Crazy Cock (22 page)

“W
HERE'S
V
ANYA
?” cried Hildred. She spoke in a strange voice, as if her diaphragm were afire, as if she were belching smoke. Though she looked everywhere—under the bathtub, under the toilet box, under the sink—there was no Vanya. But all her things were there, including the dirty wash that she had thoughtfully tucked under the bed. And the Count was there, lying in the comer like an old mandolin. And
there were arms and legs lying about, and sleeves, and wigs that had been dipped in heliotrope. It was like a laboratory in which an experiment was going on—an unfinished experiment. A home that could combine all the elements of poem and laboratory—such a home leaves nothing to be desired except music and children. Of the two, music was perhaps the more difficult to lure. There was that old mandolin, the Count, to be sure, and there was the music box in the zenana which would tinkle melodiously as long as a pipe remained. And there was the blood-red harp which bled green notes, which when all the strings quivered gave forth a symphony of Sicilian moons. The children would come in due time. Vanya, in her drunken moments, feeling her bladder distended, would promise to bring forth a blond superman—though by all the laws of heredity genius rarely produced anything but mediocrities. Of all the dreams that invaded Hildred's slumber this one of the wise, blond baby with the dash of septentrional vigor in its blood was the most bizarre and astonishing. It was born over and over again, always with a full set of teeth and a miraculous tongue. It lisped slightly, not because of any malformation, but out of sheer perversity. But this was nothing considering the marvels it uttered. They were not words which fell from its lips, but jewels spilling from a casket. Now and then, amid the cascade, bones dropped—never very many, hardly enough, one would say, to make a good-sized skeleton. . . .

T
OWARD MORNING
the telephone rang. Hildred slipped into a kimono and ran upstairs. She spoke so softly that it was like a caress. He could scarcely hear her though he stood on tiptoes
at the foot of the staircase. “I can't . . . I can't” was all he could make out.

“She's terribly drunk,” said Hildred when she got back to bed. “I could hardly understand her.”

“Where is she, then?”

“I don't know,” said Hildred.

“Well what did she want?”

“She wanted me to bring her home.”

“How could you fetch her if you don't know where she is?”

“That's just it.”

“That's too bad!” said Tony Bring. “She's going to the dogs.”

So heartily did Hildred laugh at this—and it was seldom she laughed at anything he said—that one of the veins in her neck blew up and remained inflated for days.

E
VERYBODY KNEW
who the nightingale of Lesbos was, but it was Vanya who discovered that she was the eightieth asteroid as well as a hummingbird with fiery tail. There were poems to the eightieth asteroid and to pigeons, those ditokous birds who lay only two eggs in a clutch. Like a purple heron Vanya was preening herself in the swamps and marshes of knowledge. She spoke of delphinoid cetaceans and golden groupers, of asymptotes and parabolas, of Sarvasti who was Science, of batrachians and lapiths. For three whole days she flooded their ears with a hemorrhage on white heartrot. This was a disease usually mentioned only by arboriculturists. Vanya appropriated it. There are diseases and diseases. But this disease had a fascination about it. It was brought on by a destructive species of fungus that attacked the heartwood of various broadleaf trees. Like the grampus, the fake tinder fungus was a killer, only instead of preying upon seals and marine life it attacked trees. A broadleaf tree was absolutely defenseless against the fake tinder fungus. Once the latter effected entrance to the heart of the tree it was all up; injecting bisulfide of carbon through the sawdust openings, or spraying
the foliage with arsenate of lead, was of no avail.
It was death from white heartrot!

It made her positively daffy, this song of corruption, this arboreal saga of death and transfiguration. She behaved like a rotten sloop riding out to a storm. While the wind howled in her brain the maggots were busy below—converting the wood to sawdust. No use trying to stop the wounds with putty. The wounds spread, left big holes in her sides through which you could poke an umbrella.

A
RRIVING HOME
late one night Tony Bring found Hildred sitting alone, her head buried in her arms. She was sobbing. And Vanya? Vanya was in her room scribbling—laying bluish-green eggs, unblemished, cute as pigeon eggs. There was a drama going on, but which act it was, or what the plot, he couldn't tell. Secretive souls: tight-lipped, loyal as crooks. No tender polyps these, even though ravaged by war. Strange that things should go awry now, just when everyone was employed and Paris nearer than ever. Perhaps something had gone wrong at the art school . . . perhaps Vanya had taken to playing the slut again. It was stupid work, certainly, sitting on a stool with a rag around your breasts, or standing on one leg and dreaming. Who could blame them if they fortified themselves with a little gin? Weary of imitating marble, of inspiring dreams, the nightingale of Lesbos sometimes indulged in hysterics. It was the hysteria of a statue. But when some kind soul had fed her snowflakes she became tractable again, turned to marble, never lost her balance. Leaving the academy she would fly like a hummingbird and spread her fiery tail. It was because of her great swoops that she developed
notalgia, which is a curious word for “pain in the back.” Hildred insisted that she meant nostalgia, but nostalgia was not the word. It was not homesickness, but a disorder of the spine that she had contracted. It came from flying, or from posing as a Winged Victory. Until they fed her snowflakes there was no relief.

A
ND
T
ONY
Bring—what is he doing for a livelihood? He has been so quiet lately, so subdued. One would never think, to see this quiet, sober individual marching home, that he had been shouting all night at the top of his lungs. He is distinctly not the sort to raise his voice in the marketplace, or the subway. At first it sounded more like a whisper when he opened his mouth. But one can't sell papers by whispering to people. No, that he learned quickly enough. One had to develop a stentorian voice, a voice of brass that would rouse even the dead from their dreams. One had to hustle and shove, to elbow his way, to bawl louder than the next fellow. Only thus could one get rid of his load. On Saturday nights Tony Bring knew what notalgia was—it was curvature of the spine. Only in his case it didn't come from soaring, for if he had wings he was unaware of them or they were atrophied. He felt rather as the snail must feel, crawling along with a house on its back. And when the snow came and the headlines announced that it was a blizzard it was a blizzard because blizzards are blizzards. The soft, spineless flakes, innocuous, tasteless, deodorized, carried the message through the conduits of his nerves and diluted his blood. . . . Though now he was linked closer than ever with the great metropolitan press he read nothing but headlines. The headlines
were the dikes erected by addled brains to ward off the flood of print that rose with each edition and threatened to drown the inhabitants. They were written in stench and sweat, they conspired like prostitutes, they screamed with cancerous fury, they poetized and glorified the scrimmage, they crucified the sinners, they embalmed the dead, electrified the dull-witted, roused the constipated from their sodden lethargy. The headlines weighed on his mind, strangled his dreams, broke his back. It was not a body he brought home at night, but a collection of bruises. His dreams were those of the caterpillar before it has learned to fly, of the turtle whose back is pounded by breakers.

B
ETTER THAN
standing on one leg with a towel around your hips was to furnish blood for the needy. The only capital required was health. If one had good health one had good blood and blood was selling at a premium these days. It sold for anywhere from fifteen dollars to one hundred dollars the pint. According to the grade. Supposing, for instance, one had Grade A blood. Of course it wasn't called Grade A, but then that doesn't matter. The point was that if one ate well, drank a glass of port regularly, and kept the intestines free from poisons, one could sell a pint of blood every ten or fifteen days. No need to drum up business, no political influence required, no capital to be invested. Just good, rich, healthy red blood—Grade A preferably—and that's all there was to it.

Now there was in the Village a certain blood donor who knew the game from A to Izzit. He was Grade A, and his wife was on a par with him, speaking of blood quality. They had
given away enough blood, between them, to float a battleship. And look at them! Fine bloom to their cheeks, fur coats . . . you could see them at the Caravan most any night consuming beefsteaks, dancing with both feet, drunk with blood or loss of blood.

There were hospitals and hospitals in New York, some better than others, from the standpoint of blood donors. A certain Jewish institution was the most generous of all, but then there was a waiting list—a formidable waiting list. Of course, when one got known, when the quality of one's blood acquired a reputation, as it were, one could work his way up. Best to start with a modest institution—with a Presbyterian hospital, or something like that.

But first they had to give specimens. They gave away—absolutely gratis, as samples—ordinary syringefuls. They left their samples all over the city. Hildred had a bad time of it; some amateur punctured her in the wrong place and her arm swelled up and the veins grew black. She swore she was going to lose her arm, but as it turned out, she didn't. And then she had vomiting spells. Even wild strawberries wouldn't stay on her stomach. The only thing that agreed with her was port wine. Port wine was a tonic. She advised everyone to drink port.

There were hospitals that weren't satisfied just to puncture one's arm. Insisted on thoroughgoing examination: heart, lungs, urinalysis, height, weight, Wasserman test, nationality, heredity, etc. One could be insured for fifty thousand dollars with less fuss. And then there were the young bloods with the stethoscopes slung around their necks—they were devils for thoroughness. Even a little thing like a brassiere interfered with their patient, exhaustive inquiries. There
were others—tired old duffers—who didn't even ask you to cough. A thoroughly quixotic business, no matter from what angle you viewed it.

And then came the reports! They arrived in the mail like rejection slips from editorial offices. Some were printed, stereotyped forms couched in superpolite language; some were curt and rude, written in longhand—by foreigners or night watchmen. One thing stood out clearly: they were unfit. They were neither Grade A, nor Grade B, nor Grade C, nor Grade D. The good red corpuscles so much in demand at the moment showed a minus sign. Aside from the question of good or bad blood there were other things the matter with them. There were so many things the matter with them that it was only by a miracle they fell short of cancer, dropsy, or syphilis. At the bottom of all their ills lay anemia. Anemia was a sort of white heartrot developed by city organisms, a disease that turned the blood to dishwater. Who could furnish a clean bill of blood in a city like New York? It was all nonsense. They weren't going to have the daylight scared out of them by young rubbernecks with stethoscopes slung around their necks and white trousers creased to a razor's edge.
Undernourished
—that was the answer to the whole problem. More strawberries. More port. Thick juicy steaks with blood-red gravy. The doctors be damned! They were just false alarms. If you had money and you could afford to worry about your health, they'd scare you to death. A millionaire could be kept alive, even if his stomach were cut out. There were men whose tongues had been eaten away by cancer or depravity, yet they were able to go to the dinner table in a tuxedo and feed themselves through an artificial hole. A poor man, if he had only a cough, was allowed to die
of neglect. Coughs didn't interest the medical profession much. The druggist took care of coughs and backaches. The progress of medicine was such that it was no longer a science, if science it ever was, but an art. The art of prolonging life—by artificial means. Ah, if there were no rich, what refinements would be lacking, what subtleties, what complexities! In the bodies of the rich disease sprouted luxuriantly. On these refined manure piles what marvelous roses bloomed, what beautiful ulcers! Out of dotards and hyenas the men of science were almost prepared now to make butterflies. Progress . . . progress. . . . A century ago the tree of life was fast rotting away—but today it flourished and would go on flourishing though the trunk were three-quarters cement.

O
N THE
night of Lincoln's birthday there was a blizzard, and between Lincoln's birthday and Washington's birthday it snowed on and off and everything was wrapped in wadding so that even the ash barrels and the garbage cans looked attractive. And while the snow fell things happened, as they do in Russian novels, in the Russian soul where there is God and snow and ice and talk and murder and epilepsy, where history leaves off only to make place for nature, where be it only a room there is space for the biggest drama ever written, space for the invisible host and for all peoples, climates, tongues. On the night of Lincoln's birthday, just before the blizzard fell out of the sky, Hildred stepped out in a velvet suit to mail a letter. She was gone three days and three nights in her velvet suit that had hollow silver balls down the front. There were twenty-six or twenty-seven of them, all empty, and each one veined with cicatrices which, to a microscopic organism endowed with sense of vision, would no doubt appear as the canals on the planet Mars appear to the human eye. In her absence the telephone never rang once, nor did any of the crippled, aged, or demented emissaries of the telegraph company ring the doorbell, present an open-face
envelope and an inch and a half of pencil without lead saying “Sign here.” The world was wrapped in wadding and the wadding gave out no news.