"Is all that the truth?" Yvonne asked doubtfully.
Paul chortled. "The funny thing is, it is! Old Phil's spent his whole life trying to discover something he could learn!"
"I draw myself up," I answered, "with dignity. As a modern gentleman, I am the complete sciolist. The most-smattered man you'll meet in your lifetime. There is almost nothing that I'm not slightly versed in and pretty poor at. Why—I even took archery lessons, once. Got second prize in Palm Springs—"
"Good heavens!" she said.
"I gave him some lessons in quantum theory, myself," Paul continued. "Rotten student. Wants to know the final formulation and what it means—and detests to brush up his calculus first. He can do magic tricks, too—earned his high school pin money that way. He used to spin ropes—jump through 'em. When I was a very small kid, I looked forward to seeing him. Like a one-man circus. Then I caught on—at about four years old. Uncle Phil was in kindergarten in about every subject there was. Never got any farther. Just took different primary courses every year."
"In a minute," I said, "I'll leave you guys to your libel and go back to my serial. Somebody taught me how to write fiction, along there someplace—"
Paul grinned and said, "Touché—a little."
I felt better than I had all weekend. Paul surely would calm down with Yvonne. And she wasn't going to loiter with Gwen that evening.
It left me with nothing to worry about except a no longer very sore spot in my throat—and with no emotion to grapple—except a feeling of being lonelier than God.
I went back to my room and turned the lights on bright and sat down and looked at the roses Dave had sent.
They were my flowers-for-the-living and, being alive, they should be appreciated.
There they stood—with lighter green stems and leaves than most roses and perilous, pale-green thorns. The blooms weren't quite full blown, in spite of the heat, and they were as large as any I'd ever seen—as long as my fingers. The many lamps in the room highlighted the curved outer edges of the flowers and left only the deep, inner shadows. The petals were as voluptuous as a woman's skin; they seemed to glow, like an aniline dye in ultraviolet rays. A slightly sharp perfume filled the room—a mnemonic of things that could not be materialized, of tea roses in childhood gardens and people who had been nice to you and died a long time ago. There they stood—stiff and radiant and hopelessly beautiful.
I let myself feel them—feel them the way you let yourself feel when the concert hall goes dark and the baton makes its first, swift oval.
They came from hothouses.
I thought of gardens.
All the gardens I had made or cared about.
Roses of my own, on carefully pruned canes standing in New England mulch. Rented roses on rose trees in Hollywood. I thought of sweet peas—fragrant rainbows along old fences. Of delphiniums—hybrids taller than my head, rockets frozen at the climax of blue burst. Lilies and phlox and poppies. I thought of annuals—of planting the grains, setting out the frail seedlings—and walking the later carpet—a hundred styles of color: zinnias and marigolds and asters, verbenas and lavender, sweet William and candytuft and pansies, nasturtiums, forget-me-nots and primroses. I thought of foxglove, too, and Canterbury bells. For a long time, of hollyhocks regimented against white clapboard—red, mauve, yellow, pink, purple, orange. Then I thought of sunflowersgrowing like Jack's beanstalk. Spring flowers and the years I'd spent changing a steep rise of field into a rock garden, plowing, bulldozing, wading in a cold brook to collect the great, flat stones, trucking them home, embedding them one by one in the slope—on aromatic rainy days, in the sweet spring sun, and in the hard dirt of October. A wall here, steps there, an outcrop yonder, and a place for a pool below.
Then the little hill opened into memory's bloom of crocus and narcissus, daffodil, tulip, hyacinth and scilla, the creams and livid whites, pale yellows and money-gold hues, and the many blues of springtime, bright, pastel, lilac. The bells and stars and cups—and the spring scent that is the honeyed promise of summer coming.
Next, I thought of the woodland flowers—flowers before men found them. The precious arbutus, inexhaustible spring beauties, violets, the anemones, the lady-slippers, bloodroot, showy orchis standing in a wet glade beside a moss-shawled log, and pitcher plants—red rubber flowers on the sphagnum belly of weird bog. All summer long the rues and cardinal flowers and gentians; ferns—goldenrod, when the clear air cooled—when night's sky throbbed with wings and carried to earth the enthusiastic, strange twitter of migration.
I, too, migrated.
I came to my other home in Florida—the crashing flowers, the trees bigger than houses and bright as a florist's potted plants: poinciana, bauhinia, spathodia, jacaranda. Extravagant vines—alamanda, yellow as these roses, trumpet flowers as orange as Mexico's sunsets, pandoreas, solandras, and the holy, nepenthic stephanotis. Jasmine. Glade hammocks with orchids blooming on stumps like swarms of sucking butterflies—great white wading birds watching and vultures pinned above in the blue, cloud-dappled sky.
Brief glory of flower-upholstered deserts.
Alpine flowers in the high, thin, whimpering air with near snow.
And trees. Great God, the trees!It was, taken by itself, a many lifetimes.All good.All beautiful.
A great magic given to the modern man who thought of beauty never. Or who thought beauty was a ship's engine, or the line of high ferroconcrete, or the color scheme of a porch, or—adoring Christ forgive us, a new car! Somethinghemade, anyhow.
This was some of my lives.
Ricky had shared a number of them with me—created and divided the hours and days in the years of the flowers.
Why should I wonder concerning anything, who knew and loved flowers like this—why not, in the continual floral celebrations, take all content from marvel itself?
Men missed it, most of them.
Generals detailed insensate GIs to set square borders of ageratum around the headquarters lawn.
Statesmen wore bachelor's-buttons into their deadlocks. Or maybe carnations.
Dowagers and whores—cattleyas: spilled on avid breasts and icy shoulders.
Millionaires decreed. Gardeners dug. Who looked—who saw?
Business executives had something sent up for the office, daily, and never noticed the color or knew the name. Flowers executed and embalmed to add their priceless prestige to dirty bucks.
Schoolboys planted beans and watched the halved cotyledons ascend. Then grew and prospered and spent their lives sawing women in half.
At last, tired relatives recriminated while they embedded melancholy metal pots in the green grittiness of graves.
Who cherished?
Who left them alone in the forest?
Who else—like Ricky—knew each plant to be an individual?
I put a call through.
"Hello, darling," said her clear voice.
Oh, look—love—we've had—centuries together—so beautiful, so various—people, yes—each other, yes—the topaz mornings and the amorous unsleepiness—the vague rainy Thursday afternoons—the incandescent, rose-petal you—the touching—we've had—places—Havana, for instance—this vaulting steel town—but also flowers, dear. I was thinking how long flowers really lasted. Surely, you won't mind, that the end is here? After entire histories of evolution shared by just the two of us? I knew you wouldn't—now.
I said, "How's Rushford?"
"More important—how are you?"
"Sprung-witted. Weary. And pursuing."
"Nearly finished?"
"I should make it—tomorrow. If I hold out tonight."
"Phil! What's wrong?"
The echo—the electrical overtone—that long way.
"Nothing's wrong, dear. Things are picking up. I picked up a blonde, for instance—and Paul's taking her out. So maybe his mental health is improving."
"And maybe you should have taken her out yourself! You sound like somebody playing an ocarina in Mammoth Cave; positively sepulchral."
"The heat. Expanded my sinuses. Gives me that hollow ring. Is it hot up there?"
"Eighty-six tonight. The natives are dying of it."
"It must be a hundred here."
"I read about it in the Buffalo papers. Gee!"
"It's pretty lurid. They had a veterans' parade yesterday—and I went over to Fifth to watch—and it was damn near immobilized in the asphalt. It would have been funny—millions of guys stuck there—blocking traffic all winter—!If you go out just to get a paper, you need asbestos shoes. Any minute, this joint may run like paraffin."
"I think you ought to knock off and go see somebody."
"Town's evacuated. Wouldn't be emptier if Molotov was threatening to A-bomb."
"Do you feel all right?"
"Sure, Tud. As all right as you can when you're standing by to swim up out of your own sweat, any minute. How's mother? What new mess has Popcorn made?"
She gave me the country news.
"Won't be too long now," I said.
"Miss you."
"Miss you. Been thinking about the gardens. See you day after tomorrow—barring acts of God."
"I'd rather wait longer—and have you sounding better."
"You wait till I get there and I'll do my own sounding."
"Good night," she said. "I love you."
When I hung up, I was quivering.
I'd come pretty close:
Well, Ricky, I am worried. I went to Tom's. Of course, it's probably going to turn out to be nothing. But until I know for sure I feel—the hell with it! I'm ashamed of being this way!
I sat there, taking divots out of myself and not getting on the green.
I looked at the roses again.
They were just yellow roses—big ones—in a glass vase. I yanked out the bridge table, batted the bridge lamp around, sat, and bent into it.
6
Yvonne came through the connecting doors about one o'clock. I was still bent—bent enough so it took a moment to turn and straighten after she said, "Hello, Svengali!"
She was drunk. Not happy-drunk, or mean-drunk, either. Nervous-drunk.
"Your pure relation left me," she said.
"Left you how?"
"Left me in this condition. Buy me a Scotch."
I sent the word.
She threw herself on the divan, blew down the front of her rose-pink dress—which was wrinkled now, wet under the armpits, city-smudged at the edges—and fixed her fidgety eyes on me. "We went down to the Palais and danced a bit. He's lousy. We started in having a flock of drinks. He talked. Good God, how Wylies talk! He told me the story of his life—including the full saga of Marcia. He got to that later—at the Club Mauve."
"Nice little spot!"
"He said we were both in a revolting mood and so we should go to some repulsive place."
"Then you told him the story of your life, too?"
"Up to when I met you."
"Is that going to be a date, from now on? Milestone? And millstone, too? Try to bear in mind—it's your life and you're of age."
"So all right, lambie-pie! No hard feelings. The point is—the more he told me about his Marcia—the less he noticed me. We switched to Planter's Punches, in due time, and had a zombie somewhere along the way. For a while I thought the rum was going to do what my gilded fleece couldn't. We necked. It's dark as a bat's groin there, anyhow."
"Pretty metaphor."
"We necked, I said. Back in the old days—last week—I could neck with a boy from the time he cut me out at the prom until bacon and eggs at Child's—and never feel a thing I didn't want to feel. Tonight—though—I lost ground so fast you'd think I was a juvenile delinquent trying her first reefer."
"Poor premise—but I get the idea."
"And what?"
She turned and smiled with excess brightness at George, when he carried in the round, silver tray.
"And what—?" She revived the question. "Just as your cute little Paulie-pie was getting interesting—and I thought, interested—he talked himself right into going on the hunt for his Marcia again!"
"That's too bad."
"It's too bad—and what are you going to do about it?"
"Remember what I said concerning how I don't like girls when they drink too much? Even a little bit too much?"
Yvonne gulped explosively. "All right, then! So I call up Gwen! And that's your fault!"
"Telephone's right beside you."
She looked at it sulkily. Then she grabbed it and gave the number.
"Hello ... this is Mrs. Roland Prentiss ... is Gwen Taylor there?" She stuck out her tongue at me. "Gwen, darling!... dad's gone, at last ... sure ... that would be lovely ... of course!"
"Ace-in-the-hole," I said.
"Don't be—" She shrugged and laughed restlessly. "Oh—all right. It's my life, though, isn't it?"
"That's the idea."
"Phil!"
"Present—and unaccountable." I didn't feel witty.
"You come with me—" She was standing and she finished the highball standing.
I shook my head. "I'm going after Paul."
"Where?"
"Here and there." I had one idea, anyway.
She undid her dress and stepped out of it and threw it over her arm. She looked at me for another moment with eyes both jumpy and expressionless. "You wouldn't regret it."
"Some other time, baby. I got to go find that cluck."
"See you," she said and swept out in her bra and petticoat.
This time, when I heard her shower begin, I locked my door. Then I put on a dry, newly pressed seersucker, a light silk tie, and went out before she decided to try again.
The cab tooled along Fifth Avenue a ways, dove through the Park, and rattled into a semislum section—an area of delicatessens and bowling alleys, dated, disreputable hotels, massage parlors, shrieking truck brakes, trickling electric signs, jaded cafeterias, and a crosshatch of streets narrower than the avenues, darker, lined on both sides with identical brownstones that exuded a smell of senescence and rotted brick tenements upon the façades of which hung rusty fire escapes. On the fire escapes were people, their pets, bedding and potted plants, beer pails and radios, along with their accents of Crete, Sicily and the Balkans, Bohemia and Slovakia and Sudetenland—the wonderful poor, the authority for democracy—they said, the intellectuals who had made gods of them without touching them.
I looked, listened, sniffed attentively.
Last chance.
And I remembered.
Not far away, probably torn down, probably only a greasy ghost sharing the fourth dimension of some new structure with a marquee and a doorman, was a hall bedroom within spitting distance of the curved rails of an extinct elevated railroad where I'd made my abode for a year. Not far away, the loft in which I'd earned my eighteen simoleons a week with the other sweated youths. The counters of that department store where, with the stupendous poor, I'd cut yard goods. Far away, though, the farms I'd labored on and farther still the crewmen of the freighter. In time, however, Rushford was near—the American rustic who will not call himself a peasant because he drives a Ford. Cruel, unwashed, suspicious, insanitary louts and ugly lasses—poor.
Salt of the earth. Savor of dung.
Backbone of the nation. Spineless.
In a properly informed electorate, the majority will make intelligent decisions.
Agreed.
Then, gentlemen,
shall we not inform the electorate that this is the age of knowledge? Shall we not rectify the schizoid discrepancies between these people on the fire escapes, bumpkins, and the inhabitants of penthouses? Give the good-natured fornications of the poor back to the taut middle classes? Inform the poor of the ways of children? Release the entombed libido of them all? Having done that, so they may vote sanely—having revealed the democracy of desire—how shall we set about to teach them advanced algebra, genetics, relativity, and bacteriology—so that their acts will be in some small measure relevant to the exigencies of our times?
Freedom of the mind is immured in the vaults of the Navy and the War Department and the Air Forces.
Freedom of speech is chained in the cellars of the churches.
Freedom of action is spread-eagled on the wheel of business.
There is no information in the electorate.
Instinct only.
It is a fact we had better face unless we are prepared to lose our own selves in the stunted years of an American feudalism.
Liberty, or death, gentlemen.
We who would not fight for liberty because we did not see the involvement of it are staring into the hot barrels of death.
The time for sacrifice is at hand. What have we? Production, instead! And compulsory reproduction.
I went up to Hattie's bagnio because I am a middle-class American male in the higher brackets, of Princeton extraction, who was denied the poor man's access to femalesduring adolescence and early maturity and who (owing probably to that abnormal deprivation) belongs to a distinguished group that makes blah per cent of its sex contacts with prostitutes, blah per cent by unorthodox means, and blah per cent with males. That is evidently why I knew the address. I went, owing to the fact that a member of the generation behind me—a prodigy, similarly conditioned—of superior stature, superior health, superior life expectancy, superior stability (sic), and a superior happiness quotient—far above the average by the tables!—had come a psychological cropper in a tart's arms owing to the fact that the Age of Kinsey is also the Atomic Age and he, briefed in the latter, was emotionally distrait over the conundrum: how to tell the people on the fire escape all about the effect of neutrons on chromosomes—a datum to be regarded as utterly essential for political judgment. And other troubles.
Personally, I was of the opinion the poor could not be told at this late date and would have to learn by doing. Also the rich. And this judgment, while it in no way impaired my faith in democracy, and while it gave me a good assurance of the long future, singularly blighted my assessment of so-called democratic practices in the land during the past century and filled me with a ribald contumely for the poor-doting, poor-blind, wisdom-spurning, technologically blank intellectuals, together with nearly everybody else.
I wanted to get my nephew out of a jam before he got into one.
This is a sentiment I bear toward all humanity.
My successes in its prosecution are, sometimes, trivial.
Besides which
a man who thinks he is soon to die
enjoys kiting around in a city he has cherished all his life, among the people he loves, at night, in a cab.
I rode up through the marble lobby and past the floor-ledges of the building in the gold elevator cage with the colored boy whose face showed no trace of his fascinating,perennial opportunity to look upon (before and after) the persons and countenances of hundreds of the great, the prominent, and the rich, who were not quite satisfied with the legal sex mores of their environment and the permissions of their acquaintances.
I inhaled the many-doored hallway.
"Hattie," said Viola, "is out at a party."
"Is my nephew Paul here?"
She shook her elegant head. "He hasn't been in."
Well, I could have phoned. Why didn't I?
"Miss Taylor's here." The jungle-bright eyes sloped darkly toward me and away.
"Is she? I thought—"
"I'll call her." She led me to the same room—Hattie's parlor.
I sat down. I could stick around a while. Paul might not come here, in his humiliating chase. He probably would. He'd had—no doubt—other leads to check first.
Gwen appeared. She was wearing her hair down, tonight, and a silk dress the color of a new penny. A matching dress. "'Lo, Phil." She walked gracefully to the phonograph, clicked records, turned dials, and filled the room with soft bongoses, maracas, the background thud of a conga drum.
"I thought you were going downtown?"
"Soon. Did you mind—about last night?"
"Tonight—I never mind about last night. Rule of my life. Look, Gwen. How did you know—so quickly—exactly what that gal was like?"
"I told you," she said. "I get feelings."
"I don't. Just surprises."
"You try to think," she said. "Figure. Then you go by the results of that. It's no good. You just—relax—and see what your sensations are."
"We were never allowed to relax about it. From the cradle to the crematory—we have to be either tensely on guard or else proficiently on the job."
"It's a wonder people like you ever have babies."
"We don't have many."
Gwen smiled. "On guard?"
"And proficient."
"Nature's way," she said, "of reducing the number of real dopes! Tell me something."
"Sure."
"If Yvonne hadn't busted in last night—?"
"The answer is no."
"That's what I thought."
"It wasn't you."
She stirred her red-brown hair. "I know that. If it had been me—if I'd thought so—I'd have repressed my own feelings about your blonde roommate."
"What's going to happen to her?"
Gwen curved one shoulder toward me and straightened it—a shrug that dismissed responsibility. "How do you think a girl like me feels—about one like her? She has everything. She's always had it. And thrown herself away."
"Save the tough act for somebody you can fool!"
Gwen came over and put her fingers in my hair and turned my head up and kissed me where it wouldn't show. "She wants to know—that's all. Why shouldn't she? She's been dying all her life from not knowing."
"A hundred and fifty million people—"
"Save out a few million, Phil. Not everybody has the sordid past or no past at all—or none to speak of. Some just grow up naturally."
"I'd like to meet 'em."
"Oh—" she sat down near me—"you'd never know, anyhow. Because if you found out—or anybody found out—they couldn't go on being natural any longer. It's against the law to be a person in this world. Naturalness—that relaxation I spoke of—has to stay in the bootleg department, to stay at all."
"Pity."
"You're telling me!" She thought awhile. "I'll give you some news. I don't know whether Hattie would, or not. Marcia's here."
I waited till a small shock was absorbed. "Yeah?"
"Came in this afternoon."
"What doing?"
"Working."
"Why?"
"Want to talk to her?"
"Yeah."
She kissed me again. "If the unfaithful mood ever comes over you—"
"Don't count on it."
She chuckled. "You're one of the lucky ones. Only—you don't know it. That's the way they are, mostly."
"Some compliment."
She nodded. Her metallic hair swung before my eyes. She got up from the arm of my chair. "So long! Don't worry about—you know who."
Marcia came to the door in a few minutes. She was wearing a black dress—a thin black dress and—nothing else. Her blue eyes were defiant.
"Hi!"
"Paul is apt to barge in here any minute."
"I know. I thought he might." She shut the door.
I went over to the window and squinted through the dark heat at the Jersey rivage. "He might. And you were going to have him sent in. You were going to go through a prepared routine. You were going to disillusion him—but quick—break his heart right now—and get it over with. You were going to tell him about the cute salesman who dropped in around four. The newspaper publisher who stopped by at five. The nice banker who hung around till he was late for dinner. And the college kid who'd just left."
"You read minds," she said.
"Don't."
"Why not?" She walked over to me. "What else? All you had to do the other day was to take one quick look at me and see I was a tramp. Oh—I could feel you paw me. I could see you putting your damned twenty bucks on my bureau. You knew—so you knew how to look. And—sooner or later—everybody would know. And know how to look. And look that way. And where would a good kid's wife be, then?"
"You might have thought of that sooner," I said, ignoring the false charges for the moment.
"I suppose I make the world go around! WhatdidI think about? What would anybody think about? They'd think—this is how a sweet guy treats a nice girl. This is how he talks. This is how he holds your hand. Holds your hand, for God's sake! You'd get a real kick out of that—the realest one you'd had in years. You'd think—maybe.Maybethe life could end. Maybe I could have an apartment someplace and kids and a guy people respected. Maybe I could get into the bridge games and the theater parties and the midnight snacks next door and the church suppers, even, and drive a sedan around a suburb, buying groceries at the chain stores and not forgetting to pick up Junior's shoes."
"Forsaking all others?"
"Yes," she said, "I thought about that, too! I'm human. Feelings come over me. I'm maybe even like a kleptomaniac that can't resist a box of tacks in a hardware store or a pair of cheap earrings on a counter. Maybe I could learn to choke it down. Control it. I did—for months."
"And now?"
"Now it doesn't matter."
"Months isn't years."
Her eyes fixed on mine. They were not defiant now—but speculative. "Sure. So I'm human. So Paul knew that. I told him he couldn't expect a letter-perfect show, forever."
"Did you?"
"Certainly, I did. And what did he say? He said I couldn't expect one from him, either."
"He's being pretty—devoted—right now."
"That's what has to stop. That's why I hope he does come in here. That's why I asked Hattie to let me stay here—instead of just putting me on the phone exchange, the way it used to be. I wanted to go back with a bang. After the way you looked me over the other noon—that's exactly what I wanted to do."
"Funny."
"I see nothing funny."
"I thought—you were looking me over."
She sat down suddenly—folded in the middle and dropped into a chair. "You did?"
"Yes, I did."
"Well—here I am." She spoke in a low tone—not with resignation, not with spite. "All you have to do is say so."
I skipped that. "Marcia, I never needed to consider what sort of person you were. All I needed to think about was what sort of guy Paul is. And I could see—I thought I could—the whole thing coming apart—slowly, painfully, rottenly—"
"Go on. Play God with us poor mortals."
"My opinion—that's all—sure. I know Paul pretty well, though."
"Better than I do?" She grinned sarcastically.
"Better. I know better what he comes from. Then I saw you. I had the impression, Marcia, that your maternal instincts were involved. You were pulling the child to your warm breast and nourishing his starved little body. Feelings like that. No-good feelings, for wives." She had sucked her lips into a point; she glanced at me almost with fear; so I went on. "Maybe you thought about running errands for his kids. But actually you did more thinking about fondling his emotions—taking care of him—working for him. And you even did work. You sat there in the Knight's Bar lookingat Paul like a proud female parent—like a doting mother sharing in her son's discussions of his conquests. You were the conquered—but you were the string-pulling mamma, too. Take it or leave it—that's how I felt you felt about him! And then I caught you looking at me—looking at me the way a girl with warm insides looks at a man. So if I didn't give you the impression I was struck silly with the possibilities of the match—that's also why. I'm sorry—but there's the whole answer."
She was breathing evenly—but more deeply than anybody needed to breathe, just sitting. Down the hall, doors opened and shut. Raucous, faintly nervous male laughter echoed. "Some of the boys from the convention," she said, almost reluctantly—as if she found it necessary to explain so I wouldn't stop, and as if she was afraid the explanation would stop me.
I looked at her—at a breathing, beautiful girl—and I thought for a moment about the canoe-hats. Then I shook it off. "If a good gal—a sweethearted dame who had no stomach for the life—had started living with Paul, I'd have objected. In your case—I didn't believe you were even that—"
Feet marched on happy excursions down the hall. Somebody tried the door—opened it, to his surprise—and apologized gruffly without daring to carry the impulse through and look in.
Marcia was staring at me. "So all right," she said. "Paul's just a little kid. He's not even a good boyfriend. Too jittery. I thought I could teach him. He doesn't really want to learn. He thinks a dame is made of soap bubbles and lives on a pedestal a mile high. He thinks sex is something for pack trips in the mountains and spruce boughs. I got sick to death of his pack-trip monologue! Who wouldn't? Lying with a guy on a good inner-spring mattress and listening to him yak about pine needles! Drenching myself in cologne—and hearing him rave about stable smells! I wasready to spring myself, when we had that lunch. And you gave me the excuse. I'd saved up mad enough for six girls—and I let him have it."
"He asked for it."
"Did he!"
"But you gave him the wrong medicine. Why didn't you tell him it wasn't the disapproval of an uncle—the looks to come from men—but—the spruce routine?"
"Haven't you any feelings? That was his dream. Why louse that up, too? Let him dream! Someday, God knows, he may even meet one of those spruce-loving dopes with cute little things in her flannel blouse and her jodhpurs. Let him have her! I got tired of my uptown personality the minute I realized it led straight to the Rocky Mountains—and the farther from camp the better."
"He grew up in the West."
"Pardon my spurs!" Tears filled her eyes. "I'm a sap, too. For a while—I really was in heaven. I really thought—this is love. Ye gods! What can happen to people who should know better is—unfair to humanity! And then I began looking for an out. I worked. Sure. Honest working wife—for a couple of weeks. Then—working wife has lunch with the floor manager—in a hotel room rented for the lunch. One club sandwich—and one good, busy change from Paul. Then the stockboy—a hot-looking wop with long hair—took me out in his department to show me the new materials—and the place was deserted. So I knew I was a sap!"
I thought that over. "I'm glad you told me. I know how it is. I don't mind. It's you—and that's that. But there's one thing I wish you'd do. Write Paul a letter. Don't try to teach him a lesson by letting him see you here. He'd just tear up the place—or maybe hurt you—"
"We've got a boy in the kitchen to take care of rough stuff."
"So Paul would get tossed on the street. And come back. And you'd have to call cops. I'm sure Hattie knows the onesto call. Then I'd get a buzz from jail. And Paul would have that indignity to sweat out—on top of everything else. Don't you see he holds the whole business against me—and he likes me? Against family, friends, the kind of people from whom he comes? Against the people he cares about—and the way of life he's been brought up in? If you'd write him the truth—he could transfer the damage to the place where it belongs. He'd hate you for a while—and what would that mean to you? Nothing. By and by—he'd see that he didn't even hate you—maybe even liked you. Understood. Then he'd be pretty grown up. Enough to hate the way we do on the earth, all of us, if he had to go on hating anything."
Marcia smiled gently. Her eyes were inaccessible. "You're right. I liked you—at lunch."
"Good."
"It could be. I'll tell you what. I'll write—on one condition."
"What?"
She moved quickly. She moved into my lap and put her arms around me. "My room's just three doors from here."
I didn't say a word.
"You'll remember it all your life. And I'll have something to remember, too. Paul's uncle! They all go for Marcia! Then—there's about Gwen—"
"What?"
"She told us this afternoon. I'm jealous of Gwen. I'd like—just for once—to fix her. After all—you're not like Paul; it isn't as if you'd never met a girl in my trade before. What have you got to lose? And I'll write that letter. When he sees it—he'll toss his damned torch in an icebox."
What about this Greater Love stuff? I asked myself.
She was kissing me—giving me, not invitations, but commands.
I got up with her and set her on her feet.
"No, baby. You're something. I don't blame Paul. But I play only for myself. Never mix romance in a deal."
She slapped me and ran out of the room.
My ears ring all the time, anyway—night and day, day and night, as in the song, a sound like spring peepers at a distance, sometimes like a million dinner bells tinkling, tinkling, tinkling, and at other times like a flutenote I'd give a great deal to stop. They rang harder, now. She'd hit with her hand taut and compressed hard air against the shrill, soniferous membrane. It hurt like the dentist. I scrunched myself together and let the sweat roll and looked out the window. The pain calmed down and I kept staring out, hating the earth, afraid, miserable, cheap. I fought back.
Once upon a time, billions of years ago, there was a Knower who is identified these days by the name of God.
He was totally conscious.
He was the Custodian, which is to say the Other Property, of mass-energy and space-time. He was the sublime entropy of the primordial atom, It, the universe, the stable pattern, the All, harmoniously balanced, a fixed ecstasy unmoving and so without Age.
Unfortunately, He-She developed an Ego. (Serpent? Eve? The Old Adam?)
It occurred to Him that the perfection whereof he was the Cognizant Comptroller might be more interesting if set in motion. A slight swirl, perhaps: something gentle, along an elliptical path.
(Such an impulse, of course, expresses a Flaw in God's consciousness, or perhaps only an extra electron in the whole, or—it may be—the infinite tedium of Infinity; most likely of all, the idea that Perfection is predictably unpredictable.)
Anyhow—one deduced that He gave all His electrons and His positrons a twist. Naturally, there followed an explosion. Naturally, this puffed Space into existence, to make room for itself.
(Out went the windows, the doors, and the walls.)
It follows that a fragment was a writer in the pre-Sanskrit tongues, and another was Abbé le Maître.
Of course—we want to be God's Little Helpers, wee bits of Him, and put it back together again so as to become Timeless composites of His Awareness.
Shall we, therefore, on the epochal day when the island universes start homing, be wise enough to rejoice?
When brighter, brighter, brighter glows the firmament?
When night becomes as day, and day as a blast furnace?
(Or—will the infalling clots by then be cold and ourselves so drowned and immobilized at the bottoms of hydrocarbon oceans as to be already avid for one more experimental whirl?)
Think why you fornicate! Is it not to bring together again these thunderous, silent fires? To perform your little, local reassertion of the reburgeoning I-am-so-God-is?
Look at the stars! What suitable illumination shines for love from every pretty pore of heaven!
Look at the city! The noisiest palaver of tenement, of factory and store—the talked-up edifices that speak back anathema—(removed some ways, or in some degree) lose their ugliness. Even they are like the stars which are beauty at a distance and might be beautiful close up—if you knew how to see, there.
Heat's haze—night's dark—snow—the gentle perspectives.
Look at the night!
The infernal Jersey shore battled the oblivion with Mazda bulbs, neon, sizzling arcs, and the globe's shadow eliminated all but beauty. Lights swam on the river. Antediluvian animals with pairs of red-green eyes swam up and down the Hudson. Fish from the abyss—mammoth—with ladders of light along their shining sides surfaced and sloshed in the current, hooting and humming. Ah, Jersey! Fields of phosphorescent flowers and hills set out with lantern-bearing trees! Night-blooming paradise! The magic is our own—collective. What matter that beneath one particular lavender string of streetlights mad boys pitch clinking pennies—curse—push frowsy, young, reluctant girls up alleyways—and mad, obscene old men tipple in bars that reek with millenniums of human hellishness—and mad, subpersonal old women maliciously fling slops in the yards of their neighbors? This is not the one man but his panorama.
For can they not, all of them, stinking of their sweat and overswarming with diseased intent, look east across their river and see a pattern of illumination that would have made Nero hang himself with envy and Rameses change his gods?
Manhattan!
They look. Great Heaven, they never see!
Directly below, on the sidewalk, a woman went one by one through the circular pools of street light. I could hear her heels crossing my life and every time she reached a new radiant circle I could see she had golden hair. The very beasts in the river ceased boasting to let her print the small, enchanting sound of woman's passage on the attentive dark. Her dress was green.
I soon took my leave.
7
My double bed was a sea and I was its derelict.
I read an article by a steelmaker that tish-pished those who are concerned over the possible exhaustion of America's iron ore. Run out in twenty years? this tycoon asked. Ridiculous! There is iron enough for a century and no corporation is anxious at all, where such extensive futures can be seen.
I gave this oaf a hundred years to come to his senses in the third generation.
It was an insufficient period. The iron ran out and hestill foraged—a ghost rummaging in the raped premises of his great-great-grandchildren.
Go rue the deserts man's already made!
Paul didn't come.
I read some poetry I could not understand inHarper's.
I got out the medical book on cancer and looked at throats for a while.
I took the Gideon Bible from the bureau drawer and read the Thirteenth Chapter of First Corinthians.
Then Psalms, awhile.
Then Luke, awhile.
I went into my bathroom and swallowed one of Tom's capsules.
8
It could have been morning; it could have been night; the light on the airfield was such as seeps across the northern pole in winter. Engines hiccupped and caught fire within themselves. Gouts of blue fire streamed from their steel nostrils and human figures warily aimed extinguishers as they crouched under the great wings. One B-29—a special craft—sucked up its ladder.
"Good luck!" a thin voice called.
The slam of a hatch replied. The plane snorted, bellowed, vibrated against its chocks, and lurched about. Like a house on casters—like a house-sized aluminum insect, it moved in the opalescent murk.
There was a pause.
At Flight Control, the ground officers of the Twentieth Air Force made a last check. It was not sergeant's work, or lieutenant's. Brass looked at the weather maps—high brass read the bulletins, squinted into the instruments, followed the meterological balloons, talked through telephones. Anxious brass at the hangar interrogated the mechs—studied the quadruple checks, the four-colored V's ranged after a list of thirteen hundred and eleven critical parts ofa very heavy bomber. In the officers' mess, captains, young majors, young lieutenant colonels filled their trays, walked to the tables, sat, listened while the juke box sang—
My mammy done tole me—
Listened not to the song but to the quartet of motors on the gloomy, loud field.
Above the coughing and the clamor, the roar and thump of other engines—came the long run, tightening nerves.
"There she goes!"
"War's over."
"Shut up! And who told you, lieutenant, anyhow? And what?"
The ship—wider than she was long and just under a hundred feet from tailfin to bombardier's glass snout—gained altitude. Below, the island sank in the sea of air—palms, runways, warm, damp tropical odor of mold, hangars and administration buildings, flags.
There was now only the sky and the Pacific....
They would—someday—laugh at the B-29 even while they admired her, and more especially, the men who flew her. Schoolkids in a museum of the far centuries—walking along plush ropes—examining the early aeronautical exhibits. "What a clumsy contraption! How dangerous! They used to explode in the air, you know. They could only fly about five thousand miles—bumped along at three hundred an hour. Hour, mind you! What on earth did they do to pass the time in such tight quarters? They fought with guns—yeah—those tubes. Central fire control, they called it—they could shoot eleven pairs at once. Shoot? A chemical explosion that pushed streamlined bits of metal from the tubes at low velocities—fast enough, though, to kill a man—or bring down such a crazy craft. Who'd think—one just like that—took the first real missile—?"
The bright kids-to-be, perhaps. Their galleons and triremes.
She took off—the then-perfect air-frame, slick and silver—a multiplicity of engineering feats. She climbed. Five thousand. Eight.
"Okay. Pressurize."
The ears, hearts, lungs of sixteen men lost the feel of altitude and swiftly accepted the bubble of air that now flew in a metal skin.
Colonel Calm turned over the controls to Major Waite. The colonel's famous fighting smile flashed upon the proud navigator, the flight engineer, the idle bombardier, and the co-pilot. "You know the course, major."
The course, he meant, to the enemy.
The major had set plenty of cities on fire in his time. His brief time; he was twenty-six. Twenty-six years old and he'd flown courses that had burned out, smothered, smashed, and otherwise eliminated something on the order (he figured, being a man of mathematical bent) of three billion hours of human life. Expunged on that milk run. (You take the average life expectancy in enemy cities, multiply by days in a year and hours in a day, and multiply that by two further factors: average fatalities in a raid and number of raids led by Major Waite. Three billion man-woman-child hours, conservatively).
Colonel Calm glanced at Mr. Learned, the lone journalist permitted to go along—to write the eyewitness account. Mr. Learned sat on a parachute, his spectacles aslant, his hair awry, lost sleep whitewashed on his sharp countenance. His knees made a desk for an aluminum hospital chart board and on this, on yellow paper, using a pencil of a soft sort with which his pockets bulged, he scribbled. Once, he hitched at the collar of his unfamiliar uniform. A moment later, he glanced up. He smiled.
Colonel Calm nodded and scrambled into the tunnel that ran to the rear of his ship.
It was a journey he detested.
The passageway—a straight, metal intestine lined with cloth—traversed the bomb bay and was of a diameter sufficient to contain one crawling man. If a pressurized B-29 were hit badly—or if it blew a blister—a man in the tunnel would be rammed through it by compressed air like a projectile and hurled against a bulkhead—head first, or feet first—at the speed of a hundred and sixty miles an hour.
The colonel crawled—gnawed by claustrophobia. He pushed his chute ahead in the dim tube—because that was regulations. He wished he had chosen to drag it, instead. The thing stuck. He lunged up over it and his ribs came in contact with the curved top of the tunnel. He was half-jammed there. Sweat broke out on him—he tried to breathe—his ribs hurt. He could yell—they could get a rope around his foot and haul him back. He inched clear of the chute—pushed it forward, and went on more slowly, struggling now with the afreets of panic—putting them down like mutineers, savagely.
Now he thought of the bomb bay—the oblong maw atop which he fought his way. Big as a freight car. Big as two garages set end to end. Big enough to hold—how many horses? A dozen? And what did it contain?
His sweat dried up. His skin pimpled. Coldness seemed to flush the tube as coldness flushes a belly into which ice water has been gulped. Was the air here invisibly alive? Did uranium exude invisible, lethal rays—like radium? Or did it lie inert—in uncritical masses of unknown sizes (but not big)—waiting for union?
He went on.
When, at last, his head appeared at the far end of the tunnel he wore, again, his placid fighting smile.
The top CFC man dawdled in his swivel chair. The two blister gunners nodded and looked back into the neutral nothing of their provinces. The third chap smiled softly.
Colonel Calm came down the ladder, stretched, picked up his chute familiarly, and went on to the radar room. It was, he thought, glancing back at the tunnel opening, hardlybigger than a torpedo tube. The craft in many ways resembled a submarine, when you thought about it.
There were four men in the radar room. Two at tables. One squatting, rocking with the plane's slight motion; and one stretched on the Army cot. He saw the colonel.
"'Shun!" he bawled.
"At ease, for God's sake!" Colonel Calm went to an old man who stared into the hood of a scope with the fascinated pleasure of a child seeing his first stereopticon slides. "Well, doctor? How is it going?"
Sopho glanced up—and he smiled, too. That was the thing about the colonel's mouth and eyes: you saw and you also smiled. Even when the kamikaze had connected, when Number 3 engine was on fire—pluming smoke and the CO2wasn't making headway, when flak splashed black flowers on the morning, when tracers rose like tennis balls, the deck was slick with gunners' blood, and when the inadequate, high, freezing air whistled through the ship—scaling fast, bits of plexiglass. Even then, he smiled—and you smiled back—and went on.
"Wonderful gadget," Dr. Sopho said, pointing to the hood, within which the colonel could see a scanning light-streak and the radiant wake, following and fading perpetually. "After this trip," the scientist went on, "maybe we can go back to work. Real work. Maybe—" he pointed at the scope—"use that for saving a few lives, instead."
"Hope so." The colonel thought of his tedious wife—of weary years in Washington—desiccated military establishments in Texas—the drain and drag of peacetime. "Hope so," he lied. "Everything set?"
Sopho grinned. "Hope so."
"There's a chance of a dud—?"
"Some. Partial dud, anyhow."
The colonel seemed agitated. "In that case, wouldn't they get the secret?"
The old man had a goatee. He reached for it. "Yes. Yes,they might. And spend the next twenty years trying to put one together."
Colonel Calm continued down a narrow passage and opened a small door. Freckles Mahoney was taking his ease at the breeches of his tail guns—rocked back—staring at the vault where the powdery light was least. Daydreaming of a gum-chewing, short-haired, underbreasted Kalamazoo High School babe—and keeping his eyes peeled.
The door shut.
The colonel nerved himself for the return passage. Worse than being born—so far as he could remember. Dragging a placenta of parachute and harness through an aluminum canal with an atomic bomb beneath. He gave the three gunners his smile and they did not know it was—this time—a smile of fighting himself. At any rate, he thought, after one more crawl through eternity he could stay in the control compartment, forward. Unless Sopho wanted him.
He took hold of the ladder, sighted through the black tube to freedom's eye at the far end—and his blood turned to water.
Three men besides the gunners?
He felt horror between his shoulder blades—gun, knife, and worse. He checked crew and passengers.
He pretended to be untangling his chute straps, preparing to go through the round-eyed hell. Jordan on the top blister. Smith left, here. White right—and the unknown man beside him. No visible rank. Coveralls—insignia worn or torn off. Bearded like a submariner or the men he had relieved on Guadal. Hawk nose, brown eyes—extraordinarily intelligent, too—firm mouth, a gentle, definitely civilian look. Never saw him before.
This, the colonel realized, was obviously impossible.
He'd trained the crew, himself—picked each man, with special help from Headquarters—and met all the passengers weeks ago—old Sopho last—but, still—weeks ago.
Each member of the company—cleared, checked, quadruple-checked, traced by G2 back through every childhood peccadillo, back through generations. Truman himself couldn't have got a man on board without the colonel's okay—his invitation and acquaintance.
He felt sick and feeble; he clung to the ladder under the tunnel mouth and staggered as the B-29 dived ponderously through a downdraft. Some last-minute thing, he decided; certainly the impossible passenger did not appear to be dangerous. One could not look at him and think of sabotage at the same time. These bloody, accursed, God-damned scientists! Very Important Person—he looked every inch a VIP—a VIP in science, not military affairs. No bearing to speak of—and that kindly smile at the corners of that mouth.
Last-minute stuff.
It would be assumed the colonel knew—but his four-way check had slipped.
When he returned to base—chevrons would fall. Lieutenants, captains, majors would drop back a grade.
See who he is.
The colonel went over to Smith, squatted.
"Skipper!" Smith said, returning the smile, the Air Force treasure.
The ship thrummed. Buzzed. Hummed. Ate air. Hurried toward the enemy islands.
Colonel Calm feigned to look from the blister. He supposed he saw, in the gray below, the corrugations of the Pacific, and above, the pearly heavens, the solid stretch of wing, the streamlined engine-housing. They were there, at least.
"The man with White. His name. Can't think of it."
"Chris."
"Chris what?"
Smith seemed embarrassed. "All I know. He came through the tunnel half an hour ago. 'Call me Chris,' he said. And he said, 'Mind if I sit?'"
The smile was a mask. He could keep it on his face even now. Eyes lighted up by the battery of will, corners crinkled, lips relaxed, a human twitch of the nose—man-loving, disdainful of blood and death, enemy and calamity. He could.
Came through the tunnel.
The man had not been in the control cabin, to begin with.
No bearded man.
No—Chris.
The colonel turned on his bent toes, the stranger watching.
Should he jump the guy?
Tell Smith to dive in with him?
Go back for a pistol and shoot from the tunnel?
The man smiled pleasantly.
Colonel Calm stood up, went round the post and track—the high barber's chair—and the gear and machinery that subtended the gunner in the top blister.
"Hi," the colonel said.
"Wonderful—a ship like this!"
"I've forgotten your last name."
"Chris."
"Oh. I don't believe I've had the pleasure—?"
The man held out his hand. "We've met. It was long ago, though."
Colonel Calm had the momentary sensation of remembering. Seen him somewhere—that's a fact.
Chris was smiling. "My being along was arranged late."
"I see."
"You'll want to look over my papers, perhaps? My orders, I should say."
"Yeah. White House stuff?"
The man shrugged. "Pretty high up, I'll admit." He began unbuttoning his coveralls.
The colonel wished the man would stop looking sodirectly at him. Powerful eyes—like a lot of those scientific birds. They could, with a glance, give you an impotent sensation—a feeling that you weren't in command at all. A feeling that they commanded a force which could outlast you and would defeat you in the end. They made you feel—Christ bite them!—like a tin soldier, sometimes. And yet—high up. VIP. This was a trick mission—the trickiest of the war. You couldn't afford to make a fool of yourself. "Never mind," the colonel said. "My major probably checked you in—and forgot to mention it. The strain—"
"I know your major, yes. Sad."
"Sad? Greatest flying officer who ever took a plane off a base!"
"Cold-blooded."
"Right! Veins full of liquid helium. Have to be!"
"Have to be? Perhaps. I always hesitated—though—to think of men as numbers."
The colonel felt relieved. Major Waite's discussion of flight plans—his harangues in the briefing rooms—sometimes left the colonel a little chilled. Emptied-out. Obviously this Chris knew the major. He wasn't—fantastically—impossibly—an agent of the enemy. Now the colonel gestured toward the bomb bay—the radioactive uterus of the plane. "You—helped put it together?"
The man seemed to grow pale. His smile disappeared. "No."
"Then what—? In God's name what—?"
"I am here," Chris said in so low a tone his voice scarcely carried through the pulsing air, "because I promised."
"Promised? Promised who—when—?"
"Because I said it. Lo, I shall be with you always, even unto the end of the world."
The colonel stared—and remembered. He turned the color of ashes. His right hand, ungoverned, made uponbrow, shoulders and chest the sign of the Cross. His knees bent tremblingly.
But before he could genuflect the man called Chris touched his arm. "Don't, colonel!"
The officer, in his distraction, was muttering a woman's name, over and over.
Chris smiled painfully. "I am here." He glanced, then, at the watching gunners.
The colonel looked that way, too, and recovered something of his fighting smile. They were—after all—his command. It wouldn't do to let them see him prostrate. The gunners responded to the direct glance—and the return of the smile—by a brightening of their eyes and a faint curving of the corners of their mouths; their attention went back to duty—the duty of scanning the void outside the domes of plexiglass.
"My Lord—" the colonel all but whispered—"what shall we do?"
"Return."
The soldier's eyes faltered. "Abort the mission!"
"I hoped I might persuade you."
"Another would merely follow—!"
"And them."
"But—duty!"
"To whom is duty?"
A head appeared in the round mouth of the tunnel. Learned, the journalist, grinned like an imp. "Nasty crawl," he yelled. "Hope they've got that thing well insulated. Otherwise—I'm unsexed—or hotter than radium myself!" He saw the stranger, and halfway down on the ladder stood still. His eyes, ordinarily shrewd and compassionate, showed first a little amazement—and then twinkled. "A ringer! You would pull one like that, colonel! The American press wants to know who he is!" Learned chuckled and dropped to the metal floor. Strode the two steps forward. Gave his name.Held out his hand. Explained himself. "You're a physicist, I take it?"
"My name is Chris." The dark eyes were luminous and kind.
"Chris who?"
The colonel took the journalist's arm in a hand like steel and whispered.
Learned, also, grew pale. He stared first at the colonel and then, uneasily, he eyed the stranger. Twice, the gleam of sardonic doubt shone. And twice, with all his will and concentration, he endeavored to make some satirical reply: to say, skeptically, that this would be the greatest interview in two millenniums.
Or to ask how things were in the Blue Up Yonder.
He failed. He—too—abruptly knew. The resources of his training abandoned him—left but the residue of naked personality. His tongue circled his lips. He gave the stranger another uncertain glance, a hopeful glance—and suddenly, on the impulse, took out his cigarettes and offered them.
Chris shook his head. "Thanks, Learned."
"Do you mind—"
"Of course not."
Now the journalist and the colonel shakily fumbled with cigarettes and the wavering flame of a match.
Chris had turned. He was looking expectantly toward the narrow door that led to the radar room and from it, presently, Sopho came. "Thought I'd run a counter through the tunnel," he began. "Check things." He saw Chris. "Hello! Didn't realize I hadn't met the ship's full complement."
The colonel and the reporter watched.
"My name is Chris, doctor."
"Can't place you. The Chicago Group, perhaps. I didn't meet them all."
"No."
"Army, then? White House? OSS? I'm a physicist. Sopho's the name."
"This man," said Learned, in a hoarse, uneven voice his ears had never heard before, "comes from—another place." He told the physicist.
Dr. Sopho's right thumb and forefinger touched his small beard. Across the back of his hand—tanned to leather by his long residence in the desert—skin pimpled and the reddish hairs rose. The tiny phenomenon passed—passed like the eddy of air that dimples still water and disappears. His great head with the thin nose and the straight, exaggerate brow bent forward attentively. He was searching the stranger for obvious signs of madness. It became apparent that he found none.
"Incredible," he murmured.
"You do not believe me?"
The scientist shook his head. "My dear fellow—I do not even believeinyou. So—naturally—" He turned with abruptness to the colonel. "How did he get aboard? His papers?" He now saw the colonel's frantic, imploring eyes. "Great God, man—you don't accept—?"
"It's the truth," Colonel Calm responded.
Sopho looked quickly at Learned—who glanced away.
The scientist seemed, for the first time, alarmed. Not alarmed at the statement made by the man but at its effect upon two persons whom he had considered impervious to wild suggestion. Obviously, it was up to him to break the lunatic's spell. Some fabulous stowaway—and the journalist and the soldier—drawn overfine by the magnitude of this mission—had become prey to imagination.
One humors the mad—at any rate, to begin with. "I see," said Sopho.
He now faced the stranger—who stood in their midst. "Tell me. Just why did you decide to accompany this particular raid?"
Chris, still smiling, repeated his words about his promise—and after that, the promise.
"End of the world, eh?" Sopho chuckled. "You sure?"
"Your world—perhaps."
"You want us to give it up? The mission?" Sopho pointed at the bomb bay. "That?"
Chris looked steadily at him. "If I remember rightly, doctor, you began the preparation of—that—" he, also, pointed—"not to use against men, but to have on hand if your other enemy employed such instruments. He did not. He lies defeated."
Sopho nodded. "Right. Now we are using it to shorten the war. Save lives."
"Savelives?"
"By shortening the war, man! Simple arithmetic—!"
"What about—the next war? And the next? The wars beyond that?"
"This weapon should—and in my opinion will—put an end to war."