Reinhart in Love (2 page)

I have scanned the rotunda with my telescope but no father did I see, Reinhart said ironically to himself over his whiskey in the bar. Since in a handful of civilian hours no other suggestion had been offered, he supposed he would return to college, which anyhow was free to veterans—he had a premonition that every civil possibility was in lieu of the real, i.e., the imaginary thing—and no sooner had he submitted to that supposition than he began to perceive events through the filter of various old quotations: “I have scanned the heavens with my telescope but no God did I see,” to which the devout had made some rejoinder which naturally he had forgotten; “the white-faced onanists of cities,” who seemed to be as numerous as ever; “put out the light and then put out the light”; etc., the detritus of a year and a half of university, three years before.

Lieutenant Oedipus and Jocasta were also in the bar, at a little round table, drinking from squat glasses clogged with fruit. Reinhart passed them on the way to the cigarette machine, where he applied for king-sized Whelps; he got Blackguards with a cork tip and no matchbook at all. He bruised the machine's multicolored facade until the manager threatened litigation.

When Reinhart returned to the bar stool he had a new neighbor: the distinguished gray-haired gentleman he had last seen at the newsstand, a New York or London type,
very
friendly, who offered to fire his cigarette with an expensive lighter of the kind called “engine-turned,” whatever that was, and advertised in the low-pressure manner with the price spelled out, for example, Eighteen dollars and fifty cents, in snotty magazines—Reinhart concentrated on the lighter to avoid the gentleman's lean face, for such elegance conjoined with such geniality, in America, could only mean much inversion. He decently accepted the light, though, but having got it looked very vague and, collecting his coat, drifted to and waited for the unspinning of the revolving door, which was stuffed with a heavy, dark-clothed man in a crushed hat.

Again in the great marble hall, a kind of Reichstag as yet not burned or bombed, Reinhart lurched toward the main portal and soon found himself outside taking night air and a vista of the automobile approaches to the terminal, between which lay a lighted concrete esplanade leading to the slums and, above, dead fountains on several levels. “Where every prospect pleases and only man is vile.” From his point of view every car, in the line like cartridges in a bandoleer, looked to be a 1938 Chevrolet, and driving it in or out was his father, who had missed or would miss him; and he, Reinhart
fils
, was alone in the great world. He suddenly wearied of the inevitable childishness of his fancies and decided to take a streetcar—home? Anyhow, in lieu of. So far as he knew, since his parents seldom wrote and he returned the favor in kind, a defense worker, spawned in some estaminet of Kentucky, still occupied his old room.

To take the trolley meant he must walk some incredible distance—somehow with each inch of modern progress came another mile of inconvenience: in the good old days everything you needed was in sight of your cave—and he started down the middle of the ramp, prepared to bluff automobiles: if a car hits a moose, the animal is killed, but so is the vehicle. Notwithstanding that he now weighed 221, and was sensitive, authoritative, sanguine, and would receive a pleasant surprise in the near future—all this assured by a little ticket, stamped in violet, ejected from the men's-room scale in answer to his penny, while an Uncle Tom dressed like a physician waited behind with obsequious towel—notwithstanding this full cargo, Reinhart felt almost light and very wieldy as he sauntered along, and his spirit kept pace, a certain sign something was missing. Opposite one of the dry fountains, now a big candy dish of cigarette ends, Kleenex balls, and dog turds, he was conscious that his barracks bag was no longer a constant companion. Probably the old fairy in the bar retained it as hostage.

He had got back as far as the station entrance when he saw coming through the door the fat nameless type who infests public places—except that this fellow he was seeing for the third time: hat knocked off, coming into bar, and now; and now the man was carrying his, Reinhart's, bag: and furthermore had a kind of license to do so, having become increasingly familiar to him. Indeed, Reinhart literally could not have got started without this person and as much as acknowledged it in his greeting.

“Dad!”

Immediately his father disappeared into the collar of his heavy coat; like a turtle, his reappearing hinged on how badly he had been scared. His voice issued feebly from under the carapace.

“I recognized your sack before I recognized you—because it has your name on it.” His cucumber nose inched over the collar. Pretending distant acquaintance, Reinhart quietly searched for the cigar he had purchased for the occasion, and found it in the right breast pocket, of course busted like a little whiskbroom. Which was no more than just, for he remembered his father did not smoke.

But, ah!, by this time his old man had partially emerged.

Taking care, Reinhart said wanly: “I'm sorry, Dad, I didn't know you at first. I—” He flipped the cigar fragments into the icy wind, which reversed itself at once and blew them like ape hair across the front of his ETO jacket.

Dad hastened to claim the onus: “Well I didn't know
you
, either, uh, Corporal—”

“The name's Carlo, Dad.”

“You're discharged now, is that it?” His father's hat was still crumpled, despite Reinhart's earlier having put it to rights after he knocked it off; retroactively he saw the gold initials on the sweat-band: his father always found a haberdashery with a stamping service. The point was, though, that Dad was a natty fellow—or had been. Now he seemed altogether down at the heels. For example, in addition to the seedy hat, there were his lapels, from which the nap had worn; and his shirt collar was one size loose about a chicken-veined neck and puckered all the way round under the tie. His father was an old man. Terrible, and more so than in Europe where they were born ancient and when they died, did it instantly. In an American railway station, in the evening, during the obsequies for the old year, it is always the dark night of the soul; and the lighter, the darker: above them in the entryway marquee shone a fluorescent tube under which passers-by appeared green-faced, ambulatory corpses.

“Have a lozenge?” asked Dad, producing a white paper bag.

No, it was too horible. Reinhart seized the olive-drab bag instead and hurried his pop down the ramp towards the car park. Lozenges! What could be more telling? In the old days Dad habitually chewed caramels; obviously now his teeth were gone with the vanished years 1942–45. Reinhart had distinctly heard a hideous clicking, and nothing around the station front was loose. Reinhart was grateful for his own lack of condition and tried to look even fatter, weaker, whiter, and more slovenly as he ambled slowly so his puffing father could keep stride.

Nevertheless they had gone but halfway when Dad seized his arm and failingly groaned: “I can't walk too fast, being not as young as arsewhile—on guard, here comes a taxi!” He sprang in terror upon the curb and almost collapsed on the footwalk. In the little things which menaced no one else he was a great coward. As a boy Reinhart could never hold a pocketknife, even closed, without hearing his father's augury of accidental bloodshed; had never ejected a pea through a shooter without a warning of punctured eyeballs. Preparing to go to the corner letterbox, his father issued a formal farewell; in the hundred yards between here and there were possibilities of lightning, drunken drivers who might leap the curb, hydrophobic Airedales, and that legendary staple of quiet neighborhoods, the ordinary householder who suddenly goes mad as an elephant in must, ignites his window curtains, and attacks passersby with a Stillson wrench. If you cross your eyes in horseplay, they might lock so. Sitting on concrete will give you piles. A jovial backslap will dislocate a spine. He who lifts stacked newspapers is a ruptured man. Never drink milk while eating fish: your bowels will worm. One drink of champagne makes you reckless; a second and you're out like a light, and someone will rifle your pockets. Remove the screens by the first frost, or a burglar will assume you're on a late vacation and make violent entry. Never lower your guard before the relatives or they will apply for a loan.

Walking in the deep gutter as compromise, Reinhart said to his father, up on the walk—they were now the same height—“I never did find Granpa's family in Germany.”

Immediately his dad recovered from the fright, and indeed Reinhart had only mentioned it as therapy.

“Guess you lost no sleep over that.” The son of a native Berliner, his father knew as much German as he did Patagonian. He also had about as much in common with his own son as he had with F. D. Roosevelt, whom he had voted against four times. Yet walking there both below him and on his level—the complexities of physics having some reference to the moral order—Reinhart realized his fundamental feeling towards his father was not contempt, as it had seemingly been from roughly the age of sixteen to approximately five minutes ago. He did not much like him, but he probably loved him.

“Dad?”

“Huh?” His father warily edged towards the spiked winter shrubbery on the far side of the pavement. Another fluorescent lamp, the usual undertaker, jutted from a high post like an opening straight razor; good old right angles had been everywhere outmoded since Reinhart donned the knapsack and marched away.

“Dad, do you mind? We haven't shaken hands yet.” Reinhart put out his large right, with the dirty nails.

“Is that the thing to do?”

“Who gives a damn?”

“I wish you wouldn't stand in the street—
here comes another cab!
” He referred to a vehicle at the entrance to the esplanade, a good quarter mile away.

“O.K.,” answered Reinhart. “I wouldn't want to hurt it.” He climbed to the sidewalk and took his dad's hand and squeezed it until the taxi passed them. Whether his father returned the emotion he didn't know—for Reinhart's fist was bigger than everybody else's and perforce commanded every shaking—but the old chap's head came entirely out of his coat collar for the first time. He had not shaved well, and some of his whiskers were white. He smelled of Aqua Velva, as of yore.

“Dad, you know what David Copperfield's aunt once said to him? ‘Never be mean, never be false, never be cruel.' You never have been, and I guess that makes you unique.”

They had arrived at a point where they had no option but to cross the roadway to the parking lot.

“That's very considerable of you, Carlo,” said Dad, “but in this place, look out that a car don't back over you without a signal.”

Reinhart's father drove the gray sedan slow as a hearse; otherwise it bore no resemblance to your typical funeral wagon, being drab and small. The man who in life drives a Chevrolet, in death is chauffeured in a splendid Cadillac like a South American dictator. Reinhart could not shake off the mortuary suggestions, for which he blamed the Stygian approaches to his bailiwick. He only wished he had got a little jar of instant Golden Bough. Certainly they passed enough delicatessens, even a supermarket or two burning bright in the forests of the night; here people trapped particolored containers and pushed them around in wire cages on wheels.

They passed taverns full of testy men glowering into tumblers served up by morally enervate bartenders. The waitress in a chili parlor wore a nurse's white cap and a butcher's apron gory with catsup. Some strange howling unruly animals under a streetlamp proved to be pubescent males. From the public-library door sidled a small, bug-eyed man, clutching his guide to poisons. At one corner an inebriate confessed down the slot of a postal box to a midget priest within, but before they got the green and Dad shuddered into low, the drunk finished his
peccavi
and prepared to sin again, hooting obscenities at their rear tires, which smooth as eggs habitually lost traction on the streetcar rails.

“How many miles on your heap now?” asked Reinhart.

Wincing at a boor's bright headlights, which violated a law never enforced—his father said: “Whatever you see on the speedometer, plus a hundred thousand.” And then swallowing and blinking, sprang his surprise: he waited on the list for a new convertible.

“You're kidding.”

“Yes I am,” Dad admitted smugly, then had to shy the car from a suicidal dog, missing it but almost killing the vehicle: a piece of metal, probably the motor, clattered behind on the trolley-car rails. Reinhart decarred and went to fetch the part, only a hubcap; even Dad's accidents, like his humor, were innocuous. Declining to squat upon the blacktop and fit it to the wheel while passing autos singed his posterior cheeks, Reinhart tossed it onto the rear seat and got back in in time to hear the end of what he assumed to be the comments Dad had started earlier, for his old man was habitually oblivious to whether or not anyone heard him, being utterly without ambition. “… a standard two-door is good enough for me.”

His tone reminded Reinhart of a second parent, the woman of their threesome, who whenever he had brought home a college friend stated across the dinner table: “Start right in. We're just plain folks here,” seeing it as something to brag about.

They had come to the colored ghetto west of town and as they waited for another light a slender Negress minced diagonally across corners, articulating in the midsection of the best ball bearings extant since the Eighth Air Force razed the factories at Schweinfurt. She was all girl.

“Look at those coons,” wistfully noted Dad, being plural because he meant a group of male hangers-on in front of a drugstore, digging each other's ribs, yacking and saying Man! twelve times a minute. “They sure have fun.” But just as well nothing fell from the car in that district, for he would have been scared to let Carlo get out and retrieve it; even more fun for a black man than standing before a windowful of trusses and Lifeboy, was to assault lone Caucasians.