Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (26 page)

Sure enough, a job was attempted on that liquor store, only to be foiled by two tough, lovable cops. And sure enough, there was only one thug for them to carry off to the pokey—the hardened-criminal one. “I don’t know where the kid was that night,” Bernie concluded, “but I like to think he was home in bed with a glass of milk, reading the sports page.”

There was the roof and there was the chimney top of it; there were all the windows with the light coming in; there was another approving chuckle from Dr. Alexander Corvo and another submission to the
Reader’s Digest
; there was another whisper of a chance for a Simon and Schuster contract and a three-million-dollar production starring Wade Manley; and there was another five in the mail for me.

A small, fragile old gentleman started crying in the cab one day, up around Fifty-ninth and Third, and when Bernie said, “Anything I can help with, sir?” there followed two and a half pages of the most heart-tearing hard-luck story I could imagine. He was a widower; his only daughter had long since married and moved away to Flint, Michigan; his life had been an agony of loneliness for twenty-two years, but he’d always been brave enough about it until now because he’d had a job he loved— tending the geraniums in a big commercial greenhouse. And now this morning the management had told him he would have to go: too old for that kind of work.

“And only then,” according to Bernie Silver, “did I make the connection between all this and the address he’d given me—a corner near the Manhattan side of the Brooklyn Bridge.”

Bernie couldn’t be sure, of course, that his fare planned to hobble right on out to the middle of the bridge and ease his old bones over the railing; but he couldn’t take any chances, either. “I figured it was time for me to do some talking” (and he was right about that: another heavy half-page of that tiresome old man’s lament and the story would have ruptured the hell out of its foundation). What came next was a brisk page and a half of dialogue in which Bernie discreetly inquired why the old man didn’t go and live with his daughter in Michigan, or at least write her a letter so that maybe she’d invite him; but oh, no, he only
keened that he couldn’t possibly be a burden on his daughter and her family.

“‘Burden?’ I said, acting like I didn’t know what he meant. ‘Burden? How could a nice old gentleman like you be a burden on anybody?’”

“‘But what else would I be? What can I offer them?’”

“Luckily we were stopped at a red light when he asked me that, so I turned around and looked him straight in the eye. ‘Mister,’ I said, ‘don’t you think that family’d like having somebody around the place that knows a thing or two about growing geraniums?’”

Well, by the time they got to the bridge the old man had decided to have Bernie let him off at a nearby Automat instead, because he said he felt like having a cup of tea, and so much for the walls of the damn thing. This was the roof: six months later, Bernie received a small, heavy package with a Flint, Michigan, postmark, addressed to his taxi fleet garage. And do you know what was in that package? Of course you do. A potted geranium. And here’s your chimney top: there was also a little note, written in what I’m afraid I really did describe as a fine old spidery hand, and it read, simply, “Thank you.”

Personally, I thought this one was loathsome, and Joan wasn’t sure about it either; but we mailed it off anyway and Bernie loved it. And so, he told me over the phone, did his wife Rose.

“Which reminds me, Bob, the other reason I called; Rose wants me to find out what evening you and your wife could come up for a little get-together here. Nothing fancy, just the four of us, have a little drink and a chat. You think you might enjoy that?”

“Well, that’s very nice of you, Bernie, and of course we’d enjoy it very much. It’s just that offhand I don’t quite know
when we could arrange to—hold on a second.” And I covered the mouthpiece and had an urgent conference about it with Joan in the hope that she’d supply me with a graceful excuse.

But she wanted to go, and she had just the right evening in mind, so all four of us were hooked.

“Oh, good,” she said when I’d hung up. “I’m glad we’re going. They sound sweet.”

“Now,
look
.” And I aimed my index finger straight at her face. “We’re not going at all if you plan to sit around up there making them both aware of how ‘sweet’ they are. I’m not spending any evenings as gracious Lady Bountiful’s consort among the lower classes, and that’s final. If you want to turn this thing into some goddamn Bennington girls’ garden party for the servants, you can forget about it right now. You hear me?”

Then she asked me if I wanted to know something, and without waiting to find out whether I did or not, she told me. She told me I was just about the biggest snob and biggest bully and biggest all-around loud-mouthed jerk she’d ever come across in her life.

One thing led to another after that; by the time we were on the subway for our enjoyable get-together with the Silvers we were only barely on speaking terms, and I can’t tell you how grateful I was to find that the Silvers, while staying on ginger ale themselves, had broken out a bottle of rye for their guests.

Bernie’s wife turned out to be a quick, spike-heeled, girdled and bobby-pinned woman whose telephone operator’s voice was chillingly expert at the social graces (“How do you do? So nice to meet you; do come in; please sit down; Bernie, help her, she can’t get her coat off”); and God knows who started it, or why, but the evening began uncomfortably with a discussion of politics. Joan and I were torn between Truman, Wallace, and not voting at all that year; the Silvers were Dewey people. And
what made it all the worse, for our tender liberal sensibilities, was that Rose sought common ground by telling us one bleak tale after another, each with a more elaborate shudder, about the inexorable, menacing encroachment of colored and Puerto Rican elements in this part of the Bronx.

But things got jollier after a while. For one thing they were both delighted with Joan—and I’ll have to admit I never met anyone who wasn’t—and for another the talk soon turned to the marvelous fact of their knowing Wade Manley, which gave rise to a series of proud reminiscences. “Bernie never takes nothing off him, though, don’t worry,” Rose assured us. “Bernie, tell them what you did that time he was here and you told him to sit down and shut up. He did! He did! He kind of gave him a push in the chest—this
movie
star!—and he said, ‘Ah, siddown and sheddep, Manny.
We
know who you are!’ Tell them, Bernie.”

And Bernie, convulsed with pleasure, got up to reenact the scene. “Oh, we were just kind of kidding around, you understand,” he said, “but anyway, that’s what I did. I gave him a shove like this, and I said, ‘Ah, siddown and sheddep, Manny.
We
know who you are!’”

“He did! That’s the God’s truth! Pushed him right down in that chair over there! Wade Manley!”

A little later, when Bernie and I had paired off for a man-to-man talk over the freshening of drinks, and Rose and Joan were cozily settled in the love seat, Rose directed a roguish glance at me. “I wouldn’t want to give this husband of yours a swelled head, Joanie, but do you know what Dr. Corvo told Bernie? Shall I tell her, Bernie?”

“Sure, tell her! Tell her!” And Bernie waved the bottle of ginger ale in one hand and the bottle of rye in the other, to show how openly all secrets could be bared tonight.

“Well,” she said. “Dr. Corvo said your husband is the finest writer Bernie’s ever had.”

Later still, when Bernie and I were in the love seat and the ladies were at the credenza, I began to see that Rose was a builder too. Maybe she hadn’t built that credenza with her own hands, but she’d clearly done more than her share of building whatever heartfelt convictions were needed to sustain the hundreds on hundreds of dollars its purchase must be costing them on the installment plan. A piece of furniture like that was an investment in the future; and now, as she stood fussing over it and wiping off little parts of it while she talked to Joan, I could have sworn I saw her arranging a future party in her mind. Joan and I would be among those present, that much was certain (“This is Mr. Robert Prentice, my husband’s assistant, and Mrs. Prentice”), and the rest of the guest list was almost a foregone conclusion too: Wade Manley and his wife, of course, along with a careful selection of their Hollywood friends; “Walter Winchell would be there, and Earl Wilson and Toots Shor and all that crowd; but far more important, for any person of refinement, would be the presence of Dr. and Mrs. Alexander Corvo and some of the people who comprised their set. People like the Lionel Trillings and the Reinhold Niebuhrs, the Huntington Hartfords and the Leslie R. Groveses—and if anybody on the order of Mr. and Mrs. Newbold Morris wanted to come, you could be damn sure they’d have to do some pretty fancy jockeying for an invitation.

It was, as Joan admitted later, stifling hot in the Silvers’ apartment that night; and I cite this as a presentable excuse for the fact that what I did next—and it took me a hell of a lot less time to do it in 1948 than it does now, believe me—was to get roaring drunk. Soon I was not only the most vociferous but the
only talker in the room; I was explaining that, by Jesus God, we’d all four of us be millionaires yet.

And wouldn’t we have a ball? Oh, we’d be slapping Lionel Trilling around and pushing him down into every chair in this room and telling him to shut up—“And you too, Reinhold Niebuhr, you pompous, sanctimonious old fool! Where’s
your
money? Why don’t you put your money where your mouth is?”

Bernie was chuckling and looking sleepy, and Joan was looking humiliated for me, and Rose was smiling in cool but infinite understanding of how tiresome husbands could sometimes be. Then we were all out in the alcove trying on at least half a dozen coats apiece, and I was looking at the bugler’s photograph again wondering if I dared to ask my burning question about it. But this time I wasn’t sure which I feared more: that Bernie might say, “Just for the picture,” or that he might say, “Sure I was!” and go rummaging in the closet or in some part of the credenza until he’d come up with the tarnished old bugle itself, and we’d all have to go back and sit down again while Bernie put his heels together, drew himself erect, and sounded the pure, sad melody of taps for us all.

That was in October. I’m a little vague on how many “By Bernie Silver” stories I turned out during the rest of the fall. I do remember a comic-relief one about a fat tourist who got stuck at the waist when he tried to climb up through the skyview window of the cab for better sight-seeing, and a very solemn one in which Bernie delivered a lecture on racial tolerance (which struck a sour note with me, considering the way he’d chimed in with Rose’s views on the brown hordes advancing over the Bronx); but mostly what I remember about him during that period is that Joan and I could never seem to mention him without getting into some kind of an argument.

When she said we really ought to return his and Rose’s invitation, for example, I told her not to be silly. I said I was sure they wouldn’t expect it, and when she said “Why?” I gave her a crisp, impatient briefing on the hopelessness of trying to ignore class barriers, of pretending that the Silvers could ever really become our friends, or that they’d ever really want to.

Another time, toward the end of a curiously dull evening when we’d gone to our favorite premarital restaurant and failed for an hour to find anything to talk about, she tried to get the conversation going by leaning romantically toward me across the table and holding up her wineglass. “Here’s to Bernie’s selling your last one to the
Reader’s Digest
.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Sure. Big deal.”

“Oh, don’t be so gruff. You know perfectly well it could happen any day. We might make a lot of money and go to Europe and everything.”

“Are you kidding?” It suddenly annoyed me that any intelligent, well-educated girl in the twentieth century could be so gullible; and that such a girl should actually be my wife, that I would be expected to go on playing along with this kind of simple-minded innocence for years and years to come, seemed, for the moment, an intolerable situation. “Why don’t you grow up a little? You don’t really think there’s ever been a chance of his selling that junk, do you?” And I looked at her in a way that must have been very much like Bernie’s own way of looking at me, the night he asked if I’d really thought he meant twenty-five a time. “Do you?”

“Yes, I do,” she said, putting her glass down. “Or at least, I did. I thought you did too. If you don’t, it seems sort of cynical and dishonest to go on working for him, doesn’t it?” And she wouldn’t talk to me all the way home.

The real trouble, I guess, was that we were both preoccupied
with two far more serious matters by this time. One was our recent discovery that Joan was pregnant, and the other was that my position at the United Press had begun to sink as steadily as any sinking fund debenture.

My time on the financial desk had become a slow ordeal of waiting for my superiors to discover more and more of how little I knew about what I was doing; and now however pathetically willing I might be to learn all the things I was supposed to know, it had become much too ludicrously late to ask. I was hunching lower and lower over my clattering typewriter there all day and sweating out the ax—the kind, sad dropping of the assistant financial editor’s hand on my shoulder (“Can I speak to you inside a minute, Bob?”)—and each day that it didn’t happen was a kind of shabby victory.

Early in December I was walking home from the subway after one of those days, dragging myself down West Twelfth Street like a seventy-year-old, when I discovered that a taxicab had been moving beside me at a snail’s pace for a block and a half. It was one of the green-and-white kind, and behind its windshield flashed an enormous smile.