A Confederacy of Dunces (47 page)

I always knew I'd have to go back to her someday. She'll probably have to give up San Juan, though. You can't keep Susan and Sandra alive for peanuts."

"Oh, shut up."

"You're telling me to shut up?" Mrs. Levy bounced up and down, up and down. "I'm supposed to watch your smashup in silence? I have to make plans for myself and my daughters. I mean, life goes on, Gus. I can't end up on skid row with you.

We can only be grateful that your father has left us. If he had lived to see Levy Pants lost because of some practical joke, you'd really pay. Believe me. Leon Levy would have you run out of the country. That man had courage, determination. And whatever happens, the Leon Levy Foundation goes through.

Even if Mother and I have to do without, I'm making those awards. I'm going to honor and reward people who have the kind of courage and bravery that I saw in your father. I won't let you drag his name down with you on your journey to skid row. After Abelman's finished, you'll be lucky to get hired as a water boy on one of those teams you love so much. Boy, will you have to work then, running around with a bucket and a sponge like a bum. But don't feel sorry for yourself. You had it coming." Now Mr. Levy knew that his wife's strange logic made it necessary for him to be ruined. She wanted to see Abelman victorious; she would see in the victory some peculiar justification. Since his wife had read the letter from Abelman, her mind must have been working over the matter from every angle. Every minute that she was pedaling the exercycle or bouncing on the board, her system of logic was probably telling her more and more convincingly that Abelman must win the suit. It would be not only Abelman's victory, but hers, also. Every conversational and epistolary road-sign and guidepost that she had held up before the girls pointed to their father's final, terrible failure. Mrs. Levy couldn't afford to be disproved. She needed the $500 thousand libel suit. She wasn't even interested in his speaking with Reilly. The Abelman case had passed from a purely material and physical plane to an ideological and spiritual one where universal and cosmic forces decreed that Gus Levy must lose, that a childless and desolate Gus Levy must wander endlessly with bucket and sponge.

"Well, I'm going after Reilly," Mr. Levy said finally.

"Such determination. I can hardly believe it. Don't worry, you won't be able to pin anything on the young idealist. He's too clever. He'll play another joke on you. Just watch. Another wild-goose chase. Back to Mandeville. This time they'll keep you there, a middle-aged man driving a little toy of a collegian's sports car."

"I'm going right to his house."

Mrs. Levy folded her Foundation notes and turned off her board, saying, "Well, if you're going to town, take me with you. I'm worried about Miss Trixie since Gonzalez reported that she bit that gangster's hand. I must see her. Her old hostility toward Levy Pants is out in the open again."

"Do you still want to play around with that senile bag? Haven't you tormented her enough already?"

"Even a little good deed you don t want me to do. Your type isn't even in the psychology books. You should at least go to Lenny's doctor for his sake. Once your case was in the psychiatric journals, they'd be inviting him to Vienna to speak.

You'd make him a famous man just like that crippled girl or whoever it was put Freud on the map."

While Mrs. Levy was blinding herself with layers of aquamarine eyeshadow in preparation for her errand of mercy, he got the sports car out of the monumental three-car garage, built like a substantial rustic carriage house, and sat looking over the calm, rippling bay. Little darts of heartburn pricked about in his chest. Reilly had to make some kind of confession. Abelman's shysters could wipe him out; he couldn't give his wife the satisfaction of seeing that happen. If Reilly would confess to writing the letter, if somehow he could come out of this all right, he would change. He would vow to become a new person. He might even give the company a little supervision. It was only sensible and practical to supervise that place. A neglected Levy Pants was like a neglected child: it could turn out to be a delinquent, something that created all sorts of problems that a little nurture, a little care and feeding could prevent. The more you stayed away from Levy Pants, the more it plagued you. Levy Pants was like a congenital defect, an inherited curse.

"Everyone I know has a fine big sedan," Mrs. Levy said as she got into the little car. "Not you. No. You have to own a kid's car that costs more than a Cadillac and blows my hair all around."

To prove her point, a lacquered strand flew stiffly out in the breeze as they roared out onto the coast highway. Both were silent during the journey through the marshes. Mr. Levy nervously considered his future. Mrs. Levy contentedly considered hers, her aquamarine lashes flapping calmly in the wind. At last they roared into the city, Mr. Levy's speed increasing as he felt himself getting closer to the Reilly kook.

Hanging around with that crowd in the Quarter. Goodness only knew what Reilly's personal life was like. One crazy incident after another, insanity upon insanity.

"I think I've finally analyzed your problem," Mrs. Levy said when they slowed down in the city traffic. "This wild driving was the clue. A light has dawned. Now I know why you've drifted, why you don't have any ambition, why you've thrown a business down the drain." Mrs. Levy paused for effect. "You have the death wish."

"For the last time today, shut up."

"Fighting, hostility, resentment," Mrs. Levy said happily. "It will all end very badly, Gus."

Because it was Saturday, Levy Pants had ceased its assaults upon the concept of free enterprise for the weekend. The Levys drove past the factory, which, open or closed, looked equally moribund from the street. Weak smoke of the type produced by burning leaves rose from one of the antennae of smokestacks. Mr. Levy pondered the smoke. Some worker must have left one of the cutting tables sticking in a furnace on Friday evening. Someone might even be in there burning leaves. Stranger things had happened. Mrs. Levy herself, during a ceramics phase, had once commandeered one of the furnaces for a kiln.

When they had passed the factory and Mrs. Levy had gazed at it and said, "Sad, sad," they turned along the river and stopped before a dazed-looking wooden apartment building across from the Desire Street wharf. A trail of scraps beckoned the passerby to climb the unpainted front steps toward some goal within the building.

"Don't take too long," Mrs. Levy said while she was going through the heaving and lifting process that was necessary to remove one's body from the sports car. She took with her the sampled box of Dutch cookies that had originally been intended for the patient at Mandeville. "I've just about had it with this project. Maybe she'll keep busy with the cookies and I won't have to try to make much conversation." She smiled at her husband. "Good luck with the idealist. Don't let him play another trick on you."

Mr. Levy sped off uptown. At a stoplight he looked at Reilly's address in the morning newspaper folded and stored in the well between the bucket seats. He followed the river on Tchoupitoulas and turned at Constantinople, bouncing along in Constantinople's potholes until he found the miniature house.

Could the huge kook live in such a dollhouse? How did he get in and out of the front door?

Mr. Levy climbed the steps and read the "Peace at Any Price"

sign tacked to one of the porch posts and the "Peace to Men of Good Will" sign tacked to the front of the house. This was the place all right. Inside a telephone was ringing.

"They not home!" a woman screamed from behind a shutter next door. "They telephone's been ringing all morning."

The front shutters of the adjoining house opened and a harried-looking woman came out on the porch and rested her red elbows on her porch rail.

"Do you know where Mr. Reilly is?" Mr. Levy asked her.

"All I know is he s all over this morning's paper. Where he oughta be is in a asylum. My nerves is shot to hell. When I moved next door to them people, I was signing my death warrant."

"Does he live here alone? A woman answered the phone once when I called."

"That musta been his momma. Her nerves is shot, too. She musta went to get him out the hospital or wherever they got him."

"Do you know Mr. Reilly well?"

"Ever since he was a kid. His momma was sure proud of him.

All the sisters at school loved him he was so precious. Look how he ended up, laying in a gutter. Well, they better start thinking about moving off my block. I can't take it no more.

They'll really be arguing now."

"Let me ask you something. You know Mr. Reilly well. Do you think he's very irresponsible or maybe even dangerous?"

"What you want with him?" Miss Annie's bleary eyes narrowed. "He's in some other kinda trouble?"

"I'm Gus Levy. He used to work for me."

"Yeah? You don't say. That crazy Ignatius was sure proud of that job he had at that place. I useta hear him telling his momma how he was really making good. Yeah, he made good.

A few weeks and he was fired. Well, if he worked for you, you really know him good."

Had that poor Reilly kook really been proud of Levy Pants?

He had always said that he was. That was one good sign of his insanity.

"Tell me. Hasn't he been in trouble with the police. Doesn't he have some kind of police record?"

"His momma had a policeman coming around her. A regular undercover agent. But not that Ignatius. For one thing his momma likes her little nip. I don't see her drunk much lately, but for a while there she was really going good. One day I look out in the back yard and she had herself all tangled up in a wet sheet hanging off the line. Mister, it's already took ten years off my life living next to them people. Noise! Banjos and trumpets and screaming and hollering and the TV. Them Reillys oughta go move out in the country somewheres on a farm. Every day I gotta take six, seven aspirin." Miss Annie reached inside the neckline of her housedress to find some strap that had slipped from her shoulder. "Lemme tell you something. I gotta be fair. That Ignatius was okay until that big dog of his died. He had this big dog useta bark right under my window. That's when my nerves first started to go. Then the dog dies. Well, I think, now maybe I'll get me some peace and quiet. But no. Ignatius is got the dog laid out in his momma's front parlor with some flowers stuck in its paw. That's when him and his momma first started all that fighting. To tell you the truth, I think that's when she started drinking. So Ignatius goes over to the priest and ax him to come say something over the dog. Ignatius was planning on some kinda funeral. You know? The priest says no, of course, and I think that's when Ignatius left the Church. So big Ignatius puts on his own funeral. A big fat high school boy oughta know better. You see that cross?" Mr. Levy looked hopelessly at the rotting Celtic cross in the front yard. "That where it all happened. He had about two dozen little kids standing around in that yard watching him. And Ignatius had on a big cape like Superman and they was candles burning all over. The whole time his momma was screaming out the front door for him to throw the dog in the garbage can and get in the house. Well, that's when things started going bad around here. Then Ignatius was at college fof about ten years. His momma almost went broke.

She even hadda sell the piana they had. Well, I didn't mind that. You oughta seen this girl he picks up at college. I says to myself, 'Well, good. Maybe that Ignatius is gonna get married and move out.' Was I wrong. All they done is sit in his room. It seem like every night she and him was putting on a regular hootenanny. The things I useta hear through my window! Tut down that skirt.' and 'Get off my bed.' And 'How dare you? I'm a virgin.' It was awful. I went on aspirins twenty-four hours a day. Well, that girl done left. I can't blame her. She musta been funny to hang around with him anyways." Miss Annie reached in the opposite direction for another strap. "Of all the houses in the city, how come I hadda move in here? Tell me that."

Mr. Levy could think of no reason for her having moved to this particular location. But the Ignatius Reilly story had made him depressed, and he wished he were away from Constantinople Street.

"Well," the woman rushed on, eager for the audience to hear her tale of suffering, "this stuff in the paper's the last straw.

Look at the bad publicity the block's got now. If they start anything now, I'm gonna call up the police and get him put under a peace bond. I can't take it no more. My nerves is shot to hell. Even when that Ignatius takes a bath, it sounds like a flood's coming in my own house. I think all my pipes is busted. I'm too old. I had enough with them people." Miss Annie glanced over Mr. Levy's shoulder. "It's been nice talking to you, mister. So long."

She raced back into her house and slammed her shutters. Her sudden disappearance confused Mr. Levy as much as her strange biography of Mr. Reilly had. What a neighborhood.

Levy's Lodge had always been a barrier against knowing people like this. Then Mr. Levy saw the old Plymouth trying to dock at the curb, scraping its hubcaps against its moorings before finally coming to rest. In the rear seat he saw the silhouette of the big kook. A woman with maroon hair climbed down from the driver's seat and called, "Okay, boy, get out that car!"

"Not until you clarify your relationship with that drooling old man," the silhouette answered. "I thought that we had escaped from that degenerate old fascist. Apparently I was wrong. All along you've been carrying on an affair with him behind my back. You probably planted him there in front of D. H.

Holmes. Now that I think of it you probably planted that mongoloid Mancuso there, too, to start this vicious cycle whirling. How unsuspecting, how ingenuous I've been. For weeks now I've been the dupe of a conspiracy. It's all a plot!"

"Get down from that car!"

"You see?" Miss Annie said through her shutters. "They're at it again."

The rear car door swung rustily open and a bursting desert boot stepped down onto the running board. The kook's head was bandaged. He looked tired and pale.