The Haunted Life Page 5

  2

  “Petey!”

  Peter was lying on his back on the bed, staring at the dark slanting ceiling, almost dozing.

  “Petey!”

  It was Garabed calling from the side yard, nineteen-year-old Garabed Tourian who still called for Peter from the side yard with hands cupped to mouth as he had been doing for ten years.

  Peter ran to the small window facing the Quigley house next door and pressed his nose against the screen. Garabed was standing in the moonlight below, slender and casual in white shirtsleeves, smoking a cigarette.

  “Hey Garabed!” greeted Peter. “What time is it?”

  “About ten-thirty I guess.”

  Peter yawned: “What are you doing?”

  “Nothing. Come on out . . .”

  Peter stretched his arms: “Where shall we go?”

  “Anywhere,” said Garabed. “Come on.”

  Peter turned on the floor lamp and found his cigarettes. He picked up a worn copy of the Pocket Book of Verse, turned out the light, and went downstairs. His father was back in the front room listening to a mystery thriller over the big Philco radio. Rose and the others had gone home.

  “Your Armenian is outside,” said Mr. Martin.

  Peter went into the kitchen. Aunt Marie sat at the table sipping a coke over the Boston Daily Record, intent on Walter Winchell.

  “Don’t come home at six o’clock tomorrow morning,” she said.

  Peter mumbled, “I won’t,” and opened the refrigerator door. He picked up two bottles of Coca-Cola and went out the back way. Diane was in the entry replacing a mop in a pail.

  “Kewpie was sick again. You better take that damned old cat down to the Humane Society.”

  “Don’t be stupid,” cried Peter with annoyance. “He’s sick from something he ate. That’s cat’s healthier and younger than you are.” Diane was standing peeved, with arms akimbo, when Peter gently closed the door in her face.

  He could hear her yelling: “It’s your old cat. Clean up after him yourself!”

  Garabed had plucked a rose from the Quigley bush and twined the stem in his black hair. He leaned loosely against a dark tree trunk.

  “Here,” said Peter, handing over a coke. “Hell, I guess I’ve been sleeping. I was reading Halper at nine o’clock or so . . .”

  They sat on the front porch steps. The moon had risen over the trees down the street, shrinking and whitening as it rose.

  “Oh moon, thy sideways sadness,” quoted Garabed with a dour smile. “O compassionate moon!”

  Peter grinned: “Don’t make fun of my great poem.”

  Garabed turned an olive-skinned, dark-eyed face on the other. “I’m not making fun of it. I think it’s good. I’m quoting it. You know I have the only existing copy in my possession.” He smiled, lifting the bottle to drink. “‘Supreme Reality’ . . . a poem in four parts, by Peter Martin. It’s good, Pierre. An ardent lyrical outburst. I cherish it.”

  Peter finished his coke and set it on the steps. “It’s not good poetry, certainly. It’s a riot of free verse. Too much Whitman in it.”

  “That’s alright—you’re a prose writer. I’m the verse writer on this street.”

  “Dubious distinctions for North Street.”

  “I spent the whole afternoon,” said Garabed, “in the library reading the Encyclopedia Americana. God, what a job it would be to read the whole thing! I spent two hours reading about Birmingham, Alabama, alone. Steel manufacturing. Cotton . . .”

  “What’s the idea?”

  “I don’t know. I had nothing to do. I went to a show at five o’clock, one of those God-awful Republic Pictures. I don’t know why I did that either. Coming out, I met George Breton. He says not to forget Saturday afternoon . . . baseball or something. I don’t know, I’m in a strange listless mood today. What did you do?”

  “I had to write those letters I told you about, to the people at Boston College.”

  Garabed took the rose out of his hair and stood up, smiling deeply.

  “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  Peter threw the empty bottles on the hammock and they started down the street.

  “How’s your father?” grinned Garabed.

  “Same as ever, Bed. A Coughlinite at heart. Part of his thinking is logical, I suppose . . .”

  “For instance?”

  “That part a sixty-year-old New England insurance salesman of commodious means should have . . . in contrast with that part two fresh kids like you and I should not have.”

  “What’s wrong with our thinking?” laughed Garabed defensively, flourishing the rose.

  “On the whole, it’s good. But we haven’t lived. We have only thought . . .”

  “Pete, for God’s sake, where did you pick that up? You sound like my own father!”

  “I don’t know—I’ve been thinking. I hate to be a fresh intellectual who scorns his elders. There’s something . . . oddly inorganic about it, or something.”

  “Inorganic?” screamed Garabed.

  “Well, anyway, what should we do tonight?”

  “I’m disillusioned tonight,” said Garabed. “I don’t care what I do . . .”

  “What disillusioned you: Birmingham, Alabama?”

  Garabed screamed again: “No! Claire’s letter caused my disillusionment. Birmingham, Alabama was a reaction.”

  “What’s Claire got to say?”

  “In my last letter I told her she resembled a lovely brown swallow. She replied I had stolen the phrase from Swinburne’s ‘Itylus’ . . .”

  “Come to the point. What hurt you?”

  Garabed raised his chin and looked down: “I am not hurt.”

  “You are too. Is she sore about anything? That night in Boston, for instance, when I got you drunk?”

  “God, no, she’s forgotten all about that—anyway, she never did mind. No, she’s peeved because I didn’t go to see her last week. To tell you the truth, I don’t care. This summer all I want to do is loll in the sun and read and swim and be silent. These amours of mine wear me out emotionally. God! I feel like a Dostoevsky character every time I mingle with the Boston crowd. I’m vowing a summer of silence. I must be silent even now . . .”

  Peter laughed and pushed Garabed away: “You crazy Armenian. How you’ve changed. I can remember when you were drooling and your main concern was how to outwit George away from his marbles.”

  They walked toward the railroad tracks, slashing through the tall grass. Peter chuckled: “Remember when you were my Hollywood reporter? You’d come to the yard and yell out my name and I’d come to the window and there you stood with your deadline.”

  Garabed smiled sadly: “I remember, I remember . . .”

  “Our one subscriber was poor Paul Dubois. We didn’t even know he was dying of cancer . . .”

  “I remember Paul Dubois. I’ll never forget the night he was sitting in the hammock in his backyard telling me about his trip to Cleveland or someplace. Poor dying youth. He used to buy your paper . . .”

  “Five cents a copy,” recollected Peter.

  “. . . and read it, just to please us, two snot-nosed kids. I’ll bet he’d have made a great man. He had the power of compassion.”

  Peter placed a hand on Garabed’s thin shoulder. “Power of compassion . . . the essence of Tourianism.”

  “Certainly,” smiled Garabed. Then, gravely: “The greatest men were those who had that power, sympathetic and understanding men . . . Christ, St. Francis, Dostoevsky, Lenin.”

  “I remember, I remember,” mocked Peter mildly.

  They crossed the shining, still warm railroad tracks and descended through a tangle of bushes toward a clearing by the water’s edge where sand had been spread to make a swimming beach.

  “You know that as well as I do,” remonstrated Garabed. “These were the men who suffered, the compassionate heroes of mankind, the lovers of humanity . . .”

  Garabed’s rose burned an otherworldly red in the moonlight.

  “I
t’s a beautiful thought, Bed, but it won’t withstand . . .”

  “Won’t withstand . . . what?”

  “I don’t know.” Peter sat in the sand and flicked his cigarette over the beach into the water. “Your creed is like some lovely fragile thing that can be swept away like a fume with the first breeze . . . compassion is not really a power, it’s more a weakness.”

  “Lovely and fragile,” echoed Garabed. “Pete, for God’s sake, life is lovely and fragile; look at this rose . . .”

  “I know,” Peter grinned. “Your compassion is no stronger. It will die . . . soon. There are forces so much stronger. I’m not commending them, but they will win out, these stronger forces.”

  “Christ’s compassion,” hissed Garabed, “has had more effect on the Western world than any other man’s force . . . be it Napoleon’s shrewdness or Bismarck’s whatever-he-had! Besides, the same applies to the East, where Buddha’s teachings live on.”

  “Poor Garabed. I don’t mean that. I’m talking about you yourself. You’re defenseless. You don’t dare to read Freud for fear of upsetting your emotional habits. Dostoevsky terrifies you with his Slavic portraits that remind you too much of yourself. You fear ugliness, you chase beauty and embrace it.”

  “So?”

  “So someday, something ugly and real will happen. Compassion will not help. Strength you will need, but you won’t have it. You’ll crack.”

  “Pierre,” purred Garabed, exhibiting the rose, “I’ll still have my sapphire.”

  Peter piled some sand to make a pillow and lay back. “Your sapphire. That’s just a symbol of beauty. Ugliness, when it storms you, will destroy your sapphire and leave you a hollow shell. Boo!”

  Across the river, the headlights of cars felt their way along the boulevard. The air smelled of river mud.

  “You’re wrong, Peter, completely wrong. Don’t start getting ‘prim glacial on definitions’ with me. You must have been reading the Partisan Review anyway.”

  Peter laughed.

  “Don’t laugh. Don’t you realize the Great Liberal Movement is founded on compassion? . . .”

  “Oh God you make it all so beautifully simple, Garabed, I only hope you’re right . . .”

  “Don’t you realize that progress, from Prometheus, down the ages to . . . to Lenin, has been the work of great and good men, men of faith? These men were not cynics, they believed in the soul of mankind, in the brotherhood of man. Look at Billie Saroyan!”

  “He’s your Armenian conspirator . . .”

  “Billie is a great and good writer, I don’t care what some people say. He’s compassionate, he feels for people and for the principles of the brotherhood of man; and besides,” grinned Garabed, “he writes such beautiful and sad stuff. Remember? That story called ‘The Warm, Quiet Valley of Home’? Saroyan and his cousin go out hunting and don’t kill anything. Let us salute the absent inhabitants of the world, his cousin said. That’s a noble thought, Saroyan said. They lifted their guns to their shoulders and pointed at nothing in the sky. To the dead, his cousin said. They fired the guns . . . the sound was half-crazy and half-tragic. To Kerop, Saroyan said. They fired again. To Harlan, his cousin said, and again they fired. To everyone who once lived on this earth and died, his cousin said. They fired the guns . . .”

  “That was wonderful,” Peter nodded.

  “Oh, and remember . . . ‘it’s the poor breaking heart.’ He means life’s sadness. Saroyan has heart, Pete, that’s why I love him . . .”

  Peter, lying on his back, was staring up at a skyful of rich, nodding stars. The river rustled behind Garabed’s words.

  “‘There’s a barrel-organ caroling across a golden street in the city where the sun sinks low . . .’ By God, Saroyan could have written that. He has that eye that picks out the tragi-comic everywhere, the beautiful and the sad. Pete, honestly, it will be one of the great moments of my life when I meet him.”

  “It would be for me too.”

  “We’ve got to meet him, honestly. Someday, we’ll sit right down in some old jalopy and drive right out to Fresno, California.” Garabed chuckled enthusiastically. “What a mad time we’d have! We’d introduce ourselves simply and classily as Garabed Tourian and Peter Martin from Galloway, Massachusetts, a couple of young writers. Saroyan would be delighted to see us . . .”

  “Poor, poor, poor,” grinned Peter. “Garabed, your ambition is so pricelessly uncomplicated.”

  Garabed lighted a cigarette. He said, “I just happened to think about Russia. I am now unhappy. God!”

  Peter sat up: “What a retreat . . . it’s awful.”

  “I wrote a few lines about the Russian youth at the front, last night in my room . . .”

  “I’m afraid for Moscow,” began Peter.

  “Remember our pact?” asked Garabed with a wan smile. “Moscow on a Sunday afternoon—”

  “A gray Sunday afternoon—”

  “Yes, a cloudy one; and vodka in a bare room, looking out over the rooftops of the city . . . Anyway, I wrote a few lines.”

  “What were they?”

  “Poor Russian youth,” mumbled Garabed, not listening. “Poor kids. Isn’t it really awful? I mean, right at this very moment while we sit by the river, they are dying . . . they are dying . . .”

  “For what?”

  “They are dying in the night . . . they cry: ‘Why must we die in the night encarmined in our own blood?’—those are the lines. Oh, hell, Pete I don’t know for what . . . I think of the German youth . . .”

  “The little brownshirters?”

  “I’m trying to look at it sans politics.”

  “I don’t know either, Bed. I’ll wager it’s more sensible to write poems about it than try to analyze it politically. Who knows? If we get into it, look out . . . I mean, goodbye Garabed, goodbye Peter.”

  Garabed leaned back and clasped his knees.

  “Maybe,” grinned Peter, “if we listen and be quiet, we can hear the guns . . .”

  They were silent. The train, miles away, wailed a long, dim cry.

  “Same old sleepy America,” went on Peter. “Look at that selfsame old river. Do you remember when we first dared to swim all the way across? . . . Years ago . . . I think we were in grammar school. But I was always a better swimmer than you . . .”

  Garabed was sifting sand through his fingers.

  “A wind is rising,” he said, “and the rivers flow. Remember? . . . From Wolfe.”

  “Yes. I’ll remember. I’ll remember . . .”

  The train was only a mile away. They could hear the rails back of the bushes sing with the oncoming roar.

  LATER—

  At John O’Keefe’s all-night lunch cart.

  “Pete, does the family ever hear from your brother?” Garabed had just finished a fourth hamburger and was assiduously wiping his mouth with a paper napkin.

  “Wesley?” Peter frowned. “He sent a Christmas card last year from Tampico. Doesn’t say much . . .”

  Garabed’s eyes seemed to enlarge as they moistened. He didn’t drop his head, but gazed into Peter’s eyes. “It’s a shame,” he whispered, contorting his mouth.

  Peter repressed a grin. “He’s doing alright for himself.”

  “I remember Wesley,” ignored Garabed. “I mean, I remember him vividly . . . One night, he was walking down North Street—when I was nine years old. He was sad, and I stood watching him. I remember because it was April and it was raining. The raindrops were falling by the streetlight, straight down. Wesley wore a raincoat, a black one, and no hat. His hair was wet and it hung over his eyes. I was coming home form the drugstore with some aspirins or something for my sister Esther. I said, ‘Hiya Wes!’—and he looked at me sadly—Oh! I’ll never forget it! He said, ‘Hello’—just that, not ingratiating or anything like that, just a simple, sad, sincere hello—and he went on up the street . . .”

  The jukebox began to play. Officer Haley came in, wiping his gaunt red face with a blue polka dot handkerchief; he sat at the coun
ter and warded off a fly with his hand. The overhead fan blew down a gray forelock as he momentarily removed his hat to wipe the band.

  “That was a few weeks before he left.” Garabed dipped down for a slurp of coffee, rose: “Isn’t it strange, Pierre, that I should remember like that? Of course, I can also remember all the obvious things: the time Wesley was in that crackup on the Boulevard, the time he pitched a no-hit no-run game in Twi League, the time he threw a stuffed chair out of the second story window of your house because it was burning and the whole neighborhood stood around watching him as he dumped pails of water from above . . . God! Those things are easy to remember . . .”

  “I know,” nodded Peter. “Like the time he bought that old ’28 Chevy and fixed it up in our backyard. Damn it, Bed, he got up at six o’clock that morning—it was during Summer vacation—and began to work on it. I was his assistant. ‘Give me that cotter pin, hand over that wrench’ . . . all day long. At noon he had the whole motor disemboweled and lying all over the yard. At dusk, he had ’er together again—and the whole neighborhood nauseous from the exhaust . . . He was a natural. A wonderful mechanic.”

  “I remember he worked at that Socony station near the bridge.” Garabed’s voice softened again. “He used to come home in his mechanic’s overalls, smoking a cigarette, a slim dark-eyed fellow.”

  “Yes,” said Peter, “he had my father’s eyes, and his build too. I take after my mother, they tell me: blue eyes, heavier physique. Still and all—” Peter sighed heavily—“Wesley’s been everywhere. Singapore, Liverpool, New Orleans, Hawaii—all over to hell and gone. What a life, the sea. Dick Sheffield and I used to dream of running away from home and going to sea—once we got so far as Boston, mind you, and prowled around the waterfront all night . . .”

  Garabed stabbed a crust of bread with a toothpick.

  “I still think it’s a shame, what I mean is, it really is a shame. Homeless, wandering . . . Don’t you see what sort of life that is? Loneliness, loneliness . . . And poor Wesley never comes home.”