مدیریت سایت:

شما می توانید با عضو شدن در انجمن این سایت مطالب مورد نظر خود را آسانتر پیدا کنید و در مشکلاتی هم چون ، بازی ، دانلود ، نصب ، آموزش ، و غیره به شما کمک شود.

مدیریت سایت:

برای دیدن رمان ها نیاز نیست عضو شوید.

مدیریت سایت:

برای دیدن خبر های روز دنیای بازی باید عضو سایت باشید.

THE FOUL BALL

I AM DOOMED to remember a boy with a wrecked voice-not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany. I make no claims to have a life in Christ, or with Christ-and certainly not for Christ, which I've heard some zealots claim. I'm not very sophisticated in my knowledge of the Old Testament, and I've not read the New Testament since my Sunday school days, except for those passages that I hear read aloud to me when I go to church. I'm somewhat more familiar with the passages from the Bible that appear in The Book of Common Prayer; I read my prayer book often, and my Bible only on holy days-the prayer book is so much more orderly.

I've always been a pretty regular churchgoer. I used to be a Congregationalist-I was baptized in the Congregational Church, and after some years of fraternity with Episcopalians (I was confirmed in the Episcopal Church, too), I became rather vague in my religion: in my teens I attended a "non-denominational" church. Then I became an Anglican; the Anglican Church of Canada has been my church-ever since I left the United States, about twenty years ago. Being an Anglican is a lot like being an Episcopalian-so much so that

being an Anglican occasionally impresses upon me the suspicion that I have simply become an Episcopalian again. Anyway, I left the Congregationalists and the Episcopalians-and my country once and for all.

When I die, I shall attempt to be buried in New Hampshire- alongside my mother-but the Anglican Church will perform the necessary service before my body suffers the indignity of trying to be sneaked through U.S. Customs. My selections from the Order for the Burial of the Dead ate entirely conventional and can be found, in the order that I shall have them read-not sung-in The Book of Common Prayer. Almost everyone I know will be familiar with the passages from John, beginning with". . . whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die." And then there's "... in my Father's house are many mansions: If it were not so, I would have told you." And I have always appreciated the frankness expressed in that passage from Timothy, the one that goes ". . .we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out." It will be a by-the-book Anglican service, the kind that would make my former fellow Congregationalists fidget in their pews. I am an Anglican now, and I shall die an Anglican. But I skip a Sunday service now and then; I make no claims to be especially pious; I have a church-rummage faith-the kind that needs patching up every weekend. What faith I have I owe to Owen Meany, a boy I grew up with. It is Owen who made me a believer.

In Sunday school, we developed a form of entertainment based on abusing Owen Meany, who was so small that not only did his feet not touch the floor when he sat in his chair-his knees did not extend to the edge of his seat; therefore, his legs stuck out straight, like the legs of a doll. It was as if Owen Meany had been born without realistic joints.

Owen was so tiny, we loved to pick him up; in truth, we couldn't resist picking him up. We thought it was a miracle: how little he weighed. This was also incongruous because Owen came from a family in the granite business. The Meany Granite Quarry was a big place, the equipment for blasting and cutting the granite slabs was heavy and dangerous-looking; granite itself is such a rough, substantial rock. But the only aura of the granite quarry that clung to Owen was the granular dust, the gray powder that sprang off his clothes whenever we lifted him up. He was the color of a gravestone; light was both

absorbed and reflected by his skin, as with a pearl, so that he appeared translucent at times-especially at his temples, where his blue veins showed through his skin (as though, in addition to his extraordinary size, there were other evidence that he was born too soon).

His vocal cords had not developed fully, or else his voice had been injured by the rock dust of his family's business. Maybe he had larynx damage, or a destroyed trachea; maybe he'd been hit in the throat by a chunk of granite. To be heard at all, Owen had to shout through his nose.

Yet he was dear to us-"a little doll," the girls called him, while he squirmed to get away from them; and from all of us.

I don't remember how our game of lifting Owen began.

This was Christ Church, the Episcopal Church of Graves-end, New Hampshire. Our Sunday school teacher was a strained, unhappy-looking woman named Mrs. Walker. We thought this name suited her because her method of teaching involved a lot of walking out of class. Mrs. Walker would read us an instructive passage from the Bible. She would then ask us to think seriously about what we had heard-"Silently and seriously, that's how I want you to think!" she would say. "I'm going to leave you alone with your thoughts, now," she would tell us ominously-as if our thoughts were capable of driving us over the edge. "I want you to think very hard," Mrs. Walker would say. Then she'd walk out on us. I think she was a smoker, and she couldn't allow herself to smoke in frontofus. "When I come back," she'd say, "we'll talk about it."

By the time she came back, of course, we'd forgotten everything about whatever it was-because as soon as she left the room, we would fool around with a frenzy. Because being alone with our thoughts was no fun, we would pick up Owen Meany and pass him back and forth, overhead. We managed this while remaining seated in our chairs-that was the challenge of the game. Someone-I forget who started it-would get up, seize Owen, sit back down with him, pass him to the next person, who would pass him on, and so forth. The girls were included in this game; some of the girls were the most enthusiastic about it. Everyone could lift up Owen. We were very careful; we never dropped him. His shirt might become a little rumpled. His necktie was so long, Owen tucked it into his trousers-or else it would have hung to his knees-and his necktie often came untucked; sometimes his

change would fall out (in our faces). We always gave him his money back.

If he had his baseball cards with him, they, too, would fall out of his pockets. This made him cross because the cards were alphabetized, or ordered under another system-all the infield-ers together, maybe. We didn't know what the system was, but obviously Owen had a system, because when Mrs. Walker came back to the room-when Owen returned to his chair and we passed his nickels and dimes and his baseball cards back to him-he would sit shuffling through the cards with a grim, silent fury.

He was not a good baseball player, but he did have a very small strike zone and as a consequence he was often used as a pinch hitter-not because he ever hit the ball with any authority (in fact, he was instructed never to swing at the ball), but because he could be relied upon to earn a walk, a base on balls. In Little League games he resented this exploitation and once refused to come to bat unless he was allowed to swing at the pitches. But there was no bat small enough for him to swing that didn't hurl his tiny body after it-that didn't thump him on the back and knock him out of the batter's box and flat upon the ground. So, after the humiliation of swinging at a few pitches, and missing them, and whacking himself off his feet, Owen Meany selected that other humiliation of standing motionless and crouched at home plate while the pitcher aimed the ball at Owen's strike zone-and missed it, almost every time.

Yet Owen loved his baseball cards-and, for some reason, he clearly loved the game of baseball itself, although the game was cruel to him. Opposing pitchers would threaten him. They'd tell him that if he didn't swing at their pitches, they'd hit him with the ball. "Your head's bigger than your strike zone, pal," one pitcher told him. So Owen Meany made his way to first base after being struck by pitches, too.

Once on base, he was a star. No one could run the bases like Owen. If our team could stay at bat long enough, Owen Meany could steal home. He was used as a pinch runner in the late innings, too; pinch runner and pinch hitter Meany-pinch walker Meany, we called him. In the field, he was hopeless. He was afraid of the ball; he shut his eyes when it came anywhere near Mm. And if by some miracle he managed to catch it, he couldn't throw it; his hand was too small to get a

good grip. But he was no ordinary complainer; if he was self-pitying, his voice was so original in its expression of complaint that he managed to make whining lovable.

In Sunday school, when we held Owen up in the air-especially, in the air!-he protested so uniquely. We tortured him, I think, in order to hear his voice; I used to think his voice came from another planet. Now I'm convinced it was a voice not entirely of this world.

"PUT ME DOWN!" he would say in a strangled, emphatic falsetto. "CUT IT OUT! I DON'T WANT TO DO THIS ANYMORE. ENOUGH IS ENOUGH. PUT ME DOWN! YOU ASSHOLES!"

But we just passed him around and around. He grew more fatalistic about it, each time. His body was rigid; he wouldn't struggle. Once we had him in the air, he folded his arms defiantly on his chest; he scowled at the ceiling. Sometimes Owen grabbed hold of his chair the instant Mrs. Walker left the room; he'd cling like a bird to a swing in its cage, but he was easy to dislodge because he was ticklish. A girl named Sukey Swift was especially deft at tickling Owen; instantly, his arms and legs would stick straight out and we'd have him up in the air again.

"NO TICKLING!" he'd say, but the rules to this game were our rules. We never listened to Owen.

Inevitably, Mrs. Walker would return to the room when Owen was in the air. Given the biblical nature of her instructions to us: "to think very hard ..." she might have imagined that by a supreme act of our combined and hardest thoughts we had succeeded in levitating Owen Meany. She might have had the wit to suspect that Owen was reaching toward heaven as a direct result of leaving us alone with our thoughts.

But Mrs. Walker's response was always the same-brutish and unimaginative and incredibly dense. "Owen!" she would snap. ' 'Owen Meany, you get back to your seat! You get down from up there!"

What could Mrs. Walker teach us about the Bible if she was stupid enough to think that Owen Meany had put himself up in the air?

Owen was always dignified about it. He never said, "THEY DID IT! THEY ALWAYS DO IT! THEY PICK ME UP AND LOSE MY MONEY AND MESS UP MY BASEBALL CARDS-AND THEY NEVER PUT ME DOWN WHEN I

ASK THEM TO! WHAT DO YOU THINK, THAT I FLEW WHERE?"

But although Owen would complain to us, he would never complain about us. If he was occasionally capable of being a stoic in the air, he was always a stoic when Mrs. Walker accused him of childish behavior. He would never accuse us. Owen was no rat. As vividly as any number of the stories in the Bible, Owen Meany showed us what a martyr was.

It appeared there were no hard feelings. Although we saved our most ritualized attacks on him for Sunday school, we also lifted him up at other times-more spontaneously. Once someone hooked him by bis collar to a coat tree in the elementary school auditorium; even then, even there, Owen didn't struggle. He dangled silently, and waited for someone to unhook him and put him down. And after gym class, someone hung him in his locker and shut the door. "NOT FUNNY! NOT FUNNY!" he called, and called, until someone must have agreed with him and freed him from the company of his jockstrap-the size of a slingshot.

How could I have known that Owen was a hero?

Let me say at the outset that I was a Wheelwright-that was the family name that counted in our town: the Wheelwrights. And Wheelwrights were not inclined toward sympathy to Meanys. We were a matriarchal family because my grandfather died when he was a young man and left my grandmother to carry on, which she managed rather grandly. I am descended from John Adams on my grandmother's side (her maiden name was Bates, and her family came to America on the Mayflower); yet, in our town, it was my grandfather's name that had the clout, and my grandmother wielded her married name with such a sure sense of self-possession that she might as well have been a Wheelwright and an Adams and a Bates.

Her Christian name was Harriet, but she was Mrs. Wheelwright to almost everyone-certainly to everyone in Owen Meany's family. I think that Grandmother's final vision of anyone named Meany would have been George Meany-the labor man, the cigar smoker. The combination of unions and cigars did not sit well with Harriet Wheelwright. (To my knowledge, George Meany is not related to the Meany family from my town.)

I grew up in Gravesend, New Hampshire; we didn't have

any unions there-a few cigar smokers, but no union men. The town where I was born was purchased from an Indian sagamore in  by the Rev. John Wheelwright, after whom I was named. In New England, the Indian chiefs and higher-ups were called sagamores; although, by the time I was a boy, die only sagamore I knew was a neighbor's dog-a male Labrador retriever named Sagamore (not, I think, for his Indian ancestry but because of his owner's ignorance). Sagamore's owner, our neighbor, Mr. Fish, always told me that his dog was named for a lake where he spent his summers swimming-"when I was a youth," Mr. Fish would say. Poor Mr. Fish: he didn't know that the lake was named after Indian chiefs and higher-ups-and that naming a stupid Labrador retriever "Sagamore" was certain to cause some unholy offense. As you shall see, it did.

But Americans are not great historians, and so, for years-educated by my neighbor-I thought that sagamore was an Indian word for lake. The canine Sagamore was killed by a diaper truck, and I now believe that the gods of those troubled waters of that much-abused lake were responsible. It would be a better story, I think, if Mr. Fish had been killed by the diaper truck-but every study of the gods, of everyone's gods, is a revelation of vengeance toward the innocent. (This is a part of my particular faith that meets with opposition from my Congregationalist and Episcopalian and Anglican friends.)

As for my ancestor John Wheelwright, he landed in Boston in , only two years before he bought our town. He was from Lincolnshire, England-the hamlet of Saleby-and nobody knows why he named our town Gravesend. He had no known contact with the British Gravesend, although that is surely where the name of our town came from. Wheelwright was a Cambridge graduate; he'd played football with Oliver Cromwell-whose estimation of Wheelwright (as a football player) was both worshipful and paranoid. Oliver Cromwell believed that Wheelwright was a vicious, even a dirty player, who had perfected the art of tripping his opponents and then falling on them. Gravesend (the British Gravesend) is in Kent-a fair distance from Wheelwright's stamping ground. Perhaps he had a friend from there-maybe it was a friend who had wanted to make the trip to America with Wheelwright, but who hadn't been able to leave England, or had died on the voyage.

According to Wall's History ofGravesend, N.H., the Rev. John Wheelwright had been a good minister of the English church until he began to "question the authority of certain dogmas''; he became a Puritan, and was thereafter "silenced by the ecclesiastical powers, for nonconformity." I feel that my own religious confusion, and stubbornness, owe much to my ancestor, who suffered not only the criticisms of the English church before he left for the new world; once he arrived, he ran afoul of his fellow Puritans hi Boston. Together with the famous Mrs. Hutchinson, the Rev. Mr. Wheelwright was banished from the Massachusetts Bay Colony for disturbing' 'the civil peace''; in truth, he did nothing more seditious than offer some heterodox opinions regarding the location of the Holy Ghost-but Massachusetts judged him harshly. He was deprived of his weapons; and with his family and several of his bravest adherents, he sailed north from Boston to Great Bay, where he must have passed by two earlier New Hampshire outposts-what was then called Strawbery Banke, at the mouth of the Pascataqua (now Portsmouth), and the settlement in Dover.

Wheelwright followed the Squamscott River out of Great Bay; he went as far as the falls where the freshwater river met the saltwater river. The forest would have been dense then; the Indians would have showed him how good the fishing was. According to Wall's History of Gravesend, there were "tracts of natural meadow" and "marshes bordering upon the tidewater."

The local sagamore's name was Watahantowet; instead of his signature, he made his mark upon the deed in the form of his totem-an armless man. Later, there was some dispute -not very interesting-regarding the Indian deed, and more interesting speculation regarding why Watahantowet's totem was an armless man. Some said it was how it made the sagamore feel to give up all that land-to have his arms cut off-and others pointed out that earlier "marks" made by Watahantowet revealed that the figure, although armless, held a feather in his mouth; this was said to indicate the sagamore's frustration at being unable to write. But in several other versions of the totem ascribed to Watahantowet, the figure has a tomahawk in its mouth and looks completely crazy-or else, he is making a gesture toward peace: no arms, tomahawk in mouth; together, perhaps, they are meant to signify that Watahantowet does not fight. As for the settlement of the disputed deed, you can be sure the Indians were

The Foid Ball

not the beneficiaries of the resolution to that difference of opinion.

And later still, our town fell under Massachusetts authority -which may, to this day, explain why residents of Gravesend detest people from Massachusetts. Mr. Wheelwright would move to Maine. He was eighty when he spoke at Harvard, seeking contributions to rebuild a part of the college destroyed by a fire-demonstrating that he bore the citizens of Massachusetts less of a grudge than anyone else from Gravesend would bear them. Wheelwright died in Salisbury, Massachusetts, where he was the spiritual leader of the church, when he was almost ninety.

But listen to the names of Gravesend's founding fathers: you will not hear a Meany among them.

Barlow

Blackwell

Cole

Copeland

Crawley

Dearborn

Hilton

Hutchinson

Littleneld

Read

Rishworth

Smart

Smith

Walker

Wardell

Wentworth

Wheelwright

I doubt it's because she was a Wheelwright that my mother never gave up her maiden name; I think my mother's pride was independent of her Wheelwright ancestry, and that she would have kept her maiden name if she'd been born a Meany. And I never suffered in those years that I had her name; I was little Johnny Wheelwright, father unknown, and-at the time-that was okay with me. I never complained. One day, I always thought, she would tell me about it-when I was old enough to know the story. It was, apparently, the kind of story you had to be "old enough" to hear. It wasn't until she died-without a word to me concerning who my father was-that I felt I'd

 

been cheated out of information I had a right to know; it was only after her death that I felt the slightest anger toward her. Even if my father's identity and his story were painful to my mother-even if their relationship had been so sordid that any revelation of it would shed a continuous, unfavorable light upon both my parents-wasn't my mother being selfish not to tell me anything about my father?

Of course, as Owen Meany pointed out to me, I was only eleven when she died, and my mother was only thirty; she probably thought she had a lot of time left to tell me the story. She didn't know she was going to die, as Owen Meany put it.

Owen and I were throwing rocks in the Squamscott, the saltwater river, the tidal river-or, rather, / was throwing rocks in the river; Owen's rocks were landing in the mud flats because the tide was out and the water was too far away for Owen Meany's little, weak arm. Our throwing had disturbed the herring gulls who'd been pecking in the mud, and the gulls had moved into the marsh grass on the opposite shore of the Squamscott.

It was a hot, muggy, summer day; the low-tide smell of the mud flats was more brinish and morbid than usual. Owen Meany told me that my father would know that my mother was dead, and that-when I was old enough-he would identify himself to me.

"If he's alive," I said, still throwing rocks. "If he's alive and if he cares that he's my father-if he even knows he's my father."

And although I didn't believe him that day, that was the day Owen Meany began his lengthy contribution to my belief in God. Owen was throwing smaller and smaller rocks, but he still couldn't reach the water; there was a certain small satisfaction to the sound the rocks made when they struck the mud flats, but the water was more satisfying than the mud in every way. And almost casually, with a confidence that stood in surprising and unreasonable juxtaposition to his tiny size, Owen Meany told me that he was sure my father was alive, that he was sure my father knew he was my father, and that God knew who my father was; even if my father never came forth to identify himself, Owen told me, Go* would identify him for me. "YOUR DAD CAN HIDE FROwi YOU," Owen said, "BUT HE CAN'T HIDE FROM GOD."

And with that announcement, Owen Meany grunted as he released a stone that reached the water. We were both surprised; it was the last rock either of us threw that day, and we stood watching the circle of ripples extending from the point of entry until even the gulls were assured we had stopped our disturbance of their universe, and they returned to our side of the Squamscott.

For years, there was a most successful salmon fishery on our river; no salmon would be caught dead there now-actually, the only salmon you could find in the Squamscott today would be a dead one. Ale wives were also plentiful back then-and still were plentiful when I was a boy, and Owen Meany and I used to catch them. Gravesend is only nine miles from the ocean. Although the Squamscott was never the Thames, the big oceangoing ships once made their way to Gravesend on the Squamscott; the channel has since become so obstructed by rocks and shoals that no boat requiring any great draft of water could navigate it. And although Captain John Smith's beloved Pocahontas ended her unhappy life on British soil in the parish churchyard of the original Gravesend, the spiritually armless Watahantowet was never buried in our Gravesend. The only sagamore to be given official burial in our town was Mr. Fish's black Labrador retriever, run over by a diaper truck on Front Street and buried-with the solemn attendance of some neighborhood children-in my grandmother's rose garden.

For more than a century, the big business of Gravesend was lumber, which was the first big business of New Hampshire. Although New Hampshire is called the Granite State, granite- building granite, curbstone granite, tombstone granite-came after lumber; it was never the booming business that lumber was. You can be sure that when all the trees are gone, there will still be rocks around; but in the case of granite, most of it remains underground.

My uncle was in the lumber business-Uncle Alfred, the Eastman Lumber Company; he married my mother's sister, my aunt, Martha Wheelwright. When I was a boy and traveled up north to visit my cousins, I saw log drives and logjams, and I even participated in a few log-rolling contests; I'm afraid I was too inexperienced to offer much competition to my cousins. But today, my Uncle Alfred's business, which is in his children's hands-my cousins' business, I should say-is real

estate. In New Hampshire, that's what you have left to sell after you've cut down the trees.

But there will always be granite in the Granite State, and little Owen Meany's family was in the granite business-not ever a recommended business in our small, seacoast part of New Hampshire, although the Meany Granite Quarry was situated over what geologists call the Exeter Pluton. Owen Meany used to say that we residents of Gravesend were sitting over a bona fide outcrop of intrusive igneous rock; he would say this with an implied reverence-as if the consensus of the Gravesend community was that the Exeter Pluton was as valuable as a mother lode of gold.

My grandmother, perhaps owing to her ancestors from Mayflower days, was more partial to trees than to rocks. For reasons that were never explained to me, Harriet Wheelwright thought that the lumber business was clean and that the granite business was dirty. Since my grandfather's business was shoes, this made no sense to me; but my grandfather died before I was born-his famous decision, to not unionize his shoeshop, is only hearsay to me. My grandmother sold the factory for a considerable profit, and I grew up with her opinions regarding how blessed were those who murdered trees for a living, and how low were those who handled rocks. We've all heard of lumber barons-my uncle, Alfred Eastman, was one-but who has heard of a rock baron?

The Meany Granite Quarry in Gravesend is inactive now; the pitted land, with its deep and dangerous quarry lakes, is not even valuable as real estate-it never was valuable, according to my mother. She told me that the quarry had been inactive all the years that she was growing up in Gravesend, and that its period of revived activity, in the Meany years, was fitful and doomed. All the good granite, Mother said, had been taken out of the ground before the Meanys moved to Gravesend. (As for when the Meanys moved to Gravesend, it was always described to me as "about the time you were born.") Furthermore, only a small portion of the granite underground is worth getting out; the rest has defects-or if it's good, it's so far underground that it's hard to get out without cracking it.

Owen was always talking about cornerstones and monuments-a PROPER monument, he used to say, explaining that what was required was a large, evenly cut, smooth, unflawed piece of granite. The delicacy with which Owen

spoke of this-and his own, physical delicacy-stood in absurd contrast to the huge, heavy slabs of rock we observed on the flatbed trucks, and to the violent noise of the quarry, the piercing sound of the rock chisels on the channeling machine-THE CHANNEL BAR, Owen called it-and the dynamite.

I used to wonder why Owen wasn't deaf; that there was something wrong with his voice, and with his size, was all the more surprising when you considered that there was nothing wrong with his ears-for the granite business is extremely percussive.

It was Owen who introduced me to Wall's History of Graves-end, although I didn't read the whole book until I was a senior at Gravesend Academy, where the tome was required as a part of a town history project; Owen read it before he was ten. He told me that the book was FULL OF WHEELWRIGHTS.

I was born in the Wheelwright house on Front Street; and I used to wonder why my mother decided to have me and to never explain a word about me-either to me or to her own mother and sister. My mother was not a brazen character. Her pregnancy, and her refusal to discuss it, must have struck the Wheelwrights with all the more severity because my mother had such a tranquil, modest nature.

She'd met a man on the Boston & Maine Railroad: that was all she'd say.

My Aunt Martha was a senior in college, and already engaged to be married, when my mother announced that she wasn't even going to apply for college entrance. My grandfather was dying, and perhaps this focusing of my grandmother's attention distracted her from demanding of my mother what the family had demanded of Aunt Martha: a college education. Besides, my mother argued, she could be of help at home, with her dying father-and with the strain and burden that his dying put upon her mother. And the Rev. Lewis Merrill, the pastor at the Congregational Church, and my mother's choirmaster, had convinced my grandparents that my mother's singing voice was truly worthy of professional training. For her to engage in serious voice and singing lessons, the Rev. Mr. Merrill said, was as sensible an "investment," in my mother's case, as a college education.

At this point in my mother's life, I used to feel there was a

conflict of motives. If singing and voice lessons were so important and serious to her, why did she arrange to have them only once a week? And if my grandparents accepted Mr. Merrill's assessment of my mother's voice, why did they object so bitterly to her spending one night a week in Boston? It seemed to me that she should have moved to Boston and taken lessons every day! But I supposed the source of the conflict was my grandfather's terminal illness-my mother's desire to be of help at home, and my grandmother's need to have her there.

It was an early-morning voice or singing lesson; that was why she had to spend the previous night in Boston, which was an hour and a half from Gravesend-by train. Her singing and voice teacher was very popular; early morning was the only time he had for my mother. She was fortunate he would see her at all, the Rev. Lewis Merrill had said, because he normally saw only professionals; although my mother, and my Aunt Martha, had clocked many singing hours in the Congregational Church Choir, Mother was not a "professional." She simply had a lovely voice, and she was engaged-in her entirely unrebellious, even timid way-in training it.

My mother's decision to curtail her education was more acceptable to her parents than to her sister; Aunt Martha not only disapproved-my aunt (who is a lovely woman) resented my mother, if only slightly. My mother had the better voice, she was the prettier. When they'd been growing up in the big house on Front Street, it was my Aunt Martha who brought the boys from Gravesend Academy home to meet my grandmother and grandfather-Martha was the older, and the first to bring home "beaus," as my mother called them. But once the boys saw my mother-even before she was old enough to date-that was usually the end of their interest in Aunt Martha.

And now this: an unexplained pregnancy! According to my Aunt Martha, my grandfather was "already out of it"-he was so very nearly dead that he never knew my mother was pregnant, "although she took few pains to hide it," Aunt Martha said. My poor grandfather, in Aunt Martha's words to me, "died worrying why your mother was overweight."

In my Aunt Martha's day, to grow up in Gravesend was to understand that Boston was a city of sin. And even though my mother had stayed in a highly approved and chaperoned women's residential hotel, she had managed to have her

"fling," as Aunt Martha called it, with the man she'd met on the Boston & Maine.

My mother was so calm, so unrattled by either criticism or slander, that she was quite comfortable with her sister Martha's use of the word' 'fling''-in truth, I heard Mother use the word fondly.

"My fling," she would occasionally call me, with the greatest affection. "My little fling!"

It was from my cousins that I first heard that my mother was thought to be "a little simple"; it would have been from their mother-from Aunt Martha-that they would have heard this. By the time I heard these insinuations-"a little simple" -they were no longer fighting words; my mother had been dead for more than ten years.

Yet my mother was more than a natural beauty with a beautiful voice and questionable reasoning powers; Aunt Martha had good grounds to suspect that my grandmother and grandfather spoiled my mother. It was not just that she was the baby, it was her temperament-she was never angry or sullen, she was not given to tantrums or to self-pity. She had such a sweet-tempered disposition, it was impossible to stay angry with her. As Aunt Martha said: "She never appeared to be as assertive as she was." She simply did what she wanted to do, and then said, in her engaging fashion, "Oh! I feel terrible that what I've done has upset you, and I intend to shower you with such affection that you'll forgive me and love me as much as you would if I'd done the right thing!" And it workedl

It worked, at least, until she was killed-and she couldn't promise to remedy how upsetting that was; there was no way she could make up for that.

And even after she went ahead and had me, unexplained, and named me after the founding father of Gravesend-even after she managed to make all that acceptable to her mother and sister, and to the town (not to mention to the Congregational Church, where she continued to sing in the choir and was often a participant in various parish-house functions). . . even after she'd carried off my illegitimate birth (to everyone's satisfaction, or so it appeared), she still took the train to Boston every Wednesday, she still spent every Wednesday night in the dreaded city in order to be bright and early for her voice or singing lesson.

When I got a little older, I resented it-sometimes. Once

when I had the mumps, and another time when I had the chicken pox, she canceled the trip; she stayed with me. And there was another time, when Owen and I had been catching alewives in the tidewater culvert that ran into the Squamscott under the Swasey Parkway and I slipped and broke my wrist; she didn't take the Boston & Maine that week. But all the other tunes-until I was ten and she married the man who would legally adopt me and become like a father to me; until then-she kept going to Boston, overnight. Until then, she kept singing. No one ever told me if her voice improved.

That's why I was born in my grandmother's house-a grand, brick, Federal monster of a house. When I was a child, the house was heated by a coal furnace; the coal chute was under the ell of the house where my bedroom was. Since the coal was always delivered very early in the morning, its rumbling down the chute was often the sound that woke me up. On the rare coincidence of a Thursday morning delivery (when my mother was in Boston), I used to wake up to the sound of the coal and imagine that, at that precise moment, my mother was starting to sing. In the summer, with the windows open, I woke up to the birds in my grandmother's rose garden. And there lies another of my grandmother's opinions, to take root alongside her opinions regarding rocks and trees: anyone could grow mere flowers or vegetables, but a gardener grew roses; Grandmother was a gardener.

The Gravesend Inn was the only other brick building of comparable size to my grandmother's house on Front Street; indeed, Grandmother's house was often mistaken for the Gravesend Inn by travelers following the usual directions given in the center of town: "Look for the big brick place on your left, after you pass the academy."

My grandmother was peeved at this-she was not in the slightest flattered to have her house mistaken for an inn. "This is not an inn," she would inform the lost and bewildered travelers, who'd been expecting someone younger to greet them and fetch their luggage. "This is my home," Grandmother would announce. "The inn is further along," she would say, waving her hand in the general direction. "Further along" is fairly specific compared to other New Hampshire forms of directions; we don't enjoy giving directions in New Hampshire-we tend to think that if you don't know where <

of The Flying Yankee-the express train that raced between Portland and Boston, in just two hours. It screamed through Gravesend every day at noon; and although Owen and I had watched it hurtle through town

 

from the Gravesend depot, and although we had put pennies on the tracks for The Flying Yankee to flatten, we had never before been directly under the trestle bridge exactly as The Flying Yankee was passing over us.

I was still thinking of Mrs. Meany's attitude of supplication before my mother's dummy when the trestlework of the bridge began to rattle. A fine grit sifted down between the railroad ties and the trestles and settled upon Owen and me; even the concrete abutments shook, and-shielding our eyes from the loosened sand-we looked up to see the giant, dark underbelly of the train, speeding above us. Through the gaps between the passing cars, flashes of the leaden, winter sky blinked down on us.

"IT'S THE FLYING YANKEES Owen managed to scream above the clamor. All trains were special to Owen Meany, who had never ridden on a train; but The Flying Yankee-its terrifying speed and its refusal to stop in Gravesend- represented to Owen the zenith of travel. Owen (who had never been anywhere) was a considerable romantic on the subject of travel.

"What a coincidence!" I said, when The Flying Yankee had gone; I meant that it was a farfetched piece of luck that had landed us under the trestle bridge precisely at noon, but Owen smiled at me with his especially irritating combination of mild pity and mild contempt. Of course, I know now that Owen didn't believe in coincidences. Owen Meany believed that "coincidence" was a stupid, shallow refuge sought by stupid, shallow people who were unable to accept the fact that their lives were shaped by a terrifying and awesome design-more powerful and unstoppable than The Flying Yankee.

The maid who looked after my grandmother, the maid who was Lydia's replacement after Lydia suffered her amputation, was named Ethel, and she was forced to endure the subtle comparisons that both Lydia and my grandmother made of her job-effectiveness. I say "subtle," only because my grandmother and Lydia never discussed these comparisons with Ethel directly; but in Ethel's company, Grandmother would say, "Do you remember, Lydia, how you used to bring up the jams and jellies from those shelves in the secret passageway-where they get so dusty-and line them all up

in the kitchen, according to the dates when you'd put them up?"

"Yes, I remember," Lydia would say.

"That way, I could look them over and say, 'Well, we should throw out that one-it doesn't seem to be a favorite around here, and it's two years old.' Do you remember?" my grandmother would ask.

"Yes. One year we threw out all the quince," Lydia said.

"It was just pleasant to know what we had down there in the secret passageway," my grandmother remarked.

"Don't let things get the upper hand on you, I always say," Lydia said.

And the next morning, of course, poor Ethel-properly, albeit indirectly instructed-would haul out all the jams and jellies and dust them off for my grandmother's inspection.

Ethel was a short, heavyset woman with an ageless, blocky strength; yet her physical power was undermined by a slow mind and a brutal lack of confidence. Her forward motion, even with something as basic as cleaning the house, was characterized by the strong swipes of her stubby arms-but these confident efforts were followed or preceded by the hesitant, off-balance steps of her short, broad feet upon her thick ankles; she was a stumbler. Owen said she was too slow-witted to frighten properly, and therefore we rarely bothered her-even when we discovered opportunities to surprise her, in the dark, in the secret passageway. In this way, too, Ethel was Lydia's inferior, for Lydia had been great fun to terrorize, when she had two legs.

The maid hired to look after Lydia was-as we used to say in Gravesend-"a whole other ball game." Her name was Germaine, and both Lydia and Ethel bullied her; my grandmother purposefully ignored her. Among these contemptuous women, poor Germaine had the disadvantage of being young- and almost pretty, in a shy, mousy way. She possessed the nonspecific clumsiness of someone who makes such a constant effort to be inconspicuous that she is creatively awkward- without meaning to, Germaine hoarded attention to herself; her almost electric nervousness disturbed the atmosphere surrounding her.

Windows, when Germaine was attempting to slip past them, would suddenly shut themselves; doors would open. Precious

        

vases would totter when Germaine approached them; when she reached to steady them, they would shatter. Lydia's wheelchair would malfunction the instant Germaine took tremulous command of it. The light in the refrigerator would burn out the instant Germaine opened the door. And when the garage light was left on all night, it would be discovered-in my grandmother's early-morning investigation-that Germaine had been the last to bed.

"Last one to bed turns out the lights," Lydia would say, in her litanic fashion.

"I was not only in bed but I was asleep, when Germaine came to bed," Ethel would announce. "I know I was asleep because she woke me up."

"I'm sorry," Germaine would whisper.

My grandmother would sigh and shake her head, as if several rooms of the great house had been consumed in a fire overnight and there was nothing to salvage-and nothing to say, either.

But I know why my grandmother sought to ignore Germaine. Grandmother, in a fit of Yankee frugality, had given Germaine all my mother's clothes. Germaine was a little too small for the clothes, although they were the nicest clothes Germaine had ever owned and she wore them both happily and reverentially-Germaine never realized that my grandmother resented seeing her in such painfully familiar attire. Perhaps my grandmother never knew how much she would resent seeing those clothes on Germaine when she gave them to her; and Grandmother had too much pride to admit her error. She could only look away. That the clothes didn't fit Germaine was referred to as Germaine's fault.

"You should eat more, Germaine," Grandmother would say, not looking at her-and never noticing what Germaine ate; only that my mother's clothes hung limply on her. But Germaine could have gorged herself and never matched my mother's bosom.

"John?" Germaine would whisper, when she would enter the secret passageway. The one overhead bulb at the bottom of those winding stairs never lit that passageway very brightly. "Owen?" she would ask. "Are you in here? Don't frighten me."

And Owen and I would wait until she had turned the L-shaped corner between the tall, dusty shelves at shoulder

level-the odd shadows of the jam and jelly jars zigzagging across the cobwebbed ceiling; the higher, more irregular shadows cast by the bigger jars of tomato and sweet-pepper relish, and the brandied plums, were as looming and contorted as volcanic conformations.

" 'BE NOT AFRAID,' " Owen would whisper to Ger-maine in the dark; once, over that Christmas vacation, Ger-maine burst into tears. "I'M SORRY!" Owen called after her. "IT'S JUST ME!"

But it was Owen whom Germaine was especially afraid of. She was a girl who believed in the supernatural, in what she was always calling "signs"-for example, the rather commonplace mutilation and murder of a robin by one of the Front Street cats; to witness this torture' was "a sure sign'' you would be involved with an even greater violence yet to come. Owen himself was taken as a "sign" by poor Germaine; his diminutive size suggested to her that Owen was small enough to actually enter the body and soul of another person-and cause that person to perform unnatural acts.

It was a dinner table conversation about Owen's voice that revealed to me Germaine's point of view concerning that unnatural aspect of him. My grandmother had asked me if Owen or his family had ever taken any pains to inquire if something could be "done" about Owen's voice-"I mean medically," Grandmother said, and Lydia nodded so vigorously that I thought her hair pins might fall onto her dinner plate.

I knew that my mother had once suggested to Owen that her old voice and singing teacher might be able to offer Owen some advice of a corrective kind-or even suggest certain vocal exercises, designed to train Owen to speak more . . . well. . . normally. My grandmother and Lydia exchanged their usual glances upon the mere mention of that voice and singing teacher; I explained, further, that Mother had even written out the address and telephone number of this mysterious figure, and she had given the information to Owen. Owen, I was sure, had never contacted the teacher.

"And why not?" Grandmother asked. Why not, indeed! Lydia appeared to ask, nodding and nodding. Lydia's nodding was the most detectable manifestation of how her senility was in advance of my grandmother's senility-or so my grandmother had observed, privately, to me. Grandmother was

        

extremely-almost clinically-interested in Lydia's senility, because she took Lydia's behavior as a barometer regarding what she could soon expect of herself.

Ethel was clearing the table in her curious combination of aggression and slow motion; she took too many dishes at one time, but she lingered at the table with them for so long that you were sure she was going to put some of them back. I think now that she was just collecting her thoughts concerning where she would take the dishes. Germaine was also clearing-the way a crippled swallow might swoop down for a crumb off your plate at a picnic. Germaine took too little away-one spoon at a time, and often the wrong spoon; or else she took your salad fork before you'd been served your salad. But if her disturbance of your dinner area was slight and fanciful, it was also fraught with Germaine's vast potential for accident. When Ethel approached, you feared a landslide of plates might fall in your lap-but this never happened. When Germaine approached, you guarded your plate and silverware, fearing that something you needed would be snatched from you, and that your water glass would be toppled during the sudden, flighty attack-and this often happened.

It was therefore within this anxious arena-of having the dinner table cleared-that I announced to my grandmother and Lydia why Owen Meany had not sought the advice of Mother's voice and singing teacher.

"Owen doesn't think it's right to try to change his voice," I said.

Ethel, lumbering away from the table under the considerable burden of the two serving platters, the vegetable bowl, and all our dinner plates and silver, held her ground. My grandmother, sensing Germaine's darting presence, held her water glass in one hand, her wine glass in the other. "Why on earth doesn't he think it's rightT' she asked, as Germaine pointlessly removed the peppermill and let the salt shaker stay.

"He thinks his voice is for a purpose; that there's a reason for his voice being like that," I said.

"What reason?" my grandmother asked.

Ethel had approached the kitchen door, but she seemed to be waiting, shifting her vast armload of dishes, wondering- possibly-if she should take them into the living room, instead. Germaine positioned herself directly behind Lydia's chair, which made Lydia tense.

"Owen thinks his voice comes from God," I said quietly, as Germaine-reaching for Lydia's unused dessert spoon- dropped the peppermill into Lydia's water glass.

"Merciful Heavens!" Lydia said; this was a pet phrase of my grandmother's, and Grandmother eyed Lydia as if this thievery of her favorite language were another manifestation of Lydia's senility being in advance of her own.

To everyone's astonishment, Germaine spoke. "I think his voice comes from the Devil," Germaine said.

"Nonsense!" my grandmother said. "Nonsense to it coming from God-or from the Devil! It comes from granite, that's what it comes from. He breathed in all that dirt when he was a baby! It made his voice queer and it stunted his growth!"

Lydia, nodding, prevented Germaine from trying to extract the peppermill from her water glass; to be safe, she did it herself. Ethel stumbled into the kitchen door with a great crash; the door swung wide, and Germaine fled the dining room- with absolutely nothing in her hands.

My grandmother sighed deeply; even to Grandmother's sighing, Lydia nodded-a more modest little nod. "From God," my grandmother repeated contemptuously. And then she said: "The address and phone number of the voice and singing teacher ... I don't suppose your little friend would have kept it-not if he didn't intend to use it, I mean?'' To this artful question, my grandmother and Lydia exchanged their usual glances; but I considered the question carefully-its many levels of seriousness were apparent to me. I knew this was information that my grandmother had never known-and how it must have interested her! And, of course, I also knew that Owen would never have thrown this information away; that he never intended to make use of the information was not the point. Owen rarely threw anything away; and something that my mother had given him would not only have been saved--it would have been enshrined!

I am indebted to my grandmother for many things-among them the use of an artful question. "Why would Owen have kept it?" I asked her innocently.

Again, Grandmother sighed; again, Lydia nodded. "Why indeed," Lydia said sadly. It was my grandmother's turn to nod. They were both getting old and frail, I observed, but what I was thinking was why I had decided to keep Owen's probable possession of the singing teacher's address and phone number

        

to myself. I didn't know why-not then. What I know now is that Owen Meany would have quickly said it was NO COINCIDENCE.

And what would he have said regarding our discovery that we were not alone in the Christmas use we made of the empty rooms in Waterhouse Hall? Would he have termed it NO COINCIDENCE, too, that we (one afternoon) were engaged in our usual investigations of a second-floor room when we heard another master key engage the lock on the door? I was into the closet in a hurry, fearful that the empty coat hangers would not entirely have stopped chiming together by the time the new intruder entered the room. Owen scooted under the bed; he lay on his back with his hands crossed upon his chest, like a soldier in a hasty grave. At first, we thought Dan had caught us-but Dan was rehearsing The Gravesend Players, unless (in despair) he had fired the lot of them and canceled the production. The only other person it could be was Mr. Brinker-Smith, the biologist-but he was a first-floor resident: Owen and I were so quiet, we didn't believe our presence could have been detected from the first floor.

"Nap time!" we heard Mr. Brinker-Smith say; Mrs. Brinker-Smith giggled.

It was instantly apparent to Owen and me that Ginger Brinker-Smith had not brought her husband to this empty room in order to nurse him; the twins were not with them-it was "nap time" for the twins, too. It strikes me now that the Brinker-Smiths were blessed with good-spirited initiative, with an admirable and inventive sense of mischief-for how else could they have maintained one of the pleasures of conjugal relations without disturbing their demanding twins? At the time, of course, it struck Owen and me that the Brinker-Smiths were dangerously oversexed; that they should make such reckless use of the dormitory beds, including-as we later learned-systematic process through all the rooms of Waterhouse Hall . . . well, it was perverse behavior for parents, in Owen's and my view. Day by day, nap by nap, bed by bed, the Brinker-Smiths were working their way to the fourth floor of the dorm. Since Owen and I were working our way to the first floor, it was perhaps inevitable-as Owen would have suggested-and NO COINCIDENCE that we should have encountered the Brinker-Smiths in a second-floor room.

I saw nothing, but heard much, through the closed closet door. (I had never heard Dan with my mother.) As usual, Owen Meany had a closer, more intense perception of this passionate event than I had: the Brinker-Smiths' clothes fell on both sides of Owen; Ginger Brinker-Smith's legendary nursing bra was tossed within inches of Owen's face. He had to turn his face to the side, Owen told me, in order to avoid the sagging bedspring, which began to make violent, chafing contact with Owen's nose. Even with his face sideways, the bedspring would occasionally plunge near enough to the floor to scrape against his cheek.

"IT WAS THE NOISE THAT WAS THE WORST OF IT," he told me tearfully, after the Brinker-Smiths had returned to their twins. "I FELT LIKE I WAS UNDERNEATH THE FLYING YANKEE!"

That the Brinker-Smiths were engaged in a far more creative and original use of Waterhouse Hall than Owen and I could make of the old dormitory had a radical effect on the rest of our Christmas vacation. Shocked and battered, Owen suggested we return to the tamer investigations of  Front Street.

'' Hardness! Hardness!'' Ginger Brinker-Smith had screamed.

"Wetness! Wetness!" Mr. Brinker-Smith had answered her. And bang! bang! bang! beat the bedspring on Owen Meany's head.

"STUPID 'HARDNESS,' STUPID 'WETNESS,' " Owen complained. "SEX MAKES PEOPLE CRAZY."

I had only to think of Hester to agree.

And so, because of Owen's and my first contact with the act of love, we were at  Front Street-just hanging around-the day our mailman, Mr. Morrison, announced his resignation from the role of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come.

"Why are you telling me?" my grandmother asked. "I'm not the director."

"Dan ain't on my route," the glum mailman said.

"I don't relay messages of this kind-not even to Dan,'' my grandmother told Mr. Morrison. "You should go to the next rehearsal and tell Dan yourself."

Grandmother kept the storm door ajar, and the bitter December air must have been cold against her legs; it was plenty cold for Owen and me, and we were positioned deeper

        

into the hall, behind my grandmother-and were both wearing wool-flannel trousers. We could feel the chill radiating off Mr. Morrison, who held my grandmother's small bundle of mail in his mittened hand; he appeared reluctant to give her the mail, unless she agreed to carry his message to Dan.

"I ain't settin' foot in another of them rehearsals," Mr. Morrison said, shuffling his high-topped boots, shifting his heavy, leather sack.

"If you were resigning from the post office, would you ask someone else to tell the postmaster?" my grandmother asked him.

Mr. Morrison considered this; his long face was alternately red and blue from the cold."It ain't the part I thought it was," he said to Grandmother.

"Tell Dan," Grandmother said. "I'm sure I don't know the first thing about it."

"/ KNOW ABOUT IT," said Owen Meany. Grandmother regarded Owen uncertainly; before she allowed him to replace her at the open door, she reached outside and snatched her mail from Mr. Morrison's tentative hand.

"What do you know about it?" the mailman asked Owen.

"IT'S AN IMPORTANT PART," Owen said. "YOU'RE THE LAST OF THE SPIRITS WHO APPEAR TO SCROOGE. YOU'RE THE GHOST OF THE FUTURE- YOU'RE THE SCARIEST GHOST OF ALL!"

"I got nothin' to say!" Mr. Morrison complained. "It ain't even what they call a speakin' part."

"A GREAT ACTOR DOESN'T NEED TO TALK," Owen said.

"I wear this big black cloak, with a hood" Mr. Morrison protested. "No one can see my face."

"There's some justice, anyway," my grandmother said under her breath to me.

"A GREAT ACTOR DOESN'T NEED A FACE," Owen said.

"An actor needs somethin' to do" the mailman shouted.

"YOU SHOW SCROOGE WHAT WILL HAPPEN TO HIM IF HE DOESN'T BELIEVE IN CHRISTMAS!" Owen cried. "YOU SHOW A MAN HIS OWN GRAVE! WHAT CAN BE SCARIER THAN THAT?"

"But all I do is point," Mr. Morrison whined. "Nobody would even know what I was pointin' at if old Scrooge didn't

keep givin' speeches to himself-'If there is any person in the town who feels emotion caused by this man's death, show that person to me, Spirit, I beseech you!' That's the kind of speech old Scrooge is always makinM" Mr. Morrison shouted. " 'Let me see some tenderness connected with a death,' and so on and so forth," the mailman said bitterly. "And all I do is point! I got nothin' to say and all anybody sees of me is one J?ngeH" Mr. Morrison cried; he pulled his mitten off and pointed a long, bony finger at Owen Meany, who retreated from the mailman's skeletal hand.

"IT'S A GREAT PART FOR A GREAT ACTOR," Owen said stubbornly. "YOU HAVE TO BE A PRESENCE. THERE'S NOTHING AS SCARY AS THE FUTURE."

In the hall, behind Owen, an anxious crowd had gathered. Lydia in her wheelchair, Ethel-who was polishing a candlestick-and Germaine, who thought Owen was the Devil . . . they huddled behind my grandmother, who was old enough to take Owen's point of view to heart: nothing is as scary as the future, she knew, unless it's someone who knows the future.

Owen threw up his hands so abruptly that the women were startled and moved away from him."YOU KNOW EVERY-'THING YET TO COMET' he screamed at the disgruntled mailman. "IF YOU WALK ONSTAGE AS IF YOU KNOW THE FUTURE-I MEAN, EVERYTHING!-YOU'LL SCARE THE SHIT OUT OF EVERYONE."

Mr. Morrison considered this; there was even a glimmer of comprehension in his gaze, as if he saw-albeit momentarily- his own, terrifying potential; but his eyes were quickly fogged over by his breath in the cold air.

"Tell Dan I quit, that's all," he said. Thereupon, the mailman turned and left-"most undramatically," my grandmother would say, later. At the moment, despite her dislike of vulgar language, Grandmother appeared almost charmed by Owen Meany.

"Get away from the open door now, Owen," she said. "You've given that fool much more attention than he deserves, and you'll catch your death of cold."

"I'M CALLING DAN, RIGHT AWAY," Owen told us matter-of-factly. He went directly to the phone and dialed the number; the women and I wouldn't leave the hall, although I think we were all unconscious of how very much we had

        

become his audience. "HELLO, DAN?" he said into the phone. "DAN? THIS IS OWEN!" (As if there could have been any doubt concerning who it was!) "DAN, THIS IS AN EMERGENCY. YOU'VE LOST THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS YET TO COME. YES, I MEAN MORRISON-THE COWARDLY MAILMAN!"

"The cowardly mailman!" my grandmother repeated admiringly.

"YES, YES-I KNOW HE WASN'T ANY GOOD," Owen told Dan, "BUT YOU DON'T WANT TO BE STUCK WITHOUT A SPIRIT FOR THE FUTURE."

That was when I saw it coming; the future-or at least one, small part of it. Owen had failed to talk Mr. Morrison into the role, but he had convinced himself it was an important part-far more attractive than being Tiny Tim, that mere goody-goody. Furthermore, it was established that the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come was not a speaking part; Owen would not have to use his voice-not as the Christ Child and not as the Ghost of the Future.

"I DON'T WANT YOU TO PANIC, DAN," Owen said into the phone, "BECAUSE I THINK I KNOW SOMEONE WHO'D BE PERFECT FOR THE PART-WELL, IF NOT PERFECT, AT LEAST DIFFERENT."

It was with the word DIFFERENT that my grandmother shivered; it was also the first time she looked at Owen Meany with anything resembling respect.

Once again, I thought, the little Prince of Peace had taken charge. I looked at Germaine, whose lower lip was captured in her teeth; I knew what she was thinking. Lydia, rocking in her wheelchair, appeared to be mesmerized by the onesided phone conversation; Ethel held the candlestick like a weapon.

"WHAT THE PART REQUIRES IS A CERTAIN PRESENCE," Owen told Dan. "THE GHOST MUST TRULY APPEAR TO KNOW THE FUTURE. IRONICALLY, THE OTHER PART I'M PLAYING THIS CHRISTMAS-YES, YES, I MEAN THE STUPID PAGEAJSTIWflCW-ICALLY, THIS PREPARES ME FOR THE ROLE. I MEAN, THEY'RE BOTH PARTS THAT FORCE YOU TO TAKE COMMAND OF THINGS, WITHOUT WORDS . . . YES, YES, OF COURSE I MEAN ME!" There was a rare pause, while Owen listened to Dan. "WHO SAYS THE GHOST OF CHRISTMAS YET TO

TO COME HAS TO BE TALL?" Owen asked angrily. "YES, OF COURSE I KNOW HOW TALL MISTER FISH IS. DAN, YOU'RE NOT USING YOUR IMAGINATION." There was another brief pause, and Owen said: "THERE'S A SIMPLE TEST. LET ME REHEARSE IT. IF EVERYBODY LAUGHS, I'M OUT. IF EVERYONE IS SCARED, I'M THE ONE. YES, OF COURSE- 'INCLUDING MISTER FISH.' LAUGH, I'M OUT. SCARED, I'M IN."

But I didn't need to wait to know the results of that test. It was necessary only to look at my grandmother's anxious face, and at the attitudes of the women surrounding her-at the fear of Owen Meany that was registered by Lydia's transfixed expression, by Ethel's whitened knuckles around the candlestick, by Germaine's trembling lip. It wasn't necessary for me to suspend my belief or disbelief in Owen Meany until after his first rehearsal; I already knew what a presence he could summon-especially in regard to the future.

That evening, at dinner, we heard from Dan about Owen's triumph-how the cast stood riveted, not even knowing what dwarf this was, for Owen was completely hidden in the black cloak and hood; it didn't matter that he never spoke, or that they couldn't see his face. Not even Mr. Fish had known who the fearful apparition was.

As Dickens wrote, "Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command, for this is thy dominion!"

Owen had a way of gliding across stage; he several times startled Mr. Fish, who kept losing his sense of where Owen was. When Owen pointed, it was all of a sudden, a convulsive, twitchy movement-his small, white hand flashing out of the folds of the cloak, which he flapped. He could glide slowly, like a skater running out of momentum; but he could also skitter with a bat's repellent quickness.

At Scrooge's grave, Mr. Fish said: " 'Before I draw nearer to that stone to which you point, answer me one question. Are these the shadows of the things that Will be or are they shadows of the things that May be, only?' "

As never before, this question seemed to seize the attention of every amateur among The Gravesend Players; even Mr. Fish appeared to be mortally interested in the answer. But the midget Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come was inexorable; the

 

tiny phantom's indifference to the question made Dan Need-ham shiver.

It was then that Mr. Fish approached close enough to the gravestone to read his own name thereon.'' 'Ebenezer Scrooge ... am / that man?' " Mr. Fish cried, falling to his knees. It was from the perspective of his knees-when Mr. Fish's head was only slightly above Owen Meany's-that Mr. Fish received his first full look at the averted face under the hood. Mr. Fish did not laugh; he screamed.

He was supposed to say, " 'No, Spirit! Oh, no, no! Spirit, hear me! I am not the man I was!' " And so on and so forth. But Mr. Fish simply screamed. He pulled his hands so fiercely away from Owen's cowl that the hood was yanked off Owen's head, revealing him to the other members of the cast-several of them screamed, too; no one laughed.

"It makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, just to remember it!" Dan told us, over dinner.

"I'm not surprised," my grandmother said.

After dinner, Mr. Fish made a somewhat subdued appearance.

"Well, at least we've got one good ghost," Mr. Fish said. "It makes my job a lot easier, really," he rationalized. "The little fellow is quite effective, quite effective. It will be interesting to see his ... effect on an audience."

"We've already seen it," Dan reminded him.

"Well, yes," Mr. Fish agreed hastily; he looked worried.

"Someone told me that Mr. Early's daughter wet her pants," Dan informed us.

"I'm not surprised," my grandmother said. Germaine, clearing one teaspoon at a time, appeared ready to wet hers.

"Perhaps you might hold him back a little?" Mr. Fish suggested to Dan.

"Hold him back?" Dan asked.

"Well, get him to restrain whatever it is he does," Mr. Fish said.

"I'm not at all sure what it is he does," Dan said.

"I'm not either," Mr. Fish said. "It's just ... so disturbing."

"Perhaps, when people are sitting back a few rows-in the audience, I mean-it won't be quite so ... upsetting," Dan said.

"Do you think so?" Mr. Fish asked.

"Not really," Dan admitted.

"What if we saw his face-from the beginning?" Mr. Fish suggested.

"If you don't pull his hood off, we'll never see his face," Dan pointed out to Mr. Fish. "I think that will be better."

"Yes, much better," Mr. Fish agreed.

Mr. Meany dropped Owen off at  Front Street-so he could spend the night. Mr. Meany knew that my grandmother resented the racket his truck made in the driveway; that was why we didn't hear him come and go-he let Owen out of the cab on Front Street.

It was quite magical; I mean, the timing: Mr. Fish saying good night, opening the door to leave-precisely at the same time as Owen was reaching to ring the doorbell. My grandmother, at that instant, turned on the porch light; Owen blinked into the light. From under his red-and-black-checkered hunter's cap, his small, sharp face stared up at Mr. Fish-like the face of a possum caught in a flashlight. A dull, yellowish bruise, the sheen of tarnished silver, marked Owen's cheek-where the Brinker-Smiths' mobile bed had struck him-giving him a cadaver's uneven color. Mr. Fish leaped backward, into the hall.

"Speak of the Devil," Dan said, smiling. Owen smiled back-at us all.

"I GUESS YOU HEARD-I GOT THE PART!" he said to my grandmother and me.

"I'm not surprised, Owen," my grandmother said. "Won't you come in?" She actually held the door open for him; she even managed a charming curtsy-inappropriately girlish, but Harriet Wheelwright was gifted with those essentially regal properties that make the inappropriate gesture work . . . those being facetiousness and sarcasm.

Owen Meany did not miss the irony in my grandmother's voice; yet he beamed at her-and he returned her curtsy with a confident bow, and with a little tip of his red-and-black-checkered hunter's cap. Owen had triumphed, and he knew it; my grandmother knew it, too. Even Harriet Wheelwright- with her Mayflower indifference toward the Meanys of this world-even my grandmother knew that there was more to The Granite Mouse than met the eye.

Mr. Fish, perhaps to compose himself, was humming the tune to a familiar Christmas carol. Even Dan Needham

        

knew the words. As Owen finished knocking the snow off his boots-as the little Lord Jesus stepped inside our house- Dan half-sang, half-mumbled the refrain we knew so well: "Hark! the her-ald an-gels sing, 'Glo-ry to the new-born King!' "

There'd been an automobile accident somewhere near the Maine border, so Simon rated a low priority in the emergency room; that was fine with all of us, because the longer it took for Simon to get his tetanus shot and his stitches, the longer we would be away from the deer flies and the mosquitoes and the heat. Simon even pretended not to know if he was allergic to anything; Aunt Martha and Uncle Alfred had to be called, and that took more time. Noah started flirting with one of the nurses; with any luck, Noah knew, we could fart around the whole rest of the day, and never go back to work.

One of the less-mangled victims of the auto accident sat in the waiting room with us. He was someone Noah and Simon knew vaguely-a type not uncommon in the north country, one of those ski bums who don't seem to know what to do with themselves when there isn't any snow. This was a guy who'd been drinking a bottle of beer when one car hit another; he'd been the driver of one of the cars, he said, and the bottleneck had broken in his mouth on impact-he had lacerations on the roof of his mouth, and his gums were slashed, and the broken

neck of the bottle had pierced his cheek. He proudly showed us the lacerations inside his mouth, and the hole in his cheek-all the while mopping up his mouth and face with a blood-soaked wad of gauze, which he periodically wrung out in a blood-soaked towel. He was precisely the sort of north country lunatic who gave Hester great disdain for Sawyer Depot, and led her to maintain her residence in the college community of Durham year 'round.

"Did you hear about Marilyn Monroe?" the ski bum asked us.

We were prepared for a dirty joke-an absolutely filthy joke. The ski bum's smile was a bleeding gash in his face; his smile was the repulsive equal to his gaping wound in his cheek. He was lascivious, depraved-our much-appreciated holiday in the emergency room had taken a nasty turn. We tried to ignore him.

"Did you hear about Marilyn Monroe?" he asked us again. Suddenly, it didn't sound like a joke. Maybe it's about the Kennedys! I thought.

"No. What about her?" I said.

"She's dead," the ski bum said. He took such a sadistic pleasure in his announcement, his smile appeared to pump the blood out of his mouth and the hole in his cheek; I thought that he was as pleased by the shock value of what he had to say as he was thrilled by the spectacle of wringing his own blood from the sodden gauze pad into the sodden towel. Forever after, I would see his bleeding face whenever I imagined how Larry Lish and his mother must have responded to this news; how eagerly, how greedily they must have spread the word! "Have you heard? You mean, you haven't heard!" The rapture of so much amateur conjecturing and surmising would flush their faces as irrepressibly as blood!

"How?" I asked the ski bum.

"An overdose," he said; he sounded disappointed-as if he'd been hoping for something bloodier. "Maybe it was an accident, maybe it was suicide," he said.

Maybe it was the Kennedys, I thought. It made me feel afraid; at first, that summer, it was something vague that had made me feel afraid. Now something concrete made me feel afraid-but my fear itself was still vague: what could Marilyn Monroe's death ever have to do with me!

"IT HAS TO DO WITH ALL OF US," said Owen Meany, when I called him that night. "SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR

        

WHOLE COUNTRY-NOT QUITE YOUNG ANYMORE, BUT NOT OLD EITHER; A LITTLE BREATHLESS, VERY BEAUTIFUL, MAYBE A LITTLE STUPID, MAYBE A LOT SMARTER THAN SHE SEEMED. AND SHE WAS LOOKING FOR SOMETHING-I THINK SHE WANTED TO BE GOOD. LOOK AT THE MEN IN HER LIFE-JOE DIMAG-GIO, ARTHUR MILLER, MAYBE THE KENNEDYS. LOOK AT HOW GOOD THEY SEEMl LOOK AT HOW DESIRABLE SHE WAS! THAT'S WHAT SHE WAS: SHE WAS DESIRABLE. SHE WAS FUNNY AND SEXY-AND SHE WAS VULNERABLE, TOO. SHE WAS NEVER QUITE HAPPY, SHE WAS ALWAYS A LITTLE OVERWEIGHT. SHE WAS JUST LIKE OUR WHOLE COUNTRY," he repeated; he was on a roll. I could hear Hester playing her guitar in the background, as if she were trying to improvise a folk song from everything he said. "AND THOSE MEN," he said. "THOSE FAMOUS, POWERFUL MEN-DID THEY REALLY LOVE HER? DID THEY TAKE CARE OF HER? IF SHE WAS EVER WITH THE KENNEDYS, THEY COULDN'T HAVE LOVED HER-THEY WERE JUST USING HER, THEY WERE JUST BEING CARELESS AND TREATING THEMSELVES TO A THRILL. THAT'S WHAT POWERFUL MEN DO TO THIS COUNTRY-IT'S A BEAUTIFUL, SEXY, BREATHLESS COUNTRY, AND POWERFUL MEN USE IT TO TREAT THEMSELVES TO A THRILL! THEY SAY THEY LOVE IT BUT THEY DON'T MEAN IT. THEY SAY THINGS TO MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR GOOD-THEY MAKE THEMSELVES APPEAR MORAL. THAT'S WHAT I THOUGHT KENNEDY WAS: A MORALIST. BUT HE WAS JUST GIVING US A SNOW JOB, HE WAS JUST BEING A GOOD SEDUCER. I THOUGHT HE WAS A SAVIOR. I THOUGHT HE WANTED TO USE HIS POWER TO DO GOOD. BUT PEOPLE WILL SAY AND DO ANYTHING JUST TO GET THE POWER; THEN THEY'LL USE THE POWER JUST TO GET A THRILL. MARILYN MONROE WAS ALWAYS LOOKING FOR THE BEST MAN-MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST INTEGRITY, MAYBE SHE WANTED THE MAN WITH THE MOST ABILITY TO DO GOOD. AND SHE WAS SEDUCED, OVER AND OVER AGAIN-SHE GOT FOOLED, SHE WAS TRICKED, SHE GOT USED, SHE WAS USED UP. JUST LIKE THE COUNTRY. THE COUNTRY WANTS A SAVIOR. THE COUN-

TRY IS A SUCKER FOR POWERFUL MEN WHO LOOK GOOD. WE THINK THEY'RE MORALISTS AND THEN THEY JUST USE US. THAT'S WHAT'S GOING TO HAPPEN TO YOU AND ME," said Owen Meany. "WE'RE GOING TO BE USED."

Georgian Bay: July , -The Toronto Star says that President Reagan "actually led the first efforts to conceal essential details of his secret arms-for-hostages program and keep it alive after it became public." The Toronto Star added that "the President subsequently made misleading statements about the arms sales"-on four separate occasions'.

Owen used to say that the most disturbing thing about the antiwar movement-against the Vietnam War-was that he suspected self-interest motivated many of the protesters; he thought that if the issue of many of the protesters being drafted was removed from the issue of the war, there would be very little protest at all.

Look at the United States today. Are they drafting young Americans to fight in Nicaragua? No; not yet. Are masses of young Americans outraged at the Reagan administration's shoddy and deceitful behavior? Ho hum; not hardly.

I know what Owen Meany would say about that; I know what he did say-and it still applies.

"THE ONLY WAY YOU CAN GET AMERICANS TO NOTICE ANYTHING IS TO TAX THEM OR DRAFT THEM OR KILL THEM," Owen said. He said that once-when Hester proposed abolishing the draft. "IF YOU ABOLISH THE DRAFT," said Owen Meany, "MOST AMERICANS WILL SIMPLY STOP CARING ABOUT WHAT WE'RE DOING IN OTHER PARTS OF THE WORLD."

I saw a mink run under the boathouse today; it had such a slender body, it was only slightly larger than a weasel-with a weasel's undulating movement. It had such a thick, glossy coat of fur, I was instantly reminded of Larry Lish's mother. Where is she now? I wondered.

I know where Larry Lish is; he's a well-known journalist in New York-"an investigative reporter" is what he's called. I've read a few of his pieces; they're not bad-he was always clever-and I notice that he's acquired a necessary quality in his voice ("necessary," I think, if a journalist is going to make a name for himself, and gain an audience, and so forth). Larry Lish has become particularly self-righteous, and the quality in

 

his voice that I call "necessary" is a tone of moral indignation. Larry Lish has become a moralist-imagine that!

I wonder what his mother has become. If she got the right guy to marry her-before it was too late-maybe Mitzy Lish has become a moralist, too!

In the fall of ' when Owen Meany and I began our life as freshmen at the University of New Hampshire, we enjoyed certain advantages that set us apart from our lowly, less-experienced peers. We were not subject to dormitory rules because we lived at home-we were commuters from Graves-end and were permitted to park our own means of transportation on campus, which other freshmen were not allowed to do. I divided my at-home time between Dan and my grandmother; this had an added advantage, in that when there was a late-night university party in Durham, I could tell Dan I was staying with my grandmother and tell Grandmother I was staying with Dan-and never come home! Owen was not required to be home at any special time; considering that he spent every night of the summer at Hester's apartment, I was surprised that he was going through the motions of living at home at all. Hester's roommates were back, however; if Owen stayed at Hester's, there was no question regarding the bed in which he spent the night-whether he and Hester "did it" or not, they were at least familiar with the intimate proximity that Hester's queen-size mattress forced upon them. But once our classes began, Owen didn't sleep at Hester's apartment more than once or twice a week.

Our other advantages over our fellow freshmen were several. We had suffered the academic rigors of Gravesend Academy; the course work at the University of New Hampshire was very easy in comparison. I benefited greatly from this, because-as Owen had taught me-I chiefly needed to give myself more time to do the work assigned. So much less work was assigned than what I had learned to expect from the academy that-for once-I had ample time. I got good grades, almost easily; and for the first time-although this took two or three years-I began to think of myself as "smart." But the relatively undemanding expectations of the university had quite a different effect on Owen Meany.

He could do everything he was asked without half trying, and this made him lazy. He quickly fell into a habit of getting no better grades than he needed to satisfy his ROTC "schol-

arship"; to my surprise, his best grades were always in the ROTC courses-in so-called Military Science. We took many of the same classes; in English and History, I actually got better grades than Owen-had become indifferent about his writing!

"I AM DEVELOPING A MINIMALIST'S STYLE," he told our English teacher, who'd complained that Owen never expanded a single point in any of his papers; he never employed more than one example for each point he made. "FIRST YOU TELL ME I CAN'T WRITE USING ONLY CAPITAL LETTERS, NOW YOU WANT ME TO 'ELABORATE'-TO BE MORE 'EXPANSIVE.' IS THAT CONSISTENT?" he asked our English teacher. "MAYBE YOU WANT ME TO CHANGE MY PERSONALITY, TOO?"

If, at Gravesend Academy, had persuaded the majority of the faculty that his eccentricities and peculiarities were not only his individual rights but were inseparable from his generally acknowledged brilliance, the more diverse but also more specialized faculty at the University of New Hampshire were not interested in "the whole boy," not at all; they were not even a community, the university faculty, and they shared no general opinion that Owen Meany was brilliant, they expressed no general concern that his individual rights needed protection, and they had no tolerance for eccentricities and peculiarities. The classes they taught were for no student's special development; their interests were the subject themselves-their passions were for the politics of the university, or of their own departments within it-and their overall view of us students was that we should conform ourselves to their methods of their disciplines of study.

Owen Meany, who had been so conspicuous-all my life-was easily overlooked at the University of New Hampshire. He was in none of his classes as distinguished as the tomato-red pickup, which was so readily distinguishable among the many economy-model cars that most parents bought for most students who had their own cars-my grandmother had bought me a Volkswagen Beetle; in the campus parking lots, there were so many VWs of the same year and navy-blue color that I could identify mine only by its license plate or by the familiarity of whatever I had left on the back seat.

And although Owen and I first counted Hester's friendship as an advantage, her friendship was another means by which

        

Owen Meany became lost in Durham; Hester had a lot of friends among the seniors in what was our first year. These seniors were the people Owen and I hung out with; we didn't have to make any friends among the freshmen-and when Hester and her friends graduated, Owen and I didn't have any friends.

As for whatever had made me feel afraid in the summer of '-whatever that fear was, it was replaced by a kind of solitariness, a feeling of being oddly set apart, but without loneliness; the loneliness would come later. And as for fear, you would have thought the Cuban Missile Crisis-that October-would have sufficed; you would have thought that would have scared the shit out of us, as people in New Hampshire are a/ways untruthfully claiming. But Owen said to Hester and me, and to a bunch of hangers-on in Hester's apartment, "DON'T BE AFRAID. THIS IS NO BIG DEAL, THIS IS JUST A BIT OF NUCLEAR BLUFFING-NOTHING HAPPENS AS A RESULT OF THIS. BELIEVE ME. I KNOW."

What he meant was that he believed he "knew" what would happen to him; that it wasn't missiles that would get him- neither the Soviets' nor ours-and that, whatever "it" was, it didn't happen in October, .

"How do you know nothing's going to happen?" someone asked him. It was the guy who hung around Hester's apartment as if he were waiting for Owen Meany to drop dead. He kept encouraging Hester to read The Alexandria Quartet-especially Justine and Clea, which this guy claimed he had read four or five times. Hester wasn't much of a reader, and I had read only Justine. Owen Meany had read the whole quartet and had told Hester and me not to bother with the last three novels.

"IT'S JUST MORE OF THE SAME, AND NOT SO WELL DONE," Owen said. "ONE BOOK ABOUT HAVING SEX IN A FOREIGN ATMOSPHERE IS ENOUGH."

"What do you know about 'sex in a foreign atmosphere'?" the quartet-lover had asked Owen. Owen had not answered the guy. He surely knew the guy was a rival for Hester's affections; he also knew that rivals are best unmanned by being ignored.

"Hey!" the guy shouted at Owen. "I'm talking to you. What makes you think you know there's not going to be a war?"

"OH, THERE'S GOING TO BE A WAR, ALL RIGHT," said Owen Meany. "BUT NOT NOW-NOT OVER CUBA.

EITHER KHRUSHCHEV WILL PULL THE MISSILES OUT OF CUBA OR KENNEDY WILL OFFER HIM SOMETHING TO HELP HIM SAVE FACE."

"This little man knows everything," the guy said.

"Don't you call him 'little,' " Hester said. "He's got the biggest penis ever. If there's a bigger one, I don't want to know about it," Hester said.

"THERE'S NO NEED TO BE CRUDE," said Owen Meany.

That was the last we ever saw of the guy who wanted Hester to read The Alexandria Quartet. I will confess that in the showers in the Gravesend Academy gym-after practicing the shot-I had noticed that Owen's doink was especially large; at least, it was disproportionately large. Compared to the rest of him, it was huge

My cousin Simon, whose doink was rather small-perhaps owing to Hester's childhood violence upon it-once claimed that small doinks grew much, much bigger when they were erect; big doinks, Simon said, never grew much when they got hard. I confess: I don't know-I have no doink theory as adamant or hopeful as Simon's. The only time I saw Owen Meany with an erection, he was wrapped in swaddling clothes-he was only an eleven-year-old Baby Jesus; and although his hard-on was highly inappropriate, it didn't strike me as astonishing.

As for the shot, Owen and I were guilty of lack of practice; by the end of our freshman year, by the summer of - when we were twenty-one, the legal drinking age at last!-we had trouble sinking the shot in under five seconds. We had to work at it all summer-just to get back to where we had been, just to break four seconds again. It was the summer the Buddhists in Vietnam were demonstrating-they were setting themselves on fire. It was the summer when Owen said, "WHAT'S A CATHOLIC DOING AS PRESIDENT OF A COUNTRY OF BUDDHISTS?" It was the summer when President Diem was not long for this world; President John F. Kennedy was not long for this world, either. And it was the first summer I went to work for Meany Granite.

It was my illusion that I worked for Mr. Meany; it was his illusion, too. It had been amply demonstrated to me-who bossed whom, in that family. I should have known, from the start, that Owen was in charge.

"MY FATHER WANTS TO START YOU OUT IN THE

        

MONUMENT SHOP," he told me. "YOU BEGIN WITH AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE FINISHED PRODUCT-IN THIS BUSINESS, IT'S EASIER TO BEGIN WITH THE FINE-TUNING. IT'S GETTING THE STUFF OUT OF THE GROUND THAT CAN BE TRICKY. I HOPE YOU DON'T THINK I'M CONDESCENDING, BUT WORKING WITH GRANITE IS A LOT LIKE WRITING A TERM PAPER-IT'S THE FIRST DRAFT THAT CAN KILL YOU. ONCE YOU GET THE GOOD STUFF INTO THE SHOP, THE FINE WORK IS EASY: CUTTING THE STONE, EDGING THE LETTERS-YOU'VE JUST GOT TO BE FUSSY. IT'S ALL SMOOTHING AND POLISHING-YOU'VE GOT TO GO SLOWLY.

"DON'T BE IN A HURRY TO WORK IN THE QUARRIES. AT THE MONUMENT-END, AT LEAST THE SIZE AND WEIGHT OF THE STONE ARE MANAGEABLE- YOU'RE WORKING WITH SMALLER TOOLS AND A SMALLER PRODUCT. AND IN THE SHOP, EVERY DAY IS DIFFERENT; YOU NEVER KNOW HOW BUSY YOU'LL BE-MOST PEOPLE DON'T DIE ON SCHEDULE, MOST FAMILIES DON'T ORDER GRAVESTONES IN ADVANCE."

I don't doubt that he was genuinely concerned for my safety, and I know he knew everything about granite; it was wise to develop a feeling for the stone-on a smaller, more refined scale-before one encountered the intimidating size and weight of it in the quarry. All the quarrymen-the signalman, the derrickman, the channel bar drillers, and the dynamiters-and even the sawyers who had to handle the rock before it was cut down to monument size ... a// the men who worked at the quarries were afforded a less generous margin for error than those of us who worked in the monument shop. Even so, I thought there was more than caution motivating Owen to keep me working in the monument shop for the entire summer of '. For one thing, I wanted muscles; and the physical work in the monument shop was a lot less strenuous than being a logger for my Uncle Alfred. For another thing, I envied Owen his tan-he worked in the quarries, unless it was raining; on rainy days, he worked in the shop with me. And we called him in from the quarries whenever there was a customer placing an order for a gravestone; Owen insisted that he be the one to handle that-and when the order was not placed by a funeral home,

when the customer was a family member or a close Mend of the deceased, we were all grateful that Owen wanted to handle it.

He was very good at that part of it-very respectful of grief, very tactful (while at the same time he managed to be very specific). I don't mean that this was simply a matter of spelling the name correctly and double-checking the date of birth, and the date of death; I mean that the personality of the deceased was discussed, in depth-Owen sought nothing less than a PROPER monument, a COMPATIBLE monument. The aesthetics of the deceased were taken into consideration; the size, shape, and color of the stone were only the rough drafts of the business; Owen wanted to know the tastes of those mourners who would be viewing the gravestone more than once. I never saw a customer who was displeased with the final product; unfortunately-for the enterprises of Meany Granite-I never saw very many customers, either.

"DON'T BE VAIN," Owen told me, when I complained about the length of my apprenticeship in the monument shop. "IF YOU'RE STANDING IN THE BOTTOM OF A QUARRY, THINKING ABOUT WHAT KIND OF TAN YOU'RE GETTING-OR YOUR STUPID MUSCLES- YOU'RE GOING TO END UP UNDER TEN TONS OF GRANITE. BESIDES, MY FATHER THINKS YOU'RE DOING A GREAT JOB WITH THE GRAVESTONES."

But I don't think Mr. Meany ever noticed the work I was doing with the monuments; it was August before I even saw Mr. Meany in the shop, and he looked surprised to see me-but he always said the same thing, whenever and wherever he saw me. "Why, it's Johnny Wheelwright!" he'd always say.

And when it wasn't raining-or when Owen wasn't talking directly to a customer-the only other time that Owen was in the shop was when there was an especially difficult piece of stonecutting assigned, a particularly complicated gravestone, a demanding shape, lots of tight curves and sharp angles, and so forth. And the typical Gravesend families were plain and dour in the face of death; we had few calls for elaborate coping, even fewer for archways with dosserets, and not one for angels sliding down barber poles. That was too bad, because to see Owen at work with the diamond wheel was to witness state-of-the-art monument-making. There was no one as precise with the diamond wheel as Owen Meany.

        

A diamond wheel is similar to a radial-arm saw, a wood saw familiar to me from my uncle's mill; a diamond wheel is a table saw but the blade is not part of the table-the blade, which is a diamond-impregnated wheel, is lowered to the table in a gantry. The wheel blade is about two feet in diameter and studded (or "tipped") with diamond segments-these are pieces of diamond, only a half inch long, only a quarter inch wide. When the blade is lowered onto the granite, it cuts through the stone at a preset angle into a waiting block of wood. It is a very sharp blade, it makes a very exact and smooth cut; it is perfect for making the precise, polished edges on the tops and sides of gravestones-like a scalpel, it makes no mistakes, or only the user's mistakes. By comparison to other saws in the granite business, it is so fine and delicate a tool that it isn't even called a saw-it is always called "the diamond wheel." It passes through granite with so little resistance that its sound is far less snarly than many wood saws of the power type; a diamond wheel makes a single, high-pitched scream-very plaintive. Owen Meany said: "A DIAMOND WHEEL MAKES A GRAVESTONE SOUND AS IF THE STONE ITSELF IS MOURNING."

Think of how much time he spent in that creepy monument shop on Water Street, the unfinished lettering of the names of the dead surrounding him-is it any wonder that he SAW his own name and the date of his death on Scrooge's grave? No; it's a wonder he didn't SEE such horrors every day! And when he put on those crazy-looking safety goggles and lowered the diamond wheel into cutting position, the terribly consistent scream of that blade must have reminded him of the "permanent scream," which was his own unchanging voice-to use Mr. McSwiney's term for it. After my summer in the monument shop, I could appreciate what might have appealed to Owen Meany about the quiet of churches, the peace of prayer, the easy cadence of hymns and litanies-and even the simplistic, athletic ritual of practicing the shot.

As for the rest of the summer of -when the Buddhists in Vietnam were torching themselves, and time was running out on the Kennedys-Hester was working as a lobster-house waitress again.

"So much for a B.A. in Music," she said.

At least I could appreciate what Owen Meany meant, when he said of Randy White: "I'D LIKE TO GET HIM UNDER THE DIAMOND WHEEL-ALL I'D NEED IS JUST A FEW

SECONDS. I'D LIKE TO PUT HIS DOINK UNDER THE DIAMOND WHEEL," Owen said.

As for doinks-as for mine, in particular-I had another slow summer. The Catholic Church had reason to be proud of the insurmountable virtue of Caroline O'Day, with or without her St. Michael's uniform-and of the virtue of countless others, any church could be proud; they were all virtuous with me. I felt someone's bare breast, briefly-only once, and it was an accident-one warm night when we went swimming off the beach at Little Boar's Head and the phosphorescence, in my opinion, was especially seductive. The girl was a musical friend of Hester's, and in the tomato-red pickup, on the ride back to Durham, Hester volunteered to be the one to sit on my lap, because my date was so displeased by my awkward, amateurish advances.

"Here, you sit in the middle, I'll sit on him," Hester told her friend. "I've felt his silly hard-on before, and it doesn't bother me."

"THERE'S NO NEED TO BE CRUDE," said Owen Meany.

And so I rode from Little Boar's Head to Durham with Hester on my lap-once again, humiliated by my hard-on. I thought that just a few seconds under the diamond wheel would certainly suffice for me; and if someone were to put my doink under the wheel, I considered that it would be no great loss.

I was twenty-one and I was still a Joseph; I was a Joseph then, and I'm just a Joseph now.

Georgian Bay: July , -why can't I just enjoy all the nature up here? I coaxed one of the Keeling kids to take me in one of the boats to Pointe au Baril Station. Miraculously, no one on the island needed anything from the station: not an egg, not a scrap of meal, or a bar of soap; not even any live bait. I was the only one who needed anything; I "needed" a newspaper, I'm ashamed to say. Needing to know the news- it's such a weakness, it's worse than many other addictions, it's an especially debilitating illness.

The Toronto Star said the White House was so frustrated by both Congress and the Pentagon that a small, special-forces group within the military was established; and that actual, active-duty American troops fired rockets and machine guns at Nicaraguan soldiers-all this was unknown to the Congress or the Pentagon. Why aren't Americans as disgusted by them-

        

selves-as fed up with themselves-as everyone else is? All their lip service to democracy, all their blatantly undemocratic behavior! I've got to stop reading about this whole silly business! All these headlines can turn your mind to mush- headlines that within a year will seem most unmemorable; and if memorable, merely quaint. I live in Canada, I have a Canadian passport-why should I waste my time caring what the Americans are doing, especially when they don't care themselves?

I'm going to try to interest myself in something more cosmic-in something more universal, although I suppose that a total lack of integrity in government is "universal," isn't it?

There was another story in The Toronto Star, more appropriate to the paradisiacal view of the universe one can enjoy from Georgian Bay. It was a story about black holes: scientists say that black holes could engulf two whole galaxies! The story was about the potential "collapse of the star system"-what could be more important than that!

Listen to this: "Black holes are concentrations of matter so dense they have collapsed upon themselves. Nothing, not even light, can escape their intense gravitational pull." Imagine mat! Not even light-my God! I announced this news to the Keeling family; but one of the middle children-a sort of science-prize student-responded to me rather rudely.

"Yeah," he said, "but all the black holes are about two million light-years away from Earth."

And I thought: That is about as far away from Earth as Owen Meany is; that is about as far away from Earth as I would like to be.

And where is JFK today? How far away is he?

On November , , Owen Meany and I were in my room at  Front Street, studying for a Geology exam. I was angry with Owen for manipulating me into taking Geology, the true nature of which was concealed-at the University of New Hampshire-in the curriculum catalog under the hippie-inspired title of Earth Science. Owen had misled me into thinking that the course would be an easy means of satisfying a part of our science requirement-he knew all about rocks, he assured me, and the rest of the course would concern itself with fossils. "IT'LL BE NEAT TO KNOW ALL ABOUT THE DINOSAURS!" Owen had said; he seduced me. We spent less than a week with the dinosaurs-and far less time with fossils

than we spent learning the horrible names of the ages of the earth. And it turned out that Owen Meany didn't know a metamorphic schist from an igneous intrusion-unless the latter was granite.

On November , , had just confused the Paleocene epoch with the Pleistocene, and I was further confused by the difference between an epoch and an era.

"The Cenozoic is an era, right?" I asked him.

"WHO CARES?" said Owen Meany. "YOU CAN FORGET THAT PART. AND YOU CAN FORGET ABOUT ANYTHING AS BROAD AS THE TERTIARY OR THE QUATERNARY-THAT'S TOO BROAD, TOO. WHAT YOU'VE GOT TO KNOW IS MORE SPECIFIC, YOU'VE GOT TO KNOW WHAT CHARACTERIZED AN EPOCH- FOR EXAMPLE, WHICH EPOCH IS CHARACTERIZED BY THE TRIUMPH OF BIRDS AND PLACENTAL MAMMALS?"

"Jesus, how'd I ever let you talk me into this?" I said.

"PAY ATTENTION," said Owen Meany. "THERE ARE WAYS TO REMEMBER EVERYTHING. THE WAY TO REMEMBER PLEISTOCENE IS TO REMEMBER THAT THIS EPOCH WAS CHARACTERIZED BY THE APPEARANCE OF MAN AND WIDESPREAD GLACIAL ICE-REMEMBER THE ICE, IT RHYMES WITH PLEIS IN PLEISTOCENE."

"Jesus Christ!" I said.

"I'M JUST TRYING TO HELP YOU REMEMBER," Owen said. "IF YOU'RE CONFUSING THE BLOSSOMING OF BIRDS AND PLACENTAL MAMMALS WITH THE FIRST APPEARANCE OF MAN, YOU'RE ABOUT SIXTY MILLION YEARS OFF-YOU'RE MAKING A PRETTY BIG MISTAKE!"

"The biggest mistake I made was to take Geology!" I said. Suddenly, Ethel was in my room; we hadn't heard her knock or open the door-I don't remember ever seeing Ethel in my room before (or since).

"Your grandmother wishes to see you in the TV room," Ethel said.

"IS SOMETHING WRONG WITH THE TV?" Owen asked her.

"Something is wrong with the president," Ethel said.

When we found out what was wrong with Kennedy-when we saw him shot, and, later, when we learned he was dead-

        

Owen Meany said, "IF WE FIRST APPEAR IN THE PLEISTOCENE, I THINK THIS IS WHEN WE DISAPPEAR-I GUESS A MILLION YEARS OF MAN IS ENOUGH."

What we witnessed with the death of Kennedy was the triumph of television; what we saw with his assassination, and with his funeral, was the beginning of television's dominance of our culture-for television is at its most solemnly self-serving and at its mesmerizing best when it is depicting the untimely deaths of the chosen and the golden. It is as witness to the butchery of heroes in their prime-and of all holy-seeming innocents-that television achieves its deplorable greatness. The blood on Mrs. Kennedy's clothes and her wrecked face under her veil; the fatherless children; LBJ taking the oath of office; and brother Bobby-looking so very much the next in line.

"IF BOBBY WAS NEXT IN LINE FOR MARILYN MONROE, WHAT ELSE IS HE NEXT IN LINE FOR?" said Owen Meany.

Not even five years later, when Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, Hester would say, "Television gives good disaster." I suppose this was nothing but a more vernacular version of my grandmother's observation of the effect of TV on old people: that watching it would hasten their deaths. If watching television doesn't hasten death, it surely manages to make death very inviting; for television so shamelessly sentimentalizes and romanticizes death that it makes the living feel they have missed something-just by staying alive.

At  Front Street, that November of ', my grandmother and Owen Meany and I watched the president be killed for hours; for days we watched him be killed and re-killed, again and again.

"I GET THE POINT," said Owen Meany. "IF SOME MANIAC MURDERS YOU, YOU'RE AN INSTANT HERO-EVEN IF ALL YOU WERE DOING IS RIDING IN A MOTORCADE!"

"I wish some maniac would murder me," my grandmother said.

"MISSUS WHEELWRIGHT! WHAT DO YOU MEAN?" Owen said.

"I mean, why can't some maniac murder someone old-like me?" Grandmother said. "I'd rather be murdered by a maniac than have to leave my home-and that's what will happen to me," she said. "Maybe Dan, maybe Martha-maybe you,"

she said accusingly to me. "One of you, or all of you-either way, you're going to force me to leave this house. You're going to put me in a place with a bunch of old people who are crazy," Grandmother said. "And I'd rather be murdered by a maniac instead-that's all I mean. One day, Ethel won't be able to manage-one day, it will take a hundred Ethels just to clean up the mess I make!" my grandmother said. "One day, not even you will want to watch television with me," she said to Owen. "One day," she said to me, "you'll come to visit me and I won't even know who you are. Why doesn't someone train the maniacs to murder old people and leave the young people alone? What a waster" she cried. A lot of people were saying this about the death of President Kennedy-with a slightly different meaning, of course. "I'm going to be an incontinent idiot," my grandmother said; she looked directly at Owen Meany. "Wouldn't you rather be murdered by a maniac?" she asked him.

"IF IT WOULD DO ANY GOOD-YES, I WOULD," said Owen Meany.

"I think we've been watching too much television," I said.

"There's no remedy for that," my grandmother said.

But after the murder of President Kennedy, it seemed to me that there was "no remedy" for Owen Meany, either; he succumbed to a state of mind that he would not discuss with me-he went into a visible decline in communication. I would often see the tomato-red pickup parked behind the vestry of Kurd's Church; Owen had kept in touch with the Rev. Lewis Merrill, whose silent and extended prayer for Owen had gained him much respect among the faculty and students at Graves-end. Pastor Merrill had always been "liked"; but before his prayer he had lacked respect. I'm sure that Owen, too, was grateful for Mr. MerriH's gesture-even if the gesture had been a struggle, and not of the minister's own initiative. But after JFK's death, Owen appeared to see more of the Rev. Mr. Merrill; and Owen wouldn't tell me what they talked about. Maybe they talked about Marilyn Monroe and the Kennedys. They talked about "the dream," I suppose; but I had not yet been successful in coaxing that dream out of Owen Meany.

A HANDFUL OF DUST is Evelyn Waugh's scathing commentary on the well-mannered death struggles of the upper classes-an irrepressibly amusing picture of society politely blowing its own brains out, with a defiant smile. It tells of Brenda, Tony and their friends-a wonderfully congenial group who live by a unique set of social standards. According to their rules, any sin is acceptable provided it is carried off in good taste.

A Handful of Dust, (c) Copyright 1934, by Evelyn Waugh

CONTENTS

A Handful of Dust

1. Du Côté de Chez Beaver 2. English Gothic-I 3. Hard Cheese on Tony 4. English Gothic-II 5. In Search of a City 6. Du Côté de Chez Todd 7. English Gothic-III

A HANDFUL OF DUST

... I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding behind you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust. -THE WASTELAND

CHAPTER ONE

Du Côté de Chez Beaver

"WAS anyone hurt?" "No one I am thankful to say," said Mrs. Beaver, "except two housemaids who lost their heads and jumped through a glass roof into the paved court. They were in no danger. The fire never properly reached the bedrooms I am afraid. Still they are bound to need doing up, everything black with smoke and drenched in water and luckily they had that old-fashioned sort of extinguisher that ruins everything. One really cannot complain. The chief rooms were completely gutted and everything was insured. Sylvia Newport knows the people. I must get on to them this morning before that ghoul Mrs. Shutter snaps them up." Mrs. Beaver stood with her back to the fire, eating her morning yoghort. She held the carton close under her chin and gobbled with a spoon. "Heavens, how nasty this stuff is. I wish you'd take to it, John. You're looking so tired lately. I don't know how I should get through my day without it." "But, mumsey, I haven't as much to do as you have." "That's true, my son." John Beaver lived with his mother at the house in Sussex Gardens where they had moved after his father's death. There was little in it to suggest the austerely elegant interiors which Mrs. Beaver planned for her customers. It was crowded with the unsaleable furniture of two larger houses, without pretension to any period, least of all to the present. The best pieces and those which had sentimental interest for Mrs. Beaver were in the L-shaped drawing room upstairs. Beaver had a dark little sitting room on the ground floor behind the dining room, and his own telephone. The elderly parlourmaid looked after his clothes. She also dusted, polished and maintained in symmetrical order on his dressing table and on the top of his chest of drawers, the collection of sombre and bulky objects that had stood in his father's dressing room; indestructible presents for his wedding and twenty-first birthday, ivory, brass bound; covered in pigskin, crested and gold mounted, suggestive of expensive Edwardian masculinity-racing flasks and hunting flasks, cigar cases, tobacco jars, jockeys, elaborate meerschaum pipes, button hooks and hat brushes. There were four servants, all female and all, save one elderly. When anyone asked Beaver why he stayed there instead of setting up on his own, he sometimes said that he thought his mother liked having him there (in spite of her business she was lonely); sometimes that it saved him at least five pounds a week. His total income varied around six pounds a week, this was an important saving. He was twenty-five years old. From leaving Oxford until the beginning of the slump he had worked in an advertising agency. Since then no one had been able to find anything for him to do. So he got up late and sat near his telephone most of the day, hoping to be called up. Whenever it was possible, Mrs. Beaver took an hour off in the middle of the morning. She was always at her shop punctually at nine, and by half past eleven she needed a break. Then, if no important customer was imminent, she would get into her two-seater and drive home to Sussex Gardens. Beaver was usually dressed by then and she had grown to value their morning interchange of gossip. "What was your evening?" "Audrey rang me up at eight and asked me to dinner. Ten of us at the Embassy, rather dreary. Afterwards we all went on to a party by a woman called de Trommet." "I know who you mean. American. She hasn't paid for the toile-de-jouy chaircovers we made her last April. I had a dull time too; didn't hold a card all the evening and came away four pounds ten to the bad." "Poor mumsey." "I'm lunching at Viola Chasm's. What are you doing? I didn't order anything here I'm afraid." "Nothing so far. But I can always go round to Brat's." "But that's so expensive. I'm sure if we ask Chambers she'll be able to get you something in. I thought you were certain to be out." "Well I still may be. It isn't twelve yet." Most of Beaver's invitations came to him at the last moment; occasionally even later, when he had already begun to eat a solitary meal from a tray (... "John, darling, there's been a muddle and Sonia has arrived without Reggie. Could you be an angel and help me out. Only be quick, because we're going in now"). Then he would go precipitately for a taxi and arrive, with apologies, after the first course... One of his few recent quarrels with his mother had occurred when he left a luncheon party of hers in this way. "Where are you going for the week-end?" "Hetton." "Who's that? I forget?" "Tony Last." "Yes, of course. She's lovely, he's rather a stick. I didn't know you knew them." "Well I don't really. Tony asked me in Brat's the other night. He may have forgotten." "Send a telegram and remind them. It is far better than ringing up. It gives them less chance to make excuses. Send it tomorrow just before you start. They owe me for a table." "What's their dossier?" "I used to see her quite a lot before she married. She was Brenda Rex, Lord St. Cloud's daughter, very fair, under-water look. People used to be mad about her when she was a girl. Everyone thought she would marry Jock Grant-Menzies at one time. Wasted on Tony Last, he's a prig. I should say it was time she began to be bored. They've been married five or six years. Quite well off but everything goes in keeping up the house. I've never seen it but I've an idea it's huge and quite hideous. They've got one child at least, perhaps more." "Mumsey, you are wonderful. I believe you know about everyone." "It's a great help. All a matter of paying attention while people are talking." Mrs. Beaver smoked a cigarette and then drove back to her shop. An American woman bought two patch-work quilts at thirty guineas each, Lady Metroland telephoned about a bathroom ceiling, an unknown young man paid cash for a cushion; in the intervals between these events, Mrs. Beaver was able to descend to the basement where two dispirited girls were packing lampshades. It was cold down there in spite of a little oil stove and the walls were always damp. The girls were becoming quite deft, she noticed with pleasure, particularly the shorter one who was handling the crates like a man. "That's the way," she said, "you are doing very nicely, Joyce. I'll soon get you on to something more interesting." "Thank you, Mrs. Beaver." They had better stay in the packing department for a bit, Mrs. Beaver decided; as long as they would stand it. They had neither of them enough chic to work upstairs. Both had paid good premiums to learn Mrs. Beaver's art. Beaver sat on beside his telephone. Once it rang and a voice said, "Mr. Beaver? Will you please hold the line, sir, Lady Tipping would like to speak to you." The intervening silence was full of pleasant expectation. Lady Tipping had a luncheon party that day, he knew; they had spent some time together the evening before and he had been particularly successful with her. Someone had chucked... "Oh, Mr. Beaver, I am so sorry to trouble you. I was wondering, could you possibly tell me the name of the young man you introduced to me last night at Madame de Trommet's? The one with the reddish moustache. I think he was in Parliament." "I expect you mean Jock Grant-Menzies." "Yes, that's the name. You don't by any chance know where I can find him, do you?" "He's in the book but I don't suppose he'll be at home now. You might be able to get him at Brat's at about one. He's almost always there." "Jock Grant-Menzies, Brat's Club. Thank you so very much. It is kind of you. I hope you will come and see me some time: Goodbye." After that the telephone was silent. At one o'clock Beaver despaired. He put on his overcoat, his gloves, his bowler hat and with neatly rolled umbrella set off to his club, taking a penny bus as far as the corner of Bond Street. The air of antiquity pervading Brat's, derived from its elegant Georgian façade and finely panelled rooms, was entirely spurious, for it was a club of recent origin, founded in the burst of bonhommie immediately after the war. It was intended for young men, to be a place where they could straddle across the fire and be jolly in the card room without incurring scowls from older members. But now these founders were themselves passing into middle age; they were heavier, balder and redder in the face than when they had been demobilised, but their joviality persisted and it was their turn now to embarrass their successors, deploring their lack of manly and gentlemanly qualities. Six broad backs shut Beaver from the bar. He settled in one of the armchairs in the outer room and turned over the pages of the New Yorker, waiting until someone he knew should turn up. Jock Grant-Menzies came upstairs. The men at the bar greeted him saying, "Hullo, Jock old boy, what are you drinking?" or simply "Well, old boy?" He was too young to have fought in the war but these men thought he was all right; they liked him far more than they did Beaver, who, they thought, ought never to have got into the club at all. But Jock stopped to talk to Beaver. "Well, old boy," he said. "What are you drinking?" "Nothing so far." Beaver looked at his watch. "But I think it's time I had one. Brandy and ginger ale." Jock called the barman and then said: "Who was the old girl you wished on me at that party last night?" "She's called Lady Tipping." "I thought she might be. That explains it. They gave me a message downstairs that someone with a name like that wanted me to lunch with her." "Are you going?" "No, I'm no good at lunch parties. Besides I decided when I got up that I'd have oysters here." The barman came with the drinks. "Mr. Beaver, sir, there's ten shillings against you in my books for last month." "Ah, thank you, Macdougal, remind me some time, will you?" "Very good, sir." Beaver said, "I'm going to Hetton tomorrow." "Are you now? Give Tony and Brenda my love." "What's the form?" "Very quiet and enjoyable." "No paper games?" "Oh, no, nothing like that. A certain amount of bridge and backgammon and low poker with the neighbours." "Comfortable?" "Not bad. Plenty to drink. Rather a shortage of bathrooms. You can stay in bed all the morning." "I've never met Brenda." "You'll like her, she's a grand girl. I often think Tony Last's one of the happiest men I know. He's got just enough money, loves the place, one son he's crazy about, devoted wife, not a worry in the world." "Most enviable. You don't know anyone else who's going, do you? I was wondering if I could get a lift down there." I don't I'm afraid. It's quite easy by train." "Yes, but it's more pleasant by road." "And cheaper." "Yes, and cheaper I suppose... well, I'm going down to lunch. You won't have another?" Beaver rose to go. "Yes, I think I will." "Oh, all right. Macdougal. Two more please." Macdougal said, "Shall I book them to you, sir?" "Yes, if you will." Later, at the bar, Jock said, "I made Beaver pay for a drink." "He can't have liked that." "He nearly died of it. Know anything about pigs?" "No. Why?" "Only that they keep writing to me about them from my constituency." Beaver went downstairs but before going into the dining room he told the porter to ring up his home and see if there was any message for him. "Lady Tipping rang up a few minutes ago and asked whether you could come to luncheon with her today." "Will you ring her up and say that I shall be delighted to but that I may be a few minutes late." It was just after half past one when he left Brat's and walked at a good pace towards Hill Street.

CHAPTER TWO

English Gothic-I

BETWEEN the villages of Hetton and Compton Last lies the extensive park of Hetton Abbey. This, formerly one of the notable houses of the county, was entirely rebuilt in 1864 in the Gothic style and is now devoid of interest. The grounds are open to the public daily until sunset and the house may be viewed on application by writing. It contains some good portraits and furniture. The terrace commands a fine view. This passage from the county Guide Book did not cause Tony Last any serious annoyance. Unkinder things had been said. His aunt Frances, embittered by an upbringing of unremitting severity, remarked that the plans of the house must have been adapted by Mr. Pecksniff from one of his pupils' designs for an orphanage. But there was not a glazed brick or encaustic tile that was not dear to Tony's heart. In some ways, he knew, it was not convenient to run; but what big house was? It was not altogether amenable to modern ideas of comfort; he had many small improvements in mind, which would be put into effect as soon as the death duties were paid off. But the general aspect and atmosphere of the place; the line of its battlements against the sky; the central clock tower where quarterly chimes disturbed all but the heaviest sleepers; the ecclesiastical gloom of the great hall, its ceiling groined and painted in nappies of red and gold, supported on shafts of polished granite with carved capitals, half-lit by day through lancet windows of armorial stained glass, at night by a vast gasolier of brass and wrought iron, wired now and fitted with twenty electric bulbs; the blasts of hot air that rose suddenly at one's feet, through grills of cast-iron trefoils from the antiquated heating apparatus below, the cavernous chill of the more remote corridors where, economising in coke, he had had the pipes shut off; the dining hall with its hammer-beam roof and pitch-pine minstrels gallery; the bedrooms with their brass bedsteads, each with a frieze of Gothic text, each named from Malory, Yseult, Elaine, Mordred and Merlin, Gawaine and Bedivere, Lancelot, Perceval, Tristram, Galahad, his own dressing room, Morgan le Fay, and Brenda's Guinevere, where the bed stood on a dais; its walls hung with tapestry, its fire-place like a tomb of the thirteenth century, from whose bay window one could count the spires of six churches-all these things with which he had grown up were a source of constant delight and exultation to Tony; things of tender memory and proud possession. They were not in the fashion, he fully realised. Twenty years ago people had liked half timber and old pewter; now it was urns and colonnades; but the time would come, perhaps in John Andrew's day, when opinion would reinstate Hetton in its proper place. Already it was referred to as "amusing" and a very civil young man had asked permission to photograph it for an architectural review. The ceiling of Morgan le Fay was not in perfect repair. In order to make an appearance of coffered wood, moulded slats had been nailed in a chequer across the plaster. They were painted in chevrons of blue and gold. The squares between were decorated alternately with Tudor roses and fleur-de-lis. But damp had penetrated into one corner, leaving a large patch where the gilt had tarnished and the colour flaked away; in another place the wooden laths had become warped and separated from the plaster. Lying in bed, in the grave ten minutes between waking and ringing, Tony studied these defects and resolved anew to have them put right. He wondered whether it would be easy, nowadays, to find craftsmen capable of such delicate work. Morgan le Fay had always been his room since he left the night nursery. He had been put there so that he would be within calling distance of his parents, inseparable in Guinevere; for until quite late in his life he was subject to nightmare. He had taken nothing from the room since he had slept there, but every year added to its contents, so that it now formed a gallery representative of every phase of his adolescence-the framed picture of a dreadnought (a coloured supplement from Chums), all its guns spouting flame and smoke; a photographic group of his private school; a cabinet called 'the Museum,' filled with a dozen desultory collections, eggs, butterflies, fossils, coins; his parents, in the leather diptych which had stood by his bed at school; Brenda, eight years ago when he had been trying to get engaged to her; Brenda with John, taken just after the christening; an aquatint of Hetton, as it had stood until his great-grandfather demolished it; some shelves of books, Bevis, Woodwork at Home, Conjuring for All, The Young Visitors, The Law of Landlord and Tenant, Farewell to Arms. All over England people were waking up, queasy and despondent. Tony lay for ten minutes very happily planning the renovation of his ceiling. Then he rang the bell. "Has her ladyship been called yet?" "About quarter of an hour ago, sir." "Then I'll have breakfast in her room." He put on his dressing gown and slippers and went through into Guinevere. Brenda lay on the dais. She had insisted on a modern bed. Her tray was beside her and the quilt was littered with envelopes, letters and the daily papers. Her head was propped against a very small blue pillow; clean of makeup, her face was almost colourless, rose-pearl, scarcely deeper in tone than her arms and neck. "Well?" said Tony. "Kiss." He sat by the tray at the head of the bed; she leant forward to him (a nereid emerging from fathomless depths of clear water). She turned her lips away and rubbed against his cheek like a cat. It was a way she had. "Anything interesting?" He picked up some of the letters. "No. Mama wants nanny to send John's measurements. She's knitting him something for Christmas. And the mayor wants me to open something next month. Please, needn't I?" "I think you'd better, we haven't done anything for him for a long time." "Well you must write the speech. I'm getting too old for the girlish one I used to give them all. And Angela says will we stay for the New Year?" "That's easy. Not on her life, we won't." "I guessed not... though it sounds an amusing party." "You go if you like. I can't possibly get away." "That's all right. I knew it would be 'no' before I opened the letter." "Well what sort of pleasure can there be in going all the way to Yorkshire in the middle of winter..." "Darling, don't be cross. I know we aren't going. I'm not making a thing about it. I just thought it might be fun to eat someone else's food for a bit." Then Brenda's maid brought in the other tray. He had it put by the window seat, and began opening his letters. He looked out of the window. Only four of the six church towers were visible that morning. Presently he said, "As a matter of fact I probably can manage to get away that week-end." "Darling, are you sure you wouldn't hate it?" "I daresay not." While he ate his breakfast. Brenda read to him from the papers. "Reggie's been making another speech... There's such an extraordinary picture of Babe and Jock... a woman in America has had twins by two different husbands. Would you have thought that possible?... Two more chaps in gas ovens... a little girl has been strangled in a cemetery with a bootlace... that play we went to about a farm is coming off." Then she read him the serial. He lit his pipe. "I don't believe you're listening. Why doesn't Sylvia want Rupert to get the letter?" "Eh? Oh well, you see, she doesn't really trust Rupert." "I knew it. There's no such character as Rupert in the story. I shall never read to you again." "Well to tell you the truth I was just thinking." "Oh." "I was thinking how delightful it is, that it's Saturday morning and we haven't got anyone coming for the week-end." "Oh you thought that?" "Don't you?" "Well it sometimes seems to me rather pointless keeping up a house this size if we don't now and then ask some other people to stay in it." "Pointless? I can't think what you mean. I don't keep up this house to be a hostel for a lot of bores to come and gossip in. We've always lived here and I hope John will be able to keep it on after me. One has a duty towards one's employees, and towards the place too. It's a definite part of English life which would be a serious loss if..." Then Tony stopped short in his speech and looked at the bed. Brenda had turned on her face and only the top of her head appeared above the sheets. "Oh God," she said into the pillow. "What have I done?" "I say, am I being pompous again?" She turned sideways so that her nose and one eye emerged. "Oh no, darling, not pompous. You wouldn't know how." "Sorry." Brenda sat up. "And, please, I didn't mean it. I'm jolly glad too, that no one's coming." These scenes of domestic playfulness had been more or less continuous in Tony and Brenda's life for seven years. Outside, it was soft English weather; mist in the hollows and pale sunshine on the hills; the coverts had ceased dripping, for there were no leaves to hold the recent rain, but the undergrowth was wet, dark in the shadows, iridescent where the sun caught it; the lanes were soggy and there was water running in the ditches. John Andrew sat his pony, solemn and stiff as a Life-Guard, while Ben fixed the jump. Thunderclap had been a present on his sixth birthday from Uncle Reggie. It was John who had named her, after lengthy consultation. Originally she had been called Christabelle which, as Ben said, was more the name for a hound than a horse. Ben had known a strawberry roan called Thunderclap who killed two riders and won the local point-to-point four years running. He had been a lovely little horse, said Ben, till he staked himself in the guts, hunting, and had to be shot. Ben knew stories about a great many different horses. There was one called Zero on whom he had won five Jimmy-o-goblins at ten to three at Chester one year. And there was a mule he had known during the war, called Peppermint, who had died of drinking the company's rum rations. But John was not going to name his pony after a drunken mule. So in the end they had decided on Thunderclap, in spite of her imperturbable disposition. She was a dark bay, with long tail and mane. Ben had left her legs shaggy. She cropped the grass, resisting John's attempts to keep her head up. Before her arrival riding had been a very different thing. He had jogged around the paddock on a little Shetland pony called Bunny, with his nurse panting at the bridle. Now it was a man's business. Nanny sat at a distance, crocheting, on her camp stool; out of ear shot. There had been a corresponding promotion in Ben's position. From being the hand who looked after the farm horses, he was now, perceptibly, assuming the air of a stud groom. The handkerchief round his neck gave place to a stock with a fox-head pin. He was a man of varied experience in other parts of the country. Neither Tony nor Brenda hunted but they were anxious that John should like it. Ben foresaw the time when the stables would be full and himself in authority; it would not be like Mr. Last to get anyone in from outside. Ben had got two posts bored for iron pegs, and a whitewashed rail. With these he erected a two foot jump in the middle of the field. "Now take it quite easy. Canter up slow and when she takes off lean forward in the saddle and you'll be over like a bird. Keep her head straight at it." Thunderclap trotted forwards, cantered two paces, thought better of it and, just before the jump, fell into a trot again and swerved round the obstacle. John recovered his balance by dropping the reins and gripping the mane with both hands; he looked guiltily at Ben, who said, "What d'you suppose your bloody legs are for? Here take this and just give her a tap when you get up to it." He handed John a switch. Nanny sat by the gate re-reading a letter from her sister. John took Thunderclap back and tried the jump again. This time they made straight for the rail. Ben shouted "Legs!" and John kicked sturdily, losing his stirrups. Ben raised his arms as if scaring crows. Thunderclap jumped; John rose from the saddle and landed on his back in the grass. Nanny rose in alarm. "Oh what's happened, Mr. Hacket, is he hurt?" "He's all right," said Ben. "I'm all right," said John, "I think she put in a short step." "Short step my grandmother. You just opened your bloody legs and took an arser. Keep hold on to the reins next time. You can lose a hunt that way." At the third attempt John got over and found himself, breathless and insecure, one stirrup swinging loose and one hand grabbing its old support in the mane, but still in the saddle. "There, how did that feel? You just skimmed over like a swallow. Try it again?" Twice more John and Thunderclap went over the little rail, then nanny called that it was time to go indoors for his milk. They walked the pony back to the stable. Nanny said, "Oh dear, look at all the mud on your coat." Ben said, "We'll have you riding the winner at Aintree soon." "Good morning, Mr. Hacket." "Good morning, miss." "Goodbye, Ben, may I come and see you doing the farm horses this evening?" "That's not for me to say. You must ask nanny. Tell you what though, the grey carthorse has got worms. Would you like to see me give him a pill?" "Oh yes, please, nanny, may I?" "You must ask mother. Come along now, you've had quite enough of horses for one day." "Can't have enough of horses," said John, "ever." On the way back to the house, he said, "Can I have my milk in mummy's room?" "That depends." Nanny's replies were always evasive, like that-'We'll see' or 'That's asking' or 'Those that ask no questions, hear no lies'-so unlike Ben's decisive and pungent judgments. "What does it depend on?" "Lots of things." "Tell me one of them." "On your not asking a lot of silly questions." "Silly old tart." "John. How dare you? What do you mean?" Delighted by the effect of this sally John broke away from her hand and danced in front of her saying, "Silly old tart, silly old tart" all the way to the side entrance. When they entered the porch his nurse silently took off his leggings; he was sobered a little by her grimness. "Go straight up to the nursery," she said. "I am going to speak to your mother about you." "Please, nanny. I don't know what it means, but I didn't mean it." "Go straight to the nursery." Brenda was doing her face. "It's been the same ever since Ben Hacket started teaching him to ride, my lady, there's been no doing anything with him." Brenda spat in the eye black. "But, nanny, what exactly did he say?" "Oh I couldn't repeat it, my lady." "Nonsense, you must tell me. Otherwise I shall be thinking it something far worse than it was." "It couldn't have been worse... he called me a silly old tart, my lady." Brenda choked slightly into her face towel. "He said that?" "Repeatedly. He danced in front of me all the way up the drive, singing it." "I see... well you were quite right to tell me." "Thank you, my lady, and since we are talking about it I think I ought to say that it seems to me that Ben Hacket is making the child go ahead far too quickly with his riding. It's very dangerous. He had what might have been a serious fall this morning." "All right, nanny, I'll speak to Mr. Last about it." She spoke to Tony. They both laughed about it a great deal. "Darling," she said. "You must speak to him. You're so much better at being serious than I am." "I should have thought it was very nice to be called a tart," John argued, "and anyway it's a word Ben often uses about people." "Well, he's got no business to." "I like Ben more than anyone in the world. And I should think he's cleverer too," "Now you know you don't like him more than your mother." "Yes I do. Far more." Tony felt that the time had come to cut out the cross talk and deliver the homily he had been preparing. "Now, listen, John. It was very wrong of you to call nanny a silly old tart. First, because it was unkind to her. Think of all the things she does for you every day." "She's paid to." "Be quiet. And secondly because you were using a word which people of your age and class do not use. Poor people use certain expressions which gentlemen do not. You are a gentleman. When you grow up all this house and lots of other things besides will belong to you. You must learn to speak like someone who is going to have these things and to be considerate to people less fortunate than you, particularly women. Do you understand?" "Is Ben less fortunate than me?" "That has nothing to do with it. Now you are to go upstairs and say you are sorry to nanny and promise never to use that word about anyone again." "All right." "And because you have been so naughty today you are not to ride tomorrow." "Tomorrow's Sunday." "Well next day, then." "But you said 'tomorrow.' It isn't fair to change now." "John, don't argue. If you are not careful I shall send Thunderclap back to Uncle Reggie and say that I find you are not a good enough boy to keep him. You wouldn't like that would you?" "What would Uncle Reggie do with her? She couldn't carry him. Besides he's usually abroad." "He'd give him to some other little boy. Anyway that's got nothing to do with it. Now run off and say you're sorry to nanny." At the door John said, "It's all right about riding on Monday, isn't it? You did say 'tomorrow.' " "Yes, I suppose so." "Hooray. Thunderclap went very well today. We jumped a big post and rails. She refused to first time but went like a bird after that." "Didn't you come off?" "Yes, once. It wasn't Thunderclap's fault. I just opened my bloody legs and cut an arser." "How did the lecture go?" Brenda asked. "Bad. Rotten bad." "The trouble is that nanny's jealous of Ben." "I'm not sure we shan't both be soon." They lunched at a small, round table in the centre of the dining hall. There seemed no way of securing an even temperature in that room; even when one side was painfully roasting in the direct blaze of the open hearth, the other was numbed by a dozen converging draughts. Brenda had tried numerous experiments with screens and a portable, electric radiator, but with little success. Even today, mild elsewhere, it was bitterly cold in the dining hall. Although they were both in good health and of unexceptional figure, Tony and Brenda were on a diet. It gave an interest to their meals and saved them from the two uncivilised extremes of which solitary diners are in danger-absorbing gluttony or an irregular regimen of scrambled eggs and raw beef sandwiches. Under their present system they denied themselves the combination of protein and starch at the same meal. They had a printed catalogue telling them which foods contained protein and which starch. Most normal dishes seemed to be compact of both so that it was fun for Tony and Brenda to choose the menu. Usually it ended by their declaring some food 'joker.' "I'm sure it does me a great deal of good." "Yes, darling, and when we get tired of it we might try an alphabetical diet, having things beginning with a different letter every day. I would be hungry, nothing but jam and jellied eels... What are your plans for the afternoon?" "Nothing much. Carter's coming up at five to go over a few things. I may go over to Pigstanton after luncheon. I think we've got a tenant for Lowater Farm but it's been empty some time and I ought to see how much needs doing to it." "I wouldn't say 'no' to going in to the 'movies.' " "All right. I can easily leave Lowater till Monday." "And we might go to Woolworth's afterwards, eh?" What with Brenda's pretty ways and Tony's good sense, it was not surprising that their friends pointed to them as a pair who were pre-eminently successful in solving the problem of getting along well together. The pudding, without protein, was unattractive. Five minutes afterwards a telegram was brought in. Tony opened it and said "Hell." "Badders?" "Something too horrible has happened. Look at this." Brenda read. Arriving 3. 18 so looking forward visit. Beaver. And asked, "What's Beaver?" "It's a young man." "That sounds all right." "Oh no it's not, wait till you see him." "What's he coming here for? Did you ask him to stay?" I suppose I did in a vague kind of way. I went to Brat's one evening and he was the only chap there so we had some drinks and he said something about wanting to see the house..." "I suppose you were tight." "Not really, but I never thought he'd hold it against me." "Well it jolly well serves you right. That's what comes of going up to London on business and leaving me alone here... Who is he anyway?" "Just a young man. His mother keeps that shop." "I used to know her. She's hell. Come to think of it we owe her some money." "Look here we must put a call through and say we're ill." "Too late, he's in the train now, recklessly mixing starch and protein in the Great Western three and six-penny lunch... Anyway he can go into Sir Galahad. No one who sleeps there ever comes again-the bed's agony I believe." "What on earth are we going to do with him? It's too late to get anyone else." "You go over to Pigstanton. I'll look after him. It's easier alone. We can take him to the movies tonight and tomorrow he can see over the house. If we're lucky he may go up by the evening train. Does he have to work on Monday morning?" "I shouldn't know." Three-eighteen was far from being the most convenient time for arrival. One reached the house at about a quarter to four and if, like Beaver, one was a stranger there was an awkward time until tea; but without Tony being there to make her self-conscious, Brenda could carry these things off quite gracefully and Beaver was so seldom wholly welcome anywhere that he was not sensitive to the slight constraint of his reception. She met him in what was still called the smoking room; it was in some ways the least gloomy place in the house. She said, "It is nice that you were able to come. I must break it to you at once that we haven't got a party. I'm afraid you'll be terribly bored... Tony had to go out but he'll be in soon... was the train crowded? It often is on Saturdays... would you like to come outside? It'll be dark soon and we might get some of the sun while we can..." and so on. If Tony had been there it would have been difficult for she would have caught his eye and her manner as châtelaine would have collapsed. And Beaver was well used to making conversation, so they went out together through the French windows on to the terrace, down the steps, into the Dutch garden, and back round the orangery without suffering a moment's real embarrassment. She even heard herself telling Beaver that his mother was one of her oldest friends. Tony returned in time for tea. He apologised for not being at home to greet his guest and almost immediately went out again to interview the agent in his study. Brenda asked about London and what parties there were. Beaver was particularly knowledgeable. "Polly Cockpurse is having one soon." "Yes, I know." "Are you coming up for it?" "I don't expect so. We never go anywhere nowadays." The jokes that had been going round for six weeks were all new to Brenda; they had become polished and perfected with repetition and Beaver was able to bring them out with good effect. He told her of numerous changes of alliance among her friends. "What's happening to Mary and Simon?" "Oh, didn't you know? That's broken up." "When?" "It began in Austria this summer..." "And Billy Angmering?" "He's having a terrific walk out with a girl called Sheila Shrub." "And the Helm-Hubbards?" "That marriage isn't going too well either... Daisy has started a new restaurant.. It's going very well... and there's a new night club called the Warren..." "Dear me," Brenda said at last. "What fun everyone seems to be having." After tea John Andrew was brought in and quickly usurped the conversation. "How do you do?" he said. "I didn't know you were coming. Daddy said he had a weekend to himself for once. Do you hunt?" "Not for a long time." "Ben says it stands to reason everyone ought to hunt who can afford to, for the good of the country." "Perhaps I can't afford to." "Are you poor?" "Please, Mr. Beaver, you mustn't let him bore you." "Yes, very poor." "Poor enough to call people tarts?" "Yes, quite poor enough." "How did you get poor?" "I always have been." "Oh." John lost interest in this topic. "The grey horse at the farm has got worms." "How do you know?" "Ben says so. Besides you've only got to look at his dung." "Oh dear," said Brenda, "what would nanny say if she heard you talking like that?" "How old are you?" "Twenty-five. How old are you?" "What do you do?" "Nothing much." "Well if I was you I'd do something and earn some money. Then you'd be able to hunt." "But I shouldn't be able to call people tarts." "I don't see any point in that anyway." Later in the nursery, while he was having supper, John said: "I think Mr. Beaver's a very silly man, don't you?" "I'm sure I don't know," said nanny. "I think he's the silliest man who's ever been here." "Comparisons are odious." "There just isn't anything nice about him. He's got a silly voice and a silly face, silly eyes and silly nose," John's voice fell into a liturgical sing-song, "silly feet and silly toes, silly head and silly clothes... "Now you eat up your supper," said nanny. That evening before dinner Tony came up behind Brenda as she sat at her dressing table and made a face over her shoulder in the glass. "I feel rather guilty about Beaver-going off and leaving you like that. You were heavenly to him." She said, "Oh it wasn't bad really. He's rather pathetic." Further down the passage Beaver examined his room with the care of an experienced guest. There was no reading lamp. The ink pot was dry. The fire had been lit but had gone out. The bathroom, he had already discovered, was a great distance away, up a flight of turret steps. He did not at all like the look or feel of the bed; the springs were broken in the centre and it creaked ominously when he lay down to try it. The return ticket, third class, had been eighteen shillings. Then there would be tips. Owing to Tony's feeling of guilt they had champagne for dinner, which neither he nor Brenda particularly liked. Nor, as it happened, did Beaver, but he was glad that it was there. It was decanted into a tall jug and was carried round the little table, between the three of them as a pledge of hospitality. Afterwards they drove into Pigstanton to the Picturedrome where there was a film Beaver had seen some months before. When they got back there was a grog tray and some sandwiches in the smoking room. They talked about the film but Beaver did not let on that he had seen it. Tony took him to the door of Sir Galahad. "I hope you sleep well." "I'm sure I shall." "D'you like to be called in the morning?" "May I ring?" "Certainly. Got everything you want?" "Yes thanks. Goodnight." "Goodnight." But when he got back he said, "You know, I feel awful about Beaver." "Oh Beaver's all right," said Brenda. But he was far from being comfortable and as he rolled patiently about the bed in quest of a position in which it was possible to go to sleep, he reflected that, since he had no intention of coming to the house again, he would give the butler nothing and only five shillings to the footman who was looking after him. Presently he adapted himself to the rugged topography of the mattress and dozed, fitfully, until morning. But the new day began dismally with the information that all the Sunday papers had already gone to her ladyship's room. Tony invariably wore a dark suit on Sundays and a stiff white collar. He went to church, where he sat in a large pitch pine pew, put in by his great-grandfather at the time of rebuilding the house, furnished with very high crimson hassocks and a fireplace, complete with iron grate and a little poker which his father used to rattle when any point in the sermon attracted his disapproval. Since his father's day a fire had not been laid there; Tony had it in mind to revive the practice next winter. On Christmas Day and Harvest Thanksgiving Tony read the lessons from the back of the brass eagle. When service was over he stood for a few minutes at the porch chatting affably with the vicar's sister and the people from the village. Then he returned home by a path across the fields which led to a side door in the walls garden; he visited the hot houses and picked himself a button-hole, stopped by the gardeners' cottages for a few words (the smell of Sunday dinners rising warm and overpowering from the little doorways) and then, rather solemnly, drank a glass of sherry in the library. That was the simple, mildly ceremonious order of his Sunday morning, which had evolved, more or less spontaneously, from the more severe practises of his parents; he adhered to it with great satisfaction. Brenda teased him whenever she caught him posing as an upright, God-fearing gentleman of the old school and Tony saw the joke, but this did not at all diminish the pleasure he derived from his weekly routine, or his annoyance when the presence of guests suspended it. For this reason his heart sank when, emerging from his study into the great hall at quarter to eleven, he met Beaver already dressed and prepared to be entertained; it was only a momentary vexation, however, for while he wished him good morning he noticed that his guest had an A. B. C. in his hands and was clearly looking out a train. "I hope you slept all right?" "Beautifully," said Beaver, though his wan expression did not confirm the word. "I'm so glad. I always sleep well here myself. I say I don't like the look of that train guide. I hope you weren't thinking of leaving us yet?" "Alas, I've got to get up tonight I'm afraid." "Too bad. I've hardly seen you. The trains aren't very good on Sundays. The best leaves at five-forty-five and gets up about nine. It stops a lot and there's no restaurant car." "That'll do fine." "Sure you can't stay until tomorrow?" "Quite sure." The church bells were ringing across the park. "Wel

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

  by Ernest Hemingway

 

 

Flyleaf:

 

      The greatest American novel to emerge from World War I, _A Farewell to Arms_ cemented Ernest Hemingway's reputation as one of the most important novelists of the twentieth century. Drawn largely from Hemingway's own experiences, it is the story of a volunteer ambulance driver wounded on the Italian front, the beautiful British nurse with whom he falls in love, and their journey to find some small sanctuary in a world gone mad with war. By turns beautiful and tragic, tender and harshly realistic, _A Farewell to Arms_ is one of the supreme literary achievements of our time.

 

 

 

Copyright 1929 by Charles Scribner's Sons

Copyright renewed 1957 by Ernest Hemingway

 

 

SCRIBNER

1230 Avenue of the Americas

New York, NY10020

 

 

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places,

and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are

used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons,

living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

 

 

All rights reserved including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

 

 

ISBN 0-684-83788-9

 

 

 

 

A FAREWELL TO ARMS

 

 

 

BOOK ONE

 

 

 

 

 

1

 

 

      In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village that looked across the river and the plain to the mountains. In the bed of the river there were pebbles and boulders, dry and white in the sun, and the water was clear and swiftly moving and blue in the channels. Troops went by the house and down the road and the dust they raised powdered the leaves of the trees. The trunks of the trees too were dusty and the leaves fell early that year and we saw the troops marching along the road and the dust rising and leaves, stirred by the breeze, falling and the soldiers marching and afterward the road bare and white except for the leaves.

      The plain was rich with crops; there were many orchards of fruit trees and beyond the plain the mountains were brown and bare. There was fighting in the mountains and at night we could see the flashes from the artillery. In the dark it was like summer lightning, but the nights were cool and there was not the feeling of a storm coming.

      Sometimes in the dark we heard the troops marching under the window and guns going past pulled by motor-tractors. There was much traffic at night and many mules on the roads with boxes of ammunition on each side of their pack-saddles and gray motor trucks that carried men, and other trucks with loads covered with canvas that moved slower in the traffic. There were big guns too that passed in the day drawn by tractors, the long barrels of the guns covered with green branches and green leafy branches and vines laid over the tractors. To the north we could look across a valley and see a forest of chestnut trees and behind it another mountain on this side of the river. There was fighting for that mountain too, but it was not successful, and in the fall when the rains came the leaves all fell from the chestnut trees and the branches were bare and the trunks black with rain. The vineyards were thin and bare-branched too and all the country wet and brown and dead with the autumn. There were mists over the river and clouds on the mountain and the trucks splashed mud on the road and the troops were muddy and wet in their capes; their rifles were wet and under their capes the two leather cartridge-boxes on the front of the belts, gray leather boxes heavy with the packs of clips of thin, long 6.5 mm. cartridges, bulged forward under the capes so that the men, passing on the road, marched as though they were six months gone with child.

      There were small gray motor cars that passed going very fast; usually there was an officer on the seat with the driver and more officers in the back seat. They splashed more mud than the camions even and if one of the officers in the back was very small and sitting between two generals, he himself so small that you could not see his face but only the top of his cap and his narrow back, and if the car went especially fast it was probably the King. He lived in Udine and came out in this way nearly every day to see how things were going, and things went very badly.

      At the start of the winter came the permanent rain and with the rain came the cholera. But it was checked and in the end only seven thousand died of it in the army.

 

 

 

 

2

 

 

      The next year there were many victories. The mountain that was beyond the valley and the hillside where the chestnut forest grew was captured and there were victories beyond the plain on the plateau to the south and we crossed the river in August and lived in a house in Gorizia that had a fountain and many thick shady trees in a walled garden and a wistaria vine purple on the side of the house. Now the fighting was in the next mountains beyond and was not a mile away. The town was very nice and our house was very fine. The river ran behind us and the town had been captured very handsomely but the mountains beyond it could not be taken and I was very glad the Austrians seemed to want to come back to the town some time, if the war should end, because they did not bombard it to destroy it but only a little in a military way. People lived on in it and there were hospitals and cafés and artillery up side streets and two bawdy houses, one for troops and one for officers, and with the end of the summer, the cool nights, the fighting in the mountains beyond the town, the shell-marked iron of the railway bridge, the smashed tunnel by the river where the fighting had been, the trees around the square and the long avenue of trees that led to the square; these with there being girls in the town, the King passing in his motor car, sometimes now seeing his face and little long necked body and gray beard like a goat's chin tuft; all these with the sudden interiors of houses that had lost a wall through shelling, with plaster and rubble in their gardens and sometimes in the street, and the whole thing going well on the Carso made the fall very different from the last fall when we had been in the country. The war was changed too.

      The forest of oak trees on the mountain beyond the town was gone. The forest had been green in the summer when we had come into the town but now there were the stumps and the broken trunks and the ground torn up, and one day at the end of the fall when I was out where the oak forest had been I saw a cloud coming over the mountain. It came very fast and the sun went a dull yellow and then everything was gray and the sky was covered and the cloud came on down the mountain and suddenly we were in it and it was snow. The snow slanted across the wind, the bare ground was covered, the stumps of trees projected, there was snow on the guns and there were paths in the snow going back to the latrines behind trenches.

      Later, below in the town, I watched the snow falling, looking out of the window of the bawdy house, the house for officers, where I sat with a friend and two glasses drinking a bottle of Asti, and, looking out at the snow falling slowly and heavily, we knew it was all over for that year. Up the river the mountains had not been taken; none of the mountains beyond the river had been taken. That was all left for next year. My friend saw the priest from our mess going by in the street, walking carefully in the slush, and pounded on the window to attract his attention. The priest looked up. He saw us and smiled. My friend motioned for him to come in. The priest shook his head and went on. That night in the mess after the spaghetti course, which every one ate very quickly and seriously, lifting the spaghetti on the fork until the loose strands hung clear then lowering it into the mouth, or else using a continuous lift and sucking into the mouth, helping ourselves to wine from the grass-covered gallon flask; it swung in a metal cradle and you pulled the neck of the flask down with the forefinger and the wine, clear red, tannic and lovely, poured out into the glass held with the same hand; after this course, the captain commenced picking on the priest.

      The priest was young and blushed easily and wore a uniform like the rest of us but with a cross in dark red velvet above the left breast pocket of his gray tunic. The captain spoke pidgin Italian for my doubtful benefit, in order that I might understand perfectly, that nothing should be lost.

      "Priest to-day with girls," the captain said looking at the priest and at me. The priest smiled and blushed and shook his head. This captain baited him often.

      "Not true?" asked the captain. "To-day I see priest with girls."

      "No," said the priest. The other officers were amused at the baiting.

      "Priest not with girls," went on the captain. "Priest never with girls," he explained to me. He took my glass and filled it, looking at my eyes all the time, but not losing sight of the priest.

      "Priest every night five against one." Every one at the table laughed. "You understand? Priest every night five against one." He made a gesture and laughed loudly. The priest accepted it as a joke.

      "The Pope wants the Austrians to win the war," the major said. "He loves Franz Joseph. That's where the money comes from. I am an atheist."

      "Did you ever read the 'Black Pig'?" asked the lieutenant. "I will get you a copy. It was that which shook my faith."

      "It is a filthy and vile book," said the priest. "You do not really like it."

      "It is very valuable," said the lieutenant. "It tells you about those priests. You will like it," he said to me. I smiled at the priest and he smiled back across the candle-light. "Don't you read it," he said.

      "I will get it for you," said the lieutenant.

      "All thinking men are atheists," the major said. "I do not believe in the Free Masons however."

      "I believe in the Free Masons," the lieutenant said. "It is a noble organization." Some one came in and as the door opened I could see the snow falling.

      "There will be no more offensive now that the snow has come," I said.

      "Certainly not," said the major. "You should go on leave. You should go to Rome, Naples, Sicily--"

      "He should visit Amalfi," said the lieutenant. "I will write you cards to my family in Amalfi. They will love you like a son."

      "He should go to Palermo."

      "He ought to go to Capri."

      "I would like you to see Abruzzi and visit my family at Capracotta," said the priest.

      "Listen to him talk about the Abruzzi. There's more snow there than here. He doesn't want to see peasants. Let him go to centres of culture and civilization."

      "He should have fine girls. I will give you the addresses of places in Naples. Beautiful young girls--accompanied by their mothers. Ha! Ha! Ha!" The captain spread his hand open, the thumb up and fingers outspread as when you make shadow pictures. There was a shadow from his hand on the wall. He spoke again in pidgin Italian. "You go away like this," he pointed to the thumb, "and come back like this," he touched the little finger. Every one laughed.

      "Look," said the captain. He spread the hand again. Again the candle-light made its shadows on the wall. He started with the upright thumb and named in their order the thumb and four fingers, "soto-tenente (the thumb), tenente (first finger), capitano (next finger), maggiore (next to the little finger), and tenentecolonello (the little finger). You go away soto-tenente! You come back soto-colonello!" They all laughed. The captain was having a great success with finger games. He looked at the priest and shouted, "Every night priest five against one!" They all laughed again.

      "You must go on leave at once," the major said.

      "I would like to go with you and show you things," the lieutenant said.

      "When you come back bring a phonograph."

      "Bring good opera disks."

      "Bring Caruso."

      "Don't bring Caruso. He bellows."

      "Don't you wish you could bellow like him?"

      "He bellows. I say he bellows!"

      "I would like you to go to Abruzzi," the priest said. The others were shouting. "There is good hunting. You would like the people and though it is cold it is clear and dry. You could stay with my family. My father is a famous hunter."

      "Come on," said the captain. "We go whorehouse before it shuts."

      "Good-night," I said to the priest.

      "Good-night," he said.

 

 

 

 

3

 

 

      When I came back to the front we still lived in that town. There were many more guns in the country around and the spring had come. The fields were green and there were small green shoots on the vines, the trees along the road had small leaves and a breeze came from the sea. I saw the town with the hill and the old castle above it in a cup in the hills with the mountains beyond, brown mountains with a little green on their slopes. In the town there were more guns, there were some new hospitals, you met British men and sometimes women, on the street, and a few more houses had been hit by shell fire. Jt was warm and like the spring and I walked down the alleyway of trees, warmed from the sun on the wall, and found we still lived in the same house and that it all looked the same as when I had left it. The door was open, there was a soldier sitting on a bench outside in the sun, an ambulance was waiting by the side door and inside the door, as I went in, there was the smell of marble floors and hospital. It was all as I had left it except that now it was spring. I looked in the door of the big room and saw the major sitting at his desk, the window open and the sunlight coming into the room. He did not see me and I did not know whether to go in and report or go upstairs first and clean up. I decided to go on upstairs.

      The room I shared with the lieutenant Rinaldi looked out on the courtyard. The window was open, my bed was made up with blankets and my things hung on the wall, the gas mask in an oblong tin can, the steel helmet on the same peg. At the foot of the bed was my flat trunk, and my winter boots, the leather shiny with oil, were on the trunk. My Austrian sniper's rifle with its blued octagon barrel and the lovely dark walnut, cheek-fitted, schutzen stock, hung over the two beds. The telescope that fitted it was, I remembered, locked in the trunk. The lieutenant, Rinaldi, lay asleep on the other bed. He woke when he heard me in the room and sat up.

      "Ciaou!" he said. "What kind of time did you have?"

      "Magnificent."

      We shook hands and he put his arm around my neck and kissed me.

      "Oughf," I said.

      "You're dirty," he said. "You ought to wash. Where did you go and what did you do? Tell me everything at once."

      "I went everywhere. Milan, Florence, Rome, Naples, Villa San Giovanni, Messina, Taormina--"

      "You talk like a time-table. Did you have any beautiful adventures?"

      "Yes."

      "Where?"

      "Milano, Firenze, Roma, Napoli--"

      "That's enough. Tell me really what was the best."

      "In Milano."

      "That was because it was first. Where did you meet her? In the Cova? Where did you go? How did you feel? Tell me everything at once. Did you stay all night?"

      "Yes."

      "That's nothing. Here now we have beautiful girls. New girls never been to the front before."

      "Wonderful."

      "You don't believe me? We will go now this afternoon and see. And in the town we have beautiful English girls. I am now in love with Miss Barkley. I will take you to call. I will probably marry Miss Barkley."

      "I have to get washed and report. Doesn't anybody work now?"

      "Since you are gone we have nothing but frostbites, chilblains, jaundice, gonorrhea, self-inflicted wounds, pneumonia and hard and soft chancres. Every week some one gets wounded by rock fragments. There are a few real wounded. Next week the war starts again. Perhaps it start again. They say so. Do you think I would do right to marry Miss Barkley--after the war of course?"

      "Absolutely," I said and poured the basin full of water.

      "To-night you will tell me everything," said Rinaldi. "Now I must go back to sleep to be fresh and beautiful for Miss Barkley."

      I took off my tunic and shirt and washed in the cold water in the basin. While I rubbed myself with a towel I looked around the room and out the window and at Rinaldi lying with his eyes closed on the bed. He was good-looking, was my age, and he came from Amalfi. He loved being a surgeon and we were great friends. While I was looking at him he opened his eyes.

      "Have you any money?"

      "Yes."

      "Loan me fifty lire."

      I dried my hands and took out my pocket-book from the inside of my tunic hanging on the wall. Rinaldi took the note, folded it without rising from the bed and slid it in his breeches pocket. He smiled, "I must make on Miss Barkley the impression of a man of sufficient wealth. You are my great and good friend and financial protector."

      "Go to hell," I said.

      That night at the mess I sat next to the priest and he was disappointed and suddenly hurt that I had not gone to the Abruzzi. He had written to his father that I was coming and they had made preparations. I myself felt as badly as he did and could not understand why I had not gone. It was what I had wanted to do and I tried to explain how one thing had led to another and finally he saw it and understood that I had really wanted to go and it was almost all right. I had drunk much wine and afterward coffee and Strega and I explained, winefully, how we did not do the things we wanted to do; we never did such things.

      We two were talking while the others argued. I had wanted to go to Abruzzi. I had gone to no place where the roads were frozen and hard as iron, where it was clear cold and dry and the snow was dry and powdery and hare-tracks in the snow and the peasants took off their hats and called you Lord and there was good hunting. I had gone to no such place but to the smoke of cafés and nights when the room whirled and you needed to look at the wall to make it stop, nights in bed, drunk, when you knew that that was all there was, and the strange excitement of waking and not knowing who it was with you, and the world all unreal in the dark and so exciting that you must resume again unknowing and not caring in the night, sure that this was all and all and all and not caring. Suddenly to care very much and to sleep to wake with it sometimes morning and all that had been there gone and everything sharp and hard and clear and sometimes a dispute about the cost. Sometimes still pleasant and fond and warm and breakfast and lunch. Sometimes all niceness gone and glad to get out on the street but always another day starting and then another night. I tried to tell about the night and the difference between the night and the day and how the night was better unless the day was very clean and cold and I could not tell it; as I cannot tell it now. But if you have had it you know. He had not had it but he understood that I had really wanted to go to the Abruzzi but had not gone and we were still friends, with many tastes alike, but with the difference between us. He had always known what I did not know and what, when I learned it, I was always able to forget. But I did not know that then, although I learned it later. In the meantime we were all at the mess, the meal was finished, and the argument went on. We two stopped talking and the captain shouted, "Priest not happy. Priest not happy without girls."

      "I am happy," said the priest.

      "Priest not happy. Priest wants Austrians to win the war," the captain said. The others listened. The priest shook his head.

      "No," he said.

      "Priest wants us never to attack. Don't you want us never to attack?"

      "No. If there is a war I suppose we must attack."

      "Must attack. Shall attack!"

      The priest nodded.

      "Leave him alone," the major said. "He's all right."

      "He can't do anything about it anyway," the captain said. We all got up and left the table.

 

 

 

 

4

 

 

      The battery in the next garden woke me in the morning and I saw the sun coming through the window and got out of the bed. I went to the window and looked out. The gravel paths were moist and the grass was wet with dew. The battery fired twice and the air came each time like a blow and shook the window and made the front of my pajamas flap. I could not see the guns but they were evidently firing directly over us. It was a nuisance to have them there but it was a comfort that they were no bigger. As I looked out at the garden I heard a motor truck starting on the road. I dressed, went downstairs, had some coffee in the kitchen and went out to the garage.

      Ten cars were lined up side by side under the long shed. They were top-heavy, blunt-nosed ambulances, painted gray and built like moving-vans. The mechanics were working on one out in the yard. Three others were up in the mountains at dressing stations.

      "Do they ever shell that battery?" Tasked one of the mechanics.

      "No, Signor Tenente. It is protected by the little hill."

      "How's everything?"

      "Not so bad. This machine is no good but the others march." He stopped working and smiled. "Were you on permission?"

      "Yes."

      He wiped his hands on his jumper and grinned. "You have a good time?" The others all grinned too.

      "Fine," I said. "What's the matter with this machine?"

      "It's no good. One thing after another."

      "What's the matter now?"

      "New rings."

      I left them working, the car looking disgraced and empty with the engine open and parts spread on the work bench, and went in under the shed and looked at each of the cars. They were moderately clean, a few freshly washed, the others dusty. I looked at the tires carefully, looking for cuts or stone bruises. Everything seemed in good condition. It evidently made no difference whether I was there to look after things or not. I had imagined that the condition of the cars, whether or not things were obtainable, the smooth functioning of the business of removing wounded and sick from the dressing stations, hauling them back from the mountains to the clearing station and then distributing them to the hospitals named on their papers, depended to a considerable extent on myself. Evidently it did not matter whether I was there or not.

      "Has there been any trouble getting parts?" I asked the sergeant mechanic.

      "No, Signor Tenente."

      "Where is the gasoline park now?"

      "At the same place."

      "Good," I said and went back to the house and drank another bowl of coffee at the mess table. The coffee was a pale gray and sweet with condensed milk. Outside the window it was a lovely spring morning. There was that beginning of a feeling of dryness in the nose that meant the day would be hot later on. That day I visited the posts in the mountains and was back in town late in the afternoon.

      The whole thing seemed to run better while I was away. The offensive was going to start again I heard. The division for which we worked were to attack at a place up the river and the major told me that I would see about the posts for during the attack. The attack would cross the river up above the narrow gorge and spread up the hillside. The posts for the cars would have to be as near the river as they could get and keep covered. They would, of course, be selected by the infantry but we were supposed to work it out. It was one of those things that gave you a false feeling of soldiering.

      I was very dusty and dirty and went up to my room to wash. Rinaldi was sitting on the bed with a copy of Hugo's English grammar. He was dressed, wore his black boots, and his hair shone.

      "Splendid," he said when he saw me. "You will come with me to see Miss Barkley."

      "No.

      "Yes. You will please come and make me a good impression on her."

      "All right. Wait till I get cleaned up."

      "Wash up and come as you are."

 

9

 

 

      The road was crowded and there were screens of corn-stalk and straw matting on both sides and matting over the top so that it was like the entrance at a circus or a native village. We drove slowly in this matting-covered tunnel and came out onto a bare cleared space where the railway station had been. The road here was below the level of the river bank and all along the side of the sunken road there were holes dug in the bank with infantry in them. The sun was going down and looking up along the bank as we drove I saw the Austrian observation balloons above the hills on the other side dark against the sunset. We parked the cars beyond a brickyard. The ovens and some deep holes had been equipped as dressing stations. There were three doctors that I knew. I talked with the major and learned that when it should start and our cars should be loaded we would drive them back along the screened road and up to the main road along the ridge where there would be a post and other cars to clear them. He hoped the road would not jam. It was a one-road show. The road was screened because it was in sight of the Austrians across the river. Here at the brickyard we were sheltered from rifle or machine-gun fire by the river bank. There was one smashed bridge across the river. They were going to put over another bridge when the bombardment started and some troops were to cross at the shallows up above at the bend of the river. The major was a little man with upturned mustaches. He had been in the war in Libya and wore two woundstripes. He said that if the thing went well he would see that I was decorated. I said I hoped it would go well but that he was too kind. I asked him if there was a big dugout where the drivers could stay and he sent a soldier to show me. I went with him and found the dugout, which was very good. The drivers were pleased with it and I left them there. The major asked me to have a drink with him and two other officers. We drank rum and it was very friendly. Outside it was getting dark. I asked what time the attack was to he and they said as soon as it was dark. I went back to the drivers. They were sitting in the dugout talking and when I came in they stopped. I gave them each a package of cigarettes, Macedonias, loosely packed cigarettes that spilled tobacco and needed to have the ends twisted before you smoked them. Manera lit his lighter and passed it around. The lighter was shaped like a Fiat radiator. I told them what I had heard.

      "Why didn't we see the post when we came down?" Passini asked.

      "It was just beyond where we turned off."

      "That road will be a dirty mess," Manera said.

      "They'll shell the ---- out of us."

      "Probably."

      "What about eating, lieutenant? We won't get a chance to eat after this thing starts."

      "I'll go and see now," I said.

      "You want us to stay here or can we look around?"

      "Better stay here."

      I went back to the major's dugout and he said the field kitchen would be along and the drivers could come and get their stew. He would loan them mess tins if they did not have them. I said I thought they had them. I went back and told the drivers I would get them as soon as the food came. Manera said he hoped it would come before the bombardment started. They were silent until I went out. They were all mechanics and hated the war.

      I went out to look at the cars and see what was going on and then came back and sat down in the dugout with the four drivers. We sat on the ground with our backs against the wall and smoked. Outside it was nearly dark. The earth of the dugout was warm and dry and I let my shoulders back against the wall, sitting on the small of my back, and relaxed.

      "Who goes to the attack?" asked Gavuzzi.

      "Bersaglieri."

      "All bersaglieri?"

      "I think so."

      "There aren't enough troops here for a real attack."

      "It is probably to draw attention from where the real attack will be."

      "Do the men know that who attack?"

      "I don't think so."

      "Of course they don't," Manera said. "They wouldn't attack if they did."

      "Yes, they would," Passini said. "Bersaglieri are fools."

      "They are brave and have good discipline," I said.

      "They are big through the chest by measurement, and healthy. But they are still fools."

      "The granatieri are tall," Manera said. This was a joke. They all laughed.

      "Were you there, Tenente, when they wouldn't attack and they shot every tenth man?"

      "No."

      "It is true. They lined them up afterward and took every tenth man. Carabinieri shot them."

      "Carabinieri," said Passini and spat on the floor. "But those grenadiers; all over six feet. They wouldn't attack."

      "If everybody would not attack the war would be over," Manera said.

      "It wasn't that way with the granatieri. They were afraid. The officers all came from such good families."

      "Some of the officers went alone."

      "A sergeant shot two officers who would not get out."

      "Some troops went out."

      "Those that went out were not lined up when they took the tenth men."

      "One of those shot by the carabinieri is from my town," Passini said. "He was a big smart tall boy to be in the granatieri. Always in Rome. Always with the girls. Always with the carabinieri." He laughed. "Now they have a guard outside his house with a bayonet and nobody can come to see his mother and father and sisters and his father loses his civil rights and cannot even vote. They are all without law to protect them. Anybody can take their property."

      "If it wasn't that that happens to their families nobody would go to the attack."

      "Yes. Alpini would. These V. E. soldiers would. Some bersaglieri."

      "Bersaglieri have run too. Now they try to forget it."

      "You should not let us talk this way, Tenente. Evviva l'esercito," Passini said sarcastically.

      "I know how you talk," I said. "But as long as you drive the cars and behave--"

      "--and don't talk so other officers can hear," Manera finished. "I believe we should get the war over," I said. "It would not finish it if one side stopped fighting. It would only be worse if we stopped fighting."

      "It could not be worse," Passini said respectfully. "There is nothing worse than war."

      "Defeat is worse."

      "I do not believe it," Passini said still respectfully. "What is defeat? You go home."

      "They come after you. They take your home. They take your sisters."

      "I don't believe it," Passini said. "They can't do that to everybody. Let everybody defend his home. Let them keep their sisters in the house."

      "They hang you. They come and make you be a soldier again. Not in the auto-ambulance, in the infantry."

      "They can't hang every one."

      "An outside nation can't make you be a soldier," Manera said. "At the first battle you all run."

      "Like the Tchecos."

      "I think you do not know anything about being conquered and so you think it is not bad."

      "Tenente," Passini said. "We understand you let us talk. Listen. There is nothing as bad as war. We in the auto-ambulance cannot even realize at all how bad it is. When people realize how bad it is they cannot do anything to stop it because they go crazy. There are some people who never realize. There are people who are afraid of their officers. It is with them the war is made."

      "I know it is bad but we must finish it."

      "It doesn't finish. There is no finish to a war."

      "Yes there is."

      Passini shook his head.

      "War is not won by victory. What if we take San Gabriele? What if we take the Carso and Monfalcone and Trieste? Where are we then? Did you see all the far mountains to-day? Do you think we could take all them too? Only if the Austrians stop fighting. One side must stop fighting. Why don't we stop fighting? If they come down into Italy they will get tired and go away. They have their own country. But no, instead there is a war."

      "You're an orator."

      "We think. We read. We are not peasants. We are mechanics. But even the peasants know better than to believe in a war. Everybody hates this war."

      "There is a class that controls a country that is stupid and does not realize anything and never can. That is why we have this war."

      "Also they make money out of it."

      "Most of them don't," said Passini. "They are too stupid. They do it for nothing. For stupidity."

      "We must shut up," said Manera. "We talk too much even for the Tenente."

      "He likes it," said Passini. "We will convert him."

      "But now we will shut up," Manera said.

      "Do we eat yet, Tenente?" Gavuzzi asked.

      "I will go and see," I said. Gordini stood up and went outside with me.

      "Is there anything I can do, Tenente? Can I help in any way?" He was the quietest one of the four. "Come with me if you want," I said, "and we'll see."

      It was dark outside and the long light from the search-lights was moving over the mountains. There were big search-lights on that front mounted on camions that you passed sometimes on the roads at night, close behind the lines, the camion stopped a little off the road, an officer directing the light and the crew scared. We crossed the brickyard, and stopped at the main dressing station. There was a little shelter of green branches outside over the entrance and in the dark the night wind rustled the leaves dried by the sun. Inside there was a light. The major was at the telephone sitting on a box. One of the medical captains said the attack had been put forward an hour. He offered me a glass of cognac. I looked at the board tables, the instruments shining in the light, the basins and the stoppered bottles. Gordini stood behind me. The major got up from the telephone.

      "It starts now," he said. "It has been put back again."

      I looked outside, it was dark and the Austrian search-lights were moving on the mountains behind us. It was quiet for a moment still, then from all the guns behind us the bombardment started.

      "Savoia," said the major.

      "About the soup, major," I said. He did not hear me. I repeated it.

      "It hasn't come up."

      A big shell came in and burst outside in the brickyard. Another burst and in the noise you could hear the smaller noise of the brick and dirt raining down.

      "What is there to eat?"

      "We have a little pasta asciutta," the major said.

      "I'll take what you can give me."

      The major spoke to an orderly who went out of sight in the back and came back with a metal basin of cold cooked macaroni. I handed it to Gordini.

      "Have you any cheese?"

      The major spoke grudgingly to the orderly who ducked back into the hole again and came out with a quarter of a white cheese.

      "Thank you very much," I said.

      "You'd better not go out."

      Outside something was set down beside the entrance. One of the two men who had carried it looked in.

      "Bring him in," said the major. "What's the matter with you? Do you want us to come outside and get him?"

      The two stretcher-bearers picked up the man under the arms and by the legs and brought him in.

      "Slit the tunic," the major said.

      He held a forceps with some gauze in the end. The two captains took off their coats. "Get out of here," the major said to the two stretcher-bearers.

      "Come on," I said to Gordini.

      "You better wait until the shelling is over," the major said over his shoulder.

      "They want to eat," I said.

      "As you wish."

      Outside we ran across the brickyard. A shell burst short near the river bank. Then there was one that we did not hear coming until the sudden rush. We both went flat and with the flash and bump of the burst and the smell heard the singing off of the fragments and the rattle of falling brick. Gordini got up and ran for the dugout. I was after him, holding the cheese, its smooth surface covered with brick dust. Inside the dugout were the three drivers sitting against the wall, smoking.

      "Here, you patriots," I said.

      "How are the cars?" Manera asked.

      "All right."

      "Did they scare you, Tenente?"

      "You're damned right," I said.

      I took out my knife, opened it, wiped off the blade and pared off the dirty outside surface of the cheese. Gavuzzi handed me the basin of macaroni.

      "Start in to eat, Tenente."

      "No," I said. "Put it on the floor. We'll all eat."

      "There are no forks."

      "What the hell," I said in English.

      I cut the cheese into pieces and laid them on the macaroni.

      "Sit down to it," I said. They sat down and waited. I put thumb and fingers into the macaroni and lifted. A mass loosened.

      "Lift it high, Tenente."

      I lifted it to arm's length and the strands cleared. I lowered it into the mouth, sucked and snapped in the ends, and chewed, then took a bite of cheese, chewed, and then a drink of the wine. It tasted of rusty metal. I handed the canteen back to Passini.

      "It's rotten," he said. "It's been in there too long. I had it in the car."

      They were all eating, holding their chins close over the basin, tipping their heads back, sucking in the ends. I took another mouthful and some cheese and a rinse of wine. Something landed outside that shook the earth.

      "Four hundred twenty or minnenwerfer," Gavuzzi said.

      "There aren't any four hundred twenties in the mountains," I said.

      "They have big Skoda guns. I've seen the holes."

      "Three hundred fives."

      We went on eating. There was a cough, a noise like a railway engine starting and then an explosion that shook the earth again.

      "This isn't a deep dugout," Passini said.

      "That was a big trench mortar."

      "Yes, sir."

      I ate the end of my piece of cheese and took a swallow of wine. Through the other noise I heard a cough, then came the chuh-chuhchuh-chuh--then there was a flash, as when a blast-furnace door is swung open, and a roar that started white and went red and on and on in a rushing wind. I tried to breathe but my breath would not come and I felt myself rush bodily out of myself and out and out and out and all the time bodily in the wind. I went out swiftly, all of myself, and I knew I was dead and that it had all been a mistake to think you just died. Then I floated, and instead of going on I felt myself slide back. I breathed and I was back. The ground was torn up and in front of my head there was a splintered beam of wood. In the jolt of my head I heard somebody crying. I thought somebody was screaming. I tried to move but I could not move. I heard the machine-guns and rifles firing across the river and all along the river. There was a great splashing and I saw the star-shells go up and burst and float whitely and rockets going up and heard the bombs, all this in a moment, and then I heard close to me some one saying "Mama Mia! Oh, mama Mia!" I pulled and twisted and got my legs loose finally and turned around and touched him. It was Passini and when I touched him he screamed. His legs were toward me and I saw in the dark and the light that they were both smashed above the knee. One leg was gone and the other was held by tendons and part of the trouser and the stump twitched and jerked as though it were not connected. He bit his arm and moaned, "Oh mama mia, mama Mia," then, "Dio te salve, Maria. Dio te salve, Maria. Oh Jesus shoot me Christ shoot me mama mia mama Mia oh purest lovely Mary shoot me. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. Oh Jesus lovely Mary stop it. Oh oh oh oh," then choking, "Mama mama mia." Then he was quiet, biting his arm, the stump of his leg twitching.

      "Porta feriti!" I shouted holding my hands cupped. "Porta feriti!" I tried to get closer to Passini to try to put a tourniquet on the legs but I could not move. I tried again and my legs moved a little. I could pull backward along with my arms and elbows. Passini was quiet now. I sat beside him, undid my tunic and tried to rip the tail of my shirt. It would not rip and I bit the edge of the cloth to start it. Then I thought of his puttees. I had on wool stockings but Passini wore puttees. All the drivers wore puttees but Passini had only one leg. I unwound the puttee and while I was doing it I saw there was no need to try and make a tourniquet because he was dead already. I made sure he was dead. There were three others to locate. I sat up straight and as I did so something inside my head moved like the weights on a doll's eyes and it hit me inside in back of my eyeballs. My legs felt warm and wet and my shoes were wet and warm inside. I knew that I was hit and leaned over and put my hand on my knee. My knee wasn't there. My hand went in and my knee was down on my shin. I wiped my hand on my shirt and another floating light came very slowly down and I looked at my leg and was very afraid. Oh, God, I said, get me out of here. I knew, however, that there had been three others. There were four drivers. Passini was dead. That left three. Some one took hold of me under the arms and somebody else lifted my legs.

      "There are three others," I said. "One is dead."

      "It's Manera. We went for a stretcher but there wasn't any. How are you, Tenente?"

      "Where is Gordini and Gavuzzi?"

      "Gordini's at the post getting bandaged. Gavuzzi has your legs. Hold on to my neck, Tenente. Are you badly hit?"

      "In the leg. How is Gordini?"

      "He's all right. It was a big trench mortar shell."

      "Passini's dead."

      "Yes. He's dead."

      A shell fell close and they both dropped to the ground and dropped me. "I'm sorry, Tenente," said Manera. "Hang onto my neck."

      "If you drop me again."

      "It was because we were scared."

      "Are you unwounded?"

      "We are both wounded a little."

      "Can Gordini drive?"

      "I don't think so."

      They dropped me once more before we reached the post.

      "You sons of bitches," I said.

      "I am sorry, Tenente," Manera said. "We won't drop you again."

      Outside the post a great many of us lay on the ground in the dark. They carried wounded in and brought them out. I could see the light come out from the dressing station when the curtain opened and they brought some one in or out. The dead were off to one side. The doctors were working with their sleeves up to their shoulders and were red as butchers. There were not enough stretchers. Some of the wounded were noisy but most were quiet. The wind blew the leaves in the bower over the door of the dressing station and the night was getting cold. Stretcher-bearers came in all the time, put their stretchers down, unloaded them and went away. As soon as I got to the dressing station Manera brought a medical sergeant out and he put bandages on both my legs. He said there was so much dirt blown into the wound that there had not been much hemorrhage. They would take me as soon as possible. He went back inside. Gordini could not drive, Manera said. His shoulder was smashed and his head was hurt. He had not felt bad but now the shoulder had stiffened. He was sitting up beside one of the brick walls. Manera and Gavuzzi each went off with a load of wounded. They could drive all right. The British had come with three ambulances and they had two men on each ambulance. One of their drivers came over to me, brought by Gordini who looked very white and sick. The Britisher leaned over.

      "Are you hit badly?" he asked. He was a tall man and wore steel-rimmed spectacles.

      "In the legs."

      "It's not serious I hope. Will you have a cigarette?"

      "Thanks."

      "They tell me you've lost two drivers."

      "Yes. One killed and the fellow that brought you."

      "What rotten luck. Would you like us to take the cars?"

      "That's what I wanted to ask you."

      "We'd take quite good care of them and return them to the villa. 206 aren't you?"

      "Yes."

      "It's a charming place. I've seen you about. They tell me you're an American."

      "Yes."

      "I'm English."

      "No!"

      "Yes, English. Did you think I was Italian? There were some Italians with one of our units."

      "It would be fine if you would take the cars," I said.

      "We'll be most careful of them," he straightened up. "This chap of yours was very anxious for me to see you." He patted Gordini on the shoulder. Gordini winced and smiled. The Englishman broke into voluble and perfect Italian. "Now everything is arranged. I've seen your Tenente. We will take over the two cars. You won't worry now." He broke off, "I must do something about getting you out of here. I'll see the medical wallahs. We'll take you back with us."

      He walked across to the dressing station, stepping carefully among the wounded. I saw the blanket open, the light came out and he went in.

      "He will look after you, Tenente," Gordini said.

      "How are you, Franco?"

      "I am all right." He sat down beside me. In a moment the blanket in front of the dressing station opened and two stretcherbearers came out followed by the tall Englishman. He brought them over to me.

      "Here is the American Tenente," he said in Italian.

      "I'd rather wait," I said. "There are much worse wounded than me. I'm all right."

      "Come, come," he said. "Don't be a bloody hero." Then in Italian: "Lift him very carefully about the legs. His legs are very painful. He is the legitimate son of President Wilson." They picked me up and took me into the dressing room. Inside they were operating on all the tables. The little major looked at us furious. He recognized me and waved a forceps.

      "Ca va bien?"

      "Ca va."

      "I have brought him in," the tall Englishman said in Italian. "The only son of the American Ambassador. He can be here until you are ready to take him. Then I will take him with my first load." He bent over me. "I'll look up their adjutant to do your papers and it will all go much faster." He stooped to go under the doorway and went out. The major was unhooking the forceps now, dropping them in a basin. I followed his hands with my eyes. Now he was bandaging. Then the stretcher-bearers took the man off the table.

      "I'll take the American Tenente," one of the captains said. They lifted me onto the table. It was hard and slippery. There were many strong smells, chemical smells and the sweet smell of blood. They took off my trousers and the medical captain commenced dictating to the sergeant-adjutant while he worked, "Multiple superficial wounds of the left and right thigh and left and right knee and right foot. Profound wounds of right knee and foot. Lacerations of the scalp (he pro

27

 

 

      I woke when Rinaldi came in but he did not talk and I went back to sleep again. In the morning I was dressed and gone before it was light. Rinaldi did not wake when I left.

      I had not seen the Bainsizza before and it was strange to go up the slope where the Austrians had been, beyond the place on the river where I had been wounded. There was a steep new road and many trucks. Beyond, the road flattened out and I saw woods and steep hills in the mist. There were woods that had been taken quickly and not smashed. Then beyond where the road was not protected by the hills it was screened by matting on the sides and over the top. The road ended in a wrecked village. The lines were up beyond. There was much artillery around. The houses were badly smashed but things were very well organized and there were signboards everywhere. We found Gino and he got us some coffee and later I went with him and met various people and saw the posts. Gino said the British cars were working further down the Bainsizza at Ravne. He had great admiration for the British. There was still a certain amount of shelling, he said, but not many wounded. There would be many sick now the rains had started. The Austrians were supposed to attack but he did not believe it. We were supposed to attack too, but they had not brought up any new troops so he thought that was off too. Food was scarce and he would be glad to get a full meal in Gorizia. What kind of supper had I had? I told him and he said that would be wonderful. He was especially impressed by the dolce. I did not describe it in detail, only said it was a dolce, and I think he believed it was something more elaborate than bread pudding.

      Did I know where he was going to go? I said I didn't but that some of the other cars were at Caporetto. He hoped he would go up that way. It was a nice little place and he liked the high mountain hauling up beyond. He was a nice boy and every one seemed to like him. He said where it really had been hell was at San Gabriele and the attack beyond Lom that had gone bad. He said the Austrians had a great amount of artillery in the woods along Ternova ridge beyond and above us, and shelled the roads badly at night. There was a battery of naval guns that had gotten on his nerves. I would recognize them because of their flat trajectory. You heard the report and then the shriek commenced almost instantly. They usually fired two guns at once, one right after the other, and the fragments from the burst were enormous. He showed me one, a smoothly jagged piece of metal over a foot long. It looked like babbitting metal.

      "I don't suppose they are so effective," Gino said. "But they scare me. They all sound as though they came directly for you. There is the boom, then instantly the shriek and burst. What's the use of not being wounded if they scare you to death?"

      He said there were Croats in the lines opposite us now and some Magyars. Our troops were still in the attacking positions. There was no wire to speak of and no place to fall back to if there should be an Austrian attack. There were fine positions for defense along the low mountains that came up out of the plateau but nothing had been done about organizing them for defense. What did I think about the Bainsizza anyway?

      I had expected it to be flatter, more like a plateau. I had not realized it was so broken up.

      "Alto piano," Gino said, "but no piano."

      We went back to the cellar of the house where he lived. I said I thought a ridge that flattened out on top and had a little depth would be easier and more practical to hold than a succession of small mountains. It was no harder to attack up a mountain than on the level, I argued. "That depends on the mountains," he said. "Look at San Gabriele."

      "Yes," I said, "but where they had trouble was at the top where it was flat. They got up to the top easy enough."

      "Not so easy," he said.

      "Yes," I said, "but that was a special case because it was a fortress rather than a mountain, anyway. The Austrians had been fortifying it for years." I meant tactically speaking in a war where there was some movement a succession of mountains were nothing to hold as a line because it was too easy to turn them. You should have possible mobility and a mountain is not very mobile. Also, people always over-shoot downhill. If the flank were turned, the best men would be left on the highest mountains. I did not believe in a war in mountains. I had thought about it a lot, I said. You pinched off one mountain and they pinched off another but when something really started every one had to get down off the mountains.

      What were you going to do if you had a mountain frontier? he asked.

      I had not worked that out yet, I said, and we both laughed. "But," I said, "in the old days the Austrians were always whipped in the quadrilateral around Verona. They let them come down onto the plain and whipped them there."

      "Yes," said Gino. "But those were Frenchmen and you can work out military problems clearly when you are fighting in somebody else's country."

      "Yes," I agreed, "when it is your own country you cannot use it so scientifically."

      "The Russians did, to trap Napoleon."

      "Yes, but they had plenty of country. If you tried to retreat to trap Napoleon in Italy you would find yourself in Brindisi."

      "A terrible place," said Gino. "Have you ever been there?"

      "Not to stay."

      "I am a patriot," Gino said. "But I cannot love Brindisi or Taranto."

      "Do you love the Bainsizza?" I asked.

      "The soil is sacred," he said. "But I wish it grew more potatoes. You know when we came here we found fields of potatoes the Austrians had planted."

      "Has the food really been short?"

      "I myself have never had enough to eat but I am a big eater and I have not starved. The mess is average. The regiments in the line get pretty good food but those in support don't get so much. Something is wrong somewhere. There should be plenty of food."

      "The dogfish are selling it somewhere else."

      "Yes, they give the battalions in the front line as much as they can but the ones in back are very short. They have eaten all the Austrians' potatoes and chestnuts from the woods. They ought to feed them better. We are big eaters. I am sure there is plenty of food. It is very bad for the soldiers to be short of food. Have you ever noticed the difference it makes in the way you think?"

      "Yes," I said. "It can't win a war but it can lose one."

      "We won't talk about losing. There is enough talk about losing. What has been done this summer cannot have been done in vain."

      I did not say anything. I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain. We had heard them, sometimes standing in the rain almost out of earshot, so that only the shouted words came through, and had read them, on proclamations that were slapped up by billposters over other proclamations, now for a long time, and I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago if nothing was done with the meat except to bury it. There were many words that you could not stand to hear and finally only the names of places had dignity. Certain numbers were the same way and certain dates and these with the names of the places were all you could say and have them mean anything. Abstract words such as glory, honor, courage, or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates. Gino was a patriot, so he said things that separated us sometimes, but he was also a fine boy and I understood his being a patriot. He was born one. He left with Peduzzi in the car to go back to Gorizia.

      It stormed all that day. The wind drove down the rain and everywhere there was standing water and mud. The plaster of the broken houses was gray and wet. Late in the afternoon the rain stopped and from out number two post I saw the bare wet autumn country with clouds over the tops of the hills and the straw screening over the roads wet and dripping. The sun came out once before it went down and shone on the bare woods beyond the ridge. There were many Austrian guns in the woods on that ridge but only a few fired. I watched the sudden round puffs of shrapnel smoke in the sky above a broken farmhouse near where the line was; soft puffs with a yellow white flash in the centre. You saw the flash, then heard the crack, then saw the smoke ball distort and thin in the wind. There were many iron shrapnel balls in the rubble of the houses and on the road beside the broken house where the post was, but they did not shell near the post that afternoon. We loaded two cars and drove down the road that was screened with wet mats and the last of the sun came through in the breaks between the strips of mattings. Before we were out on the clear road behind the hill the sun was down. We went on down the clear road and as it turned a corner into the open and went into the square arched tunnel of matting the rain started again.

      The wind rose in the night and at three o'clock in the morning with the rain coming in sheets there was a bombardment and the Croatians came over across the mountain meadows and through patches of woods and into the front line. They fought in the dark in the rain and a counter-attack of scared men from the second line drove them back. There was much shelling and many rockets in the rain and machine-gun and rifle fire all along the line. They did not come again and it was quieter and between the gusts of wind and rain we could hear the sound of a great bombardment far to the north.

      The wounded were coming into the post, some were carried on stretchers, some walking and some were brought on the backs of men that came across the field. They were wet to the skin and all were scared. We filled two cars with stretcher cases as they came up from the cellar of the post and as I shut the door of the second car and fastened it I felt the rain on my face turn to snow. The flakes were coming heavy and fast in the rain.

      When daylight came the storm was still blowing but the snow had stopped. It had melted as it fell on the wet ground and now it was raining again. There was another attack just after daylight but it was unsuccessful. We expected an attack all day but it did not come until the sun was going down. The bombardment started to the south below the long wooded ridge where the Austrian guns were concentrated. We expected a bombardment but it did not come. It was getting dark. Guns were firing from the field behind the village and the shells, going away, had a comfortable sound.

      We heard that the attack to the south had been unsuccessful. They did not attack that night but we heard that they had broken through to the north. In the night word came that we were to prepare to retreat. The captain at the post told me this. He had it from the Brigade. A little while later he came from the telephone and said it was a lie. The Brigade had received orders that the line of the Bainsizza should be held no matter what happened. I asked about the break through and he said that he had heard at the Brigade that the Austrians had broken through the twenty-seventh army corps up toward Caporetto. There had been a great battle in the north all day.

      "If those bastards let them through we are cooked," he said.

      "It's Germans that are attacking," one of the medical officers said. The word Germans was something to be frightened of. We did not want to have anything to do with the Germans.

      "There are fifteen divisions of Germans," the medical officer said. "They have broken through and we will be cut off."

      "At the Brigade, they say this line is to be held. They say they have not broken through badly and that we will hold a line across the mountains from Monte Maggiore."

      "Where do they hear this?"

      "From the Division."

      "The word that we were to retreat came from the Division."

      "We work under the Army Corps," I said. "But here I work under you. Naturally when you tell me to go I will go. But get the orders straight."

      "The orders are that we stay here. You clear the wounded from here to the clearing station."

      "Sometimes we clear from the clearing station to the field hospitals too," I said. "Tell me, I have never seen a retreat--if there is a retreat how are all the wounded evacuated?"

      "They are not. They take as many as they can and leave the rest."

      "What will I take in the cars?"

      "Hospital equipment."

      "All right," I said.

      The next night the retreat started. We heard that Germans and Austrians had broken through in the north and were coming down the mountain valleys toward Cividale and Udine. The retreat was orderly, wet and sullen. In the night, going slowly along the crowded roads we passed troops marching under the rain, guns, horses pulling wagons, mules, motor trucks, all moving away from the front. There was no more disorder than in an advance.

      That night we helped empty the field hospitals that had been set up in the least ruined villages of the plateau, taking the wounded down to Plava on the river-bed: and the next day hauled all day in the rain to evacuate the hospitals and clearing station at Plava. It rained steadily and the army of the Bainsizza moved down off the plateau in the October rain and across the river where the great victories had commenced in the spring of that year. We came into Gorizia in the middle of the next day. The rain had stopped and the town was nearly empty. As we came up the street they were loading the girls from the soldiers' whorehouse into a truck. There were seven girls and they had on their hats and coats and carried small suitcases. Two of them were crying. Of the others one smiled at us and put out her tongue and fluttered it up and down. She had thick full lips and black eyes.

      I stopped the car and went over and spoke to the matron. The girls from the officers' house had left early that morning, she said. Where were they going? To Conegliano, she said. The truck started. The girl with thick lips put out her tongue again at us. The matron waved. The two girls kept on crying. The others looked interestedly out at the town. I got back in the car.

      "We ought to go with them," Bonello said. "That would be a good trip."

      "We'll have a good trip," I said.

      "We'll have a hell of a trip."

      "That's what I mean," I said. We came up the drive to the villa.

      "I'd like to be there when some of those tough babies climb in and try and hop them."

      "You think they will?"

      "Sure. Everybody in the Second Army knows that matron."

      We were outside the villa.

      "They call her the Mother Superior," Bonello said. "The girls are new but everybody knows her. They must have brought them up just before the retreat."

      "They'll have a time."

      "I'll say they'll have a time. I'd like to have a crack at them for nothing. They charge too much at that house anyway. The government gyps us."

      "Take the car out and have the mechanics go over it," I said. "Change the oil and check the differential. Fill it up and then get some sleep."

      "Yes, Signor Tenente."

      The villa was empty. Rinaldi was gone with the hospital. The major was gone taking hospital personnel in the staff car. There was a note on the window for me to fill the cars with the material piled in the hall and to proceed to Pordenone. The mechanics were gone already. I went out back to the garage. The other two cars came in while I was there and their drivers got down. It was starting to rain again.

      "I'm so--sleepy I went to sleep three times coming here from Plava," Piani said. "What are we going to do, Tenente?"

      "We'll change the oil, grease them, fill them up, then take them around in front and load up the junk they've left."

      "Then do we start?"

      "No, we'll sleep for three hours."

      "Christ I'm glad to sleep," Bonello said. "I couldn't keep awake driving."

      "How's your car, Aymo?" I asked.

      "It's all right."

      "Get me a monkey suit and I'll help you with the oil."

      "Don't you do that, Tenente," Aymo said. "Ifs nothing to do. You go and pack your things."

      "My things are all packed," I said. "I'll go and carry out the stuff that they left for us. Bring the cars around as soon as they're ready."

      They brought the cars around to the front of the villa and we loaded them with the hospital equipment which was piled in the hallway. When it was all in, the three cars stood in line down the driveway under the trees in the rain. We went inside.

      "Make a fire in the kitchen and dry your things," I said.

      "I don't care about dry clothes," Piani said. "I want to sleep."

      "I'm going to sleep on the major's bed," Bonello said. "I'm going to sleep where the old man corks off."

      "I don't care where I sleep," Piani said.

      "There are two beds in here." I opened the door.

      "I never knew what was in that room," Bonello said.

      "That was old fish-face's room," Piani said.

      "You two sleep in there," I said. "I'll wake you."

      "The Austrians will wake us if you sleep too long, Tenente," Bonello said.

      "I won't oversleep," I said. "Where's Aymo?"

      "He went out in the kitchen."

      "Get to sleep," I said.

      "I'll sleep," Piani said. "I've been asleep sitting up all day. The whole top of my head kept coming down over my eyes."

      "Take your boots off," Bonello said. "That's old fish-face's bed."

      "Fish-face is nothing to me." Piani lay on the bed, his muddy boots straight out, his head on his arm. I went out to the kitchen. Aymo had a fire in the stove and a kettle of water on.

      "I thought I'd start some pasta asciutta," he said. "We'll be hungry when we wake up."

      "Aren't you sleepy, Bartolomeo?"

      "Not so sleepy. When the water boils I'll leave it. The fire will go down."

      "You'd better get some sleep," I said. "We can eat cheese and monkey meat."

      "This is better," he said. "Something hot will be good for those two anarchists. You go to sleep, Tenente."

      "There's a bed in the major's room."

      "You sleep there."

      "No, I'm going up to my old room. Do you want a drink, Bartolomeo?"

      "When we go, Tenente. Now it wouldn't do me any good."

      "If you wake in three hours and I haven't called you, wake me, will you?"

      "I haven't any watch, Tenente."

      "There's a clock on the wall in the major's room."

      "All right."

      I went out then through the dining-room and the hall and up the marble stairs to the room where I had lived with Rinaldi. It was raining outside. I went to the window and looked out. It was getting dark and I saw the three cars standing in line under the trees. The trees were dripping in the rain. It was cold and the drops hung to the branches. I went back to Rinaldi's bed and lay down and let sleep take me.

      We ate in the kitchen before we started. Aymo had a basin of spaghetti with onions and tinned meat chopped up in it. We sat around the table and drank two bottles of the wine that had been left in the cellar of the villa. It was dark outside and still raining. Piani sat at the table very sleepy.

      "I like a retreat better than an advance," Bonello said. "On a retreat we drink barbera."

      "We drink it now. To-morrow maybe we drink rainwater,"

      Aymo said.

      "To-morrow we'll be in Udine. We'll drink champagne. That's where the slackers live. Wake up, Piani! We'll drink champagne tomorrow in Udine!"

      "I'm awake," Piani said. He filled his plate with the spaghetti and meat. "Couldn't you find tomato sauce, Barto?"

      "There wasn't any," Aymo said.

      "We'll drink champagne in Udine," Bonello said. He filled his glass with the clear red barbera.

      "We may drink--before Udine," Piani said.

      "Have you eaten enough, Tenente?" Aymo asked.

      "I've got plenty. Give me the bottle, Bartolomeo."

      "I have a bottle apiece to take in the cars," Aymo said.

      "Did you sleep at all?"

      "I don't need much sleep. I slept a little."

      "To-morrow we'll sleep in the king's bed," Bonello said. He was feeling very good.

      "To-morrow maybe we'll sleep in--," Piani said.

      "I'll sleep with the queen," Bonello said. He looked to see how I took the joke.

      "You'll sleep with--," Piani said sleepily.

      "That's treason, Tenente," Bonello said. "Isn't that treason?"

      "Shut up," I said. "You get too funny with a little wine." Outside it was raining hard. I looked at my watch. It was half-past nine.

      "It's time to roll," I said and stood up.

      "Who are you going to ride with, Tenehte?" Bonello asked.

      "With Aymo. Then you come. Then Piani. We'll start out on the road for Cormons."

      "I'm afraid I'll go to sleep," Piani said.

      "All right. I'll ride with you. Then Bonello. Then Aymo."

      "That's the best way," Piani said. "Because I'm so sleepy."

      "I'll drive and you sleep awhile."

      "No. I can drive just so long as I know somebody will wake me up if I go to sleep."

      "I'll wake you up. Put out the lights, Barto."

      "You might as well leave them," Bonello said. "We've got no more use for this place."

      "I have a small locker trunk in my room," I said. "Will you help take it down, Piani?"

      "We'll take it," Piani said. "Come on, Aldo." He went off into the hall with Bonello. I heard them going upstairs.

      "This was a fine place," Bartolomeo Aymo said. He put two bottles of wine and half a cheese into his haversack. "There won't be a place like this again. Where will they retreat to, Tenente?"

      "Beyond the Tagliamento, they say. The hospital and the sector are to be at Pordenone."

      "This is a better town than Pordenone."

      "I don't know Pordenone," I said. "I've just been through there."

      "It's not much of a place," Aymo said.

 

 

 

 

28

 

 

      As we moved out through the town it was empty in the rain and the dark except for columns of troops and guns that were going through the main street. There were many trucks too and some carts going through on other streets and converging on the main road. When we were out past the tanneries onto the main road the troops, the motor trucks, the horse-drawn carts and the guns were in one wide slow-moving column. We moved slowly but steadily in the rain, the radiator cap of our car almost against the tailboard of a truck that was loaded high, the load covered with wet canvas. Then the truck stopped. The whole column was stopped. It started again and we went a little farther, then stopped. I got out and walked ahead, going between the trucks and carts and under the wet necks of the horses. The block was farther ahead. I left the road, crossed the ditch on a footboard and walked along the field beyond the ditch. I could see the stalled column between the trees in the rain as I went forward across from it in the field. I went about a mile. The column did not move, although, on the other side beyond the stalled vehicles I could see the troops moving. I went back to the cars. This block might extend as far as Udine. Piani was asleep over the wheel. I climbed up beside him and went to sleep too. Several hours later I heard the truck ahead of us grinding into gear. I woke Piani and we started, moving a few yards, then stopping, then going on again. It was still raining.

      The column stalled again in the night and did not start. I got down and went back to see Aymo and Bonello. Bonello had two sergeants of engineers on the seat of his car with him. They stiffened when I came up.

      "They were left to do something to a bridge," Bonello said. "They can't find their unit so I gave them a ride."

      "With the Sir Lieutenant's permission."

      "With permission," I said.

      "The lieutenant is an American," Bonello said. "He'll give anybody a ride."

      One of the sergeants smiled. The other asked Bonello if I was an Italian from North or South America.

&am

John Kennedy Toole

A Confederacy of Dunces

    

    When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.

     — Jonathan Swift

    “THOUGHTS ON VARIOUS SUBJECTS, MORAL AND DIVERTING”

Foreword

    

    Perhaps the best way to introduce this novel — which on my third reading of it astounds me even more than the first — is to tell of my first encounter with it. While I was teaching at Loyola in 1976 I began to get telephone calls from a lady unknown to me. What she proposed was preposterous. It was not that she had written a couple of chapters of a novel and wanted to get into my class. It was that her son, who was dead, had written an entire novel during the early sixties, a big novel, and she wanted me to read it. Why would I want to do that? I asked her. Because it is a great novel, she said.

    Over the years I have become very good at getting out of things I don’t want to do. And if ever there was something I didn’t want to do, this was surely it: to deal with the mother of a dead novelist and, worst of all, to have to read a manuscript that she said was great, and that, as it turned out, was a badly smeared, scarcely readable carbon.

    But the lady was persistent, and it somehow came to pass that she stood in my office handing me the hefty manuscript. There was no getting out of it; only one hope remained — that I could read a few pages and that they would be bad enough for me, in good conscience, to read no farther. Usually I can do just that. Indeed the first paragraph often suffices. My only fear was that this one might not be bad enough, or might be just good enough, so that I would have to keep reading.

    In this case I read on. And on. First with the sinking feeling that it was not bad enough to quit, then with a prickle of interest, then a growing excitement, and finally an incredulity: surely it was not possible that it was so good. I shall resist the temptation to say what first made me gape, grin, laugh out loud, shake my head in wonderment. Better let the reader make the discovery on his own.

    Here at any rate is Ignatius Reilly, without progenitor in any literature I know of — slob extraordinary, a mad Oliver Hardy, a fat Don Quixote, a perverse Thomas Aquinas rolled into one — who is in violent revolt against the entire modern age, lying in his flannel nightshirt, in a back bedroom on Constantinople Street in New Orleans, who between gigantic seizures of flatulence and eructations is filling dozens of Big Chief tablets with invective.

    His mother thinks he needs to go to work. He does, in a succession of jobs. Each job rapidly escalates into a lunatic adventure, a full-blown disaster; yet each has, like Don Quixote’s, its own eerie logic.

    His girlfriend, Myrna Minkoff of the Bronx, thinks he needs sex. What happens between Myrna and Ignatius is like no other boy-meets-girl story in my experience.

    By no means a lesser virtue of Toole’s novel is his rendering of the particularities of New Orleans, its back streets, its out-of-the-way neighborhoods, its odd speech, its ethnic whites — and one black in whom Toole has achieved the near-impossible, a superb comic character of immense wit and resourcefulness without the least trace of Rastus minstrelsy.

    But Toole’s greatest achievement is Ignatius Reilly himself, intellectual, ideologue, deadbeat, goof-off, glutton, who should repel the reader with his gargantuan bloats, his thunderous contempt and one-man war against everybody — Freud, homosexuals, heterosexuals, Protestants, and the assorted excesses of modern times. Imagine an Aquinas gone to pot, transported to New Orleans whence he makes a wild foray through the swamps to LSU at Baton Rouge, where his lumber jacket is stolen in the faculty men’s room where he is seated, overcome by mammoth gastro-intestinal problems. His pyloric valve periodically closes in response to the lack of a “proper geometry and theology” in the modern world.

    I hesitate to use the word  comedy — though comedy it is — because that implies simply a funny book, and this novel is a great deal more than that. A great rumbling farce of Falstaffian dimensions would better describe it;  commedia would be closer to it.

    It is also sad. One never quite knows where the sadness comes from — from the tragedy at the heart of Ignatius’s great gaseous rages and lunatic adventures or the tragedy attending the book itself.

    The tragedy of the book is the tragedy of the author — his suicide in 1969 at the age of thirty-two. Another tragedy is the body of work we have been denied.

    It is a great pity that John Kennedy Toole is not alive and well and writing. But he is not, and there is nothing we can do about it but make sure that this gargantuan tumultuous human tragicomedy is at least made available to a world of readers.

    

    WALKER PERCY

    There is a New Orleans city accent… associated with downtown New Orleans, particularly with the German and Irish Third Ward, that is hard to distinguish from the accent of Hoboken, Jersey City, and Astoria, Long Island, where the Al Smith inflection, extinct in Manhattan, has taken refuge. The reason, as you might expect, is that the same stocks that brought the accent to Manhattan imposed it on New Orleans.

    

— — —

    

    “You’re right on that. We’re Mediterranean. I’ve never been to Greece or Italy, but I’m sure I’d be at home there as soon as I landed.”

    He would, too, I thought. New Orleans resembles Genoa or Marseilles, or Beirut or the Egyptian Alexandria more than it does New York, although all seaports resemble one another more than they can resemble any place in the interior. Like Havana and Port-au-Prince, New Orleans is within the orbit of a Hellenistic world that never touched the North Atlantic. The Mediterranean, Caribbean and Gulf of Mexico form a homogeneous, though interrupted, sea.

    A. J. Liebling,

    THE EARL OF LOUISIANA

    

    

One

    

    A green hunting cap squeezed the top of the fleshy balloon of a head. The green earflaps, full of large ears and uncut hair and the fine bristles that grew in the ears themselves, stuck out on either side like turn signals indicating two directions at once. Full, pursed lips protruded beneath the bushy black moustache and, at their corners, sank into little folds filled with disapproval and potato chip crumbs. In the shadow under the green visor of the cap Ignatius J. Reilly’s supercilious blue and yellow eyes looked down upon the other people waiting under the clock at the D. H. Holmes department store, studying the crowd of people for signs of bad taste in dress. Several of the outfits, Ignatius noticed, were new enough and expensive enough to be properly considered offenses against taste and decency. Possession of anything new or expensive only reflected a person’s lack of theology and geometry; it could even cast doubts upon one’s soul.

    Ignatius himself was dressed comfortably and sensibly. The hunting cap prevented head colds. The voluminous tweed trousers were durable and permitted unusually free locomotion. Their pleats and nooks contained pockets of warm, stale air that soothed Ignatius. The plaid flannel shirt made a jacket unnecessary while the muffler guarded exposed Reilly skin between earflap and collar. The outfit was acceptable by any theological and geometrical standards, however abstruse, and suggested a rich inner life.

    Shifting from one hip to the other in his lumbering, elephantine fashion, Ignatius sent waves of flesh rippling beneath the tweed and flannel, waves that broke upon buttons and seams. Thus rearranged, he contemplated the long while that he had been waiting for his mother. Principally he considered the discomfort he was beginning to feel. It seemed as if his whole being was ready to burst from his swollen suede desert boots, and, as if to verify this, Ignatius turned his singular eyes toward his feet. The feet did indeed look swollen. He was prepared to offer the sight of those bulging boots to his mother as evidence of her thoughtlessness. Looking up, he saw the sun beginning to descend over the Mississippi at the foot of Canal Street. The Holmes clock said almost five. Already he was polishing a few carefully worded accusations designed to reduce his mother to repentance or, at least, confusion. He often had to keep her in her place.

    She had driven him downtown in the old Plymouth, and while she was at the doctor’s seeing about her arthritis, Ignatius had bought some sheet music at Werlein’s for his trumpet and a new string for his lute. Then he had wandered into the Penny Arcade on Royal Street to see whether any new games had been installed. He had been disappointed to find the miniature mechanical baseball game gone. Perhaps it was only being repaired. The last time that he had played it the batter would not work and, after some argument, the management had returned his nickel, even though the Penny Arcade people had been base enough to suggest that Ignatius had himself broken the baseball machine by kicking it.

    Concentrating upon the fate of the miniature baseball machine, Ignatius detached his being from the physical reality of Canal Street and the people around him and therefore did not notice the two eyes that were hungrily watching him from behind one of D. H. Holmes’ pillars, two sad eyes shining with hope and desire.

    Was it possible to repair the machine in New Orleans? Probably so. However, it might have to be sent to some place like Milwaukee or Chicago or some other city whose name Ignatius associated with efficient repair shops and permanently smoking factories. Ignatius hoped that the baseball game was being carefully handled in shipment, that none of its little players was being chipped or maimed by brutal railroad employees determined to ruin the railroad forever with damage claims from shippers, railroad employees who would subsequently go on strike and destroy the Illinois Central.

    As Ignatius was considering the delight which the little baseball game afforded humanity, the two sad and covetous eyes moved toward him through the crowd like torpedoes zeroing in on a great woolly tanker. The policeman plucked at Ignatius’s bag of sheet music.

    “You got any identification, mister?” the policeman asked in a voice that hoped that Ignatius was officially unidentified.

    “What?” Ignatius looked down upon the badge on the blue cap. “Who are you?”

    “Let me see your driver’s license.”

    “I don’t drive. Will you kindly go away? I am waiting for my mother.”

    “What’s this hanging out your bag?”

    “What do you think it is, stupid? It’s a string for my lute.”

    “What’s that?” The policeman drew back a little. “Are you local?”

    “Is it the part of the police department to harass me when this city is a flagrant vice capital of the civilized world?” Ignatius bellowed over the crowd in front of the store. “This city is famous for its gamblers, prostitutes, exhibitionists, anti-Christs, alcoholics, sodomites, drug addicts, fetishists, onanists, pornographers, frauds, jades, litterbugs, and lesbians, all of whom are only too well protected by graft. If you have a moment, I shall endeavor to discuss the crime problem with you, but don’t make the mistake of bothering  me.”

    The policeman grabbed Ignatius by the arm and was struck on his cap with the sheet music. The dangling lute string whipped him on the ear.

    “Hey,” the policeman said.

    “Take that!” Ignatius cried, noticing that a circle of interested shoppers was beginning to form.

    Inside D. H. Holmes, Mrs. Reilly was in the bakery department pressing her maternal breast against a glass case of macaroons. With one of her fingers, chafed from many years of scrubbing her son’s mammoth, yellowed drawers, she tapped on the glass case to attract the saleslady.

    “Oh, Miss Inez,” Mrs. Reilly called in that accent that occurs south of New Jersey only in New Orleans, that Hoboken near the Gulf of Mexico. “Over here, babe.”

    “Hey, how you making?” Miss Inez asked. “How you feeling, darling?”

    “Not so hot,” Mrs. Reilly answered truthfully.

    “Ain’t that a shame.” Miss Inez leaned over the glass case and forgot about her cakes. “I don’t feel so hot myself. It’s my feet.”

    “Lord, I wisht I was that lucky. I got arthuritis in my elbow.”

    “Aw, no!” Miss Inez said with genuine sympathy. “My poor old poppa’s got that. We make him go set himself in a hot tub fulla berling water.”

    “My boy’s floating around in our tub all day long. I can’t hardly get in my own bathroom no more.”

    “I thought he was married, precious.”

    “Ignatius? Eh, la la,” Mrs. Reilly said sadly. “Sweetheart, you wanna gimme two dozen of them fancy mix?”

    “But I thought you told me he was married,” Miss Inez said while she was putting the cakes in a box.

    “He ain’t even got him a prospect. The little girl friend he had flew the coop.”

    “Well, he’s got time.”

    “I guess so,” Mrs. Reilly said disinterestedly. “Look, you wanna gimme half a dozen wine cakes, too? Ignatius gets nasty if we run outta cake.”

    “Your boy likes his cake, huh?”

    “Oh, Lord, my elbow’s killing me,” Mrs. Reilly answered.

    In the center of the crowd that had formed before the department store the hunting cap, the green radius of the circle of people, was bobbing about violently.

    “I shall contact the mayor,” Ignatius was shouting.

    “Let the boy alone,” a voice said from the crowd.

    “Go get the strippers on Bourbon Street,” an old man added. “He’s a good boy. He’s waiting for his momma.”

    “Thank you,” Ignatius said haughtily. “I hope that all of you will bear witness to this outrage.”

    “You come with me,” the policeman said to Ignatius with waning self-confidence. The crowd was turning into something of a mob, and there was no traffic patrolman in sight. “We’re going to the precinct.”

    “A good boy can’t even wait for his momma by D. H. Holmes.” It was the old man again. “I’m telling you, the city was never like this. It’s the communiss.”

    “Are you calling me a communiss?” the policeman asked the old man while he tried to avoid the lashing of the lute string. “I’ll take you in, too. You better watch out who you calling a communiss.”

    “You can’t arress me,” the old man cried. “I’m a member of the Golden Age Club sponsored by the New Orleans Recreation Department.”

    “Let that old man alone, you dirty cop,” a woman screamed. “He’s prolly somebody’s grampaw.”

    “I am,” the old man said. “I got six granchirren all studying with the sisters. Smart, too.”

    Over the heads of the people Ignatius saw his mother walking slowly out of the lobby of the department store carrying the bakery products as if they were boxes of cement.

    “Mother!” he called. “Not a moment too soon. I’ve been seized.”

    Pushing through the people, Mrs. Reilly said, “Ignatius! What’s going on here? What you done now? Hey, take your hands off my boy.”

    “I’m not touching him, lady,” the policeman said. “Is this here your son?”

    Mrs. Reilly snatched the whizzing lute string from Ignatius.

    “Of course I’m her child,” Ignatius said. “Can’t you see her affection for me?”

    “She loves her boy,” the old man said.

    “What you trying to do my poor child?” Mrs. Reilly asked the policeman. Ignatius patted his mother’s hennaed hair with one of his huge paws. “You got plenty business picking on poor chirren with all the kind of people they got running in this town. Waiting for his momma and they try to arrest him.”

    “This is clearly a case for the Civil Liberties Union,” Ignatius observed, squeezing his mother’s drooping shoulder with the paw. “We must contact Myrna Minkoff, my lost love. She knows about those things.”

    “It’s the communiss,” the old man interrupted.

    “How old is he?” the policeman asked Mrs. Reilly.

    “I am thirty,” Ignatius said condescendingly.

    “You got a job?”

    “Ignatius hasta help me at home,” Mrs. Reilly said. Her initial courage was failing a little, and she began to twist the lute string with the cord on the cake boxes. “I got terrible arthuritis.”

    “I dust a bit,” Ignatius told the policeman. “In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

    “Ignatius makes delicious cheese dips,” Mrs. Reilly said.

    “That’s very nice of him,” the old man said. “Most boys are out running around all the time.”

    “Why don’t you shut up?” the policeman said to the old man.

    “Ignatius,” Mrs. Reilly asked in a trembling voice, “what you done, boy?”

    “Actually, Mother, I believe that it was he who started everything.” Ignatius pointed to the old man with his bag of sheet music. “I was simply standing about, waiting for you, praying that the news from the doctor would be encouraging.”

    “Get that old man outta here,” Mrs. Reilly said to the policeman. “He’s making trouble. It’s a shame they got people like him walking the streets.”

    “The police are all communiss,” the old man said.

    “Didn’t I say for you to shut up?” the policeman said angrily.

    “I fall on my knees every night to thank my God we got protection,” Mrs. Reilly told the crowd. “We’d all be dead without the police. We’d all be laying in our beds with our throats cut open from ear to ear.”

    “That’s the truth, girl,” some woman answered from the crowd.

    “Say a rosary for the police force.” Mrs. Reilly was now addressing her remarks to the crowd. Ignatius caressed her shoulders wildly, whispering encouragement. “Would you say a rosary for a communiss?”

    “No!” several voices answered fervently. Someone pushed the old man.

    “It’s true, lady,” the old man cried. “He tried to arrest your boy. Just like in Russia. They’re all communiss.”

    “Come on,” the policeman said to the old man. He grabbed him roughly by the back of the coat.

    “Oh, my God!” Ignatius said, watching the wan little policeman try to control the old man. “Now my nerves are totally frayed.”

    “Help!” the old man appealed to the crowd. “It’s a takeover. It’s a violation of the Constitution!”

    “He’s crazy, Ignatius,” Mrs. Reilly said. “We better get outta here, baby.” She turned to the crowd. “Run, folks. He might kill us all. Personally, I think maybe  he’s the communiss.”

    “You don’t have to overdo it, Mother,” Ignatius said as they pushed through the dispersing crowd and started walking rapidly down Canal Street. He looked back and saw the old man and the bantam policeman grappling beneath the department store clock. “Will you please slow down a bit? I think I’m having a heart murmur.”

    “Oh, shut up. How you think I feel? I shouldn’t haveta be running like this at my age.”

    “The heart is important at any age, I’m afraid.”

    “They’s nothing wrong with your heart.”

    “There will be if we don’t go a little slower.” The tweed trousers billowed around Ignatius’s gargantuan rump as he rolled forward. “Do you have my lute string?”

    Mrs. Reilly pulled him around the corner onto Bourbon Street, and they started walking down into the French Quarter.

    “How come that policeman was after you, boy?”

    “I shall never know. But he will probably be coming after us in a few moments, as soon as he has subdued that aged fascist.”

    “You think so?” Mrs. Reilly asked nervously.

    “I would imagine so. He seemed determined to arrest me. He must have some sort of quota or something. I seriously doubt that he will permit me to elude him so easily.”

    “Wouldn’t that be awful!

Three

    

    Ignatius staggered up the brick path to the house, climbed the steps painfully, and rang the bell. One stalk of the dead banana tree had expired and collapsed stiffly onto the hood of the Plymouth.

    “Ignatius, baby,” Mrs. Reilly cried when she opened the door. “What’s wrong? You look like you dying.”

    “My valve closed on the streetcar.”

    “Lord, come in quick out the cold.”

    Ignatius shuffled miserably back to the kitchen and fell into a chair.

    “The personnel manager at that insurance company treated me very insultingly.”

    “You didn’t get the job?”

    “Of course I didn’t get the job.”

    “What happened?”

    “I would rather not discuss it.”

    “Did you go to the other places?”

    “Obviously not. Do I appear to be in a condition that would attract prospective employers? I had the good judgment to come home as soon as possible.”

    “Don’t feel blue, precious.”

    “‘Blue’? I am afraid that I never feel ‘blue.’”

    “Now don’t be nasty. You’ll get a nice job. You only been on the streets a few days,” his mother said and looked at him. “Ignatius, was you wearing that cap when you spoke to the insurance man?”

    “Of course I was. That office was improperly heated. I don’t know how the employees of that company manage to stay alive exposing themselves to that chill day after day. And then there are those fluorescent tubes baking their brains out and blinding them. I did not like the office at all. I tried to explain the inadequacies of the place to the personnel manager, but he seemed rather uninterested. He was ultimately very hostile.” Ignatius let out a monstrous belch. “However, I told you that it would be like this. I am an anachronism. People realize this and resent it.”

    “Lord, babe, you gotta look up.”

    “Look up?” Ignatius repeated savagely. “Who has been sowing that unnatural garbage into your mind?”

    “Mr. Mancuso.”

    “Oh, my God! I should have known. Is he an example of ‘looking up’?”

    “You oughta hear the whole story of that poor man’s life. You oughta hear what this sergeant at the precinct’s trying…”

    “Stop!” Ignatius covered one ear and beat a fist on the table. “I will not listen to another word about that man. Throughout the centuries it has been the Mancusos of the world who have caused wars and spread diseases. Suddenly the spirit of that evil man is haunting this house. He has become your Svengali!”

    “Ignatius, get a holt of yourself.”

    “I refuse to ‘look up.’ Optimism nauseates me. It is perverse. Since man’s fall, his proper position in the universe has been one of misery.”

    “I ain’t miserable.”

    “You  are.”

    “No, I ain’t.”

    “Yes, you are.”

    “Ignatius, I  ain’t miserable. If I was, I’d tell you.”

    “If I had demolished private property while intoxicated and had thereby thrown my child to the wolves, I would be beating my breast and wailing. I would kneel in penance until my knees bled. By the way, what penance has the priest given you for your sin?”

    “Three Hail Mary’s and a Our Father.”

    “Is that all?” Ignatius screamed. “Did you tell him what you did, that you halted a critical work of great brilliance?”

    “I went to confession, Ignatius. I told Father everything. He says, ‘It don’t sound like your fault, honey. It sounds to me like you just took a little skid on a wet street.’ So I told him about you. I says ‘My boy says I’m the one stopping him from writing in his copybooks. He’s been writing on this story for almost five years.’ And Father says, ‘Yeah? Well, don’t sound too important to me. You tell him to get out the house and go to work.’”

    “No wonder I cannot support the Church,” Ignatius bellowed. “You should have been lashed right there in the confessional.”

    “Now tomorrow, Ignatius, you go try some other place. They got plenty  jobs in the city. I was talking to Miss Marie-Louise, the old lady works in the German’s. She’s got a crippled brother with a earphone. He’s kinda deaf, you know? He got himself a good job over by the Goodwill Industries.”

    “Perhaps I should try there.”

    “Ignatius! They only hire blind people and dummies to make brooms and things.”

    “I am certain that those people are pleasant co-workers.”

    “Let’s us look in the afternoon’s paper. Maybe they got a nice job in there!”

    “If I must go out tomorrow, I am not leaving the house so early. I felt very disoriented all the while I was downtown.”

    “You didn’t leave here until after lunch.”

    “Still, I was not functioning properly. I suffered several bad dreams last night. I awoke bruised and muttering.”

    “Here, listen to this. I been seeing this ad in the paper every day,” Mrs. Reilly said, holding the newspaper very close to her eyes. “‘Clean, hard-worker man…’”

    “That’s ‘hard-working.’”

    “‘Clean, hard-working man, dependable, quite type…’”

    “‘Quiet type.’ Give that to me,” Ignatius said, snatching the paper from his mother. “It’s unfortunate that you couldn’t complete your education.”

    “Poppa was very poor.”

    “Please! I couldn’t bear to hear that grim story again at the moment. ‘Clean, hard-working, dependable, quiet type.’ Good God! What kind of monster is this that they want. I am afraid that I could never work for a concern with a worldview like that.”

    “Read the rest, babe.”

    “‘Clerical work. 25-35 years old. Apply Levy Pants, Industrial Canal and River, between 8 and 9 daily.’ Well, that’s out. I could never get all the way down there before nine o’clock.”

    “Honey, if you gonna work, you gotta get up early.”

    “No, Mother.” Ignatius threw the paper on top of the oven. “I have been setting my sights too high. I cannot survive this type of work. I suspect that something like a newspaper route would be rather agreeable.”

    “Ignatius, a big man like you can’t pedal around on no bike delivering newspapers.”

    “Perhaps you could drive me about in the car and I could toss the papers from the rear window.”

    “Listen, boy,” Mrs. Reilly said angrily. “You gonna go try somewheres tomorrow. I mean it. The first thing you gonna do is answer this ad. You playing around, Ignatius. I know you.”

    “Ho hum,” Ignatius yawned, exhibiting the flabby pink of his tongue. “Levy Pants sounds just as bad if not worse than the titles of the other organizations I have contacted. I can see that I am obviously beginning to scrape the bottom of the job market already.”

    “Just you wait, babe. You’ll make good.”

    “Oh, my God!”

    

II

    

    Patrolman Mancuso had a good idea that had been given to him by, of all people, Ignatius Reilly. He had telephoned the Reillys’ house to ask Mrs. Reilly when she could go bowling with him and his aunt. But Ignatius had answered the telephone and screamed, “Stop molesting us, you mongoloid. If you had any sense, you would be investigating dens like that Night of Joy in which my beloved mother and I were mistreated and robbed. I, unfortunately, was the prey of a vicious, depraved B-girl. In addition, the proprietress is a Nazi. We barely escaped with our lives. Go investigate that gang and let us alone, you homewrecker.”

    Then Mrs. Reilly had wrestled the phone away from her son.

    The sergeant would be glad to know about the place. He might even compliment Patrolman Mancuso for getting the tip. Clearing his throat, Patrolman Mancuso stood before the sergeant and said, “I got a lead on a place where they got B-girls.”

    “You got a lead?” the sergeant asked. “Who gave you the lead?”

    Patrolman Mancuso decided against dragging Ignatius into the matter for several reasons. He settled on Mrs. Reilly.

    “A lady I know,” he answered.

    “How come this lady knows about the place?” the sergeant asked. “Who took her to this place?”

    Patrolman Mancuso couldn’t say “her son.” It might reopen some wounds. Why couldn’t conversations with the sergeant ever go smoothly?

    “She was there alone,” Patrolman Mancuso said finally, trying to save the interview from becoming a shambles.

    “A lady was in a place like that alone?” the sergeant screamed. “What kinda lady was this? She’s probly a B-girl herself. Get outta here, Mancuso, and bring me in a suspicious character. You ain’t brought in one person yet. Don’t gimme no tips from B-girls. Go look in your locker. You’re a soldier today. Beat it.”

    Patrolman Mancuso drifted sadly off to the lockers, wondering why he could never do anything right for the sergeant. When he was gone, the sergeant turned to a detective and said, “Send a couple men over to that Night of Joy some night. Someone there might’ve been just dumb enough to talk to Mancuso. But don’t tell him. I don’t want that goon taking any credit. He stays in costume until he brings me in a character.”

    “You know, we got another complaint on Mancuso today from somebody who says a small man wearing a sombrero pressed up against her in a bus last night,” the detective said.

    “No kidding,” the sergeant said thoughtfully. “Well, any more complaints like that, and we  arrest Mancuso.”

    

III

    

    Mr. Gonzalez turned the lights on in the small office and lit the gas heater beside his desk. In the twenty years that he had been working for Levy Pants, he had always been the first person to arrive each morning.

    “It was still dark when I got here this morning,” Mr. Gonzalez would say to Mr. Levy on those rare occasions when Mr. Levy was forced to visit Levy Pants.

    “You must be leaving home too early,” Mr. Levy would say.

    “I was standing out on the steps of the office this morning talking to the milkman.”

    “Oh, shut up, Gonzalez. Did you get my plane ticket to Chicago for the Bears’ game with the Packers?”

    “I had the office all warm by the time everybody else came in for work.”

    “You’re burning up my gas. Sit in the cold. It’s good for you.”

    “I did two pages in the ledger this morning when I was in here all by myself. Look, I caught a rat near the water cooler. He didn’t think anybody was around yet, and I hit him with a paperweight.”

    “Get that damned rat away from me. This place depresses me enough. Get on the phone and make my hotel reservations for the Derby.”

    But the criteria at Levy Pants were very low. Promptness was sufficient excuse for promotion. Mr. Gonzalez became the office manager and took control of the few dispirited clerks under him. He could never really remember the names of his clerks and typists. They seemed, at times, to come and go almost daily, with the exception of Miss Trixie, the octogenarian assistant accountant, who had been copying figures inaccurately into the Levy ledgers for almost half a century. She even wore her green celluloid visor on her way to and from work, a gesture that Mr. Gonzalez interpreted as a symbol of loyalty to Levy Pants. On Sundays she sometimes wore the visor to church, mistaking it for a hat. She had even worn it to her brother’s funeral, where it was ripped from her head by her more alert and slightly younger sister-in-law. Mrs. Levy, though, had issued orders that Miss Trixie was to be retained, no matter what.

    Mr. Gonzalez rubbed a rag over his desk and thought, as he did every morning at this time when the office was still chilly and deserted and the wharf rats played frenetic games among themselves within the walls, about the happiness that his association with Levy Pants had brought him. On the river the freighters gliding through the lifting mist bellowed at one another, the sound of their deep foghorns echoing among the rusting file cabinets in the office. Beside him the little heater popped and cracked as its parts grew warmer and expanded. He listened unconsciously to all the sounds that had begun his day for twenty years and lit the first of the ten cigarettes that he smoked every day. When he had smoked the cigarette down to its filter, he put it out and emptied the ashtray into the wastebasket. He always liked to impress Mr. Levy with the cleanliness of his desk.

    Next to his desk was Miss Trixie’s rolltop desk. Old newspapers filled every half-opened drawer. Among the little spherical formations of lint under the desk a piece of cardboard had been wedged under one corner to make the desk level. In place of Miss Trixie, a brown paper bag filled with old pieces of material, and a ball of twine occupied the chair. Cigarette butts spilled out of the ashtray on the desk. This was a mystery which Mr. Gonzalez had never been able to solve, for Miss Trixie did not smoke. He had questioned her about this several times, but had never received a coherent answer. There was something magnetic about Miss Trixie’s area. It attracted whatever refuse there was in the office, and whenever pens, eyeglasses, purses, or cigarette lighters were missing they could usually be found somewhere in her desk. Miss Trixie also hoarded all of the telephone books, which were stored in some cluttered drawer in her desk.

    Mr. Gonzalez was about to search Miss Trixie’s area for his missing stamp pad when the door of the office opened and she shuffled in, scuffing her sneakers across the wooden floor. She had with her another paper bag that seemed to contain the same assortment of material and twine, aside from the stamp pad which was sticking out of the top of the bag. For two or three years Miss Trixie had been carrying these bags with her, sometimes accumulating three or four by the side of her desk, never disclosing their purpose or destination to anyone.

    “Good morning, Miss Trixie,” Mr. Gonzalez called in his effervescent tenor. “And how are we this morning?”

    “Who? Oh, hello, Gomez,” Miss Trixie said feebly and drifted off toward the ladies’ room as if she were tacking into a gale. Miss Trixie was never perfectly vertical; she and the floor always met at an angle of less than ninety degrees.

    Mr. Gonzalez took the opportunity of her disappearance to retrieve his stamp pad from the bag and discovered that it was covered with what felt and smelled like bacon grease. While he was wiping his stamp pad, he wondered how many of the other workers would appear. One day a year ago only he and Miss Trixie had shown up for work, but that was before the company had granted a five-dollar monthly increase. Still, the office help at Levy Pants often quit without even telephoning Mr. Gonzalez. This was a constant worry, and always after Miss Trixie’s arrival he watched the door hopefully, especially now that the factory was supposed to begin shipment of its spring and summer line. The truth of the matter was that he needed office help desperately.

    Mr. Gonzalez saw a green visor outside the door. Had Miss Trixie gone out through the factory and decided to reenter through the front door? It was like her. She had once gone to the ladies’ room in the morning and been found by Mr. Gonzalez late that afternoon asleep on a pile of piece goods in the factory loft. Then the door opened, and one of the largest men that Mr. Gonzalez had ever seen entered the office. He removed the green cap and revealed thick black hair plastered to his skull with Vaseline in the style of the 1920s. When the overcoat came off, Mr. Gonzalez saw rings of fat squeezed into a tight white shirt that was vertically divided by a wide flowered tie. It appeared that Vaseline had also been applied to the moustache for it gleamed very brightly. And then there were the unbelievable blue and yellow eyes laced with the finest tracing of pinkish veins. Mr. Gonzalez prayed almost audibly that this behemoth was an applicant for a job. He was impressed and overwhelmed.

    Ignatius found himself in perhaps the most disreputable office that he had ever entered. The naked light bulbs that hung irregularly from the stained ceiling cast a weak yellow light upon the warped floorboards. Old filing cabinets divided the room into several small cubicles, in each of which was a desk painted with a peculiar orange varnish. Through the dusty windows of the office there was a gray view of the Poland Avenue wharf, the Army Terminal, the Mississippi, and, far in the distance, the drydocks and the roofs of Algiers across the river. A very old woman hobbled into the room and bumped into a row of filing cabinets. The atmosphere of the place reminded Ignatius of his own room, and his valve agreed by opening joyfully. Ignatius prayed almost audibly that he would be accepted for the job. He was impressed and overwhelmed.

    “Yes?” the dapper man at the clean desk asked brightly.

    “Oh. I thought that the lady was in charge,” Ignatius said in his most stentorian voice, finding the man the only blight in the office. “I have come in response to your advertisement.”

    “Oh, wonderful. Which one?” the man cried enthusiastically. “We’re running two in the paper, one for a woman and one for a man.”

    “Which one do you think I’m answering?” Ignatius hollered.

    “Oh,” Mr. Gonzalez said in great confusion. “I’m very sorry. I wasn’t thinking. I mean, the sex doesn’t matter. You could handle either job. I mean, I’m not concerned with sex.”

    “Please forget it,” Ignatius said. He noticed with interest that the old woman was beginning to nod at her desk. Working conditions looked wonderful.

    “Come sit down, please. Miss Trixie will take your coat and hat and put them in the employees’ locker. We want you to feel at home at Levy Pants.”

    “But I haven’t even spoken with you yet.”

    “That’s all right. I’m sure that we’ll see eye to eye. Miss Trixie. Miss Trixie.”

    “Who?” Miss Trixie cried, knocking her loaded ashtray to the floor.

    “Here, I’ll take your things.” Mr. Gonzalez was slapped on the hand when he reached for the cap, but he was permitted to have the coat. “Isn’t that a fine tie. You see very few like that anymore.”

    “It belonged to my departed father.”

    “I’m sorry to hear that,” Mr. Gonzalez said and put the coat into an old metal locker in which Ignatius saw a bag like the two beside the old woman’s desk. “By the way, this is Miss Trixie, one of our oldest employees. You’ll enjoy knowing her.”

    Miss Trixie had fallen asleep, her white head among the old newspapers on her desk.

    “Yes,” Miss Trixie finally sighed. “Oh, it’s you, Gomez. Is it quitting time already?”

    “Miss Trixie, this is one of our new workers.”

    “Fine big boy,” Miss Trixie said, turning her rheumy eyes up toward Ignatius. “Well fed.”

    “Miss Trixie has been with us for over fifty years. That will give you some idea of the satisfaction that our workers get from their association with Levy Pants. Miss Trixie worked for Mr. Levy’s late father, a fine old gentleman.”

    “Yes, a fine old gentleman,” Miss Trixie said, unable to remember the elder Mr. Levy at all anymore. “He treated me well. Always had a kind word, that man.”

    “Thank you, Miss Trixie,” Mr. Gonzalez said quickly, like a master of ceremonies trying to end a variety act that had failed horribly.

    “The company says it’s going to give me a nice boiled ham for Easter,” Miss Trixie told Ignatius. “I certainly hope so. They forgot all about my Thanksgiving turkey.”

    “Miss Trixie has stood by Levy Pants through the years,” the office manager explained while the ancient assistant accountant babbled something else about the turkey.

    “I’ve been waiting for years to retire, but every year they say I have one more to go. They work you till you drop,” Miss Trixie wheezed. Then losing interest in retirement, she added, “I could have used that turkey.”

    She began sorting through one of her bags.

    “Can you begin work today?” Mr. Gonzalez asked Ignatius.

    “I don’t believe that we have discussed anything concerning salary and so forth. Isn’t that the normal procedure at this time?” Ignatius asked condescendingly.

    “Well, the filing job, which is the one you’ll have because we really need someone on the files, pays sixty dollars a week. Any days that you are absent due to sicknes

Seven

    

    Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, was housed in what had formerly been an automobile repair shop, the dark ground floor of an otherwise unoccupied commercial building on Poydras Street. The garage doors were usually open, giving the passerby an acrid nostrilful of boiling hot dogs and mustard and also of cement soaked over many years by automobile lubricants and motor oils that had dripped and drained from Harmons and Hupmobiles. The powerful stench of Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, sometimes led the overwhelmed and perplexed stroller to glance through the open door into the darkness of the garage. There his eye fell upon a fleet of large tin hot dogs mounted on bicycle tires. It  was hardly an imposing vehicular collection. Several of the mobile hot dogs were badly dented. One crumpled frankfurter lay on its side, its one wheel horizontally above it, a traffic fatality.

    Among the afternoon pedestrians who hurried past Paradise Vendors, Incorporated, one formidable figure waddled slowly along. It  was Ignatius. Stopping before the narrow garage, he sniffed the fumes from Paradise with great sensory pleasure, the protruding hairs in his nostrils analyzing, cataloging, categorizing, and classifying the distinct odors of hot dog, mustard, and lubricant. Breathing deeply, he wondered whether he also detected the more delicate odor, the fragile scent of hot dog buns. He looked at the white-gloved hands of his Mickey Mouse wristwatch and noticed that he had eaten lunch only an hour before. Still the intriguing aromas were making him salivate actively.

    He stepped into the garage and looked around. In a corner an old man was boiling hot dogs in a large institutional pot whose size dwarfed the gas range upon which it rested.

    “Pardon me, sir,” Ignatius called. “Do you retail here?”

    The man’s watering eyes turned toward the large visitor.

    “What do you want?”

    “I would like to buy one of your hot dogs. They smell rather tasty. I was wondering if I could buy just one.”

    “Sure.”

    “May I select my own?” Ignatius asked, peering down over the top of the pot. In the boiling water the frankfurters swished and lashed like artificially colored and magnified paramecia. Ignatius filled his lungs with the pungent, sour aroma. “I shall pretend that I am in a smart restaurant and that this is the lobster pond.”

    “Here, take this fork,” the man said, handing Ignatius a bent and corroded semblance of a spear. “Try to keep your hands out of the water. It’s like acid. Look what it’s done to the fork.”

    “My,” Ignatius said to the old man after having taken his first bite. “These are rather strong. What are the ingredients in these?”

    “Rubber, cereal, tripe. Who knows? I wouldn’t touch one of them myself.”

    “They’re curiously appealing,” Ignatius said, clearing his throat. “I thought that the vibrissae about my nostrils detected something unique while I was outside.”

    Ignatius chewed with a blissful savagery, studying the scar on the man’s nose and listening to his whistling.

    “Do I hear a strain from Scarlatti?” Ignatius asked finally.

    “I thought I was whistling ‘Turkey in the Straw.’”

    “I had hoped that you might be familiar with Scarlatti’s work. He was the last of the musicians,” Ignatius observed and resumed his furious attack upon the long hot dog. “With your apparent musical bent, you might apply yourself to something worthwhile.”

    Ignatius chewed while the man began his tuneless whistling again. Then he said, “I suspect that you imagine ‘Turkey in the Straw’ to be a valuable bit of Americana. Well, it is not. It is a discordant abomination.”

    “I can’t see that it matters much.”

    “It matters a great deal, sir!” Ignatius screamed. “Veneration of such things as ‘Turkey in the Straw’ is at the very root of our current dilemma.”

    “Where the hell do you come from? Whadda you want?”

    “What is your opinion of a society that considers ‘Turkey in the Straw’ to be one of the pillars, as it were, of its culture?”

    “Who thinks that?” the old man asked worriedly.

    “Everyone! Especially folk singers and third-grade teachers. Grimy undergraduates and grammar-school children are always chanting it like sorcerers.” Ignatius belched. “I do believe that I shall have another of these savories.”

    After his fourth hot dog, Ignatius ran his magnificent pink tongue around his lips and up over his moustache and said to the old man, “I cannot recently remember having been so totally satisfied. I was fortunate to find this place. Before me lies a day fraught with God knows what horrors. I am at the moment unemployed and have been launched upon a quest for work. However, I might as well have had the Grail set as my goal. I have been rocketing about the business district for a week now. Apparently I lack some particular perversion which today’s employer is seeking.”

    “No luck, huh?”

    “Well, during the week, I have answered only two ads. On some days I am completely enervated by the time I reach Canal Street. On these days I am doing well if I have enough spirit to straggle into a movie palace. Actually, I have seen every film that is playing downtown, and since they are all offensive enough to be held over indefinitely, next week looks particularly bleak.”

    The old man looked at Ignatius and then at the massive pot, the gas range, and the crumpled carts. He said, “I can hire you right here.”

    “Thank you very much,” Ignatius said condescendingly. “However, I could not work here. This garage is particularly dank, and I’m susceptible to respiratory ailments among a variety of others.”

    “You wouldn’t be working in here, son. I mean as a vendor.”

    “What?” Ignatius bellowed. “Out in the rain and snow all day long?”

    “It don’t snow here.”

    “It has on rare occasions. It probably would again as soon as I trudged out with one of these wagons. I would probably be found in some gutter, icicles dangling from all of my orifices, alley cats pawing over me to draw the warmth from my last breath. No, thank you, sir. I must go. I suspect that I have an appointment of some sort.”

    Ignatius looked absently at his little watch and saw that it had stopped again.

    “Just for a little while,” the old man begged. “Try it for a day. How’s about it? I need vendors bad.”

    “A day?” Ignatius repeated disbelievingly. “A day? I can’t waste a valuable day. I have places to go and people to see.”

    “Okay,” the old man said firmly. “Then pay me the dollar you owe for them weenies.”

    “I am afraid that they will all have to be on the house. Or on the garage or whatever it is. My Miss Marple of a mother discovered a number of theater ticket stubs in my pockets last night and has given me only carfare today.”

    “I’ll call in the police.”

    “Oh, my God!”

    “Pay me! Pay me or I’ll get the law.”

    The old man picked up the long fork and deftly placed its two rotting tongs at Ignatius’s throat.

    “You are puncturing my imported muffler,” Ignatius screamed.

    “Gimme your carfare.”

    “I can’t walk all the way to Constantinople Street.”

    “Get a taxi. Somebody at your house can pay the driver when you get there.”

    “Do you seriously think that my mother will believe me if I tell her that an old man held me up with a fork and took my two nickels?”

    “I’m not gonna be robbed again,” the old man said, spraying Ignatius with saliva. “That’s all that happens to you in the hot dog trade. Hot dog vendors and gas station attendants always get it. Holdups, muggings. Nobody respects a hot dog vendor.”

    “That is patently untrue, sir. No one respects hot dog vendors more than I. They perform one of our society’s few worthwhile services. The robbing of a hot dog vendor is a symbolic act. The theft is not prompted by avarice but rather by a desire to belittle the vendor.”

    “Shut your goddam fat lip and pay me.”

    “You are quite adamant for being so aged. However, I am not walking fifty blocks to my home. I would rather face death by rusty fork.”

    “Okay, buddy, now listen to me. I’ll make a bargain with you. You go out and push one of these wagons for an hour, and we’ll call it quits.”

    “Don’t I need clearance from the Health Department or something? I mean, I might have something beneath my fingernails that is very debilitating to the human system. Incidentally, do you get all of your vendors this way? Your hiring practices are hardly in step with contemporary policy. I feel as if I’ve been shanghaied. I am too apprehensive to ask how you go about firing your employees.”

    “Just don’t ever try to rob a hot dog man again.”

    “You’ve just made your point. Actually, you have made two of them, literally in my throat and muffler. I hope that you are prepared to compensate for the muffler. There are no more of its kind. It was made in a small factory in England that was destroyed by the Luftwaffe. At the time it was rumored that the Luftwaffe was directed to strike directly at the factory in order to destroy British morale, for the Germans had seen Churchill wrapped in a muffler of this sort in a confiscated newsreel. For all I know, this may be the same one that Churchill was wearing in that particular Movietone. Today their value is somewhere in the thousands. It can also be worn as a shawl. Look.”

    “Well,” the old man said finally, after watching Ignatius employ the muffler as a cummerbund, a sash, a cloak, and a pair of kilts, a sling for a broken arm, and a kerchief, “you ain’t gonna do too much damage to Paradise Vendors in one hour.”

    “If the alternatives are jail or a pierced Adam’s apple, I shall happily push one of your carts. Though I can’t predict how far I’ll go.”

    “Don’t get me wrong, son. I ain’t a bad guy, but you can only take so much. I spent ten years trying to make Paradise Vendors a reputable organization, but that ain’t easy. People look down on hot dog vendors. They think I operate a business for bums. I got trouble finding decent vendors. Then when I find some nice guy, he goes out and gets himself mugged by hoodlums. How come God had to make it so tough for you?”

    “We must not question His ways,” Ignatius said.

    “Maybe not, but I still don’t get it.”

    “The writings of Boethius may give you some insight.”

    “I read Father Keller and Billy Graham in the paper every single day.”

    “Oh, my God!” Ignatius spluttered. “No wonder you are so lost.”

    “Here,” the old man said, opening a metal locker near the stove. “Put this on.”

    He took what looked like a white smock out of the locker and handed it to Ignatius.

    “What is this?” Ignatius asked happily. “It looks like an academic gown.”

    Ignatius slipped it over his head. On top of his overcoat, the smock made him look like a dinosaur egg about to hatch.

    “Tie it at the waist with the belt.”

    “Of course not. These things are supposed to freely flow about the human form, although this one seems to provide little leeway. Are you sure that you don’t have one in a larger size?

    “Upon close scrutiny, I notice that this gown is rather yellow about the cuffs. I hope these stains about the chest are ketchup rather than blood. The last wearer of this might have been stabbed by hoodlums.”

    “Here, put on this cap.” The man gave Ignatius a little rectangle of white paper.

    “I am certainly not wearing a paper cap. The one that I have is perfectly good and far more healthful.”

    “You can’t wear a hunting cap. This is the Paradise vendor’s uniform.”

    “I will not wear that paper cap! I am not going to die of pneumonia while playing this little game for you. Plunge the fork into my vital organs, if you wish. I will not wear that cap. Death before dishonor and disease.”

    “Okay, drop it,” the old man sighed. “Come on and take this cart here.”

    “Do you think that I am going to be seen on the streets with that damaged abomination?” Ignatius asked furiously, smoothing the vendor’s smock over his body. “Give me that shiny one with the white sidewall tires.”

    “Awright, awright,” the old man said testily. He opened the lid on the little well in the cart and with a fork slowly began transferring hot dogs from the pot to the little well in the cart. “Now I give you a dozen hot dogs.” He opened another lid in the top of the metal bun. “I’m putting a package of buns in here. Got that?” He closed that lid and pulled upon a little side door cut in the shining red tin dog. “In here they got a little can of liquid heat keeps the hot dogs warm.”

    “My God,” Ignatius said with some respect. “These carts are like Chinese puzzles. I suspect that I will continually be pulling at the wrong opening.”

    The old man opened still another lid cut in the rear of the hot dog.

    “What’s in there? A machine gun?”

    “The mustard and ketchup’s in here.”

    “Well, I shall give this a brave try, although I may sell someone the can of liquid heat before I get too far.”

    The old man rolled the cart to the door of the garage and said, “Okay, buddy, go ahead.”

    “Thank you so much,” Ignatius replied and wheeled the big tin hot dog out onto the sidewalk. “I will be back promptly in an hour.”

    “Get off the sidewalk with that thing.”

    “I hope that you don’t think I am going out into traffic.”

    “You can get yourself arrested for pushing one of them things on the sidewalk.”

    “Good,” Ignatius said. “If the police follow me, they might prevent a robbery.”

    Ignatius pushed slowly away from the headquarters of Paradise Vendors through the heavy pedestrian traffic that moved to either side of the big hot dog like waves on a ship’s prow. This was a better way of passing time than seeing personnel managers, several of whom, Ignatius thought, had treated him rather viciously in the last few days. Since the movie houses were now off limits due to lack of funds, he would have had to drift, bored and aimless, around the business district until it seemed safe to return home. The people on the street looked at Ignatius, but no one bought. After he had gone half a block, he began calling, “Hot dogs! Hot dogs from Paradise!”

    “Get in the street, pal,” the old man cried somewhere behind him.

    Ignatius turned the corner and parked the wagon against a building. Opening the various lids, he prepared a hot dog for himself and ravenously ate it. His mother had been in a violent mood all week, refusing to buy him any Dr. Nut, pounding on his door when he was trying to write, threatening to sell the house and move into an old folks’ home. She described to Ignatius the courage of Patrolman Mancuso, who, against heavy odds, was  fighting to retain his job, who  wanted to work, who was making the best of his torture and exile in the bathroom at the bus station. Patrolman Mancuso’s situation reminded Ignatius of the situation of Boethius when he was imprisoned by the emperor before being killed. To pacify his mother and to improve conditions at home, he had given her  The Consolation of Philosophy, an English translation of the work that Boethius had written while unjustly imprisoned, and had told her to give it to Patrolman Mancuso so that he might peruse it while sealed in his booth. “The book teaches us to accept that which we cannot change. It describes the plight of a just man in an unjust society. It is the very basis for medieval thought. No doubt it will aid your patrolman during his moments of crisis,” Ignatius had said benevolently. “Yeah?” Mrs. Reilly had asked. “Aw, that’s sweet, Ignatius. Poor Angelo’ll be glad to get this.” For about a day, at least, the present to Patrolman Mancuso had brought a temporary peace to life on Constantinople Street.

    When he had finished the first hot dog, Ignatius prepared and consumed another, contemplating other kindnesses that might postpone his having to go to work again. Fifteen minutes later, noticing that the supply of hot dogs in the little well was visibly diminishing, he decided in favor of abstinence for the moment. He began to push slowly down the street, calling again, “Hot dogs!”

    George, who was wandering up Carondelet with an armload of packages wrapped in plain brown paper, heard the cry and went up to the gargantuan vendor.

    “Hey, stop. Gimme one of these.”

    Ignatius looked sternly at the young boy who had placed himself in the wagon’s path. His valve protested against the pimples, the surly face that seemed to hang from the long well-lubricated hair, the cigarette behind the ear, the aquamarine jacket, the delicate boots, the tight trousers that bulged offensively in the crotch in violation of all rules of theology and geometry.

    “I am sorry,” Ignatius snorted. “I have only a few frankfurters left, and I must save them. Please get out of my way.”

    “Save them? Who for?”

    “That is none of your business, you waif. Why aren’t you in school? Kindly stop molesting me. Anyway, I have no change.”

    “I got a quarter,” the thin white lips sneered.

    “I cannot sell you a frank, sir. Is that clear?”

    “Whatsa matter with you, friend?”

    “What’s the matter with  me? What’s the matter with  you? Are you unnatural enough to want a hot dog this early in the afternoon? My conscience will not let me sell you one. Just look at your loathsome complexion. You are a growing boy whose system needs to be surfeited with vegetables and orange juice and whole wheat bread and spinach and such. I, for one, will not contribute to the debauchery of a minor.”

    “Whadda you talking about? Sell me one of them hot dogs. I’m hungry. I ain’t had no lunch.”

    “No!” Ignatius screamed so furiously that the passersby stared. “Now get away from me before I run over you with this cart.”

    George pulled open the lid of the bun compartment and said, “Hey, you got plenty stuff in here. Fix me a weenie.”

    “Help!” Ignatius screamed, suddenly remembering the old man’s warnings about robberies. “Someone is stealing my buns! Police!”

    Ignatius backed up the cart and rammed it into George’s crotch.

    “Ouch! Watch out there, you nut.”

    “Help! Thief!”

    “Shut up, for Christ’s sake,” George said and slammed the door. “You oughta be locked up, you big fruit. You know that?”

    “What?” Ignatius screamed. “What impertinence was that?”

    “You big crazy fruit,” George snarled more loudly and slouched away, the taps on his heels scraping the sidewalk. “Who wants to eat anything your fruity hands touched?”

    “How dare you scream obscenities at me. Someone grab that boy,” Ignatius said wildly as George disappeared into the crowds of pedestrians farther down the street. “Someone with some decency grab that juvenile delinquent. That filthy little minor. Where is his respect? That little guttersnipe must be lashed until he collapses!”

    A woman in the group around the mobile hot dog said, “Ain’t that awful? Where they get them hot dog vendors from?”

    “Bums. They all bums,” someone answered her.

    “Wine is what it is. They all crazy from wine if you ast me. They shouldn’t let people like him out on the street.”

    “Is my paranoia getting completely out of hand,” Ignatius asked the group, “or are you mongoloids really talking about me?”

    “Let him alone,” someone said. “Look at them eyes.”

    “What’s wrong with my eyes?” Ignatius asked viciously.

    “Let’s get outta here.”

    “Please do,” Ignatius replied, his lips quivering, and prepared another hot dog to quiet his trembling nervous system. With shaking hands, he held the foot of red plastic and dough to his mouth and slipped it in two inches at a time. The active chewing massaged his throbbing head. When he had shoved in the last millimeter of crumb, he felt much calmer.

    Grabbing the handle again, he shoved off up Carondelet Street, waddling slowly behind the cart. True to his promise to make it around the block, he turned again at the

Eleven

    “Aw, look,” Santa said, holding the newspaper close to her eyes. “They got a cute picture show on in the

neighborhood with little Debbie Reynolds.”

    “Aw, she’s sweet,” Mrs. Reilly said. “You like her, Claude?”

    “Who’s that?” Mr. Robichaux asked pleasantly.

    “Little Debra Reynolds,” Mrs. Reilly answered.

    “I don’t think I can place her. I don’t go to the show much.”

    “She’s darling,” Santa said. “So petite. You ever seen her in that cute picture where she played Tammy, Irene?”

    “Ain’t that the picture where she went blind?”

    “No, girl! You must be thinking of the wrong show.”

    “Oh, I know who I was thinking of, precious. I was thinking of June Wyman. She was sweet, too.”

    “Aw, she was good,” Santa said. “I remember that picture where she played the dummy who got herself raped.”

    “Lord, I’m glad I didn’t go see that show.”

    “Aw, it was wonderful, babe. Very dramatic. You know? The look on that poor dummy’s face when she got raped. I’ll never forget it.”

    “Anybody want more coffee?” Mr. Robichaux asked.

    “Yeah, gimmee some there, Claude,” Santa said, folding the newspaper and throwing it on top of the refrigerator. “I’m sure sorry Angelo couldn’t make it. That poor boy. He told me he’s gonna be working day and night on his own so he can bring somebody in. He’s out someplace tonight, I guess. You oughta heard what his Rita been telling me. It seems Angelo went out an bought a lot of expensive clothes he can wear so maybe he can attract some character. Ain’t that a shame. That just shows you how much that boy loves the force. If they was to kick him out, it’d break his heart. I sure hope he takes in some bum.”

    “Angelo’s got him a hard road to travel,” Mrs. Reilly said absently. She was thinking of the PEACE TO MEN OF GOOD WILL sign that Ignatius had tacked to the front of their house after he had come home from work. Miss Annie had immediately started an inquisition about that as soon as it had appeared, screaming questions through her shutters. “What you think about somebody wants peace, Claude?”

    “That sounds like a communiss to me.”

    Mrs. Reilly’s worst fears were realized.

    “Who wants peace?” Santa asked.

    “Ignatius got a sign up in front the house about peace.”

    “I mighta known,” Santa said angrily. “First that boy wants a king, now he wants peace. I’m telling you, Irene. For your own good. That boy’s gotta be put away.”

    “He ain’t wearing no earring. I ask him and he says, ‘I ain’t wearing no earring, momma.’”

    “Angelo don’t lie.”

    “Maybe he just got him a small one.”

    “A earring’s a earring to me. Ain’t that right, Claude?”

    “That’s right,” Claude answered Santa.

    “Santa, honey, that’s a sweet little Blessed Virgin you got on top that TV,” Mrs. Reilly said to get them off the earring topic.

    Everyone looked at the television set next to the refrigerator, and Santa said, “Ain’t that nice, though? It’s a little Our Lady of the Television. It’s got a suction cup base so I don’t knock it over when I’m banging around in the kitchen. I bought it by Lenny’s.”

    “Lenny’s got everything,” Mrs. Reilly said. “It looks like it’s made outta nice plastic, too, don’t break.”

    “Well, how you kids liked that dinner?”

    “It was delicious,” Mr. Robichaux said.

    “It was wonderful,” Mrs. Reilly agreed. “I ain’t had me a good meal in a long time.”

    “Aarff,” Santa belched. “I think I put too much garlic in them stuffed eggplants, but I got a heavy hand with garlic. Even my granchirren tell me, they say, ‘Hey, maw-maw, you sure got a heavy hand with garlic.’”

    “Ain’t that sweet,” Mrs. Reilly said of the gourmet grandchildren.

    “I thought the eggplants was fine,” Mr. Robichaux said.

    “I’m only happy when I’m scrubbing my floors and cooking my food,” Santa told her guests. “I love to fix a big pot of meatballs or jumbalaya with shrimps.”

    “I like to cook,” Mr. Robichaux said. “It helps out my daughter sometimes.”

    “I bet it does,” Santa said. “A man who can cook is a big help around the house, believe me.” She kicked Mrs. Reilly under the table. “A woman’s got a man that likes to cook is a lucky girl.”

    “You like to cook, Irene?” Mr. Robichaux asked.

    “You talking to me, Claude?” Mrs. Reilly had been wondering what Ignatius looked like in an earring.

    “Come back out the clouds, girl,” Santa ordered. “Claude here was axing you if you like to cook.”

    “Yeah,” Mrs. Reilly lied. “I like to cook okay. But sometimes it gets so hot in that kitchen, especially in the summer. You don’t get no breeze out that alley. Ignatius likes to eat junk, anyways. You give Ignatius a few bottles of Dr. Nut and plenty bakery cakes, and he’s satisfied.”

    “You oughta get you a letrit range,” Mr. Robichaux said. “I bought my daughter one. It don’t get hot like a gas stove.”

    “Where you getting all this money from, Claude?” Santa asked interestedly.

    “I got me a nice pension from the railroad. I was with them for forty-five years, you know. They gimme a beautiful gold pin when I retired.”

    “Ain’t that nice,” Mrs. Reilly said. “You made good, huh, Claude?”

    “Then,” Mr. Robichaux said, “I got me a few little rental properties around my house. I was always putting a little of my salary aside to invest in properties. Property’s a good investment.”

    “It sure is,” Santa said, rolling her eyes wildly at Mrs. Reilly. “Now you well fixed, huh?”

    “I’m pretty comfortable. But you know sometimes I get tired of living with my daughter and her husband. I mean, they’re young. They got they own family. They are very nice to me, but I’d rather have my own home. You know what I mean?”

    “If I was you,” Mrs. Reilly said, “I’d stay where I was. If your little daughter don’t mind having you around, you got you a nice setup. I wisht I had me a nice child. Be grateful for what you got, Claude.”

    Santa ground the heel of her shoe into Mrs. Reilly’s ankle.

    “Ouch!” Mrs. Reilly cried.

    “Lord, I’m sorry, babe. Me and my big feet. Big feet’s always been my problem. They can hardly fit me down by the shoe store. That clerk sees me coming, and he says, ‘Lord, here comes Miss Battaglia again. What I’m gonna do?’”

    “Your feet ain’t so big,” Mrs. Reilly observed, looking under the kitchen table.

    “I just got them squshed up in this little pair of shoes. You oughta see them things when I’m barefoot, girl.”

    “I got bum feet,” Mrs. Reilly told the other two. Santa made a sign for Mrs. Reilly not to discuss her deficiencies, but Mrs. Reilly was not to be silenced. “Some days I can’t hardly walk. I think they went bad when Ignatius was little and I useta have to carry him around. Lord but he was slow walking. Always falling down. He was sure heavy, too. Maybe that’s how I got my arthuritis.”

    “Listen, you two,” Santa said quickly so that Mrs. Reilly would not describe some new, horrible deficiency. “Why don’t we go see that cute little Debbie Reynolds?”

    “That would be nice,” Mr. Robichaux said. “I never go to the show.”

    “You wanna go see a show?” Mrs. Reilly asked. “I don’t know. My feet.”

    “Aw, come on, girl. Let’s get out the house. It smells like garlic in here.”

    “I think Ignatius told me this movie ain’t no good. He sees every picture that comes out, that boy.”

    “Irene!” Santa said angrily. “You all the time thinking of that boy, and with all the trouble he’s giving you. You better wake up, babe. If you had any sense, you woulda had that boy locked away at Charity Hospital a long time ago. They’d turn a hose on him. They’d stick a letrit socket in that boy. They’d show that Ignatius. They’d make him behave himself.”

    “Yeah?” Mrs. Reilly asked with interest. “How much that cost?”

    “It’s all for free, Irene.”

    “Socialized medicine,” Mr. Robichaux observed. “They probly got communiss and fellow travelers working in that place.”

    “They got nuns operating the place, Claude. Lord, where you all the time getting this communiss stuff from?”

    “Maybe them sisters been fooled,” Mr. Robichaux said.

    “Ain’t that awful,” Mrs. Reilly said sadly. “Them poor sisters. Operating for a buncha communiss.”

    “I don’t care who’s operating the place.” Santa said. “If it’s free and they lock people away, Ignatius oughta be there.”

    “Once Ignatius started talking to them people, they’d maybe get mad and lock him up for good,” Mrs. Reilly said, but she was thinking that even that alternative wasn’t too unattractive. “Maybe he wouldn’t listen to the doctors.”

    “They’d make him listen. They’d beat him in the head, they’d lock him up in a straitjacket, they’d pump some water on him,” Santa said a little too eagerly.

    “You gotta think about yourself, Irene,” Mr. Robichaux said. “That son of yours is gonna put you in your grave.”

    “That’s it. You tell her, Claude.”

    “Well,” Mrs. Reilly said, “We’ll give Ignatius a chance. Maybe he’ll make good yet.”

    “Selling weenies?” Santa asked. “Lord.” She shook her head. “Well, lemme go dump these dishes in the zink. Come on, let’s go see that precious Debbie Reynolds.”

    A few minutes later, after Santa had stopped in the parlor to kiss her mother goodbye, the three of them set out for the theater. The day had been a balmy day; a south wind had been blowing steadily from the Gulf. Now the evening was still warm. Heavy odors of Mediterranean cooking floated across the congested neighborhood from the opened kitchen windows in every apartment building and double house. Each resident seemed to be making some contribution, however small, to the general cacophony of dropping pots, booming television sets, arguing voices, screaming children, and slamming doors.

    “St. Odo Parish is really at it tonight,” Santa commented thoughtfully as the three slowly strolled down the narrow sidewalk between the curb and the steps of the double houses built in solid, straight rows down each block. The streetlights shone on the treeless stretches of asphalt and cement and continuous old slate roofs. “It’s even worst in the summertime. Everybody’s out on the streets till ten-eleven o’clock.”

    “Don’t tell  me, precious,” Mrs. Reilly said as she hobbled dramatically between her friends. “Remember I’m from Dauphine Street. We useta put the kitchen chairs out on the banquette and set there till midnight sometimes waiting for the house to cool off. And the things the people down here say! Lord.”

    “Vicious is what it is,” Santa agreed. “Dirty mouths.”

    “Poor poppa,” Mrs. Reilly said. “He was so poor. Then when he went and got his hand caught in that fanbelt, the people in the neighborhood had the nerve to say he musta been drunk. The anonymous letters we got about that. And my poor old Tante Boo-boo. Eighty years old. She was burning a candle for her poor departed husband and it fall off the night table and sets her mattress on fire. The people said she was smoking in bed

like lesser veck in a white coat, and this one was very nice

too, and I was led off to a very nice white clean bedroom with

curtains and a bedside lamp, and just the one bed in it, all for

Your Humble Narrator.  So I had a real horrorshow inner

smeck at that, thinking I was really a very lucky young mal-

chickiwick.  I was told to take off my horrible prison platties

and I was given a really beautiful set of pyjamas, O my

brothers, in plain green, the heighth of bedwear fashion.  And I

was given a nice warm dressing-gown too and lovely toofles

to put my bare nogas in, and I thought: "Well, Alex boy, little

6655321 as was, you have copped it lucky and no mistake.

You are really going to enjoy it here."

After I had been given a nice chasha of real horrorshow

coffee and some old gazettas and mags to look at while peet-

ing it, this first veck in white came in, the one who had like

signed for me, and he said: "Aha, there you are," a silly sort of

a veshch to say but it didn't sound silly, this veck being so like

nice.  "My name," he said, "is Dr. Branom.  I'm Dr. Brodsky's

assistant.  With your permission, I'll just give you the usual

brief overall examination."  And he took the old stetho out of

his right carman.  "We must make sure you're quite fit, mustn't

we?   Yes indeed, we must."  So while I lay there with my pyjama

top off and he did this, that and the other, I said:

"What exactly is it, sir, that you're going to do?"

"Oh," said Dr. Branom, his cold stetho going all down my

back, "it's quite simple, really.   We just show you some films."

"Films?" I said.  I could hardly believe my ookos, brothers,

as you may well understand.  "You mean," I said, "it will be just

like going to the pictures?"

"They'll be special films," said Dr. Branom.  "Very special

films.  You'll be having the first session this afternoon.  Yes," he

said, getting up from bending over me, "you seem to be quite a

fit young boy.  A bit under-nourished perhaps.  That will be the

fault of the prison food.  Put your pyjama top back on.  After

every meal," he said, sitting on the edge of the bed, "we shall be

giving you a shot in the arm.  That should help."  I felt really

grateful to this very nice Dr. Branom.  I said:

"Vitamins, sir, will it be?"

"Something like that," he said, smiling real horrorshow and

friendly, "just a jab in the arm after every meal."  Then he went

out.  I lay on the bed thinking this was like real heaven, and I

read some of the mags they'd given me - 'Worldsport', 'Sinny'

(this being a film mag) and 'Goal'.  Then I lay back on the bed

and shut my glazzies and thought how nice it was going to be

out there again, Alex with perhaps a nice easy job during the

day, me being now too old for the old skolliwoll, and then

perhaps getting a new like gang together for the nochy, and

the first rabbit would be to get old Dim and Pete, if they had

not been got already by the millicents.  This time I would be

very careful not to get loveted.  They were giving another like

chance, me having done murder and all, and it would not be

like fair to get loveted again, after going to all this trouble to

show me films that were going to make me a real good mal-

chick.  I had a real horrorshow smeck at everybody's like

innocence, and I was smecking my gulliver off when they

brought in my lunch on a tray.  The veck who brought it was

the one who'd led me to this malenky bedroom when I came

into the mesto, and he said:

"It's nice to know somebody's happy."  It was really a very

nice appetizing bit of pishcha they'd laid out on the tray - two

or three lomticks of like hot roastbeef with mashed kartoffel

and vedge, then there was also ice-cream and a nice hot

chasha of chai.  And there was even a cancer to smoke and a

matchbox with one match in.  So this looked like it was the

life, O my brothers.  Then, about half an hour after while I was

lying a bit sleepy on the bed, a woman nurse came in, a real

nice young devotchka with real horrorshow groodies (I had

not seen such for two years) and she had a tray and a hypo-

dermic.  I said:

"Ah, the old vitamins, eh?"   And I clickclicked at her but she

took no notice.  All she did was to slam the needle into my

left arm, and then swishhhh in went the vitamin stuff.  Then she

went out again, clack clack on her high-heeled nogas.  Then

the white-coated veck who was like a male nurse came in with

a wheelchair.  I was a malenky bit surprised to viddy that.  I

said:

"What giveth then, brother?  I can walk, surely, to wherever

we have to itty to."  But he said:

"Best I push you there."  And indeed, O my brothers, when I

got off the bed I found myself a malenky biy weak.  It was the

under-nourishment like Dr. Branom had said, all that horrible

prison pishcha.  But the vitamins in the after-meal injection

would put me right.  No doubt at all about that, I thought.

 

 

4

 

Where I was wheeled to, brothers, was like no sinny I had ever

viddied before.  True enough, one wall was all covered with

silver screen, and direct opposite was a wall with square holes

in for the projector to project through, and there were stereo

speakers stuck all over the mesto.  But against the right-hand

one of the other walls was a bank of all like little meters, and

in the middle of the floor facing the screen was like a dentist's

chair with all lengths of wire running from it, and I had to like

crawl from the wheelchair to this, being given some help by

another like male nurse veck in a white coat.  Then I noticed

that underneath the projection holes was like all frosted glass

and I thought I viddied shadows of like people moving behind

it and I thought I slooshied somebody cough kashl kashl

kashl.  But then all I could like notice was how weak I seemed

to be, and I put that down to changing over from prison

pishcha to this new rich pishcha and the vitamins injected into

me.  "Right," said the wheelchair-wheeling veck, "now I'll leave

you.  The show will commence as soon as Dr. Brodsky arrives.

Hope you enjoy it."  To be truthful, brothers, I did not really

feel that I wanted to viddy any film-show this afternoon.  I was

just not in the mood.  I would have liked much better to have

a nice quiet spatchka on the bed, nice and quiet and all on my

oddy knocky.  I felt very limp.

What happened now was that one white-coated veck

strapped my gulliver to a like head-rest, singing to himself all

the time some vonny cally pop-song.  "What's this for?" I said.

And this veck replied, interrupting his like song an instant,

that it was to keep my gulliver still and make me look at the

screen.  "But," I said, "I want to look at the screen.  I've been

brought here to viddy films and viddy films I shall."  And then

the other white-coat veck (there were three altogether, one

of them a devotchka who was like sitting at the bank of

meters and twiddling with knobs) had a bit of a smeck at that.

He said:

"You never know.  Oh, you never know.  Trust us, friend.  It's

better this way."  And then I found they were strapping my

rookers to the chair-arms and my nogas were like stuck to a

foot-rest.  It seemed a bit bezoomny to me but I let them get

on with what they wanted to get on with.  If I was to be a free

young malchick again in a fortnight's time I would put up with

much in the meantime, O my brothers.  One veshch I did not

like, though, was when they put like clips on the skin of my

forehead, so that my top glazz-lids were pulled up and up and

up and I could not shut my glazzies no matter how I tried.  I

tried to smeck and said: "This must be a real horrorshow film

if you're so keen on my viddying it."  And one of the white-

coat vecks said, smecking:

"Horrorshow is right, friend.  A real show of horrors."  And

then I had like a cap stuck on my gulliver and I could viddy

all wires running away from it, and they stuck a like suction

pad on my belly and one on the old tick-tocker, and I could

just about viddy wires running away from those.  Then there

was the shoom of a door opening and you could tell some

very important chelloveck was coming in by the way the

white-coated under-vecks went all stiff.  And then I viddied this

Dr. Brodsky.  He was a malenky veck, very fat, with all curly

hair curling all over his gulliver, and on his spuddy nose he

had very thick ochkies.  I could just viddy that he had a real

horrorshow suit on, absolutely the heighth of fashion, and he

had a like very delicate and subtle von of operating-theatres

coming from him.  With him was Dr. Branom, all smiling like as

though to give me confidence.  "Everything ready?" said Dr.

Brodsky in a very breathy goloss.  Then I could slooshy voices

saying Right right right from like a distance, then nearer to,

then there was a quiet like humming shoom as though things

had been switched on.  And then the lights went out and there

was Your Humble Narrator And Friend sitting alone in the

dark, all on his frightened oddy knocky, not able to move nor

shut his glazzies nor anything.   And then, O my brothers, the

film-show started off with some very gromky atmosphere

music coming from the speakers, very fierce and full of dis-

cord.  And then on the screen the picture came on, but there

was no title and no credits.  What came on was a street, as it

might have been any street in any town, and it was a real dark

nochy and the lamps were lit.  It was a very good like pro-

fessional piece of sinny, and there were none of these flickers

and blobs you get, say, when you viddy one of these dirty

films in somebody's house in a back street.  All the time the

music bumped out, very like sinister.  And then you could

viddy an old man coming down the street, very starry, and

then there leaped out on this starry veck two malchicks

dressed in the heighth of fashion, as it was at this time (still

thin trousers but no like cravat any more, more of a real tie),

and then they started to filly with him.  You could slooshy the

screams and moans, very realistic, and you could even get the

like heavy breathing and panting of the two tolchocking mal-

chicks.  They made a real pudding out of this starry veck, going

crack crack crack at him with the fisty rookers, tearing his

platties off and then finishing up by booting his nagoy plott

(this lay all krovvy-red in the grahzny mud of the gutter) and

then running off very skorry.  Then there was the close-up

gulliver of this beaten-up starry veck, and the krovvy flowed

beautiful red.  It's funny how the colours of the like real

world only seem really real when you viddy them on the

screen.

Now all the time I was watching this I was beginning to get

very aware of a like not feeling all that well, and this I put

down to the under-nourishment and my stomach not quite

ready for tthe rich pishcha and vitamins I was getting here.  But

I tried to forget this, concentrating on the next film which

came on at once, brothers, without any break at all.  This

time the film jumped right away on a young devotchka who

was being given the old in-out by first one malchick then

another then another then another, she creeching away very

gromky through the speakers and like very pathetic and tragic

music going on at the same time.  This was real, very real,

though if you thought about it properly you couldn't imagine

lewdies actually agreeing to having all this done to them in a

film, and if these films were made by the Good or the State

you couldn't imagine them being allowed to take these films

without like interfering with what was going on.  So it must

have been very clever what they call cutting or editing or

some such veshch.  For it was very real.  And when it came to

the sixth or seventh malchick leering and smecking and then

going into it and the devotchka creeching on the sound-track

like bezoomny, then I began to feel sick.  I had like pains all

over and felt I could sick up and at the same time not sick up,

and I began to feel like in distress, O my brothers, being fixed

rigid too on this chair.  When this bit of film was over I could

slooshy the goloss of this Dr. Brodsky from over by the

switchboard saying: "Reaction about twelve point five?  Prom-

ising, promising."

Then we shot straight into another lomtick of film, and this

time it was of just a human litso, a very like pale human face

held still and having different nasty veshches done to it.  I was

sweating a malenky bit with the pain in my guts and a horrible

thirst and my gulliver going throb throb throb, and it seemed

to me that if I could not viddy this bit of film I would perhaps

be not so sick.  But I could not shut my glazzies, and even if I

tried to move my glaz-balls about I still could not get like out

of the line of fire of this picture.  So I had to go on viddying

what was being done and hearing the most ghastly creechings

coming from this litso.  I knew it could not really be real, but

that made no difference.  I was heaving away but could not

sick, viddying first a britva cut out an eye, then slice down the

cheek, then go rip rip rip all over, while red krovvy shot on to

the camera lens.  Then all the teeth were like wrenched out

with a pair of pliers, and the creeching and the blood were

terrific.  Then I slooshied this very pleased goloss of Dr.

Brodsky going: "Excellent, excellent, excellent."

The next lomtick of film was of an old woman who kept a

shop being kicked about amid very gromky laughter by a lot

of malchicks, and these malchicks broke up the shop and then

set fire to it.  You could viddy this poor starry ptitsa trying to

crawl out of the flames, screaming and creeching, but having

had her leg broke by these malchicks kicking her she could

not move.  So then all the flames went roaring round her, and

you could viddy her agonized litso like appealing through the

flames and the disappearing in the flames, and then you

could slooshy the most gromky and agonized and agonizing

screams that ever came from a human goloss.  So this time I

knew I had to sick up, so I creeched:

"I want to be sick.  Please let me be sick.  Please bring some-

thing for me to be sick into."  But this Dr. Brodsky called back:

"Imagination only.  You've nothing to worry about.  Next

film coming up."  That was perhaps meant to be a joke, for I

heard a like smeck coming from the dark.  And then I was

forced to viddy a most nasty film about Japanese torture.  It

was the 1939-45 War, and there were soldiers being fixed to

trees with nails and having fires lit under them and having their

yarbles cut off, and you even viddied a gulliver being sliced off

a soldier with a sword, and then with his head rolling about

and the rot and glazzies looking alive still, the plott of this

soldier actually ran about, krovvying like a fountain out of

the neck, and then it dropped, and all the time there was very

very loud laughter from the Japanese.  The pains I felt now in

my belly and the headache and the thirst were terrible, and

they all seemed to be coming out of the screen.  So I

creeched:

"Stop the film!  Please, please stop it!  I can't stand any

more."  And then the goloss of this Dr. Brodsky said:

"Stop it?  Stop it, did you say?  Why, we've hardly started."

And he and the others smecked quite loud.

 

 

5

 

I do not wish to describe, brothers, what other horrible vesh-

ches I was like forced to viddy that afternoon.  The like

minds of this Dr. Brodsky and Dr. Branom and the others in

white coats, and remember there was this devotchka twid-

dling with the knobs and watching the meters, they must have

been more cally and filthy than any prestoopnick in the Staja

itself.  Because I did not think it was possible for any veck to

even think of making films of what I was forced to viddy, all

tied to this chair and my glazzies made to be wide open.  All I

could do was to creech very gromky for them to turn it off,

turn it off, and that like part drowned the noise of dratsing

and fillying and also the music that went with it all.  You can

imagine it was like a terrible relief when I'd viddied the last bit

of film, and this Dr. Brodsky said, in a very yawny and bored

like goloss: "I think that should be enough for Day One, don't

you, Branom?"  And there I was with the lights switched on,

my gulliver throbbing like a bolshy big engine that makes

pain, and my rot all dry and cally inside, and feeling I could

like sick up every bit of pishcha I had ever eaten, O my

brothers, since the day I was like weaned.  "All right," said this

Dr. Brodsky, "he can be taken back to his bed."  Then he like

patted me on the pletcho and said: "Good, good.  A very

promising start," grinning all over his litso, then he like

waddled out, Dr. Branom after him, but Dr. Branom gave me a

like very droogy and sympathetic type smile as though he had

nothing to do with all this veshch but was like forced into it

as I was.

Anyhow, they freed my plott from the chair and they let go

the skin above my glazzies so that I could open and shut them

again, and I shut them, O my brothers, with the pain and throb

in my gulliver, and then I was like carried to the old wheel-

chair and taken back to my malenky bedroom, the under-veck

who wheeled me singing away at some hound-and-horny

popsong so that I like snarled: "Shut it, thou," but he only

smecked and said: "Never mind, friend," and then sang louder.

So I was put into the bed and still felt bolnoy but could not

sleep, but soon I started to feel that soon I might start to feel

that I might soon start feeling just a malenky bit better, and

then I was brought some nice hot chai with plenty of moloko

and sakar and, peeting that, I knew that that like horrible

nightmare was in the past and all over.  And then Dr. Branom

came in, all nice and smiling.  He said:

"Well, by my calculations you should be starting to feel all

right again.  Yes?"

"Sir," I said, like wary.  I did not quite kopat what he was

getting at govoreeting about calculations, seeing that getting

better from feeling bolnoy is like your own affair and nothing

to do with calculations.  He sat down, all nice and droogy, on

the bed's edge and said:

"Dr. Brodsky is pleased with you.  You had a very positive

response.  Tomorrow, of course, there'll be two sessions,

morning and afternoon, and I should imagine that you'll be

feeling a bit limp at the end of the day.  But we have to be hard

on you, you have to be cured."  I said:

"You mean I have to sit through - ?  You mean I have to

look at - ?  Oh, no," I said.  "It was horrible."

"Of course it was horrible," smiled Dr. Branom.  "Violence is a

very horrible thing.  That's what you're learning now.  Your

body is learning it."

"But," I said, "I don't understand.  I don't understand about

feeling sick like I did.  I never used to feel sick before.  I used to

feel like very the opposite.  I mean, doing it or watching it I

used to feel real horrorshow.  I just don't understand why or

how or what - "

"Life is a very wonderful thing," said Dr. Branom in a like

very holy goloss.  "The processes of life, the make-up of the

human organism, who can fully understand these miracles?  Dr.

Brodsky is, of course, a remarkable man.  What is happening

to you now is what should happen to any normal healthy

human organism contemplating the actions of the forces of

evil, the workings of the principle of destruction.  You are

being made sane, you are being made healthy."

"That I will not have," I said, "nor can understand at all.

What you've been doing is to make me feel very ill."

"Do you feel ill now?" he said, still with the old droogy

smile on his litso.  "Drinking tea, resting, having a quiet chat

with a friend - surely you're not feeling anything but well?"

I like listened and felt for pain and sickness in my gulliver

and plott, in a like cautious way, but it was true, brothers,

that I felt real horrorshow and even wanting my dinner.  "I

don't get it," I said.  "You must be doing something to me to

make me feel ill."  And I sort of frowned about that, thinking.

"You felt ill this afternoon," he said, "because you're getting

better.  When we're healthy we respond to the presence of the

hateful with fear and nausea.  You're becoming healthy, that's

all.  You'll be healthier still this time tomorrow."  Then he

patted me on the noga and went out, and I tried to puzzle the

whole veshch out as best I could.  What it seemed to me was

that the wire and other veshches that were fixed to my plott

perhaps were making me feel ill, and that it was all a trick

Then, after sort of eating her up in two swallows, he said:

"Why should you think in terms of there being anything

wrong?  Have you been doing something you shouldn't,

yes?"

"Just a manner of speech," I said, "sir."

"Well," said P. R. Deltoid, "it's just a manner of speech from

me to you that you watch out, little Alex, because next time,

as you very well know, it's not going to be the corrective

school any more.  Next time it's going to be the barry place

and all my work ruined.  If you have no consideration for your

horrible self you at least might have some for me, who have

sweated over you.  A big black mark, I tell you in confidence,

for every one we don't reclaim, a confession of failure for

every one of you that ends up in the stripy hole."

"I've been doing nothing I shouldn't, sir," I said.  "The mil-

licents have nothing on me, brother, sir I mean."

"Cut out this clever talk about millicents," said P. R. Deltoid

very weary, but still rocking.  "Just because the police have not

picked you up lately doesn't, as you very well know, mean

you've not been up to some nastiness.  There was a bit of a

fight last night, wasn't there?  There was a bit of shuffling with

nozhes and bike-chains and the like.  One of a certain fat boy's

friends was ambulanced off late from near the Power Plant

and hospitalized, cut about very unpleasantly, yes.  Your name

was mentioned.  The word has got through to me by the usual

channels.  Certain friends of yours were named also.  There

seems to have been a fair amount of assorted nastiness last

night.  Oh, nobody can prove anything about anybody, as

usual.  But I'm warning you, little Alex, being a good friend to

you as always, the one man in this sick and sore community

who wants to save you from yourself."

"I appreciate all that, sir," I said, "very sincerely."

"Yes, you do, don't you?" he sort of sneered.  "Just watch it,

that's all, yes.  We know more than you think, little Alex."

Then he said, in a goloss of great suffering, but still rocking

away: "What gets into you all?  We study the problem and

we've been studying it for damn well near a century, yes, but

we get no further with our studies.  You've got a good home

here, good loving parents, you've got not too bad of a brain.

Is it some devil that crawls inside you?"

"Nobody's got anything on me, sir," I said.  "I've been out of

the rookers of the millicents for a long time now."

"That's just what worries me," sighed P. R. Deltoid.  "A bit

too long of a time to be healthy.  You're about due now by my

reckoning.  That's why I'm warning you, little Alex, to keep

your handsome young proboscis out of the dirt, yes.  Do I

make myself clear?"

"As an unmuddied lake, sir," I said.  "Clear as an azure sky of

deepest summer.  You can rely on me, sir."  And I gave him a

nice zooby smile.

But when he'd ookadeeted and I was making this very

strong pot of chai, I grinned to myself over this veshch that

P. R. Deltoid and his droogs worried about.  All right, I do

bad, what with crasting and tolchocks and carves with the

britva and the old in-out-in-out, and if I get loveted, well, too

bad for me, O my little brothers, and you can't run a country

with every chelloveck comporting himself in my manner of

the night.  So if I get loveted and it's three months in this

mesto and another six in that, and the, as P. R. Deltoid so

kindly warns, next time, in spite of the great tenderness of my

summers, brothers, it's the great unearthly zoo itself, well, I

say: "Fair, but a pity, my lords, because I just cannot bear to

be shut in.  My endeavour shall be, in such future as stretches

out its snowy and lilywhite arms to me before the nozh

overtakes or the blood spatters its final chorus in twisted

metal and smashed glass on the highroad, to not get loveted

again."  Which is fair speeching.  But, brothers, this biting of

their toe-nails over what is the cause of badness is what turns

me into a fine laughing malchick.  They don't go into the cause

of goodness, so why the other shop?  If lewdies are good

that's because they like it, and I wouldn't ever interfere with

their pleasures, and so of the other shop.  And I was patron-

izing the other shop.  More, badness is of the self, the one, the

you or me on our oddy knockies, and that self is made by old

Bog or God and is his great pride and radosty.  But the not-self

cannot have the bad, meaning they of the government and the

judges and the schools cannot allow the bad because they

cannot allow the self.  And is not our modern history, my

brothers, the story of brave malenky selves fighting these big

machines?  I am serious with you, brothers, over this.  But

what I do I do because I like to do.

So now, this smiling winter morning, I drink this very

strong chai with moloko and spoon after spoon after spoon

of sugar, me having a sladky tooth, and I dragged out of the

oven the breakfast my poor old mum had cooked for me.  It

was an egg fried, that and no more, but I made toast and ate

egg and toast and jam, smacking away at it while I read the

gazetta.  The gazetta was the usual about ultra-violence and

bank robberies and strikes and footballers making everybody

paralytic with fright by threatening to not play next Saturday

if they did not get higher wages, naughty malchickiwicks as

they were.  Also there were more space-trips and bigger stereo

TV screens and offers of free packets of soapflakes in ex-

change for the labels on soup-tins, amazing offer for one

week only, which made me smeck.  And there was a bolshy big

article on Modern Youth (meaning me, so I gave the old bow,

grinning like bezoomny) by some very clever bald chelloveck.

I read this with care, my brothers, slurping away at the old

chai, cup after tass after chasha, crunching my lomticks of

black toast dipped in jammiwam and eggiweg.  This learned

veck said the usual veshches, about no parental discipline, as

he called it, and the shortage of real horrorshow teachers

who would lambast bloody beggary out of their innocent

poops and make them go boohoohoo for mercy.  All this was

gloopy and made me smeck, but it was like nice to go on

knowing one was making the news all the time, O my

brothers.  Every day there was something about Modern

Youth, but the best veshch they ever had in the old gazetta

was by some starry pop in a doggy collar who said that in his

considered opinion and he was govoreeting as a man of Bog

IT WAS THE DEVIL THAT WAS ABROAD and was

like ferreting his way into like young innocent flesh, and it was

the adult world that could take the responsibility for this with

their wars and bombs and nonsense.  So that was all right.  So

he knew what he talked of, being a Godman.  So we young

innocent malchicks could take no blame.  Right right right.

When I'd gone erk erk a couple of razzes on my full inno-

cent stomach, I started to get out day platties from my ward-

robe, turning the radio on.  There was music playing, a very

nice malenky string quartet, my brothers, by Claudius Bird-

man, one that I knew well.  I had to have a smeck, though,

thinking of what I'd viddied once in one of these like articles

on Modern Youth, about how Modern Youth would be better

off if A Lively Appreciation Of The Arts could be like en-

couraged.  Great Music, it said, and Great Poetry would like

quieten Modern Youth down and make Modern Youth more

Civilized.  Civilized my syphilised yarbles.  Music always sort of

sharpened me up, O my brothers, and made me feel like

old Bog himself, ready to make with the old donner and blit-

zen and have vecks and ptitsas creeching away in my ha ha

power.  And when I'd cheested up my litso and rookers a bit

and done dressing (my day platties were like student-wear:  the

old blue pantalonies with sweater with A for Alex) I thought

here at last was time to itty off to the disc-bootick (and

cutter too, my pockets being full of pretty polly) to see about

this long-promised and long-ordered stereo Beethoven

Number Nine (the Choral Symphony, that is), recorded on

Masterstroke by the Esh Sham Sinfonia under L. Muhaiwir.  So

out I went, brothers.

The day was very different from the night.  The night be-

longed to me and my droogs and all the rest of the nadsats,

and the starry bourgeois lurked indoors drinking in the

gloopy worldcasts, but the day was for the starry ones, and

there always seemed to be more rozzes or millicents about

during the day, too.  I got the autobus from the corner and

rode to Center, and then I walked back to Taylor Place, and

there was the disc-bootick I favoured with my inestimable

custom, O my brothers.  It had the gloopy name of MEL-

ODIA, but it was a real horrorshow mesto and skorry, most

times, at getting the new recordings.  I walked in and the only

other customers were two young ptitsas sucking away at ice-

sticks (and this, mark, was dead cold winter and sort of

shuffling through the new pop-discs - Johnny Burnaway,

Stash Kroh, The Mixers, Lay Quit Awhile With Ed And Id

Molotov, and all the rest of that cal).  These two ptitsas

couldn't have been more than ten, and they too, like me, it

seemed, evidently, had decided to take the morning off from

the old skolliwoll.  They saw themselves, you could see, as real

grown-up devotchkas already, what with the old hip-swing

when they saw your Faithful Narrator, brothers, and padded

groodies and red all ploshed on their goobers.  I went up to

the counter, making with the polite zooby smile at old Andy

behind it (always polite himself, always helpful, a real hor-

rorshow type of a veck, though bald and very very thin).  He

said:

"Aha.  I know what you want, I think.  Good news, good

news.  It has arrived."  And with like big conductor's rookers

beating time he went to get it.  The two young ptitsas started

giggling, as they will at that age, and I gave them a like cold

glazzy.  Andy was back real skorry, waving the great shiny

white sleeve of the Ninth, which had on it, brothers, the

frowning beetled like thunderbolted litso of Ludwig van him-

self.  "Here," said Andy.  "Shall we give it the trial spin?"  But I

wanted it back home on my stereo to slooshy on my oddy

knocky, greedy as hell.  I fumbled out the deng to pay and one

of the little ptitsas said:

"Who you getten, bratty?  What biggy, what only?"  These

young devotchkas had their own like way of govoreeting.

"The Heaven Seventeen?  Luke Sterne?  Goggly Gogol?"  And

both giggled, rocking and hippy.  Then an idea hit me and

made me near fall over with the anguish and ecstasy of it, O

my brothers, so I could not breathe for near ten seconds.  I

recovered and made with my new-clean zoobies and said:

"What you got back home, little sisters, to play your fuzzy

warbles on?"  Because I could viddy the discs they were buying

were these teeny pop veshches.  "I bet you got little save tiny

portable like picnic spinners."  And they sort of pushed their

lower lips out at that.  "Come with uncle," I said, "and hear all

proper.  Hear angel trumpets and devil trombones.  You are

invited."  And I like bowed.  They giggled again and one said:

"Oh, but we're so hungry.  Oh, but we could so eat."  The

other said: "Yah, she can say that, can't she just."  So I said:

"Eat with uncle.  Name your place."

Then they viddied themselves as real sophistoes, which was

like pathetic, and started talking in big-lady golosses about

the Ritz and the Bristol and the Hilton and Il Ristorante Gran-

turco.  But I stopped that with "Follow uncle," and I led them

to the Pasta Parlour just round the corner and let them fill

their innocent young litsos on spaghetti and sausages and

cream-puffs and banana-splits and hot choc-sauce, till I near

sicked with the sight of it, I, brothers, lunching but frugally off

a cold ham-slice and a growling dollop of chilli.  These two

young ptitsas were much alike, though not sisters.  They had

the same ideas or lack of, and the same colour hair - a like

dyed strawy.  Well, they would grow up real today.  Today I

would make a day of it.  No school this afterlunch, but edu-

cation certain, Alex as teacher.  Their names, they said, were

Marty and Sonietta, bezoomny enough and in the heighth of

their childish fashion, so I said:

"Righty right, Marty and Sonietta.  Time for the big spin.

Come."  When we were outside on the cold street they

thought they would not go by autobus, oh no, but by taxi, so

I gave them the humour, though with a real horrorshow in-

grin, and I called a taxi from the rank near Center.  The driver,

a starry whiskery veck in very stained platties, said:

"No tearing up, now.  No nonsense with them seats.  Just re-

upholstered they are."  I quieted his gloopy fears and off we

spun to Municipal Flatblock 18A, these two bold little ptitsas

giggling and whispering.  So, to cut all short, we arrived, O my

brothers, and I led the way up to 10-8, and they panted and

smecked away the way up, and then they were thirsty, they

said, so I unlocked the treasure-chest in my room and gave

these ten-year-young devotchkas a real horrorshow Scotch-

man apiece, though well filled with sneezy pins-and-needles

soda.  They sat on my bed (yet unmade) and leg-swung, smeck-

ing and peeting their highballs, while I spun their like pathetic

malenky discs through my stereo.  Like peeting some sweet

scented kid's drink, that was, in like very beautiful and lovely

and costly gold goblets.  But they went oh oh oh and said,

"Swoony" and "Hilly" and other weird slovos that were the

heighth of fashion in that youth group.  While I spun this cal

for them I encouraged them to drink and have another, and

they were nothing loath, O my brothers.  So by the time their

pathetic pop-discs had been twice spun each (there were two:

'Honey Nose', sung by Ike Yard, and 'Night After Day After

Night', moaned by two horrible yarbleless like eunuchs whose

names I forget) they were getting near the pitch of like young

ptitsa's hysterics, what with jumping all over my bed and me in

the room with them.

What was actually done that afternoon there is no need to

describe, brothers, as you may easily guess all.  Those two

were unplattied and smecking fit to crack in no time at all, and

they thought it the bolshiest fun to viddy old Uncle Alex

standing there all nagoy and pan-handled, squirting the hypo-

dermic like some bare doctor, then giving myself the old jab

of growling jungle-cat secretion in the rooker.  Then I pulled

the lovely Ninth out of its sleeve, so that Ludwig van was now

nagoy too, and I set the needle hissing on to the last move-

ment, which was all bliss.  There it was then, the bass strings

like govoreeting away from under my bed at the rest of the

orchestra, and then the male human goloss coming in and

telling them all to be joyful, and then the lovely blissful tune

all about Joy being a glorious spark like of heaven, and then I

felt the old tigers leap in me and then I leapt on these two

young ptitsas.  This time they thought nothing fun and

stopped creeching with high mirth, and had to submit to the

strange and weird desires of Alexander the Large which, what

with the Ninth and the hypo jab, were choodessny and zam-

mechat and very demanding, O my brothers.   But they were

both very very drunken and could hardly feel very much.

When the last movement had gone round for the second

time with all the banging and creeching about Joy Joy Joy

Joy, then these two young ptitsas were not acting the big lady

sophisto no more.  They were like waking up to what was

being done to their malenky persons and saying that they

wanted to go home and like I was a wild beast.  They looked

like they had been in some big bitva, as indeed they had, and

were all bruised and pouty.  Well, if they would not go to

school they must stil have their education.  And education

they had had.  They were creeching and going ow ow ow as

they put their platties on, and they were like punchipunching

me with their teeny fists as I lay there dirty and nagoy and fair

shagged and fagged on the bed.  This young Sonietta was cre-

eching: "Beast and hateful animal.  Filthy horror."  So I let them

get their things together and get out, which they did, talking

about how the rozzes should be got on to me and all that cal.

Then they were going down the stairs and I dropped off to

sleep, still with the old Joy Joy Joy Joy crashing and howling away.

 

 

5

 

What happened, though, was that I woke up late (near seven-

thirty by my watch) and, as it turned out, that was not so

clever.  You can viddy that everything in this wicked world

counts.  You can pony that one thing always leads to another.

Right right right.  My stereo was no longer on about Joy and I

Embrace Ye O Ye Millions, so some veck had dealt it the off,

and that would be either pee or em, both of them now being

quite clear to the slooshying in the living-room and, from the

clink clink of plates and slurp slurp of peeting tea from cups,

at their tired meal after the day's rabbiting in factory the one,

store the other.  The poor old.  The pitiable starry.  I put on my

over-gown and looked out, in guise of loving only son, to

say:

"Hi hi hi, there.  A lot better after the day's rest.  Ready now

for evening work to earn that little bit."  For that's what they

said they believed I did these days.  "Yum, yum, mum.  Any of

that for me?"  It was like some frozen pie that she'd unfroze

and then warmed up and it looked not so very appetitish, but

I had to say what I said.  Dad looked at me with a not-so-

pleased suspicious like look but said nothing, knowing he

dared not, and mum gave me a tired like little smeck, to thee

fruit of my womb my only son sort of.  I danced to the bath-

room and had a real skorry cheest all over, feeling dirty and

gluey, then back to my den for the evening's platties.  Then,

shining, combed, brushed and gorgeous, I sat to my lomtick

of pie.  Papapa said:

"Not that I want to pry, son, but where exactly is it you go

to work of evenings?"

"Oh," I chewed, "it's mostly odd things, helping like.  Here

and there, as it might be."  I gave him a straight dirty glazzy, as

to say to mind his own and I'd mind mine.  "I never ask for

money, do I?  Not money for clothes or for pleasures?  All

right, then, why ask?"

My dad was like humble mumble chumble.  "Sorry, son," he

said.  "But I get worried sometimes.  Sometimes I have dreams.

You can laugh if you like, but there's a lot in dreams.  Last

night I had this dream with you in it and I didn't like it one

bit."

"Oh?"  He had gotten me interessovatted now, dreaming of

me like that.  I had like a feeling I had had a dream, too, but I

could not remember proper what.  "Yes?"  I said, stopping

chewing my gluey pie.

"It was vivid," said my dad.  "I saw you lying on the street and

you had been beaten by other boys.   These boys were like the

boys you used to go around with before you were sent to

that last Corrective School."

"Oh?"  I had an in-grin at that, papapa believing I had really

reformed or believing he believed.  And then I remembered my

own dream, which was a dream of that morning, of Georgie

giving his general's orders and old Dim smecking around

toothless as he wielded the whip.  But dreams go by opposites

I was once told.  "Never worry about thine only son and heir,

O my father," I said.  "Fear not.  He canst taketh care of himself,

verily."

"And," said my dad, "you were like helpless in your blood

and you couldn't fight back."  That was real opposites, so I had

another quiet malenky grin within and then I took all the deng

out of my carmans and tinkled it on the saucy table-cloth.  I

said:

"Here, dad, it's not much.  It's what I earned last night.  But

perhaps for the odd peet of Scotchman in the snug some-

where for you and mum."

"Thanks, son," he said.  "But we don't go out much now.  We

daren't go out much, the streets being what they are.  Young

hooligans and so on.  Still, thanks.  I'll bring her home a bottle

of something tomorrow."  And he scooped this ill-gotten

pretty into his trouser carmans, mum being at the cheesting of

the dishes in the kitchen.  And I went out with loving smiles all

round.

When I got to the bottom of the stairs of the flatblock I

was somewhat surprised.  I was more than that.  I opened my

rot like wide in the old stony gapes.  They had come to meet

me.  They were waiting by the all scrawled-over municipal