Fools die

by Mario Puzo

  I had a different point of view. I was realistic, I thought, not a bigot. What was happening was that the city of New York was turning its housing projects into black slums, establishing new ghettos, isolating the blacks from the rest of the white community. In effect using projects as a cordon sanitaire. Tiny Harlems white-washed with urban liberalism. And all the economic dregs of the white working class were being segregated here, the ones too badly educated to earn a living, too maladjusted to keep the family structure together. Those people with a little something on the ball would run for their lives to the suburbs or private homes or commercial apartments in the city. But the balance of power hadn’t shifted yet. The whites still outnumbered the blacks two to one. The socially oriented families, black and white, still had a slim majority. I figured the housing project was safe at least for the twelve months we would have to stay there. I really didn’t give a shit about anything else. I had, I guess, a contempt for all those people. They were like animals, without free will, content to live from one day to the other with booze and drugs fucking just to kill time whenever they could find it. It was becoming another fucking orphan asylum. But then how come I was still there? What was I?

  A young black woman with four kids lived on our floor. She was solidly built, sexy-looking, full of vibrant good humor and high spirits. Her husband had left her before she moved into the project, and I had never seen him. The woman was a good mother during the day; the kids were always neat, always sent off to school and met by the bus stop. But the mother was not so much on the ball at night. After supper we could see her all dressed up, going out on a date, while the kids were left home alone. Her oldest kid was only ten. Value used to shake her head and I told her it was none of her business.

  But one night, late, when we were in bed, we heard the scream of fire engines. And we could smell smoke in our apartment. Our bedroom window looked directly across to the black woman’s apartment, and like a tableau in a movie, we could see flames dancing in that apartment and the small children running through it. Vallie jumped up in her nightgown, tore a blanket off the bed and ran out of our apartment door. I followed her. We were just in time to see the other apartment door open down the long hallway and four children come running out. Behind them we could see~ flames in the apartment. Value was running down the hallway after them, and I wondered what the hell she was doing. She was running frantically, a blanket in her hand trailing the floor. Then I saw what she had seen. The biggest girl, coming out last, shooing the younger ones before her, had begun to fall. Her back was on fire. Then she was a torch of dark red flame. She fell. As she writhed on the cement floor in agony, Vallie jumped on her and wrapped her in the blanket. Dirty gray smoke rose above them as firemen poured into the hallway with hoses and axes.

  The firemen took over, and Value was back with me in the apartment. Ambulances were clanging up onto the internal walks of the project. Then suddenly we saw the mother in the apartment opposite us. She was smashing at the glass with her hands and screaming aloud. Blood poured over her finery. I didn’t know what the hell she was doing, and then realized that she was trying to impale herself on the glass fragments. Firemen came up behind her, out of the smoke billowing from the dead flames, the charred furniture. They dragged her away from the window, and then we saw her strapped down on a stretcher being carried into the ambulance.

  Again these low-income housing projects, built with no thought for profit, had been so made that the fire could not spread or the smoke become a hazard too quickly to other tenants. Just the one apartment was burned out. The little girl who was on fire would, they said, recover, though severely burned. The mother was already out of the hospital.

  Saturday afternoon, a week later, Vallie took the kids to her father’s house so that I could work on my book in peace. I was working pretty well when there was a knock at the apartment door. It was a timid knock I could barely hear from where I was working on the kitchen table.

  When I opened the door, there was this skinny, creamy chocolate black guy. He had a thin mustache and straightened hair. He murmured his name and I didn’t catch it, but I nodded. Then he said, “I just wanted to thank you and your wife for what you did for my baby.” And I understood that he was the father of the family down the hail, the one that had had the fire.

  I asked him if he wanted to come in for a drink. I could see that he was almost close to tears, humiliated and ashamed to be making his thanks. I told him my wife was away, but I would tell her he had come by. He stepped just inside my door, to show that he wouldn’t insult me by refusing to come into my house, but he wouldn’t take a drink.

  I tried my best, but it must have shown that I really hated him. That I had hated him ever since the night of the fire. He was one of the black guys who left their wives and children on welfare to go out and have a good time, to live their own lives. I had read the literature on the broken homes of black families in New York. And how the organization and torments of society made these men leave their wives and children. I understood it intellectually, but emotionally I reacted against it. Who the fuck were they to live their own lives? I wasn’t leading my own life.

  But then I saw that tears were streaming down that milk chocolate skin. And I noticed he had long eyelashes over soft brown eyes. And then I could hear his words. “Oh, man,” he said. “My little girl died this morning. She died in that hospital.” He started to fall away and I caught him and he said, “She was supposed to get better, the burns weren’t that bad, but she just died anyway. I came to visit her and everybody in that hospital looked at me. You know? I was her father? Where was I? What was I doing? Like they blame me. You know?”

  Vallie kept a bottle of rye in the living room for her father and brothers when they came to visit. Neither Value nor I drank usually. But I didn’t know where the hell she kept the bottle.

  “Wait a minute,” I said to the man crying before me. “You need a drink.” I found the bottle in the kitchen closet and got two glasses. We both drank it straight, and I could see he felt better, he composed himself.

  And watching him, I realized that he had not come to give his thanks to the would-be saviors of his daughter. He had come to find someone to pour out his grief and his guilt. So I listened and wondered that he had not seen my judgment of him on my face.

  He emptied his glass and I poured him more whiskey. He slumped back on the sofa tiredly. “You know, I never wanted to leave my wife and kids. But she was too lively and too strong. I worked hard. I work two jobs and save my money. I want to buy us a house and bring up my children right. But she wants fun, she wants a good time. She’s too strong and I had to leave. I tried to see my kids more, she won’t let me. If I give her extra money, she spends it on herself and not on the kids. And then, you know, we got further and further apart and I found a woman who liked to live the way I live and I become a stranger to my own children. And now everybody will blame me because my little girl died. Like I’m one of those flying dudes, who leave their old ladies just to follow their nose.”

  “Your wife is the one that left them alone,” I said.

  The man sighed. “Can’t blame her. She go crazy if she stay home every night. And she didn’t have the money for a baby-sitter. I could have put up with her or I could have killed her, one or the other.”

  I couldn’t say anything, but I watched him and he watched me. I saw his humiliation at telling all this to a stranger and a white stranger. And then I realized that I was the only person to whom he could show his shame. Because I didn’t really count and because Vallie had smothered the flames burning his daughter.

  “She nearly killed herself that night,” I said.

  He burst into tears again. “Oh,” he said. “She loves her kids. Leaving them alone don’t mean nothing. She loves them all. And she ain’t ever going to forgive herself, that’s what I’m afraid of. That woman is going to drink herself to death, she’s going down, man. I don’t know what to do for her.”

  There was nothing
I could say to this. In the back of my head I was thinking, a day’s work wasted, I’d never even get to go over my notes. But I offered him something to eat. He finished up his whiskey and rose to go. Again that look of shame and humiliation in his face as he thanked me and my wife once again for what we had done for his daughter. And then he left.

  When Vallie came home with the kids that night, I told her what had happened, and she went into the bedroom and wept while I made supper for the kids. And I thought of how I had condemned the man before I ever met him or knew anything about him. How I had just put him in a slot whittled out by the books I had read, the drunks and dopers who had come to live in the project with us. I thought of him fleeing from his own people into another world not so poor and black, escaping the doomed circle he had been born in. And left his daughter to die by fire. He would never forgive himself, his judgment far harsher than that I in my ignorance had condemned him with.

  Then a week later a lovey-dovey couple across the mall got into a fight and he cut her throat. They were white. She had a lover on the side who refused to stay on the side. But it wasn’t fatal, and the errant wife looked dramatically romantic in her huge white neck bandages when she took her little kids to the school bus.

  I knew we were getting out at the right time.

  Chapter 16

  At the Army Reserve office in the armory the bribe business was booming. And for the first time in my Civil Service career I received an “Excellent” rating. Because of my bribe rackets, I had studied all the complicated new regulations, and was finally an efficient clerk, the top expert in the field.

  Because of this special knowledge, I had devised a shuttle system for my clients. When they finished their six months’ active duty and came back to my Reserve unit for meetings and two weeks summer camp, I vanished them. I devised a perfectly legal system for them to beat it. In effect I could offer them a deal where after they did their six months’ active duty, they became names on the Army Reserve inactive rosters to be called up only in case of war. No more weekly meetings, no more yearly summer camps. My price went up. Another plus: When I got rid of them, it opened up a valuable slot.

  One morning I opened the Daily News, and there on the front page was a big photograph of three young men. Two of them were guys I had just enlisted the day before. Two hundred bucks each. My heart gave a big jump and I felt a little sick. What could it be but an expose of the whole racket? The caper had blown up. I made myself read the caption. The guy in the middle was the son of the biggest politician in the state of New York. And the caption applauded the patriotic enlistment of the politician’s son in the Army Reserve. That was all.

  Still, that newspaper photo frightened me. I had visions of going to jail and Vallie and the kids being left alone. Of course, I knew her father and mother would take care of them, but I wouldn’t be there. I’d lose my family. But then, when I got to the office and told Frank, he laughed and thought it was great. Two of my paying customers on page one of the Daily News. Just great. He cut out the photograph and put it on the bulletin board of his Army Reserve unit. It was a great inside joke for us. The major thought it was up on the board to boost unit morale.

  That phony scare threw me off guard in a way. Like Frank, I started to believe that the racket could go on forever. And it might have, except for the Berlin crisis, which made President Kennedy decide to call up hundreds of thousands of Reserve troops. Which proved to be very unlucky.

  The armory became a madhouse when the news came out that our Reserve units were being called into the Army for a year’s active duty. The draft dodgers who had connived and paid to get into the six months’ program went crazy. They were enraged. What hurt the worst was that here they were, the shrewdest young men in the country, budding lawyers, successful Wall Street operators, advertising geniuses, and they had been outwitted by that dumbest of all creatures, the United States Army. They had been bamboozled with the six months’ program, tricked, conned, sold, never paying attention to the one little catch. That they could be called up to active duty and be back in the Army again. City slickers being taken by the hicks. I wasn’t too pleased by it either, though I congratulated myself for never having become a member of the Reserves for the easy money. Still, my racket was shot to hell. No more tax-free income of a thousand dollars a month. And I was to move into my new house on Long Island very soon. But still, I never realized that this would bring on the catastrophe I had long foreseen. I was too busy processing the enormous paperwork involved to get my units officially on active duty.

  There were supplies and uniforms to be requisitioned, all kinds of training orders to be issued. And then there was the wild stampede to get out of the one-year recall. Everybody knew the Army had regulations for hardship cases. Those that had been in the Reserve program for the last three or four years and had nearly finished their enlistment were especially stunned. During those years their careers had prospered, they had gotten married, they made kids. They had the military lords of America beat. And then it all became an illusion.

  But remember, these were the sharpest kids in America, the future business giants, judges, show business whizbangs. They didn’t take it lying down. One young guy, a partner in his father’s seat on the Wall Street Exchange, had his wife committed to a psychiatric clinic, then put in papers for a hardship discharge on the grounds that his wife had had a nervous breakdown. I forwarded the documents complete with official letters from doctors and the hospital. It didn’t work. Washington had received thousands of cases and taken a stand that nobody would get out on hardship. A letter came back saying the poor husband would be recalled to active duty and then the Red Cross would investigate his hardship claim. The Red Cross must have done a good job because a month afterward, when the guy’s unit was shipped to Fort Lee, Virginia, the wife with the nervous breakdown came into my office to apply for necessary papers to join him down at camp. She was cheerful and obviously in good health. In such good health that she hadn’t been able to go along with the charade and stay in the hospital. Or maybe the doctors wouldn’t go that far out on a limb to keep the deception going.

  Mr. Hiller called me up about his son, Jeremy. I told him there was nothing I could do. He pressed me and pressed me, and I said jokingly that if his son was a homosexual, he might be discharged from the Army Reserve and not called to active duty. There was a long pause at the other end of the phone, and then he thanked me and hung up. Sure enough, two days later Jeremy Hiller came and filed the necessary papers to get out of the Army on grounds he was a homosexual. I told him that it would always be on his record. That sometime later in life he might regret having such an official record. I could see that he was reluctant, and then he finally said, “My father says it’s better than being killed in a war.”

  I sent the papers through. They were returned from Governors Island, First Army HQ. After Pfc. Hiller was recalled, his case would be evaluated by a Regular Army board. Another strikeout.

  I was surprised that Eli Hemsi had not given me a call. The clothing manufacturer’s son, Paul, had not even shown his face at the armory since the recall to active duty notices had been sent out. But that mystery was solved when I received papers through the mail from a doctor famous for his book publications on psychiatry. These documents certified that Paul Hemsi had received electric shock treatments for a nervous condition over the past three months and could not be recalled to active duty, it would be disastrous to his health. I looked up the pertinent Army regulation. Sure enough, Mr. Hemsi had found a way out of the Army. He must have been getting advice from people higher up than me. I forwarded the papers on to Governors Island. Sure enough, they finally came back. And with them special orders discharging Paul Hemsi from the United States Army Reserve. I wondered what that deal had cost Mr. Hemsi.

  I tried to help everybody who put in for a hardship discharge. I made sure the documents got down to Governors Island HQ and made special calls to check up on them. In other words, I was as cooperative as
I could be to all my clients. But Frank Alcore was the opposite.

  Frank had been recalled with his unit to active duty. And he felt it a point of honor to go. He made no effort to get a hardship discharge, though with his wife and kids and his old parents he had a good case. And he had very little sympathy for anybody in his units trying to get out of the one-year recall. As chief administrative officer of his battalion, both as a civilian and the battalion sergeant major, he sat on all the requests for hardship discharge. He made it as tough as he could for all of them. None of his men beat the recall to active duty, not even those who had legitimate grounds. And a lot of those guys he sat on were guys who had paid him top dollar to buy their enlistment in the six months’ program. By the time Frank and his units left the armory and shipped to Fort Lee there was a lot of bad blood.

  I got kidded about not having been caught in the Army Reserve program, that I must have known something. But with that kidding there was respect. I had been the only guy in the armory not to have been sucked in by the easy money and the absence of danger. I was sort of proud of myself. I had really thought it all out years ago. The monetary rewards were not enough to make up for the small percentage of danger involved. The odds were a thousand to one against being called to active duty, but I had still resisted. Or maybe I could see into the future. The irony was that a lot of WWII soldiers had been caught in the trap. And they couldn’t believe it. Here they were, guys who had fought three or four years in the old war and now back in green fatigues. True, most of the old-timers would never see combat or be in danger, but still, they were pissed off. It didn’t seem fair. Only Frank Alcore didn’t seem to mind. “I took the gravy,” he said. “Now I have to pay for it.” He smiled at me. “Merlyn, I always thought you were a dummy, but you look pretty smart right now.”