Reinhart in Love (7 page)

“Going out to dinner,” said Reinhart, trying to get a new blade out of its many wrappings without cutting his thumb, and as usual failing. With all his liberalism he rejected a negative worry about going into a Negro district with an open wound: all those germs.

“I knew you'd make swell friends in no time,” said Dad. “If I'd known, would have given you a dollar to go to the while-you-wait cleaner's and have your uniform done.”

At least Reinhart hadn't cut his face so far. His cheeks emerged bright pink from the shearing; in the colored section he would shine like a dime among pennies. The white race was screwed when it came to camouflage.

“They give you a barrel to stand in,” his father went on, a man who could sit forever without adjustments to the life force: nose-picking, scratching, etc.; he had never even chewed gum. “No they don't, Carlo, but you have seen those cartoons, I imagine. Have you caught up again on the funnies?” Had Dad found a profession that could be conducted in, or from, a bathroom, he would have made his fortune; he took ease there and even wore a faint smile; and taken as bowels and epidermis, Caesar, Napoleon,
et al
., were hardly more than he.

“Tell you what was on my mind,” he apprehensively changed the subject. “Now, no criticism intended, it goes without saying, but I was contemplating what you figure on doing till school starts. Because I know you'll be taking advantage of the GI Bill, full tuition paid and in addition this generous emollient per the month of expenses. A
wonderful opportunity
, and one never before vouchfaced to the American veteran.… You
will
take advantage of this wonderful opportunity?”

Dad attended patiently on Reinhart's deliberate opening of the tap—the son refused to assent before the plumbing did; at last scalding his finger, Carlo nodded.

“Righto,” agreed Dad. “But till the onset of the summer session, if I have sized you up, with all your pep you can't stand laying around the house. Mentioned my calculation to Claude Humbold today, and as you might expect, that good-hearted man—who thinks almost as much of you as your mother—well, to put it in a word, he's ready to make you an offer.”

Reinhart left the Nirvana of the hot washrag and asked, with open pores: “For what, Dad?”

“A job, Carlo. Or rather, if I know him, a position. Till college starts and even then, maybe, for late-afternoon and Saturday morning, ess etera, ess etera.”

It sounded like a gangland killing up the hall towards the kitchen, double-barreled shotguns and Italian venom, but it was rather Maw's announcement:
“Fine time to pick for going on the throne, George. I slave for hours over this supper to see it turn to cold grease on account of your bullheadedness. Well I can tell you, one minute more and you eat it out of the garbage can.”

“Coming, Maw,” called Dad, rising warily to the thin ground between him and Carlo, who realized by that movement that his own silent malevolence was stronger than Maw's noise—and that Dad
was
bullheaded and most formidable, despite his disguise. Reinhart had never concealed his distaste for Humbold, having nothing particular against the man but everything in general.

“Ah, Dad, you never give up. You've been throwing that bastard at me all my life. I cut his grass and washed his car, and he beat my price down ten cents less than I got from anybody else. I walked the rotten dog he had before Popover, which tore my cuff, and Hum-bold simply laughed when I told him. Before I left for college you had me go see Humbold, I'll never know why, because he left school in the eighth grade and is, so he told me, an enemy of higher education who could buy up the entire faculty of the Municipal University from his petty cash.” Reinhart milked the water from his shaving brush and tossed it into the medicine cabinet between tincture of merthiolate and cocoa-butter suppositories, feeling a pain the latter could never assuage. “You are the Mahatma Gandhi to my British Empire, Dad, and I see your strength but don't get the moral behind it.”

Dad showed him a back of rumpled shirt and baggy seat, handkerchief three-quarters out of the rear left pocket, cuffs scouring the floor and frayed where the shoe heels bit them.

“Okay, okay, okay.” Dad's voice issued from the little end of a megaphone, and his expiration seemed imminent. He would never reach Maw's overcooked repast, but die like a dog in the hall.

On the way out, Reinhart dropped by the kitchen, where his parents sat forlorn over their coffeecups—surely not because of his absence, but rather owing to a habitual postprandial
tristitia:
belly full, what was left?

At least Maw got some fun from his intrusion. “Oh great!” she chortled. “Late for your first
dinner
invite. That'll go over big! Everything cold with the grease congealed, your hosts sitting around ravenous. You know other people work all day and need their food. You'll get punched right in the mush, and never think you'll come waltzing back here to get your grub. You'll have to go that boogie joint on the West Side and order ptomaine goulash.”

Could she suspect his destination? While his back was turned, Dad slipped out to the living room.

Reinhart took the load off his feet, on Dad's empty chair. “I might take some of your coffee.”

“Pretty egotistical, eh? Half-hour late is not enough, make it an hour. To heck with the next fellow.” She seized the pot from the adjacent stove and filled a cup which was already waiting at his table-place. This cup was of course decorated with Chinese (?) birds, summerhouses, etc., in blue and had a chip where your lips would go if you drank it right-handed. Before he could catch her, Maw turned the coffee blue to match with a great flood from the milk bottle.

“Don't have to be there till seven,” said Reinhart.

“Aren't we grand?” sneered Maw. “Their nigger chauffeur picking you up?”

Again he was startled by the relevance of her images, but laid it to the psychic sympathy between mother and son—even such an unlikely Mutter und Sohn as those having coffee at this moment, once had used a common bloodstream, and Reinhart was but a maverick projection of Maw's essence. Thinking this over, he seemed to recall certain tendernesses tendered him when he was but a babe, the last time he had been satisfactory, even to himself, and he now put a hand on Maw's forearm irregular with tendons.

“Ah, Maw, don't fight it.”

She shook him off, rose, and began a brutal clatter in the sink. Sometimes the gall gathered in her throat in a kind of tumor, as at present. She sought to hum some private Horst Wessel Song and choked.

“You all right?” asked Reinhart, making a treaty with the rancid coffee, i.e., leaving it.

“Sure, it's only my cancer. Now git!” She shooed her apron, which had dual pockets for potholders, at him; and held a copper-bottomed pan as if it were a missile.

“Oh, is
that
all?” He fled, having as a child served many times for her target practice. She rated Expert with all the kitchen implements, and what with age and weight he had lost the old agility.

When he reached the front door Dad crept from behind a bookcase and tried to press the car keys on him.

“What about Lodge?” asked Reinhart, patting his father's spongy shoulder.

“I'll walk,” whispered Dad. He kept advancing the key case, which had a little replica of a Chevrolet embossed in its leather as well as the incised address of the dealer, to whom it could be mailed if lost and found.

“No,
I'll
walk,” said Reinhart, and they Alphonsed and Gastoned for a time, but being very quiet about it, and heard the kitchen clatter testify to their success.

Finally pointing to the waist flap of his ETO jacket, which missed closure by a half inch, Reinhart established the fact that he could use the exercise and escaped, though not without suffering a folded dollar bill from Dad, who advised: “Be sure to take along some candy or flowers. That's the way to make a hit with swell people.”

The evening was falling rather shabbily as Reinhart set out on the two miles to the West Side, a murky cloud or two melting like old dumplings into the stew of the sky. He sniffed for rain, and got the bouquet of some neighbor's fried haddock. On the main East-West axis, three-quarters of the journey behind him, he bought several cheap cigars from a tobacconist who himself represented the transition: he was white, but gradually darkening from the ills of aging man and the cares of storekeepers. For example, he assured Reinhart that the people who had mobbed him for black-market cigarettes during the war, with the same zeal avoided his place of business now that smokes were plentiful.

“Your typical customer is a louse, I must say,” he must have said, though Reinhart, choking on the El Ropo, heard him imperfectly. “You servicemen got yours for a nickel a pack, I know, and sent loads home, but I don't complain of that.”

“You don't?” asked Reinhart sympathetically, lighting the cigar again at the little blue gas flame which sprang pistil-like from a kind of metal tulip planted on the counter.

“Nah? Where you think I got my extras to peddle? A son in the Navy, hoho. But you can bet I never sold any to the boogies.”

It seemed the whole white world knew where Reinhart was going for dinner and tried to make him feel guilty about it, no great job with a person of his temperament, but shortly he was at the frontier. Just as he feared, the hour was not too early for the drugstore guard. They stood with their striped shirts and keychains and cuffs choking their ankles and hair in their necks, and one fellow, whose skin was navy-blue, wore a great white fedora banded in alligator. As Reinhart approached, nobody looked directly at him, yet he was under a keen surveillance. He walked with his eyes tight and his hams followed suit, and he bumped right into the man with the white fedora.

“Oh excuse me!” said Reinhart. As unobtrusively as you could when you were his size, he tried to slip by.

The navy-blue man, however, hung on, his great hat riding at Reinhart's right shoulder. “Say Captain,” he said, “you looking for action?”

Disingenuously, Reinhart made a naive smile. “I come in peace,” he asserted, believing that the affected utterance was what might go over.

Beneath the alligator band his companion chuckled with the sound of frying butter and said: “Well after the services, then, maybe a little action for the Blessed Lord?”

It appeared to Reinhart that his companion—who was quite small, anyway—was not suggesting violence, but rather some sport. Besides which the other colored fellows had dematerialized as evil spirits might at the appearance of a shaman, or more likely vice versa, for he had seen the noted rolling of their eyes in apprehension and even the shill at his elbow suddenly asked: “You sure you ain't The Man?”

Calmer now, Reinhart looked down at him and said: “Frankly, sir, I don't know what you are talking about.”

“The Man, Captain, the bulls, the police. I guess you ain't cause you wearing Army.” He tipped back his hat. Oddly, he wore no gold teeth, and the others were not startlingly white, that is, the others that could be seen, for the front ones were gone and he guarded what was left with his massive lips, speaking from the smallest possible aperture, as if he would rather whistle. “And ‘action,' that's
action
, which tonight is craps in the second-floor front over Honey Dove's Turkish Lounge, which is two doors from Daddy Small's Blessed Angel of Peace Church, which you already made an announcement you was in motion towards. Now if you
is
The Man, it will be
you
word only against mine that I be scout for said action, as you can appreciate by realizing potential witnesses to the otherwise has gone up the spout, as is said among our English cousins.”

“England?” asked Reinhart. “Were you ever in England?”

“England?” the man repeated. “I tell you, Ducks, I as English as George Rex! You make my action in Bridgwater? I was with the Army,” he added. “Ours.”

“Never,” Reinhart answered. He would so have liked to give some assent to the man and call back the potential witnesses, but he feared that such a move would be exactly what they expected of a disguised policeman. “And I'm sorry I can't make it here, but could you direct me to Mohawk Street?”

The scout turned suspicious. “You collecting on in-surance or overdue liberry books?” He reconcealed himself under the hat. “See, I don't live hereabout but come in on the commute, familiarizing only with this here corner.”

“Now
you
don't understand,” said Reinhart. “There's nothing devious or illegitimate about my present endeavor. My purpose is essentially—”

“Man, you do talk up a sirocco,” said the scout. “And verily I don't pick up your pip on my radar a-tall. But being you change the motion of you de-sires, I am always available for consultation. My card.” He passed it on, a square of cream-colored cardboard, much thumbed, embossed:
THE
MAKER
.

Reinhart thanked him kindly and went to put it away.

“You can't
keep
it,” said the Maker. “I only got one.” He reclaimed the card, inserting it within a wonderful old fake-alligator wallet that matched his hatband but was somewhat older, several of the scales having come loose at one margin, like so many little trapdoors.

Regretfully, Reinhart saw he must, for the present, make his way without the Maker's help, and was about to move on when a potential witness filtered between them saying: “Maker, here come a john,” and returned to the fourth dimension. A lone white man ranged the far sidewalk and lit a new cigarette at every store window, in which he was terribly interested though they were each one dark.

“Now I was wrong about maybe you,” said the Maker, with a jerk of his hat and a flash of his many rings and a whiff of his breath smelling of lavender and a tug at his camel's-hair coat almost as white as his hat, “but if I ever saw a mortal ready to do business, it's our slinky friend yonder.”