The Essential Noir Bundle, page 163
When they had walked perhaps a hundred yards, Lee Branch told his sister, “Swede’s leaving.”
His tone made her look sharply at him and she asked, “Well?”
Lee said, “I’m a fool, I guess, but I thought we—Well, anyhow, he’s talking about leaving.” He kicked a small mound of gravel apart as he walked.
She stood still and the two men stopped with her. She turned her face to Tulip and it was quite pale now. “Did he,” she began, and hesitated, “did he try to buy you with me?”
Tulip said, “That’s a dopey way to look at it, Paulie.”
She looked down at their feet and in a very low voice said, “Yes, I guess it is,” and began to walk again as before.
They came back to the house and, after he had carried his share of the ducks to the kitchen, Tulip went upstairs to his room and began writing a letter to a girl in Atlanta.
Dear Judy:
You will probably be surprised to hear from me after all these years, but for some reason I have been thinking about you a lot this past week or ten days and I have to come down to Atlanta pretty soon anyhow, so I thought …
Donald had come into the living room to tell us dinner was ready while Tulip was telling his version of this tale. We had gone into the dining room and Tulip had talked through most of the meal, finishing as we were starting on the dessert, black-walnut tarts. He had never gone to Atlanta, of course, though he said he had meant to. On his way down there he had stopped over in Washington and got himself lengthily involved in something to do with a veterans’ organization—or a potential veterans’ organization—and by that time he was not so sure that Judy would still be in Atlanta after all these years even if he had remembered her address correctly, and of course Paulie wasn’t around now to remind him of Judy.
“That’s all right,” I said when he had finished, “but it hasn’t got much to do with you. You’re just a cipher in it, unless, of course, you want to admit that as soon as things or people threaten to involve you, you make up a fantasy you call the memory of something some place else to drag you away from any sort of responsibility.”
Tulip lowered his forkful of tart and said, “I don’t know why I waste time talking to you. Look, I told you how I felt about Paulie, and about the girl in Atlanta. I—”
“What you tell me about what went on in your head at the time has got nothing to do with anything. I’m disregarding all that.”
He shook his head. “You’re a pip. No wonder writing hasn’t got much to do with life if that’s the way writers do.”
“Go on and eat,” I said. “It’s your thoughts on life that haven’t got much to do with life. Why do you suppose you turned your back on Paulie?”
He said through the bite of tart he was chewing, “Well, I’ve always been a love-’em-where-you-find-’em-and-leave-’em-where-you-love-’em guy and I—”
“That’s what I mean; and you expect me to call that thinking?”
He took another bite of tart and shook his head again. “You’re a pip.”
“Do you suppose she was right in thinking her brother had done the same thing with Horris?”
“I never did any wondering about that. Look, Pop, whatever homo there is in Lee I don’t think he ever knew about. He’s not a bad kid.”
“The chief trouble with people like you is not that your own thoughts are so childish, but that you keep people from thinking around you.”
“I know. I haven’t got the right kind of oohs and ahs for the half-baked pieces of Freudism that you misunderstood in a book somewhere to bring out the best in you. Girls are better at that, aren’t they?”
“Not the ones I know. I guess I’m unlucky.”
“Well, when I get rested a little I’ll see if I can dig you up some numbers. I never was nuts about the kind of dames you ran around with except maybe that—”
“I’d hate to think I ran around with the kind of dames you’re nuts about. Want coffee here or in the living room?”
We went back to the living room and Donald brought us coffee there. Donald Poynton was a trim medium-sized Negro of thirty-five with a handsome very dark face. I liked him. He had a pretty good sense of humor that he didn’t use very much unless he knew you. He said, “The dogs are out in the kitchen if you want them.”
“There’s no hurry,” I said. “Shoo ’em in when you’re through, unless they’re in your way.”
“The trouble with you,” Tulip began when Donald had gone out, and then corrected himself. “One of the troubles with you is you’re always too sure you understand me.”
“I don’t think I understand you very often. Where we differ is that I don’t think there’s very much there worth understanding.”
I crossed the room to get cigars while he was saying, “Oh, so you don’t think everybody’s worth understanding?”
“Theoretically, yes. But there’s a time element involved and I can’t count on living more than fifty or sixty years more.” I brought the glass jar of cigars back to him and he took one.
“Yours? Or do they go with the house?” he asked.
“Mine.”
“Good. Your cigars are probably the only thing about you that I’ve always liked, or did you think it was your hair? If you hadn’t been so sure you understood me that time in Baltimore we wouldn’t’ve had all that trouble.”
“Oh, that? That wasn’t really trouble.”
He bit off the end of his cigar and stared glumly at me. “You’re a tough man to talk to sometimes, Pop. No wonder they sent you to jail.”
“You worry too much about that time in Baltimore, about getting off on the wrong foot with me. I’d’ve forgotten it years ago if you didn’t keep bringing it up. Why don’t you give it a skip?”
He said, “You patronizing son of a bitch,” but laughed when I laughed. “It really gripes you to think you’re only human.”
“I don’t like that word only, unless you mean of course Everest is only 29,000 feet high or the blue whale is only the largest animal or—”
“What are you trying to do?” he asked disgustedly. “Show off to me? Or if you’re getting ready to launch into one of those dull speeches about the future of the human race and mankind’s unused possibilities and potentialities I’m going to bed. Maybe you’re not too old to talk that way, but I’m too old to listen to it.” He burst out laughing. “Hey,” he said, still laughing, “I finally read something you wrote. A fellow gave it to me in San Francisco. It’s a pip.”
“What is it?”
“It’s in my bag, I’ll show it to you tomorrow. I don’t want to spoil it by telling you about it. Is it a honey! I always knew you were bats, but—” He shook his head.
“Can I get you a drink? Maybe a shot of brandy. You get yourself all upset when you think about back in Baltimore, just as you did when I mentioned Kiska. I guess you must have a lot of things in your back life to upset you when you happen to think about them.”
“That’s the second time tonight you’ve mentioned Kiska,” he said, “and that certainly wouldn’t be one of them. What’d you expect me to do? You know I never pulled rank much, but just the same I was a lieutenant-colonel and you were a lousy non-com who tried to—”
“There weren’t any Japanese officers’ overcoats left on the island then, if there’d ever been any.”
“I saw ’em myself. Don’t tell me that.”
“A couple of guys who had been tailors in civilian life were cutting up those good Japanese blankets and sewing them up into officers’ overcoats with fake tabs and stuff and the boys were peddling them to the boats for a hundred and twenty-five bucks apiece, or its equivalent in liquor, which wasn’t very much liquor in those days.”
“Do you mean that?”
“I mean that. And you bitched up the whole thing hunting for an overcoat cache that was never there. We had plenty of the blankets, but you knew that.”
He said, “You’re lying. Just for that I’m going to get that piece you wrote. Where are my bags?”
“In the yellow room. Turn right at the head of the stairs and all the way down to the end of the hall.”
He went out, climbed the stairs and presently I heard his feet overhead. When he came back he had a yellowing sheet of paper in his hand. “Here,” he said, “and if you can read that without laughing you’re a better deadpan comic than I am.”
The sheet had been cut from a weekly that had gone out of existence in the depression days of the early ’30s.
“It’s a book review,” I said.
“It’s a pip,” he said.
I read:
Out of that extraordinary chaos of guesses, ambiguities, mountebankery, and vagueness which is Rosicrucian history, Arthur Edward Waite, in The Brotherhood of the Rosy Cross (William Rider and Son, London, 1924), has essayed to bring orderly arrangement and evaluation of data. Painstakingly thorough, broadly experienced in mystical research, he has been successful in clearing the shelves of a vast amount of rubbish accumulated by students who in their enthusiasm have seen in each alchemist, each cabalist, each miscellaneous magician, an authentic Brother of the Rosy Cross.
Waite’s facts seem always to be facts, although his reading of their implication is not always convincing. Thus, though he shows clearly that there is no actual evidence of the existence of the Rosicrucian order before the appearance, in 1614 and 1615 respectively, of the anonymous Fama Fraternitatis R ∴ C ∴ and Confessio Fraternitatis R ∴ C ∴, and in 1616, of Johann Valentin Andreæ’s Chemical Marriage, he denies that Andreæ could have been in any way a founder of the order. Supporting this denial, he quotes Vita ab Ipso Conscripta, in which Andreae, listing the Chemical Marriage among his writing of the years 1602–1603, characterizes it as a youthful jest that proved prolific of other ridiculous monsters: “a playful delusion, which you may wonder by some was esteemed truthful, and interpreted with much erudition, foolishly enough, and to show the emptiness of the learned.”
Waite suggests that the text of the Chemical Marriage was interpolated with its Rosicrucian symbolism after its author had read the Fama and Confessio. He overlooks a more probable alternative that the unknown author or authors of those two manifestoes got their symbolism from the Chemical Marriage. That they should have seen it during the fourteen years that elapsed between its composition and the first printing of which we have record is not at all unlikely. In that event, of course, the prevalent theory that Andreæ was the father of Rosicrucianism would be correct, even though his parenthood were the result of a jest. In this connection, there is no reason for thinking that the Fama and Confessio were excluded from, if not especially included in, the “other ridiculous monsters” of which Andreæ said his pamphlet was prolific.
Notwithstanding his own contrary belief, there is nothing in Waite’s arrangement of the evidence to show that a corporate order of Rosicrucians whose members were not consciously imposters existed before the eighteenth century, when the order seems to have grown up side by side—if not more intimately mingled—with Speculative Masonry. In Clavis Philosophiae et Alchymiae Fluddanae, 1633, Robert Fludd, who was informed on his subject if anyone was, seems to have summed up the result of seventeen or more years of inquiry in the sentence: “I affirm that every Theologus of the Church Mystical is a real Brother of the Rosy Cross, wheresoever he may be and under what obedience soever of the Churches politic.” This certainly does not indicate Fludd’s acquaintance with any legitimate corporate body.
The Order of the Rosy and Golden Cross organized, or reorganized, by Sigmund Richter in Germany in 1710, undoubtedly became to the best of its members’ belief an authentic Rosicrucian order. Thence to the present (Waite gives a chapter to American Rosicrucians) there is evidence of more or less sporadic groups of men who have employed the name and symbols of the Rosy Cross to mean whatever they liked, to further whatever purposes they happened to have, whether alchemical, medical, theosophical, or what not. Of connection between groups, even among contemporaries, of any lineage worthy of the name, there are few traces. The Stone and the Word have meant anything to any man, as he liked.
Waite chooses to discover some continuous thread of mystic purpose running from the inception of Rosicrucianism to the present day. Fortunately he does not tamper with the evidence to support any of his theories. He has cleared away fictions wherever he recognized them, regardless of their import, achieving by this means a scholarly—and as nearly authoritative as is possible in so confused a field—history of a symbol that has fascinated minds of theosophical or occult bent since early in the seventeenth century.
When I finished reading and looked up Tulip said, “You kept your face straight. Don’t tell me you liked it.”
“Who likes anything they’ve written in the past? But with the exception of a couple of points … Oh, well, I was an erudite fellow back in ’24, wasn’t I?”
“M-m-m. And you sure-God had your finger right in the hot life-pulse of daily doings too, didn’t you? The man in the street must’ve had a hell of a time trying to figure out which way to jump till that piece came out to put him straight.”
“And you figure this evens us up for your dopiness in Kiska?” I asked.
“Well, if you want to play it that way it’s all right, of course, but I figured it put me a little ahead.”
“Can I have a copy of this? I’d forgotten it.”
“You can have that. I don’t blame you for wanting to burn it.”
“You said you got it from a fellow in San Francisco?”
“A guy named Henkle or something. You know him? He said he used to run around with you.”
“I probably know him but don’t remember his name. I started to write in San Francisco.”
“So he said. He had some stories about you that were pretty good, especially one about you being tied up with a couple of racketeers down in Chinatown and—”
“I remember him now, a fellow named Henley or something that I used to see around the Radio Club. I suppose the racketeers were Bill and Paddy, unless that’s just a touch you added.”
“I don’t add any touches. I just tell you what the man said.”
“That’s as unlikely a statement as I’ve ever heard, but all right. That was back in the days when if you ran a joint you had a bodyguard whether you needed one or not, just to rate. Bill had a roly-poly middle-aged Chinese pansy whom he offered to lend me if I had anybody I wanted pushed around—like a leg broken or something—but told me not to spoil him by giving him any money. ‘Five or ten dollars is all right as a tip,’ he said, ‘but don’t spoil him by giving him any money.’ I wrote the Chinese into a picture in the ’30s in Hollywood, but we had a he-man director who wouldn’t shoot fags, so we had to change him around.”
Tulip nodded. “This Hembry, or whatever his name was, told me about the fairy gunman. He also told me you had a girl named Maggie Dobbs who was engaged to a fellow in Tokyo and—”
“He liked to talk, didn’t he?”
“Yes. He had something the matter with his voice and people with something the matter with their voices always like to talk. I guess he was a kind of admirer of yours.”
The dogs came in from the kitchen with Donald. The Irongates had two brown poodles and a black one. One of the browns, Jummy, was enormous for a poodle. They came over to play with me awhile and then went back to see how much petting they could get out of Tulip. Donald said good night and took the coffee things away.
Tulip, scratching one of the dog’s heads, looked after Donald and said, “He walks good.” I remembered that was one of the things Tulip always noticed about people. He himself was a man of only medium height but carried himself so erect he seemed taller in spite of his massive chest and shoulders, walking with a conscious sort of forward thrust as if determined never to be pushed back or caught off balance. Somebody—I think it was his friend Dr. Mawhorter—once said he could have gone anywhere if he had had a compass.
“He used to be a pretty good welterweight fifteen or sixteen years ago, fought out of Philly under the name of Donny Brown.”
“Never heard of him.”
“He was pretty good just the same; but he says he didn’t have the hands for it and it’s a hard way for a Negro to make a living unless he thinks he’s going to the top pretty soon or can’t do anything else.”
“It’s a hard way to make a living in Philly no matter what your color is. That’s a hard town to get a taxi in, too, isn’t it? You have to walk out to the curb and wave your arms at ’em to attract their attention.”
The dogs decided they’d got all the attention out of Tulip they were going to get for the moment and left him, Jummy going to lie down in his usual place behind the sofa and Meg settling herself for the night on the floor at the end of the sofa. Cinq, the black, still had some puppy in him, so he started moving from room to room hunting for the ideal spot to lie down, favoring places where he would be in the draft from under a door.
“You’ve really got troubles,” I told Tulip. “Why don’t you—” I broke off as a car-horn honked out in the driveway.
Tony Irongate came in lugging a couple of canvas bags. He dropped them in the doorway when the dogs converged on him. He was a smallish wiry boy of fourteen with brown eyes in a bright pale face. “Hi,” he said, “what do you hear from Paulie and Gus?”
“They should be home late tomorrow or sometime Wednesday,” I said and introduced him to Tulip.
Tony waded through the dogs to shake hands with Tulip, then told me, “I got a new crossbow from Mingey Baker. It’s got a lot of power but the bolts slip when I aim it down. Can we fix that?”
“It ought to be easy enough.”
“Swell. Shall we do it tomorrow? I don’t suppose Sexo and Lola have showed up yet.”
“Not yet.”
“Well, I’m going to get some milk and go to bed. Want anything from the kitchen?”
I said, “No, thanks,” and he said, “See you in the morning,” to both of us, picked up the canvas bags and went out followed by the dogs.
