«Stop that,” Esme said, clearly unshaken. «He saw an American do it in a fish‑andchips queue, and now he does it whenever he’s bored. Just stop it, now, or I shall send you directly to Miss Megley.»
Charles opened his enormous eyes, as sign that he’d heard his sister’s threat, but otherwise didn’t look especially alerted. He closed his eyes again, and continued to rest the side of his face on the chair seat.
I mentioned that maybe he ought to save it—meaning the Bronx cheer—till he started using his title regularly. That is, if he had a title, too.
Esme gave me a long, faintly clinical look. «You have a dry sense of humor, haven’t you?» she said—wistfully. «Father said I have no sense of humor at all. He said I was unequipped to meet life because I have no sense of humor.»
Watching her, I lit a cigarette and said I didn’t think a sense of humor was of any use in a real pinch.
«Father said it was.»
This was a statement of faith, not a contradiction, and I quickly switched horses. I nodded and said her father had probably taken the long view, while I was taking the short (whatever that meant).
«Charles misses him exceedingly,” Esme said, after a moment. «He was an exceedingly lovable man. He was extremely handsome, too. Not that one’s appearance matters greatly, but he was. He had terribly penetrating eyes, for a man who was intransically kind.»
I nodded. I said I imagined her father had had quite an extraordinary vocabulary.
«Oh, yes; quite,” said Esme. «He was an archivist—amateur, of course.»
At that point, I felt an importunate tap, almost a punch, on my upper arm, from Charles’ direction. I turned to him. He was sitting in a fairly normal position in his chair now, except that he had one knee tucked under him. «What did one wall say to the other wall?» he asked shrilly. «It’s a riddle!»
I rolled my eyes reflectively ceilingward and repeated the question aloud. Then I looked at Charles with a stumped expression and said I gave up.
«Meet you at the corner!» came the punch line, at top volume.
It went over biggest with Charles himself. It struck him as unbearably funny. In fact, Esme had to come around and pound him on the back, as if treating him for a coughing spell. «Now, stop that,” she said. She went back to her own seat. «He tells that same riddle to everyone he meets and has a fit every single time. Usually he drools when he laughs. Now, just stop, please.»
«It’s one of the best riddles I’ve heard, though,” I said, watching Charles, who was very gradually coming out of it. In response to this compliment, he sank considerably lower in his chair and again masked his face up to the eyes with a corner of the tablecloth. He then looked at me with his exposed eyes, which were full of slowly subsiding mirth and the pride of someone who knows a really good riddle or two.
«May I inquire how you were employed before entering the Army?» Esme asked me.
I said I hadn’t been employed at all, that I’d only been out of college a year but that I like to think of myself as a professional short‑story writer.
She nodded politely. «Published?» she asked.
It was a familiar but always touchy question, and one that I didn’t answer just one, two, three. I started to explain how most editors in America were a bunch— «My father wrote beautifully,” Esme interrupted. «I’m saving a number of his letters for posterity.»
I said that sounded like a very good idea. I happened to be looking at her enormousfaced, chronographic‑looking wristwatch again. I asked if it had belonged to her father.
She looked down at her wrist solemnly. «Yes, it did,” she said. «He gave it to me just before Charles and I were evacuated.» Self‑consciously, she took her hands off the table, saying, «Purely as a momento, of course.» She guided the conversation in a different direction. «I’d be extremely flattered if you’d write a story exclusively for me sometime.
I’m an avid reader.»
I told her I certainly would, if I could. I said that I wasn’t terribly prolific.
«It doesn’t have to be terribly prolific! Just so that it isn’t childish and silly.» She reflected. «I prefer stories about squalor.»
«About what?» I said, leaning forward. «Squalor. I’m extremely interested in squalor.»
I was about to press her for more details, but I felt Charles pinching me, hard, on my arm. I turned to him, wincing slightly. He was standing right next to me. «What did one wall say to the other wall?» he asked, not unfamiliarly.
«You asked him that,” Esme said. «Now, stop it.»
Ignoring his sister, and stepping up on one of my feet, Charles repeated the key question. I noticed that his necktie knot wasn’t adjusted properly. I slid it up into place, then, looking him straight in the eye, suggested, «Meetcha at the corner?»
The instant I’d said it, I wished I hadn’t. Charles’ mouth fell open. I felt as if I’d struck it open. He stepped down off my foot and, with white‑hot dignity, walked over to his own table, without looking back.
«He’s furious,” Esme said. «He has a violent temper. My mother had a propensity to spoil him. My father was the only one who didn’t spoil him.»
I kept looking over at Charles, who had sat down and started to drink his tea, using both hands on the cup. I hoped he’d turn around, but he didn’t.
Esme stood up. `Il faut que je parte aussi,” she said, with a sigh. «Do you know French?»
I got up from my own chair, with mixed feelings of regret and confusion. Esme and I shook hands; her hand, as I’d suspected, was a nervous hand, damp at the palm. I told her, in English, how very much I’d enjoyed her company.
She nodded. «I thought you might,” she said. «I’m quite communicative for my age.»
She gave her hair another experimental touch. «I’m dreadfully sorry about my hair,” she said. «I’ve probably been hideous to look at.»
«Not at all! As a matter of fact, I think a lot of the wave is coming back already.»
She quickly touched her hair again. «Do you think you’ll be coming here again in the immediate future?» she asked. «We come here every Saturday, after choir practice.»
I answered that I’d like nothing better but that, unfortunately, I was pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to make it again.
«In other words, you can’t discuss troop movements,” said Esme. She made no move to leave the vicinity of the table. In fact, she crossed one foot over the other and, looking down, aligned the toes of her shoes. It was a pretty little execution, for she was wearing white socks and her ankles and feet were lovely. She looked up at me abruptly. «Would you like me to write to you?» she asked, with a certain amount of color in her face. «I write extremely articulate letters for a person my—»
«I’d love it.» I took out pencil and paper and wrote down my name, rank, serial number, and A. P.O. number.
«I shall write to you first,” she said, accepting it, «so that you don’t feel compromised in any way.» She put the address into a pocket of her dress. «Goodbye,” she said, and walked back to her table.
I ordered another pot of tea and sat watching the two of them till they, and the harassed Miss Megley, got up to leave. Charles led the way out, limping tragically, like a man with one leg several, inches shorter than the other. He didn’t look over at me. Miss Megley went next, then Esme, who waved to me. I waved back, half getting up from my chair. It was a strangely emotional moment for me.
Less than a minute later, Esme came back into the tearoom, dragging Charles behind her by the sleeve of his reefer. «Charles would like to kiss you goodbye,” she said.
I immediately put down my cup, and said that was very nice, but was she sure?
«Yes,” she said, a trifle grimly. She let go Charles’ sleeve and gave him a rather vigorous push in my direction. He came forward, his face livid, and gave me a loud, wet smacker just below the right ear. Following this ordeal, he started to make a beeline for the door and a less sentimental way of life, but 1 caught the
half belt at the back of his reefer, held on to it, and asked him, «What did one wall say to the other wall?»
His face lit up. «Meet you at the corner!» he shrieked, and raced out of the room, possibly in hysterics.
Esme was standing with crossed ankles again. «You’re quite sure you won’t forget to write that story for me?» she asked. «It doesn’t have to be exclusively for me. It can—»
I said there was absolutely no chance that I’d forget. I told her that I’d never written a story for anybody, but that it seemed like exactly the right time to get down to it.
She nodded. «Make it extremely squalid and moving,” she suggested. «Are you at all acquainted with squalor?»
I said not exactly but that I was getting better acquainted with it, in one form or another, all the time, and that I’d do my best to come up to her specifications. We shook hands.
«Isn’t it a pity that we didn’t meet under less extenuating circumstances?»
I said it was, I said it certainly was.
«Goodbye,” Esme said. «I hope you return from the war with all your faculties intact.»
I thanked her, and said a few other words, and then watched her leave the tearoom.
She left it slowly, reflectively, testing the ends of her hair for dryness.
This is the squalid, or moving, part of the story, and the scene changes. The people change, too. I’m still around, but from here on in, for reasons I’m not at liberty to disclose, I’ve disguised myself so cunningly that even the cleverest reader will fail to recognize me.
It was about ten‑thirty at night in Gaufurt, Bavaria, several weeks after V‑E Day. Staff Sergeant X was in his room on the second floor of the civilian home in which he and nine other American soldiers had been quartered, even before the armistice. He was seated on a folding wooden chair at a small, messy‑looking writing table, with a paperback overseas novel open before him, which he was having great trouble reading.
The trouble lay with him, not the novel. Although the men who lived on the first floor usually had first grab at the books sent each month by Special Services, X usually seemed to be left with the book he might have selected himself. But he was a young man who had not come through the war with all his faculties intact, and for more than an hour he had been triple‑reading paragraphs, and now he was doing it to the sentences. He suddenly closed the book, without marking his place. With his hand, he shielded his eyes for a moment against the harsh, watty glare from the naked bulb over the table.
He took a cigarette from a pack on the table and lit it with fingers that bumped gently and incessantly against one another. He sat back a trifle in his chair and smoked without any sense of taste. He had been chain‑smoking for weeks. His gums bled at the slightest pressure of the tip of his tongue, and he seldom stopped experimenting; it was a little game he played, sometimes by the hour. He sat for a moment smoking and experimenting. Then, abruptly, familiarly, and, as usual, with no warning, he thought he felt his mind dislodge itself and teeter, like insecure luggage on an overhead rack. He quickly did what he had been doing for weeks to set things right: he pressed his hands hard against his temples. He held on tight for a moment. His hair needed cutting, and it was dirty. He had washed it three or four times during his two weeks’ stay at the hospital in Frankfort on the Main, but it had got dirty again on the long, dusty jeep ride back to Gaufurt. Corporal Z, who had called for him at the hospital, still drove a jeep combat‑style, with the windshield down on the hood, armistice or no armistice. There were thousands of new troops in Germany. By driving with his windshield down, combat‑style, Corporal Z hoped to show that he was not one of them, that not by a long shot was he some new son of a bitch in the E. T.O.
When he let go of his head, X began to stare at the surface of the writing table, which was a catchall for at least two dozen unopened letters and at least five or six unopened packages, all addressed to him. He reached behind the debris and picked out a book that stood against the wall. It was a book by Goebbels, entitled «Die Zeit Ohne Beispiel.»
It belonged to the thirty‑eight‑year‑old, unmarried daughter of the family that, up to a few weeks earlier, had been living in the house. She had been a low official in the Nazi Party, but high enough, by Army Regulations standards, to fall into an automatic‑arrest category. X himself had arrested her. Now, for the third time since he had returned from the hospital that day, he opened the woman’s book and read the brief inscription on the flyleaf. Written in ink, in German, in a small, hopelessly sincere handwriting, were the words «Dear God, life is hell.» Nothing led up to or away from it. Alone on the page, and in the sickly stillness of the room, the words appeared to have the stature of an uncontestable, even classic indictment. X stared at the page for several minutes, trying, against heavy odds, not to be taken in. Then, with far more zeal than he had done anything in weeks, he picked up a pencil stub and wrote down under the inscription, in English, «Fathers and teachers, I ponder `What is hell?’ I maintain that it is the suffering of being unable to love.» He started to write Dostoevski’s name under the inscription, but saw—with fright that ran through his whole body—that what he had written was almost entirely illegible. He shut the book.
He quickly picked up something else from the table, a letter from his older brother in Albany. It had been on his table even before he had checked into the hospital. He opened the envelope, loosely resolved to read the letter straight through, but read only the top half of the first page. He stopped after the words «Now that the g.d. war is over and you probably have a lot of time over there, how about sending the kids a couple of bayonets or swastikas …» After he’d torn it up, he looked down at the pieces as they lay in the wastebasket. He saw that he had overlooked an enclosed snapshot. He could make out somebody’s feet standing on a lawn somewhere.
He put his arms on the table and rested his head on them. He ached from head to foot, all zones of pain seemingly interdependent. He was rather like a Christmas tree whose lights, wired in series, must all go out if even one bulb is defective.
The door banged open, without having been rapped on. X raised his head, turned it, and saw Corporal Z standing in the door. Corporal Z had been X’s jeep partner and constant companion from D Day straight through five campaigns of the war. He lived on the first floor and he usually came up to see X when he had a few rumors or gripes to unload. He was a huge, photogenic young man of twenty‑four. During the war, a national magazine had photographed him in Hurtgen Forest; he had posed, more than just obligingly, with a Thanksgiving turkey in each hand. «Ya writin’ letters?» he asked X. «It’s spooky in here, for Chrissake.» He preferred always to enter a room that had the overhead light on.
X turned around in his chair and asked him to come in, and to be careful not to step on the dog.
«The what?»
«Alvin. He’s right under your feet, Clay. How ‘bout turning on the goddam light?»
Clay found the overhead‑light switch, flicked it on, then stepped across the puny, servant’s‑size room and sat down on the edge of the bed, facing his host. His brick‑red hair, just combed, was dripping with the amount of water he required for satisfactory grooming. A comb with a fountain‑pen clip protruded, familiarly, from the right‑hand pocket of his olive‑drab shirt. Over the left‑hand pocket he was wearing the Combat Infantrymen’s Badge (which, technically, he wasn’t authorized to wear), the European Theatre ribbon, with five bronze battle stars in it (instead of a lone silver one, which was the equivalent of five bronze ones), and the pre‑Pearl Harbor service ribbon. He sighed heavily and said, «Christ almighty.» It meant nothing; it was Army. He took a pack of cigarettes from his shirt pocket, tapped one out, then put away the pack and rebuttoned the pocket flap. Smoking, he looked vacuously around the room. His look finally settled on the radio. «Hey,” he said. «They got this terrific show comin’ on the radio in a coupla minutes. Bob Hope, and everybody.»
X, opening a fresh pack of cigarettes, said he had just t
urned the radio off.
Undarkened, Clay watched X trying to get a cigarette lit. «Jesus,” he said, with spectator’s enthusiasm, «you oughta see your goddam hands. Boy, have you got the shakes. Ya know that?»
X got his cigarette lit, nodded, and said Clay had a real eye for detail.
«No kidding, hey. I goddam near fainted when I saw you at the hospital. You looked like a goddam corpse. How much weight ya lose? How many pounds? Ya know?»
«I don’t know. How was your mail when I was gone? You heard from Loretta?»
Loretta was Clay’s girl. They intended to get married at their earliest convenience. She wrote to him fairly regularly, from a paradise of triple exclamation points and inaccurate observations. All through the war, Clay had read all Loretta’s letters aloud to X, however intimate they were—in fact, the more intimate, the better. It was his custom, after each reading, to ask X to plot out or pad out the letter of reply, or to insert a few impressive words in French or German.
«Yeah, I had a letter from her yesterday. Down in my room. Show it to ya later,” Clay said, listlessly. He sat up straight on the edge of the bed, held his breath, and issued a long, resonant belch. Looking just semi‑pleased with the achievement, he relaxed again.
«Her goddam brother’s gettin’ outa the Navy on account of his hip,” he said. «He’s got this hip, the bastard.» He sat up again and tried for another belch, but with below‑par results. A jot of alertness came into his face. «Hey. Before I forget. We gotta get up at five tomorrow and drive to Hamburg or someplace. Pick up Eisenhower jackets for the whole detachment.»
X, regarding him hostilely, stated that he didn’t want an Eisenhower jacket.
Clay looked surprised, almost a trifle hurt. «Oh, they’re good! They look good. How come?»
«No reason. Why do we have to get up at five? The war’s over, for God’s sake.»
«I don’t know—we gotta get back before lunch. They got some new forms in we gotta fill out before lunch…. I asked Bulling how come we couldn’t fill ‘em out tonight—he’s got the goddam forms right on his desk. He don’t want to open the envelopes yet, the son of a bitch.»
Nine Stories Page 9
