For Esmé, With Love and Squalor Page 5

  Ginnie hesitated. “Well, maybe she was busy.”

  “Yeah. Busy. Busy as a little goddam beaver.”

  “Do you have to swear so much?” Ginnie asked.

  “Goddam right I do.”

  Ginnie giggled. “How long did you know her, anyway?” she asked.

  “Long enough.”

  “Well, I mean did you ever phone her up or anything? I mean didn’t you ever phone her up or anything?”

  “Naa.”

  “Well, my gosh. If you never phoned her up or any—”

  “I couldn’t, for Chrissake!”

  “Why not?” said Ginnie.

  “Wasn’t in New York.”

  “Oh! Where were you?”

  “Me? Ohio.”

  “Oh, were you in college?”

  “Nope. Quit.”

  “Oh, were you in the Army?”

  “Nope.” With his cigarette hand, Selena’s brother tapped the left side of his chest. “Ticker,” he said.

  “Your heart, ya mean?” Ginnie said. “What’s the matter with it?”

  “I don’t know what the hell’s the matter with it. I had rheumatic fever when I was a kid. Goddam pain in the—”

  “Well, aren’t you supposed to stop smoking? I mean aren’t you supposed to not smoke and all? The doctor told my—”

  “Aah, they tellya a lotta stuff,” he said.

  Ginnie briefly held her fire. Very briefly. “What were you doing in Ohio?” she asked.

  “Me? Working in a goddam airplane factory.”

  “You were?” said Ginnie. “Did you like it?”

  “ ‘Did you like it?’ ” he mimicked. “I loved it. I just adore airplanes. They’re so cute.”

  Ginnie was much too involved now to feel affronted. “How long did you work there? In the airplane factory.”

  “I don’t know, for Chrissake. Thirty-seven months.” He stood up and walked over to the window. He looked down at the street, scratching his spine with his thumb. “Look at ’em,” he said. “Goddam fools.”

  “Who?” said Ginnie.

  “I don’t know. Anybody.”

  “Your finger’ll start bleeding more if you hold it down that way,” Ginnie said.

  He heard her. He put his left foot up on the window seat and rested his injured hand on the horizontal thigh. He continued to look down at the street. “They’re all goin’ over to the goddam draft board,” he said. “We’re gonna fight the Eskimos next. Know that?”

  “The who?” said Ginnie.

  “The Eskimos. . . . Open your ears, for Chrissake.”

  “Why the Eskimos?”

  “I don’t know why. How the hell should I know why? This time all the old guys’re gonna go. Guys around sixty. Nobody can go unless they’re around sixty,” he said. “Just give ’em shorter hours is all. . . . Big deal.”

  “You wouldn’t have to go, anyway,” Ginnie said, without meaning anything but the truth, yet knowing before the statement was completely out that she was saying the wrong thing.

  “I know,” he said quickly, and took his foot down from the window seat. He raised the window slightly and snapped his cigarette streetward. Then he turned, finished at the window. “Hey. Do me a favor. When this guy comes, willya tell him I’ll be ready in a coupla seconds? I just gotta shave is all. O.K.?”

  Ginnie nodded.

  “Ya want me to hurry Selena up or anything? She know you’re here?”

  “Oh, she knows I’m here,” Ginnie said. “I’m in no hurry. Thank you.”

  Selena’s brother nodded. Then he took a last, long look at his injured finger, as if to see whether it was in condition to make the trip back to his room.

  “Why don’t you put a Band-Aid on it? Don’t you have any Band-Aid or anything?”

  “Naa,” he said. “Well. Take it easy.” He wandered out of the room.

  In a few seconds, he was back, bringing the sandwich half.

  “Eat this,” he said. “It’s good.”

  “Really, I’m not at all—”

  “Take it, for Chrissake. I didn’t poison it or anything.”

  Ginnie accepted the sandwich half. “Well, thank you very much,” she said.

  “It’s chicken,” he said, standing over her, watching her. “Bought it last night in a goddam delicatessen.”

  “It looks very good.”

  “Well, eat it, then.”

  Ginnie took a bite.

  “Good, huh?”

  Ginnie swallowed with difficulty. “Very,” she said.

  Selena’s brother nodded. He looked absently around the room, scratching the pit of his chest. “Well, I guess I better get dressed. . . . Jesus! There’s the bell. Take it easy, now!” He was gone.

  Left alone, Ginnie looked around, without getting up, for a good place to throw out or hide the sandwich. She heard someone coming through the foyer. She put the sandwich into her polo-coat pocket.

  A young man in his early thirties, neither short nor tall, came into the room. His regular features, his short haircut, the cut of his suit, the pattern of his foulard necktie gave out no really final information. He might have been on the staff, or trying to get on the staff, of a news magazine. He might have just been in a play that closed in Philadelphia. He might have been with a law firm.

  “Hello,” he said, cordially, to Ginnie.

  “Hello.”

  “Seen Franklin?” he asked.

  “He’s shaving. He told me to tell you to wait for him. He’ll be right out.”

  “Shaving. Good heavens.” The young man looked at his wristwatch. He then sat down in a red damask chair, crossed his legs, and put his hands to his face. As if he were generally weary, or had just undergone some form of eyestrain, he rubbed his closed eyes with the tips of his extended fingers. “This has been the most horrible morning of my entire life,” he said, removing his hands from his face. He spoke exclusively from the larynx, as if he were altogether too tired to put any diaphragm breath into his words.

  “What happened?” Ginnie asked, looking at him.

  “Oh. . . . It’s too long a story. I never bore people I haven’t known for at least a thousand years.” He stared vaguely, discontentedly, in the direction of the windows. “But I shall never again consider myself even the remotest judge of human nature. You may quote me wildly on that.”

  “What happened?” Ginnie repeated.

  “Oh, God. This person who’s been sharing my apartment for months and months and months—I don’t even want to talk about him. . . . This writer,” he added with satisfaction, probably remembering a favorite anathema from a Hemingway novel.

  “What’d he do?”

  “Frankly, I’d just as soon not go into details,” said the young man. He took a cigarette from his own pack, ignoring a transparent humidor on the table, and lit it with his own lighter. His hands were large. They looked neither strong nor competent nor sensitive. Yet he used them as if they had some not easily controllable aesthetic drive of their own. “I’ve made up my mind that I’m not even going to think about it. But I’m just so furious,” he said. “I mean here’s this awful little person from Altoona, Pennsylvania—or one of those places. Apparently starving to death. I’m kind and decent enough—I’m the original Good Samaritan—to take him into my apartment, this absolutely microscopic little apartment that I can hardly move around in myself. I introduce him to all my friends. Let him clutter up the whole apartment with his horrible manuscript papers, and cigarette butts, and radishes, and whatnot. Introduce him to every theatrical producer in New York. Haul his filthy shirts back and forth from the laundry. And on top of it all—” The young man broke off. “And the result of all my kindness and decency,” he went on, “is that he walks out of the house at five or six in the morning—without so much as leaving a note behind—taking with him anything and everything he can lay his filthy, dirty han
ds on.” He paused to drag on his cigarette, and exhaled the smoke in a thin, sibilant stream from his mouth. “I don’t want to talk about it. I really don’t.” He looked over at Ginnie. “I love your coat,” he said, already out of his chair. He crossed over and took the lapel of Ginnie’s polo coat between his fingers. “It’s lovely. It’s the first really good camel’s hair I’ve seen since the war. May I ask where you got it?”

  “My mother brought it back from Nassau.”

  The young man nodded thoughtfully and backed off toward his chair. “It’s one of the few places where you can get really good camel’s hair.” He sat down. “Was she there long?”

  “What?” said Ginnie.

  “Was your mother there long? The reason I ask is my mother was down in December. And part of January. Usually I go down with her, but this has been such a messy year I simply couldn’t get away.”

  “She was down in February,” Ginnie said.

  “Grand. Where did she stay? Do you know?”

  “With my aunt.”

  He nodded. “May I ask your name? You’re a friend of Franklin’s sister, I take it?”

  “We’re in the same class,” Ginnie said, answering only his second question.

  “You’re not the famous Maxine that Selena talks about, are you?”

  “No,” Ginnie said.

  The young man suddenly began brushing the cuffs of his trousers with the flat of his hand. “I am dog hairs from head to foot,” he said. “Mother went to Washington over the weekend and parked her beast in my apartment. It’s really quite sweet. But such nasty habits. Do you have a dog?”

  “No.”

  “Actually, I think it’s cruel to keep them in the city.” He stopped brushing, sat back, and looked at his wristwatch again. “I have never known that boy to be on time. We’re going to see Cocteau’s ‘Beauty and the Beast’ and it’s the one film where you really should get there on time. I mean if you don’t, the whole charm of it is gone. Have you seen it?”

  “No.”

  “Oh, you must! I’ve seen it eight times. It’s absolutely pure genius,” he said. “I’ve been trying to get Franklin to see it for months.” He shook his head hopelessly. “His taste. During the war, we both worked at the same horrible place, and that boy would insist on dragging me to the most impossible pictures in the world. We saw gangster pictures, Western pictures, musicals—”

  “Did you work in the airplane factory, too?” Ginnie asked.

  “God, yes. For years and years and years. Let’s not talk about it, please.”

  “You have a bad heart, too?”

  “Heavens, no. Knock wood.” He rapped the arm of his chair twice. “I have the constitution of—”

  As Selena entered the room, Ginnie stood up quickly and went to meet her halfway. Selena had changed from her shorts to a dress, a fact that ordinarily would have annoyed Ginnie.

  “I’m sorry to’ve kept you waiting,” Selena said insincerely, “but I had to wait for Mother to wake up. . . . Hello, Eric.”

  “Hello, hello!”

  “I don’t want the money anyway,” Ginnie said, keeping her voice down so that she was heard only by Selena.

  “What?”

  “I’ve been thinking. I mean you bring the tennis balls and all, all the time. I forgot about that.”

  “But you said that because I didn’t have to pay for them—”

  “Walk me to the door,” Ginnie said, leading the way, without saying goodbye to Eric.

  “But I thought you said you were going to the movies tonight and you needed the money and all!” Selena said in the foyer.

  “I’m too tired,” Ginnie said. She bent over and picked up her tennis paraphernalia. “Listen. I’ll give you a ring after dinner. Are you doing anything special tonight? Maybe I can come over.”

  Selena stared and said, “O.K.”

  Ginnie opened the front door and walked to the elevator. She rang the bell. “I met your brother,” she said.

  “You did? Isn’t he a character?”

  “What’s he do, anyway?” Ginnie asked casually. “Does he work or something?”

  “He just quit. Daddy wants him to go back to college, but he won’t go.”

  “Why won’t he?”

  “I don’t know. He says he’s too old and all.”

  “How old is he?”

  “I don’t know. Twenty-four.”

  The elevator doors opened. “I’ll call you laterl” Ginnie said.

  Outside the building, she started to walk west to Lexington to catch the bus. Between Third and Lexington, she reached into her coat pocket for her purse and found the sandwich half. She took it out and started to bring her arm down, to drop the sandwich into the street, but instead she put it back into her pocket. A few years before, it had taken her three days to dispose of the Easter chick she had found dead on the sawdust in the bottom of her wastebasket.

  * * *

  The Laughing Man

  * * *

  In 1928, when I was nine, I belonged, with maximum esprit de corps, to an organization known as the Comanche Club. Every schoolday afternoon at three o’clock, twenty-five of us Comanches were picked up by our Chief outside the boys’ exit of P. S. 165, on 109th Street near Amsterdam Avenue. We then pushed and punched our way into the Chief’s reconverted commercial bus, and he drove us (according to his financial arrangement with our parents) over to Central Park. The rest of the afternoon, weather permitting, we played football or soccer or baseball, depending (very loosely) on the season. Rainy afternoons, the Chief invariably took us either to the Museum of Natural History or to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  Saturdays and most national holidays, the Chief picked us up early in the morning at our various apartment houses and, in his condemned-looking bus, drove us out of Manhattan into the comparatively wide open spaces of Van Cortlandt Park or the Palisades. If we had straight athletics on our minds, we went to Van Cortlandt, where the playing fields were regulation size and where the opposing team didn’t include a baby carriage or an irate old lady with a cane. If our Comanche hearts were set on camping, we went over to the Palisades and roughed it. (I remember getting lost one Saturday somewhere on that tricky stretch of terrain between the Linit sign and the site of the western end of the George Washington Bridge. I kept my head, though. I just sat down in the majestic shadow of a giant billboard and, however tearfully, opened my lunchbox for business, semi-confident that the Chief would find me. The Chief always found us.)

  In his hours of liberation from the Comanches, the Chief was John Gedsudski, of Staten Island. He was an extremely shy, gentle young man of twenty-two or -three, a law student at N.Y.U., and altogether a very memorable person. I won’t attempt to assemble his many achievements and virtues here. Just in passing, he was an Eagle Scout, an almost-All-America tackle of 1926, and it was known that he had been most cordially invited to try out for the New York Giants’ baseball team. He was an impartial and unexcitable umpire at all our bedlam sporting events, a master fire builder and extinguisher, and an expert, uncontemptuous first-aid man. Every one of us, from the smallest hoodlum to the biggest, loved and respected him.

  The Chief’s physical appearance in 1928 is still clear in my mind. If wishes were inches, all of us Comanches would have had him a giant in no time. The way things go, though, he was a stocky five three or four—no more than that. His hair was blue-black, his hair-line extremely low, his nose was large and fleshy, and his torso was just about as long as his legs were. In his leather windbreaker, his shoulders were powerful, but narrow and sloping. At the time, however, it seemed to me that in the Chief all the most photogenic features of Buck Jones, Ken Maynard, and Tom Mix had been smoothly amalgamated.

  Every afternoon, when it got dark enough for a losing team to have an excuse for missing a number of infield popups or end-zone passes, we Comanches relied heavily and selfishly on the Chief’s talent fo
r storytelling. By that hour, we were usually an overheated, irritable bunch, and we fought each other—either with our fists or our shrill voices—for the seats in the bus nearest the Chief. (The bus had two parallel rows of straw seats. The left row had three extra seats—the best in the bus—that extended as far forward as the driver’s profile.) The Chief climbed into the bus only after we had settled down. Then he straddled his driver’s seat backward and, in his reedy but modulated tenor voice, gave us the new installment of “The Laughing Man.” Once he started narrating, our interest never flagged. “The Laughing Man” was just the right story for a Comanche. It may even have had classic dimensions. It was a story that tended to sprawl all over the place, and yet it remained essentially portable. You could always take it home with you and reflect on it while sitting, say, in the outgoing water in the bathtub.

  The only son of a wealthy missionary couple, the Laughing Man was kidnapped in infancy by Chinese bandits. When the wealthy missionary couple refused (from a religious conviction) to pay the ransom for their son, the bandits, signally piqued, placed the little fellow’s head in a carpenter’s vise and gave the appropriate lever several turns to the right. The subject of this unique experience grew into manhood with a hairless, pecan-shaped head and a face that featured, instead of a mouth, an enormous oval cavity below the nose. The nose itself consisted of two flesh-sealed nostrils. In consequence, when the Laughing Man breathed, the hideous, mirthless gap below his nose dilated and contracted like (as I see it) some sort of monstrous vacuole. (The Chief demonstrated, rather than explained, the Laughing Man’s respiration method.) Strangers fainted dead away at the sight of the Laughing Man’s horrible face. Acquaintances shunned him. Curiously enough, though, the bandits let him hang around their headquarters—as long as he kept his face covered with a pale-red gossamer mask made out of poppy petals. The mask not only spared the bandits the sight of their foster son’s face, it also kept them sensible of his whereabouts; under the circumstances, he reeked of opium.

  Every morning, in his extreme loneliness, the Laughing Man stole off (he was as graceful on his feet as a cat) to the dense forest surrounding the bandits’ hideout. There he befriended any number and species of animals: dogs, white mice, eagles, lions, boa constrictors, wolves. Moreover, he removed his mask and spoke to them, softly, melodiously, in their own tongues. They did not think him ugly.