His voice went suddenly in the middle of his
pleading. He took out a spiral notebook and a pencil. He always
carried them about. He started scribbling and showed me:
You’d better hurry if you want to hear
this.
Hear? I thought it was see. I shook my head
and stuffed the pajamas into the flight bag. He scribbled:
Listen, I said $500 a week in the letter.
Let’s make it $700.
“It’s not the money, Harvey.” His pencil
whispered.
One thousand dollars then. That’s double.
I stepped into my trousers, zipped up and
fastened the belt. After a while he handed me another sheet of
paper:
Listen. Stay with me a little and you’ll
inherit. Twenty-five percent. That’s $290,000, less the federal and
state cut: say $200,000, all yours. No joke. Soon. Only don’t talk
to Hanna about it. Stay.
I asked him how I could possibly help him. I
knew nothing about whatever it was he was working on. He had Hanna.
She had bigger muscles than I did.
He scribbled away.
Hanna doesn’t give a shit about my work. She
doesn’t believe in it. You do. Or you will when you come down into
the cellar. She’s too young to recognize the voices.
“What voices?” I asked. He wrote:
The voices I’m pulling in, for God’s sake,
I’ve been telling you. The voices I want you to hear down in the
cellar.
So to humor him I followed him into the
cellar. I had the flight bag for a quick get-away.
We went down the cellar steps into reddish
light and a fierce crackling like a bonfire. It was the red bulbs
and a steady blast of static from a loudspeaker with maybe a voice
going on beneath the static.
He sat down at the console and made me sit
opposite him. He reached and pulled me over the console so that my
face was inches from his mouth. He could produce the faintest of
whispers. That along with the movements of his lips allowed me to
surmise:
“The shadow.”
“The shadow?”
With his wasted face and what his breath
communicated I mentally completed: “In the shadow of the valley of
death.” But his lips and that faint whisper cooperated to put
together something bizarre and familiar: “The tree of crime bears
bitter fruit.” And now his face became sardonic and he must have
intended laughter. It came out as a succession of feeble
wheezes.
He bent over the console, interrogated dials,
stabbed buttons and coaxed knobs: the rigmarole of what he called
“sequencing.” I smiled tolerantly and was prepared to go when
things began to emerge beneath the sea of static: snatches of corny
swing, an impersonal news broadcaster voice: “…ench Premier
Daladier and British Prime Minister Chamberlain in a dramatic
last-minute …” and I knew what and when that was.
Now it was more brassy swing and suddenly the
other thing came back in my mind. The shadow. Not the shadow but
The Shadow, pitiless upholder of justice, terror of law-breakers,
6:30 pm Wednesdays, was it? And what station? Wasn’t it WOR? And
with The Shadow came my once best friend Charley Schulz, out of
mind for half a century, in a summer lot playing The Shadow and me
the Italian gangster and Charley laughing sardonically and reciting
the business about the tree and the fruit.
He or it – was it Harvey or his machine
behind the lead-armored wall? – was ranging over wavelength and
time. The time-leap was now from late 1938 to late l941 or maybe
early 1942, from Munich to the distorted but unmistakable
song:
Praise
the Lord and Pass the Ammunition
, so immediate post-Pearl Harbor. But wasn’t it all – Tommy
Dorsey, Munich, the serial, the bellicose song – a contemporary
broadcast indulging in nostalgia, a safe return to the past via a
montage of old radio programs?
This is how disbelief broke down, at 6:47 am.
Broke down for no good reason. What emerged could still have been
an element of a montage. Maybe I wanted to believe.
There was more violent static and beneath it,
hardly audible, a jaunty heavy-beat song with debris floating up on
the surface of the static: “spot” “lot” “much”. Disbelief broke
down as, like paleontologists with fragments of bones, we recreated
it, two old men in a cellar, at least one of them with tears in his
eyes, adding their own quaver (his a pathological whisper) to the
old voices:
Pepsi-Cola hits the spot
Twelve (ten) full ounces
That’s a lot
Twice as much for a nickel too
Pepsi-Cola is the drink for you
“Remember?” he croaked. Croaking myself from
emotion I said of course I remembered. Why those tears? We got up
and did a kind of dance all the while chanting it, yes, Harvey too.
It acted like some potent incantation bringing back his voice a
little, this tiny victory over time stymieing the crab for a little
while. I stumbled over the flight bag and kicked it out of the way.
Why did I do that? And why those tears at a soda-pop jingle as at
the Credo of the Bach B Minor?
“
Twelve
full ounces,” I corrected. His memory was really
bad. He shook his head and held up both hands with all the fingers
spread apart. We sang it over and over even after the jingle had
made way for a moving commercial (house-moving but moving too in
the other sense): the comically threatening cavernous voice:
“
Don’t make a
move! – without calling Lincoln!!
”
Exhausted we finally collapsed on his cot and let
the waves of varying lengths, the voices and the years cover us.
The reception improved.
We heard (reheard) the vibrant potent male
voice inquiring, ostensibly about Manichevitz Wine, “Do you
like
it?” and the whispered woman’s
voice: “I
love
it,” and
marveled at what they’d been able to smuggle into commercials in
those up-tight years.
We heard a voice saying “thirty-nine”
repeatedly and getting studio-laughter for it, then sour
fiddle-music and knew it was Jack Benny, (born Benjamin Kubelsky
1894-1974) lying about his age, for a decade holding on to his late
thirties, minting the slow tragedy into golden laughs as a poor
consolation and I pulled out of oblivion Sunday evenings listening
and laughing with my mother and father and recovered a Sunday
dinner down to the dessert: red apple-sauce with heavy cream. My
nostrils were filled with the pungency of the cinnamon and cloves
in it.
We pulled in the acid nasal voice of Fred
Allen (born John Florence Sullivan 1894-1956) and the singsong
Russian-Yiddish voice of the woman, what was her name? Neither of
us could recall her name but I recalled the exact pattern of the
carpet I used to lie on belly-down, listening to her and the
others.
We heard the organ prelude to a soap opera
called “Young Widow Brown,” the commercial and the first minute of
the episode. Her son had just come down with polio. The doctor,
with a resonant actor’s voice, expressed hope for him and clear
interest in the mother. I pictured them as I’d seen them, my
mother’s friends, devastated by afternoon boredom, housewives
beyond adultery, listening, staring sightless at their shabby
living room walls. I felt like weeping again despite the poor
materials my country afforded for nostalgia.
Now Teddy the Poet murmuring verse in the
most outrageously faggish of voices to camp twirls of his organ
(the musical instrument). It chuckled slyly in glissandos at his
coy jests. Those same housewives marooned in the slow afternoons
used to eat him alive.
We stayed there the rest of the morning. At
each voice he exclaimed, “I remember!” and asked, “Remember?” and
when I hesitated it became a command: “Remember!” Once he said that
it all came back, just that little bit was enough and everything
else came back.
It was true. Those familiar distorted voices
recreated lost worlds. It was like the old experiment in the shack.
The water stood clear in the glass. You added the tiniest of
crystals. Suddenly the clear water revealed what it had been
holding in invisible supersaturated solution and you had a glassful
of crystals like diamonds, millions of them. I couldn’t (and
mustn’t) begin to enumerate all the scenes, experiences, objects
and people, dead now but alive again for a moment in my mind, all
the days and years that crystallized out at the prompting of those
tinny voices.
The familiar forgotten voice which came in at
about 11:00 am interrupted a blubbering confession. “We do not use
such language on the air,” said the cold, precise contemptuous
voice and that was Mr Anthony and his Court of Human Relations.
What was the language the other had used? I
wondered now as I had so often in the past. In the late thirties
terms forbidden in print were aired all over the Eastern Seaboard.
The celebrated Anthony voice summed up the scandalized horror
attributed to 53,000,000 potential listeners and allowed him to get
away with it. His reaction was so contemptuous of the blubbering
turd that one couldn’t help feeling sorry for the offender.
External censorship would have fallen far short of what that
intergalactically frigid voice had expressed. How could the censor
be censored? As for the offender, he would never appear again,
dispatched with Mr Anthony’s implacable: “Leave this woman. Return
to your lawful spouse and your five children, etc.” And the poor
shit would blubber: “Thank you Mr Anthony.” But there had been no
forgiveness.
And now the floodgates of memory opened wide,
a vast flood of corn-syrup threatening to engulf me and I saw them
all, snatched back from the jaws of death, see them all, the
(adult) members of the family gathered about the picturesque
dome-shaped scrolled radio with the yellowed celluloid tuning
screen.
My mother is eagerly bent forward toward the
radio. “What did he say, what did he say, Victor?” My father, one
eye on me sitting in a far armchair to which I have been banished,
pretending to read, straining my ears, is whispering the thing to
my mother.
I can hear my mother’s scandalized joyous
throat-sound. It’s more real than these cellar walls, than the
sound of the rats.
I have to get out of it.
The last thing we heard before it suddenly
faded was Red Barber’s soft gentlemanlike southern voice covering a
lost game between the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Two balls two strikes on Dolph Camilli, .284, the Dodger’s first
baseman and sole slugger. He struck out.
Harvey, sitting next to me on the cot,
touched my shoulder. He tried to say something to me. Was he
crying? Could he cry? His voice was a croak. The healing effect of
the Pepsi-Cola potion had worn off. Again he had to write. I
couldn’t talk myself although what was choking me was nothing
malignant, I foolishly thought at the time.
Red Barber went on, suddenly in another
inning, with a neat double-play, then a line-drive to center-field
and Pete Reiser’s leaping catch, back against the wall. Harvey
scrawled away feverishly in big hurried characters,
forward-slanting as though pursued. He ripped out page after page
from the spiral notebook and thrust them at me with one hand while
with the other he went on scrawling on the new sheet. His wig was
askew. Half of his naked skull gleamed red as though he’d been
scalped.
He wrote in a semi-burlesque style, maybe to
keep the emotion under control, that if he were superstitious he’d
think it was the hand of God. My image pedaling away in the shack
had appeared to him one night like the Virgin at Fatima. He made a
feeble obscene joke about my long-standing non-virginity. Then a
week later I had come again, this time in the flesh and lo voices
came out of the past and in the same night as the voices he’d
understood in a flash why I had been pulled in on the bike despite
the vertical spatial differential.
What the machine had done as a quirk it could
be made to do at will. It had been frustrating, I had no idea,
being limited to the cellar. He was condemned to viewing old
darkness while life was going on on the floor above. Momma was up
there baking for him, moving about, cleaning and waxing. (Reading
this I imagined her ghostly form, in a red bandanna and wielding a
dust-rag, superimposed on the contemporary mess, the cracks, the
dirt, the stains, the roaches.)
But now he knew the way to give the machine
vertical and maybe later horizontal freedom. Some of the images to
recapture were upstairs in this house, but most of them were in the
other house, the blonde’s house, standing where the old house had
stood. Wouldn’t I like to see the other people who had lived in the
old house? There had been his mother and father, younger, his
uncle, his grandparents. There had been himself and myself,
younger.
Wouldn’t I like to see Rachel Rosen?
No, I said out loud as though he’d spoken not
scrawled that crazy invitation. I forced my mind into emptiness and
listened on for a while to the game with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The Pirates evened up as Hank Greenberg connected and sent the ball
into the center-field grandstands. Then there was a burst of static
and Red Barber’s voice faded. The static slowly faded too. Now the
only sound was a painful snore coming alongside me on the cot where
Harvey was sleeping.
When I pulled myself up out of the silent
cellar it was almost two in the afternoon. I went past Hanna
slouched in the armchair looking at TV. She was chewing a candy bar
and drinking beer. I climbed the stairs to the bedroom, leaving
behind me the vulgar contemporary TV voices. I pulled the curtains
and collapsed on the bed.
Baseball was the thing that flashed on (or
the thing that I allowed to flash on) in my built-in display
monitor. It was all there, saved on my hard-drive. I marveled at
the capacity of my hard-drive to restitute all that early junk.
Actually it may have been a sign of debility, of the daily loss of
gigabytes, as in
A Space Odyssey
where the hero removes memory-unit after memory-unit and
the poor murderous super-computer HAL is finally reduced to
babbling early things like “Mary had a little lamb.”