How had I managed to leave out all these divine behemoths and the ruckus they were constantly creating, me up on the carpet every few days to explain this and explain that, as if I had instigated their peculiar, inexplicably screwy behavior. Yeah, what a job trying to convince the big shot (with the brain of a midget) that the flower of America was seeded from the loins of these crack-pots, these monsters, these hair-brained idiots who, whatever the mischief, were possessed of strange talents such as the ability to read the Cabala backwards, multiply ten columns of figures at a time or sit on a cake of ice and manifest signs of fever. None of these explanations, of course, could alleviate the horrendous fact that an elderly woman had been raped the night before by a swarthy devil delivering a death message.
It was tough. I never could make things clear to him. Any more than I could present the case for Tobachnikov, the Talmudic student, who was the nearest replica of the living Christ that ever walked the streets of New York with Happy Easter messages in his hand. How could I say to him, this owl of a boss: This devil needs help. His mother is dying of cancer, his father peddles shoe laces all day, the pigeons are crippled. (The ones that used to make the synagogue their home.) He needs a raise. He needs food in his belly.
To astonish him or intrigue him, I would sometimes relate little anecdotes about my messengers, always using the past tense as if about some one who had once been in the service (though he was there all the time, right up my Sleeve, securely hidden away in Px or FU office.) Yes, I’d say, he was the accompanist of Johanna Gadski, when they were on tour in the Black Forest. Yes (about another), he once worked with Pasteur at the famous Institute in Paris. Yes (still another), he went back to India to finish His History of the World in four languages. Yes (a parting shot), he was one of the greatest jockeys that ever lived; made a fortune after he left us, then fell down an elevator shaft and smashed his skull.
And what was the invariable response? Very interesting, indeed. Keep up the good work. Remember, hire nothing but nice clean boys from good families. No Jews, no cripples, no ex-convicts. We want to be proud of our messenger force.
Yes, sir!
And by the way, see that you clean out all these niggers you’ve got on the force. We don’t want our clients to be scared out of their wits.
Yes, sir!
And I would go back to my perch, do a little shuffling, scramble them up a bit, but never fire a soul, not even if he were as black as the ace of spades.
How did I ever manage to leave them out of the messenger book, all these lovely dementia praecox cases, these star rovers, these diamond-backed logicians, these battle-scarred epileptics, thieves, pimps, whores, defrocked priests and students of the Talmud, the Cabala and the Sacred Books of the East? Novels! As if one could write about such matters, such specimens, in a novel. Where, in such a work, would one place the heart, the liver, the optic nerve, the pancreas or the gall bladder? They were not fictitious, they were alive, every one of them and, besides being riddled with disease, they ate and drank every day, they made water, they defecated, fornicated, robbed, murdered, gave false testimony, betrayed their fellow-men, put their children out to work, their sisters to whoring, their mothers to begging, their fathers to peddle shoe laces or collar buttons and to bring home cigarette butts, old newspapers and a few coppers from the blind man’s tin cup. What place is there in a novel for such goings on?
Yes, it was beautiful coming away from Town Hall of a snowy night, after hearing the Little Symphony perform. So civilized in there, such discreet applause, such knowing comments. And now the light touch of snow, cabs pulling up and darting away, the lights sparkling, splintering like icicles, and Monsieur Barrere and his little group sneaking out the back entrance to give a private recital at the home of some wealthy denizen of Park Avenue. A thousand paths leading away from the concert hall and in each one a tragic figure silently pursues his destiny. Paths criss-crossing everywhere: the low and the mighty, the meek and the tyrannical, the haves and the have nots.
Yes, many’s the night I attended a recital in one of these hallowed musical morgues and each time I walked out I thought not of the music I had heard but of one of my foundlings, one of the bleeding cosmococcic crew I had hired or fired that day and the memory of whom neither Haydn, Bach, Scarlatti, Beethoven, Beelzebub, Schubert, Paganini or any of the wind, string, horn or cymbal clan of murikers could dispel. I could see him, poor devil, leaving the office with his messenger suit wrapped in a brown parcel, heading for the elevated line at the Brooklyn Bridge, where he would board a train for Freshpond Road or Pitkin Avenue, or maybe Kosciusko Street, there to descend into the swarm, grab a sour pickle, dodge a kick in the ass, peel the potatoes, clean the lice out of the bedding and say a prayer for his great grandfather who had died at the hand of a drunken Pole because the sight of a beard floating in the wind was anathema to him. I could also see myself walking along Pitkin Avenue, or Kosciusko Street, searching for a certain hovel, or was it a kennel, and thinking to myself how lucky to be born a Gentile and speak English so well. (Is this still Brooklyn? Where am I?) Sometimes I could smell the clams in the bay, or perhaps it was the sewer water. And wherever I went, searching for the lost and the damned, there were always fire escapes loaded with bedding, and from the bedding there fell like wounded cherubim an assortment of lice, bedbugs, brown beetles, cockroaches and the scaly rinds of yesterday’s salami. Now and then I would treat myself to a succulent sour pickle or a smoked herring wrapped in newspaper. Those big fat pretzels, how good they were! The women all had red hands and blue fingers—from the cold, from scrubbing and washing and rinsing. But the son, a genius already, would have long, tapering lingers with calloused tips. Soon he would be playing at Carnegie Hall.) Nowhere in the upholstered Gentile world I hailed from had I ever run into a genius, or even a near genius. Even a book shop was hard to find. Calendars, yes, oodles of them, supplied by the butcher or grocer. Never a Holbein, a Carpaccio, a Hiroshige, a Giotto, nor even a Rembrandt. Whistler, possibly but only his mother, that placid looking creature all in black with hands folded in her lap, so resigned, so eminently respectable. No, never anything among us dreary Christians that smelled of art. But luscious pork stores with tripe and gizzards of every variety. And of course linoleums, brooms, flower pots. Everything from the animal and vegetable kingdom, plus hardware, German cheese cake, knackwurst and sauerkraut. A church on every block, a sad looking affair, such as only Lutherans and Presbyterians can bring forth from the depths of their sterilized faith. And Christ was a carpenter! He had built a church, but not of sticks and stones.
15.
Things continued to move along on greased cogs. It was almost like those early days of the Japanese love nest. If I went for a walk even the dead trees inspired me; if I visited Reb at his store I came back loaded with ideas as well as shirts, ties, gloves and handkerchieves. When I ran into the landlady I no longer had to worry about back rent. We were paid up everywhere now and had we wanted credit we could have had it galore. Even the Jewish holidays passed pleasantly, with a feast at this house and another at that. We were deep into the Fall, but it no longer oppressed me as it used to. The only thing I missed perhaps was a bike.
I had now had a few more lessons at the wheel and could apply for a driver’s license any time. When I had that I would take Mona for a spin, as Reb had urged. Meanwhile I had made the acquaintance of the Negro tenants. Good people, as Reb had said. Every time we collected the rents we came home pie-eyed and slap happy. One of the tenants, who worked as a Customs inspector, offered to lend me books. He had an amazing library of erotica, all filched at the docks in the course of duty. Never had I seen so many filthy books, so many dirty photographs. It matte me wonder what the famous Vatican Library contained in the way of forbidden fruit.
Now and then we went to the theatre, usually to see a foreign play—Georg Kaiser, Ernst Toller, Wedekind, Werfel, Sudermann, Chekov, Andreyev … The Irish players had arrived, bringing with them Juno and the Peacock and t
he Plough and the Stars. What a playwright, Sean O’Casey! Nothing like him since Ibsen.
On a sunny day I’d sit in Fort Greene Park and read a book—Idle Days Patagonia, Haunch, Paunch and Jowl, of The Tragic Sense of Life (Unamuno). If there was a record I wanted to hear which we didn’t have I could borrow from Reb’s collection or from the landlady’ s. When we felt like doing nothing we played chess, Mona and I. She wasn’t much of a player, but then neither was I. It was more exciting, I found, to study the games given in chess books—Paul Morphy’s above all. Or even to read about the evolution of the game, or the interest in it displayed by the Icelanders or the Malayans.
Not when the thought of seeing the folks—for Thanksgiving—could get me down. Now I could tell them—it would be only half a lie—that I had been commissioned to write a book. That I was getting paid for my labors. How that would tickle them! I was full of nothing but kind thoughts now. All the good things that had happened, to me were coming to the surface. I felt like sitting down to write this one and that, thanking him or her for all that had been done for me. Why not? And there were places, too, I would have to render thanks to—for yielding me blissful moments. I was that silly about it all that I made a special trip one day to Madison Square Garden and offered up silent thanks to the walls for the glorious moments I had experienced in the past, watching Buffalo Bill and his Pawnee Indians whooping it up, for the privilege of watching Jim Londos, the little Hercules, toss a giant of a Pole over his head, for the six day bike races and the unbelievable feats of endurance which I had witnessed.
In these breezy moods, all open to the sky as I was, was it any wonder that, bumping into Mrs. Skolsky on my way in or out, she would stop to look at me with great round eyes as I paused to pass the time of day? A pause of half or three-quarters of an hour sometimes, during which I unloaded titles of books, outlandish streets, dreams, homing pigeons, tug boats, anything at all, whatever came to mind, and it all came at once, it seemed, because I was happy, relaxed, carefree and in the best of health. Though I never made a false move, I knew and she knew that what I ought to do was to put my arms around her, kiss her, hug her, make her feel like a woman, not a landlady. Yes, she would say, but with her breasts. Yes, with her soft, warm belly. Yes. Always yes. If I had said—Lift your skirt and show me your pussy! it would have been yes too. But I had the sense to avoid such nonsense. I was content to remain what I appeared to be—a polite, talkative, and somewhat unusual (for a Goy) lodger. She could have appeared naked before me, with a platter of Kartoffelklose smothered in black gravy and I wouldn’t have laid a paw on her.
No, I was far too happy, far too content, to be thinking about chance fucks. As I say, the only thing I truly missed was the bike. Reb’s car, which he wanted me to consider as my own, meant nothing. Any more than would a limousine with a chauffeur to tote me around. Not even a passage to Europe meant much to me now. For the moment I had no need of Europe. Nice to dream about it, talk about, wonder about it. But it was good right where I was. To sit down each day and tap out a few pages, to read the books I wanted to read, hear the music I craved, take a walk, see a show, smoke a cigar if I wanted to—what more could I ask for? There were no longer any squabbles over Stasia, no more peeking and spying, no more sitting up nights and waiting. Everything was running true to form, including Mona. Soon I might even look forward to hearing her talk about her childhood, that mysterious no man’s land which lay between us. To see her marching home with arms loaded, her cheeks rosy, her eyes sparkling—what did it matter where (she was coming from or how she had spent the day? She was happy, I was happy. Even the birds in the garden were happy. All day long they sang, and when evening came they pointed their beaks at us and in their cheep-cheep language they said to one another—See, there’s a happy couple! Let’s sing for them before we go to sleep—
Finally the day came when I was to take Mona for an outing. I was now qualified to drive alone, in Reb’s opinion. It’s one thing, however, to pass a test and quite another to have your wife put her life in your hands. Backing out of the garage made me nervous as a cat. The damned thing was too huge, too lumbering; it had too much power. I was in a sweat lest it run away with us. Every few miles I brought it to a halt—always where there was room to make a clean start!—in order to calm down. I chose the side roads whenever possible, but they always led back to the main highway. By the time we were twenty miles out I was soaked with perspiration. I had hoped to go to Bluepoint, where I had passed such marvelous vacations as a boy, but we never made it. It was just as well too, for when I did visit it later I was heart-broken; it had changed beyond all recognition.
Stretched out on the side of the road, watching the other idiots drive by, I vowed I would never drive again. Mona was delighted by my discomfiture. You’re not cut out for it, she said. I agreed. I wouldn’t even know what to do if we had a blow-out, I said.
What would you do? she asked.
Get out and walk, I replied.
Just like you, she said.
Don’t tell Reb how I feel about it, I begged. He thinks he’s doing us a great favor. I wouldn’t want to let him down.
Must we go there for dinner this evening?
Of course.
Let’s leave early then.
Easier said than done, I replied.
On the way back we had car trouble. Fortunately a truck driver came to the rescue. Then I smashed into the rear end of a beaten up jalopy, but the driver didn’t seem to mind. Then the garage—how was I to snook her into that narrow passageway? I got half-way in, changed my mind, and in backing out narrowly missed colliding with a moving van. I left it standing half on the sidewalk, half in the gutter. Fuck you! I muttered. Make it on your own!
We had only a block or two to walk. With each step away from the monster I felt more and more relieved. Happy to be trotting along all in one piece, I thanked God for having made me a mechanical dope, and perhaps a dope in other respects as well. There were the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, and there were the wizards of the mechanical age. I belonged to the age of roller skates and velocipedes. How lucky to have good arms and legs, nimble feet, a sharp appetite! I could walk to California and back, on my own two feet. As for traveling at seventy-five an hour, I could go faster than that—in dream. I could go to Mars and back in the wink of an eye, and no blow—outs…
It was our first meal with the Essens. We had never met Mrs. Essen before, nor Reb’s son and daughter. They were waiting for us, the table spread, the candles lit, the fire going, and a wonderful aroma coming from the kitchen.
Have a drink! said Reb first thing, holding out two glasses of heavy port. How was it? Did you get nervous?
Not a bit, said I. We went all they way to Blue-point.
Next time it’ll be Montauk Point. Mrs. Essen now engaged us in talk. She was a good soul, as Reb had said. Perhaps a trifle too refined. A dead area somewhere. Probably in the behind.
I noticed that she hardly ever addressed her husband. Now and then she reproved him for his rudeness or for his bad language. One could see at a glance that there was nothing between them any more.
Mona had made an impression on the two youngsters, who were in their teens. (Evidently they had never come across a type like her before.) The daughter was overweight, plain looking, and endowed with extraordinary piano legs which she did her best to hide every time she sat down. She blushed a great deal. As for the son, he was one of those precocious kids who talk too much, know too much, laugh too much, and always say the wrong thing. Full of excess energy, excitable, he was forever knocking things over or stepping on some one’s toes. A genuine pipperoo, with a mind that jumped like a kangaroo.
When I asked if he still went to synagogue he made a wry face, pinched his nostril with two fingers, and made as if pulling the chain. His mother quickly explained that they had switched to Ethical Culture. It pleased her to learn that in the past I too had frequented the meetings of this society.
Let’s have some
more to drink, said Reb, obviously fed up with talk of Ethical Culture, New Thought, Baha’i and such fol de rol.
We had some more of his tawny port. It was good, but too heavy.
After dinner, he said, we’ll play for you. He meant himself and the boy. (It’ll be horrible, I thought to myself.) I asked if he was far advanced, the boy.
He’s not a Mischa Elman yet, that’s for sure. He turned to his wife. Isn’t dinner soon ready?
She rose in stately fashion, smoothed her hair back from her brow, and headed straight for the kitchen. Almost like a somnambulist.
Let’s pull up to the table, said Reb. You people must be famished.
She was a good cook, Mrs. Essen, but too lavish. There was enough food on the table for twice as many as we were. The wine was lousy. Jews seldom had a taste for good wine, I observed to myself. With the coffee and dessert came Kummel and Benedictine. Mona’s spirits rose. She loved liqueurs. Mrs. Essen, I noticed, drank nothing but water. Reb, on the other hand, had been helping himself liberally. He was slightly inebriated, I would say. His talk was thick, his gestures loose and floppy. It was good to see him thus; he was himself, at least. Mrs. Essen, of course, pretended not to be aware of his condition. But the son was delighted; he enjoyed seeing his old man make a fool of himself.
It was a rather strange, rather eerie ambiance. Now and again Mrs. Essen tried to lift the conversation to a higher level. She even brought up Henry James—her idea of a controversial subject, no doubt—but it was no go. Reb had the upper hand. He swore freely now and called the rabbi a dope. No talky-talk for him. Fisticuffs and wrastling, as he called it, was his line now. He was giving us the low-down on Benny Leonard, his idol, and excoriating Strangler Lewis, whom he loathed.