Where the Dark Streets Go

by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

  “And gin,” Nim said, “and Scotch, I suppose, and Irish, and all the wines of Paris.”

  “It is not right for you to be bitter,” the pawnbroker said. “Bitterness is judgment.”

  “Self-pity,” Nim said. “Is that judgment? I suppose it is.”

  “So your father consented to your studying painting,” Rosenberg gently turned the subject.

  “Not bloody likely. I consented and I’ve paid my own way since. And I’m glad. For all the bump, bump, bumps, I like it this way.”

  “That is much better,” Rosenberg said.

  Nim looked at McMahon. “But I was thinking—what you said about the possibility of choosing the wrong art? For years and years I’ve wanted to be able to play the piano.”

  “So you will teach one another,” Rosenberg said, a born fixer.

  McMahon shook his head. “I am an old dog,” he said, and as though the devil put the words in his mouth, he added: “I learned my tricks too long ago.” Realizing what he had said and how it could be construed as mockery of his priesthood, he drank the cognac down like whisky and got up from the chair. His anger with himself, his situation, was too strong to conceal. But where to hide the darkness? He went to the bookshelf for want of any place to go except out the door. That was where he should have gone, but his feet would not take him there. “You are right, Nim. Things are so crazy,” he said, looking at the books as though he was actually seeing them, and trying to ease matters for the others as well as for himself. “I coveted these books the first time I saw them.”

  It would have been easy for her to say, Take them, have them, and thus set off a round of banal protest to drown out the troubled moment, but neither she nor Rosenberg spoke. The conflict was his own, and they would not intervene to ease or to aggravate it. It was a kind of test of character, the ability to endure oneself in nakedness, and on her part, and perhaps Rosenberg’s, to endure the nakedness of another’s spirit. Whereas on his part, it had always been a matter of clothing quickly. The cloth…I can smell the cloth: the bartender in the homosexual bar. Phelan: he thought of him seeking the cloth, and he, the naked priest, all but urging it upon the man that he might clothe himself. He stood there, his back to the others, his hands in his pockets, and let it happen to him, whatever it was that was happening, the surfacing awareness that he had said what he had wanted to say, that there was no devil, only his own contention between will and want.

  Finally he heard the clink of glass on glass and Rosenberg brought him the cognac. “Drink. It is the last of the bottle. But there is always a new bottle if a man wants to go out and get it.”

  McMahon, taking his hand from his pocket, drew with it the folded money Miss Chase had given him. He looked at it and then held it closer to the light to be sure: it was a hundred-dollar bill.

  “Rosenberg,” he said, taking the glass from the old man’s hand, “where could you buy a piano for a hundred dollars?”

  15

  NIM WAITED FOR HIM in the church while McMahon returned to the rectory, changed his clothes, and made his excuses to Miss Lalor. The monsignor had been invited out to dinner and she hated to cook for the other two. She would give them eggs and set aside for the next night that night’s menu. No family ever lived under such a matriarchy.

  He found Nim walking up and down the side aisle, trying to see the stations of the cross, but the light was poor which, considering the artistic merits of the sculptures, was fortunate. An old Irish parishioner, half blind, was making the stations, her bones creaking at every genuflection. “Is it Father McMahon?” she said as he passed. “I could tell your step.”

  “How are you, Mrs. Carroll?”

  “I’ve aches and pains,” she whispered, “but otherwise I’m fine, thank God.”

  McMahon and Nim went out the side door where he had tried to catch up with her the day she first came to see him. On the street he repeated Mrs. Carroll’s “Aches and pains but otherwise I’m fine, thank God.”

  “You know,” Nim said, “I dig everything about religion except the church.”

  “And God,” McMahon suggested.

  “Sometimes I even dig him. But that’s when things are pretty bad.”

  “Try it sometime when things are good. You’ll like him better.”

  “Who needs him then?” she said.

  They took a bus uptown to the warehouse off Broadway in the eighties where Rosenberg had called a friend. “Those old pianos you’re always trying to get rid of, Michael,” the pawnbroker had said with a wink to Nim and McMahon. “I have some young friends who might take one of them off your hands.” And it had been arranged that the night watchman show them the dozen or so relics at the back of the storeroom.

  The click of Nim’s heels echoed through the huge loft. “People buying pianos today won’t get the likes of these even on the installment plan,” the watchman said, making the most of the chance to play salesman. “Of course, you have to have a house to suit them. They like more room than most.”

  He excused himself to turn on another light. A big man, on in years, he walked with a limp, and McMahon supposed he might have been a mover and incurred an injury.

  Nim said, “Do you think everything in this place is alive to him? Did you hear, they like more room?”

  “I hope they have life,” McMahon said, thinking of all the classroom pianos in all the parochial schools in the city.

  The watchman returned and they went on to where a row of bruised and battered uprights, some with keyboards open and some closed, stood against the wall.

  “Look at them,” the watchman said, “smiling up at you.”

  “The trouble is,” McMahon said, “I’m not a dentist.” He put his hand to one and struck a chord, or what would have been a chord when the old strings could make it.

  “Some have more tune,” the watchman admitted.

  “So does the Liberty Bell.” McMahon lifted the keyboard lid on the next one and tried it. The improvement in sound was slight, but the promise in each separate key as he struck it was greater. He stood back and looked at it in line with the others: it had the added advantage of being smaller.

  “Maybe we should choose by the pound,” Nim said.

  “Believe me,” McMahon said. He left the keyboard open and tried the others. None was better and some were worse. He borrowed the watchman’s flashlight and examined the strings and mallets. Nim stood on tiptoe and looked in too. The wires were like ripples in a sea of dust. McMahon got down on the floor and tested the pedals by hand.

  “You’d think it was a horse,” the watchman said.

  McMahon looked up at him. “Do you have a name for it too?”

  “Dulcimer,” the man said without hesitation. “It’s a word I always liked. I wanted to call our daughter Dulcimer—you know, Dulcie for short? But the wife wouldn’t have it. Sharon. It’s a nice enough name.”

  “Now,” McMahon said, getting up and dusting his hands and knees, “how do we get it from here to there?”

  The watchman’s face lengthened. “You’ve not arranged that?”

  “There wasn’t anything to arrange till now,” McMahon said.

  “True, true. What floor do you live on?”

  “The fourth,” Nim lied.

  “The fifth,” McMahon said.

  “No elevator?”

  “If I had an elevator I’d be buying on the installment plan,” Nim said with asperity.

  “Where do you live, Miss?”

  She lifted her chin. “On Fifth Street near Avenue A.”

  “I was afraid it was San Francisco.” The watchman took the weight off his feet, half-sitting on the closed board of the next piano. “We’ve got some black boys working for us who might moonlight it on Sunday if I can get hold of them. I’ll phone from the office. But five floors. The young lady was right. I’ll tell them four and you tell them the fifth.”

  “How much do you think it will cost?”

  “The last time, fifteen dollars per man and twenty for
the truck. Four men.”

  “Eighty dollars,” McMahon said. Then: “Isn’t there a bench or a stool goes with it?”

  “No, sir. Them we can sell for money.”

  On the street again, the delivery arranged for Sunday morning, McMahon said, “Now we have twenty dollars to spend on dinner. Where shall we go?”

  “The Brittany,” Nim said. “It’s cheaper than most and I like it better. Do you know where it is?”

  “Yes,” McMahon said. Nothing more: it was within a few blocks of the rectory.

  “Or better. There’s a fish house on Third Avenue in the forties,” Nim said, trying hard not to show her realization of why he had been reluctant about the Brittany.

  “And we can have a drink at Tim Ryan’s,” he said. “He’s an old friend of mine.”

  “And broadminded,” Nim said.

  McMahon did not answer.

  “I’m sorry. Don’t priests ever take girls to dinner?”

  “You know the answer to that as well as I do, Nim. An agreement between us—no games?”

  “No games,” she repeated, and took his arm as they crossed the street toward Central Park. “But it is a game all the same, and I’m playing it even though I know I’m going to get hurt.”

  He was aware of her hand on his arm, more than aware. “Nobody’s going to get hurt,” he said.

  “Let’s just say nobody’s going to cry. Will you go with me to see Professor Broglio?”

  “I can’t,” McMahon said. “I have dress rehearsal in the morning for Sunday’s concert.”

  “But by noon couldn’t you get to Columbia?”

  “I can try.”

  “Could I come to the concert Sunday?”

  “It’s in the school auditorium at three,” he said. “I’ll write you a pass. Otherwise it’s two dollars.”

  “Two dollars!” Nim said, and then, “Forgive me.”

  “Toward the building fund.”

  Before walking through the park, Nim took off her shoes. “I’m quite primitive, you know.”

  “Savage,” McMahon said, and then walking hand in hand, finding one another’s hands by some mutual impulse he certainly was not going to examine then, they managed to throw off the gray mood that had come on them with the choosing of a restaurant. But McMahon could not take her to Tim Ryan’s—for her sake, not his own. He could see the Irishman’s cold blue eyes measuring the woman who consorted with off-duty priests. Broadminded Tim.

  They drank where they ate, and it was better, the settling in to be themselves and with a waiter who calculated his tip by every drink and instead of hurrying, urged them to take their time—a public-private place.

  Nim said: “If tomorrow you could go any place in the world you wanted to, where would it be?”

  “Somewhere by the sea—with a long shore and no people anywhere. The sand would be damp and hard so I could run on it. I love to run. I had a dream once—it was as though I was chasing myself along a beach, trying to catch up.”

  “Did you?”

  He shook his head.

  “You love the sea and Stu hated it, except for the things beneath it. Protoplasmic man.”

  McMahon thought of the painting of Nim’s, one that Wallenstein had admired, the last she had put away after he left. The undersea quality was in it. “You knew him well, Nim. Maybe better than you know.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “That painting of yours, the one you asked if I liked?”

  “It was the last thing I did while he was with me.”

  “I was just wondering if it might have had to do with his going away from you.”

  “I was becoming too much him to him, is that it?” she said after a moment.

  “Or he was becoming too much you.”

  “I’d never have thought of it that way.”

  “Only in isolation would he have had what he needed of himself. I don’t think you’ll agree with this, but whatever he called it, I think he was looking for God.” The thought of Phelan skimmed through his mind: something of this had come through to him too.

  “Or the devil. Maybe he wanted to kill the devil, and I said he would shake hands with him.”

  “The world’s infections,” McMahon mused, “into the cauldron of his genius.”

  “Now that’s spooky,” Nim said. “When I told you that, that’s the word I should have said, cauldron. It’s the word he used, but I couldn’t think of it. I said furnace. There are times you’re very like him, Joe.”

  “There are times I even feel like him, whatever that means.”

  “I know what it means to me,” Nim said. Her face, when he looked up, had become bleakly sad.

  “Not tonight, not tonight,” McMahon said. “I think we can manage a cognac. Then I’ve got to go home.”

  16

  “IT MAY SEEM WRONG to you, but I do not feel grief for him, the way you tell his dying.” He sat, a small man, deep in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment. His head was as bald as Picasso’s. “Even when I knew him he lived on the edge of life, daring the step that might take him over. In a way it was me who brought him into the department. A mistake. Or was it? Who knows what is a mistake? Add up all the mistakes of my life and I am a success. Add up my successes and I am a failure. A man should not be in one place for thirty years. And if there is anything we can be sure about Tom Chase, he did not make that mistake. His name was a natural gift.”

  Nim said, “Professor Broglio, please tell us everything you can about him.”

  The old man grunted and scratched the top of his head. “Everything. Even that has a beginning. It was the first and last time I was ever political and I would say the same for him, the Adlai Stevenson campaign. It was in the old Marcantonio district, First Avenue on the edge of Harlem. We worked in an empty store, artists and writers for Stevenson. It was quite insane, ladies in mink, painters in dungarees, a classless society. Ha! All that does not matter but that’s where we met. It was afterwards I got to know him, his rage at the frightened intellectuals, that was the time. Everybody playing it safe—afraid to think anything new, much less to teach it on the campuses. So I said, you are not afraid: teach. Teach what? What you know, how to paint, how to draw. He was a fine craftsman. And I got him a class a week to teach drawing, here where everything is new, experimental.” He spoke ironically, hardly lifting his heavy-lidded eyes. He got up from the desk then, moving slowly with difficulty in straightening up at first, and McMahon thought he would have spent years in damp places to have become so arthritic. He moved a chair out of his way and took a picture down from the wall leaving a white space where it had hung. “I had forgotten this. It is his.”

  He brought it back and put it in Nim’s hands. McMahon looked at it over her shoulder: a sketch of a market place such as he himself knew from the Italian section on Ninth Avenue—the stalls and baskets, and an aproned man putting something in the scale: a simple drawing of a complex scene, but the shape of the man told it all, the rhythm of his lifetime was in the line of his back.

  “He did not sign it,” Nim said.

  “But it is his all the same.”

  “He must have had a body of painting,” McMahon suggested, “for you to have been able to judge his work.”

  “I do not judge work, only how people go about it. Judgment I leave to my superiors. That is survival and he came to hate me for it. To answer your question, Father, there was a body of work. I took the head of the department to his place, a loft on Amsterdam Avenue, and the boss agreed. There was an opening that February. He was given the assignment on condition that he try to get a gallery and show within a year. Backwards, you say, but the boss had that kind of confidence in himself—and his contacts. Some painters are born, others are made.”

  “And was there a showing?” McMahon asked.

  “Never to my knowledge. But his contract was renewed for a year. The serious students liked him. The others were in the majority, and before the year was out, he walked out on his contract. The
y were studying for credits, you see, and he did not approve of working in the arts for credit. He was hopeless, pursuing the absolute. Anarchy. And now you tell me what happened to him—and you, Miss Nim—what he was like when you knew him, and I repeat, hopeless. He was always running, even when he was standing still. But we did enjoy life together, wine…and women. We enjoyed, and that is the thing. Maybe it is the only thing.” He reached out a gnarled hand and patted Nim’s. “Do you know, Miss Nim, when your father brought you to see me, how long ago?…”

  “Eight years,” Nim said.

  “I almost told you both about him then, what it is like to want everything so that you settle for nothing. But it was too complicated for me to try to explain in the presence of a scientist.”

  “A scientist,” Nim said with a touch of derision.

  “You are still at war with him,” the old man said.

  “No. It’s an armed truce, if it’s anything.”

  “But you are painting?” He turned her hand over and exposed the fingernails.

  “Yes, thanks to him.” She set the drawing on the desk.

  “No. Thanks to yourself only. You may have the drawing.”

  “I do want it very much,” she said.

  “Then it is yours.” He turned to McMahon. “Does she paint well, Father?”

  “I think so. Do you know a man named Wallenstein?”

  “I know the name very well. David Wallenstein is an important collector, mostly in the Impressionists.”

  “I think this man’s name is Everett,” McMahon said.

  “That would be the son. A dilettante—so I have heard. I forget in what connection.”

  “He also collects—Tchelitchew among others.”

  “Ah, yes. There is a show, or was recently. Tchelitchew is not my dish.”

  “Mr. Wallenstein thinks I’m good,” Nim said, with that characteristic thrust of the chin.

  Broglio leaned back in his chair. “Who is to say a dilettante does not know? It is only himself he does not know.”

  McMahon asked: “Do you have the address where Chase had his loft, professor?”