Leo had equipped the vacuum with an extension cord which, added to the long wire that unwrapped from the hooks on the handle, gave him twenty feet to play with, so that he could plug it into a hall socket and enter the living room with the machine already whirring and nod and smile while his mother’s mouth worked inaudibly. Before the development of this technique he had been at her mercy; he did not have the stomach to throw the switch once she had begun to talk. Though, in truth, it was all the same to her whether she could be heard or not.
She had been a different woman when his father was alive. His father had been the talker. Funny, Leo had no precise memory of what his father had talked about, but it was always good-natured and often accompanied by a finger in the area of his bellybutton, followed by a little popping vibration of his father’s lips. His father would also address him with joke names like “Schnickelfritz” or “Buster Brown,” and sometimes from no other motive than high spirits give him a penny for jawbreakers. Leo usually salted these coins away, but he would come around with his tongue stuck in his cheek and say something so his father could suggest: “Better finish the candy before trying to bejabber.”
In those days his mother did all the housework. Sometimes she would take a moment in the late afternoon just before supper to pedal a roll through the player piano, though she never sang. She was up in the morning before everybody else, and stayed up at night until all were in bed. She knitted mufflers, crocheted doilies, canned every variety of fruit and vegetable, and baked all the bread and cake they ate. In the spring she cleaned the wallpaper of every room in the house with that pink putty that soon turned black. When repapering was called for, she did that as well, first soaking the old layer with a sponge and then stripping the plaster bare with a triangular scraper. She would set up a pasting rig like a professional, boards across sawhorses, shoot the roll along it, mark, cut, and slap on the flour-and-water mix with the big white-bristled brush; then climb the stepladder and drop the segment along the wall. On the finished job you could not see where the patterns joined unless you went right up to the seams.
In her day she never had the electrically powered instrument now wielded by Leo. His mother did the job with a carpet sweeper, and better than he, as she had been a better cook, a better housekeeper all around; indeed a better person until his father had fallen off the roof, because she had a job commensurate with her talents and interests.
Whereas Leo had felt misplaced all his life. What was he doing selling used cars? He was no extrovert like Buddy, and his interest in money was rather in saving what he had than in making more, the reverse of the salesman’s proper mystique.
While vacuuming each Sunday, Leo simultaneously carried out the accumulation of trash from his soul, cleaning it for another week of balanced existence. Why was his sex life confined exclusively to writing imaginary notes to schoolgirls? Why did he have no friends and furthermore feel no need to have any? Why was he without hobbies and avocations? For he was aware, from articles in This Week as well as the attitudes of such associates as Jack his co-worker and Plum the neighbor, that the way he lived might seem restricted, even bleak, to others; to some who were not aware that he supported his mother, perhaps even downright odd. But if you had no friends, there were fewer persons to speculate on such matters.
If you had short-lived, fantasy relationships with females, you spent no time or money; and if they were with teen-aged girls, the make-believe was not rich enough to distract you from reality. Leo feared the consequences of even imagining an association with, say, a Grace Plum, in whose large breasts and deep hips one might disappear as if in quicksand. Therefore he sensibly averted his eyes when he saw her come out to sunbathe attired in shorts and halter.
As to hobbies, he had scarcely enough leisure in which to perform his tasks.
This left, to last, what was always the first question of his Sunday stocktaking: his job. True, he was by nature no salesman, but at least since he had worked for Buddy he had been offering for sale a product that customers were in the market for, else they would not have come on the lot. Previously, in the worst years of the Depression, after being laid off as clerk at the coal company, a job he had had since dropping out of school, he was forced to go from door to door with the kind of merchandise nobody sought of their own volition: a one-volume encyclopedia, then a line of shoddy brushes in imitation of Fuller, and finally the real Realsilk hosiery, a product that was decent enough but required calling on housewives with an intimate item when they were home alone. No doubt Buddy would have made a bundle at this, as well as an enormous commission in flesh, but Leo preferred the hostile women who slammed the door in his face to those who did not even open it.
Finally, there was security in working for Buddy. Their personalities were compatible. At the rare moments when Buddy’s control failed, as in the incident with Ballbacher—which was unprecedented in the appearance of the gun—Leo’s own gift came into play. Had Ballbacher been his own customer, of course, no trouble would have arisen. One problem Leo could handle beautifully was the last-minute loss of nerve by a certain type of client. When Ballbacher had hesitated, Leo would have taken the initiative in negation, denied him the pen and the purchase agreement, and made a display of compassionate superiority. “Let’s look at something else that’s not too rich for your blood.” This might have led to a lesser sale or none at all, but it might also have stung the man’s pride in a subtle way, suggesting that in considering a car he could not afford he had been the fraud, and not the salesman.
…All this while Leo had been methodically vacuuming the hallway, with its long, dun-colored runner that was worn through to the backing along the center line. Reaching its end, he ran the machine across the bare patch of floor between hall and living room, from which it evoked a thunderous reverberation. Across the faded maroon-and-blue carpet he steered for the area under the parrot’s cage, with its week’s collection of the sunflower seeds, whole, fragmented, or husks, either dropped by Boy with his insouciant eating habits or flung out deliberately. He seemed to enjoy the machine and always clung to the near bars, head cocked to watch its progress below; though if Leo bumped the standard that supported his abode, Boy would beat his wings and squawk shrilly enough to be heard above the motor.
Boy was supposed to be about the same age as Leo, according to the old lady who had given him the bird when he was fifteen. Despite the parrot’s manifest affection for him, Leo sometimes looked at the merciless yellow eye and wondered how they both would fare if Boy were five feet eight and he were a tiny man behind bars.
Without relaxing its attention, without even a tremor of tail, the parrot suddenly ejected a spurt of liquid excrement, which solidified instantly when it hit the newspapers on the cage floor, forming another oyster-colored clump with seeds, chaff, and gravel.
Leo deftly swung the machine around and rumbled across the rug towards the davenport, keeping his eyes down until the first row of orange-and-pink, octagonal segments of afghan intruded into the top of his vision. There was nothing for it now but to look up and see his mother’s mouth working.
But a sudden tension of the power cord caused him instead to turn and see he had encircled the vertical standard of the birdcage. Another inch of forward motion would have toppled it over. He had never done this before.
He switched off the motor, creating an awful silence. Boy was back on his swing, green head stolidly pulled down neckless into his sloping shoulders, eyes self-righteously closed.
Leo turned. His mother never noticed his activities unless he made a mistake while performing them. She would not have missed this error, which he was fully prepared to admit had been idiotic.
The afghan had fallen to the floor, and she was all blood from her chin to the waist of the old dressing gown. If her past hemorrhages had been only in fantasy, this one was real, and she was white-faced and dead.
Even in the throes of horror, Leo realized he must clean up here before carrying the Hoover upstairs.
br /> chapter 7
ACCORDING TO an alphabetical scheme, Ralph and Hauser were assigned to different home rooms in high school. On the first day, after an assembly attended by the entire student body, everyone was dismissed until the following morning. The two friends found themselves in the crowd and started the familiar walk home. The high school adjoined the grade school to which they had gone for eight years.
As freshmen they were allowed one elective, and Ralph had chosen Speech. Hauser had predicted he would himself opt for Manual Training, which had been compulsory in the seventh and eighth grades, but now he announced that he too had decided on Speech.
“It’s supposed to give you poise,” said Ralph. “That comes in handy in business and I guess in whatever other field you might go into in later life.”
“Listen, Sandifer,” said Horse, “until I learn the ropes I hope you don’t try to crack me up when I have to make a speech.” He compressed his lips earnestly. “You know, like make a monkey face or give me the old—” He thumbed his nose.
Some other kids went by on bikes. One cried: “You eat it, Hauser.”
“Christ, why would I do that?” asked Ralph in amazement.
“You want to make an agreement? You won’t try to crack me up, and I won’t do it to you. O.K.?”
“It’s a deal.” They shook on it.
“Listen,” Ralph said. “I think I’ll take you up on that job, if you still mean it. I think I’ll go over there about three P.M.”
“Sure.” Hauser looked morose. But suddenly he brightened. “How about that brick we threw through Bigelow’s window! I bet he didn’t know whether to shit or go blind when he found that.” Without warning he rammed Ralph with his hard hip. Taken by surprise, Ralph fell against a low retaining wall at the edge of someone’s property.
“God damn you,” he cried as he rose. He examined the seat of his trousers. “If you’ve torn these new pants of mine—”
Across the street on the other sidewalk he saw Darlene and Doreen Montgomery, twins who were in their class, and realized Hauser had knocked him down to show off to them. They made identical grimaces. One shouted: “You think you’d grow up now you’re in high school.”
Hauser, usually so quick with a rejoinder, turned his head away, smiling foolishly and in silence. He had a crush on the twins.
When they had walked snippishly on, he said in a sickeningly sentimental voice: “Gee, I’m crazy about those cuties. Aren’t they just the cutest things imaginable?” He seemed to be talking to himself. “They got real good taste in clothes too. Look at them little tams on the backs of their heads.”
“You’re going crazy, Hauser,” Ralph said sourly. “I don’t know what you see in those snotty bitches.”
“Class,” said Horse. “See how clean they keep their saddle oxfords, and their skirts ain’t never wrinkled. I bet you they go to Florida again in November like they did last year, and come back with lovely suntans in the winter.”
Mrs. Montgomery was a cousin of the Flegenbaums, the brewery family. Before Prohibition they had been bootleggers. Mr. Montgomery, a sallow little man, had been given a managerial job at the beer plant, which made him well-to-do in the local context: he drove a Chrysler, and the twins sported a different outfit every schoolday. However, they were far from being the rich girls portrayed by Katharine Hepburn, with their own tennis courts and a uniformed flunky who served breakfast from silver-covered dishes; and to show you how provincial they were, once when Ralph borrowed an ascot from his father to wear inside his sports-shirt collar to hide the top of a frayed undershirt, the Montgomery twins snickered and asked if he had a throat-cold.
Hauser watched the girls until they turned the corner. They walked briskly, in step, their pleated skirts swinging in unison.
“They slay me, those two,” said he.
“Yeah, yeah.”
“Sandifer, I want to ask you man to man: do you think I’ve got a chance?”
“With which one?”
Hauser hung his head. “It’s weird. Either one. Both, I guess. The idea of twins is devastating. I can’t imagine one without the other. I can’t tell one from the other. I’d like to get married to them both.”
“Married? What the hell you want to get married for?”
“Why,” said Hauser, frowning, “because you fall in love.”
Ralph snorted. “You’re a fifteen-year-old kid, for Christ sake.”
“I guess you’re thirty-five.”
“When I am,” said Ralph, “I won’t be married.”
“You’ll be jacking off in some boardinghouse someplace: that’s what you’ll be doing.”
Ralph had not intended to get into this argument, but he could not endure Hauser in a sentimental phase. “I’ll be going out with movie stars!”
They had stopped walking. Hauser seized the crook of his elbow and said: “Tell me this then: suppose you had the chance to get married to Merle Oberon?”
“She’s already married. That’s no example.” He did not know this for a fact about Merle. If he came across an article about her in a newspaper or movie mag he quickly turned the page. He could not bear learning about her personal life. He wanted stars to live only on the silver screen, vanishing into a limbo between pictures. He had heard that his favorite male performer, Errol Flynn, was a big drunk and sex fiend in real life. He hated to hear that kind of information.
“By time you’re thirty-five maybe she’ll be divorced. You know movie stars.”
Ralph said stiffly: “I don’t want to talk about it. It’s ridiculous.”
Hauser jeered. “You’re afraid to admit you’re madly in love with Merle. I notice you never talk dirty about her, either. That’s what I mean, Sandifer. A man just don’t go through life fucking whores. He wants to find the girl of his dreams and settle down in a little love nest and have kids.”
“A glamorous star like Merle in a little love nest?”
“Go on,” said Hauser, throwing up his shoulder caps, “be sarcastic. You don’t hurt my feelings none. Someday when you’re an old bum, you come around my house where I’m living with Doreen—or Darlene—and we’ll give you a hot meal on the back steps.”
“O.K.,” said Ralph. “Then you come for cocktails in my New York penthouse, and be sure to wear your tuxedo because if you don’t the butler won’t let you in.”
They had reached Horse’s home, a two-story structure from which the paint was flaking. The long porch ran downhill at the north end, where a post was disintegrating from rot or termites. A blackened dump-truck sat in the twin mud tracks that constituted the driveway. Hauser’s father was a driver for the coal company.
“Oh-oh,” said Horse, seeing the truck. “The big prick is home for lunch.”
“See you,” said Ralph.
“Not if I see you first,” Horse cried without turning his head.
Buddy went to the bank as soon as it opened, poked his head into the frosted-glass cubicle of Charlie Furst, the president, and asked for the return of the erroneous night-deposit envelope.
Charlie was dunking a teabag into a china cup. “Sure, Bud,” said he. “Mary just went down to bring them up.” He hung the tiny tag over the side of the cup. “Say, I’m going to buy a new machine and if Hellman Buick won’t give me enough on the trade-in, I might come around and see you.”
“You’d do all right over there,” said Buddy. “They need your business.” Furst had approved a loan for Buddy some years before and ever since had been threatening to ask for the return of what was not that big a favor. He would expect top dollar for his car. Buddy had better friends now at the Building & Loan Society. Still, this was not the time for reluctance; he could save that until Furst showed up at the lot. “But if they don’t,” he said, “come on over and we’ll see what we can do.”
“Thirty-seven Buick four-door, clean as a whistle. You know the car. Less than fifty thousand mileage?” He was asking how much it would bring.
Buddy would not accept the q
uestion. “We’ll be glad to take a gander if it don’t work out with Hellman. But I know him to be fair.”
Furst raised his eyebrows. “I thought he was the competition.” Hellman had his own used-car lot next to his showroom.
“Charlie,” Buddy said sententiously, “I never try to succeed by knocking someone else.”
Furst held his cup over the metal wastebasket and plucked out the dripping teabag, which however he did not discard but rather tucked onto the saucer for later use. He was a middle-aged man of no great local popularity, having had to foreclose mortgages on various people during the Depression.
“That’s a real manly attitude,” said he.
Buddy gave him a one-fingered salute and went to the last teller’s window, which was unattended. Through the bars he saw that Mary Wentworth had brought the night deposits up from the basement in a Werk Soap carton, which she was now emptying onto her desk.
He called to her, and she came to the window. Mary was a widow in her late thirties. Her trunk was slender but she had a plump face and a large round behind. Recently she had taken to hennaing her brown hair, no doubt because of the arrival of some gray.
After hearing Buddy’s problem in sullen silence, she returned to her desk, found the envelope, and brought it to him. “I never thought you’d make a mistake,” she said sourly and went back to work.
“Obliged, Mary,” said Buddy. It had been Mary he was pronging in the office that night when Clarence tried to steal a car. She had come originally to the lot to sell her late husband’s automobile, which she could not drive, and anyway she was in grievous need of money, her uninsured spouse having left her with two children and no profession. Buddy gave her more for the old Hupmobile than he could ever sell it for, and he also made her a gift of his tool for several months until her gratitude became obnoxious. She of course called it love, but Buddy knew it was rather that she had been badly in need of confidence. He had done a lot for her, even put in the good word with Charlie Furst that got her hired at the bank; but since he had turned off the sex, all she had for him was the peevishness of the spurned.