It made her positively daffy, this song of corruption, this arboreal saga of death and transfiguration. She behaved like a rotten sloop riding out to a storm. While the wind howled in her brain the maggots were busy below—converting the wood to sawdust. No use trying to stop the wounds with putty. The wounds spread, left big holes in her sides through which you could poke an umbrella.
ARRIVING HOME late one night Tony Bring found Hildred sitting alone, her head buried in her arms. She was sobbing. And Vanya? Vanya was in her room scribbling—laying bluish-green eggs, unblemished, cute as pigeon eggs. There was a drama going on, but which act it was, or what the plot, he couldn’t tell. Secretive souls: tight-lipped, loyal as crooks. No tender polyps these, even though ravaged by war. Strange that things should go awry now, just when everyone was employed and Paris nearer than ever. Perhaps something had gone wrong at the art school . . . perhaps Vanya had taken to playing the slut again. It was stupid work, certainly, sitting on a stool with a rag around your breasts, or standing on one leg and dreaming. Who could blame them if they fortified themselves with a little gin? Weary of imitating marble, of inspiring dreams, the nightingale of Lesbos sometimes indulged in hysterics. It was the hysteria of a statue. But when some kind soul had fed her snowflakes she became tractable again, turned to marble, never lost her balance. Leaving the academy she would fly like a hummingbird and spread her fiery tail. It was because of her great swoops that she developed notalgia, which is a curious word for “pain in the back.” Hildred insisted that she meant nostalgia, but nostalgia was not the word. It was not homesickness, but a disorder of the spine that she had contracted. It came from flying, or from posing as a Winged Victory. Until they fed her snowflakes there was no relief.
AND TONY Bring—what is he doing for a livelihood? He has been so quiet lately, so subdued. One would never think, to see this quiet, sober individual marching home, that he had been shouting all night at the top of his lungs. He is distinctly not the sort to raise his voice in the marketplace, or the subway. At first it sounded more like a whisper when he opened his mouth. But one can’t sell papers by whispering to people. No, that he learned quickly enough. One had to develop a stentorian voice, a voice of brass that would rouse even the dead from their dreams. One had to hustle and shove, to elbow his way, to bawl louder than the next fellow. Only thus could one get rid of his load. On Saturday nights Tony Bring knew what notalgia was—it was curvature of the spine. Only in his case it didn’t come from soaring, for if he had wings he was unaware of them or they were atrophied. He felt rather as the snail must feel, crawling along with a house on its back. And when the snow came and the headlines announced that it was a blizzard it was a blizzard because blizzards are blizzards. The soft, spineless flakes, innocuous, tasteless, deodorized, carried the message through the conduits of his nerves and diluted his blood. . . . Though now he was linked closer than ever with the great metropolitan press he read nothing but headlines. The headlines were the dikes erected by addled brains to ward off the flood of print that rose with each edition and threatened to drown the inhabitants. They were written in stench and sweat, they conspired like prostitutes, they screamed with cancerous fury, they poetized and glorified the scrimmage, they crucified the sinners, they embalmed the dead, electrified the dull-witted, roused the constipated from their sodden lethargy. The headlines weighed on his mind, strangled his dreams, broke his back. It was not a body he brought home at night, but a collection of bruises. His dreams were those of the caterpillar before it has learned to fly, of the turtle whose back is pounded by breakers.
BETTER THAN standing on one leg with a towel around your hips was to furnish blood for the needy. The only capital required was health. If one had good health one had good blood and blood was selling at a premium these days. It sold for anywhere from fifteen dollars to one hundred dollars the pint. According to the grade. Supposing, for instance, one had Grade A blood. Of course it wasn’t called Grade A, but then that doesn’t matter. The point was that if one ate well, drank a glass of port regularly, and kept the intestines free from poisons, one could sell a pint of blood every ten or fifteen days. No need to drum up business, no political influence required, no capital to be invested. Just good, rich, healthy red blood—Grade A preferably—and that’s all there was to it.
Now there was in the Village a certain blood donor who knew the game from A to Izzit. He was Grade A, and his wife was on a par with him, speaking of blood quality. They had given away enough blood, between them, to float a battleship. And look at them! Fine bloom to their cheeks, fur coats . . . you could see them at the Caravan most any night consuming beefsteaks, dancing with both feet, drunk with blood or loss of blood.
There were hospitals and hospitals in New York, some better than others, from the standpoint of blood donors. A certain Jewish institution was the most generous of all, but then there was a waiting list—a formidable waiting list. Of course, when one got known, when the quality of one’s blood acquired a reputation, as it were, one could work his way up. Best to start with a modest institution—with a Presbyterian hospital, or something like that.
But first they had to give specimens. They gave away—absolutely gratis, as samples—ordinary syringefuls. They left their samples all over the city. Hildred had a bad time of it; some amateur punctured her in the wrong place and her arm swelled up and the veins grew black. She swore she was going to lose her arm, but as it turned out, she didn’t. And then she had vomiting spells. Even wild strawberries wouldn’t stay on her stomach. The only thing that agreed with her was port wine. Port wine was a tonic. She advised everyone to drink port.
There were hospitals that weren’t satisfied just to puncture one’s arm. Insisted on thoroughgoing examination: heart, lungs, urinalysis, height, weight, Wasserman test, nationality, heredity, etc. One could be insured for fifty thousand dollars with less fuss. And then there were the young bloods with the stethoscopes slung around their necks—they were devils for thoroughness. Even a little thing like a brassiere interfered with their patient, exhaustive inquiries. There were others—tired old duffers—who didn’t even ask you to cough. A thoroughly quixotic business, no matter from what angle you viewed it.
And then came the reports! They arrived in the mail like rejection slips from editorial offices. Some were printed, stereotyped forms couched in superpolite language; some were curt and rude, written in longhand—by foreigners or night watchmen. One thing stood out clearly: they were unfit. They were neither Grade A, nor Grade B, nor Grade C, nor Grade D. The good red corpuscles so much in demand at the moment showed a minus sign. Aside from the question of good or bad blood there were other things the matter with them. There were so many things the matter with them that it was only by a miracle they fell short of cancer, dropsy, or syphilis. At the bottom of all their ills lay anemia. Anemia was a sort of white heartrot developed by city organisms, a disease that turned the blood to dishwater. Who could furnish a clean bill of blood in a city like New York? It was all nonsense. They weren’t going to have the daylight scared out of them by young rubbernecks with stethoscopes slung around their necks and white trousers creased to a razor’s edge. Undernourished—that was the answer to the whole problem. More strawberries. More port. Thick juicy steaks with blood-red gravy. The doctors be damned! They were just false alarms. If you had money and you could afford to worry about your health, they’d scare you to death. A millionaire could be kept alive, even if his stomach were cut out. There were men whose tongues had been eaten away by cancer or depravity, yet they were able to go to the dinner table in a tuxedo and feed themselves through an artificial hole. A poor man, if he had only a cough, was allowed to die of neglect. Coughs didn’t interest the medical profession much. The druggist took care of coughs and backaches. The progress of medicine was such that it was no longer a science, if science it ever was, but an art. The art of prolonging life—by artificial means. Ah, if there were no rich, what refinements would be lacking, what subtleties, what complexiti
es! In the bodies of the rich disease sprouted luxuriantly. On these refined manure piles what marvelous roses bloomed, what beautiful ulcers! Out of dotards and hyenas the men of science were almost prepared now to make butterflies. Progress . . . progress. . . . A century ago the tree of life was fast rotting away—but today it flourished and would go on flourishing though the trunk were three-quarters cement.
3
ON THE night of Lincoln’s birthday there was a blizzard, and between Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s birthday it snowed on and off and everything was wrapped in wadding so that even the ash barrels and the garbage cans looked attractive. And while the snow fell things happened, as they do in Russian novels, in the Russian soul where there is God and snow and ice and talk and murder and epilepsy, where history leaves off only to make place for nature, where be it only a room there is space for the biggest drama ever written, space for the invisible host and for all peoples, climates, tongues. On the night of Lincoln’s birthday, just before the blizzard fell out of the sky, Hildred stepped out in a velvet suit to mail a letter. She was gone three days and three nights in her velvet suit that had hollow silver balls down the front. There were twenty-six or twenty-seven of them, all empty, and each one veined with cicatrices which, to a microscopic organism endowed with sense of vision, would no doubt appear as the canals on the planet Mars appear to the human eye. In her absence the telephone never rang once, nor did any of the crippled, aged, or demented emissaries of the telegraph company ring the doorbell, present an open-face envelope and an inch and a half of pencil without lead saying “Sign here.” The world was wrapped in wadding and the wadding gave out no news.
Tony Bring lay in his bed and Vanya lay in hers. The first day said Vanya aren’t you worried and he answered no. On the second day said Vanya what are you going to do and he answered nothing. The third day said Vanya I’m going to notify the police and he made no reply. But instead of notifying the police she went out and got drunk and when she returned she was raving about cathedrals and rats and athletes with bull necks; she even ceased to be original and called herself “an arrow of yearning for the other shore.” Toward morning she began to sing off-key and scream and shriek, she got up and held the walls apart with her dirty palms. The Danish sisters rapped on the floor with their shoes. This having no effect, the only thing left to do was to throw a pail of water over her, which was done. Thereupon she slept as calmly as if she were in a straitjacket and Tony Bring examined her toenails, which were long and bent. In the morning Hildred walked in, her eyes glassy, and all the explanation that she offered was that she had met a poet, saying which she tumbled into bed without even removing her velvet suit, which now had only twenty-two or twenty-three balls down the front, all of them empty and each and every one of them veined with cicatrices.
She had a long, long sleep and when she awoke no one knew whether it was seven in the morning or seven at night. She opened the window and collected a bowl of snow. Then she went out and bought food—heaps of food—and said how beautiful it was out of doors. Two things were good for the complexion and two only: a damp climate, such as England had, and wet snow. No matter what she touched on there was snow on her tongue. Her eyes were still glassy, and though her spirit was bright it was strangely bright, snow-bright, and after she had eaten she vomited and the beautiful glow on her cheeks that had come with the snow disappeared and her skin looked as it had always looked—flour-white, satiny, heavy, languid. With her bright red lips and her bright round eyes she was like a fever-wraith and her talk had fever in it.
From the day the blizzard set in, which was Lincoln’s birthday, until Washington’s birthday Tony Bring never got out of bed except to go to the bathroom. He was down with hemorrhoids. In a box containing a tube of ointment which Hildred purchased at the druggist they found a description of the malady printed in five languages. The English read as follows:
Hemorroides
Hemorroides are varicous veins produced by the dilatation of the veins of the body rectum. They are due chiefly to constipation and enteritis and can be internal or external. Sometimes itchings accompany the push. The saddle is nearly always painful.
Our Treatment
Avoid in food all that can inflame the system such as spiced food, game, etc.
Eat little meat. To become almost a vegetarian.
Not be constipated, but above all never to take drastics such as Scamonee, Aloes, Jalap.
Take light infusions of Bourdaine or still better Paraffin oil.
Local Treatment
Use the canule to bring into the rectum a little Sedosol. In cases of itchings rub gently with Sedosol and the soothing effect is felt immediately.
Take great care before every application to make a good lotion of hot boiled water.
Our product, which is a real new piece of science, does not grease or stain the skin and is put away very easily even with cold water.
Twice a day, therefore, they turned him over on his stomach and doctored his rectum. Between times they lubricated his system so thoroughly and conscientiously that if he had been a Linotype machine or a Diesel engine he would have functioned smoothly for a year to come. But he was a trying patient. Instead of being grateful to them for their pains he yelled and cursed. He complained because the ice melted too fast and grumbled when they refused to read to him. He asked for Jerusalem by Pierre Loti and they brought back Claude Farrere—L’Homme Qui Assassina. They were busy again putting arms and legs together, dyeing wigs, making hinges, sewing garments for their shooting gallery of Lilliputians. All day long and far into the night they labored, and while they labored they banged and scraped and whistled and sang in Russian and French and German, and they tossed off vodkas and gorged themselves with sandwiches, with caviar and sturgeon. They removed the old bulbs which had given out a yellow, sickly light and substituted daylight lamps. The effect was shattering. It seemed to him as if his flesh were a mass of splinters, that his nerves were exposed and scraped. He could feel the veins in his rectum throbbing, the blood bubbling there as if it were coursing through a wild pulse. And of what interest to him was their wild gibberish about Picasso and Rimbaud or the Comte de Lautréamont? They talked as if they were already seated on the terrasse in front of the Dôme. They even fixed the date of their going and disputed hotly as to which line they would take and whether they would live in a cheap hotel or rent a studio. They knew in advance that they would not be taking baths except at long intervals, that Camels would be too expensive to smoke, and that a sou wouldn’t buy even a brass button.
How the piles alone are sufficient to make a man nervous and irritable; they weigh you down and make you feel as if your insides were dropping out. They can become so cursedly unbearable that the thought of hanging by the wrists becomes an unmitigated pleasure. But when, all day long, and far into the night, the place is turned into a carpenter shop and there is the sound of glasses clinking and tongues wagging, a man may be excused for going off his nut. And Tony Bring behaved exactly as if he had gone cuckoo. He yelled with pain or rage, and then he sang, and after that he cursed or laughed. If they mentioned Picasso he would talk about Matisse, or that wild man Czobel, and neither Czobel nor Matisse meant anything to him, nor did anybody, but he wanted to be heard and drown them with words, or if he couldn’t drown them asphyxiate them because if they went on talking and talking he felt his guts would turn to sawdust and it would be the tale of the fake tinder fungus all over again. Injecting bisulfide of carbon or arsenate of lead wouldn’t help a damned bit. A man who’s being strangled in the rectum, who asks nothing more of the world than a saddle of cracked ice, can’t be expected to have the temper of a saint or the heroism of a god. He wants to be left alone in peace and quiet, in a dark room preferably, and listen to some kind angel read aloud from some enchanting or disenchanting book. He doesn’t want to hear of poems bordered by copper light or houses that open like oysters. He doesn’t want to amuse himself with Chinese puzzles, for it was nothing less th
an a Chinese puzzle and would always remain one where Hildred had gone the night of the blizzard when she stepped out in a velvet suit with hollow silver balls down the front to mail a letter and then after not showing up for three days and nights neither telegraphing nor telephoning suddenly walks in with glassy eyes saying that she had met a poet and not even a punctuation mark beyond this. And if she thought everything could be put straight again by calling in a sawed-off, hammered-down runt of a doctor she was mistaken. He wouldn’t have any cheap kikes tinkering with him, not even with his rectum. But the doctor came just the same and it was the old trick of slipping a thermometer under the tongue and asking questions you couldn’t answer. A strange thing was that instead of talking about Capablanca or Einstein the doctor spoke of Hilaire Belloc, who he said was a scholar without wisdom, and anyway for the Gentile to deal with the Jews was like running a race with your legs tied because the Jewish mind was keen, quick, slippery, capable of turning over a thousand times to the Gentile’s once. Hildred, who was greatly offended by her husband’s rudeness, ushered the doctor to the front door and apologized, and the doctor kissed her hand and said there was nothing to worry about. “He’s lazy . . . he’s malingering,” he said. And so with a light heart she returned to her carpenter shop and thereafter paid not the slightest heed to groans, aches, screams, curses, threats, laughs, et cetera.