***
Four
When we came into the living room the gigantic woman was making room on the table, shoving the newspapers to one side. She had her blouse on but hadn’t bothered buttoning it. The TV was roaring with canned laughter at a sit-com. I was about to ask where the phone was when Harvey croaked that I should sit down. I could hardly make him out. I went over and switched the sound off the sit-com. I got a murderous look from her. It must have reminded her of what I’d done to the lawn mower. I pushed a rumpled stocking off a chair and sat down. She opened a loose-leaf notebook and stared down at it and then at the bank-statement.
“It’s like I said. We lost more than five thousand on Bell South last month. I told you we should’ve gotten rid of it. How many times did I tell you that?” To the invisible witnesses: “How many times did I tell him that?”
“Hanna. Takes care of the investments,” Harvey said to me, ignoring her. “Consultative voice. Normal. Gets it all. When I croak. Don’t mean the way I’m croaking now. Mean the big croak. That puts an end. To this kind of croaking. Gets it if she’s a good girl. And behaves properly. To our guest.”
She looked at me murderously again. Harvey asked me if I wanted to see what Hanna got if she behaved.
He showed me the monthly statement, black on white from NationsBank. A little over $300,000 in US Government bonds. About $400,000 in a Prime Money Market account. Practically $500,000 in blue chips: AT&T, Bell South, Exxon, IBM, etc. A stab of envy. I wondered where it came from. His parents had been of modest means.
He was a millionaire in a pigsty. I felt relief for that $1,000 check of his but still wanted to get to the phone.
She went on with the position of the securities one by one. He didn’t answer. He sat motionless. His eyes were closed. He seemed to be asleep or dead. I got up and went outside into the mowed part of the garden. The heat and sunshine and the smell of the cut grass were pleasant.
The blonde was still there but on her knees now, planting tulip-bulbs in the long flowerbed that ran the length of the hurricane-fence. We chatted through it about flowers and authors as she made holes. Her hand-tool made a hole in a single movement. Pop went the tulip-bulb into the hole and was given a deft burial. Then she repeated the operation. With her head bent down to the flowerbed her face had color and when she smiled she lost about ten years. With certain movements her modestly unbuttoned blouse fell away from her body and at that angle you could see small sharp-pointed breasts. Her bent-forward position gave them deceptive youth and firmness. Kneeling like that in the flowerbed was the best position for her.
Just to say something I said she wasn’t like some women, afraid of getting their hands dirty. Overreacting to the remark, she said she could garden all her life and after life too. If heaven was the Garden of Eden she wouldn’t ask for wings or a harp but a spade and a rake. If that’s where she was going, she said.
She paused. Her mind must have been making opposite associations because then she spoke about how she’d once transplanted a climbing rose to the fence, her side. She thought she could on her side. Just as it was about to bloom, yellow-pink flowers with “heavenly fragrance,” Sutter’s Gold it was called, that terrible woman clipped it at the base saying she had no right to plant anything against their fence. And apparently that was true. She hadn’t been able to sleep a wink that night, she said. It was silly weeping over a rose-plant.
When she got up, clapping the dirt off her hands, the color drained out of her face. Time and gravity took charge of her breasts. She asked more questions about poets. Keats and Shelley led to her son who used to write such beautiful poems. That was before a certain problem. Since the problem he didn’t write any more. If somebody who knew – an expert, not just his mother – could tell him how good his poems were maybe he’d want to go back to writing and that would help with the problem. She got confused with her explanations and what she didn’t want to explain. Finally her tongue moistened her lips nervously and she said:
“Maybe you wouldn’t mind just glancing at some of his poems, Professor? I could show them to you tomorrow afternoon.”
Springing the outrageous request on such short acquaintanceship she caught me off balance. Instead of summoning up a mysterious wounded expression and answering as I always did in such circumstances, “I can’t, simply can’t, please don’t ask me why,” I felt safe enough to reply that I’d have loved to read his poems but was leaving the next day, first thing in the morning. I invented an excuse for returning to the house before she had the idea of showing me the poems on the spot.
I found his phone in the corridor. It was an early flight but not early enough for me.
I returned to the living room. They were still at it there. She was assessing General Electric. “What time do you folks eat around here?” I asked in a pause. It was nearly seven. I’d had an early sandwich for lunch. “The refrigerator’s in the kitchen,” she said and returned to GE. Harvey added that mealtimes were very flexible. I didn’t have to worry about formality here. You ate when you were hungry. The refrigerator was always full of food. Himself, he ate down in the cellar.
I went into the grubby kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes. I opened the refrigerator. The cold didn’t keep down the moldy smell. There were unidentifiable bits of meat dried to greenish leather, layers of thawed pizzas, soup-plates heaped high with noodles. Just breathing through the nostrils and looking at what the refrigerator held solved the hunger problem on a short-time basis. Then I practically bolted out of the kitchen. I’d finally noticed the roaches on the floor, the walls, on top of the refrigerator. They were holding a national convention on the dirty dishes in the sink. I’d rather face a Bengal tiger than a cockroach.
Later Harvey took me up to his old bedroom. It was mine now, he said. He slept down in the cellar on a cot. He looked at his watch and went down to his machine. I’d forgotten to tell him I wouldn’t be staying. I’d leave him a note.
The bedroom looked as if it hadn’t been lived in for years. There was dust everywhere and a big spider on the floor. At least it was dead, probably from asphyxiation. I tried to open the window. It was stuck. Struggling with it I saw the picture window in the neighboring living room and the blonde sprinkling something into a goldfish bowl. She was talking, either to someone I couldn’t see or to the goldfish. I gave up on the window and examined the bedding very carefully before I committed myself. The sheets were clammy but uninhabited.
A banging noise woke me up. In the darkness I didn’t know where or when I was and turned around to Mary and embraced emptiness. I caught up on time and remembered Mary wasn’t associated with bed anymore but with alimony, retroactive bed-toll. Someone was banging feebly on the door then pushed it open and stepped inside. Light blinded me.
I struggled to a seated position. Harvey was panting from the flights of stairs. His voice was terrible. He told me to hurry down into the cellar, never mind about dressing. It was a breakthrough, I made out. I remembered what I’d seen or rather hadn’t seen on the screen.
“Let me sleep,” I mumbled. “Go back to bed.” I retreated beneath the sheet head and all. He brought out:
“Who has time? To sleep? It’s got me. By the balls. By the throat.”
He nagged at me, we were wasting time, I had to get up and go down to the cellar. When I didn’t answer he finally said that was what I was there for, to help him. It was part of the contract, he said. I sat up at this and told him I had signed no contract. I’d come here on a trial basis and, sorry, I’d decided not to buy. I was leaving first thing tomorrow morning.
I peered at my watch. It was already first thing in the morning. There was a little light in the sky, what you could see of the sky through the dirty panes and the branches of that badly planted elm.
I wasn’t tired any more. I got out of bed and started dressing. I decided to skip the morning toilet. I would walk back to the terminal.
“You can’t. Go. You can’t. Leave me.”
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“I’ve got this thing about roaches,” I said, buttoning my shirt.
“For Christ’s sake. Roaches. Hanna’ll pick up. Roach-powder tomorrow.”
“They’ll come back. They like dirt. I don’t. And I don’t like frozen pizza. I can’t stand disorder either, it’s too biographical. And I don’t like Hanna. She murders climbing roses.” I tied my shoelaces.
His voice went suddenly in the middle of his pleading. He took out a spiral notebook and a pencil. He always carried them about. He started scribbling and showed me:
You’d better hurry if you want to hear this.
Hear? I thought it was see. I shook my head and stuffed the pajamas into the flight bag. He scribbled:
Listen, I said $500 a week in the letter. Let’s make it $700.
“It’s not the money, Harvey.” His pencil whispered.
One thousand dollars then. That’s double.
I stepped into my trousers, zipped up and fastened the belt. After a while he handed me another sheet of paper:
Listen. Stay with me a little and you’ll inherit. Twenty-five percent. That’s $290,000, less the federal and state cut: say $200,000, all yours. No joke. Soon. Only don’t talk to Hanna about it. Stay.
I asked him how I could possibly help him. I knew nothing about whatever it was he was working on. He had Hanna. She had bigger muscles than I did.
He scribbled away.
Hanna doesn’t give a shit about my work. She doesn’t believe in it. You do. Or you will when you come down into the cellar. She’s too young to recognize the voices.
“What voices?” I asked. He wrote:
The voices I’m pulling in, for God’s sake, I’ve been telling you. The voices I want you to hear down in the cellar.
So to humor him I followed him into the cellar. I had the flight bag for a quick get-away.
We went down the cellar steps into reddish light and a fierce crackling like a bonfire. It was the red bulbs and a steady blast of static from a loudspeaker with maybe a voice going on beneath the static.
He sat down at the console and made me sit opposite him. He reached and pulled me over the console so that my face was inches from his mouth. He could produce the faintest of whispers. That along with the movements of his lips allowed me to surmise:
“The shadow.”
“The shadow?”
With his wasted face and what his breath communicated I mentally completed: “In the shadow of the valley of death.” But his lips and that faint whisper cooperated to put together something bizarre and familiar: “The tree of crime bears bitter fruit.” And now his face became sardonic and he must have intended laughter. It came out as a succession of feeble wheezes.
He bent over the console, interrogated dials, stabbed buttons and coaxed knobs: the rigmarole of what he called “sequencing.” I smiled tolerantly and was prepared to go when things began to emerge beneath the sea of static: snatches of corny swing, an impersonal news broadcaster voice: “…ench Premier Daladier and British Prime Minister Chamberlain in a dramatic last-minute …” and I knew what and when that was.
Now it was more brassy swing and suddenly the other thing came back in my mind. The shadow. Not the shadow but The Shadow, pitiless upholder of justice, terror of law-breakers, 6:30 pm Wednesdays, was it? And what station? Wasn’t it WOR? And with The Shadow came my once best friend Charley Schulz, out of mind for half a century, in a summer lot playing The Shadow and me the Italian gangster and Charley laughing sardonically and reciting the business about the tree and the fruit.
He or it – was it Harvey or his machine behind the lead-armored wall? – was ranging over wavelength and time. The time-leap was now from late 1938 to late l941 or maybe early 1942, from Munich to the distorted but unmistakable song: Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition, so immediate post-Pearl Harbor. But wasn’t it all – Tommy Dorsey, Munich, the serial, the bellicose song – a contemporary broadcast indulging in nostalgia, a safe return to the past via a montage of old radio programs?
This is how disbelief broke down, at 6:47 am. Broke down for no good reason. What emerged could still have been an element of a montage. Maybe I wanted to believe.
There was more violent static and beneath it, hardly audible, a jaunty heavy-beat song with debris floating up on the surface of the static: “spot” “lot” “much”. Disbelief broke down as, like paleontologists with fragments of bones, we recreated it, two old men in a cellar, at least one of them with tears in his eyes, adding their own quaver (his a pathological whisper) to the old voices:
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot
Twelve (ten) full ounces
That’s a lot
Twice as much for a nickel too
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you
“Remember?” he croaked. Croaking myself from emotion I said of course I remembered. Why those tears? We got up and did a kind of dance all the while chanting it, yes, Harvey too. It acted like some potent incantation bringing back his voice a little, this tiny victory over time stymieing the crab for a little while. I stumbled over the flight bag and kicked it out of the way. Why did I do that? And why those tears at a soda-pop jingle as at the Credo of the Bach B Minor?
“Twelve full ounces,” I corrected. His memory was really bad. He shook his head and held up both hands with all the fingers spread apart. We sang it over and over even after the jingle had made way for a moving commercial (house-moving but moving too in the other sense): the comically threatening cavernous voice: “Don’t make a move! – without calling Lincoln!!”
Exhausted we finally collapsed on his cot and let the waves of varying lengths, the voices and the years cover us. The reception improved.
We heard (reheard) the vibrant potent male voice inquiring, ostensibly about Manichevitz Wine, “Do you like it?” and the whispered woman’s voice: “I love it,” and marveled at what they’d been able to smuggle into commercials in those up-tight years.
We heard a voice saying “thirty-nine” repeatedly and getting studio-laughter for it, then sour fiddle-music and knew it was Jack Benny, (born Benjamin Kubelsky 1894-1974) lying about his age, for a decade holding on to his late thirties, minting the slow tragedy into golden laughs as a poor consolation and I pulled out of oblivion Sunday evenings listening and laughing with my mother and father and recovered a Sunday dinner down to the dessert: red apple-sauce with heavy cream. My nostrils were filled with the pungency of the cinnamon and cloves in it.
We pulled in the acid nasal voice of Fred Allen (born John Florence Sullivan 1894-1956) and the singsong Russian-Yiddish voice of the woman, what was her name? Neither of us could recall her name but I recalled the exact pattern of the carpet I used to lie on belly-down, listening to her and the others.
We heard the organ prelude to a soap opera called “Young Widow Brown,” the commercial and the first minute of the episode. Her son had just come down with polio. The doctor, with a resonant actor’s voice, expressed hope for him and clear interest in the mother. I pictured them as I’d seen them, my mother’s friends, devastated by afternoon boredom, housewives beyond adultery, listening, staring sightless at their shabby living room walls. I felt like weeping again despite the poor materials my country afforded for nostalgia.
Now Teddy the Poet murmuring verse in the most outrageously faggish of voices to camp twirls of his organ (the musical instrument). It chuckled slyly in glissandos at his coy jests. Those same housewives marooned in the slow afternoons used to eat him alive.
We stayed there the rest of the morning. At each voice he exclaimed, “I remember!” and asked, “Remember?” and when I hesitated it became a command: “Remember!” Once he said that it all came back, just that little bit was enough and everything else came back.
It was true. Those familiar distorted voices recreated lost worlds. It was like the old experiment in the shack. The water stood clear in the glass. You added the tiniest of crystals. Suddenly the clear water revealed what it had been holding in invisible
supersaturated solution and you had a glassful of crystals like diamonds, millions of them. I couldn’t (and mustn’t) begin to enumerate all the scenes, experiences, objects and people, dead now but alive again for a moment in my mind, all the days and years that crystallized out at the prompting of those tinny voices.
The familiar forgotten voice which came in at about 11:00 am interrupted a blubbering confession. “We do not use such language on the air,” said the cold, precise contemptuous voice and that was Mr Anthony and his Court of Human Relations.
What was the language the other had used? I wondered now as I had so often in the past. In the late thirties terms forbidden in print were aired all over the Eastern Seaboard. The celebrated Anthony voice summed up the scandalized horror attributed to 53,000,000 potential listeners and allowed him to get away with it. His reaction was so contemptuous of the blubbering turd that one couldn’t help feeling sorry for the offender. External censorship would have fallen far short of what that intergalactically frigid voice had expressed. How could the censor be censored? As for the offender, he would never appear again, dispatched with Mr Anthony’s implacable: “Leave this woman. Return to your lawful spouse and your five children, etc.” And the poor shit would blubber: “Thank you Mr Anthony.” But there had been no forgiveness.
And now the floodgates of memory opened wide, a vast flood of corn-syrup threatening to engulf me and I saw them all, snatched back from the jaws of death, see them all, the (adult) members of the family gathered about the picturesque dome-shaped scrolled radio with the yellowed celluloid tuning screen.
My mother is eagerly bent forward toward the radio. “What did he say, what did he say, Victor?” My father, one eye on me sitting in a far armchair to which I have been banished, pretending to read, straining my ears, is whispering the thing to my mother.
I can hear my mother’s scandalized joyous throat-sound. It’s more real than these cellar walls, than the sound of the rats.
I have to get out of it.
The last thing we heard before it suddenly faded was Red Barber’s soft gentlemanlike southern voice covering a lost game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Brooklyn Dodgers. Two balls two strikes on Dolph Camilli, .284, the Dodger’s first baseman and sole slugger. He struck out.
Harvey, sitting next to me on the cot, touched my shoulder. He tried to say something to me. Was he crying? Could he cry? His voice was a croak. The healing effect of the Pepsi-Cola potion had worn off. Again he had to write. I couldn’t talk myself although what was choking me was nothing malignant, I foolishly thought at the time.
Red Barber went on, suddenly in another inning, with a neat double-play, then a line-drive to center-field and Pete Reiser’s leaping catch, back against the wall. Harvey scrawled away feverishly in big hurried characters, forward-slanting as though pursued. He ripped out page after page from the spiral notebook and thrust them at me with one hand while with the other he went on scrawling on the new sheet. His wig was askew. Half of his naked skull gleamed red as though he’d been scalped.
He wrote in a semi-burlesque style, maybe to keep the emotion under control, that if he were superstitious he’d think it was the hand of God. My image pedaling away in the shack had appeared to him one night like the Virgin at Fatima. He made a feeble obscene joke about my long-standing non-virginity. Then a week later I had come again, this time in the flesh and lo voices came out of the past and in the same night as the voices he’d understood in a flash why I had been pulled in on the bike despite the vertical spatial differential.
What the machine had done as a quirk it could be made to do at will. It had been frustrating, I had no idea, being limited to the cellar. He was condemned to viewing old darkness while life was going on on the floor above. Momma was up there baking for him, moving about, cleaning and waxing. (Reading this I imagined her ghostly form, in a red bandanna and wielding a dust-rag, superimposed on the contemporary mess, the cracks, the dirt, the stains, the roaches.)
But now he knew the way to give the machine vertical and maybe later horizontal freedom. Some of the images to recapture were upstairs in this house, but most of them were in the other house, the blonde’s house, standing where the old house had stood. Wouldn’t I like to see the other people who had lived in the old house? There had been his mother and father, younger, his uncle, his grandparents. There had been himself and myself, younger.
Wouldn’t I like to see Rachel Rosen?
No, I said out loud as though he’d spoken not scrawled that crazy invitation. I forced my mind into emptiness and listened on for a while to the game with the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Pirates evened up as Hank Greenberg connected and sent the ball into the center-field grandstands. Then there was a burst of static and Red Barber’s voice faded. The static slowly faded too. Now the only sound was a painful snore coming alongside me on the cot where Harvey was sleeping.
When I pulled myself up out of the silent cellar it was almost two in the afternoon. I went past Hanna slouched in the armchair looking at TV. She was chewing a candy bar and drinking beer. I climbed the stairs to the bedroom, leaving behind me the vulgar contemporary TV voices. I pulled the curtains and collapsed on the bed.
Baseball was the thing that flashed on (or the thing that I allowed to flash on) in my built-in display monitor. It was all there, saved on my hard-drive. I marveled at the capacity of my hard-drive to restitute all that early junk. Actually it may have been a sign of debility, of the daily loss of gigabytes, as in A Space Odyssey where the hero removes memory-unit after memory-unit and the poor murderous super-computer HAL is finally reduced to babbling early things like “Mary had a little lamb.”
The uniformed figures started coming back. His contraption was a primitive time machine of sorts, apparently. But the images they induced in my mind were a million times superior to the poor distorted ones his screen displayed, if I could believe his description of myself pedaling away for the Static Electricity Machine in a flickering blur. On my back, staring up at the mottled ceiling I was able to summon up weak-chinned Peewee Reese, shortstop, swarthy Harry Lavaghetto on third, of course slugger Dolph Camilli on first. Wasn’t somebody chunky called Hodges on second base? Hadn’t I got the Brooklyn infield in the early 1940s?
For hours I safely resurrected baseball. I couldn’t fall asleep. Maybe my hard-drive was softening but I extracted lots of things from it tucked away for decades but saved and available like the line-up of the unbeatable St Louis Cardinals with their sluggers-row, the pansy Philadelphia Athletics, hitless wonders, guided by ancient Connie Mack, a gentlemen so a loser, into eighth place, year after year.
I even started salvaging a day in Ebbet’s Field, good seats behind the catcher. Even a stain of mustard from the hotdog (HeissHund I say as a joke) on my scorecard which records St Louis’ two homeruns in the third inning. Brooklyn going into the last inning has a string of goose eggs. Now I explain the fine points to her even though she doesn’t know the basic rules of baseball. I see her politely intense look as I explain a double play. She must be bored, but like so much else, doesn’t allow it to show.
I want to say I’ll teach her baseball. “Ich werde dich Baseball lernen,” I say in my atrocious German, learned practically for her sake. She thanks me politely, corrects the verb and adds, “Dear.” Of course it’s not the inconceivable English word. It’s the indirect personal object dir instead of dich. But that intimate form of “you” is almost as good as “dear” even though it’s no more than a corrective echo of my verbal intimacy with her in her unwanted language.
The crowd rises to its feet yelling. She rises with us. She’s obediently trying to enjoy herself. Harvey ordered her to accept my invitation to Ebbet’s Field. “Have a good time,” he said to her and went back to his equations. She’s doing her best. She’s a docile girl and does what Harvey tells her to do.