The 40s: The Story of a Decade

by The New Yorker Magazine

  It was on the fifth visit, about halfway through, that the doctor turned to Trexler and said, suddenly, “What do you want?” He gave the word “want” special emphasis.

  “I d’know,” replied Trexler uneasily. “I guess nobody knows the answer to that one.”

  “Sure they do,” replied the doctor.

  “Do you know what you want?” asked Trexler narrowly.

  “Certainly,” said the doctor. Trexler noticed that at this point the doctor’s chair slid slightly backward, away from him. Trexler stifled a small, internal smile. Scared as a rabbit, he said to himself. Look at him scoot!

  “What do you want?” continued Trexler, pressing his advantage, pressing it hard.

  The doctor glided back another inch away from his inquisitor. “I want a wing on the small house I own in Westport. I want more money, and more leisure to do the things I want to do.”

  Trexler was just about to say, “And what are those things you want to do, Doctor?” when he caught himself. Better not go too far, he mused. Better not lose possession of the ball. And besides, he thought, what the hell goes on here, anyway—me paying fifteen bucks a throw for these séances and then doing the work myself, asking the questions, weighing the answers. So he wants a new wing! There’s a fine piece of theatrical gauze for you! A new wing.

  Trexler settled down again and resumed the role of patient for the rest of the visit. It ended on a kindly, friendly note. The doctor reassured him that his fears were the cause of his sickness, and that his fears were unsubstantial. They shook hands, smiling.

  Trexler walked dizzily through the empty waiting room and the doctor followed along to let him out. It was late; the secretary had shut up shop and gone home. Another day over the dam. “Goodbye,” said Trexler. He stepped into the street, turned west toward Madison, and thought of the doctor all alone there, after hours, in that desolate hole—a man who worked longer hours than his secretary. Poor, scared, overworked bastard, thought Trexler. And that new wing!

  It was an evening of clearing weather, the Park showing green and desirable in the distance, the last daylight applying a high lacquer to the brick and brownstone walls and giving the street scene a luminous and intoxicating splendor. Trexler meditated, as he walked, on what he wanted. “What do you want?” he heard again. Trexler knew what he wanted, and what, in general, all men wanted; and he was glad, in a way, that it was both inexpressible and unattainable, and that it wasn’t a wing. He was satisfied to remember that it was deep, formless, enduring, and impossible of fulfillment, and that it made men sick, and that when you sauntered along Third Avenue and looked through the doorways into the dim saloons, you could sometimes pick out from the unregenerate ranks the ones who had not forgotten, gazing steadily into the bottoms of the glasses on the long chance that they could get another little peek at it. Trexler found himself renewed by the remembrance that what he wanted was at once great and microscopic, and that although it borrowed from the nature of large deeds and of youthful love and of old songs and early intimations, it was not any one of these things, and that it had not been isolated or pinned down, and that a man who attempted to define it in the privacy of a doctor’s office would fall flat on his face.

  Trexler felt invigorated. Suddenly his sickness seemed health, his dizziness stability. A small tree, rising between him and the light, stood there saturated with the evening, each gilt-edged leaf perfectly drunk with excellence and delicacy. Trexler’s spine registered an ever so slight tremor as it picked up this natural disturbance in the lovely scene. “I want the second tree from the corner, just as it stands,” he said, answering an imaginary question from an imaginary physician. And he felt a slow pride in realizing that what he wanted none could bestow, and that what he had none could take away. He felt content to be sick, unembarrassed at being afraid; and in the jungle of his fear he glimpsed (as he had so often glimpsed them before) the flashy tail feathers of the bird courage.

  Then he thought once again of the doctor, and of his being left there all alone, tired, frightened. (The poor, scared guy, thought Trexler.) Trexler began humming “Moonshine Lullaby,” his spirit reacting instantly to the hypodermic of Merman’s healthy voice. He crossed Madison, boarded a downtown bus, and rode all the way to Fifty-second Street before he had a thought that could rightly have been called bizarre.

  May 31, 1947

  Carson McCullers

  The jockey came to the doorway of the dining room, then after a moment stepped to one side and stood motionless, with his back to the wall. The room was crowded, as this was the third day of the season and all the hotels in the town were full. In the dining room bouquets of August roses scattered their petals on the white table linen and from the adjoining bar came a warm, drunken wash of voices. The jockey waited with his back to the wall and scrutinized the room with pinched, crêpy eyes. He examined the room until at last his eyes reached a table in a corner diagonally across from him, at which three men were sitting. As he watched, the jockey raised his chin and tilted his head back to one side, his dwarfed body grew rigid, and his hands stiffened so that the fingers curled inward like gray claws. Tense against the wall of the dining room, he watched and waited in this way.

  He was wearing a suit of green Chinese silk that evening, tailored precisely and the size of a costume outfit for a child. The shirt was yellow, the tie striped with pastel colors. He had no hat with him and wore his hair brushed down in a stiff, wet bang on his forehead. His face was drawn, ageless, and gray. There were shadowed hollows at his temples and his mouth was set in a wiry smile. After a time he was aware that he had been seen by one of the three men he had been watching. But the jockey did not nod; he only raised his chin still higher and hooked the thumb of his tense hand in the pocket of his coat.

  The three men at the corner table were a trainer, a bookie, and a rich man. The trainer was Sylvester—a large, loosely built fellow with a flushed nose and slow blue eyes. The bookie was Simmons. The rich man was the owner of a horse named Seltzer, which the jockey had ridden that afternoon. The three of them drank whiskey with soda, and a white-coated waiter had just brought on the main course of the dinner.

  It was Sylvester who first saw the jockey. He looked away quickly, put down his whiskey glass, and nervously mashed the tip of his red nose with his thumb. “It’s Bitsy Barlow,” he said. “Standing over there across the room. Just watching us.”

  “Oh, the jockey,” said the rich man. He was facing the wall and he half turned his head to look behind him. “Ask him over.”

  “God no,” Sylvester said.

  “He’s crazy,” Simmons said. The bookie’s voice was flat and without inflection. He had the face of a born gambler, carefully adjusted, the expression a permanent deadlock between fear and greed.

  “Well, I wouldn’t call him that exactly,” said Sylvester. “I’ve known him a long time. He was O.K. until about six months ago. But if he goes on like this, I can’t see him lasting out another year. I just can’t.”

  “It was what happened in Miami,” said Simmons.

  “What?” asked the rich man.

  Sylvester glanced across the room at the jockey and wet the corner of his mouth with his red, fleshy tongue. “A accident. A kid got hurt on the track. Broke a leg and a hip. He was a particular pal of Bitsy’s. A Irish kid. Not a bad rider, either.”

  “That’s a pity,” said the rich man.

  “Yeah. They were particular friends,” Sylvester said. “You would always find him up in Bitsy’s hotel room. They would be playing rummy or else lying on the floor reading the sports page together.”

  “Well, those things happen,” said the rich man.

  Simmons cut into his beefsteak. He held his fork prongs downward on the plate and carefully piled on mushrooms with the blade of his knife. “He’s crazy,” he repeated. “He gives me the creeps.”

  All the tables in the dining room were occupied. There was a party at the banquet table in the centre, and green-white August moths h
ad found their way in from the night and fluttered about the clear candle flames. Two girls wearing flannel slacks and blazers walked arm in arm across the room into the bar. From the main street outside came the echoes of holiday hysteria.

  “They claim that in August Saratoga is the wealthiest town per capita in the world.” Sylvester turned to the rich man. “What do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know,” said the rich man. “It may very well be so.”

  Daintily, Simmons wiped his greasy mouth with the tip of his forefinger. “How about Hollywood? And Wall Street—”

  “Wait,” said Sylvester. “He’s decided to come over here.”

  The jockey had left the wall and was approaching the table in the corner. He walked with a prim strut, swinging out his legs in a half-circle with each step, his heels biting smartly into the red velvet carpet on the floor. On the way over he brushed against the elbow of a fat woman in white satin at the banquet table; he stepped back and bowed with dandified courtesy, his eyes quite closed. When he had crossed the room he drew up a chair and sat at a corner of the table, between Sylvester and the rich man, without a nod of greeting or a change in his set, gray face.

  “Had dinner?” Sylvester asked.

  “Some people might call it that.” The jockey’s voice was high, bitter, clear.

  Sylvester put his knife and fork down carefully on his plate. The rich man shifted his position, turning sidewise in his chair and crossing his legs. He was dressed in twill riding pants, unpolished boots, and a shabby brown jacket—this was his outfit day and night in the racing season, although he was never seen on a horse. Simmons went on with his dinner.

  “Like a spot of seltzer water?” asked Sylvester. “Or something like that?”

  The jockey didn’t answer. He drew a gold cigarette case from his pocket and snapped it open. Inside were a few cigarettes and a tiny gold penknife. He used the knife to cut a cigarette in half. When he had lighted his smoke he held up his hand to a waiter passing by the table. “Kentucky bourbon, please.”

  “Now, listen, Kid,” said Sylvester.

  “Don’t Kid me.”

  “Be reasonable. You know you got to behave reasonable.”

  The jockey drew up the left corner of his mouth in a stiff jeer. His eyes lowered to the food spread out on the table, but instantly he looked up again. Before the rich man was a fish casserole, baked in a cream sauce and garnished with parsley. Sylvester had ordered eggs Benedict. There was asparagus, fresh buttered corn, and a side dish of wet black olives. A plate of French-fried potatoes was in the corner of the table before the jockey. He didn’t look at the food again, but kept his pinched eyes on the centrepiece of full-blown lavender roses. “I don’t suppose you remember a certain person by the name of McGuire,” he said.

  “Now, listen,” said Sylvester.

  The waiter brought the whiskey, and the jockey sat fondling the glass with his small, strong, callused hands. On his wrist was a gold link bracelet that clinked against the table edge. After turning the glass between his palms, the jockey suddenly drank the whiskey neat in two hard swallows. He set down the glass sharply. “No, I don’t suppose your memory is that long and extensive,” he said.

  “Sure enough, Bitsy,” said Sylvester. “What makes you act like this? You hear from the kid today?”

  “I received a letter,” the jockey said. “The certain person we were speaking about was taken out from the cast on Wednesday. One leg is two inches shorter than the other one. That’s all.”

  Sylvester clucked his tongue and shook his head. “I realize how you feel.”

  “Do you?” The jockey was looking at the dishes on the table. His gaze passed from the fish casserole to the corn, and finally fixed on the plate of fried potatoes. His face tightened and quickly he looked up again. A rose shattered and he picked up one of the petals, bruised it between his thumb and forefinger, and put it in his mouth.

  “Well, those things happen,” said the rich man.

  The trainer and the bookie had finished eating, but there was food left on the serving dishes before their plates. The rich man dipped his buttery fingers in his water glass and wiped them with his napkin.

  “Well,” said the jockey. “Doesn’t somebody want me to pass them something? Or maybe perhaps you desire to reorder. Another hunk of beefsteak, gentlemen, or—”

  “Please,” said Sylvester. “Be reasonable. Why don’t you go on upstairs?”

  “Yes, why don’t I?” the jockey said.

  His prim voice had risen higher and there was about it the sharp whine of hysteria.

  “Why don’t I go up to my god-damn room and walk around and write some letters and go to bed like a good boy? Why don’t I just—” He pushed his chair back and got up. “Oh, foo,” he said. “Foo to you. I want a drink.”

  “All I can say is it’s your funeral,” said Sylvester. “You know what it does to you. You know well enough.”

  · · ·

  The jockey crossed the dining room and went into the bar. He ordered a Manhattan, and Sylvester watched him stand with his heels pressed tight together, his body hard as a lead soldier’s, holding his little finger out from the cocktail glass and sipping the drink slowly.

  “He’s crazy,” said Simmons. “Like I said.”

  Sylvester turned to the rich man. “If he eats a lamb chop, you can see the shape of it in his stomach a hour afterward. He can’t sweat things out of him any more. He’s a hundred and twelve and a half. He’s gained three pounds since we left Miami.”

  “A jockey shouldn’t drink,” said the rich man.

  “The food don’t satisfy him like it used to and he can’t sweat it out. If he eats a lamb chop, you can watch it tooching out in his stomach and it don’t go down.”

  The jockey finished his Manhattan. He swallowed, crushed the cherry in the bottom of the glass with his thumb, then pushed the glass away from him. The two girls in blazers were standing at his left, their faces turned toward each other, and at the other end of the bar two touts had started an argument about which was the highest mountain in the world. Everyone was with somebody else; there was no other person drinking alone that night. The jockey paid with a brand-new fifty-dollar bill and didn’t count the change.

  He walked back to the dining room and to the table at which the three men were sitting, but he did not sit down. “No, I wouldn’t presume to think your memory is that extensive,” he said. He was so small that the edge of the table top reached almost to his belt, and when he gripped the corner with his wiry hands he didn’t have to stoop. “No, you’re too busy gobbling up dinners in dining rooms. You’re too—”

  “Honestly,” begged Sylvester. “You got to behave reasonable.”

  “Reasonable! Reasonable!” The jockey’s gray face quivered, then set in a mean, frozen grin. He shook the table so that the plates rattled, and for a moment it seemed that he would push it over. But suddenly he stopped. His hand reached out toward the plate nearest to him and deliberately he put a few of the French-fried potatoes in his mouth. He chewed slowly, his upper lip raised, then he turned and spat out the pulpy mouthful on the smooth red carpet which covered the floor. “Libertines,” he said, and his voice was thin and broken. He rolled the word in his mouth, as though it had a flavor and a substance that gratified him. “You libertines,” he said again, and turned and walked with his rigid swagger out of the dining room.

  Sylvester shrugged one of his loose, heavy shoulders. The rich man sopped up some water that had been spilled on the tablecloth, and they didn’t speak until the waiter came to clear away.

  August 23, 1941

  John O’Hara

  The car turned in at the brief, crescent-shaped drive and waited until the two cabs ahead had pulled away. The car pulled up, the doorman opened the rear door, a little man got out. The little man nodded pleasantly enough to the doorman and said “Wait” to the chauffeur. “Will the Under Secretary be here long?” asked the doorman.

  “Why?” said t
he little man.

  “Because if you were going to be here, sir, only a short while, I’d let your man leave the car here, at the head of the rank.”

  “Leave it there anyway,” said the Under Secretary.

  “Very good, sir,” said the doorman. He saluted and frowned only a little as he watched the Under Secretary enter the hotel. “Well,” the doorman said to himself, “it was a long time coming. It took him longer than most, but sooner or later all of them—” He opened the door of the next car, addressed a colonel and a major by their titles, and never did anything about the Under Secretary’s car, which pulled ahead and parked in the drive.

  The Under Secretary was spoken to many times in his progress to the main dining room. One man said, “What’s your hurry, Joe?,” to which the Under Secretary smiled and nodded. He was called Mr. Secretary most often, in some cases easily, by the old Washington hands, but more frequently with that embarrassment which Americans feel in using titles. As he passed through the lobby, the Under Secretary himself addressed by their White House nicknames two gentlemen whom he had to acknowledge to be closer to The Boss. And, bustling all the while, he made his way to the dining room, which was already packed. At the entrance he stopped short and frowned. The man he was to meet, Charles Browning, was chatting, in French, very amiably with the maître d’hôtel. Browning and the Under Secretary had been at Harvard at the same time.