The Haunted Life Page 7

  She laughed. Peter’s best Boston manner continued to amuse her. It amused him, also.

  “Are you on a long drunk?” she inquired. “You look it, you know . . .”

  “Why Eleanor, three years ago—” Peter paused. “When I’d met you under the high school clock, blushing. Who would have thought?”

  He was tired now; Eleanor lulled him, and to be incoherent with her was to be clever. It was perfect. He felt like talking. She held his arm tightly.

  “Who would have thought what?”

  “That such a question would arise, I mean ever. I kissed you first in November at a skating pond. You told your diary; I told my intimates. Hell!”

  Eleanor laughed. She misunderstood the totality of his thought, as he did; but she heard the ringing hints, and they fitted perfectly into the harmonies of her mind.

  “It’s a sin to grow up. Periodically you lose your so-called primal innocence. Blah! Now you meet me in front of McTigue’s. Soon you will meet me at the prison gates; later at the United States Senate . . .”

  Peter shook his head violently, casting away.

  “I’m beat out. I need a couple of shots. I started out the morning wooing la vie. Later . . . I thought of doom coming. Now I verge on . . . My schedule omitted one fact: the degeneracy of the—What am I?”

  “My good for nothin’ Joe.”

  “The degeneracy of the inactive poet. He is so full of ardor. It is only a sign of excess. The other end is at work too. I’m oscillating down toward the other end. It will be worse when noon comes . . .”

  Now Eleanor was impatient; he was incoherent.

  “The next noon, I mean. What’s going to happen? Eleanor . . . ,” he had noticed the crisis of her annoyance, “. . . when do I call you next?”

  “Monday evening, monsieur?”

  “Si. Baby of mine. J’aime tes yeux.”

  They laughed at his stupidities, and Eleanor’s eyes danced. They were now on Center Street, and stopped in front of a shoe store. She fumbled in her bag.

  “This is my first stop. Goodbye?”

  Peter nodded and waited casually. She moved off, promising him with her eyes. He retraced his steps.

  At the bar, he made rings with his shot glass and then obliterated them sliding his glass back and forth. He ordered a beer and sipped abstractedly. The incoherence of his communications to Eleanor, he now considered, foretasted a madness he would never lose. That Saturday morning in May, and the Wheaties and the two homeruns, all gone. Flaming youth on the Boston Common, the verses proclaiming eternal Hellenic love, not completely gone, but diminishing. (The poet held on to youth until death did him part). Young manliness next, perhaps now; and the insanity of insight and perception.

  He thought of Boston College, and the engineering students thereat; and the campus bells. Neurosis did not stalk there. The Irish Catholics stalked there.

  The clock said nine-thirty. Later, it said ten-thirty. Peter had drunk six glasses of beer, thinking about his life. With a start, he felt the heat pouring in from the street door. Noon’s rapprochement.

  And then he knew he was exhausted. Even when his father, Joe Martin, walked in, he knew his last moments had come. The role of destiny’s prince, which had thus far justified his morning’s dissipation in leisure, now also dropped away, like his stamina. He was pooped and slightly humiliated by his father’s workaday entrance.

  “Pete!” There was not a hint of disapproval in Martin’s greeting. “Having yourself a beer, are you?”

  Peter grinned and nodded. Martin chuckled good naturedly and squeezed his son’s shoulder.

  “Draw me one, Mac,” he called. He was having his midmorning thirst-slaker. He buried his lips in the foam and drank as only the old drinker can.

  “I just placed a couple of bets,” he went on. “I’m taking a flyer on a three horse parlay. Your remember old Devil’s Gold . . . we won on him at Suffolk Downs last summer? I’ve got him in the sixth, across the board . . .”

  Peter nodded. Once, he had followed the races with his father, a tempestuous loser, a chuckling winner. Together they had run the gamut of gamblers’ emotions: had feasted mightily at the Old Union Oyster House in Boston after a killing at the track, or had ridden home gloomily in the twilight. It was a period in Peter’s life, beginning at twelve and vaguely ending now, that had brought him very close to his father. Haunting music tugged at his heart: boy, youth, you’re breaking down. He remembered the racetrack, the slanting rose sun at the eighth and final race, his father’s face over the program, the hush of the mob in the grandstand presaging not only the running as well as the deciding of the race, but time itself, death itself. The hush rose to a roar, the steeds passed before the tote board, galloped back to be unsaddled, the hush dispersed, the crowd went home scattering a sad refuse of programs, form sheets, tout cards, and torn tickets, the sun set on the scene of blasted hopes, and a graveyard prepared for the night. Peter remembered all this, especially when the grandstands emptied and grew cool and vaulted in the failing light. It represented the melancholy American seriousness. Americans were not sportsmen like the British; they were earnest losers. His father was typical.

  He was talking about his bets. Tonight, if he should happen to lose, he would brood in his corner chair.

  Peter, exhausted and a bit high, softened up to his old man. Boy, youth, don’t break down.

  “Why don’t we go to the races sometime this summer?” he said.

  Martin ordered another beer and grinned. “Sometime in July, when work slacks up. I’ll bring me a good roll this time and really take a crack at it. With luck, we’ll take in a show and a dinner in Boston . . .” Martin dipped into his beer. “Up long?”

  “I got up at nine,” Peter lied. “Just met Eleanor a while back. I’m going home in a few minutes. I’m going for a good swim this afternoon . . .”

  “Eleanor’s a pretty girl. Where’s she working now?”

  “At Webber’s . . . salesgirl.”

  “Don’t swim too much this summer. The coach told me last month it wasn’t good for track muscles . . .”

  “I know. I take it easy. I’ll be training on my own next month. A sprint a day.”

  “And . . .” chuckled Martin, “take it slow on the beer.”

  “Don’t worry,” grinned the son.

  “How do you like this little son-of-a-gun!” said Martin to McTigue behind the bar. “My kid’s on a track scholarship at Boston College and here he is slopping it up first thing in the morning!”

  McTigue laughed.

  “He looks fit enough to stand a few, Joe.”

  Martin put his arm around his son’s shoulder. “You’ve heard of this boy, haven’t you, Mac? Pete Martin.”

  “Oh . . . sure!” said McTigue. “I’ve seen that name dozens of times on the sports page. I didn’t know he was your kid, Joe.”

  “Why hell yes! Didn’t I ever tell you? State low hurdles champ when he was in high school here. B.C.’s ace-in-the-hole for next winter’s indoor season. He’ll be a sophomore in the Fall . . .”

  “Well, well, well.”

  “Hell yes, that’s my boy . . .”

  They had another beer, father and son, and left the bar. At the Square they parted, Peter bound for home and bed via the Wild Street bus, Martin bound for his afternoon’s honest work in a quick, short-stepping stride. The sun danced, noon-mad. Peter waited for his bus in a cold sweat of fatigue, no longer a mechanism of impressions; he was now a bag of broken nerves, sagging against the Square clock. Life had wearied him. Enough . . . he was now ready for the sweet death of sleep, for no-expression and no-impression.

  He dozed as the yellow bus lurched riverward, a short hysterical nap aberrated with tangents of idea, mists of image. Neurosis stalked through Galloway, a gross black seven-foot monster with obscene wide hips, searching for him. The black hand reached through the kitchen window and snatched up the bowl of Wheaties and cream and the package with the picture of Jimmie Foxx. Garabed shrieked a
s Peter soared skyward with an evil leer . . .

  The bus bumped over the road under repair. Peter awoke nervously and looked at the workingmen boiling black tar in the street; a gust of furnace-like heat blew in through the open windows, and then the bus went on up Wild Street between the trees.

  4

  There is something about the American home in the suburbs that cures all apprehensions about life. The next afternoon found Peter Martin sitting on his porch with a glass of lemonade, listening to the Red Sox–Detroit game over the portable radio.

  Aunt Marie’s green Venetian blinds shut out the four o’clock sun on the right and the Quigley elm provided a speckled green shade on the left. Kewpie the cat gazed disinterestedly at the quiet street from his station in front of the screen door. A fly buzzed at Peter’s ear and when he fanned it away, causing the hammock to creak at the exertion, Kewpie turned two placid green eyes and stared straight through him, wondering.

  Peter liked to listen to ballgames. In the pauses during the announcer’s lack of something to say, one could hear the catcalls from the stands and benches, the distant pep-talk of catchers, and someone occasionally whistling. It was a vast and drowsy sound.

  “Two and one . . .” the announcer would say. Seconds later, almost as an abstracted afterthought, he would enlarge: “Two balls and one strike . . .” A long silence follows. Someone, perhaps the shortstop, babbles his singsong encouragement to the pitcher. This chant returns again and again, without variation. One can hear the close tinkle of ice cubes as the announcer helps himself to a glass of cold water. Far off, perhaps from the sun bleachers, a voice cries out a long war-whoop. Then someone whistles . . .

  “Here it comes,” says the announcer. There is a sudden quiet. Thup! into the catcher’s mitt.

  “Strike two, called strike, two and two.”

  And again, the vast sleepy comingling of sounds in the hot afternoon sun. The shortstop’s weird chant returns, an aeroplane is heard from far off, and the first base coach suddenly hoots to distract the enemy pitcher.

  “Bridges is ready . . . here’s the pitch.”

  Tack! The silence is punctuated with this sound and an enthusiastic mass cry is raised. The announcer’s voice is almost drowned: “. . . There’s a long one . . . out to the left field fence . . . way over . . .” There is confusion. Action has broken out in the hot sun, swift and vicious, dead in earnest. “. . . Cronin is rounding first . . . there’s the throw in . . . it’s going to be close, very—” The crowd furnishes the emotion of the action going on at second base, the announcer is too rapt to convey what he sees. “He . . . is . . . SAFE! Safe at second, a double . . .” The crowd’s long subsiding cheer, which will eventually slide into a sigh and a rummaging of seats regained, begins, as the announcer gathers his wits. “A two-bagger for Skipper Joe Cronin, a long belt off the left field fence . . .”

  Ten seconds later, the quiet returns and the monotonous procedure is resumed, the procedure which, during fourteen hundred innings or so in a baseball season, must be carried out slowly, carefully, and perhaps lethargically in one hundred and fifty afternoons of hot sun, infield dust, and white-blinding shirt-sleeved crowds. And throughout the country, broadcast over millions of radio sets, in fire departments (where firemen loll in chairs beside their fire engines, glittering red and rampant in repose, in the long concrete coolness of the garages); in poolrooms where the billiard balls click and the fans whir; in beery, cool, brass-gleaming saloons, where men sit ranged at the bars in complete silence; and on porches in the suburbs, the great and sleepy sound of the baseball game is brought to Americans, the distant whistling, the repeated chant, and the thup of the ball in the catcher’s mitt.

  Peter liked to listen to ballgames, especially when it was too hot to read or take a walk or go to a movie. He could concentrate on the drama of the game without too much paying of attention, for the thread of the action could always be picked up, after a long soporific sequence, at the instant of the crowd’s sudden roar. In the interims, one had time to relax and steal a fancy or two.

  It was during one of these drowsy pauses, as Peter finished his lemonade, that Dick Sheffield mounted the front steps and stopped. The sun caught his straw-colored hair and made frizzy wisps of gold.

  Peter looked up as Dick was striking a pose intended to convey his contempt.

  “The supine pariah,” he said, opening the screen door.

  “Dick. Come in. What are you doing?”

  Dick sat down on the footstool; he never made himself too comfortable, he was always ready to resume his energies.

  “How’s the desk job?” chided Peter.

  “All right, all right, but it won’t be long. I’m on to something really hot this time.” Dick paused to readjust his position. “The South Sea islands, m’boy. How can you waste your time listening to a ballgame?—you can get the results in the papers . . .”

  Peter had lighted a cigarette.

  “What are you talking about? . . . the South Sea islands!” Peter said. “Another of your mad plans? Am I coming along on this voyage?”

  Dick was half-resentful. “Certainly you are. You just leave it to Uncle Dick . . . follow me and you’ll have the greatest adventure of your life. It’s simple. We’ll be in this war before you can say Jack Robinson. Okay. So you and I enlist in the Army, and when the war comes, boom! we’re in the middle of everything. Remember that picture about soldiering in the Philippines, The Real Glory?—well, Pete, that’s the ticket for us. My brother knows a guy enlisted in the Army last Fall—where is he now? In the tropics, the Philippines m’boy, Manila . . .”

  “Sounds swell!” said Peter. “Unless, of course, everything goes haywire, like last Summer when we were supposed to hitch-hike to New Orleans and . . .”

  “Different matter, m’boy! We didn’t collect the cash amount we had in mind. Economic determinism . . . so we didn’t go to Nola. But this is the Army . . . don’t cost a cent to join the Army. And—” he raised his hand to silence Peter, who had opened his mouth to speak—“don’t bring up other instances!”

  “That play we were going to put on in Fordboro . . .”

  “I know, money again. We didn’t have enough money to put it on, so what? We wrote the script didn’t we? Put out the radio or get some music or something. Any cookies in the house?”

  “Yeah,” grinned Peter.

  “Fetch me some. I know Aunt Marie isn’t home, I saw her on the Square twenty minutes ago.”

  They walked into the cool hallway.

  “So,” said Peter, “you took the first bus up here to get some cookies.”

  “Partly correct. I also have the afternoon off. Strike at the silk mill. And, by the way, those cookies of hers are good. Did she put a lot of chocolate in them like I told her?” They were in the brightly curtained kitchen.

  “Hell, yes,” said Peter, opening the breadbox. He took out a dish of cookies wrapped in cellophane paper. “Milk?”

  “Ice cold milk? . . . You express my sentiments.”

  Dick sat on the cool, shiny linoleum and began to eat.

  “I wish,” he said, “my mother made some of these. Look—” waving a cookie—“this new plan of mine is tops. We want to travel, right? We want adventure, we’re sick of this hole in the wall, right? So we join the Army.”

  Peter was standing by the cupboard drinking milk. He grinned irrepressibly at Dick.

  “Who wants to stay in Galloway all his life?” continued Dick. “Didn’t we promise each other we’d get around the world sometime? Did we try to go to sea . . . when was it?”

  “Five years ago this summer—”

  “Okay, and we were too young, they didn’t want to ship us out. Unions and all that. Did we try to go to sea five years ago because we wanted to suck our thumbs? No, we wanted the real life. Well, here we are, going on to twenty, still at home, still in Galloway, the furthest we’ve gone south is New Haven, the furthest north a hike to the lower White Mountains, the furthest east is Boston, an
d the furthest west—Vermont! What a couple of slobs we turned out to be! Here I am wasting my time in a silk mill office, with my feet on the desk all day long—and you! Making a Joe College out of yourself so you can sell insurance after you graduate . . .”

  Peter shouted, laughing, “Insurance! Man, that’s no ambition of mine.”

  “It all amounts to the same, you’ll see.” Dick got up to get some more cookies and then regained his seat on the floor. “We’re flops, both of us. I’m ashamed. We used to say we’d go to Hollywood someday, write, act, anything they want . . . why hell, do you think these people will want us now, we’ve seen nothing, have been nowhere, have not lived and loved Polynesian maids, nothing!”

  “Okay Goethe, don’t lose your temper.”

  “Not Goethe, m’boy. Sheffield. Now listen, you and I go to Boston via the thumb next week and see about enlisting in the United States Army, huh?”

  Peter shrugged, regaining a seriousness he never could attain while Dick was launched on one of his long monologues.

  “I dunno, Dickie.”

  Dick got up and washed his empty glass in the white sink.

  “I’d be game to do anything for the summer, you know that,” went on Peter in a considering, preoccupied tone. “The summer represents a time-off period from what you might call my career . . . huh! I dunno . . . After that, I must return to the scholarship duties, track, studies, and everything else. I do hate that place! I mean, college itself . . .”

  “Of course you do,” provided Dick, replacing the cookies in the breadbox. “College is no place for a guy like you and me. You surrender all your greatest talents there.”

  “To what?”

  “Why, hell, to that system of concessions called society.”

  “You’ve been reading John Dewey.”

  Dick moved off down the hall: “It’s fact. What the hell good is life if you don’t live it to the bone? Jack London was a great liver, Halliburton, even Herodotus . . . there was a man! To hell with college! Did I ever advise you to go to college?”

  Peter grinned.