by Packer, Vin
“All what?”
“All that going home and writing home and calling home. You know, Dan, we’re never heroes in their eyes; that’s crap, Dan! You know, Dan, a man will stick his neck out and his folks will call it getting into trouble.”
“Huh?”
“That’s the truth. They don’t know how brave their sons are. Then they try to take all the credit. After a man’s been through hell!”
The waiter brought them two more and Thorpe said, “We ought to take the check now, don’t you think, Peter?”
“The check will be there when we’re ready.”
“I don’t think I’m following what you’re saying.”
“The check isn’t going to blow away, Dan.”
“I mean about a man going through hell and his folks taking all the credit.”
“You’re not listening.”
“Yes, I am.”
“You’re not paying attention.”
“I am, Peter.”
“You know, we have a very weak chapter here at Far Point. The pledges think they can go over the actives’ heads.” “I didn’t know that.” “You remember what Osmond pulled?” “Well. His mother died.” “I didn’t kill his mother.” “I guess that was an exception.”
“An exception? No. Standard procedure for the kind of mother-lovers we pledge. Run to Blouter. Cry on Blouter’s shoulder. When Blouter’s not home crying on his mother’s shoulder … Dan, I’ll tell you something: Shepley better get off my back.”
“What does that mean?”
“You tell him that.”
“Okay.”
“You tell him I’m not going to put up with his threats.” “Shep threatened you?”
“He’s dangerous, Dan. There’s something wrong with his mind.”
“What’d he threaten you about?” “He just threatened me, that’s all.” “What did you do to him?”
“Dan, I am exactly five foot one and one-half inches tall. Charles Shepley is five foot ten, at least. What could I do to him?”
“I don’t know, but I can’t imagine Shep threatening anyone.”
“That’s what they always say about killers, isn’t it? He was such a nice boy. Such a good boy. So attentive to his mommy and daddy.”
“Oh, wow!”
“What?”
“I don’t know what the hell we’re talking about.” “Do you know the words to ‘I’ll Feel Blessed’?” “Yes.”
“Sing them.”
“Here?”
“Here. Now.”
Thorpe sang very softly:
If the Chinese drop the bomb
Or I’m sent to Vietnam,
I’ll still —
Then Hagerman joined in, singing at the top of his lungs:
I’ll still feel blessed.
If a Pi Pi pin is on my chest, I’ll still feel blessed.
If I have to die —
Thorpe could feel his face turn red as the men at the bar turned to stare. Hagerman was waving his swizzle stick above his head; he was wearing a blue and white Pi Delta Pi blazer, and his diamond pin was pinned onto his shirt over his heart.
Let my last words be Pi Pi.
When the discotheques are dead, When we’ve licked the last damn Red, I’ll still feel blessed.
If a Pi Pi pin is on my chest, I’ll still feel blessed.
Thorpe pretended he had to use the men’s in a hurry.
When he came out, Hagerman was not at the table. The check was there with money on top of it; Thorpe looked around and saw Hagerman up near the phone booth with the Far Point directory spread before him; he was running his finger down the column of a page.
When he walked back to the table, he said: “Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch’entrate.”
“Conosco i segni dell’ antica fiamma,” Thorpe managed; he had practiced the response all morning.
“Let’s go,” said Hagerman.
He reached up and fastened a button to the lapel of Thorpe’s sport coat. It said: “Mothers, let the Vietnamese do it themselves!”
Thorpe laughed. “Where’d you get that?”
“They’re on sale at the Co-op.”
Then Hagerman began bellowing, “Pi Pi, my love for you is why I strive,” and again Thorpe blushed while the customers in Eddie’s gave them drop-dead looks, but as he left there arm-in-arm with Hagerman, he figured what the hell, Hagerman wasn’t such a bad guy after all, just a little bombed, same as Thorpe.
They sang all the way into Far Point; Thorpe even sang
“China” to “Dinah,” and Hagerman actually joined in: “China, is there any place wiser? Won’t we ever recognize her — ” and when Hagerman’s Corvair pulled up in front of a small white bungalow on a quiet street in the residential section of Far Point, they were weak from laughing, and really feeling the Hanky Bannister. It was dark now; the streetlights were on, and over the car radio Edward P. Morgan was beginning his evening commentary.
Hagerman offered Thorpe one of his French cigarettes.
“I don’t smoke.”
“That’s right. You take pretty good care of the old body, don’t you, Dan?” “I guess I do.”
“That’s why I wouldn’t take you down to Aunt Sate’s place.”
“I wouldn’t have minded.”
“You could get the syph from one of her girls, Dan. I take better care of you than that.”
“Thanks, Peter…. Where are we?”
“We’re at Matilda’s, Dan. She might not be much to look at, but don’t let that fool you. Matilda’s the best lay this side of the river.”
Thorpe looked at the small white bungalow. It had a picture window and there was a light on in the living room, and Thorpe could see a ledge near the window with plants resting on it.
Hagerman said, “She works by herself.”
“Here?”
“Looks just like an ordinary home, doesn’t it?” “Yeah.”
“Well, it’s a cat house, boy, and there’s a pussycat inside waiting for some action. Matilda. Five bucks for fifteen minutes.”
“Geez, Peter, I don’t know. I had a lot to drink.” “You’re in shape, Dan. Go ahead.”
“What’ll I say? Geez, Peter, do I just walk up and ring the bell?”
“Just walk up and ring the bell. Tell her you want to talk to her in private. Tell her Turtle’ sent you. When you get inside, tell her Turtle said she’d give you fifteen minutes for five dollars.”
“I have to do it, huh?”
“Dan, I’m doing you a favor. You don’t want to get the syph from one of Aunt Sate’s girl! Now, get going, pledge! Hop to it, mother-lover!” Thorpe sighed.
“Do you have five?” Hagerman asked. “Yes.”
“She’ll look like anything but what she is, Thorpe, but don’t let that throw you off.”
Thorpe pushed down on the door handle. Hagerman said, “I’ll be waiting, pledge.” “Yeah,” Thorpe said. “Okay.”
He went up the walk with some difficulty; the Scotch had finally reached his legs. At the door, he took a deep breath, let it out, straightened himself up, and gave the bell an aggressive punch. He had been with a whore before, but there had been others with him, and they had gone to a real house with a dozen or more girls in it, and it had been late at night, down on the Jersey shore, in the middle of summer.
He punched the bell again.
Then a woman opened the door; she had black hair with streaks of gray in it, and harlequin glasses, and she was wearing an apron over her dress. She was old enough to be Thorpe’s mother.
“Yes?”
“May I come in?” “What do you want?”
She was drying her hands on her apron; Thorpe could smell hamburger cooking. He said, “Turtle sent me.” “He did?”
She smiled and stepped back, and Thorpe walked into a foyer filled with wall racks containing more plants. He could see Chet Huntley on the television in the living room, and he stood there uncertainly while she shut the door and led him inside.
“He’s all right, isn’t he?”
“Sure. Yes.”
There were antimacassars on the arms and backs of all the chairs and the couch, and there was a bag with knitting spilling out of it on a glass-top coffee table.
She said, “Sit down.”
He did, in a slat-back chair, and she sat on the couch. “I was just getting dinner,” she said. He felt suddenly very drunk. He said, “I can smell it.” “Are you hungry?”
“No. I’ve been drinking.” “Where do you know Joey from?” “Who?”
“We never liked the name Turtle,” she smiled. “He gave me a message.”
“Would you like some coffee? I don’t keep liquor.” “Look, let’s get it over with. Turtle said you’d go fifteen minutes for five dollars.” “I beg your pardon?”
“Look, Matilda, it’s all right. I’m from the college.” “What are you talking about?” “Don’t you want to make five dollars?” “How?”
Thorpe laughed. He giggled. She was like somebody’s goddam mother.
She said, “Maybe you’d better come back when you’re sober, Mr. — Mr. — what is your name?”
“I’m sober enough, Matilda. Why don’t we just go into the bedroom?”
“What?”
She was on her feet now, edging over toward the fireplace.
She actually looked as though she were afraid of Thorpe.
Thorpe said, “I’m from the college, Matilda.”
“Get out of here!” She was reaching for an andiron.
“Wait a minute!” Thorpe stood up, lurched against the coffee table, and stood swaying. “Wait a minute! Turtle sent me. Do you want to make five dollars or not? You don’t have to hit me over the head. Just tell me yes or no.”
“No! Get out of here!”
“Okay, okay! What are you in business for?” “Get out of my house!”
“I’m going. What the hell is the matter with you?”
“You scum! Get out of my house!” and she was starting for him with the andiron.
On his way down the walk, running, he fell on one knee.
Hagerman called to him, “Get up! Hurry!”
He reached the car, and Hagerman took off before he had the door closed.
The wheels squeaked as they rounded the corner.
“Was she really a whore, Hagerman?”
“What’d she say?”
“She told me to get out of her house.”
“Maybe it was the wrong place.”
“No. She knew who Turtle was, all right.”
“Maybe she just wasn’t in the mood, Dan.”
“She sure wasn’t!”
“Well, Matilda’s moody, Dan.”
“I’m pretty smashed, Peter.”
“Your Inferno’s over, pledge.”
“Wasn’t much of an Inferno,” Thorpe mumbled.
Hagerman laughed. “It was for Matilda.”
Ten
Charles Shepley was not prepared for Terry Swan.
What he had expected was a Rona Jaffe Best of Everything type, who was very chic, but had stockings drying in the tub behind the shower curtain, and was just a little shy with Charles in the beginning, though they would become fast buddies before the night was over, exchanging whatta-nut-Lois-is stories; he would no doubt even break down and ask her to join them for dinner. He had gotten $150 from Hagerman for the tape; he had paid forty-some for the Pucci, and he needed enough to get through the Rabbit Hop, but he could still afford dinner for three, if they went somewhere up in the East Eighties like Bell’s or Beggi’s or Dorian’s.
What she had on was hipster pants of checked white flannel, with a red, white, and blue flag blouse that came just below her breasts, leaving several inches of bare skin between the pants and top; bare arms, save for a huge square wristwatch with a white leather strap, and shiny silver boots. Her black hair was cut like Rudolph Nureyev’s, to whom she bore a faint resemblance; her long, dangling, black-and-white papier-mâché pinwheel earrings hung down past her shoulders.
When Charles and Lois walked into her apartment, she was standing there with an English Oval hanging from her lips, spraying herself with a newly opened two-ounce size of Celui.
When Charles said, “Ummm. Celui,” she said, “The boy can read; that’s what college does for you.” “This is Charles Shepley, Terry.” “Hi, Charles.”
“Hi … Celui is the only perfume I can recognize. Lois wears it.”
“I do not!” from Lois. “C-e-l-u-i?” Charles spelled it out. “Of course I don’t!”
“I thought — ” he stopped when he felt her fingernails digging into the back of his hands.
Terry Swan sprayed some of the perfume at Lois. “I know you copy me, darling,” she said. “Don’t be humiliated.”
But Lois Faye’s face was a brilliant red and Charles knew that right at that moment she loathed him.
A stereophonic hidden from view was playing Miss D.’s “Perdido,” and now the whole room reeked of the perfume, and Terry Swan was gliding around snapping her fingers and singing, “Perdido, I looked for my heart; it’s perdido; I lost it way down in Toredo — ” and asking, “What’ll you have to drink?”
They told her and she still danced around, into the kitchen for the ice bucket and glasses — “Bolero, I glanced as we danced the Bolero” — out to the cabinet where she kept her liquor — “Bolero, I glanced as we danced the Bolero” — and finally all three were fixed with drinks and settled in a semicircle.
“You chose the perfect day to come in,” she said. “There’s a crowd coming by and we’re all going to the Cheetah.” “Can I go like this?”
“Sure, anything goes. Oh my God, you should have seen the South American I met there two weeks ago. Rich as Croesus. He took me to the Kaleidoscope and spent three hundred and fifty dollars on me in about ten minutes. Like that.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis.
Lois said, “I just got the most divine Pucci blouse.”
“Ugh and ugh! I hate anything but the pants. Darling, go to the Kaleidoscope or Splendiferous or Paraphernalia. Puccis are dullsville. Buy something ghastly, or you’ll feel like last year, darling. I might even break down and get a big Heinz pickle for over my fireplace, and you know how I try to keep my castle conservative.”
Charles said, “It’s a very nice apartment.”
She looked at him as though he were a tradesman and for some unbeknown reason had taken it into his head to sit down in her living room; then she continued to direct her conversation to Lois. Lois’s few glances in his direction were no more approving; he knew he would never hear the end of the Celui thing.
“Anyway,” said Terry Swan, “this South American is separated from his wife; they’re all Catholics down there so they never get divorced, but he lives all alone in this huge manse and he’s panting for me to come down and go skinny dipping with him every night in this big swimming pool he’s got shaped like a banana; he sent me a picture of it. I said send me the ticket, round-trip, and I’d get around to it sooner or later, and I opened my mail the other day and damn near fainted right in front of the doorman, because there was the ticket, round-trip; he couldn’t have left New York any longer than twenty-six hours. So I marched myself down to Pan Am this morning and voilà. I’m going to buy some A.T. and T. with some of the money; it’s way down now.”
Lois was laughing now, and managing to say, “You cashed it in? Oh, Swanny,” chortle, huff, hee-haw, gasp, “really! Have you no shame?”
“The thing that makes me really sick-in-bed is that I didn’t tell him I couldn’t come without a girl friend for a chaperone, because he would have fallen for that; I could have gotten twice as much.”
“I love it!” said Lois Faye.
Charles Shepley looked at her and realized he had rarely seen her as happy, as comfortable, as at home, anywhere.
He got up eventually and fixed himself a drink, since neither of the girls gave any indication they were going to offer to do that; they hardly paid a
ttention as he dropped the ice into his glass, went into the kitchen for water, and set his drink on the counter there, and then began a search for the bathroom.
There were papers down on the floor for the Yorkshire and the Yorkshire was sitting inside a straw house under the sink, with a red velvet ribbon in her hair. She was chewing on one end of a rubber toy shaped like a hot dog in a roll, complete with a glob of yellow mustard on top. Charles leaned down and played with her for awhile; he urinated and washed his hands, waited for them to dry by themselves rather than soil the flimsy light-blue hand towels on the brass rack, and made a solemn face in the mirror, a smiling one, an angry one, and one of Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde. Then he flushed the toilet and put down the seat, and looked at his watch. It was five thirty.
He had not liked the idea of going to the Plaza for drinks, because the drinks there were very expensive, but he had looked forward to taking Lois there, because he had imagined it would be a huge treat for her, and he would have liked to see her face while they sat there and looked at one another — she was very good at that, looking at someone across the table with a very intense expression. It was all turning out rather badly. He had hoped she would savor some of the things, like buying the Pucci — he had hoped she would bring it along to show Terry Swan — but of course now, after meeting Terry, he understood why she had left it in the car; he knew, too, that she would probably not want to go to the Plaza now; it would be dullsville or squaresville; he supposed this place with the animal name would cost an arm and a leg; the $103 he had with him wouldn’t take him through the Rabbit Hop.
He should have gotten more out of Hagerman; he probably could have gotten $200. The thing was he had felt sorry for Hagerman; wasn’t that a pistol? But he had; frightened people always moved him.
• • •
When he was very young and all wrapped up in insect and animal life, and that was pretty much his world for a long time, until he was thirteen, fourteen, he had brooded over his mother’s penchant for furs, imagining the terror of lacerated animals screaming in newly sprung traps. He had lain awake at night flinching in the darkness of his bedroom as he pondered the barbarism of the vivisection laboratory and the slaughterhouses. He was the bringer-home of stray cats and dogs and birds that had fallen from trees; he spent whole Saturdays and Sundays and afternoons after school tracking Billy, for Billy swung the other way; Billy was the other side of the coin. He tied cats’ legs together with complicated knots and shot at chipmunks and squirrels, indifferent to whether or not he had made a clean kill, and he tortured caterpillars and angleworms and chameleons and butterflies with pins and matches, and when Charles first heard that Billy’s own body was punished by the very same machinery which Billy had used to run down muskrats, kittens, raccoons, anything upon the road at night and dazzled dumbstruck by his headlights, he had not been glad — that was not accurate — but it had not been sad news exactly; it had made Charles believe, almost, there was a God, or anyway, a scheme to things.
