“Dru, I know this may sound like pedantic speak but allow me to say that there should be inaugurated as soon as possible in this town a devout society dedicated against the total indifference to the erosion of the human spirit. Enormous amounts of which are clearly present in your own heart.”
“I must kiss you for saying that. I must. Just a peck.”
Stephen O’Kelly’O taking his leave, formally bowing to Dru at the elevator door, kissing her hand in the European manner as clock chimes on two different clocks rang ten. Nightlife in New York starts to wake up. Not that the day life ever dies. Departing empty-handed. Tempted as I was to have stuffed a few of the delicious canapés into my pocket. And to have put my arms enveloping around her. The sound of the elevator coming. And the warm inner nature of this woman. As she suddenly rises on her toes, leaning forward to again kiss me on the brow. So close. Smelling so sweet. So welcome to the nose. As there is no worse or more unforgettable smell on a battleship than cordite and the stink of half a dozen sweating men.
Stephen O’Kelly’O walking with a limp along Fifty-seventh Street. Go by, one after another, the massive apartment houses. Somber with their many windows. And spaciously spaced inside where souls dwell, self-existing on private incomes. Doorways with their doormen stationed within. Suspicious eyes peering out. And I go step by step across this tall city. Passing a pharmacy and a discount store selling rugs, paintings. A hardware store selling locks. Another selling brass bathroom fittings, that the citizens struggle to own. A dark dingy brick building there with no windows but has a sign.
INTERBOROUGH
RAPID TRANSIT CO.
SUB STATION NO. 42
The pedestrians thicken westward across First, Second, Third, Lexington, and Madison avenues. And in this city of fervent aspirations, finally to Fifth Avenue the geographical center of wealth. And farther on where it begins to fade, turning into the stone bow-fronted elevation of Horn and Hardart. This old faithful emporium for the cheap square meal. For a dollar bill getting change of twenty nickels strewn out on the worn piece of marble. Twenty times you can read “United States of America. Liberty.” A buffalo bent ready to charge on one side and the noble profile of an American Indian on the other. And the settlers beat the holy shit out of both. But when plugging enough nickels in the slot, a hamburger, glass of milk and piece of blueberry pie come out.
My old pal seen last time I was here is now over there, halfway across the room, collecting his usual dregs of coffee, cup by cup, and with what looks like a script of some kind tucked under his arm. Gives me an acknowledging smile as he ladles out the ketchup on a goodly sized scrap of bread and munches away. Amazing how one can so immediately recognize a kindred spirit. Even though everyone is pulling his prick in this city and shooting each other with guns and stabbing people with knives, it’s still, with its flowing heaving tides of raw humanity, a wonderful democracy. And with a vengeance capable of leading to murder, everyone free to despise, resent and hate everyone else.
Thought of Drusilla all the way back to Pell Street, subway noise roaring in the ears. The faint blue veins of her hands, long-fingered and strong. A glittering bracelet covered in diamonds on both her wrists. Turn now to catch a peek at the rogue’s gallery of somber faces across the aisle. Each one looking as if he’s committed a recent murder or is about to get murdered. Although I had to rake up leaves and cut grass, I had a thirty-five-cents-a-week allowance and poor old Dru had nothing. But in my present poverty there is a vast chasm between our lives. The poor who want advantages and the rich, who don’t want to be taken advantage of. And her wealth, married as she is, wearing her golden handcuffs. Linked and locked up to a rich, rich man. Sampling her luxury makes the confines of Pell Street feel ever more gloomy. And dangerous. As later that night, Aspasia called again. Asked if I got the recording of her singing she’d left against the wall downstairs under the mailbox. I said I’d go and see and that it would be a miracle if it hadn’t been stolen. Said she told her boyfriend I lived on the corner of Fifth and East Sixty-first Street. She knew it was a house she had walked past many a time when she worked wheeling out an old man down the street, and which always looked empty. And now the boyfriend was foaming at the mouth to get there, with a knife longer than she had ever seen before. God help anyone answering the door without a baseball bat to knock the fucker on the head.
As a good citizen, I skipped downstairs, found the record, and went out and made an anonymous call to the police. Mayhem expected at Fifth and Sixty-first. Crazed, berserk, mentally ill and frenzied man rabid and foaming at mouth, armed with a big knife and screaming he is going to commit murder. Please try to save the lives of all the decent people you can. Then I returned to the apartment slightly happier, indeed delighted that justice might be served on Fifth Avenue and Sixty-first Street and put Aspasia’s record on the phonograph. And listened. My God. The exquisite beauty of the melodic golden sonority so purely rising from her throat. A voice reminiscent of the great Russian sopranos. What if they don’t get this son of a bitch and I were ever conducting and she were a soloist at St. Bartholomew’s. Dru and her husband there. And Sylvia on the steps outside, smoking cannabis and snorting cocaine up her nose. Then Aspasia’s boyfriend, if he hasn’t already been arrested by a couple of dozen policemen jumping out of half a dozen squad cars, rushes in with a war cry and foaming at the mouth, charges up the aisle with a knife. My back turned, he has his stiletto raised ready to plunge in between my shoulder blades. The congregation knows I’m a Roman Catholic, so none of these Episcopalian Protestants will deign come to my rescue. And because of the thunderous voices of the chorus, no one hears folk shouting, “Hey, conductor, watch out.”
Waking this next morning in Pell Street unstabbed, alive, and hungry. The sun briefly out from behind the taller buildings shone as it did for exactly eleven minutes on the bed before it disappeared for good for the rest of the day. Exhausted by my dreams of a Steinway somewhere out in the wilds of Montana, I lay between the yellowing sheets and went back to sleep without anything to eat. At lunchtime, resurrecting to go out to buy my matters of survival, a bagel, cream cheese, an orange, and splurged on a croissant and the Daily News. Brewed some coffee in the old percolator, a comforting sound as the dark liquid spurts up. And then as I sipped my first cup, I turned over the newspaper to the front page and nearly keeled over in a faint. There a picture of a marauder brandishing a nine-inch knife and surrounded by a dozen police, guns drawn. Son of a bitch black bastard looked like a giant. With an equally massive headline.
MENTALLY DISTURBED MAN
ATTACKS FIFTH AVENUE MANSION
It was as if the whole world now knew everything about my life and that on any line as I read down the page, my name Alfonso Stephen O’Kelly’O would be revealed. Aspasia’s boyfriend luckily described as incoherent and disarmed after a struggle, was apprehended by the police, arrested, and arraigned. And he could finally be brought to prison on Rikers Island just up the East River and through Hell’s Gate, only a short canoe ride from Dru’s. And I could have been playing my minuet to send him on his way. A sort of tickling sensation to be at last part of the conspicuous activity in this city, even as a remote root cause, and maybe not so remote and safe, from some mad son of a bitch trying to kill you.
Spread open on the kitchen table I read the caption and the brief story a dozen times. Some black bastard gets a knife and goes out to kill a white bastard and in less than five-minutes activity gets his picture all over the newspaper. While I struggle for months to get a tiny plug for my minuet for immediate release, maybe in a parish magazine. And the only recognition I have to show is my name published on my mailbox. To take immediate delivery of an electricity bill. It’s the pigeons who have the best time in this city. Flying where they want. Roosting and cooing and shitting from on high all over the goddamn place. And just as I was imagining hearing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 2 in my mind, the phone rang. Sending a shiver through me. Because I owe the phone bill. Pic
k it up. Wait for a growl. Or now an interrogation by the police. And hearing the Chicago drawl of a familiar voice, sigh with relief.
“Hiya kid, old buddy. Remember me. It’s your old friend Maximilian. I was best man at your wedding. Gee, I almost hung up, thinking it was a wrong number. You sound suspicious.”
“Hello, good friend.”
“Gee, that’s better. Sorry to hear about Sylvia but she gave me the number. Ran into her in, of all places, the lobby of the Waldorf-Astoria. You know, where a guest can still arrive in his private railway car. Hey, and I guess you heard all about me and Ertha.”
I had heard. But not the whole story. Old Max divorced by his first wife because he was broke without prospects, she then didn’t waste time trying to take him for all he was worth, which Max pleaded was nothing at the time except for a vintage Bentley. And then he became instantly more considerably rich as he immediately had married Sylvia’s pal Ertha after a whirlwind romance. The newlyweds then moved southwest to enjoy a dalliance in a severely affluent suburban clime located in Houston, Texas, where Ertha’s father was an oil magnate who readily assisted his very affably charming new son-in-law in making his way around in the corporate jungle of petroleum. And buying them a wedding present of a spacious house with coffered cathedral ceilings in a fancy district with two acres, four-car garage, five and half bathrooms, swimming pool and a cook and maid in attendance.
“Gee pal and old buddy boy, all went fine and swell for a while out on the old cocktail terrace until a comedy of unpremeditated imbroglios ensued, the unbelievable happenstance of which you could not ever in your wildest fears conceive.”
It transpired that old Max who, it had to be admitted, couldn’t control his sexual appetite and would, as the opportunity presented, jump in the nicest possible way on anything that moved and even a few that didn’t, had screwed someone else’s wife after a football game in a kiosk adjoining someone’s tennis court. The event of this alleged intercourse hit the local headlines when a robber, trying to rob the house next door with the owners away, got ripped apart and killed by two Doberman pinschers. Old Max and the beauteous lady, a multimillionaire’s spouse, discovered present on the other side of the fence, were called as material witnesses. And Max’s quote—“Hey gee, we were playing backgammon when we heard all this barking and then screams. We thought it was someone kibitzing about and having fun.” Nobody believed, including the judge, that they were merely playing backgammon. But the judge at least said they weren’t on trial. However, Houston society decided they were, and the scandal suddenly found Max out of a job, minus his twenty-four suits and three cars and, after a divorce, out of a marriage and without a roof over his head which literally happened overnight, for, added to his woes, the cuckholded husband put out a contract on his life, effective if he wasn’t out of Houston by sundown.
“That’s right old pal, pronto I beat it back to New York. But I wasn’t the one who first cheated. All that happened old pal after another story. Anyway, I drove the whole way back east in my old Bentley, the top down, the wind blowing through my hair. Later I find out old Ertha is all the time fucking an old flame. A two-hundred-and-fifty-pound linebacker on a professional football team, who gave her a venereal infection she gave to me, is how I first suspected what was going on. But wait till we meet and I tell you the rest of the story.”
Old Max, who himself came from Evanston, Illinois, on Lake Michigan and a fairly affluent family and was fond of reminding me in the navy that Evanston had the highest percentage of college graduates of any big town in the United States. He had old-fashioned ideas of behavior and etiquette amounting nearly to prudishness, not surprising, as Evanston was also the national headquarters of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union of which his mother was an important member. He said he was disgusted by the kind of betrayal involving Ertha’s past lover. Which embarrassed hell out of him having to go back home to visit his family doctor and milk down his prick just as they did at a short-arm inspection in the navy when some medic was examining suspected cases of a contagious inflammatory disease of the genitourinary tract. Max in his own act of unfaithfulness, maintaining that he was only just yielding to a brief temptation, led on by a woman in heat, whom it would have been grossly ungentlemanly to rebuff. Sure, he could get his own back on Ertha, but what the hell, life was too short. He wasn’t going to yield to any low-down retaliatory behavior, no matter how much he was provoked. And even as he was at the moment monstrously provoked by the monstrous amount of alimony he was sentenced to pay. Having now that he was back east, got himself a slot downtown in a brokerage house at better than a decent salary, a membership in a fancy athletic club, and had taken over the lease on Ertha’s old rented apartment on Waverly Place in the Village, from which Ertha was presently trying to evict him, and which he had now filled with his collection of seashells and plants.
“Well old buddy boy, I guess I’m truly back in this town with its ten thousand major attractions. Gee, come and see me, old pal. I could do with a real friend. After Ertha and I divorced, I thought, Gee, she’s already rich and doesn’t need any money and suddenly now I have lawyers breathing down my neck for accumulated maintenance, with threats that they will end me up in alimony jail. I admit I had it kind of good out there in Texas, and her family was the reason. But now I feel I’m being taken unfair advantage of. You soon find out what a woman’s really like when they get lawyers and get you into court. And it takes the poor bastard for everything he’s got. And if you can find any other better way to make him suffer, do that too. Sort of brings on a paranoia. You begin thinking that no one on this goddamn earth can be trusted. You even find you’re looking for an excuse to hate people. That’s why it’ll be so goddamn good to see you pal. I’m taking the afternoon off. Why don’t you on Friday come to afternoon tea. Scones at teatime and all that goes with them. You know these nice old customs they got in old England help to keep you sane in a city like this. And maybe it’s a good thing I don’t live far from the Women’s House of Detention to remind me of the foibles of the female. Gee pal, it will be great to see you.”
Meanwhile another naval pal I knew who knew Max said it seemed old Max had in addition to his vintage Bentley, taken to wearing tweeds and become very English in both his accent and attitude, including flying the Atlantic several times to check up on having a pair of shotguns made by a famed London gunsmith. Also he’d headed to Georgia for numerous quail shoots, that is when he wasn’t making himself familiar with certain factions of the British landed gentry with whom he took up while indulging brief bouts of foxhunting. And I recalled his fastidiousness and complaints in the navy about the constant vulgar language. And then to find him uncharacteristically wearing nearly skintight tailor-made bell-bottoms which he said sent the girls nuts when he went back home on leave. And was just like a West Virginian we both knew aboard ship, who also on leave, was so mobbed by waiting women when he got off the train that they tore off his uniform and left him on the platform in his skivvies, until the strongest girl rescued him and took him home to screw him insane as he said, but left him just sane enough to fuck again.
Friday dawned sunny. With winter over, a mild breeze blowing up grit and dust in the eyes. And taking a bus north and forgetting to get off at the stop for Waverly Place, I had to walk back downtown again. And as would happen, past the Women’s House of Detention, a grim edifice seeming to stand like an island of feminine horror at the crossroads of Greenwich and Sixth avenues. There, high up at the windows, were wild jeering faces screaming out between the bars, voices raucous and vulgar shouting down into the street.
“Hey Romeo, let me suck your cock, if you’ve got one, while my girlfriend in here sticks her tongue up my ass.”
One shakes a fist up at these unseemly women, but then in instant retaliation, suffers just some more shockingly vulgar discourtesy and ill behavior, which one has so reluctantly become accustomed to in this town. You hear such vile invective coming out of a woman’s mouth, you
kind of wonder what normal women are harboring in their brains. But at least in the Villagey atmosphere here, there are a few trees. And unlike nearly all the rest of New York, convening streets slanting in different directions. Turn left. A vegetable store. Next to it, a Chinese laundry. Mother and father in there around the clock sweating over hot irons while the sons and daughters are at Ivy League colleges, their nose stuck in books. This is it. Right here. At these stone steps. The engraved name above a bell. Press. Wait. Hear a buzzer. Push open the door. Climb up stairs. At the top stands Maximilian Avery Gifford Strutherstone III, grinning in a yellow cashmere sweater. How do I know it’s a cashmere sweater. I don’t. But on Max it sure looks like one. And on his feet highly polished mahogany loafers and thick fluffy sweat socks. Growing up, we kids had a name for it—“studied casualness in dress.”
“Gee pal, old buddy, this is a great treat. How are you doing.”
“I’m fine, Max. How are you doing.”
“Well, today I’m doing fine. Fine. Come in. It’s so damn good to see you.”
With a sweep of his arm, Max ushering one in. Under the leaves of palm plants to sit drinking Lapsang souchong and biting into the warmth of scones fresh from the oven and deliciously slathered with clotted cream and black cherry jam. All everywhere neat and clean. His shell collection in a display cabinet. A blue parrot in a cage. The floors polished. College pennants on the walls. Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Colgate, the latter located mid–New York State where, Max after the war, came back east to go to college.