Voices From the Street

  “Yes,” Hadley said. “My wife and I live down there.” He sensed and gratefully appreciated the friendliness of the man. But he knew, at the same time, that Beckheim’s attention was forced; that any moment it might be broken off. That any moment it was going to end, and never resume.

  “You have children?” Beckheim asked.

  “Yes. A boy. Pete.” Hadley fumbled automatically in his coat pocket, his fingers eager and rushed. Then he changed his mind, conscious of the time slipping away. “He’s only a month or so old.”

  “How long have you been married?” Beckheim asked.

  “Several years.” At this moment, he wasn’t sure how long.

  “What line of work are you in?”

  “I’m a salesman.” Reluctantly, with much trepidation, he admitted: “Television sets.”

  Beckheim pondered, glanced over at Marsha with an expression Hadley could not read, and then asked: “Are you a churchgoer?”

  With difficulty Hadley admitted: “No. I’m not.”

  “What faith is your family?”

  “Protestant.”

  Beckheim smiled gently, understandingly. “We’re all Protestants, Mister Hadley. I meant, what portion of the Protestant faith does your family belong to?”

  “I don’t know. Some kind of Congregationalists.”

  “Modernists?”

  “Yes.”

  After a moment Beckheim asked: “Did you come up here to see me?”

  “Yes,” Hadley answered. He tried to put his feelings into the word; he tried to put across how much it meant to him.

  “Why?”

  Hadley’s mouth opened, but he could not think of what to say. He felt too strongly; all he could do was mutely shake his head.

  Eyes still on Hadley, the great Negro softly asked: “Are you ill, Mister Hadley?”

  Gratefully, Hadley rushed to answer. “Yes. Very ill.” He gazed down at the floor, shaking and terrified.

  “Are you ill enough to die?”

  “Yes,” he managed to answer, nodding vigorously.

  Beckheim’s thin lips pulled back. “Well, we are all ill enough to die, Mister Hadley. That is a great sickness, and we are all down with it badly.”

  “Yes,” Hadley agreed, fervent and overwhelmed with emotion. He felt as if he might cry. He was unable to take his eyes from the floor; he sat silent and unmoving, hands clenched together, perspiration rolling down his neck. Around him and Beckheim the room was dark; nothing stirred, nothing happened.

  “Do you want to be well?” Beckheim asked presently.

  “Yes.”

  “Very much?”

  “Yes, very much.” Hadley’s breath rasped in his throat, quick and fluttering with abject fright. In a way, he felt as if he were playing out a macabre and formal ritual, form without content. But in another way the words being said had great meaning, and he felt with overpowering emotion everything he said. His words, his responses, came from deep inside him; and at the same time there was a timeless impersonal quality to them.

  He wanted the words to have meaning. He willed himself to accept them; and presently the feeling of ritual dimmed. But it did not go away. As he sat across from Beckheim a part of his brain remained aloof, a spectator, cold and detached, amused and grimly cynical. He loathed that part of him. But he could not excise it. To that part of his brain Stuart Hadley and the great black man across from him were absurd puppets, grotesque, dancing and gesturing foolishly. That portion of his brain began quietly to laugh; and still he sat listening and answering.

  “Who do you think can make you well?” Beckheim asked, in his toneless, measured voice. “Do you think I can make you well?”

  Hadley hesitated, shuddered in a spasm of emotion. “I—don’t know.”

  “No,” Beckheim said. “I can’t make you well.”

  Hadley agreed, nodding his head.

  “But you can,” Beckheim continued. “It’s up to you.”

  Hadley agreed to that, too. For a time the two of them sat facing each other, silent and waiting, as if in the immediate interval there might be some change manifest. As if Hadley were expected to heal himself now, become well on the spot, without further delay. The tension rose until, for Hadley, it passed bearing. All eyes, and there seemed to be millions of them, were fixed intently on him, unwavering, without mercy, without any kind of emotion. As if he were being scrutinized from beyond the world, beyond the universe.

  Then suddenly Beckheim turned to Marsha. “The coffee’s boiling.”

  “Oh,” Marsha said guiltily, and got hurriedly to her feet. “Cream and sugar?” she asked Hadley.

  “Yeah,” he answered, dazed and blinking, coming up to the surface, blinded by the sudden glare of the room.. He grabbed his cigarette and stubbed it out violently; the spell was broken, and Beckheim had taken out a newspaper from his jacket pocket; he was unfolding it and beginning to scan it. The moment was over; Hadley had been dismissed. He hadn’t realized how far down he had gone…if down was the proper term. In any case, he had gone a long way. He wondered where.

  In the kitchen, Marsha bustled and prepared. The clink of dishes awakened Tertullian on his pallet under the stove; the dog glanced up, alert and avid, then lowered his muzzle as the woman swept past him, carrying a tray into the living room.

  Hadley took his cup and automatically began stirring the contents. In the center of the tray was a glass plate of pale cookies. They remained after the three cups had been taken, a circle of pasty store-bought dough taken from some cardboard and cellophane package, each cookie exactly like the next. Presently Beckheim selected one of them and began gnawing on it.

  Fascinated, Hadley watched the man eat. Beckheim took a second cookie, and then a third. He inserted each into his mouth, chewed and swallowed, took another, as mechanically as a machine. Visibly, Beckheim did not taste the food. He ate without pleasure or interest; it was a functional process of no special importance to him. Again and again his hand moved between the plate and his mouth; his attention was focused totally on the crumpled newspaper, and nothing else.

  “I see,” Beckheim said, reading from the newspaper, “that American fliers complain there are no targets of importance left in North Korea. They complain it is useless to try to bomb one Chinese carrying an armload of ammunition over a mountain.” He closed the newspaper and added: “Napalm has taken care of the villages and crops.”

  Hadley said nothing. He sipped mutely at his coffee, all of him a spectator now, withdrawn and detached from the two people in the room with him. Like a quiet domestic couple, Beckheim and Marsha sat drinking coffee and reading the newspaper, a closed circle from which he was excluded. He did not protest, however; he accepted his place without agitation.

  Abruptly, Beckheim folded the newspaper away and got stiffly to his feet. “If you’ll pardon me,” he said to Hadley. Moving away from the Arizona sheet slate table, he got out a case from his pocket and fitted a pair of black horn-rimmed glasses onto his nose. Rolling up his sleeves he slowly left the room, an expression of deep meditation on his face. Hadley saw into a small study, littered with papers and books; an ancient rolltop desk occupied one corner, with a goosenecked lamp and wooden swivel chair. Beckheim seated himself at the desk and began rummaging around in the stacks of papers.

  Marsha arose and hurried after him. “You want the letters?” she asked. She burrowed among great cardboard boxes of printed pamphlets; Hadley recognized the cheap throwaways that the Society distributed on every street corner.

  “You went through them?” Beckheim asked in his low rumble.

  The conversation became a blur, and Hadley turned his back. But there was nothing else to look at or think about; the big black man hunched over at the desk was the only center of activity in the apartment. Marsha, standing behind Beckheim and leaning over his shoulder, was pointing out various papers as they came from the cardboard boxes. Beckheim was sorting mail. Black elbows resting on the surface of the desk, he studied a letter intently, t
hen pushed it aside and selected another. After a time Marsha turned around and reentered the living room.

  “More coffee?” she asked Hadley.

  “No thanks.”

  Marsha seated herself and began mechanically tearing to shreds a bit of paper envelope. “There’s a lot of work to do,” she explained. “A thing like this is a full-time job, keeping accounts straight, that sort of paperwork.”

  In the study, Beckheim labored over the heap of letters. From some he extracted inserts—checks or money—and carefully put them into a square metal box. Each letter was slowly read and studied, then marked with a dark scratch from his heavy gold fountain pen. Above the desk was a framed reproduction of the ubiquitous bearded youth with his fatuous half-parted lips, eyes upturned; the imaginary, romantic re-creation of the young Christ. At one side of the desk stood a small brass electric heater. Behind that three wicker chairs were crowded together. On the arm of one lay a tattered red sweater.

  Without raising his massive head or looking around, Beckheim said: “Mister Hadley, what is your wife’s name?”

  “Ellen,” Hadley answered, coming quickly to life.

  After a time, when the heavy gold pen had scratched off half a dozen letters, Beckheim continued: “How old is she?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  Beckheim presently asked: “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-five.”

  For a while Beckheim continued working in silence; the only sound was the scratching of his pen and the rustle of paper. “Had you thought,” he asked presently, “of joining the Society?”

  Hadley became critically tense. His mouth dry, his vision swimming, he gazed down at the floor and answered: “I hadn’t thought much about it. Not that way. It was more that I wanted to meet you…as a person.”

  Nothing more was said for a time, and Hadley’s tenseness burgeoned. He climbed to his feet and paced from the living room into the study. Beckheim continued working as Hadley came up behind him and stood awkwardly, hands in his pockets, licking his dry lips and wondering what to say. Beckheim seemed to be waiting; at least, he had nothing more to ask or add.

  “I never paid much attention to religion,” Hadley said clumsily. “I really don’t know anything about it.”

  Beckheim nodded slightly and went on with his work. In the other room, Marsha sat alone on the Hollywood bed, her cup of coffee between her fingers, face blank and expressionless. Outside the apartment building the noises of a big city at night clanged and jarred dully. Cold fog, rolling in from the Bay, drifted around the warped frames of the windows.

  “What is your little boy’s name?” Beckheim inquired.

  “Peter.”

  “Do you have a picture of him?”

  This time Hadley got out his wallet; he stood holding it uncertainly while Beckheim continued working. All at once Beckheim pushed his letters aside and reached for the wallet. He laid it on the desk and glanced at it critically.

  “He’s healthy-looking,” Beckheim observed as he resumed his work.

  “Yes, he’s always been healthy and full of pep.” After an uncertain moment Hadley restored the wallet to his pocket. “We’re keeping our fingers crossed, of course…but so far he seems to be fine.”

  “Do you have a picture of your wife?”

  Again Hadley got out his wallet and opened it. He laid it dutifully down; after a time Beckheim peered over at it, pen held above a long letter in a woman’s shaky handwriting. Behind the stained, almost opaque celluloid folder, the snapshot of Ellen Hadley lay exposed for the old man to see.

  “She’s attractive,” Beckheim said. “Ellen Hadley… Stuart Hadley. I’ve seen many young couples like you.” He put down his pen and spun around on his chair to face Hadley. “But not alike; everybody is different. You’re unique… Every man is a new combination, in some way or other. Haven’t you felt that about yourself?”

  “I guess so,” Hadley said.

  “What would happen if Stuart Hadley died? What would come along to take Stuart Hadley’s place? Could there be another Stuart Hadley?” Behind the horn-rimmed glasses the dark, large eyes bored upward at Hadley. “I think there could not be. What do you think?”

  “No,” Hadley admitted.

  “Do you mean that?”

  “Yes.” Hadley nodded. “I’ve felt that.”

  “But you will die. How do you explain that? What’s the answer to that paradox?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Of course you know! You know the answer as well as I do; use your head… You just don’t want to think. Your brain is rusty; it’s painful to think. Open the gates inside your mind… There isn’t much time left.”

  “No,” Hadley agreed, “there isn’t much time.”

  Beckheim picked up Hadley’s wallet. “This is Stuart Hadley,” he said, holding the corroded package of leather and paper and celluloid in his hands. “Money,” he said, examining the paper bills stuffed into the money pouch. “Change.” He emptied out some dimes and quarters from the little compartment. “This is a woman’s wallet; do you know that?”

  “No,” Hadley said, astonished.

  “Only women’s wallets have change compartments.” Beckheim laid out a little heap of bent white cards. “These are to give to customers? ‘Stuart Hadley: television salesman, Modern TV Sales and Service. 851 Bancroft Avenue, Cedar Groves, California.’” Beckheim examined a stained, rumpled card on which was printed a crude drawing of a braying donkey. At the bottom of the card was lettered the legend Come to the donkey roast. Get yourself apiece of ass. “What is this?” Beckheim asked.

  Mortified, Hadley muttered: “Just a joke. A trick thing; doesn’t mean anything.”

  Beckheim put the card away and burrowed deeper. He brought out a crushed pack of slips of folded paper, on which were written, in lead pencil, names and addresses and phone numbers. “Customers,” Beckheim guessed. “Prospects for sales.”

  “Yes,” Hadley agreed. “And personal friends.”

  “Keys.” Beckheim laid out a car key and two door keys. “One to your apartment. The other to your store?”

  “That’s right,” Hadley said. “And the car key’s for the store truck; sometimes I have to pick it up at the garage.”

  “What’s this?” Beckheim laid out a dingy flat disk of uncertain metal. Punched in the center was a square hole.

  “My good-luck charm,” Hadley answered, embarrassed. “A Chinese coin; I found it on the beach when I was a kid.”

  Beckheim deliberately turned the glassine flaps. One by one he examined Hadley’s identification papers. “Your Social Security card. Driver’s license. Your draft card… You’re 4-F?”

  “Liver trouble,” Hadley explained.

  “Membership in the Elks.” Beckheim turned to the next set of sweat-stained cards stuffed in the corroded, yellowed squares. “Photostat of your birth certificate. You were born in New York?”

  “That’s right. I grew up in Washington, D.C.”

  “Library card.” Beckheim plucked some cards stuffed behind others. “Blue Cross hospitalization card. Stubs for Regal Gasoline Lucky Prize drawings…” He passed by the photographs of Peter and Ellen. From the last glassine envelope he plucked a snapshot jammed out of sight. “Who is this woman? Not your wife, is she?”

  “No,” Hadley admitted begrudgingly. “That’s a girl I used to go around with, a long time ago.”

  Beckheim solemnly studied the photograph; it showed a shy, smiling Italian girl with heavy dark hair and large lips, wearing a tight cotton summer dress that accentuated her inordinately prominent breasts. “And you still carry this picture around with you?” Beckheim inquired.

  “I never threw it away,” Hadley said defensively. “Anyhow, the girl’s living someplace up in Oregon now.”

  Beckheim had come to the end of the wallet. He put back the contents, closed it, and handed it back to Hadley. “And all this,” he said, “can be wiped out, destroyed in an instant. And after that—what?”

/>   “I don’t know,” Hadley said.

  Beckheim’s face darkened angrily. “You do know! Why do you keep saying you don’t know? What don’t you know? Do you think you can be wiped out like those papers? Do you think fire can destroy everything that makes you up? Isn’t there something that won’t burn, that fire can’t consume?”

  “I guess so. I don’t know.” Confused, Hadley shook his head. “I don’t know what to think.”

  Harshly, Beckheim demanded: “Then you’re just going to stand there and wait? Doing nothing?”

  “I—suppose so.”

  The old man smiled wryly and spread his big gray hands. “Well, my friend, then there’s nothing anyone can do for you. Do you really want help?”

  “Yes,” Hadley said quickly.

  Beckheim sighed and again picked up his heavy gold fountain pen. He turned his chair back to the desk; moving a stack of letters forward he proceeded to examine the top one. “I wish,” he said, “that there was more time. So many people, and so little time…time running out, getting shorter every day. I see by the newspapers that we may be at war with China one of these days. Four hundred and fifty million people… Of course, atomic bombs will cut down that number. But so many people…and after that, the rest of Asia. Country after country, endless millions. And finally the rest of the world. The torch, the sword.”

  Hadley said nothing.

  “Open the drawer by you,” Beckheim said without looking up. “The top drawer.”

  Clumsily, Hadley pulled the heavy wooden drawer open. It was crammed with bottles of ink, paper clips and pencils, heaps of cards tied with rubber bands, booklets and pamphlets and scratch pads. “What did you want?” he asked uncertainly.

  As he wrote, Beckheim said: “You have interesting hands… Do you know that?”

  “I guess so,” Hadley answered.

  “Get me one of those blue cards, there. In the front of the drawer, by the glue bottle.”

  Hadley plucked at a stack; one card came loose and he lifted it awkwardly out. “This?”

  Beckheim pushed the drawer shut and reached up for the card. With his heavy gold fountain pen he wrote the name Stuart Wilson Hadley in the blank space in the center of the card, a firm flow of black ink in the middle of the ornate printing. Carefully, with measured dignity, he selected a blotter and blotted the writing. He handed the card back to Hadley.