Black Spring (11 page)

Gradually he got acquainted with all the old cronies who hung out in the front of the shop. He showed them how the Crown Prince walked, how he sat down, how he smiled. One day he brought a flute with him and he played the Lorelei on it. Another day he came in with a finger of his pigskin glove sticking out of his fly. Each day he had a new trick up his sleeve. He was gay, witty, amusing. He knew a thousand jokes, some that had never been told before. He was a riot.

And then one day he took me aside and asked me if I could lend him a dime-for carfare. He said he couldn’t pay for the clothes he had ordered but he expected a job soon in a little movie house on Ninth Avenue, playing the piano. And then, before I knew it, he began to weep. We were standing in the dressing room and the curtains were drawn, fortunately. I had to lend him a handkerchief to wipe his eyes. He said he was tired of playing the clown, that he dropped in to our place every day because it was warm there and because we had comfortable seats. He asked me if I couldn’t take him to lunch-he had had nothing but coffee and buns for the last three days.

I took him to a little German restaurant on Third Avenue, a bakery and restaurant combined. The atmosphere of the place broke him down completely. He could talk of nothing but the old days, the old days, the days before the war. He had intended to be a painter, and then the war came. I listened attentively and when he got through I proposed that he come to my home for dinner that evening-perhaps I could put him up with us. He was overwhelmed with gratitude. Sure, he would come-at seven o’clock punkt. Fine!

At the dinner table my wife was amused by his stories. I hadn’t said anything about his being broke. Just that he was a baron-the Baron von Eschenbach, a friend of Charlie Chaplin’s. My wife-one of my first ones-was highly flattered to sit at the same table with a baron. And puritanical bastard that she was, she never so much as blushed when he told a few of his risque stories. She thought they were delightful-so Euro pean. Finally, however, it came time to spill the beans. I tried to break the news gently, but how can you be gentle about a subject like syphilis? I didn’t call it syphilis at first-I said “venereal disease.” Maladie intime, quoi! But just that little word “venereal” sent a shudder through my wife. She looked at the cup he was holding to his lips and then she looked at me imploringly, as though to say-“how could you ask a man like that to sit at the same table with us?” I saw that it was necessary to bring the matter to a head at once. “The baron here is going to stay with us for a while,” I said quietly. “He’s broke and he needs a place to flop.” My word, I never saw a woman’s expression change so quickly. “You!” she said, “you ask me to do that? And what about the baby? You want us all to have syphilis, is that it? It’s not enough that he has it-you want the baby to have it too!”

The baron of course was frightfully embarrassed by this outburst. He wanted to leave at once. But I told him to keep his shirt on. I was used to these scenes. Anyway, he got so wrought up that he began to choke over his coffee. I thumped him on the back until he was blue in the face. The rose fell out of his buttonhole on to the plate. It looked strange there, as though he had coughed it up out of his own blood. It made me feel so goddamned ashamed of my wife that I could have strangled her on the spot. He was still choking and sputtering as I led him to the bathroom. I told him to wash his face in cold water. My wife followed us in and watched in murderous silence as he performed his ablutions. When he had wiped his face she snatched the towel from his hands and, flinging the bathroom window open, flung it out. That made me furious. I told her to get the hell out of the bathroom and mind her own business. But th baron stepped between us and flung himself at my wife supplicatingly. “You’ll see, my good woman, and you, Henry, you won’t have to worry about a thing. I’ll bring all my syringes and ointments and I’ll put them in a little valise-there, under the sink. You mustn’t turn me away, I have nowhere to go. I’m a desperate man. I’m alone in the world. You were so good to me before-why must you be cruel now? Is it my fault that I have the syph? Anybody can get the syph. It’s human. You’ll see, I’ll pay you back a thousand times. I’ll do anything for you. I’ll make the beds, I’ll wash the dishes… I’ll cook for you….” He went on and on like that, never stopping to take a breath for fear that she would say No. And after he had gotten all through with his promises, after he had begged her forgiveness a hundred times, after he had knelt down and tried to kiss her hand which she drew away abruptly, he sat down on the toilet seat, in his cutaway and spats, and he began to sob, to sob like a child. It was ghastly, the sterile, white-enameled bathroom and the splintering light as if a thousand mirrors had been shattered under a magnifying glass, and then this wreck of a baron, in his cutaway and’ spats, his spine filled with mercury, his sobs coming like the short puffs of a locomotive getting under way. I didn’t know what the hell to do. A man sitting on the toilet like that and sobbing-it got under my skin. Later I became inured to it. I got hard-boiled. I feel quite certain now that had it not been for the two hundred and fifty bed patients whom he was obliged to visit twice a day at the hospital in Lyons, Rabelais would never have been so boisterously gay. I’m sure of it.

Anyhow, apropos the sobs… . A little later, when another kid was on the way and no means of getting rid of it, though still hoping, still hoping that something would happen, a miracle perhaps, and her stomach blown up like a ripe watermelon, about the sixth or seventh month, as I say, she used to succumb to fits of melancholy and, lying on the bed with that watermelon staring her in the eye, she would commence to sob fit to break your heart. Maybe I’d be in the other room, stretched out on the couch, with a big, fat book in my hands, and those sobs of hers would make me think of the Baron Carola von Eschenbach, of his gray spats and the cutaway with braided lapels, and the deep red rose in his buttonhole. Her sobs were like music to my ears. Sobbing away for a little sympathy she was, and not a drop of sympathy in the house. It was pathetic. The more hysterical she grew the more deaf I became. It was like listening to the boom and sizzle of surf along the beach on a summer’s night: the buzz of a mosquito can drown out the ocean’s roar. Anyway, after she had worked herself up to a state of collapse, when the neighbors couldn’t stand it any longer and there were knocks on the door, then her aged mother would come crawling out of the bedroom and with tears in her eyes would beg me to go in there and quiet her a bit. “Oh, leave her be,” I’d say, “she’ll get over it.” Whereupon, ceasing her sobs for a moment the wife would spring out of bed, wild, blind with rage, her hair all down and tangled up, her eyes swollen and bleary, and still hiccoughing and sobbing she would commence to pound me with her fists, to lambast me until I became hysterical with laughter. And when she saw me rocking to and fro like a crazy man, when her arms were tired and her fists sore, she would yell like a drunken whore -“Fiend! Demon! “-and then slink off like a weary dog. Afterwards, when I had quieted her down a bit, when I realized that she really needed a kind word or two, I would tumble her on to the bed again and throw a good fuck into her. Blast me if she wasn’t the finest piece of tail imaginable after those scenes of grief and anguish! I never heard a woman moan and gibber like she could. “Do anything to me!” she used to say. “Do what you want!” I could stand her on her head and blow into it, I could back-scuttle her, I could drag her past the parson’s house, as they say, any goddamn thing at all-she was simply delirious with joy. Uterine hysteria, that’s what it was! And I hope God take me, as the good master used to say, if 1 am lying in a single word I say.

(God, mentioned above, being defined by St. Augustine, as follows: “An infinite sphere, the center of which is everywhere, the circumference nowhere.”)

However, always merry and bright! If it was before the war and the thermometer down to zero or below, if it happened to be Thanksgiving Day, or New Year’s or a birthday, or just any old excuse to get together, then off we’d trot, the whole family, to join the other freaks who made up the living family tree. It always seemed astounding to me how jolly they were in our family despite the calamities that were always threatening. Jolly in spite of everything. There was cancer, dropsy, cirrhosis of the liver, insanity, thievery, mendacity, buggery, incest, paralysis, tapeworms, abortions, triplets, idiots, drunkards, nc’er-do-wells, fanatics, sailors, tailors, watchmakers, scarlet f ever, whooping cough, meningitis, running ears, chorea, stutterers, jailbirds, dreamers, storytellers, bartenders-and finally there was Uncle George and Tante Melia. The morgue and the insane asylum. A merry crew and the table loaded with good things-with red cabbage and green spinach, with roast pork and turkey and sauerkraut, with kartoffel-klosze and sour black gravy, with radishes and celery, with stuffed goose and peas and carrots, with beautiful white cauliflower, with apple sauce and figs from Smyrna, with bananas big as a blackjack, with cinnamon cake and Streussel Kiichen, with chocolate layer cake and nuts, all kinds of nuts, walnuts, butternuts, almonds, pecans, hickory nuts, with lager beer and bottled beer, with white wines and red, with champagne, kiimmel, malaga, port, with schnapps, with fiery cheeses, with dull, innocent store cheese, with flat Holland cheeses, with limburger and schmierkase, with homemade wines, elderberry wine, with cider, hard and sweet, with rice pudding and tapioca, with roast chestnuts, mandarins, olives, pickles, with red caviar and black, with smoked sturgeon, with lemon meringue pie, with lady fingers and chocolate eclairs, with macaroons and cream puffs, with black cigars and long thin stogies, with Bull Durham and Long Tom and meerschaums, with corncobs and toothpicks, wooden toothpicks which gave you gum boils the day after, and napkins a yard wide with your initials stitched in the corner, and a blazing coal fire and the windows steaming, everything in the world before your eyes except a finger bowl.

Zero weather and crazy George, with one arm bitten off by a horse, dressed in dead men’s remnants. Zero weather and Tante Melia looking for the birds she left in her hat. Zero, zero, and the tugs snorting below in the harbor, the ice floes bobbing up and down, and long thin streams of smoke curling fore and aft. The wind blowing down at seventy miles an hour; tons and tons of snow all chopped up into tiny flakes and each one carrying a dagger. The icicles hanging like corkscrews outside the window, the wind roaring, the panes rattling. Uncle Henry is singing “Hurrah for the German Fifth!” His vest is open, his suspenders are down, the veins stand out on his temples. Hurrah for the German Fifth!

Up in the loft the creaking table is spread; down below is the warm stable, the horses whinnying in the stalls, whinnying and champing and pawing and stomping, and the fine aromatic smell of manure and horse piss, of hay and oats, of steaming blankets and dry cruds, the smell of malt and old wood, of leather harness and tanbark floats up and rests like incense over our heads.

The table is standing on horses and the horses are standing in warm piss and every now and then they get frisky and whisk their tails and they fart and whinny. The stove is glowing like a ruby, the air is blue with smoke. The bottles are under the table, on the dresser, in the sink. Crazy George is trying to scratch his neck with an empty sleeve. Ned Martini, the ne’er-do-well, is fiddling with the phonograph; his wife Carrie is guzzling it from the tin growler. The brats are downstairs in the stable playing stinkfinger in the dark. In the street, where the shanties begin, the kids are making a sliding pond. It’s blue everywhere, with cold and smoke and snow. Tante Melia is sitting in a corner fingering a rosary. Uncle Ned is repairing a harness. The three grandfathers and the two great-grandfathers are huddled near the stove talking about the FrancoPrussian war. Crazy George is lapping up the dregs. The women are getting closer together, their voices low, their tongues clacking. Everything fits together like a jigsaw puzzle-faces, voices, gestures, bodies. Each one gravitates within his own orbit. The phonograph is working again, the voices get louder and shriller. The phonograph stops suddenly. I oughtn’t to have been there when they blurted it out, but I was there and I heard it. I heard that big Maggie, the one who kept a saloon out in Flushing, well that Maggie had slept with her own brother and that’s why George was crazy. She slept with everybody-except her own husband. And then I heard that she used to beat George with a leather belt, used to beat him until he foamed at the mouth. That’s what brought on the fits. And then Mele sitting there in the corner-she was another case. She was queer even as a child. So was the mother, for that matter. It was too bad that Paul had died. Paul was Mele’s husband. Yes, everything would have been all right if that woman from Hamburg hadn’t shown up and corrupted Paul. What could Mele do against a clever woman like that-against a shrewd strumpet! Something would have to be done about Mele. It was getting dangerous to have her around. Just the other day they caught her sitting on the stove. Fortunately the fire was low. But supposing she took it into her head to set fire to the house-when they were all asleep? It was a pity that she couldn’t hold a job any more. The last place they had found for her was such a nice berth, such a kind woman. Mele was getting lazy. She had had it too easy with Paul.

The air was clear and frosty when we stepped outdoors. The stars were crisp and sparkly and everywhere, lying over the bannisters and steps and windowledges and gratings, was the pure white snow, the driven snow, the white mantle that covers the dirty, sinful earth. Clear and frosty the air, pure, like deep draughts of ammonia, and the skin smooth as chamois. Blue stars, beds and beds of them, drifting with the antelopes. Such a beautiful, deep silent night, as if under the snow there lay hearts of gold, as if this warm German blood was running away in the gutter to stop the mouths of hungry babes, to wash the crime and ugliness of the world away. Deep night and the river choked with ice, the stars dancing, swirling, spinning like tops. Along the broken street we straggled, the whole family. Walking along the pure white crust of the earth, leaving tracks, foot-stains. The old German family sweeping the snow with a Christmas tree. The whole family there, uncles, cousins, brothers, sisters, fathers, grandfathers. The whole family is warm and winey and no one thinks of the other, of the sun that will come in the morning, of the errands to run, of the doctor’s verdict, of all the cruel, ghastly duties that foul the day and make this night holy, this holy night of blue stars and deep drifts, of arnica blossoms and ammonia, of asphodels and carborundum.