Voices From the Street

  There was nothing lunatic-fringe about Succubus. He realized with growing wonder that this was designed to go into the best homes. In its own way, this was respectable. On an imported Philippine mahogany coffee table, beside an inlaid ashtray, a handsome lamp, Succubus would look lovely. It would grace the most tasteful living room.

  After the first shock, Hadley did a lot of thinking. Again and again he opened the folder and peeked in at the thick white packet of book-bond paper. A dollar. It looked like Fortune: a kind of political, artistic version. But it had no circulation. Probably it was distributed one copy at a time. This issue bore no date: undoubtedly, most of them were mailed out directly, not put on stands. He couldn’t imagine Succubus appearing on a newsstand.

  About two in the afternoon he began to wonder about Beckheim. What did this tell him about the Society? Not much. He couldn’t connect the People’s Watchman, the rows of kindly faces at the lecture, with this elegant publication. This had class, prestige. It wasn’t directed at the kind of people who had flocked to hear Beckheim.

  He understood, suddenly, what kind of world Dave and Laura lived in. With organized enemies ready to destroy them; and the Golds had been forced to go to one of these enemies for help. Delivered over to them: they had been helpless to resist. It was wrong; he knew how wrong it had been, that there was no other place they could go.

  The Golds hadn’t asked for this world, any more than he had. They had been born involuntarily. And now that they were here their presence was resented, as if they had somehow conspired to exist, as if their birth were part of some occult scheme. As if by being born and trying to live like everybody else, they were getting away with something. Managing to put over a dishonest enterprise.

  And the great exposers were only calling attention to the enterprise. By pointing at the Golds they proved the reality of the conspiracy. By being born, the Golds validated the theory. The Golds had only to occupy space and breathe air to offend the theorists. They had already demanded too much. The theorists had to reveal nothing more than that the Jews existed; that was sufficient. By showing that Jews could be found standing on street corners, or sitting in movie theaters, or driving buses, or telling jokes on the radio—wherever a Jew existed he proved the dogma of the theorist. Only by ceasing to exist was the Jew safe. Only by quickly dying could he erase the taint, the guilt of trying to survive.

  Thinking of this, Hadley saw how much the Golds were like himself. He had no place, either. But still he had no sympathy for them. Because he had no sympathy for himself. In a terrible deep-down way, all the way to the bottom of his soul, he despised them for being victims, as he despised himself for being a victim. He didn’t want to be like them. He didn’t want to be taken for one of them, one of the victimized group. He wanted to get out, climb above that.

  He was not content, as the Golds were. All they sought was to keep what little they had; they didn’t demand anything more. But he demanded more. And he loathed them for letting Sorrell walk over them. He loathed them for letting him walk over them.

  The Golds were the weak mute victimized image of himself, and in his rage, he was bursting out of that image. He couldn’t stand that image any longer—Stuart Hadley: victim. And Marsha Frazier, her image was becoming clear, too. She was another side of him, strong, calculating, ruthless, efficient. Knowing what she wanted, doing what she wanted. Letting nothing stop her. In him something responded. In him, something admired those things about her, her assurance, her unequivocal sense of self. He admired her—and he was frightened. He was rising to that specter-presence; he was moving that way.

  “What’s that you have there?” Fergesson demanded good-naturedly, appearing in front of him, hand extended. “Let’s see it.”

  Hadley blinked. Embarrassed, he stammered and stalled; he hadn’t seen Fergesson come up. “You wouldn’t be interested.”

  Fergesson stopped being amused. “I’m interested in anything you’re reading on my time.” He sensed guilty resistance. “What is it, a dirty magazine? Pictures of girls?”

  Hadley reluctantly handed Succubus over. Laying it out on the counter, Fergesson flipped the pages rapidly. “See?” Hadley said belligerently, his ears beginning to burn apprehensively. “I told you it wasn’t something you’d care about.”

  “Christ,” Fergesson said softly.

  “What’s the matter?”

  Fergesson’s face twisted with disgust. He dropped the magazine as if it were alive with vermin. “Where’d you get this garbage?”

  “Somebody gave it to me,” Hadley muttered evasively.

  An outraged, baleful expression on his face, Fergesson glared at him. “What is it about you? How do you do it?”

  Nettled, humiliated, Hadley muttered, “Do what?”

  “Good God…you always manage to get mixed up in something cracked. You have a knack. If there’s anything crazy, you’re in on it. You head straight for this nut stuff, don’t you? How do you manage it?”

  Trembling, Hadley retrieved his magazine. “What I read is my own business.” In a blind haze he shoved it back in its folder. “This is a free country; I can read what I want. You can’t stop me. You can’t keep me from reading this. Understand?”

  Shaking his head, his face stony, Fergesson strode off.

  Hadley did not take Succubus home. He stuck it away in the back closet, behind some old Atwater Kent display signs, where no one would find it.

  At home that night, he brooded about it. What was he getting himself into? Maybe Fergesson was right. It was easy to imagine Horace Wakefield carrying around a copy of Succubus, slipping it out of his coat to show to friends. Secretly confiding the articles to the select few he could trust. Having it ready as he sat in the Health Food Store eating his tapioca pudding and carrot salad. Like the article by G. B. Shaw on vaccination…more ammunition to be fired at the corrupt world.

  He could picture Wakefield delighting in the mystical knowledge of Jewish world power. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: if Wakefield knew about them, how pleased, how excited he would be!

  Ellen brought in a plate of melting vanilla ice cream she had churned up in the freezer of the refrigerator. “Stu,” she said, “what are you thinking about?”

  “Nothing,” he answered, accepting the ice cream.

  “Has—Fergesson said anything to you about buying that store? I think he’s really going through with it. From what Alice told me…”

  “No,” Hadley said shortly. “He hasn’t said anything.”

  The matter dropped, and he continued brooding. He was moving down a long corridor, the end of which was obscured from sight. And yet, this was why he had been attracted. It was new. It was not a warmed-over rehash of old things, stale routines repeated from his past. He had never before experienced a man like Theodore Beckheim. He had never met a woman like Marsha Frazier, or thumbed through Succubus. He didn’t even know what succubus meant.

  Getting a dictionary from the bookcase, he quickly looked it up. What he expected he didn’t know; in any case, he was surprised. Succubus: a male demon who assumes female form to tempt men from the virtuous path by having sexual intercourse with them during the night. The word came from the Latin succubare: to lie under. And from the Latin succuba: a whore. It was quite a title for a magazine. He closed the dictionary and put it away.

  The next day, Tuesday, he prepared his arrangements well in advance. “I’m meeting somebody for lunch,” he told Fergesson. “At noon—okay? I want to get out promptly.”

  Fergesson, checking over invoices, grunted and nodded without answering. As Hadley descended the stairs to the main floor he realized what a narrow rope he was walking: there were a dozen ways Ellen could find out. Fergesson might tell her. She might walk in the store looking for him while he was out with Marsha. Dave Gold might mention it to her. And so on.

  He was going to have to bring it out in the open—or forget the whole thing.

  While he was meditating about forgetting the whole thing, Mar
sha Frazier strolled into the store.

  As before, she wore slacks, tight-fitting and pocketless, a wide leather belt, a heavy checkered shirt. Her reddish, sandy hair was brushed back. She carried a gigantic leather briefcase under her arm. At the front counter she paused, glanced slowly around, and saw him.

  He hurried over. “Hello,” he said to her. “I got the magazine.”

  Thoughtfully, she nodded. “Are you able to leave the store?”

  Hadley rushed upstairs, told Fergesson he was leaving, got his coat, and rushed down the steps to the front of the store. Marsha had strolled back out again; she stood in the entrance, expressionless, clearly not wishing to waste time. He joined her breathlessly.

  “Where do you want to go?” he asked. It was just noon; people were starting to appear in quantity. “How about in here?” He indicated the Health Food Store. “Okay?”

  Marsha preceded him into the Health Food Store, a stately figure moving slowly toward the tables in the back. She glanced momentarily at the dried root and yam display, then plucked back the chair and seated herself. She was getting a package of cigarettes as Hadley awkwardly sat down across from her.

  Betty came wheezing over, her gray-dough face twisted into a grimacing smile. “Morning, Stuart.” She nodded to Marsha. “Good day, miss. Nice hot weather, don’t you think?”

  Hadley agreed. “Very nice.” Marsha said nothing.

  “There’s creamed chipped beef on toast,” Betty recited laboriously, “macaroni salad, green peas, and banana cream pudding.”

  “Just coffee,” Marsha said firmly.

  Hadley ordered the meal for himself, and off went Betty to give the order to the colored cook in back. Women were beginning to pour in, well dressed, heavyset, middle-aged. The cackle and bustle had begun.

  “What do you think of this place?” Hadley asked Marsha.

  “It’s interesting.” The expression on her face showed she was totally uninterested. “Did you have a chance to examine the magazine?”

  He answered: “Yes.” Without elaborating; he didn’t know what to say because he didn’t know how he felt. At this point he didn’t understand his own mind at all.

  “What did you think of it?” Calm, dispassionate. But a question that he was going to have to answer.

  Hadley fooled with the strap of his wristwatch. He studied the sugarless canned fruit displays that were stacked up to the ceiling behind Marsha, shelf after shelf of tasteless peaches, pears, plums, packed in water for diabetics. “I was surprised,” he said finally. “It wasn’t what I expected.”

  “What did you expect?”

  “I don’t know…a literary journal, maybe. Like our college quarterly.”

  Marsha smiled her thin, bloodless smile. Her face was skull-like, bony. Eyes set in deep hollows, dark shadow beneath the cold gray pupils. “No,” she agreed, “we’re not printing poems about Venice and short stories about abortions in North Carolina. It’s nice-looking, don’t you think? Good paper, good printing. The cover is five-color.”

  “I knew the cover looked unusual.”

  The food came, and Hadley began devouring it. Across from him Marsha sipped her coffee and stonily watched. “Did you have a chance to read any of the articles?” she asked.

  “No,” he answered, “I didn’t take it home. I left it at the store.”

  “Why?”

  He hesitated. He couldn’t answer her truthfully. “I forgot it,” he said instead. “I’ll take it home tonight.” He couldn’t help asking: “Is there any particular—reason? I mean, is there any rush?”

  It sounded wrong to him. But he was uncomfortably aware that he was being subjected to an inquisition; he didn’t like it. He felt that he had been tricked in some way; Succubus wasn’t what he had expected, and magazines should never contain surprises. In this simple, elemental manner, he was able to feel resentment; it neatly overbalanced his guilt. He tried to pretend that this concerned the business process of buying and selling; he told himself that he was facing a seller who had misrepresented her product. He felt an American indignation. And yet, at the same time, he knew that the situation was infinitely more complex; it wasn’t really a business transaction at all. Marsha wasn’t trying to sell him a copy of Succubus or even a subscription… She wasn’t trying to solicit funds from him. She was after something more greater.

  “This coffee is terrible,” Marsha said.

  “It’s not real. It’s bran meal, health-food stuff. No caffeine.”

  “Why not?”

  Hadley waved his hand. “You know—nothing stimulating. Nothing unnatural.”

  Marsha got to her feet and crossed the room to the counter. She returned a moment later with a glass of orange juice. Hadley watched with interest as she seated herself. She had carried the glass with grave intensity, as if it were a thing of importance.

  “You’re worse than I am,” Hadley said jokingly. “You take things too seriously.”

  “Do people tell you that?”

  “They tell me I should go to ball games. Have a good time. Stop worrying and thinking.”

  “Do you go to ball games?”

  “No.”

  Marsha nodded. “You’re not frivolous.”

  He hadn’t thought of it that way. “What do you mean?”

  “They’re out to enjoy themselves… That’s all they’re interested in. The whole mass thinks in terms of pleasure. They want excitement, artificial thrills. Amusement parks, fast auto races, baseball games, liquor…cheap sensations. They’re jaded, restless, bored.”

  “Yes,” Hadley said.

  “But these are symptoms. Only indications…not the cause. On Saturday night the kids wander the streets in packs, looking for something to fill their empty lives. Standing around drugstores, just waiting. Waiting for what? Five, six hours. What for? Girls go by…they just stare.”

  “They get in fights,” Hadley suggested. “I was reading an article in the Chronicle about the rise in juvenile delinquency.”

  “The fighting is a symptom, too. It’s a spontaneous return to a natural primitive combat. Going out in bands, like the ancient tribes. Fused together, loyal to each other, by blood oaths. Doing battle, the medieval concept of valor…virtue in the old Roman sense: manliness. The trial, the purification, metal against metal. You know Wagner? The forging of the sword Notung, from the pieces of the old, down in the smoky forges of the dwarf Mime.” She smiled at him over her glass of orange juice. “Down in the deep, dark caves under the surface of the ground, where Siegfried grew up…not knowing who he was, not knowing his father, his mother.”

  Fascinated, Hadley asked: “Who were his father and mother?”

  “His father was Siegmund, a survivor of the ancient warrior race…the Wälsungs. His mother was Sieglinde… Siegmund’s sister.”

  “Brother and sister?” Hadley asked huskily, his body suddenly taut, frozen in its motions of eating. “They—were married?”

  The cold gray eyes were fixed on him. “It’s an old myth. The Nibelungenlied. The Rheingold…the accursed symbol of all earthly power.”

  “Earthly power,” Hadley echoed slowly. He was spellbound. “It was cursed? Why?”

  “Because it was stolen. The lecherous dwarf Alberich stole it from the Rheinmaidens… He had hidden himself to watch them bathe. He stole the gold… They put a curse on it. Whoever owned the gold would be destroyed.”

  “Did it work out?” He was like a little boy at the lap of his mother, hanging on every word of her tales.

  “The dwarfs quarreled over the gold… The gods stole it from them, finally. Because of the gold the gods grew old and withered… They lost their virility.” Marsha sipped her orange juice and added matter-of-factly: “Of course, it’s been said that the dwarfs represent the Jews. Their greed for wealth and power. You know, in Goethe’s Faust, Mephistopheles represents the Jew. Tempting Faust from his destiny. Tempting him with the worldly kingdoms: the fleshly joys and pleasures we were just discussing.”

&
nbsp; There it was. His flesh turned cold as he heard her words. Because it was as if he were speaking, as if a portion of him were saying it. A terrible image of him had sprung out; there it sat, across from him, slim and smiling. Succubus—a male demon in female form. Yes, it was she. And it was himself, too.

  His dread grew…but he could not end the fascination. She said it aloud; but that portion of him that believed those things was afraid. It couldn’t speak out: it was too weak. It didn’t dare. In spite of himself, he still admired her.

  “You know,” he said hoarsely, “you’re vicious. Like a hawk, a bird of prey. I sit here listening because I can’t help it…because something in me responds.”

  “I know,” Marsha said evenly. “You do respond.”

  “And I know it’s wrong. I know it’s the vicious part of me, the part that wants to be strong and cruel. Like you—without feeling. Indifferent to others. To suffering and weakness. Contemptuous of weakness.”

  “You just don’t want to hear,” Marsha disagreed. “You’re afraid. It’s fear that makes you resist.”

  “No,” Hadley answered. “No, it’s conscience.”

  For a time Marsha reflected. “Once,” she said finally, “there was a little boy who stood in a parade and watched the king pass. The king had no clothes on. Everybody knew it, everybody saw it, everybody experienced it, but nobody could bring himself to say it aloud, because they had been taught it was a terrible thing to say. But the little boy went ahead and said it. And finally everybody had to say it, because they always knew it was true. They always said it privately. All those people standing there watching the king go by naked, and nobody said anything. Do you think it was better to say nothing? Do you think if a truth is unpleasant it shouldn’t be said?”