The Town and the City: A Novel

  On one of these ships, leaning wearily on the rails, were Joe and Paul Hathaway, older, gruffer, darker, and more drunken than ever. Both of them were scarred and darkened and embittered by war, but calmer too, actually more at peace with themselves than they had ever been, sarcastic, weary, wise, vigorously sharp, ponderously amused. They looked at each other solemnly when the boys began to whistle at the girls a whole mile away on the piers. They shook their heads, turned away, stared glumly, sarcastically at big New York and its crested splendors, threw their cigarettes in the water below, leaned there on the rail in silence, and watched.

  A few afternoons later they were striding through Times Square with bags over their backs, smoking cigars, looking around, hailing cabs with calm peremptory gestures and swearing up and down when the cabs swept by, tossing their bags on the sidewalk to sit and consult darkly. Then you saw them in a bar sitting at one end together, just drinking and not saying a word, ordering more drinks, staring straight ahead with bloodshot, weary, meditative eyes, lighting cigarettes with deliberation and afterthought, and just brooding there.

  Both of them were sergeants. Paul had been a ground crew mechanic with a few flights to his credit, but his tremendous surly labors on the ground among littered wreckages of engines and tools and oil-rags and grease-guns had made him, and many other men of moody ravaged kind, indispensable in a war that had been won by work of all kinds. Joe had started off as a mechanic, and later had been assigned as flight engineer in a B-17 that survived forty-odd missions over Europe before it was shot up and had to make a crash landing on the English coast. In that crash Joe had gashed and broken his arm. It happened at a time when he was about to be transferred to the Pacific theater but by the time he came out of the hospital the European war was over. There were delays and confusions, finally the Japanese war was over, and he and Paul were shipped home on the same boat.

  Something strange had happened to Joe in England, something like exasperation, disgust, terrific moody joylessness. He suddenly “didn’t care any more.” He went A.W.O.L. all over England and hardly remembered later on what he did over the fuzzy drunken days and nights. He spent some time in the guardhouse for this, but he didn’t care about that either, it was all the same. Most significantly, he stopped writing to Patricia Franklin altogether. When he arrived in New York that October in 1945 he had not written to Patricia in eight months, he had no idea where she was now, and he didn’t care. Sometimes it occurred to him how thin a line was drawn in himself between love or indifference, devotion or disgust, confidence or carelessness, and finally—between living joy or outlawish fury. He could laugh and have a good time, and then suddenly go off and break something with all the violence of a madman. He thought about it sometimes but most of the time he didn’t give enough of a damn to think about it. He remembered feeling like this before, especially when he was twenty or thereabouts, full of wild recklessness and drunken, suicidal fury, and now it was back, but there was no more joy, somehow no more beauty in it, no more young man’s awe and delight in it, and it seemed to him that something was over and done with.

  He went home to Brooklyn with Paul Hathaway, to see the folks. He found his father in his sick chair. In the slanting afternoon light, by the basement window that faced the pavement, old George Martin sat dying and brooding and thinking, with a blanket over his legs, an old bathrobe over his back, his antique silver-rimmed glasses magnified and skeletal in his lank face, his Daily Racing Form on a table beside the chair. The change that had come over him, in his face and physique, since Joe had last seen him three years back was enough to stun him back to an awful sense of boyish grief and terror.

  There sat George Martin, gaunt and haggard with suffering, his once bulging chest shrunken down like the hollow bird’s-breast of a consumptive, his hands pale and splotched with yellow cirrhosis spots (yet still inkstained at the fingernails), and his huge blue eyes gaping sorrowfully from out of the hollows of his bony face, full of fear, and dumb abashment, and an eager joyful awe that was more woefully intense than anything Joe had ever seen. The old man cried, and laughed and joked, and cried, and hugged his son, and talked and cried again. It seemed that all the tremendous eagerness and earnest sufferance in the old man’s soul had grown in proportion to the waning of his body and had found a sad, wild, staring focus in his great blue eyes.

  “Lord, lord, lord!” he cried. “I thought I’d never see you again, I thought they’d killed you, Joey! Oh, oh, oh!” he wept. “Now they’ve killed little Charley, I’m sure of that! Marge, you know that’s true, you know it yourself.”

  “Charley?” cried Joe with amazement. “Isn’t he in Okinawa? Did you get word from him?”

  “No, oh, no,” said the old man sadly, “he’s finished. We haven’t had a word from him in a long time. Little Charley’s finished, just a little before my time, that’s all, I’m sure of that.”

  “Well, maybe he just didn’t write! Hell! The War Department would send word—”

  “I know, I know.… I expect that any day now, Joey. God, you poor fellows! both of you! How are you, Hathaway? How are you feeling? A poor fellow your age …”

  Sometimes the old man babbled like that and seemed to forget what he was saying a moment ago, or even that anybody was in the room with him. Then he paused and stared into the abyss of his approaching death and just stared wildly, coming out of it with a huge sigh and a cry and a mournful look around the room, and finally a heart-wrenched seizure of joy at the mere sight of anyone who happened to be there.

  “Joey, you’ll never know what your poor mother has been through with me. I’m just a useless big hulk of flesh sitting here, I ought to be taken out and just thrown on the dump, for all the trouble I’ve caused that poor girl, all the trouble! Joey, she works and slaves, and I just sit here helpless, Joey! I can walk around all right, though … say, by the way!” he suddenly cried, gleefully, “you know something else? I sit here figuring the horses all day long, I can take care of myself a little. Ha, ha, ha! She comes home at night thinking maybe I’ll be sitting here groaning and moaning, but, by God, here I am listening to the race results and figuring how I made out for the day—”

  “That’s true,” said the mother, standing behind Joe’s chair and stroking his hair, “he never complains, Joey. All he does is figure the horses”—and she shook her head, mutely looking at her husband.

  “I could have gone to a hospital,” grinned the old man slyly, “but they make you lay there doing nothing! At home I can play the radio and figure the horses. I thought I’d never see you again, Joey. I’m old and sick and dying and I’m full of thoughts of death. No, I thought I’d be meeting you wherever the hell they’d decide to send us!”

  “Don’t say that word!” whooped Joe, jumping up. “What do you want to do, influence the devil?”

  “By gosh!” yelled the old man, laughing, “it feels so wonderful to have Joey back again. There ain’t been a laugh in this house since I don’t know when! And do I hate this hell-hole New York! Joey, do I hate it! If God would only let me die in peace back in beautiful New England, that’s all I ask. Men don’t live the way God intended them to live in this place! Whatever you do, Joe, don’t stay here, please don’t stay here! Marge, give Joe something to eat, something to drink, and, Paul, make yourself at home, and take off that damn soldier suit.”

  And then a moment later he brooded in the abyss of death, wrapped in thoughts and silent wonder, his great blue eyes staring, his hands limp, his lower lip pouting, his gaunt face lowered reverently over the mystery of his own life and the mysterious ruin of all life.

  While the others were in the kitchen and he was alone in the front room, and as Mickey was just coming in the iron gate on the sidewalk outside, he looked up, startled, stunned from his reverie, and groaned in a low voice:

  “God have pity on my soul.”

  When Joe had finished his second cup of coffee in the kitchen he took his wallet and threw an enormous amount of money on the table
.

  “Now listen to me, Ma, you’re not going to work in that factory any more, you’re going to stay right here at home with Pa and take care of him and take care of yourself. Do you hear me?”

  “But, Joey, there’s no more money coming in the house, and besides I don’t mind the work, I like it, I’ve done it before—”

  “Never mind that!” he cried angrily. “There’s about twenty-two hundred bucks on the table there.” He picked up the money and spread it out “It’s back-pay money, some of it, and most of it I won in crap games coming over. It’s yours. Do you hear me? You’re not going to work another minute, you’re going to stay right here at home.”

  “But, Joey, I don’t want to take your money—” she cried mournfully.

  “Did you hear me? Never mind I said!”

  “But what are you going to do?”

  “I’ll stay here when I’m discharged—and I’ll get a job, I guess. But until I get discharged I’ve got a little money to horse around with. This is for you. I’ll just have to get drunk on rotgut instead of Scotch for a change, that’s all,” and he turned and winked at Hathaway, and at Mickey, who stood gazing at him joyfully. “Why the hell didn’t you write and tell me all this, I could have sent you a lot of money two months ago, I had thousands then!”

  “Joey,” said the mother, sighing, “I didn’t want to worry you. But, gosh—this is an awful lot of money to just give away like that. You don’t know what a relief it is,” she finally admitted mournfully, and they saw, in her haggard worried eyes, how everything had become so grief-stricken, troublous, and hopeless for her in the past year in New York. She hugged Mickey broodingly. “I wanted him to stay in high school whatever happened.”

  “And what about everybody else!” shouted Joe furiously. “Is it true what he was saying about Francis and Petey and all them?”

  “Petey’s given us money, whenever he goes to sea. Francis—Well, we don’t know what he’s doing.”

  “What about Liz? What’s she doing?”

  “We don’t even know where she is, Joey.”

  He waved his hand violently and snarled away, and stood at the window looking out, almost sadly, with a convulsive little gesture of sick disgust and sorrow. He was silent a long time, and said finally:

  “What a hell of a family this turned out to be.”

  For a moment, as he looked out, his attention was diverted by the huge advertisement of the man holding his head in torment on the warehouse wall. He stared at it. “Hell knows, I was bad enough myself—but this! Who would have thought it, when we were all kids in Galloway, in the house—when he was big and fulla pep. If there was some way to make everything go back the way it was, or something like that, not let it go on like this till he dies. And he is going to die, anybody can see that, and it won’t be long.”

  “No, Joey, it won’t be long,” said the mother, shaking her head slowly.

  Liz was actually living in New York, in rooms on Fiftieth Street near Ninth Avenue, and had been living there a long time, at least a year and a half.

  Peter went to see his sister one day. He was living alone now in a cheap room on the waterfront, in the Seaman’s Church Institute, knowing that his father was dying, afraid to go home to watch him die, knowing that everything between Judie and himself was finished, hiding out in the great sprawl of the city with a sense of doom.

  While he waited for Liz to come home he spent a pleasant hour chatting with a beautiful dark-eyed brunette girl who said her name was Pat. He never dreamed that she was Joe’s fiancée, Patricia Franklin. He had never seen her before.

  Patricia herself had looked up Liz a month or so after Joe’s letters unaccountably stopped coming. It was with that astounding and inexplicable cleverness that women sometimes have that this girl decided to find her lover’s sister, and having found her—which was something Buddy Fredericks himself could not always do—she made her way into her heart, into her confidence at least, and they became extremely close friends. Liz and Patricia were as different as night and day. Patricia was the same as she had always been, essentially a smalltown girl, somewhat old-fashioned even, fundamentally the same as Joe had found her—a sturdy, sensible, principled family girl.

  Liz had changed a lot since the day she had lost her baby in a Detroit hospital. She had become one of the many girls in America who flit from city to city in search of something they hope to find and never even name, girls who “know all the ropes,” know a thousand people in a hundred cities and places, girls who work at all kinds of jobs, impulsive, desperately gay, lonely, hardened girls. They run away from home at eighteen and never stop running, they can take care of themselves like men, have a woman’s heart and a man’s mind, are brusque, businesslike, ebullient, wild, passionate, forever in the course of relentless enterprises which are either successful or “laid low in the middle of nowhere.” Searching for some kind of resting place in their lives, which they never really want, they travel in busses and trains and sometimes hitch-hike (in slacks). They are girls who “know everything” and know nothing at all, “hip-chicks” who are seen in Hollywood working in drive-ins or speeding along Hollywood Boulevard in some “producer’s” convertible, or in Miami on a bookmaker’s arm, or in Las Vegas with a gambler, or in a Chicago nightclub, or in New York going around with jazz musicians. They fall in and out of love a dozen times a year, go away in ragged clothes and return in a fur coat. They are girls who know their rights, know what they want, know how to go about it, and end up being insulted, baffled, and frustrated by every nighttime character in every night’s-end of American life.

  Liz had become one of these girls. She had grown somewhat hard-faced, due largely to the way she wore her hair and the way she dyed it blonde. The change was mostly in her mouth somehow, in the way it slackened sullenly in moments of reflection, with a grim set to it, almost surly and certainly bitter. Her shell-blue eyes which used to mist over in moments of sheepish joy were now constantly splintered and clear and hard. When Peter saw his sister after all the war years he was struck dumb and mortified.

  Liz had a photo of him taken after he quit college in 1941, a melancholy sort of picture showing him gazing emptily into space and looking completely dogged—with the realization, almost, of what his life could very well become. She kept this picture and cherished it everywhere she went, hanging it in prominent parts of her room.

  “Do you know why I like that picture?” she laughed. “It shows you just as you are, it’s the picture of a young character who’s been slapped in the face and doesn’t know what to make of it.”

  “Haven’t we all?”

  “Man, I suppose all of us have—but some of us fight back, you know, some of us don’t like to stay whipped. That’s the picture of a whipped dog, a dog who’s given up his right to snap back.”

  “You certainly have a fine opinion of your own brother,” he muttered.

  “Oh, come off it!” Liz cried, flaring up with her menacing way, stalking around the room like a caged lioness. “I like real things and that picture’s real, besides, as I say, it looks like you. It should remind you of the fact anyway that you can’t go around in this world with your shoulders drooped and expect to make a go of it.”

  Peter prodded her gleefully. “Now you’re talking how to win friends and influence people, like the Chamber of Commerce, a great social rebel like you.”

  “Can anyone be anything but a rebel in a conventional world like this? But stay cool, I love you just the same, little one.”

  When she talked like that Peter remembered that summer night he had helped her elope with Buddy, when she was so fiercely yet so shyly proud, so sweet and mystified by the wonder and strangeness of her own heart. Now it was certain that nothing mystified her, that she had little faith in people, least of all in men, after all the things she had done and seen and all the distortions and venoms she had somehow acquired along the way.

  She loved to prod at Peter’s weaknesses. “Well, daddio, there you go po
uting again. Isn’t that stupid?”

  “Pouting? Maybe I picked it up from Pa, he pouts all the time. I was reading in Moby Dick how the white whale pouts.…”

  “What’s this white whale routine? What kick are you on now?”

  With Liz everything had become “kicks”—either you were “goofing off,” on the goof-off kick, just being lazy and doing absolutely nothing in a deliberate, formal, almost desperate way, or you were listening to music which came under the heading of an emotional kick, or you were in love which was another kick, or you hated somebody and put his name in a little black book and that was a certain kind of kick—and so on, all of it divided into neat categories through which existence kicked along.

  Liz and her husband Buddy were “just friends” now. There was a certain kick in their new relationship, a “cool kick”—Buddy was Liz’s “mother.” He came around every now and then to talk to her awhile, to swap news about happenings all the way from Los Angeles to Boston, from Miami to Seattle, news of other “cats” and “chicks” like themselves connected in some way with jazz music, nightclubs and show business, and after that he kissed her on the cheek and coolly slouched off back to his jazz music, that was all.

  In New York Liz held down various types of jobs, singing in small clubs at times, at other times standing around showing her legs in second-rate floorshows, at other times wandering “beat” around the city in search of some other job or benefactor or “loot” or “gold.” When you were loaded with loot and having your kicks, that was living; but when you were hung up without gold and left beyond the reach of kicks, that was a drag.