Jailbird (18 page)

He told about another man in the steeplechase, who had been sentenced to die in an electric chair in Texas. The doomed man had instructed his lawyers to fight anybody, including the governor and the President of the United States, who might want to grant him a stay of execution. The thing he wanted more than anything in life, evidently, was death in the electric chair.

Two joggers came down the path between me and the radio. They were a man and a woman in identical orange-and-gold sweatsuits and matching shoes. I already knew about the jogging craze. We had had many joggers in prison. I found them smug.

About the young man and his radio. I decided that he had bought the thing as a prosthetic device, as an artificial enthusiasm for the planet. He paid as little attention to it as I
paid to my false front tooth. I have since seen several young men like that in groups—with their radios tuned to different stations, with their radios engaged in a spirited conversation. The young men themselves, perhaps having been told nothing but “shut up” all their lives, had nothing to say.

But now the young man’s radio said something so horrifying that I got off my bench, left the park, and joined the throng of Free Enterprisers charging along Forty-second Street toward Fifth Avenue.

The story was this: An imbecilic young female drug addict from my home state of Ohio, about nineteen years old, had had a baby whose father was unknown. Social workers put her and the baby into a hotel not unlike the Arapahoe. She bought a full-grown German shepherd police dog for protection, but she forgot to feed it. Then she went out one night on some unspecified errand, and she left the dog to guard the baby. When she got back, she found that the dog had killed the baby and eaten part of it.

What a time to be alive!

So there I was marching as purposefully as anybody toward Fifth Avenue. According to plan, I began to study the faces coming at me, looking for a familiar one that might be of some use to me. I was prepared to be patient. It would be like panning for gold, I thought, like looking for a glint of the precious in a dish of sand.

When I had got no farther than the curb at Fifth Avenue, though, my warning systems went off ear-splittingly:
“Beep, beep, beep! Honk, honk, honk! Rowrr, rowrr, rowrr!”

Positive identification had been made!

Corning right at me was the husk of the man who had stolen Sarah Wyatt from me, the man I had ruined back in Nineteen-hundred and Forty-nine. He had not seen
me
yet. He was Leland Clewes!

He had lost all his hair, and his feet were capsizing in broken shoes, and the cuffs of his trousers were frayed, and his right arm appeared to have died. Dangling at the end of it was a battered sample case. Clewes had become an unsuccessful salesman, as I would find out later, of advertising matchbooks and calendars.

He is nowadays, incidentally, a vice-president in the Diamond Match Division of The RAMJAC Corporation.

In spite of all that had happened to him, though, his face, as he came toward me, was illuminated as always with an adolescent, goofy good will. He had worn that expression even in a photograph of his entering prison in Georgia, with the warden looking up at him as the secretary of state used to do. When Clewes was young, older men were always looking up at him as though to say, “That’s my boy.”

Now he saw me!

The eye contact nearly electrocuted me. I might as well have stuck my nose into a lamp socket!

I went right past him and in the opposite direction. I had nothing to say to him, and no wish to stand and listen to all the terrible things he was entitled to say to me.

When I gained the curb, though, and the lights changed, and we were separated by moving cars, I dared to look back at him.

Clewes was facing me. Plainly, he had not yet come
up with a name for me. He pointed at me with his free hand, indicating that he knew I had figured in his life in some way. And then he made that finger twitch like a metronome, ticking off possible names for me. This was fun for him. His feet were apart, his knees were bent, and his expression said that he remembered this much, anyway: We had been involved years ago in some sort of wildness, in a boyish prank of some kind.

I was hypnotized.

As luck would have it, there were religious fanatics behind him, barefoot and chanting and dancing in saffron robes. Thus did he appear to be a leading man in a musical comedy.

Nor was I without my own supporting cast. Willy-nilly, I had placed myself between a man wearing sandwich boards and a top hat, and a little old woman who had no home, who carried all her possessions in shopping bags. She wore enormous purple-and-black basketball shoes. They were so out of scale with the rest of her that she looked like a kangaroo.

My companions were both speaking to passers-by. The man in the sandwich boards was saying such things as “Put women back in the kitchen,” and “God never meant women to be the equals of men,” and so on. The shopping-bag lady seemed to be scolding strangers for their obesity, calling them, as I understood her, “stuck-up fats,” and “rich Tats,” and “snooty fats,” and “fats” of a hundred other varieties.

The thing was: I had been away from Cambridge,
Massachusetts, so long that I could no longer detect that she was calling people “farts” in the accent of the Cambridge working class.

And in the toe of one of her capacious basketball shoes, among other things, were hypocritical love letters from me. Small world!

Good God! What a reaper and binder life can be sometimes!

When Leland Clewes, on the other side of Fifth Avenue, realized who I was, he formed his mouth into a perfect “O.” I could not hear his saying “Oh,” but I could see his saying “Oh.” He was making fun of our encounter after all these years, overacting his surprise and dismay like an actor in a silent movie.

Plainly, he was going to come back across the street as soon as the lights changed. Meanwhile, all those fake Hindu imbeciles in saffron robes continued to chant and dance behind him.

There was still time for me to flee. What made me hold my ground, I think, was this: the need to prove myself a gentleman. During the bad old days, when I had testified against him, people who wrote about us, speculating as to who was telling the truth and who was not, concluded for the most part that he was a real gentleman, descended from a long line of gentlemen, and that I was a person of Slavic background only pretending to be a gentleman. Honor and bravery and truthfulness, then, would mean everything to him and very little to me.

Other contrasts were pointed out, certainly. With every
new edition of the papers and newsmagazines, seemingly, I became shorter and he became taller. My poor wife became more gross and foreign, and his wife became more of an American golden girl. His friends became more numerous and respectable, and mine couldn’t even be found under damp rocks anymore. But what troubled me most in my very bones was the idea that he was honorable and I was not. Thus, twenty-six years later, did this little Slavic jailbird hold his ground.

Across the avenue he came, the former Anglo-Saxon champion, a happy, ramshackle scarecrow now.

I was bewildered by his happiness. “What,” I asked myself, “can this wreck have to be so happy about?”

So there we were reunited, with the shopping-bag lady looking on and listening. He put down his sample case and he extended his right hand. He made a joke, echoing the meeting of Henry Morton Stanley and David Livingstone in Darkest Africa: “Walter F. Starbuck, I presume.”

And we might as well have been in Darkest Africa, for all anybody knew or cared about us anymore. Most people, if they remembered us at all, believed us dead, I suppose. And we had never been as significant in American history as we had sometimes thought we were. We were, if I may be forgiven, farts in a windstorm—or, as the shopping-bag lady would have called us, “fats in a windstorm.”

Did I harbor any bitterness against him for having stolen my girl so long ago? No. Sarah and I had loved each other, but we would never have been happy as man and wife. We could never have gotten a sex life going. I had
never persuaded her to take sex seriously. Leland Clewes had succeeded where I had failed—much to her grateful amazement, I am sure.

What tender memories did I have of Sarah? Much talk about human suffering and what could be done about it—and then infantile silliness for relief. We collected jokes for each other, to use when it was time for relief. We became addicted to talking to each other on the telephone for hours. Those talks were the most agreeable narcotic I have ever known. We became disembodied—like free-floating souls on the planet Vicuna. If there was a long silence, one or the other of us would end it with the start of a joke.

“What is the difference between an enzyme and a hormone?” she might ask me.

“I don’t know,” I would say.

“You can’t hear an enzyme,” she would say, and the silly jokes would go on and on—even though she had probably seen something horrible at the hospital that day.

I
WAS ABOUT TO SAY
to him gravely, watchfully but sincerely, “How are you, Leland? It is good to see you again.” But I never got to say it. The shopping-bag lady, whose voice was loud and piercing, cried out, “Oh, my God! Walter F. Starbuck! Is that really you?” I do not intend to reproduce her accent on the printed page.

I thought she was crazy. I thought that she would have parroted any name Clewes chose to hang on me. If he had called me “Bumptious Q. Bangwhistle,” I thought, she would have cried, “Oh, my God! Bumptious Q. Bangwhistle! Is that really you?”

Now she began to lean her shopping bags against my legs, as though I were a convenient fireplug. There were six of them, which I would later study at leisure. They were from the most expensive stores in town—Henri Bendel, Tiffany’s, Sloane’s. Bergdorf Goodman, Bloomingdale’s, Abercrombie and Fitch. All but Abercrombie and Fitch, incidentally, which would soon go bankrupt, were subsidiaries of The RAMJAC Corporation. Her bags contained mostly rags, pickings from garbage cans. Her most valuable possessions Were in her basketball shoes.

I tried to ignore her. Even as she entrapped me with her bags, I kept my gaze on the face of Leland Clewes. “You’re looking well,” I said.

“I’m feeling well,” he said. “And so is Sarah, you’ll be happy to know.”

“I’m glad to hear it,” I said. “She’s a very good girl.” Sarah was no girl anymore, of course.

Clewes told me now that she was still doing a little nursing, as a part-time thing.

“I’m glad,” I said.

To my horror, I felt as though a sick bat had dropped from the eaves of a building and landed on my wrist. The shopping-bag lady had taken hold of me with her filthy little hand.

“This is your wife?” he said.

“My what?” I said. He thought I had sunk so low that this awful woman and I were a pair! “I never saw her before in my life!” I said.

“Oh, Walter, Walter, Walter,” she keened, “how can you say such a thing?”

I pried her hand off me; but the instant I returned my attention to Clewes, she snapped it onto my wrist again.

“Pretend she isn’t here,” I said. “This is crazy. She has nothing to do with me. I will not let her spoil this moment, which means a great deal to me.”

“Oh, Walter, Walter, Walter,” she said, “what has become of you? You’re not the Walter F. Starbuck I knew.”

“That’s right,” I said, “because you never knew any Walter F. Starbuck, but this man did.” And I said to Clewes,
“I suppose you know that I myself have spent time in prison now.”

“Yes,” he said. “Sarah and I were very sorry.”

“I was let out only yesterday morning,” I said.

“You have some trying days ahead,” he said. “Is there somebody to look after you?”

“I’ll look after you, Walter,” said the shopping-bag lady. She leaned closer to me to say that so fervently, and I was nearly suffocated by her body odor and her awful breath. Her breath was laden not only with the smell of bad teeth but, as I would later realize, with finely divided droplets of peanut oil. She had been eating nothing but peanut butter for years.

“You can’t take care of anybody!” I said to her.

“Oh—you’d be surprised what all I could do for you,” she said.

“Leland,” I said, “all I want to say to you is that I know what jail is now, and, God damn it, the thing I’m sorriest about in my whole life is that I had anything to do with sending you to jail.”

“Well,” he said, “Sarah and I have often talked about what we would like to say most to you.”

“I’m sure,” I said.

“And it’s this:” he said, “Thank you very much, Walter. My going to prison was the best thing that ever happened to Sarah and me.’ I’m not joking. Word of honor: It’s true.”

I was amazed. “How can that be?” I said.

“Because life is supposed to be a test,” he said. “If my
life had kept going the way it was going, I would have arrived in heaven never having faced any problem that wasn’t as easy as pie to solve. Saint Peter would have had to say to me, ‘You never lived, my boy. Who can say what you are?’”

“I see,” I said.

“Sarah and I not only have love,” he said, “but we have love that has stood up to the hardest tests.”

“It sounds very beautiful,” I said.

“We would be proud to have you see it,” he said. “Could you come to supper sometime?”

“Yes—I suppose,” I said.

“Where are you staying?” he said.

“The Hotel Arapahoe,” I said.

“I thought they’d torn that down years ago,” he said.

“No,” I said.

“You’ll hear from us,” he said.

“I look forward to it,” I said.

“As you’ll see,” he said, “we have nothing in the way of material wealth; but we need nothing in the way of material wealth.”

“That’s intelligent,” I said.

“I’ll say this though:” he said, “The food is good. As you may remember, Sarah is a wonderful cook.”

“I remember,” I said.

And now the shopping-bag lady offered the first proof that she really did know a lot about me. “You’re talking about that Sarah Wyatt, aren’t you?” she said.