Short Stories: Five Decades (58 page)

“On Christmas Eve, for an old man, Eddie.”

“You lost,” Eddie said without heat. “I won. O.K.”

He left and the Custodian settled down in his carpet-seated rocker next the furnace. The Custodian rocked mournfully back and forth and shook his head as he watched Eddie go up the cellar steps out into the gray afternoon.

Eddie shambled aimlessly around the winter-bare school grounds. “Military School! Aaah!” he said to himself. He should be home in New York City, blazing with lights, green and red and white lights, filled with people hurrying happily through the streets with packages done up in colored ribbon, and Santa Clauses ringing their little bells on the street corners for the Salvation Army and the thousand movie houses gaping invitingly along the sidewalks. He should go watch Pop act tonight and go to dinner with him afterwards on Second Avenue, and eat duck and potato pancakes and drink spiced wine and go home and listen to Pop sing German songs at the top of his voice, accompanying himself on the piano loudly, until the neighbors complained to the police.

He sighed. Here he was, stuck at a Military Academy in Connecticut, because he was a bad boy. Ever since his sixth birthday he’d been known as a bad boy. He’d had a party on his sixth birthday and he’d had a fine time, with cake, candy, ice cream and bicycles, until his sister Diana had come into the middle of the room and done a scene from
As You Like It
that her English teacher had coached her in. “All the world’s a stage,” she’d piped in her imitation Boston accent that the English teacher gave her, “and all the men and women in’t merely playahs …” At the end of it everybody shouted “Bravo!” and Pop grabbed her and swung her up and cried on her blonde hair and said over and over again, “Little Bernhardt, my little Bernhardt!”

Eddie had thrown a plate of ice cream at her and it had spattered all over Pop and Diana had cried for two hours and he’d been spanked and sent to bed.

“I hate Connecticut,” he said to a leafless elm, leaning coldly over the dirty snow on the side of the walk.

Since then he had thrown Diana off a porch, tearing ligaments in her arm; he had run away in a rowboat off the coast of New Jersey and had had to be rescued by the Coast Guard at ten o’clock at night; he had played truant from seven different private and public schools; he had been caught coming out of burlesque houses with older friends; he had disobeyed his father on every possible occasion, and had been beaten three times to the month, standing there proud and stubborn, conscious in those moments at least, as Pop stood over him angry and terrible, that, actor or no actor, he was getting some attention, some evidence of paternal love.

He leaned against a tree and closed his eyes. He was in his Pop’s dressing room at the theater and Pop was in his silk bathrobe with pieces of beard stuck here and there over his face and his hair gray with powder. Beautiful women with furs came in, talking and laughing in their womanly musical voices and Pop said, “This is my son, Eddie. He is a little Henry Irving,” and the women cried with delight and took him in their arms, among the scented furs and kissed him, their lips cool from the winter outside on his warm red face. And Pop beamed and patted his behind kindly and said, “Eddie, you do not have to go to Military School any longer and you don’t have to spend Christmas with your aunt in Duluth, either. You are going to spend Christmas in New York alone with me. Go to the box office and get a ticket for tonight’s performance, Row A, center. ‘Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs …’ Yes, Pop, yes, Pop, yes …”

Eddie blinked his eyes and looked around him at the mean wood walls of the Academy. Prison, prison. “I wish you burn,” he said with utter hate to the peeling paint and the dead ivy and the ramshackle bell tower. “Burn!
Burn!
”

Abruptly he became quiet. His eyes narrowed and the cast of thought came over his face beneath the stiff short visor of his military cap. He regarded the dreary buildings intently, his lips moving silently over deep, unmentionable thoughts, the expression on his face a hunter’s expression, marking down prey for the kill far off in the tangled jungle.

If the school burned down he couldn’t sleep in the December woods, could he, they would have to send him home, wouldn’t they, and if he was rescued from the burning building Pop would be so grateful that his son was not dead that … The school would have to burn down completely and they would never send him back and fire burns from the bottom up and the bottom was the cellar and the only person there was the Custodian, sitting lonely there, longing for his Christmas bottle …

With a sharp involuntary sigh, Eddie wheeled swiftly and walked toward the cellar entrance, to seize the moment.

“Lissen,” he said to the Custodian, rocking mournfully back and forth next to the furnace. “Lissen, I feel sorry for yuh.”

“Yeah,” the Custodian said hopelessly. “I can see it.”

“I swear. An old man like you. All alone on Christmas Eve. Nothin’ to comfort yuh. That’s terrible.”

“Yeah,” the Custodian agreed. “Yeah.”

“Not even a single drink to warm yuh up.”

“Not a drink. On Christmas!” The Custodian rocked bitterly back and forth. “I might as well lay down and die.”

“I got a change of heart,” Eddie said deliberately. “How much does a bottle of applejack cost?”

“Well,” the Custodian said craftily, “there’s applejack and applejack.”

“The cheapest applejack,” Eddie said sternly. “Who do you think I am?”

“You can get a first-rate bottle of applejack for ninety-five cents, Eddie,” the Custodian said in haste. “I would take that kindly. That’s a thoughtful deed for an old man in the holiday season.”

Eddie slowly assorted ninety-five cents out in his pocket. “Understand,” he said, “this ain’t a usual thing.”

“Of course not, Eddie,” the Custodian said quickly. “I wouldn’t expect …”

“I won it honest,” Eddie insisted.

“Sure, Eddie.”

“But on Christmas …”

“Sure, just on Christmas …” The Custodian was on the edge of his rocker now, leaning forward, his mouth open, his tongue licking at the corners of his lips.

Eddie put out his hand with the coins in it. “Ninety-five cents,” he said. “Take it or leave it.”

The Custodian’s hand trembled as he took the money. “You got a good heart, Eddie,” he said simply. “You don’t look it, but you got a good heart.”

“I would go get it for you myself,” Eddie said, “only I got to write my father a letter.”

“That’s all right, Eddie, my boy, perfectly all right. I’ll take a little walk into town myself.” The Custodian laughed nervously. “The clear air. Pick me up. Thank you, Eddie, you’re one of the best.”

“Well,” Eddie said, starting out. “Merry Christmas.”

“Merry Christmas,” the Custodian said heartily. “Merry Christmas, my boy,
and
a happy New Year.”

And he sang “I saw three ships go sailing by, go sailing by,” as Eddie went up the cellar steps.

Five hours later Eddie walked down Forty-fifth Street, in New York City, without an overcoat, shivering in the cold, but happy. He marched across from the Grand Central Station through the good-natured holiday crowds, reciting gaily to the lights, the neon signs, the bluecoated policemen, “If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die?” He crossed Sixth Avenue, turned into the stage-entrance alley of the theater over which the huge sign read in electric bulbs,
The Merchant of Venice
by William Shakespeare. “And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge?” he shouted thickly at the alley walls, as he opened the stage door and ran upstairs to his father’s dressing room.

The door was open and his father was sitting at his make-up table, applying grease and false hair carefully, close to the mirror. Eddie sidled in softly.

“Pop,” he said, standing at the door. Then again, “Pop.”

“Uh.” His father touched up an eyebrow with a comb, making it bush out.

“Pop,” Eddie said. “It’s me.”

His father soberly put down the grease-stick, the small comb, the false hair, and turned around.

“Eddie,” he said.

“Merry Christmas, Pop,” Eddie said, smiling nervously.

“What’re you doing here, Eddie?” His father looked him straight and seriously in the eye.

“I’m home, Pop,” Eddie said quickly. “I’m home for Christmas.”

“I am paying that money-grabbing Military Academy forty-five dollars extra to keep you there and you tell me you are home for Christmas!” The great voice boomed out with the passion and depth that made audiences of fifteen hundred souls shiver in their seats. “A telephone! I want a telephone! Frederick!” he called for his dresser. “Frederick, by God Almighty, a telephone!”

“But, Pop …” Eddie said.

“I will talk to those miserable toy soldiers, those uniformed school-ma’ams! Frederick, in the name of God!”

“Pop, Pop,” Eddie wailed. “You can’t call them.”

His father stood up to his six-foot-three magnificence in his red-silk dressing gown and looked down on Eddie, one eyebrow high with mockery on the huge domed forehead. “I can’t call them, my son says. Little snot-nose tells me what to do and what not to do.”

“You can’t call, Pop,” Eddie yelled, “because there’s nothing to talk to. See?”

“Oh,” his father said, with searing irony, “the school has disappeared. Poof! and off it goes. The Arabian Nights. In Connecticut.”

“That’s why I’m here, Pop,” Eddie pleaded rapidly. “There ain’t no more school. It burned. It burned right down to the ground. This afternoon. Look, even my overcoat. Look, I don’t have an overcoat.”

His father stood silent, regarding him soberly through the deepset cold gray eyes under the famous gray brows. One of the famous long thick fingers beat slowly, like the pendulum of doom, on the dressing table, as he listened to his son, standing there, chapped by exposure, in his tight uniform, talking fast, shifting from one foot to another.

“See, Pop, it burned down, I swear to God, you can ask anyone, I was lying in my bed writing a letter and the firemen got me, you can ask them, and there wasn’t no place for them to put me and they gave me money for the train and … I’ll stay here with you, Pop, eh, Pop, for Christmas, what do you say, Pop?” Pleading, pleading … His voice broke off under his father’s steady, unrelenting stare. He stood silent, pleading with his face, his eyes, the twist of his mouth, with his cold, chapped hands. His father moved majestically over to him, raised his hand, and slapped him across the face.

Eddie stood there, his face quivering, but no tears. “Pop,” he said, controlling his voice as best he could. “Pop, what’re you hitting me for? It ain’t my fault. The school burned down, Pop.”

“If the school burned down,” his father said in measured tones, “and you were there, it was your fault. Frederick,” he said to his dresser, who was standing in the doorway, “put Eddie on the next train to his aunt in Duluth.” And he turned, immutable as Fate, back to his dressing table and once more carefully started applying false hair to the famous face.

In the train to Duluth an hour later, Eddie sat watching the Hudson River fly past, crying at last.

The House of Pain

“
T
ell her Mr. Bloomer wants to see her,” Philip said, holding his hat, standing straight before the elegant, white-handed hotel clerk.

“It’s a Mr. Bloomer, Miss Gerry,” the hotel clerk said elegantly, looking through Philip’s plain, clean face, far across the rich lobby.

Philip heard the famous voice rise and fall in the receiver. “Who the hell is Mr. Bloomer?” the famous, sweet voice said.

Philip moved his shoulders uncomfortably in his overcoat. His country-boy ears, sticking out from his rough hair, reddened.

“I heard that,” he said. “Tell her my name is Philip Bloomer and I wrote a play called
The House of Pain
.”

“It’s a Mr. Philip Bloomer,” the clerk said languidly, “and he says he wrote a play called
A House of Pain
.”

“Did he come all the way up here to tell me that?” the deep rich voice boomed in the receiver. “Tell him that’s dandy.”

“Let me talk to her, please.” Philip grabbed the receiver from the clerk’s pale hand. “Hello,” he said, his voice shaking in embarrassment. “This is Philip Bloomer.”

“How do you do, Mr. Bloomer?” the voice said with charm.

“The thing is, Miss Gerry, this play I wrote,” Philip tried to find the subject, the object, the predicate before she hung up, “
The House of Pain.
”

“The clerk said
A House of Pain
, Mr. Bloomer.”

“He’s wrong,” Philip said.

“He’s a very stupid man, that clerk,” the voice said. “I’ve told him so many times.”

“I went to Mr. Wilkes’ office,” Philip said desperately, “and they said you still had the script.”

“What script?” Miss Gerry asked.

“
The House of Pain
,” Philip cried, sweating. “When I brought it into Mr. Wilkes’ office I suggested that you play the leading part and they sent it to you. Now, you see, somebody at the Theatre Guild wants to see the script, and you’ve had it for two months already, so I thought you mightn’t mind letting me have it.”