A Confederacy of Dunces (13 page)

"Your momma was very excitable, huh?"

"Poor girl. Standing there in the rain and cold with her old sunbonnet on not knowing what nobody was saying half the time. It was hard in them days, Irene. Things was tough, kid."

"You can say that again," Mrs. Reilly agreed. "We sure had us some hard times down on Dauphine Street. Poppa was very poor. He had him a job by a wagon works, but then the automobiles come in, and he gets his hand caught in a fanbelt.

Many's the week we lived on red beans and rice."

"Red beans gives me gas."

"Me, too. Listen, Santa, why you called, sugar?"

"Oh, yeah, I almost forgot. You remember when we was out bowling the other night?"

"Tuesday?"

"No, it was Wednesday, I think. Anyway, it was the night Angelo got arrested and couldn't come."

"Wasn't that awful. The police arresting one of they very own."

"Yeah. Poor Angelo. He's so sweet. He sure got trouble at that precinct." Santa coughed hoarsely into the telephone.

"Anyway, it was the night you come for me in that car of yours and we went to the alley alone. This morning I was over by the fish market buying them ersters, and this old man comes up to me and says, 'Wasn't you by the bowling alley the other night?' So I says, 'Yeah, mister, I go there a lot.' And he says, 'Well, I was there with my daughter and her husband and I seen you with a lady got sorta red hair.' I says, 'You mean the lady got the henna hair? That's my friend Miss Reilly. I'm learning her how to bowl.' That's all, Irene. He just tips his hat and walks out the market."

"I wonder who that could be," Mrs. Reilly said with great interest. "That's sure funny. What he looks like, babe?"

"Nice man, kinda old. I seen him around the neighborhood before taking some little kids to Mass. I think they his granchirren."

"Ain't that strange? Who'd be asking about me?"

"I don't know, kid, but you better watch out. Somebody's got they eye on you."

"Aw, Santa! I'm too old, girl."

"Listen to you. You still cute, Irene. I seen plenty men giving you the eye in the bowling alley."

"Aw, go on."

"That's the truth, kid. I ain't lying. You been stuck away with that son of yours too long."

"Ignatius says he's making good at Levy Pants," Mrs. Reilly said defensively. "I don't wanna get mixed up with no old man."

"He ain't that old," Santa said, sounding a little hurt. "Listen, Irene, me and Angelo coming by for you about seven tonight."

"I don't know, darling. Ignatius been telling me I oughta stay home more."

"Why you gotta stay home, girl? Angelo says he's a big man."

"Ignatius says he's afraid when I leave him alone here at night.

He says he's scared of burgulars."

"Bring him along, and Angelo can learn him how to bowl, too."

"Whoo! Ignatius ain't what you'd call the sporting type," Mrs.

Reilly said quickly.

"You come along anyways, huh?"

"Okay," Mrs. Reilly said finally. "I think the exercise is helping my elbow out. I'll tell Ignatius he can lock himself up in his room."

"Sure," Santa said. "Nobody's gonna hurt him."

"We ain't got nothing worth stealing anyways. I don't know where Ignatius gets them ideas of his."

"Me and Angelo be by at seven."

"Fine, and listen, precious, try and ask by the fish market who that old man is."

The Levy home stood among the pines on a small rise overlooking the gray waters of Bay St. Louis. The exterior was an example of elegant rusticity; the interior was a successful attempt at keeping the rustic out entirely, a permanently seventy-five-degree womb connected to the year-round airconditioning unit by an umbilicus of vents and pipes that silently filled the rooms with filtered and reconstituted Gulf of Mexico breezes and exhaled the Levys' carbon dioxide and cigarette smoke and ennui. The central machinery of the great life-giving unit throbbed somewhere in the acoustically tiled bowels of the home, like a Red Cross instructor giving cadence in an artificial respiration class, "In comes the good air, out goes the bad air, in comes the good air."

The home was as sensually comfortable as the human womb supposedly is. Every chair sank several inches at the lightest touch, foam and down surrendering abjectly to any pressure.

The tufts of the acrylic nylon carpets tickled the ankles of anyone kind enough to walk on them. Beside the bar what looked like a radio dial would, upon being turned, make the lighting throughout the house as mellow or as bright as the mood demanded. Located throughout the house within easy walking distance of one another were contour chairs, a massage table, and a motorized exercising board whose many sections prodded the body with a motion that was at once gentle yet suggestive. Levy's Lodge-that was what the sign at the coast road said-was a Xanadu of the senses; within its insulated walls there was something that could gratify anything.

Mr. and Mrs. Levy, who considered each other the only ungratifying objects in the home, sat before their television set watching the colors merge together on the screen.

"Perry Como's face is all green," Mrs. Levy said with great hostility. "He looks like a corpse. You'd better take this set back to the shop."

"I just brought it back from New Orleans this week," Mr. Levy said, blowing on the black hairs of his chest that he could see though the V of his terry cloth robe. He had just taken a steam bath and wanted to dry himself completely. Even with year-round air conditioning and central heating one could never be sure.

"Well, take it back again. I'm not going to go blind looking at a broken TV."

"Oh, shut up. He looks all right."

"He does not look all right. Look how green his lips are."

"It's the makeup those people use."

"You mean to tell me they put green makeup on Como's lips?"

"I don't know what they do."

"Of course you don't," Mrs. Levy said, turning her aquamarine-lidded eyes toward her husband, who was submerged somewhere among the pillows of a yellow nylon couch. She saw some terry cloth and a rubber shower clog at the end of a hairy leg.

"Don't bother me," he said. "Go play with your exercising board."

"I can't get on that thing tonight. My hair was done today."

She touched the high plasticized curls of her platinum hair.

"The hairdresser told me that I should get a wig, too," she said.

"What do you want with a wig? Look at all the hair you've got already."

"I want a brunette wig. That way I can change my personality."

"Look, you're already a brunette anyway, right? So why don't you let your hair grow out naturally and buy a blonde wig?"

"I hadn't thought of that."

"Well, think about it for a while and keep quiet. I'm tired.

When I went into town today I stopped at the company. That always makes me depressed."

"What's happening there?"

"Nothing. Absolutely nothing."

"That's what I thought," Mrs. Levy sighed. "You've thrown your father's business down the drain. That's the tragedy of your life."

"Christ, who wants that old factory? Nobody's buying the kind of pants they make anymore. That's all my father's fault. When pleats came in in the thirties, he wouldn't change over from plain-front trousers. He was the Henry Ford of the garment industry.

Then when the plain front came back in the fifties, he started making trousers with pleats. Now you should see what Gonzalez calls 'the new summer line.' They look like those balloon pants the clowns wear in circuses. And the fabric. I wouldn't use it for a dishrag myself."

"When we were married, I idolized you, Gus. I thought you had drive. You could have made Levy Pants really big. Maybe even an office in New York. It was handed all to you and you threw it away."

"Oh, stop all that crap. You're comfortable."

"Your father had character. I respected him."

"My father was a very mean and cheap man, a little tyrant. I had some interest in that company when I was young. I had plenty interest. Well, he destroyed all that with his tyranny. So far as I'm concerned, Levy Pants is his company. Let it go down the drain. He blocked every good idea I had for that firm just to prove that he was the father and I was the son. If I said,

'Pleats,' he said, 'No pleats! Never!' If I said, 'Let's try some of the new synthetics,' he said, 'Synthetics over my dead body.' "

"He started peddling pants in a wagon. Look what he built that into. With your start you could have made Levy Pants nationwide."

"The nation is lucky, believe me. I spent my childhood in those pants. Anyway, I'm tired of listening to you talk.

Period."

"Good. Let's keep quiet. Look, Como's lips are turning pink.

"You've never been a father figure to Susan and Sandra."

"The last time Sandra was home, she opened her purse to get cigarettes and a pack of rubbers falls on the floor right at my feet."

"That's what I'm trying to say to you. You never gave your daughters an image. No wonder they're so mixed up. I tried with them."

"Listen, let's not discuss Susan and Sandra. They're away at college. We're lucky we don't know what's going on. When they get tired they'll marry some poor guy and everything will be all right."

"Then what kind of a grandfather are you going to be?"

"I don't know. Let me alone. Go get on your exercising board, get in the whirlpool bath. I'm enjoying this show."

"How can you enjoy it when the faces are all discolored."

"Let's not start that again."

"Are we going to Miami next month?"

"Maybe. Maybe we could settle there."

"And give up everything we have?"

"Give up what? They can fit your exercising board in a moving van."

"But the company."

"The company has made all the money it's ever going to make.

Now is the time to sell."

"It's a good thing your father's dead. He should have lived to see this." Mrs. Levy gave the shower shoe a tragic glance.

"Now I guess you'll spend all your time at the World Series or the Derby or Daytona. It's a real tragedy, Gus. A real tragedy."

"Don't try to make a big Arthur Miller play out of Levy Pants."

"Thank goodness I'm around to watch over you. Thank goodness _I_ have an interest in that company. How's Miss Trixie? I hope she's still relating and functioning pretty well."

"She's still alive, and that's saying a lot for her."

"At least I have an interest in her. You would have thrown her out in the snow long ago."

"The woman should have been retired long ago."

"I told you retirement will kill her. She must be made to feel wanted and loved. That woman's a real prospect for psychic rejuvenation. I want you to bring her out here someday. I'd like to really get to work on her."

"Bring that old bag here? Are you nuts? I don't want a reminder of Levy Pants snoring in my den.

She'll wet all over your couch. You can play with her by long distance."

"How typical," Mrs. Levy sighed. "How I've stood this heartlessness through the years I'll never know."

"I've already let you keep Trixie at the office, where I know she must drive that Gonzalez nuts all day long. When I went there this morning everybody was on the floor. Don't ask me what they were doing. It could have been anything." Mr. Levy whistled through his teeth. "Gonzalez is on the moon, as usual, but you should see this other character working in there. I don't know where they got him from. You wouldn't believe your eyes, believe me. I'm afraid to guess what those three clowns do in that office all day long. It's a wonder nothing's happened already."

Ignatius had decided against going to the Prytania. The movie being shown was a widely praised Swedish drama about a man who was losing his soul, and Ignatius was not particularly interested in seeing it. He would have to speak with the manager of the theater about booking such dull fare.

He checked the bolt on his door and wondered when his mother would be coming home. Suddenly she was going out almost every night. But Ignatius had other considerations at the moment. Opening his desk, he looked at a pile of articles he had once written with an eye on the magazine market. For the journals of opinion there were "Boethius Observed" and

"In Defense of Hroswitha: To Those Who Say She Did Not Exist." For the family magazines he had written "The Death of Rex" and "Children, the Hope of the World." In an attempt to crack the Sunday supplement market he had done "The Challenge of Water Safety," "The Danger of Eight-Cylinder Automobiles," "Abstinence, the Safest Method of Birth Control," and "New Orleans, City of Romance and Culture."

As he looked through the old manuscripts, he wondered why he had failed to send any of them off, for each was excellent in its own way.

There was a new, extremely commercial project at hand, though. Ignatius quickly cleared the desk by brushing the magazine articles and Big Chief tablets smartly to the floor with one sweep of his paws. He placed a new looseleaf folder before him and printed slowly on its rough cover with a red crayon THE JOURNAL OF A WORKING BOY, OR, UP

FROM SLOTH. When he had finished that, he tore the Blue Horse bands from the stacks of new lined paper and placed them in the folder. With a pencil he punched holes in the sheets of Levy stationery which already held some notes and inserted them in the front section of the folder. Taking up his Levy Pants ball-point pen, he began writing on the first sheet of new Blue Horse paper:

Dear Reader,

Books are immortal sons defying their sires.

-Plato

I find, dear reader, that I have grown accustomed to the hectic pace of office life, an adjustment which I doubted I could make. Of course, it is true that in my brief career at Levy Pants, Limited, I have succeeded in initiating several work-saving methods. Those of you who are fellow office workers and find yourselves reading this incisive journal during a coffee break or such might take note of one or two of my innovations. I direct these observations to officers and tycoons, also.

I have taken to arriving at the office one hour later than I am expected. Therefore, I am far more rested and refreshed when I do arrive, and I avoid that bleak first hour of the working day during which my still sluggish senses and body make every chore a penance. I find that in arriving later, the work which I do perform is of a much higher quality.