The Black House (10 page)

That afternoon, Cassie made a poster on a big piece of cardboard to be tacked on a wall of the Meetcha Bar down the street.

ROOF RAISIN'
RENT RAISIN'
PARTY!
SAT. NITE 9 PM ONWARD
103 FROTT ST. (3rd FLOOR)
BRING YOUR RAISIN
ALL WELCOME (this ain't no church)
DISCO ELECTRONIC
ADMISSION $3.00
AND BRING YOUR OWN POWDER, JUICE, Etc.

The last line, Cassie conceded, was a halfway thing between saying no refreshments would be offered (untrue), and a suggestion that if people really had a preference as to drink and other things, they should bring their own so they'd be sure and get it. Cassie had been imbibing beer as she worked, and after an hour she was tired, but picked up at the boys' praise of her artwork. She had drawn a couple of nudes dancing, with real raisins glued on where the sex organs would have been. The nude figures were lanky and blue-colored.

“Really great!” Ben said. “Eye-
catching
!”

Cassie flopped on a bed on her back, smiling, and closed her eyes, her arms curled above her head. She looked lovely to Ralph, with her thighs bulging her jeans, shirt buttons straining over her breasts that were partly visible through the gaps.

Ralph was assigned to put the poster up, and went out with it, taking along also an old envelope in which Georgie had put six or more thumbtacks. For some reason (well, Ralph knew why), he was considered just a little more square than the others, more respectable even. Ralph didn't care much for that, and maybe it wouldn't last forever. So far he hadn't run up a bill with Ed Meecham, who owned the Meetcha, whereas the others had. Small bills, of course, because Ed didn't give credit higher than twenty dollars. Into this wooden-tabled, wooden-chaired establishment Ralph clumped in his cowboy boots with the poster in hand, and at once glanced around the walls, looking for a free and suitable place. The walls were already pretty much filled by art exhibition posters, announcements of sales of secondhand items, apartment-sharing opportunities, and cartoons of the patrons. Ralph greeted a couple of fellows hunched over beer or coffee at the tables, and made his way to Ed Meecham behind the bar at the back.

“Okay if I put this up, Ed?”

Ed, bald, with a mustache like a black and gray shaving brush, eyed the poster sharply as if examining it for porn—and maybe he was—then nodded consent. “If you find a spot, Ralph.”

“Thanks, Ed.” Ralph felt flattered because Ed had called him by name. Ed knew him, of course, but up to now hadn't called him anything. Funny how little things like that built up the ego, Ralph thought. That was what the group at the dump spent a lot of time talking about—ego—what you thought of
yourself
. It was important. Ralph's newfound confidence inspired him to tack, smoothly and with suitable speed, Cassie's poster over a small poster of graffiti which Ralph considered the clientele had laughed at long enough. Ralph waved good-bye and departed.

Back at the loft building, Ralph glanced at the mailbox before climbing the stairs. Two items. The box had a lock, but it had been broken. To Ralph's surprise, one envelope was addressed to him in his father's large yet angular hand with his genuine pen. His father didn't like ballpoints. Ralph climbed the stairs, reported his success with the poster-fixing, and went into the kitchen to look at his letter. Ben and Georgie were working with guitar and piano, talking also. They'd already had a practice session that day, and Ben wanted another, but there were still five minutes to read a letter, and maybe his father had even enclosed a check, Ralph thought as he picked open the envelope of sturdy white paper. No stamp on it. His father had delivered the letter. Ralph had noticed that at once downstairs, but now that fact—or something—made his fingers shake.

There was no check in the letter. It went, after the date which was Wednesday, yesterday:

Dear Ralph,

It is late in the evening but I feel inspired or compelled to write a few words to you by way of explaining my attitude, which I know you consider wrong, inhuman perhaps, or plain blind. So it may come as a relief to you to know that I've decided not to interfere or try to influence you from now on. Every human being has the right to make his own life. Birds must fly the nest. So did I when I left my parents exactly at your age, 20, and went to try my luck in Chicago and then in New York. You have the same right. And I realize that what seems to me wrong or unwise may be for you—right. At any rate, you are a man and you should be able to and be allowed to stand on your own feet.

I think this may help clear the atmosphere and enable us to have a better relationship, because God knows it cannot be pleasant for a son to sense “parental disapproval” all the time, even if for the most part you shrug it off.

However if you're sick, you know very well I'm here to look after you. You are not alone in the world, Ralph, just free. And my good wishes and love are with you.

                                 Your dad, ever,

                                 Steve

P.S. I know that the absence of your mother from the household has not helped, hasn't made you any happier or stronger. I am bitterly and personally sorry about that, and I am no happier for it either. We should both (you and I) realize that we are not the only father and son in the world who have had to experience the same thing.

Ralph felt shocked, in a strange and profound way. His father had cut him off. That P.S.—Well, they'd been over that, lots of times, in few words every time, but lots of times. That divorce had been his
mother's
fault, that “other man” and all that. His father had never wanted a divorce, in spite of Bert who had disappeared as his father had thought he would. Ralph knew his mother had also been disappointed in him, Ralph. But the divorce remarks in the letter weren't what upset Ralph. It was his father's washing his hands of him. And such a polite way of saying it: You have the same right. Ralph was still under twenty-one. Wasn't he still a minor? Well, no, if you could vote at eighteen, Ralph recalled.

“Love
letters
—in—the—sand—” Georgie came into the kitchen singing. “Somebody let you down?”

Ralph tried to get the frown off his face. “Na-ah. Letter from my dad. No dough.—Mister No-Dough.”

“Well, you knew that.” Georgie poured himself some cold coffee from the pot on the stove, and upended a cellophane bag of potato chips into his mouth, a bag nearly empty. “Let's go again, Ralphie? Another half hour or so. ‘Airport Bird' now.” Georgie gestured towards the living room.

Ralph got his clarinet from its place under the foot of one of the double beds, where he had put it while he tacked the poster. He had to lift the bed to get it, rake the case out with his foot, but at least the instrument was always safe there, unstolen, unstepped on. The record-cutting would cost seventy-five dollars. They had a deal with Mike, the man in the Bronx. He distributed their records to cut-rate pop record shops which tried to push new groups, according to Mike. So far the Plastics hadn't had any revenue from that, but what they had created was
on record
, and there were two earlier records here at the dump. They practiced, Cassie included. It was after six, and the ceiling spotlights were on, three pink ones, a couple of blues, but mainly white ones. Someone had said such lights ran into big electricity bills, but the lights gave atmosphere, and after the music got going, who thought about an electricity bill? Ralph tried to play with especial care and exactitude, letting himself go only in the finale of “Fried Chicks,” the song that would be number five, the last, on the record Sunday.

But Ralph's thoughts, most of his thoughts, were on his father and he couldn't shake them off. Amazing. He was upset. And ordinarily he would have said to his chums, “I'm uptight today, sort of thrown.” But that evening he didn't say it, even in the break they took around nine in the kitchen, where Cassie was stirring up a tomato sauce for their spaghetti dinner. Ben lit a joint which they passed around. Georgie went out for lettuce and a bottle of Italian table wine, the kind that came in a big glass jug. No meat for the spaghetti sauce, Cassie announced, but it was going to taste good anyway. And his father thought they didn't eat properly, Ralph remembered.

Why not invite Steve to the party? If his father condescended to come, he could see that they ran a going household with clean walls, that they weren't a bunch of apes. Ralph knew his father thought they never knew what day of the week it was, that they lived off their parents—absolutely not true in the case of Georgie and Ben, who gave piano and guitar lessons—and that they never washed their clothes, whereas the tub had clothes soaking in it half the time, and Cassie was a great ironer.

“Hey, does anybody
mind
,” Ralph began loudly, but the hi-fi was on, Ben had just said something funny, so everyone was laughing. Everyone now included two new people, a boy and girl who must have arrived with Georgie when he came back with lettuce and wine. Ralph tried again. “Hey, Cass! I feel like inviting my
father
Saturday night. Okay?”

Cassie, smiling, shrugged a little as usual. It looked like the movement she made when she was dancing. “
Why not?
”

Ralph smiled in a glow of contentment, even pride. Would his own parents, for instance, have opened their doors as freely to
his
chums of the dump? Good God, no! Who, between the two of them, was more charitable, Christian, tolerant, all that crap?

“That
crap
!” Ralph yelled. “Let's get rid of it! Let's conquer it with
love
!” No one was listening, no one heard, but that didn't matter. He had got his message out. “Across and
out
!” Ralph shouted, and plunged toward the telephone. Twenty to ten, if his watch was correct. Ralph dialed his father's number.

No one answered the telephone. This disappointed Ralph.

Throughout the evening, Ralph tried his father's number at half-hour intervals. By midnight, everyone at the dump, including three more arrivals, knew whom he was trying to reach and why, and Ben had said he would invite his uncle for Saturday. Ben's parents lived somewhere upstate, but he had an uncle in Brooklyn. At a little past 1
A.M
. Ralph's father answered the telephone, and Ralph proceeded to invite him for Saturday night, any time after 9
P.M
.

“Oh? A party. Well—y-yes, Ralph, thanks,” his father said. “I'm glad you did call, because I was a little worried after I dropped that letter.”

His father sounded unusually serious, even sad. “Oh, that's—Thanks, Dad, I was glad to get it really.” The words came out of nowhere, and didn't mean anything, Ralph realized, but his tone was polite.

After they had hung up, Ralph had a strange feeling that the conversation hadn't really taken place, that he had imagined it. But his father's voice had said that he would come. Yes. Definitely.

The next two days till Saturday were enhanced by the coming party, in the way Ralph recalled that the approach of Christmas had made the days preceding magical, different, prettier, when he had been little. Ben had the brilliant idea of making potato soup their main dish, cheap and easy, and they would have thin slices of frankfurter floating in it, and a big bunch of parsley in the kitchen to garnish each bowl or paper cup or even plate of this thick soup, which Cassie promised to create. Plenty of garlic was to go into the soup, which would have a ham hock base. And Cassie and Georgie had also been busy with the decor. From a friend down the street she had acquired yards of old film reels, and these looked festive, twisted and strung from corner to corner of the room, and tied together in the center with somebody's long red scarf.

“Don't nobody strike a match!” Cassie said the evening of the party. “You know what they say about flaming cellophane!”

The potato soup, in two huge cauldrons (one borrowed from a girl who was coming to the party), steamed discreetly over low gas flames, the parsley stood ready, and there was one measly six-pack of beer in the fridge, two jugs of the Italian table wine, and six sticks of Italian bread. People were supposed to bring their own drink, after all. A shoe box labeled
ALMS
sat on the trestle worktable near the door, and Georgie voiced his disapproval of its being so near the door, because someone could depart hastily and be down the stairs with the box before anyone knew what had happened. But the box stayed there, because people were not to be admitted without their three dollars, and Ben and Cassie agreed that it would be silly to open the door and go off somewhere like the little bedroom to stick three dollars into the shoe box.

Stereo boomed and throbbed, and people trickled in. Coats and jackets even shoes got tossed in a heap on the double bed in the little bedroom, and then on the floor in the corner by the trestle table. On the pushed-together double beds, Cassie had placed a folded bridge table plus the ironing board to provide surfaces for bowls of potato chips, pretzels, popcorn and olives.

Olives!
Black and green olives. Ralph suddenly remembered that he had bought them. A touch of elegance. He had spent about ten dollars on them. Ralph, in a clean shirt, cleanish jeans, boots which he had given a wipe, felt nervous, as if he alone were giving the party. He kept watching the door, expecting his father, feeling relieved though a bit sweaty when each time the door opened strange kids, or faces he barely recognized, came in. It was nearly eleven. Had his father changed his mind?

You ain't forgotten
mee
-ah . . .
You ain't for
gotten
mee-eee . . .

sang the male voice on the blaring hi-fi.

Ralph tossed back a paper cupful of distasteful red wine. Why was he drinking the stuff? He preferred beer any time.