Horace Afoot

by Frederick Reuss

  “And the archive that has been quietly resting here for the better part of the century will suddenly become all the rage?”

  Mohr shrugs and drops his chin to his chest as though in contemplation, then lifts his head back up. “There will be a dedication ceremony,” he says.

  I pick up his thread. “And people will come for a while to use the new machines. Look up the names of their relatives, show their kids. Then it will collect dust. Just like the books on the shelves do.”

  “I plan to scan the photograph collections first. The photographs will make a bigger initial impression.”

  “And after that, Major Wilkington’s accounting statements and shopping lists?”

  “Say what you like. It’s for the good. As long as the collections are preserved.” He sits down in his chair behind the desk.

  “But by preserving the stuff in a format based in an esoteric technology, all you’re doing is making the material less available to the future!”

  “As long as the information is preserved … that’s all that counts.” He pauses to shuffle some papers on the desk. “You’re too pessimistic, Horace. If I listened to you I would do nothing.”

  “Maybe that’s not such a bad idea.”

  He waves me away with a disgruntled flap of the wrist. “You tire me out, Horace. Really, you do. I don’t understand why you say half of what you say.” He looks at his watch, a large old thing that dangles on the bones of his wrist like a heavy bracelet. “The library closes in ten minutes. Would you like to join me for dinner?”

  “Where?” I ask, surprised by the invitation. Mohr and I have kept our acquaintance to the library since that night of drinking and confession.

  “Across the street. The food isn’t bad.”

  “I’m not hungry. But I’ll keep you company.”

  “Great.” He hauls himself out of the chair. “I’ll be ready in ten minutes.”

  I go outside and wait for him. The air is crisp and very cold. The lights at the front entrance cast a warm, incandescent glow across the snow. Traffic is moving steadily along Main Street, the rush-hour exodus of people and cars almost over. I lean against the brick wall beside the entrance, saturated by a sense of well-being. The cold air, the steps of the library, the snow; a sense of being completely in the present, of fitness and proportion and charm that I can’t sum up but which has descended on me like a momentary state of grace. I take long drafts of cold air into my lungs and exhale large clouds of steam that dissolve in a yellow glow of light.

  Mohr emerges from the front door and locks it behind him. We stand together at the top step for a moment, looking at the thin stream of traffic passing slowly up Main Street. “Come on,” he says and carefully descends the icy steps, one at a time.

  The Corn Tassel is one of those restaurants that changes its atmosphere according to the meal being served. At lunch it is a busy diner. At dinner the lights are dimmed and it becomes a cocktail lounge and restaurant. Mohr chooses a booth. He peels off his overcoat and hangs it on a hook and slides onto the crimson vinyl bench. I slide in across from him as the waitress appears.

  “How are you tonight, Mr. Mohr?”

  “Oh, same as always,” he responds in a voice reserved for the occasion.

  “That’s good. Can I get you something to drink?” She is a large woman on the edge of matronly middle age with a wide, friendly face. I think I’ve seen her before but don’t remember where. The bank, maybe.

  “I’ll have the usual.”

  “Glass of red wine?”

  Mohr nods.

  “I’ll have a cup of coffee.”

  The booth makes it feel like we’re squaring off for something. Mohr fidgets with his silverware and says a few things about the cold and the food at the restaurant. Then, after the waitress has brought him his wine and me my coffee, he looks me squarely in the eye. “I’m going to retire in two weeks.”

  “In two weeks?”

  “And I am moving into the hospice.” He lifts his glass to his lips and sips with a mild, bemused expression.

  “What about all these plans you’re making?”

  “My successor can take them over.” He sips his wine. “I wish I’d taken to fund-raising a long time ago. I seem to be fairly good at it. People become so friendly once they’ve decided to part with some of their cash. And you want to know something?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Being sick has come in handy.”

  “You mean people feel sorry for you?”

  He nods and laughs. “It’s like taking candy from a baby.”

  “So how much have you raised?”

  “More than I ever imagined possible. Enough to get the collection digitized and the place wired with computers. Mrs. Entwhistle will have plenty to work with.”

  “She’s taking over from you?”

  He nods.

  “Can’t you stay long enough to get it started?”

  He puts his glass down and drops his hands into his lap. The lamp attached to the wall in the booth casts a shadow that makes the lines and crevices of his face seem deeper and the hair of his wig seem darker than it actually is. “I’m too exhausted. I’ve done as much as I can, and now it’s time to stop. I go to the oncologist three mornings a week. Then to work. Then home. I’m stoked with painkillers and pep talks from the doctor. It’s the pep talks that are killing me.” He smiles and reaches for his glass.

  The waitress arrives to take the order. Mohr asks for chicken pot pie, carrots, broccoli, and another glass of wine. He gives me a knowing grin. “How about you?” “I’m fine.”

  “You’re not going to order dinner?” the waitress asks.

  “No thanks.”

  “Have a glass of wine with me,” Mohr says.

  “Okay,” I agree.

  “Red or white?” the waitress asks.

  “Red.”

  She jots everything onto her pad and departs to fill the order.

  “I have a glass of wine every night at dinner,” Mohr says, still grinning. “Since last summer. Of course, they don’t serve the good stuff here.”

  “When are you moving?” I ask.

  “Next week.” His expression turns serious. “A place came available. I’ve got to take it or they’ll bump me to the bottom of the list.” The waitress brings our wine. “My friend Bill is coming from Chicago to help get me settled.”

  “That’ll be good.”

  “I’m afraid he’s in for a shock. We haven’t seen each other for several years. I’ve lost a lot of weight.”

  “I’m sure he knows what to expect.”

  Mohr shrugs. “Knowing what to expect and confronting the facts are two different things.” He looks into his glass for a moment. “We lived together for close to ten years.” His voice has the edge of confession in it. I sip from my glass and wait for him to continue. “How do you like the wine?” he asks after a brief silence.

  I shrug, not expecting the detour. “It’s not the greatest.”

  “It stinks,” Mohr says. “I’ve always meant to bring my own bottle, but I always forget, and now I’m used to drinking the bad stuff.”

  A few more people come into the restaurant, all elderly regulars. Mohr waves to one couple who take the booth behind us. “He used to be the mayor,” Mohr says.

  “Do you eat here often?”

  “Since I stopped cooking, almost every night.”

  “When did you stop cooking?”

  “About six years ago,” he says. “When Bill moved to Chicago.”

  I can tell he would like me to ask about Bill, give the signal that I’m ready to hear his whole story. But I’ve already deduced the outlines of it from the tone in his voice and don’t need to hear it. Don’t want to, really. “What about the hospice?”

  “What about it?”

  “Will they feed you there?”

  “Of course.” Mohr pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “It’s their job. And they do a lot more than just feed you.”
/>   “Such as.”

  “They nurse you to death.” He says it with mock sarcasm, the bitterness in his tone stemming, I guess, less from the irony of the observation than from the fact that I haven’t given him the opening to talk about Bill.

  The waitress arrives and sets Mohr’s meal in front of him and asks if she can bring me anything. I shake my head and settle back to watch Mohr as he picks up his fork and begins the motions of eating. After a few dabs and bites he puts the fork down, takes a sip from his glass, and returns his napkin to the table.

  “You’re not going to eat?” “I can’t.”

  “Is it because I’m here?”

  He shakes his head. “My appetite. It comes and goes at random. It’s the medication, I think.”

  “What kind of medication?”

  “Painkillers, mainly. They do funny things.” He leans back and stares across the table at me. His black horn-rims make it seem as if he is looking at me through a barrier erected across his face. I can see the air going out of him.

  “Do you want to leave?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Sitting here is fine. You’ll have to pardon me. The end of the day is exhausting.”

  The waitress stops by. “Is there anything wrong, Mr. Mohr?”

  He shakes his head. “No. Just resting.”

  “You want me to clear it away?”

  “Leave it. Maybe I’ll get inspired.”

  She smiles indulgently and bustles off, well acquainted with the routine. We sit in silence for several minutes. Mohr makes another attempt to eat, but after a few small bites he puts his fork down again and signals the waitress to take it away. “You know,” he says after the table is cleared, “I won’t really miss the library.”

  I wait for him to continue.

  “I used to think of it as an extension of my personality. When I started it was a more vital part of the town than it is today. We had money then. For programs. I used to put all sorts of things together. Concerts. Lectures. Seminars.”

  “What happened?”

  “Money dried up. People lost interest. Things change. I hope Mrs. Entwhistle will be able to put more things together than I have been able to these last years.” He sips his wine. “Besides remedial reading programs. Read a Book This Week. Read to the Children Day. Reading Is Fun Month. It’s depressing. Enough of that. Tell me about your family.”

  “My family?”

  The note of surprise in my voice makes him smile. “Parents. Brothers. Sisters. Tell me about them.”

  “There is nothing to tell.”

  “Come now,” he says, smiling and on the offensive. “Everybody has a story to tell.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Exactly what?”

  “Everybody has a story to tell, and mine is no different from any other.”

  “Don’t be so sure of that. Are you estranged from your family?”

  “You could say that.”

  “When did you last see your mother?”

  I calculate the years back. “Fifteen years ago. Something like that.”

  Mohr’s eyes widen behind his glasses. “Fifteen years! And your father?”

  “The same.”

  “Brothers? Sisters?”

  “I don’t have any.”

  He smiles at what he senses to be a hint of things to come and sits up as straight as he is capable of. The rush to probe has revived him and sparkles in his eyes. To satisfy his pathetic curiosity, I decide to oblige him. “My parents are dead.”

  “Oh, I, I’m sorry.” My statement deflates him momentarily; then he resumes the inquiry. “Were they old?”

  “No. They both died fairly young.”

  “I see.” And his tone says, Now I’m beginning to understand.

  “I was thirty, I think.”

  Mohr will not be denied. “Were you close?”

  “No. Not at all. I knew from the time I was a kid that I was different from them. They knew it too.”

  “Funny how that works,” Mohr says without a trace of irony in his voice.

  “The only way I can think of them now is as stereotypes.”

  “How do you mean?” The look of engrossment on Mohr’s face is too authentic to back out and, in a way, outweighs my reservations about talking.

  “Only that they were typical.”

  “Typical of what?”

  “Just typical.” I lift the glass to my lips. The sour smell puts me off, but I sip anyway and try to end the narrative. “My father had a heart attack and died at fifty-seven. My mother died at fifty-one.”

  Mohr gives a grave nod of recognition and presses on. “How did she die?”

  “She killed herself.”

  “I see,” Mohr says without changing expression.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I add, finding it strange that these barest facts can still make me mad. “She drank herself to death. Worked hard at it for years.”

  “Out of grief?”

  “More out of boredom, I think. Boredom and acute self-absorption.”

  “That is sad,” Mohr says. “Where did you live before you came here?”

  The waitress sweeps by, offers coffee and dessert, then disappears again. The restaurant is empty except for the former mayor and his wife seated in the booth behind us and two truck-driver types drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes at a table near the door.

  “Everywhere.”

  “Abroad?”

  I nod, pausing to consider how much further my little autobiography needs to go. It isn’t intimacy with Mohr that causes my reluctance but the decision I made years ago to maintain myself always in the present. The past is a vortex of traps into which it is easy to fall and difficult to get out of, the birthplace of illusions and the graveyard of the self. Danger signs should be erected in the lobe of the brain that controls memory, one going in that reads Check idylls at the door and one going out that reads Deposit all grudges.

  “Where abroad?”

  “All over. It really doesn’t matter.”

  “You don’t want to tell me?”

  “Would knowing make any difference?”

  Mohr thinks for a moment. “I suppose not,” he says.

  “There’s nothing to tell. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Mohr’s face goes red. “Talk about self-absorption! Now I know where you inherited it from. I’m not just some nosy neighbor, Horace.” His brow collapses in a bundle of knots and his eyes fix on me from behind his glasses and under his wig like submerged points.

  His vehemence catches me by surprise. “I didn’t mean it that way.”

  “The trouble with you is you don’t ever know what you mean. You’re so goddamn blasé it makes me sick. I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but you don’t impress me with it one bit.”

  “I’m not trying to impress anyone.”

  Mohr is rolling and cuts me off. “I don’t care what you say, nobody, nobody, nobody …”

  “Nobody?”

  “Nobody can talk the way you just did—as if you were describing some sociological phenomenon. It’s pompous and stupid. Have your emotions atrophied completely?” He is sputtering and leans back to catch his breath. I wait for him to continue, but he turns his gaze out into the restaurant. “I don’t believe you are being sincere.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re not being frank. You’ve never sorted yourself out—emotionally.” He stops there and dabs his slightly beslobbered lips with a napkin.

  “I prefer to live in the present.” For a few minutes an uncomfortable silence reigns. I lean back and try to imagine what has prompted his outburst, what has upset him. Mohr doesn’t look at me but out into the restaurant like an injured lover. He turns to me, tears welling. I continue, “And my emotional life hasn’t atrophied. I have just taken firm control of it.”

  “Glad to hear it.” He seems to want comforting.

  “I didn’t mean to put you off. I just don’t think discussing the past is always the best w
ay of framing the present. I prefer to let mine rest.”

  “I’m sorry,” Mohr says, removing his glasses and dabbing his eyes with the corner of his napkin. “I don’t know what got hold of me.”

  “Now it’s your turn. Tell me about your parents.”

  “Maybe I can agree with you up to a point.” He replaces his glasses. “But I find that memories can be a source of comfort.” He pauses for me to object, then continues, “I grew up in Cincinnati. Mount Adams. As kids we used to call the neighborhood Mount Dumbass.” He chuckles, begins to cough, and stops himself, holding a fist against his chest. “Our house overlooked the Ohio River. My father worked for the electric company. He married my mother when she was seventeen. I had an older brother, Jim. He was killed in Korea. It was devastating, terrible, the whole family. Now you know how old I am.”

  “I never really cared.”

  Mohr shrugs and continues. “My mother had a nervous breakdown. Back then people got put away for that kind of thing. Lobotomized. Luckily, my father was something of a skeptic and didn’t want to leave Mother to a bunch of men in white coats. He took early retirement and moved us to Florida. It was an extraordinary thing to do, I now realize. My father was an extraordinary man. I went off to college shortly after that.” He begins to cough and wrests control again. “I visited them whenever I could. Anyway, my mother got better.”

  “Are they still alive?”

  “My father died ten years ago. Mother died one year later almost to the day.” He begins to slump a little so that, seen from across the table, he seems to be shrinking. “Lately I think about my brother more than I do about my parents. His death was so—unfair.”

  “Unfair?”

  “He didn’t give his life—as the army says in the letter they sent to my parents—he had it taken from him. It was so meaningless and unnecessary.”

  “How is that different from any other death?”

  “I don’t know. I will die of cancer. There’s no meaning in that, I suppose.”

  “But you say your brother’s death was meaningless and unnecessary and unfair?”