Authors: Thomas Tryon
Michael, squinting past the dripping hood of his jacket as he turned the corner, was sure the master would have disappeared, but no, the umbrella was there, up ahead. Halfway down the block it slowed, paused. Two figures emerged from the shadows, and their umbrellas came together with the master’s in a brief and (Michael thought) sinister conversation. A dim light glimmered above a doorway where the three—one of them was a woman—gathered, and a hand went out to ring a doorbell. The door opened immediately, they went in, the door closed behind them.
Michael hurried from the corner, lengthening his stride until he came abreast of the entrance. A small brass plate discreetly identified the place: the Urban Clement Funeral Parlor. Michael frowned, backed to the curb, and looked over the facade. The door, a single curtained window, nothing else. He caught sight of movement at the corner and looked to see another figure approaching. Michael quickly crossed the street and trotted down a low flight of steps into a deserted archway, where he could watch without being observed.
The figure directly approached the door, rang, collapsed his umbrella, and shook it. He was admitted at once, and the door closed again. Its chipped green enamel glinted slickly, wet beads runneling the panels, and, as Michael continued to watch, during the ensuing quarter of an hour it opened three more times. When Michael saw a woman in a raincoat approach along the sidewalk on his side of the street and stop for a moment at the corner while a car whirled by, he abandoned his cover and followed her closely to the funeral parlor door, where they both gained entrance without challenge or question.
Once inside, he followed her at a few yards’ distance, imitating her progress through the dim interior. They moved in silence down a passageway, sliding their hands along the wall, feeling for hooks where wet coats and umbrellas were hung. Another door at the end of the passageway led to a large room, clinical, antiseptic, surgical looking, where a single light burned, casting bright gleams against chrome and nickel and squares of white tile. In the tracks of his mute companion, Michael crossed to the opposite side of this room, slipped through a door, closed it, and found himself in another passage, whose termination revealed yet another door, through which he passed, again closing it behind him.
The room he and the unknown woman had just entered was apparently the desired goal, the center of the labyrinth. Michael spotted a little grove of potted palms, where he quickly secreted himself so that he might take in the room without being observed. It was a high-ceilinged space, and it had about it a certain shabby yet overstated glamour, resembling the lobby of a medium-sized hotel at the turn of the century in a fashionable spa, say Saratoga Springs. Or it might have put one in mind of the salon in a moderately stylish bordello, a room of substance, furnished with straight-backed chairs whose seats were identically upholstered in tufted velvet, worn to exhaustion by continual use. At present, most of these were occupied by men or women who sat talking in subdued tones. Other than the desultory talk on topics of small moment, however, they were simply waiting. Their clothes were as much at variance as their faces; some looked well-to-do, some were of an obviously middle-class background, some even caught in straitened circumstances. Some seemed intelligent, others bland, others dull. A wide-ranging mixture reposed in decorous tableau. Waiting. Everyone was waiting. And then Michael saw him: standing among them, rubbing his hands together, the abstracted gesture of a man who holds himself in anticipation of some looked-for event, the master waited too.
Michael stared at him through the palm fronds, but not too intently; he wasn’t sure that he wanted the master to feel his eyes and become cognizant of his presence. But then he smirked inwardly at this inane precaution. Surely the master knew he was there, surely he had led him deliberately to this very place? By ways apparently but not actually devious, by means of a cavalierly transparent subterfuge—which was no doubt part of the lesson—the master had brought him here, where he wanted him to be. But why? He would find out in time; meanwhile, he resolved to do what was obviously expected of him: to wait and to watch.
The hour had grown late. Somewhere beyond the heavy oak sliding doors a clock sounded with dull resonance, a kind of knell. A woman clenching a cigarette leaned toward a man and wordlessly asked for a light, receiving it and blowing a stream of blue smoke into the gloom. Someone looked at her with disdain and coughed; another, as if unable to resist the impulse, echoed it. The master, looking fatigued from his long walk, sat in a chair placed beside a pillar. The black patch now covered his sightless eye. As Michael watched him, he crossed his legs with professorial calm and laced his long fingers around his knee, looking down at the nails of his thumbs.
He did not look up when the oaken doors slid open and the quiet was broken by the sound of wheels rolling across the floor, onto the rug. Michael thought he must be aware of others rearranging themselves about the room, his half vision glimpsing waists and feet moving over the arabesques of the patterned rug. The master straightened his back slightly in the chair, drawing in a soundless breath, expelling it slowly through parted lips. Around him there were light, sliding movements, the rustle of women’s garments, the brush of shoe leather across the carpeting. Someone went out, closing the oak doors behind. Among those waiting there went a chain of whispers like a persistent breeze, to die in silence, rise briefly, die again. In the quiet and the whispers they waited.
At last the master lifted his sunken chin, like a minister after the invocation, contemplating his assembled congregation. One-eyed, he looked at those nearest him, but did not acknowledge them. They were still waiting, but now Michael understood that they were waiting for him, for the master. Here and there a face was turned expectantly toward him, most turned away in some unspoken etiquette established among them to accommodate such occasions.
The master got up from his chair and stood and looked as though unseeing around the circle of heads and moved through it. No one touched him as he passed among them and proceeded to the center of the room, where the rubber-wheeled table had been placed. He paused, looking down, then with his thumbs and forefingers lifted and folded back the sheet, perhaps a foot, one neat fold, the economical gesture of a hospital attendant. Again a whisper riffled through the gathering around him. Heads craned.
Michael heard someone say the face was a good face tonight. Under the taut, opaque skin the flesh was like gray marble, with opaque shadows the color of oysters surrounding the eyes, sooty smudges lending a bruised, tired expression. The ends of white fibers showed faintly at the nostrils where they had been plugged with cotton. The mouth was relaxed into a neutral expression, the lower lip drawn back slightly under the upper, both bloodless, with a purplish cast. Then there was the odor, not unpleasant, something like the scent of a freshly diapered infant.
The nares of Wurlitzer’s nose seemed to widen as, bending, his face suspended above the face beneath him, with a graceful movement, lost in dreamlike languor, he drew the sheet further down, draping it loosely at the foot of the zinc table. The cloth slid, and someone made a quick movement, caught it before it touched the floor. Murmurs rose as the naked and marmoreal form was disclosed. The hands lay along the sides, palms cupped upwards, fingers curled. The chest rose in bony prominence above the flattened abdomen, the midsection modestly covered by the width of a towel. Below the towel the legs lay aligned in parallel, the knees, calves, and anklebones just touching in classic symmetry. It was a good body, someone said, a fine body. The veins showed bluely under the skin, along the forearms and the fronts of the lower extremities.
The master straightened, raised his right hand in a reflective and passive gesture of commitment, then let it slip down so the fingers rested on the dead thigh. He slid the padded tips along in tactile concentration. Behind him little glimmers of light had burst, matches tipped the wicks of candles, and the electric sconces were switched off with audible clicks. The room shone with a soft amber radiance. Someone had brought a chair, which now rested several inches behind the master’s legs. He bent his knees and lowered himself into the seat, his meager weight making the tufted cushion give only slightly. He sat in the candlelight, leaning toward the horizontal form, the pale shoulder just at his own shoulder but not touching. He angled his head so he looked upon the face sideways.
There was a stirring among the watchers as he languidly moved his hand along the exposed inside of the bare arm, letting his fingertips come at last to the opened palm, where he thoughtfully studied the creases in the flesh. He traced them with the rim of his nail, pressed slightly along the mounds, delicately touched each finger in turn, then gently enclosed the hand in his own. His eye closed, he sat like a doctor beside a patient, brooding, aloof, coldly pondering a difficult diagnosis. The fingers of one hand now rested firmly about the curve of the ribs; the other hand closed tightly around the Eye of Horus, which hung around his neck; then he laid the side of his face against the breast, just at the level of the frozen heart, and in this position he remained, motionless and scarcely breathing.
Beyond the paired doors the clock struck again. Several people were smoking now, and tobacco smoke drifted down from the ceiling. No sound came from outside the walls of the red-papered room. In frieze, those attending watched, grouped about the room. Two or three, including Michael, as if fearful of venturing into the light, however dim, lingered behind the arching branches of the palms.
Waiting, watching, those assembled sounded among them small, muffled signals, denoting a community of desire, softly uttered murmurs that became low moans, hanging in the room like laments that increased gradually in volume, and as if these sounds of themselves had induced movement the watchers began moving, rubbing their hands with a miser’s covetousness as slowly they entered now into themselves or outward from themselves, succumbing to whatever profane ecstasy they had assembled to experience.
Though beyond the doors the clock had tolled, in the room itself there was no time. They waited, who could tell how long, with almost courtly diffidence, waited until the old man, whom they seemed to look upon with unspecific reverence, lifted his cheek and sat staring down at the marble face. Then he rose, and the chair was solicitously withdrawn from behind him. He turned away, the moist coating on his eye catching the candlelight, dancing, then disappearing into darkness as though a light had been extinguished, and all that might be seen was the black patch, which seemed visionary of its own accord.
Then, as Wurlitzer moved farther away, not looking back, the watchers closed about. They grouped themselves around the rubber-wheeled table, whose metallic surfaces rayed light against the ceiling plaster. A woman sank down on the rug as if unable to support herself, another lowered her body beside the first, and they clasped hands, their free hands reaching up to touch and feel, their eyes shut in inarticulate passion, moaning, whispering secret thoughts, lost in a dreamless dream.
After these two, the rest joined in, a choir of hands reaching with spread fingers, trembling, groping, to touch the holy object of their awful adoration. A frenzied energy had begun to communicate itself through the room, from person to person, a tangential awareness, but each was locked in a solitude of lonely joyfulness, private and unfathomable. One, more eager than the rest, came close against the far side of the table, and leaning over the prostrate form, bent to it, and as the first living mouth was pressed against the dead one a single cry of muted but uncontrollable passion was heard.
Through the palm fronds, Michael saw the master wait for a time, watching, inhaling the tallowed smoke that drifted about the candle tips; then, abruptly, he left the room. Michael’s principal instinct was to follow, yet something compelled him to move forward, to see at least what it was the master had done, what it was that held these people transfixed. And then he saw—the dead man’s chest rose and fell, exhaling the breath of sleep. He was alive!
Michael turned and hastened through the same door by which he had entered what seemed an eternity ago. Outside, the rain had lessened, but there was a cool breeze, and he quickly realized he was chilled to the bone. The street was empty. When he reached the corner, he looked back, peering down the block, registering the little light still glowing above the wet green door. Pulling his hood down to his eyebrows, he headed in the direction of Union Square.
He was angry and frustrated without knowing why; and both fascinated and frightened, for reasons he knew perfectly well. And exhilarated. Suddenly he was running, not on the sidewalk but along the gutter, jumping with both feet in the puddles and splashing them and cursing aloud. It didn’t matter; there was no one to see or hear him. His pants were soaked to the knees as he waited for a bus to take him across town.
He transferred at Eighth Avenue and took the uptown bus. When he got off it had begun raining again, and he made short work of the half block to the theater. He let himself in next door, wiping his feet on the mat and slipping out of his wet jacket as soon as he entered. Turning, he saw the black umbrella, neatly rolled and cinched with its cloth fastener, exactly where it had been earlier. He touched it: it felt dry. The large black rubbers sat under the hall tree; they too were dry. Upstairs, the light from the sitting room slanted into the hall, and he could hear the drone of the television set.
He came into the room and pulled up short, his mouth agape with surprise. Lena was in her chair, stitching while she watched a late movie. And, impossibly, the master sat in the chair in the study alcove, a book on his lap, his face half obscured by his green celluloid eyeshade as he examined something with a magnifying glass. He wore his vest, and his feet were slid into his old leather slippers; at his elbow a smoking pipe lay in the ashtray. Lena looked up as Michael came in, smiled a greeting, then returned her eyes to the television screen. Max’s head lifted, he pushed back the eyeshade and waved Michael in. Michael stood staring at him. The old man’s face betrayed nothing, but there was a hint of something in the voice. “Well, home again, eh? Did you enjoy yourself?”