Then it struck me. He was being kind to me.
I let him pour. Then I took out the four joints I still had from El Paradiso, wrapped in foil in an old Schimmelpfennig tin. I’d known they were there all the time. But they were for safari. I held them out. “I drink your wine. You smoke my smoke.” That sounded Indian to me. Hop-hop, into the war dance.
He lumbered to the sliding door, rolled it shut, and listened. Like a turnkey, but shutting in himself. On 42nd Street, whose rumble I could still faintly hear. The ways people can shut themselves up, and still think themselves out in the street with the common man, always interest me. As if I’ve always known I was going to have to do some of that myself. Libraries, study halls. Seminaries. Offices. And all the time, the common man is doing the same thing.
“I knew a man shut himself up in a tennis club. Winters. Came into Boston once a week to give our school indoor lessons. And to play bridge with his wife.”
He sat down opposite me. “You’ve already had such a lot of experience. Worldly experience.”
“What’s the Christian for ‘Oy’?”
His laugh was enormous. “You’re a card.”
“That was last month.” But I could feel the talent coming back in me like a jaunty flower, up from the windpipe to the head again, with lesser branches for the ears. “You have to listen, to be a card.” To friends. Though it doesn’t look like it. “Where’d you learn that word?”
“We have a few, here.”
“This the seminary?”
“The building in back.”
I reached out and touched the joint he was holding. “Keep it for later, if you want—that’s okay.”
I could see the little carbuncle of greed near his eye. Better than he could see the hungry quiver at the back of my nose?
“Each to his own gormay? Why not?”
So it ended up he drank his wine, I smoked my smoke. Both of us listening. Let him think it was like in church; to me it was Indian. Once, I used to count up the cronies, like I never did with the girls. Now I did it again, in a sort of wood-touching. Ike, Witkower. Emilio from Siena. Betts. I couldn’t quite add Melchior. But he had a face like a good ogre. Or a seven-foot horse.
I slipped on my shades.
“Take it easy,” Melchior said. “I’m just a machine.”
“Yeah. But I can see the building at the back.”
He sipped, easy. “We don’t shanghai.”
“You been a sailor?”
“Padre on a troopship.”
“Which war?”
He spread his hands. “Africa.”
We tippled on. When I coughed once; he didn’t laugh. Really I was trembling, with what I had to say to him.
“Nice jacket you have. Had one like it in the Congo once.”
“Buddy got it, at Hunting World. Has as many pockets as a head. Haven’t worn it since I got back.”
“Where from?”
“London, Paris, the Low Countries. India. Wales.”
“Odd itinerary.”
“Yeah.” India sticks out.
“How did you come to do it?”
“Deferment,” I said. “How did you get to the Congo?”
“My mother was Belgian. She brought me up in her country. Where I was not normal.” His grin was huge. Fixed. He put wine in it.
“Orphan?”
“I had a mother.”
“Oh.” A bastard. “Thought that was a blemish too.”
“Pardon?”
“Thought a—” The joint wasn’t getting anywhere. “—bastard couldn’t go for priest.”
He put his big rabbit-hand on the table, as if might get away.
“Sorry. Hard to rap, when there’s no frame of reference.”
“Rap?”
“Dialogue.”
“On the contrary. Only now I am the person. You are the machine.”
“Ask me a question then,” I said.
He took the cigarette from my fingers, sniffed it, put it down on the ashtray. I took his wine glass and set it away from him.
He squinted at me sideways. As if I were his wine glass now. Came close enough to peer into my shades, like an oculist. Raised one finger, wiggling at his image there. “What are the stations of the Cross?”
I jumped back. “Jesus.”
He giggled. “The Jewish for Christ?”
I was meanwhile feeling something hard against my lower back, between me and the chair. The Inquisition, maybe. “How’s Archie, by the way? He going to be the black for it?”
“Poor Archie’s left us.” He giggled again.
“For Ireland?”
“Because of it. Still a lot of patriots in the parish here, sons and grandsons of the old Hell’s Kitcheners. He said they were too militant.”
“You seven-footers, have to watch yourselves, huh. He go back to the game?”
“No, the Congo. Something wrong with that chair?”
I was rubbing like a cat for the pleasure of it, against an object in the jacket somewhere, whose shape I could almost define.
“Ants in the pants? Archie had them too. I told him what the abbot said to me when I was his age. ‘Son, you belong better in the order of St. Benedict.’ ‘What’s that order?’ I said—‘I never heard of it.’ Archie neither. So I told him what the abbot told me. ‘The order of St. Benedict, Melchior. Two heads on one pillow’.”
“Find plenty in the Congo.”
“I was already a padre,” he said.
The drink was gone, the joints burnt to ash. We hunched over the table, both of us on the mark. Nobody said go.
I saw how his hand could be like my stutter, a tic from deep down, made public. Only, most tics mimed grotesquely or even sang, blurting up the life denied. His hand sat on display, like the photos of themselves some savages hang around the neck as happy tokens from the other world. Had it always under his eye—this heavy hare that his God had made of him.
“Wooden pillows, they have out there,” I said. “No, that’s Japan.”
The jacket is short on me. The object in its lining could be the reed flute that I bought from a blind boy in the plane stop at Karachi. Or it could be the joss stick I picked up at Bett’s grave. I knew it was neither of them.
“Archie means to work for peace as well. Mind if I say something, Mr. Bronstein?”
“Do.” I stood up, shaking out the jacket.
“You are a gentle generation.”
“Not fit for this world, you mean.”
“Fit to conquer it. The only ones who ever will.”
“Ah, come on.”
Back of the band for bullet-clips, behind the flask-pocket, and the patented waterproof oilskin ones for matches and holster—in case of rhino—there was a seam for a drawstring I never used, running all around the garment to its other side, where the slits were for pas-port, letters of identification and money-clip—and a note-pad, erasable with steel stylus, for taking bush-notes. I pulled the drawstring, shook the coat hard, and my knife fell out of it. Along with a forgotten stash of flat money, and a couple of postcards.
“Thought I’d lost it. It’s called The Bush Wife.”
No matter what the salesman called it. I waggled some of its parts, with love for their domestic cunning, from the sliderule-and-level, file and burning-glass division, to the two blades—one to filet fish, the other to eat it with. I flipped it suddenly. Out sprang the nearest single answer to a switchblade. ‘What’s that?’ Buddy’d said to the salesman. He’d looked us straight in the face. For wild boar. ‘What’s that for,’ the girls ask. Harakiri, the brave boy replies.
I held it out to Melchior, blade up. “Instructions? Give or get.”
“Made a lot of converts in my time. For and against.”
So it was an impasse. And the joint wouldn’t take.
I don’t know how long it was before I began to hear what the house was saying. Or he began to listen, in a way that let me feed him the questions I could answer. And let him answer the house.
As if the wine in him was rising in me. And what I’d smoked, was wafting him.
“What’s it like? To be an heir?”
“I’ve the kind of family won’t disappear.”
“I’d have liked a family,” he said.
“All the deaths we didn’t die—” I said “That would be a family.”
And the lives we didn’t live? He didn’t ask it. But I heard.
Outside, the street gave a loud whine. Stretching itself, to get in here? Not a chance.
“Near the end of the calendar year,” I said, “the pity everybody has for everybody has grown to the size of a pumpkin. You hollow out yours, cut a mouth of teeth in it, and burn a candle in its head for all their souls. Around Christmas-time, you can usually get rid of it.”
I was never able to.
Or did he say that?
Across the table, I saw what was wrong with him.
“You’re in mufti,” I said. “Oh, poor man.”
It was an old suit, European surely, too cheap ever to have been a good brown, too greenish now to be a good black.
“Indeed, I have no money. I’ve been spoiled. That’s what they call a spoiled priest.” But his smile was almost his own when he bent down to himself. “I leave, Saturday.”
“Leaving here, you mean—or—”
He wouldn’t look up. “Or.”
That why I’m here?
“Need a place to stay?” I said.
“I shall be staying with a friend’s. With a friend’s relatives, that is, a brother. Until my job starts. And until she can take her vows.”
“The veil?”
“Oh, no. No, no.” That hand of his crossed to the other and clasped it. “She and I won’t have much … apparently. I’m not a practical man. But we shall manage.”
“Where’s your job to be?”
“At the Museum of Modern Art. As a guard. Not my field, of course.”
“Scarcely.”
“Modern, I mean.” He burst out laughing.
I remembered St. Sauveur. “No.”
He fondled one of the empty bottles. “This seminary has a wicked cellar. Deeded from a parishioner who had a restaurant. Thought this was to be my last bottle of it. But I shall follow your thieving example and bring up one more. For a certain occasion.”
We looked at each other like cronies.
“You’re a card.” I stood up, pocketing the debris that had fallen onto the table from my jacket—money, postcards. All except the knife, which I held out to him. “Thirty-nine uses, it has. You may find more.” I couldn’t offer him money; I could only do that if I was poor. “What was the name of that restaurant man by the way?”
“Why I don’t know, son. He deeded it around your prohibition time. Why?”
“Had an R.C. friend whose father was going to have a restaurant. You never know.”
He took the knife, careful of the blade. “Instructions?”
“A wedding present. Keep it for the road.”
I showed him how every part fitted, and how to retract the blade.
“Thirty-nine uses. Can you spare it?” He was already in love with it.
“I’ll remember I had it once. And that it wasn’t lost.”
At the door, Mrs. McMurter peeped. “Another call, sir. Will wait.”
I was trembling. “If I once had a knife with thirty-nine uses, I ought to be able to remember how many ways people can be lost.”
He’d found the burning-glass, and the compass next to it.
“Never very accurate,” I said. “But can I ask you something?” I had come for it. “Don’t we have to watch out for them? Keep track of them? L-like, aren’t all the deaths ours? In any world I would want to live in, they would be … And isn’t that the stations of the Cross?”
He took his time putting the knife away. One pocket he tried had a hole. “You’re either a saint, Bronstein—or a Catholic.”
Under the woman’s eyes, peeping again, he blessed me. “Can’t stop me, until Saturday.” The big smile came back on him. “The disgrace to them; they’re being very kind.”
I saw he was prepared to be happy, in the sad, conclusive way of those getting ready to be joined.
He shook my hand. “Anything I can ever.”
I thought of asking him about the women in Friesland, but killed it. “Thanks for the instruction. Thanks for everything.”
“Thank you for it,” he said, still pumping my hand. “That’s why I asked you here.”
“Me?” If he was thanking me for Reeves, he needn’t. Limpets who never pry loose, who are never lost; there are those too; she was one of them.
“It was in my head before you said it, Bronstein; that I won’t deny. But when you said it—somehow, that was the day.”
“Said what?”
He walked me outside the house door and closed it. “Don’t you remember? You said ‘Mister Melchior.’”
We were standing at the head of the high stone steps. What he had just said seemed improbably delicate for Forty-second Street. I couldn’t see the library. But I could see the gun store.
“Keep in touch, Bronstein. And remember now. Anything I—anything.”
Last Sunday, at the Southport Sea Museum, what did I find but a piece of scrimshaw. With a lady etched on it instead of a whale. Even so, that the skinny-straight reality of those days came back to me. Another lost neighborhood.
“Ever run across anybody named Witkower, let me know.”
“How’ll I know him?”
“Catholic. They married him off at sixteen. He’ll be around somewhere. In the suburbs.”
At the bottom of the steps, I looked up. He was still standing there. He waved at me, like he was on a ship sailing for Saturday. I could see the hump the knife made in his pocket, that thin tweed.
But as I rounded the corner, the old jauntiness came over me. I could give him and Reeves the farm, why not? They might balk, but I’d manage it. If I’d already done what he said I had, I could do anything.
I made it back to the office in three skips and a jump. On my way, people stared into my purple glasses. I had lines of force.
LAST NIGHT I WENT to the park, to try to be mugged. Over the winter, I’ve done that about once a month. It’s always summer there. People without overcoats. Once I had my wallet taken, with a rabbit-punch and a snarl from behind, and thrown back empty of nothing but money, in front of me. “Freddie?” I said. “Freddie?” But whoever it was thudded away through the bushes. Once it was taken from me frontwards, all of it, with a black smile and a switchblade. “He’s not Freddie, is he,” I said to the black girl smiling at me. Her no-color friend said “Tell the man, no.” And once a fag whose pass I mistook and held out my billfold to, squealed angrily, “I came to buy.” Everybody’s a veteran of something.
But now it’s real summer again. And whoever hasn’t frozen into a swan at the bottom of some lake, or died of beauty treatments at the Woman’s House of Detention, might be coming out of hiding. Into a more natural setting. From whatever nest the winter has managed to knit for them.
This time I had a piece of Maeve’s old loot with me, from the Michelangelo jewel box. That was innocent of me; I’m often that, still. But I’d learned something anyway. Maeve hadn’t taken it with her. The bad-luck piece.
I was walking along the gray dusk in the mugging-hour, which comes later now, smelling beautiful. Having just checked the pavilion where the chess-players will soon come up as if planted and watered. Laughing at myself for my fidelity. The same paving-stone as last year can make me feel happy. Like adding to a jewel box.
On the public patio there’s a guy sits. Wearing army issue. That could be anybody. That could be me. But this one’s Spanish; he could be a Chicano. One of those desert-simple Diego Rivera faces, altogether with itself, like a bird. I try to see the girl Dina with it. When I come nearer, he says, “Watcha out the dogga sheet.” He’s got a weapon somewhere; I can see him shivering for it.
When I looked up again
, there it was—a gun. Nothing from the armory room. Even sitting, his short legs were bowed around an invisible burro. Because I’m tall, he was pointing the gun up. A gun muzzle is like an anus. With a loose sphincter muscle. “Felipe—” I whispered. “Esta tu?” I don’t know Spanish. I made it up. He frisked me, taking only the two tens he found where they should be; he too was a hander-back. “Other side,” I said. “Little pocket.” Slit they never see unless it’s fingered for them. “There’s twenty more.” This is the moment it’s dangerous, when they think I’m tricking them. Sometimes I put only ten there, sometimes a fistful more. Not to be Robin Hood. Just to test what trust is left in people. My guess is Robin Hood never died of old age. So far I been lucky; maybe they can tell I’m aimless about money. Like them.
He was a truster. But Maeve’s pin puzzled him. “You steala?” When I nodded yes, he made a kind of pal high-sign, shrugging a sorry. Carefully. I couldn’t have taken the gun off him. Training it at me as he pulled away, he called back. “Juan. No Felipe.”
I love walking back to my office home at night. Now that I’m about to leave it, what a Hotel Universe—its lights rising floor by floor with the cleaning women, or steadfastly wasteful, while the dark streets below coddle themselves inside their own arrangements, as bodies do when unvisited. By other bodies. And the solitary passenger hears the sonic dialtone of his only audience. On the way to the Federal Reserve the flash stores speak in vain, like deaf-mutes. Only I could see myself going down the block from one store window to the other—this odd, myopically interrupted frieze of oneself, little shadow that goes in and out with the city child, and will companion him all his life.
“Bunty,” I said to it. “How now?”
The elevator tickled my flesh like a tease, and dropped me. I skipped from it, lamblike. Doing a hoedown. Going to Berkeley, onka-bonka, with a passel on my back.
Blum was still there at the fancy sink in her own cubicle. Setting her hair. An old habit she won’t discard. He paid her like a family man but kept her a subordinate. Since Buddy died, she’s let the hair go from blond to gray—a task thing for a girl of only forty-five. “Mourning,” she said coldly, when I asked her why. We held hands for two minutes. Then she blew her nose. “And so Push & Shove won’t think I’m after the boss.” The partners. She began calling me “the boss” to them right away. Buddy left her a stockholder. Between the two of us, and with me learning the business in the daytime, we have stood the vultures off. It wasn’t the money. So much about money wasn’t.
Eagle Eye Page 16
