Underworld (72 page)

The moans of spewing buses rose into the settling dusk. The office lights were on now and all up and down the halls the girls tapped on the squarish keys of their IBM Selectrics. The graved ball kissed the ribbon, the ribbon kissed the paper, a superior grade of bond that was rag-weaved like the oxford shirts worn by the bosses of the typing girls. Every sixteen seconds one of them hit the wrong key and muttered a middling curse.

The married copywriters met their secretaries, or the secretaries of other writers, or the tall and lissome secretaries of account executives, white-shod and well-spoken, and went about the tender regimen of their lunchtime love—the nooner, it was called, or the matinee—meeting in the secretaries' snug apartments, striking in their dimensional similarity to the cubicles the writers worked in, only decorated more touchingly and vulnerably, with posters of Madrid on the off-white walls, or prints of Marino Marini horses or Bernard Buffet lobsters, or in the larger apartments of secretaries with roommates, which complicated the schedule and made the writers yearn for an intimate glimpse of one of the roommates, barefoot in a partially open robe, perhaps, coming from the shower after a late night with a failed date, the apartments situated
nearly always in the sunless hindquarters of white-brick buildings in the East 80s, undoormanned, the small elevators inspected every two years by an individual called A. Bear, according to recent entries on the record of inspection that was fixed to the elevator walls.

And yes, it's true, Charlie has practiced this kind of erotic disport himself, off and on, with one or another single young woman working in the production department or somesuch level of the mothership, belowdecks and lonesome and not always, actually, very young. But did he enjoy these interludes or were they sad entertainments he inflicted on himself in the stark space of a convertible sofa turned open to span the room so that he had to walk upon the bedding to go and pee? He had lovely sex with his wife in an antique bed with carved oak posts, so what are you doing here, Charlie, balling this morose media clerk. It was an odd form of mortification for some pattern of behavior, or grain of being, too transparent for this adman to fathom.

“This is the challenge, Dwayne. You have to read the mysterious current that passes in the night and connects millions of people across a continental landmass, compelling them to buy a certain product first thing in the morning. They gotta have it and you gotta be ready for them when they show up.”

He said, “Package goods and painkillers. These are the things that keep the country running.”

A swarthy male stood in the doorway.

“Jou order oranjuice?”

Charlie fished some money out of his pocket and paid the guy. He took an extra-strength antacid tablet out of the bottle in his desk and washed it down with the watery pulpless half-rancid juice, for whatever calmative effect it might have on his acidic backwash.

He told a dirty joke to Dwayne and sensed the fellow going pink out there on the prairie. There was nothing left to do but leave. Charlie walked through the semiswank lobby, done in Babylonian art deco, and nipped around the corner to his Swedish masseuse, who karate'd his aching lumbar for ten minutes. Then he wheeled into Brooks Brothers and picked up a couple of tennis shirts because what's more fun than an impulse buy? He double-timed it across Madison to the Men's Bar at the Biltmore, where he massively inhaled a Cutty on the
rocks and was out the door in half a shake and skating across the vast main level of Grand Central, the Bobby Thomson baseball jammed into the pocket of his topcoat—a Burberry all-weather that he loved like a brother and that went especially well with the suit he was wearing, a slate gray whipcord made for Charlie by a guy who did lapels for organized crime—because he'd decided the ball was no longer safe in his office and he wanted his son to have it, for better or worse, love or money, real or fake, but please Chuckie do not abuse my trust, I could fall down dead passing the stuffed mushrooms at dinner and this is the one thing I want you to take and keep and care for, and he went striding through the gate just in time to make his train, which was the evolutionary climax of the whole human endeavor, and he bucketed up to the bar car, filled with people who more or less resembled Charlie, give or take a few years and a few gray hairs and the details of their evilest dreams.

The last express to Westport.

There were stories about the Pope. There were reports, a certain kind of underground rumor that can make its way across a country, parish to parish. Pope Pius was having mystical visions. That was the rumor going round. He was witness to a series of supernatural events, seeing things in the dead of night. That was the story people told, I don't know, nuns, old ladies on novena nights, maybe well-heeled parishioners too, pink and fit, officers of the Knights of Columbus. People hear such a story and feel something turn in their souls, a leap out of dear old singsong life into some other reading altogether.

In class a student mentioned the rumors to Father Paulus in the course of a discussion that touched on the subject of thaumatology, or the study of wonders.

The old priest looked out the window.

“If you'd been drinking dago red until three in the morning, you'd have visions too.”

I went to see Father in his office later in the day. It was a three-hundred-yard
walk through a billowing white storm. I had the edges of my watch cap unfurled over my ears and kept my forearm raised against the cutting sleet, against the whole hard physical thing, the snowstorms and open spaces, the reality of a mass of land called North America, new to my experience.

Father started talking before I had my jacket off.

“It's when the hair in my nostrils begins going stiff. That's when I want to retire to the south of France.”

“The snow on the parade.”

“Yes, I know.”

“The benches are buried.”

“Yes,” he said.

“I realized, just out the window there, I was walking over a bench.”

“Yes. Sit down, Shay, and tell me how you're doing. A young man's progress. That's the title of this session.”

“I borrowed a pair of boots.”

He liked that response.

“Do they fit?”

“No.”

Even better. When he asked about the state of my mind and soul, which he did only rarely, and when I answered on a practical plane, as I always did, he seemed to think I was devising a down-to-earth reply out of some manly instinct when in fact I was only confused, forever trying to put together a suitable set of words.

“What are you reading?”

I recited a list.

“You understand what's in those books?”

“No,” I said.

Again he smiled. I think he was tired of gifted kids. He'd done work with boys of advanced standing and now he wanted to talk to misfits of the other kind, the ones who'd made trouble for themselves and others.

“Some of it maybe. What I don't understand, I memorize.”

His arm was propped on the desk and he leaned his head into the canted hand. No smile this time.

“That's not why we started this place, is it?”

“I study like a madman, Father.”

“But you can't memorize ideas the way you do the endings of Latin verbs.”

His hands were unspotted and small. Some of the other jebbies wore flannel shirts and heavy sweaters but Father Paulus was not influenced by climate or geography or the sense of special freedoms at Voyageur. He went black-suited and roman-collared and I respected this and found it reassuring.

“One of the things we want to do here is to produce serious men. What sort of phenomenon is this? Not so easy to say. Someone, in the end, who develops a certain depth, a spacious quality, say, that's a form of respect for other ways of thinking and believing. Let us unnarrow the basic human tubing. And let us help a young man toward an ethical strength that makes him decisive, that shows him precisely who he is, Shay, and how he is meant to address the world.”

You were always afraid of disappointing Father, being unequal to the level of discourse. Being bland when he wanted a more spirited sort of traffic, even a bullshit act, wiseass and slouchy. Bland and plodding when he wanted independence and open argument.

“My own life, I confess—yes, why not, you'll hear my confession, Shay. Who better than you? Took me all these years to understand that I'm not a serious man. Too much irony, too much vanity, too little what—I don't know, a lot of things. And no rage, you see. Or a small ingrown toenail rage, a puny frustration. Eventually you get to know these things. Do you act out of principle? Or do you devise self-justifying reasons for your bad behavior? This is my confession, not yours, so you're not required to come up with answers. Not yet anyway. Eventually, yes. You'll know in your heart how well you've met the calling to be a man.”

“No rage,” I said. “What do you mean?”

“No rage. Rage and violence can be elements of productive tension in a soul. They can serve the fullness of one's identity. One way a man untrivializes himself is to punch another man in the mouth.”

I must have looked at him.

“You can't doubt this, can you? I don't like violence. It scares the hell out of me. But I think I see it as an expanding force in a personality.
And I think a man's ability to act in opposition to his tendencies in this direction can be a source of virtue, a statement of his character and forbearance.”

“So what do you do? Punch the guy in the mouth or resist the urge?”

“Point well taken. I don't have the answer. You have the answer,” he said. “But how serious can a man be if he doesn't experience a full measure of the appetites and passions of his race, even if only to contain them or direct them, somehow, usefully?”

Who better than you to hear me confess? He'd said that, hadn't he? Someone who's been in correction. Someone who has the answer. Of course I had nothing that resembled an answer and wondered why he thought I carried a stain of special knowledge for having done what I'd done.

“Have you come across the word velleity? A nice Thomistic ring to it. Volition at its lowest ebb. A small thing, a wish, a tendency. If you're low-willed, you see, you end up living in the shallowest turns and bends of your own preoccupations. Are we getting anywhere?”

“It's your confession, Father.”

His office was in an old barracks building and the force of the wind made the beams shift and crick.

“Aquinas said only intense actions will strengthen a habit. Not mere repetition. Intensity makes for moral accomplishment. An intense and persevering will. This is an element of seriousness. Constancy. This is an element. A sense of purpose. A self-chosen goal. Tell me I'm babbling. I'll respect you for it.”

We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order—except the natives, in this case, were us. Poor city kids who showed promise; some frail-bodied types with photographic memories and a certain uncleanness about them; those who were bright but unstable; those who could not adjust; the ones whose adjustment was ordained by the state; a cluster of Latins from some Jesuit center in Venezuela, smart young men with a cosmopolitan style, freezing their weenies off; and a few farmboys from not so far away, shyer than borrowed suits.

“Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You'd be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from.”

This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots.

“Those are ugly things, aren't they?”

“Yes they are.”

“Name the parts. Go ahead. We're not so chi chi here, we're not so intellectually chic that we can't test a student face-to-face.”

“Name the parts,” I said. “All right. Laces.”

“Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed.”

I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly.

“Sole and heel.”

“Yes, go on.”

I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box.

“Proceed, boy.”

“There's not much to name, is there? A front and a top.”

“A front and a top. You make me want to weep.”

“The rounded part at the front.”

“You're so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You've named the lace. What's the flap under the lace?”

“The tongue.”

“Well?”

“I knew the name. I just didn't see the thing.”

He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress.

“You didn't see the thing because you don't know how to look. And you don't know how to look because you don't know the names.”

He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk.

A plain black everyday clerical shoe.

“Okay,” he said. “We know about the sole and heel.”

“Yes.”

“And we've identified the tongue and lace.”

“Yes,” I said.

With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace.

“What is it?” I said.

“You tell me. What is it?”

“I don't know.”

“It's the cuff.”