Stolen Pleasures (13 page)

“I want you to stay and meet my son,” he said to me, laying his hand on my shoulder.

“Go on, beat it, go on,” my father said to him, the jerking of his elbow establishing his brotherhood with the rest.

“He's a bastard, my son,” the Caesar said.

The orderly, lounging in a wicker chair at the far end of the piano, lay his
Argosy
down upon his thigh and watched, and the old man, seeing my eyes darting to the place behind him where he knew the orderly sat, lifted his hand from me and went into the sleeping room where he stood with his back to us, watching the cardplayers.

“A son of a bitch himself,” my father said, shifting position sprawlingly. “The loony tried to murder his own son. This guy is always talking about how his son and his son's wife were figuring to dig up some three thousand bucks he's got buried somewhere. What the hell he thinks three thousand bucks is? I made that much in overtime the couple years I worked at Douglas Aircraft during the war. That's what it amounts to—nothing. A down payment on a Ford, a funeral, a loan to your uncle, a week for you and me at
Catalina, and it was gone. And this guy thinks it's enough to kill his son about. A loony.”

The long living room was like Sunday—the inmate curled on the sofa, the visitors, the scent of oranges; the only thing missing was the comic papers. Over by a closed door to somewhere, a middle-aged woman in a black dress and a black straw hat with red cherries sat on one side of a gray-clad patient and her middle-aged sister sat on the other side of him, a middle-aged brother whom sunlight hadn't touched in a long while, a man who had probably sat all day in a screened porch. Now, out in the world, he sat watching me with fear in his pale eyes. I saw him rise and walk away, feeling more cornered by my glance than by the women who pressed him in between them. They continued to talk across him, not missing him, but I was interested in my effect on him and sought him out, glancing into the sleeping room and finding him standing sideways, ten feet away, waiting for me to meet his eyes.

“What do you think they'll do to me, Arty?” my father was asking. He slid down, resting his elbow on the arm of the sofa and, with his hands, forming an arch to hide his face from the orderly. “I'd like to get rid of this cough. My chest has been bothering me from the coughing. They had me in the basement for a while and the cold came up from the floor. Ah, Jesus, it was miserable down there, like a menagerie in the hold of a ship. The croakings and cryings.”

“They do anything for your cough?”

“Nothing. The hell with them. Maybe they like you to come in with lung cancer or whatever it is I got. Maybe they want you to die as soon as you can, conditions in bughouses being as crowded as they are.”

“They got these places to cure people,” I said.

He laughed explosively, folding up and then unfolding so far that his legs stretched straight out and his back arched out from the sofa's back. The patient on the next sofa turned over and, his head hanging over the edge, watched my father with the unblinking eyes of a mild and curious animal.

“They give us hot chocolate before we go to bed,” my father said, “and a little cookie, star-shaped. You see how far man has progressed? They never did that in Bedlam, Arty, you tell that to any cynic you meet. You tell them in the psycho ward they give your father hot chocolate and a little cookie.”

We were sitting facing the double doors to the hallway, and through the screen saw an orderly come up the ramp pushing a food conveyance and wait in the hallway, ringing for admittance. He pushed the metal cart through the living room and to the closed door, and the door was left open after he had passed through and I saw that the room beyond was a dining room. Two women attendants were setting the long, dark table, and beyond that room was a kitchen with cabinets and a sink; and the sound of plate on plate from those rooms was a reassuring sound, and it seemed, though I knew it was impossible, that a wood fire had been lighted behind a screen somewhere in that room where the women set the table. The noises of the plates and silver predicted for me the meals that I would spend in company of persons whose existence I did not know of, in houses I did not know of, as I had not known of this locked living room with the gray inmates and the wicker chairs.

Over on the sofa by the dining room door the sisters wound the straps of their purses around their wrists, set their black shoes heavily
on the floor, and went to the sleeping room to find their brother and say goodbye. The black woman, tall and with the composure of a civil service clerk, drew on her coat over her high shoulders.

“They make everybody leave at suppertime, I guess,” I said.

“Where you going to eat?” my father asked.

“I don't know,” I said, not wanting to eat anywhere.

“There's a Chinese dump around the corner from Vernal,” he said. “You seen it. They got chicken giblet chop suey and they don't leave the liver out—most gyp joints save the liver for something fancy—and they got those peas cooked in the pod, you know how they do.” And disgusted by his detailing of trivia, he set his palms over his eyes. Under his blindfold, his mouth asked me, “You still at that place on Vernal?”

“Yes,” I said.

“You going back to your Aunt Glorie's?”

“I guess I won't,” I said.

“You going back to San Diego at all?”

“No, I guess I won't.” We were talking lower, for the other visitors were moving past us to the door, and the inmate lying on the next couch was awake on his back, his arms under his head.

“What you going to write to her then?”

“What you want me to write to her?”

He thought about it a minute as if he had not thought about it every day of his confinement. “Well, I'd like her to keep my tools intact,” he said “I got the key to my toolbox with me, or maybe you got it now, but that don't mean anything if she wants to sell them. I got some London spring steel saws in there I'd hate to lose. I'm afraid if you tell her where they got me, she'll sell my tools, she'll
think I'm never coming back to live there anymore and hoping I won't. So you tell her not to sell my tools and that's all. Just write it in a letter and don't say anything else.” He removed his hands to see if I were nodding.

“All right.” I nodded.

“You could get a job in this lousy town, I was working in a laundry when I was your age.”

We stood up, then, to be with the rest of the visitors gathering by the double doors, waiting for the orderly. The cardplayer, a heavyset fellow with a shaven head, came out to his wife, but the patient who was afraid of me did not come out to his sisters. Caesar, in his flowered robe, stood by the sofa we had vacated, muttering his chagrin with his son's failure to show up even at the last moment. The orderly in his white uniform strode from the dining room, jangling his keys playfully under the visitors' noses, and the visitors, stuporous from the afternoon's confinement, smiled servilely.

My father shook hands with me, it was the thing to do in public. In the corners of his eyes were white dots of weariness, and there was a sickly smell of anxiety upon him; I felt the sweat of it in the palm of his hand.

“The clerk says I can take the Greyhound bus, it'll get me there, or almost. Then I take a jitney that runs from the town to the hospital,” I told him.

“They got a private bus for us patients,” my father said, loudly so the orderly could hear his joking. “I hear it's a nice ride, see the ocean, see the hills, go past them mansions of the movie stars in Malibu.”

The orderly, his
Argosy
folded in his hind pocket, smiled as he turned the key. There was no hanging back after that. The atmosphere of the ward became unbreathable at the final moment when the door was opened to the outer air, and I followed the three women down the ramp, out through the swinging glass doors, and down the concrete steps with the metal rail that the sisters held on to.

As I went along by the high wire fence, ivy-woven, I glanced up to the second floor, not expecting at all to locate that particular ward and was surprised to find myself looking into the windows of the sleeping room. I saw the bent heads of the cardplayers and the back of the chair that the wife had sat in. By another window in that room my father was standing in his gray garments, watching me go. And I knew then that I was guilty of something and he was accusing me of it, and it was the guilt of sight. For he was the father who breaks down under the eyes of his son, the father in his last years when all the circumstances of his life have got him trussed and dying, while the son stands and watches the end of the struggle and then walks away to catch a streetcar.

For my true friend,
Isaac Babel,
in his basement.

 

O
CEAN LINERS SAILED right on through the Depression years, and certain persons who had jobs, like teachers, could go and visit countries that were not at war. Miss Furguson had been to Japan. She brought to school a silk kimono purchased in Nagasaki, for a sum she would not divulge. One of the boys asked her outright, but she bowed her head, smiling tolerantly. It's not polite to ask those kinds of questions, she said, so we don't answer them. The boy, humiliated, angry, turned his whole body sideways in his seat and stared out the window.

The kimono hung on a long bamboo rod with a black silk tassel at each end, showing off the wide sleeves to advantage and the hand-painted scene of a teahouse and white cranes wading in a stream. It had a red silk lining. You could file along before it but
you could not touch it. Miss Furguson fingered the silk between her thumb and forefinger. The feel of silk, nothing like it, she said.

Only for Jolie Lotta, as she filed by, did Miss Furguson point out the kimono's many precious details. What a beautiful girl she was, Jolie Lotta. How pale and clear her skin, how long and light her hair, how modestly plump her hands, ready for those gold rings promising bliss, her bare legs ready for skin-pale silk stockings, her complete person like a presentation of a virtue for all to see. A girl held in such high esteem by Miss Furguson, the boys kept their distance. And how could it be that Jolie Lotta was best friends with me?

Tall dry weeds and wild oats—that was the outskirts of the town and its empty lots, but you'd be surprised by who you'd find in the drugstore. Jolie Lotta's mother was the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in all my thirteen years of learning what beauty is. Hers was beyond comparison with the pretty ones in our class, already preening themselves for their entry into the marketplace. She wore a clerk's tan uniform, her hair, a darker blonde than her daughter's, was coiled at the nape of her neck, and her large, hazel eyes held a certainty of her own beauty, a lovely basking, a look that I hoped I might show for myself someday and knew I never could.

My mother, said Jolie Lotta to me one day, wants me to stop being friends with you. She named three girls who went around together and with nobody else, one whose father was the mayor, one whose father was the city attorney, and one whose father was simply rich, and it was these three girls whom her mother wanted for her friends. I already knew what was unfavorable about me, but I knew more emphatically then. I became who I was in her mother's beautiful eyes. Beauty can do that to you. I became the girl who
Jolie Lotta's mother saw, those few minutes in the drugstore when she appeared to be seeing only her daughter. How skinny my legs, how scrawny my hands, still an agile child's hands, sun-browned, stained with colored inks, and how unruly my dark hair, and how crazily stitched my clothes by my mother going blind and insisting on sewing up the tears. With the prescience some children have of their life to come, I knew then that I would keep my own distance from them, from those who were perfected by their beauty and in everybody's adoration. The farther the distance, the less the longing to be like them.

Miss Furguson asked the class to point to the one among us who we liked the best, I pointed to the girl who was a better artist than myself, and found their fingers pointing at me. A mistake! I was entangled hand and foot in Miss Furguson's mistaken question. They would not have chosen me had they known everything about me, the shameful things that only I knew. Oh, is it Delia? said Miss Furguson, not looking at me, looking around to see if some fingers were pointing at some others, and found that they were. Ah hah, this country is a democracy, she said, and smiled at me consolingly.

Noontime, I began to go around alone, seeking places from where I could not see the promenading girls, all perfecting themselves. Then the shyest girl in class, who was never heard from, began to follow me around. She spoke not one word, that Wilma, her large, darkly shining eyes doing all the pleading of me to be her best friend. Go away, I said. Go away and stay away. She would not go, she would not let me be alone. Until one day I pounded on her back, and then she went away. And even as if I had thought I was the boy who asked Miss Furguson the price of her kimono, I thought I was
that girl, that Wilma. I did not want to be them. It was no place for me to be, there in their wounded hearts, but there I was.