While Mortals Sleep: Unpublished Short Fiction

  “Yes,” said Annie, “I will.”

  “What kind of a man was he?”

  “What kind?” said Annie, standing reverently. “I never saw him. We just wrote to each other. He was a good, good man.”

  “What did he do that was good?”

  “He made me feel pretty,” said Annie. “I know what that’s like now.”

  “You know what he looked like?”

  “No. Not exactly.”

  “He was tall and broad shouldered, I hear. He had blue eyes and curly hair. That the way you imagined him?”

  “Oh, yes!” said Annie happily. “Exactly. I could tell.”

  The sun was setting when the one-eyed gnome drove into the cemetery, after having warned Annie about strangers and put her on the train. Tombstones cast long shadows across his way as he went once more to the lonely poet’s grave in the woods.

  He took Annie’s bouquet from the grave with a sigh.

  He drove back to his stone house, and put the flowers in water, in a vase on his desk. He touched off the fire laid in the fireplace, to drive out the early spring evening’s dampness, made himself a cup of coffee, and sat down to write, leaning forward to sniff Annie’s flowers as he did so.

  “My dear Mrs. Draper:” he wrote. “How strange that you, my pen pal and soul’s dearest friend, should be on a chicken farm in British Columbia, a beautiful land that I shall probably never see. No matter what you say about life in British Columbia, it must be very beautiful, for hasn’t it produced you? Please, please, please,” he wrote, and he grunted emphatically as he underlined the three words, “let us not descend to the vulgarity of, as I believe the phrase goes, ‘exchanging snaps.’ No photographer, save in Heaven, could ever take a picture of the angel that rises from your letters to blind me with adoration.”

  (illustration credit 10)

  TANGO

  Every job application form I fill out asks for a tabulation, with dates, of what I’ve done with my adult life so far, and tells me sternly to leave no periods unaccounted for. I would give a great deal for permission to leave out the last three months, when I served as a tutor in a village called Pisquontuit. Anyone writing my former employer there for an appraisal of my character would get his ears burnt off.

  On each application form there is a small blank section entitled remarks, where I might tell my side of the Pisquontuit story. But there seems little chance of anyone’s understanding my side if he hasn’t seen Pisquontuit. And the chances of an ordinary man’s seeing Pisquontuit are about the same as his chances for being dealt two spade royal flushes in a row.

  Pisquontuit is an Indian word said to mean “shining waters,” and is pronounced Ponit by the few privileged to know that the village exists. It is a secret assemblage of mansions by the sea. The entrance is unmarked, an unpromising lane leading from the main road into a forest of scrub pine. A guard lives in the forest by a turnaround on the lane, and he makes all cars that do not belong in Pisquontuit turn around and go back where they came from. The cars that belong in Pisquontuit are either very big ones or very little ones.

  I worked there as a tutor for Robert Brewer, an amiable, mildly fogbound young man who was preparing to take college entrance examinations and needed help.

  I think I can say without fear of contradiction that Pisquontuit was the most exclusive community in America. While I was there, a gentleman sold his house on the grounds that his neighbors were “a pretty stuffy bunch.” He went back to where he came from, Beacon Hill in Boston. My employer, Robert’s father, Herbert Clewes Brewer, spent most of his time between sailboat races writing indignant letters to Washington. He was indignant because every mansion in the village was shown on United States Geodetic Survey maps, which could be bought by just anybody.

  It was a quiet community. Its members had paid a handsome price for peace, and small ripples looked like tidal waves. At the heart of my troubles there was nothing more violent or barbaric than the tango.

  The tango, of course, is a dance of Spanish-American origin, usually in four-four time, and is distinguished by low dips and twisting steps on the toes. One Saturday night, at the weekly dance of the Pisquontuit Yacht Club, young Robert Brewer, my student, who had never even seen the tango performed in his eighteen years of life, began to dip lowly and twist his toes. His movements were tentative at first, as involuntary as shudders. Robert’s mind and face were blank when it happened. The heady Latin music wandered in through his ears, found nobody at home under his crew cut, and took command of his long, thin body.

  Something clicked, locking Robert in the machinery of the music. His partner, a plain, wholesome girl with three million dollars and a low center of gravity, struggled in embarrassment, and then, seeing the fierce look in Robert’s eyes, succumbed. The two became as one, a fast-moving one.

  It simply was not done in Pisquontuit.

  Dancing at Pisquontuit was an almost imperceptible shifting of weight from one foot to the other, with the feet remaining in place, from three to six inches apart. This seemly shifting of weight was all things to all music, samba, waltz, gavotte, fox-trot, bunny hug, or hokeypokey. No matter what new dance craze came along, Pisquontuit overpowered it easily. The ballroom could have been filled with clear gelatin to shoulder height without hampering the dancers. It could have been filled to a point just below the dancers’ nostrils, for that matter, for agreement on every subject was so complete that discussion had been reduced to a verbal shorthand resembling asthma.

  And there was Robert crossing and recrossing the ballroom floor like a Chris-Craft.

  No one paid the slightest attention to Robert and his partner as they careered and careened. This indifference was equivalent to breaking a man on the wheel or throwing him down the oubliette in other times and places. Robert had put himself in the same class with the poor devil in Pisquontuit history who put lampblack on the bottom of his sailboat, another who found out too late that no one ever went swimming before eleven in the morning, and another who could not break the habit of saying okey dokey on the telephone.

  When the music was over, Robert’s partner, flushed and rattled, excused herself, and Robert’s father joined him by the bandstand.

  When Mr. Brewer was angry, he thrust his tongue between his teeth and talked around it, withdrawing it only to make s sounds. “Good Lord, Bubs!” he said to Robert. “What do you think you are, a gigolo?”

  “I don’t know what happened,” said Robert, crimson. “I never did a dance right before, and I just kind of went crazy. Like flying.”

  “Consider yourself shot down in flames,” said Mr. Brewer. “This isn’t Coney Island, and it isn’t going to become Coney Island. Now go apologize to your mother.”

  “Yessir,” said Robert, shaken.

  “Looked like a damn flamingo playing soccer,” said Mr. Brewer. He nodded, pulled in his tongue, closed his teeth with a clack, and stalked away.

  Robert apologized to his mother and went straight home.

  Robert and I shared a suite, bathroom, sitting room, and two bedrooms, on the third floor of what was known as the Brewer cottage. Robert seemed to be asleep when I got home shortly after midnight.

  But at three in the morning I was awakened by soft music from the sitting room, and by the sounds of someone striding around in agitation. I opened my door and surprised Robert in the act of tangoing by himself. In the instant before he saw me, his nostrils were flaring and his eyes were narrowed, the smoldering eyes of a sheik.

  He gasped, turned off the phonograph, and collapsed on the couch.

  “Keep it up,” I said. “You were doing fine.”

  “I guess nobody’s as civilized as he’d like to think,” said Robert.

  “Lots of nice people tango,” I said.

  He clenched and unclenched his hands. “Cheap, asinine, grotesque!”

  “It isn’t supposed to look good,” I said. “It’s supposed to feel good.”

  “It isn’t done in Pisquontuit,” he said.

/>   I shrugged. “What’s Pisquontuit?”

  “I don’t mean to be impolite,” he said, “but you couldn’t possibly understand.”

  “I’ve been around long enough to see the sort of thing they get exercised about around here,” I said.

  “It’s very easy for you to make comments,” said Robert. “It’s easy to make fun of anything, if you don’t have any responsibilities.”

  “Responsibilities?” I said. “You’ve got responsibilities? For what?”

  Robert looked about himself moodily. “This—all this. Someday I’ll be taking all this over, presumably. You, you’re free as the air, to come and go as you please and laugh all you like.”

  “Robert!” I said. “It’s just real estate. If it depresses you, why, when you take it over, sell it.”

  Robert was shocked. “Sell it? My grandfather built this place.”

  “Fine bricklayer,” I said.

  “It’s a way of life that’s rapidly disappearing all over the world,” said Robert.

  “Farewell,” I said.

  “If Pisquontuit goes under,” said Robert gravely, “if we all abandon ship, who’s going to preserve the old values?”

  “What old values?” I said. “Being grim about tennis and sailing?”

  “Civilization!” he said. “Leadership!”

  “What civilization?” I said. “That book your mother keeps saying she’s going to read someday, if it kills her? And who around here leads anything anywhere?”

  “My great-grandfather,” said Robert, “was lieutenant governor of Rhode Island.”

  For want of a reply to this thunderclap, I started the phonograph, filling the room with the tango once more.

  There was a gentle knock on the door, and I opened it to find Marie, the young and beautiful upstairs maid, standing outside in her bathrobe.

  “I heard voices,” she said. “I thought maybe there were prowlers.” Her shoulders were moving gently in time with the music.

  I took her easily in my arms, and we tangoed together into the sitting room. “With every step,” I said to her, “we betray our lower-middle-class origins and drive the stake deeper into the heart of civilization.”

  “Huh?” said Marie, her eyes closed.

  I felt a hand on my shoulder. Robert, breathing shallowly and quickly, was cutting in.

  “After us the deluge,” I said, loading the record changer.

  Thus began Robert’s secret vice—and Marie’s, and mine. Almost every night the ritual was repeated. We would start the phonograph, Marie would come to investigate, and Marie and I would dance, with Robert looking on sullenly. Then Robert would rise painfully from his couch, like an arthritic old man, and take her from me wordlessly. It was the Pisquontuit equivalent of the Black Mass.

  In three weeks’ time, Robert was an excellent dancer and hopelessly in love with Marie.

  “How did it happen?” he said to me. “How could it?”

  “You are a man and she is a woman,” I said.

  “We’re utterly different,” he said.

  “Vive la utter difference,” I said.

  “What’ll I do, what’ll I do?” he said heartbrokenly.

  “Proclaim your love,” I said.

  “For a maid?” he said incredulously.

  “Royalty’s all gone or spoken for, Robert,” I said. “The descendants of the lieutenant governor of Rhode Island have no choice but to marry commoners. It’s like musical chairs.”

  “You’re not very funny,” said Robert bitterly.

  “Well, you can’t marry anybody in Pisquontuit, can you?” I said. “There’s been a guard in the woods for three generations, and now all the people inside are at least second cousins. The system carries the seeds of its own destruction, unless it’s willing to start mixing in chauffeurs and upstairs maids.”

  “There’s new blood coming in all the time,” said Robert.

  “He left,” I said. “He went back to Beacon Hill.”

  “Oh? I didn’t know that,” said Robert. “I don’t notice much of anything anymore but Marie.” He laid his hand on his chest. “This force,” he said, “it just does with you what it wants to do with you, makes you feel what it wants to make you feel.”

  “Steady, boy, steady,” I said, and I went to question Marie rather sharply as to whether she loved Robert or not.

  Over the noise of the vacuum cleaner, she gave me coy, equivocal answers. “I feel like I’d kind of created him,” she said, “starting with nothing.”

  “He says you’ve showed him the savage in himself,” I said.

  “That’s what I mean,” she said. “I don’t think there was any savage to begin with.”

  “What a pity,” I said, “after they’ve gone to so much expense keeping the savages out. If you married him, you’d have a very rich savage, you know.”

  “It’s just an incubator baby now,” she said wickedly.

  “Life is losing all meaning for Robert,” I said. “You don’t know what you’re doing to him. He’s stopped caring if he wins or loses at tennis and sailing.”

  As I spoke of another’s love and looked into the wide, blue windows of her soul, a rich, insistent yearning flooded my senses. “He can’t even manage a smile anymore when somebody pronounces Pisquontuit the way it’s spelled,” I murmured, my voice trailing off at the end.

  “I’m very sorry, I’m sure,” she said bewitchingly.

  I lost my head. I seized her by the wrist. “Do you love me?” I whispered hoarsely.

  “I might,” she said.

  “Do you or don’t you?”

  “It’s hard,” she said, “for a girl who’s been brought up to be friendly and affectionate to tell. Now let an honest girl get about her work.”

  I told myself that I had never seen such an honest and pretty girl in all my life, and went back to Robert a jealous rival.

  “I can’t eat, I can’t sleep,” he said.

  “Don’t cry on my shoulder,” I snapped. “Go talk to your father about it. Let him sympathize.”

  “God no!” he said. “What an idea!”

  “Have you ever talked to him about anything?” I said.

  “Well, for a while there, there was what he called getting to know the boy,” said Robert. “He used to set aside Wednesday nights for that, when I was little.”

  “All right,” I said, “you’ve got a precedent for talking to him. Recreate the spirit of those days.” I wanted him to get off the couch so I could lie down and stare at the ceiling.

  “Oh, we didn’t talk exactly,” said Robert. “The butler would come up to my room and set up a motion-picture projector, and then father would come up and run off Mickey Mouse for an hour. We just sat in the dark with the thing grinding away.”

  “As thick as thieves!” I said. “What brought an end to these emotional binges?”

  “A combination of things,” said Robert. “The war mostly. He was chief air-raid warden of Pisquontuit, in charge of the siren and all, and it took a lot out of him. And I got the hang of feeding the film through the spools and all myself.”

  “Kids mature early around here,” I said, contemplating a nice dilemma. It was my duty as tutor to make Robert a mature individual. Yet, his immaturity gave me my biggest advantage over him in our rivalry for Marie. After much thought, I devised a plan that promised to make Robert a man and deliver Marie into my arms free and clear.

  “Marie,” I said, catching her in the hall, “is it Robert or is it me?”

  “Shhhhh!” she said. “Keep your voice down. There’s a cocktail party downstairs, and sound carries right down the stairway.”

  “Wouldn’t you like to be taken away from all this?” I whispered.

  “Why?” she said. “I like the smell of furniture polish, I make more money than my girlfriend at the airplane factory, and I meet a very high class of people.”

  “I’m asking you to marry me, Marie,” I said. “I’d never be ashamed of you.”

  She took a ste
p backward. “Now, what made you say a mean thing like that? Who’s ashamed of me, I want to know?”

  “Robert,” I said. “He loves you, but his shame is bigger than his love.”

  “He’s glad enough to dance with me,” she said. “We have a lovely time.”

  “In private,” I said. “Do you think, for all your charms, he’d dance one step with you at the Yacht Club? In a pig’s eye.”

  “He would,” she said slowly, “if I wanted him to, if I really wanted him to.”

  “He’d rather die,” I said. “You’ve heard of closet drinkers? Well, you’ve got yourself a closet lover.”

  I left her with this annoying thought, and was gratified to see a challenging look in her eye when she came to dance late that night. She did nothing unusual, however, until Robert cut in. Ordinarily, she transferred from me to Robert without opening her eye or missing a step. This time she stopped, her eyes open wide.

  “What is this?” said Robert, dipping lowly and twisting his toes, while she stood as rigid as an iron post. “Something wrong?”

  “No,” said Marie in a brittle tone. “Why would you think there was something wrong?”

  Reassured, Robert started to dip and twist some more, but again failed to budge Marie.

  “There is something wrong,” he said.

  “Do you think I’m at all attractive, Robert?” said Marie coolly.

  “Attractive?” said Robert. “Attractive? Lord yes! I should say. I’ll tell the world.”

  “As attractive as any girl my age in Pisquontuit?”

  “More!” said Robert heartily, starting to dance again, and again getting nowhere. “Much more, much, much more,” he said, his movements subsiding.

  “And do I have good manners?”

  “The best!” said Robert, puzzled. “Absolutely the best, Marie.”

  “Then why don’t you take me to the next Yacht Club dance?” she said.

  Robert became as rigid as Marie. “To the Yacht Club?” he said. “To the Pisquontuit Yacht Club?”

  “That’s the one,” said Marie.

  “What she’s asking, Robert,” I said helpfully, “is, are you a man or a mouse? Are you going to take her to the Yacht Club dance, or does she go out of your life forever and into the airplane factory?”