Reinhart in Love Read online

  “They probably will, Dad,” Reinhart said, putting his hand on Dad’s old wool shoulder, over the moth holes. “And I do not believe they do—harm, that is…. Anyway, there I was. I don’t mind telling you, right down on rock-bottom, even farther down than I myself realized at the time. Funny how you don’t know how bad it was till later. You know, if we didn’t have either memory or imagination, I guess we would never be in trouble.”

  Dad sat back on his haunches and stared wistfully at the hose.

  “Then,” said Reinhart, giving his father a shoulder-whack, “it all changed. And it was by means of Claude Humbold that it did. And I want to acknowledge how your advice was right from the beginning. I was too dumb to see that last spring when you were trying to get me associated with him. I thought I was too sophisticated for this hick town. I didn’t get the point of normal life.”

  “Carlo, if you could just reach me the hose, I’d do the rest. There’s some mud on this bumper still.”

  “Here you go,” said Reinhart, handing it over as he squatted, dousing his father partially. “Well sir, you were absolutely right, Dad, no question about it.”

  “Carlo, if you don’t mind, I’ll need the sponge too.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry. Here, give us back the hose. I’m supposed to do that. Sorry, Dad.”

  Dad repeated a protest he had made at the outset: “How does it look for an executive to be helping a fat old man clean a dirty old Chevy?”

  The condescension was of course just the feature that attracted Reinhart. He had lately taken to admitting to himself his worst motives for every option—to beat fate to it, as it were, for he was still on uneasy terms with success and feared that the disasters he nowadays missed were piling up somewhere in preparation for a massive sneak attack. Just as when in bad times he asked why he should have all the ill luck, he now wondered why he deserved so much good—this in spite of the fact that he had no religion. There was still much about life that would bear discussion; hence this attempt with Dad, whom he had, naturally, avoided during the time of trouble: no one wants to be humiliated in front of his father. Moreover, Dad was embarrassed by the difficulties of others, perhaps because he overrated everybody. If X then failed, it was an adverse reflection on Dad; maybe it was even worse to be Dad than X, at least so Dad would have you believe. Indeed he was strange, and not just as a father. With friends like Claude Humbold and the Gibbons, with whom he had grown up, he stayed an insurance man.

  And speaking of embarrassments, Reinhart felt very awkward nowadays just to be in the vicinity of an old, economy-priced automobile. Talk all you want about the vulgarity of large, gaudy cars, but Reinhart lived in the United States of America and not, say, in the Orient, where it might be good manners to run a shabby rickshaw, for all he knew; here, there was no getting away from the fact that it lowered your tone to drive a seedy heap, notwithstanding your spiritual worth.

  “Aw,” said Reinhart, “don’t talk like that, Dad. You’re not …” But he really was old and fat and the car was dirty and outmoded; and it made sense to take another approach: “Why don’t you let me see what kind of deal I can get you on that convertible you told me about the night I got home from the Army?” He squeezed a dirty torrent from the sponge—queer marine creature whose skeleton ended up in this role—and smeared the mud off the bumper.

  “Convertible?” asked Dad in an awe-filled whimper, as if he might be ran down by one.

  “Well, maybe that is a bit wild,” Reinhart hastily admitted, making an accompanying motion with the hand that held the hose: again Dad got it, though again only the periphery of the main gush.

  “Carlo,” said Dad, shaking droplets off his arms, “in your opinion, wouldn’t it be advisable to finish off with a bucket? I believe we waste a lot of water this way, and not to mention the expense, there is this drought you read about in the papers.”

  “O.K.,” Reinhart said brightly. “I can just shut it off here by putting my thumb over the end, until we are ready to go around to the spiggot. No wasted motion, eh Dad? That’s something you learn in my job.” After a moment, he learned something here, too: that if you plug even a weak dribble, it is no great time before the pressure has got very strong indeed. Yet he had a muscular thumb, and hung on.

  “Carlo,” said Dad, “I wanted to ask you how the sewer is coming.” A dead leaf suddenly tumbled down through the air and settled in the groove of his hat, stem down, resembling a feather; he suggested a retired Indian scout. “It must be nice, associating with the Honorable Bob J. Gibbon, who is a fine statesman, and that nice coon boy, who is a credit to his race, as I always say—you know how they always mention that on the radio about Joe Louis. No doubt he has the makings of a second George Washington Carter, who rose from slave to … well, I don’t recall exactly what it was he rose to, but you can look it up in the Reader’s Digest.”

  “Car-ver, I believe it is, Dad.” Reinhart said this through clenched teeth, so hard was it to retain the hose; his thumb felt big as an orange.

  “Oh,” said Dad, “you know of him. Then you get my point. Honest as the day is long. One time it rained on a book he borrowed from the library. Wasn’t his fault, he stuck it up among the rafters in the attic of the log cabin where he lived as a boy with his old mammy. Well, the shingles were rotted there and let in the rain. Well, he felt it was his responsibility to pay for that book, and he did, by doing manual labor for months.”

  “Wasn’t that Abe Lincoln?” asked Reinhart. Suddenly there was no more force against his hold; apparently the water had at last learned who was boss and retreated back into the pipes. Or Maw had turned it off. Anyway, a great red ring was incised in the ball of his thumb.

  “I never enjoyed your educational advantages,” Dad admitted, half sitting on a fender, “but I think those stories are swell. Somebody to look up to—that’s what the big fellows provide for us little guys. Imagine that, walking four miles through the snow in leaky shoes—or was that another story? Anyhow, that illustrates why Granpa was glad he came here and stopped being a German.”

  Not a drop coming through the hose now, so Reinhart let it fall. “I don’t believe,” he offered, “I ever told you of my curious experiences in Germany.” Dad looked at sea, so he clarified: “The war.”

  “Ah,” said Dad sympathetically, “that’s O.K., Carlo. I’ll never ask, you can rely on it.”

  “Anyway, Dad,” Reinhart said, “the point is, I haven’t done as badly as I might have, in the prewar era.” By standing near the windows of the automobile he could make an image therein that was not unflattering: blue-serge suit that he had not deigned to remove for the present chore, white collar, striped tie, clean handkerchief in breast pocket. He had jazzier costumes, but not for a Sunday visit to his folks. He honored the memory of his late penury and lifelong parsimoniousness by continuing to wear Army-issue underwear; otherwise he was all new as to clothes, and all items were charged to his account at Gents’ Walk, where the chief executive of Cosmopolitan Sewers, Ltd., had unlimited credit.

  “You know there’s a one and only thing that will take your tar off a hubcap,” Dad stated, sitting on his heels and fingering a bit of the former on the right front latter. “And that is carbon tetrachloride. Yes sir, you can’t sell me a substitute.”

  “Do you mind my saying something?” asked Reinhart, a certain agony in his smile, which Dad however would not see. “Half a year ago, all you could talk of was Claude Humbold. Now when I want to, you won’t.” He took a cigarette holder from his pocket and put a Pall Mall into it. Nowadays he smoked a good deal; he was also working again towards the portly—it being impossible for an executive to maintain a Calvinist face towards food and tobacco; yes, and drink as well, which may have contributed to his color: several times he had been asked whence a sunburn in autumn. He strolled to and fro upon the oily grass within the parallel concrete strips of the driveway, hands linked across the sacroiliac, cutting a figure for the benefit of the neighbors, who, according to Maw’s ol
d testimony, always had offspring who did better.

  When he looked up from his shoes, off which the grass was whipping the shine, Dad had vanished. But moving swiftly, Reinhart cornered him in the garage, near where the garden hose was looped for the winter.

  He repeated the statement. Dad feinted left and went right, through the side door into the back yard, where he tipped the dirty water from the birdbath, saying: “A early freeze would of split it wide open.”

  “Dad, do you mind?” asked Reinhart. “As a matter of fact, I have always wondered why it’s so hard to talk to you.”

  “Looky there.” Dad pointed to the bottom of the garden, where his lawnmower stood against the only tree—matter of fact, a maple to which Reinhart was in the relation of parent to child; he had brought it home from school years ago one Arbor Day, as no more than a twig with roots like hair. It grew now in a vigorous sort of young-manhood; though at the moment, as a step towards going bald for the winter, its leaves had turned yellow, in some cases tinged with a red of the same hue as the dominant tone in Reinhart’s new complexion.

  “The tree?” asked Reinhart. “Yeah, hasn’t it grown well!”

  “No, my lawnmower,” said Dad. “The darn Whipple boy didn’t put it away the last time he cut the grass. And that was last…” He was gone again. Ah, there he went, down the stairway to the outside basement door. Though breathless, Reinhart plunged after him.

  “Time for storm windas again, Carlo. Got to replace the old putty, paint the sash, and clean the panes with Windex and Scott towels; you’ll get streaks with anything else. Izzat what you use? Say, you know I’m still wet from that hosing down you let me have, and will get pneumonia if I don’t change.” He hung his hat on a rafter-nail and would have taken the steps to the first floor had not his son denied him access to them.

  “Jig’s up, Dad. Afraid I must insist.”

  “On what?” asked Dad. “What jig? The one you work with?” Behind his pale eyes lay no discernible guile. He could have used a hair-trim over his ear on each side. On his upper lip was a small razor cut, very minor, but he was conscious of it and did not smile as wide as usual, when he smiled. Right now he was neither amused nor grave, just blank, and nobody could be as blank as Dad.

  “Humbold, Dad. The sewer project, Dad. There’s something you don’t like about it.”

  “Oh.” Dad first satisfied himself that all escape routes were blocked, then looked straight ahead, which for him was on the level of his son’s necktie-knot. “Well,” he said at last, “isn’t it crooked?”

  “Ill straighten it when I get to a mirror,” said Reinhart. “Wait a minute—you mean the project?” As always, it made him uneasy to loom so high above his father, and he slumped against a metal pillar that had a built-in jack to raise a sag in the floor above. “Why, sure,” he lightly admitted, “aren’t they always? … What?”

  Dad had mumbled something. Now he repeated it audibly: “You aren’t even building a sewer.”

  “They’re your friends who are in back of it,” Reinhart said. “That’s the way your town has always been run. I am a citizen of the world.” Then he responded to what Dad had said: “Sure we’re building a sewer. Haven’t you seen the crew with the steam shovel and concrete mixer down by West Creek? The crooked part is that the Gibbons engineered the contract award so it would go to our company, which they and Claude secretly own. Splendor and I are just front men. They think I don’t understand this—Claude and the Gibbons, that is, and had us sign some phony papers as corporation officers. … I don’t know if I ever told you, Dad, but there are a lot of people who think I’m dumb. This is because of my light complexion, I believe. If you have blond hair and blue eyes, and in addition are big—well, you’ll find a number of people who will doubt you have much upstairs.

  “But I have found out how to use this, see: let ‘em think what they want, while all the while quietly going your own way.” He brought his eyes out of the slits he had affected to dramatize the point. The coldness of the metal pillar had worked through his jacket tail and trousers seat and chilled one ham. “So in regard to this sewer business. It has given a job to Splendor who, having had certain misfortunes, needed it. You should see what it’s done for him: he’s stopped thinking of himself as a Negro every minute of the day.” He lowered his voice so that it might not be heard through the floor above. “And it brought me back my wife, and I’m going to be a Dad myself in December.”

  “But,” Dad said stubbornly, looking at Reinhart’s Adam’s apple, “no sewer is getting built.”

  “Why do you keep saying that? Go down to West Creek and look at the concrete mixer.”

  “I have,” said his old man, “and got a stick and lifted the cover of that manhole they poured cement for last week, and there isn’t any sewer underneath it, just earth.”

  “There isn’t?” asked Reinhart, shifting against the pillar. “Odd…. Well, there must be an explanation. I can’t imagine a whole crew of men whose profession it is to dig sewers, not digging one; it doesn’t make sense. For such men it would be harder, I think, not to dig than to dig. And why wouldn’t they dig, since that’s what they are being paid to do?” He stamped his feet, the basement being cold as a tomb. “From what you have indicated, I should say that the men in question are concrete-pourers, exclusively. They proceed along the line where the sewer is to go, setting in a manhole every so many feet. Then, later, along come the sewer people underneath, boring out the main and running up the manhole connections at the appropriate place. That would be somewhat similar to the way sandhogs build things like the Lincoln Tunnel in New York—one crew starts boring from the New Jersey side, and one from the Manhattan Island side, and they meet in midstream. Incidentally, seldom are they more than a few inches off, owing to the modern systems of measurement, etcetera. You can look that up in the Reader’s Digest, or maybe it was Life.”

  Dad looked remarkably sympathetic throughout the explanation, and now nodded enthusiastically. “Sure, I’ve seen that in the news-reels. Big, sweaty fellows wearing dirty undershirts and tin helmets. They always shake hands with the other side when they break through, and grin at the camera.”

  From this reaction Reinhart took courage to accept his own theory, which had been rather desperately formulated: he could not bear to have his father believe that he was out of control, or that he was crooked, for that matter. He understood for the first time that when he had become a man, the exterior representative of his conscience had changed from Maw to Dad, and he breathed easier. Foolishly, for however successful the sandhog example, it was soon exhausted, and Dad obstinately returned to the issue.

  “The only thing is,” said he, still squeezing his sweater in the damp places—he hadn’t forgotten that, either—“I been along the whole route of the sewer and haven’t found one place where they started to dig.”

  Reinhart impatiently expelled his breath. “What are you snooping around for, anyway, Dad? I thought your business was insurance.”

  “Why,” his father answered, taking no offense, “I’m a taxpayer.”

  A sacred word, and Reinhart pulled in his horns. A taxpayer had even more rights than a veteran, standing in relation to the latter as the Lord to Jesus, and of course properly there should be no clash between the two: the fellow who paid for it and he who defended it. The Gibbons regularly invited the public to attend council meetings and inspect the jailhouse; the sewer could hardly be exempt if the citizenry footed the bill.

  So Reinhart smiled tremulously at his progenitor and said: “They do that later, as I pointed out; they first situate all the manholes, then the diggers come along. All very simple, Dad, when you’re in a position of responsibility.” He relied on Dad to take the hint when it was put with so much regard for his feelings, and Dad did, throwing his head back to sneeze and then lowering it to follow his son upstairs.

  Genevieve, so to speak twice as big as life, sat upon the living-room sofa listening to Maw. She had returned to Reinhart three mon
ths before, and was now in her high time with a great swell beneath her maternity smock that would have impeded her running away again. Nevertheless he always felt some anxiety when out of her presence; and when in it, kept close company so as not only to block any flight by force if necessary, but also to anticipate and dispose of the circumstances in reaction to which she might wish to flee. He had become far more subtle a husband than he once had been. For example, he delegated to her many of the duties he used to perform himself—some of them, such as taking out the garbage, even demeaning. He knew pain as he watched her bend with difficulty to extract the paper bag from the kitchen step-on can and carry it to the back porch, worry the lid off the big galvanized container, and drop in the parcel before the liquid from the wastes had caused it to disintegrate. Sometimes she didn’t quite make it, and orange rinds, eggshells, and veal-cutlet leavings were scattered wide. Nor would this stir her husband to report with the mop; he had sworn never again to usurp her functions, notwithstanding the gritting of his teeth, which sometimes worked independently of his resolutions; when you truly loved someone, you had the strength to let them clean up their own messes.

  Not, certainly, that Gen found her chores pleasing, but like all women she had an instinct for reality, and he at last had come to understand it, which in turn gained him her respect. These interlocking arrangements were what marriage consisted of, being but translations into other areas of existence of the basic connection of the genitalia which your amateur supposes is all.

  Anyway, there sat Gen, as it were a giant Easter egg in her lap and noncomment on her face, while Maw talked from across the room—from as far across as possible, as it happened, from a chair in the corner beyond the cabinet radio. They had never been close, these two, and perhaps never would be. But they seldom met, so it was no issue.