In the Absence of Angels (12 page)

Still holding the sparkling cap awkwardly to her head with one hand, she bent over the desk and picked up one of the cards. Beautifully printed and shaded in India ink, it seemed unmarred, and in truth, working delightedly all that morning over her inscriptions, she had been almost reluctant to settle on one as perfect enough for her vivid purpose. She had copied the first word secretly from the slip on Willa Mae’s desk. Her own name she knew how to do. The last of the legend she had transcribed lovingly from the yellowed card rifled from Professor Davis’ office door. Only, here, with this last, making a single change which for her amounted to an act of creation, almost of intelligence, she had inverted the sequence, so that the little card she held in her hand now, copy of that still more perfect one she had slipped into the box, read:

“Engaged. Professor Walter Wallace Davis. And Letitia Reynolds Whyte, Emeritus.”

O
N SMOKY SPRING
evenings, from the windows of the commuter’s train which rides through the lowlands of Jersey, the little bars, which are seldom more than a block or so from the stations, look like hot coals burning in the thin dusk. Spotted over the countryside, they send up their signal flares, promising the fought-off moment of excitement before you open the door — when it seems as if someone may just this minute have said: “Here is the place —
the place
,” and the flat, sold feeling after the door is open, and you see that this is just about like any such place anywhere.

If, having missed your usual train perhaps, you stop off at the particular hole-in-a-corner which clings to your station — Joe’s Place, or Morelli’s, or the Rainbow Tavern — and you sit there over your glass, after your phone call, waiting for the taxi or the wife with the car — then you may find, after the quick rash of one-shot commuters is over, that you are alone, or almost alone, with perhaps a solitary, leather-jacketed baggageman musing over his beer on his stool down at the other end. And you wonder what keeps a joint like this alive.

Down in the thriving center of town, or settled here and there on its skirting streets, are places, certainly, which cater more specially to a man’s sudden convivial needs, or to his malaises. Out on the highway which is never far from such a town, the roadhouses, each evening, corral the people who want steak, pizza, chicken-in-the-basket. There is a “good place to take the family and still get a drink,” a haunt for the juke-box babies, a daytime spot which draws the lawyers from the courthouse over at the county seat, even a swank little box of a place where certain rich women of the town gather to sip away time from the huge carafe of it that confronts them each day between breakfast and the arrival of the evening train. And because no man or woman lives his life in just one context, sooner or later you may see a person who more properly belongs in a particular one of these places, seated, explicably or not, in another.

But the nondescript place where you are sitting now — could it be said to have a category? To whom or what could it cater, other than to the casual, modestly sated thirsts of its portion of two trainfuls a day of men homeward bound toward the snow shovel or the garden, or toward the less seasonal dictates of the television, the wife, and the children with egg on their chins? And as you rise, relievedly, to the toot of a horn outside, and exchange diffident nods with the owner, you decide that his reserve with you on this and other occasions is the case, not because you are not a regular, but because there are no regulars here. As you go out the door, you wonder idly how he hangs on here at all, and you imagine him of a Sunday, when the trains are all but stilled, totting up his supplier’s bills and his receipts, and worrying about a better spot for trade.

Should you sit on there for a sufficient number of evenings, however, you might learn how wrong you were. For that place is one of a circuit of such places which certain men of the town ride ceaselessly, for reasons which neither appear to be simple nor are.

Take, for instance, the Rainbow Tavern at Northville, and four of its regulars — James De Vries, Dicky English, Jack Burdette, and Henry Lister. If you get to know the habits of these four, who are sure to appear there singly or in varying combinations almost every night of the week — and if you also happen to learn of a minor tragedy which befell one of them — then in the course of time you may also sense, although you may never quite be able to put your finger on it, the nature of that
spécialité de la maison
which is served by the Rainbow Tavern.

James De Vries, who is always called “the judge,” out of deference to the fact that he was once, for several years, a justice of the peace, is the only one of the four who was born in Northville — and perhaps some of the deference is to this fact too. In a town where most of the men make their living elsewhere, he is one of those vanishing few who subsist on their inherited knowledge of the place and the “connections” in it — a little banking, some law, a few real estate transactions, and a little politicking. He can tell you the real legend of the old Viner place, and what went on there in the old days, can search a title in his mind before he has to refer to county records, and lives in the ground-floor apartment of the cupolaed house in which he was born — the house bought by his grandfather, who was a minor henchman of Boss Tweed. Although there has never been any suggestion of financial hanky-panky about his own reputation, there still clings to him, somehow, the equivocal aura of the man who turns a dollar because he is in the know. As he stands at the bar, with his hat brim turned low over his long, swart face, so that if you are near him and fairly tall you cannot glimpse anything but his mouth (for the judge is quite short, and in the manner of many short men, affects hats a little too high in the crown and wide of brim), he keeps a silence weighted faintly with an indication that silence is what he has come here for. If he is addressed, however, on a question of local affairs, he likes to pronounce the answers in a measured, monotonous voice, although he will never keep the conversational ball rolling with the added fillip of a question or an opinion. He is at the bar briefly at five, at seven-thirty, and at ten, so precisely that Denis, the owner, often may answer a time query from one of the regulars: “Almost time for the judge’s last round.” He has two drinks at five, three at seven-thirty, and three at ten, always of straight bourbon with a dash of bitters, and always set before him by Denis as soon as he appears. He has probably not ordered out loud for years, never buys or is bought a drink, and has long since managed to convey, by this routine, that for him, liquor — something to be accomplished, as it were, as is a meal by a man not interested in the table — is never in any case a specific for some disreputable need. It is ironic, therefore, that in a place where casualness and haphazard spontaneity are part of the mores, the very carefulness of the judge’s behavior has made him the oddity he imagines he is not.

For, often, when a man is to be found night after night in the same place, swaying deep in drink, progressing through the stereotype stages of the drunk — from the painful interest in each newcomer, the mumbled revelation to the bartender, down to the final, locked communion with the glass — often a common thing to be heard in the pitying undertones behind him is: “Nice guy though. They say his wife is a bitch.” But in the Rainbow Tavern this is most commonly said of the judge. Not by any of the other three regulars, incidentally, for all the regulars share a solidarity of reticence about their affairs outside, one even stronger than is usual among men, perhaps, and peculiarly noticeable, since it suggests that, with them, home may be really the outside, and “inside” is here. No one knows the origin of this rumor about the judge, or any verification for it, for although the other three know each other in another context, the social life of the town — have visited each other in their homes, and even, by prearrangement, have brought their wives here, after the manner of men who twice a year tolerate ladies’ night at the club — the judge does not know any of these people socially, and never brings his “outside” here. The rumor arises, possibly, because there is no worse place to hide than among the heightened awareness of others who are hiding too.

When a man walks into the Rainbow Tavern, it is often possible to tell his mood, at what stage in the circuit he is, or how full he is or intends to be, from the angle at which he wears his hat. Dicky English’s hat is always tipped toward the back of his head. This is true of him wherever he is making an entrance, whether to the Rainbow or others of its ilk, to a party, to a meeting of one of the dozens of committees on which he is a prime mover, or to the smoker of the morning train. A buzzing, bustling, smart dresser of a man, in whose freshly barbered face, above his bow-tie, the slightly juvenile features are only healthfully obscured by a faintly moony, fortyish fat, Dicky, if not exactly a dream of fair women, is conceivably that of a number of fair typists in the office of which he is manager. Only longer acquaintance with him suggests that in his very trueness to form there is something much too credible. Watching Dicky at first, one is bored or amused by the larger-than-life verisimilitude of the man; later one wonders how, under such a bewildering collection of verisimilitudes, there can be a man at all. Here, one says, as he struts chestily into a conversation, or, his backside waggling in jaunty efficiency, is seen disappearing round the bend in the center of two or three cronies he has marshaled on an errand of pleasure — here is the eternal seller of tickets to raffles, the organizer of poker games and pig roasts; here is the life-of-the-party, in whom, as with so many such, there is just enough of the clown, the simpleton, the butt — so that by his very
bêtises
he breaks down the united ice of others, warming them, even at the cost of ridicule, to that sense of occasion he craves.

To his intimates at the Rainbow, where his invariable greeting is “You’re planning to go, aren’t you?” his invariable adieu “Be sure to be there, now,” Dicky passes for a joiner, a mixer, a man whose compulsion barely escapes buffoonery, but is invaluable to those whose gregariousness is more wistful, less competent. He is sensitive to the needs of the company, too — a Rotarian in Rotary, a father among fathers, a fornicator among fornicators — always so long as he can go on talking. Even his drinking is versatile and somehow controlled; he is good for an elegiac, gossipy chat in a corner or for an all-night spree with the boys, but even in the midst of the spree he never seems
personally
drunk. Only when you see him at home, a paterfamilias outdoing all others, or at a roadhouse, perhaps, this time with the wife, to whom he is playing the uxoriously gallant part of the husband on his girl’s night out, or in the morning smoker, where he persists in reading tidbits of news to men whose issues of the same paper are already slack and crumpled in their hands — only then may you realize that Dicky is more than a man who lives for the occasion — he is a man who cannot live without it, however small. Like those little mechanical toy men with the keys in their split, metal backs, he will scuttle around and around only as long as the original impetus lasts — one begins to imagine, behind the truckling rounds of his talk, a gasping prescience that, when he slackens, he will topple over on his side forever. He is a man who convinces himself into humanity only by the ululating sound of his own voice. And because one can imagine him en route to an experience, or possibly from it, but never actually in the middle of it, one can form conclusions as to Dicky’s reasons for stopping so often at a place like the Rainbow, which is essentially, after all, en route.

As for Jack Burdette and Henry Lister, there is no need to take up separately two who are almost always together. They roomed together at college, went into business and married at about the same time, bought houses on adjoining streets in that fancy modern development in Northville before it was too evident that their wives would never get along, and refugees now, each from the disapproval of two wives, are ever more closely united in the deep beatitudes of the bottle. Jack is a great beef of a man with a fine nose only just beginning to vein, and an extraordinarily sweet smile which, with the cleft in the first of his chins, forms a solitary fleur-de-lys above the others. He is one of those large, deceptively solid men who melt in drink: as the evening advances, the smile grows fixed on a face which recedes behind it like a huge, fair egg, the bottom outline of which has been drawn several times over by a wavering artist.

Seen over his shoulder, in that rich, Rembrandt-colored air of the Rainbow, which is half submerged smell, half expunged light, Henry Lister’s face, mouse-sharp and precise, does not change at all. There is no mystery about Henry unless it is the absence of one. He is a neutral, common denominator of a man, whose only departure from the ordinary is his drinking; even the latter seems an effort to fill up the uncomfortable reservoir of his averageness. He is never out of place in any company he keeps, and never quite of it; he is a man who is always seen over someone else’s shoulder — in this case Jack’s.

Over the years, the association of these two has effected a likeness quite apart from looks — the kind of dual semblance which occurs in a long, uneventful marriage. Jack, who is an investment counselor, often surprises his business acquaintances with quite a bookish allusion, and Henry, who is in the trade department of a publishing house, is considered by his colleagues to be pretty sharp on the market. During the business day, Jack’s eye is remarkably clear and shrewd, notwithstanding the night before, and Henry’s manner may be a little on the vague side, but at closing time in the Rainbow, after the long, matched session of glass for glass, it is Henry who gently leads the faltering Jack away from the bar and drives him home.

One might think that their wives — both childless, both graduates of the stern discipline of the evasive phone call, the mummified supper, the endless evening in the empty living room, of which there happens to be a counterpart not half a block away — one would think that they might pool their grievances in a sort of friendship too. Such is not the case, however. They hate each other — oddly enough each of the women saves her invective not for her rival, but for his wife. It is simpler that way perhaps. Or possibly it is easier to bear the onus of a rival than the presence of someone whose grievances are the same.