“Just like that!” grinned the old man, poking the woman in the ribs. “Did you hear that? People just do that nowadays. Here’s your sophisticated man-about-town sitting right in front of you. I’ve spawned a Casanova! Times have changed, all right! Ha ha ha! Why, if I’d of pulled anything like that in Lacoshua the old man would have taken me out to the woodshed, but I guess this isn’t Lacoshua and this isn’t 1890. As far as I’m concerned, what did that English king once say? ‘God won’t punish us for taking a little fun along the way.’ Ha ha ha! Say,” he demanded eagerly, “how are all those whacky friends of yours making out?”
“They’re all right, I guess,” mumbled Peter.
“That Dennison guy? There’s another character. What’s he up to now?” demanded the old man curiously.
There was nothing Peter could think of saying.
“And that kid who was drunk that time, that Kenny fellow—he strikes me as being some sort of nut. When he dropped his beer glass on the floor that time in the bar, he just opened his fingers and let it drop. He told the waiter it was an accident, but he didn’t fool me.”
“Yeah, he does things like that.”
“I don’t know,” said Mrs. Martin sadly. “I wish Petey could make friends with some nice normal young people. Everything I hear about those kids of yours sounds awful. They don’t seem to have anything on their minds.”
“They’ve got plenty on their minds!” laughed Peter sarcastically.
“Like your girl Judie. If she really likes you, why doesn’t she save her money and make a nice clean little home for you for when you come back from sea? Instead of that, from what I hear, the place is always a mess. All she does is throw parties and hang around in bars and spend her aunt’s money. You can say I’m just an old gossip, but I’d like to see you with a real girl that would look after you a little bit.”
“But she does!” laughed Peter. “She cooks and everything, sometimes she works, gets jobs.… Why, right now she’s knitting me socks, you know. It’s only that she gets sick and tired sometimes and drops everything. All the girls in New York are like that now.”
“Well, I don’t know,” his mother said, shaking her head sadly, “they don’t sound wholesome and they don’t sound right to me. I wish you could meet some nice young people like you knew in Galloway, like Tommy Campbell—the poor child—and Danny Mulverhill or little Helen you took to your prom in prep school-young people like that who take things to heart.”
“That’s New York, Marge!” the father cried, suddenly angry. “The place drives everybody crazy after a while. Any nuts that happen to pop up in the country come rolling into New York, they don’t go anywhere else, they’re all here.” He brooded darkly. “We moved here, so we can’t expect much more.”
Peter looked at his father gravely. “Have you heard from Liz lately?”
The old man looked away. “We haven’t had a word from Liz herself in more than a year, so there you are.”
“That’s true, Petey,” said the mother mournfully.
“We haven’t had a word from her and we never even know her address wherever she happens to be. I guess she doesn’t give the slightest damn for her parents any more. She’s been all over the country like a stray cat. Just went silly, like a lot of others nowadays, just as you say. Of course, that awful thing that happened to her in Detroit … that hurt. But it hurt us, too, more than she’ll ever know, the little fool! I don’t know, she doesn’t give a hoot about our feelings. You might almost say you can’t expect much more with the country turned upside down the way it is. Kids just don’t have anything to lean on, any sort of faith, I guess. It gets the kids before it gets anyone else. Lord knows, the older generation is harassed enough.” He spoke gloomily and looked away. “I could tell you a lot of the reasons why the whole shebang is getting to be what it is. I may be all wet, but it seems to me that everything is being turned upside down as completely as you might turn a cup over and spill everything out. Here you have a younger generation that doesn’t believe in right and wrong. The cup’s been overturned for sure. Isn’t that so?”
Peter shrugged. “There’s some truth in what you say.”
“You know, Petey, I walk all around New York and Brooklyn here and watch people, and listen to their conversations in movies and subways and on the streets. And that’s what I’ve come to realize. Understand—this generation knows right and wrong, they sense it all right and that’s probably why they do so many crazy things, like those friends of yours. It makes them jumpy and neurotic. But they don’t believe in right and wrong. There’s a big difference there—and what I’d like to know is how this all came about, and I’ve been thinking about that too. With that other war we had, a lot of things changed, a lot of them to the better—like the standard of living and a decent job and so on and some good unions among the bad ones, better working conditions. But a lot of things changed to no good, like this business of ignoring the simple right and wrong of living. The other day I read about a girl who committed suicide in a New York hotel and she left a note explaining that she couldn’t get along with her family, they ‘repressed her life,’ that’s what she wrote. She was a student at one of those rich girls’ schools—her family was rich, the father a Kansas businessman, and it seems that she had a lot of expensive clothes in her room when they found her, so that when all is said and done the family was doing all it could for her, the best schools, good clothes, and all that. How did they repress her? What I think of first is, what kind of guff did she learn in that school, what are they teaching nowadays that’s doing so much, so much to separate the children of this generation from their parents?”
“That’s a hot one,” laughed Peter. “Just a minute ago you were criticizing me for the friends I have in New York.”
“Yes, yes, I admit that, but why are the youngsters living the way they do? With no sense of right and wrong, no feeling of responsibility, no sincere hopes or things like that. You might say on account of the war. But think of the poor kids who haven’t got time to feel one way or another about it right now, the kids on the fronts—will they all be like that after the war? It’s like your sister Liz—she had one bad break and wham! She decides not to give a damn about anything any more. There’s something missing somewhere. God knows your mother and I tried to make a good life for all you kids and we tried to teach you a decent sense of respect for certain things, but it didn’t seem to work in Liz’s case, or in Francis’ either. He’s become a sarcastic young punk. We didn’t even know where he lived and one day I ran into him and a bunch of his friends, I guess it was on Lexington Avenue, and he talked to me for a minute or so on the street, didn’t even introduce me to his friends as his father, said he was busy, looked ashamed, off he went!”
“Francis did that?” cried Peter, amazed. “When was that?”
“Sometime last winter, what does it matter?”
“He’s got his own life to live now,” said the mother, “but he should at least have enough love for his father to introduce him to his friends.”
“Doesn’t he ever come here?”
“Oh, no. He never even writes.”
“Gone—just like that!” snapped the old man. “Good-bye to a son—who used to turn to me for help and to your mother for comfort. He’s a prime shining example of what I’m talking about, your own brother. What’s happening I don’t know! Last month I got a book out of the library and I never read anything so ugly in all my life. The jacket said it was by a promising young author who should go far, all that kind of ballyhoo. So I read it. This story was about a young man who was the black sheep of his family, always complaining and whining around, and finally he comes to New York and whattaya know! He finds out he’s a sissy. He likes boys better than girls. So the rest of the book is all about what he says to people in bars and how unhappy he is and finally he picks up with another sissy and whoopsidoo! they live together and have a big romance. It’s all worked out with a lot of rigamarole and symbols and he even brings po
litics into it. It’s a big world-shaking business—two big boys playing with each other like those morons who hang around men’s rooms in the subway. He ends up talking about being grown up, mature, he used that word plenty in the last pages, and he seems to be criticizing everybody else for being immature, and blames all the troubles of the world on that. Gol-dang it, I remember Doc Kimball once telling me that thirteen-year-old boys are likely to fool around like that, but they always outgrow it at fifteen or so and start going for girls. So I figure that our mature genius was talking through his hat a little bit. Ha ha ha!”
“There’s a lot of that in New York,” said Peter meditatively.
“To have someone write a book about it and base the whole philosophy of the story on it is just the last straw as far as I can see it. I dunno. I often have a hunch that there are more nuts nowadays than ever, only now it’s become a great philosophy!”
“That’s what Leon Levinsky says,” grinned Peter, “you remember Levinsky, that kid with the glasses—”
“Yes, I remember him, how could I forget him,” sighed the old man. “I never did hear such a fast talker in all my life. I gotta hand it to you, Petey, you sure have a knack for picking out the screwballs. Your Alexander in Galloway was one. God knows, he was harmless enough and good-hearted—but these!”
He chuckled awhile, and then grew serious again. “I laugh, but it’s damn serious. The country’s going straight to hell if something doesn’t happen. Some mighty funny things have been going on in the past ten years. Like I say, they’ve overturned the cup and they’re trying to drain the country dry of whatever it used to have that made it strong. It’s all these foreign ideas! I call it gall if nothing else, that they should come over here from Europe,” he roared, “and get themselves jobs and then turn around and tell American citizens who they should vote for and how they should spend their money, and on top of all that do their damnedest to change our form of government and economy after they themselves lived for centuries like beggars in the old countries. Why the hell do they think we fought all our wars—for the fun of fighting? Or just so they could come here and bring Europe back again? But don’t you see,” minced the old man savagely, “they’re cultured and we’re not, they know what should be done, they read Karl Marx or whatever his name is and they read this one and that one, while we’re just a bunch of ignorant blockheads who just do nothing but work. Oh, boy, I hear plenty of that on Union Square, I go down there and listen every once in a while.”
“You should meet Francis’ great friend, Engels,” laughed Peter, “he’s one of those leftist intellectual characters—”
“I don’t want to meet him or anyone like him!” shouted the old man warningly. “I might break their necks! I’m really afraid I would!”
And at this point Mickey laughed because his father was shouting so furiously and comically, and the mother got up and made another pot of coffee and brought out the date pie again, and they cleaned the pie-pan down to the crumbs. They sat around the kitchen table till after midnight. It seemed that something gleeful, rich and dark, something rare and wildly joyful, something ineffably glad, half-sad, hovered and lurked nearby, in corners somehow, in the dark hall, behind the curtains, in the very air of the midnight rooms leaning in, brooding around the lighted kitchen … something they could not say, which they all knew, and felt, mysteriously, eagerly, gratefully.
“I don’t know,” said Marguerite Martin with a wistful air, “but the best kind of life, as far as I’m concerned, was the life we used to live on my grandfather’s farm in New Hampshire. That was before my father died, before I had to go to work in the shoeshops. You remember, George, when you first knew me and you used to call on me on weekends there. Gosh, how you ate that time! Petey, on a Saturday morning your Aunt Alice and I picked turnips and cabbage and carrots and potatoes and peas fresh out of the garden and made a big stew—oh, a delicious stew, with all the vegetables still juicy from the ground and tasting so rich and strong in the broth. Well now, at noon your father ate three heaping plates of that stew. I thought he was going to bust! Do you remember, George, I kept telling you you looked purple?”
“I’ll say I remember!”
“Well now. My grandfather kept big barrels of apple cider in the cellar and all afternoon long you just drank cider until I thought you’d bust again—”
“I also went fishing with the old man at the creek, remember?”
“Yes. Then at night my grandfather went out in the yard and started his charcoal fire and broiled the dinner. And listen!—at night we made molasses candy. We stood on the porch pulling and pulling at it till it was nice and golden colored, singing songs, you know. And we ate that candy and sang at the piano and had a wonderful time. And you know, Petey, my grandfather would never let us go to bed without drinking a glass of hot wine—vin ferré he called it. He put a hot iron in the wine and it puffed up blue smoke, and when you drank that wine my grandfather always used to say you could go skating in your bloomers.” She laughed delightedly.
“He was a funny old type—”
“In the morning, Petey, in the morning, my grandfather went out and milked his cows and brought back a pail full of thick cream you could cut with a knife. Then he cut some brisket and fried it in a pan, and then broke eight eggs in it, and fried them, and brought your father here all that for a breakfast, plus fresh bread your Aunt Alice made that very morning in her oven, and the cream to soak it in, plus some pure Vermont maple syrup.”
“And, Petey,” said the old man reverently, “if you’ve never eaten fresh bread with cream and syrup you missed the greatest food on earth—”
“Then remember, George, it was a Sunday, and my grandfather went out and shot some ducks and brought them back and plucked them, cut them in half, and broiled them over his fire.”
“What a feast that was!”
“At night, Petey, we all went to church at Willamette’s Corners for vespers. Your father here wanted to please me, so he came tagging along to church with us, but I knew he didn’t go to church any other time.” She winked gravely at her sons. “That was all so long ago, wasn’t it, George? My uncles are still living like that in New Hampshire and others in Canada, and that’s the best life there is. They work hard all right, but they get rewarded for their work, they live, and they’re happy and healthy, and they’re independent, no one can tell them what to do. You can have your Communists and your neurotics and all that stuff, but give me a good old church-going farmer for a man, a real man—”
“That leaves me out, hey?” cried Martin, poking Peter in the ribs. “I guess that leaves the old man out in the cold, huh?”
“New York’s all right,” went on the mother, “it’s all right for shows and stores and excitement and a lot of people, but when it comes to living the way people were intended to live, give me the country and the small town.”
They talked on like that till two o’clock in the morning, till Mickey was dozing on the table beside them.
When they all went to bed, Peter stepped out in the back yard for a few minutes. He smoked a cigarette in the cool night air, and stared at the great portrait of the man holding his head in pain, on the wall of the warehouse, as the Brooklyn night rumbled and roared about him.
[6]
One night that week Peter joined Kenny Wood at a Second Avenue bar. They had to meet Judie and Jeanne and the others on Fifty-Second Street in a half hour, but lingered a while, drinking in this sad old place, before they went outside to hail a cab.
It was a strange bar, more like a saloon, where Kenny Wood went all the time, a bare, gloomy, drafty hall of a place in which the local Poles conducted great riotous polkas on Saturday nights that Kenny watched in grinning silence while tossing down his boilermakers. Sometimes he had to be assisted out of the place to a cab by these people who neither spoke English nor understood why he came there. On this night, as on most weekday nights, it was like a gloomy railway station with all the old men muttering over beers at the
bar, in the one dim light surrounded by shadows, beside a small potbelly stove.
Kenneth was sitting forward with his head in his hands. “Someday I want to live in the Balkans among the Slavs. They’re great mysterious people who just don’t live like we live, nor love like we love, nor rave like we rave.” He suddenly turned to Peter and said, “Why don’t you go back to your splendid Galloway, Martin? What are you doing here?” He peered at him strangely. “Have you ever been haunted by a spook? Did you ever wake up in the middle of the night and find one leaning over your bed, leering? Did you ever feel that you were locked in a closet, smothering with such a spook?”
“What are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about Waldo. It’s what he did at Judie’s the night you came home. He came back after Judie threw him out. He was leering at me and he was leering at Jeanne, way in the middle of the night.”
Peter was mystified and did not know what to say.
“Martin, do you know that some people are condemned, and some are not? Some gets hanted and some gets grace, so what are you doing here? You’re the one that got grace. Why don’t you go back to all those pretty little rivers and baseball fields of yours, that great home-vale of yours. Don’t you appreciate the value of a vale? Where’s that little Mickey-brother of yours you used to tell me about on the ship? Where’s all those fine sisters that used to linger around so lovingly? Where’s your Maw, your Paw? Where’s your sense, boy?”
“Why, my whole family’s living in New York now.”
“Ah, Martin, you sadden me. Still, do you think you could possibly lend me a hundred dollars so I could run away to Mexico? You have money, don’t you? You just got off a ship not so long ago.” He was suddenly pale and earnest.
“I haven’t got a hundred dollars. What do you want to run away to Mexico for?”
“To get away from the spook! The old man! Old leering one-arm Waldo! Old castrated mother-witch Meister with the meat hanging from her bones!”