The Recognitions (Dalkey Archive edition) (85 page)

—I’m going out for awhile, he said in the doorway, looking suspiciously at his wife’s hand as it lowered from the hearing-aid control pinned at her bosom. She stared at him. —You ought to learn self-control, like those yogis, she said.

—I should learn control. I! Me!

—That’s a wonderful religion they got, that voodooism.

—Hopeless, he said, turning into the other room. —I was going to get you a book, but I don’t think you even could read it if I did. There he sat down before a mirror, illuminated like a theatrical dressing-room mirror. Spread before him was an array of jars, tubes, colored pencils, and hair in bits and transformations which any star might have envied. On the wall hung a crucifix, a picture of Cavalieri as Tosca, some neckties representing better schools at home and abroad, and a reminder of a papal bull of Pius IX, the Pio Nono of many happy memories, in this case the
Bolla di Composizione
of 1866, granting pardon to the felon who devotes to pious uses three per cent (3%) of his plunder, permitting him to “keep and possess the remainder in good faith, as his own property justly earned and acquired.”

On the table at his elbow, among bottles of aqua regia, alcohol, benzine, nitric acid, something known in the trade as “dragon’s
blood,” a pair of shears, some beeswax, some resin, some mastic, some amber, some steel plates, and some oil of lavender whose springtime fragrance pervaded the room, lay two exotic passports, and a copy of the
Theologia Moralis
of Alfonso Liguori, on top of Bicknall’s
Counterfeit Detector
for 1839. He had opened a large bottle of a solution of potassium permanganate, and sat now carefully daubing his face and neck with this brilliant purple, throwing the silver medal which hung at his throat over his shoulder.

—Thank God he took down his washing anyhow, he heard her mutter.

—What do you mean my washing? What washing?

—Them twenty-dollar bills you had hanging all over the place to dry.

—If you smeared any! He turned a face, which was minute by minute blooming with the flush of youth, threateningly to the doorway. —That’s just the way they picked up the greatest artist that there ever was, he went on, returning to the mirror. —Jim the Penman, he drew every bill by hand, for twenty years he was a success. And what happens? Some dumb grocery clerk smudges one of them with a wet hand. When he was tried, you know what the defense was? He was an artist. Any of his work was worth more as a work of art than what the government was shoving. An artist, a real artist.

—Don’t you worry, I didn’t smear any of your worthless paper. Worthless, worthless paper, she muttered at the sink.

—
Worth
less! he cried. —Do you know how hard I worked on that? Do you know where I got the paper to print them? What do you think it was, old newspaper? Well it wasn’t, there was two hundred and fifty dollars’ worth of paper hanging up there. Do you think I’d do a cheap job after the work it was to make those plates? Did I ever do a cheap job? Worthless paper! That was two hundred and fifty one-dollar bills, bleached to print the twenties on. It took me almost eight years to make those plates, he added.

—That was a nice way to spend your time in prison, God knows.

—That’s right, those are hand-engraved steel plates, you don’t see them any more. None of your cheap photo-engraving. He started to fold a packet in brown paper, but appeared unable to resist taking out a bill, which he turned over in his hand murmuring, —You don’t see work like this any more, as he looked into the challenging face of the seventh President. Under the packet lay the current issue of the monthly
National Counterfeit Detector
, where reviews of his work had not appeared in many years: in this work, anonymity advanced with worth, just as it did in the vignettes on the currency itself. The Father of His Country was crumpled,
folded, and offered in the most piking and meretricious traffic millions of times a day, infinitely better known and worse treated than McKinley and Cleveland, far more readily summoned than the five thousand times remote Madison, still less than kin, ten thousand times removed, with Salmon P. Chase, if more than kind with him in coveting supreme office, a recognition never granted to that Secretary of the Treasury under Abraham Lincoln, who made the five hands down without even getting a haircut.

—You don’t see work like this any more, he repeated. —Everything’s cheap, everybody does things the quick cheap way. This is one of the only crafts left. Look at the eyes, there’s none of that dead quality you see in a cheap job. Look at the sensitive lips, he murmured laying the bill back with the others. —I don’t waste my time like a lot of people I know.

—Don’t talk to me about wasting time, she came back at him. —If you had the kind of pains like I do. Go out and catch cancer yourself, and see how smart you are then.

—Cancer! Indigestion, that’s what you’ve got.

—And another thing I want to talk to you about before you get yourself all made up like a circus clown. Where are you going anyway? she demanded, appearing in the doorway as he opened a bottle of eserine and took out an eyedropper.

—I’m going to make a meet, he answered shortly.

—To make a meat. That’s nice.

He filled the eyedropper and turned to her with exaggerated patience. —I’m going out to meet a passer, to hand this stuff over to him. It’s all arranged and paid for.

—Such nice friends you got. Socially I should meet them.

—You should meet them! I don’t even know him myself, I don’t want to know him, I don’t want him to know me. They’re the ones who get picked up first. If he doesn’t know me, he doesn’t know where he got the stuff, he can’t talk. It’s always trouble with the middleman and the passers that get you pulled in. I don’t even have any middleman. Everything’s middlemen. Everything’s cheap work and middlemen wherever you look. They’re the ones who take the profit. Thirty dollars a hundred while I get eight. After the way I work? Look at those three plates, that’s hand-engraved on steel, they’ll never wear out like these zinc plates in a cheap photoengraving job. He tilted his head back and raised the dropper. —This guy I’m going to meet, he’s going to identify me by I’m almost blind with my glasses . . . She watched a drop of eserine fall into his left eye, while he went on, —Do you think I can take chances? How many men do you think there are in this country who can pick up engraving tools and do what I can do? There’s
hardly half a dozen, and they can hardly come near me. Even them, they either work for the government or they’re in jail. And do you think nobody knows who I am? The minute they spot a piece of this stuff, they’ve got it under a microscope. They’ve got work of mine they picked up thirty years ago, and they can compare it. They’re not dumb, with a microscope in their hand, the Secret Service, they can find the smallest resemblance, even after thirty years they can see my own hand in there, a little of myself, it’s always there, a little always sticks no matter what I do.

She stood supporting herself on the door jamb, and looked at him wearily; sniffed, and raised her eyes as though looking over distance in the landscape of his kingdom, the strong-scented landscape of Sheol. Finally she said, —So keep your friends to yourself, but let me tell you, when the doctor gives me morphine for my pains, what happens to it? Right out of the house it disappears. Who steals it? Your son, that’s who steals it. From his mother yet.

—He’s not mine, he’s yours. I don’t claim him. Does he ever go to church? No. He hasn’t got any morals, he hasn’t got any talent.

—So who ruined him? So who stood over him when he was a baby, and says, My ain’t it wonderful his first two fingers are the same length, so he could pick pockets, trying to teach him how to make his fingers like scissors, picking pockets. So who stood over him and says, My, with sensitive fingertips like that I could feel the tumblers fall in any safe in the world. So who was it give him Daddy’s signet ring, like he was a prince of somewhere, except this signet ring it’s got a little knife in it, to cut pockets open yet.

Her husband turned to look at her. His was an odd look, for one pupil had shrunk almost to a pin-point, swimming in eserine which he wiped away. —Those things were primary courses, like any kid gets in his first grade school. Do you think I wanted him to be a bum? So I taught him some basic things, how to use his hands. Did he ever learn anything? Did he ever try? No. He never worked a day in his life, like his father. You had his moral side to bring up. That’s a mother’s work, all those years I was away you had him here to bring up his moral side. Look how it come out.

—So who’s crying over spilled milk? It’s no good to talk about, all I want is he stops stealing his mother’s morphine. I go through his pockets, even, looking for it, what do I find, seasick remedy and chewing gum I find.

—So you think he’s seasick? You know what he uses them for? He goes to the dog track, and dopes the dogs up with Mothersill’s seasick remedy. The chewing gum he puts between their pads to slow them up. You think I taught him that?

—Anything bad he knows, you must have taught him.

She stood there, gazing at him, as he dropped eserine into his right eye. —Such a clown, yet, she said wistfully. —Anyhow he’s never been in prison like his fine father who just come out again.

—You think I didn’t figure that out? he said, turning from the mirror, to look at her with two pin-pointed pupils. —There was a war going on, and things are bad when there’s a war. It’s hard to get metal for the plates, it’s hard to get the right inks, everybody you can depend on gets drafted, or they get a job in an airplane factory. Like prosperity, things get lousy. It’s not so easy now.

But she just looked at him. —Frank, ain’t it ever going to let up? Every time you go in this room, I don’t know who’s coming out. Two months go by, and everything gets chalk on them from your hands when you clean your plate. Everything smells all the time. Like I used to think lavender was flowers, but now I smell it somewhere all I think of is you doing this . . . this . . .

—I’m busy, he said, and returned to the table before him. —You’re disturbing me on my nerves.

—Your nerves! she wailed, back at the sink. —So maybe I haven’t got any nerves? Whenever you’re away J think when you come back maybe it will be different, and then by the time you’re back a month I almost wish you was away again. You’d be in there yet for that trouble you was in over the stamp, if it wasn’t for a mistake they made.

—Mistake! If ever the hand of the Virgin watched over me it was that time. That conviction was thrown out because one of the jurymen was a Jew. He took his oath swearing on a New Testament. A mistake you call that. That was the Virgin Mary getting even for a mistake the Jews made two thousand years ago, that’s what a mistake it was. He waited for her to answer, suspecting that she had turned off her hearing aid. Then he went on, nostalgically, looking at himself in the glass, —That stamp was beautiful, that one-penny Antigua stamp. It took me four months to make that plate. And do you think the color was easy? Do you think just anybody can make the color puce? That’s why that kid is no good. Would he work hard on something like that? Do you hear me? He waited, suspiciously, to see if she had turned off her hearing aid, something he had not yet caught her at.

—I hear you, she said wearily, at the sink, and turned off her hearing aid.

—Well then stop talking to me like I was a common gangster. Did you ever see me with a gun? Did I ever hurt anybody, except once and that was a mistake, everybody knows it was, and you couldn’t count the Masses I’ve had said for her. He crossed himself hurriedly, and chose his hair for the evening, a healthy black mop.
—Not like that kid, he wouldn’t have a Mass said for his own mother. He’s slipshod and no good. Whenever I was home to give him the benefit of my study and experience, I tried to teach him. I taught him how to spring a Yale lock with a strip of celluloid. I taught him how to open a lock with wet thread and a splinter. I taught him how to look like he has a deformed spine, or a deformed foot. Nobody taught me all that. I learned it myself. It was a lot of work, and he had me right here to teach him, right here, his own father. So what does he learn? Nothing. He’s never done a day’s work in his life. You think a bum like that I’d claim him for my son? He’s like everybody now, they don’t study their work, they don’t study their materials. Show me somebody who can get that color green so perfect, he went on, looking down at the back of a twenty-dollar bill. —It’s not a place for bums to get into, it’s a place for artists, for craftsmen.

Mr. Sinisterra paused to fit the black hair in place over his own, a thinning texture of early gray. Then he went on in a lower tone, —He has no ambition like his father. I tried to teach him how to make copper plates, zinc plates, glass plates. The only platinum plate I ever made he almost ruined it for me. Just once he tried it alone, he tried to make some Revenue stamps. I helped him right through it, like a old master, cleaning the copper plate with benzine, putting on the wax ground, softening it with a little lavender oil. He made a mess of it. I had to throw the whole thing out before he got us all in trouble. Even the color, do you think he could tell the difference of one green and another? He couldn’t tell it from red even. His father’s a craftsman, an artist, he’s nothing but a bum.

Mr. Sinisterra dusted the black hair into place. There were sounds from the kitchen, but no answering words; only the clatter of pans. —It isn’t like the old days, he said, looking at himself in the glass. —It isn’t like when you could pass a gilded quarter for a ten-dollar gold piece. It isn’t like the days of Pete McCartney and Fred Biebusch, and Big Bill the Queersman, the days when Brockway passed a hundred thousand just like that. It isn’t like the days when Johnnie the Gent melted down the Ascot Cup.

He went to the rack to choose a necktie. Flicking aside Eton and Harrow, he lifted the soft dark blue with jagged red streaks of the Honourable Artillery Company, considered it for a moment, and then replaced it beside the false arm hung on the rack. —It’s not a place for bums to get into, it’s a place for art. You know how big the spaces behind Hamilton on the ten are? Less than one one-hundred-twentieth of an inch. Do you call that a place for bums? That kid wouldn’t even try, when he made those Revenue stamps. The acid got under the wax and made everything jagged. Do you
think he cared? He didn’t even know the difference. How sharper than a snake’s tooth it is to have a kid like that, do you hear me? You never read a book in your life. Well never mind. It’s a great disappointment for a father, when his son don’t take an interest in his father’s work and carry it on.