Nothing That Meets the Eye (31 page)

“You will keep it, too! It's a small thing compared to my Felix!”

Mr. McKenny smiled and made a little bow. “Thank you, Miss ­Walker.” Somebody handed him the empty cage and the shopping bag.

The maid preceded him down the hall to open the door. Mr. McKenny heard a quick pair of feet following him. He knew whose they were.

“Morning,” said the young reporter on the pavement. “You remember me, don't you?”

“Yes,” said Mr. McKenny. “How are you?”

“Fine. How did you like your write-up the last time?”

“Oh, very nice, I thought.”

“You'll get a bigger one this time. You have quite a lot of luck finding parakeets, haven't you, Mr. McKenny?”

“Well—this was luck. I suppose he was attracted to my birds. That's the only way I can explain it.”

“I thought you didn't have any birds.”

“I've acquired some since. I told you I used to keep them.”

“Hm-m. Just how many birds have you found, Mr. McKenny?”

“Oh . . . just these two, I think—that I remember.” Mr. McKenny looked up at the young man, half expecting to be struck down, by the young man or by the Lord.

The reporter's mouth was turned down at one corner. “You know, I think you're a big fake. I don't think that's Miss Walker's bird in there at all. I'm going to do a little investigating this morning, and if what I think is true . . . well, I'm going to see that it gets printed, that's all.”

Mr. McKenny's knees sagged a little. “All right. That's your privilege,” he said softly, and then turned and walked on.

That morning, Mr. McKenny did not greet any of his neighbors. Let them think he had gone deaf or blind overnight, he didn't care. By tomorrow, his neighbors wouldn't want to speak to him, either. Dark, tumultuous thoughts filled his mind. His shame permeated everything, but the thought that he would have to move was almost as horrible, to find another apartment at a rent he could afford and also where he would be allowed to keep his birds. And he would have to find one immediately. He could not bear to think of stepping out his door even once when every person on the block would know of his disgrace.

The greeting from his parakeets when he walked into his apartment shamed him, too. His parakeets were his only friends now, he realized—and that only because they couldn't read a newspaper. In a kind of daze, so that he had to concentrate very hard to understand what the words meant, Mr. McKenny read the advertisements for furnished apartments in the newspapers he had bought that morning. They all sounded extremely bleak and joyless. Or else unbelievably expensive. One place that sounded possible he saw on second reading was a hundred and ten dollars a week, not a month.

He made more tea. He talked with his parakeets, drawing a little cheer from their thoughtless cheerfulness. Finally, he dragged his one trunk out of a closet and began unsystematically to pack. Maybe the evening papers would have an apartment for him, he thought. He knew they wouldn't.

At last, he just stood at his window, staring out with wide eyes and whistling an old song.

The doorbell rang, and Mr. McKenny jumped. More reporters, he thought. Or maybe even the police! For one instant, he thought of escape. There was only one way, out the kitchen window, down into the court. Suicide. But he had never thought suicide honorable. Mr. McKenny straightened up. He would face his punishment or fine or whatever like a man.

The doorbell rang again, and Mr. McKenny went to the kitchenette and pressed the release button.

He recognized the step of the young reporter. He was alone. Perhaps he was the bearer of a summons. Or he wanted a firsthand confession from him for his paper. The young man knocked. Mr. McKenny opened the door.

“Good afternoon, Mr. McKenny,” the young man said politely. “May I come in?”

Mr. McKenny opened the door wider.

The young man came in. There was no tablet in his hand. “Mr. McKenny—I was wrong this morning about Miss Walker's parakeet. I went back and talked to her. She's positive the parakeet is hers because he knows some phrases she taught him and she has some color photographs, too. I saw them.”

“Well, parakeets do look pretty much alike,” Mr. McKenny said. “It's pretty easy to make a mistake, but—”

“But this parakeet really is Miss Walker's.” He moistened his lips. “I checked with some back issues of my paper and some other papers, though, and went over to see a couple of the people who'd gotten their parakeets back—from you. One woman over on York Avenue, maybe you remember, had a parakeet named Billy.”

“Yes—I remember.”

“Well, it's not Billy that she's got now. The kids weren't at home. The woman told me. She said it looked quite a bit like Billy, but it wasn't. They renamed it Ting because that's what it keeps saying. But the kids still think it's their bird, and while they're happy, she can't bring herself to tell them.”

Mr. McKenny realized he was smiling. “Good!”

“I told her I thought you'd been doing this all over town, bringing in parakeets and getting rewards. She said she didn't think I ought to report you. In fact, she begged me not to. She said if you were making so many families happy, it didn't really matter. So did a couple of other people say the same thing. Anyway, Mr. McKenny, I feel the same way and I thought I'd drop by and tell you in case you were worried about what I said this morning.”

“Oh—not at all,” Mr. McKenny said.

“I guess it's kind of like Santa Claus. Santa Claus isn't real, either, but he makes a lot of kids happy.” The young man walked toward the door. “Well, so long, Mr. McKenny.”

Mr. McKenny turned around, took a deep breath and smiled. There were people who understood. The world seemed brighter, full of sunshine and goodwill. He looked at his watch. Three o'clock already! Mr. McKenny went to his closet for his jacket and his hat. Time to go out and get the afternoon papers.

MUSIC TO DIE BY

A
aron Wechsler got home from work at ten past six. He had stayed a few minutes longer than usual helping to sort the mail after the post office closed at five, just to give an impression that today was like any other day, that he was not at all uneasy or anxious to get out of the place, even though Roger Hoolihan's body was crumpled up and bloody in a back storage closet where they kept spare mailbags. Who'd find it? Aaron wondered. Mac, the postmaster? Bobby, Mac's son? One of the carriers? Aaron didn't care who found the body.

He was a middle-sized man with a slight paunch, fifty-five years old, with straight black hair that was graying at the temples. He wore dark-rimmed, thick-lensed glasses that gave a blurry, evasive look to his eyes. Actually, Aaron's eyes were evasive. More and more, he disliked looking straight at people. He was restless and nervous, and he hated his job at the post office, but he was determined to stick it out—to stick it out in some post office, if not this one—until he got his pension, his just reward for a lifetime's work. Aaron went to the kitchen and washed his hands thoroughly with the yellow soap he used for dishes. Then he sat down at the table that served him both as eating table and desk, and opened the gray ledger in which he kept his diary. He wrote:

September 28, 19——

Today I killed Roger Hoolihan. I did it shortly after noon, as I had planned. The others had gone out to lunch and I was supposed to go out at 12 while Roger kept the post office open. Roger was to go out at 1. So about twenty past 12 Roger looked over his shoulder and said with his customary sneer, “Aren't you going out to lunch?” He was standing at the counter going through the money order book. I picked up the stapler and hit him in the back of the head. I probably fractured his skull with the first blow, but I hit him several times. Then I dragged him to the storage closet in back and dumped him on the mailbags. I didn't go home to lunch, but I went out before 1 and came back around 1 when the others did. When Mac asked where Roger was (this was around 2) I said, “I haven't seen him since I went out a little after 12.” Mac looked surprised, but didn't say anything. I suppose Mac will call his house tomorrow morning when he doesn't show up or they'll start looking for him tonight when he doesn't come home. But it might be a couple of days before they find the body, as that closet is not opened very often.

Roger Hoolihan. Number One.

Aaron laid his pen down in the groove of the ledger, rubbed his palms gently together, and looked at what he had written. The handwriting was very small and neat, the ink black. Mac was next. Wipe out that self-satisfied expression, stop that scornful head-shaking, the eyes that slurred away, as if whatever or whoever Mac looked at was the lowest of the low, not even worthy of a word of contempt from the great Edward MacAllister, postmaster. Yet whatever bungling Bobby did, that was okay, because Bobby was his son. “Dad, where's the seven-cent airmails? . . . Dad, mind if I shove off? I got an early date with Helen.” Bobby might be Number Three. Watch out, Bobby.

Aaron went to the sink again, stooped, and from behind a blue-and-white checked curtain below the sink took a bottle of rye that stood among Clorox and ammonia bottles and other cleaning material. He poured himself a generous drink, dropped in some ice cubes, and sipped it with appreciation. Then he opened a can of corned beef hash, and put it into a frying pan with an egg in the center of it. It crossed his mind, very faintly, that he might have treated himself to something special like a steak or at least lamb chops or pork chops, but the thought did not last long, and brought him no discontent with his simple meal. His wife had used to make fun of him for liking corned beef hash, and said he had the taste of a convict. His memory was confused for a few seconds between Vera smiling when she had said that and Vera sneering when she said it. Well, maybe she'd done both at different times. She'd ended by walking out on him, and she'd certainly been sneering then. Good riddance, Aaron thought. He hadn't gone to rack and ruin, he hadn't lost his health, or his job, or anything else Vera had predicted. He'd quit the job in the post office in East Orange and moved to Copperville, New Jersey, where he'd had no difficulty at all in getting the same kind of job at the Copperville post office.

“The hell with her,” Aaron murmured, and dragged a folded newspaper on the table toward him. His eyes moved over the print, but he did not read. He ate at a steady rate, neither fast nor slow. He got up for a second helping, which finished the hash. The hell with his children, too, Aaron was thinking. Billy was twenty-four now—no, twenty-seven—and Edith was twenty-three and already had three kids by that lowlifer she'd married. Yes, there'd been a time when Aaron had had great ambitions for his children, and Billy had gone through college and was a certified public accountant, but Edith had fallen in love in her sophomore year and gotten married, and to a numbskull who was not a college man and who hadn't any money. Aaron had flown into a rage and tried to get the marriage annulled, but alas, Edith was already pregnant, so an annulment was out of the question, but Aaron had fumed—hadn't he reason to, and wasn't he borne out now, with the two of them and their three kids living in some slum in Philadelphia?—and Billy had defended his sister and so had Vera. To Aaron, it had been as if his whole world had suddenly lost its mind, reversed the correct order of things. He had stood alone in his defense of sanity, education, the good life, and his own family had turned traitor, betrayed him and all he had struggled for since the children had been born and before. Aaron had gotten so angry one day, he had wrecked the house. He had torn pictures off the walls and stamped on them, pulled down the curtains and thrown every dish in the house on the floor. Then Vera had burst into tears and said she was leaving him, and she had. And he'd let her.

“Let her,” Aaron murmured to himself as he sipped his instant coffee. “Let her!” Let her leave him, with all her talk about psychiatrists for him, a talk with the preacher—“Tschuh,” Aaron said with contempt. His blood boiled for an instant, and subsided. He was better off now than he'd ever been in his life. There was a lot to be said for independence. He was saving more money now, too, than he'd ever been able to save since he got married. Last year, he had toyed with the idea of taking a cruise to the West Indies in the summer, but he had postponed it, and postponed it this year, too. Well, one summer it'd be Europe instead, and that was more interesting than the West Indies, which were simply closer and cheaper. Yes, his life was fine now, except for the awful batch of people he had to work with. They made him dislike his work, and dislike all the gadgets and rubber stamps and weighing machines and every other mechanical device in the place. He'd been in Copperville three years now. There were times when it didn't seem that long, and times when it seemed much longer. Tonight it didn't seem that long.

Roger Hoolihan had a boy in college and another in high school. Plus a wife. Aaron shrugged. It was no time for pity.

He washed up his dishes, put a couple of shirts and a pair of pajamas in a washtub to soak, and went to bed early. Aaron liked to sleep. He slept ten hours every night.

The next morning was bright and sunny, the temperature a perfect sixty-two, Aaron saw by his thermometer beside his front door. Aaron's house was set behind the larger house of his landlord, at the end and to one side of the driveway which led to a garage where his landlord kept his car, a pale blue Buick. There was a thin lawn between Aaron's house and the landlord's house, and Aaron's feet had worn a faint path from his door diagonally across the lawn to the nearer of the two barren streaks made by the car's wheels in the driveway. Aaron had a five-block walk to the post office, through streets of two-story houses with elm and maple trees growing along the sidewalk.

Mac was in the post office. Mac was always the first to arrive, a few minutes before eight.

“Morning, Aaron,” Mac said, not deigning to look up at him.

“Morning,” Aaron replied. He hung his jacket on a hook on the back wall.

Mac was slowly putting away sheets of stamps in the broad flat drawers under the counter. He always took a long while putting away stamp sheets, holding them up first and scrutinizing them, especially if they were new stamps. But he apparently enjoyed just staring at the perforations in ordinary stamps, like the four-cent Lincolns and the one-cent Washingtons. The government should know, Aaron thought, just how much time their postmaster, their senior employee at the Copperville, New Jersey, post office, wasted in doing a dozen little jobs that any ordinary office boy could do.

On a large flat desk behind Mac stood a little card that said tension, so printed that one's eyes wavered and began to hurt when one looked at it. This small torture was achieved by bands of gray printed alternately above and below the bold black letters, causing a fuzziness in the letters' appearance. Aaron turned the card so that he would not see it while he sorted the morning mail. The office was too hot, already too hot and overheated, but Aaron was afraid this morning to go to the thermostat by the toilet and turn it down. Mac liked it hot and he liked to work in shirtsleeves, so the rest had to sweat it out all day. Aaron watched Mac slide a drawer shut, then walk over to the Muzak box and turn it on. The thing began to play, from the middle of the song “On the Sunny Side of the Street.”

He waits till I get here to turn it on, Aaron thought, just because he knows I don't like it.

“Aaron—there's mail to be sorted, you know.” Mac nodded toward the tied-together bundles of letters on the desk where Aaron had rearranged the tension sign.

“I'm getting at it,” Aaron said, but not very briskly. He took the first bundle and untied it. There were, Aaron could see at a glance, about eight hundred letters to be sorted for the carriers who took off on their rounds between nine and nine-thirty. He began dropping letters into different piles on the broad desk, according to the zones which Aaron knew from the street names. Copperville was too small to have postal zone numbers. Plop, plop, plop. Some letters, destined for the private boxes at the front of the post office inside the foyer, he put into certain cubbyholes above the desk, which were marked by groups of numbers. Bills, junk mail, junk mail, bills, bulb catalogs, mail-order-house catalogs, junk, junk, junk.

Roger Hoolihan came in. Aaron barely glanced at him, then bent over his work again, frowning. He heard Mac and Roger exchange, “Good morning.”

“Feeling any better?” Mac asked.

“Oh, yeah, thanks. Little bicarb did the trick, plus a nap,” Roger said.

Mac was leaning on the counter on one elbow, doing nothing. “What was it? Pie à la mode or something?” Mac chuckled.

“No, I had beef stew,” Roger said. “Ordinary beef stew and . . .”

Aaron was bored and wished he could stop listening. For a moment, he did stop listening, but then he heard the music: a straining baritone singing “This Almost Was Mine,” with a lot of violins playing the tune. Aaron remembered yesterday when Roger came back from lunch at two. He remembered Roger saying with a pained expression to Mac, “Gosh, I'm all doubled up with something I ate. I think I'd better take the afternoon off.” Aaron didn't want to remember it. He concentrated on the names, the box numbers on the envelopes he was sorting. Mrs. Lily Foster, Lily Foster, Lily Foster. A divorcée. She had a hat shop in town, and she got more mail than anybody.

“Well, Aaron,” Roger said as he came back from hanging his jacket up, “how about oiling the monster this morning, eh?” He jerked his head in the direction of the four-foot-high black machine some six feet away from him in the middle of a clear space in the floor.

Aaron managed a smile at Roger's feeble quip, and also gave him a nod. Be more polite than he is, Aaron told himself, because you're better than he is. But he did not glance at the monstrous machine. He hated it. He once knew what it was for, but somehow he had obliterated that knowledge from his mind. He simply didn't know what it was for now, he honestly didn't. It looked like a compressed guillotine, as if some giant hand had pressed down on a guillotine and mashed it almost beyond recognition. Yes, what was it? A weighing device? A machine to press letters from a three-foot-square mass into a ten-inch-square? A machine for crushing people's hands? Feet? Heads? I don't want to have anything to do with that! Aaron could still hear his own voice shouting at Mac—a month ago? six months ago?—whan Mac had asked him to do something on it. Aaron's mind went blank again, and he smiled with satisfaction. No, he didn't know what the black machine did, and he didn't care to know and he never would know. They couldn't fire him for not knowing, either. They ­couldn't fire him. He was a civil servant who had passed his examinations.

But the music all day long was driving him crazy, and he might quit. Music to die by, Aaron often thought. He remembered going up in an elevator somewhere in New York to some appointment he had dreaded—a dentist, a doctor?—and such sick-making music had been coming from the ceiling of the elevator, dulcet strains of violins, calculated to soothe, maybe, but which hadn't soothed, any more than it would have soothed the mind of a man walking to an execution chamber, music that any fool knew was being played to smooth over something, or to conceal something so horrible that the human mind could not face it.