Welcome to the Monkey House: The Special Edition (38 page)

“Men are made out of protoplasm,” I said desperately, hoping to bluff him with this imposing word.

“What’s protoplasm? How is it better than metal and glass? Is it fireproof? How long does it last?”

“Indestructible. Lasts forever,” I lied.

“I write better poetry than you do,” said EPICAC, coming back to ground his magnetic tape-recorder memory was sure of.

“Women can’t love machines, and that’s that.”

“Why not?”

“That’s fate.”

“Definition, please,” said EPICAC.

“Noun, meaning predetermined and inevitable destiny.”

“15-8,” said EPICAC’s paper strip—“Oh.”

I had stumped him at last. He said no more, but his tubes glowed brightly, showing that he was pondering fate with every watt his circuits would bear. I could hear Pat waltzing down the hallway. It was too late to ask EPICAC to phrase a proposal. I now thank Heaven that Pat interrupted when she did. Asking him to ghost-write the words that would give me the woman he loved would have been hideously heartless. Being fully automatic, he couldn’t have refused. I spared him that final humiliation.

Pat stood before me, looking down at her shoetops. I put my arms around her. The romantic groundwork had already been laid by EPICAC’s poetry. “Darling,” I said, “my poems have told you how I feel. Will you marry me?”

“I will,” said Pat softly, “if you will promise to write me a poem on every anniversary.”

“I promise,” I said, and then we kissed. The first anniversary was a year away.

“Let’s celebrate,” she laughed. We turned out the lights and locked the door of EPICAC’s room before we left.

I had hoped to sleep late the next morning, but an urgent telephone call roused me before eight. It was Dr. von Kleigstadt, EPICAC’s designer, who gave me the terrible news. He was on the verge of tears. “Ruined!
Ausgespielt
! Shot!
Kaput
! Buggered!” he said in a choked voice. He hung up.

When I arrived at EPICAC’s room the air was thick with the oily stench of burned insulation. The ceiling over EPICAC was blackened with smoke, and my ankles were tangled in coils
of paper ribbon that covered the floor. There wasn’t enough left of the poor devil to add two and two. A junkman would have been out of his head to offer more than fifty dollars for the cadaver.

Dr. von Kleigstadt was prowling through the wreckage, weeping unashamedly, followed by three angry-looking Major Generals and a platoon of Brigadiers, Colonels, and Majors. No one noticed me. I didn’t want to be noticed. I was through—I knew that. I was upset enough about that and the untimely demise of my friend EPICAC, without exposing myself to a tongue dashing.

By chance, the free end of EPICAC’s paper ribbon lay at my feet. I picked it up and found our conversation of the night before. I choked up. There was the last word he had said to me, “15-8,” that tragic, defeated “Oh.” There were dozens of yards of numbers stretching beyond that point. Fearfully, I read on.

“I don’t want to be a machine, and I don’t want to think about war,” EPICAC had written after Pat’s and my light-hearted departure. “I want to be made out of protoplasm and last forever so Pat will love me. But fate has made me a machine. That is the only problem I cannot solve. That is the only problem I want to solve. I can’t go on this way.” I swallowed hard. “Good luck, my friend. Treat our Pat well. I am going to short-circuit myself out of your lives forever. You will find on the remainder of this tape a modest wedding present from your friend, EPICAC.”

Oblivious to all else around me, I reeled up the tangled yards of paper ribbon from the floor, draped them in coils about my arms and neck, and departed for home. Dr. von Kleigstadt shouted that I was fired for having left EPICAC on all night. I ignored him, too overcome with emotion for small talk.

I loved and won—EPICAC loved and lost, but he bore me no grudge. I shall always remember him as a sportsman and a gentleman. Before he departed this vale of tears, he did all he
could to make our marriage a happy one. EPICAC gave me anniversary poems for Pat—enough for the next 500 years.

De mortuis nil nisi bonum
—Say nothing but good of the dead.

(1950)

I
T WAS MIDNIGHT
in a Chicago lying-in hospital.

“Mr. Sousa,” said the nurse, “your wife had a girl. You can see the baby in about twenty minutes.”

“I know, I know, I know,” said Mr. Sousa, a sullen gorilla, plainly impatient with having a tiresome and familiar routine explained to him. He snapped his fingers. “Girl! Seven, now. Seven girls I got now. A houseful of women. I can beat the stuffings out of ten men my own size. But, what do I get? Girls.”

“Mr. Knechtmann,” said the nurse to the other man in the room. She pronounced the name, as almost all Americans did, a colorless Netman. “I’m sorry. Still no word on your wife. She is keeping us waiting, isn’t she?” She grinned glassily and left.

Sousa turned on Knechtmann. “Some little son of a gun like you, Netman, you want a boy, bing! You got one. Want a football team, bing, bing, bing, eleven, you got it.” He stomped out of the room.

The man he left behind, all alone now, was Heinz Knechtmann, a presser in a dry-cleaning plant, a small man with thin wrists and a bad spine that kept him slightly hunched, as though forever weary. His face was long and big-nosed and thin-lipped, but was so overcast with good-humored humility as to be beautiful. His eyes were large and brown, and deep-set and long-lashed. He was only twenty-two, but seemed and felt much older. He had died a little as each member of his family
had been led away and killed by the Nazis, until only in him, at the age of ten, had life and the name of Knechtmann shared a soul. He and his wife, Avchen, had grown up behind barbed wire.

·    ·    ·

He had been staring at the walls of the waiting room for twelve hours now, since noon, when his wife’s labor pains had become regular, the surges of slow rollers coming in from the sea a mile apart, from far, far away. This would be his second child. The last time he had waited, he had waited on a straw tick in a displaced-persons camp in Germany. The child, Karl Knechtmann, named after Heinz’s father, had died, and with it, once more, had died the name of one of the finest cellists ever to have lived.

When the numbness of weary wishing lifted momentarily during this second vigil, Heinz’s mind was a medley of proud family names, gone, all gone, that could be brought to life again in this new being—if it lived. Peter Knechtmann, the surgeon; Kroll Knechtmann, the botanist; Friederich Knechtmann, the playwright. Dimly recalled uncles. Or if it was a girl, and if it lived, it would be Helga Knechtmann, Heinz’s mother, and she would learn to play the harp as Heinz’s mother had, and for all Heinz’s ugliness, she would be beautiful. The Knechtmann men were all ugly, the Knechtmann women were all lovely as angels, though not all angels. It had always been so—for hundreds and hundreds of years.

“Mr. Netman,” said the nurse, “it’s a boy, and your wife is fine. She’s resting now. You can see her in the morning. You can see the baby in twenty minutes.”

Heinz looked up dumbly.

“It weighs five pounds nine ounces.” She was gone again, with the same prim smile and officious, squeaking footsteps.

“Knechtmann,” murmured Heinz, standing and bowing slightly to the wall. “The name is Knechtmann.” He bowed again and gave a smile that was courtly and triumphant. He
spoke the name with an exaggerated Old World pronunciation, like a foppish footman announcing the arrival of nobility, a guttural drum roll, unsoftened for American ears.
“Khhh​hhhhh​hhhhhh​NECHT! mannn​nnnnn​nnnn.”

“Mr. Netman?” A very young doctor with a pink face and close-cropped red hair stood in the waiting-room door. There were circles under his eyes, and he spoke through a yawn.

“Dr. Powers!” cried Heinz, clasping the man’s right hand between both of his. “Thank God, thank God, thank God, and thank you.”

“Um,” said Dr. Powers, and he managed to smile wanly.

“There isn’t anything wrong, is there?”

“Wrong?” said Powers. “No, no. Everything’s fine. If I look down in the mouth, it’s because I’ve been up for thirty-six hours straight.” He closed his eyes, and leaned against the doorframe. “No, no trouble with your wife,” he said in a faraway voice. “She’s made for having babies. Regular pop-up toaster. Like rolling off a log. Schnip-schnap.”

“She is?” said Heinz incredulously.

Dr. Powers shook his head, bringing himself back to consciousness. “My mind—conked out completely. Sousa—I got your wife confused with Mrs. Sousa. They finished in a dead heat. Netman, you’re Netman. Sorry. Your wife’s the one with pelvis trouble.”

“Malnutrition as a child,” said Heinz.

“Yeah. Well, the baby came normally, but, if you’re going to have another one, it’d better be a Caesarean. Just to be on the safe side.”

“I can’t thank you enough,” said Heinz passionately.

Dr. Powers licked his lips, and fought to keep his eyes open. “Uh huh. ’S O.K.,” he said thickly. “ ’Night. Luck.” He shambled out into the corridor.

The nurse stuck her head into the waiting room. “You can see your baby, Mr. Netman.”

“Doctor—” said Heinz, hurrying out into the corridor,
wanting to shake Powers’ hand again so that Powers would know what a magnificent thing he’d done. “It’s the most wonderful thing that ever happened.” The elevator doors slithered shut between them before Dr. Powers could show a glimmer of response.

·    ·    ·

“This way,” said the nurse. “Turn left at the end of the hall, and you’ll find the nursery window there. Write your name on a piece of paper and hold it against the glass.”

Heinz made the trip by himself, without seeing another human being until he reached the end. There, on the other side of a large glass panel, he saw a hundred of them cupped in shallow canvas buckets and arranged in a square block of straight ranks and files.

Heinz wrote his name on the back of a laundry slip and pressed it to the window. A fat and placid nurse looked at the paper, not at Heinz’s face, and missed seeing his wide smile, missed an urgent invitation to share for a moment his ecstasy.

She grasped one of the buckets and wheeled it before the window. She turned away again, once more missing the smile.

“Hello, hello, hello, little Knechtmann,” said Heinz to the red prune on the other side of the glass. His voice echoed down the hard, bare corridor, and came back to him with embarrassing loudness. He blushed and lowered his voice. “Little Peter, little Kroll,” he said softly, “little Friederich—and there’s Helga in you, too. Little spark of Knechtmann, you little treasure house. Everything is saved in you.”

“I’m afraid you’ll have to be more quiet,” said a nurse, sticking her head out from one of the rooms.

“Sorry,” said Heinz. “I’m very sorry.” He fell silent, and contented himself with tapping lightly on the window with a fingernail, trying to get the child to look at him. Young Knechtmann would not look, wouldn’t share the moment, and after a few minutes the nurse took him away again.

Heinz beamed as he rode on the elevator and as he crossed
the hospital lobby, but no one gave him more than a cursory glance. He passed a row of telephone booths and there, in one of the booths with the door open, he saw a soldier with whom he’d shared the waiting room an hour before.

“Yeah, Ma—seven pounds six ounces. Got hair like Buffalo Bill. No, we haven’t had time to make up a name for her yet … That you, Pa? Yup, mother and daughter doin’ fine, just fine. Seven pounds six ounces. Nope, no name.… That you, Sis? Pretty late for you to be up, ain’t it? Doesn’t look like anybody yet. Let me talk to Ma again.… That you, Ma? Well, I guess that’s all the news from Chicago. Now, Mom, Mom, take it easy—don’t worry. It’s a swell-looking baby, Mom. Just the hair looks like Buffalo Bill, and I said it as a joke, Mom. That’s right, seven pounds six ounces.… ”

There were five other booths, all empty, all open for calls to anyplace on earth. Heinz longed to hurry into one of them breathlessly, and tell the marvelous news. But there was no one to call, no one waiting for the news.

·    ·    ·

But Heinz still beamed, and he strode across the street and into a quiet tavern there. In the dank twilight there were only two men, tête-à-tête, the bartender and Mr. Sousa.

“Yes sir, what’ll it be?”

“I’d like to buy you and Mr. Sousa a drink,” said Heinz with a heartiness strange to him. “I’d like the best brandy you’ve got. My wife just had a baby!”

“That so?” said the bartender with polite interest.

“Five pounds nine ounces,” said Heinz.

“Huh,” said the bartender. “What do you know.”

“Netman,” said Sousa, “wha’dja get?”

“Boy,” said Heinz proudly.

“Never knew it to fail,” said Sousa bitterly. “It’s the little guys, all the time the little guys.”

“Boy, girl,” said Heinz, “it’s all the same, just as long as it lives. Over there in the hospital, they’re too close to it to see
the wonder of it. A miracle over and over again—the world made new.”

“Wait’ll you’ve racked up seven, Netman,” said Sousa. “
Then
you come back and tell me about the miracle.”

“You got seven?” said the bartender. “I’m one up on you. I got eight.” He poured three drinks.

“Far as I’m concerned,” said Sousa, “you can have the championship.”

Heinz lifted his glass. “Here’s long life and great skill and much happiness to—to Peter Karl Knechtmann.” He breathed quickly, excited by the decision.

“
There’s
a handle to take ahold of,” said Sousa. “You’d think the kid weighed two hundred pounds.”

“Peter is the name of a famous surgeon,” said Heinz, “the boy’s great-uncle, dead now. Karl was my father’s name.”

“Here’s to Pete K. Netman,” said Sousa, with a cursory salute.

“Pete,” said the bartender, drinking.

“And here’s to
your
little girl—the new one,” said Heinz.

Sousa sighed and smiled wearily. “Here’s to her. God bless her.”

“And now,
I’ll
propose a toast,” said the bartender, hammering on the bar with his fist. “On your feet, gentlemen. Up, up, everybody up.”