Humpty Dumpty in Oakland Page 4

  “No,” he said.

  “The father,” she said, “is all society and his relation to it. Once he has that he never outgrows it. But if he doesn’t have it, he can never get it.”

  “Get what?” he said.

  Lydia said, “The trust and hope.”

  “I give up,” he said. “You better throw in a course in English, along with the Plato.”

  “I know,” Lydia said, “that if you had got a happier man in with you, you would not now look forward so emptily. Another man, in your place, retiring with so much accumulated wealth— what would be in his mind? Let me see it and depict it to you, my good dear. Joy.”

  “Joy,” he echoed, with bitterness and some amusement.

  “The joy of tomorrow,” his wife said.

  “I’m sick,” he said. “Tired and physically sick. Ask the doctor. Ask Dr. Fraat. Call him up. I mean, ask what the facts are, instead of spinning a lot of philosophy. At my expense! What am I supposed to do, start taking great books courses along with you? Reading those guys? What do you know? I’d like to see you fix any simple thing there is, like a lightcord plug. Fix that and then come to me.”

  “You’re so much like that man,” she said.

  He grunted and sat rubbing his forehead.

  “He is that part of you,” she said. “But you are more. He is nothing but that. Nothing but defeat. Because he lacks that faith.”

  At last he resumed eating his dinner, drinking his soup and spooning up the stewed chicken with its cooked, soft, colorless bones.

  After dinner Jim Fergesson did something that had become natural to him, in the recent years. He turned on the TV set and placed his overstuffed easy-chair before it.

  Not again, his wife would have said, had she still been home. But tonight Lydia had a seminar; she had been picked up by a car—it had honked once, and out she had gone with her books, wearing her coat and low-heeled shoes. And so she was not here to say it.

  His mind, however, said it for her.

  On the screen, Groucho Marx insulted some man who had come up, grinning, wearing a suit. No matter what Groucho said, the man continued to grin. It was all fun. Watching, Jim Fergesson found himself stirring with restlessness. At last he shut off the set.

  Is that all they have now? he asked himself. He turned the set on briefly, trying the other channels. Westerns, a panel discussion . . . he shut it off. Bunch of goofs, he thought. Especially those fairies, those grinning guys who play up to the ladies, give away dishes, kiss old ladies on the cheek. Ask moronic questions; a quiz. Good they got the big crooks, he thought. At least that’s gone. Especially that one, that intellectual. What a crook he was. Lydia had liked him so much, that Van Doren. He really took them in, the old man thought. But he never took me in with those manners. That educated crap. That polished front they teach them.

  Going to the closet he got his coat. He did something that, although not usual, had come to him now and then in the past. Going downstairs to the street he locked the front door of the house (too bad, if she doesn’t have her key) and got into his parked car. A moment later he was driving along the dark street, in the direction of San Pablo Avenue, and his garage.

  That’s what college ought to do, he thought as he drove. Give you the knowledge to tell a good man when you meet one. But look at Lydia, taken in by Van Doren. And look at Alger Hiss; look at how they all fell for him because he had that refined look, that thin face, the dignity and bearing and breeding, even though he was a Communist spy . . . even Stevenson fell for him. We might have had a President who would deliver the country over to those State Department Harvard queers in their striped pants. The only man who really saw through that was old Joe, and they got him; they ganged up on him because he was too blunt. He called a spade a spade.

  He thought, Joe McCarthy saw through the lies and fraud that runs this society. And how he’s dead because of it.

  When San Pablo Avenue appeared ahead, with its light, Jim Fergesson kept to the curb lane; he slowed his car, but not at his garage. Instead, he stopped a block away at a red neon sign: THE RING-A-DING CLUB, a bar that he visited when the mood came to him.

  Quite a few people were in the bar; as he opened the door, noise spilled out over him, pleasing him. And the smells of people, the good warm smells; companionship, laughter, the racket of life—its characteristic motion and color. At the bar he found himself a place to stand, and ordered a Burgie.

  There were even a few women in the bar. Mostly older, however. A glance showed him that they were shrill bags. He turned away.

  By the entrance a tall middle-thirties Negro in a topcoat and tan sweater was blowing up a balloon. On the floor beside him a plump black and white springer spaniel panted and lolled its tongue. Everybody seemed to be watching the dog. The Negro blew on the balloon and it expanded; the people around him shouted different things, suggestions.

  What’s this? Fergesson wondered. He turned to watch.

  The dog, gasping, had risen on his haunches. His eyes were fixed on the balloon, which was now as large as a melon. The balloon was colored red. The man, laughing, lifted it away from his mouth and wiped his lips with the side of his hand. He was laughing too hard to blow.

  “Here,” a companion said, reaching. “Give it to me, man.”

  “No, you let me blow it; he like it better if I blow it.” The man blew again; the balloon swelled and the dog watched. Suddenly the man’s shoulders heaved and he dropped the balloon. The balloon fizzled away, darting. Hands flapped at it as it bounced to the floor. The dog whined and ran at it, then away again. His round body twitched. Leaning against the wall the man laughed soundlessly, and his friends groped among the tables and chairs for the empty balloon.

  “I got more,” the man said, reaching into his topcoat pocket. Balloons spilled out like the fingers of gloves. “Man,” he gasped, “I got all the balloons in the world; let that go: it dirty.”

  This time he blew up a yellow balloon. The dogs tongue went in and out and he swallowed. Strange, Fergesson thought. Why’s the dog interested? He thought about his own dog, dead under the wheels of a customer’s car. The dog had slept in the garage, under cars being worked on. Several years ago, now.

  The yellow balloon had been blown up, and the Negro tied a knot in its neck. The dog, on his feet, whined avidly and lifted and lowered his head.

  “Throw it for him,” a woman urged. “Don’t make him wait.”

  “Go on,” a man at a table said.

  “Yes, go on and let it go.”

  The Negro, raising the balloon up high, let it fall. The dog caught it on his nose and bunted it. Up went the balloon, and drifted across a table. The dog followed and again he bunted it; the balloon rose and fell and the dog kept beneath it. People got out of his way. The dog scampered in a circle, his plump body pinwheeling and his mouth open. He saw nothing but the balloon, and when he crashed into a man the man moved and the dog went on.

  Fergesson said to the man next to him, “Hey, they ought to commit that dog.” He began to laugh. He laughed until he felt tears coming out of his eyes; he leaned back against the bar and yelled with laughter. The dog tumbled across chairs and people’s feet, lunged at the balloon, knocked it again and again into the air, and then, in his excitement, bit into the balloon and popped it.

  “Yaf!” the dog wheezed, and stopped short. His eyes smeared over and he sat breathing in huge, rough gulps. He seemed dazed. The fragments of the balloon were picked up by a young colored man in a purple shirt who examined them and then put them in the pocket of his sports coat.

  “Jesus,” Fergesson said, wiping his eyes. The dog has settled down to rest and the man was again blowing up a balloon. This one was blue. “There he goes again,” he said to the man next to him, who also watched, grinning. “What does he do, go on all night? Doesn’t he get tired?”

  “That’s enough,” the Negro said, letting the air out of the balloon.

  “No, go on,” a woman said.

  “O
ne more,” a man at the bar said.

  “He too tired,” the owner of the dog said, stuffing the balloon back into his pocket, “Later, maybe.”

  To the man beside him, Fergesson said, “It doesn’t make sense. What’s the dog get out of it?”

  The man shook his head, grinning.

  “It’s contrary to nature,” Fergesson said. “It’s perverted. He probably thinks about nothing but balloons all day and night. Nothing but balloons.”

  “Worse than some people,” the man beside him said.

  “Animals have no sense,” Fergesson said. “They don’t know when to stop. They get an idea, and that’s all there is. They never lose it.”

  “Instinct,” the man beside him said.

  The dog’s owner, the tall Negro, moved from table to table with an open cigar-box. Bending, he spoke to persons and some of them dropped coins into the box. He reached the bar.

  “For the dog,” he said. “He want to go to school and learn a trade.”

  Fergesson put a dime in. “What’s his name?” he said. But the Negro had gone on.

  “That colored guy,” the man next to Fergesson said, “probably trained him for TV. They have those dog acts on all the time.”

  “They used to,” Fergesson said. “Not so much anymore. Now it’s mostly westerns, mostly for kids. I sure can’t watch them.”

  “You think if you saw this on TV, this dog chasing a balloon, you’d laugh?”

  “Sure, I’d laugh,” Fergesson said. “Didn’t you see me just now? I was laughing pretty hard. That’s exactly what I want to see on TV, real entertainment.”

  “I don’t think it would be funny on TV,” the man said, “on that small screen.”

  “I’ve got a twenty-six-inch screen,” Fergesson said. He decided to ignore the man; sipping his beer he gazed off in the other direction.

  There, in a booth, sat Al Miller. With him was his wife Julie. And with them was the Negro in the topcoat who owned the dog; the Negro was talking to them, and all three seemed to be having a good time, and to be absolutely friendly.

  In fact, from the way Al was gesturing, Jim Fergesson realized suddenly that he was stoned.

  This was the first time that he had seen Al really drunk. Now and then he had seen him when he had had a few drinks, such as when he had come to dinner; his coordination had been bad, but that was not like this. This was the real thing, and the old man chuckled. He turned so that he could watch. So even gloomy Al, who always went around hunched over, never joking or laughing except maybe in sarcasm—even he let down once in a while. The guy, the old man thought, was actually human after all. He thought, Maybe I’ll go over and join him. What about that?

  Watching, he saw that Al was trying to buy the dog from the colored man. He was offering him a check, which he had in front of him and was writing with his fountain pen. Julie was trying to pull the check away from him; she shook her head no, and scowled and talked to both men. She had one hand on Al’s shoulder and the other on the Negro’s.

  To the old man, that seemed funny, so funny that again he began to laugh; tears again came to his eyes. He set down his drink and got to his feet. Cupping his hands to his mouth he yelled across the noisy bar, “Hey Al, that’s just the business for you.”

  It did not seem as if Al had heard him; the business negotiations continued, both men deeply engrossed. So he yelled again.

  This time Al glanced up. His glasses were missing, and his hair hung down over his eyes. Without his glasses his eyes had a weak, unfocused look; he peered about half-blindly, and then returned to the negotiations. He tore up the check with great labored twists of his fingers, scattered the pieces, got out his wallet, and began writing another check in its place.

  Chuckling, the old man swung back to the bar and picked up his beer. What a business for Al Miller, he thought. The perfect business. A dog that bunted colored balloons in bars; and Al could pass the hat for the dog. He thought, So the dog can go to school instead of Al.

  “Hey,” he yelled, again turning. But his voice was lost in the noise. “It can go to school in your place, and get that degree.”

  This time Al did hear him; he saw the old man and waved his hand in greeting.

  The old man slid from his spot at the bar and made his way carefully through the crowd of people over to the booth. It was really hard to hear; even when he got over to the booth he could not make out Al’s words. Bending down, he rested his hand against the side of the booth, his head close to Al’s.

  “I couldn’t hear you,” Al yelled up.

  “Send the dog to school,” the old man said, chuckling at what he had said, at what he had thought up. “Instead of you.” He winked at Julie, but she stared past him.

  Al said, “Hell, I’m buying it to kill it. I hate the God damn thing. It’s an abomination.”

  “Oh,” the old man said, still laughing. He hung around for a time, but none of them paid attention to him; they were too involved in their transaction.

  “This is Tootie Dolittle,” Al said presently, introducing the Negro, who glanced up and nodded formally. “A relative of mine.”

  The old man murmured something, but did not try to shake hands.

  “I guess I’ll be going,” he said. They had not asked him to sit down. Now his laughter had gone. It did not seem so funny, and he felt tired. I still have to get over to the garage and work, he recalled. I can’t stick around here, and what the hell if they don’t want me to sit down. “So long,” he said.

  Al nodded as the old man moved away.

  I wouldn’t have sat down anyhow, he thought as he pushed the door of the bar open and stepped out onto the cold sidewalk. The fresh air blew around him as he walked toward his parked car. He took several deep breaths, which cleared his head at once. Hell, he thought. When do I sit down with Negroes?

  He started up his car and drove the block or so to the garage.

  Soon he was beneath a Studebaker, alone in the damp partly-lit building, his radio playing from its shelf. As he unfastened the crankcase pan of the car he thought, Why am I here doing this? Lying on his back, beneath the car . . . alone in the garage, with no one even knowing he was there. What was the purpose of it?

  But he continued, unscrewing the bolts. Laboring away. So the guy can have it back tomorrow? he asked himself. Obligation to my old customers? Maybe it was that. He did not know. All he knew was that he had no other place to go, no other spot to be. There was really no problem, because he came here without deliberation; he came because he had always come. When there was nothing on TV to watch, or Lydia was out and there was no one to talk to, or things were not too interesting at the Ring-a-Ding Club.

  I’ll work an hour or so, he decided. And then call home and see if Lydia’s back. That won’t be so long to work.

  4

  It seemed clear to Al Miller that soon he would have to give up his lot. He would be pre-empted for some grand purpose: the new owner would tear down the garage and put up a supermarket or a furniture mart or multiple-unit apartments. Such had been the pattern for several years in Oakland and Berkeley. Old buildings were being torn down, even old churches. And if old churches had to go, then surely Fergesson’s garage could be thrown in. And Al’s Motor Sales.

  With no spirit he drove the next afternoon down San Pablo to a realtors office, to a woman that he had dealt with in the past. It was no accident that Mrs. Lane was a Negro; he had met her through the Dolittles. She had gotten Mrs. Dolittle several of her rental properties. Her specialty was business property in the non-restricted—he added in his mind, run-down—part of Oakland. He knew that he could hope for nothing better. What was a used-car lot, if not the embodiment of non-restricted Oakland?

  Thinking that, he entered Lane Realty and approached the varnished oak counter. To his right, on a table, was a rubber plant in a pot with a saffron bow tied around it. Beside the plant was a stack of Saturday Evening Posts and an ashtray.

  All that Lane Realty had in the way of fi
xtures were a desk and a typewriter, and, on the wall, a map of the East Bay. Mrs. Lane sat at the desk typing, but when she noticed him she rose and came toward the counter, smiling.

  “Good morning, Mr. Miller,” she said.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Now what can I do for you?” Mrs. Lane had a low, smooth voice. She wore a dark dress, and on her finger she had a nice big gold ring. Her hair had been done up, and she had on lots of makeup; as always she looked impressive. She was, he thought, about forty-five or fifty. She could have been a successful matronly receptionist or club woman anywhere, he thought, except of course that she was colored. And except for the fact, too, that when she smiled she made visible gold-capped front teeth of great size; jewelry, like her ring, the left of which showed the carving of a diamond, the right a club.

  Al said, “I’m looking for a new location.”

  “I see,” Mrs. Lane said. “On San Pablo? I have a lot on Telegraph Avenue.” She looked at him searchingly, to see what it was he wanted.

  “I don’t care where it is,” Al said. “Just so it’s a good location.” He could think of no way to improve on that utterance; he culled his brain, but no more expressive statement came. The woman smiled at him with sympathy; beyond any doubt she wanted to help him. It was her job to do so. And her heart was in her work. He felt that.

  “I guess you don’t want to go too high,” Mrs. Lane said. “As far as rental costs.”

  “No,” he agreed.

  “I could drive you around to that location on Telegraph,” Mrs. Lane said. “You could take a look at it.”

  “I don’t need it right away,” he said. “I have around two months. There’s no rush. I want to be sure I get something good.”

  “Yes, that’s the important thing,” Mrs. Lane said.

  “The used-car business doesn’t pay very good,” he said.

  “Must be like the real-estate business,” Mrs. Lane said, with a smile.

  Maybe so, Al thought. We’re both in the same boat. Or maybe I’m doing you an injustice, putting you with me. Placing you down at such a hopeless point. A personable woman like you. What would you be if you had been born white? County chairman of the Republican party? Wife of some industrialist? And what would I be if I had been born colored? Just a jerk. Another nowhere jerk.