Jailbird (19 page)

There was a silence among us, although the uproar of
the metropolis went on and on. Neither Clewes nor I had mentioned Sarah’s maiden name.

I finally managed to ask her, woozy with shapeless misgivings, “How do you know that name?”

She became foxy and coquettish. “You think I don’t know you were two-timing me with her the whole time?” she said.

Given that much information, I no longer needed to guess who she was. I had slept with her during my senior year at Harvard, while still squiring the virginal Sarah Wyatt to parties and concerts and athletic events.

She was one of the four women I had ever loved. She was the first woman with whom I had had anything like a mature sexual experience.

She was the remains of Mary Kathleen O’Looney!

“I
WAS HIS CIRCULATION MANAGER
,” said Mary Kathleen to Leland Clewes very loudly. “Wasn’t I a good circulation manager, Walter?”

“Yes—you certainly were,” I said. That was how we met: She presented herself at the tiny office of
The Bay State Progressive
in Cambridge at the start of my senior year, saying that she would do absolutely anything I told her to do, as long as it would improve the condition of the working class. I made her circulation manager, put her in charge of handing out the paper at factory gates and along breadlines and so on. She had been a scrawny little thing back then, but tough and cheerful and highly visible because of her bright red hair. She was such a hater of capitalism, because her mother was one of the women who died of radium poisoning after working for the Wyatt Clock Company. Her father had gone blind after drinking wood alcohol while a night watchman in a shoepolish factory.

Now what was left of Mary Kathleen bowed her head, responded modestly to my having agreed that she had been a good circulation manager, and presented her pate to Leland Clewes and me. She had a bald spot about the size of a
silver dollar. The tonsure that fringed it was sparse and white.

Leland Clewes would tell me later that he almost fainted. He had never seen a woman’s bald spot before.

It was too much for him. He closed his blue eyes and he turned away. When he manfully faced us again, he avoided looking directly at Mary Kathleen—-just as the mythological Perseus had avoided looking at the Gorgon’s head.

“We must get together soon,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“You’ll be hearing from me soon,” he said.

“I hope so,” I said.

“Must rush,” he said.

“I understand,” I said.

“Take care,” he said.

“I will,” I said.

He was gone.

Mary Kathleen’s shopping bags were still banked around my legs. I was as immobilized and eye-catching as Saint Joan of Arc at the stake. Mary Kathleen still grasped my wrist, and she would not lower her voice.

“Now that I’ve found you, Walter,” she cried, “I’ll never let you go again!”

Nowhere in the world was this sort of theater being done anymore. For what it may be worth to modern impresarios: I can testify from personal experience that great crowds can still be gathered by melodrama, provided that the female in the piece speaks loudly and clearly.

“You used to tell me all the time how much you loved me, Walter,” she cried. “But then you went away, and I never heard from you again. Were you just lying to me?”

I may have made some responsive sound. “Bluh,” perhaps, or “fluh.”

“Look at me in the eye, Walter,” she said.

Sociologically, of course, this melodrama was as gripping as
Uncle Tom’s Cabin
before the Civil War. Mary Kathleen O’Looney wasn’t the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to no imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentant murderers ten years old, and dope fiends and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time.

Good-hearted people were meanwhile as sick about all these tragic by-products of the economy as they would have been about human slavery a little more than a hundred years before. Mary Kathleen and I were a miracle that our audience must have prayed for again and again: the rescue of at least one shopping-bag lady by a man who knew her well.

Some people were crying. I myself was about to cry.

“Hug her,” said a woman in the crowd.

I did so.

I found myself embracing a bundle of dry twigs that
was wrapped in rags. That was when I myself began to cry. I was crying for the first time since I had found my wife dead in bed one morning—in my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

M
Y NOSE, THANK
G
OD
, had conked out by then. Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn’t so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom. Thus is it possible to eat Limburger cheese—or to hug the stinking wreckage of an old sweetheart at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.

It felt for a moment as though Mary Kathleen had died in my arms. To be perfectly frank, that would have been all right with me. Where, after all, could I take her from there? What could be better than her receiving a hug from a man who had known her when she was young and beautiful, and then going to heaven right away?

It would have been wonderful. Then again, I would never have become executive vice-president of the Down Home Records Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. I might at this very moment be sleeping off a wine binge in the Bowery, while a juvenile monster soaked me in gasoline and touched me off with his Cricket lighter.

Mary Kathleen now spoke very softly. “God must have sent you,” she said.

“There, there,” I said. I went on hugging her.

“There’s nobody I can trust anymore,” she said.

“Now, now,” I said.

“Everybody’s after me,” she said. “They want to cut off my hands.”

“There, there,” I said.

“I thought you were dead,” she said.

“No, no,” I said.

“I thought everybody was dead but me,” she said.

“There, there,” I said.

“I still believe in the revolution, Walter,” she said.

“I’m glad,” I said.

“Everybody else lost heart,” she said. “I never lost heart.”

“Good for you,” I said.

“I’ve been working for the revolution every day,” she said.

“I’m sure,” I said.

“You’d be surprised,” she said.

“Get her a hot bath,” said somebody in the crowd.

“Get some food in her,” said somebody else.

“The revolution is coming, Walter—sooner than you know,” said Mary Kathleen.

“I have a hotel room where you can rest awhile,” I said. “I have a little money. Not much, but some.”

“Money,” she said, and she laughed. Her scornful
laughter about money had not changed. It was exactly as it had been forty years before.

“Shall we go?” I said. “My room isn’t far from here.”

“I know a better place,” she said.

“Get her some One-a-Day vitamins,” said somebody in the crowd.

“Follow me, Walter,” said Mary Kathleen. She was growing strong again. It was Mary Kathleen who now separated herself from me, and not the other way around. She became raucous again. I picked up three of her bags, and she picked up the other three. Our ultimate destination, it would turn out, was the very top of the Chrysler Building, the quiet showroom of The American Harp Company up there. But first we had to get the crowd to part for us, and she began to call people in our way “capitalist fats” and “bloated plutocrats” and “bloodsuckers” and all that again.

Her means of locomotion in her gargantuan basketball shoes was this: She barely lifted the shoes from the ground, shoving one forward and then the other, like cross-country skis, while her upper body and shopping bags swiveled wildly from side to side. But that oscillating old woman could go like the wind! I panted to keep up with her, once we got clear of the crowd. We were surely the cynosure of all eyes. Nobody had ever seen a shopping-bag lady with an assistant before.

When we got to Grand Central Station, Mary Kathleen said that we had to make sure we weren’t being followed. She led me up and down escalators, ramps, and stairways,
looking over her shoulders for pursuers all the time. We scampered through the Oyster Bar three times. She brought us at last to an iron door at the end of a dimly lit corridor. We surely were all alone. Our hearts were beating hard.

When we had recovered our breaths, she said to me, “I am going to show you something you mustn’t tell anybody about.”

“I promise,” I said.

“This is our secret,” she said.

“Yes,” I said.

I had assumed that we were as deep in the station as anyone could go. How wrong I was! Mary Kathleen opened the iron door on an iron staircase going down, down, down. There was a secret world as vast as Carlsbad Caverns below. It was used for nothing anymore. It might have been a sanctuary for dinosaurs. It had in fact been a repair shop for another family of extinct monsters—locomotives driven by steam.

Down the steps we went.

My God—what majestic machinery there must have been down there at one time! What admirable craftsmen must have worked there! In conformance with fire laws, I suppose, there were lightbulbs burning here and there. And there were little dishes of rat poison set around. But there were no other signs that anyone had been down there for years.

“This is my home, Walter,” she said.

“Your what?” I said.

“You wouldn’t want me sleeping outdoors, would you?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“Be glad, then,” she said, “that I have such a nice and private home.”

“I am,” I said.

“You not only talked to me—you hugged me,” she said. “That’s how I knew I could trust you.”

“Um,” I said.

“You’re not after my hands,” she said.

“No,” I said.

“You know there are millions of poor souls out on the street, looking for a toilet somebody will let them use?” she said.

“I suppose that’s true,” I said.

“Look at this,” she said. She led me into a chamber that contained row on row of toilets.

“It’s good to know they’re here,” I said.

“You won’t tell anybody?” she said.

“No,” I said.

“I’m putting my life in your hands, telling you my secrets like this,” she said.

“I’m honored,” I said.

And then out of the catacombs we climbed. She led me through a tunnel under Lexington Avenue, and up a staircase into the lobby of the Chrysler Building. She skied across the floor to a waiting elevator, with me trotting behind. A guard shouted at us, but we got into the elevator before he could stop us. The doors shut in his
angry face as Mary Kathleen punched the button for the topmost floor.

We had the car all to ourselves, and upward we flew. Within a trice the doors slithered open on a place of unearthly beauty and peace within the building’s stainless-steel crown. I had often wondered what was up there. Now I knew. The crown came to a point seventy feet above us. Between us and the point, as I looked upward in awe, there was nothing but a lattice of girders and air, air, air.

“What a glorious waste of space!” I thought. But then I saw that there were tenants after all. Myriads of bright yellow little birds were perched on the girders, or flitting through the prisms of light admitted by the bizarre windows, by the great triangles of glass that pierced the crown.

The vast floor at whose edge we stood was carpeted in grassy green. There was a fountain splashing at its center. There were garden benches and statues everywhere, and here and there a harp.

As I have already said, this was the showroom of The American Harp Company, which had recently become a subsidiary of The RAMJAC Corporation. The company had occupied this space since the building opened in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. All the birds I saw, which were prothonotary warblers, were descended from a single pair released back then.

There was a Victorian gazebo near the elevator, which contained the desks of the salesman and his secretary. A woman was sobbing in there. What a morning it was for tears! What a book this is for tears!

The oldest man I had ever seen came tottering out of the gazebo. He wore a swallowtail coat and striped trousers and spats. He was the sole salesman, and had been since Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was the man who had released from the hot cage of his hands and into this enchanted space the first two prothonotary warblers. He was ninety-two years old! He looked like John D. Rockefeller at the end of his life, or like a mummy. The only moisture left in him, seemingly, was faint dew on the surface of his eyes. He was not entirely defenseless, however. He was president of a pistol club that shot at targets shaped like men on weekends, and he had a loaded Luger the size of a Doberman pinscher in his desk. He had been looking forward to a robbery for quite some time.

“Oh—it’s you,” he said to Mary Kathleen, and she said that, yes, it was.

She was accustomed to coming here almost every day and sitting for several hours. The understanding was that she was to get out of sight with her shopping bags, in case a customer came in. There was a further understanding, which Mary Kathleen had now violated.

“I thought I told you,” he said to her, “that you were never to bring anybody else with you, or even to tell anybody else how nice it was up here.”

Since I was carrying three shopping bags, he concluded that I was another derelict, a shopping-bag man.

“He isn’t a bum,” said Mary Kathleen. “He’s a Harvard man.”

He did not believe this for a minute. “I see,” he said, and he looked me up and down. He himself had never even graduated from grammar school, incidentally. There had been no laws against child labor when he was a boy, and he had gone to work in the Chicago factory of The American Harp Company at the age of ten. “I’ve heard that you can always tell a Harvard man,” he said, “but you can’t tell him much.”