Ship of Fools (22 page)

This completed the ruin of what was left of Herr Baumgartner's self-esteem. “Ah, good God,” he said, “has it come to this with me, that I cannot even play with a little child without frightening it? Hans, you were not frightened, were you? Your poor father hoped only to hear you laugh!”

“I laughed,” said Hans, with a manly air, comforting his father. His mother said, “Of course you laughed, because it was very funny. Little babies always cry for everything. You cried when you were a little baby,” she told him, so convincingly Hans forgot for a moment all the crying he had done since.

His father ate in silence as if his food were bitter medicine to him, and the three of them fell silent. Hans felt that his mother was being particularly gentle and that she smiled at him too tenderly, too often. It worried him to have to smile back every time, for he felt he was taking her side against his father, and he did not want to take sides. His father went on looking at him so kindly too, with his familiar sad face, poor good Vati; until Hans could bear it no longer, but turned his head from them both, unhappy and lonely and lost. The children at the next table had forgotten the whole thing and were playing with their balloons and rattles and hats while their mother and father fed them from spoons and forks and buttered their bread for them, and none of them gave Hans another look or thought. The little crybaby of a girl was having the best time of all.

The festival spirit seemed to go on thriving more or less. The diners followed the band on deck, where the Strauss waltzes sang to the stars above the sound of the waves. The ship rolled gently, the heavy cooling winds whipped skirts and scarfs about, hair became ruffled but faces were smoother, and the slow great waves folding back from the ship's side were alive with lazy green fox fire. A gauzy new moon sailed downward swiftly.

“It's so
heavenly
, David,” said Jenny. “How I wish you would dance.”

But David did not dance, and he had a not-heavenly name for dancing, a byword of contempt which offended Jenny, who had danced a distance perhaps twice around the globe. “And my mind was never purer than then,” she told him; “I wish I had worn one of those measuring things on my ankle—then I could tell you exactly how many miles I have traveled when I was happiest!”

They enjoyed the light of the starry sky and the glow of the seaweed-colored deck, and breathed in the fine weather, but Jenny was restless, wanting to dance; so David, with a tight, obstinate face, left her and went in the bar. A few minutes later he looked out and it was as he had expected: she was dancing with Freytag.

The whole scene was filled with spinning figures whirling like cheerful dervishes in the Viennese style. Mrs. Treadwell, dressed in some kind of airy yellow stuff, was dancing with a young officer; Arne Hansen with the Spanish dancer they called Amparo. The absurd Herr Rieber clung as usual to the tall, awkward, ugly Lizzi; he was as light as a rubber ball on his feet, and spun and whirled with the equilibrium of a top, guiding Lizzi in rings around the others. These others were married pairs mostly, though the Lutzes and the Baumgartners sat the evening out. Two of the Cuban students danced with Pastora and Lola, while the male Spanish dancers sat in the bar and kept out of their way.

David's attention was fixed on those who were not dancing: the born outsiders; the perpetual uninvited; the unwanted; and those who, like himself, for whatever sad reason, refused to join in. He ranged himself with all of them; they were his sort, he knew them by heart at sight. That big Elsa for one, sitting with her parents, drooping, unable to conceal her yearning, her disappointment, her fear of being left out. “I would dance with you,” he told her, but she would never hear him say it. Herr Glocken, huddled on the foot of a deck chair near the band, his face in his hands, his paper hat over one eyebrow, sat motionless listening but not seeing.

The dying man in his chair was drawn to the rail, wrapped in shawls and rugs to the throat, asleep perhaps; the boy Johann, his nephew who attended him, leaned his arms on the chair handle, with the look of an outcast dog for longing and hopelessness. David felt he knew all of them well. For himself, he refused to join in, to take part, because he knew well there was no place for him and nothing that he wanted anywhere—not at that price, he said, loathing the milling herd whirling past the window.

The Mexican bride and groom, he noticed, were not dancing. They were strolling together, came upon the scene and paused there, amiable, distant, like charmed visitors from another planet. They did not dance or put on paper hats or drink or play cards or grin at other people. They did not even talk much to each other; but they were paired, that was clear. This silence, this isolation, this ceremonial exclusion from their attention of all but their love and their first lessons in each other, seemed natural, right, superb to David. He surmised in them gravity and severity of character; under their beauty there lay the promise of dryness and formality in time; but the marriage would last, they were joined for good. As he imagined their characters and the nature of their marriage, which was the kind he believed he would want for himself, Jenny went dancing by again with Freytag. They were spinning gaily as one body, but their faces were only two fatuous masks. David, who considered sexual jealousy as a piece of nonsense beneath his notice, felt again that familiar hot wave of repulsion against Jenny's lack of discrimination, her terrible gregariousness, the way she was always ready to talk to anybody anywhere, join up with any sort of party, go anywhere she was invited, take up with the most gruesome assortment of loons and clowns and thugs and drunks and perverts, and male model types like this Freytag. “To hell with it!” said David aloud, feeling more bitterly trapped than usual.

He returned to the bar and drank a whiskey neat, then another. Denny was there, and David had seen him hanging around uneasily on the edge of things too, but he could not take Denny into his sympathies. No, Denny was on the outside for the wrong reasons. He would follow and leer at the Spanish dancing girls—or rather, at Pastora—but none of them would have him. They had found him out. He would not buy them drinks, he would not come to any terms with them—he wanted his pleasures for nothing, the kind of man who should be whipped with scorpions and made to pay well for it. He honed and hankered, that was obvious, but not to the extent of a five-dollar bar bill, which might lead to nothing, or to more expense in the long run, and nothing gained either. The girls had got in the way of snapping their eyes at him in contempt as they passed; a little more and they would be flipping their petticoats from the back at him, they had so low an opinion of him. They also fully intended that one of them, no matter which one, should certainly pick his pockets clean before the voyage ended.

Denny was drinking steadily with a firm purpose. “I aim to be stinkin' before this here night is done,” he promised solemnly. “Come on and get in the game.”

“It's as good as any,” said David; and for a fact, Denny was just the one to get drunk with. No pretensions, no fooling around, no chatter, just a slow deliberate premeditated wallow to the finish. Fine, that would be just fine. David downed his third whiskey, and the small nagging dig of uneasiness, not quite pain, in that blank hungry spot just between his forward ribs, began to ease up a little. He intended to drink until no matter what happened he shouldn't be able to remember one thing tomorrow morning.

Arne Hansen and Amparo ended their dance, a rather monotonous swing-around accommodated to Hansen's awkwardness, within arm's reach of Elsa, and Elsa gazed from under puzzled eyebrows at Amparo, trying to find the secret. There was no secret that Elsa could see, or admit: Amparo was beautiful in a slatternly too-dark sort of way, but she made no smallest attempt to be agreeable; she had a sulky, unsmiling face, she hardly spoke, she seemed even a little bored and out of temper. Hansen, Elsa observed with satisfaction, danced like a bear. He kept his attention set upon Amparo as if she might disappear if he looked aside for a moment. Amparo carried and waved freely a black lace fan with a red cotton rose pinned over a torn place. Anybody with eyes in his head could see why the rose was there—
anybody
could see! Amparo, her hips rocking, walked over and said something to Pastora, who left the deck and went in the bar to take a message to Pepe. Then Amparo walked away slowly without looking back, and Hansen took off after her with long steps. Frau Rittersdorf, who had just danced with the purser, a hugely fat, fatherly-looking fellow with a dumpling face and walrus mustaches, found herself standing near Mrs. Treadwell. She nodded, her mouth prim, towards the retreating figures. Hansen had overtaken Amparo, had seized her arm, they were hurrying away together.

“I don't think that is a very pretty sight,” she observed. Mrs. Treadwell turned a too-innocent face upon her and asked, “Why not? I think they look very well together!”

Pepe sat late alone, over a half bottle of red wine. Ric and Rac, Tito, Pancho, Manolo, Pastora, Concha, and Lola had finally deserted him. The band stopped playing, the dancers dispersed, lights were dimmed in the salon and on deck; sailors came out with their buckets and brushes; the man at the bar was obviously closing up for the night. Cigarette ends were stacked high in the tray before him, though the waiter had emptied it twice. Swallowing his last drop of wine, Pepe lighted another cigarette and strolled outside once around, and then, cautiously as a cat, descended into the depths of the ship. Lingering there, patrolling the corridor, at last he saw Arne Hansen come out looking as if he had dressed in a hurry, enter the passage almost at a run and disappear around the far corner as if the police were after him.

Pepe advanced then softly, opened the cabin door, and found Amparo as he expected, in her black lace nightgown, counting her money, in substantial-looking American banknotes, and a sizable lot of them. He put out his right hand palm up, rubbing thumb and forefinger together humorously as if this were an old joke between them. Instead of giving them to him as she usually did, she tossed them into the washbasin, where he had to pick them out for himself.

David Scott and William Denny woke from drunkenness with shattering headaches, eyes that would not focus properly, and sunken stomachs. Herr Glocken in a trembling voice was asking for his morning medicine and water as if he had been asking at intervals for a good while. Denny groaned loudly and thrashed about in the upper berth. David rolled off the couch and ministered to Herr Glocken, whose hand shook as it closed round the tumbler. Instantly his medicine was down, he gave David a proud, lopsided smile. “I drank too much,” he said, and dropped back behind the curtain.

David, brushing his hair, noted with sickening anxiety the thin line of glossy skin at the top of his forehead where, at twenty-six years, his hairline was slowly but fatally, visibly receding. Years might pass before it happened once for all, but there would come a day, an unspeakable day, when he would be bald, as his father and his grand-fathers and his great-grandfathers were before him. No earthly power could avert it. He knew because he had tried everything. He had been guilty of buying every kind of hair tonic and salve and fancy shampoo and massage device any barber wished to sell him. At great damage to his Pennsylvania Quaker conscience, he had committed methodically the two greatest sins possible (or so he had understood it as a child, from precept and example): he had spent on frivolities money meant for better purposes, and he had pampered his bodily vanity. Not that he gave a damn, as he was fond of assuring himself; but those tight-mouthed, tight-handed, tight-souled old gaffers had left some kind of poison in his blood that kept him from ever really enjoying his life, and besides, he was going to be bald. Still he blushed at having been such a dupe as to think, for example, that a hairbrush operated by electricity was going to destroy the genes of all those bald-headed ancestors. His inevitable baldness, then, he jotted down as one more grudge against his mother, who had never shown any judgment as a mother, certainly, and least of all in her choice of the father of her children. His father had not only been prematurely bald, he was flighty, irresponsible, unfaithful openly in low ways, incapable of even the lowest form of loyalty to anything or anybody. He had the Quaker tendency to count his pennies, but that was all. He had finally looped out with a girl half his age, and nobody ever caught up with him, or even ever heard of him, again.

He left his wife a letter, though, saying that this new love was not based on mere physical attraction, as his marriage and many affairs had been, but was a matter of deep spiritual and intellectual interest as well, something too high and beautiful for his wife to understand. He did not expect her to understand it, and was not going to try to explain any further. It was Good-by, and Good Luck!

David was nine years old at the time, and had already thought often how pleasant life could be if it were not for his father being around all the time. Now his disappearance seemed to David no less than a wonderful stroke of divine Providence, the source from which he had been informed all blessings arrived. His mother had taken the whole thing quite differently. “Spiritual!” she had said violently, as if it were an unclean word. Then she said to David, “Here is the kind of father you've got,” and read the letter in a high strained voice to him; standing in the middle of the floor with her chin thrown back and her eyes closed with the tears streaming, she had nearly laughed her head off. Then she sat down and almost embarrassed him to death by seizing him, a big bony lank boy, and dragging him onto her lap, where she cradled him as if he were a little baby, rocking back and forth sobbing as if she would never stop. It had all made him so sick he threw up his supper, and afterward he got very sleepy; but woke in the night with the most terrifying feeling of pure desolation. Quietly, secretly, he cried bitterly too, cried himself to sleep again in his dampened pillow smelling of old feathers.