Reinhart in Love (6 page)

“You still don't remember me from high school?” Reinhart asked. “I was one of the crowd of Irish peasants in
Spreading the News
. I wore a pair of rubber hip boots and carried a pitchfork. Harry Wales accidentally backed into it and Miss Atkinson had to find a replacement for him within two days of the performance.”

Splendor snapped his jaws together. “And please don't look at that tire as if you think I'm going to profit from it. Joe gives the orders here. After dark he'll shellac this, wind it in paper, and put it with the new ones on the shelf. He'll send an old skin to be recapped, and thus get paid twice.”

“She threw me out of the play,” said Reinhart, getting woozy from the oil fumes. “Well, it wasn't much of a part, anyway.”

Splendor kicked the tire in chagrin. “My truck ran over a mine in Normandy. The explosion ripped the shirt off my back, though strangely enough didn't damage me except for shock. The lieutenant gave me his blouse while he went for the medics. Before he got back some MP's came up and arrested me for impersonating an officer in a combat zone. The lieutenant was killed before he could make a deposition. Hence I was condemned by the court-martial…. But I don't suppose that will touch your heart when you write your report.”

“Nevertheless,” Reinhart went on, “I certainly wanted to be in that play, and to be thrown out in such a humiliating manner! Well, I'll tell you, Bettysue English, whom you have probably forgotten too, who was my girl friend at the time, she wouldn't speak to me for a week—what report?”

“I suppose you're some kind of inspector,” said Splendor. “Once bitten, twice shy. I'm not so naive as to get fooled again.”

“Awwww …” Reinhart threw up his hands. “I've been trying to tell you, but what's the use? You've got some kind of phobia. Too bad there's not another Splendor to cure you of it.” He made as if to leave.

“Wait a minute,” said the Negro. “I think I've got a recollection.

… Hip boots, eh?” he asked, scratching his ear, the great ball jumping in his biceps.

“And pitchfork.”

“Pitchfork, eh?”

“And hip boots.”

“You were lighter then, of course.”

Reinhart said: “Though not for a moment to be compared with your difficulties, I had a trouble or two in the Army and ended up in the hospital where there was little to do but eat. I probably used food as a substitute for something.”

“For what?” Splendor asked, suspicious again. “It's perfectly normal to take one's sustenance.”

“Well…”

“I see you still wear your uniform.”

“Yes,” said Reinhart. “I can explain that. It is a symbol of my loneliness in civilian society, but the fact that I don't keep it neat shows I don't want to go back to the service, either.”

Splendor authoritatively shook his head. “Forget all those theories if you want to be my friend. The truth of life is that things are exactly as they appear, and symbols are the bunk. You are either too lazy to change your clothes or too parsimonious to buy new ones.”

“All right, have it your own way,” said Reinhart, delighted he had roused Splendor's interest and wary of denying him. “But you have to admit a lot of people would disagree.”

“And as for you, you agree because I am a Negro. Which is also why you remember me so well from high school.”

Now Reinhart was at first embarrassed by this unrelenting naturalism, but then he saw that Splendor, who after all implied they were to be friends, was smiling fraternally upon him.

“Then I'll tell you, since you're being so frank,” he said. “Why are you, with all your intelligence, working in a garage? How are the Negroes ever going to get anywhere when a gifted person like you refuses to better himself?” Reinhart had really meant this to be affectionately offensive, since he had been somewhat offended by everything Splendor said, while liking him all the more for it, for he had long understood that a real friend invariably draws blood. But he was surprised when Splendor did not thrust back, but rather gulped, bagged his eyes, and muttered: “Man, you're ruthless.”

“Around crums like Hector and Willard,” Reinhart went on, to confirm Splendor's judgment of him. “And the boss is a crook. Haven't you any pride?”

“Go on,” said Splendor, collapsing on top of the tire, “That's what I need.”

“Why, there's all sorts of opportunities around,” cried Reinhart.

Splendor extended a cautionary finger, on which the color began very dark at the joint with a palm and shaded to fawn at the tip. “With a D.D. I can't qualify for the GI Bill.”

“Balls to that. And stand up when I'm talking to you!” A kind of fiend in Reinhart provoked him to provoke Splendor, but his friend leaped up without cavil and maintained a military attention. “For Christ's sake, man, pride, pride, pride!”

“Which is a Christian sin,” Splendor noted mildly, yet keeping his eyes front and fingers at the seams of his trousers.

“That's typical,” said Reinhart derisively. He realized only now that he should have gone in seriously for officer's training during his Army career, or better yet, posed as a lieutenant; unlike Splendor he would have succeeded, for he had real command presence. Thinking about which he grew so pleased with himself that he lost authority—which should have been a lesson to him.

Splendor relaxed from attention, though not from pride. “I needed that,” he said. “A good bracing now and again puts a man into a relationship with the high powers.”

Reinhart now himself fell upon the tire and gazed dreamily into a nearby pool of grease, which gave a thick, sort of Negroid cast to everything it turgidly reflected. He threw an old bolt into it and waited forever for the viscid splash to subside.

“I don't know,” said Splendor, “when I ever met a man before of whom I could say he, as has been pointed out by some thinker or other in reference to the quality which should be sought in prose, is so characterized by
justice
, a term I infinitely prefer to
reason.”

“That's most kind of you,” Reinhard replied. “But in all fairness, I spent my last six months of service in the booby hatch.”

“Doesn't it figure!” Splendor neighed in exasperation and rippled his body skin like a horse. “What I'm getting around to, though, is—”

Joe stuck his head through the doorway and whined from a mouth distorted with grease and grievance: “Customer! I got to do everything?”

Splendor rolled his eyes at Reinhart. “Joe is really what you call a good guy. He commands with pathos. What's become of the good old-fashioned tyranny that made you feel like a man? Anyhow, I got to go now, without having a chance to tell you you were wrong: I have my plans, which I only needed you to come along and crystallize.”

“Glad to have been of service,” said Reinhart, rising slowly like a mountain coming through a cloud.

Splendor seized his hand and shook it; he was one of the persons who try to damage you thereby, avoiding the palm and catching the fingers down near their ends where they are resourceless. Now fat, contrary to popular supposition, has no deleterious effect on strength; and despite Splendor's conspicuous musculature, Reinhart could have seized any part of him and squeezed it lifeless. For just that reason, he did not, and accepted his brief suffering, even taking some satisfaction in it since it was unnecessary.

“But,” said Splendor, releasing him, “your obligation is only beginning. I want you to have dinner at my house tonight, and shall look for you about eight.
Don't let me down.”

His profound stare, all expanding iris, elicited an assent from Reinhart before the ex-corporal understood what iconoclasm he was in for. Though they did not live on Rebel ground, nobody in Reinhart's suburb ever broke bread with, or talked to a person of the opposite sex who was a, though you might walk down the street with, give a ride to, take a school shower near, and slap on the back someone of your own sex identified as a:
Negro
.

Reinhart muttered expletives as he slunk through the areaway and into a back alley, where a small woolly dog instantly harassed him. He could foresee being spat upon by the drugstore-corner sentinels, perhaps even pursued through back yards of washlines and rotting fences and howling curs, and at last ensnared in some Aunt Jemima's circus-tent bloomers, getting his lumps from a gantlet of furious natives.

The dog at his feet presently locked its teeth in his pants cuff. His mind as usual on troubles to come, Reinhart plucked it off by the scruff of the neck and flung it yelping way up on the roof of the garage, where it sat for a long time barking at a whirling ventilator and at last made water on it—something to see.

When Reinhart informed Maw of his dinner appointment, of course withholding his host's identity, she shut off the wash-machine for her question, prepared to turn it on again to kill his answer, and asked abrasively: “Dinner?” She wore a bandanna headdress, being suspicious of the basement's clemency, although this cellar—Reinhart's first since the home of subterranean friends in Berlin—was paved, painted, calked, drained, weatherstripped, and the little windows were curtained in dotted Swiss. Screens were stacked in the beams. It was all very nice and sound, and brighter than the up stairs living room. They had put in an oil burner just before Pearl Harbor: the ex-coalroom was Maw's laundry and colored in green like a marine cavern.

“Thank you,” Maw went on. “And I been bothering all morning about your dinner, putting on galoshes and tramping to the groshery to get smear cheese and ham sausage and real rye and sweet jerkins for Mr. Big, because he's home from the Army.” She peered malevolently through the washer's porthole, like a shipboard husband spying on his wife and the steward, then opened the airlock and removed a cocoon of damp sheets. Although, once she came out of the laundry, Reinhart was the only obstruction in a basement of wide vistas, she steered towards, and managed to collide with, him; ordering, “Clear the way,
Lump.”
Which, though the English that it sounded like also applied—he was indeed something of a lump—was really a kind of German, meaning “bum.”

“Ah,” said Reinhart, clasping the clammy end-of-sheet she thrust to him, “I got it, Maw. We're using different lingoes! I mean
evening
dinner—”

“You mean ‘sthupper,' ith what
you
mean.” Maw took one clothespin from a series of them, like split cigars, in her mouth and stabbed it over sheet-end and ceiling line. “And it isn't evening, but five-thirty, which is when
we
eat, and if it isn't good enough for you, you can lump it.” Here of course she meant the American colloquialism, but the German also made sense: you can bum it—which in a sense was what he was going to do. An eloquent woman, and rather proud of him in her own way, for although his invisible claque had ears too poor to hear it, he had already detected within her symphony of negation a piccolo note of acquiescence.

And surely enough, when he had secured his end of the sopping percale she disapproved of the job, resituated the clothespin, yet said: “‘Spose you're going to shave? And don't think Dad'll let you use the car, because he's going to Lodge and you can just walk. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, my fine feathered friend.”

FFF, who saw the moment as hardly propitious for revealing the name of his host, let alone the race, wiped his damp hands on his olive-drab behind and steered upstairs, calling back: “Look forward to the gherkins, Maw. See you at lunch.”

“Dinner
, you galoot!” yelled Maw. “And stay out of the living room once.” The washer began its idiot tumble.

Later, circa 5:25
P
.
M
., after an inconvenient afternoon—denied the living room, and wherever else he tried to go Maw found good reason for his exclusion, Reinhart took refuge in the garage, very cold with its concrete floor, and threw an old sheath knife at a knothole on the wall—at about 5:25, without taking off his shirt, he shaved. He defied the house rule of open-bathroom-door-except-when-crapping-or-full-immersion-bathing. A rule observed even by the defense worker, whose name was Emmet Swain, except that Swain seldom used the bath, by reason of seldom being around; he owned an old fat Hudson of the kind usually parked in platoons before blatant roadhouses, and was presumed to be generally out in it when not working on the swing shift. Reinhart had met him but twice in rapid passage: he was small, hairy, and saturnine.

Lathering with the old GI-issue brush, Reinhart heard a sound outside the door not unlike what he supposed obsolete novelists meant by “a scratching in [or on or
at
] the wainscot,” whatever that was. Couldn't be Maw, who would have split the wood. He asked Dad in, thinking it would please him to be recognized unseen.

And surely it did; yet the old fellow showed worry behind his good manners, saying “Thank you, Carlo, I don't want to intrude, but…”

“Be my guest.” Reinhart indicated the toilet seat in its green chenille envelope, and Dad went there and sat.

“Carlo, I was wondering—look here, why don't you use my gear? Seen it?” He rose and in the linen closet found an enormous giftbox of men's toiletries, matched: powder and lotion and scalp-goo, a blade for corns, nailclippers, rotary mower for nose-hair, and a paste to allay underarm offending. “Your aunt's Xmas idea for me. Pearls in front of swine. I wish you would use it. I don't.”

Pointing to his own porcine face in the mirror, Reinhart asked: “Why then cast it in front of me?”

“Good-looking fellow like you?” His father in embarrassment leaned against the toilet tank behind, agitating its heavy lid, and the Epsom-salts and bicarbonate jars thereon made their clinking remarks. “Fellow with all the advantages?”