Flying to America (32 page)
This is really a dumb game, thought Maria.
Mrs. Teach dipped into the vase for the next card.
“
One who boasts of liberty but sighs for the slavery he condemns
.”
“That would be acute,” Mr. Lynch said thoughtfully, “had I ever boasted. But I recall no such occasion. There is, in fact, a kind of shame and horror attached to the bachelor state — an odium combined with a tedium. Sleeping with strumpets is not the liveliest business in the world, I assure you.”
“What are they like, really?” asked Miss Bookly.
“Some are choice, some are not,” said Mr. Lynch.
“For heaven’s sakes, man, be silent!” exclaimed Mr. White.
“A bit of fresh, as the expression runs,” said Mr. Lynch, “can —”
Mr. White drew forth his pistol and shot Mr. Lynch dead with it.
“Good Lord! He is dead!” cried Mrs. Teach.
Dr. Balfour knelt over the body. “Yes, he is dead,” he said. All assisted the Doctor in placing the carcass on the sofa.
“There is but one more card in the vase,” said Mrs. Teach, peering into the article in question. “Dare we look at it?”
“Yes, yes,” was the answer, in a subdued murmur.
“I sincerely hope that it may be a favorable one,” said Mrs. Teach, “for I fear we have dealt harshly with our late friend tonight.”
The last card was drawn from the vase. Mrs. Teach examined it closely on both sides and then proclaimed, “
Blank!
”
“A prophecy,” said the younger Miss Jennings. “Who could have foreseen what was to happen?”
“It was not a matter of foreknowledge,” said Maria. “The card is mine. 1 couldn’t think of anything to write.”
“Well,” said Mrs. Teach, “I am not entirely satisfied with my little experiment this evening, and so shall leave it to another to choose the entertainment for our next.”
“Not at all,” said Mr. White. “The evening, despite its sad but necessary consequences, has been most delightful. I can’t recall when more interesting things have been said or done, in all the years of my residence in this city. And as I shall have the pleasure of giving the next party, I shall most certainly adopt your little experiment, as you call it.”
“What will the question be?” asked Miss Jawart.
“Something dangerous,” said Mr. White, with a twinkle.
“Parties are always dangerous,” said Miss Jawart.
“I am inviting Geronimo, chief of the Apache Indians, who happens to be in town,” said Mr. White.
“That will make it all the more dangerous,” said Mrs. Teach, “as I am told that he is extremely cruel to his enemies.”
“He is extremely cruel to
everyone,
” said Mr. White.
Yes, it was an agreeable party after all, Maria thought. My mother is not dumb. My mother is surprisingly intelligent. It was wrong of me to think ill of her. Now no one will ever know that Mr. Lynch was the man who — How strange is justice! How artful woman!
Author’s note:
This piece is an
objet trouvé.
It was originally published in
Godey’s Lady’s Book
in 1850, under the byline of a Hickory Broom. I have cut it and added some three dozen lines.
O
ut for a walk I was, wanted to clear my head, I’d been drinking the night before, tequila mostly, a bit of lime juice, one lime per bottle, or four limes in all, by the end of the evening. I was feeling poorly. I had asked for help with the tequila, but no one came, all sent regrets, busy elsewhere, prior engagement, don’t go out after dark anymore, that sort of thing, allergic to rats, that sort of thing. I could not blame them. My brother sent regrets, from his room behind the kitchen, stuffy bastard, nose in a book probably, or playing his drums, the jackass, fraternity is not among his talents.
So I wandered out, in the cool of the morning, fell down a time or two, that was to be expected, reached the whorehouse district without other difficulty but they’d all gone to bed, banged my head on a door or two but no one answered, that was to be expected, it was 7 or thereabouts, fresh, cool, and golden. And I said why not the graveyard? and could think of no compelling contrary argument, and went there, and tumbled into an open grave, and broke a leg.
It was a new grave, having been readied the previous day for a 10
A.M.
ceremonial, I say 10
A.M.
because that was the hour at which they discovered me. They fished me out and took me in a van to a hospital where a young man cut straight up my trouser leg with shears, not knowing I suppose that I had no other trousers, and then
did the necessary with the plaster and canvas or whatever it is, and hung the finished product from a sort of slingshot affair above the bed. Double spiral break, he said, very nasty, and asked the date of my birth and what authority I belonged to, city, county, state or Federal, and I told him, as best as I could remember. And thus I found myself, for three months and ten days, at the mercy of my brother Manfred, for whom pig is perhaps too soft, or sweet, a word.
Manfred sits in his room behind the kitchen, calculating, humming, cabalistic summing, watching N.F.L. football or playing his drums: interests passed on by our father, but to which in the genetic scheme of things, thank God, I inherited a recessive genotype.
Father, a first cousin twice removed of B. Spinoza, inherited his interest in the gematria
*
from the Hebraic side of the family and his reductivist inclination from his great-nephew A. Reinhardt, the painter. Father spent his entire life summing up the written word and oral information of the Western World, assigning a numerical equivalent to each letter of the alphabet according to its position: A=1, B=2, C=3, D=4, E=5, F=6, G=7, H=8, I=9, J=10, K=11, L=12, M=13, N=14, O=15, P=16, Q=17, R=18, S=19, T=20, U=21, V=22, W=23, X=24, Y=25, Z=26. In so doing he could spell out any word numerically and add it to reach the sum, the essence, the heart of the word. Adding the sum of each word to the heart of the next (an addiction inherited from his granduncle R. Descartes), Father would reduce the glib, the banal, the genius, the truth, the beauty in fiction and nonfiction of the Western World to one final number, to be grasped by all of Occidental mankind instantly and at once. Sums that were prime were entered into a double-entry profit ledger as they were deemed prophetic.
To the end Father summed. Giving up the ghost, as it were, dying so to speak, on the penultimate page of St. Matthew’s “Gospel According To.” Manfred took up the mantle having the genotype of an adder but the phenotype of a pig. He completed Father’s last summation, a number that boggles the mind, but alas, not prime.
Manfred works night and day interpreting numbers, searching for the additional meanings in lists of numerals, reversing the paternal process; translating random and not so random numbers into language. He believes this to be more humanistic and humane, forgetting there is more to a person than his shoe size, blood pressure, diastolic and systolic, weight, age, and blood count. His interest in N.F.L. football has nothing to do with being one of the boys or hail fellow well met, but instead is an obsessive need to decode the line-up on the line of scrimmage. He mutters to himself, “There’s more to N.F.L. football than fun and games.”
Nothing misses his porcine eyes and calculating mind. He notices immediately that the 57 on the can of pork and beans is incorrect as far as
PORK AND BEANS
(16 + 15 + 18 + 11 + 1 + 14 + 4 + 2 + 5 + 1 + 14 + 19) is concerned, it being equal to 120, whereas 57 equals
PEACHES
(16 + 5 + 1 + 3 + 8 + 5 + 19),
AFOOT
(1 + 6 + 15 + 15 + 20),
DEMIGOD
(4 + 5 + 13 + 9 + 7 + 15 + 4), and
FUNGI
(6 + 21 + 14 + 7 + 9), none of which is in the can.
Unable to move without aid, a captive in my brother’s room, abused and bemused by morphemes and phonemes, by “Science and Sanity,” Manfred pontificates on general semantics (a trait inherited from his close friend A. Korzybski). He tells me, “We are handicapped in the knowledge of our language by being born into it. . . .” He says, “The meaning of meanings, in a given case, in a given individual, at a given moment represents composite, affective psychological configurations of all relations pertaining to the case, colored by past experiences, state of health, mood of the moment and other contingencies. . . .” He says, “. . . Only in mathematics do we find a language of similar structure . . . the importance of mathematics considered as a language becomes of fundamental significance for the theory of sanity. . . .” Fraternity is not among his talents.
And so I spent all of February and March and April and ten days in May of this leap year deprived of comfort, companionship, and conversation. For one hundred days and nights hurting and healing. All things being equal 100 equals
USELESS
(21 + 19 + 5 + 12 + 5 + 19 + 19), and so it was.
_________________
*
Gematria (n., Heb.): A cabalistic method of interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures based upon the numerical value of the letters in the words.
A
fireman woke up one morning to find that his left hand was gone.
My left hand! he thought.
Then he thought: This is going to be damned inconvenient.
The fireman cursed for a while. “God damn it! Jesus, Mary, and Joseph! God damn it to Hell! Bloody Hell! Dumb ass! Christ Almighty! Son of a bitch!”
But the stump is not bad-looking, he reflected. A neat separation. Not offensive to the eye.
He got out of bed and took a shower. Washing his right side, which he customarily did with his left hand, was difficult. It was also difficult to dry himself with one hand. Usually he took a large brown towel in both hands and zipped it back and forth across his back. But he discovered that one cannot zip a towel with one hand. One can only flop a towel with one hand.
Putting on socks with one hand is not easy. Shaving, however, presented no particular problems.
At the firehouse nobody said anything about the hand. Firemen are famously tactful and kind to each other. Harvey read the
New York Times
until there was an alarm. Then he put on his rubber coat
and boots and climbed up on the engine in his regular place, second from left, in the back.
“No,” the captain said.
“What do you mean, ‘No’?”
“You can’t go to the fire,” the captain said. “You don’t have any left hand.”
“I can cradle the hose in my arms as one would a baby and pull it in the right direction!”
“Get down off there, Harvey. We’re in a hurry.”
Harvey stood in the empty firehouse.
My livelihood is threatened! he thought.
My livelihood!
And it wasn’t even an on-the-job injury. It was, rather, a “mysterious occurrence.” No compensation!
He sat down in a chair. He placed his fireman’s hat on top of the
New York Times.
I must face this problem intelligently. But what is intelligently? Prosthesis? Prosthetic device concealed under black glove? A green glove? A blue glove? The cops wear white gloves on traffic duty. But a man would be a fool to wear a white glove to a fire. A brown suede driving glove from Abercrombie — the Stirling Moss model? Probably there is such a thing in the world.
He got up and went to the place in the firehouse where the whiskey was hidden and had a shot, neat.
He thought: Why don’t we buy better whiskey for the firehouse? This stuff tastes like creosote.
A twelve-year-old girl who hung around the firehouse a lot entered at this moment.
“Harvey,” she said. “How come you aren’t out on the run with the rest of the men?”
Harvey waved his stump in the air.
“What’s with the hand?” the girl asked. “I mean, where is it?”
“It fell off, or something, last night, while I was sleeping.”
“What do you mean,
fell off?
Was it in bed with you when you woke up? Or on the floor? Or under the bed?”
“It was just . . . missing.”
“Man, that’s
strange,
” the girl said. “God, I mean that’s
weird.
It gives me a funny feeling. Let’s talk about something else.” Then she paused. “Is there anything I can do? I could go out on your runs with you. Function as your extra hand, as it were.” There was a look of childish eagerness in her eyes.
The fireman thought: This child is childish. But a good kid.
“Thank you, Elaine,” he said. “But it wouldn’t work. There’d be union problems and stuff.” Delicately he avoided mentioning that she was a twelve-year-old girl.
“I’ve been studying the Civil Service exam for fire lieutenant,” Elaine said, producing a study guide to the Civil Service examination for fire lieutenant published by Arco Publishing Co. “I know it backwards and forwards. Ask me anything. Just dip in anywhere and ask me anything. At random. I know the answers.”
“Elaine,” Harvey said, “would you mind letting me alone for a little while? I have to think about something.”
Silently the little girl withdrew.
A hook? Harvey wondered.
The next day at the firehouse Harvey was playing chess with his friend Nick Ceci. He consciously made all his moves with his new artificial hand in its black glove. Every time Harvey moved, a lot of the pieces fell off the board. Nick said nothing. He just picked up the pieces off the floor and put them back in their proper places. The alarm bell rang.
