Part 22 (1/2)
”Where'd you get a nutty idea like that?” he yelled over his shoulder. ”I said Jobb, I meant about this saying I thought up. Jobb from the Bible. My club, we wanna use it, you know, like sometimes when we go collecting dues? You know, a motto, like, 'Get on the Jobb and Relieve Our Itch for Money.' You think that's any good, anybody'll get it?”
”It might be hard to get.”
He pondered this lugubriously. ”I mean it's kind of like a gag?” he ventured.
”Anyway,” I consoled, ”it's not bad.”
He brightened at once. ”Yeah, that's what I thought. See, I knew this guy once that itched as bad as Jobb practically. He was a leopard,” he told me.
”Is that so?” I said with interest. ”Where?”
”Up in New Haven.”
”New Haven, Connecticut?”
”Yeah, he was in a bad way up there.”
”There aren't any lepers in New Haven,” I protested.
”This guy was a leopard, he was from New Haven. One night his whole jaw fell right off. He was brus.h.i.+ng his teeth, same as anybody would, and all of a sudden-pff! the whole thing dropped bang into the sink, all them teeth and everything stuck straight in the bone, you know? All in one piece.” His rear-view mirror accused me sternly, d.a.m.ning me for a skeptic. ”That's a medical fact,” he concluded.
At these absorbing words, full of scientific connoisseurs.h.i.+p, a settled good will, almost an affection, pa.s.sed diffidently but wholesomely between us. He was a man of judicious parts, though young. His hair grew wispily long over his big unashamed ears, whiter than paper; his nape bore a crowd of strangely unpigmented mole-like speckles, too diminutive to be really ugly-it was as though he had been splattered with invisible ink. In someone else they would perhaps have been no more curious than freckles. I fixed on them, and they seemed to thicken; so, meanwhile, did our friends.h.i.+p; so, meanwhile, did the traffic. We had long talkative waits under stubborn lights, the motor slackened in expectation of the click that foretold green, and, all around us, the silver herd pressing near.
He had other acquaintances. They were all extraordinarily stricken. One-a resident of Teaneck, New Jersey-was a victim of yaws. Another, who lived in Philadelphia, suffered from trachoma, and had actually had to give up television, the flies got so much in the way. These cases were not in the least unusual. Rampant tropical diseases afflicted the East Coast of the United States, the most dangerous area in the world (he explained) for one's health. He knew of a malarial outbreak in Dobbs Ferry; he was certain of five instances, possibly six, of bubonic plague in the Consolidated Edison Company of New York. Presently, persuaded that he had plainly won both my confidence and my admiration, he invited me to join his organization, which was dedicated to stamping out yellow fever in the Bronx. Its slogan was ”Don't Be Yellow-Join the Fight.” He told me with a touch of conceit that he had invented this himself. ”Of course you got to pay the dues,” he apologized, ”if you come in with us.” He also offered further data on the world's hidden albinos. It developed that the following were deficient in melanin: Princess Margaret Rose, John Foster Dulles, the young Aga Khan, two television comedians whose names I never did get right, and Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton.
”Booker T. Was.h.i.+ngton! Oh come on, now you're carrying it too far. You can't claim him.”
”You ever hear of Julius Caesar?” he demanded in easy reb.u.t.tal. ”This here old-time king?”
”Him too?”
The pupils of his eyes-I now examined them for the first time-were a deep red, but the irises were faint and milky and impressed the mirror so little that it scarcely gave them back. ”You heard of Tommy Dorsey, right? The band leader?” he swept on, with a pink blink.
”All right,” I a.s.serted readily enough. ”But Booker T. Was.h.i.+ng-”
”Listen,” he said, reaching out an arm (we had arrived) to open the door nearest me, ”I got a list, n.o.body's found me wrong yet.”
So I decided not to find him wrong, either: and took him for a philosopher for whom the world is cleft, like the devil's hoof, in two. His Yang and Yin were no more unreasonable than anyone's. Where my mother saw the powerful and the inconsequential, William the ordained and the immortal, Enoch the guilty and the murdered, and all the rest of the world parochial versions of cowboys and Indians, he apprehended albinos and the obscurely diseased. It was an opposition-whiteness beyond imagining, a transparency of the flesh that hid not a single capillary, an openness of the soul's entelechy; and, against this, inconceivable deformity both bulbous and agonizingly minute, scales, monstrous flaking rot, hideous sc.u.m-an opposition no madder than the truth. I put him down for a visionary and began counting out dollars.
”You going to see somebody in one of them buildings there? I knew this stockbroker, see, commuted down from Mount Vernon-”
”That one.”
Double gla.s.s doors gleamed like slivers of mica in the base of a concrete mountain.
”-he got dysentery from a water cooler in a building right around here, over on Broad Street. Worst water in the world, this district.”
But this warning of his (I supposed it to be a warning) stopped short. I held out the bills; attentively he accepted them; he put them pleasurably to his lips as though I had handed him a nosegay; and, uncannily, perhaps out of pure suggestibility, produced a modest but unmistakable sneeze.
”Bless you,” I said sympathetically. ”You'd better watch that. Sounds like pellagra.”
Thereupon-but with gravity-he smiled. ”Yeah, you're pulling my leg.” Not merely the smile, but its sober acquittal, seemed at once unfortunate. A formulator of any sort-by which I mean a system-maker-ought never to smile at a conclusion drawn from his system, lest we think him a contradictory fool, whereas he is only being superior and tolerant; while to smile gravely is to affirm the worst. It is as though the ghost of that old Greek Anaximander, confronting his sole surviving sentence, were to say, ”Yes, but that is not what I meant. What I really meant is in the part that is missing.” All in a moment, blasted at a stroke by the flash of this taxi-driver's good strong teeth, Yang and Yin collapsed, the ideal image of contrasting pairs of essentials collapsed. Albinism and disease, whiteness and impurity-the two pillars crumbled, and the world they supported rolled away like a severed head. An elegiac solemnity informed but denied his unceasing smile: ”You can't kid me. Pellagra, they only got that in the South.”
His method-alas-had the occasional flaw of ordinary seeing.
In this fas.h.i.+on I came at last to William's office, where, to my uninstructed surprise, an engagement party was under way.
3.
The party was for William's son.
”We've got gin and scotch and rye,” said the girl at the desk. ”The ginger ale's all gone. So are the paper cups. We barely had enough to go around, and now there's not one left. I watched mine like a hawk, but anyhow I ended up with somebody else's-look, what a vile shade”-she held it up to show the broad violet crescent of lipstick at the rim. ”See? It must be one of the girls from the steno pool. I mean only a cow would wear a shade like that. A purple cow.” She laughed, and, leaning over, spied my utensil. ”A dipper! Hey, that's bright! Who sent you after it?”
”n.o.body,” I said. ”I just came in.”
”Mister n.o.body and his brother. Anyhow it's just what we need around here. I hate these paper things-it's like drinking from a deed, you know? With sealing wax on it!” She s.n.a.t.c.hed up the dipper and filled it from one of the clutter of bottles on the desk-there were signs from the abundance of fifths and quarts and forlornly soaked pretzels that it had been designated for a bar. Behind the desk an empty tray lay upside down on a chair, with a man's hat on top of it. ”Hey, do you have to be a lumberjack to work this thing?”-she had the long handle by its end, and was sweeping the big square spoon up to her lips: but through some error of balance the cup unexpectedly rolled over and spilled. ”Now I've done it. There goes somebody's perfectly good whiskey.”
”There goes somebody's perfectly good hat,” I amended. A swimming puddle filled the dip in the crown.
”Flora Fedora,” said the girl, ”they used to call me in them thar days. Well, oops. It'll smell better than hair oil, look at it that way. Hey, if you just came in how did you know we were all out of cups?”
”As a matter of fact I didn't know you were all in them,” I could not resist saying, looking around, but it was a shot too high for her. ”You can keep it.”
”Keep what?”
”The dipper. It's brand new. You can have it for a present. You can't ever get lost with it because it keeps pointing to the North Star.”
”Look, are you one of these cruds from Miss Putrid's?”
It was my turn for bafflement.
”That school,” she explained.
”No, I've come on business.”
This made her hesitate. ”I think we're closed.”
”Then you're not the regular receptionist?” I inquired, and did not trouble to cover the gibe.
”An hour ago she left, old Prisshead. Hates office parties. Hey, I've got the hang of it!” Out went the length of the handle, gripped by a row of knuckles; up rode the cup. She drained it with aplomb. ”I'm in filing. I could say you're here,” she told me doubtfully, ”only it wouldn't do any good.”
”There's no one to say it to?”
”Well, they're around, but it's sort of a celebration. I mean they've announced it already and the whole staff's applauded and all of that-” She studied me speculatively. ”Some of the lawyers, the young ones, thought up the idea and then we all had to chip in fifty cents. It matters to them because he might get to be their boss, like a sort of partner, but if you ask me it's pretty silly. He didn't even graduate yet.”
Plainly she was speaking of William's son.