The victim (15 page)

the sink, when his face was wet, he began to cry. He snatched a paper towel from the box and covered his eyes. Then he heard someone approaching and turned blunderingly into a stall. He shut the door and, with his back against it, gradually, with silent effort, brought himself under control.

15

ON the ferry there was only a current of brackish air instead of the usual fresh breeze. The boat took the water with a sullen thudding beneath the broad lip of its bow. The air was chalky and the afternoon sun looked pale. One of the deck hands sat with his naked back touching the pilothouse, his head lying on his knees, his big forearms locked about his legs. At the slip, he dragged himself down the ladder to take down the chain, and Leventhal sprang past him and hurried through the shed. His bus was just pulling away from the curb, and he ran alongside and slammed at the door with his open hand. The bus stopped, the door folded open, and he squeezed in among the passengers on the lower step. The driver raised himself in his seat and called out something, stridently. His throat was taut and angry, his gray collar blackened with sweat. No one answered and, after a delay, he ground down the gearshift and they started again. Leventhal was panting. He did not heed the streaming of his face or the stinging of his hand. He was thinking, as he had thought on the boat, that he must expect to be blamed. Elena was bound to blame him and her mother sure to egg her on. He had argued for the hospital, he had brought the specialist; he had meddled. The old lady did not matter, but his dread of Elena was intense. Probably the disease was already in the fatal stage when Denisart took the case. In the hospital Mickey had at least had a chance, and if she had listened to the first doctor's advice he might have been saved. So it was her fault, if anyone's. But it was precisely because of the unreasonableness of the blame that he feared her. Nevertheless he was obliged to face her. He could not stay away now. He hunted among the rows of bells, found his brother"s, rang, and climbed up. The door of the flat was open a few inches. He pushed it and was startled to feel a resisting weight on the inside. Letting the knob go, he retreated a step. It ran swiftly through his mind that it was not a child behind that door, not Philip. And why should Max try to keep him out? Could it be Elena? A hot wave of fright passed over him at the thought that the energy of madness had held back his push. "Who's there?" he said hoarsely. "Who is it?" He went up to the door again. This time, merely at his touch, the door swung open. Elena's mother was in the hallway. He understood at once what had happened. Standing at the hinge to see who was coming she had been caught against the wall in the narrow vestibule. "What are you doing?" His tone was harsh. She was silent, and he was baffled by her look; behind its vindictiveness there was something crazily resembling amusement. "Where is everybody?" "Go out. I alone," she said in her rough voice. He had never before heard her speak English. It surprised him. As for the amusement, he must have been mistaken about that. It was the concentration of her look that had suggested it. The boy was, after all, her grandson. "Where did they go?" Either she did not know or was unable to explain. She uttered a few sounds. Steam was coming from the kitchen; he saw it behind her. Was she cooking dinner? "Where are they, at the chapel? Is the funeral today?" She merely shrugged; she refused to answer, and she gave him another of those frightful glances of spite and exultation, as though he were the devil. "They're going to come home to eat, aren't they--mangare? When?" It was a waste of time. She only wanted to get rid of him. He turned from her and went downstairs. No one responded to his knock at Villani's. His headache was becoming severer. He frowned and hit at the door despairingly. Then it occurred to him to try the superintendent. He found him in the court, reading the paper in the shade of the furnace room stairs. "Do you know where I can find my people?" he said. "I'm Max Leventhal's brother." The superintendent got up. Old and slow, he rested his weight on bent, swollen knuckles. "Why, the boy's being buried out of Boldi's parlors." "The old mother-in-law is upstairs, but she wouldn't tell me. Where is this Boldi place?" "Two blocks down. Turn left when you leave the building. Same side as this. There's a church on the corner." He bent to gather up the paper which had unfolded over his brown felt slippers. The sun had come round to a clearer portion of the sky and its glare was overpowering. Leventhal took off his jacket. The heat of the pavement penetrated his soles and he felt it in the very bones of his feet. In a long, black peninsular yard a row of scratchy bushes grew, dead green. The walls were flaming coarsely, and each thing--the moping bushes, the face of a woman appearing at a screen, a heap of melons before a grocery--came to him as though raised to a new power and given another quality by the air; and the colors, granular and bloody, black, green, blue, quivered like gases over the steady baselines of shadow. The open door of the grocery was like the entrance to a cave or mine; the cans shone like embedded rocks. He had a momentary impression of being in a foreign city when he saw the church the superintendent had mentioned--the ponderousness, the gorgeous-ness, the decay of it, the fenced parish house, the garden, and the small fountain thick with white lead and flimsily curtained with water. He passed through Boldi's office and entered the lounge. There he saw Philip sitting in a wicker chair. His legs were crossed on a footstool and his head rested on his raised shoulder. "How are you, boy?" Leventhal said quietly. "Hello, uncle," said Philip. He looked listless. "I hear your father's back." "Yes, he came in." Leventhal caught the flush of candles through the oval windows of the studded leather door. He went into the chapel. It was cool. A master fan murmured somewhere in the building. Beyond the heaped-up, fiery glasses of the altar hung a Christ of human size. Taking off his hat, Leventhal walked up to the coffin. He was struck by the softness of the boy's face, the absence of signs of recoil or fright. He noted the curve of his nose, the texture of his brushed-up hair, the ends of which touched the folds of the satin, the poise of his small chin over his breast and decided, "He was going to turn out like Max and me. A Leventhal." Reflectively he fingered the smooth copper rail with its knot of dark plush and glanced upward. The chapel displeased him. Elena had undoubtedly insisted on a Catholic funeral. That was her right. But from the Leventhals' side, and the boy was one of them, too, it was peculiar, after so many generations, to have this. Prompted by an indistinct feeling, he thought to himself, "Never mind, thanks, we'll manage by ourselves..." He turned from the rail and encountered his brother. The sight of him hit Leventhal with a terrible force. He had been prepared to meet him in anger; his very first word was to have been a rebuke. But now, instead of speaking, he took in his brother's appearance, the darkness and soreness of his swollen face, the scar at the corner of his mouth from a cut received in a street fight years ago in Hartford. Outdoor work had weathered him; the loss of several teeth made his jaw longer. His suit--it was a suit such as laborers used to buy in his father's store. His new black shoes were dusty. "I didn't make it in time," he said. "I heard, Max." "I left as soon as the telegram came. I got in about ten minutes late." "When's the funeral?" "Four o'clock." Max motioned him to come aside. In the aisle near the wall, clasping Leventhal's hand and stooping over it, he burst into tears. He whispered, but occasionally one of his sobs or half-articulated words broke out of key and reverberated through the place. Leventhal stiffened his arm and supported him. He heard him say, "He was covered up," and bit by bit, through many repetitions, he learned that Max had come into the room unaware that Mickey was dead and found the sheet drawn over his head. "Awful," he said. "Awful." He gazed at Max's burly back and his sunburnt neck, and, as his glance moved across the polished rows of benches, he saw Elena sitting between Villani and a priest. The look she gave him was one of bitter anger. Though the light was poor, there was no mistaking it. Her face was white and straining. "What have I done?" he thought; his panic was as great as if he had never foreseen this. He was afraid to let her catch his eye and did not return her look. Helping Max up the aisle, he sat down beside him, still holding his arm. What would he do if then and there--imagining the worst--she began to scream at him, accusing him? Once more she turned her face to him over her shoulder; it seemed to be blazing in its whiteness. She must be mad. She was mad. He did not allow himself to use the word again. He held it back desperately like a man who is afraid to whisper lest he end by shouting. He rode out to the cemetery with Villani and the priest, behind the limousine with Max, Elena, Philip, and Mrs Villani. During the burial he sheltered himself under a tree, hanging back from the others at the graveside in the full blast of the sun. When the shoveling of the earth began he walked back to the car. The chauffeur was waiting on the running board at the edge of the stonedust driveway. The glow of the sun in the locust trees gave a yellowish shine to his uniform. He had white hair, his eyes were bloodshot and his long lips impatiently drawn as he endured the heat moment by moment and breath by breath. Soon Villani and the priest came up. The priest was a Pole, stout and pale. He gave a push to his black Homburg, lit up, drawing deeply, and let the smoke out between his small teeth. Pulling out a handkerchief, he wiped his face and neck and the back of his hands. "You're a relative, huh?" he said, addressing Leventhal for the first time. Villani answered for him. "He's the man's brother, Father." "Ah, yeah, tough deal." His fingers, virtually nailless and curving at the tips, pinched the cigarette. He looked keenly into the sky, creasing the thick white skin of his forehead, and made a remark about the heat. The family were now approaching the cars and the chauffeurs started up the motors. "Too hot back there for three," said Leventhal, and climbed into the front seat. He wanted to avoid the priest. Touching the heated metal of the handle, he said mentally, "So long, kid," and peered out of the moving window at the yellow and brown of the large-grained soil and at the two booted men working their shovels. He occasionally saw Max in the back seat of the Cadillac and tried to recall Elena, persistently picturing how she had looked on the way to the grave, walking between Max and Villani, the fullness of her figure in the black dress, the grip of her hands on each arm, the jerking of her head. Poor Max, what was he going to do with her? And what about Philip? "I'd take him in a minute," he thought. He did not say good-by to the family. It was after sunset when he reached the ferry. The boat went slowly over the sluggish harbor. The splash of a larger vessel reached it and Leventhal caught a glimpse of the murky orange of a hull, like the apparition of a furnace on the water. The searchlight on the bridge passed over it and it was lost in a moment, put out. But its giant wading was still audible seaward in the hot, black air. After getting off the subway he delayed going home. He stopped in the park. The crowd was extraordinarily thick tonight. The same band of revivalists was on the curb. A woman was singing. Her voice and the accompaniment of the organ were very dim, only a few notes emerging from the immense, interminable mutter. He searched for a long time before he found a seat near the pond where a few half-naked children were splashing. The trees were swathed in stifling dust, and the stars were faint and sparse through the pall. The benches formed a dense, double human wheel; the paths were thronged. There was an overwhelming human closeness and thickness, and Leventhal was penetrated by a sense not merely of the crowd in this park but of innumerable millions, crossing, touching, pressing. What was that story he had once read about Hell cracking open on account of the rage of the god of the sea, and all the souls, crammed together, looking out? But these were alive, this young couple with bare arms, this woman late in pregnancy, sauntering, this bootblack hauling his box by the long strap. Leventhal fell to thinking that to his father what had happened in Staten Island today would be incomprehensible. In Hartford the old man used to point at the baskets of flowers in the doorways and remark how many foreign children, Italian or Irish, died. He was amazed at the size of the families, at the numbers born and dying. How strange if he could know that his own grandson was one of these, buried in a Catholic cemetery. With flowers, like the others. And baptized. It occurred to Leventhal for the first time that Elena must have had him baptized. And that a son of his was a workingman, indistinguishable from those who came to the store to buy socks, caps, and shirts. He would not have understood it. Heartsick and tired, Leventhal started home at ten o'clock. He did not think of Allbee till he began to go up, and then quickened his step. Twisting the key, he threw the door back with a bang and turned on the lights. On the couch in the dining-room, sheets, bathrobe, and towel were twisted together. There was half a glass of milk on the floor. He went back to the front room and stretched out on the bed, intending to rest awhile before taking off his clothes and shutting off the lights. He put his hand to his face with a groan. Almost at once he fell asleep. During the night he heard a noise and sat up. The lights were still burning. Someone was in the flat. He went softly into the dark kitchen. The dining-room door was open, and by the window he saw Allbee undressing. He stood in his underpants, pulling his shirt over his head. The fear that Leventhal felt, though deep, lasted only a second, a single thrust. His indignation, too, was short lived. He returned to the front room and took off his clothes. Switching off the lights, he went toward his bed through the dark, mumbling, "Go, stay--it's all the same to me." He was in a state of indifference akin to numbness, and he lay down more conscious of the heat than of any emotion in himself.

16

MR MILLIKAN, who attended to make-up at the printer"s, was representing the firm at an all-industry conference, and Leventhal, at midday, had to go to the shop in Brooklyn Heights to replace him. He waited on the subway platform in the dead brown air, feeling spent. He did not know how he was going to get through the day. The train rolled up and he sat down spiritlessly under the slow-wheeling fan that stirred the heat. Again and again he thought about the child's death. So soon closed over, covered up. So soon. He repeated it involuntarily while his head rocked with the bucketing of the cars in the long pull under the river that ended below the St George Hotel. He left the train and rode up to the street level in the elevator. Millikan had made up four pages, leaving him four more. The work went slowly; he became drowsy and made mistakes and tedious recounts. Toward four o'clock, he began to drop off. "It's the machine," he thought. The presses were upstairs and they ran without interruption all day. He took time out for a walk. It was curious that he should feel so dull and heavy, and yet at the same time so apprehensive. He went into a restaurant for a cup of coffee. The chairs were standing on the tables and a boy with a red, bluff head and freckled, rolling shoulders was mopping the tiles. The waitress made a detour of the advancing line of dirty water to ask Leventhal to move out of the way. He drank his coffee at the counter, wiped his mouth on the oblong of a paper napkin he did not bother to unfold, loitered through the lobby of the St George, examining a few magazines, and returned to the shop. Contemplating the pages with their blank spaces, he sighed and picked up the scissors. The presses had stopped before he was done. At half-past six he pasted his last strip and rubbed his hands clean with a piece of wastepaper. On his way to dinner, he stopped at his flat to look in the mailbox. There was a note from Mary saying that she was writing a long letter which she expected to mail in a day or two. Disappointed, he slipped the note into his shirt pocket. He did not go upstairs. Near the corner he met Nunez, in his dungarees and straw hat, carrying a webbed market bag full of groceries. "Eh, eh, hey! How are you, Mr Leventhal? I see you got yourself some company while your wife is away." "How do you know?" said Leventhal. "Us supers, we keep track of everything around a building. We're supposed to be nosey. That's not what it is, you find out even if you don't care. You can't help it. The tenants get surprised. Brujo, I see through the wall. They don't know, eh?" He described a spiral with his fingers, enjoying himself greatly. "No. You go out in the morning and then I hear your radio play. This afternoon the dumb-waiter goes up to the fourth floor. Later on, what's in it?--A empty soup can and rye bottle." "So that's what he's doing?" thought Leventhal. "Guzzling all day. That's what I let him in for." He said to Nunez, "I've got a friend staying with me." "Oh, I don't care who you got." Nunez gave a suggestive laugh and wrinkled his nose with pleasure, the veins on his forehead puffing out. "Who do you think I've got?" "That's okay. The way the dumb-waiter went up, there was no lady pulling on the rope, I know that. Don't worry." He swung the bag with his big-jointed, muscular arm tattooed with a bleeding heart. Leventhal continued toward the restaurant. "No money for rent," he said going down the stairs and bending under the awning. "But for hooch he has it. For hooch he can raise it. Where?" It occurred to him that Allbee had stolen some article from the house and pawned it. But what valuables were there? Mary's sealskin coat was in storage. Spoons? The silver was not worth stealing. Clothing? But a pawnbroker would be running a great risk, seeing how Allbee was dressed, to deal with him. No, hockshops had to think of their licenses. Leventhal did not really fear for his clothes. He had a tweed suit sealed in a mothproof bag in his closet; the rest was not worth pawning. And the suit was a small enough price to pay for getting rid of Allbee. Allbee was certainly clever enough to realize that. Drunks, of course, when they were thirsty enough, desperate enough, turned reckless. "But it isn't the few bucks he's after," Leventhal reasoned. For he had already offered him money. Allbee must have some of his own, since he could afford to buy whisky. Then what about his being evicted, was that an invention? But what of his appearance, that filthy suit of his, his shirt, his long hair? Leventhal tentatively concluded that he kept a little money for whisky by economizing on rent and other things. "But I better lock up the valuables, meanwhile," he told himself. He ate a small dinner of baked veal overseasoned with thyme, had a glass of iced tea with sandy, undissolved sugar, and lit a cigar. Max and the family had replaced Allbee in his mind. Should he phone? Not just now, not tonight--he busily supplied good excuses, flinching a little at the shadow of his own weakness which lay behind them. He knew it was there. But this was not really the time to call. Later, when things had settled down, Max would soon find out--assuming that Elena's last look in the chapel signified what he thought it did--what he had on his hands. Though perhaps there was nothing so unusual in that look under the circumstances. Perhaps--Leventhal studied the seam in the long ash of his cigar--he had let his imagination run away with him. Grief, overloading of the heart... "Horror, you know," he silently explained. People crying when their faces were twisted might appear to be laughing, and so on. "Well, I hope to God I'm wrong," he said. "I hope I am. And if he can run the old woman out of the house, maybe they can come through." The boy's death ought to bring the family closer together, at least. The old woman's influence on Elena was bad; and now especially she could work round her. For Philip's sake, Max ought to show the old devil the door. With her cooking and housekeeping she might try, at a time like this, to make herself a power in the house. He must impress the danger of this on Max, who might be inclined to let her stay. "Throw her out, don't give her a chance!" Leventhal exclaimed. If Max came to rely on her, why... And he might, if it freed him, go where he liked and leave Philip in her hands. No, she must be pitched out. He sat awhile at his gloomy corner table, his black eyes giving very little evidence of the gloomy anxiety that filled him. At home he took off his jacket in the vestibule. Through the window, in the clear depth over the wandering brown smoke and the low-lying red of twilight clouds, he saw the evening star. He went through the narrow kitchen into the dining-room, which was empty. Coming back to the front room, he was not immediately aware of Allbee's presence. It was only after he had dropped into a chair beside the window that he discovered him sitting between the desk and the corner, and he cried out fiercely, "What's the big idea!" He shot up and turned on the desk lamp. His hands were shaking. "I was enjoying the evening." "My foot, the evening," Leventhal grumbled. "Drunken bastard!" He was stubbornly silent, after this, determined that Allbee should speak first. The electric clock whirred swiftly. Allbee's head lay on the back of the chair, his large legs were thrown wide apart, their weight supported on his heels. His hands, loose-wristed, were folded on his chest. After some time he moved a little and sighed, "This killing heat, it takes my energy away." "It couldn't be something besides heat that takes it away, could it?" "What-?" "Whisky," Leventhal said. "You're supposed to be looking for work. What have you been doing? Sitting here, drinking? When you came I understood you were going to get something to do and find yourself a room." Allbee brought his head forward. "I don't want to rush into anything," he said beginning to smile. "In any deal--you know that, you must know it by instinct--the worst thing of all is to hurry. Before you make up your mind... if you settle for buttons, peanuts... You have to think things over," he ended with an unsteady, delighted, foolish look of self-congratulation. Was he drunk? Leventhal wondered. "You, a deal," he said contemptuously. "What kind of a deal have you got?" "Oh, I might have. I might have something." "Furthermore, how do you get in and out of here? I locked the door last night. I'm sure I locked it." "I hope you don't mind. There were some keys in the kitchen and one of them fitted." Leventhal scowled. Had Mary forgotten her key? Or was this an extra? "Originally the agent gave us two," he thought, "and the mailbox keys and the key to the locker in the basement. Or were there three house keys?" "I wasn't sure I was coming back," said Allbee. "But as long as there was a possibility of it, I thought it would be more convenient to have a key. I tried to call you at your office yesterday, but you weren't in." "Don't start bothering me at the office," Leventhal said excitedly. "What did you want?" "I wanted to ask your permission about the key, for one thing. And then there was something else that occurred to me, that on an outside chance there was an opening for someone like me at Beard and Company, and I might apply. You're in a position to help me there." "At Beard's?--It didn't just occur to you! I don't believe it." "It did so," Allbee quickly began, but stopped. His large full lips were parted and his loud breathing suggested repressed laughter; he looked at him with comic curiosity. But, seeing him stare back, he started over again, more seriously. "No, it did, it struck me all of a sudden as I was eating breakfast. 'Why shouldn't Leventhal help me get a job at his place?' And it's fair enough, isn't it? I introduced you to Rudiger. We won't count what happened. We'll forget about it. Let's think of it only as a return courtesy. You make an appointment with Mr Beard for me--does he do the hiring over there in person?--and we'll be square." "They don't need anybody." "Let me find that out for myself." "Anyway, they couldn't give you the type of job you want." "But you don't care what kind of job I want. It wouldn't make any difference to you, what," he said grinning. "Whether I became a dish washer or scavenger, or hired myself out as human bait." "No, it wouldn't, that's true," Leventhal replied. "Then why should you worry about the type of work they offer me at your place?" "Didn't I hear you talking about a deal?" said Leventhal. He went to the mantel, fumbled for a cigarette in a jar, and, sitting down, slid his hand across the window sill toward the packet of matches lying in the ash tray. Allbee watched him. "You know, when I see how your mind works, I actually feel sorry for you," he said finally. Leventhal pulled deeply at the cigarette; it stuck to his lips and he plucked it away. "Look, the answer is a straight no. Never mind the discussion. I have plenty of trouble as it is. Skip the discussions." His self-possession was temporary, like a reflection in water that may be wiped out at the first swell. "I understand. You're afraid I'll turn around and do to you what you did to me at Dill's. You think I want to go there and retaliate by getting you fired. But your introduction isn't necessary. I can make trouble for you without it." "Go ahead." "You know I can." "Well, do!" he began to be shaken by the swells. "You think the job is so valuable to me? I can live without it. So do your worst. Hell with it all!" "I took Williston's word about you. He said you were all right, so I made the appointment for you with Rudiger. See? I wasn't suspicious. It's not in my make-up, I'm happy to say. I didn't even know who you were, except from seeing you a few times at his parties." "I feel too low to horse around with you, Allbee. I'm willing to help you out. I told you so already. But as far as having you in the same office where I could see you every day--no! As it is, there are plenty of people over there I don't care to see every day. You'd fit in with them better than I do. I don't have any choice about them. But I do about you. So it's out of the question. No!--and finished. I couldn't stand it." Allbee seemed to be considering something in Leventhal's words that pleased him, for his smile deepened. "Yes," he admitted. "You don't have to have me around. And you're right. I think you really are right. You have a choice. I envy you, Leventhal. Because when it came to the important things in my life, I never had the chance to choose. I didn't want my wife to die. And if I could have chosen, she wouldn't have left me. I didn't choose to be stabbed in the back at Dill's either." "Who! I stabbed you in the back?" Leventhal furiously said, making a fist. "I didn't choose to be fired by Rudiger, do you like that better? Anyway, you're in an independent position and I'm not." He was already falling into that tone of speculative earnestness that Leventhal detested. "Now I believe that luck... there really is such a thing as luck and those who do and don't have it. In the long run, I don't know who's better off. It must make things very unreal to have luck all the time. But it's a blessing, in some things, and especially if it gives you the chance to make a choice. That doesn't come very often, does it? For most people? No, it doesn't. It's hard to accept that, but we have to accept it. We don't choose much. We don't choose to be born, for example, and unless we commit suicide we don't choose the time to die, either. But having a few choices in between makes you seem less of an accident to yourself. It makes you feel your life is necessary. The world's a crowded place, damned if it isn't. It's an overcrowded place. There's room enough for the dead. Even they get buried in layers, I hear. There's room enough for them because they don't want anything. But the living... Do you want anything? Is there anything you want? There are a hundred million others who want that very same damn thing. I don't care whether it's a sandwich or a seat in the subway or what. I don't know exactly how you feel about it, but I'll say, speaking for myself, it's hard to believe that my life is necessary. I guess you wouldn't be familiar with the Catholic catechism where it asks, 'For whom was the world made?' Something along that line. And the answer is, 'For man.' For every man? Yes, for every last mother's son. Every man. Precious to God, if you please, and made for His greater glory and given the whole blessed earth. Like Adam. He called the beasts by their names and they obeyed him. I wish I could do that. Now that's clever. For everybody who repeats 'For man' it means 'For me.' 'The world was created for me, and I am absolutely required, not only now, but forever. And it's all for me, forever.' Does that make sense?" He put the question with an unfinished flourish and Leven-thal