V. (50 page)

Lenox is grand, are you digging me, Rachel,

Broadening a's by the width of an h'll

Be something we've never tried . . .

Up in the country of Alden and Walden,

Country to glow sentimental and bald in

With you by my side,

How can it go wrong?

Hey, Rachel [snap, snap-on one and three]: you coming along . . .

She'd hung up halfway through. Winsome sat by the phone, holding the slip. Just sat.

II

Esther had indeed got her ass in a sling. Her emotional ass, anyway. Rachel had found her earlier that afternoon crying down in the laundry room.

"Wha," Rachel said. Esther only bawled louder.

"Girl," gently. "Tell Rach."

"Get off my back." So they chased each other around the washers and centrifuges and in and out of the flapping sheets, rag rugs and brassieres of the drying room.

"Look, I want to help you, is all." Esther had got tangled in a sheet. Rachel stood helpless in the dark laundry room, yelling at her. Washing machine in the next room ran all at once amok; a cascade of soapy water came funneling through the doorway, bearing down on them. Rachel with a foul expression kicked off her Capezios, hiked her skirt up and headed for a mop.

She hadn't been swabbing five minutes when Pig Bodine stuck his head around the door. "You are doing that wrong. Where did you ever learn to handle a swab."

"Here," she said. "You want a swab? I got your swab." She ran at him, spinning the mop. Pig retreated.

"What's wrong with Esther. I wrapped into her on the way down." Rachel wished she knew. By the time she'd dried the floor and run up the fire escape and in the window to their apartment Esther was, of course, gone.

"Slab," Rachel figured. Slab was on the phone after half a ring.

"I'll let you know if she shows."

"But Slab -"

"Wha," said Slab.

Wha. Oh, well. She hung up.

Pig was sitting in the transom. Automatically she turned on the radio for him. Little Willie John came on singing Fever.

"What's wrong with Esther," she said, for something to say.

"I asked you that," said Pig. "I bet she's knocked up."

"You would." Rachel had a headache. She headed for the bathroom to meditate.

Fever was touching them all.

Pig, evil-minded Pig, inferred right for once. Esther showed up at Slab's looking like any traditional mill hand, seamstress or shop girl Done Wrong: dull hair, puffy face, looking heavier already in the breasts and abdomen.

Five minutes and she had Slab railing. He stood before Cheese Danish # 56, a cockeyed specimen covering an entire wall, dwarfing him in his shadowy clothes as he waved arms, tossed his forelock.

"Don't tell me. Schoenmaker won't give you a dime. I know that already. You want to put a small bet on this? I say it'll come out with a big hook nose."

That shut her up. Kindly Slab was of the shock-treatment school.

"Look," he grabbed a pencil. "It is no time of year to go to Cuba. Hotter than Nueva York, no doubt, off season. But for all his Fascist tendencies, Battista has one golden virtue: abortion he maintains is legal. Which means you get an M.D. who knows what he's about, not some fumbling amateur. It's clean, it's safe, it's legal, above all, it's cheap."

"It's murder."

"You've turned R. C. Good show. For some reason it always becomes fashionable during a Decadence."

"You know what I am," she whispered.

"We'll leave that go. I wish I did." He stopped a minute because he felt himself going sentimental. He finagled around with figures on a scrap of vellum. "For 300," he said, "we can get you there and back. Including meals if you feel like eating."

"We."

"The Whole Sick Crew. You can do it inside a week, down to Havana and back. You'll be yo-yo champion."

"No."

So they talked metaphysics while the afternoon waned. Neither felt he was defending or trying to prove anything important. It was like playing one-up at a party, or Botticelli. They quoted to each other from Liguorian tracts, Galen, Aristotle, David Riesman, T. S. Eliot.

"How can you say there's a soul there. How can you tell when the soul enters the flesh. Or whether you even have a soul?"

"It's murdering your own child, is what it is."

"Child, schmild. A complex protein molecule, is all."

"I guess on the rare occasions you bathe you wouldn't mind using Nazi soap made from one of those six million Jews."

"All right -" he was mad - "show me the difference."

After that it ceased being logical and phony and became emotional and phony. They were like a drunk with dry heaves: having brought up and expelled all manner of old words which had always, somehow, sat wrong, they then proceeded to fill the loft with futile yelling trying to heave up their own living tissue, organs which had no business anywhere but where they were.

As the sun went dawn she broke out of a point-by-point condemnation of Slab's moral code to assault Cheese Danish # 56, charging at it with windmilling nails.

"Go ahead," Slab said, "it will help the texture." He was on the phone. "Winsome's not home." He jittered the receiver, dialed information. "Where can I get 300 bills," he said. "No, the banks are closed . . . I am against usury." He quoted to the phone operator from Ezra Pound's Cantos.

"How come," he wondered, "all you phone operators talk through your nose." Laughter. "Fine, we'll try it sometime." Esther yelped, having just broken a fingernail. Slab hung up. "It fights back," he said. "Baby, we need 300. Somebody must have it." He decided to call all his friends who had savings accounts. A minute later this list was exhausted and he was no closer to financing Esther's trip south. Esther was tramping around looking for a bandage. She finally had to settle for a wad of toilet paper and a rubber band.

"I'll think of something," he said. "Stick by Slab, babe. Who is a humanitarian." They both knew she would. To whom else? She was the sticking sort.

So Slab sat thinking and Esther waved the paper ball at the end of her finger to a private tune, maybe an old love song. Though neither would admit it they also waited for Raoul and Melvin and the Crew to arrive for the party; while all the time the colors in the wall-size painting were shifting, reflecting new wavelengths to compensate for the wasting sun.

Rachel, out looking for Esther, didn't arrive at the party till late. Coming up the seven flights to the loft she passed at each landing, like frontier guards, nuzzling couples, hopelessly drunken boys, brooding types who read out of and scrawled cryptic notes in paper books stolen from Raoul, Slab and Melvin's library; all of whom informed her how she had missed all the fun. What this fun was she found out before she'd fairly wedged her way into the kitchen where all the Good People were.

Melvin was holding forth on his guitar, in an improvised folk song, about how humanitarian a cove his roommate Slab was; crediting him with being (a) a neo-Wobbly and reincarnation of Joe Hill, (b) the world's leading pacifist, (c) a rebel with taproots in the American Tradition, (d) in militant opposition to Fascism, private capital, the Republican administration and Westbrook Pegler.

While Melvin sang Raoul provided Rachel with a kind of marginal gloss on the sources of Melvin's present adulation.

It seemed earlier Slab had waited till the room was jammed to capacity, then mounted the marble toilet and called for silence.

"Esther here is pregnant," he announced, "and needs 300 bucks to go to Cuba and have an abortion." Cheering, warmhearted, grinning ear to ear, juiced, the Whole Sick Crew dug deep into their pockets and the wellsprings of a common humanity to come up with loose change, worn bills, and a few subway tokens, all of which Slab collected in an old pith helmet with Greek letters on it, left over from somebody's fraternity weekend years ago.

Surprisingly it came to $295 and some change. Slab with a flourish produced a ten he'd borrowed fifteen minutes before his speech from Fergus Mixolydian, who had just received a Ford Foundation grant and was having more than wistful thoughts about Buenos Aires, from which there is no extradition.

If Esther objected verbally to the proceedings, no record of it exists, there being too much noise in the room, for one thing. After the collection Slab banded her the pith helmet and she was helped up on the toilet, where she made a brief but moving acceptance speech. Amid the ensuing applause Slab roared "Off to Idlewild," or something, and they were both lifted bodily and carried out of the loft and down the stairs. The only gauche note to the evening was struck by one of their bearers, an undergraduate and recent arrival on the Sick Scene, who suggested they could save all the trouble of a trip to Cuba and use the money for another party if they induced a miscarriage by dropping Esther down the stairwell. He was quickly silenced.

"Dear God," said Rachel. She had never seen so many red faces, the linoleum wet with so much spilled alcohol, vomit, wine.

"I need a car," she told Raoul.

"Wheels," Raoul screamed. "Four wheels for Rach." But the Crew's generosity had been exhausted. Nobody listened. Maybe from her lack of enthusiasm they'd deduced she was about to roar off to Idlewild and try to stop Esther. They weren't having any.

It was only at that point, early in the morning, that Rachel thought of Profane. He would be off shift now. Dear Profane. An adjective which hung unvoiced in the party's shivaree, hung in her most secret cortex to bloom - she helpless against it - only far enough to surround her 4' 10" with an envelope of peace. Knowing all the time Profane too was wheelless.

"So," she said. All it was was no wheels on Profane, the boy a born pedestrian. Under his own power which was also power over her. Then what was she doing: declaring herself a dependent? As if here were the heart's authentic income-tax form, tortuous enough, mucked up with enough polysyllabic words to take her all of twenty-two years to figure out. At least that long: for surely it was complicated, being a duty you could rightfully avoid with none of fancy's Feds ever to worry about tracking you down on it, but. That "but." If you did take the trouble, even any first step, it meant stacking income against output; and who knew what embarrassments, exposes of self that might drag you into?

Strange the places these things can happen in. Stranger that they ever do happen. She headed for the phone. It was in use. But she could wait.

III

Profane arrived at Winsome's to find Mafia wearing only the inflatable brassiere and playing a game of her own invention called Musical Blankets with three beaux who were new to Profane. The record being stopped at random was Hank Snow singing It Don't Hurt Any More. Profane went to the icebox and got beer; was thinking of calling Paola when the phone rang.

"Idlewild?" he said. "Maybe we can borrow Roony's car. The Buick. Only I can't drive."

"I can," Rachel said, "stand by."

Profane with a rueful look back at the buoyant Mafia and her friends, moseyed down the fire stairs to the garage. No Buick. Only McClintic Sphere's Triumph, locked, keys gone. Profane sat on the Triumph's hood, surrounded by his inanimate buddies from Detroit. Rachel was there in fifteen minutes.

"No car," he said, "we're screwed."

"Oh dear." She told him why they had to get to Idlewild.

"I don't see why you're so excited. She wants to get her uterus scraped, let her."

What Rachel should have said then was "You callous son of a bitch," slugged him and sought transportation elsewhere. But having come to him with a certain fondness - perhaps only satisfied with this new, maybe temporary, definition of peace - she tried to reason.

"I don't know if it's murder or not," she said. "Nor care. How close is close? I'm against it because of what it does to the abortionee. Ask the girl who's had one."

For a second Profane thought she was talking about herself. There came this impulse to get away. She was acting weird tonight.

Because Esther is weak, Esther is a victim. She will come out of the ether hating men, believing they're all liars and still knowing she'll take what she can get whether he's careful or not. She'll get to where she can take on anybody: neighborhood racketeers, college boys, arty types, daft and delinquent, because it's something she can't get along without."

"Don't, Rachel. Esther, wha. Are you in love with her, you sweat it so much."

"I am."

"Close your mouth," she told him. "What is your name, Pig Bodine? You know what I'm saying. How many times have you told me about under the street, and on the street, and in the subway."

"Them," chopfallen. "Sure, but."

"I mean I love Esther like you love the dispossessed, the wayward. What else can I feel? For somebody who guilt's such an aphrodisiac for. Up to now she's been selective. But when she's felt it, feeling always this own breed of half-assed love for Slab, and the pig Schoenmaker. Going for these exhausted, ulcerous, lonely rejects."

"Slab and you were -" kicking a tire - "horizontal once."

"OK." Quiet. "It is myself, what I could slide back into, maybe a girl-victim underneath this red mop -" she had one little hand pushed up from under into her hair and was slowly lifting the thick mane of it, while Profane watched and began to grow erect - "part of me that I can see in her. Just as it is Profane the Depression Kid, that lump that wasn't aborted, that became an awareness on the floor of one old Hooverville shack in '32, it's him you see in every no-name drifter, mooch, square's tenant, him you love."

Who was she talking about? Profane'd had all night to rehearse but never expected this. He hung his head and kicked inanimate tires, knowing they'd take revenge when he was looking for it least. He was afraid now to say anything.

She held her hair up, eyes gone all rainy; came off the fender she'd been leaning back on and stood spraddle-legged, hips poised in a bow, his direction.

"Slab and I rotated our 90 degrees because we were incompatible. The Crew lost all glamour for me, I grew up, I don't know what happened. But he will never leave it, though his eyes are open and he sees as much as I do. I didn't want to be sucked in, was all. But then you . . ."