The Man Who Was Left Behind (4 page)

What things people did, wearing a wooden mouse, wearing a live spider. You hardly ever saw a woman wearing flowers any more. When he was courting he brought Betty flowers and she would wear them. Wear them in her hair,
which was long then and done up with combs. You hardly ever saw that any more, either. When you take out the combs how it falls down like ribbons, and braiding it up for the night, he in his nightshirt and still not liking pajamas, wondering how could they say modern youth was so immoral because if they wore those things he didn’t see how they’d manage, taking them off and putting them on again all night long. He brought her flowers and chocolates and they took walks. Who took walks now? And you never thought of smoking if a lady was in the room. All the things that had changed. But it was always so, his father having to have the newspapers read to him in nineteen forty-two and saying: in my day cavalry meant just that, you were on a horse, not some new-fangled machine or other. In my day this, in my day that. The children had thought it was funny, but he understood better now.

In Mr. Mackenzie’s day he had studied the classics. He thought he would reread some of the works he had forgotten, though he had always had a good memory. He remembered the time he had had to have the operation, it must have been five or six years after he’d passed the bar exams, and the surgeon told him that under the anaesthetic he had quoted about two thousand lines of Virgil, and he had thought it was because of cramming for exams all that time ago and imagine remembering it for so long. But now he thought: pretty damn smart of that doctor to know it was Virgil.

He looked for a book in Greek or Latin. They were all translations. The girl at the counter was craning her neck to see what he was doing, if he was stealing the books or defacing them. Suddenly he wanted to go. Unless he was drinking he did not like being inside places for very long. He grabbed a book off the shelf and took it to the counter. He saw as she marked the inside with the stamp that the book was a copy of Marcus Aurelius combined with essays on
Greek and Roman Stoicism, a textbook apparently, and that there was a printed notice pasted on the opening page which cautioned all library users not to return the book in case of scarlet fever or other contagious diseases.

In the street again, he flipped through the leaves. The book fell open to a page where the writer commented on the necessity of looking upon death with equanimity and explained the construction of the world and the process of man’s return to the seminal principles of the universe after death. No later consciousness, no personality, no afterlife. Just as he had always thought, just as he hoped. A few pages later another author said that the ideal Stoic philosopher should be able to look back upon ruin, to accept the destruction of his property, his house burned down and his family all killed, without shedding a tear.

Mr. Mackenzie closed the book. He did not believe such a thing could ever have happened to that philosopher and he didn’t want to read any more. He put the book in his pocket and thought he would return it as soon as possible in exchange for another one.

He started off in the direction of the park and then changed his mind. To the house. He would go look at the house just once again, just to see. He walked slowly. There was plenty of time. And when he arrived by the fence, looking over the grass and garden into the white house, it was like a face looking back at him. He had spent nearly all his life in that house, he was born in it. And his father before him. It was strange to think that he could not walk up the path and go in. What was the sense of one old man living in a large house like that, even if there hadn’t been memories? He had had to sell it, naturally. But it was quite a thing to see it again; it did something to his insides like music or books or paintings, though he couldn’t yet tell if the effect was good or bad, just that it was strong.

Whoever had bought it had made some changes. They
had put up different curtains in the dining-room and in the room he had used for a study. That used to be a library—not very sensible to keep a library in the sunniest room of the house. Good for reading, but bad for the books. After his father’s death he had moved the books into another room and taken it over as a study. All those shelves, it had taken weeks. Now the owners had changed the curtains. That upset him, he liked the old curtains. He was beginning to feel cranky about the alterations. Other changes too, a blue-painted tricycle leaning up against the toolshed in the distance. And two children were playing on the lawn, two little girls throwing a ball back and forth to each other. A song went through his mind:
They play in their beautiful
gardens, the children of high degree.
That was all he could remember, just the first line. One of them was standing on the exact spot where Ben had stood when he and Betty and her Aunt Sophie had looked through the windows and seen Ben, aged about five then, taking aim with his bow and arrow, being egged on by Jim and Carl and Stuke Bender, to shoot the second in the series of orange cats with literary names. And he hit it, too, although the damage was slight as the arrows were tipped with rubber suction cups; they were later taken away because Ben had shot them at the ceiling and they pulled the plaster off in two places, besides making smudge marks on the wallpaper.

He became aware of the fact that he had been standing in front of the house for a long while. The two children were edged up against the tree, peeking at him around the trunk. When he turned his head to look, they dashed out over the grass and ran into the back of the house. A few minutes later a coloured girl in a starched maid’s uniform came out from the back into the garden, looked over at him, and disappeared. He stayed where he was. Then the curtains twitched at his study window and he felt a small thrill like a twinge of toothache, to see the curtains move in the room where
he used to spend so much of his time, in the house where he was born.

He turned away and shuffled off down the street, moving slowly and looking at the flower beds as he went, not thinking anything in particular. It was summer and he remembered many summers, but for the time being no one of them stood out and spoke to him. He was three and a half blocks away from the house when the patrol car stopped at the kerb and a policeman got out of the front seat. Another remained seated behind the wheel, a third sat in the back.

“Going someplace?” said the one who got out.

“Just walking.”

“We’ve had a complaint about you from some folks down the road. Want to tell me why you were hanging around those kids?”

“What kids?” said Mr. Mackenzie.

“At number seventeen.” He jerked his thumb backwards. “Back there. The whole family saw you, hanging around the kids.”

“I was looking at the house.”

“That’s right.”

“That’s right.”

“What for?”

“My house,” Mr. Mackenzie said.

The policeman in the driver’s seat leaned towards them and said, “Give him a warning and let’s go, Frank. We got a call.” He began to talk into a shortwave microphone. Noises came out of the radio like the sound of frying fat.

The other one said, “Your house, huh?”

“Used to be.”

“Oh sure, sure. Don’t try it again. Not in this part of town, you hear?”

“I heard you.”

“Okay.” He pulled out a notepad and said, “Let’s have your name.”

“Vanderbilt,” said Mr. Mackenzie. The one behind the wheel laughed. The other, in the back seat, said, “Okay, pull him in.”

They put him into the back of the car and drove off. He let himself be squeezed between the two of them until it struck him how hot it was and how he didn’t like being so near. He tried to stand up, and said, “Hold on a minute, I don’t want to go anywhere.” The one who had the notepad chopped him across the cheek and the other one, who had been sitting there all the time, thumped his fist hard into his ribs. Mr. Mackenzie began to cough.

Later in jail while they decided whether to book him with just loitering and resisting arrest or with drunk and disorderly and perhaps molestation also, somebody jokingly asked him if he wanted to call his lawyer. He said what for, he
was
a lawyer. And while they were laughing Rick Spooner, coming around a corner in the corridor, saw him, did a double take recognizing him, and said, “Charlie, what the hell?”

So then he was out, on the street again, with Rick asking him to have something to eat.

“Can’t, I’ve got to go somewhere.”

“Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Fine, fine,” he said.

He remembered to buy a pack of cigarettes and went into a store where it appeared you could buy most things you’d need in life: fruit, bread, vegetables, sandwiches, candy, papers, magazines, and cigarettes. As he put the change in his pocket he saw, through the window, a serviceman carrying a duffel bag on his shoulder. The bag hid his face, but the way he walked, it looked like Ben. Mr. Mackenzie ran through the doorway and on to the sidewalk to watch the boy move away into the distance, feeling his eye travelling hard among the crowd to latch on to the soldier. And then he saw the bag swing off, turning, and the back of a head,
not Ben, because this one had red hair. He felt cheated, running out into the street to look at a stranger. Yet something remained, a kind of tingling all over him, like the time when the phone rang.

The call came through at four in the morning, saying nothing definite except that there had been an accident, and he just had time to answer, “I’m coming right over.”

The doctor did not understand how it could have happened. It was hard to understand how anyone could want death that much, suicide so they tell you being a negative action, not a passionate proof of will. And how he must have wanted to die! He had pretended to take the sleeping pills—a child’s trick, keeping them in your hand or in the pouch of your cheek like a squirrel. All during the evening he had been quite docile, had talked, said he felt much better, let them change his bandages and give him shots. The nurse on duty had been called to another ward during the night because there was one patient who suffered from screaming nightmares and wouldn’t go back to sleep unless she talked to him—the other nurse would not do. He must have known that. He had taken in a lot of information that no one had suspected: where the soap and sheets and towels were kept, the razor blades, the drugs. His condition was such that it precluded movement, so everyone thought, although he was not strapped to pulleys like many of the other patients who had single rooms. As for getting out of the bed, half-healed and with only half of one leg and none of the other, the pain would cause immediate blackout, so they believed. He had done it in spite of the thought and belief and professional opinion, pulled himself along the floor all the way down the corridor to the razor blades, reaching the cabinets God knew how. He made it as sure as possible by swallowing a quantity of pills, torn from the shelves by the boxful, and washing them down with a bottle
of rubbing alcohol while he dug at the veins in his wrists and throat.

Mr. Mackenzie didn’t know how to tell his wife. He asked the doctor: how can I tell her? And in fact he never did tell her everything, not because she wouldn’t have been able to take it, but because he could not bring himself to say it. Haemorrhage, relapse, he wasn’t trying to live, he wanted it that way—that was as close as he got. She saw the body, but often people do not see what they are not looking for, and most people only really see the face of their dead, so perhaps she never knew.

After the funeral he held back for two days, all day long, all night long. Then Betty went out, shopping and probably to go back to the graveyard, and he went into the study and closed the door and wept, wept until he thought it would kill him. That was the first glimpse he had had of the truth, the reason why Indians step right off the kerb into the traffic: because it can happen any time and happens to everyone, since for everybody, for all, the management orders the doors to be locked to make sure nobody gets out before paying.

He remembered that he had forgotten to buy any matches for the cigarettes, and had to go back to the shop.

At the park again he found that he had the place to himself. He sat down on the bench, concentrated on the tree, and went out into Mexico. Afterwards, looking up, he saw that the three had returned. He got out the cigarettes, ripped off the cellophane, and lit one. Then he held out the pack to the one who had come up to him in the morning. The hobo came over, took the matches and cigarettes, and was followed by the other two. They all lit cigarettes and returned to their benches; the one he had given them to pocketed both cigarettes and matches. It didn’t seem to matter. Mr. Mackenzie continued to smoke. It lasted a long time and the taste was heavier than he remembered, and the
kick in the lungs—the reason why he’d liked to smoke and had had such a hard time giving it up—was sharper, almost like pain. He looked at the tree some more and did not leave till twilight.

The next day he bought some more cigarettes and again offered them around, though this time he held on to the pack. The hobos had brought a bottle with them and offered it to him. He took a long swig and handed it back, thinking that it must be homemade.

After that he began to know them. It was a slow process but there was plenty of time, he was in no hurry. They never introduced themselves. He only discovered their names from the way they addressed each other. The one who had first talked to him was called Spats. He was tall, younger than the others, and at the bottom of the hierarchy—that was why he had been delegated to sound out Mr. Mackenzie. He only understood that later, when he realized how they worked and how they must have regarded him at the beginning.

The second in command was Elmie, a small man with a big, square face and a whispery monkey laugh that ran through all his speech and was mysteriously pleasant to hear. The third hobo, the leader, was named Jumbo: lean, white-haired, with a long lantern jaw and a peculiar shape to his head. From the side it was long, from behind you could see the part of the skull which gave the head its length, round as a billiard ball above his coat collar.