Absence of the Hero (3 page)

I can hear my father bathing. He splashes tremendously, spews water, knocks his elbows against the sides of the tub.

“Have you noticed that I've had my teeth in all day, Mama?”

“No, I didn't know.”

“They feel like my own teeth, all my life.”

“Pretty soon you'll be able to eat nuts and things.”

“Nuts. Ha!”

My father walks down his driveway, stops, stoops, talks to my mother, who is still in the house:

“This carrot is still alive.”

“I know. Say, what's that . . . your sleeve. . . .”

“What?”

“Look, your sleeve is torn. Under the arm. Look under the arm. . . .”

I find a note on my bed. It's written on the back of an envelope, inked in my father's fat scrawl:

My father walks down the hall. He wears leather slippers that knock on the floor. He walks into the bathroom. “Gosh, what's all this water on the floor? Did you spill all this water on the floor?” he asks my mother.

“What water?”

He opens the door and walks into my room. “Did you spill all that water on the floor?”

“Yes,” I say, “I cupped my hands and tossed it around.”

He begins to shout. . . .

My brother George tells his war experiences: “They blew the paratroop alarm and I thought, my God, the Japs are coming. Well, I thought, I've got my C-rations, I've got my .45, my dum-dums; I've got a bottle of Stateside, and I thought, well, I'm all set. I'll go down to the field and take a C-47 the hell out of here. . . .”

My brother George is missing all night and phones me in the morning: “Chuck. Chuck. I'm all cut up. I have a big scar over my eye. I've got a black eye. Blood all over me. My coat is ruined. Got drunk with a man who had scars all over the inside of his mouth from sticking pins in it. Said pain was merely a matter of control. Blacked out, don't remember what happened. I'm in Hollywood. What day is this?”

We are at the dinner table, except for George. My mother sits in her big house gown and puts a potato in her mouth.

“Chucky, your cheeks are so thin. I will make your cheeks so big they will hang over your jaws. It's a shame, the way you are. You have such a lovely profile.”

“That's true,” says my father.

“Already you've gained,” says my mother. “If only you'd stop drinking. . . . Why do you keep your eyes on your plate? Why don't you look at people? Look at me. . . . Do you want some more potatoes?”

“No.”

“More meat?”

“No.”

“More celery?”

“No.”

“Do you want some more coffee?”

“No.”

“More peas?”

“No.”

“How about some bread?”

“No,
NO
! Goddamn it, if I want anything, I'll
ask
for it!”

“Now what's the matter with
you
?” yells my father. He throws his napkin across the table, slams his chair back, and rushes into the front room, his slippers knocking on the floor.

“Chucky,” says my mother,
“you have no idea how you hurt us. You have
no idea how we try to please you. Your father
loves you. You come here. You start George drinking. You
are twenty-five years old. There is still time. Father wants
to teach you to drive the car. No, you say.
You don't want a library card, a free movie. Just
drink, drink, drink, and your eyes in your plate. Have you any money left?”

“No.”

“What are you going to do?”

“Chucky, answer me, your mother.”

I heard the typewriter and rang the bell. He came to the door.

“I heard your typewriter,” I said.

He was a huge man, large-boned, tall, wide, somehow fortified. I glanced at his face and didn't find it particularly striking. There was a little mustache, untrimmed, the hairs standing out separate and uneven; the forehead was flat and low on the large, oval head; there was a scar extending from the right side of a too-small mouth, and the eyes were not unusual.

His writing was mostly a tautology of the popular mode, though sometimes he worked with abstraction, and because the others
weren't
doing it, it did give his stories a clean, fresh ring, a ring, I thought sometimes a little too valiant with experimental pageantry. But what the devil, he
was
trying.

I followed the big shoulders and head into the little house. The front rooms were dark and as I followed him to the back, we passed a red-haired woman stretched out on a couch. I judged her to be his wife, but he plunged ahead without an introduction. I smiled down at the lady and said Hello. She smiled back and said Hello. Her eyes came up out of the dark, clearly amused, and I liked her immediately.

We pushed ahead, past a swinging door and into the kitchen. He motioned a big hand at a miniature yellow table: “Sit down. I'll make some coffee.”

The lights were uncomfortably bright, and I felt all unveiled in my pressed suit, clean shirt, tight and polished shoes. His shirt was open at the throat and he wore grey, musty pants. On the table was a typewriter, sheet inserted, partially done up in small, very black type. Other sheets were stacked to one side, and there were pretzels, a bulging pile of them, in a high, white bowl. I couldn't help
thinking
that I had been invited to a ham dinner, but I was somehow relieved that it wasn't so.

Against the back wall of the kitchen was a homemade closet-like affair without a door and strung across with shelves. It was well-stacked with those writer's magazines that give the markets and other to-do of literary journalism. They were placed neatly even, according to size, and no doubt in chronological order. From this shelf in the kitchen, and other hints, I had my open book on the suzerain of the little house.

The coffee was set up and he dropped down across from me, behind his typewriter. He looked half-ritually at his sheet a moment, the eyes becoming round, dog round; the little glitter funneled to his reading. Then the spherical head came up.

“Have a pretzel,” he said.

I reached to the high, white bowl, sensing he was going to launch an analytical look, so I let him have full sway. I came back with my pretzel and bit off half of it.

“I thought you were a younger man,” he said.

“I'm twenty-five,” I answered, “but I've led a hard life.”

“Still, you look the way I thought you would. I can always tell the way you fellows will look.”

I knew what he meant: darkly sophisticated and strung up on a rather sharp edge. I stood up, took off my coat, threw it over a chair and loosened my tie. I would have taken off my shirt, too, but I wasn't wearing an undershirt. I sat down and took another pretzel. The coffee began to boil.

“Say, where's the bathroom?” I asked. He gave me directions, and I set out. It was a surprisingly large bathroom for such a little hut . . . probably a Russian architect or an acephalous Irishman . . . but I went ahead with good intentions. I heard a sound and looked around: the door had opened a notch and a big hand was sticking through the notch with a towel. I took the towel from the hand. “Thanks,” I said. There was no answer. The big hand withdrew and the door closed.

When I returned, the coffee was ready, and he
suggested that we go to the bedroom. We picked up
our cups and walked carefully so the coffee wouldn't spill.
There wasn't a table in the room, but we went
over to a desk. He held his saucer waist-high, lifted
the cup, dipped the oval head, the vagrant yellow mustache,
and sipped. Then he put his cup down on the
desk and left the room.

There were clippings and photographs all over the walls. On the floor was a wooden box filled with empty brown envelopes, written upon, the stamps cancelled, the brass clips twisted away. On the desk was a paper book. There was a pencil drawing on the cover, not exceptional, and the book was entitled
The Collected Stories of K________ M________
. I ran a thumb through the typewritten pages, then pushed the book away. I felt close in the room, as if I were being examined for assassination.

He came back with his high, white bowl of fourscore pretzels and set them before me. I obliged and sipped at my coffee. He stood in the center of the room.

“You know who that is, don't you?” He was pointing to a magazine clipping, a photograph of somebody, pinned to the wall. I left the desk to examine the clipping.

It was a woman, looking diacritic, argute, behind thick-rimmed glasses. She looked like a teacher of upper algebra.

“Who is it?”

“Read underneath.”

Martha Foley, it said.

I went back to the desk, sat down, and ate another pretzel.

“I didn't make it this year,” he said. “I think I'll make it next year, though. She was lucky to get a book out this year . . . moving . . . she lost some of her things. I had to send her two extra copies of the magazine . . . the one with your story in it. I have letters from her. Do you want to see them?”

“No, it's all right. . . . Look, let's go catch a drink.”

“I don't drink,” he said.

“How about a beer?”

I heard him
rumbling about in the closet, and turning in the swivel
chair, I saw his buttocks working in the musty grey
pants as he bent over looking for something. Perhaps a bottle of wine?

I got up and went to the window. I saw a grassless backyard surrounded by a profusion of lots. Well, he was alone, at any rate. There was a tire back there, an incinerator, a box of cans. It was all I could make out in the moonlight, and it was enough.

He came out
of the closet with a paper shoebox. He stood next
to me and lifted the lid. For the first time,
he smiled at me, at last coming out of his
hoop of seriousness, and I felt warm and glad. His
faced looked so much more honest when he smiled; the
small mouth widened and the scar pulled just a little on the chin.

“Letters,” he said.

I looked down into the shoebox. He withdrew one, then another. “
Accent
,
Circle
, all of them. You know, ones that
just
missed. They write you about them.”

I made some comment and he put the lid back on the shoebox and returned it to the closet. He came out of the closet looking grave again. I was back at the desk, at the high, white bowl. He stood there a moment, silent, looking very huge, the zebu.

“I've decided,” he said, “that I can't use you as an associate editor. You may not believe in such things—I doubt if you do—but sometimes God speaks to me, and last night I had a vision, and I was told you wouldn't do.”

I left soon after that, and he insisted on driving me the two miles to the streetcar line, saying that the buses probably didn't run out there at that time of night, and if they did, it was probably at hour intervals.

I stood out on the porch with the red-haired lady who was probably his wife, as he went back to the garage to get the car.

“He's really a nice fellow,” I said.

She stood there, her arms folded, with that beautiful, clearly amused smile. It was then that I remembered it was Sunday night and she had been alone for hours.

“We've been married almost twenty-five years.”

“Yes?”

“And it was all right until this writing thing started.”

The car came down the drive backwards . . . about a 1928 model; thick steel body and enormous headlights, like the eyes of a monster, a great steel monster refusing to die.

He opened the car door and looked out at me. The red-haired woman opened the door of the little house.

“Goodbye,” I said.

“Goodbye,” she answered.

He drove toward the streetcar terminal and we discussed Sherwood Anderson. Arriving, we shook hands, said the parting words, and he helped me with the door handle. I got out. The monster chugged once, almost stopped, and then charged off into the night. . . .

I am in another town now, but he has written me. It was a short note, typewritten on a piece of small yellow paper. I understand he has given up abstraction. He says his job there is done. He has agents in New York and London. Also, he writes, he has given up the magazine to devote himself fully to his art.