Pricksongs & Descants (14 page)

“
It is 10:16, Alfred,
”
announces the Stationmaster quietly. Outside, one can indeed hear the 10:18 Express Train to Winchester arriving.

The knife drops from Alfred
’
s hand. He is crying. He presses his hands to his face. The Stationmaster emerges from his office, kneels down beside Alfred, picks up the knife.
“
Now, watch, Alfred,
”
he says.
“
Watch!
”

Alfred peeks through his hands, weeping, whimpering, as the Stationmaster severs the tall stranger
’
s head with three quick strokes. The eyes on the head pop open suddenly and the body jerks spasmodically for a moment. Blood gurgles out of the man
’
s neck, staining Alfred
’
s trousers where he kneels on the floor. Alfred continues to weep beside the long body, which twitches still with small private reflexes of its own, as the Stationmaster carries the head into his office. He returns, lifts the body up on his shoulders, and carries it out the door. The carcass can be heard tumbling down steps.

When the Stationmaster returns, Alfred is still kneeling on the floor, weeping. The clock above the gate to Track i says 10:18, and one can hear a train outside sound its whistle, then pull away. The Stationmaster looks down at Alfred, sighs
shortly
, shakes his head, then walks over toward the Track 2 gate. There is a chair there, which the Stationmaster now slides under the clock. He stands on the chair, opens the glass that protects the clock dial, moves the hands around until they read 9:26. He steps down from the chair, slides it back to its former position, returns to his office. Alfred studies the clock, shudders, wearily gath
ers up his scattered posses
sions and places them once again in the canvas bag. The Stationmaster reopens the ledger. Alfred walks up to the ticket window, his cap in his hand.

○ ○ ○

5

Klee Dead

Klee, Wilbur Kle
e
, dies. Is dead, rather. I know I know: too soon. It should come, after a package of hopefully ingenious preparations, at the end: and thus, gentle lector, Wilbur Kle
e
is gathered to his fathers. But what
’
s to be done? He
’
s already gone. The city clerk has, with customary dispatch, shifted his file, just before lunch in fact, and the city clerk, public toady that he is, is not one to suffer any meddler
’
s disturbance of things as they are and—as he would put in—must be. Not even for a bribe, certainly not for any kind of bribe that I could offer, not even for tickets to the circus. The city clerk, in short, is a surly sonuvabitch, quite beyond the touch of human sops; and so
Klee
is, irretrievably, dead.

In some languages, it is possible to say:
to die oneself
, as in: I die myself, you will die yourself, he would have died himself, and so on, cunningly planting the idea that one
’
s own hand was perhaps involved. (Which, if I may say so in passing, would seem to have been the case with Wilbur
Klee
.) But unluckily I don
’
t know any of these other languages—God knows I wouldn
’
t be bludgeoning you with my insufferable English if I did—and even if I did know them it would be inconceivable I should know them well, conjugations above all, in which case my circumlocutions would only make you laugh and forget that the point of the matter is that
Klee is dead and he quite lively did it himself
, to hell with friends, family, lovers, employers, gods, countries, and anyone else who had designs on him. Providing he was in fact encumbered with any of these, and who on this earth can doubt that he was?

Yet, contrarily, old Millic
e
nt Gee is not dead, either by her own hand or any other. Perhaps you don
’
t know Millic
e
nt Gee
...
?
Well, I can
’
t blame you for that. She lives, in a manner of speaking, on State Street between Twelfth
and Fourteenth Avenues, the ab
sence of a Thirteenth Avenue being a preclusion, not an oversight, of our City Fathers who had every reason to expect a little bad luck, lives there in a multistory unren
ovatcd brownstone. Millie, a be
lievable if somewhat scabby old lady, well into her dotage, keeps house alone in the basement, along with her old ram whom she tactlessly calls Lothario, her stagnant aquariums, and her vast—and for our purposes, nameless—assemblage of interfiliated cats, who provide Millie a little vicarious pleasure to lighten the daily press of care: little fuckers! Millie has been heard (her windows are always open, winter and summer, little square windows down at ground level, yet, from the inside, above Millie
’
s reach, which helps account for the fact she has never closed them—what, in this makeshift world, is not hopelessly flawed?) to cackle from time to time, and one must assume she is referring to the cats. The fish have been dead for some time.

What Millie keeps on the several floors aboveground can only be guessed, and for my part, it
’
s her own business. Rumors are rife, but not to be trusted. Above all: not to be encouraged. The Constitution says enough about the promulgation of rumors, no need for lectures here. Thank God for the Constitution, What
e
v
e
r she keeps up there, though, one thing is certain: it is not likely to be or to have been human. Millie wouldn
’
t stand for it. And perhaps there is nothing up there at all. To be sure, we seem impulsively driven to load up empty spaces, to plump some goddamn thing, any object, real, imagined, or otherwise, where now there might happily be nothing, a peaceful unsullied and unpeopled emptiness, and maybe that
’
s what she hides up there, who knows
?

But, not to be taken in by our own biases, this much needs to be said: Millie, all efforts to the contrary notwithstanding, is not entirely divorced from humankind, and there is reason therefore to doubt that she has let all that upper space go for nothing. Her son—God knows how she came by him—has no part to play in her life, apparently his own choice. He no longer lives with old Millie, but resides elsewhere in an efficiency apartment. He passes by here occasionally to attend the seasonal
devotions, in which he partici
pates in all good humor and kindness, finely done up in his clover-green suit and stovepipe hat with its ostrich feather, which, I
’
m told on good authority, has something to do with his profession and is not, therefore, to be laughed at. There is no point saying much more about him, even were I capable of it, he never visits his mother, smiles at the idea of duty or oblations, and perhaps is not really her son at all, merely the victim of well-intentioned but wrongheaded gossip. To tell the truth, I wish I hadn
’
t brought him up in the first place. Please forget I mentioned him, if you can. What
’
s more, I
’
m not entirely sure why I told you about Millie. Certainly, she can have nothing to do with Wilbur
Klee
. In fact, I smile to think of it, that unconscious old nanny. Perhaps it was merely to demonstrate, before facing up to
Klee
, that I could tell a story without bringing the hero to some lurid sensational end, and who but Millie could that hero be? In any case, whatever it was led me this way, let me say in conclusion: God preserve old Millicent Gee! it
’
s the least I can do.

As for Wilbur Klee, I
’
ve not much more to say about him cither, you
’
ll be glad to know, just this: that he jumped from a high place and is now dead. I think you can take my word for it. The proof is, as it were, here in the pudding. Need I tell you from
what
high place? Your questions, friend, are foolish, disease of the western mind. On the other hand, if you wish to assume a cause-and
-
effect relationship—that he is dead
because
he jumped from a high place—well, you ar
e
free to do so, I confess it has occurred to me more than once and has colored my whole narration. Certainly, there is some relationship: the remains of Klee, still moist, are splattered out in their now several and discontinuous parts from a point direc
tl
y below the high place from which he jumped only a moment before. But that
’
s as far as I
’
ll go, thank you. I refuse to be inveigled into any of the almost endless and no doubt learned arguments which so gratify and absorb the nation
’
s savants. I don
’
t mean to belittle, a man must take his pleasures where he finds them, it
’
s only that, if I weren
’
t careful, one would think before they
’
d had done with me that Klee had died to save physics. That Klee is dead, however, leaves less room for dissent: he
’
ll never be the same again and only the worst sort of morbid emotionalism could imagine a suitable future for him in his present condition. So here is where I
’
ll stand my ground: Klee is dead. As for the rest of it, if you wish to believe as I do that he took his own life, fine! It certainly will make it easier for me as we wind this up. But I won
’
t be dogmatic about it.

Who was Klee, you ask? I do not know, I do not care. (
If
I knew, do you think I would have broken silence for such a matter as this—or any man
’
s—death? Really, my friend, you do me an injustice and forget my vows. Though this is no disparagement. I confess, I forget them frequently myself.) Wilbur Klee was Wilbur Klee, that
’
s where it starts and ends. And already I may have pushed too far, perhaps that
’
s not his name at all, I may have made it up, very likely in fact, given my peculiar and unprincipled penchant for logogriphics—but no matter! Whether it was his name or not, it will do as well as any other.

But enough of Klee! It
’
s time for an assessment of some kind, time, as it is so enigmatically put by the storybook people, to wrap it up and call it thirty, to prophesy by the clouds and sign off ... but I am reminded for no clear cause of the case of Orval Nulin Evachefsky. Let us hope for some link, some light, and drive on.

Orval was born exactly forty-two years ago today, the second son of Felix and
Il
se Evachefsky, on a small Eastern farm which Felix had acquired with the savings of his deceased immigrant parents. Orval
’
s early years were largely uneventful. A strong but timid boy of average intelligence, he passed through Porter County High School as a popular athlete and incurious student. Times were difficult, the world was large and redoubtable, and the family farm was deeply mortgaged, so Orval and his two brothers, Perk and Willie, the first older than Orval, the second younger (the only sister Marge was married and living some distance away in Huffam County), stayed on after high school to help their father. Old Felix had lost his right arm in a threshing machine accident and doubtless would have lost the farm as well, had not Perk, Orval, and young Willie pitched in. He lost it anyway, as it turned out, not many months after all three boys were drafted into the service during the war, they having failed to declare their status as farmworkers. Felix died two years later, a broken and disillusioned man, entirely de pendent upon state relief. Even at that, some might say he was fortunate in not living long enough to learn of the
lackluster
in-the
-
service-of-their-country deaths of his sons Perk and Willie. Only Orval returned from the wars, thou
gh not entirely whole: an other
wise well-meaning buddy had introduced him to a Maggie Wilson, who in turn had introduced him to Treponema Pallidum, and the cure was long and psychically debilitating. For several months after his discharge, Orval lived isolated and unshaven in his mother
’
s apartment (she had moved here to the City after Felix died), and had the old lady not been totally
impervious to all external phe
nomena, she might have discovered in her son a tendency toward morbid melancholia. But luckily an old friend encouraged Orval to take advantage of governmental education handouts to veterans, and Orval went off to business school, soon forgetting—apparently any way—his worries. At school, he met Sissy Ann Madison, rescued her from the humdrum of the business world and introduced her to the humdrum of housewifery, though not without suffering a few weeks of strange and irrational panic just before the ceremony. Orval and Sissy Ann were painfully slow at reaching a state of what people call perfect union, and
in
fact, much too slow for Sissy Ann? who grew increasingly nervous about the delay, and who would certainly have sought her own sol
utions had she had enough imagi
nation to do so. Meanwhile, though lacking most of the business man
’
s arts, and often the gull of unscrupulous colleagues, Orval developed steadily into a dependable and conscientious salesman, unimpeachably loyal to the Company and embarrassingly honest in his negotiations. Then, as oftentimes happens, as Orval
’
s self-con
fidence grew, Sissy Ann came to enjoy him more, and finally, with appropriate gaiety, surprised him on the night of their ninth wedding anniversary with the news that a child was expected. A kind of delirium possessed Orval. He! A father I For the first time in at least sixteen years, he thought of his own father, that morose but proud old man, and on the day after Sissy Ann had told him, he impulsively bought cigars for everyone in the Company, even though he still had nearly eight months to wait. Well, such things are understood and, more often than not, forgiven in the business world. His sales soared over the next few months, his self-confidence climbed to a new and exhilarating peak, and in short, life was extraordinarily bountiful for Orval Nulin Evachefsky
...
until one day, late in the autumn, Sissy Ann, only a month away
from par
turition, developed a strange red splotch on her face. She thought nothing of it, in spite of feeling a little funny, but then a second one appeared a day later, and she began to grow alarmed. Yet her alarm was the purest serenity, compared to what was happening to Orval. He did not need the second splotch, that first one was quite enough to dredge up all the forgotten and unconfessed fears of his troubled past, and in particular, to call up the grinning
specter
of Maggie Wilson and her spirochaet
e
. He staggered away from the breakfast table, forgetting his hat and briefcase, and hours later found himself stumbling blindly about in the port area of the City, a piece of cold toast in his hands. With the aid of three gin rickeys, he was able to pull himself together by nightfall and find his way home, but his sleep was shattered by terribly biological visions. The next day, hardly noticing the second splotch on Sissy Ann
’
s face, he left
without
hat, briefcase, credit cards, or tie. Whether or not he went to the office is unfortunately not known. But at 12:47, Orval took the elevator to the thirty-seventh floor of the Federal Building, and at 12:52, without the slightest hesitation, leaped from a west window to his death, impaling himself on a parking meter in the street below, to the immense horror of Carlyle Smith, schoolteacher, age thirty-six, who was about to put a penny in the meter. Just before learning of his death, his wife Sissy Ann was told by her obstetrician that she had a fairly acute case of infectious erysipelas. He gave her a shot of penicillin in the bottom and ordered her to bed.