Timebends (44 page)

With Mr. Franks incapable of initiating the least conversational effort, we soon fell silent. After 1930 there was simply nothing more for him to say. On the shelf of a breakfront behind his head was propped Sidney's bachelor of science diploma from Columbia, and beside it his
cum laude
certificate. He was presently on a subway
coming up from a shop near the Centre Street police headquarters with his first cop's uniform. I noticed that Mr. Franks was no longer smoking and recalled him with his cut-off cigar stuck into his pipe as he crossed the 110th Street sidewalk in front of our building early in the mornings to be ushered into his beige Locomobile touring limousine by Alfred, his chauffeur, for the ride down to Wall Street.

Steps on the stairs coming up two at a time. Sidney burst in before Mr. Franks could get out of his chair. He had a long cardboard box under his arm. “Hi!” We were laughing as he undid the twine and took out the blue jacket. Sid was tall, with coal black hair and eyes, long lashes, and full curved lips. It was a face alive with a forward-moving curiosity, a quick-to-pun, put-down intelligence. He pinned the badge on his jacket and stood there for our inspection, looking at himself in the mahogany-framed floor-length tilting mirror. Then he turned to me, and we fell around the room laughing. The jacket collar stood away from his neck, the sleeves were slightly too long. I made him put on the cap, and there was space between his temples and the inner rim.

“What the hell are you going to do if something happens?”

“I've got a whistle, for Christ's sake, I'll call a cop.”

There was a knock on the door. We shut down instantly. They never had visitors. It had to be the inspector. Sid went and opened the door. The man came in already asking for me, obviously accustomed to entering without being invited, but Sid's uniform jacket dampened his surly assurance, though he seemed confused by the light tan trousers. Drenched in disbelief, he asked to be shown where I slept, where my clothes were. We showed him everything, even my towel in the tiny box of a bathroom. He left abruptly, almost in my mid-sentence. When the door closed behind him, Mr. Franks turned to me. “Well, say!” (That came off all right, didn't it!)

Now Sid hung up his uniform, took his new revolver out of its carton, and loaded it with cartridges. Mr. Franks watched. “Well, say,” he said gravely, registering that his son's life was seriously changing. The smile was leaving Sid's face as he loaded the gun. I saw now that he really was a policeman.

Since his graduation two years earlier, his life had gone through a typical devolution for these times. How to live had started out as an analytical problem of how to place himself so as to intercept the flow of money in the society. He thought in such objective abstractions. With production jobs nonexistent, advertising, words—what he called bullshit—were at a premium. Sid went to the Forty
second Street library to analyze the possibilities, took some free courses somewhere, and as an exercise analyzed the Fruit of the Loom underwear ads, attempting to come up with better ideas of his own for the product. This petered out, and he joined a team selling vacuum cleaners door to door. Analyzing that problem now, he rapidly climbed to top grosser for the company and was given his own team and the entire southwest quarter of the Bronx. His success, he believed, was the result of his objectifying what moved women to buy vacuum cleaners, which by and large they needed, he said, like a hole in the head.

He had discovered, working door to door, that people, women especially, would much rather placate a stranger than move into conflict with him. The trick, therefore, was to ask questions whose answers were bound to be positive. “Is this Nine ten Fairview Avenue?” “Yes.” “Are you Mrs. Brown?” “Yes.” “Do you have carpets or rugs?” “I do, yes”—and so on.

“By the time I got to my cleaner I had them nodding so fast they couldn't stop. The second stage is guilt. You unlimber the machine, always a new one in a new carton, which you cut open; cutting open the new carton creates an obligation, and the effort involved in unpacking puts them in your debt. By the time you're massaging the rug, the hook is in—you've done work for them, they owe you something, they've taken up your precious time …”

After a year or so disgust overwhelmed him even though—or perhaps because—the higher echelons of the company were opening up to him. He was attending conferences in Albany, the regional headquarters, and was invited to lunch with a vice-president. This seemed to threaten him further, and he now analyzed his position and was unable to deny to himself that he was telling lies all day six days a week, inventing a need where for the most part none really existed. He gave up smoking cigarettes not because of the health hazard, of which at the time there was little mention, but out of resentment at his responding to cigarette advertising. He went over to cigars, but an unlabeled and unadvertised brand sold by the tobacconist downstairs. By the time he passed the police exams, he had come to certain fixed conclusions, all objectively arrived at. We had sat in the Automat on the corner over two blueberry muffins and two cups of coffee as he explained.

“I am not an unusually talented person. I know I could be a good engineer, but they're a dime a dozen now and probably will be unless there's another war. By that time, if I go on the cops, I could save enough to go back to school and get an engineering degree.

There are two things I can't stand—insecurity and bullshit. An engineer is real, but I can't make that now. There's security on the cops, and from what I can tell so far the amount of bullshit involved is minimal.”

Perhaps that was what had made us laugh so hard when he put on his uniform for the first time; it was so blatantly a masquerade and a mere costume, an absurdity and a childishness. And that was why we stopped laughing when he came to load his revolver—there was something in both of us that sensed this was really him.

We continued seeing each other two or three times a year during the early forties. Initially he still seemed to see it as a temporary job, but once he married, that kind of talk thinned out, and with the war on he figured he might as well be in this uniform as the other, although he had been shot at a few times in Harlem and could almost as easily have ended up dead there as in the army.

After a while it dawned on me that I was the one who always initiated our meetings. It was uncomfortable to admit, but our lives were diverging as I became better and better known as a writer. But there was also a kind of obsessive bitterness in him toward corruption in the LaGuardia administration, which was conventionally regarded as liberal and honest. With less and less humor he talked about Roosevelt's cynicism and in the president's fourth and final campaign revealed that he had given up voting altogether. Finally I could no longer imagine his idea of a future, either for himself or the country.

We had a beer one evening at an Irish bar on Third Avenue not far from his precinct station. Silences between us had grown longer. Something unrelentingly negative in him was pushing me away. And yet I occasionally glimpsed him as I had known him in our childhood, that bright-eyed little boy, the rare one with the foresight to save his marbles from one summer to the next. Now he said, “When I go into a dark alley after some bastard I am not thinking about his shitty upbringing and his deprived childhood.” At the same time he had not a single friend on the force. “I bring my body in in the morning and take it home with me at night.” The other cops were incurably reactionary, anti-Semitic, and ignorant. But the idea of resuming his education was gone. “I'm going to the end; I want the pension and that's it. I may try to become an engineer after that or maybe just sit home and cut up paper dolls, I don't know.”

Still, something of his old joyfulness returned whenever he met my parents, with whom he could sit and talk about his own children
or about the pre-Crash years. He seemed like an orphan on these visits. My mother, who drew all conversations toward intimate things, had him confessing that in his total refusal to compromise with the duplicities of business he had betrayed himself into another position that was just as false and inauthentic. They would sit together on our porch on a Sunday afternoon facing the backyard, over which my pear and apple trees—as whips, I had paid thirty-five cents apiece for them on Cortland Street in 1930—now spread their branches, his heels resting on the railing as he stretched out his legs with his open poplin jacket revealing the holster on his hip. Every few months he would come out like this to hear my mother talk about his mother, whom he found impossible to recall no matter how he tried. It was an illogical hole in his life. “Oh, she was elegant and so smart. But the minute it rained she would go with your rubbers to school and meet you coming out. Her Sidney!—my God, you were all she thought about.. .“At this his face would soften and almost glow as through my mother's voice he felt his own mother near him. He adored my mother for these recitations that gave him back some sweetness in his life, even though she kept at him remorselessly to change his career.

“But if you have no special talent…,” he tried to explain all over again.

“For God's sake, Sidney, a boom is starting, you're a young man. With that head you could make a wonderful career in something!” And I saw the temptation stir in his black eyes, and it hit me that he may have gone on strike against life out of spite, because his mother had deserted him by her death.

These visits would end with him staring out at the backyard chewing his cheap cigar, and I think I saw what he was seeing—not the current boom but the collapse that was bound to follow later; the Depression had left a knife cut across his brain. My mother would draw his head down as he was about to leave and kiss him on his eyelids, as soothingly as if he were a child being put to sleep

We ceased seeing each other altogether sometime in the mid-forties. He always managed to be busy on the evenings I suggested we meet, until I gave up. Then, sometime in 1955,1 was walking up Lexington Avenue when I thought I spotted him with a group of eight or ten men I took to be police, in light zipper jackets and sleeveless shirts. It was a perfect spring evening at around dusk, when the light is purple, the same kind of light we would wait for to release our fireflies.

For three or four weeks now the
World-Telegram
and the Hearst
Journal-American,
along with Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan in
his
Daily News
column, had been running patriotic attacks on my left-wing background. I had spent half the summer in the rough streets of Bay Ridge gathering material on warring youth gangs—what was then called juvenile delinquency—for a film that was to have been made with city cooperation. As I learned only later, a Mrs. Dolores Scotti had been sent from Washington by the House Un-American Activities Committee to secretly warn the city officials who were dealing with me and the project that the Committee was trying to “place” me as a member of the Communist Party, and though they had not yet succeeded, it would be best to break off any relations with me. Alerted, the Committee's press mouthpieces wailed in chorus until the city withdrew its cooperation, effectively destroying the project. It was the blacklisting time when the careers of many of my actor friends were being destroyed and any effective resistance to this bloodless American fascism was hard to detect.

The troop of cops was heading for the Sixty-seventh Street precinct off Lexington, having an animated discussion as they momentarily slowed to a halt on the corner. I approached from behind them. It was years since I had seen Sid, and all I felt was the joy of finding him again. From ten yards away I called out his name.

I was sure he recognized my voice, but he only half turned to me as I approached with my hand extended. With a strained grin he lightly returned my grasp and immediately let go. The other men had moved off by this time and were glancing at us from up the block. “I've got to report in,” Sid said, turning away to join them as they rounded the corner toward the precinct.

I now recalled that my photo had been in the
Daily News
twice in the past few weeks, and just a few days before, the
World-Telegram
had actually published an editorial to the effect that I should be “allowed” to write the delinquency movie—after all, it was billed as a liberal newspaper—but that my name should simply not appear on it. There had been no reaction from any side to this perfectly Soviet strategy of dealing with recalcitrant writers.

Over the next thirty years I could never pass that police precinct without wondering whether Sid was afraid of contamination or had been genuinely converted, a premature neoconservative. I remember how I continued up to the corner in time to see him mount the steps, the doorway flanked by two green globes that cast a sheen of iridescence over the cluster of young cops climbing the stoop. Sid was still busy talking to one of them. It looked to me like he had made friends at last.

His hostility still heated my face, and at the same moment I
recalled him shaking out his jar of fireflies over 110th Street. Walking away down Lexington, I wondered if we were more conscious than in earlier times of such concatenations of experience, rather than its gradual unfolding, and whether it was this awareness that had exploded forms in the arts. In my own work I felt a need to hurry from climax to climax as in film montage, or even in Joycean prose with its strings of firecracker words, or in Picasso's figures seen from several angles superimposed, closing up the intervals of time. Life itself was a continuous multiple exposure. Did it seem like this because everything kept changing so quickly now and truth was far more a fluid than a fact? And was this why, at least in America, one lived in such anticipation and unease?

The Arab calls the Crusaders “accursed”—as did the Jews of medieval Europe, who were so frequently massacred by them on their way to redeem Jerusalem, the City of God—while the Christian image of the Crusader is all nobility, the epitome of the ideal man. Which view is properly history?