Candy (11 page)

Just then the door opened and Krankeit entered.

To everyone’s surprise, he didn’t seem to be shocked by what was happening, and actually waved his hand to the dancers as if to tell them not to bother about him but to go on with their fun.

Perhaps it was for
her
sake, Candy thought with a catch in her throat, to save
her
from the painful embarrassment of a scene.

In gratitude for Krankeit’s good sportsmanship, Uncle Jack and Luther linked arms like chorus girls and began kicking rhythmically to the tune “Give My Regards to Broadway.”

The young doctor smiled good-naturedly, but refused to go as far as taking part himself when Luther beckoned him to come and join the chorus line.

“I take it back!” Livia cried gaily to Krankeit from the bed. “I thought you were going to be one of those melancholy ones, but you’re not a bad chap at all—God, if there’s one thing depresses me it’s to have some mopey Hebe around when people are trying to be cheerful, don’t you agree?”

At this remark, a nervous tic appeared in Krankeit’s cheek, but he soon mastered it and said to Uncle Jack, “Well, I’m glad to see you’re up out of bed and getting the kinks out of your bones. Mustn’t overdo it though. Mustn’t take on too much the first day. . . . Careful your bandage doesn’t come off. . . .”

Uncle Jack’s dressing
had
come undone, and he was waving a loose yard of gauze, can-can style, in time to the step. Now, with amusing versatility, he changed again, metamorphosing into a gorilla—lumbering about, scratching himself under the arms, and pouting his lips disdainfully.

“Sid has become a real
scream
since he got that bang in the head,” Livia commented.

The “ape” lurched to where Ida, deathly pale, was still reading
Popular Mechanics;
gripping her magazine tightly, she kept her eyes trained on the page and did not look up.

Uncle Jack made an insulting monkey-face in her direction, and turned to the wall. He seemed to be making some rapid adjustments in his costume. From time to time, he made a soft hooting sound in imitation of a chimpanzee. Then, finally ready, he turned to face the crowd—he had undone his bathrobe, lifted his nightgown, and, with a fatuous leer, was exposing his member!

Good Lord!
Candy thought in panic.
Not again!

“You can’t say he’s not the life of the party,” Livia quipped in high spirits.

Poor Luther, who had taken one brief look at what was happening, had buried his face in a chair, like an ostrich.

Uncle Jack stood not more than two feet from Ida and cynically waved his member at her. At last she looked up from her magazine. “Well—uh—well, perhaps something should be done,” she suggested in a discreetly unruffled voice, catching Krankeit’s eye.

“Oh my no!” Krankeit declared, with a scowl of professional concern.

“Well, after all—I mean don’t you think—uh—” (The ape-man was
very
close to her. His gross organ virtually loomed in the corner of her sight.)

“Oh heavens no!” Krankeit assured her. “Perfectly okay. Best thing in the world for him.”

“Dr. Krankeit feels that the way to clear up our mental problems is to . . . to
masturbate,
Aunt Ida,” Candy explained.

Ida listened to this information calmly, but she had become rather green and was swallowing continuously.

“AH!”

Everyone turned and looked at Livia, who had suddenly staggered to her feet. She held her palm to her mouth as if to suppress a screech of fright, and, with the other hand, she pointed an accusing finger at Uncle Jack’s member.
“JACK! . . . AH!”
she gasped in certain recognition—and crumbled to the floor.

Uncle Jack and Luther set to work immediately to mimic her—falling and getting up in a series of imitations of people passing out from drink.

“Great Scott!” Krankeit exclaimed, looking at Livia lying motionless on the floor. “We’d better get her to the dispensary at once! I’m afraid she’s had a bit
too much”
and, signifying to the others to continue with their fun, he lifted the unconscious young woman onto the wheeling-table and rolled her smoothly away.

Now that their audience was gone, and with Candy and Ida glaring at them, the two men finally stopped their cavorting and sat down exhausted on the bed.

“Whew!” panted Luther, trying to make it seem as if their insensate exhibition had been an innocent lark, “I don’t know when I’ve had a workout like that in the last six years.” He chuckled and glanced sheepishly at the women, who looked back at him in grim silence. “Well, Sidney,” he said, getting up and retrieving his shirt from the floor, “this has been an awfully pleasant visit, and I hope—uh—I hope we’ve helped you get your mind off your troubles a bit—”

“Wait a minute!” Uncle Jack said excitedly, and sprang from the bed. “I just thought of one we forgot to do!” and he began to hum the familiar strains of the Parisian “Apache Dance,” took several ominous strides, and froze ludicrously, having just knocked an imaginary Mademoiselle to the floor. “Right?” he said to Luther. “Come on!” he roared. “LET’S GO!” motioning for the chubby Luther to perform the painful role of the girl.

“Now Sidney, maybe we’d better not get started again,” Luther observed apprehensively. “You know the doctor just told you to take it easy—”

“COME ON!” Uncle Jack bellowed, and whether he was furious at his partner’s reluctance, or whether it was simply part of the dance, he stalked up to his brother-in-law and slapped him smartly in the face.

This was too much for Ida, who finally passed to the attack and began pushing Uncle Jack vigorously toward his bed.

“Hands off!” he shouted in astonished protest. “Hands off, you sow!”

I can’t stand another minute of this, Candy thought. Good Grief! And she rushed blindly out of the room to find help.

She flew down the hall, and with a little sob of despair, flung open the first door she came to, but was startled to find herself again in the service room, full of mops and buckets, where she’d made the acquaintance of Irving Krankeit’s mother.

It seemed impossible . . . she could have sworn that the tiny room was whole floors and corridors distant, tucked away in some obscure corner of the colossal building. Hadn’t it taken her ten minutes to find her way back from it to Daddy’s room?

She stepped to the shelf and moved aside some packages of detergent. . . . Yes, there was the little sliding panel!

It was still partially open, and as she looked she heard someone in the amphitheater say something that sounded like “Ping!” Candy had an almost physical premonition warning her not to look; but some still louder inner force fiercely compelled her to peer into the vastness below. . . .

“Chiang!”

Aunt Livia—naked, unconscious, attached by the wrists to the vertical operating table—looked like a handsome animal offered for sacrifice.

Seated immediately behind her was Krankeit. The young doctor sat silently as if meditating on the form before him, then he took something from a table at his side, leaned forward, and inserted it in Livia’s girlish right buttock.

“Moo!” he said distinctly, settling back into his seat.

This was Krankeit’s “ancient Chinese therapy,” Candy thought, with a tinge of reverence. These were the Chinese pins with which he had treated
her,
the same silver pins. . . .

“Dung!”

. . . that he was now sticking in Livia.

Candy suddenly felt very tired; and beyond the fatigue was an aching uneasiness which wasn’t due solely to her resentment at seeing Livia occupy
her
place on the tilting-table. . . . I feel as if something were coming to an end, she thought. My childhood perhaps. . . .

“Tch’ou!” Krankeit said, and sat back.

In a minute though, he was forward again with another pin. Back and forth he went, like someone giving artificial respiration very slowly; and the pins grew into clusters like two little bouquets, one on each of Livia’s handsome tushy. . . .

“Moung!”

How defenseless Aunt Livia looked! . . . Strapped to the table, naked and unconscious . . . and a few hours ago it had been
her.
Of course Krankeit was a doctor, Candy reflected, but he was also a man! And Livia
was
beautiful. It seemed so unfair somehow, and Candy had a momentary impulse to take off her own things and rush into the amphitheater.

“Ping!”

Oh I just wish that it would stop happening! she thought, cross and weary. I just wish I were someplace else. . . .

“Meeow!” (There was a note of tense excitement in Krankeit’s voice now which grew stronger with each pin.)

. . . someplace far from Racine. . . . I’m tired of that darn old college too.

“Fu!” Krankeit cried. “Feng! Jao!” (putting in three pins in quick succession).

“I don’t
care,”
Candy said to herself, “I don’t want to see Aunt Livia anymore . . . or Dr. Krankeit either.”

“Wowee!”

One of Krankeit’s hands, Candy noticed, was briskly engaged in his lap. Why—why he’s
abusing
himself, she thought, her eyebrows shooting up.

At that precise moment, she thought of New York City, and decided to go there . . .

“Wu Shih! Wu Shih!” Krankeit yelled.

. . . someplace where she knew no one, and where no one knew her . . .

“POW! FANG DANG POW!” Krankeit screamed triumphantly, dropping forward from his chair, to lie utterly spent, face down and apparently unconscious, on the floor of the great amphitheater.

. . . where she could lose the old Candy in the nameless city streets, she thought, where she could finally . . . be
herself.

T
HERE WAS ONLY
one tree on Grove Street. This was the sort of thing Candy was quick to notice, and to love. “Look,” she would say softly, squeezing someone’s hand. “Isn’t it too
much!
I could just hug myself everytime I pass it!”

And that was where she met the hunchback.

It was late one airless summer day, when the sky over Greenwich Village was the color of lead. It had just begun to rain, and Candy was standing back in a shallow doorway, waiting for her bus. Dreamily humming a little Elizabethan tune, feeling fresh and quietly joyful in her new mandarin rain-cloak, hugging it to her—she saw him. He was out in the midst of the downpour, leaning against the tree, staring into the window display of the men’s shop on the corner. He was standing very still, though from time to time there seemed to be a slight movement of his back, as if he might be consciously pressing his hump against the tree.

Candy’s humming softened as she watched him, and her heart beat a little faster.
Oh, the fullness of it!
she thought,
the terrible, beautiful fullness of life!
And a great mass of feeling rose in her throat at the pity she felt for her father so shut away from it all, never to know life, never even to suspect what it was all about. She put her arms around her delightful body and hugged herself, so glad at being alive, really alive, and her eyes brimmed with shimmering gratitude.

Just then two boys passed the corner, dark coats turned up, heads half hidden out of the rain. One of them noticed the hunchback and gave a derisive snort:

“Wha’cha doin’, Mac—gittin’ yer nuts off?”

He kept nudging his companion, who wouldn’t even bother to look.

“The guy’s gittin’ his
nuts
off fer chrissake!” he shouted again as they walked on.

The hunchback gazed after them oddly.

“Rubatubdub!” he said. “Rubadubtub!”

Candy hadn’t heard either one of them distinctly, but there was no mistaking the tone of contempt, the obvious effort to hurt and humiliate. “The ignorant fools!” she said half aloud, and gave a little stamp of impatience. At that moment the bus rounded the corner beyond; she frowned as she watched it approach, but just before it reached her, she took a deep breath and walked away from the stop, then casually over to where the hunchback was standing.

“Hi!”
she said, giving him a wonderfully warm smile and tossing back the hood of her cloak to feel the fresh rain on her face. . . . Wasn’t it just too much, she thought joyfully, standing here in the rain, in Greenwich Village, talking to a hunchback—when she
should
have been at her job ten minutes ago! . . . She considered the explanation she would have to give, the attempt to make them understand, and she was so happy and proud of herself she could have wept.

“That’s
my
tree, you know,” she said instead, smiling like a mischievous child, then laughing gaily at her own foolishness. “I pretend that it is,” she admitted, almost shyly. “The
only
tree on Grove Street! Oh, I do love it so!” She leaned forward and touched it gently, half closing her eyes, and then she gave the hunchback another tender smile.

The shop on this corner of Grove was a man’s underwear shop, and the hunchback’s eyes devoured another crotch or two before he looked up. He was also smiling. He supposed she was a policewoman.
“Rubatubdub!”
he said, agitating his hump vigorously against the tree. Getting run in was part of his kick.

“Three men in a tub!” cried Candy, laughing in marvel at their immediate rapport. How simple! she thought. How wonderfully, beautifully simple the important things are! And how it had so completely escaped her father! She would have given twenty years of her life to have shared the richness of this moment with her father—he who had said that poems were “impractical”! The poor darling dummy! Why
only
a poem could capture it! Only a poem could trap the elusiveness, the light-like subtlety, the vapor-edge of a really big thing, and lead it, coax it past . . . a poem, or music perhaps . . . yes, of course, music. And she began to hum softly, swaying her body a little, her fingers distractedly caressing the tree. She felt very relaxed with the hunchback.

And he was still smiling too—but that first gray glimmer of hope had died from his eyes, and they narrowed a bit now as he decided, quite simply, that she was a nut.