Reinhart in Love (3 page)

So much for the old man, who was free, white, and past fifty. As they neared home, Reinhart's concern was his mother, a person who could be rather formidable if she caught you in the uncalloused places.

“How's Maw?”

“About time,” answered his male progenitor. This was the only theme upon which he was capable of even a minor remonstrance. “She's thought of nothing but you for the past three years. You know you're all she's got.”

“Poor woman,” said Reinhart sarcastically. “What about you?”

“Ah, what am I?” Dad paused a moment to strip the gears. “But a very old geezer.”

They turned left at the Presbyterian church which looked like a fire-house; passed the high school, which looked like a church, and a pencil factory that resembled Christ's College, the alma mater of many old poets, in some textbook illustration; and finally the town hall, looking by God like what it was, the air cigar-blue in the lighted upstairs windows. Reinhart suddenly chose now as the time to wonder what he was doing here at all, at this precise moment in late February 1946, at 9:31
P
.
M
., alongside an inappropriate father, bumping over streets not germane to his idea of his own identity, approaching an irrelevant home. Every atom of the human substance has been renewed in the course of seven years: a hundred of Reinhart's pounds were of another meat than he had carried away, and this change was little beside that of the spirit. In the school yard he saw his grammar-school self in dunsel cap and leather boots waterproofed with neat's-foot oil smelling like a wet hound; he toted an oilcloth bookbag in the depths of which a banana was turning black. From a candy-store doorway slouched Reinhart the adolescent, who suffered from unprovoked hard-ons and blotches of the forehead, and wore a fake press card in the ribbon of his hat. Through the last three blocks, residential, level as a bowling alley, deserted now except for an impatient man roped to a pet doing its business, walked an apparition of College Carlo, hitchhiked home for the weekend, supercilious, penniless, flunking.

They pulled into the driveway on parallel tracks of concrete, divided by a strip of grass Reinhart had once been commissioned to trim weekly. He stared at a vision of the squatting boy in merciless sunshine. Art thou there yet, truepenny? The lad thumbed his nose. Night returned, and Reinhart, fat, twenty-one, a veteran, was Home.

His father was all for slinking around to the back door like a felon, his usual mode of entry, but ceremonious Reinhart demanded the front. On the way around, they saw under the nearest streetlamp the man walking the spaniel, which was the inevitable neurasthenic quaking with emotional ague. In great disgust Reinhart recalled them both: Claude Humbold, a realtor with whom his father was in some kind of cahoots, writing insurance for the houses Humbold peddled, and Popover, the dog.

The latter salivated over Reinhart's combat boots while the former, who wore a red balloon for a face and had painted on it a hairline mustache, shouted in the timbre of a washtub being kicked, though coming so close he clipped Reinhart's gut with an elbow: “Hiya Georgie!”

“I'll be a son of a bitch,” said Reinhart as Humbold managed at the same time both to walk through him and ignore him. But as of yore he went unheard, Humbold's rubber soles sucking the pavement and letting go in a series of deafening belches. This man was his old nightmare, and he should have known that small things like a war, reaching manhood, going halfway around the world, etc., were like taking aspirin for syphilis.

“I must say,” said Dad, “that next to your mother there goes the human being who thinks more of you than anybody.”

“Yeah?” asked Reinhart on the porch steps. “What about you?”

“Ah,” said Dad, “you'll be buried in pauper's field if you got no more assets than me.” He fished beneath his overcoat for a key with which to free the door he locked against wandering brigands—poor cutthroat who would break in and face Maw!

“Wipe your shoes!” commanded a martial, metallic voice as they crossed the threshold. Its source then receded, taking with it his father, into the blackness of the living room—no sense in paying the electric company for needless lights. An overstuffed chair, with pelt of mohair, attacked Reinhart in the thighs while a footstool bit his shins. When a wrought-iron bridge lamp joined the fray he surrendered and ignited his cigarette lighter. No folks, much furniture. On the radio, a photo of his maternal uncle in lodge fez, looking vicious as a Cairo procurer. In the bookshelves above the secretary desk, ninety of the
World's Hundred Best Short Stories;
Volume Seven had not yet been found. Nor had the spot on the rug where the dog had once puked ever quite gone. A real kerosene lamp wired for electricity, and a fake one fitted down to a mock wick which could be elevated, flanked one another on an end table so giddy it quaked when a truck went by, to which as if castanets the windows joined with their clatter. Plastic acorns terminating the shade pulls. One shade showed a stain where it had been rained on in 1939. New shade on the bridge lamp, which had an adjustable transverse member that you could clutch and turn and play tommy gun with at an enemy behind the hassock-fortress.

All the while Reinhart took inventory he was conscious of being stared at by a photographic image within a golden frame on the drum table behind him. If he did not face it down now, he might have to in a nightmare, where things like that always begin with the upper hand. It was the likeness of a perfect idiot of twelve, wearing hair grooved in the middle of the scalp and a degenerate grin that claimed the entire terrain south of the part. He preferred to think his visions of himself from the car were sounder than the camera's, but unfortunately could not, being bluffed by any kind of science. Choosing the only mode of rebuke the little swine would understand, he counseled the picture: “Siss on you, pister; you ain't so muckin fuch,” and moved into the hall, at the end of which was a glow signifying the kitchen and perhaps life.

Dad stood behind the refrigerator, arranging for the woman known as Maw to upstage him. She held a hot iron as if she might force Reinhart to accept it in handshake, then dangled it from her pinky, for she was terribly strong. Yet Reinhart was of course larger, and perhaps threatened by that fact as he filled the doorframe, she cocked her pugnacious jaw and snarled: “Here comes six more shirts per week.”

“Welcome home,” said Reinhart.

Maw answered: “You should be mighty grateful you got such a lovely home to come back to.”

He said he was, and eventually she thawed to the degree that she catalogued for him a number of catastrophes having as their principals nobody he knew. At last, too, he ascertained that his old room was still occupied by the defense worker, and Supply Sergeant Maw issued him 2 blankets and 1 pillow. He was assigned a billet on the living-room couch, to which he repaired when permitted and where, his head on one doily, socks on another, and being goosed by a loose spring, he immediately fell asleep and dreamed of love and criminality in an exotic
mise en scène
.

For the next two weeks Reinhart made wan attempts to tell his European reminiscences to the folks, doing this from a sense of obligation, since as yet nobody had mentioned a word about board payment, and while he didn't really have a room and ate only moderately (for him) of his mother's insipid cuisine, which agreed with his intent to diet, he was certain he owed them something, though he wasn't certain what.

To these accounts, from which of course all sex and violence were stricken, leaving almost nothing, Dad's reaction, or lack of it, was polite boredom and Maw's a rude interest. Dad, with his head—now snow-capped!—in the
Intelligencer's
sports pages, was privy to the personal lives of ballplayers, knew what songs they sang in the showers, when their children had scarlatina, where their wives were birthmarked. Nevertheless he said the right things at the right places: “Well, I'll be!” “Is that right!” And even repeated the dénouement—“So Marsala gave his candy ration to the German kid”—while all the while he was actually down in Florida with Chuck Rafferty, who had reported to spring training with hemorrhoids.

On the other hand, Maw resisted an anecdote from start to finish, no device being too extreme: stew onto tablecloth, coffee into Dad's lap, counterstories about neighbor lads introduced just before Reinhart's punchline, the boiling kettle with its whistle; once she caught a fork in the cloth and pulled the whole table setting to disaster, to kill a pretty meager thing about a taxi-tour of London. Yet, having taken the field, with Reinhart in total rout, she might dramatize Churchill's In Victory, Magnanimity: dishes done, the scene removed to the living room, glaring at him in a kind of bellicose affinity (he being both repugnant and hers) she would demand: “Go on, what about Wallis Warfield Simpson's house? I got to drag your stories out word for word. My, I expected when you came back from the war we could never stop you talking. Looks like the other way around!” And here, one of her rare laughs, the sound of steel wool against rust, showing strong sarcastic canines.

That she was in many ways an impossible woman went without saying and actually suited Reinhart's sense of himself as a highborn orphan. On the other hand, he did respect her grievance. As a girl she had showed a gift for sketching, which Philistine time and circumstance had gone on to deny her as a vocation. Art is short and life is long. No girl of her class and place became an artist. It was probable that she had yearned to be a man, and the evidence of her failure was Reinhart. Thus he, Exhibit A, could hardly condemn her, and concentrated instead on defending himself. From time to time she still drew fine-penciled heads of old-fashioned ladies with Gibson coiffures. He occasionally came across one in the margin of a woman's magazine—these first days he spent much time sunk in apathy and overstuffed chairs, reading whatever he could reach without getting up—a gracious, shaded, high-haired head of circa 1910 hovered wraithlike above the fatuous pink housewife of a 1946 ad making an instant roast beef that hubby would never distinguish from the authentic.

The olden time before Reinhart was born—Reinhart too was nostalgic for it when one day he realized that all Maw's sketches were self-portraits. For a time he backslid to an earlier conviction which six months' therapy was supposed to have obliterated: namely, that his purpose on earth was to rectify life's dirty deals. Damn, damn, damn, his head reeled and his heart overpumped, and he lost his place in “Frost on the Hyacinths,” A Novelette Complete in This Issue, by Persephone Claxon, about a young woman named Jennifer married to a genial accountant who soon after the nuptials turns bilious, cynical, and cryptic owing to (concealed from Jennifer) the reap pearance of an old flame with whom he thought it had been finis when she fled to the Virgin Islands the year before and cabled one word: “Adios.” When Jennifer finds….

It stood to reason, if not to the nervous system, that the genuine injustices could be amended only by discovering how to outwit clock and calendar. Reinhart wondered why Einstein, up at Princeton, did not put away spatial time and take up mortal—the time that was numbered for him, too, poor old Albert: minute by minute, the forward gears working famously but the reverse
kaputt
. A movie film run backwards, the diver undiving, the blasted mountainside imploding, were mere pathetic images of light: the diver may already be dead, and the mountainside is proven so.

At any rate, from his regrets Reinhart derived nothing but an urge to escape, by any means less final than the Dutch act—“If life and death are just the same, why don't you commit suicide?” “Because they are just the same,” said his favorite philosopher, whose name he didn't know, which was probably why he was his favorite.

Civilian life had more terrors than even he, who seldom knew a sanguine anticipation, dreamed of. Add to this the distinct impression he had that in America it wasn't serious, either—because all tragedies here seemed to be specific rather than generic; mad little private hopelessnesses—and you had his dilemma. Which need not be permanent, however, because he would go back to college in June, when the next term started, in a year or so get a crash-program BA majoring in Vagueness, be instantly hired for the young-executive training by Whirlpool Inc., the great detergents empire of southern Ohio, and issued a wife, sedan, and six-room cottage from their stockroom and whatever the quota in kids. Living to a smooth old age, and a clean one owing to the employes' discount on soap, in time retiring to a dotage of home-workshop puttering and a bland diet for his ulcers, he would finally and unobtrusively turn up his toes, leaving behind the means for his delinquents to accept the obligations of maturity and in their time follow suit.

Who did he think
he
was? as Maw always asked.

A fat man, for one. He hadn't yet got around to using his weights, which he couldn't locate; he suspected they had been sold during the iron shortage.

After a time of this turbulence within and utter quiet without—Reinhart yet always had a feeling that something would turn up, from nowhere would come money or women or adventure and even an old friend, that is, an
opportunity;
Christ, it was the richest and most powerful country in the world, and you every day read about vagrants picked off park benches and made movie stars and John T. Nobody whose name was pulled from a hopper to win radio lotteries worth thousands—after a time during which the remarkable failed to happen, Reinhart issued forth on foot, though Dad offered the car, to seek out people. For several weeks he had been with Maw & Dad but hadn't seen a
person
since he returned.

He was at some disadvantage, having had in high school five years before three real friends and one girl, all of whom by now were as altered as he or had vanished. A pudgy little woman with bird's-nest hair, trailed along Market Street by two slum urchins, turned out to be Bettysue English, once so merry and reckless. Mortimer Bother, though built like a water buffalo, had been tubercularly disqualified from the draft and did well at the bank, working up from third teller's cage to first from the door. When he cashed Reinhart's mustering-out check he coughed into a blue handkerchief, said “Hi fella,” and quickly affixed the little sign reading:
GO TO
NEXT
WINDOW
.