“Is he Jewish?” I asked.
“Is he? He’s a Zionist, an anarchist, a Talmudist and an abortionist. A damned fine chap—and if you’re in need of help he’ll give you his shirt. I was just around to your house—that’s how I found out. Your wife seems to be tickled to death. She’ll live pretty comfortably on the alimony you’ll have to pay her.”
I told Mara what he had said. We decided to have a look at the place immediately. Stanley had disappeared. Ulric thought he might have gone to the bathroom.
I went to the bathroom and knocked. No answer. I pushed the door open. Stanley was lying in the tub fully dressed, his hat over his eye, the empty bottle in his hand. I left him lying there.
“He’s gone, I guess,” I shouted to Ulric as we sailed out.
8
The Bronx! We had been promised a whole wing of the house—a turkey wing, with feathers and goose pimples thrown in. Kronski’s idea of a haven.
It was a suicidal period which began with cockroaches and hot pastrami sandwiches and ended à la Newburg in a cubbyhole on Riverside Drive where Mrs. Kronski the Second began her thankless task of illustrating a vast cycloramic appendix to the insanities.
It was under Kronski’s influence that Mara decided to change her name again—from Mara to Mona. There were other, more significant changes which also had their origin here in the purlieus of the Bronx.
We had come in the night to Dr. Onirifick’s hide-out. A light snow had fallen and the colored panes of glass in the front door were covered with a mantle of pure white. It was just the sort of place I had imagined Kronski would select for our “honeymoon.” Even the cockroaches, which began scurrying up and down the walls as soon as we turned on the lights, seemed familiar—and ordained. The billiard table, which stood in a corner of the room, was at first disconcerting, but when Dr. Onirifick’s little boy casually opened his fly and began to make peepee against the leg of the table everything seemed quite as it should be.
The front door opened directly on to our room, which was equipped with a billiard table, as I say, a large brass bedstead with eiderdown quilts, a writing desk, a grand piano, a hobbyhorse, a fireplace, a cracked mirror covered with fly-specks, two cuspidors and a settee. There were in all no less than eight windows in our room. Two of them had shades which could be pulled down about two-thirds of the way; the others were absolutely bare and festooned with cobwebs. It was very jolly. No one ever rang the bell or knocked first; everyone walked in unannounced and found his way about as best he could. It was “a room with a view” both inside and out.
Here we began our life together. A most auspicious debut! The only thing lacking was a sink in which we could urinate to the sound of running water. A harp might have come in handy, too, especially on those droll occasions when the members of Dr. Onirifick’s family, tired of sitting in the laundry downstairs, would waddle up to our room like auks and penguins and watch us in complete silence as we ate or bathed or made love or combed the lice out of one another’s hair. What language they spoke we never knew. They were as mute as the reindeer and nothing could frighten or astound them, not even the sight of a mangy fetus.
Dr. Onirifick was always very busy. Children’s diseases were his specialty, but the only children we ever noticed during our stay were embryonic ones which he chopped into fine pieces and threw down the drains. He had three children of his own. They were all three supernormal, and on this account were allowed to behave as they pleased. The youngest, about five years of age and already a wizard at algebra, was definitely on his way to becoming a pyromaniac as well as a supermathematician Twice he had set fire to the house. His latest exploit revealed a more ingenious turn of mind: it was to set fire to a perambulator containing a tender infant and then push the perambulator downhill towards a congested traffic lane.
Yes, a jolly place to begin life anew. There was Ghompal, an ex-messenger whom Kronski had salvaged from the Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company when that institution began to weed out its non-Caucasian employees. Ghompal, being of Dravidian stock and dark as sin, had been one of the first to get the gate. He was a tender soul, extremely modest, humble, loyal and self-sacrificing—almost painfully so. Dr. Onirifick cheerfully made a place for him in his vast household—as a glorified chimney sweep. Where Ghompal ate and slept was a mystery. He moved about noiselessly in the performance of his duties, effacing himself, when he deemed it necessary, with the celerity of a ghost. Kronski prided himself on having rescued in the person of this outcast a scholar of the first water. “He’s writing a history of the world,” he told us impressively. He omitted mentioning that, in addition to his duties as secretary, nurse, chambermaid, dishwasher and errand boy, Ghompal also stoked the furnace, hauled the ashes, shoveled the snow, papered the walls and painted the spare rooms.
Nobody attempted to wrestle with the problem of roaches. There were millions of them hidden away beneath the moldings, the woodwork, the wallpaper. One had only to turn on the light and they streamed out in double, triple, file, column after column, from walls, ceiling, floor, crannies, crevices—veritable armies of them parading, deploying, maneuvering, as if obeying the commands of some unseen superroach of a drillmaster. At first it was disgusting, then nauseating, and finally, as with the other strange, disturbing phenomena which distinguished Dr. Onirifick’s household, their presence among us was accepted by all and sundry as inevitable.
The piano was completely out of tune. Kronski’s wife, a timid, mouselike creature whose mouth seemed to be curled in a perpetual deprecatory smile, used to sit and practice the scales on this instrument, oblivious apparently of the hideous dissonances which her nimble fingers produced. To hear her play “The Barcarolle,” for example, was excruciating. She seemed not to hear the sour notes, the jangled chords; she played with an expression of utter serenity, her soul enrapt, her senses numbed and bewitched. It was a venomous composure which deceived no one, not even herself, for the moment her fingers ceased wandering she became what in truth she was—a petty, mean, spiteful, malevolent little bitch.
It was curious to see the way in which Kronski pretended to have found a jewel in this second wife. It would have been pathetic, not to say tragic, were he not such a ridiculous figure. He cavorted about her like a porpoise attempting to be elfish. Her digs and barbs served only to galvanize the ponderous, awkward figure in which was hidden a hypersensitive soul. He writhed and twisted like a wounded dolphin, the saliva dripping from his mouth, the sweat pouring from his brow and flooding his all too liquid eyes. It was a horrible charade he gave us on these occasions; though one pitied him one had to laugh, to laugh until the tears came to one’s eyes.
If Curley were around he would turn on Curley savagely, in the very midst of his antics, and vent his spleen. He had a loathing for Curley that was inexplicable. Whether it was envy or jealousy which provoked these uncontrollable rages, whatever it was, Kronski would, in these moments, act like a man possessed. Like a huge cat, he would circle around poor Curley, taunting him, baiting him, stinging him with rebukes, slanders, insults, until he was actually foaming at the mouth.
“Why don’t you do something, say something?” he would sneer. “Put up your dukes! Give me a crack, why don’t you? You’re yeller, aren’t you? You’re just a worm, a cad, a stooge.”
Curley would leer at him with a contemptuous smile, saying not a word, but poised and ready to strike should Kronski lose all control.
Nobody understood why these ugly scenes took place. Ghompal especially. He had evidently never witnessed such situations in his native land. They left him pained, wounded, shocked. Kronski felt this keenly, loathing himself even more than he loathed Curley. The more he fell in Ghompal’s estimation the harder he strove to ingratiate himself with the Hindu.
“There’s a really fine soul,” he would say to us. “I would do anything for Ghompal—anything.”
There were lots of things he might have done to alleviate the latter’s burdens, but Kronski gave the impression that when
the time came he would do something magnificent. Until then nothing less would satisfy him. He hated to see anyone lend Ghompal a helping hand. “Trying to salve your conscience, eh?” he would snarl. “Why don’t you put your arms around him and kiss him? Afraid of contamination, is that it?”
Once, just to make him uncomfortable, I did exactly that. I walked up to Ghompal and, putting my arms around him, I kissed him on the brow. Kronski looked at us shamefacedly. Everyone knew that Ghompal had syphilis.
There was Dr. Onirifick himself, of course, a presence which made itself felt throughout the house, rather than a human being. What went on in that office of his on the second floor? None of us really knew. Kronski, in his elaborate, melodramatic way, gave crude imaginative pictures of abortion and seduction, bloody jigsaw puzzles which only a monster could put together. On the few occasions when we met, Dr. Onirifick impressed me as being nothing more than a mild, goodhearted man with a smattering of learning and a deep interest in music. Only for a few minutes did I see him lose his poise, and that altogether justifiable. I had been reading a book by Hilaire Belloc dealing with the persecution of the Jew throughout the centuries. It was like waving a red flag in front of him to even mention the book and I immediately regretted the blunder. In diabolical fashion Kronski tried to widen the breach. “Why are we harboring this snake in the grass?” he seemed to say, arching his eyebrows and twitching and squirming in his customary way. Dr. Onirifick, however, passed it off by treating me as if I were merely another gullible idiot who had fallen for the arch casuistry of a diseased Catholic mind.
“He was upset tonight,” Kronski volunteered after the doctor had retired. “You see, he’s after that twelve-year-old niece of his and his wife is on to him. She’s threatening to turn him over to the district attorney if he doesn’t stop running after the girl. She’s jealous as the devil and I don’t blame her. Besides, she hates to think of the abortions that are pulled off every day, right under her nose, polluting her home, as it were. She swears there’s something wrong with him. There’s something wrong with her too, if you notice. If you ask me, I think she’s afraid he’ll cut her open some night. She looks at his hands all the time, as if he always came to her fresh from a murder.”
He paused a moment to let these observations sink in. “There’s something else preying on her mind,” he resumed. “The daughter is growing up . . . she’ll be a young woman before long. Well, with a husband like that you can see what’s bothering her. It’s not just the idea of incest—horrible enough—but the further thought, that. . . that he’ll come to her some night with bloody hands . . . the hands that murdered the life in her own daughter’s womb. . . . Complicated, what? But not impossible. Not with that guy! Such a fine fellow. A sensitive, delicate chap, really. She’s right. And what makes it worse is that he’s almost Christlike. You can’t talk to him about the sex mania because he won’t admit a word you say. He pretends to be absolutely innocent. But he’s in deep. Someday the police will come and take him away—there’ll be a hell of a stink, you’ll see. . . .”
That Dr. Onirifick had made it possible for Kronski to pursue his medical studies I knew. And that Kronski had to find some extraordinary way of paying Dr. Onirifick back I was also aware of. Nothing would suit him better than to have his friend disintegrate completely. Then Kronski would come to the rescue in magnificent fashion. He would do something wholly unexpected, something no man had ever done for another. That was how his mind worked. Meanwhile, by spreading rumors, by slandering and maligning his friend, by undermining him, he was only hastening a downfall which was inevitable. He was positively itching to get to work on his friend, to rehabilitate him, to repay him superabundantly for the kindness he had shown him in putting him through college. He would pull the house down about his friend’s ears in order to rescue him from the ruins. A curious attitude. A sort of perverted Galahad. A meddler. A super-meddler. Always doing his damnedest to make things go from bad to worse so that at the last ditch he, Kronski, might step in and magically transform the situation. Even so, it was not gratitude he desired but recognition, recognition of superior powers, recognition of his uniqueness.
While he was still an intern I used to visit him occasionally at the hospital where he was serving his time. We used to play billiards with the other interns. I only visited the hospital when I was in a desperate mood, when I wanted a meal or the loan of a few dollars. I hated the atmosphere of the place; I loathed his associates, their manners, their conversation, their very aims even. The great healing art meant nothing to them; they were looking for a snug berth, that was all. Most of them had as little flair for medicine as a politician has for statesmanship. They didn’t even have that fundamental prerequisite of the healer—the love of humankind. They were callous, heartless, utterly self-centered, utterly disinterested in anything but their own advancement. They were worse boors than the butchers in the slaughterhouse.
Kronski was thoroughly at home in this environment. He knew more than the others, could outtalk them, outsmart them, outshout them. He was a better billiard player, a better crapshooter, a better chess player, a better everything. He knew it all and he loved to spew it forth, parade up and down in his own vomit.
Naturally he was heartily detested. Of a gregarious nature he managed, despite his obnoxious traits, to keep himself surrounded by his kind. Had he been obliged to live alone he would have fallen apart. He knew that he was not wanted: nobody ever sought him out except to ask a favor of him. Alone, the realization of his plight must have caused him bitter moments. It was difficult to know how he really appraised himself because in the presence of others he was all gusto, merriment, bluster, bravado, grandeur and grandiloquence. He behaved as though he were rehearsing a part before an invisible mirror. How he loved himself! Yes, and what loathing there was behind that facade, that amourpropre! “I smell bad!”—that’s what he must have said to himself every night when alone in his room. “But I’ll do something magnificent yet. . . just watch!”
At intervals there came moods of dejection. He was a pitiful object then—something quite inhuman, something not of the animal world but of the vegetable kingdom. He would plop himself down somewhere and let himself rot. In this condition tumors sprouted from him, as from some gigantic moldy potato left to perish in the dark. Nothing could stir him from his lethargy. Wherever he was put he would stay, inert, brooding incessantly, as though the world were coming to an end.
As far as one could make out he had no personal problems. He was a monster who had emerged from the vegetable kingdom without passing through the animal stage. His body, almost insentient, was invested with a mind which ruled him like a tyrant. His emotional life was a mush which he ladled out like a drunken Cossack. There was something almost anthropophagous about his tenderness; he demanded not the promptings and stirrings of the heart but the heart itself, and with it, if possible, the gizzard, the liver, the pancreas and other tender, edible portions of the human organism. In his exalted moments he seemed not only eager to devour the object of his tenderness but to invite the other to devour him also. His mouth would wreathe itself in a veritable mandibular ecstasy; he would work himself up until the very soul of him came forth in a spongy ectoplasmic substance. It was a horrible state of affection, terrifying because it knew no bounds. It was a depersonalized glut or slop, a hang-over from some archaic condition of ecstasy—the residual memory of crabs and snakes, of their prolonged copulations in the protoplasmic slime of ages long forgotten.
And now, in Cockroach Hall, as we called it, there was preparing itself a delicious sexual omelet which we were all to savor, each in his own particular way. There was something intestinal about the atmosphere of the establishment, for it was an establishment more than a home. It was the clinic of love, so to speak, where embryos sprouted like weeds and, like weeds, were pulled up by the roots or chopped down with the scythe.
How the employment manager of the great Cosmodemonic Telegraph Company had ever allowed himself to
be ensnared and trapped in this blood-soaked den of sex surpasses understanding. The moment I got off the train at the elevated station and started descending the stairs into the heart of the Bronx I became a different person. It was a walk of a few blocks to Dr. Onirifick’s establishment, just sufficient to disorient me, to give me time to slip into the role of the sensitive genius, the romantic poet, the happy mystic who had found his true love and who was ready to die for her.
There was a frightful discordance between this new inner state of being and the physical atmosphere of the neighborhood through which I had to plunge each night. Everywhere the grim, monotonous walls loomed up; behind them lived families whose whole life centered about a job. Industrious, patient, ambitious slaves whose one aim was emancipation. In the interim putting up with anything; oblivious of discomfort, immune to ugliness. Heroic little souls whose very obsession to liberate themselves from the thralldom of work served only to magnify the squalor and the misery of their lives.
What proof had I that poverty could bear another face? Only the dim, fuzzy memory of my childhood in the 14th Ward, Brooklyn. The memory of a child who had been sheltered, who had been given every opportunity, who had known nothing but joy and freedom—until he was ten years of age.
Why had I made that blunder in talking to Dr. Onirifick? I had not intended to talk about the Jews that evening—I had intended to talk about The Path to Rome. That was the book of Belloc’s which had really set me on fire. A sensitive man, a scholar, a man for whom the history of Europe was a living memory, he had decided to walk from Paris to Rome with nothing but a knapsack and a stout walking stick. And he did. En route, all those things happened which always happen en route. It was my first understanding of the difference between process and goal, my first awareness of the truth that the goal of life is the living of it. How I envied Hilaire Belloc his adventure! Even to this day I can see in the corner of his pages the little pencil sketches he made of walls and spires, of turrets and bastions. I have only to think of the title of his book and I am sitting in the fields again, or standing on a quaint medieval bridge, or snoozing beside a quiet canal in the heart of France. I never dreamed that it would be possible for me to see that land, to walk through those fields, stand on those same bridges, follow those same canals. That could never happen to me! I was doomed.