Set This House on Fire (50 page)

“Pardon me,” Cass put in abruptly. Something had jogged his memory; it had tickled him before and it tickled him now. “You know what,” he said, already laughing, “you know what the cardinals in the Vatican call Spellman?”

“No, what?” said Grace.
“Cardinal
Spellman.”

“Guess.”

“I really couldn’t guess,” she said with a hopeful look.

“Shir—” He had begun to laugh so hard that he could barely get the words out. “Shir—” Convulsed, he pressed his head against his hands, weakly heaving. “Shir—Oh Christ. Shirley Temple!”

“Cass!” Poppy cried.

“No, I mean it!” He giggled, gazing into Grace’s scandalized face. “He comes winging in from the U.S. and A., by this Super Constellation, see—”

“Cass!” said Poppy.

“No, I mean it! I was told this by a
priest,
mind you. In he comes to Ciampino, and the news gets around the Vatican that
Shirley Temple é arrivata!”

“Cass!”

“Haw haw haw!” Gusts of laughter exploded forth from the table, startling Cass, who looked up to see McCabe, mouth wide-open like his own, shaking in helpless mirth. “That’s rich, pal!” he said, wiping his eyes. “Shirley Temple, that’s the most! You hear that, Grace?” He could hardly wait, he added between wheezes, to tell Bill Hurley that one.

“I don’t think it’s funny at all,” said Grace sharply.

It was at that moment, Cass recalled later, that the evening took a vigorous turn for the better; to be sure, when all was said and done the change was illusory, lulling him, leading him into a trap, and engaging him in a tangle of emotional crises which he was not to shake off for a long time. At that moment, though (who knows what might be the repercussions of a single hairy joke?) he felt full of himself, transformed by McCabe’s surprising, appreciative laughter from a sour introvert into a talented clown. As for McCabe himself, who still sat across the table shaking his head and letting out loose wails of merriment, he basked for Cass in a new and more kindly light. That he was simple-minded and an ass was one thing; that in the face of his wife’s ambitious and tedious piety he could laugh gave him, in some odd and obscure way, more solid dimensions. Cass felt himself actually warming a little toward the man, “pal” and all.

“No, I’ll be confidential with you, see?” McCabe said after dinner, when Poppy and Grace were washing the dishes. “I’m a good Catholic and all that, but I’m not
thick
about it, see? Now Rome is great, I’ll tell you, but me and Grace have just come for two different reasons.” And, describing the curve of phantom breast or buttock with his hand, he said with a long vaudeville wink: “Know what I mean, pal?”

“I sure do, Mac,” said Cass benevolently.

The fatal moment had arrived. The transmogrified Mineola Eve, proffering forbidden fruit. “Say,” he said in a hoarse whisper. “You look like it’s been a long time since you had the real American article. How about some Old McCabe?”

He was not joking, and Old McCabe was no fiction: it was one hundred proof sour mash bourbon whiskey, bottled in Tennessee and sold in Mineola under McCabe’s own picturesque label (shamrocks, harp, Hibernian pipe), and he had a quart full of it in the sagging pocket of his mackintosh. Cass heard a groan, mingled in equal parts of joy and despondency, escape his lips as McCabe held the bottle, flashing amber, up to the light; he groaned and he fidgeted and he sweated and finally he said, in tones of purest affliction: “Well, Mac, I haven’t had any of that stuff since I left the States, and I’d like to. But I can’t.”

“Watsa matter? It’s the real article, pal. I never travel without it.”

“I can’t handle the booze,” he said simply. “It takes me. It gives me problems. I stick to a little wine. If you want to know the truth, I’m a whiskey-head. Also, Mac, I got an ulcer.”

He might have known better than to temporize this: within an hour, during this the cruelest night of his recent reckoning, he was on his way to becoming the drunkest man in Rome. And why? Why! Why on this night, under these particular circumstances, with this foolish and irksome stranger? Why, after so lojig a struggle to keep his balance, should he go off now, on a dull drab night in Rome which demanded the stuff neither for celebration nor mourning? Why, he kept asking himself, as in despair and in rapid succession he downed three half-tumblers full, straight, was he such a weak-kneed slob, unless he had simply been set down in a situation over which he had utterly no control? Suddenly (this was when McCabe, moist-mouthed and stripped to his red, white, and blue suspenders, had begun a series of gamy Irish jokes, full of Pats and Mikes and begorras) he began to wonder if this storekeeper were not really a sort of bizarre
advocatus diaboli,
sent not merely to test but to prove, through the irresistible sour mash, his inability to survive in the world of his own will. Mother of God, he thought as with mumbling lips he downed his third glass, I’m slipping again. But Old McCabe was, in truth, the real article: Cass began to glow inwardly and outwardly and all around; he abandoned himself to the jokes, hee-hawing with mouth wide-open and, like the meanest smoking car poltroon, slapping his haunches, rooting at his crotch, and telling McCabe a few of his own. When “the girls” returned from the kitchen, half an hour later, his face was aflame, he had torn off his tie, he was awash in sweat, and he was prancing the room like a billygoat.

“So this Irishman was on the train,” he was saying, “next to this little Middle Europe Jew who couldn’t read English and kept asking him to translate from the newspaper. So this Irishman said to himself, I’ll play a joke on this little guy.’—You know this one?”

“Cass Kinsolving!” He heard behind him Poppy’s cry of distress. “Oh, Cass, you’ve started all over
again!”

“Hush, Poppy! I’m telling a story!”

“But,
Cass—”

“So every time the Jew would ask ‘What’s this?’ the Irishman would say something like ‘syphilis’ or ‘Gonorrhea’ or—”

“Cass! You listen to me!”

“So finally the Jew said, ‘What’s this mean? This word right here,’ and the Irishman said, ‘That means the clap.’ So the Jew just shook his head slowly back and forth and said, ‘Oy! Is that Pope a
sick
man!”

“Haw haw haw!”
McCabe roared, rolling back on the couch. “Haw haw haw haw haw!”

Limp himself with mirth, free now of despair, regrets, recriminations, he wheeled about to face Poppy’s unhappiness: “You said you
wouldn’t
any more!”

“I was kidding,” he said, beaming, throwing an arm around her. “Forgot what fun it was.”

She jerked away from him. For a moment her mouth parted, trembling on speech. Then, as if canceling whatever it had been in her mind to say (God love her, he thought in a dreamy haze, she has never once nagged me in her life), she cast McCabe a ruinous look, turned silently about and left the room, either unwilling or unable to see him once more embrace his demon. She slammed the bedroom door.

Then strange things happened. Grace, still prim and aloof for a while, slowly dropped her guard and, prompted by her husband’s loud and deprecating wisecracks ("Come on, Gracie, don’t be a drag, so it’s Lent, you haven’t swore off the Old McCabe."), sampled some of the product; finding it as good as ever, she soon became well lubricated, loose of tongue and hair-do, and by midnight, just before their game of three-handed blackjack began, she had abandoned all airs and religiosity, hinting with a snicker that she might also have come to Rome “to pick up a couple of alligator bags,” and letting slip several hells and goddams. Cass should have known better than to gamble when drunk (especially, it gradually dawned on him, with someone like McCabe, who, holding his liquor like a grenadier, quickly dropped all pretense at conviviality and settled down to the game with falcon eye and stony hand), but when McCabe had said, ‘How’s about a little cards?’ it had been in the nature of a clarion and resistless cry: of all his memories of the war, poker was the one remaining which had a shred of decency, of charm. He was—at least he had been in the past—an expert. Indeed, a virtuoso. It had even brought him, in his Marine Corps outfit, a kind of middling fame. Money in those days, accumulated pay, meant nothing. On half a dozen Pacific islands, in hotel rooms in Hawaii, on stateside bivouacs, and in the steaming holds of Navy transports he had won and lost what would have been, for him, a prodigal fortune at any time; once in a three-day game in New Zealand he had won sixteen thousand dollars, only to lose all of it within a week in a luckless and inferior game of craps. Once he had won over four thousand dollars in a single hand, by the skin of his teeth, to be sure—on an inside straight touched by the hand of the Almighty. And once, on the psychiatric ward of the naval hospital in San Francisco, playing with an accredited schizophrenic, two constitutional psychopathic inferiors, and a D.U. (Diagnosis Undetermined) like himself, he had won twenty-eight million dollars, and a sense of triumph that was not diminished by the quixotic nature of the stakes. He loved the cards, he had not played—though he always lugged with him cards and chips wherever he went—since he had been in Europe, and he fell to with passion (God knew they needed the money) and with the illusion that he would clean out the dreary McCabes—which was a mistake. If the Old McCabe had been the proscribed apple, it was the game of blackjack through which he found himself expelled from the Garden.

Tense and quiet, the brief camaraderie gone, the three of them played through the early hours of the morning; groggily, hazily, almost hypnotically, he watched the whiskey in the bottle (he alone now drinking) fall to the mid-point level, then lower, shook his head from time to time to keep his swiftly blurring mind in focus, and wondered why he seemed to be losing in such a headlong rush. It was his own reckless fault, he thought, for setting so high the limit of the bets—three hundred lire, or roughly fifty cents; even so, drunk or not, or simply rusty, he had had too good a set of cards—nineteens, twenties all along—to have lost by one o’clock nearly all of his available cash. By one-thirty he was out of pocket eighteen thousand lire and he was forced to go to the kitchen, to rummage around in the dark and pluck ten thousand more from the tea can which served as Poppy’s household exchequer. Bleeding God, he thought as he stumbled back through the shadows, I’m acting like a bum in the flicks; we just don’t have this kind of cash to throw away. Sitting down heavily, he glanced squint-eyed at the McCabes. Rapt in stony concentration, cigarettes dangling from their mouths, cold-sober, and silent save for the brisk, peremptory way they each muttered “Hit” or “Stick,” in the tone of someone who had played cards for profit all his life, they had lost all aspect of the devout pilgrims they had first pretended to be, transformed like twin Cinderellas by the alchemy of midnight into avid, consecrated, hungry sharks. And for the life of him, Cass could not get a blackjack, that fortunate marriage of ace and face-card which would make McCabe relinquish the deal. They gave him the willies, these two dough-faced Micks; he felt ganged-up on, and he saw the ten thousand lire begin to vanish like water poured down a drain. He beat McCabe three times running; he thought his luck was changing. The deal passed from McCabe to Grace; Cass lost again, with a consecutiveness of ill-luck that made him writhe inside and caused the sweat to pop out in droplets on his face. Then he got the deal on his first and only blackjack: the deal lasted two hands, on both of which he lost, and reverted once more to McCabe.

“Mothera God!” he cried out in disgust, as for the fifteenth time his ace and nine—a solid twenty—were beaten by McCabe’s twenty-one. “You don’t need no Pope, Mac. You got the goddamdest luck I ever saw.” He was down once more to a dollar’s worth of lire.

“I know what you mean, pal,” said McCabe, in his longest speech of the game. “That’s the way the breaks run sometime. Gimme a match, will you, Gracie?”

By then it was past two o’clock. Although he was still functioning after a fashion—functioning in the realm of the game, at least, taking no rash chances, cautious when caution was called for, forcing his luck, such as it was, only to the most barely tolerable limit —the whiskey, he knew, had begun to work upon his mind a most un-subtle demolition. He felt hemmed-in, depressed, claustrophobic. The room had suffered a slight, secret yet nonetheless weird and unnerving displacement of dimension: smaller now, wreathed in clouds of smoke, it seemed almost to have become tilted a bit—somehow with a premonition of menace—like the cabin of a ship at sea moving slantwise in the troubled yet still noiseless waters that presage a violent storm. His head was giddy (it had just been so
long,
he kept thinking) and an uncomfortable nausea had begun to gurgle at the pit of his stomach, and from the high pitch of his early delight he had been brought down—by his tragic losses, by a surfeit of booze, maybe both—to the clammiest sort of anxiety and depression. And it was symptomatic of the deep-dyed lush he was, he thought even while ritualistically he groped for the bottle, that he should assume that a whole lot more of the Old McCabe could ease all of these problems.

“Have another,” he heard himself saying thickly to Grace, holding out the bottle, which was (inconceivably!) only a third full. “How ’bout some more the Ole Mac here?”

Whatever slight inebriety had loosened her up before had fled from her, in spirit and in countenance. Her face was as cold-looking as a clamshell. “Me and Mac don’t believe in mixing liquor and the cards,” she said austerely, shuffling the deck like a prestidigitator.

Intolerance, of the sort Cass bore toward Catholics in general and the Irish in particular, breeds brooding; brooding breeds suspicion; and suspicion, in this case mingled with financial loss and an out-of-hand drunkenness, breeds an infuriate conviction. The conviction being that night, as he stood in the dark once more groping for lire in Poppy’s tea-can treasury, that between the two of them the McCabes of Mineola comprised a crooked house. In the darkness he felt his brain lurch like a seesaw; pinpoints of ruby-red fire dotted his vision, and he swayed top-heavy against the sink, cracking his elbow. He drew out from the can a fistful of lire—greasy, shredded, of all denominations; as he did so, it occurred to him, in a kind of explosive and vindictive flash, in an access of imagination or fantasy so intense that it was truer than truth, that McCabe, the miserable sonofabitch, had been bottomdealing from the deck throughout the entire game. Thrice-punctured Christ! he thought. He had been trusting, stupid, and as blind as a bat. Pilgrims your ass! They were two miserable lowbrow suburban sharpers, and they had tried to take him for the sucker that he deserved, but at this point, by God, refused, to be. Pros they were, an old-time Mississippi twosome, crooks in pietists’ clothes who had lushed him up, fattened him for the kill, and plucked him clean as a pullet. A tremendous belch tore itself from his gorge, reverberating around the black kitchen. He felt a damp and queasy sensation in his palm, and drew back his hand from the place where he had propped it, unfeeling, in a plate of cold spaghetti. He began to tremble in total, towering, Protestant wrath. And though his wrath was a moral one, it was also the wholly uncomplicated one at having been taken by these sharp punks, who should have assumed that he, disciplined through a thousand deadly games (for
stakes,
not for peanuts) to sniff out the slightest funny-business or skulduggery, was too dumb to detect a simple bottom-deal, and would be blind to what (and of this he was sure!) had been going on all along, revealed by the flesh of McCabe’s somewhat pudgy knuckle—middle finger, left hand—as he performed his slippery fraud. Well, we’ll see about that! he thought. And he lumbered grim as Armageddon back into the living room, lurched into his chair, and said: “Deal!”