Nothing That Meets the Eye Page 4

  The cripple looked at the bag under his arm, and kept the same bland expression. His wide, fluted lips opened but no sound came.

  The smaller man saw the slow eyes, the nose and mouth that were squeezed absurdly between the doughy forehead and the smooth jaw. One ear bent under the black-and-white checked cap, but where the other ear should have been was a daub of white flesh like the opening of a balloon which is tied with string.

  He yanked the bag from under the cripple’s arm, ripped the zipper halfway and took a quick look in, then closed it. He shot a glance into the calm eyes. “Thief! . . . Dope!” Then, with a contemptuous movement of his mouth, “I oughta turn you in!” But he walked away with the bag, on up Sixth Avenue.

  The cripple looked after him, and at the bag under his arm, watched both become smaller. His figure gave a convulsion, and abruptly he flung himself after the polo coat, up the long block toward Eighth Street. So fast did his long legs cover the ground that he was only some thirty feet behind when the man with the bag turned into a bar and disappeared.

  He relaxed his gait and came to a stop outside the bar and grill. He looked meekly from under the cap brim into the mellow interior, and put his hand on the slimy iron pipe of a parking sign. Wisps of white steam came fast from his lips.

  Inside, over the mole-colored curtain that hid half the window, the cripple could see the green hat bend now and then as the man sipped his beer. He came closer to the window, and saw the bag sitting on a stool beside the man. After a moment, the man in the bar slid open the zipper and put a hand inside. The cripple felt a leaden throb in his chest. Just as slowly, the man closed the zipper and, standing up, crossed the muffler under his coat, tilting his head to get the smoke stream out of his eyes.

  Shyly, the cripple moved a few feet down the sidewalk, stood in the doorway of a haberdashery shop and looked toward the bar.

  The man with the khaki bag came out and walked straight across Sixth Avenue, past the House of Detention for Women, up the left side of Greenwich Avenue.

  Behind him now came the cripple, exerting himself only enough to match the other’s now-moderate pace. First he had to think exactly what to say to the green-eyed man. But his brain seemed to jam. It refused to create the proper picture, the proper words, to imagine one moment beyond the here-and-now. He followed doggedly up the street, his eyes fixed on the khaki bag.

  At Seventh Avenue the first man crossed, while the cripple was caught by a stream of traffic. The streetlights came out suddenly, jumping on in groups up the avenue, making the sky darker. The cripple was a block behind when the man turned west onto Jane Street. Though the street was dim, the cripple could see the pale haze of the polo coat, and could hear once or twice the raucous slip of a heel on the slanting sidewalk before a garage.

  The polo coat crossed Hudson Street, continued westward, and turned north onto Greenwich Street.

  Looking after him, the cripple saw perhaps two blocks away a lighted corner, and into this walked the man with the bag. The cripple pushed on faster, past the jutting stoops, past the ash cans and lids that his dragging foot struck occasionally with unpleasant noise.

  The light came from a modern, silver-plated diner which resembled a car from an electric train. The cripple approached this slowly as he had the bar and grill. The diner was perched high, brightly lighted. He could see through the steamy windows the row of black-and-white menus over the big shining coffee urns. Between the black watch cap and a sailor’s hat was the green hat. The cripple came to the long side of the diner, where he could see through the glass door. The khaki bag was on the man’s lap now, pressed against the underside of the counter. His wet, yellowish shoes were splayed on the footrest of the stool.

  The wind howled up from the river, slapped the rain against the metal side of the diner, and tore at the pale smoke that came from the whirling ventilator. He could catch whiffs of frying hamburger meat, bacon, eggs in butter. His stomach gave a thin, sick rattle. The fluted lips under the overhanging nose came together harder and the blue eyes blinked.

  A man behind the counter set, with generous swooping gesture, a plate of yellow eggs before the polo coat, the square shoulders bent forward. The right arm working fast forking the eggs in, poking the triangular pieces of buttered toast into the face behind the hat. When the eggs were gone, he pulled a napkin from the container and blew his nose so hard the man outside could hear it faintly. He dropped the napkin below the counter and started eating pie.

  The cripple was studying the bag, noticing how the end bulged with something, how the man paid no attention to it. Maybe it was dirty clothes, he thought, his heart contracting, or tin cans, or garbage. No, there must be something better inside, or why would the green-eyed man want it? Maybe it was something nice like oranges, or sandwiches, or socks, or maybe money.

  Finally the man at the counter shoved back his plate, and a puff of smoke broke under the brim of his hat. The cigarette was white and clean in the hairy hand. He tossed off the last bit of coffee and, getting up, swung the overcoat back and reached in his trousers pocket.

  The cripple felt a sudden desire to run away. He retreated to the end of the diner, where he could see a straight line down the front. He rested his left foot lightly on the sidewalk, poised to turn in any direction.

  The man with the bag under his arm came out the door smoking, down one step before he noticed the figure on the corner. The cripple twisted himself, embarrassedly.

  The man with the bag stood a long moment, motionless. Then he came down a step and started walking. The jolt of the step he had not seen took the cigarette from his lips. Rattled, he stopped short again, turned his eyes from the cripple and crossed directly over the street, going once more up Greenwich Street. He walked faster than before and in a few seconds was out of sight.

  Hearing the cripple in the darkness behind him, he felt the first stirrings of panic. He quickened his steps, and hitched the bag higher under his arm, his mouth twisted on one side, smiling, reassuring himself, because the bag wasn’t worth the trouble or the fear, or the man following him, and it would only be three minutes at most until he came to Fourteenth Street where he would turn off to go to the meeting.

  The cripple came on with much waste motion, paddling himself by the two long arms, in a gait that was more like falling and catching himself than walking. Seeing his gain, he felt more cheerful, began to think how he would climb the stairs with the bag and take it into his room and open it sitting on the bed. But first he must say to the man, “I was standing on the platform a long time before you was.” He tried this sentence, panting it into his upturned collar: “I-I-I wuz standin’ thur a long t-t-t befur you wuz. . . .” The big egg of an Adam’s apple flowed up and down. “T-t-time befur you wuz!” he gasped.

  He must say this right. He needed courage to do it. He recalled one of his rare moments of complete happiness, and the voice and the words that had made him so happy: “Archie’s all right. When he does say something, it comes out sense.” It was Mr. Hendricks who had said it. Mr. Hendricks, who always smiled at him and spoke to him, too. And he had been talking about him, Archie, who pushed the drays around at the newspaper plant. Mr. Hendricks was one of the editors. Archie remembered exactly how he heard it. He was by the elevator shaft and Mr. Hendricks was talking to Ryzek, the foreman. “Archie’s all right. When he does say something, it comes out sense.” He had felt so happy then, he could make himself happy at any time simply by recalling these words, and hearing Mr. Hendricks’s voice as he said them. “Archie’s all right . . .”

  He felt strong and very brave. He would catch up with this man with the bag. He would say words that came out sense.

  He began to think of the situation as a mistake that a few words could explain. . . . His sole caught on a curb and made a loud report.

  The man in the polo coat threw a glance behind him. Fear settled deeper in his spin
e and shot him forward with supernormal energy. He ran across the intersection of Fourteenth Street, over the flattened cobblestones and trolley tracks. He could see no people on Fourteenth Street, and for a couple of blocks it was as dimly lighted as the street he was on. He darted back into Greenwich. For a while he walked on his toes, hoping the cripple would think he had turned off on Fourteenth Street. Then he kicked something that slid raspingly over the sidewalk.

  “Goddamn!” he said, and his dirty teeth chattered. He turned around and held himself taut, listening. The scrap-slap-scrape came on. He started to trot. “Wh-what the hell am I doin’ bein’ chased by a nut,” he whispered, “when I shoulda turned off Fourteent’ t’get t’the meetin’. . . .” His feet hardly seemed to touch the ground, yet he had a sense of being dragged from behind. The cripple took fantastic proportions in his mind, became the inescapable, machinelike figure of a nightmare, and he believed he was after him now, not the bag, driven by a crazy desire for revenge. He clutched the bag harder and determined to turn off at the next street, however dark it might be, to get to some place where there were people.

  He heard his heart stagger, catch itself up like a pair of heavy feet, and he slowed immediately. He shouldn’t be hurrying like this, a guy with a delicate heart. What if he should keel over in the gutter. . . . “Suppose he don’t leave me alone all night! Suppose he don’t never leave me alone! . . . What would the guys at the hall think if they saw me wit’ a lousy bag bein’ chased by a nut!”

  For he was the bookkeeper of a large fraternal organization, and occasionally made speeches, as he had only two weeks ago tonight made the speech denouncing Putterman, who had sat on the front row hardly six feet away. “It ain’t often I feel called upon to talk like this about a fellow member,” he had concluded, wiping his mouth with his handkerchief. “But my only concern is the organ-eye-zation! . . . I say Putterman is a guy who says things are all right to your face an’ then . . . an’ then,” extending a finger, but the gesture reminded him of hailing the cripple, “then goes and spills this crap about the organ-eye-zation to someone higher up! . . . Gentlemen, I got my facts an’ I present them!” Great applause, Putterman ousted by oral vote. Wh-what would the guys say if they . . .

  “Huy!” shouted the cripple, very close. “Huy!” He made a pass at the yellow coat with his gangling hand.

  The shorter man bounded. “You want it? Take it!” he screamed.

  “Huy! . . . I jus’ . . . I jus’ . . .”

  But the man in the polo coat was far away, and the thock-thocks were running now, turning off, running eastward.

  The big bony hands came down, groping over the sidewalk. They found the bag, lifted it, nestled it in the lumpy arms of the coat. Archie continued up the street, holding the bag so tightly against him that the affection sprang in him, making him warm and happy. The man in the polo coat faded from his mind. He smelt the damp khaki, redolent of clothiness. The fluted mouth spread serenely.

  He kept going for four or five blocks, up to Twentieth Street, where he went east. He did not feel to see what might be in the bag. His face had returned to its usual expression of bland contemplation. He looked straight ahead of him, not noticing his shadow that the lamplights along the curb passed one to the other, the shadow whose head twisted now and again in bizarre design on the sidewalk.

  At a certain brownstone he pulled himself up by a broad balustrade, produced a key and let himself in. The foyer was lighted by a small naked bulb at the ceiling. He climbed the stair, tugging at the shaky banister, turning at each landing with a dogged pump of his head. At the fourth floor he stopped at a low squarish door, so kicked and fingerprinted that the brown paint was almost all off. He opened the padlock with another key.

  Inside, he went familiarly and turned on the gooseneck lamp that sat on the oilcloth-covered table beside the gas burner. The yellowish light revealed a cube of a room, furnished with a bed that sagged like a hammock, a spool-legged table, a straight chair, a bedtable made of an upended crate, and a battered chest of drawers. All around the walls were tiny notations, so closely and equidistantly written as to make almost a pattern: the names and addresses and telephone numbers of all the people with whom he had anything to do. There were the employees of the newspaper plant down to the scrubwomen, the names and particulars of the grocery men at the corner, of the cigar store and the drugstore, and many addresses of miscellaneous direct mail advertisers who had in past months sent him letters.

  He hung his overcoat behind a cloth that made a closet of one corner. His head was quite long and flat on top, seen from the side, like the model profile beside a Mercator projection. The hair was blond and very fine, falling in big haphazard locks around his head. He moved gracefully in his room, as though he were completely at ease and knew the position of every article.

  He carried the bag to his bed and sat himself gently on the bumpy quilt. The gold-colored zipper sent a chill of pleasure through his fingers. Its purr was a song of richness, of mechanical beauty. His fluted mouth spread wider, his blond eyebrows arched expectantly. He parted the sides of the bag and in the dim interior saw many columns of glossy blue and gold paper, and red and yellow and green and gray and mauve and white papers, each a block itself, but making one great block together. The regular and immaculate wrappings of hundreds of penny chocolates and chewing gums.

  His eagerness subsided to a troubled, uncertain disappointment. The arched eyebrows dropped a little and the mouth hung loose. Then, caught by the spectroscopic colors, he lifted ten or fifteen chocolate pieces from their box, pressed one against the other between his thumb and forefinger, and laughed aloud until the column broke, tumbling over his legs onto the bed and the floor. He put his hand in again, this time drawing forth many green boxes of chewing gum, which he let cascade off his palm onto his pressed-together thighs. He took more chocolates and sifted them through his fingers like coins, dropping them onto the bedspread. And there was also, at one end of the bag, in a drab canvas sack, perhaps two dollars’ worth of pennies.

  He pulled up the spool-legged table, removed the alarm clock and the pencil stub and made a field of the chocolates on the top, arranging them in rows of dark blue, mauve, and green, squinting from all possible angles at this panoply of color, at these hundreds of pieces of candy which he would have bought only one at a time, and very rarely. Then, luxuriously, indulgently, he chose a certain piece and, unwrapping it, put the black cool candy onto his tongue. He pushed himself back against the wall, turned his flat-topped head to let the light fall on the little paper in his hand and, humming tunelessly, began reading the ingredients of the thing releasing flavor in his mouth.

  MAGIC CASEMENTS

  I

  Hildebrandt knew it was the magic casements that drew him each evening to the deserted bar, but he would have confessed this to no one but himself. The magic casements were only doors, made to look like the windows of the galleon’s stern, which, looming absurdly from a wall of red brocade, formed the entrance to the gigantesque Pandora Room. Mid-Victorian was certainly not his style, yet the casements redeemed it all. Their brass-hinged, golden-hazed arms were influng casually, differently each evening, and had a tremulous, suspenseful look of being about to usher forth a miracle.

  He turned from his brandy to gaze at them once more, and idly recited to himself, “‘That oftimes hath (something) magic casements, Opening on the foam of perilous seas, in faery lands forlorn. Forlorn! The very word is like a bell!’—”

  Oh, when would someone, be it man or woman, walk through those magic casements and into his life? Or was he becoming one of those fixtures that had always roused his pity, sometimes his contempt, the brandy-fuddled, rather asinine gentleman-at-the-bar, eternally waiting?

  He surveyed the Pandora Room dismally. His somber brown eyes were partially shielded by shriveling lids that drew over their outer corners. Though there was no one but the bartender to see
him, he was conscious of the aristocratic lids as he straightened on his stool and inspected the room with an air of thoughtful superiority. Far away amid a cemetery of white-clothed tables, a waiter attended a lone dinner guest. Sources high in the walls, concealed by festoons of gray or red velvet, poured recorded music without cease into the ever-empty chalice lined with tapestry, Persian rug, and gilt moldings. Background music that backgrounded nothing, Hildebrandt thought. The gargantuan loneliness of the place seemed at times to dwarf his own. He wondered if that might be another reason why he came here.

  “Pandora Room,” he whispered, “what a mockery of your name!”

  He slumped lower on the tall, delicately legged stool and turned the stem of the brandy glass that resembled a mounted thimble. His slight black-suited figure looked insignificant as a candle wick. The amber bar that occupied only a corner of the huge room glowed around him like a fuzzy flame.

  He began to stare critically at himself in the mirror behind the bar. The ingenuous hope of deliverance from boredom, which ordinarily only peeked now and then through the jadedness, confronted him plainly like an imprisoned but still spirited child that cried, “What have you done about me? . . . What are you going to do about me?” It was a face hard to notice and easy to forget, a wisp of a face unasserted by the broad, close-clipped mustache. Whatever distinction it possessed was inherited, his own contributions tending to its detriment. The eyelids, for example, might have been old when he got them, for they reminded him now of outworn lace curtains hanging at oeil-de-boeufs in a decaying mansion. He admitted that it was, already, the perfect face for a gentleman-at-the-bar of one of New York’s largest and most conservative hotels, eternally ­waiting.

  I am not lonely so much as terribly alone, he thought. For though he could honestly say he had many friends, old friends and new friends, to a man and to a woman they bored him and served only to impress upon him that the rut he was in, lest he think it only the sinecure of a job so comfortable he would never leave it, included the whole of what composed his life.