For Esmé, With Love and Squalor Read online

  After another inning, the light got bad for fielding. The game was called, and we started picking up all the equipment. The last good look I had at Mary Hudson, she was over near third base crying. The Chief had hold of the sleeve of her beaver coat, but she got away from him. She ran off the field onto the cement path and kept running till I couldn’t see her any more.

  The Chief didn’t go after her. He just stood watching her disappear. Then he turned around and walked down to home plate and picked up our two bats; we always left the bats for him to carry. I went over to him and asked if he and Mary Hudson had had a fight. He told me to tuck my shirt in.

  Just as always, we Comanches ran the last few hundred feet to the place where the bus was parked, yelling, shoving, trying out strangleholds on each other, but all of us alive to the fact that it was again time for “The Laughing Man.” Racing across Fifth Avenue, somebody dropped his extra or discarded sweater, and I tripped over it and went sprawling. I finished the charge to the bus; but the best seats were taken by that time and I had to sit down in the middle of the bus. Annoyed at the arrangement, I gave the boy sitting on my right a poke in the ribs with my elbow, then faced around and watched the Chief cross over Fifth. It was not yet dark out, but a five-fifteen dimness had set in. The Chief crossed the street with his coat collar up, the bats under his left arm, and his concentration on the street. His black hair, which had been combed wet earlier in the day, was dry now and blowing. I remember wishing the Chief had gloves.

  The bus, as usual, was quiet when he climbed in—as proportionately quiet, at any rate, as a theatre with dimming house lights. Conversations were finished in a hurried whisper or shut off completely. Nonetheless, the first thing the Chief said to us was “All right, let’s cut out the noise, or no story.” In an instant, an unconditional silence filled the bus, cutting off from the Chief any alternative but to take up his narrating position. When he had done so, he took out a handkerchief and methodically blew his nose, one nostril at a time. We watched him with patience and even a certain amount of spectator’s interest. When he had finished with his handkerchief, he folded it neatly in quarters and replaced it in his pocket. He then gave us the new installment of “The Laughing Man.” From start to finish, it lasted no longer than five minutes.

  Four of Dufarge’s bullets struck the Laughing Man, two of them through the heart. When Dufarge, who was still shielding his eyes against the sight of the Laughing Man’s face, heard a queer exhalation of agony from the direction of the target, he was overjoyed. His black heart beating wildly, he rushed over to his unconscious daughter and brought her to. The pair of them, beside themselves with delight and coward’s courage, now dared to look up at the Laughing Man. His head was bowed as in death, his chin resting on his bloody chest. Slowly, greedily, father and daughter came forward to inspect their spoils. Quite a surprise was in store for them. The Laughing Man, far from dead, was busy contracting his stomach muscles in a secret manner. As the Dufarges came into range, he suddenly raised his face, gave a terrible laugh, and neatly, even fastidiously, regurgitated all four bullets. The impact of this feat on the Dufarges was so acute that their hearts literally burst, and they dropped dead at the Laughing Man’s feet. (If the installment was going to be a short one anyway, it could have ended there; the Comanches could have managed to rationalize the sudden death of the Dufarges. But it didn’t end there.) Day after day, the Laughing Man continued to stand lashed to the tree with barbed wire, the Dufarges decomposing at his feet. Bleeding profusely and cut off from his supply of eagles’ blood, he had never been closer to death. One day, however, in a hoarse but eloquent voice, he appealed for help to the animals of the forest. He summoned them to fetch Omba, the lovable dwarf. And they did. But it was a long trip back and forth across the Paris-Chinese border, and by the time Omba arrived on the scene with a medical kit and a fresh supply of eagles’ blood, the Laughing Man was in a coma. Omba’s very first act of mercy was to retrieve his master’s mask, which had blown up against Mlle. Dufarge’s vermin-infested torso. He placed it respectfully over the hideous features, then proceeded to dress the wounds.

  When the Laughing Man’s small eyes finally opened, Omba eagerly raised the vial of eagles’ blood up to the mask. But the Laughing Man didn’t drink from it. Instead, he weakly pronounced his beloved Black Wing’s name. Omba bowed his own slightly distorted head and revealed to his master that the Dufarges had killed Black Wing. A peculiar and heart-rending gasp of final sorrow came from the Laughing Man. He reached out wanly for the vial of eagles’ blood and crushed it in his hand. What little blood he had left trickled thinly down his wrist. He ordered Omba to look away, and, sobbing, Omba obeyed him. The Laughing Man’s last act, before turning his face to the bloodstained ground, was to pull off his mask.

  The story ended there, of course. (Never to be revived.) The Chief started up the bus. Across the aisle from me, Billy Walsh, who was the youngest of all the Comanches, burst into tears. None of us told him to shut up. As for me, I remember my knees were shaking.

  A few minutes later, when I stepped out of the Chief’s bus, the first thing I chanced to see was a piece of red tissue paper flapping in the wind against the base of a lamppost. It looked like someone’s poppy-petal mask. I arrived home with my teeth chattering uncontrollably and was told to go right straight to bed.

  * * *

  Down at the Dinghy

  * * *

  It was a little after four o’clock on an Indian Summer afternoon. Some fifteen or twenty times since noon, Sandra, the maid, had come away from the lake-front window in the kitchen with her mouth set tight. This time as she came away, she absently untied and re-tied her apron strings, taking up what little slack her enormous waistline allowed. Then she went back to the enamel table and lowered her freshly uniformed body into the seat opposite Mrs. Snell. Mrs. Snell having finished the cleaning and ironing was having her customary cup of tea before walking down the road to the bus stop. Mrs. Snell had her hat on. It was the same interesting, black felt headpiece she had worn, not just all summer, but for the past three summers—through record heat waves, through change of life, over scores of ironing boards, over the helms of dozens of vacuum cleaners. The Hattie Carnegie label was still inside it, faded but (it might be said) unbowed.

  “I’m not gonna worry about it,” Sandra announced, for the fifth or sixth time, addressing herself as much as Mrs. Snell. “I made up my mind I’m not gonna worry about it. What for?”

  “That’s right,” said Mrs. Snell. “I wouldn’t. I really wouldn’t. Reach me my bag, dear.”

  A leather handbag, extremely worn, but with a label inside it as impressive as the one inside Mrs. Snell’s hat, lay on the pantry. Sandra was able to reach it without standing up. She handed it across the table to Mrs. Snell, who opened it and took out a pack of mentholated cigarettes and a folder of Stork Club matches.

  Mrs. Snell lit a cigarette, then brought her teacup to her lips, but immediately set it down in its saucer. “If this don’t hurry up and cool off, I’m gonna miss my bus.” She looked over at Sandra, who was staring, oppressedly, in the general direction of the copper sauce-pans lined against the wall. “Stop worryin’ about it,” Mrs. Snell ordered. “What good’s it gonna do to worry about it? Either he tells her or he don’t. That’s all. What good’s worryin’ gonna do?”

  “I’m not worryin’ about it,” Sandra responded. “The last thing I’m gonna do is worry about it. Only, it drives ya loony, the way that kid goes pussyfootin’ all around the house. Ya can’t hear him, ya know. I mean nobody can hear him, ya know. Just the other day I was shellin’ beans—right at this here table—and I almost stepped on his hand. He was sittin’ right under the table.”

  “Well. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

  “I mean ya gotta weigh every word ya say around him,” Sandra said. “It drives ya loony.”

  “I still can’t drink this,” Mrs. Snell said. “. . . That’s terrible. When ya
gotta weigh every word ya say and all.”

  “It drives ya loony! I mean it. Half the time I’m half loony.” Sandra brushed some imaginary crumbs off her lap, and snorted. “A four-year-old kid!”

  “He’s kind of a good-lookin’ kid,” said Mrs. Snell. “Them big brown eyes and all.”

  Sandra snorted again. “He’s gonna have a nose just like the father.” She raised her cup and drank from it without any difficulty. “I don’t know what they wanna stay up here all October for,” she said malcontentedly, lowering her cup. “I mean none of ’em even go anywheres near the water now. She don’t go in, he don’t go in, the kid don’t go in. Nobody goes in now. They don’t even take that crazy boat out no more. I don’t know what they threw good money away on it for.”

  “I don’t know how you can drink yours. I can’t even drink mine.”

  Sandra stared rancorously at the opposite wall. “I’ll be so gladda get backa the city. I’m not foolin’. I hate this crazy place.” She gave Mrs. Snell a hostile glance. “It’s all right for you, you live here all year round. You got your social life here and all. You don’t care.”

  “I’m gonna drink this if it kills me,” Mrs. Snell said, looking at the clock over the electric stove.

  “What would you do if you were in my shoes?” Sandra asked abruptly. “I mean what would you do? Tella truth.”

  This was the sort of question Mrs. Snell slipped into as if it were an ermine coat. She at once let go her teacup. “Well, in the first place,” she said, “I wouldn’t worry about it. What I’d do, I’d look around for another—”

  “I’m not worried about it,” Sandra interrupted.

  “I know that, but what I’d do, I’d just get me—”

  The swinging door opened from the dining room and Boo Boo Tannenbaum, the lady of the house, came into the kitchen. She was a small, almost hipless girl of twenty-five, with styleless, colorless, brittle hair pushed back behind her ears, which were very large. She was dressed in knee-length jeans, a black turtleneck pullover, and socks and loafers. Her joke of a name aside, her general unprettiness aside, she was—in terms of permanently memorable, immoderately perceptive, small-area faces—a stunning and final girl. She went directly to the refrigerator and opened it. As she peered inside, with her legs apart and her hands on her knees, she whistled, unmelodically, through her teeth, keeping time with a little uninhibited, pendulum action of her rear end. Sandra and Mrs. Snell were silent. Mrs. Snell put out her cigarette, unhurriedly.

  “Sandra . . .”

  “Yes, ma’am?” Sandra looked alertly past Mrs. Snell’s hat.

  “Aren’t there any more pickles? I want to bring him a pickle.”

  “He et ’em,” Sandra reported intelligently. “He et ’em before he went to bed last night. There was only two left.”

  “Oh. Well, I’ll get some when I go to the station. I thought maybe I could lure him out of that boat.” Boo Boo shut the refrigerator door and walked over to look out of the lake-front window. “Do we need anything else?” she asked, from the window.

  “Just bread.”

  “I left your check on the hall table, Mrs. Snell. Thank you.”

  “O.K.,” said Mrs. Snell. “I hear Lionel’s supposeta be runnin’ away.” She gave a short laugh.

  “Certainly looks that way,” Boo Boo said, and slid her hands into her hip pockets.

  “At least he don’t run very far away,” Mrs. Snell said, giving another short laugh.

  At the window, Boo Boo changed her position slightly, so that her back wasn’t directly to the two women at the table. “No,” she said, and pushed back some hair behind her ear. She added, purely informatively: “He’s been hitting the road regularly since he was two. But never very hard. I think the farthest he ever got—in the city, at least—was to the Mall in Central Park. Just a couple of blocks from home. The least far—or nearest—he ever got was to the front door of our building. He stuck around to say goodbye to his father.”

  Both women at the table laughed.

  “The Mall’s where they all go skatin’ in New York,” Sandra said very sociably to Mrs. Snell. “The kids and all.”

  “Oh!” said Mrs. Snell.

  “He was only three. It was just last year,” Boo Boo said, taking out a pack of cigarettes and a folder of matches from a side pocket in her jeans. She lit a cigarette, while the two women spiritedly watched her. “Big excitement. We had the whole police force out looking for him.”

  “They find him?” said Mrs. Snell.

  “Sure they found him!” said Sandra with contempt. “Wuddaya think?”

  “They found him at a quarter past eleven of night, in the middle of—my God, February, I think. Not a child in the park. Just muggers, I guess, and an assortment of roaming degenerates. He was sitting on the floor of the bandstand, rolling a marble back and forth along a crack. Half-frozen to death and looking—”

  “Holy Mackerel!” said Mrs. Snell. “How come he did it? I mean what was he runnin’ away about?”

  Boo Boo blew a single, faulty smoke-ring at a pane of glass. “Some child in the park that afternoon had come up to him with the dreamy misinformation, ‘You stink, kid.’ At least, that’s why we think he did it. I don’t know, Mrs. Snell. It’s all slightly over my head.”

  “How long’s he been doin’ it?” asked Mrs. Snell. “I mean how long’s he been doin’ it?”

  “Well, at the age of two-and-a-half,” Boo Boo said biographically, “he sought refuge under a sink in the basement of our apartment house. Down in the laundry. Naomi somebody—a close friend of his—told him she had a worm in her thermos bottle. At least, that’s all we could get out of him.” Boo Boo sighed, and came away from the window with a long ash on her cigarette. She started for the screen door. “I’ll have another go at it,” she said, by way of goodby to both women.

  They laughed.

  “Mildred,” Sandra, still laughing, addressed Mrs. Snell, “you’re gonna miss your bus if ya don’t get a move on.”

  Boo Boo closed the screen door behind her.

  She stood on the slight downgrade of her front lawn, with the low, glaring, late afternoon sun at her back. About two hundred yards ahead of her, her son Lionel was sitting in the stem seat of his father’s dinghy. Tied, and stripped of its main and jib sails, the dinghy floated at a perfect right angle away from the far end of the pier. Fifty feet or so beyond it, a lost or abandoned water ski floated bottom up, but there were no pleasure boats to be seen on the lake; just a stern-end view of the county launch on its way over to Leech’s Landing. Boo Boo found it queerly difficult to keep Lionel in steady focus. The sun, though not especially hot, was nonetheless so brilliant that it made any fairly distant image—a boy, a boat—seem almost as wavering and refractional as a stick in water. After a couple of minutes, Boo Boo let the image go. She peeled down her cigarette Army style, and then started toward the pier.

  It was October, and the pier boards no longer could hit her in the face with reflected heat. She walked along whistling “Kentucky Babe” through her teeth. When she reached the end of the pier, she squatted, her knees audible, at the right edge, and looked down at Lionel. He was less than an oar’s length away from her. He didn’t look up.

  “Ahoy,” Boo Boo said. “Friend. Pirate. Dirty dog. I’m back.”

  Still not looking up, Lionel abruptly seemed called upon to demonstrate his sailing ability. He swung the dead tiller all the way to the right, then immediately yanked it back in to his side. He kept his eyes exclusively on the deck of the boat.

  “It is I,” Boo Boo said. “Vice-Admiral Tannenbaum. Née Glass. Come to inspect the stermaphors.”

  There was a response.

  “You aren’t an admiral. You’re a lady,” Lionel said. His sentences usually had at least one break of faulty breath control, so that, often, his emphasized words, instead of rising, sank. Boo Boo not only listened to his voice, she se
emed to watch it.

  “Who told you that? Who told you I wasn’t an admiral?”

  Lionel answered, but inaudibly.

  “Who?” said Boo Boo.

  “Daddy.”

  Still in a squatting position, Boo Boo put her left hand through the V of her legs, touching the pier boards in order to keep her balance. “Your daddy’s a nice fella,” she said, “but he’s probably the biggest landlubber I know. It’s perfectly true that when I’m in port I’m a lady—that’s true. But my true calling is first, last, and always the bounding—”

  “You aren’t an admiral,” Lionel said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You aren’t an admiral. You’re a lady all the time.”

  There was a short silence. Lionel filled it by changing the course of his craft again—his hold on the tiller was a two-armed one. He was wearing khaki-colored shorts and a clean, white T-shirt with a dye picture, across the chest, of Jerome the Ostrich playing the violin. He was quite tanned, and his hair, which was almost exactly like his mother’s in color and quality, was a little sun-bleached on top.

  “Many people think I’m not an admiral,” Boo Boo said, watching him. “Just because I don’t shoot my mouth off about it.” Keeping her balance, she took a cigarette and matches out of the side pocket of her jeans. “I’m almost never tempted to discuss my rank with people. Especially with little boys who don’t even look at me when I talk to them. I’d be drummed out of the bloomin’ service.” Without lighting her cigarette, she suddenly got to her feet, stood unreasonably erect, made an oval out of the thumb and index finger of her right hand, drew the oval to her mouth, and—kazoo style—sounded something like a bugle call. Lionel instantly looked up. In all probability, he was aware that the call was bogus, but nonetheless he seemed deeply aroused; his mouth fell open. Boo Boo sounded the call—a peculiar amalgamation of “Taps” and “Reveille”—three times, without any pauses. Then, ceremoniously, she saluted the opposite shoreline. When she finally reassumed her squat on the pier edge, she seemed to do so with maximum regret, as if she had just been profoundly moved by one of the virtues of naval tradition closed to the public and small boys. She gazed out at the petty horizon of the lake for a moment, then seemed to remember that she was not absolutely alone. She glanced—venerably—down at Lionel, whose mouth was still open. “That was a secret bugle call that only admirals are allowed to hear.” She lit her cigarette, and blew out the match with a theatrically thin, long stream of smoke. “If anybody knew I let you hear that call—” She shook her head. She again fixed the sextant of her eye on the horizon.