Short Stories: Five Decades (5 page)

“All right, Palangio,” he said.

“Yuh bet,” Palangio answered.

“Now we oughta go to the movies,” Elias said.

“That’s right,” Palangio nodded seriously.

“Yuh oughta be shot,” Geary shouted.

“They’re playin’ Simone Simon,” Elias announced to the crowd. “Let’s go see Simone Simon.”

Walking steadily, arm in arm, like two gentlemen, Elias and Angelo Palangio went down the street, through the lengthening shadows, toward Simone Simon.

Main Currents of
American Thought

F
lacker: all right now, Kid, now you’d better talk,” Andrew dictated. “Business: Sound of the door closing, the slow turning of the key in the lock. Buddy: You’re never going to get me to talk, Flacker. Business: Sound of a slap. Flacker: Maybe that’ll make you think different, Kid. Where is Jerry Carmichael? Buddy: (Laughing) Wouldn’t you like to know, Flacker? Flacker: Yeah. (Slowly, with great threat in his voice) And I’m going to find out. One way or another. See? Business: Siren fades in, louder, fades out. Announcer: Will Buddy talk? Will Flacker force him to disclose the whereabouts of the rescued son of the railroad king? Will Dusty Blades reach him in time? Tune in Monday at the same time, etcetera, etcetera …”

Andrew dropped onto the couch and put his feet up. He stretched and sighed as he watched Lenore finish scratching his dictation down in the shorthand notebook. “Thirty bucks,” he said. “There’s another thirty bucks. Is it the right length?”

“Uhuh,” Lenore said. “Eleven and a half pages. This is a very good one, Andy.”

“Yeah,” Andrew said, closing his eyes. “Put it next to Moby Dick on your library shelf.”

“It’s very exciting,” Lenore said, standing up. “I don’t know what they’re complaining about.”

“You’re a lovely girl.” Andrew put his hands over his eyes and rubbed around and around. “I have wooden hinges on my eyelids. Do you sleep at night?”

“Don’t do that to your eyes.” Lenore started to put on her coat. “You only aggravate them.”

“You’re right.” Andrew dug his fists into his eyes and rotated them slowly. “You don’t know how right you are.”

“Tomorrow. At ten o’clock?” Lenore asked.

“At ten o’clock. Dig me out of the arms of sleep. We shall leave Dusty Blades to his fate for this week and go on with the further adventures of Ronnie Cook and His Friends, forty dollars a script. I always enjoy writing Ronnie Cook much better than Dusty Blades. See what ten dollars does to a man.” He opened his eyes and watched Lenore putting her hat on in front of the mirror. When he squinted, she was not so plain-looking. He felt very sorry for Lenore, plain as sand, with her flat-colored face and her hair pulled down like rope, and never a man to her name. She was putting on a red hat with a kind of ladder arrangement going up one side. It looked very funny and sad on her. Andrew realized that it was a new hat. “That’s a mighty fine hat,” he said.

“I thought a long time before I bought this hat,” Lenore said, flushing because he’d noticed it.

“Har-
riet!
” The governess next door screamed in the alley to the next-door neighbor’s little girl. “Harriet, get away from there this minute!”

Andrew turned over on his stomach on the couch and put a pillow over his head. “Have you got any ideas for Ronnie Cook and His Friends for tomorrow?” he asked Lenore.

“No. Have you?”

“No.” He pulled the pillow tight around his head.

“You’ll get them by tomorrow,” Lenore said. “You always do.”

“Yeah,” said Andrew.

“You need a vacation,” Lenore said.

“Get out of here.”

“Good-bye,” Lenore started out. “Get a good night’s sleep.”

“Anything you say.”

Andrew watched her with one eye as she went off the porch on which he worked and through the living room and dining room, toward the stairs. She had nice legs. You were always surprised when a girl with a face like that had nice legs. But she had hair on her legs. She was not a lucky girl. “Oh, no,” Andrew said as the door closed behind her, “you are not a lucky girl.”

He closed his eyes and tried to sleep. The sun came in through the open windows and the curtains blew softly over his head and the sun was warm and comforting on his closed eyes. Across the street, on the public athletic field, four boys were shagging flies. There would be the neat pleasant crack of the bat and a long time later the smack of the ball in the fielder’s glove. The tall trees outside, as old as Brooklyn, rustled a little from time to time as little spurts of wind swept across the baseball field.

“Harr
iet
!” the governess called. “Stop that or I will make you stand by yourself in the corner all afternoon! Harriet! I demand you to stop it!” The governess was French. She had the only unpleasant French accent Andrew had ever heard.

The little girl started to cry, “Mamma! Mamma! Mamma, she’s going to hit me!” The little girl hated the governess and the governess hated the little girl, and they continually reported each other to the little girl’s mother. “Mamma!”

“You are a little liar,” the governess screamed. “You will grow up, and you will be a liar all your life. There will be no hope for you.”

“Mamma!” wailed the little girl.

They went inside the house and it was quiet again.

“Charlie,” one of the boys on the baseball field yelled, “hit it to me, Charlie!”

The telephone rang, four times, and then Andrew heard his mother talking into it. She came onto the porch.

“It’s a man from the bank,” she said. “He wants to talk to you.”

“You should’ve told him I wasn’t home,” Andrew said.

“But you are home,” his mother said. “How was I to know that …?”

“You’re right.” Andrew swung his legs over and sat up. “You’re perfectly right.”

He went into the dining room, to the telephone, and talked to the man at the bank.

“You’re a hundred and eleven dollars overdrawn,” said the man at the bank.

Andrew squinted at his mother, sitting across the room, on a straight chair, with her arms folded in her lap, her head turned just a little, so as not to miss anything.

“I thought I had about four hundred dollars in the bank,” Andrew said into the phone.

“You are a hundred and eleven dollars overdrawn,” said the man at the bank.

Andrew sighed. “I’ll check it.” He put the phone down.

“What’s the matter?” his mother asked.

“I’m a hundred and eleven dollars overdrawn,” he said.

“That’s shameful,” his mother said. “You ought to be more methodical.”

“Yes.” Andrew started back to the porch.

“You’re awfully careless.” His mother followed him. “You really ought to keep track of your money.”

“Yes.” Andrew sat down on the couch.

“Give me a kiss,” his mother said.

“Why?”

“No particular reason.” She laughed.

“O.K.” He kissed her and she held him for a moment. He dropped down on the couch. She ran her finger under his eye.

“You’ve got rings under your eyes,” she said.

“That’s right.”

She kissed him again and went to the rear of the house. He closed his eyes. From the rear of the house came the sound of the vacuum cleaner. Andrew felt his muscles getting stiff in protest against the vacuum cleaner. He got up and went to her bedroom, where she was running the machine back and forth under the bed. She was down on one knee and was bent over, looking under the bed.

“Hey!” Andrew yelled. “Hey, Mom!”

She turned off the machine and looked up at him. “What’s the matter?”

“I’m trying to sleep,” he said.

“Well, why don’t you sleep?”

“The vacuum cleaner. It’s shaking the house.”

His mother stood up, her face setting into stern lines. “I’ve got to clean the house, don’t I?”

“Why do you have to clean the house while I’m trying to sleep?”

His mother bent down again. “I can’t use it while you’re working. I can’t use it while you’re reading. I can’t use it until ten o’clock in the morning because you’re sleeping.” She started the machine. “When am I supposed to clean the house?” she called over the noise of the cleaner. “Why don’t you sleep at night like everybody else?” And she put her head down low and vigorously ran the machine back and forth.

Andrew watched her for a moment. No arguments came to him. The sound of the cleaner so close to him made his nerves jump. He went out of the room, closing the door behind him.

The telephone was ringing and he picked it up and said, “Hello.”

“Ahndrew?” his agent’s voice asked. His agent was from Brooklyn, too, but he had a very broad A, with which he impressed actors and sponsors.

“Yes, this is Ahndrew.” Andrew always made this straight-faced joke with his agent, but the agent never seemed to catch on. “You didn’t have to call. The Dusty Blades scripts are all through. You’ll get them tomorrow.”

“I called about something else, Ahndrew,” his agent said, his voice very smooth and influential on the phone. “The complaints’re piling up on the Blades scripts. They’re as slow as gum. Nothing ever happens. Ahndrew, you’re not writing for the
Atlantic Monthly
.”

“I know I’m not writing for the
Atlantic Monthly
.”

“I think you’ve rather run out of material,” his agent said lightly, soothingly. “I think perhaps you ought to take a little vacation from the Blades scripts.”

“Go to hell, Herman,” Andrew said, knowing that Herman had found somebody to do the scripts more cheaply for him.

“That’s hardly the way to talk, Ahndrew,” Herman said, his voice still smooth, but hurt. “After all, I have to stand in the studio and listen to the complaints.”

“Sad, Herman,” Andrew said. “That’s a sad picture,” and hung up.

He rubbed the back of his neck reflectively, feeling again the little lump behind his ear.

He went into his own room and sat at his desk looking blankly at the notes for his play that lay, neatly piled, growing older, on one side. He took out his checkbook and his last month’s vouchers and arranged them in front of him.

“One hundred and eleven dollars,” he murmured, as he checked back and added and subtracted, his eyes smarting from the strain, his hands shaking a little because the vacuum cleaner was still going in his mother’s room. Out on the athletic field more boys had arrived and formed an infield and were throwing the ball around the bases and yelling at each other.

Dr. Chalmers, seventy-five dollars. That was for his mother and her stomach.

Eighty dollars rent. The roof over his head equaled two Ronnie Cook’s and His Friends. Five thousand words for rent.

Buddy was in the hands of Flacker. Flacker could torture him for six pages. Then you could have Dusty Blades speeding to the rescue with Sam, by boat, and the boat could spring a leak because the driver was in Flacker’s pay, and there could be a fight for the next six pages. The driver could have a gun. You could use it, but it wouldn’t be liked, because you’d done at least four like it already.

Furniture, and a hundred and thirty-seven dollars. His mother had always wanted a good dining-room table. She didn’t have a maid, she said, so he ought to get her a dining-room table. How many words for a dining-room table?

“Come on, Baby, make it two,” the second baseman out on the field was yelling. “Double ’em up!”

Andrew felt like picking up his old glove and going out there and joining them. When he was still in college he used to go out on a Saturday at ten o’clock in the morning and shag flies and jump around the infield and run and run all day, playing in pickup games until it got too dark to see. He was always tired now and even when he played tennis he didn’t move his feet right, because he was tired, and hit flat-footed and wild.

Spain, one hundred dollars. Oh, Lord.

A hundred and fifty to his father, to meet his father’s payroll. His father had nine people on his payroll, making little tin gadgets that his father tried to sell to the dime stores, and at the end of every month Andrew had to meet the payroll. His father always gravely made out a note to him.

Flacker is about to kill Buddy out of anger and desperation. In bursts Dusty, alone. Sam is hurt. On the way to the hospital. Buddy is spirited away a moment before Dusty arrives. Flacker, very smooth and oily. Confrontation. “Where is Buddy, Flacker?” “You mean the little lad?” “I mean the little lad, Flacker!”

Fifty dollars to Dorothy’s piano teacher. His sister. Another plain girl. She might as well learn how to play the piano. Then one day they’d come to him and say, “Dorothy is ready for her debut. All we’re asking you to do is rent Town Hall for a Wednesday evening. Just advance the money.” She’d never get married. She was too smart for the men who would want her and too plain for the men she’d want herself. She bought her dresses in Saks. He would have to support, for life, a sister who would only buy her dresses in Saks and pay her piano teacher fifty dollars a month every month. She was only twenty-four, she would have a normal life expectancy of at least forty years, twelve times forty, plus dresses at Saks and Town Hall from time to time …

His father’s teeth—ninety dollars. The money it cost to keep a man going in his losing fight against age.