tantaliz (31 page)

She felt warmth in her stomach, a nervous tightening at the base of her neck, and she took a strand of her straight, black hair and brushed it across her Hps, nibbling the ends thoughtfully. This was the beginning of a new poem, and she knew that well. She did not, as yet, know precisely what the poem would be, what emotional direction it would take, but she felt that somehow it would concern an old man who, achieving resurrection in his grave, broke through the earth with his hands and sat up in amazement among the stiff floral tributes that others had placed above him.

The idea so excited her that she spoke her thoughts aloud: Most of us see death, when we see it at all, through the long, optimistic window of life, she said: but in her poem the convention would be reversed, for her hero would look forward toward life from the grave, through the most terrible and perhaps truest window of all— the foolish, arranged elegance of a funeral wreath.

The Filipino houseboy came up with a cocktail pitcher. When he had filled the glasses, the guests were silent for a time, staring indolently at the park and the tall buildings beyond. Inside the park, between a flowering syringa and the starched laciness of a ginkgo tree, was a bird house atop a green pole. It was new and elaborate, and it rose upward in setback levels, like the scaled down model of an ancient temple. There were circular holes in each tier, designed so precisely for size that while a bird no larger than a wren could easily enter and find sanctuary, its enemies, because of the very bulk that made them dangerous, were turned back finally, and defeated.

Dr. Hilde Flugelmann gestured with her cigarette holder and said in her ingratiating, foreign voice, "It was not the window that caught my eye: it was the little white bird house." She smiled and inclined her head, exposing obliquely the pink gums above her small, seed-like teeth. "I think the security of the bird house impressed me because I see terror, terror, terror all day long in the poor, insecure minds of my patients. Why, only a moment ago I was thinking to myself that no matter how vulnerable we are, at least the birds are somewhat safe."

For a time they all talked at once, contrasting the security of animals with the security humans know, but at length they turned to Walter Nation, as if some law of courtesy permitted the host the flattery of the final opinion; but he merely sighed and said that all the talk about funeral wreaths and bird houses had put him in mind of a laundryman who had been murdered a few years before. It was an affair which had always interested him, he said, for there was in it mystery, pathos, terror, suspense, and even a touch of that baffling, artistic senselessness which is found in all truly memorable crimes.

He hesitated and glanced expectantly at his guests, but when they said they were not familiar with the case and asked him to tell it to them, he continued: "It happened here in New York, in Harlem to be exact, and the name of the murdered man was Emmanuel Vogel. But let me begin at the beginning, and tell you some of the things the police found out in the course of their investigation: Emmanuel was born in a small Polish village. I've never seen the place, of course, but Tve always thought of it as one of those communities Chekhov describes so well: a village consisting of a general store and a collection of houses, surrounded in winter by the traditional sea of mud."

He took a cigarette from a box at his elbow, lighted it, and went on with his story. Emmanuel's father, he explained, had been a poor peddler who went about the countryside with a pack strapped to his back; his mother had been the local laundress. She was a frail woman, and when her son could barely walk, he was already helping her at the washtub. She died when he was seven. Afterwards, he had washed, cooked, and scrubbed for his father, just as she had done; he had even carried on her laundry business as best he could; but three years later his father died too, and he was entirely alone in the little town.

"Oh, I know that place so well," said Dr. Flugelmann. "I have seen it, or its counterpart, many times. At the edge of the village there was an old factory with a rusting iron roof. There was a market place where the farmers came to trade, and about a mile in the distance, set in a grove of handsome trees, was the big house where the local nobility lived." She shook her head, sighed, and continued: "I see Emmanuel so plainly at this instant: I see him delivering a parcel of laundry in a basket almost too big for him to manage, and as he moves down the street, away from his home, he glances back over his shoulder. He has rust-colored hair, a long neck, and a big, jutting nose. I think he cracks his knuckles when he's nervous, and as he waits at the door for the money he's earned, he presses his palms together, or twists one leg anxiously about the other."

"My clearest picture of him is in his home, immediately after his father's funeral," said Marcella Crosby. "He is wearing a ridiculous little black hat: something hard like a derby, but with a very low crown, with mourning crepe sewed over the original band. His suit is too short and too tight for him. He is walking up and down, trying to control his grief, but suddenly he gives in, rests his face against his mother's old washtub, and cries." She brushed back her hair, closed her eyes for concentration, and continued, "He must have felt terror at that moment, knowing he was alone in a world he feared, and which despised him, and a little later, I think he ran to the doors and windows and locked them all securely."

Mr. Nation inhaled, sat farther back in his chair, and said he considered the fantasy of the locking of the doors and windows a most interesting one. Perhaps it really had happened that way; perhaps it was the beginning of Emmanuel's preoccupation with locks and bolts and bars which was, some years later on, to baffle the police so greatly. He crushed his cigarette with a slow, scrubbing motion, and went on with his story:

It seemed that following his father's death, Emmanuel was not only alone, but homeless too, and at once a pathetic, itinerant existence had begun for him, for he became a sort of housewife's helper who rarely spent more than a day or two in any one place: a kind of rustic menial who moved from villager to villager, from farmer to farmer, doing the domestic work required of him in return for his food, his temporary bed, and perhaps even a few coins on occasion. He cooked, he scrubbed, he mended, he baked for his employers—but washing was the thing he did best, and that was the task he was usually called on to do.

But Mr. Nation did not want his listeners to think of Emmanuel as being without ambition during those years. If they did think so, they would be misled, for actually the child had had a positive, if somewhat modest goal that never wavered, and that was to come to America and eventually own a laundry of his own. His task was a difficult one, and to achieve his purpose he had led a life of hysterical penury and deprivation; nevertheless, he had his passage money eventually, and a little besides, and when he was twenty years old he landed triumphantly in New York.

Being a laundryman, he had gone at once to work in a laundry. It was a small establishment, located somewhere on the lower east side, and for the next few years, according to the material the police gathered after his death, he had put in long hours at his washtub, or bending above his ironing board. He had lived entirely to himself, but if the timidity of his temperament had prevented his having friends, it had served equally well to preclude his making enemies. The only relaxation he had had was smoking, and Mr. Nation felt he must make this point sooner or later, since the buying of a pack of cigarettes had figured in his murder.

People who had known him in those years described him as a thin, hairy, shy, eccentric little man with a delicate constitution; and while Mr. Nation found it possible to believe almost anything he had heard about Emmanuel Vogel, he could not bring himself to credit the reports of his physical frailness, since all his life he had performed, as a matter of course, work which would have caused the average, healthy dray-horse to stagger and collapse in the streets.

John Littleton, the lawyer, said: "I know he got his own laundry sooner or later. The question is, how long did it take?"

It took ten years," continued Mr. Nation. "By that time he'd saved a thousand dollars, and had already found a ground-floor location in Harlem where he hoped to prosper."

In the rear of the living-room, which was already becoming a little dusky, the Filipino houseboy was stuffing broiled mushroom caps with a mixture of crab and lobster meat He listened with pride to the conversation, smiling and nodding wisely each time Mr. Nation made a point It was his opinion that his employer was not aggressive enough, that too often he permitted his inferiors to dominate a conversation.

The houseboy placed the mushrooms on circular pieces of thin toast, and added to each a portion of a golden-brown, spiced sauce which he had perfected himself. When he first had come to work for Mr. Nation, he sometimes would put down his tray, rub his hands together, and laugh boisterously at his employer's witty remarks, rolling his eyes and glancing seductively at the guests, as if urging them to appreciate and applaud too; but Mr. Nation had told him finally that such partisanship, while heart warming and most flattering, was not entirely in keeping with the stricter usages of good form, and he had had to give it up. Now he arranged the mushrooms on a silver platter and moved silently toward the guests, his teeth white and gleaming, and at that instant Mr. Nation was saying:

"It's necessary for me to describe the new place in detail, I'm afraid. Well, to begin with, there was a large front room that faced on the street; behind it, there were two smaller connecting rooms that opened onto a tenement hallway. The one window in the main room looked out on a narrow courtyard at the side.—Have I made myself clear? Do you visualize the layout of Emmanuel's laundry?"

The guests said they did, and he went on: "After taking the place, Emmanuel's first move was to rent the two smaller rooms to an old colored woman who lived alone, and who was content to mind her own business. When the deal between them was made, the connecting door was locked and bolted from the laundry side, but not being satisfied with that, Emmanuel had it nailed securely. He had iron bars put across the window that faced the court, bars so close together that not even a sparrow hawk could have got through them. Afterwards, he had two extra locks and a heavy chain put on the street door, and as a further precaution, the workmen added a strong iron bolt—all, you understand, on the inside."

John Littleton selected a mushroom, bit into it, swallowed, and said, "He'd already invested his capital, so he couldn't have had much loose cash lying around at the time. Then what was he trying to protect? What did he really have to lose?"

Marcella Crosby sat forward excitedly in her chair. It was axiomatic, she said, that those who have the least must guard it the most faithfully. She pointed out that when we love and are loved in return, we leave our riches unguarded for all to accept or destroy; but when love is gone, we see, at last, what has slipped through our fingers, and struggle to keep what we no longer possess.

When we are young and full of life, and have health in profusion, we consider those things our peculiar right, and accept them without gratitude. While we have our treasure, we give no thought to it, as if our very indifference to the things we have in abundance were our assurance they would last forever; but when we are old and ailing, and life has become nagging, painful, and hardly worth keeping, we discover, at length, that it is too precious to be given up, and make the most elaborate efforts to preserve it, to hold on to the unprofitable days we have left

Marcella confessed that the fable of the barn door and the missing horse had always interested her, not because of its innate truth, but because of its sly, ingenuous falsity. To be accurate, to accord with the perverse nature of man's mind, the moral should be reversed to warn us all that there's no use locking the barn door until we know for certain that the horse is actually gone.

Her voice grew self-conscious, hesitated, and died away.

Phil Cottman, who published her work, who advertised her as the greatest mystic poet since William Blake, and who was embarrassed by her imagery until it was safely between the covers of one of her volumes, looked down at the rug and said, "Perhaps Emmanuel had accumulated more money than the price of his laundry, and the extra cash was hidden somewhere about the place. If that's true, then his precautions were sensible enough."

Outside, the park was now bathed in the soft, full light of the sun, and Dr. Flugelmann, observing it in silence, her eyes half closed and a little sad, waved suddenly in the direction of the bird house and said, "Oh, no, no! It wasn't anything definite, anything real, he feared. The laundry with its locks and bolts and bars was only his little white bird house where he hoped to be safe. Oh, I know the type so well, and have had them in treatment many times. Always, they have a sense of their own doom: they fear they will be robbed, they fear they will be murdered, they fear, beyond the next building, there lurks some terror for them alone."

She turned to Walter Nation, asking him if Emmanuel had expressed his anxieties to others, and if they were now part of the record of his death; but he said that he did not know. A moment later he went on with the details of Emmanuel's life in the new neighborhood. During the months he had lived there, he had not once gone out of the small area from which he drew his living. He had had no assistants. He had continued to work long hours, longer than ever, now that he was laboring for himself alone. He was never known to go to the theater, or even to the movies. He did not read. He did not drink or gamble. He did not have a friend with whom he could talk, or to whom he could confide his ambitions or his fears. He had no sweetheart.

And so Emmanuel lived for a time, and then, after delivering a parcel of laundry to a customer one night, he stopped in the cigar store across the street from his place to buy a pack of cigarettes. It was 10 o'clock at the time, and the clerk, who knew him as well as anybody, asked if he were now going to bed. Emmanuel replied that he'd like to, but could not, as he had at least two hours more work to do that night Then the clerk watched him cross the street, unfasten bis system of locks, enter his laundry, and turn on the lights. Fifteen minutes later, the clerk happened to look across the street again, and seeing the fights in the laundry go out he said to himself, "Emmanuel didn't do his work after all." He started to turn away, to go back behind his counter, but he had an odd sense of disaster at that moment, a feeling that something was wrong across the street, and he stood irresolute inside his shop, staring at Emmanuel's door.