The Town and the City: A Novel

  “So Ma wondered if you’d come over sometime,” said Mickey slowly, “and see him and talk to him and just, you know, see him?”

  “I see,” said Francis absentmindedly. “Yes, well, of course I certainly must do that.”

  “I’ll tell her,” said the boy simply, and turned to go. Almost compulsively, Francis roused himself from his musing reverie and asked him to sit down and stay awhile. Whereupon Mickey sat awkwardly on the edge of a chair and seemed to blush continually. Anne got up and mixed him a coke with ice. Nobody could think of anything to say and there were long moments of embarrassing silence as Mickey sat there drinking the coke, looking up at Francis occasionally with a grave perplexed look.

  After the boy had left Francis said, “Well, what do you think of my kid brother?”

  “Really, after all, he blushes nice.”

  “God! Now I’ll have to get down there sometime and pay my respects to my father. I’m sorry to hear that he’s in such bad shape.”

  “I’m afraid you’ll have to go,” smiled Anne faintly. “There’s nothing you can do about it. When they ask you like that …”

  “Yes.”

  Outside, as it grew dark in the streets, young Mickey hurried home looking around him with the eager fascination of a boy raised in a small town who suddenly finds himself alone in the middle of fabulous and fashionable Manhattan. Everyone was so well-dressed, the men distinguished and handsome, some of them in Homburg hats, the women lovely, concealed, and secret in beautiful furs. They were all going to cocktails and restaurants and theaters as it got dark, and the lights glittered like diamonds. It was so different from Brooklyn, and of course, so different from darkest Galloway.

  “What a nice apartment Francis lives in,” he thought, “right in the middle of New York, and what a nice blonde he’s got there, what a nice, quiet, pretty woman with him. Imagine having a girl like that right in the middle of New York, and a good job, and go out at night to big restaurants and then go to shows and everything. Yow! What a lucky guy!”

  [3]

  Peter went home to his family that Autumn.

  A sharp knowledge had now come to him of the tragic aloneness of existence and the need of beating it off with love and devotion instead of surrendering to it with that perverse, cruel, unnecessary self-infliction that he saw everywhere around him, that he himself had nursed for so long.

  His father was dying—and his own life was dying, it had come to a dead end in the city, he had nowhere else to go. Peter did not know what to do with his own life but somehow he knew what to do about his father, who was now not only his father, but his brother and his mysterious son too.

  He spent the dying winter in Brooklyn and helped with the expenses of the house and doctors’ bills by working in an all-night cafeteria. He came home from work every morning around seven, just as his mother was leaving for the shoeshop and his brother Mickey was getting ready to go to school, and brewed a pot of coffee and drank a cup with his father in the kitchen and argued and rhubarbed with him as much as ever. Now they both knew that the end was coming and their arguments were fewer and fewer, they were no longer arguments. They laughed together more than they had ever done. The father was very happy that his closest, saddest, more serious son had come back to him at last.

  “Ah, Petey, life isn’t long enough, there’s so many things I could have done!” cried Martin in the morning. “If I had done the right thing, invested my money carefully in something good, in a home or a farm or something like that, just think how different it would be now, maybe I wouldn’t be sick and your mother there wouldn’t have to be working in a shoeshop in my dying day. Ah, now I know how much I underestimated that kid in my time!”

  “Kid?”

  “Your mother, Petey, your mother. Don’t you know how men are? They play down their women, they call them knuckleheads all their life, until finally it dawns on them who’s the knucklehead in the end? Hah? And, sure enough, if I had done the right thing, maybe I wouldn’t be dying from all the disappointment I’ve had since I lost my shop back home, since I came to New York. Somehow, somewhere, we’d be living a better life and we’d be happy enough to make it click. By gosh, I wish I could start all over again!” he cried, slapping the arm of the chair with his intense, tearful, emphatic look of mournful determination.

  “Feel good this morning, huh?”

  “Sure, I feel good! I’m not dead by a long shot, you know! By God, sometimes I feel so good I can almost feel this damn junk in my body falling apart and healing itself someway. It could happen, you know,” he added shrewdly, “it could happen just as sure as I’m sitting here. Sometimes I don’t wonder but it will! And I’d bounce right up again and do something although I’d be pretty weak, I’m weak, all right, I’m weak, Petey, and I’m a lot older, I don’t know if I’d be worth much any more—” He trailed off painfully.

  “The way you’ve got the horses beat maybe you could go to Florida and make a profession of it!”

  “Why, sure! Did I show you last week’s figures, how I came out?” Eagerly, with the wild absorption of a little boy at play, the old man produced his complicated jumble of figures and explained them at length with many gestures and ejaculations and wishes that he could be in Florida at that very moment. Then they had more coffee and talked for hours.

  Peter worked at his job, a lonely miserable dishrag of a nighttime job that ticked away in the dreary midnights of city-time and city-blackness, and came home in the gray dawns along streets covered with butts and newspapers and chewing-gum wrappers, along sidewalks with gratings that breathed the stale air of subways. When the sky itself was a dishrag and the earth was covered with the rat-gray paving that city people lived on—he came home from his job, smoking and silent and trudging, his mind blank, his soul deadened, his heart breaking: he came home to see his father wasting away throughout the Winter and into the Spring in the midst of dreadful wreckage. Something like Spring came into the air, something that suggested birds swinging on branches in sweet alluring singsong, and sweet air, and Homeric dawn—but it was a suggestion for only a short while, soon forgotten in the roar of Brooklyn morning.

  Old Martin swung with amazing courage from joyous, almost robust days when he loved to talk and drink coffee and listen to the radio and read books, and days when he just sat slumped and ravaged of all his strength, almost dead, buried in the huge ennui of sickness and dizzy sorrow.

  There were strange nights, too, when he woke up in the middle of the night and sat in the kitchen alone and talked to himself while the others slept. He talked to his own mother and father long dead, he addressed them his appeals as a son, he mourned them so long buried, he asked them their dark advice, he remembered the pale flowers of their faces strangely. And he talked to God, sometimes with heated familiarity and argumentative fury, he asked why things had been made so hard for men, why, and if there was no why, then what it was that was so strange, beautiful, sad, brief, raggedly real, so hurt and inconsolable. He asked God why he had been made by Him, for what purpose, for what reason the flower of his own face and the fading of it from the earth forever; why life was so short, so hard, so furious with men, so impossibly mortal, so cruel, restless, sweet, so deadly. And he talked to the lone self that would die with him for always. “George,” he said, “George, all the misery in the world and what can you do about it in the end? George, there’s too much misery in you, too much headache, you can’t last. All your life went through your fingers and you laughed it off because you thought you had all the time in the world. You had all the time in the world, all right, all the time it gives you and no more. And I was always sore when something went wrong, and all the time it was just me that was wrong. George! why the hell didn’t you do what you were always just about to do! When you woke up in the middle of the night sometimes, you knew, you knew, George! That big thing we were always waiting for and no one ever did … We? Yass, all of us, all of us—Oh, we’re all dying! All the others and all the misery in store.
But what’s misery, George?—your own ignorant foolishness in the middle of life. In the middle of life. Oh, God, I want to be in the middle of life! It’s sad, it’s sad to die, it’s misery dying like this, knowing. I don’t want to die!” He bit his lip thinking of it. “But I’m ready to die, God, I guess because it’s all I’ve got left. I’m ready—but, God, whoever I am and whatever reason you made me live, I know one thing, God, I wish I was certain about one thing—about my wife and children. I know them, God!” He laughed, scratching his chin. “Ah, but I know them well, everything about them. Ha ha ha! I’ve seen them and heard them and felt them all right. Just see that they’ll be all right after I’m gone.” He raised his face mournfully to the poor cracked ceiling of midnight, he looked at heaven through the plaster-cracks of Brooklyn. “See that I can look back from the grave and find out how they’re coming along, some way or the other, there must be a trick like that to make up for this. See that they’re happy, God!”

  He puttered around the kitchen at four in the morning talking like that. At times he stared out the window at the black Brooklyn night and cursed it up and down for what it seemed to have done to him.

  And when Peter came back in the mornings, the old man asked him what had happened all night in the cafeteria. Nothing had happened, people just came in to eat doughnuts and drink coffee in the dead of night, and left, all in the middle of life. And then father and son looked at each other, and talked about the past, all the things in the million-shadowed blazing past, and about what they would like to do, what they might have done, what they should do now. Father and son were also two men in the world, sitting idle for a moment together, recognizing in sad-voiced commentary that the destiny of men is to come up to rivers, and cross them one way or another, this man’s way and that man’s way and any other possible way, and get over them or turn back in defeat and sarcasm. At these times they experienced moments of contentment talking to each other. This was the last life they would ever know each other in, and yet they wished they could live a hundred lives and do a thousand things and know each other forever in a million new ways, they wished this in the midst of their last life.

  These things began to work their change on young Peter who saw, as in an ancient vision spaded up from his being, what life must be about, at last. He saw that it was love and work and true hope. He saw that all the love in the world, which was sweet and fine, was not love at all without its work, and that work could not exist without the kindness of hope. He gazed into the face of these things at last just as he gazed at his father’s impending death, into eyes that would soon be blind and dead. He understood these things when he helped the feeble old man out of bed in the mornings and supported him on wandering feet that used to stride and clack along on Saturday nights in Galloway, he saw these things when his father roused himself from fevered reveries to eat, wash himself, and settle his things around his chair to resume another day.

  He saw that all the struggles of life were incessant, laborious, painful, that nothing was done quickly, without labor, that it had to undergo a thousand fondlings, revisings, moldings, addings, removings, graftings, tearings, correctings, smoothings, rebuildings, reconsiderings, nailings, tackings, chippings, hammerings, hoistings, connectings—all the poor fumbling uncertain incompletions of human endeavor. They went on forever and were forever incomplete, far from perfect, refined, or smooth, full of terrible memories of failure and fears of failure, yet, in the way of things, somehow noble, complete, and shining in the end. This he could sense even from the old house they lived in, with its solidly built walls and floors that held together like rock: some man, possibly an angry pessimistic man, had built the house long ago, but the house stood, and his anger and pessimism and irritable laborious sweats were forgotten; the house stood, and other men lived in it and were sheltered well in it.

  Peter and his father, by just looking painfully at one another, seemed to understand that to question the uncertainties and pains of life and work was to question life itself. They did that every day, yet they did not hate life, they loved it. They saw that life was like a kind of work, a poor miserable disconnected fragment of something better, far greater, just a fragmentary isolated frightened sweating over a moment in the dripping faucet-time of the world, a tattered impurity leading from moment to moment towards the great pure forge-fires of workaday life and loving human comprehension.

  And old George, when the blindness of pain and disintegration dimmed his brain, rolled his eyes mad in their sockets. When he was like that, having his gloomy dying days of demented terror, Peter was stabbed in his own heart with the loneliness and brutality of it, and tried to cheer him up, and sat with him, and worried himself white.

  “Oh, I’ve been sick so long, and so damn tired.… Petey! Petey! life is too long, it takes too long to get it over with.…”

  This was unbearable to Peter, locked in his own vision of death, trying to come out of it like a man crawling out of a Black Canyon as the vultures darkened the sun. What if he should succeed in clawing and clutching out of this abyss only to meet his father dead, without hope? What if he should suddenly see the whole terrible bleak enigma as no man had ever seen it, and die of it himself?

  But gravity, glee, and wonder would return to his father by the miracle of everyday heartbeat, and he would look up out of a dream of death to see the mother and Mickey and Peter moving around the house, he would see the slow, somehow stupid motions of the world around him, the dear pathetic things of it, and some vast pity would sink through him like a drug, some vision would inflame his inflammable brain with its pictures of joy and regret and trembling sad affection, and he would come talking and laughing back to them, back to the noonday staple of his life’s blood. All that, and his slow unfolding amazement, his knowledge of poor mortality, of the awe of little children, of the workaday purposes and passions and loves of men in their prime, of the silence and sorrow of old men, all these things would flame in his mind like explosions of light, like the powerful flutterings of candlelight near the end.

  But the candle, which is light, is extinguishable just because it is light. And one morning in May he died.

  A strange thing had happened the day before he died. For some reason or other the old furies of contention had risen between him and Peter, and they had argued again. It had started when Peter mentioned something that he was reading.

  “Listen to this, Pa, just to show you what an amazing sort of guy Tschaikowsky was—you know, the composer. It says here that he came to a hotel and was taken upstairs, ordered his dinner, saw to all the towels and whatnot, tipped the waiter, and when everything was all settled and he was alone in his room, he just threw himself on the bed and started crying … for no reason at all.”

  “Why did he do that?”

  “That’s the kind of guy he was, you know, a melancholy Russian composer. I’m amazed that he did that.”

  “Sure, sure!” cried the old man bitterly. “You’re amazed, all right. You’re amazed because he’s a Russian and because he’s a composer and because they all write about him, he’s not an ordinary joker like me!”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “Ah!” cried Martin, waving his hand violently. “Chekooski and Plakooski, just as long as it’s some fancy Russian name it means a hell of a lot more when they cry!”

  “Why are you saying all this!” demanded Peter, who was deeply hurt.

  “Why? Because I find out what you damn kids nowadays are thinking about all the time, that’s why! Why does it have to be Chekooski that you admire! Why! Just because he cries?” he yelled furiously, pounding the chair. “Goddam it, I cry, I cry too! But it doesn’t mean a goddam thing when I cry, I’m not Chekooski, I’m not a Russian composer, I’m just a poor ordinary American slob, that’s all, when I cry it’s because I’m a slob not because I’m amazing!”

  Peter stamped out of the room angrily and went barging around the kitchen in a blind reel of fury and embarrassment.

  “I c
ry too! I cry too!” his father was shouting in the other room. “Remember that, my fine-feathered young son with all your fancy books!”

  They hardly spoke a word the rest of the day. Peter was off from work that night, a time he would have ordinarily spent chatting with his father in the kitchen over a carton of beer while the mother and Mickey slept. Instead of staying home, he went walking all over Brooklyn in the profoundest daze he had ever known in all his life. Never had he felt so low that he had to shuffle his feet, compulsively, as he moved along the sidewalks that night. He tried to walk in a normal way but ended up shuffling and dragging along feebly, helplessly, wondering vaguely why. He covered miles and miles of streets that way, with his head lowered, his hands dangling at his side, his shoes scuffling slowly on the pavement, not looking particularly at anything along the way.

  When he came back home at three in the morning, his father was in bed sleeping. From the kitchen where he sat with his head down on the table in deep and helpless thought, Peter suddenly began to try breathing in rhythm with his father’s snores, just on a whim, almost in a lighthearted way, and realized wearily that he could not keep up with those rapid desperate wheezings without becoming dizzy and sick. It never occurred to him that anything was wrong, although, by the fact that he was so utterly and physically depressed, he realized later that his very furthermost nature must have known that his father was slowly nearing death during those very hours. The doctor had come the evening before to tap some more water out of the old man’s ravaged belly, as he had been doing for almost a year’s time, and weakness and shock were conspiring at last to bring the end, something which the doctor had expected many months ago.

  At dawn Peter raised his head from the table when his mother shuffled into the kitchen to get ready to go to work. The old man called them from the other room and said that it made him dizzy to lie in bed, so they helped him to his chair. He stared blindly at them and said: