The Henderson Equation (11 page)

"Now there's a pair of headlights," Charlie had
said, whistling lightly, a sound she must have heard; later Nick learned that
she had secretly enjoyed the attention. To Nick, whose knowledge of women was
confined to the demeaning "bam-bam, thank you, ma'am" variety of
relationship in the makeshift cathouses of war-scarred Europe, Margaret Domier
represented the epitome of unattainability. And although the men watched her,
the blood, like his, he thought, surging in their genitals, she maintained the
kind of professional coolness that could defuse them. As for Nick, even though
they had begun a casual acquaintance, he always felt himself flushing in her
presence, perhaps because his fantasies had by then been prompting him to
masturbation and, unique to the era, massive guilt feelings.

He had wondered if others were sharing the recall of her
covered breasts, imagining them lying warm and full, nipples pink and gorged,
in the restraints of her brassiere. It was the years in which the mass media,
preliminary to
Playboy
's institutionalizing the phenomenon, was
proclaiming the American male's hang-up with mammaries, and he assumed his case
was of the galloping kind, investing him with the burden of imagined sexual
aberration.

If it weren't for the massive snowstorm of 1947, which
dumped twenty-six inches of whiteness, the last time in memory that New York had ever appeared so clean, he might have continued his masturbatory fantasies
without abatement on through middle age. As it was, they were both working late
on stories, she on a movie review and he, oddly, on the weather roundup, a
sidebar on transportation tie-ups that was to be replated for the two-star
edition. The office was nearly deserted when he dumped his finished story in
front of the night city editor and moved toward the time clock. Margaret had
just punched out and he found himself walking beside her along the corridor
leading to the elevators.

"I'm supposed to catch a flick tonight, but I'd better
get home," she said. She was living with her parents in Borough Park then. "Besides, it doesn't much matter. I could rewrite the
Variety
review."

"That's cheating."

"Better than being caught in the bowels of the New York subway system freezing my ass off." The reference embarrassed him.

"No sweat with the subways. I just spoke to
them."

"What about later?"

"They swear the system won't break down."

"That a guarantee?"

"I give it my personal blessing."

She looked at him curiously, as if seeing him for the first
time. He felt the interest, sensed the moment.

"I'll make a deal," he stammered. "Take me
to your movie and I'll take you home."

"Isn't it out of the way?" He was living with
Charlie in a walk-up apartment on Second Avenue.

"Not at all," he lied. He hoped she wouldn't ask
him where he lived. It was a gift, he mused, watching her button up the top
buttons of her cloth coat over those tantalizing, bulging mysteries. She was
silent as they went down in the elevator and walked through the lobby, the big
globe circling on its pivot, with a protective chrome safety railing to enhance
its veneration. In the street the snow was falling thickly, the drifts heavy.
But with the feel of the crystals on the skin, and the clear smell in the air,
there came an odd refreshment. It was a night to be out in, he had thought.

"What the hell," she said, tucking a hand under
his arm. He imagined he felt the softness of her breasts pressing against him.
They walked up Forty-second Street, following a beaten trail, their booted feet
crunching in the fresh snow. He felt his heart leaping with the excitement of
her nearness, embellished by the pride he felt in having the guts to ask her to
be with him. They walked slowly, savoring the falling crystals which dropped
gently on their skin. In the lobby of the New York State on Broadway, they
brushed the snow off their faces and clothes. Her cheeks were red with the glow
of the cold and the delight of the sudden warmth.

In the darkened theater he felt her closeness, his
concentration difficult as he sensed her breathing in the rise and fall of her
chest. She was restless, perhaps writing her review in her head as she watched
the contrivances of the John Wayne horse opera, mounted in gloss, clichés
abounding, the music in stirring accompaniment to the lingering long shots of
the Western landscape. It was odd that he could never remember the name of the
movie, only the impossible happiness he was feeling, waiting for her
restlessness to brush her body against his, contemplating ways in which he
could move closer, trembling with impatience for the next touch. He never found
the courage to reach for her hand or slide his arm along the back of her seat.
When the picture was over and they filed back toward the exit, he discovered
that his shirt was soaked with perspiration. By the time they had ordered
waffles at the near-empty Childs restaurant across the street, he had determined
that he was in love and he could barely find the strength to lift the
syrup-drenched confection to his mouth. Mostly he watched her lips move, noting
the crookedness of one of her teeth, a charming flaw, as she recounted her
opinion of the movie.

"Pure escapist," she said. "When you've seen
one John Wayne, you've seen them all."

"Will you roast it?" he asked.

"No," she said after a pause. "I'll judge it
strictly in terms of our audience. The yardstick will be whether it's a good
John Wayne or a bad John Wayne."

"And the conclusion?"

"It was a good John Wayne."

"How many stars?"

"Three, easy."

"That's pandering."

She looked up at him, a speared waffle segment in midair.
"Don't confuse me."

He felt himself trying to make an impression, assuming a
flippancy that he hoped she might appreciate. Above all, he wanted to be
noticed, remembered, flagged down by her consciousness. The subways were
running on schedule, although the drafty stations were freezing and the wait
between trains was long because of the hour. They had to change, finally
arriving at her station in Brooklyn after midnight. During the long ride he had
searched his repertoire for ideas that might interest her, compulsively seeking
ways to keep the conversation going. He got her talking about herself. Her
father was a longshoreman and she painted verbal pictures of a heavy, brutish
man, sitting around the house in an undershirt, with a cowed mother who worked
as a waitress, and, herself, the defiant daughter.

"My father is always mad at me," she said.
"He can't understand my interest in being a newspaper-woman, among other
things."

"Like what?"

"Like I'm a renegade Catholic. When I stopped going to
confession he let me have it. I finally told him I got tired of the fat priest
asking me where I touched myself. When I was through he was sorry he had asked.
He's a good old bird, though, an overgrown kid."

"My father was a doctor. I hardly saw him when I was
growing up. I only found out about him through his letters to me in the army.
By the time I knew about him, he was already dying. He was a marvelous writer.
I've saved all his letters."

He was conscious that he was saying things that could only
be said to someone trusted, a gift from oneself, the private revelation
reserved for special ears.

"What was it like, living in a small town?" she
asked. He was overjoyed that he had, at last, engaged her.

Perhaps it was the special way she asked that hinted of a
deeper interest on her part. He felt its beginnings. No one had quite asked
that question in precisely the same way, even Charlie, who considered Warren, Ohio, a kind of purgatory.

"Like living in the bosom of one big family." The
reference made him hesitate, smiling inwardly at himself. "You knew pretty
near everybody and since I was the doctor's son, I had a special status. My
mother took this status quite seriously. She still revels in it. There was a
special role, too, in having married a Jew. There's a mystique about Jewish
doctors, a kind of prejudice in reverse, as if the Jew doctor were somehow smarter,
more competent."

"Was it true?"

"Yes."

By the time the ride was over, he had reconstructed his
life and she hers, hardly conscious of the screening process that might have
made the related images less meaningful. On the long walk to her apartment
building in the deepening snow, he sensed that they had become closer. Despite
the snow and the difficulties he would have in returning to Manhattan, he
wanted to prolong the closeness.

Sitting on the hallway steps outside her apartment,
shivering in the unheated hall, they continued to talk, whispering. He felt her
warm breath against his cheek. Finally she stood up and leaned against the
wall.

"It was great fun, Nick." He looked into her
eyes, deep in shadows, staring silently, feeling clumsy as he pressed his body
against hers, searching for her lips. He had moved cautiously, hoping for some
flicker of matching effort on her part, which came, surprisingly, as she lifted
her face to compensate for his height, pressing her lips against his, her mouth
slightly open. His tongue tentatively reached for a caress from hers, which
responded, making his heart beat wildly. He felt her contours through the thick
coat. Enveloping her in his arms, he pressed his mouth harder against hers,
until he could feel her beginning to gasp for air. Never before had a kiss had
so much meaning. When they had disengaged, she turned away quickly and without
another word put her key in the apartment lock and let herself in. He stood
there for a long time before he went back into the snow. He had all he could do
to prevent himself from throwing himself frontside up into a snowbank and
letting the crystals fall into his opened mouth. Instead, he made snowballs and
flung them against the sides of cars. It took him three hours to get back to Manhattan. The subways had been disrupted after all.

Nick had always characterized himself as analytical,
probing, with a mind that perceived life with some logic and sought truths with
scientific curiosity. Yet he could not put his finger on the precise motivating
factor within his makeup that insisted on his being a journalist. Perhaps it
was a genetic transference of his father's pursuit of medicine, essentially a
similar game of hunt and find, although newspapering made little pretense to
the scientific method.

It was only a wild guess on his part, although there were
writers alleged to be in his father's line dating back to Europe and his mother
had a great-uncle who had once owned a weekly paper in a town near Toledo, Ohio. But since he could never find an answer in his ancestry that totally
satisfied him, he thought instead that he had a special gift, a rare enthusiasm
for the written word. Hadn't it been discovered early in his life by a fourth
grade teacher? She had said to him that he had a real flair for composition, a
spark that ignited soaring expectations in his parents' hearts and encouraged
them to encourage him.

This encouragement, which came in heavy doses, made him
bookish, and by the eighth grade he was becoming insular and shy; the world of
the imagination, characters in library books, seemed more exciting than people
who lived in Warren. How many exploding fantasies and ambitions are spawned in
the public libraries of small towns? In Nick's case, after books, it was in the
newspaper section of the library, where the papers hung neatly on wooden rods.
Perhaps it was also the serenity of the reading room itself, the huge globes
that hung on long heavy linked chains from the white ceilings, the polished
tables and wooden chairs, the smell of books and newspapers. Each turn of the
newspaper page brought portents of excitement, panoramic views of cataclysmic
events, stirring passions, rages, humors to his young mind. The progression
from the
Columbus Dispatch
to the
Chicago Tribune
to the
New
York Times
began slowly, then accelerated, and soon he was comparing the
way each newspaper said things and perceiving similar events in different ways.
Then, suddenly, the library phase was over and the high school newspaper became
the obsession. This first boldface byline, misspelled as it was, was an event
greater than his first long pants, which in the early thirties was an otherwise
unmatched event.

Explanations about why he pursued the newspaper business
with such passion never seemed, somehow, to hit the mark. He liked to think he
had a natural talent for it, an insatiable curiosity, and a special flair for
presentation, although in those days he still built stories like pyramids with
the five W's always intact in the lead. Under the by-line, though, he couldn't
resist the snappy lead and once looking over his high school clips which his
mother had saved, he was quite impressed with the way he turned the phrases.
You were a precocious bastard, Nick, he would tell himself, as he pored over
his mother's musty shrine. Unfortunately, the old newspaper clips, yellowed and
crumbled, would hardly stand the test of time. It had taught him how transitory
newspapers really were.

A life is a series of converging vectors, Nick had decided
in recalling his own. If he had not been drafted after college, he would not
have met Charlie. And if Charlie had not been the peculiar blend of himself,
the magnetizing force that could never be adequately explained, Nick might not
have been attracted to him. In the end, the contrivance was Fate, which could
have killed one or the other off in the random ways of war. There was, of
course, no end to that kind of speculation, but somehow Nick could relate all
this sudden interest in the why of his life to his burgeoning love for Margaret.
Love was apparently the time one looked inward on oneself, searching in all the
dark corners, a kind of spring dusting process, uncovering obscurities,
discovering misplaced riches. Love, as Nick discovered then, was only corny if
you weren't in it.

But now that love had come the real insecurities also
began. Was it to be unrequited or returned? Was he doomed to heartache and
despair or was there hope ahead, the promise of unbounded joy? On that first
day after the movies and the snowstorm, and the first reaching out, he had come
into the office earlier than usual. He was determined to get to his typewriter
early, before prying eyes might accidentally see what he was writing. He wanted
desperately to tell Margaret how much the time spent with her had meant to him.
After all, the typed word was the operative mode of expression and surely
Margaret was sensitive enough to understand that some things could only be said
properly on pulpy copy paper.

But midway through his outpourings, being the only reporter
around, he was sent out to cover a traffic accident on the West Side Highway,
and soon became too absorbed with facts to allow the intrusion of any other
sentiment. Maybe this was the thing about the newspaper business, the total
absorption, the need to press against time, the concentration on acquiring
information above all else. He had always seen that moment as a special
intrusion, a harbinger of the destructive force of pressed time, the compelling
necessity to feed the maw of the presses at fixed moments, whatever the human
consequences of this timetable.
Deadline,
even as a word, was pregnant
with depravity.

When he eventually returned to his love letter from the
bloody sights of the highway accident the sweetness seemed gone from his
typewriter. The fires of love still blazed, but the muse had failed.

There was a water fountain beyond her office from which,
when you dipped your body to line your mouth with the spigot, you could see
into the large glassed-in feature room where Margaret spent her time. That day,
like a man with an insatiable thirst, he paraded back and forth from the water
fountain waiting for a glimpse of her, which never materialized. He learned
later that she had been out watching movies, but the sudden emergence in
himself of the possessive state had made him seethe with anxieties,
insecurities, jealousies.

When she finally did return to the office, he was exhausted
with uncertainty, fed further by her seemingly casual interest as she lifted
her head from the typewriter and waved, pleasantly enough, to his mooning face
staring from the other side of the glass. The very aspect of pleasantness, so
kind and unassuming, so bland, could only be a heatless flicker to his
inflammable inner tinder. Had he misread her the night before?

Fearful that he would betray the vulnerable softness in
himself, he was quick to assume that he was merely the newest victim of
unrequited love, and he deliberately changed his tactics. His first strategy
was a withdrawal. He decided to ignore her, only to discover on still another
trek to the water fountain that she had left for the day.

"What the hell's the matter, Nick?" Charlie had
asked. The loss of self-possession was obvious.

"Bellyache."

"Where the hell were you last night?"

"Around."

"Okay, don't tell." Charlie had his own problems
then.

When he met Margaret in the city room she smiled at him
almost too broadly and their exchanges were bantering and, on his part,
cautious.

"How's the mooin pitchers?"

"It was a bad week. The ants in my pants are getting
restless."

He searched her eyes for the remotest sparkle of returned
affection. God, he loved that woman, he was certain. Near her, his body
trembled and his tongue froze in his mouth. What had he done? What was there in
him that she could not find equally as fascinating as he found in her?

The pain was the more excruciating in the face of the
Christmas season. New York bloomed with Christmas preparations. Park Avenue was blazing with colored lights, festooned in its annual trail of huge
Christmas trees. Santa Clauses stood on street corners collecting money in
their chimneys, looking jolly with rouged cheeks while they stamped their feet
in the cold.

Perhaps it was simply the agony of unrequited love that
embellished his introspection, but that Christmas-time, he seemed to look out
upon the world with a heightened sense of observation.

"Remember two years ago, Charlie?" he asked. They
were huddled up in their coats against the freezing wind as they walked back to
their apartment. Charlie's nose was running over his upper lip.

"How can I forget?"

"It was a bitch. We're lucky we lived through
it."

"I hope you're right."

He looked at Charlie.

"Yeah," he said. "We'll have to see if it
was worth the sparing."

"Shit."

It was a hurled curse out of context, a hint of anxiety
which did not surface until a couple of days before Christmas Eve. Absorbed
with his own problems of apparent rejection, Nick didn't see what was happening
to Charlie.

At that stage in their friendship Nick knew little of
Charlie's early history. Charlie had been brought up in modest suburban
circumstances in the days when suburban life was a genuine symbol of WASP
superiority, even without the frills of wealth. Nick had pieced together a
picture of a scrubbed American family living in a modest house with porch and
faintly squeaky screen door, neatly painted and shingled and looking out on a
broad elm-lined street, a three-block walk from the quaint Long Island railroad
station. From the details of the half-sketched picture, Nick could summon up
images of the old swimming hole, smoking corn silk back in the shed, bamboo
fishing poles, bubble gum cards, even an American flag fluttering on a pole in
front of the house on legal holidays.

Growing up in Warren was like that, and in Nick's frame of
reference his first mental picture of Charlie's younger days was a hangover
from his own happy childhood. He could not imagine childhood without warmth and
serenity, and it wasn't until Christmas dinner in the Pell house in Hempstead
that he finally saw the inside of Charlie's anguish.

Charlie's invitation seemed frantic.

"You've got to come with me," he had commanded.

"Got to?"

"Please, Nick. I just can't do it alone. It's been
five years since I've been there for Christmas. I need a little moral
support."

"You sound like it's some kind of hell."

"You don't know the half of it."

In the train, Nick sat closest to the window, watching the
flat landscape recede, the now barren farmland interspersed with tiny towns
looking neat under the snow blanket. He felt Charlie's restlessness as his
friend crossed and uncrossed his legs and slumped in his seat. He was silent
for most of the trip, until near the end when he finally spoke.

"My mother's mad, Nick," he said.

"Mad?" He had thought Charlie had meant angry.
"At you?"

"Mad, mad. Balmy. Nutty as a fruitcake." Nick
turned from the window and looked at Charlie. There was no humor in the retort
at all, despite the bantering cadence of his response. "We'll all be
playing a little game. The idea is not to notice how nuts she really is. Keep
an eye on my old man. He'll give you the cues." Nick didn't answer,
contemplating the possibilities of an eccentric afternoon. Charlie sighed and
shook his head. "It'll be grim, kid."

By the time they reached Hempstead, the train had emptied
and they had little trouble finding a rickety thirtyish vintage cab outside the
station. Nick could feel Charlie grow more tense as the ancient taxi rattled
through town and past the deserted shopping area with the Christmas decorations
tinkling in the wind. The cab pulled up in front of a white house, carefully
maintained, as if the owner had taken special care to keep it shined like a
prized jewel. To Nick it looked bright and cheerful enough, a picture postcard
quality.

After the cab had crunched away through the white, clean
snow, Charlie stood for a moment surveying the house, his eyes growing moist.

"A pretty little place," Nick said. Charlie
turned his face away and sniffled, brushing the back of his hand across his
nose.

"Don't let it fool you," he barked, kicking up a
mist of snow as he strode up the wooden steps to the door and banged the
polished brass knocker.

A thin, cadaverous face appeared, as deeply lined as if a
sculptor's tool had sliced deep ruts from the man's high cheekbones, down to
the chin. He was dressed in a dark blue suit, shiny with use, surely his best
suit, with a white shirt and tightly knotted tie; a gold collar pin passed
under the knot, tightening a frayed collar. There was a vaguely familiar hint
of Charlie in the way the man carried himself, although that aspect of him
seemed lost to the impression of a kind of withered plant. There was no display
of affection between father and son, only a lightly clasped handshake.

"This is my friend, Nick Gold," Charlie said.
Nick put out his hand and was conscious of a valiant attempt at a forced smile.
But the older man retained a puzzled look, keeping his arm stiff, leaving
Nick's proffered hand stuck in the air.

"I didn't expect..." Charlie's father began.

"It's all right," Charlie said. Nick observed
that they were talking in whispers. They followed the older man through a long
uncarpeted corridor, the wood brightly polished. It squeaked lightly as they
walked. Nick noticed a sparsely set dining table. Shades were drawn, casting
shadows, the bright day shut away except where shafts of white light struck
inside where the shades were not snugly fitted. They walked into a parlor lit
by low-wattage bulbs under old-fashioned lampshades. Nick's further observation
of the room was interrupted by a sudden change in voice pitch as Charlie's
father, straightening, began walking with an exaggerated gait, like an actor
coming suddenly onstage.

"Charles is here, Princess," the man said. He had
directed his falsetto, cheerful voice to a hideously white-masked woman sitting
stiffly on a wing chair. Charlie flashed a troubled gaze at Nick, as if urging
him to patience, obviously embarrassed by the sight of the strangely made-up
woman. Charlie's mother's face looked like that of some strange rag doll, the
lips exaggerated in a bright red cupid's bow, eyebrows shining in a long thin
line, eyes deep in mascara, the stark white forehead ringed with little red
curls. But it was the white makeup, so beyond humanness, like a character in
mime, that held the interest. Nick watched her with fascination as one might
observe a freak in a circus sideshow. The woman was obviously demented. Mad,
Charlie had warned.