Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters & Seymour: An Introduction

  “May I ask where you heard that?” I said. My lips were quivering slightly, like two fools.

  “You may,” she said, looking at Mrs. Silsburn instead of me. “Muriel’s mother happened to mention it about two hours ago, while Muriel was sobbing her eyes out.” She looked at me. “Does that answer your question?” She suddenly shifted her bouquet of gardenias from her right to her left hand. It was the nearest thing to a fairly commonplace nervous gesture that I’d seen her make. “Just for your information, incidentally,” she said, looking at me, “do you know who I think you are? I think you’re this Seymour’s brother.” She waited, very briefly, and, when I didn’t say anything: “You look like him, from his crazy picture, and I happen to know that he was supposed to come to the wedding. His sister or somebody told Muriel.” Her look was fixed unwaveringly on my face. “Are you?” she asked bluntly.

  My voice must have sounded a trifle rented when I answered. “Yes,” I said. My face was burning. In a way, though, I felt an infinitely less furry sense of self-identification than I had since I’d got off the train earlier in the afternoon.

  “I knew you were,” the Matron of Honor said. “I’m not stupid, you know. I knew who you were the minute you got in this car.” She turned to her husband. “Didn’t I say he was his brother the minute he got in this car? Didn’t I?”

  The Lieutenant altered his sitting position a trifle. “Well, you said he probably—yes, you did,” he said. “You did. Yes.”

  One didn’t have to look over at Mrs. Silsburn to perceive how attentively she had taken in this latest development. I glanced past and behind her, furtively, at the fifth passenger—the tiny elderly man—to see if his insularity was still intact. It was. No one’s indifference has ever been such a comfort to me.

  The Matron of Honor came back to me. “For your information, I also know that your brother’s no chiropodist. So don’t be so funny. I happen to know he was Billy Black on ‘It’s a Wise Child’ for about fifty years or something.”

  Mrs. Silsburn abruptly took a more active part in the conversation. “The radio program?” she inquired, and I felt her looking at me with a fresh, keener, interest.

  The Matron of Honor didn’t answer her. “Which one were you?” she said to me. “Georgie Black?” The mixture of rudeness and curiosity in her voice was interesting, if not quite disarming.

  “Georgie Black was my brother Walt,” I said, answering only her second question.

  She turned to Mrs. Silsburn. “It’s supposed to be some kind of a secret or something, but this man and his brother Seymour were on this radio program under fake names or something. The Black children.”

  “Take it easy, honey, take it easy,” the Lieutenant suggested, rather nervously.

  His wife turned to him. “I will not take it easy,” she said—and again, contrary to my every conscious inclination, I felt a little pinch of something close to admiration for her metal, solid brass or no. “His brother’s supposed to be so intelligent, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “In college when he was fourteen or something, and all like that. If what he did to that kid today is intelligent, then I’m Mahatma Gandhi! I don’t care. It just makes me sick!”

  Just then, I felt a minute extra added discomfort. Someone was very closely examining the left, or weaker, side of my face. It was Mrs. Silsburn. She started a bit as I turned abruptly toward her. “May I ask if you were Buddy Black?” she said, and a certain deferential note in her voice rather made me think, for a fractional moment, that she was about to present me with a fountain pen and a small, morocco-bound autograph album. The passing thought made me distinctly uneasy—considering, if nothing else, the fact that it was 1942 and some nine or ten years past my commercial bloom. “The reason I ask,” she said, “my husband used to listen to that program without fail every single—”

  “If you’re interested,” the Matron of Honor interrupted her, looking at me, “that was the one program on the air I always absolutely loathed. I loathe precocious children. If I ever had a child that—”

  The end of her sentence was lost to us. She was interrupted, suddenly and unequivocally, by the most piercing, most deafening, most impure E-flat blast I’ve ever heard. All of us in the car, I’m sure, literally jumped. At that moment, a drum-and-bugle corps, composed of what seemed to be a hundred or more tone-deaf Sea Scouts, was passing. With what seemed to be almost delinquent abandon, the boys had just rammed into the sides of “The Stars and Stripes Forever.” Mrs. Silsburn, very sensibly, clapped her hands over her ears.

  FOR AN eternity of seconds, it seemed, the din was all but incredible. Only the Matron of Honor’s voice could have risen above it—or, for that matter, would have attempted to. When it did, one might have thought she was addressing us, obviously at the top of her voice, from some great distance away, somewhere, possibly, in the vicinity of the bleachers of Yankee Stadium.

  “I can’t take this!” she said. “Let’s get out of here and find some place to phone from! I’ve got to phone Muriel and say we’re delayed! She’ll be crazy!”

  With the advent of the local Armageddon, Mrs. Silsburn and I had faced front to see it in. We now turned around again in our jump seats to face the Leader. And, possibly, our deliverer.

  “There’s a Schrafft’s on Seventy-ninth Street!” she bellowed at Mrs. Silsburn. “Let’s go have a soda, and I can phone from there! It’ll at least be air-conditioned!”

  Mrs. Silsburn nodded enthusiastically, and pantomimed “Yes!” with her mouth.

  “You come, too!” the Matron of Honor shouted at me.

  With very peculiar spontaneity, I remember, I shouted back to her the altogether extravagant word “Fine!” (It isn’t easy, to this day, to account for the Matron of Honor’s having included me in her invitation to quit the ship. It may simply have been inspired by a born leader’s natural sense of orderliness. She may have had some sort of remote but compulsive urge to make her landing party complete. . . . My singularly immediate acceptance of the invitation strikes me as much more easily explainable. I prefer to think it was a basically religious impulse. In certain Zen monasteries, it’s a cardinal rule, if not the only serious enforced discipline, that when one monk calls out “Hi!” to another monk, the latter must call back “Hi!” without thinking.)

  The Matron of Honor then turned and, for the first time, directly addressed the tiny elderly man beside her. To my undying gratification, he was still glaring straight ahead of him, as though his own private scenery hadn’t changed an iota. His unlighted clear-Havana cigar was still clenched between two fingers. What with his apparent unmindfulness of the terrible din the passing drum-and-bugle corps was making, and, possibly, from a grim tenet that all old men over eighty must be either stone-deaf or very hard of hearing, the Matron of Honor brought her lips to within an inch or two of his left ear. “We’re going to get out of the car!” she shouted to him—almost into him. “We’re going to find a place to phone from, and maybe have some refreshment! Do you want to come with us?”

  The elderly man’s immediate reaction was just short of glorious. He looked first at the Matron of Honor, then at the rest of us, and then grinned. It was a grin that was no less resplendent for the fact that it made no sense whatever. Nor for the fact that his teeth were obviously, beautifully, transcendently false. He looked at the Matron of Honor inquisitively for just an instant, his grin wonderfully intact. Or, rather, he looked to her—as if, I thought, he believed the Matron of Honor, or one of us, had lovely plans to pass a picnic basket his way.

  “I don’t think he heard you, honey!” the Lieutenant shouted.

  The Matron of Honor nodded, and once again brought the megaphone of her mouth up close to the old man’s ear. With really praiseworthy volume, she repeated her invitation to the old man to join us in quitting the car. Once again, at face value, the old man seemed more than amenable to any suggestion in the world—possibly not short of trotting over and having a dip in the East River. But ag
ain, too, one had an uneasy conviction that he hadn’t heard a word that was said to him. Abruptly, he proved that this was true. With an enormous grin at all of us collectively, he raised his cigar hand and, with one finger, significantly tapped first his mouth, then his ear. The gesture, as he made it, seemed related to a perfectly first-class joke of some kind that he fully meant to share with all of us.

  At that moment, Mrs. Silsburn, beside me, gave a visible little sign—almost a jump—of comprehension. She touched the Matron of Honor’s pink satin arm, and shouted, “I know who he is! He’s deaf and dumb—he’s a deaf-mute! He’s Muriel’s father’s uncle!”

  The Matron of Honor’s lips formed the word “Oh!” She swung around in her seat, toward her husband. “You got a pencil and paper?” she bellowed to him.

  I touched her arm and shouted that I had. Hastily—almost, in fact, for some reason, as though time were about to run out on all of us—I took out of my inside tunic pocket a small pad and a pencil stub that I’d recently acquisitioned from a desk drawer of my company Orderly Room at Fort Benning.

  Somewhat overly legibly, I wrote on a sheet of paper, “We’re held up indefinitely by the parade. We’re going to find a phone and have a cold drink somewhere. Will you join us?” I folded the paper once, then handed it to the Matron of Honor, who opened it, read it, and then handed it to the tiny old man. He read it, grinning, and then looked at me and wagged his head up and down several times vehemently. I thought for an instant that this was the full and perfectly eloquent extent of his reply, but he suddenly motioned to me with his hand, and I gathered that he wanted me to pass him my pad and pencil. I did so—without looking over at the Matron of Honor, from whom great waves of impatience were rising. The old man adjusted the pad and pencil on his lap with the greatest care, then sat for a moment, pencil poised, in obvious concentration, his grin diminished only a very trifle. Then the pencil began, very unsteadily, to move. An “i” was dotted. And then both pad and pencil were returned to me, with a marvellously cordial extra added wag of the head. He had written, in letters that had not quite jelled yet, the single word “Delighted.” The Matron of Honor, reading over my shoulder, gave a sound faintly like a snort, but I quickly looked over at the great writer and tried to show by my expression that all of us in the car knew a poem when we saw one, and were grateful.

  One by one, then, from both doors, we all got out of the car—abandoned ship, as it were, in the middle of Madison Avenue, in a sea of hot, gummy macadam. The Lieutenant lingered behind a moment to inform the driver of our mutiny. As I remember very well, the drum-and-bugle corps was still endlessly passing, and the din hadn’t abated a bit.

  The Matron of Honor and Mrs. Silsburn led the way to Schrafft’s. They walked as a twosome—almost as advance scouts—south on the east side of Madison Avenue. When he’d finished briefing the driver, the Lieutenant caught up with them. Or almost up with them. He fell a little behind them, in order to take out his wallet in privacy and see, apparently, how much money he had with him.

  The bride’s father’s uncle and I brought up the rear. Whether he had intuited that I was his friend or simply because I was the owner of a pad and pencil, he had rather more scrambled than gravitated to a walking position beside me. The very top of his beautiful silk hat didn’t quite come up as high as my shoulder. I set a comparatively slow gait for us, in deference to the length of his legs. At the end of a block or so, we were quite a good distance behind the others. I don’t think it troubled either of us. Occasionally, I remember, as we walked along, my friend and I looked up and down, respectively, at each other and exchanged idiotic expressions of pleasure at sharing one another’s company.

  When my companion and I reached the revolving door of Schrafft’s Seventy-ninth Street, the Matron of Honor, her husband, and Mrs. Silsburn had all been standing there for some minutes. They were waiting, I thought, as a rather forbiddingly integrated party of three. They had been talking, but they stopped when our motley twosome approached. In the car, just a couple of minutes earlier, when the drum-and-bugle corps blasted by, a common discomfort, almost a common anguish, had lent our small group a semblance of alliance—of the sort that can be temporarily conferred on Cook’s tourists caught in a very heavy rainstorm at Pompeii. All too clearly now, as the tiny old man and I reached the revolving door of Schrafft’s, the storm was over. The Matron of Honor and I exchanged expressions of recognition, not of greeting. “It’s closed for alterations,” she stated coldly, looking at me. Unofficially but unmistakably, she was appointing me odd-man-out again, and at that moment, for no reason worth going into, I felt a sense of isolation and loneliness more overwhelming than I’d felt all day. Somewhat simultaneously, it’s worth noting, my cough reactivated itself. I pulled my handkerchief out of my hip pocket. The Matron of Honor turned to Mrs. Silsburn and her husband. “There’s a Longchamps around here somewhere,” she said, “but I don’t know where.”

  “I don’t either,” Mrs. Silsburn said. She seemed very close to tears. At both her forehead and her upper lip, perspiration had seeped through even her heavy pancake makeup. A black patent-leather handbag was under her left arm. She held it as though it were a favorite doll, and she herself an experimentally rouged and powdered, and very unhappy, runaway child.

  “We’re not gonna be able to get a cab for love or money,” the Lieutenant said pessimistically. He was looking the worse for wear, too. His “hot pilot’s” cap appeared almost cruelly incongruous on his pale, dripping, deeply unintrepid-looking face, and I remember having an impulse to whisk it off his head, or at least to straighten it somewhat, to adjust it into a less cocked position—the same impulse, in general motive, that one might feel at a children’s party, where there is invariably one small, exceedingly homely child wearing a paper hat that crushes down one or both ears.

  “Oh, God, what a day!” the Matron of Honor said for all of us. Her circlet of artificial flowers was somewhat askew, and she was thoroughly damp, but, I thought, the only thing really destructible about her was her remotest appendage, so to speak—her gardenia bouquet. She was still holding it, however absent-mindedly, in her hand. It obviously hadn’t stood the gaff. “What’ll we do?” she asked, rather frantically, for her. “We can’t walk there. They live practically in Riverdale. Does anybody have any bright ideas?” She looked first at Mrs. Silsburn, then at her husband—and then, in desperation possibly, at me.

  “I have an apartment near here,” I said suddenly and nervously. “It’s just down the block, as a matter of fact.” I have a feeling that I gave out this information a trifle too loudly. I may even have shouted it, for all I know. “It belongs to my brother and me. My sister’s using it while we’re in the Army, but she’s not there now. She’s in the Waves, and she’s off on some trip.” I looked at the Matron of Honor—or at some point just over her head. “You can at least phone from there, if you like,” I said. “And the apartment’s air-conditioned. We might all cool off for a minute and get our breaths.”

  When the first shock of the invitation had passed over, the Matron of Honor, Mrs. Silsburn, and the Lieutenant went into a sort of consultation, of eyes only, but there was no visible sign that any kind of verdict was forthcoming. The Matron of Honor was the first to take any kind of action. She’d been looking—in vain—at the other two for an opinion on the subject. She turned back to me and said, “Did you say you had a phone?”

  “Yes. Unless my sister’s had it disconnected for some reason, and I can’t see why she would have.”

  “How do we know your brother won’t be there?” the Matron of Honor said.

  It was a small consideration that hadn’t entered my overheated head. “I don’t think he will be,” I said. “He may be—it’s his apartment, too—but I don’t think he will. I really don’t.”

  The Matron of Honor stared at me, openly, for a moment—and not really rudely, for a change, unless children’s stares are rude. Then she turned back to her husband and Mrs. Sil
sburn, and said, “We might as well. At least we can phone.” They nodded in agreement. Mrs. Silsburn, in fact, went so far as to remember her code of etiquette covering invitations given in front of Schrafft’s. Through her sun-baked pancake makeup, a semblance of an Emily Post smile peeped out at me. It was very welcome, as I remember. “C’mon, then, let’s get out of this sun,” our leader said. “What’ll I do with this?” She didn’t wait for an answer. She stepped over to the curb and unsentimentally disengaged herself from her wilted gardenia bouquet. “O.K., lead on, Macduff,” she said to me. “We’ll follow you. And all I have to say is he’d better not be there when we get there, or I’ll kill the bastard.” She looked at Mrs. Silsburn. “Excuse my language—but I mean it.”

  As directed, I took the lead, almost happily. An instant later, a silk hat materialized in the air beside me, considerably down and at the left, and my special, only technically unassigned cohort grinned up at me—for a moment, I rather thought he was going to slip his hand into mine.

  MY THREE guests and my one friend remained outside in the hall while I briefly cased the apartment.

  The windows were all closed, the two air-conditioners had been turned to “Shut,” and the first breath one took was rather like inhaling deeply in someone’s ancient raccoon-coat pocket. The only sound in the whole apartment was the somewhat trembling purr of the aged refrigerator Seymour and I had acquired second-hand. My sister Boo Boo, in her girlish, naval way, had left it turned on. There were, in fact, throughout the apartment, any number of little untidy signs that a seafaring lady had taken over the place. A handsome, small-size, ensign’s navy-blue jacket was flung, lining down, across the couch. A box of Louis Sherry candies—half empty, and with the unconsumed candies all more or less experimentally squeezed—was open on the coffee table, in front of the couch. A framed photograph of a very resolute-looking young man I’d never seen before stood on the desk. And all the ashtrays in sight were in full blossom with crumpled facial tissues and lipsticked cigarette ends. I didn’t go into the kitchen, the bedroom, or the bathroom, except to open the doors and take a quick look to see if Seymour was standing upright anywhere. For one reason, I felt enervated and lazy. For another, I was kept pretty busy raising blinds, turning on air-conditioners, emptying loaded ashtrays. Besides, the other members of the party barged in on me almost immediately. “It’s hotter in here than it is on the street,” the Matron of Honor said, by way of greeting, as she strode in.