Collected Stories

  Victor called him the Santa Claus of threats. He was amused by him. He also said, “Krieggstein belongs to the Golden Age of American Platitudes.”

  “What do you mean by that, Victor?”

  “I’m thinking first of all about the ladies he takes out, the divorcщes he’s so attentive to. He sends them candy and flowers, Gucci scarves, Jewish New Year’s cards. He keeps track of their birthdays.”

  “I see. Yes, he does that.”

  “He’s part Whitehat, part Heavy. He tries to be like one of those Balzac characters, like what’s-his-name—Vautrin.”

  “Only, what is he really?’_ said Katrina. For Victor, what a Krieggstein was really wasn’t worth thinking about. Yet when she returned to the dining room, the flapping of the double-hinged door at her back was also the sound of her dependency. She needed_ somebody, and here was Krieggstein who offered himself. At least he gave the appearance of offering. Not many went as far as that._ Didn’t even make the gesture. Here she was thinking of her sister Dorothea.

  “Bad moment, eh?” said Krieggstein gravely. “You have to go. Is he sick again?”

  “He didn’t say that.”

  “He wouldn’t.” Krieggstein, contracted with seriousness, had a look of new paint over old—rust painted over in red.

  “I have to go.”

  “You certainly must, if it’s like that. But it’s not so bad, is it? You’re lucky to have that old Negro lady taking care of the little girls the way she took care of you and your sister.”

  “That sounds better than it really is. By now Ysole ought to be completely trustworthy. You would think…”

  “Isn’t she?”

  “The old woman is very complex, and as she grows older she’s even harder to interpret. She always was satirical and sharp.”

  “She’s taking sides; you’ve told me so before. She disapproves of the divorce. She keeps an eye on you. You suspect she takes money from Alfred and gives him information. But she had no children of her own.”

  “She was fond of us when we were kids….”

  “But transferred her loyalty to your children? I haven’t got what it takes to track her motives with.”

  Katrina thought: But whom am I having this conversation with? Krieggstein’s bare head, bare face, by firelight had the shapes you saw in Edward Lear’s books of nonsense verse—distorted eggs. He meant to wear an expression of Churchillian concern—the Hinge of Fate. He was saying it wouldn’t be a good idea to lose your head. The big artists, big minds, didn’t peter out like average guys. Think of Casals in his nineties, or Bertrand Russell, et cetera. Even Francisco Franco on his deathbed. When they told the old fellow that some General Garcia was there to say good-bye to him, he said, “Why, is Garcia going on a trip?”

  Katrina wanted to smile at this but, in the crowding forward of anxious difficulties, smiling was ruled out.

  The Lieutenant said, “You can be sure I’ll help all I can. Anything_ you need done.” Krieggstein, always tactfully and with respect, hinted that he would like to figure more personally in her life. The humblest of suitors, he was a suitor nonetheless. This, too, took skillful managing, and Trina didn’t always know what to do with him.

  She said, “I have to call off a date with the court psychiatrist.”

  “A second time?”

  “Alfred has dragged Victor into it. He said our relationship was harming the kids. This headshrink was very rude to me. Parents are criminals to these people. He was so rude that Dorothea suspected he was fixed.”

  “Sometimes the shrinkers prove their impartiality by being rough on both parties,” said the Lieutenant. “Still, it’s a realistic suspicion. Did you mention to your lawyer what your sister suggested?”

  “He wouldn’t answer. Lawyers level only among themselves. If ever.”

  “This doctor may be ethical. That’s still another cause of confusion. As a buddy used to say on Guadalcanal, the individual in the woodpile may be Honesty in person—I could take this appointment for you. I have all the right credentials.”

  “Oh, please don’t do that!” said Katrina.

  “Objectively, I could make a wonderful case for you.”

  “If you’d only call his appointment secretary and set a time later in the week.”

  Dorothea was forever warning Trina against Krieggstein, whom she had met at one of the gun-display tea parties. “I wouldn’t have him around. I think he’s bananas. Is he really a cop, or some imaginary Kojak?”

  “Why shouldn’t he be real?” said Katrina.

  “He could be a night watchman. No—if he worked nights he wouldn’t be dating so many lonely middle-aged women. Still taking them to the senior prom. Have you had him checked out? Does he have a permit for those three guns?”

  “The guns are nothing.”

  “Maybe he’s a transit cop. I’m sure he’s a nutcase.”

  Krieggstein was asking Katrina, “Did you tell the psychiatrist that you were writing a book for children?”

  “I didn’t. It never occurred to me.”

  “You see? You don’t do yourself justice—put your best foot forward.”

  “What would really help, Sam, would be to walk the dog. Poor old thing, she hasn’t been out.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Krieggstein. “I should have thought ofthat.”

  The snow creaked under his weight as he led big Sukie across the wooden porch. The new street lamps were graceful, beautiful, everybody agreed, golden and pure. In summer, however, their light confused the birds, who thought the sun had risen and wore themselves out twittering. In winter the lights seemed to have descended from outer space. Packed into his storm coat, Krieggstein followed the stout, slow dog. Victor called him a “fantast.” Who else would use such a word? “A fantast lacking in invention,” he said. But the Lieutenant was a safe escort. He took Trina to see Yul Brynner at McCormick Place.

  The three guns in fact made her feel safe. She was protected. He was her loyal friend.

  She found herself affirming this to Dorothea later, after he was gone. She and her sister often had a midnight chat on the telephone.

  After her husband died, Dorothea sold the big house in Highland Park and moved into fashionable Oldtown, bringing with her the Chinese bridal bed she and Winslow had bought at Gump’s in San Francisco. The bedroom was small. A single window opened on the back alley. But she wouldn’t part with her Chinese bed, and now she lay with her telephone inside the carved frame. To Katrina all that carving was like the crown of thorns. No wonder Dotey complained of insomnia and migraines. And she_ was setting Katrina_ straight? “You’re locked into this futureless love affair, isolated, and the only man safe enough to see is this dumdum cop. Now you’re hopping off to Buffalo.”

  “Krieggstein is a decent fellow.”

  “He’s three-quarters off the screen.”

  Poodle-haired, thin, restless, with what Daddy used to call “neurasthenic stick” arms and legs, and large black eyes ready to soar out of her face, Dorothea was a spiky person, a sharp complainer.

  “The children will go to school as usual with the older kid next door. Ysole comes at ten.”

  “You have to rush away and tumble through the clouds because the great man says you must. You claim you have no choice, but I think you like it. You remind me of that woman from Sunday school—‘her foot abides not in her house.’ A year’s study in France was a wonderful privilege for you and me after graduation, but it was damaging, too, if you ask me. Dad was getting rid of some of the money he raked in through the tax assessor’s office, and it was nicer to make Parisian demoiselles of us than to launder his dough in the usual ways. He was showing off. We were lost in Paris. Nobody to pay us any attention. Today I could really use those dollars.”

  O Dotey! bragging and deploring in the same breath. Dotey’s husband had owned a small plastics factory. It was already going under when he died. So now she had to hustle plastic products. Her son was working for an MBA but not at a first-rate school
. A woman in her situation needed a good address, and the rent she paid in Oldtown was outrageous. “For this kind of dough they could exterminate the rats. But I signed a two-year lease, and the landlord laughs at me.” Forced into the business world, she sounded more and more like Father. But she hated the hustling. It was death to Dorothea to have to go anywhere, to have to do anything. To get out of bed in the morning was more than she could bear. Filtering her coffee, she cursed blindly, the soaring eyes filled with rage when the kettle whistled. To drag the comb through her hair she had to muster all her strength. As she herself said, “Like the lady in Racine: _’Tout me nuit, et conspire р me nuire.‘“__ (Taking a Chicago dig at her French education, a French dig at Chicago.) “Only Phшdre is you, baby, sick with love.”

  Dorothea drove herself, trembling, out of the house. Think how hard it was for her to call on chain-store buyers and institutional purchasing agents. She even managed to get on the tube to promote her product, wangling invitations from UHF ethnic and Moral Majority stations as a Woman Executive. Sometimes she seemed to be fainting under her burdens, purple lids closing. On the air, however, she was unfailingly vivacious and put on a charming act. And when she was aroused, she was very tough. “Let Wulpy go home if he’s sick. Why doesn’t his wife come fetch him?”

  “Don’t forget, I almost lost Victor last year,” said Katrina.

  ” You_ almost… almost lost him._ “

  “It’s true you had surgery the same week, and I had to be away, but you weren’t on the critical list, Dotey.”

  “I wasn’t referring to me but to his wife, that poor woman, and what she suffered from you and other lady friends…. If she had to leave the room, this ding-a-ling broad from Evanston would rush in and throw herself on the sick man.”

  No use telling Dotey not to be so rude and vulgar. Katrina listened to her with a certain passivity, even with satisfaction—it amounted, almost, to pleasure. You might call it perturbation-pleasure. Dotey continued: “It isn’t right that the man should use his mighty prestige on a poor lady from the suburbs. It’s shooting fish in a barrel. You’ll tell me that you have the magical secret, how to turn him on….”

  “I don’t think that it’s what I do,_ Dotey. It happens simply to be me._ He even loves my varicose veins, which I would try to hide from somebody else. Or my uneven gum line, and that was my lifelong embarrassment. And when my eyes are puffy, even that draws him.”

  “Christ, that’s it then,” said Dorothea, testy. “You hold the lucky number. With you he gets it up.”

  Katrina thought: Why should we talk so intimately if there isn’t going to be any sympathy? It was sad. But on a more reasonable view you couldn’t blame Dorothea for being irritable, angry, and envious. She had a failing business to run. She needed a husband. She had no prospects to speak of. She hates the fact that I’m now completely out of her league, Katrina told herself. Over these four years I’ve met people like John Cage, Bucky Fuller, de Kooning. I come home and tell her how I chatted with Jackie Onassis or Franчoise de la Renta. All she has to tell me is how hard it is to push her plastic bags, and how nasty and evil-minded those purchasing agents are.

  Dorothea had lost patience. When she thought that the affair with Victor was a flash in the pan, she had been more tolerant, willing to listen. Katrina had even persuaded her to read some of Victor’s articles. They had started with an easy one, “From Apollinaire to E. E. Cummings,” but then went on to more difficult texts, like “Paul Valщry and the Complete Mind,”

  “Marxism in Modern French Thought.” They didn’t tackle Marx himself, but they had French enough between them to do Valщry ‘s Monsieur Teste,_ and they met for lunch at Old Orchard Shopping Center to discuss this strange book. First they looked at clothes, for with so many acres of luxurious merchandise about them it would have been impossible to concentrate immediately on Teste._ Katrina had always tried to widen her horizons. For many years she had taken flying lessons. She was licensed to pilot a single-engine plane. After a lapse of twenty years she had tried to resume piano lessons. She had studied the guitar, she kept up her French at the center on Ontario Street. Once, during the worst of times, she had taken up foreign sports cars, driving round and round the north suburbs with no destination. She had learned lots of Latin, for which she had no special use. At one time she considered going into law, and had passed the aptitude test with high marks. Trying to zero in on some kind of perfection. And then in a booth at Old Orchard, Katrina and Dorothea had smoked cigarettes and examined Valщry: What was the meaning of the complete mind, “man as full consciousness”? Why did it make Madame Teste happy to be studied by her husband, as happy to be studied as to be loved? Why did she speak of him as “the angel of pure consciousness”? To grasp Valщry was hard enough. Wulpy on_ Valщry was utterly inaccessible to Dorothea, and she demanded that Trina explain. “Here he compares Monsieur Teste to Karl Marx—what does he mean by that?”

  “Well,” said Katrina, trying hard, “let’s go back to this statement. It says, ‘Minds that come from the void into this strange carnival and bring lucidity from outside Then Dotey cried, “Which_ void?” She wore the poodle hairdo as a cover for or an admission of the limitations of her bony head. But even this may have been a ruse, as she was really very clever in her way. Only her bosom was filled with a boiling mixture of sisterly feelings, vexation, resentment. She would bear with Katrina for a while and then she would say, “What is it with you and the intelligentsia? Because we went to the Pont Royal bar and none of those philosophers tried to pick us up? Or are you competing intellectually with the mans wife?”

  No, Beila Wulpy had no such pretensions. The role of the great man’s wife was what she played. She did it with dignity. Dark and stout, beautiful in her way, she reminded you of Catherine of Aragon—abused majesty. Although she was not herself an intellectual, she knew very well what it was to be one—the real thing. She was a clever woman.

  Katrina tried to answer. “The strange carnival is the history of civilization as it strikes a detached mind….”

  “We don’t play in this league,” said Dotey at last. “It’s not for types like us, Trina. And your brain is not the organ he’s interested in.”

  “And I believe I’m equal to this, too, in a way of my own,” said Katrina, obstinate. Trying to keep the discussion under control. “Types like us” wounded her, and she felt that her eyes were turning turbid. She met the threat of tears, or of sobs, by sinking into what she had always called her “flesh state”: her cheeks grew thick, and she felt physically incompetent, gross. Dotey spoke with a harshness acquired from her City Hall father: “I’m just a broad who has to hustle plastic bags to creeps who proposition me.” Katrina understood well enough that when Dotey said, “I’m a broad,” she was telling her, “That’s what you are, too.” Then Dotey said, “Don’t give me the ‘strange carnival’ bit.” She added, “What about your elephant?”

  This was a cheap shot. Katrina had been trying for some time to write a children’s story about an elephant. She hoped to make some money by it, and to establish her independence. It had been a mistake to mention this to Dotey. She had done it because it was a story often told in the family. “That old elephant thing that Dad used to tell us? I’m going to put it to use.” But for one reason and another she hadn’t yet worked out the details. It was mean of Dotey to get at her through the elephant. The Valщry discussions at Old Orchard had ended with this dig.

  But of course she had to tell Dotey that she was flying to Buffalo, and Dotey, sitting upright with the telephone in her carved Chinese bed, said, “So if any hitch develops, what you’d like is that I should cover for you with Alfred.”

  “I don’t expect it to come to that. Just to be on the safe side, give me a number where I can reach you during the afternoon.”

  “I have to be all over the city. Competitors are trying to steal my chemist from me. Without him I’ll have to fold. I’m near the breaking point, and I can do without extra burdens.
And listen now, Trina, do you really care so much? Suppose the court does give Alfred the kids.”

  “I won’t accept that.”

  You might not mind too much. Mother’s interest in you and me was minimal. She cared more about the pleats in her skirt. To this day, down on Bay Harbor Island, she’s like that. You’ll say you aren’t Mother, but things do rub off.”

  “What has this got to do with Mother?”

  “I’m only reckoning the way people actually do. You aren’t getting anywhere with those kids. The house is a burden. Alfred took away all the pretty things. It eats up too much money in maintenance. Suppose Alfred did get custody? You’d move east with all the painters and curators. It would be nothing but arts and letters. Victor’s set…”

  “There isn’t any set.”

  “There are crowds of people after him. You could insist on being together more openly, because Victor would owe_ you if you lost the kids. While he lasted…”

  “In the midst of such conversations, Dotey, I think how often I’ve heard women say, ‘I wish I had a sister.’ “

  Dorothea laughed. “Women who have sisters don’t say it! Well, my way of being a good sister is to come in and turn on all the lights. You put off having children until you were almost too old. Alfred was upset about it. He’s a quick-acting decisive type. Jewelers have to be. In his milieu he’s somebody. Glance at a diamond, quote you a price. You didn’t want kids by him? You tried to keep your options open? You were waiting for the main chance? Naturally Alfred will do you in if he can.”

  That’s right, Katrina commented silently, scare me good. I’ll never regret what I’ve done. She said, “I’d better go and set the alarm clock.”

  “I’ll give you a couple of numbers where you might find me late in the afternoon,” said Dorothea.

  At five-thirty the alarm went off. Katrina never had liked this black winter hour. Her heart was low as she slid back the closet door and began to dress. To go with the green suit she chose a black cashmere sweater and matching hose. She rolled backward clumsily on the chaise longue, legs in the air, to pull the hose on. Her boots were of ostrich skin and came from the urban cowboy specialty shop on South State Street which catered to Negro dudes and dudesses. The pockmarked leather, roughly smooth and beautiful, was meant for slimmer legs than her own. What did that matter? They—she herself—gave Victor the greatest possible satisfaction.