law degree. Listen, old pal, I didn’t see a quad, a tree, a lawn, my many years in school—I saw only columns of the law, walls of heavy books, I saw only cheese crackers under fluorescent light, pages of opinion almost as blanched as bleached jeans—mock this, mock that—he
ard Jewish jokes. My class comprised scores of grinders just like me, as well as a few liberated ladies repeatedly unscored upon. Lived in a lousy little lightless room. Sat through stultifying lectures. Read boring books—boring boring books. And after all that got a so-so job. Don’t Alma mother me. He should have given her exactly seventy-eight cents. If she wanted to pretend to precision that would serve her lying tongue right, to round her sum off and ruin its verisimilitude for the next sucker, though having the seventy-eight pennies she wouldn’t plead for a simple seven smackers, would she? He still wished his tin hadn’t had a dent in it. A nice man just gave me seventy-eight cents so now all I need from you, sir, is seven bucks to get me back to Yonkers. Yet who would stoop to it—solicit, beg, entreat—who didn’t need to? There, in front of all eyes, on a public street? Still, only he—sap Hugh sap Hamilton sap Hardy—had met her eye. Otherwise their entire transaction was invisible as perfect servants were supposed to be. True charity was anonymous, wasn’t it? Handing her the tenner, no it was the fiver, he and she turned into two stones in a stream, and pedestrians passed around them the way they stepped over sleepers on the stairs to the Metro. Noli me tangere wasn’t something Latin from the law. This seeyounot hearyounever training was transcribed in the genes and, paradoxically, transmitted by sperm that touchedyounowhereyouknewabout. Molly was not an appropriate name for the Cleopatra whose breasts she permitted him to heft. A holy office. Raising the fatty chalice to his lips. The Salzburg Seminar wanted him to support it, the Folger ditto. Anywhere you had ever been became an endangered place; everything you did incorporated itself as a not-for-profit foundation in need of funds; every Cause followed you with open envelope. Dear sir…sir. She offered herself—should he say?—fulsomely. Hardy waited for the last kid to dump his donation but the last kid didn’t budge, humiliation held him in his seat, he had no gift, he said, for the hungry homeless poor, he hadn’t because…because he’d just forgot. Forgot the hungry homeless shabby needy poor. Well, that’s all right. Just bring something useful tomorrow. The kid’s red hair tried to creep under his scalp. Hardy had no name for him. Just kid. He remembered the brand of his soupy beans but not the name of the crestfallen kid who had embarrassed the class with his embarrassment. Van Camp’s. Help me through my struggle. In his first job Hardy had worked for Hemline Associates, a big outfit, big enough to hold a whole building captive, in an office park surrounded by grass green as money. Hemline had sent Hardy abroad for his first time—to England to match the English sneer for sneer. At sneering he’d been a failure. He couldn’t give looks. Giving was a significant thing at Hemline, part of your job, a definite expectation, Hardy found out, when he didn’t turn in his promissory note to the United Way. It would have come out of his pay. As automatic as an electric eye, his bank account would open its arms. Like the seeing-eye door at the market where a padded Santa would stand, ting-a-ling-linging, giving you a stare-you-down stare. Hardy was metaphorically dumbfounded: here was a commercial fiction’s fake representative giving you the once-over as you prepared to give a business your business—outrageous! you were the real creature after all—you weren’t a shabbily costumed bad actor in a stupid play—and giving you the twice-over when you left. Once. Twice. Over. Not even Santa’s red stomach was real. The belt was of cheap shiny vinyl. Donk donk went the ding-a-ling’s bell. Hardy remembered the pennies which bad luck that day had brought him, and how heavily they weighed in his pocket; how he had received four cents in change when he paid for a magazine, four more on account of a small packet of staples and four from a frozen dinner, it wasn’t fair, they bumped against his leg as if he were carrying a cosh made from coins, precious metals in a sock. Good idea. To clobber professional accosters on their noggins. Here’s your money, dummy. They rang your bell, made you come to the door. Held your home up. Preyed upon your politeness. So they could rant, presume, even pray, while pretending to chat on your front steps as if they were leaving a party. Confronters. Beggars of attention. In pairs like police: one black one white. Halo-hoopers. Petitioners with clipboards as if they held the Tablets of the Law. A good cause is always a good excuse. Walkathoners. They…the profiteers of philanthopyl…they’ll make use of anybody, children too, who skip rope in relays for hours to repair the sad plights of unwanted babies as though the bastards were rips in a coat. Trick or Treat runs through the same extortionist routine. Nowadays the kiddies offer you riddles older than the Nile—what’s black and white and red all over?—presents that you, donning a clown’s jolly surprised smile, reward with sweets bought in bags at the SuperStore: dwarfed bars of preserved glucose that coat the riddlers’ stomachs and ruin their preteen teeth—that was meager comfort—instead of suffering the soaped windows of former times or the absence of patio furniture that’s been hoisted without malice but for your inconvenience atop your porch roof. The chain had almighty many links, always: the candy manufacturers, for instance, who had captured Valentine’s Day and had a leg up on Easter, sold during the weeks approaching their designated holy days enough sugar to make a capitalist of Cuba. If you gave a kid a healthy apple he might shit on your stoop in disappointment and revenge. You turn the trick, dear, and I’ll enjoy the treat. Darkies came in dreadful droves to mug the smug in their suburban enclaves. They didn’t even costume up or anything, just collected candy, keeping the economy healthy, their presence menace enough; what would we do without the poor to engage the gears? Yet what have we left them? Only a sweet tooth with which to bite down on their stale little pittance. A bit peanuttery, wasn’t it? Hardy remembered the riddles and prepared an appropriate riposte: a nun, a chef, and a fireplug. Through eyeholes, down false noses, the kids stared at your answer as if at a bulldog. The worst doorknock nuisances were those prissily dressed pairs (white boy black girl) who wanted you to listen to their religious spiel, who requested the precious gift of their time, your attention, and received instead the absence of your mind and the anger of your soul. Nigerians have those wide noses, don’t they? Splayed, but no nostril hair, never see hair there. Cowed. He’d been cowed. In Naples in Rome crowds of gypsy children crowd round you at the railroad station trying to steal your bags or your purse or your wallet or the package under your arm while you are hunting for lire to fit into all those grimy aggravating fists; thin-fingered they are, pale-faced though swarthy, greedy and grinning, inevitably skinny and in clothes patched from here to there, but dancy and darty, shifty-eyed and slick. Hardy was reminded of the insatiable appetite of squirrels. She didn’t shave under her arms, was rather proud of the black thatches that enlivened her nudity. Matisse-ish. No. Modigliani. Ish. Long hair on ladies, Hardy thought, was a gift because it took some taking care of. Short-haired women weren’t much for the giving business, in Hardy’s opinion. Only interested in Easy Maintenance. In Maintaining a Masculine Image or the Business Woman Look. I’ll do you if you do as you’re told, Molly always said, with a smile like she’d already had her satisfaction. Once women wore layers of fat to be pleasing, were ample and rolling like verdant meadows and soft plump mattresses on pillowed beds. Warmly redundant. Like reciting Our Father in church. Dundant. The organ moaned an Offertory, a saucer-shaped basket would pass and mostly envelopes would fill it. Nothing so vulgar as a bill to prime the plate like hatcheck chicks line a glass so you could see what you should do. Beggars were apportioned—in Florence, in Pisa—one to a doorway. In Bologna, Hardy believed, charity was better managed because the Communists didn’t permit poverty. In a just society compulsory generosity would be unnecessary. But our society was just social. According to the church, giving gave you good luck and a Christian blessing. Of some sort. Hardy wasn’t able to believe in a deity precisely because of creation’s constant need for charity. Well, he felt bad about the boy who hadn’t brought—maybe couldn’t afford—wasn’t allowed—a donation, so the next day he filched a can of asparagus tips from the Hardy larder and tried to give it to what-was-his-name? its label said Le Sueur, before homeroom convened, but the kid—what-was-its-name?
fancy French—Le Sueur, let’s say—shook his nameless lankhaired head, wouldn’t take Hardy’s offering, dashed off, clearly unstuck from his seat. Disappeared around a corner like a sparrow who’s heard a cough or a footstep on the gravel. Turned truant, Hardy was told. Were there a good god, there’d be no needy, Hardy’s wise high school head said. Hardy felt worse about the shame than the truancy. Shame was like a sun rising inside you, wet and steaming from the sea. You grew warm, oddly feverish, your heart beat so fast it began to sweat, maybe it was like a hot flash, camera popping off to light your dark insides. And observing, sharing someone’s embarrassment—secondhand shame—also brought blood to the cheeks. Was it the same blood, he wondered, that gave you an erection or was it blood from a different section of the system? Burn always with a bright shame-like flame. Yeah. He’d heard or he’d read. Eat from each edge. Flames meeting in the middle. One consuming the other. So giving charity or getting it: which did more harm? It certainly perpetuated problems, rewarded failure, indolence. How to keep the homeless homeless: feed them. Let them lie about on the warm sand, sleep in moist warm sea air, stare at the ocean until it turns into dream. Bless our happy homeless state. Hardy was in a happy homeless state, wasn’t he? His apartment was as empty as a sunny Sunday. In any case, how much good got done? Were some givers given God’s grace as a consequence of their giving, or did they need God’s grace in order to give in the first place? He’d read that most of the money these charities collected went to the administrators of the business. To buy little red soldier suits and a tambourine, or to dress deadbeats up as Santas. Only a little found its way to the poor, the sick, the diligent researcher, the ill-favored poet in his garret, the painter supported only by his easel, the cold-fingered composer who’s had to pawn his ivories, feeding dog food to his famished genius till it barks, and music blares out the horn of the speaker. All that the Boy and Girl Scouts did when they went scouting, as far as Hardy could see, was solicit for the scouts. Badges ought to be awarded for cookie sales and raffles. Hi. I’m Heather. I live down the street. Would you like to order some Girl Scout cookies? What kinds do you got, sis? Raisin oatmeal as always, I dunno, chocolate chip, of course, I guess, everybody’s favorite, looking a lot like oatmeal raisin, ginger peachie it’s called, I think, this year they promised to bake some of that hardasnails butterscotch. Hardy remembered peppermint with a certain fondness. Some would be so young their moms would have to follow in a car like FBIs tailing an actress. Apartments wouldn’t let them in—one advantage of high-rise life. Except for the families in residence who roamed the corridors howling like Indians. KIDS AND PETS NOT ALLOWED was a utopian policy which had to be disavowed on account of those cowards in Washington, where Hardy, he was ashamed to say, lived, so he could enjoy being annoyed with his neighborhood, disgusted with his city, embarrassed by the country and its lascivious citizens—whose undisciplined offspring loved to button up and down on the elevators, to pester your floor, play hide and seek, and, fueled by giggles, race the halls until they located your poorly protected pad, where they would rap as resoundingly as the concierge you had given up expecting though the tap still dripped. At fifteen, at his home then on Greenleaf Street, Hardy would have to answer the door—Mom and Dad had sworn off that chore because—they lied—on the other side might be a complaining parent come to confront Dad with a D he alone had awarded and a D that would keep their stupid little squit out of Dartmouth—“answer the door” was the expression, as if it had asked, as if its deadbolt had made such a declaration…ah! and meet Heather—too undeveloped to be dated—standing on the stoop, but not dressed in her little Girl Scout skirt, or in her wide green sash where the medals were pinned, instead in a sack suitable for five-year-old grannies, sewn from a pattern better used to tile a floor. Hardy couldn’t put a stopper on his youthful condescension (a more sincere if unmerited assumption of superiority), and inevitably succumbed to the temptation to tease. Where’s your uniform, Heather, how do I know you’re a scout without your uniform? She had an official paper in her hand. This was thrust in his face. Hey, he said, without your uniform you’re not a scout, and without your skirt you’re not a girl you’re a granny. Her other hand held a folder depicting plates of garish-colored cookies in restful circumstances. The folder slipped open and flapped shut. Hardy laughed loudly and honestly at her. The stupid girl’s mum gave his mom a complaining call, and soon both mothers were furious with a fury that flowed from them in fiery pinwheeling rings. They’d have to stop answering the phone or reading their mail, his parents said, and hard-ear any kind of question coming from the public sector. Hardy had hated scouts ever since…ever since Heather. Voice recorders were invented specifically to protect those who had fled to apartments to avoid salesmen, because now it was the phone that rang, not the front-door bell—“answer the phone” was the operative phrase—whereupon a heavily accented voice would try to give you something. As soon as Hardy heard the words “Congratulations, you’ve—” he’d hang. Or the phone would go deeple deeple deeple so Hardy’s recorded voice could repeat: “This is Hugh Hamilton Hardy, I am sorry I cannot come to the phone right now but please leave a message after the tone and I’ll get back to you”; whereupon a mechanical clone, turning a tin ear to his dismally conventional apology, would wonder whether Hugh was sure Hamilton was sufficiently insured by Hardy. Such solicitude from a machine should extract a tear from a hinge. However, Hardy loved the firemen’s magical formula “weir raisin sum muny for the orfans.” Raisin. Like bringing up baby. Or a ship from the depths. She would redden sometimes in the space between her breasts; he would praise her; she would shy a smile and run his hands through her hair. The firemen would infest intersections, holding boots up to your nose, if you’d been foolish enough to slow down while enjoying an open window. These were slicker-yellow boots into whose depths you were expected to cast coins of a number sufficient to rattle pellymelly on the way down since the firemen were always jiggling them as if absent legs were feeling a bit of bladder pressure and needed to water a garden. In Hardy’s Midwest hometown, its admirable but underpaid defenders had gone on strike, and, in order to emphasize the public’s need for their protection, had burned down a couple of empty buildings. Well, they weren’t all empty. A pair of tramps got scorched. They burned—the buildings—very slowly, and many people came to contemplate their consummation. In Prague, because his window overlooked the street, Hardy had watched a master at work. A man, slightly portly, just past middle age, dressed neatly and rather formally, in tie, hat, and sweater worn like a vest, would come every midmorning to a slight indentation in the old buildings which so solidly lined the street, and fitting himself in a niche would simply stand in solemn impassivity with one open hand held at the side of his chest into which an amazing amount of small bills and change were deposited by passersby to whom he said not a word, nor did he wink or bow or smile. The hand would fall into his coat pocket and just as mechanically rise again, empty now, to resume its very discreet petitioning. That hand, so naturally positioned, could almost have been held where he held it as if it were being held there in idleness, without prior purpose. I am gentry, his dress, his expression, his posture said. I clearly don’t need your money. Nor shall I try to elicit your sympathy by looking forlorn in any way; you’ll hear not a word of whining, I’ve no sad story; you’ll catch nary a look of anxiety or remorse, an imploring gesture; nor shall I close my fist on your florin, as if in a hurry, nor show, by bob or nod or bless you, some sign of appreciation. Hardy would slowly kiss her cute feet: toe one, toe two, toe three…She would grow moistly abundant. Resplendent, the thigh skin, stretching away to the mount. He thought just then of the Mount of Olives. Absurd the adventitious bridges between words. Yet it was astonishing how a sacrifice, a catastrophe could comprise a gift. After Cans for Kids had come and gone, the carton would remain in a corner of the classroom, flaps up, waiting for its gaps to close. Indent. New paragraph. “1. A wife suffering chronic osteoporosis for five years.” It was not
able that after the salutation “Dear Sir,” there was a period incorrectly bestowed, whereas at the end of the presumably heart-tuggy phrase “I am a senior citizen trying to cope,” there was a colon, properly disposed to herald the oncoming list of tribulations: “1. A wife…” The typing, too, was flawless, and a local address was placed at both top and bottom of the page: upper right, then lower left below the signature, a Lemuel not a Gulliver but someone Tugge. Jeez. Lemuel Tugge. Really? He’d been—lawyer Hardy had—denied the services of a secretary because, as at Hemline, he was repeatedly on-the-road, in-the-plane, appearing-in-offices-all-over-the-world with his case and his pale almost painted smile, faint as those mural figures that have faded on the flaking wall of an ancient church in dingy Sicily, his purpose in suddenly showing up to quietly consternate a deadbeat, a behindhand supplier, an unfair competitor, a patent thief, a malingerer, a physician who was practicing imaginary medicine. Hardy’s passivity was perfect, he’d been told—although it hadn’t gotten him a raise in two years due to tough times, he’d been also told—because it was not subservient or cautious or lacking in oomph, but gave off an aura of calm confidence and certainty about the legal, if not the moral, superiority of his position, a nimbus which could have come from nothing but a clear and steady we’ll-wheel-you-into-suicide point of view, accompanied by a softly polished face, a cuff and color odor as seductively alluring as perfume from a scratch patch, yet a posture exhibited by the suit that resembled, in representing the claimant’s attitude, a volcanic cone only momentarily covered with cooling snow. He had been left holding the can, so he put the peas—or was it corn? asparagus?—on top of the sack like an uneasy crown. Its presence was remarked the next day because during the night, Hardy supposed, it had toppled to the floor and rolled a short distance into a very prominent middle-of-nowhere. Miss Rudge merely swooped it up without a word and dropped it through a sack’s ruffled throat. In contrast, Hardy’s dad was aware of every open spot in his collection. Consequently, when laggards made up for their tardiness with late deposits he immediately took notice of them. Ah. Someone has had the kind consideration to bring us nearer to our goal, Dad the Good Samaritan would loudly announce. Splendid! More of such thought, if taken, will put us in the pink. The pink. Yes. Of extended palm. Hardy had to hurry off to his own homeroom where Miss Rudge effectively ignored her charitable assignment—Hardy was happy about that—so her solicitations scarcely filled two skinny paper bags. She picked up and plop-dropped his can of peas—beans—as mechanically as a sweeper. Miss Rudge’s seniors didn’t have to have Santas pasted to the twenty-four panes of their windows. They didn’t have to have paper chains looped above the blackboard as though something above had given way. Seniors didn’t have to make Christmas greetings for loved ones out of Magic Marker, doilies, and art card. They were grateful for their seniority. But they still had to contribute to Cans for Christmas. They still had to pledge their allegiance. No indent. New paragraph. “2. A grown daughter diagnosed as a manic depressive after an auto accident.” Maybe, Hardy thought, he should offer to take her case on a split-the-settlement basis. Illnesses itemized. The sums required were accurately estimated and efficiently summed. Amazing. Nevertheless not unlike the exactitude of the lady from Yonkers. Which offered itself as a model. The letter was neatly typed and professional except for the dot after “Dear Sir.” Personalized. “Dear”—meaning cherished? meaning pricey? meaning loaded? “Dear Sir.” On some: “Dear Sir or Madam.” Signed with just the right amount of incompetence. But a copy nevertheless, as his wet thumb drawn across the signature proved. Not even the suggestion of a smear. I need a secretary because, although I can walk into a Prague or Padua or Paris office and terrify the paperclips simply by saying hello and unsnicking my slick black briefcase, shiny as Mephistopheles’s mirror, I can’t face down a scheming beggar on the street. Coward yellow-livered coward. What did his correspondent want? Black too, called himself a Negro (yes, caps) (oHh the shrewdness of that nomenclature), well, this negro needed money to buy a house. A house. Hardy didn’t have a house. He lived alone in a bare-walled caramel-carpeted apartment on New Hampshire. Where he met Molly. Who also lived conveniently by, in a building of the feminine gender. Where, after inviting him up, she stood barefoot on his back in front of an open window. Don’t you dare look up my cunt or I’ll trampoline your spine. She was slim as a hipped stick, still…her weight made him feel light. And durable. Even though his position was appropriate for the weak. Hardy let his cheek lie against the cool unshaven rug. He knew his passivity was regularly misconstrued. One could not insist too strongly: passivity was his strong suit. But it was—well, if not quite an act, an adoption—like a lie once told you are stuck with—a stray taken in—so you frequently have to add to it, feed it, elaborate on it, currycomb it and live by it. Day after day, on and on—prolonged. His penis would struggle to grow in the no-space between rug and belly. Worth putting up with because in a bit she’d step off and straddle, her feet like hugging hands against his ribs. Then Hardy would be allowed to turn over and look up. If that’s what it took, take it, that was his motto; and right now it was a living, though he was weary of airports and the boredom of business class, the self-inflating chat of his fellow travelers, their predictable complaints, sly self-compliments, lies they had overtold by now until they were a part of history, bastards whom hope has made legitimate, and in his passive mode, in practice for his arrival in Providence or Buffalo, he’d listen, or rather nod, chewing airline chips to create a munch of protective static to insert between his ears and the babble of his seatmates. The garrulous travelers were not soothing the way a fountain soothes. They weren’t squirting water at the sky and pretending to make rain, a rain so controlled it drew amusing pictures, pittypatters on the plane of the pool…Hardy emerged a moment from his reverie. His thoughts were being detoured, but the detours were odd because there was nothing under construction. Not plop—plap. That was the sound the dimes and pennies made when tossed by well-wishers into the basin where at least the copper glittered, a bowl cleverly designed to keep the donations at a depth deeper than a thievish arm, so that once or twice a month a man in fireman’s boots and a hand rake, or in sandals if the pool had been drained, would skiddle or wade about collecting coins for what would be advertised as a charity—Children Without Stuffed Animals—some such—teddy bears for kids that cancer was killing, therefore comforts that could be recycled—a thought that made Hardy smile out his window at the university students hurrying through the streets to destinies much like his, though how many girls would grow up to have their toes kissed: toe one, toe two, toe five; or how often would a guy get the gift of a fleece like hers, ebonized, abundant, such as the long fall of hair that splashed over her shoulders, curled as though waiting to be wound around a finger? Hardy had a slow smile, he’d been told, one that scarcely cracked and barely widened during those silences which served, for him, as the customary response to a plea, and excuse, even a bluster, a smile that grew like a tree ring till his teeth finally showed, and continued on, at the close of the client’s or the distributor’s or the competitor’s explanation, to open in a loopy grin of disbelief, genuine because Hardy was always surprised by the excuses his…well…targets thought up; their fabrications amazed him, the apologies they proffered left him gaga. No wonder the company never considered its suppliers, its contractors, its customers, doctors or their patients to be anything but liars, dishonorable deadbeats, incompetent crooks—multimalfeasors, his boss liked to say, multimals—consequently, Hardy (his calling card read: HUGH HAMILTON HARDY, RECEIPTS ATTORNEY, HEALTH AND HAVEN INDUSTRIES) was never cast in any role other than that of the Enforcer—Receipts Attorney indeed—his warm round innocently open face like a Gatling gun going off in a paneled office, no coffee from Sumatra thank you I’ve already had breakfast, no scotch from Glenquaritch thank you it’s too early for me, no water from Vichy either thank you all the same I don’t smoke so shall we solve our little problem now since I know your time
is valuable, time is more than money it is life itself, our hours even minutes are, so yours must be. I’m (softly said) sure. I’m sure. Hardy presented himself as a man with no needs and no concern for politeness. Not that he was rude. Against his rules. There was never any reason to be rude. Brisk not brusque, efficient not inconsiderate. As a response to his adversary’s hospitality, in reply to pleasantries, Hardy would return a quiet confident word of warning, offer a pithy phrase of god-fatherly advice, a sentence set down like a sentence from the bench in place of the glass of Vichy on a doily or a cork coaster, a coaster so the glass wouldn’t sweat where sweat wasn’t wanted, coastered where the rocked scotch might have sat, or a cup of fresh and steaming Kona could have rested: beverages chosen to call attention to the company’s taste, drunk to encourage a comfortable climate, placed to promote a sense of shared values, where instead Hardy’s black brief smugly threatened. The niceties were nice enough though they—alas—did nothing for the supplier’s lack of promptitude, nothing to alleviate the deep disappointment their corporation had inflicted upon those who had counted on reliable deliveries, or a certain level of quality in the product, or the promised performance of a drug or an instrument; who moreover suffered from the inconceivable inaccuracies in the offending company’s catalogue, with its pages of barren boasts, the flagrancies of its invoices, its evasive personnel, its grudging responses; so, under the circumstances, Hardy saw no way to slow or soften Health and Haven’s insistence upon mutually agreed guarantees which, were they not promptly honored, XYZ Plastics—the End-of-Alphabet Company’s presently miserable business—would surely suffer final disaster, almost immediately feel the serious impact of just and proper punishments: ill will, loss of custom on account of damaging rumors and other dirty words of mouth, lawsuits, dumping, infiltration, fines, raids, maybe a takeover followed by sell-offs, foreclosures, bankruptcy…and eventually, after futile but expensive payments to lawyers, there would be an unpleasant trial concluding with prison and, therein, a long stay. Perhaps XYZ’s CEO would one day be writing Hardy one of those begging letters that were finding their way into his apartment’s mailbox. Hardy took time out seriously to wonder this, not aloud, of course, or as an oblique way of suggesting such a fate for himself, since, face-to-face, he never doubted his cause. His inner rightness glowed like the word of God…glowed. What Hardy liked about business was that in business nothing was known of charity. It was, in that sense, a genuine world. There were only—sometimes—projects undertaken to cultivate goodwill, because goodwill and a Samaritan appearance were both cash crops. “I’ve labored my entire life to be self-supporting and am embarrassed to have to ask for help because of the desperate need for money.” “I have been fighting my battles for three years now without a break.” “My physical condition is improving but my finances are completely gone.” “My husband’s job folded in January this year. He’s still seeking permanent employment.” “I was really having major problems breathing to the point on May 13th, 1996, my father carried me to the hospital because I was collapsing every thirty minutes while walking, cooking, doing anything.” “Sold my home in 1993 to support family needs.” “I am a retired Army enlisted person crippled in both legs, both arms, and I have osteoarthritis in my upper spine.” During the time Hardy’s head was being filled with pleas, he looked the beleaguered company officer right in the eye. Which he couldn’t do when confronted by a faceless page. Implacability would invade his gaze, as if his eyes were watering from some irritation. In the middle of his whites was the big blue sky like a bullet hole in a paper target. Hardy’s boss was decent, an older man, beginning to fatten, show gray, who had reached the stagnant level of his skills, and who, therefore, could never be advanced if management were to continue to be shrewd. He was a lawyer, too, but hired by the company to protect its interests. He was supposed, like a house dick, to keep the peace, and, at a distance, the police. But in the day-to-day of his vocation he resembled a ship’s doctor, those architects whom contractors hire, or chemists who contrive perfumes or find ways, selectively, to kill weeds, encourage seeds, entice rain, grow wormless fruit. And, under him, Hardy had a similar function: enforcer for the H & H family. He was proudly aware of the comparison and how well he matched it. It even, one could say, monitored his heart. Yes…Hardy was well paid. Sellouts usually sold out for something. Yes…Hardy was good at his job. But sellouts lost faith in themselves, then lost will and were no longer effective. Hardy hadn’t, had he? felt a weakening of confidence or commitment. So he wasn’t a sellout, was he? Once, Pilip, his boss, Greg Pilip, had asked him—Hardy had just completed a résumé of one of his journeys—yes, it had been after a long and arduous trip to Prague to confront a company which had agreed to supply Health and Haven downlike comforters for their chain of Golden Homes—the down count was in question—and as a form of conclusion, between them, between the Boss and his Bully Boy, as after sex, there had occurred a moment of relaxation during which time Greg (as he was just then) had wondered: Do you know of…he had asked him did he ever hear of a gangster in the twenties whose name was Baby Face Nelson? Hardy hadn’t, but the question sent him to the Net and its miniature biographies. Soon Hardy became acquainted with the Karpis gang, Ma Barker and Machine Gun Kelly, Dillinger and Capone; he saw Clyde die in a car that would consequently sport a hundred bullet holes; thus he witnessed Clyde die in more indomitable condition, on account of that, than a tattered flag. But he was a gangster of the thirties, a bandit for Depression times, and certainly unsuitable for the more exuberant twenties. In any case, he would never have corrected his Boss over one measly decade. The belief that Hardy was Billy the Kid and Baby Face Nelson, if not rolled into one at least identically twinned, had secured his job once he had obtained it, but the combination in his person of the two outlaws also guaranteed he’d be frozen at his present level, because such a skill—he believed management thought—had a limited market, and further, that if he were moved up—promoted for muscularity as a strong arm—his strength, when employed to push pencils, would be largely wasted; though as Boss he might effectively terrorize his Bully Boys into realizing their own inner belligerency, still…would that be the best use of Hardy’s rare and inexplicable talent? His talent, few knew, was for docility, not a real docility which might be lazy and intermittent and taken for granted, but one which was the object of enterprise and effort, and therefore was always finding fresh submissions designed to delight, and subtle gestures of idolatry that, for instance, could convince Molly that Molly’s calves were golden. O she did so want to believe! The wondrous length of her leg made Hardy’s mouth pretend to water, though it did water, so where was the pretense? A lot of his life was like the line his tongue took toward its goal: eager yet enacted, planned but passionate, urgent therefore slow and deliberate. The important thing was, she felt his touch, his tongue’s tip. Or did she? Perhaps she simply read his kisses and responded to their meaning, completing the circuits of excitement through her head instead of through her skin? Whatever, as our children say today. Hardy had a hunch—he clung to it—it was his only hope—that other companies might covet his particular skills; after all, every one he’d visited, every firm whose duty he’d reminded their corporate conscience of, would be aware of his worth; of course, they’d not be so indiscreet about their own shortcomings as to mention him in that connection, so his methods might remain unheralded after all, even when they should have won him wide renown, and increased his value on the market. Hardy was puzzled. It was a problem. He was afraid he might be mispracticing his profession. The law wasn’t a gun to be held at someone’s head, was it? Because, in a way, his practice of the law was prelegal, prior to any filings, arguments in court, judgments, or jury findings. A similar quandary amazed his thoughts about Molly and her apparent pleasure in dominating him. It was, he believed, only theater. She was as free from commitment as a leaf in the wind. Molly was very male that way: to enjoy her enjoyment was her aim and end. Yet which one of them was really in charge? B
ecause Hardy knew that if he groveled, if he bowed as if utterly to her will, Molly would melt, and he would soon have the pleasure of her having him, settling on him very slowly, the way someone sore might settle on a cushion, giving him nearly the only thing in life which sustained his self-esteem, and allowed him to expire in a sigh which would have signaled sleep if they’d been making out in his apartment. She would pretend to rise and find herself unable to; we appear to be screwed together, she would say, pressing him into her. Whenever Hardy did toe three, toe eight, toe ten, Molly would get the giggles and pound on the bed with her fists. I beg your pardon, sir, but I unfortunately find myself in a bit of a predicament. My purse was stolen on the train, and I need to get back home to a hungry child, yet here I am without the fare for a taxi, sir, you could surely spare seven seventy-eight. How to stare in silence as if to a stone. That’s all I need, I’ve asked that driver there what his price would be. How to brush by a pleasant person, so she seemed, with nary a reply, after she had sought him out in the crowd, spoken to him in such a sad and anxious way. Hey…I find myself in a predicament too. I am glued to my girlfriend. Her arms, which were holding her hands prayerfully together, rose like parallel beams to point in perfect unison at a Yellow idling near the curb. Like a fool Hardy fumbled for a fiver. Couldn’t be cold, couldn’t be big about it either. Hardy should have advised her to huddle in a doorway, put on an imploring face and hold her famished Yonkered tyke to her shriveled bosom; then seven seventy-eight in lire would spill like tears into the gray cloth of her lap where a few prechosen coins might already rest to signify charity’s chosen receptacle…and prime the pump the way hatcheck girls do, cigarette girls too, as well as the indicative flapped-over caps of sidewalk artists. And why, after he had fumbled up his fiver, hadn’t he hung around to see whether she would take her coconspirator’s cab? to catch her in her lie? why? whatever for? Because Hardy knew it was a fabrication, and she knew he knew, how could she not know, although it was a reasonable way to beg without begging exactly, since she would simply seem to be borrowing a precise sum for a specific purpose, in a natural fix, could happen to anyone at least once, moment by moment more mothers were being mugged on the Independent, even though the cab was pulling away without any passenger, just as Hardy was being washed down the avenue, borne on a stream of pedestrians who did not enjoy folks like rocks lying in their way, bumping him a bit about the elbows till he started slipping along himself, in tune, increasingly, to the flow of traffic, another mummm in the hum of New York life. While the beggarqueen was already down a block soliciting ten twenty-five to return to the Bronx. Please, sir. Please? They infested the intersections. They…they…how many?…multitudes. Sometimes little girls holding gaily creped boxes and wearing a hot weary sorrowful expression begged at the stoplight, raising a crayon-created cardboard sign to a car window where a sour-faced honky name of Hardy sat in his sedan staring sternly straight ahead and tried not to notice not to care if the Rainbow girls got to summer camp or wonder what work the wonk would do—as he had advertised—for food, or bother to count how many kids the fat lass had. Had had, and would have. Hardy had a hunch that more than once a few young men of no special connection hung about with tin cans to collect a little action money. Sometimes the kids were ethnically disadvantaged, tiny and teetery, likely to back into the path or the side of a car; it would happen one day and who would sue whom then? or complain in some D.C. city council meeting of being struck for racial reasons. Hardy approached such lights with extreme care, sliding the driver’s window up. He had learned to shrug like a pauper and smile at the approach of a paper-covered juice tin or shiny Crisco can. He imagined there’d be a problem getting the grease out: just how well were the pots washed? How well did they need to be? Or there would be a bevy of formidable black women peddling little sacks of chocolate candy that the candy company (enterprising as always) had especially bagged and tagged for sale by charities. They are turning the streets into toll roads, Hardy thought. Occasionally the solicitors were dressed in the uniform of some odd rip-off cult like what were they called? those alleged African Jews, Yah…Ben something…one of the lost tribes of Israel, the beggarly tykes’ mothers in white sheets and head wraps watching safely from a sidewalk, out of their own harm’s way, while their offspring handed out leaflets full of illiterate racist propaganda which would provide some bang for the sucker’s buck if he paid but otherwise remained wadded in the nongimme fist as if it would never be released…wah…yes…yahwah; but mostly it was black boys raising money to buy basketball uniforms, or those Korean cult creeps selling rosebuds—what a racket—or once in a while a woman willing to work for food to feed her get—like the Yonkers con—the sole support of her entire unfortunate famished family, their lives hanging by a threadbare thread. Hardy didn’t drive much, but he did object to being victimized, particularly when alone in his own locked and technically moving vehicle…One time the children wore white T-shirts with the words HELP US TO HELP OURSELVES printed on the back in black. The organizers had made an investment in T-shirts. Hardy was impressed. He admired flagrant honesty. They were going to help themselves to the money in his wallet. If people gave to the government a quarter of what they throw to the charitable scams as if they were tossing Mardi Gras beads into the trees we could buy better bulletproof vests for the police and undertake small local wars without being noticed by anybody not even the budget. Kept next to the heart in his regulation lawyer nonlinen nonseersucker suit he was required to wear the entire D.C. year even when Washington was hotter and wetter than the tropics. Entirely unfair. Secretaries swished about in dresses shorter than shorts and thinner than flimsies. Molly was amused when it poked its head from his bikini brief. Coast clear, it is supposed to ask. The youngsters were distributing leaflets—explaining themselves, Hardy guessed, informing all and sundry why this or that motorist ought to have shelled out, but offering the news only when, and well after, the motorist had…shelled. His curiosity awoke the second time he’d waited at that light (because life usually committed you, if to go…then to return) where he’d been opportuned by a tyke no taller than a yardstick; and this sad measurement provoked him into handing a dollar out his window to the length of an elbow. He received in smileless blessless thankless exchange a piece of poorly printed paper the size of an ordinary book page which he promptly tossed on the seat beside him and forgot. Though Hardy remembered now and then with a genuine shiver how once off FDR Drive just before the mouth of the Triborough Bridge he had been approached at a light by a thug with a brick and a squeegee—your window or your reward—and Hardy was indeed scared by the prospect, especially since the off-ramps were lined with burned-out cars—it was as if he had suddenly driven into an apocalyptic movie—when nearly in the nick of time the line lurched forward and Hardy’s windshield received only a squirt of something no wider or wetter than the spatter of a moth. Toe two…the little piggy that had roast beef?…can of baked beans with real molasses…tomato soup, very popular, homerooms would swap dupes…package of pasta, something of use…like kissing a big beard, the beard of a bearded lady…well, they all were…beard blessed…cellophane bag of marshmallows…her moan, he assumed, meant for him to go on…do more…jar of peanut butter, package of pudding mix…we shall grow old together, she predicted, pretending to be stuck…packet of tea bags, box of macaroni and cheese…toe ten. In D.C. if you were smart you stayed away from the edges of downtown, but he had not thought of riskiness that noon because he was simply walking through the fringe, so he had not thought about how foolish he was being although after all it was broad day and there were plenty of people around even if he was walking through the fringe and the people were mostly dregs and drearies, so what was there to think about? When ching-a-ching ching-a-ching jeezus right near Chinatown’s big fake gate the fancy-dancy boy with the wide white eyes drew his shoes up alongside and said with a grin made of steel teeth sir…so what do you do, she said smiling widely wonderfully at his—was it?—right ear, and someth
ing in Hardy said I go to dooz like this, that’s what I dooz, which turned her wide wonderful smile into an enchanting grin that defined her full-lipped mouth and made it impossible to imagine she was unattached, nor was she, as it turned out, as her eyes enlarged behind her wine, because like so many in the city of secretarial love, she was the plaything of a congressman’s aide—how was that for being near the center of power?—who, however, bored her and was only good for pop concert tickets, and who could be dumped with less than a moment’s notice if a real improvement could be offered, which he offered over and over in the next few days, clearly besotted, a condition she easily perceived and a state that didn’t do his case any harm since it was seen as a big improvement, because these secretaries were accustomed to being taken for granted and abused, driven by their ambitions to betray their bodies by lending them to men who, even naked, wore their suits, tight ties, and the arrogant faces of loan officers to the SleepEase of love, coming with no more sound than a rubber-soled shoe, though if their squeeze didn’t squeal, didn’t buck and sweat and play the whore, they grew mean. Once these stags got their balls racked, they skidded from bed like a book that’s fallen from sleepy hands, withdrew into their underpants and were soon quietly closing the apartment door, fleeing the hall as if the building were on fire. Hardy naturally thought of SleepEase because it was a company he’d had to threaten, their mattresses were some springs short. You must think our old people don’t move when they groove, he’d been inspired to say, this time to a lady too far down the pecking order for Hardy to be seeing on such a serious subject; it annoyed him a little so he was—in tune with his temper—a little rude. She was black to boot. How far down was that? Measure the inseam of that insult. Molly’s man came back for more, of course, but he rarely bothered to ask her out, which was what she was fucking him for—to be seen in the scene with her squire. So, for Hardy, it was a ripe time. He was lucky. Her beau, who didn’t know he had been xxx’d out, phoned a few times, discreetly rattled the knob of her door. Quietly: toe three…toe three…toe three. What’s that? It’s fureee. Let’s see. A leg languidly…lan guid ly…At the intersection this time stood the rose peddler. Invariably in nothing but bud, long-limbed, darkly, redly petaled, the stems were inserted into a plastic water-filled baggie, the baggies boxed, the box parked on a median strip where the TwiceSaved stood. Hardy wondered what their supposed price was, these posies sold by well-scrubbed kids no more Korean than Grandma’s cookies, not nearly as moony as he was, remembering her skin, her shoulders laden with hair, her rich-lipped grin. You don’t know how to crawl, she said. I’ll learn to squirm, Hardy had replied, holding her with a wink and a word as securely as dining out or disco did, his arms also in an enraptured twine. Hardy, however, was happy to take her out; he was proud to be seen with such a bust, and a smile that was bestowed on him like a promise; it made him proud because it made others envious. Hardy, unlike her other lovers, knew how to love her; he followed her desires the way a weathercock sniffs the wind. Hardy did dates, went to movies, held in the cinema’s semidark no more than her hand and kissed her slowly before they undressed, softly letting her lips encase his, appreciating their width (toe one), appreciating ears neck and shoulders, in no hurry (toe two), appreciating her feet and ankles (toe three), calves and even knees (toe four), appreciating the long sweet streets that were her thighs (toe five), really in no hurry; and these were appreciations Molly appreciated. Because he didn’t embarrass her with sitcom jokes such as How are the twins? To which she had learned to reply, Getting bigger every day. In public Hardy was polite and attentive. That’s all. It led her to think he Hardy was in love. Though Hardy would have traded her in for a secretary. “Your reputation as a person who has helped people like me in the past prompts me to ask you to consider helping me now. I write this letter in need of immediate assistance for a travel opportunity which has recently been offered to me.” “I understand you have helped people like myself in the past and I would like you to consider helping me at this time. I am a recently married young woman who is fighting for her life against cancer and debt.” “It is my understanding that you do consider helping people like me that have a plan but do not have the financial means to put it together.” “Hello. My name is Marvin R. Travertine. A little over six years ago my illness really started to take its toll. I was working all over the United States on our Hospitals, Major Electrical and Defense projects. I started having problems that intensified over five years to cause me to loose my business and work, to loose my wife and kids, to loose everything.” “Dear Sir or Madam: I understand you have helped people like myself in the past and I would like you to consider helping me at this time. I am a creative motivated minorities person with a lot of invention design idea’s, that need to be researched, developed and marketed for the consumer market.” “Your reputation as a person who has helped people like me in the past prompts me to ask you to consider helping me now. I recently lost my job and am unable to find another one because of age discrimination.” Just how long did Hardy think his baby-face would remain so threateningly fresh and cruelly innocent? He worried that his work was leading him into a dead end. What he was learning, he worried, was not useful. Whatever he was honing had no future. Like a girl he examined his fresh face for signs of lines, laxness at a level just below the skin. What if he did become the perfect pickle fork? Pickle forks were on their way out; they were being replaced by colored toothpicks for God’s sake. Hardy couldn’t help himself. What was SleepEase thinking? What was SleepEase thinking? To sic a secretary on him. A rank insult. Though they did replace their sleazy sleepmaps, he remembered. So whatever it took he’d take, including humiliation. Maybe he could buy one of those T-shirts he’d seen and wear it for Molly. HELP ME TO HELP MYSELF. She’d pretend to scream with glee. Hardy fell more and more frequently into broods, and into eddies of ideas, turning and turning around, a tightening coil of concentration sucking his sense of safety and accomplishment down out of sight so he could no longer see with any degree of satisfaction his face in the mirror or shiny desk at his office or his name on a ticket purchased for him for a plane or on a paycheck received in the mail since someone at work had started unsealing envelopes to peek—one presumed—at what others were making. It was in just such a brown study, one noon, as he was driving to an appointment at Walter Reade—why was it always the lunch hour? he had munched through so many dismal minutes of meditation lately, whenever he was away from his work, and that was the reason—being off duty—he imagined, because then his mind was free to maunder…anyway, he was in a high-noon mood when he drew up to an intersection occupied by hefty yellow-slickered firemen helping yet another year the children stricken with impetigo to control their itch, when, without a thought, nary a realization, he tossed his half-eaten handful of hamburger pickle lettuce cheese yellow mustard meat and bun into a proffered boot as the light fortunately turned and his foot scooted his car through the intersection with such admirable though unplanned dispatch he hardly heard the holler behind him. Hardy couldn’t have helped himself. His hand had had a will, for the moment, of its own, as unconscious as the sharpshooter of foul shots is supposed to be, eye arm aim and lifted limb, like that of a dancer, oblivious to the howls of the crowd, the taunts of the enemy, as automatically accurate as the strike of the snake or the escape of the grouse, more the latter, as Hardy zoomed with an incontinent squeal across the crossed roads and into an unexpected lack of traffic. Which he believed was a lucky thing, beginning to sigh with relief before he knew what he should feel relieved about, when he realized instead that it made the task of the car now following him an easy one. Here it came, with apparatus of a dismaying sort—like a siren or twin flashers—on its roof. One of the fire folk was after him—what could they do?—Hardy’s hands began to sweat on the wheel, but now he didn’t dare speed with a coplike character on his tail, closing fast, and—wait a minute—going around in a rush, with a luggage rack on the roof, not a siren or some lights, a condition Hardy would
have recognized had he been less shaken—what could they have done, had it actually been an authority who then stopped him?—there was no law to his knowledge determining what you might or might not drop in a boot unless it was a bomb if the boot was held up to your nose, and without any invitation, if you were stopped legally at a light, minding your own thoroughfare; still, Hardy had behaved badly because he had let an impulse, without warning—the way with impulses—overcome him. Then he thought: foreign money. He flew to Toronto, Paris, Rome, Madrid, London, even Singapore and Hong Kong. And returned with unspent coins of their realms in his pockets. Heavy as his thoughts. What was he thinking? Why was he sweating? His hands, his palms, his thoughts, sweating heartsweat. Hardy saw palms crossed with coin. Have sum. Will travel. He of course saved his change: he piled it into margarine tubs for use another time the way he’d washed out the containers, melting the oil with very hot water, carefully, like those paper-coated lard cans must not have been, the coins in stacks arranged by size and therefore by denomination; so when he alit at Tegel and needed a nosh or a newspaper before he hit the Exchange he already had in hand a few marks. How they would rattle down the tubes of the Salvation Army’s Santa—Hardy’s savings—and drop to the money-littered bottom of Kringle’s bucket—MERRY CHRISTMAS—or fill with their wish-fulfilling weight the palm of some arrogant accoster—GOD BLESS YOU SAHR—or sag the hat of the street entertainer, fiddling and singing sixties songs in a voice that was strangled by his nose. “At this time, I am recovering from two serious injuries—a near fatal head injury from an auto accident and a severe leg injury suffered while rock climbing.” The margins of these missives were justified. That is: they were written on a computer. Issued in begging batches by a dot matrix printer. Poor unfortunate bastards. Hurt. Out of work. Overcome by obligations. Molly giggled quite a lot. Hardy kneaded her buttocks, then her back. You do like tending to me, don’t you, she said. Don’t you like to be tended? Hardy thumbed her shoulder blades. ’Course. But I enjoy it because it’s so important to you, she said, turning and inserting him. Hours in airports. It was another reason why he was valued by his firm: he could travel without becoming rebelliously bored or worn out; jet lag didn’t leave him irritable or sleepy; he was indifferent to the strangeness of strange rooms, even to strange tongues, money, towns, faces, food. He read The Wall Street Journal for practice, and, on long flights, Business Week, Fortune, or Forbes because they projected, like a few frames of film, a good impression. Hardy’s garb was the sort you’d never notice. I like your clothes better off, Molly said; they’re nice folded over the back of a chair…where his jacket kept its drape. He opened envelopes carefully so they wouldn’t tear, especially after he began finding those begging letters in his box. One day he received: two. With a solicitation from the Kennedy Center Opera Company in addition. He could become a donor for fifty, a sponsor for a hundred, a benefactor for two Cs, a sustainer for five, an angel if more. Angels could go to rehearsals, hobnob with the singers, sip a glass in the greenroom with the first violinist. Angels flew through generous clouds of gratitude. They—the Kennedy Center Opera Company—would love to be named in the will of Hugh Hamilton Hardy, Esq., Attorney at Law. What could he will them, he wondered. He’d will them society women in gorgeous gowns to grace their glamorous intermissions. No, stay on top, I like it better. But how had they got the address of his apartment? His office would seem a more likely target, if anything about these requests was likely. And Hardy felt, as he gradually began to process and assimilate the many messages—he undertook to number them in an upper corner—that they were suddenly swarming and assailing him, creating a weight in his stomach with their carbon- or computer-copied sentences. On the back of one envelope, in pencil, were painfully printed words his lawyer eye read as Latin but, except for the “Deo,” didn’t understand: “vero glutine ei conglutinature, id est caritate…adhaerens Deo.” What in the world? He knew “id est” and probably “vero” too. There was a dogthrown bone bothering his belly though he hadn’t swallowed it, just chased it: the memory of a horrid moment heretofore only his childhood knew. To pass through untouched had been his intention. As through airports, on planes, in enemy offices. “Glutinus”? In front of his own wide window where he could watch George Washington students, as well as secretaries, stream from the streets: he was…ensconced…envelope in hand, Latin on its back flap like a mystery motto. His father had once said he’d been “touched” for a loan, and Hardy had wondered for a while about what that was: was it special, such a touch? was it a secret society’s secret signal? a gesture of intimacy? the call for an historic promise to be fulfilled? It was. In order to seem a bit more personal to those designated by a list to receive them, his mother wrapped certain gifts in white tissue paper because it was Christmas, but in white tissue paper, too, because such paper was plain and unprepossessing, and wouldn’t too entirely intimidate its recipient, or advertise its offering as more valuable than it was. It was thought to give to the box a festive and personal touch, and possible because Hardy’s parents knew the name, the address, the sex and size of the family. A tag might say: “for the boy.” Women wrapped. Men undid. Wrapping was only for toys and trinkets, not for common staples, or for cleaning powders. There were a few of his father’s discarded shirts in the cache, a sweater that never fit anyone, as well as a hat with a perky flower, a skirt of a length to encourage modesty, a box of pencils which were not all stubs, and other useful things in serendipitous variety—bridge club favors, for instance, that Hardy’s mother had happily received but hadn’t liked. Then a bag of candy—jelly beans or corn. Nothing—like the plain white wrapping paper—fancy. How abundant, how refulgently full of good things, the big box finally looked. Hardy was made to admire it, and his reluctance to do so was assumed to be the result of being asked to give up some unemployed toy or two of his own to the accumulating bounty. “From the Hardy Family and Mr. Hardy’s Homeroom” was printed in block letters on a large red-and-white shipping tag wired to one of the carton’s corners. Jackson Central Senior High, the school’s name, was writ small at the bottom of the label, but was never an afterthought. The box, now precariously laden, was placed very carefully in the trunk of the Packard (a vintage car especially polished for the journey and felt to be festive) and then they all prepared to go out and do good—as sober in their selection of suit and dress as the choice of tissue was. By now most children had left school to wait for a Christmas that was only a week and a half away. Carols were relentlessly replayed by the radio and saccharine movies by the tube. The day was cool bright dry and brittle. The road seemed slow to turn, reluctant to roll. Hardy had a heavy stomach. Full of what they called knots, he decided. His father said it was like having a bone in your belly. Molly moaned to keep him interested. In the middle of moving up and down on her like a pump handle trying to coax a little water, Hardy suddenly heard in his head—so long, so long ago—the title on the tag. From the Hardy Family and Mr. Hardy’s Homeroom, he thought, as he thrust home. Afterward he rose as if setting, so weary he was. That was a change, Molly said with a light laugh of satisfaction. But for Hardy, something…everything…gave him, when weighed, a wrong sum; was amiss and out of place like a shoe in a sink; a sinister slope slid under and fought off his step. His father, of course, drove. As carefully as a driver’s ed instructor. Seedy neighborhoods succeeded one another. His mother said: looks like rather a nice house. And then the car slowed before a front porch that sagged a little along the bungalow’s short length. One door and two wide windows faced the street, the windows set off well to one side as if they were afterthoughts. Hardy looked hard for mice but didn’t notice any. Paint clung to the clapboards the way insects cling—with expert indifference. There were no curtains in the windows, only tattered shades that had been indecisively drawn down. His father grunted and pulled the Packard onto two narrow strips of concrete that served as a drive. Did he feel like this when going to the dentist? Intestines might not grumble, they were supposed to be ropy, but h
ow friendly was his stomach to the lake of lava it presently entertained? Are you sure these people need relief, his mother asked. They were on the list, his father replied. Homerooms just pick—you know—just pick a name. Well, you should have gauged the address. It must be a two-bedroomer, they’re not cramped, moving into her hypercritical mode, and adopting a tone that made her son cringe: cool, cruel, inexorable. It was the same voice that discussed his report card. It was the same voice that listed his shortcomings as if being a son were a performance to be reviewed. It was the same voice that wondered who had left a shoe in the study—with a sock stuffed in it—where the sixth braid ovaled itself into the rag rug. It was the same voice. Hardy’s father kept out of his schooling. Conflict of interest, his father said, a viewpoint that was baffling for a boy, but was quite comprehensible to a young man in the lawyer line. Bell or buzzer couldn’t be heard, probably didn’t work. His father thundered the door; his mother rapped sharply as though with heels. Hardy heard the din long after it was physically complete. At last the door cracked and a face could be seen through a former screen. Missus…Hardy, heavy in the plastic-coated armchair the apartment furnished him, couldn’t remember, couldn’t dredge up the name, ordinary as every day, a name he thought he’d never forget; well, he hadn’t forgotten, just misplaced it, yet it was not on the tip of anything either. Missus…A pale face appeared, not at eye height, not even at his height, a little girl’s face, though his father addressed her as Missus more than once while the kid stared at the alien invaders. Oz-borne. Hardy sighed, some would have said in relief, but Hardy didn’t feel relieved, he remembered very vividly that Molly had said—he was about to roll off and slide under—had said stay—when they were in the midst—had said stay where you are, I like it better. Hardy’s thumb remained forgotten in the open envelope that now lay in his lap. Memory was a spiteful monster. Going on then in the conventional way and reaching the middle of their journey—in some books supposed to be the best part—he read his father’s homeroom off the wall behind the headboard even though the headboard was busy waggling. Saw it there as if that’s where his mind’s eye was. Not the number of Hardy’s homeroom, to whose bags he’d brought his dented demeaning bean soup (maybe chili) can, but his father’s, though the collection was their joint benevolence now, the largesse of the family, bounty that was presently trunked in the freshly polished Packard. Saw with his mind’s eye, then heard it said in his head despite the action of his hips, which were pumping as though he were running no maybe climbing stairs. The words were as vivid as dreamed. Normally…normally?…normally after his devotional rites—toe two toe ten—she had settled on him, slowly as nightfall, teasing him in. Later, one leg through a panty, she said it was a nice change. No. That was a change, is what she said, sitting on “that” as though it were a sofa. Nice remained unproffered. She wore a satisfied smile to signal her approval. Did she perhaps mean doing it in bed? waggling the headboard? The kid went away at least her face did. Leaving to be seen through the screen a faint wall maybe not dirty. Hardy’s father said don’t, she’s fetching her folks, but his mother drummed on. It was the same as a stampede in a Saturday movie. Then the empty screen drew back and they mostly went in. Hardy’s father mumbled a minute if you please and went back to the car while Hardy and his mother hovered at the sill a moment before stumbling stupidly—well, Hardy did, he stumbled stupidly—into a dim room where there was a presence. Oh I guess we need some light, Frank, an air-filled voice said. Frank? Violet, get your father, thems from the charity is here. In a minute a man came to snap a shade up in one of the windows. There was a pause like that between distant lightning and its thunder. Hardy’s father, bearing the box, pushed through the door. The room had no table, only a few chairs, so finally, after a hesitating turn around, Hardy’s father bent to lower the carton with an almost inaudible grunt to the floor. The room, in its emptiness, neared neat. Frank was fat. One count for and one against then—on his mother’s tally. The women…especially the girl…their daughter no doubt…was thin as hope, and her mother was slight too, wispy-haired, an Ozark mountain blonde with an Okie overbite, cheeks that had sunk under a now cool crust, and wearing a much-washed—would that be his mother’s judgment?—pale, unfrilly—unfrilly was a positive point—what would you call it?—frock? Point plus. Point minus. Point plus. Point plus. Point plus. Good early lead. They stood around the box like mourners at a grave. There was no Christmas tree. There were no stickers on the windows pretending to be bows or bells. He saw no paper chains, no wreaths, no signs of lush living, which was lucky. There was one lamp whose shade was slightly askew, something on one wall Hardy never made out, four wooden chairs whose seats had once been caned—Hardy’s father, during the inevitable postmortem, would surmise—where now scrap-shaped pieces of plywood were nailed. Violet of the thin arms held her mother’s hand, and Frank, stout, solemn or sullen, who could tell?—Hardy’s mother would be the judge of that—stood in the middle of the room as still as if he were holding up the roof. Hardy’s father had a speech whose delivery would not be denied, not even by silence. And Hardy heard him as he had other years, during other dispensations, without admitting any meaning, suffered the schoolteacher’s voice which came spooling out of his father’s mouth, a voice specially created for educational occasions and enveloped by its tone the way the words which fill a cartoon balloon are encircled: lettered more darkly for emphasis here, light of line for contrast there, larger or smaller sometimes as its message required, and accompanied by exclamations stark as pines in an otherwise snowed-over field. But Hardy couldn’t have repeated a single syllable. Memory was a sly monster maybe, and forgetting a fearful necessity; yet the fear was there, brought on by the experience of blanks, bothersome blanks concerning this or that, this or that that should have been available to be summoned like a servant. His father gave credit where credit was due, so much Hardy was sure of. Teachers knew what credits were and how they counted. The homeroom’s number would be—would have been—reiterated. The importance of giving, particularly during such a season, would be stressed, though because of the separation of church and state, religious language, infrequent in his family anyway, would be excluded. These three: faith, hope, and charity—no, no, love; charity had been excluded—replaced or excluded. Hardy stared through the dusk at a few dark hurrying figures, late from work, on their way home. Lights came on in previously unlit buildings. Shifts were changing. Day students replaced by older hopefuls. Private life would now, for a night, be tried. And found wanting. Meanwhile he sat in dreamthought while his father concluded his pieties with words almost whispered they’d become so solemn, touching the box with the toe of his shoe to put period to all he’d said. Hardy’s father seemed nervous, which was a surprise, because only after the speech was delivered did he remember to ask if he was addressing Mr. and Mrs. Osborne. Or…? Neither said a word though Mrs. Osborne emitted a faint mewmaah. The rule was: the box had to be entirely emptied so that the carton could be retrieved. Hardy’s mother said why don’t you see what’s there, or did she just say see what’s here? Why don’t you. Mr. Osborne peered down like a stone head does waiting for the water to drain from its mouth. There’d be can one, can two, package three, toy four, till all were removed and placed upon the floor…an eternity. Hardy’s discomfort was not quite the same as that evident in Mr. Osborne. Hardy was wearing humiliation’s second-best suit: his was the shame of one who shames. Mr. Osborne’s heavy arms fell from his dun-colored shirt like further sleeves. In his regular line of work Hardy had encountered many liars, many spokesmen for the culpable, many criminals, and some showed, some even felt, guilt, occasionally they even inflicted their remorse upon him; but never had he seen shame, not in those well-oiled offices, not from hirelings who had patted the requisite powders on their blade-shaven cheeks each morning (just as Hardy did: foam first, palped into place, the razor moving as if it were mowing snow, then a blubbery rinse of the scraped face and a rough towel-off before the slap of skin-tightening b
racer and the comfort of soothing talc); flunkies like himself who nevertheless had redlipped, red-fingertipped secretaries to stoke the coffeepot and greet them in the morning with a steaming mug bearing a company insignia; because, having known both sorts of shame—having inflicted shame and suffered it—shame searing his soul so its skin smoked—Hardy knew the difference between a guilty conscience and crushed pride, between—in a shameless world—getting caught and being defiled. I like it because you like it, Molly’d said. She’d said so much this visit, which was not like her. Now and then she’d squeal, sure, often emit a sigh, or maybe give a grunt of desire or a moan of pleasure, but not…she’d not…make remarks. Look, Charlie, a can of beans, the lady whispered. Peas, Hardy’s mother quickly corrected. They have black eyes in the picture. Like the Susans, Hardy heard himself, in painful sympathy, say. The little girl’s voice had sounded full of false excitement, but she probably was excited a little. There were packages tissue had turned into treasures, after all. The girl had let go of her mother’s hand when her mother had stooped to unpack the provisions, so she was free now to look at Hardy. My name is Susan, she said, but my eyes are green. Cans and jars and bottles were surrounding the carton like defenders come out of their castle. Susan’s mother made low moos of presumably…affirmation. The resolution required for freezing Mr. Osborne’s face left the rest of him as loose and dangerous as a slide of shale. While Hardy was looking at the girl who had decided to call herself Susan, Hardy felt her father—Hardy felt the heat from her father’s head—and Hardy sensed their mutual embarrassments burning like beacons built to warn of reefs. Why don’t you open this, honey, Susan’s kneeling mother suggested. Pulling at one end, the girl immediately knotted the string. Let me do that, Hardy’s mother said, scooping it up to untie the tangle with her teeth. Ripping open an end, his mother handed the package back. Thrust the package…pushed the package…he pushed his memory of the package back. Immediately that day that visit that intrusion what he’d seen through the screen—nothing…nothing—seemed to Hardy far away like the people passing that last moment in the street, and his fingers began to play with the envelope in his lap as if his mood had made his fingers nervous. It was a distance through which outcry couldn’t reach. If a woman walking in the street below were suddenly accosted by a buck in running shoes and asked for change—wud do a deal of gud, ma’am—and a hand were thrust in her face so aggressively she started, perhaps cried out, seeing big eyes bearing down, suppose she screamed, the scream would seem no more to Hardy than a leaf let loose to litter the park. So pink the palm. Soft Mollypink the palm. Maybe it was his mother who shoved the whole scene like the package into his fidgeting fingers. It’s some pencils. How nice. Almost all of them the same size. Mr. Osborne growled; it wasn’t a word he uttered, just a sound, a growl a growl; but Hardy hardly heard the whole gruff rumble of it, his blood was hammering his head so, though a figure—it must have been his father—stepped back from the group as though startled, pushed. The fallback of his forces went unadvertised. Susan’s mother continued to gallop gamely toward the cliff’s edge. She shook a blouse from its wad for all to see. It had pretty pink buds all over it like the pustules of some disease. It was encouraged to billow out over the top of the box, to settle like a blanket of snow in a theater scene. Leave, roared Mr. Osborne. Take——stuff——this stuff——leave. Please, someone said softly. Suddenly that resolute face had become a face worn featureless by centuries of rain. Hardy’s mother’s hands flew into the air and Hardy’s father, in a cloud of consternation such as a rejected genie might employ, caromed through the door still narrowly ajar. Hardy was suddenly in the rear seat of their rapidly retreating car without the slightest idea of how he’d gotten there. For hours he bore burning ears. No one ever spoke of it: not of the hoarseness of the outcry, not of the rude completeness of their dismissal, not of the Alpine height of the ingratitude displayed, not of the Hardy family’s ignominious flight. Why should anyone speak of something that had never happened? couldn’t have, consequently didn’t. Hardy was haunted by afterimages, however. Of a small worn rug their gift box nearly smothered when the Hardy offering was set down upon it. A thin band on the thin finger of a thin hand. String struggling in the mouth of his mother. Who was, as a result of their commonly imposed Coventry concerning the subject, unable to compute the recipient’s failing score, since the game had been called on account of catastrophe; because that’s what she and his father usually did, went over the occasion like a lawyer and a client practicing Q & A: how did the house look? for it must be poor and run-down to provide proof of need, yet it should seem tidy and scrubbed to demonstrate character; were their manners appropriate to the occasion? neither suspiciously servile and gushingly grateful nor indifferent nor rudely unappreciative; how were their hearts? their spirit must be sufficiently downcast as to require rescue, but not wholly crushed and beyond restoration; did it appear that they would put their provisions to a proper use, that the clothes would be cared for and worn with a smile, that delighted children—Lily or Lilac—would play with their new-to-them toys? Above all, the Hardys wanted to come away feeling that their effort, and that of the homeroom children, had been worthwhile, that some injustice in this world had been set right, some suffering alleviated; it was the least the benefited could do, because it encouraged more giving, more help in the future to folks like themselves, down on their luck and needing a hand; for suppose there was no hand, suppose, as in this case, it had been badly bitten, and was held out no longer; suppose Mr. Hardy’s kids collected cans without élan, that tins were stuffed into his father’s homeroom sacks as they were heaped higgledy-piggledy in all the others—then what? for heaven’s sake. The box had been left behind like an abandoned cannon when the Hardy family fled the field. There would be no box by which to measure next year’s offerings. To make a match: that might mean no offerings at all. At last Hardy pulled the plain sheet forth, properly folded in threes like all the others. Postmortem, he thought. Appropriate designation. There’d been no postmortem. Yet he had just now remembered one. In which his father had held forth on the subject of—what? the repaired seats of the Osborne chairs. Yes. So had it happened? had there been a rehash after all, a family confab like so many others? or had he imagined it as he had imagined the words on Molly’s bedroom wall? while headlonging into his pleasure. Molly may have been indulging him their entire time together, while he was equally intent on indulging her. Hey…maybe that was the definition of a decent relationship. Were he to speak for her now, he might just say: I am giving you what I imagine you want, while you are pretending to want it on my account. Well, little wrong with that, Hardy decided. It had not been a day of decision, but it had been a decisive day. T-day. The nightlights were lit. Yellow patches pretended to warm the streets. The company was sending him back to Toronto. Apparently his pleasantly delivered threats were no longer threatening. Toronto had done nothing to remedy their errors, although they had admitted them readily enough. They had even offered reparations, and Hardy had been gracious in his acceptance. So what had happened? Whatever it was, recalcitrance had occurred twice during the last three weeks—after each of his recent trips, in fact—nothing had happened, that was his problem—though Toronto was especially troubling because the sale of inaccurate blood-testing equipment was hardly a minor matter, not like those damn Mexmade hospital scuffs that peeled apart from toe to heel, or the porous plastic sheeting they made in Moline…man alive…manufacturing methods were poor everywhere in the world, but Hardy had held up his end—yes—up to now he had been almost a hundred percent successful in the intimidation department; his firm was spoiled, it had too high an expectation, Pilip had even thought it necessary to point out, at yesterday’s rather tense meeting—tense for the first time—that Health and Haven didn’t like buying the same plane ticket twice. Get your game face on, Pilip had urged, and go get ’em. Maybe Hardy had somehow broken the chain of inconvenience. He suspected the chain wouldn’t enjoy losing linkage. Then
the letter unfolded like something alive in his lap. Another petition for his collection. Hardy had to file his own stuff, keep his own records, maybe that’s where the foul-up was, not in some weakness of his game face, not in his presentation of the grievance, but in a flaw in the paperwork which lay deeply out of sight like an intestinal worm. He didn’t believe his own argument, however. Hardy’s conscience didn’t hear in his words the requisite conviction. He never believed anything said in self-defense. What was wanted from him this time? “Hello,” Hardy read. Was that the way to begin to beggar? With hello? What happened to “Dear Sir or Madam”? As if his Hugh name on the envelope were of doubtful sex. “I write this letter in need of immediate assistance for a travel opportunity…” He—who?—Baltho—Baltho? Well, Harold Baltho didn’t know the half of it, did he? He hadn’t a job, no doubt, though Hardy hadn’t read on and so he didn’t know how Baltho had lost his last one, and therefore Baltho was not in a position to feel Hardy’s own apprehensions, many of which Hardy had read from another letter, this one printed on Greg Pilip’s tightly smiling face, sent by Greg Pilip’s carefully entwined fingers, read off their display on Pilip’s swept desk, a heavy gold frat ring on one hand, wed band on the other, thin file folder to his left, expensive rollerball resting to his right, well, Hardy had a frat ring—Delta Tau Delta—he could wear it if he wanted to, but didn’t because it might encourage some fellow feeling, a sense of internal alliance, just by chance, of course, in one of the deadbeats, you never knew, they went to college too, everybody went to college, college was as common as canned corn, even advanced degrees were without distinction. “…which has recently been offered to me.” You are my sacred shelta, they might sing silently while feeling some stickum if not a bond with Hardy, a bond outside of business. “The trip is through Trinity College in Connecticut and involves travel and study in Tibet, Kathmandu, Nepal and Italy.” Hardy could feel his travel bag where he liked it, crouched as an obedient dog might crouch, between his legs. In fact, the chair he had pulled to the window was very like those you find in an airport lounge, simply not welded to one another in regimented rows…well, the rumps wouldn’t really be resting; instead, impatient and anxious and weary, anticipating hours of discomfort on the plane, where their owners would be squeezed behind a presoiled tray like an infant about to be force-fed a tin of stewed tomatoes or French-cut green beans, and fastened safely in a thirty-thousand-foot high chair by a stomacher—French-cut green beans would be too classy—and the rumps’ owners would sit and snooze, or lie their way up the corporate ladder, unaware they were bullshitting Dick Tracy, that moment on his way to interrogate criminals caught trying to stiff Health and Haven with scuffs made of paper, maybe, or of passing off their sheeting as impervious to incontinence and protective of cotton, didn’t they realize that mattresses were soakers? that mattresses cost money? especially ones short on springs? ones constructed of unresilient coils? moreover that when mattresses have been regularly wet they can’t be reused as if you could simply rinse them out and wring them in knots like a gym towel, or replump them for another old bladder-blown shankbone to pee in his sleep on, the old goat getting out of his room and up to the nurses’ station to complain about his applesauce while wearing cardboard scuffs and a paper gown designed on account of its inadequate ties to fall open so the sight of the patient’s shrunken penis would not be denied the staff, and so that way they’d know where the wet patch had come from when they came to turn Old Bony from one bedsore to another…Oh, yeah, he’d have to say something of the sort…You could bet Hardy didn’t find that spiel weak or unconvincing as he heard himself make it, because he’d have to throw a more threatening pitch than he normally did, once up north in Toronto yet again, though in words more genteel than those in his head: about HIV and the scandal power of the press, image damage and the costs of lab contamination including lawsuits the size of skyscrapers, of which Toronto finally had a few, but where you could find really good Chinese, not like in costly but cheapeat D.C., where there were more food poisoners, Hardy had after long experience decided, than elsewhere in this ethnickerized country. In D.C. secretaries and their suitors actually sought out places where they would have to eat with their fingers and be given limberbread to wipe them on if they didn’t seize the opportunity to lick their dates’ digits: thumb waa one, pinky wee two. There were restaurants representing countries whose natives had never had anything to eat, newly unified nations where living and starving were one. Had he not recently received a “Dear Colleague” implorement?—here it was—from Unit 19a, Goldring Barn Est (“Dear Colleague”?…“est” was estate?), Henfield Road, Small Dole (were they kidding?), West Sussex, that was headlined: HELPING OUR CHILDREN IN AFRICA AFFECTED BY AIDS and that requested money to support a fund-raising cycle ride across Tunis to Cape Town (had to be…had to be…a deeply dumb joke). Hardy read that Baltho had only been informed of his good fortune a week ago and had only a month in which to find the funding for this “fantastic adventure…” um…“unparalleled opportunity…” “We will be traveling with an army escort through the Asian leg of the trip” thanks to…thanks to “the Nepalese Ministry of Culture.” Took the cake, Hardy judged, first prize at the fair. “…deepest regions of Tibet and India without fear of danger…” Health and Haven had no deadbeats in either region so it was not likely Hardy would have an opportunity to suffer exotic dysenteries anytime soon, if he held on to his job, a worry that, before yesterday, would never have bedeviled him, but did devil him now, even though he knew he was being—what did they say?—too litmussy—no, too prone to hives. For instance, these letters were getting to him, he had to admit, even though he was receiving many cordialities with which to end his day as if his day had come in the mail. “May God bless you and my grateful appreciation in advance.” Nevertheless, Hardy was of the impression that large portions of the population were ill with the dismals. “All I have done for these past three years is try hard to get back to Happiness!” Rhonda has debt, depression, and cancer, a husband who is out of work and an eviction notice from her landlord. Howie Towel is a motivated minorities person, too, “with a lot of invention design idea’s, that need to be researched, developed and marketed for the consumer market. Some of the ideas have to do with exercise equipment, and safety-breathing apparatus like for swimming, fire, as well as for gas mask, e.t.a.” “While other young brides get a nice ‘Honey-Moon,’ I’ve faced nothing but hardship and pain.” From the height of his own thirty years, Hardy wanted to assure Rhonda—Rhoda?—that he understood…that most young brides got just what she was getting, and suggest to Howie Towel that the heads of losers were stuffed to the sinuses with projects and plans which would never see more light than the handkerchief. Hardy would be that tough about it—the truth was a species of tough love to be sure—and he’d bring that news to his targets in Toronto too. Before now, however, he had never had to buck himself up for his job, he had just done it: walked in and wiped them out. Back to thoughtless happiness. Yes. Had he been there, and had he enjoyed it? happiness? You always seem so happy, Molly had observed; was it because Molly’s bare feet were giving him the Turk’s massage that he seemed so? happy? Mr. Undemonstrative? A real Turk, fat as a harem eunuch, would have crushed his back like a biscuit. Hey, ethnic sex books—a new direction. The Bulgarian Blow Job. Recipes included. He could suggest such a project to Howie Towel instead of sending him money. However, none of this deeply dumb japery elevated his spirits. If Baltho had made the most outrageous request, there was Gerald Hepsmith to win the blue ribbon for directness: “I been working in a screw company for twenty years. I am now planning on buying a screw company. I am a little short so I had to put it on hold. Because of my financial situation. Whatever you can give me will be appreciated.” But no God bless. Just an illegible signature. No date either. And the “r” of “Dear Si” had disappeared. Hardy thought he might mail an “r” to Carol Stream, Illinois. A very faint dot on the map, he bet. Hardy had so far—depressing phrase—had so far
received requests from McAlester, Oklahoma; and Moorhead, Minnesota; from Los Osos, California; Los Angeles and Garden Valley, ditto; from Leavenworth, Kansas; and St. Louis too, as well as Naples—Naples?—Naples, Florida. The Brits had weighed in in the normal way (only one was using the AIDS scam), but with letters too long to finish and with signatures aristocratically scrawled. A letter from London and another from Glasgow were identical except that Mr. Akingbemisilu wanted a thousand more than the Scot’s three. One petition, the most outrageously distant, was from a couple of retirees in Australia who desired to relocate abroad in order, of course, to help people avoid the calamities that had befallen them. They were experts in the mismanagement of money. A woman living, she said, in the backwoods of the Sierra Mountains with her infirm husband and disabled son, wanted a ten-thousand-dollar down payment on an apartment building located more conveniently near their family doctor. For this she blessed him richly. Then nearer his home (if his apartment could be so called), Hardy had heard from Waldorf, Maryland; just a bit south, he thought, on Route 301, as well as receiving the bad news from D.C. itself, where Howie resided. Wash D.C. all you want, if you want, the locals said, but washing won’t remove the grime left on the city’s marble columns from smoke blown by decades of elected officials. When D.C. didn’t stand for Dismal Climate or Decay City, it stood for Desperate Cunts or Dumb Congressmen with Doubtful Convictions, depending upon whom you were laughingly achat with and into whose bailiwick the party was being pitched. Hey, Mama, how are the twins? Cities you’ll never visit, Daddy. Hardy hadn’t heard from Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia, or Cleveland; they were no-shows at his soup kitsch; they added no hungry mouths to the breadlines. There was always tomorrow’s delivery, of course, when another nation or another major urban center might be heard from. Pack lightly tonight for a quick trip, though Toronto was a long ride. No aerosol foam, no throwaway razor, no astringent, no talc because he’d count on an immediate turnaround and be back before his whiskers grew. Good tag, sharp description: back before my/your whiskers grow. Underwear in an emergency. He remembered being stranded in Sacramento. With a hole in a sock. Remember to reset alarm. Skip breakfast. Breakfast was always a bore. Anything in a bowl was a bore. Hardy’s meals were mostly a bore because he had to eat them alone. Read and eat—not so easy. Taxi to the plane—a luxury because he could easily take the Metro. Hope the weather didn’t decide to wet the runways causing underbooked flights to be canceled on account of wet wheels or other imaginary reasons, mostly mechanical so as to suggest a concern for passenger safety. One of the damn doors won’t close. The nose wheel is flat. When, if the air ever brought him there—to the Tonto Medical Instruments Company of Toronto—he’d go straight for the jugular. Bloody their files, floor, and furniture. Buy a screw factory for Gerald. Return early evening. Ring up, should he? Molly. Wait a minute…wait. Hardy had what might be described as a secular epiphany. A letter he had received some weeks earlier, and which curiosity had encouraged him to retain, had been, he suddenly saw, the opening salvo in this barrage laid down on him by the needy. It had been from some godforlorn place in…Illinois…like Carol Stream. The room was dark now that night had sooted in, so when he rose he groped around the bowl of his borrowed lamp for its switch. In hotels he never could find them, but here, in his own…by now…he ought. Suddenly he saw his shadow so he must be real. The soft caramel-colored carpet made him kick off his shoes but the feeling was still sock. It was from a company or an institution and had an acronym, CETN, taken from the guy’s name, the guy who was running the scam—here it was—Pecetnic. Avery Pecetnic. The letter was got up and laid out like a prospectus, with topic sentences in bold: “I’m offering you a personal open invitation to contribute to a unique solution to the problems that plague our youth today.” Am I one of them youths? Maybe he’d be one of them plagues. Instead, maybe he—Hugh Hardy—came with the apartment. For rent: studio apartment, sofa bed and lawyer included, cost to you: no more a month than a maid. He had wasted his education and become a bully. He. Not even a big one. A Hugh. He struck terror only because of the mob-sponsored halo he wore. The black case he carried clearly contained at least one pistol proud of its caliber. His cool came from the confidence he had in his backup who was just a suitcoat behind him. He had a blackmailer’s face, blank as a wall. He spoke his piece like a priest. They cowered and caved in on account of his neat nails, his starched cuffs, his tightly knotted tie, the slight crimp in his hair where you might have thought a hat had sat. But he had failed to threaten anyone at Tonto, Toronto. This was not a welcome outcome. Moreover, his love affair with Molly played well only for one act. He had no home, no pet, no lounge chair worn by his own butt into comfortable billows. Worse. He had no desire for any. He should feel bad about that. He didn’t. His job was no more his than the hat he didn’t have. Why should he worry about it? His shirts sat in a blond box made of layered drawers, the facing sides scooped so they could look open like mouths: white shirts, all the same, ties with the standard slanted stripe, some red, some blue, and, as Molly said, his jacket looked best on the back of a chair. Toe ten. About clothes he didn’t care, though he knew how to tie a Windsor knot. When he’d gotten his first job, his father had given him three pairs of links. Hardy felt far away, high in the sky. Flying without wings, he was barely visible, no more than the moon in daytime. Though he often complained, he ate whatever came to hand. No one could say he had preferences that put pressure on him or skewed his course. He didn’t smoke, was the most casual of drinkers, only mildly interested in coffee, avoided vegans, serious sexual kinks, was rarely late for appointments. Hardy had no handles. Love or otherwise. He found he had a plan, though he would never have called it his “plan”—not until this nightfall when he saw the shadows of the furnishings on the floor. He wouldn’t have known they were there until the light came on. His sweet round face might linger in his target’s gaze like the blur of something bright; remain after he’d softly closed the office door behind him; but no one remembered what it was that gave their eyes, for a moment, an annoying afterimage. Hardy was merely an emissary from Tonto’s own incompetence. That’s what he should say: I’m Hugh Hamilton Hardy, and I represent your sloppy quality control. I’m the Ghost of Fudges Past. I am your Omissions. Hardy avoided giving offense, so why was he a strong arm in the delinquent-performance business? When he was utterly out of every social spotlight; when he was like the shadows that disappear during switchoff; when he was the way the world wasn’t during naptime: why were these letters being mailed to him? “Provided you had the resources at your disposal, would you be willing to contribute ten thousand, five thousand, or thereabouts dollars? Which category do you fit into? All that is required is faith and a minimum of twenty-five hundred dollars. We need heroes such as yourself to come on board to make this an effective vehicle for positive change.” They had Hardy all wrong. Or had Hardy’s address all wrong. His profession too. How little did these envelopes know him, even the ones with official-looking windows. They should be set right. Gee, he’d been all ready to give two thousand dollars, he might reply, but that sum was well beneath Pecetnic’s required minimum. Hardy had no gestures, generous or otherwise. That was it. Molly, undulating her arms, shuddering her tits, swiveling her torso, shaking her ass, had told him straight out. Not only did he never waste motions, he never gave away his feelings by unguarded body language, through this or that subordinate gesture, so that nothing was conveyed—nothing—not geniality, not anger (not happiness?), while at the same time, he wasn’t mechanical either, which, had he been, would have written paragraphs about Hugh, the man who was absent from the man. Such discretion was not easy to manage, Molly imagined, it had to be natural to Hardy, simply to move, sit, say without swaying or sawing or jiggling or hemming or hawing or twitching or showing nerves or even being especially slow, stiff, and monotonous. Hardy picked up his briefcase. Hardy hailed a taxi. Hardy turned on a light. Actions without adverbs. Hardy rarely hiccupped, coughed, sneezed, or blew his
nose, never cracked his knuckles, tugged a lobe, rubbed or fondled the slopes of his chin, yawned, ran his hands through his hair, which was stiff thick straight and blond, although he did twiddle his fingers a little, did sometimes blink overly often, did occasionally say something out loud when alone, but rarely a huff or puff otherwise, though when he came he sighed. Molly said he said saaaah. I need to ask her what color her eyes were before she went to contacts. Should I answer one of these beseechers? That might be interesting—to find out what the follow-up message would be. Or better—he could hunt up Howie Towel, who had a D.C. address, turn up on his front stoop, beribboned like a fruit basket, himself the surprise. Such an action would be uncharacteristic, Hardy was aware; indeed that was its recommendation: in terms of tactics it was the way he did business, except this time he would not be on business. He would represent—what?—a local charity, that way he could seem to be on business. How easy it was for whatshisname in Carol Stream, Illinois, to create a philanthropic outfit simply by typing CETN on his computer, and subsequently darkening his fake acronym with an elementary mouse move—CETN—so it would be ready, by virtue of another click, to be transported like royalty into the center of the page, where, with still another elementary gesture, the initials could be highlighted in order to enlarge its size and increase its power to the shout of a headline—CETN. How easy to retain the nerve, after so swiftly simple a transformation, to allege the letters stood for “Continuing Eternally to Need.” Hugh Hamilton Hardy could become a community caregiver with equal ease. Cast your bread upon the water in real life and it would sog up and sink for sure, if the ducks didn’t snap it first; but this time, Hardy thought, he might appear at opportunity’s door to demonstrate that what had been a crust when cast forth had come back by a miracle as a whole loaf, and he could hint that he’d be followed by a kingdom made of kaiser rolls—wouldn’t that be wonderful? He’d be the bread all right, a loaf so soft, to make sandwiches, he’d have to be sliced by machine. Hello there, Mr. Roller, lucky guy, your toilets are about to flush with wine. Hi Debbie—Malikowski, is it? You can leave your dying grandma and her bedside to me, I’ll sit quietly there while you go back to work to support your three preschool children and your feckless hubby, Earl, didn’t you say his name was? It did occur to Hugh, as he pondered with mounting pleasure the various agreeable responses he might make to this wholly unmerited invasion of his life, that somewhere he might have offended someone familiar with the scam, maybe some official he had had to spank, whose after-hours occupation was the fleecing of the poor, saps whose luck had oozed out, so that they were easily enticed into lying out of hope for a living: for a small sum you will be furnished with a list of premelted hearts who have a history of falling for stories full of hard luck and tough times; in addition we shall supply you with a formula to follow when petitioning them (after all, D.C. is Grant City), so your sob story will avoid mistakes of tone, errors in data, or slipups in the style of your solicitation that may scare dear Daddy Warbucks away. Attach return addresses, telephone numbers. Beg to be phoned. “Wake me up, I don’t care.” Be frank. Promise to repay. Think of it, sir, as a loan. Call on God but be conventional about it. Mention that you are the sole and sorry support of a family that of course you love. “My children that are the most precious in my life, along with my wife, see my everyday worries. I think they deserve a better life. All I need is…” My God, Debbie—who had addressed her letter with “Dear Sir or Madam”—needed only eight thousand dollars to get back on her feet. Only…“I understand you have been in a similar situation…” That last was perhaps not a wise phrase. He, Hardy, hadn’t been—wasn’t—in a similar situation. Successful people often rose like cream, steadily, though maybe oozily, yet gamely, to the top. And had never had a hitch come forward to be the hitch in their plans. Hitchless, like Hardy aimed to be. Without sin or snag, or hitch. He, Hardy, need never beg; he was not in a similar situation. Not by a mule’s smile. Hardy made a list of the differences he imagined existed between himself and his petitioners, among them the fact that even were he to be in a similar situation he’d never purchase such a stupid list, or if he did he’d never write pitiful letters to anyone about his so-called similar situation, letters where even the commas kowtowed. Entreaty would not be his forte, he’d see to that…in the life he’d one day lead. Yet the expression “similar situation” suggested a complicity he couldn’t towel off or comb away. Didn’t he go to his knees for Molly’s permissions, tongue out as a dog does, pleading for pleasure? Ah, but that was just act one in the theater of the flesh. So his and her arousals weren’t for real? “I am taking the role of an insurance broker (licensed in the state of Ohio) and am seeking other licenses, honors, degrees and equipment, besides my career in tennis that I have worked hard for. I understand you may have been in a similar situation some time in your life.” Debbie Daw, who lived on Tirmynydd Road in for god sake South Wales, wanted to get away from her mom, and wasn’t that a situation similar to Hugh’s? “…I need help to be able to look after my children properly and have a life of my own…As for my future, once my mother has passed away I hope to better myself by taking a course in floristry.” Hardy intended to sleep that night deep in the recomposition of himself so that when the light that was whitening his windows woke him, he’d be full of remedy, resolve, and inspiration. He would be the…He would represent—no—not himself—an agency, why not? community caregivers incorporated. COMMUNITY CAREGIVERS INC. COMMUNITY CAREGIVERS INC. He’d need to pack for a quick trip, though Toronto would be an overnighter now because he’d have to switch his flight into the afternoon. Pitch in a can of aerosol foam; add a simple throwaway razor, some astringent and talc, too, because he couldn’t count on being back in D.C. before his whiskers grew. Fresh underwear for an emergency. Always a good idea. This new plan had merit. It would be, after all, better to stay overnight in a restful hotel in order to come on fresh in the morning. Hit Tonto then. Like a September snowstorm. When the Canadians are not quite awake and before they’ve bought enough salt for their streets. Hit Howie Towel the same way—this up-and-coming morn, front-stoop him. Make him wish he’d never been born. Or had Howie already said that? “I’m ashamed to say I sometimes wish…” He had…had written…someone had written…Why were they writing?…writing him? he? Hugh? The question followed him to bed where, fully dressed, he fell face-first into his pillow. At dawn of the big day, Hugh took off his shoes before getting out of bed, and tossed his rumpled clothes into a corner. He saw that it had been a moist night. The streets were wet and empty. He hummed through his shower. A happy noise but not a tune. It helped to have a purpose in life. Hardy was up and out and off far too early, although he was pleased that he’d beaten the can handlers to their intersections. Hardy cruised Howie Towel’s neighborhood, one of worn red row houses sporting duplex stoops with corroded railings and crumbling steps. For his sort, these streets were still unsafe at any speed. Cruise and let them know I’m coming, he rather vaingloriously thought. Maybe I ought to honk. After all, I am a honky. But he drove out to a nearby urb and ate a dry egg on soft toast for breakfast, killing time with a Post he purchased from a sidewalk box, and toying with the counter’s sugar shaker. Now that it was nine, it might be prudent to arrive. Hugh curbed his car three row houses from his goal, and let his case swing casually in his left hand lest he be spied. Indeed, as he approached, a young black woman and two milk-chocolate-colored kids came from behind the door of three thirty-five…and a half a—number Hugh could scarcely read. She stood on the stoop while the children pellmelled up and down the sidewalk, one furzy-head darting past Hardy on his briefcase side as if he weren’t a paleface, the kid only concerned to enjoy his release, his happy flight. Hi there, good morning, Hugh greeted her, finding a morning use for some after-five joviality. She wore a simple loose cotton frock and straw sandals despite the coolish air. There was a slight gleam to her straightened hair. From the stoop she threw Hardy an intense but noncommittal look. My name is Hugh Hamilton, Ha
rdy said, and I’m from Community Caregivers Incorporated. Don’t want any, the woman replied. The wet night’s gray skies were beginning to dissipate, and a line of soft light ran straight along the ridge of her nose to fall on the rich roll of her lower lip. I’m looking for a Mr. Howard Towel, Hamilton said, his tone agreeably deferential. Him? Hers was a stern fierce face, very sculptural, quite beautiful. Her eyes flickered, following the race of her two kids. For some reason, Hardy had got the impression that Howie Towel was white. Yes, ma’am. Mr. Towel has been in communication with our office, and—. Him? How? He don’t phone. He wrote, Hamilton said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. Nicely typed. The margins were justified. She turned to yell at a child who was now getting a little too far away. Hamilton saw clean pale heels and slender calves. He shouldn’t have said typed. He don’t type. Oh. Well. It was…typed. I type. This was a militant affirmation. It was a letter whose looks gave a good impression, Hamilton said a little lamely. When I work, that’s what I do—I type. Computer too. Git back here, Calvin—now! Clarisse! Clarisse, of course, stopped and looked back at her mother. Heedless, Calvin revved his engine, but, also careless with life the way kids are, immediately fell with a shriek on the broken and uneven cement. The young woman went calmly briskly down the steps past Hamilton toward Calvin’s fallen form. Clarisse, dolldear, she said, don’t you do that, that what your brother did. Dumb as a thumb. You boy. She shook her head slowly. Hamilton was left holding his case, now up near his chest. She pulled the boy to her and held his head against her thigh. Hamilton waited with a patience he had no need to summon. Then she led Calvin back to the steps. Calvin’s nose wasn’t runny, his eyes weren’t wet. And he was almost immediately over his howls. Well I wonder if Mr. Towel is…at home now. Had he almost said “hereabouts”? He aint. She beckoned Clarisse. This aint his home either. Oh, Hamilton said, the address on the letter…He’s gone for good, I guess, she said, looking at Hamilton as if she were really looking at him. Mr. Towel wrote us about some breathing apparatus, Hamilton persisted. He did ventions. The woman acknowledged that much. Calvin wiped his dry eyes on his mother’s dress. Soon she had Clarisse held in her other hand. He was always try’n to improve the breath’n. Mr. Towel said he needed some financial help, Hamilton told her, trying to smile at the children with both corners of his mouth. The young woman swung the kids around and turned her smooth pale heels to him. He asked me for money, Hamilton hurriedly added. He would want that, she replied, for his ventions, but it’d be no use. They was just rags and wires. She let go of Calvin to take hold of the knob on the door. Maybe she was just a sitter; the kids didn’t look hers, though they didn’t smile back when he offered them his grin, so maybe they were the offspring of Mrs. Stern the Smileless after all. Don’t go in, Hamilton said. Please. She herded Clarisse and Calvin through the door as if she hadn’t heard, her heels disappearing into an interior as dark as herself. Hardy self-consciously lowered his case and inspected the street. He saw unexpected anxiety. The door opened again. You can look if you like. Theys in the front room. The street was empty of everything except parked cars. Hamilton went quickly up the steps and slid inside. She shut the door through whose glass a gray light very faintly fell. A pale palm in a gesture which at the same time shuttered her silvered nails, and Hamilton turned left into—he guessed—a parlor where a pile of cloth bags with holes made for eyes were strewn (or so the holes seemed), and where wormlike translucent tubes were tangled. A piano bench emphasized the absence of any piano. Straightened lengths of coat-hanger wire pierced the sides of tin cans that were sitting on it. There was an ancient exerciser in the middle of much confusion. Mr. Towel described himself, Hamilton said—suddenly remembering Howie’s letter t for t—as a motivated minorities person. He weren’t, she said in evident scorn. But Hamilton wasn’t sure whether Towel weren’t a minorities person, or just weren’t motivated. Here was the exercise equipment the letter mentioned, perhaps these woolly things were the gas masks. What would have been the underwater gear, he wondered. The amber worms? Hamilton tried to take in, to understand, the…burlappy bags? Could anyone have hoped these sorry contraptions might function for them? Your husband, Hamilton began, but she interrupted. I aint married to ’um. Well when would he have written—ah—to my office? When he leff he leff his stuff was all she said, in a blacker voice than before. Maybe, Hamilton decided to hazard, maybe Mr. Towel wanted you to receive the money he wrote me to ask for. He dunt wunt me no more, or I him. Hamilton turned in the dim light toward her, caught a flash of eye, saw a flash of nail. He thrust his case awkwardly between his legs. Nothing was turning out as he had expected. He drew out his billfold and emptied it of money. I dunt wunt your munny, she said in a voice as flat and hard as the hand that subsequently slapped him when he pushed a fistful of cash in her direction. The sting went everywhere his bones went. He felt his feet as well as his cheeks warm. In a kind of blind consternation, Hardy, clutching his case to his chest like a shield, got into the hall, then stood a moment, bewildered, fist still stuffed with twenties. Calvin pulled the door open for him. There were a number of people on the street now—a baby carriage, a cat, some kids, a van. Hardy’s car was as close as Canada. He was barely aware how he clasped his money or clutched his case. In his ears Hardy heard a heart hammering. He had hot elbows, hot knees, a hot nose. With hot knees did he dare to take a plane? He made a face that no one saw how horrible. To alleviate the sting, Hardy’s blood recapitulated his every shame, and reminded him of the way he’d run after the red-haired boy with a can of—what? God, what?—held helplessly high in his hand. Then feeling mostly stupid…silly but unstruck. By his mother he’d been ass-chewed but never smacked. She bent over, brought her face close, and shouted up his nose. I understand you have helped people like me in the past. Helping those who have been trying to do right. By confronting deadbeats and cheats. Get away…get away…get away, the pounding in his head said. With care he stepped down steps that were steps well swept. Strangers who would remain strangers to him were in the street, unmoving, as if painted—their figures, their foreignness. Normal concerns were what he needed now. To restore the quo. Dare he call Molly when he came back still slap-cheeked from Toronto? Hardy promised to roll on the floor in an ecstasy provoked by her excellence. There was always more carpet. But would she ever love—or merely moisten for—a groveler? Around dawn the sidewalk had been rainwashed. It wasn’t slick but it wasn’t even. And the car—it seemed—so far. Or should he assume the supplicating posture of one dishonored…with its appropriate rush of blood in the wrong direction? Hardy had to be careful of the cracks, some of which were still dark with damp. Shift to slow, and be slow to go. Show courage. Though if he fell and dirtied his knee now she might rest his head against her thigh, and feel sorry for him, for a change, all night long.