Look at the Birdie: Unpublished Short Fiction Page 14

Nancy remained serene. “Huh,” she said. “Bye, now.”

  “Bye, Red.”

  As she walked away, Red picked up his spyglass, and looked down at Eddie’s oyster shack. Through the window, he could see Eddie, blue-gray in the twilight interior, shucking oysters. Eddie was a small man, with a large head majestic in sorrow. It was the head of a young Job.

  “Hi,” whispered Red. “Guess who’s home.”

  When Nancy came back from the lunchroom with a warm, fat paper bag, Red stopped her again.

  “Saaaaaay,” he said, “maybe you’ll grow up to be a nurse, after taking such good care of old Eddie. I wish there’d been nice nurses like you at the hospital I was at.”

  Nancy’s face softened with pity. “You were in a hospital?”

  “Three months, Red, in Liverpool, without a friend or a relative in this world to come see me, or even send me a get-well card.” He grew wistful. “Funny, Red—I never realized how lonely I was, till I had to lie down and stay down, till I knew I couldn’t ever go to sea again.” He licked his lips. “Changed me, Red, like that.” He snapped his fingers.

  “All of a sudden, I needed a home,” he said, “and somebody to care about me, and keep me company—maybe in that little cottage out there on the point. I didn’t have nothing, Red, but mate’s papers that wasn’t worth the paper they were printed on for a man with one leg.”

  Nancy was shocked. “You’ve only got one leg?”

  “One day I was the crazy, tough kid they all remember down there,” said Red, including the village in a sweep of his hand. “The next day I was an old, old man.”

  Nancy bit her knuckle, sharing his pain. “Haven’t you got a wife or a mother or a lady friend to look after you?” she said. By her stance, she offered her services as a daughter, as though it were a simple thing that any good girl would do.

  Red hung his head. “Dead,” he said. “My mother’s dead, and the only girl I ever loved is dead. And the lady friends, Red—they’re never what you’d call real friendly, not if you can’t love them, not if you’re in love with a ghost.”

  Nancy’s sweet face twisted as Red forced her to look at the grisliness of life. “Why do you live up the river, if you’re so lonesome?” she said. “Why don’t you live down here, where you’d be with your old friends?”

  Red raised an eyebrow. “Old friends? Funny kind of friends to have, who wouldn’t even drop me a postcard to tell me Violet’s kid had bright red hair. Not even my folks told me.”

  The wind freshened, and on the wind, from seemingly far away, came Nancy’s voice. “Daddy’s lunch is getting cold,” she said. She started to walk away.

  “Red!”

  She stopped, and her hand went up to her hair. She kept her back to him.

  Red wished to God he could see her face. “Tell Eddie I want to talk to him, would you? Tell him to meet me in the lunchroom after I get off work—about ten after five.”

  “I will,” she said. Her voice was clear, calm.

  “Word of honor?”

  “Word of honor,” she said. She started walking again.

  “Red!”

  Her hand went up to her hair, but she kept on walking.

  Red followed her with his spyglass, but she knew she was being watched. She kept her head turned, so he couldn’t see her face. And seconds after she went into the oyster shack, a shade was drawn across the window that faced the bridge.

  For the rest of the afternoon, the shack might as well have been empty for all the life Red could see. Only once, toward sunset, did Eddie come out. He didn’t so much as glance up at the bridge, and he kept his face hidden, too.

  The screech from his own stool in the lunchroom brought Red back to the present. He blinked at the sunset, and saw the silhouette of Eddie Scudder crossing the bridge, big-headed and bandy-legged, carrying a small paper bag.

  Red turned his back to the door, reached into a jacket pocket, and brought forth a packet of letters, which he set on the counter before him. He put his fingertips on them, like a cardplayer standing pat. “Here’s the man of the hour,” he said.

  No one spoke.

  Eddie came in without hesitation, with a formal greeting for everyone, Red last of all. His voice was surprisingly rich and deep. “Hello, Red,” he said. “Nancy said you wanted to see me.”

  “That’s right,” said Red. “Nobody here can figure out what I’d have to say to you.”

  “Nancy had a little trouble figuring it out, too,” said Eddie, without a trace of resentment.

  “She finally got the drift?” said Red.

  “She got it, about as well as an eight-year-old could,” said Eddie. He sat down on the stool next to Red’s, and set his bag on the counter, next to the letters. He showed mild surprise at the handwriting of the letters, and made no effort to hide his surprise from Red. “Coffee, please, Slim,” he said.

  “Maybe you’d rather have this private,” said Red. He was a little disconcerted by Eddie’s equanimity. He’d remembered Eddie as a homely clown.

  “Makes no difference,” said Eddie. “It’s all before God, wherever we do it.”

  The straightforward inclusion of God in the meeting was also unexpected by Red. In his daydreams in his hospital bed, the resounding lines had all been his—irrefutable lines dealing with man’s rights to the love of his own flesh and blood. Red felt the necessity of puffing himself up, of dramatizing his advantages in bulk and stature. “First of all,” he said importantly, “I wanna say I don’t care what the law has to say about this. This is bigger than that.”

  “Good,” said Eddie. “Then we agree first of all. I’d hoped we would.”

  “So’s we won’t be talking about two different things,” said Red, “lemme say right out that I’m the father of that kid—not you.”

  Eddie stirred his coffee with a steady hand. “We’ll be talking about exactly the same thing,” he said.

  Slim and the three others looked out the windows desperately.

  Around and around and around went Eddie’s spoon in his coffee. “Go on,” he said happily.

  Red was rattled. Things were going faster than he had expected—and, at the same time, they were seemingly going nowhere. He’d passed the climax of what he’d come home to say, and nothing had changed—and nothing seemed about to change. “Everybody’s gone right along with you, pretending she was your kid,” he said indignantly.

  “They’ve been good neighbors,” said Eddie.

  Red’s mind was now a mare’s nest of lines he hadn’t used yet, lines that now didn’t seem to fit anywhere. “I’m willing to take a blood test, to find out who’s her father,” he said. “Are you?”

  “Do we all have to bleed, before we can believe each other?” said Eddie. “I told you I agreed with you. You are her father. Everybody knows that. How could they miss it?”

  “Did she tell you I’d lost a leg?” said Red hectically.

  “Yes,” said Eddie. “That impressed her more than anything. That’s what would impress an eight-year-old the most.”

  Red looked at his own reflection in the coffee urn and saw that his eyes were watery, his face bright pink. His reflection assured him that he’d spoken well—that he was being trifled with. “Eddie—that kid is mine, and I want her.”

  “I’m sorry for you, Red,” said Eddie, “but you can’t have her.” For the first time, his hand trembled, making his spoon click against the side of his cup. “I think you’d better go away.”

  “You think this is a little thing?” said Red. “You think a man can back away from something like this like it was nothing—back away from his own kid, and just forget it?”

  “Not being a father myself,” said Eddie, “I can only guess at what you’re going through.”

  “Is that a joke?” said Red.

  “Not to me,” said Eddie evenly.

  “This is some smart way of saying you’re more her old man that I am?” said Red.

  “If I haven’t said it, I will say it,” said Eddi
e. His hand shook so uncontrollably that he was obliged to set his spoon down, to grip the counter’s edge.

  Red saw now how frightened Eddie was, saw how phony his poise and godliness were. Red felt his own strength growing, felt the flow of booming good health and righteousness he’d daydreamed of. He was suddenly in charge, with plenty to say, and plenty of time in which to say it.

  It angered him that Eddie had tried to bluff and confuse him, had nearly succeeded. And on the crest of the anger rode all Red’s hate for the cold and empty world. His whole will was now devoted to squashing the little man beside him.

  “That’s Violet’s and my kid,” said Red. “She never loved you.”

  “I hope she did,” said Eddie humbly.

  “She married you because she figured I wasn’t ever coming back!” said Red. He picked up a letter from the top of the packet and waved it under Eddie’s nose. “She told me so—just like that—in so many words.”

  Eddie refused to look at the letter. “That was a long time ago, Red. A lot can happen.”

  “I’ll tell you one thing that didn’t happen,” said Red, “she never stopped writing, never stopped begging me to come back.”

  “I guess those things go on for a while,” said Eddie softly.

  “A while?” said Red. He riffled through the letters, and dropped one before Eddie. “Look at the date on that one, would you? Just look at the date on that.”

  “I don’t want to,” said Eddie. He stood.

  “You’re afraid,” said Red.

  “That’s right,” said Eddie. He closed his eyes. “Go away, Red. Please go away.”

  “Sorry, Eddie,” said Red, “but nothing’s gonna make me go away. Red’s home.”

  “God pity you,” said Eddie. He walked to the door.

  “You forgot your little paper bag,” said Red. His feet danced.

  “That’s yours,” said Eddie. “Nancy sent it. It was her idea, not mine. God knows I would have stopped her if I’d known.” He was crying.

  He left, and crossed the bridge in the gathering darkness.

  Slim and the other three customers had turned to stone.

  “My God!” Red cried at them. “My own flesh and blood! It’s the deepest thing there is! What could ever make me leave?”

  No one answered.

  A terrible depression settled over Red, the aftermath of battle. He sucked the back of his hand, as though nursing a wound. “Slim,” he said, “what’s in that bag?”

  Slim opened the bag and looked inside. “Hair, Red,” he said. “Red hair.”

  LITTLE DROPS

  OF WATER

  Now Larry’s gone.

  We bachelors are lonely people. If I weren’t damn lonely from time to time, I wouldn’t have been a friend of Larry Whiteman, the baritone. Not friend, but companion, meaning I spent time with him, whether I liked him particularly or not. As bachelors get older, I find, they get less and less selective about where they get their companionship—and, like everything else in their lives, friends become a habit, and probably a part of a routine. For instance, while Larry’s monstrous conceit and vanity turned my stomach, I’d been dropping in to see him off and on for years. And when I come to analyze what off and on means, I realize that I saw Larry every Tuesday between five and six in the afternoon. If, on the witness stand, someone were to ask me where I was on the evening of Friday, such and such a date, I would only have to figure out where I would be on the coming Friday to tell him where I had probably been on the Friday he was talking about.

  Let me add quickly that I like women, but am a bachelor by choice. While bachelors are lonely people, I’m convinced that married men are lonely people with dependents.

  When I say I like women, I can name names, and perhaps, along with the plea of habit, account for my association with Larry in terms of them. There was Edith Vranken, the Schenectady brewer’s daughter who wanted to sing; Janice Gurnee, the Indianapolis hardware merchant’s daughter who wanted to sing; Beatrix Werner, the Milwaukee consulting engineer’s daughter who wanted to sing; and Ellen Sparks, the Buffalo wholesale grocer’s daughter who wanted to sing.

  I met these attractive young ladies—one by one and in the sequence named—in Larry’s studio, or what anyone else would call apartment. Larry adds to his revenues as a soloist by giving voice lessons to rich and pretty young women who want to sing. While Larry is soft as a hot fudge sundae, he is big and powerful-looking, like a college-bred lumberjack, if there is such a thing, or a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman. His voice, of course, gives the impression that he could powder rocks between his thumb and forefinger. His pupils inevitably fell in love with him. If you ask how they loved him, I can only reply with another question: where in the cycle do you mean? If you mean at the beginning, Larry was loved as a father pro tem. Later, he was loved as a benevolent taskmaster, and finally, as a lover.

  After that came what Larry and his friends had come to call graduation, which, in fact, had nothing to do with the pupil’s status as a singer, and had everything to do with the cycle of affections. The cue for graduation was the pupil’s overt use of the word marriage.

  Larry was something of a Bluebeard, and, may I say, a lucky dog while his luck held out. Edith, Janice, Beatrix, and Ellen—the most recent group of graduates—loved and were loved in turn. And, in turn, given the ax. They were wonderful looking girls, every one of them. There were also more like them where they had come from, and those others were boarding trains and planes and convertibles to come to New York because they wanted to sing. Larry had no replacement problem. And, with plenty of replacements, he was spared the temptation of making some sort of permanent arrangement, such as marriage.

  Larry’s life, like most bachelors’ lives, but far more so, had every minute accounted for, with very little time for women as women. The time he had set aside for whatever student happened to be in favor was Monday and Thursday evenings, to be exact. There was a time for giving lessons, a time for lunch with friends, a time for practice, a time for his barber, a time for two cocktails with me—a time for everything, and he never varied his schedule by more than a few minutes. Similarly, he had his studio exactly as he wanted it—a place for everything, with no places begging, and with no thing, in his eyes, dispensable. While he might have been on the fence about marriage as a young young man, marriage soon became impossible. Where he might once have had a little time and space to fit in a wife—a cramped wife—there came to be none, absolutely none.

  “Habit—it’s my strength!” Larry once said. “Ahhhh, wouldn’t they love to catch Larry, eh? And remake him, eh? Well, before they can get me into their traps, they’ve got to blast me out of my rut, and it can’t be done. I love my cozy little rut. Habit—Aes triplex.”

  “How’s that?” I said.

  “Aes triplex—triple armor,” he said.

  “Oh.” Aes Kleenex would have been closer to the truth, but neither one of us knew that then. Ellen Sparks was around, and ascendant in Larry’s heavens—Beatrix Werner having been liquidated a couple of months before—but Ellen was showing no signs of being any different than the rest.

  I said I liked women, and gave as examples some of Larry’s students, including Ellen. I liked them from a safe distance. After Larry, in his amorous cycle with a favorite, ceased to be a father away from home and eased into a warmer role, I in turn became sort of a father. A lackadaisical, slipshod father, to be sure, but the girls liked to tell me how things were going, and ask my advice. They had a lemon of an adviser in me, because all I could ever think of to say was “Oh well, what the hell, you’re only young once.”

  I said as much to Ellen Sparks, an awfully pretty brunette not likely to be depressed by thoughts or want of money. Her speaking voice was pleasant enough, but when she sang it was as though her vocal cords had risen into her sinuses.

  “A Jew’s harp with lyrics,” said Larry, “with Italian lyrics in a Middle Western accent, yet.” But he kept her on, because Ellen was a lot of fun t
o look at, and she paid her fees promptly, and never seemed to notice that Larry charged her for a lesson whatever he happened to need at the moment.

  I once asked her where she’d gotten the idea to be a singer, and she said she liked Lily Pons. To her that was an answer, and a perfectly adequate one. Actually, I think she wanted to get away from the home reservation and have some fun being rich where nobody knew her. She probably drew lots to see whether the excuse would be music, drama, or art. At that, she was more serious-minded than some of the girls in her situation. One girl I know about set herself up in a suite with her father’s money, and broadened herself by subscribing to several newsmagazines. One hour out of every day, she religiously underlined everything in them that seemed important. With a thirty-dollar fountain pen.

  Well, as New York father to Ellen, I heard her, as I had heard the others before her, declare that she loved Larry, and that she couldn’t be sure, but she thought he might like her pretty well, too. She was proud of herself, because here she was making headway with a fairly famous man, and she’d only been away from home five months. The triumph was doubly delicious in that, I gathered, she’d been looked upon as something of a dumb twit in Buffalo. After that, she confided haltingly about evenings of wine and heady talk of the arts.

  “Monday and Thursday evenings?” I asked.

  She looked startled. “What are you, a Peeping Tom?”

  Six weeks later she spoke guardedly of marriage, of Larry’s seeming at the point of mentioning it. Seven weeks later she graduated. I happened to drop by Larry’s on my Tuesday call for cocktails, and saw her seated in her yellow convertible across the street. By the way she slouched down in the cushions, defiant and at the same time completely licked, I knew what had happened. I thought it best to leave her alone—being, for one thing, dead sick of the same old story. But she spotted me, and raised my hair with a blast of her horns.

  “Well, Ellen, hello. Lesson over?”

  “Go on, laugh at me.”

  “I’m not laughing. Why should I laugh?”

  “You are inside,” she said bitterly. “Men! You knew about the others, didn’t you? You knew what happened to them, and what was going to happen to me, didn’t you?”