In the Absence of Angels (20 page)

Then he would flee into the haven of some small restaurant, always somehow, the wrong one, where, under the slack gaze of the waiter, he would choose from the menu with an exaggerated sense of the importance of his choice, and eat his dinner slowly, head bent, whetting himself against the knife of his solitude, until home seemed at last the only destination there was, and he would rise and go. Home, exhausted, ready at last for its commonplaces, he would let himself into the dim clogged air of the hall. Nodding over a book, his father would look up to mutter his half-irritated “Where’ve you been?” and to all the sounds and stimuli singing in his head the remark would be like a shutter, closing down between the halves of himself, and he would reply guiltily, almost as if he had been lying,
“Just around”
…or
“Nowhere.”

Tomorrow, delivered once more from the disturbed, uninhabited spaces of the week end, he would sink almost gratefully into the round of his job, that job which was so far from the context of his home that he could never have expected it to be understood at home, had he ever been asked. Along with the hundreds of others spewed out by the colleges the previous summer, into professions that had no room for them, he had found a place in the only employment where there was room, in the vast framework of the city’s welfare department. He had been at it almost a year now, toiling up the steps of tenements in neighborhoods he had never before seen, delivering his blue and yellow tickets to existence to his one hundred and forty families.

In the beginning it had been exciting, almost romantic, to penetrate deeper into the unknown capillaries of the city that he loved, finding, in the midst of the decaying East Side tenements, the rococo hoardings on an old theatre that had been the glory of his father’s day, seeing a date on the crumbling pink façade of the stables on Cherry Street where the peddlers kept their nags, reading the layered history of the city like a palimpsest. But lately it had seemed more and more as if he were immured in the catacombs of a daily round, from which he would never work himself up into the clear.

He thought of the families he would be visiting tomorrow, each of them like a little aperture into the world that really was. There would be the whine of Mrs. Barnes, born, raised, and married, on some form of aid, but with the steamy smell of comfort somehow always in her kitchen.

“Now there’s William,” she would whisper, with her sidelong glance. “Poor boy, he’s a diabetic, you know. He needs special food.” And the boy William would stand there with his over-sharp, delicate Irish face averted, his hunched shoulders straining away from notice. In the next house, Mr. McCue, “brassworker for thirty years,” would once more exhume the badge to which he clung, the bank book showing the $4000 savings which had lasted three and a half years until now, and on his broad brick face there would be the usual look of puzzlement at what could happen to a man who had worked and done what was right and proper.

This was Yorkville, but over on 95th, near the river, the stunted inhabitants had seemed to him at first like a race of anthropophagi whose faces he never would be able to distinguish one from the other. Stumbling once through one of these buildings, in search of a family that was about to be evicted, he had passed through room after room in which the varicolored women, sprawling on daybeds, or huddled around tables in shrieking atonal conversation, had paid no more attention to him than if he had been invisible. Passing on into the dark center of the building, he had found himself in a black windowless room where there was no light but the red sparks flying out from under the frying pan in which a girl with wild Hottentot hair was cooking fish. She had looked at him indifferently, as though she would not have been surprised if he had grown from the floor, and had replied hoarsely to his question: “Family? There ain’ no
families
here.” He had stood there for a moment in the disoriented blackness, feeling himself shrunk to a pinpoint, a clot in time, and it had seemed to him that he had penetrated to the nadir of the world, where personality was at an end.

In the quiet planes of the room behind him, his father’s breathing went on, like a gentle, insistent susurrus from a world that had been. Only that morning, the radio, playing Grofé’s “Grand Canyon Suite,” with its swaying theme of the donkeys, had reminded him, as always, of one of his father’s favorite anecdotes, one that, as a boy, he had never heard without an ache of emulation, of desire for the avenues of action that would one day be his.

“That summer I was eighteen, Mr. Motley sent me out all the way to San Francisco. Some responsibility for a boy, but I’d been working there in New York for him for two years, and he trusted me. Travelling on the Union Pacific, met a man in the dining-car, Colonel Yates, big mine-owner out there. Took a liking to me and invited me to stop off the next day and go down to one of his mines. I thought I shouldn’t stop off to do it, but he said
‘Listen, boy! You want to see the world, or not?’
So the next morning I got off with him, but when he saw me he said ‘God, boy! You can’t go down a mine in those clothes!’ You see, those days, every salesman of any account dressed to look the part, and I had on a three-button cutaway and a top hat.

“ ‘Colonel,’ I said, ‘these are the only clothes I have.’ And it was true, too. He shook his head, but we went on anyhow, and when I saw that canyon we were going down into I wished I’d stayed home in New York. A drop down into nothing for miles, and the only way to go down it was a narrow little trail not wide enough for a man. What they did, they used these little Kentucky single-footers, mincing from side to side, one foot in front of the other. Well, I looked at that donkey, and he looked at me, and I flipped up my coat-tails and got on. Went all the way down that canyon with my top hat on my head, and my coat-tails hanging down behind!”

The picture of his father, middle-sized, dapper, in the raw West of the eighties, brought back momentarily the pride and tenderness which had always been a part of the feeling that he supposed was meant by the term “filial.” As a boy he had never minded that his aging father had never joined in the baseball games like other fathers, or taken him swimming, for in his tales of the trotting-races at Saratoga, the fights in which John L. Sullivan had battered round after round bare-knuckled, the cockfights held secretly in a grimy cul-de-sac in New Orleans, had been the heady sense of an apprenticeship to the masculine world. And blending always with that gamy recall of the sporting world of the nineties had been the undercurrent that was implicit in his father’s knowing allusion, in the slow spreading smile of reminiscence, in the anecdote lopped off at an unsuitable part — an undercurrent that spread beneath his talk, moving provocatively under the lace of words like a musky perfume — the sense of beautiful women.

Outside he could almost feel the subtle pressing of the sooty spring air, snubbing against the pane like an invitation. In his mind he traversed again the grim woodcut streets of his “district” wondering whether Sunday brought easement there, or whether there too, it was like a vacuum sucking the inhabitants into a realization of despair. He thought again of Anna Guryan, whom he had first visited two days before.

The address had been that of an old tenement off Hester Street, most of the occupants of which were already on his list. On the paper-strewn gritty stoop he had met old Mr. Askenasi, evidently on his way to the barber-shop for the pre-Sabbath “shave with hot towels” to which the Jewish men, young and old, clung, throughout the humiliation of being on relief, as to a last shred of independence and manhood, though there might be no cholla for the table, or little tea for the glass.

“Guryan?” The old man had shaken his head. Then he had drawn back, pressing his lips together. “Taht one? You mean she will get on the relief too?” Throwing up his hands, he had exploded in a torrent of Yiddish. Then he had drawn closer. “Listen!” he had whispered in English, patting the other rhythmically on the shoulder for emphasis. “Since she has been here that door has never been closed. All hours of the night, men going up there. It is a shame for the other people in the house. Listen ...” But at the other’s guardedly professional lack of response he had broken off and gone on down the stoop, turning once to shake his head angrily with a glance that was like an accusation.

He had found the door easily enough, on the ground floor to the left, as one entered the dank focus of smells that was the hall. Most of these apartments led directly into the kitchen from the hall, and his first impression as he entered was that the kitchen was far cleaner than most, partly perhaps because the furniture was so sparse and there was no litter of food, or evidence of where it might be stored. He had been prepared for one of the volubly evasive women who were flocking to the protective disguise of the relief rolls, or who were occasionally referred to him by the probation officers on a promise to “go straight,” many of them fat and aging, distinguished from the neighborhood women only by their carefully hammered hair and the clear aseptic finish of their make-up.

He had found her sitting at the table, a small, deceptively young woman, her figure thin and unexuberant under the dark blue dress. To his first surprised glance she had appeared dated somehow, possibly because of the way she wore her hair, close to her head in the casque effect of the flapper period, with its sharp black wings pointed flatly against the white-powdered oval of her face. As she answered his formal questions in the slurred, unclassifiable monotone of her speech, her poised hands folded in her lap, he had been reminded of that Egyptian cat in the Museum, which had come through the erosive sands of the centuries and the trembling hands of archaeologists, to sit finally on its chill pedestal in the echoing gallery, regarding the modern world still with its glance of impenetrable dislike. He had found himself avoiding her unreflecting onyx gaze, which slid over him as if she were making some secret assessment of himself. Ruffled, he made a show of scrawling her answers in his notebook, a technique he hated and almost never used, partly because he had always felt too keenly the humiliation of those who were being probed, and partly because he had found soon enough that the intonations of misery were not easily forgotten.

She had just been discharged from the hospital, she said, and had told them she had no means of support. They had told her to go to the relief. The janitor of the building was a friend of hers and had let her have the apartment free until the end of the month, since the rent collector had already made his rounds. The furniture? The janitor had lent her an old bed for the back room, and the kitchen set had been left by the previous occupant.

In this neighborhood, where everything was sold and exchanged down to the very nail-parings of existence, where old men sat in front of stalls formed by their knees and the sidewalk, haggling over used shoestrings, a few screws and bent nails, even a single boot, he had known this could not be true. Even so, the kitchen table stood between them, irrefutably new, its white baked enamel surface shining like a statement.

Raising his head to confront her with this, he had found that he could not say the bald words, and across the table he had seen a thin film of triumph slide over the opaque slits of her eyes. With a gesture of finality she had risen for the first time and pulled the chain on the light bulb that hung over them. Behind her the two blotches of windows sprang forward onto his sight like two frames holding forth the dark. On one uncurtained sill there was a bottle. Reaching for it, she drew a shot-glass from the table drawer, and poured.

“Anise. You have some.”

He had refused, out of a conflict of reasons that were obscure to him, the least of which was that the rules of his job would have forbidden it. Gathering up his pencil and notebook, he retreated to the door, explaining hurriedly that he would let her know the decision of the office.

She had opened the door for him, clasping it close against her to let him by.

“All right. You come back and let me know. Any time.” A smile had widened her lips, spreading like oil, and just before the door closed, looking down, he had seen, like a revelation, an intimacy, the pink inner orifice of her mouth.

Hurrying into the half-tones of the evening, all the way home in the swaying push of the subway, even now, as he leaned against the pane, he had retained in his mind, like the central core of an undifferentiated whirl of feeling, the image of the glass of anise waiting on the table, light radiating from its icy viscous white as from a prism.

Behind him on the sofa his father still slept, punctuating with his breath the quiet that pressed on the eardrums like a weight. For one warm moment it seemed almost possible to him that, shaking the slumped shoulders, touching the brown crepe hand, he might awaken his father beyond the present minute, into an awareness of him at last; in some long shared conversation, that backward elegiac glance would for once be forced fully, openly, on him, and he might say, “Father …was it so for you? …For what is it I wait?” Instantly the fantasy shrank, and he winced at the picture of the clumsy byplay that would really occur, knowing that between them lay the benumbing sleep of the years, a drowse from which it was not possible to awake.

Outside the window there was sound, motion, involvement, even if only in one of his long aimless hegiras through the streets. He turned slowly and left the room. Down the long hall, the first door open on the right was that of his parents’ bedroom. Entering, he picked up the hairbrush from his father’s chifferobe and began brushing his hair.

Even here, the sense of his father’s youth was present to him, like a minimizing mirror in which he saw himself. On the high chifferobe, neatly arranged, as were all his father’s accouterments, lay the silver toilette set of which the hairbrush, with a handle, in the old style, like a woman’s, was a part. There was a broad clothesbrush, then a narrower hat-brush, and a small stud-box, all with heavy intricately wrought tops of silver repoussé, in the center of each the flat shield with the monogram JHE, and a soap-box, like a huge Easter egg of plain silver, on its top the embossed head of a nymph with twining silver hair. One saw odd pieces of similar sets now, unwanted and forlorn, in the dusty jackdaw windows of Third Avenue junk shops, crowded among the sad statuary and implements of a period that was done but had not quite yet slipped into the cherishable patina of the antique. Holding the brush, he remembered.