Don't Rely on Gemini

by Packer, Vin

  “Bernie’s. Like, they sell magazines and Cokes and they got a juke and couple pinballs and things. You know?”

  “What are you going there for?” Bardo had inquired. “For? You have to go for something? We’re just going there.”

  He glared at Bardo with resentment. It was the same resentment he frequently felt toward his family. They couldn’t understand why he hung around Bernie’s either.

  “You got records home,” his old father would argue with him in German, “and you got a phonograph. And you got all the soft drinks you need downstairs in the place. Bring your friends home, Hans, the way a good boy does.”

  “The place” was Die Lotosblume, the Heines’ small restaurant on Eighty-sixth Street near Third Avenue. Flip’s sister sang there, and his three older brothers helped run the business. Four evenings a week Flip waited tables reluctantly, hating the familiar smells of grilled Bratwurst, red cabbage, schnitzel, and dark draught beer. The melancholy choruses of “Muss I’ Denn,” “Lili Marlene,” and “Nur Du,” which filled the room as the night wore on, filled Flip with shame at being there among the white-haired old Germans whose tears rolled down to their handle-bar mustaches as they reminisced; whole families gathered around one table, their napkins tucked under their chins, their voices rising in thick, guttural accents; and the sight-seers, who asked Flip what Bauernwurst was, what kind of meal a real German would order, and if the “little Fräulein” would sing “Come, come, I love you only” in German for a dollar bill.

  “Aren’t we good enough for you, Hans?” his father would demand.

  “I didn’t say that,” Flip would answer.

  “You say it, Hans. You say it with your eyes.”

  “O.K.! O.K.! I don’t dig Germany. Germans don’t give me kick one!”

  “You go to that store to learn that talk, is that it? To learn to talk smart-aleck to your old father?

  “All the guys go there, Pa.”

  “All the wise guys.”

  Bardo looked questioningly at Heine now, and with nervous irritation coloring his voice Heine said, “Like, we go to Bernie’s and put out for a Coke, and play the juke. Bull around.”

  “Well, don’t apologize, my good man,” Bardo responded.

  Flip had never heard a crazier comment in his whole life. Who was apologizing?

  Wylie was ten minutes late already, and Manny, as usual, was dawdling. Ordinarily Flip would not have been bothered by these things, but this afternoon he was. He wondered what to say to Raleigh, and he wondered what kept him from crossing him off as a creep and just ignoring him. All the while he wondered, he strained for another likely topic of conversation.

  He said, “Wait till you meet Wylie, man. Man, girls eat their hearts for breakfast over old Wyle!”

  Bardo shifted his rapier to the other arm, took a silver nail clipper and file from his pocket, and worked with it on his hands, which were already immaculately white, the nails meticulously groomed. He was wearing gray linen trousers, and a white shirt under his charcoal-colored linen jacket. His necktie was inch thin, and striped black and blue. His academy graduation ring, which he wore on the little finger of his left hand, had a ruby stone that flashed its reflection in the gold handle of the rapier, jutting out from the leather case. Heine and Pollack had gone to the club for handball, but Bardo had gone there for his fencing lesson. When it was over he had planned to drop the sword with the doorman at his apartment building and go to a double feature. Then in the locker room, when he got into conversation with Flip, after Manny had dog-walked it to the shower, Bardo had changed his mind. He was immediately captivated by Heine’s disciplinary measure, and by the amusing, almost absent way he instigated it, and afterward appeared to slough off his triumph over Pollack. Such an impassive personality intrigued Bardo, to say nothing of the whole subject of discipline.

  Raleigh had been an exemplary cadet during his four years at Sandside. In that strange world of little men carrying big guns, parading close order in full dress, standing white-glove inspection, and “popping to” like automatons at a senior officer’s sharp bark, Bardo excelled. During his four years at the academy he had been “pulled” only once, in his freshman year, for failing to shine his brass, and his last year he had served as Colonel of Cadets. Discipline was his obsession. When he read in a modern history book one of De Gaulle’s statements made during World War II, he saw to it that every cadet memorized it and could repeat it word for word. It was a sentence that somehow inspired him:

  “France will fight this battle with passion, but she will fight it with discipline!”

  “Thank God,” Bardo had concluded his commencement address on his final day at the academy, “that I have learned the value of discipline, for it is the difference between leading and following in this world. The followers will never appreciate its value; the leaders, who do, are obliged to be their shepherds.”

  There was a polite sprinkle of applause from the student-parent section, and a rousing ovation from General Baird’s box. The military band broke into the “March of the Men of Harlech,” and Bardo Raleigh did not touch his glove to his cheek to stop the tear that had rolled there from his brimming eyes.

  • • •

  ‘"How is it?” Bardo said to Flip, “that you have so much power over your friend Manny?”

  “I just put Manny down,” Flip retorted. He disliked analyzing situations. Flip just said things and people said things back, and if it did not make intellectual history, it did not confuse him either. Bardo spoke unlike anyone Flip had ever encountered before. He seemed to probe for answers Flip did not know how to give him. It made Heine feel curiously and newly inadequate, and vaguely uncomfortable in Raleigh’s presence. At the same time he was aware that he somehow admired him for this very fact. He was oddly pleased, even flattered, that Bardo was joining them.

  “What do you mean, you put him down?”

  “I don’t like anyone calling me Kraut,” Flip elaborated.

  “I’m talking about power, my good man. Your pow-er over him.”

  “Power?” Flip shrugged his shoulders, embarrassed. “Who says?”

  “Why are you so evasive?”

  Flip chuckled and cracked his knuckles in a frustrated, awkward gesture. “Man, oh, man,” he said, for no reason. Raleigh said, “Where did you pick up that jargon?” “Heard it around.” “He doesn’t like it,” Bardo said. “Who doesn’t?”

  “Bardo Raleigh doesn’t,” Bardo Raleigh answered. “He finds it infinitely tiresome.”

  • • •

  Emanuel Pollack pulled his olive-colored tie to a neat knot and studied his face in the locker-room mirror. He wondered if his father had been right this morning when he had suggested that the reason Manny had flunked two of his subjects this term was that the curriculum was too difficult for a young boy.

  “They drive you kids too hard,” he had said in his soft, serious tone. “They expect too much of you. Why, I saw you studying every night with my own eyes, Emanuel. Latin and French and all those subjects are hard! And you with an I.Q. of a hundred and eighteen. Nobody can say you haven’t got the brains, Emanuel.”

  Manny would have liked to accept his” father’s idea that the school was to blame, and not himself, but Flip and Wylie both had passed their subjects, and he remembered the principal’s report. His mother had read it aloud.

  “… convinced that his inability to concentrate and his dreamy attitude during class sessions are rooted in a

  basic personality problem. The faculty recommends that Emanuel apply for consultation with a psychologist at the Jewish Children’s Clinic …”

  “You don’t have to go, son,” his father had declared. “You just forget all about it.”

  But his mother had said he certainly was going to go.

  “Not if he doesn’t want to, Ruth!”

  “Well, he should want to!” and then turning to Manny she had said, “Don’t you want help? Do you want to be backward and stay behind another year? Y
ou want help, don’t you, Emanuel?”

  “What about it, Emanuel? Do you?”

  Emanuel said, “I don’t know. I—What do you think?”

  “I think,” his father said, “that you should do as you please. You should do whatever you think is best, Emanuel.”

  As he remembered these things, Manny’s reflection frowned back at him. His face was gaunt and somewhat sullen; his gray eyes were always rather timid-looking. A teacher once described Manny by saying that he had the face of a melancholy seventeenth-century poet and the build of a professional football tackle. His hair was chestnut-colored and curly, and now still wet from the shower. As he took his comb from his trouser pocket, he heard Flip’s familiar whistle outside. Without bothering to part his hair, he grabbed the coat of his tan summer suit from the wire hook on the wall and began to run up the basement steps. Midway, he suddenly remembered the humiliating episode of less than an hour ago. It was funny that he had forgotten all about it, and funny too that as he recalled it, he was unable to recall his anger at Flip. The incident, he realized, was a dead issue, buried now in a graveyard of past and similar incidents.

  • • •

  Coming up Lexington Avenue, approaching the club entrance, Johnny Wylie wondered who the third boy was with Heine and Pollack. He saw Manny shaking hands with him while Flip stood by, grinning inanely and pushing the yellow strings of hair back off his forehead.

  Johnny was the baby of the crowd; he had five months to go before he would be sixteen. He was five feet seven and clearly handsome, with thick black hair he wore close-cropped to his head, sparkling dark eyes, and a smooth, creamy complexion. Above his full wide lips he was cultivating a thin line of mustache.

  “Where’d you get the ‘tash, Johnny, hmm?” Lynn Leonard, the girl across the hall, had said shyly to him that morning as they met at the mailboxes in the apartment-house entranceway. “It’s nice.”

  He had tried to keep his eyes off the tight white halter she filled too well for a girl of fifteen.

  He said, “That’s a funny name for it—’tash.” He stared down at his shoes, afraid to raise his head for fear his eyes would never reach her face, but stay fixed there below her neck. He could smell the faint lilac fragrance she wore, and he was keenly aware of bare flesh at her shoulders and back, though he had not seen her fully.

  “It’s nice,” she repeated. “It’s a nice ‘tash.”

  “ ‘Tash!” He feigned a gruff tone. “I never heard one called that before. Never!”

  She laughed, tossing her head back so that her long, soft dark hair fell to the small of her back, and Johnny stole a glance at the halter. He looked squarely at her there, and then away quickly, his face flaming. He turned so she could not see.

  “See you around,” he mumbled.

  “So long, Johnny.”

  • • •

  “Do you stay in bed very long in the morning after you have once awakened?” Father Farrell had questioned Johnny after he had blurted out his confession twenty minutes ago, when he had stopped off at church on his way uptown.

  “I won’t any more, Father.”

  Johnny felt better now, after having talked about it with someone.

  As if to dismiss these scraps of thought from his mind, he squared his broad shoulders, drew a deep breath, and held his head up high. He wore a brown cord suit and a natty yellow bow tie, which was clipped to the collar of his white shirt. The taps on the heels of his heavy ox-blood shoes clicked more insistently as he stepped up his pace, waving now at the boys who were waiting for him. Johnny took the club steps by twos. He slapped Flip across the back and gave Manny a mock punch in the stomach. Then he shook hands with Bardo Raleigh.

  “Let’s all cut out for the store,” Heine said, and as the sun slipped back behind the skyscrapers to the west, casting their jagged shadows in the path, the quartet ambled lazily along Lexington Avenue.

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  This edition published by

  Prologue Books

  a division of F+W Media, Inc.

  4700 East Galbraith Road

  Cincinnati, Ohio 45236

  www.prologuebooks.com

  Copyright © 1969 by Vin Packer

  All rights reserved.

  This is a work of fiction.

  Names, characters, corporations, institutions, organizations, events, or locales in this novel are either the product of the author's imagination or, if real, used fictitiously. The resemblance of any character to actual persons (living or dead) is entirely coincidental.

  eISBN 10: 1-4405-3704-6

  eISBN 13: 978-1-4405-3704-2