At frequent intervals she would knock at the door, offer some flimsy excuse for interrupting me, then stand at the threshold for an hour or more pumping me. Obviously it excited her to think that anyone could pass the whole day at the machine, writing, writing, writing. What could I be writing? Stories? What kind of stories? Would I permit her to read one some day? Would I this and would I that? It was inconceivable the questions the woman could ask.
After a time she began dropping in on me in order, as she said, to give me ideas for my stories: fragments out of her life in Hamburg, Dresden, Bremen, Darmstadt. Innocent little doings which to her were daring, shocking, so much so that sometimes her voice dropped to a whisper. If I were to make use of these incidents I was to be sure to change the locale. And of course give her a different name. I led her on for a while, glad to receive her little offerings—cheese cake, sausage meat, a leftover stew, a bag of nuts. I wheedled her into making us cinnamon cake, streusel küchen, applecake—all in approved German style. She was ready to do most anything if only she might have the pleasure of reading about herself some day in a magazine.
One day she asked me point-blank if my stories really sold. Apparently she had been reading all the current magazines she could lay hands on and had not found my name in one of them. I patiently explained to her that sometimes one had to wait several months before a story was accepted, and after that another few months before one got paid. I at once added that we were now living on the proceeds of several stories which I had sold the year before—at a handsome figure. Whereupon, as though my words had no effect whatever upon her, she said flatly: “If you get hungry you can always eat with me. I get lonely sometimes.” Then, heaving a deep sigh: “It’s no fun to be a writer, is it?”
It sure wasn’t. Whether she suspected it or not, we were always hungry as wolves. No matter how much money came in, it always melted like snow. We were always trotting about, looking up old friends with whom we could eat, borrow carfare, or persuade to take us to a show. At night we rigged up a wash line which we stretched across the bed.
Mrs. Henniker, always overfed, could sense that we were in a perpetual state of hunger. Every so often she repeated her invitation to dine with her—“if you’re ever hungry.” She never said: “Won’t you have dinner with me this evening, I have a lovely rabbit stew which I made expressly for you.” No, she took a perverse pleasure in trying to force us to admit that we were ravenous. We never did admit it of course. For one thing, to give in meant that I would have to write the sort of stories Mrs. Henniker wanted. Besides, even a hack writer has to keep up a front.
Somehow we always managed to borrow the rent money in time. Dr. Kronski sometimes came to the rescue, and so did Curley. But it was a tussle. When we were really desperate we would walk to my parents’ house—a good hour’s walk—and stay until we had filled our bellies. Often Mona fell asleep on the couch immediately after dinner. I would do my utmost to keep up a running conversation, praying to God that Mona wouldn’t go on sleeping until the last horn.
These postprandial conversations were sheer agony. I tried desperately to talk of everything but my work. Inevitably, however, there would come the moment when either my father or my mother would ask—“How is the writing going? Have you sold anything more since we saw you last?” And I would lie shamefacedly: “Why yes, I sold two more recently. It’s going fine, really.” Then would come a look of joy and astonishment and they would ask simultaneously: “To which magazines did you sell them?” And I would give the names at random. “We’ll be watching for them, Henry. When do you think they will appear?” (Nine months later they would remind me that they were still on the lookout for those stories I said I had sold to this and that magazine.)
Towards the end of the evening, my mother, as if to say “Let’s get down to earth!” would ask me solemnly if I didn’t think it would be wiser to drop the writing and look for a job. “That was such a wonderful position you had with.… How could you ever have given it up? It takes years to become a good writer—and maybe you will never succeed at it.” And so on and so forth. I used to weep for her. The old man, on the other hand, always pretended to believe that I would come through with flying colors. He fervently hoped so, that I was certain of. “Give him time, give him time!” he would say. To which my mother would reply—“But how will they live in the meantime?” Then it was my cue. “Don’t worry, mother, I know how to get along. I’ve got brains, you know that. You don’t think we’re going to starve, do you?” Just the same, my mother thought, and she would repeat it over and over, as if to herself, that it would really be wiser to take a job and do the writing on the side. “Well, they don’t look as though they were starving, do they?” This was the old man’s way of telling me that, if we really were starving, all I had to do was call on him at the tailor shop and he’d lend me what he could. I understood and he understood. I would thank him silently and he would acknowledge my thanks silently. Of course I never called on him. Not for money. Now and then, out of a clear sky, I would drop in on him just to cheer him up. Even when he knew I was lying—I told him outrageous cock-and-bull stories—he never let on. “Glad to hear it, son,” he’d say. “Great! You’ll be a best seller yet, I’m sure of it.” Sometimes, on leaving him, I would be in tears. I wanted so much to help him. There he sat in the back of the shop, a sort of collapsed wreck, his business shot to hell, no hopes whatever, and still acting cheerful, still talking optimistically. Perhaps he hadn’t seen a customer for several months, but still “a boss tailor.” The frightful irony of it! “Yes,” I would say to myself, walking down the street, “the first story I sell I’m going to hand him a few greenbacks.” Whereupon I myself would wax optimistic, persuaded by some crazy logic that some editor would take a fancy to me and write out a check, in advance, for five hundred or a thousand dollars. By the time I reached home, however, I’d be willing to settle for a five-spot. I’d settle for anything, in fact, that meant another meal, or more postage stamps, or just shoelaces.
“Any mail today?” That was always my cry on entering. If there were fat envelopes waiting for me I knew it was my manuscripts coming home to roost. If they were thin envelopes it meant rejection slips, with a request to forward postage for the return of the scripts. Or else it was bills. Or a letter from the lawyer, addressed to some ancient address and forwarded to me in some miraculous fashion.
The back alimony was piling up. I would never be able to foot the bill, never. It looked more than ever certain that I would end my days in Raymond Street jail.
“Something will turn up, you’ll see.”
Whenever anything did turn up it was always by her contrivance. It was Mona who ran into the editor of “Scurrilous Stories,” and got a commission to write a half-dozen stories for them. Just like that. I wrote two, under her name, with great effort, with heroic effort really; then I got the bright idea to look up their old files, take their own published stories, change the names of the characters, the beginnings and endings, and serve them up rehashed. It not only worked—they were enthusiastic about these forgeries. Naturally, since they had already savored the stew. But I soon grew weary of making potpourris. Just so much time wasted, it seemed to me. “Tell them to go to hell,” I said one day. She did. But the kickback was wholly unanticipated. From being “our editor,” his nibs now became a heavy lover. We got five times the money we used to get for the damned stories. What he got I don’t know. To believe Mona, all he demanded was a half hour of her time in a public place, usually a tea room. Fantastic! More fantastic still was this—he confessed one day that he was still a virgin. (At the age of forty-nine!) What he omitted to say was that he was also a pervert. The subscribers to the bloody magazine, we learned, included a respectable number of perverted souls—ministers, rabbis, doctors, lawyers, teachers, reformers, congressmen, all sorts of people whom one would never suspect of being interested in such trash. The vice crusaders were undoubtedly the most avid of their readers.
As a reaction
to this phoney slush I wrote a story about a killer. I wrote it as if I had known the man intimately, but the truth is I had gleaned all the facts from little Curley who had spent a night in Central Park with this “Butch” or whatever he was called. The night Curley told me the story I had one of those bad dreams in which you are pursued endlessly and relentlessly, escaping death only by coming awake.
What interested me about this “Butch” was the discipline he imposed on himself in plotting his holdups. To plot a job accurately required the combined powers of a mathematician and a yogi.
There he was, right in Central Park, and the whole nation searching high and low for him. Telling his story, like a fool, to a young lad like Curley. Even divulging a few sensational aspects of the job he was then plotting.
He might as well have stood on the corner of Times Square as prowl about Central Park late at night.
A reward of fifty thousand dollars was coming to the man who got him, dead or alive.
According to Curley, the man had locked himself in his room for weeks; he had spent hours upon hours lying on the bed with a bandage over his eyes, rehearsing in detail every step, every move that was to be made. Everything had been thought out thoroughly, even the most trifling details. But, like an author or a composer he would not undertake the execution of his plans until they were perfect. He not only took into account all possibilities of error and accident, but like an engineer, he allowed a margin of safety to meet unexpected stress and strain. He might have been dead certain himself, he might have tested the ability and the loyalty of his confederates, but in the end he could count only on himself, on his own brains, his own foresight. He was alone against thousands. Not only was every copper in the country on the alert, but so were the civilians throughout the land. One careless little move and the jig was up. Of course he never intended to let himself be caught alive. He would shoot it out. But there were his pals—he couldn’t let them down.
Perhaps, when he strolled out to get a breath of air that evening, he was so chock-full of ideas, so certain that nothing could go amiss, that he simply couldn’t contain himself any longer. He would collar the first comer and spill the beans, trusting to the fact that his victim would be reduced to such a state of terror that he would be paralyzed. Perhaps he enjoyed the thought of brushing elbows with the guardians of the law, asking them for a light, maybe, or for directions, looking them straight in the eye, touching them, thanking them, and they none the wiser. Maybe he needed such a thrill to steady himself, to get the cold feel of things—because it’s one thing to think it out intensely all by yourself, securely locked in a room, and quite another thing to start moving about outdoors, with every pair of eyes examining you, with every man’s hand raised against you. Athletes have to warm up first. Criminals probably have to do something similar.… Butch was the sort who enjoyed courting danger. He was an A-1 criminal, a guy who might have made a great general, or a wily corporation lawyer. Like so many of his kind, he had assured Curley not once but several times, that he had always given his man a fair chance. He was not a coward, neither was he a sneak, and certainly not a traitor. He was against Society, that was all. Playing a lone hand, he had reason to be proud of his success. Like a movie star, he was vain about his following. Fans? He had millions of them. Now and then he had done something off the record, just to let them know his caliber. Playing to the gallery. Sure. Why not? One had to get a little fun out of it too. He didn’t particularly relish the killings, though he didn’t have a bad conscience about them either. What he liked more than anything was to put it over on the soft-shoe blokes.
They always thought themselves so goddamned smart!
Curley was still trembling with excitement, fear, anguish, admiration and God knows what. He could talk of nothing else. He urged us to watch the papers. It would be a sensational affair. Even to us he refused to reveal the nature of it. He was still frightened, still hypnotized. “His eyes!” he exclaimed over and over. “I felt as if I were turning to stone.”
“But you met in the dark.”
“Doesn’t matter. They glowed like coals. They gave off sparks!”
“Don’t you think maybe you imagined it, knowing he was a killer?”
“Not me! I’ll never forget those eyes. They’ll haunt me to my dying day.” He shuddered.
“Do you really think, Curley,” asked Mona, “that a criminal’s eyes are different from other people’s?”
“Why not?” said Curley. “Everything else about them is different. Why not their eyes? Don’t you think eyes change when the personality changes? They all have “other” personalities. I mean, they’re not themselves. They’re something plus—or less, I don’t know which. They’re another breed, that’s all I can say. Even before he told me who he was I felt it. It was like getting a vibration from another world. His voice was unlike any human voice I know. When he shook hands with me I thought I had hold of an electric current. I got a shock, I can tell you—I mean a physical shock. I would have run away from him, then and there, but those eyes kept me rooted to the spot. I couldn’t budge, couldn’t lift a finger.… I begin to understand now what people mean when they talk of the Devil. There was a strange smell about him—did I mention that? Not sulphur and brimstone. More like some concentrated acid. Maybe he had been working with chemicals. But I don’t think it was that. It was something in his blood.…”
“Do you think you would recognize him if you saw him again?”
Here Curley paused, to my surprise. He seemed baffled.
“Frankly,” he answered, and with great hesitation, “I don’t think I would. Strong as his personality was, it also had the power to erase itself from one’s consciousness. Does that sound fishy? Let me put it another way.” (Here I was genuinely astounded, Curley had indeed made strides.) “Supposing St. Francis appeared before you tonight in this very room. Supposing he spoke to you. Would you remember what he looked like tomorrow or the day after? Wouldn’t his presence be so overwhelming as to wipe out all remembrance of his features? Maybe you’ve never thought of such an eventuality. I have because I knew someone once who had visions. I was only a kid at the time but I can remember the look on the person’s face when she told me of her experiences. I know that she saw more than the physical being. When someone comes to you from above he brings something of heaven with him—and that’s blinding. Anyway, that’s how it seems to me.… Butch gave me a similar feeling, only I knew he didn’t come from above. Wherever he came from, it was all about him. You could sense it. And it was terrifying.” He paused again, his face brightened. “Listen, you’re the one who urged me to read Dostoevski. You know what it is, then, to be dragged into a world of unmitigated evil. Some of his characters talk and act as if they inhabited a world absolutely unknown to us. I wouldn’t call it Hell. Something worse. Something more complex, more subtle than Hell. Nothing physical can describe it. You sense it from their reactions. They have an unpredictable approach to everything. Until he wrote about them, we’d never known people who thought as his characters do. And that reminds me—with him the criminal, the idiot, the saint are not so very far apart, are they? How do you figure that out? Did Dostoevski mean that we’re all of one substance? What is evil, and what divine? Maybe you know.… I don’t.”
“Curley, you really surprise me,” said I. “I mean it.”
“You think I’m so very different now?”
“Different? No, not so very, but certainly more mature.”
“What the hell, you don’t remain a kid all your life.”
“True.… Tell me honestly, Curley, if you could get away with it, would you be tempted to lead the life of a criminal?”
“Possibly,” he answered, lowering his head ever so little.
“You like danger, don’t you?”
He nodded.
“And you don’t have many scruples either, when the other fellow gets in your way?”
“I guess not.” He smiled. A rather twisted smile.
“An
d you still hate your stepfather?”
Without waiting for a reply I added: “Enough to kill him, if you could get away with it?”
“Right!” said Curley. “I’d kill him like a dog.”
“Why? Do you know why? Now think, don’t answer me straight off.”
“I don’t have to think,” he barked. “I know. I’d kill him because he stole my mother’s love. It’s as simple as that.”
“Doesn’t that sound slightly ridiculous to you?”
“I don’t give a damn if it does. It’s the truth. I can’t forget it and, what’s more, I’ll never forgive him. There’s a criminal for you, if you want to know.”
“Maybe you’re right, Curley, but the law doesn’t recognize him as one.”
“Who cares about the law? Anyway, there are other laws—and more important too. We don’t live by legal codes.”
“Right you are!”
“I’d be doing the world a service,” he continued heatedly. “His death would purify the atmosphere. He’s of no use to anyone. Never was. I ought to be honored for doing away with him and his kind. If we had an intelligent society, I would be. In literature men who commit such crimes are regarded as heroes. Books are as much a part of life as anything else. If authors, can think such thoughts, why not me or the other fellows? My grievances are real, not imaginary.…”
“Are you so sure of that, Curley?” It was Mona who spoke.
“Dead sure,” said he.
“But if you were the central character in a book,” said she, “the important thing would be what happened to you, not your stepfather. A man who kills his father—in a book—doesn’t become a hero just on that account. It’s the way he behaves that counts, the way he faces the problem—and resolves it. Anyone can commit a crime, but some crimes are of such stupendous import that the doer becomes something more than a criminal. Do you see what I’m getting at?”