Voices from the Street Page 6

  Hadley was astonished. It had never occurred to him that there was a type of person Laura Gold found objectionable. Mute and disgusted, Laura prowled heavily around the apartment, straightening piles of books and magazines, pushing aside a jar of peanut butter, a box of soda crackers, a carton of sour milk.

  The Dave Gold apartment smelled dully of ancient dust-heavy carpets and stale cabbage. Torn curtains sagged against the windows, greasy with grime. Unfinished manuscripts were littered around the rusty Underwood typewriter, mixed with yellowed copies of the Nation and People’s World. Dirty clothes were heaped in one corner, by the closet. The uninvited guests had pushed aside the debris and made themselves at home.

  Among the guests one figure stood out. A woman, leaning against the wall, hands in the pockets of her jeans. She seemed to be the center of the group of heaven’s children; she was older than the others, taller, less extravagant, more dignified.

  “That’s the old succubus herself,” Laura growled in his ear. “She owns it. Dave did an article for her—the whole thing’s arty and mystical—reactionary crap.” She padded off into the bathroom to express herself in private.

  Dave stood facing the tall, thin women, tapping dead ash from his pipe and fumbling for his tobacco sack. “I know,” he was saying aloud, nodding intently. The expression on his face showed that he didn’t like her any more than Laura did. “We dropped by for a couple of minutes.”

  The woman continued talking. Her voice was low, controlled. She was perhaps thirty. High-cheeked, reddish hair thin and cut short . . . With her neatly pressed jeans she wore a green-checkered sports shirt, a western-style leather belt, a heavy silver buckle. For a moment her gray eyes moved in Hadley’s direction; curiosity was turned briefly on him and then back to Dave.

  “What did you think?” she asked huskily. Around her the circle of lotus eaters gazed up in benign rapture.

  “We didn’t hear anything. And you know what I think of that junk.”

  Expressionless, the woman continued: “I’m trying to find out if Beckheim is basing his movement on quietism.” Her voice trailed off, lost from Hadley in the murmur of sound and music that hung over the room. “. . . A reaction, too, but not the same kind. You’re thinking of nonviolence; quietism was more like the Friends’ concept of individual inspiration . . . the first heresy . . . Protestant sense of individual conscience.”

  Hadley stumbled over the ankle of a small girl crouched in a heap, listening raptly. A tiny white-haired thing with huge china-blue eyes and the body of a ten-year-old boy. She smiled at him sweetly and turned back to hear.

  “These North Beach intellectuals,” Laura grated in his ear. “Queer, every one of them. Degenerate dilettantes. No social conscience.” She carried an armload of beer cans from the kitchen and dropped them in the center of the moth-eaten carpet with a loud clatter. “Help yourselves,” she bellowed sullenly. “Sorry, no glasses.”

  The can opener was tossed around. In the background Paul Robeson’s rich deep voice rolled forth lower and lower; the record seemed to be gradually slowing down.

  And all your tears of sorrow,

  And all your tears of sorrow,

  And all your tears of sorrow,

  Mamita Mia,

  We shall avenge them,

  We shall avenge them.

  Standing at the window, Hadley gazed out at the night gloom. Streetlights glowed yellow here and there, without pattern or visible design. A universe of chance . . . random particles swirling and settling without meaning.

  Dave came over beside him. “Do you know her?”

  “No,” Hadley answered.

  “She runs this high-type quarterly up in San Francisco. Critical articles on T. S. Eliot and Jung. Short stories by Capote’s bunch . . . or worse.”

  “I know,” Hadley said. “Succubus.”

  “You want to go home? I’ll drive you home—it’ll give me a chance to get out of here.”

  “I can get home okay,” Hadley said. He wondered why Dave and Laura disliked the woman so intensely. “You don’t have to—”

  “That’s what I’m going to do, though.” Dave signaled to Laura; she glared back but made no move to stop him. “Maybe Marsha will be gone when I get home.” He pushed open the door to the hall.

  “You’re leaving?” the tall, slim woman asked.

  “I’ll be back,” Dave muttered evasively.

  As the door closed behind them, Hadley caught a final glimpse of Marsha Frazier, arms folded, already continuing her talk in the same low, indifferent tone.

  “They never stop,” Dave said angrily. “Talking, I mean. That’s not the worst of it, either. If that was all . . .” Explosively he said: “I should have known this Watchmen stuff would bring them out of their holes. Goddamn fungus—turn over a rock and look what you get.”

  Searching his memory Hadley asked: “Is she the woman you did that article for? The one you got in that argument with, and she never printed it?”

  “Fascists,” Gold muttered. His voice was bleak, troubled with the ring of unhappy foreboding. “Friends of Ezra Pound.” He and Hadley strode gloomily down the sidewalk to the car. “Anti−Semites.” Furiously, he tugged open the car door. “Hop in and let’s go. I’ll probably wreck us along the way . . . but I want to get you home. The less you see of those people the better.”

  Jim Fergesson, forty-two, sound of health, owner of Modern TV Sales and Service, lay in his living room and contemplated gain. His shoes were heaped beside the couch. His newspaper was crumpled on the floor. In the corner, his wife, Alice, rocked back and forth in her chair and hooked away at a rug. The radio, quietly to itself, described a new advance in lawn seed that was to revolutionize outdoor patios.

  From an abalone-shell ashtray, Fergesson selected the smoking remnant of his cigar and placed it between his lips. Meditatively, he belched. “I’m going to call Bud O’Neill,” he shouted. “What’s holding me up? I’m going over there and close the deal tonight.”

  “Go over and look at the place once more before you decide,” Alice suggested.

  “I’ve seen it enough to find my way through it in the dark. If I don’t close him somebody else’ll grab it.” Greedily, he reflected on the gross take. The high percentage of net profits. No, profits misstated it; he rejected profits and concentrated on the overall picture. Of course, profits were there; a man didn’t go into business to see his name on the state tax certificate pasted over the till. Profits were to a business what roaring down the track was to a train. Profits were the quotient, the juice squeezed from the press . . . They announced that the business worked.

  But profits became meaningful only when put to work, when reinvested. The driveshaft of a motor attached to nothing merely turned around and around, a useless child’s toy.

  That was why it was essential he buy O’Neill Appliance, the flashy, classy, shiny-bright, new highway-located appliance emporium, with its gleaming neon signs, overhead spots, white refrigerators, stoves, washers, dryers, a vast bathroom of porcelain and chrome, a tiled Elysium of bosom-white baked enamel that was closer to God than cleanliness. Buying O’Neill Appliance was a spiritual act, almost a mystical rapport with the Almighty. If God lurked anywhere on earth He was present when a massive crate was torn open and a gleaming Bendix spin dryer was slid from its packing frame onto the display floor. If ever there was a holy spot, it was the fifty-foot display window of O’Neill Appliance, spread out like a beacon along Bayshore Highway.

  In buying O’Neill Appliance, Fergesson demonstrated the essential spirituality of his soul.

  He really loved easing the black-metal pry bar between the slats of soft fresh pine, snipping the twisted wires, yanking the alfalfa and brown gummy paper from the towering smooth-white slab of metal. He got fierce satisfaction squatting down on the floor to struggle the castors into a heavy washer. He was ecstatic, involved in the act of ultimate adoration, when he unboxed the trays and chromium shelves of a nine-foot refrigerator and fitted them into
place (they always fitted exactly right). And O’Neill’s warehouse was bulging with still-crated refrigerators, never touched or pawed or examined.

  “Nobody else will grab it,” Alice said gently. “It’s been up for sale a year and a half.” The wife Jim Fergesson had selected was eleven years younger than he. Plump, black-haired, with competent hands and the firm, alert features of a woman who efficiently managed every part of her home. “You’re not usually this way,” she continued. “Anything happen to make you incautious this way?”

  “No,” Jim said shortly. “I’ve waited a year and a half; how cautious can you get?”

  “Remember, if you buy O’Neill Appliance you’ll have to work twice as hard as you do now.” Alice spoke patiently, firmly. “And you’ve got plenty to do as it is. Why don’t you leave the money in the bank? You’re getting two and a half percent interest, probably as much as you’ll make out of O’Neill’s place. There’s too much overhead there.”

  “We’ve discussed it before,” Jim answered. His wife sometimes took the magic out of things. “I want to expand. I want to grow.” Conscious that Alice was smiling understandingly, he pulled himself upright and took umbrage. “Stop laughing at me, you old bat. If I just sit still the damn business will shrink. Turn your back and it gets smaller.”

  Alice laughed. “That’s because when you’re away from it you build it up in your mind until it’s as big as Macy’s.”

  “I have dreams,” Jim said.

  “You have a big tongue. You were a salesman during the depression; your tongue kept us alive. Remember how long you talked for a nine-dollar sale? Longer than you talk now for a three-hundred-dollar combination.”

  Jim Fergesson remembered back. “Those nine-dollar Emersons kept us in potatoes.” He grinned to himself. “Remember that winter day I turned on the heater in the back of the store—you were up in the office typing out the bills. And a man came in to look at sets . . . You wondered why I didn’t come out.” He roared. “I was sound asleep in front of the heater.”

  “The only time in your life you missed a sale.”

  Jim cackled nostalgically. “That sure taught me something. That heater never went on again; too much comfort is bad.” He reflected for a time. “Maybe that’s what’s wrong with the young people today: too much luxury. They’re soft. All they have to do is push a button, turn a knob.”

  “You’re selling them the machines, aren’t you?”

  “A machine isn’t good or bad; it’s how you use it . . . If a man gets a machine so he can lie in the shade and sleep, that’s bad. If he gets a machine so he can do more work, that’s fine.” His small, well-muscled body stiffened pridefully. “Remember how hard we worked back in the old days? You did the bookkeeping and kept the place clean while I sold people radios and vacuum cleaners. Boy, we really had to sell; people didn’t walk in and buy, like they do now. Anybody can sell something to a man that wants to buy; that’s not selling.” He chuckled and winked at his wife. “It didn’t hurt us any, did it? We had fun.”

  Alice smiled good-naturedly. “Kept my weight down; I’ll say that much.”

  “And we never wasted anything, by God. We never threw anything away; remember the old trash cartons down in the basement? Remember me jumping up and down, flattening those boxes and baling them up with packing wire?” He shook his head. “You can’t teach people today not to waste things. I’ve seen Hadley use a piece of carbon paper and toss it away—use it once and throw it in the basket.”

  “If you buy O’Neill’s place,” Alice said carefully, “you won’t be able to run it. You can’t open up two stores at once; you’ll have to get somebody to handle it for you . . . and you know how you fret when you’re not there to boss everybody around.”

  “Everybody does things wrong.”

  “By your standards. But different people have different standards.”

  “I hire them! I pay them good money! If they want to work for me they’re going to have to meet my standards.” Jim twisted resentfully. “The thing that’s wrong with these young kids is they don’t know how to work. They expect the customer to walk up and hand them the money. They don’t know how to go out and really work for it, like we had to. They’re soft. Luxury—that’s what’s done it.”

  “I know,” Alice said gently. “You’ve mentioned it before, from time to time.”

  Fergesson got to his feet and padded broodingly toward the kitchen. “There’s such a thing as too much of a good thing. A man gets effeminate with all the stuff they’re selling these days. Perfume for men—aftershave, they call it, but it’s perfume. Hadley uses it; I can smell it.” He halted pointedly at the kitchen door, cigar between his fingers. “Alice, I’m a simple man. I have simple tastes. I like a good meal, I like to read the paper after dinner and smoke this.” He solemnly waved the stump of his cigar. “I like a little fun, once in a while. A ball game or a drive out in the country. How long’s it been since we’ve seen a movie?”

  “God knows.”

  “I like a little music—not that longhair stuff: something simple and sweet, with a melody I can follow. Some of that classical stuff you can’t make head nor tail of; you know, I think the people who listen to that must be crazy. Or maybe they’re pretending . . . Maybe they know darn well it’s just a lot of crazy sounds. Of course, I don’t go for this hot jazz all the kids like. It’s nigger music; that’s what it is, pure and simple. I like the old-fashioned stuff we used to have; it was the stuff you could walk home humming to yourself. It was easy to dance to. You know, the tunes Rudy Vallee used to play. And John Charles Thomas.” He jabbed his cigar at her, nodding his head with emphasis. “There’s a great artist, that John Charles Thomas. I heard him sing, once. You know, when he sings he closes his eyes. He stands there with his eyes shut and his hands clasped; he’s a simple man, Alice. He’s sincere. You can tell, when you hear him.” Fergesson disappeared into the kitchen. “Nelson Eddy was another. Whatever happened to him?”

  “He’s still around.”

  Fergesson rooted noisily in the dark kitchen. “What happened to all the beer I brought home last week? You and your canasta ladies drank it all up, did you?”

  “Look down in the bottom of the refrigerator, with the vegetables.”

  Fergesson poured himself a beer and returned to the living room. There was an intense frown of concentration on his round, red-wrinkled face. He pawed fretfully at the fringe of gray-black hair above his left ear and said: “Alice, what the hell am I going to do? I can’t turn Modern over to Hadley—he can’t tell his ass from a hole in the ground. But they’re all that way! He’s the least of them, I suppose, when you get down to it. They’re all a bunch of WPA leaf rakers . . . Christ, they just stand there with their hands in their pockets.” He sipped his beer resentfully. “Watching TV while people swarm by outside.”

  “Hooks have gone out of style.”

  “I don’t want high pressure! I just want somebody who likes his work, who likes to sell. If I turn Modern over to Hadley he’ll put it out of business in a week.”

  “You can still do the buying,” Alice said patiently; they had gone over it many times. “If you want, I’ll go down and keep the books. You can get some high school kid to dust the television sets. School’s almost out for the summer.”

  “Yeah,” Fergesson admitted reluctantly. “You know, I damn near fired Hadley the other day. He showed up with a hangover, again; he could hardly drag one foot after another and he was shaking like a leaf. If I had any sense I’d let him go. But how the hell can I? He’s got that wife of his knocked up, and all those unpaid bills . . . Around the end of the month he’s into the till for ten or fifteen bucks. It’s pathetic. Every time he goes by a clothing shop he buys himself a new bunch of socks and ties, or maybe an imported cashmere sweater. What’s he want with all those clothes? I thought only women bought a lot of clothes!”

  “He’s a good-looking young man,” Alice pointed out. “You ought to go along with him.” She reached u
p and critically plucked at her husband’s frayed cuff. “You’ve been wearing that same blue serge suit for years.”

  “This is a good suit,” Fergesson said with stubborn pride. “I got this suit before the last war. They don’t make them this way, not anymore.”

  “You’re the only man I know who still wears a vest. And carries a pocket watch.”

  “My dad gave me this watch.” Fergesson flipped it open expertly. “You know how many jewels it has?”

  “I know.” Her eyes twinkled, gray and kindly. “None. It cost your dad a dollar and a half back in the French and Indian War.”

  “Not that far back.” Fergesson grinned. “You’re trying to make a monkey out of me. You, too, kid. Remember when you used to wrap up an apple and a peanut butter sandwich and a pint of milk for me? Every goddamn day I carried that little paper sack down to the store. How the hell long was that? Almost fifteen years.”

  “You could try Hadley out for a while,” Alice suggested. “For that matter, you need a vacation. Go up and stay in Lake Country at your cousin’s a week or so. It’s summer—business is slow. Hadley can’t do much harm . . . Maybe he’ll work out all right. Maybe the responsibility will set well on him.”

  “I won’t have anybody running my store who swills celery phosphates.”

  “Now you’re being silly,” Alice said sharply. “Are you going to tell your employees what to eat and drink? Give them some life of their own.”

  “It’s not that,” Fergesson said gloomily, “not the stuff he swills, in itself. It’s what it means . . . A man who drinks that stuff is unbalanced.”

  “Is a man who drinks beer unbalanced?”

  “You know I’m right,” Fergesson persisted. “There’s something wrong with Stumblebum . . . You can see it in the goofy things he does. He gets mad in the wrong way, not like other people. He’s mad all the time. It’s always down there inside him . . . Things bring it to the surface. Someday he’s going to bust loose. He’s going to go out on a wingding and wind up in jail. Or worse.”