He dressed carefully in clean clothes and then wondered whether he would dare the outside. It was Thursday; tomorrow he would have to start collecting the rents again. And what further deterioration had set in in the houses? How high were the bills piled in his basement office? Dread of the familiar routine filled him. The illness had done something to him. For some reason, he had no idea what to expect from himself. Even walking was new to him, and he found himself estimating his weight distribution with each step. Shaved, swaddled as warmly as possible in suit and overcoat, he put his hand on the doorknob. God help him, he was not prepared for this. And he went out into a strange city.
7
ON THURSDAY MORNING, during the time Norman was crawling out of the last of his hallucinatory illness, Lester exploded at the final soft probing of his aunt Minna.
“You want to know what’s bothering me?” he screeched, shaving soap still on his earlobe and Eva extending a tentative hand to wipe it off as well as to gentle the high-strung (how the two aunts loved that word on him) boy. “Well I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you why I been looking so down in the mouth. Your little nephew Lester has gotten into man-sized trouble.”
“What, what?” Eva moaned. She and Minna were together in the pummeling of fear while their nephew’s fresh-squeezed orange juice settled in the glass and his Cream of Wheat turned cool. The oil of the vitamin drops would show on the top of the juice, Eva worried, like evidence of evil intent on her part. “Don’t get all worked up, Lester dear. Just tell me.
“Let’s just sit down and talk it out,” Minna said with her usual attempt at psychological resolution. “There’s nothing that can’t be talked out.” But she knew she would be going to the office with a stone in her stomach, and she hated to throw up in that tiny lavatory where everyone could hear her. “There’s no sense in just . . .”
“It’s a girl!” Lester said grimly, studying the orange juice.
“Drink it,” Eva said.
Lester pushed it away with disgust.
“A girl.” Minna seemed to gargle the word. “What do you mean?”
“What do I mean? I mean that I’ve gotten her in trouble.” He chopped at the cereal, his weak, youthful face raked by misery and anger and fear. “She’s pregnant, she’s pregnant.”
“Oh God,” Eva said, clapping her hand to her heart.
Minna bolted for the bathroom, and Eva and Lester were motionless in the sound of her vomiting, guilty, anguished, and resigned. Finally Minna came back, chalk colored, her lipstick and rouge like embalmer cosmetics on her face.
“All right,” she said in a dead, purged voice. “Tell us about it.”
And Lester proceeded to narrate the tedious details they had enjoyed smugly in books and on television programs for years. A girl who worked in the same office, someone he had been dating for some time. They had gotten to that point where . . . Yes he liked her . . . yes she was a decent girl in spite of . . . She had missed two—you knows . . . her family would be wild. . .. No, it didn’t show. Yes he was sure he was the one—she hadn’t seen anyone else since. No, of course he didn’t want to get married, he was too young and hadn’t found himself. . ..
Strangely, the more he talked and the more his helpless misery was revealed, the more animated the two aunts’ faces became. Minna seemed to get some color back, Eva became sly and strong looking and more Indian than ever. Occasionally she touched her sister to mark a certain detail, and Minna nodded knowingly back at her. What was common to both of them revealed a side of their old, deformed love for each other. If Lester noticed a perversity in their rekindled faces, he didn’t know what he felt about it—gratitude for their protection or resentment for their finding strength in his fiasco. In any event he did achieve relief in resting part of the burden on them. They were at least mothers, perhaps more; to date they had not let anything irrevocable happen to him. Once he had stolen a piddling amount and they had taken care of it; another time he had cheated on a school examination and they had smoothed that over. He had come home sick and drunk and frustrated, feeling like an exile from the world, and they had warmed him and reminded him that he was important there. He was stuck together with the adhesive liquid of their love, and in their presence he could never come undone. After a while he was smoking peacefully and sharing their solemn study of the problem.
“Drink your juice,” Eva said in a tone of renewed command. And Lester, temporarily knowing his place again, drank the juice and imagined a bleak peace for a while.
“There are several things to do,” Minna said, smoking so quickly the cigarette was down to a stub in no time. “There are doctors. . .”
Eva looked at her with a thrilled revulsion. Lester sat open-mouthed before their old powers. Minna nodded sternly, her face filled with unaccustomed strength. “And there are medicines . . .”
“And if those don’t work?” Lester whined, on the verge of nervous laughter because of the deep relief he felt.
“Well there are homes where a girl can have her child without anyone knowing. They put the child out for adoption. It probably won’t come to that, but just in case, I will look into it. We can speak to her family and no outsiders need know.”
“See, you get out in the business world and you know so many things,” Eva said in grudging tribute to her sister.
“Oh my God, everyone knows about those things,” Minna said, taking the tribute loftily.
Lester finished his breakfast, taking deep breaths and letting them out in sighs after each mouthful. When he was finished he kissed each of his aunts and told them he didn’t know what he would do without them, and they just nodded sadly, full of their beloved cross, doting on the sweet sorrow he brought them. They sent him off to work and then looked at each other over coffee.
“Did you expect anything like that?” Eva said dolefully.
“Lester is . . . is susceptible. He’s high-strung, emotional. It was something I had considered.”
“Well I never . . . I mean, it’s terrible,” Eva said into her cup.
“Yess-s,” Minna said dubiously. “When you have a boy . . .”
“They’re hard to bring up. But he has good things. It’s just a question of finding himself.”
“That’s all it is.” Minna stubbed out her cigarette, drank the last of her coffee, and stood up. “I’m going to have to make some phone calls, speak to some of the girls in the office . . . you know.”
Eva nodded. “Don’t forget your sandwich,” she called after her sister.
Minna held up the bag to show she had it. “Don’t worry,” she said.
“No, no, I won’t worry.”
For a long time after her sister had gone she sat at the kitchen table examining a little corner of ironic life. She had been married for three years, and she and Joe had tried to make a baby all the time. All she had left from that brief wedlock was an official married name and a weapon to use cruelly in her fights with Minna. Lester had let himself go just once perhaps, and look at the trouble. And where had Minna learned that ugly wisdom? Had she perhaps herself been . . . No, not Minna; she was too fastidious to have been kissed by a man. Wasn’t it all strange? And yet wasn’t it a consolation to know Lester still needed them? With a sigh that was a good deal sadder than she felt, she got up and did the dishes.
When she took the rubbish out to the hallway dumper, she met Betty Jacoby, and they stood for a while in that brief neighborly attitude of exchanging talk.
“A young boy like my nephew has problems. It’s hard for us old ones to remember what things look like. He gets involved—it’s the enthusiasm of the young.”
Betty couldn’t stand up straight for the tug of arthritis and yet she almost relaxed because she didn’t have to pretend it wasn’t there. Only in Arnold’s presence did she keep herself erect and let the dim light efface all the time in her face and body. “They’re the same at seventy,” she said, “just older boys. Arnold is trying to keep some kind of trouble about his job from me, but I know. The
y’re so transparent, so foolish. You can’t be honest with males, you daren’t.”
“I know,” Eva said. “They’d be lost without us.”
And two blocks away, at the edge of the park, Arnold was surprised on his bench by Marvin Schoenbrun. “Just getting a little air before I go to work,” Arnold said cheerily.
“Well it’s at least a place for a little peace and quiet,” the handsome young man said, sitting on the end of the bench. “This city is so crowded with crude people, noisy abusive people.”
“It’s a little slow down to the plant, you see. Actually, I’m kind of on a holiday because it’s so slow,” Arnold said. “See, they finish with their Christmas stuff in September and . . . I don’t like to let on to my wife because she’d right away think, Uh uh, he’s getting the sack because of his age. It’s not true, of course, but it doesn’t pay to get the women all in a dither.”
“And those two crazy musicians,” Marvin said. “They have no respect for other people. Last night I had a splitting headache, and they were blowing trumpets and banging drums until all hours. In a crowded city you have to have some respect for others. I sit and try to listen to something nice on my hi-fi, and they start blasting that trash so your ears could burst.”
Arnold nodded politely. “At least the weather is still fine. Hate to be spending my days in the park in drizzle or snow.”
“One can contemplate a little here,” Marvin said. “One isn’t abused and annoyed.”
“Almost like the country,” Arnold said.
They sat without talking for a while. The trees were a dark tracery against the clear morning sky, and above the modest traffic on Central Park West, the birds that stayed for winter could be heard in wing flutters nearby or an occasional piping from a thicket. The ground had that heartbreaking color of lost green and brown, and some taller winter grass was pink where the cinder path turned out of sight. Now and then the wind swung the tops of the trees and carried the distant sounds, from the zoo across the park, of the beasts that were now interned in the heated buildings. Arnold’s face was rosy and was sunk into his upturned collar, which was somewhat threadbare where it met his ears; his eyes were half closed. Marvin sat erect in his velvet-collared coat, an exquisite profile against the subtle colors of the winter-bound landscape.
“I tried to speak to them reasonably,” Marvin said, his eyes fixed on something too small to see. “I merely asked them to respect their neighbors. That Sidone is just a maniac, but it was Katz who was deliberately cruel. The unnecessary things, the vulgar things he said. I don’t know why people have to go out of their way to humiliate . . .”
“It’s sure funny,” Arnold said, really commenting upon his own odd form of love.
“Hardly funny,” Marvin said. “Kind of terrible, I’d say.”
“Well yes, terrible too I suppose, but . . . I don’t know whether I would have wanted it any different if I had it to do all over.”
“I don’t know,” Marvin said. He looked at his watch and stood up. “Goodness, I must run along. So long, Mr. Jacoby,” he said, crunching away on the path.
“Call me Arnold,” Arnold answered absently, taking his hand out of his pocket to wave. Then he sank down deeper into his coat and studied a finch he hadn’t seen the like of since boyhood. The wind tapped at the soft brim of his hat, and he thought of his Betty moving in beauty in the dim warmth of the apartment. The day seemed long ahead of him, and he refused to think about what he would do when the weather got too cold for him to sit there or what he would do when the money ran out. The sun rained twig shadows on the little huddled pile of him.
•
“That fusty little bitch Marvin Schoenbrun,” Katz said in a green voice. “We’re too noisy and coarse! Sidone, are you noisy and coarse?”
Sidone, costumed for the outdoors, on his way to the union office in Alpine hat and ever-present sunglasses, his skinny body human in a black Loden coat, spread his fingers in shock. “Coarse? Noisy? Why, what a perfectly bitchy thing to say, lover. I am the very soul of refinement. We both are. There isn’t a rough edge to us. We shit vaseline. I mean we’re so smooth. What a freshy that Marvin is!”
Katz laughed like an engine without oil. “Did I tell him off or did I?”
“Oh, you were so cru-el, sweetness. You accused him of being a homo-sex-ual! Now he won’t come down to see us any more.” He brayed happily.
Sidone left him with only the reverberations of his laughter for company, and Katz zigzagged from littered table to stained chair to defaced wall, miming his own tiny-arced smile. He knew he had to keep moving, and the force of his panic made it difficult to adjust to the precision of dressing himself. Four times he tried to tie his tie, his wide cheery face a blur in the bad mirror. He ended up pulling the tie through his collar and off as though it were a piece of gut that held his insides together.
“That gay little jerk,” he said aloud. “He had it coming to him. What does he expect? What am I supposed to do for him? Haven’t I got enough?” He had been indoctrinated with his own unworthiness by his father, a man who had loved his son but who had lived in fear of love and its vulnerability. Katz tried a bow tie, shaking in an effort to clear his throat of the phlegm of self-hatred. In the mirror, which was worn half out of its reflective backing, he saw, behind his curly head, the face of the cancer-killed Katz Senior, speaking silently from his sour mouth, saying, “I love you Stanley,” but having it come out in what seemed a safer language, so all the young trumpeter could hear was “You’re stupid, Stanley, you’re stupid and hopeless and you’ll never get anywhere. Blow your horn, drink and whore with those nuts, those musicians. I’ll bail you out of an alcoholic ward, I’ll pay for mercury treatments for the syph. I’m your father and I’m used to what you are.” And then it was that sour face extending on the horizontal from one side of the mirror frame, sunken into a pillow, and its wide structure (Stanley was in its image) stripped of the insulating flesh. And it was the last chance for both of them to redeem that tormenting bond. The sucked-in lips tried to shape those words that had always been such a horror to him, to speak ultimately what was the truth before blackness obscured even the worst of sins. And he said it, he did say, “I love you so much, my son, I adore you beyond the risk of love’s mutilation, I love love love you.” But all that the mortal ears of Katz could hear was the whispered, “You bum, Stanley, you poor stupid bumm-mm . . .”
“Ah, crap!” Katz cried, throwing the tie down and taking a little clip-on maroon bow tie that he wore with his musician’s tuxedo. “Screw that little faggot Schoenbrun!”
He went into the other room and got his trumpet. A handkerchief brought it to a zenith of brightness, and he raised it to his lips.
Wah wahwah wah. The air broken through, he took a brief, swift ride, roller-coastering over the scales and then landing on a cushioning pool of melody. His fingers punted the vessel of sound gracefully along the shore of silence, in and out of tiny coves. And he was looking up and ahead for some tremendous cataract that would give him the golden rush of triumph big enough to translate a dead man’s language, to convert it to the truth he knew was there. His eyes lidded, he dreamed alertly, one hand cupping the bell of the instrument in a pulsating muting. Wah wahwah wah wahwah wahh . . .
Doors slammed in the hallway as the other tenants went out to work. He had as long as he needed, a night worker trespassing on the day. He blew through his trumpeter’s flattened lips, effacing Schoenbrun, blowing away the dead king of a hardware man who might have been pleading for some kind of vindication too; he eliminated the specter of his own frame of failure. Katz then, in the morning of the city, was adorning himself with his only covering, playing foolish, cheap little songs with all his heart and all his talent, and for a little while it was more than enough, much more than enough.
But a man’s breathing is a tricky thing, and the flow of saliva, like that of blood, can undo you. He coughed and cut his soul on an evil note.
“Friggen faggot com
ing down here . . .” He put his trumpet in the velvet-lined case, a white, murderous look on his face. The clicks of the locks were like the sounds of nails in a coffin. He put on his belted flannel coat, his sunglasses and Hawkshaw hat. There was no staying there, and by concentrating on the union hall, he kept thoughts broken into small digestible words.
Jim Sprague came into the hallway at the same moment, his coat buttoned wrong and lipstick cockeyed on a corner of his mouth.
“Hello there, Sidone,” he said with a bluff, manly smile.
“Whatta ya say,” Katz answered, not bothering to correct him; fifty per cent of the time he came out Katz—it was more than enough.
“Going to the subway?” Jim Sprague asked.
Katz couldn’t deny it. They rode down in the groaning elevator with nothing to look at but the “Did Not Pass Inspection” notice and the rusted drawings of genitalia.
“Our noise bother you?” Katz asked grimly.
“What do you mean?” Sprague shifted uncomfortably in the misbuttoned coat, his expression one of distaste for himself; he thought his body had somehow gotten out of line.
“Our practicing, you know—the trumpet, Sidone’s drums.” He had no real hope of vindication from this fogbound man.
“Oh, he’s the trumpeter,” Sprague said, throwing his head back in a silent guffaw at his mistake. “I thought Katz was the drummer.”
“I’m Katz, Sidone is . . .” He waved the whole thing away, his eyes half closed in exasperation . . . no, not exasperation; he would have been happy with just that. An unhealthy sheen of sweat skinned him to the cold breeze, his skittery smile was curved around fury and anguish. “That damned Schoenbrun, you know, the fairy with the pretty face—he came up this morning and complained about our vulgar music.”
Jim Sprague looked at Katz’s face, intent on sound and look to the exclusion of confusing words. His own face mirrored the puzzling torture on Katz’s, and without definition he stored something he felt, something he would attempt to tell Jane about later but which would come out only as he had received it—as feeling. And she would become as hopelessly entangled in that as she was in everything else, though it would also wed them again.
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 9
