Reinhart in Love (53 page)

Splendor agreed, and added: “If I may be so bold, Carlo, you will make a commonplace discovery into an enterprise of great pitch and moment.”

“Well it is, for me,” Reinhart admitted. By his failure he had let himself open to a certain amount of impudence from his friend and colleague, and it would have been too shamefully easy to point out Splendor's inadequacies.

The latter had gone into quite a good mood and was rubbing his beige palms together.

“Now,” he said, “we can get to work.”

“On what?” Reinhart asked in a clipped, sarcastic manner. “No irony, please. I may have to accept the status quo at present, but as soon after the baby is born as is feasible, I'm going to resign. I will not permanently remain in a job where I have lost face.”

The vice-president left his desk and took up Claude's late position in the center of the room. Reinhart recognized the old fanatical look he had not seen since the days of Dr. Goodykuntz.

“Isn't this what we've always wanted?” Splendor cried, his lower jaw continuing to tremble between sentences. “Our backs to the wall, no hope of succor, food gone, and ammunition in short supply. What do we do now, boys?” he asked an invisible Lost Battalion, and gave the answer as if from them:
“We attack!”

“Take it easy, Splendor. Don't you remember? We just did that.” Reinhart unobtrusively reached towards the water carafe which was part of his desk equipment, meaning to dash its contents at the Negro if reason would not calm him. He absolutely would not again join in any extravagance.

“I beg to correct you. And don't drench me until you've heard me out,” Splendor said more moderately. “What we have seen is an attempt at negotiation, and its inevitable failure. Now for the frontal assault.” He hastily waved Reinhart down. “O.K., disregard the military idiom: I use it only because you have always shown an adolescent taste for glory.”

“Yes,” said Reinhart, “at one time that was certainly true about me; but the very fact that I can listen to you sneer at it now without punching your snoot proves I have matured.”

“You've got me wrong,” Splendor said evenly. “You've
always
had me wrong from the first, but I don't mind.”

“Well, why don't you mind?” asked Reinhart. “If anybody had always had me wrong, I would mind. It's the normal thing to do. Go on, mind.”

“Because, simply because I want to get on to more important things.” You couldn't say that Splendor struck a pose; he always stood like that if you were seated.

Reinhart said: “Personally, I find your nobility irrelevant, or perhaps just late. What I cannot understand, to put it as decently as possible, is why your high principles are reserved only for me. And not ten minutes ago you backed down disgracefully from Claude Humbold. Is it unfair to mention Dr. Goodykuntz? Whose head wore the turban at the moment of truth? Who had to endure being accused as a plagiarist by the editors of
The Midland Review?
I can tell you right now that two things in all the world that I do not want to be are nonchemical physician and writer. I was deeply humiliated on both occasions, and the latter almost broke up my marriage.”

Splendor continued to stand between the desks, untouched, in the neat pinstripe with a white handkerchief above his heart.

“I'll tell you, Carlo, some other time we'll draw up your bill of particulars against me, but at the moment I ask you to put aside my delinquencies, your plans for wreaking revenge, Dr. Goodykuntz,
et al
., the whole kit and caboodle.” Splendor spoke with some passion, and his saliva spray could be seen against the light. “I ask us now to go beyond all these petty specificities, to move out of the strait passages onto the broad plains where are enacted the events of magnitude and scope which give our civilization its peculiar character. Materialism, my dear Carlo, the superstition that we consist in no more than three yards of intestine beginning with an open maw and terminating in a rectum, is our enemy, and not its poor disreputable advocates, the victims of the delusion so coarsely expressed in the maxim you and I both heard while serving with our armed forces in the late conflict: ‘If you can't eat it or copulate with it, urinate on it.'“

Splendor wiped his mouth with his breast-pocket handkerchief and replaced it messy. His eyes were preoccupied. He resumed: “You know why we must build this sewer, more than ever now that Mr. Humbold will oppose us with all his might?”

He was the only person in the whole organization, not excluding the secretaries or the guy who came to read the electric meter, who addressed Humbold in the polite style—no doubt for the simple reason that he had never been told “call me Claude.” But Reinhart suddenly liked to think that Splendor would have been formal anyway: the last gentleman on earth, with his back against the wall, and nobody else here but us Visigoths.

“Certainly not to benefit the population,” Splendor answered himself. “The present sanitary facilities will be adequate until at least 1980, according to the statistical projection made last year by the county engineers. The average town resident unit produces 1,512.7 cubic feet of sewerage annually. The annual percentage of increase for the next 35 years, allowing for a steady rise in the number of automatic washing machines, extra bathrooms, exterior water hydrants, etc., added to existing homes, allowing even for the construction of more additional residences than the town has space for—as you know, because of surrounding communities we cannot grow much—this on the one hand, and on the other, our only real industry, the Amalgamated Pencil Company, providing it expands beyond the wildest dreams of avarice on the part of its management”—Splendor cleared his throat—“could increase its present flow of sewage by 150 per cent without overencumbering the present mains, which after all date only from 1932, with a new treatment plant in ‘38.”

He stopped here, in full cognizance of the effect on Reinhart.

“You know all this for a fact?” asked the latter, in lieu of anything more striking.

“For three months,” said Splendor, “I had nothing to do as vice-president but study the field. In all modesty I can describe myself as a sanitary engineer in all but the certificate.” He returned to his desk and produced from its drawers sundry volumes, graphs, and charts that Reinhart was willing without argument to accept as the last word on the theme. He had always wondered what Splendor was reading while he, Reinhart, signed requisitions for Johnny Reo.

“You did not get these by mail from Pocatello, Idaho?”

Splendor laughed politely—that is, not in Reinhart's face but towards the windows. “Never fear. Ah, no, the county engineer's office, with its excellent library, is very cooperative on such matters.”

“Yes,” said Reinhart with no malice, “and that office would be in the courthouse, whose location you would know, having been in jail there last spring.” Splendor nodded benignly. Reinhart then chuckled, though feeling as exhausted as if he had run a mile. With approaching fatherhood, he suffered a marked diminution of the old endurance; yet he would not let this make him mean. “Well,” he said, “I guess you have showed us.”

“Please,” Splendor protested, “I'm hardly interested in exhibitionism.” His eyebrows came down. “I was hoping you'd ask why then we should build the sewer when it's not needed. And I trust I have proved it isn't—except for the West Side, the one part of town where it will not go. The present facility in my home district is disgraceful. You can fake a new sewer elsewhere, because the old one does an adequate job, but—”

Reinhart at last cleared things with his amour propre and sprang in here: “I get it, I get it!”

“You don't,” Splendor said coldly.

“Wait a moment,” Reinhart cried. “Hear me out. Our funds may have been reduced by three months of fantastic graft, but we still have surely enough to put a new main through the West Side. That's about half a mile at the outside, and it can link up with the trunk line just north of Mayberry Place.”

“No, no, no,” shouted Splendor. “I an officer of the company building the Negroes a new sewer? How would that look? Collusion and influence-peddling all over again.”

“Christ, you've got to benefit somebody. You mean, out of some highly abstract conception of honor we should make an altogether purposeless excavation in the middle of nowhere? That is what they call—”

“Reductio ad absurdum.”

Splendor pronounced it with so much satisfaction that Reinhart was moved to wail: “You read in
Life
magazine about those Existentialists and have become one.”

Splendor just loved to be accused of something or other; he protested, but you could see it made him happy just to be charged. However, he really had improved, in his own way, ever since leaving jail: having Reinhart fined for littering the park was a means of striking back. Now he had grown beyond mere negative aggression and wanted to establish himself ethically, like one of Conrad's young captains who yearns for bad weather to steer his ship through so as to prove his worth as mariner and man.

Reinhart got his cigar butt from the ash tray where it had gone cold some time before.

“Look here,” he said, “I am the legal president of this company. To put me where I would catch the blame, Claude and the Gibbons had to give me real power. There's a lesson in that. I don't know the Existentialist position on the matter, but a rather varied experience of life has shown me that one necessarily involves the other; power: obligation: honor. Now, since the responsibility is primarily mine in this case, I must make the decision. But I shall need you for the performance, my dear fellow. In fact, I must abandon the project if you refuse your aid.

“We shall build an honest, efficient sewer, not to spite Claude or because we are good citizens and godfearing men or any such hot air, but because we have contracted to do so. We will restore the value of a man's word!

“Second, we shall dig it through the West Side, not because the residents there are more deserving than those elsewhere, or because the vice-president of our firm has personal interests in that district, but rather because that's where it is needed.”

Splendor tried to look sinister, to emphasize his warning: “You are prepared to lose your house?”

“Not,” said Reinhart, “until I've used the tricks up my sleeve. If they fail, of course Claude will throw us out. But I'd rather see my child born in a cheap hotel room than have it grow up with a gutless father.” He gestured at his friend. “By the way, we'd like you to come to dinner, but you understand it is inconvenient for Gen, being pregnant.”

“I apologize, Carlo, for accusing you of getting me wrong. Indeed we see eye to eye,” Splendor graciously admitted. “You know of course that we shall probably fail. Ranged against us are the mayor, the chief of police, and the biggest businessman in town; and Johnny Reo is essentially a gangster.”

“None of that materialist talk,” cried Reinhart, using the tiny cigar butt as a saber.

Reinhart felt much less confidence than he professed, but temporarily everybody else had a false sense of security and would not bother him, at least not for the rest of the day, Claude, Genevieve, and Splendor. Of course he must let Dad know without delay, who had really headed him for the new goal, just as he had steered him to the old. Way last March, Dad said, go to Humbold; and now, build a real sewer, and his son had acquiesced after only token resistance. As a result he no longer felt guilty about the old fellow, but just resented him for telling Why but not How. Very normal situation on both sides; he would get his revenge on his own son; and so the world keeps turning.

Meanwhile, we all must do our jobs. Reinhart swore Splendor in as technical director and sent him off to the county engineer's office, not neglecting to pave his way by phone and written authorization, lest that official be not as cooperative as Splendor had, to make a point, represented him.

Next Reinhart placed a call to the number that the office book listed opposite the name of Johnny Reo. At length this got him a phone booth in the rear of the Star Tavern and Grill.

“Are you sure?”

“Whadduh yuh sure?” asked the bartender. “Don't I know when I walk all the way back here?”

“I wonder,” said Reinhart, “how I happened to get this number for Johnny Reo, the sewer subcontractor.”

“Maybe because he's usually in the booth alongside only not now gimme your phone he'll call yuh.”

Reinhart did so and hung up. He was now about to draw his ace from the hole, and his audacity had not yet reached his throat: if he talked just now, his voice would quaver. At the same time he grew maniacally horny, and believed that if the secretaries had returned (they had not) he might have violated them both in the outer office, in full sight of passers-by. However, it was the compensatory lust of little faith, rather than a symptom of overconfidence—when you are married, you learn such things—and after two quick shots from the bottle he kept in his desk as an antidote for self-doubt, it went away.

He seized the telephone again and dialed Long Distance.

“Listen, Operator, I want to place a person-to-person call to James T. Marsala, Brooklyn, New York. I have his number.”

She rang and buzzed and clicked, and eventually someone answered from deep in that terra incognita. Another bar & grill. Party referred them to a numbah rin Bridgeport, Conn. Jimmy apparently then was back from the Army; Reinhart's hopes rose. The Bridgeport phone was in a barbershop. The proprietor said: “He ain't in Bridge-a-port. Gone to New Jerse,” gave an address, added: “I don' wan' no troub',” and rang off.

“Shall I try this Whoopee Club in Hamhurst?” asked the operator with her
noli me tangere
diction.

“Naturally,” Reinhart answered, taking another shot of booze with his right hand. He had always understood that Jimmy's brother was the hood, and taken even that as a bit of forgivable hyperbole.