Plexus (29 page)

I felt I had to say something to clear myself.

“You don't have to tell me,” said Gene. “I know what it's like.”

“But we're not always broke,” I said. “Listen, I'm going to come again soon, very soon, I promise you. And I'll bring my wife along next time.

“Don't talk about it,” said Gene. “I'm so glad you came. We have some lentil soup on the stove, and we have some bread. We won't go hungry.”

He began again—about the days when they didn't have a crumb to eat, when he had grown so desperate that he had gone to his neighbors and begged for a little food—just for the children.

“But Dave would have helped you, I'm sure,” I said. “Why didn't you ask him for money?”

He looked pained. “You know how it is. You don't like to borrow from your relatives.”

“But Dave isn't just a relative.”

“I know, Henry, but I don't like to ask for help. I'd rather starve. If it weren't for the kids I guess I would have starved.”

While we were talking the kids had slipped out, to return in a few minutes with some cabbage leaves, celery and radishes.

“You shouldn't have done that,” said Gene, admonishing them gently.

“What did they do?” I asked.

“Oh, they filched those things from a neighbor of ours who's away.”

“Good for them!” I said. “Damn it, Gene, they've got the right idea. Listen, you're too modest, or too proud. I don't know which.” I apologized at once. How could I berate him for his simple virtues? He was the essence of kindness, gentleness, true humility. Every word he uttered had a golden ring. He never blamed anybody, nor life either. He spoke as if it were all an accident, part of his private destiny, and not to be questioned.

“Maybe they could dig up a little wine too,” I said, half in joke, half in earnest.

“I forgot all about that,” said Gene blushingly. “We've got a little wine in the cellar. It's homemade wine… elderberry… can you drink it? I've been saving it for just such an occasion.”

The boys had already slipped downstairs. They were becoming more expansive with each sally. “They're fine boys,
Gene,” I said. “What are they going to do when they grow up?”

“They won't go into the factory, that's one thing I know. I'm going to try to send them to college. I think it's important to have a good education. Little Arthur, the youngest one, he wants to become a doctor. The big fellow is a wild one; he wants to go West and become a cowboy. But he'll get over that soon, I guess. They read these silly Westerns, you know.”

Suddenly it occurred to him to ask if I didn't have a child.

“That was by my other wife,” I said. “A girl.”

He was amazed to learn that I had remarried. Divorce, apparently, was something which never entered his head.

“Does your wife work too?” he asked.

“In a way,” I said. I didn't know quite how to explain the complexities of our life in a few words.

“I suppose,” he said next, “you're still in the cement company.”

The cement company!
I nearly fell off the chair.

“Why no, Gene,” I said, “I'm a writer now. Didn't you know that?”

“A writer?”
It was his turn to be astonished. His face lit up with pleasure. “It doesn't really surprise me, though,” he said. “I remember how you used to read to us kids in the old days. We always fell asleep on you, remember?” He paused to reflect, his head bowed, then looked up and remarked: “Of course you had a good education too, didn't you?” He said it as if he had been an immigrant boy who had been denied the usual privileges of an American.

I tried to explain that I hadn't gone very far in school, that we were practically in the same boat. In the middle of it I suddenly asked if he ever read any more.

“Oh yes,” he answered brightly. “I read quite a little. Nothing much else to do, you know.” He pointed to the shelf in back of me where his books were lodged. I turned round to glance at the titles: Dickens, Scott, Thackeray, the Brontë sisters, George Eliot, Balzac, Zola.…

“I don't read any of the modern trash,” he said, answering my unvoiced question.

We sat down to eat. The boys were ravenously hungry. Again I felt a pang of remorse. I realized that had I not been there they would have eaten twice as much. As soon as the soup was finished we tackled the greens. They had no oil, no dressing of any kind, not even mustard. The bread had given out too. I fished in my pocket and dug up a dime, all I had besides the carfare home. “Let them go and get a loaf of bread,” I said.

“It's not necessary,” said Gene. “They can go without. They're used to it by now.”

“Come on! I could stand a bit more myself, couldn't you?”

“But there's no butter or jam!”

“What's the difference? We'll eat it plain. I've done that before.”

The kids ducked out to get the bread.

“Jesus,” I said, “you really are down to nothing, aren't you?”

“This isn't bad, Henry,” he said. “For a time, you know, we lived on weeds.”

“No, don't tell me that! It's preposterous.” I was almost angry with him. “Don't you know,” I said, “that you don't have to starve? This country is lousy with food. Gene. I'd go out and beg before I'd eat weeds. Damn it, I never heard of such a thing.”

“It's different with you,” said Gene. “You've knocked around. You've been out in the world. I haven't. I've lived like a squirrel in a cage.… Except for that time I worked on the garbage scow.”

“What?
The
garbage
scow? What do you mean by that?”

“I mean just that,” said Gene calmly. “Hauling garbage to Barren Island. It was when my kids were living with my wife's parents for a time. I had the chance to do something different for a change.… You remember Mr. Kiesling, the alderman, don't you? He got me the job. I enjoyed it
too—while it lasted. Of course the smell was frightful, but you can get used to anything after a while. It paid eighty dollars a month, about twice what I earned in the pipe factory. It was fun too, sailing out into the bay, around the harbor, up and down the rivers. It was the first and only chance I ever had to get out into the world. Once we got lost at sea, during a storm. We drifted around for days. The worst of it was that we ran out of food. Yeah, we were forced to eat garbage. It was quite a wonderful experience. I must say I enjoyed it. Far better than being in a pipe factory. Even if there was a terrible stench.…”

He paused a moment to savor it anew. His best days! Then suddenly he asked me if I had ever read Conrad, Joseph Conrad, who wrote about the sea.

I nodded my head.

“There's a writer I admire, Henry. If you could ever write a story like him, well.…” He didn't know what to add to this. “My favorite is
The Nigger of the Narcissus
. I must have read it at least ten times. Each time it seems better to me.”

“Yes, I know. I've read nearly all of Conrad. I agree with you, a wonderful writer.… How about Dostoevski, have you ever read him?”

No, he hadn't. Never heard the name before. What was he, a novelist? Sounded like a Polish name to him.

“I'll send you one of his books,” I said. “It's called
The House of the Dead
. By the way,” I added, “I have loads of books. I could send you anything you like, as many as you like. Just tell me what you'd enjoy.”

He said not to bother, he liked reading the same books over and over.

“But wouldn't you care to know something about other writers too?”

He didn't think he had the energy to get interested in new writers. But his son, the big lad, he liked to read. Maybe I could send
him
something.

“What sort of books does he read?”

“He likes the moderns.”

“Like whom?”

“Oh, Hall Caine, Rider Haggard, Henty.…”

“I see. Sure,” I said, “I can send him something interesting.”

“Now the little fellow,” said Gene, “he hardly reads at all. He's up on science. All he looks at are the scientific magazines. I think he's cut out to be a doctor. You should see the laboratory he's rigged up for himself. He's got everything in there, all cut up and bottled. It stinks in there. But if it makes him happy.…”

“Exactly, Gene.
If it makes him happy.”

I stayed on until the last bus. Walking down the dark, mangy street we hardly exchanged a word. As I shook hands with them all I repeated that I would be back soon. “We'll have a feast next time, eh kids?”

“Don't think of that, Henry,” said Gene. “Just come… and bring your wife along too.”

The ride home seemed interminable. I not only felt sad, I felt morose, despondent, licked. I couldn't wait to get home and switch on the lights. Once inside the love nest I would feel secure again. Never had it seemed more like a cozy womb, our wonderful little apartment. Truly, we lacked for nothing. If now and then we were hungry we knew it wouldn't last forever. We had friends—and we had the gift of speech. We knew how to forage. As for the world, the real world was right inside our four walls. Everything we wanted of the world we managed to drag to our lair. It's true, now and then I grew sensitive, or shy, when it came to making a touch of someone, but these moments were rare. In a pinch I could muster the courage to tackle an utter stranger. Certainly it was necessary to swallow one's pride. But I preferred to swallow my pride rather than my own spittle.

Borough Hall never looked better to me than when I stepped out of the subway. I was already home. The passers-by wore a familiar air. They were not lost. Between
the world I had just left and this one the difference was unthinkable. It was only the outskirts of the city, really, where Gene lived—but it was the wilderness to me. I shuddered to think that I might ever be condemned to such an existence.

An imperative desire to roam the streets for a while led me instinctively to Sackett Street. Filled with memories of my old friend, Al Burger, I walked past his house. It looked sadly dilapidated. The entire street, houses and all, seemed to have diminished since my last visit. Everything was shrunk and shriveled. Despite all, it was still a wonderful street to me. The
Via Nostalgia
.

As for the suburbs, so sinister and forlorn—everyone I knew who had gone to live in the suburbs had given up the ghost. The current of life never bathed these purlieus. There could be only one purpose in retiring to these living catacombs: to breed and wither away. If it were an act of renunciation it would be comprehensible, but it was never that. It was always an admission of defeat. Life became routine, the dullest sort of routine. A humdrum job, a family with a big bosom to slink into, the barnyard pets and their diseases, the slick magazines, the comic sheets, the farmer's almanac. Endless time in which to study oneself in the mirror. One after another, regular as the noonday sun, the brats fell out of the womb. The rent came due regularly, too, or the interest on the mortgage. How pleasant to watch the new sewer pipes being laid! How thrilling to see new streets opening up and finally covered with asphalt! Everything was new. New and shoddy. New and desolate. New and meaningless. With the new came added comforts. Everything was planned for the coming generation. One was mortgaged to the shining future. A trip to the city and one longed to be back in the neat little bungalow with the lawn mower and the washing machine. The city was disturbing, confusing, oppressive. One acquired a different rhythm living in the suburbs. What matter if one was not
au courant?
There were compensations—such as
warm house slippers, the radio, the ironing board which sprang out of the wall. Even the plumbing was attractive.

Poor Gene, of course, had no such compensations. He had fresh air, and that was about all. True, his was not quite the suburbs. He was marooned in that in-between area, that no man's land where one kept body and soul together in some hapless way which defied all logic. The ever-expanding city was always threatening to gobble him up, land and all. Or, the tide might recede for some quixotic reason and leave them high and dry. Sometimes a city starts to move outward in a certain direction, then suddenly changes its mind. Any improvements begun are left unfinished. The little community begins slowly to die, for lack of oxygen. Everything deteriorates and depreciates. In this atmosphere one may just as well read the same books—or the same book—over and over again. Or play the same phonograph record. In a vacuum one has no need of new things, nor of excitement, nor of foreign stimuli. One has only to maintain a bare survival, to vegetate, like a fetus in a jar.

I couldn't sleep that night for thinking of Gene. His plight was all the more disturbing to me for the reason that I had always regarded him as my twin brother. In him I always saw myself. We looked alike and we spoke alike. We had been born almost in the same house. His mother could well have been
my
mother: certainly I preferred her to my own. When he winced with pain, I winced. When he expressed a longing to do something, I felt the same longing. We were like a team in harness. I don't remember ever disputing with him, ever crossing him, ever insisting on doing something he did not want to do. What he owned was mine, and vice versa. Between us there was never the least jealousy or rivalry. We were one, body and soul.… I saw in him now not the caricature of myself but rather a premonition of what was to come. If Fate could treat him so unkindly—my own brother who had never done anyone any harm—what might it not have in store for me? The
good that was in me was the overflow of his own bottomless well of goodness; the bad was my very own. The bad had accumulated as the result of our separation. When we parted ways I had lost that echo which I depended on for self-orientation. I had lost my touchstone.