His eyes slipped off axis, then abruptly he reached for another nail. "Course we are," he said. He lined up the nail and with two angry raps drove it home. "Don"t worry," he said, "it don"t hurt much."
I remember only the inside of the building where the songfest was held. It must have been a church, very large, with wooden walls, as yellow-gray as the walls of a new barn. It was brightly lighted, the walls and overhead beams high above us all glowing as if waxed. Everyone my parents had ever known was there, it looked like. The people milled around for what seemed to me hours, shouting and talking, pressing tightly together, my father moving behind my mother from group to group, carrying me on his shoulders. My grandmother, wearing a light black coat and helping herself along on two brown canes-it was only that winter that she"d begun to need them-went from one old white-haired Welshwoman to another, talking and nodding and laughing till she cried, sometimes pointing a bony, crooked finger across the room and gleefully shouting out a name, though no one could possibly have heard her in all that uproar.
Then somehow we got to seats, all of us together, me wedged in between my father and Uncle Charley. A man got up in the front of the room-he looked like a congressman or a well-to-do minister-and said something. Everyone laughed. He said something more, they laughed some more, and then from somewhere, booming around us, came organ music. Uncle Charley was jerking at my elbow, making me look down. He held a small Bible-like book with writing in it-no music, as in the hymnbooks in our church at home (I hadn"t yet seen the ones my grandfather left my mother), just writing, and not a word anywhere that I could read. "You know your do re mi?" he asked, looking at me sternly, his face very bright. I shook my head, noticing only now that above the hymn words, all in Welsh, there were little words-do, re, mi, and so on-as meaningless to me at the time as all the others. Uncle Charley looked up at my father as if in alarm, then grinned, looking back at me. "Never mind," he said, "you sing what I sing." On every side of us people were standing up now, a few of them beginning to tap their feet, just barely moving the toes of their lumpy shoes. My father and Uncle Charley helped me stand up on my chair. Suddenly, like a shock of thunder that made the whole room shake, they began to sing.
Most of them seemed to have no need of the hymnbooks and couldn"t have used them anyway, singing as they did with their heads lifted, mouths wide as fishmouths, proclaiming whatever it was they proclaimed not so much to the front of the hall as to the gleaming roof. They sang, as Welsh choruses always do, in numerous parts, each as clearly defined as cold, individual currents in a wide, bright river. There were no weak voices, though some, like Uncle Charley"s, were reedy and harsh-not that it mattered; the river of sound could use it all. They sang as if the music were singing itself through them-sang out boldly, no uncertainties or hesitations; and I, as if by magic, sang with them, as sure of myself every note of the way as the wisest and heartiest in the room. Though I was astonished by my powers, I know, thinking back, that it was not as miraculous as I imagined. Borne along by those powerful voices, the music"s ancient structure, only a very good musician could have sung off key. And yet it did seem miraculous. It seemed our bones and blood that sang, all heaven and earth singing harmony lines, and when the music broke off on the final chord, the echo that rang on the walls around us was like a roaring Amen.
Hymn after hymn we sang-old people, children, people my parents" age-ancient tunes invented before the major mode was thought of, tunes like hugely breathing creatures. We were outside ourselves, caught up in a hwell, as the Welsh say. It really did seem to me, once or twice, that I looked down on all the congregation from the beams above our heads. My father"s hand was closed hard on mine; Uncle Charley held my other hand, squeezing it just as tightly. Tears streamed from his brown eye and blue eye, washing his cheeks, dripping from his moustache, making his whole face shine. Afterward, when we were leaving, I saw that Aunt Kate and my mother had been crying too, even my grandmother, though not my father or Uncle Ed. On the steps outside, lighting his cigar, Uncle Ed said, "Good sing." My father nodded and hitched up his pants, then turned to look back at the door as if sorry to leave. "Good turn-out." Uncle Charley, with his hands in his pockets, staring at the ground, said nothing.
The following night Uncle Charley didn"t come in for supper, though they called and called. I watched through the kitchen window as Uncle Ed and my father, gray as ghosts in the moonlit garden, shouted toward the trees across the road, the glittering creek, the blacksmith"s shop, then turned and moved heavily, as if gravity had changed and the air had grown thick, toward the mill. Later, Uncle Ed, in the wooden armchair in the kitchen, holding his cigar in the hand that had three fingers missing, stared into s.p.a.ce and said, "Poor Cholly. I wonder what"s got into him."
Aunt Kate stood over by the sink with her head bowed, thinking, folding the dishtowel, then unfolding it, then folding it again. "I guess we better phone the police," she said at last.
"No, don"t do that!" Uncle Ed said suddenly, as if she"d startled him out of a daydream. He leaned his forearms on the arms of the chair and hefted himself up out of it. "I"ll run out to the office and phone around among the neighbors a bit," he said, and at once went to the door.
"Why not phone from here?" Aunt Kate said, or began to say, then glanced at me and stopped.
"Here, let me give you a hand," my father said. The two of them went out, bent forward like shy boys, and closed the door quietly behind them.
"I"ll give Buddy his supper," my mother said. "I suppose it won"t hurt for the rest of us to wait."
"That"s fine," Aunt Kate said, still folding and unfolding the dishtowel.
"We should never have taken him to the songfest," my grandmother said. "I told you it wouldn"t be good for him!"
My mother, herding me over to my chair, said, "Mother, you never said any such thing!"
"Well, I meant to," my grandmother said, and firmly clamped her mouth shut.
Toward morning they found him, I learned much later, right across the road in the creek behind the blacksmith"s shop. I still occasionally dream of it, though of course I never saw it, Uncle Charley lying face up below the moonlit, gla.s.s-clear surface, staring, emotionless, at the perfectly quiet stars.
Aunt Kate, it turned out, had known all along that he"d gone off to take his own life, though she"d refused to believe it and had therefore told no one. She"d found his clothes that afternoon, just a little after sunset, neatly folded and stacked on the chair beside his bed in the room they let him live in downstairs. He"d left them as a message, my grandmother said: for what they were worth, the world could have them back. ("Now that"s enough of that," my father said sharply.) Aunt Kate had told herself one foolish lie after another, she explained to us, her hands over her eyes, her gla.s.ses on the table in front of her. Perhaps he"d found a lady-friend, she"d said to herself, and had gone out and bought himself new clothes, even new socks and shoes.
The following night, when everyone knew Uncle Charley was dead, though no one was admitting it was suicide (they never did admit that), Uncle Ed"s livingroom was filled with people. All the chairs were occupied, even the arms of them, where boys or young women sat, most of them cousins, and there were people on the chairs my father had brought in from the diningroom and kitchen, too. The people were all talking in low voices and sniffling, their eyes wet and red. I sat on one of my father"s legs, watching.
They talked of the singer Uncle Charley had been; the festivals would never be the same without him. They spoke of what a shame it was that he"d never had a wife and children; it would have made all the difference. Then for a while, since sad talk made them ill at ease, they talked about other things-crops and the weather, marriages, politics. Sometimes they talked now in groups of three or four, sometimes all as one group. Aunt Kate served tea. Some of the men had whiskey with them, which Aunt Kate didn"t approve of, but she looked at the carpet and said nothing. The clock on the mahogany desk ticked on and on, but neither in the darkness outside nor in the dimly lit livingroom was anything changing. People stirred a little, now and then, shifting position, moving just an arm or a foot, sometimes blowing their noses, but no one got up yet, no one left for home. Slowly the whole conversation died out like embers in a fireplace, and as the stillness deepened, settling in like winter or an old magic spell, it began to seem that the silence was unbreakable, our final say.
Then an old farmer named Sy Thomas, sitting in the corner with his hands folded, twine around his pants cuffs, cleared his throat, pushed his chin out, face reddening, eyes evasive, and began to sing. Tentatively, then more boldly, others joined in with him. Aunt Kate, with an expression half timid, half cunning, went to the piano and, after a minute, sat down, took off her gla.s.ses, and began to play. They were singing in parts now, their heads slightly lifted. On the carpet, one after another, as if coming to life, their shoes began to move.
THE ART.
OF LIVING.
There used to be a cook in our town, a "chef" he was called in the restaurant where he worked-one of those big, dark Italian places with red fake-leather seat cushions, fake paintings on the walls, and on every table a Chianti bottle with a candle in it-but he preferred to think of himself as simply a cook, since he"d never been comfortable with high-falutin pretense, or so he claimed, though heaven knew the world was full of it, and since, whereas he knew what cooking was, all he knew for sure about chefs, he said, was that they wore those big, obscene-looking hats, which he himself wouldn"t be caught dead in. In all this he was a little disingenuous, not to mention out of date, since everybody knew that, in the second-floor apartment over Custus"s Sweet Shop, Newsstand, & Drugstore, where he and his family lived, he had hundreds of books and magazines about cooking, as well as books and magazines about everything else, even a couple of those San Francisco comic books, and all his talk about being an ordinary cook, not a chef, was just another pretense, in this case low-falutin, an attempt to seem what he would never be in a hundred years, just one of the folks. His talk about chefs" hats was just empty chatter, maybe something he"d thought up years ago and had never thought better of. He did a lot of empty chattering, especially after his son died in the war. He could get all emotional about things not even locked-up crazy people cared about. At the time of this story there weren"t many chefs" hats in the town where I lived, up in the northern part of New York State, but they were standard garb in the pancake houses, hamburger islands, and diners of the larger cities, like Rome or Utica. The cook"s name, I forgot to mention, was Arnold Deller.
Cooks are notoriously cranky people, but Arnold was an exception. Why he should have been so even-tempered seems a mystery, now that I think about it-especially given his fondness for rant and given the fact that, as we all found out, he was as full of pent-up violence as anybody else at that time. Nevertheless, even-tempered he was. Sometimes when certain kinds of subjects came up, his eyes would fill with tears; but he never swore, or hardly ever, never hit anybody, never quit his job in a huff.
He had it easy, I suppose, in some ways at least. He"d worked in the same place for twenty-some years, almost one of the family, and the working conditions weren"t bad, as such things go. The place was respectable. If you got out a joint, just held it between your fingers, the next thing you knew you were out in the alley on your back, looking up at garbage cans and waste bins. And the kitchen he worked in was large and sufficiently well designed that he didn"t have to run his fat legs off all the time. He"d gotten them to copy it from a restaurant he"d seen in San Francisco or someplace, some convention he"d gone to on saving the endangered species. He and his daughters were big on things like that, also politics and the Threat of Drug Abuse, the same things everybody else was into, except that Arnold and his daughters were more serious. When people wore fur coats, Arnold"s daughters would practically cry. Arnold"s wife mostly slept and watched TV. After their son"s death, she hardly ever left the apartment.
As I say, it was a good job for Arnold. He had a helper, part cook, part dishwasher, a half-Indian, half-Italian kid named Ellis. And all across one wall of the kitchen there were windows, which Arnold and Ellis could open if they wanted to, summer or winter, so the heat was only slightly worse than elsewhere. But above all, the job was ideal for a person of Arnold"s inclination and temperament because the owner, an old man named Frank Dellapicallo-a gray-headed, gloomy man we hardly ever saw-would let Arnold cook anything he wanted, so long as the ingredients could be found and weren"t wildly expensive and the customers would eat it so the old man, Dellapicallo himself, didn"t have to. All he ever ate was spaghetti.
Granting Arnold Deller this freedom was no big risk on Dellapicallo"s part. Though he could talk like a congressman or a holy-roller preacher, Arnold was never outrageous when it came to cuisine-or anyway almost never. It had all started a long time ago, when he"d gone to Paris as a soldier at the end of World War II-he was an army cook-and had eaten in a couple of relatively fancy restaurants (considering the times), which he"d enjoyed a good deal and could still talk about in tiresome detail to anyone who"d listen. Since then, of course, he"d visited other good restaurants. It wasn"t that, discovering fine food, he"d lost all perspective. The first times, in Paris, had taught him that food could be "art," a fact he never tired of mentioning; but it hadn"t turned his heart to exotic dishes, in spite of what you may think when I come to the event this story must eventually lead to. What he"d ordered in Paris, both times, was steak, which turned out to be bifteck au poivre, and it had taught him that food should be wonderful, not necessarily outlandish. Both times, he said, he"d praised the food, the waiter, and the chef so lavishly that in the end they"d insisted he had to be Canadian. That too was a revelation, that food made peace between nations.
So now, every other week or so, Arnold would come up with a new "Friday night chef"s special"-Peking duck, beef Wellington, rack of lamb, salmon mousse-which always ran out before the evening was half over and which gradually made Dellapicallo"s restaurant somewhat famous in and around our town, so that if somebody came home from Viet Nam, or cousins came in from Syracuse or somewhere, or a bunch of old ladies wanted a nice place to go, Dellapicallo"s was the first place they thought of.
I know now, looking back, that the food was more or less ordinary, at least by big-city standards. But our town, in those days, had only twenty thousand people, give or take a few thousand, depending on the weather and conditions on the lake, and so it didn"t really seem to us pretentious or deep-down stupid when Arnold began to describe himself as "an artist." For one thing, it came on him gradually, so that none of us really noticed, except in pa.s.sing. And for another, Arnold had a bookish way of speaking-he read a lot, as I"ve said; not just cookbooks but anything that fell into his hands. Any kind of print that came in front of his steel-rimmed spectacles he would read-license plates, the numbers on wallpaper seams-and a lot of times with a person like that, especially if the Beatles or the Jefferson Airplane are wailing in the background, you don"t really notice when what the person is saying has gotten odder. Anyway, the "we" I"m talking about now is the Scavengers gang, motorcycle hoods, or so we liked to think, really just a bunch of greaser kids in second-hand black jackets, fighting pimples, hanging around, waiting to get drafted and shot at. We weren"t exactly unaware that that was how it stood with us. Some of the kids in our town enlisted, ran out and joined up as quick as they could with the United States Marines; others went to college and tried to get out of it. We were the poor stupid animals in between: too smart to enlist, too dumb to run and hide in the revolution. "A pox on all your houses!" was our motto, or would have been if the phrase were one we"d ever heard. Our bikes bore no peace signs, no American flags, no LSD rainbows, n.a.z.i swastikas or iron crosses. Their only symbolism was their dull black paint. For Romantic despair, invisibility. We drove third- or fourth-hand Harleys, mostly old flatheads with the pipes opened up-drove them or, more often, pushed them. Nonetheless Kings of the Road we were, with muscular grins. For the most part, whatever our anarchist dreams, we had to be good honest laboring citizens to keep our hogs rolling.
Usually it was sometime in the early afternoon that we"d drop in to rap with old Arnold. "Hey, let"s go rap with old Arnold," one of us would say, maybe Tony Petrillo, making a kind of joke of it. The last thing anyone in the gang would have admitted was that it was actually interesting to hear Arnold talk. So far as I remember, n.o.body even admitted that it was interesting to sit in the terrible proximity of old Dellapicallo"s granddaughter Angelina. In the early afternoon Arnold the cook had nothing much to do. He"d have a pot or two simmering, things he"d go back into the kitchen to check on, from time to time; but at that time of day there was nothing urgent, nothing Ellis couldn"t have handled fine if Arnold had temporarily dropped dead. So Arnold would settle himself at one of the dark, round tables near the bar (the restaurant was separate) where Joe Dellapicallo, the owner"s son, was bartender and where sometimes, if we were lucky, Joe"s daughter Angelina worked as waitress. Arnold drank sherry; he"d pick up the gla.s.s with just his thumb and first finger and let the others sort of float. He allowed himself only one large gla.s.s all afternoon, though it was said that after work, when he went home, around midnight, he often got smashed, reading books and sipping whiskey while his wife and three daughters snored. It was dark in the bar, blurry with TV noise and the music of the juke that was fixed so it never shut off. We"d get ourselves draught beers and go to his table, turn the chairs around, and sit.
"Hey, Arnold."
" "Lo, boys." He spoke with what he no doubt intended to seem dignified reserve, voice from the mountaintop, like Lyndon Baines Johnson when he talked on TV about controlled response; but Arnold"s voice never quite made it. He was fat and pink, the steel-rimmed gla.s.ses on his nose slightly steamy, the eyes behind them tiny and light blue, and even here, where it was dark and cool, his forehead and throat always glistened with a thin wash of sweat. The smell that came off him, if you sat downwind, was awesome. His hair was light reddish-brown, partly gray, and cut short, old-time army-style but with longish golden sideburns, which made him an anomaly at Dellapicallo"s, where just about everybody-at least until the dinner crowd arrived-was Italian. I too was, to some extent, exceptional: half-Irish.
"How"s the stock market?" one of us would say, maybe Benny Russo; years later he"d become a computer expert. Or maybe one of us would say, "Hey, what"s the secret of happiness, Arnold?" That would be Lenny the Shadow. He was into sensation-mired in it, I guess. In Viet Nam, he"d learn about drugs, and he"d be wasted from an overdose at twenty. It didn"t much matter what you said, it would get Arnold Deller rolling. Whatever we asked him, he always a.s.sumed we were more or less serious. Hippy sincerity was in, in those days, at least in certain circles, and that was more or less the tone we took, with just sufficient ironic edge that n.o.body could really pin us down, prove we actually existed.
"Ha, you punklets," Arnold would say, just lifting the corners of his mouth and eyebrows, as if drawing his head back in disdain were too much work; but it wasn"t unfriendly. He knew us. Everybody knew us. Most of the people in town even liked us, I learned years later, though they hated the d.a.m.n noise. "Listen, kid," he said the afternoon this story begins. His eyes were narrowed more than usual and his voice was edgy. "Listen, kid, you"re talking to an artist, see? What does an artist know about a thing like that? You know what"s the matter with the world today? People are always asking the wrong people the big important questions. Like a football player, they want him to tell "em about politics. Or a famous minister like Billy Graham, they want him to predict who"ll win the Super Bowl." He shook his head, as if the whole thing depressed him more than words could say. "You kids had any brains, you"d ask me what to do with oregano. Educate yourself, learn a good honest trade, or, rather, art." He smiled, big-chinned. His chin was like a big pink softball with two or three whiskers. "But I"ll tell you one thing. Better to ask me these grandiose questions than ask somebody thinks he knows the answers." He looked over at Joe at the bar, as if that was who he meant.
Joe went on as always, wiping things with his cloth-bar-top, faucets, ashtrays, anything he couldn"t remember having wiped just a minute ago. The television was on above him, the latest news of who"d killed who, demonstrations, riots, helicopters hovering over Viet Nam or Berkeley, it was all the same. Lot of shouting, bearded commies, bearded Green Berets, one with a piece of Scotch tape on his gla.s.ses. It was hard to believe that outside the restaurant the sun was shining and dogs lay asleep on the sidewalk.
Joe never looked at the television. He had his own wars, undeclared, like the big one; mainly with Angelina. He had quick, nervous hands like a card player"s, and his black hair was slicked back so smooth you might have thought it was paint. Like Arnold, he was resisting the longer-locks look. Sometimes when his eye accidentally fell on my hair, which hung pretty far down my back in those days, his face would freeze out and for a minute or two it would look like he"d given up breathing. Of those who admired my ambling indifference to the world"s imperatives, Joe Dellapicallo, Angelina"s father, was not one. Sometimes today he would suddenly grin a little crossly, like a man hearing voices, but he was careful never to let on that he was hearing Arnold"s voice, or ours.
Then the front door opened, letting in a blast of light, and Angelina came in. School had let out. She was a senior. Joe glanced up and noticed, that was all. He was always like that, so cool he was ice. You"d have thought he hated her or didn"t know her, but if anybody"d touched her on one of those beautiful brown bare-naked legs he"d"ve been out from behind that bar like a shot, and for the man with the traveling fingers it would have been Doomsday. I thought a lot about that, usually lying on my back with my hands behind my head, in my bed at my parents" house at night. It was supposed to be the age of the s.e.xual revolution, love for free, just ask-it was in all the magazines, and sometimes I was sure it was happening all around me, every party I didn"t get to, every lighted-up farmhouse. It probably was, in fact, even in our town-people painting flowers on one another"s bodies, giving gang-bang ma.s.sages, one eye c.o.c.ked over toward the instruction book; but it wasn"t happening where I was or, apparently, where Angelina was. I was fairly sure of that. I had a habit, to tell the truth, of checking up on her nights. I"d idle past her house, sort of coasting, almost silent, to see if the light in her room was on, and if it wasn"t, and I couldn"t catch a glimpse of her downstairs, I"d tool around checking out parties from a distance. Once for something like an hour and a half, I followed a car she was riding in, I thought-hanging back with my lights out, keeping down the noise-but when they finally got up their nerve and pulled under some trees down by the lake, and I zoomed in and zapped the headlights on, all three of them at once, on high-beam, the terrified face that looked out at me wasn"t Angelina"s; some girl with blond hair. I beeped and waved, let "em know I was a friendly. Suffice it to say that, between her father"s watchfulness and mine, Angelina could hardly move a finger.
She came in walking fast, long-legged, sailing, her expression intense, as if expecting a fight and hoping this once she might get out of it. "Hi, Pop," she said, chewing gum, not meeting his eyes, pulling her coat off. She had her outfit on, black with white around the collar and the hem of the skirt. She wore these push-up bras, and the collar was as low as the skirt was high. She couldn"t be blamed for it, that was what waitresses wore in such places; but when she came to your table she liked to lean way over and make you nervous, and that I did blame her for, a little-as did her father, watching-not that I wanted her to stop. It didn"t mean a thing, though, or meant the opposite from what it said. I"d figured out long since that in her heart of hearts she was a nun, maybe a physicist. I guess the real truth is, Angelina hardly knew what she wanted herself. She was a straight-A student, a virgin, a tease-church-scared, father-scared; the usual business. In the days of Playboys right out in the livingroom, she might as well have been back in Calabria, winking at goatherds, warning them back with a knife.
"Hi, Arnold," she"d always say, smiling. Not a word to us.
He would smile back, blissful, squeezing his eyes shut. "Hi, Angelina." It was obscene. But he"d known her since she was zero, of course. He had uncle"s rights.
She would say, jabbing out at us with the filthy wet rag she wiped the table with and maybe tossing a quick look at her father, "You guys should pay rent. You ever try walking around outside in the sunshine?" Big smile, eyes like dark jade. I used to wonder if it ever occurred to her that one of these days, for all her glory, she"d have to marry one of us and have babies and get fat. I took it for granted that that was how it would end. Who could have believed, in a town like ours, that a little more than a year from then, Angelina would be trying to close down Cornell University, shouting angry slogans in doggerel verse, and firing windy, ranting letters at me-"Dear Finnegan"-in some Asian swamp?
As soon as she"d left us, Arnold would wipe his forehead and start up again, folding his pink hands on the tabletop, smiling like a pink-faced priest in the direction of Angelina.
This day he said, "You wonder why she"s so attracted to me, right? Maturity, boys. Maybe I can give you some pointers." He tapped the tips of his fingers together.
"Hey, Mr. Deller, do that," Lenny Cervone said, holding his hands out to Arnold and wiggling the fingers as if to lure out words. Lenny-Lenny the Shadow-was the toughest of us, at least he looked it. Even right after he shaved, before he stopped doing that, he had five-o"clock shadow. We all leered and waited.
Arnold smiled and stretched his chin. "Your trouble is," he said, "you just circle. That"s for goldfish. No offense! Listen, the world"s in chaos, right?" He leaned forward over his elbows, eyebrows lowered, wincing a little, as if thinking hard made his head ache. "War, revolution, students rioting, police rioting, drugs and promiscuity ... Let me tell you something: it will pa.s.s. n.o.body believes that, n.o.body thinks about afterward-h.e.l.l no!-but let me tell you, it will pa.s.s! After the world-wide glorious high there"s going to be a crash like the world never dreamed of. Things will be changed, even here, in a backwater hick-town like this one, but whatever the world"s like afterward, we"re gonna be stuck with ourselves again-ourselves! It"s a gloomy prospect. A person could go crazy!" He smiled and pushed out his chin in the direction of Tony Petrillo. "It"s easy to throw yourself at grand ideals, and it"s also easy to cut out, call everything nonsense. It"s even natural, right now: the world"s in the middle of a big noisy party; but eventually the party will be over, you mark my words. All this wild scrambling, all this floundering and screaming, people killing each other, making love in the street-one of these days you"ll wake up and it"s gonna be quiet out. Maybe a few storm-troopers or black-suited businessmen keeping order. But quiet, everywhere. Nothing moving. People will be stuck with themselves again." He drew back and wiped his mouth. His hands were shaking, though he grinned and tried to hide it. "It"s no good, this backing off from things. Don"t worry, I know what you"re up to, you guys. I know what everybody"s up to." He looked over at Joe. "You think I"m not tempted to back off, just throw up my hands and say the h.e.l.l with it? But it"s no good, leads straight into craziness. The thing a person"s gotta have-a human being-is some kind of center to his life, some one thing he"s good at that other people need from him, like, for instance, shoemaking. I mean something ordinary but at the same time holy, if you know what I mean. Very special. Something ritual-like, better yet, cooking!" He stretched back his lips-no doubt he meant it for a smile-and closed his eyes.
It made us all uneasy, the way he"d plunged straight into it, no fooling around, no glancing back. Then Lenny the Shadow snapped his fingers and said, "That"s it! Pa.s.s me the stove!"
We all pretended it was funnier than it was, hitting each other on the shoulders lightly, saying "Hoo!" and "s.h.i.t!" (Sometimes it was a lot of work, just hanging around.) Angelina glanced at us from her barstool, letting us know we were deep-down boring. Joe went on mechanically wiping things, one small muscle in his jaw working. Only the cook showed any mercy. He looked away from Lenny and, without raising the heel of his hand from the tabletop, pointed at Benny the Butcher-that was what we called him, n.o.body remembers why. He had a bushy long black beard, Indian headband, little gold-rimmed gla.s.ses.
"You smile," the cook said, mostly for rhetoric, since Benny the Butcher was always smiling, his look faintly rueful, staring at the table or the wall or the floor, slightly moving his head as if slowly and thoughtfully saying "No." He had something a little bit wrong with his eyes. "You smile," Arnold said, "but you"ll see, believe me! People can get the idea life"s just instinct, no trick to it. But we"re not animals, that"s our great virtue and our terrible dilemma." He raised one finger, solemn, a kind of ironic apology for the super-fancy talk. "We"ve got to think things out, understand our human nature, figure out how to become what we are."
"Plan a head," Tony Petrillo broke in. "Plan a head!" He smacked his right fist into his left hand, almost missing though he was watching so hard his eyes crossed. n.o.body paid any attention to him. Nothing Tony ever said made any sense. He claimed he"d gone crazy from watching Walter Cronkite. He always tried to get the channel turned before Cronkite said, "That"s the way it is." Tony was gangly-armed, swing-headed, clumsy. He was so out of it that one time when we stopped for a redlight he forgot to put his feet down and tipped over, d.a.m.n near caught the bike on fire. His ambition in life was to run a skull-crusher in some big city. It was a scary idea. Actually he ended up working in a V.A. hospital.
"What are we?" Arnold said, moving his hands across the tabletop, palms up, toward me. I was always the one that paid the closest attention and made the fewest jokes. I don"t brag about it. I was just never very funny. "Big super-apes with enormous brains," Arnold said. He suddenly looked angry, as if it were the fault of the Scavengers gang that people were just apes. "Enormous brains relatively speaking, I mean," he said. "Half-wit morons compared to whales, but never mind. Big brains relatively-anyway big enough that they"ve tuned out the body, if you know what I mean. What animals know by instinct has a hard time getting through to us, except for the really big instincts, the ones that knock your block off. So what are we? What can we deduce about, to coin a phrase, the Art of Living?" His lips shook.
Angelina was half sitting, half leaning on the barstool, one leg bent at the knee, as in a movie-ad, mocking by her very existence the enormous human brain. It came to me that she was listening, as interested as any of the rest of us, though she pretended not to be, and then it came to me that Arnold Deller knew it. I wondered if her father did.
The cook started counting things off on his fingers, never looking for as much as a second at Angelina. He sat mounded forward over the table, leaning on his elbows, urgent. "We"re social animals. We"re no good if we don"t run in packs, like you guys. Take one of you alone-even Benny the Butcher here-why a half-starved alleycat could knock him over! But it"s not only that. Even when we pretend to be otherwise-like you, Finnegan." He pointed at me and closed one eye, very grim, lips trembling. "Even if we pretend it"s otherwise, we like to run in packs. We get lonely. We want something to love and protect." He wagged his head toward Angelina and winked, not humorously, as he no doubt intended it, but somehow horribly, the way a severed head might wink. I shot a glance at her father, then another one at Arnold, startled. He raised his hand, palm out, all innocence. "Okay," he said, "so, one, we"re social animals. We gotta live with that. It"s one of those big instincts you can"t get away from-comes of having babies that can"t fend for themselves. Parents gotta stick with "em enough to take care of "em, so little by little, through the centuries, as Mr. Darwin says-you should get somebody to read him to you, Finnegan-ha ha! ha ha!-little by little through the centuries human beings got more and more loving until now, the way we are, it"s almost like a sickness, all that anguish of love-but cheer up, it"s even worse with whales. Okay, so where was I? Okay." Suddenly, like a fist closing, his face closed into a frown.
Benny the Butcher looked at me, suspecting something, then went back to looking at the table and shaking his head. There was nothing I could tell him. I wasn"t sure what was happening myself. The cook was always a little crazy, a little rhetorical and preachy, but something was going on that wasn"t quite usual, that was clear. The room was building up a charge, as if it were the furniture, the dark red walls that had slipped toward not-quite-sane. I felt restless, in need of s.p.a.ce and air, but also I wanted Arnold Deller to keep talking. Even if he was making some kind of play for Angelina-it was a weird idea, but it crossed my mind-I had a feeling the talk was in some strange way getting at something. Angelina sat aloof, poised like a bird on a wire. Her father stood with his back to her, only his arms moving, mechanically washing gla.s.ses.
"Okay," Arnold said, "but what else we know is, two, we got a war instinct, also on account of the baby." He aimed a finger at me like a gun. "Any animal can fight-duck, wolf, bear-but human beings are serious about it. You ever wonder about that? It"s all on account of those babies, that"s what I figure. Ordinary mating fight, usually sooner or later one of the males will back off, except horses. Horses are nuts. But human babies, that changes things. You gotta protect the nest till the baby can walk and talk, learn to make fire, hunt and cook. That takes a long time. Ten years? Twelve? It"s no good just knocking off an enemy now and then. You gotta clean out that forest, make the whole place safe. So the baby that survives is the one with the parents that are the best at holding grudges, the ones that are implacable." He looked at Lenny the Shadow, who had his mouth open, ready to break in. "Look it up, kid," Arnold said. "Ask your priest."
Lenny raised his eyebrows and his hands and looked at me, innocent and injured, surprised by the attack. "Is there no justice?" his look said. There was no justice.
Arnold was digging in, cutting rock. He leaned forward on his elbows again, sweat shining on his face, and looked straight at me as if he"d forgotten the others were there. "But ah," he said, "that"s where the trouble starts, you can see that yourself! The parents love the baby, and love each other, of course, or they wouldn"t stay together and protect the baby, and pretty soon they learn to love their relatives and neighbors, since that also helps survival, and after a while, after centuries and centuries, they learn to love dead relatives and whatever bits of wisdom they may have scratched on pieces of wood or stone before they died. What a conspiracy! The family and neighbors both living and dead, all standing guard over the poor helpless baby! But they hate-repeat, hate-the enemy, the stranger." He threw a sharp look at Joe behind the bar-Angelina looked at him too-but Joe, it seemed, noticed none of it.
"All very well," Arnold said, "as long as people stay in tight little groups. But what happens when Italians and Irishmen start trying to live in the same town? Or Englishmen and Welshmen, Germans, Jews, Chinamen, black men? When that begins to happen we"ve gotta expand our horizons, retrain our instincts a little." He lowered his head and pointed at my nose. "We invent civilization and law courts, even figure out ways of loving the dead relatives of those other guys-dead relatives who said terrible things about our own dead relatives. That"s when you"ve gotta use your head-you see? Love by policy, not just instinct. That"s the Art of Living. Not just instinct; something you do on purpose. Art!" He was practically shouting.
It may be clear to you by now what was happening, part of it anyway, but it wasn"t clear to me. My heart was pounding and I could feel the blood rushing up, stinging my cheeks, though I managed to keep my cool muscle-smile. It didn"t quite seem to me that the cook had gone really, literally insane, and I was sure he wasn"t drunk, but why he was yelling at me, apparently trying to make a fool of me, I was in too much of a panic to understand. Even the weird things Tony Petrillo said seemed to make more sense.
"You got it all figured out," I said. "I gotta hand it to you, Arnold." Smiling; voice soft, as if I weren"t actually there, just a projection beamed down from a s.p.a.ceship. I had a feeling Angelina was looking at me, but when I glanced over at her, she wasn"t. Her partly turned-away face was dark, as if she too were blushing.
It must finally have occurred to Arnold Deller that none of us was getting it, with the possible exception of Joe, behind the bar. Arnold suddenly grinned and drew back. "Crazy talk from a cook, eh?" he said, and gave a laugh.
"Hey, listen, man," Lenny the Shadow began, but then, whatever he"d meant to say, he forgot it, just sort of faded back into the darkness.
"I"ll tell you this," the cook said. "Art"s where it all comes together, that"s what we"re talking about. You take a good Chinese dinner, something very special." He shot a quick nervous look over at Joe and Angelina. The way he was rolling his eyes, it was like one of those old-time Eisenstein movies. "My boy Rinehart, over there in Viet Nam-"
Quickly, we all nailed our eyes to the table. It was the worst trick he had, that way of talking about his son as if everything were fine. He"d always fake a smile and raise his eyebrows-he didn"t even know he was doing it-and his lips would tremble and his voice would cloud over and more often than not his eyes would fill with tears. It should have made us sad, theoretically, but I guess the truth is it made us feel creepy, crowded in on, a little disgusted. If he"d done it any oftener, we"d have quit going by.
"My boy Rinehart had a certain dish over there in Asia, a certain dish you might think no American would touch, given our prejudices. But it was made so perfectly, it was so downright outstanding, sooner or later you just had to give in to it. That"s what he wrote. I"ve got the letter. It wasn"t just food, it was an occasion. It was one of the oldest dishes known in Asia. Sit down to that dinner-this is what he wrote, and he was right, dead right-you could imagine you were eating with the earliest wis.e.m.e.n in the world."
We went on staring at the table, maybe all of us thinking about that slip, "dead right."
Arnold said, talking more quietly all at once, "Art, ya see, art stirs up emotion that people can get together on. Universal humanness, you know what I mean? It"s one of those centers of order I was talking about. It doesn"t matter whether you"re the artist or one of the serious appreciators, one of those people that gets a big crowd together and goes to listen to, ha ha, Ol" Blue Eyes every time he comes to town. Life"s full of drift. Everything. Drift." His voice was shaky. We all breathed shallowly, as if to steady the room, keep him from breaking out in sobs. I was thinking dark thoughts-I suspect we all were. I was sorry for him, sure, and I knew you couldn"t blame him; but I wished he"d get the h.e.l.l ahold of himself. No doubt that was programmed too, I thought-the inclination to pull away, leaving the dying to the wolves.
"Listen," I said, "n.o.body"s down on art, okay? Artists are beautiful."
Angelina was staring into the mirror, no doubt thinking, correctly, that she was art. Accidentally, our eyes met.
The cook was wringing his hands, moving his shoulders back and forth as if his back ached. Instead of taking the out I"d offered him, he felt, apparently, a compulsion to be honest and exact. "It may not be they all are," he said, sort of whining. "I guess there are some that cut their ears off and shoot themselves, maybe even a few that shoot other people." He jerked his mouth, then leaned forward, quickly and guiltily licking his lips. His cheeks were wet, tears oozing out in a thin wash below the steel-rimmed gla.s.ses. I agreed with Benny the Butcher, shaking his head. There wasn"t much hope. Maybe the floor would open up and the cook would vanish.
He brushed at the wetness on his cheeks with both hands, then bent his head and rolled his eyes up, still guilty but also cross now, d.a.m.ned annoyed at our daring to pull away on him. Maybe he sensed that his talking of himself as an artist was beginning to grate. His tone became stubborn, petulant. "But it"s not as artists they do those things," he said, "or anyway the crazy things aren"t what makes "em artists, though maybe it all goes together, maybe artists are children, impractical and so on." He stretched his chin out, warning us not to agree with him too boldly. "But you gotta consider the end result," he said. He poked the table, hard, with his finger. "If he"s an artist, what a man does, or a woman, is make things-objects which n.o.body asked him to make or even wanted him to make, in fact maybe they wanted him not to. But he makes them, and once people have them in their hands or standing there in front of them, people for some reason feel they would like to take them home with them or eat them, or if the object"s too big to take home or eat, have it hauled to some museum. That"s what it"s all about. Making life startling and interesting again, bringing families together, or lovers, what-not."
Suddenly Joe leaned over the bar, hands out to each side on the bartop, eyebrows arching out like blackbird wings. "No!" he shouted, apparently at Arnold. "I don"t give a d.a.m.n about all your crazy talk. No, black, dog!"
Angelina"s face went pale with anger. She glanced at her father, then came over and put her hands on the table and said, "Why don"t you hoods get out of here? Why don"t you just beat it and leave him alone?"
"Jesus Christ, Angelina!" Lenny said. He looked like he might fall over from purest amazement.
"It"s all right, Angie," the cook said. His face was dark red, his eyes murderous. "I gotta go back and check on things." He pushed back from the table, then leaned forward and stood up-big as a house, tattoo of a blue-and-red dragon on his arm. He grinned, lips trembling. "It"s not you guys. Don"t worry." He pointed at me. "What I said, Finnegan. Take it to heart!"
With our mouths open, we watched him waddle to the kitchen, then we got the h.e.l.l out.
After we left Dellapicallo"s we cruised awhile, as usual. With the wind in my ears and hair, right away my head felt clearer, though what had happened was as baffling as ever. The others had no more understood it than I did. "What the f.u.c.k did we do, man?" Crazy Tony said as soon as we were out on the sidewalk, blinking in the light. "Yeah, what did we do?" the others said. We threw our arms out to the sides and jerked our heads as if to shake off dizziness, all the age-old gestures of the falsely accused poor misunderstood hood, but this time it was for real. So now we rode in somewhat closer formation than we usually did, geared down, making all the noise we could.
Despite my feelings of guilt and confusion, riding with the pack felt beautiful, maybe more so that afternoon than at other times, since the ride was charged-must have been charged-with the poignancy of things one has intuited to be pa.s.sing. It was good hearing that deep chug-chug only Harleys make, or used to make, and looking at Benny the Butcher"s black-jacketed back, solid as a wall there in front of me, Lenny the Shadow to the left of him, both hogs fat-wheeled, borne down by taillights, big-piped as cla.s.sy small-town wh.o.r.es. Tony Petrillo rode to the left of me, old-time c.o.o.ntails streaming from his handgrips. When I glanced at him he raised a black gauntlet, with such elegance I wondered if all the spastic clumsiness was just play. I grinned and gave him back his sign.
Ah, that too was love, of course; part of the vastly complex genetic plan. Kings of the Road we were, vrooming the throttle, backing down the spark to shoot a fart at the ladies and gentlemen on the curb. We came to the edge of town and we began to lean in, cut rock. Twilight was upon us. Benny, then Lenny, turned his lights on, bank on bank of them. The lake was still, as smooth as a mirror, every corner from end to echoing end accepting our wild young animal racket as if pleased that we"d swung by.
I was still feeling aftershocks of guilt and confusion-though also I was beginning to incline toward a theory-when I went out to the garage that night and hunkered down to work on my motorcycle, trying to get it fine-tuned. Part of the anguish I was feeling was hope. At supper my mother had told me I looked sick, and my sister had said as if stating a fact, "Finnegan"s in love."
"Don"t talk with your mouth full!" I"d told her-just the helpful big brother.
"Oh, Finnegan"s always in love," my mother said, and waved it away.
But my father the sly one, crafty old Calabrian, looked over at me, his head down near his plate, level with the hurrying fork, and grinned. "Can she cook?" he said. The innuendo was faint, but when I saw my mother and father exchange looks, I knew they were on to me. Suddenly-three or four seconds had pa.s.sed-Shannon, my sister, got the joke and cackled, both hands up to her mouth.
"Finnegan"s in love with Angeleeena!" she sang.
"Shannon, stop teasing your brother," my mother said. She turned to me, reaching for my plate to heap on more food. "You should invite her over sometime, Finnegan."
"She wouldn"t come," I said.
"Don"t be silly," she said. She said it with such instant and absolute conviction that I suddenly got a whole new vision of what had happened at Dellapicallo"s-what was happening every minute, everywhere in the world.
When I"d been working on my bike for an hour or so, I heard a knock at the door behind me-a knock merely of politeness, since the door was wide open, looking out at the street. I turned but at first saw nothing, just a blurry outline, my eyes loosened by the glare of the trouble-light. Then the blur, like an image through heat-waves, settled down, and I saw that it was, as I"d thought it just might possibly be, Angelina. I looked at my watch: 10 p.m. She should still be at the restaurant.
"Hey, Angelina," I said.
She looked small, as if huddled against cold, though it wasn"t cold. She didn"t even look all that pretty, just tired, though my heart was whamming. She stayed by the door, leaning against the frame.
"Hi," she said. Then, after a moment, "Finnegan, could I talk to you?"
"Sure. Why not?" I couldn"t decide whether or not to stand up. If I stood up, that would be nice, a sign of welcome; but it might seem aggressive or threatening or something, and anyway maybe I looked better hunkered down by my bike. Nor could I think what to say. "You look terrific," I might have said, which was true and not true. No matter what I said, even if I said something honest, she"d catch me out. I knew her. She hadn"t even apologized for yelling at us, like she was the Queen and she had the right.
"That"s a beautiful motorcycle," she said. She p.r.o.nounced it "sigh-kull," not as we did, "sickle." It was glorious that she did that. Don"t ask me why.
"Yeah. It doesn"t always run so good," I said.
"Is something wrong with it?"
The question seemed thoughtful, loaded with overtones, as if maybe she were making fine distinctions too complex for me to dream of working out. My heart soared. What a face! What eyes! It was true, as I"ve said, that she was supposed to be smart in school.
"Well, it just doesn"t work so good," I said, and shrugged. "I"m sort of tuning it." I smiled. "Like a piano." Now I did stand up, but stoop-shouldered and loose, so anybody could see I wasn"t dangerous. I wiped my hands on the rag over the seat.