An American novelist and short story writer 2 страница
His face was blazing. He loved the world, and the world loved him. When he thought back over his life, it appeared to him in a rich and wonderful light, full of astonishing experiences and unusual friends. He thought that his job as an elevator operator – cruising up and down through hundreds of feet of perilous space – demanded the nerve and the intellect of a birdman. All the constraints of his life – the green walls of his room and the months of unemployment – dissolved. No one was ringing, but he got into the elevator and shot it at full speed up to the penthouse and down again, up and down, to test his wonderful mastery of space.
A bell rang on 12 while he was cruising, and he stopped in his flight long enough to pick up Mrs. Gadshill. As the car started to fall, he took his hands off the controls in a paroxysm of joy and shouted, "Strap on your safety belt, Mrs. Gadshill! We're going to make a loop-the-loop!" Mrs. Gadshill shrieked. Then, for some reason, she sat down on the floor of the elevator. Why was her face so pale, he wondered; why was she sitting on the floor? She shrieked again. He grounded the car gently, and cleverly, he thought, and opened the door. "I'm sorry if I scared you, Mrs. Gadshill," he said meekly. "I was only fooling." She shrieked again. Then she ran out into the lobby, screaming for the superintendent. 
The superintendent fired Charlie and took over the elevator himself. The news that he was out of work stung Charlie for a minute. It was his first contact with human meanness that day. He sat down in the locker room and gnawed on a drumstick. His drinks were beginning to let him down, and while it had not reached him yet, he felt a miserable soberness in the offing. The excess of food and presents around him began to make him feel guilty and unworthy. He regretted bitterly the lie he had told about his children. He was a single man with simple needs. He had abused the goodness of the people upstairs. He was unworthy.
Then up through this drunken train of thought surged the sharp figure of his landlady and her three skinny children. He thought of them sitting in their basement room. The cheer of Christmas had passed them by. This image got him to his feet. The realization that he was in a position to give, that he could bring happiness easily to someone else, sobered him. He took a big burlap sack, which was used for collecting waste, and began to stuff it, first with his presents and then with the presents for his imaginary children. He worked with the haste of a man whose train is approaching the station, for he could hardly wait to see those long faces light up when he came in the door. He changed his clothes, and, fired by a wonderful and unfamiliar sense of power, he slung his bag over his shoulder like a regular Santa Claus, went out the back way, and took a taxi to the lower East Side.
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The landlady and her children had just finished off a turkey, which had been sent to them by the local Democratic Club, and they were stuffed and uncomfortable when Charlie began pounding on the door, shouting "Merry Christmas!" He dragged the bag in after him and dumped the presents for the children onto the floor. There were dolls and musical toys, blocks, sewing kits, an Indian suit, and a loom, and it appeared to him that, as he had hoped, his arrival in the basement dispelled its gloom. When half the presents had been opened, he gave the landlady a bathrobe and went upstairs to look over the things he had been given for himself.
Now, the landlady's children had already received so many presents by the time Charlie arrived that they were confused with receiving, and it was only the landlady's intuitive grasp of the nature of charity that made her allow the children to open some of the presents while Charlie was still in the room, but as soon as he had gone, she stood between the children and the presents that were still unopened. "Now, you kids have had enough already," she said. "You kids have got your share. Just look at the things you got there. Why, you ain't even played with the half of them. Mary Anne, you ain't even looked at that doll the Fire Department give you. Now, a nice thing to do would be to take all this stuff that's left over to those poor people on Hudson Street – them Deckkers. They ain't got nothing." A beatific light came into her face when she realized that she could give, that she could bring cheer, that she could put a healing finger on a case needier than hers, and – like Mrs. DePaul and Mrs. Weston, like Charlie himself and like Mrs. Deckker, when Mrs. Deckker was to think, subsequently, of the poor Shannons – first love, then charity, and then a sense of power drove her. "Now, you kids help me get all this stuff together. Hurry, hurry, hurry," she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over. She was tired, but she couldn't rest, she couldn't rest.
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REUNION
The last time I saw my father was in Grand Central Station. I was going from my grandmother’s in the Adirondacks to a cottage on the Cape that my mother had rented, and I wrote my father that I would be in New York between trains for an hour and a half, and asked if we could have lunch together.
His secretary wrote to say that he would meet me at the information booth at noon, and at twelve o’clock sharp I saw him coming through the crowd. He was a stranger to me – my mother divorced him three years ago and I hadn’t been with him since – but as soon as I saw him I felt that he was my father, my flesh and blood, my future and my doom. I knew that when I was grown I would be something like him; I would have to plan my campaigns within his limitations. He was a big, good-looking man, and I was terribly happy to see him again. He struck me on the back and shook my hand. "Hi, Charlie," he said, "Hi, boy. I’d like to take you up to my club, but it’s in the Sixties, and if you have to catch an early train I guess we’d better get something to eat around here." He put his arm around me, and I smelled my father the way my mother sniffs a rose. It was a rich compound of whiskey and after shave lotion, shoe polish, woolens, and the rankness of a mature male. I hoped that someone would see us together. I wished that we could be photographed. I wanted some record of our having been together.
We went out of the station and up a side street to a restaurant. It was still early, and the place was empty. The bartender was quarreling with a delivery boy, and there was one very old waiter in a red coat down by the kitchen floor. We sat down and my father hailed the waiter in a loud voice.
"Kellner!" he shouted. "Garcon! Cameriere! You!"
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His boisterousness in the empty restaurant seemed out of place.
"Could we have a little service here?" he shouted. “Chop-chop.” Then he clapped his hands. This caught the waiter’s attention, and he shuffled over to our table.
"Were you clapping your hands at me?" he asked.
"Calm down, calm down, Sommelier," my father said. "If it isn’t too much to ask of you, if it wouldn’t be too much above and beyond the call of duty, we would like a couple of Beefeater Gibsons."
"I don’t like to be clapped at," the waiter said.
"I should have brought my whistle," my father said. "I have a whistle that is audible only to the ears of old waiters. Now, take out your little pad and your little pencil and see if you can get this straight: two Beefeater Gibsons. Repeat after me: two Beefeater Gibsons."
"I think you’d better go somewhere else," the waiter said quietly.
"That," said my father, "is one of the most brilliant suggestions I have ever heard. C’mon, Charlie, let’s get the hell out of here."
I followed my father out of that restaurant and into another. He was not so boisterous this time.
Our drinks came, and he cross questioned me about the baseball season. He then struck the edge of his empty glass with his knife and began shouting again.
"Garcon! Kellner! Cameriere! You! Could we trouble you to bring us two more of the same?"
"How old is the boy?"
"That is none of your God damned business."
"I’m sorry, sir," the waiter said, "but I won’t serve the boy another drink."
"Well, I have some news for you," my father said. "I have some very interesting news for you. This doesn’t happen to be the only restaurant in New York. They’ve opened another on the corner. C’mon, Charlie."
He paid the bill, and I followed him out of that restaurant into another. Here the waiters wore pink jackets like hunting coats, and there was a lot of horse tack on the walls. We sat down, and my father began to shout again.
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"Master of the hounds! Tallyhoo and all that sort of thing. We’d like a little something in the way of a stirrup cup. Namely, two Bibson Geefeaters."
"Two Bibson Geefeaters?" the waiter asked, smiling.
"You know damned well what I want," my father said angrily. "I want two Beefeater Gibsons, and make it snappy. Things have changed in jolly old England. So my friend the duke tells me. Let’s see what England can produce in the way of a cocktail."
"This isn’t England," the waiter said.
"Don’t argue with me," my father said. "Just do as you’re told."
"I just thought you might like to know where you are," the waiter said.
"If there is one thing I cannot tolerate," my father said, "it is an impudent domestic. C’mon, Charlie."
The fourth place we went to was Italian.
"Per favore, possiamo avere due cocktail americani. Subito."
The waiter left us and spoke with the captain, who came over to our table and said, "I’m sorry, sir, but this table is reserved."
"All right," my father said. "Get us another table."
"All the tables are reserved," the captain said.
"I get it," my father said. "You don’t desire our patronage. Is that it? Well, the hell with you. Vada all’ inferno. Let’s go, Charlie."
"I have to get my train," I said.
"I’m sorry, sonny," my father said. "I’m terribly sorry." He put his arm around me and pressed me against him. "I’ll walk you back to the station. If there had only been time to go up to my club."
"That’s all right, Daddy," I said.
"I’ll get you a paper," he said. "I’ll get you a paper to read on the train."
Then he went up to a newsstand and said, "Kind sir, will you be good enough to favor me with one of your God damned, no good, ten cent afternoon papers?" The clerk turned away from him and stared at a magazine cover. "Is it asking too much, kind sir," my father said, "is it asking too much for you to sell me one of your disgusting specimens of yellow journalism?"
"I have to go, Daddy," I said. "It’s late."
"Now, just wait a second, sonny," he said. "Just wait a second. I want to get a rise out of this chap."
"Goodbye, Daddy," I said, and I went down the stairs and got my train, and that was the last time I saw my father.
THE PLEASURES OF SOLITUDE
One evening when Ellen Goodrich had just returned from the office to her room in Chelsea, she heard a light knock on her door. She knew no one in the city intimately; there was no one she could expect. She opened the door and found two small boys standing in the hallway. She supposed they were ten or eleven. Their clothing was thin and they were shaking with cold.
"Florence Valle live here?" one of them asked.
"I don't know anyone by that name," Ellen said. "Perhaps if you ask the landlady – she lives on the first floor."
"We're looking for Florence Valle. She's his cousin," the second boy said, pointing to his friend. " She used to live here."
"I'm very sorry," Ellen said, "but I don't know her."
"Maybe she's moved," he said. "We walked all the way over here..."
Ellen very seldom felt that she could afford pity and sympathy for other people, but the boys looked frightened and cold, and her desire to help them was stronger than her reserve. She noticed them staring beyond her to a dish of candy in the room. When she invited them to have a piece, they refused with a shy and elaborate politeness that made her want to take them in her arms. She suggested that they each take a piece of candy home and went into the room for the dish. They followed her.
"You got a nice place here, Miss."
"Yuh, you got a nice place here."
Their faces were thin and solemn and their voices were hoarse. "Haven't you any overcoats, you boys?" she asked. "Are you going around in the cold dressed like that?"
"We ain't got any overcoats, Miss."
"I should think you'd take cold, walking around like that."
"We ain't got any overcoats."
They told her their names and ages when she asked for them, and said that they lived on the lower East Side. She had walked through the slums herself and she could imagine the squalor and neglect in which they must live. While she was talking with them she realized that it was the first time in more than a year that she had allowed anyone other than the landlady to come into her room. Having the boys there pleased her and she kept asking them questions until she caught the tone of her own excited voice. She stopped abruptly. "I guess you had better go now," she said. "I have some things to do." They thanked her for the candy and backed out of the room. Altogether, the encounter left her feeling generous and happy.
Ellen was not a generous person. She lived in a Chelsea rooming house in order to bank as much of her salary as possible toward purchasing an annuity. It had always been difficult for her to find friends. During the ten years she had lived in New York she had suffered a great deal from loneliness, but this suffering was forgotten now because of the care with which she arranged her solitude. She could be unmerciful with herself and others. Her mother had once written asking if she would help her younger brother with a loan. "I think it will be better," Ellen replied, "if Harold experiences a little hardship. It is only in knowing hardship that he can understand the value of money. I don't pretend to be poor, but the little I have in the bank was put at a great sacrifice and I have no intention of lending it to Harold when we all know that he could have done as well himself if he tried. I think he owes it to you to do more than I have done, for, after all, you and Father spent more on his education than you spent on mine." She was twenty-eight at the time.
After the boys had gone that night, Ellen changed from her dress into a house coat and cooked her supper. The cold wind rattled the windows and made her appreciate the warm, light room. She washed the dishes and sat down to read a rental-library book. This was the way she spent most of her evenings, and she was proud of the fact she was no longer restless and lonely. But her mind kept returning to the boys. She saw their thin, solemn faces, and when she thought of them walking in the cold she was filled with sadness and pity. Her uneventful life led her to attach significance to the few irregular things that happened to her. There was some purpose, she felt, some reason for this accidental meeting.
A week later, at the same hour, there was a knock on the door and, she found the boys in the hallway again.
"We were walking by."
"We thought we'd come to see you."
"Well, I'm very glad you stopped," Ellen said, and realized that her voice could be heard by the other tenants whose doors opened into the hallway. There was nothing wrong in what she was doing, but at the same time she didn't want the other tenants to know that she was asking strange boys into her room, so she waited until she had closed the door after them before she spoke again. "I'm very glad you stopped," she repeated. She invited them to sit down. Then she thought of giving them a drink of Coca-Cola, but this seemed a little too forward. They told her they were Italian, and she asked them if they knew how to make a veal parmigiana, something she had always wanted to learn. They didn't know, but they told her about other Italian dishes. One of the boys, the older, seemed interested in some ornaments on Ellen's dresser and she showed them to him. The younger boy took a cigarette end from his pocket and lighted it.
"Aren't you too young to smoke?" Ellen asked.
He looked at his friend and they both giggled. Ellen colored. The looks they exchanged and their laughter frightened her. "Those are called maracas," she said nervously, pointing to a pair of painted maracas that hung on the wall. "I bought them when I went for a Caribbean cruise in 1933. They use them in orchestras in the Caribbean."
The incident of the cigarette seemed to have made the boys feel more at ease. Ellen might have asked them to leave, but she hesitated. The younger boy put out his cigarette in her pin tray and she watched him without saying anything. She was enjoying herself in a way she could not quite understand. They told her stories about their families, about their sisters, stories that were sly and lewd and that she should have stopped them from telling. At the end of half an hour she asked them to leave. They had been gone for some time before she discovered that her purse was missing.
If they had been in the room then, she might have murdered them. She took hold of the back of a chair and held it rigidly until her arms and her shoulders ached. "They don't have to steal!" she cried. "They don't have to steal! They don't have to!" She threw herself onto the bed and wept for a long time. When she sat up, she composed a discourse on honesty and imagined herself delivering it to them. She thought of calling the police, but when she tried to describe what had happened as if she were talking to the police, it sounded unconvincing and even suspicious. She went into the bathroom and washed her face with a cold cloth. "They don't have to steal," she said. "They don't have to steal. I would have given them money if they need money." She walked the floor, talking angrily to herself.
In the morning, Ellen decided to forget about the boys; it was better to lose the fifteen or twenty dollars that had been in her purse than to lose her peace of mind. Usually she could forget things that troubled her, but this time it was not so easy. In the back of her mind was the feeling she had somehow made a mistake that threatened her whole way of living. A few nights later, on a Wednesday, someone knocked on the door again. She opened it and found the two boys standing in the corridor.
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