Authors: Frank Conroy
It was another hour before the clerk beckoned them forward from behind the grill with an index finger. She disappeared for a moment and then opened a door and beckoned them again. Claude and his mother entered the enormous interior in which it seemed a hundred telephones were ringing at once in a continuous unsynchronized sheet of sound punctuated by typewriters clacking, voices shouting, and doors slamming. The bird-like woman led them this way and that, past a low gate to a cubicle and a pudgy, red-cheeked young man in a white shirt and checked necktie.
"Mr. Simpson," said the clerk, and withdrew.
Simpson shuffled through the papers on his desk and found the certified letter. Emma sat down in front of him while Claude stayed to the rear by the low gate. Simpson studied the document on both sides, reached for a file which he perused for several minutes, and finally looked up.
"I can't go sixty days," Emma said. "I've got a kid to feed." She swept an arm to indicate the boy.
Once again Claude felt a stir of admiration at the brazenness of her lies. He had been feeding himself for quite some time. He had bought the sneakers on his feet at Thorn McAn with his own money.
"A hardship," said Simpson. "I can certainly appreciate that." He spoke in a precise, fluty voice.
"I never heard of anybody getting sixty days," she said.
He took a small pamphlet from his drawer and slipped it forward across the surface of the desk with two fingers. She looked down at it but didn't pick it up.
"It's quite within the powers of theâ"
"I didn't do anything," she said.
Simpson's face betrayed a hint of irritationâa minuscule tightening at the corners of his mouth. He turned the letter over and tapped the back. "Code G is checked. Transporting a passenger with the flag up."
"I never do that. Not ever. Not once in all these years."
He consulted the file, holding it in such a way that she could not see what he was reading. He flipped several pages. "It
is
surprising. You have a spotless record heretofore. Not even a moving violation. Remarkable." He sighed. "Nevertheless, an inspector saw you on the Seventy-ninth Street transverse with the flag up and a passenger in the rear on the second of July at four-fifteen in the afternoon."
She leaned forward. "Let me see that. What inspector? It's a flat lie, goddamn it."
He tilted the file to his chest. "The identity of the inspector is privileged information."
"I want him to say that to my face!"
"My hands are tied, Mrs. Rawlings, I'm sorry. And as you may have noticed, there are additional boxes checked. Box A, for shortchanging in an amount in excess of five dollars. Box K, inappropriate attire. Box M, disrespectful attitude towards the customer with the use of foul language. These are from members of the general public."
"This is horseshit," she whispered. "This is all made up, cooked up."
"There are procedures for appeal," he offered, raising his head and holding her eye.
"How? What?"
"Fill out form 1219-WS, submit it to the bureau, and a hearing will be held. You are entitled to counsel, and you may present witnesses on your behalf."
"And how long will that take?"
He adjusted his tie. "Well, of course, I don't know how long it will take you to prepare yourâ"
"No, no," she interrupted. "I mean, how long before the Hack Bureau holds the hearing?"
He reached into his desk again, withdrew a small book, leafed through it, ran his finger down a page, and said, "Ninety days." Was that an infinitesimal smile on his bland face? "They have up to ninety days. Of course, it might actually take less."
"Ninety days to act on a sixty-day suspension?"
"Yes, I know. The rules sometimes seemâ"
"You call that fair?" she cried, her voice rising.
"I don't call it anything, Mrs. Rawlings."
"Anonymous accusers? You call that fair? How am I supposed to defend myself?" She slapped her thick hand on the desk.
He looked at her hand and then went back to the file, slowly leafing through.
"Why?" she asked. "Why would I leave the flag up? It's my cab. I own the medallion. Am I supposed to be stealing from myself?"
"Perhaps you simply forgot. But the rules are the rules."
She made a little hissing sound through her teeth. Claude edged a bit closer to the gate. After several moments of silence she got up. She was approaching Claude when Mr. Simpson spoke.
"There is something here in your file..."
She froze, looking directly at Claude.
"A memo," he went on. "In the event of trouble you are to call a Mr. Burdick?"
And now she seemed to be looking through Claude. He watched a red flush climb up her neck to her face. Her upper lip pulled away from her teeth. She whirled.
Simpson was momentarily paralyzed as she rushed forward. By the time he raised his hands it was too late. She had bent over the desk to grab the top of his trousers with one hand and the knot of his checked necktie with the other. She lifted him in the air and, with his head firmly grasped in her armpit, swept the desk with the lower part of his body, sending files, papers, pencils, paper clips, trays, telephone, and a coffee cup scattering in all directions.
Simpson began to scream, his arms first flopping around her big body, then trying to hang on.
One after another, two policemen came through the gate, just in time to see her throw Simpson through the air against the wall of the cubicle. There was a snapping sound and the wall, as Simpson slid downward, began to fall back to a forty-five-degree angle. The startled faces of two women in the next cubicle were revealed as they backed away.
The cops came at her from two sides, one tackling her and the other trying for a headlock. She tottered but managed to grab the second cop by the shoulder and twist him around so that he landed on the desk. He stood up and jumped down on her, his full weight on her shoulders. They fell to the floor with a heavy thump. A third cop appeared, pulling out a set of handcuffs as the cop who had jumped pressed his knees into Emma's neck. Simpson began to crawl toward the gate. Except for grunting and thumping, the scene was played out in silence.
When Claude saw the first handcuff snapped into place he edged sideways, backed through the gate as the observers gathered there, and ran away, zipping through the maze until he found a door to the outside corridor and, eventually, the street.
***
Mr. Burdick brought her home a couple of days later. It was mid-morning and he passed Claude a donut from a paper bag. He gave Emma a container of coffee. "Well, I'm glad this all worked out," he said. "Sorry you had to spend two nights in there."
"In where?" Claude asked.
His mother looked at him. "In jail is where he means."
"The thing is, Mrs. Rawlings, the clerk had a separated shoulder." Burdick sipped his coffee. Suddenly he laughed. "He was unprepared for the perils of civil service, I would say. Definitely caught by surprise. But he finally listened to reason. Charges dropped."
"Did you talk to him?" she asked.
"No. The people from Washington."
"The FBI?"
Burdick shook his head. He put his container of coffee on the table, sat down, rested his elbows on his knees, and folded his hands. "I know you haven't asked my advice, Mrs. Rawlings, and even though I'm just a messenger boy in all this, I hope you'll give it some thought." He spoke in firm, quiet tones, looking straight at her. "Don't fool with these people. They are powerful. They have their own investigators, their own files, their own sources, and you just can't take the risk of second guessing them. Between you, me, and the lamppost, I don't care for their methods, but they are a fact of life. They can crush people. They do it every day."
"What are you saying?" She was surprised.
"I'm saying they're dangerous."
"So you're not with them?" Claude broke in.
"They do stuff like this and they just get away with it?" She shook her head slowly.
"This is nothing." Burdick got up and went to the door. "At least they lifted the suspension. You can go to work. Next time they won't do that." He opened the door, ducked his head, and was gone.
"Sight-reading," Weisfeld had said, "is not a big deal. Mechanical. Eye-hand coordination. It requires no thought, no emotion, no sensitivity. It is like typing. Like typing on a typewriter. A monkey practically could do it. A chimpanzee." He had shaken his head. "So here's what we're going to do. We're going to separate things. Don't listen, just play. Listening you can do later. We can put it back together later, you see what I mean?"
"I think so," Claude had said.
"Don't get involved is what I'm saying. Just play whatever it is and don't think about it."
"Even if it'sâ"
"Yes! Yes!" Weisfeld interrupted. "Particularly if it's. Especially if it's, because that's when you'll start to get involved. Play like a machine. Don't stop, don't think, and don't feel. Just play. Play the notes."
"Really?"
Weisfeld had nodded.
"It doesn't sound like fun."
"Fun will only take you so far." He paused, stroking his mustache. "There are deeper pleasures than fun. Fun is good, it helps things, helps to forget things. But it isn't everything."
Claude had gone to work, and for the first few months his inability to make his hands the slaves of his eyesâexclusively of his eyesâmade for slow going and flares of temper. At the white piano in his room he would explode in frustration, sweep the music aside, and play boogie-woogie until his hands ached. He would stand at the keyboard and pound away, lost in sound and the beat. Then he'd go out, walk around the block, and come back to try again.
One day, on a whim, he'd turned on the radio, tuned to a news program, left the volume up, and sat down to sight-read an early section from Bach's
Art of Fugue.
Almost immediately he realized he'd made a valuable discovery. He was able to divert much of his ear to the radio, with enough left over to monitor the piano. With his attention thus fragmented, it was much easier to follow Weisfeld's instructions. His progress in sight-reading accelerated rapidly, and after another six months he only rarely used the radio.
The critical age, as far as the movie theater people were concerned, was twelve. At twelve you were supposed to pay full price for your ticket, but you no longer had to sit in the children's section. This policy was common to the theaters clustered on Eighty-sixth Street: the RKO, Loew's Orpheum, Loew's Eighty-sixth Street, and the Grande (which showed foreign films and didn't really have a children's section). Claude exploited his small size and baby face at the box office, but once inside he sat wherever he wanted. The constant chatter and restlessness of the children's section was no longer tolerable, since the
whole point was to find some quiet seat in the dark and sink completely and utterly into the dream.
He forgot himself as he watched the other worlds, entering them not as a character but as elements of those worldsâthe scrublands through which the wagons moved, the ocean bearing up the pirate ships, the sunlight on the side of a white house. He became the air, the sky, the light in which the dramas occurred. He was himself without boundaries as he watched the people in the films. Bodiless in the dark cathedral, he absorbed the parables of good and evil that linked the movies togetherâa kind of grand arc through cowboys, gangsters, cops, moms and dads, factories, armies, lovers, thieves, angels, cities and towns, animals, kings and queens, cab drivers, gamblers, priests, detectives, the devil (Claude Rains: "What in my domain is that?" The boy the only person in the theater to laugh), beauties, beasts, comics, and ghosts. It was nothing less than the infinite story of life, and he attended.
If he was nothing, or almost nothing, with no idea of where he had come from or where he was going, why he was living or what he was supposed to be doing (the piano only an elusive hint), and if, further, he was buffeted by forces he could not name but which were loneliness, sadness, longing, anger, fear, and spiritual nausea, would he not deeply attend the infinite story of life? Would he not pay the fucking twenty-five cents to get into the cathedral and see the light?
H
IS FINGERS
no longer carried the stain of shoe polish. He no longer collected bottles, although he sometimes went over to the building on Park Avenue for a game of gin with Al. Now he wore a white shirt and tie, black Florsheim shoes, and worked in the music store. Weisfeld paid him by the hour, and it was enough for food, the movies, and incidental expenses.
They sat side by side on stools behind the main counter. Weisfeld read a German newspaper, folding it neatly in thirds as people did in the subway. Claude, having swept up, was polishing a Cohn trumpet from the front window with a soft cloth.
"Take out the valves," Weisfeld said.
Claude, handling the instrument gingerly, stared down at it.
"Under the keys," Weisfeld said. "Unscrew the rings and lift them out."
Claude did so, placing each piece on the glass. The valves were about three inches long, gleaming with a faint sheen of fine oil. Three steel tubes with holes at irregular intervals. Each tube made a little click so he'd know which went where when he'd put them back.
"Brass instruments are really all the same." Weisfeld put down the paper. "From the mouthpiece, a flow of vibrating air. It goes through the tube"âhe traced the curved lines with his fingerâ"and comes out the horn. Two factors influence the pitch. How hard you blow, which allows you to climb the overtone series, and how long the tube
is, which allows you to break it down into tones and half tones. Every brass instrument works that way." While Claude looked at the trumpet, Weisfeld got off the stool and took an old, somewhat battered trombone off the wall. He extended the slide fully, blew a low note, and then without moving the slide blew a note an octave higher, and then a fourth higher than that. "You see? That's by blowing. How am I going to get the notes in between?"
"The length?"
"Correct. If I pull up the slide, what am I doing to the length?"