Jailbird Read online

  Nor was I without my own supporting cast. Willy-nilly, I had placed myself between a man wearing sandwich boards and a top hat, and a little old woman who had no home, who carried all her possessions in shopping bags. She wore enormous purple-and-black basketball shoes. They were so out of scale with the rest of her that she looked like a kangaroo.

  My companions were both speaking to passers-by. The man in the sandwich boards was saying such things as "Put women back in the kitchen," and "God never meant women to be the equals of men," and so on. The shopping-bag lady seemed to be scolding strangers for their obesity, calling them, as I understood her, "stuck-up fats," and "rich Tats," and "snooty fats," and "fats" of a hundred other varieties.

  The thing was: I had been away from Cambridge, Massachusetts, so long that I could no longer detect that she was calling people "farts" in the accent of the Cambridge working class.

  And in the toe of one of her capacious basketball shoes, among other things, were hypocritical love letters from me. Small world!

  Good God! What a reaper and binder life can be sometimes!

  When Leland Clewes, on the other side of Fifth Avenue, realized who I was, he formed his mouth into a perfect "O." I could not hear his saying "Oh," but I could see his saying "Oh." He was making fun of our encounter after all these years, overacting his surprise and dismay like an actor in a silent movie.

  Plainly, he was going to come back across the street as soon as the lights changed. Meanwhile, all those fake Hindu imbeciles in saffron robes continued to chant and dance behind him.

  There was still time for me to flee. What made me hold my ground, I think, was this: the need to prove myself a gentleman. During the bad old days, when I had testified against him, people who wrote about us, speculating as to who was telling the truth and who was not, concluded for the most part that he was a real gentleman, descended from a long line of gentlemen, and that I was a person of Slavic background only pretending to be a gentleman. Honor and bravery and truthfulness, then, would mean everything to him and very little to me.

  Other contrasts were pointed out, certainly. With every new edition of the papers and newsmagazines, seemingly, I became shorter and he became taller. My poor wife became more gross and foreign, and his wife became more of an American golden girl. His friends became more numerous and respectable, and mine couldn't even be found under damp rocks anymore. But what troubled me most in my very bones was the idea that he was honorable and I was not. Thus, twenty-six years later, did this little Slavic jailbird hold his ground.

  Across the avenue he came, the former Anglo-Saxon champion, a happy, ramshackle scarecrow now.

  I was bewildered by his happiness. "What," I asked myself, "can this wreck have to be so happy about?"

  So there we were reunited, with the shopping-bag lady looking on and listening. He put down his sample case and he extended his right hand. He made a joke, echoing the meeting of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone in Darkest Africa: "Walter F. Starbuck, I presume."

  And we might as well have been in Darkest Africa, for all anybody knew or cared about us anymore. Most people, if they remembered us at all, believed us dead, I suppose. And we had never been as significant in American history as we had sometimes thought we were. We were, if I may be forgiven, farts in a windstorm--or, as the shopping-bag lady would have called us, "fats in a windstorm."

  Did I harbor any bitterness against him for having stolen my girl so long ago? No. Sarah and I had loved each other, but we would never have been happy as man and wife. We could never have gotten a sex life going. I had never persuaded her to take sex seriously. Leland Clewes had succeeded where I had failed--much to her grateful amazement, I am sure.

  What tender memories did I have of Sarah? Much talk about human suffering and what could be done about it--and then infantile silliness for relief. We collected jokes for each other, to use when it was time for relief. We became addicted to talking to each other on the telephone for hours. Those talks were the most agreeable narcotic I have ever known. We became disembodied--like free-floating souls on the planet Vicuna. If there was a long silence, one or the other of us would end it with the start of a joke.

  "What is the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?" she might ask me.

  "I don't know," I would say.

  "You can't hear an enzyme," she would say, and the silly jokes would go on and on--even though she had probably seen something horrible at the hospital that day.

  13

  I WAS ABOUT TO SAY to him gravely, watchfully but sincerely, "How are you, Leland? It is good to see you again." But I never got to say it. The shopping-bag lady, whose voice was loud and piercing, cried out, "Oh, my God! Walter F. Starbuck! Is that really you?" I do not intend to reproduce her accent on the printed page.

  I thought she was crazy. I thought that she would have parroted any name Clewes chose to hang on me. If he had called me "Bumptious Q. Bangwhistle," I thought, she would have cried, "Oh, my God! Bumptious Q. Bangwhistle! Is that really you?"

  Now she began to lean her shopping bags against my legs, as though I were a convenient fireplug. There were six of them, which I would later study at leisure. They were from the most expensive stores in town--Henri Bendel, Tiffany's, Sloane's. Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale's, Abercrombie and Fitch. All but Abercrombie and Fitch, incidentally, which would soon go bankrupt, were subsidiaries of The RAMJAC Corporation. Her bags contained mostly rags, pickings from garbage cans. Her most valuable possessions Were in her basketball shoes.

  I tried to ignore her. Even as she entrapped me with her bags, I kept my gaze on the face of Leland Clewes. "You're looking well," I said.

  "I'm feeling well," he said. "And so is Sarah, you'll be happy to know."

  "I'm glad to hear it," I said. "She's a very good girl." Sarah was no girl anymore, of course.

  Clewes told me now that she was still doing a little nursing, as a part-time thing.

  "I'm glad," I said.

  To my horror, I felt as though a sick bat had dropped from the eaves of a building and landed on my wrist. The shopping-bag lady had taken hold of me with her filthy little hand.

  "This is your wife?" he said.

  "My what?" I said. He thought I had sunk so low that this awful woman and I were a pair! "I never saw her before in my life!" I said.

  "Oh, Walter, Walter, Walter," she keened, "how can you say such a thing?"

  I pried her hand off me; but the instant I returned my attention to Clewes, she snapped it onto my wrist again.

  "Pretend she isn't here," I said. "This is crazy. She has nothing to do with me. I will not let her spoil this moment, which means a great deal to me."

  "Oh, Walter, Walter, Walter," she said, "what has become of you? You're not the Walter F. Starbuck I knew."

  "That's right," I said, "because you never knew any Walter F. Starbuck, but this man did." And I said to Clewes, "I suppose you know that I myself have spent time in prison now."

  "Yes," he said. "Sarah and I were very sorry."

  "I was let out only yesterday morning," I said.

  "You have some trying days ahead," he said. "Is there somebody to look after you?"

  "I'll look after you, Walter," said the shopping-bag lady. She leaned closer to me to say that so fervently, and I was nearly suffocated by her body odor and her awful breath. Her breath was laden not only with the smell of bad teeth but, as I would later realize, with finely divided droplets of peanut oil. She had been eating nothing but peanut butter for years.

  "You can't take care of anybody!" I said to her.

  "Oh--you'd be surprised what all I could do for you," she said.

  "Leland," I said, "all I want to say to you is that I know what jail is now, and, God damn it, the thing I'm sorriest about in my whole life is that I had anything to do with sending you to jail."

  "Well," he said, "Sarah and I have often talked about what we would like to say most to you."

  "I'm sure," I said.

 
"And it's this:" he said, "Thank you very much, Walter. My going to prison was the best thing that ever happened to Sarah and me.' I'm not joking. Word of honor: It's true."

  I was amazed. "How can that be?" I said.

  "Because life is supposed to be a test," he said. "If my life had kept going the way it was going, I would have arrived in heaven never having faced any problem that wasn't as easy as pie to solve. Saint Peter would have had to say to me, 'You never lived, my boy. Who can say what you are?'"

  "I see," I said.

  "Sarah and I not only have love," he said, "but we have love that has stood up to the hardest tests."

  "It sounds very beautiful," I said.

  "We would be proud to have you see it," he said. "Could you come to supper sometime?"

  "Yes--I suppose," I said.

  "Where are you staying?" he said.

  "The Hotel Arapahoe," I said.

  "I thought they'd torn that down years ago," he said.

  "No," I said.

  "You'll hear from us," he said.

  "I look forward to it," I said.

  "As you'll see," he said, "we have nothing in the way of material wealth; but we need nothing in the way of material wealth."

  "That's intelligent," I said.

  "I'll say this though:" he said, "The food is good. As you may remember, Sarah is a wonderful cook."

  "I remember," I said.

  And now the shopping-bag lady offered the first proof that she really did know a lot about me. "You're talking about that Sarah Wyatt, aren't you?" she said.

  There was a silence among us, although the uproar of the metropolis went on and on. Neither Clewes nor I had mentioned Sarah's maiden name.

  I finally managed to ask her, woozy with shapeless misgivings, "How do you know that name?"

  She became foxy and coquettish. "You think I don't know you were two-timing me with her the whole time?" she said.

  Given that much information, I no longer needed to guess who she was. I had slept with her during my senior year at Harvard, while still squiring the virginal Sarah Wyatt to parties and concerts and athletic events.

  She was one of the four women I had ever loved. She was the first woman with whom I had had anything like a mature sexual experience.

  She was the remains of Mary Kathleen O'Looney!

  14

  "I WAS HIS CIRCULATION MANAGER," said Mary Kathleen to Leland Clewes very loudly. "Wasn't I a good circulation manager, Walter?"

  "Yes--you certainly were," I said. That was how we met: She presented herself at the tiny office of The Bay State Progressive in Cambridge at the start of my senior year, saying that she would do absolutely anything I told her to do, as long as it would improve the condition of the working class. I made her circulation manager, put her in charge of handing out the paper at factory gates and along breadlines and so on. She had been a scrawny little thing back then, but tough and cheerful and highly visible because of her bright red hair. She was such a hater of capitalism, because her mother was one of the women who died of radium poisoning after working for the Wyatt Clock Company. Her father had gone blind after drinking wood alcohol while a night watchman in a shoepolish factory.

  Now what was left of Mary Kathleen bowed her head, responded modestly to my having agreed that she had been a good circulation manager, and presented her pate to Leland Clewes and me. She had a bald spot about the size of a silver dollar. The tonsure that fringed it was sparse and white.

  Leland Clewes would tell me later that he almost fainted. He had never seen a woman's bald spot before.

  It was too much for him. He closed his blue eyes and he turned away. When he manfully faced us again, he avoided looking directly at Mary Kathleen---just as the mythological Perseus had avoided looking at the Gorgon's head.

  "We must get together soon," he said.

  "Yes," I said.

  "You'll be hearing from me soon," he said.

  "I hope so," I said.

  "Must rush," he said.

  "I understand," I said.

  "Take care," he said.

  "I will," I said.

  He was gone.

  Mary Kathleen's shopping bags were still banked around my legs. I was as immobilized and eye-catching as Saint Joan of Arc at the stake. Mary Kathleen still grasped my wrist, and she would not lower her voice.

  "Now that I've found you, Walter," she cried, "I'll never let you go again!"

  Nowhere in the world was this sort of theater being done anymore. For what it may be worth to modern impresarios: I can testify from personal experience that great crowds can still be gathered by melodrama, provided that the female in the piece speaks loudly and clearly.

  "You used to tell me all the time how much you loved me, Walter," she cried. "But then you went away, and I never heard from you again. Were you just lying to me?"

  I may have made some responsive sound. "Bluh," perhaps, or "fluh."

  "Look at me in the eye, Walter," she said.

  Sociologically, of course, this melodrama was as gripping as Uncle Tom's Cabin before the Civil War. Mary Kathleen O'Looney wasn't the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to no imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentant murderers ten years old, and dope fiends and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time.

  Good-hearted people were meanwhile as sick about all these tragic by-products of the economy as they would have been about human slavery a little more than a hundred years before. Mary Kathleen and I were a miracle that our audience must have prayed for again and again: the rescue of at least one shopping-bag lady by a man who knew her well.

  Some people were crying. I myself was about to cry.

  "Hug her," said a woman in the crowd.

  I did so.

  I found myself embracing a bundle of dry twigs that was wrapped in rags. That was when I myself began to cry. I was crying for the first time since I had found my wife dead in bed one morning--in my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

  15

  MY NOSE, THANK GOD, had conked out by then. Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn't so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom. Thus is it possible to eat Limburger cheese--or to hug the stinking wreckage of an old sweetheart at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.

  It felt for a moment as though Mary Kathleen had died in my arms. To be perfectly frank, that would have been all right with me. Where, after all, could I take her from there? What could be better than her receiving a hug from a man who had known her when she was young and beautiful, and then going to heaven right away?

  It would have been wonderful. Then again, I would never have become executive vice-president of the Down Home Records Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. I might at this very moment be sleeping off a wine binge in the Bowery, while a juvenile monster soaked me in gasoline and touched me off with his Cricket lighter.

  Mary Kathleen now spoke very softly. "God must have sent you," she said.

  "There, there," I said. I went on hugging her.

  "There's nobody I can trust anymore," she said.

  "Now, now," I said.

  "Everybody's after me," she said. "They want to cut off my hands."

  "There, there," I said.

  "I thought you were dead," she said.

  "No, no," I said.

  "I thought everybody was dead but me," she said.

  "There, there," I said.

  "I still believe in the revolution, Walter," she said.

  "I'm glad," I said.

  "Everybody else lost heart," she said. "I never lost heart."

  "Good for you,
" I said.

  "I've been working for the revolution every day," she said.

  "I'm sure," I said.

  "You'd be surprised," she said.

  "Get her a hot bath," said somebody in the crowd.

  "Get some food in her," said somebody else.

  "The revolution is coming, Walter--sooner than you know," said Mary Kathleen.

  "I have a hotel room where you can rest awhile," I said. "I have a little money. Not much, but some."

  "Money," she said, and she laughed. Her scornful laughter about money had not changed. It was exactly as it had been forty years before.

  "Shall we go?" I said. "My room isn't far from here."

  "I know a better place," she said.

  "Get her some One-a-Day vitamins," said somebody in the crowd.

  "Follow me, Walter," said Mary Kathleen. She was growing strong again. It was Mary Kathleen who now separated herself from me, and not the other way around. She became raucous again. I picked up three of her bags, and she picked up the other three. Our ultimate destination, it would turn out, was the very top of the Chrysler Building, the quiet showroom of The American Harp Company up there. But first we had to get the crowd to part for us, and she began to call people in our way "capitalist fats" and "bloated plutocrats" and "bloodsuckers" and all that again.

  Her means of locomotion in her gargantuan basketball shoes was this: She barely lifted the shoes from the ground, shoving one forward and then the other, like cross-country skis, while her upper body and shopping bags swiveled wildly from side to side. But that oscillating old woman could go like the wind! I panted to keep up with her, once we got clear of the crowd. We were surely the cynosure of all eyes. Nobody had ever seen a shopping-bag lady with an assistant before.

  When we got to Grand Central Station, Mary Kathleen said that we had to make sure we weren't being followed. She led me up and down escalators, ramps, and stairways, looking over her shoulders for pursuers all the time. We scampered through the Oyster Bar three times. She brought us at last to an iron door at the end of a dimly lit corridor. We surely were all alone. Our hearts were beating hard.

  When we had recovered our breaths, she said to me, "I am going to show you something you mustn't tell anybody about."

  "I promise," I said.

  "This is our secret," she said.