“That’s because you’re a Protestant.”
“I am not a Protestant. I’m nothing. I don’t believe in anything… there!”
“You’d better take that back,” said Sadie, thoroughly alarmed. “God could strike you dead for talking like that.”
She was so visibly appalled by my utterance that her fear imparted itself to me.
“I mean,” said I, endeavoring to backwater, “That we don’t pray like you do. We only pray in church—when the minister prays.”
“Don’t you pray before you go to sleep?”
“No,” I replied, “I don’t. I guess I don’t know much about praying.”
“We’ll teach you then,” said Sadie. “You must pray every day, three times a day at least. Otherwise you’ll burn in Hell.”
We parted on these words. I gave her my solemn promise that I would make an effort to pray, at least before going to sleep. As I walked away, however, I suddenly asked myself what it was I was supposed to pray for. I was almost on the point of running back to ask her. The word “sins” struck in my crop. What sins? I kept asking myself. What had I been doing that was so sinful? I rarely lied, except to my mother. I never stole, except from my mother. What had I to confess? It never occurred to me that I had committed a sin in lying to my mother or stealing from her. I had to behave thus because she didn’t know any better. Once she saw things in my light she would understand my behavior. That’s how I viewed that situation.
Mulling over my conversation with Sadie, reflecting on the somber gloom which pervaded their household, I began to think that perhaps my mother was right in distrusting Catholics. We didn’t do any praying in our house yet everything went smoothly. Nobody ever mentioned God in our family. Yet God hadn’t punished any of us. I came to the conclusion that Catholics were by nature superstitious, just like savages. Ignorant idol-worshipers. Cautious, timid folk who hadn’t the guts to think for themselves. I decided I would never again go to Mass. What a dungeon their Church was! Suddenly—a random flash—it dawned on me that maybe they wouldn’t be so poor, Sadie’s family, if they didn’t think about God so much. Everything went to the Church, to the priests, that is, who were always begging for money. I had never liked the sight of a priest. Too oily and smirky for me. No, the hell with them! And to hell with their candles, their rosaries, their crucifixes—and their Virgin Marys!
At last I’m face to face with that man of mystery, Alan Cromwell, handing him another drink, slapping him on the back, having a grand time with him, in short. And right in our own little love nest!
It was Mona who had arranged the meeting—with the connivance of Doc Kronski. Kronski is drinking too, and shouting and gesticulating. And so is his mousy little wife who is posing for the occasion as my wife. I am no longer Henry Miller. I have been given a new moniker for the evening: Dr. Harry Marx.
Only Mona is absent. She is “supposed” to arrive later.
Things have progressed fantastically since that moment earlier in the evening when I shook hands with Cromwell. I have to admit to myself, speaking of the devil, that he is indeed a handsome chap. And not only handsome (in a Southern way) but fair-spoken and gullible as a child. I wouldn’t say that he was stupid, no. Trusting, rather. Not cultured either, but intelligent. Not shrewd but capable. A man with a good heart, an outgoing man. Bubbling over with good will.
It seemed a shame to be taking him in, to be making sport of him. I could see that the idea was Kronski’s, not Mona’s. Feeling guilty because we had neglected him, Kronski, so long, she had probably acquiesced without thought. That’s how it looked to me.
Anyway, we were all in fine fettle. The confusion was enormous. Fortunately, Cromwell had arrived lit up like a Zeppelin. By nature unsuspecting, the drinks made him more so. He seemed not to realize that Kronski was Jewish, though it was obvious he was even to a child. Cromwell took him for a Russian. As for me, with that name Marx, he didn’t know what to think. (Kronski had conceived the brilliant idea of palming me off as a Jew.) The disclosure of this startling fact—that I was Jewish—made no impression whatever on Cromwell. We might as well have told him I was a Sioux or an Eskimo. He was curious, however, to know what I did for a living. In accordance with our preconceived plan I informed Cromwell that I was a surgeon, that Dr. Kronski and I shared offices together. He looked at my hands and nodded his head gravely.
For me the difficult thing was to remember, during the course of an endless evening, that Kronski’s wife was my wife. This, of course, was another invention of Kronski’s fertile brain—a way of diverting suspicion, he thought. Every time I looked at that mouse of his I felt like swatting her. We did our best to ply her with drinks; all she would do, however, was to take a little sip and push the glass aside. But as the evening wore on and our horseplay grew bolder, she livened up. A way of saying that she unkinked a bone or two, no more. When on one occasion she broke into a fit of hysterical laughter I thought she would be taken seriously ill. She was better at weeping.
Cromwell, on the other hand, was a hearty laugher. At times he didn’t know what he was laughing about, but our own laughter was so infectious that he didn’t give a damn what he was laughing about. Now and then he asked a question or two about Mona, whom it was obvious he regarded as a very strange individual, though an adorable one. We, of course, pretended that we had known her from infancy. We praised her writing outrageously, inventing a whole arsenal of poems, essays and stories which she, we were certain, was too modest to have mentioned the existence of. Kronski went so far as to express the opinion that she would be the foremost woman writer in America before long. I pretended not to be so certain of this but agreed that she possessed extraordinary talent, extraordinary possibilities.
Asked if we had seen any of the columns she had turned out, we professed to be completely ignorant, astounded in fact, that she was doing such a thing.
“We’ll have to put a stop to that,” said Kronski. “She’s too good to be wasting her time that way.”
I agreed with him. Cromwell looked baffled. He couldn’t see what was so terrible about writing a daily column. Besides, she needed money.
“Money?” shouted Kronski. “Money? Why, what’s the matter with us! I’m sure Dr. Marx and I can take care of her needs.” He seemed amazed to hear that Mona might be in need of money. A little hurt, in fact.
Poor Cromwell felt that he had made a faux pas. He assured us that it was only an impression he had gathered. But, to get back to the subject, he would like us to glance at those columns and give him our honest opinion of them. He said he was no judge himself. If they were really good he was certain he could get her the assignment. He mentioned nothing, of course, about shelling out a hundred a week.
We had another drink on this and then diverted him to other subjects. It was easy enough to sidetrack him. He had only one thought in mind—when would she arrive? Every now and then he begged us to let him dash out and make a telephone call to Washington. In one way or another we always managed to frustrate these attempts. We knew that Mona would not arrive, not at least until we had gotten him out of the way. She had given us until one in the morning to get rid of him. Our only hope therefore was to get him so potted that we could put him in a taxi and pack him off.
I had tried several times to find out where he was staying but got nowhere. Kronski thought it of slight importance—any old hotel would do. In the midst of the goings on I asked myself why this fool business had been arranged. It made no sense. Later I was told that Mona had thought it important to let Cromwell see that she was really living alone. There was another side to it, of course, and that was to find out if Cromwell really hoped to be more frank with us than with her. But we had dropped the subject early in the evening, thanks to Kronski. For some queer reason of his own, Kronski was obsessed with the notion of filling Cromwell with hair-raising stories about the operating ward. I of course had to chime in with him. No one in his right senses would have given the least credence to these yarns he
kept inventing. They were so sensational, so utterly fantastic, and so gory and gruesome withal, that I wondered that Cromwell, dead drunk though he was, didn’t see through them. Of course the more horrible and unbelievable the tale, the more we laughed, Kronski and I. Our hilarity puzzled Cromwell somewhat, but finally he accepted it as “professional callousness.”
To believe Kronski, nine out of ten operations were pure criminal experiments. Except for a rare handful, all surgeons were born sadists. Not content with diabolical fantasies about the mistreatment of human beings, he went into long dissertations on the subject of our cruelty to animals. One of these, a harrowing story, which he told amidst gales of laughter, concerned a poor little rabbit which, after numerous injections, electric shocks, and all manner of miraculous resuscitations, was brutally butchered. To cap it all, he elaborated on how he, Kronski, had gathered the remnants of the poor little creature and made a stew of it, oblivious, until after he had swallowed a few portions, that arsenic had been injected into the poor rabbit. Over this he laughed inordinately. Cromwell, slightly sobered by the bloody tale, remarked that it was too bad Kronski hadn’t died, then laughed so heartily over this thought that absent-mindedly he swallowed a full glass of neat cognac. Whereupon he had such a fit of coughing that we had to stretch him out on the floor and work over him like a drowned man.
It was at this point that we found Cromwell becoming unmanageable. To give him a working over we had stripped off his coat, vest, shirt and undershirt. Kronski, to be sure, was doing the major work; I merely pummeled Cromwell now and then, or slapped his chest. Now that he was stretched out comfortably, Cromwell didn’t feel like putting on his things. He said he felt too good to budge. Wanted to take a snooze, if only for a few minutes. He reached out vaguely for the divan, wondering, I suppose, if he could transfer himself to a still more comfortable position without rousing himself.
The thought that he might go to sleep on us was alarming. We began to cut up like real jackanapes now, standing poor Cromwell on his head, dancing around him (to his utter bewilderment, of course), making grimaces, scratching ourselves like apes… anything to make him laugh, anything to prevent his heavy lids from closing. The harder we worked—and by now we had become positively frenetic—the more insistent he became about having his little snooze. He had reached the point now of crawling on all fours towards the coveted divan. Once there, God himself would be powerless to wake him up.
“Let’s lay him out,” I said, indicating by gestures and grimaces that we could then dress him and bundle him out.
It took us almost a half-hour to get his things on. Cromwell, drunk and sleepy though he was, refused with might and main to permit us to unbutton his trousers, which we had to do to tuck his shirt in. We were obliged to leave his fly open and his shirt sticking out. When it came time we would cover his shirt with the overcoat.
Cromwell passed out immediately. A heavy trance, punctuated by obscene snores. Kronski was radiant. Hadn’t had such a good time in ages, he assured me. Then, without dropping his voice, he blandly suggested that we go through Cromwell’s pockets. “We ought at least to get back what we laid out for food and drink,” he insisted. I don’t know why I suddenly became so scrupulous but I refused to entertain the notion. “He’d never miss the money,” said Kronski. “What’s fifty or a hundred bucks to him?” Just to reassure himself he extracted Cromwell’s wallet. To his utter amazement there wasn’t a bill in it.
“Well I’ll be damned!” he mumbled. “That’s the rich for you. Never carry cash. Pfui!”
“We’d better get him out of here soon,” I urged.
“Try and do it!” said Kronski, grinning like a billy goat. “What’s wrong with letting him stay here?”
“Are you mad?” I shouted.
He laughed. Then he calmly proceeded to tell us how wonderful he thought it would be if we would play the farce out to the end, that is, to wake up, all five of us (next morning) and continue to enact our respective roles. That would give Mona a chance to do some real acting, he thought. Kronski’s wife wasn’t at all enthusiastic over this suggestion—it was all too complicated to suit her.
After much palaver we decided to rouse Cromwell, drag him out by the heels, if necessary, and dispatch him to a hotel. We had to tussle with him for a good quarter of an hour before we succeeded in getting him to a semi-standing position. His knees simply refused to straighten out; his hat was over his eyes and his shirttails were sticking out from under the overcoat which we were unable to button. He looked for all the world like Snuffy the Cabman. We were laughing so hysterically that it was all we could do to descend the steps without rolling over one another. Poor Cromwell kept protesting that he didn’t want to go yet, that he wanted to wait for Mona.
“She’s gone to Washington to meet you,” said Kronski maliciously. “We got a telegram while you were asleep.”
Cromwell was too stupefied to get the full import of this. Every now and then he sagged, threatening to collapse in the street. Our idea was to give him a bit of air, brace him up a bit, and then bundle him into a cab. To find a cab we had to walk several blocks. Our way led towards the river, a roundabout way, but we thought the walk would do him good. When we got near the docks we all sat down on the railroad tracks and took a breather. Cromwell simply stretched out between the tracks, laughing and hiccupping, quite as if he were a babe in the cradle. At intervals he begged for something to eat. He wanted ham and eggs. The nearest open restaurant was almost a mile away. I suggested that I would run back to the house and get some sandwiches. Cromwell said he couldn’t wait that long, wanted his ham and eggs right away. We yanked him to his feet again, a job which demanded our combined strength, and started pushing and dragging him towards the bright lights of Borough Hall. A night watchman came along and demanded to know what we were doing there at that hour of the night. Cromwell collapsed at our feet. “Whatcha got there?” demanded the watchman, prodding Cromwell with his feet as if he were a corpse. “It’s nothing, he’s just drunk,” I said. The watchman bent over him to smell his breath. “Get him out of here,” he said, “or I’ll fan the whole bunch of you.” “Yes sir, yes sir,” we said, dragging Cromwell by the armpits, his feet scraping the ground. A few seconds later the watchman came running up with Cromwell’s hat in his hand. We put it on him but it fell off again. “Here,” I said, opening my mouth, “put it between my teeth.” We were panting and sweating now from the exertion of dragging him. The watchman observed us a few moments in disgust, then he said: “Let go of him! Here, sling him over my back… you guys are dubs.” Like this we reached the end of the street where the elevated line swung overhead. “Now one of you guys fetch a cab,” said the night watchman. “Don’t pull him around any more, you’ll wrench his arms out.” Kronski skedaddled up the street in search of a cab. We sat down on the curb and waited.
The cab arrived in a few minutes and we bundled him in. His shirttails were still hanging out.
“Where to?” asked the driver.
“The Hotel Astor!” I said.
“The Waldorf-Astoria!” shouted Kronski.
“Well, make up your minds!” said the cabby.
“The Commodore,” shouted Cromwell.
“Are you sure?” said the driver. “This ain’t a wild-goose chase, is it?”
“It’s the Commodore all right, isn’t it?” I said, sticking my head inside the cab.
“Sure,” said Cromwell thickly, “anywhere suits me.”
“Has he got any money on him?” asked the cabby.
“He’s got loads of money,” said Kronski. “He’s a banker.”
“I think one of you guys better go along with him,” said the driver.
“O.K.,” said Kronski and promptly hopped in with his wife.
“Hey!” shouted Cromwell, “what about Dr. Marx?”
“He’ll come in the next cab,” said Kronski. “He’s got to make a telephone call.”
“Hey!” he shouted to me, “what about your wife??
??
“She’s all right,” I said, and waved good-bye.
When I got back to the house I discovered Cromwell’s brief case and some small change which had dropped out of his pockets. I opened the brief case and found a mass of papers and some telegrams. The most recent telegram was from the Treasury Department, urging Cromwell to telephone someone at midnight without fail, extremely urgent. I ate a sandwich, while glancing over the legal documents, took a glass of wine, and decided to call Washington for him. I had a devil of a job getting the man at the other end; when I did he answered in a sleepy voice, gruff and irritated. I explained that Cromwell had met with a little accident but would telephone him in the morning. “But who are you… who is this,” he kept repeating. “He’ll telephone you in the morning,” I repeated, ignoring his frantic questions. Then I hung up. Outside I ran as quickly as I could. I knew he’d call back. I was afraid he might get the police after me. I made quite a detour to reach the telegraph office; there I sent a message to Cromwell, to the Commodore Hotel. I hoped to Christ Kronski had delivered him there. As I left the telegraph office I realized Cromwell might not get the message until the next afternoon. The clerk would probably hold it until Cromwell woke up. I went to another cafeteria and called the Commodore, urging the night clerk to be sure to rouse Cromwell when he got the telegram. “Pour a pitcher of cold water over him if necesary,” I said, “but be sure he reads my telegram… it’s life and death.”
When I got back to the house Mona was there cleaning up the mess.
“You must have had quite a party,” she said.
“That we did,” I said.
I saw the brief case lying there. He would need that when telephoning Washington. “Look,” I said, “we’d better get a cab and deliver this to him right away. I’ve been reading over those papers. They’re dynamite. Better not to be caught with them in our possession.”
“You go,” said Mona, “I’m exhausted.”