This Old Heart of Mine Page 12

  “I think so.”

  Humbold frowned, looking like a rubber ball being pinched. “That’s not the right comeback. Be positive, defiant, overbearing, never welch. When you are asked ‘You got it?’ answer ‘Better than you!’“

  “Even to you?”

  “Especially to me, bud. Who you think’s paying you?” Humbold found a handkerchief beneath his coat and snapping it at his shoes in the way a towel is used to sting someone’s bare body, cleared them of dust. “O.K.,” he said, “now try it. Got it?”

  Because the boss held the handkerchief as if he would give him a taste of it for failure to comply, Reinhart counterfeited a heavy, sneering insolence that made his stomach curdle, replying: “Better than you, goddammit!” He felt ill and hoped he musn’t have to do this frequently.

  “There’s one thing I won’t stand for,” Humbold asseverated. “And that is a foul mouth. Clean it up, bud, or you’re out of a good opportunity. No taking of the Lord’s name in vain; no friendship towards the King Brothers; no suggestiveness about the fair sex. Just listen to your Dutch Uncle Dudley. Remember you wouldn’t be in this world without your dear old mother. Write to her frequently, boy. Worship your God in your own way, and go to the church of your choice this Sunday. I say so even to a Jew, for in the eyes of the Big Boy upstairs we are all even as children. He’s the greatest bidnissman of them all, bud, and knows a bad property when he eyes one. Don’t forfeit your Big Commission.”

  When Reinhart, more or less sincerely, said: “You know, Claude, you would have made a great preacher,” he saw he had at last pushed the right pedal. Humbold uttered no sound, struck no attitude; rather, his eyes disappeared in true humility, he briefly locked arms with his employe in that old knight’s embrace where each fellow clasps the other’s biceps, and said: “You’ll make a great bidnissman, bud, in time.”

  And there came upon Reinhart in this barren March afternoon a portent of imminent glory, a kind of Star of Bethlehem in whose radiance he saw himself as Henry Ford Reinhart, emperor of the clangorous assembly lines; or Woolworth Reinhart, seated on a mountain of small coins; and finally, John D. Reinhart, withered, digestion ruined, dining on milk and crackers, tipping dimes, his mouth like an empty purse and his purse like a full mouth, not the worst kind of dotage. And for years he had hated business in general and Humbold in particular; we don’t know how the other half lives.

  “Bandits approaching at three o’clock,” warned Humbold, using his left fist as an intercom; his right presumably on the rudder, he banked towards the hut, from which Clendellan emerged with an armload of baby and extra swathings. Another child, of about two and a half feet—Reinhart was no good at computing age—a girl, and malicious of expression, walked alongside her papa clutching the seam of his chinos. Behind this group, carrying nothing, shuffled a little man in the garb and make-up of a silent-movie comedian, baggy of pants, saggy of shirt, unbarbered, with a face white as flour and hair black as night.

  Of course Reinhart knew all along this little Chaplin was a woman and Clendellan’s wife, but it was part of the strategy he was swiftly formulating that he pretend otherwise. He saw in astonishment that the boss had turned on a gross gallantry, bowing with fingers to his gut.

  “Humbold,” Mrs. Clendellan said, a description rather than a greeting.

  Straightening, Humbold imperiously signaled the attendance of Reinhart. “My assistant, to take the kids off your hands.”

  “They’re not on mine. Are you myopic?”

  “No mam,” said the boss. “I speak with all respect.” He appealed mutely to Reinhart and back-pedaled to the side of Clendellan, where the girl fetched him a kick in the shins, which could have done little damage considering her height, but Reinhart saw his pride was wounded and marveled at it.

  Reinhart himself was now unnerved at a situation that had thrown his boss, and was desperately planning to speak in the character agreed upon—he tried to think of something favorable to say about the Soviet Union—when Mrs. Clendellan shook his hand with incredible strength for so small a woman and said: “I’m Alice.”

  “My name is Carlo Reinhart. How do you do, madam.”

  She smiled and slid her grip to his big forearm. “You can drop the feudal designations, Carlo. I’m Alice, and I’ve been a worker in my time, too: the five-and-ten housewares section. What kind of wage does this reactionary pay you?”

  “Oh, a very decent one.” For a moment Reinhart thought he discerned a basically attractive woman disguised somewhere within the little creature kneading his arm, and thought oh what a pity, and there was a catch in his voice.

  Mrs. Clendellan interpreted it otherwise.

  “Strength!” she said, in both sympathy and triumph, and moved her grasp to his upper arm, which was indeed as high as she could reach and it must have been awkward to walk in that manner, for all this while the party was proceeding towards Humbold’s car.

  The word, however, had to the apprentice a certain Fascist connotation; perhaps after all Claude had been correct in his strange assessment of the Clendellans. So Reinhart answered it with: “Through Joy!” and opened the rear door of the automobile. Frankly he didn’t care what they were.

  He struggled briefly with Mrs. C. over who helped whom into the car. At last he won, and she clambered in giving him a view of the back of her slacks, from which no valuable data were gained, for they were too baggy to show the shape of her bottom. When he got in, however, he ascertained that her hip was very firm, for she pressed it against his and otherwise sat close enough to allow for three more passengers, though only one came: the small daughter, with a final kick at Humbold, swarmed like a chimpanzee over the backrest of the front seat and violently embraced Reinhart with all her extremities, sharp little kneecap in his ear, little paws in his nostrils, etc., screaming “I love you, big giant!”

  Now if Reinhart was flattered, he was also embarrassed, not towards the titular head of this clan—for Clendellan’s weak eyes were watery with approval, looking back over the baby’s transparent scalp; it was clear his women were seldom pleased—but towards the boss, whose face he could see through the small fingers passionately clawing at his own.

  Money? Ah no, it wasn’t money which your true businessman lusted after. Reinhart all at once knew this and became a professional in one fell insight. It was love. Humbold looked ghastly, being deprived of it. On the other hand, Reinhart had never liked him more, and wondered if the boss would eventually see that his assistant’s success was also his own.

  For the nonce, anyway, Claude did not. He backed off the mud flat as listless as a grazing water buffalo and droned slowly along the highway hugging the right shoulder so close Reinhart feared he might sever a progression of Burma-Shave verses: IN THIS VALE—OF TOIL AND SIN—YOUR HEAD GROWS BALD—BUT NOT YOUR CHIN.

  Tiny Margaret—for that was her name; she said it again and again as she climbed Reinhart’s chest and sat upon his head, with one foot in the breast pocket of his jacket: “I’m Margaret Clendellan and I love the giant, I’m Margaret,” etc.—little Margaret swung her weight diagonally forward, taking Reinhart’s neck along with it perforce, which brought her to the rear adjacency of Humbold’s fat shoulders, from which it was even for her short arm a simple maneuver to play streetcar conductor with the boss’s earlobe and order: “Make it go!”

  There was no love lost between mother and daughter—at the moment they contested over Reinhart, with Margaret, being spryer, holding the edge; though Mrs. C. had somehow wormed one dirty saddle oxford between his new shoes—but Clendellan’s frau now contributed her heckle to the same cause.

  “Why do you drive so hearselike, Humbold? Surely you must be an honorary sheriff.”

  “Yes mam,” answered naive Claude, making feeble efforts to free his ear, helpless as the infant in Clendellan’s arms, who as a matter of fact was quite self-reliant and had begun to menace Humbold with a blue-and-white rattle, egged on by a proud, no longer cringing dad. “I’m also a big donor to th
e Police Retirement Fund.”

  “An overweight one, anyway,” rejoined Alice Clendellan, making no move towards the wallet, with all his courtesy cards dangling like an open concertina, which Humbold had pushed over the backrest while steering with one hand. To save the boss’s face, Reinhart thought he might take it, but was outmoved by little Margaret, who tore the celluloid insert from the billfold and swiftly destroyed its contents.

  For Reinhart it was a further insight into the character of both Humbold and business in general to see that when the damage was discovered the boss brightened—the point was, he at last had got a response he could understand—and he actually gave his Stonewall Jackson hat to Margaret, suggesting she tear it to shreds. Some of the old lilt returned to his voice, and he speeded up to forty.

  But as anybody could have told him, sanctioned destruction is not the same thing at all. Margaret not only declined; she replaced the hat upon his head and waged no further aggression against him.

  Well, so it went all afternoon: the family just couldn’t resist Reinhart and just couldn’t stand Humbold. Claude continued to wilt until he seemed to have changed roles with Clendellan. By the time they stopped at the third house, the latter had got so far as to punch Humbold in the back and say: “I don’t think we’ll even bother to get out for this turkey.”

  The irony was that the houses looked to Reinhart like very good buys. He had assumed Humbold would try to do the Clendellans dirty, but no: the first two had been sound bungalows on Presbyterian streets. This one, a block from the northeastern corner of the town line, was old brick shaded by elms; its back yard after fifty feet became an apple orchard; and instead of your modern type of garage, with its vile bleakness, here stood a little green shed which would conceal a car without looking as if it did. Yet this was what Clendellan termed a turkey and declined to consider.

  Reinhart believed everybody present save himself was fighting some kind of war which had nought to do with buying or selling a house. He understood the justice of Humbold’s preparatory comments. The only trouble was that even so the boss had lost every engagement; and he certainly couldn’t be happy about an assistant who had won them to no purpose. Reinhart therefore contrived an excellent, if he did say so himself, intrigue. On the taxi ride with the Maker, he had noticed, in the southern district where the Slav kept his junk, a real abomination: a kind of junior tenement of four stories, absurdly distant from the town center for a multiple dwelling, built purposely as a slum, with garbage cans for a yard and a miniature Gobi as a park, where degenerates molested children, children tortured cats, and the latter ate songbirds, while rodents ran with impunity. The building was occupied by emigrés from Kentucky, who had come north to work in the factories and were, despite their salaries, forever indigent; they were also the very same people Reinhart had seen there ever since he was a boy—apparently they never grew older; he swore the urchin eating dirt from a flowerpot had been his schoolfellow in the third grade.

  Anyway, this horror of a residence wore a sign on which, under an overlay of misspelled references to the reproductive and excretory activities of Homo sapiens, one could read FOR SALE (and ignore the legend some depraved wag had penciled in beneath: my Sister).

  Reinhart’s plan was this: disingenuously to offer the tenement to the Clendellans, by so doing to shock them into a reasonable attitude towards Claude and the decent properties he had been showing all afternoon.

  The best feature was that not even Claude himself understood the scheme. When Reinhart suggested they drive south, the boss pouted. The baby reached over and ran a finger up his spread nose, and its father chuckled idiotically.

  Freeing his air, Claude also liberated some of the spleen which had been building up in him for hours: “That’s a dumb idea, you. Dumb, dumb, dumb.” He abused the driving controls and started up with a thrust that threw Reinhart, Alice, and Margaret together into one amorphous monster with six limbs. Though this far from displeased the girls, they both struggled loose and made their demands, one in tin-whistle coloratura, the other in malignant contralto: they either went where Reinhart said or home.

  Humbold furiously drove right to the tenement, which in addition to its other deficiencies stood upon a dead-end street, where he had the greatest trouble reversing the Gigantic and finally was forced to bull, tanklike, into the curb, crumbling it.

  He punched his hat, and said sardonically: “This is a waste of time, unless you want to buy the Tenderloin.”

  “What’s the Tenderloin?” asked Clendellan.

  But his wife already knew. She leaned across Reinhart’s lap—and he began quickly to think she wasn’t so bad a dish—and counted the windows in the facade of the building, all broken, some masked with cardboard.

  “Something definitely could be made of it,” Alice crooned. A cadaverous woman with Medusa hair stared back at her from the second-floor front. On the eroded entrance steps a small boy plucked at his convex navel, which was bare between pants tops and shirt-end. Leaning from the window, the woman advised him: “Don’t run with them boys if they kick the shit out’n you.” He seemed grateful for the counsel and having drifted along by the trash cans began to break bottles on the sidewalk.

  Now it was no surprise to Reinhart that these people cared for one another, but both the Clendellans were much impressed and pursed their lips, while Claude snorted crudely and revved the engine.

  “Off we go,” he said. “I got to take a shower.”

  Little Margaret shoved past her mother and, hanging from the car with her feet in Reinhart’s face, called to the boy: “I love you, tiny midget!” He replied with a fantastically vivid obscenity for such a small child, who would as yet have only known it as hearsay, absolutely enchanting Margaret, who leaped out and embraced him. He punched at her nose and missed; in no time at all her half-nelson had him grounded.

  “Looks like Maggie’s making a hit,” Clendellan told the infant in his arms, and each bubbled at the other.

  “Humbold, I may as well inform you now,” said Mrs. Clendellan, “if we buy this building it will be on the following terms: Mr. Reinhart will get the commission.”

  Claude laughed hysterically and started to drive off. “Oh no, mam, you wouldn’t joke so mean with me.”

  “Reverse this bison!” she ordered. “Try no Cossack tactic on me!” Clendellan tried to add a word, probably affirmative, but she anyway shouted him down.

  “Mam,” pleaded Humbold, showing a confusion ever ready to become chagrin. “You’re a great little ladder but nobody’d purchase the Tenderloin. The town will condemn it next month and—”

  “And hurl this underdeveloped population into the street?”

  He nodded sadistically. “The owner would unload it maybe for eighteen five, with the rats thrown in. That proves something, being next door to selling it for the nails. The plumbing rusted out in ’43; in every room there’s muck knee-high like after a flood; the Hunky in his junkyard bums rubber continually; the roofs like cheesecloth; no tomcat’s got nerve to enter the cellar where the vermin are big as Shetland ponies; you can’t light a match but what the whole shebang would go up like excelsior soaked in fuel oil. And the neighborhood is type Z zoning; they could build a gas works next door.”

  But before he had finished, the three remaining Clendellans had swarmed from the car and into the tenement, the baby of course willy-nilly though he displayed the greatest interest, babbling merrily.

  “Tell um I refuse to come,” whispered Humbold as he frustrated Reinhart’s apology and pushed him after them.

  Reinhart was determined to apologize to someone, though, feeling responsible for this grotesquerie which had got out of control, but it took him ever so long just to catch up with them, who cut through the building as if it were a cantaloupe. When he did, Alice said with the inevitable bodily contact (under the mask of discretion, for a host of natives stood nearby gawking and scratching): “I think you’ve made yourself a sale!”

  His protest was lost
as they dashed upstairs. In passing, the baby scraped some filth from the banister and smeared it on its dad. With an effort Reinhart could see how they might fit in as tenants if not as landlords, and began to tell himself: Why not, old fellow, ride with the current?

  Clendellan called to Alice, who climbed faster than he: “What does eighteen five mean?”

  “Eighteen thousand, five hundred dollars. You can get it from your family.”

  “Of course that means we’ll have to eat dinner with them.”

  “All right,” said Alice, marching fearlessly into the darkened second-story hallway which smelled of faeces and far worse, “I won’t say a word about Labor just this once.”

  An insolent rat, a street-corner bum of his breed, swaggered out of the abandoned carton that was his poolroom and sneered at her. She clattered a tomato can at him, saying: “Your days are numbered, Chiang Kai-shek.” Losing face, he slunk away.

  Suddenly, when they had reached the end of the black hall, Reinhart conceived an enormous horniness for Alice Clendellan, comparable to that which she had showed for him all afternoon and which if she did buy the tenement was surely her motive. Let’s face it, he may be a walking aphrodisiac to a certain type of woman. The very shapelessness of her clothing now excited him as if he were a Japanese.

  “Wonder where this leads?” he hypocritically asked, having found a doorknob and turned it. “Aha!” he went on, facing a gulf of darkness where nothing could be seen and much smelled, all unpleasantly. As he expected, Alice was intrigued and found him with much groping of his person. It was made all the more exciting by the proximity of Clendellan, who with the baby paced about over broken glass nearby and sneezed from the dust.

  But when Reinhart tried to return the exploration, she eluded him like a dream, and in a moment could be heard going towards the staircase to the third floor, whither he, panting from ardor and ascent, pursued her. Beyond the turn of the landing, they were again alone, and she turned to him, saying lustily: “I haven’t been this excited in years!” He seized her waist, with both hands, muttering similar feelings—it was like going after a naked woman through twisted bedclothes—and shortly was embracing nought but air.