This Old Heart of Mine Read online

  “Sorry I flew off the handle,” said Reinhart.

  “Do you mind moving your big arsch off my hope chest?” asked his mother. “The last time you sat on it—which was in February 1941 when you hitchhiked home from college having three days between exams and then decided our home wasn’t good enough for you to study in and went back to that broom closet the authorities swindled you into taking as a room, for which your poor father had to pay through the nose—waiting for me to darn a blue-and-red Argyle wool sock that cost one dollar fifty per pair just that past Christmas time, when cotton at sixty-five cents is good enough for the other boys, while you sat on that hope chest you sprang the lid and it took me years to pry it open, for long as I remember you been disgustingly overweight.”

  “That’s all true enough,” said Reinhart, rising. “Except I was never fat before six months ago. However, what I want to say is only: I think I ought to have my own room again. I feel like a punk sleeping in the living room, and it is beneath my station to do so when I am a returned veteran and after all had a room to myself since I was five. Therefore—”

  “Silence!” thundered Maw. “If you were half the man our roomer Emmet Swain is, you’d of got a defense job and made the shekels rather than running off to the Army like a sneak. Emmet Swain leaves here over my dead body.”

  A shattering howl issued from the pupa that was Dad, who had heard imperfectly. “Emmet bread, Carlo rind, you and me fast frying…”

  Maw called time out to her spleen and shouted into his muffler: “George no! Emmet has never passed on. It was a figure of speech on my part referring to what will happen to me, me, me if your son keeps tormenting, who by the way I wish you would stop saying he’s blind. He sees his way clear enough to the grub, for that is his sole feeling in all the world.”

  “Therefore,” Reinhart continued, with the aplomb of his friend the toad, “I have decided to make a room for myself out of your laundry, have already in fact moved some things of mine in, and am now on my way to call the plumber, who will install new water outlets for the wash machine in the northwest corner of the basement, and I will pay him from my own funds. I must request that from now on if you have any business in the cellar, you conduct it quietly, for I have under consideration the proposition of an influential friend, which I must study in peace. Naturally, I shall give you a fair rent—say ten dollars a week—and if this idea goes through, who knows? I may require an address of my own.”

  Dad’s eyeballs swiftly rolled up to the white and the lids slowly descended as he fainted dead away. Maw put her nose into a Kleenex and stertorously breathed, her wide forehead so shiny Carlo could have seen his reflection there, a face within a face that was already his.

  Dry-crying—she had never his life long produced tears, just as she had never laughed in amusement, yet her life was pure emotion—Maw stretched forth an arm that would not have reached him had he been in range, for it was meant to demonstrate the ultimately empty hands of parents.

  “Boy,” she cried. “Not that, boy, oh not that. We don’t want rent. Just stay by me, now you’ve long last come home from far away. Have the warshing room, if you will, or expel Emmet Swain if you must. Just don’t forsake your old mother or you’ll break her heart.”

  Now the strange thing was, in the degree to which Reinhart believed this plea to be hypocrisy he was sincerely moved by it, because behind false feeling it stands to reason somewhere there exists authentic. It was a great sorrow and difficulty to him that human beings cannot regularly be candid with one another especially in matters of love. On the other hand, he could recognize the delight which deviousness made possible by affording suspense. His personal folly was that he liked almost everybody; this temper allowed nothing for the next person to work against; he could neither be won nor lost, like the last noodle which eludes the fork but remains glued to the plate. Though true, he was a clump of resentments, all of them were very shallow-rooted, waiting to be instantly eradicated by a kind word. He could not explain his weak character on the basis of either of his parents’.

  “Well?” said Maw, getting fierce again as he stood there to all appearances vacantly studying the inverted bowl of the ceiling light fixture, a cemetery of flies.

  “Shame on you, Maw,” he answered, “for equating money with feeling. Sure I’ll stay and sure I’ll pay rent. But right now I’m going to make you some toast and a soft-boiled egg.”

  “You just boil it long enough, brother. If the white comes all snotty, I’ll throw it at you.”

  Before he escaped to the kitchen, Dad revived and ordered: “Campbell’s chicken-and-rice soup, Carlo, and three crackers with butter. A cup of tea if you don’t mind. And maybe an extra piece of toast for me and you might smear some marmalade on it. I might also try one of your eggs, but poached. No, make it two and please put them on that piece of toast and make another if you will for the marmalade. Also a glass of milk, chocolate milk, stir in a little Hershey’s syrup—excuse me, malted milk, rather, if there’s some Horlick’s around, and beat a raw egg in it—”

  “And don’t,” added Maw, “stir it with your finger and then lick it. I know you won’t do my egg right and can just see it swimming in goo like the eye of a cow. No thank you, I’ll just have a cut of that cold roast beef, and not too thin, either, and one of those baked potatoes you’ll find wrapped in wax paper in the back of the fridge. Alongside I’ll have a dill pickle, and you slice me a tomato and a bit of onion and splash on a little Thousand Island—”

  “Got to get the phone,” interrupted Reinhart, for its bell was tolling in annunciation of money, power, and beauty at the far end of the line, and he knew it rang for him.

  Indeed it did. A throaty female voice asked his name and gasped in ardor. “Mr. Reinhart, oh!”

  Which was consistent: a rich man would have his secretary call. There was a rustle as if she were removing her clothes.

  “Mr. Reinhart, my name is Constance Fluellen, and I’m positively mad to meet you. Yes. I am building you in front of me on the basis of your virile voice. Have you time for me or do I go forlorn?”

  “Oh don’t go,” cried Reinhart through constricted passages.

  “You want me?”

  “I do, I do!”

  “Sight unseen? But I am forty-nine, myopic, and portly.”

  “Please don’t joke.”

  “Teehee, well then. Sure? Dear, you must act now,” said Constance, whose velvet murmur had begun subtly to recede. It came closer again. “Say ‘I will.’”

  “I will.”

  “I will buy.’”

  “I will buy.”

  “‘A set of the Cyclopedia Rusticana.’”

  “I’ll be damned!” said Reinhart.

  “Don’t swear at me!” Constance ordered, suddenly acid, and a man’s voice whispered Give me that phone you horse’s ass and came on with maniacal vigor.

  “Congrats, sir! King-size vol one reaches you in Friday’s mail. Three cheers for joining the march on ignorance. You can pay your hundred eighty-five ninety-nine in easy daily payments. We are delirious to have your pledge.” The last was nasty with threat.

  “I’m reporting this call to the FBI,” said Reinhart dully. The line went dead as his heart, and he walked into the kitchen and began to break eggs.

  Chapter 6

  Reinhart got all moved into the laundry, where it was hardly as comfortable as he had imagined, being very damp. No matter how many blankets he used, the scene of every dream was the floor of some Norwegian fiord, on which he lay naked and paralyzed; and until noon of each day he went about trembling to the core, as if an ice cube were lodged in his stern tubes.

  Dad got worse while Maw flourished; both stayed in bed and had many wants, particularly in the direction of food. Twice a day Reinhart fetched comestibles from the grocery; in between he cooked: custards and consommé for Dad, but Maw’s requirements were heartier, robust meats cooked to a cinder and boiled potatoes taken only with a bit of salt, and cake or pie to f
ollow. Yet she stayed sinewy, while Dad grew plumper and Reinhart worried about him: Dad had loosed his engagement with the animal cycle and was preparing for hibernation at the wrong season; outdoors, spring crept surely into every vital passage, the toad now jumped five-eighths inch when goosed, a soviet of ants instituted a splendid new penal colony beneath the hydrangea bush, and the bush itself seemed to be in labor.

  On one of Doc Perse’s visits, Reinhart waylaid him and communicated his concern.

  “Fortunately,” said the doctor, beadily inventorying the living room as if it were to become his after he buried his patients, “your father’s case is simple. In three words: he is dying.” Jerking at his mustache, he dashed out the front door and sped away in his gasping Ford.

  Reinhart spent a fearful day and night wondering how to make Dad quickly understand he loved him, notwithstanding the foregoing years that may have given the other impression. Along towards dawn, down in his room, at the little card table under the bare ceiling bulb, he began to write him a note, and for “Dear Dad” inadvertently wrote “Dead Dad.” He scratched his cheek in agony, tearing out a bloody furrow, and had to go up to the bathroom, get the styptic pencil, and inscribe a false scab. Naturally he had trouble at the cabinet and made a clatter that awakened Maw, who had instantly to come throw up. While she was occupied he stole into the dark bedroom. Not hearing his father’s breath, in panic he groped for Dad’s face on the pillow. The forehead felt waxen. He traced the large nose and found the nostrils, which were quite still and cold. God!

  Suddenly, Dad’s voice, stronger than usual, vibrated through his hand: “Do you mind taking your fingers out from my nose, whoever you are? Take my money but give me my life.”

  No sooner had Reinhart withdrawn than he received a ferocious blow to the face that sent him reeling against the dresser. Dad, out of bed, dealt him several more; old, fat, dying, his pop was strong as a rhino. He had Rinehart floored now, sat on his chest, and beat him about the noggin. For all his phantom fears, Dad showed lion courage in what he supposed to be the extremity. Swelling with relief and with contusions from his old man’s blows, Reinhart at last managed to make himself known.

  Meanwhile Maw had returned and snorting “What a time to wrestle, you jerks,” plunged into sleep.

  “Carlo,” Dad acknowledged. “Oh my, I must have had a nightmare. I thought an unknown assolvent had come to slay me, hahaha. Imagine what a brute like you would do to old pooped-out me.” And Carlo, whom he had just been beating the piss out of, had almost to carry him back to bed.

  “Dad, I just came to see if you were O.K.,” he chided, adjusting the blankets.

  “Thank you kindly,” said his father. “Easy there, not so tight around the neck.”

  Next day Reinhart related the incident to Perse as a confutation of the doctor’s diagnosis.

  “Naturally, Gordon, any fool knows a man begins to die the day he’s born,” said Doc, getting after a profound itch under his vest, which set his watch chain and its ornaments a-jiggle. “So you see a baby crying and say ‘Poor thing, his days are numbered,’ and you’re right, as you would be if he was even laughing. That is Nature’s Law, red in tooth and claw. Bad diet only brings it on quicker. How-somever, there are at least two times when a man knows this about himself: pooberty and another crisis called climat-eric, not as marked as in the woman but indisputably occurring when the individual knows himself as eventually a goner. He may feel this as soon as the early fifties and then live another fifty. Blurt!” Doc coughed dry, yet wiped his mouth on a tweed lapel. “Or somebody who doesn’t feel it might go out like a candle in a tornado: a young boy like yourself, who looks habitually so peaked.” He coughed again and averted his bleary eyes. “I want to say a word to you about self-abuse, John: it can make you weak-minded.” He picked up his bag, which had a hole in the corner and was leaking tongue-depressors, and loped to his patients’ room.

  Now Reinhart, with his overdeveloped sympathies, felt at once both worse and better about Dad, having apparently suffered a climacteric recently himself, with no immediate signs of coming out of it. Now that there was hope, why couldn’t he once do something for the old man? The something was of course nothing other than applying to Claude Humbold for that job, which, gritting his teeth, he could probably survive in till June and the beginning of the summer term at the university. He had to trust that Dad would understand the sacrifice being made for him. He also believed it might do him, Reinhart, good by doing him bad, which was a principle he had worked out some time before and told to a friend in Germany on the night they got into a certain trouble resulting in the death of two men, including the friend, and his own psychoneurotic difficulties. It had taken him until this moment to really get well, which he did now at once when he realized—as how few people do! hence the widespread disaffection—that the mere formulation of a principle has absolutely no effect on existence in re; which, for example, is why you’ll look forever to find a good Christian.

  He went to the phone book, found the realtor’s number, dialed it, and soon heard a competent female voice in his ear. He asked for his enemy and was icily resisted, the secretary being one of those persons who confuse intermediary with principal positions. He had to invent a house he wished to buy; even then, in ignorance he put the price too low: five thousand dollars, what he recalled his parents had paid for their bungalow years ago; one forgot that inflation grew by leaps and bounders like Humbold.

  “Five?” sneered the secretary. “Say, who is this? All our listings are in restricted neighborhoods—”

  To his own delighted surprise, Reinhart heard himself answer harshly: “Madam, I suggest you let me talk to someone in authority. I am Conrad Fluellen, regional director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation and I said twenty-five.”

  Soon a man who must have been Humbold came upon the wire, though Reinhart hardly recognized the voice, so wheedling had it gone. He decided he had begun on the wrong foot, and quietly hung up. He would report personally to the office.

  The least he could do was travel in dignity. He phoned for a taxi—in an impulse of Bohemianism, the Negro one. When at length it appeared—an aged Chrysler with a yellow roof and body of asymmetrical checkers, belching blue smoke and making odd groans at the tailpipe—in the driver’s seat sat none other than the Maker. He wore semi-official cab clothes: cap with a sweatband of wicker, his jacket had epaulets and the pocket was compartmented for pencils; but Reinhart knew him well enough. The reverse, however, was not true: see one Caucasian, see them all.

  The Maker hopped out and opened the rear door, which was more than a white taximan would have, but then he proceeded to do another peculiar thing: cheat on the distance by taking the longest way, up around the end of the suburbs, where a sallow woman scratched the start of a garden; down to the other extremity, where some Slav with an enormous family all boys sold waste paper and rusty iron; then plunged to the eastern limits and its railroad of abandoned boxcars.

  Now Reinhart never said a word until they finally stopped before the mock fieldstone exterior of Humbold’s one-story office at the edge of the business district. Over the years he had never learned how to remonstrate with a malefactor face to face; between his indignation and its expression always rose the specter of his own corrupt person; he feared damaging countercharges.

  Thus now he could only say with veiled sarcasm: “Thanks for the tour.”

  The Maker answered: “We aim to please.” He left the taxi, slipped between its forward bumper and the rear one of a bloated auto parked ahead, probably Humbold’s, and opened Reinhart’s door. He announced the fare as thirty-five cents. It slowly became apparent to Reinhart, who tipped him the remainder of a half-dollar, that the Maker’s cab like all suburban taxis went by zone charges rather than meters. The ride had cost him under five cents a mile, and he just wished he had been intelligent enough to enjoy it.

  To boot, the Maker returned the tip, explaining that he was owner-driver, not wage-slave, and Reinha
rt thanked him, and the Maker rejoined “Yours truly,” and drove away.

  Expecting the resistance of a compressed-air device, Reinhart thrust too hard against the glass door to the office. It swept back, hit some hidden elastic stop, and came forward with great velocity. Was he struck? No, deft fellow, he performed a neat evasion, but the door’s wind raised the papers from the secretary’s desk and whirled them to the floor.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” he said, secretly resentful. Since the inconvenience must occur repeatedly, he supposed it was artfully arranged to happen, to put the caller at an immediate disadvantage. On the other hand, he was thrilled he understood it, that within his first moment on the premises he had divined one of the subtleties of modern business.

  “Not at all,” the secretary answered malignantly. “You’re not sorry at all. Neither are you really the regional director of the FBI.” She was actually as young as he, but in her clothing and make-up pretended not to be, wearing the tight under-armor and pungent perfume of a middle-aged woman simulating youth, as well as conspicuous junk jewelry. She stared so caustically at Reinhart as he crept about fetching papers that he believed his fly must be open. Coughing as a cover, he checked it, and it wasn’t; but he regretted not having bought a new suit, for at his right hip was a considerable moth hole through which protruded a corner of his olive-drab drawers.

  “You don’t want to do anything for us,” the secretary charged. “You want us to do something for you.” She wet on her tongue the end of a purple-taloned finger and pressed it upon her glossy knee.

  “Got a runner?” Reinhart asked sympathetically, trying to ingratiate himself, for he foresaw that working with or near this girl would be abrasive unless he could, metaphorically speaking, refasten her brassiere strap from the tightest to the loosest connection.