Moloch: Or, This Gentile World (32 page)

Corse Payton, Larry Carroll, Pat McCarren: the best sprig of shamrock that was ever worn in Williamsburg’s frock coat. When any of this trinity ambled along the thoroughfare there was life. It was years later that the North Side and the South Side became moth-eaten. But in that day men like old man Martin flourished. Professor Martin, if you please! Professor of bugology. Roach and rodent exterminator for the best hotels in New York. Worked single-handed, with a pair of ferrets and a concoction of powders invented out of his own head. When the Professor came reeling along Driggs Avenue, scattering coins, his red nose gleaming like the setting sun, you knew that God had found an answer to the Asiatic scourge. Professor Martin was a big man in a world that teemed with rodents. He commanded a high price. A bit of a blowhard, too, but a damned good spender. He threw fortunes across the bar. When he spoke of cigars, he said: “Yesterday I bought thirty-five hundred Havana cigars, at two hundred dollars the thousand.” On Saturday nights he referred to his cigars in carload lots, and less carload. You can bet your bottom dollar there were no pikers in the Fourteenth Ward
… except a few Dutchmen. And, as everyone admitted with a smile, the only time that the Germans got ahead of the Irish was on St. Patrick’s Day, when the band led the parade.

Moloch hot-footed it from one corner to another. North First Street was simply a broken actor. Not a sign of life. Not even a “Commit No Nuisance” sign, such as Sauer used to have hanging on his property. He stood peering in the basement of Sauer’s old store. The familiar smell of leather came back to him … queer, big chunks of leather that used to lie curled up on the counter like slumbering Angoras.

He sat down on the curb in front of Miss O’Melio’s house, drinking in every detail of the red brick house opposite. On the top floor were the windows he used to wash every Friday as soon as school was out. What a job! All the kids could see him from the street… the little pet washing Mamma’s windows. From the top-floor windows he was able, once upon a time, to look down on Miss O’Melio’s low roof, where she fed her army of stray cats. All the cats in Williamsburg were on that roof at feeding time. What ever put that bug in her head? Is that what happens to a woman when she can’t get a man?

And underneath the pussy-cat sanitarium was the veterinary’s. Always something going on at Dr. Kinney’s establishment. Somedays the whole street smelled of iodoform. He had a fresh, clear vision of a horse pegged to the ground just inside the low archway; a man was sitting on the animal’s shoulders, holding a big rag to its nose. When he grew up and went to college he realized that the operations he used to witness in Dr. Kinney’s establishment were for purposes of castration. It dawned on him one day as he sat listening to a lecture on Spinoza.... “Now a horse,” he thought, “hasn’t any philosophy to give up. When a horse is gelded his joys and troubles are over. After that his only concern is oats … bushels of oats.”

Well, and what was
his
concern right now? To get to bed, or prepare for eternity? He made a grimace, got up, stretched, and looked up at the roof of Miss O’Melio’s. There wasn’t even the ghost of a cat in evidence. After the Williamsburg Bridge was thrown open, and the Exodus commenced, even the cats were
ashamed to remain in the old neighborhood.

He walked along morosely, taking his own sweet time. He didn’t care a hang about sleep. His illusions, speaking figuratively, were wrapped in a neat paper bundle marked “Fragile.” Thoughts about Blanche hovered in the offing; they stood off, these thoughts, at a respectful distance—in the way that mourners behave when they at last comprehend the tremendous grief of those about to witness the body of their loved ones lowered into the deep hole. Down, down, into the slimy pit, down into eternal darkness and worm-eaten corruption.

It wasn’t that he felt he had made a mess of his life. It was rather that life had made a mess of him.... “He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved.” … The Bible for you! What had baptism to do with it? One might with equal reason ordain: “Only vegetarians admitted.” What about maggots, then? Where would they come off? Or didn’t maggots have souls? What sort of soul would Crazy Willy Maine deliver at the Golden Gate? Perhaps there were compartments in Heaven just as in Continental trains … first, second, and third class. “Garlic eaters stand on the platform!”

He was passing the old Presbyterian Church. When, as a child, he had memorized the Twenty-third Psalm (it was a little worn-out, that psalm!) he was obliged to recite it to the white-haired minister. The minister used an ear trumpet to catch the words
which he knew backwards “He maketh the lame to walk, the
deaf to hear.” (Drunkards and harlots given a thorough cleansing.) The thought of that silly old pfoof cutting up didoes with his fool trumpet made Senor Moloch savage. “Put up that trumpet,” he shouted, hoping that his voice would carry across the valley of death, “and tell me whether the streets are paved with gold.”

Silly stuff, talking that way in the middle of the night, with Williamsburg so silent, Pat McCarren dead and buried, and Larry Carroll’s saloon looking like a morgue. But he had an insane notion to ask that dried-up centenarian with the ear trumpet to tell him what happened to all the dead horses that used to swell up and lie in their own filth in the middle of the street until
the wagon came and took their bloated carcasses away When
a horse swelled up, he stank. (Worse than a dead senator!) It didn’t matter whether he was a racehorse once, or attached to a brewery wagon. They all stank at the finish....

There was Teves, the funeral director. Just passed his place a minute ago. A nice, quiet little place next door to the Chinese laundry. Teves was always open for a game of pinochle, always waiting for new cadavers … for fresh orders, as it were. Sometimes they’d interrupt Teves in the middle of a good hand. It never made Teves sore, though. There were lots of good hands in a pinochle deck. You couldn’t expect him to sit tight and say, like Jesus—”Let the dead bury their dead.” Somebody had to be on hand all the time to shovel them under. Otherwise there’d be a helluva stink.

At the Bridge Plaza, Moloch borrowed a nickel from a newsboy. The boy didn’t ask him for his name and address, nor did Moloch promise to mail him the five cents in penny stamps.

He took a Broadway train, marked “Cypress Hills,” and settled down to chew the cud of reminiscences. It was a long ride, with two changes. The changes were uneventful. At the second change he got into an empty car and had his pick of discarded newspapers. He picked up a
Morning World
.

It was customary for him to take a squint each morning at the advertising section because sometimes the newspapers omitted to print the Great American Telegraph Company’s want ads. Of course, they always got a rebate for these oversights, what good was a rebate if they had no applicants for “messengers from 16 to 21 on a piecework basis, good earnings, some make as high as $25 a week,” etc.?

He took his usual squint. The ad was in all right. That meant a fine crop in the morning. He’d go through them like a dose of salts....
What’s this?

MEN!!!

DO YOU NEED

A FEW THOUSAND DOLLARS?

NOW AND THEN AS THE YEARS ROLL AROUND TOWARD THE HOLIDAY SEASON SOME OF US FEEL AS THOUGH WE’D LIKE TO DO A RIP VAN WINKLE TILL IT’S ALL OVER. THAT’S BECAUSE OF THE SLENDER BANKROLL. TO GIVE AT CHRISTMAS IS GREAT … IF YOU HAVE SOMETHING TO GIVE WITH. IF IT SHOULD HAPPEN THAT YOU NEED A FEW THOUSAND DOLLARS EXTRA THIS YEAR, whether you are

Engineer 
Foreman 
Shipping clerk 
Retired business 
Labor union leaders 
Superintendents, &c.

XYZ, World, Downtown.

“You ask very pertinently (in capital letters) IF I NEED A FEW THOUSAND DOLLARS EXTRA. I not only need it
extra
,
but constantly. In fact, to put it to you plainly—why should we keep anything from one another?—I should say conservatively that a few thousand dollars a year regularly would relieve me of the trying ordeal of writing you for information
about some crack-brained scheme or other for peddling Christmas cards or silk hosiery.

“I have never been a retired businessman, or a labor union leader, nor even a shipping clerk, unfortunately. My previous occupational experience is necessarily denominated by that all-embracing caption ‘&c.’ Undoubtedly you are sufficiently astute to gather from this just whether or not I am suited to the proposition of raking in a few thousand shekels in my spare time.

“If so, please let me know when I may be favored with an interview. There is less than ninety days till Christmas, and I don’t like the idea of being stuck at the last minute (on Christmas Eve) with a measly seven or eight hundred in my wad.

“Yours for opulence in this world or the next.

“Dion Moloch, Esquire

or

Mr. Dion Moloch

or

Just Plain Dion Moloch.”

THE SERENITY THAT MOLOCH HAD BEGUN TO MANIFEST
 of late is proving a source of mystery and irritation to his spouse. This poise, this grip on life, as it were, Blanche unfortunately is capable of attributing only to the appearance of a new star in the firmament of his adulterous brain.

How can we best describe the change he felt coming over him? Certainly it was not a moral improvement. Perhaps the simplest way to express it is that his soul made itself known; he no longer thought of it as an intangible entity inhabiting the body, and deserting it at death. This soul of his suddenly began to take on apostolic dimensions. It required attention, like a plant.

The book he had promised himself to write was completed. The manuscript was now reposing in a drawer of Mr. Twilliger’s rolltop desk. It was to remain there for a period until that individual could go through it at his leisure. Neither Twilliger nor
Moloch, at this time, had any apprehension of the fact that this simple-looking document would serve, not many days hence, as a pretext for the dismissal of the erstwhile employment manager Dion Moloch. However, our narrative does not carry us that far. We have no concern with Dion Moloch as job-hunter and temporary lodger in the Miravski menage.

Significant of Moloch’s changed attitude is his complete silence about the other sex. It is impossible for Blanche to fathom his motives. If she had consulted him in the matter it might not have proven such a mystery. Valeska had been transferred to a post of importance in Havana as soon as the President of the company got wind of the fact that she was not a pure Caucasian. How the President acquired this delicate piece of information is another story; it is enough to hint that Mr. Twilliger’s chief tailor was still proving his ability to earn his salt. As for Marcelle, well—Moloch began to realize that she had never been anything more than a depraved virgin. Her virginity stank, like Father Zossima’s corpse. Concerning Marcello’s virginity Blanche, of course, affected a complete ignorance. Possibly she never thought of the young lady’s virginity in a purely analytical way. As for such an expression—”depraved virginity”—it is doubtful if Blanche could ever regard it as having anything more than a vague literary connotation.

The sullen bitterness of the woman, her morose defiance, the silent, repressed fury whose malignant potency would heretofore have goaded him into desperation—all this he endured now with a calm, pervasive air. He had acquired the habit recently of referring, in a dark way, to his spiritual state, or condition. Blanche regarded this enigmatic nonsense as a religious travesty. She dosed him with vitriolic shafts of ridicule. It was not, as with some husbands who pose before the world as martyrs, a showcase stoicism that Moloch displayed. Indeed, there was nothing of suffering, or of consciously willed forbearance, in his attitude. He was simply possessed by a fantastic exuberance.

In this condition of exaltation he came home one evening to find his supper on the stove. Blanche was not there. He examined the food that had been left for him with an abstract air. Presently
there was a knock at the door, and the woman upstairs poked her head through the door. She came to inform him that Blanche had gone to the theater.

He smiled tenderly at her. Was it so, indeed? He seemed overjoyed at the news. Had Blanche gone to see
Androcles and the Lion
?
No? He mentioned another. Not that either? The woman repeated that she hadn’t the least idea where Blanche had gone. Well, what did it matter? He would go out and purchase a bouquet for her. Perhaps the good woman would sit down a few moments and sip a little port wine with him? It was always well to keep a little port wine about the house for just such occasions as these. He apologized for the absence of anything better than
port wine Ideal weather, wasn’t it? Had she noticed the moon
this evening? Why did people insist on mentioning green cheese when they referred to the moon? It was more like a mauve scimitar, if you asked his opinion. Had she ever thought about the moon?—that is, in dactylic hexameters?