He took a deep drink, leaned forward, and raised his voice enough to leave no doubt of his intention to address the group. Wasn’t this, he asked, a beautifully typical story of these times and this place? A man could rant and smash and grapple with the State Police, and still the sprinklers whirled at dusk on every lawn and the television droned in every living room. A woman’s only son came home insane, confronting her with God only knew what agonies of grief and guilt, and still she busied herself with the doings of the zoning board, with little chirrups of neighborly good cheer and cardboard boxes full of garden plants.
“I mean talk about decadence,” he declared, “how decadent can a society get? Look at it this way. This country’s probably the psychiatric, psychoanalytical capital of the world. Old Freud himself could never’ve dreamed up a more devoted bunch of disciples than the population of the United States—isn’t that right? Our whole damn culture is geared to it; it’s the new religion; it’s everybody’s intellectual and spiritual sugar-tit. And for all that, look what happens when a man really does blow his top. Call the Troopers, get him out of sight quick, hustle him off and lock him up before he wakes the neighbors. Christ’s sake, when it comes to any kind of a showdown we’re still in the Middle Ages. It’s as if everybody’d made this tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality! Let’s have a whole bunch of cute little winding roads and cute little houses painted white and pink and baby blue; let’s all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality—Daddy’s a great man because he makes a living, Mummy’s a great woman because she’s stuck by Daddy all these years—and if old reality ever does pop out and say Boo we’ll all get busy and pretend it never happened.”
It was the kind of outburst that normally won their clamorous approval, or at the very least caused Milly to cry, “Oh that’s so true!” But it seemed to have no effect. The three of them sat watching politely while he talked, and when he stopped they looked mildly relieved, like pupils at the end of a lecture.
There was nothing for him to do but get up and collect the glasses and retreat to the kitchen, where he petulantly wrenched and banged at the ice tray. The black kitchen window gave him a vivid reflection of his face, round and full of weakness, and he stared at it with loathing. That was when he remembered something—and the thought seemed to follow rather than precede the stricken look it caused on his mirrored face—something that shocked him and then filled him with a sense of ironic justice. The face in the glass, again seeming to anticipate rather than reflect his mood, had changed now from a look of dismay to a wise and bitter smile, and it nodded at him several times. Then he busied himself with the drinks, anxious to get back to the company. The thing he had remembered, whatever else it might mean, would be something to talk about.
“I just thought of something,” he announced, and they all looked up. “Tomorrow’s my birthday.”
“Well!” The Campbells said in tired, congratulatory unison.
“I’ll be thirty years old. Can you beat that?”
“Hell yes, I can beat it,” said Shep, who was thirty-two, and Milly, who was thirty-four, began brushing cigarette ashes off her lap.
“No, but I mean it’s funny to think you’re not in your twenties any more,” he said, re-establishing himself on the sofa. “It’s kind of—you know, the end of an era or something. I don’t know.” He was getting drunk; he was drunk already. In another minute he’d be saying even sillier things than this, and repeating himself—he knew that, and the desperation of knowing it made him talk all the more.
“Birthdays,” he was saying. “It’s funny how they all run together when you look back. I do remember one of them damn well, though, and that was my twentieth.” And he began to tell them how he had spent it, or part of it, pinned down by mortar and machine-gun fire in the last week of the war. One small, cold-sober part of his mind knew why he was doing this: it was because humorous talk of the army and the war had more than once turned out to be the final salvation of evenings with the Campbells. There was nothing Shep seemed to relish more, and though the girls might laugh in the wrong places and jokingly insist they would never fathom the interests and the loyalties of men, there was no denying that their listening faces would shine with a glow of romance. One of the most memorable nights of the whole friendship, in fact, had been built on a series of well-turned army stories and had found its climax in a roar of masculine song. Shep Campbell and Frank Wheeler, exultantly laughing and sweating and bathed in the sleepy admiration of their wives, had thumped their fists in marching cadence on the coffee table and bellowed out, at three in the morning:
“Oh-h-h-h—
Hidey, tidey, Christ Almighty
Who the hell are we?
Flim, flam, God damn
We’re the infantry…”
And so he told his anecdote, as carefully and well as he could, using all the tricks of wry self-disparagement that had come to form his style of military reminiscence over the years. It wasn’t until he got to the part that went “—so I poked the guy next to me and said ‘Hey, what day is this?’” that he began to feel uneasy, and by then it was too late. There was nothing to do but finish it: “And it turned out to be my birthday.” He knew now that he’d told this same story to the Campbells before, using almost the same words; it must have been a year ago that he’d told it, in connection with his turning twenty-nine.
Both the Campbells made conscientious little clucks of amusement, and Shep discreetly inspected his watch. But the worst part—the worst part of the whole weekend, if not of his life to date—was the way April was looking at him. He had never seen such a stare of pitying boredom in her eyes.
It haunted him all night, while he slept alone; it was still there in the morning, when he swallowed his coffee and backed down the driveway in the crumpled old Ford he used for a station car. And riding to work, one of the youngest and healthiest passengers on the train, he sat with the look of a man condemned to a very slow, painless death. He felt middle-aged.
FIVE
THE ARCHITECTS OF THE KNOX BUILDING had wasted no time in trying to make it look taller than its twenty stories, with the result that it looked shorter. They hadn’t bothered trying to make it handsome, either, and so it was ugly: slab-sided and flat-topped, with a narrow pea-green cornice that jutted like the lip of a driven stake. It stood in an appropriately humdrum section of lower midtown, and from the very day of its grand opening, early in the century, it must clearly have been destined to settle deep into that smoke-hung clutter of numberless rectilinear shapes out of which, in aerial photographs, the mightier towers of New York emerge and rise.
But for all its plainness, the Knox Building did convey a quality of massive common sense. If it lacked grandeur, at least it had bulk; if there was nothing heroic about it, there was certainly nothing frivolous; it was a building that meant business.
“There it is, Frank,” Earl Wheeler said to his son on a summer morning in 1935. “Straight ahead. That’s the Home Office. Better take my hand here, this is a bad crossing…”
It was the only time Frank had ever been brought to New York by his father, and it had come as the climax to an exhilarating several weeks that always seemed, in retrospect, the only time his father could ever have been described as jovial. During that time the cryptic phrase “Oat Fields” had flown in happy profusion through his father’s dinner-table talk, along with “New York” and “The Home Office,” and had repeatedly caused his mother to say “Oh, that’s wonderful, Earl,” and “Oh, I’m so glad.” Frank had eventually figured out that Oat Fields had nothing whatever to do with Quaker Oats but was in fact the odd name of a man—Mr. Oat Fields—a man remarkable not only in his size (“One of the biggest men in the Home Office”) but in his intellectual astuteness. And he’d scarcely put this information straight in his mind before being presented, by his mother, with some startling news. Mr. Oat Fields, upon learning that Mr. Ear
l Wheeler had a son of ten, had invited that son to accompany his father on a visit to the Home Office. Father and son would then be the guests of Mr. Fields at luncheon (it was the first time he’d ever heard her use that word instead of lunch), following which Mr. Fields would take them to a ball game at Yankee Stadium. In the next few days the suspense had grown all but intolerable until it threatened to spoil everything on the morning of the trip: he very nearly threw up his breakfast from tension and trainsickness on the way to town, and might have done it in the taxi too if they hadn’t gotten out to walk the last several blocks in the fresh air; but with the clearing of his head as they walked it began to seem that everything was going to be fine.
“There,” his father said when they’d crossed the street. “Now, here’s the barbershop, that’s where we’re going for our haircuts in a minute, and here’s the subway—see how they’ve built the subway entrance right into the building?—and look over here, this is the display room. These windows run the entire length of the building, from here on. Lot bigger than our dinky old showroom out home, isn’t it? And look—these are just a few of the products we make. Here’s your typewriters, of course, and your adders and calculators and some of your different kinds of filing systems, and that’s one of the new bookkeeping machines back there in the corner; and then look over here, in the next window. These are your punched-card machines. That big one is your tabulator, and the little one beside it is your sorter. When you watch a demonstration of that baby, it’s really a sight to see. Fella takes a deck of punched cards, stacks ’em, puts ’em in there and presses a button, and those old cards go flying through there lickety-split.”
But Frank’s eyes kept wandering from the machines to his own reflection in the plate glass. He thought he looked surprisingly dignified in his new suit, with its coat and tie almost exactly like his father’s, and it pleased him to see this bright image of the two of them, man and boy, with the endless swarm of people moving past on the sidewalk behind them. After a minute he backed several steps away and looked straight up, until his collar cramped the back of his neck, and Wow! He would admit he’d hoped for a skyscraper, but the last of his disappointment was vanishing now in this one long look. Up and up and up the tiers of windows rose, each smaller and more foreshortened than the one beneath, until their ever-narrowing sills and lintels seemed to merge. Imagine falling from the very top floor! Then he saw that the high, high cornice was moving slowly and steadily forward against the sky—the building was falling over on them!—but there was no time for panic before he saw his mistake: it was the sky that moved, white clouds floating back over the ledge of the roof, and at the instant his mind came into focus on this fact he felt a shiver of wonder down his spine at the enormous granite strength and stillness of the building. Wow!
“All set?” his father was saying. “Let’s go to the barber’s, then, and get fixed up, and then we’ll go on inside. We’re going to ride the elevator all the way up to the top.”
But as things turned out, that preliminary moment on the sidewalk was the high point of the day. The barbershop proved to be nice enough, and so did the echoing marble-flagged lobby, which smelled of cigars and umbrellas and ladies’ perfume, but from there on the pleasures of the day began to dwindle steadily. The elevator gave no sense of flight, for one thing, but only of confinement and nausea. Of the office itself, the top floor, he remembered only an acre of white lights and a very thin lady whose openwork blouse revealed an incredible number of straps that were apparently connected with her underwear, who called him Sonny and showed him how the water cooler worked (“Look, Sonny; watch the big bubble come up when I press the button—Blurp!—isn’t that funny? Here, you try it”); and he would never forget the instantaneous revulsion he felt in the presence of Mr. Oat Fields, who if not the biggest was certainly the fattest man he had ever seen. Oat Fields’s glasses mirrored staring images of the office lights, so that you couldn’t see what his eyes were doing when he talked to you, and he talked in a very loud voice without seeming to hear your replies.
“Well, aren’t you a big fella! What’s your name? Huh? You like school? Well, that’s fine. You like baseball? Huh?”
The worst part of him was his mouth, which was so wet that a dozen shining strands of spittle clung and trembled between his moving lips; and it was this as much as anything that hampered Frank’s enjoyment of the lunch, or luncheon, which took place in the restaurant of a great hotel. Oat Fields’s mouth did not close while chewing and it left white streaks of food on the rim of his water glass. Once he softened the hard crust of a roll by holding it submerged in the gravy boat for some time before he lifted it to his reaching lips, allowing part of it to fall and leave a bright tan stain on his vest.
“You’re absolutely right, Oat,” Earl Wheeler kept saying throughout the meal, and “I certainly do agree with you on that,” and the few times he glanced at Frank it was with startled eyes, as if surprised to find him sitting there. The ball game was a letdown too: nobody hit a home run, and in Frank’s limited knowledge of the game a home run was all that mattered. For the last hour of it the sun slanted straight in his eyes, giving him a headache, and he had to go to the bathroom but didn’t know how to broach the subject. Then came the grimy ordeal of subway connections to Penn Station, during which his father took him angrily to task for having failed to say “Thank you I had a very nice time” to Oat Fields. In the bleak light of the trainshed, as they stood waiting for the gates to open, he stared unnoticed at the physical exhaustion and moral defeat in his father’s face, which looked loose and porous and very old. Then, lowering his eyes, he discovered that his father’s trouser leg was slightly and rhythmically twitching with the anxious movement of his pocketed fingers on his genitals.
And that, ultimately, would become his most vivid single remembrance of the day; at the time, though, later that same night as he staggered and crouched barefoot in the tilting, oddly shrunken bathroom of his home, it was his memory’s vision of Oat Fields’s eating mouth that made the spasms of vomiting come again and again.
Not until years later was he able to piece the simple facts of the case together. Earl Wheeler, having clung to an assistant branch managership in Newark through any number of Depression layoffs and cutbacks, had somehow come to Home Office attention as a candidate for the job of right-hand man to Oat Fields (and not until later still did he guess the explanation of that name—the fact that in a world of mandatory diminutives, a corporation of jolly Bills and Jacks and Herbs and Teds in which an unabbreviable given name like Earl must always have been a minor handicap, “Oat” was the best that could be done for a man with the given name of Otis). But the promotion had fallen through; higher authority had decreed that Oat Fields could get along without a right-hand man, and Earl Wheeler must either have learned or guessed this outcome at some point during the luncheon or the ball game.
And whether or not he ever came to accept the disappointment, Frank knew that to the end of his life he never understood it. It must, for that matter, have been the first of many events that passed Earl Wheeler’s understanding, for it came at the beginning of his decline. In the years after that he was transferred from one field assignment to another until his retirement soon after the war (and not long after Oat Fields’s own retirement and death), by which time he had slipped from the assistant-manager level to that of an ordinary salesman in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. And in those years too, with increasing bewilderment, he had failed to understand the weakening of his health, the rapid difficult aging of his wife, the indifference of his two older sons—and finally the shrill rebellion, the desertion and the moral collapse of his youngest.
A longshoreman! A cafeteria cashier! An ungrateful, spiteful, foul-mouthed weakling, boozing his way through Greenwich Village with God only knew what kind of companions; a punk kid with no more sense of decency than to drive his mother nearly out of her mind not writing for six, eight months and then mailing a letter with no return address and the postsc
ript: “Got married last week—might bring her out sometime.”
It was a lucky thing for Earl Wheeler, then, that he wasn’t present in a cheap bar near the Columbia campus one noontime in 1948, when his son sat in conference with another slouching youth named Sam, a graduate student in philosophy who held a part-time job in the student placement office.
“So what’s the problem, Frank? I thought you’d be back in Europe by now.”
“Big joke. April’s knocked up.”
“Oh Jesus.”
“No, but listen; there’re all different kinds of ways of looking at a thing like this, Sam. Look at it this way. I need a job; okay. Is that any reason why the job I get has to louse me up? Look. All I want is to get enough dough coming in to keep us solvent for the next year or so, till I can figure things out; meanwhile I want to retain my own identity. Therefore the thing I’m most anxious to avoid is any kind of work that can be considered ‘interesting’ in its own right. I want something that can’t possibly touch me. I want some big, swollen old corporation that’s been bumbling along making money in its sleep for a hundred years, where they have to hire eight guys for every one job because none of them can be expected to care about whatever boring thing it is they’re supposed to be doing. I want to go into that kind of place and say, Look. You can have my body and my nice college-boy smile for so many hours a day, in exchange for so many dollars, and beyond that we’ll leave each other strictly alone. Get the picture?”
“I think so,” said the philosophy student. “Come on back to the office.” And there, adjusting his glasses and thumbing through a card index, Sam began to write out a list of companies that seemed to fit the picture: a great copper-and-brass manufacturer, a great public utility, a gigantic firm that made all kinds of paper bags…