“You think he messes around on the road?”
“I think he doesn’t like sex is what I think.”
I tried to imagine what that would be like and failed. “If you’re Catholic, what do people think about your not having any kids?”
“They think we’re among those poor unfortunates that the Lord made barren, and they pray for a miracle.” She raised her left foot off the bed and wiggled her toes. “You know, Mr. Ogden, I’d say until this afternoon our department was the least scandalous in the whole company.”
“How’s that?”
“It’s all men, except me, and none of those fellows like me that way. But just look at the rest of the place. Mr. Collins himself getting that girl in trouble and sending her away to have it gotten rid of.”
“How did you find out about that?”
“I’m real nosey, Mr. Ogden. And people think I don’t listen so they say things when I’m around. But I do listen.”
Mrs. Caspian spent the next half hour regaling me with the misdeeds and peccadilloes of upper and middle management. If half of it was true, which I doubted, then our little aircraft manufacturing concern was a cesspool of vice and iniquity unrivaled since Nero’s Rome. When I asked her about our esteemed comptroller Mr. Huff she regretted having nothing to give me. “Because he’s really the one who’s got it in for you and Mr. Collins. Nobody has anything bad to say about him, though. He’s a big shot in the K of C and he’s on all those charity boards and my gosh, have you ever seen his family?”
“I never have.”
“Four of the best looking kids you ever saw. And when he was in the hospital he got over three hundred get-well cards.”
“Appendectomy or something serious?”
“He was attacked and beaten up pretty bad.”
I sat up. “How’s that?”
“Oh, it was during the war. He was out for a walk and some hoodlums jumped him.”
“You don’t say. In broad daylight?”
“Oh, no, it was at night.”
“And I suppose it was on a downtown sidewalk.”
“No, he was walking in Riverside Park. Past midnight, I think. He said he does it sometimes to clear his head. Why are you smiling like that?” she asked.
“Mrs. Caspian, you’re okay in my book.”
“Thank you, Mr. Ogden,” she said, and she took my hand and guided it below her belly again and gave me the kind of smile only a straying member of the cathedral choir can give.
HIRAM FISH NO longer worked for Mrs. Collins, he informed me over the phone, having fallen out with the old virago over the reimbursement of his medical expenses. He wanted me to know that there were no hard feelings and that he was available for any sort of work Mr. Collins might wish to have him undertake, including but not limited to surveillance and surreptitious photography.
“What kind of camera do you use for that kind of work?”
He cleared his throat and I remembered the Speed Graphic I’d batted off the hood of his car. “It depends upon the situation,” he said.
“Suppose I want to take a picture at night without the subject knowing he’s been photographed?”
“Gosh, I sure don’t know. I always use a bulb at night, and they sure know after that goes off.”
“You think you could figure out a way? We might have some work for you if you can.”
“I’d be most happy to look into it,” he said, sounding like the preening gigolo he strove so hard to resemble.
I WOKE THE next morning with a toothache. It was a right rear molar and it’d been bothering me off and on for a month or more, and now it hurt so bad I was afraid I might need a root canal or worse, an extraction. I thought about going to see Dr. Werner, our old family dentist, but I remembered in him what I now recognized as a sadistic streak—he was a skimper on the Novocain, and he used to sneer whenever a young patient cried out. He was born in the old country, and would have made a great Nazi in the movies. I didn’t want to pay out the nose, either, so I headed over to the VA hospital on Kellogg and waited for an hour with half a dozen other guys until my name was finally called.
The ex-army dentist who examined me lectured me on the evils of sweets and the importance of good dental hygiene before putting the gas mask on me and drilling away at what was still, in his estimation, a manageable cavity. Dr. Werner hadn’t approved of the laughing gas, as he thought it might lead to narcotic use, and I saw now that the old Kraut had a point; if I wasn’t literally laughing I sure felt like it. There was a sense of separation from my body, as well as a sense that I was doing cartwheels while still seated and immobile in the torture chair, and I made a mental note never to start using Hycodan myself, a thought that came a half-second after the thought that maybe it would be worth trying out some of the old man’s pills. No, thanks, I’ll stick to peddling the stuff.
I was walking through the atrium, mouth full of gauze, when I ran into Bunk Fletcher, a kid I’d grown up with and hadn’t seen since I was inducted.
He was out of the army and working for the VA as a file clerk. Despite my temporary speech impediment, we fell to talking and he invited me up to his office to jaw and drink Uncle Sam’s watery coffee.
He was showing me the filing system and I asked him, just for laughs, to pull my file. He did it, and I was impressed with its thoroughness and accuracy. My whole military career, at least the comings and goings, and all the pertinent medical data were there, along with an identification photo that may have been the dourest image of me ever captured on film. All my transfers, from Fort Dix all the way to Rome and finally my discharge, were right on there. My current address, as well as my last one, were in there, too, as well as the fact that I worked at Collins, even in which department. It got me thinking how easy it would be for the military to find me if for some reason I wanted to drop off the face of the earth.
“This the only copy?” I asked Bunk.
“There’s one on file in Washington, updated from your local file.”
“What if someone wanted to see it?”
“They’d have to have a pretty good reason. We keep a pretty tight lid on these things.”
A real tight army lid, he meant, and I knew better than anybody how easy those were to pry off. If you knew how.
SALLY SURPRISED ME when I came in that night with a houseful of new furniture from Bellow’s. The front half of the parlor contained an oak dining room set, with a credenza along the wall. In the rear half, which she now insisted on calling the living room, sat a new davenport and, to my horror, an overstuffed fauteuil that had replaced my father’s old reading chair.
My father was a genial and quiet man who had a life of the mind quite separate from his daily mathematical routine, an important corrective against seeing life as a ledger. When I enrolled in Wichita University my father urged me to study business, a subject that interested me not at all; by the time I was in the army selling tires and gasoline and running whores, though, I was immensely grateful to him for the advice. He read every night in that chair, and on nights when I was home so did I. I was not happy to see it gone.
My silence had put a scare into her, and her voice was very quiet when she asked me how I liked it. Typically, she hadn’t run through in her mind all the possible reactions to her expensive little surprise. I didn’t want to be an ogre, but I couldn’t pretend to be happy about it.
“How much?”
“A little less than a thousand, in installments. It was a bargain, if you look at what these pieces all cost individually. And they gave us a special extra five percent discount, with you being a vet and all.”
“Where’s the old furniture?”
“They took it away.”
“And did you get a trade-in? A discount for the value of the old furniture?”
“I didn’t think to ask.”
I walked out without another word.
I FOUND THE manager standing in the back of the furniture store selling a bedstead to a young couple who looked as though they were saving it for the wedding night. The boy’s eyes looked like they were going to pop right out of his skull if he didn’t dip his wick pretty soon, which was understandable given the healthy young specimen of femininity at his side. I’d made it clear to the other clerks that the manager was the only one I’d do business with, and I must have looked serious because they kept their distance. The manager was getting flustered, and finally he met my steady glare.
“Can one, ah, one of our salesmen help you, sir?”
“You’re the manager, you’re the one I need to see. I’ll wait.”
“Is this about an adjustment?”
“You might say that.” I made a point of keeping my voice low; nothing betrays weakness like an emotional outburst. “Your boys cheated my wife in my absence, and I’m here to see it set right.”
The young couple exchanged glances.
“I’m sure if there’s been some kind of misunderstanding one of the salesmen can help, they’re authorized . . . ”
“I’ll wait. You sell the lovebirds their nuptial bed and we’ll talk afterward.”
“Actually we’re going to wait a day or two and think about it,” the boy said, and the girl whacked his elbow.
“I want to get it now, Herbie,” she hissed as Herbie pulled her away by the arm.
“Sorry if I cost you a sale,” I said, without the least trace of sorrow in my voice.
“That’s quite all right, couples often need to ponder a major purchase, especially just starting out. Now what was the problem with your wife?”
“It’s not a problem with my wife, it’s a problem with your sales force. They had a whole houseful of perfectly good furniture hauled out of my place this afternoon with no credit given in return.”
“Of course we’re dealers in new furniture only.”
“I don’t give a damn, you know perfectly well you don’t give good material away to the Salvation Army. You sell them someplace, now I want some of those pieces back, and I want compensation for the rest.”
“As far as I’m concerned, sir, you’re not entitled to any. If your wife had mentioned compensation at the time we would have informed her . . . ”
“Listen to me. What’s your name?”
“Stan Franklin.”
“All right, Stan, I notice Bellows has an ad once a week in the
Eagle
but not the
Beacon
. Old man Bellows got something against the Jews?”
“Mr. Bellows happens to be my father-in-law, and he doesn’t feel that the
Beacon
’s readers are our type of clientele.”
“I mention it because I know the
Eagle
wouldn’t run a story about a naïve mother-to-be, the wife of a vet, getting gypped by one of their own advertisers, but I bet the
Beacon
would jump at it. Of course, that wouldn’t matter to you, since none of your customers read the
Beacon
.” TWO HUNDRED DOLLARS off the price of the furniture, and my dad’s old chair would be delivered in the morning. I was a little disappointed that old Bellows caved in so quickly when his son-in-law phoned him. What I’d really wanted was to smash one of their expensive tables to pieces and beat Mr. Stan Franklin to a bleeding pulp with one of its legs, after which I might allow the remainder of the sales force to flee before I soaked the place in kerosene and watched it burn to the ground. Maybe, I thought, I needed a drink.
THREE SOAKS, TWO men and a woman, were swozzled over at Norman’s blind pig. Norman introduced them but their names wouldn’t stick in my head so I ended up calling the woman Honey, the taller of the two men Stretch, and the fatter one Tub. Neither of the men seemed to like his nickname much, but neither said anything at first. The woman warmed to hers, spilling out of her girdle with her eyes at half mast, mascara running with sweat and possibly tears from earlier in the evening.
Tub and Stretch were vying for her favors, and my arrival had made them question the short-term wisdom of that rivalry. The presence of an interloper called for a united front, lest Honey decide against both of them. Norman was a friend, so I let the rubes’ veiled insults roll off my back at first.
Later, though, an innocent mention of my war record on Norman’s part set Stretch off on a long, rolling diatribe about returning servicemen and the easy ride we had. When I didn’t challenge his assertions he got madder and started dropping hints that I might have fabricated my service record. I didn’t really give a good goddamn what these idiots thought about me, but the bourbon was starting to make me feel mean.
“You may be right, Stretch. You know my wife got a whole five percent off a dining room suite this afternoon, just by virtue of me having been overseas? Shit, if I’d know about the five percent veteran’s discount at Bellow’s Furniture Emporium I’d have signed up before Pearl Harbor.”
Stretch made a face like someone had just cut a fart, and he looked away from all of us, sniffling in distaste.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Lots of guys got classed 4-F. Nobody thinks the worse of you for it.”