Plexus (32 page)

Still he was reluctant to take the money.

I was at my wits' end. If he was not going to accept the money all my efforts were in vain. I left him with the promise that he would think it over.

It was Sadie who came to my rescue. She was closer to her mother and she understood the situation in a more practical way. At any rate she thought her mother ought to know what I meant to do for them—in order to express her appreciation.

Before the week was up we had a talk together, Sadie and I. She was waiting for me outside the school gate one afternoon.

“It's settled, Henry,” she said, all out of breath, “my mother agrees to take the money, but only for a little while—until my brother gets a full-time job. Then we'll pay you back.”

I protested that I didn't want to be paid back, but that if her mother insisted on such an arrangement I would have to give in. I handed over the money which was wrapped in a piece of butcher's paper.

“Mother says the Virgin Mary will protect you and bless you for your kindness,” said Sadie.

I didn't know what to say to this. No one had ever used such language with me. Beside, the Virgin Mary meant
absolutely nothing to me. I didn't believe in that nonsense.

“Do you really believe in all that… that Virgin Mary stuff?” I asked.

Sadie looked shocked—or perhaps grieved. She nodded her head gravely.

“Just what is the Virgin Mary?” I asked.

“You know as well as I do,” she answered.

“No I don't. Why do they call her
Virgin?”

Sadie thought a moment, then replied most innocently:

“Because she's the mother of God.”

“Well, what
is
a Virgin anyway?”

“There's only one Virgin,” answered Sadie, “and that's the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

“That's no answer,” I countered. “I asked you—what
is
a Virgin?”

“It means a mother who is holy,” said Sadie, none too sure of herself.

Here I had a brilliant thought. “Didn't God create the world?” I demanded.

“Of course.”

“Then there's no mother. God doesn't need a mother.”

“That's blasphemy,” Sadie almost shrieked. “You'd better speak to the priest.”

“I don't believe in priests.”

“Henry, don't talk that way! God will punish you.”

“Why?”

“Because.”

“All right,” said I,
“you
ask the priest! You're a Catholic. I'm not.”

“You shouldn't say things like that,” said Sadie, deeply offended. “You're not old enough to be asking such questions.
We
don't ask such questions. We believe. If you don't believe you can't be a good Catholic.”

“I'm willing to believe,” I retorted,
“if he will answer my questions.”

“That's not the way,” said Sadie. “First you have to
believe. And then you must pray. Ask God to forgive your sins.…”

“Sins? I don't have any sins to confess.”

“Henry, Henry, don't speak that way, it's wicked. Everybody sins. That's what the priest is for. That's why we pray to the Blessed Mary.”

“I don't pray to anybody,” I said defiantly, a little weary of her moony talk.

“That's because you're a Protestant.”

“I am
not
a Protestant. I'm nothing. I don't believe in anything…
there!”

“You'd better take that back,” said Sadie, thoroughly alarmed. “God could strike you dead for talking like that.”

She was so visibly appalled by my utterance that her fear imparted itself to me.

“I mean,” said I, endeavoring to backwater, “That we don't pray like you do. We only pray in church—when the minister prays.”

“Don't you pray before you go to sleep?”

“No,” I replied, “I don't. I guess I don't know much about praying.”

“We'll teach you then,” said Sadie. “You must pray every day, three times a day at least. Otherwise you'll burn in Hell.”

We parted on these words. I gave her my solemn promise that I would make an effort to pray, at least before going to sleep. As I walked away, however, I suddenly asked myself what it was I was supposed to pray for. I was almost on the point of running back to ask her. The word “sins” struck in my crop. What sins? I kept asking myself. What had I been doing that was so sinful? I rarely lied, except to my mother. I never stole, except from my mother. What had I to confess? It never occurred to me that I had committed a sin in lying to my mother or stealing from her. I had to behave thus because she didn't know any better. Once she saw things in my light she would
understand my behavior. That's how I viewed
that
situation.

Mulling over my conversation with Sadie, reflecting on the somber gloom which pervaded their household, I began to think that perhaps my mother was right in distrusting Catholics. We didn't do any praying in our house yet everything went smoothly. Nobody ever mentioned God in our family. Yet God hadn't punished any of us. I came to the conclusion that Catholics were by nature superstitious, just like savages. Ignorant idol-worshipers. Cautious, timid folk who hadn't the guts to think for themselves. I decided I would never again go to Mass. What a dungeon their Church was! Suddenly—a random flash—it dawned on me that maybe they wouldn't be so poor, Sadie's family, if they didn't think about God so much. Everything went to the Church, to the priests, that is, who were always begging for money. I had never liked the sight of a priest. Too oily and smirky for me. No, the hell with them! And to hell with their candles, their rosaries, their crucifixes—and their Virgin Marys!

At last I'm face to face with that man of mystery, Alan Cromwell, handing him another drink, slapping him on the back, having a grand time with him, in short. And right in our own little love nest!

It was Mona who had arranged the meeting—with the connivance of Doc Kronski. Kronski is drinking too, and shouting and gesticulating. And so is his mousy little wife who is posing for the occasion as my wife. I am no longer Henry Miller. I have been given a new moniker for the evening: Dr. Harry Marx.

Only Mona is absent. She is “supposed” to arrive later.

Things have progressed fantastically since that moment earlier in the evening when I shook hands with Cromwell.
I have to admit to myself, speaking of the devil, that he is indeed a handsome chap. And not only handsome (in a Southern way) but fair-spoken and gullible as a child. I wouldn't say that he was stupid, no. Trusting, rather. Not cultured either, but intelligent. Not shrewd but capable. A man with a good heart, an outgoing man. Bubbling over with good will.

It seemed a shame to be taking him in, to be making sport of him. I could see that the idea was Kronski's, not Mona's. Feeling guilty because we had neglected him, Kronski, so long, she had probably acquiesced without thought. That's how it looked to me.

Anyway, we were all in fine fettle. The confusion was enormous. Fortunately, Cromwell had arrived lit up like a Zeppelin. By nature unsuspecting, the drinks made him more so. He seemed not to realize that Kronski was Jewish, though it was obvious he was even to a child. Cromwell took him for a Russian. As for me, with that name Marx, he didn't know what to think. (Kronski had conceived the brilliant idea of palming
me
off as a Jew.) The disclosure of this startling fact—that I was Jewish—made no impression whatever on Cromwell. We might as well have told him I was a Sioux or an Eskimo. He was curious, however, to know what I did for a living. In accordance with our preconceived plan I informed Cromwell that I was a surgeon, that Dr. Kronski and I shared offices together. He looked at my hands and nodded his head gravely.

For me the difficult thing was to remember, during the course of an endless evening, that Kronski's wife was
my
wife. This, of course, was another invention of Kronski's fertile brain—a way of diverting suspicion, he thought. Every time I looked at that mouse of his I felt like swatting her. We did our best to ply her with drinks; all she would do, however, was to take a little sip and push the glass aside. But as the evening wore on and our horseplay grew bolder, she livened up. A way of saying that she unkinked a bone or two, no more. When on one occasion she broke
into a fit of hysterical laughter I thought she would be taken seriously ill. She was better at weeping.

Cromwell, on the other hand, was a hearty laugher. At times he didn't know what he was laughing about, but our own laughter was so infectious that he didn't give a damn what he was laughing about. Now and then he asked a question or two about Mona, whom it was obvious he regarded as a very strange individual, though an adorable one. We, of course, pretended that we had known her from infancy. We praised her writing outrageously, inventing a whole arsenal of poems, essays and stories which she, we were certain, was too modest to have mentioned the existence of. Kronski went so far as to express the opinion that she would be the foremost woman writer in America before long. I pretended not to be so certain of this but agreed that she possessed extraordinary talent, extraordinary possibilities.

Asked if we had seen any of the columns she had turned out, we professed to be completely ignorant, astounded in fact, that she was doing such a thing.

“We'll have to put a stop to that,” said Kronski. “She's too good to be wasting her time that way.”

I agreed with him. Cromwell looked baffled. He couldn't see what was so terrible about writing a daily column. Besides, she needed money.

“Money?”
shouted Kronski.
“Money?
Why, what's the matter with
us!
I'm sure Dr. Marx and I can take care of her needs.” He seemed amazed to hear that Mona might be in need of money. A little hurt, in fact.

Poor Cromwell felt that he had made a faux pas. He assured us that it was only an impression he had gathered. But, to get back to the subject, he
would
like us to glance at those columns and give him our honest opinion of them. He said he was no judge himself. If they were really good he was certain he could get her the assignment. He mentioned nothing, of course, about shelling out a hundred a week.

We had another drink on this and then diverted him to other subjects. It was easy enough to sidetrack him. He had only one thought in mind—
when would she arrive?
Every now and then he begged us to let him dash out and make a telephone call to Washington. In one way or another we always managed to frustrate these attempts. We knew that Mona would
not
arrive, not at least until we had gotten him out of the way. She had given us until one in the morning to get rid of him. Our only hope therefore was to get him so potted that we could put him in a taxi and pack him off.

I had tried several times to find out where he was staying but got nowhere. Kronski thought it of slight importance—any old hotel would do. In the midst of the goings on I asked myself why this fool business had been arranged. It made no sense. Later I was told that Mona had thought it important to let Cromwell see that she was really living alone. There was another side to it, of course, and that was to find out if Cromwell really hoped to be more frank with us than with her. But we had dropped the subject early in the evening, thanks to Kronski. For some queer reason of his own, Kronski was obsessed with the notion of filling Cromwell with hair-raising stories about the operating ward. I of course had to chime in with him. No one in his right senses would have given the least credence to these yarns he kept inventing. They were so sensational, so utterly fantastic, and so gory and gruesome withal, that I wondered that Cromwell, dead drunk though he was, didn't see through them. Of course the more horrible and unbelievable the tale, the more we laughed, Kronski and I. Our hilarity puzzled Cromwell somewhat, but finally he accepted it as “professional callousness.”

To believe Kronski, nine out of ten operations were pure criminal experiments. Except for a rare handful, all surgeons were born sadists. Not content with diabolical fantasies about the mistreatment of human beings, he went into long dissertations on the subject of our cruelty to
animals. One of these, a harrowing story, which he told amidst gales of laughter, concerned a poor little rabbit which, after numerous injections, electric shocks, and all manner of miraculous resuscitations, was brutally butchered. To cap it all, he elaborated on how he, Kronski, had gathered the remnants of the poor little creature and made a stew of it, oblivious, until after he had swallowed a few portions, that arsenic had been injected into the poor rabbit. Over this he laughed inordinately. Cromwell, slightly sobered by the bloody tale, remarked that it was too bad Kronski hadn't died, then laughed so heartily over this thought that absent-mindedly he swallowed a full glass of neat cognac. Whereupon he had such a fit of coughing that we had to stretch him out on the floor and work over him like a drowned man.

It was at this point that we found Cromwell becoming unmanageable. To give him a working over we had stripped off his coat, vest, shirt and undershirt. Kronski, to be sure, was doing the major work; I merely pummeled Cromwell now and then, or slapped his chest. Now that he was stretched out comfortably, Cromwell didn't feel like putting on his things. He said he felt too good to budge. Wanted to take a snooze, if only for a few minutes. He reached out vaguely for the divan, wondering, I suppose, if he could transfer himself to a still more comfortable position without rousing himself.

The thought that he might go to sleep on us was alarming. We began to cut up like real jackanapes now, standing poor Cromwell on his head, dancing around him (to his utter bewilderment, of course), making grimaces, scratching ourselves like apes… anything to make him laugh, anything to prevent his heavy lids from closing. The harder we worked—and by now we had become positively frenetic—the more insistent he became about having his little snooze. He had reached the point now of crawling on all fours towards the coveted divan. Once there, God himself would be powerless to wake him up.