Found in the Street (9 page)

Natalia spent as much of her spare time away from him as with him, Jack thought. There was always Louis Wannfeld on business trips to Philadelphia and New York, so that when Jack thought Louis was in one city, he might be in the other, and maybe Natalia was too, and seeing Louis not deliberately but because Louis happened to be around. Natalia came home at 2 and 3 in the morning after evenings with Louis “out somewhere,” or at Louis' apartment, but if she felt tired the next morning, she could call Isabel, who was usually at the gallery by 10, and say she didn't feel like coming in till 2 p.m., and Isabel was never annoyed as far as Jack could tell. Jack could have accompanied Natalia on the Louis evenings, he knew, but he also knew that Louis' group was mainly all men, and that meant homosexuals, with whom Jack felt a bit odd-man-out.

“We don't talk about sex—or tell jokes,” Natalia said rather defensively to Jack. “In fact there's more talk about sex and more advances made at straight parties, if you ask me.”

They talked about everything but sex, according to Natalia. But they (the boys) always liked a girl or two around, or an older woman. Natalia an older woman at twenty-eight! On the other hand, Jack had learned that some of the boys were twenty. Jack was not really annoyed, or resentful, because the terms of their marriage had been that both should show respect for independence, avoid “feeling stuck together,” as Natalia had put it. Intellectually, logically, Jack did agree that this was a good idea. For one thing, it staved off boredom with each other, and might prevent it entirely. Before their marriage, Jack had made a promise about this kind of independence, and he was not going to go back on it. Another element, which Jack could not complain about, was that it left him more time alone in which to work.

Unbeknownst to Natalia, who respected his creative efforts and never demanded to see what he had been doing lately, Jack was trying his mostly elongated weirdo personages on canvas in acrylic. They looked rather good in pale, pastel colors, with the finest of black outlines, sometimes incomplete outlines. Of course he could not even with a fine brush get the speed of a pen. But his ten or so efforts were not bad, he thought, and he especially liked one he called “The Suicide,” which depicted a figure of indeterminate sex bending over a nearly full bathtub and clutching a rope, a straight razor, and a bouquet of flowers.

Even avoiding Bedford Street, Jack spotted Ralph Linderman one morning as he, Jack, was loping around the corner of Hudson into Barrow Street. Linderman was just then crossing Barrow, with God on the leash, of course, toward the north side of Barrow, saw Jack and called from the sidewalk, “Oh, Mr. Sutherland! May I have a . . .”

Jack ran on up the clear sidewalk opposite Linderman, as if he had heard nothing. It had been two weeks, maybe more, since Linderman's letter, which Jack had torn up and thrown away.

9

The latter part of October and early November brought nothing but unpleasant shocks in the life of Ralph Linderman. In October, he received a telegram saying that his mother had died of a heart attack and that his “services were needed.” He was to communicate with “undersigned Mabel Haskins,” who had sent her telephone number. Ralph recognized her name, had even met her, he thought. She was his mother's closest neighbor and best friend in the last years. So Ralph telephoned and learned that his mother had lain nearly twenty-four hours on the floor of her living-room before she was discovered by Mabel and the house superintendent who had a key. Ralph should come at once, if he wished to attend the funeral.

Ralph didn't want to attend the funeral, but he notified the Midtown garage of his sudden call of duty, and went to New Hampshire, only to find that his mother had been buried six hours before. The coroner came especially to see him at his mother's apartment. Her funeral arrangements had been taken care of according to her insurance and health policies. The funeral had been done nicely, said Mabel Haskins, who was with Ralph when the coroner arrived. Ralph had papers to sign, which he did. What Mabel Haskins knew of his mother's affairs was little, but better than nothing. She knew where his mother had kept her checkbook, and it seemed there were only a couple of little bills to pay in the neighborhood. Ralph had to arrange for his mother's furniture—none of which was worth much—to be auctioned or given to the Salvation Army. Mrs. Haskins kindly invited him to stay the night at her house—she was a widow too and had a spare room—so Ralph did. He could not get to sleep for his thoughts, the strange room, the fact that he was not used to sleeping at night anyway, but no matter. He had requested an extra day to wind it all up. Somehow he still owed eleven hundred dollars on his mother's expenses for the funeral, toward which he signed a two-hundred-dollar check, with a promise to pay the rest within a month. There was a little jewelry, and Ralph hesitated, then decided to keep a ring he remembered, and for which his mother's fingers had probably grown too knobby in the last many years. Ralph emphatically did not want any of his father's jewelry, no tie pin, no cufflinks. He gave various things to Mrs. Haskins, whatever she could use or even sell. She was a bent but spry little woman. One of her brown eyes was clouded over, due to an injury, she said. In the end, he was grateful for her help. After two days, he hadn't even visited his mother's grave, because he didn't want to. In the two (almost) sleepless nights, Ralph had stared at a dark and creamy ceiling corner of his room, and recalled that when he had been ten and twelve, he had loved his mother, had been even jealous of his father, because of his mother's affection for his father. Then his mother had seemed to spurn him when he was about twelve, and Ralph had been deeply hurt, and had kept the hurt to himself. She had continued to take care of him, preparing his meals and all that, but Ralph had sensed a terrible coldness. He had got over this by pretending to hate his mother for a while, though he had never really hated her. When he had become eighteen, and had gone to college for a while, he had realized his mother's limitations, and then he had decided to accept her as she was, and to do his duty by her also, when his father had died. But love her? Not any more. She had forced him to go to church, too, prodding him even when he had been fifteen and more. Even his father had begged out on many a Sunday, with one feeble excuse or another. His mother had contributed to his hating the church, which had been all to the good. Only when his father had died, and Ralph had had to leave college and take a job, had he refused to set foot in church again, any church. What had the church to do with morals? Very little, and that more honored in the breach than in the observance. Ralph could see that the church gave people a nice funeral service when they died, made the people attending feel they were doing the right thing, showing respect for the dead. Well and good. But the church throughout history had twisted right and wrong to suit itself, had usually sucked up to the powers-that-be, which meant the church had been anti-poor a lot of the time, to maintain social order. Now the well-to-do in America were all church-goers, proper looking WASPS, and God was a sandwich-man advertising the Republican party. Filthy business! Only Poland seemed different, where the church was a fighting faction. Such thoughts ran through Ralph's head in the wee hours when the winter dawn broke dismally and late through the unfamiliar windows.

“I don't believe in an afterlife,” Ralph said after some particularly boring remark from Mrs. Haskins. “And it's barbaric to embalm corpses and put 'em in thick coffins, when they won't keep anyway and—fire is more sanitary and ashes take up less room.”

Mrs. Haskins told him he was just a bit upset.

The next jolt had come one night at the Midtown-Parking garage, when two blacks and a third fellow who looked more Hispanic than black, had opened the door of the glass office where Ralph had been standing. One had pointed a gun at him.

“Open the cash box or you'll get it! Now!”

Another had giggled nervously, but they had stood like three statues, each with one sneakered foot forward, concentrated on him, and it wouldn't have been wise to open the drawer and pull out one of the guns then. Joey had just gone to the mid-point in the wall of the long garage where the toilet was, and the trio must have observed this. Ralph had backed a step toward the desk, where the desk met the wall, and pressed a button with his right hand. The bell was the silent one, which summoned the police.

“Don't move!” another of the youths said, jutting his pocket forward as if he had a gun in it.

“I didn't move. There's the cash,” Ralph had said with a nod at the cash register that stood on another table more to the front of the office, and if they all focused on the cash register, or shot it open, Ralph intended to pull a gun on them.

Then Joey came at a run, the trio looked at him, and Ralph picked up a gun and pushed the safety off. The three fled like lightning out of the office and around to the left, as a police siren sounded.

That was that. Nothing had happened. The police took Ralph's story. Joey had seen them too. How did one describe apes? Short curly black hair, all about eighteen maybe. Not even their blue jeans, sneakers and black plastic waist-length jackets provided any useful clue, because their clothing was like a uniform. Their gun might have been phony, Ralph thought, but didn't bother saying so, because lots of phony-looking guns were real, and vice versa.

Nothing had really happened, yet that incident seemed more real to Ralph than his mother's death and absence now. The cops' arrival—that too—had been real. Ralph had not been praised by anybody, perhaps he didn't merit praise, but he had done the right thing. The invasion had been real, or at least he realized that it had been real.

But his mother's death, no. She was just someone he would not have to write to once or twice a month. He would miss her, though she had so seldom written to him, and her letters had been all alike and boring when she had. The eleven hundred dollars that he had to pay were not a nuisance to him; rather he felt a bit ashamed and heartless when he wrote the check for the nine hundred that remained due, as if he were paying off something, saying farewell to his mother in a cold way.

Another worrisome thing in his thoughts now was the girl Elsie and to a lesser extent the young man John M. Sutherland, whom Ralph had thought so highly of just a few months ago. Elsie might already have sunk to the depths, probably had, but she was rescuable, because of her youth. He only hoped that she did not become pregnant, and did not contract some awful venereal disease like syphilis (said to be curable, Ralph knew) or herpes which was incurable, Ralph thought, or the latest called AIDS, which homosexuals could pass on to normal people. These days everything was mixed, homosexuals often had wives, few people seemed to love anybody or stay with any one person. Take John Sutherland. Ralph was not sure about his promiscuity, but he had a flashy and egocentric look, in Ralph's opinion. He had not replied to Ralph's letter—though Ralph realized after he had dropped the letter into Sutherland's box that he had not written his address on the back—and Sutherland had purposely ignored him when Ralph had tried to get his attention on the street. Ralph had taken pains with his letter, and the letter had been courteous. If Mr. Sutherland were not up to something with Elsie, why hadn't he said as much, been willing to speak with him on the street? Or he could have opened the telephone book and found his name and communicated somehow, but he hadn't.

These matters of Elsie's and of John Sutherland's welfare presented problems of differing sizes, Elsie's being by far the larger, Sutherland's like a little cloud no bigger than a man's hand, as the good book said somewhere. Elsie he had seen twice in the past three weeks, though even glimpsing her had been difficult. She was still working at the coffee shop down on Seventh Avenue, though her hours seemed to change all the time. Not only that, but she could duck back in the kitchen when she saw him come in, or she would ask another girl to serve him coffee or whatever.
Oh, knock it off!
she had said with a frown the first of the two times he had spoken to her, and she had avoided serving him then. Ralph had noticed the two other girl waitresses exchanging smiles, and he wondered if they knew more than he did about Elsie's nocturnal or anytime activities? The second time, when he had repeatedly and softly called her name, trying to get her to pause for half a minute, she had finally stood in front of him and said across the counter,
You mind your own business or I'll get the cops. This isn't funny any more.
And she had said something else about speaking to the manager who was back in the kitchen (Ralph didn't believe there was any manager in the kitchen), and seeing that he was not allowed into the shop. That was regrettable. But people who needed guidance, a word of advice, always put up a stonewall resistance. If he'd been preaching Jesus' footsteps or some such, he could have understood her telling him to get lost, but what he had to offer was commonsense. She was so vulnerable! Ralph felt angry when he thought of her behind that counter at all hours, 5 or 6 p.m. till 2 a.m., or 8 a.m. until 4 p.m., young and pretty, radiating health and innocence. Innocence! Always the magnet for the sexually sick boys and men who ogled her. Ralph had seen the leers by day and by night! He had seen Elsie pause to laugh with some of these characters, seen her flip the wet cloth she wiped the counter with into the faces of these boys and men who would nearly fall off their stools with delight at her attention. All of them trying to make dates with her, and Ralph had no doubt she did make a few dates. If she finished work at 2 a.m., it was easy to imagine her going for a drink somewhere with one of the toughs, who would want to walk her home. And then? Ralph had discovered where she lived, on Minetta Street, and had seen the girl with whom she lived. Ralph had seen Elsie and another girl coming out of the supermarket on Sixth Avenue one Saturday when he hadn't been working, and he had followed them to the Minetta Street house. The other girl looked about twenty-five, was taller than Elsie, had dark reddish hair and her garb made her look like something out of a Turkish harem, billowy pink pants tied in at the ankles by chains, golden pointed slippers—in October—and the general look of a whore. Maybe the long-haired young woman ran a call-girl business on Minetta Street, and Elsie picked up extra money as one of her girls. Ralph recalled seeing a horrid green on the harem girl's eyelids, or had it been purple? Perhaps left over from the night before. Anyway, she had looked unwashed, and Ralph couldn't have cared less about her. Elsie was different, had been different that Saturday, bouncing along in her white tennis shoes, even though both her arms had been full of grocery bags, engrossed in conversation with the Turkish-harem girl. Ralph had thought Elsie might hand the girl the sacks and say good-bye at the door, but Elsie had gone into the house with the girl and with the air of living there. Before this, Elsie had lived on King Street, he knew from having followed her a couple of times, and then somewhere on Eighth Street for a couple of weeks, at someone else's apartment, of course. A man's or a woman's apartment on Eighth Street? Ralph had never learned. How could a young girl have any sense of home, respectability, security, hopping around like that?

To cap all this negativity, this long season of wrongness, Ralph discovered that someone had scooped him on one of his inventions. This was a cheap and simple way to take salt out of sea water. There was a diagram in the
Times,
much as Ralph had drawn his own four or maybe six years ago in his notebook. An inlet of
warm
salt water, yes, indeed, from near the surface, this passing through a heat chamber which converted it to steam, the vacuum which Ralph had thought of, of course, to decrease air pressure and make the water come to a steam point sooner. Of course, it required a generator and a turbine, which Ralph had included also, and these were in the drawing in the newspaper. Ralph's own drawing and notes were in one of his unruled, blank­page notebooks on a shelf above his table. He could have found the sketch easily, if he guessed the year. Ralph didn't bother. His fault, of course, for not making a little model, however faulty, and sending it into the patent office in Washington. How many times had this happened? Five, six? Ralph didn't care to reckon. It would only have made him angrier.

He had some white paint in the house and he bought more, enamel paint. On his two free days in the middle of the week, he repainted both his bookcases, and dusted his books and notebooks and old magazines, and while waiting for the paint to dry, cleared out his upper shelves in the kitchen and washed them, and was about to repaint them completely, too, but did only the outside. These shelves were fixed to the wall. He must still have looked rather grim, because Johnny at the grocery store said when he walked in: “Don't give me no lectures this afternoon, Mr. Linderman. I ain't in the mood. And I been good, I swear!” Laughing, Johnny made the sign of the cross on his breast. “No foolin' around with girls, I swear!”