“When we were kids in Montana, we used to say they were plucking geese in heaven. I wonder if they still say that.”
“I never heard it before,” I said, entirely willing to make peace.
“Maybe the saying’s gone out. It was long ago.”
“Couldn’t he so long,” I said generously, and won a saddened smile.
“Oh, yes, long enough.”
Gesell wrote on, also smiling, thinking, perhaps, of his wife’s girlhood or of similar myths of his own early days. The yawning dog closed his jaws with a snap.
“Then there was rain,” said Beth.
“I know,” said Gesell. “Angels?”
“Oh, get along, Peter.” She laughed, and the color from her hair seemed to spread along her cheeks. “Placer mining.”
“I never heard of that, either,” I said.
“And here you are,” said Gesell, fluttering the receipt.
We were smiling broadly, all three.
Not long afterward, however, on a Sunday afternoon, the house began to go cold, and at two o’clock the electricity was shut off. It was a mild day; we might easily have borne the chill. But we had been listening to a Brahms concerto. I hurried downstairs and rang at Gesell’s door. The Dalmatian threw himself in a rage against it, clawing the glass. I ran around to the basement entrance and, without knocking, went in. Gesell stood at his workbench, a length of pipe in his hand. A pistol would not have deterred me. I strode toward him, kicking rods, board-ends, pieces of wire, out of my way.
“Why did you turn off the current?” I said.
“I had to work on this stoker, that’s why.”
“Why the devil do you wait until Sunday? And why couldn’t you tell us beforehand?”
“I don’t have to get your permission to work on this stoker,” he said.
“How long are you going to keep it off?”
Ignoring this question, he turned sullenly back to his bench.
“Well, how long?” I repeated. And, when I saw that he was not going to reply, I took him by the shoulder and, forcing him round, pushed aside the pipe and struck him. He fell, the pipe clattering under him on the cement. But instantly he was up again, brandishing his fists, shouting, “If that’s what you want!” He could not reach me. I carried him to the wall, hitting repeatedly into his chest and belly and cutting my knuckles on his open, panting mouth. After the first few blows, my anger vanished. In weariness and self-disgust I pinned him against the bricks. Hearing his thick, rasping shouts, I said pacifyingly, “Don’t get excited, Mr. Gesell. I’m sorry about this. Don’t get excited!”
“You damned fool!” he cried. “You’ll get yours! You damned crazy fool!” His voice quivered with terror and anger. “Beth, Be-eth! You wait!” Twisting him away from the wall, I shoved him from me. “I’ll get out a warrant. Be-eth!”
“You’d better not,” I said. But I felt the emptiness of my threat and, more ashamed than ever, I went upstairs where I bandaged my hand and sat down to wait for the police. Iva laughed at my fears and said I would have a long wait. She was right, though I was prepared all week to go to court and pay a fine for disorderly conduct. Iva guessed that Beth was unwilling to invest in a warrant. We moved a month later. Iva and Beth made all the arrangements. We forfeited several weeks’ rent to make our escape.
This was “not like” me; it was an early symptom. The old Joseph was inclined to be even-tempered. Of course, I have known for a long time that we have inherited a mad fear of being slighted or scorned, an exacerbated “honor.” It is not quite the duelist’s madness of a hundred years ago. But we are a people of tantrums, nevertheless; a word exchanged in a movie or in some other crowd, and we are ready to fly at one another. Only, in my opinion, our rages are deceptive; we are too ignorant and spiritually poor to know that we fall on the “enemy” from confused motives of love and loneliness. Perhaps, also, self-contempt. But for the most part, loneliness.
Iva, though she concealed it at the time, was surprised; she later told me so. This was a rebellion against my own principle. It alarmed me; and the treasons I saw at the Servatius party were partly mine, as I was forced at the time to acknowledge.
February 8
The thermometer still wavers around zero. The cold is part of the general malignancy. I think of its fitness, as the war news comes in. You are bound to respect such a winter for its unmitigated wintriness. “I tax not you, you elements, with unkindness,” Lear yells. He invites their “horrible pleasure.” He is quite right, too.
February 9
I feel I am a sort of human grenade whose pin has been withdrawn. I know I am going to explode and I am continually anticipating the time, with a prayerful despair crying “Boom!” but always prematurely.
The sense in which Goethe was right: Continued life means expectation. Death is the abolition of choice. The more choice is limited, the closer we are to death. The greatest cruelty is to curtail expectations without taking away life completely. A life term in prison is like that. So is citizenship in some countries. The best solution would be to live as if the ordinary expectations had not been re moved, not from day to day, blindly. But that requires immense self-mastery.
February 10
Steidler has been here twice in the past week. He seems to find me congenial. Which means, I venture to say, that he assumes we are in the same boat. I would not mind the visits nor the assumption if it were not for the fact that I still feel, at the end of a few hours, that we are practicing some terrible vice together. We smoke and talk. He tells me about his adventures on the Coast, in the hospital, and about his present affairs. I have learned that he receives ten dollars a week from his mother and five more from his brother. Budgeting himself strictly, he manages to live on twelve, and the rest he spends on horses. Occasionally he wins, but he estimates that he has lost four or five thousand dollars in the last ten years.
He does not care to speak of such things. He mentions them only in passing. He is not at all blind to their meanness. He simply takes it for granted that they are bound to be mean. There is no dignity anywhere, nothing but absurd falsehood. It is no use trying to bury this falsehood. It would only rise again, to laugh at you. He says this in so many words. When you ask him about the details of his life, he gives you a look of surprise. He is not offended; but that such admittedly shabby things should interest you surprises him genuinely. He would rather tell you the story of a bet lost or won, a fraud, a clever reply, an interesting reprisal, an insulting letter he sent a creditor, a love affair.
Last time, he told me a tortuous, long story about his attempts to conquer a Norwegian girl who lives in his hotel—Laird Towers. He had met her on Thanksgiving Day, in the lobby. Hartly, the night clerk, had given him the wink, and so he set about the siege. She didn’t like him, of course. It always started that way. Around Christmas she started to look at him more encouragingly. Unfortunately he was pinched, had no money. It came to his notice that other men in the hotel were making headway with her. Hartly kept him only too well informed. “He didn’t have to tell me. I could see from the beginning she was dynamite.”
During the holiday he made a killing on a little pony called Spotted Cow; it romped home two lengths ahead of the field. He asked the Norwegian out to the Fiorenza for a spaghetti dinner.
“I thought we were getting along pretty well, and when she excused herself for a few minutes at eleven o’clock I sucked tranquilly at my Perfecto Queen and said to myself, ‘It’s in the bag.’ She had been drinking Pink Ladies, and she was running over. She went away unevenly. I waited. At eleven-fifteen there was no sign of her, so I thought, ‘Maybe she’s sick in the powder room?’ And I went to get the matron to have a look. But I got as far as the orchestra, and there was the girl sitting in some guy’s lap. Well, I tried not to seem injured, and I suggested that it was getting late, we ought to start for home. But she wouldn’t get up, and I didn’t want to make a fool of myself. So I beat it.”
He sent her letters for two week
s. She did not answer. When he had almost spent the last of his winnings, he met her in the Loop. It was her birthday, she said. He offered to buy her a drink. They went to the Blackhawk and had four. By-and-by a few handsome, well-dressed fellows came up to the bar, one in a naval uniform. Alf rose, paid for the drinks, put the rest of his change on the table, and said, “I know when I’m outclassed.” Without a cent in his pocket, he walked back to the hotel.
The story wandered to its inevitable conclusion—the conquest, with the Norwegian learning at last to distinguish between his superior worth and his appearance, giving in to him jokingly and condescendingly while drunk, and then finding that she had more than she had bargained for, et cetera. It would have shocked Alf to know that he was boring me, for he considers himself a first-class entertainer. Any night club would be lucky to have him. He can be original in several dialects. But I would rather not be entertained. I welcomed him at first, and I still rather like him. But I wish he would not come so often.
February 11
Myron Adler is back; he called this morning and said. he was coming to visit me as soon as he could break away. Robbie Stillman has come in after six months in Officers’ School. He has become an engineer. His business will be to construct airfields. Army life, he says, is not hard when you accustom yourself to discipline. You have to learn to submit.
His brother Ben is somewhere in the interior of Brazil. He hasn’t been heard from since October.
February 14
No sign of Myron or of anyone else. Even Steidler seems to have deserted me. Two days without visitors, talk, interest. Nothing. A pair of perfect blanks punched out of the calendar. It’s enough to make one pray for change, merely change, any change, to make one worship experience-in-itself. If I were a little less obstinate, I would confess failure and say that I do not know what to do with my freedom.
February 25
Letter from Abt, rich in Washington gossip and explanations of current policy. Why we act as we do in North Africa and toward Spain, De Gaulle, Martinique. It amuses me to catch the subtle pride with which he mentions his familiarity with important figures. (I assume they are important in official circles; I have never heard of them.)
February 16
Old Mrs. Kiefer is, as Mrs. Bartlett puts it, “sinking PDQ. She can drag along for a week or two weeks, but this”—in dumb show she sank a needle into her arm—“can’t keep her going forever.” We walk through the house gingerly. Captain Briggs no longer goes out for his evening smoke. It is too cold.
February 17
Iva and I have grown closer. Lately she has been remarkably free from the things I once disliked so greatly. She does not protest against this rooming-house life; she seems less taken up with clothes; she does not criticize my appearance or seem disturbed because my underwear is in such a state that in dressing I often put my leg through the wrong hole. And the rest: the cheap restaurant food we eat, our lack of pocket money. Yet she is as far as ever from what I once desired to make her. I am afraid she has no capacity for that. But now I am struck by the arrogance with which I set people apart into two groups: those with worth-while ideas and those without them.
February 18
Yesterday, passing the bush on which I found the stolen socks, I saw a second pair. Vanaker must have taken several. I pointed them out to Iva as we passed this evening. She, too, recognized them. She says we should find a way of showing that we are aware of the theft.
February 19
Another letter from John Pearl, asking for news of Chicago. As if I had any to give him. I know no more about it than he does. He wanted to go to New York but now sounds nostalgic and writes with deep distaste about his “peeling environment.”
“Peeling furniture, peeling walls, posters, bridges, everything is peeling and scaling in South Brooklyn. We moved here to save money, but I’m afraid we’d better start saving ourselves and move out again. It’s the treelessness, as much as anything, that hurts me. The unnatural, too human deadness.”
I’m sorry for him. I know what he feels, the kind of terror, and the danger he sees of the lack of the human in the too-human. We find it, as others before us have found it in the last two hundred years, and we bolt for “Nature.” It happens in all cities. And cities are “natural,” too. He thinks he would be safer in Chicago, where he grew up. Sentimentality! He doesn’t mean Chicago. It is no less inhuman. He means his father’s house and the few blocks adjacent. Away from these and a few other islands, he would be just as unsafe.
But even such a letter buoys me up. It gives me a sense of someone else’s recognition of the difficult, the sorrowful, in what to others is merely neutral, the environment.
February 22
If I had Tu As Raisan Aussi with me today, I could tell him that the highest “ideal construction” is the one that unlocks the imprisoning self.
We struggle perpetually to free ourselves. Or, to put it somewhat differently, while we seem so intently and even desperately to be holding on to ourselves, we would far rather give ourselves away. We do not know how. So, at times, we throw ourselves away. When what we really want is to stop living so exclusively and vainly for our own sake, impure and unknowing, turning inward and self-fastened.
The quest, I am beginning to think, whether it be for money, for notoriety, reputation, increase of pride, whether it leads us to thievery, slaughter, sacrifice, the quest is one and the same. All the striving is for one end. I do not entirely understand this impulse. But it seems to me that its final end is the desire for pure freedom. We are all drawn toward the same craters of the spirit—to know what we are and what we are for, to know our purpose, to seek grace. And, if the quest is the same, the differences in our personal histories, which hitherto meant so much to us, become of minor importance.
February 24
Heavy snowfall last night. I skipped lunch, to avoid wetting my feet three times in one day.
February 27
Only twenty-two days until spring. I swear that on the twenty-first I will change from my winter clothes and, no matter what the weather is like, even if there is a blizzard, I will walk through Jackson Park hatless and gloveless.
March 1
Abler showed up, at last. He came in the middle of the afternoon, when I was not expecting him. Mrs. Bartlett had let him in and, I gathered, cautioned him against making noise, for when I saw him on the landing he was walking on tiptoe.
“Who’s sick, Joseph?” he asked with a look back at Mrs. Bartlett, who was softly monitoring the street door. The pneumatic arm that shut it was out of commission.
“The landlady. She’s very old.”
“Oh-oh! And I rang twice,” he said guiltily. I motioned him into the room. He was much disturbed. “Do you think I shouldn’t have?”
“Everybody rings the bell. How do you suppose people get in here? Don’t worry about it.”
Adler was very spruce, in a wide-shouldered coat and a tweed suit, new style, without cuffs. He looked fresh and healthy. His hat with its blunt crown was new also, and very stiff. It had cut a red line into his forehead.
“Sit down, Mike,” I said, clearing a chair for him. “You’ve never been here before, have you.”
“No,” he said, and he inspected the room, hardly able to conceal his surprise. “I thought you had an apartment.”
“Our old apartment? We gave that up long ago.”
“I know. But I thought you were living in one of those furnished flats.”
“It’s snug here.”
It’s true, the room did not look its best. Marie had cleaned it, after a fashion, but the coverlet was wrinkled, the towels on the rack looked as though they had not been changed for weeks, Iva’s shoes under the bed showed a crooked line of heels. The day, too, was not altogether favorable. The sky hung low, loose, with blemished clouds that spotted the street from curb to horizon with shadows. And the weather intruded into the room. The walls above the radiator were as dirty as the snow in the yard, and the linen
—the dresser scarf and the towels—seemed spun out of the same material as the sky.
“You’ve been here since last fall, haven’t you?” he said.
“Since June,” I corrected. “Nearly nine months.”
“Is it that long?” he said unbelievingly.
“Almost the tenth.”
“And there’s nothing new?”
“Do I look as if I were concealing something new?” I exclaimed. This startled him. I relented and said, “Nothing’s been changed.”
“You don’t have to take my head off because I ask.”
“Well, you see, everybody asks the same question. You get tired of answering. I have this routine to do, over and over and over. Questions are fired at me, and I’m supposed to scramble like a retriever, fetching answers. Why? Well, if I don’t I won’t get a certificate of politeness. Hell!”
Adler’s color changed, so that the dent the hat had made above his eyes showed white.
“You’re not very generous, Joseph.”
I did not reply. I looked down at the street, the yards, at the masses of snow like dirty suds.
“You’ve changed a lot. Everybody says so,” he went on more calmly.
“Who?”
“Why, people who know you.”
“I haven’t seen anyone. You mean that business in the Arrow.”
“No, no, that was only one case.”
“I wasn’t all wrong in the Arrow.”
“You’re becoming bad-tempered.”