The Fear Makers, page 6
I cut on down toward the Baltimore Pike. I knew the road fairly well. Many times I’d driven this road in Clark’s fancy, imported Bugatti. That seemed long ago. That time was gone and past. Last time we’d driven this way was when my old man came East for a geological convention. He’d stopped two days in Washington, D. C. That was in 1940. Clark and I had driven him to Baltimore. Now, Clark was dead. The Bugatti long since had vanished. In the hospital I’d received two letters from my old man. He was back in China, no longer a mining geologist; he was a field officer, G-2. He didn’t know when he’d again be in this country. Maybe he didn’t ever expect to return home. Maybe years ago, mother’s death had ended his home, finished him for teaching, started him on his geological wanderings…
I’d never thought about it that way before.
Having lost the address Brown had given me, it wasn’t until after 2230 hours that I found a street sign to West Amherst on the other side of the Pike. On the train, I recalled, Brown had said I couldn’t miss the place; it was the only white house in the block. Set back under the trees, houses were dim shapes. Lights showed behind most of the windows. All the houses appeared comfortable and good, holding people warm and protected from the rain…
In those houses would be soft beds and running water and stocked refrigerators, the modem conveniences. The war wouldn’t stay in such houses. Those houses were homes. In homes people sat by the warm fires. They turned on a radio and listened to a voice announce our forces in the Pacific were bombing Okinawa Island; and, by and by, these people turned off the voice.
Like that, they could turn off the war. And upstairs they’d go into beds with clean sheets.
= 3 =
I first thought Brown had been wrong because, what with the darkness, there seemed more than one white house.
The end house was square and ugly, of stone. It was white. Rather, when I stopped and peered out it might have been a dirty gray. I wasn’t sure of the color. I wished I had my G.I. flashlight. That was in the duffel bag.
Then—I saw the house he meant. He wasn’t wrong. This was a big two-story house. It was right next to the gray one, although more hidden by trees. Even in the night, the white showed between the trees once one had noticed it. I backed up, and stopped. I got out quick into rain. I was hoping the people in this house had received Brown’s wire.
I shouldered the duffel bag and as I followed the winding walk, I obtained a better view of the house. It had a porch on one side, a row of front windows with a warm glow of light through white curtains. Wind moaned in the high trees. Gusts of rain beat down. I deposited the duffel bag on the top step, standing underneath one of those little pointed roofs one finds over front doors in houses in Maryland. I used the brass knocker. It was good to use a knocker once more.
So, I knocked again.
After about two minutes, the door opened. It was the nearest thing I’ve ever seen to an oversized Dresden-china horse—standing on two legs, I mean. But a very frayed one although maybe all Dresden horses are frayed and nearsighted and wear glasses when they open doors. Remember the Dresden horse—those made fifty or two hundred years or so ago in chinaware? They have the long, curving neck, ungainly, stumpy body. The legs always look as if they’d just hastily tucked themselves into a prancing position after having stumbled over a brick or whatever was in the road at that moment.
This one didn’t say anything at first. He had so much mustache below the nose I couldn’t tell whether he was smiling or if it were the natural expression. He was about a mile high. He was stooped. His head dropped lower and he stooped some more. He adjusted the glasses on his nose.
He blew through the fringy, brown mustache with a nervous exhalation of sound. “I am Dr. Nathan. You are Dr. Schofield, no? Tomorrow night I exbected you—” He stepped away, gesturing, no longer blocking the door. “Welcome, blease.”
Despite everything, somehow that sudden exploding “Blease” of his seemed funny.
I said I was sorry; I wasn’t Dr. Schofield. I said something about the room and the telegram Mr. Brown had sent.
Apparently, that was too tough for him to handle. “Brown?” he asked, giving it a different pronunciation. “Do I know beoble named Brown who send telegrams? So exbensive.” He revolved around without another word and left the hall vacant.
Rain was dripping, sliding off the roof above the door. In some other place than Washington, where hotels with rooms still vacant exist, where houses have unfilled beds, I might have let it go at that and waited. Here, I pushed in.
I waited in the long hall. Purple-colored carpet reached to the front stairs. Wallpaper was decorated with pink flowers. It was splattered with framed photographs, mostly of people in queer hats or stiff, wide dresses, high shoes, very different from the people walking around Washington. To my left was one of those old-fashioned entrances into a parlor. It had the two waxed wooden pillars and the draped bead curtain. During the pause, I caught a glimpse of the parlor. I saw Dr. Nathan. I saw his back. His pants were too tight. His feet splayed out.
His soft, inflected voice was going, too. It was talking in
German. For a second I caught a glimpse of someone else. I saw this girl in the big leather chair drawn in front of the fire. I mention it here because I shall never forget her as I saw her that first time. Or, if the old Colonel guy in Boston was right—when everything else is gone, if the haze comes down completely, it will be the last thing I forget.
Evidently, she’d been reading. Now, on her lap the book lay open. As Dr. Nathan spoke to someone beyond my view she was listening to whatever Dr. Nathan was saying in German. She wasn’t very big. She was wearing a yellow sweater. She had black hair, loose now, abundant and thick down her back as she leaned forward. Just then she must have suddenly become aware of me. She must have realized someone had walked through the door and was staring.
She looked straight at me. She had green eyes in a face the color of white almonds. As I say, I was staring; perhaps it was the yellow sweater—or the long, careless tumble of black hair. I don’t know. It wasn’t seeing an American girl sitting by the fire. It was partly walking in out of the night. It was seeing someone who couldn’t be just an American girl, not with that coloring, the vivid mouth, the faintly aquiline nose. It was seeing someone who might have emerged momentarily for me out of all that faraway land of memory which I’d almost lost. Sure, I stared. The white almond cheeks changed to rose petals. Like a young Persian cat she arose from the chair—all in one swift, easy motion. An old lady hove into view; I didn’t see any more of the girl.
Dr. Nathan and the old lady returned to the hall. The old lady came about as high as my ears and I don’t come too high, either. She was in a gray dress, a lace effect about her neck. Perhaps she was sixty. I couldn’t tell. In appearance she was plump, indestructible. Just looking at her, I bet she ran the place.
She stopped. She folded chubby, firm hands in front of her. She said, “V’at do you vish, please? I am Mrs. Veil.”
I can’t do it that way. I can’t do it in dialect. It doesn’t come out as Mrs. Weil spoke it. Doing it that way makes a fake kind of burlesque Yiddish dialect. It’s all right now and then to try to put in how Dr. Nathan exploded his “p’s” into “beoble” for “people” or “blease” for “please.” Because he wouldn’t have minded if someone thought it was funny—it is all right; he would have laughed, himself, if anyone explained it to him. But it isn’t all right to do Mrs. Weil that way. That isn’t the way Mrs. Weil spoke. It wasn’t funny or grotesque at all. She had a warm, rich, fragrant talk like borsch soup…
So, in her warm, thick accent she said she was Mrs. Weil. Dr. Nathan said, “Ahem,” apologetically, seeming to think I might be blaming him for not understanding about the telegram. I tried again. I told about Mr. Brown.
The old lady puckered her nose. She said, “Gan it be Marcus Braun, now? Marcus, he is my nephew.”
I spelled the name. It wasn’t “Braun.”
Quickly she said, “No. We have received no telegram from such a Brown,” only it was really “ve haff’ instead of “we have.”
The girl seemed to drift toward the hall. A minute before she hadn’t been standing between the two dark pillars. Now she was there, watching me. Without turning my head, I had the impression she was there. It was as though I could feel her presence, not so much seeing her, but sensing a faint fragrance, something more than that, too. Maybe it’s imagination. It was like being in a cold, dark room and having a door open, with something warm and fresh and good just outside the opening.
Anxiously, Dr. Nathan was asking, “You have made a mistake, bossibly, no?”
I asked didn’t they have any rooms to rent?
From behind me, I heard the girl’s slow words, “Aunt, it is very wet outside, tonight.”
Down the stairs quietly stepped a second man. He came forward, and as I saw him more plainly, I noticed he had a squint in one eye. A cheek was scarred. A bulldog or something like a bulldog must have grabbed his left ear at one time and chewed on it. He looked at me and retreated to where the girl was standing, joining her, not saying anything, waiting.
Mrs. Weil said, “You do not understand? You will please to find another room.”
In the following stillness, the girl’s breathing quickened. I looked at her now and she looked back at me and it was as though the whole night came into the house and was between us. The thin little cock-eyed guy lit himself a cigarette, cupping his hand over his scarred face. He hid the match flame. When he was through, he silently blew out the match before taking his hands away. Carefully he dropped the match in his pocket as if the burnt stick were something valuable, worth saving.
There was that dreamlike quality, listening to Mrs. Weil repeat herself about having no room. The little cock-eyed guy saw I’d noticed his gesture with the match. I suppose he didn’t miss much. It wasn’t a smile—I wouldn’t say that; a faintly ironic expression appeared on the scarred, round face. It passed away before I was certain I’d seen it. He could have been privately amused. He could have realized he’d automatically been doing something he needn’t do any more and with the knowledge his face had lit up and died out again.
Dr. Nathan was anxiously blowing out through his mustache. Mrs. Weil finished, “I do not have to rent rooms. Because of the war, now and then myself and my sisters, we rent rooms to a few of our own people who need rooms. It is a mistake you make, please. I am sure.”
Yes. I am sure it was a mistake I make. I’d half hoped the girl would say something more. It wasn’t a reasonable hope. It wasn’t based on anything but hearing her slow words saying it was wet outside as if only she and I knew that, and no one else in this house. Maybe die was afraid to say anything more.
This place was all wrong. Nobody had ever told them. It wasn’t right for me to be the one outside, trying to push myself in. It wasn’t right. I didn’t have the experience. Where I’d lived in my life these people were asking to come in, one way or another, ingratiating and humble, or proud and shoving, meek or important about it, and if my kind of people did let them in we felt a glow even if we were too advanced or too righteous, or if we privately assured ourselves that we believed they should be permitted to come in out of the darkness. But that was different. These people had all the experience trying to come in. I didn’t. Now, all at once it was reversed. They were in.
And I wasn’t.
It was a new one on me, all right. I didn’t like it. I didn’t like any part of it, begging them to’ let me have one of their rooms. While I was thinking, no one said a word.
They were all waiting for me to see it, to understand it was a mistake, to realize I didn’t belong—and get out. I could feel the house closing in, subtly, softly, already pushing against me. Rain swept in through the door. I said, “If that’s it, thank you very much for telling me.”
I was more than angry. On my side I had the centuries, too, to help me in the way I felt for being turned out. I had the centuries behind me, of being on topside, turning out these people. I could take it this once, as something to remember and to mention later to Megassum or Senator Wal-der perhaps. As a joke of course. “Don’t talk to me about discrimination. They don’t have it so tough. Why, last night…
But not exactly as a joke.
Soon as I was outside, darkness and rain swept in hard, against a door closing behind me. Tall, dark trees murmured. Wet leaves slithered across the space of night ahead of me. I tried to lift my duffel bag; it was too heavy. I dragged it down the steps, using the cane to help the leg. I was scared the leg might give for good before I reached my convertible.
Now, the convertible had become the sanctuary, the goal. All I wanted was to reach it. Inside the convertible would be a warm, soft place, a hole. I’d done fine to arrive this far and find myself a home and now my home was a convertible, eight-cylinder automobile, 1939 model.
I got in. I closed the door, shoving the duffel bag to my right. I started the car, throwing the gear into first. I judge I might have gone four or five feet in sheer blankness of mind before I realized the whole front end of the convertible was wallowing. I stopped. Perhaps for three or four minutes I just sat, listening to the rain.
By and by I opened the door. I splashed through water running along the gutter. It was the left front tire. At first I thought it was only a flat, until I ran my hands over the rubber. It wasn’t just a flat. It was hardly a tire any more. Someone had been an expert. The knife must have been very sharp to slash a tire so effectively.
CHAPTER IV
Not caring about rain any more, I dragged the duffel bag to the running board. At the bottom of the bag I found the
G. I. flashlight. It was a waste of time inspecting the tire with a G.I. flashlight, or anything else. The few feet I’d driven had done everything to the tire the knife hadn’t.
Returning to the house, I didn’t have any pride left. I used the knocker. I waited. I was in a time-machine. Everything was repeating over again on the time-machine that
H. G. Wells or maybe it was Superman had at last succeeded in inventing.
I was right back at the beginning. Door opened. I don’t recall much of what I said. I was too tired.
Dr. Nathan was confused, too. He said, “Blease.” The spectacles had tilted to one side of the nose. He took hold of himself. He said, “Of course, yes,” in a stricken, wounded tone as if he’d received it somewhere below the heart. “You may use the phone. Blease. Blease do.”
Around the front stairs I followed him, down the hall. Telephone was near the kitchen, placed on a beautiful black carved-wood Russian samovar stand which didn’t resemble the heavy, machine-made American department-store furniture I’d glimpsed in the parlor.
In the telephone book I found a Hyattsville garage. I put a call through. While I waited, I leaned on the wall. I was alone. Those faint, warm scents and odors clinging to a dark back hallway reminded me of something just beyond the edge of memory.
In my ear the receiver clattered.
The man at the other end sounded sleepy. I had to repeat. I got as far as about the tire and needing to have someone change it for me, when he laughed. After he laughed he became sore. He asked me where I’d been. He asked if I didn’t know a war was 9n. Before I could sort out the right one from the three or four answers that came into my mind—he’d hung up.
I tried two more garages.
As if it were their fault, I marched to the front hall. I hung on to one of those waxed wooden columns in the living room entrance. In front of the fireplace, Dr. Nathan was talking. The parlor seemed filled with shapes. The girl was there, looking at me, not moving.
I said perhaps it didn’t mean anything to them, but I didn’t like having my tire slashed. I’d appreciate knowing who did it.
After the little cock-eyed guy stepped away from the fireplace, Dr. Nathan slowly dropped his arm. Dr. Nathan sighed. The little guy let smoke trickle out of a fine, high-bridged nose. Softly he spoke, “It is rather shocking, to find a tire slashed.” He took a puff at the cigarette. “However, I can assure you no one in this house has been outside since you entered.”
Without replying, I walked into the rain, having trouble with the steps. My cane slipped.
Trying to hold a flashlight and a cane, I lifted the rear of the convertible. That’s a trick to learn some day. When there’s no rain. Rain dumped everything it had in all the buckets. About me, a night shook and muttered. More and more, actuality slipped into a kind of dream. I flashed the light inside the rear compartment. The spare tire was there. I couldn’t find any of the tools to remove the tire. Tools were probably up under the seat.
I don’t know if anyone can understand haw it is. Inside me everything was slowing down. Having the spare tire in one place, tools in another, was suddenly beyond my powers of comprehension. It was like that last day on the beach. That was when one had to think of each action, of lifting a foot, of putting it down again. It was when everything broke into small pieces. Ordinary actions became unendurably complex. I was mixed up. I was confused. I didn’t know who had slashed the tire.
Out of the darkness, the girl’s voice asked, “May we help?”
I remember answering her voice; I remember saying something about the tools not being where the spare tire was. I remember opening the door and pulling the duffel bag off the seat, letting it drop to the wet street. I remember pawing at the seat with one hand, the cane falling. I remember saying, “You might try to help with the seat,” and pointing the pale beam of flashlight out of the car door and seeing the girl and the two men, Dr. Nathan and the little cock-eyed guy.
The girl was in a white-hooded raincoat. She held out her hand. “I will take the flashlight, please.”
After what happened inside, having the three of them come out here in the rain helped increase the uncoordinated feeling. Finally, I handed the flashlight to the girl.
I said the tools were under the seat.
