In the Slammer With Carol Smith (15 page)

‘On the circuit, here and in Europe—barefoot most of the time, which they insisted on. They finally said they wanted to return to their families. Very politely, because this I couldn’t argue. But really they were tired, very tired, of being just theater. They wouldn’t be that at home. But to me—who’d enticed them here, they couldn’t say.’

‘Because you’re the—the theater person?’

He smiles. ‘Good phrase. Yes, I wrote their songs or arranged them, and the little dance-dramas we found we could do.… Know what “business” means in the theater? Not money—though I took care of that. It means what actors do other than speaking: props, interaction, the physical movement of the play. I’m no playwright, though I can wordsmith, a bit. I can carpenter a song. Put a time clock on the drumbeat. Push the presentation along. I’m the “business” chap. But that alone wasn’t why they held back from me.’

He wants me to ask. Compelled by his talking to me this way, I can. ‘Why, then?’

‘Because we had been brothers. But I wasn’t going home.’

I get up from my chair.

‘More tea?’ he says quickly. He wants me to stay. I don’t want the tea, but I can be polite. ‘Thanks.’

While he puts the kettle on I go to the window that’s not boxed in, and look down. I know the garment district. Street is empty now. By morning it’ll be a bramble of people. I like to walk through that guttural, hearing the know-how that unites the smart, anxious girls, the fat men clamping cigars—a street fair. ‘He’s bankrupt,’ you hear. ‘Him—he’s flush.’ I press against the window-pane. The dank feel and smell reassures me. The outside is there. ‘You’ve got a lamppost down there. How lucky.’ The New York ones are too elegant, like out of an old movie. Gangs used to bust them. I saw one uprooted once. But now they don’t bother; they’re used to them. This one has a solitary glow.

‘The men liked it. At this time of night especially.’

I am still here, yet half outside. ‘If there were somebody leaning against it, it could be a painting.’

I hear his chuckle from behind me. ‘You’re the painter.’

‘I’m no artist. Even in occupational therapy, the hospital, they couldn’t make me be.’

‘There are artists who have no art.’

‘That crap—’ I say without turning. The word slips from me. I feel the old elastic quick-sass between the ears. ‘You mean I have the temperament. Without the goods.’

—No, I don’t mean, Dr. Camacho said. I mean—you’re trying to make art of your life. When you should be living it.—

‘Can’t say what you’re doing in that line,’ Martyn says from behind me. But it’s clear you’re doing something.… Excuse me.’ He goes down the hall.

He’s getting too close. I have to head him off.

—‘No, you can’t draw, or sing—’ Dr. Camacho said. Says. ‘And though you have a flair for language, many do. Historians, say. And occasionally—doctors.’ He coughs, waits. I don’t speak. ‘Carol,’ he says. He knows how that affects me. ‘Carol, what you have is the single vision. Carried too far. Saints have it. You have the tenacity of a nun. But you’re not a saint. And a hospital tries to humanize, Carol. You’re just afraid of the doubleness of the world.’—

All I answered was: ‘I hate the word “flair.”’

You have to head them all off.

‘Excuse me,’ I say when he returns. ‘I hear old dialogues.’ But when I wheel around the drums confront me. Their owners have returned to the family. ‘You have a family there, Martyn?’

The water is boiling on the tiny range. He pours some into the pot and serves up. ‘I had a wife. She was an Anglo but she could pass for a colored. Old Cornish stock from the silver mines, maybe with Romany mixed in. We met in Britain. She joked Africa was the first place she felt warm. Now she’s back in England, married again, and has the family we couldn’t settle to. I still hear from her. Once a year.’ He too is looking into a distance. ‘She’s a New Ager now. Those couples who live in caravans, trippers on other peoples’ land? Christmas, she’ll send me some address I can reply to. Plus pics of the children we didn’t have. Products of the caravan life she mistook mine for.… That fill you in?’

‘Quite.’ I say it with a Brit accent. He smiles, but before I can smile back for a joke shared, he says: ‘On the road—a professional—you ever want a family? Or say, if it happened to you?’

He’s not asking if I screw. Or would with him. He asks straight, this Wall.

‘I would have to learn, first. How to be in a family.’

‘Just having one seems to do that for most.’

When a Wall is bitter, you’re reminded it’s a man. ‘You were very fond of her.’

He nods.

‘The aunts who brought me up—I was fond too. But I’d have been fonder of the mother one, had she ever said. She never did.’

‘You are half-and-half.’ His tone takes it for granted. ‘So am I. My mother was the Brit. But braver than yours. She kept me by her.’

‘Oh—they kept me by.’ It trails out, expressing the way I’d felt exactly. So when he grips my hands I let him.

‘Oh, Carol. Unidentified?’

Confiding is simpler than therapy. You nod.

He drops my hands carefully. ‘I was kept, and acknowledged. It was given out—not by us, by the other Anglos, that our Indian doctor had sired me. But our black servants knew it was one of their own kin. And so did the community. My mother carried a gun everywhere. My father couldn’t, being still, on and off—in the household. She was pressured to say she’d been raped. So they could dispose of him. Instead, she made it known we were a family in a way—she and the young school teacher who was our major-domo’s grandson. And me. My father was sent back to Jo-burg, where he’d been educated. He was shot in our garden, on a visit to the house. When I was two.’

‘Who by?’

‘The grandfather.’

‘Her father.’

‘Oh no. His own. Though it is probable her Brit husband supplied the gun. So honor was done. Since our major-domo kept his job. And so I grew.’

Violence hushes me. I’m in awe of it. In the slammer I knew enough to get out of the way. But the hospital had to dose me extra to stop the shivering, if I witnessed any. They tell you it’s because you really want to do damage too.

‘My dialogues took place in our garden,’ he says. ‘Every shadow spoke.’

We sit in silence. The kind you can share with a person suitable for conversation.

There are few shadows in this room, except maybe around the line of drums against the glass wall. The room is unlived in. That smell of bread-and-blood currents which people exude has faded out. ‘I like lived-in places. Not that I have to meet the people involved. That’s peculiar of me, isn’t it, Martyn?’ His name comes so naturally.

Most people would evade. He nods. ‘And when you’re so easy to meet.’

‘I never think of meeting, or being met.’

‘That’s why.’

‘No, it’s depression. They said.’

He gives them the raspberry. That glorious rudeness.

‘I used to whistle—’ I say low. ‘But not through my teeth.’

‘You can admit that out loud, Carol. All the examiners are asleep.’

Except him?

‘I met my grandfather—’ I say. ‘I never let on I knew who he was. He delivered our coal.’

We’re sitting up straight in the two bony armless chairs. His face is clean now except for the blond stubble. I see the wet start in his eyes. Mine begin to fill as well. ‘Funny—’ I say. ‘I never bawled over that before.’

‘Go ahead. Here’s my shoulder—if you’ll allow.’

It’s only a wall to lean against, as the tears in my throat granulate. ‘I never cry—’ I say, as my gullet fills with slush. My neck cracks forward. Under my forehead his shirt is smooth. Am I bawling for having been inside of places for so long—or for getting out?’ Why’m I spilling my guts?’ I bawl. ‘My father won the Purple Heart.’

As the sludge of tears racks me, the wall grows arms. When we stand up we’re bracing each other.

‘Posthumous?’ he says.

‘Um.’

‘So you never knew him either.’

‘Oh no. There was a picture of him. In the American Legion Hall.’

Under our feet the newspapers have rucked up. I bend to smooth them.

‘That’s all right, don’t. I got what I needed.’

‘I should go, then. It’s getting light.’

‘To walk? Little early for that.’

‘There’re no rules for it,’ The strap of the Shelter-Pak tangles, the bag’s only fault. Broad as a belt, the harness takes fiddling to get comfortable in.

‘That thing your badge, Carol? Or your cross?’

It does weigh. ‘Maybe it’s my saviour.’

He doesn’t laugh. ‘Like my glass enclosure. Look at it.’

It’s merely that translucent paning common to basement windows, in a pattern of hexagons if you look close. But light is light.

‘Salesman who subleased me had a refrigerated closet there. For his mink samples. So I tore out the beaverboard, put in glass you could imagine distance beyond. Only an illusion. But the troupe needed it. Western rooms are hard on them.’

‘So are they on Westerners.’

He ducks his chin to that. ‘But you had a pad.’

‘Part time. Too much of the time.’

He kicks the
Times
across the floor. ‘I’ll have to be off tomorrow, on any plane I can get. And you, scatting off in this vast city, God knows where. The place is yours, if you’ll use it. As a favor.’

‘Favor?’

‘To a part-time friend. No obligation.’

The bag lies there like a wily octopus, the multiple catch on it glinting like an eye. ‘I’m just sorting things put. My obligations.’

He flails his arms. ‘Water my plants.’

The one window-sill is bare. The billboard clippings hang motionless, waiting for tomorrow’s breeze. The drums wait. ‘Oh Martyn. You have no plants.’

Why am I smiling? And he the grim one.

‘Park that heavy jacket you’re wearing then. Until you really need it.’ He toes the backpack. ‘Give this guard dog of yours a night’s rest. Throw yourself on the mercy of the city, if you must. Just keep this, will you? And use it? Once in a while?’ He throws a keychain on the table. Scowls at it as if it might rat on him. ‘Truth is—I can’t bear to lose sight of you.’

A rich voice; as an actor he can’t help that. But pushing no lie. And to be answered truly.

‘Being kept in sight by one person—is not on my agenda. That’s what people in houses do.’

‘Hah. So that’s your vocation? Walking the open road, watched only by God?’

‘God’s not on the agenda.’

‘Somebody has to be. A life that’s not watched—counts for what?’

‘It’s my routine. Or will be. And maybe that will count. And if there are enough of us out there, strong enough to be seen—then people will watch.’

Down in the street below, traffic is beginning to whir. Trucks will be bringing in the furs, guards swaggering as they open vault doors. The fruit vendor will be opening his cart. Not that they will much regard my sort. But we will be passing.

‘Hah. Knew there was something. But people get used to—people like that. In the end, you’ll be the only one watching. Watching yourself.’

‘Maybe. But better than tossing a bomb was.’

When you say your secret you have the impression that for a minute the world stops. It doesn’t, of course. Even I know that much about the audience.

‘So that’s it—’ Martyn is repeating, hushed. ‘So that’s what they got you for.’

‘No. I meant to be—in on it. But when it happened, I wasn’t there.’

He groans. ‘So then?’

‘So then I was nowhere. I cracked up.’

‘Nowhere.’ He looks beat. ‘I’ve been there.’

‘You?’

‘I didn’t—crack. But I’ve an idea what it’s like.’

‘How come?’ This is how we used to ask each other, on the ward.

‘My country turned upside down, remember?’

The news sheets on the floor are crushed, but still powerful. ‘There’s years of those I’ll have to bone up on.’

‘Well, you won’t find me in too many of those accounts. Not personally. I meant to be. But I wasn’t.’

‘You helped sing the songs.’

‘So my mother counsels. And of course, I helped her.… You remind me of her, somewhat.’

‘I—remind you—of her?’

‘Not in looks. She began as a tall, spiky blond. And still has the manner.… No, in the way you’re both always—running for Parliament.’ His smile is mischievous. ‘She is actually, once again. That’s one reason why I’m going back for a spell. To see her through.’

‘Me? Running for a parliament? You’re out of your skull.’

‘Think about it.… Meanwhile, you don’t have to sleep here, if it goes against principle. Drop in. Stationer’s down the block keeps my daily paper for me. Bone up.’ He grins. ‘Feed the cat.’

‘No thanks. I had a bad cat experience. More than one.’ I’m remembering the cats the neighbor boy hung in the aunts’ barn. I look up at him. Height determines how far a person must stretch, or bow. The aunts were exactly of a height; it helped them blend. ‘Not all memory is a joy to recover, is it? But when you’re given it back in a lump you get all of it.’

He shakes his head, but not as if I puzzle him. ‘Agreed. But I’d like to do more than remember you.’

‘I’ll remember you, Martyn.’

‘How would you remember me, or anybody much? It’s not in your scheme.’

‘That way! That you credit me with a scheme. Even though—’

‘Though what?’

‘You mayn’t approve.’

‘That’s not me you’d be remembering, Carol Smith. That’s still you.’

Those steady eyes shame me. Gray—I’ll not forget those. ‘What you just said; I’ll hear that. I’ll hear how we talked. And how, when we didn’t—we were still company.’

‘Were? That what the doctors taught you? To stash everything in the past?’

‘For me the present was a long time coming. Hard to believe I would have one. And when I got into it … I mangled it. Swinging like mad. Like being with somebody would tell me the time of day.’

He grasps my hands. ‘I see you, Carol.’

‘You and me—it’s like we’re flirting with our minds. Not just with sex.’

‘No.’ He squeezes my hands, drops them. ‘I mean—yes.’

‘I don’t even know your gender for sure.’

His mouth moves like hypnotized. ‘Not to worry.’

‘It’s just that these days it’s polite—not to assume.’

‘Excuse me then, if I’ve taken you being female for granted.’