Jailbird.

"Now that I"ve found you, Walter," she cried, "I"ll never let you go again!"

Nowhere in the world was this sort of theater being done anymore. For what it may be worth to modern impresarios: I can testify from personal experience that great crowds can still be gathered by melodrama, provided that the female in the piece speaks loudly and clearly.

"You used to tell me all the time how much you loved me, Walter," she cried. "But then you went away, and I never heard from you again. Were you just lying to me?"

I may have made some responsive sound. "Bluh," perhaps, or "fluh."

"Look at me in the eye, Walter," she said.

Sociologically, of course, this melodrama was as gripping as Uncle Tom"s Cabin Uncle Tom"s Cabin before the Civil War. Mary Kathleen O"Looney wasn"t the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to no imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentant murderers ten years old, and dope fiends and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time. before the Civil War. Mary Kathleen O"Looney wasn"t the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to no imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentant murderers ten years old, and dope fiends and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time.

Good-hearted people were meanwhile as sick about all these tragic by-products of the economy as they would have been about human slavery a little more than a hundred years before. Mary Kathleen and I were a miracle that our audience must have prayed for again and again: the rescue of at least one shopping-bag lady by a man who knew her well.

Some people were crying. I myself was about to cry.

"Hug her," said a woman in the crowd.

I did so.

I found myself embracing a bundle of dry twigs that was wrapped in rags. That was when I myself began to cry. I was crying for the first time since I had found my wife dead in bed one morning-in my little brick bungalow in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

15.

MY NOSE, THANK G G.o.d, had conked out by then. Noses are merciful that way. They will report that something smells awful. If the owner of a nose stays around anyway, the nose concludes that the smell isn"t so bad after all. It shuts itself off, deferring to superior wisdom. Thus is it possible to eat Limburger cheese-or to hug the stinking wreckage of an old sweetheart at the corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street.

It felt for a moment as though Mary Kathleen had died in my arms. To be perfectly frank, that would have been all right with me. Where, after all, could I take her from there? What could be better than her receiving a hug from a man who had known her when she was young and beautiful, and then going to heaven right away?

It would have been wonderful. Then again, I would never have become executive vice-president of the Down Home Records Division of The RAMJAC Corporation. I might at this very moment be sleeping off a wine binge in the Bowery, while a juvenile monster soaked me in gasoline and touched me off with his Cricket lighter.

Mary Kathleen now spoke very softly. "G.o.d must have sent you," she said.

"There, there," I said. I went on hugging her.

"There"s n.o.body I can trust anymore," she said.

"Now, now," I said.

"Everybody"s after me," she said. "They want to cut off my hands."

"There, there," I said.

"I thought you were dead," she said.

"No, no," I said.

"I thought everybody was dead but me," she said.

"There, there," I said.

"I still believe in the revolution, Walter," she said.

"I"m glad," I said.

"Everybody else lost heart," she said. "I never lost heart."

"Good for you," I said.

"I"ve been working for the revolution every day," she said.

"I"m sure," I said.

"You"d be surprised," she said.

"Get her a hot bath," said somebody in the crowd.

"Get some food in her," said somebody else.

"The revolution is coming, Walter-sooner than you know," said Mary Kathleen.

"I have a hotel room where you can rest awhile," I said. "I have a little money. Not much, but some."

"Money," she said, and she laughed. Her scornful laughter about money had not changed. It was exactly as it had been forty years before.

"Shall we go?" I said. "My room isn"t far from here."

"I know a better place," she said.

"Get her some One-a-Day vitamins," said somebody in the crowd.

"Follow me, Walter," said Mary Kathleen. She was growing strong again. It was Mary Kathleen who now separated herself from me, and not the other way around. She became raucous again. I picked up three of her bags, and she picked up the other three. Our ultimate destination, it would turn out, was the very top of the Chrysler Building, the quiet showroom of The American Harp Company up there. But first we had to get the crowd to part for us, and she began to call people in our way "capitalist fats" and "bloated plutocrats" and "bloodsuckers" and all that again.

Her means of locomotion in her gargantuan basketball shoes was this: She barely lifted the shoes from the ground, shoving one forward and then the other, like cross-country skis, while her upper body and shopping bags swiveled wildly from side to side. But that oscillating old woman could go like the wind! I panted to keep up with her, once we got clear of the crowd. We were surely the cynosure of all eyes. n.o.body had ever seen a shopping-bag lady with an a.s.sistant before.

When we got to Grand Central Station, Mary Kathleen said that we had to make sure we weren"t being followed. She led me up and down escalators, ramps, and stairways, looking over her shoulders for pursuers all the time. We scampered through the Oyster Bar three times. She brought us at last to an iron door at the end of a dimly lit corridor. We surely were all alone. Our hearts were beating hard.

When we had recovered our breaths, she said to me, "I am going to show you something you mustn"t tell anybody about."

"I promise," I said.

"This is our secret," she said.

"Yes," I said.

I had a.s.sumed that we were as deep in the station as anyone could go. How wrong I was! Mary Kathleen opened the iron door on an iron staircase going down, down, down. There was a secret world as vast as Carlsbad Caverns below. It was used for nothing anymore. It might have been a sanctuary for dinosaurs. It had in fact been a repair shop for another family of extinct monsters-locomotives driven by steam.

Down the steps we went.

My G.o.d-what majestic machinery there must have been down there at one time! What admirable craftsmen must have worked there! In conformance with fire laws, I suppose, there were lightbulbs burning here and there. And there were little dishes of rat poison set around. But there were no other signs that anyone had been down there for years.

"This is my home, Walter," she said.

"Your what?" I said.

"You wouldn"t want me sleeping outdoors, would you?" she said.

"No," I said.

"Be glad, then," she said, "that I have such a nice and private home."

"I am," I said.

"You not only talked to me-you hugged me," she said. "That"s how I knew I could trust you."

"Um," I said.

"You"re not after my hands," she said.

"No," I said.

"You know there are millions of poor souls out on the street, looking for a toilet somebody will let them use?" she said.

"I suppose that"s true," I said.

"Look at this," she said. She led me into a chamber that contained row on row of toilets.

"It"s good to know they"re here," I said.

"You won"t tell anybody?" she said.

"No," I said.

"I"m putting my life in your hands, telling you my secrets like this," she said.

"I"m honored," I said.

And then out of the catacombs we climbed. She led me through a tunnel under Lexington Avenue, and up a staircase into the lobby of the Chrysler Building. She skied across the floor to a waiting elevator, with me trotting behind. A guard shouted at us, but we got into the elevator before he could stop us. The doors shut in his angry face as Mary Kathleen punched the b.u.t.ton for the topmost floor.

We had the car all to ourselves, and upward we flew. Within a trice the doors slithered open on a place of unearthly beauty and peace within the building"s stainless-steel crown. I had often wondered what was up there. Now I knew. The crown came to a point seventy feet above us. Between us and the point, as I looked upward in awe, there was nothing but a lattice of girders and air, air, air.

"What a glorious waste of s.p.a.ce!" I thought. But then I saw that there were tenants after all. Myriads of bright yellow little birds were perched on the girders, or flitting through the prisms of light admitted by the bizarre windows, by the great triangles of gla.s.s that pierced the crown.

The vast floor at whose edge we stood was carpeted in gra.s.sy green. There was a fountain splashing at its center. There were garden benches and statues everywhere, and here and there a harp.

As I have already said, this was the showroom of The American Harp Company, which had recently become a subsidiary of The RAMJAC Corporation. The company had occupied this s.p.a.ce since the building opened in Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. All the birds I saw, which were prothonotary warblers, were descended from a single pair released back then.

There was a Victorian gazebo near the elevator, which contained the desks of the salesman and his secretary. A woman was sobbing in there. What a morning it was for tears! What a book this is for tears!

The oldest man I had ever seen came tottering out of the gazebo. He wore a swallowtail coat and striped trousers and spats. He was the sole salesman, and had been since Nineteen-hundred and Thirty-one. He was the man who had released from the hot cage of his hands and into this enchanted s.p.a.ce the first two prothonotary warblers. He was ninety-two years old! He looked like John D. Rockefeller at the end of his life, or like a mummy. The only moisture left in him, seemingly, was faint dew on the surface of his eyes. He was not entirely defenseless, however. He was president of a pistol club that shot at targets shaped like men on weekends, and he had a loaded Luger the size of a Doberman pinscher in his desk. He had been looking forward to a robbery for quite some time.

"Oh-it"s you," he said to Mary Kathleen, and she said that, yes, it was.

She was accustomed to coming here almost every day and sitting for several hours. The understanding was that she was to get out of sight with her shopping bags, in case a customer came in. There was a further understanding, which Mary Kathleen had now violated.

"I thought I told you," he said to her, "that you were never to bring anybody else with you, or even to tell anybody else how nice it was up here."

Since I was carrying three shopping bags, he concluded that I was another derelict, a shopping-bag man.

"He isn"t a b.u.m," said Mary Kathleen. "He"s a Harvard man."

He did not believe this for a minute. "I see," he said, and he looked me up and down. He himself had never even graduated from grammar school, incidentally. There had been no laws against child labor when he was a boy, and he had gone to work in the Chicago factory of The American Harp Company at the age of ten. "I"ve heard that you can always tell a Harvard man," he said, "but you can"t tell him much."

"I never thought there was anything special about Harvard men," I said.

"That makes two of us," he said. He was being most unpleasant, and clearly wanted me out of there. "This is not the Salvation Army," he said. This was a man born during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. Imagine that! He said to Mary Kathleen, "Really-I"m most disappointed in you, bringing somebody else along. Should we expect three tomorrow, and twenty the day after that? Christianity does have its limits, you know."

I now made a blunder that would land me back in el calabozo el calabozo before noon on what was to have been my first full day of freedom. "As a matter of fact," I said, "I"m here on business." before noon on what was to have been my first full day of freedom. "As a matter of fact," I said, "I"m here on business."

"You wish to buy a harp?" he said. "They"re seven thousand dollars and up, you know. How about a kazoo instead?"

"I was hoping you could advise me," I said, "as to where I could buy clarinet parts-not whole clarinets, but just clarinet parts." I was not serious about this. I was extrapolating a business fantasy from the contents of my bottom drawer at the Arapahoe.

The old man was secretly electrified. Thumbtacked to the bulletin board in the gazebo was a circular that advised him to call the police in case anyone expressed interest in buying or selling clarinet parts. As he would tell me later, he had stuck it up there months before-"like a lottery ticket bought in a moment of folly." He had never expected to win. His name was Delmar Peale.

Delmar was nice enough later on to make me a present of the circular, which I hung on my office wall at RAMJAC. I became his superior in the RAMJAC family, since American Harp was a subsidiary of my division.

I was certainly no superior of his the first time we met, though. He played cat-and-mouse with me. "Many clarinet parts, or a few?" he asked cunningly.

"Quite a few, actually," I said. "I realize that you yourself don"t handle clarinets-"

"You"ve come to the right place all the same," he hastened to a.s.sure me. "I know everyone in the business. If you and Madam X would like to make yourselves comfortable, I would be glad to make some telephone calls."

"You"re too kind," I said.

"Not at all," he said.

"Madam X," incidentally, was the only name he had for Mary Kathleen. That was what she had told him her name was. She had simply barged in one day, trying to escape from people she thought were after her. He had worried a lot about shopping-bag ladies, and he was a practicing Christian, so he had let her stay.

Meanwhile, the sobbing in the gazebo was abating some.

Delmar conducted us to a bench far from the gazebo, so we could not hear him call the police. He had us sit down. "Comfy?" he said.

"Yes, thank you," I said.

He rubbed his hands. "How about some coffee?" he said.

"It makes me too nervous," said Mary Kathleen.