“You’d better start making my spring practice reservations. I gave you my itinerary of practice camps, didn’t I?”
“Yes, sir. By the way, I have some letters for you to sign. I had to write a letter to Abelman’s Dry Goods. We always have trouble with them.”
“I know. What do those crooks want now?”
“Abelman claims that the last lot of trousers we shipped him were only two feet long in the leg. I’m trying to straighten out the matter.”
“Yeah? Well, stranger things have happened around this place,” Mr. Levy said quickly. The office was already beginning to depress him. He had to get out. “Better check with that foreman in the factory. What’s his name? Look, suppose you sign those letters like always. I have to go.” Mr. Levy pulled the door open. “Don’t work these kids too hard, Gonzalez. So long, Miss Trixie. My wife asked about you.”
Miss Trixie was sitting on the floor relacing one of her sneakers.
“Miss Trixie,” Mr. Gonzalez screamed. “Mr. Levy is talking to you.”
“Who?” Miss Trixie snarled. “I thought you said he was dead.”
“I hope that you will see some vast changes the next time that you drop in on us,” Ignatius said. “We are going to revitalize, as it were, your business.”
“Okay. Take it easy,” Mr. Levy said and slammed the door.
“He’s a wonderful man,” Mr. Gonzalez told Ignatius fervently. From a window the two watched Mr. Levy get into his sports car. The motor roared, and Mr. Levy sped away within a few seconds, leaving a settling cloud of blue exhaust.
“Perhaps I shall get to the filing,” Ignatius said when he found himself staring out the window at only an empty street. “Will you please sign that correspondence so that I can file the carbon copies. It should now be safe to approach what that rodent has left of the Abelman folder.”
Ignatius spied while Mr. Gonzalez, painstaking, forged Gus Levy to the letters.
“Mr. Reilly,” Mr. Gonzalez said, carefully screwing the top onto his two-dollar pen, “I am going into the factory to speak with the foreman. Please keep an eye on things.”
By things, Ignatius imagined that Mr. Gonzalez meant Miss Trixie, who was snoring loudly on the floor in front of the file cabinet.
“Seguro,” Ignatius said and smiled. “A little Spanish in honor of your noble heritage.”
As soon as the office manager went through the door, Ignatius rolled a sheet of Levy stationery into Mr. Gonzalez’s high black typewriter. If Levy Pants was to succeed, the first step would be imposing a heavy hand upon its detractors. Levy Pants must become more militant and authoritarian in order to survive in the jungle of modern commercialism. Ignatius began to type the first step:
Abelman’s Dry Goods
Kansas City, Missouri
U. S. A.
Mr. I. Abelman, Mongoloid, Esq.:
We have received via post your absurd comments about our trousers, the comments revealing, as they did, your total lack of contact with reality. Were you more aware, you would know or realize by now that the offending trousers were dispatched to you with our full knowledge that they were inadequate so far as length was concerned.
“Why? Why?” you are in your incomprehensible babble, unable to assimilate stimulating concepts of commerce into your retarded and blighted worldview.
The trousers were sent to you (1) as a means of testing your initiative (A clever, wide-awake business concern should be able to make three-quarter length trousers a by-word of masculine fashion. Your advertising and merchandising programs are obviously faulty.) and (2) as a means of testing your ability to meet the standards requisite in a distributor of our quality product. (Our loyal and dependable outlets can vend any trouser bearing the Levy label no matter how abominable their design and construction. You are apparently a faithless people.)
We do not wish to be bothered in the future by such tedious complaints. Please confine your correspondence to orders only. We are a busy and dynamic organization whose mission needless effrontery and harassment can only hinder. If you molest us again, sir, you may feel the sting of the lash across your pitiful shoulders.
Yours in anger,
Gus Levy, Pres.
Happily pondering the thought that the world understood only strength and force, Ignatius copied the Levy signature onto the letter with the office manager’s pen, tore up Mr. Gonzalez’s letter to Abelman, and slipped his own into the correspondence Outgoing box. Then he tiptoed carefully around the little inert figure of Miss Trixie, returned to the filing department, picked up the stack of still unfiled material, and threw it into the wastebasket.
*
“Hey, Miss Lee, that fat mother got him the green cap, he comin in here anymore?”
“No, thank God. It’s characters like that ruin your investment.”
“When your little orphan frien comin here again? Whoa! I like to fin out what goin on with them orphan. I bet they be the firs orphan the po-lice be interes in ever.”
“I told you I send the orphans things. A little charity never hurt nobody. It makes you feel good.”
“That really soun like Night of Joy chariddy when them orphan payin in a lotta money for whatever they gettin.”
“Stop worrying about the orphans and start worrying about my floor. I got enough problems already. Darlene wants to dance. You want a raise. And I got worse problems on top of that.” Lana thought of the plainclothesmen who had suddenly started to appear in the club late at night. “Business stinks.”
“Yeah. I can tell that. I starvin to death in this cathouse.”
“Say, Jones, you been over to the precinct lately?” Lana asked cautiously, wondering whether there was an outside chance that Jones might be leading the cops to the place. This Jones was turning out to be a headache, in spite of the low salary.
“No, I ain been visitin all my po-lice frien. I waitin till I get some good evidence.” Jones shot out a nimbus formation. “I waitin for a break in the orphan case. Ooo-wee!”
Lana twisted up her coral lips and tried to imagine who had tipped off the police.
*
Mrs. Reilly could not believe that it had really happened to her. There was no television. There were no complaints. The bathroom was empty. Even the roaches seemed to have pulled up stakes. She sat at the kitchen table sipping a little muscatel and blew away the one baby roach that was starting to cross the table. The tiny body flew off the table and disappeared, and Mrs. Reilly said, “So long, darling.” She poured another inch of wine, realizing for the first time that the house smelled different, too. It smelled as close as it ever did, but her son’s curious personal odor, which always reminded her of the scent of old tea bags, seemed to have lifted. She lifted her glass and wondered whether Levy Pants was beginning to reek a little of used pekoe.
Suddenly Mrs. Reilly remembered the horrible night that she and Mr. Reilly had gone to the Prytania to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow in Red Dust. In the heat and confusion that had followed their return home, nice Mr. Reilly had tried one of his indirect approaches, and Ignatius was conceived. Poor Mr. Reilly. He had never gone to another movie as long as he lived.
Mrs. Reilly sighed and looked at the floor to see whether the baby roach was still around and functioning. She was in too pleasant a mood to harm anything. While she was studying the linoleum, the telephone rang in the narrow hall. Mrs. Reilly corked her bottle and put it in the cold oven.
“Hello,” she said into the telephone.
“Hey, Irene?” a woman’s hoarse voice asked. “What you doing, babe? It’s Santa Battaglia.”
“How you making, honey?”
“I’m beat. I just finished opening four dozen ersters out in the backyard,” Santa said in her rocky baritone. “That’s hard work, believe me, banging that erster knife on them bricks.”
“I wouldn’t try nothing like that,” Mrs. Reilly said honestly.
“I don’t mind. When I was a little girl I use to open ersters up for my momma. She had her
a little seafood stand outside the Lautenschlaeger Market. Poor momma. Right off the boat. Couldn’t speak a word of English hardly. There I was just a little thing breaking them ersters open. I didn’t go to no school. Not me, babe. I was right there with them ersters banging away on the banquette. Every now and then momma start banging away on me for something. We always had a lotta commotion around our stand, us.”
“Your momma was very excitable, huh?”
“Poor girl. Standing there in the rain and cold with her old sunbonnet on not knowing what nobody was saying half the time. It was hard in them days, Irene. Things was tough, kid.”
“You can say that again,” Mrs. Reilly agreed. “We sure had us some hard times down on Dauphine Street. Poppa was very poor. He had him a job by a wagon works, but then the automobiles come in, and he gets his hand caught in a fanbelt. Many’s the week we lived on red beans and rice.”
“Red beans gives me gas.”
“Me, too. Listen, Santa, why you called, sugar?”
“Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. You remember when we was out bowling the other night?”
“Tuesday?”
“No, it was Wednesday, I think. Anyway, it was the night Angelo got arrested and couldn’t come.”
“Wasn’t that awful. The police arresting one of they very own.”
“Yeah. Poor Angelo. He’s so sweet. He sure got trouble at that precinct.” Santa coughed hoarsely into the telephone. “Anyway, it was the night you come for me in that car of yours and we went to the alley alone. This morning I was over by the fish market buying them ersters, and this old man comes up to me and says, ‘Wasn’t you by the bowling alley the other night?’ So I says, ‘Yeah, mister, I go there a lot.’ And he says, ‘Well, I was there with my daughter and her husband and I seen you with a lady got sorta red hair.’ I says, ‘You mean the lady got the henna hair? That’s my friend Miss Reilly. I’m learning her how to bowl.’ That’s all, Irene. He just tips his hat and walks out the market.”
“I wonder who that could be,” Mrs. Reilly said with great interest. “That’s sure funny. What he looks like, babe?”
“Nice man, kinda old. I seen him around the neighborhood before taking some little kids to Mass. I think they his granchirren.”
“Ain’t that strange? Who’d be asking about me?”
“I don’t know, kid, but you better watch out. Somebody’s got they eye on you.”
“Aw, Santa! I’m too old, girl.”
“Listen to you. You still cute, Irene. I seen plenty men giving you the eye in the bowling alley.”
“Aw, go on.”
“That’s the truth, kid. I ain’t lying. You been stuck away with that son of yours too long.”
“Ignatius says he’s making good at Levy Pants,” Mrs. Reilly said defensively. “I don’t wanna get mixed up with no old man.”
“He ain’t that old,” Santa said, sounding a little hurt. “Listen, Irene, me and Angelo coming by for you about seven tonight.”
“I don’t know, darling. Ignatius been telling me I oughta stay home more.”
“Why you gotta stay home, girl? Angelo says he’s a big man.”
“Ignatius says he’s afraid when I leave him alone here at night. He says he’s scared of burgulars.”
“Bring him along, and Angelo can learn him how to bowl, too.”
“Whoo! Ignatius ain’t what you’d call the sporting type,” Mrs. Reilly said quickly.
“You come along anyways, huh?”
“Okay,” Mrs. Reilly said finally. “I think the exercise is helping my elbow out. I’ll tell Ignatius he can lock himself up in his room.”
“Sure,” Santa said. “Nobody’s gonna hurt him.”
“We ain’t got nothing worth stealing anyways. I don’t know where Ignatius gets them ideas of his.”
“Me and Angelo be by at seven.”
“Fine, and listen, precious, try and ask by the fish market who that old man is.”
*
The Levy home stood among the pines on a small rise overlooking the gray waters of Bay St. Louis. The exterior was an example of elegant rusticity; the interior was a successful attempt at keeping the rustic out entirely, a permanently seventy-five-degree womb connected to the year-round air-conditioning unit by an umbilicus of vents and pipes that silently filled the rooms with filtered and reconstituted Gulf of Mexico breezes and exhaled the Levys’ carbon dioxide and cigarette smoke and ennui. The central machinery of the great life-giving unit throbbed somewhere in the acoustically tiled bowels of the home, like a Red Cross instructor giving cadence in an artificial respiration class, “In comes the good air, out goes the bad air, in comes the good air.”
The home was as sensually comfortable as the human womb supposedly is. Every chair sank several inches at the lightest touch, foam and down surrendering abjectly to any pressure. The tufts of the acrylic nylon carpets tickled the ankles of anyone kind enough to walk on them. Beside the bar what looked like a radio dial would, upon being turned, make the lighting throughout the house as mellow or as bright as the mood demanded. Located throughout the house within easy walking distance of one another were contour chairs, a massage table, and a motorized exercising board whose many sections prodded the body with a motion that was at once gentle yet suggestive. Levy’s Lodge—that was what the sign at the coast road said—was a Xanadu of the senses; within its insulated walls there was something that could gratify anything.
Mr. and Mrs. Levy, who considered each other the only ungratifying objects in the home, sat before their television set watching the colors merge together on the screen.
“Perry Como’s face is all green,” Mrs. Levy said with great hostility. “He looks like a corpse. You’d better take this set back to the shop.”
“I just brought it back from New Orleans this week,” Mr. Levy said, blowing on the black hairs of his chest that he could see through the V of his terry cloth robe. He had just taken a steam bath and wanted to dry himself completely. Even with year-round air conditioning and central heating one could never be sure.
“Well, take it back again. I’m not going to go blind looking at a broken TV.”
“Oh, shut up. He looks all right.”
“He does not look all right. Look how green his lips are.”
“It’s the makeup those people use.”
“You mean to tell me they put green makeup on Como’s lips?”
“I don’t know what they do.”
“Of course you don’t,” Mrs. Levy said, turning her aquamarine-lidded eyes toward her husband, who was submerged somewhere among the pillows of a yellow nylon couch. She saw some terry cloth and a rubber shower clog at the end of a hairy leg.
“Don’t bother me,” he said. “Go play with your exercising board.”
“I can’t get on that thing tonight. My hair was done today.”
She touched the high plasticized curls of her platinum hair.
“The hairdresser told me that I should get a wig, too,” she said.
“What do you want with a wig? Look at all the hair you’ve got already.”
“I want a brunette wig. That way I can change my personality.”
“Look, you’re already a brunette anyway, right? So why don’t you let your hair grow out naturally and buy a blonde wig?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
“Well, think about it for a while and keep quiet. I’m tired. When I went into town today I stopped at the company. That always makes me depressed.”
“What’s happening there?”
“Nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
“That’s what I thought,” Mrs. Levy sighed. “You’ve thrown your father’s business down the drain. That’s the tragedy of your life.”
“Christ, who wants that old factory? Nobody’s buying the kind of pants they make anymore. That’s all my father’s fault. When pleats came in in the thirties, he wouldn’t change over from plain-front trousers. He was the Henry Ford of the garment industry. Then when the pl
ain front came back in the fifties, he started making trousers with pleats. Now you should see what Gonzalez calls ‘the new summer line.’ They look like those balloon pants the clowns wear in circuses. And the fabric. I wouldn’t use it for a dishrag myself.”
“When we were married, I idolized you, Gus. I thought you had drive. You could have made Levy Pants really big. Maybe even an office in New York. It was handed all to you and you threw it away.”
“Oh, stop all that crap. You’re comfortable.”
“Your father had character. I respected him.”
“My father was a very mean and cheap man, a little tyrant. I had some interest in that company when I was young. I had plenty interest. Well, he destroyed all that with his tyranny. So far as I’m concerned, Levy Pants is his company. Let it go down the drain. He blocked every good idea I had for that firm just to prove that he was the father and I was the son. If I said, ‘Pleats,’ he said, ‘No pleats! Never!’ If I said, ‘Let’s try some of the new synthetics,’ he said, ‘Synthetics over my dead body.’”
“He started peddling pants in a wagon. Look what he built that into. With your start you could have made Levy Pants nationwide.”
“The nation is lucky, believe me. I spent my childhood in those pants. Anyway, I’m tired of listening to you talk. Period.”
“Good. Let’s keep quiet. Look, Como’s lips are turning pink.”
“You’ve never been a father figure to Susan and Sandra.”
“The last time Sandra was home, she opened her purse to get cigarettes and a pack of rubbers falls on the floor right at my feet.”
“That’s what I’m trying to say to you. You never gave your daughters an image. No wonder they’re so mixed up. I tried with them.”
“Listen, let’s not discuss Susan and Sandra. They’re away at college. We’re lucky we don’t know what’s going on. When they get tired they’ll marry some poor guy and everything will be all right.”
“Then what kind of a grandfather are you going to be?”