Joan never saw the thing, because she was asleep when I finally managed to get it into an envelope and into the mail. And there was no word from Bernie—or about him, between the two of us—for nearly a week. Then, at the same hour as his last visit, the frayed-out end of the day, our doorbell rang. I knew there was going to be trouble as soon as I opened the door and found him smiling there, with spatters of rain on his sweater, and I knew I wasn’t going to stand for any nonsense.
“Bob,” he said, sitting down, “I hate to say it, but I’m disappointed in you this time.” He pulled my folded manuscript out of his sweater. “This thing is—Bob, this is nothing.”
“It’s six and a half pages. That’s not nothing, Bernie.”
“Bob, please don’t give me six and a half pages. I know it’s six and a half pages, but it’s nothing. You made this man into a fool, Bob. You got him giving his dough away all the time.”
“You told me he gave dough, Bernie.”
“To the Puerto Rican kids I said yes, sure, maybe he could give a little, fine. And now you come along and you got him going around spending here like some kind of—some kind of drunken sailor or something.”
I thought I might be going to cry, but my voice came out very low and controlled. “Bernie, I did ask you what else he could do. I did tell you I didn’t know what the hell else he could do. If you wanted him to do something else, you should’ve made that clear.”
“But Bob,” he said, standing up for emphasis, and his next words have often come back to me as the final, despairing, everlasting cry of the Philistine. “Bob, you’re the one with the imagination!”
I stood up too, so that I could look down at him. I knew I was the one with the imagination. I also knew I was twenty-two years old and as tired as an old man, that I was about to lose my job, that I had a baby on the way and wasn’t even getting along very well with my wife; and now every cab driver, every two-bit politician’s pimp and phony bugler in the city of New York was walking into my house and trying to steal my money.
“Ten bucks, Bernie.”
He made a helpless gesture, smiling. Then he looked over into the kitchen area, where Joan was, and although I meant to keep my eyes on him, I must have looked there too, because I remember what she was doing. She was twisting a dish towel in her hands and looking down at it.
“Listen, Bob,” he said. “I shouldn’t of said it was nothing. You’re right! Who could take a thing six and a half pages long and say it’s nothing? Probably a lot of good stuff in this thing, Bob. You want your ten bucks; all right, fine, you’ll get your ten bucks. All I’m asking is this. First take this thing back and change it a little, that’s all. Then we can—”
“Ten bucks, Bernie. Now.”
His smile had lost its life, but it stayed right there on his face while he took the bill out of his wallet and handed it over, and while I went through a miserable little show of examining it to make goddamn sure it was a ten.
“Okay, Bob,” he said. “We’re all square, then. Right?”
“Right.”
Then he was gone, and Joan went swiftly to the door and opened it and called, “Goodnight, Bernie!”
I thought I heard his footsteps pause on the stairs, but I didn’t hear any answering “Goodnight” from him, so I guessed that all he’d done was to turn around and wave to her, or blow her a kiss. Then from the window I saw him move out across the sidewalk and get into his taxicab and drive away. All this time I was folding and refolding his money, and I don’t believe I’ve ever held anything in my hand that I wanted less.
The room was very quiet with only the two of us moving around in it, while the kitchen area steamed and crackled with the savory smells of a dinner that I don’t think either of us felt like eating. “Well,” I said. “That’s that.”
“Was it really necessary,” she inquired, “to be so dreadfully unpleasant to him?”
And this, at the time, seemed clearly to be the least loyal possible thing she could have said, the unkindest cut of all. “Unpleasant to him! Unpleasant to him! Would you mind telling me just what the hell I’m supposed to do? Am I supposed to sit around being ‘pleasant’ while some cheap, lying little parasitic leech of a cab driver comes in here and bleeds me white? Is that what you want? Huh? Is that what you want?”
Then she did what she often used to do at moments like that, what I sometimes think I’d give anything in life never to have seen her do: she turned away from me and closed her eyes and covered her ears with both hands.
Less than a week later the assistant financial editor’s hand did fall on my shoulder at last, right in the middle of a paragraph about domestic corporate bonds in moderately active trading.
It was still well before Christmas, and I got a job to tide us over as a demonstrator of mechanical toys in a Fifth Avenue dimestore. And I think it must have been during that dimestore period—possibly while winding up a little tin-and-cotton kitten that went “Mew!” and rolled over, “Mew!” and rolled over, “Mew!” and rolled over—it was along in there sometime, anyway, that I gave up whatever was left of the idea of building my life on the pattern of Ernest Hemingway’s. Some construction projects are just plain out of the question.
After New Year’s I got some other idiot job; then in April, with all the abruptness and surprise of spring, I was hired for eighty dollars a week as a writer in an industrial public-relations office, where the question of whether or not I knew what I was doing never mattered very much because hardly any of the other employees knew what they were doing either.
It was a remarkably easy job, and it allowed me to save a remarkable amount of energy each day for my own work, which all at once began to go well. With Hemingway safely abandoned, I had moved on to an F. Scott Fitzgerald phase; then, the best of all, I had begun to find what seemed to give every indication of being my own style. The winter was over, and things seemed to be growing easier between Joan and me too, and in the early summer our first daughter was born.
She caused a one- or two-month interruption in my writing schedule, but before long I was back at work and convinced that I was going from strength to strength: I had begun to bulldoze and dig and lay the foundation for a big, ambitious, tragic novel. I never did finish the book—it was the first in a series of more unfinished novels than I like to think about now—but in those early stages it was fascinating work, and the fact that it went slowly seemed only to add to its promise of eventual magnificence. I was spending more and more time each night behind my writing screen, emerging only to pace the floor with a headful of serene and majestic daydreams. And it was late in the year, all the way around to fall again, one evening when Joan had gone out to the movies, leaving me as baby-sitter, when I came out from behind the screen to pick up a ringing phone and heard: “Bob Prentice? Bernie Silver.”
I won’t pretend that I’d forgotten who he was, but it’s not too much to say that for a second or two I did have trouble realizing that I’d ever really worked for him—that I could ever really have been involved, at first hand, in the pathetic delusions of a taxicab driver. It gave me pause, which is to say that it caused me to wince and then to sheepishly grin at the phone, to duck my head and smooth my hair with my free hand in a bashful demonstration of noblesse oblige—this accompanied by a silent, humble vow that whatever Bernie Silver might want from me now, I would go out of my way to avoid any chance of hurting his feelings. I remember wishing Joan were home, so that she could witness my kindness.
But the first thing be wanted to know about was the baby. Was it a boy or a girl? Wonderful! And who did she look like? Well, of course, naturally, they never did look like anybody much at that age. And how did it feel to be a father? Huh? Feel pretty good? Good! Then he took on what struck me as a strangely formal, cap-holding tone, like that of a long-discharged servant inquiring after the lady of the house. “And how’s Mrs. Prentice?”
She had been “Joan” and “Joanie” and “Sweetheart” to him in his own home, and I somehow c
ouldn’t believe he’d forgotten her name; I could only guess that he hadn’t heard her call out to him on the stairs that night after all—that maybe, remembering only the way she’d stood there with her dish towel, he had even blamed her as the instigator of my own intransigence over the damned ten bucks. But all I could do now was to tell him she was fine. “And how’ve you people been, Bernie?”
“Well,” he said, “I’ve been all right,” and here his voice fell to the shocked sobriety of hospital-room conferences. “But I almost lost Rose, a couple of months back.”
Oh, it was okay now, he assured me, she was much better and home from the hospital and feeling well; but when he started talking about “tests” and “radiology” I had the awful sense of doom that comes when the unmentionable name of cancer hangs in the air.
“Well, Bernie,” I said, “I’m terribly sorry she’s been ill, and please be sure to give her our—”
Give her our what? Regards? Best wishes? Either one, it suddenly seemed to me, would carry the unforgivable taint of condescension. “Give her our love,” I said, and immediately chewed my lip in fear that this might sound the most condescending of all.
“I will! I will! I’ll certainly do that for you, Bob,” he said, and so I was glad I’d put it that way. “And now, what I called you about is this.” And he chuckled. “Oh, don’t worry, no politics. Here’s the thing. I’ve got this really terrifically talented boy working for me now, Bob. This boy’s an artist.”
And great God, what a sickly, intricate thing a writer’s heart is! Because do you know what I felt when he said that? I felt a twinge of jealousy. “Artist,” was he? I’d show them who the hell the artist was around this little writing establishment.
But right away Bernie started talking about “strips” and “layouts,” so I was able to retire my competitive zeal in favor of the old, reliable ironic detachment. What a relief!
“Oh, an artist, you mean. A comic-strip artist.”
“Right. Bob, you ought to see the way this boy can draw. You know what he does? He makes me look like me, but he makes me look a little bit like Wade Manley too. Do you get the picture?”
“It sounds fine, Bernie.” And now that the old detachment was working again, I could see that I’d have to be on my guard. Maybe he wouldn’t be needing any more stories—by now he probably had a whole credenzaful of manuscripts for the artist to work from—but he’d still be needing a writer to do the “continuity,” or whatever it’s called, and the words for the artist’s speech balloons, and I would now have to tell him, as gently and gracefully as possible, that it wasn’t going to be me.
“Bob,” he said, “this thing is really building. Dr. Corvo took one look at these strips and he said to me, ‘Bernie, forget the magazine business, forget the book business. You’ve found the solution.’”
“Well. It certainly does sound good, Bernie.”
“And Bob, here’s why I called. I know they keep you pretty busy down there at the UP, but I was wondering if you might have time to do a little—”
“I’m not working for the UP anymore, Bernie.” And I told him about the publicity job.
“Well,” he said. “That sounds like you’re really coming up in the world there, Bob. Congratulations.”
“Thanks. Anyway, Bernie, the point is I really don’t think I’d have time to do any writing for you just now. I mean I’d certainly like to, it isn’t that; it’s just that the baby does take up a lot of time here, and then I’ve got my own work going—I’m doing a novel now, you see—and I really don’t think I’d better take on anything else.”
“Oh. Well, okay, then, Bob; don’t worry about it. All I meant, you see, is that it really would’ve been a break for us if we could of made use of your—you know, your writing talent in this thing.”
“I’m sorry too, Bernie, and I certainly do wish you luck with it.”
You may well have guessed by now what didn’t occur to me, I swear, until at least an hour after I’d said goodbye to him: that this time Bernie hadn’t wanted me as a writer at all. He’d thought I was still at the UP, and might therefore be a valuable contact close to the heart of the syndicated comic-strip business.
I can remember exactly what I was doing when this knowledge came over me. I was changing the baby’s diaper, looking down into her round, beautiful eyes as if I expected her to congratulate me, or thank me, for having once more managed to avoid the terrible possibility of touching her skin with the point of the safety pin—I was doing that, when I thought of the way his voice had paused in saying, “We could of made use of your—”
During that pause he must have abandoned whatever elaborate building plans might still have lain in saying “your connections there at the UP” (and he didn’t know I’d been fired; for all he knew I might still have as many solid connections in the newspaper business as Dr. Corvo had in the child psychology field or Wade Manley had in the movies), and had chosen to finish it off with “your writing talent” instead. And so I knew that for all my finicking concern over the sparing of Bernie’s feelings in that telephone conversation, it was Bernie, in the end, who had gone out of his way to spare mine.
I can’t honestly say that I’ve thought very much about him over the years. It might be a nice touch to tell you that I never get into a taxicab without taking a close look at the driver’s neck and profile, but it wouldn’t be true. One thing that is true, though, and it’s just now occurred to me, is that very often in trying to hit on the right wording for some touchy personal letter, I’ve thought of: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter today, so I had to write you a long one instead.”
Whether I meant it or not when I wished him luck with his comic strip, I think I started meaning it an hour later. I mean it now, whole-heartedly, and the funny part is that he might still be able to build it into something, connections or not. Sillier things than that have built empires in America. At any rate I hope he hasn’t lost his interest in the project, in one form or another; but more than anything I hope to God—and I’m not swearing this time—I hope to whatever God there may be that he hasn’t lost Rose.
Reading all this over, I can see that it hasn’t been built very well. Its beams and joists, its very walls are somehow out of kilter; its foundation feels weak; possibly I failed to dig the right kind of hole in the ground in the first place. But there’s no point in worrying about such things now, because it’s time to put the roof on it—to bring you up to date on what happened to the rest of us builders.
Everybody knows what happened to Wade Manley. He died unexpectedly a few years later, in bed; and the fact that it was the bed of a young woman not his wife was considered racy enough to keep the tabloids busy for weeks. You can still see reruns of his old movies on television, and whenever I see one I’m surprised all over again to find that he was a good actor—much too good, I expect, ever to have gotten caught in any cornball role as a cab driver with a heart as big as all outdoors.
As for Dr. Corvo, there was a time when everybody knew what happened to him too. It happened in the very early fifties, whichever year it was that the television companies built and launched their most massive advertising campaigns. One of the most massive of all was built around a signed statement by Dr. Alexander Corvo, eminent child psychologist, to the effect that any boy or girl in our time whose home lacked a television set would quite possibly grow up emotionally deprived. Every other child psychologist, every articulate liberal, and very nearly every parent in the United States came down on Alexander Corvo like a plague of locusts, and when they were done with him there wasn’t an awful lot of eminence left. Since then, I’d say offhand that the New York Times would give you half a dozen Alexander Corvos for a single Newbold Morris any day of the week.
That takes the story right on up to Joan and me, and now I’ll have to give you the chimney top. I’ll have to tell you that what she and I were building collapsed too, a couple of years ago. Oh, we’re still friendly—no legal battles over alim
ony, or custody, or anything like that—but there you are.
And where are the windows? Where does the light come in?
Bernie, old friend, forgive me, but I haven’t got the answer to that one. I’m not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house. Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship, and if that’s the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.
FROM
Liars in Love
Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired
WHEN FRANKLIN D. ROOSEVELT was President-elect there must have been sculptors all over America who wanted a chance to model his head from life, but my mother had connections. One of her closest friends and neighbors, in the Greenwich Village courtyard where we lived, was an amiable man named Howard Whitman who had recently lost his job as a reporter on the New York Post. And one of Howard’s former colleagues from the Post was now employed in the press office of Roosevelt’s New York headquarters. That would make it easy for her to get in—or, as she said, to get an entrée—and she was confident she could take it from there. She was confident about everything she did in those days, but it never quite disguised a terrible need for support and approval on every side.
She wasn’t a very good sculptor. She had been working at it for only three years, since breaking up her marriage to my father, and there was still something stiff and amateurish about her pieces. Before the Roosevelt project her specialty had been “garden figures”—a life-size little boy whose legs turned into the legs of a goat at the knees and another who knelt among ferns to play the pipes of Pan; little girls who trailed chains of daisies from their upraised arms or walked beside a spread-winged goose. These fanciful children, in plaster painted green to simulate weathered bronze, were arranged on homemade wooden pedestals to loom around her studio and to leave a cleared space in the middle for the modeling stand that held whatever she was working on in clay.