Plexus

  I had intended to get up at noon the next day, but it was almost four o’clock when we tumbled out of bed, more dead than alive. The joint looked like the wreck of the Hesperus.

  “You’d better take a walk and eat your breakfast out,” I urged. “I’ll fix myself something as soon as I’ve tidied up a bit.”

  It took me about an hour and a half to create even a semblance of order. By then I was too weary to think of making breakfast for myself. I poured myself a glass of orange juice, lit a cigarette, and waited for Mona to return. The customers would be showing up any minute now. It seemed to me that the last one had left only a few minutes ago. Outdoors it was already dark.

  The rooms still reeked of stale smoke and stale drinks.

  I opened the windows back and front to create a draught, only to find myself coughing fit to bust a lung. The toilet was the place to repair to. I took the orange juice with me, sat down on the toilet seat, and lit another cigarette. I felt used up.

  Presently there was a knock on the toilet door. Mona, of course.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she cried. I had resumed my seat, the glass in one hand, the cigarette in the other.

  “I’m resting,” I said. “Besides, it’s too draughty out there.”

  “Get your things on and take a good walk. I’ll take over now. Here are some strudels for you and a charlotte russe. I’ll have breakfast ready for you when you get back.”

  “Breakfast?” I yelled. “Do you know what time it is? It’s time for dinner, not breakfast. Jesus, I’m all topsyturvy.”

  “You’ll get used to it. It’s lovely out … hurry! So soft and balmy. Like a second spring.”

  I made ready to go. It seemed crazy to set out for a morning walk just as the moon was coming up.

  Suddenly I thought of something. “You know what? It’s too late to go to the bank.”

  “The bank?” She stared at me vacantly.

  “The bank, yes! That’s where to put the money we rake in.”

  “Oh that! I forgot all about the money.”

  “Well I’ll be damned, you forget about that! That’s just like you.”

  “Go on, take your walk. You can bank the money tomorrow—or the day after. It won’t melt.”

  Strolling along I kept fingering the money. It made me itchy. Finally, like a thief I made for a quiet spot where I could disgorge. Almost five hundred dollars did I say? I had over five hundred! So elated was I that I almost ran back to show it to Mona.

  Instead of running, however, I sauntered along at an easy pace. I forgot for a little while that I was in search of breakfast. After a time I decided that I must have miscalculated. Keeping my eyes peeled, I stopped in the shadow of an abandoned house and fished the money out again. This time I counted it put very extra careful, as they say. It came to exactly five hundred and forty-three dollars and sixty-nine cents. I was electrified. And a bit frightened, too, walking around in the dark with a sum like that on me. Better make for the bright lights, I told myself. Keep moving, man, or somebody will sneak up on you from behind!

  Money! And they talk about benzedrine.… For a shot in the arm give me money any time!

  I kept myself on the move. My feet weren’t touching the ground: I was rolling along on roller skates, my eyes peeled, my ears laid well back against the sides of my head. I was that dizzy, that full of pep, that I could have counted up to a million and back without missing a digit.

  Gradually a feeling of hunger overtook me. A powerful hunger it was. I broke into a dogtrot as I headed back for the joint, one hand pressed against my breast pocket where the wallet was stowed away. My menu was already composed for me: a light omelette with cold lox, some cream cheese and jam, some Jewish rolls with birdseed covered with slabs of sweet butter, coffee and thick fresh cream, a dish of strawberries with or without sour cream …

  At the front door I found I had forgotten the key. I rang the bell, my mouth watering with the thought of the breakfast coming. It took several minutes for Mona to answer the bell. She came to the door with a finger over her lips. “Shhhhhh! Rothermel’s inside. Wants to speak to me alone. Come back in about an hour.” She scooted off.

  Dinner hour—for ordinary people—was well advanced and here was I looking for breakfast. In despair I went to a lunch wagon and ordered ham and eggs. That down, I strolled over to Washington Square, flopped on a bench and dreamily watched the pigeons gobbling up crumbs. A panhandler came along and without thinking I gave him a dollar bill. He was so astounded that he stood there, right in front of me, examining the bill as if it were counterfeit money. Convinced finally that it was the real thing, he thanked me warmly and—just like a sparrow—hopped away.

  I killed a good hour and then some before returning—just to make certain the coast was clear. “You’d better get some ice,” were the first words that greeted me. I set off again, to look for ice.

  “When,” I asked myself, “is the day going to begin?”

  It took some scouting around to find the iceman. He lived in a cellar near Abingdon Square. A big surly brute of a Pole he was. Said he had made two attempts to deliver the ice but no one had answered the bell. Then he looked me up and down, as if to say—“How will you get it home?” His attitude told me clearly enough—crystal clear, in fact—that he had no intention of helping me deliver it a third time.

  With five hundred odd bucks in my pocket I saw no reason why I shouldn’t hail a cab, ice and all.…

  During the brief trip back to the house I had some strange recollections, thoroughly irrelevant too. At any rate, there in my mind, as clear and vivid as could be, was Mr. Meyer, an old friend of my parents. He was standing at the top of the stairs waiting to greet us. Looked exactly as I had known him when I was a boy of eight or nine. Only now I realized what I had never suspected then—that he was the image of “Gloomy Gus” from the comic strip.

  We shake hands, exchange greetings, and enter. Now Mr. Meyer’s wife enters the picture. She is coming out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on the spotless white apron she wears. A frail little woman, neat, quiet, orderly. She speaks to my parents in German, a more refined, more pleasing German than I am accustomed to hearing at home. What I can’t get over is the fact that she is old enough to be Mr. Meyer’s mother. They stand there arm in arm, exactly like mother and son. As a matter of fact she was Mr. Meyer’s mother-in-law before she married him. Yes, even as a boy, that fact had registered deep. Katie, her daughter, had been a beautiful young woman. Mr. Meyer had fallen in love with the daughter and married her. A year later Katie died, quietly and quickly. Mr. Meyer couldn’t get over it. But a year later he married his wife’s mother. And to all effects they got along beautifully. Briefly, that was the situation. But there was something else connected with this remembrance which stirred me even more deeply. Why was it that every time we visited the Meyers I had the conviction that it was in their living room I once sat in a highchair reciting German verses, while above me in a cage near the window a nightingale sang. My mother always insisted that this was impossible. “It must have been some other place, Henry!” Yet each time we visited the Meyers I walked instinctively to a certain spot in the living room, where the bird cage had once hung, and tried to reconstruct the original scene. To this very day, if I but close my eyes and concentrate, I am able to relive this unforgettable moment.

  However, as Strindberg says in his Inferno—“there is nothing I dislike more than calf’s head with brown butter.” Mrs. Meyer always served parsnips with these meals. From the very first I disliked parsnips, especially buttered parsnips. Every time I taste one now I think of Mr. Meyer sitting opposite me at the head of the table, his face wreathed in melancholy resignation. My mother used to say of him that he was such a good man, so quiet, thoughtful and considerate. To me he always smelled of the grave. Never once did I see him smile. His brown eyes were ever swimming in a dolorous fat. Twiddling his thumbs, he would sit motionless and expressionless with hands folded in his lap. When he spoke it was
as if from far off and deep down in the bowels of the earth. He must have been like that even when he was in love with Katie, his wife’s daughter.

  Ah, but he was indeed a strange man! Peaceful and serene as their home life appeared to be, nevertheless one day this lugubrious soul up and disappeared. Never a word from him. Not a trace did he leave behind. Naturally, everyone thought he had committed suicide. Not I. I thought then, as I do now, that he simply wanted to be alone with his sorrow. The only thing he had taken with him was the photograph of his Katie which used to stand on the dresser. Not a stitch of clothing … not even a handkerchief.

  Strange recollection. Followed immediately by another, equally baroque. Now it’s my father’s sister, the one who married my Uncle Dave. Aunt Millie is lying on a couch in the middle of the room, their parlor. I am sitting on the piano stool, only a foot or two away from her, with a fat music roll on my lap. (My mother has sent me to New York to play for my Aunt Millie who is dying of cancer.) Like all my father’s sisters, Aunt Millie has a sweet, beautiful nature. I ask her what she would like me to play for her. She says—“Anything.” I pick out a sheaf of music—The Orange Blossom Waltz—and I play it for her. When I turn around she is gazing up at me with a beatific smile. “That was lovely, Henry,” she says. “Won’t you play another?” I pick out The Midnight Fire Alarm, and I rattle that off. Again the same warm look of appreciation, the same plea to continue. I go through my whole repertoire—The Chariot Race, Poet and Peasant, The Burning of Rome, and so on. What drivel to be hammering out to someone dying of cancer! But Aunt Millie is in raptures. She thinks I am a genius. “You will be a great musician some day,” she whispers when I am leaving.

  It’s at this point that the cab stops and I unload the ice. The genius! (“Il est l’affection et l’avenir.”) Eight p.m. and the genius is just about to begin the day’s work—serving drinks and sandwiches. In a good mood, however. Somehow, the recollection of these odd incidents from the warm past awakens the thought that I am still a writer. I may not have time to set them down on paper now, but I will one day.

  (It’s now a good twenty years later. The “genius” never forgets. “Il est l’amour et l’éternité.”)

  I am obliged to make two trips through the rooms with a block of ice on my shoulder. To the customers—there are eight or ten on hand—it seems amusing. One of them offers to help me. It’s Baronyi, the promoter. Says he must have a long talk with me soon. Buys me a drink to cement the deal. We stand there in the kitchen chatting, my eyes riveted to a spot just above his head where I have pasted a snapshot of my daughter, her head set off by a little bonnet trimmed with fur. Baronyi drones away. I nod my head and throw him a smile now and then. What is she doing at this moment, I wonder? Has she been tucked to bed already? And Maude, still practicing like a madwoman, I suppose. Liszt, always Liszt, to warm her fingers up. … Someone asks for a pastrami sandwich on rye bread. Baronyi immediately dives into the icebox and gets out the pastrami. Then he slices the bread. I’m still riveted to the spot.

  From far away I hear him telling me that he’d like to play me a game of chess some night. I nod and absent-mindedly make myself a sandwich which I begin to munch between sips of Dubonnet.

  Now Mona sticks her head in. Wants to tell me that George Inness would like a few words with me—when I can spare the time. He’s sitting in the bedroom with his friend Roberto, the Chilean.

  “What’s on his mind?” I ask. “Why does everyone want to talk to me?”

  “Because you’re a writer, I guess.” (What an answer!) In a corner, near the front window, Trevelyan and Caccicacci are huddled. They are having a furious argument. Trevelyan has the features of a vulture. The other is like a clown out of the Italian opera. A strange pair to be hobnobbing together.

  In another corner sit Manuel Siegfried and Cedric Ross, two discarded lovers. They stare at each other gloomily. Now Marjorie comes bouncing in, her arms loaded with packages. Immediately things brighten up. In a few minutes, like trains pulling in, Ned arrives, then O’Mara, then Ulric himself. The old club spirit, what! Fratres Semper!

  Everyone has now become acquainted with his neighbor. All talking at once. And drinking! That’s my job, to see that no one is without a fresh glass. Now and then I sit down to have a little chat with someone. But what I enjoy most is waiting on the customers, running to and fro, lighting their cigars, making up short orders, uncorking the bottles, emptying the ash trays, passing the time of the day with them and that sort of thing. The constant activity enables me to enjoy my own private thoughts. Seems I’m due to write another big book in my head. I study eyebrows, the curve of a lip, gestures, intonations. It’s as though I’m rehearsing a play and the customers adlibbing. Catching a little phrase on my way to the kitchen, I round it out into a sentence, a paragraph, a page. If someone asks a question of his neighbor I answer it for him—in my head. Droll effects. Really exciting. Now and then I have a little drink or another sandwich on the q.t.

  The kitchen is my realm. In there I dream away whole passages of destiny and causality.

  “Well, Henry,” says Ulric, cornering me at the sink, “how goes it? This is to your success!” He raises his glass and downs it. “Good stuff! You must give me the address of your bootlegger later.” We have a little drink together while I fill a couple of orders. “Golly,” he says, “it sure does look funny to see you with that carving knife in your hand.”

  “Not a bad way to pass the time,” I remarked. “Gives me a chance to think of what I will write some day.”

  “You don’t mean it!”

  “Of course I do. It’s not me making these sandwiches—it’s someone else. This is like sleepwalking.… How about a nice piece of salami? You can have the Jewish kind or the Italian. Here, try these olives—Greek olives, what! You know, if I were simply a bartender I’d be miserable.”

  “Henry,” he says, “you couldn’t be miserable no matter what you were doing. You’ll always find life interesting, even when you’re at the bottom. You know, you’re like those mountain climbers who, when they fall into a deep crevasse, see the stars twinkling overhead … in broad daylight. You see stars where others see only warts or blackheads.”

  He gave me one of those knowing, tender smiles, then suddenly assumed a serious mien. “I thought I ought to tell you something,” he began. “It’s about Ned. I don’t know if he’s told you, but he lost his job recently. Drink. He can’t take it. I tell you this so that you’ll keep an eye on him. He thinks the world of you, as you know, and he’ll probably be here frequently. Try to keep him in hand, won’t you? Alcohol is poison to him.…”

  “By the way,” he continued, “do you suppose I might bring my chess set down some evening? I mean, when things quiet down a bit. There’ll be nights when nobody will turn up. Just give me a ring. By the way, I’ve been reading that book you lent me—on the history of the game. An astonishing book. We must go one day to the museum and have a look at those medieval chess boards, eh?”

  “Sure,” I said, “if we ever manage to get up by noon!”

  One by one my friends filed into the kitchen to chat with me. Often they served the customers for me. Sometimes the customers came to the kitchen themselves to ask for a drink, or just to see what was going on.

  O’Mara, of course, anchored himself in the kitchen. He talked incessantly about his adventures in the sunny South. Thought it might be a good idea to go back there, all three of us, and make a new start. “Too bad you haven’t got an extra bed here,” he said. He scratched his head thoughtfully. “Maybe we could put a couple of tables together and spread a mattress over them?”

  “Later, maybe.”

  “Sure, sure,” said O’Mara. “Anytime. It was just a thought. Anyway, it’s good to see you again. You’ll like it down South. Good clean air there, for one thing.… This is some dump! What a comedown from that other place! By the way, do you still see that crazy gink—what’s his name again?”

  “You mean Sheldon?” r />
  “Yeah, Sheldon, that’s the guy. He’ll pop up again, just wait! You know what they’d do with a pest like that down South? They’d grab him by the seat of his pants and run him over the line—or else lynch him.

  “By the way,” he continued, clutching my sleeve, “who’s that dame in the corner over there? Ask her in here, will you? I haven’t had a good lay now in two weeks. She’s not a Yid, is she? Not that I give a damn… only they cling too much. You know.” He gave a dirty little laugh and helped himself to a brandy.

  “Henry, I’ll have to tell you sometime about the gals I fooled around with down there. It was like a passage out of the History of European Morals. One of them, with a big colonial house and a retinue of flunkeys, was all set to hook me for life. I almost fell for it too—she was that pretty. That was in Petersburg. In Chattanooga I ran across a nymphomaniac. She nearly sucked me dry. They’re all a bit queer, I tell you. Faulkner’s got the low-down on them, no gainsaying it. They’re full of death—or something. The worst of it is, they spoil you. I was pampered to death. That’s why I came back. I’ve got to do something. Christ, but New York looks like a morgue! People must be crazy to stay here all their lives.…”

  The girl in the corner, whom he had been eyeing steadily, gave him a sign. “Excuse me, Henry,” he said, “this is it,” and off he skedaddled.

  It was when Arthur Raymond started coming regularly that things began to take a dramatic turn. He was usually accompanied by his bosom pal, Spud Jason, and Alameda, the latter’s “paramour.” Arthur Raymond liked nothing better than to argue and dispute, and, if possible, to consummate these sessions on the floor, with toe holds and arm locks. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to twist someone’s arm or wrench it out of its socket. His idol was Jim Driscoll, who had lately turned professional. Perhaps it was because Jim Driscoll had once studied to be an organist that he adored him so.