The Fool's Progress

  He put his ear to her belly and heard, sure enough, the gentle thumping of a tiny fetal heart. “Who’s the father?”

  “You’re the father.”

  “We’ve been separated for six months.”

  “You’re my husband. So you’ll have to be the father.”

  Ipso facto, Q.E.D., thusly so, thought Henry. He inverted, reversed, transposed and redacted her syllogism, trying to detect its fatal flaw. “Okay,” he said, “but if I might ask, all the same, only out of innocent curiosity you understand, what’s the name of the man who did it?”

  “Does it really make any difference?”

  “Not really. Only—”

  “Only you’d like to know so you can take one of those awful guns of yours and go kill him, right Henry?”

  Right, he thought. “Oh no,” he said.

  “You’ve always wanted an excuse to kill somebody, haven’t you? The only way to prove to yourself you’re a man, right Henry?”

  “Is he an artist?”

  “Is who an artist?”

  “This son of a bitch who knocked you up.”

  “Of course he’s an artist. A great artist. And a real man. Neither of which you will ever be, Henry.”

  How many goddamned artists in New York? he thought. About five hundred thousand. Common as cashews at Chock full o’ Nuts. Well, he thought, I’ll track him down. “You know, Myra, in most states this is grounds for divorce.”

  She continued to smile at her astrological ceiling. “Grounds for divorce?”

  “Infidelity.” He could not bring himself to use the word adultery. Although either was enough to bring up his own guilt feelings. From their dank Christian root-cellar depths.

  As she knew. She laughed. “Henry, I never dreamed I’d hear that word from you. Infidelity…what a word.”

  He was silent for a moment or two. Or three. “But it is grounds.”

  “Grounds, grounds, coffee grounds.” Suddenly she sat up and glared at him. “You can lie there and talk about infidelity? You? And then try to threaten me with this stupid talk about divorce? With my father dying? With me in my third month of pregnancy? You could even think of leaving me now?” The tears began to flow.

  “Why don’t you marry this artist friend of yours?”

  “He’s already married,” she bawled. “Anyhow I already have a husband.”

  Namely me, he thought. Henry the cretin. The idiot. Le fou. Aloud he said, “How do you think this makes me feel? Here you admit you’re going to have a baby—”

  “Our baby. It’s going to be our baby.”

  “It’s not my baby.”

  “It will be your baby.” She wiped the tears from her cheeks and glared at him again. “Can’t you ever grow up? Can’t you ever learn to accept responsibility? Is your real name Peter Pan?”

  He stared at the ceiling, unable to face the disgust in her eyes. “But damn it, Myra—”

  “Don’t you love me anymore? You came here just to screw me once and then run? Is that the kind of man you are?”

  Henry had never in his life been capable of telling a woman, any woman, that he no longer loved her. He lacked the kindness to be so cruel. “Of course I still love you, but doggone it, Myra….”

  She looked at him. Quietly she said, “You left me alone for six months, Henry.”

  “I know. But—”

  “I’m a woman, Henry. A young healthy sensuous woman with real psychosexual needs, Henry.”

  Silence. Staring intently into his flustered baffled exasperated face, she waited for the appropriate response. It finally came.

  “All right Myra, what do you want from me?”

  She nodded. Quietly and reasonably she explained his duties to him. “I want you to get a job.”

  “But I just got laid off. I’m on vacation.”

  “I mean a real job. Not one of those summertime Smokey Bear jobs. I want you to get a full-time permanent job, here in the city. I want you to settle down and accept the responsibilities of marriage and fatherhood. We’ll live in this apartment and the one upstairs. You can help Uncle Sid collect the rents from our tenements on River Street. Those schwartzes and Puerto Ricans are dangerous; he needs a bodyguard. That will give you something to do on weekends.”

  “What are you going to do?”

  “I have my work.” She looked with solemn satisfaction at the huge vain and vapid paintings on the walls, the mute blank-eyed androids slouching in the corners.

  She has her work, he thought, and I have my duties. A fair division of labor. What is the perfect robot anyhow but a properly processed human being? a soundly pussywhipped American male? Right. Horns on his head? Think of them as antlers. “So art’s the thing?”

  “That’s right,” she said, cheering up rapidly. “And in six months I’m going to be a mother.”

  “I’m not sure I can go along with this plan.”

  She smiled brightly, kissed him and drew back to look again at the spacious, gallerylike room. “But you’ve got to, Henry. We have no alternative. What do you think of those horrible purple drapes on the street windows? We should take them down, put in venetian blinds. Let more light into this room.”

  IV

  Through Myra’s Uncle David, a publisher’s chief accountant, Henry Lightcap was provided employment as a technical writer with Western Electric. Though neither technical nor a writer, Henry did hold a bachelor’s degree. Good enough for corporate work. Along with nineteen other men, young and old, he found himself installed at a desk under fluorescent lights, in a big office on the twenty-second floor of a forty-story tower, editing drafts of training manuals for American military forces stationed in the Arctic.

  Since Henry’s security clearance would take several weeks, he was assigned the menial chore of editing a nonclassified U.S. government document called How to Dispose of Human Sewage [is there any other kind?] in Permafrost: Preliminary Draft. A work authored by C. J. Budnik, T. S. Schlunk and B. F. Cudball, FASCE (Fellows, American Society of Civil Engineers). In skimming over this 128-page monograph, the labor of two years by three full-grown men, Henry discovered—through a dense cobweb of subliterate supratechnical jargon complete with maps, charts, graphs, tables and organic equations—that Budnik, Schlunk and Cudball had arrived at no final feasible economically solvent solution to the vexing problem of how to dispose of human sewage in permafrost. Various proposals were submitted, outlined, evaluated, rejected: (1) drill boreholes through the permanent ice to a depth of five thousand feet, injecting sewage under pressure into hole casings and then compacting it to a solid state by means of specially devised tamping machines; (2) surface compaction, overland transport by snow tractor and hauler sledges to the nearest maritime port, burial at sea; (3) rocket transport into permanent orbit around Uranus; (4) once-daily transport of human personnel by supersonic jet to restroom facilities at latitudes below or beyond the permafrost zone; (5) special restricted diet for human personnel at military installations, such as, e.g., Triscuit crackers and longhorn (style) cheese; (6) satisfactory conclusion of experimental research toward development and production of a nonlethal antidiuretic colonic bungstopper effective for a minimum three-month period; (7) processing of sewage into recyclable edible matter such as Spam, or “caramel yoghurt” or Cap’n Crunchies or “Viennese sausages,” etc.; (8) temporary collection and storage of fecal materials in shallow sewage lagoons until the necessary technology for permanent disposal is developed; and (9) crap in the snow like an Eskimo, let the dogs eat it.

  Solution #9, actually, was Henry’s own. Leading to an even better idea, which he offered to Karp, the project supervisor.

  “What? You wanta what?”

  Get on a plane, Mr. Karp, fly to Nome, Point Barrow, Baffin Bay and Ultima Thule, investigate the problem firsthand in the field. Would only take a few weeks, probably; he’d gather the data, fly back with the know-how on file to produce the world’s best training manual on Arctic sewage disposal.

  Mr. Karp took a drag
on his White Owl, puckered his lips to form a nozzle and expelled the smoke in a plume, draping Henry in a blue-gray hood of noxious gases.

  “Back to your desk, Lightcap.”

  “Sir?”

  “I mean the answer is no. Your job, Lightcap, is translating these engineers’ gobbledygook into readable English, not doing shit research.”

  Wounded, Henry returned to his desk. Resentful, he sat there for five minutes, then transferred himself to the water cooler by the west-side windows. Paper cup of chlorinated water in hand, he gazed for ten minutes through the murky glass at the Hudson River, the Hoboken waterfront, the heights of Weehawken, the miasmal mists beyond where a red autumn sun was sinking toward Stump Crick West Virginia, Osceola Arkansas, Dalhart Texas, Shiprock New Mexico, Hanksville Utah and the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. His heart ached, his bowels yearned, the salt tears of exile formed in his eyes.

  There he stood for about half of the working hours of the next two weeks, not even tasting the bitter water. At the beginning of the third week Mr. Karp descended from his elevation and came to Henry.

  “Lightcap.”

  The young man at the window did not stir.

  “I’m talking to you, Lightcap.”

  No answer.

  “Lightcap, I get the feeling you don’t really want to be a Western Electric technical writer. I get the feeling, Lightcap, you aren’t happy here.” A pause. “Am I right, Lightcap?”

  No response.

  “That’s what I thought. So we’re letting you go as of the end of this week. If it weren’t for your wife’s uncle I’d have sent you to the down elevator the minute I laid eyes on you. Where’d you learn to knot a necktie that way?”

  Henry did not wait for the end of the week. He left two minutes after the discussion with Mr. Karp. He ricocheted down the twenty-two stairways (faster than waiting for an express elevator) to Ninth Avenue, walked south to the Village giddy with his sense of liberation, paused in the White Horse Tavern for two bourbons and beer in honor of his hero Dylan (the real Dylan), walked on to the Barclay Street Ferry, crossed over the majestic effluent of the Hudson River to Hoboken, idled away some time in the Clam Broth House where he drank four schooners of draft Lowenbräu and ate a platter of steamed clams and then—with a newfound crony from the New York City Welfare Department named Bat Lanahan—took the train to Jersey City for the matinee at Minsky’s Burlesque. Lili St. Cyr was in town that week, doing her velvet trapeze act above the heads of Henry, his new friend Bat and three hundred sexual degenerates. Coming next week: Tempest Storm!

  But sooner or later he had to confront reality before it confronted him. In the dismal November twilight, through a tenebrous mist of acid rain, over the greasy cobbles of the alleyways, he shambled afoot toward the brownstone apartment house that Mrs. Lightcap called home.

  He arrived on a scene of normal Mishkin pandemonium. The old man had relapsed again, been sent by ambulance back to the hospital. Myra’s mother Leah, a duck-shaped female of sixty years, sat locked in the bathroom in a coma of despair, while her son Lenny, having just been mugged by a gang of Uncle Sid’s tenants—four Puerto Ricans and a Hairless Mexican—lay groaning on the sofa. Myra greeted Henry with the confirmation—hardly news—that he’d been sacked from his job, that she’d been trying to locate him since noon, that she wanted an immediate divorce (hope rose), that she would give him one more chance (then sank), that Uncle David had promised to get Henry a position as chief stock clerk at McGraw-Hill’s book warehouse in Hackensack and that her father was dying again while he, Henry, Henry the Schmuck, her so-called “husband,” wandered the streets in a state of public drunkenness after spending the last of their money, probably, on some cheap blonde shiksa slut from Boston (she knew his type, she knew his stripe) he’d picked up at MoMA, right? some skinny WASP bitch with tiny tits and no ass, right Henry?

  Henry denied everything. Everything, including the obvious. He’d not been fired, he quit. He wasn’t drunk, he was only tired. He never went to the MoMA because there was something about Braque, Mondrian, Leger & Co., and Gottlieb, Rothko and Pollock Inc., that inspired him with an animal repugnance. As for Uncle David and his McGraw-Hill, they could shove the whole puke-blue forty-four-story glass-and-tin obelisk up their collective asshole because he, Henry Lightcap, was going to get a new and better job as a social investigator (investigating society) with the NYC Welfare Dept., starting next week, depending on how soon Bat got things lined up.

  Who? What? Bat?

  Bat Lanahan. My friend Bat. He works there. All I have to do is pass a civil-service test, have a talk with some ward boss, and the job is mine. They’re crying for help.

  And what’s the pay?

  Henry paused; he divulged the amount.

  What? she screamed. That’s half what you get as a technical writer.

  But, he explained, as a welfare worker he’d only have to spend two or three days a week in the office. The rest of the time he’d be out in the field, so to speak, investigating, as it were.

  Oh God, she moaned, oh God, what’s going to become of us. She placed both hands on her belly. It’s kicking again, I’m going to have a miscarriage, Daddy’s dying, Momma’s having a breakdown, my brother’s wounded, my husband stabs my back….

  And she fled. Downstairs. To where Lenny was screaming at Mother Leah through the bathroom door. Maw, I’ll kick it down….

  Henry crept wearily to bed, lay down and died the little death. There are days there are nights when that’s all a man wants to do: fall out, turn in, lie down, curl up and die.

  V

  A day at the madhouse:

  Emerging from the Catacombs, Henry halted for a moment to get his bearings. What he used to think of as his instinctive sense of direction seemed to have vanished since he came to the city to live. Nor could he get a clue to his position by looking to the heavens: the sky, from where he stood, consisted of an irregular narrow rectangle of gray murk, dripping fly ash and sulfuric acid in his face, through which no hint of the sun could be seen, though it was after nine o’clock in the morning. Wherever he looked the view was the same: steel, cement, glass, iron, brick, asphalt, extending, as he knew from bitter experience, for miles, for leagues, for eternities in every direction, north to Boston, south to Baltimore, the world’s greatest labyrinth, full of Minotaurs.

  A stray gust of wind came whirling down the street, blowing grit in his teeth, and he remembered which way he had to go. Squinting his eyes, breathing cautiously, he buttoned his coat up close to his sore streptococcoid throat and hurried—against the wind—through the bleak corridor of the street until he reached the concrete steps leading up to the door of the Department of Welfare Building, Church Street Branch. He was not alone, of course; others entered with him, but these were welfare clients rather than welfare employees. He found his time card in the rack and slipped it into the prim little mouth of the time clock. The clock chattered, bit the card, and when he pulled it out his time was stamped in red ink: 9:27. His usual time of arrival, for he had discovered an easy way of avoiding the worst of the morning rush: go to work late. It was a beautiful discovery, which he longed to share with others, though he knew that it contained in its heart an inherent paradox. Furthermore, what was good for him was not necessarily good for all Americans. Was it? Though how could they be sure until they tried it?

  Bypassing the elevators, he climbed to his fourth floor office by way of the back stairs, which was quicker and easier. Despite months in the city, he still could not adapt to the custom of standing immobile in an immobile herd in order to ride in a box up two or three floors. Even worse, from his point of view, were the terrifying escalators, where men and women, stiff as machine parts on an assembly line, glided like zombies up and down perpetual stairways.

  You’re late again, Mr. Lightcap.

  Yes, ma’am.

  Look at this report from the timekeeper’s office. Mrs. Kelly, unit supervisor, shoved a card in his face. You’ve been late sevente
en times in the last twenty-one working days. How do you account for that, Mr. Lightcap?

  Well, Mrs. Kelly…the other four times I was early.

  That’s no excuse. Suppose everybody followed your pattern?

  Well…I would too.

  Are you being insolent, young man? Mrs. Kelly watched him closely with bulging hysteric eyeballs, magnified alarmingly by the thick lenses of her goggles. The rest of us manage to get here by nine o’clock. Why can’t you? She spoke in a voice under firm but measured control. Do you think you deserve special privileges?

  I don’t…Well, maybe, yes…He found he couldn’t look her in her eyes, he was afraid they’d spring from their sockets at any moment. The poor woman, she suffered from high blood pressure, hypertension and cirrhosis. And menopause. He lowered his vulgar stare, kept his eyes on the hard Spandex breasts mounted unnaturally, like a pair of tin funnels, high on her ribcase.

  We try to treat everyone fairly here, Mr. Lightcap. No one gets special privileges, least of all you. We treat everyone exactly the same.

  Is that fair?

  What? Is what fair?

  Mrs. Kelly! Mrs. Kelly! screamed the unit clerk, waving a telephone. Other telephones were jingling and jangling merrily throughout the immense office, where 120 caseworkers, 40 administrators, and 40 clerks wallowed in seas, billowing ocean waves of papers, papers, papers. Mrs. Kelly! Sadie Grossman…

  Yes, yes, just a minute. She returned to Henry. What precisely did you mean by that remark, Mr. Lightcap?

  I think I’m doing a good job, Mrs. Kelly. I try to keep up. I make the field visits. I fill out the forms.

  That’s not quite the point, Mr. Lightcap. We’re pleased with your progress here and expect even better work from you in the future. But you’ve still got to learn to get here by nine o’clock. It won’t kill you.

  It hurts…

  Mrs. Kelly! the unit clerk screamed. It’s the fire department. Sadie Grossman is trying to commit suicide. They want her investigator at once.

  All right, stop screaming. Mrs. Kelly swung away from Henry. Who’s got Sadie Grossman?