The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (127 page)

—In that case, you’ll have to consider me unamerican too, in Alabama . . .

—No, the point was sublimation, see? This is the whoring of the arts, and we’re the pimps, see?

—You should have hit him.

—I did. That’s where I got this. Morgie pointed to the tape above his eye. —No matter how much you talk to them, they don’t get it. It’s too simple. It’s too goddam simple for them to understand. They still think their cigarettes would cost them half as much without advertising. The whole goddam high standard of American life depends on the American economy. The whole goddam American economy depends on mass production. To sustain mass production you got to have a mass market. To sustain a goddam mass market you got to have advertising. That’s all there is to it. A product would drop out of sight overnight without advertising, I don’t care what it is, a book or a brand of soap, it would drop out of sight. We’ve had the goddam Ages of Faith, we’ve had the goddam Age of Reason. This is the Age of Publicity.

—O.K. Morgie, you believe in it. Come into the control room and see your dancing girls.

—Goddam right I believe in it. You got to regard advertising as public information, that’s what it is.

—O.K. Morgie, relax. Put out your cigarette.

Morgie dropped his cigarette on the floor, and stopped to put it out with his shoe. —I know it, but I get browned off the way some people talk. They talk as if we weren’t respectable.

—It’s the highest paid business in the U.S., said the old Alabama Rammer-Jammer man.

A man in shirt-sleeves came through the door. —You seen Benny? Ellery asked him.

—Benny who?

A girl going the other way heard this. —I know who you mean, she said to Ellery. —He’s in OP, nobody around here knows him. I know who you mean, he was here earlier and he left.

—Thanks, said Ellery; hunching up one shoulder he dropped his cigarette, put it out, and watched the girl go down the hall as he held the door.

—You’ve only got two cameras up there? Morgie asked. They stood looking at three selective screens. Ellery nodded. —I don’t think I’d call this even a B show, even for morning, Morgie said. He was watching the close-up screen where a four-year-old girl,
extended at the practice rail, smiled a personality smile into the wrong camera. Ellery looked at his watch.

—And look. What the hell are they doing now, is this part of this show? Ellery was watching that screen, where the façade of an ugly church quivered into focus. The image moved to the squat steeple, and turned up to follow the spire to its top. —There’s a guy up there, there’s a guy climbing up it . . .

Someone handed Ellery a telephone. —That’s right, telephoto on number one as soon as you get number two camera set up down in the street, got me? Cut an announcement in right now, got me? First-hand coverage of a stark human drama, take it from there. Get the church in, nice if you can get a shot of the service going on but don’t bust
that
up, got me? That’s it, that’s it . . . he went on, watching the screen. —Lift it a little, get the bells in . . .

—See if they can get the whole goddam cross in, Morgie whispered.

——Ladies and gentlemen, Necrostyle, the modern scientific aid to civilized living, interrupts its regular program,
Today’s Angels
, to bring you on-the-spot coverage of a stark human drama . . .

The close-up screen flashed into life again with the figure of a man mounting the shingled spire toward the cross. Ellery stood silent, gripping the telephone. —But wait a minute, he said. —Wait a minute . . .

—Let it roll, let it roll, Morgie said beside him. —It’s terrific.

—Wait a minute . . .

—You can almost see the sweat on his face, Morgie said beside him. —Coming over like a dream.

—It’s too bad they didn’t get some pancake on him before he went up, said the old Alabama Rammer-Jammer man. —But that light blue necktie . . .

—That light blue necktie . . .

Morgie took a step closer to the screens. He held his breath. When he realized that the man beside him was holding his breath, he commenced to breathe self-consciously. The man beside him realized this, and he commenced to breathe self-consciously.

Then at the same instant they both stopped breathing again.

——Our camera seems to be having some difficulty . . . We’re sorry, friends, but because of the crowd which has gathered in the immediate vicinity there on the sidewalk it looks like we are going to be unable to bring our camera in for a close-up . . .

—Like a dream, said Morgie, as they breathed again.

When the scene was obliterated in favor of a sleek-haired oily countenance, they turned to one another. —Where’s Ellery?

——. . . brought to you through the courtesy of Necrostyle Products. And so friends, don’t forget,
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, in the vanguard
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—Where’s Ellery?

In the background, an electric organ played
The End of a Perfect Day
.

——. . . no harmful after-effects. For men
and
women over forty, start living again, with
Pubies
 . . .

—He must have gone out, do you think it got him down?

——And so remember, friends, when
you
come to the end of a perfect day . . .

They went out to the bright corridor where, after a moment, Ellery appeared from an office. He was walking very slowly and staring at the floor. —I just had to see B.F. for a minute, he said when they joined him, and he stood there by the door and lit a cigarette.

—Like a dream, Morgie congratulated him. But Ellery did not raise his eyes. From the office they could hear a voice. It was B.F. on the telephone. —Hello, hello Ben? Listen, there was a jump a few minutes ago, it . . . what? No, this was a man, off a church up in the Bronx, he . . . Yeah, that’s the point, it was one of our own men, a guy named Benny . . . what? I don’t know, something must have went wrong. I know you can’t hush it up, but try to keep us out of it . . . Yeah, they can play up this other one then, the woman . . . Inside the office B.F. hung up the telephone. He stared vacantly for almost a full minute. Then he clicked his lips and took out a cigar.

Ellery blew a heavy ring of smoke toward the floor. It rolled, getting larger, dropping more slowly, and settled round the toe of his shoe.

All this time Morgie was talking. —You handled it beautifully, it came over like a dream. But look, what’s the matter, did it upset you? A thing like that? Look at it this way. Those things happen. This happened. We happened to be there. What the hell, it’s all in a goddam day’s work. Come on, he said as they started to walk down the corridor. Ellery dropped his cigarette and paused to step on it. —Come on, I’ll buy you the best lunch in town. You’ll bounce back.

—Twenty-one? said the Alabamarammerjammerman.

—Twenty-one Ellery?

—Twenty-one.

One after another the flashbulbs burst and, in the gray light of that day, seemed each time to arrest an instant of riotous motion as lightning freezes motion and then, in the dark again, the persistence of vision retains that image of abandon which could not have sustained itself, as it did here, on the winter pavement, after the newspaper photographer had bundled up his equipment and hurried into the hotel, hoping to make the sporting final.

The morning mail was late, for the falling body had struck the mailman, setting off a pattern of inconvenience which intruded upon many routines. Outside that hotel of faded Edwardian elegance which, having become a landmark, was about to be torn down, the body lay in a pose of reckless flamboyance, a gratuitous gesture annoying such passers-by as the tall woman who was leading a poodle and saying to a friend, —Her name is Huki-lau, that means fish-picnic in Hawaiian, isn’t that cute? She used to bite her nails right down to the quick, analysis is doing her a world of good. Oh God! Look! No, don’t look.

Discovered breathing, she was taken away on a stretcher instead of the pinewood crate which was already half unloaded.

The hotel room itself proved so rewarding that the newspaper photographer telephoned for more flashbulbs, and asked the city desk to send over somebody with shorthand. He said the reporter with him had just been taken sick by the fumes. Then he hurried back down the hall, took a deep breath, and entered that mélange of smoke, whisky, and roses, where he paused only to sweep some of the letters into a pile with his foot as graphic witness to the story which would say that they were ankle-deep all over the room. The bottles he did not have to rearrange at all, their hollow necks protruded everywhere. As for the roses, he could not have done a better job if he’d taken a month to it. They were festooned dead, dying, and two or three dozens still in bloom, wherever that desperate ingenuity could contrive, and the hand reach. —Roses . . . he would say later (when someone was trying to recall a line of poetry that contained “Roses, roses . . .” to use in the caption), —Roses till hell wouldn’t have them. The bathroom, especially, was entirely transformed. There was no place to sit down at all.

But when he returned to his office, the newspaper photographer found an atmosphere of tense gloom which even his prize plum could not dispel. The managing editor, the feature editor, and the foreign editor were all gazing at a story from their own columns. There were two pictures: in one, a little girl in long white stockings; but they were looking at the other, a man with a round face whose limp flabby quality was belied by an exquisite mustache and penetrating eyes beneath a sharply parted widow’s peak. —That
bastard, one of them muttered, and which one was not clear, for all of their expressions reflected the same feeling. —That dago bastard.

—All right, how much is four million lires? What are lires, Spanish or Italian?

—Eyetalian.

—What do these spics want with Eyetalian money? for Christ sake.

—That’s their business.

—Six thousand six hundred sixty-six dollars and two-thirds of a cent, a junior reporter reported, after careful miscalculation.

—Lemme see that God damn letter again. “A respectable business man and professor,” for Christ sake. “A mere child in arms when this unhappy incident occurred,” for Christ sake. “Reparations . . . my unblemished character . . . four million (4,000,000) lire . . .” for Christ sweet sake.

—You’re a Catholic yourself, aren’t you?

—Christ yes, but not one of these ignorant spic Catholics.

—So?

—So we’re screwed. We’ll settle for three million. How much is that? . . . And what the hell is all this?

—These are some of the letters from that hotel room where that dame jumped out the window, the photographer said, and continued pulling them out of a bulging pocket. —You didn’t send me a speedwriter down so I just brought some along before the cops moved in.

—Any good reporter would have done that in the first place. Why didn’t you bring them all?

—I would have needed a truck . . .

—So you just left the rest of them there, for every other paper in town to sift through . . .

—I mailed one of them.

—You
what?

—There was a thick one all sealed, with the name of this Doctor somebody on it, so I just looked his name up in the phone book and wrote an address on it . . .

—You stupid bastard. You stupid stupid bastard. What address?

—I don’t remember, the first one I saw under his name, I think it was somewhere on Fourteenth Street . . .

—Oh you stupid bastard.

—I just thought I’d do her a favor, I . . .

—You just thought . . . Christ! How did you get onto this paper? How did any of you get onto this newspaper? And how much is three million lire, didn’t you figure it out yet?

—All I get is sixes, six six six . . .

—All right, shut up. And now what’s this?

—A watch. I found it on the pavement beside her.

—Jesus Christ. The battered thing dangled between his fingers. —Even Minnie wouldn’t know him.

It was roses, roses, all the way

And like an avenue of flags unfurled, the newspapers quivered in the hands of passengers whose faces reflected costive content and requited destitution, prodigies of unawareness, done with plotting against life, secure in disenchantment, recovered from the times when Cleopatra’s gnathic index, or Nefertiti’s cephalic index, might have made a difference, while the train shook only negligent response from attitudes which flouted the aesthetician who devised the divine proportion of seven to one from the dimensions of the human being.

All save one: for there was an alertness about Mr. Pivner’s attitude, as there was an eagerness in his face, which distinguished him, hurrying home now under the ground. Eddie Zefnic was coming over again this evening, and they were going to listen to something on the radio which Eddie said was very worth listening to.

Above ground, he hurried, scarcely pausing at curbs, scarcely pausing to greet Jerry when he got his paper, almost run down at his own corner where a truck swerved past bearing before his eyes a primitive family pictogram and the legend, “None of us grew but the business.” Even near his own door he scarcely paused when he dropped a coin into the tin cup of the blind accordion player who had been stationed there the last few evenings.

Once inside he did not waste a moment, did not even pause to lock the door behind him, entered in darkness straight across the room to the floorlamp, which he turned to its highest brilliance. He ate with no sensation but of what was too hot, what too cold; looked three times to make sure of two quart bottles of beer in the icebox; took his injection with professional dispatch; and then, his shoulders drooping in weariness, squaring again with pride, he drew on his dressing gown, pulling its generous folds tight: for he still had the sense that it had been a gift from the guest he expected. He turned on the radio and it responded with
The Bells of Saint Mary’s
, played by the Department of Sanitation Band. Uncertain just what it was that Eddie had said would be very much worth listening to, he left it at that and sat down with his newspaper.