Clock Without Hands (18 page)

"You look like you have tertiary syphilis," Sherman said as a starter.

"Like what?"

"When you sit wonkensided like that it's a sure sign of syphilis."

"I'm just sitting on a jar."

Sherman did not ask why he was sitting on a jar and naturally Jester did not volunteer. Sherman only wisecracked: "Sitting on a jar ... a slop jar?"

"Don't be so crude."

"People in France sit like that a lot of times on account of they have syphilis."

"How do you know?"

"Because in my brief stint in the service I was in France."

Jester suspected this was one of Sherman's lies but said nothing.

"When I was in France I fell in love with this French girl. No syphilis or anything like that. Just this beautiful, lily-white French virgin."

Jester changed his position because it's hard to sit long on a jar of caviar. He was always shocked by dirty stories and even the word "virgin" gave him a little thrill; but shocked or no he was fascinated so he let Sherman go on and he listened.

"We were engaged, this lily-white French girl and I. And I knocked her up. Then, like a woman, she wanted to marry me and the wedding was going to take place in this ancient old church called Notre Dame."

"A cathedral," Jester corrected.

"Well, church ... cathedral ... or however you call it, that's where we were going to be married. There were loads of invited guests. French people have families like carloads. I stood outside the church and watched them coming in. I didn't let anybody see me. I just wanted to see the show. This beautiful old cathedral and those French people dressed to kill. Everybody was chick."

"You pronounce the word 'sheik,'" Jester said.

"Well, they were sheik and chick too. These carloads of relatives all waiting for me to come in."

"Why didn't you go in?" Jester asked.

"Oh, you innocent dope. Don't you know I had no intention of marrying that lily-white French virgin? I just stayed there the whole afternoon watching these dressed up French people who were waiting for me to marry the lily-white French virgin. She was my 'feancee' you understand, and come night they realized I was not going to be there. My 'feancee' fainted. The old mother had a heart attack. The old father committed suicide right there in the church."

"Sherman Pew, you're the biggest liar who ever walked in shoe leather," Jester said.

Sherman, who had been carried away with his story, said nothing.

"Why do you lie?" Jester asked.

"It's not exactly lying, but sometimes I think up situations that could very well be true and tell 'em to baby-ass dopes like you. A lot of my life I've had to make up stories because the real, actual was either too dull or too hard to take."

"Well, if you pretend to be my friend, why try to make me be a sucker?"

'You're what the original Barnum described. Barnum and Bailey Circus, in case you don't remember. 'A sucker is born every minute on this earth.'" He could not bear to think of Marian Anderson. And he wanted Jester to stay but he did not know how to ask him. Sherman had on his best blue rayon pajamas with white piping, so he was glad to get out of bed to show them off. "Would you like a little Lord Calvert's bottled in bond?"

But whiskey and best pajamas were far away from Jester. He was shocked by the dirty story, but he was touched by Sherman's explanation of why he lied. "Don't you know that I'm one friend you don't have to lie to?"

But gloom and rage had settled in Sherman. "What makes you think you're a friend?"

Jester had to ignore this and he only said, "I'm going home."

"Don't you want to see the fine food Zippo's Aunt Carrie sent to me?" Sherman walked to the kitchen and opened the icebox door. The frigidaire had a faintly sour smell. Sherman admired Aunt Carrie's fancy food. "It's a tomato aspic molded ring with cottage cheese in the middle."

Jester looked dubiously at the food and said, "Do you lie to Aunt Carrie, Cinderella Mullins, and Zippo Mullins?"

"No," Sherman said simply. "They got my number."

"I've got your number too, and I do wish you wouldn't lie to me."

"Why?"

"I hate stating obvious facts and the fact why I don't like you to lie to me is too obvious for me to state."

Jester squatted by the side of the bed and Sherman lay in his best pajamas, propped with pillows and pretending to be at ease.

"Have you ever heard the saying that truth is stranger than fiction?"

"Of course I've heard it."

"When Mr. Stevens did that thing to me it was a few days before Halloween and it was my eleventh birthday. Mrs. Stevens had given me this wonderful birthday party. Many invited guests attended, some wearing party clothes and other people Halloween outfits. It was my first birthday party and was I thrilled. There were guests in witches' costumes and in pirates' outfits as well as party best clothes they wore to Sunday School. I started the party wearing my first brand new pair of navy blue long trousers and a new white shirt. The state paid my board, but that didn't include birthday parties nor brand new birthday clothes. When the invited guests brought presents, I minded what Mrs. Stevens said, didn't snatch at the presents but said 'Thank you' and opened them very slowly. Mrs. Stevens always said I had beautiful manners and I truly had beautiful manners on that birthday party. We played all kinds of games." Sherman's voice trailed off and finally he said, "It's a funny thing."

"What's funny?"

"From the time the party began until in the evening after it was over I don't remember hardly a single thing. For it was the evening of the fine party that Mr. Stevens boogered me."

In a swift unconscious gesture Jester half raised his right hand as though warding off a blow.

"Even after it was done and over and the real Halloween had already gone, I remembered only snitches and snatches of my b-bi-birthday p-party."

"I wish you wouldn't talk about it."

Sherman waited until his stammer was under control, then went on fluently: "We played all kinds of games, then refreshments were served. Ice cream and white iced cake with eleven pink candles. I blew out the candles and cut the birthday cake as Mrs. Stevens said for me to do. But I didn't eat a bite on account of I wished so much to have beautiful manners. Then after the refreshments we played running and hollering games. I had put on a sheet like a ghost and a pirate hat. When Mr. Stevens called out behind the coal house I ran to him quickly, my ghost sheet flying. When he caught me I thought he was just playing and I was laughing fit to kill. I was still laughing fit to kill when I realized he wasn't playing. Then I was too surprised to know what to do but I quit laughing."

Sherman lay on the pillow as if he were suddenly tired. "However, I have a charmed life," he continued with a tone of zest that Jester found hard to believe at first. "From then on I never had it so good. Nobody ever had it so good. Mrs. Mullins adopted me ... not a real adoption, the state still paid for me, but she took me to her bosom. I knew she wasn't my mother, but she loved me. She would beat Zippo and spank Cinderella with a hairbrush, but she never laid a hand on me. So you see I almost had a mother. And a family too. Aunt Carrie, Mrs. Mullins' sister, taught me singing."

"Where is Zippo's mother?" Jester asked.

"Died," Sherman said bitterly. "Passed on to glory. That's what broke up the home. When Zippo's father remarried, neither Zippo or I liked her a bit so we moved out and I've been Zippo's house guest ever since. But I did have a mother for a little while," Sherman said, "I did have a mother even though that cheating creep of a Marian Anderson is not my mother."

"Why do you call her a cheating creep?"

"Because I prefer to. I've ripped all thought away from her. And stomped on all her records." Sherman's voice broke.

Jester, who was still squatting by the bed, steadied himself and suddenly kissed Sherman on the cheek.

Sherman rared back in the bed, put his feet down for balance and slapped Jester, using his whole arm.

Jester was not surprised although he had never been slapped before. "I only did that," he said, "because I felt sorry for you."

"Save your peanuts for the zoo."

"I don't see why we can't be serious and sincere," Jester said.

Sherman, who was half out of the bed, slapped him again on the other cheek so hard that Jester sat down on the floor. Sherman's voice was strangled with rage. "I thought you were a friend and you turn out like Mr. Stevens."

The slap and his own emotions stunned Jester, but quickly he got up, his hands clenched, and biffed Sherman straight in the jaw, which surprised Sherman so that he fell on the bed. Sherman muttered, "Sock a fellow when he's down."

"You weren't down, you were sitting on the bed so's you could slap me hardest. I take a lot of things from you, Sherman Pew, but I wouldn't take that. Besides you slapped me when I was squatting."

So they went on arguing about sitting up and squatting and which was a more sportsmanlike position to slap or to punch somebody. The argument went on so long that they quite forgot the words that had preceded the blows.

But when Jester went home he was still thinking: I don't see why we can't be serious and sincere.

He opened the caviar, but it smelled like fish which he didn't like. Neither did his grandfather like fish, and Verily just said "Ugh" when she smelled it. The part-time yardman, Gus, who would eat anything, took it home.

I
N
N
OVEMBER
Malone had a remission and was admitted for a second time to the City Hospital. He was glad to be there. Although he had changed doctors, the diagnosis had not changed. He had changed from Dr. Hayden to Dr. Calloway and changed again to Dr. Milton. But though the last two doctors were Christians (members of the First Baptist and Episcopal churches) their medical verdict was the same. Having asked Dr. Hayden how long he would live, and having received the unexpected and terrifying answer, he was careful not to ask again. Indeed, when he changed to Dr. Milton, he had insisted he was a well man and just wanted a routine checkup and that one doctor had said that there was just a slight suspicion of leukemia. Dr. Milton confirmed the diagnosis and Malone asked no questions. Dr. Milton suggested that he check in at the City Hospital for a few days. So Malone again watched the bright blood dripping drop by drop, and he was glad because something was being done and the transfusions strengthened him.

On Mondays and Thursdays an aide wheeled in some shelves of books and the first book Malone selected was a murder mystery. But the mystery bored him and he could not keep track of the plot. The next time the aide came around with the books, Malone returned the mystery and glanced at the other titles; his eyes were drawn to a book called
Sickness unto Death.
His hand had reached for the book when the aide said, "Are you sure you want this one? It doesn't sound very cheerful." Her tone reminded him of his wife so that he immediately became determined and angry. "This is the book I want and I'm not cheerful and don't want to be cheerful." Malone, after reading for a half hour, wondered why he had made such a fuss about the book and dozed for a while. When he awoke he opened the book at random and began to read just to be reading. From the wilderness of print some lines struck his mind so that he was instantly awake. He read the lines again and then again:
The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc., is sure to be noticed.
If Malone had not had an incurable disease those words would have been only words and he wouldn't have reached for the book in the first place. But now the thought chilled him and he began to read the book from the first page. But again the book bored him so that he closed his eyes and thought only of the passage he had memorized.

Unable to think of the reality of his own death, he was thrown back into the tedious labyrinth of his life. He had lost himself ... he realized that surely. But how? When? His father had been a wholesale druggist from Macon. He had been ambitious for J.T., his eldest son. Those years of boyhood were good for the forty-year-old Malone to dwell on. He had not been lost then. But his father was ambitious for him, too ambitious it seemed later to Malone. He had decided that his son would be a doctor as that had been his own youthful ambition. So the eighteen-year-old Malone matriculated at Columbia, and in November he saw snow. At that time he bought a pair of ice skates and he actually tried to skate in Central Park. He had had a fine time at Columbia, eating the chow mein he had never tasted before, learning to ice skate, and marveling at the city. He had not realized he had started to fail in his studies until he was already failing. He tried to bone up ... studying until two o'clock on examination nights ... but there were so many Jew grinds in the class who ran up the average. Malone finished the first year by the skin of his teeth and rested at home, a bona fide premedical student. When the fall came round again the snow, the ice, the city was not a shock to him. When he failed at the end of his second year at Columbia, he felt himself to be a no-good. His young man's pride would not let him stay in Macon, so he moved to Milan and got a job as a clerk with Mr. Greenlove, in the Greenlove drugstore. Was it this first humiliation that made him fumble in the beginning of life?