“Took you a long time to answer,” Hollingsworth complained.
“I’ve been thinking.”
Hollingsworth looked at his wrist watch. “I’m come up here to inform you,” he said apologetically, “that in fifteen minutes you must come down and the transfer must take place.”
McLeod wiped one hand against the other. “You gave me until tomorrow morning.”
“Sorry.”
“I suppose you have your troubles,” McLeod said.
His foot ticking the floor, Hollingsworth shook his head. “A fellow can change his mind, that’s all.”
McLeod grinned. “They want you at their office right away. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“They’re fantastic, they have no right …” Hollingsworth said in a choked voice.
“To suspect you?” He chortled. “They’ve been slow.”
Hollingsworth looked at him, his thin lips moist, his forearm extended in the futile gesture of a man who has something difficult to say, and frustrated, may only pinch his finger against his thumb. “No, you must listen to me,” he piped suddenly, his dull eyes expressive at last in the tears which clouded their surface. A whimper, small and involuntary, came from some depth within. “Everybody wants to hurt me,” he said like a boy of twelve.
“You’re tired, too,” McLeod said quietly.
“I can’t go back to working for them,” he burst out suddenly. “They go at a fellow so. You ask yourself, ‘Who am I anyway?’ Do you understand? But of course you do. You are so understanding,” he said tenderly. “Why the dear experiences I’ve had with some of my colleagues, and now they’re persecuting my friends and myself. And they’re just like us although they don’t realize it.” His outpour halted momentarily, and he took off his straw boater, and reached down to massage the toe of his pointed orange moccasins. “I must apologize for hurting you the other day, but you see I knew you gave your talk for Mr. Lovett, and my feelings were terribly hurt. I can’t express the admiration I feel for a gentleman like yourself. I think if conditions had been more, so to speak, propitious, we could have been dear friends.” He put his hand on McLeod’s arm.
Subtly, McLeod disengaged it. “I’m sorry,” he said stiffly, “but I’m afraid I have strong prejudices.”
Hollingsworth would not make it a rebuff. “Oh, it doesn’t matter. We’ll see each other I hope when all this is quiet. And I’ll take good care of your wife. Opposites attract, as she says, but then at bottom they’re so much the same.” He hesitated, but this was the last opportunity, and it must be said. “I can’t tell you how glad I am that you decided to give it to me. Because otherwise I would have had to bring you in, and that would have made me feel very bad. You know, I think I first had the idea for my offer when it occurred to me that I could also save you.” And he said this with passion so suppressed that the effort made him lean almost against the body of McLeod. “You’re such a stern sort of fellow,” he murmured. “I’ve always liked your type. And deep down, now don’t answer cause I know better than you, I feel that you could get to like me.” He caught himself short.
“All this is by the bye. Will you be down in fifteen minutes?”
“You’ve told me once.”
“And you take care of yourself. Make plans to leave at the same time I do. It’s not advisable to wait.” He seemed about to shake hands, and then turned around, walked quickly down the stairs.
McLeod went back into his room. I waited to cross the hall until the sound of footsteps had completely disappeared. Pushing forward the door which was open, I found McLeod sitting in a chair. Across from him was the desk and the empty seat which had belonged to Hollingsworth.
McLeod looked up at me. “You heard it all?” he asked.
I nodded, and he plucked some lint from his trouser leg. “I’ve finally made a decision,” he stated.
“Yes.”
“I’m not giving it to him.”
We were both silent after this. “Well, what are you going to do?” I asked.
“In a few minutes I’ll go down to see him.”
“Why don’t you …” I began.
“Disappear?” He laughed softly to himself. “Well, for that I’m afraid I don’t have the strength. You see he’s waiting down there, and his ears are not inconsiderable. No, he waits with the woman who was m’wife and the child, even the clothing’s been packed, and there’s only the last detail to be finished.”
“What about Guinevere?”
He shrugged sadly. “All my life I’ve loved ideas. So I loved the idea of loving my wife. And perhaps the child as well. I may face it now. No, Lovett, I’ve killed the alternatives. It seems to me I wanted to fail in every case, for it’s the alternatives cut your will to make the decision I have come to.” He shivered suddenly. “Except for one.”
“What will happen in the next few minutes?” I asked.
He jeered at me. “Oh, you assume too much. There’ll be a scene and threats, and then I’ll be on my way.”
The way he said this gathered my flesh. “And you leave nothing?”
“Nothing.”
“Then why don’t you give it to me?” I said carefully.
He was out of his chair and squeezing my arm. “Are you sure?” he asked in a tense voice.
My heart was beating so powerfully, I did not know if I could speak. “I’ve thought about it,” I managed to say. “I’m not a brave man, I know that …” It was expressed at last. “I have no future anyway. At least I can elect to have a future. If it’s short, small matter.”
He punched me lightly on the chest. “Old sonofabitch Lovett.” A smile illumined his face. “Ah, there’s so little time and so much to tell you. You’re romantic, boy, and you must guard against it. And you’re innocent, and you have much to learn.” He walked around nervously in a circle. “It’s impossible to give all advice in a minute, and even then you must learn yourself.” Able to contain himself no longer, he caught me in a bear hug and wrestled me about the room. “I’m proud of you,” he said loudly almost before he had thought the words, and laughed in pleasure. “Here.” He sat me down at the desk. “We’ve only a minute or two, and I must explain it to you. The details, the conditions, and the characteristics you can work out at leisure if you have any.”
When he was done he looked sternly across the table and said, the pedagogue again, “As Lenin said to the priest Gapon, ‘Study, little father, or you will lose your head.’ You hear, Lovett?”
I nodded.
“All right. Then I’ll be going down.”
“I’ll go with you,” I said.
McLeod was on his feet. “Oh, no. No, no. You don’t ruin it now.” He was suddenly furious. “You come down and that’s the finish of both of us. No, look, m’bucko”—and he had me by the shirt, his pale eyes glaring—“I’m an old hand, you know, and you don’t think I’ve spent the last few days without working over certain tactical questions for myself”—his breath coming hot against my face—“I mean, you don’t think I’d walk down there with no more than m’legs and not an idea in my head. No, I have a procedure, you see I discovered it today, and I can tell you that your presence, oh, I assure you, it would be the worst thing possible.” Releasing me, he muttered, “No, you stay here, and if something goes wrong, there is the chance, clear out and I’ll meet you in the alley at the end of the street.”
“If you … If you’re sure?”
As though he were drunk he bent forward with a half-comic, half-conspiratorial gesture, and said, “Mind you now, boy, don’t come down, or ruin it you will. When I get back, I’ll enumerate how the old fox McLeod has stolen the grapes again.” With that he pressed an envelope in my hand. “Just a few words. I was going to slip them under your door. Don’t read it now.” Lighting a cigarette, he passed into the hall, patted the banister rail, and moved out of sight.
For many minutes I obeyed his injunction, sitting in the darkness of the room, while slowly, my body motionless, heat drained from my limbs, th
e walls grew cold, and the stagnant attic air which had oppressed me for so many weeks, lost its warmth. My nose leaked, my hands were ice, and the silence of the house worked relentlessly at my nerve. I waited, until my ears selecting at last the momentous rhythm of water dripping from a pipe, I must attempt to determine from where it came—was it only across the hall, or could I hear it even from the cellar of another house?—and received each drop as though I were bound and the water tapped upon my skull. So, in the cave I waited, while stalactites offered their deposit to the floor.
The silence no longer endurable, I left his room for my own, and in the hall, my ear at the stair well, thought I heard the cadence of Hollingsworth’s voice. I descended a half-flight, and a footstep might have been heard. Or in its weariness did a timber creak? Thus, deploying at the end of a rope for certainly I would return, I passed the third-floor landing and then the second, pausing beside Lannie’s door. On the other side, in her room, the light would be on, the bulb burning into the darkness, while her windows still damp with their wound would stare at her face as she lay on the bed, and the paint not yet cold would voyage downward in its thick slow passage upon the glass. There I waited for another minute, tarrying at the last familiar outpost.
In the downstairs hallway a dusty lamp sat on a battered table, and encouraged an insect which circled above misaddressed bills and dead letters bearing the name of people who could no longer be found. Weight on my toes, body clenched, I paused there too, my fingers shuffling the envelopes, my eyes reading nothing.
They were talking. Now, on the stairs which led to the door of Guinevere’s suite, I could detect their voices, each whispering, and yet the rapidity with which they spoke and the lash of one whispered voice upon another betrayed their haste. Whisper to whisper and a low cry from Guinevere, Monina’s voice breaking out once in a whimper and silenced immediately. My head was at the keyhole, and they muttered back and forth, each voice becoming more resolved until the threat at last specific, the defiance was even clearer, and Hollingsworth’s voice was shrill for a single instant, crying out with the pain of a boy.
“You gypped me. You gypped me,” I heard him say.
“Crybaby, cry,” Monina sang.
What they were doing I hardly knew, but silence descended again, so filled, so complete, that I might have been upstairs in the other room frozen by the sequence of water falling, drop upon drop.
“You’ve hurt a fellow’s feelings,” Hollingsworth said in the mildest voice I had ever heard him use, “and that is why I am forced to punish you.”
Perhaps it was the way he said this, perhaps the hush which followed. But now the silence was impossible to bear. I heard the smallest creak of a step, and I could almost see the weapon uncovered and the slow rapt movement of each man about the other. There was some sound of attack, a thick cry which followed, and at that moment I flew against the door and came careening into the room to see McLeod collapsing before me. That in the fraction of a glance, and an instant later I must have been struck from behind, for something seemed to burst in my head, and I saw the floor rushing to my face, fell headlong with force enough to shatter consciousness.
So, helplessly, my arms groped before me while the floor yawed to my half-shut eyes like a raft floating on the swell. And with the shrieking and caterwauling of animals washed over the dam, I heard voices screeching: Guinevere, from a long way off, “I’m doomed, I’m doomed,” and Hollingsworth cursing and weeping, running first to one corner of the room, and then pacing to the other. “The car is ready,” I heard him cry, “and now we must go,” and an attack of sobbing which followed it. “Leave me here,” a woman’s voice was begging, Guinevere’s I knew at last, “just leave me here and let me lay,” whimpering in a panic, until he must have seized her with his arms and borne her to the door. “It’s off we go,” he said hoarsely, “and no time to lose, and now nobody will ever have it,” blubbering this, “nobody will ever have it, and what have I done?” until he screamed, “Come here, get the child, get her, I tell you.” Over my paralyzed head tumbled the chase, Monina yipping in fright, and the breath of the others sobbing at her neck. With a thump she was caught and with another hauled into somebody’s arms, and then I heard them stumbling out the door, and Guinevere crying, “It can’t have happened, it never does,” and a moment later or so I thought, the floor revolving with me, I heard the motor of some machine, an automobile I knew, and they were driving away, and into my head with a clarity which makes me certain it was said, Monina’s voice gave one last bleat.
“I want my daddie,” she wailed.
And the car disappeared, and the floor came up like a grappler, threw me off my knees and gasping on my back.
THIRTY-TWO
FINALLY, I managed to stand, and if I extended my arms far enough, the room would balance. I navigated the floor, and kneeled beside his body. The long thin arms covering his face, I did not try to see with what heart and what loss he had received his death. I touched the flaccid fingers and then I reeled away and stood leaning against the wall, remembering once to touch the envelope he had given me.
Lannie came through the door. Dressed in the sodden black rags of what had been once her pajamas, she wandered aimlessly back and forth, hair fallen over her eyes, and mouth crooning a tuneless song. She saw McLeod before she saw me, and stood singing tonelessly, her frail body lost in its wrapper. Then she drifted forward and looked into my face.
“Oh, you are my brother,” she said softly, “for there is blood on your cheek, and so we are wed.” And she gave me her hand.
We stood together against the wall, while outside the sound of automobiles descended upon us. One motor came racing down the street, braked to a halt, and its light which had traced a swath across the room, blinked out, and was replaced by the glare of a second car, which birthed from its twin, must come racing, braking, and blinking into position behind the other. When a third car turned the corner and roared to follow the others, I slipped away from the wall and drew Lannie after me into the bedroom.
After thirty seconds in which car doors slammed and men’s feet drummed upon the pavement, and my head absorbed them both, the iron gate to Guinevere’s apartment clanged open, and agents of the country we live in ran through the door. Three men with athletic bodies and business suits and gray felt hats came into the foyer. I sought Lannie’s mouth too late. She had begun to croon again, and even as they were looking dumbly at one another, she moved out of the darkness toward them. “You’ve come, I see,” she said in a loud clear voice as though they were deaf. “And I have decided to meet you.” As she raised her wrist the stigmata of cigarette burn was revealed upon it.
One of the men looked at her carefully.
“Book her,” he said.
When the others came forward, she smiled. “I love you even if you torment me, for you suffer,” she said. But as she passed with them through the door, light and shadow rippled across her face and terror with it. “Oh,” she said in a piteous little voice. And for a moment she must twist her body free.
“Oh,” she whispered, “I run through a field of tall grass and I fall. Does it choke me or do I sleep here?”
They led her onto the street and other men took their place. But I could hardly attend them. For as they entered the front door I was stealing through the back window, and when hubbub broke at the sight of the dead man on the floor I must have been halfway down the alley.
THIRTY-THREE
THE envelope contained McLeod’s will:
To Michael Lovett to whom, at the end of my life and for the first time within it, I find myself capable of the rudiments of selfless friendship, I bequeath in heritage the remnants of my socialist culture.
Almost as an afterthought he had scrawled:
And may he be alive to see the rising of the Phoenix.
So the heritage passed on to me, poor hope, and the little object as well, and I went out into the world. If I fled down the alley which led from that rooming house, it was
only to enter another, and then another. I am obliged to live waiting for the signs which tell me I must move on again.
Thus, time passes, and I work and I study, and I keep my eye on the door.
Meanwhile, vast armies mount themselves, the world revolves, the traveller clutches his breast. From out the unyielding contradictions of labor stolen from men, the march to the endless war forces its pace. Perhaps, as the millions will be lost, others will be created, and I shall discover brothers where I thought none existed.
But for the present the storm approaches its thunderhead, and it is apparent that the boat drifts ever closer to shore. So the blind will lead the blind, and the deaf shout warnings to one another until their voices are lost.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1923 in Long Branch, NJ, and raised in Brooklyn, NORMAN MAILER was one of the most influential writers of the second half of the twentieth century and a leading public intellectual for nearly sixty years. He is the author of more than thirty books. The Castle in the Forest, his last novel, was his eleventh New York Times bestseller. His first novel, The Naked and the Dead, has never gone out of print. His 1968 nonfiction narrative, The Armies of the Night, won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He won a second Pulitzer for The Executioner’s Song and is the only person to have won Pulitzers in both fiction and nonfiction. Five of his books were nominated for National Book Awards, and he won a lifetime achievement award from the National Book Foundation in 2005. Mr. Mailer died in 2007 in New York City.
By Norman Mailer
The Naked and the Dead
Barbary Shore
The Deer Park
Advertisements for Myself
Deaths for the Ladies (and Other Disasters)
The Presidential Papers
An American Dream
Cannibals and Christians
Why Are We in Vietnam?