Joe Gould's Secret (11 page)

I said I could arrange for him to make the call right then, through the office switchboard.

“That would be fine,” he said, “except I'm not supposed to call her during the day. The niece told me I should call her at night, because she's at the hospital during the day. If you'll just let me have the money, I'll call her tonight from the pay phone in Goody's.”

Next morning, shortly after I got to the office, Gould telephoned and said that after calling the woman person-to-person several times he had reached her around midnight. “She must be all tired out and nervous,” he said, “because she scolded me severely. She reminded me that when she agreed to store the Oral History she had made it clear that I couldn't be taking it out and putting it back in but that I'd have to let it stay put for the duration of the war. ‘You wanted it in a safe place,' she said, ‘and it's in a safe place, so just relax.' I asked her when she expected to return, but I didn't get much satisfaction out of her. ‘It might be weeks,' she said, ‘and it might be months, and it might be years. And in the meantime,' she said, ‘quit bothering me.' I tried to reason with her, and she hung up on me.”

“Would it do any good if I called her?” I asked.

“As soon as she found out what you were calling about,” Gould said, “she'd hang up on you.”

This put me in a predicament. Ever since my first interview with Gould, I had been tracking down friends and enemies of his and talking with them about him. Most of these people had known Gould for a long time and either were regular contributors to the Joe Gould Fund or had been in the past. In fact, several of them—E. E. Cummings, the poet; Slater Brown, the novelist; M. R. Werner, the biographer; Orrick Johns, the poet; Kenneth Fearing, the poet and novelist; Malcolm Cowley, the critic; Barney Gallant, the proprietor of Barney Gallant's, a Village night club; and Max Gordon, the proprietor of the Village Vanguard, another Village night club—had been giving him a dime or a quarter or a half dollar or a dollar or a couple of dollars once or twice a week for over twenty years. Each person I saw had suggested others to see, and I had looked up around fifteen people and spoken on the telephone with around fifteen others. All of them had been willing, or more than willing, to tell what they knew about Gould, and I had got a great many anecdotes and a great deal of biographical information about him from them. I had read the clippings concerning him in the morgues of three newspapers. (The oldest clipping I found was dated March 2, 1934, and was from the
Herald Tribune
. In it, Gould told the reporter that the Oral History was 7,300,000 words long. In another clipping from the
Herald Tribune
, dated April 10, 1937, he said that the Oral History was now 8,800,000 words long. In one from
PM
, dated August 24, 1941, Gould was called “an author who has written a book taller than himself.” “The stack of manuscripts comprising the Oral History has passed 7 feet,”
PM
said. “Gould is 5 feet 4.”) At the suggestion of one of his classmates, I had gone to the library of the Harvard Club and hunted through the reports of his class—the class of 1911—for references to him. I had spent a day in the genealogy room in the Public Library looking through New England genealogies and town and county histories for information about his ancestors and family connections, and had been able to verify most of the statements he had made about them. Now all I needed was one more thing, a look at the oral part of the Oral History, but that seemed to me to be essential. As far as I was concerned, the Oral History was Gould's reason for being, and if I couldn't quote from it, or even describe it first hand, I didn't see how I could write a Profile of him. I could postpone further work on the Profile until the woman returned from Florida and let Gould into her cellar, but I knew from experience that postponing a project of this nature usually meant the end of it; I knew that my interest in it would fade as soon as I got involved in other matters, and that before long simply having it hanging over me would very likely cause me to turn against it. Furthermore, I was growing leery of Gould; I had begun to feel that, whatever the reason, he really didn't want me to see the oral part of the Oral History, and that when the woman returned, some brand-new difficulty might very well present itself. I decided on the spur of the moment that the best thing to do was to abandon the project right then and there and go on as quickly as possible to something else.

“I'm sorry, Mr. Gould,” I said, “but I think we'd better just drop the whole thing.”

“Oh, no!” Gould said. His voice sounded alarmed. “Look,” he said. “I have an abnormal memory. In fact, people have often told me that I probably have what the psychologists call total recall. I've lost chapters of the Oral History several times and reconstructed them entirely from memory. Once, I lost one and reconstructed it and then found the one I had lost, and a good many pages in the two of them matched almost word for word. If you'll meet me in Goody's tonight, I'll recite some chapters for you. I'll recite dozens of chapters. If you've got the patience to listen, I'll recite hundreds. You'll get as good an idea of the oral part of the Oral History that way as you would by reading it. Considering my handwriting, you may even get a better idea.”

That night, around eight, Gould and I sat down at a table in a quiet corner in the back of Goody's. First, he drank two double Martinis, doing so, he said, for a particular purpose. “I have found,” he said, “that gin primes the pump of memory.” Then he began telling the life story of a man he said he used to run into in flophouses who was a kind of religious fanatic and was called the Deacon, telling it in the first person, just as the Deacon had told it to him. The Deacon was a gloomy periodical drinker. He was a backslidden member of some schismatic Lutheran sect, he was under the impression that he had lost his soul, he believed that he had discovered hints in the Bible concerning the exact date—year, month, day, and time of day—of the end of the world, and he often saw things at night. One summer night, for example, while he was sitting in a doorway on Great Jones Street, near the Bowery, he smelled sulphur and looked up and saw the Devil walk past and felt the heat of Hell emanating from him. Later the same night, he saw two mermaids in the East River. They were off Pier 26, at the foot of Catharine Street, frolicking in the moonlight. “They weren't exactly half women, half fishes,” he told Gould. “They were more like half women, half snakes. When they saw me sitting on the pier looking at them, they held out their arms and wriggled and made certain other motions trying to tempt me to come in with them, and if I had done so they would've wrapped themselves around me and dragged me to the bottom.”

Gould spent an hour or so on the Deacon's visions and torments. Then, after drinking another double Martini, he quoted some remarks that he said had been made to him by a doleful old Hungarian woman, known as Old Budapest or Old Buda the Pest, who used to sit in bars on Third Avenue, around Cooper Square, and talk on and on to anyone who would listen. Gould said he had filled many composition books with her talk. Old Buda had been three times a wife and three times a widow; she had had some connection with the dope trade through one of her husbands; she had been a madam, or, as she defined it, “the operator of a furnished-room house for women over in the Navy Yard district in Brooklyn”; and she had wound up working in the kitchen of a city hospital. Her talk was made up for the most part of descriptions of and reflections on awful things that she had experienced or observed. Gould recited a few of her soliloquies verbatim and paraphrased others and summarized others. Finishing with Old Buda, he drank a fourth Martini—a regular one this time. Then he ordered another, but decided not to drink all of it. Instead, he ordered a large beer, drank it, and then ordered a small beer and drank it. At this point, he described an eating place in which he said he had spent a lot of time during the early thirties. It was called Frenchy's Coffee Pot; it was on First Avenue, near Twenty-ninth Street, just across from the Pathological Building of Bellevue Hospital, a building that also housed the City Mortuary; it stayed open until two in the morning and opened again at six; and it was patronized by nurses, internes, orderlies, ambulance drivers, morgue attendants, embalming-school students, and other people who worked in the hospital and the mortuary. Whenever he could, Gould said, he would engage these people in conversation, and now he began to quote some of the things they had told him. “This part of the Oral History is pretty gory,” he said. “It is called ‘Echoes from the Backstairs of Bellevue,' and it is divided into sections, under such headings as ‘Spectacular Operations and Amputations,' ‘Horrible Deaths,' ‘Sadistic Doctors,' ‘Alcoholic Doctors,' ‘Drug-Addicted Doctors,' ‘Women-Chasing Doctors,' ‘Huge Tumors, Etc.,' and ‘Strange Things Found During Autopsies.'”

Presently, after quoting at some length from each of his sections on Bellevue, Gould ordered another small beer and drank it, and then said that he would now quote for a little while from the longest and most important part of the Oral History. He said that he called this part “An Infinitude of Bushwa,” and that it was about the Village, and that it ran through approximately seventy-five composition books. “It contains an enormous number of monologues, conversations, and disputes about a wide variety of art, literary, political, theological, and sexual matters that I overheard in the Village,” he said, “and this will be very valuable to social historians in centuries to come, but the most valuable thing it contains is gossip—the things that people in the Village said about each other behind each other's backs during the twenties and thirties. As I say somewhere in my introduction to this part, which in itself takes up nine composition books, ‘Malicious gossip, vicious and malicious. Spite and jealousy and middle-aged lust and middle-aged bile.' You can mention just about anybody who was around the Village during the last quarter of a century, and I've probably got something about him or her in this part of the History—something nasty. However and nevertheless and notwithstanding and be that as it may,” he said, suddenly getting to his feet, “please excuse me a minute.”

I had been so busy taking notes that I hadn't looked up for some time, and now I looked up and saw that Gould was drunk, or close to it. His eyes were blank and staring; he stared at me as if he had never seen me before. I was surprised, for his voice had been clear and his talk had been coherent. “I'll be right back,” he said. Starting to step away from the table, he lurched into the aisle. Then, recovering himself, he made his way to the men's room, shuffling along cautiously and holding his arms out in front of him for balance, like a feeble old man.

When he returned, I said I was afraid that he was tired of talking, and suggested that we adjourn and meet again the following night. He shook his head vigorously. “I'm not in the least bit tired,” he said. I closed my notebook and started to put it in my pocket. “You're the one who's tired,” he said. He reached over and grabbed my sleeve. “Don't go yet,” he said. “I want to say something about my mother. I didn't say much about her the other day in the diner, and I feel I should. Don't bother taking notes. Just listen.”

His mother had been a good mother, he said, except for one thing: She had never treated him as a grownup. While he was at Harvard, he said, and even after he had been living in New York City for years and had become well known as a bohemian and had grown a beard, she had occasionally sent him packages of a kind of penny candy, called peach pits, that he had liked as a child. This was typical of her, he said. “My mother did one thing to me when I was a boy,” he said, “that I've never been able to forgive or forget. It may seem like a trivial incident to you, not worth thinking about twice, but I must've thought about it a thousand times. We were sitting in the parlor of our house in Norwood one evening after supper. I was studying, and I happened to look up and I saw that she was looking at me and apparently had been for some time and that tears were running down her cheeks. ‘My poor son,' she said.” Gould's eyes blazed. He was silent for a few moments. Then he forgot all about his mother and began talking about his father. He got wound up talking about his father; he couldn't seem to stop. His father had been a railroad enthusiast, he said, and a collector of timetables and of pictures of locomotives. Norwood is on a branch line of what was then the New England Railroad and is now the New York, New Haven & Hartford, and his father had been local surgeon for the railroad and a member of the International Association of Railway Surgeons. “One evening,” Gould said, “my father put down his newspaper, which was the Boston
Evening Transcript
, you may be sure, and announced that he was going in to Boston in the morning to see a new locomotive that the railroad was getting ready to put into service, and then he announced that he was taking me with him. This was when I was around nine or ten, back before he had given up on me, so to speak, and it was one of the happiest days of my life. We got up before day and had breakfast together, and then we went in on an early train and stopped in the station restaurant in Boston and had a second breakfast. He had coffee and a cinnamon bun, and I had hot chocolate and a cinnamon bun. Then we went out in the yards. There was a crowd of railroad men standing around the locomotive, looking it over, and my father knew one of them. ‘How do you do, Mr. Delehanty,' my father said. ‘This is my son Joseph.'”

Gould was so moved by this recollection that his voice broke and his eyes filled with tears and he was unable to continue talking. A few moments later, while he was dabbing at his eyes with a paper napkin and trying to regain his composure, one of the old bohemians at the bar came over to him and said, “I know how you feel, Joe. It was really quite a shock.” Gould stared at the old bohemian. “What shock?” he asked. The old bohemian stared back at Gould. “Hearing about it,” he said. “Hearing about what?” asked Gould. “Bob,” said the old bohemian. Then, giving Gould a searching look and seeing that he was mystified, the old bohemian said that a man named Bob Something-or-Other (I didn't catch his last name), who was evidently another old bohemian and a friend of both of them, had keeled over in Goody's during the afternoon, while he was sitting at the bar, and had been taken to St. Vincent's Hospital, where, according to a telephone call the bartender had just received, he had died not long after he arrived. Gould was visibly delighted by this piece of news. “Well, I must say,” he said, “I think that was very commendable of Bob. In fact,” he went on, “it's probably the most commendable thing he ever did.” The old bohemian was taken aback, but a moment later his face changed and he laughed heartily. “Poor old Bob,” said Gould, in mitigation. Then he and the old bohemian became engrossed in an intensely serious discussion about Bob's age—whether he had hit seventy or was still in his sixties—and I took the opportunity to say good night and depart.