This Old Heart of Mine

By now Maw had got into the habit of looking derisively at Dad whenever Carlo spoke. That done, she speared a piece of pork chop and masticated violently. Dad imitated the ceramic French cook’s head on the kitchen wall above him—a cavity behind the Frog’s distended cheeks hid a ball of twine, the end of which issued through his pursed lips—through Dad’s a string of spaghetti went the other way. While he swallowed, his eyes crossed briefly.

  “I see you got the car off the Fritz, Carlo, and thank you. Be sure and remind me to reimburst you.” He pursued a rolling Brussels sprout across the plate, onto the table, and—it bounced soggily upon the floor. “Ah, the jig is up.”

  Maw fled choking into her two hands. “Oh haha. George, had you only been a Jew you’d of made your bundle as a network comedian.”

  Dad smiled modestly, having no idea of what she meant and not lusting for any. Suspense moved him not. He would pad off to the toilet just at the climax of radio mysteries, and never opened his Xmas packages until badgered by the giver. The old Chinese would have run out of water before he screamed for the next drop to fall.

  Reinhart, however, blessed or cursed by the affinity with his mother, which is why he never missed her when away, changed the subject with no hope of success. “I notice you still have—”

  “Splendor Mainwaring’s a jig, you goof!” she chortled at Dad.

  Dad smiled at the wonder of it and addressed the milk bottle: well, he was going to say something but opening his mouth had trouble with his upper plate, readjusted it with thumb and forefinger, turned a long gout of milk into his cup of Sanka and drank it down, getting after the molten sugar in the bottom with a prehensile tongue.

  “Jigaboo,” explained Maw.

  Reinhart was laboriously preparing the protest which his superego insisted upon; actually he had always thought these epithets harmless, but had read that the people to whom they were applied did not; besides, as a college man an enlightened attitude was expected of him. But it was a complex business, for his parents, who were of German extraction, not only did not bridle at someone else’s saying “Kraut,” but thinking it cute habitually used it themselves.

  Before he spoke, Maw proceeded to confuse the issue: “Poor niggers, personally I always stick up for them. You can imagine how popular that makes me!” Her delight in having no friends never waned.

  “Anyway,” said Reinhart, “I ran into Splendor Mainwaring at the garage.”

  “Remind me to reimburst you at the earliest convenience,” said Dad, with a spoon examining his canned pears for foreign matter.

  “But,” continued Maw, “I won’t stand for noise, sex, and enthusiasm, like what used to happen every single night after Joe Louis won a fight. They would shoot off a cannon on the West Side, making windows rattle this far away. Then if somebody would of been lynched, they would of griped. One thing you can say about a coon: he’s never satisfied.”

  “Del-Ponte,” said Dad, happily munching his fruit. “First pick of the crop. You never get a tinge of yellow towards the end of a Del-Ponte pear. Inspectors follow every inch of the canning process. They find a bit of the core on one pear, they disauthorize the lot—and I don’t mean your one can but your whole carload. Because of this their product costs a few pennies more, but is well worth it to discriminating consumers.”

  Reinhart momentarily forgot his subject to swell with pleasure about Dad, who so loved life. “Have one?” he asked, passing a box of Lorna Goons.

  “I’ll have two,” Dad joked. Having chosen his cookies, he closed the box according to the little diagram printed on its wrapper, a complicated mode of closure guaranteed to seal the contents against moisture: Twist waxpaper inner liner, folding end upon itself; insert flap A of outer cover in slit B; shake container vigorously so contents will settle; rush out and buy more when cookie level falls below danger mark on See-Thru© index window. Dad read the instructions aloud, and in due time came upon the recipes which followed. “Listen to this, Maw. ‘Turnip Casserole a la Grand Hotel’: two pounds turnips, pint oysters, white of an egg, leaf sweet basil, whatever that is, box Lorna Goons, oregano to taste, dash Angostura bitters, teaspoon cooking sherry—or could that be a mixprint for ‘cherry’—pinch allspice—”

  “Now George,” interrupted Maw, “how a man as brilliant as you—whom I have always insisted could have known no end to his accomplishments had you not liked the Good Life too much; and I’m not criticizing but merely noting—how you can believe everything in black and white is beyond me. Could you keep your wits about you you’d recall I made that very dish one time in January, 1943, and no sooner did it go down your hatch than you rushed to the john, where it came right up again. The remainder of the bowl I put out for the Schiller cat, who up and died three days later, I shouldn’t be sure whether or not from that, but have my suspicions. So while I guess it wouldn’t bother this two-hundred-pound lout who came back to me from the Army, and prefers talking to anybody else—including members of the dusky race who so I heard were dishonorably discharged from the service for impersonating officers—you and I got too tender stomachs for either.”

  “Aw,” groaned Reinhart. “The poor guy!”

  “Aha!” screamed Maw. “So you’re another! I wondered how you could have got to Berlin as just a corporal. Probably were caught and dishonorably discharged as well. You snuck home in a suspicious way, I’ll say that much.”

  You could imagine how Maw might receive the true account of Reinhart’s last days under arms, which was probably what she now fished for, suspecting something though he had always been prudent. Because he had served on the staff of a military hospital, there had been no change of address when he entered its psycho ward as patient; besides, he seldom wrote anyway. It came in handy now that he recalled his old wish to be a spy.

  “Say whatever you will, Maw. I got strict instructions never to speak even to my own family about Intelligence work, till ten years after.”

  Holding her fork like a screwdriver—she still worked on seconds of the main course, never ate desserts, spurning the soft and sweet—Maw slitted her mouth towards his father and asked: “Kindly explain, George.”

  “Sarbotage, Maw, S.P.-onage, clock-and-digger stuff. Behind enemy lines in the dead of night. ‘Who goes there?’ ‘Colonel Schultz of the German Imperial Guard.’ ‘Pass, friend.’ When really it is old Carlo here, wearing a fake mustache and speaking Kraut like a native.” He spooned up the last drop of pear juice, tilting the bowl.

  “Oh they could tell,” Maw insisted, but dropped that line.

  “Did they,” asked Dad, “give you one of those teeny little cameras that fit into the head of a ring, or a gun disguised as a cigar, or a sword in a umbrella?”

  “Never,” said Reinhart, preoccupied. “Tell me more about Splendor, Maw. Can’t you see why a fellow like that would impersonate an officer? Can’t you see? You know what he’s doing now? Working in that crummy garage, is what he’s doing. Why he was valedictorian.”

  “You’re a mighty snob,” answered Maw. “Your cousin Turner has worked in a garage his livelong days and is white besides. Besides, it was salutatorian, if you want your facts. That’s second. First was that skinny little thing”—she picked up her third pork chop and cropped it with her teeth to the bone, flung it onto the plate, clunk!— “Angelica Slimp, whose father sold homemade horseradish door to door in the Depression—”

  “Yeah. Why, Splendor was offered three college scholarships!” said Reinhart, who was getting all worked up and feeling just great, getting back to his old self, feeling morally superior to just about everybody, including Splendor, in a world where a gifted Negro got the dirty end of the stick—and took it, apparently unprotesting.

  Of course Maw refused to say more when she found Reinhart was interested, and Dad had actually gone to sleep right at the table. Later Reinhart hunted up his high-school yearbook, The Specter, and looked first at his own picture, near the end, face like a balled athletic sock—he had determined not to smile, but the buffo phot
ographer, whistling, farting, etc., soon succeeded in breaking him up and snapped the shot just as he exploded. Then there was Splendor, in the high white collar and black suit Negroes always wore for ceremonies, no doubt owing to their noted respect for the cloth. His middle name was “Gallant,” his nickname nonexistent, for nobody apparently had known him that well, including the other Negroes, who all had them: “Fox,” “Sport,” “Jellyman,” etc. There followed a list of academic clubs, Latin, Spanish, Drama—of course, drama: Splendor had once played the magistrate in Lady Gregory’s Spreading the News, in which the actors, even he, were obliged to simulate Irish brogues. Reinhart supposed he should find this recollection humorous, but decided instead it was singular.

  The Class Will, written in a spirit of levity: “S. Mainwaring bequeaths his track shoes to Bob Ball” (a white sophomore, so obese he could hardly walk). The Class Prophecy: “Splendor M. in 1961 was elected Mayor of Harlem, New York City, where he had long operated one of the better known nite spots for jazz devotees.” A piece of malice that, though probably well intentioned at the time. Reinhart somewhat peevishly remembered as he put the book aside and settled on the couch for the night, that he himself had been omitted from both Will and Prophecy, which on the other hand signified that both his past and future were open.

  Reinhart did sleep well, as Splendor predicted, and next day, on foot, he returned to the garage prepared to chaff the Negro about it as prelude to an explanation, on both sides, of the, when you thought about it, hilarious error of the day before. But no sooner had he entered and run the gantlet of Willard, et al., who wheezed and sucked their teeth at him, than Splendor looked up from the tire he was battering off a wheel with a ball-pean hammer, and reproached: “Wasn’t that an unsympathetic thing you did yesterday!” His lower lip had come out like a camel’s. Through the door to an adjoining wing labeled “Lube Dept,” Reinhart saw Joe Laidlaw, the garage owner, raise a car on the grease rack and assault its rusty private parts with a wrench. Splendor beat his hammer on the wheel. Someone howled up outside with a ruined muffler. Hector and “Pup” began mindlessly to strike pop bottles together, and Willard, to test his strength, intermittently lifted the entire cooler an inch and dropped it shatteringly to the floor. A customer entered and seeing nobody to attend him, tested his spark plugs himself, on a sand-blasting device. Joe kept dropping tools, then gave an enema to the car on the rack, using a monstrous squirtgun powered by a compressor whose noise prevailed over the various rhythm sections, until outside, the jealous virtuoso with the bad muffler opened his throttle to the extreme, producing a maniacal blast of sound at which Reinhart’s socks fell to his ankles and a fly dropped stone-dead out of the air.

  What a place for a sensitive man to work! Reinhart noticed, as he had not the day before, that all manner of obscene advices were posted throughout the garage: GARFAC! LUBELOC! KULAKIZE YOUR KAR! WHEN IN DOUBT, FRAG IT! BUDGAR YOUR TAILPIPE! FROKK YOUR VALVES! WHEN YOU THINK OF BRAKEBANDS, ASK FOR HUMP. On a 1939 calendar representing the good will of D’Amato Brothers, inner-tube jobbers, a big blonde wearing glassine panties and otherwise her birthday suit supported barrage-balloon tits in webbed fingers while chiding a tortoise-shell cat. This photo was entitled: “Naughty Pussy.” On another called “Dog’s Life,” a Scottie had got his leash entwined between a redhead’s legs, pulling high her skirt and slip to show frothy underwear and long garters; red tongue out, he stared up glassily at her Y, on which the joker who traveled from garage to garage to provide that service had sketched with a black pencil.

  By the time Reinhart had got up his wind to shout, all noises ceased at once, as it is their wont to do, and when he cried to Splendor: “Hey, let’s talk!” he alone broke the stillness and out in the lube room Joe twitched his grease gun in annoyance.

  “Is it your purpose to get me in trouble?” Splendor asked quietly. He had freed the tire from the rim, and now trundled it out a side door into an areaway which, because the sun was on it, stank worse of oil than did the interior. Indeed, Reinhart felt as if his nasal passages had been Garfacked.

  “Listen,” he told the Negro, “I am interested in what you did yesterday.” While in reality he was far more intrigued with what Splendor was doing at this moment: writing, in chalk, “Recap” on the tire’s sidewall, though the tread was almost new in a time when rubber was still scarce.

  Splendor sullenly straightened up. “I’ll return your dollar, okay? Hector told me you weren’t a hick from upstate but the son of Mr. Reinhart the insuranceman. I don’t hurt anyone, so don’t act as if I do. One day a rube came in here with a headache and was ready to take a couple of aspirins with a coke. I said not to take that combination which as everybody knows will make you drunk. He answered with an offensive remark and I had to strike him. It so happened he reeled back with a smile. You did it, he said. What? asked I. My headache’s gone! He gave me a dollar and from time to time thereafter other individuals come in with sundry complaints. Most ills are of the feelings. Change the feeling, the trouble’s gone. What harm is there in that?” He kept frowning at Reinhart, obviously mistaking him for a foe.

  “You still don’t remember me from high school?” Reinhart asked. “I was one of the crowd of Irish peasants in Spreading the News. I wore a pair of rubber hip boots and carried a pitchfork. Harry Wales accidentally backed into it and Miss Atkinson had to find a replacement for him within two days of the performance.”

  Splendor snapped his jaws together. “And please don’t look at that tire as if you think I’m going to profit from it. Joe gives the orders here. After dark he’ll shellac this, wind it in paper, and put it with the new ones on the shelf. He’ll send an old skin to be recapped, and thus get paid twice.”

  “She threw me out of the play,” said Reinhart, getting woozy from the oil fumes. “Well, it wasn’t much of a part, anyway.”

  Splendor kicked the tire in chagrin. “My truck ran over a mine in Normandy. The explosion ripped the shirt off my back, though strangely enough didn’t damage me except for shock. The lieutenant gave me his blouse while he went for the medics. Before he got back some MP’s came up and arrested me for impersonating an officer in a combat zone. The lieutenant was killed before he could make a deposition. Hence I was condemned by the court-martial…. But I don’t suppose that will touch your heart when you write your report.”

  “Nevertheless,” Reinhart went on, “I certainly wanted to be in that play, and to be thrown out in such a humiliating manner! Well, I’ll tell you, Bettysue English, whom you have probably forgotten too, who was my girl friend at the time, she wouldn’t speak to me for a week—what report?”

  “I suppose you’re some kind of inspector,” said Splendor. “Once bitten, twice shy. I’m not so naive as to get fooled again.”

  “Awwww …” Reinhart threw up his hands. “I’ve been trying to tell you, but what’s the use? You’ve got some kind of phobia. Too bad there’s not another Splendor to cure you of it.” He made as if to leave.

  “Wait a minute,” said the Negro. “I think I’ve got a recollection.

  … Hip boots, eh?” he asked, scratching his ear, the great ball jumping in his biceps.

  “And pitchfork.”

  “Pitchfork, eh?”

  “And hip boots.”

  “You were lighter then, of course.”

  Reinhart said: “Though not for a moment to be compared with your difficulties, I had a trouble or two in the Army and ended up in the hospital where there was little to do but eat. I probably used food as a substitute for something.”

  “For what?” Splendor asked, suspicious again. “It’s perfectly normal to take one’s sustenance.”

  “Well…”

  “I see you still wear your uniform.”

  “Yes,” said Reinhart. “I can explain that. It is a symbol of my loneliness in civilian society, but the fact that I don’t keep it neat shows I don’t want to go back to the service, either.”

  Splendor authoritatively shook his head. “Forg
et all those theories if you want to be my friend. The truth of life is that things are exactly as they appear, and symbols are the bunk. You are either too lazy to change your clothes or too parsimonious to buy new ones.”

  “All right, have it your own way,” said Reinhart, delighted he had roused Splendor’s interest and wary of denying him. “But you have to admit a lot of people would disagree.”

  “And as for you, you agree because I am a Negro. Which is also why you remember me so well from high school.”

  Now Reinhart was at first embarrassed by this unrelenting naturalism, but then he saw that Splendor, who after all implied they were to be friends, was smiling fraternally upon him.

  “Then I’ll tell you, since you’re being so frank,” he said. “Why are you, with all your intelligence, working in a garage? How are the Negroes ever going to get anywhere when a gifted person like you refuses to better himself?” Reinhart had really meant this to be affectionately offensive, since he had been somewhat offended by everything Splendor said, while liking him all the more for it, for he had long understood that a real friend invariably draws blood. But he was surprised when Splendor did not thrust back, but rather gulped, bagged his eyes, and muttered: “Man, you’re ruthless.”

  “Around crums like Hector and Willard,” Reinhart went on, to confirm Splendor’s judgment of him. “And the boss is a crook. Haven’t you any pride?”

  “Go on,” said Splendor, collapsing on top of the tire, “That’s what I need.”

  “Why, there’s all sorts of opportunities around,” cried Reinhart.

  Splendor extended a cautionary finger, on which the color began very dark at the joint with a palm and shaded to fawn at the tip. “With a D.D. I can’t qualify for the GI Bill.”

  “Balls to that. And stand up when I’m talking to you!” A kind of fiend in Reinhart provoked him to provoke Splendor, but his friend leaped up without cavil and maintained a military attention. “For Christ’s sake, man, pride, pride, pride!”