The churl who spoke was familiar to me by sight. An Englishman—a VIP during the war—who had often stayed at the Astolat. A medium-sized man of sixty with a red face and eyes like gray gas. A brittle British voice, snotty in every particular. An iron-gray Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and a way of smacking his lips underneath it, when he was in a temper, that shook its points.
He was always accompanied by his wife. As a rule, they ate quietly—talking together now and then, and more often just swilling in food. She was a lank, vapid woman with a toadstool's complexion, a chin like a fist, and hair tormented into little knobs—as if she absent-mindedly had cooked it, rather than coiffed it—and burned it in the process. Lumpy, burned hair, a disgusting dish of it—and a voice like claws, to match her master's.
She stared, now, at her empty plate, and said nothing. She did not seem to be ashamed, or embarrassed, or to be waiting for a storm to subside. She was a woman born without the knack for yielding or apology. She merely looked at her plate because she would be God-damned if she cared to look at anything or anybody else.
Fred came back. He put on a sympathetic expression. "The chef says he is very sorry. He says that this is not the time of year for baked apples."
"The stands are loaded with apples," the Englishman snorted. "Seen 'em myself!"
"I know. But they're eating apples. Not baking apples. They come later in the fall."
The Englishman doubled his fist and lightly thumped the table. "I said I wanted a baked apple! All I wanted was a baked apple."
"I have explained."
"With cream. A baked apple with cream."
I have seen Englishmen by the dozen go through this sort of routine. With the exception of certain Germans, some of them are, I believe, the rudest people on the earth. Badly brought-up babies—these empire builders.
This one was insulting the waiter and his wife, in the bargain—but I have rarely seen an Englishman who minded insulting his wife by making scenes. When crossed in matters like baked apples they seldom consider wives, children, strangers, decorum, or the reputation of Britannia. They merely behave like twirps.
Fred had said nothing.
"I suppose," the Englishman at last went on, shivering his mustache, "you mean to tell me I am not to have a baked apple—?"
"Perhaps for dinner—one of the eating kind could be baked—"
The Englishman suddenly hurled his napkin on his plate. He stood. "No baked apple," he said. "Well!"
He intended to stalk from the room.
However, Paul—who had at first been chortling over the slow-spilled tray and later watching the Englishman with intent, even exaggerated, care—now interposed, to my great surprise.
He sat next to the Britisher—on the same banquette. Thus when the infuriated man surged upright he stood alongside Paul and between our two tables.
Paul stretched out his foot, rested his shoe on the corner of the Englishman's table, and untied the lace.
The man, barred by the long leg, said, "Good Gad!"
Paul retied the lace. He looked dimly at the Englishman—who, I honestly believe, had not so much as noticed or recalled a single person in the room but himself all during the baked apple affair. It is a kind of concentration peculiar to the British.
"Put down your foot, man!"
"Quintod!" Paul said, as if using rare syllables of opprobrium: "Quidhetch! Vassenoy!" He moved his foot this way and that, eying it. Even the Englishwoman was staring at it now, in some shock. After all, it was on her table, twenty inches from her picklelike nose, and not a victual.
Paul turned again to the standing man and hissed, "Kittenpitches!"
"Waiter!"
Fred was still standing there—still fairly impassive. He had the wit to say, "Yes, sir?"
"This person is drunk!"
Paul came to his feet then—and towered over the Englishman. He bent close. "Pomadiant nocrot," he said harshly. "Cantapunce. Cabulate geepross. Dreek!"
The Englishman opened his mouth and emitted a thin, high, frightened squeak.
Paul scowled. "Nikerpole," he said, sadly now. "Oose."
Quite suddenly, Paul sat down. He spoke to Marcia in a perfectly matter-of-fact tone—but a tone loud enough to carry around the respectfully quieted room. "Never did understand why people came here without first learning the language.Andthe manners. I dare say my Japanese surprised him! Probably an admiral in civies, spying out the next war. Got a camera in his mustache, I presume, clever devils!"
The Englishman then left the room, shaking from head to foot.
His wife, however, remained staring at her plate. By and by Fred brought her a stewed fish with which she began to fill her baleful gizzard.
I would have thought—I would have bet—that this was the end of such things. The tray, alone, would have done as the month's quota for this proper restaurant.
I was wrong.
Hardly had the Englishman departed—hardly had his wife commenced to make slushing sounds with the cream sauce on her fish—hardly had I dried my tears—when the corner of the eye opposite the one that had caught sight of the teetering tray drew my attention in its new direction.
This was toward the bar.
Here Mrs. Doffin was sitting at her regular table.
She had been sitting there, lunch and dinner, when I had first entered the Knight's Bar in 1937. A tall, narrow woman with dyed red hair, who was given to wearing witches' hats—such hats as women wore in Merlin's day—round and pointed. A stovepipe of a woman with a face on which a bleached fuzz grew, and eyes that resembled spoon-backs.
Year in, year out, the four seasons through, Mrs. Doffin had five Martinis for lunch, five for dinner, five in the evening after dinner, and refreshments in her room, between-times. Some ten million dollars lay to her account in various banks, I understood, but, since the death of her husband in 1932, she had devoted herself entirely to one form of enjoyment, if the pointed hats be excepted.
Never soused, noisy, or shot—she was never remotely sober. Sometimes, late at night, if you came into the bar, you would see her lips move as she communed voicelessly with whatever shades or hallucinations accompanied the thirteenth or fourteenth Martini. Occasionally, in a moment of clarity, she would recognize this person or that—a waiter, the manager, Ricky, myself. She would nod regally then, wish you good morning, afternoon, or evening—approximately according to the time—and flick her fingers flirtatiously.
She never bothered anybody.
She was not bothering anybody now.
She was sitting at her regular table, wearing a bright, vacant smile, and stuffing matches into her nose.
She had placed twenty or thirty when I spotted her.
She picked up another and delicately inserted it, pressing it up until its pink tip came even with the rest.
"Curious," I said.
Marcia and Paul craned their necks. They watched awhile.
"I wonder how many it will hold," Paul said.
"Another half dozen, I should think. She has a bit more room on the right side."
"Does she light them when she gets a snoot full? Make quite a firework."
"It's new," I answered. "First variation in ages."
"Somebody should stop her!" Marcia said urgently.
Paul's head shook. "On what grounds?"
"Good heavens, Paul—!"
Mrs. Doffin reached the point where neither nostril would contain another match. She tamped them pensively and nodded to herself. They protruded, I would say, the best part of an inch—all neat and even.
Mrs. Doffin then removed her hat. It was the first time I had seen the full billow of her hair. It looked like excelsior on which paprika had been sprinkled. She set the hat on the seat at her side and glanced with a bright smile and opaque eyes at the whole earth. I suppose the waiters had failed to notice her new gambit owing to the fact that she, and her soundless palaver, were fixtures in the place, like the intruding girders and the gaudy horsemen on the walls. All the waiters ever saw was her glass, when she emptied it. She could have breathed fire, or come in tattooed, and they would have observed no change.
From her hat, Mrs. Doffin withdrew a hatpin, long and as black as any of her garments or their accessories.
This, with the utmost aplomb, she thrust through both her cheeks, hesitating only momentarily at the midpoint, evidently in order to get her tongue beneath the line of direction. One does not—her pleased look seemed to say—absurdly and clumsily impale one's tongue, in these little maneuvers.
"Fred," I called at this point. "Mrs. Doffin needs you."
He looked. His eyes bulged and his brows shot high. He hurried toward her.
She flirted her fingers at him.
He signalled to Jay.
Together they escorted Mrs. Doffin from the room.
Nobody ever saw her again.
There are homes for the rich to do such things in.
5
"The heat is getting people," Paul said, as he and Marcia bade me good-bye in the lobby.
Marcia gave me one last look. She knew she hadn't passed.
She ascribed the wrong cause to the fact.
She thought that, since I'd seen her sensual impulse was not confined to one person, I'd written her off as a slut.
Whose sensual impulses have ever been confined to one person?
Were they so limited, human breeding would be the rarest of activities and marriage almost unheard of.
I didn't mind Marcia's libido.
All I objected to was its orientation.
I rode up to my room and began dilatorily to strip once again.
6
I am told the female of ruff is reeve.
I am told the energy of one of the early atomic bombs is about equal to the energy that falls on a mile and a half square of the earth in a single day.
I am told that a bishop in Philadelphia ordered two motion-picture houses to close down their shows.
I am told that common goldfish will survive under winter ice while the fancy sorts will not.
I am told the kurbash is a whip.
I am told that Soviet fighter planes are buzzing our airlift.
I am told that Paris is unchanged this summer.
I am told that a committee is being formed to censor as un-American all books which, in its opinion, are sacrilegious or immoral.
I am told that no creature can travel faster than a hundred and twenty-five miles an hour, or thereabouts.
I am told that Truman reads Keats.
These are things I had not known before.
I subtract myself from them and find life going on as usual—the land I love deteriorating, the world I adore growing ever more miserable.
I throw the papers and magazines on my coffee table and go to work.
7
Once, I laughed.
Not at the slapstick landslide of dirty dishes on the dowagers.
Not at the weird vanishing of Mrs. Doffin.
But at the matter of a baked apple.
O England—culture uncultivated!
Brave boors.
8
Toward half past five I got my nose bloodied.
It happened this way:
I went down to the newsstand for a typewriter ribbon; the energy of my sentiments had worn holes in the incumbent tape.
While I was waiting for a red light on Madison Avenue I heard band music and saw people scurrying toward Fifth. I went over to see the parade.
It was a listless marching—veterans on gummy asphalt all along the limp trees by the Park. The older men from the older war rode in mimic locomotives that bucked their front wheels, hooted sirens, clanked bells. Some current soldiers marched—carrying rifles with hot metal parts, and behind them came a show of mechanized equipment, with bands interspersed. I listened to the bands and thought of Shakespeare's reference to men who couldn't contain their urine when they heard the bagpipes play. Brass bands, as much as anything, had undone the loose hold of the Germans on sense. Songs about rolling caissons and lifting anchors were flaring the eyes and dropping the chins of the street-lining crowds here, too. I studied these people, remembering all philosophers and the scientists and their faith in reason. Man's monumental Thought—his pride—was silly in these surroundings. Plato, Aristotle, Socrates, Kant, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Descartes, Hume, Berkeley, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, James, and a hundred more—compartments of order in a chaos of shining orbs and panting tongues. Pretty compositions, real in themselves, and true enough—but floating in a flood their owners did not observe or—if they saw it—ruled irrelevant, nor realized they rode it, too. What old classic premise could stand the test of a brass band? None.
I watched the bright horns and the dull guns.
I stood at attention when the flags went by—feeling, asI always do, the aspiration in those white stars and those red stripes.
We would continue to aspire—some of us—while breath stayed in us.
But this stirring—this patriotic thrill—did not debilitate my sphincters. Tightened them, rather, against the multimillion goons who would as soon sell all of liberty down any creek as their own two-bit integrity. What patriots remain these days must battle harder against their countrymen for truth, for dignity, for honesty and love than ever against an outside foe.
It proved a misfortune to be moved to lofty sentience, at that time.
The tiresome military iron clanked by as it has clanked through every city on the earth for thousands of years.
More men of the newer war came, canoe-shaped hats worn cock-eyed, bellies lean still, faces blank in the scalding sunshine.
I noticed, now, that many paraders were moving among the spectators—marchers who had been dismissed some distance up the Avenue. These men, from other states, ticketed like parcel post, badge-thick and boozy, shoved among the ordinary citizens, cawing and singing, carrying pails, and shooting water pistols. Occasional cops watched them with the fixed, tolerating smiles taught in the department—proper address toward large political groups. The men, in what they thought of as boisterous glee, peed out their pistol streams at any pretty girl, blotting blouses, stippling skirts with dark dribbles, and evoking, as often as not, coaxing screams.
I wandered through a block or two of this nickering infantilism, this petty and symbolic repayment for a thousand lacks and ten thousand wretched frustrations. Men will be boys, I thought. Boys, I knew, will hardly ever be men.
I came to a lamppost where a dozen pistoleers weresinging, "I want a girl just like the girl who married dear old dad." Their mouths yearned it and the sun sparkled on the gold fillings in their teeth. This song, so far as I recall, is the only legitimate outlet for the Oedipus complex permitted in twentieth-century U.S.A. So I watched gents from Oklahoma and Idaho and Nebraska sing their incest, get their backs in it, and I wondered how much effort it would take to elicit from even one of them an acknowledgment of that emotion which, hidden deep inside him, gave him his particular inflection and look while he sang that particular song. I have wondered before while viewing luncheon clubs as they yearned for a girl like mother. To a face, every here and there, the anthem does memorable things. I supposed they would all rather be dead than have to admit the possibility of the truth. I supposed that the recognition of the baby alive in us all would require the hurdling of yet more dead bodies—billions, at least—to bring them to a happy acceptance of such affairs.
American babies are not allowed to be Freudian.
Not till they grow up, anyhow.
I pushed along.
There was a clearing in the crowd ahead. Out of it came such blats of laughter, animal calls, and whistlings as mark the approach to a feeding zoo—the same sound that is emitted by the amused radio audience.
I reached the edge.
Here the canoe-hats had formed an open oblong between the curb and an apartment front. It was necessary for anyone who went by to cross this area. On its rim stood a man with a stick, and heavy batteries. He wore a sergeant's chevrons and his breast was a blaze of heroism. Men crossed the vacated cement untouched—and middle-aged women, also. But whenever a young girl made her way through the hem of the crowd and came unexpectedly into the hollow oblong, the sergeant sneaked forward with his stick, gotbehind her, lifted the rear of her skirt, poked, and applied the juice.
The girls, shocked electrically, without warning, in this delicate and private part of their anatomies reacted frantically. Most of them screamed. All of them leaped—thrusting their hips forward convulsively. Some then ran—and dove into the crowd on the other side. One, a girl with long, dark hair, slipped after she leaped, fell, and tore a hole in her stocking. Another jumped, turned, and cursed. One tried to hit the sergeant with her pocketbook. Most endeavored to recover some shred of composure—to laugh—or to slip away without showing what they felt. Some wept instantly.
But the response of the delighted—the ecstatic onlookers, was always the same: a jarring salvo of catcalls, guffaws, finger whistles, ribald yells, mirth's paroxysms.
I watched this business for quite a while—the bands going by behind me—the flags—the guns—and the sweating people standing all along the curb for miles of Fifth Avenue.
Finally, a fair-haired girl of about sixteen came innocently into the open place, looked about to find the reason for it, saw none, and began to cross. The sergeant slipped swiftly behind her. Quickly, with his stick, he lifted the little pink cotton of her skirt, bent as he walked, with ogling pool-room pantomine, took aim, and thrust. This girl did not leap but stood transfixed on the point of the electric stick. A great grin broke on the sergeant's face and he thrust, now—again and again. Her head turned in slow horror. Whatever fantasy had seized her brain was shattered by the sight of the lewd man jabbing at her. The crowd roared like all the pottery on earth falling over a precipice. A look of the most pitiful terror came over her. At last, she found the nerves and muscles for running and escaped into the yapping multitude.
The sergeant straightened up. When he straightened, I stepped out and hit him on the mouth as hard as I could.
The approving roar stopped as if a noose had tightened on its throat.
The sergeant stared at me with addled menace. Blood trickled from between his lips, where I had felt his teeth loosen.
Then one of his buddies hit me from the side.
My nose blazed with pain.
The hollow lost its shape. Different—yet not much different yells were raised.
Someone cracked the back of my head.
I saw a place between two fat men, lunged at it, looked back. The sergeant was slowly sitting down, fumbling for his handkerchief.
Blows fell on me. A man in a navy uniform grabbed my arm. I hit him and he let go. The crowd closed around me.
When, after long minutes of pushing and weaving, I emerged on a side street, my nose was bleeding.
I wiped it and went, somewhat shakily, to the hotel.
The nosebleed stopped in a few minutes.
I turned on my radio and found a cello solo amongst the predinner music.
Ave Maria, as a matter of fact.
9
Tom Alden—Tom-the-doctor—had been thinking about me, off and on, for more than thirty hours, now.
He is the kind of person whose thoughts give birth more to inquiry than opinion.
We went to a Longchamps for dinner—the gold and vermilion decorations made bearable by air conditioning. Traffic was light; only a few people were about—people going tiredly in the heat-choked night. After dinner, we rode back in a cab to the Astolat and strolled over to the Park where we sat together on the Mall, listening to the concert.Thousands of people had spread out newspapers in the lamplit dusk and lay upon them, asleep, talking, making love. The police had suspended the bans that one night. Tenements and penthouses were ovens; their refugees gasped on the grass. Kids played in the fountains and no one interfered. The city itself had an evacuated feeling; all who were able had fled the heat wave and the rest were in parks, in cool restaurants, or in the movie theaters. Stars shone hazily above the trees and the stagy skyscrapers. Music, coming down the Mall, was distorted by invisible eddies that still rose from the sun-baked cement; it soared and fell and wobbled through the furnace atmosphere.
Tom, as I said, is given to inquiry. This is not surprising in a man who practices several sciences. If we were old friends, we were also dedicated, in different ways, to the examination of all that surrounded ourselves and each other. Our sensibilities were tuned to the fact; they lacked the common diffidences of most such attachments.
"How's it going?" That was his first question, when he arrived at my hotel rooms.
"Okay."
He put down the black bag that lies within easy reach of his whole life.
"Jittery?"
"Not that I know of."
"Tell Ricky?"
"No."
"How is she?"
"All cured—we hope."
His pale eyes fixed on me. "Let me have another look at the throat."
He had another look—rearranging lights.
"I did a little reading on it, Phil. I can't say for sure what it is."
"I'm going on the assumption that it is—what-for."
"Yes. You would. Most people would take the oppositeattitude—until the last possible fraction of the last possible second."
"Why?"
He shrugged and put his tools away. "Wishful thinking."
"More fun to know than wish—look than dream."
"Not many agree with that."
"They don't know enough—look far enough. If you're going to get yourself free—you've got a lot of illusion to hack through first."
"Do you feel really free?"
I shook my head. "Not free at all. But I do feel I know what freedom is—what it means—what it's for. Maybe that's as near as you can get—these days."
He went to the toilet and washed—in an absent-minded, habitual manner. "Hot night."
"Hot."
"You've been told your number was up before now. I've been considering that. You know what it's like."
"Sure."
"What's it like?" He asked it eagerly, and yet academically, as if there were a formula for the reply.
"Changes from minute to minute."
"I suppose so." He seemed disappointed.
That was when we started for Longchamps.
He took the bag along. He always does....
He ordered one Tom Collins. The tall glass was sweating even before the waiter could bring it from the bar.
"How are you—fixed?"
I told him that.
He peered at the room, the other diners, the gaudy colors. "Funny. I remember back in high school in Montclair when you were the class poet. Everybody thought you'd be a writer, sure. The last will and testament of our class left your pen to the juniors. Remember that?"
I remembered.
"But I don't suppose anybody—including yourself—ever thought you'd rip out magazine serials like logs going through a circular saw. Get to be a popular writer. And then set people on their ears by writing about psychology. We all thought you were destined for the garret—a lot of reputation, maybe—but not Florida houses and—fifty thousand dollars' worth of insurance—"
"No."
"Did you?"
"Yeah."
"You did!"
"No harm in daydreaming, was there? Back then?"
Tom meditated on those distant high school years. "You realized the daydream."
"A person like me has a good many daydreams. When one comes true—he automatically starts on the next."
"Do you consider yourself happy?"
"Enormously, Tom."
"So do I.Why?How come? When you spend about ninety per cent of your time considering the unhappiness of the world?"
"Somebody has to collect the garbage or we'd all die of plague. And a born garbage collector loves his job."
"There's more to it than that."
"Yeah. It's not garbage. It's what we discard, ignore, repress. The green fertilizer of the next crop. The yin to the coming yang. My contemplation of what you call the unhappy aspects of life is really the substance of what I find to be hope."
"Jung changed you a lot, Phil."
"I dunno. I got thinking—some years back—of a poem I wrote when I was twenty-one. Threw it away—lost it—haven't any idea what happened to it. But in that poem was the fundamental Jungian idea—the idea that instinct directs human affairs—and that it's a force in action which always has equal and opposite reactions—"
"Still—Archie—"
I thought of Archie—the psychiatrist to whom Tom had sent me for analysis. "Archie taught me psychology—Freudian, Jungian, Adlerian—and let me work out my own problems, aloud. He was a great teacher."
"He died of cancer," Tom mused.
"'—too'?"
He looked at me and grinned gently. "Masochism takes funny forms in you."
"In us all." I went back a little way in the discussion. "When I was a young guy, I formed the habit of listening to, and looking at, everything that happened in my mind. Ruling out nothing. Trying to relate everything to everything else. That's a good habit. That's the natural mind. There are too God-damned many prohibitions and taboos in the life of a Presbyterian minister's son to keep track of. So I started—as a game—ignoring all of them, in my head. Plenty of people do. I arrived—in that poem—at a pretty complete formulation of instinct and the laws of instinct—as Jung sees it working. As Toynbee sees it working collectively, on civilizations. As Northrop glimpses it. As Jesus tried to define it. As Aristotle didn't even guess it."
"So you think you really never underwent a philosophical change?"
"No. I lost sight of what I'd felt—when I was a dizzy, drunk Hollywood writer. But when Archie taught me Freud and Jung—I got back the insight—in contemporary terms and scientific formulations. That's all. And it isn't very much."
"Are you ever frightened?"
"I'm protoplasm, for God's sake!"
He chuckled. "That's a relief! I've wondered what are you scared of. Sometimes—you seem haunted. Most of the time, I could swear you were afraid of nothing."
"The shadow of the ego—the black streak behind it that it never looks around to see."
"And what does that mean?"
"What I'm scared of. Inhumanity. Cruelty. To man—to me, also, I guess.''
"People get more humane."
"Like hell!"
"If you lived a thousand years ago—or ten thousand you'd believe it. The trouble is, you're supersensitive."
I took a long breath.
"What do you read?" I asked. "What do you want to hear? A list of German concentration camps? An account of the cremation of some six million innocent people by Germany? A survey of conditions in Russian slave labor camps? A discussion of physical torture as it is used by modern police in America? Or by military men? Or as a political instrument in Europe? Or as a diplomatic measure, by, let us say, the English, in their colonies? Do you want to hear a discourse on the behavior of Jap troops in war? On our own troops? Would you like to have me run over the treatment of people in American lunatic asylums? Shall I touch on lynching details—and other minor unpleasant experiences of the American Negro? Would you like me to talk about how we Americans disposed of the Indian problem? Would you be interested in some studies of corporeal punishment as it is administered in American slum homes and on American farms? Shall I recite the prison methods and jail practices common amongst our agents of law enforcement? Or would a review of the various effects of intense radiation on the human body, as well as its genes, coupled with the fact that about every other American is sitting around these days asking why in hell we don't atom-bomb Russia, tend to persuade you that we are not, essentially, humane people? Shall I discuss brutality in sports? Are you interested in considering our annual million smashed in automobiles as evidence of a certain basic scarcity of the humanitarian impulse? There are various business practices I could go into, in documenting the matter. Not the ruination ofwidows and orphans. Not the adulteration and poisoning of products. Just the little results of the basic premise of business which is that making money is the whole object, without reference to kindness or love. Or would you like to review the various sorts of crimes committed by the people in our fair land? Would you like to contemplate the interesting and vicious psychology of many of thevictimsof these crimes? Shall we look at the degree of obliviousness, smugness, or rejection which Americans held toward the atrocities before the recent war—or hold now toward massacre and famine in India—famine in China—ruthless dictatorship in a dozen nations—Spain, for instance—Argentina—a lot more? Or shall we, on the other hand, investigate a whole field of cruelty as large as the one just hinted at: thepsychologicalcruelties of modern men? It would double the scope of the survey. The teachers—devising torments to sweat off their frustrations on their pupils. The common office techniques of the average man-of-affairs. The torments of the soul written into the class structures of society. The awful havoc wreaked on man whenever a minister preaches hell-fire and damnation. No fooling! We are not humane. We are—per capita—the cruelest people who ever lived, because, unlike the poor thieves on the two other crosses—we do know what we do!"
Tom took off his fogged spectacles and wiped them. I pushed the advantage. "Cruelty among doctors. An interesting little sidetrack. I recall, for example—"
"Skip it." He looked sorrowfully at me. "You win that one."
"All I want," I said, "is for people tobetruly humane.Trulyloving. But, to gain that, we'd be obliged to give up a great deal we now cherish dearly."
We had lemon ice.
Later, we walked into the Park and sat down....
The people on the newspapers on the grass, the silosmell of trees at night in heat waves, lamplight and music—as I have said....
"Cruelty in doctors," Tom repeated musingly, after we found a bench on the Mall, where we could feel the breeze if one came.
"Last night," I responded, when he didn't go on, "I was reading a book that suggested the whole philosophy of medicine was cruel. Saving babies—increasing the life span—only so people will go hungry by millions."
"Vogt? Osborne? I read them. What's true humanity? I don't know—except sometimes, in individual cases. What about old people, for instance?"
"What about them?"
He looked back over his shoulder as if he could see through the night, the trees of Central Park, and the blocks of buildings, to the East River. "Out on the Island—I take care of a ward filled with them. Chronics. Sixty years old. Seventy. Eighty. Ninety. Some been in bed for twenty years. No cure. No hope. No chance—in a high percentage—of doing a thing, ever. An organ's shot—ruined beyond repair. Half of them touched with senile dementia; a quarter, sunk in it. Mess their beds. You feed 'em with spoons. And yet they go on—year after year after year."
"I've seen the ward."
"America has millions of such people. Only a fraction of 'em in hospitals. Moms and pops, grandmas and grandpas, hanging on to the last, sick gristle of existence. Spoiling the lives of other millions of people. Taking their time and their energy. Absorbing funds that young kids desperately need. All for nothing. Wheedling and whining and complaining if everything isn't soft and easy for them. Reminding sons and daughters and grandchildren of their 'duty.' The duty to be enslaved by meaningless, useless senility. The food and the clothes, the beds and the service, the tax money, the energy, the topsoil, if you go for Vogt—and the metal—pours down their gullets and is worn out by theirworn-out bodies—and not one single, solitary useful thing is accomplished."
"You're stealing my act," I said.
Tom laughed ruefully. "It's an easy act for a doctor to crib! Tell me, why in hell do people look forward so much to old age? Nine times out of ten, it's a mess. Even proud, independent people, when they get old, usually lose their pride and their independence—and go down begging for handouts."
"The best reason I can think of," I said, "is that they're disappointed in life as they've lived it up to middle age."
"The whole country grows older," Tom went on, after nodding to himself. "The American landscape will soon be cluttered with human antiques. Pension-seeking, vengeful, dogmatic, persecuting, bloc-voting, parasitic millions. An ocean of wasteful protoplasm—Old Men of the Sea—and old Women—riding on the backs of everybody. Is a thing like that humane?"
"It is richly sentimental."
"In the labs, thousands of my colleagues are sweating to bring it about. Studying the degenerative diseases. Trying to lick cancer and heart trouble and hypertension. Trying to lick aging itself—to keep the old, old indefinitely! Geriatrics—a whole science for the maintenance of second childhood! Sometimes, Phil, I actually think the world is as crazy as you say it is. Sometimes—when I run into a bright kid whose parents can't afford to have its legs straightened—and then when I visit my ward—I'd like to sweep the place clean with a Thompson gun and move in the kids who need it."
"There is the Townsend Plan," I offered. "Two hundred dollars a month for everybody who's old, if they spend it right away—and millions are too stupid to see the catch. In fifty years—Pensioned Old Age may be the great goal that progress and prosperity are today. Of course, there isn't enough stuff to go around, and there will never be, so twohundred bucks, if you gave it to the gaffers to spend, soon wouldn't buy a good-sized roast. But they may try for it."
Tom laughed somberly. "They are trying. You should see the pension literature in my ward. The letters they write. The voting they do. Should I shoot them? What the hell do you really believe about it?"
"There is the death wish," I said.
"They don't want to die! Not one in a dozen! Even if they're blind, vomiting on the hour, spoon-fed, and in pain—they want to go on living—and are proud of it."
"It's Jung," I answered, "who keeps talking about the law of opposites. The death wish is subjective. But we translate it into its opposite form—in this case, the objective. We want other people to die—to suffer—to bear our load—to take our responsibility. We hate. What did you say about your old folks? Vengeful and persecuting and parasitic? That's the death wish turned wrong-side-out. Or—take this pair of opposites. We have applied reason to extending life. So we have automatically obliged ourselves to apply reason to death. That is a psychological consequence of administering life—stretching it, maintaining it—of baby-saving and so on. Only—being egoists—blind to the basic laws of instinct—we won't kill anybody. Millions of Russians, maybe, but not one American. It's even against the law for a person to kill himself, for whatever merciful and laudable a reason. So what? We insist on our right to save and maintain every life. We also insist on dodging the resultant duty at the other end of the natural spectrum: death. The living have no recourse left but to extravert their death wish. To hate others because of the hatefulness of the trap they're in."
"How do you work it out?"
"In the better world," I said, "a person who had enjoyed the long conscious control of his life would feel somewhat responsible for controlling his death. When he got useless, he would give up. He would regard it as rational—and as part of that 'greater love' that almost no man, these days, hath a sign of."
"Voluntary euthanasia?"
"Why not? And if you came a header and couldn't do it for yourself—the state would do it."
"Do you think," Tom said with asperity, "that the people would permit anything like that? Or think of it asidealism? Why—it's a sin—!"
"Sure. Sin. It's one of the sins that keep the churches full and the heads and hearts of the folks empty. Vested interest."
"How many people would do it?"
I shrugged. "Couldn't say. You've seen cases. You'll likely witness another—my own—before long—"
"Good God! I'm sorry—Phil—!"
I laughed and he relaxed—visibly.
"The mass of humanity," he went on after a time, "hasn't that kind of insight, education, nerve—"
"No. Maybe not. Hasn't—as I'd put it—even that much access to its own instincts. Doesn't know even that clearly the relationship of ideals to acts. Of material gains to inner responsibilities. That's the trouble with the mass of humanity. It decides to use atom bombs—the work of a few geniuses who, left to themselves, might not."
"Appalling," Tom said.
"Sure. But the moldboard plow is just as deadly as the bomb in the hands of the common mass. And the implications of plows are much easier for the common jerk to understand than the implications of nucleonics. But he doesn't. So why worry about atomic bombs? Merely another aspect of the same, deep, and ubiquitous nonsense."
We sat awhile.
"What," Tom finally said, "will the better world be like?"
"Woodsy," I answered.
I could hear his grin in his voice. "To restore and shore up the topsoil?"
"Yep. To maintain the ecology that maintains man. And besides, woods are pleasant."
"The rivers would be clear. The factories would dump their wastes in the desert. And the sewage would go through processing plants and then be put back on the land."
"Not many factories, anyhow," I said.
"No? Why?"
"Not nearly so many people, for one thing. People would—people did—cherish each other more when they were scarcer. That's a psychological aspect of overpopulation thus far hardly observed. There are so many of us getting in each other's way and making life tough by merely being that we tend to hate each other just from congestion. Then—the people in the better world wouldn't be so crazed over junk. A tenth of the factories we've got now would probably furnish all the junk they'd want."
"Cities, do you think?"
"Maybe a few small ones—where people put in a few years before going back to the open country."
"Villages? Small towns?"
"Sure. Lots of schools and colleges. Everybody would be pretty bright—and pretty anxious to learn. Everybody would be artistic. Everybody would want to do a certain amount of work with his hands."
"Why?"
"That's the instinct of the critter, isn't it?"
"How come they'd all be bright?"
"Because the biggest fun we're going to have—when we get that wise, if we ever do—is breeding bright people. Living for the sake of future generations—and having some happiness doing it. Happiness with sex, amongst other things, when it ceases to scare us to pieces."
"Maybe," Tom's tone objected, "you might finally convince the folks that knocking themselves off when they gotuseless was evidence of a great love—an assimilated employment of the death wish. I can even see certain remedial effects in the idea—if that were the common philosophy: people would want to make a bigger effort while they did live, for example. But you can't get dumb babies to knock themselves off."
"You could start—though—at the other end. Clamping down on the people who overproduce and are least qualified to do so."
"Birth control for the morons? The Jukes and Kallikaks?"
"Yeah."
"Too difficult. They fornicate when drunk."
"Then set your lab wizards to find an easy, lasting system. They ought to work toward stopping the output of predefeated babies—of society-defeating hordes of nitwits—as a compensatory duty for working on longevity and the diseases of old age. Fill the drugstores with something you take a sip of that'll sterilize you for five years straight. Chocolate flavor. And back it with national advertising."
"Try to sell that idea! Every church would say it would mean the suicide of the race."
"Suicide of church members, maybe! Kidding aside, the more intelligent specimens of mankind, who do use birth control, still do have offspring—on purpose. It's just that they're outnumbered—and the net result is genetic decline."
"What else—in the better world?"
"No mummery about sex. No mysteries. The young allowed to develop according to their impulses—without shame or restraint so long as they aren't hurtful. The sex manners and aesthetics of the mature built upon that background of unashamed, free experience."
"And what would those manners be?"
"Don't ask me! I'm a shame-produced human gimmick, myself."
"You're welching!"
"Not exactly. I suspect—in the better world—sex would be such a different set of ideas and acts and experiences and feelings that we can't even imagine them."
"Nobody would dare bring up kids that way."
"People already have dared. A school in England does it. A school for difficult kids—not the socially elite specimens. And they turn out fine. Normal; and nice people. Which is something you definitely cannot say of the kids turned out by our own reform schools."
"It's hard to believe," Tom said.
"Isn't it! That's the trouble with truth—these days."
We went on talking for a long while about the better world.
As we designed it, that hot night, I kept thinking how much of our envisioned heaven-on-earth was constituted of what are now considered to be mortal sins.
By and by, Tom said, "Half the doctors in the Utopia would be psychiatrists—right?"
"No."
"Doesn't it follow—in your idea of the state of things? Half the people who go to doctors, you say, have psychological causes for their physical symptoms. And I'd just about agree. Half the hospital beds are occupied by nuts."
"The better world, though, is designed to keep people from getting neuroses and psychoses—individually. And to stop the massive neuroses and psychoses of nations and races."
"So it is!" He chuckled. "That's your everlasting premise, isn't it? If all the people understood themselves, they'd live according to their understanding, and be well, wise and happy, if not particularly wealthy."
"Doctors, like factories, would be scarcer in the better world."
"But what in hell would peopledo?"
"Oh—they'd do unto others as they'd be done by. And they'd add a step even to the Golden Rule. They'd do untothe unborn generations as they would wish their ancestors had done unto them. The existing Golden Rule—which nobody practices anyhow—is objective. Its subjective counterpart refers to the people to come, not the people around at the moment. That's the Golden Rule of instinct—what instinct is all about. Evolution. The increase of consciousness down the aeons. Obvious, isn't it—that the history of evolution steadily spells increasing consciousness? Logical, therefore, that such is the inevitable bent of the future of life—as life is conveyed in man, or as it might someday be conveyed in another form, if man doesn't catch on, consciously, to the scheme behind his consciousness."
"Biological immortality," Tom said.
"Psychobiological immortality. Only—modern man, being so pompous about what goes on in his cortex and repressing so much of what goes on in the rest of his brain, has construed the 'immortal' aspect of instinct as a property of his ego. The natural urge to live through his species, through kids—to love, that is—to be man's father—is drained off into the asinine notion that his personal ego will live in a slap-happy eternity."
"Man," said Tom, "has a pretty damned powerful feeling about that personal immortality. Hard to shake."
"Why not? It's fashioned out of his most powerful instinct. The one that supports life itself, reproduction, and that at least accompanies evolution. Man takes that billion-year-old galaxy of instincts, filters it through his cortex, and comes up with the idea of Heaven. It's a childish mistake. But even a child, when it's mistaken about the actual nature of an instinct, still has as powerful a compulsion in his error as he would have if he were correct. Say he's frightened by something that isn't really frightful: he's still just as much afraid. And we—most of us—are in that state about pretty much all of our inner selves."
"And have been, you think, for a long while?"
"Sure. Since thousands of years before Christ. You guysin medicine ought to quit studying tissue per se—and study its functioning some more. Contemporary man—as a rule—never gets even a glimmering of how his personality is split and how the conscious part can bamboozle the unconscious part—and believe it has got away with it. You know the fact—you ignore the implications. For instance, Tom, we actually see upside-down, right?"
"Sure."
"In our first few weeks—as babies, we react according to the fact of our vision. We want to grab the top of something—but we reach for the bottom—because human vision is inverted."
"It is."
"We learn—by experience—that we see upside-down. As we age—month by month—we develop a 'mind' that makes the correction for us. By the time we're some months old, everything 'looks' rightside-up. And only once in a while, under peculiar conditions, does anybody's mind ever glimpse the world the way his eyes see it—inverted."
"So what?"
"So—that is an example of useful autohypnosis. An immensely potent example. It shows how the 'mind' can establish a set of facts directly opposite to those observed by the eyes. A mind that can go through life looking at an inverted world but 'seeing' it the way it is—manifestly is capable of accepting almost any degree of suggestion from its other parts, and its various senses—of accepting true suggestion or false suggestion. Manifestly, it isn't necessarily 'right' or 'wrong' about anything not proven."
"An argument for empiricism."
"Sure. But for psychological empiricism. That is—an argument for refusing to take for granted any human descriptions of the nature of mind, personality, spirit, psyche, soul—call it what you will—until the descriptions have been pragmatically checked. Take my proposition that all ideas of personal survival after death are misconstructions of an instinct designed to apply to the psychological and biological future of men on earth. Then look over some people who, as a group, reject the idea of Heaven. The communists, I mean.
"I've pointed out—and brighter men have pointed out before me—that when the materialist dialectic was applied on a mass of people, it became a religion. Reason and logic departed. Dogma, orthodoxy, emotion, creed, saints, apostles, holy orders, a Bible with gospels—the whole, compulsive paraphernalia of religion burst into being. What was intended as an abstract, atheistic, scientific, materialistic pattern for living turned into the most fanatical evangelism, the most bigoted crusade, the least logical movement the earth has seen for ages. Lately, where the facts of the science of genetics have proven contrary to communist dogma, the Soviet has abolished science. The Roman Catholic Church never did anything more religious, in the worst sense of that word—more superstitious—more compulsive—or more absurd."
"What are you driving at?"
"Just this. What happened, psychologically, in Russia is one more great proof of instinct. Until and unless you find out pragmatically what instinct is, and what its laws are, no theory of government or system for living will be anything but a set of compulsive simulations of instinct. A religion. Communism was dialectical materialism so long as men just talked about it; when they tried to put it in effect, it became another faith, with the complete trappings of a faith. Dialectical materialism not merely denies that men are instinctual—it ignores the very possibility; as a result, its application drives instinct entirely into the unconscious mind. You can see the proof of that by reading in the daily papers what's happening in Russia or by noting the Russian technique of debate. Pure theology. Pure nonsense."
"I wish you'd written more along those lines," Tom said.
"I'd planned to. I'd even started the first chapters. Thecalm, collected, documented description of what instinct is and how it works. It was going to be a scientific contribution. Jung explained to the Freudians. Wylie explained to the Jungians."
Tom sat stiff for a minute or so. "Essays?"
"Peaceful ones. Scholarly. No brass and no balloons."
"Golly."
"Why 'golly'?"
"We need that tome."
"Not really. Too soon. Jung wrote me, once, that he thought it would take about five hundred years before people began to understand generally the ideas he elicited."
"More books might help shorten the interval."
I nodded my head affirmatively. "Might. Time doesn't matter, though. Not so much. When I first began to see what caused the immense and self-evident discrepancy between what some men would like to be and what most men actually are I burned up with the idea of noising the news around. I learned the hard way that the idea was one for just a few people—too few to be more than leaven in the coming centuries. I finally realized that my burn was, mostly, the desire to be the missionary myself. To get a by-line. Ego in a low form. And I also slowly realized that the truth would be there, always—and since it was there, steps could be taken by anybody, anytime, toward finding it again."
"You just write off your whole civilization—like that."
"It's what we're here for. To write ourselves off."
"Usefully."
"Well—our civilization has learned enough useful technical tricks to last for millenniums. We served a purpose."
Tom looked at his watch—and sighed. "Gotta go."
"I thought we were to have a long evening together."
"So did I. But I have to go back to Medical Center. They called before supper. There's a peculiar pneumonia up there—and something that isn't leukemia but acts like it."
We stood up and went across the grass, blinking in the gloom and stepping around prone figures.
"You seem all right," he said.
"I'm all right."
"I still think we could use that book—and I hope that we'll get it."
"Thanks."
"Need anything?"
He meant medicine. I said I didn't.
We both waved and a cab stopped.
He thanked me rather formally for dinner.
"So long, boy," he said, then. "And don't give up hope."
"I've got plenty of hope—it just isn't immediate, like the fiscal prospects of department stores."
"I mean for yourself."
"Hope isn't for yourself," I said.
"Night!"
His voice was gentle, affectionate. The door thwacked.
The cab went away into the torrid murk, its two little top lights blinking out when the driver threw the flag.
I stood on the corner, on cobblestones, shaded from nothing by the suffocating trees above me and thinking, I guess, about the book I wasn't going to write. All of a sudden my eyes filled with tears. I felt so lost, so lonely, so ashamed of my body and so scared that I wanted to have someone put comforting arms around me.
A couple necking on a flat bench beside the Park wall diddled a battery radio and it began to sing through its nose.
"Alllll—thuh worrrrld—is waiting for the sunnnnrise—alll—"
All that was coming up was the stone moon.
Diagonally down Fifth Avenue, I noticed the spot where the canoe-hat had poked the girl who looked like my daughter.
I went over there. On the cement sidewalk—a broad,pale path that sparkled in the street light—I saw the stains of that bastard's blood.
I wanted to spit in them.
I had an impulse to look around for a tooth—something to have mounted for a watch charm.
I supposed he'd put them in his pocket to give to his dentist.
I didn't feel so lonely after that.
10
It was about half past nine when I came back to my apartment.
I stripped off my clothes and put in two hours of work.
Then the phone rang.
I was sure it would be Ricky.
Some men's wives, calling that late, would be checking up.
Ricky would just be missing me.
I jumped over to the phone.
It wasn't that clear Hello Darling, like a star in clouds, a landfall in unknown, tedious seas.
"Hello. Phil Wylie?" A pleasant voice. Yvonne, perhaps.
"Yeah-me." I wasn't very civil since it wasn't Ricky.
"This is Gwen. Can you talk?"
"Gwen?"
"We met last night. If you've forgotten so soon, it's not my fault."
The redheaded girl at Hattie's—the one who looked studious and unaffected—the one who had made me think of the handsome wife of some fortunate professor. An interesting one.
"Oh," I said. "Sure."
"I'm not—interrupting—anything? Hattie said you were being a bachelor—and you sat up late. I just asked her."
"I was working."
"And I was hoping you were lonesome."
"Well, I am, as a matter of fact."
"Goody! I'll take a cab."
I was going to tell her to do no such thing. I sat down on the sofa to explain my intention of working until the words ran together and all I could manage was a dozen steps to bed sometime, probably, before dawn. But I leaned back and, in doing that, I looked into the other room. I saw myself sitting there, trying to read myself to sleep, eating some of Tom's barbiturate to help—and solitude eating me.
I said, "All right."
"You sound terribly nonchalant."
"It's the telephone," I said. "You can't see over it."
She chuckled and drew in her breath just enough so I heard it and said, "Twenty minutes."
I fixed up the manuscript and set the bridge table aside. Then I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror. "Why?" I said to myself.
This inquiry may seem to have a connotation of guilt. Such is not the case. It represented introspection, which I continued as I removed, in the now-tepid water that emerged from the tap marked "cold," all track and trickle of the night's labors.
My friend Dave Berne—whom I'd come upon with Marcia indolce far niente—once quoted Forbisher-Laroche to the effect that there are fifteen hundred and six discrete reasons for associating with prostitutes and only nine even potentially commensurate objections. Dave and I, with an hour or so to spare at the time, were able to list three hundred and twenty of the fifteen hundred and six and felt, upon discontinuing the game, that we had every good prospect of recapitulating the lot from our own joint knowledge.
A degree of doubt was cast upon the Forbisher-Laroche figures in my subsequent association with Dave, owing to the fact that he quoted the same authority on so many othermatters—the breeding rate of hamsters, for example, the relative climbing efficiencies of various kite designs, and the esoteric causes of giddiness. It occurred to me that "Forbisher-Laroche" might serve my lawyer friend in lieu of the name of an authority or researcher which he could not call to mind—or even in lieu of better authority than his own. This, however, was remarkably good; so the table, even if specious, may be regarded as sound from the order-of-magnitude standpoint.
Among the nine objections to association with prostitutes were at least two (Dave said) which could be regarded as obsolete: the dangers of disease and of pregnancy. Of the remaining seven, only two more (he claimed) could be regarded as rational by the man of ethical detachment—one aesthetic; the other, the practical matter of costs. The rest were mere excursions into "morals"—a contradiction in itself since, were we to apply any genuine morality to sex and sexual conduct, we should have to begin by contemplating the field with simple honesty—a process in which the "Moralistical" objections would dissolve instanter, so he stated.
Of the two objections worth considering, then, one was the expense—a matter to be pondered in all deals and negotiations. The other was that old chestnut which appears in the endless series of candid books of advice to boys, books advertised as providing "complete sex enlightenment," books which, in sum, horribly frighten their readers and leave them, as a rule, incapable of any real enlightenment for the rest of their lives. "Would you," such books fiercely inquire, "walk into a cheap hotel, find that the stranger before you had left the tub filled with his dirty bath water, and immerse yourself in it?" This, in short, is theaestheticobjection.
It contains certain fallacies. One is the implied idea that sex relations are equivalent to ablution—that they are designed to transfer from each individual to the other suchforeign matter as may have accumulated on his or her person. There is the further implication that such individuals are thereafter unable to cleanse themselves of the alleged spotting and staining supposedly got in such a fashion. Carried to its logical conclusion, this thought would force hotels, as just one example, to discard a bathtub with the checking out of each guest. Industry could not keep up with such tub-scrapping.
In other words, the question is unfairly put. If cleaning one's self is to be admitted as a pertinent analogue for love-making, the question should read, "Would you use thebathtubin a cheap hotel?" And why necessarily cheap?
"Would you," the interrogator should ask in all equity, "dawdle voluptuously in the shining, sunken, marble tub of the most gaudy hostelry on Park Avenue?"
Again, modern chemistry being what it is, and business being ingenious, it is a safe inference that the tub in the palatial hotel and the tub in its humble competitor would be made ready by the identical advertised product—one having the same statistical effect upon the muck and microbes of the rich as upon the grime and germs of the impecunious. And, even if such were not the case, the Park Avenue situation per se cannot be ruled out.
But I fear the bathtub analogue is hardly intended to be examined for what it is. There is no integrity of thought behind it. Its author does not pause to consider that millions already do plunge daily into common tubs—swimming pools, which are, presumably, well chlorinated. Nor does he go on to inquire as to whether his reader uses the dishes in restaurants and drugstores and whether, before using them, he inspects the dishwashing facilities and practices. There is a lack of fairness in the man. He himself—for reasons he would never dare to inspect—regards prostitutes as he regards the standing pool of some rank stranger's bath; and he deems it as his mission in life to promulgate this obscene and entirely unrealistic simile in the hope (and the good expectation) that all his young readers will, for the rest of their lives, upon encountering the flossiest of doxies, think instanter of stale tub water.
The fact of the matter is that the bright and capable girl who engages in prostitution will be found, on any count, cleaner and shinier, better soaped, scrubbed, polished and perfumed than the average for all wives in the land. Statistically, she may be slightly more venereal than her married sisters, but only slightly—and, since we have given her brightness and capability, it is equally certain (statistically) that she will be more likely to be under treatment and so incapable of communicating afflictions which, as noted above, have themselves somewhat lost their menacing aspect. In short, were a woman to be chosen by lot from (a) the general married group or (b) the group of alert tarts, and were the criterion to be bodily aesthetic desirability, there would be no doubt as to which group one should draw from. Tubs are tubs.
It is at best a trifling matter.
The positive first item on the Forbisher-Laroche list (if you're interested) and the first which Dave and I set down on our own impromptu schedule, was "fun." The idea that sexual congress, erotic play, coition—call it what you will—isfunhas very nearly vanished from Western society. To all persons who approach prostitution with the standing-tub-water philosophy, even the most faithful and the most sanctified relations between man and wife will hardly be even appetizing—since, by their acknowledged images, such people will find themselves condemned to a single tub of water in which they will be obliged to bathe all their lives. This, of course, is the inevitable penalty paid by every denigrator of sex activities: his own, under his best auspices, will still forever seem vile. Also this is the outlook of churches. It explains why the churchly so rarely have any fun and why, if they do, they make sure someonepays for it later—preferably a heretic, and, if possible, in blood.