Voices from the Street Page 5

  Hadley glared at her. “I have taste; is there something wrong with having taste and wanting to live nicely?”

  “I thought you objected to this man’s possessions,” Dave Gold said, puzzled and disturbed. “I don’t get you, Stuart. You talked as if you wanted these things wiped out . . . but now you say—”

  “I don’t think he should live that way,” Hadley said stubbornly. “It’s not right.”

  Ellen rose, frigid with hostility. “I think I smell the roast. Stuart, go wash for dinner.” She disappeared into the kitchen, vast and swaying. Laura followed after her; low voices and then shrill laughter floated out to the living room.

  Hadley and Dave Gold faced each other across the room.

  “What do you know about the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus?” Hadley asked.

  Gold puffed on his pipe. “Not much.”

  “They’re having a meeting tonight.”

  Gold nodded. “That’s so. Stuart, it’s none of my business, but you ought to quit your job. You’re eating your heart out, working at that run-down little TV shop. You shouldn’t be working for that man. What do you care about television? Get the hell out of there.”

  Hadley spread his hands helplessly. “How? Christ, this is no time to quit, with the baby coming.”

  “Don’t you have anything saved?”

  “A couple hundred for hospital expenses.” It wasn’t really that much; he didn’t know exactly what it was down to by now.

  “Can’t you get anything from your mother?”

  “I hate like hell to write back east. I want to make this alone. I—don’t write to her unless I really need the money.”

  Dave brooded. “What about your sister?” He searched his memory. “What became of Sally? I haven’t seen her since high school.”

  “She’s married. Living up in Berkeley. I’m sure as hell not going to write them for money.” Hadley was getting angry; he was more disturbed each moment. “You never knew Sally—you never met her in your life.”

  “She was always around,” Dave said mildly. “Christ, I knew your sister and mother; I’ve known you since we were in the eleventh grade.”

  “All right,” Hadley muttered, wanting to leave the subject. He loathed the thought of dirty, sloppy Dave Gold knowing his sister, even being in the same world as his sister. “I can borrow on my life insurance if I have to.” He had already borrowed on it, of course; now he wondered if it had really been hit for all it was worth. “I could even borrow from Fergesson . . . He lent me a hundred bucks when we got married.”

  “Crumbs,” Dave said, disgusted. “He probably got it back from your salary.”

  “How else would he get it back?”

  Dave knocked his pipe against an ashtray and fished in his sloppy trouser pockets for his tobacco pouch. “I wish to hell we could unionize you petit bourgeois white-collar workers. There must be millions of you. You don’t show up . . . You’re a vast undifferentiated mass. I see you driving your damn cars along the highway on Sunday, going out in the country for picnics. I see you lined up at movie theaters, taking the kids to the show. I see your wives in supermarkets pushing baskets. But goddamn it, you never come to union meetings.”

  Ellen appeared briefly at the kitchen door. “Dinner’s ready. Stuart, get the chairs and set up the card table. You know where the tablecloth is, and the silver.”

  Hadley roused himself. “Sure,” he said listlessly. He went to get the chest of silver his parents had given them as a wedding present; used perhaps six times in the long interval of their life together, the marriage of Stuart Hadley and Ellen Ainsworth.

  He was laboriously carrying dirty dishes from the table to the kitchen when Ellen barred his way. “I hope you’re proud of yourself,” she told him bitterly. “Sitting there not eating, scowling like a little boy.”

  In the living room Dave and Laura were arguing some point. Hadley heard the note of aggravation in their voices; was it true that he had destroyed the evening? It wasn’t often that any of his old high school friends came over; he liked to see Dave, in spite of everything, in spite of Laura. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I don’t feel so hot.”

  “You never feel so hot,” Ellen rasped accusingly; she moved aside so he could put down the plates on the drainboard of the sink. “If you don’t stop acting this way—” A clatter of dishes cut off her words, as Hadley got plates from the cupboard for apple pie and ice cream. “You just have to stop acting this way! Can’t you see how unfair it is to everybody?”

  Hadley boiled. “It’s unfair to me; what am I supposed to do, turn my feelings on and off the way you work that stove? All right—” He gouged slimy-hot pie from its store pan and laid the dripping sections on saucers. “I’ll laugh and tell funny stories; is that what you want?”

  Ellen gave him a mixed look, compounded of misery and outrage, then wheeled and lumbered to the refrigerator for the ice cream. She slammed the refrigerator door and smashed the quart carton down beside the pie. When Hadley looked around for a big spoon, she had left the kitchen, returned to the living room with Dave and Laura.

  Silently, alone, he spooned the mushy ice cream from its pasteboard carton onto the pie. Ellen hadn’t had enough sense to put the ice cream in the freezer; cold sticky rivulets trickled down his wrists, into his cuffs and sleeves. He grabbed up two of the plates and made his way morbidly into the living room.

  Cornered again as he went to see how the coffee was doing, Hadley listened to a brief, explosive tirade of despair. “I don’t care if you feel well or not. I’m sick of your moaning and complaining: there’s always something wrong with you.” Ellen trembled as she collected the dirty dessert plates together in the sink. “God, this awful grocery-store ice cream—if we weren’t so broke all the time we could have had hand-packed ice cream from the drugstore.” Water roared over the dishes. “And you didn’t have sense enough to put it in the freezer.”

  “Oh,” he said, remembering now. It was he, after all. He had brought the ice cream home and absently laid it with the apples and oranges at the bottom of the refrigerator. “You know you could have got it this noon when you shopped,” he said defensively. “Take it out of the household money.”

  Ellen followed him as he collected coffee cups. “What household money? You swiped every last cent of it—as you know perfectly well. That morning when you came home, when you were drunk and in jail. When you were in that fight and knocked that man down.”

  “Let’s forget it.”

  “Sure, let’s forget it. Let’s forget you lost thirty dollars, maybe more. Let’s forget you were arrested and locked up and you didn’t come home until the next morning. Let’s forget I almost went out of my mind with worry.”

  The after-dinner coffee was drunk in dismal silence. “Well,” Dave Gold said finally, fooling with his saucer, “I guess we’re going to have to get going.”

  Laura screeched like a macaw. “Not without doing the dishes! There’s such a thing as doing the dishes before you’re ready to leave.”

  Ellen toyed frigidly with her coffee cup. “That’s all right.” She didn’t look up. “Forget it.”

  “But—,” Laura began.

  “I’m leaving them until tomorrow. I think I’ll watch TV awhile and then go to bed.” Ellen smiled mechanically at Laura. “Thanks anyhow.”

  As Dave and Laura fumbled into their coats, Hadley examined his wrist-watch. It was later than he thought—almost eleven. Most of it was over, of course; but there was still a chance of getting the tail end. “Say,” he said to Dave, “I’ll come along with you. Okay? You have your car, don’t you?”

  They walked down the dark, deserted sidewalk, heels clicking loudly in the night. “I think you better go back inside,” Laura brayed. “Your wife’s going to be mad at you.”

  Hadley said nothing. He stood patiently by the car while Dave searched his pockets for the key. The Gold car was a tired old Cadillac, without paint or color, a rusting heap of iron that jutted up like a World War I
Army tank. Dave unlocked the doors and they swung noisily open. The interior smelled of beer and wet upholstery and burned oil. Hadley pushed aside heaps of old magazines, cushions, a few knobby potatoes fallen from a shopping bag. He settled himself in the backseat, against the window, feet resting on the exposed springs of the seat ahead. After a moment Dave climbed in beside him with a grunt.

  “Laura’s driving,” he explained. “My night vision’s too lousy.” He lit his pipe; in the darkness it wheezed and glowed like a distant factory. “Make yourself comfortable . . . It takes a little while to get the motor warm.”

  In the driver’s seat Laura fooled with the controls. The motor coughed and spluttered, then came on with a furious roar that echoed up and down the street. Overpowering fumes rose up and choked Hadley; a cloud of blue gas settled around him, pungent and thick and nauseous. Beneath him the frame of the car jiggled and vibrated; the motor backfired, stalled, caught again, and then settled down.

  “This is really living,” Dave commented.

  As the ponderous car lunged jerkily forward, Laura shouted: “Want to stop at a bar and have a couple of drinks? Or you want to go directly to our place?” She roared the car out into the center of the street; backfiring, bucking, the car rumbled through an intersection and stop sign, gaining momentum as it went.

  “Let me off downtown,” Hadley said. “Thanks.”

  “Downtown!” Laura yelled above the uproar. “What do you mean, downtown? Downtown isn’t a place. Downtown’s a bourgeois concept!”

  “Just let me off,” Hadley said acidly. “Anywhere it’s convenient.” He didn’t feel capable of social niceties; as the huge equipage crawled along the dark street his stomach rolled queasily. Probably it was the poisonous vapors from the motor. Probably it was the bucking of the car, and the blinding headlights from the state highway beyond the edge of town. And the tension with Ellen.

  All the conflicts of their married life had been accentuated by her pregnancy. Petty trifles magnified until they squatted like obese nightmares in all corners of his married life. But now that he was out of the apartment cool sense told him that it wasn’t Ellen; it was himself. It was the thing inside him, the restless dissatisfaction, the blind striving toward something intangible and unknown. He would not, he could not, destroy his marriage; it meant too much to him. Ellen, and the baby.

  He tried to picture the near future. The three of them; but it might not be a boy. If it was a girl things would be odd, peculiar, mystical. It had to be a boy; it had to be an entity he understood. There were already too many things beyond his comprehension; his marriage had to remain a finite core around which he could collect himself.

  “Listen,” Dave said gravely, “are you going to that holy-roller conclave?”

  Hadley reflected. “I am, yes. You mean the Society of the Watchmen of Jesus?”

  “Whatever it’s called. Are you getting mixed up in that?” Dave’s voice rose sharply. “Why, that’s crazy. They talk about Armageddon. That’s nut stuff!” He spluttered excitedly. “That’s the most ignorant form of—stupidity! Stupidity, you hear me? Don’t you get mixed up in that, you hear me?”

  Laura yelled: “What is it? What’s he mixed up in?”

  Hadley slumped down sullenly. “I’m open-minded enough to go by and hear what they have to say.”

  “I’ll tell you what they have to say. I’ve been to those things. Some madman gets up there and raves and screams and slobbers . . . Everybody moans and sways and shouts, ‘Hallelujah! De Lawd am comin’ to save!’ ” Dave waved the stalk of his pipe in Hadley’s face. “You’re going there to hear them call Communists hell-hordes of Satan, atheistic godless Antichrist—turn the car around and head back,” he ordered Laura. “You must be out of your mind.” His voice trailed off in baffled disgust. “I didn’t think that trash appealed to anybody but schlumps. No, I won’t be a party to this. If you want to go, you can walk.”

  They drove in silence. “I have a right to go,” Hadley complained as Laura turned onto a side street. “Christ, it’s almost over anyhow.”

  Laura turned around and snapped something in Yiddish. She and Dave conferred rapidly, tongues flying; Hadley glared out the window and loathed both of them. “All right,” Dave said briefly, having decided. “We’ll take you there and go in with you. We’ll stay a couple of minutes so you can see what it’s like.”

  “When your curiosity’s satisfied,” Laura hollered, “then we’ll give them the old raspberry and take off. We’ve got some ice-cold beer at our place.” She gave a passing car the raspberry.

  “We’ll show them!” She commenced to scream a Spanish civil war song she had memorized from a phonograph record.

  Hadley was still squashed sullenly down against the seat when the Cadillac pulled up before the Watchmen Hall. Cars were parked solidly up and down all the nearby streets, most of them old and dusty, but a few bright, modern, and expensive. All sparkled moistly in the night mist. The hall itself, a square wood building, yellow and dilapidated, a firetrap, a relic, blazed with lights and banners. A handful of people were visible, loitering at the entrances with armloads of throwaways.

  “Let’s go,” Laura shouted enthusiastically. “Might as well get it over with.” She double-parked the car in front of a gray Chevrolet and yanked on the emergency brake. The three of them crossed the street to the main entrance, Dave and Laura on each side of Hadley, like a police escort.

  Laura became silent as they passed through the entrance and into the building. First came a small lobby, with fiberboard walls on which notices and pictures had been tacked. Two small doors led to the hall itself; they passed through one, and abruptly they were inside.

  Foolishly, embarrassed, they stood inside the door, pressed together, conscious suddenly of the rows of quiet, humble, unmoving people. The three of them had invaded a vast chamber of silence and attention. Dipping waves of rapt faces, many of them Negro, most of them plain working-class, ordinary citizens in jeans, overalls, cheap suits, cotton dresses. The meeting was almost at an end. On the platform, the speaker was answering a question apparently put to him by a woman to one side. The speaker was addressing her, and all the room at the same time.

  No one noticed the three who had just come in. The people were intent on the speaker’s words, hushed with that tense hunger that comes at the end of a protracted suspense. The rapport was incomprehensible to the three people at the door; at first they were outside it; and then, as they became drawn into the flow of speech, the lecture abruptly ended. With a single flowing motion, like a plate of water overturned, the rows of people slid from their chairs and headed up the aisles. Perfectly expressionless, impassive, they came rapidly forward.

  “Jesus,” Dave said, urging Hadley and Laura out of the doorway. “Let the steamroller get by.”

  They found shelter at the bottom of narrow stairs leading to a second floor; a moment later the torrent burst into the antechamber and out onto the sidewalk. A low buzz muttered briefly; then the swarm broke up and dissolved in the direction of the cars, down the sidewalks, into the night gloom. Cars started up; there was a furious interval of rumbles and whirrs. The activity died, and the three people found themselves alone.

  “It’s over,” Laura said, disappointed.

  “Come on.” Dave started for the car. “Let’s get out of here.”

  Despondently, Hadley followed after them, back across the street and into the Cadillac. Laura turned on the motor and a moment later they were thundering down the street away from the hall. The sounds of other cars died behind as they left the downtown section. Night closed in around them, mixed tendrils of darkness and cold, fetid air from the Bay, as they made their way in the direction of the Gold apartment house.

  “What’s the matter?” Dave asked Hadley. “Say something.”

  Hadley sat slumped over. He was dazed with disappointment; he only half heard the man beside him. “Like what?” he muttered.

  “It’s not my fault it’s over,” Dave
pointed out.

  “I’m not blaming you.”

  “Christ,” Laura shouted back to them. “That man was talking about Jonah and the whale!” She honked wildly at a milk truck coming out of a driveway. “Like Sunday school, yet!”

  At the Gold apartment lights burned. Music and the noises of people filtered under the door. Dave turned the knob; the door wasn’t locked. He hesitated, scowled, shrugged, and finally pushed the door open.

  A group of people lounged around the living room. They greeted Dave and Laura enthusiastically.

  “Hi, Dave!”

  A bass voice boomed: “Where the hell have you two been?”

  “The door wasn’t locked,” a tiny young woman tittered. “We came on in.”

  And a slender young man piped: “It’s about time you folks got home!”

  Stuart Hadley shut the door and wandered glumly around the living room. He wished he had stayed at home; God knew how long he’d be here, wasting time with these people. Of course, he could go home on foot, or grab a crosstown bus. He moaned with despair. He had missed Beckheim, caught only a fleeting glimpse of the big dark man, heard a few fragments of his words. And now this.

  These people were a familiar type; he had run into them in college. Sprawled around on the floor, they were listening to Paul Robeson records, spirituals and work songs. Albums of jazz lay scattered around: Bix Beiderbecke and Mezz Mezzrow. Lute music of the seventeenth century. Girls, in black toreador pants and sandals, turtleneck sweaters, hair plastered down and stringy, gazed limply up and babbled greetings to Dave and Laura. Thin young men, quaintly dressed, slippery hipped, curled their way forward, with languid observations hanging like sugar from their lips.

  “What are you doing down from San Francisco?” Dave asked them.

  “Oh,” said one of these children of paradise, “we came to hear the talk.”

  “We came to hear Theodore Beckheim.”

  “And it was charming!”

  Laura stood in the corner, pulling off her coat. “This is the bunch from Succubus,” she muttered to Hadley. A resentful, surly expression rose to the surface of her pitted face like a dead fish floating up to seaweed. “I should have known they’d flock down for this thing.”