It took him a while to get nerve enough to go calling on the widow Gratz.
At last, he rolled himself into her room and up to her bedside.
Gloria was reading a copy of the Ladies’ Home Journal. When George rolled in, she covered the lower part of her face with the magazine. She covered it too late. George had already seen how fat-lipped and snaggletoothed she was.
Both eyes were black and blue. Her hair was immaculately groomed, however. And she wore earrings—big, barbarous hoops.
“I—I’m sorry,” said George.
She didn’t answer. She stared at him.
“You came to see me—tried to cheer me up,” he said. “Maybe I can cheer you up.”
She shook her head.
“Can’t you talk?” said George.
She shook her head. And then tears ran down her cheeks.
“Oh my—my,” said George, full of pity.
“Pleath—go way,” she said. “Don’t look at me—pleath! I’m tho damn ugly. Go way.”
“You don’t look so bad,” said George earnestly. “Really.”
“He thpoiled my lookth!” she said. The tears got worse.
“He thpoiled my lookth, tho no other man would ever want me!”
“Oh now—” said George gently, “as soon as the swelling goes down, you’ll be beautiful again.”
“I’ll have falth teeth,” she said. “I’m not even twenty-one, and I’ll have falth teeth. I’ll look like thomething out of the bottom of a garbath can. I’m going to become a nun.”
“A what?” said George.
“A nun,” she said. “All men are pigth. My huthband wath a pig. My father wath a pig. You’re a pig. All men are pigth. Go way.”
George sighed, and he went away.
George snoozed before supper, dreamed about Gloria again. When he woke up, he found Gloria St. Pierre in a wheelchair next to his bed, watching him.
She was solemn. She had left her big earrings in her room. And she was doing nothing to cover her bunged-up face. She exposed it bravely, almost proudly, for all to see.
“Hello,” she said.
“Hello,” said George.
“Why didn’t you tell me you were a minithter?” she said.
“I’m not one,” said George.
“You’re thtudying to be one,” she said.
“How do you know that?” said George.
“It’th in the newthpaper,” she said. She had the paper with her. She read the headline out loud: “DIVINITY THTUDENT, GUN MOLL, HOTHPITALITHED BY THUGTH.”
“Oh boy,” murmured George, thinking of the effect of the headline on his landlord, the dean of the Divinity School, and on his own parents in a white clapboard house in the Wabash Valley, not far away.
“Why didn’t you tell me what you were?” said Gloria. “If I’d know what you were, I never would have thaid the thingth I thaid.”
“Why not?” said George.
“You’re the only kind of man who ithn’t a pig,” she said. “I thought you were jutht thome college kid who wath a pig like everybody elth, only you jutht didn’t have the nerve to act like a pig.”
“Um,” said George.
“If you’re a minithter—or thtudying to be one, anyway—” she said, “how come you don’t bawl me out?”
“For what?” said George.
“For all the evil thingth I do,” she said. She didn’t seem to be fooling. She knew she was bad, and she felt strongly that George’s duty was to scare her.
“Well—until I get a pulpit of my own—” said George.
“What do you need a pulpit for?” she said. “Don’t you believe what you believe? Tho why you need a pulpit?” She rolled her wheelchair closer. “Tell me I’ll go to hell, if I don’t change,” she said.
George managed a humble smile. “I’m not sure you will,” he said.
She backed off from George. “You’re jutht like my father,” she said contemptuously. “He’d forgive and forgive and forgive me—only it wathn’t forgiving at all. He jutht didn’t care.”
Gloria shook her head. “Boy—” she said, “what a lothy mitherable minithter you’re going to be! You don’t believe anything! I pity you.”
And she left.
George had another dream about Gloria St. Pierre that night—Gloria with the lisp this time, Gloria with the teeth missing and the ankles in casts. It was the wildest dream yet. He was able to think of the dream with a certain wry humor. It didn’t embarrass him to have a body as well as a mind and a soul. He didn’t blame his body for wanting Gloria St. Pierre. It was a perfectly natural thing for a body to do.
When George went calling on her after breakfast, he imagined that his mind and soul weren’t involved in the least.
“Good morning,” she said to him. Many swellings had gone down. Her looks were improved—and she had a question all ready for him. This was it:
“If I wath to become a houthwife with many children, and the children were good,” she said to George, “would you rejoith?”
“Of course,” said George.
“That’th what I dreamed latht night,” she said. “I wath married to you, and we had bookth and children all over the houth.” She didn’t seem to admire the dream much—nor had it done anything to improve her opinion of George.
“Well—” said George, “I—I’m very flattered that you should dream of me.”
“Don’t be,” she said. “I have crathy dreamth all the time. Anyway, the dream latht night wath more about falth teeth than it wath about you.”
“False teeth?” said George.
“I had great big falth teeth,” she said. “Every time I tried to thay anything to you or the children, the falth teeth would fall out.”
“I’m sure false teeth can be made to fit better than that,” said George.
“Could you love thomebody with falth teeth?” she said.
“Certainly,” said George.
“When I athk you if you could love thomebody with falth teeth,” she said, “I hope you don’t think I’m athking you if you could love me. That itn’t what I’m athking.”
“Um,” said George.
“If we got married,” she said, “it wouldn’t latht. You wouldn’t get mad enough at me if I wath bad.”
There was a silence—a long one in which George finally came to understand her somewhat. She treated herself as worthless because no one had ever loved her enough to care if she was good or bad.
Since there was no one else to do it, she punished herself.
George came to understand, too, that he would be worthless as a minister as long as he didn’t get angry about what such people did to themselves. Blandness, shyness, forgiveness would not do.
She was begging him to care enough to get mad.
The world was begging him to care enough to get mad.
“Married or not,” he said, “if you continue to treat yourself like garbage and God’s sweet earth like a city dump, I hope with all my heart that you roast in hell.”
Gloria St. Pierre’s pleasure was luminous—profound.
George had never given that much pleasure to a woman or to himself before. And, in his innocence, he supposed that the next step had to be marriage.
He asked her to marry him. She accepted. It was a good marriage. It was the end of innocence for them both.
$10,000 A YEAR, EASY
“So you’re finally moving, eh?” said Gino Donnini. He was a small, fierce-looking man, who had once been a brilliant operatic tenor. His brilliance was gone now, and, in his sixties, he gave voice lessons in order to pay for his cluttered apartment under mine, a little food and wine, and expensive cigars. “One by one my young friends are going. How will I stay young now?”
“I’d think you’d be glad to get somebody upstairs who wasn’t tone-deaf.”
“Aaaaaah—you make fine music inside. What’s that book there?”
“I was just cleaning out our storage locker, Maestro, and found my old high-school ann
ual.” I opened the book to the checkerboard of faces and brief biographies that was the section devoted to the hundred and fifty seniors that year. “See how I’ve failed? They predicted I’d be a great novelist someday, and here I go to work for the telephone company as a maintenance engineer.”
“Aha,” said Gino, examining the book, “what great expectations these American children have.” He had been an American for forty years, but still regarded himself as a puzzled outsider. “This fat little boy was going to be a millionaire, and this girl the first woman Speaker of the House.”
“Now he runs a grocery, and she’s his wife.”
“Lo! how the mighty are fallen. And here’s Nicky! I keep forgetting you two were classmates.”
Nicky Marino had come to study voice with Gino, an old friend of his father, after the war, and he’d found an apartment for me in the same building when I’d decided to get an engineering degree under the G.I. Bill. “Well,” I said, “the prediction for Nicky has held up beautifully.”
“A great tenor,” read Gino, “like his father.”
“Or like you, Maestro.”
Gino shook his head. “He was better. You can’t imagine. I could play you records, and as bad as recording was in those days, Nicky’s father’s voice comes through more thrilling than anything you’ll hear today. Generations can go by without knowing a miracle like that voice. And then he had to die at twenty-nine.”
“Thank God he left a son.”
In the small town in which Nicky and I’d grown up, everyone knew whose son Nicky was—and no one doubted that he’d make our town famous as soon as he was full grown. No civic occasion was complete without his singing whatever was appropriate. His mother, herself an unmusical businesswoman, spent most of her money on voice and language lessons for Nicky, recreating in him the image of her lost husband.
“Yes,” said Gino, “thank God he left a son. Will you have a farewell drink with me, or is it too soon after breakfast?”
“This isn’t quite farewell. We don’t move for two more days. I’ll take a rain check on the drink, thanks. Now I’ve got to return some books to Nicky.”
* * *
Nicky Marino was in the shower, singing with the volume of a steam calliope when I arrived. I sat down in the one-room apartment to wait.
The walls were covered with photographs of his father, and with old posters headed by his father’s name. On the table, beside a pot of coffee, a cracked cup in a cigarette-filled saucer, and a metronome, was a scrapbook, its edges festooned with the ragged ends of newspaper clippings about his father.
On the floor were his garish pajamas and the morning mail—a letter with a check and a snapshot clipped to it. It was from his mother, who never wrote without enclosing some memento of his father from a seemingly inexhaustible store of souvenirs. The check was from the earnings of her small gift shop, and, little as the check was, Nicky had to make it last, for he had no other income.
“How did that sound?” said Nicky, stepping from the bathroom, his big dark, slow body glistening wet.
“How should I know? All I can tell is the difference between loud and soft. It was very loud.” I’d lied to Gino about returning a book to Nicky. What I was after was ten dollars Nicky’d owed me for three months. “Look, about the ten bucks—”
“You’ll get it!” he said expansively. “Everybody who was good to Nicky as an unknown will be rich when Nicky is rich.”
He wasn’t joking. His mother talked the same way—without a trace of uncertainty about his future. He had been talking and hearing himself talked about in this way all his life. Sometimes, he behaved as though he’d already reached the top.
“That’s nice of you, Nicky, but I’ll let you off the hook now for ten dollars, and then you won’t have to make me rich later. You can keep it all yourself.”
“Are you being sarcastic?” said Nicky. He stopped grinning. “Are you trying to tell me that the day won’t come when—”
“No, no—hold on. It’ll come, I guess. How should I know? All I want is my ten dollars, so I can rent a truck to move my stuff.”
“Money!”
“What can you do without it? Ellen and I can’t move.”
“I’ve always done without it,” said Nicky. “First the war takes four years out of my life, pft! And now money troubles.”
“Then ten bucks would take years out of your life?”
“Ten, a hundred, a thousand.” He sat down dejectedly. “Gino says it’s showing up in my voice—the insecurity. I sing of happiness, he says, and insecurity shows through—poisons it. I sing of unhappiness, and it spoils that, too, because my real unhappiness isn’t great or noble but cheap—money unhappiness.”
“Gino said that? I thought the worse off an artist was financially, the better he was artistically.”
Nicky snorted. “The richer they get, the better they get—especially singers.”
“I was kidding, Nicky.”
“Pardon me if I don’t laugh. People who sell bolts and nuts and locomotives and frozen orange juice make billions, while the people who struggle to bring a little beauty into the world, give life a little meaning, they starve.”
“You’re not starving, are you?”
“No, not physically,” he admitted, patting his belly. “But my spirit is starving for security, a few extras, a little pride.”
“Uh huh.”
“Oooooooh, what do you know about it? You’re set—pension plan, automatic raises, free insurance for everything you can think of.”
“I hesitate to mention this, Nicky,” I said, “but—”
“I know, I know, I know! You’re going to say why don’t I get a job.”
“I was going to be diplomatic about it. Not give up voice, understand, but pick up a little cash and security while you’re studying with Gino, while you’re getting ready for the big push. You can’t sing all the time.”
“I must and do.”
“All right, then, get a job out-of-doors.”
“And get bronchitis. Besides, you can imagine what working for somebody else would do to my spirit—licking boots, saying yes all the time, grovelling.”
“Pretty terrible, all right, working for somebody.”
There was a knock on the door, and Gino walked in. “Oh—you still here? Brought the morning paper, Nicky. I’ve read it.”
“Talking about insecurity, Maestro,” I said.
“Yes,” said Gino thoughtfully, “it’s something to talk about, all right. It’s broken greater spirits than ours, and robbed the world of God knows how much beauty. I’ve seen it happen more times than I like to think about.”
“It’s not going to happen to me!” said Nicky passionately.
“What are you going to do?” said Gino. He shrugged. “Go into business? You’re too much of an artist. If you were going to go ahead and try it anyway, I suppose the place to start would be in the want-ad section. But no—I’m against it. It’s beneath you. You could get in and maybe make your fortune and get out again, and give your full attention to voice—but no, I don’t like it, and I feel responsible for you.”
Nicky sighed. “Give me the paper. The average man doesn’t even suspect the price an artist pays to bring beauty into his life. Now the son of Angelo Marino is going into business.” He turned to me to berate me as a representative of average men everywhere. “You understand what that means?”
“I’ve adopted a wait-and-see policy,” I said.
“Nicky,” said Gino gravely, “you’ve got to promise me one thing: that you won’t let business get the better of you, that you’ll keep the real end in view—your singing.”
Nicky banged his fist on the table. “By God, Gino—here I thought you knew me better than anybody else on earth, next to my mother, and you say a thing like that!”
“Sorry.”
“Now what’s the stupid paper got to say for itself?”
On the day of our move from the apartment, Nicky insisted on my paying att
ention to matters far more important than my own piddling affairs—his affairs. He had been tramping the streets for two days, investigating likely ads in the Business Opportunities section.
“Where would I get a thousand dollars?” I grunted, as I lifted a chair onto the rented truck.
He made no effort to help, and stood by with an expression of annoyance, as though I had no business dividing my attention. “Five hundred, then.”
“You’re crazy. I’m in hock for my car, the new house, and the baby. If turkey was five cents a pound, I couldn’t buy the beak.”
“How on earth am I going to buy this doughnut shop?” he asked irritably.
“What the hell am I, the Guggenheim Foundation?”
“The bank’ll lend me four, if I’ll put in four,” said Nicky. “You’re passing up a chance of a lifetime. This lousy little shop nets ten thousand a year. The man proved it to me. Ten thousand a year, easy,” he said, awe in his voice. “Twenty-seven dollars a day, every day. There it is, just waiting. Machines make the doughnuts; you buy the mix in bags, and sit around making change.”
Gino came out of my apartment, carrying two lamps. “Back from the bank, Nicky?”
“They’ll only lend me half, Gino. Can you beat it? They want me to put up four thousand, too.”
“A nice wad, four thousand,” said Gino.
“Peanuts!” said Nicky. “The owner’s been making ten G’s, even though he doesn’t advertise or make a decent cup of coffee or try new flavors or—” He stopped short, and his enthusiasm decayed. “You know,” he said flatly, “the stupid things businessmen have to do to make a thing go. Well, the hell with it, anyway.”
“Just forget the ten thousand a year,” said Gino.
An hour later, as I climbed into the cab of the truck and started the engine, Nicky came running out of his apartment. “Shut off the motor!”
Obediently, I did. “For the last time, Nicky, I can’t even afford the ten you already owe me.”
“I don’t need it,” he said.
“Given up? Good. I think you’re wise.”
“Someone else put up the money as a silent partner. The bank told him about me.”
While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction Page 17
