But if it was ego that drove him, why was he not a professional skip, like Kleppmann—a man who moved from city to city setting up paper businesses, borrowing on them, vanishing as if in smoke. What could be more satisfying if it was ego, nothing more?
But that, too, he had an answer for. The Congressman’s ideas were no longer viable, his faith was as empty and dead as his estate, yet they’d left their mark on Will Hodge Jr as on all of them. The American dream turned nightmare. They were not such fools—or anyway Will Jr was no longer such a fool—as to pursue the dream, but at least, with the impossible ideal in mind, he could hate the forces that denied it. Nothing short of hate could explain his continuing pursuit of a man he knew had the power—and the indifference—to kill him. It was no fantasy. His evidence wouldn’t stand up in court, but he had evidence that R. V. Kleppmann had arranged the murder of a private detective in Madison, Wisconsin. The man had been found shot through the head, sitting on a public toilet.
It gave Will Jr nightmares, and when first he’d learned he had seemed to see Kleppmann on every dark street corner, in every alley, in every airport crowd. Once, pulling up at an intersection, he’d looked over at the man in the car beside him and had imagined in stark terror that the ghostly white face in the car next to his own—as white as a tangle of potato sprouts in a dark cellar—was Kleppmann’s, the pipe in the man’s hand a revolver. And once, getting into the M&T elevator, finding another man ahead of him, with his face hidden in his newspaper, Will had thought—heart pounding in his chest—that when the door closed the newspaper would be lowered and he would be meeting Kleppmann’s eyes. Wrong, of course. Kleppmann was not a man to do his own exterminating. Nevertheless, Will had gotten out his almost forgotten Army .38 and now carried it with him wherever he went, tucked into his briefcase. The nightmares continued, but little by little his daylight fears had withdrawn. Almost casually he seized the few trifling Kleppmann stocks or accounts he could locate—here fifty dollars, there seventy—stocks and accounts left, as if with malicious scorn, to mock him. He had, all told, ninety thousand to collect for Mercantile—God knew how many more debts the man had for some other poor collector to chase. But as for Kleppmann’s large accounts, Will Hodge was always a few hours or a few minutes too late. To Will’s certain knowledge, the man had pulled in a hundred and sixty thousand dollars since March, but always, as soon as Will could trace the stuff, it was gone, had vanished to thin air. It was as if the man had someone right here in the office keeping tabs. It was not beyond the realm of possibility. It had come to this, to tell the truth: whenever June, Will’s secretary, came into the room behind him, the hair on the back of his neck began to tingle with alarm. Louise said, “You’re going to have a breakdown, Will. I mean it!”
“This is stupid,” Will said aloud. “I should go home.” He leaned toward his desk, about to rise. That same instant, a door slammed, maybe the front door of the office. Will Jr jerked so violently that he almost fell off his swivel chair. He caught himself, splashing out with both hands toward the glossy desk on one side, the rolling typewriter table on the other, and got to his feet as quickly as he could manage.
“Who’s there?” he called.
His voice resounded in the dark hallway. No one answered.
Hurriedly, breathing in huge gulps, heart hammering, he went back in to his desk, moving his arms at his sides like a man swimming. He bent to his briefcase for the gun. When he had it in his hand he went back to the door and called again. After his shout, the silence seemed deeper than before. He went cautiously down the hallway, panting, and snapped on the light. All the office doors were closed. Through the high window at the end of the hallway he could see the dark windows of the office building opposite the M&T and he could feel in his blood the abyss falling away toward the street.
Behind him, in his own office, the phone rang. He started violently again and almost fired the gun. The phone rang a second time; he went to it.
Louise said, “Will?”
“It’s me,” he said. He struggled for breath.
“Will,” she said, “do you know what time it is?”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I got involved and—”
“Are you alone?” she asked.
“Who in hell would be here with me?”
She said nothing.
At last he said, speaking carefully, to hide his fright from her, “I’m just packing up to leave. I’ll be home in twenty minutes.”
The phone clicked; she’d hung up.
Then, crazily, he wondered: “Was it Louise?” He closed his eyes tight for a moment, then opened them. If it wasn’t Louise, then whoever had been inside one of those closed offices would be gone. What kind of people was he dealing with?
When he reached home she was still angry.
He said casually, “Did you phone me, at the office?”
She stared at him. “What’s the matter with you? Of course I did.” Her squint came.
“It’s all right,” he said. “All I meant was—” He could think of nothing to say. “Kids asleep?” he asked.
“Well what do you think? It’s almost midnight.”
Hours later, just as he was going to sleep, he thought again of the small white stones which the Chief of Police had held out to him. He remembered now. He had seen them twenty-five years ago. They’d been kept, in those days, in the locked drawer of his Grandfather Hodge’s desk. The effect of the memory was shattering, and he heaved himself up onto one elbow. With the sharp recollection of the stones there came, in terrible soul-crushing clarity, the desk itself—polished walnut that had seemed to burn with an inner light—the walnut captain’s chair where the Old Man always sat, the notebooks, the Bible, the legal books, the wide, clean window looking out on a world now utterly vanished—expanses where trees grew taller than any trees grow now, where fences stood out in precise detail and flowers were sharp particulars—a world where, for all the offices of the banjo clock and for all the gloomy intimations of the boggy, squitchy painting hanging on the study wall, a sailing vessel sinking in an eerie light, there was Space stretching out endlessly from the center of his child’s brain, but no hint yet of the antique serpent, the old destroyer, Time.
The stones had gone to his Uncle Taggert, it came to him. He was the only one who’d followed the Old Man’s interest in the occult. In horror, he realized that he knew the bearded creature in Clumly’s photograph. There was no possibility of mistake, much as he was changed. “Has it brought him to this?” he thought. “But what are we to do?” He saw again the malevolence in Clumly’s eyes.
“Louise,” he whispered.
She was asleep. All the street was asleep. He held his breath to listen to her breathing.
3
He awakened stiff and miserable, the covers tangled around his knees, the rest of his huge hairy body exposed to the morning chill. A patch of hair on the side of his head had been pressed the wrong way against the sheet and stuck up now, rigid and cold, as if it had been starched. He evaded the question that had troubled his sleep all night. His wife, too, had the covers off, but she’d pushed them away on purpose. She lay on her side, facing him, naked breasts softly, comfortably resting on the frame of her right arm, her left hand under the pillow just under his neck. He got up on one elbow and slid his jaw forward, studying her as though she were a stranger. Beside his own enormous bulk she was childlike and pitifully vulnerable, he thought, and his heart went out to her—or went out, rather, to all of them—Louise, Uncle Tag, his father and mother, his memory of himself as a child. Her hair was thinning a little on top, and the precise hairs rising from the white of her scalp made him think of the wax figure he’d seen once at Sutro’s in San Francisco, a self-portrait of a Japanese wax artist the hairs of whose head were, alas, all too literally numbered. With a detachment faintly disturbing to him he observed that Louise was still pretty, even in the morning, even with her dark, naturally curly hair slightly matted, a little coarse-looking, and her ski
n blotchy with sleep and the slowing of the blood. The trouble was that he did not feel drawn, stirred, interested. It was the dreams he’d had, that was it. Nightmares which began in a world radiant with a beauty organized and harmonious and full of light, like naked women to the eyes of an adolescent. The hills in his dreams shone as Louise had shone when he was first in love with her, or as the world had shone when he was still in love with the world: full of springtime sunlight, the hope of mysteries, when there were angels perched among the apples and plums and pears. But the dream world kept going monstrous, as life had done. Nothing shone for him that way any more, outside mere dreams. Not because of sins of commission or sins of omission, not because he had tasted the knowledge of good and evil, but because he was what he was, merely a man. His half-mad uncle would understand.
He lay back and closed his eyes. He’d been through all that before, without the dreams. It was exactly what made this Buffalo rat race so monstrous and, at the same time, so neurotically satisfying. One was born to a world luminescent with mother-and-father love, a mere upsurge of animal instinct never meant to be translated into idea, vision, and yet inevitably translated by the very nature of that terrible accident Man. One projected onto the indifferent breezes—onto the indifferent greens or the softness of snow—the absurdities of one’s human temperament—beauty, holiness, truth. One made of sticks and stones and rivers and mountains the grandiose affirmation of human heads. Thus the writer to the Hebrews on the subject of Faith: an outreaching of the mind beyond what it immediately possesses. Self-transcendence. But the reach did not imply the existence of the thing reached for. One knew it even as one reached.
But that too he had been through before. It was one thing to know that “first love,” or one’s first idea of God, or one’s first shock of reaction to a work of art is mere chemistry, a trick of the universe on its victim. It was another to be able to resist.
He’d talked with Ben Jr, long ago—it was the year before Ben Jr died—about painting. They were up in the Musicians Union Hall, waiting for Ben Sr to come pick them up in his truck and drive them home. The Civic Orchestra had just rehearsed. It was late, half-past eleven or so. Main Street, below where they sat looking out, was dark and quiet.
Will had said, “I wish I could paint sometimes, a night like this.”
Ben stood tall and gloomy, the French horn still cradled in his arm, blond hair vague in the darkness. “I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t see it. Tonight, anyway.”
Will scoffed. “ ‘See it.’ Talk about grand affectations! ‘I can’t see it.’ “
Ben said nothing, and after a moment Will said guiltily, “Forget it.”
Ben put his long shoe up on the windowledge and looked at the mouthpiece of the horn. “Something happens to your eyes,” he said. “Sometimes you decide you’re going to paint, and you work and work, and—nothing. You ever stop to think how many artists take drugs, or get drunk, or screw around with women—abandon their families?”
“Well.”
“There’s a reason. The world is not beautiful. Tonight, say. I look out and it’s nothing but junk. Like the orchestra tonight. Everything sounded out of tune; Civic Orchestra’s always out of tune, we all realize that, but sometimes your ear does things to it, it all starts swinging. Same with painting. Sometimes you look at some hills or something and you get out your paints and everything you do is right—you could give the paints to a cow and it would be right, or anyway great, something you could fix. It’s inspiration. When you’ve got it, everything’s terrific, and when you haven’t, the world is all worms,”
Will thought about it. “I need a beer,” he said, then laughed abruptly. “If you got painting you’d be in a different mood, pretty soon.”
Ben laughed, too, hollow and terrible, and a year later when the news came that Ben Hodge Jr was dead in Korea, Will Jr would hear that laugh again, like a comment from beyond the grave. That night, lunging drunkenly along the bank of the Tonawanda Creek, flailing his arms and crying, Will Jr though he did not believe in prayer had prayed that when the machine gun caught him Ben Jr had been seeing like an artist, the waters alive. Will had fallen then, his feet tangled in a roll of rusty barbed wire, and had gone to sleep, the whole world wheeling around his drunkenness, and while he slept he had a dream in which Ben Jr came to him and said, “Everything will be all right.” He sat wide awake in the wet grass, the wire cutting into the calves of his legs, and in the place where Ben Jr had been standing there was nothing. He got up, cold sober, and made a small pile of stones. Then he went home.
The room was full of sunlight around him, and Louise had gotten up. He must have slept, then. He would be late for work. But he still resisted the effort of will that would throw his legs over the side and hoist his head up into the room. He could hear Danny and Madeline chattering happily, down in the breakfast room, and now and then Louise’s voice commanding them to eat. The voices blended with the sunlight and the dancing motes, and the sunlight blended with the walls, the yellow maple of the highboy, the covers no longer in a tangle around his knees but drawn up over him and gently tucked in around his shoulders. Everything is going to be all right. No sooner were the words established in his mind than his belly closed tight and sour around the thought of his uncle. Telling Clumly what he knew was out of the question, obviously. Should he go to his father? Uncle Ben? Should he hunt Uncle Tag himself? His mind worked quickly and efficiently, raising up obstacles. The emotions that might have given him some signal would not stir.
He got up, groaning with pain, drew on his bathrobe and padded into the bathroom. He got the roll of Tums from the medicine chest, then sat down on the toilet. His bowels burned like hot bricks moving down, and when he looked, afterward, there was blood. Well, he would live. He’d lived this long. He brushed his teeth and shaved.
If a man were really wise he would not merely wait for the waters of inspiration to move, he thought; he would freeze his heart against their moving. He would refuse to be deluded. A gritty, corpuscular universe, a grating of stiff and angular machines. Beware the colored lights that turn mere stagecraft into dinosaurs and singing rivers from the morning of the earth. Beware of chemistry, counsellor! What man not born a witch can tell the pastures of Paradise from the devil’s green illusions? Take the narrower view. I am not a man unaffected by chemistry, but I have at least this: I can try to withstand my poisons.
4
“Mr. Kleppmann, I believe?” Will had said, extending his hand. He was aloof, official, for he knew nothing yet of R. V. Kleppmann: another debtor, merely. It was Will’s place to be polite, his business to be cold, a functionary, invulnerable to any wedge of fellow-feeling.
“Good day, sir,” Kleppmann said. He was tall, well kept, with a face large and emotionless, a precise gray moustache, small and yet oddly protruding eyes adorned with neat, low-hanging gold-rimmed glasses of the sort seen in Czechoslovakia, say, or Russia. His manners those of a prince.
“Have a chair, Mr. Kleppmann.” Will Jr pointed with three fingers, palm up.
“Thank you.”
Will remained standing after Kleppmann sat down. He stood over his desk, his arms folded over his upper belly, his lips pursed judicially, and after a moment he began, formal, “As you know, I think, it is my unpleasant duty to ask you to answer a few questions this morning, for the purpose of ascertaining, so to speak, the whereabouts of any holdings which might be applied to the satisfaction of your present obligations to my client.”
Kleppmann nodded. He was a man of sixty or so. It was difficult to believe, from the looks of him, that he was not a man of the highest integrity.
Will cleared his throat. “We may as well proceed at once,” he said. “As you know, I presume, I’m obliged to examine you under oath.” He corrected himself, oddly flustered, “That is to say, you will be under oath, if I make myself clear.”
Kleppmann sighed. “Just as you say. Yes.”
“We may as well proceed at once.” It str
uck him that he’d used exactly that phrase a few seconds before. A bad beginning. He irritably switched on the tape.
Well, a grim ordeal. Seated, holding his hat in his hands like a supplicant, Kleppmann had managed to make Will Jr crawl. He was brilliant, that was all there was to it. He had a trace of an accent. In a soft voice, speaking in short, perfect sentences now and then punctuated by the involuntary sighs of a man ground under by adverse fortune, he told his tragic story. He’d been born into a wealthy family of Polish Jews, clothiers originally, but that was long before his time: his father was an art speculator, a man who bought up the work of promising young painters, sculptors, and ceramicists all over the world, particularly those in Paris, then waited, to put it politely, for their stock to rise. In point of fact he did not merely twiddle his thumbs, watching the market. His method was difficult to explain in a few words, Kleppmann said, but it went something like this. One must understand, first, that the world is amply stocked with art collectors who know nothing whatever about art, who buy for fashion’s sake or on speculation, but lack Kleppmann Sr’s eye. And one must understand, second, that a Miró which sells for an unheard-of price automatically raises the value of all other Mirós. The elder Kleppmann’s system was this: he sold paintings in groups, each group including one work—a blue Picasso, for instance—worth plenty. He gave away the Picasso for a song but jacked up the prices of the works by unknowns—and thus jacked up the value of other works by those painters, including, of course, the paintings in his own collection.