“Maybe people would be shocked at the facts—I half hope so—because that aspect of it is really part of it. Courtship can be a terrible thing too. I have heard that certain versions of Hell are merely too much of what you had once thought so desirable. Love, too, can be carried too far, at least in certain forms. Did you ever guess about us?” she asked, just humanizing Norman enough to require his answering.
“I’ve only begun guessing about things lately. Now I guess about everything,” he said from the floor.
“We, Arnold and I, are not married,” she said, her voice echoing in the porcelain and tile chamber. Norman looked up at her in small delight, seeing her aged face with the wonder of one glimpsing a marvel of craftsmanship, as though she were a miraculous toy that spoke in a girl’s voice from an old woman’s mouth. The noon whistle fountained up through the middle of the city and fell back down in an immense spray of echoing silence. “I stole him from his wife and child fifty years ago. It was a terrible thing. I left my own husband. We are still selling our beauty to each other, although I was long ago satisfied with Arnold and knew that the bargain was well made. And I guess that Arnold has felt the same about me. Yet neither of us have been able to feel certain about the other. He is still trying to show his good physique to me, trying to demonstrate his manly strength. I know he is old and decrepit, but it hasn’t mattered for years. I have loved him too deeply for anything to matter. And I have kept the light from me, thought I could still present the illusion of my beauty to him. It should have been obvious to both of us that all of it was foolish. But it hasn’t been—probably never will. We’ll each die in the near future and we will continue this terrible play-acting. He will hold in his stomach and pretend he is working; I will speak a certain way and keep the shades drawn. . . .”
“Oh my,” Norman said, sketching absently with his finger in the wet cement. There was a giddiness in him, a compulsion to laugh; all that held it back was concern for the old woman’s feelings. He was amazed at the long, long reverberations that passion could elicit—one could laugh at octogenarian lovers, but that laughter must contain awe and terror too. In the pale winter light that came through the frosted window, he watched his drawing finger as it tried to make the shape of a soul. She watched him too, as though she had given him a specification and expected him to come up with a diagram of the house she had dwelled in for a half a century. The box of Gelusil tablets made a rattling sound as she moved it in her knobby fingers; a booming radio in another apartment gave a feeling of rooms inhabited by housewives, their aural daydreams only occasionally interrupted by advertisements for soap and flour.
“I had the feeling that there was something strange,” Norman said, his pose like that of a mooning schoolgirl. “And now that you’ve told me that, it’s more real and more fantastic at the same time. You see, most of my life I thought that mystery was only in things that had nothing to do with me.”
She laughed softly. “People carry on so about love and hatred—what is so much worse, so much more a burden, is tenderness and pity. Even grief is nothing beside those two things.”
Norman sighed through the next moment of his perpetual metamorphosis and then went back to his sloppy masonry when Betty Jacoby tottered from the room.
•
“What are you hocking their heads with that crap, those Hebrew lessons?” Hirsch said to his nephew Aaron. “What will those children get out of it? Let them alone; they should be like the other American monsters. They’ll chew gum, they’ll swear, they’ll earn money and marry and be like everyone else. You want them to be foreigners? You want them to be little Yidlach that everyone can see right away they don’t belong? Unless maybe the boy you think will get the good racket to be efsher a rabbi with a good salary, a social director for the caterers?”
Norman painted the dialogue in odd symbols with his paintbrush; he was already on the second coat, but the burned wall seemed still to char through.
“Stay out of it, Uncle,” Aaron said in a clenched voice. “You must not interfere. They must know they are Jews, no matter.”
“Aaron, Aaron, don’t get excited—he means well,” Sarah said from another room.
“Oy vays mir, haven’t you learned anything from our teachers we had over there?” the old man went on. “You want they should know they are Jews? Okay, so take them down to the tattoo parlor; the man can use you or me for a model. He will copy the style numbers perfect. They will know good then.”
“They hear all this, the children,” Aaron cried fiercely. “Will you keep your wretched ideas to yourself? And how about their connection with . . . God?” One could sense Aaron’s inner wincing at the trap of words he had been driven into.
“Ah, yes, God,” Hirsch said in his moderate nasty voice. “Our good friend God. Oh yes, that is very important, to keep good relations with Him. Sure, sure, we are his Chosen People. Chosen for what?” he snarled, his usually quiet voice suddenly raised just enough to chill the listener.
“The children,” Sarah said in a loud, frantic whisper. “Please, Uncle.” “He is a madman,” Aaron groaned.
“Chosen for torture, chosen for murder, chosen for humiliation, chosen for insanity, chosen for . . .”
“Stop, stop, stop,” Sarah hissed. “The man is here.” She was the only one of them connected to the everyday earth.
“God,” Hirsch howled, his voice seeming to take some weird delight in hurting them. “You know what He is? He is the biggest, oldest, greatest shvantz in the universe!”
Norman, between stove and sink, studied the ingrained white on his hand and felt himself to be in a magnificent place, a place so huge that it oppressed his heart. Oddly enough, he felt blessed.
“You are mad,” Aaron said. “You should be locked up and put in a strait jacket, behind bars.”
“Ahhh-h,” said Hirsch. “Yes, yes, you are right. . . .” It sounded as though he had achieved that wound for which he had labored all his life.
“No, no, Uncle, I didn’t mean . . . Please, have mercy,” Aaron said in a shuddering voice.
And in the silence that followed, Norman knew that the old man would stay with them. For the Lublins, Hell was never over. But the constant presence of Hell, its garish, molten glow, was a sort of back light which threw their lives into strong relief and made them tangible, reassuring for each other. Unlike Norman, they had never doubted their existence. They knew their passions and their thresholds of pain. And, strangely, the persistent accompaniment of Hell’s savage and wheedling voice also gave them whatever was the opposite of Hell. The fact was, they loved.
Norman, covering the marks of the fire, caught the reflected light of their lives and changed color slightly himself. Outwardly, he turned paler.
•
And on an afternoon when the outside air was so clear that the buildings and the people seemed imbedded in the purest crystal, he was doing his best to repair the warped window in J. T. Leopold’s bedroom. Already dangerously deep in the wood, he planed with suicidal delight, feeling his mouth water at the sight of the thick, sweet-smelling curls of shaving. J. T., wrapped snugly in several blankets because of the opened window, watched him with an expression of deep disgust for the amateurism of Norman’s work.
“It seems mighty odd to me,” Milly Leopold said from the doorway, where she stood, coated for the outside, “that you, the agent, should be doing that kind of work.”
“There are agents and there are agents,” Norman said gaily, his fine-boned face coated with beige dust.
“Well, it beats me,” she said. Then she took a breath for change and said, “Well, I have to run out for a few minutes. You don’t mind if I take advantage of you being here? Sort of keep an eye on J. T.”
“No trouble at all,” Norman said. “He’ll want for nothing while I’m here.”
J. T. rumbled his disgust, whether for Norman’s inept carpentry, which must have offended his artisan’s eye, or for the idea that he had to be looked after like an infant. Which
ever it was made no difference to Milly; she took it as a hand upraised against her and hurried away.
For a little while after she had gone, the air seemed lighter; the old painter had somehow relented, with her out of earshot and gone from his sight. He watched Norman planing with a rather drowsy expression, as though in the clouds of wood dust, which swam in an orange-gold cloud around the agent’s small dark head, he caught dim glimpses of himself, vigorous and happy, clad in the white overalls and cap of his trade; perhaps he could even hear the voice he had had, full of anger and rebellion and lust.
“Gonna ruin that window, way you’re going,” he said in his deep, froggy voice. “Ought to shorten up the blade considerable.”
Norman turned toward him with some surprise. “I’m like a babe in the woods with all this,” he said, adjusting the blade and holding it up for J. T. to check. “How’s this?”
“More,” J. T. rasped. “Just let a sliver of the blade out.”
“Nothing can discourage me,” Norman said. “But sometimes I feel I’m trying to chop down a sequoia with a butter knife.”
“Why you doing this, anyhow?” J. T. asked.
“That’s an excellent question, Mr. Leopold,” Norman answered, blowing on the blade of the tool. He began to plane once more, somehow disappointed at the fine, meager shavings that now oozed out. “I can only say that I seem to be approaching explosion. I’m trying to live up to the feeling.”
J. T. hissed incredulously. “Kind of talk is that?”
“Doesn’t make sense in words, does it? Well, let’s just say that I want to fix these buildings up, that it seems important to me. There is no money to renovate—my employer only wants things to stay as they are. The property has a particular value for him as it is. He’s not even aware that people live in the buildings. All of you are just tenants. If I were in his position, I would feel the same way. I myself was as happy as most people. But suddenly, one day, after I took this job, something started to happen to me, something terrible. I’m at a point where I’m a slave to impulse. Doing all these things seemed imperative.” He paused a moment to study the tiny worlds of wood floating in the cold air. “Perhaps I’m trying to give a name to what is happening.”
J. T. stared at him from his bundling of blankets. “The hell you need a name for it. Take me, I know what’s happening to me. Don’t matter whether you call it dying or living or whatever. Alls I know—I’m not what I was and she ain’t what she was. Like stuff that turns in hot weather, we don’t smell good to each other any more. Only thing is, she feels guilty about it and I’m just goddamned, killing mad about it. She looks at me every time I cough, scared that she’ll be glad, afraid to be caught feeling relief in the second that I kick off. And I can’t help trying to scare her, because her face burns me up. I used to like her face, and it seems she went and changed it out of spite. I was always stronger than her too—used to be able to lift her up with one hand and pin her to the bed looking scared and excited, knowing J. T., the I.W.W. bull, was going to give her what-for.”
Norman planed, and the sill grew straight and smooth, changing its shape from its conformity with the ravages of time and weather. “I.W.W.?” Norman asked in the gritty air.
“Industrial Workers of the World,” J. T. rasped proudly. “I was one of a great bunch of men. Our heroes didn’t wear white shirts and ties.”
Suddenly there came an astounding sound; it was like that of a man singing from beneath a lake of mud. J. T. was singing!
“I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night,
Alive as you and me . . .”
But the tons of mud were too much for the lone singer. He began to cough terribly, hiding his face in the swathing of blankets. The present honked and squealed from the street below; the luminous afternoon glistened. Norman worked now with severe attention, his feelings blossoming like threads of blood in water. Dimly, muffled by the blanket he hid in, J. T. snarled, “Lousy, rotten, stinkin’, putrid, scummy . . .” And on and on without end.
•
Gaylord discovered Karloff’s death six days after they had cleaned his room, and Norman, after notifying the sulky grandson, went over to see what death could have done.
The corpse sat upright, with only the head tilted forward to indicate that Karloff no longer listened for knocks at his door. Since Norman’s last visit, the old man had had time to make a small settlement of dirt on that part of the table within his reach. There was a strong urine smell, and the chamberpot lay on its side. Norman studied the dull flesh, the whole stubbornly erect figure, and he tried to picture what small shape, now fled, had been the thing that had carried the great creature through the world. Where were the shining black horses, the savage women, the huge sweet fruits, the terrible men and children that Karloff had drunk in through his eyes and his ears? There was just this decaying body, robbed of color, unrecognizable in a small room of the city. Why did he feel a connection between his efforts with the Leopolds’ window and this dead flesh? The gnarled fingers were spread stiffly, seemed to be reaching for a hard, torn crust just out of reach. The white walls and ceiling glowed and made a great cubic frame for what was, after all, nothing now. And Norman looked around carefully, as though he thought to surprise the last wisp of the vanished spirit, as though he would be able to determine from it what he had in himself.
That afternoon he puttied the windows in the doors of the Thirteenth Street building, as inept as ever. He got the glass in solid enough, but used so much putty that the panes looked like portholes. Nevertheless, when he stood up from his work in the evening, he was somewhat taller.
21
THE FOLLOWING WEEK, after another enraged call from Irwin, Norman drew two thousand dollars from his own savings account and sent a certified check for the amount to his employer. Temporarily, this freed him for his crusade. He went back to the work with an energy that seemed to grow in proportion to how much he assaulted his body. Chronic tiredness engraved fine lines beneath his eyes, and turpentine could not remove the flecking of white in his dark hair. He slept excitedly and woke up out of breath. How much can a body take? he wondered with amusement. Joy wrapped him with stinging tentacles, but he would take nothing to relieve the pain. Not too far ahead he perceived a breakthrough, perhaps a breakdown—neither alternative worried him; it was sufficient that he would achieve something, whatever one called it.
By February he had done three quarters of what he had set out to do to the buildings. He had used a lake full of paint, a small mountain of cement, and enough wire to go from New York to his home town and back again.
Paxton came to his office on an icy afternoon, dramatic and gay in sunglasses, with his coat over his shoulders, thespian style. He carried a suitcase and his portable typewriter, and he plunked them down as he sat exhaustedly in Norman’s one chair.
“God,” he sighed, “I never thought I’d make it. I humped this black ass to the breaking point. Now I can breathe.”
“You’re leaving me?” Norman asked, admiring the exotic look of the Negro with his cloaked coat and sunglasses.
Paxton flashed his superb smile, and Norman had to return it with interest. Such a gift, that smile, he thought. How can he have problems?
“At last,” Paxton answered. “The manna has arrived. I have finished the final draft of the thing. Yussel is free, sweety, free as the luft. From here I go to my agent, then to say bye-bye to Momma, and then—one-hundred-per-cent American Airlines to the City of Light. Like a big-assed bird, I fly, fly. . . .”
Norman took the keys Paxton tossed on the desk. “That’s wonderful,” he said. “I’ll miss you, Paxton.”
Paxton’s smile grew sardonic, yet tender, as he studied Norman’s face. His eyes widened slightly, then narrowed; he speculated upon what he saw.
“You’re changing, dad. What is it with you?”
“Changing?” Norman considered. “Or becoming?” He went to the window and gazed at the flaking n, almost r now. “I don’t know what it is, but
I’m glad, I’m practically merry.”
“You look like a senile Huck Finn. I see agony. What kind of merry is that?”
“Maybe,” Norman said softly, “maybe it’s agony to become.” For a moment he tried to pick at the flaking letter himself, but stopped as soon as he realized the words were painted on the outside.
“I think I will miss you too,” Paxton said rather slyly. “You are a very interesting creature, Moonbloom. Would that I had the time . . .”
“Well,” Norman shrugged modestly. “So you’re going to fly away from everything. Is it so easy? Can you leave everything behind?”
“Oh no you don’t,” Paxton said, waving a finger at Norman. “You’re not going to get me on to that. I’m moving, I’ve got no time. Oh, I’m no fool. What kind of idiot do you think I am? I know what I’m taking with me, don’t worry about that. I’m taking the actor, but at least I’m leaving the lousy set behind. You can examine and examine—three psychiatrists have already. The thing is, I know what’s happened to me and why, just as clear as day. I was a fresh black boy in Dixie, and they took it out of me the only way they could—invisible castration. Now I know, but of course I can’t put back that invisible dingus, can I? So I mess around with boys just to keep my prostate active, but in my work, dad, in my work I fuck the bejesus out of the world like the biggest old bull this side of the labyrinth. And when I fly over that Atlantic Ocean, I really do fly, I goddamn well soar!”
“Yes, yes, I guess you do,” Norman said wonderingly. “It’s amazing the funny ways people can fly. I have some hope of it myself.”
Paxton studied him further, observed how the cold sunshine through the glass dimmed the outlines of his wasted figure. “Man, I think you’ll make it, I truly do,” he said. Then, because he was one of those people sensitive to the subtle reverences due to certain resonant moments, he sat in silence. There was a propriety involved; simpler people waited twenty minutes after eating—Paxton would not eat and run. And Norman, staring out at the windy street with its scud-dings of paper and bent-over people, appreciated the deep courtesy that could occur between people, a courtesy that many aristocrats in name, who would sooner die than belch in company, had no idea of. The Jacobys had it, Kram had it, Basellecci had it. It was not necessarily understanding what the other person said, but, rather, a great awareness that he had spoken.
The Tenants of Moonbloom Page 19
