“The devil!” they cried.
“Didn’t I mention the devil? But he was there all the time, he’s God’s arch competitor in fancy carpentry and cuisine. He’s in business too, but he just doesn’t know how to blow whoo! like God and make human beings, he has a pot but no little human beings to sample in it. So he watches and sneers, and he works his dirty fingers into all the human beings, he tries to make them perfectly wrong, but they’re too disorganized even for that. God makes notes just the same, he learns something from every little life, bud-to-pot, bud-to-pot! And now he’s got his drop of splendid juice and he goes over to the ocean and lifts the mish-mash pot and dumps the whole mess in the ocean.”
“In the ocean!” laughed Peter, clapping himself on the head. “What for?”
“For the sharks, he’s got to feed his sharks. And then he’s going to start all over again a billion years from now.” And Kenny threw himself on the couch beside Jeanne.
“So that’s where the shark feed came from.…”
“Yiss! yiss!”
“Oh, Kenny, you’re wonderful!” laughed Judie gleefully. “You’re really an Indian.”
Everybody burst out laughing.
“Oh, but yes!” cried Judie. “Don’t you know anything about Indians? Don’t you, Jeanne? Indians are the most wonderful people on earth, they walk without making a sound and they can see in the dark and they stand straight as trees, and everything they do is wonderful because they’re Indians.”
“There goes your pot,” said Peter, grinning at Ken. “God doesn’t throw little Indians in the pot.”
“Petey’s an Indian too,” said Judie, pouting darkly. “I knew it the first time I saw him, by the way he walked and the way he looked at me and owned me.” With this she suddenly went over to Peter and put her arms around his neck and leaned her head on his shoulder meekly. She was almost crying and Peter stared down at her gravely. Everyone was silent. They heard a sound out in the hall.
Suddenly Jeanne said, “Isn’t that a rather skeptical philosophy?”
Kenny looked startled and jumped up from the couch. He picked up the liquor bottle deliberately, took a drink, and turned to Jeanne with a smile. “Do I have to put up with that, ma petite?”
“With what?” she cried confused.
“One should go back to Vassar and try philosophy all over again,” said a spectral voice from the hallway. Judie jumped with fearful surprise.
“I do believe in the devil and there he is!” shouted Ken suddenly, and began roaring with laughter. “Oh, Vassar, Vassar!” he howled, and slapped the wall with his hand.
“What the hell!” cried Peter. He ran to the door and looked in the hallway. There stood a well-dressed man of thirty-five, carrying a cane and a raincoat over one arm, with the sleeve of the other arm tucked neatly and almost modishly in a side-pocket, a suave, almost distinguished, kindly-looking figure of a man. Peter seemed to remember him from somewhere. The newcomer stood there, smiling.
“Oh, it’s only him,” said Judie suddenly, looking over Peter’s shoulder. She said this with utter contempt, but casually too. “That damn parasite, Waldo. I wish he would just stay home.”
Peter was completely amazed. He looked at the man whom he recognized now as one-armed Waldo Meister whom Kenneth had once brought around to their ship. Ken now stood grinning in the middle of the room, and Jeanne remained stretched out on the couch.
“One shouldn’t speak disrespectfully of their elders,” spoke up Waldo mockingly. “Should one, Kenneth?”
“Oh, shut up, parasite!” Judie spat.
“Judie!” whispered Peter, mortified with horror, but she never looked up.
“What was that crack about my alma mater, Waldo?” Jeanne asked without stirring on the couch. “What was so apt about the Vassar remark, Kenny? I think you’re both making fun of me.”
“Of course not,” said Waldo, “we wouldn’t dream, would we, Kenneth?”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Ken, suddenly brooding, and disappearing into the next room.
“I like Dennison but this is the last time he’s going to send you up here,” spat Judie, “the damn last time.”
“It wasn’t Dennison sent me, it was Levinsky.” The man appeared in the light and Peter saw the pitted, faintly perspiring, dark face with it rueful sneer.
“He’s just a parasite too, so it doesn’t make much difference—birds of a feather,” cried Judie.
Peter was so mystified by all this that he could only stand in the room looking around wildly. Finally now, almost angrily, he walked up to Waldo and shook his hand.
“You don’t know me,” said Peter gruffly and with harassed confusion. “Please sit down, for krissakes. Here’s the couch.”
“But I do know you. You’re Peter Martin!” said Waldo softly, and at that Peter recoiled and went across the room without a word.
“Ah, Waldo, you should thank the good Lord for the existence of well-mannered young Galloway mill workers who feel sorry for you,” laughed Ken from the other room.
“Huh!” scoffed Judie, jumping up. “Petey, do you know what this awful man did? I didn’t want to tell you because I’m afraid of you when you get mad. You remember the little cat that used to play around here?”
“Yes, what happened to the cat?” yelled Peter, turning around and glaring at Judie.
“He hanged it from the lamp!”
“Wait a minute, Judie, that’s a lie and you know it!” said Waldo swiftly.
“Dennison told me. He was here, and he doesn’t lie to me.”
“Dennison is a first-rate fabricator of Gidean romances, my dear.”
“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, but I know you hanged that cat and it’s just like you, too! It could have died if Dennison hadn’t taken it down. It was your necktie!”
“Lord, Lord!” yelled Ken from the other room and no one could tell whether he was laughing.
“It’s a silly idle lie,” said Waldo, leering pitifully around the room, “I don’t want to hear any more about it. It’s not true in the least. Dennison loves to make up things like that. The whole thing is just as absurd as that story he made up about my stealing a cripple’s crutch in Paris in 1934 and hobbling around the streets. The whole thing is another one of Dennison’s fancies—”
“We believe you,” muttered Peter suddenly without turning from the window.
“Thank you, kind one,” said Waldo, murmuring.
“Just the same, parasite, I wish you’d get out of here and never come back,” Judie was shouting. “I can’t stand your greasy sneaky ways.”
Jeanne got up from the couch, stretching, saying, “Oh, this is perfectly marvelous. Poor dear Waldo. Nobody loves him.”
“That should be perfectly obvious,” came the voice from the other room, “and it should also be perfectly obvious to everyone that Waldo did hang the cat and that Waldo’s going straight to hell someday and Waldo’s not wanted and why doesn’t Waldo leave.”
“Good night, sweet ladies,” said Waldo and left the house.
At nine o’clock in the morning Peter woke up and saw the sunlight streaming in the open window. His bedroom door was closed, but in the front room he could hear excited voices. For a moment he had difficulty remembering who they were and what he was doing there. Still forlorn with half-sleep, he recalled the dreams he had been having.
He was standing in his father’s bedroom in the old Martin house in Galloway. Liz and his mother were reminding him that there was a “smell of flowers” in the air. “That means someone is dead,” his mother said in the dream. Peter was terrified. “Who’s dead?” he cried. Liz and his mother silently pointed into another room, the front room of the old house, and there, in a coffin surrounded by flowers, lay his father, George Martin, dead. And then, with the whole world rumbling with doom and dark, the scene shifted to a field, the weather turned gray and pallid, and Peter—little Peter, about five years old—was standing in the middle of the field filled wit
h terror. On one side of the field was an old abandoned house—the “haunted house” of Galloway. Nearby was the house in which a “little boy” had died, a boy “like Julian, his brother.” And there was an old shack in which “gypsies” lived, the “pockmarked gypsies who always kidnap little boys.” And Francis was on that side of the field too, possibly living in the haunted house, or in the house where little Julian had died: that seemed most probable. In the field itself Peter stood terrified by a further danger—the “drunken men” who got drunk and fell on children and killed them, because “when men are drunk they weigh a thousand pounds.” (This was a popular superstition among Peter’s little chums of yore.) One of the drunks was lying senseless there in the weedy swamp. But on the other side of the field, in a vista of space, with the sun shining, there stood a bunch of tall raw-boned youngsters, including his brothers Joe and Charley, around a kind of tractor plow, talking and smoking. Nearby was his father’s car, the old Plymouth, and his father himself sitting in it and smoking a cigar and looking at a roadmap (just as he used to do on Sundays long ago in New England)—and all of it in the great light of a plain, with mountains beyond.
These dreams overwhelmed Peter to such an extent that he continued them with his eyes closed, imagining himself walking away from the field and the haunted houses towards Joe and the raw-boned boys and his father in the car. He desperately had to do this, he even pretended to himself that he was fast asleep and dreaming so that he could make everything turn out the way he wanted. Yet he was only day-dreaming now.
Suddenly he jumped out of bed and thought: “I’ll go see Ma and Pa in Brooklyn, we’ll talk, we’ll go to a movie, I’ll talk to Mickey, I’ll get news about the whole family. I won’t be silly any more like these kids in the next room. Oh, yes, someday I’m going to begin to live,” he cried to himself jubilantly. “Someday I’ll show them all I know how to live!”
He chuckled and began dressing. When he opened the door to the front room, he was trembling with excitement.
They were all there, all the strange young people whose lives had become mingled with his in New York. Kenneth Wood was sitting on the windowsill looking at him sardonically, yet with that sadness that always happened when they looked at each other—as though there was something they knew that nobody else knew, a crazy sorrowful knowledge of themselves in the middle of the pitiable world. Judie was all dressed up to go somewhere. At the moment she was glaring angrily at Leon Levinsky, who had arrived with Waldo Meister. The latter was freshly attired and smiling. Jeanne was dressed in a bright new outfit, carrying a hatbox, apparently ready to go to work at the downtown model agency. They were all jabbering away.
Judie went to the door. “Everybody clear out!” she snapped irritably. “I’m going out and nobody’s staying behind in my house. And that goes for you too, Levinsky: you bring Waldo here once again and I’ll kick you in the teeth. I don’t want you around, either of you.”
“The lady is indiscreet,” murmured Waldo, vaguely, getting up to go.
“I’ll indiscreet you!” yelled Judie.
They all started down the stairs.
“Incidentally, Pete,” Levinsky called back, “I saw Dennison last night and he said he’d like to see you today. Shall I tell him you’re coming?”
“Don’t go there!” snapped Judie, turning on Peter. “I don’t like that Dennison character either, I don’t want you to go see him. I want you to stay with me today.”
“I thought you liked Dennison.”
“Not any more! Oh, how I hate everybody around here! Someday I’m just going to leave and go out West and live on a ranch, Arizona or someplace!”
“What’s the matter with you?” grinned Peter, taking her in his arms. “You’re as mad as a wildcat this morning, and such a beautiful morning too.”
“Petey!” she cried desperately, almost paling. “Let’s go out in the woods today and sit in the grass and talk and eat oranges. I can’t stand it here any more, everything’s so horrible. I even hate Kenny because he keeps talking to that damn Waldo as though he mattered. I want to be alone with you, I want you to marry me. Petey, when are you going to marry me?” she demanded gravely.
He took Judie’s hand and started downstairs to follow the others. “Judie, who do you think I am—Rockefeller?” he cried. “I haven’t got any money, I don’t know what I’m going to do, and I don’t want to be tied down. You know all that.”
“That’s what you always say. All right!” she said angrily. “You’ll be sorry someday, because there won’t be another woman around who’ll understand you the way I do. Remember that! You’re awful dumb, Pete, so awful dumb. Any other woman would laugh at you, you’ll find out that after I’ve gone away.” She flushed and hurried down the stairs ahead of him.
Peter followed everybody gloomily. On the sidewalk they were all standing around talking, the sun was shining warmly and the street was thronged with coatless people strolling about on the “first real day of Spring.”
Suddenly Kenneth yelled: “Hey! I’ve always wanted to explore that old abandoned house over there.” He galloped across the street to a boarded-up brownstone house.
Without ceremony he ran up on the stoop and kicked in some boards. They had already been busted by children and collapsed immediately. Kenneth vanished inside greedily.
“Hey, wait for me!” yelled Jeanne, throwing her hatbox to Judie. She ran after him eagerly, and in a moment had vanished inside the dark wreckage of boards and masonry. Levinsky and Waldo strolled across the street after them with great curiosity. Judie stood with arms akimbo and glared at the whole crazy thing. People going by on the sunny street seemed to pay no attention whatever to what was going on. Peter leaned against a rail and watched everything with wonder.
“Jeanne, you fool!” Judie yelled. “You’re going to dirty my new dress!”
They heard Jeanne’s muffled cry, from inside: “Don’t worry, I’ll watch it!” There was a clatter of boards and much scuffling and banging-around as the crazy Kenneth roved about excitedly. With strange suddenness, he appeared in a third floor window looking down at them in solemn silence.
In a moment Jeanne showed up behind him, smiling foolishly.
“What idiots!” cried Judie, infuriated.
“What’s in there, Kenneth?” Waldo demanded, in a low voice that carried all over the street with a strange articulate clearness.
Kenneth vanished inside without a word. Once more they could hear him kicking boards out of the way and scuffling over masonry and rubbish, and stamping down on the floor as though he wanted to see if it would collapse. They could hear Jeanne murmuring with laughter.
“Darkness, darkness!” yelled Kenneth suddenly. “Just your meat, Waldo …”
At this point Judie dropped the hatbox and walked away. She went down the street, not looking back, pretending not to know any of them, and finally, during a moment when Peter looked up to see Kenneth standing in the sun on the roof, Judie had just disappeared around the corner.
Peter remembered his dream about the old haunted house, and the house of death, and the gypsies, and all the darkness and helpless fear of it. It was strange to realize that he had obscurely and inexpressibly foreseen all this in that dream, and he was filled with a vague terror and premonition.
Before Peter hurried off to look for Judie, he handed the hatbox to Levinsky, who went inside the house with gleeful curiosity. When Peter looked back, he saw Waldo standing all alone looking up at the shattered windows and crumbling masonry above.
[5]
Peter was unable to find Judie. He knew she would be around again in the evening when her sulking was exhausted. He decided to go and see Will Dennison before going to Brooklyn.
This strange man whose background included a wealthy family, Princeton, travel on the continent, and whose source of income was a trust fund established by his millionaire grandfather, lived in a cold-water flat which rented for twelve dollars a month. It was located in the lower East Side, d
own by the waterfront, near Henry Street in the shadow of the great Manhattan bridge.
It was a neighborhood where shapeless old men kept rubbish fires smoldering in the streets from dawn till nightfall for reasons as enigmatical as their own undiscoverable selves. Children from nearby Jewish and Italian tenements cavorted and yelled and played games all day in ancient streets. Old rabbis moved along the sidewalks musing and stepping around melancholy fires with their hands clasped behind them. Sometimes old women went by carrying bags of wood on their backs, or old men came down the middle of the street with pushcarts filled with rags. The grim tenements rose on each side of the street, some of them covered with weird inscriptions and signboards written in Hebraic letters, and others, nearer the bridge, alive all day with the brooding window-vigils of watching all-comprehending Italian mothers. Just a few blocks away, where the El roared and the trucks and busses rattled over the cobblestones of Chatham Square, was the Bowery with all its stews and saloons and grimy doorways and, just beyond, little Chinatown with its tiny streets. Soaring above, high and magnificent and as though sprung straight from the old soiled rooftop of these things, were the Wall Street towers distant and proud and looming.